"Embracing the Positive"

I recently read a letter in The New Yorker referencing Erik Erikson, a “brilliant neo-Freudian thinker from the past century,” who, according to the letter writer, posits that as we get older we either embrace what was positive in our lives or wallow in feelings of failure. Can’t be more polarized than that, but as one who levitates between the two poles, I decided I better look into exactly what Erikson had to say to maybe find out how to embrace the positive.

Erikson sees this choice as a process, a series of stages, in which one develops a personality based on social experience and relationships. In each stage people experience a conflict that determines whether one meets that conflict with a quality that allows for growth or fails to meet that conflict or develop essential skills needed for a strong sense of self. Mastery of the skills needed to grow equips one with “ego strength” or “ego quality.”

That’s all well and good, but how do you deal with ego strength in a society that emphasizes competition and comparison that is exacerbated by unlimited access to information about everyone with whom you can possible compete or compare?

I’m almost 70 years old. I can easily “wallow” when I think about all the incredible things that other 70 year olds like Louise Erdrich and Bill Frisell have provided for me. I’ve also lived through many “stages” that are life affirming. So how do I refrain from the competition and comparison to focus on the positive? I decided to make a list, starting with my early adult life, of the experiences and relationships that have made an impression.

1.     I went to a crazy college—Antioch—where I learned all about love and politics and expanding the mind and met lots of crazy people.

2.     I got a co-op job at the Central Clearing House in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which I never left—New Mexico, that is.

3.     I invented a career as journalist for alternative newspapers like Seer’s Catalogue that floated around the Albuquerque underground.

4.     I found my dog Judge, my dearest companion, in an Oregon forest while doing shit work one summer for the Forest Service.

5.     I got to spend two summers as a fire lookout on Mount Taylor while acting as a spy for environmental groups fighting uranium exploration in the forest.

6.     I fell in love with Mark, my partner of 34 years, in the fire lookout.

7.     Mark and I built a house in Placitas from scratch.

8.     We traveled all over Mexico, having all sorts of adventures, from Yucatan to Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara and Mexico City, where Mark got his pocket picked and we had to go to the US Embassy to get enough money to pay for a hotel until we could get money wired from his parents for a bus ride home.

9.     I got to earn money hiking around the Sandia Mountains (again, the Forest Service).

10. I parleyed those hikes into classes—hiking and cross-country skiing—and guidebooks under my own imprint: Acequia Madre Press.

11. I gave birth to Jakob Matthews Schiller in 1981.

12.  I fought the Forest Service—Cibola Forest Plan—and the Forest Service won. I fought the developers—building Placitas fake adobe haciendas—and the developers won.

13. I gave birth to Max Matthews Schiller in 1988.

14. Mark and John Kennedy and I wrote the UnReal Estate news to parody the developers Real Estate News and nobody knew it was us.

15. Mark and I wanted out of Placitas so we traded houses with a woman who lived in Llano San Juan but she wanted us to exorcise our house in Placitas so we kicked her out.

16. Mark and I did get out of Placitas, but to El Valle, where we finished a house, restored a hay field, planted a garden, and started an orchard.

17. Mark and I became norteño activists and got to hang out with Ike DeVargas, Max Cordova, and Chellis Glendinning.

18. Mark and I went after Forest Guardians and Sam Hitt, those absolutist, urban environmentalists, in our radical rag newspaper, La Jicarita News.

19. We went backcountry skiing and backpacking all over northern New Mexico. We taught our kids to downhill ski. Climbed a few Colorado peaks as well.

20. We went to demonstrations where environmentalists were hung in effigy.

21. We went dancing with Tomás, the unofficial mayordomo of El Valle, and his girlfriend, in Las Vegas on Sunday afternoons.

22. We went to Spain—the Prado, the Alhambra, the Pyrenees— to visit Jakob who was there for his senior year.

23. I wrote a couple of children’s’ books.

24. We sent both kids off to college.

25. I hiked the Grand Canyon, backpacked in Big Bend, and skied to the yurts with the “girls,” who became my boon companions on many outdoor adventures.

26.  I published a couple of books with Sunstone Press: Culture Clash; Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities, and Stories From Life’s Other Side.

27. Jakob married Casey in 2010; 10 months later Mark died of pancreatic cancer.

28. David Correia, Eric Shultz and I pounded out La Jicarita online, extending coverage to police violence in Albuquerque and fascism at the Santa Fe Opera.

29. Jakob and Casey gave me two grandchildren, Lulu and Marcos.

30. I published two more books under Acequia Madre Press: Unf*#!ing Believable and ¡No Se Vende! Water as a Right of the Commons.

31. John Nichols wrote me a 60 page letter in response to Unf*#!ing Believable and we became fast friends.

32. Jakob and I taught the grandkids to downhill ski. I won’t be able to keep up with them in a few more years.

33. I volunteered at the Mexican border with shelters harboring Latin American refugees seeking asylum in the United States as Trump separated children from their parents and put them in cages.

34. After years of lambasting Forest Service policy I helped start the Rio de Las Trampas Forest Council to develop a forest restoration program on the Camino Real Ranger District.

35. I helped John publish what he says will be his last book, Goodbye Monique: Requiem for a Brief Marriage, about the death of his mother when he was just two years old.

36. I’m piddling around with my novel. I don’t know what to do with myself if I’m not writing something.

It turns out Fred Rogers was also heavily influenced by Erikson in developing his much beloved series for children. Supposedly his favorite quote was from “The Little Prince:” “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” He took that to mean that what is essential to life isn’t the “honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. . . . It’s the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff . . . What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye.”

As my life becomes more circumscribed and my body declines, I hope “what is essential” about me remains.

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Am I a Literary Luddite or do I Just Have Good Taste?

I read two books in British writer Rachael Cusk's much acclaimed trilogy and I have to tell you I don't get it—meaning I don't get what all the fuss is about. She's been quoted as saying that a novel's traditional make-up—characters, plot, description—is "fake and embarrassing," that because one has sufficiently suffered personally one only has to tell one's own story. I barely made it through the first book, Outline, where a writer in a first person narrative—has to be first person, remember, as there are no made up characters—gets on a plane and travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. It's neither autobiography, novel, or memoir, but is what is now called autofiction, like the unbelievably long books by Karl Ove Knausgaard that might not be so boring if they weren't so long. Is it because it has a new name that all the literary critics think it's so wonderful?

I skipped the second in the series, Transit, and made it through the third, Kudos, in which a writer gets on a plane, travels to another country to a literary event, runs into various people, has conversations with them where they tell her various things, and then she gets on a plane and goes home. This time I found the people she encounters a little more interesting than those in Outline, and their stories a little more emotionally engaging, but their suffering is not contextualized, their stories are fragmented and existential, and if there is something in this structure that is supposed to supplant the lack of theme and cohesiveness supplied by character, plot, and description, it's lost on me.

To not appear a literary luddite I have to say that I read another relatively new book that the critics loved called 10:04 by Ben Lerner, who is also a poet. If anyone had told me, you should read this book by someone who is a white Gen X guy who lives in hipster Brooklyn I would have said, not interested, but the book is beautiful and brilliant and I read it twice. Lerner's book could also be classified as autofiction, I suppose, but the difference between his conception of the genre and Cusk's is night and day: the warmth and breadth of the interplay between his muddled personal life and the neoliberal streets of New York or the art/fart of Marfa challenge the reader's imagination with humor and intelligence. In a passage in which he falls into the third person, Lerner summarizes the book: “His narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation.” This is expressed in numerous ways throughout. While dealing with his own serious illness the author agrees to become a sperm donor for his best friend Alex, scrupulously maintaining a Platonic relationship with her and trying to figure out what parenting might mean. He tries to establish community with an Occupy activist by allowing him to shower in his apartment and mentoring an eight-year-old boy while questioning the sincerity of his efforts. He volunteers at a food co-op as an ironic statement of capitalist consumerism while listening to a riveting story of a fellow worker's life. Ironies, contradictions, politics, personal dilemmas, humor, fear, and anxiety: the mixed bag of who we and what we confront explored by someone who's razor sharp intelligence makes every page a delight.

