Why? Thoughts On The Final Exam

An Open Letter To Students in May of 2016

"Man is his own star; and the soul that can

Render an honest and a perfect man,

Commands all light, all influence, all fate;

Nothing to him falls early or too late.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.”

- Robert Frost

Now, as we prepare to close out our year, I’d like to revisit the question with which we opened it.

Prompt:  Discuss how education and discipline make it possible for an individual to gain the freedom and power necessary to effectively shape identity.

 Why now? 

1. Because it is the end of the year and I am feeling nostalgic about endings.
2. Because I believe that endings, when properly honored, represent possibilities for growth and new beginnings
3. Because I have a love for you that my daughter taught me, when she let me hold her in her arms and know her preciousness, who imbued upon me a deep desire to protect and preserve that which was most sacred and precious and in need of protecting. 
4. Because we are doing social justice research, and have been for… awhile. Against a backdrop of considering what it means to be an educated individual in a society that would encourage individual visions to surrender to the blind pull towards conformity.
5. Because it is my hope that you may be able to think deeply about how you as an individual is in fact inseparable from larger forces at work within society.  

So let’s talk about those forces against which I hope you will learn, as young warrior-scholars, to resist, defy, and ultimately defeat.  I am speaking here of those powers that, in this day and age in America, work in a way that is counter to the ideals of democracy (freedom, liberty, equality, justice), which promote an agenda expressly designed for one reason and one reason only: to generate power.  These are the forces of a market left unchecked by those untrained, unwilling, and discouraged from questioning that its motives may not be entirely human.

You are shaped by these forces before you are of an age to even question how they are shaping you, and yet possessed of a power that is a natural right of being human, to exercise agency to shape it.  How do you know? Because you are trained to be consumers before you are trained to think for yourself.  A good consumer consumes what is offered.  A thinker asks, “Why are you giving me this?” and “Is it good for me?”

And a thinker with heart asks, “Is it good for others?”

And yet, you live in a time when you are being actively conditioned, by forces that do not have your best interest at heart, who wish to use your precious life force to feed their incessant need to get, acquire, possess:  more money, more influence, more power, more control. Simply put, the more power these forces wield, the greater freedom they will have to control, possess, acquire.  

I mean, do you ever wonder why we have so many zombie movies out there? Why zombies like the outrageously popular The Walking Dead, so capture our cultural imagination?  The whole show is based on a ridiculous premise when you think about it: Picture the board room.  Silence, then somebody offers, “Let’s make a show where a bunch of undead walk around terrorizing people, where the people who are not zombies have to camp out in fear and worry about being bit, all the while suspecting that some member of their camp has already been bitten and is thereby in the position of rendering every one of them into a permanent class of blood-thirsty, no-longer-human, walking dead.” 

Apparently, the response went something like: “Cool. This is an idea whose time has come.”

Now I don’t need to be the one to remind you that there are a lot of ridiculous ideas out there. But what if - just for the sake of argument - the writers of this show were actually onto something?  That the populace was actually primed to entertain the possibility that on some subconscious level, it had become entirely possible for the undead among us to threaten our very humanity and - what’s more - to turn us, in fear for our own safety, against one another?

What is really going on here? What is it about the overwhelming cultish popularity of this series that appeals to large masses of people, many of whom are (relatively) educated and sensitive individuals?

*[Disclaimer: I do not watch the show, as I do not watch most television series for reasons that are too complex to name here, but which may be oversimplified as: no cable, no interest, a strong aesthetic preference for books, and no desire to be subjected to the images of people being gored by zombies. I do however, follow television and other media trends via the analysis of philosopher, writers, and commentators, and friends whom I respect.]  

Back to the question - could the answer possibly have something to do with the way that large numbers of people, despite living in an age where they may easily be living unwittingly as slaves to a machine that would gladly separate themselves from their own capacities for awareness and insight - have, somewhere, a small, sneaking, and yet persistent sense that the threat of the undead and ravenous blood-hungry hordes?

Listen, please. I implore you with a mother’s love for what you may be, the preciousness of which you have yet to begin to fathom:  The fact that I wish to implore you not to take my statement at face value does not excuse me from needing to say it, because I know it is my conviction.  I want you never to be killed by the forces that would wish to steal from you your life.  I hope for you that you may never lose sight of your dignity, although you live in a society where the dominant forces conspire to take from you your life, who would train you to actually enjoy your own dehumanization,  for whom you are at worst a casualty of war, and after that a prisoner, and after that a ward of the state, and after that a subject of surveillance, and - at the very least, a consumer.  But never will they remind you or even allow you if they can help it, to recall your own dignity, that part of you capable of understanding -  exactly what Emerson means when he reminds you, from almost two centuries ago, that it is within your very nature, and within the dream of democracy, and within every great religion that has ever held traction in the history of humankind, to remember how "The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray."

Testify. 

Testify. 

Testify: To what you know, and especially that which you have been trained to mistrust.  Including me; do not trust me because I tell you that love you. Face it - I don’t even really know you beyond what I believe that I see. Just as you should never become so conditioned as to believe that you should trust any person who claims that they love you, who claims, by the sheer alluring whisper of words - to be capable of offering the source of your protection, relief, pleasure, and the need to be recognized for the unique individual that you are. In a culture that pays a lot of lip-service to honoring how “unique” and “amazing” you are, whose corporate greedy forces are actively at work convincing you that you “deserve” whatever ego-inspired, selfishly ignorant, materialistic, entitled shit you can imagine, and which would have you believe that the degree to which you “deserve” this - “fill in the blanks with any iteration of impulsively gratifying, satisfying need you can imagine” outweighs the force of civic responsibility that - if democracy exists at all - ties you to others in ways much more intricate, durable, and lasting than any infant’s untrained ideas of what matters most.  

This is your final exam:  Talk back.

No, forget that - shout back.  

