"Sometimes it is not what you say that matters but what you don't say," political consultant Frank Luntz wrote in the introduction to a list called "The 14 Words Never to Use." Luntz specializes in emotional reactions and how they apply to political decision-making, and in particular, how the average person responds to the use of words. Sometimes his polls discover markedly different percentages of the sample group supporting a particular course of action, based on the terminology used. Far more people oppose a "death" tax than oppose an "estate" or "inheritance" tax. "If you want to kill the estate tax," he advises his Republican readers, "call it a death tax." The man on the street doesn't quite understand what "corporate transparency" even means, but everyone believes in "corporate accountability." And the phrase "drilling for oil" conjures up images of "an old-fashioned oilrig that gushes up black goop," but there's something so clean and modern about "exploring for energy."
Perhaps no issue is more fraught with emotion than the abortion debate, and perhaps there is no argument in which both sides have engaged in quite so much verbal and ideological "framing" of this sort. Both sides have been guilty of emotional appeals, selective use of evidence, red-herring arguments, and ad hominem attacks. And each side seems to have its own language to describe what happens during an abortion, who and what is being acted upon, and even why it matters. Sociolinguists have discovered that people feel more positively about an issue, whatever that may be, when it is framed in positive terms, so perhaps it's not surprising that both those who favor legal abortion on demand and those who oppose it most often prefer to refer to themselves as "pro-" something: "pro-choice" on one hand, and "pro-life" on the other.
I refuse to use either term. I despise euphemism on principle; I believe in calling a thing by its name. It's the words we're afraid to speak that have power over us. Moreover, abortion is an issue that emcompasses both life and choice. What's in dispute is the moral import of that life, and the moral significance of that choice. To reduce the abortion question to a matter of either life or choice is an insult not only to well-meaning people on the opposite side of the issue, but to those who have been personally affected by it and didn't have the luxury of obviating the nuances with a neat turn of phrase.
I'm anti-abortion, but you won't hear me refer to myself as pro-life. I believe that term is only correctly used by those who embrace a consistent life ethic, which, as I favor capital punishment in very select cases and euthanasia for those who thoughtfully request it, I cannot say I do. In fact, there are many who lump opposition to euthanasia with opposition to abortion under the "pro-life" label, but relatively few of them take their belief in "life" so far as to oppose capital punishment, the slaughter of animals, or war, as a consistent life ethic would demand. I've always considered it dangerous to lump issues together haphazardly in this manner (considering the number of Christians I've heard who always mention "abortion and homosexuality" in the same breath when discussing social evils, I'm not surprised how many gays and lesbians favor legalized abortion on principle simply because to oppose it seems somehow like being in bed with the enemy), and to slap a label on your platform that doesn't quite represent what it stands for is plainly dishonest.
I also despise the easy reversal employed by some self-identified pro-lifers (yes, I'm accusing people who share my viewpoint, on this issue at least, of low tactics!), dubbing the opposition "anti-life" or even "pro-death." This is a gross reduction that aims to shut down thought by portraying a group of principled individuals, however misguided their principles might be, as cartoon villains, rejoicing in evil for its own sake. I have a number of dear friends who identify as "pro-choice," and not one of them thinks of abortion as an innately good thing (though I know very well that there are people who do, which I have more to say about presently).
Using the term "pro-life," and denouncing the other side as murderous monsters, makes it easy for those of us who oppose abortion to rest smugly on our moral laurels, without taking it upon ourselves to promote and develop alternatives or work to change the societal norms that make abortion sometimes seem like a desirable choice. How many folks are there who are positively aghast at the notion of teenagers being provided with condoms and taught to use them, who rant and rail against any family structure other than the traditional nuclear family presided over by a married husband and wife, then condemn the young woman who finds it easier to schedule an abortion than to let people she respects find out she's been sexually active? Use of such weighted language makes it easy to demonize others, while doing nothing to examine our own attitudes.
I choose the term "anti-abortion" to describe my position. Yes, I'm resigned to that politically off-putting "anti," because I think it's important to speak plainly about what I mean, and "pro-illegalization of medically unnecessary abortion" is just too wordy. Ironically, even though framing one's position in "pro" terms is supposed to have a more favorable sound, I've never heard anyone object to being called "anti-abortion," even those who preferred to call themselves "pro-life" - but the moment I refer to the other side as "pro-abortion," I find myself in a heated debate over terminology.
"I'm not 'pro-abortion,'" I've been told, over and over again. "I believe in a woman's right to choose." I'm sick of hearing "choice" used as a euphemism for "abortion," as if that were the only kind of choice a person were ever faced with. Whenever I hear someone say s/he believes in "a woman's right to choose," I always want to ask (and whenever possible, I do), "Choose what?" "To choose" is a transitive verb, and "abortion" is the rarely-spoken object, the elephant in the room.
Self-professed pro-choicers often refer to their opponents as "anti-choice" or even "pro-coercion," and this is every bit as unfair as the use of "anti-life" or "pro-death." I, for one, believe in choice. I don't know anyone who doesn't. I believe you have the right to choose soup or salad or spaghetti or a sandwich for lunch. I believe you have the right to choose Verizon, Sprint, or AT&T, or to shun modern technology altogether. I believe in school choice and cable choice. I believe you have the right to choose if, when, and with whom you have sex, and what kind of sex (if any) to have. If you're with someone of the other gender and both of you are of reproductive capability, you have the right to choose to conceive a new life together, or not. If you choose not to, you have the right to choose the rhythm method, a barrier method, chemical contraception, permanent sterilization, or abstinence from any activity that could introduce semen into the vagina. (I don't mean to state that all of these choices are equally wise, practical, desirable, or even necessarily in some cases ethical - just that they're legitimate choices.) I also believe that some choices necessarily preclude other choices. I choose not to go to jail, but if I commit a felony, that choice becomes meaningless. Unwanted pregnancy is, in most cases, the direct and logical consequence of a person's choices. (Fewer than ten percent of abortions, even according to the most liberal sources, are perfomed as a result of rape, maternal health concerns, or fetal abnormality; the actual number seems to be somewhere around two percent.) I believe a pregnant woman has choices too. I believe she has the right to keep her child or give it up for adoption. I believe she has the right to be as involved in the adoption process as she wants to be, whether that means signing the papers immediately after delivery without ever looking at the baby, or cultivating a relationship with carefully selected adoptive parents who will encourage her to be active in the child's life. If she chooses to keep her child, I believe she has the right to devote herself single-mindedly to motherhood or to pursue education and/or a career, and I believe she and her child deserve the social support systems in place that will keep them from falling through the cracks.
Abortion is just about the only thing I don't believe she has the moral right to choose!
Those who claim to be "pro-choice" surely don't believe that all choices are legitimate. No one's speaking up for a thug's right to choose to make a living stealing cars, or a six-year-old's right to choose to have a beer with lunch, or a mother's right to choose to murder her ten-year-old child. Granted, those are extreme examples - the equivalent of "But surely you don't believe a frail ten-year-old who was gang-raped by her father, uncle, and brother and ended up pregant with anencephalic quadruplets should have to carry that pregnancy to term?" However, those who favor legal abortion often quite openly advocate restricting some kinds of choice. For example, some of those who are most vocal about a woman's "right to choose" abortion staunchly oppose a pharmacist's right to choose not to participate in it by fulfilling prescriptions for chemical abortifacients.
"Pro-choice" sounds like a winning term, because in a society in which we are endlessly focused on individual rights, no one wants to be accused of limiting another person's freedoms. The fact is, no one really believes there should be no limits on human behavior. (Even the most flamboyantly nihilistic anarchist will take offense if you decide you have a right to steal his stereo or punch him in the nose.) "A woman's right to choose" is simply a euphemism for "a woman's right to have an abortion." If it really were all about personal freedom, pro-choicers would be as adamantly determined to make sure that no woman was ever coerced into an abortion as they are to keep abortion legal. They would have been the first to express outrage when an undercover investigation by an anti-abortion group caught Planned Parenthood employees on camera offering advice to a man posing as a sex trafficker looking for confidential treatment, including abortions, for underage girls in his "care." Instead, those who made the video were widely condemned for employing deceptive methods.
"But I don't believe women should be encouraged to get abortions, or anything like that," I'm told. "So you can't say I'm 'pro-abortion.' I just think they should be able to make the decision themselves." To those who make this argument, I can only point out that to be in favor of something doesn't mean you believe it should be universal or compulsory, or even that it's right in every circumstance. For example, I am pro-gay marriage. That doesn't mean I believe that all gays should be encouraged to get married, or that any behavior is acceptable if it advances the gay-marriage cause, or that officiants should face legal repercussions if they refuse to solemnize same-sex weddings. As a woman who was in an abusive relationship with another woman this time last year, and who is now very much in love with a man, I certainly don't believe that homosexual couples have any innate superiority to heterosexual pairs, or that only gays should be allowed to get married! What I believe is that two people who want to spend the rest of their lives together, who happen to be of the same gender, should be able to get a marriage license - even though a same-sex marriage is not the right choice for me, or for a majority of the population. If you believe that abortion is a valid option that should be available to those who feel it is right for them, you are pro-abortion, even if you'd never have (or encourage/support) one yourself.
Some who disdain the use of the term "pro-abortion" do so because they're well aware that there are people in this world who do view abortion as a fundamentally positive thing. Radical feminists have repeatedly claimed that abortion is an empowering experience for women, a statement that is not only a slap in the face of every woman (I've known at least five personally) who has been tormented with guilt and grief in the aftermath of her "choice," but which also seemingly contradicts their professed intent to bring about a world in which abortion is "safe, legal, and rare" - if it's truly empowering, why should it be rare? I've gotten into debates with trolls on an online anti-abortion forum who tried to persuade me that adoption is dangerous for the adoptee and for society as a whole; their arguments were transparently flawed, and it seems to me that if they really believed in women having choices, they shouldn't actively discourage an option that millions of women, unready for motherhood but uneasy about abortion, have embraced. I'll never forget the time I brought the wrath of an entire college campus down upon my head (or so it felt at the time) for simply daring to suggest that abortion wasn't something to celebrate. And then there's Ginette Paris, whose monograph The Sacrament of Abortion (later reissued under the much less offensive title The Psychology of Abortion) declares that abortion is a symbolic sacrifice to the archetypal principle represented by the goddess Artemis, and goes a long way toward making the absurd claims I've seen on some paranoid Christian anti-abortion websites sound almost plausible.
I can see why those whose support for abortion is much more reluctant, who've heard enough horror stories about wire coat hangers to conclude that legal abortion is a tragic social necessity, would want to distance themselves from adoption-bashers and Ginette Paris. My knee-jerk reaction here - and yes, this is pure tu quoque with a hefty helping of overgeneralization on the side - is to tell "pro-choicers" that I will happily embrace their preferred terminology, so as to set them apart from the abortion-loving lunatic fringe, as soon as they learn to tell the mainstream anti-abortion movement apart from its lunatic fringe. The overwhelming majority of abortion opponents soundly and unreservedly condemn any acts of violence against abortionists, abortion clinics, or the women who use them, yet regularly see themselves portrayed, in the mainstream media as well as in "pro-choice" propaganda, as murderous fanatics. In my experience, there are more "pro-choicers" willing to use "celebrate" and "abortion" in the same sentence than there are "pro-lifers" who applaud the murder of a Barnett Slepian or George Tiller. When you acknowledge that Eric Rudolph doesn't speak for me, I'd like to tell the indignant "pro-choicers," I'll acknowledge that Ginette Paris doeesn't speak for you. Of course, this is an emotional response on my part, not a logical argument, and if that were all there were to it, I'd grit my teeth and leave the pro-abortion crowd to their euphemisms.
