by Lucy S.
I've spent another long day alternating between my computer, the books stacked around me, and my old standby - one of those big multi-sectioned spiral notebooks of the kind I used for years as journals. When my brain has felt overloaded, I've switched over to emails and Facebook to quickly write or read another article someone posted and share or like some of them. I even added a bunch of books and music that I like, for some reason - something I've never bothered much with before. When I feel nervous, I tend to gravitate toward anything to attach my focus to when I'm taking a break form the main activity. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works to keep sheer panic from filling up my otherwise free-floating mind.
Tomorrow I go to the campus to make copies of the syllabus for the students, scan book excerpts, make other copies, check out the classroom where I'll be teaching, and do anything else I can to feel ready to teach a college class for the very first time. Justin, my oldest son - my steady help in so many things over the years - is going with me to help me scan, in case I don't understand quickly enough what I'm supposed to do. This way, he can keep showing me, if need be. I want to figure out how to use the computer in class, too. I don't want students to think I seem lost or dumb. I want to seem like a real professor.
And so I move from being a student to being a teacher at a college. This stuns me. I don't think I've ever quite figured out how to tell myself or anyone else this story of going to school, and going back to school, and back again, and again, and finally ending up at a point I've never been at in my life. I wrote a master's essay which engaged critically with the idealized American 'success story' - the tale of ascension, of upwardness, for the person who keeps trying, works hard, cares enough, has something worthy to contribute... I said that these stories which work to inspire hope and prove the possibility of mobility for some always at the same time prove immobility for most, because the whole 'plot' basis rests in someone beating the odds - showing that there are odds to beat. Yes, I wrote all that, and I feel it keenly. But, oh man, when you are the one trying, you can't really be cynical about it. At least, I can't be.
There's no pot of gold waiting at the end. Within my circle - those I'm closest to - there is some amazement that one of us could travel this path and end up as a college teacher (!!!). But I know that in the discipline itself, I will be someone with "only" a master's, and I also know that the difference is not at ALL "just a piece of paper." I know the enormous amount of work those pieces of paper take. And I've chosen to go to school for something that I probably can't earn much of a living at. That's wrong. We who do this work, even the non-tenured, deserve to make living wages. I aim to be part of that struggle. But at the same time, I know that I did this because I have always loved the core work itself - the reading, writing, talking, creating whatever fragile communities we can build together... I didn't do it to 'climb' but rather to 'be' - to be immersed in these efforts, to be able to share these yearnings with others, to continually learn and seek. Maybe that sounds too romanticized and too stereotypical. But it's true.
I've been reading about narratives, trying to choose readings for my students about them, trying to take notes that will become my own points to make in class. We take these hours and days and frame them into stories with meanings and form - beginnings, middles, and endings that aren't just random, but that convey something important. And I've been trying to create or recognize what mine is and what larger stories it in turn fits into.
I've also been gathering a collection of readings for this class on the topic of "why literature," meaning: why does literature matter, and why does it matter for everyone to experience great stories and poetry? I was just thinking right now that for me, I read and write in order to both immerse myself in the flow of history (personal and societal) and to paradoxically freeze time. I read and write in order to stand outside the rush, to stay still and to go back to a time and stay still in it again. I read and write to hold onto people and places and times, and to understand.
But I don't know whee I am in this story yet.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Crossroads
by Lucy S.
I can't see the future stretching out very far anymore. I can't see where I'm going. I only know what I will do this day or week or for the remainder of this year (and even that last part is hazy, even if some of it is neatly typed out on my syllabus). Beyond the end of this year, everything seems blank. Will I teach; if so, where, if not, then what; what will the rest of my life look like in a year or five?
Is the feeling I have mostly happy excitement or is it sustained exhaustion thoroughly interlaced with anxiety? Will I do well at this first class, or will it be a disaster? Or will I just be mediocre? How do I learn to speak the way I so wish I spoke and think the way I so wish I thought? How will I ever have sufficient knowledge to share with students? Is it safe to feel that I can continue to teach where I will teach this semester?
Where do I belong?
There is a part of me that turns towards people - many people - towards efforts to organize and build community with people in the work to make a more just society. And there is a part of me that is so tired of trying to fit into situations where I have little or no history with people, and that longs to feel deeply at home as I go about my days. Where is that home? Is it here or in California? Is it even a place?
For the past four years, I've changed myself and let myself be profoundly changed. What am I to do with this changed self now?
Here is one part of the shift. All of a sudden, after years of debating, after being brought up in a family that debated so vigorously - all of a sudden, I feel sick of it. I'm tired of the feeling I get in those discussions, and that baseless intensity - as if everything depended on winning over the other person to my position - when we are so often talking about issues in which we have little to no actual influence. Meanwhile, a poem goes unread or unwritten, and a painting goes unexamined or unpainted, and a story somewhat might share with me or I might share with them goes untold. A garden goes neglected or un-begun. A gentle conversation is never had that might have been. A walk with one of my kids isn't taken. We displace our confusion and pain and aching care and hope for better onto these conversations that have no power, except the power to wear us out and drain our relationships of affection.
And also, I find myself sick of pity for myself and even for my most devastated loved ones. What did pity or anger ever do for us? What is there after pity and after even anger? Maybe they are nothing but peeling layers of skin, and there is a healthy core under them, Maybe that core is the tendency to enjoy each other and ourselves while we can, not hedonistically and selfishly, but with smiling gratitude always accompanied by a barely perceptible wince at how fragile it all is, and painful, and resilient, and regenerative, and funny, and lovely. And there is generosity, the way we might share our last pieces of summer fruit with someone, because this, more than hoarding them, keeps their taste lingering even through winter.
Tonight, my friend Jiji is flying to Australia from her liminal days in Vancouver, on her way to begin a new life in the morning. Not many days ago, a package came to me from her, with dates from her country, packed with cashews. And a kind of almond paste, and chocolates for Sean and Ryan.
Tonight, I'm flying to a new age that I will land in by morning in freshly washed sheets to greet my new year. Today, so much shifted. How did I live this last day? I put an LED light bulb in the lamp next to my bed, a bulb that is supposed to last for 22 years. Jonathan made me a mug of cinnamon rooibos tea not long ago. I talked with Shy, who is living with us now. I read the poem "Even Gods" by Mourid Barghouti to Sean and Ryan for a second time, and we talked about it more. I read more of My Antonia to them - the last chapter of book 3 and the first two in book 4. I had a Facebook debate with a friend over an article I shared about the NYPD's stop and frisk policies and their racial profiling, and I decided that I will never have that kind of debate again. Justin sat in my room talking, and then we talked again later in the living room. Gloria called and said she'd been thinking the 28th instead of the 25th for some reason, and I said, in the way we always talk, "Man, get the dang information you have written all over the scraps of paper in your purse onto a calendar already." She laughed, and then we both did. I knew she would. I can see that kind of future.
I can't see the future stretching out very far anymore. I can't see where I'm going. I only know what I will do this day or week or for the remainder of this year (and even that last part is hazy, even if some of it is neatly typed out on my syllabus). Beyond the end of this year, everything seems blank. Will I teach; if so, where, if not, then what; what will the rest of my life look like in a year or five?
Is the feeling I have mostly happy excitement or is it sustained exhaustion thoroughly interlaced with anxiety? Will I do well at this first class, or will it be a disaster? Or will I just be mediocre? How do I learn to speak the way I so wish I spoke and think the way I so wish I thought? How will I ever have sufficient knowledge to share with students? Is it safe to feel that I can continue to teach where I will teach this semester?
Where do I belong?
There is a part of me that turns towards people - many people - towards efforts to organize and build community with people in the work to make a more just society. And there is a part of me that is so tired of trying to fit into situations where I have little or no history with people, and that longs to feel deeply at home as I go about my days. Where is that home? Is it here or in California? Is it even a place?
For the past four years, I've changed myself and let myself be profoundly changed. What am I to do with this changed self now?
Here is one part of the shift. All of a sudden, after years of debating, after being brought up in a family that debated so vigorously - all of a sudden, I feel sick of it. I'm tired of the feeling I get in those discussions, and that baseless intensity - as if everything depended on winning over the other person to my position - when we are so often talking about issues in which we have little to no actual influence. Meanwhile, a poem goes unread or unwritten, and a painting goes unexamined or unpainted, and a story somewhat might share with me or I might share with them goes untold. A garden goes neglected or un-begun. A gentle conversation is never had that might have been. A walk with one of my kids isn't taken. We displace our confusion and pain and aching care and hope for better onto these conversations that have no power, except the power to wear us out and drain our relationships of affection.
And also, I find myself sick of pity for myself and even for my most devastated loved ones. What did pity or anger ever do for us? What is there after pity and after even anger? Maybe they are nothing but peeling layers of skin, and there is a healthy core under them, Maybe that core is the tendency to enjoy each other and ourselves while we can, not hedonistically and selfishly, but with smiling gratitude always accompanied by a barely perceptible wince at how fragile it all is, and painful, and resilient, and regenerative, and funny, and lovely. And there is generosity, the way we might share our last pieces of summer fruit with someone, because this, more than hoarding them, keeps their taste lingering even through winter.
Tonight, my friend Jiji is flying to Australia from her liminal days in Vancouver, on her way to begin a new life in the morning. Not many days ago, a package came to me from her, with dates from her country, packed with cashews. And a kind of almond paste, and chocolates for Sean and Ryan.
