What We Feel and What We Do About It

Sunny isn't angry but caught in rapid motion she looks a little crazed, doesn't she?

 

Anger:

Things were not going well for me on Monday and Tuesday, from a business point of view, and I don’t mean the expected post-holiday “cooling” (which is more like a solid freeze), but the fact that books I ordered from my national distributor in early December, with a back order in place, so I would be sure to have them by the book’s January 9 release date, had not even been shipped by January 9. They should have been shipped the previous Friday to get to me in time. On Monday I called customer service and spoke with a very pleasant young man about the situation, but he was too low on the hierarchy (bottom rung) and too far offshore (the Philippines) to be able to do anything for me. It’s Wednesday now, the book was released to the public yesterday, and my two orders are still not on their way to me.

 

In retrospect, I see that I should have ordered directly from the publisher. Hindsight. It never occurred to me that an order from my usual source of new books would not be honored in a timely fashion.

 

The online behemoth is sold out, on the first day of sales! They got their books! Are mine now being shipped to them? I am seriously and impotently pissed off.

 

…Sit with the anger. How does it feel? I feel disrespected. Invisible. Treated as valueless. Totally without power.

 

Yesterday I posted a question on Facebook in second person: “What would you lose if you gave up your anger?” One friend’s answer, which another echoed, was: “Stress, headaches, and more.” Okay, I’ll buy that. But when I put the question in first-person form, “What would I lose if I gave up my anger?” the question took on a different tone, because who would want to hang onto stress and headaches? No, I must be hanging onto something else, something important to me. 

 

Angry that my book order was not filled in time to have books by the on-sale date, what am I getting out of anger? What’s in it for me? If I can’t have the books, I’ll have instead -- .

 

Oh, yeah: Self-righteousness! If I’m powerless, I’m a victim. If I have been wronged, someone else is to blame. And I can feel, oh-so-right!

 

But.…  Does that feel good? Does it make me happy? Does it get me anything I really want – not only the books but visibility and respect?

 

(Do you recognize rhetorical questions when you encounter them?)

 

It isn’t even third prize. 

 

In this instance, there is no specific person to single out for blame -- which didn’t stop me from becoming very pissed off -- but what if, hypothetically, an individual could be identified? Let’s imagine some snotty Higher Up looking down at tiny little me (how likely is that? Ha!) and saying, “Don’t fill that order! Let her wait. Who cares about a little one-person bookshop in Northport, Michigan?” If that unlikely scenario were true, would blaming that HU get me my books any sooner? Make me feel respected and happy?

 

The truth is that I have no power here in this situation (I’ve done all I can do with phone calls and e-mails) and that life, as my father told me so often when I was growing up, is often not fair. And, honestly, this is one book release. If I don’t get first printings when my order finally arrives (assuming it does!), there’s nothing I can do about it, and although I’ll be disappointed (I’m already disappointed not to have the books on time), it won’t be the end of the world. It won’t even be the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. My husband died. That was the worst thing that’s happened in my life – and I’m still alive, still engaged enough with life to get all upset about a late book order! What foolishness! Cool it!

 

Altruism:

 

What I was thinking about most recently related to the brain stuff (see here, where I wrote about my top nonfiction picks for 2023) is the question of altruism. Psychologists and philosophers and others argue back and forth on this. Some claim that if apparently other-regarding acts benefit the giver (and studies show that they do: here is a whole list), then they are egoistic rather than altruistic. Freud saw altruism as neurotic, and Nietzsche saw it as antithetical to full human flourishing, while others point out that altruism, even extreme self-sacrifice, is not limited to the human species but can be seen exemplified in other animals, that we naturally care for each other, not only for ourselves, and that we would never survive otherwise.

 

(Does this remind anyone else of the nature vs. nurture question?)

 

I was thinking of the Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve dinners I took to our old friend. Why did I perform those apparently Good Samaritan acts? If it made me feel good, was it for his sake or really for myself?

