Semester magazine for Ellie Epp's advisor group
Fall 2003, Goddard College Individualized MA program
Image by Favor Ellis |
Anne Bergeron Favor Ellis Rhonda Patzia Cynthia Perry Astro Saladino Emily Van Strien Sally Koering Zimney |
EE, Editor's introduction
This end-of-semester magazine is an informal publication I assemble for my advising group in the Individualized MA program of Goddard College. It is primarily intended to show the members of my group what others in the group have done since they last met. There are many cross-connections in the work, and these are not visible unless there is a forum where everyone's work can appear together.
This semester I have chosen two pieces of work from each of my students (or three if they are short). I try to pick what I think is the student's best work, and also work that will interest the others in the group.
Many of the pieces I have chosen are candid investigations of quite personal questions. I am proud of my students' courage first in creating the work and then in allowing it to be shown.
This is the first semester our publication includes images. Where these
images are images of people, they are being shown in careful collaboration
with their subjects.
Anne Bergeron, Journals From the Middle Ground
29 October
The last time I was here, clusters of rusty brown leaves still hung on the trees. Now bare branches and the fine white trunks of slender birches, grey birches and maples, are interspersed with only a few golden tamarack. What stands out most against the white birch trunks is the dark green of the white spruce tree, not as common a tree in central Vermont as the hemlock and red spruce, but found in small groves all over our hillsides. The golden leaves of sugar maples seem distant now, as do the bright yellow leaves of red maples. It's been raining since the snow left three days ago. The storm moves out as I come to the land. I see the new grey gravel road up into it for the first time. Not the grassy lane it once was, but inviting still. Late afternoon. In an hour it will be dark.
I hear water rushing and walk into the woods to look. Water saturates the ground - the small brook that runs down from the hilltops is running high and fast. The test pit for a small pond dug a few weeks ago is brimming with muddy water six feet deep. A mound of dark earth forms a cone next to it taller than me. It is cold. No wind; rainwater pearls on evergreens, droplets fall everywhere to the ground. I get wet walking through brush, touching branches. My black rubber boots collect soft mud. I have Dante with me. He circles the waterhole, sniffs and runs down to the brook and drinks. He turns to look at me and walks back. He doesn't dash toward the logging road eager to lead me on a walk, as is his emerging habit when we come into the woods. Today the road doesn't appeal to him, or to me. We walk through wet ground to the crumbling stone wall amid white spruce trees that line the edge of the meadow. I step up onto a small boulder, leap down into wet field grass. Out in the open mist settles down. I walk the edge of the field and follow the swath of bulldozed earth up to the cabin. The part of our spring line that crosses the meadow has been buried; the ground is smoothed again, the wide trench a few hundred feet long is closed up. Things settle.
30 October
Here again near dark. I like this quiet time as the day leaves. The 1950 International Pickup truck that we inherited with the place, marooned on the top of the meadow, is fully revealed now. Blackberry brambles that covered it all summer were dug up to run the water line or have simply died away. Its doors are wide open, one white, one green, most of its once green body turned to rust. Inside the cab, two shiny plastic purple sleds with white rope attached cover the bench seat. They belong to the kids at the farm below. From the top of the meadow, a long run down into the farm's hilly pasture is wide open, the only obstacle the brook that bisects the field. The truck was last registered for the road twenty five years ago. I sit on the hood and look at my cabin, a board and batten salt box built nearly forty years ago. Wooden scaffolding is still there - a series of 2x6 beams that we stood on when we cut an additional window into the front of the cabin - as is the white spruce tree growing right next to the cabin, branches touching the windows, its top nearly as high as the grey metal roof. I twist around to look behind me, out over the rounded roof of the truck to local hills. Another grey day, low clouds occluding the tops of the trees. No wind. Soon there will be snow. Soon it will be dark at half past four. For now, I look as the sky whitens and the hills go gently dark.
31 October
The pumpkin by my doorstep in Washington is uncarved; the pot of pale orange chrysanthemums in a ceramic pot next to it, despite hard frost, still sends scant blooms out of a bright green stem. It is warm this morning, in the fifties, with temperatures forecast in the high sixties. I put my dogs in the back of our old Volvo wagon, Glynn loads slabs of blue stone, old apple crates and two Adirondack chairs into the back of the truck and we drive early to our land. Once there, we finish stacking cord wood and move a pile of brush as tall as we are and as long. Pushed into a hard pile at the top of the meadow by the excavator, we extricate white spruce, maple, beech and birch saplings from each other, tangled in each other's branches and layered with earth. It takes a few hours to move the pile. The sun is warm, the sky is clear, deep blue; there is a mild wind. We talk about where we might site the house, whether or not we'll make it to our friends' party tomorrow night, and then fall into silence, lifting long branches out from the pile and dragging them behind us down deeper into the meadow. A better place for burning them once the snow falls and I like looking at the top of the meadow clear. Just as we finish, I hear the Johnsons' lumber truck shifting down into first gear on our road. The load of rough sawn hemlock they leave behind will cover the small temporary barn we're building for hay storage and for shelter for the sheep.
We unload the pair of Adirondack chairs from the back of the pickup and bring them to the top of the meadow. We place them out in front of the barn frame which Glynn cut from downed hemlock from our woods and roofed with metal. We eat bread, tomatoes and sheep cheese as we look toward New Hampshire and the five high peaks of the Franconia range. Today, we also see Mounts Washington and Jefferson, all revealed in the cloudless sky. After lunch we get to work. Glynn cuts the hemlock to length with a circular saw powered by a propane generator; I fit the boards in place and nail them in with eights. We work in tandem until dark, cutting and nailing. By evening, we have sided the front and back angles as well as the entire back wall of the barn. The moon approaches half full and is orange above the hills. It gives us the light we need to collect tools, and carry the generator to the cabin. There is no rain forecast until tomorrow night. We leave the wood uncovered and walk into the meadow casting shadows on the grass. We return to the chairs, where we sit for a time and watch the moon rise.
November 1
Back to the land by nine o'clock. Hot tea in travel mugs, bread, tomatoes, apples and cheese in the pack basket, hunter's orange scarves around the dogs' necks. The first day of muzzle loader season. Hunters who favor bows have been out for nearly a month. Gradually we work toward rifle season that begins in two weeks and ends the Saturday after Thanksgiving. My neighbor Jack hunts with friends on his land and ours. I don't know who else comes here. I wonder about this briefly, then begin to work. As yesterday, Glynn cuts hemlock with the skills saw, I fit boards together and nail them in place. Another warm day, but the clouds have moved in. I cannot see the Franconias this morning.
The work is pleasing. Carrying boards and pounding nails into thick hemlock, I work up a light sweat. It feels good not to need the long underwear I have worn for the past few weeks, to not wear a wool hat. The dogs wander the meadow's edges all morning, chasing brown squirrels, following scents, sniffing fox scat. Their orange neck scarves allow me to see them easily at a long distance. I hear the high swirl of wind in the white pine grove near where we work.
Dark clouds carrying rain move in sooner than anticipated and we work quickly to finish our project. At two in the afternoon I nail the last board in place and our three-sided barn is finished. We move Adirondack chairs into the barn, and eat our lunch listening to light plinks of raindrops on the roof. By the time we finish eating, the rain drops have stopped, there is not enough momentum yet for a steady storm. I get the post hole digger, loppers and spade. While Glynn works on the roof of the cabin, I lay out a winter pasture for the sheep, one hundred feet in circumference. Inside this area to be fenced, land slopes down to the boundary with Rich's farm: an electrified fence with two charged wires attached to cedar posts, at the far edge of his cow pasture. The grass in our meadow is browning and up to the top of my thighs; thin trunked maples rise in it. I clip grass and brambles, make sure to keep nearby wild apple trees and young white spruce out of the sheep paddock. The sheep have tastes that range well beyond grasses - they peel bark readily, nibble on evergreens, chew up apple and deciduous tree branches. My two Shetlands, one Clun Forest and one Montadale have the appetites of goats and will range far. Once I have the edge of their pasture clipped and cleared, I take the post hole digger, pace eight steps from one edge of the barn and stop. Holding the two long handles of the digger, I drop the steel blades to the ground, squeeze the handles together and lift the first layer of grass and roots up. I open the handles, drop the tool to the ground, and the two blades dig in. I squeeze and take out another clump of rich brown loam. The digging goes well. There are few rocks, and in several drops and lifts, I have a hole a foot and a half deep that a six foot cedar post will slip into neatly. I pace eight more steps and drop the tool to the ground, squeeze and take out a clump of grass. Over the hills to the south, the clouds are grey-black. The wind comes up, as it has all afternoon, it's raining close by. By the time I finish digging holes for twelve posts it still hasn't rained. Although covered by clouds, I can see the light of the waxing half moon in the east. I take my tools up to the cabin, help Glynn carry the generator inside, walk out to the field to survey the coming of night, call the dogs, follow the headlights of my Volvo down our steep, newly graveled road.
November 2
In a box of books I find one I've had for a few years and never read - Bernd Heinrich's The Trees in My Forest. Now that I plan to live on land that is mostly forested, I peruse the book with interest. Heinrich teaches environmental studies at the University of Vermont and owns three hundred acres of forest in northern Maine. He has spent twenty years coming to know his land and the book is an exploration of the trees and a testament to his connection to his place, where, he says, he "roots his spirit." I turn immediately to a chapter near the end of the book called "My White Pines." I have been watching my white spruce trees with an emergent attentiveness; Bernd's knowledge of his white pines is intimate. I am taken with how he describes them.
He starts with their ancestry, centuries of virgin generations of pine tell part of the story of the natural history of Maine. The white pine was widespread in New England, New York and Pennsylvania when the first European settlers landed (196-197). The Abenaki called the trees, "goas," and Bernd says they were "by far the biggest and oldest trees" (197). Of all trees in New England, they live the longest, sometimes more than three hundred years. They grow straight and may reach one hundred and fifty feet in height. They were used for ship masts by the colonists and a market for them was found with ship builders in Europe. By 1820 the white pine was the emblem on the Maine state seal. The Penobscot River became the main waterway for transporting logs out of the Maine woods and down to the coast; by the start of the Civil War, the town had a population of 14,408, up from 277 who lived there in 1830.
The cone and tassel of the tree became the state flower in 1895 and the white pine became the official state tree in 1945 (198). Even so, by 1900, most of the virgin stands had been logged off in Maine - it is with this in mind that Heinrich manages his pines (198). A virgin stand of trees, or an old growth stand, depending on the tree, is generally two hundred to three hundred years old. Heinrich says that in spite of the decimation of the tree, the tree is still widespread because of its "biology;" it is a tree that "thrives on disturbance" (199). Seedlings of the tree are able to grow only in clearings - the tree doesn't tolerate shade - and so, prior to intensive logging, the trees likely grew in clearings created by fire, high winds or in areas cleared by Native Americans. Bernd's pines are between fifty and sixty years old - they stand fifty feet tall and their trunks have a diameter at breast height of twenty-two inches (201).
The white spruce trees that edge the meadow and form a horseshoe around my cabin are at least seventy-five feet tall. Like the white pine, they grow in clusters and in clearings. Where they are clustered, the trees reach tall into the sky; they haven't been thinned or managed and trunks are closely packed. In the meadow, others grow broadly with more space. One, in particular, stands alone at forty feet tall. Its branches reach out widely into the space, from the ground, up, looking like the quintessential Christmas tree, so different from those clustered, whose branches are thin at the bottom and often without needles. Those that grow close together, reach long and tall toward the light, competing with each other for sun, to photosynthesize.
November 3
I stand in the grove of white spruce where a grassy lane, wide enough for a truck runs through. Two dirt tire tracks reveal evidence of having been churned up by trucks that have come through - trucks delivering lumber, trucks delivering a five hundred gallon propane tank and then the gas to fill it, trucks delivering cord wood. Today Glynn and I wait for two more trucks, one that belongs to Stephen Beede, who hauls trash and operates Saturday morning recycling in nearby Washington. The other belongs to Paul Poulin, a local logger who will bring us two cords of wood cut to twenty-two inch lengths - nice thick chunks for our large Hearthstone wood stove that we bought second hand and sits in the center of the cabin. We move large stones, one at a time, to two ruts that have formed in the lane so the heavy trucks won't sink in. We are experiencing the rainiest autumn in twenty-five years. It is so wet that rivers have been cresting at flood stage, threatening, as is typical in spring, to overflow their banks. Mushrooms grow thickly in the grass and on tree bark, pasture grass is still green. I like the rain, and in particular the quantity. We've had several very dry years lately; the water table has been well below normal and it feels good to me to know that it is, for the time being, restored.
Shortly after we fill in the ruts, Stephen's two-ton truck with high wooden sides comes tipping through the pines. He is his usual friendly self even though it's raining and his partner, recovering from knee surgery, has to sit in the front cab while the three of us load the truck. Glynn and I have already recycled all the plastic milk jugs, stacks of old magazines, newspaper, tin cans, bottles, cardboard boxes, paper bags, and scrap metal left by the former owners. Otherwise, the cabin was full of things that could only be thrown out - mouse and moth-eaten sweaters, sweat shirts, blue jeans, tee shirts, jackets and hand knit scarves, old sneakers and rubber boots full of holes, old board games in dirty boxes missing cards, pieces, and play money, puzzles with half of their pieces gone, utensils with no handles or vice versa, wooden spoons with chunks of spoon missing, pine boards with old, melted candles stuck to them, damp boxes of matches, old food - unopened buckwheat pancake mix with a 1998 expiration date, half-empty jars of peanut butter, packets of Lipton soup powder, cans of baked beans, unopened bottles of herbed vinegar with plant stems and flowers completely yellowed but still suspended in the vinegar. We have dispensed with all of this. Today we get rid of garbage bags full of the mouse-infested insulation that we ripped out the first weekend we owned the place, broken lamps, boxes of cracked plates, chipped mugs without handles, three rusty bed frames, one heavy mouse-eaten pull out couch, a vinyl easy chair that looks like someone took a knife to it, the seat of a swivel office chair, bent curtain rods, torn curtains, three mattresses, one futon, pillows, all of which have evidence of mouse infestation, a white metal cabinet with an unhinged door, broken glass, asphalt roof shingles, two bags of asbestos tile, dented and dirty aluminum pots and pans. Glynn gets into the wide back of the truck while Stephen and I haul all that we cleared out of the cabin nearly two months ago. We're happy when we easily lift the heavy couch, when we toss a mattress deep into the truck, when we hear boxes of pans shatter the stillness. Near the end, Glynn finds a crock pot, lifts it to toss it in and black motor oil comes spilling out of it, pooling in a thick puddle on the pine needle forest floor.
After Stephen drives away we warm our hands by the woodstove until we hear Paul's truck groaning up the hill. He drives his pick-up with the hydraulic bed lift right up to the cabin and unloads two cords of wood. When he smiles whiskery lines fan out from the corners of his mouth; blue eyes spark. He runs thick fingers, red and calloused from work, through the short straight spikes of his red hair. White spruce, he says, as he looks at the grove of trees. You don't see those too often around here. He walks out into the meadow to look around, but today even the local hills are enshrouded with mist.
After we finish covering the pile of wood with large plastic tarps to keep the wood dry until we find time to stack it properly, we hear another truck coming up the road. Our neighbors, Jack and Suzi, drive into the pine grove and stop their pickup midway into the trees, before the ruts. We've come to see how the pioneers are doing, Jack says, laughing. Inside the cabin, he looks around and nods his head. It looks better already, he says of the place that is completely gutted, full of tools and work tables, sheetrock, 2x4s, spades, rakes, hand saws, every tool we own. Well, it smells better, at least, I say. We discuss our plans for the cabin and they remind us of the potluck they're having on Sunday night.
We walk out to the meadow, they look at the small sheep barn we have built and Glynn explains the overhang he will construct on the front of it this week so we can mount two solar panels. Suzi says she likes the mist, the occasional drizzle, the quiet of the day. The dark green of the white spruce stands out in the mist. As they're walking back through the grove of white spruce, Suzi turns around and looks up at the trees. This is really nice, she says. We say goodbye and then walk back under the canopy of trees to the cabin.
November 7
I arrive with the dogs mid afternoon. Though it's clouded up, it's a dry day, like yesterday, after four days of rain. And it's warm; fifty degrees. Glynn has been here since early this morning. He shows me the overhang on the barn and explains how he'll mount the solar panels there. I inspect the work he's done in the last few days. He took two days off from work so he could work on reinsulating - the entire upstairs in the cabin is now insulated and covered with clear plastic. He has begun to do the same downstairs. I decide to wash exterior windows today. Tomorrow the temperatures will be in the twenties, falling into the single numbers at night. This may be the last good day to wash windows. I spend an hour on scaffolding and on ladders scrubbing off pollen, bugs, and layers of dirt. I force myself to save the insides of the windows for another day, and take advantage of the warmth to set the fence posts into the holes I dug last Saturday. I start with the pole closest to the barn and set the six foot pole down into the hole, push loam with my boot and my hands back into the hole, packing the pole in well. Then I stand on a small step ladder and drive the pole into the ground with the round end of a maul. Dull thwacks fill the air. Wind whirs through the white spruce trees. The front leading the arctic air that would make this job a slower one tomorrow is en route. After I have set all the poles, Glynn joins me and we tack wire stock fencing to the poles. It comes in thick rolls and so has a natural tendency to curve. The challenge is to straighten it out and get it as stiff as possible before securing it to the cedar posts with thick staples. Glynn leverages the fence at each post with a 2x4, stretching it as taut as it will go. I anchor the fence to the ground with my foot and hammer three staples along the length of the pole. By dark, we have fenced one side. A near full moon rises to the east as we finish the last few poles - it is orange-pink in a smoke blue sky. A long wisp of cloud drifts through its center. The wind picks up.
November 8
Saturday. I arrive at the end of the afternoon, as the day fades. Temperature in the twenties; wind a constant twenty miles an hour, the Franconia range and Mount Washington golden rose in the late day light. Snow caps the peaks; the entire cone of Washington gleams rich white. In the meadow all remnants of last night's snowfall are gone - the green soft grass belies November.
Glynn and I drive down to Norwich on an errand, out over the winding road through Goose Green, a road that we will come to know well. It intersects with Route 113 in Vershire and we follow this route through West Fairlee and Thetford down to Route 5 that runs astride the wide, calm Connecticut River to our destination. We buy white primer and paint trays at the general store, then stop for tea at a café in Hanover. On the drive home, the full moon reflected on the river is a long white beam. Back in Corinth, we stand in moonlight out in the meadow, our shadows wide and dark; Glynn's face is illumined, almost clear as day. I see that a curve on the underside of the moon darkens, the full lunar eclipse begins. We watch in the cold until a quarter of the moon is dark, then drive home to Washington. By the time we arrive home, half of the moon is dark; the other half is orange. While I read, Glynn cooks vegetables in the wok. We check the moon through our window and watch until all that will be occluded is in shadow.
November 9
Another early morning at the cabin, my home territory, in the midst of November. Mourning doves, downy and hairy woodpeckers, chickadees show up at the bird feeder. This morning on my way to the outhouse, I see a blue bird sitting on the fence - rust belly, bright blue wings, plump, round body. This late migrant is a surprise. I check the field guide to see if it could be a blue warbler - it doesn't appear to be. The breast is too red. I see that tree sparrows arrive for the winter from the Arctic, and although I have not seen them, I suspect cedar waxwings forage for berries in the juniper. Beneath the ground, voles breed, long-tailed weasels are in the midst of changing to white. Raccoons burrow into big hollow trees, hunkering down for the winter, preparing to live off the fat they have accumulated. Beech nuts and acorns provide food for red squirrels, bear, grouse, turkeys, jays and woodpeckers.
I take the dogs to the woods. The brook still rushes from all the rain; I watch it spill over stones while the dogs drink. On the other side, we walk easily through brush, in places we sink into the wet forest floor. Not five feet from us we flush a ruffed grouse from beneath a clump of hemlocks. It angles away from us, moving wings quickly, lifting slowly on a long trajectory into the air. I like this land in November. The woods open, sunlight comes through, the day holds promise.
In the evening we arrive at Jack and Susi's home for a potluck dinner. The occasion is to introduce Matt and Sarah, Glynn and me to some of their friends and neighbors in West Corinth. Matt and Sarah, are a young couple who live on the Maplewood Road on the village edge, and have become Jack and Susi's junior partners in their sugaring operation. I meet Lindel, the dressage teacher who raises horses on Magoon Hill, Ginny and Stephen, local foresters and editors of Northern Woodlands magazine, Chris who leaves for the Tobago for the winter on Tuesday and who writes guide books about the Caribbean. I reconnect with Mary, a woman who taught at the local community college when I did ten years ago and who has just published her first novel at age sixty-three. I recognize Louisa, a woman with long grey hair I met a few weeks ago at the East Corinth library, who works as a substitute teacher.
I eat in the kitchen near the cookstove with Jack, Matt and Sarah. I hear about Matt and Sarah's plans to start a tree nursery, their Christmas wreath business, how they are adding onto a small cabin they have built on their land. We talk about the sugarbush. Glynn and I walked through it with Jack back in July, acres of trees linked by blue piping, cleared of all understory for easy access. The average sugarbush has sixty or so taps per acre. Each tap produces, again on average, ten gallons of sap that boil down to one quart of syrup. The return on syrup produced from an acre of trees is four or five hundred dollars, or as much as twice that, depending on the year. Jack talks about the Guy Fawkes party he attended last night; I share a similar story about a Fawkes party on November 5 hosted by a colleague at school. As the darkness seeps into our lives, little more than nine hours of daylight now, warm gatherings, fires - fireworks attached to an effigy and burned - put a hedge on the gathering dark.
November 10
Up early and at the cabin by eight in the morning. Another day of sun, warmer by far than the last two. Glynn runs errands in Bradford; I put a wooden chair in front of the sheep barn, consider the Franconia range, feel the warm sun on my face, and read comfortably. Dante and Annabelle sniff the trails of turkey, voles, coyote, grouse in the field and along the edge of white spruce. I wear a wool hat, fleece shell and vest, quilted work pants, long underwear.
I hear the cows groaning down at the farm - long, deep groans - as they are attached to milking machines. The low buzz of the machine rises, but doesn't obliterate the brook, flowing fast down the southern hillside. Haze sweeps across the eastern sky and ridgeline, meadow grass shines as frost turns to dew. Golden rods stands straight up, its sandy colored flowers dead on red stalks. Milkweed seed pods dot the meadow in white feathery puffs. The 1950 International pick-up was hauled away yesterday to the local junkyard. A few blackberry bushes, still with bright green leaves rise up from the space the truck left behind. Tiny hemlock saplings hidden under wheel wells open to the sun. Red squirrels squeak in the woods, metal on the barn roof expands as the day warms, tiny bangs punctuate the buzz of the milk machine. Annabelle returns and curls up a few feet from my chair. I hear her inhale and exhale. In the southern sky, a twin engine plane glides noiselessly, trails of steam form a "V" that points down toward the ridge.
I read an essay, "Restoring the Wild: Species Recovery and Reintroduction," by Stephen Trombulak and Kimberly Royar. Trombulak teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College; Royar is a biologist with the state's Fish and Game department. I consider the animals in northern New England whose populations were once endangered or extinct. An understanding of the animal ancestry of the place where I live lets me know the inhabitants of the land a little better. I read that caribou were native to Vermont and the rest of northern New England, but were hunted into extinction in the 1800s. Reintroduction efforts, made in earnest in Maine, have failed. The only place I have seen caribou in the northeast is in Newfoundland, grazing on open green meadows in August. Elk, likewise native, met a similar fate, but have been successfully reintroduced in western Pennsylvania. It does not surprise me that beaver were extinct in Vermont by 1841. They were legally protected in 1910, reintroduced in 1921, and have since spread widely, living throughout the state. It is a similar story with fisher, whose populations were greatly reduced by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the 1960s they were reintroduced in Vermont. Wild turkey were eliminated from Vermont, as well, by 1850, a result of land clearing and overhunting. In 1970, thirty-one turkeys from stock in Pennsylvania were relocated to southwestern Vermont, and from there successfully reintroduced throughout the state. The peregrine falcons, who still return to nest in the cliffs of Fairlee, were victims of DDT throughout the 1960s. After DDT was banned in 1972, they were reintroduced throughout the northeast and removed from the endangered species list in 1999. Osprey suffered a similar fate, and have returned. Each spring I lived in the Champlain Islands, I would watch pairs return to nests they made atop defunct electrical poles in the wildlife refuge at the edge of the causeway. As the woods return, the animals who live come back.
I hear the Volvo wagon rumbling up the road. I put away the books, help Glynn unload a heavy spool of wire stock fencing and we finish enclosing winter pasture for the sheep. Inside, we add logs to the woodstove, heat pasta for lunch, and sit in front of the fire and eat. Clouds move in. Upstairs, we spend the afternoon screwing sheetrock to studs, then I put a coat of white primer on what we've hung. In late afternoon light, we pack our tools away, and leave the cabin until the end of the week.
Driving home on the Backway Road toward Corinth Corners, the moon, two days past full, low on the horizon and bright orange begins to rise, heavy in the sky.
15 November
Since I was last here four days ago, there has been a winter storm. A fifty foot spruce tree came down right across our road; four more spruces in the grove by the cabin snapped and fell in winds that gusted to seventy miles per hour. Five inches of snow cover the ground. Even though the storm has passed, some of the wind lingers, stirring light dust devils up in the meadow. Five trees over fifty feet tall gone.
Driving home I notice two moose and a falling star at the same moment. On the side of the road, the moose stop browsing and stare into my headlights. I stop the car. They stand still, a mother and a yearling, then they turn at the same time and walk into the woods. This is a good time of year to see moose congregating. The rut is over and they come together to browse, getting as much food as they can now to help them survive the winter. Soon they will splinter from the group, go off on their own and find a place in the woods where they can rest, slow down, browse a little. For now, they browse together as the Leonid meteor shower begins.
* * * *
Anne Bergeron, Annotation of Bram Djikstra's Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place
Twenty years ago I discovered the landscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe, those she painted and those Alfred Stieglitz captured of her body. I found a book on O'Keeffe's work, and Stieglitz's book with photographs of her, simultaneously. I happened upon O'Keeffe in a University library while looking for something else. I sat on a tile floor, leaning against the stacks, rapt by the deep color in her paintings, by the magnified elements of the Western landscape, by how intricately she rendered a jack-in-the-pulpit, a yellow iris, red hills. I read her words accompanying the work. I turned the pages in Stieglitz's book of photographs, examined the rise of her hip bones, the flesh of her breasts, the wide backs of her hands, her sharp nose, and dark eyes. I was as much intrigued by her abstractions of bone, flower and light as by her intense beauty.
I had never heard her name; I had no idea who Stieglitz was; nothing preconceived to tell me whether the art was good or bad. I had brushed the surface of art history in my studies, but had never encountered any work that looked like O'Keeffe's. I had not been to New York City, the Gaspé, Lake George or New Mexico. All I knew was that I had never been so taken with the paintings, words and body of an artist. I got off the library floor and checked out the books.
I spent weeks looking at O'Keeffe's paintings and writing. She wrote about driving in a Model A Ford across the desert to camp and paint, of the wind shaking the tent, of coyotes calling. She ate canned moose meat, fresh fish, and warm bread in a French home in the Gaspé. She collected skulls and bones she found on the desert floor.
She said that other people "hung all their associations on her flowers," that "some people she had loved made her see nothing," that the world viewed her paintings as abstractions. But they are so real to me, she said, that they are almost photographic. In order to understand "the unexplainable thing in nature" that defines the world as infinitely beyond our understanding, she needed, she said, to create form. Her words made a new sense to me. Lawrence Tree and Red Hills and Pedernal became the forms I imagined when I pictured the Southwest.
I tried to find more books of her work, searched the Jansen art history text, found nothing. I savored what I read about her in Stieglitz's books. I started collecting black skirts. I favored white blouses. I bought two of O'Keeffe's prints and a portrait of her at the Harvard Coop. I hung the prints in my first high school classroom in northern New Hampshire. I matted the portrait and placed it in the 200-year-old house I shared with another teacher. I bought one book of O'Keeffe's paintings. I talked about her and her work to my students; we wrote about her images. One March day in 1986, a student raised her hand in my class and said, "You know that woman that you like so much who paints - I heard on the radio that she died."
At the end of my first year of high school teaching, I quit my job and joined my boyfriend on my first journey west. As I sat in stalled traffic on Interstate 95 outside of New York City, I began reading a biography of O'Keeffe, cobbled together from interviews with anyone who remotely knew her, from her own writing and from Stieglitz's work. O'Keeffe had slammed the door of her Abiquiu home in the biographer's face; O'Keeffe was irascible, reclusive, full of intolerance. Three days into the trip on a Sunday morning, I walked into the Art Institute in Chicago because I knew I would find three of O'Keeffe's paintings there. The moment I saw the corner of Sky Above Clouds IV hanging over the landing on a stairwell, I broke into a run. It was far bigger than I imagined. I sat before it, stood before it, paced its length, welled with tears.
Late in August, we came into New Mexico. I hiked in cliff dwellings around Taos and Santa Fe, skirted Abiquiu. Blue sky, red hills, papery yellow hollyhocks, dust on my jeans. Dry days walking in canyon washes; cold nights on the desert floor, wrapped in sleeping bags, watching stars blink in a low black sky.
In 1989, back in New Hampshire and teaching once more, I took the day off from school to drive to New York City for the O'Keeffe retrospective. Paintings, smaller than I would have guessed, and early drawings and sketches, filled room after room. I saw the The Lawrence Tree, several Jack-in-the-Pulpits, image after image of pelvis bone and sky. I returned home with a print of Music Pink and Blue II and hung it on my classroom wall.
By 1997, when I found myself back in New Mexico, O'Keeffe's work enjoyed wide appreciation in the culture at large. New books on her works and life emerged that included her many letters and a wealth of information about her relationships with Anita Pollitzer, Steiglitz, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Tony Luhan, Ansel Adams. As we drove down from the San Juan Mountains through Durango and Aztec, and out a long, dirt road with deep potholes to the ruins of Pueblo Bonito, I was not much thinking of O'Keeffe. We spent three days hiking in ruins, and then Glynn and I climbed to the summit of Wheeler Peak. When we came into Santa Fe, I discovered a permanent O'Keeffe museum would open in five days.
We drove up to Abiquiu and set up camp on a reservoir in view of the pedernal, a few miles from the adobe house O'Keeffe called home. On the far side of the lake, a forest fire burned. We hiked dry trails around Ghost Ranch and wandered among sage brush in red hills. One day I walked up the steep road to O'Keeffe's house. A sign warned people like me away. We returned to Santa Fe, Sunday morning, 7 a.m., two hours before the museum would first open to the public. The line outside was thick and wound along several blocks under hot sun. Finally inside, I found guards in black uniforms with strict orders to usher everyone through in eighty minutes. Even though I hung back a lot, it all felt like ten minutes, and I was once again out on the street.
What was I hoping to feel and see? The immensity and freedom the places of O'Keeffe's paintings engendered in me so many years back? The ghost of a grey-haired woman wearing a black skirt and denim jacket - her set jaw and wrinkled face? Had I, as art critic and professor Bram Dijikstra would say, "turned O'Keeffe into an icon of her art - a preternatural creature, shamanistic, exalted, and removed from everyday experience" (9)? Had I come to acknowledge, not the work, but all of what she had symbolized for me since that day in the University library? Was it inevitable that I would leave the museum created to house her work disappointed?
In 1980, in the University library, I found the paintings and the painter - I found New Mexico, New York City, the Gaspé, Lake George, and a distinct woman whose body and face articulated independence and strength, and whose rendering of place was absolutely inseparable, to me, from that body and face. I read her body like I read the The Lawrence Tree, Sky Above Clouds IV, Pelvis With Moon. I read the paintings for what they could teach me about trees, desert and sky. I read her body for what it had to teach me about the beauty of flesh. Looking at her body led me to an appreciation of my own. In discovering O'Keeffe, I acknowledged my own love of place.
* * * *
I have always taken Georgia O'Keeffe at her word.
I believed her when she said,
I find that I have painted my life - without knowing. After painting the shell and shingle many times, I did a misty landscape of the mountain across the lake, and the mountain became the shape of the shingle - the mountain I saw out my window, the shingle on the table in my room. I did not notice they were alike for a long time after they were painted."
And I believed her when she said,
"It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."
I found truth in the paradox that abstraction is a definite form, a form that expresses something deep in the self, not easily apprehended. And I believed this now famous sentence:
"Well - I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't." (text with An Orchid, 1941).
I still do.
Much has been said about O'Keeffe's caginess, her tendency toward deceit. I do not doubt that. But I trust the depth of her eye, the intensity and duration of her presence with flowers. I believe she painted what she saw. She is interested, first, I suspect, in forms and shapes. Given the context in which she came of age, at least as Dijikstra presents it in Georgia O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place, she had to be aware of herself as a woman, creating not so much a new and different art, but an art that was true to her nature, and of her nature. O'Keeffe's paintings show us the strong, deep colors of real flowers, their vibrancy and movement. They are not whispy and cool, but thick and brilliant; arresting. They demand that you look. Compared to the paintings of the tonalists discussed in Djikstra's book, who undoubtedly influenced O'Keeffe's aesthetic, her work is less ambiguous, less serene. She perceives in nature the force of energy present in it, the life in petals and bone. Her abstractions are detailed and specific.
Some critics have accused O'Keeffe of making an icon of herself. Dijikstra accuses Americans of not trusting artists. There is something about O'Keeffe that we do not want to trust. We see the Trickster in one of her many smiles and are wary. Her good friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan tells the story of O'Keeffe stealing a stone from her home; there is perhaps a sexual relationship with Dodge's husband, Tony Luhan. There is the solitary living - but so many people inhabit her writing, her letters. I cannot say that the particulars of her life do not interest me; the voyeur in me is tantalized by personal detail. But a desire for this type of detail did not fire my initial pursuit of O'Keeffe's art - it was the inextricable twining of her painting and her body that first held me entranced. I wanted to know about that.
I read Dijikstra's study in the midst of my own exploration of the connections between body and place. His book gives a perspective on O'Keeffe's work, and the first four decades of her life, that is unlike any I have encountered previously. When Dijikstra says of O'Keeffe's painting that "form as such becomes the object of desire - becomes what is both other and self," (6) I know he sees an amorous love of place at the center of her work. When he says "The world she makes us see is a superbly self-confident celebration of the material world as coextensive with selfhood, as the repository of the visual modalities of a personal expression unhedged by convention and the predictable formal arrangements with which habit contrives to dull our senses," (6) I see he situates her in a singular personal world outside of societal constructs, and that such a world is one few of us let ourselves experience. And so, on some level, I live my passion for the world through O'Keeffe's portrayal of her own.
Dijikstra says the sense of space in her work establishes a "common ground" within and beyond us. It is indefinite space, on the one hand, because what is inside us or the artist, or outside us or the artist, may not be clear, but her work "celebrate[s] instead the polymorphous eroticism of the body in nature" (6). I like that idea of polymorphous eroticism. In her work, I see a passionate love of nature - and of self - fused with a passionate love of place. Because she boldly expressed her eros for place, the work touched my own amorous connection with place, and made that love, not only recognizable to me, but valid. Because I found her body, as interpreted by Stieglitz (who expressed his eros for her in photographs) not dissimilar from the size and look of my own (or so I imagined) I began to view myself with appreciation. When I read critics who equated O'Keeffe's flowers with vaginas I didn't know whether to think I had been naively tricked into thinking I was viewing flowers close-up or whether her flowers, similar in form and function to vaginas, simply revealed the actual resemblance. I have heard enough people - my friends and colleagues, for example - reiterate that "of course, the flowers are great big vaginas," as if she had set out specifically to paint vaginas. I think she would have observed vaginas the way she did flowers and painted them, if that was what she was interested in. Dijikstra's idea that her paintings express the polymorphous eroticism in nature takes her work far beyond a discussion about the flowers really being vaginas. They are flowers, presented in all their erotic clarity and fineness of detail. And, paradoxically, they are abstractions.
* * * *
In 1998, Music Pink and Blue II hangs on my classroom wall. One of my male colleagues, a man born and raised in Ireland, brings a fellow male history teacher, into my room. The three of us are close academic colleagues - we share thirty students in American History and Literature. "So, what do you think that is?" Liam asks Bruce, with a sly smile. Bruce says nothing as he considers the painting. "Well, I know exactly what that is," Liam says. He sounds disgusted, on the one hand, and yet there is the smile. I know what's coming. Liam asks me. "It's music" I say. Liam walks out of the room shaking his head, with Bruce behind him. I half expect the principal to appear in my room to examine O'Keeffe's painting. I am at the school another year and a half and never hear a word about the painting again.
Dijikstra notes that flowers have long been associated with female eroticism, and that association was pronounced in the 1920s when O'Keeffe created many of her flower paintings (227). What O'Keeffe was doing in her work was to "reclaim" eroticism, by focusing on it close-up and big, from the "obsessive cultural symbolism to which it had been confined" (227). And to demonstrate that nature itself is erotic, I think.
Dijikstra's book got me thinking about O'Keeffe in a more focused and careful way than I have before. As I look at her paintings and read her words, I reconsider how much of an influence Stieglitz had on her aesthetic and popularity. The artist Dijikstra presents was less the darling of An American Place and 291, than an artist whose style and aesthetic was firmly established when, at age thirty, she met Stieglitz. Djikstra credits her with arriving in New York self-possessed and confident in her talent; two traits her relationship with Stieglitz is often credited with inspiring.
The opening pages of Djikstra's study introduce the gender ideology that characterized the intellectual climate O'Keeffe came of age in. The painting of her first studio in New York, Fifty-ninth Street Studio, indicates a turning point in her aesthetic, he argues. It is an example of "an art freed from prejudices of gender - an art that would instead find its motivation in a celebration of the creative energies generated by a sense experience grounded in reality. This fundamentally humanist concept was the motivating force behind virtually all of O'Keeffe's work from this point on" (7). Interestingly enough, it was New York City that became significant in her "attempts to establish analogues between her states of mind" (7) and the visual cityscape that surrounded her.
What Social Darwinism firmly established - that intellectual superiority lay with men, and concurrently, that the intellect was synonymous with creativity - was confirmed by turn-of-the-century philosophy and science that placed the source of creative intelligence in the semen or "élan vital" (36). For men to withhold semen was to store up vital creative energy. And the art establishment in America, desperate to compete with the cerebral art of France, wanted most for its signature landscape art to evolve and mature beyond its "feminine" subject matter. Woman and femininity were allied pejoratively with nature - both found weak for their chaos, softness and lack of intellect. Gender dimorphism led to cementing the following unfortunate, prevailing dichotomy: the mind was masculine and the body was feminine (31).
"True men" would counter the effeminacy associated with painting nature. Since Social Darwinists considered intuition as a specifically feminine trait, and since the United States was determined to emerge as a world power, a masculine art was needed to represent the new "muscle" the US was exerting in the world. It is this elevation of the masculine in the political, artistic and psychological realms that influenced the gender ideology of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The masculinist ideologies, Djikstra argues, had an influence on O'Keefe's work:
The dominant sentiment that had developed in American culture, as O'Keeffe was becoming conscious of the art world around her, was that true individualism - and hence true artistry (which was more and more held to be an exclusively masculine trait) - was a factor of 'the spirit of place' and hence accessible only to those who understood that 'the local is the only universal.' these favorite slogans of such eager early modernists as William Carlos Williams and the painters of the Stieglitz circle had already become prominent notions within the American cultural environment well before the turn of the century. (43)
The nineteenth century American painters whose native places and landscapes figured prominently in their art - Frederic Edwin Church, Arthur Wesley Dow, George Inness and Charles Harold Davis, for example - would be criticized by early twentieth century critics like Charles H. Caffin for their preponderance of "female concerns" (quoted in Djikstra 12). In fact, intellectual movements, like Social Darwinism, coupled with the influence of the modernism of the Paris salon and their "derision" of "women artists" (14) influenced American intellectuals and critics to rail against a perceived "femininization of American culture" (13), especially in art and education. Social Darwinists promoted an emerging masculinist philosophy and science that relegated each gender to its own unique but "separate role in the evolutionary process" (82).
Caffin's criticism of late nineteenth century landscape painters aside, the work of Church, Dow, Inness and Davis flourished in the United States, helped along by a thirty-three percent import duty on the French Salon paintings long favored by wealthy industrialists who collected most of the art in the United States. The tariffs imposed a "need" for arts patrons to look at home instead of abroad for art, bringing Church and company and their "tonalist" aesthetic into favor.
Tonalism, a turn-of-the-century movement in American art, gave, if only by necessity, landscape painting its desired "male" muscle. Undergirded by transcendentalist philosophy, tonalist painters worked to convey their belief that humans and nature were "one," (Dijikstra, 25). To express this unity, they sought harmony with ambiguous lines, soft shadows and somber hues as they explored the connection between the spiritual realm and the natural world. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution and the closing of the western frontier, tonalists looked back with nostalgia to a time when the Americans inhabited their landscape more harmoniously. The philosophy fueling the painting moved American art into a more intellectual realm, while at the same time developing a style uniquely American and independent. Tonalist painters' portrayal of the American landscape was admired for its "astonished reverence for the unrelenting, harshly demanding purity of nature, distinctly American" (17). French impressionism, with its aesthetic of sunlit landscapes, it was not.
Consider the work of American artist, George Inness, whose paintings typify the tonalist aesthetic. In his work, November Montclair, painted in 1893, Inness creates the landscape of his New Jersey home in hues of browns and greys. Mist permeates November Montclair, occluding the landscape; soft lines suggest an ambiguity among trees, sky, field. Influenced by the writings of philosopher, Emanuel Swedenborg, Inness explores the connections between the physical world and the spiritual realm in his work, expressing his belief in their unity. By the turn of the century, American art had entered what critic S.G.W. Benjamin had called for in 1877: an "era of mental development" (quoted in Dijikstra, 16). Between 1890 and 1910, tonalism had become respected as "a gracefully undemonstrative, subtly intellectual style of painting that ultimately succeeded in escaping the clergy's harsh judgments concerning humanity's (and particularly women's) subservience to the punishing censure of God's will, by first investigating and subsequently celebrating the bonds connecting the mind, the body, and nature" (13). Ideas clearly evident in O'Keeffe's work.
What interests me in the work of the tonalists is that it is rooted in transcendentalism. The idea that reason and intuition hold an equal place in the ethical and intellectual development in both men and women defies the pejorative assessment that woman - and thereby nature, body and intuition - are inferior to reason (24). According to the transcendental ideal, one's moral development relies on a capacity to intuit "the necessary link between human understanding and the intrinsic coherence of nature" (24). The idea that nature lives within each of us, that we are in it and of it, was dismissed by the growing dualistic science of the late nineteenth century and by Social Darwinists. It is this articulation of transcendentalism - a union of intuition and reason - that I see now in O'Keeffe's work.
