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.

All Saints' Day in exile

It is a particularly brilliant November 1, which of course is at odds with the very meaning of the day, heralding for those of the northern hemisphere the coming of winter and for me New Years. November 1 is my personal New Years. I sit here, with the mass of my life flowing through my consciousness, all those gorgeous elements, Irish, Minnesotan, French, German. I am Northern European through and through. I have nothing of the exotic green and little flashes of lurid color that characterizes this place. It is all alien to me. This is all about land. If this were Iceland I could be at home. But in this backwards, menacingly and disorientingly bizarre place, no. No.

But let’s drag this back again to the possible payback of living in a state of perpetual disorientation, a state of physical and psychological exile. Such a life fills one with a permanent sense of anger, but maybe a productive anger. A refusal to accept anything and a belligerent attitude towards everything. We exiles are eternally vigilant, with adrenalin coursing endlessly through our circulatory systems.

Living in exile forces one to confront and consolidate one’s own mythology. I have re-established contact with the endless Wim Wenders sky of the Midwest, the trip across, across, across what exactly? The limitless space of the plains. Catching a glimpse on the horizon of the bright lights of a city. I have reclaimed the prairies, which used to seem like an endless rugburn. I have also embraced the sorrow of my national past, the absolute horror of the crimes we perpetrated. I have integrated slavery into the narrative of our past, which means that I have recognized how absolutely irreconcilable our foundational values of freedom are with the reality of what we did and continue to do. I will not back down on that. But in recognizing the falseness of the social compact I have listened again to the voices of the founding fathers, and I feel their distress as they hit up against that intransigent Southern-white-guy block ready to defend slavery to the end. I hate and love in equal measure Thomas Jefferson, planter, elitist, true hypocrite, pretending to be a man of the people. His black-white vision of morality, mistrust of government, stubborn desire to dismantle, his dirty politics; and yet, his despairing fear to look at where his ideology led because the result was too horrific, nothing less than the end of everything. He held on, like we do sometimes, to civilization, because we just have too much to lose. I despise his modern counterparts with every breath in my body, and yet I understand their obsessive need to turn their eyes away. And just as I hate them, I love John Adams, despite his need for approval, even as I love the contingent of American ready to fight oppression of all kinds, because after all who is going to do good unless they are petted and fed approval?

In exile I have come to appreciate the intelligence and deplore the populism of us in a way that I could not have otherwise. I have a safe place here from which to utterly loathe vulgarity.

In exile I have a place to develop as a scholar. There is trade-off here; I am surrounded by mediocrity unrelieved by the flashes of brilliance one finds at home. But I have time. Mediocre myself, I need to be around brilliance to develop ideas. But without the time afforded by this easy easy culture, I would not have developed at all. Maybe the paradoxes are clearer, too.

And, finally, being here keeps me on the move, physically, which is the necessary correlative of mentally. I have to travel more, much more, than I would otherwise, and with every trip comes a portion of knowledge.

Parve — nec invideo — sine me, liber, ibis in urbem:

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.

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.

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.