Of Now Done Darkness pt. 1

Today likewise marks a Decennial since my Mom's passing, a scant few days after my return from Puerto Rico.  I knew she had rapidly worsened in the past few months, but I hadn't realized the full extant thereof till I stepped off the plane. Here is part 1 of an account I once wrote about it...

And Jacob was left alone, and there wrestled a man until the breaking of the day.

-Genesis 32:24

Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (My God!) my God

-Gerard Manley Hopkins

I

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

-CS Lewis

But then my eyes fall, for I see that which I had not considered.

I remember it like it was tomorrow.

At the end of the terminal, as I turn the corner, my Mom sits a shadow of her former self—frail, ghostly, white.  Her long blond hair is now short, thin, curly, gray.  Her flushed face is now pale, emaciated, withered, tired.  Her arms are frail and bony, they struggle into the air.  Her once-firm belly bulges beneath her medical gown, but not with life.  She always looked young for her age; now she’s old before her time.

Tears stream from her eyes—her lifetime of reserve is broken.  No mascara streaks, no make-up, no figure-flattering dress, her native vanity has vanished, for she’s too far beyond such things now.  She forces her feet to stand and support her weight one last time, in a Herculean effort to embrace her returning son. 

And I falter.

Dear God in heaven.

I don’t even recognize her. 

I take a breath.  I bite my lip.  I force eye contact and step forward. 

Quickly now, lest they catch you pausing.  Absently I adjust my tie, then my flapping suit jacket (I’ve lost a lot of weight), I reposition my shoulder bag.  For the first time in two years, Goosebumps ripple up and down my spine.

I can feel hers through her loose-fitting gown.  Carefully I embrace her—gently now, or she’ll crumble in your hands!  A stiff breeze might blow her away.  Her hands are now limp and weary as they wrap awkwardly around my back; she places her palms on the precise spot that for months now contorts me in pain if touched too hard, but I don’t even feel a thing.  She whispers hoarsely, “I’m so glad you’re home, I love you so much…” or something some such, I don’t know, I’m not really listening, I’m distracted.  She exhales deeply.  She is at ease, she is at peace. 

All mine is gone. 

As uncomfortable as I am—as much as I want to throw her off and sprint down the terminal, past baggage claim and into the night screaming in shock and rage at this blasphemy—still I let her hold me as long as she wants, while I take deep breaths and force a mumbled “I love you too Mom.”  Finally, of her own volition, she unwraps and his helped back into the wheelchair.  I force a smile, pose for some pictures, greet the other well-wishers and grip their hands—for a flash I’m ashamed of the relief I feel at their firm, healthy grips.  They comment on my deep tan, my Spanish accent, all as I nod and try violently to remember their names.  I almost forget to embrace my own Father, and my brother’s near an afterthought.  

At baggage claim, I stare for my luggage like I would for a sniper, a mountain lion, or a life-raft, something to lunge at and grasp, to engross my attention for even 10 whole seconds, and not have to torture myself with the question of whether or not I should incline my head slightly towards the right at the frail woman breathing heavily in the wheel chair (Dios el Padre that’s my Mother, isn’t it!) and say something, anything, to her before she drifts unconscious, and run the risk of appearing to my relatives as either callous or a blubbering mess, and I resent deeply that I suddenly care what others think of me again—

Mercifully my luggage tumbles down the carousel. I snatch for it like a drowning man.  Before anyone else can small-talk, I march out the revolving doors.  Dad pulls up the car.  Mom is carefully helped into the front seat, while I give the well-wishers strong hugs of gratitude and good-bye.  Planes roar over the Oregon clouds.  Soon the sun will rise in the Caribbean, but here it’s still mid-night.  I shiver again, and I don’t know if it’s from the cold or if it’s a shudder.  I get in the car last.

And Abraham ascended Mount Moriah. 

Or am I Isaac?  No.

I am Jacob.

To Be Continued

Against Digital Humanities

English academia is perhaps second only to the clothing industry in being beholden to trends, fads, and flash-in-the-pan fashions.  It may seem strange for a field that focuses so much on classics and long-dead writers to care so desperately about appearing "cutting-edge," but here we are.  The current big buzz-word in the discipline is the "Digitial Humanities."  As flashy as that may sound, it's basically just another mode for transforming critical-thinkers into clerks, tricking humanities scholars into pursuing the very careers in data-entry and website maintenance that we all entered English to avoid in the first place. 

