Life Riddles Us

Early today, this shell appeared on the beach.

It had not been there long enough to be collected.

The shell's beauty, as it becomes lace-like, is the result, most frequently, of being riddled by the sharpened tongues of tiny carnivorous sea snails.

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are:" [link is to a wonderful 1966 essay by the inimitable Nat Hentoff]

“But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go - we’ll eat you up - we love you so!”

The world does eat us up as it keeps us with it. Life riddles us with mysteries (carnivorous sea snail?!), pains, and pleasures that leave our faces pitted, our knees scarred, our backs twisted, our hands gnarled.

We are lucky to be consumed by the world that loves us so.

And yet: consumption is not always pleasant. We endure great suffering as we are gnashed within the teeth of this world, some more than others.

I found this shell on Third Beach in Middletown, RI, where I am for the week supporting a dear friend who, 12 years ago at age 48, was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's.

Hers is a particularly virulent form of the disease inherent to her genetic roots in the Portuguese Azores. This goes far beyond the trembling (known as dyskinesia) you can see in Katharine Hepburn's later movies. It involves a separate but related disease, known as dystonia: painful, prolonged muscle contractions that cause abnormal movements and postures and physical damage. In my friend's case, the dystonia has been breaking bones in her spine and neck, resulting in two surgeries in each area, all only somewhat successful.

My friend is a brilliant and engaged doctor of economics. The world loves her so it is eating her up, bite by bite, each bite all too apparent to the rest of us who also love her.

Life riddles us with mysteries and holes. Why her and not me? Why do our bodies fail in such painful ways? While death is an essential part of our natures, some of the routes we take to arrive there seem unnecessarily excruciating.

And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps in all our various sufferings and pains, all of the violence and anguish, the replaced joints and cancers, the divorces and abandonments and cruelties we might understand, in our battered bones, how frail and imperfect, how vulnerable we as a species are.

We could be humbled in the face of this frailty, and in our humility we might focus on how to hold these soft, vulnerable bodies, hearts and souls, and the planet of which we are but a part, with care and kindness.

Instead in so many ways we double down, ferociously keeping death at bay with one hand while with the other wreaking the very havoc that increases our suffering: murdering, raping, and pillaging not only each other but the entire planet with toxins, trash, and tactics that brutalize it, drilling millions of tiny holes in the very atmosphere meant to protect us, in the water that is our life blood. Refusing to see how these poisonous habits are the source of so many of our cancers, so much of our suffering.

It's not about someone else "out there" or a god who is not in every one of us. It's about us.

Life riddles us. Our shells are filled with tiny holes, sometimes visible, sometimes not. And rather than exulting in the wondrous mystery of it all, we pull in our heads and pretend we are not just each a tiny organism dependent on the millions around us.

The Body and the Blood

Casting a big shadow
on my first communion.

Becoming a "bride of Christ" with my Catholic first communion at age seven was a joyous occasion. I had a pretty good if unconscious affinity for myth, parable, and fable (thank you, Aesop, and Sunday school, too) but not much of a grip on metaphor so the transubstantiation was as it should be: a mystery. Honestly, that we would eat the body and blood of Christ on a regular basis makes a lot of sense if you grow up understanding that Christ is the spirit of the world -- love -- and you need to physically ingest this spirit to become and live it.

If you don't grow up with that understanding, it's possible you do not hold food as sacred; and this in turn has supported the development of a White American culture in which food is cheapened, made unhealthy for our bodies through over-processing and additives, and then wasted while too many children experience food insecurity.

You may also believe Catholics are cannibals. Or worse.

Being confirmed by the Bishop of the Diocese of Norwich, CT in 1975 at age 14 WAS worse. I had already read Rita Mae Brown's Rubyfruit Jungle and quite possibly Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation lurked as a stolen library book beneath my bedroom chair. The photos of my confirmation all feature me red faced and swollen from the sobbing, screaming, middle school tantrum I seemingly held right up until the moment I was standing alongside the Bishop.

I quit going to church the moment I stripped off my hand-made red sash sporting my confirmation name in honor of my beloved grandmother, Mary. I spent the next four years in my parents' home enduring not the wrath but, much worse, the quiet disappointment of my family members.

Since then, the Catholic Church has not improved much over its history of witch burnings during the Inquisition; its Doctrine of Discovery justifying the genocide of native peoples; the sexual abuse of uncountable numbers of children and the death of many more in native boarding schools; and homophobia and the myopic misogyny of its all-male priesthood and anti-abortion policies.

Yet somehow, in the face of all this and despite 30 years of Buddhist practice, I still hang my deep faith in the mysteries of this world on the Catholic liturgy of my youth -- on communion, forgiveness, love, service, congregation and praise -- and attend mass when I can.

The reconciliation of all of this -- the differences between the shame of the institution and its many lovely people and the liturgy itself -- is no small hat trick and keeps me hard at work.

