Down and Out in America

Peter H Rossi

Each successive section of this chapter has documented another set of problems experienced by the extremely poor and especially the homeless. In the previous chapter we also saw that unemployment and underemployment are endemic, and in this chapter we learned that so are signs of chronic mental illness, alcoholism, and poor health. The homeless have also frequently had run-ins with the criminal justice system, and their social supports are minimal. The accumulation of these conditions result in a profile of the homeless showing that only a handful do not suffer from one disability or another.

Rossi's famous survey of homelessness in Chicago during the '80s is a very factual survey of poverty and homelessness. How much truth you get out of it is debatable. It's hard work being poor.

On the Natural History of Destruction

W G Sebald
Tr. Anthea Bell

This secondhand memory going back over half a century is horrible enough, yet it is only a tiny part of what we do not know. 

What we do not know. On the Natural History of Destruction is a pair of strong arms that grasp you by your shoulders and force you round to face the sight of things you want forgotten: we would rather medicate pain than deal with it. Sebald remarks the paucity in German society of attempts to be with the horrors of WWII. Sebald points out a conspicuous absence through admission that borders on denial. It seems that German literature, with a few exceptions, has acknowledged that the horrors (Stalingrad to U-boats to Auschwitz to Dresden to Surrender to Nazism) of WWII happened, but has gone no further. We did it. It happened. You did it. We've moved on. But Sebald argues that this sort of approach to such horrific atrocities is a very cheap escape.

With a coldly critical eye, Sebald proceeds to slowly turn each page of the lauded German literature that claims to deal with the most evil and painful aspects of WWII. Mostly he finds that people do not deal with it. History and remembrance begin somewhere after 1947 or even later. And who can blame them? Who can face these things? Who wouldn't rather not know?

We like our wars to be won or over. That was then and now we're here and no longer there. Think of Iraq. Most of the Americans you ask about it will tell you that we just need to get out of there. Whether they were against it from the first, fully in support of it, disillusioned, or never really cared, the near-unanimous stance now seems to be that it's time to leave. Even those who believe we must stay in Iraq out of a responsibility to provide stability think the sooner we get out the better. And how will we deal with it? It's over. Think about the first Gulf War...what war? It happened, sure it was tough, all war is, but it's over now, we've moved on, they've moved on. Everyone's doing their thing...

We don't want to deal with our wars anymore than the Germans wanted to deal with theirs. Without doubt the collective culpability of societies like Germany and Japan after WWII was far greater and a much harder weight to slide out from under, but whether you would find the US guilty in either Iraq war or not, you cannot doubt that we do not want to deal with it.

The closest anyone comes is to talk about the returning veterans with PTSD or the collateral damage (all those other people who happen to be killed, dismembered, or in other ways have the life in their bodies displaced). But think about it: what have you heard that faces the Iraq War? What have you seen? What do you know?

The 'second-hand memory going back over half a century' that Sebald cites is this:

There was a bunker built in the middle of the meadow, said to be bombproof, made of concrete with a pitched roof....Fourteen hundred people took shelter there after the first night of terror. The bunker received a direct hit and burst apart. The extent of what happened then must have been apocalyptic....Hundreds of people outside, including my mother, were waiting to be taken to an assembly camp in Pinneberg. To reach the trucks, they had to climb over mountains of corpses, some completely dismembered, all lying around on the meadow among the remains of the former bombproof bunker. Many could not help vomiting when they saw the scene, many vomited as they trampled over the dead, others collapsed and lost consciousness. So my mother told me. 

Remember that this is only a tiny part of what we do not know. So then think of what you do know about Iraq, Afghanistan, or the first Gulf War. It is very many very horrible things, what we do not know.

I remember watching the opening movements of 'Shock and Awe' on the television, live. In that unique green of nightvision, things flashed in the Iraqi night sky. I watched this on television. This was people dying. This was death. This was people hiding in their basements because the buildings were being unbuilt. And I called it 'the opening movements'.

Have you ever seen such a small moment of violence....some image or footage of a shattered limb or a corpse....and felt it in your stomach and your heart because it was real and horrible and you could imagine it being your limb, your corpse? Always remember that it was only a tiny part of what we do not know. Vollmann's question comes back: How can we not know what goes on in this world?

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs Sylvie Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother's house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it.

Lucille wants to be Housekeeping and so do most of the people in town, but everyone has such trouble with it. If you organize a stack of empty tin cans, keeping them clean and storing them up for housekeeping, is that housekeeping? If you decide windows are better without the glass and leave them be when they are broken, is that housekeeping? Is wearing the same style of dress that all the other girls are wearing housekeeping? Is wandering around aimlessly good housekeeping? Is doing your homework?

Sylvie lives a life that does not seem to follow any convention or have much of a purpose. What do you do with Sylvie? She was married but it didn't work out and when they ask her how Mr Fisher is, she doesn't recognize the name. She goes for walks without destinations and is generally absent-minded.

If you've ever seen a person pause, with a small frown or maybe not even that much expression, maybe just slight concern that could be puzzlement on their features, and seen from their posture that they were letting something pass by or happen because they couldn't quite understand it and weren't sure what was going on, that they were keeping their hands off because they had not quite figured out what it was they were seeing, if you've ever seen this expression, you will know how the characters in Housekeeping feel. It's the look of not recognizing something.

The Last Supper

Pawel Huelle
Tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Nothing that requires a lot of explanation is perfect, replied Berdo decisively. So perhaps the best definition of faith is a medicine? As the prophet says: God did not create a suffering without also creating some remedy against it. Such a remedy is faith. Or at least that is how I understand it.

In late middle age, an artist wants a picture from which to paint a rendition of the Last Supper. He gathers twelve of his friends from his youth and has them pose at a table in a theater on an empty stage. Pawl Huelle's Last Supper is painted of the memories and stories of some of these men as they come together again.

 

The People of the Abyss

Jack London

From the slimy, spittle-drenched sidewalk, they were picking up bits of orange peel, apple skin, and grape stems, and they were eating them. The pits of greengage plums they cracked between their teeth for the kernels inside. They picked up stray bits of bread the size of peas, apple cores so black and dirty one would not take them to be apple cores, and these things these two men took into their mouths, and chewed them, and swallowed them; and this, between six and seven o'clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London's streets! Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live. Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to move on. You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets. Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same. It is his business to rout you out. It is also a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out.
But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends. It would grow into a mighty story. Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer.
Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me. And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London Town this night. Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual. But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?

The application of the Golden Rule determines that East London is an unfit place in which to live. Where you would not have your own babe live, and develop, and gather to itself knowledge of life and the things of life, is not a fit place for the babes of other men to live, and develop, and gather to themselves knowledge of life. It is a simple thing, this Golden Rule, and all that is required. Political economy and the survival of the fittest can go hang if they say otherwise. What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.

These people who try to help! Their college settlements, missions, charities, and what not, are failures. In the nature of things they cannot but be failures. They are wrongly, though sincerely, conceived. They approach life through a misunderstanding of life, these good folk. They do not understand the West End, yet they come down to the East End as teachers and savants. They do not understand the simple sociology of Christ, yet they come to the miserable and the despised with the pomp of social redeemers. They have worked faithfully, but beyond relieving an infinitesimal fraction of misery and collecting a certain amount of data which might otherwise have been more scientifically and less expensively collected, they have achieved nothing.

Reading The People of the Abyss will do many things to you: it will impress upon your soul the miserable state of the East End of London in 1902; it will make you angry at Jack London; it might make you wonder just when the "developed" world became distinct from the "developing" world, and it might raise this question--how could things be this bad?

There is so much abundance on this planet. Yet somehow we've managed to divide it up in such a way as to keep most of it out of most everyone's hands. But how could you divide it better? Many people I respect would say that the best way to divide everything is through the freedom of capitalism. But while this seems to be a good idea, isn't it evident that one of the basic premises of capitalism is not in effect? There is no equal starting point. At least a third of the world is receiving a substantial head-start, so substantial that many of the rest might as well give up the race. So how do we divide it better?

In the vein of Jack London, perhaps a little observation is in order. Recently traveling, this is what I saw: I went through four airports (Seattle, Chicago, Ft Lauderdale, and Dallas). These airports are in very different geographic regions of the United States, yet in each and every airport, certain sights were ubiquitous. Every time I passed a shoe-shine station, it was invariably a white person on the high chair, while a person with darker skin was shining the shoe. Every janitorial cart that passed (and I spent almost three full days in the airport, being passed by many janitorial carts) was not pushed by a white person, but a person with darker skin. Without fail, the people performing the most menial tasks were not white people.

How is it, if the freedom of capitalism does work, that a minority population is so vastly over-represented in menial positions and so vastly under-represented in all the positions above this? It's not an issue of geographic location, because what I saw was the same in the Pacific Northwest as it was Miami as it was in Dallas as it was in Chicago. If this is happening in a nation where the freedom of capitalism is kept more free than anywhere else, what hope is there for the freedom of capitalism?

Some part of the system is promoting this. I don't think that it is inherent in capitalism (although I can imagine it so), which leads me to suspect that the problem is with the base assumptions that we use as the foundation of our system. One of those is that everyone gets to start from an equal point. Capitalism is equitable as long as the people who participate in the system are allowed to start at the same level. This clearly does not happen.

Of course, some might say that the system was never intended to be equitable, but rather to generate the greatest amount of wealth for the largest number of people. Or they might just say that it was intended to generate the greatest amount of wealth. Either way, it is not hard to see how such a system could generate the situation London saw in The People of the Abyss.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Haruki Murakami

Noboru Wataya glanced at his watch in order to ascertain that the world was still spinning on its axis and costing him precious time.

Do you know the story of the monkeys of shitty island? I asked Noboru Wataya.
He shook his head, with no sign of interest. Never heard of it.
Somewhere, far, far away, there's a shitty island. An island without a name. An island not worth giving a name. A shitty island with a shitty shape. On this shitty island grow palm trees that also have shitty shapes. And the palm trees produce coconuts that give off a shitty smell. Shitty monkeys live in the trees, and they love to eat these shitty-smelling coconuts, after which they shit the world's foulest shit. The shit falls on the ground and builds up shitty mounds, making the shitty palm trees that grow on them even shittier. It's an endless cycle.
I drank the rest of my coffee.

Well, how can I put this? Sometimes, when I'm looking at you, I get this feeling like maybe you're fighting real hard against something for me. I know this sounds weird, but when that happens, I feel like I"m right with you, sweating with you. See what I mean? You always look so cool, like no matter what happens, it's got nothing to do with you, but you're not really like that. In your own way, you're out there fighting as hard as you can, even if other people can't tell by looking at you. If you weren't, you wouldn't have gone into the well like that, right? But anyhow, you're not fighting for me, of course. You're falling all over yourself, trying to wrestle with this big whatever-it-is, and the only reason you're doing it is so you can find Kumiko. So there's no point in me getting all sweaty for you. I know all that, but still, I can't help feeling that you are fighting for me, Mr Wind-up Bird--that, in a way, you are probably fighting for a lot of other people at the same time you're fighting for Kumiko. And that's maybe why you look like an absolute idiot sometimes. That's what I think, Mr Wind-up Bird. But when I see you doing this, I get all tense and nervous, and I end up feeling totally drained. I mean, it looks like you can't possibly win. If i had to bet on the match, I'd be on you to lose. Sorry, but that's how it is. I like you a lot, but I don't want to go broke. 

