Warped Mom

We sit on the pavement of the Palace Parking Lot.  It’s my third Warped Tour with my daughter, Katya.  This year she has blue hair, a septum piercing, and is wearing a Batman cropped top.  The sun is beginning to go down (thank God!), and we are both exhausted, but we have two hours to go before BearTooth plays.  They are the big band this year.  I don’t own a phone, so it seems only fair that during lulls I should get to pull out my paperback—The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez—if only to feel myself thinking … anything.  Thank God, I am still alive, not brain-dead!  “You’re never gonna get it I’m a hazard to myself,” sang the EMO heartthrob Andy Biersack (a.k.a Black) earlier in the afternoon, “I’ll break it to you easy this is hell, this is hell.”  I sang along loudly, thinking, “yes, Andy, this is hell.”  But I keep this thought to myself because Katya thinks I like this stuff and I try, for her sake, to get into the spirit, singing along to the songs I know, pumping my fist in the air, and bouncing up and down when I feel like it but not when some of the more obnoxious singers (like Fronzilla of Attila) issue commands to the crowd:  “You gotta go fuckin nuts!  I don’t wanna see anyone standing still!”  Make me, asshole … is what I’m thinking.  It’s hard to control my inner critic:  it all seems so sad, all the young people thinking that this is self expression; and directly in front of me is a biggish boy wearing a tee shirt that actually says, “Jesus is a cunt.”  Why am I here?  My short practical answer is that the only year I let her go with Zoey and Zoey’s mother, she passed out from dehydration, lack of food, and exhaustion.  In the months leading up to this year’s festival, I asked many times if friends weren’t going.  “I’d rather go with you, Mom.”  This year I understood why.  

 She needs a maternal buffer to give hugs and love.  She puts her head on my shoulder and I rub her back as we sit inside the cool arena to take a break, watching the artists (so-called) on the floor passing trays along a lavish buffet.  She seems lost and maybe even bored.  I look over the printed schedule to see if anything strikes me:  “hey, what about ‘War on Women,’?”  She’s game and we head out in the heat to a smallish crowd watching a band with two women guitarists and a lead singer with green dreadlocks which she whips in circles as she crouches and leaps around the stage, working the crowd, urging us to say things like, “I was RAPED!  I had an ABORTION!”  I can’t say the words in this context, even if the first phrase is true.  Why am I here?  My longer psychological answer is that I identify with my daughter’s struggles to become her own person not just because I was once an adolescent but because I have, for complex reasons, remained trapped in the role of child daughter.      

“Nearly every major character begins his life as the hero of his own fairy tale; then comes a point at which the world and his desires come into conflict and his eyes are opened both about his own errors and the nature of life.”  Gabriel Josipovici on Old Testament characters.

My mother was and, even at 86, still is an amazing storyteller, and I grew up listening to stories in which she was the champion worker who picked peaches, packed blueberries, milked cows, cultivated fields, faster and more diligently than anyone else.  She and her brother were “hellians,” “the worst kids in Nesco,” tipping over outhouses, jumping off barn roofs with umbrellas, racing Packards.  She went to a one-room schoolhouse, taught by her mother, but when she went to public high school, she was a star basketball player and popular … of course.  When her sister, Ruthellen, came to our house to visit, she and my mother, nicknamed Midge, would make lists, while dragging on Kool cigarettes, of the boys and men they had kissed.  I listened.  I loved her stories … loved the extended family life, lived on the edge of the Pine Barrens in South Jersey, that came vividly to life in her hero stories.  I must have been 9 or 10 when I convinced my younger sister Katie to get Mom to let us go down to Jersey in the summer and pack blueberries for the last of the Wescoat blueberry farmers.  We were the only packers (the pickers were migrant workers).  Aunt Ruth shook us awake before dawn and sent us back out to the barn after dark … it was a grueling schedule for two little girls from suburbia, used to running through sprinklers, riding bikes, and playing with friends every lazy summer day.  We lasted two weeks.  For years I accepted my mother’s take on our failed experience:  kids today just don’t know how to work.  Now I think that my work was just fundamentally different:  I was trying to imagine Midge’s magical life.  Going there was my attempt to get inside it, an effort closer to anthropological fieldwork than actual field work. 

As I grew up, I felt like I grew smaller in relation to my larger-than-life mother.  My father died.  I found him dead in a cabin on an Adirondack Lake.  My mother wasn’t there.  With my siblings, I screamed my grief into the fog on a rainy August morning.  My mother arrived, and pulled us into a group hug; but Mom was too strong to cry.  Not then or anytime afterward did she show any sign of weakness.  We were taught to soldier on.  “Lot’s of families lose fathers.”  I took up a permanent post at her kitchen table to keep her company while she cooked turned French Fries in oil and flipped hamburgers for four kids and two elderly parents.  She needed someone, didn’t she?  She must want to talk.  The hole in her chest must hurt like mine.  But she never spoke of missing him or of her feelings.  She never invited me to speak of mine.  She kept telling stories though, but the stories were no longer about South Jersey.  They were about her move to upstate New York and adjustment to suburban housewifery, and in them, she cast my much loved father as some kind of oppressive force from which she could now return to being superhero, Midge. 

            The way I found to feel, grieve, and recover (to the extent on ever does) was literature.  I stayed in school to complete a Ph.D. and write a dissertation on the female complaint, titled, “Means to Mourn Some Newer Way.”  I taught in Turkey, got a teaching job in Flint, published a book and many articles, married, adopted a baby girl from Kazakhstan, taught in Kazakhstan on a Fulbright.  I have worked hard and made myself some sort of heroine.  But my mother has never read a word of what I’ve written.  “When you go there,” comments my husband, “you lose your personality.”  I shrink into the little girl listening to stories, waiting for an invitation to speak of feelings or ideas. 

