Margotlog: Who Were These Other Men?
I hadn't a clue in high school and college--gay life wasn't recognized in polite Charleston, South Carolina society during the 1950s and 60s. Yes, rock n rollers with duck tails and pompadours rumbled against the crew cuts, but they all had girls hanging on their arms. James Dean's slouch, a cigarette dangling from his pouty lip, was about as "rouee" as it got, though my parents entertained a couple of men who ran an antique shop "South of Broad," until one of them ran off to New Orleans and got married. No one ever dreamed his partner might be a man, and as far as I knew, it wasn't.
Slowly, knowledge that there were other ways to enjoy another's body seeped into my rather staid consciousness. But race and women's lib took precedence. In my race to escape my parents' household, then to form a more perfect union, I allowed only the icons of racial liberation to shine outside my marriage vows. Even then, it took me years to catch up with truly informed and practicing believers in racial equality. Feminism, on the other hand, caught me by the scruff of the neck: why was it that white, married. female colleagues were the ones to fear? Now when I parse those ugly shoves and dismissals, I note that we attack those who are closest and more likely to edge us out of the tiny chance we have to move to the top.
Then came AIDS. Occasionally when I teach a class on science and western culture, I invite my ex-husband to visit. As a young physician, he performed an alternative to fighting in Vietnam by joining the U.S. Public Health Service. Information about an odd infection seeped into the United States from Germany in the early 1980s, if I'm remembering right. It seemed to have been brought from Africa by male, airline stewards. They were very very ill, wasting away, and eventually died. The disease was traced to prostitution, and beyond that to the practice among some African tribes of eating what we now call "bush meat."
I know now that the Stonewall Riots of the late 1960s introduced mainstream Americans to gay life and its repression with a bang, but I wasn't paying attention. But by the 1980s, I was capable of registering a major new and frightening disease--AIDS. The fact that it attacked gay men, far more frequently than any other group, brought the culture into sharp relief. Two literary works and a movie helped me understand: Paul Monette's 1992 memoir Becoming a Man: A Half Life, and Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, 1996, and the movie "Philadelphia."
But I knew before that of the wildness of gay life, the "bath house" sexual switcheroos and art that shook American standards to their foundation. AIDS caught the kaleidoscope of gay life up short, and for those of us outside, reminded us that human beings were suffering and dying at unnaturally young ages and in excrutiating agony.
So much has changed in the last twenty-five years. AIDS is now brought under control for sufferers in the U.S. through a combination of drugs that reduces it to a chronic condition. AIDS in AFrica, however, rages among all ages and kinds of people, infecting female prostitutes at truck stops in Uganda, children in the womb, parents, grandparents, you name it. The AIDS epidemic changed the way gay men in the U.S. lived their lives--many like Monette and Doty nursed partners dying of AIDS. MOnette himself died of it. The scourge dampened free and open sexual practices and sent several generations of gay men into monogamy. Then into marriage, where they could accomplish it.
Now I know who these other men are. I've read their memoirs and poetry, agonized with a few friends who have lost lovers to AIDS, and helped others celebrate unions as strong as any heterosexual ones. The revolution in American knowledge and attitudes about gay life during the last thirty years is astonishing. Yet, in Minnesota and other states, we now have a vote pending on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Five steps forward, four steps back. Nothing as monumental as this cultural "coming out" can happen easily. Most of the suffering has fallen on the men who've died of AIDS and their healthy counterparts who still cannot live their sexuality without scorn. I have benefited enormously from this change because I now can be open and affirming with gay friends. They have taught me that there are many ways to be a man in American life, and some have nothing to do with football or driving huge cars as fast as possible.
Friday, September 2, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Margotlog: What Washington Learned
Margotlog: What Washington Learned
It takes a particular genius to bring alive a hero so ossified and marblized as George Washington. We see him in full-length statues and half portraits later in life, with his mouth a tight scar across his hawk-nosed face. The poor man had such bad teeth, and then bad wooden dentures that he didn't smile and often suffered from mouth and jaw pain. His profile is on our coins and dollar bills. We rub against him daily, as perennial and indistinguisable as sky. Thus it's no surprise that only a literary and historical genius can set him back on a real stage and show us the inside of his head and heart, blood and guts.
