Exile is a strange darkness. My heart is black. It used to break, but now it shelters an endless dusky pain instead. Or is it my liver that aches? That's where French people hurt. No, it is because I am Prometheus, liver pecked to bits anew every day.
The difference between here and there is so stark. I can count out change there, speak to the cashier with no accent. I return as an alien. Here I am a cartoon, a sad Poindexter, a creature with no context. But let the metaphor work in the other direction; after all, this isn’t Tomis on the Black Sea. There are planes. I could leave if I had to. Let’s pluck the pleasure from this bad relationship that I choose not to end for a mass of compelling reasons, let's stop throwing the sorrow into lugubrious relief. Living in exile is like being horribly in love – the payback, pleasure in the sorrow has to be psychologically significant or we wouldn’t do it. So I will find the pleasure and ignore the cost. Yes, I stretch my hand into the dark water, search for something down there – even if it is just a minnow.
Here is my pleasure - it is the nostalgia. Tears not quite shed. I can summon up huge expanses of earth where I am not alien. Quebec, for example. All of my childhood myths crowd together on the Plains of Abraham. We learned that the French, searching for a northwest passage, came down the St. Lawrence; that Pierre Radisson floated down into Minnesota; that missionaries tried to convert the Indians. And all of it spread out forever under those huge skies, relentless, and troubled with roiling clouds. These same skies hung, hang over Minnesota, land of the silver birch, the same hugeness and cold brittle air. I am at home in Quebec. The names of the Indian tribes and their languages live on in the places there, like they do in Minnesota.
At home, part of my fantasy was that Jefferson never sold Louisiana and that we in Minnesota spoke French. Those people are actually alive; they live in Quebec. That French is mine, that bizarre, broad accent and twangy nasals that melt the vowels down. North American French. My multiple mythologies find a home in Quebec.
Most of all, Quebec has fall. When I was in Quebec last fall, I swam twice in the early evening in the hotel, a heated pool half in half out of the building. Fluffs of condensed air billowed from the surface of the water outside. I could see the pinkish orange of the setting sun between the gusts of clouds. This memory is a minnow, grab it, it flicks between my fingers, it slips away, but I touch it. I could live in other places. But just not here. Just not here.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Stepping sideways....
My grandma – my only physical trace of her is a small cross I brought her one year from Benediktbeuern. But she is with me, just as she was when I used to sit beside her and hear her talk about the olden days. She is my link to that other world, that one I can access sometimes by slipping sideways in time. The people there are black and white – except for the moments when I slip in and see them, all of a sudden, and see their freckles, their bright brown eyes, starched but worn clothes. It is a world rich with meaning; indeed, it contains all of the meaning that my own world, 1970s polyester and food created from fake food, has always lacked.
I used to pore over her pictures. There were just a couple, sepia-toned, but through them I could recreate her heartbreakingly chocolate dark eyes and warm, rich skin, and her glorious black hair, which was always described to me as auburn. (How different my own life would have been had I been born with Grandma’s color, or any other color, for that matter. Her black Irish hair and skin; tan skin and blond hair; olive skin with pale green eyes. Any color at all. It would have been good to be a person with color.) I could never quite see her freckles, but I knew they were there, just like mine. The color matters, because without it the figures from our pasts float out of our grasp; the color anchors them. Also important is to make her sufficiently thin, haggard, even. She had six children, after all. And she is tall, like I am, thin from the side, broad from the front. Through her I can touch that community of women that goes back and back; through her, I can touch Ireland, another misty world steeped with meaning, where life is humid and real. They still eat real food there, smell like real people.
She is my conduit to that real life. But the problem – and here is the essence of life – is that that real life is so filled with pain. The cold horrible violence of Catholicism. There existed and still exists a hierarchical chain of all being in that Church in which I can no longer take part, but the reality of it is nonetheless imbues every atom of my life. The horror of it has been much diminished over the years, and even by the time I came around it had at least lost its omnipotence. My own family lived within its shadow, but I knew from early on that I could dodge it, run away from it, because there were places where it had no purchase. But for Grandma there was never an escape. Not from the shadow of the Church, not from depressing and relentlessly male-dominated every-day life. She got married. What else could she do? She had to quit school in eighth grade even though she was very bright. Our family story always proved her intelligence by her ability to do crosswords, by the old words of wisdom she imparted. “It’s better than a kick in the teeth,” was her typical response to the good that life infrequently tossed her.
She married my grandpa. Why? She was so pretty. He was a good, steady man, they say, but he was uneducated. He worked in a garage. I could not find him, cannot fathom him. My only access to him came from some elderly cousins at Grandma’s funeral who spoke of him with such affection (and spoke to me in German although they had lived in the US for at least sixty years) that I felt the beginnings of a relationship. I was happy, because I do not feel any relationship with most of them. Uncle Lenny, Grandma’s brother, dead in about 1945 of TB and drink, I do feel him, close to Grandma and brown-eyed like she was. I probably mix him up with my cousin of the same name. But Grandma’s other two brothers – I feel nothing for them. I don’t know them.
I do not like my great-grandma. Grandma claims that she was a beauty, and the one picture we have of her as a young woman bears this out. But it was a nasty kind of beauty. Even in the black and white, her eyes are light and icy. Grandma stands beside her, hardly more than a baby, with her dark cloud of hair and my cousin’s eyes. She raised my grandma to believe that she was not pretty, a sort of cruelty that I can never never forgive. Because Grandma, like all of our babies, deserved the unconditional love and unstinting praise of a warmly affectionate mother. Her excuse was that she did not want Grandma to be vain. But here is no excuse. No decent mother would do such a thing. The only answer is that she did not love her daughter sufficiently.
But I do feel that I know and love her husband, my great-grandpa. He has Grandma’s color, round brown eyes and dark dark hair. He was college educated, maybe even a masters degree. On the other hand, he did get the half-witted maid pregnant, forfeiting forever the love of his wife and children. Great-grandma tossed him out. I understand her disgust, and they undoubtedly had a history beyond this particularly horrendous indiscretion. But she was bitter, and being bitter only hurts. It hurt Grandma. Her father tried to reach out to his children when they grew up, but they would have nothing to go with him.
I want to catch and hold Grandma's particularity, her sweetness. Of course, my perception is based at least in part on her physical helplessness, her resignation, maybe caused by her electric shock treatment. But I believe it was also her core. Partly because I don’t believe that I would love her so overwhelmingly if sweetness were not essentially a part of her. Partly because I see some of it in my own mother. Mom is pathologically reserved, both utterly rigid and entirely vulnerable, needing to paint the blacks black and the whites white. My own mother cannot bear anything that disturbs her framework, but inside she is utterly sweet. Grandma, I think, had lived too long and seen too much sorrow to be anything else. Living in sorrow either turns you bitter or it wears down the edges, opens you up, makes you even more vulnerable.
The imaginary of my childhood is formed around the blessed coolness of her house, the dim interior contrasting with the brilliant green heat of a summer afternoon. Her house, just across the alley form the school ground where we spent summer vacation, was our haven. We could always dash across to get a drink. Ring the doorbell. And she would appear, smiling. Or the sound of feet stamping on the porch in winter, and, again, again, the contrast between the frozen air outside and the warmth inside.
The sorrow of her life crushes. The horror of the repressive Catholic environment, being told by her mother that she was homely. Marriage to a man who immediately dashed off to hunt or fish in his spare time. Yes, he brought home the pay check, $12 a week. But there was no intimate bond. And then she lost him to cancer, when my mother was only nine. How much did she love him, I wonder? She said that she was SO green when she got married. Oh oh the sadness of those years. The depression that came later in her life, when she should have been able to relax and enjoy herself. And yet, it’s always the relationships that keep us going, and she had her girls. And I hope that she had her granddaughters. We had her, in any case.
I want to talk about the sadness of life, that real life she led. I can't make it right for her, but I can acknowledge it. Say it, say it and keep saying it. It was bleak,and it was grueling. But when one slips in, one sees that it was filled with color: blazing leaves, sad brown grass, painfully sharp glistening snow. And her eyes. I never saw the auburn hair, but I knew her dark dark eyes. She was a gorgeous person to have come out, so sweet, on the other side of that stony road. I am trying to keep touching her.