I'm not shy about my anti-abortion views - I believe abortion is a craven, irresponsible act that destroys a human life - which is why I'm sure what I have to say next would come as a shock even to those who know me well: I actually have more respect for some pro-abortion folks than I do for certain wishy-washy moderates I've known. I'm not talking about hypocrites, trolls, or Ginette Paris, who needs to be (figuratively! figuratively!) taken out and shot. I'm talking about the likes of Camille Paglia, who embraces the "pro-abortion" label and scorns the use of "pro-choice" as "cowardly." Although she supports "unconstrained access to abortion on demand," Paglia has, in her own words, "always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the powerless by the powerful" and "results in the annihilation of concrete individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue." Her contention that the individual's "absolute right to control his or her body" justifies making legal "the extermination of the powerless by the powerful" is contemptible, but I can't deny that Paglia has genuinely grappled with the ethical ramifications of what she believes. Compare that to, say, my mother, who claims to believe that abortion is morally evil, but considers herself "pro-choice" because it's not her business to try to force anyone to agree. On the surface, that may sound exactly like Paglia's position, but Paglia, an atheist who presumably doesn't conceive of "evil" as a moral absolute in the religious sense, is weighing innocent life against individual liberty, while my Christian mother is weighing innocent life against . . . the possibility of offending somebody. Hiding behind the concept of "choice," she doesn't have to think too hard about the ramifications of her position. She can vote for candidates who proudly proclaim their belief in abortion as a right, while distancing herself from the ugly reality of what happens in an abortion clinic.
What I want to say to her, and to everyone else who claims to be "pro-choice," is this: if you think it ought to be legal, why do you distance yourself from it? Why is abortion too terrible a thing to admit outright you believe should be legal, but not terrible enough that it shouldn't be legal? Are you ashamed of the word, or are you ashamed of the concept? Are you afraid that if you were confronted head-on with the reality of that "choice" you believe in, you might not find it so easy to believe in anymore? Why are so many of you offended when anti-abortion activists distribute pictures of aborted fetuses? If you believe it should be legal, why can't you bring yourself to look it in the eye?
If you believe abortion should be legal - own it. Take pride in it. Get out from under that spineless euphemism of "choice." Maybe you and I will never find common ground on this issue, let alone come to any sort of agreement. But however much I may hate what you espouse, at the very least you'll finally have my respect.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
The Miniature Rosebush
I took good care of it, I thought, but
it was just a prickly stick in the end. I think
maybe it was never really meant
to thrive.
I know it had one bud
when I bought it, blushing at the tip
with the kiss of tightly furled petals, the promise
of one perfect tender pink rose. It never opened,
that bud, and withered right there where it was.
I think it fell off eventually, though some
of the leaves hung on, brittle and brown.
Death came slowly, as if there were something to fight for.
Surely one ought to have more to offer than this. . . .
it was just a prickly stick in the end. I think
maybe it was never really meant
to thrive.
I know it had one bud
when I bought it, blushing at the tip
with the kiss of tightly furled petals, the promise
of one perfect tender pink rose. It never opened,
that bud, and withered right there where it was.
I think it fell off eventually, though some
of the leaves hung on, brittle and brown.
Death came slowly, as if there were something to fight for.
Surely one ought to have more to offer than this. . . .
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Green Eggs and Humanity
With apologies to Theo Geisel. Though, knowing how he felt about Hitler, I'm not sure he would mind.
I am Stan,
Doctor Stan.
Would you like to kill this man?
I would not like to,
Doctor Stan.
I do not want to kill this man.
Will you shock him
'til he's dead?
Will you shoot him
in the head?
I will not shock him 'til he's dead.
I will not shoot him in the head.
I do not want to kill this man.
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan.
Will you stab him
with a knife?
Gas his children,
rape his wife?
I will not stab him with a knife,
Nor gas his kids, nor rape his wife.
I will not shock him 'til he's dead.
I will not shoot him in the head.
I do not want to kill this man.
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan.
Will you hang him from a tree,
by the neck for all to see?
Will you make him dig a pit,
and bury him alive in it?
I will not hang him from a tree
by the neck for all to see!
I will not make him dig a pit
and bury him alive in it!
I will not stab him with a knife!
Nor gas his kids! Nor rape his wife!
I will not shock him 'til he's dead!
I will not shoot him in the head!
I do not want to kill this man!
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan!
Now settle down! Don't have a fit!
Why must you be so obstinate?
Who do you think yourself to be,
to speak in such a way to ME?
You hesitate to kill this man?
You must not understand the plan.
One such as you can't comprehend
the higher things that I intend!
Be silent! Do not stay your hand!
Give in and do as I demand!
In my position you can trust,
And I say kill him! Yes! You must!
I cannot keep from shuddering.
I do not want to do this thing.
I have no choice but to obey.
So I will kill him, as you say.
Say! That wasn't bad by half.
In fact, it almost made me laugh.
I did just as you said I should,
and somehow it felt awfully good.
Have you another I must kill?
I'll do it gladly, yes I will!
I'd love to shock him 'til he's dead!
Please let me shoot him in the head!
What fun, to stab him with a knife,
and gas his kids, and rape his wife!
Let's gather folks around to see:
I'm going to hang him from a tree!
How droll, to make him dig a pit
and bury him alive in it!
To start, I'll spit into his face.
Then I'll exterminate his race!
I'll hunt them down until I'm done,
and won't it be such jolly fun?
I'm glad you made me kill that man.
Thank you,
thank you, Doctor Stan!
I am Stan,
Doctor Stan.
Would you like to kill this man?
I would not like to,
Doctor Stan.
I do not want to kill this man.
Will you shock him
'til he's dead?
Will you shoot him
in the head?
I will not shock him 'til he's dead.
I will not shoot him in the head.
I do not want to kill this man.
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan.
Will you stab him
with a knife?
Gas his children,
rape his wife?
I will not stab him with a knife,
Nor gas his kids, nor rape his wife.
I will not shock him 'til he's dead.
I will not shoot him in the head.
I do not want to kill this man.
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan.
Will you hang him from a tree,
by the neck for all to see?
Will you make him dig a pit,
and bury him alive in it?
I will not hang him from a tree
by the neck for all to see!
I will not make him dig a pit
and bury him alive in it!
I will not stab him with a knife!
Nor gas his kids! Nor rape his wife!
I will not shock him 'til he's dead!
I will not shoot him in the head!
I do not want to kill this man!
I will not kill him, Doctor Stan!
Now settle down! Don't have a fit!
Why must you be so obstinate?
Who do you think yourself to be,
to speak in such a way to ME?
You hesitate to kill this man?
You must not understand the plan.
One such as you can't comprehend
the higher things that I intend!
Be silent! Do not stay your hand!
Give in and do as I demand!
In my position you can trust,
And I say kill him! Yes! You must!
I cannot keep from shuddering.
I do not want to do this thing.
I have no choice but to obey.
So I will kill him, as you say.
Say! That wasn't bad by half.
In fact, it almost made me laugh.
I did just as you said I should,
and somehow it felt awfully good.
Have you another I must kill?
I'll do it gladly, yes I will!
I'd love to shock him 'til he's dead!
Please let me shoot him in the head!
What fun, to stab him with a knife,
and gas his kids, and rape his wife!
Let's gather folks around to see:
I'm going to hang him from a tree!
How droll, to make him dig a pit
and bury him alive in it!
To start, I'll spit into his face.
Then I'll exterminate his race!
I'll hunt them down until I'm done,
and won't it be such jolly fun?
I'm glad you made me kill that man.
Thank you,
thank you, Doctor Stan!
Monday, February 21, 2011
Out of Battery
I don't even remember what we were arguing about the first time she hit me. I think it had something to do with my bookcases. She was disappointed how many books I still had. By her way of thinking, it was my depression and loneliness that had made me a hoarder, and now that I was with her, that shouldn't be a problem anymore. What she didn't realize, what she didn't want to hear, was that my book-hoarding days were behind me. I'd given away all the books I didn't really want, and the living room was still lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, the shelves packed with volumes that I cherished, books I had enjoyed or was eager to read, books that brought joy to my heart when I looked at them. I loved my books more than I'd ever loved her, and I think she knew it.
I don't remember what we were arguing about the first time she hit me; what I do remember is where. Where geographically, and where on me. We were in the dining room of our apartment, right by the entrance to the hall. She was closer to the hall and had her back to it. I was facing her, with my back to the living room. Her face was scary and red, wild-eyed, irrational. This wasn't the woman who had once been my dearest friend, the one I had resigned myself to loving for the rest of my life. This wasn't the sweet, childlike spirit I affectionately called "Bug." I didn't know this rage-bound termagant. When her hand lashed out suddenly and struck me just below the left collarbone, I couldn't believe it had really happened.
She'd been a victim of domestic violence herself. Her first husband, with his military police training, had boasted that he could hit her, hard, in a way that wouldn't leave a mark, so there wouldn't be any evidence of his assault even if she did go to the authorities. (It's not as if she could really have gone to her husband's colleagues for help, anyway.) He'd forced her to participate in painful and degrading sex acts; this was in the early 1980s, when most people considered "marital rape" to be a contradiction in terms. On one occasion, he had nearly strangled her. She'd finally escaped with her two sons to a women's shelter, where she was helped and counseled to break her ties with him and learn to stand on her own. It had taken her over twenty years to understand that what he'd done to her really wasn't her fault, and she had expressed an interest in volunteering at a shelter like the ones where she had once stayed, using her own experience to help other abused women.
How could she have hit me?
I must have stepped into someone else's life, because this sort of thing didn't happen to me. I wasn't supposed to be one of those women who let themselves be hit by a partner who claims to love them. I had been raised from early childhood to believe that domestic abuse was unacceptable. Violence wasn't how we solved our problems in my world. Even my parents, although they weren't opposed to corporal punishment, rarely employed it. I'd known a number of battered women in the hospitals and group homes where I had spent so much of my young adulthood, and I'd regarded them with compassion. How horrible, for a person to think so little of herself that she would allow someone to treat her that way. With my interest in psychology and criminology, I knew the factors that contributed to interpersonal violence, including ongoing violence between intimate partners. I knew about the cycle of violence - and the progression. Now I had become a victim. A statistic.
Or had I? She hadn't hit me that hard, after all. Of course, that's what all the battered women say, but in my case it was true. It hadn't even really hurt. All she did was flick her hand at me. Well, it was more than a flick, but it wasn't exactly a hit. Not a hit like you think of when you think about domestic violence, anyway. She hadn't punched me or slapped my face. I didn't have to look under my shirt to know it hadn't left a mark. Maybe I was overdramatizing things to think of this as an assault. My brother and I used to hit each other like this when we were kids, and neither of us had grown up violent.
Actually, I realized with a warm shame, this was probably the best thing that could have happened to me - that is, to us. When she realized what she'd done, she was going to be horrified. I didn't have to feel bad about that; after all, she was the one who had done it. She'd changed in the months we'd had the apartment. In the years that we had been acquaintances and then friends, before she professed her love for me, she'd always been quiet and meek - to a fault, even. She'd told me she had a bossy side, but I didn't realize just how domineering and uncompromising she could be until we'd signed the lease. More and more, it seemed nothing I did was ever good enough for her. This was the first time she'd hit me, but she'd thrown things at me before, hard. She talked frequently about how well she was doing emotionally (like me, she had a lifelong history of mental illness), and I hadn't dared contradict her. Now surely she would see what she had become. She couldn't possibly keep berating me over something selfish I'd done six weeks ago and apologized for a thousand times. She couldn't possibly insist that I was the one causing all the problems in the relationship, just because I lacked initiative when it came to doing housework and was too easily influenced by my mother.
For a few seconds, I just stood there while all these thoughts swirled around in my head. Then, as fresh tears sprang to my eyes, I simply said, "You hit me."
She would apologize now, I knew. She'd be appalled with herself. I wouldn't let her grovel, but I was going to be firm: you will get help, and this will not happen again. She'd do anything I asked now, but all I wanted was my friend back. I was waiting for her with open arms. I wasn't going to take advantage of her guilt. I would never throw it back in her face that she had hit me once.
"Yes, I did," she snarled, "and I'm not sorry. You make me so mad . . ." and she was off into another tirade. She was blaming me, for making her hit me! I was stunned. Had I ever really known this woman at all?
