09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
I have an idea for a new monetary system. 'Money' will be issued to people and businesses based on a system of credits-and-debits. People will receive 'credits' for everything they do that benefits the environment, from growing their own vegetables, to recycling, to offering services that support the community such as teaching, nursing, home-making, park maintenance, art, music and so on, and the same people will also receive debits for things they do that destroy the environment: for example, musicians today almost all have to use a lot of electronic equipment for which they would be issued some small number of debits. Large businesses that discharge toxins into our rivers will receive huge debits, even though they may be receiving credits for the products they are making. That ought to cut into their 'profit margins!' - and hopefully inspire them to make some necessary changes. Similarly, businesses that produce a lot of paper waste will receive debits but businesses that produce plastic or other non-biodegradable materials will be issued major debits. Companies that produce useful products, such as underwear, or cookwear, or appliances, and who also use biodegradable packaging will receive additional credits.
We could still have a capitalistic society but there would be greater incentive to be environmentally sound in business practices.
What do you think?
03:40 PM | Permalink
I've been thinking how we all think we have such good values, because we're Americans or because we are Christians, or Jews or whatever it is - but I think really that Germans may have better values than we do - and that, of course, must be impossible! But seriously, we are all so Bible-believing in our country, yet...
In our country, the people who give love and care to our very young (our promise of the future) and our very old (a precious treasury of experience and lives lived in service) are paid such low wages that they can't really support themselves at even a lower middle class lifestyle, while the people who are busy destroying our environment are paid the big bucks, from the CEOs of these corporations down to the men who operate the heavy equipment.
Go figure
03:14 PM | Permalink
I enjoyed this book! Love Alice Hoffman's writing style: so vivid and sensate. Enjoyed the way she wove in the history of Coney Island - many layers - and studded her work with gems of wisdom. And of course, the basic story of two people who find themselves and each other in a setting of both visual beauty (nature photography) and visual anomaly.
She wove in a sub-theme around Jane Eyre, a favorite book of the Wolfman at the Museum, who after reading of the incarceration of the first Mrs. Rochester, decided to free himself from his own incarceration by his family in Virginia. He finds out that the world will not be kind to a 'wolfman' and that his family's hiding him away while caring for him with attention, books, nice food, providing a private domain of enjoyments for him was an act of love of their part. He was not unloved.
Mr. Rochester had the same motivation in hiding away his first wife, an untreated, undiagnosed schizophrenic before there was such a diagnosis. To read about the treatment of schizophrenics in his era, read Sebastian Faulks' novel "Human Traces" - it is an absolutely amazing book! Hoffman seems critical of Mr. Rochester's incarceration of his wife, which he claims he did out of love for her. As Faulks' book tells us, most schizophrenics were chained in outbuildings or kept in basements, dungeons, and yes, attics, completely ignored and barely fed. But Mrs. R. had a constant attendant, and Rochester contrasts his wife's situation to what it might have been in an asylum of the day. Read "Human Traces" if you want to form a more realistic idea of what that was like. (Happily, the book is about more than that, so I promise you it won't be a steady diet of misery.)
Also, Charlotte Bronte's sister Anne wrote a novel about the plight of a woman married to a debauched wealthy land-owning man. Apparently, as is often the case where there are great riches involved, there was a lot of debauchery among the upper classes of England during their imperial heyday. Families were impoverished by debauched males who gambled away the family fortune or spent it on entertainments and courtesans. There's quite a bit of good literature on that topic out there. So, Charlotte turns the tables here and asks the question, what about a debauched woman, who is also schizophrenic - what is the effect of such a person on a young unformed male just starting out on his adventure of life. Rochester expresses regrets over his 'lost innocence' that Jane resonates with. They are two good people who find each other and who must reach across a cultural and social abyss to meet. They meet as 'souls' - as 'soul mates.' Yes, there is a Deus ex Machina but it was the first, not a typical Gothic Romance - no, actually, the very first one that all the others imitated.
I'd like to write more about what Jane Eyre meant to me. Will try to get back to this soon.