David McCullough in "1776" does just that. But though Washington is eventually the pinnacle of this pyramid of a history, with the foot soldiers as the base, McCullough does not begin with him. He opens the book with a long description of George III's setting out from St. James palace to address Parliament on the question of the colonies' rebellion. We are entertained by lavish details of the king's coach--all 4 tons, with elaborate exterior sculptures and scenes, inside which rides the rather pedestrian personage of the king, not given to either sexual or gustatory license, preferring puttering on his farms to the intrigue and excess of court life. By the time McCullough sights across the 3000 miles of ocean to the siege of Boston, we are convinced that though Brittiania rules the waves, it harbors a canker within--excess confidence and debauch within its aristocracy. Still it has the largest and best-trained army and navy in the world.
Whereas, the ragtail rebellion holding the British within Boston after the pyrrhic British victory at Bunker Hill, are poorly clad and armed, irregularly fed, and its generals except for Washington are green to the business of warfare. Not so Washington. From the beginning of his command, Washington rises above his men. His physique and physical strength, at the start, capture our attention. At 42 years old, six feet, two inches tall, he is used to riding to the fox hunt for seven or eight hours at a stretch and has fought in the French and Indian Wars. At crucial moments of near rout, he will position himself among his faltering army and in a fury of threats and pleas rouse them to battle.
His pen is never idle: in a era of epistolary communication, his letters provide masterly details of the rebellion, his own uncertainties of command, and occasionally minute directions to Mount Vernon for the cleaning of chimneys, finishing of wainscotting and pruning of fruit trees. Precision and order are native to his personality, as is constant, daily involvement with the men under his command. Perhaps his first lesson learned is subterfuge: As the Americans are digging into fortifications on the heights of Dorchester, Washington provides the British down in the city of Boston with a diversion. It works. The British wake up to discover the American army above them, and soon decamp.
The next lesson is to know the surrounding territory, which is not the case with New York, the Americans' next stop. Even to me Washington's decision to bring his army into what we now call Manhattan seems foolhardy--the huge British fleet will anchor in the harbor and send ships cruising up and down the Hudson and East Rivers. Washington has no generals who know Brooklyn or Long Island, which is where the British make a surprise landing. The Americans are poorly positioned to take on the huge British and Hessian army, and Washington is forced to pull up the island toward the narrow, heavily wooded heights.
Finally, as winter closes in and Washington's troops have walked toward Trenton, often with no shoes, leaving bloody trails to mark their passing, Washington learns one more lesson in this crucial first full year of conflict: the advantage of a surprise attack. Ever since American history meant anything to me--I'm guessing maybe age 8 as my history-professor father lectured us at the dinner table--Washington's crossing of the Delaware River has loomed as one of the crucial instances. To read that it actually happened, that the ragtag army and all its cannon and horses were crossed in flat-bottom boats in foul weather to surprise the Hessians billeted at Trenton brings to life Washington's daring and determination. Outnumbered and outgunned, yet with surprise as their weapon, they rouse the Hessians in the middle of the night, and capture hundreds, killing the Hessian leader as well. This victory, as Washington understood, was necessary to rouse and unite the flagging American populace, fix the army's confidence, and find purpose to keep fighting.
The truism of the ultimate American victory is that the Americans were fighting on their home ground. To this McCullough adds Washington's grit, intelligence, and spirit of command. He was not the only fine American general, nor was he inordinately proud and incapable of collaboration. In fact, he was often humbled by what transpired, and throughout had an excellent eye for the skill and courage of his subordinate generals and staff. He did not stint himself; but often put himself in the thick of the fight, as did occasionally the British general Lord Howe. But Washington had perserverance, determination, and the physical and emotional qualities to thrive in what we call a theater of war. That he also made a fine first president has earned him the title "Father of his Country." Given how raw was the country, how much it was building itself up from scratch, his gifts were even more necessary and helped determine our survival.
It takes a particular genius to bring alive a hero so ossified and marblized as George Washington. We see him in full-length statues and half portraits later in life, with his mouth a tight scar across his hawk-nosed face. The poor man had such bad teeth, and then bad wooden dentures that he didn't smile and often suffered from mouth and jaw pain. His profile is on our coins and dollar bills. We rub against him daily, as perennial and indistinguisable as sky. Thus it's no surprise that only a literary and historical genius can set him back on a real stage and show us the inside of his head and heart, blood and guts.
