Chaos/Theory
“There was this man one time,” an old friend recalls, “back in Montenegro there, and he had eight children, five boys, I
think, and three girls. No. Yes. Five sons and three daughters. Or four and
four. Something like that. And a lot of grandchildren, all good, except this
one. One of his grandsons was always in trouble, always angry, causing
problems, stealin’, lyin’, hurtin’ people. Everyone was afraid of him, you know
what I mean? He had a lot of friends, too. His grandfather, he tried to talk to
him, but nothing. No one wants to get him mad, and so he is ruinin’ life, you
know, for every single one of them.” H laughs. “One time, when he was eighteen,
he beat up two police officers. Yeah! He did that. Even that. He got 20 months
in jail. Twenty months. When he got out, same shit. No different at all. So his grandfather—this old man,
he was early nineties then—calls him over. ‘Why you do this? You and all these
friends?’ And the grandson wants to just go, and his grandfather say, ‘How many
friends you got?’ and the grandson say, ‘A lot,’ and his grandfather say, ‘How
many? Five? Fifty? Ten? You got a hundred friends? How many?’ and the grandson
figure it out,” and here H counts on his fingers, as if he is the grandson,
“and he says, ‘A lot, twenty or thirty,’ and his grandfather say, ‘Good
friends?’ and the grandson say, ‘Yeah.’ So one day, it was the Moslem holiday
time, the grandfather tell his son, this boy’s father, ‘Go and find a sheep.
Kill it, skin it, and bring it to me.’ And the son does this. The old man takes
the skinned sheep and lays it out on a table in the back room, and puts a white
sheet over it, so the blood soaks through, and he calls his grandson. He come,
and old man takes him to the back room, and points to the bloody sheet. He
tells the grandson, ‘I kill a man today, and I need to get rid of the body. I
need your help. Call your friends. You go get one of your good friends to help with
this,’ and the grandson starts shaking, and say, 'Grandfather! You, you kill a man?' and his grandfather said, 'Yes. Now go get your friends.' And the grandson, his eyes are like this, he can't believe it; he even shit his pants, but he goes, so
scared, my god. He goes from one friend to the next, and no one will help, they
tell him to forget it, and he comes back to his grandfather alone, and the old
man say, ‘Where are your good friends?’ and the grandson say, ‘They won’t
come,’ and the old man say, ‘No one will help you? Your good friends?’ and then
he take the boy in the back room and lift the sheet. ‘Tonight we will roast
this, and we will all eat it together.’ And that was it. The grandson got it. He
got it. That was it. The old man, he couldn’t read or write, not even his name,
but he was a genius. I miss him. He was sweet.” H lights a cigarette. “Oh,
Lisa, mankind. Mankind my ass.”
Readers, I didn't kill a man, if that's what you think, or do time, because it's been too long, but I'll tell you this: your Miss O’s mind is all
over the fucking place today, so many thoughts, my god. Between being months-too-long understaffed/overworked at work and going on a too-short week’s vacation with Quinn and Ryan and Jerry the dog (see last summer's Travelblogue for similar pics) up to
Lake George (only to return early when a storm knocked out the power) and going
back to work with a work pile-up, to say nothing of unanswered emails; followed
by a month-long bathroom renovation that all started when a dear friend wanted to snake out
my slow bathtub drain (don't even go there), and the snake went right through a corroded pipe into my
basement, splash (I know, you went there), where he discovered that the years-ago contactors had packed
all the pipes in cement (“go, now," he said, "and get me a hammer, those motherfuckers,
who does that?”) and he also wanted to give me a new non-spraying bathroom sink
faucet and then discovered there were no shut-off valves under the sink (“Lisa,
this is shit”), and then learned, when he removed the toilet to replace the
crumbling tile that was bugging him that the lead pipe leading to the sewer
line was full of holes (“Lisa, we gotta big problem”--see photo above). The man is an angel. “Lisa,
you are so lucky, my god. MY god. You know what coulda happen if you had an emergency?” I got the water
shut off in the complex, and H changed out all the pipes in the faucet; and
later the rest throughout the bathroom (where there were shutoff valves), and replaced and repaired it all (oh, the pipes! joints! plumber's tape! the sozas ("saws"), the sheer brute labor of it), and then
laid new tile (the thin-set cement, the grout, the caulk…my hall rug…), and now I have an upstairs bathroom that works. (I have a
bathroom in the basement, or we couldn’t have taken our time—our time, as if I did more than hold the
flashlight and hand him the right wrench—thanks Stage Craft 101!)—and avash, avash, we have it done, one month
to the day. Today, though, infrastructure aside, I want to say something about
greed, and its offshoot of totally different motivations, hoarding. I’m also
thinking about inhumanity in the form of screaming at buses full of abandoned
immigrant children being screamed at like this is Little
Rock in 1957.
And Israel, now a right-wing warmonger, not unlike the right-wing of this
country, full of hatred and cruelty, making Putin, another right-winger, look
halfway decent by comparison. There has never been a positive policy suggestion
or a positive result from the right wing. Ever. Will no one face this?
How many right-wingers does it take
to screw in a light bulb? Fuck the light bulb. Shoot it the fuck up and then
blow up the ceiling and then deport the HOUSE.
How many bloody sheets does a wise
old grandfather have to lift up to the young to show them who their real friends are?
Anonymous Anonymous
“I
would venture to guess than Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them,
was often a woman.”
[Often totally misquoted as, “For
most of history, Anonymous was a woman” in every link on the ever-unchecked
Web.]
“The notion of giving something a name is the
vastest generative idea that ever was conceived.”
~ Suzanne K. Langer,
who I’m convinced would be a more famous philosopher if she’d been a man,
quoted in an epigraph in Reclaiming the
Imagination: Philosophical Perspectives for Writers and Teachers of Writing, Ann
E. Berthoff, ed., Heinemann: Portsmouth, NH, 1984, a compendium of cool
articles about the imaginative life, my first book in my first summer at Bread
Loaf School of English, summer of 1990. I graduated from there twenty years ago
this summer.
“In the Beginning was
the Word, and the Word was made Man.”
~God,
or someone imagining God
“Young children name
their drawings only after they have completed them; they need to see them
before they can decide what they are. As children get older they can decide in
advance what they are going to draw.”
~L.S.
Vygotsky, Mind in Society
What’s in a name? Naming names. Put
your name on it. Sign here. It's anonymous. Years ago, while I was away in Vermont, a former
student, between places to live (read: kicked out on his ass by his
stepfather), house sat for me (house sat is not quite it; “infiltrated” more
like, which I say after finding at least two old-fashioned green army men under
my couch later that fall), and he was a dear kid, and really a doll, like a son, I tell ya, but nineteen, you know. So when I called
the night before coming back, he panicked. “Why didn’t you warn me?” he cried,
and I said, “It’s on the big note on the fridge—with the dates…” “What note???”
and then “Oh….” Yes, that giant note on the 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper with the
black Sharpie writing in ALL CAPS with my return date on it. That one. And as I had
nowhere else to go and really wanted to get home, I came. See, the deal was
that he could house sit, which is to say live the summer rent-free, if he would
paint my (very small) kitchen and replace a shower stall liner in the bathroom.
Apparently not only had he done neither, but he was essentially living with an
assortment of D & D friends and a girlfriend, and the house was a mess.
When I pulled in at around 7 PM after an 11-hour drive, I found him sweeping up
the kitchen after a long day of painting, and the bathroom had not been
touched. His girlfriend was helping him, but I later learned (through his slip
of the tongue) that a Tom Sawyer painting party had ensued, including the help of a
colleague (another of his former teachers), who would never admit to it, even for
a laugh. Why not own it? This dear kid really was furious with me, and then felt guilty; I’d upset
his entire summer of fun. In the two weeks before I kicked him out, reminding him he had to get his own place ("Really, I will throw all your stuff on the driveway, and I say that with love"), it took all my energy to pull him away from his
computer games long enough to get him to help me go pick up and install the shower liner.
(I quickly saw why his stepfather had initially kicked him out, not that it was a nice thing to do.) This question of
ownership, of putting a name on your work (and seriously, back in New York for
a second, I even found initials in
the cement (cement! around pipes!) “Lisa, who does this?…” Apparently "C.H." if I read that right) of saying, “I
did this,” is really important to Miss O'. I despise, for example, the Koch brothers for their
funding of the Tea Party not so much because it’s a right-wing fascist bullshit
crap outfit, but more for their not wanting
their names attached to the purse strings that fund it, because they know
good and well that it’s a right-wing fascist bullshit crap outfit. Wall it off. Stonewalling.