I don't remember how the rest of the argument went. I know I apologized for pushing her to such extremes of anger. I would have confessed to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, too, if I'd thought it would placate her, because the truth is that she terrified me. I'd always thought "spitting mad" was a figure of speech, until I'd seen the flecks of saliva in the corners of her mouth when her contorted puce face was hovering just inches away from mine. For months now I'd been walking on eggshells, living from outburst to outburst. I hadn't felt this way in nearly ten years, since I was seventeen and living with my father. He'd raged at me too, and although he was no longer in my life, I still saw him in my dreams, his face and body tense with a hot red energy. He'd never hit me in his wrath, though I had often feared he would, but his emotional abuse had taken its toll. Now I was right back where I'd sworn I would never be again: living with intense anxiety. I felt the impact of her hand long after it reasonably should have faded away, as if she'd managed to leave an invisible and painless bruise.
Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who had noticed her deteriorating mental health. We lived across the street from a county mental health clinic and "clubhouse" for mental health "consumers." My partner was active in a number of activities there, often in a leadership capacity, and nearly everyone liked and respected her. Even when she was at the clubhouse, though, she was having trouble controlling her anger. One day, when she'd launched into a vicious tirade at a man who was abusing his telephone privileges, the staff social worker, whom my partner liked and admired tremendously, called her aside to discuss her emotions and behavior. I was at home at the time, but when my partner called and invited me to join the meeting, I hurried over.
For some reason we ended up discussing an incident that had taken place three months earlier, when she and I went out together to the grocery store and to get the mail. There had been tension between us when we left, and everything I said and did made things worse. Since we were together, I'd left my keys at home, and as we approached the steps up to our apartment, my partner hurried ahead of me to the front door and taunted me, "See how you like being locked out!" I had no idea how long she meant to make me wait, but I wasn't about to wait around at her mercy and find out. I went to the rental office and called my mother, who came to pick me up for the night. The next day, I came home, and my partner apologized for what she had done, but when I told her some of the things I had discussed with my mother, she became angry again - not just with my mother for presuming to judge when she didn't fully understand the situation, but with me for turning to her in the first place. She'd only had the door locked for about ten minutes anyway - why did I have to overreact? Her last word on the matter was that she'd been wrong to lock me out, but I'd really deserved it, and all she'd needed was a little space to cool off, and if I'd just given her that, we would have settled everything nicely and I wouldn't have turned my family against her.
I'd pretty much come around to accepting the "official version" of the incident, but the social worker somehow couldn't bring herself to terms with it. She insisted my partner needed to accept responsibility for what she'd done, that it had been wrong. "I know it was wrong!" my partner sputtered, her fury barely contained. "Why can't you just let it go! I wasn't the only one at fault, but everyone concentrates on what I did!"
I didn't dare mention what had happened a few days earlier. If she knew my partner had hit me, the social worker would have been legally and morally obliged to treat it as a case of domestic violence. It would ruin the special rapport my partner had always shared with her. I couldn't bring myself to turn someone she respected and admired against her like that.
My partner and I went home together later that evening, but only a couple of days later she went to the clubhouse and didn't come back. She'd accepted that she needed help and she would be going into the hospital for a few days. I packed a bag for her and rushed it over, and we parted with hugs and hope. The days that followed were the best I'd had in a long time. I had the apartment to myself, and in between long uninterrupted hours with a book I got all sorts of things done. I paid the bills, which was something she usually took care of. I looked through some cookbooks and found an easy recipe I could prepare to surprise her with when she came home. I kept the house reasonably neat and stayed in regular touch with her family and friends, giving out information or the hospital phone number as she deemed appropriate. She and I talked every day, and after only a couple of days she sounded much calmer, more relaxed and optimistic. It was less than a week after she went in that she was released, and a friend with a car brought her home.
That was mid-December, and the rest of the year we were almost as happy together as we'd imagined we would be when we got the apartment. Except for the first month of our official coupledom, it was the happiest time in our relationship. I won't say there was no conflict between us those three or so weeks, but what there was, we dealt with honestly and constructively. We enjoyed each other's company again, and I found myself daring to believe that the worst was over. We'd survived a rough patch and come out stronger for it. My partner even agreed to spend Christmas with my family, and everyone had a good time. At some point, she apologized for hitting me, without qualification, and I forgave her. I understood she hadn't been herself. I didn't really need to tell her it must never happen again, but I did anyway, and she hung her head in agreement. Since she'd been mentally unbalanced at the time, I decided what she'd done didn't really count as domestic violence. Besides, she'd only hit me once, more lashing out in frustration than really trying to hurt me, and sought help almost immediately thereafter. Anyone could make one mistake.
We had a friend of hers over to ring in the new year with us, and after the friend went home, my partner got the idea to go to Denny's for a midnight meal. I didn't feel much like going out, but then I thought how much fun it would be to have a crazy little adventure we could look back and reminisce about. Once we got started, it was great fun. We laughed so much, the waitstaff must have thought we were drunk. On the way back, we stopped at a 24-hour drugstore on the corner to browse, and I realized I'd dropped my purse. I wasn't so much worried about losing the contents as I was about losing the purse itself, which she had crocheted for me. We headed back the way we'd come and it was a great relief to see the purse lying in the circle of illumination of one of the streetlights, where it had fallen when it slid off my shoulder. We went home after that. There was the faintest hint of sunrise in the sky when we finally slid with happy exhaustion into the warmth of our beds.
It was around noon when I woke. My partner was still asleep. I spent the afternoon doing things I loved: reading, playing my favorite computer game. It was nearly dusk when she walked sleepily into the living room, and I'd made up my mind to tell her something.
Since my early adolescence I'd made a point of going to bed at midnight and waking around five or six. At least, that's what I told myself. It was so easy to stay up later, for any reason; in fact, it often seemed that I was most alert in the evenings and at night, when the rest of the world (or my particular slice of it, anyway) was slowing down around me. I'd always been a night owl, and ever since I'd been out of school, I'd found myself staying up all night when I didn't have any other obligations to dictate my hours, then sleeping all morning. For the most part, I'd just assumed it was insomnia that kept me up at night, or interest in some activity. When we got the apartment, I'd promised my partner I'd try to stick to a more conventional schedule, but I often struggled with insomnia when we turned the lights out. Sometimes I fell into a restless half-sleep; other times I got up and puttered around for a while, reading in the living room or playing a computer game with headphones on, until I got tired on my own or my partner urged me to go back to bed. It happened regularly that I would wake around five or six in the morning and read for a couple hours, then feel myself growing sleepy again right around the time my partner woke for the day; actually, it happened often enough that she'd accused me of deliberately going back to sleep in order to avoid her. On days when she had promised to open the clubhouse in the morning, however much I told myself I would stay awake and enjoy the solitude, I always found myself barely able to keep my eyes open, even before she was out the door, and the moment I was alone in the apartment I headed right back to bed for another four or five hours of sleep.
A couple of weeks before our late-night Denny's jaunt, I'd spent a couple of days alone at my uncle's house, caring for his two dogs while he was on vacation with his family. I told myself I would do the responsible thing and go to bed at midnight, but I just couldn't bring myself to head to bed when I wasn't tired. The hours slipped by before I knew it, and it was around six o'clock when I finally fell asleep. I was disgusted with myself and figured the rest of the day was shot. Since I often slept ten hours a day at home, I could hardly expect to be awake before sunset. To my surprise, I woke right around noon, and I felt as refreshed as I did on days when I'd woken at noon after sleeping intermittently since midnight. Looking back over my adult life, I realized how often I'd fallen into that precise pattern when left to my own devices (in the group homes, for instance) - asleep at dawn, awake at noon. Attempts to get up in the morning and stay up were met with fatigue and failure. Even when I was in the hospital, and on medications that knocked me out at night, I never woke feeling really refreshed, and although I was often up before sunrise, I usually went back to bed before breakfast and slept all morning. (I'd spent over a year in a long-term facility, and the whole time I was there I don't think I ate breakfast more than thirty or forty times. Sometimes, when I knew from the posted menu that they were serving pancakes, I would force myself to stay up, only to collapse gratefully in bed after a meal I'd been nearly too tired to enjoy.) I'd always thought of myself as a person who could get by with less than the average amount of sleep, and I was ashamed of the hours I had kept for so many years. But what if the problem wasn't that I was sleeping too much at all, but that I was sleeping at the wrong time? Maybe my body was just naturally programmed to be asleep in the morning and to wake at noon. I could force myself to sleep at other times, either with chemical assistance or by lying in the dark with my eyes closed until my brain took the hint, but it wouldn't be really satisfactory sleep, and my body would still crave sleep at the proper time anyway. It seemed there had been two kinds of days in my adult life: days when I went to bed at night and slept until noon, and days when I went to bed at dawn and slept until noon. I didn't need or desire ten hours of sleep after all! I just needed to get six hours of sleep when my body and brain were ready for it!
It seemed so perfectly logical, and yet so absurd. I hadn't let myself think about it too much, and I hadn't said anything to my partner. I'd all but forgotten about it until that New Year's Day when we both stayed up all night. It all made sense. She'd been running on excitement and novelty, fighting her body's natural rhythms (whether she felt it or not) to stay awake all night, and when she'd finally succumbed to her exhaustion, her body needed even more rest than usual, which was why she slept for nearly twelve hours. I'd been tired too after our busy night, but no more so than my partner would be, say, after a busy day at the clubhouse, and I'd gone to bed at just the right time for sleep at its most restful and efficient. My hypothesis was, if not confirmed, at least plainly supported.
When she woke that evening, I shared with her what I'd observed. She seemed moderately interested, though more focused on putting together something for dinner. Then I proposed an experiment: for two weeks, I would sleep according to my body's natural rhythms. I wouldn't force myself to stay up all night, but I wouldn't make any special effort to go to bed at the time I normally tried to, either. If the experiment confirmed what I already expected about my body's natural rhythm, I would be in position to do something about it - to see a sleep specialist, perhaps. I suspected we might not even choose to go that route, however. Practically, it wouldn't make much difference. My "insomnia" had given me plenty of practice at being awake at night without disturbing her. She was often out of the house in the morning, so it wouldn't make any difference to her whether I was asleep or not. (I thought I could even help her get ready to go in the morning and spend some time with her before she left, then settle down to my morning's rest.) I'd gotten to be pretty good over the years at sleeping through regular daytime noise; those days when she was home, she could work on her crafts or watch the stupid morning TV shows that I detested, or even have friends over, and the only concession I would expect in the interest of my peaceful slumbers would be to have the bedroom door closed. She complained about my lack of drive in matters of housekeeping, and I lamented how little time I had for the solitary activities I enjoyed. If I could spend the nights reading, writing, or playing on the computer instead of trying to force myself to sleep, getting time for myself wouldn't be a problem, and contributing to the upkeep of our home wouldn't seem like such a burden. I'd even have more physical and emotional energy for the activities she wished to share with me, which I didn't always come to with the greatest enthusiasm. But if I knew I would have all night to do the things I wanted to do, I wouldn't mind nearly so much spending the afternoons and evenings the way she wanted to spend them. Living in accord with my body's natural rhythm could only have positive effects on my mood and my health in general.
I didn't get to explain the benefits I thought might come from this unconventional schedule, however. I didn't even have a chance to make it clear that my primary interest was finding a solution that worked for us both, whether that involved adhering to my innate biological rhythm or seeking to alter it somehow. When she realized what I wanted to do, her relaxed and friendly mood shifted into pure wrath as quickly as I've ever seen. It was as if some tight bomb of anger had burst in her chest, and it was all her skin could do to contain the shrapnel.
She wouldn't stand to hear of me doing any such thing! I'd promised before we got the apartment to give up my nocturnal ways, and now I wasn't even pretending to honor that promise. It simply wasn't acceptable! Not even as a two-week experiment!
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't realize you felt that strongly about it."
