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One of the things I valued most about my relationship with the ex-co-conspirator was that we could talk about our experiences as white people trying to grapple with racism. Our experiences are different-- he is more politically active than I am, he's Jewish and I'm part of the Gentile Auxiliary -- but we trusted each other enough to tell the truth. We could talk about the gap between what we knew and how we acted, and how much we hated our own self-consciousness around racism--the personal failings that felt more shameful than outright wrongs. Because we loved each other, and we loved these moments of honesty, we didn't chicken out and use that information to attack each other, to bolster one temporarily at the other's expense against the fear that maybe we weren't really Good People after all. Those talks were a gift.
I also valued his giant collection of political books. I miss it. In Vancouver, I read his copy of bell hooks' Killing Rage. hooks told me something very useful. I am still grateful that she had the generosity to write it down, because it was something I'd very much wanted to know, and it helped move me forward. She wrote about what she felt when she looked at a white person.
Specifically, she wrote that she felt rage and terror. It will sound odd, but it was a relief to have her say that. I felt like I could begin to know where I stood, to see myself in her context. No one wants to be monstrous; but knowing, I had a place to start from.
* * * * * * * *
You know that alarmingly disproportionate anger/panic white people display when (as somebody other than me first said) we feel the vertigo of suddenly not being at the center? I was thinking how some of that is about narrative. The disruption of the personal narrative -- not the big societal one, but an individual's everyday sense of themselves as heroic, as always right and always wronged. Not just my sense of myself as powerful, or safe, but my sense of myself as essentially good.
That word again, good.
* * * * * * * *
On a lesser narrative note.
It's the semi-recent LJ discussion about cultural appropriation and writing that has made me think about narrative. I don't want to reincarnate the conversation, but I did want to mention the mailbox.
There's a scene in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye where Philip Marlowe confronts the man who claims to know what happened to Marlowe's, well, pretty much boyfriend, Terry Lennox, who is supposed to have killed himself in Mexico over a murder he didn't commit. Marlowe first proves Lennox is innocent, and then he goes on to "prove" Lennox is also alive.
Lots of interesting stuff there. The apotheosis of the hard-boiled detective novel's focus on speech as assertion of reality. Speech, in fact, as magic, logic as action, "proof" as "truth". Marlowe essentially speaks Lennox back to life, conjures him out of the visitor from Mexico who's come to tell him about Lennox' death. That rabbit-from-a-hat reappearance as a fascinating something or other about ethnicity and transformation. The instability of identity. The question of whether or not Chander knew a damn thing about Mexico.
The mailbox, though. I like that mailbox. Let the mailbox contain the unconscious errata that are brought to writing, out of the habits of hegemony, as it were.
They worry me.
{rf}
I also valued his giant collection of political books. I miss it. In Vancouver, I read his copy of bell hooks' Killing Rage. hooks told me something very useful. I am still grateful that she had the generosity to write it down, because it was something I'd very much wanted to know, and it helped move me forward. She wrote about what she felt when she looked at a white person.
Specifically, she wrote that she felt rage and terror. It will sound odd, but it was a relief to have her say that. I felt like I could begin to know where I stood, to see myself in her context. No one wants to be monstrous; but knowing, I had a place to start from.
* * * * * * * *
You know that alarmingly disproportionate anger/panic white people display when (as somebody other than me first said) we feel the vertigo of suddenly not being at the center? I was thinking how some of that is about narrative. The disruption of the personal narrative -- not the big societal one, but an individual's everyday sense of themselves as heroic, as always right and always wronged. Not just my sense of myself as powerful, or safe, but my sense of myself as essentially good.
That word again, good.
* * * * * * * *
On a lesser narrative note.
It's the semi-recent LJ discussion about cultural appropriation and writing that has made me think about narrative. I don't want to reincarnate the conversation, but I did want to mention the mailbox.
There's a scene in Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye where Philip Marlowe confronts the man who claims to know what happened to Marlowe's, well, pretty much boyfriend, Terry Lennox, who is supposed to have killed himself in Mexico over a murder he didn't commit. Marlowe first proves Lennox is innocent, and then he goes on to "prove" Lennox is also alive.
"I had a letter from Terry.... The mailbox bothers me." I said. "Where he said there was a mailbox on the street under his window and the hotel waiter was going to hold his letter up before he mailed it, so Terry could see that it was mailed.... They wouldn't have one in a place like Otatoclan."
Lots of interesting stuff there. The apotheosis of the hard-boiled detective novel's focus on speech as assertion of reality. Speech, in fact, as magic, logic as action, "proof" as "truth". Marlowe essentially speaks Lennox back to life, conjures him out of the visitor from Mexico who's come to tell him about Lennox' death. That rabbit-from-a-hat reappearance as a fascinating something or other about ethnicity and transformation. The instability of identity. The question of whether or not Chander knew a damn thing about Mexico.
The mailbox, though. I like that mailbox. Let the mailbox contain the unconscious errata that are brought to writing, out of the habits of hegemony, as it were.
They worry me.
{rf}
goodness is in the eye of a needle
Date: 2006-07-27 05:57 pm (UTC)I've always been troubled by the concept of 'goodness'. Maybe coz deep down I feel that no matter how hard I try to attain 'goodness' I can't escape my 'original sin', my inherent badness. I blame my Protestant upbringing. ;)
goodness is in the eye of the beholder/storm/newt
Date: 2006-07-27 07:03 pm (UTC)Sometimes I have a sense of myself as generally Good, with occasional mistakes and weaknesses.
Sometimes I have a sense of myself as essentially Bad, and unable to create anything good in the world.
The more I examine myself and my actions, the more this Goodness and Badness break down. This is both frightening and fascinating. I am left with an almost mechanistic view of myself. I act, and my actions have effects; some are good, some are bad, some are bizarre. I can't really be quantified as good or evil, and I think that is the case for most of us. That is not to dismiss the idea of harmful and unharmful actions, but to say that I really couldn't say which I'd done more of, and that it seems fairly unpredictable, in an average person, which kind of action they're going to perform at any given time.
And of course there is the interpretation of the action and its consequences, and long-term versus short-term consequences, and the whole question of intent and whether it "counts".
I've heard your question before; and, yeah, I'm sure they do and did. I'm sure they were the heroes of their own movies. How could they not be? And all the people who made something like the Holocaust possible, through participation, through acquiesence, through inaction: I'm sure they were too. If they thought about victimization, I'm sure it was mostly in terms of feeling sorry for themselves.
And what do you do about this incredible veering from sanity? I don't know.
I heard an interview on the CBC with Chava Rosenfarb (she's an author and Holocaust survivor). She said, "I don't think people are good or evil. I think they are mostly selfish."
{rf}