Thursday, April 28, 2011

The Storm of Life

August in Indiana—we're on Hwy 43, heading north from Lafayette, through cornfields, toward Chalmers. I'm eight years old and I've just been baptized. My hair is wet on the collar of my white Sunday shirt.

In the back seat I'm thinking, I'm completely pure.

That night, as on most nights, I fight with my brother. As soon as I surface from the mild hysteria of our brawling, I realize, That was my first sin!

And I  rush to my bedroom and kneel next to my bed. Speaking aloud, my arms folded across my chest, my eyes closed, I tell God, "Please forgive me for fighting with Jared."

I end the prayer and stand up. But I don't feel quite the same.

Really, since that day, I've never felt quite the same.

~

But I've always—even now—yearned to. I've yearned for the same all-encompassing whiteness of that August afternoon: the white jumpsuit I wore; Dad in white, in the water, waiting, and taking my hand, and receiving me into his arms; and then announcing the baptismal oath above me; and my brother and sisters kneeling beside the font, watching; and Mom, so proud, her tears—a young woman, not yet thirty—as she looked with joy at her son, at me.

Under I went. The water received me, closed over me. I clutched my dad's arms and he drew me up into air. And I could feel my purity: I was—for the first and last time—indisputably pure. In other words, at that instant, for that moment, I was, I thought, what I'm supposed to be.

~
The thing that most white people imagine that they can salvage from the storm of life is, really, in sum, their innocence. . . . I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives.
— James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy"
If I remember correctly, I was actually baptized on my eighth birthday: August 2, 1975. I share that birthday with James Baldwin, who was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924. There are additional similarities: we are both first sons of large families; we both grew up in intensely religious homes; we both had—have, in my case—bewilderingly powerful fathers; we both decided as adolescents that we wanted to be writers; and not long after we'd entered adulthood we wandered from the faiths of our families.

I care about all of this because no single author has shocked me with insight as consistently as Baldwin. Very rarely, in all my years of reading, has a sentence changed my life—changed, I mean to say, my orientation toward my own behavior. Baldwin's sentences have done that not once but many times.

So during the past few months I've gone back to him the manner that my dad might turn to his Bible. By dumb luck I came across what Baldwin has to say about white America's attachment to innocence.

~

I tell her: But this! And you, this!

The children have fled to their bedrooms.

No! she says, this! And not this! That!

I understand myself. We always understand ourselves.

The door, the sky, the ocean air.

Later, alone, in exile, I write: Don't forget this.

I'm in pursuit of my innocence. Again I'm that boy—lustrously blond, wearing his embarrassing glasses, his teeth misshapen by years of sucking his thumb—running to his bedroom to retrieve what belongs to him, what he's been promised. 

~

A man who was once my prophet, Brigham Young, claimed that Africans are descendants of the murderer Cain: “Cain slew his brother . . . and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin."

Thirty years ago, I found that idea reasonable. After all, I read The Book of Mormon before I was seven, in preparation for my baptism, and, time and again, it had linked righteousness—by which it meant innocence—to fair skin. To be dark was—is—a de facto sign of guilt in God's eyes.

I see now that in this regard Mormonism is merely American. This country has always connected, at the level of essence, skin color and soul.

But Baldwin didn't need a prophet or a book to tell him he was guilty. He had the policeman's stare, the boss's disdain, the banker's fear, the librarian's condescension, and his father's relentless bitterness. Guilt, James Baldwin knew, was his birthright. No one tells us more poignantly how this myth of inherent guilt is black America's curse.

White America's curse is its opposite: the myth of our congenital innocence.

~

I can't remember a time in my life when I haven't spent a tremendous amount of energy maintaining—for myself, most of all—the myth of my innocence. Eric the Good; Eric the Well-intentioned; Eric, Guardian of Star-crossed Memories and What-Should-Have-Been, But for This World. Eric the Misunderstood.

Over the years, I've had no better proof of my innocence than my failures.