"Well, you should have!" she screamed. "I told you how I feel about people sleeping all day! You told me you weren't going to do it!" She proceeded to remind me of all the reasons I should have known better than to mention such a thing, and they were all about her. Her first husband's job with the military police had required him to work irregular shifts, and it had been awful for her trying to work around that, as a mother of an active little boy and an infant, and there was no way she could feel comfortable going about her dailly activities in the morning while I was asleep, no matter how I assured her that I didn't mind noise and that I wouldn't be upset even if she did happen to wake me accidentally; most likely I'd just grunt affably, roll over, and fall contentedly back to sleep. She reminded me of the years she'd been depressed and spent most of her time sleeping, more than twenty hours a day sometimes; sleeping during the day meant depression, to her, and it offended her to the very depths of her soul that I would even suggest such a thing might be perfectly healthy for me.
"Never mind," I said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have mentioned it. It was a stupid idea anyway."
"Yes, it was!" she snarled. "But it's too late to say you're sorry. It doesn't change the fact that you said it. It doesn't change the fact that you would even think about such a thing, when you promised me back in June that you wouldn't be sleeping all day! You lied to me, and you've ruined everything!"
She reminded me of all the compromises she'd made for me. She didn't want a living room lined with bookcases. She didn't want to become a vegetarian. But she'd known from the beginning that my books and I were a package deal, and that I didn't want to be with someone who ate meat, and she'd accepted those things for my sake. (Actually, she hadn't. She made no secret of the fact that she ate meat when she was out with other friends, and the way she kept throwing her great "sacrifice" in my face every time we had an argument, I'd started wishing I'd never asked that of her in the first place. What I'd wanted was someone who shared my convictions, and I know now that if I was willing to settle in that regard, I really had no right to ask her to live by them.) What, she asked belligerently, had I ever done for her?
"Wait a minute," I protested. "You can't compare your feelings about unconventional sleep times with my position on vegetarianism. You're talking about a personal preference, and I consider eating meat to be morally wrong."
I'd thought I'd seen her angry before. I thought I'd heard her shout. I'd been painfully naive. "It is morally wrong, for me!" she screamed. "Sleeping during the day is morally wrong, for me!" If it weren't so terrifying to have this mighty tantrum going on just a couple of feet away from me, it might have been almost laughable in its absurdity: a reasonably intelligent fifty-year-old woman huffing and puffing and insisting that her personal preferences, no matter how strong or rooted in traumatic experience, were morally equivalent to my ethical convictions.
I backtracked all over myself. I admitted I'd been thoughtless and selfish. The more I apologized, the louder she screamed. I don't remember how we got through the rest of the night. I think we came to some semblance of peace, but the issue (by which I mean her temper) kept spontaneously erupting over the course of the next few days. More than anything else, she was upset that I'd suggested my moral values were more "important" than her individual preferences, as if in so doing I'd suggested I was more important than she was as a person. (It never occurred to me until just now that I could have turned it around on her. I never would have dreamed of comparing, say, my personal distaste for her turning the TV on when she wasn't really watching it, with her principled refusal to say anything strongly negative about her abusive ex-husband in the presence of her sons.)
It was the second day of the fight when she hit me for the second time. She'd ranted plenty the night before, and thrown things, but she hadn't laid a hand on me. The next day, when she brought it up again, I thought maybe now that she was a little calmer, she would be more reasonable, so I dared to suggest, very hesitantly, that, while I understood the strength of her feelings and I maybe I should have anticipated just how intensely she would react, perhaps upon further reflection she could understand my feelings too and see that I really hadn't meant any harm.
This was too much to ask. "It doesn't matter what you meant!" she snapped. "You can't treat me like this and then think it will all go away just because you didn't mean it! You did mean it or you wouldn't have said it!" I was sitting on my bed, fighting back tears, and she was standing over me, and she leaned over and struck me while I cowered.
She went to the living room after that to crochet and calm down, which in her case meant working herself up into a state of tightly controlled, highly wounded forbearance. I lay on my bed and cried - quietly, so as not to disturb her. She hated my tears.
I knew I should leave. I knew I needed to pick up the telephone and call my mother. I needed to say "She hit me once last month, and today she hit me again." I needed to pack a bag and go out by the rental office to wait. I knew this.
I also knew I wasn't going to do it.
I wasn't ready to admit that I'd failed. I couldn't bear to let anyone know that I'd been treated that way. And what if they agreed with her, that I was the one causing all the problems? I still couldn't bring myself to think of a couple of light smacks as domestic violence. After all, real domestic battery is a criminal offense, and what she'd done hadn't been actionably illegal. If I complained to the police about it, they'd probably laugh in my face. If what she said was true, I had been horribly selfish and unreasonably demanding, and people would probably understand why she'd been angry enough to lash out. She hadn't really tried to hurt me. I was bigger and stronger than she was. No one would understand.
She wasn't going anywhere, so I would have to be the one to leave. I'd lose my home, and if my family wasn't willing to take me in, I'd end up in the system again. And unless I could convince someone that she needed to be in the hospital again - and I shuddered just to think what might happen if I told her allies at the clubhouse and clinic what she had done (she knew the social worker she so admired had asked me a few times if there was something "wrong," and although I'd always been adamant in my denials, my partner was furious at me for having been publicly distraught enough to make her ask the question) - I'd have to leave before I'd had time to make any sort of proper arrangements at all, and trust her not to damage or destroy my books or computer in one of her rages.
Besides, surely she wouldn't be like this unless something were wrong? She'd realize soon that she needed to go back into the hospital. She loved me, didn't she? She was a sweet and gentle person underneath it all, wasn't she? If I left now, I might really ruin everything.
I'll always remember that as one of the lowest, saddest, and weakest moments of my life: the moment after that second hit when I knew I wasn't going to leave, and how desperately I tried to convince myself I hadn't simply gotten used to fear and internalized the blame.
For the next ten weeks I lived from day to day, from minute to minute, from hope to hope, from explosion to explosion, and then it was over. She threw me out. It was awful at the time, but looking back, I can see how none of the things I ever feared were ever really close to happening. My family was willing to take me in. I went back to the apartment one last time and moved my things into storage. Nothing was lost that had ever been worth having.
If I'd known I could do it - if I'd known I had options, if I'd known for sure I could survive and so could she - would I have taken the initiative to get out earlier? I'd like to think so. And honestly, I'm pretty sure I would have, though sometimes I wonder if I ever could have brought myself to challenge my fear, inertia, and yes, the lingering traces of loyalty and love. What I do know is that it will never happen again. I know better now than to ignore the red flags, which I finally had to admit had been there from the beginning. I'd seen them, and I'd worried about them, but ultimately, I had dismissed them. I've always had better instincts than I've given myself credit for. It's time for me to stop doubting myself at every turn.
Looking back, it's hard to have faith in my own strength now. After all, I was the one who sat there and cried while she hit me. But the fact is, there was something I could have done to make our relationship work. I could have relinquished my essence. I could have given away most of my books, and she would have been so proud. I could have forced myself to get up in the morning and slog miserably through the day until my natural rhythm of awareness caught up with me in the afternoon, and she would have probably have been kind enough to "let" me sleep in once or twice a week. I could have plastered a smile on my face and died inside, and she would have loved me - except I really couldn't do it. She wasn't the first one who drew me in with a promise of unconditional acceptance, only to seek to bend me to some unnatural design - and she wasn't the first who failed. My essence, my core, protects itself with an impregnability stronger than my need to be loved, or my need to belong. Under my surface with its scars, I've carried myself like a treasure through all these years, something too precious to be hurt or destroyed, even if I was the only one who knew - even if I was the only one who would ever know.
In the thing that matters most, I am, and always have been, strong enough.
I don't remember what we were arguing about the first time she hit me; what I do remember is where. Where geographically, and where on me. We were in the dining room of our apartment, right by the entrance to the hall. She was closer to the hall and had her back to it. I was facing her, with my back to the living room. Her face was scary and red, wild-eyed, irrational. This wasn't the woman who had once been my dearest friend, the one I had resigned myself to loving for the rest of my life. This wasn't the sweet, childlike spirit I affectionately called "Bug." I didn't know this rage-bound termagant. When her hand lashed out suddenly and struck me just below the left collarbone, I couldn't believe it had really happened.
She'd been a victim of domestic violence herself. Her first husband, with his military police training, had boasted that he could hit her, hard, in a way that wouldn't leave a mark, so there wouldn't be any evidence of his assault even if she did go to the authorities. (It's not as if she could really have gone to her husband's colleagues for help, anyway.) He'd forced her to participate in painful and degrading sex acts; this was in the early 1980s, when most people considered "marital rape" to be a contradiction in terms. On one occasion, he had nearly strangled her. She'd finally escaped with her two sons to a women's shelter, where she was helped and counseled to break her ties with him and learn to stand on her own. It had taken her over twenty years to understand that what he'd done to her really wasn't her fault, and she had expressed an interest in volunteering at a shelter like the ones where she had once stayed, using her own experience to help other abused women.
How could she have hit me?
I must have stepped into someone else's life, because this sort of thing didn't happen to me. I wasn't supposed to be one of those women who let themselves be hit by a partner who claims to love them. I had been raised from early childhood to believe that domestic abuse was unacceptable. Violence wasn't how we solved our problems in my world. Even my parents, although they weren't opposed to corporal punishment, rarely employed it. I'd known a number of battered women in the hospitals and group homes where I had spent so much of my young adulthood, and I'd regarded them with compassion. How horrible, for a person to think so little of herself that she would allow someone to treat her that way. With my interest in psychology and criminology, I knew the factors that contributed to interpersonal violence, including ongoing violence between intimate partners. I knew about the cycle of violence - and the progression. Now I had become a victim. A statistic.
Or had I? She hadn't hit me that hard, after all. Of course, that's what all the battered women say, but in my case it was true. It hadn't even really hurt. All she did was flick her hand at me. Well, it was more than a flick, but it wasn't exactly a hit. Not a hit like you think of when you think about domestic violence, anyway. She hadn't punched me or slapped my face. I didn't have to look under my shirt to know it hadn't left a mark. Maybe I was overdramatizing things to think of this as an assault. My brother and I used to hit each other like this when we were kids, and neither of us had grown up violent.
Actually, I realized with a warm shame, this was probably the best thing that could have happened to me - that is, to us. When she realized what she'd done, she was going to be horrified. I didn't have to feel bad about that; after all, she was the one who had done it. She'd changed in the months we'd had the apartment. In the years that we had been acquaintances and then friends, before she professed her love for me, she'd always been quiet and meek - to a fault, even. She'd told me she had a bossy side, but I didn't realize just how domineering and uncompromising she could be until we'd signed the lease. More and more, it seemed nothing I did was ever good enough for her. This was the first time she'd hit me, but she'd thrown things at me before, hard. She talked frequently about how well she was doing emotionally (like me, she had a lifelong history of mental illness), and I hadn't dared contradict her. Now surely she would see what she had become. She couldn't possibly keep berating me over something selfish I'd done six weeks ago and apologized for a thousand times. She couldn't possibly insist that I was the one causing all the problems in the relationship, just because I lacked initiative when it came to doing housework and was too easily influenced by my mother.
For a few seconds, I just stood there while all these thoughts swirled around in my head. Then, as fresh tears sprang to my eyes, I simply said, "You hit me."
She would apologize now, I knew. She'd be appalled with herself. I wouldn't let her grovel, but I was going to be firm: you will get help, and this will not happen again. She'd do anything I asked now, but all I wanted was my friend back. I was waiting for her with open arms. I wasn't going to take advantage of her guilt. I would never throw it back in her face that she had hit me once.
"Yes, I did," she snarled, "and I'm not sorry. You make me so mad . . ." and she was off into another tirade. She was blaming me, for making her hit me! I was stunned. Had I ever really known this woman at all?
