Madame Bovary: Desire, Grace, God
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Spirituality, What I'm Reading and Why on August 12, 2010
Even in loquacious, verbose English — elegantly performed in my audio version by Simon Vance, in a translation by Eleanor Marx-Aveling — the precision of Gustave Flaubert’s French comes through. We are all searchers and Emma Bovary is the distillation of our longing. She marries dull, devoted Charles to escape the routines of her childhood home. Dissatisfied with their small village of Tostes, she occasions their move to nearby Yonville, though the latter is merely the former village reconfigured. From boredom with Charles she takes up an affair with the wealthy roué Rodolphe — hers is a painfully easy seduction. The affair runs its course and Rodolphe dumps her, sending a Dear Jane letter whose composition Flaubert describes in terms that will make anyone squirm who has written or contemplated such an act. In her distress Emma falls ill and turns to religion, last refuge of saints and scoundrels, but with her slow recovery her devotions slack off. She reencounters the young student Léon, her earliest obsession, at whom she throws herself anew.
If Emma were merely flighty we would tire of her more quickly than Rodolphe or Léon, but her caprices evoke a deeper, more profound longing that anyone shares who has been touched by music or fiction or painting or any of our infinite manifestations of the imagination. It is, I think, the longing for God.
In using the word I realize for the first time which, of chicken or egg, came first: Desire preceded God. With its rules of grammar and syntax, human speech must necessarily be the servant of reason, but desire is the enemy of reason; and so every language demands – requires — a placeholder, a word to set limits on our boundless capacity for desire. And so out of our own invention we invented God.
Let us cross-examine the logic here. By definition “infinity” is beyond logic, outside reason, beyond the capacity of human speech to describe or encompass. And yet all mythologies agree that God is infinite. How, then, may we know God, the Infinite, the Unknowable? Surely only through that feature of the human condition that knows no limits: through our desire, or maybe better put, through our longing. In our hypersexed age “desire” inevitably invokes sex, whereas throughout Madame Bovary Flaubert makes clear that sex is only a symptom of Emma’s larger, deeper, infinite, lifelong longing.
Thus only through the infinitude of desire may we understand the infinitude of God.
Sometimes I think that God is desire, and that desire is God.
This idea, which strikes our cynical, jaded, prudish, early 21st century ears as bizarre, was commonplace in the Middle Ages and lay close to the heart of the writings of some of its most famous preachers and mystics — Bernard of Clairvaux, Abélard, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich. Some conceived of angels as pure desire, an idea that has sadly fallen by the wayside (along with the notion that in the hierarchy of being, angels are inferior to human beings, since they are given heaven as a matter of course whereas we have to earn it).
This sanctifying of desire horrifies the institutionalized Church, which like all institutions exists to contain and regulate passion. But when Flaubert famously cried, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” (“Madame Bovary, she is I!”), he was speaking for all of us. In that universality, more than in its scandal, lies the source of the novel’s immediate and enduring popularity.
Emma is dissatisfaction personified and epitomized. Her successive obsessions — with Rodolphe, with God, with Léon — act out a reality that Flaubert grimly summarizes as “the eternal monotony of passion.” All three affairs follow the unvarying pattern: Meeting, obsession, consummation, boredom, recrimination, death.
[Emma] was not happy, and never had been. How was it, then, that there was this emptiness in life? How was it that whatever she leaned against straightway began to crumble into dust? Oh, but if somewhere there breathed a being brave and handsome, a man of power and resolution, one whose nature was wrought of sweetness and strength, a man with the heart of a poet and the form of an angel, a lyre with brazen strings, sounding his bridal songs of triumph and of pain beneath the echoing vault of heaven, why, peradventure, should she not meet him? What a hopeless dream! Wherefore should she seek the undiscoverable? Everything rang false, everything was a lie, every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse. Nor was there any pleasure but brought satiety in its train, and every kiss, were it never so sweet, never so passionate, would but leave upon the lips a longing for some bliss that should be greater still.
Or, as Buddhists say, with more efficiency but less grace, “Life is dissatisfaction.”
As for me, I side with grace, which is why I believe. For this is the remarkable fact of Madame Bovary: No bleaker portrayal of the human condition exists. Emma’s affairs come to naught, less because she is trapped by marriage — more than once she makes clear her willingness to throw it over — than because she is trapped, as we are all trapped, in longing. Her husband Charles’s one attempt at immortality — he undertakes an operation to correct a boy’s club foot — ends disastrously. Emma eats arsenic in hopes of a swift and painless death; instead she endures prolonged agony that Flaubert, a surgeon’s son, renders in excruciating detail. Her extravagance ruins her husband and consigns their daughter, who has committed no sin other than to be their offspring, to a life of factory labor. Charles mercifully dies sitting in his garden — suggesting that, indeed, life’s only dependable mercy is death. In the novel’s last sentence the cowardly self-promoting fraud Monsieur Homais is awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honor.
And yet the music of the prose contradicts the message. Through this most abstract of media – squiggly black lines on a white page, read, in my case, in translation — Flaubert evokes the pathos and beauty and tragedy of the human condition. In perhaps the novel’s most famous passage, Flaubert deprecates the power of language in any form:
. . . the most exaggerated speeches usually hid the weakest feelings — as though the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow into the emptiest phrases, since no one can ever express the exact measure of his needs, his conceptions or his sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked pot on which we beat out rhythms for bears to dance to when we are striving to make music that will wring tears from the stars.
In its beauty and its truth the passage transcends its bleak message. The passion of the prose proves greater than its logic. I finish Madame Bovary not weeping or morose but bowing my head in awe, which as a response to the human condition serves handsomely as an alternative to despair.