“You are safest when you are able to use your feelings on your own behalf,” a wise friend notes, but it has been hard for me to accept that sensitivity, imagination, and a passion for thinking and analyzing can be the very things that make me strong.  My mother still forbids me to drive the 13 hours to her house.  She doesn’t think I’m capable.  She worries if she calls my home in Flint and finds that I’m walking home from the university in the dark—“is it safe?”  To her, I am still very much a child.  It has only been recently, since facing up to my own abuse and taking a stand against my abuser that I’ve distanced myself from her.  When she blamed me for that, something broke inside.  She became less of a hero.

Warped Tour fell at the end of Katya’s two weeks of musical theater camp.  After the festival, she had several dates with friends, and I even let her go to a movie with a boy “friend.”  When I picked her up from Courtland Center cinema, she couldn’t tell me anything about the plot of Dunkirk and smelled strongly of the boy’s cologne.  “I guess it went well,” I said, uncertain what to feel.  That same night she flat out refused to go on the family vacation.  “You didn’t tell me it was for TWO weeks.  I cannot be away for that long.”  “But, I’ve done everything you wanted this summer,” I pleaded weakly, “and I haven’t had a vacation.”  We screamed at each other.  I took the dog out, and came home prepared to read quietly and stick to my guns.  But she wanted to “talk it out,” and lectured me tearfully for an hour and a half … about her struggles, her problems, her fears, her lack of friends.  It went on and on.  Later that night, I decided to skip the New Jersey leg of the vacation even though I had arranged to meet relatives I hadn’t seen in 40 years.  Back in July, I’d written a magazine essay on my mother’s mythologizing of Nesco (the farming settlement where she grew up) that was also an attempt to come to terms with what her place means to me.  It was not easy for me to claim the right to tell the story and parts of it differently than my mother would.  The role reversal felt dangerous almost as if I were striking out against Mom.  This summer trip to Jersey, connected as it was with my personal project, promised to be extra special.  But we always had fun there anyway.  There is the beach, the Atlantic City boardwalk, great seafood, the woods, the ticks, the hotel pool—what’s not to like?—and I couldn’t understand Katya’s preference for her own dark bedroom.  But rather than work on the puzzle, I gave in to her pressure:  cancelled the hotel, cancelled the kennel, and suffered a very angry day … angry at her, at myself, at the world.  When dinnertime rolled around, after I had childishly given her the silent treatment all day, we screamed at each other again. 

I had put off calling my Uncle Bud to say I wasn’t coming.  I just didn’t have the heart.  It was a good thing, too, because my mother called at 7:00 the next morning and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I could not cancel and that I had to take control.  “Mothers are in charge.” 

Two hours later, Katya rolled out of bed and wandered into my office.  I told her quietly that we had to go to New Jersey, that I deserved a vacation, but that we would shorten the trip, giving her two more days in her twilit comfort zone.  She accepted it, and we both were happy that day. 

Was my mother right?  “Always check things out with me,” she’d said.  I was grateful for the advice but not the added commentary on my approach to mothering—“You have let her run you.”  There it was again:  the same old insinuation that I am incompetent.  But I prefer to think (and I told my mother this) that the fights, the arguments, the almost physical struggle is hard but also important.  My daughter is seen and heard, and I hope she is also learning to see and hear me.  We are parts of a whole, and neither can be content if the other is miserable or if the other silently capitulates.  I’ve raised a screamo singer (she literally was the screamer for a short-lived teen band), and that, to me, is far preferable than a daughter fearful of her own voice and her own aggression.

 

            The night before Warped Tour, I sat in Churchill’s drinking with two former students, and we talked about family and how we are never “done” struggling with our mothers and fathers.  I’d just finished Joyce Carol Oates’ remarkable essay, Boxing, and it struck me that family is the first arena in which we must fight for our lives.  Oates thinks that America’s obsession with sports is “the dark, denied, muted, eclipsed, and wholly unarticulated underside of America’s religion of success.”  This is because sports, especially boxing, is only partly about winning; it is also about losing.  “Failure, hurt, ignominy, disgrace, physical injury, sometimes even death—these are facts of life, perhaps the very bedrock of lives.”  My mother tried to deny the facts of life.  She didn’t let me fight openly, and so I’ve had shadow box.  In any boxing match, if one cannot hit, one can yet be hit and know that he is still alive.  After taking many many hits, I am coming to believe that I am not a human punching bag but have been cultivating pain in the interests of a project that is forming and growing within.  Whether my own mother approves, I know I am a fighter temperamentally, a thinker by trade, and a Warped mother with fists pumping the air.

Turtle and Teen

            I’d moved out to the screened in porch to read in my circle of light.  Out she comes.  “Mom,” she says, testing the waters, I forgot to show you a picture I took this afternoon.  Reluctantly, I’d let her go to For-Mar (a local arboretum) to meet a bi-polar friend with whom she’s enamored and who is the subject of her book on friendship and “mental disorders” because “that’s what teens are interested in.”  She brings up the photo on her phone and hands it to me.  A snapping turtle hovers close to the surface of the pond surrounded by orange “goldfish,” but the reflections of clouds on the water make it seem like the pond is the heavens and he’s swimming both in and out of his element at the same time.  “Oh, it’s a lovely picture,” I tell her, keeping aloof, keeping up my silent treatment.

            “We had an agreement,” I said in my first message, “4:00.”  She isn’t answering her phone, and I call again, having borrowed a phone from one of the student workers in the Nature Center.  “I’m torn between worry and anger, but you better get your butt up here fast.”  She tells me a lot, so I know the weirdness of this boy, I know he likes her, I know he smokes pot, and I know he has been picked up by the police for wandering around after curfew going through dumpsters.  Crazy images pass through my mind, but mainly I am angry.  Breathless and with soaking wet feet, she’s back at the car forty minutes late without the boy, who slunk away, afraid to meet a mother.

            I listen to her excuses, speak in brief, angry sentences, but there are things she says that move me.  She explains that she told Ryan two days ago that this wasn’t a date.  She reads me a text.  “Look, I need to take it slow.  There are four guys trying to get with me right now, and I am evaluating each one very carefully and trying not to make the same mistakes I’ve made before, getting into ‘friends with benefits’ too soon.”  OMG these are my words of advice differently worded.  I smile inwardly thinking that maybe she listens, that maybe my efforts to guide her are not for naught.

