CHAPTER: DULUTH (MAYBE CHANGE TO THE GULF OF MEXICO OR SOMETHING LATER)
Maureen sat down on what passed for the beach and stared into the enormous lake. ignoring behind her the sculpted paved path on which joggers and elderly couples wandered by chatting, and glancing only occasionally into the lake.
Four birds stood just at the edge of the water, with round heads, duck bills, grey feathers and white breasts. Three of them stood to the left, tittered and ran backwards from the lapping waves coming to the shore. The fourth, just in front of her, stood still, unfraid of the water rush its spindly legs. Maureen and the bird stayed still, hunkered down against the breeze, staring into the water.
Maureen suddenly wanted to feel wild. Her skin itched to touch the sand. She wanted nothing more than to take off her tshirt and roll barebreasted through the sand. The solitary bird toddled off in front of her, not quite fully up to the others, always keeping a little distance before it finally and slowly joined its friends. One of the birds began to suqll, its head pointed upward, neck pumping up and down like a calliope, and they spread their wings out across the water, no form, no V, no leader, just an agreed upon path.
Maureen felt so peaceful that she began to feel restless. She should be doing something. She wouldn’t be able to sit here forever, so it became difficult to sit at all. How long should she stay here? She looked around behind her and noticed a small alcove further down the beach, which looked somewhat secluded. She picked up her bag and walked toward it.
Once there, she settled into the stones. The fit her perfectly. Crossing her legs into a perfect lotus, her back straight and the waves rolling toward her. She sat with her eyes closed, facing the lake and feeling the red warmth of the sun on her eyelids, smiling, and sunning herself like a lizard praying on the rock.
Maureen looked around. She could see almost no one. Just a few people on the walkway, but they were probably too far away to see her. She looked around one more time and removed her t-shirt and leaned back against the rock. She felt the stone beneath her shoulders and the wind and warmth of the sun on her breasts, which were rarely afforded such sensuous luxuries. She wondered if the people on the barge about a half mile out on the lake could see her. She pulled her tshirt in front of her breasts. She tried not to feel self-conscious, but to focus on the feeling of the sun on her shoulders. She titled her head toward her shoulder and closed her eyes as the wind blew up the nape of her neck like a lover planting a kiss. She wished Clark were there with her to sit and listen to the rolling waves, to cradle her like the stones did. She wanted to kiss him here on the shore, lie together in the sand. She wanted to call him up and beg him to come join her -- find a graduate student to teach his summer classes and sit here with her on the beach. She knew that Clark would never just walk away from his work like that.
The waves jumped up at her in a game of tag, never quite making it to the tip of her show or the leg of her pants. One large wave came close and she started, giggling. She became fixed on the tide going simultaneously in and out and the way the wind generated a cross breeze across the water, creating wrinkles, as if plastic wrap had been spread over the lake. Finally, she took her shirt down again, lay on her back in the sand, and fell asleep to the warmth of the sun and the sound of the waves.
Surrealist Doodle
This was used as the cover of Karawane in 2006 and I have included it in on a number of bags and postcards over the years. Someone on the subway asked me if it was a Miro. I was very flattered!
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part II)
It has to be said, lest it sound like I am proscribing something equally restrictive and repressive . . . I am not arguing against any type of poetry per se. I do not want to create a monolith of styles, themes, as restrictive as a Marxist-Leninist insistence on social realism. I do oppose the stilted reification that much slam work has fallen into, both stylistically and thematically. There is a certain sound that poetry slam audiences and judges have come to expect, a rhythm to the words that isn’t necessarily organic to the poem and therefore it becomes a contest of style rather than of performance, of doing justice to the words.
Also, it is a time worn cliché now that a slam poem needs to be about either the poet herself (her deep feelings, a break-up that he just went through, a situation that the poet is confronting) or about a social condition (a homeless mother and child, a junkie, someone that the poet knew of and/or read about), or both (about the poet’s identity as a woman, as a Puerto Rican, an Asian, a gay man or a lesbian, a Latina lesbian, etc. etc.). When I competed in poetry slams, it was always what I call my “bitch feminist” poems that won rounds, not my more interesting and complex poems that I had worked on to perform well as well as to craft in the first place.
In 1986, I was at a writer’s conference in Illinois and I heard several poets, including Carlos Cumplian, talking about these poetry contests in which people showed up in costume and performed poetry and I realized about 10 years ago that what he was talking about where the early days of poetry slam. This is a far cry from the sense of “authenticity” and the singular voice of the poet with the poem itself that I have heard poetry slam participants talk about today. In the initial days of the slam, as described by poets working in Chicago in 1986, it was merely about providing a sense of excitement to the audience and performing the poem as best as you could.
At around the same time, I heard other poetry slams in the Quad Cities, about 3 hours from Chicago on the Iowa/Illinois border. There, slam was already becoming entrenched as a style, with the poets reading their poems very fast, almost like a race to poetry. Yet there were no set themes to the poems. It had not yet merged with rap music to develop the style and had not yet merged with identity politics, which had not really become widespread, moving out of the academy, until the early 1990s when activists and artists around the country started to pick up on that aspect.
I do want to honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. I do want to acknowledge the role that poetry slams have played in building an audience for poetry. From their inception, they sought to bring the excitement of sport to poetry, a spirit of fun and of not taking oneself as a “Poet” so seriously. All of these things are good things. But poetry slam has been around officially for a quarter of a century and is now an institution.
I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? And how can poetry slam fit into this without providing a known form, which is antithetical to the imagination that it should be releasing?
If the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society and art, culture, and society need only to “catch up,” then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing it for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are and were famously wont to lament).
I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people. And this means that the avant-garde will always be the avant-garde, will always be changing. Even as we feel that we “know” surrealism, that is because surrealism has been associated with a style, which can be painted, written, and then put away in a box, rather than being a “technique” for opening the imagination, which it can do over and over again, without repeating itself, for each iteration of the surrealist techniques for getting to the imagination will yield different results, different images, different juxtapositions, especially with literature, which was a field that Andre Breton, the so-called “pope” of Surrealism, contended.
Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.
To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.
To then take this and bring it to the people is what poetry slam can do -- to take literature off the page and bring it to those who would not normally pick up a book of poetry, for example, or to bring that alive with performance, to reach a larger audience that is hungry for something real, something surreal, something unknown. This is the lure of science fiction and it could also be the lure to poetry. Not to write science fiction into poetry, but to perform possibilities never before imagined. Some people who know me think that I am especially hard on poetry slam and perhaps I am, but only because I think there are so many more possibilities that poetry slam can bring to the world, rather than giving it simply a different type of institutionalized, reified poetry.
Also, it is a time worn cliché now that a slam poem needs to be about either the poet herself (her deep feelings, a break-up that he just went through, a situation that the poet is confronting) or about a social condition (a homeless mother and child, a junkie, someone that the poet knew of and/or read about), or both (about the poet’s identity as a woman, as a Puerto Rican, an Asian, a gay man or a lesbian, a Latina lesbian, etc. etc.). When I competed in poetry slams, it was always what I call my “bitch feminist” poems that won rounds, not my more interesting and complex poems that I had worked on to perform well as well as to craft in the first place.
In 1986, I was at a writer’s conference in Illinois and I heard several poets, including Carlos Cumplian, talking about these poetry contests in which people showed up in costume and performed poetry and I realized about 10 years ago that what he was talking about where the early days of poetry slam. This is a far cry from the sense of “authenticity” and the singular voice of the poet with the poem itself that I have heard poetry slam participants talk about today. In the initial days of the slam, as described by poets working in Chicago in 1986, it was merely about providing a sense of excitement to the audience and performing the poem as best as you could.
At around the same time, I heard other poetry slams in the Quad Cities, about 3 hours from Chicago on the Iowa/Illinois border. There, slam was already becoming entrenched as a style, with the poets reading their poems very fast, almost like a race to poetry. Yet there were no set themes to the poems. It had not yet merged with rap music to develop the style and had not yet merged with identity politics, which had not really become widespread, moving out of the academy, until the early 1990s when activists and artists around the country started to pick up on that aspect.
I do want to honor and acknowledge the word of identity formation, community building, and progressive values that many forms of poetry can participate in. I do want to acknowledge the role that poetry slams have played in building an audience for poetry. From their inception, they sought to bring the excitement of sport to poetry, a spirit of fun and of not taking oneself as a “Poet” so seriously. All of these things are good things. But poetry slam has been around officially for a quarter of a century and is now an institution.
I want to ask, then what? NOW what? Where do we go? After at least a century of searching actively for a revolutionary function of poetry, (why) have we given up? (why) have we abandoned the incomplete experiments of the past? Where and how can poetry function uniquely, in other words, what are the unique functions of poetry, as a revolutionary practice? And how can poetry slam fit into this without providing a known form, which is antithetical to the imagination that it should be releasing?
If the term avant garde, where avant garde falls into elitism, is in its very accepted (if perhaps unofficial, naturalized) definition that the avant garde is ahead of, “anticipates” and in many ways, is therefore, more advanced and “better” than mainstream art, culture, society and art, culture, and society need only to “catch up,” then of course, in the catching up, the mainstream has then co-opted the avant garde, misusing it for commerce or entertainment, for style, failing to recognize the true substance, the original intent (as contemporary Surrealists are and were famously wont to lament).
I prefer instead to think of the avant garde as the “first wave,” the ground work of consciousness, preparing the field. The change of consciousness, overused and virtually emptied of meaning as that idea may have become, is what necessarily must predate genuine social change. It is not up to poets (or even activists, politicians or “leaders”) to proscribe where that change needs to go, but to empower the imaginations around us to imagine something new, to dream our way out of the current world, which works only for a very few people. And this means that the avant-garde will always be the avant-garde, will always be changing. Even as we feel that we “know” surrealism, that is because surrealism has been associated with a style, which can be painted, written, and then put away in a box, rather than being a “technique” for opening the imagination, which it can do over and over again, without repeating itself, for each iteration of the surrealist techniques for getting to the imagination will yield different results, different images, different juxtapositions, especially with literature, which was a field that Andre Breton, the so-called “pope” of Surrealism, contended.
Education is the watchword and it has a very important role to play, but as an instrument of “instruction” and propaganda, it is subject to the same pitfalls that all other forms of discourse and communication fall pretty to. Religious missionaries often (almost always) accompanied or came fast upon the heels of conquerors to ensure that hears and spirits were converted while trying to enforce a new culture and a new rule upon the conquered. Poets must see themselves as missionaries of the imagination, not as propagandists.
To restructure language is to restructure thought, to restructure possibilities. To scramble, if not permanently, which is impractical and will not lead to the world we want, but temporarily, the world as we (think) we know it, the language that binds us to the now, to put new ideas, new juxtapositions into play, new planets into orbit. This is the revolutionary work of the poet.
To then take this and bring it to the people is what poetry slam can do -- to take literature off the page and bring it to those who would not normally pick up a book of poetry, for example, or to bring that alive with performance, to reach a larger audience that is hungry for something real, something surreal, something unknown. This is the lure of science fiction and it could also be the lure to poetry. Not to write science fiction into poetry, but to perform possibilities never before imagined. Some people who know me think that I am especially hard on poetry slam and perhaps I am, but only because I think there are so many more possibilities that poetry slam can bring to the world, rather than giving it simply a different type of institutionalized, reified poetry.
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry (Part I)
The Liberation of the Imagination: From “Feminine Writing” to Revolutionary Poetry
In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.
Shoshona Feldman (1975)
“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)
Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made, “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.
To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?
Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.
(To be continued . . . .)
In the introduction to Feminist Critique of Language, editor Deborah Cameron cites a quote by Shoshona Feldman on language that particularly resonates with me and my work on poetry, language and liberation.
Shoshona Feldman (1975)
“The challenge facing women today is nothing less than to reinvent language . . . to speak not only against but outside the structure . . . to establish a discourse the status of which would no longer be defined by the phallacy of male meaning.” (In Feminist Critique of Language, ed. Deborah Cameron, p. 8)
Cameron elaborates further upon Feldman’s idea, discussing briefly the work of French Feminists such as Luce Irigaray and Helene Cixous and a search for a “feminine writing” and “women’s language.” (By the way, I highly recomment Cixous. I have not delved much into Irigaray, but to me her work seems very much grounded in some rather complicated Freudian and psychoanalytic theory. Cixous is lively and quite readable.) Cameron also raises the other side of the debate, citing Elaine Showalter’s position that the issue for women is not so much a male-based “prisonhouse of language” (props to Jameson) but the very fact of access and entitlement for women to speak. The issue is not the inadequacy of language, or as Judith Butler would point to, the way in which language performs, enacts, speaks into being our condition (from the moment the declaration is made, “It’s a girl” Butler tells us, a whole universe of implications is set in motion.). Others reject an essentialist strain that says that women need different language than men to express their lives, their realities, their psyches, their thoughts, etc.
To me the core issue here is that all marginalized, disempowered people, need access to a language of imagination. Not a replacement language per se, but a paralanguage, a language that works, functions on a completely different level than the ordinary, the quotidian, the banal, the mundane, and (consequently) the hegemonic uses of language. The language as it is now practiced, even if it is not inherently structured to protect and maintain power, it has certainly been subverted to that use, propagated in contemporary life, by the constant onslaught of mainstream media—advertising, news, the normative values promoted by almost all television programming and many movies (look at the glorification of the police not only through shows like Cops, but through shows like CSI that glamorize police work, or the nuclear-family centered values of most sitcoms, etc.). In insidious ways we are constantly being told what to believe, what to buy, how to act, how to be moral, how to be patriotic, how to look a certain way, how to fit in and belong in American society, etc. etc. How is one to rethink the world, remake the world, the government, the neighborhood, the culture, the communities we come from and live in, our own very daily existence, among the onslaught of images that perpetuate someone else’s vision and serve up to us only the world as we already (think) we know it?
Resistance is possible through the remaking of language, of finding new, creative, imaginative linguistic practices to sustain us, to help us move toward our visions, to help us have visions we never even thought possible. I am talking here about a language that speaks outside of the dominant discourse, whether racialized, patriarchal, class-based, etc., an un-discourses or non-discourse, a paradiscourse, that brings with it the chance to step outside, run alongside, that does not attempt to use the tools of power that already exist, but to forge new tools that could create new structures, new edifices not previously imagined. The techne, the tool, in many ways proscribes what can be built. We know that with new technology new ways of thinking emerge. So why would we not want new mental and imaginative linguistic tools of our own? As Sol Lewitt says, rational thoughts repeat rational thoughts. The way we think perpetuates itself, we continue to think only in the ways we’ve always thought. I’m not looking then for a feminine language per se, except insofar as it might offer a resistive language, a paralanguage that we can frolic in and search for something unknown, a Dada language a non-sense that leads to sense a zaum a de-formed formalism that will birth new forms.