Tonight, I'm flying to a new age that I will land in by morning in freshly washed sheets to greet my new year. Today, so much shifted. How did I live this last day? I put an LED light bulb in the lamp next to my bed, a bulb that is supposed to last for 22 years. Jonathan made me a mug of cinnamon rooibos tea not long ago. I talked with Shy, who is living with us now. I read the poem "Even Gods" by Mourid Barghouti to Sean and Ryan for a second time, and we talked about it more. I read more of My Antonia to them - the last chapter of book 3 and the first two in book 4. I had a Facebook debate with a friend over an article I shared about the NYPD's stop and frisk policies and their racial profiling, and I decided that I will never have that kind of debate again. Justin sat in my room talking, and then we talked again later in the living room. Gloria called and said she'd been thinking the 28th instead of the 25th for some reason, and I said, in the way we always talk, "Man, get the dang information you have written all over the scraps of paper in your purse onto a calendar already." She laughed, and then we both did. I knew she would. I can see that kind of future.
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Paradoxes of Strength
by Lucy S.
I was driving to work out with a trainer late one morning last week and got to thinking about what it means to be strong. Am I strong because I decided to call this trainer? (She runs a small facility that focuses on weight-training with the goal being to get the person fully able to do the workouts at home rather than permanently relying on a trainer.) I thought five sessions with her would be enough to get me set for doing my workouts with the right form at home, but I can tell now that I will probably need to go with ten workouts with her to really have it all down properly and have the form right.
Ten workouts; is this me doing what I need to do to care for myself and get physically stronger, or is it weak self-indulgence to pay someone to work with me like that, and to work out with weights rather than just working hard enough in my garden and doing other things? My income isn't high, and yet if I were as low-income as I used to be, I would never in a million years be able to afford this. And is this guilt that I'm feeling, and if it is guilt, is it weakness? Or is writing about the guilt a way of actually defusing it, and is THAT weakness or is it strength (or neither, really)?
Recently, I realized that at some point years ago, I had inadvertently stopped doing some of the exercises properly that I'd learned from another trainer at that facility years ago. My form was wrong, so they weren't working what they were supposed to be working as well as they should have been, and I was also more likely to cause some injuries in myself.
There has long been a part of me that insisted on something being done or made well - or not insisting, exactly, but trying hard for that aim and being moved when I find others making their own tremendous efforts to do something as superbly as they can. Yet I believe in relishing life - or maybe no "yet" belongs at the front of this sentence, as if we have to choose between meaningful, challenging work and embracing pleasure.
My son Kevin reminds me sometimes that the great IWW labor organizer Big Bill Haywood used to say, "Nothing's too good for the working class." He said this because he and his fellow organizers sometimes bought good liquor and good food. (I'm out on a limb with this, because I don't have a citation, and I need to verify this, but at any rate, this is what Kevin says.) I almost never drink liquor because I don't feel too good when I do (though I miss good margaritas on the rocks with lots of salt around the edges, and once in a great while will split one with someone - maybe twice a year - and maybe twice a year will have a beer). Is this strength or weak selfishness? It gets confusing at times to think it through.
I know I don't like puritanical asceticism. I detest that feeling I get from some people that everything enjoyable is wrong, and that we are supposed to compete for degrees of misery - that we will somehow find our way to more purity or have more legitimacy in our struggle against capitalism and imperialism and sexism and all the other mean dominating exploitations of the many by the fewer if we suffer more. And none of the poor or working-class people I've been close to over the course of my life compete for misery, either. Is this healthy, life-loving vigor in us? Or are our desires too constructed by what advertisers and mass-culture instills in us? Are we strong or weak?
At the same time, I get impatient with people who can't deal with any interruptions to the steady stream of bland comfort in their lives. I remember one time visiting my old boss and his wife about nine years after I'd stopped working for him (a one time visit), and I did the driving into downtown Atlanta (they lived on the outskirts), because I had the minivan (and he had the Porsche he'd just bought himself for his 40th birthday). It was a warm day for April, and the air conditioner started to stop working just then. Not a big problem with the windows rolled down, but he was soon uncomfortable and outspoken in his irritation. He said to his wife, "This is everything I'm opposed to. I hate this experience." I wanted to roll my eyes and tell him to shut up and stop acting like a spoiled idiot, and that he should be embarrassed for himself, but of course I didn't say that, and I don't think anyone has ever said anything like that to him in his adult life. When I worked for him back in the day, he was always preaching about work ethic to me, and he was sure, or at least pretended to be so sure, that he was strong. And I suppose in his mind, people who have to drive around in minivans with failing air conditioners are weak, because if they were strong (his kind of strength), they'd have plenty of money and wouldn't have low life vehicles like that. Whereas for me, someone like him is weak, because they can't handle hardships in life, even pretty mild ones like riding in a vehicle without air conditioning on a nice warm, but not hot, day, after eating a good breakfast and sleeping in his 4000 plus square foot home.
I think about strength, too, with regard to my own living situation over the years. Was it strength to try at various times to make my marriage "work" (probably a useless term in itself, I think - "work" in this context)? Or was it weakness that I didn't end it in the first couple of years when I realized that there were some huge gaps in our communication? Or to not fully end it five or ten or more years ago? Or for that matter, is it strength that I never really go into much detail about what specifically went wrong years back or went wrong in other ways about ten years ago or went wrong in other ways in 2007 or at various other points? Is being brutally honest strength? And how do you keep that from slipping into the dishonesty of self-justification? Or on the other hand, from slipping into putting yourself down? How do you not only write the truth but have the strength of judgment to know which truths should be told and which should be left unsaid?
This makes me think about my lifelong friend, Gloria, and how when she left her spouse, she tried to avoid explaining herself to people as a way to justify herself. She said she didn't care to run him into the mud to make herself look good. This is not to say she kept a stoic silence. She sometimes shared something that had driven her crazy, but not in answer to people who wanted explanations. (Well... maybe in answer to a close family member or two, but only to point them to what they already knew.) And because of that, she and her former spouse remain on good terms, and treat one another as family. I respect the way she handled it. This to me was strength on her part.
I remember one time another friend wrote to me that I do not have to explain myself to anyone, unless I really want to. And for some reason, those words gave me strength.
For other people I'm close to, breaking the silence has been strength. Sometimes this has been to contribute to a broader knowledge about abuse, but it isn't possible to disentangle this from standing up for oneself and divesting some people from their ignorant assumptions.
I think about strength also in connection with my intellectual efforts. Was it strong of me to go back to school in 2009 and finally finish the BA and then go on, when the opportunity was there, to get the MA? Or was it weak thinking and self-indulgence, because English literature is not exactly the most lucrative field for many people with graduate degrees? (And especially for me, at this point, and with "only" a master's degree.) And if I were really intellectually strong, would I not apply to PhD programs? Or is it strong that I want to stay bound to places and people, and that I demand (if to no avail right now) that we should all have the right to keep growing intellectually wherever we are - and that I proclaim that education is not a scarce resource to be hoarded by a few? Am I strong to behave or not behave according to the logic of academia or am I weak in behaving according to some other logic? Am I weak to not force myself to move away from everyone I know, whether I feel heartbroken at that thought or not? Or is that itself - that I would be bereft to leave everyone and my home - is that feeling the proof of weakness? Is it strength to not love anyone or any place too much, or is fierce, tenacious, gentle love a strength?
What does strength mean, and when do we need it, and what should we use it for? I tend to slip back into the morality of what I was raised to believe - or at least the remaining residuals which feel true: the call to love others as we love ourselves. Is this strength? Is this possible? Do these words mean something, or have they just worn such a groove into my psyche that I think and feel that they mean something?
If I loved others as I love myself, would I have paid this trainer for five sessions to get me into better shape and set me on a course to continue working out? (And I will probably pay for five more.) Maybe the problem is in personalizing the systemic. I want systemic change, and a decision to go or to not go to the trainer doesn't somehow become a push for systemic change. But this is not absolution, nor is it an answer to questions of strength or weakness.
So much seems to burst beyond the binaries of strength and weakness. Yet I am so moved by the many forms of strength I see in the people I love or in people whose work and struggles I respect and value. My strong friend Jiji is moving yet again in a few days - off to a whole new continent to embark on a PhD program where she knows no one at all, always missing loved ones who are almost always far away. And she loves them every bit as much as I love those here who I don't want to move away from, but her choices are constrained, so she does what she needs to do. Her strength amazes me, and at the same time, I yearn for a world in which she didn't have to be quite that strong in that way - a world in which more of us were collectively strong enough to make our societies far less cruel and far more nurturing.
I was driving to work out with a trainer late one morning last week and got to thinking about what it means to be strong. Am I strong because I decided to call this trainer? (She runs a small facility that focuses on weight-training with the goal being to get the person fully able to do the workouts at home rather than permanently relying on a trainer.) I thought five sessions with her would be enough to get me set for doing my workouts with the right form at home, but I can tell now that I will probably need to go with ten workouts with her to really have it all down properly and have the form right.
Ten workouts; is this me doing what I need to do to care for myself and get physically stronger, or is it weak self-indulgence to pay someone to work with me like that, and to work out with weights rather than just working hard enough in my garden and doing other things? My income isn't high, and yet if I were as low-income as I used to be, I would never in a million years be able to afford this. And is this guilt that I'm feeling, and if it is guilt, is it weakness? Or is writing about the guilt a way of actually defusing it, and is THAT weakness or is it strength (or neither, really)?
Recently, I realized that at some point years ago, I had inadvertently stopped doing some of the exercises properly that I'd learned from another trainer at that facility years ago. My form was wrong, so they weren't working what they were supposed to be working as well as they should have been, and I was also more likely to cause some injuries in myself.
There has long been a part of me that insisted on something being done or made well - or not insisting, exactly, but trying hard for that aim and being moved when I find others making their own tremendous efforts to do something as superbly as they can. Yet I believe in relishing life - or maybe no "yet" belongs at the front of this sentence, as if we have to choose between meaningful, challenging work and embracing pleasure.
My son Kevin reminds me sometimes that the great IWW labor organizer Big Bill Haywood used to say, "Nothing's too good for the working class." He said this because he and his fellow organizers sometimes bought good liquor and good food. (I'm out on a limb with this, because I don't have a citation, and I need to verify this, but at any rate, this is what Kevin says.) I almost never drink liquor because I don't feel too good when I do (though I miss good margaritas on the rocks with lots of salt around the edges, and once in a great while will split one with someone - maybe twice a year - and maybe twice a year will have a beer). Is this strength or weak selfishness? It gets confusing at times to think it through.
I know I don't like puritanical asceticism. I detest that feeling I get from some people that everything enjoyable is wrong, and that we are supposed to compete for degrees of misery - that we will somehow find our way to more purity or have more legitimacy in our struggle against capitalism and imperialism and sexism and all the other mean dominating exploitations of the many by the fewer if we suffer more. And none of the poor or working-class people I've been close to over the course of my life compete for misery, either. Is this healthy, life-loving vigor in us? Or are our desires too constructed by what advertisers and mass-culture instills in us? Are we strong or weak?
At the same time, I get impatient with people who can't deal with any interruptions to the steady stream of bland comfort in their lives. I remember one time visiting my old boss and his wife about nine years after I'd stopped working for him (a one time visit), and I did the driving into downtown Atlanta (they lived on the outskirts), because I had the minivan (and he had the Porsche he'd just bought himself for his 40th birthday). It was a warm day for April, and the air conditioner started to stop working just then. Not a big problem with the windows rolled down, but he was soon uncomfortable and outspoken in his irritation. He said to his wife, "This is everything I'm opposed to. I hate this experience." I wanted to roll my eyes and tell him to shut up and stop acting like a spoiled idiot, and that he should be embarrassed for himself, but of course I didn't say that, and I don't think anyone has ever said anything like that to him in his adult life. When I worked for him back in the day, he was always preaching about work ethic to me, and he was sure, or at least pretended to be so sure, that he was strong. And I suppose in his mind, people who have to drive around in minivans with failing air conditioners are weak, because if they were strong (his kind of strength), they'd have plenty of money and wouldn't have low life vehicles like that. Whereas for me, someone like him is weak, because they can't handle hardships in life, even pretty mild ones like riding in a vehicle without air conditioning on a nice warm, but not hot, day, after eating a good breakfast and sleeping in his 4000 plus square foot home.
I think about strength, too, with regard to my own living situation over the years. Was it strength to try at various times to make my marriage "work" (probably a useless term in itself, I think - "work" in this context)? Or was it weakness that I didn't end it in the first couple of years when I realized that there were some huge gaps in our communication? Or to not fully end it five or ten or more years ago? Or for that matter, is it strength that I never really go into much detail about what specifically went wrong years back or went wrong in other ways about ten years ago or went wrong in other ways in 2007 or at various other points? Is being brutally honest strength? And how do you keep that from slipping into the dishonesty of self-justification? Or on the other hand, from slipping into putting yourself down? How do you not only write the truth but have the strength of judgment to know which truths should be told and which should be left unsaid?
This makes me think about my lifelong friend, Gloria, and how when she left her spouse, she tried to avoid explaining herself to people as a way to justify herself. She said she didn't care to run him into the mud to make herself look good. This is not to say she kept a stoic silence. She sometimes shared something that had driven her crazy, but not in answer to people who wanted explanations. (Well... maybe in answer to a close family member or two, but only to point them to what they already knew.) And because of that, she and her former spouse remain on good terms, and treat one another as family. I respect the way she handled it. This to me was strength on her part.
I remember one time another friend wrote to me that I do not have to explain myself to anyone, unless I really want to. And for some reason, those words gave me strength.
For other people I'm close to, breaking the silence has been strength. Sometimes this has been to contribute to a broader knowledge about abuse, but it isn't possible to disentangle this from standing up for oneself and divesting some people from their ignorant assumptions.
I think about strength also in connection with my intellectual efforts. Was it strong of me to go back to school in 2009 and finally finish the BA and then go on, when the opportunity was there, to get the MA? Or was it weak thinking and self-indulgence, because English literature is not exactly the most lucrative field for many people with graduate degrees? (And especially for me, at this point, and with "only" a master's degree.) And if I were really intellectually strong, would I not apply to PhD programs? Or is it strong that I want to stay bound to places and people, and that I demand (if to no avail right now) that we should all have the right to keep growing intellectually wherever we are - and that I proclaim that education is not a scarce resource to be hoarded by a few? Am I strong to behave or not behave according to the logic of academia or am I weak in behaving according to some other logic? Am I weak to not force myself to move away from everyone I know, whether I feel heartbroken at that thought or not? Or is that itself - that I would be bereft to leave everyone and my home - is that feeling the proof of weakness? Is it strength to not love anyone or any place too much, or is fierce, tenacious, gentle love a strength?
What does strength mean, and when do we need it, and what should we use it for? I tend to slip back into the morality of what I was raised to believe - or at least the remaining residuals which feel true: the call to love others as we love ourselves. Is this strength? Is this possible? Do these words mean something, or have they just worn such a groove into my psyche that I think and feel that they mean something?
If I loved others as I love myself, would I have paid this trainer for five sessions to get me into better shape and set me on a course to continue working out? (And I will probably pay for five more.) Maybe the problem is in personalizing the systemic. I want systemic change, and a decision to go or to not go to the trainer doesn't somehow become a push for systemic change. But this is not absolution, nor is it an answer to questions of strength or weakness.
So much seems to burst beyond the binaries of strength and weakness. Yet I am so moved by the many forms of strength I see in the people I love or in people whose work and struggles I respect and value. My strong friend Jiji is moving yet again in a few days - off to a whole new continent to embark on a PhD program where she knows no one at all, always missing loved ones who are almost always far away. And she loves them every bit as much as I love those here who I don't want to move away from, but her choices are constrained, so she does what she needs to do. Her strength amazes me, and at the same time, I yearn for a world in which she didn't have to be quite that strong in that way - a world in which more of us were collectively strong enough to make our societies far less cruel and far more nurturing.
Saturday, August 17, 2013
On Reading Aloud (to My Kids)
by Lucy S.
It's just past noon on this Saturday in mid-August in this mild 2013 summer of our upper Midwest. I've just read more of My Antonia to Sean and Ryan, and then two poems that I love by Audre Lorde: "Coal" and "From the House of Yemanjaa." Now I'll return to getting everything ready for the class I'll teach in the fall, and coming up with a proposal or two for classes to teach in the spring. It's only exuberant happiness that makes me want to write something here, and I know I can get myself into trouble when that is the force driving me to write - not big trouble, but just committing the sin of aimlessness - the sin of wasting time.
I don't know what I'll do if I ever reach a point in which there is no one to read to, because I've been reading to my kids for such a long time. We meet in these stories or poems or various nonfiction books, and there has always been something steady and steadying there in our meeting place. My voice has to speak there, and it has to express words from out in the world, brought into our small space, for us to listen to, repeat, agree with, argue with, and merge with our own words. Reading to them makes me into a storyteller, even when I'm not a storyteller. Reading makes me share wisdom with them, even when I don't feel wise.
There is still something magical to me, even after all these years, in this invention of humans to put words down to be carried across space and time and then to become thoughts in other people's minds or reconstitute into spoken words again. I've never quite gotten over how wonderful this is.
How else could I ever say this to Sean and Ryan (from "Coal" by Audre Lorde)?
It's just past noon on this Saturday in mid-August in this mild 2013 summer of our upper Midwest. I've just read more of My Antonia to Sean and Ryan, and then two poems that I love by Audre Lorde: "Coal" and "From the House of Yemanjaa." Now I'll return to getting everything ready for the class I'll teach in the fall, and coming up with a proposal or two for classes to teach in the spring. It's only exuberant happiness that makes me want to write something here, and I know I can get myself into trouble when that is the force driving me to write - not big trouble, but just committing the sin of aimlessness - the sin of wasting time.
I don't know what I'll do if I ever reach a point in which there is no one to read to, because I've been reading to my kids for such a long time. We meet in these stories or poems or various nonfiction books, and there has always been something steady and steadying there in our meeting place. My voice has to speak there, and it has to express words from out in the world, brought into our small space, for us to listen to, repeat, agree with, argue with, and merge with our own words. Reading to them makes me into a storyteller, even when I'm not a storyteller. Reading makes me share wisdom with them, even when I don't feel wise.
There is still something magical to me, even after all these years, in this invention of humans to put words down to be carried across space and time and then to become thoughts in other people's minds or reconstitute into spoken words again. I've never quite gotten over how wonderful this is.
How else could I ever say this to Sean and Ryan (from "Coal" by Audre Lorde)?
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Monday, August 12, 2013
In Praise of Insecurity
by Lucy S.
The longer I study literature in academia and try hard to write well - and then just read the multitude of things that pull me into them, for moments or for the duration - the more confused I get about how to write what I mean to write, and how to do that well. And now, having written that, I'm not even sure if that's true, and truth is a vital element in what I'm reaching for.
I don't know yet exactly what this post will be about. But a friend came over with her spouse and two kids last night, and at one point, she said something about how it is when you explain yourself to some people - the way they take that as weakness. And I said something like, "Yes! That's so true! There are some people who, if you talk that way - they don't just see it as you being open and honest; they see it as if you don't know what you're doing." She agreed, and we talked about this some more.
There are people who express no self-doubt, who go through their days acting oh so sure of themselves, when they are often the very people who could use a healthy dose of self-interrogation and even overt insecurity (rather than the inverted kind) for a change. It's easy to be secure in your ideas when you don't let any new information or relationships in far enough to challenge what you thought you knew and believed and felt for so long. Or I've also seen people instantly don a new set of practices and beliefs and feelings within a day or two - not so different than if you went out with someone and they proposed marriage on the second date - and I have to wonder how true their new convictions run when they never even have to struggle with it all for some time to think it through from a multitude of angles, and let it seep in to discover what they really come to feel about it. They simplify what isn't simple at all.