11:35 AM in Books, contemplation, fiction, healing room notes, history buff, place, reading room notes, spiritual artistry | Permalink
Here is the review of this book I wrote for Amazon: "This book answered all my questions about Nella Larsen, and I appreciated the author's very readable style coupled with meticulous historiography. I did try to read Thadious Davis' book first, but it felt like reading a legal brief and I just couldn't take it :-) However, it did make me realize that in some ways Nella Larsen has been brought to trial - people felt she had done wrong and needed to exonerate herself (so to speak) but that task turned out to be more daunting than might be supposed. My own reading of her, as a woman who was neither white nor black, and was perhaps more white than black culturally, although she had a dark complexion, was accessible through Hutchinson's book. I read "Passing" first and became completely fascinated by Larsen, perhaps not least because my mother and her parents were dealing with color-line issues in the 1920's as well. I followed up "Passing" with "Quicksand" - and having Danish relatives myself, having visited Denmark too - I found her depiction of Danish culture to be quite true to form. Sprinkled through the book's pages were also anecdotes of many leading lights and important events and incidents of the various eras covered by Larsen's life. I especially enjoyed the recounting of her nursing work during the Spanish Influenza epidemic in New York City. So, I have to say, I found the book very entertaining and informative on a much wider scale than just one person's life. Nevertheless, I found her particular life - a woman far ahead of her time - very fascinating, and the whole treatment of the dynamics and politics of the color-line as it played out in her particular life nuanced and extremely thought-provoking."
What I didn't say in this review is that just considering Larsen as a novelist ought to be material enough for a nice portably slim volume. She really only wrote two novels "Quicksand" and "Passing." Sadly, we've lost other novels which she wrote, and I especially would like to have seen the 'white' novel that was turned down even though its ending was supposed to have been spectacular!
The fact that in her later years she returned to nursing and that 'nursing and reading' were her life make me feel close to Larsen. There's nothing wrong with a life of reading and reflection, especially when coupled with the hard work she seems to have maintained as the night supervisor for the old Gouvernor's Hospital in New York City.
If you want to know more about Nella Larsen, after reading her two novels, this is the next book to read!
Ps - Thank you George Hutchinson!
04:06 PM in Books, dna/genealogy, history buff, nostalgia, reading room notes, self, spiritual genealogy | Permalink
Gary and I watched this film starring and produced and directed by Tommy Lee Jones. It was an excellent film, but not an easy one, about a homesteading woman who agrees to take three mentally ill pioneer women by wagon back to Iowa. She realizes she can't manage the three of them alone and hires a low-life former soldier to assist her. He is played by TLJ. For me, the upshot of this film - in fact, nearly every scene fairly shouted to me the message - settling the west was madness! Every one in this film is mad in their own way, even the most sane in appearance - and I found this ultimately to be rather sad. And scary, especially the final scene. Watch it at your own risk! But if you want a good dose of 'reality,' this is the film for you!
Jimmie P is the story of the psychoanalysis of a Native American - I think they call him a Plains' Indian, but the setting is New Mexico. Jimmie is a veteran who was not seriously injured in the second world war but who suffers from continuous headaches, periods of disorientation, depression and severe fatigue - in short, PTSD in an era that did not yet recognize the disorder. Medical tests are negative and finally he is sent to a facility where the psychiatrist calls in an anthropologist with psychological training to conduct Jimmie's psychoanalysis. The anthropologist knows enough about Native American culture to be able to talk with Jimmie using 'insider' lingo that Jimmie understands, and through compassionate listening and a non-pathologizing attitude, allows Jimmie to open up and share about his past traumas, most of which took place in childhood. I thought the film-makers' did a good job of showing how childhood traumas create problems for people later in life. For example, Jimmie witnessed a little girl drown when he was only five years old - nevertheless even as a tiny child himself, he felt he ought to have tried to save her. Instead, terrified, he ran away. Even so much later in life he still carried around with him a great deal of guilt over that perceived 'failure', unreasonable though it was.
So overall the film was a good portrayal of a successful analysis, with the added interest of a beautiful setting in New Mexico - or somewhere out west. I saw the film a few weeks ago and already I'm forgetting important details. There's a minor subplot about the analyst's personal life: his change of identity after fleeing Europe during the Nazi era, changing his Roumanian-Jewish name to a French equivalent. He also receives a month-long visit from his high-class married girlfriend, providing some romantic interludes from the psychoanalytic process. All in all a pleasant and interesting film, a lovely night's entertainment that stays with you afterward. I give it four stars.
What I liked best about this film was that it highlights the importance of cultural awareness in psychoanalysis or, I would think, any kind of counseling. Culture is one of our current-day hurdles to mutual understanding and even to democracy. The problem is, that in coming to understand the cultures of others, we learn things about our own culture that we weren't really quite 'aware' of, and that is often rather painful.
01:44 PM in Film, healing room notes, native america | Permalink
This film is all about letting go and moving on as part of 'healing' from trauma. A family has been traumatized by an accidental death. Young mother, father and little girl go out in the speedboat which crashes and Mom dies. Dad had been drinking. None of this is depicted at any point, but comes out gradually in the first half of the movie (so this is not a spoiler - but in general I ought to say 'SPOILER ALERT' right up front). Anyway, the family is really struggling with these wounds. Little girl has gone to be live with Grandpa (Mom's father) while her own Dad disappears into despair, his better intentions drowning in drink and drugs.
Meanwhile, in another town, a complete 'nobody,' an apparently orphaned girl has been living in the home of an elderly lady for whom she has cared for perhaps ten years. When the old lady dies, her pastor finds her a position caring for this orphaned girl in the story above. She takes the bus and moves in. 'Destroyed Dad' meets her when she arrives and when he returns to Chicago, he writes her a thank you note for taking on the job of caring for his daughter. She writes a reply and gives it to now-teenaged daughter and her friend to post for her. Of course, they open the letter and have a gas-attack of giggles over it and decide to have some fun 'replying' to this letter as if it's from Dad. The letter is never posted, but the 'correspondence' continues via email courtesy of the girls.
Over time, the 'cleaning lady' gets the idea that Dad really likes her and actually finds her attractive and beautiful. The two begin to hatch plans. 'Destroyed Dad' is trying to re-build his life in Chicago and has bought a derelict motel and Cleaning Lady decides to help him in his project. They plan it all via email. She invests her own saved money in the project and sets off for Chicago to move in with him, as per his invitation. When she learns the truth, she is humiliated. But in spite of that, she sets to work cleaning up his dive of a motel, just as she cleaned up the living arrangements at Grandpa's house earlier in the film.
What I particularly liked about this film is that it focuses on someone whose work and persona are not valued in our culture - the cleaning person. We'll spend big bucks to go to a seminar where we're told we must clean up our clutter, or that part of the Buddhist way is to purify our minds, bodies and environments. But what that translates to is spending a LOT of time sorting, scrubbing, dusting, dumping, and doing basically menial labor which no one values - and in the case of cleaning up our own clutter, no one pays for - not even minimum wage.
Nevertheless, this woman makes a huge difference to everyone whose life she touches. And it's not because of what she has to say - well, occasionally, but even then her speech is pretty much monosyllabic. She changes people's lives by changing their environment.
And, really, I do think there is such an important lesson for all of us there. Plus, I just liked her simple, focused, single-mindedness. She could be the poster-child for Buddhist teaching, but she's just a white-bread nobody kind of gal, running the vacuum-cleaner.
There are many little gems and jewels in this film - understated 'showings' of the truth of things. Truths that are missed when we're not paying attention, when we're so tangled up in our own negative feelings that somehow just keep on compiling. When the precious jewel that's inside each of us can't be seen because of all the grime that's encrusted it - but it's still there. Well, there's so much more that could be said about this little film.
For me, this is a spiritual artistry film. What it's showing is something spiritual, without being preachy or didactic in any way.
01:37 PM in Film, spiritual artistry | Permalink | Comments (0)
I've completed my reading of Nella Larsen's Quicksand. I thought her writing was simply superlative in Passing, and I haven't changed my opinion. I found 'Quicksand' to be well written and very interesting from the autobiographical angle, especially her trip to Denmark; having visited relatives there myself, I thought she captured many aspects of Danish culture accurately, economically and well.
I also found this novel revealing of Larsen's own personality, her sensitivity and volatility in particular, even more than in 'Passing,' and have realized that she must have intended to depict parts of herself in both Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry in 'Passing', as she must also have done with Helga Crane and Anne Grey in 'Quicksand.' Unless, I'm going to discover more about some 'close friend' in "In Search of Nella Larsen" which I'm reading right now. However, I doubt that I will, as she did not seem to make close friends in her life. She certainly seems to be one of the most alone women I've ever encountered in my reading!
I found the ending of Quicksand supremely tragic, and also I couldn't quite buy it. But I'm wondering if the fate she assigns Helga Crane doesn't reflect her own fears for herself? Having been raised 'white' for all intents and purposes, (although as a scapegoated, marginalized white so to speak), she must have felt alienated from much of black culture and perhaps frightened of certain aspects of it, that while not necessarily 'endorsed' by African-Americans was at least not totally unfamiliar to them as it would have been to her. What a lonely character she was, in life - talk about Quicksand.
I might suggest an interesting companion piece to read along with Larsen's two novels, and that is a family memoir, "The Sweeter the Juice," written by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip about her mother who was the lightest child in an African-American family descended from the brother of Martha Washington (just to add a little historical interest), and who was essentially 'forced' to pass as white, experiencing heart-searing loss and feelings of abandonment throughout her life, while searching for her siblings. Haizlip helped her mother, Margaret, at age 80, finally track down and reunite with at least one of her sisters. Margaret experienced the 'opposite side of the coin' to Nella's experience, having looked white while being raised in a black family, yet finally finding herself set adrift in a white world.
This is a well-written book, and shows how the pain of segregation cut both ways.
Another book that is not judgemental about 'passing', but rather takes a more compassionate view, is Allyson Hobbs' 2014 book, "A Chosen Exile." I highly recommend this one!
I've just finished reading Nella Larsen's "Passing" and also Sinclair Lewis' "Kingsblood Royal." Both are absolutely excellent books for anyone interested in the history of racism in our country right up to the present day - although these books both address a form of racism that isn't as much of an issue as it once was, namely the Jim-Crowing of white people who have 'hidden' African ancestry, ie "Black Blood." (By the way, my mother's high-school photo was sepia-washed like this photo of Nella Larsen, a popular 'technique' of the era for indicating 'mulatto' status).
Nella Larsen's novel, Passing, captures the emotional reverberations of the Jim Crow era for light-colored 'Negroes' as well those white-looking enough to 'pass' as white, better than anyone else I've ever read - for example, in the scene where the three women (two 'passing') talk about their intense anxieties about their children to the point where they are physically sweating with fear, or in the intense discomfort of feeling 'confined' in life that is experienced by the narrator's copper-skinned physician husband, Brian, who would like to escape the 'color-line' by moving to Brazil.
But the book is even beyond this, so much more! Nella Larsen seems to be quite a good psychologist, even though in life she worked mostly as a nurse and also as a librarian. For example, the main 'passing' character is Clare who is married to a white man who is a raging racist. The general consensus seems to be that people who pass are exceptionally selfish people who want to 'get' things, even though there is also an admission that everyone wants to get as much as they can, but not everyone is willing - or able - to 'pass' in order to get them. 'Getting things' seems to be a priority in human life, as far as I can see, but spurning your family and community to get them, or even to acquire a greater measure of personal freedom, is too radical a move for most people to make.
And here is the genius of Nella Larsen: she makes it quite clear that Clare does not have any family. Her mother died while Clare was a baby and she was 'raised' by a white-skinned Negro-identified drunken janitor who died when she was fifteen. At that point, she was removed from the community by three white maiden great-aunts who used her as their household laborer until the time when Clare's blonde dark-eyed beauty attracted a rich white man who wanted to marry her. She ditches the aunts without a backward glance - all the better that none of them know about her marriage, so that no hint of her secret black identity should get back to her husband, who turns out to be quite racist.
