I dream with open eyes, p.6
I Dream with Open Eyes, page 6
The intimacy offered by books nurtures its own form of political consciousness. Reading Carlo Levi’s The Watch, an Italian novel from the post-Mussolini era this morning, on a day when Extinction Rebellion protests were blocking traffic in Central London, I came across a passage beginning, “The question now was whether that extraordinary popular movement called the Resistance would actually develop further, remolding the shape of the country, or would be pushed back into historical memory, disavowed as active reality . . . like a spiritual experience without visible fruits,” and felt myself profoundly stirred. Enlivened for our own struggle, just by virtue of feeling my own urgent questions inscribed through another consciousness. More than any particular political message, reading imparts a sense of solidarity in solitude across time and cultures that can strengthen our courage, even when it validates our foreboding.
One problem we face now is that those who would resurrect wholesale a former golden age, with all its rancid inequities, are counterbalanced by those who seek a future in which the slate is finally wiped clean—whether for the sake of sanitizing the moral landscape to protect fragile inheritors of trauma, or in deference to new technologies that promise to mold reality afresh in ways everyone can buy into equally.
Something in the ecology between past and present has gone awry. The imbalance distorts our judgment not just on what’s happening now, but also gazing forward in time. We’ve lost our temporal demarcations, as if these were the stilts of wooden piers swept away by a superstorm. News comes to us continually. There’s no anticipation of a rich weekend paper, let alone the next morning’s edition. There’s no Sabbath to our work, since in America almost everyone makes themselves constantly digitally available. (Surely one of the great silent coups in the annals of business management is the unheralded transition to the expectation that ambitious employees in white-collar jobs will append off-hour contact information to their work emails—as if every job required the vigilant responsiveness of doctors on call for a hospital emergency room. Then again, with the unassailable excuse of being always partly at work, each individual has been gifted by their company with an ever-ready escape hatch from the discomfiting immediacy of family intimacy.) The electronic mailbox never ceases delivery. The online store never shuts. The virtual entertainer never stops dancing out for our private delectation. We live in the perpetual twilight smear of casino time. Forever awaiting some jackpot of news—personal, professional, or global. Forever hunched before our screens, rattled and ravaged as a sclerotic, zombie-eyed smoker staring at the spinning symbols on the slots in Las Vegas.
Even if we cast aside the haptic model of the physical book as no longer culturally or environmentally viable, the practice that used to be referred to in schools by the acronym SSR—sustained silent reading—holds off this subjugation to incessancy, allowing the mind to simultaneously focus and drift across time zones without the gambler’s agitation. In so doing it too becomes a form of resistance to the corrosive hysteria of the hour. “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” Wittgenstein wrote. The purpose of this struggle, others have glossed, is deliverance from a kind of idle fascination, which is to say the liberation of consciousness, the inception of freedom as such.
“I know words. I have the best words.” Trump’s riff in Hilton Head on the penultimate day of 2015 continued: “I have the best, but there is no better word than stupid. Right? There is none, there is none. There’s no, there’s no, there’s no word like that.” And the crowd burst with hilarity. Detonations of laughter that blur into explosions of gunshot. Gag and MAGA. Gog and Magog.
Perhaps the world ends neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with gibberish.
In the final moments of clearing up before our guests arrived, I found myself arranging some of the artworks we’d come into possession of over the years: the exquisite, old miniature oil painting of Archimedes planting a compass across an open book. A tiny, ancient Medusa’s head. Silk magic lantern screens depicting silhouettes of brownies swinging through a filigreed forest made by one of my grandmother’s cousins. The polychrome Chinese lions from my great-aunt; a Persian rook; Roman dice. A small black wooden hand clutching a scroll from ancient Egypt. Drawings, photographs, and conceptual pieces. Detritus of diverse dreams of civilizations, fallen, superseded, forever obscure or now forgotten, I reencountered them then in ways to which I was inured most days. Many of the objects were fragmentary. Almost all the older ones had originated with my mother’s family. Few had real monetary value, but they each evoked a different world, and possessed beauty autonomously. Lately, however, I’d begun to think of the collection of objects in our house, like our books, as finished.
