* Martha Eve-Washington: The Feminist Conundrum

Martha Eve-Washington
but not Eve-Washington, D.C.



















The Feminist Conundrum





Choosing a marital name: Somehow feminists have convinced themselves that retaining their maiden (virginal?) name is an act of liberation from male domination. Think again. All last names are male names. They all came from fathers. Retaining your father's name is no less an act of submission to male domination than taking your husband's name. Such is the feminist conundrum.

This debate raged during my years at Yale Divinity School (1976-80) and contnues in a lower tone today. I proposed a solution then which I repeat today: Women should put the prefix "Eve" (for the first Woman) before whatever last name they take, or keep.

And by the way the very term "woman" comes from the medieval "wifman" itself a term of submission: Wifman's Liberation?

During my days at Bread Loaf School of English (l991-97) one longtime faculty couple who married belatedly in life tried to solve this problem by creating a third name from syllables of family last names from either side of the marital equation. And example of this might be Smith marries Jones and takes the new name Smones. The conundrum remains: Even syllables from previous family names incorporated into a new name derive from male last names.

All-------------repeat all-----------last names come from males.

My solution while awkward does at least amount to a declaration of indpendence from maleness. Martha Eve-Washinton; Mary Eve-Todd Eve-Lincoln; Sally Eve-Hemmings, Michelle Eve-Obama.

And Barack Eve-Obama?

What about husbands? If they concur, they could be Abraham Eve-Lincolns and George Eve-Washingtons too.

And Washington, D.C.?

No change.














But Seattle?

Definitely Eve-Washington.

* Cargoon Catharsis: Disney's Puny "Poetics"

Name this actor (_____)


Michael
Barrymore



Reginald Owen








Name this actor (______)




Alistair Sim





Jim Carrey

































































Somehow the Disney Digital Deception, A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey, seems almost silly. Tiny Tim looks like a rubbbery, goony Alfred E. Newman on Carrey's shoulder in this photo, and Carrey's nose makes Cyrano, Shylock, Pinnochio and Scrooge all swim in the same genetic pool. Disney was at his best with fairy tales and myths and cartoons, but this Scrooge and Company are cargoons, not cartoons.

I tried to find the original A Christmas Carol black and white film I watched on television in the 1950's but it seems not to be on Google images or wikipedia. I was looking for that original and most convincing hatchet faced Scrooge to date and couldn't find him. The best I could do is the 1935 Alistair Sim and a later Scrooge who looks like Felix Unger's sloppy roommate or Carl Malden or one of those actors with a torn pocket for a face. Even Patrick Stewart, who managed to turn the towering evil of Melville's Ahab into a baldheaded twit, elicits more respect from me than Disney's digital disaster, at least in the one photo I could find of Stewart as Scrooge.

And there was Lionel Barrymore, about whose Scrooge more need not be said than Barrymore.

What Disney fails to realize, is that our ability to be moved by this curmudgeon's transformation, depends on his being a real human being, not Jim Carrey wrapped in a digital shroud. Even the round-faced Sim or the Carl Malden look-alike version shown above grab me because they could be me.

Disney's Digital Deception just doesn't do it. It lacks the possibility for identification and thus the pity and fear necessary for catharsis.

It's just another silly Disney rubber duckey.

And if there's one thing Dickens is not, it's silly.

* Raising the Dead: Thanksgiving, 1963

President John F. Kennedy as matchbook cover




Samuel Pepys as paper doll






















Somewhere in the 2 million word, 9 volume Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sam, the author of what has become the most famous autobiography of all time, writing around age 30, describes the funeral of his brother and then, back to the office a day later, exclaims, "Oh, Lord! How soon we forget the dead" (or words very similar to these).

Since November 22, 1963 (46 years ago) I have watched the most famous man in the world dwindle to little more than the name on a performing arts center or airport, or the face on a matchbook cover. All of the television-watching world was almost physically stricken with grief on the Thanksgiving weekend of his assassination, but now that event, and even his life and presidency, are barely resuscitate-able, even by the medium of documentary film.

Such is the necessary nature of human memory. We must push events and emotions further away lest we remain paralyzed in the ecstacy or anguish of their present.

The eulogizers intone from the pulpit at funerals, "We will never forget him (or her)" but this is a social lie we must tell each other in order not to feel barbaric at what we know will happen to our dearly departed: dilution----infinite dilution.

The answer to a trivia question informs me that at this very moment an atom from the last breath breathed by Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. is in this room or any room in the world since atoms disperse infinitely.

That is the only immortality one can expect on this planet.

Off this planet---who knows? Everything has been promised from an Emerald City in the Sky to an Eternal Furnace on the lowest level of a triple decker universe.

