The ashes I feel are in my lungs. They are not a metaphor. They give me a small feel for what cystic fibrosis might feel like, or maybe how my mom felt after losing the lower left lobe of her lung last summer. Each breath burns my nostrils a little, and my voice has taken on a rasp.
Last night I built a big fire in the fireplace, my remedy against the gathering darkness and cold of this November night. It caught with vigor. Within seconds, however, waves of smoke were rolling back toward me. It took me a while to process how wrong this was, captivated by the gorgeous, silky billowing waves, like the fog that used to tumble over the mountains from the Pacific toward the Bay when I was in college. "Down draft," my brain said. "This will pass."
The smoke detector kicked sense back into me. The house was now filled with smoke such that the other side of the living room was hard to see. The flu, I thought with dread. I texted our friend who dog-sat the night before.... "Did you by chance shut the...?" Her thought bubbles bounced on my phone as the smoke billowed forth. "Yes, everything OK?" she replied. I looked at the flames now lapping the top of the chimney with no place to go and the impressive arsenal of fuel I'd built below them. Something short of OK. Panic.
By now the boys and dog had arrived on the scene. Duncan began to shout instructions. Fire extinguisher! I grabbed some stick thing we keep beside the fireplace for this express purpose. Couldn't peel the paper from it or find the string I was supposed to pull. Useless. Grabbed the next one, on the pantry shelf. De-charged! Nothing! Think, think. (Getting harder, nostrils burning, trying to push anxious children and dog to the door.) Kitchen ~ last chance. Read the instructions: Pull off cap, yank out pin, point at fire, stay minimum 6 feet away...
Pshrrrrrrrrrr!!!! White foamy goop shot out, immediately dousing the flames. Relief! Though in my haste and protective instinct to block boys and dog, I stood more like 4 feet away with no heed to my own inhalation. Out? A few determined embers re-ignited and... Fire extinguisher empty! "Water, Mom!" Duncan runs to the kitchen sink to fill a mixing bowl. "Let me, let me!" I shout. I grab the bowl and fling it at the embers. Now steam mixed with chemicals mixed with smoke and ash gurgle and billow from the angry gaping mouth of the fireplace. Not enough! Another bowl. And ... we're out.
Our mantel now looked like one of those aerial photographs of a river delta after hideous poisoning by petrochemicals have made an ecological wasteland of once thriving intertidal waters. Swirling patterns of ash and white foam and water. Beautiful, a kind of ruination art. The alarm, having fulfilled its purpose in alerting us to danger and saving our lives, had moved into Phase 2: Punishment, blasting us viciously for our ignorance.
I scurried around to open all windows and doors. Soon the house, which I had hoped to warm up to the temperature of a cocoon in the late summer sun now plummeted to about 34 degrees, or roughly the temp of sludge on the bottom on ponds where frogs burrow to wait out the winter. Eventually, after much waving of Duncan's sweatshirt like a white flag of surrender, the fire alarm relented. In the eery calm I surveyed the room. A white dusting of ash everywhere. Everywhere. (To the far reaches of the house, I would discover this morning...)
Memories. Emerging from an inn in Kyushu, Japan one morning while traveling with friend Tomoko, finding her car covered with what I thought was snow but was volcanic ash. Wheezing while pregnant and walking Wiley Dog in the Hollywood Hills under gray skies and an apocalyptic-red sun while wild fires consumed mountains nearby. The house I shared with roommates in Oakland when I was 26: Waking up to the smell of smoke (no alarm) and eery flickering light under the door, opening it to find a wall on fire, a few feet from a Christmas tree. Roommate Mara and I grabbed the fire extinguishers provided by our landlord; they both failed. Reflexive, focus without feeling of fear, I beat the flames with an area rug while Mara gather up animals. Suddenly pitch black, literally pitch ~ a greasy heaviness to the lungs. Turning on the lights, a shocking solid white from floor to ceiling. As the smoke dissipated to find black char around a floor heating unit where we'd learn later a fleece jacket had fallen and caught fire. Delayed reaction, body quivering with fear as the what-if's flood imagination.
Sympathies. With my cousins, whose historic summer home on Cape Cod burned this fall. Oldest of same cousins, a volunteer firefighter who fought to save his own house from wild fires in Ketchum, Idaho the week after his twins were born. A close friend who lost her father, a firefighter, when she was a young child. With everyone in Napa Sonoma. Countless people who know the particular force and terror of fire out of control.
I tossed and turned in the night, my lungs still laboring in house air still toxic. I ended up sleeping with my windows open and the ceiling fan on. At 6am I drank coffee outside in the Adirondack chair, greeting the morning stars before they gave way to the rising sun. Never so grateful for fresh oxygen. A breeze shook the white pines overhead, a sound that evoked the rustling of palm tree fronds at my grandparents' home on Key Largo, and an image of my grandfather's bare bum behind a bamboo screen as he changed into his bathing suit for a morning swim. Funny the strange tracks memory will travel. Then a tender dream from my night of fitful sleep returned, impressions of a friend from San Francisco I hadn't thought about in months. I didn't mind that it was 27 degrees as these thoughts rolled around. I welcomed the cold and darkness I'd been running from.
I thought about how wildfires are a part of the natural cycle out west, and much of the damage they do is because they are not allowed to rage. How much damage do I do when I'm not allowed to rage? Western fires also crack open seeds for new forest growth. Maybe I'm a seed. I like this idea.
Fire bears the weight of so many metaphors, pop songs, and Biblical significance. There's a fire starting in my heart, reaching a fever pitch and it's bringing me out the dark. Standing outside the fire... Life is not right, it is merely survived if you're standing outside the fire... Oh, I've seen fire and I've seen rain. A bush that burns without being consumed. Passion, anger, revelation, purification. Which metaphor to apply? Maybe all. Maybe none - just something that happened, burning away abstractions.
Monday, November 20, 2017
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Romantic Reality, Quality, Gumption, G-Traps & a few others from Zen
Some of the many passages to save before returning Robert M. Persig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to the library...
I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
Romantic reality is the cutting edge of experience. It's the leading edge of the train of knowledge that keeps the whole train on the track. Traditional knowledge is only the collective memory of where that leading edge has been. At the leading edge there are no subjects, no objects, only the track of Quality ahead, and if you have no formal way of evaluating, no way of acknowledging this Quality, then the entire train has no way of knowing where to go. You don't have pure reason – you have pure confusion. The leading edge is where absolutely all the action is. The leading edge contains all the infinite possibilities of the future. It contains all the history of the past. Where else could they be contained?
The past cannot remember the past. The future can't generate the future. The cutting edge of this instant right here and now is always nothing less than the totality of everything there is.
p.283
******
At present we're snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there's no rational format for any understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts–thin art–because there's very little assimilation of extension into underlying form. We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it's ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.
p.294
******
Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. ... You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face–that searching look–then it's gone.
...
It's the primary America we're in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it's been with us ever since. There's this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV and movie spectaculars. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what's immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what's right around them is unimportant. And that's why they're lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you're just a kind of an object. You don't count. You're not what they're looking for. You're not on TV.
p.356
*****
"Man is the measure of all things." Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things–it fits. And they taught rhetoric–that fits.
p.374
*****
The difference between a good mechanic and a bad one, like the difference between a good mathematician and a bad one, is precisely this ability to select the good facts from the bad ones on the basis of quality. He has to care!
p.281
*****
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the psychic predecessor of all real understanding. An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors. It's this understanding of Quality as revealed by stuckness which so often makes self-taught mechanics so superior to institute-trained men who have learned how to handle everything except a new situation.
p.286
*****
The nature of our culture is such that if you were to look for instruction in how to do any of these jobs, the instruction would always give only one understanding of Quality, the classic. It would tell you how to hold the blade when sharpening the knife, or how to use a sewing machine, or how to mix and apply glue with the presumption that once these underlying methods were applied, "good" would naturally follow. The ability to see directly what "looks good" would be ignored.
The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you: technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.
p.292
*****
I think that if we are going to reform the world, and make it a better place to live in, the way to do it is not with talk about relationships of a political nature, which are inevitably dualistic, full of subjects and objects and their relationship to one another; or with programs full of things for other people to do. I think that kind of approach starts it at the end and presumes the end is the beginning. Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.
p.297
*****
Peace of mind isn't at all superficial to technical work. It's the whole thing. That which produces it is good work and that which destroys it is bad work. The specs, the measuring instruments, the quality control, the final check-out, these are all means toward the end of satisfying the peace of mind of those responsible for the work. What really counts in the end is their peace of mind, nothing else. The reason for this is that peace of mind is a prerequisite for a perception of that Quality which is beyond romantic Quality and classic Quality and which unites the two, and which must accompany the work as it proceeds. The way to see what looks good and understand the reason it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through.
I say inner peace of mind. It has no direct relationship to external circumstances.... It involves unselfconsciousness, which produces a complete identification with one's circumstances, and there are levels and levels of this identification... The mountains of achievement are Quality discovered in one direction only, and are relatively meaningless and often unobtainable unless taken together with the ocean trenches of self-awareness–so different from self-consciousness–which result from inner peace of mind.
This inner peace of mind occurs on three levels of understanding. Physical quietness seems the easiest to achieve... Mental quietness, in which one has no wandering thoughts at all, seems more difficult, but can be achieved. But value quietness, in which one has no wandering desires at all but simply performs the acts of his life without desire, that seems the hardest.
p.295
*****
I like the word "gumption" because it's so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn't likely to reject anyone who comes along. It's an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like "kin," seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of "enthusiasm," which means literally "filled with theos," or God, or Quality. See how that fits?
A person filled with gumption doesn't sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He's at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what's up the track and meeting it when it comes. That's gumption.
...
The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one's own stale opinions about it. But it's nothing exotic...
Gumption is the psychic gasoline that keeps the whole thing going. If you haven't got it there's no way the motorcycle can possibly be fixed. But if you have got it and know how to keep it there's absolutely no way in this whole world that motorcycle can keep from getting fixed.
...
What I have in mind now is a catalog of "Gumption Traps I Have Known." ...
The first type is those in which you're thrown off the Quality track by conditions that arise from external circumstances, and I call these "setbacks." The second type is traps in which you're thrown off the Quality track by conditions that are primarily within yourself. ...
This internal part of the field can be broken down into three main types of internal gumption traps: those that block affective understanding, called "value traps"; those that block cognitive understanding, called "truth traps"; and those that block psychomotor behavior, called "muscle traps." The value traps are by far the largest and most dangerous group.
Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. ... If your values are rigid you can't really learn new facts...
What you have to do if you get caught in this gumption trap of value rigidity, is slow down – you're going to have to slow down anyway whether you want to or not– but slow down deliberately and go over ground that you've been over before to see if the things you thought were important were really important and to . . . well . . . just stare at the machine. There's nothing wrong with that. Just live with it for a while. Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you live, you'll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid way if you're interested in it. That's the way the world keeps on happening. Be interested in it.
********************
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Marge and Me
Surely I've written about this before ~ my vexed relationship with minivans. It almost got me a job when, still in Los Angeles, fresh out film school, filled with 30-something vanity I swore never ever to drive one, I got offered to direct a short film on this very identity crisis. It got me into a bitter online battle with Park Slope Parents (.com) when, expecting a third baby, I asked the Brooklyn Parent Hive Mind for recommendations of vehicles – other than minivans – that could handle 3 kids; I got hate mail from parents who told me to "get over my ego" and "f*ing give it up."
I politely replied (trying to save myself from ostracism on the playground) that in excluding minivans, I only meant to encourage suggestions beyond known options. I added, to cover my tracks, that I lived in a neighborhood with tight parking and so sought a vehicle with smaller profile.
Lies. Or maybe truthiness rather than truth. Yes, I knew the minivan option. Yes, I wanted a smaller profile, but not to fit in a parking spot. I wanted a smaller profile because, let's face it, we are what we drive. The smaller profile I seek is my own.
My sister and mother have been driving minivans much longer than I, and if they are what they drive, then let's pause to examine how they have pulled it off. My sister succeeds in making her van the coolest rig on the road. Hers are grey. She looks good behind that wheel: Driving with her shades on and her sporty bangs and her laser-focus. She has little sporty magnets to the back. Her family just owns it ~ make it feel like a transport unit for a hot rod race car or something.
My mother has her own approach. She positions rubber duckies in her window and keeps a Persian rug in the backseat for her Havanese dog. Mom keeps an ample food supply, survival gear for every emergency, her gardening stuff, and a scattering of garden soil throughout. It is home on wheels.
Me? I've never owned it. I haven't wanted to own it. I haven't wanted Jordy to own it. (I will go on the record saying I don't find men driving minivans to be sexy, except of course the sports god nephews my two sisters have spawned.) I've wanted to hold my nose and get it over with.
This morning, driving the three boys to the bus stop in our bulbous navy blue minivan, Duncan remarked how people look like their cars. "Interesting," I said, trying to mask my terror with false casualness. "Kind of like they look like their dogs... So... Do I look like the van?"
To my relief, all three exclaimed, "No!" Then Duncan added, "But you do look like the Audi." Phew! My ego sighed.