But then I had a conversation with my friend Terri, who I loaned Lerner's book to, and while she also thought it was an intelligent, funny book, especially the part about Marfa (she's a visual artist), as a working class lesbian she had more trouble with the white Gen X hipster Brooklyn genesis than I did. "Am I really all that interested in hearing the perspective of the dominant voice in literature again?" as she put it, even if he's smart and witty and entertaining?

I suppose what this all reveals is that I'm a white privileged secular humanist and that the literary trends that are correlative will resonate, and those that aren't, won't. That's why I never read Derrida, struggled with Foucault, could only read Pynchon and Burroughs in my twenties, gave up on Foster Wallace, am very picky with DeLillo, and am embarrassed that I've hardly read Borges.

But even within these boundaries there's something else at work, what you just have to admit is taste, or more presumptively, discretion. Just as when I thought the movie that won the Oscar year before last, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, was a racist piece of crap (eventually a number of other critics finally expressed this opinion as well) or Crash, which won a few years ago, was a contrived piece of crap. This may never happen with Rachel Cusk, but I'll stick to my opinion that her deadpan look at suffering doesn't do much to enlighten, entertain, or delight. 

Brett Kavanaugh Unleashed

I watched the whole, damn, disgusting spectacle on Thursday. I thought the painful part would be when Christine Blasey Ford testified about the sexual assault she accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of perpetrating 36 years ago when she was 15 and he was 17. Although a #MeToo victim myself, which I wrote about in a former blogpost, I worried more about her and the many women out there who like Dr. Blasey, had suffered or are still suffering significant trauma. I was raped in my early twenties, but I haven't experienced the residual trauma that many others have. As Sarah Shulman explains it, "two people can have the same experience  and one can be devastated for life" but the other can move beyond it because of other factors each person brings to it. I found that watching Dr. Blasey's testimony —brave, measured, forthright, and authentic—wasn't painful, however; it was validation that although her assault had deeply affected her at different times in her life, she has a sense of purpose and composure that  compelled her to come forward as she put it, to do her "civic duty."
 
No, the painful part of yesterday's hearing was when Brett Kavanaugh sat in the witness chair. In either my political naivete or astuteness, one of which will be born out in next week's full senate hearing on his nomination to the Supreme Court, I thought Kavanaugh would come out prepared to woo the few Repubs who just might have a modicum of decency left to vote against him (or more likely, the constituency that forced them to vote against him). Like he presented himself at the initial hearings before the judicial committee: good Catholic student who went to a prestigious prep school who got into Yale law school on his academic record and then went on to work in Washington D.C. for George W. Bush and became a judge because of his brilliance as an attorney and married a wonderful woman and had two wonderful girls and coached their basketball teams because he's such a good guy.

Instead, Brett decided to come out as the Trumpster: mean, vicious, petulent, full of lies. You, know, the white man of privilege who thinks he's the victim when anyone gets in his way. He went on to reveal himself as the partisan hack he's been since he graduated from law school and joined forces with the cabal of conservatives that included Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, and George Conway (Kellyanne's husband). He worked for Ken Starr on the Clinton investigations where numerous Justice Department policies were violated including leaks to journalists, particularly regarding Bill Clinton's sexual activities (which led a federal judge to commission an investigation into whether members of Starr’s staff violated the prohibitions on disclosing grand jury information). He was intimately involved in the conspiracy theory that Clinton deputy White House counsel Vince Foster had been murdered rather than committed suicide, tormenting Hilary and Foster's family. During his tenure as a White House staffer under George W. Bush he was accused of using stolen materials from Democratic senators' offices to help judicial nominees and then lied about it under oath during hearings. It's also likely he reviewed materials involving "enhanced interrogation" methods while in the Bush White House but because Trump withheld so many documents from the the 2018 Senate judicial committee no paper trail was evident.

