Margotlog: Poetry and the Night Sky
Living in modern cities with street lights dimming the dark, we settle into a comfortable amnesia. This is all there is: kilowatts and miles per hour. Each day fractured into little bits. Nerves, heart, even our prose growing ever speedier.
Then, if we're lucky and live near the edge of the great light bubble, we escape. We pare down, turn off, retain only essential ties. There's enough food to keep us alive for days. A bird feeder draws summer close. A great expense of lake stretches in many directions, captures clouds and waves, a few loons. We have a horizon again.
Even so, I'm reluctant to wait out the light. It takes a long while for nerves and muscle to release the energy of arrival and departure, schedules and commitments. For many days I fall asleep before the light has completely left the sky.
As time relaxes, I dive deeper into memory and image. Lines begin to sing in my head. One night I am alert. I wait up. When deep dark has arrived, I step outside. The night sky is aswarm with stars. Caverns and archipelagos, ice caps and mountains, worlds I can barely imagine they are so distant. Yet they shine down on me. A plane or two chugs across. A shower of meteors darts like sky minnows. With luck, northern lights throw green veils across the dark. I have become the infinitessimally small in the vastness of time, space and stars.
Poetry comes from this kind of wonder. Even if the emotion is not subdued, but pounds and shatters, it must arrive in language that has looped beyond the commercial bubble. It must stretch far and wide. It must try to see in the dark.
Not only has my own poetry flourished during my lucky tenure with the Laurel Poetry Collective, but my experience of what is possible has stretched enormously as I've been surrounded by this company of star gazers. It's not that we hear the same voices in the dark. But that singly or together, we step outside and seek to be awed, amazed, surprised by what constantly exists, yet is usually very hard to see. In 2012, we will publish our last anthology. It's time to celebrate our years, more than a decade long, of plucking poetry out of the dark.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Margotlog: Dirty, Foul-Mouthed, Cold: Washington's Boston Army
Margotlog: Dirty, Foul-Mouthed, Cold: Washington's Boston Army
In these days of intense partisanship, when disgust at our fellow citizens runs high, it's been a good counteractive to listen to David McCullough read his account of 1776, when a rag-tail army, dirty, foul-mouthed, and cold, eventually forced the British to withdraw from Boston. The American commander of course was George Washington, but McCullough, with his perennial wit, clarity and vivid personification of men, climate, and geography, also brings to life the British commander Lord Howe, many of Washington's supporting officers, notably Boston bookseller Henry Knox, and the shifting regulars who had no uniforms but their farmer clothes, little book-learning thought lots of physical know-how, and an acute shortage of gunpowder.
After the Battle of Bunker Hill in July 1775 showed the British how feisty and wily their opponents could be, the Americans spent the next seven months digging fortifications, trying to figure out how to "smoke" the British out of Boston, and getting used to each other. Washington did not like New Englanders. McCullough paints a vivid portrait of the American commander, contrasting his Virginia elegance and hardihood in the saddle--Washington enjoyed day-long fox hunts--with the rough men from New England who made up his army. This is one of the most important underlying contrasts in the period: Virginia planters were served by slaves who did almost every kind of physical labor on plantations. New Englanders worked their own land, made their own wagons and built their own houses. They were jacks-of-all-trades, used to physical hardship, and not particularly polished by education or social niceties.
As Henry Knox also proved, they could be rallied in the hinterlands to support the cause of independence. Knox himself, a large, hearty, sociable Boston bookseller-turned-soldier, had the idea of traveling to Fort Ticonderoga in December of 1775 and bringing back the fort's usable cannon and mortars, floating them down Lake Champlain, then sledding them over the Berkshire Mountains. This enormously difficult feat was accomplished against all but constant odds, forced ahead by Knox's refusal to give up, and the aid of local citizens along the way, who built sledges, helped recover cannon which sank, luckly close to shore, and provided oxen, then horses to drag the sledges over the mountains.
The British, McCullough makes clear, had little of this "get up and go." Lord Howe, the commander, though a brave and well-trained soldier--he led the last charge up Bunker Hill and was the only British soldier left standing--was slothful, over-confident, and given to constant socializing. One of my favorite scenes takes place that Boston winter during a Boston theatrical, in which booms of cannon resounded. The audience of British soldiers and Loyalists took the cannonade to be part of the farce, but in reality it was American guns. A telling mistake.
McCullough sums up the difference between the British and American command with several succinct comparisons: The American generals and other officers had, with a few exceptions, little military experience except for years before, fighting as did Washington in the French and Indian Wars. The British soldiers were not only highly trained, but their leaders had all served in many engagements. Yet the loose regulations governing American hierarchy let virtual unknown civilians like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox rise to the top, which proved immensely important, as they added wit and intelligence and determination to the cause. Meanwhile the British rigid division between aristocracy and commoners kept brilliant military strategists and engineers at lower levels.
By the time Washington's army, using decoying techniques, had dug the Ticonderoga guns into the Heights of Dorchester, both sets of assumptions were proven wrong. The British were not superior as they withdrew, deciding to save their men, rather than engage. They had been outsmarted. And Washington had tested the mettle of his officers and men. Whether he changed his mind about New Englanders, at least in his voluminous correspondence, I have yet to find out. I'm only half-way through the book.
It's good to be reminded that from the very beginning of this nation's formation, there was a divide between northern and southern ways of life. Washington had the fortitude, humility, power of command and intelligence to use what he was given to its best advantage. Perhaps this is what we lack today. Though I admire President Barack Obama for many of his initiatives and his obvious desire to compromise, I see him lacking qualities that made Washington a compelling leader, not just a good one or an experienced one, but compelling. With his imposing figure always in the field, encouraging, directing, taking charge when necessary, Washington provided an outstanding leader whose skill, determination, and power to unite could not be ignored. One example comes back to me: in a melee that fall of 1775, when the American soldiers fell upon each other to beat and curse, and damage each other, Washington (one of the tallest of his contemporaries) strode into the fight, grabbed two combatants and held them at arms' length as he alternately cursed them and knocked their heads together.
We are not now on a battlefield except figuratively. But it gives me great satisfaction to image President Obama pulling apart two of the most snarly Dems and Republicans and giving them a talking to, then knocking some sense into them.
In these days of intense partisanship, when disgust at our fellow citizens runs high, it's been a good counteractive to listen to David McCullough read his account of 1776, when a rag-tail army, dirty, foul-mouthed, and cold, eventually forced the British to withdraw from Boston. The American commander of course was George Washington, but McCullough, with his perennial wit, clarity and vivid personification of men, climate, and geography, also brings to life the British commander Lord Howe, many of Washington's supporting officers, notably Boston bookseller Henry Knox, and the shifting regulars who had no uniforms but their farmer clothes, little book-learning thought lots of physical know-how, and an acute shortage of gunpowder.
