When my sister was born, she made herself known. Screamed so loud, they moved her to a room far from all the other babies. But two years later, when I came along, it was different. I did not make a sound. In fact, I was so quiet, from what I understood, my mother was pretty sure I must be dead.
As a child, death was never too far from my mind. Long and hard would I gaze upon roadkill, awaiting a twitch. In fifth grade, a guest speaker came to frighten us about drugs. He included a statistic on teen mortality. Said you could expect at least one of us would not live past eighteen. I concluded it would be Brenda, a girl who had dandruff. In the days after, I watched, amazed, as she continued to eat lunch, and perform other ordinary tasks, as if the long black shadow didn’t hover so close. You might call it a preoccupation, these thoughts. Or a hobby, but not the kind you enjoy. Through the years, teachers would ask what I spent class daydreaming about, but how to tell them, “We are all soon to die.”
So, the story of how I was born made me wonder. What if no one had noticed that I was alive? What if I’d ended up tossed in the garbage, or whatever happened to babies in cases like that? On the other hand, what if my mother had been right all along? What if all who loved me were only pretending that I was alive, so as not to hurt my feelings, when the unavoidable truth was that I was actually dead? It might account for how my fingers and toes in the winter sometimes wouldn’t warm up.
The thought of being born dead stayed there, hung in my firmament, a very long time, with facts like “my people are stout” and “I have a large head.” Things neither good nor bad, only true. Until some time, as an adult, when I mentioned the story of my birth in my mother’s hearing. “Dead?” she said. “No! C’mon! I said I thought you were deaf.”
What if it the story you live by got handed down wrong? Or at least incomplete? Take Jesus, for instance. Go into any church around Christmas. Their Nativity Pageant has the wise men on stage, hanging out with the shepherds. It’s fine pageant, true. But what they are doing is not in the gospels. Luke has the shepherds. The wise men? In Matthew. Mark skips any birth story to pick up with the baptism of the full-grown Jesus. And John tells it the way a man on the bus mutters about the government and somebody named Sharon. Some will point out that no one took notes at the birth of a no-name in backwater Nazareth, that any version at all was only tacked on much later, to fill in the blanks. What we’re left with is less like a story than a bag of bright Legos, dumped out on the rug.
So, go ahead, mash them all together. Shave down the edges. Make one seamless whole. Many put on a pageant. Who can blame them? We need something to go by when the night is so dark. But the truth, it still whistles around and through us, not to be bottled up. Not in one single story, nor in any one body. Christ comes in fragments, in disjointed gospels. Like broken glass on the pavement that only hints at the whole. And what is true about us might be somewhat the same. “I am large,” said Walt Whitman. “I contain multitudes.” And even that wasn’t the whole of it.
So, look, I don’t deny that each breath draws us closer to our last. We are bound for the grave. From dust we have come, and to dust we’ll return. But that’s only one story, only one way to tell it. Others alongside it tell of far greater glory. Of how the eternal turned out to be here, all along. How the flesh, squeezable, lovable though it may be, could not be all we are. Amazing stories. Ones, if you heard them, you just would not believe.
Last week, my partner and I spent five days and four nights in the hospital with our one-and-a-half-year-old kiddo. Little Bean has a congenital cyst that has now gotten infected twice since she was born. Once infected, she has to be on IV antibiotics and the cyst has to be surgically drained. Though thankfully not life-threatening or even life-altering, still, it was a stressful and tiring week. We took turns rotating at night between the (more comfortable) fold-out cot and the (less comfortable) recliner. I had to concentrate to remember what day it was when I put on the clothes I was wearing. When unexpected events like this hospitalization come our way, it was and is easy, so easy, to feel totally overwhelmed by everything else in our lives demanding our attention.
I know our general situation is not an unusual one. But someone I read about recently has me approaching it in a fresh way. I have always tended to be a fairly reflective person, wanting to fully process things, journal about it all, go to therapy in order to better understand myself and others, all of that. In the Unitarian Universalism congregations and communities I have grown up in, significant value is placed on developing self-awareness, on the “free and responsible search for truth on meaning.” I have taken that charge to heart by looking for the deeper meaning in everything that happens, constantly asking myself “what can I learn from this?” But what David Kessler’s story makes me wonder is: is it possible that sometimes self-reflection is not actually all-that-helpful? Might it be better, this time, to just focus on the tasks that need to be done?