I've built my life upon this poetic contradiction, simply because it's allowed me to imagine that, fundamentally, I don't fail. The world fails. Other people fail. And my faultless heart is stymied by their practical, coldhearted cynicism.

Or: confronted by the reality of their pain, my contrition, forgiveness, cleansing, and justification occur with the arrival of my first tear. To weep is my moment of truth—proof of my return to innocence.

~

Now, maybe too late, I see that what Baldwin calls the "dream" of my innocence is destroying me. I'm breaking myself to pieces against it. There's no forgiveness, no cleansing, no renewal; there's the storm of life. The rain, the wind, the nostalgic shafts of sunlight—everything comes and goes, unceasingly. Nothing is ever—can ever be—undone.

~

I'm not the only white American to wonder why black Americans often seem so free. Lawlessly free, really—so lawless that their freedom seems to reinforce our belief in their guilt.

It hadn't occurred to me until reading Baldwin that they're free because they don't care about being innocent. By declaring them innately guilty, we freed them from the burden of devoting their lives to a myth of purity. Their freedom from innocence is what we mean—what they mean, too—when we say, They don't give a fuck.

Of course it's true that a good many of them—perhaps a majority of them, including Baldwin's father—destroy themselves raging against the myth of their guilt. Baldwin spent his adult life warning against the bitter futility of that fight. It's futile, of course, because it's a fight with a lie.

But the African-Americans who have succeeded in rejecting the myth of black guilt have given this country it's richest glimpse, up to now, of real freedom. Mournful freedom, yes—freedom in the key of the blues. But real freedom. I shiver to think of this country without it.

~

Which brings me, as always, back to myself.

Looking at my own life, and listening to Baldwin talk about his, has led me, over the past few weeks, to this conclusion: the myth of white innocence and the myth of black guilt are equally lethal. They end in delusion, in cruelty, in bitter despair.

I'm neither innocent nor guilty; I'm a man soaked—baptized—and windblown by the storm of life. I have no reason to repent because I've never been innocent. There's no holiness I can hope to return to. There's no guilt that I need to purge.

Through the maelstrom, I can hear singing. It's the free singing of people who don't believe in their innocence, don't care about guilt. It's the free singing of people who understand love.

~

Freeze that wet-haired boy in the back of his father's car. Sit next to him, put your arm around his shoulders, and tell him: "Kid, it's like this."

He'll listen. He's curious and he has, like every eight year old, an honest heart. And he knows about storms. He sees them coming all the time across the fields of high corn. Sometimes he receives them with laughter, arms up, soaked to the skin.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

TFTD

ALL THAT NONSENSE WAS WORTH IT!!!

The Guardian

The Art of Revision

Tea Party Talking Points

Draft 1

Barack Obama: Kenyan-born, socialist, terrorist-sympathizing, white-hating, anti-American Muslim.

Draft 2

Barack Obama: Kenyan-born, socialist, terrorist-sympathizing, white-hating, anti-American Muslim.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

TFTD

A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends.

— Christopher Hitchens

Monday, April 25, 2011

Gonzalo Rojas, RIP

Skinny Chile, land of poets—and just free of Pinochet when I lived there, in 1991. So its poets were finally returning, which for Chileans meant the return of their national soul.

Foremost among them: the impeccable Gonzalo Rojas.

I was one of the students in his class at the University of Concepción. Like everyone else—except, maybe, my friend Paul Marchant, who talked about Sr. Rojas all the time—I had no idea how fortunate we were. Looking back now, it's perfectly clear: we were taking a class on Latin American poetry from one of Latin America's—one of the world's—great poets.

Every week he gave us a firsthand account of the birth, triumph, exile, and fragile survival of Chilean lyric poetry in the 20th century. Only years later did I appreciate that we were talking about a body of work that's unsurpassed in the recent history of world poetry, given its influence, variety, popularity, and beauty.

