What else?…Sarah Palin
October 4, 2008
Sometimes in my most solipsistic moments I begin to see national or world events as some divinely provided symbol sent as commentary on life.
And so it happened that as I was going back to work, feeling pangs of motherly guilt, and crying about daycare drop-off in small out-of-the-way places at school, the world send me Sarah Palin.
Could the cultural myth of the Supermom, revised and burnished by the reluctant approval of the religious Right, be any more ironic?
But there she was iconicized in the form of the New York Times website, her biography perfectly dovetailing the profiles of undecided voters. Thrust forward were her credentials as a mom: five kids, mother of a special needs child, hockey mom, army mom. All of this while hunting moose, whistle-blowing, and cheering on her snowmobile-racing husband. Oh, and governing the state of Alaska.
Sarah Palin did not make me feel inferior as a mother. But, the heralding of Sarah Palin as mother underscored the cultural biases that, on some level, impact how I feel about my own parenting. (I wonder, was Hillary Clinton villainized as she was in ’92 because she’d only had one child? Was her lack of productivity as a mother reason to doubt her ability to advise her husband? Was it reason to fear her stanch feminism?)
With the hullabaloo around SP, I saw the old trap for mothers that I and my mom-friends still feel the pinch of today. SP (with her red high heel sandals, up-do, and carcass of a grizzly slung across her couch) embodies the old perfume commercial whose jingle I can still hear in my head: “I can bring home the bacon…fry it up in a pan…and never let you forget you’re a man…’Cuz I’m a woman…” Ah, yes. Isn’t that what feminism is all about? Elevating the status of a woman by talking about how a woman can do all the things a man an do…and more?
In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir discusses the history of how women’s bodies have been misunderstood. According to Aristotle I believe, women were incidental (convenient?) receptacles for sperm– the real source of humanity. Indeed, women’s bodies have been as much about what is seen as what is unseen…And perhaps eroticizing women’s bodies is compensation for all that is unseen and misunderstood.
It’s a leap, but Sarah Palin– for all her highlights, beauty contestant photos, and newscaster sheen– is another example of a myth thrust in front of women to tell them what they are. But who needs to have women explained for them, really? Sarah Palin is the latest in a long line of patriarchal fantasies. She is another fantasy of male cultural reproduction…She represents the fantasy of what a patriarchal world wants to believe it can produce. And ironically, this fantasy has been sold to women as the epitome of female power– of female choice!– and of feminism itself.
Of course, it’s not ironic that Sarah Palin is anti-choice. In order to keep the male patriarchal fantasy alive, the fantasy must reproduce. Therefore, women in this fantasy cannot have control over reproduction. Which is another way of saying sex, for a woman, must be about reproduction. Sex, for a man, can be about desire. Again, Sarah Palin embodies both. Sarah Palin is not a notch in the belt of feminism. She is another version of the old mold, slightly revised to co-opt the language of feminists.
And every morning, when I leave my little boy, I am happy to go work and sad not to stay at home with him. The choices are a blessing. But they are not without consequences, a reality the mythological, supermom, “cake and eat it too” example of Sarah Palin will never address.
The year of being full-time mom is coming to a close. The city is fully spring now, and yesterday we had our first hot day. The streets are beginning to hold on to the sour smell of garbage swill, and since two days ago, we’ve had the windows open 24/7. Fall is too close.
This time has been so sweet, of course, because it is fleeting. I’d like to say it’s been all daffodils and roses the entire 14 months, but the truth is, it has been terrifying, frustrating, stagnating, and, well, hard. Even as I type those adjectives, the Uber Mother voice rears up inside and raises her finger to chastise me. Isn’t this the most important thing you’ve ever done? Can’t you think of someone besides yourself? Don’t you love your son????
I both hate the Uber Mother, and want to be her. I want to hear her, and I want to shut her up for good. At least, I think, I am beginning to understand her.
I don’t know how or if I tried to prepare myself for motherhood. The goal of “growing up, going to college, getting married, and having children” was pretty heavily ingrained from early on. It’s not a path I ever denied or tried to see around. When I hit my mid-twenties and had no immediate marriage prospects, I sought depression, not options. Eventually, I got out of the habit of waiting for something to happen and told myself that I might just have to consider other paths. I stopped thinking about wanting children because I wanted children to be a conversation, a possibility that came from a conversation with the right person. I didn’t want children to be this “one size fits all” dream that I’d have to lodge another person into.