Djikstra book presents this union of intuition and reason through an extended discussion of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Colloqui of Monos and Una," which, he says, presented a unified male and female principle in a society not yet fragmented by the Industrial Revolution. For Poe, Djikstra argues, only a return to the "harmony" and "coherence of nature" could reconnect the male/female split wrought by our emergence into an industrial world. This is what O'Keeffe was doing in Fifty-ninth Street Studio, he argues, - recreating "pregendered wholeness, when intellect and body are in harmony, when 'the idea of entity' becomes 'merged in that of place'" (30).
In O'Keeffe's work, I agree, intellect and body harmonize; identity is unified with place. But during the early years of the twentieth century, art became influenced by the categorization of mind as male and body as female; a dualism, Dijikstra says the work of O'Keeffe counters.
In chapter five of his book, entitled "The Body in the Landscape," Djikstra presents O'Keeffe's childhood in the Midwest as the place where she learned about "the textures of nature" (46). Watching storm clouds on the horizon and clouds "shifting hues of blue" (46) in the sky presented shapes and forms of nature that would become O'Keeffe's religion: "The meaning of life, to her, was a festive, non-prescriptive being-in-the-world" (47). She was, he says, "a humanist and a realist" (47). The tonalists and their theory that nature was a corollary to human emotions influenced O'Keeffe, or at least was a theory with which she found resonance. Because tonalists were seen as distinctly American, the early modernist movement of the early 1900s, of which O'Keeffe was a part, looked to them for technique and style.
When O'Keeffe was in art school, she painted two poplar trees she had seen at night. The next day she showed them to a fellow student, who told her they lacked color. To show her what he meant, he painted bright colors onto them, in the manner of the French Impressionists. She thought the student had ruined her work. She painted over it once more, trying to recapture what she had seen in the trees, but the paint dried thickly and the work failed. O'Keeffe kept the painting for years because "it represented an effort toward something that had meaning to me - much more than the work at school" (72). In representing what she saw in the tree in dark, muted colors, she was working in the style of the tonalists. This incident and others at art school forced O'Keeffe to resist the imposition of style, and of specifically masculine and feminine forms. Her idea was to capture the emotion - the awe and delight - that she felt in the presence of nature, and "to find a way to express the nongendered essence of the gendered human body" (72). Her work to find a "nongendered essence" was her attempt to recapture the pre-industrial culture of America, as illustrated in Poe's "Monos and Una."
By 1910, O'Keeffe and other American modernists had separated themselves in their love of abstraction from a cooler European aesthetic that favored elevating the intellect over nature as a means of achieving transcendence. O'Keeffe's work at this time, Djikstra argues, displayed "a continuing and unwavering respect for the visual-tactile forms of nature" (160), prefiguring oversized jack-in-the-pulpits, iris, bones.
Again, this respect for form and specificity in abstraction is what I see now when I look at O'Keeffe's work. It is what makes me believe what she said about her flowers. Stieglitz saw sexual themes in O'Keeffe's work, themes she would come to discount. And as Djikstra notes, she abdicates outline for color (181) in order to represent the connection between emotions and the objects of the material world, although the color contrasts create definite lines, as in Music Pink and Blue. Djikstra presents Stieglitz as an emblem of that masculinist aesthetic O'Keeffe countered in her work. And, Djikstra says this about O'Keeffe's view of being a model for Stieglitz's work:
But O'Keeffe recognized that, stripped of its masculinist posturing, Stieglitz's obsession with the erotic landscape of her body was no different from her own creative fascination with the earth, the leaves of a tree, or the curves in a riverbank. She remarked laconically that Stieglitz, in his art, was not really paying tribute to others, but instead, he was 'always photographing himself.' Secure in her own creative identity, she understood - and accepted - his photographic appropriation of her body as a form of artistic self-expression. (183)
His photographs, Djikstra says, communicated O'Keeffe's own pleasure in the sensory experiences of her body and her world.
And this:
Seeing herself become a subject of art in Stieglitz's photographs, recognizing herself as a landscape of infinitely subtle gradation and linear variation in the sharply modulated lines and shadows of her loins, her arms, and her breasts, she at once began to rethink the function of volume and line in her own work, and to uncover in nature that topography of the emotions she had recognized in the body of the man's desire. If for Stieglitz her body had become the landscape of his personal longing, if he was unable to express himself through her body, and turn her body into the matter of his life, then the matter she loved could just as easily become body to her sense of self. (187)
O'Keeffe's perception of a clear link between her body and the earth may be what spoke to me twenty years ago in the University library. O'Keeffe did not fear her own nature. She did not fear being a woman, being erotic, nor did she deny the earth its eroticism. Her work celebrates who she is and what she perceives. She is a woman painting the experience of a woman, perceiving nature as a woman, yet she is a woman with a finely developed animus.
Djikstra says that Music - Pink and Blue II is the most graphic of her vaginal images. The cultural conditioning that equates sexuality with a fear of loss of control and of the vagina as a "portal to the unknown" (201) prevents us, Djikstra says, from seeing the image in its purity: "an affirmation of life experience, of joy; a celebration of being as being" (201). And because the painting celebrates the joy of being, it denies "our carefully constructed fictions of progress as valid motives for self-denial, also certain to undermine the systems of domination and submission that maintain our economic and intellectual productivity" (201). O'Keeffe, Djikstra continues, used the feminine to challenge that way we perceive:
If in the modulations of a shell, or a mountain range, or a flower, O'Keeffe is able to make us celebrate the body of being, it may be that her medium for the expression of that experience was most often the female body, but the essence of what we feel - that intense joy of the senses that is at the core of all good art and that confounds all theorizing - is human and without gender. (201)
Of all of the perceptions about O'Keeffe that Djikstra offers, this one articulates best what I remember feeling that day long ago in the University library. There was joy; my whole being leapt in response to the work, unencumbered by criticism and deconstruction. It celebrated nature - landscape, human and spirit. The human body, the hills, the sky, a shell, an iris, eloquent examples of polymorphous eroticism.
I brought a print of Pelvis III back from the New Mexico trip in 1997. Now, it sits atop a book shelf in my room at the school where I teach. Maxine, a senior, whose brown, oily hair hangs in a pony tail, who wears grey t-shirts and who dreams of being a corrections officer, came into my room on Tuesday. She reached out and touched O'Keeffe's painting, tracing the circle of the pelvis where it meets the sky.
"That's cool," Maxine said softly, moving her fingers out of the circle and into the shadow of the bone. "What is it?"
"A bone," said Shelby, whose blue hair, tousled on the top of her head, bounced as she looked up from her writing.
"That's so cool," Maxine said, continuing to trace a line around the opening in the pelvis.
"I know that artist," Shelby says. "I've seen her paintings before."
Favor Ellis, Imp
There is a story I want to tell you.
I work with a young man who goes by the street name Imp. Imp and I have been working together since he was sixteen. He's unusually small, probably 4'7" or 8", and as a measure of balance, unusually tough. He wears steel-toed boots and a heavy leather jacket every single day, with spikes along the sleeves, and "NGP" (Nihilist Gutter Punks) emblazoned on the back. His hair is cut into a bi-hawk; shaved close at the ears and down the center of the scalp, grown long in two strips above the eyebrows. This is a style you must earn on the streets, by proving yourself deserving of respect. He runs with a tough crowd, and by that I mean he has seen death many times, and has likely participated in bringing people there. Imp carries a six-inch hunting knife and a smiley, which is a heavy silver chain with a lock connecting the end links. So named for the wound it leaves when whipped at a person's throat. In the past year, Imp has started using crystal meth, which has marked him with "speed bumps" - red and black sores all over his body, which itch constantly.
When he comes to visit me, he does so stealthily, constantly aware of any police near the building, as well as any former or current business associates who may be lurking near the entrance. Imp wheels his bicycle through the doorway, and we engage in silent acknowledgement that this is not the bike he had yesterday, and that one was different from the day before. Once he's through the door, he looks both ways, then at his feet, before he reaches out his arms for a cautious, necessary hug. He smells like he hasn't bathed in months, and he agrees that this assessment is true. I know that if he takes off his clothes, they won't be there when he wants them again. Plain as that. He forgoes hygiene for the status of his leather and the safety of his body. He doesn't smell himself anymore.
He raids the fruit bowl on the table, taking bunches of bananas into his jacket, grabbing a handful of Twinkies if we have any. He plops himself on to my comfy blue chair and asks me how I am. We talk small talk while he eats banana after banana, Twinkie after Twinkie. He tells me his body doesn't feel well, so he's cut down to just three packs a day. He sleeps outside, so it's hard for him to know how he'll sleep on any given night. It's been raining lately, and he has holes in the boots I gave him for Christmas last year. He's been clean for four days, and he's thinking about just quitting for good. He knows he needs to be totally off drugs if he wants to get the Peer Advocate job in December. He thinks he can really help kids, if he had a reason to. He's right, of course.
The last time Imp came for a visit was two weeks ago. We went through the usual ritual of shy hugs and sly pilfering. He looked particularly tired, and seemed edgy. He told me he had only had a bowl of sugar cereal yesterday morning, and hadn't eaten since. He had an abscess on his arm that he needs treated, but the clinic didn't open again until Tuesday. It's raining, he's tired, and he's hungry. "I don't know how I'm gonna do it, Favor." He folded his arms tight over his chest and shifted his weight in the chair. I told him to sit tight, drink that water; I'll be right back. I headed for the kitchen. I knew the latest church group had donated twenty rotisserie chickens that morning. I put one in the microwave and heated it for five minutes. When I handed it to Imp, he asks me if I knew he was craving chicken all week. He sat in the blue chair, pulling meat from the greasy bones until he had finished half the bird. He told me he thinks it might be time for people to call him by his other name, Tyson. He asked me if I would be the first to start. He wiped his hands on his pants, and asked me if he could just rest for a while, until my next meeting, or until I had to leave. I put a blanket over him, and he fell asleep instantly.
I typed at my computer for two hours before it was time to go home. I wrapped the rest of the chicken and labeled it "Tyson's Chicken," and put it in the refrigerator. I wrote a note on a yellow Post-It: Goodnight, Tyson. Sleep well. Your chicken's in the fridge. Be safe, and I'll see you Monday. F. I slipped the note between his fingers on his lap and whispered goodnight. He didn't stir, and I realized how blessed I am that he feels so safe in my space; he's used to being prepared to fight for his life when he is asleep.
Monday morning, there was a note on my desk: a gift for Favor, from Tyson. A Post-It on a king-sized pack of Reese's peanut butter cups. He knows they're my favorite.
This is what feeds me. The tough boys trusting me, warming to me, coming to me for comfort. Part of me feels lucky, but I know what kind of work I do to get to that place of safety. I had a reputation a few years ago of being the only case manager the "hardest" kids would work with. My secret then was that I had conversations with them, instead of telling them what they were supposed to do. I made eye contact. I laughed with them. I helped them clean up after a fight. They all knew what I wanted from them was that they made choices that made them happy. Not choices that got them respect or money or power. But choices about their own lives that made them happy and helped them be safe. And now, get me in a room with a hysterical twelve year old girl just brought in by the police for prostituting, and in five minutes, I'll have her drinking water slowly, breathing and telling me she's scared and doesn't know what to do. Put me with a boy waving a chair over his head, and he'll leave the room, threatening everyone in it but me, and hugging me once he gets outside (that really happened). Even after I lay down consequences for violent behavior, these kids ask for two things: food and meetings with me.
Favor Ellis, Wake
wrong turn in Arizona
and we were mesmerized.
a circle
of grieving horses
nose to tail
counterclockwise
east north west south
keening over
a bloated foal.
three years later,
I have no words but these
for what happened to me then.
* * * *
Rhonda Patzia, Walking and rolling meditation
I was fascinated by the concept of walking meditation for two reasons. First, I can't walk well - sometimes not at all. What a challenge, then, to embark upon an awareness practice that represents a barrier to me in name alone. I theorized that the experience might be profound for me, considering that every shaky step I already take directs my awareness to my feet and legs.
The second reason I just had to try out walking meditation was because I was told not to bother with it. All the internet surfing I did on the topic just directed disabled people to sit. The info never lauded the potential awareness breakthrough of attempting it with a bum gait. I was just instructed to "sit." So I didn't!
With MS, I can only tentatively plan the night before for the next day. If I wake up with a fever - as I often do - I can barely get out of bed and a trip to the bathroom sends me ping ponging from wall to wall through my hall of squeaky floors, dodging my dog, who thinks we're playing.
However, this morning I awoke refreshed, but still had to go through an AM ritual of alertness practices that includes a cup of ice water, a heat sensitivity pill - ALWAYS accompanied by food - and green tea. Halfway through the green tea, I'm usually coherent enough to find my glasses, at which point the world materializes enough for me to embrace it - slowly slowly. But this cloudy and cool morning was different in that I was set on taking to the streets to meditate - rather than striking a normal body-pretzel pose on my study floor.
I begin. The internet suggests stepping out the door to feel my feet rest on the ground for a minute or so. I myself begin by struggling with putting on my biking gloves - for a better rolling grip - then wrestling my wheelchair out the swiftly-closing-in-my-face front door, to my too-small-for-both-ofus front porch, down my steps (throwing the 20 lb. roller ahead of me), across the aggravatingly-lumpy grass, down the insufferably chaotic driveway, and to the sidewalk/grassy concrete area that runs in front of our new home. Once I get to the sidewalk, I stand to breathe, planning to really begin the meditation at that point, even though I remember that one major rule of walking meditation is to make the practice my own. Tomorrow, I think, maybe I won't cuss at my wheelchair. Two women are coming my way, so I pretend to be inspecting my wheelchair tire as they pass. No time to be friendly, I think. I'm meditating!
Pushing my chair slowly down the sidewalk, I breathe and think about my feet first. My sock is all bunched up with my left foot, the one with the new brace that is a bit uncomfortable on my ankle, but not enough to stop me, and the doctor says I'll get used to it. I feel my feet lift and set down and I try to be intentional about walking in a straight line, which the brace helps on account of the plastic sole not letting my foot drop and drag. My walking problems only began two years ago. I asked Mike then if he noticed. "Yes," he said.
I'm liking what I am doing with my feet, so I relax them and move up my leg to feel clothing and wind on my shins, then knees, then thighs. I am attentive to how they are all working, relax them one by one, then move up to my hips and pelvis. The sidewalk doesn't have grass in the cracks anymore, but large cement filler nodes in each - like keloids. My wheelchair goes up and down them every couple of steps. I like the roughness. I feel it moving my whole body.
The how-to sheets for walking meditation talk of imagining that the pelvis is carving a three-dimensional triangle as I move down a path. This imagery is fun, but I'm swaying terribly, which frustrates me at first, until I imagine how interesting my triangle must look.
I go around a smooth sidewalk next to a hilly pond and park area. My muscles work differently as I go uphill. My back, neck, arms, all tight. I relax them all and re-relax my legs. I feel like a rag doll and wonder that I am still moving so easily.
I circle the pond, and when I go downhill, my chair wants to run away with my body. I have control again with attention to my legs, arms, back. At the bottom of the hill, I know I need to rest. So I set my wheelchair in the grass and collapse into it without attention to how I fall. I feel my body warm and tingly all the way through. I take some deep breaths. My eyes close. Breathing
But I hear voices. Distant? No, near; and my eyes start open and dart around and around like tracking lasers, like desperation. Do they see me? What do they think? Do they know I am meditating? They probably think I'm praying - but like a christian. Wouldn't want to give 'em the luxury of that thought. "My," they'll think, "isn't she such a holy and good christian girl!" No, dammit!
I breathe for a while - inhale exhale inhale exhale - until I feel my eyes in my head again and forget what the lightning commotion was about.
Do I roll myself home? I enjoy walking. I exhale and stand. I relax my muscles. The birds.
I begin
The breeze on my legs and across my face. I feel cool.
The sidewalk cracks. "Bump, bump." "Bump, bump."
Happy. Content. "Bump, bump." "Bump, bump."
Wheelchair bars in my hands. Waving to the passing car.
"Choock choock." "Choock choock." Old woman in a nightie, solitary, cutting her hedge. She doesn't look up at me and I pass, solitary. "Choock choock." "Choock choock."
Shadows. Birds. Movement of light.
Wheelchair up my driveway. Gravel. Muscles shifting. Backyard. Park. Sit down. Breathe
.
After, I feel very relaxed and as if I discovered a form of awareness practice that is more natural to me than sitting in a quiet room.
Of course, I think, walking meditation doesn't take me back to the womb, but to a familiar rhythm of my childhood - when through play, I was so in-touch with my natural environment that I never considered our boundaries. In addition, I remember that my best photography was the result of a series of walking/wandering explorations that I can legitimately label meditations now.
Interestingly, with regard to my challenges in walking, I didn't consider the whole of my problems while I was out. I didn't lump it all under MS, but just considered my ankle and foot and legs separately. To consider a particular thing is to love and nurture it. When lumping things, hate and blame are more natural; and I am fragmented by this ignorance born of inattentiveness and stagnation.
Isn't movement a necessary part of life, one that an awareness practice
should incorporate?
Cynthia Perry, Practical Zen I
I am interested in the practical application of Zen to everyday life. I am not interested in using Zen as a method for analyzing my psyche. I have to study and experiment with how the application of Zen practices and philosophies can affect my life on a daily level. My definition of everyday life is very simply the things I do every moment of every day. It's the tasks I perform day in and day out that put me in direct contact and engagement with the world. Crispin Sartwell states in Zen and the Art of Living that it is precisely in the mundane activities of our everyday life that we come to awareness, if we come to awareness at all, because almost all of our lives consist of such activities. He goes on to say that "such activities may not yield works of art. But they can be experienced as artistic activities when they are experienced in devotion to process" (32). This paper describes the main concepts of Zen and relates them, in a personal way, to how I live my life every day.
The Practice
The first, and most obvious, Zen concept that has impacted my life is the Practice. The Zen writings point out often that the words, lessons, and concepts alone are inadequate to help us most fully. It is the practice itself that gives us tools with which to respond to the situations we all face every day. The practice of zazen has three distinct aspects - concentration, meditation, and contemplation. The approach toward each differs, with the result being perhaps about the same - a stilling of the mind. My interest in the practice of zazen is simple. I think it is valuable and worthwhile to learn how to still the mind. There are times in my practice that I may use any one of the three aspects of zazen - concentration when I am purposely trying to center on specific thoughts, meditation when I want to reflect on specific words, or contemplation when I want to just be - although after studying Zen in more detail, it seems it is the contemplative aspect of zazen that fits my purpose and needs the best, and on which I concentrate this study.
The Zen readings point out to me what an influential part my mind plays in the daily living of my life. I have become more and more aware of how much chatter and noise are generated by my thoughts - getting to the point, more than once, of desperately wondering if I would ever be able to stop what seem like abusive mind games. The incessant internal gossip that compares, re-lives, analyzes, doubts, hopes, and fears weighs heavily on my ability to not only enjoy life but to be productive and responsive to it. The Zen writings describe this mind as the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the mind that is thinking all the time - the instrument through which all our thoughts and feelings, impulses and perceptions are translated into actions in the world. The conscious mind is very busy and quite unstable. Zen doesn't advocate completely shutting down the conscious mind and our ability to think. Zen instead provides the disciplining practice, called zazen, to control the conscious mind so that we can get in touch with the Big Mind, the Buddha nature, the Universal Mind. The goal of zazen is to quiet the conscious mind and become one with the Universal Mind. It is this mind that has always been here and that holds everything in its knowing.
Discipline is the key to developing a practice of controlling the mind. A basic discipline is required just to begin to include meditation as a part of my daily schedule. A lot of emphasis is placed on the word schedule in the Zen writings, to the point of saying that the schedule is your first teacher. Standing firm and adhering to the same time for contemplation every day is the first step in letting my mind know that I will not surrender to its desires. There is great power in the act of repetition, and my body responds very quickly to patterns of repetition. Once in a contemplative state, it takes continued discipline to deal with my mind and its thoughts - thoughts that remind me of what else I could/should be doing. Thoughts that cause me to continually have to justify spending my time in this place. But eventually, I reach a threshold, an amount of time after which the thoughts don't pull me, don't influence me anymore. I simply recognize them, name them, and allow them to move on. It is at this time that my perseverance wins out over my thoughts and I give myself to the contemplation, allowing it to be, naturally.
I believe that contemplation is valuable. I believe in the discipline it develops. I am now at a point in my practice where I want to push the envelope. I want to become more disciplined about doing it every day and I want to lengthen the amount of time I sit. It is totally empowering to know I can have control over what, how much, and whether I allow my mind to think. I want to extend myself so that I continue to reach what I think is my capacity for tolerance of time and silence and then push beyond. Strengthening my connection to the Universal Mind that is the inner place of quiet and knowing will allow me to find it more and more easily in every moment of my life.
Present Moment
In his book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn describes meditation practice as the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment (9). Living in the present is one of the most powerful Zen concepts and one that has already greatly influenced how I live my daily life.
Kabat-Zinn demonstrated what it means to live in the present moment in a powerful way when he pointed out that every other creature and plant on the Earth functions in the present. In Nature every event happens for a reason in its own time. Living in the present is about giving permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is without forcing. When there is no forcing one can surrender to the moment and appreciate it as it is. Not forcing means doing things in the most harmonious and reverent way but maybe not necessarily the most efficient way. Not setting goals, not forcing an agenda but instead, letting go and moving with the flow of life's energy moment by moment is living in the present. The analogy of the leaf just falling is a powerful visual for letting go to the moment.
