Class conflict & reading Henry James and Malcolm X

After 5 1/2 months of no posts, this sudden appearance of a long piece might seem odd. I simply want to post it, and I have no other place that seems appropriate. Do not feel obliged to read it, oh dear and old friends! If it interests you, then by all means, please do! :)

Please understand that I do not see African Americans as the only oppressed ones!

* * *

How can a person read The Autobiography of Malcolm X for the first time and a novel by Henry James, concurrently? Of course it's possible to simply read the words on the page, to continue with one's program of reading through all of James's lush 19th century novels about Americans and Europeans in sequence, and to also read the story of one of America's tragically eloquent sons who found himself at the bottom of society's ladder, the same ladder where James's characters enjoy a leisurely view from the uppermost rungs. But reading is not simply traversing. It is pleasure. It is also acquisition, assimilation, reflection, and answering a desire to understand.

The next novel in my reading-through-James program after starting Malcolm X's autobiography was The Princess Casamassima. I had encountered the mercurial title character in James’s previous novel Roderick Hudson, and while that book presented characters from opposite ends of America's and Europe's class structures, it still reveled in the delights of long leisurely months exploring Rome and Venice by individuals who didn’t lift a finger to earn their keep. Only slightly did James ask me to sympathize with someone poor — the artist Roderick Hudson — who nonetheless was endowed by a wealthy American friend, thus able to sustain a dissipating life.

Out of desire and shame, I had also begun reading through a list of African American must-reads. I had gotten my bachelor’s in English literature before diversity lit was required as it is rather universally today, and since I advise students in the same department where I earned my degree, my sense of this reading gap grew until I just had to bridge it. I began with Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and then The Color Purple by Alice Walker. My intention was to read one AA book, then another James novel, and keep alternating through the lists. Please don’t judge me for my tardiness.

I tried, tried and tried again to dive into The Princess Casamassima while immersed in Malcolm X's story, he who was raised so close to where I live, in Lansing and then in mostly-white Mason, Michigan, in the home of a foster family. He moved on to a dreadful but fascinating life on the streets of New York and Boston to, in his words, find “some kind of hustle to survive” and “to stay high in some way to forget what [we] had to do to survive.“ I kept telling myself in opposing parts of my brain that there is great value in James’s writing, reminding myself of the many times I had already been informed by the thought processes of his characters. Weighing pros and cons in complicated situations in my job or personal life, I kept turning to him, like a counseling friend or professor. But the lifestyle, the wealth beyond imagining, the goods and comforts and delights of the upper crust! How could I reconcile these with the violence, poverty and systemic obstruction of black people in my country, suppressed beneath even the poorest white folks, treated as less than human?

Whatever I told myself, I just couldn’t stomach it. It wasn’t only that I tried reading them together. It was that I was asking myself to resolve the distinctions, to bridge them in meaningful ways, to live with them, because I recognized myself as a person born to white privilege in a context of still-horrifying racial conflict.

While this reading struggle took place, massive protests in Baltimore were erupting over the death of Freddie Gray at the hands of the police. Simultaneously with Malcom’s description of the death of a black Harlem man after police shot him in 1943, I read media coverage of the same country in 2015 rising to fever pitch over the same abusive police practices in Ferguson, New York, Baltimore, and virtually everywhere else. How could anyone believe that much has changed?

Then one night in bed with my iPad Kindle app I got past the first few pages of The Princess Casamassima and realized that the hero of the novel, Hyacinth Robinson, is dirt poor. Not only that, the novel is actually about the remarkable class struggles in England mid-19th century, and how the Princess Casamassima becomes involved. (I refuse to read summaries of these books before reading, because of spoilers.) Here was a topic congruous with the struggles of Malcolm X!

The truth is, like James’s hero, poor Hyacinth Robinson, I love living vicariously in the cool, sophisticated salons of wealthy aristocrats. Gorgeous art, polished furniture, windows the size of walls opening out onto serene lawns, bibelots arranged on tables that cost a common man’s annual wages, rustling silk, shuffling servants — I find it all bedazzling. When the Princess Casamassima renounces her monumental possessions and turns to a London ghetto homestead for the cause of a rebellion against nobility, I feel a certain pleasure flicker and fade. Now whose splendor will sparkle through the rest of the book’s pages? Am I kidding myself that I want to read James for his characters’ wise and deep critical thinking processes? Am I really more smitten with their private landscapes, vast halls dressed in mirrors and paintings, their delicate teacups, spotless gloves and elegant manners?

