Utopias
A book has been published recently that looks at utopian writings by four late-19th century authors with limited name recognition: Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The book’s author, Michael Robertson, examines contradictions and paradoxes that pepper each author’s conception of what it would take to build an ideal world. For instance, slaves exist in some, women are restricted in significant ways in others, privilege based on money or birth flourishes in still others. As I finished the review, I knew I won’t be reading the whole book though I’m glad Mr. Robertson has written it. But I will continue puzzling over why people ponder the physical and psychological and political landscape necessary to call a place or culture an utopia.
Because I’ve been rereading Greek drama in order to facilitate a discussion group in my living room, Plato has found his way into my consciousness again. When I worked at the University of Minnesota, I often reminded students that we are still suffering from his insistence on an “either/or” theory of human behavior/consciousness. What would it have been like for us, as inheritors of much of classical Greek (and Roman) thinking if some leading philosopher of that period had advocated for a world order based in “both/and” instead, I would ask my earnest students. Recently, however, I see another deep problem underlying Plato’s definition of who and what are necessary and forbidden in his conceptualization of an ideal state. Of course, this has taken me back to his work, The Republic, published around 380 B.C. In it he states quite emphatically that two kinds of people are not to be admitted if there is any chance of an ideal state–poets and musicians. His reasoning is clear even if disturbing: poets and musicians create works that enter our consciousness so fast that we are unable to exercise rational control over our responses to their work. That means we might prefer to listen to Aretha Franklin rather than going to work, or we might read Mary Oliver’s poetry rather than learning the latest catechism purveyed by the church or state of our choice. This would in turn create disorder and Plato is quite clear that any ideal community must have order and agreement about how to think and behave along certain fundamental principles.
Mr. Robertson surely is pointing out a similar requirement proposed by his four more modern authors. Utopias require a kind of moral and behavioral adherence to a set of laid down rules or protocols or norms. Some cultural scholars interested in today’s world are telling us that democracies are messy enterprises because they are systems that keep reaching out to include more kinds of people and ideas. This requires an ability to keep expanding our definition of “citizen” and opening ourselves to those we are inclined to label “strangers.” In contrast, cultures that organize around some form of tribalism or clannishness tend to limit who or what can be tolerated or even admitted. So those cultures may well be, whether their adherents know it or not, arguing against democracy in favor of utopias. “Make America Great Again” implies a paradise lost somewhere along the way, some idyllic place where there were no “strangers” or, if they existed, they were easily consigned to some outer circle that was under the control of the founders who drew up the blueprint for the utopia.
I’m glad Michael Robertson has written his book because, whether he intended it or not, he invites some of us to continue knowing that those imagined or nostalgically recalled “paradises” or utopias either never existed in any mundane sense or, as John Milton believed, were not a place where mere human beings could learn who we really were and then work to become better. At the end of the review that got me started on this blog idea, its author says: “We always want to get past the room we’re in in order to break out and change the universe. The lesson that life tends to teach is that change begins at home, and that we can’t escape rooms on our way to worlds. The world is made of rooms.”
Prayers of the People, August 12, 2018
At my church, between the homily and the Eucharist, a member of the congregation stands in the pulpit and reads a series of petitions to which we in the pews respond “Lord, hear our prayer.” Though all the rest of the service follows a beautiful ritual that is the same every week, these petitions offered in our name are a moment of profound spontaneity. I find myself wondering as the reader mounts the steps just what the liturgist will have asked us to focus on this week.
Today, the 12th of August in the year 2018, I knew that there was to be a march in Washington, D.C. later in the day, held by the same group that just a year ago marched in Charlottesville, VA, carrying torches and chanting obscenely racist, anti-Semitic, zenophobic slogans. This group of hateful people ended up killing one young woman–Heather Heyer–and wounding about a score more counter-demonstrators. I thought we might be asked to pray for an end to violence in the world as some sort of general plea for sanity. I was wonderfully wrong. Here’s what we were asked to pray for:
For all those who believe in the God of Abraham–Jews, Christians, and Muslims–and that our leaders will work to build harmony among all faiths. For an end to discrimination of all sorts, especially on the basis of skin color. For the original inhabitants of this country, that our governments will treat them with dignity and respect. For early immigrants who crossed our borders looking for a better life. For immigrants crossing our borders today, especially for the children.