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What I Saw In California
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Where I Am, Where I've Been on August 9, 2010
8/9/10, a nice sequential date.
From Salt Lake City I cross the vast high sagebrush-dotted desert of Nevada, with the only variant in 400 miles a roadkill ruffed grouse. As I approach California thunderheads mass over the high Sierra. I pass through Reno and, after 2000-plus miles of effortless open road, precisely as I cross the state line traffic slows to a crawl — I-80 is being resurfaced across Donner Pass. Indifferent to the stop-and-start traffic my innards recall the two cups of coffee I had for breakfast but all the rest stops are closed and finally I resort to slipping behind a Douglas fir at a place where the emergency lane widens to accommodate winter chain removal. Welcome to California.
That evening I stop in Sacramento to give my road-weary dogs a rest. Here in the heart of an ever- deepening financial crisis my host’s partner speaks of remodeling his kitchen which as it stands might be featured in Architectural Digest but he will tear out the counters, replacing the dark granite countertop with a gray granite countertop and elevating the whole from prosperity to luxury.
On Sunday we go to a gay pool party hosted by an older man. In past lives and at different times my two friends have each been the lover of our host, who now has a sweet-faced younger man filling that role. A pipe filled with pot sits discreetly beside the six-burner gas grill. Twenty gay men straggle in, along with one woman and two nonoperative transsexuals. Everyone gets plastered by the pool except the transsexuals, who slip to a side table to smoke. At some point I slip away to walk a block to the American River, flowing swift and clean, and jump in some real water, a living creature, swimming with full effort upstream I just manage to stay in place.
As we sit to table the host proposes a toast to his sibling, “my dear little sister Donna Rae, formerly my dear little brother Donald Ray.” Donna stands in her lavender halter-top bikini, not a great look for a nonoperative transsexual in her 60s. In Florida she packs a pistol for self-preservation but we are in California and life is good. We are in the capital of the world’s ninth largest economy and the conversation centers on politics, the Senate race, the governor’s race — will Californians return hoary Jerry Brown to the post more recently occupied by the muscleman Arnold Scharzenegger.
On the ride back to my host’s house we have much discussion about the success or failure of the thong in covering Donna Rae’s equipment and of the vexing question of whether one could support an employment protection bill that excluded transsexuals or whether the only possible stance is the pure stance, all-inclusive or nothing. I’m an incrementalist — take the rights when and where you can get them and keep fighting — a point of view not popular in left-wing gay California.
And now I am in socked-in San Francisco but in mid-afternoon the sun peeks through the cool gray. The apartment where I stay is in chaos as workers prepare it for my host’s imminent return so I retire to a neighborhood cafe where the conversation focuses on Twitter and Facebook and textual content and viral advertising. The chief conversant, a young Hindu /Latino/Caucasian mix, features on her arm an oval scar from a tattoo removal. A woman ahead of her time, I think, but we are in California and life is good.
Greetings from the Sunflower State
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Where I Am, Where I've Been on August 4, 2010
The great inclined plain of Kansas is very impressive. The fields are emerald green as if it’s spring, until near Salina I arrive at amber waves of grain that are being harvested, with combines moving back and forth, back and forth, cutting the black earth’s hair. In my rear view mirror I see the long decline to the Missouri; ahead, always up, up, up in a gentle but unmistakeable climb. The cottonwoods are green and tall and beautiful until somewhere after Salina and they abruptly shrink and limit themselves to creek beds.
August, the only month whose name serves us, richly and well, as an adjective. On this hot day Kansas bears out the name, down to the thunderstorm that glowers on the horizon for the last 50 miles and drops a quick shower just as I arrive.
And now greetings from the Vagabond Hotel in Hays, KS, my first stop out of Kansas City. When I asked where I could get a good burger the clerk at the counter looked down at his register and said, “Well, I go to Q Bar — it’s a sports bar downtown.” OK, so I drive downtown to Q (as in “cue,” as in “pool cue”) Bar and sit at the bar, though it’s clear it’s a divey kind of place, but hey, I’m in Hays, Kansas.
The guy next to me is already drunk at 7:30 pm on a Tuesday and starts talking my ear off about Voltaire and Louis L’Amour, which is a promising combination, but he talks on and on until I look bored and he begs off, since he’s obviously hitting on me (“I’m the only one of my brothers and sisters who’s not married”) and I’m just as obviously not interested.
I turn back to my burger and realize — Oh, duh. This is what passes for the gay bar in Hays, which only has about 10,000 people but is the only town of that size for a hundred and more miles in all directions and has a small state university. No, not a gay bar — it’s a pool bar, in fact, but it’s also the place where a person could pick up another person of the same gender and nobody’s going to pull a gun, and in Hays that will have to do. The population of the bar on a Tuesday night at 8 pm is 20 people — 19 men and one very High Plains lesbian looking woman (the bartender). My take on the subject is very possible, I’m thinking. Probable, in fact. The burger is passable — not a chi-chi California burger (nobody bothered to ask me how I like it cooked) but not greasy and with pretty good fries.
As I leave I turn back to my neighbor and reintroduce myself and thank him for being a reader. His is a big mind and it hasn’t the space it needs out here on the plains and I thank the stars again for catapulting me into the big world, not because the big world is better but because I needed its space to grow. May he find the space to grow, I whisper to myself as I leave.
Giving Care I
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Caretaking, Caregiving on July 28, 2010
Some years back I came to a point where I had lived long enough and known enough summers and loss that I became a better looker — I began to pay more attention. I’m a teacher and I’d like to think such matters can be taught, though here as elsewhere the Incarnation provides the best possible metaphor: the Ideal is useless until becomes flesh, until it is lived out.
