Our Bodies Are Not Our Own

            By the time we had our talk, relations had regained their suppleness.  Monday was a blowout.  When I picked Katya (Kat) up from seeing Suicide Squad with two girlfriends, as I trusted, I looked in the plate glass window of the theater to see her bending over kissing a seated boy, who was wearing neon green—frogman (let’s call him).  “You are in big trouble,” I said unsubtly.  Later she confessed that when she heard me say that she thought of the children’s book Countdown to Kindergarten with the little girl’s running refrain—“I am in big trouble”—because the first day of school is coming and she doesn’t know how to tie her shoes.  Kat may be fourteen, but she is still my baby, and frogman is seventeen and drives!  Yes, she was in big trouble.  After a night of screaming, cutting, and threatening, the upset subsided into days of suspicion and disappointment until, to make peace and preserve my relationship with her, I offered a possible way that she might see frogman.  The proposal was no sooner out of my mouth than she texted it to him and her mind turned to wedding dresses—mine of all things.  And funnily enough, Friday of this week from hell was my seventeenth wedding anniversary.  “It’s probably yellow by now, huh?”  “Maybe not.  It’s folded up in a pillowcase somewhere upstairs.  I’ll see if I can find it.”  I was quite surprised that she would care about my wedding dress, especially since she seems to know that my marriage has been less than ideal.  At dinner that night (to celebrate), we were also working hard to make light of the heaviness that was past, and it was fun to re-tell the way Frogman’s Flint-tough mother showed up to scream at me for implying that her son was wrong to sneak off to the movies with a young girl.  “I know why she was so upset,” I said.  “The 17-14 age difference potentially makes what he did illegal—statutory rape … if anything happened.”  My daughter’s face turned serious before she popped the question.  “Mom,” she began, “I was going to ask you earlier what would be okay.”  I knew at once what “what” she meant:  what level of physical contact would be permissible?  I almost choked.  “But we can talk about it later,” she added, glancing at my husband, who clearly had no clue what she was asking.

            Later came sooner than I was ready for.  But when would I be ready?  She settled down into the red armchair in my office, facing windows open to the night air.  With little premeditation, I told her things that I hope she remembers like she remembers what I said about kissing one day driving home from school—“everything depends on the playfulness of your mouth.”  She loved that and has brought it up many times since.  “The thing about sex,” begins Mary Jo (not Mom), “is that it is too easy to get caught up, swept along from kissing to touching to sucking to oral to vaginal … you get the idea.  But if you get to the end of the story too quickly, there is no more mystery (even though when done right the ride is different each time).  So you don’t want the story to end too soon; you must take time to savor each chapter or, better yet, each word.  It would be fine to hold hands, to hold him … for days, weeks, years.  Let the boy’s ‘vegetable love grow vaster than empires and more slow.’”  Oh, no, I didn’t really say that.  That is Andrew Marvell’s seduction line from “To His Coy Mistress.”  But I did say, “let the feelings grow,” and I was thinking about Juliet’s metaphor ‘this bud of love may prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.’  “Because here’s the truth about sex:  excitement is a mystery that has as much to do with the mind and the feelings as it does with lips, breasts, and genitals.  If you can’t kiss a boy for a year, then maybe he isn’t playful enough or creative enough.  Test him.  See if you feel comfortable showing yourself, expressing your self in words, in smiles, in gestures.  Sex is a language or a dance that involves the whole person.  See if he wants all of you before you give away the parts.”  I said these kinds of things, derived from all the bad experiences, half-lived dreams, and still undiscovered country that exists for me somewhere over the rainbow.  I, too, am young in this.

            But there was a lot that I didn’t say and, perhaps, should have said.  Today I feel all those unsaid words jostling around inside me as I sit in the bleachers of Mt. Morris High School waiting for her team, the Kearsley Hornets, to play again.  “That’s my girl,” I say to Stacia’s mom and every time my girl serves, my eyes tear up.  She didn’t get to play the first round, and I felt dispirited but tried hard not to let my face register the disappointment.  At such times, I feel her feelings, smart at her rejection.  At these times, I feel like we share a body—that mine is not mine alone and hers is not hers alone.  After I shared my thoughts with her about boys and sex, I wanted to say something that perhaps doesn’t make sense or wouldn’t have been helpful to her:  “Remember: our bodies are not our own.”  This may seem counterintuitive and a far cry from the liberal feminist emphasis on a “woman’s right to choose” what’s good for her own body.  But I am, first and foremost, a Shakespearean; and the self-fashioning credo sounds dangerously close to Iago’s belief that “our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.”  Iago, for those of you who don’t know, is devious, plotting, self-interested, jealous: the snake in Othello’s paradise.  Shakespeare is consistent across all the plays:  the villains never feel the “deity” in their “bosoms” called soul or conscience, only the humble characters (the murderers and slaves) hear their consciences accuse them when they steal, swear, lie with their neighbor’s wives, or even think to do such things.  Any man that seeks to live well, says one of the poor men hired by the evil Richard to kill brother Clarence, must live without this “blushing shame-fac’d spirit.”  All of Shakespeare’s simple men know that a demanding immortal spirit dwells in each one of us.

            I could have avoided Shakespeare and employed the easy phrases—oft heard in Catholic schools—to make my point:  “you are a temple of the Holy Ghost” or “you are made in the image of God” or “we are parts of the body of Christ.”  Even though these statements may be true, they sound like church irrelevancies, abstracted from the texture of real passion and real searching.  Who am I?  How can love be wrong?  Go girl, seek happy nights to happy days.  Had I said these things to my daughter, she would have rejected them, as you, reader, may be rejecting them, now.  I could not then and cannot now rely on trite Christian truisms, to gain her attention and move her to reflection, I have to find words for real experiences.  I remember something that my little sister said a very long time ago.  She was describing an early experience of sexual shame: after going down on a guy in a casual hook up, she remembered feeling that “the woods woundn’t look at [her] anymore.”  I can recall countless moments of estrangement after sex—the first and worst followed an anal rape when the unknown man dropped me in the middle of Athens, and I made it back to my hotel room where I cried, tucked into crisp white sheets, too shocked to feel anything much except horrified numbness.  Sex can render us faceless.  We cover our faces quicker than our loins so that our humiliation expressed in vacancy, disappointment, and deep sadness doesn’t show.  The deity leaves the facial threshold to hide out in the depths of the body.