Another benefit of living in the Now is that it gives me a way to deal with the concept of past and future. I can remember events and people in my past and I can think about the future but the only real time that I have is this moment right now. It is true that the circumstances that brought me to this moment are the result of all that has gone on before it. This moment is an accumulation of all past moments. Likewise, my action in this moment is the seed that will determine whether my next moment will be one of greater understanding, clarity and kindness. I can have regrets about the past and I can worry and wonder about what will happen in the future, but it is only this moment that tells me how I feel right now. This philosophy of living forces and allows one to live the Truth.
Zen writing talks a lot about the kind of Truth that comes from being aware of what's happening in this moment. Whatever I feel in this moment is what I am feeling. If I feel sad, the truth is that I am sad and that's OK. Jakusho Kwong tells us in No Beginning No End that returning to the moment is a way to renew our lives moment after moment because the energy of life is one of constant change (247). We suffer because we think every thing, every emotion is fixed and permanent. It's hard to know which is the cause and which the effect. Is it because we don't realize that everything is in constant motion and change that we feel the need to name and define our life. Or is it our obsession with having to define and label things that keeps us from knowing that life is constant change and that definition separates us from the whole? The Truth is that everything is connected and everything is changing. We are just as much a part of that dynamic as every other sentient being on the planet and in the universe. Kwong puts it succinctly when he says, "Once you are no longer separated from reality, once the duality of subject and object, inside and outside, appears less in your mind, you meet yourself everywhere (245). Isn't it interesting that bringing oneself into the fine-tuned space of this very moment can open up such a vast world of interconnectedness? It's the ever changing world of constant movement, of no beginning, no end. And even though to some this might cause a sense of fear and insecurity, for me it's a connection that brings calmness and stability and, of course, responsibility.
Mindfulness
Responsibility is a word that, for me, describes living mindfully. Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose. Mindfulness is caring about and taking responsibility for every word, thought, and action. Mindfulness comes directly out of living in the present moment. It is described as the cultivation of some appreciation for the fullness of each moment (Kabat-Zinn 3). Mindfulness is a sustained, mindful, attentive looking and feeling in each moment.
Mindfulness cultivates patience; patience cultivates mindfulness. This one speaks loudly to me. I am a high-energy person who has always prided myself on my ability to do more than one thing at a time. I'm the one who carries around the list, constantly checking off and adding each task that's required to complete the job in the timeframe allotted. I can be fixing one problem and at the same time thinking about how getting this one done will affect the next two or three things on my list. My approach to doing something has been described, in the past, as "blasting". There is nothing about Zen that says one can't get things done. Mindfulness is about the approach and action used to carry out the process. Acting with mindfulness asks us to bring an awareness to each task that allows us to see and understand the interconnectedness of all of life's experiences. Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as the "engagement with the full range of phenomena experienced by human beings" (74).
Living my life in mindfulness will require effort and discipline. It means being awake and aware of what I am doing as much of the time as possible. The skills I acquire from practicing meditation will allow me to quiet the thoughts in my mind which will help me stay in the Now moment. Mindfulness can only happen in the Now moment. It is this kind of attention that will bring clarity and meaningfulness to what I do which is what mindfulness is all about.
Everyday Tasks
"String moments of awareness together, moment by moment" (Kabat-Zinn 19). That may become my mantra for approaching the tasks of my everyday life. The Zen writings have interesting things to say about the everyday of life. It's referred to as the ordinary - an ordinary that provides the potential to come alive. It's the soothing motion of repetition whether we're sweeping a broom from side to side or using circular motions to dry the dinner plates. Zen emphasizes coming full circle, back to the ordinary and the everyday, Kabat-Zinn says (267). It's the particulars of life that count - how I walk, how I sit, how I eat, how I talk, how I relate to another and to my environment. It's an intimacy with life that includes everything I do - an intimacy that can only happen when I place myself directly into the experience. Zen is direct experience.
Zen teaching depends on example because we can neither talk about nor explain reality. Gary Thorp explains the importance of this kind of experiencing in his book Sweeping Changes when he says that "nothing compares to actually plunging into the water - where you can feel the wateriness to the very root of your being. When you "experience" water, you know it in a truly different way. You'll always be able to relate to it, even though you may have difficulty describing it in words" (136). Or the example given that in order to make good bread we must do it over and over until we become the bread. We must figuratively put ourselves in the oven just as we put ourselves into everything else we do if we are to know what bread is and what we are. Direct experience is about having no barriers between you and what you're doing.
It's about doing just one thing at a time and putting your entire self into it. How many of us read while we're eating. Watch TV while we eat. Talk on the phone while we drive the car. The true essence of Zen is in this moment; just do one thing. Experiencing life in this way brings a certain newness to everything. If we are truly engaged, we will experience the same task differently each time we do it. We will forget what we're doing. We will stop thinking and become one with the task. Without thinking, without expecting anything, we will be completely free within the daily activity of life.
When we reach this state of doing, it could be said that we are in a state of non-doing. The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to happen for this moment to be complete. Non-doing means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Non-doing is described by Kabat-Zinn as letting execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion, beyond thinking. It is a merging of mind and body in motion (44). Non-doing could be described again as letting go. Just as the rain falls, letting go is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. It seems to me that the ultimate challenge is whether we can be in touch with our life unfolding. And the ultimate experience is being in touch with our life unfolding. I believe the Zen methodology provides the tools that can bring me very close to this kind of experience.
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The practice, the moment, and mindfulness in my life every day. Practical Zen is about coming from a place within rather than being motivated by activities and interactions outside. It's about letting go. It's about finding the place, the space, and the time to become quiet. To engage from a place of stillness that connects me with each moment. It's about waking up and experiencing things just the way they are, in the here and now. With full mind, full attention, full awareness.
Cynthia Perry, Practical Zen II
Monday, September 22, 2003
I feel, at times, that my writing is very elementary. Maybe because I'm amazed at how difficult it is for me to turn what I read and have a real reaction to around into thoughts that flow and make sense. Is that one of the goals of this work - to become better at comprehending and then enunciating information? It's a huge organizational task for me to read about things in lots of different places and then regurgitate it in a thoughtful, intellectual way.
I feel I live with a view of life, I live a life that is magical, enchanted, feeling, and perceptive right now. My practice of being in the present moment is awakening even more of those types of responses in me. And I think, hope, more people "should, could" do the same? But when I get out into the world (traveling) or just think about the people I'm around every day, I wonder how I think I could do anything to change any of their ways of doing or seeing things. And how can I tell how they're perceiving anyway? I don't want to judge. So it's a personal thing. But what do I do with it? Should I or can I express it?
Things that I would love to experience are moving in the wind, on the beach, in flowing fabric. Dancing to Diana Krall with someone who feels it the same as I do and experiencing the sensation of our moving together. I can sense so vividly what that would feel like that I well up with emotion and my breath is taken away just thinking about it. That's something I could do forever.
I react. But who am I to think that the way I react is special or worthy of note, or that I can affect anyone else's perception.
I am a very organized person. People tell me that all the time at work. They love me for it. It has helped me find a niche in the workplace. But just being able to write now as it comes out, feels very freeing. It feels like I was at the point of explosion and this is a major release.
I feel like I need to find some theme, idea, methodology upon which to build whatever it is I'm going to take into the world? My perceptions? My view? Or is my expressing them enough?
Meaning, passion, spirit, closeness, experience.
Believe me, I'm not interested in psychoanalysis. I've mentioned this. I've done a lot of personal work (I vowed never to go to a psychologist) using a technique that a friend of mine has developed over the past 15 years. It's personal and I do the work. And it has worked. I'm not interested in Zen for that reason. But I have found that the idea of being in the present moment, (that that is the only time we really have) has given me a place to come back to and feel grounded.
I'm planning to go to a meeting in October where they will talk about work in the Peace Corps. That's something I wanted to do when I graduated high school. But didn't. It was a long time after that before I realized that back then I didn't have a real self. I wasn't really connected to my self. I have done a lot of work in the past few years, work that has built my self-esteem and opened my awareness to who I am - to falling in love with my self. I understand now the phrase, you can't say I love you until you can say "I". If I had known
Using technology. Camera. Music. Tape recorder. If I were more responsive to technology I could branch out and find new ways to express. Maybe the camera. Maybe film. I did think about that in one of my "open yourself to all possibilities" sessions I did with Margo before I came to Goddard. I liked the feeling of the movement better than the photo that stops the action.
Am I just all words and no action? What are all these big ideas - building a house, making a film, being an artist? And I sit here reading words to regurgitate in a report.
I play mostly popular music on the piano now - dance band music of the 40's, show tunes, 60's and 70's popular songs, David Lanz and other "new age" stuff. I've always been a good sight reader but never done any improv. I'm just beginning to feel comfortable moving away from the printed notes and letting my body speak through my fingers. When I'm not reading the notes, the music flows, moves. Is simple, with a melodic line that speaks. A lot of times in a minor key. In the mood of Spanish guitar. With a repeated phrase somewhere in it that is haunting. And the moment when the minor chording resolves to the major, a feeling of such beauty and completeness.
My playing has been described as with "heart" at the Unity church where I've been playing for both Sunday services since May. It has been another kind of "coming out" for me. A way of learning more about who I am and to feel more and more comfortable with that. But the interim minister who is here until February, when we will have a permanent replacement for Sherry, an unbelievably wonderful person who supported me and made a comfortable place for me to express myself through music, wants to hire a permanent music director who will put together "performances" each Sunday. That's not my style, so I'm giving that up for now. I'll have Sunday mornings back again. I sold my parlor grand piano about six months ago. My friends are letting me use their electronic keyboard, which is wonderful because I can play it, with the headset, any time of the day or night.
I love the look of Finnish words. Repetitive letters in geometric starkness. And the sound of Japanese words broken into short, crisp syllables.
Sometimes I think I could just go on living my life, everyday, being aware of how I perceive the world and everything would be just fine. But I feel I need more. It's like the Buddhist writings say, we seem to be searching for something that is here right now. I feel I have something to say in some way. If my "enchanted" experience of life is what I have to say, then how, to whom, and why do I talk about it?
There are so many things that pull me in. Goldsworthy's work. Taking the ordinary and making us see it. The air. The movement of water. It's not enough to build a small stone fence, you build it for miles curving around the trees and disappearing into the water. Doing more than you think is possible. Finding just the right stones. Lots and lots of them.
That juxtaposed to the amount of expression that can be read into a simple, single calligraphic line. Bringing everything down to one brushstroke, one moment. Maybe that's all we really have. I don't look at this Master's process as necessarily having a goal - an ending - a completion. I'm not looking for the final answer and then I'll be done. I'm struggling with finding a means, a method, a medium I can use that will allow me to continue living each moment with meaning right up to the last one.
The way I feel when I see rows of corn or wheat in the fields. Rows. Rows of sand in the Japanese garden. Rows of quilting. Rows of coiling that spiral into shape. Many rows moving together. Pattern. Simplicity. Essence. Stillpoint. Movement.
I have written these thoughts as they came to me. Can I find the energy to organize them into something coherent? I would like to just leave them.
Is all I'm trying to do is say something, talk about how I experience the world? I have enjoyed that part of my writing so far. Being aware and then writing about it? Or taking a picture of it? Or playing music about it?
I feel I need some kind of framework that gives whatever I'm doing credibility. Something big enough to make it real? Or noticed by others? Or gives me the confidence that I can do something with it? That's what I seem to be searching for.
That's one of the things I liked about wabi-sabi (besides the words themselves!). It's not feng shui. It's not something that's out there much now, YET! It's like I'm trying to be ahead of what the next rush of marketing hype will be about. I don't want to do that. But I feel like I need some way to be identified. Why is that? Do I?
No, I have had a very honest, deep reaction to the Zen thing, initially for its concept of being in the present moment. That has a whole lot of meaning for me. Just saying it can ground me to where I find myself. But I've reacted with feeling to some of the aesthetic principles that come out Zen also - the simplicity, the impermanence, the repetition.
Just the other day my "boss", the General Manager, a 35-year old woman who has a lot of the same expectations and runs the organization a lot the way I would, said to me that she was impressed with the way I was saying more and becoming more of a presence in what was going on there.
I have a reputation for not making mistakes. People at work make a big deal about it if I "mess up".
I like challenges. Taking on big projects that have a meaning. I have energy and spirit to put into things like that.
I've never had a job as a human resources manager. But that's what I do at the Community Mercantile, our local, 27-year old natural food cooperative. I've been in the business world all my life, having spent a number of years working with my former husband in computer start-ups where I did everything from writing legal agreements to designing marketing brochures to producing financial reports. It's there that I gained a lot of experience doing systems work - the design and implementation of procedures and processes. In fact, I would have told you that I felt my biggest weakness was in dealing with people, never been anything I was drawn to. But at the Merc, what I do and the way I do it is working. Jeanie, my "boss", had so much faith, or whatever, in me that she didn't even look at my resumé before she hired me as their first HR Manager, more than two years ago. I'm continuing to write policies and procedures, but I also get to "oversee, help, interact with" a family of about 100 employees in lots of different situations. I'm genuinely friendly, have lots of energy, consistently positive, and also thought of as being very professional with high expectations for quality work. It's turned out to be a good combination for this environment. Plus I get to work in a place that sells stuff I believe in and that I eat! For that I am very, very, very grateful. Like, it has been a perfect situation for me.
All of this seems a helluva long way from the intricate meanings of the tea ceremony. But this is what your letter has pulled out of me. Should I send this to you now or put it with my next packet? I'll think about it for awhile.
I do believe that the divine plan for me is to live fully, meaningfully, and productively. It's not that I'm not there now. I'm very, very grateful for the opportunity to open to the Universe and find more.
Maybe it's all about balance. Balance of moving slowly and blasting. Balance of rest and work. Balance of emotion and passion. Balance of desire and completeness. Balance of wanting more and having enough. Balance of knowing and wondering. Balance of holding in and letting out. Balance of speaking and silence. Balance of something and nothingness. Balance of whiteness and color. Balance of thoughts and actions. Balance of pushing and stopping. Balance of structure and chaos. Balance of control and freedom. Balance of planning and letting go. Balance of
Pushing, pushing, pushing,
What do I need?
What do I want?
Where will I find it?
Why do I need it?
What will I do with it if I find it?
How will I know if I've found it?
Do I already have it and don't know it?
IT
Why do I think that I will ever find the answer to those questions? I don't want to get into "pushing" mode again. Searching. Asking. The Zen thing has calmed me down. Too much?
Should I live my fantasies? Make beautiful meals? Dress in soft clothing? Dance in a flowing dress? Sit in the middle of a flower garden? Ride the wind? Sometimes it seems like those are better left as fantasies. It feels risky any other way. Like I could easily lose my groundedness. I can feel them almost as though they are real. Maybe that's the feeling I'm trying to express - in words? How else?
An expertise, a mastery, an authority to claim. I had the thought a couple of weeks ago that one thing I would be good at and maybe should prepare for is running an organization - heading up something. Prepare for? Anything other than this moment is speculation.
My husband was always trying to turn my creative work into a business. We'll sell the dolls/figures you create, the children's clothing you make, the rugs you weave, the containers you coil. But it never worked because whenever we got to the marketing part, I didn't want to think about or try to figure out why people buy or what I had to do to get them to buy. I like the idea of handmade but not the idea of hyping that goes into just about anything that's out there these days.
I have been writing and thinking for more than four hours. I came home, opened the computer and it started pouring out. I get up and walk away and rush back because another thought is coming.
They're out. They came out this way. A big moment of spontaneity. I can't put them in any order. It's as it has to be.
Thursday September 25
It's 3:30am. I might as well get up and write.
I was only looking at ZEN as a basis upon which to build my project. There were some good connections being made in all my reading about it. Getting into the aesthetics, artistic part of it was very interesting to me. I like living in a "world" of connections. Where I'll find references to people, events, books, that I've heard about or read or done at another time. It's like Tuesday. I got off work and it was so perfectly gorgeous outside I knew there was nothing I could do but go to the university and lie in the sun at my favorite spot. It's very near the art and architecture library and I had some books to return. I decided I'd check out the current periodical section to read my favorite magazines while I was there. (Things like that excite, fulfill, make me feel good.) I did take the books back, went to the bathroom and as I walked through one of the aisles of books I set up an exercise. I thought OK, go to a book that is important. This has happened quite often for me when I've been unconscious about it. I will just go to something that is the right thing for that time. The only difference was this time I was setting it up in the beginning. I kept walking toward the periodical section. There's a shelf of new books near there and as I walked straight toward it I was drawn to a book, facing frontwise on the shelf. I picked it up to find that it was a book on a recent art exhibition that featured as one of the artists, Brice Martin, someone I had never heard of until David Clarke talked about him in his article on Zen and American Artists.
I had made a note at the time I read about him that I wanted to look up his art. I sat down and read the book. I really liked the art of another of the artists featured in the exhibit, as well. I learned even more about the influence of Zen on American art and artists in the 1930's, 40's, and 50's. And even that Georgia O'Keefe had made a connection with and been influenced by the calligraphic style. It had one of her pictures in the book. I can't find the word to explain how I felt when I saw her painting. So minimalist and immediate.
I really love making connections and living in a connected world. It gives everything meaning and opens to new possibilities, connections, all the time. It's about just letting things lead you, taking your cues from listening and being aware. I've also had an interesting reaction to reading about artists in this section on Zen. I actually had the thought that if I had pursued a Master's in art history, this would have been the perfect subject to delve into - the influence of Zen on American Art. Continuing on in a study of art history was never anything I thought I would do at all. I always enjoyed the connection part of art history the most. Now, out on my own and away from what has to be done, I'm actually making new connections that have meaning to me. And finding new artists whose work I can have personal reactions to. It has a mature feeling to it for me. A feeling that this is something I will always have.
In fact, that's what living this "enchanted" life gives me also. It feels like something that will be with me all my life. That it is very personal. Something I will know deep inside that I have. That means I won't ever be alone. It feels very satisfying to me.
It was interesting that a friend of mine, well, not really a close friend, but a girl I went to high school with who is living in Lawrence now, stopped into the store yesterday at lunch time to see if I was busy. I was delighted to have someone new to eat lunch with. During the conversation she said she really wanted to get away from watching her TV all the time, for one reason because when she did that, she snacked and ate too much. (This woman is not a typical couch potato. She has her own business of court reporting. Was on the debate team in high school. Bright. Etc.) She asked me straight out. Tell me what you would do with your time (if you weren't doing this "study"). I told her I had been considering that recently. How would I just "live" my life if I weren't being driven to some more immediate goal. I didn't have any problem answering her. I told her I would always be reading something interesting, going to the university library or to the used book store to see what was "up" next. Following leads and making connections that would undoubtedly bring new experiences and opportunities for creativity. I'd play the piano, listen to music, dance. I'd enjoy fixing good food and having a friend over for conversation. And maybe just sit. She was invigorated. I said, well maybe the first step is to get rid of the TV.
Friday, September 26
I am finding it freeing to not be bound to books when I sit down to write. To be able to just write what I feel, what is on my mind, and try to relate that to this topic without a lot of extra verbiage from others.
Maybe it's the little things that I need to concentrate on for sure. That I need to learn how to express. So I can know that I do have feelings. That I can express them. That I can talk them. To make my life richer, fuller, more complete. To counterbalance the blasting, routine, organized world. To go a level or two or three deeper. That by learning how to talk about these kinds of things, I will become a deeper, more caring, more communicative, more authentic person. To allow the feelings, the words, the thoughts, the gestures to become a part of my life. It's about finding my self in the ordinariness of life. But it isn't really ordinary. But it's also not the really BIG challenges, either. It's not the bike trip around the Gaspé Peninsula, building my own house, writing a book, running a business. This is quiet, unassuming, but truthful. Real. Ongoing.
It's been a long time since I was hard on myself. I'm finding this time around that I don't need or want to do it. That I can pull myself out of it quickly. But I am still haunted with the judgment that I'm all words and no action which is making me fearful to commit to any one project. Is the problem that I haven't found the right project? Or is it more a need to just experience what comes, as it comes, instead of setting up scenarios, creating experiences. For instance, there are particular parts of the straw bale construction project that continue to be in my thoughts - as a sensation that I would like to experience. In particular, I am fascinated with the feeling of being in a small room with such deep, narrow windows, and I can feel, through my hands, the sensuousness of applying the plaster on the straw to sculpt the shape. What does it mean to imagine these feelings? In some ways, that's enough. Or has been. Right now my hands would love to be feeling the cool wetness of the plaster and applying it in swirling motions at the rounded edges of the window sill.
The pictures of the straw packages of soybean curd and eggs in the Wabi-Sabi-Suki book. Their stunningly simple beauty is beyond words. The starkness of the tan straw with the white eggs. The square, triangle, and round shapes of the soybean products in the simple, red lacquer box. Can the essence of this beauty be described? Or am I just trying to describe my reaction to it? What do I feel when I look at it? Order? Peace?
The leaf packages made from wrapped and tied pieces of bamboo leaves. What do they speak of? What is so intriguing about them? The dark green leaves that wrap them? The delicate ties? The smallness? The texture? Do I want to hold them? Do I want to be inside them? Do I want to be them? What deep emotion is being evoked here? In one way I could try for a long time to explain the sensation they evoke. And in another way I am totally satisfied to let them just "be". To experience them and let them go.
I am really rambling but it feels good to just write from the feeling and not from an intellectual perspective.