After the Battle of Bunker Hill in July 1775 showed the British how feisty and wily their opponents could be, the Americans spent the next seven months digging fortifications, trying to figure out how to "smoke" the British out of Boston, and getting used to each other. Washington did not like New Englanders. McCullough paints a vivid portrait of the American commander, contrasting his Virginia elegance and hardihood in the saddle--Washington enjoyed day-long fox hunts--with the rough men from New England who made up his army. This is one of the most important underlying contrasts in the period: Virginia planters were served by slaves who did almost every kind of physical labor on plantations. New Englanders worked their own land, made their own wagons and built their own houses. They were jacks-of-all-trades, used to physical hardship, and not particularly polished by education or social niceties.
As Henry Knox also proved, they could be rallied in the hinterlands to support the cause of independence. Knox himself, a large, hearty, sociable Boston bookseller-turned-soldier, had the idea of traveling to Fort Ticonderoga in December of 1775 and bringing back the fort's usable cannon and mortars, floating them down Lake Champlain, then sledding them over the Berkshire Mountains. This enormously difficult feat was accomplished against all but constant odds, forced ahead by Knox's refusal to give up, and the aid of local citizens along the way, who built sledges, helped recover cannon which sank, luckly close to shore, and provided oxen, then horses to drag the sledges over the mountains.
The British, McCullough makes clear, had little of this "get up and go." Lord Howe, the commander, though a brave and well-trained soldier--he led the last charge up Bunker Hill and was the only British soldier left standing--was slothful, over-confident, and given to constant socializing. One of my favorite scenes takes place that Boston winter during a Boston theatrical, in which booms of cannon resounded. The audience of British soldiers and Loyalists took the cannonade to be part of the farce, but in reality it was American guns. A telling mistake.
McCullough sums up the difference between the British and American command with several succinct comparisons: The American generals and other officers had, with a few exceptions, little military experience except for years before, fighting as did Washington in the French and Indian Wars. The British soldiers were not only highly trained, but their leaders had all served in many engagements. Yet the loose regulations governing American hierarchy let virtual unknown civilians like Nathaniel Greene and Henry Knox rise to the top, which proved immensely important, as they added wit and intelligence and determination to the cause. Meanwhile the British rigid division between aristocracy and commoners kept brilliant military strategists and engineers at lower levels.
By the time Washington's army, using decoying techniques, had dug the Ticonderoga guns into the Heights of Dorchester, both sets of assumptions were proven wrong. The British were not superior as they withdrew, deciding to save their men, rather than engage. They had been outsmarted. And Washington had tested the mettle of his officers and men. Whether he changed his mind about New Englanders, at least in his voluminous correspondence, I have yet to find out. I'm only half-way through the book.
It's good to be reminded that from the very beginning of this nation's formation, there was a divide between northern and southern ways of life. Washington had the fortitude, humility, power of command and intelligence to use what he was given to its best advantage. Perhaps this is what we lack today. Though I admire President Barack Obama for many of his initiatives and his obvious desire to compromise, I see him lacking qualities that made Washington a compelling leader, not just a good one or an experienced one, but compelling. With his imposing figure always in the field, encouraging, directing, taking charge when necessary, Washington provided an outstanding leader whose skill, determination, and power to unite could not be ignored. One example comes back to me: in a melee that fall of 1775, when the American soldiers fell upon each other to beat and curse, and damage each other, Washington (one of the tallest of his contemporaries) strode into the fight, grabbed two combatants and held them at arms' length as he alternately cursed them and knocked their heads together.
We are not now on a battlefield except figuratively. But it gives me great satisfaction to image President Obama pulling apart two of the most snarly Dems and Republicans and giving them a talking to, then knocking some sense into them.
Sunday, August 14, 2011
Margotlog: I've Stopped Eating...
Margotlog: I've Stopped Eating...
First or second go-around farmers in Minnesota grew a little bit of everything from chickens and turkeys to beef and dairy cows to wheat, corn, flax, rye, and the numerous tiny crops of their summer kitchen gardens. When I visit friends in Finlayson almost straight north of Saint Paul on Highway 35, I stand amazed in a garden as big as my city backyard filled with potatoes, corn, beans, broccoli and cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, onions, and the perennial herbs like oregano and mint, not to mention flowers twined around for beauty and charm. It's a bonanza of fecundity, which this quasi-farm family (really the wife) cans and dries, freezes and stews or stores in sand in the cellar. Did I mention the family also grows several kinds of apples and pears?
They know exactly where their food is coming from and what growing it does to the environment--no pesticides, herbicides or other "cides," which of course means an agent of death. To combat plant killers, they rotate crops, spray with relatively benign mixtures of vinegar or soap suds, pick off some noxious critters themselves, or shroud their trees in nets. To keep up the fertility of the soil, they dig compost into it every spring. Every summer, some scourge gets a crop or plant or two, but they still harvest an enormous stash of healthy food which lasts them almost through the winter.
Yet it's a lot of work and it keeps them all summer chained to their garden. No gadding about to Europe, Asia or the antipodes. Though I tend to gad, still I admire them and try to take the message of their work to heart. Lately I've been troubled by evidence that we in the Northland have forgotten one of the most profound messages of farming: What gets dumped upstream pollutes down the river.
Item number one: Minnesota farms send a huge plume of nitrates down the Mississippi every growing season. This plume joins other such noxious run-off and settles in the Gulf of Mexico to deaden the water for any crustacean or fish. According to a recent article in the StarTribune, this dead zone is the size of Connecticut. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act should be working to help farmers at our end of the watershed use less fertilizer, ring their fields with run-off barriers of tall plants that would filter out these nitrates. But whatever is being done is clearly not enough.
Our fish populations especially on the Atlantic shores are already so over-fished as to be nearly extinct--due to rampant greed and the high-tech killing capability of fishermen. (There's some evidence that they're taking a new tack toward conservation--after all, their own livelihoods depend on restraint.) I've also read that farmed fish that eat other fish are no solution. ONLY TILIPIA, which is a plant-eating fish, works in a farm and helps conserve wild fish stocks. So I'm not eating salmon or cod anymore because it's very pricey or farmed. I'm eating TILIPIA.