As each wonderful invocation followed the next, I just stood there and wept with gratitude to my church for finding a way to respond to the violence and hatred by too many for people different from them in some important way. I also stood a little taller with pride to be a member of a congregation that responded with genuine energy as we made our usual response. Several people near me seemed to be speaking with more volume and conviction than usual, so I choose to believe they were feeling some of what I was feeling. Our priest has asked us on several occasions as he has been speaking to the many deep flaws in the hierarchy of Roman Catholicism to “be the church you want the church to be.” This is not just a palindromic clause–it is a mantra to live by, day by day and in all avenues of our lives. This morning, our group prayers to the God of our varied understandings achieved that lofty goal with clarity and conviction.
Memory and Memories
A while back, I wrote about my mother’s elaborately designed garden as one avenue where she could express her creativity. Doing that has brought her back to mind. Because she died fifty-four years ago and because we had a seriously tangled relationship, I have spent a lot of time not thinking about her at all. I would try at times, like on Mother’s Day, but memories usually were negative, so I became reluctant to return to painful or angry times. But recently I heard a fascinating program on National Public Radio about what constitutes a memory. The researcher being interviewed said we are constantly revising what began as an original memory; that each time we remember the same event or person, whatever really happened is removed a little bit more. He concluded that the only stable “memory” would be one that happened once and only once. He even posited that people who can no longer remember their past may well have the purest memories of that past.
I began thinking about writing this blog because I wanted to recount a clear memory I have of my mother’s Christmas decorations in our house in Fairfield, Alabama. I was going to argue that, like her work in her elaborate garden, her transformations of our living room and front porch afforded her another arena for her creativity. Then I remembered that I had already written about this phenomenon in my first memoir, I Dwell in Possibility, published in 1992. So I dug out my copy and read the relevant chapter entitled “My Mother, My Muse.” After describing what she actually did, I concluded that her insisting on doing exactly what she had always done for the holidays in 1955 was remarkable. I want now to return to that time and see how my memory may have changed.
My father and her husband died on New Year’s Day in 1954. For reasons best known to her, she made it clear to my older sister and me that we were never to mention his name in her presence because doing so threw her into a vortex of despair. So, as I tried to cope with all those devastating “firsts” experienced by anyone suffering severe loss of a loved one, Mamie (what most people called my mother) acted as if they did not exist. So during the first week in December, she set up our rickety step ladder in front of the majestic pier mirror over our living room fireplace. She had already gone into our basement and located several boxes of silver balls of various sizes. She’d also found the sturdy tree branch she’d painted brilliant white several years before. So the process began that resulted in a magical decoration. First she climbed up onto the last safe step on the ladder and lodged the white tree branch between the top of the mirror and the ceiling. Then she suspended all the silver balls on razor thin wires that were barely visible from the floor. The whole creation was, of course, reflected in the mirror, adding to the magic. Every time we had a fire in the fireplace, the heat caused the balls to move ever so slightly. The whole thing was simply beautiful. My problem was it made me incredibly sad to look at it because Daddy was not sitting in “his” chair by the radio where he listened to “Amos and Andy” or some one singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.”
The decorations were still up on January 4th, the day of my father’s funeral. Because there was no church service even though my mother was a pillar of our little Episcopal church, the pastor came to our living room to perform some kind of memorial. Mamie’s two brothers were there as were some cousins from other cities in Alabama and at one point someone wanted to take a picture of her. As I said in the 1992 memoir, “She is as carefully dressed as ever and her hair and make-up are in place. But her face reveals a woman in deep grief.” Since my father’s death and the silence surrounding it were devastating to me as a seventeen year old, I assumed we would never again have those joyous and elaborate decorations. I was wrong. Mamie climbed back up on her ladder and reproduced her magical mobile into the future.
