I dream with open eyes, p.8
I Dream with Open Eyes, page 8
My mother’s ninth great-grandmother was Anne Hutchinson, the fearless Puritan matriarch, who’s been claimed as a proto-feminist on account of her commitment to the transmundane potential of her entire community and her willingness to defy the Massachusetts Bay patriarchy—despite the fact that her egalitarianism was in thrall to a fanatical piety that drove her to promulgate the most stringent interpretation of the faith they had left England to live by. Anne categorically denied the existence of free will and the notion that any human action could influence the work of salvation. She exalted the doctrine of predestination professed by leaders of the Calvinist movement back home, before they discovered that to establish a functioning society in the New World would require some judicious pruning of their orthodoxy. If everyone’s fate were entirely predetermined, how could you motivate anyone to contribute to society’s betterment?
And my mother was the eighth great-granddaughter of John Cotton, the English minister who’d embraced the conviction that personal metamorphosis through the advent of grace at the moment of spiritual conversion was the central event of Christianity. From his pulpit at St. Botolph’s in Lincolnshire he’d brought Anne to dedicate herself to the Puritan mission, promising that those whom God elected to save would experience direct communication with Him, and that the Massachusetts Bay Colony represented a crowning wonder of the Reformation. One might say that in compensation for the loss of free will, Cotton held forth the prospect of a heavenly intimacy.
After listening to Cotton’s sermons, Anne heard God prophesize to her in the words of Jeremiah: I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have driven thee, but I will not make a full end of thee. She followed Cotton over the ocean to the New Jerusalem. At first the two worked in tandem there as allies, but Anne’s insistence that she possessed unimpeachable knowledge of God’s will, combined with her efforts to make the community adhere to its foundational theological precepts, led to frequent tussling with the authorities. Eventually, her belief in the nonhierarchical dispensation of grace led her to challenge the very possibility of human magistracy, at the same time as Cotton was placing ever greater emphasis on law and the obligation to address the community’s pragmatic needs. Despite the fact that she had never lost faith in him, Cotton at last joined the other Puritan elders in finding Anne guilty of sedition and contempt. She, her husband, and their seven surviving children were sent into exile. Anne’s courage and conviction that she was the vehicle of a transcendent truth were impressive, even though what she actually believed in was for the most part antipathetic to the values that inform the social visions we’re inspired by today.
In the bronze statue of Anne before the Massachusetts State House, she gazes up implacably toward heaven, a book propped in the crook of her left arm, a fist clenched against her heart, while a child nestles in the folds of her skirt. Something in her attitude of dauntless faith did remind me of my mother, suggesting the way character traits gesture backward through time, even when everything around the marked features may alter so dramatically that the scene resembles a slow-motion version of a myth out of Ovid.
Though vastly less judgmental than her Puritan forebear, my mother had tried to hold herself and her family to an exhaustingly higher set of old-fashioned, formal standards, which made my siblings and me freaks in the Fairfax vernacular. My mother too believed in assurance through revelation, “an inward conviction of the coming of Spirit,” though in her case that took the form of non-doctrinal telepathy and communication through dreams. She was continually having presentiments about the circumstances of loved ones—fuzzy intimations that coexisted with outbursts of adamant conviction about the task of those wielding power. To this day I can hear her inside me, speaking out with Anne’s passion against the dereliction of America’s duty to give refuge to the world’s needy, as this country had once done for her husband’s family when they arrived on these shores as indigent refugees.
“How could you be so rude and inconsiderate!” she’d exclaim if she stood before the ranks of those entering the White House in 2017. “You must learn to stop thinking only about your own selves. It’s just Me-Me-Me all the time.” Opening and closing her hands by her cheeks while speaking, as if these were tiny mouths whining. “Frankly, I think you’re behaving like big bullies and you should all be ashamed!”
I still recall when our parents drove us all into Washington in the spring of 1968 to see the Poor People’s March camped out on the mall, thirteen years before Reagan cheerfully revived the Protestant view of poverty as divinely punitive, a visceral emblem of the needy’s moral deficiency. I remember the sagging tents and stinking churn of yellow-brown mud as we threaded our way between the cramped shelters and wide, hopeful, hurt faces in the wake of my mother’s firm steps. I remember the concentration and sympathy in her gaze through which, even as a child, I could see we were being shown a great wrong that demanded our attention.
My mother moved through the police standing watch at the edge of the Poor People’s encampment as if she were Anne Hutchinson walking out from the meetinghouse in Boston where the judges were gathered, with her stare focused beyond worldly authorities. Just as—in a manner my father never ceases to retell with wonder and pride—when she’d later accompanied him to China on a State Department visit during the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, my mother had unhesitatingly walked up to protestor after protestor to express her admiration for their bravery, earning their trust and encouraging them to tell their stories. All these sorts of actions on her part could be understood as variations on the ethical imperative of finding intimacy with those under duress. A sense of obligation that went beyond the contours of any particular crisis to embrace her reflexive commitment to making manifest our commensurate humanity, an idea driven by instinctual empathy at odds with all varieties of exceptionalism—save the principle that inherited privilege confers a greater responsibility to help others less fortunate.