Wall-building. Border patrols. Buses of migrant children. “Something there is
that doesn’t love a wall…,” and I think, what with all the disclaimers and lies
and bullshit, how the longer we know people, or nations, the less knowable they
become. With or without names.
Name THIS.
What else is pissing me off? (There's a lot to love, too, sure, but today I'm indulging in a little old-fashioned curmudgeoning.) Contraception…women’s rights…the
vote…a sick race of people who call themselves “pro-life,” when what they really
are is “past hope” in their own lives, so they try to destroy the lives of women
who are making harder choices than they can imagine. Whether it’s the
unpunished raping of women in India, or the bombing of Gaza by the right-wing
fascist outfit that Israel has become, H and I more and more know that it’s
religion and misogyny at the root of it. If H had his way, “The world would be
run by 95% women.” His religion would be the Mother Goddess.
Religion and money. Money and
religion. Here’s the story of the greatest religious fraud in America, L. Ron Hubbard,
and Scientology, his baby and his cash cow, as told my his great-grandson.
Listen and be sickened: How
Scientology Started. (This is how I spend my time. Who's really sick?)
The Parable of the Crappy Money
“So my father tells this story—I
don’t know how truth it is—but it could be,” H begins. “This boy wants his father
to sell the family farm in Montenegro. He’s always wanting money from his
father. Money, money, more money. The father keeps money in a basket tied to a beam, in the house there, and all the time his son keeps stealing it, so one day his father decides he'll leave some money there, but hides
most of money in a new place. Then the son beats them for more money, so
finally the father says, ‘There is more…,’ and he directs him to the outhouse,
says, ‘It’s behind the outhouse, in front of a fig tree, two meters down.’ So
the son takes the shovel, and he digs for two meters, and then three meters—but
no money, he can’t find it. His father says, pointing to the outhouse, “The
other one is full, and we need a new hole, and you dug it. That’s where the money goes—you work, you eat, you shit.” H smiles.
And you will be buried there. There it is.
Thirteen Dumpsters, Plus Three
H emptied out an old super’s
apartment, stacked with jars, cans, papers going back to the Nixon
Administration. “Lisa, three containers. Forty feet long. Three, for one
apartment. Dead rats. I’m so sick, my god. Pigs. I'm sorry to say it. How do people live like that?”
The neighbor of a friend in New Jersey died recently, leaving a house that it
took thirteen (13) giant dumpsters to empty out. I think Hoarding and Greed are
brothers, but kind of opposites. Hoarders spend with abandon, the greedy take
money and keep it all for themselves—one can’t bear to part with anything, the
other can’t bear for anyone besides themselves to have anything. All I know is everybody else is forever cleaning up
after their shit—the legal acquisitions of hoarders, the sneak-thievery that is
greed. And those people are exhausting us.
The Parable of the Rich Man with the Island
“There was this guy, a rich man,
and he was looking a place to build his house for himself and the family,” H
says, “and he hire a couple experts, they say ‘this is the place,’ or they
don’t like it, high mountains, flatland, whatever it was. The rich man’s idea
was to build his house in the middle of the ocean, where there are no snakes,
only fish, and only his family. They will be completely safe. So his wife gives
birth to a boy, and his son turns three, and he says, ‘Daddy I want grapes.’ No
grapes there. The rich man had boats and slaves, so he sends a security guy in a boat to go and buy a grape, and he came back, and says, ‘Here’s the
grape.’ They give them to the boy, and in the grapes, was little tiny snake,
and the snake bites the boy’s tongue, and the boy dies. The rich man learned
there is no safe place in the entire world. ‘I am being punished, something
took my son away,’ and that was it. So the rich really live in a lovely way, and
then the biggest thing they have, no matter what they try, is a headache
anyway.”
Rules of the Playground
The rules of the game: “If you hit
this,” explains the little boy on the handball court on the playground that
abuts my building here in Queens, “you win World Cup. If you don’t, you’re a
loser!” Apparently a ball goes amiss. “Hey, scooter,” he shouts, “send it back!
