Mary Karr’s Lit, it turns out, is the story of an Augustinian conversion. I was more than a little surprised when we began to move from drunken rage at life's unfairness and general rowdiness into Catholic spirituality. She notes that many of her lapsed Catholic friends were horrified when she started to turn in that direction, demanding to how such an intelligent person as she could take on Catholicism with all of its misogynistic superstition and baggage. I don’t have any trouble understanding her attraction – how can you not love the incense and the rustling of the satin as they parade down the aisle holding those great big crucifixes. But what I do want to know is why Mary Karr, a woman who at the time she begins her instruction is divorced and has no intention of remaining single forever and who is even enjoying a sex life, why she gets to waltz into Catholicism and partake of all the consolation it has to offer, while I, a person who was raised in the Church, who left the Church with the greatest imaginable sorrow because I couldn’t adhere to the fundamental law not to remarry after a divorce (a decision that took me years to final make reluctant as I was to leave the Church; indeed, for several years I imagined living like the Sebastian’s already-married sister Julia whom Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited wants to marry, but who finally refuses him because as a Catholic she cannot face the idea of remarriage after a divorce); who has not taken communion since my remarriage; who lives outside the Church because I cannot in good conscience live within it, lives excluded forever? I run around in circles like a hopeful little dog begging to be let back in and being kicked in the face, while Mary Karr just bursts right in. My first instinct is to ask myself what possible difference it could make to me that she is welcomed in – that she finds spiritual guides who teach her to pray and that God actually ANSWERS her. Her inclusion in the Church has nothing to do with my exclusion. That is always my first instinct. What’s it to me?
And yet, in this case, as I grow more distant from the book, achieve critical distance, I feel a righteous anger brewing. The positive thing is that it helps me to consolidate my own position, which is that I will not sneak through the backdoor into an institution according to whose rules, rules recently reiterated by the pedophile-friendly Pope, I am not allowed to receive the greatest gift the Church has to offer, the sacraments. I do not regret my decision. I regret the Pope’s decision. But not mine. I would rather not be Catholic than a half-assed one who really isn’t supposed to be there, who will never be accepted fully by the boys in charge. But the thing that drives me crazy it that it doesn’t bother Mary Karr that the Pope doesn't want her there, or, at least that he wouldn't if she bothered to ask. And why doesn't she ask? Because she doesn't accept the Pope as the head of the Church. What? So how in the name of sense is she Catholic? The best the rest of us would get if we rejected the Pope would be Anglican. Still, there she is typing away about her Augustinian-style conversion. Who is this woman? Why doesn't she have to lie awake at night wracked with guilt? Why does she just get to fall to her knees, have a chat with God, and then GET things from Him? This after she has gotten to be an alcoholic, squandering years of talent, self-indulgent, mean, furious, ungrateful, and self-pitying, who finally decides to be Catholic and instantly sets up direct communication with God. I want to know why. I want to know exactly what I’ve done that is so monstrous that I get banished to a desert island from God maliciously tempts me from time to time with promises of return only to throw them, cackling, back in my face. All of the praying in the world has not only not gotten me a reprieve, it’s gotten me shattering refusal after shattering refusal. After reading Lit I tried Thomas Merton, whom Karr found a sympathetic guide for her spiritual journey. I’m trying, but the distance between the sympathetic God whom Merton desires to please and the mocking God who enjoys refusing my every request and then sending bad luck on top of it is so great that I’m baffled.
On what planet does this Catholicism that she has discovered exist? This institution that comforts and accepts? I’m sure it’s easy to convert to a gorgeous ritual-based institution that offers the love of a genuinely kind God. But that Church is a figment of Mary Karr's imagination. The real Church sets a couple of bars that many of us can’t manage to clear and then cheerfully kicks us out without appeal when we don’t make it. It blithers against girls who tempt boys to lust. It publishes the names of parishioners with the sum of their yearly contributions to the Church. It holds itself up as the supreme male arbitrator over all of our silly female lives, quietly embracing pedophiles, while ignoring women. It is bursting at the seams with fathers, fathers, fathers, far as the eye can see, who can do no wrong, who can smoke in the cars with the window up, who can order the girls to clean the kitchen while they watch football and call for a beer. That’s that Church I get, anyway, and it has booted me. Where did she get hers? And why can’t I have some of it?
Friday, March 26, 2010
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Exiled between the middle class and the trailer court crowd
Reading Mar Karr’s Lit and thinking again that my problem is as much that I was never trashy enough as that I was never middle-class enough. I have no long tale of insane mothers, strings of divorce, fathers coming home at dawn from the night shift with flaccid white skin peeking out below their farmer tans. This means that I am abject, stretched between those two categories, those two known identities of doctor’s daughter and alcoholic night-worker at packing plant’s daughter, but alienated from both. Trashy picaresque at least is interesting; but I was too garbagey for the one, too chicken-livered for the other. That’s the source of my malady. If I reach deep into my gut all I pull out is a limp, detached set of testicles that, never having descended, simply shrivelled up and died. I have never been a man in any form at all. Men come in all sorts, from the carefully groomed Wasp to the dock-working Marlon Brando. But they do not come in abject, which is what I am.
I didn’t even have the courage to launch myself into a life of drugs and alcohol. I, descendant of a long line of Irish alcoholics, and I mean serious alcoholics, the kinds that drink themselves to death, could manage no better than an eating disorder. It was a pretty good eating disorder, complete with the firecracker shed full of blow ups. But all the drama took place behind locked doors. The whole force of my pain and outrage was directed at imaginary beings, God, mostly, because I never would have had the guts to explode in public or even in private at a lover. I was a pathologically normal cut-out figure leading a wacky drama inside my own creepy head and acting it out on my own grotesque form. I got the whole dismal load of self-loathing without the drugged-out lit-up coolness of being out of control.
No, and the whole time I was leading that midnight game of chicken all by myself I was practicing a bizarre game of passive Midwestern congeniality that somehow kept getting me chosen. In those days, we girls were chosen, asked to dance, asked out on dates. My practice, so natural to me, was to be nice. I had a sort of pliant thing going that attracted a certain kind of dweeb who, relative to me, would see himself for the first time able to take the initiative, and thus he would choose me. They too were abject but too horrified at myself I could not feel any sympathy; all I saw in them was what I was trying to escape in myself, that is, the lack of belonging, the weirdness, the inability to fit my square gawky form into any known shape. It always blew up. Because I could never hold the façade of nice girl together; something always didn’t work. How could it when I all I felt was imposed upon for having been chosen by another abject being, and I wanted out, wanted out, wanted out, wanted to get in a car, hit the road, and keep on going. I wanted Paris, I wanted Berlin.
I was such a pusswad. Remember going to Paris as an au pair and lasting exactly one night? I woke up, crying, unable to pull it off. Let someone like Tiger Woods’ magnificent wife, Elin, pull off an au pair stint. She can, because of her privileged background. But I crumbled. Being a servant in a rich person’s house feels like being part of the family for someone like Elin. But for me it cut too close to the bone; it reminded me that in a profound way I was a servant, taking up a job that I’m sure my ancestors must have taken when they came off the boat, in the homes of wealthy New Yorkers, before they hit the road for the Midwest and a farm. We servants know that we are servants, and, unlike the privileged, we cannot really play at being one. I did not have the courage to be a servant even in the most benevolent of families.
So I told the very nice lady of the manor that because of my own easy background I found myself unable to act as someone else’s servant. I could hardly tell her the truth, that I couldn’t be her au pair because the position activated a lifetime of dormant knowledge of my family’s servitude. And she graciously called me a cab which I took to the airport, a luxury that I would not allow myself even now, when I have a 6-figure (barely) income. Needed to do that, though, to show myself that I was NOT a servant, to re-establish the boundaries that had been so abruptly rubbed out when I entered into au pairdom.
So I have worked hard without any boundaries, the kind that we need to know who we are, to find who we are, which is the first step before we can do anything. My God, what a job. As Mary Karr writes, sort of, can’t remember quite what her exact words are, “It’s taken me so much effort to do as medium shitty as I’ve heretofore done....” I applaud you, Mary Karr. You are brilliant, funny, and, besides, you are skinny and beautiful and dressed in black. But I submit that it is even harder to find your way when you emerge out of the dirty soup of dreams of middle-class without the mordant edginess of the trailer court. That slice of protoplasm you see slipping around the margins, that’s me.
I didn’t even have the courage to launch myself into a life of drugs and alcohol. I, descendant of a long line of Irish alcoholics, and I mean serious alcoholics, the kinds that drink themselves to death, could manage no better than an eating disorder. It was a pretty good eating disorder, complete with the firecracker shed full of blow ups. But all the drama took place behind locked doors. The whole force of my pain and outrage was directed at imaginary beings, God, mostly, because I never would have had the guts to explode in public or even in private at a lover. I was a pathologically normal cut-out figure leading a wacky drama inside my own creepy head and acting it out on my own grotesque form. I got the whole dismal load of self-loathing without the drugged-out lit-up coolness of being out of control.
No, and the whole time I was leading that midnight game of chicken all by myself I was practicing a bizarre game of passive Midwestern congeniality that somehow kept getting me chosen. In those days, we girls were chosen, asked to dance, asked out on dates. My practice, so natural to me, was to be nice. I had a sort of pliant thing going that attracted a certain kind of dweeb who, relative to me, would see himself for the first time able to take the initiative, and thus he would choose me. They too were abject but too horrified at myself I could not feel any sympathy; all I saw in them was what I was trying to escape in myself, that is, the lack of belonging, the weirdness, the inability to fit my square gawky form into any known shape. It always blew up. Because I could never hold the façade of nice girl together; something always didn’t work. How could it when I all I felt was imposed upon for having been chosen by another abject being, and I wanted out, wanted out, wanted out, wanted to get in a car, hit the road, and keep on going. I wanted Paris, I wanted Berlin.
I was such a pusswad. Remember going to Paris as an au pair and lasting exactly one night? I woke up, crying, unable to pull it off. Let someone like Tiger Woods’ magnificent wife, Elin, pull off an au pair stint. She can, because of her privileged background. But I crumbled. Being a servant in a rich person’s house feels like being part of the family for someone like Elin. But for me it cut too close to the bone; it reminded me that in a profound way I was a servant, taking up a job that I’m sure my ancestors must have taken when they came off the boat, in the homes of wealthy New Yorkers, before they hit the road for the Midwest and a farm. We servants know that we are servants, and, unlike the privileged, we cannot really play at being one. I did not have the courage to be a servant even in the most benevolent of families.