Now it looks as if fish in the Gulf are being forced further and further from shore, if not outright suffocated with chemical pollution. CORN is the culprit. Ethanol is the reason, not to mention the nation's abhorrent dependence on corn-fed beef and corn syrup which gives soft drinks their diabetic punch. I swore off soft drinks unless they're sugar free years ago, and now I'm working on my husband to swear off beef. NOTE THIS: The fat content of feed-lot, corn-bed beef is 90% higher than range-fed/grass-fed beef.
The answer of course has to start at home: we have to change our own eating habits first--organic and local foods, and animals treated to their and our own best health. But we also need to lobby our representatives.
One of the most profound underlying causes is the enormous size of contemporary Minnesota farms. It is more possible to monitor the health of fields when a farmer has only the old homestead size of 180 acres. But with the thousand acres (think of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres), maximizing yield through the enormous application of herbicides and pesticides becomes an end in itself. We need to get rid of ethanol, it's proven poorly cost-effective, and the corn used to produce it contributes the majority of nitrate run-off.
Though very wealthy huge farmer will lobby powerfully, we as individuals can make a difference by what we consume. No ethanol (ultimately more expensive anyway), and no corn syrup sodas, no corn-fed, feedlot beef (our hearts will thank us), and letters to our congressional reps.
It's not easy being green!
First or second go-around farmers in Minnesota grew a little bit of everything from chickens and turkeys to beef and dairy cows to wheat, corn, flax, rye, and the numerous tiny crops of their summer kitchen gardens. When I visit friends in Finlayson almost straight north of Saint Paul on Highway 35, I stand amazed in a garden as big as my city backyard filled with potatoes, corn, beans, broccoli and cauliflower, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, squash, onions, and the perennial herbs like oregano and mint, not to mention flowers twined around for beauty and charm. It's a bonanza of fecundity, which this quasi-farm family (really the wife) cans and dries, freezes and stews or stores in sand in the cellar. Did I mention the family also grows several kinds of apples and pears?
They know exactly where their food is coming from and what growing it does to the environment--no pesticides, herbicides or other "cides," which of course means an agent of death. To combat plant killers, they rotate crops, spray with relatively benign mixtures of vinegar or soap suds, pick off some noxious critters themselves, or shroud their trees in nets. To keep up the fertility of the soil, they dig compost into it every spring. Every summer, some scourge gets a crop or plant or two, but they still harvest an enormous stash of healthy food which lasts them almost through the winter.
Yet it's a lot of work and it keeps them all summer chained to their garden. No gadding about to Europe, Asia or the antipodes. Though I tend to gad, still I admire them and try to take the message of their work to heart. Lately I've been troubled by evidence that we in the Northland have forgotten one of the most profound messages of farming: What gets dumped upstream pollutes down the river.
Item number one: Minnesota farms send a huge plume of nitrates down the Mississippi every growing season. This plume joins other such noxious run-off and settles in the Gulf of Mexico to deaden the water for any crustacean or fish. According to a recent article in the StarTribune, this dead zone is the size of Connecticut. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act should be working to help farmers at our end of the watershed use less fertilizer, ring their fields with run-off barriers of tall plants that would filter out these nitrates. But whatever is being done is clearly not enough.
Our fish populations especially on the Atlantic shores are already so over-fished as to be nearly extinct--due to rampant greed and the high-tech killing capability of fishermen. (There's some evidence that they're taking a new tack toward conservation--after all, their own livelihoods depend on restraint.) I've also read that farmed fish that eat other fish are no solution. ONLY TILIPIA, which is a plant-eating fish, works in a farm and helps conserve wild fish stocks. So I'm not eating salmon or cod anymore because it's very pricey or farmed. I'm eating TILIPIA.
Now it looks as if fish in the Gulf are being forced further and further from shore, if not outright suffocated with chemical pollution. CORN is the culprit. Ethanol is the reason, not to mention the nation's abhorrent dependence on corn-fed beef and corn syrup which gives soft drinks their diabetic punch. I swore off soft drinks unless they're sugar free years ago, and now I'm working on my husband to swear off beef. NOTE THIS: The fat content of feed-lot, corn-bed beef is 90% higher than range-fed/grass-fed beef.
The answer of course has to start at home: we have to change our own eating habits first--organic and local foods, and animals treated to their and our own best health. But we also need to lobby our representatives.
One of the most profound underlying causes is the enormous size of contemporary Minnesota farms. It is more possible to monitor the health of fields when a farmer has only the old homestead size of 180 acres. But with the thousand acres (think of Jane Smiley's Pulitzer-prize-winning novel A Thousand Acres), maximizing yield through the enormous application of herbicides and pesticides becomes an end in itself. We need to get rid of ethanol, it's proven poorly cost-effective, and the corn used to produce it contributes the majority of nitrate run-off.
Though very wealthy huge farmer will lobby powerfully, we as individuals can make a difference by what we consume. No ethanol (ultimately more expensive anyway), and no corn syrup sodas, no corn-fed, feedlot beef (our hearts will thank us), and letters to our congressional reps.
It's not easy being green!
Friday, August 12, 2011
Margotlog: Summer's Lease and the Freedom Riders
Margotlog: Summer's Lease and the Freedom Riders
I've been noticing a shift in heat and days, the congregation of birds at the free-standing feeder, now full of chickadees and red and gold finches, as the fledglings forage for themselves and parents fatten up for the cold. Summer's lease, in Shakespeare's wonderfully evocative phrase, is slowly expiring, mornings dawning later, and we in the northland even lucky enough to have cool, as compared to those poor creatures in Texas, sweltering through yet another day over 100.
Faulkner's Light in August has just run itself out on my disk player. I'm noticing how the master of Southern storytelling shifts from focus on his three main players, using omniscient narration to depict each one in shifting perspectives, to broader, more anonymous and briefer renditions. The one who survives is Lena Grove, pregnant and walking from Alabama to Mississippi at the beginning of the book, in search of the man who "knocked her up," as we used to say in my Carolina teen years. "Passed on" by the end are the two men, Reverend Hightower, that flabby dechurched preacher whose failure is rank with sweat and solitude, and Joe Christmas, the reputedly half-Negro, orphan now 33 years old, a Christ-like figure whose childhood of hateful treatment has made crazy. He has killed a white woman who was his lover and by the end is hounded down by various incarnations of Southern militarism. Lena survives, walking again after pausing in Jefferson, Mississippi, to acquire a protector and give birth to her child. The voice who describes her at the end is that of the small-town truck driver who provides a ride into Tennessee for her and her protector, Byron Bunch. The driver, returned home, lies in bed and relates to his wife how Byron finally had enough gumption to present himself as her consort. The narrator is amused by Byron's "indefatigable"--along with "outrage" one of Faulkner's favorite words--attentions to the serene, madonna-like Lena, and so are we, amused and grateful that Byron has finally found declared himself.
Writing in the early 1930s, Faulkner depicts an "unreconstructed" South--now we're hearing my North Dakota mother's voice. Though far from an out-and-out liberal, my mother rarely mouthed any racism nastiness, as opposed to my father who often could not shut up about it. (I've decided he was co-opted by racism, and prepared to be so by a childhood in Pittsburgh where as a Protestant Italian he and his missionary family were hazed every Sunday by their Catholic compatriots. But that's another story.) The Southern story is about the change that swept over the South in what we call civil rights.
This summer is the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, when young black "agitators" (my father's term, but he was not alone) rode interstate buses into the South to prove that the Supreme Court decisions desegregating interstate transportation were not upheld. Calvin Trillin has a fine essay in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker describing his experiences covering the south for Time magazine during this year of 1960-61. When reporters like him contributed to regular national coverage of civil rights agitation (and success and murder) in the South, they helped widen national thinking. Public opinion shifted from considering segregation as he puts it, a "regrettable regional problem" to seeing it as "a moral wrong that had to be addressed."
Many histories have been written of this crucial period, but most of them focus on the brave people, black and white, outsiders and Southerners, leaders and followers, who either challenged the segregated system or opposed that challenge. But the story of the civil rights era should also include the by-standers, those black and white Southerners--or Northerners living out their lives there like my parents. As Faulkner's novel makes evident, racism in the South twisted everyday life into extremes, imbuing the already rigid divides in Protestant Christianity with extra fiery force, and tainting the average white person's ability to "see" black people's poverty and lack of freedom and opportunity, not as something they deserved, but as something the white people themselves promulgated (one of my father's favorite words).
To quote Trillin again, civil rights preaching (think Martin Luther King) toward love and equality "seeped through the defenses" of good Southern white people and taught them that supporting segregation was not "independent and enlightened" nor was agitation caused by "meddling outsiders." In fact, we date the beginning of change to the sit-ins conducted by black college students wearing suits and ties, heels and hats and gloves--bright and determined Southern blacks. Though my father never overtly admitted how wrong and hateful his language had been during the civil rights era, he eventually simply talking that way, either too tired to continue, or (what I like to hope) finally understanding the justice of equality under the law.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
I've been noticing a shift in heat and days, the congregation of birds at the free-standing feeder, now full of chickadees and red and gold finches, as the fledglings forage for themselves and parents fatten up for the cold. Summer's lease, in Shakespeare's wonderfully evocative phrase, is slowly expiring, mornings dawning later, and we in the northland even lucky enough to have cool, as compared to those poor creatures in Texas, sweltering through yet another day over 100.
Faulkner's Light in August has just run itself out on my disk player. I'm noticing how the master of Southern storytelling shifts from focus on his three main players, using omniscient narration to depict each one in shifting perspectives, to broader, more anonymous and briefer renditions. The one who survives is Lena Grove, pregnant and walking from Alabama to Mississippi at the beginning of the book, in search of the man who "knocked her up," as we used to say in my Carolina teen years. "Passed on" by the end are the two men, Reverend Hightower, that flabby dechurched preacher whose failure is rank with sweat and solitude, and Joe Christmas, the reputedly half-Negro, orphan now 33 years old, a Christ-like figure whose childhood of hateful treatment has made crazy. He has killed a white woman who was his lover and by the end is hounded down by various incarnations of Southern militarism. Lena survives, walking again after pausing in Jefferson, Mississippi, to acquire a protector and give birth to her child. The voice who describes her at the end is that of the small-town truck driver who provides a ride into Tennessee for her and her protector, Byron Bunch. The driver, returned home, lies in bed and relates to his wife how Byron finally had enough gumption to present himself as her consort. The narrator is amused by Byron's "indefatigable"--along with "outrage" one of Faulkner's favorite words--attentions to the serene, madonna-like Lena, and so are we, amused and grateful that Byron has finally found declared himself.
Writing in the early 1930s, Faulkner depicts an "unreconstructed" South--now we're hearing my North Dakota mother's voice. Though far from an out-and-out liberal, my mother rarely mouthed any racism nastiness, as opposed to my father who often could not shut up about it. (I've decided he was co-opted by racism, and prepared to be so by a childhood in Pittsburgh where as a Protestant Italian he and his missionary family were hazed every Sunday by their Catholic compatriots. But that's another story.) The Southern story is about the change that swept over the South in what we call civil rights.
This summer is the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, when young black "agitators" (my father's term, but he was not alone) rode interstate buses into the South to prove that the Supreme Court decisions desegregating interstate transportation were not upheld. Calvin Trillin has a fine essay in the July 25th issue of The New Yorker describing his experiences covering the south for Time magazine during this year of 1960-61. When reporters like him contributed to regular national coverage of civil rights agitation (and success and murder) in the South, they helped widen national thinking. Public opinion shifted from considering segregation as he puts it, a "regrettable regional problem" to seeing it as "a moral wrong that had to be addressed."
Many histories have been written of this crucial period, but most of them focus on the brave people, black and white, outsiders and Southerners, leaders and followers, who either challenged the segregated system or opposed that challenge. But the story of the civil rights era should also include the by-standers, those black and white Southerners--or Northerners living out their lives there like my parents. As Faulkner's novel makes evident, racism in the South twisted everyday life into extremes, imbuing the already rigid divides in Protestant Christianity with extra fiery force, and tainting the average white person's ability to "see" black people's poverty and lack of freedom and opportunity, not as something they deserved, but as something the white people themselves promulgated (one of my father's favorite words).
To quote Trillin again, civil rights preaching (think Martin Luther King) toward love and equality "seeped through the defenses" of good Southern white people and taught them that supporting segregation was not "independent and enlightened" nor was agitation caused by "meddling outsiders." In fact, we date the beginning of change to the sit-ins conducted by black college students wearing suits and ties, heels and hats and gloves--bright and determined Southern blacks. Though my father never overtly admitted how wrong and hateful his language had been during the civil rights era, he eventually simply talking that way, either too tired to continue, or (what I like to hope) finally understanding the justice of equality under the law.