Hey, scooter!” [beat] “I’ll chase you!” And the noises stop on the other side
of my trash alley-perched porch wall. For a while.
We sit in the quiet. H tells me about his favorite
singer, Croatian, I think: “There was this lady, as far as guitars, named Fatima
Sukoly, and she created those songs for the government; she was the best artist
history remembered, and not even happening today, but everyone remembers her.
Literally she make a guitar cry, and sorry she had to die so young, but her
voice, the best—she sang songs, had to make them for government and leaders,
Communism time, she didn’t really want to—beautiful songs about the president, and
in the end she say, ‘How to read Fatima?’ (which was her); many different
ideas, and the president himself loved her. You can’t do that, not without
practicing—no one could become the artist she was without the work.” In this song on YouTube
(thanks, YouTube), H translated the words: “Mother gives them birth but guns
brought them up.”
Rules of the game.
The Parable of the Lie/Religion
“‘What do you believe?’ This guy
ask me what I believe. Who asks that?” H will sometimes open his wallet and
show a dollar bill, but not this time. ‘Nothin’,’ I tell him. ‘You don’t
believe nothin’? Aren’t you Moslem?’ he says. And I say, ‘No, I’m nothin’.’ One
time a police officer says to me, ‘What are you?’ This is right after 9-11, and
he stopped me for speedin’, on the Taconic there, an’ it’s dark. Nobody out. He
look like he wants to shoot me. ‘I’m American, like you,’ I say. ‘You were
speeding,’ he says, ‘get out of the car,’ an’ he puts his hand on his gun. I
take my time. ‘You want me to shoot you?’ he says, an’ I say, ‘I can’t stop
you.’” H takes a drag off his cigarette. H knew he could stop him, use martial
arts and quickly, leave him there and no one would find him for hours. But instead
he’s cool, shrugs, waits for his car to be “inspected.” “Not everybody is a
liar, but everybody lie,” H observes. “It’s an old business.”
The oldest, right after hooking. In
this conservative climate, anything made that shoots to kill, whether in open
carry or open skies, is the equivalent of the fucking flag. I’m so sick of it.
“What do you believe?” How about, “What do you SEE?”
Meanwhile, Education, and Why I Sometimes Think I Am Wasting My Life
I’m not a writer who pays much attention to theme.
In my experience,
thinking about theme instead of about the mechanics of story
and the
truth of characters leads to false and self-aware work. My opinion is
that “theme” is another word for “things the writer believes to be true
about
the world.”
~ Bo Wilson, playwright and classmate at Virginia Tech. (He
graduated a year ahead of me.) His work is opening everywhere lately, and this
is awesome.
How does one learn to write? First
one must read. How does one learn to read, and read well? One of the big
subjects in education today is Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the
instructing to which is my current writing task at work. Forget testing: I hate
standardized testing, and CCSS should, too, because all the real stuff they
target makes for the opposite of testability, which should be a good thing. So
here’s the point: The biggest key to CCSS as far as English Language Arts (ELA)
is concerned is something called “close reading.” I learned all about close
reading over the five summers I attended Bread Loaf School of English up in
Ripton, Vermont. At the time I began
there, in 1990, the idea of canonical reading—the old early 20th
century practice of reading select “classic” books written by white men (and
one by Jane Austen), and being told via lecture, from a white male professor,
what exactly it was that the writer “meant” by that text, and which passages
were the most important. To demonstrate a deeper understanding students wrote papers
(now called “research-based formative assessment”) in which salient passages
were quoted from various texts (comparative literature-style) and the opinions
of various critics were strung together, all of which was supposed to “prove”
your own “original” thinking. My generation wrote research papers like this all
the time (and I continued to do some of this at Bread Loaf, until I finally
learned to stop). Students of this school memorized the dates, themes, and
salient passages and were given a comprehensive final exam (now called
“summative assessment) to demonstrate their mastery of the lecture material and
texts. It’s not an awful thing—I gave tests like that as a teacher. But the
idea of reading a text deeply and getting out of it whatever you get out of it
was an alien concept until a group called The Deconstructionists came along.