I feel like my study of the different aspects of Zen was being spontaneous to what the world brings - on a path of discovery and connection. I felt that this was a very worthwhile effort at something that could inform my work. I probably was getting myself buried a little too deeply into the specifics of the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and tea gardens. But there are aspects of each of these that I reacted to very deeply. I tend to get caught up in following paths of interest and making connections that perhaps remove me too far. But as I make connections and follow leads I feel passion and excitement and in this case, it felt like it was, and in actuality was, leading me to some very basic truths.
I look for signs, synchronicities, and connections in all that I do. An awareness of the connections in my life helps me make my decisions, both at an intuitive level and after contemplation. The straw bale house idea comes from a place five or six years ago when I really felt I needed to build something of my own. As I look back, in the time period since then, I have been building something of my own, me.
I would love the experience of heading up a crew that builds this kind of house. It would be another one of those "challenge" types of experiences. I found a lot of the sites on the internet related to straw bale construction, including the ones where women are building their own and even starting companies related to that idea. That's another thing I know about myself and have to watch out for. I have to be careful about finding out about what other people have done with ideas similar to mine because then I tend to judge myself against them. I'm better off creating and defining what I do with the knowledge that comes from within me - not because someone else either has or hasn't done a similar thing.
An interesting observation that my recent writing has pointed out to me - the two extremes - total organization on the outside and the huge bank of feelings on the inside.
Astro Saladino, Reading notes from: Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City by Nicholas Christopher (these are all quotes from Christopher)
As with most film noir protagonists, the posthumous narrator is possessed by what Leslie Fiedler, in asserting the primacy of the Gothic influence on American literature since 1800, defines as "images of alienation, flight and abysmal fear."
The disjunction between the voice-over, cool and calm, and the tangled, ongoing, present action of what we see, provides inherent, revelatory, sometimes unbearable tension.
Edgar Allan Poe: our first poet of the industrialized, extended city, an avatar of the exotic and the macabre, the inventor of the modern detective story.
film noir: a term coined in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank.
Twentieth century man is . . . seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is made into its creation, its executive organ, and finally its victim.
The oblique lighting and camera-angling referred to, in both studio and location scenes, reinforce our implicit understanding that the characters' motives are furtive, ambiguous, and psychologically charged; that their innermost conflicts and desires are rooted in urban claustrophobia and stasis; and that they tread a shadowy borderline between repressed violence and outright vulnerability.
There is organized crime, social conditions at once fluctuating and polarized, the ebb and flow (and muck and mire) of politics and finance, ethnic clashes, cultural crosscurrents (and shocks), a Babel of languages and all their permutations (from street talk to salon niceties), and a psychic atmosphere in which nightmares and dreams, the fantastic and the mundane, collide at every turn.
"Labyrinth" (a metaphor for the noir city) derives from a pre-Hellenic, Lydian word, labrys, meaning "doubled-headed axe," which was an emblem of sovereignty in Minoan Crete, shaped like a waxing and waning moon fused together back to back and symbolizing the moon goddess' creative as well as destructive powers.
In The Dream of the Underworld by James Hillman, "Entering the underwold" refers to a transition from the maerial to the psychical point of view. Three dimesnions become two as the perspective of nature, flesh, and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial, mirrorlike images. Which could also serve as a definition of film.
"The undersorld is the mythological style of describing a psychological cosmos . . . the underworld is psyche."
The noir city is not just a given city on a given night but an entire urban civilization that seems to be unraveling faster than the mind can comprehend - a collective nervous breakdown observed at fast speed.
By night, the city's downtown is a tableau of slashing white light, steep jet shadows, and richly luminous surfaces punctuated by the flashes of chrome and glass on parked cars, the mirrors on vending machines, and even the stainless steel cart of an all-night popcorn vendor, who would seem to have little prospect of making a sale on the utterly deserted streets.
By 1955, the film noir hero of Kiss Me Deadly is no longer a prisoner of his own private hell; he is the tenant in a universal Hell, as boundaryless and unstoppable in its growth as the nuclar explosion that ends his life.
Much of the tension in the quick, slippery, descending arc that the noir hero follows to his destruction lies in the fact that the smaller maze is continually contracting while the larger one is every-expanding.
In the noir cityscapes we are often being introduced to the film's most significant element - the city - just as in other genres we more commonly see one of the characters enter a film's narrative frame behind the opening credits.
From the first, the labyrinth in the film noir - the city-as-world - is made to appear implacable and unassailable, and the hero puny and vulnerable. The one, all stone and steel, will endure; the other will play out a short, transient role among millions of others as insignificant and interchangeable as he, and then disappear.
The city itself is portrayed as a battlefield, imploding from within.
The great, sprawling American city, endlessly in flux, both spectacular and sordid, with all its amazing permutations of human and topographical growths, with its deeply textured nocturnal life that can be a seductive, almost otherworldly, labyrinth of dreams or a tawdry bazaar of lost souls: the city is the seedbed of noir.
Los Angeles: in 1830 a mission settlement on the fringes of the Spanish Empire, by 1945 it is a 500-square-mile sprawl.
Like the conquistadors who brought untold diseases of the body to the New World in the sixteenth century, the G.I.s returning to the US from Europe and the Pacific carry, not microbes, but lethal infirmities of the mind and spirit after four years of living day in and day out with brutality and violent death, and of surviving a war in which 1700 cities and townships were destroyed and 35 million people were killed.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: "No matter how many valuable functions the city has furthered, it has also served, throughout most of its history, as a container of organized violence."
Alex de Tocqueville: "I regard the size of some American cities and especially the nature of their inhabitants as a real danger threatening the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I should not hesitate to predict that it is through them that they will will perish . . . "
Between the economic poles of opulence and squalor, and the overlapping social codes of rapacious laissez-faire capitalism and organized crime, the indelibale motto of the postwar American city in the so-called boom years becomes "Anything Goes."
The broad cycle of film noirs that burst forth on the heels of the Second World War can be seen to comprise the complex mosaid of a single, thirteen-year urban dreamscape - often nightmarish, often fantastic and beautiful, always symbol-laden, and sometimes so starkly black-and-white (literally and figuratively) in its depiction of city life, and of the innermost conflicts and struggles of the human spirit in the city, that it shocks us into moments of recognition and epiphany.
These films share a stark, dark vision of American urban life. While they represent the apogee of black-and-white filmmaking, with their stunning visual style and technical virtuousity, on the deepest level they are not concerned primarily with black and white - good and evil,a s such - in moral terms, but with the grays, the subtler gradations (as in degrees of Hell) of a more pervasive evil.
The tremendous postwar boom in consumer goods and luxury items . . . and the wildfire acquisitiveness and gaudy commercialism that accompanied it, and that "freedom at any price" ethos takes on an even uglier tinge.
"final global dementia."
Businessmen have become indistinguishable from gangsters, nervous breakdowns and emotional burnouts are depicted as commonplace, and all of it is backdropped by moish decors, automatic weapons, synthetic narcotics, and lethal pollution.
The pastoral, they insist, is not only quaintly self-indulgent, but also irrelevant in light of the reality (the word itself begins to carry a repraochful ring) around us. Even from a purely demographic standpoint, this is not surprising: Americans have become an overwhelmingly urban people, with predominantly urban fears and obsessions (and with sprawling suburbs whose problems, too, have been imported from the cities).
Brainstorm (1965) and Point Blank (1967) are . . . populated by charcters so cold-blooded, existentially blank, and alienated - sundered, actually, from the disintegrating society around them - that the metallic, splashily lit nightmare cities of steel and glass they wander seem most chilling for their matter-of-factness.
In film noir, the actual and dream cities merge, are recorded fugitively, and transformed into myth - the most revealing mirror of all.
The tension, and the shocks, are heightened by restraint, and an ominous, unliftable sense of imminent danger.
City-building must be not just a technical question but an aesthetic one in the highest sense.
The Lonon we see, crime-ridden and hardscrabble, is recovering from Hitler's bombardments and from years of terrible deprivation whose aftereffects have lingered deep in its collective nervous system.
Fabian Society: British Socialist society founded in 1884.
The aftermath of war is rubble - the rubble of cities and men. The cities can be rebuilt, but the wounds of men, whether of the mind or of the body, heal slowly. (From Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.)
Los Angeles of today: a clotted mass of sprawling suburbs and helter-skelter expressways. Gertrude Stein: "There is no there."
The automobile becomes an insulated version of the city in miniature, in transit.
Today the air traveler in America might feel at timesa s if the entire country were urban. With urban points of departure and arrival, the vast countryside in between - the lakes, valleys, mountians, and forests previously seen by intercity travelers - are now profoundly absent. The airplane urbanizes the American consciousness even before its pasenger sets foot in a city.
Highly alienated, and alienating, the "hive" environments of noir buildings - exquisitely bejeweled obelisks and rectangles when seen from a distance, as in those long pans of nocturnal skylines that open dozens of film noirs - experienced from within had a profoundly adverse effect on the individual and collective psyches of their denizens. For forty hours a week, these office workers were trapped by the time clock behind sealed windows, hierarchically regimented, pigeonholed and cubicled, held rigidly accountable for their actions, breathing recycled air (and, in those days, plenty of tobacco fumes) while bathed in the rays of fluorescent lights.
James Garfield: Hollywood's first antihero, sexy, up-from-the-streets, brash and dangerous - but sensitive. Whether playing a boxer, a drfiter, a revolutionary, or even a violinist, Garfield brought these qualities to all his roles.
"rat race": entered the language in 1939, the dawn of the modern business era.
In the noir city, the nightclub can serve as a glittering, silvery-black mirror reflecting the after-hours diversions of the postwar economic boom, and at the same time can appear to be no more than a sordid, gloomy watering hole for life's losers.
The word "nightclub" enters English usage in 1894, on the hels of the so-called Gilded Age and the economic crash of the previous year.
Certainly by the late 1940's, the nightclu embodies the postwar hunger for luxury, glamour, and personal freedom.
New York Magazine: "a nightclub reflects the collective consciousness. It manifests the moment."
The noir nightclub as an amazingly elaborate, diversely populated, world-unto-itself establishment, with its own social codes and mores, has its cinematic roots in the fantastically baroque casino in the proto-film noir, The Shanghai Gesture.
The money complex is the demoic . . . the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.
A city reflects the new masculine aggressive psychology of revolt against the female principles of dependence and nature.
Artists in film noir are routinely presented as dangerous subversives or disgruntled radicals - though they rarely seem to be driven by coherent political philosophies.
Racketeering (the word enters the language in 1928) forms a sort of shadow government in the noir city.
Film noir is filled with sexual exotica and issues of deviation and fetishism.
Because of the censorship imposed by the Hays Office, which stifled even indirect representation of physical love and sex to the point where the byplay around cigarettes between male and female characters (proffering, tapping, lighting, blowing, stroking, extinguishing) served as a stand-in for sexual activity, and the lingering kiss came to be emblematic of sexual intercourse . . .
Noir is first and foremost a subversive form, galaxies removed from the usual cinematic concerns of marriage, conventional romance, love as elixir, and even "acceptable," ultimately redemptive, depictions of infidelity and divorce.
"the cultural sterility of the suburbs."
The suburbs may be spiritually barren, but they are also reassuringly static to their denizens, a place apparently not subject to tremors from the tumultuous currents underlying the city. They are a kind of limbo in which nothing changes, unless the change Is initiated in, or spills over from, the nearby city. This remains true today, of course, when the many varieites of violent urban crime have made their way to the suburbs, victimizing the very people who fled the city for fear of them.
The institution of the family is often portrayed with contempt and anger as a claustrophobic relic, a nuisance - something to be exposed, compromised, or fractured in the course of the individual's struggle for self-preservation. In short, the family is presented as something wholly unsuited to the stresses and strains of a disintegrating social structure, and then dismissed as just another, often feeble tool of repression.
While the principal female figure in film noir is the femme fatale/spider woman/dark lady, she comes in many forms, wears many masks, and is never one-dimensional. She tends to be more enigmatic, more textured, and more powerful than the noir hero. And however evil she may be, her real power, it is made clear, derives not from some malignant core or deformity of character, as it does with the most negative male characters, but from her sexuality.
Feminist critic Janey Place: "Classic noir stands as the only period in American film in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting, and strong . . . they are active, not static symbols, intelligent and powerful, if destructively so."
The femme fatale takes the extra, forbidden step that differentiates the transgressor from the aggressor. She violates codes. Personifies doom. Becomes the woman with a gun who is the woman with a penis. Yet she is more womanly than other women. In a world of violent men, who are often afraid, she is unafraid. She shuns and abhors, not men, but passive women.
In the cinematography of one of the earliest harbingers of film noir, the silent film Manhattan Sunrise (1927), heavily influenced by German Expressionism, character is for the first time revealed most powerfully through lighting changes.
Allen Daviau: "Darkness is the most important element in the scene. The most important lights are the ones you don't turn on."
Brainstorm is post-apocolyptic: you cannot reduce a desert any further; you can only stagger around it, trying to stave off the inevitable, inflicting, deflecting, and absorbing pain, running toward death even as you run away from it. In the end, circling yourself over and over again, until the trail you leave is a radial one, concentric circles that collapse in on themselves.
Hollywood has discovered that the classic film noirs are now highly marketable. First, of course, they must be "repackaged," in color, with contemporary movie stars, their plots watered down for an audienced - benumbed by an onslaught of mindles television programs, thirty-second commercials, and three-minute music vicdeos - with a short attention span and limited patience for digressive action.
Film noir attacked and interpreted its sociological conditions, and, by the close of the classic noir period, created a new artistic world which went beyound a simple sociological reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism which was by far more a creation than a reflection.
Paul Schrader: "Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems."
The faux-noirs: their paint-by-number stylization of authentic films noirs can be expected to produce little more than the occasional, and haphazard, cinematic frisson: something carelessly (or exploitatively) tossed off, comprised of serious elements that in other contexts might be sustained with lasting impact, but which in these films offers us only a quick and unsatisfactory whiff of the real thing.
The incomprehensible sizes of institutions public and private since the
Second World War, from business conglomerates to governments overseeing
enormously complex populations, has been a prime factor in the development
of noir as a cultural force; for the individual faced with a physical and
psychological labyrinth so fantastical in scope or design as to be unnegotiable,
the quest may devolve from a goal of illumination with a slim chance of
escape - as with earlier noir heroes - to one of bare survival while seeking
out the least excruciating torment.
* * * *
Astro Saladino ,"vivianpusher" Episode 1: "vivian the goat lover" (pilot), copyright 2003
SCENE 1
LOCATION: AUCTION HOUSE (can be indoors or outdoors)
OPENING SHOT: The shell of a sunflower seed is spit onto the floor. LEROY, the custodian on hand (oddly sexy, intense, etc.) moves quickly to sweep it up. Then another comes, and another, and it is revealed that the spitter is VIVIAN, an elegant but cold, and thoroughly unresponsive, woman. Meanwhile, a goat auction is taking place in the background; we HEAR the AUCTIONEER, people BIDDING, the NOISES OF GOATS, etc.
Finally, after a few more rounds of spitting and sweeping, Leroy decides to address this.
LEROY: Excuse me, Ma'am, could you please not spit your sunflower seeds onto the ground?
She continues to spit, and he continues to sweep.
LEROY: Apparently, you're not the kind of woman who likes being told what to do. Okay, fine.
She continues to spit, a little harder - and he continues to sweep.
LEROY: What is it with you, anyway? Do you just like seeing me clean up after you?
She spits, quite emphatically, as if this has become a symbolic language of some kind; he sweeps, with an almost blissful expression on his face.
SCENE 2
LOCATION: AUCTION HOUSE, NEXT DAY
Same set-up as in Scene 1.
LEROY: Hello again, Ma'am. Still devourin' those sunflower seeds, huh? That's okay. Would you at least tell me your name?
She spits, he sweeps.
LEROY: My name is Leroy.
She spits, he sweeps.
LEROY: I guess there's no hope for us, is there? For what it's worth, I like you. I don't know why. Maybe it's the way you stare at those goats. With such concern, such emotion. You got a thing for goats? Would you like me better if I were a goat?
He makes goat sounds. She ignores him, and continues to spit; he continues to sweep.
SCENE 3
LOCATION: AUCTION HOUSE, NEXT DAY
Same set-up as in previous two scenes: she spits, he sweeps.
LEROY: Won't you at least tell me your name? Haven't I earned at least that?
VIVIAN (quickly, coldly): Vivian.
She gets up and leaves, quite emphatically.
SCENE 4
LOCATION: LEROY/RABBIT'S HOME, THAT NIGHT.
Leroy is confiding in his friend/roommate, a fuzzy man-rabbit.
LEROY: Her name is Vivian.
RABBIT: Yes, Vivian Pusher.
LEROY: How do you know?
RABBIT: Because I read the newspapers, and I watch the news. I haven't insulated myself from the world.
LEROY: I've told you a million times, it's the only way I know how to achieve peace.
RABBIT: Okay, okay. Well, anyway . . . Vivian Pusher was the leader of the movement to free goats from servitude. Her father was Paul Pusher. He started the movement. He was a major animal-rights activist. It was through him, for instance, and his tireless campaigning and petitioning, that we rabbits were set free. We're no longer to be used for our fur or our meat or as pets or even as a symbol for the Easter holiday. That was all because of Paul Pusher. He died two years ago.
LEROY: Now I understand why she seemed so interested in those damn goats.
RABBIT: Exactly. She attends all the auctions so she can make sure the goats go to good homes . . . so that they're not bought or sold back into slavery.
LEROY: So that's why she copies down the names of everyone who wins one!
RABBIT: Yes. She has her people conduct thorough background searches on all new goat owners. That's a well-known fact.
LEROY: She wouldn't speak to me. She just kept spitting out sunflower seeds, and I kept cleaning them up. But the more she spit, the more I wanted her. It was violent, crazy, impassioned. They were almost like bullets. Seriously, Rabbit, I . . . I . . . I . . . feel something for this strange woman. I don't know why. She was so cold, so unresponsive. Yet . . . I keep thinking about her. Her dedication to those goats - it's weird, but it's genuine. I see it in her eyes. I like that.
RABBBIT: So why don't you just tell her?
LEROY: Because then she'll know.
RABBIT: Isn't that the point?
LEROY: She probably doesn't make a regular habit of hanging out with janitors.
RABBIT: You're not the typical janitor.
LEROY: She doesn't know that.
RABBIT: She would if you spoke to her.
LEROY: I told you, she wouldn't speak to me!
RABBIT: You were probably too eager, too invasive. You frighten women sometimes. You need to tone it down.
LEROY: Thanks for the advice, Bugs Bunny.
RABBIT (highly insulted): Don't call me Bugs Bunny! That is so condescending and species-ist! I don't even like Bugs Bunny! The cartoon is way too violent . . . and because Bugs Bunny is always shown eating a carrot, people assume that all rabbits like carrots. Do you know how many times people have offered me a carrot? I HATE CARROTS!
LEROY: Who am I kidding? I don't have a chance with her.
RABBIT: Don't think that way. Don't play into the ever-increasing class tensions. Please. I see this in the rabbit world as well. Former pet rabbits are seen as the lowest rung on the ladder in the rabbit world, and they've been trained to think they shouldn't even talk to the rabbits that are pictured in Easter decorations - who are of course seen as celebrities. I don't claim to be above all of this, but I genuinely try to resist it as much as possible. I guess that's why most of my friends are humans. But other rabbits resent that. They say I'm a traitor - that I'm befriending the enemy.
LEROY: Vivian Pusher. I love that name. It can have so many meanings. I can see myself "pushing" her again and again, in all different contexts - but ever so delicately, with utter love.
RABBIT: It doesn't sound very loving.
LEROY: Ah, but it is, Rabbit , is is.
INSERT: SERIES OF PUSHINGS: TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED: Vivian is standing on line in various places (restaurant, bank, etc.) . . . Leroy, dressed in a Ripper-like outfit, stalks into the scene and then pushes her, with ever-increasing manic intensity. The mood is ominous, and these scenes are filmed with an ironic and twisted suspensefulness, as if he's doing a lot more than pushing her.
SCENE 8
LOCATION: AUCTION HOUSE, DAY OR SO LATER.
Vivian is sitting in her usual place, spitting out sunflower seeds more rapidly than before. Leroy chases each one and sweeps it into his shovel. This goes on for a few BEATS, and then finally Leroy protests.
LEROY: I can't keep up with you today, Vivian. You've increased your speed.
VIVIAN: Do you really think I don't know it's you?
LEROY: What's me?
VIVIAN: You're the one who's been pushing me.
LEROY: Yes.
VIVIAN: You're a maniac.
LEROY: Oh, no - I pushed you with love, Vivian - sheer love. And it grew in intensity with each push.
VIVIAN: I know. I felt it.
LEROY: Is that why you never objected?
VIVIAN: I don't know why I never objected. I've asked myself the same question. Is this just another example of a woman feeling that she has no choice but to accept violence as a natural and inevitable form of communication between men and women? You know - the whole "her no really means yes" syndrome. But no! Somehow, I understood that the pushings were . . . like you said, loving. Does that make sense? To me it does. And do you know why? Because I was doing the same thing to you with the sunflower seeds. The more that I grew to like you, the harder, further, and faster I spit them.
LEROY: Why did you grow to like me?
VIVIAN: Because I really believe that you didn't know who I was at first.
LEROY: I didn't.
VIVIAN: I know. I thought that was sweet.
LEROY: My friend filled me in. I admire your work. And your father's.
VIVIAN: Well, my father pushed himself too hard. I warned him about that. He promised he would try to let up a bit, but then he pushed me. And I let him. I let him push me to the point of mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion. Campaigns. Meetings. Press conferences. Pickets. Protests. Interviews. Goats, goats, goats. That's all he cared about.
