Sunny Juliet’s biggest winter thrill may be finding deer bones left behind by coyotes, but when she has enjoyed one for a day or two and her momma surreptitiously bags it and spirits it away, she makes do with any old bone, because however marrow- and flesh-free the bone, it has plenty of chewing left in it.
 |
| Sunny! Her very name speaks light. |
Reading for distraction
A good friend told me she is currently reading a book of ecclesiastical history by a 4th-century scholar! Feeling like an incredible lightweight, I admitted to her that I had laid aside The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, which I was inspired to read after reading the novel Perspective(s) by Laurent Binet, to re-read, for the -nth time, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, a book I know practically by heart. I told her I was “distracting myself from real-life lies and murder.” She replied with a confession of her own—that over the past two weeks she has re-read, for the fifth or sixth time each, six of the seven Harry Potter books! “Distractions,” she noted, “are intellectual life savers.” That made me feel better.
Serious reading
Besides casual bedtime reading of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (quite the hothead, as well as a marvelously gifted artist and craftsman), I've gotten started this week on a couple of other serious and more contemporary books—books of our own time, that is—one of those, Jamie Raskin’s Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Here is the stunning opening paragraph in the preface to Raskin’s book:
In the week between December 31, 2020, and January 6, 2021, my family suffered two impossible traumas: the shattering death by suicide of my beloved twenty-five-year-old son, Tommy, and the violent mob insurrection at the U.S. Capitol that left several people dead, more than 140 Capitol and Metropolitan Police officers wounded and injured, hundreds of people (including several in our family) fleeing for their lives, and the nation shaken to its core. Although Tommy’s death and the January 6 insurrection were cosmically distinct and independent events, they were thoroughly intertwined in my experience and my psyche. I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to disentangle and understand them to restore coherence to the world they ravaged.
January 6, 2021, was Rep. Raskin’s first day back in the House following the death of his son only a week before. Probably still in shock, he did not fear for his life while traveling to the Rayburn Building, despite threatening crowds and gestures from people in those crowds. The important procedure of the day was counting and certifying votes from all 50 states to insure the peaceful transfer of power, a procedure that had never in our nation’s history been sidetracked or prevented from occurring, and the Congressman was going to do the job he had sworn an oath to do.
When the mob breached the Capitol and members of Congress had to leave their Chamber for safety, Raskin says he felt “curiosity, anger, resolve,” but no fear, because for him the worst had already happened. His son had died. Reliving January 6 in the present tense, he continues,
But I am still in the land of the living, and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. He is occupying my heart and filling my chest with oxygen. He is showing me the way to some kind of safety.
My beautiful son is giving me courage as we flee the U.S. Capitol Building for our lives.
My trauma, my wound, has now become my shield of defense and my path of escape, and all I can think of is my son propelling me forward to fight.
Giving up on a book
I got this far in a draft on Friday and returned that night to Cellini but finally set him aside in disgust, 159 pages in, heartily sick of the man. I don’t even want to quote him but will only say that after so many pages of boasting and a temper that erupted time after timer into violence, even murder, it was his behavior at an overnight lodging place that revealed the man’s essential pettiness. Greatly talented, obviously, but thin-skinned, vindictive and petty in the extreme.
Here's the incident: Cellini and a friend are traveling and stop at an inn to stay overnight. The innkeeper wants payment for the room in advance rather than in the morning, and Cellini is incensed. He finally pays and is pleased to find a clean, spacious room with new beds and immaculate linens, but his sense of outrage persists. He contemplates killing the innkeeper, as one possibility. He considers slaughtering the innkeeper’s horses. At last he hits on the expedient of destroying the beds and linens—and is inordinately pleased with himself as he continues on his way! A mean, cowardly, and completely inexcusable “revenge” for something that was not even unreasonable in the first place—being asked to pay for a room before occupying it!
No, I do not want to spend any more time with this horrid, vile little man! I will keep the book in my home library only because it was, as a used book with illustrations by Dali, one of the first gifts I ever gave the Artist in my own life, and I keep it for the inscription, not for the content. I only hope my Artist never read it and only looked at the Dali art.
On second thought, maybe I will tear out and keep only the inscription page and ditch the book. What do you think?
Avoiding difficult subjects
The news this past week has been heartbreaking, enraging, and terrifying. As I see it, nothing less than the soul of our country is at stake, and yet there are people who think we should remain silent on politics when we disagree in order to keep family and community “peace.” Why, they ask, do we have to let one subject, i.e., politics, completely overtake our lives and relationships? Why can’t we simply talk about other things and avoid politics?
From where I stand, this means avoiding a subject that is on my mind every single day. It wasn’t always so, and my thoughts still free-range over a vast number of subjects, but right there in the forefront, these days, is the struggle for my country’s soul.
Thinking about not-talking-about-it, here are a couple historical scenes I try to imagine.
Picture family members or friends during the period of the American Revolution. Now imagine them split between those supporting the Declaration of Independence and those remaining loyal to the King of England and then trying to avoid politics in order to enjoy one another’s company and conversation. Can you see that working?
Or think of Americans with intertwined lives but opposing politics during the Civil War, a family or community riven by that conflict. Imagine a supporter of the Union, an abolitionist, asked to “avoid politics” in order to maintain a cordial, loving, ongoing daily relationship with a member of the Confederacy, perhaps even a slaveholder.
Imagine someone in either of these situations, in either of these time periods, saying something like, “Can’t we just have a nice Thanksgiving dinner and talk about other things?” People whose lives have not—yet!—been touched personally will think my examples are far-fetched and exaggerated, but I don't think so.
Pretend there’s no elephant standing between us in the living room? Pretend that your vision of the future (or a future you are unwittingly helping to create) is not my vision of earthly hell? Pretend that your political allies are not trying to wipe me and mine off the face of the earth?
Taking breaks
 |
| Happy news: NJ's is open again. |
Since last fall, I have been in a different kind of discussion, an ongoing conversation that is for me an island of sunlight in this dark, violent winter of our national discontent. It is a conversation without limits, meandering from the weather and what each of us had for dinner to literature, through history, and beyond. We share stories from our childhoods and younger years, talk of our families and other people we have known who were important to us. We speak of death and grief. No topic is too trivial or too grand or too puzzling or too silly. And yet we touch on politics and current (outrageous) events infrequently and usually only briefly.
There are two reasons why politics is not a larger part of this ongoing conversation. The first reason is that we don’t need to argue about it. We are in agreement. The second is that we don’t need to let that dark cloud come between us and happiness. When you have an island of light in your life, the last thing you want to do is trigger a power outage.
This is not avoidance. It’s taking a break, it’s recharging, it’s drawing and giving strength. See the difference?
 |
| A welcome morning sunrise |
No comments:
Post a Comment