            Disappointing sex proves better than many other experiences that we have souls, and those souls play across faces involuntarily if they are coaxed out, breathed out, shared delicately.  Doctor Faustus (from Christopher Marlowe’s play) was plagued by his soul because he could find no way to express it in the external world of work or love.  His solution is to dispense with it; and, in a chilling scene, he attempts to sign his soul away to Mephistopheles in exchange for twenty-four years of unlimited power.  As he tries to write the deed of gift in blood, his own blood congeals.  Mephistopheles must fetch a brazier of coals from hell to get it flowing again.  Even more frightening is the writing that appears on his arm—“Homo fuge!” (O man fly!).  If we listen, our own bodies (like Faustus’) tell us when we are desacralizing them, using them in ways that sever the connective links with mysteries of spirit and cosmos.  Faustus knows, as soon as he hands over the deed, that he got the short end of the stick.  “Give me a wife,” he demands and gets a hot whore.  Tell me about the stars, and Mephistopheles hands him a book of diagrams.  When he asks to be initiated into the secrets of nature, he is directed to the same book … as if a book could contain the experience of being alive and surprised by joy and pain.  At the limit of his twenty-four years of power, Faustus seems to understand that he could not get rid of the immortal part of him.  He wishes that he was a body without soul because then there would be some limit to what he must suffer in hell. 

            How could I say all or any of this to my fourteen-year-old daughter, who just wants to go out with frogman?  Yet, my body insists on saying one more thing:  a jock in a neon green shirt who continues to fiddle with his phone, after being kissed by my beautiful blue-haired daughter (nymph or naiad) wearing a fetching black camisole, is probably not be good enough.  Who could be good enough?  No one this mother knows.  Even if Kat and I never shared a body literally (she is adopted), we share one now.  I held her, rocked her, spooned her while singing lullabies.  When the dentist said, “open,” I opened my mouth.  When the doctor gave her a shot, I flinched.  When she got her ears pierced, I squeezed her hand hard.  And when she sits on the bench in her first tournament at the beginning of her freshman year in a new high school, my heart hurts.  “That’s my girl,” I say proudly.  She is worth her weight and more in joy, in fun, in playfulness.  And I want her to find someone that helps her become her whole immortal self.  “Hey, Mom,” she says to me today while helping me clean up my school office in preparation for the start of school, “wasn’t it weird seeing the other volleyball girls with their Moms.”  Why?  “Well, they just kind of sat there, and they seemed distant … mature.  I’m glad I’m not mature.”  It occurs to me that I was not alone yesterday in feeling that we shared a body.  The simple explanation is that she is still dependent on me, but I prefer to take the coincidence as proof that our bodies are not our own but meant to be shared.  And we must listen oh so carefully to our fleshed selves as we struggle to share them only with those who will wait for the monarch to appear on the balcony of the palace and be graced by a smile that comes from God knows where.

Fighting my way out of Far Rockaway

            “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  This was what the medic in Tim O’Brien’s book about Vietnam, The Things They Carried, says when he has picked up the pieces and plugged up the holes of too many bodies to count and he’s beginning to imagine his friends dead and finally himself as nothing more than meat for jungle bugs.  Brian, a student of mine is writing about this book in a thesis that analyzes the ways writers use humor to cope with horror.  The book is very moving but not funny … not to me.  I feel like I have just come through a struggle that for five years has felt like I was battling for my own life.  The battle ended with a sabbatical during which I was using an academic project to free myself from dependence on an abusive therapist, but he called every day and tried to insert himself into every thought, every insight.  He even called himself the “midwife” of my project.  Even though I was working well and keeping him at bay, the nightmares worsened.  I could taste something rotting in my body.  The taste (or was it a smell?) worsened at night.  I felt like I was dying inside.  I tossed and turned, imagining the feeling of being buried, in a casket, watching my funeral from a distance.  The image of myself dead met me everywhere.  I concluded that I was damned and that God was punishing me through my own body.  I knew that whatever was causing these thoughts had to stop.  I knew that somehow I had to get out, get free—of him.  The only way I could stop the thoughts was by working.  Writing—about Shakespeare and the Bible—was my way to hold onto my life.  So I understand what Rat Kiley, the medic, was going through when he said, “I can’t keep seeing myself dead.”  Rat shot himself in the foot to get helicoptered out of the jungle to a hospital in Japan.  “I thought I could be a good friend to you,” said my abuser, who, at the end left me to live or die … alone.  “No one gets out of these situations without external help.”  “He confabulated everything, making himself your husband, father, even God, how could you have chosen?”  “But you were working yourself free.”  These are the things people (counselors) say to me to help me live.  Jesus walked into the house where a young girl had died, “Get up,” he said with authority; and she lived.  For years I’ve imagined myself as Jacob wrestling with the angel.  Now that I am beginning to read the New Testament, I am trailing Jesus, longing to touch the hem of his garment, believing that with just one touch I, too, might live and stop seeing myself dead.

