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
Wednesday, October 11, 2017
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.
Thursday, February 2, 2017
Back on the Rickety Ladder
First - must register shock that I never opened this blog in the year 2016. We were busy. There was the country's most vile election in history on the one hand, and on the other, production of our first feature film, an against-all-odds journey across that same country, graced by glorious sunrises, sunsets, rainbows, helpful strangers, and highway safety over 3,200+ miles.
Now we must live with the world that election wrought. Like many, I have not slept well since November, some nights barely at all since January 20th. The imagination goes to toxic rivers and air, internment for Muslims, assassinations of journalists and political opposition leaders, the dismantling of public education, and endless manufactured wars that justify a fascist coup and the end of constitutional government. Already most people I know are reconsidered their digital footprint. Will this post be used against me? Maybe.
Sooner or later, true patriotism – the heart's attachment to justice, equality before the law, enlightened stewardship of our land and honorable dealing with global neighbors, not the shallow, jingoistic macho patriotism peddled by Trump– is risky business. It turns out our generation is not exempt from this risk. This is something of a shock to our Sesame Street generation. For all the set backs we could name, we are the generation in which Science, Creativity, and Justice prevailed. We were born the year man landed on the moon; we were the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights and Women's movements; we survived the end of the Cold War, watching the Berlin wall fall – in my case on Japanese TV where I lived among my grandparents' generation's enemies; we traded francs in for Euros and traveled freely on EurRail passes. We witnessed science and public health contain the AIDS epidemic, the dot.com gold rush, the smartphone and Facebook revolutions. We elected the most dignified president ever, one of our generation and outlook, who rescued an economy in free fall, got Osama Bin Laden, made inroads on insuring millions for health care, kept us safe from terrorism for 8 years, and gave us the "No Drama Obama" model of Cool under Pressure. And yet...
I'm sure there isn't a head that hasn't being scratched in this country (and much of the world) wondering how this rapid and vicious unraveling could happen. For a time I turned off the radio, let the newspapers stack up, turned to more eternal sources – snow falling, the hills, psalms, the smell of my children's heads, the chickadees and tufted titmouse birds at the feeder, my grandmother's 100th birthday – but the mind never stops churning... Questions and more questions... What were the structural flaws in the America we were building in our time? What parts of progress came by suppression vs. change/growth in consciousness? What are the real economic and cultural dynamics that have abandoned rural America (which I witness daily here)? What are the consequences of speech unleashed on social media, and is there a path back to civil discourse? What is the role of popular culture in shaping our reality, and comedy in both outing and undermining "truth"? How do we define "the good life" or what it means to be human? What is the relationship between the health of the body politic and the individual? Where is there honor in manhood, womanhood, parenthood, citizenship now? How has the narrative failed, or, what is this crisis of meaning, and how do we remedy it? What is the role of faith, and how do we nurse so many hurting souls all around?
For 2017, I'd like to climb back on the rickety ladder to think about these questions (and many more) slowly. I appreciate you, family and friend readers, helping me think better, more clearly. I think half the evil unleashed on the world last year owed to so many trigger-fingers tweeting and Facebooking before thinking. As we try to teach the boys in our Hebrew studies together, our thoughts will be filled with all manner of ugliness; they are first drafts. But when we speak, they become real in the world, so let's take our time to measure them.
I also want to use this blog to gather some of the best articles, videos, etc. – words well chosen by others, with an aim to curate for quality (or at least significance?) over quantity. Along those lines, here are some thought-provokers for future posts:
George Packer, "Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt," The New Yorker 10/31/16
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt
Emily Nussbaum, "How Jokes Won the Election," The New Yorker 1/23/17
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/how-jokes-won-the-election
Bill Maher, "New Rule: Stop Apologizing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaC1-U8LIY0
President Barak Obama's Farewell Address
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udrKnXueTW0
Breitbart News,
http://www.breitbart.com/
Plato, The Republic
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
Valarie Kaur, Groundswell Movement
https://youtu.be/LCenwgheIBs
Theme for next time: Empathy Redistribution
Now we must live with the world that election wrought. Like many, I have not slept well since November, some nights barely at all since January 20th. The imagination goes to toxic rivers and air, internment for Muslims, assassinations of journalists and political opposition leaders, the dismantling of public education, and endless manufactured wars that justify a fascist coup and the end of constitutional government. Already most people I know are reconsidered their digital footprint. Will this post be used against me? Maybe.
Sooner or later, true patriotism – the heart's attachment to justice, equality before the law, enlightened stewardship of our land and honorable dealing with global neighbors, not the shallow, jingoistic macho patriotism peddled by Trump– is risky business. It turns out our generation is not exempt from this risk. This is something of a shock to our Sesame Street generation. For all the set backs we could name, we are the generation in which Science, Creativity, and Justice prevailed. We were born the year man landed on the moon; we were the beneficiaries of the Civil Rights and Women's movements; we survived the end of the Cold War, watching the Berlin wall fall – in my case on Japanese TV where I lived among my grandparents' generation's enemies; we traded francs in for Euros and traveled freely on EurRail passes. We witnessed science and public health contain the AIDS epidemic, the dot.com gold rush, the smartphone and Facebook revolutions. We elected the most dignified president ever, one of our generation and outlook, who rescued an economy in free fall, got Osama Bin Laden, made inroads on insuring millions for health care, kept us safe from terrorism for 8 years, and gave us the "No Drama Obama" model of Cool under Pressure. And yet...
I'm sure there isn't a head that hasn't being scratched in this country (and much of the world) wondering how this rapid and vicious unraveling could happen. For a time I turned off the radio, let the newspapers stack up, turned to more eternal sources – snow falling, the hills, psalms, the smell of my children's heads, the chickadees and tufted titmouse birds at the feeder, my grandmother's 100th birthday – but the mind never stops churning... Questions and more questions... What were the structural flaws in the America we were building in our time? What parts of progress came by suppression vs. change/growth in consciousness? What are the real economic and cultural dynamics that have abandoned rural America (which I witness daily here)? What are the consequences of speech unleashed on social media, and is there a path back to civil discourse? What is the role of popular culture in shaping our reality, and comedy in both outing and undermining "truth"? How do we define "the good life" or what it means to be human? What is the relationship between the health of the body politic and the individual? Where is there honor in manhood, womanhood, parenthood, citizenship now? How has the narrative failed, or, what is this crisis of meaning, and how do we remedy it? What is the role of faith, and how do we nurse so many hurting souls all around?
For 2017, I'd like to climb back on the rickety ladder to think about these questions (and many more) slowly. I appreciate you, family and friend readers, helping me think better, more clearly. I think half the evil unleashed on the world last year owed to so many trigger-fingers tweeting and Facebooking before thinking. As we try to teach the boys in our Hebrew studies together, our thoughts will be filled with all manner of ugliness; they are first drafts. But when we speak, they become real in the world, so let's take our time to measure them.
I also want to use this blog to gather some of the best articles, videos, etc. – words well chosen by others, with an aim to curate for quality (or at least significance?) over quantity. Along those lines, here are some thought-provokers for future posts:
George Packer, "Hillary Clinton and the Populist Revolt," The New Yorker 10/31/16
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/hillary-clinton-and-the-populist-revolt
Emily Nussbaum, "How Jokes Won the Election," The New Yorker 1/23/17
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/23/how-jokes-won-the-election
Bill Maher, "New Rule: Stop Apologizing"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaC1-U8LIY0
President Barak Obama's Farewell Address
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udrKnXueTW0
Breitbart News,
http://www.breitbart.com/
Plato, The Republic
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html
Valarie Kaur, Groundswell Movement
https://youtu.be/LCenwgheIBs
Theme for next time: Empathy Redistribution
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Tuesday, January 27, 2015
Samanthasaurus Rex
This week I discovered that I am going extinct. Leon Wieseltier ("Among the Disrupted") confirmed what I've suspected for a long time (like, at least since the iPhone 6 came out and, once again, I didn't give a hoot): My generation was the long tail of western European liberalism, humanism, and the Enlightenment, all of which have been rendered irrelevant, no dir, by the DIR (the Digital Information Revolution). We are officially relics.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
To call us a generation is a stretch - what is a generation? Technically, the freshmen who entered Stanford (class of 1994) when I was a junior are my generation, and yet we are pleistocenes apart. They used email, in college. I submitted papers - on paper! (so retro!) - and used telephones that were wired to the wall. I took exams in blue books! I road-tripped to Stanford from New England with nothing more than a AAA Triptik to guide me (does anyone else remember?), the optimized route lovingly highlighted by hand, just for me. You had to order that, like, at least 5 days before your trip.
Something inside me which I can only call my soul (that phenomenon construed by my verbal cortex to provide the sustaining illusion that "I" exist, or matter) longs to highjack one of the consumer space travel technologies currently being tested in Siberia and re-program it to take me to the Enlightenment. I would buy Kant a couple of pints in exchange for his thoughts on what moral imperatives apply to conduct on Facebook or the use of drones in warfare. I'd check in with Spinoza about global warming and God and nature and all that stuff, break it to Pope ("Know then thyself, presume not God to scan/ The proper study of mankind is man") that neither God nor Man gets many "likes" these days unless He's shirtless (or pantless, depending on the app).
When I left for Japan in 1989 I had a tidy plan to guarantee my expensive liberal arts college education would justify itself: I would have fun thinking about things for a couple of years, all the while completing pre-med requirements for a secure and productive future. But once I left the matrix of the Stanford campus, an existential crisis set in. I returned to campus a year later, confused. I went to the only person I could imagine might direct me - Lee Yearly, whose Introduction to the Humanities class had offered the most exciting intellectual (does that word still exist?) conversations of my life. He listened patiently to my rambling, then offered simply, "I don't mean to be imperialist, but I think you are asking religious questions." Religious questions?! Thank you, I said (while my Thought Bubble mocked: Intelligent, modern people don't ask religious questions.) But as I walked out, I began to wonder... What does he mean by religion? Is it possible to ask religious questions without identifying with a given religion? What's the difference between religion and spirituality? What is the spirit? Why does it matter? What is the right kind of language to express the ineffable? Can art or nature generate legitimate "religious experiences"? I changed my major and abandoned my plans. If not a religious experience, then it was at least a very good tickle to the neurons.
I am entertaining a vainglorious fantasy that my generation, derogatorily dubbed "Generation X" -- the neither-here-nor-there generation raised with '60s free love ideals and '80s AIDS realities, the last Cold War kids to know what ICBM and MAD stood for, too late (or unimaginative) to invent Google or YouTube -- will Save the World in the end. When the computers take over, and we are their slaves, and we must go offline to survive, outwitting our new Digital Gods by navigating with moldy maps and thinking long thoughts and reciting poems from memory, we will be the revered Elders of Humanity who remember how... (If we can remember anything at all by the time we're that old, but I trust we'll have eradicated old age by then, so why worry?)
The other day over massaman curry I asked Gifford, my scientist friend who studies climate change, what era we are in. There's debate on this question, he replied. We're either at the very end of the Holocene Era, which started after the last ice age, or we're just entered the Anthropocene Era, the first named for the impact of humans on the Earth, mostly in the form of widespread extinctions and pollution.
I told you I was the end of an era! Good thing I uploaded some selfies from the Holocene to Facebook where they will live forever.
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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...
