American Watermelon

In Elizabeth Gilbert's book Eat, Pray, Love, during the protagonist's first overseas stop in Italy, she mentions a friend, an Italian, whose American wife had apparently written on the walls of their apartment some angry profanity and accusations in Italian, once during a fight. Julio says that, had his wife truly been free and expressive, she would have written in her native language, in English, following the passion of her rage. Writing in Italian would have given her pause - time for translation. All Americans are like this, diagnoses Julio in Gilbert's words: "A savage people." Buttoned up and repressed at all times except when truly uncorked, and therefore, in the latter moments, unsafe and potentially lethal.

There is something lasting about the repressed-American story in Gilbert's memoir. While still in Italy, her narrator reports on many other Italian tendencies that clash with the ways overworked, guild-ridden Americans would respond to life.

Something of the latent feeling of these narratives pinned itself on me the afternoon I read about them, when I returned from the grocery store carrying a 20-lb watermelon.

The watermelon was mushy, and I had been so eager to bite into its crispiness that I was disappointed and, given that I am a little bit of an American, thought for a brief second that   I could return it.  Maybe should return it. I had the receipt.

Returning food to the grocery store is organically foreign to me. I think I have done it once, under pressure of people who'd urged me to exercise my American right to perfect food, but I have only done it once, and the fact that I even had the thought with this watermelon felt contrived. As if the thought had been produced in a far off place and only delivered to me superficially, landing on the top of my head, on top of my hair, like an oversized cloth stamp, and just sitting there, tottering.

As it was, I was not going to take the watermelon back. I wrapped up what I had not eaten (or spit out) and put it in the refrigerator, as if I were putting a baby in its crib, thinking about how much more energy there would be in returning a food like this than in eating and enjoying whatever parts of it were healthy. It isn't anybody's fault, after all, that the watermelon was mushy. If I had picked it out from the field in which it had grown and it was overripe, would I return it back to the soil? "I would like my money back, soil."

And yet our economy endorses this odd sense of entitlement on the part of the consumer. Of course with certain commercial items, return is reasonable and necessary: clothing that is damaged, a car that does not work. But to return a watermelon and get your five dollars back actually probably costs sixty dollars to the system that supports it. There is the time you spent buying the watermelon that you will never get back. There is the fact that you wanted a watermelon two hours ago and now have not had one yet still and have spent additional time thinking about how you are entitled to perfect watermelons and have somehow been swindled. There is the time of all the store employees and of the store itself: the cost of the watermelon, its transport, storage and display. And there is the sheer fact that you will be throwing away something on which, even as you toss it, you are expending additional needless energy.

All because, as Julio might put it, you were too overworked and emotionally undernourished to take from the earth what it happened to have given you. In our demand for perfection - in watermelon, in customer service, in ourselves - we deplete the soil of our life and culture. That patch of earth where the bad watermelon came from has now cost several patches. You have taken an overripe watermelon, which may have had half the value of a perfectly ripe one, and have expounded its liability. Your demand on its perfection, your disposal of it, return of it to the store, time spent dealing with and transporting it, has now built a small credit on the soil that it came from.

And it is because of this blindness that American life is expensive, that Americans are in debt. If every patch of soil that has a small foible on it costs ten healthy patches, this is life on credit. Life on profligacy.

I cannot say why this idea of American attitudes takes me so directly to Julio's repressed-American portrait. I only know that there is some deep connection between the tendency to repress anger and other feelings and the tendency to expound entitlement. Because I cannot tell my wife how I really feel, you, my real-estate agent, have to pamper me today. Because my child gets Cs and I can't say anything negative about it, you, my shoe salesman, will put up with every caprice about how the color black is just not the right shade on this one either. Because I am hurting, a watermelon will go back. Back and not back, for it is lost forever in the costs absorbed by my diminishing ego.

On the Bus

I once heard a man say that he'd fallen in love with a woman on a bus. A woman he'd never talked to and maybe not seen completely. But something about her pose and her clothing made him fantasize about her. And, he added, it was these little love affairs, the ones that were purely ephemeral, that were the most poignant in his life.

This makes sense, and I think many of us understand it intuitively. Who hasn't fantasized about Mr. Darcy?