LEROY: Can I keep pushing you?
VIVIAN: No.
LEROY: Why not?
VIVIAN: Because it won't mean anything anymore now that you know I know.
LEROY: I know.
VIVIAN: But you can buy me a gift.
LEROY: What?
VIVIAN: What do you think a girl who's devoted her life to the liberation of goats wants more than anything?
LEROY: I don't know. What?
VIVIAN: A goat, of course. I'd like to keep a goat as a pet. I could never bring myself to do so before.
LEROY: Why not?
VIVIAN: Because I didn't want my father's obsession to become my obsession. But it did. I love the goats. Genuinely. I do.
LEROY: (warmly): I know you do.
VIVIAN: And now I want one.
LEROY: Okay. Fine.
TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED: Leroy bids on a goat . . . and he wins it! He is given the goat and brings it to Vivian.
VIVIAN: Why thank you, Leroy! Let's see . . . what shall I name my new friend? (A beat, petting the goat lovingly.) Vivian. I shall name her Vivian.
MOVE IN ON LEROY: He looks shocked by this news - absolutely horrified.
SCENE 9
LOCATION: LEROY'S HOME, LATER THAT NIGHT
Leroy continues his reaction to Vivian's news, which consists of pained and panic-stricken screams and bizarre, almost insane facial contortions.
Rabbit enters.
RABBIT: Leroy, what's wrong?
LEROY: Vivian named her goat Vivian.
RABBIT: So.
LEROY: So . . . I have to push the goat.
RABBIT: Why do you have to push the goat?
LEROY: Because I can't push her anymore.
RABBIT: Why not?
LEROY: Because she asked me not to.
RABBIT: But that still doesn't explain why you have to push her goat.
LEROY: Because it's hers . . . or maybe it's just because of the look in Vivian's eyes when she announced the goat's name. It was taunting, seductive, as if . . . she's inviting me to do exactly this.
RABBIT: For Pete's sake, Leroy! What are you trying to express, Leroy?
LEROY: Love.
RABBIT: This is love?
LEROY: Yes, this is love. I can't express a love that's gentle. I don't know how. Love to me is violent, sick, dangerous - otherwise how could it ever defeat the pain and ugliness that's eating away at all of us? And I know that Vivian feels the same way. Her father loved her very much, but it was an angry and possessive love. The emotions were violent and extreme. He pushed her to the limit. So that's what love is to her. That's what she knows. That's what she seeks.
RABBIT: I still think it's weird that you're gonna push a goat.
LEROY (with crazy passion): I have to, Rabbit. I just . . . I . . . have to.
SCENE 10
LOCATION: GOAT'S PEN, LATER THAT NIGHT.
Leroy, dressed in his usual "pusher's disguise," sneaks into the pen and moves surreptitiously towards the goat. Then, looking around, he PUSHES her.
He pushes her again.
And again.
And again.
TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED/MONTAGE SEQUENCE:
He does this night after night, again and again - the mood is lurking, dangerous, oddly sexual, as if the goat is a mere stand-in for the girl yet possesses an allure all its own.
SCENE 11
LOCATION: AUCTION HOUSE, DAYS LATER.
Leroy is sweeping the ground at the auction house. Vivian storms in and steps on his broom. Leroy looks up at an angry figure towering over him.
VIVIAN: Do you think I don't know it's you?
LEROY: What's me?
VIVIAN: Please! Do we have to go through this again? Pushing my goat. You've been pushing my goat.
LEROY: How'd you find out?
VIVIAN: I see everything Vivian sees. We're symbiotically connected through our shared name. Besides, you left footprints.
LEROY: I did?
VIVIAN: You did.
LEROY: I'm not denying it. But do you at least know why I've been pushing your goat?
VIVIAN: Because I asked you to stop pushing me, and my goat is the next best thing. Especially since she bears my name.
LEROY: Can I continue - please?
VIVIAN: No. It bothers Vivian. I want her to feel safe and protected. Goats have been pushed around enough. All animals have.
LEROY: Why did you name your goat Vivian if you didn't want me to push her?
VIVIAN: I didn't realize you were quite that sick.
LEROY: It seemed almost like an invitation to push your goat.
VIVIAN: Perhaps it was. Perhaps I wanted to continue to experience the odd thrills of being pushed without having to actually be pushed. It became a vicarious thrill.
LEROY: So can I continue?
VIVIAN: I told you, no. And if you do, then I must warn you: Vivian may possess more than just my name. She may possess my vengeful spirit.
SCENE 12
LOCATION: VIVIAN'S PROPERTY, LATER THAT NIGHT.
Once again, despite Vivian's warning, Leroy sneaks onto Vivian's property and moves surreptitiously towards the goat. He is just about to push her, but then he notices that the goat is staring at her menacingly.
ECU of the goat's eyes.
LEROY (paranoid): What? Why are you staring at me like that? You're doing something to me - I can feel it!
Then he looks down and notices that his hands have increased in size, and have become tremendous:
He screams in shock.
LEROY: What did you do? What did you do? What did you do? Oh my G - Oh no! Or - wait a minute - maybe I should thank you. Bigger hands means I can push you harder. Yes, these are the hands of a VIVIANPUSHER!
He tries to push the goat but finds that he cannot.
LEROY: What --? It's as if - the hands have a mind of their own! That's it, isn't it? I can only push what the hands want me to push. That's your way of protecting yourself and Vivian. Clever, very clever. Grievous Goats! What's happening to me? I . . . feel . . . the . . . urge . . . to . . . push . . .
He runs out into the night.
TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED:
Like a depraved animal, Leroy pushes everyone and everything he comes across: CIVILIANS, POLICE OFFICERS, DOGS, BABY CARRIAGES, TRASH CANS, etc. PEOPLE shriek in terror, horror-movie style. Clearly, he's trying to resist this urge, but he cannot: the reluctant vampire syndrome. Finally, looking exhausted and ashamed, he staggers back home.
SCENE 13
LOCATION: LEROY'S HOME, MOMENTS LATER.
Leroy enters, falls to the floor, and weeps. Rabbit rushes over to him.
RABBIT: Leroy! Where've you been? I've been worried sick! (Noticing hands.) Holy Hands! What happened?
LEROY: Vivian the goat did this to me. She put me under a spell. With her eyes. I know it. I felt it.
RABBIT: Why would she do that?
LEROY: So I wouldn't be able to push her or Vivian. Vivian the woman, I mean.
RABBIT: But you can push twenty goats with those hands!
LEROY: No, don't you see? The hands are under her control. I must use them to push what she wants me to push. That's what I've been doing all night. I've been pushing people, police officers, dogs, trash cans. Tell me, Rabbit: is this what happens when women take their power back? Will they punish us men for all that we've put them through? Is that why we're so afraid of female power? Is that why we've tried so hard over the centuries to confine it, condemn it, and demonize it?
RABBIT: You don't have to worry. Being you is punishment enough.
LEROY: Please, Rabbit! Help me!
RABBIT: I may know of a remedy, but I'll need a pair of Vivian's gloves, preferably her best ones.
LEROY: How am I supposed to get a pair of her gloves?
RABBIT: Ask her.
SCENE 14
LOCATION: VIVIAN'S HOUSE, NEXT DAY..
Leroy, hiding his hands, knocks on the door of Vivian's house, which is even more majestic in the daylight. Vivian opens.
VIVIAN: Leroy. I've been expecting you. Come in.
Leroy enters.
LEROY: Why have you been expecting me?
VIVIAN: I know about your hands.
LEROY: How?
VIVIAN: I see what Vivian sees, remember?
He takes his hands out of hiding and shows them to Vivian; she examines them lovingly, and a bit incredulously.
VIVIAN: Amazing.
LEROY: They have a will of their own. I am compelled to follow it.
VIVIAN: I warned you that Vivian might take action against you. I am not responsible for her actions.
LEROY: I know you're not, but you must help me.
VIVIAN: How?
LEROY: I need a pair of your gloves.
VIVIAN: My gloves? Whatever for?
LEROY: I don't know. My friend and roommate, a freed rabbit, said that's al he needs to reverse the spell. I didn't ask for details.
VIVIAN: I'm not sure it would be in my best interest to assist you in reversing the spell.
LEROY: Please, Vivian. I can't live like this. The hands have forced me to push people and things that I had no desire to push.
VIVIAN: Come into the drawing room and relax for a moment. I'll fix you a drink, and we'll discuss this matter further.
She leads him into the drawing room; he sits. His attention is drawn to a portrait of Paul Pusher, which hangs prominently, perhaps a bit ominously, in the room.
LEROY: Is that your father?
VIVIAN: Yes. But I didn't hang it there, he did. This was his house, after all, and it's exactly as he left it. Except for the servants. He believed in servants, I do not. I fired them all as soon as he died. I do my own cooking, my own cleaning, and my own shopping.
He smiles dimly. Then she fixes him a drink, quite nervously.
VIVIAN: Is brandy all right?
LEROY: Yes. Fine.
She hands him the drink, and he drinks it. She fixes herself a drink, and then drinks it. Silence.
VIVIAN: Please, sit.
He sits. She sits next to him. More silence. They glare at each other.
VIVIAN: So you want a pair of my gloves?
LEROY: Yes.
VIVIAN: And this would mean that Vivian's spell would be reversed?
LEROY: Yes.
VIVIAN: And that you could theoretically go back to pushing me and/or Vivian?
LEROY: Yes.
VIVIAN: I see. I admit that I've been rather bored. I've been unable to sleep. Instead, I pace my bedroom thinking foolish thoughts.
LEROY (intrigued): Like what?
VIVIAN: Well, do you realize that you're a vivianpusher?
LEROY: I am?
VIVIAN: Of course. You've been pushing a woman named Vivian Pusher, which makes you a vivianpusher. But if I used my middle initial, then you couldn't call yourself a vivianpusher - right?
LEROY: What's your middle initial?
VIVIAN: P, as in "Pauline." See? It wouldn't sound right for you to call yourself a "Vivian P. Pusher"?
LEROY: The "p" could stand for "please." Vivian-please-pusher.
VIVIAN: I'd never say please, and neither would you. It would spoil all the fun.
LEROY: True. Okay, what about Vivian-Penis-Pusher?
VIVIAN: I don't have a penis. Besides, there are other "p" words which might be more relevant: Vivian-Pastrami-Pusher because I do like pastrami . . . Vivian-Pinafore-Pusher because I used to wear pinafores all the time . . . Vivian-Ping-Pong-Pusher because I do love a good game of ping pong . . . and so on. Oh, we're being awfully silly.
LEROY: Yes, but it's fun.
They stare at each other nervously. The tension is mounting. They search desperately for things to talk about.
VIVIAN: I . . . replaced the battery in my flashlight.
LEROY: I see. How often do you use your flashlight?
VIVIAN: Never.
LEROY: Then why'd you replace the battery?
VIVIAN: Because it needed to be replaced.
LEROY: Why did it need to be replaced if you never use it?
VIVIAN: It just DID, okay?
LEROY: Okay, fine.
VIVIAN: "Okay, fine." Don't mock me. What have you been doing?
LEROY: I told you, pushing people I don't want to push.
VIVIAN: Besides that! I know so little about you!
LEROY: What would you like to know?
VIVIAN: You're obviously a very smart man. Why are you working as a janitor?
LEROY: Because I never do what's expected of me. It makes life a lot more interesting.
VIVIAN: I see.
LEROY: What about the gloves?
VIVIAN: Oh, yes. Of course. The gloves. Would you prefer any particular style or color?
LEROY: The ones you wear the most. The ones you love the most.
VIVIAN: I know just the pair. I always seem to be wearing them on joyous occasions. Wait here. I'll go get them.
She leaves; Leroy stares at the painting of Paul Pusher.
SCENE 15
LOCATION: LEROY'S HOUSE.
Leroy is showing Vivian's gloves to Rabbit.
RABBIT: These gloves are quite nice. Amanda Dominico is a very fine brand. The best.
LEROY: But they'll never fit!
RABBIT: Yes they will. They contain Vivian's energy. Your true hands will respond to her energy, and they will return to their normal size. I'm just surprised she gave them to you.
LEROY: She saw how much I was suffering.
RABBIT: I see. I just hate to ruin these gloves. They must've cost at least $200!
LEROY: Rabbit, please! I can't take it anymore! Do whatever you need to do! Please! Please! Please!
RABBIT: Very well. But this is going to hurt, Leroy, so please try to stay as still as possible.
Rabbit tries to squeeze Vivian's gloves onto Leroy's giant hands: a bit of slapstick comedy. TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED: At first, Leroy's hands resist Rabbit's efforts, but eventually Rabbit triumphs, and Leroy's hands are reduced to regular size.
LEROY (with great relief): Thank you, Rabbit! My hands are my own again! Thank you, thank you, thank you!
RABBIT: You're welcome. But look at these gloves! They're ruined.
Rabbit picks up the gloves and holds them to his heart, with a strange sort of grief.
LEROY: I just can't continue this.
RABBIT: What do you mean, you can't continue this?
LEROY: As Vivian Pusher pointed out, pushing Vivian Pusher has made me a vivianpusher. That's more than I'd ever been before. But if I can't push Vivian, and if I can't push Vivian's goat Vivian, then I can't be a vivianpusher - and if I can't be a vivianpusher, then what would I, the pushiest pusher who's ever pushed, have left to push?
RABBIT: Well put.
LEROY: So you see? It's over.
RABBIT (deeply offended): It can't be over! What the hell is wrong with you? The men in your society are so MESSED UP! You're emotionally impaired and unable to express your love . . . so you end up expressing something very different . . . and when that's taken away, you're right back where you started, and not one bit wiser! It's sickening! I feel sorry for the women in your society if you're all they have to look forward to!
LEROY: Relax, Bugs Bunny.
RABBIT: Why don't you shut your mouth?
LEROY: Fine.
RABBIT: Do you want some carrot stew?
LEROY: I thought you said you hate carrots.
RABBIT: I do, but everyone gives me so many of them, I figure I might as well put them to use!
LEROY: I guess, yeah. Thanks.
RABBIT: You're distracted.
LEROY (like a crazed animal): What if she starts using her middle initial? I can't be a Vivian-penis-pusher! I just can't be! I can't be! I can't be! No! That can't happen to me! No! No! No!
RABBIT: Leroy, what are you talking about?! Calm down, Leroy, please! You don't want to snap again, do you? I don't know if I have the strength to take care of you this time. You frighten me when you're like that. You become a whole different person.
TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED: Leroy screams and screams; his eyes bulge out of his sockets, and he starts tearing apart the room. Rabbit backs away, scared.
SCENE 17
LOCATION: LEROY'S HOUSE, DAY OR SO LATER.
Leroy slowly wakes up from a "madness episode.". He staggers to his feet and makes his way to the kitchen. There's a pot of stew on the stove; he grabs a bowl and a spoon and scoops some of it out. He sits down, looking thoroughly wrecked, and starts eating a couple of spoonfuls - but then he spits it out violently!
LEROY: What the hell is this?
He looks around his apartment. There's blood and fur everywhere - the rabbit's fur.
LEROY: Holy Moly! Oh no! Oh shit! This is rabbit stew! Oh, Rabbit! Oh, what did I do? What did I do? What did I do?
Shaking uncontrollably, and releasing pained noises, Leroy falls to the floor and weeps, conveying genuine emotion. Then, slowly, he comes out of the heap and looks around the room. Rabbit's possessions are flung all over. Sifting through them, Leroy finds a poem entitled: "Vivian Pusher."
We HEAR Rabbit's voice (V.O.) as Leroy reads the poem to himself.
RABBIT (V.O.) (with much emotion):
Vivian Pusher is the name of a very fine girl who would be lovely to pussshhhhhhhh
Why is it that when we love, so often we tell ourselves to "shusssssssshhhhhh"?
What has happened to this world, where love is expressed through a push and a shove
What will happen when our hearts are empty and are no longer able to love?
Freeing goats was a victory not small
Free the animals, I say! Free them all!
This poem is written in honor of this girl so pure and fine
Every time my friend pushed her, I wanted the push to be mine
But I'm just a rabbit with a fuzzy tail
Many of my kind are kept in a pet's jail
Oh, how this hurts - it's as if I were mush being mushed
Vivian, my lady - please, stand where you can be pushed.
LEROY: So you wanted to push her too, Rabbit? Well, you hid it very well.
Sobbing gently, Leroy clutches the poem to his heart.
SCENE 18
LOCATION: BUILDING IN TOWN, LATER THAT DAY.
Leroy enters a nondescript building carrying a folded-down paper bag. His expression is grave as he makes his way slowly up one staircase after another. The CAMERA follows him; the mood is inexplicably ominous. Finally, he reaches the top and moves robotically through a series of corridors. It seems that his grief (over Rabbit's death) has taken the form of stoic nonemotion, and his every move conveys this - conveys a stubborn resistance to feel what he cannot feel.
He comes to a sign: "FREE FOOD FOR THE HOMELESS. ENTER HERE AND FORM A LINE ON THE LEFT. ONE PLATE PER PERSON." He enters and approaches FURBA: the spirited black woman who's in charge of the whole operation. He hands her the bag.
FURBA: What's this, a present?
LEROY: It's rabbit stew.
FURBA: Rabbit stew has been outlawed.
LEROY: I know. I didn't intend to make it. It happened accidentally.
FURBA: How does someone accidentally make rabbit stew?
LEROY: I snapped, and I guess I . . . um . . . killed . . . my rabbit friend.
FURBA: Nice.
LEROY: I can't just throw it out, because then it'll go to waste, and he will have died for nothing.
FURBA: So eat it yourself.
LEROY: I can't eat the remains of my best friend! That would sort of be like cannibalism.
FURBA: Sorry, I can't help you. I obey the law. Well, most laws. (Chuckles.)
LEROY: Please. (Reading name plate.) Furba, this is all I have left of him. It has to at least go to a good cause.
FURBA (pointing to homeless bums in background.): You think feeding these pathetic, broken-down bums is a good cause? You might as well go outside and feed it to the pigeons!
LEROY: Please.
He starts to cry.
FURBA (grabbing bag): Okay, fine. I'll it to the pigeons.
LEROY: Thank you.
FURBA: You're welcome.
He just stands there for a moment, staring at her.
FURBA: You can go now. Good-bye.
LEROY: I have nowhere to go. I don't want to go back home. There's still blood and fur everywhere. I couldn't bring myself to clean it up.
FURBA: You work?
LEROY: I did. But I quit. I couldn't take it anymore.
FURBA: What kind of job did you have?
LEROY: I swept up sunflower seeds.
FURBA: Ah, you was a janitor. I could use one here.
LEROY: Fine. But no sunflower seeds. I swear! I WON'T sweep up sunflower seeds! That's what got me into this whole mess!
FURBA: Oh, you think you can dictate the rules, do you? I used to think that too. But I was almost closed down by that bitch, Vivian what's-her-name.
LEROY: Pusher. Vivian Pusher.
FURBA: Yeah, that's her. She came here because she heard that we was feeding our clients goat meat.
LEROY: Were you?
FURBA (obviously lying): We don't package the meat, we just serve it.
LEROY: It was goat meat, wasn't it?
FURBA: Goat meat is cheaper, what can I say?
LEROY: Don't you have any feelings for goats?
FURBA: No.
LEROY: Don't you respect what Vivian is doing?
FURBA: No.
LEROY: What did she do with the meat?
FURBA: I don't know. I think she's planning to sell it to a fast-food company.
LEROY: I don't believe it! She wouldn't do that! She genuinely believes in what she's doing.
FURBA: Yeah, sure. She's got you under her spell, doesn't she? Well, good luck. I hear that her history with men don't go past her father and her goats.
LEROY: Can I have a job or not?
FURBA: Sure. The broom's in that closet over there. Get to work.
SCENE 19
LOCATION: BUILDING, THAT NIGHT.
Leroy is just getting done with his night's work; he packs up h is stuff and turns out the lights. Then he goes through the door and starts down the stairs. He goes down one flight after another, and then - he comes across a DEAD GOAT! He jumps back, horrified. Just then, Vivian appears.
VIVIAN: There! I saved you the trouble! I pushed my goat! She's dead!
LEROY (devastated): How could you? I loved her!
VIVIAN: I thought you loved me!
LEROY: But you told me to stop pushing you! How can I love you if I can't push you?
VIVIAN: You don't have to push me anymore! I've learned to push myself!
TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED: She demonstrates a weird and clumsy self-push, which possesses a subtle element of pain, loneliness, and desperation.
LEROY (indignantly, experiencing this as a personal insult): You can't be Vivian and a vivianpusher at the same time! That's redundant!
VIVIAN (shocked, helpless, unable to control the strange contortions of her own body): I can't stop! I can't stop pushing myself! Someone . . . is . . . drawing . . . me . . . to . .. them! I . . . can't . . . resist!!!!
Vivian pushes herself down the stairs and out the building . . .
EXT. VARIOUS CITY STREETS - CONTINUING ACTION
TO BE CHOREOGRAPHED: Vivian "pushes" herself all the way across the city. Then, she enters -
SCENE 20: MEAT-PACKING WAREHOUSE:
Obviously arriving at her destination, Vivian immediately stops pushing herself and looks around. There's goat meat everywhere, neatly packed in boxes as if it's ready to be shipped or sold. Furba, hand on hip and clearly in vengeful mode, emerges and greets Vivian.
FURBA: Hello, Vivian.
VIVIAN: Furba! What . . . are . . . you . . . doing . . . here?