As it turns out, the right person did want children, had already had one, and was game for at least one more. His approach to parenting was more intuitive, less about books and experts and psychologists and focus groups. Given to over-thinking any new challenge that comes my way, I welcomed this laissez-faire attitude.
I live in an era in which market forces have successfully translated love for one’s child into all kinds of accoutrements, including $800 strollers, $1500/hour doulas, pre-natal yoga, lactation consultants, a whole section at Barnes and Noble, DVDs, movement classes, music classes, sign language, etc. Preying on the natural anxiety that arises from trying to care for another human being, mega-baby stores have thrived.
Of course when a generation inherits a new array of technology and insight into time-honored traditions, it tends to want to “out-do” the previous generation, big time. I casually asked my mother-in-law one day about leaving my son crying in his car seat while I went to the bathroom. (I was feeling guilty about not being enough, to the point where I was feeling selfish for actually going to the bathroom!!!) Trying to encourage me to give myself a break, she said “Sometimes, you just have to put them down and let them cry.” My sister-in-law, who had given me a Dr. Sears book for Christmas, overheard this and said “I don’t think you should ever leave your baby alone to cry.” She then re-told a memory of waking upin the dark, alone in her crib. “I felt so abandoned,” she said.
The not-so-subtle guilt my sister-in-law was laying on her mother is also evident in the Sears’ books. Too often, the book I have “begs the question” when it defends attachment parenting. For example, when talking about bedtime, the book asks do you want bedtime to be a calming, comforting ritual in which parent and child bond? Or, do you want it to be a schedule forced on your child, even when s/he resists? I’m paraphrasing here, but the use of guilt in these parenting books, and in others, is pretty obvious.
So, where does an anxious mother go when she needs advice and support? Of course, I ask other mothers and fathers on the playground. Of course, I have to resort to my own instincts, and of course, my own personality (good or bad) influences every parenting decision. I have not been “remade” into Uber Mother as the commercial world would have me believe is possible.
A few years ago, a colleague recommended that I read The Red Tent by Anita Daimant because she thought it nicely dovetailed a book we both taught, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. I read the book, and it is a nice companion to Atwood’s dystopian novel. Atwood’s novel creates a world in which women are the architects. In this world, infertile women get to be mothers, and the fertile women are slaves to the matriarchs. In The Red Tent, Diamant re-imagines a Biblical tribal world in which women have a kind of matriarchy within a larger patriarchy. The women– sisters, mothers, wives, daughters– bear the responsibility of bearing and caring for the children. In these roles, they rely on their bonds and generations of knowledge that have been gained by first-hand experience and passed-down through careful training. These women learn about raising children by watching many mothers, every day, and by being mothers to others’ children before they have their own.
Sounds romantic– I know. Too romantic, and I hate to fall prey to the practice of idealizing an older culture. But, I feel that all of the impositions of the Uber Mother try to instill what was possible when women had a real community in which to become mothers. Today, we move away from families, we buy into the “experts” ideas about how to raise our children, and we think we have progressed when we abandon whatever ideas may have gotten us through our imperfect childhoods. We approach motherhood the way we have approached doing well in school, or competing for a job, establishing a career. The idea that succumbing to some kind of shared, experiential knowledge is advanced, seems passe.
Perhaps these products and books and experts try to get us to believe we can get back to the garden, the the state of perfection, to a state of innocence, where nothing is ruined and one’s upbringing is without abandonment, anger, fear, or loneliness. That’s a lot of pressure to heap on a parent, but I know I feel it. And I hear it in others’ rationale of their parenting. Instead, I’d like to be back in that Red Tent, with my grandmothers, my mother and her sisters. I’d like us all to be muddling through. They’d tell me it’s all going to be OK, and I’d believe them.
Motherhood and Magical Thinking / 1
May 9, 2008
May 9, 2008
What exactly is magical thinking?