But I had to admit, I felt guilty. As if I had betrayed a loyal old friend, even as she labored to make my life work, to get the kids to school, to haul our crap and deliver us from disaster... "Poor Marge," I said.
You see, Marge was only recently Christened, and her name was picked after a major middle-age fix-up job. The poor thing was just beaten to a pulp by our lifestyle. Her back was sheared by a garage door carelessly closed on her; the back right bumper doesn't attach quite right. Long ago, her sunroof stopped working, and we just left it. The sliding doors were prone to snapped cables, making the boys scamper over each other awkwardly to get in and out. Arguably a safety hazard as well as annoying. We jokingly told the kids to "fasten their seatbelts and prepare for take-off" for many months during which a squealing metal-on-metal sound gave the impression of a jetplane winding up for ascension, a sound that appeared the day her hood got clobbered by a massive ice block that flew off a UPS truck, nearly taking the windshield (and me) out. We never got around to diagnosing the squeal ~ it, like all of Marge's neglected quirks (and my own), just became a part of Marge.
And then there was her interior. Dog hair. Oh my god, the dog hair. The consequence of making Marge into Lola's "crate" for episodes of social anxiety when visitors come to our house, such as the kids' music teacher, a friend small enough for Lola to hump, or actually anyone at all... Add to her hair, Lola's greasy marrow bones, tension-relievers for the poor exiled creature that leave a stinky smear all over the leather seats. Then add the lollipop sticks with sticky ends, gathering the dog hair, jammed in the cup holders in the back, and Gatorade bottles from two baseball seasons ago and Cheetos mashed into the carpet and gum hardened into the seatbelt clips... Those boys, the very same whose BEGGING compelled me to get this minivan on December 14, 2014 (but who's counting), had begun to BEG again to dispose of her. "The van is gross!" "Let's get a Ford Explorer!" "A Suburban!"
And yet, though I've been waiting three years 11 months and some days to get rid of that van, my conscience cringed, as did our bank account. Replacement is not an option ~ we will drive that van into the ground. But it was deeper. Over time, I've come to identify with her. I am the beat-up middle aged vessel with a shockingly high number of miles on her.
Bless Jordy Green's good heart, he saw the value in re-investing in Marge rather than disposing of her. He took her to the Toyota dealer, discovering that most of the repairs were still covered by the extended warranty he had insisted we get when we bought her, already used with 54,000 miles. Hooray!
Her overhaul was MAJOR. It took almost a month, in and out of the shop. But when it was over, and after Tucker initiated an interior deep clean, we all remembered what a good pack mule our minivan is. That's when we realized: Maybe part of our disrespect was that we never named it. Or her, as we all somehow agreed she was. Hmmm.
After tossing options about, we settled on Marge. Like Marge Simpson. Like Frances McDormand's pregnant cop in Fargo. She is our Marge. Solid, broad, hard-working, unglamorous. Deserving of our respect and gratitude.
As we got to the bus stop this morning, I asked the boys, "Guys, why do you think the Audi doesn't have a name?" They didn't have an answer but they quickly had suggestions: "Kareem!" shouted Duncan. "Tim!" shouted Tucker. "Tim is a dumb name! Too common!" shouted Reeve. "Well so is Kareem!" (Boy, they can get a wicked fight going about anything!) Diverting, I asked, "Why do you think you both came up with male names?" This quieted them for a moment. While they reflected, "I mean, I just think it's interesting you identify me with the Audi, but feel the Audi is a male." Still no answer. "That's cool," I said. "Maybe it means I've got male and female sides. Maybe it means I get to be both Marge and Tim-Kareem."
Time to catch the bus.
I politely replied (trying to save myself from ostracism on the playground) that in excluding minivans, I only meant to encourage suggestions beyond known options. I added, to cover my tracks, that I lived in a neighborhood with tight parking and so sought a vehicle with smaller profile.
Lies. Or maybe truthiness rather than truth. Yes, I knew the minivan option. Yes, I wanted a smaller profile, but not to fit in a parking spot. I wanted a smaller profile because, let's face it, we are what we drive. The smaller profile I seek is my own.
My sister and mother have been driving minivans much longer than I, and if they are what they drive, then let's pause to examine how they have pulled it off. My sister succeeds in making her van the coolest rig on the road. Hers are grey. She looks good behind that wheel: Driving with her shades on and her sporty bangs and her laser-focus. She has little sporty magnets to the back. Her family just owns it ~ make it feel like a transport unit for a hot rod race car or something.
My mother has her own approach. She positions rubber duckies in her window and keeps a Persian rug in the backseat for her Havanese dog. Mom keeps an ample food supply, survival gear for every emergency, her gardening stuff, and a scattering of garden soil throughout. It is home on wheels.
Me? I've never owned it. I haven't wanted to own it. I haven't wanted Jordy to own it. (I will go on the record saying I don't find men driving minivans to be sexy, except of course the sports god nephews my two sisters have spawned.) I've wanted to hold my nose and get it over with.
This morning, driving the three boys to the bus stop in our bulbous navy blue minivan, Duncan remarked how people look like their cars. "Interesting," I said, trying to mask my terror with false casualness. "Kind of like they look like their dogs... So... Do I look like the van?"
To my relief, all three exclaimed, "No!" Then Duncan added, "But you do look like the Audi." Phew! My ego sighed.
But I had to admit, I felt guilty. As if I had betrayed a loyal old friend, even as she labored to make my life work, to get the kids to school, to haul our crap and deliver us from disaster... "Poor Marge," I said.
You see, Marge was only recently Christened, and her name was picked after a major middle-age fix-up job. The poor thing was just beaten to a pulp by our lifestyle. Her back was sheared by a garage door carelessly closed on her; the back right bumper doesn't attach quite right. Long ago, her sunroof stopped working, and we just left it. The sliding doors were prone to snapped cables, making the boys scamper over each other awkwardly to get in and out. Arguably a safety hazard as well as annoying. We jokingly told the kids to "fasten their seatbelts and prepare for take-off" for many months during which a squealing metal-on-metal sound gave the impression of a jetplane winding up for ascension, a sound that appeared the day her hood got clobbered by a massive ice block that flew off a UPS truck, nearly taking the windshield (and me) out. We never got around to diagnosing the squeal ~ it, like all of Marge's neglected quirks (and my own), just became a part of Marge.
And then there was her interior. Dog hair. Oh my god, the dog hair. The consequence of making Marge into Lola's "crate" for episodes of social anxiety when visitors come to our house, such as the kids' music teacher, a friend small enough for Lola to hump, or actually anyone at all... Add to her hair, Lola's greasy marrow bones, tension-relievers for the poor exiled creature that leave a stinky smear all over the leather seats. Then add the lollipop sticks with sticky ends, gathering the dog hair, jammed in the cup holders in the back, and Gatorade bottles from two baseball seasons ago and Cheetos mashed into the carpet and gum hardened into the seatbelt clips... Those boys, the very same whose BEGGING compelled me to get this minivan on December 14, 2014 (but who's counting), had begun to BEG again to dispose of her. "The van is gross!" "Let's get a Ford Explorer!" "A Suburban!"
And yet, though I've been waiting three years 11 months and some days to get rid of that van, my conscience cringed, as did our bank account. Replacement is not an option ~ we will drive that van into the ground. But it was deeper. Over time, I've come to identify with her. I am the beat-up middle aged vessel with a shockingly high number of miles on her.
Bless Jordy Green's good heart, he saw the value in re-investing in Marge rather than disposing of her. He took her to the Toyota dealer, discovering that most of the repairs were still covered by the extended warranty he had insisted we get when we bought her, already used with 54,000 miles. Hooray!
Her overhaul was MAJOR. It took almost a month, in and out of the shop. But when it was over, and after Tucker initiated an interior deep clean, we all remembered what a good pack mule our minivan is. That's when we realized: Maybe part of our disrespect was that we never named it. Or her, as we all somehow agreed she was. Hmmm.
After tossing options about, we settled on Marge. Like Marge Simpson. Like Frances McDormand's pregnant cop in Fargo. She is our Marge. Solid, broad, hard-working, unglamorous. Deserving of our respect and gratitude.
As we got to the bus stop this morning, I asked the boys, "Guys, why do you think the Audi doesn't have a name?" They didn't have an answer but they quickly had suggestions: "Kareem!" shouted Duncan. "Tim!" shouted Tucker. "Tim is a dumb name! Too common!" shouted Reeve. "Well so is Kareem!" (Boy, they can get a wicked fight going about anything!) Diverting, I asked, "Why do you think you both came up with male names?" This quieted them for a moment. While they reflected, "I mean, I just think it's interesting you identify me with the Audi, but feel the Audi is a male." Still no answer. "That's cool," I said. "Maybe it means I've got male and female sides. Maybe it means I get to be both Marge and Tim-Kareem."
Time to catch the bus.
Friday, October 27, 2017
Under the Same Sun
The days are getting shorter. Rain clouds between us and the rising sun are enough to shroud the morning in darkness. It's hard to get and keep going. Remedy?
A Latin Dance party for breakfast. Pillow-mashed heads emerge from their bedrooms to blasting trumpets, pounding percussion and Marc Anthony crooning, "A veces llega la lluvia para limpiar las heridas, A veces solo una gota puede vencer la sequía!" We don't know what it means, but we feel so much better! (Google translate tells me: "Sometimes the rain comes to clean the wounds, Sometimes just a drop can overcome the drought." No wonder!)
Now packing lunches, frozen burritos from BJs, Oreos, obligatory carrots. We pour Cheerios, we spill the milk. Waking up, like growing up (and breaking up) is hard to do. Now the chorus we all know, three little boys at a counter and their pajama-wearing, puffy-eyed salsa-dancing mamma singing our lungs (and breakfast sausages) out: "Voy a reír, voy a bailar, Vivir mi vida la la la la, Voy a reír, voy a gozar, Vivir mi vida la la la la..." (I'm going to laugh, I'm going to dance, To live my Life (la la la la la!), I'm going to laugh, I'm going to enjoy, To live my Life...")
Into which walks their sweet-smelling grandfather, in tweed, bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, en route to his work as a psychiatrist. Doesn't miss a beat, joins the party, pointer fingers poking the air overhead to the beat, twisting in his loafers. Gives lovey kisses to the boys, wishes them a good day, and dances back out the door on his way.
The song comes to an end. General let-down. Scramble to gather the pieces. Where's my book? I need a note to go home with friend. Where's my other shoooooeeee? The weight of the day that must be lifted sinks back upon us. Duncan dials in help from Alvaro Solar and J-Lo. We all know the chorus...
We wait in the car, peering through the murky morning for the headlights of the bus. So much darkness in the world beyond this country road, I fight to hold back the anxious grip on my breath I often feel these days, yet the hopeful rhythms still partying in my mind carry words out my mouth before thought can intercede:
"It's too late," I say to the boys. Too late for what? The boys ask, thinking I mean the bus.
"To turn us back," I answer as if fact, but also prayer. Sí juntos celebramos, aquí todos estamos, Bajo el mismo sol... We are indeed under the same sol. Vale la pena, mis amores.
*******
Last night I saw a film that exploded my heart. (Literally, my heart felt like a water balloon that swelled, oozing beyond the cage of my ribs, to bursting.) I am so grateful to the braveheart women behind documentary film It's Criminal, which tells the story of a group of Dartmouth students who collaborate with incarcerated women to write and perform a play about their lives. I encourage all to seek this film.
A Latin Dance party for breakfast. Pillow-mashed heads emerge from their bedrooms to blasting trumpets, pounding percussion and Marc Anthony crooning, "A veces llega la lluvia para limpiar las heridas, A veces solo una gota puede vencer la sequía!" We don't know what it means, but we feel so much better! (Google translate tells me: "Sometimes the rain comes to clean the wounds, Sometimes just a drop can overcome the drought." No wonder!)
Now packing lunches, frozen burritos from BJs, Oreos, obligatory carrots. We pour Cheerios, we spill the milk. Waking up, like growing up (and breaking up) is hard to do. Now the chorus we all know, three little boys at a counter and their pajama-wearing, puffy-eyed salsa-dancing mamma singing our lungs (and breakfast sausages) out: "Voy a reír, voy a bailar, Vivir mi vida la la la la, Voy a reír, voy a gozar, Vivir mi vida la la la la..." (I'm going to laugh, I'm going to dance, To live my Life (la la la la la!), I'm going to laugh, I'm going to enjoy, To live my Life...")
Into which walks their sweet-smelling grandfather, in tweed, bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses, en route to his work as a psychiatrist. Doesn't miss a beat, joins the party, pointer fingers poking the air overhead to the beat, twisting in his loafers. Gives lovey kisses to the boys, wishes them a good day, and dances back out the door on his way.
The song comes to an end. General let-down. Scramble to gather the pieces. Where's my book? I need a note to go home with friend. Where's my other shoooooeeee? The weight of the day that must be lifted sinks back upon us. Duncan dials in help from Alvaro Solar and J-Lo. We all know the chorus...
