Paper Cut to the Lip

'Tis the season, licking Christmas cards, of a paper cut to the lip. I'm not complaining. It's an odd little celebration, an acceptance of the small annoyances that can accompany mainly joyful action! And a total coincidence, as I came into my office with Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, which I had just finished reading, to share a few quotations with you, got sidetracked by the current cards, including one to Chief Art Acevedo of Houston Police Department, who spoke up courageously in support of sensible gun legislation, in rage and woe upon losing an officer due to the "boyfriend loophole." "You're either here for women and children and our daughters and our sisters and our aunts, or you're here for the NRA," he said, pressing for legislators to renew the Violence Against Women Act (which, despite the sound of its title is to help prevent violence against women.) Sigh... I am happy to cut my lip licking an envelope for a Christmas card thanking him!

I am aware of the irony of the strong either/or statement above, and Solnit general's support of the understanding that not everything is either/or.

Solnit has noticed, and so have I, how so many people disparage laws or victories as not being enough. Any good thing gets the "yes but" response. In her Afterword to the 3rd edition of her book, she says, "I have found, during my adventures in squandering time on social media, that a lot of people respond to almost any achievement, positive development, or outright victory with 'yes but.'" I have noticed that exact phenomenon over and over again on social media...which means, of course, that I need to squander less time there...but also that such naysayers might want to listen to Solnit and avoid what she terms a "naive cynicism" that reinforces patterns of despair, identification with losing, and dependence upon a self-defeating perfectionism.

"Perfectionists often position themselves on the sidelines, from which they point out that nothing is good enough," says Solnit. And even if they are activists, and I've seen this at the local level, their griping undercuts their own work or the work of others for their own or related causes. In the perfectionist's view, "Everything that's not perfect is failed, disappointing, a betrayal. There's idealism there, but also unrealistic expectations, ones that cannot meet with anything but disappointment."

Solnit's book has been great to encounter at year's end and in midlife, as I review my past and my present. I've realized I grew up in an atmosphere of nothing being quite good enough, and it's taken years to shed habits of perfectionism that can so easily attach to a more reasonable striving for excellence, as in "A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing well." I hope I approach art and life that way but with reasonable expectations and acceptance of my flaws!

Getting back to activism, as Rebecca Solnit points out, "The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible but against their ideas of perfection, and as this book reminds you, perfection is a yardstick by which everything falls short." I'm glad I read it, and glad I have a wrinkly, rolled-up measuring tape instead.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Poinsettias to you, if I am not back here before the day in question! And Happy New Year, likewise!

Hope in the Dark

I've been reading Hope in the Dark, by Rebecca Solnit, to give me, yes, hope in the dark. It was first published back in 2004, so this is a third edition, published by Haymarket Books in 2016, with an updated Foreword and Afterword to give new context to hopeful thinking that continues even now. Even now.

I picked it up at the ongoing library book sale, meaning I am supporting my library and its non-profit foundation, and started reading it December 1, the beginning of Advent. This cover is perfect, bright white like stars on a dark night. When I set it down, I set it down beside a Christmas card of white lights on a snowy tree in a dark night, with "Silent Night" printed beside the image, a card from my next-door neighbor. The book is part of my holiday decorating now. Along with ebony heads from Africa and a black mask from Mexico, and a silver bird.

What's so wonderful, comforting, and inspiring about this book is its embrace of uncertainty and its recorded knowledge of how small, steady acts of quiet resistance or concerted protest moved people to continue to act and change things. Small acts led to big changes, and that is ongoing, and I am participating in this in my own small, steady, local ways. Hope in in the Dark keeps me from despair, yes, and keeps me steadily working. Here, for example, is a paragraph that inspires me, from the Foreword to this third edition:

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes---you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It's the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

I do live among optimists and pessimists, people who choose not to act, and people who cannot tolerate uncertainty. I sympathize with them all but tend to align myself with and gravitate toward those of us who reside in uncertainty, even paradox. Both seem truer to me than most certainties the world offers.

I also recently read How to Fight Anti-Semitism, by Bari Weiss, very enlightening and inspiring. She grew up in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of the Tree of Life synagogue where the terrible mass shooting took place. She had to worry about whether her father was there...he wasn't! (I went to college with her father!) Bari Weiss has hope and offers practical advice. I wrote it all down in my reading journal. She speaks her truth, however controversial, however...certain.

And look at the coincidence of black and white. I'd add her book to my holiday decor, but it was a library book, a new one, a 7-day book, and I already took it back to share with other readers.