And forget the thing about the exam. This is the test of your life. Of our lives:

Shout back with the force of your being against the forces that would command you to silence.   Take some time to reflect on the forces in your life that work to enslave you, and - to borrow a phrase from a fellow freedom-fighter, Bob Marley, “Emancipate yourself.”

If you can do it in a moment you can do it in a day.  

Me+You=We

If you can free yourself in a day, you can free yourself in a week, a month, a year - a lifetime. 

Me=You=We 

If you can free yourself, even in a day, you can implore others - those would-be conformists, those fodders for the machine of perpetual greed, to free themselves, in much the same way that a single flame - no smaller than the light atop a 99-cent-store birthday candle - can be used to ignite the combustible surface of every other potential light it encounters. So find what it is that must be understood, and find a way to spread this message beyond yourself: Write, sing, blog, paint, rant.  I don’t care how you do it, so long as you do this: get it out in a way that does the best you can do to allow others to hear, be affected, listen, and - most importantly - choose to act in response to what you share.

What do we share? We share questions and purpose.  Like this:

Where is your flame? Where did you leave it? Who put it out? To which force(s) did you bow your head in acquiescence and say, "Okay, I surrender" -  in spite of your stubborn best self - even though a few years or months or grade levels earlier, you would have shouted in their undead, blood-hungry faces, while you stood in defiance wearing a cape and your superman underoos and the leftover- chocolate mustache from your last indulgence because  - to hell with decorum -  you were alive and dying to fly and because of this you - if you were not killed before the moment when you learned to talk, shouted defiantly in the face of the dead lumbering zombie hordes that would oppress you and insisted, “I can fly!” I can Fly!” ”I can Fly!”

You were Superman once, too.  And that’s why you loved him (You too, Wonder Woman.).  Maybe that’s why you went to see him - along with a few million others any time within the last several months - take on Batman on the big screen.  It didn’t really matter who you went to root for -  the one who climbs walls or the one who played Clark Kent in one world and flew in another - the point was, you were willing to suspend your disbelief on some level - in the name of the divine wisdom that tells you that the capacity that lies inert within each of us is far beyond that which any of us habitually recognize.

Remember: You are being conditioned to forget this. 

Remember:You are being conditioned to not ask questions.

Remember: people are natural conformists.

Remember the lesson of the Milgram experiment - You are trained to do what the experimenters tell you to do, despite how it may violate the essence of your very humanity:

Don’t ask. 

Listen to the man in the white coat.  

Don’t question. 

Electrocute your fellow man to the point of death and feel like a good citizen, a model subject in the process.

And yet, remember this too: it was the ones who retained within themselves the ability to question and the agency to voice their own questions out loud - who saved countless innocent subjects from fatal electrocution.  Who saved themselves from indoctrination into - except for a strong resistance movement - a class of undead, ruling zombies that have the power to exert a perennial reign of terror and social control. 

Unless——-

Unless what? 

The answer is for you to decide - not in a vacuum of engineered solipsism, but in harmony with other divine beings who are eager to sing, eager to ask, eager to be, laugh, dance, and celebrate.

Celebrate what?

That power within each of you, to change, by the very nature of

your awareness and your belief in individual agency and collective union - the nature of reality and the world in which you live. 

  

How?

This, I cannot tell you.

You must determine this for yourself.

I can only remind you, in an effort to remind myself: Do It. 

---

That’s my rant.

——No, not a rant.  “Rant” is a word pandered by those who wish to marginalize the genuine voices of those speaking from the margins with conviction. 

This is my song, my plea, my life’s sermon.  It is possible that what I say to you now represents my singular gift, that testament to the particular ray on the particular branch within my particular line of vision, strengthened by my belief that it is the natural tendency and right of those around me to wish to sing in harmony and not discord.

This is my conviction.

Now, What is yours?

----

Shout back at me, rage, or hold your silence in a carefully contorted pose that you choose to relate in some way that defies my English-teacher bias on the towards the ineffable power of words. 

As an English teacher, I believe in the power of words to communicate that which must be explained. As a writer, I understand better than most, the incredible weakness of words.  I believe in working endlessly at the project of aiming to convey what my heart must express, and yet it has forever been my experience - and continues to be now - that words never come close.  

Such is my lot; I am indeed a human being, subject to forces beyond my control. 

And yet: I have power within me, and I believe it is my choice as a human being no greater and no less than any other being on this earth - now, and for as long as I choose to resist the forces that wish to convince me of my powerlessness - to shape, by the force of my convictions, the fabric of the reality in which I live.  

So now I stand here before you - shouting, singing, dancing: even though my voice is broken and I can’t carry a tune that will necessarily be recognized as such;  and even though I have only one arm and half a leg and I never seem to be listening to the same rhythm that everyone else is hearing. Even though my heart is broken.  

The song I want to sing to you goes like this

“Hear this! Listen! Stop!” 

and 

“Change, like this… Here’s how...”

And the dance I have to offer is only this: one single outstretched hand and a leg that can’t keep from wanting to move. Even if the only how-to I have to offer for how is this: Let’s figure it out.  Whatever it is, it’s bound to be better than this zombie food they’re trying to feed us. 

You don’t have to be religious to believe in the power of communion.

This is what a human being can say for as long as he or she remembers their own power.

Against the battalions of zombies surrounding our ranks, shout with me: 

Warlords and agents of destruction and greed, keep your drumbeat if it means that I must never break stride in order to keep up with it.  If that’s the case I’m going to have to choose between believing in my own capacity for composing, and simply keeping up.

And say, or shout, or sing, or dance, or make signs, but anyway tell them this with all the conviction that should have - if they had their way - been trained out of you right now: 

I can work my ass off to keep up, but if in the process I must surrender the music of my heart, I say to you, merchants of death, conductors of zombies - leave me behind.  

I believe in music of the heart that breaks and bleeds and goes

on beating, and I believe that I am not alone. 

