for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially
.
Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older
partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even
morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in
effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When
coming of age as a radical leftwing activist,
"family values" were something I rejected categorically and
conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame).
Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine
from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an
imposture. "Family values" remain something to be
observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.
2.
Women usually
react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact
my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45.
This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits
from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism"
-- educated to believe that just about anything subverting
"traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know
nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a
domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers,"
along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my
other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed
to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.
3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond
in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my
model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me.
So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in
another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether
anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled
myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and
sobbing, not home but to where he lived.
4. When a little
less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf
of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the
west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This
monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of
touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified
nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows
where still I could not touch bottom.
In terror, time and
language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will
-- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body
became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront
terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you
and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My
thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.
Just how long it took to get
back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up
hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best
efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.
On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying
an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone
acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas
I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the
sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.
All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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* * *
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]"
is the
boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever
realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses"
of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's
Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK