Finding My Heart

This is the third anniversary of my mother’s death. I have not been able to write about her passing. I have spent hours with three different therapists and with them have spoken the same few sentences over and over to no avail: My mother is dead. It is my fault. I did not do enough. For three years, I have felt my body overcome with chronic physical pain, and each time I received the blood test results in the mail indicating I was “normal,” I grew more and more bitter. I was sick, and no one could or would help me. Nothing was said to me by anyone that could even come close to relieving me from the trauma of losing my mother. My anger over her death took up residence in every part of what I believe to be me, body and soul, and crushed me. In May of this year, I gave up. I actually had days when I could barely walk. My physician seemed unconcerned. There were no data to support my supposed illness. How could I give up any more than I had? There is no standardized hitting bottom; it is different for each of us. The despair I felt in May was so intense that I could not feel it.

What’s odd, I suppose, is that my mother and I were not close in the way one imagines the mother and daughter bond. From the time I was a little girl, I took care of my mother. We fought. She hated me. I reminded her too much of my father who beat and berated until she left him just before I was born. Undoubtedly, all mother-daughter relationships are complex, but my mother and I were enmeshed in a mutual betrayal that she had no understanding of how to untangle. The more I tried to work out the knot, the tighter she pulled. With her death, I am still working on that now with her. I use the present tense because I believe that we never really lose people; they take different forms at different times and in different spaces in our lives, and that time and space are not necessarily measured in decades and thousands of miles or particular shapes. They are measured in context of divisions of time that are collapsed: Heaven communing with Earth and any place there is a sentient being through whom God works.

How nearly impossible it is for the human in us to see the beloved standing right in front of us. For years, I have trained my mind to look at the world though the lens of reason – rational thought is enlightenment, right? I cannot tell you how many times reason has failed me in the most significant of ways. And when reason failed me, I attributed it to my failure of reason – I surely had committed logical fallacies of thought. Analyzing the data, the evidence would expose my error, I would apply my critical thinking skills, and all would be well. Academia has demanded this approach.

I am in no way suggesting we abandon the rational mind. If we make every decision based on following the heart, we are in for some serious trouble. Not long ago, parents in East Tennessee were charged with child abuse for using faith-healing to treat their nine-year-old child’s brain tumor. The court ordered them to admit the girl to hospital, but it was too late. And I am not always sure what I or anyone else means by the phrase “follow your heart.” What I do know in this moment, in all moments since I fell into my hell in May is that God calls us to do things that if we hear, bring us back from that hell. And it stuns us when we realize in that moment we have been called. Suddenly, we are standing in the light, and we have to squint to make sure it is not a trick of the light of our personal hell.

When my mother was dying – a highly unexpected, sudden combination of illness that consumed her with suffering for the last four months of her life – I became the highly functioning daughter that continued working a demanding job, tended to domestic necessities, cared for my mother’s increasing physical needs, and attempted to soothe her considerable fears. Being intensely empathic is not always advantageous – when my mother died, I died right along with her. During her sickness, most days I was not even sure I was walking or breathing or talking. At the end of the day, I could not remember having taught a class or having eaten. The world ceased to look familiar. The oppressive heat of August became the chill of November, and she was gone.

But I met someone in the last weeks of my mother’s life who of all the people , of anything I encountered made a mark on me – her light registered in me even though I was too broken to know it. She never said anything to me about my mother’s illness or spiritual state that I did not already know. What she gave me was outside the realm of the rational, outside the realm of words. She sat with me in a waiting room at 3:00 in the morning when she should have been home in her own bed. In the last hour of my mother’s life, I called this woman who knew my mother and who would come to be with her when she died. As I held my mother’s hand in the last moments of her life, this woman came into the CCU to help my mother’s soul leave her body. And I unknowingly fell in love with her light.

After my mother died, I deliberately stayed away from this woman who had been so kind to my mother and to me. I did not deserve the kindness. And after having shared something so intimate, my mother’s death, with a relative stranger, I did not know how to be with her. And all of my anger told me to certainly not seek God, a God who had taken away from me every person I ever loved. But I never stopped being aware of this woman’s presence in the world. One day this past August, I suddenly remembered her smile, and a few days later, I sought her out. I just wanted to see her smile and her light.

Last week, I finally admitted to myself that I have come back to find her to find God. I came back to find my heart. If I cannot find God in her, in the roses, in the fields, in the dirt, then I cannot find God. The beloved never really leave us.

The Idea of Ideas, II

After XX made known her proclivities, the tone of Women in American Literature changed. Some students migrated from the front of the class to the back rows while others nudged closer to the front. It was a fairly small class, around forty or so, with only one male in the mix, Jonah. I had met Jonah in another English class and although we were not good friends, we were academic buddies. Jonah was a gentle, thoughtful young man, a boy really, a boy you knew would only try to kiss you on the cheek and nothing more at the end of a date. He was quietly intelligent behind his round tortoise-shell frame glasses, and we all knew Jonah would graduate in four years, take no detours on his way to a mid-level graduate degree program somewhere in the mid-west. His comments in classes were never subversive; he politely echoed professors and studiously took good notes in the margins of his books. On hearing Dr. X’s confession, Jonah merely glanced over the rim of his glasses at X momentarily before re-engaging with his notes.

Jonah’s presence in the class was important because he was the only male in what I felt was an untenable situation. In explicit statements, X made it very clear that women in the class would receive preferential treatment. X was on a mission to rectify past injustices against women in education, all of them, from kindergarten through PhD and from the beginning of time. The studies X cited to us revealed what many women in class had experienced: Both male and female teachers favored male students. In a 1969 study at the University of Chicago, feminist scholar Jo Freeman found that in the main, both male and female professors not only believed male students were more intelligent than female students but that they also discouraged female students from pursuing advanced degrees. Their contention that female students neither possessed the intellectual ability nor the suitability for the academic work was purely the result of gender bias; their opinions were in no way supported by fact or logical argument. Furthermore, because most of academia was (and still is) dominated by males, it has never stopped to consider that what is good and necessary for most men is not always good and necessary for most women. Freeman cites pioneering psychologist Martina Horner’s observation that many women enter school with a “motive to avoid success” because they fear social rejection or find academic success in conflict with a feminine identity. Even in the mid-1980’s, women were still fighting to be taken seriously in a milieu they perhaps felt was one of a few that seemed to promise them a chance for professional and personal advancement. In the end, most professors discriminated against women whether they were conscious of it or not.

My own experience in school had not borne this out. I could remember only one time when a teacher seemed to prefer a male student over me. I believe it was an isolated incident. However, I could tell by the trace of hurt in X’s voice that as a student, she had certainly felt devalued by teachers who instead of nurturing her talents supported males. Other women in class shared their stories of feeling marginalized in the classroom. By the end of class that day, most of us felt a tentative hopefulness about what the class would offer. Sitting a few seats behind me was Jonah, respectfully listening to an authority figure tell him that he was essentially worthless. The situation made me uncomfortable to some degree, but I also liked hearing that I would be part of Dr. X’s chosen few, and not just because I was a woman. I sensed and later confirmed that being lesbian had no small part in one’s chances of success in X’s class, and this only created mild and brief conflict within me. I liked Jonah, but then it was clear to me that radical change was needed and if it meant excluding males, it was necessary. Although Jonah was only nineteen years old and had probably never even so much as raised his voice to another human being, he had to bear the burden of the privileged white male legacy that was being challenged by the force of feminism.

And it wasn’t just any brand of feminism. It was hardcore militant separatist lesbianism, and in almost every facet of my life, I found a separatist waiting to take me under her wing. These women were convincing; they wanted to guide me, they said, into making a life for myself among women where I would be allowed to blossom. I was flattered and happy to have so many educated, worldly women showering me with attention. What I didn’t realize until many, many years later was that just like with boys and men I had dated, I was in some way a trophy for these women. Not that we were having sex: We were not. However, each woman, in her own way, used me ever so slightly to inflate her ego and to fulfill a political agenda.  The process of indoctrination was not like that of what I imagine one would experience in a cult, yet it was subtle and convincing. X was in the first flush of love with a much older woman and even though I sensed she had some romantic interest in me, I was not attracted to her.

Initially, I was flattered that Dr. X included me in her close circle of friends outside of campus, and we spent time together playing tennis and discussing poetry she felt was breaking new ground for women. X immediately shared with me Olga Broumas’ Beginning with O, which won the 1977 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition as judged by Stanley Kunitz, a poet I respected tremendously. It excited me that an established white male poet would select to award such distinction to erotic, impassioned lyric poems that explicitly celebrate lesbian love, or as Kunitz referred to it, “Sapphic orientation.” Broumas’ poetry is breathtakingly beautiful, and not because of the subject matter but because of the way she manipulates language. But the fact that the royalty of the literary world deemed excellent a volume of poetry whose preoccupation was with the physical expression of love between women energized me. My own experience of love for a woman was still an idea, and I think that Broumas’ poetry helped me to envision just what it would mean to express that love with my body.

As my friendship with X grew, I began to feel pressured into ways of thinking that I did not necessarily understand. X introduced me to the ideas of radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly when she gave me a copy of Gyn/Ecology. I have never had trouble with radical ideas; however, what I determine from my perspective to be radical is often at odds with what others believe to be radical.  Daly’s approach to repossess language from women’s oppressors was too intellectual for me, too code-oriented. I understood her argument that language is tied to its cosmic function to name reality into being. And I agreed that patriarchy conspired in a sense to rob women of their power and identities through language. What I found troublesome was Daly’s tone: It sounded hateful. And I loved beauty. Aesthetically, Daly’s lexicography left me cold.

Because I was just starting to write poetry, I passionately did want to explore language, and how the linguistic oppression of women could even exist. I understood the power of language – the power to heal, the power to demoralize, the power to deceive, the power to identify and define. I wanted to know how language could create an authentic self. I wanted to know how exactly language obstructed women’s ability to communicate and bond with one another. I was an idealist and just as I did not know I was still innocent, my idealism was unknown to me as well. I had always been friends with boys; I played sports with boys, talked sports with boys, and played music with boys. If they were interested in me romantically, I was unaware. But I understood boys. Girls, women, I did not understand. I reasoned that I was simply not interested in girl things and therefore had nothing in common with females even though I was one. I didn’t like to shop, to gossip, to cook, to sew, or to giggle. I didn’t want to be a cheerleader, a model, or talk about boys. What would I possibly do in a group of girls? Yet, I wanted to fit in with a group of women.

The Idea of Ideas

THE IDEA OF IDEAS

I no longer have any ideas. Well, I might have a few, but I can’t always identify them. Being a college professor, my job demands that I guide diverse groups of people through explorations of issues ranging from personal experience, the personal essay, to research topics in fields such as psychology, sociology, and political science. Early in my teaching career, I learned to lecture and became quite good at holding forth to my students, knowing that most if not all of them only listened to a small portion of what I was saying. As I gained more experience in the classroom, I sensed boredom creeping into my delivery, distractions redirecting my thoughts such that for all I knew, I could very well have been conflating Shakespeare’s tragedies until I had created a muddled Will’s greatest hits medley. My remedy was to begin asking my students questions now and then during lecture, not that I expected answers or even very good answers, but it broke the monotony. And then I moved soundly to class sessions entirely based on Socratic questioning.

Over the years, my students, in general, have responded positively to Socratic questioning; I always have a few students who engage with the material, who work their critical thinking skills like athletes in training. And I have acquired a new energy for teaching. The unexpected result of the questioning has been that I no longer feel I have a foundation of knowledge from which to operate. Well, it’s more complicated than that. My base seems to be one large question, and often, I struggle to even formulate the question. So many days, the world seems just to be and that’s enough. As a teacher, it’s not enough; I have to plunge myself back into the icy waters of the unknown, treading the water until I can get to shore. But as a student, I preferred lecture, which is what I received an overwhelming majority of the time. I revered my professors, and truly loved finding out what they thought of the literature we were studying together. I was a huge blank slate that my professors appreciated and I felt comfortable being. I absorbed every bit of their learning, made it mine as much as I could, and continued the legacy in my own classrooms. But now, after seventeen years of teaching, I am once again the blank slate.