Chorus of the human heart, voices of the voiceless who refuse to remain silent for eternity, rise up and speak.

Now is the time.

What will you do with it?

                             / We

What do you know?

                           / We

What will you do with what you know?

                            / We

How will you use this knowledge to remind others in the chorus - how to be here?

                            / We

Fly. 

        Go on, you beautiful beings.  

You are no earthbound clods. Your ancestors include Prometheus, and Moses, Siddhartha and MLK, Ruth, and Mary, and Spider Woman and the Sisters of Fate and the Sisters of Mercy, and Einstein and your baby sister before she could speak, and the child you once were before you were trained out of your greatest natural talents for being whole, and all of the prophets and geniuses of history who understood how to transcend their limited fates, and who acted, in spite of their training to the contrary - in response to this deep and profound understanding.

Fly.

Returning to Work, With Leisure in Mind

The first part of this post, begun over three weeks ago (within days its intended completion), is transcribed from a notebook entry I made during the week of our return to school, which always comes with jarring speed at the end of a period of relative calm.  For teachers, this is summer, and as it ended, about a week after I finished reading Josef Pieper’s 1948 essay “On Leisure: The Basis of Culture,” I felt myself synchronously drawn to the need to more deeply contemplate its worth.  

Interesting to note how in 1948. Piper was defining the plight of  “the modern workaholic” as one who is quick to remind others of his drive and ambition as measured in hours spent in labor, who scoffs at the notion of slowing down.  Of this figure, Pieper aptly observes that the compulsion to work is often rooted in the same vapid nature as the compulsion to indolence and laziness; both, Pieper argues, are borne of a disconnect with the philosophical self, that which seeks divine union through contemplation.  

Here it is, relatively unedited, as recorded at the end of the first week back.  Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, there has been no time to edit.  

This time of year, it is helpful to acknowledge that part of what is called for - in addition to the tritely apt reminder to breathe - is some surrender to the momentum of the excitement, because only in surrender to the susurrations of life’s pulse will one be able to find stillness in any motion it fuels.  For many years I have found myself at this point in the year thinking, even in the crux of genuine enthusiasm over the new year, how I am going too fast and must soon find some time to slow down or some essential presence, mindset, or priority - often that which was polished during reflective weeks in the heart of summer - will be lost.   It’s all new beginnings and lengthy to-do lists, a sense of running all day and stopping only to drink water as needed.  Following summer, the shift is jarring.  Although I maintained various responsibilities throughout those two months, I had grown accustomed to moving throughout my days at a pace slow enough to allow for frequent pauses.  I woke up, more or less, when I was ready to.  I made time for exercise because it felt good to do so, and had a positive effect on my day.  I planned meals with care and pleasure.  

Since staff development began, two days ago - in the same week as the start of my university coursework, I find myself often rushing from one place to the next, and waiting for a moment of pause during meetings so that I may run to get water and use the restroom.  I have gone from having responsibility for myself and two others to leading hundreds.  Ideas swim in my head more quickly than I can catch, some inspired (what if we tried _ this year?), others frantic (don’t forget: make copies of __, reply to emails from _,__, and __, finish updating syllabus, set up website… the list goes on). The to-do list, though essential at such times, has a way of regenerating at such speed that it can seem menacing in a certain light.

I wish to cast it in another light.  For sanity’s sake, yes;  more precisely, for the sake of preserving intact, some of my the most admirable traits of my human inheritance - namely, capacity to wonder, reflect, search for meaning, and let my mouth fall open in awe.  Rushing with one’s head down is a sure way to detach from these  Over a decade in the profession is more than enough to have taught me that  a sense of frantic rushing and a of not having enough time to tend to all needs, are features indigenous to any territory in the vast landscape of one’s life as it may be lived in any meaningful service.  Small tasks must be written down before they fall out of the head, and large tasks - the sort that would ordinarily be at the forefront of the mind - must be written down as a reminder, lest the hold on these becomes loosened and they are lost in the current of endless activity.  Such tragic loss might easily go unnoticed; for while it happens, one is, after all, working.  

For these reasons, what serendipity to have found Pieper’s manifesto on the necessity of preserving leisure exceedingly timely.  Prior to reading it, I had an incomplete understanding of the word.  

For the Greeks, “not-leisure” was the word for the world of everyday work; and not only to indicate its “hustle and bustle,” but the work itself… “the Greeks would probably not have understood our maxims about “work for the sake of work”… Could this also imply that people in our day no longer have direct access to leisure?

This section certainly gives pause, and the effect is magnified with the observation that, “The Greek word for leisure is the origin of the Latin shola, German schule, English school.”  I think, how much the opposite has come to be true.  For those who are “good students,” scholastic excellence is associated with “hard work,” and for those detached from the process, school may as well be synonymous with boredom.  

This post emerged from a desire to remember that human dignity and beauty live in the stillness at the center of work, and are lost in the hustle and bustle.  And yet, when one does not have the luxury of making one’s own hours, the only reliable and consistent way to do this is to stop waiting for the noise to die down and to cultivate a capacity to create some inner stillness amid the wild current, and to find silence in a crowded room of shouters. As I write this, I picture a pair of noise-canceling headphones placed deliberately around the most sacred center of one’s being. 

I almost wrote, “center of the interior self,” before catching an inherent flaw in the phrase.  While the image seemed useful - a small, highly concentrated shadow self within the larger body - the concept may do more harm than good.  In our ceaseless effort to order and sort elements of our environment and experience so as to better understand, we are often much too quick to create dichotomies:  noise/silence, company/solitude, work/life, activity/stillness. Such habits of mind create mental divisions where none need to be, like superfluous walls in a room intended to be open. When it is crowded, I may long for silence, but I cannot access it through the wall.  When active, my actions tend to be meaningful and the level of activity sustainable only when anchored to a place of stillness.

Enter Pieper’s thesis:

Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus, with divine worship.