David McCullough in "1776" does just that. But though Washington is eventually the pinnacle of this pyramid of a history, with the foot soldiers as the base, McCullough does not begin with him. He opens the book with a long description of George III's setting out from St. James palace to address Parliament on the question of the colonies' rebellion. We are entertained by lavish details of the king's coach--all 4 tons, with elaborate exterior sculptures and scenes, inside which rides the rather pedestrian personage of the king, not given to either sexual or gustatory license, preferring puttering on his farms to the intrigue and excess of court life. By the time McCullough sights across the 3000 miles of ocean to the siege of Boston, we are convinced that though Brittiania rules the waves, it harbors a canker within--excess confidence and debauch within its aristocracy. Still it has the largest and best-trained army and navy in the world.
Whereas, the ragtail rebellion holding the British within Boston after the pyrrhic British victory at Bunker Hill, are poorly clad and armed, irregularly fed, and its generals except for Washington are green to the business of warfare. Not so Washington. From the beginning of his command, Washington rises above his men. His physique and physical strength, at the start, capture our attention. At 42 years old, six feet, two inches tall, he is used to riding to the fox hunt for seven or eight hours at a stretch and has fought in the French and Indian Wars. At crucial moments of near rout, he will position himself among his faltering army and in a fury of threats and pleas rouse them to battle.
His pen is never idle: in a era of epistolary communication, his letters provide masterly details of the rebellion, his own uncertainties of command, and occasionally minute directions to Mount Vernon for the cleaning of chimneys, finishing of wainscotting and pruning of fruit trees. Precision and order are native to his personality, as is constant, daily involvement with the men under his command. Perhaps his first lesson learned is subterfuge: As the Americans are digging into fortifications on the heights of Dorchester, Washington provides the British down in the city of Boston with a diversion. It works. The British wake up to discover the American army above them, and soon decamp.
The next lesson is to know the surrounding territory, which is not the case with New York, the Americans' next stop. Even to me Washington's decision to bring his army into what we now call Manhattan seems foolhardy--the huge British fleet will anchor in the harbor and send ships cruising up and down the Hudson and East Rivers. Washington has no generals who know Brooklyn or Long Island, which is where the British make a surprise landing. The Americans are poorly positioned to take on the huge British and Hessian army, and Washington is forced to pull up the island toward the narrow, heavily wooded heights.
Finally, as winter closes in and Washington's troops have walked toward Trenton, often with no shoes, leaving bloody trails to mark their passing, Washington learns one more lesson in this crucial first full year of conflict: the advantage of a surprise attack. Ever since American history meant anything to me--I'm guessing maybe age 8 as my history-professor father lectured us at the dinner table--Washington's crossing of the Delaware River has loomed as one of the crucial instances. To read that it actually happened, that the ragtag army and all its cannon and horses were crossed in flat-bottom boats in foul weather to surprise the Hessians billeted at Trenton brings to life Washington's daring and determination. Outnumbered and outgunned, yet with surprise as their weapon, they rouse the Hessians in the middle of the night, and capture hundreds, killing the Hessian leader as well. This victory, as Washington understood, was necessary to rouse and unite the flagging American populace, fix the army's confidence, and find purpose to keep fighting.
The truism of the ultimate American victory is that the Americans were fighting on their home ground. To this McCullough adds Washington's grit, intelligence, and spirit of command. He was not the only fine American general, nor was he inordinately proud and incapable of collaboration. In fact, he was often humbled by what transpired, and throughout had an excellent eye for the skill and courage of his subordinate generals and staff. He did not stint himself; but often put himself in the thick of the fight, as did occasionally the British general Lord Howe. But Washington had perserverance, determination, and the physical and emotional qualities to thrive in what we call a theater of war. That he also made a fine first president has earned him the title "Father of his Country." Given how raw was the country, how much it was building itself up from scratch, his gifts were even more necessary and helped determine our survival.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Margotlog: Lions, Tigers, and Bears, Oh My!
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.
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.
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).
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