Seven Versions of Ambiguity

For as long as I can remember, PRIDE weekend in the city has been festive and colorful. It's something to celebrate and New York feels like the center of it all.  The subways are extra crowded with excited visitors and parade participants.. the level of street noise is a little higher, and the bars, especially downtown, are packed and raging. 

This year, coming on the heels of a disastrous Presidential debate, I don't feel much like celebrating.  Saturday at Union Square I noticed only the summer homeless population-- the couple who sit outside Wendy's waiting for someone to buy them breakfast-- the beggars and signboards looking for train fare, a room for the night-- anything.  A particularly stenchy person was overturning trashcans and soliloquizing in some indecipherable angry language; anyone was a target for hurled containers and cups.  A few truly afflicted men napped on the sidewalk-- their legs swollen and oozing with untended sores. Another regular wears a hoodie and long pants with gloves, even in the late-June heatwave; his face is covered with disfiguring growths and neuromas so that he can barely see.  Children point at him, and he bows his head.  

I am failing these people, I think... where is their pride, where is their comfort?  Singlehandedly I do nothing. Yes, there are those-- mostly my son's age, who cavalierly hand out a $10 or $20, as though there is a bottomless supply. Me-- I am rarely carrying cash these days; my pathetic sympathy does nothing.

There's little worse, as an audience, than feeling anxious for the performer.  I had this presentiment all week; the very first minutes of Thursday evening's debate confirmed my worst fears.  And then it just lay there-- a kind of pathetic circus of old-man caricature versus the blustering buffoon who looked comparatively solid.  

What some of America  doesn't comprehend is the innocent celebration of freedoms and alternative opinions is threatened.  It's not just a presidential election, it's a move rightward to a platform of dictatorial narcissism.  Where is our choice?  'Either/or' no longer suffices.  And yet, that's where we seem to stand at the moment.

Pride... I thought more about the deadly sin described in Proverbs as the precursor to disgrace and destruction--that which goes before a fall.  The Lord, says Proverbs 16, 'detests all the proud of heart'. Since religion- -specifically Christianity-- seems to be creeping into politics, how does one process this? The Proud Boys-- all the participants in the January 6th incident-- will be rewarded, as democracy dissolves in an old bucket. 

My generation is proud of our children, our parents who fought wars and weathered the depression.  Some of us are proud of ourselves-- our accomplishments and our success that have enabled this version of America with its bloated wealth and alarming poverty.  Some of these people forget their roots in the 1960's and vote to preserve their own bank accounts.  They resent immigrants and social welfare programs. No one of them wants affordable housing on their block, or a shelter, or a migrant hotel. 

I know there were demonstrations during the Pride march--the suggestion of violence.  A gay rabbi boycotted this year because she was confused about the perception of her Palestinian sympathies. We are people, all of us... and yet we are polarized by beliefs. Mostly there is anger... the uptick in crime on the trains and the streets reflect this.  Any excuse-- politics, religion-- to burn off steam and maybe beat someone up.  

Pride, according to several passages in the Bible, is the root of all evil.  Not the kind of pride displayed by the June parade, but the kind displayed by the presumed Republican candidate. It's ironic to me that the Red states are reinstating much of the Church-and-State intimacy which was banned in the name of freedom. We are going backward, unraveling the path of progress that made us feel safe and proud to be American.

And the majority of people just went on with their lives today-- they went to the Hamptons, they played tennis, barbecued in the park, shopped... laughed, maybe even went to church.  At a point the sky virtually opened up and poured enough to halt the baseball mid-game. You'd think one would be reminded of our good fortune here... that we are not drowning and overcome, we turn on a faucet and water comes out-- clean water. For those of us who struggle, we can get food stamps to help with groceries... for now, while we have an inclusive local government.  

I visited my 98-year-old neighbor today whose failing eyes and ears reminded me to value what it is I have.  She worked in fashion and championed models of all colors and affiliations.  While she rarely leaves her apartment now, she could teach us all a thing or two about history. In the city today, few people were listening; they were partying, parading, drinking, eating, being happy.  Not that I am against these things, but my sense of pride in all its complicated definitions and manifestations is deeply troubled. 

When my neighbor was born, Coolidge was President.  He was known for doing very little to curb business interests, little for agriculture and the poor.  He declined to run for a second term, and when he left office, the Depression followed soon after.  In the interest of our national survival-- the democratic cause, our current president needs to swallow his version of pride.  We need to figure this out before it's too late, before all versions of pride are confounded and damaged. 

It's Sunday; I could use a sermon. We could all use some old fashioned peace, love and understanding. And a dose of leadership. Amen.