(To be continued . . . .)
Monday, March 18, 2013
The Function of Poetry as Painting et al
We now take a break from my accursed novel to bring you the following reflection upon poetry:
Once upon a time poetry was pretty much the only literary medium. All theatre was written in poetic forms, there were no novels or journalism, etc. There was only poetry. In those days, it was important for you poetry to say things, to speak truth, whether literally or poetically through image. Over the centuries, new forms have opened up--prose in the form of fiction and non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama. So with all forms and genres, we have to continually ask ourselves, what is the function of the genre we are writing in at this time.
I believe that poetry, more than any other written form, has the power to open up the imagination to altogether new realities that we could not have otherwise imagined and in my mind, the best way to do so is by experimenting with language, scrambling reason and reading, and yes, to be a literary form of visual art.
Bryon Gysin has said that poetry is 50 years behind painting. Poetry can and should embrace the image in all forms by being abstract in meaning and form as well as by presenting us with literal and literary pictures of things.
I tell the students in my poetry class that things like metaphor and simile exist to explain what we do not know in terms of what we do know. With medical students, I use the metaphorical example of "the human body is like a machine . . ." because that is a simile that they have heard so much they don't even think of it as a poetic sentence. All of those things that are not tangible -- love, freedom, justice -- must be represented in terms of something that we do know and can visualize.
In the same way, we can strive towards things -- emotions, conditions (like freedom), even social structures -- without having them all thought out, but by describing them to people in terms both strange and knowable, that will make readers want them too. Poetry, rather than being proscriptive, can encourage people to desire something and then think for themselves about what that might look like.
Once upon a time poetry was pretty much the only literary medium. All theatre was written in poetic forms, there were no novels or journalism, etc. There was only poetry. In those days, it was important for you poetry to say things, to speak truth, whether literally or poetically through image. Over the centuries, new forms have opened up--prose in the form of fiction and non-fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama. So with all forms and genres, we have to continually ask ourselves, what is the function of the genre we are writing in at this time.
I believe that poetry, more than any other written form, has the power to open up the imagination to altogether new realities that we could not have otherwise imagined and in my mind, the best way to do so is by experimenting with language, scrambling reason and reading, and yes, to be a literary form of visual art.
Bryon Gysin has said that poetry is 50 years behind painting. Poetry can and should embrace the image in all forms by being abstract in meaning and form as well as by presenting us with literal and literary pictures of things.
I tell the students in my poetry class that things like metaphor and simile exist to explain what we do not know in terms of what we do know. With medical students, I use the metaphorical example of "the human body is like a machine . . ." because that is a simile that they have heard so much they don't even think of it as a poetic sentence. All of those things that are not tangible -- love, freedom, justice -- must be represented in terms of something that we do know and can visualize.
In the same way, we can strive towards things -- emotions, conditions (like freedom), even social structures -- without having them all thought out, but by describing them to people in terms both strange and knowable, that will make readers want them too. Poetry, rather than being proscriptive, can encourage people to desire something and then think for themselves about what that might look like.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Chapter 7 of My Accursed Novel
CHAPTER: Mo gets on the bus, after stepping out of a hostel
The day was full of promise. It was the first warm day of the winter season. Not just one of those December days that are warmer than they should be, but a day that carried with it the smell and promise of spring. It was episodes like these, the hint of what was around the corner, that had made her come to love living in the Midwest. It was your reward for surviving the winter. It was the kind of day that made you carelessly run outside with no coat on, even though you knew that tomorrow you would suffer with a sore throat and a red stuffy nose. It didn't matter. It was a small price to pay for hope. That, to her, was what the seasons were all about. Hope. Keeping a promise. Cycles that would move on and change. Seasons allowed no complacency. You had to enjoy them while you could.
No matter how beautiful the spring day, with the sun warming the top of your head and the smell of lilacs in the air, and the soft, green grass between your toes on those first few days you dared to go barefoot again, it would soon turn into summer. The grass would turn brown in the 100 degree temperatures and sweat would run down your back as if you were standing, fully clothed, in a shower. Sometimes the nights were so hot, you would toss and turn for hours trying to get cool enough to sleep. But at least the crickets would sing to you while you lie awake staring out the window. And those starry nights, when you could look out into the universe and see everything! Who would want to sleep anyway? Even that, too, would soon give way to the crisp crackling of colorful autumn leaves beneath your feet and the comfort of cool evenings warmed by blankets and bonfires. Childhood memories of leaping into a high pile of leaves returned each time she passed a sour-faced boy or older man, taking the rake to his yard as if it were a great chore that mother nature had assigned. It was virtually impossible for autumn to come and go without her remembering high school football games and homecoming festivities, bundled up under blankets in the stadium. And even though high school had not by any means been a highlight of her life, these were good memories that warmed her and made her eager to greet the fall. Even that first snowfall of winter was a delight. She was still not too old to go outside and make snow angels on that first big blizzard.
While others griped and complained when too much snow make them housebound, or caused them to miss work, she still remembered the childish delight of a snowday. She never passed up an opportunity to sit at the window with a cup of cocoa, or to go outside and dance while the snowflakes fell. And she loved those endless "white nights" where the sky was lit up from the impending snow clouds, and you could walk outside even if the street lights were not on, and feel as if you were walking in the dawn. And now, even after the harshest days of winter, with its ice storms and cold winds that made you turn your head away as if you had just been slapped in the face, she was delighted with the promise of the season. Delighted that old man winter had let his fair daughter come out and play for the day. Many of Maureen's friends had moved south or west after graduation, and whenever they called, they made it a point to ask what the temperature was there, and to remind her that there had been a cold spell--75 degrees--the other day. She laughed good-naturedly and reminded them that she did not mind the cold weather. That soon enough, it would be so hot, she would miss the snowy days and the ice storms. Only once, when the wind chill fell to 25 below did she envy them.
And for her faithfulness, she was now rewarded with a glimpse of spring.
The day was full of promise. It was the first warm day of the winter season. Not just one of those December days that are warmer than they should be, but a day that carried with it the smell and promise of spring. It was episodes like these, the hint of what was around the corner, that had made her come to love living in the Midwest. It was your reward for surviving the winter. It was the kind of day that made you carelessly run outside with no coat on, even though you knew that tomorrow you would suffer with a sore throat and a red stuffy nose. It didn't matter. It was a small price to pay for hope. That, to her, was what the seasons were all about. Hope. Keeping a promise. Cycles that would move on and change. Seasons allowed no complacency. You had to enjoy them while you could.
No matter how beautiful the spring day, with the sun warming the top of your head and the smell of lilacs in the air, and the soft, green grass between your toes on those first few days you dared to go barefoot again, it would soon turn into summer. The grass would turn brown in the 100 degree temperatures and sweat would run down your back as if you were standing, fully clothed, in a shower. Sometimes the nights were so hot, you would toss and turn for hours trying to get cool enough to sleep. But at least the crickets would sing to you while you lie awake staring out the window. And those starry nights, when you could look out into the universe and see everything! Who would want to sleep anyway? Even that, too, would soon give way to the crisp crackling of colorful autumn leaves beneath your feet and the comfort of cool evenings warmed by blankets and bonfires. Childhood memories of leaping into a high pile of leaves returned each time she passed a sour-faced boy or older man, taking the rake to his yard as if it were a great chore that mother nature had assigned. It was virtually impossible for autumn to come and go without her remembering high school football games and homecoming festivities, bundled up under blankets in the stadium. And even though high school had not by any means been a highlight of her life, these were good memories that warmed her and made her eager to greet the fall. Even that first snowfall of winter was a delight. She was still not too old to go outside and make snow angels on that first big blizzard.
While others griped and complained when too much snow make them housebound, or caused them to miss work, she still remembered the childish delight of a snowday. She never passed up an opportunity to sit at the window with a cup of cocoa, or to go outside and dance while the snowflakes fell. And she loved those endless "white nights" where the sky was lit up from the impending snow clouds, and you could walk outside even if the street lights were not on, and feel as if you were walking in the dawn. And now, even after the harshest days of winter, with its ice storms and cold winds that made you turn your head away as if you had just been slapped in the face, she was delighted with the promise of the season. Delighted that old man winter had let his fair daughter come out and play for the day. Many of Maureen's friends had moved south or west after graduation, and whenever they called, they made it a point to ask what the temperature was there, and to remind her that there had been a cold spell--75 degrees--the other day. She laughed good-naturedly and reminded them that she did not mind the cold weather. That soon enough, it would be so hot, she would miss the snowy days and the ice storms. Only once, when the wind chill fell to 25 below did she envy them.
And for her faithfulness, she was now rewarded with a glimpse of spring.
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Chapter 6 of My Accursed Novel
First phone conversation with her parents:
“Clark has forwarded your mail to us.”
“Oh?” Maureen’s stomach knotted. Only gone a few weeks and he’s already clearing her out of his life.
“I guess he thought we’d make sure everything got to you. You know, that the bills got paid and everything.”
But if he loved me, if we were really a “we”, wouldn’t he keep paying our bills, she thought?
“He kept your clothes and books and things . . . for now, he said. You know, honey, I was never . . . well, I never approved of this thing with Clark. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s fifteen years older than you.”
“Twelve. And is there a point to this, Dad?”
“Well, still, don’t you think you owe him the decency . . . You should really call him, honey. He’s very upset. It sounds like you haven’t called or spoken to him at all. If you want to have a relationship with someone his age, you need to act like more of an adult.”
“I’ll drop him a card. I’m not ready to talk to anyone else just yet.”
“Is there anything we should know about it? He didn’t beat you up or anything, did he?”
“No . . . no. It’s not that.” Maureen became distracted picturing Clark puttering around the house, watching the door, running for the phone. Tears slipped from her eyes. “I’m just not ready to be found yet. Tell him I love him.”
“I’m not telling him that. You tell him.”
“I love you, too.” She hung up the phone and hoisted her backpack higher onto ther shoulder, stumbling down the sidewalk and back to the greyhound station. Her pass expired tomorrow. She would have to pick a far off destination, a 2 or 3 day trip to somewhere she could settle and work for a while to scare up a few bucks for the next leg of the trip.
“Clark has forwarded your mail to us.”
“Oh?” Maureen’s stomach knotted. Only gone a few weeks and he’s already clearing her out of his life.
“I guess he thought we’d make sure everything got to you. You know, that the bills got paid and everything.”
But if he loved me, if we were really a “we”, wouldn’t he keep paying our bills, she thought?
“He kept your clothes and books and things . . . for now, he said. You know, honey, I was never . . . well, I never approved of this thing with Clark. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s fifteen years older than you.”
“Twelve. And is there a point to this, Dad?”
“Well, still, don’t you think you owe him the decency . . . You should really call him, honey. He’s very upset. It sounds like you haven’t called or spoken to him at all. If you want to have a relationship with someone his age, you need to act like more of an adult.”
“I’ll drop him a card. I’m not ready to talk to anyone else just yet.”
“Is there anything we should know about it? He didn’t beat you up or anything, did he?”
“No . . . no. It’s not that.” Maureen became distracted picturing Clark puttering around the house, watching the door, running for the phone. Tears slipped from her eyes. “I’m just not ready to be found yet. Tell him I love him.”
“I’m not telling him that. You tell him.”
“I love you, too.” She hung up the phone and hoisted her backpack higher onto ther shoulder, stumbling down the sidewalk and back to the greyhound station. Her pass expired tomorrow. She would have to pick a far off destination, a 2 or 3 day trip to somewhere she could settle and work for a while to scare up a few bucks for the next leg of the trip.
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Chapter 5 of My Accursed Novel
CHAPTER: IOWA
It had only been a two months since he had seen Maureen, but to Clark it felt much longer. It was almost as if she had never been there at all, that she had been an apparition, or a character from a movie. Perhaps he had fallen asleep and dreamed all these situations and Maureen had never really existed at all, except as a specter, a composite of all the girls he had dated in college.
Couples were still difficult. Maureen felt guilty more than lonely. Maybe it was childish of her to have run off like that. She had a difficult time justifying it rationally, even though she knew it was what she had to do. It probably seemed like another one of her melodramatic scenes to Clark, but to Maureen, it was the least melodramatic thing she could do. She couldn’t continue the fighting. It wasn’t fair to Clark, and she didn’t feel she had the strength for it anymore. Surely he knew she just needed to get away, “clear her head.” Old hippie that he was, surely he understood. Besides, Clark was settled. Once Maureen felt ready, she knew she could go home and explain it all to him. They could work it out, if they wanted to.
West of Burlington Iowa and south of Des Moines is a Fairfield, a small town of about 10,000, home to the Maharishi International University,with its Golden Domes of Enlightenment, a name which could not help but inspire giggles from Maureen every time she heard it, and in which yogic flying was taught as part of the TM curriculum.
Fairfield sounds like a relatively unassuming little midwest town, full of Main Streets and Court Streets and Broadway of course. Like many farming communities, its economy struggled throughout the 1980s. By the early 90s, if not sooner, it was a hotbed of new age activities, full of vegetarian restaurants and proliferation of Ayur-Vedic clinics. In the 1990s, John Hagelin of the Natural Law Party, a new age quantum physicist began what would become a perpetual run for US President, like Ralph Nader the celebrity consumer advaocate for the Greens and Gus Hall, the head of the American Communist Party who ran for president 4 times and served two presidential-sized terms in prison for being accused of advocating violent overthrow of the government.
The newspaper of Maharishi International University is called The Source and can be found distributed for free among the more liberal pockets and communities of Iowa and so as Maureen was passing through the Great Corn State she picked up a copy of The Source and read through it in spare moments on the bus. Not that there was much reading to be done there, as she found that she was developing a form of travel narcolepsy. Despite all attempts to pull her gaze from the window and into a book, she stared out at the road, the trees, the passing fields. No matter how boring they seemed to her, she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Truckers refer to “white line fever”, the sort of daze from driving miles and hours and days and staring at that white line. Within a 15 minutes of moving on the bus, Maureen seemed to fall asleep anymore, book in hand, notebook or pencil buried down into the seat behind her, next to her, or beneath her.
And so she hurtled sleepily across Iowa, counting corn ears like sheep and dozing off fitfully, never fully asleep but not able to stay awake. When the bus stopped in Burlington, Maureen heard a distinctly un-midwestern sounding voice. “Is this seat taken, Miss?”
It had become Mo’s custom to fake sleep as long as possibly, until every other seat on the bus but the one beside her was taken. She was always ready with her excuse if that failed and someone began tugging on her leg, prepared to tell them that she was traveling cross country, was exhausted, and really need to stretch out. But the sound of the voice coming from the aisle, Indian sounding, of course, caused her to bolt up to see who was asking her. Thus caught, she eyed the tallish man with the robes and turban, an extra from Gandhi or perhaps a Beatles video, tucked her feet in front of her and sat up, leaning against the window so as to indicatethat she was still asleep and not really feeling chatty.
