Old Books 4: The Bone People

I got this book in Cornwall in 1986, for no particular reason, and read it the peculiar haze of being a barkeep at a holiday resort on a bluff near Perranporth. It was an odd and stranded summer, and this is an odd and haunted book.

It is filled with fierceness: fierce humor, fierce love, and fierce violence. It concerns a trio of characters: Kerewin Holmes (an obvious counterpart to the author, Keri Hulme), a woman who won the lottery, and saw her talent for painting and life shrivel into the tower she built with the proceedings; Joseph Gillayley, whose beloved wife and son died, and who is left caring for Simon, who is autistic and prone to violent rage. Joe gives back in kind, savagely beating the boy.

You'd think with a set up like that you'd end up with a gothic abbatoir of a book. But it isn't. Love and violence are not mutually exclusive in this world—indeed, in reading bell hooks' Something About Love many years later, I found I simply couldn't stomach her calm assurance that "where there is violence, there is no love" precisely because the vision of Joe and Simon kept returning.

It's not that they like hurting each other. It's not S&M in family form. But they do enact their rages back and forth around the room. In what some critics say should have been the finale, Simon smashes Kerewin's beloved guitar, and she tells him to go to hell. Joe enraged, beats him senseless. Before losing consciousness, Simon pulls out a long sliver of glass he has saved away, and neatly inserts it into his stepfather's gut. So, yes, I guess it is an abbatoir.

But it isn't the finale. Broken—Kerewin with a cancer, Joe with time in prison and lost relationship with his family, Simon made deaf and permanently injured by the final beating—they each go to the land in one way or another, and are healed. And that's the message Hulme gives to us in the end: that the fires of fierceness that tie us to the land are the same fires of violence that are a part of Maori culture (did I mention that all of this takes place on the South Island of New Zealand, and that Kerewin and Joe are Maori?), and that it's not a matter of putting those flames out, but of turning them on to what needs the flame.

The whole thing makes me question the smug way we liberals often talk about violence as inherently, utterly wrong. It's not that any character in this book is happy about being violent towards anyone else (although Kerewin smugly puts Joe in his place once with advanced aikido moves). But I think Hulme is saying that neither is violence something we can cut out of ourselves. To me, this book is a puzzle. After more than 25 years, I'm still working on it.

Angry

It's been eleven years since I was this angry, sad, and generally rendered incapable of much useful work. It's shocked me how hard the last two days have been: I mean, yes, it's awful—twenty first graders shot dead in their classroom, and the teachers and principal and so on. Of course it's awful. But there have been lots of awful things over the last ten years.

I'm not alone in this. Something about the events in Newtown have made us as a nation viscerally, boiling-over angry in a way that we haven't seen since 9/11/01. We are grief-stricken in a way we don't know what to do with.

I realized tonight that underneath the weeping for those 20 six- and seven-year-olds is something bigger. I am weeping for my country. I am weeping for the sense that this is becoming a place that isn't mine anymore. But I'm not from anywhere else. This is my home. I'm an American.

It isn't cheap political rhetoric. I spent a few days in Toronto on September, and it was such a startling weight off of me, walking through the streets of a very urban, gritty, full-of-urban-problems city, and not feeling the sense of anxiety that hangs even over my nice hometown of Minneapolis. It was like losing a headache I'd forgotten was there.

Toronto's no paradise. Canada's no paradise. I'm probably never moving to Canada. But I just don't get how so many people, including some of my friends, look at Canada and Western and Nothern Europe, and sneer at universal health care and pooh-pooh the lack of gun violence. I could quote figures at you, but I don't want to here. That's not the point. The point is, I felt more at home and at peace in a strange city than I do in my own front yard. I found that profoundly unsettling.

I am angry, angrier than I've been willing to admit to myself. I cover it up pretty well most of the time, I think—both from others and myself—but what I've seen in some of my liberal friends—the bitterness and fatalism—well, I worry I'm coming down with it too. I love my country, and I want it to be a place of love and peace. That's the picture I grew up with, and as I get older, I realize most of my fellow Americans have either given up on that vision as childish, or never had it in the first place. Instead it's a nation filled with demons needing to be stomped out with vigor. No dream of a better place in the here and now, just a resigned sigh that the battle is never won, and hope for peace in the next world.

But we're the nation that made a great industry out of dreams and fantasies. You'd think we'd know better, that we could learn to harness this great national talent for self-invention, and become a nation of Ray Bradburys. But we're not. We produce Ray Bradburys in a way no other country could, but the fantasies we adopt as our national scripts are full not of magic and hope, but of moralizing and fear and brimstone.