Every July the day arrives — it’s always the 23rd, 24th, or 25th, weather permitting — when I go out in the morning and I see that the shadows have begun to lengthen. Another summer is drawing to a close. The days are still long and warm but the sun has softened its hammer blow and soon enough we will live amid light in August, the only month whose name serves us, richly and well, as an adjective. I don’t know that it’s possible or advisable to live in such a place, with such an intense perception of mortality and time’s passing, but here we are, here I am: July 28th, to be exact.
I had hopes of a swim in one of the lakes of the Abbey of Gethsemani, under a full moon as well as in the rain (for what I hope are obvious reasons, those would be two different swims). I missed the full moon opportunities but yesterday I hopped in the car and drove over to swim in a sweet gentle warm rain, keeping ear and eye peeled for the rumble of thunder or flash of light that would send me splashing to shore.
When I first dove in the rain was churning the lake surface, but it slacked off mid-swim until the water was smooth except for big drops falling from the overhanging trees, the abundant, diverse forest of the temperate jungles of the southern Appalachians — oak, ash, walnut, sycamore, dogwood, Virginia pine, and hackberry, all dense and glistening and hung with wild grapevine as befits a jungle in the rain.
As I swim mist rises from the lake surface to wreathe the rounded top of Forty Acre Knob, visible through the holler carved by the creek that feeds the lake; so called not because its mass covers that much land but from the surname of a sheriff (William Fortyacre) of the late 1800s. (Knowing comments about a son named “Mule” are invited.)
Taking care, giving care — I see that at summer’s beginning I used the first formulation, whereas now at summer’s end I have evolved toward the second. Telling, is it not, that we use both verbs for the same gesture. Who takes, who gives — the caretaker or the person being cared for? What is the nature of this two-way street?
On the efficacy of prayer
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Caretaking, Caregiving, Spirituality on July 26, 2010
Three days hence I leave my childhood home, having spent June and July caretaking my mother. I will miss much and many about this place, but what comes first to mind is the loud, cheerful, omnipresent song of the Carolina wren bobbledy-bobbledy-bobbledy-bob (http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Carolina_Wren/sounds).
I grew up in a small town isolated in the Kentucky hills, where I now realize we made a great collective effort at pretending that for us time stood still. Studying a detailed 1888 map of the town, I realized with some bemusement that even in my town-outside-of-time, in barely a century every piece of property had changed hands . . . except one, and that is the land on which my family built its hotel and tavern, the Sherwood Inn, still in the family. Which came first, chicken or egg, persistence of ownership or the family’s resistance to change? We are not meant to live at the speed of light and yet we do, composed of light as we each are, gods from God, lights from Light.
***
On a gray, humid midsummer day I am sitting under the shelter my father built to cover the patio swing, except that we replaced the swing with a glider because the swing had become downright dangerous for my mother. This morning a grumbly thunderstorm passed through just as I was waking, and I lay in bed and said a prayer of thanks for the rain and a prayer for the health of the elderly mother of a friend. She fell — to embellish the point — while getting up from having knelt to pray, as my mother broke her hip when she fell after climbing marble stairs to a shrine of the Virgin to light a votive candle.
About this act we call prayer: What is it? New Agers and interfaith advocates like to believe it’s a synonym for what Buddhists call meditation, but I’m not so sure. Anne Lamott characterizes her praying as falling into one of two categories: “Help me, help me!” or “Thank you, thank you!”. My grade school catechism defines the former as “imperfect” prayer, the latter as something closer to “perfect” prayer.
“Perfect” prayer may be where West merges with East, where prayer in fact becomes meditation: a state not above but beyond desire. But most of us pray “imperfectly,” and our praying suggests what meditation does not: The presence of another Being, or at least the Idea of another Being. One does not have to pray for something or someone; one does not even have to pray to something or someone. But prayer requires — as to my mind meditation does not — a sense of another; an abiding sense of interconnectedness that takes place within an all-encompassing Other.
Abraham Lincoln was not an explicitly religious man. Until late in his career, according to Shelby Foote’s monumental history of the Civil War, “he seemed not to be a praying man and never joined a church.” And yet as the Civil War wore on and the casualties mounted he evolved from a logician, a man of the law, to something close to a mystic. Here is a note found on his desk and copied out by his secretary:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the now constestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
Lincoln is coming close — very close to penetrating the mystery of suffering.
***
These days the writings of the new atheists are driving me, once an agnostic, toward belief — not just in gods and goddesses, but in God, the God of Lincoln and of Martin Luther King, Jr., and of Dorothy Day.
With every day science offers us more evidence of the interconnectedness of all being. That the beat of a butterfly’s wing in Canada might lead to a typhoon in the South Pacific may be overstating the case, but science is arriving at the core teaching of Buddhism, articulated thousands of years ago: No duality, meaning no separation between us and them, me and you. We are all participants in and manifestations of the great river of energy that is constantly changing form. In the same moment we are expending the energy required to shape shift. The universe seems to be “winding down,” though so slowly as to be imperceptible and irrelevant to our daily lives. But we are evolving toward union with the One from which we came.
This much seems clear: In a universe where even the empiricists concede we can’t even know what we think we know, it’s impossible to say that prayer has no impact. We simply can’t know. But “impact” is the wrong verb. Prayer, or the aspiration to it, can perhaps bring us closer to union with the One from which we came, and that physicists posit existed in the moment before Creation – or, if one prefers, the moment before the Big Bang, though the former is a more eloquent formation.
Here is H.L. Mencken, an atheist and a real writer — compare his judicious acknowledgment of the importance and mystery of beauty with the shrill self-righteousness of today’s new atheists:
True or not, this [Christian] faith is beautiful. More, it is useful – more useful, perhaps, than any imaginable truth . . . As a body of scientific fact it may be dubious, but it remains the most beautiful poetry that man has yet produced . . . The Christians are being driven out by the churches. Their places are being filled by hunters and trappers, i.e., brutes. There will be a 20th Amendment. It will proscribe the Beatitudes, as the 18th [Prohibition] already proscribes the Eucharist.
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Taking Care II
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Caretaking, Caregiving, Spirituality on July 14, 2010
Regarding Flatulence in Gnats
When I arrived from my cross-country drive, my mother — always proud of her hearing — was nearly deaf. But I read the symptoms not as progressive deafness but as wax buildup in the ears. Her hearing had been fine until a month or so before. If she slept on an ear she couldn’t hear in it for the first few hours of the morning. The hearing had a tendency to come and go — all signs pointing to wax buildup.
“You’re not going deaf!” I shouted to her. “You just need your ears cleaned!” She sniffed. “An old lady sometimes doesn’t want to hear things,” she muttered. After a week or two I was almost buffaloed by this resistance — why not leave an old lady alone to die in peace? But in the end I forced myself to a difficult conversation — difficult, because true. “If you lose your hearing,” I said, calmly and looking her in the eye, “you’ll be a lot harder for us to care for.” To this she had no response, so I located an otolaryngologist who visits the county seat once weekly and made an appointment.
The day arrived and I announced that we were leaving for the doctor’s office. Mother elevated the footrest on her mechanical chair and declared, “I am NOT going to any ear doctor. I can hear just fine.” “No, you can’t!” I shouted. She tilted her head. “What?” So I pulled out the big gun. “Your oldest daughter is already waiting at the doctor’s office,” I shouted, and she sighed and said, “Well, I guess I can’t fight the management.”
We waited a half-hour and more – very tension inducing, as Mother started complaining, even though some part of that time was consumed while my sister spoke privately to the doctor to prepare him for the encounter. Finally we got Mother into his office, protesting all the way, but once seated she respected his thirty-something doctor’s authority, and though the atmosphere in the room was tense she let him pluck two wads of wax from each ear, each big enough, as my sister later said, to have for dinner. He was about to toss them in the garbage when my sister wisely made him show them to her.
A few more minutes and we were out of the office and in the waiting room, where we sat while my sister finished the paperwork. I made some idle comment. My mother’s face lit up with pleasure. “I can hear!” she cried. That made this particular agony worth the price of the ticket. Who knows how long the change will last, but she’s brighter and more engaged than any time since my arrival and — a warning to myself and all within hearing range — she can once again hear a gnat fart, a line she delivered to the nice, young doctor and that I heard him repeat to his assistant as she left the room. (“Did you hear what she said? She can hear a gnat fart!”) She gave him his money’s worth.
The most practical lesson to be gained may be that some of the difficulties of old age may arise from caregivers overlooking or misreading symptoms because we aren’t seeing the world through their eyes, or trying to navigate it with their knees, or hearing it through their ears. A limp, for example, may be the result of toenails that haven’t been cut in months, because the elderly cannot reach their feet or manipulate a clipper. Fogged thinking, as we discovered, could be a sign not of Alzheimer’s but of congestive heart failure, since the weakened heart can’t move the blood fast enough to keep it oxygenated.
Which in turn points to a much larger lesson indeed. Why not, as the new atheists advocate, run our society on purely rational terms? Let us allow or even encourage early deaths among the congenitally malformed. As for the elderly, those who can afford to pay for their own care are welcome on board; let the rest fend for themselves. There is no reason, after all, to support any body who’s not contributing to the consumer economy.
That argument has many responses but I grudgingly acknowledge the hardest, which is the argument of pure selfishness: In caring for them the caregiver may become a bigger person. May, I write, because caregiving for two months is one thing while caregiving for two or ten years is another matter entirely. No one need explain for me why the Southern writer Eudora Welty more or less stopped writing during her 40s, when she was caregiving for both an elderly mother and her chronically ill brother. Caregiving, even when undertaken for a few hours each day, saps the artist or the writer of the same energy required to do the work. As Blanche points out to Stella in Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, “Funerals are pretty compared to dying.”
And yet, and yet. No greater lesson prevails — the future of our species, maybe the future of the planet depends on it: Being brought to see the world through the eyes of others and taking on their burdens as ours; because they are ours, or will be soon enough.
Last night we watched a video of a family reunion, held ten years ago, in which a distant cousin told how, after many centuries, with each of us having several children, we would each have a million relatives, a figure he reported as if it were incredible. I thought: No. We each have, here and now, six point five billion relatives, with the number growing every day. This is what Jesus means, in his much-misunderstood command to abandon our families: We are to abandon the old concepts of blood family, us against them, with “them” defined as all outside a certain degree of genetic connection (third cousin? fourth cousin?). Instead we are to see ourselves as members of the family of humankind. All men and women are my brothers and sisters.
***
My mother has stopped going to church and doesn’t seem to be interested in having communion delivered. But she still sleeps every night with her rosary and, so far as I can tell, prays it – probably in the middle of the night, when sleeplessness prevails and the prospect of death must seem very near indeed.
That rosary represents something outside words, outside reason, something to do with God. That’s about all I can say about it — that, and this fact, almost certainly measurable if one insists on the primacy of what can be measured, through electrodes and blood pressure cuffs: Each morning I enter her bedroom to make up the bed and find her rosary lying on her pillow, and each time I feel the stab to the heart, the chill at the bone, which is less about her mortality than mine.
