Wednesday, February 26, 2020

AS THEY SAY, "DEEP DIVING"

The kind of writing I've been pursuing off and on is thinking about deep wounds and dilemmas from the past.  This is not "misery lit" about how hard life can be for some -- I always had enough, sometimes barely but never depriving.  Rather it's regrets and vengeances and oppressions that I didn't recognize, much less control.  It's about thinking, written because of thinking, which is my approach to just about everything because that was rewarded and encouraged by teachers and books in my early years.

"Who can tell me what 'skipping' means?" asked the second grade teacher.  My hand goes up.  I'm one of those wretched "teacher, teacher, I know" people.  I need attention and rewards.  Besides, I know.  Teacher says, "All right, Mary.  Show us what skipping is by skipping around this classroom."  So I do and every other kid hates me for being a showoff and who gives a damn what skipping is?

My reward for being so smart is that the teacher lets me wash out the saucepan she used to warm her lunch soup.  I can smell that deep-sink mop closet yet, a mix of muck, rust, disinfectant and wet mop string.  My mother found out and that was the end of that "reward."  I had not seen it through my mother's eyes.  It was maybe 1947 and no one had much, but we had our pride.

In high school I was devoted to dramatics and though I had parts on stage, what I preferred was backstage.  I was asked to help paint the flats for "All My Sons."  The back of the house.  First I made the mistake of using water-based paint when it should have been oil-based.  That was corrected.  Then the teacher called me out to the audience seats to look at the set.  She was frustrated.  "Look," she said.  I was supposed to be painting siding, but instead of straight boards, I had painted the curve of the circumference of my reach.  Someone else repainted it.  Probably the teacher.  It wasn't that I wanted to please her -- it was that my morality was based on always being right.

My mother was Presbyterian, conventionally.  Her code was unquestioned until late.  She was a churchwoman because her parents were, though her mother was really Baptist, much warmer and Jesus-based.  I had no way of knowing all this.  In 1952 the World Council of Churches published a straightforward and readable version of the Bible which I decided to read cover-to-cover.  I got as far as Noah's daughters getting him drunk so he would get them pregnant and stopped, overwhelmed.  It was not just the sex, but the drinking.  We were a temperance family, which all my cousins and sibs conveniently forgot as soon as they reached adulthood. 

Looking back, it was not conventional morality that shocked me, but an unconscious sort of morality, psychological -- even biological -- unfelt until it was violated.  I was afraid of something that everyone in the family was terrified to admit, something world destroying.  Something that the generations had denied, the entire culture -- well, the part that was proper and virtuous -- refused to look at.  Still does.  It was not that moral codes are cultural and used to be held specific to nations before they began losing their boundaries and moving their people around the world.  It was a plate tectonics of morality, the deepest levels of what Damasio calls "homeostasis", the achievement of survival.  Deeper.  Because why should one kind of being persist while the next one dies?  Why should we kill each other out of competition and dominance?

When I'm exhausted with writing for the day, I stream Netflix and Acorn.  I'm impressed by how many plot lines are about fathers and daughters.  We're stuck on Antigone and Iphigenia, but they are now usually beautiful young women, self-righteous and identity-challenged.  (Not like Medea.) Sometimes they hate their fathers, sometimes they don't know who their fathers are, and sometimes the father saves them.  It's not just that females are fertile or that the sexual revolution has changed the power games.  It's as though the daughters were aspects of the fathers.  If Oedipus and his mother were unknowing incest, what would Lear and his daughter be?  A moral incest?  One standard of behavior fucking another?

Today the media is frank about Trump's sexualization of Ivanka and publishes the photos of her underdressed in his lap.  It expresses the Euro obsession with the virginal, usually blonde, not quite mature, OWNED female that a father can play with.  Part of my contempt and nausea with Trump is from my own father, who suggested openly and cheerfully that when I was old enough he would take me to a burlesque show. He seemed to think it was just innocent entertainment.  My mother put a stop to that idea.  She didn't know that because our bus went through the part of town with both the burlesque theatres and the Romany (Gypsy) colony, that they were rather linked in my mind, but the priority went to the women in robes and glittering jewelry who sat together on straight chairs in the sunshine just outside the door of old industrial buildings.  Their lives were defined, guarded, with a tight morality of good behavior.

My curiosity was unbounded, therefore immoral, something like my interest in the gay network, which has lessened now that I realize that they are in many parts, some at war with others.  That's a different story challenge.  But it's relevant in part because I'm much more wary of women's networks.  Experience has taught me.  The worst attacks were women in competition over something they imagined.  I see some of them are retiring now, so it was long ago.


My best friend as a child was Catholic, conventional, a mother of many, conforming, and sometimes restless.  She was horrified by what I said at my mother's funeral, which was not sugar-coated.  In fact, it turned out to break the relationship more than my education did, though that ended many of my early relationships, even in the early teaching years.  Going deeper into one's inner morality is a kind of spelunking filled with danger and loss.  But not doing it can feel like sin.

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