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Margotlog: Money Sense
Margotlog: Money Sense
When my sister and I received our allowances as kids, each week's outlay probably amounted to a quarter. In that distant era, when a loaf of sliced bread cost a nickle, and a bottle of milk not much more, a quarter was big money. We would walk across Marion Square, in Charleston, South Carolina, named for Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who fought the British during the Revolutionary War, and won. From our doorway in The Old Citadel's King Street wing to the other side of Marion Square sliced the city block at a diagonal. There, on Meeting Street, half a continent away, hunched a tiny grocery story. Sometimes we bought our mother a loaf of bread but more often we purchased candy cigarettes with pink-tipped flames, or Mars bars, with their swoosh of stellar dust, or tiny wax bottles of disgustingly sweet liquor tinted green, purple or maroon. We spent our allowances, our "own money."
My mother had excellent money sense. She'd grown up in comparative wealth, half a continent away, on another diagonal, from coastal Carolina to her North Dakota hometown. Hankinson was tiny in comparison with Charleston, but it sat in the midst of acres of winter wheat, oats, and rye. Her father, though not a banker, propped up the town economy by selling furniture, caskets, and funeral arrangements. He eventually become an absentee landlord of four farms nearby clustered around a small lake. He acquired these during the Depression, my mother told me later. The owners hadn't the cash to pay the taxes, but he did. That's all it took. Later, in the 1950s, gravel was discovered beneath one of the sand hills at one edge of the lake. This gravel, sold to the county and state to improve rural roads, made my grandfather a wealthy man.
My father, on the other hand, earned only a modest college professor's salary, but with outlays of money from North Dakota, my parents were eventually able to buy a piece of property across the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant. There they built a bungalow. Now we lived not in a small city, but a really small town. During the 1950s Mount Pleasant was forging connections across the nausea-inducing Roller Coaster bridge to Charleston, but many parents of my school friends still worked locally. My father, one of those early pioneers who commuted to work in Charleston, brought home more money (I'm thinking around $15,000 a year) than lots of other working parents. When I entered high school, my mother returned to work
"B.B., before babies," as she used to quip, she worked in Pittsburgh in various college and university libraries, using her library degree from the University of Minnesota. She'd graduated in 1929, at the beginning of the Depression. As far as I know, she had no college tuition debt. But she would learn quite a bit about economizing. In order to afford her first trip to Europe with my father, in the late 1930s, she ate oatmeal twice a day. She bragged about this economizing. Later when we lived in Charleston, I watched her do the budget, sitting at the kitchen table with checkbooks and bills spread around her. It was the lists of expenses, written on the backs of envelopes--columns of tiny cramped figures--that caught my attention.
When I went to college in Baltimore, North Dakota money paid for it too, and I still had an allowance which arrived every month, a check written in my mother's tiny crabbed hand. It was probably $25. Only once during those four years was I "flush" with funds: when I won a literary prize and spent the $100 on a portable stereo and several record sets of Brahms and Mozart.
My mother's example has stood me in good stead because I, too, have had to make do at various times over the years. I have never borrowed money for anything other than a big purchase, a car, or a house. I did not enter adulthood with a load of debt. North Dakota wheat money, in part, saw to that, but equally important was my mother's money sense. She knew how to "put by" for bigger expenses. She knew how to buy second-hand, and "make do." She knew how to cook inexpensive meals. She knew how to prioritize desire and save for those luxuries--almost always intangibles like concerts, higher education and overseas travel, which meant to her the bliss of escape and storing up knowledge and aesthetic experience to enrich the inner life.
Recently I had a conversation with a masters level student who wants to write his final paper on the weight of college debt among his generation. In five minutes, he's painted a picture of ignorance, predatory lending from big banks, and long-term onerous consequences. At age 17, he walked into a Wells Fargo bank in the Twin Cities and asked for information about college loans. "I knew nothing about borrowing money," he tells me. Without doing a credit check, the bank extended him what was in essence a credit card for his tuition and living expenses. The percentage the bank could charge was variable, according to the agreement, which, of course, he was too young and ignorant to check. At some points over his four years at the University of Minnesota, the interest rate rose as high as 25%. To add insult to injury, the University discouraged students from working more than 10 hours a week. Though I appreciate this limitation, I'm also appalled at it. When this young man graduated, he had accumulated $46,000 worth of debt.
It took him only a year of attempting to live on his own, and working at a modest-paying job, to realize that the only way he could ever pay-down the debt was to move home. This he has done. He calculates that two years of having no rent costs has whittled $10,000 from the principle. Soon he will return to the rental world but with a roommate. Now with his better paying job, and a roommate sharing rental expenses, he calculates that he'll pay off the debt in three-five years.
How different from my college expenses, saved for in part by my mother, funded in part by my grandfather's gifts. I graduated with no debt and luckily a fellowship to graduate school, where again, a combination of family savings and gifts paid my dorm costs. My student will pay down his debt until eventually he has erased it, but the financial bind it put him in has forced him to take work that was not his first choice, forced him to live at home for several years, and delay marriage and children. None of these is life-threatening. He seems to have health and now a greater degree of financial savvy, as well as college and master's degrees. Far from pitiable.
Still, I'm appalled and incensed. He was clearly far too young to realize the hole the bank had waiting for him. And I'm willing to bet, he also hadn't much younger training in saving and going without. Still, the onus of this problem lies with the bank. Just as there's been a public outcry against predatory credit card solicitations among college students, we need to raise our voices against predatory college loans. NOTE: these are not federal loans, but local bank loans which many students need to supplement federal grants.
Now I have another reason to look askance at the chirpy, excessively friendly (let's say intrusive) clerks at the Wells Fargo windows where I bank. If I were a naive high school student, their chattiness would indeed translate into safety and comfort. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It's part of the package of enticing the ignorant young into signing up to be fleeced. I'm collecting stories from other clients of Wells Fargo: almost to a person, we hate this intrusive, smarmy friendliness. We're old enough to know where it can lead.
When my sister and I received our allowances as kids, each week's outlay probably amounted to a quarter. In that distant era, when a loaf of sliced bread cost a nickle, and a bottle of milk not much more, a quarter was big money. We would walk across Marion Square, in Charleston, South Carolina, named for Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, who fought the British during the Revolutionary War, and won. From our doorway in The Old Citadel's King Street wing to the other side of Marion Square sliced the city block at a diagonal. There, on Meeting Street, half a continent away, hunched a tiny grocery story. Sometimes we bought our mother a loaf of bread but more often we purchased candy cigarettes with pink-tipped flames, or Mars bars, with their swoosh of stellar dust, or tiny wax bottles of disgustingly sweet liquor tinted green, purple or maroon. We spent our allowances, our "own money."