Clare has no loyalty to the white race, who in the form of her great-aunts, abused her, so she feels free to marry this racist man and deceive him as to her true identity. She tells Irene, the light-skinned Negro narrator, married to a darker man, Brian, a physician, that she, Clare, is the kind of person who just takes what she wants and doesn't care who she hurts. This is either not entirely true, or Clare somehow regrets this coldness about herself, because she weeps as she tells this to Irene.
Clare, in my book, is a 'survivor,' someone who has no particular allegiance to anyone else, who has always had to 'take care of herself,' and cope and survive - someone who has been minimally 'helped' but much 'abandoned' by both 'races.' Irene's 'dark' father may have been kind to Clare when her drunken parent died, but no one offered to take her in. As she tells Irene, without the great-aunts (who put her to hard work for her keep) she would have had no home in the world. To me this is not someone who is superficially 'selfish' but someone desperate to survive and desirous of the best that life can offer her, who knows that it's up to her to get it for herself because no one is going to help her, and is not denying herself - in the way that Irene seems to do, Irene who treads the safe, respectable, predictable paths of the black middle-class 'professional-people' lifestyle. Clare has no family and no community, black or white.
Plato said that people like this are not really human, and this is exactly what plagues Irene about Clare and makes her friendship toxic to her. Clare is not playing by the same rules as Irene and even tries unsuccessfully to talk to Irene about it.
People write that there is a lesbian sub-text to this novel, but I can't say that I see it. A book I read in 2013 called "Yesterday's Self," written by a Polish Jew whose family left Poland for Canada when she was 13 years old evinces the same kind of language of longing, writes about all kinds of people she had to leave behind almost in the terms one uses to describe a lover. I think, based on my own experience, that a culture, an ethnicity is a very sensuous experience: the sounds of a dialect or a way of laughing, the smells of skin, hair, the interiors of homes, of ethnic foods, the colors of people skin and hair and eyes - all of this can become the object of intense longing when one is separated from the culture and its ethnic representatives.
In recent decades we've read more literature coming from the pens of descendants of dark-skinned, 'black' African-Americans, describing their experience, the fictionalized and sometimes deeply researched historical experiences of their forebears, and less attention has been placed on those who might prefer to be known as multi-'racial' or multi-ethnic. Nella Larsen and Jean Toomer would be two writers who wanted to be known as bi-racial or multi-racial, but the Jim Crow society demanded that they come down on one side or the other of the colors line: either white or black. They knew they were both, and much of Nella Larsen's writing seems to explore this knowledge.
The light-skinned African-Americans who had the possible option of 'passing' were perceived by the darker, less mixed brethren as the privileged elite. And although they did most definitely enjoy privilege relative to the darker members of the 'race,' they were still trapped in the ghetto of Jim Crow society. Blackness is the seed at the heart of the matter. Even though the narrative does not revolve so much anymore around the paradox of white people who have blackness at their cores, their narrative was nevertheless the narrative of blackness in a racist society, and served to underscore the irrationality of it. Without their layer of the story, everything becomes much more black-and-white. And so the story continues.
My own interest in Nella Larsen in particular is that my great-grandmother 'passed' as white, or tried to. She was multi-ethnic from an 'isolate-community' in Delaware who attempted to escape the color-line by taking work in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at that time a booming city with many immigrant laborers among whom she could blend in, pretending to be Irish in order to 'disguise' her archaic 'Appalachian-like' non-standard English. This was not the story of someone 'elite' or 'middle-class' as scholars like to categorize the 'passing' narrative. She was illiterate, a prostitute until she was able to locate her goal in life - a white husband from one of the classes above the level of the working-class, which she found in my highly spiritual Civil War wounded veteran great-grandfather who had been a white collar worker: county clerk. Her appearance was more Indian, or Caribbean perhaps, than 'black,' but even in that world of immigrant labor, she was recognized as 'not one of them.' Her 'passing' status was handed down to her son, my grandfather, and from him to my mother, who struggled to decide which 'race' to join - note again the sense of freedom to choose a race rather than a gut-feeling of 'belonging' to a race - I think this must be a central element in the psychological makeup of those who pass - a lack of feeling of belonging to either race.