With all the references to magical thinking (and I’m recalling two memoirs in particular, Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs and Joan Didion’s reflection on grieving The Year of Magical Thinking), I’m compelled to find an actual definition of the term.
The Wikipedia entry is so illuminating, I have to copy part of it here:
In anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science, magical thinking is nonscientific causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, correlation equaling causation, the law of contagion, the power of symbols, and the meaningfulness of synchronicity.
Magical thinking can occur when one simply does not understand possible causes, as illustrated by Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s suggestion that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (see Clarke’s three laws), but can also occur in response to situations that are largely random or chaotic, such as a coin toss, as well as in situations that one has little or no control over, especially those one is emotionally invested in. (Indeed, this can be seen as a special case of failure to understand possible causes: specifically, a failure to understand the laws of probability that guarantee the occurrence of coincidences and seeming patterns.) See below for more specific examples.
Sir James George Frazer and Bronisław Malinowski said that magic is more like science than religion, and that societies with magical beliefs often had separate religious beliefs and practices.[citation needed] The difference between science and magical thinking emerges in 17th century philosophy. Both worldviews are mechanistic and based on causality, but the scientific worldview is distinguished by the scientific method and by skepticism, requiring the falsifiability of any scientific hypothesis.
According to Frazer,[1] magical thinking depends on two laws: the law of similarity (an effect resembles its cause), and the law of contagion (things which were once in physical contact maintain a connection even after physical contact has been broken). These two laws govern the operation of what Frazer called “sympathetic magic”, the idea that the manipulation of effigies or similar symbols or tokens can cause changes to occur in the thing the symbol represented. Typical examples of sympathetic magic include the use of voodoo dolls, and the fetishization of cargo cults. Others have described these two laws as examples of “analogical reasoning” (rather than logical reasoning). Magical thinking is a common phase in child development. From the age of a toddler to early school age children will often link the outside world with their internal consciousness, e.g. “It is raining because I am sad”.
Typically, people use magic to attempt to explain things that science has not acceptably explained, or to attempt to control things that science cannot. The classic example is of the collapsing roof, described in E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Magic, and Oracles Among the Azande, in which the Azande claimed that a roof fell on a particular person because of a magical spell cast (unwittingly) by another person.
The Azande knew perfectly well a scientific explanation for the collapsing room (that termites had eaten through the supporting posts), but pointed out that this scientific explanation could not explain why the roof happened to collapse at precisely the same moment that the particular man was resting beneath it. The magic explains why two independent chains of causation intersect. Thus, from the point of view of the practitioners, magic explains what scientists would call “coincidences” or “contingency”. From the point of view of outside observers, magic is a way of making coincidences meaningful in social terms. Carl Jung coined the word synchronicity for experiences of this type.
Adherents of magical belief systems often do not see their beliefs as being magical. In Asia, many coincidences and contingencies are explained in terms of karma in which a person’s actions in a past life affects current events. Likewise in the west, ideas of “motivation” and “positive thinking” in themselves achieving outcomes are not seen as magical by those who tout their benefits.
A common form of magical thinking is that one’s own thoughts can influence events, either beneficially, by creating good luck, or for the worse, as in divine punishment for “bad thoughts”. Freud reflected on these phenomena in his essay, “The Uncanny”. These beliefs reflect an incorrect understanding of the boundaries of self; one can indeed will to move one’s own arm, but not the ashtray on the table, at least not by any direct means (e.g. we can will our arm to move the ashtray, or there may be even less direct routes of influence). We can also make the opposite error: thinking that outside agencies can see into or influence our thoughts (paranoia).
Another form of magical thinking occurs when people believe that words can directly affect the world. This can mean avoiding talking about certain subjects (“speak of the devil and he’ll appear”), using euphemisms instead of certain words, or believing that to know the “true name” of something gives one power over it, or that certain chants, prayers or mystical phrases will change things. More generally, it is magical thinking to take a symbol to be its referent.
Caveat: Blogging lends itself to one’s exhortation of ideas in an asumed vacuum. I can say some thought, relatively unique among the flurry of my general everyday thoughts, and put it here, as if it has had no precedent in the history of humankind– a kind of magical thinking in and of itself. However, I am sure what I am about to say has a precedent, I just don’t know what it is. That said, the following observation may seem a bit inflated, overly full of itself.