I remember when I was in 11th grade, hurtling down the stairs in the morning and zipping off on my bike to a 7:20am “zero period” English Lit class. The mantra I would repeat to myself on those hectic mornings was simple: “don’t-think-don’t-think-don’t-think.” Sometimes there is good reason to engage in deep reflection and discernment about a decision or a transformative event in one’s life. And sometimes it’s best to just do the dishes, do the laundry, tackle the tax paperwork, and catch up on the details of life, acknowledging that we all get overwhelmed at times, and that is all that it means. In an age when “mindfulness” is frequently touted as the ideal state, I am aware that there is also still a place and time for keeping ourselves busy and trusting that there will be time for any necessary reflection later. Right now, perhaps what most needs to be done, to quote a much-loved Marge Piercy poem, is “to pass the bags along.”
I have a terrible confession: almost all of the calories I consume in a day, I consume after 8pm.
No, I don’t cook extravagant dinners late at night. Far from it. I eat junk.
I’m not proud of it. I know that eating late at night is the worst sort of thing for my health. I have talked with my physician about it. I’ve talked with therapists. I’ve talked with nutritionists.
I have even stopped doing it for, oh, two or three days at a time.
As a matter of fact, the thought that I shouldn’t do it goes through my head each evening. Right before I head for the fridge.
And the knowledge that I shouldn’t do it . . . adds to the rush I get when I do do it.
This is a terrible confession. But you who have not sinned may hurl the first stone. Perhaps binge eating doesn’t appeal to you. OK. But something does . . .
Something you know you shouldn’t do. Bacon. Scotch. Pistachio ice cream. Gambling. Driving too fast. Drunk-dialing your ex. Sex. Drugs. Doritos.
Something.
Yes, you know you’re going to face-palm when you wake up the next morning. But you just can’t stop yourself.
Many Christians blame it on “original sin,” but a quick survey of the wreckage around us shows that sin isn’t all that original. You who have not sinned may hurl the first stone.
OK, so I know that’s not what St. Augustine meant by the “original” in “original sin.” But there is certainly a connection between those seven deadly sins—wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony—and the sort of thing I’m talking about. They are all things we do because they come naturally. Each is an easy answer in the immediate moment, though each is fairly clearly not good for us in the long run, if by “good” we mean . . . well, what? Our animal selves?
Why do we fall so easily into those patterns of behavior described as the “deadly sins”? St. Augustine thought that it’s because we’re born that way—we are born into a fallen world. I don’t think St. Augustine’s answer quite survives Occam’s Razor—it is not the simplest explanation by a long shot.
But the fact remains: why do we do what we know we shouldn’t do and that we know we will regret?
Despite the fact that he’s been dead for a hundred and thirty-three years, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky still has the best explanation, I think. His insights continue to challenge our most sacred of cows.
In his time, most Europeans believed that humanity had finally rounded a corner, and that the human future would be determined by rationality and reason—the greatest good for the greatest number.
Dostoyevsky was there to say this was not the case . . . and never will be the case.
Of all the reflections on why we human beings do what we do, from philosophers to neuroscientists, Fyodor Dostoyevsky still gets my vote for the deepest insight concerning why human beings make the choices we do:
“One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms.”
Dostoyevsky knew that the “most advantageous advantage”—for me that’s losing twenty pounds—the “most advantageous advantage” is NOT what might be reasonable and “right.” Rather, the “most advantageous advantage” is our exercising what we see as free will—making a “capricious” and “unfettered choice.”
Dostoyevsky asked,
“And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice?
What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”
Why? That’s the question we ask in those face-palm moments: Why? Why do we do that?
Philosopher Crispin Sartwell puts it this way: “When you consult your experience, the fact that you are a body is more obvious than that two plus two equals four.”