He inherited from his mother's stories the fundamental style that he used, unaltered, in his own stories: namely, the assumption that fact may not be truth, and truth may not be factual. The question of which parts of a story were factual and which were not was not a very important one for Cinnamon. The important question was not what his grandfather did but what his grandfather might have done. He learned the answer to this question as soon as he succeeded in telling the story.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle reminded me of something Salman Rushdie would write, only with more edges, or again, of something Isabelle Allende would write but not as much like a flowering plant (thorns or no thorns). It seems those historical chronicles that so often include magical realism, or those magical realism stories that just always seem to be historical chronicles, are mostly concerned with revealing the dirty secrets in our minds and our histories.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about wounds. Or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about fate. Or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a story about losing things. What most links the characters in Murakami's novel is their relation to Manchukuo, the puppet state Japan established in Manchuria in 1931-32. Perhaps because of their straightforward approach to incredible brutality or perhaps because of the tension between despair and hope in magical powers, the scenes and stories from this chapter of history are some of the most spell-binding in the book.

There are so many backwaters of history, little or large bits of the story that escape the notice of the mainstream history everyone is busy telling each other. Each culture, each nation has their own story they are telling, and as if by agreement they tell certain parts with grace and gusto so that other parts will go unnoticed. And it usually falls to the unofficial storytellers, the artists, to tell the omitted stories such as they find them. Because the artists can trick you into listening to a story you would otherwise have closed your ears to and run away from.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle gives you a sense of the hurt that society's framework is supposed to allow us all to hide and hold and function on with. To escape from his escaped wife Kumiko, Toru Okada goes to sit at the bottom of a well for three days because Lieutenant Mamiya was thrown into one, but May Kasahara decides to trap Toru down there because she wants to scare him because she's a crazy young girl because she wants to see how he will deal with it because she's fascinated by death because she likes the feeling of power because she might already be responsible for someone else's death. And this is only a tiny bit of the action, all of which seems to point to people who are trying to break out of the supporting framework because they want to know what their pain is like.

Toru can't seem to find a job (or make anything of himself), May doesn't go to school and counts bald men instead, Cinnamon doesn't speak, Kumiko runs away, Lieutenant Mamiya didn't die and can't fall in love, and the list goes on, all because they are people who don't want medication. Saying no mean thing against doctors, sometimes medication is not the thing the patient wants because the patient does not even want to be a patient. So everyone hopes that there really are some people who have superpowers and that maybe pain is like the snow that was general all over Dublin. 

The King's English

Kingsley Amis

Perceive, perception
To perceive something, or that something is so, used to mean simply to take in with the senses or the mind; you would perceive a tree on the horizon or the importance of heredity. The word is almost a synonym for see, except that a degree of effort or special ability is implied. But whatever you perceived was understood to be really there.
Then, in the earlier 1970s, a new meaning started creeping in. From then on what was perceived no longer had to be really there, it might be just the way you saw it, looked at it, saw not in the primary meaning of taking in reality but in the secondary meaning of taking a view of, e.g. I see things differently now. Nowadays journalists write of X's perception of the Labour Party when X might see the Labour Party as anything from a capitalist conspiracy to a gang of communists, while Y's perception might be entirely different and yet equally 'valid'.
When Samuel Johnson said to an acquaintance, 'Sir, I perceive you are a vile Whig,' he certainly did not mean to say anything as wishy-washy as that his uneven and temporary view of the chap took him to be some sort of vile Whig; he meant he now knew the other chap was a depraved supporter of parliament rather than the crown, etc. As Johnson would have known, the Latin roots of perceive indicate that it meant to grasp thoroughly. Latin roots of English words are notoriously often bad guides to meaning, but not seldom, as here, they may remind the user of what the English word once unequivocally meant.
This user of perceive and perception will remain at best potential until further notice. The distinction between their traditional and contemporary meanings is quite substantial enough to deter me from ever running the risk of being thus misunderstood. Such is a common result of verbal innovation: instead of anything valuable, it causes either muddle or the departure of a once-useful word.