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Taking Care
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Caretaking, Caregiving on June 17, 2010
All my fifty-something friends give me a thumbs-up, but I notice they’re not following suit: I’ve bailed on my glittering city life and even my life as a scholar in the desert heat and am instead camped out for the summer at my mother’s house, the house where I grew up, in a land of undulant forested hills we call the Kentucky Knobs, a long hour’s drive south of Louisville. I am here to be a supplemental caretaker, helping out and keeping company with my mother, who turned 94 last spring.
At mid-June, I’m two weeks into a two-month stay, and already this much is clear: It will be a long, hot summer. For days the highs have been in the low 90s. A stationary front drifts back and forth across the country’s mid-section, bringing short, violent, isolate storms that leave the forests steaming. Biting insects are plentiful after a wet spring and each day I acquire more angry, red, itching welts from chiggers and mosquitoes feasting on my fresh thin blood. Ticks abound and I have found them deeply embedded in the most private places, an experience so revolting that only my passion for hiking and swimming can overcome it. I swim often in one of the monastery lakes but I have never gone without bringing back a tiny hitchhiker. How a brain so small can store so much information is a great mystery — I think of Chekhov’s wise old man, telling the young bereaved mother that each of us is given to know only so much as he needs to know. A tick is given to know where people walk and how to conceal itself in clothing and evidently that is enough.
A small gym has opened in the county seat — the equipment is new and the woman who manages it calls me “sweet pea” even before she signs me up, and there is something impossibly charming in being called “sweet pea” by a stranger. She tells me that she and her husband drive over to my town to hang out at my family’s tavern, The Sherwood, on Wednesday nights, where the bartender, a lifelong bachelor who sports a salt-and-pepper handlebar and knows more about the Civil War than Shelby Foote, has been holding court for upwards of thirty years. When he took a daytime job that paid a decent salary and benefits I asked him if that would spell the end of his bartending. “What?” he asked. “And give up the stage?”
The gym manager and her husband are relocated Yankees, as is the Pizza Man, who moved from the Chicago suburbs about ten years ago and makes a pretty good pizza, being from Chicago and all. The pizza parlor has a hand-lettered cardboard sign in the window “Air Cond. Dinning” and consists of a chaos of tables and chairs assembled from Goodwill scattered among pieces of a band set (drums, amps, electric guitars). Pizza Man works construction during the day and has a pick-up band that hangs out on Wednesday nights in the back of his pizza parlor and he invites me to join them. I ask him his name and he pauses for a moment, befuddled, as if his synapses are reaching backward to a distant time and place. “Well, everybody here calls me Pizza Man,” he says, “but my name is Blaine.”
At the county library ten miles up the road I have commandeered a small meeting room for my work. Barely a decade ago I had to meet with the county librarian and insist that they carry my books, one of which had received (among other awards) the American Library Association Award for best gay/lesbian nonfiction. But the old staff is gone and now when I give the librarian my name so as to obtain a library card there’s much whispering and commotion. Young staffers come forward from their offices, asking if they can meet the “famous writer” and asking me to sign books.
I find this change in attitude more touching than I can put into words. How many little scenes and conversations and arguments must have taken place to bring it about, or maybe there’s just the slow, subterranean movement engendered by the books themselves, witnesses whose power roots itself in silence. In young librarians’ shy handshakes I find proof that we can change things for the better, that one must always and everywhere keep faith.
This, in the face of growing old. Within a day of my arrival I realized that for my mother and her caretakers the hardest years are yet to come. For the past decade and more we have fought my mother over the usual — everything from providing a handicapped accessible bathroom (“I can use the old bathroom just fine”) to building a ramp to the door (“I don’t have any problems with those steps”). We’ve escaped only the fight over driving — in her 80s she voluntarily gave up driving after an incident she refers to in the vaguest terms, whose particulars I don’t want to know.
All those fights seemed unimaginably hard, wasted energy — why fight a handicapped ramp when the steps were so obviously dangerous? Now I understand that they were her way of laying claim to her life, and so long as she could claim it, it was hers. Now she no longer fights, and her yielding turns out to be harder to bear than her resistance. Caretaking for someone who’s engaged, even if resisting, turns out to be both easier and more enjoyable than caretaking the functions of an otherwise inanimate body.
Mother is not there yet. Toward the end of the day spent napping in front of the television she rouses herself, and in the evening — her brightest hours — it’s possible to see embers of the woman who danced atop tables and learned to shoot a rifle better than my father, her teacher. Of her ten siblings, only she and one older sister survive, and the sister is more infirm even than my mother. Two of her nine children and one grandchild have died, and if she lives much longer she may outlast more of us, a prospect we tacitly avoid.
Watching her hoist herself from chair to walker — she has no knees to speak of, and this simple movement requires concentration, marshalling of resources in the upper body so that it may levitate and then command the lower — I consider that the bravest of all acts is consenting to growing old. After all, with a little assistance the alternative is readily available. “Awaken your faith!” cries the aged king to the audience near the end of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a play, as the title suggests, about greeting and enduring winter, most likely written late in the winter of his years on the planet. I saw it produced recently before world-weary, jaded New Yorkers, and though they wanted to read the the play’s first half as a comedy (which it’s not), at the moment of the king’s command there was not a dry eye in the house; and it was our collective tears, summoned by Shakespeare, that restored his dead love to life.
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Letter from Marseille
Posted by Fenton Johnson in Where I Am, Where I've Been on April 23, 2010
I think of the vision that Mrs. Shiflett has toward the end of a Flannery O’Connor story, in which she sees all the peoples of the world blended and mixed as one, heading toward heaven in a riotous pack of shouting, writhing, unkempt cripples and blind folks and street preachers, and bringing up the tail end of this raucous lot, last in line, the good white people who paid their credit card bills on time and carefully separated the recyclables from the garbage. O’Connor was nothing if not prophetic and, however written in the late 1950s, she offered us a vision of the globalized economy – the tower of Babel is us and we are it, and if one needed any proof one need only follow me through the streets of Marseille.