There: I think that’s it. And that’s what Dostoyevsky knew is the case: The physical trumps the reasonable. Virtue. Reason. Those don’t feel like independent choice, do they? They feel, well . . . wholesome. And wholesome, like two plus two equals four, doesn’t feel real, doesn’t feel embodied.
Isn’t the concept of original sin merely a complex way of saying that human beings are born with bodies?
And isn’t this the wellspring of so much of Western thought? Our dualism, our denial of the body?
The doctrine of original sin is all about how merely being born with a body, merely entering this world, makes us sinful. Fallen. Dirty. In need of redemption.
Well. Maybe you don’t buy that. But, when we turn the terms into “head” and “heart,” which do you think is more important? Which should predominate? Isn’t one about me staying in my chair and the other about my trip to the fridge?
Perhaps most people nowadays don’t think that the mere fact of embodiment— em-bodi-ment—the Latin prefix “em,” meaning “put into”—we perhaps don’t think that the mere fact of having a body has us on the highway to hell. But it certainly puts us in the way of some bad choices, doesn’t it?
Consider some other “em” prefixes: em-brace, em-bryo, em-barrassment. Fleshy stuff, isn’t this “em,” this being “put into”? Getting into a body appears to put us into quite a fix. I’m reminded of that Punk classic from Richard Hell and the Voidoids: “It’s a gamble when you get a face.”
I think that the most damaging idea in all of Western philosophy and religion is the body / mind distinction.
It led to the belief in a distinction between the body and the soul, which I think is a psychologically damaging and completely erroneous idea.
It led to the erroneous idea that consciousness itself is somehow distinct from the functioning of the brain.
These errors permeate Western thinking. Perhaps it’s easiest to see in the statement, “I have a body.” How could a human being possibly “have” a body? We can “have” a beer or a smoke or a snack or a new car. We can even have an opinion. But we don’t have a body: we ARE a body.
Rather than “I have a body,” the truer way to say this is, “I AM a body.”
Yes, Dostoyevsky said, people are capable of realizing the advantageous—what is good for us. But this knowledge, far from leading to rational decisions, shows us instead the way to REALLY mess things up.
I feel, as I head toward the fridge, liberated. I feel as if I were practicing free will. But am I? Or am I merely playing out my enslavement to one of the seven big sins, gluttony?
Dostoyevsky understood this dilemma. He was ruinously addicted to gambling. Still, in a world full of human beings whose actions can be predicted by statistics, what can we do? The irrational.
As Dostoyevsky had his Underground Man put it,
“The formula ‘two plus two equals five’ is not without its attractions.”
Environmental Justice struggles with a news cycle that may report a disaster, may revisit on the one year anniversary, but often abandons a community in the struggle of daily life. The media reported the Freedom Industries Chemical Spill in Charleston, first detected January 9th for about 72 hours. Maybe next January we will hear about it again…
In the meantime, the impact of the spill is ongoing. It is deeply uncertain when the water will actually be truly safe to drink and use again. Humans are born 75% water and are still more than 50% water in our final years. Water is not optional. It is essential.
Just this week, Rev. Joan Van Becelaere, Congregational Life Consultant & Regional Lead for the Unitarian Universalist Central East Regional Group (CERG), wrote:
Since the call went out, the situation has not improved.
People are still afraid to go to restaurants and service workers are feeling the brunt of that.
Pregnant women and small children are still being urged not to drink tap water and must buy bottled water.
Parents have been bathing their children in melted snow.
But adults are finding it difficult, too, and have bad reactions to the water.
Many, many folk are drinking bottled water – or trying to when they can afford it.
And yet folk are getting billed for water usage at standard usage rates.
The state government still is unable to guarantee the safety of the water.
And folk are still protesting.
I was just down there a week and half ago visiting our Charleston WV congregation.
They are still collecting funds to help pay for folks water bills, pay for home water system cleanup, helping service workers pay their bills, and buy lots and lots of bottled water for everyone.
If you have financial resources to share, please do. The Charleston congregation is committed to using your donations well; and thanks you for your care and support. Checks should be made out to: Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charleston (UUC) with the notation “Water Relief.”