I don't remember how the rest of the argument went. I know I apologized for pushing her to such extremes of anger. I would have confessed to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa, too, if I'd thought it would placate her, because the truth is that she terrified me. I'd always thought "spitting mad" was a figure of speech, until I'd seen the flecks of saliva in the corners of her mouth when her contorted puce face was hovering just inches away from mine. For months now I'd been walking on eggshells, living from outburst to outburst. I hadn't felt this way in nearly ten years, since I was seventeen and living with my father. He'd raged at me too, and although he was no longer in my life, I still saw him in my dreams, his face and body tense with a hot red energy. He'd never hit me in his wrath, though I had often feared he would, but his emotional abuse had taken its toll. Now I was right back where I'd sworn I would never be again: living with intense anxiety. I felt the impact of her hand long after it reasonably should have faded away, as if she'd managed to leave an invisible and painless bruise.
Fortunately, I wasn't the only one who had noticed her deteriorating mental health. We lived across the street from a county mental health clinic and "clubhouse" for mental health "consumers." My partner was active in a number of activities there, often in a leadership capacity, and nearly everyone liked and respected her. Even when she was at the clubhouse, though, she was having trouble controlling her anger. One day, when she'd launched into a vicious tirade at a man who was abusing his telephone privileges, the staff social worker, whom my partner liked and admired tremendously, called her aside to discuss her emotions and behavior. I was at home at the time, but when my partner called and invited me to join the meeting, I hurried over.
For some reason we ended up discussing an incident that had taken place three months earlier, when she and I went out together to the grocery store and to get the mail. There had been tension between us when we left, and everything I said and did made things worse. Since we were together, I'd left my keys at home, and as we approached the steps up to our apartment, my partner hurried ahead of me to the front door and taunted me, "See how you like being locked out!" I had no idea how long she meant to make me wait, but I wasn't about to wait around at her mercy and find out. I went to the rental office and called my mother, who came to pick me up for the night. The next day, I came home, and my partner apologized for what she had done, but when I told her some of the things I had discussed with my mother, she became angry again - not just with my mother for presuming to judge when she didn't fully understand the situation, but with me for turning to her in the first place. She'd only had the door locked for about ten minutes anyway - why did I have to overreact? Her last word on the matter was that she'd been wrong to lock me out, but I'd really deserved it, and all she'd needed was a little space to cool off, and if I'd just given her that, we would have settled everything nicely and I wouldn't have turned my family against her.
I'd pretty much come around to accepting the "official version" of the incident, but the social worker somehow couldn't bring herself to terms with it. She insisted my partner needed to accept responsibility for what she'd done, that it had been wrong. "I know it was wrong!" my partner sputtered, her fury barely contained. "Why can't you just let it go! I wasn't the only one at fault, but everyone concentrates on what I did!"
I didn't dare mention what had happened a few days earlier. If she knew my partner had hit me, the social worker would have been legally and morally obliged to treat it as a case of domestic violence. It would ruin the special rapport my partner had always shared with her. I couldn't bring myself to turn someone she respected and admired against her like that.
My partner and I went home together later that evening, but only a couple of days later she went to the clubhouse and didn't come back. She'd accepted that she needed help and she would be going into the hospital for a few days. I packed a bag for her and rushed it over, and we parted with hugs and hope. The days that followed were the best I'd had in a long time. I had the apartment to myself, and in between long uninterrupted hours with a book I got all sorts of things done. I paid the bills, which was something she usually took care of. I looked through some cookbooks and found an easy recipe I could prepare to surprise her with when she came home. I kept the house reasonably neat and stayed in regular touch with her family and friends, giving out information or the hospital phone number as she deemed appropriate. She and I talked every day, and after only a couple of days she sounded much calmer, more relaxed and optimistic. It was less than a week after she went in that she was released, and a friend with a car brought her home.
That was mid-December, and the rest of the year we were almost as happy together as we'd imagined we would be when we got the apartment. Except for the first month of our official coupledom, it was the happiest time in our relationship. I won't say there was no conflict between us those three or so weeks, but what there was, we dealt with honestly and constructively. We enjoyed each other's company again, and I found myself daring to believe that the worst was over. We'd survived a rough patch and come out stronger for it. My partner even agreed to spend Christmas with my family, and everyone had a good time. At some point, she apologized for hitting me, without qualification, and I forgave her. I understood she hadn't been herself. I didn't really need to tell her it must never happen again, but I did anyway, and she hung her head in agreement. Since she'd been mentally unbalanced at the time, I decided what she'd done didn't really count as domestic violence. Besides, she'd only hit me once, more lashing out in frustration than really trying to hurt me, and sought help almost immediately thereafter. Anyone could make one mistake.
We had a friend of hers over to ring in the new year with us, and after the friend went home, my partner got the idea to go to Denny's for a midnight meal. I didn't feel much like going out, but then I thought how much fun it would be to have a crazy little adventure we could look back and reminisce about. Once we got started, it was great fun. We laughed so much, the waitstaff must have thought we were drunk. On the way back, we stopped at a 24-hour drugstore on the corner to browse, and I realized I'd dropped my purse. I wasn't so much worried about losing the contents as I was about losing the purse itself, which she had crocheted for me. We headed back the way we'd come and it was a great relief to see the purse lying in the circle of illumination of one of the streetlights, where it had fallen when it slid off my shoulder. We went home after that. There was the faintest hint of sunrise in the sky when we finally slid with happy exhaustion into the warmth of our beds.
It was around noon when I woke. My partner was still asleep. I spent the afternoon doing things I loved: reading, playing my favorite computer game. It was nearly dusk when she walked sleepily into the living room, and I'd made up my mind to tell her something.
Since my early adolescence I'd made a point of going to bed at midnight and waking around five or six. At least, that's what I told myself. It was so easy to stay up later, for any reason; in fact, it often seemed that I was most alert in the evenings and at night, when the rest of the world (or my particular slice of it, anyway) was slowing down around me. I'd always been a night owl, and ever since I'd been out of school, I'd found myself staying up all night when I didn't have any other obligations to dictate my hours, then sleeping all morning. For the most part, I'd just assumed it was insomnia that kept me up at night, or interest in some activity. When we got the apartment, I'd promised my partner I'd try to stick to a more conventional schedule, but I often struggled with insomnia when we turned the lights out. Sometimes I fell into a restless half-sleep; other times I got up and puttered around for a while, reading in the living room or playing a computer game with headphones on, until I got tired on my own or my partner urged me to go back to bed. It happened regularly that I would wake around five or six in the morning and read for a couple hours, then feel myself growing sleepy again right around the time my partner woke for the day; actually, it happened often enough that she'd accused me of deliberately going back to sleep in order to avoid her. On days when she had promised to open the clubhouse in the morning, however much I told myself I would stay awake and enjoy the solitude, I always found myself barely able to keep my eyes open, even before she was out the door, and the moment I was alone in the apartment I headed right back to bed for another four or five hours of sleep.
A couple of weeks before our late-night Denny's jaunt, I'd spent a couple of days alone at my uncle's house, caring for his two dogs while he was on vacation with his family. I told myself I would do the responsible thing and go to bed at midnight, but I just couldn't bring myself to head to bed when I wasn't tired. The hours slipped by before I knew it, and it was around six o'clock when I finally fell asleep. I was disgusted with myself and figured the rest of the day was shot. Since I often slept ten hours a day at home, I could hardly expect to be awake before sunset. To my surprise, I woke right around noon, and I felt as refreshed as I did on days when I'd woken at noon after sleeping intermittently since midnight. Looking back over my adult life, I realized how often I'd fallen into that precise pattern when left to my own devices (in the group homes, for instance) - asleep at dawn, awake at noon. Attempts to get up in the morning and stay up were met with fatigue and failure. Even when I was in the hospital, and on medications that knocked me out at night, I never woke feeling really refreshed, and although I was often up before sunrise, I usually went back to bed before breakfast and slept all morning. (I'd spent over a year in a long-term facility, and the whole time I was there I don't think I ate breakfast more than thirty or forty times. Sometimes, when I knew from the posted menu that they were serving pancakes, I would force myself to stay up, only to collapse gratefully in bed after a meal I'd been nearly too tired to enjoy.) I'd always thought of myself as a person who could get by with less than the average amount of sleep, and I was ashamed of the hours I had kept for so many years. But what if the problem wasn't that I was sleeping too much at all, but that I was sleeping at the wrong time? Maybe my body was just naturally programmed to be asleep in the morning and to wake at noon. I could force myself to sleep at other times, either with chemical assistance or by lying in the dark with my eyes closed until my brain took the hint, but it wouldn't be really satisfactory sleep, and my body would still crave sleep at the proper time anyway. It seemed there had been two kinds of days in my adult life: days when I went to bed at night and slept until noon, and days when I went to bed at dawn and slept until noon. I didn't need or desire ten hours of sleep after all! I just needed to get six hours of sleep when my body and brain were ready for it!
It seemed so perfectly logical, and yet so absurd. I hadn't let myself think about it too much, and I hadn't said anything to my partner. I'd all but forgotten about it until that New Year's Day when we both stayed up all night. It all made sense. She'd been running on excitement and novelty, fighting her body's natural rhythms (whether she felt it or not) to stay awake all night, and when she'd finally succumbed to her exhaustion, her body needed even more rest than usual, which was why she slept for nearly twelve hours. I'd been tired too after our busy night, but no more so than my partner would be, say, after a busy day at the clubhouse, and I'd gone to bed at just the right time for sleep at its most restful and efficient. My hypothesis was, if not confirmed, at least plainly supported.
When she woke that evening, I shared with her what I'd observed. She seemed moderately interested, though more focused on putting together something for dinner. Then I proposed an experiment: for two weeks, I would sleep according to my body's natural rhythms. I wouldn't force myself to stay up all night, but I wouldn't make any special effort to go to bed at the time I normally tried to, either. If the experiment confirmed what I already expected about my body's natural rhythm, I would be in position to do something about it - to see a sleep specialist, perhaps. I suspected we might not even choose to go that route, however. Practically, it wouldn't make much difference. My "insomnia" had given me plenty of practice at being awake at night without disturbing her. She was often out of the house in the morning, so it wouldn't make any difference to her whether I was asleep or not. (I thought I could even help her get ready to go in the morning and spend some time with her before she left, then settle down to my morning's rest.) I'd gotten to be pretty good over the years at sleeping through regular daytime noise; those days when she was home, she could work on her crafts or watch the stupid morning TV shows that I detested, or even have friends over, and the only concession I would expect in the interest of my peaceful slumbers would be to have the bedroom door closed. She complained about my lack of drive in matters of housekeeping, and I lamented how little time I had for the solitary activities I enjoyed. If I could spend the nights reading, writing, or playing on the computer instead of trying to force myself to sleep, getting time for myself wouldn't be a problem, and contributing to the upkeep of our home wouldn't seem like such a burden. I'd even have more physical and emotional energy for the activities she wished to share with me, which I didn't always come to with the greatest enthusiasm. But if I knew I would have all night to do the things I wanted to do, I wouldn't mind nearly so much spending the afternoons and evenings the way she wanted to spend them. Living in accord with my body's natural rhythm could only have positive effects on my mood and my health in general.
I didn't get to explain the benefits I thought might come from this unconventional schedule, however. I didn't even have a chance to make it clear that my primary interest was finding a solution that worked for us both, whether that involved adhering to my innate biological rhythm or seeking to alter it somehow. When she realized what I wanted to do, her relaxed and friendly mood shifted into pure wrath as quickly as I've ever seen. It was as if some tight bomb of anger had burst in her chest, and it was all her skin could do to contain the shrapnel.
She wouldn't stand to hear of me doing any such thing! I'd promised before we got the apartment to give up my nocturnal ways, and now I wasn't even pretending to honor that promise. It simply wasn't acceptable! Not even as a two-week experiment!
"I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't realize you felt that strongly about it."