Well, but some people might say that I'm simplifying this whole security / insecurity question. You don't have to be secure about your ideas, they might say; the point is to be secure about your core self. Or the point is to love yourself, and carry yourself with dignity. That sounds pretty appealing. But what does it mean, beyond the abstraction of words, to be secure about your "core self"? Who is that core self? The subconscious bank of all that has happened to us so far? If so, how do we be secure about that self? Your physical animation? Your body? Your face? Your habits? Maybe it's your relationships. I feel like there's something to this, but I'm just trying to figure out what. I can't just say it's you "in your totality" because that would include some things that change, and so they wouldn't be "core."
The second concept - loving yourself and carrying yourself with dignity - seems more solid. But some of that may be a veneer. I do love myself, in a way at least somewhat akin to how I love my kids now - and how I loved them when they were little and needed to be taken care of. Or it's akin to how I loved my grandmother, who at times also needed some physical help or some help keeping her apartment clean enough. It's not entirely the same, of course; nothing is the same as our relationship with our own selves. But I don't continually berate myself as an idiot or loser or any other title. I've had times when I thought these things about myself - and that is different than how I think of people I love. But when we say or think these things about ourselves, it isn't some pronouncement of WHO WE ARE, period. Doesn't it mean: I'm worried that I'm a loser because this or that awful thing happened to me, or, please tell me that I'm not an idiot, or, I like and respect this person, and they seem to see something wrong with me, and I'm doubting myself, because what if they're right?
And sometimes they are right. There's no foolproof formula on this. I wrote in the last post about a family member telling her dad that she'd recently met a 26 year old sister whom she hadn't known existed until lately, and how he reacted to this by trying to sum her up as being a certain "way," by being a "brat" (meaning, to his grown daughter, 'you've always been nothing but a brat and you still are'). (And by telling her "fuck you" and that he didn't want anything to do with her anymore.) He was all wrong in his summations and his response, and they said far more about him than they did about her. But I know one reason she wanted to tell me and other people about what he said is because she so badly needed to hear from us that her father's assessment of her and rejection of her were wrong and awful. And she was right when she told him that he's going to end up alone by the time he's old, because of his cruelty.Her father has always loved himself too much and worried about his own ego more than about his own growth or about how he affects anyone else. (Or maybe he's always worshiped himself too much - and I'll get into this worship issue soon.)
But she was right to need people to affirm something far different about her than what her father had said she was, because this has been pounded into her for too much of her life. It would have added insult to injury to expect her to somehow just know on all levels of her consciousness that he was wrong, and to reject her some more for being too needy or not having enough "dignity" to tell no one about this. People who think this either don't understand how devastating these things are or they have handled them by putting up barricades and calling those barricades "dignity." I'm glad if they haven't experienced these assaults on their psyches. Or I can empathize with their barricade strategies for protecting themselves if they have. But they can really hurt someone who's struggling to construct a healthier concept of themselves by resisting the reductive summations of someone else - they can hurt that person if in some sense they slip in their own message that yes, indeed, there is something wrong with her, because if there wasn't, why would she even need to turn to anyone for affirmation?
This post is making me think of two parts in a couple of old Simpsons episodes. One is when Troy McClure mentions his book called Get Confident, Stupid! The other is when Marge (the mom, for those who have somehow never seen Simpsons) tells Lisa (her daughter) that you don't need anyone else to know you're cool, and Lisa tells her that of course you need other people to say you're cool in order to actually be cool.
This brings me to the worship issue. If you don't need anyone to tell you you're cool, or if you don't need to be told that the grand summation of you does not at all equal "a brat" after your parents have beat it into you (literally and metaphorically), then maybe you're relating to yourself similarly to your idea (or other people's idea) of God. With God, we're never supposed to question His rules, plans, or Being. We may be wrong, but He never is. I'm not going to veer into a theological discussion here, but I just want to ask, is this really a healthy or honest way to see ourselves? Is it conducive to growth?
I am honestly amazed at how many people seem so sure of themselves and their rightness. Does it occur to them that just as every single person they know sometimes is behaving poorly or is the one who doesn't grasp a situation well or is being too selfish or manifesting any other flaw - that maybe, just MAYBE, they might be wrong about themselves or about some of their ideas and ways of living?
I remember reading some of the French feminists arguing that women have a different way of communicating, that it is more circular than linear, and that if it doesn't make sense to men or people who have imbibed patriarchal norms, that doesn't mean it's deficient and inferior, that it may even be better, because it isn't too hasty to race to simplistic conclusions. The circular communication not only explores more, but relishes each moment for its own intrinsic value.
And then at my Orientation for teaching this coming fall, a grad student presented her research on the different styles of writing often seen in students coming from other countries and other writing traditions. Again, there was the circular approach, and various zigzagging ones. The thesis was not always stated anywhere in the beginning. Sometimes, it had to be discovered by writing, and the reader was allowed to experience the same process of discovery.
I believe all this, but I wouldn't essentialize it too much. Patriarchy - the authority of the one all-knowing and powerful father (or anyone taking on the role), dominating those who are trained to be and forced to be subservient - does have a long history of being enacted by males. And that relentless linearity of imperialism rolling over other people like an inevitable carpet - to paraphrase Devon Mehesuah in American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities (Clarity International, 1996) - is pretty bound to dominant U.S. ideas and practices. But we are never reduced to who we are by a gender or by a nationality. Many ways and identities move within us. And I have known very linear women and very circular men, and the idea of how a woman or man is supposed to be and act is so constructed and variable. And there is no way to get at any of these things reductively. And there are even times to get to the point! ("The house is on fire!")
But so much of the time, the relationship itself IS the point. If being with people, and fusing with them as best as we can, behind our inevitable barricades of 'myself' and 'yourself', doesn't matter - if this is just a means to some end, what is that end? And what DOES matter, in that case? I mean, yes, we may be working to create or learn together, or to change the world into something far more just for the majority - and far more enjoyable - but these are also our lives, right now.
And any relationship worth a damn is going to involve insecurity. We have to pull down the barricades to get close to people. We have to pull them down to even get close to ourselves, if by our "selves" we mean the subconscious us - the massive iceberg under the surface. And we have to pull them down to grow and to create anything really amazing. We have to take chances, and let people through, and let ourselves out.
One friend wrote her dissertation interrogating the hyper-focus on security in the political realm. She wrote about how this goal continues to endanger and harm so many. What has that kind of security ever done for people except keep them on adversarial terms?
I am and no doubt will always be insecure. The barricades are always broken and permeable. Whatever security I get, I get from loving the people I love, and them loving me, and living with joy and anger and fear and intense curiosity, and all of those mixed up all the time. Or if we're going to be secure, how about a form of it that paradoxically emerges from the deep care for one another that gives us the freedom to be insecure?
The longer I study literature in academia and try hard to write well - and then just read the multitude of things that pull me into them, for moments or for the duration - the more confused I get about how to write what I mean to write, and how to do that well. And now, having written that, I'm not even sure if that's true, and truth is a vital element in what I'm reaching for.
I don't know yet exactly what this post will be about. But a friend came over with her spouse and two kids last night, and at one point, she said something about how it is when you explain yourself to some people - the way they take that as weakness. And I said something like, "Yes! That's so true! There are some people who, if you talk that way - they don't just see it as you being open and honest; they see it as if you don't know what you're doing." She agreed, and we talked about this some more.
There are people who express no self-doubt, who go through their days acting oh so sure of themselves, when they are often the very people who could use a healthy dose of self-interrogation and even overt insecurity (rather than the inverted kind) for a change. It's easy to be secure in your ideas when you don't let any new information or relationships in far enough to challenge what you thought you knew and believed and felt for so long. Or I've also seen people instantly don a new set of practices and beliefs and feelings within a day or two - not so different than if you went out with someone and they proposed marriage on the second date - and I have to wonder how true their new convictions run when they never even have to struggle with it all for some time to think it through from a multitude of angles, and let it seep in to discover what they really come to feel about it. They simplify what isn't simple at all.
Well, but some people might say that I'm simplifying this whole security / insecurity question. You don't have to be secure about your ideas, they might say; the point is to be secure about your core self. Or the point is to love yourself, and carry yourself with dignity. That sounds pretty appealing. But what does it mean, beyond the abstraction of words, to be secure about your "core self"? Who is that core self? The subconscious bank of all that has happened to us so far? If so, how do we be secure about that self? Your physical animation? Your body? Your face? Your habits? Maybe it's your relationships. I feel like there's something to this, but I'm just trying to figure out what. I can't just say it's you "in your totality" because that would include some things that change, and so they wouldn't be "core."
The second concept - loving yourself and carrying yourself with dignity - seems more solid. But some of that may be a veneer. I do love myself, in a way at least somewhat akin to how I love my kids now - and how I loved them when they were little and needed to be taken care of. Or it's akin to how I loved my grandmother, who at times also needed some physical help or some help keeping her apartment clean enough. It's not entirely the same, of course; nothing is the same as our relationship with our own selves. But I don't continually berate myself as an idiot or loser or any other title. I've had times when I thought these things about myself - and that is different than how I think of people I love. But when we say or think these things about ourselves, it isn't some pronouncement of WHO WE ARE, period. Doesn't it mean: I'm worried that I'm a loser because this or that awful thing happened to me, or, please tell me that I'm not an idiot, or, I like and respect this person, and they seem to see something wrong with me, and I'm doubting myself, because what if they're right?