I used to pore over her pictures. There were just a couple, sepia-toned, but through them I could recreate her heartbreakingly chocolate dark eyes and warm, rich skin, and her glorious black hair, which was always described to me as auburn. (How different my own life would have been had I been born with Grandma’s color, or any other color, for that matter. Her black Irish hair and skin; tan skin and blond hair; olive skin with pale green eyes. Any color at all. It would have been good to be a person with color.) I could never quite see her freckles, but I knew they were there, just like mine. The color matters, because without it the figures from our pasts float out of our grasp; the color anchors them. Also important is to make her sufficiently thin, haggard, even. She had six children, after all. And she is tall, like I am, thin from the side, broad from the front. Through her I can touch that community of women that goes back and back; through her, I can touch Ireland, another misty world steeped with meaning, where life is humid and real. They still eat real food there, smell like real people.
She is my conduit to that real life. But the problem – and here is the essence of life – is that that real life is so filled with pain. The cold horrible violence of Catholicism. There existed and still exists a hierarchical chain of all being in that Church in which I can no longer take part, but the reality of it is nonetheless imbues every atom of my life. The horror of it has been much diminished over the years, and even by the time I came around it had at least lost its omnipotence. My own family lived within its shadow, but I knew from early on that I could dodge it, run away from it, because there were places where it had no purchase. But for Grandma there was never an escape. Not from the shadow of the Church, not from depressing and relentlessly male-dominated every-day life. She got married. What else could she do? She had to quit school in eighth grade even though she was very bright. Our family story always proved her intelligence by her ability to do crosswords, by the old words of wisdom she imparted. “It’s better than a kick in the teeth,” was her typical response to the good that life infrequently tossed her.
She married my grandpa. Why? She was so pretty. He was a good, steady man, they say, but he was uneducated. He worked in a garage. I could not find him, cannot fathom him. My only access to him came from some elderly cousins at Grandma’s funeral who spoke of him with such affection (and spoke to me in German although they had lived in the US for at least sixty years) that I felt the beginnings of a relationship. I was happy, because I do not feel any relationship with most of them. Uncle Lenny, Grandma’s brother, dead in about 1945 of TB and drink, I do feel him, close to Grandma and brown-eyed like she was. I probably mix him up with my cousin of the same name. But Grandma’s other two brothers – I feel nothing for them. I don’t know them.
I do not like my great-grandma. Grandma claims that she was a beauty, and the one picture we have of her as a young woman bears this out. But it was a nasty kind of beauty. Even in the black and white, her eyes are light and icy. Grandma stands beside her, hardly more than a baby, with her dark cloud of hair and my cousin’s eyes. She raised my grandma to believe that she was not pretty, a sort of cruelty that I can never never forgive. Because Grandma, like all of our babies, deserved the unconditional love and unstinting praise of a warmly affectionate mother. Her excuse was that she did not want Grandma to be vain. But here is no excuse. No decent mother would do such a thing. The only answer is that she did not love her daughter sufficiently.
But I do feel that I know and love her husband, my great-grandpa. He has Grandma’s color, round brown eyes and dark dark hair. He was college educated, maybe even a masters degree. On the other hand, he did get the half-witted maid pregnant, forfeiting forever the love of his wife and children. Great-grandma tossed him out. I understand her disgust, and they undoubtedly had a history beyond this particularly horrendous indiscretion. But she was bitter, and being bitter only hurts. It hurt Grandma. Her father tried to reach out to his children when they grew up, but they would have nothing to go with him.
I want to catch and hold Grandma's particularity, her sweetness. Of course, my perception is based at least in part on her physical helplessness, her resignation, maybe caused by her electric shock treatment. But I believe it was also her core. Partly because I don’t believe that I would love her so overwhelmingly if sweetness were not essentially a part of her. Partly because I see some of it in my own mother. Mom is pathologically reserved, both utterly rigid and entirely vulnerable, needing to paint the blacks black and the whites white. My own mother cannot bear anything that disturbs her framework, but inside she is utterly sweet. Grandma, I think, had lived too long and seen too much sorrow to be anything else. Living in sorrow either turns you bitter or it wears down the edges, opens you up, makes you even more vulnerable.