Please mail to:
UU Congregation of Charleston
520 Kanawha Blvd W.
Charleston, WV 25302
I invite us all to stand on the side of love with West Virginia. Please spread the word about the on-going struggle, call on accountability from Freedom Industries and the EPA, let the people of West Virginia know that they are not alone, not forgotten. Beloveds, we are all in this together.
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
This quote, often misattributed to Plato, perhaps originally spoken by Scottish minister, Rev. John Watson, and found in many forms out there on the internet, is one of my favorites in ministry – and in life. Whoever who said it, it is so true. Is it not?
We know not the burdens our neighbor or the stranger in the check-out line carry, just as they know not what we bear. It helps to remember that each and all of us are, at one time or another, and more often than not, fighting some sort of great battle. We would do well to be kind, as we pray that others will be kind to us.
Here in the Northeast, we are desperately awaiting Spring, and we could all use some extra kindness. This week, as our clocks spring forward, may our spirits do the same.
I wish you whispers of Spring and small kindnesses.
Blessings,
Megan
“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
— Rumi
If you are like me, you have The List. You know, that massive to-do list filled with family obligations, work projects, chores, and writing tasks that need to get done in the day, week, or month.
I love The List. It keeps me on task, helps me stay focused, and prevents any massive panics about deadlines or missed appointments.
On The List this week was “write Patheos post” and yet, when Monday afternoon brought an all-family case of a stomach virus, leaving each of crumpled and desperate, I knew that The List would be thrown out the window this week.
Alas, we have all recovered. And yet, here we are, on Friday afternoon, and I am still digging out and catching up, with no Patheos post written.
Sometimes plans go awry, I suppose, and we just need to roll with it. Instead of scrambling to put together a subpar post, I will simply include the photo above, which I snapped while out walking the dogs yesterday afternoon. The photo is part of the Lenten Spiritual Practice, which consists of daily photo prompts throughout Lent. More photos can be viewed here…http://practicinglent.tumblr.com/. Special thanks to Mr. Barb Greve for this Lenten practice idea, to Kristina Hensley for the design, and to Karen Bellavance-Grace for the Tumblrization.
In the world of super heroes, it’s called an “origin story,” that trauma that led to the super hero being super.
Poor little Bruce Wayne watches helplessly as his parents are murdered. Superman rockets off the planet Krypton, sent away by his father moments before the planet explodes, only to find himself in Kansas where a loving couple adopts him and imbues him with truth, justice, and the American Way. Magneto and Professor X start out as just normal . . . mutants . . . but life experience sends one on to found the good-guy X-Men and the other to . . . electrical evil.
Clearly, the creators of super heroes believe that nurture trumps nature in that long debate between nature and nurture. But the more we know about genetics, the more we have to ask, is that true? Do our genes make us do it, whatever the “it” might be?
Science has been known to give us answers that we are not culturally capable of understanding. The most egregious moment of that in the Twentieth Century was the eugenics movement, that is, the belief that “better babies” could be produced by selective human breeding; and the corollary belief that those born with disabilities and those of races not of Western European origin, were inferior.
Liberal preachers preached it. Liberal people practiced it. It was part-and-parcel of the early birth control movement. And of course it led ultimately to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
It also led, in the US, to immigration laws barring most people not of Western European origin, and the forced-sterilization of thousands of people. Proponents believed they could eradicate mental disorders though eugenics; they believed they could eradicate alcoholism. Forced sterilization for those in mental institutions was a practice upheld by the US Supreme Court. Thousands of poor people were forcibly sterilized. And the practice of requiring sterilization as a pre-condition for receiving welfare checks continued in some states into the 1970s.
Their motto was, “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.”
Fact is, the Nazis got many of their ideas from the United States and used the example of the US to justify their actions to other nations all through the 1930s.
Today, we know this behavior well as the rhetoric of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and some far-out right-wing politicians. But liberals?
I don’t want to in any way justify these beliefs. They are despicable. Yet dismissing these ideas as something from the dark past is a very bad idea. Rather, we should look to that terrible chapter of American history as a cautionary tale. Because, besides being based in the most virulent forms of racism and ableism, political progressives also saw eugenics as good science: the latest in scientific knowledge. That’s the cautionary tale: Eugenics appealed to the very people who were most open to the theory of natural selection.
