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Archive | Past Matters

Split at the Root: Part I

June 14, 2020 in Age Matters, Church Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Past Matters, Quoth the Raving

untitled by Chantal Joffe

If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking through for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the river bed
with its five fingers spread
–Adrienne Rich

This is a story I began writing when I was 34, the last age of Ute, whose story this really is. I am 49 now, and what were cracks in our country’s landscape then have become continental divides. But deep in the soil of this stolen land, the rot was always there, threatening to poison us all.

I knew Ute in 1998. The temperatures were already climbing. Justice as always was only truly available to those deemed human by the Founding Fathers (such a small percentage of us). Rodney King was not so far in the rear view mirror, but had already been obscured in White America’s memory by OJ in his white Bronco,  launching the whole of reality TV culture in that one uber-televised police chase leading finally to Donald Trump’s White House.

As I write this, there is no stable ground—only lethal virus, lethal white supremacy and capitalism. Righteous fury in the streets, dangerous dybbuks in the spreadsheets. I have been sick too—not with COVID but a urinary tract infection that has bloomed into my kidneys and triggered every trigger I didn’t know I still had.

My ability to filter toxins is completely maxed out.

The first day I experienced these symptoms, a first draft of Ute’s story fell onto my desk. It had been securely pinned to my bulletin board for more than a decade but on that overly warm May day, the printout suddenly dropped onto my desk.

I felt sicker.

The summer she and I knew each other, I was 27– the age when you either step into the path of adult life or die. Back then the curse of 27 wasn’t discussed as it is today. Nothing was. The Internet was still in its infancy. When I needed information I went to the library or called up a smarter friend. When I needed companionship, I showed up in people’s bedrooms. When I needed help, I prettily cried Uncle. Continue Reading →

Traveling Where We Dare Not Travel

April 10, 2020 in Country Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters

This post addresses lofty stuff, but I ask that you hang in with me if you have the available bandwidth.

I woke thinking about my college thesis. I concentrated in gender studies at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges–basically about as 90s identity politics as you can get. My thesis was about the theory of praxis–in particular, the marriage of theory and action in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed as it could be applied to Marge Piercy’s brilliant utopian/dystopian 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time.

Wildly on the edge of its own time, the book acknowledged the multiverse and envisioned a potential 2137 in which people lived in communal villages free from capitalism and the blistering restrictions of contemporary gender and racial coding as well as biological nuclear families. It seemed like a softball to receive departmental honors, if I’m going to be honest. But I made a fatal strategic error.

In the oral defense of my thesis, I was asked whether I endorsed the murderous measures that the time-traveling protagonist–a Puerto Rican woman living on the poverty level in her 1970s timeline–had taken in order to rise up against the oppressive mid-20th institutions that literally were caging her and her brethren. Of course, I said. There are times when violence is required–when the peaceful thing to do is dismantle your oppressors by any means necessary.

No prize for me–in retrospect it’s hilarious I thought a Quaker college would reward such a stance–but as I woke thinking about the robber barons committing mass genocide to line their pockets with more bucks and ensure their rule, I flashed fondly on the 22-year-old I was.

“It” of Wrinkle in Time (another crucial interdimensional travel book

There may indeed be a multiverse–as an intuitive I believe this more and more–but in every timeline I can see, I agree with that girl.

After all, who among us has not, in the last few weeks, wished what we never thought we could wish on another human being? Even vaguely alluding to such a thing breaks the law, and yet every moral law I heed has been broken every day of our reality TV dictator’s rule.

Through the Past But Never Over It

January 22, 2020 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Past Matters, Style Matters

This is my mother in 1967. She was 24, which means she had just changed her name from Mary Susan to Sari Musan (true) and married my father the year before.

As a child I thought of my mother as a redwood oak. Six foot tall in stocking-feet, she loomed over everyone else, even my father, who ogled her like the cat who ate the canary even when she was covered in sweat from doing Jane Fonda. Especially, come to think of it, when she was serving him matzo brei. With her blue-gold eyes and curving mouth and cheekbones, I guess I knew she was beautiful. But mostly I read her frustration–stuck in the suburbs, stuck with two screaming brats, stuck in compromises that whisked her away from a city career as an art designer, barely making ends meet but having so much more fun.

My father would tell me, “You’ll never be as beautiful as your mother” while she’d look away demurely, and even when I was small I’d think, What a fucked-up thing to say. But today I was nosing around the recently refinished basement of my apartment building and stumbled upon a box containing old letters and photos from my teens. There gleamed my twentysomething mother in a repose I’d long forgotten–lowered lids, pursed lips, goddess dress and tresses flowing. Venus in your bloodline: That’s something all right.

I find it no coincidence I excavated this image right before revising my book.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy