Turning 40, and the "You are here" effect
I'm going to be 40 this year in September, and I'm afraid that I'll not have written anything in my life (this is already not true, but I mean longer things, books, or even an entire story) and am a fake, someone who has managed to think himself a writer without being one. I keep researching history and considering how to expand the novel to include more instead of writing just one story. This morning I had scheduled for myself to get up and go to Susan Stinson's writing group but the hours from 8-10 are my favorite sleeping time, and I did stay in bed totally forgetting about it until around 10 when I got up. So I'm writing, see, but it's not a story, not yet.
Yesterday was therapy day. I talked almost the whole hour about the questions I have about how things happen in history. How do people mix ethnically after a military takeover? Jason says, well, uh, rape, you know. I'd asked him, feeling foolish, specifically why Pocahontas would save John Smith's life. Wasn't she a princess? Yes, but she was also a captive. When I will transpose the situation to today and answer my question in the present day, I also sanitize: there is so much brutality built into every power relation. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Beat your wife with a stick no bigger than your thumb. We're here to bring you Christ, and if you don't carefully consider it without stalling, or refuse, we'll burn you to the ground and steal your wives and children. Jason warned me about "12 Years a Slave," compared it to Mel Gibson's "Passion." I told him about watching it in NYC on Ash Wednesday. I feel distant from the glory that some Christians manage to feel watching Jesus be flayed. I just recoil from the physical horror of it. I spend plenty of time imagining various kinds of physical suffering and how I would get through them, even if it's not to survive, just to die. Lying on a battlefield with my guts hanging out. How long does a head sense after it's separated from its body? In myth, the tongues of saints go on telling sermons.
Soldiers on the ground get to know the subjects they police. Venders, personal servants including priests and other go-betweens, political graspers, courtiers, and those currently in power get to know the generals, and vice versa. Jason talks about four generations in between a change in values or beliefs, and a corresponding structural or hierarchical change. In the Bible, it only takes one generation for desert air to become the air they breathe, and for the assorted rabble to become Jews. They'd entered Egypt as Jews, but then stayed beyond the famine, stayed beyond the king who knew them, and became slaves. Leaving, they were sad about the nice things they had in Egypt. Moses dies within sight of the Promised Land, but he can't lead them there. Even the scouts come back with lies based on fear.
There are precedents for perpetual enslavement, the term that contrasts with indentured servitude. There is also the example of feudalism. The people who live on land are considered part of the package, part of what you rule when you become a chieftain, a governor, duke, earl, or king. And the Roman concept of partus, as I've heard it shortened to somewhere in a Southern accent (I want to attribute it to Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" but that's wrong; was there reason for its utterance in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"?) which is the idea that what comes from the womb is of the same kind, so that if a mother is a slave, her children are slaves, which isn't true of a servant under indenture: that person is a citizen. Before partus, European men could be held responsible for their children's welfare and education, but after, they just owned the children. Partus became part of colonial law. There is also John Punch, a case where there were two or three indentured servants who all ran off, but then were caught, and the white ones got one punishment, and Punch, who was black, got lifetime enslavement. He was the first person in the North American colonies to be enslaved for his natural life. Did he "happen to be black"? No, that was why he got it. We'd already developed that hatred of the Moor, the "dusky race," the Moslem, the non-Christian. Even though the first thing white people do when they get somewhere is start converting people, they always seem to regard them as "Christianized," like Moriscos.
In South America, they imported feudalism as encomiendos, and there was more of a missionary presence, an infantilization of the Indians. (I have only begun reading about this, don't yet know why they could do this, if it follows a bloodier submission, or the resistance is too scattered. I mean, why are Indians respected as warriors in the North and in Inca territory? Woodland and rainforest Indians seem to us to live in a state of Edenic bliss. They don't have a lot of civilization: rules, permanent structures, ornamentation, or war. I suppose there is an array of satisfaction and success among cultures, regardless of level of civilization. We do it to be happier, then blame it when it causes us pain.) In the North, the French and Spanish bring them, but the English are religious refugees.... I just paused now to say hi to Kevin on chat, and saw that Lynn Beisner had written something about wifely submission that interests me. About her mother, she writes that she just could not take the stresses of being the actively participating wife of a church leader extrovert in a noisy, demanding church, so she got very fat and unhealthy until she could no longer go to church 6 days a week and 8 hrs on Sundays. She can't live a full life, but what she has is her own. If she got healthy (in all ways), it would destroy her marriage, because in truth she cannot submit herself to her husband or her husband's idea of good Christianity or wifely submission. Since having children for her husband is a wife's duty, a big part of it, for almost all of Christian history, a punishing Creator can destroy your children's health for your own spiritual wavering or sin of any kind. Beisner asks what a husband should do, and IIRC the answer is he should beat his wife into submission.