Deadly Shames

When I was a teenager and my father was going through one of his PTSD post-war 'episodes', I hid in the upstairs hallway and eavesdropped on his conversations with my mother.  Some things were inaudible, but after begging my mother to unravel the root of the latest patriarchal angst, she related a story as best she could.  It seems when he was Captain of the 101st Airborne, he had a driver who happened to be a black man.  They were close; my father was anything but a bigot, although he had his rules and boundaries. Anyway, on an especially perilous assignment, the driver asked him to promise that if he were ever mortally wounded, my father would go to see his family, in the midwest US, and explain in person what had happened.  He wrote down all the particulars, and my father swore. 

As it happened, a grenade hit their jeep; my father was wounded but his driver was killed.  Certainly the family got the mandatory telegram and official condolence. My father recovered from the injuries, returned to active duty until August, 1945.  He'd meant to keep his promise but never did.  Before the end of his life, he apparently confessed this to a group of Old Guard veterans who finally, at 80-something, were facing their war-demons with the help of a professional psychiatrist, and maybe got some relief.  He would not have shared this with me.

Years before, when my mother told her version of the story, she hoped I'd show some compassion for my father who was tough and harsh and suffering from not just combat but private guilts.  It helped for minutes; but it occurred to me as well that it was not too late. 

I've struggled in relationships with difficult men and alcoholics, like my father.  The common denominator is not just the baggage of guilt, but the cult of shame.  Shame allows one to continue to avoid difficult truths, and paves a future path that carries the limp of the past.

At the gallery where I work Saturdays, there's a fantastic Robert Gober show that deals with so many historic, emotional and ethical issues.  One of the pieces he chose is an unpretentious ceramic sculpture by Mary Carlson.  It is a tiny, fragile bust of a woman with long hair, covering her face with her hands.  The artist credits Masaccio for inspiration.  The genius of Gober's curation is that among the layers on layers of interrelated narrative, individual pieces resonate personally for the viewer; it's nearly impossible not to be moved by some object or juxtaposition. There is something for everyone, and for me it is this tiny sculpture.  

I remember well in college visiting the Brancacci Chapel in Florence where I had ample time to study the Masaccio Expulsion of Adam and Eve.  Unlike this tiny ceramic, the figures are monumental and heavy. When I saw them, in the 1970's, they still had the fig leaves which were painted in by order, and removed only in the 1980's after restoration.  But the howling face of Eve, and that of Adam, covered by his hands, are the epitome of human shame.  

Certainly Freudian and other psychologists and sociologists have dissected the subject.  Gober, whose work is impressed with the tragedy and aftermath of the AIDS crisis in New York, is well aware. Studying religious art, I realized that sin is one thing, but shame is the emotional scar one carries.  In the case of my father, and so many alcoholics,  this grows-- it becomes ingrained, and often they manage to transfer it to their children-- like a sort of haunting they fail to exorcise.  Shame, like disease,  is contagious.

Forgiveness is a component of the antidote-- forgiving oneself as well as somehow atoning for whatever crime or oversight tripped us up in the first place.  Most often, perpetrators lack shame, while innocents, overwhelmed with compassion and self-criticism, process their lives as failures, burden themselves with shame they have not earned.  I have friends-- myself included, who feel they do not deserve a happy, healthy home, or some accolade that seems to have come too easily. 

My first husband was a black man.  He was a celebrated musician and a charming person, but interracial marriages were still the exception in those days.  My father was livid.  Both parents boycotted our wedding and basically excommunicated me. The marriage was tough enough; while we're still friends, my ex recently accused me of not wanting a half-black baby.  Of course this couldn't be farther from the truth; I was young and we were both irresponsible. But I began to think about my father, and whether in his sickness he had interpreted the racial issue as a personal reminder of that failure to contact his driver's family-- a thorn which had accompanied his lifelong torment, or more likely simply the scapegoat of a horrific and lengthy war experience.  Being decorated as he was, he always maintained the true heroes had passed away and it was not appropriate to celebrate oneself.  

It's apparent to me that guilt precedes shame... but shame does not necessarily follow.  Still, among the killings, the suicides, the longings and failures, the rejections and divorces, people are suffering; they are sorry, and they regret.  And the legacy of shame distorts not just the narrative but its truth. The current violence not just in Israel but wherever it exists, will ripple down through grief, through pain and bloodshed, and through the lives of all those who perpetrate these acts, who have learned nothing from the past, from art, from the silent wounds that old soldiers hand down to families. It's never too late to repent of poor judgement, to pay for acts of violence which are in the current situation shameless.  Looking at the little ceramic sculpture today, cut off as she is and nailed to a wooden table, I see not just shame but horror.  This is a human reaction not a judgment. And a reminder that these issues, these conflicts... the lineage... goes farther back than those frescoes, farther than any of us can remember.