Why? One reason is that they applied the idea of natural selection—still not well understood by most people in the early Twentieth Century—to an idea most Americans knew very well at the time—the selective breeding of animals. Remember the motto I mentioned: “Eugenics is the self-direction of evolution.” Nowadays most people who look at the matter know that natural selection can’t be self-selected—the time frame is way too long for human beings to affect, or even comprehend, for that matter. But, most people did not know that at the time.
Here’s how the fatal error occurred: We have cats and dogs and ridable horses because of selective breeding. People figured this out a loooong time ago. My grandparents, who could barely read and write, were experts at selective breeding. Most farmers were.
People knew that traits can be affected in a short time among animals, and so they assumed that human genetics could be affected in a short time. And that simply isn’t true—not in animals such as human beings that have long lives, anyway. Fruit flies are a different story. As is the famous case of the tube (subway) mice in London that have evolved in about a century and a half to have grey coats that exactly match the color of paint used on the bottom of the London train tunnels. But people aren’t fruit flies or mice. Scientific ideas often become dangerous when they are applied to culture or human life on a micro-level.
Remember that Charles Darwin knew almost nothing about genetics: Mendel’s work on peas was in existence in Darwin’s lifetime, but Darwin never encountered the studies.
Remember that the structure of DNA was not discovered until 1953, well after the horrors of Nazism. The first draft of the the human genome appeared in 2001.
To that we must add that the overt racist and ableist assumptions in the US at the time made for the perfect environment for the eugenics movement. Racism and ableism permeated US society—from outright segregationist to progressives to just about everybody. Heck, even the Homeopathy Society supported eugenics.
We see the same sort of misapplication of science today: Despite what New Age gurus might claim, people are not lonely because we live in an expanding universe. We can’t walk through walls because there is lots of space between atoms. We don’t vibrate with cosmic vibrations because of String Theory.
And you don’t speed up natural selection through eugenics. The time scales of the two are completely different. All these are the realm of hucksters. And, in the case of eugenics, racists.
Take away: when science appears to support your preconceptions and prejudices, watch out!
No, there isn’t really a super hero who became Spider-Man because he was bitten by an irradiated spider. But here are some things that are real science that we easily forget:
Genetic research has taught us that the entire concept of race is a fiction. A mistake. There are no genetically identifiable races. Homo-Sapiens developed along about 200,000 years ago and some homo-sapiens began leaving Africa something along about 80,000 years ago. Human generations are roughly 25 years, which means that some homo-sapiens left Africa about 3000 generations ago; other homo-sapiens, such as our Somali neighbors, left in this generation. We’re all immigrants out of Africa.
Despite what the racists of the early-Twentieth Century believed, there is no “race” in the homo-sapiens population, only separation by time and cultural difference.
You may have read that President Obama is related to Harry Truman, Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Brad Pitt. This is not urban legend. But it doesn’t prove a whole lot either, except that human beings are all related, and that we tend to notice the famous ones and not the infamous or un-famous ones.
Until everyone understands this, we will have not only the egregious lunatics such as the Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan, but also the casual cliches that still permeate our culture and destroy the lives of too many people.
Poor little Bruce Wayne. He could have been a man of leisure. Superman might have hung out on Krypton (or at least Kansas). And there’s no telling what nature might have had Magneto and Professor X doing. As for us, we will have to continue wondering and speculating just how much of what we do is up to us and how much is up to our stars . . . and our genes. All will be well, so long as we remember humility in the face of a very large universe.
On a good night these days our Little Bean (aka, Little Night Owl) will unwind herself very, very slowly towards sleep, slowly-but-steadily, mostly on her own. We have always accompanied her as she falls asleep, and it’s neat now to see her, at 1-and-a-half, sometimes able to navigate the journey herself. Keeping her company while she’s unwinding and heading towards sleep has been reminding me lately of the field of music thanatology.