The ancient Greeks say immortality is "living on" in the memories of survivors. Look what 2000 years has done to Joshua ben Joseph (aka Jesus Christ)in the memory of survivors and followers.

There is a fleet of Jesuses put forth by Roman Catholic,Catholic,Orthodox Christian, European Protestant and hundreds of American Protestant and evangelical Christian sects.

One of the great debates in New Testament scholarship is that represented by the latin phrase the ipsissima verba Jesu: the very words of Jesus.





















Some scholars says those ipsissima verba Jesu number in the hundreds , even thousands, of words in the New Testament. Others say that at the most, only 31 words can be traced back to the mouth of the reputed messiah and even those 31 words were set down (written) no closer than forty years after his death. So much for preserving the memory of a god, let alone a human.




















The very chemicals racing across synapses in my brain to produce this keyboarding will some day cease and becomes like Caesar's last breath: atoms infinitely dispersing into other atoms.

That is the most I can verify about post-mortem existence on this globe we call Earth.

All else is faith.

* "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" (For Jane and Walter)

Skull and Bones's secret society building, Yale University: Home of Geronimo's Skull









Prescott Bush as member of Skull and Bones










































My childhood friend, Jane Ridgway, and her husband, Walter Littlemoon have written a book, They Called Me Uncivilized, about Walter's childhood experience as a native of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and as a Lakota.

It is not so much about the original Wounded Knee Massacre,although there is a indelible image made of a similar 1876 event (Northern Cheyenne massacre at the Powder River near the Big Horn Mountains) when Walter tells of his great grandmother's relatives gutting ponies into whose cavities they stuffed their own children and babies so that they could keep them warm in a blizzard as they escaped the military slaughter. Several froze to death anyway.

It is not even about the 1973 Wounded Knee occupation, although one chapter effectively and efficiently untangles that complexity with simple truths and a "resident's eye view" of the Second Wounded Knee a century after the First.

And "childhood experience" is a limp euphemism.

This book is about Walter's being "abducted" to an Indian Boarding School (to quote the preface by Harvard psychologist Jayme Schorin) and being "tortured and beaten", to use Walter's words, until his soul was numbed,a phenomenon which, with its subsequent triggers, Schorin calls "Complex Traumatic Strees Syndrome".

No,like Oliver Twist without the pompous 19th century words and interminable subordinate clauses, this book is about cruelty to children and its lifelong impact, a cruelty systematically dispensed by the Indian Boarding Schools, whose military founder, Henry Pratt, had as his motto: Kill the Indian, Save the Man.

It should have read: Kill the Soul, Save the Shell.

What Walter and Jane do in this remarkable little book is document Walter's rebuilding of the soul.

This is a short volume, 92 pages, like its thin brothers before it: Hiroshima by John Hersey, Night, by Elie Wiesel,and The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass. It packs the same whollop that those brief books do too, and one senses that this moving volume might join their company.


















































For, me there is an irony in Jane's assistant-authorship, which may not strike others. Jane and I met at ballroom dancing school at the High Lane Club as teenagers in Hamden, Connecticut, four miles up Whitney Avenue from Yale University.




























This was long before Jane thought of marrying a member of the Lakota and moving to Wounded Knee. But as we danced our childhoods away at the High Lane Club in the Blue shadow of the Ivy League university up the road, a Secret Society at Yale named Skull and Bones, was conducting some of its sacred rituals around the skull of the Apache Chief, Geronimo, stolen from its grave by Prescott Bush (the father of the first President Bush and grandfather of the second, and, after his own graduation from Yale, U.S. Senator from Connecticut)and other Skull and Bones members.




As residents of Hamden, as Jane and I were, who shopped in New Haven, as Jane and I did, we had to confront the architecture of those secret society buildings from the moment Whitney Avenue, the main drag between Hamden and New Haven, split into two, one-way-streets , divided by a triangulated piece of property: That triangle was dominated by a huge white windowless tomb silently thumbing its nose to all outsiders as traffic entered the city, Yale, and the New Haven Green.



































That Secret Society building still stands sentinel in defiance of traffic today----a reminder of the often racial elitism which has gone into building Yale for 300 years.





























Walter Littlemoon ends his preface to They Called Me Uncivilized with a sentence of poetic beauty: "Now I stand naked before you all. This is my sweatlodge. This is my vision seeking.This is my Sundance. Remember, restore, reach out."

May The Moccasin Telegraph and the Internet send these words around the world.


PS: Jane Ridgeway tells me that the photo and building I have presented here as "standing sentinel" as town merges to gown in New Haven, are actually a Protestant "religious" secret society building not associated with Yale. I'm not sure my "white elitism" critique would not still pertain even if they I am incorrect in building identification since Yale has been for most of its three centuries a fortress of Protestant, white, elitism.

