Fragmentation

I have not been able to write since Omar Mateen walked into Pulse early last Sunday morning. There did not seem to be anything I could contribute to the keening over the bodies of the mostly young, Latino, gay men who perished in Orlando, even though I was feeling it in my cells. Even now, I certainly have nothing to add to the shameful, deafening second amendment brawl we are forced to listen to. I feel unworthy. What can I say in my state of secondary bereavement that could possibly comfort the mourners, allay the fears of people in communities under siege, gay people, Muslims in this country who are not extremists or psychopaths? I understand, quite suddenly, the awareness suffered by the children of Holocaust survivors. You experience the horror deeply, but at a remove. You weren't there.

At the same time, I am weighed down by the suspicion that things are going to get much worse before they get better in this homeland holy war. America, smugly distant from the rest of the world, an ocean away from the fighting in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe, is eating itself alive. A daily fusillade of hate rhetoric rises to a pitch until it explodes into real automatic weapons fire, the whole country a fragmentation bomb. On the Right, there is a story that people tell each other about good guys shooting bad guys. In this fairy tale, a salsa dancing reveler reaches for the gun strapped to his ankle and takes down the terrorist with the AR-15. Never mind that under other circumstances these same second amendment junkies would probably not be in a hurry to defend the rights of gays or brown people. They just want more guns. They can never get enough guns. On the Left, there is another story. In this beloved sentimental fiction, a tragic event, the slaughter of twenty children or forty-nine Latin music fans, proves to be the tipping point, the moment when sanity finally prevails and the culture begins to dress its wounds. Never mind that gun sales go up dramatically every time there's a mass shooting. Never mind that several bills proposing minimal attempts at gun control have already failed. You know I want to believe the redemptive vision, but some days, forgive me, I just don't. If Chris Murphy isn't standing on the Senate floor day and night, I waver. I seem to be a person of little faith.

You can see why I've been reluctant to write this past week. The day before the assault in Orlando, I was sitting up in bed trying to read Don DeLillo's latest offering, Zero K. The book is a chilling, kafka-like fable about mortality. Out of nowhere, my eyesight became fragmented, as if the normal optical mechanisms had gone on vacation. Objects in my field of vision were shattered like the pixelated images on TV of criminal associates in the witness protection program. Everything looked like broken glass, nothing cohered. It was an ocular migraine which passed in a half hour, but during that time, I recognized clearly that things fall apart. I understood that this fragmentation is one aspect of both the natural order and its poor relation, the social order.

It is easy from this point of view to become a teller of the third tale, the one that takes place in a despond of cynicism, a place to be avoided if possible. So far, I have encountered two living artworks that have had the power to rescue me from this swamp. The first was the sight of a woman I care about deeply beaming at me from twenty-five feet away in the produce aisle near the strawberries. I beamed back. We never spoke. Our connection was a bridge of endearment, not engineering. Chris Christie has no authority over that bridge. The second was the discovery of a sheep farm on Seekonk Crossroads in Great Barrington. I haven't been on that road in a long time and apparently missed the arrival of more than a hundred sheep, milling around in all their biblical wooliness, making their consoling, reassuring sound. It turns out that sheep have a bad rap. These sheep were not falling in line, mindlessly conforming to expectations like Republican congressmen. They were a peacefully congregating community of equal beings, absent any scent of blood lust, the living antidote to cynicism. Meeting them unexpectedly allowed me to breathe. I exhaled fear and inhaled hope and remembered for a moment, as Howard Zinn has written, that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. It is all those things.

What Slips Through Your Fingers

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life
                             
                             Wu-men, 13th century


Everything that matters to me is evanescent. Infancy, twilight, serenity. Sound, taste, color. I know I'm on to something holy when I try to grab it and it slips through my fingers. Even great art can't corral it. Matisse applies paint to canvas and leaves me something that makes a reference to permanence. But color itself can't be made material, can't be hung on a wall or worn around my wrist. It's a wavelength that enters my consciousness when I allow it in and sometimes grabs me by the neck and demands I pay attention to its fleeting hereness. Look at me, damn it. Look at the way crabapple blossoms send out beams of raspberry mixed with grape juice stain. I dare you to snare that shade and deposit it in the bank.

Everything begins with green. Green in spring and summer is so pervasive, so customary in the northeast that I take it for granted. I would be a different person if I woke up to the cream-caramel-pink of sand. I would be a different person if spirit had chose day-glo orange as the woodland wallpaper. Unimaginable. I rejoice at the return of green after the white-grey-brown winter and I want to write devotional prayers and love poems to it. But green is unimpressed. It just is and then it is not.

Set against the green outside my barn red house right now is a purplish rosy palette of magenta centaurea, cranesbill geranium, lipstick weigela and two different baptisias, one lilac fading into an aristocratic grey. An arrangement of blush, fuchsia and watermelon-colored Japanese primrose in the back garden is now past its season after sprouting up from seed donated by a friend. How do they do it? How do they grow and send out their own particular flavor of holiness, their own now-you-see-it-now-you-don't wavelength of the forever white light? The finite, the fleeting, the mortal arising out of the infinite.

Life's like that. Color itself, so defiant, so resistant to capture, makes a worthy object for contemplation. I'm aware of turning to it when I need a break from the effort of struggling with myself. Who else, after all, do I know well enough to struggle with, who else puts up such a good fight? I allow my gaze to settle on something in my field of vision, anything at all, a coffee cup. I say, look at the blue decoration on the cup. Blue. I make a mental note of it and somehow know that it's only passing through. Like my mother very late in the day of her life, sitting on a bench with me in Berkeley just before nightfall, looking up at the midnight blue of the California sky, the first stars flickering.

Lately, I find myself more than usually transfixed by babies and small children. The perfection of their feet, their lack of guile. These are not my children or grandchildren who all carry complex narratives of my invention. They are just centers of radiating warmth in little buttercup yellow dresses monkeying their mothers at the Coop. They are the small children who watch in graced unknowing as the wrinkled veterans ride by in the Stockbridge Memorial Day parade. That's the thing about babies and flowers. They wear their evanescence well.

Read some further observations on the miracle of the ordinary www.suzibanksbaum.com/blog/

Mix It Up

Veterans wearing red poppies
Remembrance Day London 2011

Despite the fact that I have been living a pastoral idyll since Nixon trounced McGovern, I am at my core a city girl. Or rather, I am a person with certain urban assumptions, grateful to be living in a place with almost no gridlock or garbage. These assumptions, the city person's habits of being, have nothing to do with cultural opportunities, although the benefits of late night jazz and Thai food cannot be discounted. I'm referring to the miscellany of human life that I encounter walking down one block in, say, New York. There's an exhausted young father pushing one of those ungainly two-seater strollers. One child throws his head back to guzzle his soy milk. The other wanders blissfully through baby dreamland. Behind them, two Dominican teenagers paint the sidewalk with fancy footwork, music surfing their brain waves through tender ear buds. Turning the corner, a massive black woman, diabetes in tennis shoes, drags her shopping bags home. The woman has a few choice words for the twelve-year old on a skate board who careens around the corner, almost knocking her down. One bags turns over sending pie apples rolling down Broadway, but they are retrieved by a fast-acting samaritan in a three-piece suit and a turban. As Joyce famously said, here comes everybody.

At home in the southern Berkshires, I've learned to make do with a more limited cast of characters set against an astonishing backdrop, green then russet then white, sometimes many shades of gray. Lines of well-mannered pre-schoolers on their way to story hour at the library. The annual Latino Festival in Lee, empanadas and salsa dancing on Main Street. I satisfy my craving for salty, spicy food at the Vietnamese and Indian restaurants, but, in the end, I know I'm living in a place primarily reserved for white people. Many of these people are either older and retired like myself or can afford to set up house far from any job market. Most of us who moved here from the city have traded the 24-hour urban buzz, the peacock plumage of costuming in the street, for a quieter, gentler, more predictable life where from one day to the next you see the same people, or at any rate people who look the same, when you stop at the Farmer's Market for fiddleheads in the spring and macouns in the fall.