And sometimes they are right. There's no foolproof formula on this. I wrote in the last post about a family member telling her dad that she'd recently met a 26 year old sister whom she hadn't known existed until lately, and how he reacted to this by trying to sum her up as being a certain "way," by being a "brat" (meaning, to his grown daughter, 'you've always been nothing but a brat and you still are'). (And by telling her "fuck you" and that he didn't want anything to do with her anymore.) He was all wrong in his summations and his response, and they said far more about him than they did about her. But I know one reason she wanted to tell me and other people about what he said is because she so badly needed to hear from us that her father's assessment of her and rejection of her were wrong and awful. And she was right when she told him that he's going to end up alone by the time he's old, because of his cruelty.Her father has always loved himself too much and worried about his own ego more than about his own growth or about how he affects anyone else. (Or maybe he's always worshiped himself too much - and I'll get into this worship issue soon.)
But she was right to need people to affirm something far different about her than what her father had said she was, because this has been pounded into her for too much of her life. It would have added insult to injury to expect her to somehow just know on all levels of her consciousness that he was wrong, and to reject her some more for being too needy or not having enough "dignity" to tell no one about this. People who think this either don't understand how devastating these things are or they have handled them by putting up barricades and calling those barricades "dignity." I'm glad if they haven't experienced these assaults on their psyches. Or I can empathize with their barricade strategies for protecting themselves if they have. But they can really hurt someone who's struggling to construct a healthier concept of themselves by resisting the reductive summations of someone else - they can hurt that person if in some sense they slip in their own message that yes, indeed, there is something wrong with her, because if there wasn't, why would she even need to turn to anyone for affirmation?
This post is making me think of two parts in a couple of old Simpsons episodes. One is when Troy McClure mentions his book called Get Confident, Stupid! The other is when Marge (the mom, for those who have somehow never seen Simpsons) tells Lisa (her daughter) that you don't need anyone else to know you're cool, and Lisa tells her that of course you need other people to say you're cool in order to actually be cool.
This brings me to the worship issue. If you don't need anyone to tell you you're cool, or if you don't need to be told that the grand summation of you does not at all equal "a brat" after your parents have beat it into you (literally and metaphorically), then maybe you're relating to yourself similarly to your idea (or other people's idea) of God. With God, we're never supposed to question His rules, plans, or Being. We may be wrong, but He never is. I'm not going to veer into a theological discussion here, but I just want to ask, is this really a healthy or honest way to see ourselves? Is it conducive to growth?
I am honestly amazed at how many people seem so sure of themselves and their rightness. Does it occur to them that just as every single person they know sometimes is behaving poorly or is the one who doesn't grasp a situation well or is being too selfish or manifesting any other flaw - that maybe, just MAYBE, they might be wrong about themselves or about some of their ideas and ways of living?
I remember reading some of the French feminists arguing that women have a different way of communicating, that it is more circular than linear, and that if it doesn't make sense to men or people who have imbibed patriarchal norms, that doesn't mean it's deficient and inferior, that it may even be better, because it isn't too hasty to race to simplistic conclusions. The circular communication not only explores more, but relishes each moment for its own intrinsic value.
And then at my Orientation for teaching this coming fall, a grad student presented her research on the different styles of writing often seen in students coming from other countries and other writing traditions. Again, there was the circular approach, and various zigzagging ones. The thesis was not always stated anywhere in the beginning. Sometimes, it had to be discovered by writing, and the reader was allowed to experience the same process of discovery.
I believe all this, but I wouldn't essentialize it too much. Patriarchy - the authority of the one all-knowing and powerful father (or anyone taking on the role), dominating those who are trained to be and forced to be subservient - does have a long history of being enacted by males. And that relentless linearity of imperialism rolling over other people like an inevitable carpet - to paraphrase Devon Mehesuah in American Indians: Stereotypes and Realities (Clarity International, 1996) - is pretty bound to dominant U.S. ideas and practices. But we are never reduced to who we are by a gender or by a nationality. Many ways and identities move within us. And I have known very linear women and very circular men, and the idea of how a woman or man is supposed to be and act is so constructed and variable. And there is no way to get at any of these things reductively. And there are even times to get to the point! ("The house is on fire!")
But so much of the time, the relationship itself IS the point. If being with people, and fusing with them as best as we can, behind our inevitable barricades of 'myself' and 'yourself', doesn't matter - if this is just a means to some end, what is that end? And what DOES matter, in that case? I mean, yes, we may be working to create or learn together, or to change the world into something far more just for the majority - and far more enjoyable - but these are also our lives, right now.
And any relationship worth a damn is going to involve insecurity. We have to pull down the barricades to get close to people. We have to pull them down to even get close to ourselves, if by our "selves" we mean the subconscious us - the massive iceberg under the surface. And we have to pull them down to grow and to create anything really amazing. We have to take chances, and let people through, and let ourselves out.
One friend wrote her dissertation interrogating the hyper-focus on security in the political realm. She wrote about how this goal continues to endanger and harm so many. What has that kind of security ever done for people except keep them on adversarial terms?
I am and no doubt will always be insecure. The barricades are always broken and permeable. Whatever security I get, I get from loving the people I love, and them loving me, and living with joy and anger and fear and intense curiosity, and all of those mixed up all the time. Or if we're going to be secure, how about a form of it that paradoxically emerges from the deep care for one another that gives us the freedom to be insecure?
Saturday, August 10, 2013
It's Economic - and So Much More
by Lucy S.
I find myself wanting to refer to Nicole as my niece. She's my cousin Christina's daughter, and they lived with me and my oldest (when he was an infant) when Nicole was little. Does our Standard American English's inability to adequately name our relationships reflect something lacking in what is handed down to us from on high in our society? "My cousin's daughter" utterly fails as a description for these familial relationships, as do so many of our words attached to "friend." "Good friend" or "best friend" or "close friend" - how can these speak for the nature of particular friendships that cannot be contained in these categorizations?
Nicole called this morning. I wrote about her in this recent post. http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/07/cruelties-of-positive-thinking.html
In July, she'd gotten a job in the bakery department of a major corporate grocery store in California. I saw her profile photo sometimes change to one of cupcakes with flowers she'd made. Other photos of her newly learned skills put into action were posted. The job paid $10 per hour.
She calls this morning and asks how I am. "Good! How about you?" I answer, still feeling great from yesterday's long conversation with the professor who helps the adjuncts where I will be teaching (a generous, helpful, and thoroughly delightful conversation). "Okay...." she says - on a down slope. "I lost my job yesterday."
The boss told her she wasn't a "team player" and that she's lazy. Nicole is necessarily in defense mode. She says she asked a coworker if that was how she saw her, and the coworker said not at all, that she's just in the same boat as all of them, trying to deal with a lot of stuff at one time. Nicole says she missed a shift last week because she didn't read the schedule right (they change the working hours from week to week), and that she told them, "I am SO SORRY. I'm really, really sorry. I promise you this will never happen again." She says that the main baker doesn't wash his board, that it gets to be "pretty disgusting" with eggs having been on it, staying unwashed for batch after batch of different mixes. She says she went in one day and scoured everything. Another couple of days, she cleaned and organized the department's freezer, which was also "disgusting" and "just a mess." At other times, the baker told her and other assistant bakers to wash his utensils and boards, and she told him that he needs to wash his own stuff, just like they have to wash their own stuff. These are the pieces of the picture she can convey in a 50 minute phone call. They are inevitably not enough for me to fully understand the situation.
Here's how I will NOT respond. I will not in any way imply that maybe she did something wrong, that maybe she just needs to learn to follow orders better, to suck it up, to kiss ass with a peppy smile at all times, to never question the authority of the layers of people who get to tell other people what to do. This may be seen by some as just doing what you have to do - a necessary survival strategy in a highly unequal society - but there's enough of that advice going around already. I don't need to add my voice to everyone else who, in their dubious wisdom, get to lecture her and talk to others with such confidence, about "the problem with Nicole." The dominant logic of the system is, if you're getting screwed over - if your life is not a shining "success' - then it's your own fault. This "kick 'em when they're down" mentality makes me sick.
At the same time, I'm painfully aware of my inability to provide sufficient comfort. I say something along these lines: "You know, if you and I and some other people were cooking together, and I tried to order you to clean my stuff, you could respond the way you did, and I would have no power over you in that way. I could argue the point with you, and if we had a bakery we owned together, maybe we'd all have to sit down and hash out issues in a circle, but we'd be doing that as equals. But these situations in these jobs are power relations. What they mean by 'team player' isn't at all someone who can work as an equal with others. It's someone who is always subservient and does everything they're told without daring to question anything."
We talk longer about that, and then she changes her tone and says, "It's fine, anyway. I have a talent, and I'm just wasting it there. I told them thanks for the training and I'm glad I got a chance to know you guys, and now I'm gonna find a way to really use my talent, because I LOVE baking. It's a passion of mine." My eyes water, and I say, "What if you go talk to some independent bakeries and see if anyone would hire you?" She says, "You mean as an apprentice? Yeah, I'm gonna try to do that today." I imagine her venturing out, and the simple metaphor of her monumentally uphill struggle makes me see her walking up literal hills, as if this were San Francisco, in and out of shops, to try to sell bakeries on how awesome it would be to hire her.
Later, she talks about trying to get on Trader Joe's because she's heard they're really nice to work for. "Yeah, maybe that would be good," I respond with a smiling voice. What is there to say? My answers are anemic.
I tell her that after I talked with her recently, I was thinking about how her grandmother and her mom both left physically abusive spouses and raised kids on their own for some years, and how the main thing that enabled them to do so was that their jobs paid enough. I say it's terrible how lousy these jobs pay, that it's impossible to try to live on $10 an hour now, especially in the more expensive parts of the country (which all still rely on the masses of poorly paid workers to serve the more affluent). She agrees.