Not for a moment would you confuse it with Paris, though some streets have a superficial similarity – five story, shuttered apartment buildings, fountained squares, everyone smoking. But here every vertical surface is covered with graffiti, and in certain sections of town – uncomfortably close to the tourist district for the purposes of the city’s promoters – the city’s 2500 year relationship with North Africa is apparent. The smell of cumin and coriander fills the narrow streets and the prosperous kids who race by in their sedans are playing not the latest Eurotrash hit but music featuring quanum and nay and the characteristic quavery nasal vocalizing of the Arab world, all underwritten by the tabla’s beat. Every few feet a widow in white is begging, usually with a small child lying in her lap or sitting, bored and sullen, at her side. The men wear djellabas and fezes and converse in Arabic as often as French and they argue less about art and culture and politics than about money – every conversation is liberally sprinkled with numbers.
One can find this in Paris, of course, by traveling a few Metro stops out from the rich, white city center to the farther arrondissements and one finds it in spades if one goes to the outlying banlieues, the suburbs of high-rises which always seem on the edge of exploding into violence. The difference is that in Marseille these dark-complected populations are the city center, a fact that seems very unlikely to change, much as the Marseille city government is trying to encourage gentrification. Large public buildings are undergoing overhauls, and the city has a snappy surface tram, the most stylish mass transportation I’ve seen anywhere, in addition to its underground Metro.
But though supposedly modeled after the Champs Elysées of Paris, La Canebière – the city’s main drag, named for the cannabis that once thrived here – is so far from resembling it that not even the most overblown of the tourist brochures draws the comparison. Seedy shops line the street along with low-end restaurants, and even in the middle of the day a step up any side street takes you into the land of prostitutes and drug dealers.
And yet there’s a liveliness about the place that Paris lost long ago. Lower income people can afford to live in Marseille and do, and there is certainly not the phenomenon here, so common in Paris, of rich foreigners buying apartments that they occupy for 2 weeks of the year and then pay for by renting to tourists for the remaining 50 weeks. And there is something ironic about Paris, so often gray and overcast, claiming “City of Light” as its nickname when Marseille is endlessly bathed in light, baked in light, bleached by the ever-present Mediterranean sun. Paris is gray, Marseille is ochre and yellow and rose and taupe. These colors are as particular to the painters of the south of France as the grays and dark blues of the industrial Northeast are to the palette of, say, Edward Hopper.
The borderline between Marseille as “lively” and Marseille as “scruffy” is porous and shifting, but I find a uniqueness about Marseille that all the Marseillais immediately point to as the source of their affection for the place. It’s both of France and apart from it, physically tethered to mainland Europe by multiple autoroutes and the TGV but spiritually somewhere adrift off the coast of Algeria. Its character is so resolutely Mediterranean – which is to say, not Gallic – that at times walking its streets I feel as if I am in a different nation that happens to serve croissants at breakfast. The ambiance is as different from Paris and the north as, say, that of Québec City, and that’s quite a difference. It lacks obvious tourist destinations – the museums are small, their emphasis (rather like Oakland, competing with San Francisco) on contemporary art, the usual very mixed bag; there are very few grand monuments. But every other block sports a theater and the aggressively laid-back, unambitious crowd that hangs out on the Cours Julien has no equivalent that I know of in central Paris.
Locals tell me that racism is not as intense as in the north of France and I believe them. Partly this is a phenomenon that I have encountered in, oddly enough, Tucson, where the U.S. – Mexican border was so porous for so long that people formed family and economic allegiances across it and so became comfortably bilingual and bicultural. Marseille has been trading and exchanging stories with all coasts of the Mediterranean for so long that it sees itself as having more in common with other cities of self-styled “Mediterranean rim” than with its hinterland. Marseille, Alexandria, and Beirut see themselves as leaders in this new, lively, shake-a-leg venture, so filled with energy and potential and corruption compared to the tidy, law-abiding, cold-blooded north. On the other hand, another reason Marseille is less racist is because of white flight — its right-wing, conservative money long ago decamped to the palmy environs of Aix-en-Provence, twenty miles to the north. One could live in Bordeaux, Lyons, Tours, even Paris for a lifetime and still be thought of as an outsider. Here, after three or four years, immigrants call themselves Marseillais. In this it is the most American of French cities.
Some particular observations:
At one point I was in the midst of an open-air market and watching a fishmonger, an ordinary middle-aged man; and then he turned and I saw that his face was perfectly bifurcated by a line that ran from the middle of his forehead through the bridge and septum of his nose to his chin. To one side, the side I’d first seen, he was a dark-complected man like hundreds I’d seen; to the other side he was bright red-purple, almost magenta, either from birth or from some terrible accident involving heat. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, a common response I’m sure – I pretended to look at the fish (which were diverting enough) just to sneak a glimpse.
And later, at the museum housed in the Vielle Charité, the ancient home for orphans and the aged poor, renovated under André Malraux and rather grandly billed as the Museum of African, Oceanic, and Amerindian Art: Three small but interesting rooms. One filled with a small but first-rate collection of Mexican folk art (why doesn’t Tucson have such an extraordinary collection?) prominently featuring the fantastic Dia de los Muertos masks of the famous Linares brothers of Mexico City; the second with pre-colonization African art; and the third occupied by elaborately decorated skulls collected from head-hunting tribes of the South Pacific islands (New Guinea and neighbors) and from South America. Among these sits, inexplicably, a single kachina doll from an Arizona Hopi tribe.