My mother had died the previous summer after suffering for several years with dementia. The process of accruing these old objects in our house in Brooklyn had sometimes appeared conjunctive with the disassembling of her mind. She’d lose another block of her memory; my father would disperse another cluster of family heirlooms. Together with my great-aunt Molly, she’d taught me to read, imparting her belief that some residue of magic still clings to creation, the dew of a morning which has yet to dawn but which we might wake to at any moment. Her love was an earnest of that prospect. And she’d died in unspeakable grief, pain, and humiliation in Willow Lane, the locked unit in the Virginian, a “continuing care” facility a couple of miles away from Embassy Lane in Fairfax, the suburb where we’d moved after coming back to the United States.
Throughout the election period I’d had the uncanny feeling of being returned to the Fairfax of my adolescence. A recording of the wild pounding and shrill, roaring chants from the bleachers at an old Fairfax High pep rally could be substituted seamlessly for the rabidly gleeful cheering at a Trump rally. The voices might have aged, but the bellicose, vapid, self-congratulatory elation was the same. “We’re from Fairfax, couldn’t be prouder. If you can’t hear us, we’ll chant a little louder! WE’RE FROM FAIRFAX, COULDN’T BE PROUDER . . .” Over and over, louder and louder, while the broad-chested coaches with silver whistles around their necks scanned the crowd with searchlight glares for shirkers like me who displayed insufficient pep.
When my siblings who were on Facebook informed me that many of our former high school classmates were boasting on their feeds about how great a Trump presidency would be, it seemed that a direct vein did indeed run from my experiences in that suburb to the national mood making the America First candidate possible.
Across the street from us on Embassy Lane during the years of my youth lived a family in the grip of a father who abused his three daughters for years, until the police arrived one evening and the whole family disappeared. My brothers and I didn’t know—the children were our friends. Sometimes in search for them, we’d come upon the man out back by the basement steps, with his balding, bulbous head, pencil mustache, and pale skin, gripping the green snake of a watering hose, his eyes narrowing interrogatorily at the sight of us. We’d move quickly on, looking for our sweet, dreamy, lost friends. Just up the street from them lived a family of xenophobic fanatics belonging to some offshoot of the Christian Scientists, yelling shrilly from their doorway about UNICEF and communists; on the corner of Embassy and Colony lived a quiet family who, on failing to make their mortgage payments, set their house ablaze, then drove off into the night; two streets over on Queen Anne Drive, a friend of mine shot his abusive father in the heart with a rifle; minutes away, near Pickett Run, another friend was butchered by a motorcycle gang over a drug deal gone bad. Closer to the Army-Navy Golf Course, the father of a classmate, a vet, beat his wife senseless, again and again, until a heart attack killed him; while the tall, bony father of another friend, who played Uncle Sam in the Fairfax Fourth of July parade, was accused of molesting the girls he lured to his house with offers of babysitting work. Mapping my subdivision, with pins for murderous domestic violence and random sex crimes, the neighborhood would look like an old horror-film voodoo figurine bristling with needles. And down beyond the dead end at the bottom of the street, in the tract of woods where we went to drink and stare up at the stars from the wooden plank bridge spanning the creek with its brown water skimmed rainbow shades by runoff from the oil tank farm, psychos hung cats from trees after gouging their eyes out.
Oh, the scar-spangled cruelty of our American suburb. With its high school mascot of Johnny Reb, a Confederate soldier clutching his saber-hilt, and the Confederettes as the cheerleading squad—where Rebel Run bordered the school on one side and Old Lee Highway on another, where racism was the ground and sexual abuse the figure, and Tysons Corner Shopping Mall the closest thing to a commons—how eerie it was to feel the spirit of that place resurrected and projected over the national psyche in the form of the politically weaponized Trump Organization.
Throughout the campaign cycle, whatever horror one family member or another might have been feeling about some new vile development, one of us had only to say, Thank God Mom wasn’t around to see this for the rest of us to break into exclamations of relieved agreement. “Can you imagine what she would have thought?” “Thank God! That’s one thing to be grateful for anyway,” my brother Ethan exclaimed on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “Just imagine.” “I can’t,” my father said.
