Margotlog: Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!
There were none of the above in our childhood zoo--Hampton Park, Charleston, South Carolina. Well, maybe a medium-sized brown bear in a tiny cage, sitting like a teddy bear as we stared at his doglike snout. But in our peninsular world, huge pelicans skimmed the ocean surface and what we called porpoises lifted their gray, scimitar backs in tandem above the waves. My Midwestern mother soon discovered the relief of walking down the beach away from us, breathing in an expanse of ocean and dunes not so unlike the wide fields and skies of her native Dakota.
She had an almost rural childhood, as opposed to my father who grew up amid a conglomeration of Italians in Pittsburgh. He was the least likely to enjoy a picnic, fastidious to a fault, his operatic voice rising in agony over a spot on his Citadel uniform, or for our picnics at the Battery, wearing dark trousers and a sport coat with a white sport shirt winging smartly over the coat lapels. While the rest of us sat on a blanket my mother spread on the grass, he stood, a chicken drumstick in one hand and a napkin in the other. He might have been holding up his violin for all the formality of his pose, ready to join the little orchestra that played under a canopied bandstand.
Stamina and yen for exploring the wider world lay almost entirely with my mother. She planned our summer trips either by car or train, almost always north or northwest, out of Charleston, to visit their relatives in Pittsburgh or North Dakota. For local forays, she led us into marshes, plantation gardens, beaches. I remember slogging through flats of pluff mud, searching for oysters which we plunked into a pail, then at home, washed and scrubbed, baked in the oven until they gaped and we could insert a knife between the crusty lips and pry open their pearly insides. I have no recollection of actually eating them, though, given her household economy, I'm sure we did. Those were the days before pollution made eating shellfish problematic.
Living as we did in the block-long Old Citadel, we two girls lived almost entirely outside, racing up and down the irregular slate sidewalks, roaming the beige glitter of Marion Square to snag discarded cigarette packs and extract the tin foil for postwar factories. We drew a circle hopscotch under the hackberry tree growing outside our King Street wing of the Old Citadel, and appropriated the tough orange pomegranate blossoms from the same yard as cups for our dolls. There's a picture of a school we created inside a huge packing box, which my mother nabbed from a furniture store on Hudson Street, just behind the Old Citadel.
And we walked to school, imprinting our neighborhood in ever-expanding familiarity, denizens of a real place, with its own particular architecture and faces--many of them black and poor. We learned through osmosis the difference between class and race, antebellum homes rising with their tiers of porches, and the more recent bungalows of an earlier 20th century. We learned to look down at the sidewalk, where occasionally someone would drop a nickle or dime, and once I followed errant drops of blood, sure that some dog had been wounded. We had two dogs during those years at the Old Citadel: Tippy, a smallish black terrier who died maybe six months after we acquired him, and much later (with several cats inbetween) Rover, a red hound that Shorty, our black janitor, brought from Johns Island, south of the city.
I attribute my adult love of walking the neighborhood, of traveling far and wide, and of the natural and built environment to that childhood in the warmth of Charleston, and to my mother whose entire orientation was to quiet activity, exploration, and noticing what could be made to use. That last was as important as the other two: we never believed that an item was better because bought at the store. It was as invigorating to make-do, collect and reuse--notably the dance dresses my mother bought us at the Thrift Store--as it was to acquire new. Those qualities still get me up in the morning, curious to explore and discover what there is to hand. It was my father who brought the joy of sociability into our lives, but that's a entirely different story.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Margotlog: I Wake with Rudolpho's Music...
Margotlog: I Wake with Rudolpho's Music...
Puccini's La Boheme is the quintessential Italian love story. Yes, I know, there's always Verdi's La Traviata with Violetta (reformed high-class prostitute) dying of TB at the end. She's left her middle-class lover at the instigation of his father--to "save" his reputation--and returned to a life of partying until the disease takes over. La Traviata was the quintessential opera play-acting for my sister and me as girls, but now that I'm older, give me Rudolpho's love song to the little seamstress Mimi.