            I talk about boundaries.  I talk about agreements.  I talk about respect.  What I can’t bear to talk about was the “date” itself.  “He was nice to hang out with,” she says, placing sweetness like a life-saver inside the bitterness of an argument I was driving.  Later on, I get more details as she tries to explain how a heavy conversation made them “lose track of time.”  “Well, we walked back to the hill where you like to go and sat down under a tree.”  I know that old tree.  I touch it when I’m weak.  I pray in its direction.  It is an orienting pole—an axis mundi.  And although I am conscious of a big emptiness … so little time for pleasure in my life and no one to walk and talk with in that intense teen-age kind of way, I admire my daughter’s choice of spot.  I don’t tell her but it feels nice to recognize her shared desire for closeness—not just to a boy but to nature.  I thought that I’d failed to instill that, but it must be there inside of her, and it came out of hiding when I least expected it.  Like the turtle … I’m trying to let her go, let her swim in her element, and find, to my delight that she’s also swimming in mine. 

            Ryan was almost an hour late for their meeting.  “Mom, I almost called you to come get me, but I figured I’d walk down to the pond to look for the snapping turtles.  I got into watching them and talking to the people on the dock.”  Before I adopted Katya, I would walk in For-Mar every day.  As long as I could, I carried her in a backpack and fed her baby food in the parking lot.  Once she was a toddler, I tried to get her to go with me:  “let’s go visit the snapping turtles.”  I used them as bait.  Seeing them was always surprising—even though it became a regular event.  How could they sense the presence of humans, and why did they surface and move close?  Was it expectation of food—we obeyed the sign “do not feed the animals”—or some other mysterious impulse?

            Because of our history with these turtles, Katya’s photo means way more to me than I let on.  That old turtle up from the bottom of the pond connects mother and daughter and helpfully carries the wonder of childhood into the emotional tumult of teenage experiences.  But it also reminds me that while it may be in the nature of all creatures to leave the mother, there exists an impulse toward connectivity that is just as strong.  In this mini crisis, I rejected Katya, but she kept lifting her head above the water and using her flipper fins to push aside the clouds.  I wonder why it is so easy to transpose a line from its romantic context in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to this situation where it perfectly describes old and new love I feel for her:  “I have found my daughter like a jewel, my own and not my own.”    

Shakespeare on Pussy-Grabbing Politics

            My scriptwriting class, Shakespeare in Performance, began in early January 2017.  The objective of the class was to write four one-act plays that use Shakespeare to explore the politics of modern relationships through the question, “what do we fight for?”  In the weeks leading up to the inauguration of Donald Trump—a day many students skipped class and stayed home—we were deep into our first play, which happened to be Richard III.  The famously deformed, Richard, seeks the crown to find acceptance and love which his mother has not provided and which he despairs of finding in a lady’s lap:  “Since I cannot prove a lover … I am determined to prove a villain.”  He smiles (and murders) his way into power, driving his brother Edward, the king, to an early grave, drowning brother Clarence in a butt of wine, and ordering the assassination of his two young nephews.  Richard is a sociopath, who describes himself as a Machiavel and consummate actor.  But as he rises to power, is crowned and quickly implodes, a veritable chorus of women—putative losers watching from the margins—jeer at and insult him.  “Thou lump of foul deformity!,” “Abortive rooting hog!,” “Poisonous, bunch-backed toad!,” they yell.  While the women have no political power, their speech undermines Richard’s confident self-fashioning with metaphors that capture the truth of his deformed body and soul. 

            Shakespeare uses Richard’s war with women to give psychological depth to his political rise.  He blames his deformities on his mother and makes a bid for the crown, presumably to sublimate an erotic drive he expects will never be satisfied.  But in the second scene of the play—as if to test his seductive power, he woos and wins Lady Anne (whose husband Richard killed in battle).  He doesn’t love her and doesn’t intend to keep her; he goes after her, it seems, to showcase his powers of seduction:  if he can win her, “all the world to nothing.”  He knows women are his chief enemy, and though he seems to defeat them, Shakespeare shows that it is women (not any highly placed politicos) who bring Richard down.  The truths they speak when they have nothing left to lose finally cause him to crack. 

            The parallels between American politics and the play were obvious enough to beg comment:  Trump defeated Hillary (painted as some kind of crone) despite (or because of) his outrageous bragging about grabbing pussy and the small regiment of women who came forward to accuse him of verbal violence, harassment, and even rape.  Women retaliated and came out in record numbers for the Women’s March on Washington two days after small crowds watched Trump take the oath of office—“on a Bible,” one of my students sneered.  The new president needed to exaggerate the size of the inauguration crowd and diminish the crowds of women, but everyone could see that he was rattled.  There were so many comparisons to be made between Richard and Trump but the most obvious one was their war with women.  However, as soon as I gestured carefully to the elephant in the classroom, I kicked off a quiet war with a right-wing male student that ended with a three-page attack email, accusing me of being a liberal college professor and feminist.

            Similar dynamic on a much larger scale:  Delta Airlines and Bank of America withdrew their sponsorship of the Public Theater just weeks ago (July 2017) because a Trump-esque Julius Caesar—with shock of hair, overlong red tie, and Slovenian accented wife—in the free Central Park production caused offense.  But “Trump is way too dumb to be a credible real-world analogue” for any of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, writes Grace Tiffany (fiction writer and English professor at Western Michigan).  “Despite their huge flaws, Shakespeare’s heroes are highly intelligent, well-versed in their countries’ histories, and, at least in the long run, painfully and astutely self-reflective and morally aware.  They have the capacity to learn”  (shakespearefiction.blogspot.com).  To find a Shakespearean personage who resembles Trump, Tiffany turns from tragedy to comedy and scans a list of buffoons to settle on Jack Cade—a clown in the Henry VI subplot who is also dangerous.”  Although I’m sure literary critics and political commentators have done it for generations, I question the usefulness of matching modern political leaders with Shakespearean characters.  I remember the first time I heard this done.  It was in the run-up to the Iraq War: I was watching Chris Matthews’ talk show, Hardball, and heard him compare Bush Junior to Henry V.  I laughed aloud at the mismatch:  W can’t even properly pronounce “nuclear,” how is he comparable to the fictional leader who gives the greatest ever motivational speech—“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”  Clearly, Shakespeare was being used to somehow knight or right the figurehead of the neo-con hawks.  