I found myself fascinated by this macabre collection. According to its accompanying materials, all tribes, both South Pacific and Amazonian, sustain the same requirement of young men, i.e., that they kill and decapitate an enemy in order literally to be named. Boys receive a name at birth, but they don’t receive their adult names and they are not allowed to claim their individual stories until they kill and behead an enemy, which in the Amazon tribes identify as “one who speaks differently from us.” (Take that, Yankees!)
But the heads from the different tribes, Pacific Island and Amazonian, differ in that, though both are similarly decorated (strings of beads woven through the lips, lines painted on the flesh, wigs formed from the hair of the deceased), the South American tribes shrink their heads, in a process presented in a recipe so fascinating that I cannot resist reporting it here:
The skin is carefully peeled from the skull, which is then “thrown into the river” (the instructions are quite specific). The flesh is then boiled, according to the supporting materials, for “exactly ½ hour” to eliminate the fat and shrink it. Then it is scrubbed inside and out with a tool fashioned from the rough bark of palm branches. As a final step, tiny round pebbles (“less then 1 cm diameter”) are gathered and heated and stuffed into the cavity created by the skin. The heat of the pebbles causes the skin to shrink one last time until it fits around its pebble interior. Thus, the head of the victim is preserved in miniature – the final head is about a quarter or at most a third of its original size. The exhibition is all the more striking for its being preserved in an elegantly proportioned, handsomely restored 17th century building dedicated to caring for the ill and infirm. The museum webpage presents a history in English and some excellent photos of the building.
I left the exhibit wondering at the ingenuity and perversity of the human condition – who spent all that time, all those generations perfecting the art of head shrinking? And which is more perverse – the tribe who perfected the process? The collector — a neurosurgeon, to embellish the point — who traveled the world to bring back samples to be mounted in climate-controlled Plexiglas boxes with state-of-the-art track lighting? Or the dumbstruck, open-mouthed tourist who shells out two euros for the privilege of inspecting each specimen? These fist-sized heads, their features perfectly preserved and elaborately decorated, were once men “who spoke differently.” The reference calls to mind, of course, my own stumbling, awkward French. “Off with my head!” The question begs itself: Should we create a vast preserve in the Amazon to shelter these tribes – some of which are still holding on to a small corner of the rainforest – so that they can preserve their head-hunting way of life? Or should we educate them into our advanced civilization, where they can learn that civilized people prefer methods of torture – such as those our government practiced in Guantanamo and Al Ghraib – that preserve the victim alive?
I’m not sure what to make of this juxtaposition, i.e., shrunken heads and contemporary art. After leaving the museum, though, I did feel as if I’d visited a postmodern Ripley’s or Barnum & Bailey. In the 13th century the French king miraculously uncovered the bones of Mary Magdalene not so many miles to the northeast, where she had supposedly come to do penance after Jesus’ death; for centuries her cave was a major pilgrimage destination for devout Christians. We can take some assurance in the unchanging foundations of human nature: Even as we rocket to the moon and explore the bottom of the sea, people are still devising ways in which they can use our gullibility to lighten our pockets. Marseille is an old hand at this trade.
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Peak Wildflower Sunday — Romero Pools, Catalina State Park, Tucson
Posted by Fenton Johnson in On Walking on April 19, 2010
I do not expect to see a repeat performance of this particular spring.
I wake at 5:30 and tell myself sternly: Don’t just lie in bed. Get out on the trail. And so a Sunday breakfast of French toast and Raging Sage coffee and grapefruit just plucked from the tree in the yard and I’m on the road.
I reach the trailhead at 7:30, just as the sun is peeking over the jagged peaks of Pusch Ridge, the prow of the great mile-high desert ocean liner we call the Catalinas. Just below the parking lot I cross the creek, running at full flow — a very good sign, this far from the mountains. The trail follows an old gravel road for more than a mile through bonsai’d mesquite, just beginning to show its feathery spring green leaves, and deep grasses. After a half mile or so I begin to encounter masses of deep blue phacelia with scattered brodelia and virginally white desert chicory.
I pass a middle-aged and an older woman and after a few steps I recognize the older woman’s distinctive voice — she’s a lesbian colleague from the University. So I pause and wait for them to catch up, and we exchange pleasantries about no coincidence in the world, the flowers we hope to see, a poet she’d like to invite to campus. I step onward, thinking I’ll leave them in the dust — my colleague is surely in her mid-70s, probably older — but they keep pace with me until the trail begins to climb in earnest.
And now I am among the terrifically eroded and scattered boulders in the crepuscular light of dawn, and the floral display is stunning. In the week since I’ve been on the trail the white-lipped purple lupine has come out and competes with the phacelia for greatest saturation in its particular segment of the blue-violet spectrum. The yellow yellow sunbursts of brittlebush, which in past years I have seen spend themselves by mid-February, have in this cool spring finally decided it’s safe to come out and they have burst forth, clouds of sunburst yellow against the gray-green leaves.
The ocotillos have begun to flame at their tips — “burning brands,” I will think on encountering my first patch of them, with their thorns and tiny spring green leaves culminating in a blood-red lancet. Scattered throughout: Mariposa lilies, more than I’ve ever seen in one place, but instead of the creamy white of the Ventana Canyon trail these are the color of blood oranges, with a dark secret at the heart of their triune petals.
The trail climbs through tumbled rocks green with lichen and grasses, and on all sides and above and below the saguaro lift their arms in a collective shout of praise.
As I hike I hear in my head the repeating refrain of the Handel Te Deum that I rehearsed last night and that two weeks hence I will sing:
Heav’n and earth are full of the majesty
of thy glo-o-o-o-o-o-ry
of thy glo-o-ry
of the majesty of thy glory.