FURBA: We know what you were planning to do with the goat meat, Vivian.
VIVIAN: We? Who's we?
PULL BACK, to reveal that Vivian is slowly being surrounded by goats. They file in purposefully, like jurors already convinced of the defendant's guilt. Vivian is visibly frightened.
FURBA: "Free the goats from human bondage!" "Do not eat goat meat!" "Do not profit from goat slaughter!" Remember saying those words, Vivian?
VIVIAN: Yes! I meant every word! I just didn't want to waste the meat! Then they would've died in vain!
The Goats just stare at her, with pitiless, menacing expressions.
FURBA (to Vivian): You're gonna have to do better than that, honey.
VIVIAN (coming apart): I'm telling the truth! Please! You have to believe me!
FURBA: Really? Well, you'll excuse us while we decide your fate?
Furba walks over to the goats and confers with them, in a peculiarly sinister trial-like manner. Then she announces:
FURBA: We have a very special fate for you, Vivian. You're going to be pushed one last time . . . by the person who pushes you best.
Leroy staggers in, looking befuddled and agitated - yet eager to perform the task at hand.
SCENE 21: MEAT-PACKING WAREHOUSE: LATER THAT DAY:
Vivian is perched, in an eerie walk-the-plank style, over a giant meat grinder. She's not tied up and she's not gagged. She simply stands there, unrestrained and expressionless: she's beyond shock, beyond resistance. Leroy, on the other hand, is experiencing a bizarre and mind-blowing mixture of emotions.
VIVIAN: You should be happy, Leroy. You're getting what you wanted. You're going to push me again.
LEROY: This is going to be the best push of all, Vivian, believe me.
VIVIAN: I believe you, Leroy.
He moves closer to her. Clearly, it's the pushing itself that he has come to love. Somehow, he expresses this facially: he is manic, depraved. He moves closer and closer - CUT BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN LEROY AND VIVIAN'S EXPRESSIONS - and finally, he pushes her . . . BLOOD SPLATTERS all over his face. He licks a little of it, and then says, with arms outstretched and tears in his eyes:
LEROY: I . . . I love you, Vivian.
THE END
Emily Van Strien, At The End of the Road: Reflections and Revelations from Carol Gilligan's, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love
I was 13 years old when my grandmother slipped me some advice while chopping vegetables and sipping on her malted scotch. She said, "Whatever you do, Emmy, make sure you do all your living, all the things you want to do with your life, before getting married to anyone." The scene of us cooking together, sipping on something and her slipping this advice in would repeat many times before she died. I always felt like she was trying to warn me of what she saw as a woman's fate, or else share with me the story of her great loss, of her tragedic love story, without having to lay it all out on the chopping board. Over the years, my grandmother's tragic love story settled into my body, just as my parents' unhappy, lukewarm marriage, my mother's long-stretched depression and my father's alcoholism has settled in my body. Somehow, I know I carry these love stories with me; I carry them in my cells; they are a backdrop for mine.
In her book, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love, Carol Gilligan illuminates how as a culture, we are in love with the tragic love story, the story "where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death It was 'our story'"(17). Through Gilligan's interviews and research with small boys, adolescent girls, and couples facing crisis in their relationships, along with numerous accounts of literature including Anne Frank and The Scarlet Letter, Gilligan traces "our story" back before tragedy and dissociation of the self has set in - the time and place where joy and pleasure are seen and spoken of freely. By transposing the myth of Psyche and Cupid onto modern love stories, Gilligan frames her research and sets out to answer the question, "Why are we so drawn to tragic love stories and how do we find our way to a new paradigm of love stories between men and women?"(4). The implication being this: "a change in the love story is a psychic key to a cultural and historic transformation"(18).
Before scooping into Gilligan's brilliance, I have to say that the timing of this book entering my life seems hmm, choreographed by some cosmic control board. I'm actually struggling writing this as I'm contemplating Gilligan's observations and tracing them over my own life, my current love story and the histories that I carry. To be honest, I'm squirming some. It's like when Psyche realizes that she's at a crossroads; she can continue in her illicit love affair, not speaking or seeing what she knows in her body to be true, or she can wage an unknown path where hardships are promised but the reward of being seen and heard for who she really is beckons brightly. In the last few weeks, I feel like I've been bushwhacking through densely grown-in vegetation of my most intimate relationships. I have felt more alive but more confused, at a loss but at the same time a gain. If I had the luxury, I probably would be ignoring these inner rip tides and allowing for time and reflection to gradually cast a light of understanding on it all. As it is, things are in motion, and like Psyche I don't have any options but to learn the lessons of love as I make my way through them.
Gilligan divided her book into three parts. The first part introduces Psyche and Cupid. Using this 2nd century, North African myth as a guide, Gilligan "lays out a map of love and shows the points where resistance needs to occur to avert the unfolding of a tragic love story"(10). The second part locates and uncovers lost pleasure; the last section "shifts the paradigm - a paradigm of loss gives way to a paradigm of connection, the birth of tragedy is transformed to the birth of pleasure"(10). The rhythm of the book gracefully corresponds with the rhythm of losing and finding, losing and finding. Gilligan takes you out, then reels you back in, over and again. I'll come back to this; first, I want to introduce Psyche.
Psyche's name means soul. "It also means 'breath' or 'life.'"(22). It is no wonder that Psyche feels a great loss when men and women cannot see beyond her immense physical beauty. She is known across the land as the new Venus, the goddess of love reincarnate. She mourns that "nobody knows who she is. She hates in herself that beauty in which the world finds such pleasure"(14). Needless to say, Psyche is lonely, isolated and depressed. Her father brings her to the high hill and gets instructions from the oracle of Apollo to take his daughter to the mountain crag where she is destined to marry a "wild and cruel and snaky monster"(14). Psyche consoles her grieving parents, saying "'When countries and people were giving me honours, when with a single voice they were calling me a new Venus, that is when you should have mourned me as if I were already dead'"(14).
One aspect of Psyche's story that is alive and kicking in our society is the writhing jealousy of Venus upon hearing that she has been "replaced" by a younger and more lovely mortal.
Venus, once she becomes 'old Venus,' begins to crumble away internally, because she discovers with the coming of 'New Venus' that it was not she whom people had worshiped and loved. She was filling a role, playing a part in a story that was not her story.The anger and the envy among women are inescapable in a world where one woman is seen as replacing another. If one woman can replace another, then neither woman is loved (139).
In an effort to "save her spot," Venus sends for her son Cupid, the god of love, to "punish that 'defiant beauty'"(14). Cupid is instructed by his mother to "make Psyche instantly fall in love with the most wretched of men"(14). Cupid sees a sleeping Psyche and falls in love with her. Secretly defying his mother's orders, he sneaks to Psyche every night and, "'that which was at first a novelty did by continual custom bring her great pleasure, and the sound of a mysterious voice gave comfort to her loneliness. But this is a love conducted in darkness and sealed by silence. Hidden from Venus, an illicit love'"(15). Cupid makes Psyche promise she will never attempt to see him in the light or talk of their love. Psyche can't see or speak of Cupid though she "knows him through touch and by the sound of his voice, yet she cannot see or say what she knows"(15). Psyche grows depressed.
This may be where I start to get squirmy. Psyche is depressed because she is being told she has to obey the rules and not seek or speak of the love she feels in her body. If she does not obey, she is told she will immediately lose the relationship; meanwhile she is sacrificing the relationship with herself. My squirminess comes from the many moments in my life when I've felt this ultimatum without realizing it. The most dramatic, obviously, is the relationship I felt with myself, the sense of being in love with myself and coming to a stage where that didn't seem okay, a fear that if I gave "voice to vital parts of [myself], [my] pleasure and [my] knowledge" would somehow put me in danger.(7) It was during this time in my life when sacrifice and silencing entered the picture. To seal it, the love stories I grew up with, my parents', my grandparents', seemed, by my vantage point, to be suspended in this stage. All right, squirmy is not the best word to describe this emotion of mine. Grief hits the nail.
When Psyche finds out she is pregnant, her jealous sisters convince her that Cupid is a monster and will consume Psyche and the baby the moment it is born. In order to save her life and the life of her unborn baby, Psyche, after much inner turmoil, decides to risk the relationship and defy her promise to Cupid. She discovers a beautiful "man she had known but had not been allowed to see or to speak of. And in the light of discovery, she realizes that the stories she was told by the oracle, by her parents, and by her sisters are not true"(35). While Cupid sleeps, Psyche accidentally pricks her finger with the end of one of Cupid's arrows, and consequently, "'without knowing it, Psyche of her own accord fell in love with Love'"(36). Cupid wakes up and burned by Psyche's betrayal, flies away from her, abandoning her until the birth of his daughter, Pleasure. In the meantime, Psyche finds herself at a crossroads. She has fallen in love with Love after his vulnerability was exposed. Just as she was able to verify what she intuitively knew to be true, she was abandoned by her love. Just as she gained, she lost.
A few weeks ago, I was here. I've been with my partner for almost two years. During travels, I met someone who reminded me of the parts of myself I had nearly forgotten; it was as if she took the old shoe boxes off the shelf, blew off the dust and tore off the tape. She was gentle and smart, and in the moonlight, especially, particularly sexy. Pleasure was standing there on the edge of the water, waving her arms at me, urging me on. It felt exactly right. I come home and find my boyfriend crumpled in a pile, his heart so exposed. He says he feels deeply betrayed and alone. The last few weeks have been hard but there is a sense, he would agree, of a reconnection. There are still knots and complications and implications and layers of things to sort through, but for now it feels right to be completely open with him about myself, speaking of what I know and not of what I don't.
Gilligan's research uncovers a voice that is soaked with authenticity and which speaks freely of love as it is experienced in the body. It is the voice and language of pleasure. "Pleasure is a sensation written into our bodies, the emotion of delight and joy. The resistance I observed in adolescent girls and boys was a resistance to losing pleasure and entering a hierarchy that required a sacrifice of love. It was a resistance to taking on a patriarchal story"(8).
Orthodoxy of separation states that we are born alone and we die alone. "The psychological separation between children and mothers has been seen as a mainstay of development. It has been associated with the establishment with the child's sense of self, the awareness of being a separate person"(169). Gilligan highlights new infant research where infants are observed having the rudiments of self: "a voice, the ability to initiate action, and to register experience"(169). She notes a study where,
researchers discovered how readily infants pick up and follow the rhythms and cadences of human connection, how quickly they learn the music of love the researchers caught the tidal rhythm of relationship: finding and losing and finding again, turning to, turning away and turning back again, moving in and out of touch (38).
This research implies that we are born responding to relationship. We are born with a self that understands the difference between the experience of relationship and the appearance of one. This is important to note because it goes back to the question of what keeps us from knowing and loving, if it is an intrinsic human characteristic all along. What initiates such a sacrifice?
With all the feminist classes I've taken, one would think I'd have rubbed shoulders more than I have with the word "patriarchy." The truth is that I've never really been comfortable with the word. In college, I had a couple of friends who'd holler out, "Damn the patriarchy!" but I never really got it. It's always been a big word for me. Honestly, I think the use of the word has gotten out of hand. Gilligan took a moment to define patriarchy as "an order of living that elevates fathers, separating fathers from sons (the men from the boys) and men from women, and placing both women and children under a father's authority"(16). It is a hierarchy in which, "a father or some fathers control access to truth or power or god or knowledge - to salvation in whatever form it takes"(7). It isn't solely women's oppression by men; it is oppression of people, ideas, truth, voice, etc., by the hierarchy which is, yes, usually controlled by men in charge.
Talking about patriarchy in this way is important because it not only separates families, communities, cultures, it "also creates a rift in the psyche, dividing everyone from parts of themselves"(7). I picture it as an iron wedge that breaks apart stumps until a homogenous pile of chips is all that remains. What Gilligan points out is that there is a point in every person's life where she or he comes face to face with the patriarchal wedge, and when it comes down something splinters off. Gilligan discovered that this split happens for boys around age four and five. For girls, it occurs at age eleven and twelve. Exploring the reasons why the division happens at these ages for boys and girls is another paper. Still, it's interesting to note that the differences in ages create different sorts of rifts.
Around age four and five, little boys are beginning to take on the voice of their fathers; they are beginning to play out the good-guy, bad-guy script, "the basic script of patriarchy"(69). Gilligan interviewed fathers who spoke of their four year old sons as being full of spunk. "'Spunk,' connotes a primal energy associated with joy, spontaneity, and pleasure, knowing and following one's heart's desires"(70). In fathers' efforts to protect their sons, Gilligan proposes that fathers (in the big sense of the word) teach them to be less emotive, less vulnerable and exposed. The dilemma is that with the sensitivity capped and muted, a loss of relationship must ensue. A sacrifice. With small boys, Gilligan found a voice able to talk about this loss, the boys' mothers'.
Before any sort of separation in the relationship between a son and a mother occurs, Gilligan found that the mothers were able to talk about the connection and freedom they feel with their sons, especially emotionally. Mothers described their four and five year old sons as emotionally present and tuned into them in a way their husbands weren't. They were separating themselves from their relationships, though, and in the process becoming less direct, less attentive, less articulate, and less authentic. What are the repercussions of these separations? Young boys are "more likely than girls to show signs of emotional distress in early childhood--more prone to depression, learning- and speech-disorders, and various forms of out-of-control and out-of-touch behavior"(28).
Gillian views dissociation as a "brilliant although costly way of enduring psychic survival. If dissociation is also the psychic mechanism that allows survival in patriarchy, an adaptation to the splits in relationship among and between women and men, the soul in its affinity to life and to love will resist this adaptation"(24). Gilligan would say that once resistance falls through and the patriarchal love story is taken on as our own, our emotions may dissociate from our sense of knowing, our soul from our intellect, and our pleasure from our body. It breaks the relationship. From this perspective, "The question is no longer how do we become capable of love and knowledge, but rather what keeps us from loving and knowing?"(7).
Once the dissociation has occurred, it is almost as if there are two selves. Gillian uses the term "core self" or "natural voice" to describe "the knowing self that registers our experience from moment to moment by picking up the music, the 'feeling of what happens'"(8). This is the self that is in tune with pleasure. Gilligan writes, "By listening for the voice of pleasure, a voice that is grounded in both the body and the emotions, and following the transparent voice of the core self, I followed the psyche in its efforts to resist, to free itself from patriarchy and its tragic love story"(8). In other words, Gilligan followed the natural voice until she hit the resistance, at which point she stopped and looked around. She might refer to the voice of resistance as the "autobiographical self," the "self that becomes wedded to a story about itself"(8).
This makes me think of the stories I hear at work. These are stories told by women with rock solid perceptions of themselves as "messed up," "crack heads," "negligent," "failures," "bitches," "victims," "criminals," "drug addicts," "whores," "lost," "lost cause," "bad girls," "unlovable," "incurable," "hopeless." The self-description is harsh and the stories they tell about themselves are depressing and unwavering. Her story with her drug is always the story of tragic love. It is always about loss. Needless to say, it is a lot of work on everyone's end to begin to change the story. Like Eve and Adam, "shame and blame become the two flaming swords that keep them from returning to the garden"(205). I find it interesting that most of the women talk about their addiction beginning right around the time Gillian says there is a change in a woman's language from "I know," to a dissociated "I don't know." It is right around the time a girl stops resisting and adopts the patriarchal story, right around the age of eleven years old.
Up until adolescence, girls are pretty much allowed to be the creatures they are; society doesn't have any big plans for them until puberty. For years, psychologists have noted that around age eleven and twelve, girls experience a "sudden high incidence of depression, eating disorders ranging from anorexia to obesity, problems in learning and destructive behavior"(28). Gilligan supposes that losing relationship - which is the best protection against "most forms of psychological trouble"(28) - is the impending risk at this time in a girls' life. It feels a bit like a catch 22.
I can remember being eleven. Being myself and speaking of "my pleasure" was the last thing I dared do. I remember thinking, all of a sudden, that I didn't know how to talk. I remember being eleven and feeling as if I wasn't going to survive alone. Me and another, me and a pretty girl, me and an anybody; to sit alone at lunch was death. I was nobody without somebody at my side, walking down the hall, standing by the bus. It was an urgency, I remember, in public to be seen with another. The other side of being eleven for me was hours spent reading books alone in my room. Being alone and reading and finding refuge there, finding my pleasure for sure. It was safe with books all along. It was a relief. I completely related to the passage of Anne Frank Gilligan cites, "Thank goodness they can't tell downstairs what my inward feelings are I'm completely closed up"(99). That pretty much sums me up from age eleven to seventeen.
Gilligan points out that since a girl experiences this shift in voice at a later age, she is able to bring different things to the plate. For one, she is entering into the world of good girl/bad girl just as her body is beginning to become a woman's, an object for men's desires. Gilligan noted that "girls who love boys find themselves entering a world to which boys have already adapted: an inner world rent by division and buttressed by the codes of honor and chastity" (144). The advantage of being older is that girls have a widened perspective and can "enlarge the picture, because in addition to the child's eye for truth and the adolescent's eye for hypocrisy, they bring an awareness of how we come not to see"(113). Perhaps it is because of girls' "eye for truth" along with their "eye for hypocrisy" that Gilligan sees girls' voices as leading us "out of what otherwise becomes a tragic dilemma"(164).
Where is Psyche in the midst of all of this? Psyche is in despair. After Cupid left her, Psyche attempts to throw herself into the river, but the river would not have her. The river reminds her that she has chosen love, and in doing so she has chosen life, and being of nature, she cannot destroy herself this way. Psyche ends up going down "an unfamiliar road" which will eventually lead her to confront Venus who attacks Psyche and who sets a series of near-impossible tasks for her to complete. The natural world comes to Psyche's rescue with each task. The overarching lesson Psyche learns from Venus is this: "Instead of sacrificing herself for relationship, she is to repair relationship and protect herself, to stay alive by doing what she needs to do in order to leave the world of the undead"(156-157).
The undead. I think of my mother when I was growing up, depressed, spending her days in bed. There came a point in my parents' marriage where my mom made the move to "stay alive" by doing what she had to do. If you want to talk about patriarchy, a priest told my mother at age 19 that she was going to go to hell for having premarital sex with my to-be father unless they got married. (She had contemplated being a nun before meeting my father.) My mother told me she tried to back out of the marriage several days before the wedding and her mother told her, "You made your bed, now lie in it."
My mother once told me that she had told herself the first day my younger sister got on the bus for kindergarten, "Only thirteen more years." This makes me sad, because I know this story is not rare. My mom was the first person in the family to initiate a divorce. My uncles told me that my mother divorcing my father would "ruin everything." My grandparents were shamed. My mom told me that if she didn't leave the marriage, she would have died. She left him, and they sold the only home I had ever known, and both of them moved into spaces that did not accommodate their children, and I was rageful, mournful while at the same time advocating for my mother to every relative who did not understand. The labor of this separation, of this new story, broke all of our hearts.
The year after their divorce, I was in Western Australia. The unfamiliar landscape, unheard-of night sounds and totally foreign night-time constellations were the backdrop for me being completely lost in myself. My mother would send me e-mails signing them as "Liz." I did not know this Liz person, this Liz person who was taking belly dancing lessons and meeting men on the internet and dating wealthy CEO's. Not my mother. Gilligan cites that in America it is usually the woman who initiates the divorce or separation, that "she is often seeking pleasure, moving out of dissociation, knowing what she knows: the difference between presence and absence, between love and not love"(167). My mother's love story begins when her divorce is complete.
Things fall apart just as they come together. My relationship with my boyfriend a few weeks ago was seemingly unraveling all the while I felt more together and awake. My mother found herself just as her whole world was falling down. Psyche gives birth to Pleasure only after hard psychological labor. I wonder why it is impossible to talk of pleasure and joy without talking about trauma and loss. "The very openness and vulnerability of relationship -standing out in the rain of love - exposes us to disappointment, betrayal, loss and trauma"(14).
In the last few weeks, I have attended an energy psychotherapy group. The process is entirely organic and different every session. One common thread is the instruction to locate different emotions in the body, how they rest and what they hold. We start in the body; we return there; we end there. Two weeks ago, I worked on an old grudge I apparently had held since age three. The grudge came from my feeling of needing to be delighted in but then feeling stuck because, in my three year old mind, if the attention were to go to me, nobody would be caring for my mama. It was a double-bind. By tending to the "knowing" that was in my body, I was able to recreate the scene; I was able to let go of the grudge that my mother was unable to delight in me at that age; and I was able to help my mother let go of my father's inability to love her by talking with her through my body. It was a simple scene in my mind: a child on the floor and her parents sitting on the couch with their arms around each other, smiling down on her. I didn't know this scene could exist or that it could change things. My body did. The most remarkable aspect of this group is the reminder of how the body contains wisdom and can be accessed at any time as a path leading toward the wholeness of Psyche. "This knowing becomes a taproot, anchoring the psyche in the body, in relationship, in language and culture. Pleasure will become a marker, a compass pointing to emotional true north"(161). Emotional true north, the north star, I like that a lot.
If, as a culture, we were to follow this emotional north star, where would we be? The patriarchy would be uprooted. What would our government, our churches, our schools do with a society of people who could honestly speak of their full range of emotions, where there is "psychic equality in the sense of everyone having a voice and feeling free to speak?"(206). Where patriarchy could no longer drain pleasure, and hierarchy could no longer cover our vulnerability? How would George Bush address a country of people whose love had been freed of all patriarchal binds? What would his next "State of the Union Address" sound like? Would there be poetic cadence in his words? I think he would be at a loss for words. I wonder if he would cry.