What would Joseph Campbell say? Something about the power of myth. Here, the mythology is that power flows from G-d to kings and men, and sometimes to anything with a will, so women, children, maybe horses and mice. We use that will (or we don't have it but it's hard to tell, from our subjective positions, whether we have liberty, if we are imprisoned by other men, even if we think we chose the path to that prison) to do good or bad, but firstly, we act to keep ourselves alive. If Lynn's mom had thought she could survive leaving that angry G-d, everyone she knew, even her children, and live on her own, she would. Most of us, me, I know, think we'd die if we just walked away from it all. Mary Rowlandson learns that she possibly could survive in the wilderness, if she learned the ways of the Indians who've captured her, but that so far in her life she has not learned those things and would have died if she'd walked away from her husband and community in Lancaster, MA. There has to be something to walk to, someone else, another possibility. Women's lives are usually very constrained, but those who've had to live at the bottom know they can live through something very difficult. Soldiers have already risked their lives, and lived by their wits and strength on what they stole (this was how all armies ran until someone got the brilliant idea to provision them), like the poorest of the poor do. There is comfort in the middle, doing what the chain of command tells us to do, because it's incumbent upon them to keep us alive to keep doing their will, making them richer. There is a fear of becoming lost that keeps us going. Sometimes there's a chance to advance, too, a carrot as well as a stick. If you're a good enough wife, you might be better liked and cared for, and have a place in heaven.
Beisner says for true intimacy, you need equality. (So obviously we cannot love G-d, nor can G-d love us.) There is secrecy and worse, resentment, from both sides, not just the subjugated but fear and loathing from the subjugators. (We curse G-d, He drowns us.) Like Huxley's Alphas, who are so glad they are Alphas and not dreadfully slow Betas, or unthinkable Gammas. Deltas are beyond the pale, hardly human. The air we breathe. If you are see the enormous differences between how the rich and poor live, because you come into contact with both (through stories, even), you learn to hate the Other. It breeds its own division, when you start having any kind of inequality. There's that between women and men, and among the class divisions. Lords hate dukes, dukes resent kings, princes (those not first in line or succession are styled Infante in Spain) despair of becoming less than dukes, serfs dream of becoming royal servants, they join the military or the Church to rise through the ranks to general, and often successful generals can become dukes. Most people don't actually rise very far above their birth station, and some drop. Some die before they get to sit down on the thrones they've been destined for from birth.
We defend the inequalities of our own societies fiercely. When Lynn says that even the inequality between parents and children is harmful, my first emotional response is to leap to defend the practice of keeping children protected. Of course we must not let them out of our sight. Someone could hurt them. We used to say this about our wives, and it was true, until we made a world in which women's places included more workplaces beyond home and convent. Once women truly belong everywhere, they won't be punished with violence for their transgression. (This is not the same as saying that a woman deserves violence. I am all for transgression. Look at me.) Jason's rule of four generations applied here, it will take perhaps another generation for American women to be safe from their fellow soldiers. If we made a world in which children were expected to take the subway and go into stores and factories (they used to work in mines, remember), then we'd somehow change society, not right away, but within four generations, so that it was normal and commonplace to see babies and children exercising their will far more, and going more places, and not being accosted but accommodated. What an interesting idea. Parents would buy their little tots things that tended to protect and enable, not just restrict. Remember those walkers that babies were always put in about ten years ago, and that are considered bad for them now; what if there was something like that, that allowed babies to just go wherever the hell they wanted? Like, they'd be motorized scooters for babies, so they could go anywhere in comfort. They'd have GPS and voice and hand control that babies could use. And they'd be in no more danger than anyone else in that place, no matter how far they could easily travel, because in this brave new world, we're citizens from birth, with all the rights of citizens. Someone's going to sue for it as soon as it's practical to apply. Once, what I'm describing would have been pure science fiction when applied to people with physical disabilities, yet now it's reality in most of the world. Being physically too weak to travel on one's own pins once meant you'd lost in the world where might makes right.