So I told the very nice lady of the manor that because of my own easy background I found myself unable to act as someone else’s servant. I could hardly tell her the truth, that I couldn’t be her au pair because the position activated a lifetime of dormant knowledge of my family’s servitude. And she graciously called me a cab which I took to the airport, a luxury that I would not allow myself even now, when I have a 6-figure (barely) income. Needed to do that, though, to show myself that I was NOT a servant, to re-establish the boundaries that had been so abruptly rubbed out when I entered into au pairdom.
So I have worked hard without any boundaries, the kind that we need to know who we are, to find who we are, which is the first step before we can do anything. My God, what a job. As Mary Karr writes, sort of, can’t remember quite what her exact words are, “It’s taken me so much effort to do as medium shitty as I’ve heretofore done....” I applaud you, Mary Karr. You are brilliant, funny, and, besides, you are skinny and beautiful and dressed in black. But I submit that it is even harder to find your way when you emerge out of the dirty soup of dreams of middle-class without the mordant edginess of the trailer court. That slice of protoplasm you see slipping around the margins, that’s me.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Demosclerosis and the Armagnac-Burgundian feud
My research specialty, fifteenth-century France, rarely offers examples pertinent to modern American life. But in this recent period of “demosclerosis” the story of the relentless feud between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians sheds light on our impasse.
The idea of the day is that our congress is an obsolete mess, excruciatingly ineffective compared to the parliamentary systems of our benchmark nations. Journalists like James Fallows undoubtedly are right that the problem is systemic. As Fallows notes in his recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, our only realistic hope of a way out to start shifting incrementally towards cooperation. Because after all, we are not going to suddenly trash the constitution and develop a parliamentary system wherein one side rams through its legislation. This is where the lesson of the Armagnac-Burgundian feud becomes instructive, and, I believe, offers some hope.
Feuds seem chaotic to modern eyes, but they follow a logic, serving as a form of government in periods where a central power capable of enforcement is lacking. Feuding was a fundamental part of politics in early modern France, a means of assuming and challenging power. If someone wanted to defend against an incursion, he appealed to his lord for military support. A small armed group attacked the aggressor. If one side was stronger, the conflict ended. If the sides were of equal power, however, the conflict would devolve into a long series of attacks and retaliations. Worse, seeing the central conflict, smaller players would settle their own unrelated quarrels by attaching them to the central one, hoping to resolve in this way problems that they did not have the strength to handle on their own. The Armagnac-Burgundian feud got rolling when the King Charles VI began to suffer episodic madness. His male relatives attempted to seize power during his periods of insanity, entering into a rivalry that produced various murders, constant warfare and pillaging, and enable the conquest and occupation of France by Henry V of England. The feud stretched from about 1405 until 1435.
And yet it ended eventually. Our current situation bears the hallmarks of a feud. No single enforcer is capable of bringing the recalcitrant parties to heel, and the parties are of roughly equal strength. One attacks and withdraws; the other retaliates and withdraws. The conflict cannot end because neither party is powerful enough to annihilate the other. In the meantime, special interest groups hook their causes to the central conflict, hoping to resolve problems they cannot settle on their own. But in the case of the Armagnacs and Burgundians, after years of warring and misery, the two sides finally ganged up to get rid of the English. Yes, in our case, the eternal conflict between the Democrats the Republicans is caused to a large extent by the representational abnormalities that are the fault of a decrepit system put in place over two hundred years ago. Huge swathes of the population are under or over represented, leaving business to be carried out by small groups of interested parties rather than by the people through elected representatives. Yes, progress is rendered impossible by the Republicans refusal to play ball at all. Still, it is only our feuding mentality that has brought the system to a complete halt.
But history shows that sooner or later feuds tend to run out of steam. One side either become stronger than the other (this could happen over the next several years as the demographics shift) or the feuding mentality simply runs out of steam as the generations change. It takes a lot of energy to keep up a level of hatred sufficient to fuel a feud. Do we really need to jettison the constitution? Probably not. Let’s just demystify the feuding mentality, long and loudly: let’s make medieval French history a mandatory course in high school and again at university.
The idea of the day is that our congress is an obsolete mess, excruciatingly ineffective compared to the parliamentary systems of our benchmark nations. Journalists like James Fallows undoubtedly are right that the problem is systemic. As Fallows notes in his recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, our only realistic hope of a way out to start shifting incrementally towards cooperation. Because after all, we are not going to suddenly trash the constitution and develop a parliamentary system wherein one side rams through its legislation. This is where the lesson of the Armagnac-Burgundian feud becomes instructive, and, I believe, offers some hope.