It would feel terrifying at first to be living in a culture that shifts from deep-trodden patriarchy to a place where love pushes us out of our form. There is risk, initially, as it means a loss of power and control for many. Gilligan writes that "freeing love means releasing it to find its own form. Like wind and water, love crosses borders and boundaries: when we fall in love, we fall into relationship and out of categories, because love is always particular, this person"(206).
Loving openly is like pushing down the walls that we don't even know hold us in. Love automatically sets in motion a resistance to patriarchy. It sets into motion the vows of relationship: not to lie, not to abandon, not to possess. In order to transform our culture and ourselves, we have to be able to experience our emotions, and that means we have to be able to experience and be connected to our bodies. And still there is our rhythm: of losing and finding, the losing and the finding all weaving in and out of each other like a cosmic pulse. If we were to embody all of our knowledge, our pleasure and pain, like Eve in the garden, could we want not to hide from our vulnerability? Does patriarchy naturally emerge out of this feeling of vulnerability? Is there any natural way to sustain a different kind of love story? How do we get back into the garden knowing what we know? I don't know the answers to these questions.
Gilligan says love is like rain. It varies between destructive monsoons and soft mists. There are many stories of rain. Without it, all things die, but with it, there can also be death. I think of my grandmother chopping and drinking away the wall she has in place so she can open herself enough to speak to her granddaughter of what she knows of love. I think of my father who was so lost after my mother left. I think of Paul who I saw for the first time crumpled by what he felt as my betrayal, as the threat of my abandonment. There are many stories, so many places in the road that breaks off in a new direction. Gilligan's message is that we have to be on the lookout for the signals of our pleasure, follow the guideposts of love and we'll be led back around to ourselves, to our freedom. There is always a way out.
* * * *
Emily Van Strien, "I'm Going Back to Find Her"
I am going back to find her. Wherever she lives. I think it is a box with socks in there to keep her warm. Her feet are sometimes cold but not so cold that she can't do her chores. I'm going back to find her, and I'm going to see what she is up to.
Oh, look. Ribbons in a pile next to her feet, next to her knees. She's not using them. I think at one time she was planning on using the ribbons to put in her hair or maybe as shoelaces. Nice shoe laces. She just lays there. In her box. Newspaper lining the box. It is cold in there. She needs a blanket.
There. I am giving her a blanket. And she needs a pillow.
There. You have a pillow now. She wants to get up, but she is sleeping right now. Because she hasn't had the most restful of sleeps. She says that she won't mind going on the trip, but that first she really needs to sleep.
She says you seem nice and good. She says she is glad you came back for her. She seems a little sad though. And abandoned. Wondering what the deal is for her. Well, just look. Seemingly well kept. Except for the box. Look at the hair ties on the ground. Well, look at them. They must have cost a lot of money.
No, here. You don't have to wake up just because I'm here waiting. Okay. Let's move.
Look at the way she moves. Just so... what is the word, she seems so easy. Swinging arms. Just okay with her body right now. She just keeps walking and doesn't notice other people looking at her. Doesn't notice other people not looking at her either.
It has only been five minutes.
Not much of a nap, kid. She doesn't hear you. Good kid. You can tell by the way she moves. Wait, she's stopping. She's turning around. She's here. She's wanting you to come closer. She wants to tell you something. I think she is going to whisper it to you.
Yes, I can hear you but just barely. What do you have to say? Rivers of chalk? What does that mean?
Pause .
Quiet. Rivers of some kind of river... cold, hope, lies, fear, afraid? Is that what you are wanting to try and say? Magazine holes. Nobody is perfect. Including you.
You, you are probably closer then I am. Isn't that the way it always goes? Seems to be so.
Slow motion. It is happening again. And the, in the uterus, there is a kick.
Is that you? Do you know how to do those things too? A miracle kid. So smart. That's what the parents of all the other kids say. Not me. I let them take the lead where need be.
So this little girl. What is on your mind? Why don't you like to swim anymore? Why don't you like doing much anymore. Sure are mean toward your parents. Resent them, huh. That's interesting. And normal. Five more minutes before you wake up and see me for really what you are. For what I am too. I suppose.
Hey wait, don't leave. I'm going to missy you. Miss you. It is not like
having a father. I miss you. And now you are good.... you have worked things
through. I'm just telling you. When the drug test clears, there is nothing
that can be done. A written warning. I am dreaming sort of, and i don't
know what i am writing. I have three more minutes to go. Only three and
the baby stole the clothes. The baby stole all the clothes geared toward
the other baby. And that is how I know I need to stop.
Sally Koering Zimney, The First 36 Hours
Coming home from Goddard is a strange experience. I try and explain to friends and family about the residency and I get mostly confused looks in return. Add Astro and doilies to the mix of stories, and 'confused' doesn't justify the looks they give me. But the most surprising aspect of coming home - of bringing to life the ideas and focus of my work - is that I see it everywhere. For instance, the first 36 hours:
My bags were lying on the floor of the kitchen, open. The dirty clothes had managed to make it to the doorstep of the basement, but no further, as is my habit. My husband had set flowers on the dining room table, along with a note pointing me towards the fridge where he had set out a cold beer and glass to greet me. I had worked my butt off in the last week, Detroit's planes were down, and it had taken me twelve hours to get home. Now that I was finally here, I wanted to give my brain a rest: watch some TV, drink that beer, and not think.
Not thinking turned out to be impossible.
I settle into the couch, trying 'not' to think. I flip channels: I quickly scan by Suddenly Susan (a terrible show that lasted a season, and that was generous); Late Night with Conan, one of my favorites, was just ending; and finally - an infomercial: a perfect way to not think. The music catches me for a moment. I cringe when I see what they're advertising: "God Will Find a Way" CD collection: A "toolkit" for spiritual renewal. I hate mass religious evangelism. The cheesy host, the touching testimonials - this infomercial has it all. They have a CD for every possible emotional need: for letting go, for slowing down, for finding energy, for suffering, for loneliness, for finding joy, for accepting pain - you name it.
The screen fades to a middle-age woman, dressed conservatively. In the background sit shelves of picture frames, soft green plants, and a grand piano. The woman looks into the camera and tells the story of how her daughter died. I am, of course, immediately sucked in.
A motivational speaker friend of mine once told me that the easiest way to successful speaking is to have a story that everyone wants to hear: holocaust survivors, witnesses to Columbine, being in New York the day the Twin Towers came down. And this woman had a story that I wanted to hear.
She is crying. Pictures of her daughter and her at graduation, family birthdays, prom, flash on the screen. She's so young; it was only an accident; she had such a bright future. The music of 'spiritual renewal' comes on, and now I'm crying. Yes, I'm exhausted; yes, I'm over-emotional; yes, it's possible I wouldn't be crying if I wasn't just getting home from a very intense week; and yes, it was coming from some place of truth within me.
I think back to high school, to the youth group I belonged to and mostly loved. We traveled during spring break and gave concerts to audiences of over 500 people. It was a place where I felt I belonged. There were a lot of things going for me in this group: most of my close friends were also enthusiastic members, I got to perform, the leaders and small groups were thought-provoking, and people liked me. There wasn't much I didn't like about it.
I remember standing in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people, singing. One of the great things about this group is that you didn't have to know how to sing to sing; it was all about the spirit of the event, the love that emitted from each of us. It just felt good, when the spirit moved among us. This one song, "I Am," we sang while doing sign language, and it always moved me. The music came on. I began to sign, and sing:
I am a light for living I am a dream for the dying I am a way for the hurting When the pain won't go away.
In our teenage hearts, we communed with these words. We remembered the moment of the recent break-up, the fight with our parents, and the unending seemingly enormous decisions: where to hang out after school, who to go to prom with, to drink or not to drink. Those words were comforting to us, to me.
Even then, I was torn between what felt real to me, and taking part in this thing that everyone else was buying into, too. I would sometimes look around and think: 'We couldn't all possibly be feeling this at the same time. Some people are faking it.' Even then my radar was going off. When I was done my senior year, I was glad. Not that I didn't believe in God or feel moments of love and spirit that touched me deeply, but something seemed simultaneously true and untrue about selling religion to other people. It's true for me, is that enough for it to be true for everyone else? And when it doesn't feel true, does that mean this whole concert, this whole youth group, this whole idea is untrue?
As I sit here watching "God Will Find a Way," I see both the truth and the untruth, the authenticity and the inauthenticity: the cheesy inauthentic host; the authentic stories, the authentic tears, the authentic music; the inauthentic masses of thousands, waving their hands in the air, crying.
And yet here I am, crying, feeling something real, and simultaneously seeing the untruth, the gimmick.
I pick up the magazine O in the airport: another attempt at not-thinking for a few days before I begin working. Inside, my focus is everywhere. Inside, Oprah tells us to live our "Best Life." Inside, I find persuasion - I love this stuff - but wonder about its authenticity. Oprah's trying to sell us something: is she really trying to sell us a better way to live, or is she selling us a magazine (that makes her a lot of money)? Is it enough that I'm moved by it? Or that it works, that someone's life might actually become her "best" life?
The assumption we make is that those in power are using it for our (the audience's, the public's) betterment. The assumption I make - essentially, the hope I have - is that Oprah really does care whether or not I live my best life. I believe her, I buy it, and I try to live it.
Sunday comes and I talk with my sister-in-law's mom, a proud and naïve Republican who says she was "independent" until Bill Clinton's extra-marital activities were found out, and the "morals" of our leaders were under question. Then she went straight and staunch Right. I like and hate talking with Pam because she gives me an idea of how the non-political people move in the world.
I ask her, what persuades her about G.W.?
He's sincere, she says. He cares about what's happening. He's a fatherly figure who is protecting us. She was terrorized by September 11th, and she feels safe and secure with him running the country. She likes his resolve.
I ask her if she ever checks his facts. She admits she doesn't. I ask her if Bill Clinton was in office during 9/11 if she'd feel the same. She says yes, but I don't believe her. I ask her where she gets her news, and she tells me, "Mostly Fox. But if I don't like what I'm hearing on one channel, I'll change it to another."
What is the difference, I think, between what really happens and our feelings about those happenings? Our feelings about them, our perceptions, make our truth. And if we don't like what we hear, we change the channel, buy another magazine, ignore the infomercial, until we find something that reflects our own hopes. We look for something and someone to legitimize our hopes, and that happens when someone verbalizes the hopes and fears in our hearts.
Yesterday my friend Sara came into town from Chicago. Her father died this past year, quite suddenly, fighting two different forms of cancer. She was following in his footsteps as a Lutheran Minister when he died, and so her 'calling' now takes on ominous tones. She is one of those people who remind me of all the good in the world. She gives me hope for religion: She is brave, honest, loving, wise - and not afraid to call the Religious Right the Religious Wrong. I don't know too many people who faithfully live out their beliefs (religious or otherwise), but she's one of them. Whenever we meet our lives seem to be simultaneously very different, and very similar.
She was telling me about re-living her father's death, day after day, as a chaplain in Denver this past summer. She witnessed people die, prayed with their families, and then spent the rest of the day up in the balcony of the chapel unsuccessfully hiding from the memory of her father's death. She couldn't escape it there, as she had hoped. And instead, the chapel became a place where she had to do some major "navel gazing," as she calls it.
She talked to me about needing to know her own experience with her father's death, before she could help others through their own families' experience with death. She talked to me of how painful her navel gazing became: how she had, in the six short months since her father's death, successfully buried pain. She was experiencing an interfacing of her father's death, her father's practice as a minister, and her own life's path. And she called all of this a "performance."
She and I turned to each other, walking down the street and said almost at the same time: "authenticity." As she searches for her authenticity as a minister, she must know herself to know who to be for others. To be authentic as a performer, we must know ourselves for others to know us.
I keep finding ways my semester focus touches life, pain, and truth. I wanted to weave together stories and moments in authenticity, religion, truth, persuasion, performance. 36 hours of seeing my focus everywhere, seven pages of writing about it, and what do I know?
* * * *
Sally Koering Zimney, The Language War (annotation)
Robin Tolmach Lakoff, in her book, The Language War, states that her purpose in studying language is different from what many traditional linguists study. Many linguists study the form of language; but Lakoff, who studied language as a "humanist" studied "a way to determine, from their superficial form, what sentences 'really' meant at a deeper level, why people made the choices they made, and what those choices signified about ourselves" (5). As she studied linguistics, she was surprised at the resistance of many linguists to look at the underlying meaning in our language (verses any observable evidence). Evidence had to be "linguistically observable.the assumptions speakers had in mind when they spoke, or their intentions in choosing one form rather than an apparent equivalent, were not part of 'linguistics'" (6). In other words, linguists had not been looking at purpose, at roles, at meaning and persuasion.
As Lakoff began to look at what really interested her in language, she was left unsatisfied. What about all the misunderstanding that happens in language? What about the way two people describe the same scene in two different ways? What about narrative, and persuasion, and politics? She decided we haven't asked enough important questions about how "we use [language] to construct ourselves, make deals with one another, and weave our social fabric" (6).
Analyzing the superficial linguistic form of a communication alone cannot explain why these particular words, in those specific combinations, operate to this exact effect on the minds of hearers; much less can it teach us how to be discriminating hearers and responsible creators of language (7).
As Lakoff began to not only study language closely-in its traditional form-but look deep beyond its form to its function in creating the way we understand ourselves and the world we live in, she began to see language as played out in a war of control over meaning-making. In the many ways that people communicate ideas and intentions, they take part in the war: they dive into the space that allows simultaneous understanding and misunderstanding, where the battle takes place to decide who decides what this set of discourse means, and what that means for society.
Lakoff defined communication as finding a "common" meaning within an "interpretive community" (13)-the participants in a particular discourse, as Stanley Fish defines it. (The place in which we often use "we.") Lakoff believes that "the business of language is a collaborative and indeterminable business" (11). The Speaker and Hearer attempt to get as close as they can to 'agreement'-commonality. But there is still, then, the question of defining the system in which it works. There is still the question of context, of the individuals' motives, of an (objective?) outside observer. We often deal with an interpretation of an interpretation (of an interpretation), and layers of context, culture, history, and more. Meaning is often fought for.
Lakoff acknowledges (and I agree)-like Freud-that we are "unreliable interpreters of our own behavior" (11). Interpretation is limitless, and yet cannot resonate with everyone. No one interpreter can (or should) claim to understand meaning for everyone. There may be, as deconstructionists see it, "the undecidability of meaning in any text" (12). And yet, there is a meaning for someone. Neither explanation is satisfactory to Lakoff:
But neither deconstructionist chaos nor authoritarian certitude represents the commonsense world that readers and hearers know. When competent speakers engage in any kind of discourse, they form ideas in their minds about what it means and respond accordingly (12-13).
This speaks to not only the inherent complexities of language, but the complexities of individual understanding and meaning. Each person brings to the act of communication their own systems of belief, and yet they often do find a way to form a connection of understanding, mixing each other's systems (backgrounds, cultures, moods, etc.) to create a commonality. Speaker and Hearer exchange ideas back and forth, switching roles. Soon, they may have come closer to what we could only call "understanding"-an opportunity for meaning-making. We may not get to 'the' meaning, but we find 'a' meaning, oftentimes within a community of consensus, an interpretive community.
We must see ourselves, in all our language-using roles, as participants in several always shifting communities of meaning-making. As long as our interpretations work, as long as most of the time, most people respond in a way that mostly seems appropriate, we are doing well enough. Meaning is made by consensus: the original speaker contributes form, the original audience response, the analyst an explanation linking the two (13).
Lakoff calls this "good enough" understanding. But what of the interpretive communities with, in their view, "good enough" understanding, but in my view, NOT good enough understanding? What of persuasion? What of change? What of those who do not (yet) belong to my interpretive community, but need to?
Many speakers have responded to the above questions by creating modes of controlling language, keeping the power of making meaning. As long as you're the one people want to listen to, to engage in discourse with, to open up the possibility for understanding with, you have the upper hand in the language war.
For Lakoff, linguistics is about looking at "ways of understandinghow we use language to make and change public and private meaning" (9). This is also a satisfying theory for what I hope to do with language: to change public and private meaning. And so I must enter into the language war, and investigate some of the methods of controlling understanding (and misunderstanding), persuasion, and change.
The Dangerous 'We'
I found it useful (and serendipitous) that after I had been challenged to look at my use of the word 'we', I found a section in Lakoff's book about just that: the use of 'we' in defining meaning of who 'we' are, and who 'they' are-and by doing so, defining people's place in society, and therefore their reality.
I care about the 'we' of society-as a collective whole. But I also recognize that using 'we' inherently creates a 'them'; and what of 'them'? If my focus is to change the way the world treats the 'least' of us-those who have been un-represented, under-represented, marginalized-then I must understand how the word 'we' has a history of exclusion and powerful political ramifications. The power, use, and manipulation of language has defined for entire groups of people their legal and cultural status.
I am suggesting, then, that language not only has the ability to allocate political power for all of us as a society, but also is the means and the medium by which we construct and understand ourselves as individuals, as coherent creatures, and also as members of a culture, a cohesive unit (21).
Who gets to decide who 'we' are, who 'they' are? Lakoff points to our obsession with the various forms of media-magazine articles, TV talk shows, court tv, talk radio, etc.-as being about "who has the ability and right to make meaning for everyone" (19). Language is the method by which we attempt to understand ourselves, and each other, and so our identity is intertwined with all the ways in which we speak and hear. Many people view language as merely a "representation of reality, not reality itself" (19). But language creates our reality-it structures for us our relationships, reveals to 'us' who 'they' are (or defines for 'them' who 'we' are):
And the power to make language and through it meaning has been vested in one powerful group (typically middle-and upper-class white males) for so long and so totally that that perception became a transparent lens through which we viewed 'reality': the view that group seemed to all of us the plain, undistorted, normal and natural view, often the only view imaginable (if you weren't totally crazy) (19).
Of course, not all 'we's are meant to divide. As Lakoff describes, if we saw ourselves as a 'cohesive unit'-where the assumption that the individuals (me, for example) included in this 'we' were being represented fairly and with goodwill and trust, then I will assume and hope you use your powerful 'we' to benefit me.
But 'we' is often covert in its intentions, within a long-time system working for the 'powerful group', named above. This is the place where, as Lakoff describes, "stereotypes proliferate," "interpretations go unchallenged," groups are "silenced." Even in those moments when trust has been earned, "there is a covert promise made: assimilate-become just like us-and we will take you in as one of us. And a covert threat: accept our view, or be ignored (or worse)" (32). 'We' sounds good, which is why I often use it. Lakoff puts it beautifully: "It felt like history, and history is truth" (33). It's a great method for persuasion, for exactly those reasons why it's dangerous: come join my team! We will change the way the world works! We can do it, together(but you have to behave the way I'd like you to).
On the other hand, the use of "I" creates my own meaning, my own identity. Essentially, using 'I' is responsibility for what I've said, for what part is true and untrue, for what works and doesn't work. Responsibility for the good, as well as the bad. (No wonder "I" is a rare commodity in politics.)
For years, politics has used "we" as a way to support and demonstrate the status quo, the 'team' to join, if you will. But these battles over language are, as Lakoff puts it, "battles over the ability to define, and thus create, a large part of our reality" (42). 'We' marks, or points out, the non-we's (they, the other). Who belongs? Who doesn't? Who needs to change? Who doesn't? Similarly, language also marks gender: "tiger vs. tigress". Who is already included? Why are female doctors sometimes labeled as such, when male doctors aren't? Language both reflects the state of reality, and changes our perception of it.
Frames
Frames are defined by Lakoff as a "structure of expectation," or "a body of knowledge that is evoked in order to provide an inferential base for the understanding of an utterance" (47). Frames are the essential tactic of creating a 'status' quo, of owning the correct ideology in politics. A frame helps define the mode of behavior, and gives us a scenario we know and with which we're comfortable. "Within the frame, things are unmarked: normal, predictable, neutral, orderly, natural and simple" (48). We know what to do in a set frame.
Once we identify a frame and decide what is right and appropriate within it, we become wedded to it: it becomes extremely difficult to reframe, to change our expectations. We experience demands or requests to do so as threats to our well-being and indeed even our own status as full-fledged human beingsonce a frame shifts, everything changes. We are, in a way, brought back to infantile incompetence (48).
Hence, the determined and violent response to a wide-range of ideas: polygamy, retaliation with war, gay marriage, abortion, etc. Politics uses "common sense" to continue to covertly frame its ideas as the "correct" one-the one of common sense. But common sense, as Lakoff says, is "an idea determined by its fit within a frame currently accepted by a majority of influential people" (49).
Influential people, then, decide what common sense is, what frames are acceptable, what 'we' do, and what 'we' don't. And the obstacle to change, for those outside the status quo, grows. "Once an idea becomes common sense, included in a generally accepted frame, it becomes very resistant to change. Other ideas accrete around it, lending it credibility and making its abandonment even more disturbing" (49). A gay Episcopalian Priest becomes bishop; and those whose frames are most resistant to change will leave the church. But perhaps, like marked language, people's 'frames' about the topic will change based on the perception: a gay priest is acceptable, at least to half of the church. And then, perhaps, a gay priest will be acceptable to the entire church.
We can use language as a reflection of the state of the world as we know it now. We can also create the perception of language, the acceptance of frames, and use it to change our use of language and the way people live because of that usage. This is not just about analyzing language; this is about what we can do to change the workings and understanding of the world. And I use 'we' here, deliberately. I want to be a person of influence in this context. I want language to be used as a force to nudge us towards a different understanding. I want 'us'-those who are in the positions of power and influence-to know the powers of language-and offer not only a different meaning, but a different world.