Culture… is the quintessence of all the natural goods of the world and of those gifts and qualities which, while belonging to man, lie beyond the immediate sphere of his needs and wants.  All that is good in this sense, all man’s gifts and faculties, are not necessarily useful in a practical way; though there is no denying that they belong to a truly human life, not strictly speaking necessary, even though he could not do without them.

…freedom, in its innermost circle indeed, is philosophy…

While at work- meaning, honoring some responsibility to act in a capacity of service to others or a larger cause, it can be easy to feel estranged from some of the more sustaining aspects of nature, be these relationships, art, reflection, or a simple quiet pause, 

This will happen for as long as I feel that what I love to do is necessarily separate from that to which I am called to do. For, as Pieper reminds,  as long as Leisure is equated with “vacation,” “summer,” “weekend,” and perceived as antithetical to “work,” it will remain elusive.  At work time, leisure will be anxiously missed, and on “off” time, one will be too frayed to experience the stillness at its center.  One will be constantly aware of the way that my time with it is ending, which makes it difficult if not impossible to appreciate.  

Here are some passages that linger from this week’s reading:

Up until this time… the provence of “intellectual enterprise” tended to be looked upon as a kind of paradise, where nobody needed to work; at the heart of this privileged province lay philosophy, something at furthest remove from the working world.

… Now, the takeover of this region of intellectual action… by the realm of “total work” forms only the most recent phase of a whole series of conquests made by the “imperial figure” of the “worker

...The Greek word for leisure is the origin of the Latin shola, German schule, English school.

According not only to ancient philosophers, but also to medieval thinkers, understanding may come in two ways: one comes from being, or the “purely receptive ‘looking…” to which Heraclitus referred as the “Listening-in to the being of things.” This type of knowing corresponds to what the medieval intellectuals would have called intellectus, which corresponds to “the ability of ‘simply looking’… to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye. Contrast this with ratio, “the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding…”

“All knowing involves both,” and yet there appears to be some built in bias towards the “earned via work” sort of knowing over the “simply looking.” This, as Pieper reminds, appears to be a a noteworthy sign of the times. In discussing this  cultural tendency towards “over-valuation of the difficult,” 

Pieper observes:

The innermost meaning of this over-emphasis on effort appears to be this: that man mistrusts everything that is without effort; that in good conscience he can own only what he himself has reached through painful effort; that he refuses to let himself be given anything.

I suspect that I am not the only contemporary reader who feels a slight pang of shame at this.  While I like to believe that I am not yet near the stance of “workaholic,” it is also true that many a week goes by in a rush, and somewhere in the middle of such rushes, I become  hyper-focused on “getting things done.” Although such bouts of frantic activity rarely come without some longing for slower moments, I have been guilty of holding my sleep deprivation up like a badge of honor, as if my slavish determination to “get things done” meant something on a moral level.

Maybe it does, but probably it does not, and I thank Joseph Pieper for issuing a needed (apparently, over five decades ago) call to be mindful of the ways that we are conditioned in the modern world, to freely spend energy before noticing how doing so can leave little of time or anything else needed to celebrate the sacred space that makes human energy meaningful.  

In Times That Call for Satire, Paul Beatty Delivers

In a column he penned in 2006, Canadian critic John Doyle of Canada’s Globe and Mail observed that “There are specific periods when satire is necessary. We’ve entered one of these times.”  Suffice to say that post-2008 America, when Obama’s presidency corresponds ominously with a rash of media coverage (see Ferguson, St. Louis, Charlotte, and Queens) which may or may not be (but decidedly is)  rooted in a nation’s dark history of racism, Doyle’s sentiment is perhaps as true as it ever was.   Certain topics have become so marginalized or taboo in nature that any serious discussion of them is likely to be punished or ignored.  In so-called “postracial” America, the preponderance of deeply-rooted racial inequality is perhaps one of the most concerning taboos observed in popular rhetoric.  Despite glaring evidence to the contrary, the public discourse of Americans reflect a staunch determination to insist that race is no longer a valid axis of social inequality. 

Enter Paul Beatty and his 2015 satirical masterpiece The Sellout, which has been hailed by Dwight Garner of The New York Time Book Review as “the best American satire of the millennium.”  As a reader who was serendipitously introduced to Beatty in college, upon professor Bertram Ashe’s recommendation of Beatty's 1996 TheWhite Boy Shuffle, I expected, upon opening The Sellout, to experience a mixture of exhilaration and pain similar to what I felt when I first read his work;  that is, exhilaration at being in the hands of a writer of such impressive virtuosity that the completion of a page is in itself a heady rush - and pain because the talents of this writer, as witnessed by one at the verge of an understanding that she may well be called towards writing as vocation - are enough to inspire complete surrender before one even begins.  What’s the point? Beatty is that good.  It takes only a few pages of The Sellout for any sensitive reader to understand that they are in the hands of a literary master of dazzling ambition who has arrived intent on delivering a walloping blow.  

Talent, combined with drive and incisive focus on key issues of the day, make Beatty an ideal writer to address certain taboo subjects, and this reader early on considered it a boon to observe how, in The Sellout, Beatty pulls no punches.  I can think of no one better to loudly suggest that the very idea of “postracial America” may be a farce, even given the fact of a Black president, and while this theme remains the critical focus, his scathing commentary doesn’t end there.  Beatty hits hard, with precise blows, and his targets include the ceaseless “do-gooderism” of Dave Eggers along with the cloying presence of those whose overt and puritanical insistence on politically-correct language is especially offensive when ensconced in a comfortable buffer of bourgeoise accoutrements, and when it accompanies, in the name of liberation, a suspiciously instinctive readiness for filing out to march, “zombie-like” in procession at the next calling of any cause that seems remotely related to the mission of civil rights.  He swings at the dirty conspiracy of gentrification (see below for more on this) and at the inherent reluctance of a nation of people quick to hang banners for Black History Month, to acknowledge certain of the most uncomfortable aspects of the struggle, especially those as represented by Hominy, an aging actor befriended by the protagonist, who is a former Little Rascals star whose fame has not only become the sort of thing that many people of all races would much prefer to forget about, also has the dubious distinction of being native to Dickens, an urban agrarian L.A. community that was once primarily black, which is now increasingly Mexican, in which the protagonist maintains one of the only working farms - raising satsuma oranges, distinctively luscious watermelon, fine strains of pot, and a few pigs, while riding his horse, as his father did, into and out of town - while the city itself is being silently wiped off the map by a conspiracy of real-estate interests who would prefer to pretend that it doesn’t exist. 