My mother had excellent money sense. She'd grown up in comparative wealth, half a continent away, on another diagonal, from coastal Carolina to her North Dakota hometown. Hankinson was tiny in comparison with Charleston, but it sat in the midst of acres of winter wheat, oats, and rye. Her father, though not a banker, propped up the town economy by selling furniture, caskets, and funeral arrangements. He eventually become an absentee landlord of four farms nearby clustered around a small lake. He acquired these during the Depression, my mother told me later. The owners hadn't the cash to pay the taxes, but he did. That's all it took. Later, in the 1950s, gravel was discovered beneath one of the sand hills at one edge of the lake. This gravel, sold to the county and state to improve rural roads, made my grandfather a wealthy man.
My father, on the other hand, earned only a modest college professor's salary, but with outlays of money from North Dakota, my parents were eventually able to buy a piece of property across the Cooper River in Mount Pleasant. There they built a bungalow. Now we lived not in a small city, but a really small town. During the 1950s Mount Pleasant was forging connections across the nausea-inducing Roller Coaster bridge to Charleston, but many parents of my school friends still worked locally. My father, one of those early pioneers who commuted to work in Charleston, brought home more money (I'm thinking around $15,000 a year) than lots of other working parents. When I entered high school, my mother returned to work
"B.B., before babies," as she used to quip, she worked in Pittsburgh in various college and university libraries, using her library degree from the University of Minnesota. She'd graduated in 1929, at the beginning of the Depression. As far as I know, she had no college tuition debt. But she would learn quite a bit about economizing. In order to afford her first trip to Europe with my father, in the late 1930s, she ate oatmeal twice a day. She bragged about this economizing. Later when we lived in Charleston, I watched her do the budget, sitting at the kitchen table with checkbooks and bills spread around her. It was the lists of expenses, written on the backs of envelopes--columns of tiny cramped figures--that caught my attention.
When I went to college in Baltimore, North Dakota money paid for it too, and I still had an allowance which arrived every month, a check written in my mother's tiny crabbed hand. It was probably $25. Only once during those four years was I "flush" with funds: when I won a literary prize and spent the $100 on a portable stereo and several record sets of Brahms and Mozart.
My mother's example has stood me in good stead because I, too, have had to make do at various times over the years. I have never borrowed money for anything other than a big purchase, a car, or a house. I did not enter adulthood with a load of debt. North Dakota wheat money, in part, saw to that, but equally important was my mother's money sense. She knew how to "put by" for bigger expenses. She knew how to buy second-hand, and "make do." She knew how to cook inexpensive meals. She knew how to prioritize desire and save for those luxuries--almost always intangibles like concerts, higher education and overseas travel, which meant to her the bliss of escape and storing up knowledge and aesthetic experience to enrich the inner life.
Recently I had a conversation with a masters level student who wants to write his final paper on the weight of college debt among his generation. In five minutes, he's painted a picture of ignorance, predatory lending from big banks, and long-term onerous consequences. At age 17, he walked into a Wells Fargo bank in the Twin Cities and asked for information about college loans. "I knew nothing about borrowing money," he tells me. Without doing a credit check, the bank extended him what was in essence a credit card for his tuition and living expenses. The percentage the bank could charge was variable, according to the agreement, which, of course, he was too young and ignorant to check. At some points over his four years at the University of Minnesota, the interest rate rose as high as 25%. To add insult to injury, the University discouraged students from working more than 10 hours a week. Though I appreciate this limitation, I'm also appalled at it. When this young man graduated, he had accumulated $46,000 worth of debt.
It took him only a year of attempting to live on his own, and working at a modest-paying job, to realize that the only way he could ever pay-down the debt was to move home. This he has done. He calculates that two years of having no rent costs has whittled $10,000 from the principle. Soon he will return to the rental world but with a roommate. Now with his better paying job, and a roommate sharing rental expenses, he calculates that he'll pay off the debt in three-five years.
How different from my college expenses, saved for in part by my mother, funded in part by my grandfather's gifts. I graduated with no debt and luckily a fellowship to graduate school, where again, a combination of family savings and gifts paid my dorm costs. My student will pay down his debt until eventually he has erased it, but the financial bind it put him in has forced him to take work that was not his first choice, forced him to live at home for several years, and delay marriage and children. None of these is life-threatening. He seems to have health and now a greater degree of financial savvy, as well as college and master's degrees. Far from pitiable.
Still, I'm appalled and incensed. He was clearly far too young to realize the hole the bank had waiting for him. And I'm willing to bet, he also hadn't much younger training in saving and going without. Still, the onus of this problem lies with the bank. Just as there's been a public outcry against predatory credit card solicitations among college students, we need to raise our voices against predatory college loans. NOTE: these are not federal loans, but local bank loans which many students need to supplement federal grants.
Now I have another reason to look askance at the chirpy, excessively friendly (let's say intrusive) clerks at the Wells Fargo windows where I bank. If I were a naive high school student, their chattiness would indeed translate into safety and comfort. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. It's part of the package of enticing the ignorant young into signing up to be fleeced. I'm collecting stories from other clients of Wells Fargo: almost to a person, we hate this intrusive, smarmy friendliness. We're old enough to know where it can lead.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Margotlog: London's Burning, London's Burning
Margotlog: London's Burning, London's Burning
When we were kids in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1950s, we'd play "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London bridge is falling down, my fair lady." Then on the "my fair lady," the four clasped and upraised arms could descend over a victim, one of the stream of kids walking under our bridge. The message was simple: disaster struck even the beautiful and fair, and it struck rather indiscriminately.
Some disasters are waiting to happen: so with the Great London Fire of 1666. Beginning in a single dwelling it spread over three days to destroy 439 acres, 80% of the city. The houses were all of wood. Warehouses containing very combustible materials added to the blaze. King Charles II was reluctant to call for destruction of houses within the fire's path, to create what were called fire breaks. Eventually, with a small resurgence, the fire burned itself out, destroying 13,000 houses, 89 churches, and 52 guild halls. Yet the loss of life was small: only sixteen humans. But multitudes of plague-bearing rats were incinerated. After the fire, the city rebuilt itself largely of brick, and the plague disappeared due to the decease of flea-bearing rats.
Every now and then, I pretend I'm looking down on Earth from a great height. The fires that destroyed many wooden cities flare up--San Francisco after an earthquake that led to a fire in 1906 (with 3000 dead, the worst disaster in California's history), Chicago in 1871, related to drought and high winds. It was coupled with a far larger fire that burned a swath of Wisconsin, the Peshtigo Fire, which killed between 1200 and 2500. Note this: the town of Singapore, Michigan, provided so much lumber to rebuild Chicago that the resulting deforestation created barren sand dunes which residents abandoned.