I have not finished either book. I interject these reflections as a sort of album of snapshots mid-way. I just read a lovely piece by Adrian Nicole Leblanc in The New Yorker about the photographer Mary Ellen Mark, who just died. The author's perspective reminded me of my own feelings reading the books I write about here. Is it possible to live in a world of ugliness, poverty, shame, degradation, violence, and find humor and warmth as photographer Mark did, to bring elegant thought and beautiful egoless observation and action into scenes of tragedy?

Winter comes, with heat

I’m just home from an icy drive

and the first arctic blast has frozen

the floor through the crawl space.

I sit in the big old robe

with socked and blanketed

feet on the ottoman.

My husband is working late.

In the corner, the wood stove

reaches for me with aromatic heat

as if I am the one craved.

On top, the last of the chicken soup,

that final glow of chili and garlic,

tomatoes deep and bright, flickering

onions, all velvet on my tongue now.

Inside, flashes of mystery—

red finger-snapping oak  

erupting instantly

from crusty ash, flames

beating at the window

with lust. And something

else I cannot fathom

about desire: my hands

cradling this bowl,

just right not too hot,

and splayed in the soup

two thigh bones and a knuckle,

surrendered for me, to me,

and my pleasure in this death.

possession

We are at the cider mill, which has become a massive festival of blow-up toys and pay-as-you-go corrals, the sale of cider, doughnuts and apples apparently insufficient.

The two babies are happy to be outside on their mommies' bosoms in identical, identifiable Ergo carriers, blissfully unaware of economics. 

Distancing ourselves from the festival of apples and pumpkins, we go for a walk on a path along the woods. James, two and a half, straddles Grandpa's shoulders. Grandpa plucks a hickory nut from a tree. "Look, this is a hickory nut, James." 

James takes and throws it indignantly back into the woods. "That is not our own!"

Then Grandpa breaks a small dead branch off a tree and hands it to James, now on the ground, to walk with. Instantly James throws it back. "That is not our own!"

The grassy road undulates ahead, woods on the left, a field of corn on the right. Grandpa picks an ear of dry corn and hands it to James. "That is not our own!" and he throws it back. Grandpa goes and picks up the corn where it landed. "Maybe you can just carry it a while and throw it back later."

And so he begins to eat the dried, borrowed corn. 

Arranging stones: poems and quilts

A tiny airliner

crosses the sky,

slicing 

without sound.

I type one

more word

on the page

and the seam closes.

Indian muslin

sewn to

French toile

means that pale young boys

play with a dog

in a beautiful garden

of dark-leafed paisley.

We pry

stones apart

just wide enough

to let another thing

live

and with all

that is in our power

sew them

together:

this scar

that is

ourselves.

Summer clouds

With no apparent ferocity in their wildness,

shapes of white ash and beam

roll above and past the old house and barn,

which sag under them in rumpled pleats.

Bent peaks and gables finger the buoyant clouds

but seem too weak to hook, release

and catch them: armloads of damp laundry,

which through summer centuries stay daily fresh.

When I was a girl in a small town, one

summer night I dreamt that the moon came

close enough to touch. Clouds hover today,

almost brushing my head,

until something shakes them out.

Heavily they fall. For a while I stand.

anthills

I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

— Jorge Luis Borges 

My grandson and I are out for a walk around his apartment complex of buildings. Along the edge of the asphalt, in the many cracks left by the creaks and heaves of winter, are anthills. Spring is turning to summer, truly, if the ants are rebuilding.

He is two and a half and the world belongs to him to do with as he pleases. When we play hide-and-seek around the big maples on the hill, he strips a sapling branch of its leaves before I can stop him. Now, as we walk the road, he swipes an anthill low, and in one small moment of horror I cry “no!” wanting him to obey and not run ahead and swipe as he does. “They took a long time to build the entrance to their home,” I say, but he is bent on swipe-swipe-swiping, though I grab his hand firmly against it.

I have just read about two-year-olds and the determination to do what it is they want to do until distracted. It does no good simply to fight, and there will be no spanking as there was of me, to break my will, to shape it into something not my own.

It will take time to build this boy, with the deliberateness of ants. In spite of my momentary horror, I whisk him up in feigned joy to play a new game. It works, and he is distracted from destruction.

But it was he who carried worms last summer off the asphalt into the grass to save them from cars, he who kissed ladybugs on the tree trunk and let them play along his small palms and shoulders. He who stared at the lake fly on the blue beach chair five minutes before it flew away. Were anthills an abstraction because he saw no ants, even from his small stature?

Someone taught me not to step on anthills by bending low to watch a worker cross the sidewalk carrying a single bit of earth in his mandibles. Close enough to see his mandibles! I transcended his ugliness (monster-like if movies are to be believed). I thought, how beautiful to have such mechanisms for industrious use.

In this memory I am relieved, seeing that I am not the teacher.

Day off to sew the week of Mother’s Day

I wake up to the quiet alarm

of distant thunder, rain — Spring

offering diplomacy after a lethal winter.

It is a day to sew maternal gifts,

but it is for pleasure

that I stitch and miter

fabric the colors of robin’s eggs

and lilac leaves just starred.

It is for my pleasure the cotton

steams fragrant from under the iron

spread out open and flat

in the furrows I sew.

If only Spring found pleasure

wielding her power

like this, fingers flying

in grassy compassionate treaties

along the far passes of the blue planet.

I think pleasure would be enough

for her to mete out comfort equally.

* * *

I heard about the devastating landslide in Afghanistan, burying a village after days of rain. It was when I saw photographs here that something strange and wonderful happened. Aren't we constantly presented with wide-ranging emotions? I discovered the beautiful simplicity of this village only after it was partially destroyed. I did not know such places existed, never imagining the neat prettiness there nestled in the mountains of a part of the world decimated by war. Please go see those images and perhaps you will feel the connection I feel. There are no graphic images of people dead, only a village with part of it buried. (There is a photo of a dead donkey.) To imagine what these villagers are experiencing now, one boy losing his whole family. If only Nature could heal all our sins. Well perhaps she will, long after we're gone.

The hardest thing

with my two grown children,

each with new babies,

is letting them grow down

into themselves.

I had them

close to the bone

in two years and I survived

the feedings, washings,

readings to, puttings to bed,

keeping some things in order

on a shoestring

though the cost

to me was a barrenness

of long lonely days

until I was sure

nothing alive could sprout

from me ever again.

All things rub together

into nothing.

This is where we vibrate.

Slowly, invisibly

and then the tiny tendril flame.

Holy life

The sun’s yolk

spreads

neon pink

and orange

across the pan

of sky.

Broken to flow

it bleeds

like this

everywhere

eventually

in one day

egalitarian,

as needed

Queen Anne's lace in April

After a winter of nearly

a full alphabet of storms,

from Atlas almost to Zephyr —

            conquering kings, hunters,

            warriors, destroyers —

prostrate stalks and grasses

like sickled wheat

layer the meadow,

unquestioning, submissive,

as if stepped on by gods,

except every few feet

where thin stems stand

stiff, unbent, lace collars

intact, rising like peaceful

purveyors of xenia,

the ancient obligatory gift

of hospitality and protection

to strangers, however

violently they might come.

* * *
Added at 10:08am:

I am excited by a one-on-one "workshopping" from a friend who suggests this edit. I think it is an improved, tightened version, and I appreciate it!

After a winter's alphabet of storms,

from Atlas almost to Zephyr —

            conquering kings, hunters,

            warriors, destroyers —

prostrate stalks and grasses

like sickled wheat

layer the meadow,

submissive,

stepped on by gods

except where thin stems stand

unbent,

lace collars whole,

rising like

purveyors of xenia,

the ancient obligatory gift

of hospitality and protection

to strangers, however

violently they might come.

You can read the list of names given to the storms of 2013-14, including Xenia, the most recent (I think).

"How shall I hold my soul that it may not be touching yours?"

I poke through an assortment of stuffed animals left after our grown children moved out. Among various bears, here is our son’s rhinoceros, two circles on its face like vertical eyes where velvet horns are now tattered nubs of cotton stuffing. Such abnormalities are birthmarks, in a way, marks of the emergence into adulthood after the long human development of a child. How necessary it was, all that wear and tear, the regular nightly embraces that softened and thinned the horns of a toy rhinoceros whose counterparts in Africa lie wasted from human greed.

There are stories of terror. And there are others of human magnificence. Our small granddaughter, three days old, lies sedated in an incubator, her face, chest, arms and legs relaxed open in surrender. She has been saved by magnificent humans, her own strength, the warm touch of her parents and grandparents, and the grace of God.