I am getting ahead of myself here.  The central situation of the story, as presented in the opening pages, is that the protagonist (last name Me, who is known alternately as "Bonbon" by his girlfriend, "Massa" by his slave, and "Sellout" by his nemesis) is on trial in the Supreme Court, for reinstating both slavery and segregation in his hometown of Dickens, an “urban agrarian" community in Los Angeles, where he is one of the last remaining farmers. 

The protagonist is characterized largely by childhood of being raised by his father, a “social scientist of some renown,” who had left a position as a stable-hand in Kentucky to to become interim dean at Riverside Community College while establishing a small farm in LA.  As described in one of the opening chapters:

As the founder and, to my knowledge, sole practitioner of the field of Liberation Psychology, he liked to walk around the house, aka “the Skinner box,” in a laboratory coat.  Where I, his gangly, absentminded black lab rat was homeschooled in strict accordance with Piaget’s theory of natural development.  I wasn’t fed; I was presented with lukewarm appetitive stimuli. I wasn’t punished; I was broken of my unconditioned reflexes.  I wasn’t loved, but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment.  

…in his quest to unlock the keys to mental freedom, I was his Anna Freud… when he wasn’t teaching me how to ride [horses], he was replicating famous social science experiments with me as both the control and the experimental group.

Although his early service as lab rat has the unintended effect of making him decidedly indifferent about race, Me’s odyssey begins after the death of his father, who is essentially shot by police for driving while black.  As he explains the circumstances that led him to become an agent of change in the community, Me explains his motivation as “a son’s simple wish to please his father.”  

Me's father’s murder - which has obvious chilling echoes to national news headlines - is compounded by the erasure of his hometown of Dickens, which is described by an equally pernicious and relevant process that is the sort of familiar reality that generally flies under the radar of racist censure in ways that this passage effectively highlights, which make it emblematic of a new order of inequality that differs from its predecessor primarily in outward appearance while maintaining a de facto segregation that bears many of the essential elements that post racial America is so publicly proud of overcoming:

There was no loud sendoff.  Dickens didn’t go out with a bang like Nagasaki, Sodom and Gomorrah, and my dad.  It was quietly removed  like those towns that vanished from maps of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, atomic accident by atomic accident.  It was part of a blatant conspiracy by the surrounding, increasingly affluent, two-car garage communities to keep their property values up and blood pressures down. When the housing boom hit in the early part of the century, many moderate-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles county underwent real-estate makeovers.  Once pleasant working-class neighborhoods became rife with fake tits and fake graduation and crime rates, hair and tree transplants, lipo- and cholosuctions In the wee hours of the night, after the community boards, homeowner associations, and real estate moguls banded together and coined descriptive names for nondescript neighborhoods, someone would bolt a large glittery Mediterranean-blue sign high up on a telephone pole. And when the fog lifted, the soon-to-be-gentrified blocks awoke to find out they lived in Crest View, La Cienga Heights, or Westdale. Even though there weren’t any topographical features like crests, views, heights, or dales to be found within then miles. Nowadays Angelenos who used to see themselves as denizens of the west, east, and south sides wage protracted battles over whether their two-bedroom, charming country cottages reside within the confines of Beverlywood or Beverlywood Adjacent.   

…Signs that had read “Welcome to the City of Dickens” disappeared overnight.

As explained by Megan Le Boeuf, one of the hallmarks of satire is that “the main characters always feel they are doing something wrong by violating the rules and values imposed by society, when in fact they are acting morally, a fact obvious to the audience but not to them.”

In this vein, consider Beatty’s central character, driven to find a way to honor his father’s legacy, part of which involves his recognition throughout the community as the "whisperer" capable of  talking people down from crisis situations, whose hallmark crisis-turning reminder to the desperate and despairing was, “You have to ask yourself two questions, Who am I? And how may I become myself?” The question becomes a compass for the odyssey that follows, and Me's unassuming approaches towards declaring some measure of freedom from existing axes of oppression, and to extend the same to those he cares about, lead him on a quest to bring back Dickens, which he does by replacing a “disappeared” freeway sign and painting drawing a white line around the former neighborhood, guided by an outdated map.  His other offense, as slaveholder, is a role he takes only reluctantly out of respect for an elderly neighborhood icon, Hominy, to whom he feels indebted from childhood.  Hominy, an interesting character in his own right, who, with his gentle nature, “minstrel smile,” and the way that he, like many child actors, he“never seem to age” is a symbol that speaks to the heart of Beatty’s critical offense. 

Hominy’s very presence is the unsavory residue of a national past that no one wishes to acknowledge.  A former child-actor, Hominy was a rising star on The Little Rascals series before it was cancelled at the dawn of the era that heralded a commitment to post-racial America - and with it, perhaps, a guilty or overly optimistic rush to believe prematurely in its existence.  Hominy's tragic character is endlessly surprising and interesting in ways that can not be distilled into a single passage, but the essence of his predicament is that he, “like any other child star still standing in the klieg light afterglow of a long-ago cancelled career, was bat-shit crazy.”  The pathos of Hominy’s fading fame is compounded by the fact that the few remaining loyal followers can not - as a result of the disappearance of Dickens - locate him in order to pay their respects.  The compounding grief of his loss brings Hominy to a botched suicide attempt, at which point the protagonist muses on the particular poignance of his character:

If that naked old man crying in my lap had been born elsewhere, say Edinburgh, maybe he’d be knighted by now… But he had the misfortune of being born in Dickens, California, and in America Hominy is no source of pride: he’s a Living National Embarrassment. A mark of shame on the African-American legacy, something to be eradicated, stricken from the racial record, like the hambone, Amos n’ Andy, Dave Chapelle’s meltdown, and people who say “Valentime’s Day.”