Yes, these great cities rebuilt in less combustible materials, formed stronger fire-fighting brigades, and went on to become greater cities than before. Now we face not urban fires so much as environmental disasters caused by accumulating human-made greenhouse gases. Maybe I'm drawn to disasters because they flare above the common ordinary and catch our attention: the Texas drought caused by 34 days of over 100-degree high temps, plus rainfall lower by 60% since January. This drought crosses the lower southern states, all the way from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, to Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Nuclear power plants cannot use some of the river water which normally cools the plants because the water temperature is over 90 degrees. Cattle and crops (not to mention wildlife and forests) are withering. There's talk of cleansing sewage for drinking water.
This is horrific, yes, but nothing to the mass exodus of herding and farming people in Somalia, with 29,000 children already dead of malnutrition. I look at pictures of mothers, themselves skin and bones, bending over the dehydrated, rib-showing bodies of their children or keening over their children's graves. One family has lost 4 of their 5 children within a month.
There's a beauty in fires: they rage hot and bright. They destroy right before our eyes. We humans, with our amazing ability to ignore what our experts tell us, pretend that it can't happen here. But we have trouble ignoring a major fire. In 300 years from now what will children be chanting? A version of London's burning about our droughts? Something like "Texas burning" or "Dakota flooding?" We may not see the flames but in fact, what we're doing with the constant increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) is like a constant low-level fire, filling our atmosphere with smoke, which spreads around the globe, distorts and magnifies weather patterns and will eventually BURN US UP! It's time we started singing like children. It's time we let ourselves be scared by modern-day fairy tales coming horrifically true right before our very eyes.
When we were kids in Charleston, South Carolina during the 1950s, we'd play "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London bridge is falling down, my fair lady." Then on the "my fair lady," the four clasped and upraised arms could descend over a victim, one of the stream of kids walking under our bridge. The message was simple: disaster struck even the beautiful and fair, and it struck rather indiscriminately.
Some disasters are waiting to happen: so with the Great London Fire of 1666. Beginning in a single dwelling it spread over three days to destroy 439 acres, 80% of the city. The houses were all of wood. Warehouses containing very combustible materials added to the blaze. King Charles II was reluctant to call for destruction of houses within the fire's path, to create what were called fire breaks. Eventually, with a small resurgence, the fire burned itself out, destroying 13,000 houses, 89 churches, and 52 guild halls. Yet the loss of life was small: only sixteen humans. But multitudes of plague-bearing rats were incinerated. After the fire, the city rebuilt itself largely of brick, and the plague disappeared due to the decease of flea-bearing rats.
Every now and then, I pretend I'm looking down on Earth from a great height. The fires that destroyed many wooden cities flare up--San Francisco after an earthquake that led to a fire in 1906 (with 3000 dead, the worst disaster in California's history), Chicago in 1871, related to drought and high winds. It was coupled with a far larger fire that burned a swath of Wisconsin, the Peshtigo Fire, which killed between 1200 and 2500. Note this: the town of Singapore, Michigan, provided so much lumber to rebuild Chicago that the resulting deforestation created barren sand dunes which residents abandoned.
Yes, these great cities rebuilt in less combustible materials, formed stronger fire-fighting brigades, and went on to become greater cities than before. Now we face not urban fires so much as environmental disasters caused by accumulating human-made greenhouse gases. Maybe I'm drawn to disasters because they flare above the common ordinary and catch our attention: the Texas drought caused by 34 days of over 100-degree high temps, plus rainfall lower by 60% since January. This drought crosses the lower southern states, all the way from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, to Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Nuclear power plants cannot use some of the river water which normally cools the plants because the water temperature is over 90 degrees. Cattle and crops (not to mention wildlife and forests) are withering. There's talk of cleansing sewage for drinking water.
This is horrific, yes, but nothing to the mass exodus of herding and farming people in Somalia, with 29,000 children already dead of malnutrition. I look at pictures of mothers, themselves skin and bones, bending over the dehydrated, rib-showing bodies of their children or keening over their children's graves. One family has lost 4 of their 5 children within a month.
There's a beauty in fires: they rage hot and bright. They destroy right before our eyes. We humans, with our amazing ability to ignore what our experts tell us, pretend that it can't happen here. But we have trouble ignoring a major fire. In 300 years from now what will children be chanting? A version of London's burning about our droughts? Something like "Texas burning" or "Dakota flooding?" We may not see the flames but in fact, what we're doing with the constant increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) is like a constant low-level fire, filling our atmosphere with smoke, which spreads around the globe, distorts and magnifies weather patterns and will eventually BURN US UP! It's time we started singing like children. It's time we let ourselves be scared by modern-day fairy tales coming horrifically true right before our very eyes.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Margotlog: Light in August and the National Debt
Margotlog: Light in August and the National Debt
William Faulkner drew the title for his 1932 novel from a comment his wife made while they were sitting on their porch, "There's something different about the light in August." That was in the depths of the Great Depression. Here we are, more than seventy years later, still pondering how that light can fall so differently on different minds and hearts--i.e. on local and national responses to personal and national debt.
In the novel, the heat of good and evil--specifically sexuality, racism and the Lord's dictates--goad characters into action. There could not be three more potent areas of human thought and action than these three--with the addition of the environmental imperative. With a rhetoric rich (and occasionally loggy) with repetition of abstractions--indomitable, impregnable, outraged--Faulkner shows us Lena Grove walking from Alabama to Mississippi, heavy with pregnancy. She is of two minds, comments the author, about the man who made her so: she knows he's a scoundrel, yet she believes that the Lord will bring together a man and a woman at the birth of their child. She believes she cannot help but find this man she calls Lucas.
Off in the woods on the outskirts of Jefferson, Mississippi, Joe Christmas mutually ravages and sinks into depravity with a white woman, Joanna Burden, who's carrying on her parents' Yankee efforts to aid "the Negro." Joe, orphaned, ground into hatred and mental malaise by a God-fearing adoptive father, believes he himself is part "Negro." When he slices Joanna's throat, it's because she has started to pray over him.
Finally the forces for good in Jefferson are represented by two men: a failed minister, Reverend Hightower, and a working man Byron Bunch, who has fallen in love with Lena and her burden over one slow afternoon at the mill. Byron and Hightower periodically discuss Lena, her insistent hope of discovering the scoundrel who impregnated her, and Byron's growing desire to shield her from the town, coming unraveled by the hunt for Joe Christmas and his moonshine-making partner, the drunk who's Lena's lover hiding under an assumed name.