Puccini, born in the charming walled Tuscan city of Lucca in 1858, created a blend of unfolding story and music called verismo. The music does not stop for set pieces--the older operatic duets, trios, quartets in which characters simply stand still on stage and belt out whatever is motivating them. Instead, the music twines around the action, in fact announces the action which then becomes metaphoric. So when Mimi, the seamstress, knocks at her neighbor's door (imagine a tall Parisian house with its garret overlooking rooftops), she asks for a light for her candle and then drops her key. Rudolpho, the painter of a trio of bohemian artists, instantly is drawn to her. Takes her hand and begins the love action with "Che gelida manina" or How cold is your little hand. Mimi then introduces herself, "Mi chiamano Mimi..." or They call me Mimi.
What sings in the play of words against melody is the gentle conflict between Mimi's shyness and Rudolpho's stratagem--he finds the key and pockets it to keep her there, at the door of his garret. Even more miraculous,the tenor's high notes, coming from the voice of a young Pavoratti in the recording I own, ascend toward heaven with a continuing richness that takes the breath away. What woman wouldn't swoon at such an outpouring of passion and melody?
Do we care about the rest of the opera? The inevitable struggle between poverty and freedom, freedom and declining health, which is the staple of the 19th century's treatment of "consumption?" Do we care that Rudolpho feigns eventual disinterest in Mimi in the hopes that she'll find a wealthy suitor who will feed and clothe and warm her as her illness requires? Do we care that Mimi inevitably dies in the end--typical sentimental (and of course accurate) conclusion to this scourge of the century which was imbued with the belief that consumption made one more tender, more sensitive, even more lovely?
Coughing up blood, my sister and I took turns dying as Violetta in my mother's embroidered bed jacket, a piece of nightime apparel we'd never seen our furiously busy and robustly healthy mother wear. What was the appeal to us girls, aged maybe seven (me) and five (my sister) those many years ago in The Old Citadel where we were housed in Charleston, South Carolina? (My father taught at the military college called The Citadel, and this was the former barracks, stretching a block long between Meeting and King Streets, looking for all the world like a medieval-style fortress. We didn't have a garret, but the huge rooms of our apartment with their 16-foot ceilings and deep window wells gave an entirely European backdrop to our continual expiring.)
What was the appeal of dying young in the arms of an inconstant lover? Well, we didn't factor in the lover so much as the soaring music and pathos of beauty, youth and death. Nineteenth- century Italian opera from Puccini and Verdi made TB a paragon: consumption was a sign of extra sensitivity; in fact, having the disease bestowed creative genius on the bearer. Somehow with no one telling us this, we girls knew this.
I had to grow much older the find the corrective in the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell's mid-19th century novels set in the northern manufacturing city of Manchester. There in many of her novels, a pathetic young woman who's been employed in the mills dies, maybe not of TB but of another lung disease, maybe emphysema, caused by breathing in tiny cotton fibers from the looms. These deaths in the poor holes where the workers live evoke nothing romantic or grand, no soaring metaphors. They do not ennoble the sufferers, though they do in some cases motivate other workers to unionize and protest. This shift, more realistic, emphasizes the cause of these deaths--dangerous working conditions, poor wages, unclean lodgings, heartless mill owners. The drama is much darker than Puccini's love-enthralled couples. Gaskell shows us a grim, early form of protest literature.
I admire her work and read it with a kind of pleasure. But there's very little swoon to it. She arouses our sympathic spirit of protest. She does not argue that these lives are ennobled or made more sensitive and artistic by this working-class contagion.
Puccini's La Boheme is the quintessential Italian love story. Yes, I know, there's always Verdi's La Traviata with Violetta (reformed high-class prostitute) dying of TB at the end. She's left her middle-class lover at the instigation of his father--to "save" his reputation--and returned to a life of partying until the disease takes over. La Traviata was the quintessential opera play-acting for my sister and me as girls, but now that I'm older, give me Rudolpho's love song to the little seamstress Mimi.
Puccini, born in the charming walled Tuscan city of Lucca in 1858, created a blend of unfolding story and music called verismo. The music does not stop for set pieces--the older operatic duets, trios, quartets in which characters simply stand still on stage and belt out whatever is motivating them. Instead, the music twines around the action, in fact announces the action which then becomes metaphoric. So when Mimi, the seamstress, knocks at her neighbor's door (imagine a tall Parisian house with its garret overlooking rooftops), she asks for a light for her candle and then drops her key. Rudolpho, the painter of a trio of bohemian artists, instantly is drawn to her. Takes her hand and begins the love action with "Che gelida manina" or How cold is your little hand. Mimi then introduces herself, "Mi chiamano Mimi..." or They call me Mimi.