But coming from him, most of the poems were the beautiful songs of his friends. He read them that way, elegantly dressed (always), his plump lips shaping the words with an attentiveness and love for the sound of Spanish that I found both enviable and frightening. He was doing a deeper thing; he was, I thought, being a poet. I was worrying—maybe I'm being too hard on myself—about catching the bus to the beach.

His striking wife, Hilda, her black hair to her waist, sometimes sat in on his lectures. She died, I heard, not long after we left, although she was much younger than him and seemed, at the time, to be healthier. Now, at 93, he's gone, too, but not:


Retrato de mujer

Siempre estará la noche, mujer, para mirarte cara a cara,
sola en tu espejo, libre de marido, desnuda
con la exacta y terrible realidad del gran vértigo
que te destruye. Siempre vas a tener tu noche y tu cuchillo,
y el frívolo teléfono para escuchar mi adiós de un solo tajo.

Te juré no escribirte. Por eso estoy llamándote en el aire
para decirte nada, como dice el vacío: nada, nada,
sino lo mismo y siempre lo mismo de lo mismo
que nunca me oyes, eso que no me entiendes nunca,
aunque las venas te arden de eso que estoy diciendo.

Ponte el vestido rojo que le viene a tu boca y a tu sangre,
y quémame en el último cigarrillo del miedo
al gran amor, y vete descalza por el aire que viniste
con la herida visible de tu belleza. Lástima
de la que llora y llora en la tormenta.

No te me mueras. Voy a pintarte tu rostro en un relámpago
tal como eres: dos ojos para ver lo visible y lo invisible,
una nariz arcángel y una boca animal, y una sonrisa
que me perdona, y algo sagrado y sin edad que vuela en tu frente,
mujer, y me estremece, porque tu rostro es rostro del Espíritu.

Vienes y vas, y adoras al mar que te arrebata con su espuma,
y te quedas inmóvil, oyendo que te llamo en el abismo
de la noche, y me besas lo mismo que una ola.
Enigma fuiste. Enigma serás. No volarás
conmigo. Aquí mujer, te dejo tu figura.

Friday, April 22, 2011

An Open Letter to Governor Perry of Texas

Dear Governor Perry:

I've read your official decree, formally naming today through Sunday "Days of Prayer for Rain" in Texas.

And I'd like you to know that I immediately did as you asked. I even lit a candle, in my bathroom, above the toilet.

In other words: if you get rain, it will be thanks to me.

Or it might be thanks to the prayers in the Synott Mosque, in Houston.

Who really knows, after all, whose god is withholding this rain? Mine? Theirs? Yours? (If it turns out to be yours, would you please switch to mine? Yours is clearly a jerk.)

I also thank you for using your official capacity as governor to summon your people to prayer. The government authorities in many other countries do the same—I'm thinking, for example, of Afghanistan—and it's long since time America followed their pious examples.

Keep up the good work, governor. I've always liked a man—particularly a man with an accent—who tells me to get on my knees.

Devoutly yours,

Eric Treanor

Thursday, April 21, 2011

"This Is This"

At Sam's basketball practice last night, standing next to the bleachers and doing all I could to avoid being drawn into a conversation with another parent, I read, "The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science."

And finally I was freed of my soapbox.

The article makes it clear—as if I needed proof—that human beings don't care about facts.

Instead, we care about values.

It's what we value, not what we know, that constitutes our identity. Our values shape our ideas of community, our purpose in life, our search for the admiration of those we love, our physical safety, the means by which we exercise power in the world.

Around our values we construct whatever system of "knowledge" we need to assure their survival. The legitimacy of that system isn't a consequence of how factual it is but of how effectively it reinforces what we hold dear.

In the Age of Science, it's likely religion that gives us the best example of the conflict between values and facts.

Most people of faith sense, however vaguely, that if they were to spend ten minutes objectively researching the history of their religion, they'd run up against facts that they can't reconcile with their values. So, instead of doing the research, they devote a lifetime—yes, a lifetime!—to a system of knowledge that can be eviscerated by ten minutes of scientific or historical research.