Feuds seem chaotic to modern eyes, but they follow a logic, serving as a form of government in periods where a central power capable of enforcement is lacking. Feuding was a fundamental part of politics in early modern France, a means of assuming and challenging power. If someone wanted to defend against an incursion, he appealed to his lord for military support. A small armed group attacked the aggressor. If one side was stronger, the conflict ended. If the sides were of equal power, however, the conflict would devolve into a long series of attacks and retaliations. Worse, seeing the central conflict, smaller players would settle their own unrelated quarrels by attaching them to the central one, hoping to resolve in this way problems that they did not have the strength to handle on their own. The Armagnac-Burgundian feud got rolling when the King Charles VI began to suffer episodic madness. His male relatives attempted to seize power during his periods of insanity, entering into a rivalry that produced various murders, constant warfare and pillaging, and enable the conquest and occupation of France by Henry V of England. The feud stretched from about 1405 until 1435.
And yet it ended eventually. Our current situation bears the hallmarks of a feud. No single enforcer is capable of bringing the recalcitrant parties to heel, and the parties are of roughly equal strength. One attacks and withdraws; the other retaliates and withdraws. The conflict cannot end because neither party is powerful enough to annihilate the other. In the meantime, special interest groups hook their causes to the central conflict, hoping to resolve problems they cannot settle on their own. But in the case of the Armagnacs and Burgundians, after years of warring and misery, the two sides finally ganged up to get rid of the English. Yes, in our case, the eternal conflict between the Democrats the Republicans is caused to a large extent by the representational abnormalities that are the fault of a decrepit system put in place over two hundred years ago. Huge swathes of the population are under or over represented, leaving business to be carried out by small groups of interested parties rather than by the people through elected representatives. Yes, progress is rendered impossible by the Republicans refusal to play ball at all. Still, it is only our feuding mentality that has brought the system to a complete halt.
But history shows that sooner or later feuds tend to run out of steam. One side either become stronger than the other (this could happen over the next several years as the demographics shift) or the feuding mentality simply runs out of steam as the generations change. It takes a lot of energy to keep up a level of hatred sufficient to fuel a feud. Do we really need to jettison the constitution? Probably not. Let’s just demystify the feuding mentality, long and loudly: let’s make medieval French history a mandatory course in high school and again at university.
Friday, January 22, 2010
et si domus super semet ipsam dispertiatur non poterit domus illa stare – or??
It’s been a difficult few days. All of the hope of the past year has gone, vanished with the frightening realization that our division is implacable. Rationality has no purchase here in the land of religious conversion and rebirth. As far as I can see there is nothing to look forward to, there never will be anything to look forward to, all that there is or ever will be is obstruction. Maybe I will feel optimistic again someday, but it has been a long time now that our point of stasis is virulent populism; any little deviation towards decency and intelligence is quickly pushed back.
And yet, I’ve always felt that nothing can be that depressing as long as it is not unprecedented. And there is nothing but precedent for bitterly divided populations. It must be ingrained in our nature, although I can’t quite see which evolutionary aim hating our brothers would have served. I try to drift above all of it, look down, and see us as a squabbling family. The kids form two groups, always fighting with each other. Certainly my own family divides into two groups. Which comes first? Does it start at the micro or macrocosmic level? Do we hate each other by nature or do we hate each other because of politics?
Should we just be two separate countries? Why did Lincoln fight so hard to save the Union? What would he say today? If our goal was to keep a poor country from our border, what did we gain? There is Mexico, in any case. Is it self-evident that a house divided against itself cannot stand?
I will at some point try to reach beyond the divide and recover the intelligence of conservative thought in the U.S. Nothing can hurt you too much if you understand it. But not quite yet. For the moment I will just take comfort in knowing that the divided house is a historical constant: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians; Catholics and Huguenots; Catholics and Anglicans; Gibellines and Guelfs; Roundheads and Cavaliers; Jacobins and Girondins: Irish Catholics and Protestants; Sunnis and Shiites. And the U.S. of course has always divided into Red and Blue, the slave and the free states. I don’t know that it makes it any easier to stand, but maybe the road to hope leads through resignation.
And yet, I’ve always felt that nothing can be that depressing as long as it is not unprecedented. And there is nothing but precedent for bitterly divided populations. It must be ingrained in our nature, although I can’t quite see which evolutionary aim hating our brothers would have served. I try to drift above all of it, look down, and see us as a squabbling family. The kids form two groups, always fighting with each other. Certainly my own family divides into two groups. Which comes first? Does it start at the micro or macrocosmic level? Do we hate each other by nature or do we hate each other because of politics?
Should we just be two separate countries? Why did Lincoln fight so hard to save the Union? What would he say today? If our goal was to keep a poor country from our border, what did we gain? There is Mexico, in any case. Is it self-evident that a house divided against itself cannot stand?
I will at some point try to reach beyond the divide and recover the intelligence of conservative thought in the U.S. Nothing can hurt you too much if you understand it. But not quite yet. For the moment I will just take comfort in knowing that the divided house is a historical constant: the Armagnacs and the Burgundians; Catholics and Huguenots; Catholics and Anglicans; Gibellines and Guelfs; Roundheads and Cavaliers; Jacobins and Girondins: Irish Catholics and Protestants; Sunnis and Shiites. And the U.S. of course has always divided into Red and Blue, the slave and the free states. I don’t know that it makes it any easier to stand, but maybe the road to hope leads through resignation.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Float above the fray....