What sings in the play of words against melody is the gentle conflict between Mimi's shyness and Rudolpho's stratagem--he finds the key and pockets it to keep her there, at the door of his garret. Even more miraculous,the tenor's high notes, coming from the voice of a young Pavoratti in the recording I own, ascend toward heaven with a continuing richness that takes the breath away. What woman wouldn't swoon at such an outpouring of passion and melody?
Do we care about the rest of the opera? The inevitable struggle between poverty and freedom, freedom and declining health, which is the staple of the 19th century's treatment of "consumption?" Do we care that Rudolpho feigns eventual disinterest in Mimi in the hopes that she'll find a wealthy suitor who will feed and clothe and warm her as her illness requires? Do we care that Mimi inevitably dies in the end--typical sentimental (and of course accurate) conclusion to this scourge of the century which was imbued with the belief that consumption made one more tender, more sensitive, even more lovely?
Coughing up blood, my sister and I took turns dying as Violetta in my mother's embroidered bed jacket, a piece of nightime apparel we'd never seen our furiously busy and robustly healthy mother wear. What was the appeal to us girls, aged maybe seven (me) and five (my sister) those many years ago in The Old Citadel where we were housed in Charleston, South Carolina? (My father taught at the military college called The Citadel, and this was the former barracks, stretching a block long between Meeting and King Streets, looking for all the world like a medieval-style fortress. We didn't have a garret, but the huge rooms of our apartment with their 16-foot ceilings and deep window wells gave an entirely European backdrop to our continual expiring.)
What was the appeal of dying young in the arms of an inconstant lover? Well, we didn't factor in the lover so much as the soaring music and pathos of beauty, youth and death. Nineteenth- century Italian opera from Puccini and Verdi made TB a paragon: consumption was a sign of extra sensitivity; in fact, having the disease bestowed creative genius on the bearer. Somehow with no one telling us this, we girls knew this.
I had to grow much older the find the corrective in the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell's mid-19th century novels set in the northern manufacturing city of Manchester. There in many of her novels, a pathetic young woman who's been employed in the mills dies, maybe not of TB but of another lung disease, maybe emphysema, caused by breathing in tiny cotton fibers from the looms. These deaths in the poor holes where the workers live evoke nothing romantic or grand, no soaring metaphors. They do not ennoble the sufferers, though they do in some cases motivate other workers to unionize and protest. This shift, more realistic, emphasizes the cause of these deaths--dangerous working conditions, poor wages, unclean lodgings, heartless mill owners. The drama is much darker than Puccini's love-enthralled couples. Gaskell shows us a grim, early form of protest literature.
I admire her work and read it with a kind of pleasure. But there's very little swoon to it. She arouses our sympathic spirit of protest. She does not argue that these lives are ennobled or made more sensitive and artistic by this working-class contagion.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Margotlog: How to Leave a Comment
Dear Readers, to leave a comment, type in the box, then scroll down to "Comment as:" If you have signed into your own Google.doc account, your name will probably be there, but if not, if you've arrived from outside the Goggle system, then select either "Name/URL" or "Anonymous." Enter your name, not the URL, or enter Anonymous. Press ENTER. Then press POST COMMENT below. If you're outside the Google system, you'll be asked to "read" a weird word--it's a kind of security gate. Once you pass this, make sure you keep pressing enter.
Your comment may not show up in the Post a Comment box but in a list of comments which I can access. I'm thinking of making the comments more public and possibly allowing for an exchange of comments, but so far, this is how I understand the commenting function works. Good luck.
Your comment may not show up in the Post a Comment box but in a list of comments which I can access. I'm thinking of making the comments more public and possibly allowing for an exchange of comments, but so far, this is how I understand the commenting function works. Good luck.
Margotlog: I Gave Birth...
Margotlog: I Gave Birth....
It was supposed to be natural. I'd gone with my husband to childbirth education classes, learning to pant for relieving pains. The pregnancy was uneventful--I was twenty-eight years old and in good health, I walked to classes, ate well, gained only about 12 pounds. Today more would be recommended but then, in the 1970s, my doctor applauded me.