But they don't shun the research because they're afraid of the facts. They shun the research because they don't care about facts. Really, they don't—bottom line—believe in facts. They believe in what they value; they believe in safeguarding, by any means necessary, the structure, immanently fragile, of their identity.

Their identity is real. It's not a fact: it's alive.

So it doesn't matter if this or that prophet was, speaking factually, a philandering scam-artist. What matters are friends, family, community, connectedness, personal charisma, prestige, one's personae. The "fact" that the prophet wasn't a philandering scam-artist makes all of that possible.

In the end, you know, calling him a philandering scam-artist won't help anyone through the valley of the shadow of death.

So back to my comment on the soapbox.

I've just spent a few days revising my blog. Rereading it, I was struck, more than anything, by its futility. It's changed no one's mind, and never will. People—this is a scientific fact—don't really listen, unless they need to, unless they already believe what you're saying.

Better that I share how much I like eating a tangerine while I'm sitting in the sun, it's thin skin peeled and stacked in a little pile next to my chair, ready for ants.

The breeze comes and goes according to a wilderness of facts that I can't begin to understand. The air smells of traffic.

And I'm thinking of how much I've lost, and of the facts I've needed to explain those losses, if only to myself.

A mallard pair, duck and drake, fly over head, their long necks extended, symbols of grace. They drop into the aqueduct behind my uncle's house.

Passing clouds intermittently dull the sun's brilliance.

The planet is warming. That's a fact. The church is not true. That's a fact. Our nation's wealth is consolidating into the hands of a tiny minority. That's a fact. It's a beautiful morning; this tangerine is delicious; and I wait in brutal, exquisite solitude. All facts. Which of them matters to you?

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Welcome to Legoland

Every semester—without exception!—I see the surrender in the eyes of my students when I assign an essay. It's as if I've asked them to play Rachmaninoff and they've never touched a piano.

And, predictably enough, when I read their "essays" I want to throw them across the room and head for the bar.

With each class I think to myself: The system is broken. Students arrive at my class unable to construct a coherent sentence. And I respond to their helplessness with: "Write an essay!"

Well, writing an essay is goddamn hard to do! Especially if you can't write a sentence.

Yet I repeat the same futile activity, year after year. "Write an essay!" And they figure out what hoops to jump through, and I figure out ways to pass them, and nothing has changed—not for them; not for me.

And I despair at finding a solution. And they lose confidence in themselves. And my class, for both of us, is a big, hopeless joke.

And then I read something like this fascinating article on a method of math instruction called JUMP.

And I remember how I learned. Slowly, so slowly—like building a castle with Legos. And it was wonderful fun. And most of the discoveries I made on my own, experimenting: a child at play.

Real epiphanies aren't so mystical: they merely allow us to finally see the obvious. Today's epiphany is the manifest point that competence in anything is always acquired through very small steps. Those small steps—the approach I use, for example, every season as a basketball coach—make possible rock-solid competence. For some people, those who really love what they're learning, those small steps will carry them to greatness.

The fact is, my students aren't the ones with the problem. I'm the problem. Telling them "Write an essay!" is the problem.

As with everything else, we must begin with one Lego. A verb. Now two or three more Legos. A sentence.

And language—the mind—blossoms. An essay.

Monday, April 18, 2011

Public Enemies, by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq

Life is full of odd confluences.

I few days ago I finished Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take on Each Other and the World. Near the end of the book, Michel Houellebecq—the author, most famously, of Platform—offers his advice on how to write honestly:
You simply have to visualize your own death. And imagine that it will occur shortly after publication. After the book has been printed, of course, so you have the pleasure of touching it, smelling it. But a couple of days before publication or, at the extreme, on the publication date itself. Imagine that, as a result, the critical reception doesn't affect you at all. (his emphases)
This idea was still somewhere in the back of my mind when I read a blog post last night titled "What Lucky People Do Differently." The post's author spends a lot of time quoting Steve Jobs; among the quotes, this:
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool that I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
In short, an infamous French novelist who's generally regarded as a reclusive sociopath (and who also happens to be one of the few working novelists I find worth reading) and the most influential businessman on the planet (who also happens to be, from what I hear, something of a sociopath) both give us the same advice: To be successful, imagine—remember!—that you'll soon be dead.