            The second time I saw S-----, I told him about the way my father died—in his sleep when “us kids” (myself, three siblings, and our Florida cousins) were in a rental cabin in the Adirondacks.  We found him.  I touched death and drew my hand away quickly.  Horror.  Liveliness gone.  Dead.  There was no more warmth in my life.  Childhood ended when my mother came to pick us up, pack up, and soldier on.  We carried away from that cabin more than clothes, towels, lamps, pots and pans.  No time to unpack the emotions.  No grieving and no depression allowed on Mom’s watch.  “This happens to lots of other families.”  Reality hit.  I hated myself for the selfish thought, “how will I go to college?”  I told all of this to S----- and cried.  Years later, he told me that the story of my early loss moved him because he, too, had lost a parent early.  His mother.  He felt bonded to me.  As the years went by, we often spoke about the losses that bound us to each other.  I wrote him a letter once in which I tried to explore our different ways of handling loss:  I held mine close (to the point of writing a dissertation about elegy and the female complaint) while he ran from his loss (leaving Far Rockaway far behind).  "I didn't know how sad I wanted to get," he said when I pressed him to explain why he had never helped me with my problems.  He brushed them aside and redirected me to focus on him, "us," and our study of philosophy, literature, and finally, the Bible.

            Reading scripture together, working on a project with a completely engaged older man could not help but remind me of those lost days when I suggested to my father that we build a greenhouse, and we did it together, raising plants from cuttings in a little house (90 degrees in March, heated by a chicken brooder).  Being with S----- was a fantastic way of resurrecting the dead parts of my life:  he played my father—magically returned—and my husband full of desire for me.  “All kinds of feelings come up in therapy.  The patient transfers her attachment from people in her life to the therapist, and those feelings should get talked about.”  S----- did not help me talk about the holes in my life, he filled them with fictions and with promises of an impossible future … because nothing is impossible with God.  To disconnect was to suffer the loss of my father all over again.  To succumb to him (as I did) was to lose myself, to die.  

            The war is over.  But is war ever over?  Do we ever forget the comrades we’ve lost?  My new therapist urges me to grieve.  She is different from my mother.  Tim O’Brien helps me to understand how soldiers, whether or not they have been directly responsible for death, absorb responsibility.  Several different men in his company believed they let his friend, Kiowa, sink into a field of shit where he suffocated.  They didn’t do it but they did.  In a similar way, I assume blame for what happened.  I chose to go.  I chose to let him use me.  I chose him over God.  Even though people say that I could not choose.  Even though I was battling.  Even though I was open about my struggle.  He was the therapist, and I kept turning to him for help, but he never reached out a helping hand, only a grasping violating one.

            After probing my wounds with my new therapist last week, on the drive home to Flint my mind drifted back 36 years.  I was in the car, riding shotgun.  Pop was driving through the village of Warrensburg.  We were headed back to Indian Lake where he would die that night—just hours away.  I remembered vividly the black thunder clouds over the mountains.  I remember the chill that comes before a summer storm.  From the backseat, my little cousin, David, asked me why I didn’t go to my Junior Prom, and my father, who understood my shyness, reached over and squeezed my knee.  He had just taken me back to Glens Falls to have my nose cauterized because it had been bleeding for days.  Driving north to Flint, I marveled at how vivid the sights and feelings from the last bit of time I would ever spend with him still were.  That sky was the last evening sky my father would ever see.  The night of August 18, 1980, it poured all night.  We were stuck in the cabin (no late night fishing off the dock), and he talked to neighbors about his recent (minor) heart attack and, unbeknownst to me said (I learned later) that he was ready to die … that he had raised four good kids.  I had had insomnia all week.  This was my first experience with sleeplessness which has become chronic.  The night he died, although I had not slept in five nights, I lay awake in the loft of Camp Mary listening to rain fall on the tin roof.  I heard Pop fiddle with the stove somewhere around 4:00 and imagined him in the kitchen of the cabin, the ash on his cigarette glowing in the dark.  The next morning, the coroner said he probably died around 5:00, which would have been just when I fell asleep.  I’m not aware of feeling guilty, but perhaps the guilt is too deeply buried.  What I think about is that I felt the coming storm—lay in wait for it, bled beforehand—but was helpless to do anything about it. 

            For years I knew that there was something very wrong about the relationship with S-----, but I couldn’t do anything to save my soul and myself.  I had thoughts of death.  I considered taking my life.  I imagined myself damned in hell.  But I kept dutifully writing him letters and kept reluctantly making the drive to East Lansing.  Long ago in graduate school, I had an Irish classmate.  We agonized about boyfriends and oral exams over beers in the Irish pubs of Brighton, surrounded by very drunk and rowdy guys who painted houses for a living and did other hard labor.  “You have an amazing survival instinct,” she told me once.  I caught the echo when my new counselor said, “You are a survivor.”  What triggered my survival instinct that got me out of hell (I hope) was S----’s carelessness.  In a phone conversation after his wife had discovered some emails and determined to put an end to what she concluded was an “emotional affair,” he told me that he would be devoted to my memory and compared himself to Joe DiMaggio, who took flowers to Marilyn Monroe’s grave five years after her suicide.  That remark told me that, on some level, I had become his mother, and he wished I would just die.  The impact of that bullet, made me realize that, more than wanting him as a friend, more than anything else, I wanted to live.

            I asked him to mail back some special things that I gave him:  a picture of me as a child, a wooden pen box from Kazakhstan, a silver filigree pointer for reading the Torah, a patchwork quilt, and a framed postcard of the Tent City (circa 1915) at Far Rockaway Beach.  Seeing the returned postcard hurt most of all.  It was something like a relic or the sign of my absolute devotion.  I’d fallen in love with the idea of him and with the sound and smells of his seaside home.  “Just a finger of sand at the edge of Brooklyn,” where he was taught by Irish nuns, where he found a rowboat in the reeds, where he loved a girl across the street, where he swam across the channel, where his mother got sick.  When he saw her in the hospital for the last time, she came down to the lobby looking tired.  She died.  He did not seem to know exactly what killed her.  But he went to the synagogue three times each day. It was the right thing to do.