Some professors left their imprint on me more than others. In 1984, as a freshman in college, I enrolled in junior and senior level English literature classes where I was quickly subsumed by a group of radical feminist lesbian professors and students. It was an interesting choice for me to allow myself to become part of this group. I was still so innocent that I had no idea I was innocent, but I also had been raised to fight injustice, to defend the innocent, to aid the sick and poor, to speak my mind, to improve the world. One college instructor in particular took interest in my intellectual and political curiosity. XX was a professor of English specializing in American Realism and Transcendentalism. She had graduated from UC Berkeley in the early 1970′s, and retained vestiges of her days as a love child of the Flower Power counterculture. I first met Dr. X. when I was enrolled in her spring semester American Literature-Realism course. She looked every bit the hippie in her flowing batik skirts, long straight hair, and ankle bells lightly tinkling as she lectured. X’s fashion was passé for the time and the place; even though we were on a university campus, it was 1984, Knoxville, Tennessee, always several years behind trends anyway. She was fiercely intelligent and editing the next edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. I attributed her presence on faculty to the fact that job vacancies in academia were virtually non-existent and that landing in Knoxville was a brief stop on the way to a real teaching position.

When I came back for fall term, I had a seat in Dr. X’s course Women in American Literature. The first day of class, I settled into the front row with three women who looked as anxious to learn as I was. When XX walked in to class, I initially thought I was in the wrong room. I looked harder at her face and finally recognized her as she took the lectern. Her physical appearance had undergone significant transformation. Gone was the hippie girl, replaced by a sleek androgyny: a man’s suit, a crew cut, and a thin strip of leather for a bracelet. I was pleasantly stunned. We jumped right into discussing the reading list, double the typical course reading because as anyone in academia knows, there is the canon, which must be taught at all costs, and then there is everything else. XX was determined to include the “everything else,” meaning women writers whose works had never been and would probably never be recognized as brilliant. She was unapologetic, and the class tacitly agreed. We were as excited as XX was about the prospect of rebelling.

As much as English majors do not want to acknowledge it, they are essentially conservative folks. If we truly wanted to disturb the equilibrium, we might form and join groups similar to the Black Panthers. As it is, arguing about the serial comma and whether or not Shakespeare was straight, bisexual, or gay will have to do. Our idea of a scandal, at this point in the evolution of writing and literature, is whether or not the deconstructionists are still relevant. We keep it all on paper and rely on those outside our field of study to act. In the early 1980s, the University of X had no feminist studies courses much less a women’s studies department. XX, I believe, along with two or three other female professors, challenged the English department to offer one such class and by the time I finally graduated in 1989, an anemic Women’s Studies Department existed offering ten courses culled from other programs such as art, psychology, music, and philosophy.  XX’s Women in American Literature course was exciting because writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Grace King, Elinor Wylie, and Meridel Le Sueur were in the syllabus, not relegated to the back of the book or on the side of the road. It paved the way for women’s work to be taken seriously at a relatively traditional university in a traditionally conservative academic department.

Aside from the change in the academic status of previously considered obscure women writers, the revised version of Dr. X was intriguing. She was an imposing figure, so none of the young women I knew in the class, including myself, was brave enough to say anything to her about her altered appearance. Its effect on us was, I imagine, like that of cosmetic surgery to prepare someone for the witness protection program. However, early into the first few weeks of the semester, XX interrupted a lecture with several moments of silence followed by what I call a controlled breakdown. Some would call it a confession while others would call it coming out. And it was both. But for the young women in the class, XX’s actions and words were perceived as a seamless extension of the learning process, one that empowered us to self-reflection in ways we probably had never imagined. What followed was Dr. X’s condensed version of the crisis of faith in teaching that she had experienced over the summer, the finalization of her divorce and subsequent commitment to a life with a woman. For some students, Dr. X was merely telling us she was lesbian. For others, the radical shift in being we saw before us was alluring and mysterious; we were witness to 45 years in the making of a woman without being privy to the details of the process. All we knew was that one moment Dr. X was a married hippie with two young daughters, and the next, she was a new wave lesbian with two young daughters.

Friendship in the Big Field

Friendship in the Big Field

Every ninety days, the herd rotates to a new field not only to eat better grass, but to help alleviate the spread of parasites. Moving the herd is not as difficult as it may seem; the farm owner has trained the alpha horses to her voice, and the remaining pecking order follows. Occasionally, two or three of the horses overshoot the open gate to the fresh turnout field, but they quickly stop and double back to rejoin the group, snorting and whining at being left behind.

During September, the herd lived in what is referred to on the farm as the “Woods Field,” meaning the field closest to the base of House Mountain and the furthest from the barn. The distance from the barn to the “Woods Field” is approximately 1.5 miles, a 15 to 20 minute walk depending on one’s pace. Some folks drive vehicles half the trip and park at the gate to the “Pond Field,” the last pasture before the little stand of trees where the herd spends most of its time. Loving nature and liking exercise, I generally go on foot to catch my horse no matter where the herd currently lives.