It seems that the one benefit I should be able to expect from living in exile would be some distance regarding my country, the one gift the ability to watch politics with interest but without the pain. This is not the case so far. I am as passionately attached to what happens here as would have been had I lived here physically. New Year’s resolution: to float above the fray, like a large Buddha statue, with a large benevolent smile on my face, loving, but remote. To embrace both sides of my country. Let’s try with the election of Scott Brown to the US senate, one of the greatest disappointments I have experienced in months, and I’m not even from Massachusetts. I may be too sensitive to live in this world, and this is a serious problem. Let’s get to the bottom of this.
The emotion, heartache, – as opposed to a rational reaction about what is happening in my country - I suppose is inevitable because as we all now know, we choose our political affiliation based the identities we are trying to cobble together rather than the actual policies that we support. Our political party represents ourselves, our self-image. Hence all those people voting against their self-interest because to call themselves Republican makes them pure and virile rather than muddled and girl-ish. Hence those ridiculous statements that came out during the interviews with “independents” during the last presidential elections. Remember that bizarre real-time monitor of the independents’ reactions as they listened to the candidates? How they would explain their reactions in terms of how they were perceiving the candidate’s toughness on national security? Or whether he had given the interviewee an impression of trustworthiness, whatever that means? The last thing on earth we should be valorizing is emotional reaction to a debate. And yet there we were pretending that it was a legitimate way to decide how to vote, proposing that voters listen to their instincts to choose the president. At least people who declare a party have some consistent set of principles, however nebulous and emotional, attached to the party. They are not just blowing in some wind tunnel of spontaneous reactions.
But let’s admit and look beyond the disappointment. I am disappointed because it is humiliating to be a citizen of a country that responds positively to a pick up truck. This is pure elitism on my part. Let’s get beyond it. More specifically, I am embarrassed to be part of a national narrative that promotes itself as a society of freedom-seeking, independent-minded pioneers who just want the government to leave them alone when the story is so patently false. The story gives us an excuse not to read through the information that is available, which would make it clear to us what every other civilized nation on earth can see and what we ignore, that we are all governed by the immensely powerful healthcare industry, which we have not elected. And an excuse to facilely embrace a handsome guy who looks like a movie star playing a military officer because he riles us up with more of the story, posing us as hero fighting those corrupt politicians.
I am tired of analyses of competing narratives: if we attach our current division to the tale of implacable hatred that has divided us since before the Civil War, since the pact with the devil, that "compromise" with southern slave owners when the country was founded, there is no way out. But for the moment I see no other way to explain our apparrently instinctive dislike of each other. (Or to be clear, I should say their dislike of me. I don't care about them. I do not send the red side of my family spam promoting my political ideas. They do that to me, apparently eager to pile on me, the way bullies persecute kids who like to read.) Yet surely there must be some interesting nuances. And surely I can examine these without pain. Here is my solution: displace the too-raw story of today into our horrible and beautiful history. Look harder at Thomas Jefferson and try to understand him, sympathize with him, rather than disdain him. And once I’ve done this, maybe I will be able to accept without cringing this kid-like group of compatriots who think they are tough when they are just deluded. And maybe love them some day.
Sounds like the beginning of an important odyssey to me. Important because at the end lies freedom from embarrassment, the possibility of watching the political show with equanimity.
I will begin by accepting with resigned but genuine affection Obama’s decision not to do what all other majority parties in all other civilized nations do as a matter of course – push his legislation through. The ninnies who love pick up trucks have spoken, and because Democrats are the default marginals even when they are the majority, we will defer. It cannot be otherwise. It is in the very nature of the American character that they are loud and strong, even though a minority, and I have to accept it, just as I accept the monotonous bullying spam from my family without protest. I don't have it in me to do otherwise, and I would not want to have that in me.
The emotion, heartache, – as opposed to a rational reaction about what is happening in my country - I suppose is inevitable because as we all now know, we choose our political affiliation based the identities we are trying to cobble together rather than the actual policies that we support. Our political party represents ourselves, our self-image. Hence all those people voting against their self-interest because to call themselves Republican makes them pure and virile rather than muddled and girl-ish. Hence those ridiculous statements that came out during the interviews with “independents” during the last presidential elections. Remember that bizarre real-time monitor of the independents’ reactions as they listened to the candidates? How they would explain their reactions in terms of how they were perceiving the candidate’s toughness on national security? Or whether he had given the interviewee an impression of trustworthiness, whatever that means? The last thing on earth we should be valorizing is emotional reaction to a debate. And yet there we were pretending that it was a legitimate way to decide how to vote, proposing that voters listen to their instincts to choose the president. At least people who declare a party have some consistent set of principles, however nebulous and emotional, attached to the party. They are not just blowing in some wind tunnel of spontaneous reactions.
But let’s admit and look beyond the disappointment. I am disappointed because it is humiliating to be a citizen of a country that responds positively to a pick up truck. This is pure elitism on my part. Let’s get beyond it. More specifically, I am embarrassed to be part of a national narrative that promotes itself as a society of freedom-seeking, independent-minded pioneers who just want the government to leave them alone when the story is so patently false. The story gives us an excuse not to read through the information that is available, which would make it clear to us what every other civilized nation on earth can see and what we ignore, that we are all governed by the immensely powerful healthcare industry, which we have not elected. And an excuse to facilely embrace a handsome guy who looks like a movie star playing a military officer because he riles us up with more of the story, posing us as hero fighting those corrupt politicians.