 The moral of The King's English: Words are dangerous. 

The Pagan Rabbi

Cynthia Ozick

Meanwhile Isabel frowned with logic. But it's only that the caterpillar's future is longer and his fate father off. In the end he will die too. Never, never, never, said Fishbein; it is only the butterfly who dies, and then he has long since ceased to be a caterpillar. The caterpillar never dies.--Neither to die nor to be immortal, it is the enviable state, little dear, to live always at the point of beautiful change! That is what it means to be extraordinary--when did I tell you that?--He bethought himself. The first day, of course. It's always best to begin with the end--with the image of what is desired. If I had begun with the beginning I would have bored you, you would have gone away....In my ideal kingdom, little dear, everyone, even the very old, will be passionately in the process of guessing at and preparing for his essential self. Boredom will be unnatural, like a curse, or unhealthy, like a plague. Everyone will be extraordinary.

Cynthia Ozick's Rabbi quite literally was a pagan. Not what you expected. Have you ever heard of a rabbi who converted from Judaism to Paganism? The Pagan Rabbi is a page-turner, though.

The Bostonians

Henry James

My dear child, you are so young--so strangely young. I am a thousand years old; I have lived through generations--through centuries. I know what I know by experience; you know it by imagination. That is consistent with your being the fresh, bright creature that you are. I am constantly forgetting the difference between us--that you are a mere child as yet, though a child destined for great things. I forgot it the other night, but I have remembered it since. You must pass through a certain phase, and it would be very wrong in me to pretend to suppress it. That is all clear to me now; I see it was my jealousy that spoke--my restless, hungry jealousy. I have far too much of that; I oughtn't to give any one the right to say that it's a woman's quality. I don't want your signature; I only want your confidence--only what springs from that. I hope with all my soul that you won't marry; but if you don't it must not be because you have promised me. You know what I think--that there is something noble done when one makes a sacrifice for a great good. Priests--when they were real priests--never married, and what you and I dream of doing demands of us a kind of priesthood. It seems to me very poor, when friendship and faith and charity and the most interesting occupation in the world--when such a combination as this doesn't seem, by itself, enough to live for. No man that I have ever seen cares a straw in his heart for what we are trying to accomplish. They hate it; they scorn it; they will try to stamp it out whenever they can. Oh yes, I know there are men who pretend to care for it; but they are not really men, and I wouldn't be sure even of them! Any man that one would look at--with him, as a matter of course, it is war upon us to the knife. I don't mean to say there are not some male beings who are willing to patronize us a little; to pat us on the back and recommend a few moderate concessions; to say that there are two or three little points in which society has not quite been just to us. But any man who pretends to accept our programme in toto, as you and I understand it, of his own free will, before he is forced to--such a person simply schemes to betray us. There are gentlemen in plenty who would be glad to stop your mouth by kissing you! If you become dangerous some day to their selfishness, to their vested interests, to their immorality--as I pray heaven every day, my dear friend, that you may!--it will be a grand thing for one of them if he can persuade you that he loves you. Then you will see what he will do with you, and how far his love will take him! It would be a sad day for you and for me and for all of us if you were to believe something of that kind. You see I am very calm now; I have thought it all out.

James's novel about the early feminist movement is not flattering to women. Or it is very unflattering to Bostonians, not just the female variety. If you cannot tell from the quote above, women in The Bostonians are a flighty, exceedingly emotional, vindictive, silly collection of individuals. They have passion but they go about it very foolishly.

Perhaps it demonstrates my ignorance of Henry James, but The Bostonians was not at all what I expected. The story of a bitter old maid who is young and her infatuation with a hypnotist's daughter who she (the young old maid) sponsors into becoming a motivational speaker for women's liberation would have been surprising itself, but when you include a cousin from Mississippi, some very strange views about women and men, and finally marriage of tears, it leaves you with little to say.

I never expected James to be so wild.