Gradually the man next to her, a Yogi of some sort, she assumed, drew her out with small talk. Staccato at first--short quick statements that invited but did not demand a reply. Isn’t the bus crowded today? Is she a college student? From Iowa? What school did she go to. Eventually, it worked and Maureen decided to be sociable. It wasn’t every day you got to talk to a Yogi riding a bus through a run down industrial railroading town in Iowa. She mentioned that she had seen and had been trying to read The Source and asked if he was with the Maharisihi University, which he was. He began talking to her about Transcendental Meditation and she smiled, thinking how ‘60s and wondering what Clark would make of all this. He talked about enlightenment and bliss, the importance of creating harmony. Despite her cynicism, she was entralled by his conversation. He was so unselfconscious and really believe all of these things, unlike most of her friends--and Clark’s--who talked about it, but didn’t really seem to get it. Most of the time it just seemed like a good excuse for them to get stoned so they could “transcend” the world. The Yogi explained that substance abuse was a poor substitute for TM and that the two should not intermingled.
The Yogi, whose name Maureen never asked, talked to her about her social activism,and how important it was to maintain a spiritual balance, lest her work become bland and obligatory, which would be contrary to the kind of world she wanted to create. She nodded enthusiastically, watching his face intently, and began to notice his hand on her thigh. She froze, still looking him in the eyes, smiling, and wondering what to do. She swore she heard Sexy Sadie throughout the bus and looked around several times, but no one else seemed to hear any music nor be mouthing anything going with the words and music in her head. She just sat there while this man in white robes kneaded her thigh and talked about creating harmony and positive visualization and something about using your whole brain and not having a mind/body rift. After a few minutes, the driver called that Des Moines would be coming up soon. This was all getting too weird and so she decided Des Moines would be as good a place as any to get off the bus.
Before she left, he wrote out her name in Hindi and blessed a set of beads,which he gave to her. Getting off the bus, she would have to scoot past him, and then stretch out in front of him to get her bag from the upper compartment, both of which made her self conscious. His hands did in fact end up on her ass as she squeezed past him, ostensibly trying to help her by, yet she was suspicious. Once off the bus, she dragged her stuff into the dinky little bus station of Des Moines, probably a good mile or more from the heart of downtown, and crammed it into a locker. It was 5:15 already and she thought she’d go get some food and see what her next bus option was. She pulled the beads out of the pouch on her backpack and wrapped them around her fingers sort of like a rosary and slammed the locker shut, pulling the red key out and putting it into her pocket. She went up to the attendant at the ticket window and asked when the next bus would be by into downtown.
“No more buses today. Buses stop running at 5:00.”
“5:00! I thought this was the capitol of Iowa.”
“Yep. Everyone works for the government down here. Goes home at 4:30 I guess.”
“Shit.” Maureen decided to conserve her cab fare for coming back after dark. This neighborhood, on Keo Way, whatever the hell that was, didn’t look too inviting. Despite being able to clearly see and walk to downtown from there, it felt strangely isolated, not at all like she had just stepped off into the largest city in the state, the capitol, for cyring out loud. She stuck her beaded hands in her pockets, looked around to see who might follow her, and headed out the door, for the bright lights of Des Moines.
It had only been a two months since he had seen Maureen, but to Clark it felt much longer. It was almost as if she had never been there at all, that she had been an apparition, or a character from a movie. Perhaps he had fallen asleep and dreamed all these situations and Maureen had never really existed at all, except as a specter, a composite of all the girls he had dated in college.
Couples were still difficult. Maureen felt guilty more than lonely. Maybe it was childish of her to have run off like that. She had a difficult time justifying it rationally, even though she knew it was what she had to do. It probably seemed like another one of her melodramatic scenes to Clark, but to Maureen, it was the least melodramatic thing she could do. She couldn’t continue the fighting. It wasn’t fair to Clark, and she didn’t feel she had the strength for it anymore. Surely he knew she just needed to get away, “clear her head.” Old hippie that he was, surely he understood. Besides, Clark was settled. Once Maureen felt ready, she knew she could go home and explain it all to him. They could work it out, if they wanted to.
West of Burlington Iowa and south of Des Moines is a Fairfield, a small town of about 10,000, home to the Maharishi International University,with its Golden Domes of Enlightenment, a name which could not help but inspire giggles from Maureen every time she heard it, and in which yogic flying was taught as part of the TM curriculum.
Fairfield sounds like a relatively unassuming little midwest town, full of Main Streets and Court Streets and Broadway of course. Like many farming communities, its economy struggled throughout the 1980s. By the early 90s, if not sooner, it was a hotbed of new age activities, full of vegetarian restaurants and proliferation of Ayur-Vedic clinics. In the 1990s, John Hagelin of the Natural Law Party, a new age quantum physicist began what would become a perpetual run for US President, like Ralph Nader the celebrity consumer advaocate for the Greens and Gus Hall, the head of the American Communist Party who ran for president 4 times and served two presidential-sized terms in prison for being accused of advocating violent overthrow of the government.
The newspaper of Maharishi International University is called The Source and can be found distributed for free among the more liberal pockets and communities of Iowa and so as Maureen was passing through the Great Corn State she picked up a copy of The Source and read through it in spare moments on the bus. Not that there was much reading to be done there, as she found that she was developing a form of travel narcolepsy. Despite all attempts to pull her gaze from the window and into a book, she stared out at the road, the trees, the passing fields. No matter how boring they seemed to her, she couldn’t tear her eyes away. Truckers refer to “white line fever”, the sort of daze from driving miles and hours and days and staring at that white line. Within a 15 minutes of moving on the bus, Maureen seemed to fall asleep anymore, book in hand, notebook or pencil buried down into the seat behind her, next to her, or beneath her.
And so she hurtled sleepily across Iowa, counting corn ears like sheep and dozing off fitfully, never fully asleep but not able to stay awake. When the bus stopped in Burlington, Maureen heard a distinctly un-midwestern sounding voice. “Is this seat taken, Miss?”
It had become Mo’s custom to fake sleep as long as possibly, until every other seat on the bus but the one beside her was taken. She was always ready with her excuse if that failed and someone began tugging on her leg, prepared to tell them that she was traveling cross country, was exhausted, and really need to stretch out. But the sound of the voice coming from the aisle, Indian sounding, of course, caused her to bolt up to see who was asking her. Thus caught, she eyed the tallish man with the robes and turban, an extra from Gandhi or perhaps a Beatles video, tucked her feet in front of her and sat up, leaning against the window so as to indicatethat she was still asleep and not really feeling chatty.
Gradually the man next to her, a Yogi of some sort, she assumed, drew her out with small talk. Staccato at first--short quick statements that invited but did not demand a reply. Isn’t the bus crowded today? Is she a college student? From Iowa? What school did she go to. Eventually, it worked and Maureen decided to be sociable. It wasn’t every day you got to talk to a Yogi riding a bus through a run down industrial railroading town in Iowa. She mentioned that she had seen and had been trying to read The Source and asked if he was with the Maharisihi University, which he was. He began talking to her about Transcendental Meditation and she smiled, thinking how ‘60s and wondering what Clark would make of all this. He talked about enlightenment and bliss, the importance of creating harmony. Despite her cynicism, she was entralled by his conversation. He was so unselfconscious and really believe all of these things, unlike most of her friends--and Clark’s--who talked about it, but didn’t really seem to get it. Most of the time it just seemed like a good excuse for them to get stoned so they could “transcend” the world. The Yogi explained that substance abuse was a poor substitute for TM and that the two should not intermingled.
The Yogi, whose name Maureen never asked, talked to her about her social activism,and how important it was to maintain a spiritual balance, lest her work become bland and obligatory, which would be contrary to the kind of world she wanted to create. She nodded enthusiastically, watching his face intently, and began to notice his hand on her thigh. She froze, still looking him in the eyes, smiling, and wondering what to do. She swore she heard Sexy Sadie throughout the bus and looked around several times, but no one else seemed to hear any music nor be mouthing anything going with the words and music in her head. She just sat there while this man in white robes kneaded her thigh and talked about creating harmony and positive visualization and something about using your whole brain and not having a mind/body rift. After a few minutes, the driver called that Des Moines would be coming up soon. This was all getting too weird and so she decided Des Moines would be as good a place as any to get off the bus.
Before she left, he wrote out her name in Hindi and blessed a set of beads,which he gave to her. Getting off the bus, she would have to scoot past him, and then stretch out in front of him to get her bag from the upper compartment, both of which made her self conscious. His hands did in fact end up on her ass as she squeezed past him, ostensibly trying to help her by, yet she was suspicious. Once off the bus, she dragged her stuff into the dinky little bus station of Des Moines, probably a good mile or more from the heart of downtown, and crammed it into a locker. It was 5:15 already and she thought she’d go get some food and see what her next bus option was. She pulled the beads out of the pouch on her backpack and wrapped them around her fingers sort of like a rosary and slammed the locker shut, pulling the red key out and putting it into her pocket. She went up to the attendant at the ticket window and asked when the next bus would be by into downtown.
“No more buses today. Buses stop running at 5:00.”
“5:00! I thought this was the capitol of Iowa.”
“Yep. Everyone works for the government down here. Goes home at 4:30 I guess.”
“Shit.” Maureen decided to conserve her cab fare for coming back after dark. This neighborhood, on Keo Way, whatever the hell that was, didn’t look too inviting. Despite being able to clearly see and walk to downtown from there, it felt strangely isolated, not at all like she had just stepped off into the largest city in the state, the capitol, for cyring out loud. She stuck her beaded hands in her pockets, looked around to see who might follow her, and headed out the door, for the bright lights of Des Moines.
Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Chapter 4 of My Accursed Novel
CHAPTER: SABBATICAL
At thirty-seven, Clark was finally starting to receive recognition for his work within the department. He felt the pressure to keep up this momentum. Yet, his work was becoming less engaging. He had always enjoyed academic research. Otherwise, he would not have opted for the university. Maureen was wrong to accuse him of hiding behind academia. Writing and doing research was, for him, a way to learn continuously, to connect his life to the past and dream about visions of the future. But now it was work . . . career advancement. Fifteen years ago he had railed against his own smug self-serving professors who had no life in them, the ones who were there putting in their time, publishing for prestige, not because, in his opinion, they had anything to say. Career advancement was not something Clark ever thought he would concern himself with. That was for men with two-syllable names like Michael. Or Robert. Or Charles, who was occasionally Charlie, but never Chuck. Sandy blonde-haired men named Michael who wore turtlenecks and blazers and went to faculty dinners to schmooze and be seen. Burnt out intellectuals with a home on the lake and an office no student was ever invited into. It was not for political radicals and revolutionaries who taught classes on anarchy and social upheaval in the twentieth century. Not for PhD's who wrote about the necessity of dissent in society and had their TAs over for beers on the weekend.
But lately Clark had picked up a new vocabulary. Not one that indicted the intellectual hegemony at the University. Not one that challenged the increasing conservatism on his campus. One of conciliation and peaceful coexistence, as the cold warriors had once agreed to. He knew these people didn't understand what he devoted his life to. It was just a cute childish political theory that he was clinging to for career survival. the Soviet Union had disbanded, socialism was dead. Liberalism as they understood it was dead. The more he started to "move up" within the department, as one of the few remaining "radicals" teaching political science, the more he proved them right.
Maybe it was the final nail in the coffin of the Left. Conservatism's grip was so tight, they could indulge the remaining irrelevant leftists on the faculty. Rush Limbaugh had once said that if he were running the country, it would mean that liberalism had completely died out, but he would want to keep a couple of liberals around in the universities to remind people that they once existed. On his more cynical days, Clark suspected that he fit that bill.
"Morning Clark. Will we see you at the party tonight?"
"Hi, Harry. What party?"
"Remember? Book reception? The Rise of Conservatism? We will see you there, won't we? We're counting on you to provide some lively debate. A little 'point-counterpoint'."
"Oh, yeah. Uh, look, Harry, some things have come up at the last minute. I'll try to make it, but don't be offended if I don't, o.k.?" Clark reached into his office mailbox and looked a few envelopes, trying not to look at the insulted stare of his colleague. He was in no mood today to provide that kind of academic gladiator entertainment. "I'm really sorry, Harry. I'd like to explain it to you, but I've got to get to class. You know how they are. If I'm not there, they'll use it as another excuse to duck out."
"Look, I know you're upset about Maureen. But Clark, you have responsibilities here. You can't just drop everything because you have a broken heart." Clark looked incredulous. "Besides," Harry squirmed, making a tactical shift, "it'll do you some good to get out and be among friends."
"Friends," Clark muttered absently. "Yeah, probably. Look I'll do what I can, but I can't make any promises. I really have to go now."
Clark decided to take some time off that summer for research. He needed to immerse himself in his subject for a while -- just for the sake of the project. He wanted to see if he could get back some of his enthusiasm. He walked into Harry's office with great deliberateness and stood over the desk, trying to convey to Harry the urgency of the projected.
"Well, you know we 're really counting on you," Harry had told Clark when he first heard his request. "A lot of other people already have their vacations and their own study projects planned," Harry said, leaning forward over his desk. Clark was fond of Harry, despite the fact that Harry was a career academic. Maybe even because of that. If Clark saw a younger version of himself in Maureen, as she had contended, he sometimes wondered if Harry represented his future.
Harry had brought Clark into the department. He hired Clark initially as a part-time instructor while Clark finished his dissertation. He had taken a particular interest in Clark's career and had supported him through his tenure application. Without Harry, Clark's career might have been very different. Clark appreciated this fact. But moreover, like everyone else in the department, Clark genuinely liked Harry.
"What's the matter, Clark? You haven't really been with us all semester. Since . . . well, Maureen left town, you haven't been coming to receptions, or seminars, or departmental meetings. Are you nursing your wounds, or is there something else I should know about?"
"No, I think it's just a little burnout. Have you looked at my request for a sabbatical this summer? I really need it."
"I have seen it but it's very short notice. A lot of other people have already put in for the summer off."
"They're just intro classes, Harry. Any Graduate Assistant could handle them. I may not be able to do this much longer if I don't get a break from it. Come on Harry, be a sport."Clark paused and leaned forward. “Why am I here, Harry? Because I’m brilliant? Because I provide a counterpoint to the rest of the staff?”
“Now you sound like Maureen.”
“What’s so wrong with that? Because she is occasionally right, does that make me her mouthpiece, Harry? I heard some kids . . . some students walking down the hall complaining about how much money they pay to go here and they can’t even get their professor’s attention. Is that why we’re here? To take their money, or the state’s money, so we can study and do research as if we’re the students?”
“What’s gotten into you, Clark? You know we’re a research university, not just an overgrown high school. What we do when we’re not in the classroom is just as important as when we are. What’s the matter with you?”