Yesterday was therapy day. I talked almost the whole hour about the questions I have about how things happen in history. How do people mix ethnically after a military takeover? Jason says, well, uh, rape, you know. I'd asked him, feeling foolish, specifically why Pocahontas would save John Smith's life. Wasn't she a princess? Yes, but she was also a captive. When I will transpose the situation to today and answer my question in the present day, I also sanitize: there is so much brutality built into every power relation. Spare the rod and spoil the child. Beat your wife with a stick no bigger than your thumb. We're here to bring you Christ, and if you don't carefully consider it without stalling, or refuse, we'll burn you to the ground and steal your wives and children. Jason warned me about "12 Years a Slave," compared it to Mel Gibson's "Passion." I told him about watching it in NYC on Ash Wednesday. I feel distant from the glory that some Christians manage to feel watching Jesus be flayed. I just recoil from the physical horror of it. I spend plenty of time imagining various kinds of physical suffering and how I would get through them, even if it's not to survive, just to die. Lying on a battlefield with my guts hanging out. How long does a head sense after it's separated from its body? In myth, the tongues of saints go on telling sermons.
Soldiers on the ground get to know the subjects they police. Venders, personal servants including priests and other go-betweens, political graspers, courtiers, and those currently in power get to know the generals, and vice versa. Jason talks about four generations in between a change in values or beliefs, and a corresponding structural or hierarchical change. In the Bible, it only takes one generation for desert air to become the air they breathe, and for the assorted rabble to become Jews. They'd entered Egypt as Jews, but then stayed beyond the famine, stayed beyond the king who knew them, and became slaves. Leaving, they were sad about the nice things they had in Egypt. Moses dies within sight of the Promised Land, but he can't lead them there. Even the scouts come back with lies based on fear.
There are precedents for perpetual enslavement, the term that contrasts with indentured servitude. There is also the example of feudalism. The people who live on land are considered part of the package, part of what you rule when you become a chieftain, a governor, duke, earl, or king. And the Roman concept of partus, as I've heard it shortened to somewhere in a Southern accent (I want to attribute it to Kevin Spacey in "House of Cards" but that's wrong; was there reason for its utterance in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"?) which is the idea that what comes from the womb is of the same kind, so that if a mother is a slave, her children are slaves, which isn't true of a servant under indenture: that person is a citizen. Before partus, European men could be held responsible for their children's welfare and education, but after, they just owned the children. Partus became part of colonial law. There is also John Punch, a case where there were two or three indentured servants who all ran off, but then were caught, and the white ones got one punishment, and Punch, who was black, got lifetime enslavement. He was the first person in the North American colonies to be enslaved for his natural life. Did he "happen to be black"? No, that was why he got it. We'd already developed that hatred of the Moor, the "dusky race," the Moslem, the non-Christian. Even though the first thing white people do when they get somewhere is start converting people, they always seem to regard them as "Christianized," like Moriscos.
In South America, they imported feudalism as encomiendos, and there was more of a missionary presence, an infantilization of the Indians. (I have only begun reading about this, don't yet know why they could do this, if it follows a bloodier submission, or the resistance is too scattered. I mean, why are Indians respected as warriors in the North and in Inca territory? Woodland and rainforest Indians seem to us to live in a state of Edenic bliss. They don't have a lot of civilization: rules, permanent structures, ornamentation, or war. I suppose there is an array of satisfaction and success among cultures, regardless of level of civilization. We do it to be happier, then blame it when it causes us pain.) In the North, the French and Spanish bring them, but the English are religious refugees.... I just paused now to say hi to Kevin on chat, and saw that Lynn Beisner had written something about wifely submission that interests me. About her mother, she writes that she just could not take the stresses of being the actively participating wife of a church leader extrovert in a noisy, demanding church, so she got very fat and unhealthy until she could no longer go to church 6 days a week and 8 hrs on Sundays. She can't live a full life, but what she has is her own. If she got healthy (in all ways), it would destroy her marriage, because in truth she cannot submit herself to her husband or her husband's idea of good Christianity or wifely submission. Since having children for her husband is a wife's duty, a big part of it, for almost all of Christian history, a punishing Creator can destroy your children's health for your own spiritual wavering or sin of any kind. Beisner asks what a husband should do, and IIRC the answer is he should beat his wife into submission.