Their work took off in the 1970s, but not until 1990 was a revolution brewing
on the campus of my graduate school. Venerable and famous teachers of
literature, including Alvin “The Death of Literature” Kernan and Walter “Bongo”
Litz (I’m kidding about the “Bongo”), felt that the place had gone to pot when
exams were replaced with papers, and
the papers asked of the students were to include their actual own ideas and
reflections on their own understanding of the texts they read. I attended a
panel discussion of the Canonicals vs. the Deconstructionists, summed up
perfectly by one professor, Britain’s Michael Armstrong, who at one point flew
at America’s Al Kernan: “If you tell me there’s only one way to read a text, I’m going to tell you to go to hell!” Michael was to become one of the most important
teachers of my life. Here’s what I know: Once I learned to have ownership of
the material, I discovered that I actually did have real ideas and real
questions, and real engagement. The secret? What I was doing was close reading. I was applying my
understanding of concepts such as theme, structure, semantics, grammar, syntax,
literary devices, and word meanings, and combining these with my own life
experiences to make meaning out of the texts. Doors opened, the earth moved.
I’d never go hungry again.
Not everyone is enamored of the idea of reading anything, let alone reading it closely. They (we all know "them") see long-form texts as “dry and boring” (actual words of people I actually know), and see the
kids as balls that need to be bounced. Activities! Gadgets! Lookee here! (Now test it?) It’s depressing, because that was how I
was “trained” as a teacher—keep the kids busy!—and I was always baffled as to
the point of it. Today’s kids like the gadgets, flitting from one screen to the
next, one moment to the next, faster and faster, and then, what, explode? And in school, write? How? But to
paraphrase Truman Capote’s comment about Jack Kerouac, they aren’t writing,
they are typing—unless there is real instruction, real focus, real depth to the
reading they are ostensibly responding to. So sayeth Miss O’.
And then I got to thinking: Why do
I think I am right? Why not a world of “more activities” and less depth of
connection? Why not? And then I thought about three reasons.
What Do Bruce Lee, Elaine Stritch, and Muhammed Ali Have in Common?
It sounds like the set-up of a bad
joke, but wait for the punch line. One evening, I asked H, “Who is your
greatest cultural hero?” He didn’t hesitate: “Bruce Lee.” So we went to YouTube
so he could enlighten me. Take a look yourself: Bruce Lee and the 1-inch
punch. The sheer power of it—it’s beyond impressive. You see the total
concentration of him. There are also
really interesting interviews—he was really an astonishing man. What about me? My
hero of the moment, as I had just seen the documentary Shoot Me, was Elaine Stritch, who had just died. I showed him her
seminal number. You watch, too: Elaine Stritch and the
Ladies Who Lunch. Her singing wraps total focus and control around the
music and lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, but more than that, she IS the songs she
sings. And curiously enough, we both have one idol in common: Muhammed Ali. You
watch, too: Muhammed Ali
boxing. Watch his footwork, his grace, and the astonishing quickness when
he avoids the punches of his opponents. He wore them out, and then went IN. Sure
boxing is beastly, but my mom, Lynne, adored The Greatest, even as my dad,
Bernie, moaned about the “rope-a-dope.” What the three of these disparate stars
share: That inner strength, the depth of the feeling and energy—they reach into
their deepest capacities, they train, they practice, they perform, and they do
it for themselves first and then for us. Here are three more videos: The great Bruce Lee playing ping pong
with nunchucks is staggering to watch—that is the training. Now
watch the late, great Elaine Stritch At Liberty at age 78—that is the training. She can own a
stage—only a brick wall behind her, a stool as a prop, and her dancing tights
and big white shirt as a costume. No dazzling lights—no blue follow-spots. All
these are in full, flat light. No tricks. The people themselves front and
center and alone. (The only young performer I’ve seen who has this is Adele.) This interview with Muhammed
Ali in 1971 with England’s premiere interviewer Michael Parkinson (sadly
ironic, his name) is one of the most compelling discussions I’ve ever seen. Ali
is fully great, and the greatness of his complexity shows us that greatness is
not about niceness, not about being easy, though charm is crucial,
self-awareness the linchpin. Bruce, Elaine, and Ali devoted their waking
professional lives to training to be the best at what they do, and they did it,
and we all are better for it. They were not gadabout scatter-shots, flitting
from activity to activity. Instead they were masters of the physical equivalent
of close reading. Everybody rise.