To be clear: I am not opposed to on-line archiving.  At all.  It makes research so much easier, and the Medieval monks who had to travel cross war-torn dukedoms to access another monastery's meager library would have committed murder to have the on-line resources we now have (and to think we mainly just use 'em to look up pics of funny cats!).  Three cheers for digital archiving, and I mean that sincerely!  No, what I am resisting is not databases, but this fetishising of all-things-digital, as though that is what will finally appeal to the born-and-bred-in-cyberspace Millenials who certainly "don't read" anymore.

To which, I can only respond with the following article, about how, according to a Pew study, it is actually Millenials who are reading books the most nowadays.

The typical click-baity Slate headline aside, it actually makes total sense to me that the children of the internet age would understand better than anyone the need to take breaks from the internet. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as it is mostly the older professors (ironically) who keep making a big deal about the "Digital Humanities" as somehow the future and salvation of English academia, oblivious to the fact that all the Millennials entering the field now do so specifically to get away from the digital--we're surrounded by it, we're saturated by it, we're sick of it, and crave something more substantive than the flashy and the ephemeral, the same way a starving man in a desert craves water.  In fact, in my experience, even among non-English majors the appeal of this discipline to the rising generation is in how it offers those very things that can't be googled.

Last week in my class, most of my freshmen confessed, almost sheepishly, non-bragging, that they don't even watch much TV much anymore. And why would they? They are already drowning in digital media, they don't need college to force more of it on them, like a kid after Halloween with a tummy-ache forced to keep eating sugar.

Mold! at the EPB!

In their infinite wisdom, the University of Iowa administration decided that a nifty way to "go green" and save money this last summer would be to shut off the A/C in the English building on early mornings and weekends.  Somehow the administration neglected to consult the many scientists that literally work for them--or even just the native Midwesterners that surround them--because they somehow spaced on the rather obvious fact that summer-heat-and-humidity+poorly-ventilated-spaces=wicked-nasty-mold.

Which is exactly what grew in the Grad Student offices in the basement of the EPB.  The Iowa River flood of this last summer certainly didn't help things, either--though, once again, why a University with its very own School of Architecture still built a building with a basement next to a river that regularly floods, is another grand mystery.

This is why you don't hire business executives to run colleges, boys and girls.

Now, normally the higher-ups couldn't care less what happens to lowly Grad Students, but the mold has officially become a Public Health Code Violation, so us English Grad Students were recently re-located to new offices...on the 6th floor...of a partially-condemned old building in desperate need of renovations...on the opposite side of campus from our classes.  Also, the offices look like this:

We just need to lay down a rusty mattress, scatter some used needles, and blare some '70s-era Punk Rock to complete the Heroin-Den aesthetic.

So now as we run back and forth across campus between our offices and actual classes, we begin to feel like some harried Victorian street orphans.  This prompted a facebook comment of my own: "Oy, guvnah! I ain't no street urchin, the mold in ye ol' EPB dun driven me outta house and home it did. Walkin from one end o' campus to the other I gots to now. Beggin yer pardon sir, but if twas the University presidency that done shut off the A/C when the Thames flooded, shant it be them that should be given up their offices to us? Bollocks on the lot of 'em! Dem ol' wankers do nuthin' but get banjaxed off their arses and smoke their fags and fill their nappys."

It was very well received.

On Ferguson, Belatedly

[A scene that is unfortunately not from Ukraine or Syria]

When you purchase a new vehicle in the state of Iowa, the dealership does not issue you a temp tag, but instead just transfer your old plates to your new vehicle until the new plates arrive in the mail.  This is not common practice in most states, which I learned the hard way this last summer while house-sitting in Utah.

I accidentally backed into someone you see; we exchanged insurance info, called the cops to file a police report, all pretty by the book.  That is, until the police officer ran my plates, and saw that they belonged to a different vehicle.  In short order he was yelling at me, furious, accusing me of driving a stolen car, threatening to impound my vehicle, and calling me a liar to my face when I tried to explain Iowa state law.  Not that I entirely blamed him, either; what do you say when the truth sounds like a lie?  It was the most frightening afternoon of my summer.

Fortunately cooler heads finally prevailed: I got him on the phone with the dealership in Iowa, I showed him my sales receipt, and after several hours he finally chose not to impound my vehicle, electing instead to just write me a ticket for driving without insurance, which I later got dismissed in traffic court.  I never got an apology from the cop mind you, but hey, could've been worst.

For example, I could've been black while falsely accused of stealing my own car.  Somehow, I suspect that that minor misunderstanding wouldn't have ended quite as benignly.