When asked to explain his reason for attempting to kill himself, Hominy responds, “I just want to feel relevant.”

As part of his mental breakdown, Hominy becomes “unable to distinguish between himself and the corny ‘I owe you my life, I’ll be your slave’ trope,” he wakes the day after his failed suicide attempt calling his rescuer “massa” and begging to be whipped, despite the fervent protests of his reluctant slaveholder.  When, mid-protest, the protagonist asks, “is there anything else that would make you happy?” Hominy responds, “Bring back Dickens.”

In an episode that I almost hesitate to relay in awareness that it may not translate well outside of the intricate context of the novel, the protagonists’s girlfriend Marpessa (a bus driver) -  as a birthday present to Hominy arranged by "The Sellout," installs a tribute to the aging actor’s glory days in the form of a small placards  reminding bus patrons of “Priority Seating for Seniors, Disabled, and Whites.”  The satire really shines here - in part because of the predictable outrage that ensues from various patrons (When one man cries out, “I’m offended!” the narrator responds, “What does that mean, I’m offended? …It’s not even an emotion. What does being offended say about how you feel?”) and in equal part because of the absurdity of the situation, and finally because the real-life geographical and situational segregation is so acutely defined that Hominy is left eagerly waiting all day for a chance to give up his seat and would have gone completely disappointed except for the appearance of a redheaded Jewish beauty whose appearance turns out to have been arranged by the protagonist.  In comparison to those of pre-Civil Rights America, today's buses may seem like democratic institutions, but the ride on Hominy’s birthday illustrates how its passengers are so notably non-white as to make any internal segregation within the system not only irrelevant, but redundant to boot.

Norman Rockwell's The Problem We All Live With

In a serendipitous parallel, during the week that I was reading The Sellout, NPR’s This American Life aired the first of a scathing two-part program that effectively highlights some of the real repercussions of the American reluctance to directly address race.  Entitled “The Problem We All Live With” (in homage to the iconic Norman Rockefeller painting of the same name), it is well worth the hour of listening, and far too rich to detail here except in the briefest of sketches as relates to the issues at hand.  The episode follows the narration of Nicole Hannah, investigative reporter for The New York Times, in an documenting her well-earned (throughout decades of intensive research and personal experience on school reform measures, including integration) frustration over the refusal of most policymakers to discuss integration as a viable possibility, when research overwhelmingly supports integration as the single most (in fact, the only, Hannah argues) effective means of significantly reducing the achievement gap:

I'm so obsessed with this because we have this thing that we know works, that the data shows works, that we know is best for kids, and we will not talk about it. And it's not even on the table.

The program aims, as Beatty does, to address the unspeakable American problem of racial injustice so deeply entrenched that refusal to acknowledge race as an issue that continues to bear paramount relevance with regards to social and economic standing, and strongly illustrates how this deliberate glossing-over of legitimate concerns may arguably be rooted in some aversion to intricate complexity and nuance in an age and culture where the simple explanation is so often preferred, especially when ensconced in the alluring sheen of a national pledge towards “liberty and justice for all." Surely, by now, the thinking goes, such an ideal, now well into a the third century as an ideologies experiment, must be manifest. How eager we are to idealize, how slow to acknowledge our faults.  This human tendency is magnified exponentially at the national level, especially when the veracity of a national creed is called into question by any truly sober examination of the national image in an unbiased mirror. 

This brings me to highlight the final relevant talking point of this entry, which is by no means exhaustive of the fertile critical banquet that Beatty provides.  It concerns precisely the issue of integration, and has the effect of complicating my impressions of the episode described above, Part 1 of which has the effect of leaving the listener with the message that “Integration is the answer, but we don’t consider it because we will not consider overt discussion of race.”  Instead, the words used concern crime, security, funding, preservation of equity in real estate and and “the safety of our children.” (Listen to the podcast if you don’t believe me.  At recordings taken from city hall meetings in 2013, when the closing of the Normandy unified school district, for failure to meet federal minimum standards threatened to allow thousands of  students of predominantly black district to elect to attend high school in neighboring areas that, as the saying goes, “just happened to be” predominantly white, and you may find yourself wondering, as I did, if you are in fact listening to an eerily high-definition recording of a town hall meeting, circa the wake of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandating recognition of the legal and moral illegitimacy of the “separate but equal” mentality that seems to continue to justify - in increasingly more complex nuances - the continued segregation of schools along racial lines, which most notably is the root of the reason that the term “achievement gap” continues to exist as a prominent phrase in national parlance on education, nearly half a century after it first was coined in recognition of certain uncomfortable truths that were obvious to any serious educator.)

Here’s the link to Beatty, which is precisely what landed him the hot-seat as defendant in a Supreme Court trial. To a principal of a local middle school and friend of his girlfriend, the protagonist develops and institutes a plan to segregate the local middle school, in opposition to the view that integration is a “cover up.”  As he observes:

If you ask me, Chaff Middle School had already been segregated and re-segregated many times over, maybe not by color, but certainly by reading level and behavior problem… During Black History Month, my father used to watch the nightly television news of the Freedom buses burning, the dogs snarling and snapping, and say to me, “You can’t force integration, boy. The people who want to integrate will integrate.” I’ve never figured out to what extent, if at all, I agree or disagree with him, but its an observation that’s stayed with me. Made me realize that for many people integration is a finite concept.  Here, in America, “integration” can be a cover-up. “I’m not racist. My prom date, second cousin, my president is black (or whatever).” The problem is that we don’t know whether integration is a natural or unnatural state. Is integration, forced or otherwise, social entropy or social order? No one’s ever defined the concept.