            We seem to lean on Shakespeare in troubled political times when we know we need help thinking about messy political situations, and this has never been more true than at this moment in time when the news outlets are waging a sectarian war, and the public needs more thinking and less shouting, but it is questionable whether analogue hunting, exchanging toga for a red tie, or even making blatantly political remarks in class is helpful.  Censorship forced Shakespeare to think and write subtly and deeply, and perhaps we must follow his lead.  There’s no doubt that intellectual freedom is being compromised by the caricature of the liberal college professor, but my comment lost me the opportunity to explore the relation between misogyny and sham politics that Richard III invites, which could have helped students understand how to read Trump’s war with women, which, judging by the latest skirmish with morning news anchor, Mika Brzezinski, shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

            I see now, with the benefit of hindsight, that what merited exploration is the similar placement of Richard’s seduction of Lady Anne and Trump’s brag about “grab[bing]” women “by the pussy” at the beginning of both character’s and candidate’s political wins.  Is misogyny a harbinger of political seduction?  If politicians are permitted to “do anything” to women (as Trump claimed he could), does that mean that they will be able to grab the body politic by the pussy as well?  So it seems.  The value of Shakespeare in general and Richard III in particular is that we get to train our analytical eyes on minds on a case study:  if we read the playbook of operators like Richard and Trump, perhaps we will be less vulnerable to being taken in by them.  Let’s take a look.

            Before we get to the main issue—politics as seduction, it is worth noting a powerful stylistic similarity between Richard and Trump.  Richard is always speaking directly to the audience, confiding his nefarious schemes and making us complicitous.  Trump’s incessant tweeting works in a similar way.  They are midnight confidences, shared off hours and offhand—the Public Theater had him tweeting in a golden bathtub—but we participate in their vitality by listening, reacting, re-tweeting, and endlessly rehashing them.  I think we have minimized the power of these tweets.  We shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that these tweets are irrelevant; they are slyly seductive, and America is hooked on them.  We need to turn him off and demand official press conferences which would, hopefully, raise the level of public discourse in America.

            Shifting back to blatant seduction, let’s see how Shakespeare’s Richard does it.  Before coming onto Lady Anne, he tells the audience exactly what he’s up to: it’s almost like he sets up the blazing hoop so we can marvel as he effortlessly jumps through.  “What though I killed her husband and her father?  The readiest way to make the wench amends is to become her husband and her father.”  Watch me, he directs: we do.  He does it, and then he gloats:  “Was ever woman in this humor woo’d?  Was ever woman in this humor won?  I’ll have her but I will not keep her long.”  How does he do it?  Well, it’s a long scene of verbal dueling with much graceful cut and thrust, and Lady Anne is sharp-witted and disarmed with some difficulty.  Basically, Richard turns her into a pussy and grabs her.  She begins as a proper Lancastrian noblewoman, following the dead King Henry’s hearse.  He was her father-in-law; she was married to his son, Prince Edward.  Richard is her arch-enemy, and she has every reason to want revenge.  When he appears, she calls him all kinds of names, spits at him, returns his parries of wit with sarcasm and mockery.  She doesn’t budge … until he makes a lewd remark, suggesting that he will not rest until he does so in her bed.  He hints that she has or is a pussy.  Then, he grabs her:  her beauty was the cause that made him kill her kinsmen, beauty that haunted him in his sleep and made him undertake the death of all the world.  He’s shed tears, despairing to possess her.  Finally, he gives her his sword, and tells her to kill him or accept him as her lover.  Very brilliantly he gives her power—sexual power—over him, and she caves … turns into a pussy before our eyes … not overtly sexual but pious, believing that somehow she has or will have the ability to convert him.  She accepts his ring and agrees to meet him later.  “Hah!, exclaims Richard to the audience and proceeds to assess her weakness and his strength.

                        What?  I, that kill’d her husband and his father,

                        To take her in her heart’s extremest hate,

                        With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,

                        The bleeding witness of my hatred by,

                        Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,

                        And I no friends to back my suit at all

                        But the plain devil and dissembling looks?

                        And yet to win her!  All the world to nothing.

Richard has two targets:  Anne and the audience.  He’s won her, and he’s working hard to win us.  Shakespeare connects the dots and suggests that because politics is seduction, sex scandals don’t hurt and may even help.  We may be shocked by Anne’s capitulation, but we are even more taken with Richard’s charisma or whatever it was and is that let’s Richard and guys like him get away with vulgarity and misogyny.  Trump knows that sex sells.  He said in the 1990s that it did not matter what the media said about him “as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass,” and his attitude did not change during his bid for the Oval Office.  There was the attack on Fox News anchor, Megyn Kelly, who grilled him over previous accusations of sexism.  Trump called her a “bimbo” who was incapable of objectivity when there was “blood coming out of her whatever.”  Just weeks before the election, an audio tape was leaked in which Trump bragged about not only kissing women but grabbing them by the pussy.  Several brave women came forward with accusations of harassment and abuse by Trump, and he was still elected.  “All the world to nothing” indeed!  America was and is as fascinated with the vulgar Trump as the audience is with Richard.  But in Shakespeare’s play, the honeymoon doesn’t last, the audience wakes up, puts on their critical spectacles, and begins to side with vocal women against Trump (oh, I mean Richard).