Where and how the herd lives is important to the horses. Being flight or fight animals, horses need the security of knowing their places in the herd. Because the overwhelming majority of the time horses flee from danger, they need to know when and where to run when faced with a potential or real threat. Orders begin with the alpha(s) and are passed along to the lowest horse in the herd. The behavior is necessary for survival, even when the herd has lived in the same five fields for years, and the most dangerous villain is a wild turkey flushed from the tall timothy.My Morgan, Achilles, has lived on House Mountain Farm for a year and a half. At twelve, he was experienced at being in new groups as he had three previous owners. I, on the other hand, had only owned one other horse and although her move into the herd had been uneventful, turning out Achilles for the first time into what was for him a new herd left me feeling like the nervous mother leaving her toddler at pre-school for the first time. A bit shy but spirited, Achilles was easily introduced to the herd and immediately fell into the top third of the group. The alpha mare and geldings stared at him some, but no biting, kicking, or yelling to challenge his presence. By the end of the first week, Achilles had made friends with a small quarter horse named Bo, a certified trouble-maker. When I tried to catch Achilles, Bo would inch between me and my horse, and Achilles stood on Bo’s other side laughing. Luckily, Bo was sold a month later. I was a little ambivalent about Bo’s sale; after all, he was Achilles’ best friend.

It didn’t take Achilles long to form new ties with a huge draft-quarter mix named Jack. Even though Jack is close to 18 hands, he is a sweetheart. Achilles and Jack could always be found grazing together, but sadly, Jack left for a new home just a few months after their budding friendship. Achilles adjusted well because days later, he and a school horse named Javelin became inseparable. Going on a year now, Achilles and Javelin are the best of buddies. They stand in the sun together, eat together, stand nose to switching tail together to swat away flies, and protect one another from other horses that might decide to challenge their places in the herd.

I ride at least four days a week. So, four times a week for two hours, Achilles is separated from Javelin. Unlike Bo, Javelin allows me to walk right up to Achilles, catching him easily, and patiently waits for Achilles’ return. Now and then, about half way to the barn, Achilles lets out a booming call to let Javelin know where he is and that he will be right back. On the walks back to the field, Achilles will whinny again as if to say, “Here I am! Almost there!” During September, the walk being doubled from distances to the other fields, Achilles would become impatient when we reached the “Rock Field,” the field just before the “Woods Field.” Although he has impeccable ground manners, near the middle of the Rock Field hill, Achilles began to pull a little on the lead rope and slightly picked up his pace. He may let out a cry to give Javelin a reference point, and even though I am positive Achilles likes me, he has one goal at this point in the journey: To get back to his trusted friend.

On Saturday, Achilles and I were nearing the midway point of the Rock Field hill when he called for Javelin. Javelin returned the call. Earlier when I had caught Achilles, the herd was close to the Woods Field gate, a pasture away from their stand of trees. When I reached the gate Saturday, Achilles and I both looked out to the field to see that the herd had already moved to the woods. This could have been a cause for brief, mild panic, meaning Achilles would have cried and jigged a little, would have allowed me to remove his halter and lead rope while dancing a little to be off to the herd. But Saturday, Javelin was standing in the middle of the field, a little goofy looking in his fly mask with black mesh covering his ears. He was standing at attention, ears straight up, staring at Achilles as if to say, “There you are. And here I am, waiting for you, all alone in the middle of this big, scary field!”

I opened the gate, and Achilles dutifully waited for me to remove his halter and lead while trembling a little in anticipation of being freed. As the halter slipped off, Achilles turned and broke into a gallop. As soon as he reached Javelin, the two bolted across the remaining pasture, bucking and kicking. Waiting in the big field alone, Javelin is what I imagine to be a true friend.

