Terrible Mother

Prose Before Hos

I heard more about the diamond dreams the next day from a younger miner walking the road with a shovel over his shoulder near the village of Katopka. His name was Narcise Blede, twenty-three years old, and he said the divinations that came to him the night weren't always from the ancestors. He had dreamed of having passionate sex with a rich white woman the night a big-carat discovery the year before.

"She came driving up to my house with a new car," he said. His friends next to him laughed, but he didn't appear to be joking as he told me the story through Alexie.

"It was a very good dream," he said. "I was screwing the spirit."

I asked what he had found recently and he gestured to a friend. The friend pulled out a small cardboard matchbox bearing the words Le Boxeur. Inside was a sickly yellow chip, a sad discovered half-carat.

"Diamonds are full of spirits," he said. "Very powerful. If the diamond is too big, people can go crazy and die."

Dreams and spirits. What was happening in the Central African Republic was the emergence of an entirely new folk religion. French corporations have dug the diamonds out of the sand here since the 1880s, but the large-scale recruitment of the countryside into mining didn't gear up until the Bokassa era, when a lust for imperial glitter became a presidential obsession. The president had died, but the mania hadn't. In just thirty years, diamonds had transformed the economy of the backcountry. But they had changed even more than the dreams of young men--they were changing the culture itself. The yellow rocks from the mantle had been almost unknown before, with no place in the ceremonial or religious heritage of the M'Baka, the Niam-Niam, the Baminga, the Mondjombo, or any of the tribes, and now a whole set of mythologies was laid onto their slippery surfaces.

Most of them revolved around the spirits of the dead.

-from The Heartless Stone by Tom Zoellner.

Prose Before Hos

The obsession with burial and what to do with bodies when life has fled is a defining human trait, as much a subject of poetry and epic as love or jealousy or war. It is the central point of the Iliad: not Achilles’ wrath but Priam’s decision to go and beg for the mutilated body of his son, Hector. It is the motive of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” in which everything turns on a sister’s desire to have her dead brother buried, not “left unwept, unsepulchred.” And it has haunted our own time in the search for M.I.A.s in Vietnam, the silent rituals at Ground Zero, and the anguish over the refusal to show the return of the war dead from Iraq. It is irrational—we ought to fuss more about babies than about bodies, more about keeping people alive than about what to do with their envelopes after life has left them—but it is always there, the disposition of the dead being the obsession of the living. “It is the dead / Not the living, who make the longest demands / We die forever,” Antigone bluntly explains.

Though man has lost his claim to uniqueness as a toolmaker, war planner, and even serial murderer, there is a case, made at length by paleontologists, that humans are still unique in having burial rituals for their fellows, or friends, or fashion models. Even Neanderthal man may have buried his dead, dusted with ochre and possibly sprinkled with flowers, a thing no other animal on earth had done before. Man is no longer the toolmaker but the gravedigger, arguing for all time in a Florida courtroom or a Roman imperial city about what to do with what’s left of us.

-from "Remains of the Days," by Adam Gopnik.

Prose Before Hos

Despite theological differences, all great religions share common commitments that define our ideal secular relationships. I am convinced that Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and others can embrace each other in a common effort to alleviate human suffering and to espouse peace.

But the present era is a challenging and disturbing time for those whose lives are shaped by religious faith based on kindness toward each other. We have been reminded that cruel and inhuman acts can be derived from distorted theological beliefs, as suicide bombers take the lives of innocent human beings, draped falsely in the cloak of God's will. With horrible brutality, neighbors have massacred neighbors in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

In order for us human beings to commit ourselves personally to the inhumanity of war, we find it necessary first to dehumanize our opponents, which is in itself a violation of the beliefs of all religions. Once we characterize our adversaries as beyond the scope of God's mercy and grace, their lives lose all value. We deny personal responsibility when we plant landmines and, days or years later, a stranger to us - often a child – is crippled or killed. From a great distance, we launch bombs or missiles with almost total impunity, and never want to know the number or identity of the victims.

At the beginning of this new millennium I was asked to discuss, here in Oslo, the greatest challenge that the world faces. Among all the possible choices, I decided that the most serious and universal problem is the growing chasm between the richest and poorest people on earth. Citizens of the ten wealthiest countries are now seventy-five times richer than those who live in the ten poorest ones, and the separation is increasing every year, not only between nations but also within them. The results of this disparity are root causes of most of the world's unresolved problems, including starvation, illiteracy, environmental degradation, violent conflict, and unnecessary illnesses that range from Guinea worm to HIV/AIDS.