So the memory I carry now, sixty odd years later, is of someone who found solace rather than pain in making her surroundings beautiful. If the man on public radio is correct, I am adjusting what had once seemed some kind of stubborn stoicism or strangely conceived heroism. My memory now draws me closer to Mamie because I know a lot more about grief and loss than I did in 1954. And I recognize unabashedly that, like her, I rely on repetition and ritual to get me through my roughest moments. So I will hold on to this version of the memory because it serves us both quite well.
Racism at a Cemetery
My maternal grandparents, my parents, my sister and brother-in-law are all buried at Elmwood Cemetery in Birmingham, Alabama. When that cemetery was first constructed and for many years afterwards, it served funeral needs of very wealthy and prominent white citizens and was located in an upper-class white neighborhood. There are huge walk-in mausoleums bearing names of founders of the city. One section has a beautiful thatched umbrella canopy covering seats and a little bridge over a thin water display where children could play or families could picnic. My memories of Elmwood turn around the many Sundays after church when Mamie, my mother, and I would pack a picnic lunch, load up on small gardening tools, and go tidy our lot. Being there clearly met some deep sense of loss my mother felt about not having her beloved mother to turn to. What helped us each time we went was having a little water spigot at curbside very near our lot. Beside it always was some kind of plastic or wooden container into which any one could put water from that spigot to refresh the grass or fill vases holding real flowers or help grave tenders wash bird droppings or mud from the headstones of their loved ones.
As demographics of who lived where in Birmingham began to shift as black residents exercised new rights hard won in the 1960s, white relatives of people buried in Elmwood began to shun going to their grave sites because the neighborhood changed in ways that disturbed them. They reported not feeling “safe.” Blacks began buying real estate, so white flight took over, and within a decade or two, the neighborhood was predominantly black or poor white. By then I lived in Minnesota, but whenever I visited cousins in Birmingham, I always drove to see our lot. As long as my older sister was alive, she paid the cemetery for “special care,” which meant our grass was watered and mowed more carefully around the standing marker than was true for those not paying for that service. When she died, I stepped in and began writing monthly checks to Elmwood. To my deep dismay, by the 1980s I couldn’t really tell the difference between how our graves looked and the ones not boasting a little marker stuck into the ground reading “Special Care.” So I canceled the service and found with the help of my relatives a private service to take its place. Chris, a serious gardener, who happens to be a black man, plants pansies every fall and marigolds every spring. He uses his own hand mower so the grass looks neat, since the cemetery stopped paying anyone to do that since so few white people visited their families. It pleases me to know real care is given to the graves.
Chris usually sends me a picture of his two plantings, so this past April I got the usual photograph showing bright marigolds all around the big marker. A few days ago, my cousin sent me a photo from her smart phone showing her at our grave site. Imagine my surprise when I saw no marigolds–just grass carefully cut all around the Hurley-McNaron-McAllister marker. When I e-mailed Chris to ask where the orange blooms were, he wrote apologizing and saying that the extreme heat visited upon Birmingham this year due to global warming had killed the marigolds. Before I read his next paragraph I felt mildly irritated, since I as another serious gardener here in Minnesota where it has also been unusually hot this summer just run up my water bill. So why hadn’t he gone more often to use the spigot and water the marigolds.
The next sentence said it all: “I simply couldn’t protect them since the cemetery has turned off water for the entire grounds and the heat just beat them down.” Surely the officials at Elmwood would never have dared do such a cruel thing if the white survivors of those interned there were still driving to place flowers or just say hello to a loved one. Without water at such a locale, grass will of course wither and die in summer. Without water at such a locale, no fresh flowers can last past a day or so. Without water at such a locale, love and remembrance withers. Many people of various faith communities or psychological persuasions tell us that someone doesn’t die as long as s/he is remembered. Surely a cardinal reason for cemeteries is to provide a space for the living to remember the not-living, to keep them close in our hearts and our memories. So turning off the water because Elmwood is surrounded by middle-class black families is not an example of what many today speak of as racist “micro-aggressions.” And the fact that white owners of all those lots haven’t risen up in mass protest at what is being denied to them speaks of silent collusion in racism at its most obvious.