Forced to be an optimist

 

I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. 

James Baldwin

 

 

Let's go.

A Mad Victim of Our Own Brainwashing

That was just a little chalk drawing on a path through a beautiful wood in a park somewhere in rural Washington State.

I wasn't going to write anything about it, but the Pacific Northwest certainly rivals the South (where I grew up and which, arguably, gets a whole lot more flak for its unsavory racists than other parts of the country) in evidence of racism and white supremacy. Yeah, I know the whole Pacific Northwest is one of the least diverse areas of the country, and I know that racism in overt and covert forms exists everywhere, in every part of the country, but as the white part of an interracial couple, I'm being educated in ways that I, in my privilege, have been -- let's be honest -- blind to for most of my adult life.

The Bird Photographer and I saw the evidence nearly everywhere we went, and given the general tenor of the times we live in -- well -- we didn't mess around when we saw it. We walked out of a steak house/diner/truck stop and toward our car one evening, passed a small group of older folks standing together at their pickup truck. One of the men was opening what looked like birthday presents, and they spoke openly of Trump, how much they agreed with him, how much they liked him. I know this because I walked right by them and rolled my eyes in my mind, and then I noticed that on the top of the present that the man was opening at the moment was a rolled up Confederate Flag.

I hear a lot of people crying out and writing how fucked we all are! and how this is so unbelievable! and I'm as stressed as the next privileged white liberal person, but let's face the facts. This great country -- and it is great in many ways -- has an ugly core, a rotten core, and the only way to get rid of it is to uncover and face that rotten core, to acknowledge that truth and to speak, own and face the truth relentlessly, no matter how uncomfortable it makes many of us. I think that might mean acknowledging and facing our own darkness, but it also might mean erasing swastikas chalked onto bucolic pathways or speaking up and often, even to those standing in a parking lot with an old, ugly flag. It means opening our eyes to see and using our ears to listen. I wish I'd done both, but I did neither, and I regret that.

“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” 

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

 

#resist

This Blog Still Exists

In a 1984 Paris Review interview with the writer James Baldwin, he was asked whether he found it easier or more difficult to write out of anguish, specifically his utter despair after the death of Martin Luther King Jr.  Baldwin replied, "No one works better out of anguish at all; that's an incredible literary conceit. I didn't think I could write at all. I didn't see any point to it. I was hurt...I can't even talk about it. I didn't know how to continue, didn't see my way clear." When I heard that this morning as I listened to the Paris Review podcast of the interview, it shot right through me, a kind of bolt of recognition and affirmation. When Sophie was diagnosed with infantile spasms nearly twenty-three years ago, she was not even three months old and I not quite thirty-two years, and it would be more than ten years before I'd write a single word about the experience despite the nearly twenty-seven years that I'd been writing almost daily. I've never been able to figure out why, nor to explain it -- in fact, when I did start writing again, nothing irritated me more than the comment I received over and over that you must find such comfort in writing, that it must be so therapeutic.

Perspective. 

I thought about it today as I brushed my teeth, the whir of the brush in my brain a kind of provocation for thought, willy-nilly. My parents left yesterday after spending a few days here with us for Thanksgiving. It was a lovely time -- we seem to have figured out how to love one another despite our differences and perhaps because of them. My mother insisted a few times over the days she was here about a persimmon-colored blouse she wanted to buy me, something we'd both admired in a catalog, and I kept saying, no, I really don't need that or want it, and she kept saying, yes, I want you to have it, it's good to have nice things, but aside from letting her buy it for me because she wanted to and could, it occurred to me in my head, willy nilly, as I brushed my teeth this morning, after they'd left, that my perspective is profoundly different, that it's not just that nothing material really matters having gone through such anguish over so many years, but that having gone through such anguish over so many years, everything else matters. Do you get that?

Last week, the In Home Supportive Services worker came to our home to do the annual check-up. She was Armenian (the largest population of people of Armenian descent live in Los Angeles), and at some point during the mind-numbing process of signing papers and answering inane questions about Sophie's inabilities (I'm not saying disabilities because the questions are posed negatively), she looked into my eyes and said, Where are you from? and I told her that I had a Syrian grandfather, a Scotch English grandmother and two Italian grandparents. She nodded her head, said she saw it in my eyes and mentioned that Putin and Assad were together that day. I made a face. She asked, You don't like Putin and Assad? I said, Ummm. No. She asked, Why? I said, Because they're hideous people who have caused the deaths of millions of people. She said, Ah you would know, and I let it go, her perspective, as it was, focused on my very diluted ethnicity. I'm only telling you this, Reader, because that little exchange led to her telling me about her Christianity, about her worries as a mother to two grown sons, about her asking me whether I was happy and me replying that I was and her answering that I wasn't because I had Sophie and no one could be happy with a child like that. 

Pause.

Some of you out there will think that I should report her, that she was out of line, in the wrong line of work with such a perspective, but I only felt tired. 

It'll make a good story, is what I thought, even as I calmly gave her mine.

Here it is. I wrote it down.

Hedgebrook, Day Nine

I only saw the moon last night because I turned my back and then turned back around. A pumpkin-colored disc floating just between the trees, close enough to touch except that I couldn't. I'd never have seen it if I hadn't turned.

Today I began the work of writing about Sophie's vaccination history. I push into the depths of the internet --pseudotumor cerebri and corticosteroids, pseudotumor cerebri and DT and polio vaccinations -- twenty years in, and it all comes back. How I didn't know a goddamn thing and neither did They. It's a chapter on control and there doesn't seem to be any way to, ironically, control the many arms of it. An octopus, eggplant purple, perverse, seductive, terrifying. The constant chirp of insect and throaty call of frog, the sunshine speckled pine tree outside my window, the raucous crow overhead, the solitude -- are they real? Is it opportunity to be so weakened by events outside of nature that you must find your strength in going back into it, or suicide  to do so?

My friend A suggested that I take James Baldwin's advice about fear:

Turn and walk into it.