 

Then dawn suddenly broke! What a completely left-brain question!!! The whole either/or, can’t-be-both manner of carving up the world is totally left brain! The need to have everything clearly categorized, right or wrong, yes or no. “Bullocks!” as Buck Mulligan said so often to Steven Dedalus. That isn’t life. That is a poor, thin imitation, not worth the bother of an algorithm creator. Life is much messier. It is both/and, paradox and ambiguity and mystery and enchantment. No one is an isolated, self-sufficient individual. And without the theoretical assumption of radical individualism, the question of whether or not altruism exists would never arise.

 

No more lights, but a magic wand remains.

 

Memories:

 

When I wrote about Christmas Eve, I said our old friend had been having a good day. He recognized me, remembered my name, etc. When he walked me to my car after the dinner we shared, he looked around at his yard and 40 acres and said, “We’re so lucky!” “Yes, we are,” I agreed.

 

Nine days later, on January 2, our friend was in the ER in Traverse City, and it’s pretty clear he won’t ever be able to return to his long-time home. Everyone saw it coming. We had just hoped it was going to be further down the road.

 

I’ll admit here to a selfish satisfaction -- in having what may well be my last memory of that old friend being a good time. We shared mutual memories, the sun was shining, he knew who I was and remembered my husband. He felt fortunate and expressed that feeling. “We’re so lucky,” he said in a heartfelt tone. Yes, we were. I hope his change in circumstances won’t be too hard on him.

 

Another friend of mine, who lost his beloved life partner some years ago, finds meaning in living as her “chief rememberer.” I feel some of that, too, although many remember the Artist. I remember not only him, my beloved, though, but many friends of years and decades past. The old Bluebird, the old Happy Hour. Winters when Sugar Loaf pulled in families of skiiers in the winter, and the Bird and HH did great weekend business. Jim and Linda, Fred and Molly, Les and Marina, Cy, Lisle, Marsha, Betsy, Hooper, Benny – oh, the names! I remember them all, even when the names elude me!

 

Today I am remembering many happy times shared. The snow is coming down hard tonight, but we had harder snows in the old days. Deeper snows. Longer, colder winters. You’ve heard it all before. Oldtimers’ recollections….

 

I don’t care. I’m glad I was there. I wouldn’t trade those times for quids.

Closing thought:

 

Somewhere recently (and to be quite honest, it was probably someone’s Facebook post) I read that we shouldn’t put beautiful things aside and save them for a “special occasion,” because every day we’re alive is a special occasion. So, sister Deborah, I took that Zabar’s babka out of the freezer, though I wasn’t having company, and let me tell you, it is delicious! Thank you! Another day of life! Another special occasion! 

Goodness in the Work of Toni Morrison

In an essay on “Goodness,” published in the September 8, 2019, issue of the New York Times Book Review, the late author Toni Morrison wrote of her search for goodness in American literature of the 19th and 20th century. She found that, generally speaking, with the exception of satirical works such as Don Quixote and Candide, it was evil that inspired writers to “vivid language” and gained for them a “blockbuster audience.” Those novels of earlier times ended, however, with redemption and the restoration of order, virtue its own reward in the triumph of the long-beleaguered protagonist. 

Twentieth-century novelists gave us very different stories. 

The movement away from happy endings or the enshrining of good over evil was rapid and stark after World War I. That catastrophe was too wide, too deep to ignore or to distort with a simplistic gesture of goodness. 

As was always true in her fiction, Morrison uses forceful, succinct, and vivid language to express her findings on good and evil in literature. “Evil grabs the intellectual platform and its energy,” she notes. 

It hogs the stage. Goodness sits in the audience and watches, assuming it even has a ticket to the show.

She finds modern novels -- again, in general — uninterested in goodness, except to expose “the frailty, the pointlessness, the comedy” of it. The conditional “in general” is important because the importance of Morrison’s own work cannot be overstated, and she herself was very interested in goodness and its role in fiction. 

Searching for definitions of goodness in philosophy and science, she finally narrowed the concept down to altruism and theories of altruism down to three: (1) learned behavior; (2) a form of narcissism; and (3) “instinct,” a genetic predisposition passed down through (genetic) evolution. She turned then to her own work and took examples illustrating the three theories from, respectively, A Mercy; The Bluest Eye; and Sula. 