That's exactly what happened in Ferguson, MO, isn't it.  A routine police stop quickly span out of control.  Suddenly, an unarmed black teenager is gunned down.  No police report is filed.  When protestors demand accountability, the local cops remove their name-tags, shout racial slurs, fire tear gas, and dress up like paramilitary storm-troopers while they go violate some 1st Amendment rights.

For I can testify: a single traffic-cop shouting angrily at you is frightening enough.  A whole gang of cops armed to the teeth and out of control as they try to get away with institutionalized murder?  Those protestors standing their ground have my full respect. 

In my freshman rhetoric class, I teach MLK and Malcolm X--two men who had some very choice words about police brutality--as examples of excellent rhetoricians.  I used to worry that my examples were a little dated.  After Ferguson, I fear they are not.

They Built It And We Came: Field of Dreams Revisited

"People will come, Ray.  They'll come to Iowa, for reasons they can't even fathom..." (Well, that part's certainly true!)

So one of the first things I learned upon my arrival at University of Iowa is that the much-loved 1989 Oscar-bait Field of Dreams was in fact filmed just up the road in Dyersville, IA.  ("Is this heaven?" "No, it's Iowa.")  What's more, the baseball field is still there--as is the white house--and the stadium lights--and the wooden bleachers Ray's daughter falls off--and the line in the gravel Moonlight Graham has to cross to revive her--and the corn fields, which at this time of year are just tall enough and green enough to still evoke the nostalgic aura of a film that even 25 years ago was already choked with Baby Boomer nostalgia.  There's also a tourist stand, because of course there is.

Anyhoo, a group of us, as a thing to do and yet another excuse to get out of Iowa City, drove up there this last Labor Day, to see some dead relatives, run the bases, learn something about America and learn to believe again or whatever.  Mostly just to take pictures.  And get out of Iowa City for an afternoon.

As you can probably tell, I wasn't looking for much of a nostalgia buzz there.  As we drove, I considered it almost kinda sad that this old movie set is still standing for whatever tourists still remember it (serious, is the film really that much beloved?).  Now, I seem to remember having fond childhood memories of it, but I seriously haven't seen the flick since the Clinton administration, for I have the sneaking suspicion that if I were to revisit it now, my eyes would roll relentlessly at how unapologetically schmaltzy, saccharine, and sentimental the whole shebang is--even by the standards of sports films.  But then, who knows, maybe I actually would enjoy it for just those reasons, as an all-too-rare oasis of sincerity amidst all our jaded, post-modern, ironic distance.

Or maybe I would be all the more bothered by the conspicuous lack of black baseball players, leaving only James Earl Jones to play the tired old "magic negro" trope; or maybe I would instead be fascinated by how such a blatant Reagan-era ode to conservative "Heartland" values actually trojan-horsed in a subtly progressive political agenda (anti-book-banning, celebrating counter-culture heroes, etc); or shoot, maybe, given the utter creative bankruptcy of contemporary Hollywood, I would just stand astonished at how such a weird script ever got greenlit in the first place.

Man, maybe I should rewatch the film.

Because it was actually good to be there, you see, once we arrived.  It felt good.  It was peaceful, contrary to all expectations or lack thereof.  Part of it was just the perfect weather--this is that rare time of year when Iowa can actually fool you into thinking it's pretty, what with those endless Polar Vortexes already a fading memory.  Part of it too, I'm sure, is the fact that we were literally enacting the film: they built it, and we came.  "People will come, Ray," and we did.  A fictional prophecy was made real.  And we didn't even have to pay $20.

In fact, maybe that was just it: "People will come to Iowa," begins James Earl Jones' climactic big speech, "For reasons they can't even fathom..."  And that was totally true of me--of Iowa generally, not just the baseball field (I don't even like playing baseball).  For just why am I in Iowa, of all places??  Yes, yes, I came to complete a PhD, and U. Iowa's actually a well-ranked school (nothing to sneeze at in this academic market)...but I could've gotten a PhD elsewhere, and in fact wanted to.  Was going to.  Was ready to.  But I didn't.  I came here instead, driven by some impulse I still can't account for...can't fathom.

As yet another piece of Baby Boomer nostalgic schlock, Field of Dreams is probably the worst of offenders; but as a metaphor for acting on those incessant impulses against your own better judgment, well, maybe that's where the primal appeal of this film really lies, why someone has even bothered to keep that baseball field up amidst the cornfields, why folks still make the pilgrimage there, yes, even bored grad students like us.   We never did find the passage to the next life in the corn stalks though, so don't ask.

Thoreau vs. the BYU

[Henry David Thoreau is not impressed by your BYU beard bans]

 

You can always tell when an English major got their undergrad at BYU by how vociferously they denounce Thoreau.  I don't just mean they roll their eyes at Walden or respectfully disagree with his Defense of John Brown, no, I mean they tear into him like a cornered dog, as though he has personally insulted them somehow.