We are not the Greatest Nation on Earth. Whoever said that anyway? It sounds like a P. T. Barnum line. It's cheap boasting, and we've always been good at that. But we've also been good at self-deprecation, and we've been sorely lacking that in our national debate lately, outside of Comedy Central. Maybe we were the greatest nation on earth for a while after World War II, but we didn't even get to enjoy it, because we were so consumed with hate for dissent and fear within ourselves.

I love my country, but my country lies to itself. It hates itself. It's like loving someone with anorexia: their body image doesn't match their body, and becomes an ugly tool of self-mutilation, instead of a guide to positive change.

I am angry that we need revisionists like Howard Zinn (We who live in a nation that prides itself on a clarity and practical know-how. No fancy theories with abstact thises and thats—we leave that to the old world. No outdated, ossified social hierarchies). But we need the Howard Zinns to to show us how we have lied and lied again to ourselves. Lies upon lies. No fancy theories, just plain bald-faced ignorance of evidence and stubbornness. We let people say science is just someone's opinion, and all opinions are equal, and so it doesn't matter a whit how much research and effort you've done.

Jonathan Haidt thinks liberals don't care about sanctity and loyalty and respect. We do. I do anyway. And it hurts to think that what was sacred, what I want to be loyal to, and respect, has been dragged through the filth, betrayed my loyalty, and unearned my respect.

I want to live in a country where ideology is not king, especially ideology that masks rapaciousness and greed. I know we're never going to be rid of ideologues, and that's OK. But the floor of our national sense of self is rotting from underneath, and all we seem to be able to summon the collective will to do is tap on the floor with our foot and complain about the funny smell, and argue about whose job it is to hire the contractor and whether we really ought to pay for new sills.

And weep when twenty children fall through the hole and into the basement, gone forever.

Things Fall Apart

It didn't have to end this way. And, actually, it didn't end this way.

The nightmare of my childhood and young adult years was the all-out nuclear war. The end-of the world scenario younger viewers will recognize from the end of Terminator 3. I remember it most vividly from The Day After and Threads, American and British what-if-there-were-a-nuclear-war movies.

The horror of that vision is so absolute: nothing but irradiated dirt, burnt corpses, smoldering ruins... and the presence of that nightmare lurked in the background for half a century. It still lurks today, even further in the background, though Russia and the US seem like unlikely all-out enemies today.

But in the wake of that vision of the End of Everything, there was the question, what comes afterward? What about the survivors? And the answers we were given were just as awful: a breakdown of order, summary execution of looters (that was a scene in Threads that stopped me cold and still runs through my head sometimes), shorter brutish lifespans, nuclear winter, ruined crops, starvation...

And Mad Max. Or young Don Johnson in that most peculiar film A Boy and His Dog. The world turned desert, every man for himself. Kind of like Conan the Barbarian's world, only in the imagined future, not the imagined past.

This is a world where everyone is an orphan or a widow/er, where no-one whom we survivors meet (because you and I will be part of the lucky 5%, right?) is a friend or family. So even more than Conan's world, it's the world of B-grade westerns, full of suspicious gun-toting strangers.

Here's the thing: most of the real horrors of the world don't happen with breakdown of a larger society. They happen when that larger society is kidnapped by psychopaths with a Theory: Aryan superiority, collectivization, the legitimacy of Protocols of Zion, the Tutsi Menace... When that Theory is enacted, hundreds of thousands can be efficiently murdered. When the mass societies—which may do these terrible things but mostly just serve to organize people into ever-more-efficient machines for making things—break down, they tend, sooner or later, to re-form as small societies. These small societies may wage in regular low-level warfare on each other, but my point is things do NOT completely fall apart for very long.

European explorers and long-distance traders in the Americas of the 16th to 18th centuries came across well-organized groups of Indians. They appeared, in fact, to be a permanent part of the primeval wilderness. What they did not realize was that the primeval wilderness had been a lot less wild only a few generations earlier, before waves of disease destroyed a huge proportion of the population (50%? 70%? more?). By the time those Europeans penetrated the interior of the country, whole nations had vanished, and what the Europeans encountered were the survivors. What they took as natural poverty was the poverty of the children of refugees from a holocaust.

But they didn't see savage anarchy. They thought they saw savages, but savages with intricate kinship structures, a religious life, stories and arts and costumes and dances and villages and all those things that early anthropologists loved to collect and write down. And these survivors had organized political alliances in the fast-changing landscape, entire new tribes sometimes formed out of the decimated remnants of old tribes.

The end is not the end. The collapse of a state, or a church, or an economy, or of any institution, doesn't mean zombies shambling in the streets. Or rather, it only means shambling zombies for people so devoid of social imagination that life is literally meaningless without the collapsed entity. And sadly, if that's the case... those are the people who ought to be sympathetically treated as zombies. Not the poor survivors out looking to re-form some kind of society and feed themselves and their family and friends as best they can.