The stories of a culture create a kind of matrix within which our actions and ideas take shape. That matrix (or context) can dictate a person’s way of thinking. This isn’t brainwashing, necessarily. But when immersed in stories with a particular pattern or outcome, our brains begin to follow those well-trained pathways willingly.
Although the post quotes that magic is more like science than religion, when I see this definition, I think of religion, specifically my own Christian upbringing. Is this bad? Does this diminsh religion because it is merely an institutionalization of poorly concluded causal analysis? Or does the connection elevate magical thinking to something uniquely human, developed over time, that we have come to need? For example: Adherents of magical belief systems often do not see their beliefs as being magical. In Asia, many coincidences and contingencies are explained in terms of karma in which a person’s actions in a past life affects current events. Likewise in the west, ideas of “motivation” and “positive thinking” in themselves achieving outcomes are not seen as magical by those who tout their benefits. Are these examples of “magical thinking” another way that humans craft a narrative (authority) that can serve as a kind of moral compass?
I’m beginning to plan lessons for next year, and I’m considering teaching The Scarlet Letter for the first time in ten years. What a fantastic example of magical thinking! From the righteous mob at the scaffold, to the guilt-ridden Dimmesdale, to the penitent Hester– all engage in different roles, serving the same end: redemption.
Come to think of it, The Great Gatsby exhibits its share of magical thinking…And One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest makes magical thinking the norm because the story is told from an unreliable narrator who tells us “it’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.”
Maybe all literature is a kind of magical thinking???
As the title of this series (Motherhood and Magical Thinking) suggests, I have had time to notice my own brushes with this kind of thinking. Specifically, I have been living with this assumption that after spending a year away from teaching, I would automatically resume my old life. The change I have been trying to accomodate is staying home for a year. I have ignored the obvious fact that I will never return to the way I was as a teacher. I will never be able to pick up the patterns I forged over 10 years. Yes, undeniably parts of me will be the same. I’ll still use discussion more than independent or group work, I’ll still assign mor paper than “creative” projects, I’ll still have to work not to ignore students sitting on the left side of the room, etc. But the energy, the way I worked, and how I used my time: Gone. The habit of letting work expand to fill any and all time I had: Gone.
I have files and boxes of teaching materials waiting for me, presumably to help ease my transition back into teaching. But their usefulness is practically unrecognizable, as is the peson who so earnestly prepared them and stowed them for safekeeping.
February 28
February 28, 2008
Rain Light
W. S. Merwin
All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know
look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water
the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife
that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning
My father-in-law died a year ago today. My son turns 11 months old today. I was born 35 years ago yesterday. My father died 75 years- to the day– after he was born.
The proximity of these dates and events makes me want to force some meaning out of them. What does it mean that my father was born on July 14, and that he died on July 14? What does it mean that my father and father-in-law were born in 1928, that they both served in the Navy during the Korean War? What does it mean that my father-in-law died one month — to the day– before his grandson was born? What does it mean that my father’s birthday was 7-14-28, that my father-in-law’s birthday was 3-14-28, and that my son’d birthday is 3-28-07?
The questions remind me of another poem by Mark Strand:
Precious Little
If blindness is blind to itself
Then vision will come.
You open the door that was your shiled,
And walk out into the coils of wind
And blurred tattoos of light that mar the ground.
The day feels cold on your skin.
“Out of my way,” you say to whatever is waiting, “Out of my way.”
In a trice the purple thunder draws back, the tulip drops
Its petals, the path is clear.
You head west over the Great
Divide and down through canyons into an endless valley.
The air is pure, the houses vacant.
Off in the distance the wind– all ice and feeling–
Invents a tree and a harp, and begins to play.
What could be better– long phrases of air stirring the leaves,
The leaves turning? But listen again. Is it really the wind,
Or is it the sound of someboy running
One step ahead of the dark?
And if it is, and nothing turns out
As you thought, then what is the difference
Between blindness lost and blindness regained?