My mother married someone she thought of as a white Danish man (similar to Nella Larsen's white Danish mother), although he was a Danish Jew. When I was born unambiguously white-looking with blonde hair and blue eyes, she decided the passing narrative should cease, should go underground with all the finality of a burial. However, she couldn't help herself, I suppose, and dropped hints, said things which had so much 'charge' to them at the time, that I've remembered them, wondered about them, and done the archaeology necessary to put the pieces together and interpret them. But that's a whole other story, which you can find on my weblog, Great-Grandmother's Blog.
Finally, I'd like to say that there are many different narratives of racism from all around the world, and for me some of what specifically characterizes the time-period that Nella Larsen was writing in, is that in attempting to break out of the ghetto and find some measure of greater freedom and anonymity in the wider society one ran the risk of discovery followed by disgrace, losses of all kinds (friends, family, job, status, income - as for example is narrated in Kingsblood Royal by Sinclair Lewis), and a return to a community, the black community, which may not accept you because they despise those who attempt to 'pass.' For people who don't have the option to pass, the narrative revolves around being forced to live in substandard housing, to take the lowest and worst-paying jobs, to be invisible/dismissed/hated by the dominant society's members, to be aware that your survival does not matter to your fellow-humans outside the circle of your own family and community, ie that you are expendable. Actually, all poor people, whatever their color experience this latter problem. During the days when slavery was legal, dark-complected people, including many Europeans, even if they lived free, had to live daily with the fear that they would be shanghaied into slavery and lose their freedom and self-determination on every level.
But I can see that this particular 'passing' narrative of the white-looking 'negro' has its parallels in stories like those of the Spanish Inquisition, in which people - Jews or Muslims - may have converted to Catholicism, whether genuinely or out of a sense of conforming to the dominant society at least on the surface (as was requested repeatedly by royal edicts), could be dragged from their homes, have their property seized by the state, and then be tortured and killed. An even more radical result if one failed at 'passing'! There is a novel that writes about this particular form of 'apartheid' called "The Queen's Fool" if you are interested in reading a book that deals with similar themes to those of "Passing" but in the setting of Inquisitional Europe. However, this latter book, and most books as far as I am aware, cannot approach the sheer artistry of Nella Larsen's novelistic work.
11:39 AM in Books, fiction, history buff, reading room notes, spiritual artistry, spiritual genealogy, world literature | Permalink
I just finished reading this book, The Treasure of Montsegur: A Novel of the Cathars, by Sophy Burnham, while still engrossed in "Kingsblood Royal," but I want to write my review while it's still fresh.
I've read several books on the Cathar heretics and their supposed treasure smuggled out of Montsegur before the mass martyrdom of the Cathars, and I have to say that far and away this is the best! Not only does Burnham capture the blended Catholic-Cathar culture of the South of France and its parage (way of life), which almost no one else really 'gets,' but her writing is beautiful, sensitive, intelligent and nuanced.
Her protagonist Jeanne of Beziers goes from noble lady (by birth, adoption and marriage) to a poor beggar suffering from severe post-traumatic stress after the siege of Montsegur and the decimation of her whole world, including the loss of all her loved ones to violence, which she witnesses. Burnham writes very insightfully about all of this in her portrayal of 'crazy Jeanne.'
The tale spans the gamut of lovely life among the nobility to the penury of being a poor refugee, and also paints a picture of life among the peasantry working the land and raising animals and food. To me, this book is a minor tour-de-force, and definitely worth reading if you are interested in this period in history.
(I have this book listed under 'spiritual genealogy' because we have Huguenots in our family history, and they were another group persecuted by the mainstream church, but late enough in time to have been able to escape to the 'New World.')
11:32 AM in Books, fiction, history buff, political, religions of the world, spiritual genealogy, spiritual tradition | Permalink