I note this confluence in part because Public Enemies is a record of similar surprises. Two of France's central cultural figures think through, in very different ways, the problems of violence, humanitarianism, fame, artistic creation, private personae, family life. It's a deeply personal book, spiced with some touching French petulance and, most importantly, invigorated by the ongoing conviction that the life of the mind matters. That literature matters. That passion matters.

One hopes they're right.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

*

This coming week brings something of a spring break for me, and I intend to spend it, in part, revising this blog. Some posts might disappear; posts long saved as drafts might make their first appearance; undoubtedly the content of just about every post will undergo some changes.

So continues the ongoing project of modifying my memories according to my needs.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

TFTD

Maybe it's time for me, too, to say my "farewell to reason." Reason, which has been useless to me, which has never helped me write a single line; reason, which, all my life, has done nothing but torment me with the desolate nature of its conclusions.

— Michel Houellebeqc, Public Enemies

Silence

The sky is black ink.
East of the cliff-muted
Sea, a hawk
Circles a field, as if

Tracing the contours
Of happiness. Within
Its circle, among patches

Of cypress, plovers
Dash—there
And gone—
Through drifts of
Ponderous fog.

Nothing disrupts
The silence:
Bird-flight, sea-mist,
A field gathering
Dew. Someone

In a window,
Too, the house

Otherwise empty,
The lights turned off,

Watches, waiting
For the world
To break.

Saturday, April 9, 2011

James Salter Month, Part II

The Paris Review has now posted two fine celebrations of Light Years, one by Jhumpa Lahiri and another by Porochista Khakpour. Also, they've published an excellent essay on A Sport and a Pastime, Salter's erotic masterpiece, by Ian Crouch.

(One of the reasons I started this blog was to draw attention to Salter's work. My note on Light Years, posted November 2009, can be found here.)

Friday, April 8, 2011

If You're Painting, You're Not a Painter

I am determined, even when I shall be much more master of my brush than I am now — to go on telling people methodically that I cannot paint.

— Vincent Van Gogh

Monday, April 4, 2011

"Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%"

We're not surprised that Qaddafi clings to power. We think: yet another kleptocrat cliché. And watching his intransigence from these many miles we console ourselves with the knowledge that, whatever happens, the sands of Ozymandias await him, too.

But what of the Libyans cheering his speeches? What about the mercenary Africans taking up arms in defense of a man who has spent 40 years robbing them blind, fomenting violence across Africa, and silencing anyone who dares to oppose him?

Inconceivable, right?

Sadly, no.

In America we work, fight, and die for our oligarchs, too. More than that: we voluntarily vote for them. Eagerly, we listen to their news channels, as if what they have to tell us were meant for our benefit. They tell us: "Blame the teachers!" And we blame the teachers. They tell us: "Taxation is theft!" And we lower their taxes. They tell us: "Subsidize our companies!" And we subsidize their companies. They tell us (after collapsing our economy): "Bail us out!" And we bail them out.

But the day will come—as it's come in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and across the Middle East—when we will say, "Uh, wait a minute...." Because Joseph Stiglitz is right:
The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually learn. Too late.
From a Nobel Prize-winning economist: essential reading.

Saturday, April 2, 2011

TFTD

You write in order to find out not so much who you are as who you're becoming.

— Bernhard-Henri Lévy, Public Enemies

Friday, April 1, 2011

The Joys of Student Writing: Exhibit B

"Embarrassing and kissing are expressive ways to share feelings and connect emotionally and spiritually. The position most suitable for this would be where both partners are standing face to face while the man is embarrassing the woman's body."