For despite all her years living in Fairfax, where her values had found so little sanctuary, my mother’s quaintly formal manners and generous, instinctive pluralism had remained strangely intact. She’d just kept on cheerily, doggedly giving to her extensive circle of friends, neighbors, charities, and liberal causes.
In the 1970s slideshow, there my siblings and I are, wearing big red, blue, and white “McGovern for President” buttons at a forlorn foldout table in the middle of nowhere, battling a flappy wind that keeps tangling the balloon strings and wreaking havoc with stacks of brochures we can’t find takers for anyway; and here we go, neatly combed and brushed with shirts bunchily tucked in, off to sing carols at the area hospitals where our mother volunteered. That’s one of us knocking on the doors of leery-eyed strangers up and down the cookie-cutter streets of our neighborhood to get names for her petition to integrate the local swimming pool; oh, and this picture was taken a little later—here we are helping her polish the silver tea service for a party she hosted to celebrate the graduation of a drag-queen refugee from the Khmer Rouge, whom she’d befriended while teaching English as a second language.
“Your mother is the dictionary definition of a bleeding-heart liberal!” my father would groan, but the chuckle that followed was affectionate and tinged with something like awe.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones but names can never hurt me,” my mother chimed back, with a little jiggle of soundless laughter.
Like her own mother, her speech and manners were a time capsule of an earlier era in American history. Good news was “swell,” “grand,” or “the bee’s pajamas.” She invariably called our refrigerator the “icebox.” The phone was the “horn.” The television was “the idiot box.” Reflecting back on her language, I thought of something else Elizabeth Bishop had said about visiting Marianne Moore’s place. Its atmosphere “was of course ‘old-fashioned,’” Bishop wrote, “but even more, otherworldly—as if one were living in a diving bell from a different world, let down through the crass atmosphere of the twentieth century.” The encounter on Cumberland Street with Moore’s stories and phrases, “the unaccustomed deferences, the exquisitely prolonged etiquette,” produced “a slight case of mental or moral bends” when one got back on the express train to Manhattan. That’s how I always felt leaving my mother behind, inside her little quarter-acre moat of lawn before our ranch-style tract house with its picture window looking out at the crabapple tree.
Standing now before our parlor bookshelves in Brooklyn, I drew out the forest-green volume of my mother’s grandfather’s psychoanalytic essays with its introduction by Freud, in which Freud wrote of the boon it had been to have a man “of Putnam’s lofty ethical standards and moral rectitude” ranged among the supporters of the new movement.
With my mother’s death, I’d lost the last threads connecting me physically to that America of old New England, with its heritage of Transcendentalism, arduous public service, and honorable civic pride. No doubt this heightened my awareness of the absence of her sensibility from the landscape around me. Paging through Putnam’s work, I came across his plea to fellow doctors to look upon all their patients as motivated in some measure by their “self-foreshadowing best.” Whether working with neurotic conflicts, willfulness, or regression, by seeking out these signs of promise, doctors would learn to identify more and more of such harbingers, just as closer examination of the seeds of different plants would reveal myriad dissimilarities—evidence of different possible outcomes, which could then each be nurtured toward their most hopeful fruition. His injunction seemed the reverse of the find-the-worst-in-everyone-to-eviscerate-them mania in which we were now gripped.
The last thing I remember thinking on election night, before guests started arriving, was that though the GOP would lose, something in the national discourse had coarsened sensationally, perhaps irretrievably. So far from grappling more effectively with Trump’s words over time, as the space for reflection shrank and reactive language amplified, it seemed increasingly the case that whatever repugnant comment he made, people floundered to respond in any other way than by flinging his insults back at him. It was all a variation of “You’re the same only more so.” “We may have done X, but you did X times X!” Everyone had begun playing his numbers-based language game. The spiral just kept sucking downward. At one point, when he launched an attack on the city of Baltimore, saying there were rats running all over town, the local paper of record published an editorial that began with its authors declaring they would “not sink to name-calling in the Trumpian manner” and ended by saying “Better to have some vermin living in your neighborhood than to be one.” Apparently unconscious that over the course of one brief opinion piece, they’d lost track of their own vow of decorum and dropped straight into the pit of his mocking lexicon, a triumph for the debaser-in-chief.