Let me just give you this. During my radical lesbian separatist heyday in the early 1990's, when I was employed by The Village Voice and also an editor for TRIVIA: A Journal of Ideas and Firebrand Books, my mother would take the train from Mystic to visit me in Brooklyn every Mother's Day. One morning I woke up to find her reading one of my issues of TRIVIA, which was crammed with lesbian-feminist philosophers, artists, and theorists including the likes of Mary Daly and Andrea Dworkin. Later that afternoon as we were walking down a shady block of 6th Avenue past a beautiful old Romanesque Catholic church which many Haitian immigrants attended, I asked her if she still went to church every week as she insisted we did throughout my childhood.

Mae shook her head. "The Church is just something created by men, right?" she asked me. "And they change the rules all the time. I feel closer to God in my raspberry patch."

#transubstantiation

#communion

#lesbiannation

#rubyfruitjungle

#reconciliation

#liturgy

Missing Marvelous Motors

I didn't realize how much I was missing Marvelous Mel Eaton until my dump run down the Quaco Road Wednesday morning. Melvin was only 65, a few years older than I, when he passed away two summers ago. 

There are many scenes in the rural U.S. like the photos at right of the now-abandoned Marvelous Motors, because every business out here is individually owned and operated. While there are a few franchisees (Ace Hardware, Irving Gas), we've got no stop lights and the nearest "big box" store to Deer Isle, Maine is a 2018 Family Dollar Store 20 miles away in Blue Hill.

When we lose the individual in rural America, we lose much more than a single person. We lose essential aspects of our communities that each person represents. Values. Sensibilities. Character.

The Coke machine with its block printed BACK OFF sign and the multiple Beware of the Dog postings have a disheartened look now with the weeds growing tall in front of the garage bays, the lot empty of used vehicles for sale, the mobile home bereft of its occupants. Only a bit of the shiny, Mariner blue fringe that once strung across the lot’s entrance to attract attention is visible here, forgotten on a roadside branch; the handprinted sign is fading. The row of defunct school buses which once held Melvin's massive local tire inventory are empty and the valuable automotive tools have been removed.

Marvelous Motors could be chaotic and disheveled looking even when it was thriving: boys and men and young mothers in and out for repairs, to find an affordable ride to get to work, and mostly for those stacks and stacks of tires stored in the tireless school buses. You had to know where to find him though, hidden off on the side road ending at the town’s transfer station.

In those days Melvin was a key character in the documentary video Tire Tracks by John Steed that I produced while directing the digital media program for Opera House Arts. Still cited today — sometimes negatively by those not understanding that the intentional making of tracks is not related to speeding — Tire Tracks tells a story of how rural men literally burn through tires, brakes, rear ends, “trannies”

and cash to make their marks on this world. While not a cautionary driving tale in the way many hoped or thought it should be, the video documents the peculiar alienation of white American male culture and the ingenious ways those who feel invisible create ways to be seen. 

What I really miss in Mel’s absence and the abandonment of Marvelous Motors is the kind of hurly burly, small rural business life they embodied.

The pandemic brought scores fleeing crowded American cities to remote outposts such as Deer Isle, bringing with them different sets of values and aesthetics.

For the main (and to grossly generalize), they appear to like their yards and villages tidy and neatly organized. They have enough excess wealth to trade in their used for new vehicles every three years or less, or to have dysfunctional appliances hauled away, before they have a chance to rust in the door yard; and the time to protest the construction of a Dollar store in their newly-adopted towns. And where a stern man flush with seasonal cash might find some pleasure in a new set of tires for play, the inequities of the U.S. economy mean the incoming folks have enough excess to feel entitled to post PRIVATE PROPERTY / NO TRESPASSING signs around woods and shoreline once shared by native and local communities.

The word for this invasion of excess wealth and the value and displacements of privacy that tag along with it — i.e., wealth not used for the common good -- is gentrification. Gentrification is the inflation of property values, taxes, rents, coffee prices, movie tickets and general living that occurs when individuals with more than they know what to do with drive up demand for life’s essentials and then feel the need to justify and secure their limited, rightful access to them.

I have a great fondness and longing for places such as Marvelous Motors — locally owned, individually operated, catering to working people who can’t afford a new car or who get their day-to-day pleasure from lighting up their tires — are a bulwark against gentrification. Its absence is another chink in those defenses.

#gentrification

#tiretracks

#ruralamerica

#deerisleme

The Fatal Flaw of Fatalism

 White Americans -- particularly those of us who are or who grew up working class and poor -- are very often fatalists.

For centuries those who would exploit our labor (while torturing, enslaving, and murdering our neighbors of color) have encouraged us to accept what befalls us because there is no other choice -- the world just "happens" and it "happens" to us.

The fish are either there or they are not there: it's not in our control. The climate is either warming or it is cooling: not in our control. The pandemic is going to kill more Americans per capita than in any other country: not in our control.

The "invisible hand" of capitalism or god -- too often conflated in white protestant america -- is at work.

That is what the profiteers want us to believe.

Yet even and perhaps especially for those of us who DO have faith that the world is larger than us -- that we are NOT gods and exist as small beings within a much larger universe -- the knowledge that every breath we take, every action we make impacts some other life is crucial to HOW we live our lives. The choices we make every day. Are they about ourselves alone, or do we consider our impact on everything around us?