“I need time off. I’m no good to those kids right now. What the hell am I doing here, anyway? Nothing I do matters, Harry. Nothing.”
Clark slumped into the chair and stared at Harry.
"Let me see what I can do But if I approve this, you owe me, Clark. When you come back in September, you'd better sparkle."
On June 3rd, Clark gathered together his last armful of mail and walked out of the Arts and Sciences building. The warm air hit his face and called for him to follow it. There was even a scent in the air that brought back memories. He remembered his senior year, exams over, the week leading up to receiving his sheepskin in the dark hot nylon cap & gown. Then, a summer off to do whatever he pleased before facing the responsibilities of adulthood. He walked down the cement steps of the social sciences building and like that 22 year-old, threw his papers across the parking lot. They skipped across pavement and cars like stones over water. He was going to do all of the things he couldn't do 16 years ago.
That night, Clark worked furiously on his research which he had begun during the past semester. The role of intellectuals and artists as mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War, something he had been fascinated with for years. The intellectuals and artists, sleeves rolled up, fighting side by side against an evil enemy, in defense of their ideals. It made his own life seem squeamishly safe and secure. Tonight he felt consumed in his work. He wrote free form for hours, without referring back to sources or meticulously writing down documentation, as he had come to do for all of his "scholarly" articles. He would go back later and fill all that in. Now, he was writing with a passion for the subject, reinventing and conceiving the things he had been studying for years.
Maybe this summer he would spend more time on marches and protests and activities that the department had discouraged. An arrest or an incident, Harry was afraid, would jeopardize the reputation of the department and possibly endanger endowments and donations to the department from successful alumni. But he was on his own time, now, and he didn't have to worry about such things. He thought again of Maureen. She would be proud of his resolve. She would have a million different suggestions of things he could do. She had always made it her job to know about as many different groups and activities as possible, like a clearinghouse for all the campus activists and radicals. She would definitely have pointed him toward some of her own pet projects.
Clark sat up in his bed. there were papers beside him, like a sleeping lover passed out after a night's passion. Half open books had fallen to the floor. He rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 8:37a.m. He flipped the covers off and shuffled to the bathroom. He knew it would no longer be enough just to write about his fantasies or to act them out. For 15 years he had read about men and women of action, while he merely talked about it. While he told others about their exploits. He had infiltrated the system, as he once put it. But had he brought anyone else in there? Had he really changed anything, they way he said he would?
All of the subtle confrontations he'd had over the years were starting to come back to him. And he wasn't feel good-natured about them this time. He was angry at them and angry at himself for seeing it as just good natured debate. The resident radical. He used to revel in the notoriety. Now he was just suspicious of his reputation. He was sure they all saw him as an old hippie, someone whose ideals were cute at one time, but that obviously had not held up in the real world. If they had, he would be the head of the department now, and the world they taught their students about would be a very different one. They wouldn't be discussing the Gulf War or the notion that dissent was bad for morale. That distasteful theory of General Westmoreland's, actually blaming the dragging out of the Viet Nam war on the protesters and their effect on troop morale, had become an accepted part of the country's attitude toward war. If the hippies and the peace protesters had accomplished anything at all, it would be this theory, that was seen as an anachronism. Not the peace movement itself.
He remembered Maureen coming in, shaking but exhilarated, throwing her banner down on the floor and slamming her body into a chair at the kitchen table to begin writing a letter to the editor. "They almost beat the shit out of us. Three women. The fuckers."
"What? Are you ok?"
"Yeah. We showed up at their little 'Support the Troops' rally."
"Maureen!"
"Yeah, well, we almost chickened out. We sat at McDonald's and talked about it. It was scary. There were at least 50 people there. But we decided to tough it out." She started to laugh as the absurd memories came to the surface. "They were really friendly to us at first. Then we unrolled our banner and eventually someone stepped off the curb to read it and all hell broke loose."
"What did it say?"
"Same things as theirs, only a little different. Support the Troops. Bring them home alive."
Clark put his arms around Maureen who was scratching out a letter to the editor, pausing periodically to give him the details of the day. After someone had noticed the content of their banner, which was draped over an American flag, things got very heated. The three women--Maureen, her friend Cindy, slightly younger, 19 and barely 5 feet tall, and Donna, a woman slightly older than Clark, an original Sixties Radical they knew from the peace coalition--vainly tried to discuss their feelings with the pro-war protesters. Before they knew it, the three women were surrounded by a crowd. Donna was wrapped up, mummified in the flag, and the crowd was becoming increasingly angry and hostile. People were spitting on them and contesting their right to be associating an American flag with their banner. "That could be me," one young woman shouted angrily. "All the more reason," Maureen told Clark, "that you'd think she'd want this stupid thing stopped. Is this what equality brings us? To be equally stupid in our blind patriotism. Is this what I've been marching with the feminists for?"
"Baby steps." Clark rubbed Maureen's shoulders. They were tight like rubber bands stretched to the breaking point. She sat back in her chair for a moment and relaxed her back. Then, the tension broken, she snapped back forward to the paper in front of her. Then she got up and started pacing.
"Fuck that. Anyway we thought for sure these rednecks were going to beat us up. And the whole time, there was some guy there with a camera on us. Just us. I don't know. It wasn't a media camera. Police? FBI? Thank God someone stepped in and calmed it down a little bit. I don't even think about what could have happened. And then . . ." Maureen whipped around, pointing to Clark, "do you think the cops are any help? We've been assaulted. Assaulted. Three women and a mob of mostly men, and do you think they'll let us file a complaint? Hell no. We went back to Donna's house for a while and called the media to see if we could get some photos to corroborate. But, no, just as bad as the cops."
The last of a dying breed. He sometimes thought he saw amused nods and smiles when he began talking about his field. After all, it wasn't serious politics, the way you could talk about the Russian Revolution, or the Bill of Rights. It was all theory and idealism. Even the Russian Revolution had fallen apart. The Left was just a charming idealist anachronism, it's danger dismantled like an obsolete missile, or a memento brick left over from the Berlin Wall. And how could he argue with that? If they had succeeded, Maureen would not have had to go through that. She wouldn't have been still fighting the same battles Clark and his friends, and Donna and her friends, had already fought in their youths.
Clark looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like every other aging hippie professor at the damn university. Shoulder-length auburn hair. Trimmed beard with just a little bit of conspicuous shagginess to it so as not to look too groomed. Jeans and worn tennies with a tan sportcoat to dress it up. He pulled a pair of scissors and his razor out of the drawer and took a deep breath. He cut his beard and his hair down as close as he could, as large chunks of hair began falling to the floor. As more and more of his bare head began to appear, he found himself hoping that his skull was not too oddly-shaped, as he would have to live with this for quite some time. The razor buzzed and his skin tingled, shaving his face closer and touching up his nearly bald scalp.
Then he walked to the kitchen in his underwear, foraging for food he wouldn't have to prepare. He felt a restlessness that he didn't know how to cope with it. A call to action, but with nothing to be done. he needed to get out of the house. Do something different. Whatever that was. He gave up on any foraging to be accomplished in the kitchen. He returned to the bedroom, pulling on the pants and t-shirt he had left huddled in a pile a few hours earlier. He grabbed a backpack and some notebooks and headed out the door.
Down the street was a coffee shop. Clark had always meant to spend more time there, but never got around to it. He was not a neighborhood regular. Most of his coffee had come from the vending machine down the hall from his office. He walked toward the cafe now, stopping along the way to get a paper from a newsbox. He looked at the people around him. Many were street people who came in during the day to shake of the heat and have a place to sit for a little while, until the waitress kicked them out, anyway. Buoyed by his new life and his new resolve to do the right thing, he told the waitress, "Breakfast for everyone. I'm buying." It felt good. It fit with his new resolve about what he was going to become. Ironic that it was Maureen who had brought about this change in him and now she wasn't here to see it.
In his mind, it was always the fight that had ended it. The Last Straw Fight that so many couples have. Until then, everything seemed ok to him. Just a little creative tension. Romantically flawed, but the complemented each other. At least, he'd thought so. But maybe that was the root difference. Where he saw creative tension, intellectual differences among well-meaning people, she saw co-option. It still surprised him that she usually managed to maintain herself without coming across as too rigid or self-righteous. She challenged people to be more, without indicting them for what they already were.
Except, of course, for Clark. There were different standards for the people she was closest to. Of her brothers and sisters in arms she expected more. Purity, honesty. Anything else was too damaging to the work that had to be done. But for ordinary people, for the people she talked to on the street, like the ones in this coffee shop, she had compassion and kindness. She believed that they were on her side, but they just didn't know it.
"Listen to them on the bus. In the cafeteria. Are you that removed from everyone but your students?"
Clark had to admit, his students did not fill him with great hope. They were lazy. They were victims of television. They didn't do their work because they stayed out drinking all night.
"How is that different than not doing it because you took over the Dean's office and smoked pot all night."
"Oh come on. You can't be serious. It was very different. We believed in something. We weren't just numbing ourselves stupid."
"You were turning on, dropping out? Anyway, that's not all of us. And it's not the people out there. They hate the government. They want something different. They've just been programmed not to listen to us, because we're just 'radicals'. We don't need to educate them--we need to deprogram them."
Maureen believed in the proles, as they would have been called forty years ago. The ordinary people were not stupid, and in her mind, it was the radicals who were stupid for being so condescending. "Who wants to work with a bunch of people who think they're better than you? Who wants to live in a society that's run by a bunch of removed intellectuals who think you're stupid and lazy. How is that better than a bunch of corrupt businessmen who think you're stupid and lazy but at least sell you a tv or make a movie to take your mind off of it. They can't dance here, so they don't want our revolution."
Clark looked up to find a bill sitting on his table. He looked over at the waitress and smiled, turning over the slip of paper. $128.72. He pulled a credit card from his wallet and laid it on top of the bill, after writing in a $30 tip. Suddenly this picture seemed ridiculous. Patronizingly buying breakfast for the local down-and-out with his Gold Card. Very radical. Even this smallest action took no risk on his part. Fraud. Irrelevant. Dangerous. You're right, Maureen.
He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He began making two lists. Everything he owned and everything he felt he needed. Soon, a third column emerged, precipitated by the television and VCR. It was important to keep up, to use very possible avenue to educate oneself, even if it was easy to use them for frivolity and escape. Thus, the first items under the "unsure" column. He tried to be ruthless in his determinations. Car? There was a bus stop right in front of his house. The city had a good transit system. Many people managed just fine without a car.
Artwork? Everyone needs some aesthetics in their lives. Bread and Roses, as the activists would say. He tried to discriminate between the things he was attached to, things that meant something to him, from the ones he had for show to prove his "good taste". Art for company's sake. He listed every book, every piece of music, every stick of furniture he owned in this same way, winnowing out those things he felt strongest about from the things he owned because he thought he ought to.
He walked mentally through the house, picturing each room. A too big house for just him. Two stories. Two bedrooms. A den, extra half-bath, slightly winding stairs. he had bought it when he was brought onto the faculty full-time as a reward for "making it." When he met Maureen later, and she moved in, he was happy to have a nice home to offer her. It was a place they could grow into, with family and friends. There was room for him to work and for her to have her meetings. Plenty of space for files and posters and placards and brochures and fax machines. When she left, a few months now, he tried to fill the space up again, reminding himself that it was his home long before it had become their home. Was he now ruthlessly taking stock of his own life or was he trying to find an excuse to run from the empty space she had left behind? He added the house to the sheet of paper, crossed it out, and moved it to a different column five times before making his final decision.
He had become so intent in this activity that when he looked up, two hours and twenty minutes later, he was disoriented. Was he in the kitchen? The school snack bar? Faculty lounge? He was still in the coffee house, with a hot cup of coffee that had been silently refilled several times throughout the morning. His credit card was still lying on top of the bill at the corner of the table, but with the bill now marked. Thank you. J
"Want anything else? You've been pretty engrossed in that."
Clark smiled up at her. Thank you but no. He gather his things into the backpack, took one more sip of coffee, and left, sent on his way cheerfully by the other waitresses' goodbye and have a nice days.
At home, Clark pulled out his lists and began to pack up the things on his keep list. He went to the store three blocks over to get more boxes. He set aside several rooms for the things that didn't make the cut. He pulled out the phone book and began paging through the yellow pages. Abortion. . . Accounting . . . Arts . . . Attorneys . . . Auction . . . He wrote down a few numbers. It was Saturday evening and he didn't expect to get ahold of anyone. He wrote down some numbers and put the paper up on the refrigerator. Then he went to the stereo and pulled out some music, some anachronistic idealistic music and went upstairs to grab his books and his notes from the previous evening.
Clark rolled over and touched Maureen. They were walking on a plaza among dozens of other people. The sun was shining and the trees, planted among the cobblestone, gave off a comforting shade. Maureen giggled like she used to when they first met, when he said something particularly witty or sarcastic. She blushed the first time he talked about Helen Caldicott's notions of nuclear missiles as phallic symbols and unfortunate terms like Minuteman and hard and soft silos. She giggled that way now, and he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. He pulled her chin toward him to kiss her, putting his hand on her shoulder, and she stood up abruptly, dashing off into the crowd as if she were completely unaware of him.
Clark chased her up the steps and slants of the plaza, but she kept walking, quickly and with purpose, without looking back. She was not trying to taunt him or even get away from him, but no matter how quickly Clark walked he couldn't catch up to her. Eventually she disappeared completely and Clark stood still, looking around for her, with a kiss still sitting on his lips, wishing for its intended.
Clark got out of bed and immediately began making phone calls. By the next day, he was loading up his "keep" list into a U-Haul. In the afternoon, around three o'clock, as Clark was nearly done, a woman in her middle forties pulled up in front of the house and walked to the front door, carrying a clipboard and a briefcase. Clark invited her in the house and showed her around. She began making an inventory of everything. She tried to engage Clark in discussion about the relative value of each item, but he wanted no part of it. After about an hour, he signed some papers, handed the woman his house keys and said that he would be in touch with her after the auction to collect the proceeds.
"Oh, I almost forgot these", he said, turning around and handing her the keys to his car, a perfectly ordinary burgundy two-door sedan parked in the garage.
"Are you sure about this?" The woman asked him. "Where are you going? Leaving the country or something?"
"Not at the moment," Clark smiled. "Just cutting out the unnecessaries. You know--live simply, that others may simply live."
The woman looked at Clark for a moment, not sure what he was talking about, and then went back to her list. "Well, whatever you're doing, Good luck. Where should we send the check?"
"Ill be in touch."
It was the first and only apartment Clark had looked at -- a cheap, furnished efficiency with the bedroom doubling as the living room. It was on the other side of town from all the other professors, and was also away from where most of the students lived. Only his books and clothes would remind him of his "old" life. He didn't forward his phone or mail.