Serious, almost every last BYU English grad I've ever met has at some point ranted (as though they were the only students on Earth to learn this) about how when Thoreau lived at Walden, he visited his Mom in Boston every Sunday, who in turn gave him a care package (wow, he loved his Mom and she loved him back, what a scoundrel!), and had coffee with the Emersons (*gasp* he wasn't an anti-social misanthrope, how dare he!).

While these Sunday visits maybe slightly undermine his whole Walden project of roughing it alone in the wilderness, it likewise doesn't distract from the fact that he, well, lived in a cabin the other 6 days of the week--not to mention that he built it all by himself, and survived not one but two New England winters therein (have you experienced a Nor'easter without central heating?). That is, even if his whole escape into the woods may not have been quite as awesomely hardcore as we initially assumed, well, it was still by a wide margin a heckuva a lot more daring than anything any of us have ever done.

But to hear some BYU English majors declaim, every word that Thoreau ever wrote is now delegitimized and exposed as an egregious fraud.  Besides that angry dismissal being a total ad hominem fallacy if there ever was one, well, to paraphrase Thoreau on John Brown, Thoreau can frankly only be judged by his peers--and since not one of these privileged young American college students has ever even tried to build a log cabin, let alone live two years in one, then these English majors are hardly the peers qualified to judge him. In science terms, if you don't even try to reproduce the experiment, then you are in no place to challenge the results.

And this from the self-professed disciples of a Man who taught "judge not, lest ye be judged," and what's more, One who regularly withdrew from the world to meditate in the wilderness as well!  Which makes this whole Thoreau hostility all the more perplexing--shouldn't they be looking to Thoreau as a potential model to emulate, one who embodies their most cherished virtues of thrift, self-sufficiency, contemplation, meditation, anti-materialism and unworldliness?  The BYU English dept. has this knee-jerk tendency to claim near every great writer as some closet proto-Mormon incognito (Emerson, Milton, Wordsworth, CS Lewis, etc), so why not also Thoreau, who actually does seek to live up to our purported values?

Maybe that's just it--he actually practiced what we preach, he did what we only talk about, which exposes us a bit, and we resent that a tad perhaps.  Because ideally, BYU would likewise be training our students, like Thoreau, to "seek not for riches but for wisdom," to serve God and not Mammon (the Hebrew word for wealth), to "lay aside the things of this world, and seek for the things of a better."  

But of course, BYU doesn't actually teach that, at least not nowadays.  Its top ranked programs are in Accounting and Business.  It's a hotbed for Summer Sales and Pyramid Scheme recruiters.  We are instructed to "be in the world but not of the world," but we're actually still kinda of the world too, aren't we.  In practice, BYU students do the exact opposite of what Thoreau preached, so we discredit him at every turn lest we be pricked by our own consciences.

But that theory still doesn't account for the fact that the English dept. is where all the lefties and liberals, the anti-capitalist types, tend to congregate at the BYU--but again, these are the ones, not the business majors, who savage Thoreau the most. Just what's going on here?  Is it maybe, subconsciously, they do so desperately want Thoreau to embody their most deeply held values, and so feel a palpable sense of personal betrayal when he doesn't precisely live up to his mythology?  

Is this the secular equivalent of when some Mormons learn that Joseph Smith wasn't the flawless Saint he never claimed to be, so they turn on him viciously and throw the baby out with the bathwater?  Is this BYU Thoreau-bashing an indicator that we LDS types still have not quite figured out how to treat human beings as human beings, and not as idols?  (Idolatry is a sin anyways...)

Maybe they resent Thoreau as some counterfeit Messiah?  Maybe Walden pales compared to the travails of Brigham Young and the pioneers (whom we also have not matched)?  Maybe this Harvard alum who voluntarily walked away from such prestige punctures the careerist pretensions of those attending the "Lord's" University?  Maybe his uncompromising principles gives them away as not nearly as lefty as they think they are?  Maybe we love out A/C and laptops too much to bear contemplating a world without them (as unsustainable as that world may be)?  Maybe the neck-beard throws them off?  Who knows.  

All I know is that when I prepared to move out East and wondered how I would move all this stuff, it was Walden that reminded me to quit letting the things I own own me, and leave it all behind.  And the last time I read Thoreau's "Walking," I was filled with a deep and propulsive need to go for a walk in the woods and commune with God's wonders that is as yet unmatched by any personal essay I've yet to encounter from the BYU.