The imaginary of my childhood is formed around the blessed coolness of her house, the dim interior contrasting with the brilliant green heat of a summer afternoon. Her house, just across the alley form the school ground where we spent summer vacation, was our haven. We could always dash across to get a drink. Ring the doorbell. And she would appear, smiling. Or the sound of feet stamping on the porch in winter, and, again, again, the contrast between the frozen air outside and the warmth inside.
The sorrow of her life crushes. The horror of the repressive Catholic environment, being told by her mother that she was homely. Marriage to a man who immediately dashed off to hunt or fish in his spare time. Yes, he brought home the pay check, $12 a week. But there was no intimate bond. And then she lost him to cancer, when my mother was only nine. How much did she love him, I wonder? She said that she was SO green when she got married. Oh oh the sadness of those years. The depression that came later in her life, when she should have been able to relax and enjoy herself. And yet, it’s always the relationships that keep us going, and she had her girls. And I hope that she had her granddaughters. We had her, in any case.
I want to talk about the sadness of life, that real life she led. I can't make it right for her, but I can acknowledge it. Say it, say it and keep saying it. It was bleak,and it was grueling. But when one slips in, one sees that it was filled with color: blazing leaves, sad brown grass, painfully sharp glistening snow. And her eyes. I never saw the auburn hair, but I knew her dark dark eyes. She was a gorgeous person to have come out, so sweet, on the other side of that stony road. I am trying to keep touching her.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Vivere me dices, saluum tamen esse negabis.
I am not a political refugee. Rather, I spent six years past the BA training for a very specialized sort of job and then was only able to get one in a far-off land. I have been trying without success to get home now for nine years and will keep on trying until the day I die. But one has to live, too, and living in exile has certain positive features. For me, of course, the primary positive feature of my situation is that I am able to practice my profession. I have the best job in the world, one I have decided not to give up even to return to my home. Mine is a competitive field; if I calculate correctly, more people earn a living playing tennis than working in my field.
But beyond my job, there are certain elements of living in exile that are, if not attractive, appropriate. Throughout my childhood and adolescence in the Midwest, I was a pariah, a real weirdo. It wasn’t just that I loved to read, although that was part of it. But more fatally, I never fit in because temperamentally I was cut out to be the daughter of a surgeon and a magazine-editor, a good student who received encouragement at her private school, who developed her interest in writing throughout high school and college, then went on to a job on a newspaper. However, I grew up in a working-class family which finally recognized its brand when Rush Limbaugh burst into popularity. That is, I grew up despised by my cousins, ridiculed with the same maniacal energy that they now apply to Democrats. The hatred that characterizes the general approach of the right today was already flourishing in my family back in the 1970s. I was its target: I was tall, gawky, studious, quiet. I was the antithesis of what my family valued.
I am in touch with my family and many high school classmates through Facebook. That is exactly the level of engagement with which I feel comfortable – I want to be home, but at a distance. To a certain extent, my current exile reifies a circumstance that feels natural to me.
My relationship with the Catholic Church is similar. I am not permitted to receive the sacraments because before my current real marriage, I was married (to a hyper-male, although he was nominally to the left of the political spectrum; in retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how he sees himself as a Democrat, because his authoritarian tendencies make him feel much more to the right, but whatever) to whom I simply could not remain married and therefore divorced. In any case, he had no interest in marrying me – I bullied him into it because my family was scandalized that we were not married - and less interest in being married in a Catholic Church, although (no, because) he had been through the Catholic school system during the period when nuns were still violent executioners. This did not stop him from threatening me with hell fire when I finally pulled out. It is entirely typical that within the literal-minded context within which he and many other Catholics operate he was allowed to not speak to me about anything beyond daily necessities for three years, fail to take part in any of the things that make marriage fun (like eating together), refuse to have children or even build a living space together, and then throw maledictions upon me when I said this is NOT a marriage. He was supremely indifferent to the rules except when he pulled them out to condemn me. But he could do whatever he wanted, because Catholics do not enter into a contract when they marry. You get one option – forever or nothing. I chose forever, and I am bound forever. Benedict recently reiterated that under no circumstances do we divorced and remarried Catholics get to receive the sacraments, which of course does not stop Rudy Giuliani or the divorced and remarried Kennedys from taking communion.