But this wasn’t really the editors’ fault since the grammatical trap of the big lie is that any direct riposte broadcasts and amplifies the liar’s discourse. If I say to you, “Look at that gorgeous blue sky overhead,” and there are actually a number of clouds floating above, we might have a reasonable conversation about what degree of cloud cover disqualifies a sky from being classified as gorgeous blue. If, on the same day, I say to you, “Look at the fires in that solid gold red sky,” there’s nothing you can answer back directly that won’t enter into my matrix of madness or deceit. Even to say, “No, that sky’s not on fire. No, that sky’s not gold or red” is already to employ my lexicon with the fig leaf of a negative prefix—giving “equal airtime” to terms that bear no relation to reality outside the babble of this exchange.
Language has been a principal tool in our corruption, and we must create a new vocabulary of opposition. Part of what made this political moment possible was the ingrained poverty of our definition of success: loud, rich, stuff-glutted, powerful, massively popular. The language of response we need to develop would give prominence to silence, receptivity, self-doubt, and relinquishment; the inspiring failure, the profitless beauty, the heroic loser, and the abiding sublimity of certain lost causes: the articulation of what exists outside this hour’s vortex, and the verbal rediscovery of the natural world as a counterweight.
I put down my great-grandfather’s essay. I set the head of Medusa back in place. I’d finished with our old mementos. Even ritualistically re-constellating the objects from my mother’s world felt stale now: they were where they should be and there was no room for more. The whole project of the house seemed complete. We’d gotten our life to where things ran smoothly enough. But I kept recalling another observation from Gershom Scholem, who’d considered Walter Benjamin his best friend when the two were young men in early-twentieth-century Berlin: “It is a profound truth that a well-ordered house is a dangerous thing,” Scholem wrote. Such a house would be susceptible to messianic apocalypticism, which he described as “a kind of anarchic breeze. A window is open through which the winds blow in, and it is not quite certain just what they bring in with them.”
The doorbell rang.
3
· Cartographies of Need ·
The eleven-year-old girl who burst into tears on our living-room couch that night later said she’d started crying because she’d never before seen a group of adults lose control of themselves and begin simply to panic. She looked in our faces and found nowhere to anchor. I remember her sobbing in the center of the room. I remember pairs of eyes either side of her, open wide as the moon. I remember all the food going cold. I remember feeling something in the space had moved, but not being able to decide what that was. I remember all the curtains being drawn, as if we were observing a blackout. I remember going to the bookshelf at a certain point, drawing out Stefan Zweig’s war diary, opening at random, and reading his entry in choppy English for the third of September, 1939: “I am expecting everything from these criminals. What a breakdown of civilization.” Then, turning to the final note scrawled a few months later: “I am really afraid that all this is but a prelude. Always the same default in mankind, a thorough lack of imagination! . . . This power of destruction has made such terrific progresses, that even one year would impoverish the whole world.”
I remember closing the book, its pale yellow cover the color of lemon meringue from my childhood in Cooperstown. I remember the girl folding herself, weeping, into her mother’s arms and no one speaking a word.
I remember after everyone left, well after midnight, picturing all the old champagne glasses, which had been forgotten in the freezer, shattered—littering the frosty interior like broken windowpanes on an icy sidewalk. I remember thinking how it was now November 9. November 9 . . . 1938 . . . Kristallnacht. Ridiculous. These were old champagne glasses, for God’s sake. Don’t listen to the seductive sirens of historical double-exposure. But I felt my lips shape the silent scream from the Munch painting, right before someone showed me that same image animated online; old icons of angst ushering in our reception of present-day catastrophe. I knew that the invocation of such revenants was histrionic, but this awareness only seemed to make them come faster. Had we become so gorged on specters of past disaster that we could no longer see clearly the contours of what lay directly before us?