Most work of The Carter Center is in remote villages in the poorest nations of Africa, and there I have witnessed the capacity of destitute people to persevere under heartbreaking conditions. I have come to admire their judgment and wisdom, their courage and faith, and their awesome accomplishments when given a chance to use their innate abilities.

But tragically, in the industrialized world there is a terrible absence of understanding or concern about those who are enduring lives of despair and hopelessness. We have not yet made the commitment to share with others an appreciable part of our excessive wealth. This is a potentially rewarding burden that we should all be willing to assume.

Ladies and gentlemen:

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children.

-excerpted from Jimmy Carter's Nobel Lecture, which he gave in Oslo, Norway after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Copyright© Pressens Bild AB 2002

Prose Before Hos

The Talmud says those who save one life save the world. Four hundred years ago, John Donne said the same thing, in reverse. "No man is an island, entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." We like to think that we embrace these teachings, with the similar teachings of Jesus Christ and Mohammed and the Buddha, with the compassion for human suffering that lies at the core of every great religion.

But most of the time, we don't. In the age of universal media, it's impossible. In the modern world, death is at once too ubiquitous and too distant. The morning paper brings us dozens of deaths, each of which ends a miraculous human life, each of which diminishes us all. And we feel nothing. There are simply too many of them.

But there are deeper reasons. Our society pushes death offstage. Even when those close to us die, they usually do so in a rationalized, bureaucratic hospital setting which shrink-wraps death. The inexplicable mystery becomes as ordinary as a corporate newsletter from beyond.

It isn't just our society as a whole that is responsible for this. We demand it. Death is the great unthought, the face we don't want to see. As the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote in "The Denial of Death," denying death is wired into humans. Our very personalities, our religion, our sense of the heroic -- all, Becker argued, are a response to our fundamental terror at our finitude.

-by Gary Kamiya, from the essay "A Tale of Two Horrors," published recently on Salon. Go read it. Now.

Prose Before Hos

One of the lingering cultural myths about gender is that women are bad at math -- they lack the confidence for it, they have poor visual-spatial skills, they simply don't excel at numbers the way boys do. This theory has been widely challenged over the years, and there's scant evidence to suggest that girls are in any way neurologically ill-equipped to deal with algebra or calculus. But I'd challenge the myth on different grounds: Women are actually superb at math; they just happen to engage in their own variety of it, an intricate personal math in which desires are split off from one another, weighed, balanced, traded, assessed. These are the mathematics of desire, a system of self-limitation and monitoring based on the fundamental premise that appetites are at best risky, at worst impermissible, that indulgence must be bought and paid for. Hence the rules and caveats: Before you open the lunch menu or order that cheeseburger or consider eating the cake with the frosting intact, haul out the psychic calculator and start tinkering with the budget.

Why shouldn't you? I asked a woman that question not long ago while she was demurring about whether to order dessert at a restaurant.

Immediate answer: "Because I'll feel gross."

Why gross?

"Because I'll feel fat."

And what would happen if you felt fat?

"I hate myself when I feel fat. I feel ugly and out of control. I feel really un-sexy. I feel unlovable."

And if you deny yourself the dessert?

"I may feel a little deprived, but I'll also feel pious," she said.

So it's worth the cost?

"Yes."

These are big trade-offs for a simple piece of cake -- add five hundred calories, subtract well-being, allure, and self-esteem -- and the feelings behind them are anything but vain or shallow. Hidden within that thirty-second exchange is an entire set of mathematical principles, equations that can dictate a woman's most fundamental approach to hunger. Mastery over the body -- its impulses, its needs, its size -- is paramount; to lose control is to risk beauty, and to risk beauty is to risk desirability, and to risk desirability is to risk entitlement to sexuality and love and self-esteem. Desires collide, the wish to eat bumping up against the wish to be thin, the desire to indulge conflicting with the injunction to restrain. Small wonder food makes a woman nervous. The experience of appetite in this equation is an experience of anxiety, a burden and a risk; yielding to hunger may be permissible under certain conditions, but mostly it's something to be Earned or Monitored and Controlled. e = mc2.

-excerpted from the book Appetites: Why Women Want, by Caroline Knapp.