This, of course, doesn't solve the problem at hand. If she can't get and keep a job that pays enough to live on and rent a basic apartment, she can't get her kids back. The system particularly tortures those who continue to love the people they love - kids, parents, siblings, friends, nephews, nieces... Just don't feel anything for anyone in particular - just make yourself into a spiked shell - and you'll fare a little better under capitalism's terms. But who can do it? And what kind of victory or even survival is it? As I am always saying, there are no good surrender terms here - but there aren't very good terms for battling on, either, especially as the isolated individuals we too often are forced to be.
Then Nicole tells me she had an awesome birthday week, before this happened, and that she even got to meet her sister. She has a 26 year old sister with a 9 year old daughter, both of whom she'd never met. This is her dad's daughter. She also has a 26 year old sister who she grew up with who is also her dad's (and mom's) daughter. Her dad had an affair with a woman he worked with, but he broke it off before the baby was born and never had anything to do with this daughter. Nicole says that she and her newly-found sister were happy to meet.
Nicole told her dad that she met her sister. She says that's when he went off on her. "He said it figures I'd go and do something like this, that I've always been like that, always having to create drama. He told me I'm a brat, and fuck you, and he doesn't want anything to do with me again."
As always my response is inadequate, or maybe any response is, because what I want to do in that moment is go beat the shit out of him, the way he beat the shit out of Nicole and her mom and sister and his later partners and other kids (the ones he chose to know). I think of his oozingly sweet manner which always held in it the iron insistence that he was right about everything, all the time, and held darker stuff bound to his smug self-centeredness. I remember some of my old disagreements with him.
I tell her that I don't understand how any parent can say such shitty things to their kid. She says she told him, "You're gonna end up alone. You've already lost one daughter, and now you're gonna lose another." She says he's always blamed everyone else for everything. I say that people like that are their own worst enemy. She says that she can't help it, that it still hurts, that he's still her dad. I say, yeah, I can imagine. She says she has so many things that happened in her head, and she doesn't know how to get rid of them. She says she remembers one time going with her sister to visit him (after he'd remarried), and that the two girls were playing around at the table, and he said, "You see those crystal candle holders on the table? I'm gonna knock you upside the head with one of them if you don't stop." It was never safe to take his threats as idle.
She says that she and her sister (the one she grew up with) have talked about how they see parts of their dad in themselves - how they have tempers - and how they hate this in themselves. Again, I feel the devastation in this and want so badly to make everything right somehow, and there is no way to do it. I can only be on her side.
She says she called her aunt - her father's sister - and told her what her dad said, and what her stepmom said about it (her dad's ex, who Nicole is still close to). Her aunt says, "You see, Nicole, that's your typical pattern. Your dad says something, and you have to tell others about it. You can't just keep it to yourself." I say, "Why is it all about him? And why should you have to keep it to yourself - so that he doesn't look bad? Why shouldn't you have the right to talk to some people about it if you're hurting?" I detest the impulse some people have to keep other people's truly vicious behavior secret. Shout if from the rooftops, I say - shame these assholes. I'm on the side of the people they continually hurt.
Nicole cries a little during the call, not much, just a little. She says, "God must think I can really handle a lot. I mean, I feel so overwhelmed. I wish I could just catch a break for a while. Just for a year. That'd be good."
Why can't I manage to come up with an answer of some kind? I do answer, but these words never amount to real answers.
Then, I hear the smile in her voice when she says she went out last night, that she decided she needed to have some fun. A guy she knows was having a birthday party for his wife, who is a cancer survivor, and she went by herself. She danced a lot - and some of it was swing dancing. She says she had a wonderful dance partner who was "a lovely older gentleman" for a lot of the dances, a man in his 80s, she says. I smile, laugh, and say, "That's awesome." She says she tells the birthday lady, "I"m happy you're here with us!" and that her aunt and her mom are breast cancer survivors.
We say some other things, and she asks more about how I'm doing. She tells me, again, how inspired she is by me going back to school and doing what I've done.
We wind down and tell each other that we hope the other one has a good week.
I find myself wanting to refer to Nicole as my niece. She's my cousin Christina's daughter, and they lived with me and my oldest (when he was an infant) when Nicole was little. Does our Standard American English's inability to adequately name our relationships reflect something lacking in what is handed down to us from on high in our society? "My cousin's daughter" utterly fails as a description for these familial relationships, as do so many of our words attached to "friend." "Good friend" or "best friend" or "close friend" - how can these speak for the nature of particular friendships that cannot be contained in these categorizations?
Nicole called this morning. I wrote about her in this recent post. http://labor2beardown.blogspot.com/2013/07/cruelties-of-positive-thinking.html
In July, she'd gotten a job in the bakery department of a major corporate grocery store in California. I saw her profile photo sometimes change to one of cupcakes with flowers she'd made. Other photos of her newly learned skills put into action were posted. The job paid $10 per hour.
She calls this morning and asks how I am. "Good! How about you?" I answer, still feeling great from yesterday's long conversation with the professor who helps the adjuncts where I will be teaching (a generous, helpful, and thoroughly delightful conversation). "Okay...." she says - on a down slope. "I lost my job yesterday."
The boss told her she wasn't a "team player" and that she's lazy. Nicole is necessarily in defense mode. She says she asked a coworker if that was how she saw her, and the coworker said not at all, that she's just in the same boat as all of them, trying to deal with a lot of stuff at one time. Nicole says she missed a shift last week because she didn't read the schedule right (they change the working hours from week to week), and that she told them, "I am SO SORRY. I'm really, really sorry. I promise you this will never happen again." She says that the main baker doesn't wash his board, that it gets to be "pretty disgusting" with eggs having been on it, staying unwashed for batch after batch of different mixes. She says she went in one day and scoured everything. Another couple of days, she cleaned and organized the department's freezer, which was also "disgusting" and "just a mess." At other times, the baker told her and other assistant bakers to wash his utensils and boards, and she told him that he needs to wash his own stuff, just like they have to wash their own stuff. These are the pieces of the picture she can convey in a 50 minute phone call. They are inevitably not enough for me to fully understand the situation.
Here's how I will NOT respond. I will not in any way imply that maybe she did something wrong, that maybe she just needs to learn to follow orders better, to suck it up, to kiss ass with a peppy smile at all times, to never question the authority of the layers of people who get to tell other people what to do. This may be seen by some as just doing what you have to do - a necessary survival strategy in a highly unequal society - but there's enough of that advice going around already. I don't need to add my voice to everyone else who, in their dubious wisdom, get to lecture her and talk to others with such confidence, about "the problem with Nicole." The dominant logic of the system is, if you're getting screwed over - if your life is not a shining "success' - then it's your own fault. This "kick 'em when they're down" mentality makes me sick.
At the same time, I'm painfully aware of my inability to provide sufficient comfort. I say something along these lines: "You know, if you and I and some other people were cooking together, and I tried to order you to clean my stuff, you could respond the way you did, and I would have no power over you in that way. I could argue the point with you, and if we had a bakery we owned together, maybe we'd all have to sit down and hash out issues in a circle, but we'd be doing that as equals. But these situations in these jobs are power relations. What they mean by 'team player' isn't at all someone who can work as an equal with others. It's someone who is always subservient and does everything they're told without daring to question anything."
We talk longer about that, and then she changes her tone and says, "It's fine, anyway. I have a talent, and I'm just wasting it there. I told them thanks for the training and I'm glad I got a chance to know you guys, and now I'm gonna find a way to really use my talent, because I LOVE baking. It's a passion of mine." My eyes water, and I say, "What if you go talk to some independent bakeries and see if anyone would hire you?" She says, "You mean as an apprentice? Yeah, I'm gonna try to do that today." I imagine her venturing out, and the simple metaphor of her monumentally uphill struggle makes me see her walking up literal hills, as if this were San Francisco, in and out of shops, to try to sell bakeries on how awesome it would be to hire her.
Later, she talks about trying to get on Trader Joe's because she's heard they're really nice to work for. "Yeah, maybe that would be good," I respond with a smiling voice. What is there to say? My answers are anemic.
I tell her that after I talked with her recently, I was thinking about how her grandmother and her mom both left physically abusive spouses and raised kids on their own for some years, and how the main thing that enabled them to do so was that their jobs paid enough. I say it's terrible how lousy these jobs pay, that it's impossible to try to live on $10 an hour now, especially in the more expensive parts of the country (which all still rely on the masses of poorly paid workers to serve the more affluent). She agrees.
This, of course, doesn't solve the problem at hand. If she can't get and keep a job that pays enough to live on and rent a basic apartment, she can't get her kids back. The system particularly tortures those who continue to love the people they love - kids, parents, siblings, friends, nephews, nieces... Just don't feel anything for anyone in particular - just make yourself into a spiked shell - and you'll fare a little better under capitalism's terms. But who can do it? And what kind of victory or even survival is it? As I am always saying, there are no good surrender terms here - but there aren't very good terms for battling on, either, especially as the isolated individuals we too often are forced to be.
Then Nicole tells me she had an awesome birthday week, before this happened, and that she even got to meet her sister. She has a 26 year old sister with a 9 year old daughter, both of whom she'd never met. This is her dad's daughter. She also has a 26 year old sister who she grew up with who is also her dad's (and mom's) daughter. Her dad had an affair with a woman he worked with, but he broke it off before the baby was born and never had anything to do with this daughter. Nicole says that she and her newly-found sister were happy to meet.
Nicole told her dad that she met her sister. She says that's when he went off on her. "He said it figures I'd go and do something like this, that I've always been like that, always having to create drama. He told me I'm a brat, and fuck you, and he doesn't want anything to do with me again."
As always my response is inadequate, or maybe any response is, because what I want to do in that moment is go beat the shit out of him, the way he beat the shit out of Nicole and her mom and sister and his later partners and other kids (the ones he chose to know). I think of his oozingly sweet manner which always held in it the iron insistence that he was right about everything, all the time, and held darker stuff bound to his smug self-centeredness. I remember some of my old disagreements with him.