While I was a Chaplain Intern (for a summer) and then year-long Chaplain Resident at a hospital in Portland, Oregon, there was a music thanatologist on the staff. I was so inspired by her warm energy and dedication to her calling — to serve at the bedside of those going through the life-to-death transition, to provide gentle song and presence beyond words and conversation, particularly at that stage when conversation is no longer possible.
I tend to be a wordy person, one who wants to talk through things, so perhaps that’s one reason I find the field of music thanatology so mysteriously meaningful. Music can tune into our cycles of breath and ease our spirits in unmeasureable ways. And the presence of another person in the room is a palpable, energetic dynamic that is perhaps most notable when there is no one else there. I have sat in the rooms of dying people when there was no one else visiting them, and I will never forget the feeling of absence in those rooms, the visceral feeling of alone-ness surrounding some of those people. Not all, certainly — some were peaceful, content in the quiet. But some people ached to have someone else there in the room with them, I could see it in their eyes when I walked in, a sense of relief that there is someone else here now, someone else with me.
In a somewhat startlingly similar way that I’m surprised not to have noticed anyone else talking about, perhaps because it might seem morbid or ominous to some, babies and small children seem to me to be as unreceptive to conversation at their bedsides as the dying are. There is no rationalizing with a one-year-old about it being “bedtime,” or “past bedtime,” not really. I try anyway; I gently say to our Little Bean over-and-over again, some afternoons at naptime or evenings at bedtime: “it’s time for sleeping, sweetie.” I know that she hears me, and I also know that she has to unwind in her way, at her pace, roaming about the room for a bit, playing with her familiar toys, interacting with me a bit, having a book read to her, a song sung. Sometimes she wants a little more to eat, a little bit of water to drink. Gradually the distance that she is perambulating gets smaller and smaller, and then she is just sitting on her bed with her stuffed animals and her soft scarves. She may need to cry some. She might turn the light off on her own or want it left on. Then she’ll lie down and stare up at the ceiling or the shadows on the wall, and then, finally, she’ll close her eyes, and I’ll hear her breathing shift and deepen.
In all these subtle ways, there are parallels to the dying process that I notice. At the bedside of the dying, just as at my child’s bedside, it is a delicate art, keeping company without overstepping into her space. The transition happens on its own schedule, unrelated to whatever time might be glaring at me from the digital clock. I remind myself that my being there, physically in the room, matters enormously, on any number of conscious and unconscious levels.
One of the things I learned from the Music Thanatologist in Portland was to start out singing a song at one tempo and then, ever-so-gradually, slow it down. That can help relax the listener, help her to slow down her breath as well. I do this with our Little Bean almost every night and sometimes for her afternoon nap as well. Easing into sleep. Helping her learn to slow herself down.
There is a lot of time to stare at the walls and ponder things while keeping someone company at their bedside. This living, it’s all about savoring our days while acknowledging the inevitability of our dying, right? There is a common saying in the hospital chaplaincy world that “people die how they live” and I think about that sometimes. May all our transitions into sleep be gentle rehearsals for our dying, however it may happen, some long distant day far from now. And may we all practice being present with each other and with ourselves, as genuinely and tenderly as we can, each day and night until then. Wishing you good sleep. Peace.
I wish I could talk to my Great-Aunt Marie about the movie Twelve Years a Slave, but regrettably “Neenie” died when I was three. This spinster librarian from Detroit did, however, leave a legacy—a self-published book of family history. Written in 1957, this book documented my family’s years in Missouri in the 1800’s.
My parents ridiculed these books; giant unopened boxes of them filled our attic. When my father died, I finally brought one home and began to read it. To my shock, the very first line of the preface, written by Aunt Marie in 1957, tells me my ancestors “left a Virginia country environment where they were relieved of the drudgeries of workaday life by the labor of slaves…they were members of a society in which excellence in manners, morals, and religion were prerequisites.” In 1821, when Missouri became a slave state and offered land at $1.25 an acre, my ancestors migrated there.
I had always imagined these Missouri pioneer ancestors living in a house kind of like Little House on the Prairie. Never did I envision Ma and Pa and the kids with slaves out back, ‘relieving them of the drudgeries of workaday life.’ No one ever talked about our family history as slave-owners.