* Doing My Time in Vermont

Bread Loaf,
1991-97











When I came to Vermont 25 years ago people looked at me funny. I was a flatlander and didn't know it. I stood out like a sore thumb. The two big giveaways were: I was impatient in lines and I talked too fast.

Vermont is egalitarian to the marrow of its bones. Recall, Vermont was the ONLY state which outlawed slavery in its Constitution. So when I was impatient in a line because I needed to get somewhere and somebody was holding things up, I was saying by my body language, facial expressions and tone of voice and mutterings, that I thought I was more important than everyone else. After a while I was fascinated to watch how Vermonters put up with whatever delay was happening in a grocery store or other type of line: stoically, without a trace of emotion on a square inch of their bodies. It wasn't courtesy or manners exactly, it was a philosophical commitment to giving the other person whatever they needed.

I remember in a grocery store line in Rutland fifteen years ago, 12 people ahead of me (who, like myself, had been waiting for 15 minutes without moving forward an inch) suddenly broke out in spontaneous applause. When I asked what happened, a line member said: "The person at the cashier just paid nothing for $267 worth of groceries because they had a free coupon for every single item."

Only in Vermont.

The other quality I had besides impatience was my mouth. I used it too much and too fast. Cordelia says, comparing herself to one of her duplicitous sisters, in King Lear: I want that glib and oily art to speak but purpose not.

Vermonters are very suspicious of anyone who seems to be using words to lubricate an ulterior motive or hidden agenda: to impress others; to belittle others; to hide truth; to confuse others; etc., etc.

I was a fast talking polysyllabic city slicker to most Vermonters when I arrived here. I had to learn to speak slower and not use tuxedo words for wood stove converation. And biggest lesson of all: I had to learn to listen.

Listening, I discovered, is a form of talking, to a Vermonter.

When I first moved to South Royalton 25 years ago to live with my friend Carol and her young children, Carol told me, "You have to do your time in Vermont".

It sounded like a jail sentence---but it was actually a kind of therapy. You have to let Vermont work its magic on you, is what Carol meant. You have to let Vermont's values sink in and color you. You have to let Vermont bake you, as if you were dough. And if you wait just the right amount of time and have just the right ingredients and nobody jars the oven, you'll rise to a perfect loaf.

Well, Carol did her time in Vermont and has long since left for Michigan, Florida and Washington State.



Home,
2008












I, on the other hand, will start my 25th year in Vermont soon. I'm still baking----and intend to keep doing so for the rest of my days.

* Jimmy's Gray Badge of Courage (With Footnote to the Tightly Wadded David Brooks of NYT)

Thursday's alleged mass murderer at Ft. Hood is an Army psychiatrist. President Obama expresses shock. It is almost as if wearing the presidential mantle turns one's brains to the service of propaganda.

Is it really "shocking" that a warrior-profession that takes idealistic young men and women and turns them into suspicion-ridden killers would collapse inward in self-devouring fury?

And that a doctor whose mission it is to restore humanity to those who have been dehumanized in order to kill, who have been made paranoid in order to survive, might lose his own stability in the process?

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) didn't become a formal psychiatric term until the first Viet Nam veterans to return stateside started shooting up McDonalds' customers for some odd reason in the 1970's, even before the phrase 'went postal' was coined.

Its reality has been around since Antigone sought to bury her brother Polynices on the battlefield of ancient Greece 3000 years ago.

I recall that in 1953 my next door neighbor returned from the Korean War. He had bought the only new car in our neighborhood, a 1953 gray Chevrolet which fascinated me as an 8 year old. My mother told me not to bother him about the car because he was "tired" from the war. So I watched every day from our window , waiting for him to leave for work in the morning and drive that shiny elegance off into the horizon. Boyhood!

One day Jimmy (that was his name) didn't come down from his 3rd floor attic apartment in his parents' house to drive off in that Chevy and delight my childhood eyes.


He had hung himself in his parachute up there on the third floor. No adult ever explained to me why. Maybe they didn't know themselves. Maybe I heard the word "shell shocked" out of the corner of some adult's mouth, but I think not.

The car was given to his aunt who loyally drove it in our neighborhood for the next 15 years and then gave it to her eighty-year-old boyfriend two blocks away. I realize half a century later that that car had been Jimmy's Gray Badge of Courage.

Jimmy and his car have long been forgotten---as we all will be,unless we have an Antigone (or an Aunt) in our lives who delays that inevitability a few years and insists that we continue to be honored in death.

Antigone was honoring her brother's "bravery," a word nations invented to pretty up war, a word which has turned millions of men into monsters.















Unlike Antigone, I honor not Jimmy's "bravery" but his sacrifice:The sacrifice of his childhood innocence, the sacrifice of his soul; both tortured in the inferno of the mind, set ablaze by the butchery of war.

Whatever "reasons" adults devise to explain today's butchery at Ft. Hood* there is one reality which cannot be explained: a mind consumed by its own fires, set ablaze in the name of national "bravery".

P.S. Ever heard the name John Brown?


*(added 11/10/09 Veterans' Day Eve): "Reasons" including today's David Brooks 11/10 NYT Op-Ed "The Rush to Therapy"--Has the guy never read The Red Badge of Courage? Does it occur to such a tightly wadded conservative as Mr. Brooks that war itself is "evil" not just Dr. Hasan (to use his Reaganesque, evangelical word)?

* Alma Mater Yale---- Nurturing Motherhood: Blue Milk from the Male Bosom

How preposterous! A critic says my blog picks on Yale.



The Proverb cited in the masthead clears me of that accusation. But why exactly do I focus on Yale? After all I have three other almae matres. It could be The Anti-Middlebury, or The Anti-Kent State or the Anti-Ithaca. Why The Anti-Yale?

Yale is not only my nourishing mother but my nourishing metaphor--and if you read my letter to Middlebury* you will know I believe metaphors are necessary for human survival itself.

Yale is the best and the worst in our world. It creates a safe harbor for the pursuit of truth and and fortifies that harbor by feeding off a Stock Market which has dashed the hopes of millions of the gullible, including Nobel Laureate, Elie Wiesel.

For most of the 19th and 20th century it was elitist, sexist and anti-semitic not only in its admissions policies, but in its visual presentation to the world: ensconsing itself in medieval fortresses which faced inward, away from the uncultured masses.

Local folklore has it that Yale even imported an entire town of stone-cutters from Italy ("Esposito" a prolific name in New Haven, literally means "from the outside") to build those student and academic palaces.

To its credit Yale graduated an African American Ph.D. only nine years after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln.











Edward A. Bouchet, a New Haven native and graduate of the Yale College Class of 1874 ,is the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in America. His degree was the sixth doctorate in physics ever awarded in that field.(from Yale website)


To its discredit, it observed quotas for the maximum number of Jews who could be admitted to its alabaster halls, through the 1950's, if not longer.


Would you call this semi-anti-semitism? It has a nice Yale academic ring to it, doesn't it?























Yale has recently abandoned a centuries-old tradition of worshipping a Christian God at its public services, in favor of a multi-cultural chaplaincy; and, one wonders therefore to which God the Yale motto now refers: For God, Country and Yale---Allah, Yahweh, Christ?

And women. Let's not forget about women. Until the 1970's Yale was an all male bastion (with an occasional exception in art or medicine, maybe divinity). Women were transported en masse from the sisters colleges of New England to adorn the weekend social lives of Yale men. Women were background music or potted plants to accentuate the male foreground. (Ever wonder why men "lead" in ballroom dancing, the dancing of pre-liberation America? There is absolutely no logical reason why women should not"lead", except to reinforce cultural obeisance to male hegemony.)






















\












And sexual identity? Well---we won't go there. All statistics on this are dubious for obvious age-old reasons of bigotry and harrassment and personal privacy choices, if privacy is even extant in today's facebooked, tweetered, sextmessaged generation.


Yale is my metaphor: My metaphor for crumbling cultures and self-remodelling rubble.


May my metaphorical mother continue to try to be nurturing to those many foundlings she has newly pressed to her heretofore male, blue, christian bosom.


______________________________

*THOUGHT PROCESS
Letter to the Editor
Middlebury Magazine

Dear Editor:
Gary Johnson's question at the end of "When Worlds Collide" (Spring 2009 issue) raises another question: Does cerebration itself separate us from our ideation? In other words--Do we use the metaphorical complexity of the liberal arts to obfuscate rather than confront our own primitive murderous instincts? And do we need to engage in such obfuscation in order not to commit suicide? One famous psychiatrist began all his initial encounters with patients by asking this question: "Why don't you kill yourself?" The liberal arts offers a Jack Benny kind of answer: "I'm busy thinking."
Hemingway said his "typewriter" was his "psychiatrist". His prose purges every act of cerebration in favor of ideation---look at the description of what is in front of Nick Adams's eyeballs not behind them for example. But then we all know what happened to Hemingway when he stopped writing.
We may need metaphors (and the liberal arts is loaded with them) simply to survive. And what is the most persistent and omnipresent metaphor the human species creates : religion.
Paul D. Keane, M.A. English '97