Thursday, December 1, 2016

REMOTE IMPORTANT REGIONS




            
          At about 9:30pm on Tuesday November 8th, I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge, listening to Leonard Cohen. Night had fallen in the USA. I risked danger, posting this video on Instagram from the car:



Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows

            This fact. This FACT. That we now know, that we wrestle with every day, was just starting to become true as I drove into San Francisco. It become more true as the night went on.  It became truer the next week, as Bannon happened, Sessions happened, more stormclouds continued to gather.  Every day the fact gets truer. 

            In attempting to process these first weeks of our new world, it has been hard for me to deal with facts.  It is hard to be on Facebook, to read news, to discover new things.  Facts activate my imagination: what might be in store for us?  And I know in one sense, to avoid these facts is weakness.  We must pay attention, now more than ever, we must know the facts, and continue to search for them.

But right now facts are hard to grasp in this time of profound uncertainty.  We just don’t know what the fuck is going to happen.  And I’m so deep in uncertainty, that other worlds less factual, of interpretation and ambivalence, like poetry, provide comfort and perspective.  Maybe because right now, in this transitional space, at the beginning of this one huge hard terrible fact, all I can do right now is interpret.

The day after the election, Linda the Zen Priestess who presided over our wedding ceremony sent a poem to my wife and me called “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford.  It starts like this:

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the
world
and following the wrong god home, 
we may miss
our star.

            We followed the wrong god home.  It's a moment of national grief.  Though no one, thankfully, has died (I mean to say we cannot accuse Donald Trump directly of killing anyone). We are mourning the loss of Hillary as President.  Mourning everything she stood for, all of the tolerance, progress (and facts!) that Donald Trump and his advisors appear to turn away from. And the announcement of Leonard Cohen’s death the day after the election brought things home for me.  My mother loved Leonard Cohen, and she died this year in March.  And the times when I feel my mother’s absence the most are these times, when I know she’d be able to comfort us.  These times: when my wife and I have a question about our newborn daughter, when Leonard Cohen dies, when Donald Trump is elected president of the United States.  

            So (as John Oliver put it so well) FUCKING TWENTY SIXTEEN has culminated in this collision of griefs: national and personal.  I am asking myself what would she say?  How would she help us deal?

I remember about a year ago dancing to Leonard Cohen with my mom in her living room. We were listening to “That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and she was crying, thinking about having to leave my father and sister and me. I loved the way my mom danced.  There was something quite unmusical about it, something almost floppy, but then at the same time, she had rhythm, and most of all, personality: she was always free, never self-conscious.  She often did this move with her fists, pumping them forward and back coming out from her chest, like a jack-in-the-box. At that time, she was about two thirds of the way through her battle with lung cancer.

I know one thing that drew my mother to Leonard Cohen was his grace. She knew grace because she had it, a whole lot of it. And I hope Leonard Cohen was able to die as gracefully as my mother did.  In her last few months, she and her beloved friend Jan packed things up in her house, carefully, ceremonially.  She went over with my father, sister and me the numerous, finite details of what we should do after she died, how it would all go, how everything would fall into place.  She got everything ready. She sent us all her passwords in one email.

Those discussions were hard.  In one we were back in the living room.  I was watching the green numbers on her little black CD player as we talked. I implored her to stay in the moment, to enjoy her days with us and not talk about the future.  My resistance to her made her cry. And looking back on it now, I realize she was in the moment. She was in the moment of her dying, and in her role of being a champion caretaker.  She was making sure we would have a structure in her aftermath, and in her taking care of that (taking care of us), she was taking care of herself.  Her tearful reaction to my resistance was a response to the truth of the situation: my inability to empathize with her created distance between us.  She told me that. She asked me to be there with her, to acknowledge her reality.  But in those moments of all that planning, it was really hard. 

           Here's the end section of Stafford's poem that Linda the Priestess sent to us the morning after the election:

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give-- yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

In Stafford’s lines, I can see my mother and I.  She cried because the “parade of our mutual life” was getting lost in the dark.  In the dark I thrust myself into by not being “awake” to her state of being.  My mother was never trying to fool anyone (implicit in her dancing).  In those moments of planning, her signals were clear: the darkness around her was deep.  A part of me was not awake to her darkness.  Was Donald Trump chosen because our nation is not awake to its darknesses?

My mother surely would have lamented this out about the election— all those people that Donald Trump fooled.  He is Stafford’s “breaking line” that discouraged people back to sleep.  As Saul Williams said the day after the election, “You have elected a caricatured mascot… a totem to your ignorance…here is the proof of the internal battles you have not fought.”  And might those internal battles dwell in that “remote important region” that Stafford speaks of?

             In our national grief, as we talk to each other, I watch friends rise to heights of eloquence in places that discourage it, like Facebook.  It is clear people are accessing those remote important regions.  We are summoned to do more, to act more, to speak, raise our voices (we better start swimming or we’ll sink like a stone).  But it makes me miss my mom.

When the results started getting hairy on that fateful Tuesday evening, and Hillary’s FiveThirtyEight percentages started to go down, my wife, sister, father and I had a quick text exchange.  I knew things were bad because that was the first time my Dad had ever texted.  We were all worried.  I texted everyone Keep the faith and take heart. Which is not something I would ever say.   Those were my mother’s words.  She said that a lot. Take heart Naftali.  What a phrase.  When my mother said it, it always felt good.  But I never thought about what it really meant.

The morning after the election, waking to shock, I thought about what it means to take heart. I've kept thinking about it.  And I arrived at the idea of actually holding a working human heart.  Taking it up in my hands, the physical reality of that. Of feeling it beating, blood running through my fingers, slimy, pulsing. It’s not so common, but let’s pretend for a moment this is happening and possible and that whoever’s heart it is you’re holding, they’re alive and everything’s fine.  Maybe you take up someone else’s, maybe you take up your own. Maybe I’m out in Michigan in Monroe County, looking at a white guy with a family who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.  I’m looking at him and I’m holding his heart in my hands. And he’s looking at me, wondering when I’ll put his heart back inside his body and let him get back to his family. I say to him I’m just here trying to figure out what my mom meant when she said take heart.  Thanks manAnd he says You’re welcome. I say I’m interested to hear why you voted for Trump. Not tonight he says.

Then I’m back in my house in California, looking in the mirror, holding my own heart.  My blood is dripping into the sink.  My wife is cooing to our daughter in the next room, waiting for me to change the diaper (has Donald Trump ever changed a diaper?).  What do I say to myself? What do I say to my mother? What do we say?

 I wish she could meet her granddaughter, wish she could see our house, wish she could laugh and cry and cry and laugh with us some more.  I wish she’d tell us what to do.  I think she’d say all you can do is keep living your lives with integrity and can you believe that pardon-my-French sick fucking chauvinist pig won? She'd send us some poetry. She might remind us there is a crack in everything.   She might take up our hearts in her hands-- carefully, gracefully-- and then give them back a little better than they were before.



CREDITS
I tried but couldn't figure out who took those pictures...
Where I got the Leonard Cohen Picture
Where I got the picture of people at the Javits Center on election night