Yet how isolated she became at the end in that miserable brick box near the bottom of Embassy Lane. Her constitutional inability to associate monetary success with greater merit or personal interest embroidered her breast with a kind of scarlet A for Alien. The neighbors could not understand her, neither her speech nor her etiquette. How privately she kept her small notebooks filled with fragmentary poems in bedroom drawers that she refused to open for anyone because she so disbelieved in the grace of her writing. I longed to know what she wrote because those lines were the only things she’d made for herself, mementos of impressions that didn’t find expression in her household labors or acts of charity. When I saw a few pages once, I discovered brief, poignant descriptions of natural phenomena. Seasonal changes and the flitting passage of wildlife seen through the window above the kitchen sink where she stood endlessly toiling. I knew she wanted to make more of her literary voice than her life had conduced to. Sometimes out of nowhere she’d begin quoting “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” humorously announcing that she should have been “a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” I think of the lurid scenes she stumbled across constantly in that suburb, cracking against the glass of her old New England bell jar upbringing. My sister told me just the other day that before going into the Virginian my mother was always saying that she hadn’t wanted to end up in Fairfax, that she’d never imagined the family would live there so long, that her closest friends were always elsewhere, that we lived too far from the museums and theaters, that she’d always wanted to leave, but could never overcome the argument with my father, or her conscience, that doing so in a manner that might bring on the changes she pined for could only be financially imprudent. Yet whatever renunciations she accepted, she never surrendered her positive spirit, while continually giving money and other forms of assistance to everyone in want she came to know, along with the representatives of a larger, international assembly of causes.
However frequently my father might have clutched his head in a kind of caricature Old Testament outrage at her wantonly inclusive politics, he revered my mother as an infallible moral paragon. How often in her final years, after she had moved away from our house to the Virginian, did his eyes well up as he toasted her extraordinary selflessness and uncompromising ethical wisdom at one gathering or another. He’d start remembering their first home together, the caretaker’s cottage on a peach orchard in Grand Junction; salt-of-the-earth neighbors; camping trips deep into the red sandstone operatics of Arches National Park. Stargazing at night in the desert when the fire was extinguished and not a whisper of haze lay between them and the constellations whose myths she knew in such detail. “God, she loved it out there!” he’d cry. “And when I think of her ending up in that hell in ‘Willow Lane.’” Then he’d turn away so hard it was as though his face were a door shutting into a mountain.
After the court pronounced Anne Hutchinson guilty and banished her for pretending she could know she possessed such intimacy with God, she left Massachusetts on foot from the farm near the sea to which she and her children had taken their belongings. It was the first of April, but the snow was still so deep she sank to her thighs when she stepped into the drifts. John Cotton must have felt stricken with remorse at the thought of her expulsion. The two of them had nurtured a vision of the New Jerusalem for decades. They’d shared one of the original dreams of what America could be. And now he was part of the tribunal sending her alone into the wilderness.
I imagine he rode down from Boston to the farm in modern-day Quincy early on the day she was leaving, tortured by the thought that she’d never stopped believing in him. Perhaps they spoke together one last time in the doorway while her children finished loading what they could onto the carts, and she gathered herself for the trek to Rhode Island, where she hoped to find refuge in the settlement of Providence Plantations, founded by Roger Williams in the name of freedom of conscience, though in the end she proved too radical even for that community and struck off once more into the forest.
Cotton stood by helplessly as she completed her preparations, portly and woeful, his fleecy curls billowing out from either side of his brow like miniature wings on children playing angels in nativity scenes. At last he murmured some kind of reassurance. He expressed his sorrow. She didn’t pass judgment on him. He’d been her guide in the discovery of God’s light, after all; how could she turn against him? He tried to press her hand. She gave him her blessing, then strode resolutely out the low doorway into the deep snow. She walked forward into that white blankness without looking back, because this was her fate now and she had to live it. That movement into the unknown is the physical action I would memorialize. While Cotton stood looking after her, biting his tongue to prevent himself from calling after her. Wishing everything were different. That he could somehow still save her. That she’d not placed him in this irresolvable conundrum: torn between his duty to maintain the law of the colony he’d become so invested in and his responsibility to her and the sense of radiant purpose they’d conceived together when they were still dissenters in the Old World, dreaming of the freedom to establish a sacred commonwealth on earth.