                        “… no matter where I wandered

                                                off the chart

                        I still would love to find again

                                                that lost locality

                        Where I might catch once more

                                                a Sunday subway for

                                                some Far Rockaway

                                                of the heart.”

            I made pilgrimages to Far Rockaway four times!  The first time I went was when my sister got married.  I’d ask S----- to try to draw a map of the world he inhabited at seven years old.  Holding tight to that map as I climbed off the train at the end of the line, I emerged into sunlight.  I felt like Gilgamesh who after an endless journey through dark mountains enters the garden of the gods.  It was magical.  When I found the postcard on ebay I was even more charmed.  The idea of a makeshift life on the beach, living in tents, like Israelites in the wilderness struck me as a beautifully impossible fulfillment of all my erotic and transcendent yearnings.  The tent symbolized sacred, moveable, space made in-between two people bound by countless silken ties of love and thought. 

            Before I unpacked the box of returned tokens, I bought I bottle of wine to dull the pain.  It was working.  I couldn’t look long at the postcard which once reeked of meaning.  Now it was just ephemera.  Gaudy colors on cheap paper.  Its living soul had dribbled away.  But I remembered that I had taped a quotation from Romeo and Juliet to the back of the postcard.  The line (still there in my handwriting) was Juliet's, spoken when she wakes up in the tomb after drinking the sleeping draught that makes her appear to be dead.  “I do remember well where I should be, / And there I am.”  When I selected that quote, I was really in love and committed to my pact with the impossible.  I never thought of Juliet as naïve; she was rock solid, real, pure, and took a courageous leap of faith.  Wide open and vulnerable—so many things could go wrong (and they do)—she trusts.  So did I.  When I gave him that card and inscribed the lines on the back side, I really believed that I would land in soft sand after my leap.  Things went wrong. 

            Now I wonder if, in choosing that line, I was prophetic.  The night Juliet drank the drug, she was full of anxiety and thought she might die.  The next morning, her nurse and family all believed she was really dead.  But she came through an experience that is only like death to LIFE.  She WAKES in the tomb: it is the faithless Romeo, the Romeo moved more by his own fantasies and fears than by the lively and loving Juliet, who is dead and can no longer feel the brush of parted lips.  My lips are still warm.  And I pray God will put a new song in my mouth and give me the courage to sing it.  My body will not be a sheath for Romeo’s dagger nor will I be any man’s dead mother or play Marilyn Monroe to his Joe DiMaggio.
 

            As I finish this blog, I see, more clearly than ever before, the dangers of loving literature.  I believe that fiction can be used to deepen our relationship to real life, but it must not become more important than life.  Literary characters can seem deeper and more beautiful than human beings.  We can know them in ways we often cannot know the people in our lives, and, as a result, they seduce us.  S----- turned me into Ruth (renaming me for the character in the biblical book).  Ruth is a loyal daughter and a lively redeemer whose redemption begins with surviving loss—the death of her husband and the bereavement of Naomi.  Ruth is a Moabite, and the women of Moab are, to the Israelites, whores capable of luring chosen men into the worship of idols.  But Ruth proves that the “other” is really the face of God and a force of God in the world.  Ruth teaches me many things, not least of all that I am Mary Jo and neither Ruth nor Juliet.  I am Mary Jo—daughter of Joseph.  Mary Jo, who worked with Joseph every summer to plant and tend the garden surrounding the statue of Mary at Our Lady of the Annunciation in Queensbury, New York.  Papa was a Lutheran, but he knew, without ever spelling it out, that it was more important to be in church—even a Catholic church—and to put his arm around the daughter next to him in the pew.  Being in the presence of God is what matters—in a church or in a garden.  It doesn’t matter if you fall asleep and even snore during the homily.  It doesn’t matter if the sun is hot and the weeding interminable.  What matters is being with God and with one another in His dazzling theater for worldlings, reading His book all around us.  Even in thrall to a false god, I never lost my love of His book.

Art of Hands and Feet

“Imagine surrendering to entirely different agents of knowledge:  say the pressure of fingers, such that we feel a world.”

We wet our arms in the women’s locker room so it would look like we showered and made our way through the cold corridors into the humid air of the pool area.  The shallow end was filled with animated people but was strangely quiet.  They are making shapes with their hands, my eyes told my brain.  “It must be the MSD kids.”  MSD is the acronym for Michigan School for the Deaf.  Katya and I dropped our towels and bags and found a spot along the pool’s edge where we sat to talk as we tried to ease our hot bodies into the cool water.  I learned from her that there was pleasure in watching our own feet.  Relieved of the pressure of bearing our bodies’ weight, they hung down into the watery blue, looking light, white, and even delicate.  For a second, I could imagine them detached, separate creatures. 

Lost in that meditation, I didn’t see or even sense the silent man inch toward me.  His gentle hand seized mine, which must have been dangling loose in the water, too.  His grip didn’t hurt but did feel bony and angular as if he were perhaps trying to make a shape in my hand.  I looked at Katya and felt a lump form in my throat.  I never saw his face.  He did not look at me but stayed bent over in an attitude of prayer.  Feeling the need to say something, I touched his shoulder as if to say “it is okay … it is good.”  One of the teachers drifted over (probably to make sure we were okay with his advances), and she told us that he was a person who rarely signed.  The teacher guided him away from us and waved all the others out.  Time’s up.  “Deaf people are the nicest,” Katya decided.  

We splashed around and swam.  She wanted to grab my feet and find the ticklish spots.  I eluded her easily by swimming underneath her woman’s body animated by a kid’s spirit, dog paddling on the surface so her blue hair wouldn’t turn green.  “Surrender,” a small voice told me, “Let her touch you.”  I obeyed.  Then she remembered funny assignments she was given in religious schools:  Choose your favorite station of the cross and label the prepositional phrases—“on the cross, next to the tomb, after he died.” 