Clark began to unpack the small moving truck, which was the size of a pick-up truck and camper top. He used the cupboards in the kitchen to hold his books, having kept only a few dishes and pots. He carefully unwrapped a few framed posters and paintings and hung them around the apartment. Taking stock of his wardrobe--tweeds, workshirts, jeans and tennies. He went down to the Goodwill store to pick up some t-shirts and denim jackets--a little less of the "uniform" he had worn for the past ten years, a uniform that had allowed him respectability while still feeling like he hadn't totally given in.
Clark hadn't been on a city bus in years. The following morning, having unpacked the truck, he returned it to the rental agency and walked over to the corner stop. He decided to ride the bus for its full route just to see where it went. He tried to listen to conversations around him. He wanted to see these people the way Maureen had talked about them. There was a mother pulling a crying child onto the seat roughly. "I'll give you something to cry about. Quiet!" A couple of people smelled like alcohol. Clark double checked his watch. 9:43 a.m.
A few students, between 18 and 20, Clark guessed, with heavy laden backpacks, got on the bus. New students always took too many books with them to class on their first day. Clark mused that any other summer, he would be handing out a syllabus right now, trying to keep the attention of 18 year-olds who were still accustomed to having their summers off and who would much rather be playing frisbee at the beach than learning about the differences between communism and capitalism, and who, citing Stalin and the arms race, would passionately deny that it was purely economic theory.
Over the course of the summer Clark rode all the buses just to see where they went. He tried to use the time to sit and think, without feeling pressure to work on his book or be somehow productive with his time off. He found himself in parts of town he had never been in before--housing projects and gentrified GI subdivisions. He didn't always like the people he saw on the buses. At the back of the bus, teenage boys peppered their language with "mother fucker" the way someone might use common pronouns. Young mothers yelled at screaming children, tired from too many trips from preschool to social worker to shopping mall to grocery store. The children would squeal over things they wanted from afar but couldn't have, missing out on toys and candy and everything else their hearts thought they desired. In ten years, maybe these children would be sitting at the back of the bus yelling motherfucker this and motherfucker that.
Then there were the just-too-loud, usually insipid, conversations, the ones that drown out any other thoughts Clark might have been trying to have. He would hold his breath, feel his chest tighten and his face clench, trying not to jump up and scream for everyone to shut up. These were not the ennobled working class Clark had been so passionately wanting to set free. He wasn't sure these people were ready to accept power, to be emancipated.
Clark worked through the summer and his manuscript began to take shape as a book. The direction of the work was starting to change in light of his experiences in the real world. He was starting to think that Maureen was right about him, but it no longer bothered him. Maybe it was all abstract to him, but he was starting to wonder if he could have sustained his belief in freedom and liberation all this time if he had been living this life for the past twenty years. He wasn't sure he would be able to see humanity's salvation in the small, rare acts of insight and decency of ordinary people that Maureen had always lectured him about. He was becoming much more sympathetic to the notions of the Bolsheviks--the idea that a small, organized group of revolutionaries would have to lead the masses until they were ready to lead themselves. Clark's research was now leading him to try to discover exactly where and when it went wrong. The betrayal of the revolution was the problem, not its lack of populism, as Maureen would have countered.
Every day Clark tried to remind himself of the life he wanted to live. He wanted the distinction between his old and new lives to be clear cut. The book was helping him figure a lot of things out for himself, to work out some questions in his own mind. But it was still all theory. Where would it lead him? This wasn't exactly a romance novel, a mass market paperback he was writing. It would be published by and for the same people he had just walked away from. At best, it might become a textbook in a some junior or senior level class. It was just a small puddle jump from the life had was leading three months ago. It was not Hemingway fighting Franco in a Barcelona trench.
At thirty-seven, Clark was finally starting to receive recognition for his work within the department. He felt the pressure to keep up this momentum. Yet, his work was becoming less engaging. He had always enjoyed academic research. Otherwise, he would not have opted for the university. Maureen was wrong to accuse him of hiding behind academia. Writing and doing research was, for him, a way to learn continuously, to connect his life to the past and dream about visions of the future. But now it was work . . . career advancement. Fifteen years ago he had railed against his own smug self-serving professors who had no life in them, the ones who were there putting in their time, publishing for prestige, not because, in his opinion, they had anything to say. Career advancement was not something Clark ever thought he would concern himself with. That was for men with two-syllable names like Michael. Or Robert. Or Charles, who was occasionally Charlie, but never Chuck. Sandy blonde-haired men named Michael who wore turtlenecks and blazers and went to faculty dinners to schmooze and be seen. Burnt out intellectuals with a home on the lake and an office no student was ever invited into. It was not for political radicals and revolutionaries who taught classes on anarchy and social upheaval in the twentieth century. Not for PhD's who wrote about the necessity of dissent in society and had their TAs over for beers on the weekend.
But lately Clark had picked up a new vocabulary. Not one that indicted the intellectual hegemony at the University. Not one that challenged the increasing conservatism on his campus. One of conciliation and peaceful coexistence, as the cold warriors had once agreed to. He knew these people didn't understand what he devoted his life to. It was just a cute childish political theory that he was clinging to for career survival. the Soviet Union had disbanded, socialism was dead. Liberalism as they understood it was dead. The more he started to "move up" within the department, as one of the few remaining "radicals" teaching political science, the more he proved them right.
Maybe it was the final nail in the coffin of the Left. Conservatism's grip was so tight, they could indulge the remaining irrelevant leftists on the faculty. Rush Limbaugh had once said that if he were running the country, it would mean that liberalism had completely died out, but he would want to keep a couple of liberals around in the universities to remind people that they once existed. On his more cynical days, Clark suspected that he fit that bill.
"Morning Clark. Will we see you at the party tonight?"
"Hi, Harry. What party?"
"Remember? Book reception? The Rise of Conservatism? We will see you there, won't we? We're counting on you to provide some lively debate. A little 'point-counterpoint'."
"Oh, yeah. Uh, look, Harry, some things have come up at the last minute. I'll try to make it, but don't be offended if I don't, o.k.?" Clark reached into his office mailbox and looked a few envelopes, trying not to look at the insulted stare of his colleague. He was in no mood today to provide that kind of academic gladiator entertainment. "I'm really sorry, Harry. I'd like to explain it to you, but I've got to get to class. You know how they are. If I'm not there, they'll use it as another excuse to duck out."
"Look, I know you're upset about Maureen. But Clark, you have responsibilities here. You can't just drop everything because you have a broken heart." Clark looked incredulous. "Besides," Harry squirmed, making a tactical shift, "it'll do you some good to get out and be among friends."
"Friends," Clark muttered absently. "Yeah, probably. Look I'll do what I can, but I can't make any promises. I really have to go now."
Clark decided to take some time off that summer for research. He needed to immerse himself in his subject for a while -- just for the sake of the project. He wanted to see if he could get back some of his enthusiasm. He walked into Harry's office with great deliberateness and stood over the desk, trying to convey to Harry the urgency of the projected.
"Well, you know we 're really counting on you," Harry had told Clark when he first heard his request. "A lot of other people already have their vacations and their own study projects planned," Harry said, leaning forward over his desk. Clark was fond of Harry, despite the fact that Harry was a career academic. Maybe even because of that. If Clark saw a younger version of himself in Maureen, as she had contended, he sometimes wondered if Harry represented his future.
Harry had brought Clark into the department. He hired Clark initially as a part-time instructor while Clark finished his dissertation. He had taken a particular interest in Clark's career and had supported him through his tenure application. Without Harry, Clark's career might have been very different. Clark appreciated this fact. But moreover, like everyone else in the department, Clark genuinely liked Harry.
"What's the matter, Clark? You haven't really been with us all semester. Since . . . well, Maureen left town, you haven't been coming to receptions, or seminars, or departmental meetings. Are you nursing your wounds, or is there something else I should know about?"
"No, I think it's just a little burnout. Have you looked at my request for a sabbatical this summer? I really need it."
"I have seen it but it's very short notice. A lot of other people have already put in for the summer off."
"They're just intro classes, Harry. Any Graduate Assistant could handle them. I may not be able to do this much longer if I don't get a break from it. Come on Harry, be a sport."Clark paused and leaned forward. “Why am I here, Harry? Because I’m brilliant? Because I provide a counterpoint to the rest of the staff?”
“Now you sound like Maureen.”
“What’s so wrong with that? Because she is occasionally right, does that make me her mouthpiece, Harry? I heard some kids . . . some students walking down the hall complaining about how much money they pay to go here and they can’t even get their professor’s attention. Is that why we’re here? To take their money, or the state’s money, so we can study and do research as if we’re the students?”
“What’s gotten into you, Clark? You know we’re a research university, not just an overgrown high school. What we do when we’re not in the classroom is just as important as when we are. What’s the matter with you?”
“I need time off. I’m no good to those kids right now. What the hell am I doing here, anyway? Nothing I do matters, Harry. Nothing.”
Clark slumped into the chair and stared at Harry.
"Let me see what I can do But if I approve this, you owe me, Clark. When you come back in September, you'd better sparkle."
On June 3rd, Clark gathered together his last armful of mail and walked out of the Arts and Sciences building. The warm air hit his face and called for him to follow it. There was even a scent in the air that brought back memories. He remembered his senior year, exams over, the week leading up to receiving his sheepskin in the dark hot nylon cap & gown. Then, a summer off to do whatever he pleased before facing the responsibilities of adulthood. He walked down the cement steps of the social sciences building and like that 22 year-old, threw his papers across the parking lot. They skipped across pavement and cars like stones over water. He was going to do all of the things he couldn't do 16 years ago.
That night, Clark worked furiously on his research which he had begun during the past semester. The role of intellectuals and artists as mercenaries in the Spanish Civil War, something he had been fascinated with for years. The intellectuals and artists, sleeves rolled up, fighting side by side against an evil enemy, in defense of their ideals. It made his own life seem squeamishly safe and secure. Tonight he felt consumed in his work. He wrote free form for hours, without referring back to sources or meticulously writing down documentation, as he had come to do for all of his "scholarly" articles. He would go back later and fill all that in. Now, he was writing with a passion for the subject, reinventing and conceiving the things he had been studying for years.
Maybe this summer he would spend more time on marches and protests and activities that the department had discouraged. An arrest or an incident, Harry was afraid, would jeopardize the reputation of the department and possibly endanger endowments and donations to the department from successful alumni. But he was on his own time, now, and he didn't have to worry about such things. He thought again of Maureen. She would be proud of his resolve. She would have a million different suggestions of things he could do. She had always made it her job to know about as many different groups and activities as possible, like a clearinghouse for all the campus activists and radicals. She would definitely have pointed him toward some of her own pet projects.
Clark sat up in his bed. there were papers beside him, like a sleeping lover passed out after a night's passion. Half open books had fallen to the floor. He rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 8:37a.m. He flipped the covers off and shuffled to the bathroom. He knew it would no longer be enough just to write about his fantasies or to act them out. For 15 years he had read about men and women of action, while he merely talked about it. While he told others about their exploits. He had infiltrated the system, as he once put it. But had he brought anyone else in there? Had he really changed anything, they way he said he would?
All of the subtle confrontations he'd had over the years were starting to come back to him. And he wasn't feel good-natured about them this time. He was angry at them and angry at himself for seeing it as just good natured debate. The resident radical. He used to revel in the notoriety. Now he was just suspicious of his reputation. He was sure they all saw him as an old hippie, someone whose ideals were cute at one time, but that obviously had not held up in the real world. If they had, he would be the head of the department now, and the world they taught their students about would be a very different one. They wouldn't be discussing the Gulf War or the notion that dissent was bad for morale. That distasteful theory of General Westmoreland's, actually blaming the dragging out of the Viet Nam war on the protesters and their effect on troop morale, had become an accepted part of the country's attitude toward war. If the hippies and the peace protesters had accomplished anything at all, it would be this theory, that was seen as an anachronism. Not the peace movement itself.
He remembered Maureen coming in, shaking but exhilarated, throwing her banner down on the floor and slamming her body into a chair at the kitchen table to begin writing a letter to the editor. "They almost beat the shit out of us. Three women. The fuckers."
"What? Are you ok?"
"Yeah. We showed up at their little 'Support the Troops' rally."
"Maureen!"
"Yeah, well, we almost chickened out. We sat at McDonald's and talked about it. It was scary. There were at least 50 people there. But we decided to tough it out." She started to laugh as the absurd memories came to the surface. "They were really friendly to us at first. Then we unrolled our banner and eventually someone stepped off the curb to read it and all hell broke loose."
"What did it say?"
"Same things as theirs, only a little different. Support the Troops. Bring them home alive."
Clark put his arms around Maureen who was scratching out a letter to the editor, pausing periodically to give him the details of the day. After someone had noticed the content of their banner, which was draped over an American flag, things got very heated. The three women--Maureen, her friend Cindy, slightly younger, 19 and barely 5 feet tall, and Donna, a woman slightly older than Clark, an original Sixties Radical they knew from the peace coalition--vainly tried to discuss their feelings with the pro-war protesters. Before they knew it, the three women were surrounded by a crowd. Donna was wrapped up, mummified in the flag, and the crowd was becoming increasingly angry and hostile. People were spitting on them and contesting their right to be associating an American flag with their banner. "That could be me," one young woman shouted angrily. "All the more reason," Maureen told Clark, "that you'd think she'd want this stupid thing stopped. Is this what equality brings us? To be equally stupid in our blind patriotism. Is this what I've been marching with the feminists for?"
"Baby steps." Clark rubbed Maureen's shoulders. They were tight like rubber bands stretched to the breaking point. She sat back in her chair for a moment and relaxed her back. Then, the tension broken, she snapped back forward to the paper in front of her. Then she got up and started pacing.
"Fuck that. Anyway we thought for sure these rednecks were going to beat us up. And the whole time, there was some guy there with a camera on us. Just us. I don't know. It wasn't a media camera. Police? FBI? Thank God someone stepped in and calmed it down a little bit. I don't even think about what could have happened. And then . . ." Maureen whipped around, pointing to Clark, "do you think the cops are any help? We've been assaulted. Assaulted. Three women and a mob of mostly men, and do you think they'll let us file a complaint? Hell no. We went back to Donna's house for a while and called the media to see if we could get some photos to corroborate. But, no, just as bad as the cops."
The last of a dying breed. He sometimes thought he saw amused nods and smiles when he began talking about his field. After all, it wasn't serious politics, the way you could talk about the Russian Revolution, or the Bill of Rights. It was all theory and idealism. Even the Russian Revolution had fallen apart. The Left was just a charming idealist anachronism, it's danger dismantled like an obsolete missile, or a memento brick left over from the Berlin Wall. And how could he argue with that? If they had succeeded, Maureen would not have had to go through that. She wouldn't have been still fighting the same battles Clark and his friends, and Donna and her friends, had already fought in their youths.