Suddenly as I sat in bed one evening after my husband had gone to sleep, working on my last paper for my last course in my Ph.D. program, it occurred to me to take a shower. It was probably 10:30 p.m. I was 41 weeks pregnant. It was a warm, clear October night.
As soon as I was dried off and returned to bed, lying in as comfortable a position as possible, I felt a huge wave of pain. This is it, I thought, if I was even capable of thought. The pain was all-encompassing, imperative. Someone was pounding at the door.
Waking my husband, I urged him to help me dress and grab the bag already packed. He had to help me down the flight of stairs and out to the car. Luckily the University of Minnesota hospital was only about seven blocks away. In the elevator up to the right floor, I felt as if I was one column of contractions. Will I even be able to stand up, I must have said, because he recommended I slump down.
After that, it's a blur. I was fully dialated--cervix open, eyes not. The contractions were coming maybe a minute apart. All the natural childbirth "panting" lay like a deflated garment beside the gurney. They were wheeling me to the delivery room. But wait! The doctor had been at home, in bed, five miles distant. Did I care? Coherent thought was impossible. I was squeezing my husband's hand so tight he later showed me the deep indentations still visible above his wedding ring. I can almost hear my screams.
Some kind of medication slowed me down and dulled the pain. How long it took until the doctor arrived, I have no idea. Maybe 20 minutes. I remember a white-masked face suddenly appearing above me and the words, "You can push now." My daughter was born just after midnight. Six pounds nine ounces, APGAR (if that's the right abbreviation) score, 9. Ten is perfect.
That night she was born, October 5, summer ended. When we left, five days later, it was cool, wet autumn. Welcome to your home state, daughter.
I stayed in the hospital five days, unheard of today, when young parents are sent out to the world, supposedly ready to cope in 24 hours. I would have hated that. All my oomph had gone into delivery. Afterwards, I was limp, shaky and very tired. Since it was the University of Minnesota hospital, in the days before it merged with Fairview, my doctor attended me trailing a string of medical students and residents. They stood just beyond clear vision, a semi-circle of white-robed savants, stroking their chins and murmuring. All male!
The nurses got me through. All that pushing? They dealt with the hemorrhoids, the difficult first feedings. They ushered in my occasional visitors. I had no family in town. My parents, my husband's father lived on the east coast along with aunts, uncles, cousins. Only the North Dakota relatives lived closer by, and they waited until I came home to arrive with treats, flowers, good wishes. At the hospital I was very grateful for the few friends from our little town-house complex who came to sit by my bed. I was very much still in bed.
Then, contemplating returning home, I urged my mother to visit from South Carolina. It was unprecedented. We were rarely easy with each other until she became an old woman
and allowed me close, needing the warmth of companionship and help organizing and directing her bevy of home-health-care providers.
But for the week after I left the hospital with my daughter, my mother was a godsent. Miraculously, she did not attempt to take over--her deference to my husband, "the doctor,"
no doubt helped. She kept very busy, doing all the household chores, scrubbing the bottoms of my Revere-ware pots to shiny copper. And occasionally she held the baby. I have an adorable photo of them perched on the piano stool, my mother with a fanciful scarf tied around her neck bends over the baby, that little lozenge of hungry flesh. They are for one short moment, a perfect pair.
Now, looking back, I realize that I probably duplicated her own first delivery--me--except for one important particular: she and my father had to drive to Pittsburgh from Wheeling, West Virginia where he'd found a job. It was wartime. Their "midnight ride" became the stuff of family legend. If I'd had to make such a trek, my daughter would have been born in the car. I thank heaven we avoided that. As it was, she might have entered the world in an elevator.
It was supposed to be natural. I'd gone with my husband to childbirth education classes, learning to pant for relieving pains. The pregnancy was uneventful--I was twenty-eight years old and in good health, I walked to classes, ate well, gained only about 12 pounds. Today more would be recommended but then, in the 1970s, my doctor applauded me.
Suddenly as I sat in bed one evening after my husband had gone to sleep, working on my last paper for my last course in my Ph.D. program, it occurred to me to take a shower. It was probably 10:30 p.m. I was 41 weeks pregnant. It was a warm, clear October night.
As soon as I was dried off and returned to bed, lying in as comfortable a position as possible, I felt a huge wave of pain. This is it, I thought, if I was even capable of thought. The pain was all-encompassing, imperative. Someone was pounding at the door.
Waking my husband, I urged him to help me dress and grab the bag already packed. He had to help me down the flight of stairs and out to the car. Luckily the University of Minnesota hospital was only about seven blocks away. In the elevator up to the right floor, I felt as if I was one column of contractions. Will I even be able to stand up, I must have said, because he recommended I slump down.
After that, it's a blur. I was fully dialated--cervix open, eyes not. The contractions were coming maybe a minute apart. All the natural childbirth "panting" lay like a deflated garment beside the gurney. They were wheeling me to the delivery room. But wait! The doctor had been at home, in bed, five miles distant. Did I care? Coherent thought was impossible. I was squeezing my husband's hand so tight he later showed me the deep indentations still visible above his wedding ring. I can almost hear my screams.
Some kind of medication slowed me down and dulled the pain. How long it took until the doctor arrived, I have no idea. Maybe 20 minutes. I remember a white-masked face suddenly appearing above me and the words, "You can push now." My daughter was born just after midnight. Six pounds nine ounces, APGAR (if that's the right abbreviation) score, 9. Ten is perfect.
That night she was born, October 5, summer ended. When we left, five days later, it was cool, wet autumn. Welcome to your home state, daughter.
I stayed in the hospital five days, unheard of today, when young parents are sent out to the world, supposedly ready to cope in 24 hours. I would have hated that. All my oomph had gone into delivery. Afterwards, I was limp, shaky and very tired. Since it was the University of Minnesota hospital, in the days before it merged with Fairview, my doctor attended me trailing a string of medical students and residents. They stood just beyond clear vision, a semi-circle of white-robed savants, stroking their chins and murmuring. All male!
The nurses got me through. All that pushing? They dealt with the hemorrhoids, the difficult first feedings. They ushered in my occasional visitors. I had no family in town. My parents, my husband's father lived on the east coast along with aunts, uncles, cousins. Only the North Dakota relatives lived closer by, and they waited until I came home to arrive with treats, flowers, good wishes. At the hospital I was very grateful for the few friends from our little town-house complex who came to sit by my bed. I was very much still in bed.
Then, contemplating returning home, I urged my mother to visit from South Carolina. It was unprecedented. We were rarely easy with each other until she became an old woman
and allowed me close, needing the warmth of companionship and help organizing and directing her bevy of home-health-care providers.
But for the week after I left the hospital with my daughter, my mother was a godsent. Miraculously, she did not attempt to take over--her deference to my husband, "the doctor,"
no doubt helped. She kept very busy, doing all the household chores, scrubbing the bottoms of my Revere-ware pots to shiny copper. And occasionally she held the baby. I have an adorable photo of them perched on the piano stool, my mother with a fanciful scarf tied around her neck bends over the baby, that little lozenge of hungry flesh. They are for one short moment, a perfect pair.
Now, looking back, I realize that I probably duplicated her own first delivery--me--except for one important particular: she and my father had to drive to Pittsburgh from Wheeling, West Virginia where he'd found a job. It was wartime. Their "midnight ride" became the stuff of family legend. If I'd had to make such a trek, my daughter would have been born in the car. I thank heaven we avoided that. As it was, she might have entered the world in an elevator.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Margotlog: Slavery and American Christianity
Margotlog: Slavery and American Christianity
Michele Bachman is providing mini lessons on the Southern branch of American Christianity. Granted, as she keeps telling us, she's from Iowa. Her current constituents in Minnesota may also be surprised to find that they're supporting a branch of Christianity that can be traced back to the slave-owning and segregated South.
Let's start with the recent challenge during the Iowa debates: Would you, Michele Bachman, bow to the Biblical dictum that wives should be subservient to their husbands? She nicely sidestepped that, but the underlying message of a hierarchy-- some members of the human race being closer to God and thus carrying more authority than others--remains. True, the ditty about all God's children, "black and white, red and yellow," which we used to sing in Sunday school is inherent in Christianity, but so too is the idea of a "chosen race, God's chosen people," a band of the enlightened, persecuted and reviled by pagan hordes, but triumphing if not on earth, then in heaven. Michele Bachman is all about triumphing on earth.