Feelings

I had a dream a few nights ago, where I was some sort of volunteer assistant teacher in an inner city school. The kids in my group were all African-American boys, about second or third or fourth grade. They had a series of little books about feelings on the table near them, and they were really pissed off about having to read them. Their objections amounted to, "Don't you go telling me what to feel, asshole." Probably not in that language, but I could feel their rage coming off them.

And so I tried talking with them, saying, "You know, of course you have a right to feel what you feel, but do you really always want to be drawn into a fight whenever you feel mad, or burst into uncontrollable tears when you feel sad? And when someone else is mad, do you have to just go with getting mad right back and getting into a fight with them?" I think that's what I said, or something like that. Hard to remember; it was a dream. And I woke up before I could hear any sort of reaction from them.

I've had a couple heated discussions on Facebook lately. One was with a guy in my neighborhood arguing that conceal-carry laws are good: he carries a gun as he walks around the neighborhood and it makes him feel safer. I'm not a fan of conceal-carry, but it turns out most of our energy about this comes not from facts but from communal beliefs: he's a passionate defender of individual liberties, while I tend towards a passionate interest in communality and mutual responsibility. When you get to statistical studies, having a firearm is more dangerous to the carrier because of household accidents and moments of passion, and in terms of public safety, conceal-carry a statistical wash.

But here's the thing I noticed about our back-and-forth: he came out of the box spitting mad—calling names, making accusations, saying things that weren't threats but carried the structure of threats ("If you... then I..."). And of course he has a "right to his feelings," but what I was seeing was how much his anger in and of itself washed over the relationship. It almost instantly stopped being just his anger. It was anger that I also had to deal with.

We use the word "feelings" to describe emotions, and this makes sense for little kids that are just learning about themselves: "What do you feel?" is a really good question for little kids to step back from themselves and name the churning mass of stuff inside them.

But I'm wondering about the use of that word in adults, because feelings in a group of people are more like waves: they aren't felt by you as an individual, they are emanated. They are like germs: sometimes your neighbor gets infected, sometimes her immune system kicks in with its own anti-emotion. But none of us live in emotional bubbles. Even those of us who try to, end up emanating their own weird little "can't touch me" vibe.

The other Facebook discussion was with a friend of a friend, about this letter and quickly turned into a debate about tyranny (taxation) vs reckless individualism (anti-taxation). And the guy I had the tête-a-tête with was pretty hyperbolic. He's clearly been through the comments-section school of political commentary and debate.

If you read the comments section of pretty much any article on the internet that touches on politics, you know the language: a group of villains is named, fear-and-anger-inducing words are invoked, and and either a plea for divine retribution or a call to arms concludes. These are the tools we use to try and win arguments. Except they utterly fail at that. They help us gather allies, and maybe we swing one or two people who are confused and unsure where they stand, but they don't turn anyone from the enemy camp, because they make it clear the enemy camp is the enemy.

When Jon Stewart made his plea for civility and less hyperbole ("These are hard times, not the end times...") this summer, I was interested to see some of my left-wing friends get pissed off because to them Stewart seemed to be saying "Stop fighting for what is right." And I didn't really know what to say to that, because of course we want people to fight for justice. And liberty. And freedom. And communal responsibility.

But who are they fighting? And how do you fight a demagogue, or a whole sea of demagogues? When we say we are going to fight, we invoke a specific set of analogies: there is a battle, there is an enemy, there is going to be some kind of combat. There's a poster/t-shirt slogan, "fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity," which makes the point crudely, but the problem is, we don't know how to talk about large structural issues except by fighting.

And I think the root of the problem is the tidal-emotion thing I started this post off with: When I am passionate about something, a lot of what you—my audience—are paying attention to is the passion. The work of understanding the something itself does not come in presentation, it comes from our internal processing and piecing puzzle pieces that fit our internal unanswered-question puzzle-pieces.

And so I wonder about the place of passion in public debate. It seems to me that opening more of a place for testimony from personal experience, and clear, interesting delineations of the field of debate, are needed. But that's me. Actually, I was bowled over by this discussion of the divided mind, from a recent talk at the Royal Society of Art. It may sound boring from the title, but the conclusion about the sort of balancing needed in our world, is profound:

Silverbacks

In my world, whether Dominique Straus-Kahn raped the hotel housekeeper or had consensual sex with her, he's still political damaged goods—what kind of trust do you place in a potential leader who has unprotected sex with a total stranger on a moment's notice?

Well, if you're a gorilla, you respect him (perhaps grudgingly) as the silverback leader of the tribe. And there's some part of us that recognizes silverbacks among us, and accepts them into leadership positions. Perhaps this is why so many male politicians get tripped up by exercising their sexual desires—they were chosen for their silverback qualities, and now here we are punishing them for them.