"Well, you should have!" she screamed. "I told you how I feel about people sleeping all day! You told me you weren't going to do it!" She proceeded to remind me of all the reasons I should have known better than to mention such a thing, and they were all about her. Her first husband's job with the military police had required him to work irregular shifts, and it had been awful for her trying to work around that, as a mother of an active little boy and an infant, and there was no way she could feel comfortable going about her dailly activities in the morning while I was asleep, no matter how I assured her that I didn't mind noise and that I wouldn't be upset even if she did happen to wake me accidentally; most likely I'd just grunt affably, roll over, and fall contentedly back to sleep. She reminded me of the years she'd been depressed and spent most of her time sleeping, more than twenty hours a day sometimes; sleeping during the day meant depression, to her, and it offended her to the very depths of her soul that I would even suggest such a thing might be perfectly healthy for me.
"Never mind," I said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have mentioned it. It was a stupid idea anyway."
"Yes, it was!" she snarled. "But it's too late to say you're sorry. It doesn't change the fact that you said it. It doesn't change the fact that you would even think about such a thing, when you promised me back in June that you wouldn't be sleeping all day! You lied to me, and you've ruined everything!"
She reminded me of all the compromises she'd made for me. She didn't want a living room lined with bookcases. She didn't want to become a vegetarian. But she'd known from the beginning that my books and I were a package deal, and that I didn't want to be with someone who ate meat, and she'd accepted those things for my sake. (Actually, she hadn't. She made no secret of the fact that she ate meat when she was out with other friends, and the way she kept throwing her great "sacrifice" in my face every time we had an argument, I'd started wishing I'd never asked that of her in the first place. What I'd wanted was someone who shared my convictions, and I know now that if I was willing to settle in that regard, I really had no right to ask her to live by them.) What, she asked belligerently, had I ever done for her?
"Wait a minute," I protested. "You can't compare your feelings about unconventional sleep times with my position on vegetarianism. You're talking about a personal preference, and I consider eating meat to be morally wrong."
I'd thought I'd seen her angry before. I thought I'd heard her shout. I'd been painfully naive. "It is morally wrong, for me!" she screamed. "Sleeping during the day is morally wrong, for me!" If it weren't so terrifying to have this mighty tantrum going on just a couple of feet away from me, it might have been almost laughable in its absurdity: a reasonably intelligent fifty-year-old woman huffing and puffing and insisting that her personal preferences, no matter how strong or rooted in traumatic experience, were morally equivalent to my ethical convictions.
I backtracked all over myself. I admitted I'd been thoughtless and selfish. The more I apologized, the louder she screamed. I don't remember how we got through the rest of the night. I think we came to some semblance of peace, but the issue (by which I mean her temper) kept spontaneously erupting over the course of the next few days. More than anything else, she was upset that I'd suggested my moral values were more "important" than her individual preferences, as if in so doing I'd suggested I was more important than she was as a person. (It never occurred to me until just now that I could have turned it around on her. I never would have dreamed of comparing, say, my personal distaste for her turning the TV on when she wasn't really watching it, with her principled refusal to say anything strongly negative about her abusive ex-husband in the presence of her sons.)
It was the second day of the fight when she hit me for the second time. She'd ranted plenty the night before, and thrown things, but she hadn't laid a hand on me. The next day, when she brought it up again, I thought maybe now that she was a little calmer, she would be more reasonable, so I dared to suggest, very hesitantly, that, while I understood the strength of her feelings and I maybe I should have anticipated just how intensely she would react, perhaps upon further reflection she could understand my feelings too and see that I really hadn't meant any harm.
This was too much to ask. "It doesn't matter what you meant!" she snapped. "You can't treat me like this and then think it will all go away just because you didn't mean it! You did mean it or you wouldn't have said it!" I was sitting on my bed, fighting back tears, and she was standing over me, and she leaned over and struck me while I cowered.
She went to the living room after that to crochet and calm down, which in her case meant working herself up into a state of tightly controlled, highly wounded forbearance. I lay on my bed and cried - quietly, so as not to disturb her. She hated my tears.
I knew I should leave. I knew I needed to pick up the telephone and call my mother. I needed to say "She hit me once last month, and today she hit me again." I needed to pack a bag and go out by the rental office to wait. I knew this.
I also knew I wasn't going to do it.
I wasn't ready to admit that I'd failed. I couldn't bear to let anyone know that I'd been treated that way. And what if they agreed with her, that I was the one causing all the problems? I still couldn't bring myself to think of a couple of light smacks as domestic violence. After all, real domestic battery is a criminal offense, and what she'd done hadn't been actionably illegal. If I complained to the police about it, they'd probably laugh in my face. If what she said was true, I had been horribly selfish and unreasonably demanding, and people would probably understand why she'd been angry enough to lash out. She hadn't really tried to hurt me. I was bigger and stronger than she was. No one would understand.
She wasn't going anywhere, so I would have to be the one to leave. I'd lose my home, and if my family wasn't willing to take me in, I'd end up in the system again. And unless I could convince someone that she needed to be in the hospital again - and I shuddered just to think what might happen if I told her allies at the clubhouse and clinic what she had done (she knew the social worker she so admired had asked me a few times if there was something "wrong," and although I'd always been adamant in my denials, my partner was furious at me for having been publicly distraught enough to make her ask the question) - I'd have to leave before I'd had time to make any sort of proper arrangements at all, and trust her not to damage or destroy my books or computer in one of her rages.
Besides, surely she wouldn't be like this unless something were wrong? She'd realize soon that she needed to go back into the hospital. She loved me, didn't she? She was a sweet and gentle person underneath it all, wasn't she? If I left now, I might really ruin everything.
I'll always remember that as one of the lowest, saddest, and weakest moments of my life: the moment after that second hit when I knew I wasn't going to leave, and how desperately I tried to convince myself I hadn't simply gotten used to fear and internalized the blame.
For the next ten weeks I lived from day to day, from minute to minute, from hope to hope, from explosion to explosion, and then it was over. She threw me out. It was awful at the time, but looking back, I can see how none of the things I ever feared were ever really close to happening. My family was willing to take me in. I went back to the apartment one last time and moved my things into storage. Nothing was lost that had ever been worth having.
If I'd known I could do it - if I'd known I had options, if I'd known for sure I could survive and so could she - would I have taken the initiative to get out earlier? I'd like to think so. And honestly, I'm pretty sure I would have, though sometimes I wonder if I ever could have brought myself to challenge my fear, inertia, and yes, the lingering traces of loyalty and love. What I do know is that it will never happen again. I know better now than to ignore the red flags, which I finally had to admit had been there from the beginning. I'd seen them, and I'd worried about them, but ultimately, I had dismissed them. I've always had better instincts than I've given myself credit for. It's time for me to stop doubting myself at every turn.
Looking back, it's hard to have faith in my own strength now. After all, I was the one who sat there and cried while she hit me. But the fact is, there was something I could have done to make our relationship work. I could have relinquished my essence. I could have given away most of my books, and she would have been so proud. I could have forced myself to get up in the morning and slog miserably through the day until my natural rhythm of awareness caught up with me in the afternoon, and she would have probably have been kind enough to "let" me sleep in once or twice a week. I could have plastered a smile on my face and died inside, and she would have loved me - except I really couldn't do it. She wasn't the first one who drew me in with a promise of unconditional acceptance, only to seek to bend me to some unnatural design - and she wasn't the first who failed. My essence, my core, protects itself with an impregnability stronger than my need to be loved, or my need to belong. Under my surface with its scars, I've carried myself like a treasure through all these years, something too precious to be hurt or destroyed, even if I was the only one who knew - even if I was the only one who would ever know.
In the thing that matters most, I am, and always have been, strong enough.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Which Was Which
In the afternoon she saw the lake
red and orange with the reflection of trees.
The next morning she walked around the lake,
and there was nothing but sparkling blue from shore to shore.
But along the very edge of water, under the overhanging trees,
there was a mat of dead, decaying leaves.
Oh, she thought, then, that she was the lake
and you were the trees,
but later she decided that surely you were the lake
and she the trees.
As she cried herself to sleep that night
she had to admit to herself that she was not sure which was which.
red and orange with the reflection of trees.
The next morning she walked around the lake,
and there was nothing but sparkling blue from shore to shore.
But along the very edge of water, under the overhanging trees,
there was a mat of dead, decaying leaves.
Oh, she thought, then, that she was the lake
and you were the trees,
but later she decided that surely you were the lake
and she the trees.
As she cried herself to sleep that night
she had to admit to herself that she was not sure which was which.
Sunday, February 13, 2011
A Burning Hot Topic
It was about a year ago that my ex-partner and I got into an argument on the subject of flag-burning. She wasn't the "America, love it or leave it," "my country, right or wrong" type - she respected governmental institutions, but didn't hesitate to criticize national policy. However, she was disgusted by those malcontents who burn the American flag publicly in an act of protest, and then cite the "freedom of speech" clause of the First Amendment to those who would condemn their demonstration. She was perhaps even more disgusted that the Supreme Court has their back. "Can you believe anyone would think the Founding Fathers meant their words to be interpreted that way?" she asked indignantly.
It was a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway. "Actually," I said, "I believe that's exactly what the Founding Fathers would have wanted."
She wasn't particularly interested in what I had to say in support of my position; instead, she became increasingly angry and finally delivered what she thought was the death-blow to my argument: the accusation of hypocrisy. "I bet you wouldn't be defending them if they were burning books!" she snarled.
My initial response was just what she had expected it would be: "That's different!" Of course, she insisted that it wasn't different at all, and I was just being contrary for its own sake; troubled by a sudden unease with my own position, and unwilling to continue what had been an invigorating discussion as a hostile argument, I wisely decided to drop the matter - with her. In my own mind, the subject remained open as I sought to reconcile my feelings about flag-burning and book-burning with my understanding of free speech in general.
My initial position, the one she didn't care to listen to, was hardly in favor of flag-desecration. I think burning a flag is, at best, a rather juvenile way to make a point. There may have been a time when it was a fresh and original statement; now it smacks of crass sensationalism. Burning a flag is a good way to draw attention to yourself without needing to have anything new or insightful to say. As political protests go, desecrating the flag is roughly equivalent to flipping your parents the bird when they won't let you borrow the car on Friday night: if we didn't think you were mature enough before, we're certainly not about to reconsider now.
If flag-burning isn't Constitutionally protected speech, however, then just what is it? Criminal conduct, worthy of punishment? Is that what the Founding Fathers would have wanted? Their convictions spurred them to engage in outright rebellion against a government they had been taught to respect and a king they had been raised to revere. As Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, George Washington was taking arms against a flag under which he had once fought. Sympathizers to the cause of colonial independence weren't entirely above crass demonstrations; the Boston Tea Party comes to mind. (Had their actions not been "vindicated by history," those who participated in the destruction of the tea would be remembered today, to the extent that they were remembered at all, as vandals and economic terrorists.) I don't believe the Founding Fathers would have any more sympathy for flag-burners than I do, but I can't believe they would have any less, either. The moment we bring the force of law against any ideological expression that poses no direct threat to the personal safety or property rights of another, the concept of free speech becomes meaningless. Burning a flag may be profoundly disrespectful to those who fought and died to establish or preserve what that flag represents - but the Founding Fathers had seen firsthand the consequences of legislating respect. They were born into a world where a person could be fined, jailed, or even executed for criticizing the British government. They knew what lay at the end of that slippery slope, and they didn't want to go there.
There were times, growing up, that I told my parents, in a rush of anger, that I hated them. My father would punish me for such an outburst. My mother encouraged me to express what I felt, but she wasn't manipulated by it either. Guess which one I have genuine respect for today? The fact that a crass statement of contempt for the American government is treated as protected speech by that very government is central, in my mind, to what America at its finest is capable of being. Flag-burners undermine their own argument when they turn for support to the very institutions for which they profess such disdain - which they must surely know isn't something they could take for granted in many other parts of the world. There's a poem extolling the American soldier that ends with the stirring observation, "It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." It is the very fact that s/he is fighting for the right of others to express contempt for something s/he holds dear - because s/he's fighting for freedom, and that's what freedom means - that makes the soldier's sacrifice so very noble.
The day they take away my right to burn the flag is the day I burn one.