The history of Christianity calls up this complex of ideas and emotions: persecution, special enlightenment, a "light shining in darkness," and extraordinary power to trump all established kingdoms. Very political, inherently revolutionary or at least resistant. Christianity is replete with contradictions.
I have no special pipeline to heaven, but I do have years of experience with Southern and Christian racism. My parents moved to Charleston, South Carolina after World War II. My father was the son of a Presbyterian "missionary" to his people--they being Italian immigrants in Pittsburgh, whom my grandfather, also a recent immigrant, was trying to convert to Protestantism. My father also studied for the ministry, but gave it up in favor of teaching history. Whatever notions about Christian hierarchy he brought with him to South Carolina, were, over the next four decades, infused and distorted by the furor over civil rights.
"Slavery was a benign institution," he would say, scratching his receding hairline. "It took barbarians, black as the ace of spades, and it Christianized and civilized them." It was an old apology for slavery, still making its rounds, one he undoubtedly taught in his American history courses at The Citadel. "Black people a're unclean," he would hiss as me as we passed groups of maids and janitors standing at bus stops. It took me a while to become suspicious of this apology for the aftermath of slavery we were living with: segregation. Gradually I noticed that the black parts of town were poor and ramshackled. Black maids and gardeners, our own black janitor Shorty, wore old clothes and down-at-the-heel shoes. They were subservient, though I didn't know that word, but as they passed empty seats at the front of the bus and moved to the rear, I felt ashamed at laws that burdened hard-working men and women, but privileged me, a mere teenager, simply because my skin was a lighter color.
"God has given them into our hands," my father would proclaim in his best moods. In his worst moods, he would shout, "Miscegenation will be the downfall of the race!" It took me a while to parse that one. When I finally figured out it meant a black and a white person having sex and giving birth to a child, I narrowed my eyes at him. He was, by then, accusing me of enticing black boys to our door. They would want to date me. "Daddy," I screeched, "I don't know any black boys!" Facts did not penetrate his towering, righteous certainty.
When I consider the danger that Michele Bachman represents, I'm reminded of this towering certainty and my father's rather remote connection to slavery, segregation and the Southern experience. He grew up in the North, yet his family was imbued with a deeply Christian worldview. They were also embattled: fighting one of the Western world's most decidedly religious battles between Catholicism and Protestantism. He was also given to quoting the Bible, especially the Old Testament where power resided in patriarchs, where believers were hounded out of Egypt but with God's intervention--rolling back those Red Sea waters--they reached the Promised Land.
As a history teacher, he was well aware of the divide at our nation's founding: between northern states with little slavery and a dislike of it, and the Southern plantation owners whose entire way of life was predicated on retaining African slavery. What freedom meant to these diverse regions was not the same thing. Over the decades after Freedom was gained from England, freedom shifted its glare toward the bondage of enormous numbers of black people, who lived largely in the south. But there, the white owners coopted the word freedom for their own use: they were free to pursue their own way of life. They would not be imposed upon by their northern brethren. Each side used Christian teaching to prop up their underlying belief about how to treat a people oppressed and degraded within this bastion of supposed freedom.
After listening to the likes of Michele Bachman, it's s rather a relief to remember Christianity can also be made to support "all God's children got wings," to quote a black spiritual. Christ died for ALL our sins. No one is ultimately elevated with power over another. Or, to step aside and view the way religion can be made to serve competing political positions, to remember that the United States is predicated on a separation of church and state. And t0 be deeply disturbed when reading in a recent New Yorker article on Michele Bachman, that Oral Robert University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she received her law degree, required students to sigh a "code of honor" on their Christian beliefs, and that one of the school's two goals is "to restore law to its historic roots in the Bible." (Ryan Lizza, "Leap of Faith," The New Yorker, August 15,22, 2011, p. 59).
Michele Bachman is providing mini lessons on the Southern branch of American Christianity. Granted, as she keeps telling us, she's from Iowa. Her current constituents in Minnesota may also be surprised to find that they're supporting a branch of Christianity that can be traced back to the slave-owning and segregated South.
