Success

I’m standing at the kitchen sink shelling shrimp for dinner and I’m thanking my lucky stars I’m not my famous (within certain political and literary circles) friend who is “terrified” (I know this because I’ve just got off the phone with her) at the thought of her reading later tonight in Santa Fe, where she will not only read to an eclectic group of unknowns but to her new boyfriend as well, who is also famous and flying in from out of town for the occasion.

I’m terrified only when I anticipate the nasty letters I might receive for the essay or newspaper article I occasionally write for a weekly Santa Fe paper that explore the political battles I deal with as a community activist. When the paper devoted an issue to the question of race and culture in northern New Mexico, where I live and work, I wrote about how the environmental movement fails to address issues of social justice. While I was careful not to call any particular enviros racist, I did identify the policies they effect as such. Surprisingly, I didn’t get any nasty letters for that article, but the one I called “A Question of Semantics”, which poked fun at these same environmentalists who co-opt language in an attempt to validate their positions (I questioned their use of the word “radical” to describe what I see as their reactionary politic) raised a lot of hackles.

However, this is merely a by-product of my by-default career, if one can call it that. With my “unmarried partner” (the box I checked for the 2000 Census) I write a community newspaper and organize around issues of environmental and social justice. If someone in high school had told me this would be a career, I would have laughed in her face. I was destined for academia, perhaps the law, at least “great things.” That I never got there is perhaps due to the fact that my concept of “there” was destroyed by the process of “getting”, which is essentially the substance of mine—or anyone’s—life. The “getting” took place in the late 60s and early 70s, when I and my fellow travelers were engaged in smashing the “there”—Vietnam, the military industrial complex, the nuclear family, etc.—as fervently as the times demanded.

But that’s only part of the story. My famous friend, who is “terrified” in Santa Fe, came of age alongside me, but obviously decided at some point in her life that she would dedicate it to writing books. And part of the dedication would mean being part of a national (i.e. “famous”) community that was writing and speaking to the same issues as she. I don’t know if people who so dedicate themselves to certain causes consciously say, to be successful in my endeavor I must be willing to promote myself, so that my voice becomes part of the larger voice that is listened to, that makes a difference.

Whether or not this is a conscious decision, the effect remains the same, be it Scott Nearing or Andy Warhol. I just finished reading a memoir by Helen Nearing of her life with Scott, who in an interesting twist of fate was first famous as an academic and political activist until he was banished from academia and became even more famous as a homesteader who repudiated academia and the public life (although he remained steadfast in his political life). Although a certain air of self-righteousness permeates this book and several of those they wrote together, it seems that Nearing genuinely believed that in order to share his private and political vision of what constitutes a good and moral life (he never would have embraced poststructuralism) he needed to lecture, write books, travel, spread the gospel, so to speak.

Warhol, on the other hand, dedicated his life to being as notorious as possible for the sake of that notoriety. Whether this was motivated by the Nietzschean “will to give expression to one’s personality” or simply the drive for “utter moral worthlessness”, like Colette’s first husband, Willy (from Secrets of the Flesh, Judith Thurman’s biography of Colette), doesn’t really matter. He procured his fame, just as Nearing and my friend did, and they all had or have to deal with what fame brings in our society: terror, unwelcome distractions, or attempted assassination (at least for Warhol).

It’s easier to stay home, both physically and mentally. In one of my feeble attempts to actually get a book published with the local university press, I remember telling the editor that I lacked the chutzpah it took to promote myself, and that if her press didn’t publish me this would be the beginning and end of that particular career (and it was, if you don’t count the children’s book I wrote that was published by a Santa Fe house that took 10 years to sell 2,000 copies). I’ve written some national magazine articles over the years that chronicled life in northern New Mexico, which people in mainstream America find fascinating, but the few attempts I’ve made to sell articles of import, where my voice could perhaps make a difference on critical issues of environmental justice, they were dismissed as too “local” or too hard to understand by an “eastern, urban readership.” Thus I learned that one has to pay dues, like my terrified friend, before one’s voice is heard.

I imagine that there are millions of us out here, voices that are knowledgeable, analytic, eloquent, profound (I’m not necessarily claiming all these qualities). Just like all the painters who may have been a lost link between cubism and abstract expressionism or abstract expressionism and Andy Warhol. Or composers, like the eccentric woman who hitchhikes around Taos in her mumu and straw hat and is occasionally acknowledged for her operas that are locally performed. I once wrote a short story (which sits in my bottom drawer) about her called the “Woman as Artist” (I turned her into a painter). In my story she sits on an old car seat on her back porch with her legs stretched out onto an adjacent chair to rest her varicose veins: “I’ll never be a huge success, honey,” she sighs to the narrator. “It’s not in the cards. Or should I say, it’s not in my blood. I can’t sell myself to the highest bidder to get there, like the cold-blooded ones do. Do you have any idea how many talented people there are out there in the world—painters, musicians, composers, writers, philosophers—living in places just as obscure as this crumbling adobe in El Rancho, who will never, ever see even the modest success that I’ve had in this fucked up society that defines your worth by how much you sell yourself for? Then once you’re sold they have to keep investing in you because so much money is at stake. Doesn’t matter if you’re old, stale, hackneyed and worthless—if some investment banker on the upper West side bought you for thousands of dollars to hang on his wall, by God you better double or triple by the time he’s ready to sell you to an investment banker on the upper East side to hang on his wall. ‘All the world’s a stage and we’re only the players.’”

Maybe some of this is sour grapes. I don’t have the talent that I give my Taos character, and I often lack her equanimity. But I do share her devotion to her old car seat on her back porch where she can see the Sangre de Cristo Mountains across the fields of irrigated pasture that have defined this view for 300 years. We also share a love for our neighbors, whose ancestors have lived here for 300 years. And I appreciate their regard for the work I do to help maintain these pastures and lives. That it is a way of life, not a career, is what I mean by “de-fault.” My friend who is terrified and famous also experiences this way of life, but it is within a different context, with an edge that, at least for me, spoils the quietness, the safety, the sameness. I don’t buy the adage that only things that terrify you are worth doing.

One day my almost grown son calls to ask me what I’m doing. When I tell him I’m working on my book about environmental justice, he says, mom, why don’t you publish your stuff. Ah, hito, if you only knew. But I tell him that I’m going to get down to work and finish up my memoirs of life as a norteño activist, my second novel, and edit my book of short stories so he and his brother can read it all when I’m dead. Mom,

I’m going to publish all if them, he says. Good luck, I tell him, you have my blessing. I won’t be around to be terrified.