And what of book-burning? Part of me believes that it truly is different. To desecrate a flag is to show contempt for a nation; to destroy a book is to show contempt for an idea. Nations are transient, even ephemeral, things, and they are only as meritorious as the ideas their governments and citizens put into practice. Of course, some ideas most certainly are worthy of contempt, but we need them all. To hide from an idea serves only to make it more dangerous. One of the most powerful moments I've ever experienced on television comes at the end of an episode of The Waltons, "The Fire Storm." The central controversy of the episode involves John-Boy's decision to publish excerpts from Mein Kampf in his newspaper. Many of the townspeople, including the Rev. Matthew Fordwick, openly express the desire to remain ignorant of Hitler's ideas; they fail to make the distinction between information and propaganda. At the climax of the episode, Rev. Fordwick gathers a bunch of German books, including Mein Kampf, and prepares to throw them into a bonfire before the assembled townsfolk. After all, Hitler's been burning American books, and even Bibles! John-Boy rushes over from the crowd and grabs Mein Kampf out of the Reverend's hands. "I read that a foreign tyrant was publishing his plans to take over the world, and was carrying out those plans," he shouts. "I thought you ought to have the opportunity to know about it . . . that's freedom, as far as I can see it. And if you choose not to know about it, that's freedom too - but if you take a book, and if you burn this book, then you can't know about it, and you've had your freedom taken away from you, you understand me?" He picks up another book from the pile, and offers it to a neighbor who can read German. After she reads the first paragraph, he asks her to translate, and she does: "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth." John-Boy walks away, but after a few moments Rev. Fordwick comes after him, holding both Mein Kampf and the German Bible. "These books should be in good hands," he admits, "both of them."
One very real difference between flag-burning and book-burning is that a flag is a symbol, while a book is a medium. Destroy every American flag ever made, and there will still be a United States of America. Destroy every last copy of the Bible, or Mein Kampf, or The Communist Manifesto, or The Federalist Papers, or Pride and Prejudice, or even Chicken Soup for the Soul, Ramona the Pest, or Danielle Steel's The Promise, and something has been forever lost. There's even a word, "libricide," that refers specifically to a regime's attempt to wipe out all books that they view as a threat to their power. Etymologically, it means "the killing of a book" - as if a book were something that had a life of its own, that could truly die. The novelist Ray Bradbury was inspired by the Nazi book burnings to write Fahrenheit 451, about a prospective future in which all books are banned and subject to burning. In one stirring scene from this novel, a woman whose secret library has been discovered chooses to set herself on fire and burn along with her books. Bradbury later wrote that "when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh."
But I don't believe my ex-partner was really attempting to suggest, even in the full-blown irrationality of ideological smugness, that the act of burning a single flag was morally equivalent to massive state-sponsored censorship. In The Waltons, Rev. Fordwick referred to his little ceremony as "a symbolic book-burning," even though he planned to throw actual books in an actual fire. What mattered to him wasn't the destruction of the books themselves, but the rejection of what those books represented. (Since there was only one person in town who could read German, destroying German books to censor their contents wouldn't have made much sense anyway.) Late last year, Florida pastor Terry Jones announced his plans to burn the Qur'an on September 11. (In the face of controversy and condemnation from political and religious spheres alike, he soon cancelled the demonstration.) Jones wasn't making an attempt to wipe the Qur'an out of existence, however much he might have liked to do so. His goal was to express and encourage hatred of the Islamic religion, not specifically to deny anyone access to its ideas.
It is this sort of book-burning - the destruction of individual volumes for the purpose of making a statement, not for censorship - that I have to compare to flag-burning. Even reframed in these terms, I want to say that book-burning is different. The sight of a book on fire is literally painful to me. I can't even bring myself to throw away a book that's falling apart and beyond repair - whether or not it's a book that I have any desire to read. When one of the stepsisters in Ever After, a film based on the story of Cinderella, throws the protagonist's cherished copy of Thomas More's Utopia into the fireplace, I shudder. I feel sick inside just watching and knowing what's going to happen. Reading Fahrenheit 451, I want simultaneously to weep and to cheer at the martyrdom of that brave woman who stands among her kerosene-doused trove of forbdden books and sets herself on fire. I'd like to believe that I would do the same.
But all of this, I am forced to admit, is sentiment. You can't base principles on sentiment, not if you believe in some degree of absolute truth and you're trying to get at it. I'm a writer, an intellectual, a borderline bibliomaniac. Books have always been my sustenance and joy, my dearest friends in a hostile world. Of course I feel an intense connection to them. It's just as natural that my ex-partner would feel strongly about the flag. Her father had been in the military, as had her first husband, and her two sons were currently enlisted. At the time we had this argument, her younger son was in Iraq on active combat duty. Watching a protester burn the flag of the country her son was fighting for must have felt like an attack on everything she loved.
(It may be unduly crass of me to point this out, but I believe most of the Founding Fathers would have had a stronger emotional distaste for book-burning than flag-burning. The Revolutionary War was fought for an idea, not a country. There was no United States as we know it until some years after the colonies were granted their independence, and it was still the better part of a century before most Americans learned to think of themselves as "Americans" first rather than citizens of their various states. As for the seven key Founding Fathers identified by historian Richard B. Morris, only two of them had any military experience, and only George Washington was anything like a career soldier. The others were intellectuals, writers, statemen, political philosophers, lawyers - men who understood and lived by the power of words in the finest sense.)
Perhaps it was foolish of me to attempt to engage her mind on a topic so close to her heart. Certainly I shouldn't be surprised that she wasn't in a mood to listen to logic or subtlety, or that she turned on my reasoning with an emotional red herring. (I'm not above that kind of thinking myself; it's easy for me to feel smug when I consider that she wouldn't likely get at all worked up over the burning of an Iraqi flag, while I wouldn't support the burning of, say, The Sacrament of Abortion any more than I would the burning of the complete works of Shakespeare. Doesn't that just prove I've got the moral high ground?) But that red herring gave me a lot to think about, and I've come to a conclusion, one which I don't much like. But then, there's nothing about what's right that's inherently pleasant or expedient.
Book-burning is contemptible. For reasons both emotional and ideological, I consider it an abomination, far more so than the burning of a flag. As an ideological gesture, however, I am forced to admit that "symbolic" book-burning does fall into the realm of free speech. Maybe I wouldn't pour water on a book-burner if s/he were on fire, but I would protest the jailing of one. As a writer, I must support the biblioclast for exactly the same reason that the soldier spills his/her blood for the ingrates who desecrate the flag: because it's freedom I'm pushing for, and that includes the freedom to be wrong, to be contemptible even - and without that freedom, everything I am and believe in is meaningless.
It was a rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway. "Actually," I said, "I believe that's exactly what the Founding Fathers would have wanted."
She wasn't particularly interested in what I had to say in support of my position; instead, she became increasingly angry and finally delivered what she thought was the death-blow to my argument: the accusation of hypocrisy. "I bet you wouldn't be defending them if they were burning books!" she snarled.
My initial response was just what she had expected it would be: "That's different!" Of course, she insisted that it wasn't different at all, and I was just being contrary for its own sake; troubled by a sudden unease with my own position, and unwilling to continue what had been an invigorating discussion as a hostile argument, I wisely decided to drop the matter - with her. In my own mind, the subject remained open as I sought to reconcile my feelings about flag-burning and book-burning with my understanding of free speech in general.
My initial position, the one she didn't care to listen to, was hardly in favor of flag-desecration. I think burning a flag is, at best, a rather juvenile way to make a point. There may have been a time when it was a fresh and original statement; now it smacks of crass sensationalism. Burning a flag is a good way to draw attention to yourself without needing to have anything new or insightful to say. As political protests go, desecrating the flag is roughly equivalent to flipping your parents the bird when they won't let you borrow the car on Friday night: if we didn't think you were mature enough before, we're certainly not about to reconsider now.
If flag-burning isn't Constitutionally protected speech, however, then just what is it? Criminal conduct, worthy of punishment? Is that what the Founding Fathers would have wanted? Their convictions spurred them to engage in outright rebellion against a government they had been taught to respect and a king they had been raised to revere. As Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army, George Washington was taking arms against a flag under which he had once fought. Sympathizers to the cause of colonial independence weren't entirely above crass demonstrations; the Boston Tea Party comes to mind. (Had their actions not been "vindicated by history," those who participated in the destruction of the tea would be remembered today, to the extent that they were remembered at all, as vandals and economic terrorists.) I don't believe the Founding Fathers would have any more sympathy for flag-burners than I do, but I can't believe they would have any less, either. The moment we bring the force of law against any ideological expression that poses no direct threat to the personal safety or property rights of another, the concept of free speech becomes meaningless. Burning a flag may be profoundly disrespectful to those who fought and died to establish or preserve what that flag represents - but the Founding Fathers had seen firsthand the consequences of legislating respect. They were born into a world where a person could be fined, jailed, or even executed for criticizing the British government. They knew what lay at the end of that slippery slope, and they didn't want to go there.
There were times, growing up, that I told my parents, in a rush of anger, that I hated them. My father would punish me for such an outburst. My mother encouraged me to express what I felt, but she wasn't manipulated by it either. Guess which one I have genuine respect for today? The fact that a crass statement of contempt for the American government is treated as protected speech by that very government is central, in my mind, to what America at its finest is capable of being. Flag-burners undermine their own argument when they turn for support to the very institutions for which they profess such disdain - which they must surely know isn't something they could take for granted in many other parts of the world. There's a poem extolling the American soldier that ends with the stirring observation, "It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves under the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag." It is the very fact that s/he is fighting for the right of others to express contempt for something s/he holds dear - because s/he's fighting for freedom, and that's what freedom means - that makes the soldier's sacrifice so very noble.
The day they take away my right to burn the flag is the day I burn one.
And what of book-burning? Part of me believes that it truly is different. To desecrate a flag is to show contempt for a nation; to destroy a book is to show contempt for an idea. Nations are transient, even ephemeral, things, and they are only as meritorious as the ideas their governments and citizens put into practice. Of course, some ideas most certainly are worthy of contempt, but we need them all. To hide from an idea serves only to make it more dangerous. One of the most powerful moments I've ever experienced on television comes at the end of an episode of The Waltons, "The Fire Storm." The central controversy of the episode involves John-Boy's decision to publish excerpts from Mein Kampf in his newspaper. Many of the townspeople, including the Rev. Matthew Fordwick, openly express the desire to remain ignorant of Hitler's ideas; they fail to make the distinction between information and propaganda. At the climax of the episode, Rev. Fordwick gathers a bunch of German books, including Mein Kampf, and prepares to throw them into a bonfire before the assembled townsfolk. After all, Hitler's been burning American books, and even Bibles! John-Boy rushes over from the crowd and grabs Mein Kampf out of the Reverend's hands. "I read that a foreign tyrant was publishing his plans to take over the world, and was carrying out those plans," he shouts. "I thought you ought to have the opportunity to know about it . . . that's freedom, as far as I can see it. And if you choose not to know about it, that's freedom too - but if you take a book, and if you burn this book, then you can't know about it, and you've had your freedom taken away from you, you understand me?" He picks up another book from the pile, and offers it to a neighbor who can read German. After she reads the first paragraph, he asks her to translate, and she does: "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth." John-Boy walks away, but after a few moments Rev. Fordwick comes after him, holding both Mein Kampf and the German Bible. "These books should be in good hands," he admits, "both of them."
One very real difference between flag-burning and book-burning is that a flag is a symbol, while a book is a medium. Destroy every American flag ever made, and there will still be a United States of America. Destroy every last copy of the Bible, or Mein Kampf, or The Communist Manifesto, or The Federalist Papers, or Pride and Prejudice, or even Chicken Soup for the Soul, Ramona the Pest, or Danielle Steel's The Promise, and something has been forever lost. There's even a word, "libricide," that refers specifically to a regime's attempt to wipe out all books that they view as a threat to their power. Etymologically, it means "the killing of a book" - as if a book were something that had a life of its own, that could truly die. The novelist Ray Bradbury was inspired by the Nazi book burnings to write Fahrenheit 451, about a prospective future in which all books are banned and subject to burning. In one stirring scene from this novel, a woman whose secret library has been discovered chooses to set herself on fire and burn along with her books. Bradbury later wrote that "when Hitler burned a book I felt it as keenly, please forgive me, as his killing a human, for in the long sum of history they are one and the same flesh."