But why should these two be necessarily connected? Straus-Kahn didn't make his way to the top of the IMF and France's Socialist Party on the size of his "harem." Even among those who accept that powerful men have mistresses, it is expected that they will be discreet about it.

I find myself thinking about the side-effects of domestication. When you breed wolves into dogs, one of the side effects of becoming part of the human household is a sort of perpetual puppyhood. In fact, you can correlate certain kinds of breed-related gentleness with the degree of puppy-like physical charateristics: floppy ears, shorter snout, rounder body. (A couple starter sources on this: Temple Grandin's Animals Make Us Human, and the excellent Nature documentary "The Secret Life of the Dog")

Is male sexual aggressiveness tied to wider social leadership qualities? Does promoting faithfulness and lack of sexual aggression give us milquetoasts? It makes a certain amount of sense—the leader of a gang or a tribe proves his kingship by having his pick of the women.

But this is far from the only model of human social organization with deep roots. The model of a chieftan who rules by loyalty and punishment is matched by that of the council circle—an egalitarian model where getting too far above oneself is a recipe for a group smackdown.

What I observe is that these models move back and forth. The silverback king model makes more sense when there is immediate threat, and the group needs to move quickly and responsively. Think of a platoon in battle or a group of escapees from slavery or prison—adrenaline pumps, and you do what the leader tells you, or you are dead.

By contrast, the egalitarian model makes sense when life is stable, and threats to life are longer-term—harvest, hunt, and child-rearing. Instead of adrenaline-fueled survival instincts, we take time to consider and plan, and good planning means listening and considering advice, something that doesn't happen as effectively when we are worried about Darth Vader enforcing his will upon us...

The kingship model also makes sense when the population becomes to large to manage by consensus. In a mass society, you can mitigate this by choosing a council to govern the larger group, either by election or tradition. But when selection to this council becomes competitive, it is the silverbacks who will tend to put the energy into getting onto the council, and suddenly you don't have a group of a co-operators, but a bunch of people trying to be top gun.

When the language of egalitarianism becomes embedded in a competitive political system, you thus end up with strange cognitive dissonances: Anthony Weiner on one hand brilliantly calling out outrageous anti-democratic abuses by his opponents, while on the other hand playing out an aggressive primate mating ritual on line; Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin's strange combination of driven personal ambition and endorsement of traditional stay-at-home motherhood; calls for bipartisanship alongside constant (and often personal) political attacks.

Now, it isn't fair to say that religious conservatives are somehow promoting aggressive promiscuity. Because clearly the orthodoxy says you should keep your pants on if you want to go to heaven. And good behavior is enforced by shame—the tearful admission of sin has become almost routine in scandals involving politicians. But the purist sense of human behavior—the sense that we ought to be above primate wrestling in the mud—which much of modern conservatism is grounded upon, might be a big part of the problem. Especially when that purism becomes embodied in political and social structures that are driven by the energy of those primate combats.

And that I think gets to the root of the silverback problem: We depend on silverback models of leadership to keep us together and to give us drive, but we also want to feel a sense of rational or spiritual community in which we are all treated as equals. And these two models simply do not play well together.

War

It's been a little overwhelming, frankly, the amount of new stuff I've absorbed this last few weeks. Thanks to all the regulars, new and old, who have really opened some new ideas and ways of seeing/listening to me here. I'm kind of playing catch-up...

I recently read Chris Hedges War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, which came out in 2002. It's premise is that war is Hell (nothing new there) and yet deeply seductive, even to those who have lived it. It is not an especially structured book, but that's OK. It swept over me.

One thing I was reminded of in reading Hedges' book was the character Destruction in Neil Gaiman's Sandman. The premise of that series of graphic novels was a bickering family of "Endless," embodiments of forces which are within us and yet out of our control (cutely all have names beginning with D: Death, Destiny, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delerium (who used to be Delight), and Destruction). Destruction is the embodiment especially of war. But the character abandoned his work sometime in the early seventeenth century, as war came to be seen as a "science," instead of as a horseman of the apocalypse or Dulle Griet (in my mind's eye I conflate Dulle Griet with another Breughel painting, The Triumph of Death). It was no longer a force beyond human control.

Or so people wish to believe.

Hedges book to me effectively bridges that gap between war (and us-and-them conflict in general) as a force we are somehow unable to control, and the sort of scientific brutality that cartography (see, I knew we'd get back to cartography some time) has at times been party to. In particular, he looks at war's addictive qualities, and the ways in which frankly violent criminals are able to harness the seductive qualities of war for their own ultimately disastrous purposes.

As you can tell, I recommend it.