--“And Mrs. McNea asked us to draw a picture of ourselves talking to Jesus.  I drew me and him at the beach.”

--“It sounds like a nice thing to try to imagine,” I said, thinking that I would try to draw the crouching man who seized my hand and pulled me toward a world where the body expressed the mind in simple shapes.

Something I like to wonder about:  where is the life in one of Shakespeare’s playworlds?  What produces it, or counts for it?  How small or brief can a playlife be?  Is it located in character or plot?  Maybe it is more manifoldly possible than our theme-driven, commonsensical, or sentimental responses to plays capture.  Maybe we access it by attending to the moment-by-moment phenomena.  To carry this insight into life is to realize that there are centers of feeling at every turn.  We can enter the life in anything at any moment.  So … it makes perfect sense that the Italian ballerina, Alessandra Ferri, can dance the role of fourteen year old Juliet even though she is 52 years old!  Ferri, I learned from a New York Times review of her one-off performance of the ballet at the Met, is famous for her arched feet, and with age “the arches have grown yet more strangely pronounced” making her appear more touchingly fragile.  But the reviewer singles out for praise her “vividly particular acting” in which the movement of thought was evident in every movement of her body.

It seems that the extremities of our bodies (which we ignore or cosmetically enhance with manicures, pedicures, and garish paint) are undiscovered artists.  This is as it should be since hands and feet are the means by which we come and go, touch and mold each moment in time, making it a potential pas de deux (“step of two”) or pas de Dieu with the always present, only sometimes unseen, beloved:  my daughter, my brother, my stranger, my mother.  

I have recently experienced something extreme, and it happened to my body.  "The survivor cannot reconstruct a sense of meaning by the exercise of thought alone.  The remedy for injustice also requires action."  Thinking about the way I have been pulled toward the notion of shapes made by singing hands and dancing feet, I remember that Robert Frost, somewhere in his prose, wrote that if you suffer from any confusion in life, the best thing to do is to make forms.  He goes on to give a list of suggestions: weave baskets, plant gardens, build woodpiles, blow smoke rings, write letters or make poems.  Even though I don't trust words because I was deluded by false ones and because it is hard to find true ones, I am doing this blog.  Not writing it, but doing it.  It is a formaction, a path to possible life, a way of digging my fingers into moments and not letting go.  It is a way of both saying and hiding the truth that something happened which I can only sign and solve with my whole self.

Creature Conscience

            “Their souls expanded beyond their skins.”  This is Thomas Hardy’s way of describing the transformation that happens to poor rural working people when they step out of the rounds of labor to have a pint at the Pure Drop and share rumors of their noble Norman ancestors with neighbors.  I am still taking deep whiffs of Tess of the d'Urbervilles as if the novel were the boxwoods in the Mary Garden outside St. Michael’s church from which I inhale deeply to remember South Jersey.  I appreciated Hardy’s phrase because I have, over the last ten years, experienced soul expansion “under the influence” of an extramarital involvement that was as intoxicating (for better and worse) as Tokay wine.  Imagine my delight when I today I had my soul expanded in the company of my blue-haired teenage daughter, and all it took was a walk in familiar woods.

            Content-making was the way I would describe the experience.  And it could not have happened at home.  Or could it?  I have to relearn the movements and gestures of everyday life as if clumsily learning a dance I have never danced.  At home, I am usually buried in a book and she is connected to her phone, listening to music, texting, or in her room with the door closed, face-timing Lonnie or Trevor.   “Let’s do something,” I suggest midday on July 4^th.  “Okay.  How bout the Hogbacks?” she offered.  I was surprised.  The Hogbacks are a favorite place of mine.  Because of the hills that surround a lake where, on a day in April, we spotted trumpeter swans and active beavers.  When I am there, I am almost at home in the Adirondack mountains.  Katya probably associates going to the Hogbacks with stopping at Speedway where I always buy her a Monster or Rock Star, but perhaps there is more in the experience for her, too. 

            After we made it up the first hill and started along the spine of the ridge trail, walking into fully leafed-out woods—done in the verdant palette of a master.  I was stunned by the intimate beauty of it all.  “Isn’t it lovely and peaceful,” I said aloud, as leaves lifted and fell like the petticoats of some fairy, curtsying and inviting us into a veiled layered space.  I thought about Eden—the garden God created for man, that needed man to watch over it as much as it needed rain to water it.  “It is good,” God, the maker, decided after each day of creation.  But after making man, he decided that “it was not good” for the man to be alone.  

            “I just want this to be over with,” said Katya when flies were buzzing around her head and the thorns of wild roses scratching her ankles.  “Oh, no.  Let’s just enjoy where we are now,” I said as much to call myself back to myself as to coach my daughter.  She and I are different.  She is not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.  I adopted her when she was nine months from a baby-house in Kazakhstan, yet we have lived the same seasons and sadnesses for 14 years.  Too much sadness.  “I hate to see you like this,” she said to me in the depth of my depression several weeks ago.  She has cut herself since she was in sixth grade and is in therapy for ADD and anxiety.  Mother and daughter, genetically and ethnically different, occupying the same invisible body of emotions.  That is why I now know that I must defend myself for her sake.

            Eden was not perfect, and that was its special beauty.  God rested on the seventh day, leaving creation open-ended, letting his creatures be … creative.  She and I begin to tend the garden as we walk.  We stop at the run-off pond, dotted with duckweed, where she likes to chase frogs and I like to observe the miraculous growth of skunk cabbage (the first green thing up as the ground thaws—a plant that generates its own heat).  We delight in the alarmed squeak of frogs, and she looks when I point out the tiny sky blue flowers of forget-me-nots.  Talking about bands, boys, and coming back to life after break-ups, we get to the end of the lake and she groans as I turn downhill to find the path along the opposite shore.  “It’s too long.”  “Oh, it isn’t far, and we can dip our feet in the water.”  My mistake:  the path is seriously overgrown, and there are places where we have to crawl to make it under the thick growth.  “The struggle is real” is one of Katya’s favorite expressions, and it suits the moment:  arms and hands, arms and other brains, stay low, watch out for your head, cheek to the ground, the moss is dreaming, listen. 