Prose Before Hos

My sister’s voice was like mountain water in a silver pitcher; the clear blue beauty of it cools you and lifts you up beyond your heat, beyond your body. After we went to see La Traviata, when she was fourteen and I was twelve, she elbowed me in the parking lot and said, “Check this out.” And she opened her mouth unnaturally wide and her voice came out, so crystalline and bright that all the departing operagoers stood frozen by their cars, unable to take out their keys or open their doors until she had finished, and then they cheered like hell.

That’s what I like to remember, and that’s the story I told to all of her therapists. I wanted them to know her, to know that who they saw was not all there was to see. That before her constant tinkling of commercials and fast-food jingles there had been Puccini and Mozart and hymns so sweet and mighty you expected Jesus to come down off his cross and clap. That before there was a mountain of Thorazined fat, swaying down the halls in nylon maternity tops and sweatpants, there had been the prettiest girl in Arrandale Elementary School, the belle of Landmark Junior High. Maybe there were other pretty girls, but I didn’t see them. To me, Rose, my beautiful blond defender, my guide to Tampax and my mother’s moods, was perfect.

by Amy Bloom, from the short story "Silver Water," from the collection Come to Me.

Poo-tee-weet

I read Slaughterhouse Five, the first time, when I was ten. I remember it clearly because I consumed the book more than anything: I had never read anything that so clearly used the style and conceits of science fiction while still being literary. I had also never read anything that so precisely captured the essence of war and the mechanics and grief of the kind of human suffering inflected by other humans.

It's a complicated book, a complicated work, and I can vividly recall curling into my father's La-Z-Boy to finish the last few chapters. It was summer, hot and sticky in Central California, and my brothers were outside playing in the sprinklers. It was a few years before things got terrible in my family, though the harbingers of those times were starting to show: worn edges of t-shirts and the too-empty freezer and the oil stains in the drive way from the cars we kept trading down.

And there was this book about war, but about so much more than that. It's about memory and loss and suffering. But like all of Vonnegut's work, it retains in it a simple, sad beauty so profound that, when I finished the book, I laid it down and cried. I didn't understand all of it, to be sure. I was ten, afterall, and even a precocious ten-year old is still just a ten-year old. But I felt something that went beyond all the books I had read before, and I felt it, even though it would take me 20 more years to be able to explain it the way I am now.

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday, April 11, 2007 at the age of 84. "When Hemmingway died he put a period on his life, old age is more like a semicolon," Vonnegut once said. He said this with a measure of bitterness; his own suicide attempt in 1984 had failed. I think, though, this is one of the few times Vonnegut had it wrong, and I can't help but think of the German farmer in Slaughterhouse Five, his voice calling out to the POWs he's given harbor to in his barn. In the doorway, he turns back to them. "Good night, sweet Americans," he says. It is quiet and it lingers. It's no period, certainly, not even quite the end of the book. But it's a kind of ending, all the same.

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Prose Before Hos

I used to dream about my mother, and though the details in the dream varied, the surprise in it was always the same. The dream stopped, I supposed because it was too transparent in its hopefulness, too easy in its forgiveness.

In the dream I would be the age I really was, living the life I was really living, and I would discover that my mother was still alive. (The fact is, she died when I was in my early twenties and she in her early fifties.) Sometimes I would find myself in our old kitchen, where my mother would be rolling out piecrust on the table, or washing the dishes in the battered cream-colored dishpan with the red rim. But other times I would run into her on the street, in places where I would have never expected to see her. She might be walking through a handsome hotel lobby, or lining up in an airport. She would be looking quite well--not exactly youthful, not entirely untouched by the paralyzing disease that held her in its grip for a decade or more before her death, but so much better than I remembered that I would be astonished. Oh, I just have this little tremor in my arm, she would say, and a little stiffness up this side of my face. It is a nuisance, but I get around.

I recovered then what in waking life I had lost--my mother's liveliness of face and voice before her throat muscles stiffened and a woeful, impersonal mask fastened itself over her features. How could I have forgotten this, I would think in the dream--the casual humor she had, not ironic but merry, the lightness and impatience and confidence? I would say that I was sorry I hadn't been to see her in such a long time--meaning not that I felt guilty but that I was sorry I had kept a bugbear in my my mind, instead of this reality--and the strangest, kindest thing of all to me was her matter-of-fact reply.

Oh well, she said, better late than never. I was sure I'd see you someday.

