So now that my little node of irritation that has not yet become a pearl is identified -- a need to be a "heavyweight" and its countervailing command to give all my credits to close males, who don't even know they are involved because its cultural rather than personal --so what do I do? There isn't a lot of time to do much though much much much needs to be done. Strangely, the dilemma tilts me towards biography, the explanation of others, which I push back against by looking for the big pictures, the long developments, the metaphorical moments. It also makes me useful to others.
The great benefit is that dealing with this stuff is so absorbing that it rewards me daily in a private but satisfying way. I see that being "lightweight" is a way to be passive and non-threatening, as though life were a spectator occupation that didn't ask anyone to risk their neck by making a stand. Our whole culture takes this path, allowing tragedy.
I'm a grandiose narcissist. I was born at the beginning of WWII and came to consciousness in a narrative that said individuals can heroically save others with small achievements. A friend said I was a French resistance spy delivering a crucial message by pedalling an old bicycle through the night rain, clenching the actual note in my teeth and knowing that if I'm caught I'll have to quickly swallow it. That's about right. Determination and endurance, but no explosions.
This puts me at odds with my family which accepts without question the middle-class terms of life. Oddly, those trappings -- piano lessons, public lectures, travel, books, "nature" -- in my family were only paid for by doing what is beneath people these days: field labor. My mother and my sibs and I picked berries and beans, my mother worked in a cannery for a month and did bookkeeping for a button business, but I never understood how to make money. I could never master the relationship between qualifications and salary or between abilities and tasks.
Money was actively resisted by me because my father used our weekly "allowance" to control our behavior. For a little kid such strategies -- based on operant conditioning which was "scientific" and thus all the rage -- was a "heavyweight" issue to me. In fact, converting intimate attachment to a kind of employment is connected to religion and sex -- morality and genetics. I'm looking through my papers to find an article justifying Lolita, that little twit, as taking care of herself by making her obsessed captor pay the bills. Cats must've hidden it.
Of course, this was a feature of Brit romances about marrying well. That meant becoming heavyweight by legal and moral commitment, while all the while pretending to be frivolous. Index Jane Austen.
In 1948 my father was driving a late night rain-sodden mountain road when his car was hit head-on, giving him a concussion in the prefrontal lobe, right side. Gradually his behavior changed and his temperament became volatile. I recognize Trump. My brothers got out by joining the Marines as soon as they were seventeen. I left for college on a scholarship. My mother assumed the burden of teaching when our father was fired. She was fine with that, even released by having her own job. Then my brother suffered a concussion, hit his head in the same place on his forehead and the story renewed.
In the end, the note clenched in my teeth said, "Save yourself." My mother was very angry with me that I was no longer middle-class, no longer lightweight, no longer someone who played by her rules. The question became finding a new context, a new view of life. All the rest is a quest.
And avoiding traps.
Newly repaired, today my pickup carried me to Shelby to the laundromat, a task long overdue. Snow still stretched over the hills, taut and crusted, way too early, cutting the fetlocks of livestock. All was curves of indigo and azure, a shallow wind curve taking a quarter of the sky where clouds piled up against the mountains. Few people on the road when I went -- more on the way back and by then the wind had hit the highway but no snow was loose to blow.
Somehow a bit of water had gotten into the pickup gas days earlier, but I carry a bottle of Heet, and that solved the problem. No repeat today. When I got home the cats were camped on the electric bed, so comfortable that none came to interfere with my laundry sorting. But they had been busy. Papers scattered across the rooms. I was only pleased that the house was warm, since it was cold when I had gotten up. There's a little sensor in the floor furnace that occasionally fails to respond. It only needs a little tweak.
These are tiny dangers, easy to cope with in order to get on with the real business, which is thinking. Print is only an enablement. Here I am.
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