We wait in the car, peering through the murky morning for the headlights of the bus. So much darkness in the world beyond this country road, I fight to hold back the anxious grip on my breath I often feel these days, yet the hopeful rhythms still partying in my mind carry words out my mouth before thought can intercede:
"It's too late," I say to the boys. Too late for what? The boys ask, thinking I mean the bus.
"To turn us back," I answer as if fact, but also prayer. Sí juntos celebramos, aquí todos estamos, Bajo el mismo sol... We are indeed under the same sol. Vale la pena, mis amores.
*******
Last night I saw a film that exploded my heart. (Literally, my heart felt like a water balloon that swelled, oozing beyond the cage of my ribs, to bursting.) I am so grateful to the braveheart women behind documentary film It's Criminal, which tells the story of a group of Dartmouth students who collaborate with incarcerated women to write and perform a play about their lives. I encourage all to seek this film.
Friday, October 20, 2017
Unbearable Sweetness of Being
When your heart is breaking, it's helpful to remember little things.
Such as,
Walking home from the bus stop with just Tucker, now seven, big brothers off at soccer and art activities, late autumn warm spell, golden sideways sun rays raking us and the shorn hay fields beside us, he abruptly cuts short a story from his school day (involving an irritating exercise in "Guidance" in which he, Calvin and Chandler learned the word "compromise," mainly through their failure to do so), throws off his backpack, and crouches over the blacktop, hands hovering, and lunges.
After many attempts, that grasshopper being a quick one, he secures the little green being in his cupped hands and presents it to me, opening a hole just wide enough to peer in, but not too wide to give his captive freedom (just yet). "See him, Mom?" Yes, I say. Then he squats to the grass, opens his hands and says quietly, a private conversation, "Goodbye, friend."
*****
Winding down for bed. Doing dishes, Duncan watching Game 5 with Tucker, Reeve cartooning over MooseTracks ice cream at the dinner table. Lola reposing on the couch. Curtains drawn signifying fall ~ we hung those curtains our first year here, first time to feel the exposure when the leaves fall, leaving our life a tableau vivant for drivers-by to watch (thank you, but no); memories of the day I stood on a ladder drilling the curtain rods in, later to say goodbye to the hope of a Baby Springtime, who departed aloft a parade of luminous candle lanterns rising to the moon that night.
But this, here, now, I'm talking on the phone with Jordy about why I desire to support a friend in starting an African American theater company in the (vast majority white) Upper Valley, something about the connection between Arts and Diversity, how we need to be able to imagine ourselves as others, that - looking back on my childhood, I looked like I fit in, I could play that part but - I never felt like I fit in, on the inside. And how important it was to "find my people," whom I found in other places, and didn't fit any mold of culture, age, gender, sexuality, but all shared this ~ a feeling of themselves as other than/more than the package they were born into, and longing to express that, and the arts giving voice/image/music/words to that longing ~ and meanwhile, as I am speaking, Reeve wanders over from the table and gets my attention, mouthing silently the words, self-referencing with a thumb pumping toward his heart, "Me too. I feel like that," and our eyes meet and I nod, and I feel completely understood in the universe, and I hope he does too.
*****
Duncan, game over. Yankees, totally legit comeback, taking the series to 3-2 heading back to Houston where we feel sorry for our Yankees, faced by insane Houston fans decked out in Orange, rabid, maniacal, like their lives depend on victory, but pumped for Game 6, and also prepared to let Houston have this one, if it should come to pass, as "they've had a rough time and kinda deserve something good," confesses our good man and loyal Yankeeist, Duncan Green.
Same day, over coffee at Anne's with Duncan Green's grandfather, Grampy Dicken, who shares ~ nay, bequeathed? ~ Duncan's round head, solid athletic frame, and stunning capacity to spin the tedium that is professional sports into epic drama yarn even I can care (a little) about, tells me that he wants me to share a confession on his behalf with my son, Duncan: Namely that, for the first time in his life, he (Grampy, a diehard Red Sox fan) is rooting for the Yankees. Such good men, both, I am blessed to be born of and have given birth to.
That night before bed I let Duncan know that Grampy Dicken will henceforth be his driver/chaperone to Hebrew tutoring on Tuesdays. Duncan nods, a Dude's nod, not giving up too much and so all the more poignant, saying simply, "Cool." Then heads for his room. Then turns and comes back. "You know, Mom? I feel like I have a special connection with Grampy. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have a great connection with all my grandparents. But with Grampy, it's different. Special. Or something. Ya know?" I nod and say I do know. He nods again, "Cool. Good night." Good night, beautiful boy.
*****
So many unbearably sweet things.
A little arm gripping my neck at bedtime. A tiny man folding laundry in symbolic apology for a colossal dinnertime meltdown. Waiting for access to the bathroom while little men test hair gel.
Cut flowers placed on the toilet with a note of thanks for the nice things I do. An unsolicited Lola nuzzle to my knee while waiting for the bus. Custom-made birthday gifts of cartoon strip of the "Kitty Flash" and "The Girl From Thrasher Road" samba.
The first sound produced on a new instrument. A text to apologize for being cranky. Clouds in the shape of beheaded sheep. A symbolic compass, homemade meat pies, and forgiving soil after a very long, rocky hike.
"Good nights" every night, and "good mornings" every morning.
*****
To love in private moments known only to us, and even we are unlikely to remember.
Such as,
Walking home from the bus stop with just Tucker, now seven, big brothers off at soccer and art activities, late autumn warm spell, golden sideways sun rays raking us and the shorn hay fields beside us, he abruptly cuts short a story from his school day (involving an irritating exercise in "Guidance" in which he, Calvin and Chandler learned the word "compromise," mainly through their failure to do so), throws off his backpack, and crouches over the blacktop, hands hovering, and lunges.
After many attempts, that grasshopper being a quick one, he secures the little green being in his cupped hands and presents it to me, opening a hole just wide enough to peer in, but not too wide to give his captive freedom (just yet). "See him, Mom?" Yes, I say. Then he squats to the grass, opens his hands and says quietly, a private conversation, "Goodbye, friend."
*****
Winding down for bed. Doing dishes, Duncan watching Game 5 with Tucker, Reeve cartooning over MooseTracks ice cream at the dinner table. Lola reposing on the couch. Curtains drawn signifying fall ~ we hung those curtains our first year here, first time to feel the exposure when the leaves fall, leaving our life a tableau vivant for drivers-by to watch (thank you, but no); memories of the day I stood on a ladder drilling the curtain rods in, later to say goodbye to the hope of a Baby Springtime, who departed aloft a parade of luminous candle lanterns rising to the moon that night.
But this, here, now, I'm talking on the phone with Jordy about why I desire to support a friend in starting an African American theater company in the (vast majority white) Upper Valley, something about the connection between Arts and Diversity, how we need to be able to imagine ourselves as others, that - looking back on my childhood, I looked like I fit in, I could play that part but - I never felt like I fit in, on the inside. And how important it was to "find my people," whom I found in other places, and didn't fit any mold of culture, age, gender, sexuality, but all shared this ~ a feeling of themselves as other than/more than the package they were born into, and longing to express that, and the arts giving voice/image/music/words to that longing ~ and meanwhile, as I am speaking, Reeve wanders over from the table and gets my attention, mouthing silently the words, self-referencing with a thumb pumping toward his heart, "Me too. I feel like that," and our eyes meet and I nod, and I feel completely understood in the universe, and I hope he does too.
*****
Duncan, game over. Yankees, totally legit comeback, taking the series to 3-2 heading back to Houston where we feel sorry for our Yankees, faced by insane Houston fans decked out in Orange, rabid, maniacal, like their lives depend on victory, but pumped for Game 6, and also prepared to let Houston have this one, if it should come to pass, as "they've had a rough time and kinda deserve something good," confesses our good man and loyal Yankeeist, Duncan Green.
Same day, over coffee at Anne's with Duncan Green's grandfather, Grampy Dicken, who shares ~ nay, bequeathed? ~ Duncan's round head, solid athletic frame, and stunning capacity to spin the tedium that is professional sports into epic drama yarn even I can care (a little) about, tells me that he wants me to share a confession on his behalf with my son, Duncan: Namely that, for the first time in his life, he (Grampy, a diehard Red Sox fan) is rooting for the Yankees. Such good men, both, I am blessed to be born of and have given birth to.
That night before bed I let Duncan know that Grampy Dicken will henceforth be his driver/chaperone to Hebrew tutoring on Tuesdays. Duncan nods, a Dude's nod, not giving up too much and so all the more poignant, saying simply, "Cool." Then heads for his room. Then turns and comes back. "You know, Mom? I feel like I have a special connection with Grampy. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have a great connection with all my grandparents. But with Grampy, it's different. Special. Or something. Ya know?" I nod and say I do know. He nods again, "Cool. Good night." Good night, beautiful boy.
*****
So many unbearably sweet things.
A little arm gripping my neck at bedtime. A tiny man folding laundry in symbolic apology for a colossal dinnertime meltdown. Waiting for access to the bathroom while little men test hair gel.
Cut flowers placed on the toilet with a note of thanks for the nice things I do. An unsolicited Lola nuzzle to my knee while waiting for the bus. Custom-made birthday gifts of cartoon strip of the "Kitty Flash" and "The Girl From Thrasher Road" samba.
The first sound produced on a new instrument. A text to apologize for being cranky. Clouds in the shape of beheaded sheep. A symbolic compass, homemade meat pies, and forgiving soil after a very long, rocky hike.
"Good nights" every night, and "good mornings" every morning.
*****
To love in private moments known only to us, and even we are unlikely to remember.
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
From Shame to Joy
In this Jewish festival of Sukkot, the tradition commands us to enjoy. It comes the week after Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which begins at sundown with a service called Kol Nidrei, which has a morally legalistic framework of releasing us from our oaths and promises of the past year. Why?
This release is considered a necessary pre-requisite to genuine atonement: If we can't admit how fall we've fallen short of our good intentions, we can't renew our efforts to live up to a higher ideal, and worse, we may abandon the project of seeking lives of meaning and virtue all together.
Part of the genius of the tradition is revealed in the language. For 24 hours Jews fast and attend services where we admit our collective sins of the previous year. With each one, we hammer our hearts with our clenched fists. The Hebrew uses the plural ~ together we have lied, committed perjury, held grudges, been jealous, been possessive, used hateful language, been greedy.... It's a very long list. (Then the congregation listens to a reading of Jonah and the Fish (not whale!), in which God's powers of forgiveness are on vivid display in contrast to Jonah's avoidance of duty and petty pouting. Yom Kippur also affirms the 13 attributes of God we are wise to cultivate, among them patience and forgiveness, of self as well as others.)
I've been thinking a lot about whether I believe collective atonement means anything, or is even valid, and how it's different from some of the destructive shaming dynamics I'm trying to understand, which seem a form of imposed collective atonement that aren't working. Here's as far as I've gotten:
I don't think there's any magical redemptive power in the practice. I think a lot of people say the words without thinking deeply of examples in their own lives. But most Jews come back next year to do it again, and every year we are different people. We don't know when we or anyone else will be ready, but the doors open on an annual basis to see if this is year we're ready for change. And while the details may not stick in memory, a process gets internalized that is constructive for the soul the rest of the year and over a lifetime.
Unlike Catholic confessional in which sinners are separated and isolated, which seems to me to confirm shame and make the sinner feel uniquely flawed, Jews gather to shout the whole catastrophe to the heavens together. Each individual has the privacy to contemplate the list individually, but with the relief of being together in this messy project of trying to become good people. The shame part is taken away, which gives the soul a reprieve to try again, instead of hiding in the shadows where destructive ideas can fester and motivate destructive behavior toward self or others.
Individuals need to make a personal investment in any process of atonement if it will be meaningful. I fear that the painful corrective we're feeling in our culture is that much of the progress we thought we'd made on racism and sexism was achieved by enforcing silence and shame, rather than finding a way into the hearts of people with unexamined prejudices. As Americans, we need to keep seeking collective processes of atonement that resist shaming and reveal the greater joys available when all have a seat at the table.
In the end, we build a hut of wood and grasses in which we are commanded to take our meals, gather with friends and make merry. One interpretation is that we build a new home for our souls every year after the hard work of self-reflection and return to our higher principles. We do it every year because it's understood that the skill of the internal moral work is a lifetime project. Our family's sukkah gets better every year as we improve our building and decorating techniques; I hope our souls are on the same path. The hut is also commanded by Torah to be impermanent, made of biodegradable materials with roof coverings that allow viewing of the stars. Our work is always impermanent, as are our lives, and there is always a heaven above toward which we need to fix our gaze.
It can feel like a betrayal of the cause to pause and let ourselves feel joy. That's why the Jewish tradition commands it, like Shabbat, time in the week when we pause to perceive the goodness of things as they are, even if unfinished. We need to feel joy, and we need to feel it together, or we are really doomed.
The spiritual "I'm gonna sit at the welcome table...I'm gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days, Hallelujah..." has come to mind often recently, with many of the songs I sang as a member of the Glide Ensemble Choir. In his sermon "An Attitude of Gratitude," Glide co-pastor Doug Fitch described the difference between Happiness and Joy: Happiness is a fleeting feeling, a sensation that depends on outside circumstances to sustain it. Joy is rooted in our sorrow, and can't nobody take it from us. The voices in my head are asking us to sing along, to share our pain without which we can't reach our joy. We can't do it alone.
Conspiracy of Love
This release is considered a necessary pre-requisite to genuine atonement: If we can't admit how fall we've fallen short of our good intentions, we can't renew our efforts to live up to a higher ideal, and worse, we may abandon the project of seeking lives of meaning and virtue all together.
Part of the genius of the tradition is revealed in the language. For 24 hours Jews fast and attend services where we admit our collective sins of the previous year. With each one, we hammer our hearts with our clenched fists. The Hebrew uses the plural ~ together we have lied, committed perjury, held grudges, been jealous, been possessive, used hateful language, been greedy.... It's a very long list. (Then the congregation listens to a reading of Jonah and the Fish (not whale!), in which God's powers of forgiveness are on vivid display in contrast to Jonah's avoidance of duty and petty pouting. Yom Kippur also affirms the 13 attributes of God we are wise to cultivate, among them patience and forgiveness, of self as well as others.)
I've been thinking a lot about whether I believe collective atonement means anything, or is even valid, and how it's different from some of the destructive shaming dynamics I'm trying to understand, which seem a form of imposed collective atonement that aren't working. Here's as far as I've gotten:
I don't think there's any magical redemptive power in the practice. I think a lot of people say the words without thinking deeply of examples in their own lives. But most Jews come back next year to do it again, and every year we are different people. We don't know when we or anyone else will be ready, but the doors open on an annual basis to see if this is year we're ready for change. And while the details may not stick in memory, a process gets internalized that is constructive for the soul the rest of the year and over a lifetime.
Unlike Catholic confessional in which sinners are separated and isolated, which seems to me to confirm shame and make the sinner feel uniquely flawed, Jews gather to shout the whole catastrophe to the heavens together. Each individual has the privacy to contemplate the list individually, but with the relief of being together in this messy project of trying to become good people. The shame part is taken away, which gives the soul a reprieve to try again, instead of hiding in the shadows where destructive ideas can fester and motivate destructive behavior toward self or others.
Individuals need to make a personal investment in any process of atonement if it will be meaningful. I fear that the painful corrective we're feeling in our culture is that much of the progress we thought we'd made on racism and sexism was achieved by enforcing silence and shame, rather than finding a way into the hearts of people with unexamined prejudices. As Americans, we need to keep seeking collective processes of atonement that resist shaming and reveal the greater joys available when all have a seat at the table.
In the end, we build a hut of wood and grasses in which we are commanded to take our meals, gather with friends and make merry. One interpretation is that we build a new home for our souls every year after the hard work of self-reflection and return to our higher principles. We do it every year because it's understood that the skill of the internal moral work is a lifetime project. Our family's sukkah gets better every year as we improve our building and decorating techniques; I hope our souls are on the same path. The hut is also commanded by Torah to be impermanent, made of biodegradable materials with roof coverings that allow viewing of the stars. Our work is always impermanent, as are our lives, and there is always a heaven above toward which we need to fix our gaze.
It can feel like a betrayal of the cause to pause and let ourselves feel joy. That's why the Jewish tradition commands it, like Shabbat, time in the week when we pause to perceive the goodness of things as they are, even if unfinished. We need to feel joy, and we need to feel it together, or we are really doomed.
The spiritual "I'm gonna sit at the welcome table...I'm gonna sit at the welcome table one of these days, Hallelujah..." has come to mind often recently, with many of the songs I sang as a member of the Glide Ensemble Choir. In his sermon "An Attitude of Gratitude," Glide co-pastor Doug Fitch described the difference between Happiness and Joy: Happiness is a fleeting feeling, a sensation that depends on outside circumstances to sustain it. Joy is rooted in our sorrow, and can't nobody take it from us. The voices in my head are asking us to sing along, to share our pain without which we can't reach our joy. We can't do it alone.
Conspiracy of Love
Tuesday, October 10, 2017
More on the Dynamics of Shame
A few more unfinished thoughts:
When I arrived on campus as a college freshman, my resident faculty advisor shared a piece of unforgettable advice. The most important decision you make every day here at Stanford, said Dennis, is where you sit in the cafeteria. Will you sit with people who look like you? Who promise comfort and appear to share your background? Or will you seek students of other races and cultures?
I was from a small town in New Hampshire. My childhood hadn't given me many chances to befriend, in a meaningful way, kids of other races or backgrounds. I remember the moment I learned the "N" word while playing four square in our condominium complex. The neighborhood bully, Joey Cicotti, used it to taunt two Black girls who'd just moved in. I didn't know what it meant, but I could tell they knew what it meant and it wasn't good. I ran inside to ask my mother. I was crushed to learn, and guilt-ridden for not having shut Joey up on the spot. I was also scared of Joey. I discovered early both the shame of sharing responsibility for racial violence by virtue of shared race and my powerlessness to stop it.
(An aside: Joey transitioned later in life; she is now Josephine, and she runs a car dealership in our area.)
This story distilled the essence of the white shame dynamic. I felt ashamed of the attitudes and behavior of another white person, whose ignorance and hatred cause visible harm. As a small child, I started the process of forming a white identity based on taking responsibility for white racism, and by standing up to it, guaranteeing that I couldn't be guilty of the same.
Dangers of excess lie in this, among them ideological rigidity that justifies any degree of shaming other white people to protect our own egos. More on that toward the end.
So I followed Dennis's advice. Gathering my courage, I headed for a table occupied only by African American students in our dorm complex. Conversation stopped upon my arrival. I had the distinct feeling I wasn't welcome, not hostility exactly, something else.
Freeze frame: How should I interpret this awkward and embarrassing moment?
The sensitive ego could choose to turn awkwardness into resentment, to let loose the contained beast of shame, which ~ scaring the sensitive conscience into paralysis ~ would justify a defensive and self-aggrandizing reaction, something along the lines of Don't they appreciate that I'm trying? Or worse, see? They're racist too!
For many, their development is arrested at this point. Maybe it didn't happen on a college campus, but on a work site, or a basketball court. The wounded and fragile white ego says, I tried, throws up its hands, and surrenders the project. This path is mistaken and leads to the Dark Side.
We can choose other responses. One is simply to imagine that it's not all about us. I don't know what each individual student at that table felt, but what I came to understand through repeated efforts to join conversations on campus was that for many Black students, this was their first experience finding a community of other students who shared their experience of being high achieving and Black. They were discovering commonalities they wanted to build and explore after 18 years of being the token African American student at their schools, of suppressing parts of themselves or hiding the impact of accumulated comments, exclusions, and overt forms of prejudice they'd endured to get where they were. They did not share my need for an experiential interracial learning project just then. I had the choice to respect their privacy and not take it personally. (Which is not the same as giving up the bigger effort.)
During my freshman year, the Western Civilization curriculum became the target of protests. Students occupied the Dean's office. I think they overturned a bus? It made national news. I was sympathetic, but I didn't join the protests. I was fully on board with revising the cannon, but I wasn't convinced that the classical philosophers and writers of the Western tradition, whom I'd only just discovered and whom I thought deserved credit for some of the very ideas supporting these campus protests, should be discarded on the basis of being male and white. I wanted to think about these questions a little more slowly, in more depth. But I also understood that change must sometimes reach a revolutionary fervor. I appreciated my classmates who seemed full of sound and fury; I trusted they signified something ~ I was just trying to catch up.
The more revolutionary frontier for me lay in the personal spaces, at meals, speakers, classes, activities with classmates where I could experience my awkwardness in the context of growing relationships and, hopefully, gain deeper insight into differences in our specific life experiences.
My junior year, I was invited to participate in a panel of women of color for a "Psychology of Women" class by my roommate. Jeanne reunited six or eight of the women we'd known from our freshman dorm. We represented a wide range of racial and cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations. I represented "white." For my part, I described my journey from small town New Hampshire to California college campus; by then I had also lived in Japan for a year, which had stretched my thinking about identity a great deal further. I shared my idea that being female and raised by a single mom may help me imagine the experiences of women of color, in the power differentials I witnessed and to which I was subjected, a kind of empathetic bridge to reach across our experiences. My friends on the panel listened and nodded sympathetically. It was an intersectionality fantasy.
The next year, after Jeanne left for graduate school to study Culture and Emotion at Berkeley, the professor asked me to compose a similar panel. By then, all my dorm mates had graduated; I was on campus an extra year, owing to my time off in Japan. I invited women I didn't know well.
It was disastrous. I knew from the first word that the premise of the panel was offensive to many of the women I invited. Being white, I didn't offer the safety Jeanne, being Asian American, may have. I tried to share similar thoughts to the previous year, but was met with derision for presuming that my experiences had any relevance to theirs. Whether anyone said it, I don't know, but what I felt was: You and your white privilege... It's amazing how shame literally burns. I suppose the blood floods our capillaries or something. I'd like an evolutionary biologist to explain.
So let's freeze frame again: How should I react to this humiliation?
Again, the ego ~ ever sensitive to shame and ready to flare up to protect us ~ might say, I'm out of here. My first reaction was to resent the professor. I blamed her for making me lead a hot-button discussion for her class without either the credibility of being a woman of color or the relationship of TA with students. These were valid critiques, but not deserving of resentment.
After venting a little, I was ready to learn. I realized that I needed to listen to the discomfort I felt from the women when I first approached them. I needed to discuss the plan in more nuance with the professor. I needed to question the comfortable narrative I'd spun for myself that my womanhood gave me a way to connect with women of color's experiences. I learned beyond any doubt that the path would be many lifetimes long. I learned to survive shame and come back to the conversation.
When I got to Mississippi to teach, I was shocked to find my social reception reversed: My white students now held me in greater suspicion than my Black students. Being from California, I supposed, my whiteness connoted that I was probably another ideological carpet bagger from up North who came to impose their values on the South. My petitions to incorporate African American writers, the Blues as poetry, and to teach Standard English as a dialect, with respect to the Black English, etc. would have confirmed prejudices my white students may have had about me.
And their mistrust had rational roots, not only in history but in their daily lives. The school was about 20% white, 80% Black. The white students who attended were mostly poor. They didn't have an easy time as minority students, nor did many of them have an easy time at home, as I witnessed at close range. I felt the concentration of judgement upon them, the shame-based emotional tactics of parents living in poverty against their kids, of upper-middle class Southern whites looking down at lower-class, that I could add to if I wasn't careful.
Shame not only cuts the soul, but it can unleash violence. I didn't want to be an agent of such destruction through a thoughtless or monolithic application of my so-called progressive values. To care about racial reconciliation is to love all people. I made it my mission to forge close ties with all of my students. I accepted invitations to church revivals, including a white church revival in which the congregation circled me to help me achieve the ecstasy of speaking in tongues. (I didn't, to all of our disappointment.) I attended Thanksgiving dinner with a family who deep-friend their turkey in an oil drum. I befriended an elderly neighbor, a Baptist who surprised me with his accepting views on gay love. The more you get to know people, the more individual they become. The more individual they become, the more you just can't sum it all up. Ultimately, love is always and only personal.
Why am I compelled to write about all this? There's an urgency in trying to find the words. I still feel like I've only begun to tell my story. I floated a working title to Jordy this weekend: The Autobiography of Nobody. Why would you call yourself a "nobody," he asked? Because by being a nobody, I've been able to meet and get to know so many amazing Somebodies who've revealed parts of myself to me, who've helped me map my place in the world and, as Geena Davis says, learned how to stop apologizing for the space I take up in it.
Like so many Americans, I am living with exhausting daily grief that the dream of achieving a country that judges people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, and gives all people their shot is slipping away from us. We are living in a terrifying time of fear, mutual suspicion, retraction. We have a White Supremacist in the White House who courts favor with vicious racists and anti-semites. He whips up hatred toward immigrants, the cheapest of populist tricks to manipulate his so-called base. How does he do it so effectively? By activating unbearable shame wounds. My resistance is to call for the end of shaming as a weapon of mass destruction.
We pushed the concept of infinitely delineated political identities to its logical conclusion, and in carving out turf, lost track of our shared public spaces. We hit a dead end. We hid our pain behind anger. We gave up on the Love part, the oxygen we share. Our story needs to be re-written. I guess I'm writing in search of the new narrative. It has to do with specificity. Seeing each other and ourselves individually, beyond categories and beyond fear. Listening to each other's stories. Feeling the details. Reclaiming "virtual reality" for what it always was ~ art that enables empathy. Giving each other permission to find ourselves in each other.
To be continued.
When I arrived on campus as a college freshman, my resident faculty advisor shared a piece of unforgettable advice. The most important decision you make every day here at Stanford, said Dennis, is where you sit in the cafeteria. Will you sit with people who look like you? Who promise comfort and appear to share your background? Or will you seek students of other races and cultures?
I was from a small town in New Hampshire. My childhood hadn't given me many chances to befriend, in a meaningful way, kids of other races or backgrounds. I remember the moment I learned the "N" word while playing four square in our condominium complex. The neighborhood bully, Joey Cicotti, used it to taunt two Black girls who'd just moved in. I didn't know what it meant, but I could tell they knew what it meant and it wasn't good. I ran inside to ask my mother. I was crushed to learn, and guilt-ridden for not having shut Joey up on the spot. I was also scared of Joey. I discovered early both the shame of sharing responsibility for racial violence by virtue of shared race and my powerlessness to stop it.
(An aside: Joey transitioned later in life; she is now Josephine, and she runs a car dealership in our area.)
This story distilled the essence of the white shame dynamic. I felt ashamed of the attitudes and behavior of another white person, whose ignorance and hatred cause visible harm. As a small child, I started the process of forming a white identity based on taking responsibility for white racism, and by standing up to it, guaranteeing that I couldn't be guilty of the same.
Dangers of excess lie in this, among them ideological rigidity that justifies any degree of shaming other white people to protect our own egos. More on that toward the end.
So I followed Dennis's advice. Gathering my courage, I headed for a table occupied only by African American students in our dorm complex. Conversation stopped upon my arrival. I had the distinct feeling I wasn't welcome, not hostility exactly, something else.
Freeze frame: How should I interpret this awkward and embarrassing moment?
The sensitive ego could choose to turn awkwardness into resentment, to let loose the contained beast of shame, which ~ scaring the sensitive conscience into paralysis ~ would justify a defensive and self-aggrandizing reaction, something along the lines of Don't they appreciate that I'm trying? Or worse, see? They're racist too!
For many, their development is arrested at this point. Maybe it didn't happen on a college campus, but on a work site, or a basketball court. The wounded and fragile white ego says, I tried, throws up its hands, and surrenders the project. This path is mistaken and leads to the Dark Side.
We can choose other responses. One is simply to imagine that it's not all about us. I don't know what each individual student at that table felt, but what I came to understand through repeated efforts to join conversations on campus was that for many Black students, this was their first experience finding a community of other students who shared their experience of being high achieving and Black. They were discovering commonalities they wanted to build and explore after 18 years of being the token African American student at their schools, of suppressing parts of themselves or hiding the impact of accumulated comments, exclusions, and overt forms of prejudice they'd endured to get where they were. They did not share my need for an experiential interracial learning project just then. I had the choice to respect their privacy and not take it personally. (Which is not the same as giving up the bigger effort.)
During my freshman year, the Western Civilization curriculum became the target of protests. Students occupied the Dean's office. I think they overturned a bus? It made national news. I was sympathetic, but I didn't join the protests. I was fully on board with revising the cannon, but I wasn't convinced that the classical philosophers and writers of the Western tradition, whom I'd only just discovered and whom I thought deserved credit for some of the very ideas supporting these campus protests, should be discarded on the basis of being male and white. I wanted to think about these questions a little more slowly, in more depth. But I also understood that change must sometimes reach a revolutionary fervor. I appreciated my classmates who seemed full of sound and fury; I trusted they signified something ~ I was just trying to catch up.
The more revolutionary frontier for me lay in the personal spaces, at meals, speakers, classes, activities with classmates where I could experience my awkwardness in the context of growing relationships and, hopefully, gain deeper insight into differences in our specific life experiences.
My junior year, I was invited to participate in a panel of women of color for a "Psychology of Women" class by my roommate. Jeanne reunited six or eight of the women we'd known from our freshman dorm. We represented a wide range of racial and cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations. I represented "white." For my part, I described my journey from small town New Hampshire to California college campus; by then I had also lived in Japan for a year, which had stretched my thinking about identity a great deal further. I shared my idea that being female and raised by a single mom may help me imagine the experiences of women of color, in the power differentials I witnessed and to which I was subjected, a kind of empathetic bridge to reach across our experiences. My friends on the panel listened and nodded sympathetically. It was an intersectionality fantasy.
The next year, after Jeanne left for graduate school to study Culture and Emotion at Berkeley, the professor asked me to compose a similar panel. By then, all my dorm mates had graduated; I was on campus an extra year, owing to my time off in Japan. I invited women I didn't know well.
It was disastrous. I knew from the first word that the premise of the panel was offensive to many of the women I invited. Being white, I didn't offer the safety Jeanne, being Asian American, may have. I tried to share similar thoughts to the previous year, but was met with derision for presuming that my experiences had any relevance to theirs. Whether anyone said it, I don't know, but what I felt was: You and your white privilege... It's amazing how shame literally burns. I suppose the blood floods our capillaries or something. I'd like an evolutionary biologist to explain.
So let's freeze frame again: How should I react to this humiliation?
Again, the ego ~ ever sensitive to shame and ready to flare up to protect us ~ might say, I'm out of here. My first reaction was to resent the professor. I blamed her for making me lead a hot-button discussion for her class without either the credibility of being a woman of color or the relationship of TA with students. These were valid critiques, but not deserving of resentment.
After venting a little, I was ready to learn. I realized that I needed to listen to the discomfort I felt from the women when I first approached them. I needed to discuss the plan in more nuance with the professor. I needed to question the comfortable narrative I'd spun for myself that my womanhood gave me a way to connect with women of color's experiences. I learned beyond any doubt that the path would be many lifetimes long. I learned to survive shame and come back to the conversation.
When I got to Mississippi to teach, I was shocked to find my social reception reversed: My white students now held me in greater suspicion than my Black students. Being from California, I supposed, my whiteness connoted that I was probably another ideological carpet bagger from up North who came to impose their values on the South. My petitions to incorporate African American writers, the Blues as poetry, and to teach Standard English as a dialect, with respect to the Black English, etc. would have confirmed prejudices my white students may have had about me.
And their mistrust had rational roots, not only in history but in their daily lives. The school was about 20% white, 80% Black. The white students who attended were mostly poor. They didn't have an easy time as minority students, nor did many of them have an easy time at home, as I witnessed at close range. I felt the concentration of judgement upon them, the shame-based emotional tactics of parents living in poverty against their kids, of upper-middle class Southern whites looking down at lower-class, that I could add to if I wasn't careful.
Shame not only cuts the soul, but it can unleash violence. I didn't want to be an agent of such destruction through a thoughtless or monolithic application of my so-called progressive values. To care about racial reconciliation is to love all people. I made it my mission to forge close ties with all of my students. I accepted invitations to church revivals, including a white church revival in which the congregation circled me to help me achieve the ecstasy of speaking in tongues. (I didn't, to all of our disappointment.) I attended Thanksgiving dinner with a family who deep-friend their turkey in an oil drum. I befriended an elderly neighbor, a Baptist who surprised me with his accepting views on gay love. The more you get to know people, the more individual they become. The more individual they become, the more you just can't sum it all up. Ultimately, love is always and only personal.
Why am I compelled to write about all this? There's an urgency in trying to find the words. I still feel like I've only begun to tell my story. I floated a working title to Jordy this weekend: The Autobiography of Nobody. Why would you call yourself a "nobody," he asked? Because by being a nobody, I've been able to meet and get to know so many amazing Somebodies who've revealed parts of myself to me, who've helped me map my place in the world and, as Geena Davis says, learned how to stop apologizing for the space I take up in it.
Like so many Americans, I am living with exhausting daily grief that the dream of achieving a country that judges people by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin, and gives all people their shot is slipping away from us. We are living in a terrifying time of fear, mutual suspicion, retraction. We have a White Supremacist in the White House who courts favor with vicious racists and anti-semites. He whips up hatred toward immigrants, the cheapest of populist tricks to manipulate his so-called base. How does he do it so effectively? By activating unbearable shame wounds. My resistance is to call for the end of shaming as a weapon of mass destruction.
We pushed the concept of infinitely delineated political identities to its logical conclusion, and in carving out turf, lost track of our shared public spaces. We hit a dead end. We hid our pain behind anger. We gave up on the Love part, the oxygen we share. Our story needs to be re-written. I guess I'm writing in search of the new narrative. It has to do with specificity. Seeing each other and ourselves individually, beyond categories and beyond fear. Listening to each other's stories. Feeling the details. Reclaiming "virtual reality" for what it always was ~ art that enables empathy. Giving each other permission to find ourselves in each other.
To be continued.
Shame/less
I started this blog to capture ideas that coalesce around themes, topics, stories, memories. The posts are never complete. This topic in particular will never be completely explored, understood, illuminated. This is the beginning of what will likely become several posts to explore the identity politics of our time at a personal level. Just a reminder.... I named the blog "rickety ladder" and invited readers to "climb with me." I hope you will.
(I misfired and hit "publish" on the below before reading over. It was emailed to the small list of people who subject themselves to this blog regularly. I wanted to polish further, but I've decided to let these thoughts remain in draft form, unfinished and unorganized, as I am.)
Found this today after posting this blog yesterday, in which Cory Booker discusses the power of seeing each other... "I see your dignity, your worth as a human being... I am invested in who you are and what's happening in your life."
Conspiracy of Love
**********
Under the best of circumstances, it is very hard to see another person. I think about how hard it is to see our boys, in their full individuality. For spouses who've thought they've known each other for decades to see each other. For new lovers to see each other as they are, not as each other's fantasy projected on a pretty screen.
After a while teaching public high school in Crystal Springs, Mississippi in the early '90s, the Assistant Principal, Coach Palmer, came into my room one day, undoubtedly after helping me with classroom misbehavior. He sat down and said he wanted to tell me something. "I feel like you see me," he said. "Like, actually see me. You're different from... others. I just wanted to say that." And he left.
Coach Palmer as a compact man, built like the soccer players I'd grown up with. He taught Social Studies and coached various sports. He was soft-spoken but firm. He was raising six of his own children, and doing his damnedest to raise hundreds more at our school.
I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I felt the "..." suggested other white people. I was surprised by his comment, and also glad he didn't specify. It allowed me to hope he was acknowledging a sympathy with each other that came from recognition of a shared spirit. We shared a love of the children we were trying to educate ~ and who, speaking for myself, were educating me. We were both athletes. We both had big hearts that crested the banks of the identities race/culture/history had assigned us. His ambiguity let the "seeing" be bigger than our racial categories.
In the course of editing our feature film, I received some critical feedback on scenes filmed in Mississippi that included African American characters. The viewer remarked that she was tired of seeing characters of color in supporting roles to white leads, in particular in the "noble savage" tradition of being spiritual guides to whites. Moreover, she was offended by the use of wind chimes made from empty bottles as "cultural appropriation" of the slave tradition of hanging bottles at slave burial sites.
I've reflected on these comments a great deal over the months since I received them. I'm searching to understand her point of view, but I'm also questioning her assumptions. I wish I were blind to the demographics of this reviewer (I am not), but I have tried my best to put that knowledge aside and sit with the discomfort of her comments to benefit from what this exchange can offer to help me improve as an artist and storyteller.
Let me bounce back to the '90s again. My swan song in Mississippi was to direct of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Chautauqua Park, a neglected little patch of public performance space in our small town. Dorothy Alford, a retired English teacher in her late '80s (who was white and whose career spanned the forced integration of schools by the Federal Government), reviewed our play in The Meteor, our local paper: "I declare..." (no, she didn't actually lead with that, but her accent was so much like Scarlett O'Hara, I just had to write it) ... More like: "I never believed in my lifetime I would see Shakespeare performed live again here in Crystal Springs, Mississippi..." Our cast was fully interracial, not based on a conscious political agenda of mine, but on the compatibility of the actors, whom I'd gotten to know quite well as my students. Dorothy Alford didn't comment on the racial make-up; she was just pleased as punch to see live theater return to her community.
I want to take this apart a little: Mrs. Alford would have held some racial attitudes to make my skin crawl. Some in the audience may have had negative opinions they kept to themselves. A case could be made that by staging a dead white male's show, I was reinforcing the white cultural hegemony that continues to exclude and disenfranchise. These things are all true.
But it's also true that the play gave kids a chance to imagine themselves as characters wildly different from themselves, speaking a new form of English, before the eyes of their small, not progressive Southern town. A former student from that play found me years later on Facebook to thank me for helping her "find her voice" in our creative writing class and drama projects. She credited me (too much, her creative engine is her own) for helping her on her journey toward careers in music producing and interior design. She came out in her 20s and has made her life in cities far beyond Copiah County. We spoke last spring about the 2016 election, the dire state of racism in our country, her relief in some ways that the fantasy some white people in particular had that we were living in a "post racial" world under the Obama administration was punctured and we are now dealing with the wounds. (This was all before Charlotte.) She blew fire into my sagging spirits about the relevance of filmmaking to tell stories that can change the course of history ~ for individuals if not our country. She shared her love of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and Maya Angelou's poetry. As always, I always felt I had more to learn from her than she from me.
Forward to the late '90s. I left Mississippi to follow a guy to San Francisco, whereupon we promptly broke up. I was unemployed, grieving Mississippi. I showed up at Glide Church one Sunday with my broken heart in my lap, where the choir burst into "Pass me not, oh gentle savior...," and I did what everyone does their first time at Glide: I bawled. On stage I saw the vision my heart yearned for: 125 people, mouths wide open with song, swaying together, white/black/brown/yellow/
I have to bounce back to Mississippi, though, to trace another fissure in my heart that I carried to San Francisco. While teaching, I had invited a professional theater group from Jackson to perform at our school among whom was an actor with an exceptional talent for creating characters through his voice, from slave dialects of 200 years ago to the Queen's English. We exchanged glances, then conversation, in the school office after the show; he invited me to his next show in Jackson, Fences, by August Wilson, in which he would play "Cory." Come back stage after, he said. It was an amazing show. I went back stage. He invited me to go out "for milk" sometime and gave me his phone number.
We dated for a few months. We surprised his parents, in their '80s, one night when we drove to their house in Albany, Georgia. (Guess Who's Coming for the Weekend, the sequel) His mother was tight-lipped. His father was embracing. Reginald explained on the way that his father had advised him in his time, black boys could get lynched for dating a white girl, best to leave it alone. By the end of the weekend, his dad told me, "Samantha, I feel like I've been knowing you a long time."
I was the first white woman Reginald would be with, but not the last. Years later, after we'd parted ways but remained in touch, he went to England to study at RADA and made a meteoric career as a stand-up comedian. I made it into a show he wrote called "White Women." I was disappointed and relieved not to be featured more prominently, beat out in his heart by a little girl named "Judy," the first white woman he fell in love with sometime in early elementary school. But I got mention in the show in the part about dating a "feminist." I hope it was as funny to others as it was to me; by the time I heard it, the rules about sexual communication I internalized from my college classes had evolved enough to share the laugh. I admired his brilliance in employing comedy to deal with the infinite complexity of interracial dating. I wish I had half that talent, for your sake (dear reader) and mine.
I wasn't over Reginald when I initiated a break-up, but I was overcome with doubt. I had fielded my grandparents' "we're not against it, we just worry for the children" argument against our dating. I was prepared, even welcomed, the fight of making a life together. But I was uneasy about our compatibility. We were young, just starting to find ourselves in the world. I was trying on religion; he was trying to escape it. As evidenced in his show, we were unsure how to communicate about sexuality. (!) We were both in over our heads. As is my introspective habit, I was raking through the many layers race added to the intrinsic complexity of young love. An African American actress in his troupe loathed me without knowing me; instead of blaming her, I questioned myself ~ was I exploiting white privilege to be in this relationship? Was I appropriating a beautiful Black Man? (Though we didn't have the word "appropriate" yet.) Was this some kind interracial adventurism fed by a history of fetishizing and objectifying of the Other? Was our meeting a beautiful thing, a terrible thing, a triumph, a disaster, just a casual thing, or all of the above? Could we actually see each other at all?
Eventually, a simple decision has to be made out of infinitely complex circumstances. We weren't meant to attach to each other for all time. As an artist, he was more developed than I was; I would have stood in his shadow and clutched him insecurely. We both needed to make our ways in the world separately and love other people. It was the right thing to be together and it was the right thing to let go. Now to the extent I see him, it's on YouTube.
Romantic love is always a expression of the soul's yearning to escape existential aloneness. Add race, and romantic love can be a means to escape the confines of racial categories that imprison all of us. When Reginald and I broke up, I grieved a parts of myself that came alive with him and that could imagine myself in a world much bigger than the one I'd been assigned. This and more came flooding through me at Glide Church, in a chapter of my life that led to a more durable love and determination to overcome the narrowness of my life. I may have lost touch with Reginald, but I could keep in touch with the currents that had brought us together ~ art and storytelling, for me through film and theater.
For me, art uniquely invites us to imagine ourselves as someone else. Not to fortify our identity but rather to identify with others. To escape the strictures of identity assigned to us by circumstance and catalogued by race/gender/sexual-
Back to 2017 for now, and our film critic on the topic of cultural appropriation...
Cultural appropriation is an extremely valuable articulation of an exploitative cultural dynamic, and I respect the corrective this idea exerts as a critique to imbalances of power. Watching the Ken Burns documentary Jazz recently, for example, I feel very uneasy and sad about the co-option of jazz by white musicians in the early 20th century; Elvis Presley stole, essentially, of much of the music of Mississippi Blues artists. I watched San Francisco transform in the '90s from a diverse city to one in which young, wealthy white people seeking diversity in their restaurant options drove actually diverse communities from their neighborhoods by skyrocketing rents. So many real and serious issues we need to devote ourselves to working on.
In trying to make art, though, and trying to take the charge of cultural appropriation made against my film seriously, I have touched on the raw nerve and maybe discovered a destructive dynamic among progressive white people that I want to try to name. For now, rough draft, I'm calling it White Shaming.
A few other events coalesced to make me reflect deeper on the patterns. A theater friend of mine, also white, who is trying to put together a production of the musical 1776 received a furious email rant from another woman, also white, about the insensitivity of putting on a show that features white people and celebrates the Declaration of Independence, which in her view amounted to nothing more than a manifesto of oppression; the author of the email is also a local leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in our (very white/homogenous) community. A Facebook exchange with a friend of mine (also white) soured when I posted a celebration of the 19th amendment, to which he expressed feeling obligated to point out that it only served white and Chicana women (not historically true, a more serious point about voter suppression, for all women, being lost in the confusion of the social media form).
What purpose are these exchanges serving? My best theory is that well-intentioned white people are unwittingly engaging in a process of trying to soothe the pain of guilty conscience and consciousness about the horrific violence of white racism by shaming other white people who they feel don't sufficiently "get it." For me to name this phenomenon risks painting a target on my own forehead, and I feel my chest seize and my palms grow sweaty as I anticipate an angry response. But I am delving into this with a goal to achieve some kind of deeper healing, for all, from the scars shame inflicts. Because my guess is that people who use shame to try to control the behavior and beliefs of others were themselves victims of shame at some point in their lives.
Seeking inspiration from other progressive movements, I have appropriated an idea from the Gay Pride Movement ~ namely, Pride. Pride is opposed to Shame. For too many centuries, LGBT people have been made to feel shame for who they are. The Queer revolution in our history, with the brilliant metaphor of "coming out of the closet," is a gift to all people. I believe we all have closets we need to come out of, myself included, around our sexual identities.
The Civil Rights Movement proudly took ownership of "Black" to express pride in being shame, to collectively take the language of oppression and own it as liberation. Language creates our realities; to make "Black" Beautiful was to upend a hierarchy of shame whose perniciousness could make perpetrators of emotional violence even within the African American community, when shades of blackness could be used to insult one another.
Among Jews, Shame takes the form of the "self-hating" Jew, a controversial category but a description of a dynamic with reality to it... That powerlessness and oppression can turn inward, against oneself and members of one's own group, and manifest in shame toward the appearances or behavior of members of one's one group.
It's overwhelming to engage the historical moral responsibility of being white in this country, and it is tempting, in the absence of a white identity one can feel proud of, to dedicate oneself to the causes of others and appoint oneself the enforcer. But where this leads, I fear, is to an identity based on Shame. This is the exact opposite lesson from the one we should take from our history's liberation social movements, in which personal acceptance is a pre-requisite of taking one's rightful place in the world as a human being.
So what identity can any conscious white person in America inhabit without shame? I once white-shamed a white guy at a Zydeco festival in Louisiana, not to his face, but to an African-American couple sitting next to me. He was an embarrassingly bad dancer, which of course I did not want to identify with, so I made a stupid comment I'm too ashamed to write here. Their reaction was swift and morally clear: "We don't judge people by color here. He is enjoying himself." I burned to my core. I was ashamed, but I learned ~ and I've never forgotten.
Shame in any form poses dangers to our spirits and to making art. It makes us afraid to explore, particularly the unfinished parts of ourselves. The charge of cultural appropriation can be valid, but it can also be a dressed up way of doubting a storyteller because of who they are, not what they are saying.
In the case of the critic of my film, in this case she has some facts wrong. The bottle tree tradition, which I riffed on, is a West African tradition carried into Appalachia and the South in which bottles inverted on tree branches are believed to attract evil spirits, who like the color blue best, hence the prevalence of cobalt blue bottles. Julie Dash's masterpiece Daughters of the Dust depicts such a bottle tree among the Gullah people and a heart-breaking scene in which the tree is smashed in a fit of anger.
I took the idea of re-using bottles, but invented the idea of wind chimes. I was exploring the idea of making music from the empty refuse of sorrows drowned in alcohol, with a nod to the folk art of bottle trees and their cultural history. An artist friend in New Hampshire, self-described as a "Jew-witch," designed the chimes we used in the film. The chimes are not meant as denoting a burial site, and I'm not aware ~ even after researching in the wake of this comment ~ of any slave tradition of hanging bottles near burial sites, nor of making bottle wind chimes per se. I'm genuinely trying not to be defensive, but I am left to wonder, did this critic see my film, or did she see what she expected, applying filters habituated in a university environment of politically activist art criticism?
Similarly, I was aware, in writing the script and shooting the film, of the dangerous precedent of patronizing African American characters in roles as comforters and care-givers to white lead characters. I make films because I hope people will see my story, so I am going to ask her and others with similarly habituated blinkers to see more: The characters I wrote are supporting, that's true. They are also individuals who don't fit the roles we expect. They are small business owners, family members, friends. I tried to capture the formality authentic to my experiences living in the South, where manners are a container for tolerance, including (in this story) the messiness that the (white) characters bring with them on the road. I wasn't ready to tell all stories at once, but this does not mean I disrespect the characters whose stories are not fleshed out. The most artistically honest thing I could do was tell a family story whose depths were more familiar to me. As I build my directing skill and strive to grow as a person, I hope to tell many stories of diverse characters with integrity. And when I do, I hope the charge of cultural appropriation will not be levied against me.
For me, many questions remain... How do I make art, tell stories, authentically, honestly, with the limitations of being just one person, but reaching for genuine connection with others? Where is the line between creative cultural riffing and improvisation that leads to new art forms, fusions (my favorite in all aesthetics), and cultural appropriation? How do we find the security of relationships, of benefit of the doubt, to give ourselves and others permission to try on our identities for a song, for a show, for a night and feel a little of what it's like to be me? The Reverend Cecil Williams made clear every Sunday that we are all in recovery. Maybe we need to recover our ability to see anew, with eyes like children with curiosity, a desire to touch, a yearning for stories in which carpets can fly and we are free to be you and me.
(I misfired and hit "publish" on the below before reading over. It was emailed to the small list of people who subject themselves to this blog regularly. I wanted to polish further, but I've decided to let these thoughts remain in draft form, unfinished and unorganized, as I am.)
Found this today after posting this blog yesterday, in which Cory Booker discusses the power of seeing each other... "I see your dignity, your worth as a human being... I am invested in who you are and what's happening in your life."
Conspiracy of Love
**********
Under the best of circumstances, it is very hard to see another person. I think about how hard it is to see our boys, in their full individuality. For spouses who've thought they've known each other for decades to see each other. For new lovers to see each other as they are, not as each other's fantasy projected on a pretty screen.
After a while teaching public high school in Crystal Springs, Mississippi in the early '90s, the Assistant Principal, Coach Palmer, came into my room one day, undoubtedly after helping me with classroom misbehavior. He sat down and said he wanted to tell me something. "I feel like you see me," he said. "Like, actually see me. You're different from... others. I just wanted to say that." And he left.
Coach Palmer as a compact man, built like the soccer players I'd grown up with. He taught Social Studies and coached various sports. He was soft-spoken but firm. He was raising six of his own children, and doing his damnedest to raise hundreds more at our school.
I didn't know exactly what he meant, but I felt the "..." suggested other white people. I was surprised by his comment, and also glad he didn't specify. It allowed me to hope he was acknowledging a sympathy with each other that came from recognition of a shared spirit. We shared a love of the children we were trying to educate ~ and who, speaking for myself, were educating me. We were both athletes. We both had big hearts that crested the banks of the identities race/culture/history had assigned us. His ambiguity let the "seeing" be bigger than our racial categories.
In the course of editing our feature film, I received some critical feedback on scenes filmed in Mississippi that included African American characters. The viewer remarked that she was tired of seeing characters of color in supporting roles to white leads, in particular in the "noble savage" tradition of being spiritual guides to whites. Moreover, she was offended by the use of wind chimes made from empty bottles as "cultural appropriation" of the slave tradition of hanging bottles at slave burial sites.
I've reflected on these comments a great deal over the months since I received them. I'm searching to understand her point of view, but I'm also questioning her assumptions. I wish I were blind to the demographics of this reviewer (I am not), but I have tried my best to put that knowledge aside and sit with the discomfort of her comments to benefit from what this exchange can offer to help me improve as an artist and storyteller.
Let me bounce back to the '90s again. My swan song in Mississippi was to direct of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Chautauqua Park, a neglected little patch of public performance space in our small town. Dorothy Alford, a retired English teacher in her late '80s (who was white and whose career spanned the forced integration of schools by the Federal Government), reviewed our play in The Meteor, our local paper: "I declare..." (no, she didn't actually lead with that, but her accent was so much like Scarlett O'Hara, I just had to write it) ... More like: "I never believed in my lifetime I would see Shakespeare performed live again here in Crystal Springs, Mississippi..." Our cast was fully interracial, not based on a conscious political agenda of mine, but on the compatibility of the actors, whom I'd gotten to know quite well as my students. Dorothy Alford didn't comment on the racial make-up; she was just pleased as punch to see live theater return to her community.