The idea of having to give up living in the world, even this manicured version of the world, is anathema. Who was the greedy corporate con artist who first thought of putting all old people in one warehouse and calling it Pleasant Acres? Where is the recognition that these Senior Living arrangements are sinister ghettos that separate people from the texture of life lived in real communities? When you visit your Aunt Mildred in one of these places, you know in your gut that the incentive for herding the old under one roof is the same as the motivation behind prisons and factory farms. Let's round 'em up so we can manage 'em. We'll seat them at assigned tables in the dining room and feed them portion-controlled salisbury steak with canned green beans. We'll distract them with golden oldie sing-a-longs and holiday galas with party hats and noisemakers. They'll be fine. After all, it's not as if they have plans, divergent interests, deep personal histories that seek expression.

Don't send me to Senior Living. I'm not talking about a nursing home which admittedly I'd also prefer to avoid. I understand, I really do, that at a certain point I may not be able to manage my ADLs. That's Activities of Daily Living for the uninitiated. Bathing and dressing and getting the spoon from the bowl into your mouth. I may require nursing care even, if I can still carry out my own preferred ADLs, daydreaming, reading, praying. I may require someone to tie my shoes. But as long as I'm still able to decide between egg salad and pea soup for lunch, while I remain disdainful of bingo and would rather read Don DeLillo on a rainy day, have mercy on me and let me live in the world. I'd rather sit on a park bench covered in bird droppings than slouch on an upholstered recliner in a cavernous sitting room where a sprinkling of other residents are nodding in the middle of the afternoon.

I want to hear babies crying. I want to witness the struggles of the young and listen to their dance music. Give me my own little spot with a few strategically situated handrails and not too many steps and I'll take care of the rest. A little public transportation wouldn't hurt. Like I said, I'm a city girl. I came of age on the Broadway bus.

Tomorrowland

photo by Peggy Braun
courtesy of Sohn Fine Art

Our President, the one we still have, remains audacious about hope. A few days ago, he advised the citizens of Flint, Michigan not to communicate despair to their children. This is the kind of nuanced suggestion we have come to expect from Barack Obama. It implies that he understands the anguish experienced by the people of Flint as they check in to motels in neighboring towns once a week to shower.....but that he also appreciates the corrosive effect that despair can have on young people. He knows that children need hope, even if giving it to them involves a certain amount of bearing false witness. The incident in Michigan makes me think back to the unwarranted optimism of the postwar years when confidence in the future was impressed upon me. I like to say that I was born in the last four days of the pre-nuclear age, August 2, 1945. Of course, as an infant, I was ignorant of the more than 50 million people who had just died in World War II, including the Holocaust and the bombs dropped on Japan. But it wasn't just me. Throughout grade school in the Eisenhower years, unless we were red diaper babies, we all continued to cling to a scrubbed version of reality. Where I came from, we were spoon fed progress with our Gerber's baby food. It was, as the pre-presidential General Electric spokesman, Ronald Reagan pointed out, our most important product.
We all wandered wide-eyed in Mr. Disney's Tomorrowland, flying to the moon, curing cancer. We were hoodwinked into believing that the epic violence at mid-century was an aberration, that the country would outgrow its racism. We watched as the new cars came off the assembly line and the women waxed their floors on TV and we held fast to the illusion of a future.

Somewhere along the line, while our contemporaries fought in Vietnam, or protested the war at home, or spent those years exiled in Sweden, we lost our innocence. Now, we are confronted with a Candidate who advertises his authenticity, his fervor for "telling it like it is," who gleefully brings the widespread simmering fear of women, people of color and immigrants to a boil. The Candidate serves up a toxic soup - promising to make America great again by playing to a nostalgia for a simpler time that never existed - seasoned with a reality show hot sauce that leaves us desperate for a cold glass of water that doesn't come from the Flint River. What goes around comes around. Some months ago, I saw a post on Facebook that featured a head shot of Hitler next to Trump with a list of characteristics common to both of them. I immediately shared it. Ten minutes later, I frantically took it down, thinking I had gone too far, crossed the line. This is the hopeful child in me, crouching under her school desk in the ludicrous belief that this posture will save me in the event of a nuclear attack. I am a grownup now and can't afford to be so naive.

But what will we tell the children? It depends on our willingness to absorb some portion of the pain of the world, even when it keeps us awake at night or causes us to burst into tears for no discernible reason. Confronting the reality makes it possible for us to know what's at stake when our children ask us difficult questions. The best answers come when we stare down the demons, let them know that we are on to them and will not allow ourselves to be deceived. If we fall for the magician's sleight of hand as my parents and teachers did in the '50s, we will lapse into habits of denial and avoidance. Children know the difference between adults who are carrying a great burden of truth, feeding it to them in digestible bites, and adults who are not paying attention. Children, if they are loved, will ask to be citizens of this fractured world in small increments and sometimes they will see things, like hungry people on street corners, that adults have become inured to. Then, they will be our teachers. We will learn from them that one answer, a first response, to the man's hunger is to give him your sandwich.

On Drowning

We used to go to Montreal for long weekends, shooting straight up the Northway from Albany and finding ourselves, four hours later, in an actual foreign country. One September, we saw Tim Raines at the end of his illustrious speed demon career hit a line drive double to right field in an Expos 4-2 win over the Phillies, play by play in French. We were delirious, despite the anemic size of the crowd and the reprehensible astroturf. That night, we ate a tajine that made us weep for joy and the following day, a Saturday, we explored the Arab quarter around Rue St. Denis and bought our own clay pot so we could recreate the flavor of North Africa in the Berkshires. Montreal felt so international, so open. In an Ethiopian diner where we went for lunch before making the return trip south, a waitress demonstrated the proper method for eating the spongy bread called injera by tearing a piece off the aluminum tray on our table with her hand and stuffing it directly into my mouth. We were lit up when we arrived home late in the evening of September 9, 2001.

Now, these neighborhoods and similar areas in London, not to mention Paris and Brussels, seem filled with threat. I am not speaking here of the low probability of being caught in the crossfire or the eurocentric concern about bombings in familiar places as against the same bombings in Iraq or Pakistan. I'm not speaking about the origins of radical Islam or the role of the West in aggravating Muslim grievances. I am speaking about that fear that has grown in us over the last several years and the fact that my sense of who I am is offended by this fear. What happened to the person who cherished and defended the idea of a common humanity? Was this person an artifact of a period when the official enemy was summed up by the vaudeville clown Khrushchev banging his shoe at the U.N.? The cognitive dissonance gives me a headache and the headache has gotten worse.

It was only five years ago that we spent an afternoon meandering around Brick Lane in east London, inhaling the fragrance of curry and zatar, admiring the Indian women in their pink and green silk saris and the Muslim men in their loose white kaftans and taquiahs, indistinguishable to me from the 

kippot worn in synagogue. We were such innocents abroad that we walked up to a group of these men, standing outside of a small mosque, and asked if we could go inside and look around. You know, like tourists. One man asked, "are you Muslim?"

No, I am not. I am an older American Jewish woman living in a tranquil preserve in western Massachusetts, far from the current suffering, far from the bombed out wreckage of Aleppo, far from the capsized boats crammed with smuggled refugees drowning in the Adriatic. We have seen these pictures, but we have also been assaulted by a constant barrage of fear-mongering images and rhetoric, not only from the usual suspects, but from the empire of entertainment. We have been 

homelanded.

This year, as I prepare for Passover, my teeth are on edge, filled to capacity with a volatile amalgam of anxiety and sorrow. I consider what it meant to be stranger in the land of Egypt, what it meant to be enslaved. I picture the Israelites, desperate to be free, rushing toward the sea and the sea in its turn swallowing the pursuing Egyptians. It is an accident of history that those of us gathering for seders in the carpeted comfort and apparent safety of our homes, time zones away from the bloodshed, only imagine that we are drowning in our own anguish. It could be otherwise. Sometimes, the sea doesn't part and the drowning is real.

This Passover, may we keep our heads above water so that we can be grateful for the goodness of our lives, the idle ballpark days and memorable meals and, at the same time, help one another develop the capacity to witness the terrible upheaval of humanity all over the world that understandably frightens us and rightly breaks our hearts.

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Tales Out of School

Tales Out of School

Susie Kaufman

It is not true that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Every new passageway that clears in the subterranean sludge of my brain - even if I have no idea where it's leading - just might illuminate some gritty, trash-strewn corner that's always been in the shadows. A little learning, the dawning of an unfamiliar day, is really only dangerous when I conflate the beginning, the dazzling spark of the new, with the end of learning....When I believe in my own born again expertise, and, even more so, when I delude myself into believing there actually is an end to learning. If I convince myself that I've arrived, I am in serious trouble. I have not arrived. I once got a fortune cookie that said - going straight for the jugular - pain is the privilege of the living. Arrival is the destination of the  dead.

When I open my awareness to the possibility of something new, it is a miracle in nature, like a snake sloughing its skin or the sun reappearing after a winter's half-day of darkness. Anything can happen. Stepping into the river of new learning, I wiggle my toes to determine if any rocks or spiky creatures are buried just below the surface and I wade in cautiously up to my knees, up to my belly, to get used to the chill. But, in the end, I have to be willing to be uncomfortable. There's no way around it. I have to be a beginner.

There are successes and there are failures. Studying Spanish was not the healing I had hoped for. I imagined that I could in some small way redress the grievances of all the unrecognized Puerto Rican children I went to school with uptown...All the children struggling to learn American history from deadly textbooks written in English, a history that did not include the part about sugar barons making a meal out of the island. Instead, Spanish made fun of me behind my back. Irregular verbs confounded me with their stealth discrepancies. They were like so many mosquitoes, buzzing around, evading capture. Not enough memory left to learn a foreign language. Just enough to understand how hard it was for the children I didn't make friends with in fifth grade, a learning of a different kind.

In school, we were served a cafeteria tray of the basic information food groups - spelling, arithmetic, geography - whether or not they appealed to us or satisfied any particular hunger. Now, in one of the great unheralded benefits of aging, I am old enough to decide what I want to know and what offbeat flavors I might develop a taste for. Every novice encounter in the physical world signals a deepening appreciation for the patience and devotion to practice, the willingness to stumble, that are part of becoming newly skillful. 

I want to make pie crust, don't ask me why. I want to cut the cold shortening into the flour to make that coarse meal they talk about, then add the ice water, mixing it together until it miraculously coalesces into a ball of dough. I want to cover the ball in plastic wrap and roll it out on a floured board so that it forms a large, uniform, thin circle of pastry and I want to sing Summertime while I'm cutting, mixing and rolling. You will not be called upon to sample my leaden early efforts. Eventually, the pie crusts will become lighter, flakier, easier in the making and the eating. The blueberry filling will drip down my chin and I will be saved. Until I remember that I need to bone up on compassion and gratitude, the perennial course of study. And here I will stumble, just as I did wielding the rolling pin.

One friend will entice me with another friend's shortcomings and I will fall into the despond of judgment, adding my own seasoning to the gossipy mix. I will harbor uncharitable thoughts and I will be greedy for attention. Arrogance will make a pass at me and deceit will pretend to have my best interests at heart. It can be disheartening, this serpentine process....Always slithering around on my belly in the underbrush, never moving forward in a straight line. But because I am in love with learning, because learning is the greatest aphrodisiac, I sharpen my pencils and remind myself that every moment is an opportunity, a new beginning, the terrifying, exhilarating first day of school.

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Witness

Witness

Susie Kaufman

It's like a seven layer cake, this family. When you dig in with the side of a three-tined silver fork, you get a dark glaze of ganache, a dry floury sheet, then sticky raspberry and apricot. No layer of the family story can be skipped over if the cake in its entirety is to be savored deeply. Its origins in the Balkans. Its shopkeeper livelihood uptown in the big city. The two daughters, a half generation apart. The older daughter's three children, grown to adulthood in the East Bay. One quiet, cautious. One radiant, diffuse. One wounded, craving.

"I want to talk about the family," the older sister asks the younger, visiting from back East.

"OK. Sure. Who do you want to talk about?"

"I want to know how they all died....Aunt Julie, Aunt Honey, Uncle Jerry, all of them," she demands with some urgency. She's doing research, collecting data about the end-times of relatives, none of them all that interesting when they were alive.

My big sister is celebrating her 81st birthday, not very old for most people these days, but she got old young. Vascular dementia, I think, though she doesn't seem to have a diagnosis. She naps on the couch when she's not eating and shuffles, right hand on her cane, left hand gripping the piano, the sink, when she moves around her cramped apartment in the basement of the house where she raised her children. Accumulations of twenty year old issues of The Nation and sheet music from the '40s, Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, pile up on the floor, making navigation treacherous. Every year, it diminishes the tempo of her living, the square footage she is willing to move through. She will not go out to commune with the nasturtium in the sun-drenched North Berkeley back yard. She prefers the moldy, dark, familiar confines of her apartment. It suits her.

"You didn't tell me how mother died. Why didn't anyone tell me?"

As it happens, she was there when our mother took her last breath in a nursing home at the age of 99, but she doesn't remember and if you press her to respond to a question that she doesn't know the answer to, she becomes irritable.

"Do we have to talk about that now?" she grouches.

Still, I'm patting myself on the back, overflowing with self-congratulation. The kind that comes from the perception of devotion, openness and generosity to a loved one in trouble. I think...I'm the only one she can ask about family members long gone. I'm her link to the past. Without me, she can't really heal the wounds that are still festering. Me me me.

She wants to talk about her longstanding hostile feelings towards our mother. I have heard this song before, all my life, but I never really learned the lyrics. She was ten when I was born, so I missed the tone of her childhood, the key of our mother's limited interest in children. I ask her if there was anyone else she felt close to when she was young.

"Aunt Julie was always friendly," she says. "But then one day, I can remember it exactly, we were sitting on the gold brocade sofa in the living room and I was telling her how mean mother was, but she betrayed me. Aunt Julie betrayed me. She acted like she cared, but then she didn't take my side. She went and told on me. After that, mother didn't talk to me for days. She put on that Empress of All the Russias face, you know the one I mean, and just waltzed right by me playing jacks on the kitchen linoleum."

I cherish the story I've invented that my mother and sister resolved their differences at the end. I mean, I really need to believe that. Even if it's not true. Even though I know whatever my sister wants to hang on to is hers to keep, like an old shirt, stained but comfy. The heaviness of carrying that illusion around starts to interfere with my good intentions, reduces my caregiving to the lowest level of nursiness. I pick up after her. I watch her, eagle-eyed, to make sure she doesn't fall. I demand that she takes her pills when I want her to take them. 

"Yes, mother," she responds to maximum effect.

At her birthday party, we watch vintage slides on a rented carousel projector. My sister is luminous. There she is in the fall of 1958, pregnant with her first baby. She's wearing a raspberry tinted sweater, almost the identical color to the one she's wearing at the party. In the background, Ella Fitzgerald is singing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered." 

We lean our heads together and sing "I'm wild again, beguiled again, a simpering whimpering child again" and we eat cake, lots of cake.