            Within the very first act, Shakespeare puts the breaks on Richard’s momentum by giving him a worthy female opponent in the woman who was once a queen and army general and is now a powerful crone figure:  Margaret.  Hillary could play her role.  Margaret was exiled after the Lancasters were defeated in the War of the Roses, but instead of disappearing, she sticks around to say everything others are too scared or too self-interested to say to Richard.  She curses Richard and everyone who colludes with him, and her curses come true, forcing the admission that “Margaret was a prophetess.” A woman who has nothing to lose takes a stand.  By the end of Act 1, a commoner—one of the thugs Richard has hired to kill his brother—has a qualm of conscience.  Although he really needs the money, he realizes that he must answer to a higher god than Richard.  Although the other hired gun kills Clarence, he really dies as a result of his own gullibility.  He wanted to believe that Richard loved him, despite so much evidence to the contrary, including a bone-chilling nightmare in which Richard pushed him off a ship to drown.  The message is clear:  don’t be fooled by surface charm, listen to your heart, wake up, do what is right.  Later in the play, citizens talk to one another.  They know the score, but they dare not speak too publicly.  But nobles begin to turn against Richard, and Margaret talks to the surviving women, including Richard’s mother, and teaches them how to curse.  They confront Richard, smother him with the breath of bitter words; and in the day of battle, their words do, in fact, weigh heavier on him that his armor.  He dies fighting on foot; even his horse famously abandons him.

            We rarely think about the relationship between love and politics, but I think only love will motivate masses of people to be engaged citizens.  Remember the Bernie movement?  But what kind of love is needed?  That is the question.  Love of country?  Love of her laws and institutions?  Love of her peoples’ histories and struggles?  Love of a father figure—a king or dictator?  Love of self?  In Richard III Shakespeare gives us a study of a politician wearing the mask of smooth seducer which covers self-loathing; and in Trump we have a crude seducer who loves only himself.  Just think about that fake Time Magazine cover with the flattering headlines that Trump plastered all over his properties.  Cult of personality isn’t just for North Korea or Turkmenistan.  But what will wake up America?  We have no popular theater as they did in Elizabethan England.  We have no common culture that encourages individual critical thinking as did Reformation England.  We are in the middle of an ideological war zone, and we need art desperately because reporting alone will not enable the psychological examination of the president and the electorate that badly needs doing.  When America elected a self-confessed pussy-grabber they were asking to be fucked by Trump, and until that happens—until Trump voters with existing conditions die because Trump Care won’t cover them or until their sons and daughters have to go to war with Iran or North Korea—I think they’ll continue to let Sean Hannity and all the right-wing pundits stroke their persecuted egos and dismiss the very bad deal Trump made with the Russians.  What I’d like to say to all those “poorly educated” rubes is this:  he doesn’t love you, he doesn’t care about you, he used you.  Doesn’t that make you the biggest pussy of all?  

Pioneers of Life: Shakespeare's Amateurs

Sitting down to write something about Shakespeare’s actors, my mind turns to Marcus Green.  “Dr. Kietzman, how the fuck are you?” he yelled from a passing car after he’d been out of school for a couple of years.  I still remember the time he played Richard III for a scene in class, and refused to take off his crown and his hump back after the scene was over.  He sat through the class pretending to be Richard.  Hell, he may have limped around for the rest of the day.  There was something about Richard that mattered, that he connected with—probably Richard’s deep need, the domestic abuse, the suffering that turned Richard desperate and murderous.  Marcus clung to his part … even if it was just for a day or two.  That was something.

Shakespeare’s plays are not plot-based but part-based.  He imagined parts for men he knew well.  It is generally accepted that Shakespeare’s actors learned their parts without a detailed sense of how the play would unfold.  The script was copied, cut up, and parts for each actor were assembled.  Each actor was given his roll or part to study privately, and when he turned up for rehearsal, he would know his lines and cues but not how his part intersected and affected others—that was a mystery.  “For the actor with his fiercely possessed part is at once radically alone and reaching for others, his world pre-scripted only to the extent that it is also abyssally unknown.”

Shakespeare was fascinated by acting as a profession.  He got his start as an actor.  Perhaps the danger and thrill of freestyling characters on stage (even in school plays) enabled him to risk going to London and imagining his friends playing characters remarkable, unforgettable.  New Historicist critics in the 1980s and 1990s were constantly commenting on the possible relationship between the rise of the public theaters and new geographic and social mobility available in Elizabethan London—a society where, for the first time, the son of a glovemaker would not necessarily follow in his father’s footsteps.  Acting, critics speculate, encouraged people to consider fashioning and playing new social roles.  It is 2017 Flint Michigan:  the bottom has fallen out of the local economy, a mad money-god (worse than any Shakespearean tyrant) is president, and, perhaps worst of all, because Humanities curriculum in secondary schools and university is not valued, there is an anorexically slim chance of reviving the life of imagination in America.  We need to act.  But how?  We need to imagine new parts.  But how? 

Shakespeare gives us vignettes of ordinary people acting.  The “mechanicals,” referred to as “hard handed men,” stage a classical tale—“Pyramus and Thisbe”—in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The local schoolteacher, parish curate, a group of yokels mount a version of “The Nine Worhies” in Love’s Labor’s Lost.  Do these plays succeed or fail?  It’s hard to tell.  In both cases, the onstage audiences are aristocrats, who behave very badly, ridiculing the actors, while the live audience gives what the aristocrats withhold:  laughter and even love.  There is something pathetic about the way the rich folk bait the poor … snarl and snap like dogs rushing at a staked bear.  Bear-baiting competed with theatre for audiences in London’s “liberties” (zones just outside of the city limits—red light districts, if you will), and Shakespeare agonistically tones the theatrical shows of his amateurs to prompt the audience to want the non-professionals to succeed and do their collective best to help:  we laugh out our support and let laughter change to tears when an actor really gets into his character and speaks a speech affectively.