I want to take this apart a little: Mrs. Alford would have held some racial attitudes to make my skin crawl. Some in the audience may have had negative opinions they kept to themselves. A case could be made that by staging a dead white male's show, I was reinforcing the white cultural hegemony that continues to exclude and disenfranchise. These things are all true.
But it's also true that the play gave kids a chance to imagine themselves as characters wildly different from themselves, speaking a new form of English, before the eyes of their small, not progressive Southern town. A former student from that play found me years later on Facebook to thank me for helping her "find her voice" in our creative writing class and drama projects. She credited me (too much, her creative engine is her own) for helping her on her journey toward careers in music producing and interior design. She came out in her 20s and has made her life in cities far beyond Copiah County. We spoke last spring about the 2016 election, the dire state of racism in our country, her relief in some ways that the fantasy some white people in particular had that we were living in a "post racial" world under the Obama administration was punctured and we are now dealing with the wounds. (This was all before Charlotte.) She blew fire into my sagging spirits about the relevance of filmmaking to tell stories that can change the course of history ~ for individuals if not our country. She shared her love of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and Maya Angelou's poetry. As always, I always felt I had more to learn from her than she from me.
Forward to the late '90s. I left Mississippi to follow a guy to San Francisco, whereupon we promptly broke up. I was unemployed, grieving Mississippi. I showed up at Glide Church one Sunday with my broken heart in my lap, where the choir burst into "Pass me not, oh gentle savior...," and I did what everyone does their first time at Glide: I bawled. On stage I saw the vision my heart yearned for: 125 people, mouths wide open with song, swaying together, white/black/brown/yellow/
I have to bounce back to Mississippi, though, to trace another fissure in my heart that I carried to San Francisco. While teaching, I had invited a professional theater group from Jackson to perform at our school among whom was an actor with an exceptional talent for creating characters through his voice, from slave dialects of 200 years ago to the Queen's English. We exchanged glances, then conversation, in the school office after the show; he invited me to his next show in Jackson, Fences, by August Wilson, in which he would play "Cory." Come back stage after, he said. It was an amazing show. I went back stage. He invited me to go out "for milk" sometime and gave me his phone number.
We dated for a few months. We surprised his parents, in their '80s, one night when we drove to their house in Albany, Georgia. (Guess Who's Coming for the Weekend, the sequel) His mother was tight-lipped. His father was embracing. Reginald explained on the way that his father had advised him in his time, black boys could get lynched for dating a white girl, best to leave it alone. By the end of the weekend, his dad told me, "Samantha, I feel like I've been knowing you a long time."
I was the first white woman Reginald would be with, but not the last. Years later, after we'd parted ways but remained in touch, he went to England to study at RADA and made a meteoric career as a stand-up comedian. I made it into a show he wrote called "White Women." I was disappointed and relieved not to be featured more prominently, beat out in his heart by a little girl named "Judy," the first white woman he fell in love with sometime in early elementary school. But I got mention in the show in the part about dating a "feminist." I hope it was as funny to others as it was to me; by the time I heard it, the rules about sexual communication I internalized from my college classes had evolved enough to share the laugh. I admired his brilliance in employing comedy to deal with the infinite complexity of interracial dating. I wish I had half that talent, for your sake (dear reader) and mine.
I wasn't over Reginald when I initiated a break-up, but I was overcome with doubt. I had fielded my grandparents' "we're not against it, we just worry for the children" argument against our dating. I was prepared, even welcomed, the fight of making a life together. But I was uneasy about our compatibility. We were young, just starting to find ourselves in the world. I was trying on religion; he was trying to escape it. As evidenced in his show, we were unsure how to communicate about sexuality. (!) We were both in over our heads. As is my introspective habit, I was raking through the many layers race added to the intrinsic complexity of young love. An African American actress in his troupe loathed me without knowing me; instead of blaming her, I questioned myself ~ was I exploiting white privilege to be in this relationship? Was I appropriating a beautiful Black Man? (Though we didn't have the word "appropriate" yet.) Was this some kind interracial adventurism fed by a history of fetishizing and objectifying of the Other? Was our meeting a beautiful thing, a terrible thing, a triumph, a disaster, just a casual thing, or all of the above? Could we actually see each other at all?
Eventually, a simple decision has to be made out of infinitely complex circumstances. We weren't meant to attach to each other for all time. As an artist, he was more developed than I was; I would have stood in his shadow and clutched him insecurely. We both needed to make our ways in the world separately and love other people. It was the right thing to be together and it was the right thing to let go. Now to the extent I see him, it's on YouTube.
Romantic love is always a expression of the soul's yearning to escape existential aloneness. Add race, and romantic love can be a means to escape the confines of racial categories that imprison all of us. When Reginald and I broke up, I grieved a parts of myself that came alive with him and that could imagine myself in a world much bigger than the one I'd been assigned. This and more came flooding through me at Glide Church, in a chapter of my life that led to a more durable love and determination to overcome the narrowness of my life. I may have lost touch with Reginald, but I could keep in touch with the currents that had brought us together ~ art and storytelling, for me through film and theater.
For me, art uniquely invites us to imagine ourselves as someone else. Not to fortify our identity but rather to identify with others. To escape the strictures of identity assigned to us by circumstance and catalogued by race/gender/sexual-
Back to 2017 for now, and our film critic on the topic of cultural appropriation...
Cultural appropriation is an extremely valuable articulation of an exploitative cultural dynamic, and I respect the corrective this idea exerts as a critique to imbalances of power. Watching the Ken Burns documentary Jazz recently, for example, I feel very uneasy and sad about the co-option of jazz by white musicians in the early 20th century; Elvis Presley stole, essentially, of much of the music of Mississippi Blues artists. I watched San Francisco transform in the '90s from a diverse city to one in which young, wealthy white people seeking diversity in their restaurant options drove actually diverse communities from their neighborhoods by skyrocketing rents. So many real and serious issues we need to devote ourselves to working on.
In trying to make art, though, and trying to take the charge of cultural appropriation made against my film seriously, I have touched on the raw nerve and maybe discovered a destructive dynamic among progressive white people that I want to try to name. For now, rough draft, I'm calling it White Shaming.
A few other events coalesced to make me reflect deeper on the patterns. A theater friend of mine, also white, who is trying to put together a production of the musical 1776 received a furious email rant from another woman, also white, about the insensitivity of putting on a show that features white people and celebrates the Declaration of Independence, which in her view amounted to nothing more than a manifesto of oppression; the author of the email is also a local leader of the Black Lives Matter movement in our (very white/homogenous) community. A Facebook exchange with a friend of mine (also white) soured when I posted a celebration of the 19th amendment, to which he expressed feeling obligated to point out that it only served white and Chicana women (not historically true, a more serious point about voter suppression, for all women, being lost in the confusion of the social media form).
What purpose are these exchanges serving? My best theory is that well-intentioned white people are unwittingly engaging in a process of trying to soothe the pain of guilty conscience and consciousness about the horrific violence of white racism by shaming other white people who they feel don't sufficiently "get it." For me to name this phenomenon risks painting a target on my own forehead, and I feel my chest seize and my palms grow sweaty as I anticipate an angry response. But I am delving into this with a goal to achieve some kind of deeper healing, for all, from the scars shame inflicts. Because my guess is that people who use shame to try to control the behavior and beliefs of others were themselves victims of shame at some point in their lives.
Seeking inspiration from other progressive movements, I have appropriated an idea from the Gay Pride Movement ~ namely, Pride. Pride is opposed to Shame. For too many centuries, LGBT people have been made to feel shame for who they are. The Queer revolution in our history, with the brilliant metaphor of "coming out of the closet," is a gift to all people. I believe we all have closets we need to come out of, myself included, around our sexual identities.
The Civil Rights Movement proudly took ownership of "Black" to express pride in being shame, to collectively take the language of oppression and own it as liberation. Language creates our realities; to make "Black" Beautiful was to upend a hierarchy of shame whose perniciousness could make perpetrators of emotional violence even within the African American community, when shades of blackness could be used to insult one another.
Among Jews, Shame takes the form of the "self-hating" Jew, a controversial category but a description of a dynamic with reality to it... That powerlessness and oppression can turn inward, against oneself and members of one's own group, and manifest in shame toward the appearances or behavior of members of one's one group.
It's overwhelming to engage the historical moral responsibility of being white in this country, and it is tempting, in the absence of a white identity one can feel proud of, to dedicate oneself to the causes of others and appoint oneself the enforcer. But where this leads, I fear, is to an identity based on Shame. This is the exact opposite lesson from the one we should take from our history's liberation social movements, in which personal acceptance is a pre-requisite of taking one's rightful place in the world as a human being.
So what identity can any conscious white person in America inhabit without shame? I once white-shamed a white guy at a Zydeco festival in Louisiana, not to his face, but to an African-American couple sitting next to me. He was an embarrassingly bad dancer, which of course I did not want to identify with, so I made a stupid comment I'm too ashamed to write here. Their reaction was swift and morally clear: "We don't judge people by color here. He is enjoying himself." I burned to my core. I was ashamed, but I learned ~ and I've never forgotten.
Shame in any form poses dangers to our spirits and to making art. It makes us afraid to explore, particularly the unfinished parts of ourselves. The charge of cultural appropriation can be valid, but it can also be a dressed up way of doubting a storyteller because of who they are, not what they are saying.
In the case of the critic of my film, in this case she has some facts wrong. The bottle tree tradition, which I riffed on, is a West African tradition carried into Appalachia and the South in which bottles inverted on tree branches are believed to attract evil spirits, who like the color blue best, hence the prevalence of cobalt blue bottles. Julie Dash's masterpiece Daughters of the Dust depicts such a bottle tree among the Gullah people and a heart-breaking scene in which the tree is smashed in a fit of anger.
I took the idea of re-using bottles, but invented the idea of wind chimes. I was exploring the idea of making music from the empty refuse of sorrows drowned in alcohol, with a nod to the folk art of bottle trees and their cultural history. An artist friend in New Hampshire, self-described as a "Jew-witch," designed the chimes we used in the film. The chimes are not meant as denoting a burial site, and I'm not aware ~ even after researching in the wake of this comment ~ of any slave tradition of hanging bottles near burial sites, nor of making bottle wind chimes per se. I'm genuinely trying not to be defensive, but I am left to wonder, did this critic see my film, or did she see what she expected, applying filters habituated in a university environment of politically activist art criticism?
Similarly, I was aware, in writing the script and shooting the film, of the dangerous precedent of patronizing African American characters in roles as comforters and care-givers to white lead characters. I make films because I hope people will see my story, so I am going to ask her and others with similarly habituated blinkers to see more: The characters I wrote are supporting, that's true. They are also individuals who don't fit the roles we expect. They are small business owners, family members, friends. I tried to capture the formality authentic to my experiences living in the South, where manners are a container for tolerance, including (in this story) the messiness that the (white) characters bring with them on the road. I wasn't ready to tell all stories at once, but this does not mean I disrespect the characters whose stories are not fleshed out. The most artistically honest thing I could do was tell a family story whose depths were more familiar to me. As I build my directing skill and strive to grow as a person, I hope to tell many stories of diverse characters with integrity. And when I do, I hope the charge of cultural appropriation will not be levied against me.
For me, many questions remain... How do I make art, tell stories, authentically, honestly, with the limitations of being just one person, but reaching for genuine connection with others? Where is the line between creative cultural riffing and improvisation that leads to new art forms, fusions (my favorite in all aesthetics), and cultural appropriation? How do we find the security of relationships, of benefit of the doubt, to give ourselves and others permission to try on our identities for a song, for a show, for a night and feel a little of what it's like to be me? The Reverend Cecil Williams made clear every Sunday that we are all in recovery. Maybe we need to recover our ability to see anew, with eyes like children with curiosity, a desire to touch, a yearning for stories in which carpets can fly and we are free to be you and me.
Monday, September 25, 2017
In Search of Smaller Gods, or Why the MonoGod needs to Move over
Today on the way to work I heard a poem about peonies on the radio. It came from a collection called "In Search of Smaller Gods," or at least that's what I think I heard. I was barely listening, distracted by thoughts about the NFL's show of solidarity with its protesting players, Angela Merkel's win despite gains by the far Right, and the possibility of nuclear armageddon with North Korea. But this name lassoed my attention.
I was born too late to count as a Flower Child, and feminism has been on the rocks since the moral betrayal of white college-educated women in last year's election, so the following cry from the gut needs a lot more context than I have the time to write now, but I set this down as a start: We need the Goddess, and we need her bad.