-opening paragraphs from "Friend of My Youth," by Alice Munro, published in the collection of the same name.

Prose Before Hos

[*tm: this is from one of my favorite essays "American Girl Crazy!" which is, of course, on Salon. It's about American Girl dolls, but also about the difficult job of being a parent, of wanting to keep your child young and innocent for as long as possible. It is also published in the excellent book Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves.]

Sometimes at night I lie awake and think about how fast time goes with children. For years adults said this to you and you never knew what it meant. And then you had children and the baby time was molasses slow and then it seemed to go faster and faster, and you could imagine far too clearly all the things your children, who are so sweet and full of blooming affection now, wouldn't want to do in just a few years time -- like hug you in public. I see the ridiculousness of brooding about the inevitable and desirable -- we want our children to grow up, which means, in part, away from us -- not to mention the not-even-here-quite-yet. But there it is. Talia's mother probably feels something like the same sentiment, and Talia probably senses it.

It's odd what will draw a child into history, and into history's particular way of vouchsafing a sense that our world is not the only world. And it's odd how we can't know or always plan for the edifying moments. Not long ago, on a trip to Boston, my husband and I and our two children wandered into a very old graveyard. It was a place I'd always liked when I'd lived near it in my early twenties -- a quiet place on a hill, with a view of the Boston Harbor, gleaming like a nickel in the sun. We had planned to stop there for a few minutes on our way to get pizza. But our children loved it and wanted to linger. The seven-year-old lay on his stomach in front of a stone and read the inscriptions as though he were cracking a code, which in a way he was. His younger sister traced the words with a long stalk of grass and rubbed her fingers over the little death's heads with wings that you see in old New England graveyards -- not quite angels, something harsher. They asked a lot of questions. What did the skeletons look like? Where were their souls? Where was their skin? Why were African Americans buried in a separate part of the cemetery? Why did people die so young then? What sort of a name was Hephzibah?

Children are like us, but they are not us. That's the thing we forget sometimes: that their world is in some sense ineffable for us, as passionately as we love them. And in that sense, imagining their inner lives -- as immediate as a horse's in some ways and yet much more mystical than mine -- is like imagining history. I can no more remember what it felt like to be four years old or seven, not really, than I can know what it felt like to be a person of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. I have little pictures, just as I do of history -- magic lantern slides, backlit, endlessly fascinating, and somehow just beyond my grasp. We've all heard that "the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there." Well, childhood is too. American Girl dolls are one way to visit both those foreign countries, I suppose. But every day my children surprise me with where they want to go, and how they want to get there.

-Margaret Talbot

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Prose Before Hos

This is the inaugural post in a new category, Prose Before Hos, which is the prose version of the Poem of the Week. Poetry on Thursday, prose on Saturday. Think of it as the literary equivalent of a mullet ("business in the front, party in the back").

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As my late English-professor dad would have told you at great length, "irony" does not signify something annoying or irritating, or even a strange coincidence. In its purest sense, irony is a rhetorical mode in which you say one thing and mean the opposite ("Dude, what a lovely spring day we're having!" as you walk across town in a driving sleet-storm), although it also refers to a cosmic phenomenon in which human acts produce effects contrary to those intended. (One could say that the results of the Iraq war have been ironic, for example, but only if you believe the war was actually intended to produce a peaceful, democratic Iraq.)

But I'm also not here to rail against the slippery, postmodern sense of the word "irony," the one infamously referenced by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter when he declared that irony was dead after 9/11. Carter, I suppose, was trying to say that insincerity and dispassion and a permanent attitude of poking fun had to go on hold temporarily in the wake of that disaster, and Jeez, I hope he was looking in the mirror when he said it. (In fairness, he later acknowledged that it was a dumb-ass thing to say, although perhaps not in those words.)

Nay, I am here to honor that indefinable form of irony in all its treachery and instability, its tendency to reverse the polarities of meaning or to render them indecipherable. This is the form of irony that will make all of us, as we grow older, unable to tell whether the younger people around us are behaving sincerely or not. We will find no comfortable recourse, no safe haven. This kind of irony is both a form of self-knowledge and a form of self-mockery, it is a defense against the world of late capitalism and an embrace of it. I say it is a proud and noble thing, and I say bring it.

from Beyond the Multiplex, 3-22-07, by the esteemed Andrew O'Hehir, writer for Salon.

Go read it. Now.

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