Oh, my dears. Hang on, hang on in the darkness. It is the season of light!

The Swamp

I finished reading March, by Geraldine Brooks, a sort of inter-textual novel about what was going on with Mr. March and the Civil War during Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott. Marmee (Mrs. March) goes to Washington to tend March in his severe illness. I was amazed at how pertinent this seemed:

It came to me that if the fortunes of this war do not turn, then maybe the city is destined to be no more than this: ruins, merely, sinking back into the swamp; the shards of an optimistic moment when a few dreamers believed you could build a nation upon ideas such as liberty and equality.

Wow! We hear all the "draining the swamp" talk, and here it's geographical as well as metaphorical: sinking back into the swamp. The Civil War then is a bit like the civil war now, with our volatile divisiveness. And, indeed, if we don't turn things around, and soon, our democracy is at great risk, and our country will only sink further.

It makes me sad.

But I did file my papers today to run again as a precinct committeeperson to help get out the vote and to help local people stay energized and informed. It's a Blue Monday because I'm a Democratic committeeperson and a Random Coinciday because who knew a 2005 novel about the 1860s would be so resonant right now!

I read the paperback version, so the quotation comes from pages 215-216.

This Moment...

Goodness, I can't believe I missed the whole month of October here in the blog. Yes, I continue to be busy, with necessary downtime between tasks and events. At an event in November, I read poems from a new book, This Moment...in Sarah's Garden, for which I had written poems in the voice of Sarah Davis to accompany photographs by Ken Kashian. That's it above, accordian style, with its box and inserts, which include a packet of poppy seeds and a booklet about the history of David and Sarah Davis, their letters, her garden, and you can learn more about it at Ken's Artist Book site here. After a busy week of meetings and events, including a story slam last night, I am having a grand Slattern Day today, of rest, reading, grocery shopping, and an at-home movie, borrowed from the library. My Cousin Rachel, based on the book by Daphne du Maurier, but not exactly the same story.

I am reading March, by Geraldine Brooks, borrowed from a co-worker at the library, and I can't wait to see Little Women in the theatre this Christmas! My son saw the Winona Ryder version one Christmas when he was a little boy and fell in love with it/her. I hope he'll go see this one with me; I hope my daughter will, too! March is gory and gruesome enough that I might get my son to read it over his Christmas break with us, too! My daughter has enjoyed books I've recommended, and I have shelves and shelves for her to choose from when she comes home for Christmas.

Perhaps all this movie watching and novel reading is escapism...from politics, despair, impeachment hearings, desperate reality. But Monday I will turn in my ballot petition to run again as a precinct committeeperson, because I have to do something. Of course I will vote. And see the new Tom Hanks movie about Mr. Rogers. "Look for the helpers."

Her Firstborn

I just re-read a book of short stories, Swim Back to Me, by Ann Packer, because I had noticed what I wrote down in my reading journal from the first time I read this book and wanted to revisit the whole experience. 

Such wonderful stories, linked by character or theme so that the book somehow holds together as...a whole. The first time, I was struck by certain things in the closing story, "Things Said or Done," about regrets. 

That story's title comes from a stanza of the Yeats poem "Vacillation."

Things said or done long years ago,
Or things I did not do or say
But thought that I might say or do,
Weigh me down, and not a day
But something is recalled,
My conscience or my vanity appalled.

Yes, I get that. And I was very moved and astonished by "Things Said and Done," particularly a woman's insight about what she did wrong in her marriage based on her upbringing: "I began picking at him over tiny annoyances--because the big annoyance, the fact that he wasn't paying enough attention to me, was too unreasonable for me to recognize at that point, let alone communicate. When I wasn't picking at him I was picking at the rest of mankind, going on and on about some slight, a minor social disappointment, an achievement inadequately rewarded. I was twenty-five, I thought it was just a matter of time before people shaped up and started acting as I wanted. Such is the lot of the narcissist's child, to inherit her parent's umbrage over the world's indifference." Well said. I won't say why.

But this time I was struck by something in the penultimate story, "Her Firstborn." A man is coming to understand something about his wife, who was married before. He's "had it all wrong: it isn't that Lise had a baby who died, but rather that she had a baby, who died." Yes, exactly.

Tonight I saw a lovely production of a lovely play, The Electric Baby, by Stefanie Zadravec, about a baby who glows like the moon...and about regrets. There's a woman picking at her husband in a troubled marriage. There's a young woman at the cradle of her firstborn.

This was the night of the full moon. This was a wonderful "random coinciday."