Unlike lots of critics, I do not think Shakespeare intends to mock amateurs or show off how much better his own professionals are.  Showing amateurs acting allows him to anatomize the craft … to examine what is scary about it, what is required for a good impersonation, as well as how acting impacts the real life of Bottom the weaver or Armado the buffoon.  What is more, it isn’t just mechanicals and country schoolteachers who stage plays and take on parts.  “Female” characters—like Viola and Rosalind—put  on pants to play young men (Cesario and Ganymede)—in order to save themselves and make themselves through acting.  Even Shakespeare’s tragic roles—the  great parts like Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Antony—involve the characters taking on an antic disposition, trading the role of king for that of Job, the famous biblical sufferer, strutting and fretting like a poor player to murder and go mad, trying to stand up and be the triple pillar of the world.  Amateur performance may make us hyper-aware of the homemade quality, but that quality is still something we feel when we witness the crossdressing heroine roles and those of the great tragic men .  What I am calling “homemade” or “makeshift” is, I think, the simultaneous awareness of the character and of the actor’s degree of impersonation or metamorphosis.  In almost all Shakespearean performance, we are aware of the actors reaching for something that is beyond them and only realizable in fits and starts.  We are used to method acting in which the actor strives to "become" the character; but Elizabethan auditors fully expected and valued some amount of visible interplay between actor and character.  Based on evidence within the plays, there seems to have been a much more interesting and sophisticated ability to acknowledge that character is a collaboratively created dramatic fiction and a tacit agreement that such fictions were useful tools with which to examine the psyche and all manner of social relations.  But the actors admit failure very often within a role, "Why what an ass am I!" exclaims Hamlet after a particularly histrionic bit.  It seems to me that William Gruber is right when he says that “there emerges in Shakespeare’s play a growing sense that the power to act meaningfully—to live up fully to a role—is an impossible task.” 

Because we treat Shakespeare so honorifically, it may be difficult to entertain the idea that his was an art of failure:  of actors trying, reaching, faltering, falling, being inevitably upstaged or outfaced.  But the conditions for writers and actors working in the Elizabethan theatre demanded improvisation.  Audiences, with few entertainment options, were hungry for new plays:  companies had, ready to play, 15-20 plays at a given time.  There were probably 3 or 4 rehearsals at most for new plays.  The actors came to rehearsal, clinging to their part and listening hard for opportunities to come in with their lines and, as they spoke them, must have been amazed as lines learned in private flowered in crazy ne’er before seen blooms, given the emotional heat from others they could not anticipate.  The American video artist Bill Viola once spoke of “falling” or faltering as the optimal state for making art.  Some artists take pride in striving where they risk failure.  Samuel Beckett:  “Ever tried.  Ever failed.  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader:  “All is falling.”

“But did you die tho?”  My daughter is fond of this catch phrase, and I like to think that it reflects a healthy attitude to experimentation.  It also reminds me of all the “I’m not dead yet” moments in Shakespearean performance—the most memorable of all, perhaps, being Bottom’s repeated deaths in the role of Pyramus:  “Now am I dead, now am I fled, my soul is in the sky, tongue lose thy light, moon take thy flight, now die, die, die.”  Bottom and his ilk have much to teach us, through their parts, about being bold in the roles we attempt in our lives.  Here’s my short list of life lessons from Shakespeare’s actors:

1.)  Viola playing Cesario in Twelfth Night:  washed up on the shore of a new country after a shipwreck without her twin brother, whom she suspects is dead.  She picks herself up (not dead yet) and asks the sea captain, “What country friend is this?”  When she finds out that “this is Ilyria” and weeps for her brother in Elysium, she faces her predicament practically, “And what should I do in Ilyria?”  Within her first scene, she conceives of the idea of playing a boy—a eunuch—in order to slip into the court of Orsino, a potential love interest.  Acting a eunuch is something to hold onto, a part she can cling to in the midst of total uncertainty.

2.)  Bottom, like many of us, is enthusiastic.  He loves many different things.  When his friend, Peter Quince, is looking for actors to play in his play for the Duke’s wedding, Bottom wants to play all the parts:  a tyrant, a lady, a lion … anything and everything.  Choice and commitment are hard for many of us because they can seem so limiting.  From Bottom, we learn that there is pathos in the simple act of choosing who to be and how to act.  It is impossible for one man to play many parts:  so we must push ourselves to feel and hear the variety within one life, one self, one love, one day, one night. 

3.)  Not everybody will love us.  Holofernes, the schoolteacher playwright, who is excited by all the ideas swirling around inside his head … even if he does express them in a weirdly nerdy way.  When he plays Judas Maccabeus in the Nine Worthies pageant, the aristocrats joke about his name, call him an ass, and put him “out of countenance,” but he retaliates:  “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.”  No matter how small or “simple” our gift, we must be grateful for it and willing to defend it.  Here is Holofernes’ display of gratitude:  “a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, revolutions.  These are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourish’d in the womb of pia mater, and delivered upon the mellowing of occasion.”

4.)  The louder the derisive laughter, the more we must feel.  In a film performance of the Mechanicals’ play, the actor playing Thisbe (Juliet to Pyramus’ Romeo), who wears a wig of long hair, has absurdly rouged cheeks, and speaks in falsetto, finds her lover dead, with a sword sticking out of his body.  She utters these lines that move the audience to tearful laughter:  “Asleep, my love? / What, dead my dove?”  The actor knows he must do something, and so he rips off his wig and moves into his own voice, broken by real sorrow:  “O Pyramus, arise! / Speak, speak!  Quite dumb? / Dead, dead?  A tomb / Must cover thy sweet eyes, / These lily lips, / This cherry nose, / These yellow cowslip cheeks, / Are gone, are gone!”  Because the actor is feeling it, we feel it.  We must not be afraid to show our feelings.

5.)  Armado is the Spanish buffoon—a kind of court jester in the court of the King of Navarre, who doesn’t see himself as a clown … only a lover patterned on the model of Samson or Hercules—men of great carriage who were in love.  By the end of the play when he’s been recruited to play Hector in the Nine Worthies pageant, he has gotten Jacquenetta, whom he affectedly calls, “the child of our grandmother Eve,” with child.  So … one of his fellow-actors calls him out in the middle of his performance:  “Play the honest Troyan … the child brags in her belly!”  The actors begin to strip down to their shirts in preparation for a real brawl, but Armado avoids the fight by promising to do the right thing.  “Worthies”—like Samson and Hector—enabled this goony buffoon to accept his own desires and pursue the country wench he loved, and playing "Worthies" may have given him the soldier’s courage he manifests when promising to “hold the plough for her sweet love three years.”