He will bring his staunch conservative record displayed on the D.C Circuit Court of Appeals to the U.S Supreme Court: support of the Citizens United decision; desire to overturn or severely limit Roe v. Wade (he has said he considers contraception abortion); limiting government agencies the ability to enforce environmental, safety, and other regulations; immigration restrictions; support of gerrymandering; voter suppression; the list goes on and on.

So was his revelation of who he really is a calculated strategy or just a monster unleashed in panic mode? He said he had thrown out his prepared speech and rewritten it himself with no vetting the night before. But he lies, so we don't know if that's the truth or it that's part of the calculation, either. But Trump already has his back. So does every Republican on the judicial committee. Lindsay Graham broke out in a raving rant that the hearing was a "sham", a "circus", a "disgrace" and I think he threw in McCarthy as well, destroying this good man's name. He sounded a lot like Clarence Thomas. Oh how far we have come. Seems to me he was taking a big chance of putting Susan Collins and those other fence sitters in the public eye of those who realize that women like Dr. Blasey could be their daughters or sisters or granddaughters and we better fucking listen to them.

I couldn't bear to watch the hearings again on Friday but I turned it on just at the very end to hear the vote. Lo and behold, our fence sitter Jeff Flake, Republican who isn't running for Senate again and has nothing to lose and who likes to talk bravely but continues to vote for every pernicious bill that comes down the pipe, pulled a last minute punch. Just as they were set to vote, he asked for the floor and announced that he would vote no for Kavanaugh next week in the full senate vote unless Senate leader Mitch McConnell asks for a one week delay for an FBI reopening of an investigation into the allegations made during the senate judiciary hearings. But remember, there would have to be one more "no" vote to block Kavanaugh's nomination in the full Senate. Flake said he was willing to ask the White House to reopen the FBI investigation.

So the drama continues. Will wily Mitch McConnell figure out a way to wiggle out of this one so that injustice once again prevails? That is his modus operandi, of course, to win at all costs. As one of the senators on the committee said yesterday, Dr. Blasey, like Anita Hill, will be remembered for her courage and forthrightness. Unfortunately,  those who have damaged them personally and publicly will continue to do so until their power is broken and they are held to account. The #MeToo movement has done much to bring down some powerful figures in some powerful industries: Hollywood; broadcast media; print media; and a few others. If Kavanaugh is brought down, it will be the most important power figure to date because of the impact his tenure on the Supreme Court would have on the lives of so many people. It's still the tip of the iceberg, but if it could break a hole in that Titanic, a lot more of 'em could go down.

Thank God for Novels

While I was rereading For Whom the Bell Tolls John McCain died and I found out that it was his favorite book. That was a bit discombobulating, but understandable within the context of war and heroism and all that good stuff Hemingway writes about. But Jesus, all the other stuff that Hemingway writes about in that book blew me away: love, loyalty, the longing for freedom and liberty, betrayal, courage, friendship, women, politics, Communism, socialism, fascism, anarchism, terrorism, idealism suicide, and death.

Listening to just the stuff about war and heroism as applied to McCain for almost two solid weeks was a good lesson in reductive thinking. Because McCain, a hawk, war monger, misogynist, and neoconservative, was also one of the few Republicans who expressed any opposition to Trump, in death he became the untainted hero. Obama delivered one of the eulogies. All the Democrats spewed laudatory sound bites. All the mainstream news outlets ran patriotic story after story documenting his years as a tortured prisoner of war in Vietnam and his distinguished career in the Senate where he manufactured a reputation as a maverick—he had a contrarian streak that sometimes played out against his own team—despite never seeing a war he didn't like.

But I digress. For anyone who hasn't read Hemingway's book, or those of you who don't remember it that well, it's the story of the Spanish Civil War and a band of partizans assigned the task of blowing up a bridge as part of a larger offensive against the fascists. The story is told through the eyes of Robert Jordan, an American (the Spaniards refer to him as Inglés) who had been studying in Spain before joining the Republicans to fight the fascists. Hemingway takes 471 pages to tell what happens over the course of three days. That is what makes this novel so wonderful. While I digressed about John McCain, he digressed about everything possible pertaining to a small band of guerrillas living in a cave in the mountains caught up in a war that presaged an even more horrific fight against fascism that would engulf the world just a few years later.