Click on ‘write’
February 28, 2008
I think I’ve said this before, but I love clicking on ‘write’ in the WordPress toolbar. It’s as if it’s an entre into writing, that just by clicking on the word, I could automatically feel the pulse of words. It’s as if this empty field is a portal that compels/requires/forces me to write one word after another.
My son is sitting on the floor, flipping through The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond. I don’t know what it is about the pages of that book (maybe the squeakiness of the cover?) that keeps him just sitting there and feeling the pages.
Yesterday was the first day he actually selected a book for me to read to him. Of course, it was Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do you Hear? That’s his favorite. This morning it was this barnyard puppet book, and he handed it to me twice in a row.
Yesterday, I read this article on math in the New Yorker. The scientist featured in the article is researching to what extent our brains are wired for math. He’s finding we are not wired for math the way we are wired for language, understanding spatial relationships, approximate quantities. He’s finding that we have ro learn complex computation, and how we learn it (or, where in our brains these processes are located) is different depending upon the situation in which we learn these skills. Fascinating.
The scientist also says that our brains have developed an associative quality, a quality that evolved over time to help us survive. I think of blogs, the internet in general, when links from one site to another present a tactile way of seeing the associative way we think…Which means, I suppose the internet was being born thousands of years ago…
The BIG 3-5
February 27, 2008
Something about turning 35 tomorrow is making me think about resolutions. I failed this year at coming up with a New Year’s resolution, and wanted to revive it for the Chinese New Year, but missed that one, too. Lent, another opportunity to transform some small aspect of my life through giving up or taking on, soon followed, but I let it pass as well.
My problem with resolutions is I tend to use the ritual as an opportunity to take stock in everything I want to change about myself. This year’s littany might go something like this: Eat better, eat local, exercise/do yoga more, WRITE EVERY DAY, write letters to friends (like Melissa, Jen, Joy, Tiffany, Amy, Barb, Anne, Judy, Greg), interview my family to compile a family history, be more kind to the people I love, be less moody, read Ulysses, finish Swann’s Way, read the NY Times every day, teach my son sign language, learn Spanish, blog….
You see why this never works?
So, on the cusp of middle age I’m trying to reinvigorate this notion of meeting my life with more intention. (A resolution in and of itself….I suppose I am making a resolution to make resolutions…ha ha!) And today I’m deciding that resolution will be keeping this blog more regularly. That’s it…and, of course finsh Swann’s Way (before the end of the month so I can start Ulysses!!).
No, not really. Just this blog. That’s it. Nothing more.
The date stamp on each entry will let us all know when I fall off the wagon, if that is indeed the proper idiom for this situaiton.
Ironically, in this first entry of the new year (2008, year of the rat, #36) where I begin to try to take up more cyberspace via blogging, I want to talk about the carbon footprint.
Why do I care about my carbon footprint? The honest answer is I don’t. I sit here with any number of electronics humming in their sleep mode while lamps in several rooms of my more-spacious-than-average apartment burn away. The number of cheap toys, makeup, toiletries, blank tapes, batteries, plastic thingies, and clothes I have bagged up and put out on the curb in my lifetime will have me in the Ninth Circle of consumption hell for all eternity. (And there is such a hell; it is full of Americans, oil-thirsty, resource-hoarding Americans.) But, I believe in the idea of a carbon footprint. When I think of the concept of a minimizing one’s carbon footprint, I think of the ethics of Thoreau. I’d like to think I could one day aspire to his great experiment, but I’m a long way from there.
Still, I’m happy that it is getting more difficult to escape news features about climate change. One word that pops up in these discussions is locavore, the word-of-the-year for 2007 according to the Oxford American Dictionary. Thisword describes a person who only eats locally-grown food.
I was turned on to this idea through Animal, Vegetable, Miracleby Barbara Kingsolver, specifically by this chapter. It prompted my husband and I to begin buying all groceries at our local farmer’s market (sparse as it is in January) and to buy a cheesemaking kit. We have yet to make the mozzerella, and thirst for greens and other vegetables has sent us to the big grocery stores recently. But I still think the idea of buying/eating local is right on. To me, it’s a concrete way to begin to align want and need, two things often misconstrued in the big capitalist machine. Again, I think of Thoreau, specifically his chapter “Economy.”