“Actors are pioneers, writes Simon Palfrey, risking as daily craft the reality which the rest of us suppress.”  Shakespeare highlights the plight of the actor through amateurs—all are amateurs really—in order to encourage the men and women in his audiences to follow the example of his dramatic persons and be pioneers, too, speaking boldly our parts and improvising when necessary on the stage of the world.  So pick a part, cling to it, throw yourself into it, defend it in the face of detractors, and use it as a surfboard to ride the waves this summer.  Inevitably, you will fall.  Get back on the board, stand up proudly.  “Did you die tho?”

Flint Is Not Calcutta

“Flint is our Calcutta,” said the young Catholic priest from Ann Arbor to a group of Catholics—many from the wealthiest parish in the city—assembled to discern “the Lord’s will for Flint.”  I absorbed the insult, took the hit for my city.  There was no discussion.  We’d been assembled to receive the plan which had been worked out by the bishop in Lansing—a city which might as well be worlds away.  “It’s come to Father James in prayer that God wants people praying in the St. Michael’s chapel.”  Really?  Saint Michael’s is my home parish—one that I can crawl back to every Sunday and sit by familiar faces, touch hands that will hold me up, lean on the collective body like a mother with a steady heart beat.  Last year, someone stood up after mass and announced the “plan” for Saint Michael’s:  the church will close at some indefinite but not too far away point in time, but the chapel will stay open.  This plan came down from above—from the top of the hierarchy, but I highly doubt that it is God’s will.  “Flint is our Calcutta.”  I wish I could unhear those words.  They pushed me away.  They push Flint far far away.  They turn the priest and his helpers into imitations of Mother Teresas and Flint into a service project that they can complete and fly away to the next mission.  Years ago, I went to confession in a London church, and a very wise priest asked me to imagine those ubiquitous reproductions of Van Gogh’s sunflowers.  In the dark confessional booth, I pictured a faded postcard stuck to a refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a lighthouse, and I heard the voice through the screen say, “God does not want us to imitate anything or anyone.  You don’t have to be your mother or the Virgin Mary.  Be an original.”  I think the old English priest was right, and I know the young priest is wrong.  The need to turn Flint into a service project is, I think, a defense against the defeated reality of life here.  And I wonder why we have to fear defeat.  America is dying of its own addiction to success.  Maybe a daily dose of defeat is necessary to teach us to live in solidarity with other limited people.  We are not perfectible by our own efforts.  That is the myth of America and of Catholic America, too, that thinks if I say three Our Fathers and Two Hail Marys my sins will be forgiven.  So many well-intentioned priests and laity think they have the solutions to everyone’s troubles; but I think their solutions are a cheap way of not having to share trouble. 

I was happy to get the job in Flint twenty years ago and happy to be far from a college town.  Less stimulation of a certain kind meant seeing what could be done with a little.  What do I do for Flint?  What do I do in Flint?  Some would say nothing, but I have my own ritual of entry.  Every day I go out on a kind of scavenger hunt through the neighborhoods, looking for life.  Take yesterday for instance.  Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and I had been doing nothing but chores.  After church, I cleaned the bathrooms, turned our dusty porch into a living space, did the grocery shopping.  No card, no brunch, no plans.  But while my daughter and I were grocery shopping in Meijer, the paper colored sky turned cobalt, and when I got home, I had the excuse of needing to walk Panda—my corgi who is never-too-tired to trek.  I did what I do everyday—walked myself happy.  I lost myself in things.  All along the creek that borders Mott Community College there are birds, darting through the sky and singing:  red-winged blackbirds, swallows, and yellow warblers.  The red buds are beginning to leaf out.  My dog has discovered an easy path down to the stream, and we were down in a rush and the sun beams were jumping all over the small waves and there was the smell of decay.  A clump of fur … a baby … something, and then I see the tiny beak … duckling … Oh, life.  We continue past lilacs almost finished blooming—so soon!— and cross Robert T. Longway into the neighborhoods, where life exists side by side with rot.  Every other house is in ruins.  Many still stand like bruised up boxers with no retreat:  windows smashed, trash and cheap furniture spilling out onto the sidewalk, “Fuck U” spraypainted on living room walls, and C/P with a date spraypainted to tell scavengers there’s no copper pipe left so no point ransacking.  Other houses are charred pits, chimneys or porch steps the only signs that life was once lived here.  But there are yards and gardens that are well kept.  There is the small cottage with bee hives out back and five hummingbird feeders hung on a garden arch.  Wind chimes tinkle.  At least a dozen bagels are hung on bows of a tree that’s done flowering—must be for squirrels.  A homemade street sign tells me that I am at the crossroads of Kansas and Kansas; who says we’re not in Kansas anymore?  “Honeybees come build in the empty house of the stare.”  A wisteria vine threaded through a drain pipe hangs its festive clusters of lavender blossoms over porch steps no one uses now.  But cars were pulling up at the occupied houses and visitors piling out to see mothers or grandmothers.  There was the smell of barbecue in backyards.  There were the tents in Kearsley Park—Camp Promise—people hanging out, doing “hippie things” my old student said, when I bumped into him on the boulevard above the park.  Patrick was skeptical when I suggested they were witnesses to the fact that the water crisis is not over and Flint is suffering because of so many broken promises.  Once or twice, Panda and I walked through the park and met these so-called “hippies,” rolling cigarettes in the sun.  Letting children run.  Sitting in wheelchairs.  Living.  The day I bumped into him, Patrick followed me home.  We talked about his life as a bond trader who is up all night watching the Asian markets.  “When I was in second grade, I came out to my mom that to me numbers are shapes and colors.”