This is why our understanding of government action or inaction is so critical to how good of a nation we actually are for EVERYONE.

The Trump Administration shrugged off the pandemic just as it shrugged off climate change. All the words and statements are on record showing that the administration's belief that the "private sector" of business would take care of us was a huge and miserable failure costing us, unnecessarily, hundreds of thousands of lives. Go back and listen to Jared Kushner saying the the procurement of PPE for our health care workers was not the government's problem, while meanwhile our health care workers, and those in their charges, were dying.

While the T Admin helped support the work of private enterprise to create the vaccines -- please remember Pfizer, the first to be released, did not use federal help -- they had NO PLAN to deliver vaccines into arms.

Now, quietly and surely, the Democrats are once again cleaning up the godawful mess left by the private-sector Republicans before them. Most of us of a certain age have witnessed this before -- remember the financial crisis of 2007-2008? -- and it would be nice if we all studied U.S. history a bit more thoroughly and remembered these lessons for the future.

U.S. government was created to BALANCE the rights of individuals for the responsibilities of the whole.

In order for ALL of us to thrive -- including our planet -- the rights of individuals or individual corporations to amass wealth at the expense of the greater good must be regulated and limited.

The world need not be a competition against each other. While we are not in control of everything, our individual actions DO matter. Every day, in every small way. We are responsible for stewarding our beautiful world for each other.

The excruciating and extreme losses the U.S. has suffered in this pandemic were not "inevitable." They did not "just happen." The Trump Administration bears accountability. And climate change is not "just happening." We all bear accountability for the choices we make that further it.

We need a government that understands its important role to work against profiteering and for the common good. Luckily we now have such a government in place. Let's all work to support #votingrightsforall to be sure we keep it.

"In America, the two very different responses to the pandemic have given us a powerful education in government activism. “For the past year, we couldn’t rely on the federal government to act with the urgency and focus and coordination we needed,” Biden said, “And we have seen the tragic cost of that failure….” - h/t Heather Cox Richardson

End of Saturday AM rant -- thanks to those who read, listen, and even respond!

#voteasifyourlifedependsonit

All We Leave Behind

 

Evert Hjalmer Nelson, my dad, at left
with his mother Signe in 1959 as she
was about to set sail for a visit home
from the U.S. to her native Sweden.

A few weeks ago, I was part of a conversation that moved me greatly on multiple levels.

We were prepping for a March 3 public presentation in Portland Ovations' Seeking Resonance Series -- Toward Being Future Beings, a preview of an ongoing commissioned work with Yu'pik creator Emily Johnson.

I was honored to be in the room.

We were talking about home. About our connections to place and people and ancestors. About culture and what we create from these connections.

Jason Brown, a self-professed "hyper creative" of Maine's Penobscot Nation, was among us. Jason began talking about how he was teased in school for being a "half breed" because his father was Swedish and his mother Penobscot.

As importantly, he was talking about how he knew nothing about the Swedish side of his family. They had sailed for America and left it all behind them: the language, the culture, the stories, the families along with the land.

I might be 100% French-Canadian in my genes, but my adopted family was second gen from Bohemia on my mother's side and first gen Swedish on my father's side. Similarly to the Swedish side of Jason's family, our people had left their old lives and seemingly their old selves behind with little trace when they immigrated to the States.

It's a lot to leave behind: those gifts of belonging to place and culture and the people who came before.

And as a result, White America tends to be a very disconnected culture. And in our disconnections, we have done a lot of damage -- especially to the land, but also to each other.

I was lucky growing up. Signe did keep returning for visits to Sweden. She spoke Swedish with the Swedish community in New Britain, CT, and made us Swedish foods for the holidays. Sometimes Swedish cousins would appear in CT on vacation. And when I was 13 she took me to Sweden with her for a month.

This all sounds like a lot and it was definitely something. But my dad never once went to Sweden. None of the rest of my family ever did. He did not speak the language, and as my grandmother aged we saw less and less of the Swedish cousins. I never connected with them as adults and their names and addresses are lost to me. My connections to the people who came before me are not strong, and I've noticed that is baked into White American culture. Our people were leaving behind where they came from, and when they arrived here, in order to benefit from the privileges of joining "White America," they conscientiously erased their differences.

Looking back, I see the moment when I was a teenager and became aware of this. In the 1970's, Puerto Rican immigration to New Britain boomed and new arrivals quadrupled the existing population. My father -- who no longer lived in the industrial city in central CT in which he was born -- began complaining about them. He was predominantly angry that they insisted on speaking Spanish, and often cited Signe's experience -- of arriving in the U.S. and attending night school to learn English.

Like many white western European immigrants, Signe valued assimilation. The new Puerto Rican population valued sustaining their native cultures: they brought their home with them to the mainland U.S.

We all leave things behind. Yet the history of native genocide, enslavement of Africans, and domination resulting from white immigration is a tragic result of our displacement from our own native cultures, places, and peoples. We're disconnected. We've forgotten our "we" to fiercely hold onto our "I's." In so doing, much of value has been lost to us forever -- including the humility that arises when one gives credit to those who came before.