I am tired of analyses of competing narratives: if we attach our current division to the tale of implacable hatred that has divided us since before the Civil War, since the pact with the devil, that "compromise" with southern slave owners when the country was founded, there is no way out. But for the moment I see no other way to explain our apparrently instinctive dislike of each other. (Or to be clear, I should say their dislike of me. I don't care about them. I do not send the red side of my family spam promoting my political ideas. They do that to me, apparently eager to pile on me, the way bullies persecute kids who like to read.) Yet surely there must be some interesting nuances. And surely I can examine these without pain. Here is my solution: displace the too-raw story of today into our horrible and beautiful history. Look harder at Thomas Jefferson and try to understand him, sympathize with him, rather than disdain him. And once I’ve done this, maybe I will be able to accept without cringing this kid-like group of compatriots who think they are tough when they are just deluded. And maybe love them some day.
Sounds like the beginning of an important odyssey to me. Important because at the end lies freedom from embarrassment, the possibility of watching the political show with equanimity.
I will begin by accepting with resigned but genuine affection Obama’s decision not to do what all other majority parties in all other civilized nations do as a matter of course – push his legislation through. The ninnies who love pick up trucks have spoken, and because Democrats are the default marginals even when they are the majority, we will defer. It cannot be otherwise. It is in the very nature of the American character that they are loud and strong, even though a minority, and I have to accept it, just as I accept the monotonous bullying spam from my family without protest. I don't have it in me to do otherwise, and I would not want to have that in me.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
L'essentiel c'est la contingence
La nausée struck me first, at least as far as I can remember, when I was in kindergarten, in Watertown, South Dakota, on a dreary grey day, as were all days in the winter during that time of my life (or, should I say, as were all days with a few brilliant exceptions during that time of my life; or should I say on a dreary grey day during the winter of my life), and, inside, we were all shepherded into some circle game that involved skipping around the outside of the circle. I’m quite sure that even at that age I was painfully self-conscious, aware of myself as a ludicrous bundle of bones and knobs with a cap of boy’s hair that I never felt to belong to me on top of my head. But the feeling became overwhelming as I took my turn skipping around the circle, heels clicking on the dark green tiles, yes, clicking, because my mom always bought me shoes with funny little heels, and suddenly recognized my own knees flying up at me, bony, covered with my weird spectral mottled skin, and experienced them as completely alien to me. I was undone.
I have never come to peace with the bizarre sack of flesh that I am. But it was worse as a child, when at night the idea that that was NOW that this was happening to a me to whom I had no access whatsoever of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, levelled me. I used to dread that onslaught, trying to ward it off by thinking of other things. But it slipped in and took hold. Which left me speechless throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, espeically when I had to listen respectfully to my aunts’ postulations about morality. How on earth could they be so sure of their own righteousness? Didn’t they know that we are just bags of bones?
I certainly knew and I suffered the knowledge in solitude and silence. But adulthood brought relief. For as an adult I discovered La Nausée and learned that “L'essentiel c'est la contingence.” It was a brief step out of exile, a homecoming, straight into the arms of Antoine Roquentin. He explained to me that in fact my fear was shared by others, that I was not the freak I had imagined myself to be. My terror was rational because, “par définition, l'existence n'est pas la nécessité. Exister, c'est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or, aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l'existence: la contingence n'est pas un faux-semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper; c'est l'absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. Quand il arrive qu'on s'en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter.” The creepiness that my own body provoked in me was the inevitable result of my intuitive knowledge that it was wholly arbitrary, that I was not really myself, or that if I was myself it was only by the purest chance and that I could be anything else. All was perfectly gratuitous. Hence my shame at hearing my own name and at the sound of my own raspy voice. It was alien: alien by necessity because there was no me, or, at least, I might be someone else.
What I don’t quite remember today is how Roquentin resolves his malaise. I have not solved mine. For a long time, just knowing that I did not live completely alone in this universe was enough. But suddenly today, also a dreay grey day, I have the feeling that if I get hold of La Nausée and read the ending I will have the answer. I have had that book in my hands many times, but I have never been ready to receive the answer. Maybe because I never really believed in Sartre, distressed from the very beginning by his apparent hypocrisy, the yawning gap between his pontificating on authenticity and what looks to me very much like a life based on duplicity and self-delusion. But I have come around to a new place in my own life and understand finally that our very consciousness of ourselves as human actors is grounded in a sort of double vision. If we deny that, we deny the capacity to philosophize. I have decided to limit my nervousness about hypocrisy to political hypocrisy, that is, to a clear discrepancy between the morals one preaches and one’s own life in a politician. Other hypocrites I will embrace to the extent that they have wisdom to offer.
In any case, I am a nauseated person, and I believe that I will find my own cure in this one book. And if that does not work I will have to go back and read Sartre, but really read him this time, not just pillage the little accessible bits, like Huis Clos and select paragraphs from L’Etre et le Néant. Rather than turning my gaze from the horrifying spectre of my sagging jaw skin and the stripe of grey hair on the top of my head, the lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands, and my horny calloused heels, I will run joyfully after these sad little ghosts, throw my arms around them, and accept them as the signs of my radical responsibility to create an essence. An essence that has nothing to do with my aunts’ mean little discourses.