Expressions of goodness are never trivial or incidental in my writing. In fact, I want them to have life-changing properties and to illuminate decisively the moral questions embedded in the narrative. It was important to me that none of these expressions be handled as comedy or irony. And they are seldom mute. 

What a breath of fresh air, even in the midst of the most horrible tragedies in literature (horrible because we as readers know such events took place not only in the lives of fictional characters but in our own country’s history), to find goodness given un-ironic voice! Morrison concludes her essay by telling us that “[a]llowing goodness its own speech” is crucial because it allows a character to learn something, “something vital and morally insightful….” Articulating goodness is an expression of, as well as a means to, self-knowledge. 

Such insight has nothing to do with winning, and everything to do with the acquisition of knowledge. Knowledge on display in the language of moral clarity — of goodness.

I had reached the next-to-last page of the first section of Morrison’s novel Beloved when her essay came serendipitously into my hands. I think Paul D’s words of judgment would have leaped off the page at me, anyway, but there’s no saying for sure. Anyway, Sethe is telling him that her act of violence against her children worked, in that it kept them from being returned to the plantation where she (before her escape) and others had been violated. Paul D insists she should have found some other way to save her babies. 

“There could have been a way. Some other way.”  

“What way?” 

“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” he said, and right then a forest sprang up between them, trackless and quiet. 

Is Paul D’s articulation of a moral difference between human beings and animals without language an expression of moral clarity? Does it enlarge his self-knowledge at the time of his speaking the words?

Paul D had only come to know what Sethe had done when Stamp Paid, the self-named man who smuggled other enslaved people to freedom, showed him the story in a newspaper. Stamp showed him the paper because he believed in truth and felt Paul D should know the truth of the woman whose life he had re-entered, but afterward he had doubts. He tried to set that truth-telling, going behind Sethe’s back to Paul D, against other “sneaking” things he had done, “always for a clear and holy purpose.” He had sneaked

…runaways into hidden places, secret information to public places. Underneath his legal vegetables were the contraband humans that he ferried across the river. Even the pigs he worked in the spring served his purposes. Whole families lived on the bones and guts he distributed to them. He wrote their letters and read to them the ones they received. He knew who had dropsy and who needed stovewood; which children had a gift and which needed correction….

In other words, Stamp Paid was a good man. But was telling Paul D what Sethe had done a good thing, as he believed it was when he did it?

Afterward—not before—he considered Sethe’s feelings in the matter. And it was the lateness of this consideration that made him feel so bad. 

Motivation is what matters to Morrison, as it did to Kant, in determining goodness. Amy’s apparent kindness to Sethe in caring for her wounds, and Baby Suggs’ seemingly generous neighborhood feast — despite the gentle, effective nursing in the one instance and the joyful sharing in the second — both appear imperfect in the author’s eyes, tainted by pridefulness, illustrating the narcissistic theory of goodness. We don’t see either Amy or Baby Suggs growing in self-knowledge as a result of reflecting on their own behavior, though it seems impossible to say that what either did was not good. Certainly, neither was a bad person. And neither, certainly, was Sethe herself, though her goodness through most of the story can be seen as instinctually motivated. 

Stamp Paid looks to me like the clearest example of goodness, the character who gains the most, articulately, in self-knowledge (his author’s own definition). He not only practiced goodness as a habit (Aristotle’s definition) but reflected on his deeds and their meaning, and in questioning his own motives in revealing Sethe’s story to Paul D, he created his own opportunity for further moral growth. 

Sethe and Paul D take longer to open themselves to self-knowledge, but who can blame them? It’s a long road because they have had so much pain and are protecting themselves from more until, finally, their shared past allows them to face a future together and to see not only themselves but each other in new and important ways.

I haven’t told you anything really about the story, because that you should read for yourself. Beloved is one of the most powerful American novels ever written, Toni Morrison an outstanding American writer. And for me her literary investment in “making sure acts of goodness … produce language” is as important as her command of language itself. 

Go elsewhere for superficial cleverness or smart irony. Come to Toni Morrison’s work for clarity, truth, and fiction to help you grow your soul.