The winter rains have washed out this trail — surely built under the WPA in the 1930s – until it’s little more than a gully — no money to repair that from this penurious state. But where there is water there are flowers, and so I clamber amid the tumbled boulders as if walking through a flower-lined tunnel open to the cerulean morning sky. The trail rises until I hear below the rushing creek — rises and rises more until I am walking amid the friendly blue oaks, gnarled but bursting with life, with the broken rocks all about and new varieties of flowers, some members of the pea family I don’t recognize, and the delicate spike heels of deep purple larkspur (another competitor for maximum saturation in the blue-violet spectrum).
I crest the ridge and see the source of the waters: A great trident of drainages that merge to form the single chattering, tumbling creek that has played real-time counterpoint to the Handel in my head. A great cataract now drops down below, and where the creeks merge — pools, as promised. The pilgrim has reached his shrine, and he takes off his boots and soaks his grateful feet in the copper-stained stream.
I lay in the warm sand by the murmuring creek and put my leather cowboy hat over my face and fall immediately into a deep sleep of a half-hour and more. I wake to the voices of my mid-70s-plus colleague and her friend, chatting on the far bank. An inspiration.
Somewhere in here I discover that in fact I did bring along my cell phone, which explains why, as the very observant reader may have noticed, the narration is of early morning but the photos are of late morning. You must imagine the landscape graced by long shadows and pearled by morning light.
I spot a patch of coral pink Douglas penstemon, a cheerful cosmopolite who very happily propagates in my yard but that to my perception has been disappearing from the desert in the past drought years.
But now we are well into the day, 10 am, and the hordes begin arriving: the small children, shrieking and throwing themselves in the water, their parents with their dogs unleashed in this wilderness, big horn sheep preservation area where dogs on or off leash are clearly and strictly forbidden. If asked they would say, “Well, I’m sure my Lassie wouldn’t hurt a fly!” Down below teenage boys crawl across a massive boulder to drop one by one into the churning pool. The father of one boy sports a monster camera with a telephoto lens a foot long and he taunts his young son, who is hesitating — stepping forward, backing off — at the edge of a thirty-foot drop into a pool of uncertain depth. “Come on, I can’t wait forever. Am I going to have to come over there and push you off?” Finally the boy jumps, still wearing his tennis shoes (he’ll be sorry for that on the walk back). I’m relieved to see him bob to the surface and paddle to the edge, but I note that he does not look in the direction of his father’s camera.
As I am walking down the masses are walking up, up, complaining about the dust, complaining about the heat, complaining about their lives, complaining, complaining, complaining while they swig water flown in from Fiji in plastic bottles which they will not trouble to recycle, the sorority sisters in their spandex rhinestone-trimmed halter tops, the tattooed guys in their muscle-Ts, the paunchy guys and their huffing wives, and always and everywhere the most interesting-looking people, the people I’d want to have dinner with are those few who are walking alone, mostly elderly, the men bearded, the women walking with cross-country-ski poles-cum-canes. The couples think nothing of stopping to rest in the middle of the narrow trail, looking annoyed when I step between them. A lesbian couple is paused and engaged in Serious Relationship Talk — though I strain my ears the speaker audibly pauses while I am within earshot and as I walk past all I hear is, “You do these things with considerably more grace . . .”, the urgency in her voice betraying her words and her anger.
They come in groups, in masses, I am the pilgrim returning from St. Ives facing the crowd who has heard rumor of a miracle, they travel in twos and fours and tens and they are almost never alone, and they talk and they talk and they talk. I try to think: These people might vote for saving more parkland for the sheep, these people might maybe care about global warming, these people might learn to entertain themselves close to home . . . but it’s a sham performance. I begin to hate my species, until I think it’s not good to hate one’s species, I am a member of that species. Patience, patience. What a misanthrope I’m becoming, I think, until a calm voice speaks over the Handel in my head: You are privileged, and the extent to which you share less in humanity’s vices than its virtues is the measure of your privilege.
As I drop in elevation I realize that in these few hours’ heat the claret cup cactus, earliest of the major cactus bloom, has moved that much closer to busting out and I think: If I pay attention I’ll bet I can find the one who’s jumping the gun. And sure enough, just as I’m almost back to the car here s/he is:
What a curious species we are! Chattering like sparrows in the trees, mouth music declaring I’m here, I’m alive! Might we settle for less and so receive more? The challenge is not to turn the clock backwards to some imaginary golden age, when Jim Crow enforced itself through lynchings, same-gender love dared not mention its name, children labored long hours in factories, few received education except rich white men, women frequently died in childbirth, city streets were piled with horse droppings, milk was unsafe to drink, and trainloads of orphans were shipped out of cities to be adopted as slaves. No — our challenge lies in devising and bringing into being an unprecedented future, in which we loosen the bonds of fate as a way of achieving our destinies.
Poet Marianne Moore writes, “’The wise man understands that destiny exists and that it has need of him.” By way of emphasis Miss Moore adds, “Not fate – destiny.” What is this distinction she takes such care to point up, between fate and destiny?
Fate suggests submission to the forces of life; destiny suggests engagement. The former implies some all-powerful force or figure to whose will we must submit. The latter implies that each of us is one of the infinite aspects of Creation, whose fullest achievement depends in some small but necessary way on our day-to-day, moment-to-moment decisions. We are caught — trapped, some might say — in the web of fate; but just as surely we are among its spinners. In that spinning lies our hope; in that spinning lies our destinies.
What progress we have made from those good old days! and how it is where I place my hope and my faith.
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Photo by Jocelyne Rotily.