            “Mom, I need a moment,” she says, and, after GI-Joe crawling through the thicket, we stop.  In the silence, she listens and alerts me to a tap tapping that is not a woodpecker.  “It’s a beaver,” she says.  We are near the lodge and actually saw a beaver with two kits swimming around Easter time. “Let’s sit on this rock.”  Although I don’t say it, I remember an intimate moment sitting on this same granite outcropping with my imaginary lover who couldn’t feel the spirit of the place without putting his hands all over me.  I remember him gazing over my sunglasses and commenting on the amber flecks in my irises.  He couldn’t see the greater loveliness of the wild purple irises hidden in the grasses along the water.  Oh.  It was sweet but ultimately ephemeral because groundless.  Sitting in the same spot with Katya, from which I spot a deer in the thicket and point it out to her, I am happier … really content … we are together forever and, as we help each other connect to real things, we are nourishing our shared body. 

            Rest time over, we continue walking and, although she groans her way through brush and prickers, I can tell she is enjoying my company.  “Just move through them gently like that deer … which must be bigger than either of us."  Imagine yourself a deer, with the grace to pass through a forest of tree trunks, alive to the fact that hearing is vibration.  A few steps later, Katya slaps my back.  “A bug?”  “No, it’s your punishment” [sarcasm] … “this was all your great idea.”  We make it through the woods at squat down along the water’s edge to look at the creatures in the shallows.  We see tiny crayfish scuttling along the bottom and a catfish whose existence we debate.  I think he is dead, but Katya votes for life.  Turns out, she is right.  “When you get really old and sick, what if this all turns out to be a dream and I am your conscience?”  I think about how wonderful it is to be a mother, imagining the doe with two fawns following that Katya and I saw in a different woods just yesterday.  What a privilege it is have to learn to move gracefully around obstacles for the sake of a creature conscience.

            By the time we get back to the car, together we’ve spotted a bronze toad, captured, kissed, and released him.  Katya is still swatting flies but laughing, “I want to be attractive to boys not to insects.”  I am laughing inwardly that, at this stage of the game, I find insects far less irritating.  We are humans from the humus of the earth, animals amazed at understanding what we do.  With Katya, I started to trust that I have enough vitality to assume the responsibility of my vocation, the human vocation, which is to feel the world, to be affected—like God who sat back and admired on the seventh day.

Emancipation or "Going Green" with Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Nancy Hanks

            “The wise men always return to the soil,” wrote Henry Miller in an essay on Thoreau, published in the 1962 collection Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.  One only has to think of the poets, sages, artists in every land and in every generation to realize how deep this need is in every man.  What Miller observed fifty years ago is still largely true of America today:  It is a vastly unpopulated country.  Having made my annual pilgrimage to the Pine Barrens of South Jersey and, thanks to an adventurous husband, continued south through Delaware and rural Maryland to the islands of Chincoteague and Assateague and home along byways that wend round the hills and hollows of West Virginia, I share Miller’s vision of America as a land abounding in forests, streams, lakes, mountains, rivers, and fields—“where a man of good-will with a little effort and belief in his own powers can enjoy a deep, tranquil, rich life—provided he go his own way.” 

            To reconnect to the spirits of hard scrabble ancestors is why I return every summer to the Pine Barrens, preferably during blueberry season.  Since before the Revolutionary war, they smuggled goods off British sloops and transported them through the woods to Philadelphia.  Some dug bog ore out of the swamps for the iron furnaces that manufactured cannonballs for the war effort; some were pioneers in the glass-making industry; others raised cranberries and when they got the blight experimented with cultivated blueberries bred from wild stock.  There was a line of watermen who built boats, harvested salt hay in the marshes along the Mullica, dug clams; and their sons operated tug boats and built piers in Atlantic City.  They knew the environment intimately, worked with what was available, and stuck together.  When I was growing up, my mother took me and my siblings “home” four or five times a year, and I envied that extended family life lived up and down Pleasant Mills Road: a farm, a sawmill, a one-room school teacher, a railroad engineer, an alcoholic storyteller.  Everyone had a role.  Everyone had value.  It was clear to me when I was very young that life is best lived in a network of symbiotic relationships, and I grew up envying my mother’s life and memorizing her stories. 

            But every woman must go her own way.  I learned this lesson when I tried to copy my mother’s life, volunteering at the age of 12 to spend the summer packing blueberries for my uncle (a job that migrants have done for the last sixty years).  Up before dawn and still working after dark, I felt dejected and lonely.  The life of a farm girl was too hard for a spoiled, bookish subdivision girl.  I became an academic, but one who works hard in her own field, turning over and over Shakespeare’s blank verse, tending the seeds of my ideas, and gleaning the insights that other scholars have unearthed.  I do believe there is a profound connection between farming land and farming ideas (especially in relation to Shakespeare) that is quintessentially American.  This thought received surprising support by the end of our family trip.

            The last leg of our June journey (after Jersey and the wild ponies at Chincoteague) was to be an abbreviated version of the eighth grade field trip to Washington D.C. for our fourteen-year-old daughter who is aggressively disinterested in anything remotely interesting to us.  “I just want to go home,” she’d whine and flat out refuse to visit museums or see monuments.  Modifying selfies is an activity she prefers to watching egrets, hummingbirds, or ponies let alone taking pictures of the stone effigies of Lincoln or Jefferson.  “Kat, check out the view,” says my husband driving the Chesapeake Bay bridge.  “I AM LOOKING,” she states angrily. 