This article in the New Yorker by Michael Specter explains how complex the concept of our carbon footprint truly is. There are so many factors when it comes to energy consumption– so many links in the chain at this point– that the solution to limiting our imprint on the planet is often not as obvious as it seems.
(Audible sigh here)
Why can’t it be easier?
Right or wrong, my mind jumpt to another metaphor: the time and effort it takes to close up someone’s life after he passes away. A person’s life in the bureaucratic world requires months, if not years, to expunge. Forms filled in triplicate, copies of death certificates sent to agencies you never even knew existed. Meanwhile, there is the palpable fact of a personal scent clinging to clothes that have yet to be boxed up and sent to charity, no time to measure their worth vis a vis the space they occupy or the need they no longer fulfill. Then, there are the personal connections to salve. Long lost friends, perhaps coping with a separate sorrow, who call again and again and have to be told (again and again) the one they seek has passed. There may even be fights, personal or legal, that ensue long after, just so someone can earn the right to define what to do with this empty space to fill.
…And of course those last five lines evoke “Reasons for Moving” by Mark Strand:
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
What carbon consumption have I burned in the 40 minutes I have been writing? Or, more importantly, what space am I filling? What absence have I become? What threadbare self am I striving to keep whole?
Compatibility
January 31, 2008
31 January 2008
Caveat: This is a philosophical post that perhaps dwells too long on minutia and perhaps trusts its little epiphanies a bit too much.
Lately I’ve been having an active dreaming life. Specifically, former boyfriends appear, morph into other people, and become part of these long drawn-out narratives that attempt to resolve whatever disagreement has kept these people out of my life. For example, last night, the main character was a combination of Heath Ledger and someone I haven’t seen in about 10 years. As the dream went on, the person became less like Heath Ledger and more like the person I haven’t seen in a while. When this happened, the fantasy story line dissipated and I started recounting the real story about this person to my dream-world friends.
When I have these dreams, I wake up with an eerie residue of these people, as if I have really spent time with them. As if something old has been resolved, or even more like something I had forgotten about has been dug up to remind me or its lack of resolution.
This has me thinking about compatibility. At one point in my dream, I felt connected to and compatible with the Heath Ledger character. But as he became more like my former boyfriend, I felt less compatible with him.
I have friends who at one time I would have thought myself to be very compatible. And it was a merciful act– some suspension of disbelief– that allowed me to realize my compatibility with my husband.
For a long time, I thought of compatibility as an equation involving obvious likes and dislikes: books, bands, movies, sports, occupations, etc. But now I see those things, as personal as they are, are also very external projections. For me at least, they are external projections of a self that perhaps helps me to balance all the internal elements: family dynamics, painful memories, pain. So it makes sense to me that the surface projections (that come from and salve the darker, inner places) are not the things that make me compatible with someone. Rather, compatibility is beyond those things. It supercedes these things….
About Epiphanies
January 29, 2008
January 29, 2008
In a relentlessly commercial culture, the communication of our private meanings has been vaguely corrupted around the edges of toxic idioms of merchandising. Wanting to convey an inward sensation of the sacred, we find ourselves skidding toward the usages of sales and marketing. With the idiom already compromised, the experience of revelation begins to grow ever more unsteady: Its effects can be like seasickness, but without the sea. In our age it tends to tremble and vibrate, like any visitation. It breaks boundaries and jeopardizes a feeling for scale.
Chalres Baxter
“Against Epiphanies”
Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction
By the fourth night, students were tired of the daily debrief. Coming together after a long day of gutting houses, or tramping door-to-door in the stench and the hot sun, was taxing. It was easier to hang out on the cots and eat cookies or hang out by the stoop a few doors down and smoke. Sitting in a circle and listening to 50+ people give a one-minute synopsis of their day only required more concentration and 50+ more reminders of the devastation we were steeped in.