What is it about this crummy east-side neighborhood that I love so much?  It is poor.  Half the houses are unoccupied.  Many would call it a dump, but to me it has more life than the College Cultural neighborhood where the lawns are fertilized and mowed regularly and where gardens are planted and tended.  Everything is picture perfect.  I prefer imperfection.  Only living things can die.  This neighborhood has not been improved and won't ever be.  It is going the way things do in nature, and there is something deeply reassuring that all disorder and ugliness has not been pushed away but that the woodchucks are left in peace to tunnel under and ruin garages and raise their babies.  I’m glad that birds can fly in an out of broken windows and that the homeless can take their pick of homes here.  Yes, there is a lot of real life in this disreputable looking place. “I wouldn’t walk my dog in a place like this,” warned a mail lady one gloomy day in March.  When I asked her why, she said that there were too many dogs that would attack.  Why do we have to conjure up danger in every strange face and every chained animal?  I walk.  I talk to anyone who is willing.  I long for friends.  I am open.  I wonder what would happen if I hung a big sign around my neck that said “Walking is Prayer”?  Would people like that or would they think I was some uppity white lady walking the Queen’s dog.  I don’t know, but I might give it a try.  Or I’ll just keep walking and witnessing for now.  What I know for sure is that Flint is not Calcutta.  I don’t think we can help a city or help a person unless we take time to know it or to know her.  Only out of that knowing, which is love, will God make us new.

There is a personal hurt beneath this post.  I sent that same priest a book for a Christmas gift.  He helped me last summer.  To this day, he has not acknowledged my gift.  “Honey bees, come build in the empty house of the stare.”

Somewhere in the Desert Lies a Well

Although I’ve never been in an actual desert, I feel I know it.  I’ve been in the sparse steppe of Central Anatolia and know that once you are out hiking in a landscape that appears barren, every outcropping and every tree infested with mistletoe, the shape of every hill, every delicate flower—numberless as the stars—that pops up in spring, every feature of the ground’s face is loved more in a land of ostensible lack.  I know the desert because I live in Flint—a desert—no sand but acres of emptiness without living water.  I follow the waterways every day, tracing the meandering line of Gilkey Creek down to the Flint River, thinking about Abraham and yearning to hear the Word of the Lord.

Talk about a failed life.  Abraham was 75.  He and Sarai had no children, and he was still living in his “father’s house” at the time the Lord told him to “Go from your country and your kindred … to a land that I will show you.”  He set out from Ur, settled in Haran, but quickly headed south again:  Shechem, Bethel, Negeb, Egypt, Hebron.  Abraham became a restless wanderer on the face of the earth, like Cain, except he hadn’t killed his brother and he refused the false safety of cities, preferring instead the rugged high country Canaan to the lush Jordan plain.  Displacement from country and separation from kin seemed necessary for Abraham to hear God speaking.  But how could he be sure it was God and not the desert wind picking up the songline of his own desire for the blessing of offspring?  I don’t think he could be sure … nor do I think we need to be sure when we set out.  All travel is, to some extent, directionless.  All travel is, like Abraham’s, in one sense a travailing that is intimately connected with the quest for birth.  Yes, even at the age of 75, even at the age of 100.  Even at my age of 52:  yes, I, too, want to be born again.  And Abraham’s journey was perilous.  He knew men would try to kill him because of his beautiful wife:  “pretend you are my sister,” he told Sarai, not once but twice!  She was given away to Pharaoh in Egypt and to the King of Gerar.  In both cases, God intervened and rescued the matriarch.  Raiding tribes carried off his nephew, Lot.  Water was always in short supply and the need for grazing land became ever more important as Abraham’s flocks increased.  He moved in stages, weaving a path across the land that had been promised him (“how am I to know that I shall possess it?”) between places where he’d built altars that commemorated times when the Lord spoke, the Lord appeared, the Lord promised.  

For Abraham (and probably for Muhammad, too) the life of vital experience, symbolized by the journey, would not have been possible without the song—the voice of God in his ears singing:  “I will make your seed like the dust of the earth—could a man count the dust of the earth, so too, your seed might be counted”; “Look up to the heavens and count the stars, if you can count them … so shall be your seed.”  Is the desert sand and sky empty or full?  We can ask the same question of any dry patch in our own lives and journeys.  In Abraham’s life, God’s voice becomes more than the desert wind but grows a body.  He visits Abraham in the form of three men who lunch with him under the terebinths of Mamre, and they announce the good news of Isaac’s conception.  Abraham knows these men are from God, and they intervene to change the couple’s ideas about what is possible for them.  Sarai (inside the tent) laughs when she hears the news, thinking to herself, “After being shriveled, shall I have pleasure, and my husband is old?”  The men hear this, but instead of repeating Sarai’s exact thoughts, they merely ask Abraham why Sarah doubts that she can conceive when nothing is impossible with God.  In doing so, they gesture to the secret well—Sarai may not be as shriveled as her despair suggests.  Hagar, too, threw down her empty water-skin and cried, thinking her boy would die.  But God opened her eyes to a nearby well.  There is always a well in the desert, but we need the seeing eye God and his songline to lead us to it.  We drink and know that we are forever old and young, barren and fruitful.

In Australia the aboriginal people believe that a songline, also called a dreaming track, is one of the paths across the land which mark the route followed by localized “creator-beings” during the Dreamtime.  The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting.  And aboriginal people make pilgrimages in which they chant the place names of their songlines as a way of restoring meaning to their lives and of keeping the land alive.  For most of us, sadly, I doubt there is much connection between the place we live and our habit of being in that place.  Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another.  We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.  Israel became intimately linked to Canaan (the promised land) through a song, and I believe each of us must approach Flint, for example, through a vision or a song that we find uniquely appropriate to it.  When I met my husband, the head archivist of the Genesee Historical Collections Center, we would take walks through all the gloomiest neighborhoods, and he would tell me nonstop about the buildings and the factories and the railroad lines that were once in the places we traversed.  I will never forget the feeling of walking through time, and I envied his experience of this place as so deeply layered.   

But his song couldn’t work for me, and I didn’t find my Flint song until a group of students and I wrote an adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, to Flint; and now I will forever connect that play with its axial word, “nothing,” to a city where everyone is thrust out of work, out of families, out into a forlorn reality as ostensibly blank as the desert or as barren as the heath.  We can numb ourselves with drugs and habit or we can set out, every day, to see, like the prophets in our religious traditions, whether anything can come from nothing (silences, poverty, nakedness, namelessness), whether it secretes any rare love or resilient truth, or whether there is any virtue or opportunity in a return to ground zero.