In other words, I will embrace the exile of living in my body and create an essence out of my existence.
Post script:
Here is the resolution that Roquentin finds to his problem. Write a book, in other words, write your own destiny. I feel very open to this. Satisfying answer, the only one, in fact.
Un livre. Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatiguant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. Peut-être qu’eun jour, en pensant précisément à cette heure-ci, à cette-heure morne où j’attends, le dos raid, qu’il soit temps de monter dans le train, peut-être que je sentirais mon coeur battre plus vite et que je ne dirais “C’est ce jour-là, à cette heure-là, que tout a commencé.” Et j’arriverais – au passé, rien qu’au passé – à m’accepter.
There it is. The answer. The only possible answer. And now to integrate this (impossible?) somehow with my intuition of natural law, of human rights.
I have never come to peace with the bizarre sack of flesh that I am. But it was worse as a child, when at night the idea that that was NOW that this was happening to a me to whom I had no access whatsoever of whom I had absolutely no knowledge, levelled me. I used to dread that onslaught, trying to ward it off by thinking of other things. But it slipped in and took hold. Which left me speechless throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood, espeically when I had to listen respectfully to my aunts’ postulations about morality. How on earth could they be so sure of their own righteousness? Didn’t they know that we are just bags of bones?
I certainly knew and I suffered the knowledge in solitude and silence. But adulthood brought relief. For as an adult I discovered La Nausée and learned that “L'essentiel c'est la contingence.” It was a brief step out of exile, a homecoming, straight into the arms of Antoine Roquentin. He explained to me that in fact my fear was shared by others, that I was not the freak I had imagined myself to be. My terror was rational because, “par définition, l'existence n'est pas la nécessité. Exister, c'est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or, aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l'existence: la contingence n'est pas un faux-semblant, une apparence qu'on peut dissiper; c'est l'absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. Quand il arrive qu'on s'en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter.” The creepiness that my own body provoked in me was the inevitable result of my intuitive knowledge that it was wholly arbitrary, that I was not really myself, or that if I was myself it was only by the purest chance and that I could be anything else. All was perfectly gratuitous. Hence my shame at hearing my own name and at the sound of my own raspy voice. It was alien: alien by necessity because there was no me, or, at least, I might be someone else.
What I don’t quite remember today is how Roquentin resolves his malaise. I have not solved mine. For a long time, just knowing that I did not live completely alone in this universe was enough. But suddenly today, also a dreay grey day, I have the feeling that if I get hold of La Nausée and read the ending I will have the answer. I have had that book in my hands many times, but I have never been ready to receive the answer. Maybe because I never really believed in Sartre, distressed from the very beginning by his apparent hypocrisy, the yawning gap between his pontificating on authenticity and what looks to me very much like a life based on duplicity and self-delusion. But I have come around to a new place in my own life and understand finally that our very consciousness of ourselves as human actors is grounded in a sort of double vision. If we deny that, we deny the capacity to philosophize. I have decided to limit my nervousness about hypocrisy to political hypocrisy, that is, to a clear discrepancy between the morals one preaches and one’s own life in a politician. Other hypocrites I will embrace to the extent that they have wisdom to offer.
In any case, I am a nauseated person, and I believe that I will find my own cure in this one book. And if that does not work I will have to go back and read Sartre, but really read him this time, not just pillage the little accessible bits, like Huis Clos and select paragraphs from L’Etre et le Néant. Rather than turning my gaze from the horrifying spectre of my sagging jaw skin and the stripe of grey hair on the top of my head, the lizard-like skin on the backs of my hands, and my horny calloused heels, I will run joyfully after these sad little ghosts, throw my arms around them, and accept them as the signs of my radical responsibility to create an essence. An essence that has nothing to do with my aunts’ mean little discourses.
In other words, I will embrace the exile of living in my body and create an essence out of my existence.
Post script:
Here is the resolution that Roquentin finds to his problem. Write a book, in other words, write your own destiny. I feel very open to this. Satisfying answer, the only one, in fact.
Un livre. Naturellement, ça ne serait d’abord qu’un travail ennuyeux et fatiguant, ça ne m’empêcherait pas d’exister ni de sentir que j’existe. Mais il viendrait bien un moment où le livre serait écrit, serait derrière moi et je pense qu’un peu de clarté tomberait sur mon passé. Alors peut-être que je pourrais, à travers lui, me rappeler ma vie sans répugnance. Peut-être qu’eun jour, en pensant précisément à cette heure-ci, à cette-heure morne où j’attends, le dos raid, qu’il soit temps de monter dans le train, peut-être que je sentirais mon coeur battre plus vite et que je ne dirais “C’est ce jour-là, à cette heure-là, que tout a commencé.” Et j’arriverais – au passé, rien qu’au passé – à m’accepter.
There it is. The answer. The only possible answer. And now to integrate this (impossible?) somehow with my intuition of natural law, of human rights.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Bella detesta matribus
My son is threatening to join the military. I hear those mothers and wives singing “Johnny has gone for a soldier,” but their men had no choice. Can he truly go off to war simply because he needs more structure in his life? Surely there are alternate ways to find structure.