Clark looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like every other aging hippie professor at the damn university. Shoulder-length auburn hair. Trimmed beard with just a little bit of conspicuous shagginess to it so as not to look too groomed. Jeans and worn tennies with a tan sportcoat to dress it up. He pulled a pair of scissors and his razor out of the drawer and took a deep breath. He cut his beard and his hair down as close as he could, as large chunks of hair began falling to the floor. As more and more of his bare head began to appear, he found himself hoping that his skull was not too oddly-shaped, as he would have to live with this for quite some time. The razor buzzed and his skin tingled, shaving his face closer and touching up his nearly bald scalp.
Then he walked to the kitchen in his underwear, foraging for food he wouldn't have to prepare. He felt a restlessness that he didn't know how to cope with it. A call to action, but with nothing to be done. he needed to get out of the house. Do something different. Whatever that was. He gave up on any foraging to be accomplished in the kitchen. He returned to the bedroom, pulling on the pants and t-shirt he had left huddled in a pile a few hours earlier. He grabbed a backpack and some notebooks and headed out the door.
Down the street was a coffee shop. Clark had always meant to spend more time there, but never got around to it. He was not a neighborhood regular. Most of his coffee had come from the vending machine down the hall from his office. He walked toward the cafe now, stopping along the way to get a paper from a newsbox. He looked at the people around him. Many were street people who came in during the day to shake of the heat and have a place to sit for a little while, until the waitress kicked them out, anyway. Buoyed by his new life and his new resolve to do the right thing, he told the waitress, "Breakfast for everyone. I'm buying." It felt good. It fit with his new resolve about what he was going to become. Ironic that it was Maureen who had brought about this change in him and now she wasn't here to see it.
In his mind, it was always the fight that had ended it. The Last Straw Fight that so many couples have. Until then, everything seemed ok to him. Just a little creative tension. Romantically flawed, but the complemented each other. At least, he'd thought so. But maybe that was the root difference. Where he saw creative tension, intellectual differences among well-meaning people, she saw co-option. It still surprised him that she usually managed to maintain herself without coming across as too rigid or self-righteous. She challenged people to be more, without indicting them for what they already were.
Except, of course, for Clark. There were different standards for the people she was closest to. Of her brothers and sisters in arms she expected more. Purity, honesty. Anything else was too damaging to the work that had to be done. But for ordinary people, for the people she talked to on the street, like the ones in this coffee shop, she had compassion and kindness. She believed that they were on her side, but they just didn't know it.
"Listen to them on the bus. In the cafeteria. Are you that removed from everyone but your students?"
Clark had to admit, his students did not fill him with great hope. They were lazy. They were victims of television. They didn't do their work because they stayed out drinking all night.
"How is that different than not doing it because you took over the Dean's office and smoked pot all night."
"Oh come on. You can't be serious. It was very different. We believed in something. We weren't just numbing ourselves stupid."
"You were turning on, dropping out? Anyway, that's not all of us. And it's not the people out there. They hate the government. They want something different. They've just been programmed not to listen to us, because we're just 'radicals'. We don't need to educate them--we need to deprogram them."
Maureen believed in the proles, as they would have been called forty years ago. The ordinary people were not stupid, and in her mind, it was the radicals who were stupid for being so condescending. "Who wants to work with a bunch of people who think they're better than you? Who wants to live in a society that's run by a bunch of removed intellectuals who think you're stupid and lazy. How is that better than a bunch of corrupt businessmen who think you're stupid and lazy but at least sell you a tv or make a movie to take your mind off of it. They can't dance here, so they don't want our revolution."
Clark looked up to find a bill sitting on his table. He looked over at the waitress and smiled, turning over the slip of paper. $128.72. He pulled a credit card from his wallet and laid it on top of the bill, after writing in a $30 tip. Suddenly this picture seemed ridiculous. Patronizingly buying breakfast for the local down-and-out with his Gold Card. Very radical. Even this smallest action took no risk on his part. Fraud. Irrelevant. Dangerous. You're right, Maureen.
He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He began making two lists. Everything he owned and everything he felt he needed. Soon, a third column emerged, precipitated by the television and VCR. It was important to keep up, to use very possible avenue to educate oneself, even if it was easy to use them for frivolity and escape. Thus, the first items under the "unsure" column. He tried to be ruthless in his determinations. Car? There was a bus stop right in front of his house. The city had a good transit system. Many people managed just fine without a car.
Artwork? Everyone needs some aesthetics in their lives. Bread and Roses, as the activists would say. He tried to discriminate between the things he was attached to, things that meant something to him, from the ones he had for show to prove his "good taste". Art for company's sake. He listed every book, every piece of music, every stick of furniture he owned in this same way, winnowing out those things he felt strongest about from the things he owned because he thought he ought to.
He walked mentally through the house, picturing each room. A too big house for just him. Two stories. Two bedrooms. A den, extra half-bath, slightly winding stairs. he had bought it when he was brought onto the faculty full-time as a reward for "making it." When he met Maureen later, and she moved in, he was happy to have a nice home to offer her. It was a place they could grow into, with family and friends. There was room for him to work and for her to have her meetings. Plenty of space for files and posters and placards and brochures and fax machines. When she left, a few months now, he tried to fill the space up again, reminding himself that it was his home long before it had become their home. Was he now ruthlessly taking stock of his own life or was he trying to find an excuse to run from the empty space she had left behind? He added the house to the sheet of paper, crossed it out, and moved it to a different column five times before making his final decision.
He had become so intent in this activity that when he looked up, two hours and twenty minutes later, he was disoriented. Was he in the kitchen? The school snack bar? Faculty lounge? He was still in the coffee house, with a hot cup of coffee that had been silently refilled several times throughout the morning. His credit card was still lying on top of the bill at the corner of the table, but with the bill now marked. Thank you. J
"Want anything else? You've been pretty engrossed in that."
Clark smiled up at her. Thank you but no. He gather his things into the backpack, took one more sip of coffee, and left, sent on his way cheerfully by the other waitresses' goodbye and have a nice days.
At home, Clark pulled out his lists and began to pack up the things on his keep list. He went to the store three blocks over to get more boxes. He set aside several rooms for the things that didn't make the cut. He pulled out the phone book and began paging through the yellow pages. Abortion. . . Accounting . . . Arts . . . Attorneys . . . Auction . . . He wrote down a few numbers. It was Saturday evening and he didn't expect to get ahold of anyone. He wrote down some numbers and put the paper up on the refrigerator. Then he went to the stereo and pulled out some music, some anachronistic idealistic music and went upstairs to grab his books and his notes from the previous evening.
Clark rolled over and touched Maureen. They were walking on a plaza among dozens of other people. The sun was shining and the trees, planted among the cobblestone, gave off a comforting shade. Maureen giggled like she used to when they first met, when he said something particularly witty or sarcastic. She blushed the first time he talked about Helen Caldicott's notions of nuclear missiles as phallic symbols and unfortunate terms like Minuteman and hard and soft silos. She giggled that way now, and he brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. He pulled her chin toward him to kiss her, putting his hand on her shoulder, and she stood up abruptly, dashing off into the crowd as if she were completely unaware of him.
Clark chased her up the steps and slants of the plaza, but she kept walking, quickly and with purpose, without looking back. She was not trying to taunt him or even get away from him, but no matter how quickly Clark walked he couldn't catch up to her. Eventually she disappeared completely and Clark stood still, looking around for her, with a kiss still sitting on his lips, wishing for its intended.
Clark got out of bed and immediately began making phone calls. By the next day, he was loading up his "keep" list into a U-Haul. In the afternoon, around three o'clock, as Clark was nearly done, a woman in her middle forties pulled up in front of the house and walked to the front door, carrying a clipboard and a briefcase. Clark invited her in the house and showed her around. She began making an inventory of everything. She tried to engage Clark in discussion about the relative value of each item, but he wanted no part of it. After about an hour, he signed some papers, handed the woman his house keys and said that he would be in touch with her after the auction to collect the proceeds.
"Oh, I almost forgot these", he said, turning around and handing her the keys to his car, a perfectly ordinary burgundy two-door sedan parked in the garage.
"Are you sure about this?" The woman asked him. "Where are you going? Leaving the country or something?"
"Not at the moment," Clark smiled. "Just cutting out the unnecessaries. You know--live simply, that others may simply live."
The woman looked at Clark for a moment, not sure what he was talking about, and then went back to her list. "Well, whatever you're doing, Good luck. Where should we send the check?"
"Ill be in touch."
It was the first and only apartment Clark had looked at -- a cheap, furnished efficiency with the bedroom doubling as the living room. It was on the other side of town from all the other professors, and was also away from where most of the students lived. Only his books and clothes would remind him of his "old" life. He didn't forward his phone or mail.
Clark began to unpack the small moving truck, which was the size of a pick-up truck and camper top. He used the cupboards in the kitchen to hold his books, having kept only a few dishes and pots. He carefully unwrapped a few framed posters and paintings and hung them around the apartment. Taking stock of his wardrobe--tweeds, workshirts, jeans and tennies. He went down to the Goodwill store to pick up some t-shirts and denim jackets--a little less of the "uniform" he had worn for the past ten years, a uniform that had allowed him respectability while still feeling like he hadn't totally given in.
Clark hadn't been on a city bus in years. The following morning, having unpacked the truck, he returned it to the rental agency and walked over to the corner stop. He decided to ride the bus for its full route just to see where it went. He tried to listen to conversations around him. He wanted to see these people the way Maureen had talked about them. There was a mother pulling a crying child onto the seat roughly. "I'll give you something to cry about. Quiet!" A couple of people smelled like alcohol. Clark double checked his watch. 9:43 a.m.
A few students, between 18 and 20, Clark guessed, with heavy laden backpacks, got on the bus. New students always took too many books with them to class on their first day. Clark mused that any other summer, he would be handing out a syllabus right now, trying to keep the attention of 18 year-olds who were still accustomed to having their summers off and who would much rather be playing frisbee at the beach than learning about the differences between communism and capitalism, and who, citing Stalin and the arms race, would passionately deny that it was purely economic theory.
Over the course of the summer Clark rode all the buses just to see where they went. He tried to use the time to sit and think, without feeling pressure to work on his book or be somehow productive with his time off. He found himself in parts of town he had never been in before--housing projects and gentrified GI subdivisions. He didn't always like the people he saw on the buses. At the back of the bus, teenage boys peppered their language with "mother fucker" the way someone might use common pronouns. Young mothers yelled at screaming children, tired from too many trips from preschool to social worker to shopping mall to grocery store. The children would squeal over things they wanted from afar but couldn't have, missing out on toys and candy and everything else their hearts thought they desired. In ten years, maybe these children would be sitting at the back of the bus yelling motherfucker this and motherfucker that.
Then there were the just-too-loud, usually insipid, conversations, the ones that drown out any other thoughts Clark might have been trying to have. He would hold his breath, feel his chest tighten and his face clench, trying not to jump up and scream for everyone to shut up. These were not the ennobled working class Clark had been so passionately wanting to set free. He wasn't sure these people were ready to accept power, to be emancipated.
Clark worked through the summer and his manuscript began to take shape as a book. The direction of the work was starting to change in light of his experiences in the real world. He was starting to think that Maureen was right about him, but it no longer bothered him. Maybe it was all abstract to him, but he was starting to wonder if he could have sustained his belief in freedom and liberation all this time if he had been living this life for the past twenty years. He wasn't sure he would be able to see humanity's salvation in the small, rare acts of insight and decency of ordinary people that Maureen had always lectured him about. He was becoming much more sympathetic to the notions of the Bolsheviks--the idea that a small, organized group of revolutionaries would have to lead the masses until they were ready to lead themselves. Clark's research was now leading him to try to discover exactly where and when it went wrong. The betrayal of the revolution was the problem, not its lack of populism, as Maureen would have countered.
Every day Clark tried to remind himself of the life he wanted to live. He wanted the distinction between his old and new lives to be clear cut. The book was helping him figure a lot of things out for himself, to work out some questions in his own mind. But it was still all theory. Where would it lead him? This wasn't exactly a romance novel, a mass market paperback he was writing. It would be published by and for the same people he had just walked away from. At best, it might become a textbook in a some junior or senior level class. It was just a small puddle jump from the life had was leading three months ago. It was not Hemingway fighting Franco in a Barcelona trench.
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Chapter 3 of My Accursed Novel
CHAPTER: LEAVING
Clark stood at the sink, silent and frowning. He turned the faucet on and off with deliberateness and force and slammed wet, shiny dishes into the drainer, Not hard enough to break them, but with enough noise to show his annoyance.
"Don't be like that, Clark. I was just saying . . ." Clark continued to slam dunk plastic cups and silverware into the plastic compartments on the counter.
"Clark, please . . .!" Maureen sat down at the kitchen table and stared at Clark as he wiped plates and rinsed them under the faucet. Her father's voice started to play in her ear. She had heard it through hundreds of similar silent treatments from her mother, pleading, "What's wrong? What did I do?"
Maureen tried once more to get Clark's attention. When he didn't respond, she put her elbows on the table and set her cheeks flat against her palms. Her father's voice became more pleading and loud sobs started to come from her throat. She stomach muscles pulled in and out violently and she gasped periodically, trying to take in air. A few times she thought she might choke, not be able to breathe at all around her crying. Her shoulders shook. Clark sat down in the chair across from her. His voice was flat--dead--and showed little concern. "It's just a fight over dishes. Come on, Maureen."
But by now she couldn't stop herself. Clark tried to coax her into talking to him, but she was unable to stop crying long enough to talk. Once she could control herself enough to move, she got up and went to her bedroom. She came out with car keys in her hand and her bookbag over her shoulder.
"Where are you going? Maureen, stay here and talk about it . . . "
Maureen looked down at the floor and the sobbing became heavier again. Without looking up or at Clark, she ducked out the front door. Clark pulled a glass out of the sink and slammed it against the refrigerator with full force. As it shattered, he stepped through the slivers, pushing around slivers with his toes.
Maureen pulled into the parking lot of an all-night supermarket. Numbly, she walked inside and grabbed a basket. She had managed to stop crying, with the exception of occasional sniffles or pulling of her stomach muscles. The muzak overhead was playing broken-heart songs, some original "oldies" and some quieted down remakes of top forty songs. She made her way through the aisles slowly. As she looked at the shelves, she felt disoriented. She couldn't make out the words on the products, or the labels or prices attached to the shelves. The college students, stocking shelves in jeans and t-shirts with aprons over them, paid little attention to her, and she was careful not to make eye contact. She knew what she looked like after an hour of crying. She didn't want to have to make small talk or explain herself to them.
She looked at everything without any sense of desire or preference. Nothingness. But not in the good, eastern way of transcending desire. She felt too empty, too wrung out, to want anything. The music and the bright lights and the sound of her disabled cart squeaking its way down empty, otherwise silent aisles, became too much for her. She abandoned the cart near a frozen food aisle and grabbed a pint of Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
After waiting a few minutes to be noticed at the check out aisle, she paid for her ice cream without looking up at the cashier. He tried to make small talk, asking her about her night, but got only a quiet "so-so" out of her. On her way out to the parking lot she realized that she had no eating utensils with her. She decided to stop by a fast food joint to pick up a spoon and maybe use the bathroom. Once in her car, she tried to adjust her eyes again to the dark night and the bright security lights and the white cement of the parking lot. Her eyes were still blurry from crying, which was not helping the process. Maureen started up the car and drove to one side of the parking lot, slamming on her brakes at the last minute when she realized she had come up to a curb, the same color white as the floor of the parking lot. She backed up and drove up a few feet, trying to find the exit. After several unsuccessful tries, she put the car into park and leaned her head against the steering wheel. She resumed crying, again in the same strong, violent sobs as when she had been at the house, arguing with Clark over whose turn it was to do the dishes.
She couldn't stop thinking about her parents. About the arguments over nothing. The scenes. Her running up and down the stairs, trying to reconcile them after a bad fight. She calmed herself again and put on the radio. Heavy metal. It wasn't her usual genre, but she knew there would be nothing to make her cry there. A little AC/DC was just what she needed right now.
When she got home Clark was asleep in their room. Maureen snorted and felt the blood rise to her head. He wasn't enough concerned enough to wait up for her. She sat down on the end of the bed, near his feet. She fought against the urge to throw herself on him and start slapping him. Instead, she leaned over and shook his leg gently. "Clark?"
Clark stirred and she shook his leg again. "Clark." Clark rolled over and touched Maureen on the arm. "Hi. You ok? Where did you go?"
"Clark, this isn't working."
Clark sat up. "It's just dishes, Mo. Come on. You're tired. Come to bed and we'll . . ."
" . . . talk in the morning. No, Clark. We both know it. It's not working. And it's not just dishes."
"Maureen, not now. Come on."
"If not now, when? We both know that this is not working. I can't do this anymore."
"Do what?"
"Be your 'better half.' I can't fulfill your fantasies of what you wanted to become anymore."
"Is that what you think is happening here?"
Clark and Maureen sat still, looking at each other in the dark. Clark reached for the small lamp near the bed. "No," Maureen said quietly and put her hand out to stop him. "Admit it, Clark. That's the appeal. I'm you 15 years ago. I'm what you thought you would become. I can't be your complement anymore. Some men date their students to recapture their youth, to show that they can still get young women to like them. You . . . you seem to do it to remind yourself of what you were."
Clark sat quietly until Maureen was finished. "What do I say to that? That nothing I do is good enough? We've been through this fight a million times."
"And it never gets resolved."
"That's not my fault!"
"It's not anybody's fault. I don't want it to be anyone's fault."
"That's just another way to say it's not your fault."
"Fine. It is my fault. Ok. It's all my fault. I don't even know why . . . maybe I do expect too much. But this is how I feel, ok? Whoever's fault it is, the bottom line is that we aren't fitting together anymore. If we ever did."
"Don't do this. Don't rethink our whole relationship. I love you. This is just a rough spot."
"Do you? Or do you love what I represent, Clark? And I'm just wondering if maybe I didn't romanticize what we had. It's very romantic. And I've loved it."
"Loved it? Don't speak for me. I love you. Not the it, not the notion of our relationship."
"Then I guess that makes you a better person than me, doesn't it."
Clark started to cry. "Why are you being so cold like this? Do you really mean that you never loved me? You need to hurt me that badly?"
Maureen touched Clark's cheek and wiped away the tear that was running slowly down his cheek. "I don't know what I think. I don't want to hurt you."
"Then why are you doing this? Why are you saying these things."
"I don't know. Maybe I just need to go away for a while."
"So, will you come back?"
"I can't say right now." Maureen jumped up, her speech and movements becoming agitated. "I don't know, Clark! I just . . . need something different. I just need to go away and think."
"I can't believe this. We have a fight over the dishes and now you never loved me?"
"I'm going now, Clark."
Maureen stood up and picked up her bag from the foot of the bed. She bounced down the stairs and out the door. Clark did not chase her down the stairs, which she made note of. He ran his hand through the front of his hair and went downstairs in time to see her pull away. She had taken only the clothes on her back and what was in her knapsack. Probably some books and notebooks, her check book and ATM card.
Clark walked into the kitchen, where the clean dishes were stacked higher than the refrigerator, balanced precariously upon one another. He slowly and carefully maneuvered a plastic cup from the middle of this house of cards and poured himself some milk. He was too tired to work on anything, even to think clearly, but couldn't go back to sleep now.
Maureen would have to come back. All of her things were there. She would at least have to come home and pack, and then he could talk to her. He took his glass of milk into the living room and hunted for the remote. After a few minutes he located it under a seat cushion near the coffee table, where Maureen had been stuffing envelopes earlier in the evening. He settled himself on the couch. His arm straight out, with remote in hand, Clark flipped through channels until he fell asleep, his hand dangling down the side of the couch, and the remote fell to the floor.
Maureen had already been at the hotel two days. She replayed the fight in her head. Her parents. The groups she led. Her job at the bookstore. She shuddered, literally trying to shake them off of her. I am NOT responsible for the whole world, she told herself. Just this once . . . maybe I need to be responsible to me.
She looked at the clock. 11:50. Checkout was in ten minutes. Clark would be in class right now, unless he had called in sick, worrying about her. Don't flatter yourself, she thought. She picked up the phone and called home. No. She picked up the phone and called Clark's House, she reminded herself.
Hi, this is Clark & Maureen. We're out in the trenches. Leave us a message.
Maureen hung up the phone. She felt the bags under her eyes, felt as if she had been crying for several hours. That she had been doing the kind of hard sobbing that made your shoulders shake and your whole body fold up. It had been days since she had really wept that way, but her eyes still held the memory in the extra flesh that swelled beneath her eyes.
She began to pack up her meager belongings and went to the front desk to check out. She walked down the street to the ATM machine and took out $300. Then she hopped a city bus to the greyhound station and bought an unlimited travel pass, then studied the bus schedule to see when the next bus was leaving. She would have to be out of town by early evening, or Clark would probably have tracked her down and would be trying to talk her out of this. She couldn't do this if she talked to him right now, and she knew she really wanted to do this. At 2:15, there was a bus headed for Omaha. She stepped into the snack bar for a burger and a Coke. She sat down at the counter, reading the remnants of the newspaper someone had left behind, trying as hard as possible to find something interesting among the business pages and the sports section until it was time to climb onto the bus.
Maureen ambled onto the bus and looked at the faces around her. Some people were still getting settled, trying to take off their coats, or fit their suitcases into the overhead racks. A couple of mothers were fishing out plastic bags with raisins and orange peels to keep their children quiet for the long bus ride.
Maureen took her backpack off and turned it sideways in front of her as she walked to the back, trying not to knock anyone in the head. She headed straight to the back seat. The back seat was like riding the bus on a sofa, if you could get it to yourself. It sat three people across, instead of the usual two, and anyone who was traveling cross country tried to angle for that seat, so that they could stretch out and sleep when they needed to. The downside was that it was right next to the bathroom, and on a hot day, the smell of the disinfectants could be overwhelming, even nauseating.
She settled in and leaned her head against the window as the bus started to pull away. She felt a know in her stomach. Maybe she should have left a message for Clark. What did he do that was so terrible that she should just disappear like that? She tried to shake these thoughts out of her head, but all she could see was his sleepy tear-stained face, the question over and over in her ear you never loved me? Maureen resolved to drop him a postcard at the first stop they made, just so he wouldn't worry. She settled herself back down and watched familiar streets and buildings pass by for the last time--ever? She kept asking herself why she was doing this if it was hurting her so badly. But she sat perfectly still, eyes on the houses and cars to her left, as tears rolled down her cheek. She brushed them back, wishing it were Clark's hand against her face.
She looked at everything one more time as the bus drove out of town. Buildings were reflected in one another. (Elaborate on description here.) This doesn’t have to be goodbye, she thought. And she knew it wouldn’t be forever. She didn’t know how long she would be gone, or what she would come home to, but she would make her way back.
Maureen missed clark already. As the bus passed the downtown park where they’d had lunch just last week, she wanted to jump up and beg the driver to let her off the bus, the way a squeamish child screams to be let off of a carnival ride that’s become too scary. Maureen fought off the feeling and settled back down into the seat. She breathed deeply and remembered the grocery store three nights ago. She couldn’t stay right now. The panic kept coming back and she breathed deeply and audibly, trying to fight it back down.
She looked at the people around her. The back was full of young dudes. The heads in front of her were all white, curly, manicured. Everyone under 60 was in the last five rows of the bus, stretched out with bags on their seats, like a fence around them, protecting them from seat seekers who would join them further down the line.
They rode past the capitol with its big bald dome head, wanting, really, to be the Vatican or some other mystical center, with an echoed hollow rotunda and its eyelid domes shadowed and outlined with paintings -- cherubs and fleur de lis. There were the ghosts of Clark and Maureen and all the crowds they had joined on the lawn, the invisible monuments that she saw more clearly than the immortalized founding fathers. She tried to remember how many state capitols she had visited. How many times she had stood inside, rubbing her palms on marbled banisters, climbing and descending, dropping banners from the center and raising placards toward the ceiling. With no definite plans ahead of her, neither did she know how many more of these she would pass through.
When the driver stopped for the first meal break of her trip, Maureen picked up a newspaper. She did this wherever she went--large cities or small towns. She shuddered to remember flipping through her own hometown paper, with news of people’s trips, names of those who got to meet the governor or congressman, the mayor’s arrest for peeping into sleepy bedroom windows.
Afraid she would miss the bus and lose what few belongings she had with her, Maureen did not linger in the truck stop, but got her food to go. She climbed back into the coach and spread out her hamburger and fries on the seat beside her, trying to leaf through the paper as she ate. Truck stop food was going to get too expensive to eat all the time. She was going to have to figure out a better way to do this, or her trip wouldn’t last very long at all. As she finished her meal, the white haired people and the dudes reentered the bus. She reached for her Coke, which started to spill when the bus lurched off onto its way.
Mo looked over the edge of its bus as it made its way up the ramp and back onto the interstate. The bus was too tall to be able to see the railing and she became disoriented, looking at the freightyard below which seemed only a tipover or a slippery wheel away.
Clark stood at the sink, silent and frowning. He turned the faucet on and off with deliberateness and force and slammed wet, shiny dishes into the drainer, Not hard enough to break them, but with enough noise to show his annoyance.
"Don't be like that, Clark. I was just saying . . ." Clark continued to slam dunk plastic cups and silverware into the plastic compartments on the counter.
"Clark, please . . .!" Maureen sat down at the kitchen table and stared at Clark as he wiped plates and rinsed them under the faucet. Her father's voice started to play in her ear. She had heard it through hundreds of similar silent treatments from her mother, pleading, "What's wrong? What did I do?"
Maureen tried once more to get Clark's attention. When he didn't respond, she put her elbows on the table and set her cheeks flat against her palms. Her father's voice became more pleading and loud sobs started to come from her throat. She stomach muscles pulled in and out violently and she gasped periodically, trying to take in air. A few times she thought she might choke, not be able to breathe at all around her crying. Her shoulders shook. Clark sat down in the chair across from her. His voice was flat--dead--and showed little concern. "It's just a fight over dishes. Come on, Maureen."
But by now she couldn't stop herself. Clark tried to coax her into talking to him, but she was unable to stop crying long enough to talk. Once she could control herself enough to move, she got up and went to her bedroom. She came out with car keys in her hand and her bookbag over her shoulder.
"Where are you going? Maureen, stay here and talk about it . . . "
Maureen looked down at the floor and the sobbing became heavier again. Without looking up or at Clark, she ducked out the front door. Clark pulled a glass out of the sink and slammed it against the refrigerator with full force. As it shattered, he stepped through the slivers, pushing around slivers with his toes.
Maureen pulled into the parking lot of an all-night supermarket. Numbly, she walked inside and grabbed a basket. She had managed to stop crying, with the exception of occasional sniffles or pulling of her stomach muscles. The muzak overhead was playing broken-heart songs, some original "oldies" and some quieted down remakes of top forty songs. She made her way through the aisles slowly. As she looked at the shelves, she felt disoriented. She couldn't make out the words on the products, or the labels or prices attached to the shelves. The college students, stocking shelves in jeans and t-shirts with aprons over them, paid little attention to her, and she was careful not to make eye contact. She knew what she looked like after an hour of crying. She didn't want to have to make small talk or explain herself to them.
She looked at everything without any sense of desire or preference. Nothingness. But not in the good, eastern way of transcending desire. She felt too empty, too wrung out, to want anything. The music and the bright lights and the sound of her disabled cart squeaking its way down empty, otherwise silent aisles, became too much for her. She abandoned the cart near a frozen food aisle and grabbed a pint of Rainforest Crunch ice cream.
After waiting a few minutes to be noticed at the check out aisle, she paid for her ice cream without looking up at the cashier. He tried to make small talk, asking her about her night, but got only a quiet "so-so" out of her. On her way out to the parking lot she realized that she had no eating utensils with her. She decided to stop by a fast food joint to pick up a spoon and maybe use the bathroom. Once in her car, she tried to adjust her eyes again to the dark night and the bright security lights and the white cement of the parking lot. Her eyes were still blurry from crying, which was not helping the process. Maureen started up the car and drove to one side of the parking lot, slamming on her brakes at the last minute when she realized she had come up to a curb, the same color white as the floor of the parking lot. She backed up and drove up a few feet, trying to find the exit. After several unsuccessful tries, she put the car into park and leaned her head against the steering wheel. She resumed crying, again in the same strong, violent sobs as when she had been at the house, arguing with Clark over whose turn it was to do the dishes.
She couldn't stop thinking about her parents. About the arguments over nothing. The scenes. Her running up and down the stairs, trying to reconcile them after a bad fight. She calmed herself again and put on the radio. Heavy metal. It wasn't her usual genre, but she knew there would be nothing to make her cry there. A little AC/DC was just what she needed right now.
When she got home Clark was asleep in their room. Maureen snorted and felt the blood rise to her head. He wasn't enough concerned enough to wait up for her. She sat down on the end of the bed, near his feet. She fought against the urge to throw herself on him and start slapping him. Instead, she leaned over and shook his leg gently. "Clark?"
Clark stirred and she shook his leg again. "Clark." Clark rolled over and touched Maureen on the arm. "Hi. You ok? Where did you go?"
"Clark, this isn't working."
Clark sat up. "It's just dishes, Mo. Come on. You're tired. Come to bed and we'll . . ."