Language

I haven’t written in “Surfaces” for a long time. Something happened. Several things happened. And these things that happened were mundane, the expected, but my reactions to them were severe such that old wounds were opened, ones that never healed, and I became afraid of people, of talking, of writing even. And I’ve thought about language now and then when I’m not teaching the five paragraph essay and when I’m not working up a sweat to prove to students who dislike literature that poetry could really save the world. I’ve thought about how much I expect of language. And I’ve thought about not thinking about language. How I wish for Eliot’s “still point of the turning world.” How I want to speak to you and don’t want to speak to you. “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

Until fragments of poetry begin stabbing me. I can’t keep them away. “…for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” “A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. / I have wasted my life.” Or The Misfit: ” ‘I wisht I had of been there,’ he said, hitting the ground with his fist. ‘It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,’ he said in a high voice, ‘if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.’ “

I’ve thought about how much life, as it is, outside of poetry, outside of poetry devours my soul. How even some poets I know lack the courage to go into poetry, to stare it in the face with all their fear and longing and love. This is the language I am looking for.

Today, I came across this “little” poem by Kay Ryan. It stunned me. I’m not ready to say why.

“Backward Miracle” by Kay Ryan

Every once in a while

we need a

backward miracle

that will strip language,

make it hold for

a minute: just the

vessel with the

wine in it —

a sacramental

refusal to multiply,

reclaiming the

single loaf

and the single

fish thereby.

Letter to My Father

In my early twenties, for some unknown reason, I decided to write to the father I had never met and knew very little about. I did know his birthday was March 17, and I found it sweet that he was solidly Irish and born on Saint Patrick’s Day. So, I picked out a goofy specialized birthday card with a prancing dandy leprechaun on the front and mailed it to my father. I wrote a very simple, short message inside the card: “Happy Birthday, Dad. I love you.”

A week later, I received from him the most beautiful letter, one in which he reciprocated my love. Nothing in my life has ever made me so happy. That the father I had never met, who left my life before I was born, could tell me he loved me astounded me. And his words, I believe and still believe, were sincere. I believe he wrote them because he was being honest about his feelings. Since that letter, I have had no contact with my father, by his choice, maybe, but more likely, by his wife’s choice. Over the years, I have written my father two other times, and felt my heart break many times over the silence I received in reply.

A wise person I trust with every fiber of my being has convinced me to try to contact my father one  more time. I have been sullen and combative with Angela as she has dogged me about writing the letter. Finally, I gave in, and told her I would do it for her. She was pleased, even if I have written the letter for partly the wrong reasons. Getting me to mail it took another two weeks of negotiations. Why did I not want to write it or mail it? Part of me has given up on people. Most of me has given up on people. I think my heart has decided for me; it has not been a conscious choice. But I must still have some hope, some faith in people’s willingness to for at least an hour, set aside their selfishness, their fear to tend to what matters most of all: Love.

Dear Dad,

I’m writing to you for what may be the last time. Over the years, I’ve thought about you periodically, wondering in a fairly abstract way why you won’t meet me. The first time I wrote to you, over twenty-five years ago, you responded with such a beautiful letter that filled me with joy but scared me as well. Meeting you, what would I say? What would you say? What wouldn’t we say? I’m easily overwhelmed, and so I imagined having to spend several days after our meeting processing our conversation, no matter how mundane.

Then I received a letter from your wife. I was so hurt and filled with rage that she presumed to know me, that she wrote to me at all, and that you allowed her to come between the two of us meeting. I do regret writing back to her with such anger. I would rather have heard from you telling me that we could not meet.

As it probably would be for me meeting you in person, I’m not sure what to say in what I believe will be my last letter to you.

I’m not sure I should tell you about all of the heart breaks I’ve suffered and point out the ones I believe are directly related to you – maybe they are all related to you. I’m not sure if I should tell you how angry, sad, disappointed, devastated, and rage-filled I have been not having you in my life. It has always been the longing to meet “the other half of myself” and nothing else that has prompted me to contact you. Not money, not to make allegations, not to forgive you, not revenge.

I don’t have many chances left to meet you. It’s not my style or my intention to violate your boundaries, to harass, or to pursue you; however, at this point in my life, when I am left with absolutely no family, I feel such tremendous loss and the necessity of meeting you has never felt stronger.

I’m living in Knoxville, Professor of English at South College. If you would like to meet, please let me know.

Love,

Your daughter

Reoccupy

On September 17, 2011, Manhattan’s Liberty Square became home to Occupy Wall Street, a force of people united against the injustice of economic disparity in the United States. When I first heard about the protests taking place in New York, I was immediately ambivalent about Occupy’s actions. In no way did I believe the protests were wrong — quite the contrary. But having seen the dying flames of the 1960s social revolution from the perspective of a twelve year old, I was fairly certain that after thirty some years, another mass demonstration regarding social injustice would only implode if not sputter out before it even got off the ground.

My ambivalence was probably more the result of believing that major social change is almost always the product of severe trauma. As peace-loving as I am, it seems a reality that human beings must lose their lives in order to create a new order. Whether the death and destruction come from the masses, the 99%, or from a narrow faction of elected officials, people must ultimately engage in some form of violence to achieve the goal of widespread change. I could easily provide a list of historical events that affirm my belief that loss of life must precede justice, but I assume anyone reading this will be familiar with those pivotal movements. I very much want to argue that civil disobedience, economic sanctions, and education are the tools that must be used to not only dismantle corrupt corporations and banks, any entity that inflicts harm on people, but sadly, I feel I have to defer to the overwhelming evidence that history provides.

In Knoxville, we were like many other mid-sized cities across the United States in organizing our own local Occupy. A small group of folks began responding to the protests by testing the waters via Facebook. Soon, there were two Occupy groups with pages on Facebook, and I joined both thinking they would immediately merge as soon as they discovered each other’s existence. Surprisingly, to me, this did not occur. There was a steady, low-level tension between the two similar to sibling rivalry: Love and, well, not hate, but competitiveness. It disappointed me. As one of the two groups began to grow in the number of supporters by leaps and bounds, the other group didn’t wither, but it seemed to become the bastard child of the Knoxville Occupy. And as much as people said the contrary, there were individuals in charge of these groups. Occupy is rightly proud of its reliance on what it perceives as a pure form of democracy; however, the train won’t stay on track without an engineer.

My initial involvement with Occupy in Knoxville was to encourage the smaller group to keep going and to offer my talents to the second group. My disillusionment was fast acting. The Occupy Wall Street (Knoxville) group had conviction, but it was misdirected,in my opinion. The first planned action was of all things a candle light vigil. Boy, I thought, nothing says revolution like several hundred folks walking with candles in a circle in downtown Knoxville at night after drawing money earlier from the very banks we should have been protesting. It all seemed ill-conceived. Although I was a tad embarrassed to participate in such a tender affair, I did, and I was happily surprised at the turn out, over 500 people, and the electric energy produced by the mass of people. We were vocal but not violent. I had feared complete passivity.

Since the “action” happened on a weekend night on Market Square, a city block of trendy shops and restaurants, where chiefly young adults and college kids were out eating and drinking, resistance to the protest was non-existent. There were some folks who rolled their eyes, but otherwise, the atmosphere was that of a party. And we had a good time. A few weeks later, Occupy Wall Street (Knoxville) organized a march to coincide with the University of Tennessee football team game day. The idea was to line a major road that a large number of fans would have to cross in order to reach the football stadium. In the humid September air, we walked the three blocks from home base on Market Square to Henley Street where we stood for two hours holding signs and chanting, “We…are…the 99%.” On a footbridge above us, hundreds and hundreds of football fans poured across the road. As they passed, their shouts at us created a familiar theme: Worthlessness. “Get a job, you worthless piece of shit” was quite popular. Sneers, obscenities, hate, stupidity, and even spit left the mouths of the people going to the game. I became so furious I wanted to cry. There was no hope of dialogue. No common ground they could see.

Two or three times I almost left because I was afraid I was going to hit someone. I wanted them to listen, to think, to think. They were going to a football game. What enraged me was that I had been misunderstood; people who did not know me were judging me unfairly. Nothing angers me more than being misunderstood. And I almost left because I had no idea why we were directing our protest at, mostly, football fans. Hell, I would have been at the game myself — I love the sport. Why were we not surrounding Bank Of America and challenging their policies and practices?

After that Saturday, I watched Occupy from afar. I suggested we march on banks, but instead, the group had a knitting circle for justice in Krutch Park. They continued to make signs and walk in the same circles. For a few weeks, I pouted over what I deemed missed opportunities to truly send strong messages to the criminal banks and corporations. And I wondered if perhaps I were idealizing violence, if such a thing can be, and if maybe I liked the thought of using violence before exhausting other means of communication. Maybe I wanted a fight to have a fight. Or maybe I was truly prepared to be authentic in my desire for change regardless of personal consequences.