            Somehow we make it into D.C., drive around the Supreme Court, find a very tight parking spot on Capitol Hill, and drag her into the Folger Shakespeare Library.  “Let’s just see what they have on exhibit; it won’t take long,” I cajole.  Katya is relatively knowledgeable about Shakespeare, having played Hamlette in a school adaptation, and she resigns herself to putting up with another “boring” museum.

            The exhibit, America’s Shakespeare, is an eclectic display—something for everyone.  Most fascinating to me were the ways early Americans (from the colonial period through the Civil War) alluded to Shakespeare to express political views:  “To taxt or not to taxt,” read the headline in a colonial newspaper.  A British political cartoon presents the rebellious colonists as the rabble-rousers, led by Jack Cade, in Henry VI, Part 2.

            Even more fascinating were the ways that Shakespeare was used during Lincoln’s presidency by Lincoln, himself, by John Wilkes Booth, and by the grieving nation.  I had known of Lincoln’s particular interest in Macbeth, and, I had taped an advertisement for  Michael Anderegg’s new book, Lincoln and Shakespeare, to my refrigerator so as not to forget about it.  Lincoln was prone to depression and his wife, particularly after the deaths of several children, believed (like many “Spiritualists” of the time) that it was possible to make contact with the dead.  Many facets of Lincoln’s life predisposed him to connect with the play.  One week prior to his assassination at Ford’s Theater, Lincoln had a disturbing premonitory dream that “has got possession of me, and, like Banquo’s ghost, it will not down.”  Scholars cite this dream as proof that Lincoln identified with Macbeth, but they disagree in their readings of his identification.  Some believe Lincoln like Macbeth was ambitious.  Most suggest that Lincoln felt the blood of civil war deaths sticking to his own hands.  My guess is that Lincoln identified with the sensitive moral soul of Macbeth, whose first words in the play (coming fresh from a stunning battle victory) are “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”  Macbeth feels deeply the moral ambiguity of all political action.  After the civil war was over, Lincoln visited Richmond, the devastated capital of the Confederacy.  According to witnesses, his mood oscillated between “hearty  bonhomie and sad introspection” and, on a steamer up the Potomac, he read passages from the play that describe the mental anguish that is an immediate consequence of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan.

                        What hands are here?  Ha: they pluck out mine eyes.

                        Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

                        Clear from my hand?  No: this my hand will rather

                        The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

                        Making the green one red.

Lincoln may have been ambitious to perform great deeds but Anderegg finds no evidence that he ever believed his ambition was responsible for the carnage, however grieved he was by its extent.  My own work on the play links Macbeth with Israel’s first doomed king, Saul, and suggests that there is something inherently tragic about monarchy and perhaps politics in general (which always makes “the green one red”).  And the tragedy of politics would have been felt acutely by men raised in Nature—men like Saul who would rather push a plow than be king and Lincoln, the frontiersman, who found in Macbeth powerful, imaginative expressions of pain and loss that echoed his own feelings. 

            One of the most stunning pieces of documentation in the Folger exhibit is a newspaper advertisement, printed after Lincoln’s assassination with quotations from Macbeth that would assist the nation in its grief.  Lincoln’s love of Shakespeare was recognized and honored in the imaginative identification of him with the saintly Duncan who, "Hath borne his faculties so meet, hath been / So clear in his great office."

            After leaving the Folger, we dragged Katya through the Library of Congress and headed back to the car after treating her to a Monster energy drink.  We wanted to see the Lincoln Memorial but got pushed by the steady traffic onto a highway that took us over the Potomac and toward Arlington Virginia and posh suburbs of horse farms and fox-hunting courses.  We pressed onward toward West Virginia where things became much poorer almost as soon as we crossed the state line.  We ate pizza in Romney, a small town so crucial during the civil war that it changed hands 56 times.  After dinner, we stood outside a local history museum watching a father and two kids try to catch lightning bugs.  Paul was remembering tidbits relating to John Wilkes Booth.  Apparently, after shooting Lincoln and jumping from the balcony, he yelled “Sic simper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants”).  “You must be kidding!” I said and wondered aloud if Booth imagined himself as Malcolm who gathers an armed force to rid Scotland of Macbeth, who, by the end of the play, has become a brutal tyrant, killing friends, women, and children.  When Shakespeare wrote the play in 1606, pitching it to King James I’s pet interests (in witchcraft and biblical kingship), tyrannicide was a hot topic.  James, a staunch proponent of divine right kingship, believed that no matter how bad a king was, subjects could not challenge him.  But federalist thinkers believed it was the duty of magistrates to remove kings who were not living up to their covenant obligations to God and to their subjects.  By staging an armed resistance to monarchy, Shakespeare (a lowly actor/playwright like Booth) was doing something very risky. 

            Later that night in our hotel suite, while Katya took a whirlpool bath, I skimmed portions of Anderegg’s discussion of John Wilkes Booth’s escape from Washington through the swamps, rivers, and farms of eastern Maryland.  He carried a pocket diary with him in which he recorded his own feelings about his act, likening it to the deed that “Brutus was honored for.”  A bit later, he made another indirect but likely Julius Caesar allusion, writing of what he saw as “a country groaned beneath this tyranny.”  Wilkes Booth was one of three actor brothers, who—believe it or not—acted together only once in a single performance of Julius Caesar at New York’s Winter Garden Theater, a fund-raiser for a Shakespeare statue to be erected in Central Park.

         Shakespeare—an actor and playwright—throughout his career expressed revolutionary political views, but he did so very subtly, challenging the status quo through subtext and allusion.  That Wilkes Booth used Julius Caesar as pretext for a mad political act was nothing new.  The Earl of Essex paid Shakespeare’s company to stage Richard II (a regicide play) on the eve of his attempt to overthrow Queen Elizabeth.  The attempts and not the failed deeds are stunning because they express a faith in the power of art to unsettle and express an other kind of politics.  Wilkes-Booth’s deed insured that actors would be victimized in the search for scapegoats in the days after Lincoln’s death.  A minister in Philadelphia condemned theaters as “dens of pollution, these synagogues of Satan”—language that sounds exactly like that used by anti-theatricalist writers of the early-modern period.  One minister even intimated that Lincoln got what he deserved for going to see a play on Good Friday.