But I don't believe my ex-partner was really attempting to suggest, even in the full-blown irrationality of ideological smugness, that the act of burning a single flag was morally equivalent to massive state-sponsored censorship. In The Waltons, Rev. Fordwick referred to his little ceremony as "a symbolic book-burning," even though he planned to throw actual books in an actual fire. What mattered to him wasn't the destruction of the books themselves, but the rejection of what those books represented. (Since there was only one person in town who could read German, destroying German books to censor their contents wouldn't have made much sense anyway.) Late last year, Florida pastor Terry Jones announced his plans to burn the Qur'an on September 11. (In the face of controversy and condemnation from political and religious spheres alike, he soon cancelled the demonstration.) Jones wasn't making an attempt to wipe the Qur'an out of existence, however much he might have liked to do so. His goal was to express and encourage hatred of the Islamic religion, not specifically to deny anyone access to its ideas.
It is this sort of book-burning - the destruction of individual volumes for the purpose of making a statement, not for censorship - that I have to compare to flag-burning. Even reframed in these terms, I want to say that book-burning is different. The sight of a book on fire is literally painful to me. I can't even bring myself to throw away a book that's falling apart and beyond repair - whether or not it's a book that I have any desire to read. When one of the stepsisters in Ever After, a film based on the story of Cinderella, throws the protagonist's cherished copy of Thomas More's Utopia into the fireplace, I shudder. I feel sick inside just watching and knowing what's going to happen. Reading Fahrenheit 451, I want simultaneously to weep and to cheer at the martyrdom of that brave woman who stands among her kerosene-doused trove of forbdden books and sets herself on fire. I'd like to believe that I would do the same.
But all of this, I am forced to admit, is sentiment. You can't base principles on sentiment, not if you believe in some degree of absolute truth and you're trying to get at it. I'm a writer, an intellectual, a borderline bibliomaniac. Books have always been my sustenance and joy, my dearest friends in a hostile world. Of course I feel an intense connection to them. It's just as natural that my ex-partner would feel strongly about the flag. Her father had been in the military, as had her first husband, and her two sons were currently enlisted. At the time we had this argument, her younger son was in Iraq on active combat duty. Watching a protester burn the flag of the country her son was fighting for must have felt like an attack on everything she loved.
(It may be unduly crass of me to point this out, but I believe most of the Founding Fathers would have had a stronger emotional distaste for book-burning than flag-burning. The Revolutionary War was fought for an idea, not a country. There was no United States as we know it until some years after the colonies were granted their independence, and it was still the better part of a century before most Americans learned to think of themselves as "Americans" first rather than citizens of their various states. As for the seven key Founding Fathers identified by historian Richard B. Morris, only two of them had any military experience, and only George Washington was anything like a career soldier. The others were intellectuals, writers, statemen, political philosophers, lawyers - men who understood and lived by the power of words in the finest sense.)
Perhaps it was foolish of me to attempt to engage her mind on a topic so close to her heart. Certainly I shouldn't be surprised that she wasn't in a mood to listen to logic or subtlety, or that she turned on my reasoning with an emotional red herring. (I'm not above that kind of thinking myself; it's easy for me to feel smug when I consider that she wouldn't likely get at all worked up over the burning of an Iraqi flag, while I wouldn't support the burning of, say, The Sacrament of Abortion any more than I would the burning of the complete works of Shakespeare. Doesn't that just prove I've got the moral high ground?) But that red herring gave me a lot to think about, and I've come to a conclusion, one which I don't much like. But then, there's nothing about what's right that's inherently pleasant or expedient.
Book-burning is contemptible. For reasons both emotional and ideological, I consider it an abomination, far more so than the burning of a flag. As an ideological gesture, however, I am forced to admit that "symbolic" book-burning does fall into the realm of free speech. Maybe I wouldn't pour water on a book-burner if s/he were on fire, but I would protest the jailing of one. As a writer, I must support the biblioclast for exactly the same reason that the soldier spills his/her blood for the ingrates who desecrate the flag: because it's freedom I'm pushing for, and that includes the freedom to be wrong, to be contemptible even - and without that freedom, everything I am and believe in is meaningless.
Friday, February 11, 2011
As It Was
I wrote this odd, somewhat uneven vignette about ten years ago, after I returned to California from my single fateful semester at college. I really did leave campus once and go walking through town in the middle of the night, and I really did hear music playing outside a bagel shop. I can't remember what song it was, and I can't remember if I danced on the sidewalk or not. I do remember that I wanted to. This short piece was an attempt to capture the mood of that night.
One night, unable to sleep and a bit restless, they slipped outside for a walk, she in a white silk nightgown and he in light blue cotton pajamas. The moon was full. The night was warm, and the air seemed heavy with the aromas of flowers. They did not speak as they walked west on Central Street; there was no need.
They almost failed to notice that music was playing outside the little bagel shop they had always meant to try sometime. They almost walked on past it without a pause, but he noticed the music suddenly and halted. "Why . . ." she began, but then she became aware of the music and no longer needed to ask why he had stopped. It was a song that had been very popular about six months earlier, and it was playing in front of this bagel shop on Central Street at three o'clock in the morning.
Whether it was he who reached for her first, or she who made the first move into his arms, no one could say, but they leaned into each other and began to dance. The comfort of knowing they would not be seen on the deserted street, flavored by the strangeness and daring of dancing in a public place, made them bold. A strange sort of self-consciousness swept over them: not an awareness of how they would appear to others, but a lucid awareness of their own bodies, their own thoughts. At once creating the dance and possessed by it, they followed the subtle hints of each other's bodies, sliding perfectly from one move to the next. He held her close, held her out while she twirled, lifted her into his arms and spun in a rapid circle while she threw her head back and let the perfumed air sweep like a cool breeze across her face.
Finally he put her down and they clung to each other dizzily, laughing at the absurdity of hearing music playing on these empty streets at this hour. They laughed long and hard, until at about the same time both of them realized how mirthless their laughter was, and they fell silent.
She spoke first. "You know, it's not - it's not really that funny."
"No," he agreed, and for a moment they were silent again.
"I mean - music was meant to be heard, right? And yet here's this music playing under the wide night sky in front of all these closed stores, with no one around to hear it. Except for us, I mean, and there's no reason at all why we should be here either. Any other night we would be at home, in bed, asleep, and then the music would be playing out here without anyone to hear it at all." She sat on the curb, and he sat beside her.
Suddenly he noticed tears glistening on her face in the moonlight. "Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I'm just thinking about that music playing alone at night with no one around to hear it, being what it was meant to be without doing what it was meant to do. It's such a lonely thought."
"It's strange," he murmured, turning his head away. She put her head on his shoulder but he continued to face the other direction. "We and that music justify each other somehow. Ordinarily we would be in bed, but then there would be no one to listen to the music. And it's senseless for the music to play if there's no one around to hear it, but we're here. That music's not really playing for us, and we didn't come here to listen to it, but it fits somehow."
He turned back to her. "You're crying now too," she noticed, and they embraced each other.
"I wonder why we were laughing," he said.
"I was wondering that too," she replied. "Maybe it's because we were trying to hide from what we're feeling now, because we didn't want to feel this - this -"
"Desolation," he supplied.
"Yes, that's it. Desolation." The heaviness of the fragrances in the air began to seem oppressive as they sat together on the curb, leaning into each other, comforting and being comforted in equal measure. They remained there a long time. When they finally rose, they continued west, even though the sun rises in the east.
One night, unable to sleep and a bit restless, they slipped outside for a walk, she in a white silk nightgown and he in light blue cotton pajamas. The moon was full. The night was warm, and the air seemed heavy with the aromas of flowers. They did not speak as they walked west on Central Street; there was no need.
They almost failed to notice that music was playing outside the little bagel shop they had always meant to try sometime. They almost walked on past it without a pause, but he noticed the music suddenly and halted. "Why . . ." she began, but then she became aware of the music and no longer needed to ask why he had stopped. It was a song that had been very popular about six months earlier, and it was playing in front of this bagel shop on Central Street at three o'clock in the morning.
Whether it was he who reached for her first, or she who made the first move into his arms, no one could say, but they leaned into each other and began to dance. The comfort of knowing they would not be seen on the deserted street, flavored by the strangeness and daring of dancing in a public place, made them bold. A strange sort of self-consciousness swept over them: not an awareness of how they would appear to others, but a lucid awareness of their own bodies, their own thoughts. At once creating the dance and possessed by it, they followed the subtle hints of each other's bodies, sliding perfectly from one move to the next. He held her close, held her out while she twirled, lifted her into his arms and spun in a rapid circle while she threw her head back and let the perfumed air sweep like a cool breeze across her face.
Finally he put her down and they clung to each other dizzily, laughing at the absurdity of hearing music playing on these empty streets at this hour. They laughed long and hard, until at about the same time both of them realized how mirthless their laughter was, and they fell silent.
She spoke first. "You know, it's not - it's not really that funny."
"No," he agreed, and for a moment they were silent again.
"I mean - music was meant to be heard, right? And yet here's this music playing under the wide night sky in front of all these closed stores, with no one around to hear it. Except for us, I mean, and there's no reason at all why we should be here either. Any other night we would be at home, in bed, asleep, and then the music would be playing out here without anyone to hear it at all." She sat on the curb, and he sat beside her.
Suddenly he noticed tears glistening on her face in the moonlight. "Why are you crying?" he asked.
"I'm just thinking about that music playing alone at night with no one around to hear it, being what it was meant to be without doing what it was meant to do. It's such a lonely thought."
"It's strange," he murmured, turning his head away. She put her head on his shoulder but he continued to face the other direction. "We and that music justify each other somehow. Ordinarily we would be in bed, but then there would be no one to listen to the music. And it's senseless for the music to play if there's no one around to hear it, but we're here. That music's not really playing for us, and we didn't come here to listen to it, but it fits somehow."
He turned back to her. "You're crying now too," she noticed, and they embraced each other.
"I wonder why we were laughing," he said.
"I was wondering that too," she replied. "Maybe it's because we were trying to hide from what we're feeling now, because we didn't want to feel this - this -"
"Desolation," he supplied.
"Yes, that's it. Desolation." The heaviness of the fragrances in the air began to seem oppressive as they sat together on the curb, leaning into each other, comforting and being comforted in equal measure. They remained there a long time. When they finally rose, they continued west, even though the sun rises in the east.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Life's Little Pleasures
If the cake was made with salt
instead of sugar,
it doesn't matter how good
the icing is.
instead of sugar,
it doesn't matter how good
the icing is.
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Smile
. . . and then he kissed her.
All the way home she
walked with her head down,
so that the rain could not erase
the memory of his touch from her face, nor wash
his kiss from her lips -
and so no one could see
her silly smile.
All the way home she
walked with her head down,
so that the rain could not erase
the memory of his touch from her face, nor wash
his kiss from her lips -
and so no one could see
her silly smile.
Friday, February 4, 2011
Mistake
This tiny story by Fredric Brown proves that a work of fiction doesn't need to be substantial to pack a whole lot of substance. Anthony Boucher, editor of the 1964 anthology Best Detective Stories of the Year, which includes this tale, describes it as "the shorted murder story in history - and one of the most pointed." It may be only five sentences, but I knew the moment I finished reading it that I would never forget it. It's as if you could summarize Crime and Punishment in a single paragraph without losing the emotional wallop.
Standish gave himself up to the police. "I killed a man," he said. "I thought it was a perfect crime, but I made a mistake." They asked what his mistake had been. "I killed a man," he said.
Standish gave himself up to the police. "I killed a man," he said. "I thought it was a perfect crime, but I made a mistake." They asked what his mistake had been. "I killed a man," he said.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)