Roberto (as he is lovingly called by Maria, the young woman rescued by the guerillas after her family is shot by the fascists) questions everything in his stream of consciousness and flashbacks: why is he here, who are these people, can they be trusted, who is he to question their trust, how has this war come to be, will the communists, anarchists, and Trotskyites destroy the movement with their internecine bickering, will he and Maria live to walk the fascist free streets of Madrid as husband and wife? Yet minute by minute, hour by hour he must focus on how he is going to blow up a bridge when the Republican offensive begins and then figure out how the hell they're all going to get down from the mountains to safety.

It was such a pleasure to read as a distraction from John McCain's death and Trump's rants and Brett Kavanaugh's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee as the Republicans push through his nomination to the Supreme Court. This appointment is not made by Congress anymore; it's made by the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, which draws up the list of potential conservative nominees to present to the president who then chooses the one he thinks will fulfill all his promises made to his base: overturn or severely limit Roe v. Wade, protect the president from prosecution, limit government agencies from enacting environmental and safety regulation, etc. etc.

But again I digress. I guess it just goes to show that our attention is riveted by this unbelievably strange vortex that sucks us deeper into a world we never thought we'd witness, but upon analysis was barrelling along all the time setting us up for the Trumpster. But wait! Another bomb. Kavanaugh has been accused of sexual assault by a professor in California back when they were in high school. Another disgusting Republican conservative who not only wants to control women's bodies by policy but apparently by physical force as well. Good thing I started rereading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse: about as different as you can get in so many ways from For Whom the Bell Tolls but so beautifully written and actually just as incisive a look into the human condition. No, Virginia, there's no Santa Claus, but there's still beauty in the world and I'm going to stay out of the vortex for two hours a day with the another Virginia who's even better than Santa.

A Memory of Days Gone By

While I was on my morning walk a memory of days gone by popped into my head. I don’t know why, it just did. The memory was of an old friend who I met in the Women’s Studies Department at UNM many years ago. She was a part-time student, a nurse by trade, married to a doctor with two small children and a house in an upscale neighborhood in the North Valley. We became friends in class and soon she invited me to come meet her husband and kids. Which I did, and soon after, she asked me if I’d be interested in staying at her house and taking care of the kids while she and her husband went to Mexico for a few days.

I knew nothing about taking care of children. I had twenty-something priorities of drinking beer at Okie’s, the university bar, and dancing at Rosa’s Cantina in Algodones (always political, I found time to write for the alternative papers Seer’s Catalog and Coatamundi). I’d only known her for a few months and she was willing to trust her children to this ignorant caregiver? And these were young children, four or five and two or three, somewhere around there in age. I, of course, said yes (again, I’m a pretty nice person who likes to help people out), but I’d have to bring my dogs with me, which I did, to combine with their several dogs, and, as a bonus, a gorilla.

Now, I don’t remember if she provided the gorilla information to me at the outset and I was intrigued by the situation, or it came as an afterthought and I was caught off guard. The gorilla was named Huerfanita, who had been born at the Albuquerque Zoo but abandoned by her mother and was being raised by the wife of the zoo director. My friend and her husband were taking care of Huerfanita for a short period of time to give the zoo keeper’s wife a reprieve, but why they thought they could go off to Mexico and leave this baby gorilla in my care is also a mystery.

So for three or four days, I don’t remember (a recurring theme) which, I stayed with two toddlers, four or five dogs, and a gorilla that clung to my chest during its waking hours while I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or spaghetti to feed these children who spent a lot of time tormenting me by getting into all kinds of trouble in the house, usually involving water in the bathroom. But I survived, I stayed friends with the family, and watched these children grow up. I babysat many more times over the years and enjoyed their packed refrigerator, pantry, and bar. When Mark and I became a couple, he and I babysat the kids and enjoyed the amenities together.  And many years later, the doctor ended up delivering our first baby, Jakob, when I had to have a Caesarian section instead of a natural birth at a the Southwest Maternity Center (he was the consulting doctor for the Center). We paid him for his services with pot.