I wrap up "Rhiney" for my now 31-year-old son to hold while he cannot hold his first child. I wonder at this inanimate thing, the color of stone, able to vibrate with life and healing though it cannot heal itself, or feel me holding it. We shoot meaning into what we touch and attend to. What essence are we connecting with in these things, which are also somehow vibration, linking with our own pulsing souls?

And how much more then, between living beings?

“How shall I hold my soul that it may not
Be touching yours? How shall I lift it then
Above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all forgot,
With some lost thing the dark is isolating
On some remote and silent spot that, when
Your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.
You and me – all that lights upon us though,
Brings us together like a fiddle bow
Drawing one voice from two strings, it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.” 

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Our granddaughter, Olive Rose, was born Monday night with a congenital abnormality called Tracheoesophageal Fistula, which means that her trachea and esophagus were connected in bad ways, and her esophagus did not connect with her stomach. She would not have survived if surgeons at the Children's Hospital had not operated Wednesday to reconstruct the trachea and esophagus for normal functioning, after a day of tests Tuesday. Gratefully, Olive does not seem to have the other abnormalities that can come with this one (and do for half the babies that do), and she underwent five hours of thoracoscopic surgery with four little incisions. She will stay in children's hospital 30 days to recover.

spring equinox

My shoulders like

the ground are paralyzed

and rivers frozen thicker

than for a hundred years.

In a matter of days,

ice and snow melt will heave

in fabulous dark crowds

across roads, fast-fingered

roots creep into cellars.

I feel in my body the

frozen waiting for this

migration, the

fear and the hope

of spring upbraided,

the synapses of earth’s

unfathomable brain,

cords of living matter

bulked, tapered, floating

elongated across

low places in requisite

water, full of fault

without intent.

I want to stem this

movement, protest

on the streets, protect

vulnerable farmers, the poor

dilapidated houses in the low city!

I want to fall on the earth

with hands cupped

to the sun, like a primordial

woman before her altar,

like that almond sliver of light

that falls a few hours a year

between stone walls!

the art of fabric, the fabric of art

Besides work, my grandsons, and a granddaughter yet to be born (two days "late"), these days my daily light shines on creating art with quilts. I am full of energy and passion for painting with fabric this way. It feels odd to watch the shift of attention from words and poems to color and pattern.

Susan Sontag said

“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”

This is just what I feel! Eager!

When we write poems, we recycle words. With quilts, I am recycling fabric. Project scraps from the 1980s, clothes, dust ruffles, table cloths, sheets, whatever is salvageable and beautiful is fair game. My challenge to myself is to not purchase new fabric. There is a lot of gorgeous new fabric being designed out there, and I relish it when I see it in the creations of others. In another time I would have gobbled it up. But I find myself resisting buying anything new unless it is absolutely necessary. Besides, it is a sublime adventure to create something beautiful out of what would otherwise be discarded.

I am blogging about the quilts at birds of the air quilts. I'd love to share it with you if you are interested. I just opened an etsy shop with the first quilt, where one day someone may actually pay money for one of these.

I have only fiddled with art peripherally all my life. The media I've tried have not inspired me enough to put in the requisite work and practice. But coming back to fabric, sewing, and making quilts again, this time for my grandchildren, I discovered the wild and exhilarating world of modern improv art quilts. (Check out my Pinterst quilts board for my inspiration.)

If a poem comes, it will spill out here.

detail of my most recent quilt "Rose and her sisters"
created from a cabbage rose Ralph Lauren dust ruffle
my sister passed on to me that I never used,
vintage 1980s fabric from my stash
and linen toile leftover from a chair recovering project

chai winter

chai:

morning, the color

of wet stone

in winter’s china cup,

tepid, with a sweet

stirring finger

puddled in clay.

I part the trees to the road,

thus, through this white

sky. White!

Always white

and the trees

in varying degrees

of clarity, which to me

is all. The trees nothing

if not fingers

stirring white sky.

And what if it is

forever? What of that?

And I, boring

a hole through the bottom

of the cup?

the close of winter

We fight against the close

of winter

with our drive to go

on, not to stop

and sleep or beautifully

watch.

With blades and spades

we further our path

though we don’t know where

we are going, or

why

and in our deepening desire

for meaning, the snow

also deepens

around our tired knees.