I tell her that I don't understand how any parent can say such shitty things to their kid. She says she told him, "You're gonna end up alone. You've already lost one daughter, and now you're gonna lose another." She says he's always blamed everyone else for everything. I say that people like that are their own worst enemy. She says that she can't help it, that it still hurts, that he's still her dad. I say, yeah, I can imagine. She says she has so many things that happened in her head, and she doesn't know how to get rid of them. She says she remembers one time going with her sister to visit him (after he'd remarried), and that the two girls were playing around at the table, and he said, "You see those crystal candle holders on the table? I'm gonna knock you upside the head with one of them if you don't stop." It was never safe to take his threats as idle.
She says that she and her sister (the one she grew up with) have talked about how they see parts of their dad in themselves - how they have tempers - and how they hate this in themselves. Again, I feel the devastation in this and want so badly to make everything right somehow, and there is no way to do it. I can only be on her side.
She says she called her aunt - her father's sister - and told her what her dad said, and what her stepmom said about it (her dad's ex, who Nicole is still close to). Her aunt says, "You see, Nicole, that's your typical pattern. Your dad says something, and you have to tell others about it. You can't just keep it to yourself." I say, "Why is it all about him? And why should you have to keep it to yourself - so that he doesn't look bad? Why shouldn't you have the right to talk to some people about it if you're hurting?" I detest the impulse some people have to keep other people's truly vicious behavior secret. Shout if from the rooftops, I say - shame these assholes. I'm on the side of the people they continually hurt.
Nicole cries a little during the call, not much, just a little. She says, "God must think I can really handle a lot. I mean, I feel so overwhelmed. I wish I could just catch a break for a while. Just for a year. That'd be good."
Why can't I manage to come up with an answer of some kind? I do answer, but these words never amount to real answers.
Then, I hear the smile in her voice when she says she went out last night, that she decided she needed to have some fun. A guy she knows was having a birthday party for his wife, who is a cancer survivor, and she went by herself. She danced a lot - and some of it was swing dancing. She says she had a wonderful dance partner who was "a lovely older gentleman" for a lot of the dances, a man in his 80s, she says. I smile, laugh, and say, "That's awesome." She says she tells the birthday lady, "I"m happy you're here with us!" and that her aunt and her mom are breast cancer survivors.
We say some other things, and she asks more about how I'm doing. She tells me, again, how inspired she is by me going back to school and doing what I've done.
We wind down and tell each other that we hope the other one has a good week.
***
Looking back at this post's title, I want to make it alternate ad infinitum.... "It's Economic - and So Much More - and It's Economic - and So Much More - and It's....
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Learning with Sean and Ryan August 2013
I'm going to repost this each month for a while, adding in the newest readings to the full list (as full as we remember, though we may be forgetting some readings). I'm going to also add movies we have especially valued that we watched together. I may add some other things we do as well.
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas Utopia
Nix, Garth Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter
Sinclair, Upton The Jungle
Sinha, Indra Animal's People
Skye, Obert Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
***
The first Sunday in August now, and we're still slowly wending our way through Willa Cather's My Antonia. Maybe we can finish it in about a week, at the pace we're now reading at. We're enjoying it, and I don't want to rush, and yet I am also excited to begin reading Walking with the Comrades by Arundhati Roy to them. Maybe we will go ahead and begin that, too, and have them both going at once. Today in My Antonia, we read about the housewives blaming the young, pretty Lena Lingard because a much older married man whom she wasn't at all interested in romantically had become so infatuated with her that he followed her around out in the prairie when she watched her cows out there, and he helped her up into her wagon after church, causing another scandal. His wife, "Crazy Mary," began regularly chasing Lena with a corn knife, trying to kill her, and Antonia's mother thought it served Lena right. Lena meanwhile says she has no interest in marrying anyone. I love that Cather includes this and doesn't "punish" Lena for any of this.
***
Mid-August now. To be clear, this list isn't (of course) what we read in this one month. It's what we can remember of what we've read together so far.... period. Sort of. (We know we've read a lot more than this together, but it's what stands out and what we, again... remember.) As for the movies, we're just listing those which we want to list. (We've seen a massive amount of movies, and are leaving most out for now.)
One of the many things not included in this list are the readings we do on how to grow or take care of or harvest a particular plant in our garden. It also doesn't include the articles that we forward to each other on political happenings or building things or anything related to recent readings or situations...
Books
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas Utopia
Nix, Garth Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter
Sinclair, Upton The Jungle
Sinha, Indra Animal's People
Skye, Obert Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Short Stories and Essays
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Poetry
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Movies
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
Lessons from Northern Travels and Travelers
On a Friday in July, I drove a minivan-load of us up to the Iron Range in northern Minnesota. We were headed to Work People's College (WPC), an extended organizers' training and camp by and for members of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) (more about them and why I am a member in another post). The following Tuesday, I drove us back.
A 68 year old man from Alaska flew out the night before our northward drive and stayed at our home. He stayed another night after WPC and flew home Wednesday morning. He brought us salmon that he’d caught himself and kept frozen on the flight, salmon we stuck in the freezer, which he thawed out and cooked for us that last Tuesday night. He sliced the skin back and tucked just a sprinkling of chopped onions underneath with a little butter, and then he baked it. And he brought us two packages of honey-smoked salmon. He told us story after story from his life, stories that constituted a kind of travel for us in themselves from someone unlike anyone I have ever met. There were stories about traveling around the country in the 1960s and 70s – poaching, he said - hunting deer and other animals for food, fishing, without permits, pulling watercress out of the bottom of a stream, trading rattlesnake meat for four lobsters one day when he and his girlfriend had made their way down to Florida. He worked for money only when he had to. "My goal was to work for The Man as little as possible," he said By 1975, they'd moved up to Alaska, where he’d always wanted to live. Stories here involved bears, water that numbs you in one minute, taking turns in his car at full speed when someone was chasing him and his wife to shoot him, and building up their branch of the IWW. There were other stories - continual stories.
Periodically, he would ask, "Do you want to me to keep telling stories, or do you want to rest your mind for a while?" I love the layered kindness and decorum of this question. Not only does he break to give the listeners a chance to say whether they want him to continue, but he offers them such a humane reason which doesn't require them to further explain themselves. And he offers a reason which in turn lets them avoid hurting him, a reason that lets them be both truthful and considerate. This is one lesson I'd like to hold onto from this July. I hope I can remember it.
On the drive up, I talked with another person, who is a therapist, which fascinated me, because I have always been drawn to disciplines and practices connected to mental health, yet for years now have also been down on them for ofen propping up the capitalist status quo in various ways (getting people to put the emphasis on their individual "choices" in order to function as well as possible in the system rather than supporting their radical critiques of and challenges to that system). But here was a Wobbly (members of IWW are called Wobblies) who is also a therapist. He talked about how he asks people to consider why they're telling certain stories about themselves and their experiences rather than other stories. This question and some of its implications keep returning to me. What stories do I believe about myself, the people I am close to in various ways, the social structures I inhabit, and the larger world? If people live as characters in false stories, how does this affect them and how do they in turn affect those around them? What is my story? These are my own questions, emerging from what I understood about some of his approach. Another lesson I'd like to not only hold onto but greatly expand upon. And it connects to my own work studying and writing about stories, especially nonfiction narratives.
WPC needs its own post, maybe connected to the one about why I'm a member of IWW.
The day after our Alaskan comrade left, I headed back up north, this time to the shores of Lake Superior, with my sister. We’d planned this trip back in January, the first time in our lives that we’d finally go somewhere like that, just her and me. She planned it all, and she drove. We stayed in a cabin twenty miles south of the harbor town of Grand Marais. We each took our own breakfasts and lunches. She made dinner one night; I made dinner one night; and she treated me to her favorite restaurant one night. We headed back home on a Sunday.
While we were there, we walked; we sat by Lake Superior; we hiked some trails to see some of the waterfalls in the rivers rushing to pour into the Lake. We talked, more than we have in years. We had no internet service there, and I left my computer at home. Mornings and evenings, I wrote a little in a big spiral notebook. I woke up early and stretched out on the small sofa. From there, if I turned my head to the left, I could see Lake Superior out of the window. For those cabins, it’s just down the sloped driveway, across the road, and down some rocks to the shore. From that position, its vast blueness remained mostly beyond my scope of vision, curtailed by the wall to the left of the window and the tops of a couple chairs out on the porch – one chair, then spruce needles with a cut off tree trunk in the foreground, then the other chair top, then more spruce, then wall. Visible Lake Superior became about an inch if I held up my thumb and index finger to measure it. Yet the seen and measurable always suggested the unseen and immeasurable.
I brought a few books and read to my sister from them at times. I read from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and Zitkala-Sa, and I asked her to read an excerpt of a poem by H.D. (the modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle), an excerpt a friend emailed me in June. It’s from “The Walls Do Not Fall.” I hadn’t read it before he sent it.
Sunday, before we headed home, Tammy stopped at Temperance, where the Temperance River gushes into Lake Superior. The rivers and streams around there carry a lot of organic matter from various swamps they intersect with, and they carry some iron in them. For both these reasons, even when they're rushing and falling over rocks and big drops (we saw so many cascading waterfalls), they have a lot of brown in them, like coffee streaks. And so much white foam. (I read some of the signs explaining all this as we walked and climbed some of the trails.)
By Lake Superior, masses of rocks, thick piles covering all the ground at the shore, are what you walk on and sit on. I individually picked out some rocks to bring back. After that I wrote on a piece of scrap paper:
A 68 year old man from Alaska flew out the night before our northward drive and stayed at our home. He stayed another night after WPC and flew home Wednesday morning. He brought us salmon that he’d caught himself and kept frozen on the flight, salmon we stuck in the freezer, which he thawed out and cooked for us that last Tuesday night. He sliced the skin back and tucked just a sprinkling of chopped onions underneath with a little butter, and then he baked it. And he brought us two packages of honey-smoked salmon. He told us story after story from his life, stories that constituted a kind of travel for us in themselves from someone unlike anyone I have ever met. There were stories about traveling around the country in the 1960s and 70s – poaching, he said - hunting deer and other animals for food, fishing, without permits, pulling watercress out of the bottom of a stream, trading rattlesnake meat for four lobsters one day when he and his girlfriend had made their way down to Florida. He worked for money only when he had to. "My goal was to work for The Man as little as possible," he said By 1975, they'd moved up to Alaska, where he’d always wanted to live. Stories here involved bears, water that numbs you in one minute, taking turns in his car at full speed when someone was chasing him and his wife to shoot him, and building up their branch of the IWW. There were other stories - continual stories.
Periodically, he would ask, "Do you want to me to keep telling stories, or do you want to rest your mind for a while?" I love the layered kindness and decorum of this question. Not only does he break to give the listeners a chance to say whether they want him to continue, but he offers them such a humane reason which doesn't require them to further explain themselves. And he offers a reason which in turn lets them avoid hurting him, a reason that lets them be both truthful and considerate. This is one lesson I'd like to hold onto from this July. I hope I can remember it.
On the drive up, I talked with another person, who is a therapist, which fascinated me, because I have always been drawn to disciplines and practices connected to mental health, yet for years now have also been down on them for ofen propping up the capitalist status quo in various ways (getting people to put the emphasis on their individual "choices" in order to function as well as possible in the system rather than supporting their radical critiques of and challenges to that system). But here was a Wobbly (members of IWW are called Wobblies) who is also a therapist. He talked about how he asks people to consider why they're telling certain stories about themselves and their experiences rather than other stories. This question and some of its implications keep returning to me. What stories do I believe about myself, the people I am close to in various ways, the social structures I inhabit, and the larger world? If people live as characters in false stories, how does this affect them and how do they in turn affect those around them? What is my story? These are my own questions, emerging from what I understood about some of his approach. Another lesson I'd like to not only hold onto but greatly expand upon. And it connects to my own work studying and writing about stories, especially nonfiction narratives.
WPC needs its own post, maybe connected to the one about why I'm a member of IWW.
The day after our Alaskan comrade left, I headed back up north, this time to the shores of Lake Superior, with my sister. We’d planned this trip back in January, the first time in our lives that we’d finally go somewhere like that, just her and me. She planned it all, and she drove. We stayed in a cabin twenty miles south of the harbor town of Grand Marais. We each took our own breakfasts and lunches. She made dinner one night; I made dinner one night; and she treated me to her favorite restaurant one night. We headed back home on a Sunday.
While we were there, we walked; we sat by Lake Superior; we hiked some trails to see some of the waterfalls in the rivers rushing to pour into the Lake. We talked, more than we have in years. We had no internet service there, and I left my computer at home. Mornings and evenings, I wrote a little in a big spiral notebook. I woke up early and stretched out on the small sofa. From there, if I turned my head to the left, I could see Lake Superior out of the window. For those cabins, it’s just down the sloped driveway, across the road, and down some rocks to the shore. From that position, its vast blueness remained mostly beyond my scope of vision, curtailed by the wall to the left of the window and the tops of a couple chairs out on the porch – one chair, then spruce needles with a cut off tree trunk in the foreground, then the other chair top, then more spruce, then wall. Visible Lake Superior became about an inch if I held up my thumb and index finger to measure it. Yet the seen and measurable always suggested the unseen and immeasurable.
I brought a few books and read to my sister from them at times. I read from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston and Zitkala-Sa, and I asked her to read an excerpt of a poem by H.D. (the modernist poet, Hilda Doolittle), an excerpt a friend emailed me in June. It’s from “The Walls Do Not Fall.” I hadn’t read it before he sent it.
so I in my own way knowThat poem was on my mind a lot during my travels. I think our psyches sometimes grab and embrace words and images that we need at particular times.
that the whale
can not digest me:
be firm in your own small, static, limited
orbit and the shark-jaws
of outer circumstances
will spit you forth:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving
so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,
selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price.
Sunday, before we headed home, Tammy stopped at Temperance, where the Temperance River gushes into Lake Superior. The rivers and streams around there carry a lot of organic matter from various swamps they intersect with, and they carry some iron in them. For both these reasons, even when they're rushing and falling over rocks and big drops (we saw so many cascading waterfalls), they have a lot of brown in them, like coffee streaks. And so much white foam. (I read some of the signs explaining all this as we walked and climbed some of the trails.)
By Lake Superior, masses of rocks, thick piles covering all the ground at the shore, are what you walk on and sit on. I individually picked out some rocks to bring back. After that I wrote on a piece of scrap paper:
Sun July 21 - Temperance I chose these rocks from among so many in thick piles on a shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota - where they are tumbled and smoothed and aggregated into so many interesting combinations - minuscule, tiny, hand-holding size, and larger. All worthy and beautiful and of earth. What 'makes these stones stony,' as Viktor Shklovsky would say, is choosing them from among so many others, and holding them up to examine more closely, and sometimes to bring along with us into more of our lives.In his essay "Art as Technique," Shklovsky writes:
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic....
And so life is reckoned as nothing. Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. 'If the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.' [Leo Tolstoy Diary quote] And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.
We might also substitute here "traveling" for "art," and traveling itself can be a kind of living art, a story to live in - a changed story, new painting, different music. What matters is looking and listening and feeling closely. Freshly. Observing carefully, being deeply attentive and present. Everyone and everything is always more than what we see and measure and think we know of them. Pounded by massive forces, tossed about with others, immersed, cooled, warmed, wet, dried out, wet again, rounded, smoothed, and aggregated in particular fusions for a time.
Thursday, August 1, 2013
Orientation: Another Step to Becoming a College Profesor
This is basic -- just a straightforward sharing of another big step in me turning into this person who is a college teacher...
I went to my orientation today for fall semester. The university where I will be teaching (the same one I just graduated from in May) has an orientation each year for their adjuncts, with information sessions on various useful topics. Some of the adjuncts in there have taught for many years (one as long as 30 years!!). I have never felt anything before like what I felt today, sitting in there with them... my colleagues. I love the sense of community there. I felt humbled in the best ways, hearing about the work of my wise and experienced fellow part-time professors there. I am going to do my best to learn all that I can about how to teach well.
After the orientation, the department coordinator walked the three of us who were new over to get our faculty IDs and to get our office keys. He showed me my office and had me try my key to be sure it worked properly, so I saw the office I will be sharing with a few other part-time professors. Outside the door, I saw my name on a printed sign, along with the other three. "Professor Lucy S...." I can't help it - all of these things thrill me. It feels surreal, I am so deeply glad and thankful to be able to do this.
I feel like I have been waiting my whole adult life for this, through the childhoods of my kids, always waiting for some stable enough time to continue my education. It is hard to express how huge it becomes after so many years, how badly you can yearn for it, and at the same time, begin to see it as only a dream, and sometimes tell yourself that you probably don't want it anyway. And, finally making it back to school in 2009, and then getting to continue into graduate school because of getting the fellowship has been emotionally overwhelming. I have never just adjusted to these profound changes. I've never been able to become used to them or jaded. And now, I am becoming a college professor. I tell my kids, my extended family, my friends, and they laugh and share my joy about this. The transformation continues to unfold.
After I left the university, I met my son Kevin at the local worker-owned cafe, where we ate and then stayed talking for over four hours. Then I drove back home with my other son Justin, who had taken the bus that way to meet his friend, and we were talking and laughing and listening to Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Dorothy Moore's old song, "Misty Blue." Now I am home with the doors and windows open, simply glad to be alive. Eloquence completely eludes me. I am tired and I am happy.
I went to my orientation today for fall semester. The university where I will be teaching (the same one I just graduated from in May) has an orientation each year for their adjuncts, with information sessions on various useful topics. Some of the adjuncts in there have taught for many years (one as long as 30 years!!). I have never felt anything before like what I felt today, sitting in there with them... my colleagues. I love the sense of community there. I felt humbled in the best ways, hearing about the work of my wise and experienced fellow part-time professors there. I am going to do my best to learn all that I can about how to teach well.
After the orientation, the department coordinator walked the three of us who were new over to get our faculty IDs and to get our office keys. He showed me my office and had me try my key to be sure it worked properly, so I saw the office I will be sharing with a few other part-time professors. Outside the door, I saw my name on a printed sign, along with the other three. "Professor Lucy S...." I can't help it - all of these things thrill me. It feels surreal, I am so deeply glad and thankful to be able to do this.
I feel like I have been waiting my whole adult life for this, through the childhoods of my kids, always waiting for some stable enough time to continue my education. It is hard to express how huge it becomes after so many years, how badly you can yearn for it, and at the same time, begin to see it as only a dream, and sometimes tell yourself that you probably don't want it anyway. And, finally making it back to school in 2009, and then getting to continue into graduate school because of getting the fellowship has been emotionally overwhelming. I have never just adjusted to these profound changes. I've never been able to become used to them or jaded. And now, I am becoming a college professor. I tell my kids, my extended family, my friends, and they laugh and share my joy about this. The transformation continues to unfold.
After I left the university, I met my son Kevin at the local worker-owned cafe, where we ate and then stayed talking for over four hours. Then I drove back home with my other son Justin, who had taken the bus that way to meet his friend, and we were talking and laughing and listening to Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and Dorothy Moore's old song, "Misty Blue." Now I am home with the doors and windows open, simply glad to be alive. Eloquence completely eludes me. I am tired and I am happy.
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