Mark and I attended the wedding of their youngest son. But then years started going by and we largely lost touch (we had moved to El Valle and were much farther apart logistically as well). The last time I had any contact was when their older son developed a critical medical condition and we spoke on the phone. As far as I know he recovered.

Now I don’t know if they’re even still alive. She was 10 years older than me, he even older. But I’m very happy that for some inexplicable reason I thought of them this morning: they came in and out of my life, as so many others have done, but I have the memory.

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The Name Game

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Let’s play the game where someone’s name is mentioned and I respond with the first thing that comes to mind:

Donald Trump: authoritarian moron—yikes!

Paul Ryan: adolescent in love with Ayn Rand

Mitch McConnell: chinless opportunist

Nancy Pelosi: bourgeois maven

Chuck Shumer: Zionist sellout

Tom Perez: milquetoast

Kellyanne Conway: Queen of the Craven

Jeff Flake: fundamentalist Christian with a weakness for Jesus

Hilary Clinton: never visited a country she wouldn’t bomb

Samantha Powers: imperialism disguised as compassion

General Kelly: killing machine

Jeff Sessions: Southern comfort for the white elite

Ryan Zinke: urban cowboy who doesn’t dance

Scott Pruitt: litigator without a cause

Betsy DeVos: fundamentalist Christian with a weakness for guns

Rick Perry: empty head with or without the frames

John Bolton: also never visited a country he wouldn't bomb

A New Toilet for my Birthday

Millions of women around the world once again marched, on the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, to denounce the damage the Trump administration is doing to all of us. The next day, the Dems caved and voted to open the government for business without the commitment of specific legislation to protect the DACA “Dreamers” from being deported in March. What did they get instead? A “promise” by Mitch McConnell to have “hearings” on the issue.

I was supposed to go to the march in Santa Fe, a much less dramatic excursion than my trip to Washington D.C. last year, but a relief to not have to get on a plane. Then it snowed (hallelujah, we’re in a drought), my partner in arms Terri was too sick to venture into the cold, and then the “should I stay or should I go” dilemma arose. The answer to my question got sucked into the personal is political: is it going to make one iota of difference in anyone’s life except my own if I do or don’t go to the march in Santa Fe (millions marching and Trump is still here and the Dems are cowards)? The answer was obviously that it wouldn’t, which has never before stopped me from doing all kinds of ultimately futile things, but this time I stayed home and stewed.

I stewed because things are worse today than a year ago. Every single cabinet appointee is doing her/his best to destroy the mission of the agency they rule. That’s because libertarians don’t believe in any government regulation and oversight of corporate profiteering or protection of peoples lives and the planet we inhabit unless it’s to brutalize the “other” with bombs or the police (which pretty much sums up the agenda of the Republican Party).

I stewed because none of us really know what to do to stop this terror: support impeachment, which ain’t going to happen with the Repubs in power. Put all our energy into gaining Democratic seats in the House so we do have the votes to start the impeachment process but probably not to impeach? Somehow figure out how to get those seats filled with Bernie-like Dems who will actually talk about inequality and Black Lives Matter and the military industrial complex? Wait for Mueller to actually come up with a criminal charge?

I stewed because the next day was my birthday and because I’d planned on going to the march in Santa Fe I hadn’t planned on going anywhere to celebrate—or mourn—my day of birth. And I’d arranged to have my neighbor come help me install a new toilet because that was when he was available. So at the last minute, to avoid a total decline into despair, I had to call my kids and get them to meet me for lunch in Santa Fe, which they did and which was very nice, eating tapas. Then I had to come straight home and install my toilet, which also was very nice because he did a good job and no water was spilled on my wood floor. 

So I made it through another anxious birthday tied to another anxious year of overwhelming tsuris (that’s grief and strife and aggravation and trouble for the non-Yiddish speakers). I know there are many people out there doing everything in their power to prevent another year of this. I’ll try to do my best as well and not think about another birthday and futility and despair. Wish me luck.