It would be so simple

to let it stop

us, if we could believe

the stopping would not

do us in

if the in were actually where

the living is. If being

alone was really enough.

bruxism

For weeks I have had pain in my front tooth, which is capped. It all began with a lunch hour nap in my office. Last week, I began to think I might need a root canal. Doesn't that procedure bring terror? Thankfully now root canals are quite benign compared to the pain, and so I was resigned to it when I went to the dentist Monday to check on the tooth. After an x-ray, Dr. Stone said I don't need a root canal. Joy, relief! He proceeded to file down the cap so that it wouldn't nip my lower teeth. I sleep at night with a bite plate because I clench my teeth (called bruxism), which has eased sensitivity in my teeth over the years almost completely. But, when I take a nap on my office couch, I don't have my bite plate. Perhaps that should change.

Bruxism

My teeth throb

after waking from a nap

on my office couch. I clench

my teeth in the forest

of sleep where mind-snakes

glissade across branches.

How many they are! Metallic,

white as chalk, mortally

virulent in the heel of my

spirit. Consciously, I try

to hold my jaw open

like the gate of my head

against the kilim pillow

where a tribe of stick men

armed with blue and red

woolen stitches hold firm

against embroidered beasts.

But as sleep moves its cloud

across my face, a small

warrior clamps shut my mouth.

Awake, I feel in the great walls

of my teeth that this fortress

held true against marauders,

quiet now, asleep

alas — inside the tower!

peanuts

Peanuts, peanuts in a bowl,

floral blue and white,

old Chinese porcelain blue

like the sky today, an upturned

bowl on pedestal trees. You

remember two days ago

when it all dumped out — rice,

wet and sticky while we watched

disbelieving from these windows,

thinking the world could never

go hungry with so much falling.

But today grackles — naked, poor,

immaculate — prove the nothing

that I know under the tree,

peanuts disappearing

from the bottom of my bowl.

Bed as world

My grandson’s pleasure

is to sit on the bed

under a sheet

teepeed by his head

while I lie next to him

and read. As if the sheet

has just fallen

from a high mountain,

the entire snow-cap

intact, and now he is

the mountain and I am

the foothills at his knee,

sending echoes up

to his head, the peak,

my voice a yodler’s calling

or a squirrel's clicking

or a bear's bellowing

or a train's chug-chugging

or a bell's ding-donging

across a deep valley

where children behind

gaping glassless windows

are falling asleep in the clean

cool down of their beds,

all around them

puffing complexities 

of another world.

nomadic days & nights - a new project

These are very intensely focused days for me as we get closer to the births of another grandson (due Feb. 20) and a granddaughter (due Mar. 12). It is hard to get my head around this, but my heart has been ready for a while. :)

But the world goes on. As you know if you've known me long, news of the world's great (and small!) collapses weigh heavily on me, as they do upon you, too, no doubt. I find that I must be inspired by something for it all not to pull me down.

So I decided to begin a study that would help me focus in on a particular area, to get the context of history, art, music, literature. Because I've lived in Istanbul, I chose that part of the world.

I have started a new writing space for reflecting on these investigations. I will be posting there occasionally to reflect and better understand the current state of worldwide collapse. I want to live neither optimistically nor pessimistically, but realistically toward a transformation of humanity. It is a silk road, washed in blood and beauty.

I will keep posting here too, when I feel I must write a poem or something.

If you are interested in the topic, I would love to welcome you to that space. But please, do not feel obligated. I understand how much there is to read, and not enough time. I do relish conversation about these important things, but I start nomadic days & nights primarily for myself. I need to write in order to reflect. This will help me keep at it.

21 crows

I understand Wallace Stevens’ need to write thirteen ways. A multiplication, an exponential transformation occurs when I see these shining birds on roads of snow.

They are black jack dealt on a white table,

fortune and misfortune as one.

A constellation of flying stars,

of beaks and wings on a white sky

in the world’s negative.

Hunger falling in waves

like wind from broken trees.

They are 21 nights of insomnia —

a new habit of wakefulness.

Glyphs of a new language,

shining blue.

A black coat

lifting when I pass

floating back down

to clothe its dying friend.

They are a bridge from

sky to tree

tree to possum

possum to me.

They are strangers

or lovers

depending on the light.

They are infinity

mile by mile

Really, this could go on and on. I wonder what you see in 21 crows?