For many readers, including this one, Beatty’s sheer talent is enough to warrant effusive praise and devoted following, but what is even more interesting about The Sellout is what lingers long after the mind has steadied itself from the vertigo affected by Beatty’s sheer talent as a writer.  It is his strength as a satirist in particular, that makes it so that certain themes, as attached to particular imagery and passages in the book, continue to occupy one’s thoughts during the spaces between readings and long into the time beyond the final page. 

Exploring Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin

In the spirit of embracing summer travel plans on a stay-at-home budget, I have been wanting to schedule at least one vacation via excellent travel book. This is what led me on a memorable tour through Patagonia with Bruce Chatwin, via the author's 1977 publication of In Patagonia. Although I had no prior knowledge of the author prior to the journey, I noticed that his name consistently ranked among the great travel writers of all time.  My high expectations were not disappointed.


Documenting the expedition he undertook during the 1970s, Chatwin describes his work as such:

In Patagonia is not a travel book in the usual sense but a Quest or Wonder Voyage.  It is about wandering and exile, and its structure is as old as literature itself: the narrator travels to a remote country in search of a strange beast and, as he goes along, describes his encounters with other people who delay him en route.

The “strange beast” Chatwin references at the opening of the narrative is a “replacement of the lost piece of skin” which had so mystified the author in his youth.   Chatwin’s grandfather, sailor Charley Milward, had kept the artifact in a jar throughout his life, claiming it to be the skin of a brontosaurus discovered soon after the merchant ship he captained sunk off the Strait of Magellan.  Upon Millward’s death, the legendary skin-in-a-jar was promptly discarded by his wife, and so Chatwin sets out to unpack the mystery of its origins, discovering the beast to be not a brontosaurus but most certainly the mylodon, otherwise known as giant ground sloth, a prehistoric mammal of dino-esque proportions.  It does not take long to understand that the “strange beast” of this story is more complex than the either brontosaurus or mylodon: a sort of chimera comprised of the mythical image of his grandfather, “a god among men,” the paths that people take to exile, and the vast and intricate history of a region ripe with mythical, cultural, and political history.  

Chatwin’s “godlike” characterization his grandfather - who settled in Punta Arenas after the demise of his vessel, sets the stage for a journey steeped in  wonder and mythos that turns out to be perfectly appropriate to a region so richly imbued not only with a rich and varied fossil record, but also with stratified layers of legend and intrigue. The artists, priests, merchants, expats, stock-herders, and other characters encountered throughout the journey seem to continually reinforce an implication that the lore and mystery of the place seems not at all dulled by living there.  Ripe history of colonial occupation and expat relocation leaves a tapestry of people of varied ancestry behind: history of various stripes: Welsh, English, Persian, Spanish, Scottish, French.  One example of the author’s nuanced presentation of the region’s history can be found in an early passage, narrating his voyage southward:

Mylodon model (from wikimedia)

The history of Buenos Aires is written in its telephone directory. Pompey Romanov, Emilio Rommel, Crisping D.Z. de Rose, Ladislao Radziwil, and Elizabeth Marta Callman de Rothschild - five names taken at random from among the R’s - told a story of exile, disillusion, and anxiety behind lace curtains.

Part of the delight in reading Chatwin comes from the author’s excellent characterizations.  One is swept up in the story by virtue of the rich interplay between characters possessed of both mythical and personable charms.  Take for example, Mrs. Jones, a “squat old lady in her eighties” who runs a teashop with her son, who introduces herself from her seat at the table with this line: “I can’t move, my dear… You’ll have to come and talk to me in the kitchen… I’m crippled. I’ve had arthritis since the flood and have to be carried everywhere.”  Or Alan Powell, “a small man, crinkled by the sun and wind,” and his wife, who “had shiny cheeks and was always laughing.” His taut descriptions are precise and I am pulled along on his adventure, swiftly; I  can see these people, and their presence, in Chatwin’s lively and well-honed voice keeps the journey immersive, real, and never abstract.  Add to this the shared meals: asado with a salmuera sauce of vinegar, garlic, chiles, and oregano, washed down with vino rosado at midday in shepherd’s kitchen The evolving narrative moves less towards a resolution, and instead towards an immersion in strange delicious midday dreaminess.  Traveling primarily on foot between hitchhiking jags, it seems as though every new chapter (many of them fewer than three pages) finds the author in a new kitchen, bed, or mishap, like walking past midnight, laying awake with raucous or suspicious bunkmates, or being stranded on the side of the road after an unfortunate tire blowout at the bottom of a backcountry hill.  

The structure lends itself to being interpreted (and I have read that this was Chatwin's intention) as a series of photographs kept in an album.  One of the most memorable of the recurring characters, in addition to Chatwins seafaring grandfather, whose story is traced throughout the narrative - is Father Manuel Palacios, “a comprehensive genius of the South” who lived in the Salesian College, and who shares with Chatwin a rich history including: "statistics, radio-carbon dates, migrations of men and animals, marine regressions, upheavals of the Andes or the appearance of new artifacts.  Possessed of a photographic memory he could describe in detail every Indian rock-painting of the South…  "

Palacios' lecture, as Chatwin recalls, “melted into a dream voyage,” in which “Marquesans beached their canoes in the fjords of Southern Chile, scaled the Andes, settled by Lake Musters and merged with the indigenous population.  Father Palacios described his own discovery, in Tierra del Fuego, the sculpture of a headless woman, life sized and smothered in red ochre” and goes on to detail his theory that the origin of the species can be traced to the Andes.  The fact that this theory yet fails to achieve widespread acknowledgment as valid in the eyes of the scientific community matters little in the context of this book of abundant legend and mystery.  

