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.

Blood-Red and Complicit

Those are the books I'm currently reading, simultaneously. Well, I'm not actually reading them all at once, like scanning them from left to right, etc. -- but I dip into each one and read a bit, then lay that one down and dip into another one. I'm almost finished with the lyrical Ade by Rebecca Walker (she's Alice Walker's daughter, and I actually met her at a friend's house the other day!) and just loved it. Percival Everett's short stories are like no other that I've read, and I delved into the Flannery O'Connor because I read about The Displaced Person, didn't remember it from earlier reading and was just gobsmacked -- again -- by her brilliance. It's about a Polish refugee who finds work on a farm in Georgia, shortly after World War II, and -- well -- let's just say that it's prescient and that we haven't evolved too much since then, especially given much of the country's response to allowing Syrian refugees inside and the fact that a whole lot of people support contenders for the throne of the plutocracy who want to keep them out. There's also my own complicity to contend with (I learned at Tomales Bay from the great writer Steve Almond that we are ALL complicit in one way or another with just about every travesty) as part Syrian and all American. But hey, my last rant on that SIT U A Cee On landed me in a heap of trouble, including being asked to get my head out of my poetry ass, so I'll just leave you this passage from the story. (The Gobblehooks is what the woman, a white sharecropper, calls the Poles because she can't understand their name):

Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying "Time marches on!" This was the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others.

That story was written in the 1950s, folks.

The Sy Montgomery book is an astounding one about an octopus and human consciousness. I can hardly stand how good it is and can only read in bits. I'll report back on it next year, which is just around the corner. My other Leisure Activity, done largely at night when the children are safely in their rooms either sleeping or playing horrific video games, is watching the second season of The Affair. It's on Showtime, and I don't subscribe to Showtime, but I signed up for a trial membership, and I'm in. I know there are probably better quality shows right now on the TV, but I can't stand a crime thriller or anything with lots of lawyers or intrigue on The Hill or spies and Strong Women Who Never Smile but are CIA operatives in the middle east. Give me a cheesy drama with lots of graphic sex, good acting and unbelievable story lines that revolve around marriages and child-rearing and New York City and Long Island over self-conscious Claire Danes combatting terrorists or fake southern accented Kevin Spacey sliming Washington D.C. Don't watch The Affair with your children (just allow them to steal cars and shoot up people in foreign lands with fancy guns and that all-American camo wear) or your parents (if your parents are like mine) because I repeat: the sex is graphic and there's lots of language and pretty much every single person is despicable, but it's a good soap opera for the likes of me.

I got my nails painted bright red today -- just in time, I told my friend -- for my drive up to snowy Yosemite tomorrow morning and my phantom lover. Just kidding on the lover -- phantom or not. I am leaving with the boys for the rest of the week and meeting my parents and two of my nieces at my favorite place on earth. Yosemite is a holy place, in winter or summer, and while I did just read a disturbing article about the thousands of Native Americans who were killed and otherwise displaced from their native lands, including Yosemite, I will approach it with reverence and humility and full acceptance of my own complicity as a white woman, reaping benefits hundreds of years later, my nails blood-red.

My Syrian Relatives, Part 3 (edited with other links for clarity)

My Syrian Grandfather
My Syrian Relatives, Part Two

Wow. A lot has happened since I posted about my Syrian relatives in early September when the plight of the more than 3 million refugees from the fighting and chaos in Syria was underscored in a photo of a little boy drowned and washed up, face-down on some godforsaken stretch of water. Now we've got a bereaved country bombing the shit out of another in retaliation for the grossest and most cowardly of massacres last weekend. We ourselves as Americans are complicit in turning a blind eye toward our own leaders who've led the world in constant drone strikes against perceived enemies in a part of the world that other leaders helped to destabilize in false war. We've got governors of some of the most backward of states, crying out about sealed borders and denying refugee status to people based on their religion. I know people who send chain emails about the threat to America from Muslims, comparing my "complacency" to that of the Germans during World War II. The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming! a funny friend responded when I shared that email with him, and the image of a Paul Revere riding on the back of a horse through colonial streets came to mind.

What the hell?

My grandfather immigrated to the United States from Homs, Syria in 1907 when he was eight years old. Legend has it that he and his family were Christian refugees. I doubt he was asked what religion he practiced when he fled Syria and persecution, seeking refuge in the United States of America. Or maybe there was a blank on the form he had to fill out in Arabic for religion, but surely his welcome wasn't conditioned by his response. Given that he's Christian, I guess everything was a-ok. As I remember him, though, an often angry man of rants about those of different religions comes to mind. I think that's a sad legacy.

Honestly, I don't think we live in united states anymore. To tell you the truth, I don't want anything to do with people that think we should turn away refugees based on their religion and am grateful that I live in California whose arms appear to be open to all, both historically and at present. I know, though, that I will have to have everything to do with these people because -- well -- it's complex. I will choose to not engage with them on these topics and feel sick about that, about my own complicity.

Are the white robed men in the cone hats and black holes for eyes, holding flaming torches, burning crosses on lawns, lynching men and terrorizing families representative of Christians? Are the murderous fanatics who strap bombs onto themselves, load submachine guns with bullets and spray them into people sitting at Parisian cafes and concert halls or shopping in Lebanese markets representative of Muslims? Is there a difference?

I don't believe in bombing the shit out of anyone for retaliation or dropping bombs with planes or drones in targeted strikes. I don't believe in turning away displaced people who have traveled thousands of miles with nothing but rags on their backs, at least as long as I drive around in a sexy white Mazda, live in a million dollar bungalow, turn my grassy yard into a xeriscaped paradise, upholster my daughter's walls so that she doesn't hurt herself during a seizure, pay cash for cannabis and pay taxes that support the leaders who have contributed to that displacement and the soldiers who carry out those leaders' orders.

I don't know what to do or what not to do, what to think, how to respond or any of it. I do know that I can stand firm in my desire for peace and in my resistance to violence, and that violence includes the turning away of anyone who needs help. I will stand firm in that fully aware of my own complicity as a citizen of a country who is divided, now, even in the most basic of human impulses to help desperate human beings. I owe my Syrian relatives, some of whom might very well share the same blood as I. I want a different legacy for my own children's children than the one my angry Syrian grandfather left.