Wishing the World Away
Sometimes, as I have felt the past
few months, I want nothing but quiet—no human sounds and no human-made stuff,
is what I mean by quiet. Keeping to
my own. But what is that? One of the big troubles with “keeping to your own” (here
I reference Muhammed Ali’s expressed desire at the time (1971) for the
separation of races, his logic of “pigeons hang out with pigeons” and “Mexicans
like Mexican food and Chinese like Chinese food” notwithstanding) is that, for
example with Ali, that view doesn’t look past looks, really. Ali doesn’t consider
social inequality in terms of money and education and opportunity, which humans
have to contend with, and pigeons don’t. When poor only stays with poor, for example, and rich only with rich, something terrible is happening—a kind of rot
to the flesh and organs of the human world. There is no other species that can
think in these terms, or act with calculation in this way: purposefully to
better or to weaken not only their own species but also the world of plant and
creature species around them. There is something romantic about “faraway places
with strange-sounding names,” as the song goes, about seeing brown old men in
fezzes smoking hookahs on stone-lined narrow streets, while you yourself walk
about, white and in wonder at it all, en route to a café. It’s not only a
question of living separately, utterly bounded by race or religion, as if this
must be natural. What about rural and urban? In America, Northerner vs.
Southerner? When I was a teacher in rural Virginia taking kids on a field trip
to NYC, one young woman got off the bus, looked around the grime, glamour, and
grit that was that city in 1988, and said, “Now I know why I’ve been unhappy
all my life.” So as I say, I’m thinking I need to think about changing it up,
get out of myself for a bit. I mean, without booze.
The Bottle Cap on the Ground
Possibly I am channeling “The
Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or Virginia Woolf and her story “The
Mark on the Wall,” or that habit we have of taking lint off of someone’s
shoulder—the feeling of fixation we get on the tiny thing we can fix when
everything around us is chaos. My fixation is bottle caps discarded on the
ground or floor where anyone might slip on them. It might not be a bottle cap,
but could be a small bolt, a skate wheel, perhaps: any seemingly harmless but
potentially lethal obstruction. My fixation then moves to action: I remove it.
After I slipped on one during a rehearsal in college—and we’d all noticed it,
and no one had moved it—and broke my right ankle cleanly in two as a result, I
became mindful of how such a tiny object can upend a life. I’d like to think
I’ve made a difference dozens of times over, and in a good way.
Here’s another fixation: Rudeness. Last week while working (and this could be trying to contact Comcast or your insurance provider--make it into a parable), a fellow off site emailed to say
there was new material available on our server, but declined to say where
precisely it was. I asked for a link to the folder. He said I didn’t need one.
I replied that I did, and would appreciate it. Knowing what was coming, I
shrugged and left the office, but was so angry, not only about the dismissive
reply, but about all the time he was about to waste. And waste it he did: After
I left (which he didn’t realize) he shot back a disparaging email along the
lines of “you need to learn to find things for yourself,” he “hasn’t got time
to link out to the path all the time,” and the non-swearing equivalent of “fuck
you.” About fifteen minutes later (according to the time signature), he wrote
back an apology, and sent the path—but not the direct link. Still no link. (He, I suppose, has his hubris to consider.) By now—the first email came at 4:41 in the
afternoon and the last at 5:59 PM—an hour and eighteen minutes of time has
passed. When I followed the path that led to the folder the next morning, I had
to open nearly every document in it to find the material he’d referenced,
because the information he identified was not to be found on any document where
you might, by the title, expect to find it. I wrote him a very kind note to
explain that his file structures are not intuitive to anyone except him,
because he creates them, and are in fact often baffling, and that sending a
direct link is a professional courtesy; we bookmark these links for future
efficiency. LINKS. LINKS!
It’s these little obstructions that
are killing me, slowly, because I cannot kick ALL of them out of the way. But
what I can do is take the tiny victories—a bathroom that functions (since we dug a new one, but found no money), a Bic pen
kicked out of aisle (no link needed)—and realize that at least I didn’t have to kill a sheep and
bloody a sheet to try to get someone to see sense. H and I really could use a
year or ten by the ocean, and in it. Surely there’s a scratch ticket somewhere,
with our names on it. And not two meters deep.
Kids, here's to plumbing that works, and refreshment in all things,
with love
Miss O'