But the point of this is that from exile is an entirely appropriate way to relate to the Catholic Church. Even if it wanted me, I cannot in any case embrace an institution that systematically and self-righteously assigns second-class citizenship to women and views paedophilia as an internal issue. But, like my family, the Church is part of me. I see the things through the magical world view it taught me.
So I live in exile on a number of levels. And yet, I will never resign myself to exile. The outrage at being excluded keeps me alive. I meant to come here for about three years, then go home, that is, to blue America. But my own society will not have me, will not give me a job. So I fulminate out here, eternally shamed by this rejection by my own.
Yes, I am exiled, and it seems to be my permanent state. But this inside/outside position has advantages. Actually, it has one advantage, that is, it puts me in good company. Cicero, Ovid, Christine de Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, Rousseau, Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht. Exile is a position that exists, an acknowledged way of being in the world. I am a liminal being. We liminal beings have special properties, potential for creating unity in different ways. I’m not sure what they are in my case, but I am trying to find them.
But beyond my job, there are certain elements of living in exile that are, if not attractive, appropriate. Throughout my childhood and adolescence in the Midwest, I was a pariah, a real weirdo. It wasn’t just that I loved to read, although that was part of it. But more fatally, I never fit in because temperamentally I was cut out to be the daughter of a surgeon and a magazine-editor, a good student who received encouragement at her private school, who developed her interest in writing throughout high school and college, then went on to a job on a newspaper. However, I grew up in a working-class family which finally recognized its brand when Rush Limbaugh burst into popularity. That is, I grew up despised by my cousins, ridiculed with the same maniacal energy that they now apply to Democrats. The hatred that characterizes the general approach of the right today was already flourishing in my family back in the 1970s. I was its target: I was tall, gawky, studious, quiet. I was the antithesis of what my family valued.
I am in touch with my family and many high school classmates through Facebook. That is exactly the level of engagement with which I feel comfortable – I want to be home, but at a distance. To a certain extent, my current exile reifies a circumstance that feels natural to me.
My relationship with the Catholic Church is similar. I am not permitted to receive the sacraments because before my current real marriage, I was married (to a hyper-male, although he was nominally to the left of the political spectrum; in retrospect, I have a hard time imagining how he sees himself as a Democrat, because his authoritarian tendencies make him feel much more to the right, but whatever) to whom I simply could not remain married and therefore divorced. In any case, he had no interest in marrying me – I bullied him into it because my family was scandalized that we were not married - and less interest in being married in a Catholic Church, although (no, because) he had been through the Catholic school system during the period when nuns were still violent executioners. This did not stop him from threatening me with hell fire when I finally pulled out. It is entirely typical that within the literal-minded context within which he and many other Catholics operate he was allowed to not speak to me about anything beyond daily necessities for three years, fail to take part in any of the things that make marriage fun (like eating together), refuse to have children or even build a living space together, and then throw maledictions upon me when I said this is NOT a marriage. He was supremely indifferent to the rules except when he pulled them out to condemn me. But he could do whatever he wanted, because Catholics do not enter into a contract when they marry. You get one option – forever or nothing. I chose forever, and I am bound forever. Benedict recently reiterated that under no circumstances do we divorced and remarried Catholics get to receive the sacraments, which of course does not stop Rudy Giuliani or the divorced and remarried Kennedys from taking communion.
But the point of this is that from exile is an entirely appropriate way to relate to the Catholic Church. Even if it wanted me, I cannot in any case embrace an institution that systematically and self-righteously assigns second-class citizenship to women and views paedophilia as an internal issue. But, like my family, the Church is part of me. I see the things through the magical world view it taught me.
So I live in exile on a number of levels. And yet, I will never resign myself to exile. The outrage at being excluded keeps me alive. I meant to come here for about three years, then go home, that is, to blue America. But my own society will not have me, will not give me a job. So I fulminate out here, eternally shamed by this rejection by my own.
Yes, I am exiled, and it seems to be my permanent state. But this inside/outside position has advantages. Actually, it has one advantage, that is, it puts me in good company. Cicero, Ovid, Christine de Pizan, Isabeau of Bavaria, Rousseau, Thomas Mann, Bertold Brecht. Exile is a position that exists, an acknowledged way of being in the world. I am a liminal being. We liminal beings have special properties, potential for creating unity in different ways. I’m not sure what they are in my case, but I am trying to find them.
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