Watching her diminutive figure in broadcloth trudging through the snow, becoming smaller and smaller until she vanished completely between the scrawling black branches at the boundary of the cultivated land, Cotton must have asked himself what would become of her. He must have tried to tell himself that she would be better off where she was going, even if where she was going appeared, from his vantage point, to be nowhere. He must have remembered the last feeling of her palm in his. And the moral clarity of her voice. He must have wished he could see her pale face spin back to him once more—and must have been glad to be free of her righteous purity at last. My mother kept telling my father that she wanted to go into the Virginian up to the last moment. Over and over she promised him that she needed to be some place where he didn’t have to worry about her. She wanted him to be free to live his own life, she said repeatedly, as if either of them knew what that life was without the counterweight of her society. Ravens pecked at the white crystals for invisible seeds. She’d consoled him when she stepped into the void.
A year after Anne and her children left Williams’s colony, traveling to what is now Pelham, New York, she and her family were scalped and burned to death by Native Americans. Dutch soldiers had recently made a surprise assault on members of the Siwanoy Nation living in the area, killing eighty men, women, and children. Anne died in one of the raids meant to avenge that massacre. My last sight of my mother was at the long table of the Virginian’s bright dining room, with its elevated television perpetually chanting, the gaudy colors flickering like flames, her poor white-haired figure shrunken there amid the other residents lolling backward and forward as though they’d been hatcheted, mouths gaping open, limbs flapping, disconnected. Weeping and shrieking.
I know it’s only a crude visual stutter across the centuries, yet I can’t stop striving to interpret these hieroglyphics of the body, twitching under the shock of different socio-historical circumstances. And perhaps somewhere there’s a key that reveals the meanings are, after all, cognate. “Just like our residents, we embrace the future every day,” says the Virginian’s online prospectus, adding that that the facility stood on land once belonging to Native Americans and that the first generation of senior residents was called the Pioneers.
After my eruption at the table, one of my friends made a comment to the effect that he thought I was trying to say something about our larger situation, the sense of our all being caught now in a national upheaval of unknown dimensions. This was generous of him, and true—up to a point. For what I was even less able to delve into at that moment than my conceptual horror at the idea that we’d become characters from the historical annals I was forever brooding about was my fear that we’d now never muster the material or mental wherewithal to leave New York, though I’d been longing to get out for years, apart from any particular cataclysm. All my close friends knew of this wish (many shared it), which sometimes felt like lyric Wanderlust and at other moments like dull malaise. I short-handed the urge by saying I no longer felt “creatively nurtured by the city.” Not that the city had any obligation to provide this. But I meant by that phrase—oh, a slew of things having to do with the cultural fallout of its soaring costliness—the homogenizing corporatization that shrank and quarantined the space for eccentricity, severing all interplay between those whose existences were ordered for victory and those wayward souls with unproductive lives—between ambitious realists and those who dreamed impossibilities alone. I couldn’t say just why the loss of lost, discursive characters seemed so corrosive to the metropolitan ecology, but now I think it had something to do with the disavowal of the variegated social fabric in which other people’s humanity enlargingly surprises our private life.
I could walk down Cumberland Street toward Fort Greene Park one minute and see nothing but brusque, buffed, ear-budded go-getters, carrying commuter cups and smartphones, walking hard straight toward me and seeing nothing before them but their coming day in tech, marketing, or busy-ness as such. I could walk down Cumberland Street the next moment and see nothing but the left behind: huddled, lame, obese, ill, addicted, impoverished, or just unknown, staring from steps and behind windows no one thought to look through. The two Cumberland Streets would not merge if you viewed them through some sociological stereoscope. They did not reflect a layered community. They were two entirely different Cumberland Streets that could not be perceived at the same time, although they occupied the same spatial outline, like the duck-rabbit illusion Wittgenstein writes of: “I see two pictures, with the duck-rabbit surrounded by rabbits in one, by ducks in the other. I do not notice that they are the same. Does it follow from this that I see something different in the two cases?”
My mind drifted all the time to dream lives in other places and eras, where I fantasized that these divisions had not been so impervious. I wanted to believe Andy Warhol’s portrait of the Lower East Side in the early 1960s, in which “everything was low-budget to the point of no-budget,” and you could rent whole floors of buildings with the savings from minor scraps of work each month. It was a very peaceful neighborhood then, he wrote, “full of European immigrants, artists, jazzy blacks, Puerto Ricans—everybody all hanging around doorsteps and out of the windows. The creative people there weren’t hustling work, they weren’t ‘upwardly mobile,’ they were happy just to drift around the streets looking at everything, enjoying everything.”
The ecology I was romanticizing was grounded in empathetic assent to convivial idleness, the ideal Whitman sang of when my house on Cumberland Street was being built in the mid-nineteenth century and he lived nearby: “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat . . . Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.”
But the new economic landscape had erased the space for that invitation. The night of the election made clear, whatever else, that the prevailing vision was one in which there were only mutually exclusive categories of losers and winners, the damned and the saved.
The last embers of conversation dwindled down. The last guests embraced us at the door.
We moved listlessly through the paces of setting the house back to its everyday order. We weren’t speaking much by then. The occasional reiteration of shock or agitation like the last, stray sounds in a forest after most of the wildlife has settled for the night.