Aunt Marie says in her preface that the family letters, “too numerous to include, have been incorporated into dialogue. The conversations are necessarily fictitious, but the events are authentic. The story is a family diary with eighteen dramatic scenes.” In other words, old letters have been turned into the equivalent of bad 1957 church skits.
Each of these ‘dramatic scenes’ is scripted, with stage directions and settings written by Aunt Marie herself. These descriptions are the primary reason I wish that Aunt Marie and I could have watched and talked about Twelve Years a Slave together.
Here are a few of the lines Aunt Marie included to ‘set the stage’ for various scenes:
“Smiling blacks bear platters of food to the tables, while strains from banjo and guitar are heard from the rear.”
“Black folks … cluster around the well and weave in and out of the buildings, working, laughing, loafing.”
It wasn’t until I saw and reflected on Twelve Years a Slave and the history of cinematography about slavery that I realized where Aunt Marie’s images came from. They sprang, in technicolor, from her Hollywood-influenced mind. Hollywood has presented dozens of films with images just like the ones Aunt Marie described, showing slavery as a time when blacks smiled and laughed and loafed.
Now, thankfully, Hollywood offers a version of history more grounded in fact. Twelve Years a Slave takes its viewers into slavery, not through the eyes of the slave-owners, but through the eyes of Simon Northup, a freed black man from New York, stolen and enslaved. The film shows slavery as mundane, daily, ceaseless, violence and terror. Some African-Americans I know don’t want to see it, or loathed it. But as a white person, who doesn’t experience the daily relentlessness of racism, the physical intensity of the movie was transformative. Leaving the movie felt like stepping out of a virtual reality booth.
I suspect Aunt Marie would not want to have any of it. Her preferred view seemed to be that owning other human beings didn’t make a dent in one’s ‘excellence in manners, morals, and religion.’ Nor did ceasing to own other human beings involve any sense of repentance. As one ancestor wrote:
“I’m not going to let old John Brown or any confounded abolitionist steal my blacks… I shall free them myself. Freeing my servants will not be a financial loss to me. Most of the negroes I have were inherited. In return for their labor, I have given them food, shelter, clothing, medical care…and security in old age.”
When I utter judgment upon my ancestors, some white folks get upset with me for “imposing 21st century values” on 18th or 19th century people. Do we really have to talk about this? they all but groan.
I guess the primary reason I’m most grateful to Twelve Years a Slave is that it is a kind of family intervention. I was born in the latter part of the 21st century. Silences and lies about my family history were handed to me as intact and unbroken as the four sherbet dishes my mother gave me, which made the journey with my ancestors from Virginia to Missouri. If Aunt Marie, writing in 1957, had come to believe that owning other people was wrong, she never mentioned it. My liberal parents –civil rights activists–never saw reason to talk to us kids about this part of our family history. Like many white people, my siblings prefer not to talk about it now.
Though viciously brutal, the film’s truth-speaking is a relief. Finally! Because when do Americans, or families, sit down with each other and say, “Wow, that was us! We did that! What meaning should we make of that? How did we benefit? How were we hurt? How do we heal our nation? How should we live our lives now?”
Twelve Years A Slave may or may not win Oscars Sunday night. But its real value is in changed and enriched lives: lives of people like me who have new ways to talk about and challenge what Adrienne Rich called “the lies, secrets, and silences” which shroud our national and family and cinematic histories. If there were a category for “Most Necessary,” this would be, hands down, my choice for best picture.
stars will stop
gelling—the
hydrogen and
helium gone.
Someday, each
star will call it
a day & go to bits.
Someday the day
will be as dark as
night, the hydrogen,
the helium snuffed.
Someday, in, oh, say,
ten billion billion years,
time will eddy & stop.
Someday deep will
call to deep with
nothing here at all.
Someday here will be
empty like there,
in, oh, say ten billion
billion years . . .
So off we go to
corral the OK.
Off we go to
fish for the net.
Off we go, a link
in the unchained.
Off we go to someday.
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