            The real gift of the trip came somewhere in Virginia when I was sitting in the co-pilot seat, studying the map and looking at the zigzag line of Route 50, imagining the road as a series of snake turns through dark mountains.  Just south of highway 50 near a settlement called Antioch was a red square marking the birthplace of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother.  “We have to check it out, Paul—tomorrow morning.”  The serendipity of events seemed to prove something I read in bright morning light as we drove through the peninsular fingers reaching into the Chesapeake:  “to understand what is real as real, and what is living as living, we have to know it in its own primal and individual community, in its relationships, interconnections and surroundings.”  Perhaps I could learn something about Lincoln’s habits of mind and ways of reading Shakespeare by seeing where his mother was born.  Macbeth asked the witches to look into the seeds of time to see which grains would grow, and that is exactly what I hoped to do—belatedly.

            The morning sun lit up the wet grass as we sped past places with biblical names—Canaan Valley, Pisgah Road, Good News Gospel Church.  The road followed the curve of Saddleback mountain and ran next to a stream.  The birthplace is not well marked but we found it, parked the car, and walked up the gravelly road, ducking under a metal fence to deter cars and protect creatures like the doe and fawn, fresh from a morning drink, walking high on delicate legs and leaping away when they saw us.  The cabin, although not the original birthplace, dates from the early nineteenth century and was moved from another site.  There is only one explanatory placard, and it obscures Nancy Hanks in the verbiage of West Virginia senators, anxious to prove their Union loyalties by writing a paean to motherhood.  Lincoln’s simple statement—that everything he is he owes to his mother—is far more touching.  Nancy Hanks’ family didn’t stay in this one-room cabin for long.  In her day, people bought land cheap, cleared it, sold it for a profit and moved on.  These hard-working nomads moved from what was then Virginia, to Kentucky, and onward to Indiana.

            I look in the window and try to conjure up the legendary image of the self-taught young Abe reading by firelight.  Imagination fails me.  Much has been made of Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim in Democracy in America (a guide to life in the United States in the 1830s) that there was “hardly a pioneer’s hut that does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.”  But how many log cabins did de Tocqueville visit?  As much as I would love to believe Nancy Hanks introduced her young son to Shakespeare, I don’t see it.

            But I read in Wikipedia that Nancy Hanks Lincoln was “superior” to her husband, a strong personality who taught young Abraham his letters as well as the extraordinary sweetness and forbearance he was known for all his life.  Nancy was also described as “a bold, reckless, daredevil kind of woman, stepping on the very verge of propriety” with a melancholy expression and intellectual inclination.  She sounds fascinating, and Abe lost her when he was nine years old—whittled the pegs for her coffin.  She died homesteading, age 34, at Little Pigeon Creek in southern Indiana.  No one knows for sure what killed her:  milk sickness (drinking milk from cows that had eaten white snakeroot), tuberculosis, or cancer.

            If you read my first post, you will understand that in the last few weeks I have been trying to reclaim my own life, and have found consolation in a circle of female friends.  Some of them are real, but most are biblical, fictional, and historical.  All of them were “ruined” in some way and pushed out to labor in the wilderness.  I am thinking of Hagar, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Nancy Hanks.  I have wondered at the intense and original intellects of hardworking rural women—a focus of Thomas Hardy’s novel.  We don’t need books and universities to teach us to think.  All we really need are our senses at play with Nature which, as Emerson wrote, “conspires with spirit to emancipate us.”  When a beautiful rose dies, beauty does not die because it is not in the rose.  Beauty is an awareness in the mind.  It is a mental and emotional response that we make.  Hardy’s narrator describes Tess as being “of a piece with the element she moved in” and “at times her whimsical fancy would intensify natural processes around her till they seemed part of her own story.  Rather they became part of it; for the world is only a psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were.”

            Mothers who learned to think and feel by working closely with Nature and with others have a wide vision unobstructed by manmade things and gifts of sensibility that they pass on to their children.  Tess, for instance, has great sympathy for animals—the horse, Prince, who she is partly responsible for killing, the cows she milks, her siblings, and fellow dairy maids, less physically beautiful but with equally passionate hearts.  Tess is immune to contempt and remains open, porous, alive, and responsive.  It is no wonder that my own mother—a Jersey farm girl who milked 7 cows before going to school every day of her life—raved about Tess ever since I can remember.  I finally read her book.

            To lose such a mother is to lose a whole world.  It only makes sense, then, that Lincoln would have found a mother surrogate in Shakespeare’s capacious dramatic worlds.  Shakespeare never lectures, doesn’t dictate.  Rather, he whispers, he hints, he engages, he charms, and finally wins us, through mesmerizing figures, into a deep and dedicated covenantal relationship—one on one—that rewards labor and original thought.  Anderegg thinks that Lincoln preferred reading Shakespeare to seeing the plays staged: I do, too.  Seeing the cabin where Nancy Hanks was born and thinking about Lincoln’s early experiences—it makes sense that he didn’t try to be an expert reader, didn’t strive to read every play but pored over those he loved and, most importantly, needed to live.  “Throughout his life,” writes Anderegg, “Lincoln adapted Shakespeare to his own needs and desires, selecting a speech here or a passage there, fitting the playwright’s works into his own worldview.”  He farmed the verse.  Even if Nancy could not give him Shakespeare, she opened his eyes and mind to the wide world:  emancipating him, she (and Shakespeare) prepared him to emancipate us.