What would Joseph Campbell say? Something about the power of myth. Here, the mythology is that power flows from G-d to kings and men, and sometimes to anything with a will, so women, children, maybe horses and mice. We use that will (or we don't have it but it's hard to tell, from our subjective positions, whether we have liberty, if we are imprisoned by other men, even if we think we chose the path to that prison) to do good or bad, but firstly, we act to keep ourselves alive. If Lynn's mom had thought she could survive leaving that angry G-d, everyone she knew, even her children, and live on her own, she would. Most of us, me, I know, think we'd die if we just walked away from it all. Mary Rowlandson learns that she possibly could survive in the wilderness, if she learned the ways of the Indians who've captured her, but that so far in her life she has not learned those things and would have died if she'd walked away from her husband and community in Lancaster, MA. There has to be something to walk to, someone else, another possibility. Women's lives are usually very constrained, but those who've had to live at the bottom know they can live through something very difficult. Soldiers have already risked their lives, and lived by their wits and strength on what they stole (this was how all armies ran until someone got the brilliant idea to provision them), like the poorest of the poor do. There is comfort in the middle, doing what the chain of command tells us to do, because it's incumbent upon them to keep us alive to keep doing their will, making them richer. There is a fear of becoming lost that keeps us going. Sometimes there's a chance to advance, too, a carrot as well as a stick. If you're a good enough wife, you might be better liked and cared for, and have a place in heaven.
Beisner says for true intimacy, you need equality. (So obviously we cannot love G-d, nor can G-d love us.) There is secrecy and worse, resentment, from both sides, not just the subjugated but fear and loathing from the subjugators. (We curse G-d, He drowns us.) Like Huxley's Alphas, who are so glad they are Alphas and not dreadfully slow Betas, or unthinkable Gammas. Deltas are beyond the pale, hardly human. The air we breathe. If you are see the enormous differences between how the rich and poor live, because you come into contact with both (through stories, even), you learn to hate the Other. It breeds its own division, when you start having any kind of inequality. There's that between women and men, and among the class divisions. Lords hate dukes, dukes resent kings, princes (those not first in line or succession are styled Infante in Spain) despair of becoming less than dukes, serfs dream of becoming royal servants, they join the military or the Church to rise through the ranks to general, and often successful generals can become dukes. Most people don't actually rise very far above their birth station, and some drop. Some die before they get to sit down on the thrones they've been destined for from birth.
We defend the inequalities of our own societies fiercely. When Lynn says that even the inequality between parents and children is harmful, my first emotional response is to leap to defend the practice of keeping children protected. Of course we must not let them out of our sight. Someone could hurt them. We used to say this about our wives, and it was true, until we made a world in which women's places included more workplaces beyond home and convent. Once women truly belong everywhere, they won't be punished with violence for their transgression. (This is not the same as saying that a woman deserves violence. I am all for transgression. Look at me.) Jason's rule of four generations applied here, it will take perhaps another generation for American women to be safe from their fellow soldiers. If we made a world in which children were expected to take the subway and go into stores and factories (they used to work in mines, remember), then we'd somehow change society, not right away, but within four generations, so that it was normal and commonplace to see babies and children exercising their will far more, and going more places, and not being accosted but accommodated. What an interesting idea. Parents would buy their little tots things that tended to protect and enable, not just restrict. Remember those walkers that babies were always put in about ten years ago, and that are considered bad for them now; what if there was something like that, that allowed babies to just go wherever the hell they wanted? Like, they'd be motorized scooters for babies, so they could go anywhere in comfort. They'd have GPS and voice and hand control that babies could use. And they'd be in no more danger than anyone else in that place, no matter how far they could easily travel, because in this brave new world, we're citizens from birth, with all the rights of citizens. Someone's going to sue for it as soon as it's practical to apply. Once, what I'm describing would have been pure science fiction when applied to people with physical disabilities, yet now it's reality in most of the world. Being physically too weak to travel on one's own pins once meant you'd lost in the world where might makes right.