My heart is broken, because they will deploy him to Afghanistan to take part in a war that has been going on forever and that depends upon issues buried in the sand itself, old as life itself, but that have nothing to do with us. Obama told us that we have specific goals there; maybe his, but they are not mine. John Dickerson pontificated the nonsense that we, the people, should not be involved in deciding which wars we will fight because we are not the best informed. We are precisely the ones who should decide whether we send our boys to war. If we decided, if Congress could not simply back the President’s request for troops without our consent. And that would be a good thing.
The burden of war is not distributed equally, and that is wrong, but it is not. And therefore I have spent my life insuring that my children would never be part of the classes that are forced to join the military to get an education, to acquire a bit of prestige, to land a steady job. We are not they! My dad was, but I went to university to avoid living in that world. And now we are falling back into that class, in the space of one generation.
Beyond the pain of seeing him ready to slip us back into the working class, there is the ideological problem. The military is an alien culture. In exchange for a small income, you agree to die or become maimed if asked. Once inside the framework, you have to believe that war is a glorious business. You have to see U.S. interventions as necessary, whatever their motivation. I understand the need for a defensive military – the one down here, for example. But ours runs around invading at will. How does one accept that?
I know that he craves a framework – I too have been terrified of empty space. But had my parents handed me the opportunities we have handed him, I would have flown. If you need order, why not master Latin and Greek, I ask him. I’m afraid that the horrible truth is that he is comfortable in a blokish, non-self-reflective environment. And therefore he will do whatever they want him to do.
He needs a shape that I was not able to provide, I thinking that freedom to choose one’s own life mattered above all. But he is failing. I was so sure that exposing him to the joy of study would turn him into a scholar, but he doesn’t have it in him, at least not now.
In the meantime he is off to university for a year in Canada, study abroad. Let him come back happy, disciplined, poised for success. Or maybe he will find a way to stay and not come back. May he find what he needs; let it not be the military.
I am crying. The military and its world view, its arrogant assurance that we need to safeguard the world - without reflection or measure – is responsible for the evils of the earth. It is an organization created by boys who need excitement and authority beyond what ordinary life offers. They would be comical with their silly little salutes and their playing at glory if they weren’t carrying machine guns and dropping bombs. Once inside the house of mirrors, they start to believe that it’s all real. It’s their faulty, the ones who get old and still don’t grow up. They perpetuate this insanity by recruiting hot blooded little guys, getting them while they are still gullible and out of control, before any philosophy has taken hold in their heads, before they have the resources to say no.
They world is filled with enemies and evil because they are in charge, those little big guys, allowed to play with guns, when they should be locked up.
My heart is broken, because they will deploy him to Afghanistan to take part in a war that has been going on forever and that depends upon issues buried in the sand itself, old as life itself, but that have nothing to do with us. Obama told us that we have specific goals there; maybe his, but they are not mine. John Dickerson pontificated the nonsense that we, the people, should not be involved in deciding which wars we will fight because we are not the best informed. We are precisely the ones who should decide whether we send our boys to war. If we decided, if Congress could not simply back the President’s request for troops without our consent. And that would be a good thing.
The burden of war is not distributed equally, and that is wrong, but it is not. And therefore I have spent my life insuring that my children would never be part of the classes that are forced to join the military to get an education, to acquire a bit of prestige, to land a steady job. We are not they! My dad was, but I went to university to avoid living in that world. And now we are falling back into that class, in the space of one generation.
Beyond the pain of seeing him ready to slip us back into the working class, there is the ideological problem. The military is an alien culture. In exchange for a small income, you agree to die or become maimed if asked. Once inside the framework, you have to believe that war is a glorious business. You have to see U.S. interventions as necessary, whatever their motivation. I understand the need for a defensive military – the one down here, for example. But ours runs around invading at will. How does one accept that?
I know that he craves a framework – I too have been terrified of empty space. But had my parents handed me the opportunities we have handed him, I would have flown. If you need order, why not master Latin and Greek, I ask him. I’m afraid that the horrible truth is that he is comfortable in a blokish, non-self-reflective environment. And therefore he will do whatever they want him to do.
He needs a shape that I was not able to provide, I thinking that freedom to choose one’s own life mattered above all. But he is failing. I was so sure that exposing him to the joy of study would turn him into a scholar, but he doesn’t have it in him, at least not now.
In the meantime he is off to university for a year in Canada, study abroad. Let him come back happy, disciplined, poised for success. Or maybe he will find a way to stay and not come back. May he find what he needs; let it not be the military.
I am crying. The military and its world view, its arrogant assurance that we need to safeguard the world - without reflection or measure – is responsible for the evils of the earth. It is an organization created by boys who need excitement and authority beyond what ordinary life offers. They would be comical with their silly little salutes and their playing at glory if they weren’t carrying machine guns and dropping bombs. Once inside the house of mirrors, they start to believe that it’s all real. It’s their faulty, the ones who get old and still don’t grow up. They perpetuate this insanity by recruiting hot blooded little guys, getting them while they are still gullible and out of control, before any philosophy has taken hold in their heads, before they have the resources to say no.
They world is filled with enemies and evil because they are in charge, those little big guys, allowed to play with guns, when they should be locked up.
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