Women in suits on buses I think is also the reason many visual and storytelling artists go into their trade. I for instance, though only on the cusp of artistry in my video work, am drawn to documenting and talking and pointing cameras at people, because I want all their stories. I want the woman on the bus and the guy behind her and the mom with the little kid that's going to get whooped pretty soon, each in a little tiny book with hard covers, captured and put away on a shelf for posterity.

There is such an activity, of course. It's called fiction writing.

Writers generalize forms just as the man I heard tell the bus story did. But they generalize expansively and imaginatively. And correctly. They take the woman prototype AND the reasons random men on buses might be attracted to her AND the reasons some particular man might be - and they qualify her. They make her into a person but also into a generality. Just in the way my little hard-cover book would. Then writers put bunches of these prototypical but individualistic characters together in a collection and put life around them, just as a painting blocks its main subjects and then builds around. Then writers fill in blank after blank. They begin with a focus: someone sitting at a table telling someone else they don't know where their daughter has gone to - and then build detail upon detail. Until the blocking becomes clear. And the scenery. And, just as they seem to really get going and begin refining, the last clarifying step just snaps together. Like those awkward children's puzzles that are all strings and wobblies until you press something just right and the whole thing locks together into a cube or a ladder or something else blocky.

Then the story is done and it is over. You, the reader, were shown, bit by bit by bit, the whole picture. And as you were waiting for a similarly progressive process to go over the bits and now put bows on them, bows and all are slapped on top of the picture, finishing it in one fell swoop and pulling the curtain besides.

I like to think that, in its own way, video production can have a similar effect.

Of course, it has the advantage - and the challenge - of real people to contend with and, while a single look on a person's face can tell as much as would take special care by a writer to convey, yet the producer is at the mercy of greater uncertainty and much less control.

Music goes a long way in sculpting video projects to a focused point, and certainly the music removes video and its offshoots from the written word. Cameras and looks on faces is one thing, but add music and now you really cannot compare the media. You have to separate them and not attempt an overlap, no matter how many movies are produced from books. Perhaps the Hollywood producers who work on book-to-movie projects will have something to say about whether a movie is anything like a book or whether it is only, as its credits say, "based on" one and nothing else.

Still, auteurs of all sorts draw to the women on the buses and the men in the deserts and the people in kitchens like moths to a lantern. These are the focal points of our attraction. Around their potential we see the house of cards that our vision spins. I will start with music under and fade up from black. And then she will look up and she won't say anything. Then we will cut to a wide shot of a building with a car in front. Not that car. A white, long, skinny one. And then the music will change.

The music will change and grow and end. And I will wrap up and put the whole thing in a little book and shelve it.

The Writer God

As a secular person, I feel comfortable personifying god in almost any endeavor.
 

Within literature particularly, where writers have to know everything about human character and behavior that psychologists and neuroscientists are now starting to uncover through quite another effort, the presence of that something that some of us have and that we as a culture long for is especially vivid.
 

Why should James Joyce be compelled to say that Gabriel had to fix “his cuffs and the bows of his tie” after his jovial comment is rebuffed by the young, poor housemade to whom it was offered ? (The Dead ) Why should Tolstoy know how to make an army commander press his two fingers "more and more rigidly to his cap," when confronted with having to justify himself to a superior? (War and Peace. Book 2 Chapter 1.) And why do we know just what they mean?
 

Today, science has a lot to tell us about why people fix cuffs and holds caps, and the simple answer to how writers who are not mind scientists know what is necessary for the building of frequently complete and believable characters, is that they are intuitive psychologists.
 

And we in their readership are to be intuitive readers. From general experience, we are to interpret the information we are given correctly. We are not to think, for instance, that the commander is holding his cap because it makes him think of this daughter. We, like the writers, are to know that this action means the commander is nervous or stressed.
 

We are all intuitive psychologists. But the most direct and interesting distillation between physical reality and its interpretation happens at the level of the writer. Between the writer and god. Between him and the biochemistry and neurocircuitry that runs us and that, at present at least, is likely to be so complex that it cannot be fully quantified in an equation.
 

Unless the equation is made of words that beget images that tell stories and result in experience.

Perhaps Einstein would say that the best science is the kind you experience. Or, if he wouldn't, perhaps our next inspired genius should.

Bang! Bang!

In the story by Flannery O’Connor The Life you Save May be Your Own, a young drifter abducts a woman he has recently married to leave her at a gas station and drive away with her mother’s car, a gift for their wedding.

As he drives away, he reads a sign that says, “Drive carefully. The Life you save may be your own.”

He is among the class of citizens now for whom this sign was written. From Man with no Automobile, to Man with Automobile, whose intended philanthropy toward other lives by driving well is rewarded with a reminder that it may be himself, in the end, that he saves.

This ending is so multifaceted and poignant, because, despite clearly reaping the benefits of a message meant for conscientious citizens, of which he is not one, yet still, even as a scoundrel, he is human enough to feel entitled to the gratification. And we feel human enough, as readers, to grant him the gift.

The “moment of grace” O’Connor talks about as grounding all of her stories, is present here in the last sentiment. Among all his strengths and connivings, Tom Shiftlet, is weak enough to need to feel endorsement and pride. And it is the ironic twist that brings this feeling about by means of the car he has just stolen from a weak old woman and her weaker daughter.

There are layers upon layers here. Like a mound of gradient planes. There is a victim and a predator, yes. But there is also heart and heartache. There is knowing trickery and the surprise of accidental elation. Just as she is at the mercy of his scheme, he is at the mercy of the sign that puts him in his place even as it presents him with the illusion of his own importance.

Like the fake story that wins you the Honors of Honesty contest, Tom Shiftlet uses a car that isn’t his to reap a reward that isn’t his. A reward that isn’t his but for which there is a spot in his character nevertheless. The story seems to say that perhaps we could all be scoundrels if we had the characteristics this man has and certainly, even scoundrels need affirmation that they are honorable.

National fables and cinema illustrate the way in which a culture as a whole upholds the tenets of moral goodness despite the fact that many of its citizens must necessarily be engaged in work that is less pure. No one likes a movie in which the scoundrel wins. Unless the scoundrel is in fact the good guy and only giving those who prefer to use their skills for evil a taste of their own superior medicine. But, basically, both the guy who just swindled an old woman out of her life’s savings for a not-so-very-good car and the man who saved his neighbor’s child from drowning today want the good guy in the movie to win.

And so does Tom Shiftlet. He knows what a good guy is and now, thanks to his new automobile, he can feel like one. Never mind the means to that end. There must be a reference to this too, in the Psychology 101 book on my desk, but righteousness is ever righteous. Self-serving, self-amplifying righteousness sticks to us like a candy stick and we collect it as we go along a road down which the acts of cruelty we perform are miraged over with signs that say “Thank you for your generous donation. You are he who makes a difference in the higher orders.”

* * *

Some day in the near distant future, humans will have the opportunity to control their own population dynamics scientifically. Not only physiologically but socially. There will be a movement, a concerted, centralized effort to strive for future generations of people who are capable of fulfilling their entire potential. People who are the perfect scoundrel or the perfect angel and have no reservations or no drive to be a little more one or less of the other. People on whom the “Life You Save” sign will be lost. Then, literature will become boring and disappear next to its own moment of grace. But we won’t know it.

----------------------

Works

O'Connor, Flannery. "The Life You Save May be Your Own." var. collections

O'Connor, Flannery. "On Her Own Work." Mystery and Manners. Eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Noonday. 1969 (1957). 118.

Like Sarah

It feels a little bit like that moment when you realize you have been wasting your time talking to an unworthy partner to venture on a comment about Sarah Palin, but a recent encounter in an elevator made me realize something about her that perhaps merits attention.

The encounter was between me and a short, thin man who worked at the resort that the elevator was part of. He took one look at me with my fluffy bangs, bun and glasses and said: "I thought you were Sarah Palin."

Now, there are many reasons why I can receive this message in a mixed way. I chose to be grateful and nod smilingly at the man, who then followed his first comment with something to the effect of: "I just stood in line to see her in [insert small Idaho town] last weekend.”

It wasn't right away after this incident that I realized why the small, middle-aged man who would have never been friends with Sarah Palin was enamored with her, in her public-figure status today.