Crimea and Punishment

A friend of mine bought me a Murakami novel a couple of weeks ago. He came by to deliver it but I so rarely hear the bell downstairs or even answer the phone in my post-pandemic insulation.  It will take me a while to adjust to spontaneous door-knocking and full-frontal facial nudity.  While he didn't leave the book, in his honor I took another one from the good old NYPL.  I liked it-- until the end, that is.  Many writers have this issue with endings... like they fall in love with their characters and can't bear to leave... or they have multiple finishings... like a sort of round table discussion in their head, with the characters in triplicate, discussing.  And it hurts the book; a good story already has an ending. 

In this case, the characters sort of split off-- like they could see another version of their own reality... death and life coexisted-- the ending and the plot.    One of the women even had white hair and black hair, not that this is so unusual in our cosmetically facile culture.  After all of the credible reality and details Murakami set up, it just seemed like a cop-out.  A space ship comes down and airlifts someone... or you simply disappear, like one of those strange mysteries.  In our society, missing people haunt us; for the most part, like milk-carton children or even that Gabby Petito-- there is evil in the explanation. 

It was especially disappointing because I identified with the character. Hard to imagine Japanese girls being messy and badly groomed... on my visit there they were spectacularly put together... but it was part of her charm.  Murakami protagonists-- and narrators-- are often disarmingly direct and candid.  It seemed obvious to me that her disappearance was out of character and engineered by the author.  I prefer when the characters tell us writers what to do, lol.  Literary fate.

I am resisting the temptation to go off on one of my academically ingrained analysis-tangents.  Murakami can inspire this sort of thing... and every so often, despite the omnipresence of detail, there are these blurred adventures which step out into a sort of unlikely dream, or alternate reality.  For the realists and sleuths among us, this can be challenging and annoying.  But lately I have had these overpopulated dreams-- with plots and armies and characters and weather and animals;  they last for what seems like hours and bring me into a morning-after mental hangover.  Not unlike these novels. Waking I find some of the tragedies and losses of my imagination quite real.   

Even more than that, it forced me to think about perceived and actual realities, as manifested in the narrative of this horrid Ukranian war.  I don't pretend to understand the complexities of the disagreements and the difficult history of Crimea and its affiliation. As often in these territorial wars, the people inside the borders are not as cleanly delineated as the political boundaries.  But the main issue is the humanitarian crisis that has emerged.  And the manipulated distributed journalism in Russia is disturbing, unless we are misunderstanding entirely.  Lack of transparency, personal threats, imprisonment for opinions-- these are all qualities of a bullying and paranoid government.  While a solution seems near-impossible, it is unacceptable that innocent civilians pay the price of despotism and aggression.

Mysteries abound; people are missing, lost.  Families are divided and things have been left behind.  I have read Russian stories claiming they are rescuing Ukraine from Nazi forces.... they are liberating and protecting the people.  The POW soldiers insist a similar fiction has been their motivation.  Another story today accused the Ukrainians of inventing casualty statistics-- of  'staging' these photographs of the dead and wounded for effect.  How can these realities co-exist?  

Fake news... we are all-too well-acquainted with the term and the meaning.  The UK poet laureate used the term in his new official poem decrying the war.  'False news is news with the pity edited out,' he says, with maybe  a little intentional clumsiness... but I choose to continue to see it as news with the truth removed, and reality skewed or divided or manipulated.  Rather than 'Resistance' the poem seems to convey a sort of impotent spectator-ly dismay.  

Maybe acceptable in fiction, this lassitude of conviction and failure to convict... but with the reality of a war, the threat of annihilating a country... well, not nearly enough.  I'm not sure what is demanded of us here... perhaps if the theatre of conflict was closer to us, we'd be more active, more alarmed.  It seems discussion and talk have been dismissed;  how did we end up here, watching a hideous version of political failure become bloody and tragic history?  Why is war the chronic destroyer of peace?  Are there not enough problems without these absurd man-vs.-man killings in the name of some propagandistic principle?  

I think it's time we name a few additional sins.  The seven seem not nearly sufficient for what ails not just Eastern Europe but the global geo-political pandemic of greed.  I wonder how long it's been since Putin read Dostoevsky... a writer who understood endings.  And sin. At this moment in time repentance may seem a lot more appealing than conciliation.