" . . . talk in the morning. No, Clark. We both know it. It's not working. And it's not just dishes."
"Maureen, not now. Come on."
"If not now, when? We both know that this is not working. I can't do this anymore."
"Do what?"
"Be your 'better half.' I can't fulfill your fantasies of what you wanted to become anymore."
"Is that what you think is happening here?"
Clark and Maureen sat still, looking at each other in the dark. Clark reached for the small lamp near the bed. "No," Maureen said quietly and put her hand out to stop him. "Admit it, Clark. That's the appeal. I'm you 15 years ago. I'm what you thought you would become. I can't be your complement anymore. Some men date their students to recapture their youth, to show that they can still get young women to like them. You . . . you seem to do it to remind yourself of what you were."
Clark sat quietly until Maureen was finished. "What do I say to that? That nothing I do is good enough? We've been through this fight a million times."
"And it never gets resolved."
"That's not my fault!"
"It's not anybody's fault. I don't want it to be anyone's fault."
"That's just another way to say it's not your fault."
"Fine. It is my fault. Ok. It's all my fault. I don't even know why . . . maybe I do expect too much. But this is how I feel, ok? Whoever's fault it is, the bottom line is that we aren't fitting together anymore. If we ever did."
"Don't do this. Don't rethink our whole relationship. I love you. This is just a rough spot."
"Do you? Or do you love what I represent, Clark? And I'm just wondering if maybe I didn't romanticize what we had. It's very romantic. And I've loved it."
"Loved it? Don't speak for me. I love you. Not the it, not the notion of our relationship."
"Then I guess that makes you a better person than me, doesn't it."
Clark started to cry. "Why are you being so cold like this? Do you really mean that you never loved me? You need to hurt me that badly?"
Maureen touched Clark's cheek and wiped away the tear that was running slowly down his cheek. "I don't know what I think. I don't want to hurt you."
"Then why are you doing this? Why are you saying these things."
"I don't know. Maybe I just need to go away for a while."
"So, will you come back?"
"I can't say right now." Maureen jumped up, her speech and movements becoming agitated. "I don't know, Clark! I just . . . need something different. I just need to go away and think."
"I can't believe this. We have a fight over the dishes and now you never loved me?"
"I'm going now, Clark."
Maureen stood up and picked up her bag from the foot of the bed. She bounced down the stairs and out the door. Clark did not chase her down the stairs, which she made note of. He ran his hand through the front of his hair and went downstairs in time to see her pull away. She had taken only the clothes on her back and what was in her knapsack. Probably some books and notebooks, her check book and ATM card.
Clark walked into the kitchen, where the clean dishes were stacked higher than the refrigerator, balanced precariously upon one another. He slowly and carefully maneuvered a plastic cup from the middle of this house of cards and poured himself some milk. He was too tired to work on anything, even to think clearly, but couldn't go back to sleep now.
Maureen would have to come back. All of her things were there. She would at least have to come home and pack, and then he could talk to her. He took his glass of milk into the living room and hunted for the remote. After a few minutes he located it under a seat cushion near the coffee table, where Maureen had been stuffing envelopes earlier in the evening. He settled himself on the couch. His arm straight out, with remote in hand, Clark flipped through channels until he fell asleep, his hand dangling down the side of the couch, and the remote fell to the floor.
Maureen had already been at the hotel two days. She replayed the fight in her head. Her parents. The groups she led. Her job at the bookstore. She shuddered, literally trying to shake them off of her. I am NOT responsible for the whole world, she told herself. Just this once . . . maybe I need to be responsible to me.
She looked at the clock. 11:50. Checkout was in ten minutes. Clark would be in class right now, unless he had called in sick, worrying about her. Don't flatter yourself, she thought. She picked up the phone and called home. No. She picked up the phone and called Clark's House, she reminded herself.
Hi, this is Clark & Maureen. We're out in the trenches. Leave us a message.
Maureen hung up the phone. She felt the bags under her eyes, felt as if she had been crying for several hours. That she had been doing the kind of hard sobbing that made your shoulders shake and your whole body fold up. It had been days since she had really wept that way, but her eyes still held the memory in the extra flesh that swelled beneath her eyes.
She began to pack up her meager belongings and went to the front desk to check out. She walked down the street to the ATM machine and took out $300. Then she hopped a city bus to the greyhound station and bought an unlimited travel pass, then studied the bus schedule to see when the next bus was leaving. She would have to be out of town by early evening, or Clark would probably have tracked her down and would be trying to talk her out of this. She couldn't do this if she talked to him right now, and she knew she really wanted to do this. At 2:15, there was a bus headed for Omaha. She stepped into the snack bar for a burger and a Coke. She sat down at the counter, reading the remnants of the newspaper someone had left behind, trying as hard as possible to find something interesting among the business pages and the sports section until it was time to climb onto the bus.
Maureen ambled onto the bus and looked at the faces around her. Some people were still getting settled, trying to take off their coats, or fit their suitcases into the overhead racks. A couple of mothers were fishing out plastic bags with raisins and orange peels to keep their children quiet for the long bus ride.
Maureen took her backpack off and turned it sideways in front of her as she walked to the back, trying not to knock anyone in the head. She headed straight to the back seat. The back seat was like riding the bus on a sofa, if you could get it to yourself. It sat three people across, instead of the usual two, and anyone who was traveling cross country tried to angle for that seat, so that they could stretch out and sleep when they needed to. The downside was that it was right next to the bathroom, and on a hot day, the smell of the disinfectants could be overwhelming, even nauseating.
She settled in and leaned her head against the window as the bus started to pull away. She felt a know in her stomach. Maybe she should have left a message for Clark. What did he do that was so terrible that she should just disappear like that? She tried to shake these thoughts out of her head, but all she could see was his sleepy tear-stained face, the question over and over in her ear you never loved me? Maureen resolved to drop him a postcard at the first stop they made, just so he wouldn't worry. She settled herself back down and watched familiar streets and buildings pass by for the last time--ever? She kept asking herself why she was doing this if it was hurting her so badly. But she sat perfectly still, eyes on the houses and cars to her left, as tears rolled down her cheek. She brushed them back, wishing it were Clark's hand against her face.
She looked at everything one more time as the bus drove out of town. Buildings were reflected in one another. (Elaborate on description here.) This doesn’t have to be goodbye, she thought. And she knew it wouldn’t be forever. She didn’t know how long she would be gone, or what she would come home to, but she would make her way back.
Maureen missed clark already. As the bus passed the downtown park where they’d had lunch just last week, she wanted to jump up and beg the driver to let her off the bus, the way a squeamish child screams to be let off of a carnival ride that’s become too scary. Maureen fought off the feeling and settled back down into the seat. She breathed deeply and remembered the grocery store three nights ago. She couldn’t stay right now. The panic kept coming back and she breathed deeply and audibly, trying to fight it back down.
She looked at the people around her. The back was full of young dudes. The heads in front of her were all white, curly, manicured. Everyone under 60 was in the last five rows of the bus, stretched out with bags on their seats, like a fence around them, protecting them from seat seekers who would join them further down the line.
They rode past the capitol with its big bald dome head, wanting, really, to be the Vatican or some other mystical center, with an echoed hollow rotunda and its eyelid domes shadowed and outlined with paintings -- cherubs and fleur de lis. There were the ghosts of Clark and Maureen and all the crowds they had joined on the lawn, the invisible monuments that she saw more clearly than the immortalized founding fathers. She tried to remember how many state capitols she had visited. How many times she had stood inside, rubbing her palms on marbled banisters, climbing and descending, dropping banners from the center and raising placards toward the ceiling. With no definite plans ahead of her, neither did she know how many more of these she would pass through.
When the driver stopped for the first meal break of her trip, Maureen picked up a newspaper. She did this wherever she went--large cities or small towns. She shuddered to remember flipping through her own hometown paper, with news of people’s trips, names of those who got to meet the governor or congressman, the mayor’s arrest for peeping into sleepy bedroom windows.
Afraid she would miss the bus and lose what few belongings she had with her, Maureen did not linger in the truck stop, but got her food to go. She climbed back into the coach and spread out her hamburger and fries on the seat beside her, trying to leaf through the paper as she ate. Truck stop food was going to get too expensive to eat all the time. She was going to have to figure out a better way to do this, or her trip wouldn’t last very long at all. As she finished her meal, the white haired people and the dudes reentered the bus. She reached for her Coke, which started to spill when the bus lurched off onto its way.
Mo looked over the edge of its bus as it made its way up the ramp and back onto the interstate. The bus was too tall to be able to see the railing and she became disoriented, looking at the freightyard below which seemed only a tipover or a slippery wheel away.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Epilepsy
Many people don't know this about me, but I had epilepsy as a child and thankfully, I outgrew it, although I wonder what the adult implications will be now that I am getting older -- a predisposition to have a stroke (which I believe that I have had already) or Alzheimer's (which runs in the women on my dad's side of the family anyway) or other brain-related conditions that affect older people.
But I was very lucky. I grew up in the 70s and my parents tried very hard to make sure that I did all the same things as the other kids and did not make a HUGE deal about my epilepsy (although it was always there in the background). One memory that stands out is when one of my friends had a roller skating party. My mother had read that strobe lights can set of seizures in epileptics, and she and I drove the 20 miles into Peoria to check out the roller skating rink. She did that so that she could say yes to my going to the party. She could have just said no right away and lived with the consequence of having me whine for the next week (or 20 years). It wasn't until years later that I really thought about the implications of her doing that so that I could go to the party, and thankfully, I was able to thank her for doing that while she was still alive.
To my knowledge, my teachers treated me as they did anyone else. I think there might have been some things going on behind the scenes, which I have come to realize only upon reflection since I have been older. For example, when I first started high school, I was put in the lower level English class, the one that I later identified as borderline "remedial," which meant that I read from an anthology instead of reading Shakespeare, like the kids in the advanced classes. (Little did they know that I had read King Lear when I was 10!) But I paid those things no heed and they never held me back. I showed myself to be at the top of the class and by my junior year, I was able to pick my own classes anyway and after that year, I actually graduated. So if they were attempting to hold me back in any way, they failed, not me.
Most of my classmates knew I had a seizure every once in a while, and they would tell the teachers what to do when I had one. The teachers told them not to tell me about my seizures, but of course they did, including tales of how the teachers freaked out. (That was probably why the teachers didn't want me to know, but it was wrapped in the guise of "not upsetting me.") We would laugh about the behavior of the teachers as well as my own behavior during the seizure, because I would frequently do odd things before passing out. (Once, when we were playing baseball in the backyard, I apparently stepped off base and went to the neighbor's house and started sniffing the flowers.) Sometimes, when we had to do something we didn't want to do, my classmates would try to ask me if I could have a seizure to get out of an activity.l (I of course, couldn't invoke a seizure at will!) It was treated very normally among most of my classmates, friends, and neighbors.
I had no idea about the levels of discrimination that even existed during my lifetime that the author discusses in this article in Truth-Out. We had occasional comments from friends and family members to the extent that they were amazed that I was able to go to college or to do this or that, but I always thought that was just *their* ignorance. I had no idea that these were coming from shared social stereotypes and stigmas. I am glad that I was oblivious to this kind of thing because it meant that I just went about my life and did what I wanted to do at every turn, not feeling self-conscious about my epilepsy, not feeling like I had a "disability."
I graduated early from high school, I have my master's degree and several years toward my PhD, and have never felt that my epilepsy limited my opportunities. Consequently, I have also never felt ashamed to talk about it. I never felt a stigma. I encourage people with epilepsy to not be shy about talking about it. Just tell people around you, hey, I have epilepsy and sometimes I have a seizure, and here's what you do if you see me have a seizure. It's like coming out gay. The more people know people who have "hidden disabilities" or anything else considered "abnormal" by society, the more people see these people as competent, intelligent, creative, funny human beings just like everyone else they associate with, the more normal having these kind of conditions will become.
But I was very lucky. I grew up in the 70s and my parents tried very hard to make sure that I did all the same things as the other kids and did not make a HUGE deal about my epilepsy (although it was always there in the background). One memory that stands out is when one of my friends had a roller skating party. My mother had read that strobe lights can set of seizures in epileptics, and she and I drove the 20 miles into Peoria to check out the roller skating rink. She did that so that she could say yes to my going to the party. She could have just said no right away and lived with the consequence of having me whine for the next week (or 20 years). It wasn't until years later that I really thought about the implications of her doing that so that I could go to the party, and thankfully, I was able to thank her for doing that while she was still alive.
To my knowledge, my teachers treated me as they did anyone else. I think there might have been some things going on behind the scenes, which I have come to realize only upon reflection since I have been older. For example, when I first started high school, I was put in the lower level English class, the one that I later identified as borderline "remedial," which meant that I read from an anthology instead of reading Shakespeare, like the kids in the advanced classes. (Little did they know that I had read King Lear when I was 10!) But I paid those things no heed and they never held me back. I showed myself to be at the top of the class and by my junior year, I was able to pick my own classes anyway and after that year, I actually graduated. So if they were attempting to hold me back in any way, they failed, not me.
Most of my classmates knew I had a seizure every once in a while, and they would tell the teachers what to do when I had one. The teachers told them not to tell me about my seizures, but of course they did, including tales of how the teachers freaked out. (That was probably why the teachers didn't want me to know, but it was wrapped in the guise of "not upsetting me.") We would laugh about the behavior of the teachers as well as my own behavior during the seizure, because I would frequently do odd things before passing out. (Once, when we were playing baseball in the backyard, I apparently stepped off base and went to the neighbor's house and started sniffing the flowers.) Sometimes, when we had to do something we didn't want to do, my classmates would try to ask me if I could have a seizure to get out of an activity.l (I of course, couldn't invoke a seizure at will!) It was treated very normally among most of my classmates, friends, and neighbors.
I had no idea about the levels of discrimination that even existed during my lifetime that the author discusses in this article in Truth-Out. We had occasional comments from friends and family members to the extent that they were amazed that I was able to go to college or to do this or that, but I always thought that was just *their* ignorance. I had no idea that these were coming from shared social stereotypes and stigmas. I am glad that I was oblivious to this kind of thing because it meant that I just went about my life and did what I wanted to do at every turn, not feeling self-conscious about my epilepsy, not feeling like I had a "disability."
I graduated early from high school, I have my master's degree and several years toward my PhD, and have never felt that my epilepsy limited my opportunities. Consequently, I have also never felt ashamed to talk about it. I never felt a stigma. I encourage people with epilepsy to not be shy about talking about it. Just tell people around you, hey, I have epilepsy and sometimes I have a seizure, and here's what you do if you see me have a seizure. It's like coming out gay. The more people know people who have "hidden disabilities" or anything else considered "abnormal" by society, the more people see these people as competent, intelligent, creative, funny human beings just like everyone else they associate with, the more normal having these kind of conditions will become.
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