At home, after having straightened out my hair and removed the impromptu, Travel bun, I thought about him again and it struck me that she is the cheerleader whom he could never get close to in high school. Now, suddenly, she is inviting him to come see her, to shake her hand, to talk to her. She is winking at him on TV, speaking his language on issues of patriotism and hunting. He loves her. He loved her in high school.

Today, he and others like him - women, too - are taken aback, perhaps, by the fact that, that stereotypical beautiful girl they could not get close to, socially, is, firstly, inviting, and secondly, of their political and social stance.

I mean to imply that this is all subconscious. Nobody actually thinks that he or she is attracted to a political figure because he could not be friends with the popular crowd in high school. But what else is it when a not-very-well-informed, good-looking, well-dressed woman speaks both the language of high school politics ("ra-ra! yes, yes! let's go! team!") and a colloquial, rural, modern politicism that, from the point of view of pure discourse, smacks of intellectual regression more than of progress?

To whom would such a speaker appeal if not to those who would have wanted to know her when they were young and hoped that she was not the unapproachable figure she appeared?

Sarah Palin is a social comrade-come-true for all Americans who felt intimidated by looks and intellect in high school. I don't have access to the numbers, but my personal memory suggests something like "half," as to the percentage of the population likely to have been affected in this way.

So half of Americans within a certain mid-life age range are candidates for the kind of friendship that Palin's folksy, warm style invites. Remember me?, she says. You always wanted to know me. Well now you can. And I'm not even scary. I'll run for student-body president, yes, but I won't be intimidating with any information that you don't also know or with any intellectual prowess that might cower you. I am your equal, the way you always wanted me to be.

It's heaven.
It's the secret, unearthed dream of the repressed American heart. The timid, the hardworking, the underappreciated person who never expected to be appreciated. Never expected to be approached by anyone who spoke his language but was stronger, looked into his eyes but was more beautiful, extended a hand in a stylish suit.

It sounds as if I am deprecating a certain kind of human, a certain kind of American. I am not.

I am noting a possible psychological basis for the attraction Palin has generated.
She is good-looking, yes, but so are most women in pictures and posters.
She, instead of being just a model, is the living cheerleader from the standard, American high school, come to life in full, female form and speaking like a wind-up doll all the American-cheerleader-all-grown-up expositions we would expect to hear.

She is irreverent, she is ill-read, she is confident. She is a natural. She could be sold by Mattel.

I don't have a personal reaction to Sarah Palin. I don't dislike her. I don't think she is a malicious, invidious confectioner, out to undermine regular American politics. On the contrary. She is a very natural result of the political and social environment in this country, where far fewer than half of all students graduate from college, where chess and surgery are considered occupations only for the uber-smart and where, as a result, a very large class of under-confident workers and citizens thrives on the hope that one day the world will come to it instead of expecting the never-ending and unreasonable improvements of self and situation that are, in some catalyzing conclusion, to constitute the ubiquitous "American dream".

That moment arrives on the screen for many people, when Sarah Palin smiles and winks and fights the battles with the other student-body presidents that are intellectual and well-spoken. She lets 'em have it - her way. She speaks for everyone. She is not afraid to be colloquial. She is proud of who she is. AND - she is good looking! The personal fantasy of conquest for that half of American high schoolers who didn't want to have anything to do with smart and popular people if they were going to be deriding and all mighty. Well now they don't have to choose. Looks, confidence and poise are packaged in an unthreatening, shiny, matte package that manages to dazzle without overwhelming and to win battles without ever engaging in them. In a league of her own, with an agenda of her own, gaining everyone's attention, speaking no one's language, answering to a higher power and to no one else, unapologetic, proud. And looking at you.
Kid.

We can't blame anybody. Not even John McCain. It's part of the mix. Palin's popularity would come out as a positive quotient from the wiggles of some complicated equation about whether or not this type of personality, wielded in this way, would appeal to a certain percentage of the American population. It would be inevitable and, again, positive in value.

So here she is. Love her or hate her. Or just accept her. Like the Barbie doll you never really wanted to buy your kids but always did buy. She's there, she's shiny and we will have her!