Let's start with the recent challenge during the Iowa debates: Would you, Michele Bachman, bow to the Biblical dictum that wives should be subservient to their husbands? She nicely sidestepped that, but the underlying message of a hierarchy-- some members of the human race being closer to God and thus carrying more authority than others--remains. True, the ditty about all God's children, "black and white, red and yellow," which we used to sing in Sunday school is inherent in Christianity, but so too is the idea of a "chosen race, God's chosen people," a band of the enlightened, persecuted and reviled by pagan hordes, but triumphing if not on earth, then in heaven. Michele Bachman is all about triumphing on earth.
The history of Christianity calls up this complex of ideas and emotions: persecution, special enlightenment, a "light shining in darkness," and extraordinary power to trump all established kingdoms. Very political, inherently revolutionary or at least resistant. Christianity is replete with contradictions.
I have no special pipeline to heaven, but I do have years of experience with Southern and Christian racism. My parents moved to Charleston, South Carolina after World War II. My father was the son of a Presbyterian "missionary" to his people--they being Italian immigrants in Pittsburgh, whom my grandfather, also a recent immigrant, was trying to convert to Protestantism. My father also studied for the ministry, but gave it up in favor of teaching history. Whatever notions about Christian hierarchy he brought with him to South Carolina, were, over the next four decades, infused and distorted by the furor over civil rights.
"Slavery was a benign institution," he would say, scratching his receding hairline. "It took barbarians, black as the ace of spades, and it Christianized and civilized them." It was an old apology for slavery, still making its rounds, one he undoubtedly taught in his American history courses at The Citadel. "Black people a're unclean," he would hiss as me as we passed groups of maids and janitors standing at bus stops. It took me a while to become suspicious of this apology for the aftermath of slavery we were living with: segregation. Gradually I noticed that the black parts of town were poor and ramshackled. Black maids and gardeners, our own black janitor Shorty, wore old clothes and down-at-the-heel shoes. They were subservient, though I didn't know that word, but as they passed empty seats at the front of the bus and moved to the rear, I felt ashamed at laws that burdened hard-working men and women, but privileged me, a mere teenager, simply because my skin was a lighter color.
"God has given them into our hands," my father would proclaim in his best moods. In his worst moods, he would shout, "Miscegenation will be the downfall of the race!" It took me a while to parse that one. When I finally figured out it meant a black and a white person having sex and giving birth to a child, I narrowed my eyes at him. He was, by then, accusing me of enticing black boys to our door. They would want to date me. "Daddy," I screeched, "I don't know any black boys!" Facts did not penetrate his towering, righteous certainty.
When I consider the danger that Michele Bachman represents, I'm reminded of this towering certainty and my father's rather remote connection to slavery, segregation and the Southern experience. He grew up in the North, yet his family was imbued with a deeply Christian worldview. They were also embattled: fighting one of the Western world's most decidedly religious battles between Catholicism and Protestantism. He was also given to quoting the Bible, especially the Old Testament where power resided in patriarchs, where believers were hounded out of Egypt but with God's intervention--rolling back those Red Sea waters--they reached the Promised Land.
As a history teacher, he was well aware of the divide at our nation's founding: between northern states with little slavery and a dislike of it, and the Southern plantation owners whose entire way of life was predicated on retaining African slavery. What freedom meant to these diverse regions was not the same thing. Over the decades after Freedom was gained from England, freedom shifted its glare toward the bondage of enormous numbers of black people, who lived largely in the south. But there, the white owners coopted the word freedom for their own use: they were free to pursue their own way of life. They would not be imposed upon by their northern brethren. Each side used Christian teaching to prop up their underlying belief about how to treat a people oppressed and degraded within this bastion of supposed freedom.
After listening to the likes of Michele Bachman, it's s rather a relief to remember Christianity can also be made to support "all God's children got wings," to quote a black spiritual. Christ died for ALL our sins. No one is ultimately elevated with power over another. Or, to step aside and view the way religion can be made to serve competing political positions, to remember that the United States is predicated on a separation of church and state. And t0 be deeply disturbed when reading in a recent New Yorker article on Michele Bachman, that Oral Robert University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she received her law degree, required students to sigh a "code of honor" on their Christian beliefs, and that one of the school's two goals is "to restore law to its historic roots in the Bible." (Ryan Lizza, "Leap of Faith," The New Yorker, August 15,22, 2011, p. 59).
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Margotlog: Poetry and the Night Sky
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.
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.
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.
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