Image of the Patagonian Unicorn

The brontosaurus/mylodon is  one of many mythical beings appearing throughout the journey.  Others include ‘The Cappadocian Dragon,’ The Sect of Brujeria,  Charles Darwin, Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and those tasked with stalking them, to name a few.

Attempting to unpack the mysterious nature of a place can be problematic.  To paraphrase an insight offered by Fr. Greg Boyle on the problem of explaining humor: “It’s sort of like dissecting a frog.  You can do it, but you have to kill the frog first.”  So, instead of attempting to do so, I’ll attempt to detail a few of the elements of Patagonian lore which linger in the imagination long after the last page, and which prompted me to do a fair amount of follow up internet research to verify the veracity of their existence. 

In Fr. Palacios’s encyclopedic description of regional history, he mentions the Patagonian unicorn, which were “hunted to extinction by man in the fifth or sixth millennium B.C.” which are depicted in cave paintings near Lago Posados by  (“Really?” I think when I first read the account, recalling the burning shame of being scolded by my first grade teacher for including a unicorn in my painstaking  depiction of the garden of Eden.  “That’s not one of God’s creatures,” she barked.) I am pleased to learn that its existence is quite plausibly traced to the Toxodon, a “large hippo-like South American mammal that belonged to the now totally extinct order Nitingulata, hoofed mammals endemic to the American continent,” according to research compiled by Austin Whitthall, author of Monsters of Patagonia, and others.  There are other theories about this creature, including the rare but documented presence of one-horned deer. With a loud internal Hooray, I make a mental note to recover a favorite movie of childhood, The Last Unicorn, in order to watch it with my five year old in celebration. 

Follow this finding with the discovery of furry humanoid dwarves living in trees.  To be more specific, the Yoshil, a “tail-less protohominid with lichenous hair of yellowish green colour" dwarves that lived in trees and are rumored to have come into the beds of local women in the middle of the night.  These rumors may have countless other explanations, but fossil record and the testimony of numerous regional Salesian priests and others indicate the plausibility of reality of a Fuegian homunculus that fits the description of the Yoshil, who may also have been hunted to extinction at times when other prey were scarce.

Add to this, the fossil records of plesiosaurus, glyptodon, and macrauchenia,  ‘The Cappadocian Dragon,’  and the beaches of the here-and now (at least as they were, circa 1970s) scattered with carcasses of penguins.  Then there’s The Sect of Brujeria, a devilish cult of witchcraft rumored to dismember infants as part of initiation, and  the giant Patagons,  members of the Tehuelche Indian tribe, renamed by Magellan at first sight of their large physical stature, who are said to have been inspiration for the Shakespeare’s Caliban of The Tempest, whose voice utters the bitterness of the New World in the face of colonization: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax  my mother, which you take’s from me” (the reference, provided by Chatwin, calls to mind another, line of the same play, uttered by Sebastian (Act III, scene iii), as referenced by Whitthall: “Now I will believe, that there are unicorns…”) .  

Black-browed albatross

In this vein it is interesting to recall another legendary  figure, one John Davis, a mariner whose fateful journey is rumored to have inspired the voice of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rhyme of The Ancient Mariner, for whom, after shooting the bird: “Instead of the cross, the Albatross/ About my neck was hung.”  Considering the length of the ensuing journey, and the image I had in mind of the massive (by avian standards) albatross, the veracity of such a circumstance seemed so implausible that I have always thought that it must surely be meant as metaphor.  However, as Chatwin explains, the epic poem was in fact an historically-informed rendering of the records of voyages as recorded by John Davis, and there are in fact two much smaller members of the albatross family, both natives to Patagonia,  who are likely candidates for the role.  

As presented by Chatwin: "There are two contenders and I saw them both on Tierra del Fuego: the Sooty Albatross, ashy bird, smoke-grey all over and known to sailors as the Stinkpot or Prophet; or, less likely, the Black-browed Albatross or Mollymauk, fearless and attached to human company."

I could go on, but in the interest of time I’ll simply posit the question,  "Can you imagine?" against the tacit understanding that those who can will get it.  This is a place where over and over again, the supposed boundaries between imagination and reality and consistently blurred.  I cannot speak for other readers, but this is enough to keep me coming back for more.  

Although he was most often described as a travel writer, Chatwin did not see himself as such.  I suspect that this may have something to do with why he is such an excellent writer of travel narratives. Also generally reluctant to to identify as a novelist, Chatwin preferred to be acknowledged as a storyteller.  He is, indeed a storyteller, and his prose shimmers with wit, verve, and down-to-earth sensibilities that pair nicely with the affinity towards subtle shades of magical realism that he displays in this volume - and, I’ve read, in his other works, although Patagonia is the first of his that I am reading. 

The story lingers with a gossamer dreamlike quality, and after spending some time afterwards attempting to discern what parts were fact and what were fiction, I have given up.  It seems that some of the controversy surrounding aspects of the veracity of some of the stories within it is perhaps misplaced, although I sympathize with the tendency of outsiders to scrutinize, fact-check, and note disparities as they are found.  It seems that Chitin’s narrative is composed in the spirit of the place he is documenting, a place where, each mythical beast, as the mylodon he comes to find.  In attempting to record various human and animal histories, Chatwin observes how - in more than one instance, though this passage refers to the mylodon:

there was… a point at which the extinct beast merged with the living beast and the beast of the imagination.

This observation cuts to the heart of what is so memorable about this journey.  I cannot definitively draw the line between fact and fiction, and this seems to me to be true to experience in a way that the idea of a dichotomy between the two is not.  I have never had a significant experience which I did not burnish and polish over time as I handled it over and over again as memory.  I am certain only of the rich magic of Patagonia, and of my intention to plan future vacations with Mr. Chatwin.