To this point, I am loving this graphic, which I first saw a few weeks ago across a woman's ample bosom at open-mic night at Skunk Hollow Tavern:
And thank God(dess) for Wonder Woman's appearance in a theater near you this summer. Was a film ever needed more urgently? I loved seeing this WW-inspired street art in LA on a recent work trip:
But I am tired of women's power and leadership being something we have to buy a movie ticket – or a plane ticket to Germany – to see while letting the male power structure remain in tact and fierce. I can't stomach the women who will override their own better judgement to protect their Men in Charge, which includes the men who share their beds and the little men whose lunch boxes they fix every morning. (See: Why Hillary Clinton Was Right About White Women & Their Husbands) We've got so much more work to do than we realized.
Let me back up to say how much I love the Enlightenment, broadly speaking a theist ideology of the intrinsic and equal worth of all people from which we "freedom-loving" Americans (and I'm not being sarcastic) have all benefited from a centuries'-long rise in respect for individual rights, taking political form from the American Revolution to the Civil War to the Civil Rights era to today. For this long arc of history, I'm eternally grateful and committed to its furtherance. But as we get closer to actual equality, the forces of the old order asserting male dominance ~ particularly white male dominance ~ don't want to let go. (And, it seems, on average the more intimate one is with a white male, the less likely one is to challenge that order and join forces to usher in the next Enlightenment of Humanity, in which all people are truly valued equally.) Who is to blame for this?
The Big White Guy in the Sky. We all know Him, the one with the long white beard who sits us comfortingly on his knee when we get hurt and speaks in a stern low voice to correct us when we've been bad. Even the most devout atheists, I would argue, have a relationship with That Guy somewhere deep down. As much as we try to expand our spiritual imaginations, no matter how much yoga we do or science we practice, He's still got us all in His grip.
Nicole Krauss bit off a piece of this issue in tackling the question of whether women get to write with authority in this weekend's NYTimes Magazine. Her argument carries big authority with me, earned by her extraordinary power as a writer. It also resonates with me as I finish a first feature film in a year when women film directors lost ground in 2016, directing only 7% of the 250 top grossing films. If there is any place where a woman's authority must be strong and will be tested, it is in the making of a film, from start to finish. (I have SO MANY more thoughts on this topic for another post.)
And when I say He's still got us all in His grip, I include white men as victims of this archaic and destructive power structure. As the mother of three young white men in the making, I don't want them to surrender their full, distinctive and gorgeous humanity to the absurd miniaturization of the white male dominant gorilla model. (Thankfully, my very enlightened white male husband joins me in the mission to protect their full humanity, as we seek to help each other reclaim our own.)
Our problem is millennia in the making, so why did I expect we'd level this playing field in my life time? On a recent visit to the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades to celebrate the completion of post-production on my film, I saw several statues that struck me. One was a pair of Egyptian portraits of the goddess Isis and her male counterpart (whose name I can't remember, ha!). They were displayed side-by-side, each with penetrating gazes that look straight into and through your innermost soul. Another pair of pre-Christian Roman statues depicted a Goddess and God, again I forget the names, again side-by-side, she his equal in body size and fortitude.
Maybe the curators at the Getty chose the equal footing of these displays to suit their contemporary audience, but I was captivated by the mere fact of female + male godheads. Even those who reject religion all together learned that Monotheism was "progress" over pagan religions, many of which upheld female god figures associated with Nature. So much has been written and studied on this subject, and it's not my goal to venture into an academically rigorous discourse on this. (I make movies because I have a short attention span and want to be entertained!)
But I want to put words to the very personal stake I feel in this historical development and why it infuriates me: Unity was not integration, it was domination. The domination of male over female. The domination of technology and culture over nature. With the promulgation of monotheism beyond the ancient world through empire and colonialism, the domination of white over brown.
As long as God has to be ONE, we will keep looking to One among us who was made in His Image, and despite our best efforts to broaden our minds, we all know what he looks like: Tom Brady.
Many in my closest circles escape this problem by rejecting all traditional religion and claiming atheist exemption from the mess; others who remain committed to lives rooted in relationship with the Divine solve it by modifying prayer books to adopt gender-inclusive language. My concern is that these choices can go both too far and not far enough.
Complicating the matter is the fact that we can't foresake belief in "the One" without foresaking also the intellectual foundation of our Enlightenment claim to the equal worth of all human beings. We must agree on a unifying essence that conveys equal worth to all, or else open the floodgates to (organized and disorganized) ideologies of racial and gender superiority that have justified measureless violence and dehumanization. Why is belief required? Because there isn't anything that fixes this value in the material circumstances of our existence. (Also, I love that the word "believe" comes from the same root as "beloved," in other words, to attach oneself to a beloved idea.) On the other end of the spectrum, the well-intended idea that a few keystrokes at the publishers can gender-neutralize prayerbooks (in the case of our tradition, the Jewish Siddur) is folly. How can we possibly wrap our heads around a gender-neutral unified godhead, when we haven't yet figured out how to let people chose which bathroom they want to use? (Please watch every episode of Transparent and Jill Soloway's brilliant talk on the Female Gaze)
And how unfair is it that just at the moment when we need a massive re-balancing of the gendered universe, secular society has decided that God is dead and fundamentalist religions are doubling down on the authoritarian He-God? How legit would it be (to use my 12-year old's parlance) if the Goddess decided to give a little Revelation action, say on Mount Ascutney up here in Vermont? A second Sinai, a new set of tablets, the missing half... For, like, all of human history, power struggles among peoples have played out in the heavens ~ "our god(s)" triumphing over "their god(s)," proving our more chosen lot over you. I'd love for the Goddess to have it out with the He-God, whack him off his smug butt and save the world, etc. but it's too late ~ no one dares believe that stuff any more. So we leave it to the Special Effects artists to give us Wonder Woman on the job and keep hope alive for a female president.
So, I too am in search of smaller gods. I feel divine grace and flow in my life. I'm striving to listen to voices, not just The Voice, that whisper truths to me. To allow angels peddling dreams to bring uncomfortable realities of my life to conscious mind upon waking. To trust the wisdom of my female body in delivering three new lives to the world, and for releasing two others who were not meant to be. To lean into my role as director with curiosity about how my instincts of leadership may differ from male colleagues. To place value on the work I do to nurture others, including raising children who happen to be little men, which is not recognized on IMDB or a pay stub, and to fight to hold space for the stirrings of my own imagination, the ethical compass of my particular soul, and my unique powers to create. Until She/They show up to prove how we are all equally welcome at the One Party, I'm seeking the Wonder Woman state of mind.
I was born too late to count as a Flower Child, and feminism has been on the rocks since the moral betrayal of white college-educated women in last year's election, so the following cry from the gut needs a lot more context than I have the time to write now, but I set this down as a start: We need the Goddess, and we need her bad.
To this point, I am loving this graphic, which I first saw a few weeks ago across a woman's ample bosom at open-mic night at Skunk Hollow Tavern:
And thank God(dess) for Wonder Woman's appearance in a theater near you this summer. Was a film ever needed more urgently? I loved seeing this WW-inspired street art in LA on a recent work trip:
But I am tired of women's power and leadership being something we have to buy a movie ticket – or a plane ticket to Germany – to see while letting the male power structure remain in tact and fierce. I can't stomach the women who will override their own better judgement to protect their Men in Charge, which includes the men who share their beds and the little men whose lunch boxes they fix every morning. (See: Why Hillary Clinton Was Right About White Women & Their Husbands) We've got so much more work to do than we realized.
Let me back up to say how much I love the Enlightenment, broadly speaking a theist ideology of the intrinsic and equal worth of all people from which we "freedom-loving" Americans (and I'm not being sarcastic) have all benefited from a centuries'-long rise in respect for individual rights, taking political form from the American Revolution to the Civil War to the Civil Rights era to today. For this long arc of history, I'm eternally grateful and committed to its furtherance. But as we get closer to actual equality, the forces of the old order asserting male dominance ~ particularly white male dominance ~ don't want to let go. (And, it seems, on average the more intimate one is with a white male, the less likely one is to challenge that order and join forces to usher in the next Enlightenment of Humanity, in which all people are truly valued equally.) Who is to blame for this?
The Big White Guy in the Sky. We all know Him, the one with the long white beard who sits us comfortingly on his knee when we get hurt and speaks in a stern low voice to correct us when we've been bad. Even the most devout atheists, I would argue, have a relationship with That Guy somewhere deep down. As much as we try to expand our spiritual imaginations, no matter how much yoga we do or science we practice, He's still got us all in His grip.
Nicole Krauss bit off a piece of this issue in tackling the question of whether women get to write with authority in this weekend's NYTimes Magazine. Her argument carries big authority with me, earned by her extraordinary power as a writer. It also resonates with me as I finish a first feature film in a year when women film directors lost ground in 2016, directing only 7% of the 250 top grossing films. If there is any place where a woman's authority must be strong and will be tested, it is in the making of a film, from start to finish. (I have SO MANY more thoughts on this topic for another post.)
And when I say He's still got us all in His grip, I include white men as victims of this archaic and destructive power structure. As the mother of three young white men in the making, I don't want them to surrender their full, distinctive and gorgeous humanity to the absurd miniaturization of the white male dominant gorilla model. (Thankfully, my very enlightened white male husband joins me in the mission to protect their full humanity, as we seek to help each other reclaim our own.)
Our problem is millennia in the making, so why did I expect we'd level this playing field in my life time? On a recent visit to the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades to celebrate the completion of post-production on my film, I saw several statues that struck me. One was a pair of Egyptian portraits of the goddess Isis and her male counterpart (whose name I can't remember, ha!). They were displayed side-by-side, each with penetrating gazes that look straight into and through your innermost soul. Another pair of pre-Christian Roman statues depicted a Goddess and God, again I forget the names, again side-by-side, she his equal in body size and fortitude.
Maybe the curators at the Getty chose the equal footing of these displays to suit their contemporary audience, but I was captivated by the mere fact of female + male godheads. Even those who reject religion all together learned that Monotheism was "progress" over pagan religions, many of which upheld female god figures associated with Nature. So much has been written and studied on this subject, and it's not my goal to venture into an academically rigorous discourse on this. (I make movies because I have a short attention span and want to be entertained!)
But I want to put words to the very personal stake I feel in this historical development and why it infuriates me: Unity was not integration, it was domination. The domination of male over female. The domination of technology and culture over nature. With the promulgation of monotheism beyond the ancient world through empire and colonialism, the domination of white over brown.
As long as God has to be ONE, we will keep looking to One among us who was made in His Image, and despite our best efforts to broaden our minds, we all know what he looks like: Tom Brady.
Many in my closest circles escape this problem by rejecting all traditional religion and claiming atheist exemption from the mess; others who remain committed to lives rooted in relationship with the Divine solve it by modifying prayer books to adopt gender-inclusive language. My concern is that these choices can go both too far and not far enough.
Complicating the matter is the fact that we can't foresake belief in "the One" without foresaking also the intellectual foundation of our Enlightenment claim to the equal worth of all human beings. We must agree on a unifying essence that conveys equal worth to all, or else open the floodgates to (organized and disorganized) ideologies of racial and gender superiority that have justified measureless violence and dehumanization. Why is belief required? Because there isn't anything that fixes this value in the material circumstances of our existence. (Also, I love that the word "believe" comes from the same root as "beloved," in other words, to attach oneself to a beloved idea.) On the other end of the spectrum, the well-intended idea that a few keystrokes at the publishers can gender-neutralize prayerbooks (in the case of our tradition, the Jewish Siddur) is folly. How can we possibly wrap our heads around a gender-neutral unified godhead, when we haven't yet figured out how to let people chose which bathroom they want to use? (Please watch every episode of Transparent and Jill Soloway's brilliant talk on the Female Gaze)
And how unfair is it that just at the moment when we need a massive re-balancing of the gendered universe, secular society has decided that God is dead and fundamentalist religions are doubling down on the authoritarian He-God? How legit would it be (to use my 12-year old's parlance) if the Goddess decided to give a little Revelation action, say on Mount Ascutney up here in Vermont? A second Sinai, a new set of tablets, the missing half... For, like, all of human history, power struggles among peoples have played out in the heavens ~ "our god(s)" triumphing over "their god(s)," proving our more chosen lot over you. I'd love for the Goddess to have it out with the He-God, whack him off his smug butt and save the world, etc. but it's too late ~ no one dares believe that stuff any more. So we leave it to the Special Effects artists to give us Wonder Woman on the job and keep hope alive for a female president.
So, I too am in search of smaller gods. I feel divine grace and flow in my life. I'm striving to listen to voices, not just The Voice, that whisper truths to me. To allow angels peddling dreams to bring uncomfortable realities of my life to conscious mind upon waking. To trust the wisdom of my female body in delivering three new lives to the world, and for releasing two others who were not meant to be. To lean into my role as director with curiosity about how my instincts of leadership may differ from male colleagues. To place value on the work I do to nurture others, including raising children who happen to be little men, which is not recognized on IMDB or a pay stub, and to fight to hold space for the stirrings of my own imagination, the ethical compass of my particular soul, and my unique powers to create. Until She/They show up to prove how we are all equally welcome at the One Party, I'm seeking the Wonder Woman state of mind.
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Packing Up the Rickety Ladder
The puppies and I were running through the woods above the Top of the World yesterday when a thought unrelated to anything arose that it...