In Byron and Hightower's conversations, Faulkner takes us deep into the difficulty of doing what is right. Their recognition of evil, of double and complicated minds, and of the necessity of protecting the vulnerable--all call up our political debates from this summer, the Minnesota and national argument about how to manage the public debt. Whereas Lena operates from two opposed but fixed ideas, and Christmas is set in motion by impulse and canny intelligence, Byron and Hightower examine Lena's situation with caution, probing for good, and aware of limitations. At one point Faulkner comments that men who habitually lie become skilled in fooling themselves that they're telling the truth--that would be Lucas--though they rarely fool anyone else. But a man who consistently tells the truth, i.e. Byron, can occasionally lie with the effect of being generally believed.
What do I make of these complicated and engrossing stories that Faulkner displays in the steamy and hazy August light? First, that the good is almost always created in relation to others; it is difficult to create and sustain alone. Second, that weighing what is possible within any given set of heart demands and head limitations remains difficult, necessary, and ultimately fruitful. Byron wants to remove Lena from a boarding house so that she can give birth away from the constant wear and tear of scandal, yet in her compromised situation, pregnant and alone, his very attentions might cause both of them to suffer.
In our summer of political conflict about how to lower the national debt, competing plans have been put forward by those who claim divine guidance, those who speak for the vulnerable among us, and those who urge draconian actions. In our conflict, divine guidance in this conflict is almost always claimed by "Tea Party" Republicans who admit that they owe allegiance to their churches before anyone or anything else, Claims to represent the vulnerable usually come from liberal (also often intransigent) Democrats who refuse to accept any changes in "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare. I find myself impressed ultimately by neither camp, just as in Faulkner's dense and complicated fiction, I recognize the shewed beliefs and dangerous behavior of both Joe Christmas/Joanna Burden and the indomitable (couldn't help myself) Lena Grove.
Despite her unwavering trust in the Lord, Lena must be protected by those who recognize the limitations of public life and sentiment. On the other hand, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, in their hatred and isolation, cannot ultimately make a difference. They collapse into a black hole of nonbeing. They cannot function. It is clear to me that we as a state and a nation must step around the rigid, God-fearing appeals which cannot work in the real world. Yet we must keep the needs of the vulnerable in mind but find workable ways to help them without bankrupting the public treasury. There is no knight in shining armor to save Lena. Only slow, careful consideration and a willingness to extend ourselves can make a difference.
William Faulkner drew the title for his 1932 novel from a comment his wife made while they were sitting on their porch, "There's something different about the light in August." That was in the depths of the Great Depression. Here we are, more than seventy years later, still pondering how that light can fall so differently on different minds and hearts--i.e. on local and national responses to personal and national debt.
In the novel, the heat of good and evil--specifically sexuality, racism and the Lord's dictates--goad characters into action. There could not be three more potent areas of human thought and action than these three--with the addition of the environmental imperative. With a rhetoric rich (and occasionally loggy) with repetition of abstractions--indomitable, impregnable, outraged--Faulkner shows us Lena Grove walking from Alabama to Mississippi, heavy with pregnancy. She is of two minds, comments the author, about the man who made her so: she knows he's a scoundrel, yet she believes that the Lord will bring together a man and a woman at the birth of their child. She believes she cannot help but find this man she calls Lucas.
Off in the woods on the outskirts of Jefferson, Mississippi, Joe Christmas mutually ravages and sinks into depravity with a white woman, Joanna Burden, who's carrying on her parents' Yankee efforts to aid "the Negro." Joe, orphaned, ground into hatred and mental malaise by a God-fearing adoptive father, believes he himself is part "Negro." When he slices Joanna's throat, it's because she has started to pray over him.
Finally the forces for good in Jefferson are represented by two men: a failed minister, Reverend Hightower, and a working man Byron Bunch, who has fallen in love with Lena and her burden over one slow afternoon at the mill. Byron and Hightower periodically discuss Lena, her insistent hope of discovering the scoundrel who impregnated her, and Byron's growing desire to shield her from the town, coming unraveled by the hunt for Joe Christmas and his moonshine-making partner, the drunk who's Lena's lover hiding under an assumed name.
In Byron and Hightower's conversations, Faulkner takes us deep into the difficulty of doing what is right. Their recognition of evil, of double and complicated minds, and of the necessity of protecting the vulnerable--all call up our political debates from this summer, the Minnesota and national argument about how to manage the public debt. Whereas Lena operates from two opposed but fixed ideas, and Christmas is set in motion by impulse and canny intelligence, Byron and Hightower examine Lena's situation with caution, probing for good, and aware of limitations. At one point Faulkner comments that men who habitually lie become skilled in fooling themselves that they're telling the truth--that would be Lucas--though they rarely fool anyone else. But a man who consistently tells the truth, i.e. Byron, can occasionally lie with the effect of being generally believed.
What do I make of these complicated and engrossing stories that Faulkner displays in the steamy and hazy August light? First, that the good is almost always created in relation to others; it is difficult to create and sustain alone. Second, that weighing what is possible within any given set of heart demands and head limitations remains difficult, necessary, and ultimately fruitful. Byron wants to remove Lena from a boarding house so that she can give birth away from the constant wear and tear of scandal, yet in her compromised situation, pregnant and alone, his very attentions might cause both of them to suffer.
In our summer of political conflict about how to lower the national debt, competing plans have been put forward by those who claim divine guidance, those who speak for the vulnerable among us, and those who urge draconian actions. In our conflict, divine guidance in this conflict is almost always claimed by "Tea Party" Republicans who admit that they owe allegiance to their churches before anyone or anything else, Claims to represent the vulnerable usually come from liberal (also often intransigent) Democrats who refuse to accept any changes in "entitlement" programs like Social Security and Medicare. I find myself impressed ultimately by neither camp, just as in Faulkner's dense and complicated fiction, I recognize the shewed beliefs and dangerous behavior of both Joe Christmas/Joanna Burden and the indomitable (couldn't help myself) Lena Grove.
Despite her unwavering trust in the Lord, Lena must be protected by those who recognize the limitations of public life and sentiment. On the other hand, Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, in their hatred and isolation, cannot ultimately make a difference. They collapse into a black hole of nonbeing. They cannot function. It is clear to me that we as a state and a nation must step around the rigid, God-fearing appeals which cannot work in the real world. Yet we must keep the needs of the vulnerable in mind but find workable ways to help them without bankrupting the public treasury. There is no knight in shining armor to save Lena. Only slow, careful consideration and a willingness to extend ourselves can make a difference.
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