After the first work brigade returned in April, those of us who hadn’t gone with them were buoyed by their tales of community. These pioneers had seen the destruction first, and their recollection assured us we would never believe the sights, the stories. Their pictures, video footage confirmed what the newspapers conveyed: People had lost jobs, had lost their families. People knew people who had committed suicide because relief just hadn’t come—wouldn’t come. The obvious difference between the levee in the ninth ward and the system of levees in the French Quarter confirmed the most cynical suspicions. But, because this group had experienced these things together they had a powerful, unspeakable bond. Many of us wanted to know what it would be like to have that feeling.
While we were there to do work, of course, we were also there to get our epiphany, our own story that would show we had been as close to the incident as possible. Usually it came when gutting houses. Families acquainted with loss had come back to get what they wanted, but left behind a framed Biblical passage. Or, belongings were piled in one unsalvageable heap. Small water-stained images of a family at a birthday party belied better times.
From these scraps, we hoarded our own epiphanies. Once, I even heard a student admit to it. In our debrief, she said she had been waiting for her story about New Orleans, her encounter with a survivor, or the evidence in a gutted house of its former living, breathing occupants. But as she told us of her moment, she said it wasn’t having the effect she had hoped for. She was still depressed.
After 9-11, I had a desire to be close to the incident then as well. It’s not that I wanted to skim the periphery of the smoking, gaping hole at the city’s heart. I wanted to be bussed in after curfew. I wanted to speak to people who had just come from the wreckage. And I did. I volunteered with Salvation Army to serve meals to rescue workers at one of the respite centers. For several eight hour shifts, I spooned baked salmon with capers to one exhausted worker after another.
Is the commercialization of private meanings so wide-spread that I wanted my piece of a more authentic pie? Or, does that commercialization evoke what my husband refers to as liberal tourism, this trend to commodify a cause so that well-meaning do-gooders can feel connected to it, and good about themselves by extension?
When I went to New Orleans I believed my intentions were genuine. I had visited the city a dozen times since I was 14. I had powerful memories of the place, and it was my favorite American city. Now, however, I wonder. Perhaps since these events are only beginning to be commodified, they are the only remnants of the sacred we feel we can trust anymore.
Memoriam
December 17, 2007
Boast Of Quietness
–By Jorge Luis Borges
Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than
meteors.
The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside.
Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would
like to understand them.
Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air.
Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack.
They speak of humanity.
My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty.
They speak of homeland.
My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old
sword, the willow grove’s visible prayer as evening falls.
Time is living me.
More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous
multitude.
They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow.
My name is someone and anyone.
I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn’t
expect to arrive.
__________________________________
December 14, 2007
The mourners close Shabbat with a service and I leaf through the book in my hand (right to left as I have seen men on the train do) trying to keep up. I can walk into any Episcopal church on any day and pick up the prayers at any point. To be in the space of another ritual, and feel so lost, is strange. So I read the prayers. I like the God I am reading about. I like what the prayers ask of people, assume of people. I want to be at home here.
Here is the apartment of my good friend’s mother, and now that her mother has suddenly passed, I realize how much I have taken for granted the comfort of this apartment. First of all, this apartment is a kind of worm hole into a sector of New York to which I’ll never have access. The ceilings are impossibly high, the windows unbelievably wide. Nine floors up, the busy-ness of Broadway is muted. The bigness and quietness of the place in this overcrowded noisy city is comfort.
As I learn at the funeral service, this apartment has been a gathering place for hundreds, not just for me and my cohort of writers who have met here on and off for two and a half years. Anytime we needed a larger, more comfortable space for a workshop or longer meeting, my friend and her mother opened up their home to us. A year ago, my friend hosted my baby shower here.
For years now, when I walk through the intimidating wrought iron gates that cut a clear and ominous divide between the sidewalk and the courtyard, I feel less like the outsider I am supposed to be. When the elevator attendant lets me out at the ninth floor, I know what to do with my coat, my shoes.
As the mourners honor this woman’s presence that the fact of death can’t deny, glimpses of her well up for me too. Especially stark is the last time I saw her, her appreciation of my son’s picture, her interest in how he is doing. My friend’s obvious concern for her mother is also there, something I didn’t know how to ask about without causing more pain.
The night weighs in and wraps around this place of mourning. We cross rooms and trade condolences, stories. We try to believe. Mostly, though, we try to figure out how we will live up to the love the world has lost. We wonder how we will make do without.
