Things Best Left Unsaid

photo by Amy Brandon

"Sometimes it seemed to me that my daughter had a need to fly into a rage."

Fredrik Welin in Henning Mankell's After the Fire

All my life I've been drawn to solitude. Spare, barren, windswept, lonely snowscapes wrap me in truth and take my mind to a place I've never been able to find any other way. Anything hinting at unrelenting cold and solitude enchant me. My mental safe place has always been a windowed berth on a train speeding through a snow-covered landscape.  Last year, when I stumbled on Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson and Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell, I felt like I had died and gone to the heaven I don't believe in.

When I recognized the similarities between the two books, I decided to re-read them both, making notes as I went.  I did re-read Italian Shoes and loved it as much the second time around as the first.  Before I got around to re-reading Out Stealing Horses, I stumbled across After the Fire by Henning Mankell, which is a sequel to Italian Shoes.  I was wandering around my new local LOCAL bookshop (Bookmarks in Winston-Salem) when I found After the Fire.  What a great bookshop!  The book though...well...

I was so happy to find a book that was the unknown sequel to a book I had loved. But here is what happened:  I find myself, involuntarily, to be reading through the cultural lens of my time, and I am so tired of being constantly confronted with men's icky sex obsessions.  I mean, honestly, at this point, what I would (or maybe wouldn't) like to know is are all men dysfunctional sex addicts?  A lot of books would lend evidence to the answer to that being yes. In that case, I'd like to go on not knowing for sure, thanks anyway.

There are so many good things about this book, so many beautiful ideas, beautiful words, made even more beautiful by the retrospective knowledge that Henning Mankell was writing this book in the last years of his life.  But damn, man...men...stop with the icky sex ideation.  Just stop.  Seriously. 

I can't even go on from here. I'd like to. I have so many passages marked that I'd like to share and consider. I'd like to discuss the book and its merits, but all I can say is that the constant 70 year old dude wanting to bang the 30 year old chick fantasy completely overshadowed everything else for me right now, which is just sad and a real waste.  So I'm done with this, and again I think maybe I may have to read only women authors until I get this "Oh Look Who's A Sexual Predator Now" taste out of my mouth.  

Our Dirty Glass Castles

photo by Amy Brandon

 

"Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?"

~Miss Kenton in The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a beautiful introspectively retrospective novel, but I must admit I had a bipolar relationship with it.  For a while, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to finish it.  The entire novel is a narration of the past by Stevens the Butler, who is the opposite of woke.  I found myself losing patience with his cluelessness and his repression on more than one occasion. Steven’s memory is so colored and re-cast that much of it has become fallacy, a narrative he tells himself as a comfort, as a justification, sometimes almost a celebration, of his existence.  Instead of seeing things as they were, he assauges his own doubts by casting them in a muted, better light, which apparently was his habit throughout his life. Do we all do this, I wonder?  I suppose to an extent, we do.  I suspect forgiveness itself hinges somewhat on being able to forget or at least to temper our memories. How much do any of us have to find a way to excuse and/or justify the choices we have made over a lifetime?  This theme harks back to The Buried Giant, also by Kazuo Ishiguro, where a collective memory wipe was necessary for a group of people to live in peace. 

 

Poor Stevens works so hard to cast his father in the light of the ever-illusive patriarchal perfection and then strives his whole life to live up to the unattainable, imagined standard of a long-dead father. Eventually, Stevens ingratiated himself with me, and I found myself feeling sorry for him, in his bumbling cluelessness, as I often tend to do with bumbling, clueless people in real life.  But now I begin to wonder how much that kind of permissive, maternal sympathy is to blame for the liberal latitudes men have been allowed for centuries? It brings to mind the sociological issue of raising our daughters and loving our sons.  Men like Stevens the Butler want to live in a bubble, and they want the people around them to help them maintain that bubble.  When someone begins to prod at the flimsy walls of self-deception they’ve constructed, they shut down, run away, or lash out.  They use cluelessness or repression or denial or privilege or some combination of these defenses (See Roy Moore, Harvey Weinstein, Louis CK) to maintain their slick glass castles in the air, never bothering to look down to see the earth at their feet, where the rest of us stand bearing the burden of their fallacious facades.

 

The Remains of the Day  won me over eventually, and I have now come to miss the voice of Stevens the Butler, but I don't miss his infuriating habit of obsessing on all the wrong things or his constant attempts to justify and explain his past.

 

 

Things You Never Want to Hear Your Mom Say

photo by Amy Brandon

When I was 25, I read Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, and I fell in love.  I fell in love with Tom Builder and with the story of how he got his name and the history of cathedral building, which felt to me like a history of communal faith itself.  So much of the story felt like something I remembered, as strange as that seemed at the time.  In the age of epigenetics and DNA testing that “remembering”  feels less strange and much more possible now, but that’s a topic for a different post.

Years later, when  the second book, World Without End came out, I was discussing its arrival with one of my friends.  She said, “Yeah, I liked Pillars of the Earth, but I got really tired of all the rape and weird sex stuff.”  I was at a loss for words, because I didn’t even remember any of the sex stuff.   To this day, I have no idea if there is rape and weird sex stuff in Pillars of the Earth, because I haven’t re-read it.  Possibly it’s there, and I ignored it, because I am the Queen of Not Seeing What I Don’t Want to See (again a different post).  Currently, at the ripe old age of 2(25), I now know there is a lot of weird sex stuff out there:  in books, in movies, in TV shows, in comedy routines, and apparently just in life in general.  I do not know why this is.  Do not ask me.  I do not understand because 1. I don’t have a penis (I use penis here in a non-gender specific way as I have met women who, while they don't have a physical penis, have a penis in this regard), and 2. I’m pretty naïve.

Just because I am naïve does not mean I am a prude or a fan of censorship.  I am not easily offended. I love sex. I even like some porn, assuming it's the kind where no one is getting peed on, literally or metaphorically (file that under Things You Never Want to Hear Your Mom Say, so sorry Brandon and Anna).  I can’t think of any kind of sex scene that does not involve one person’s infringement on another person’s dignity that would bother me.  There are plenty of possibilities to write or to draw or to film healthy and inspiring acts of human sexuality.  I am all for all of those. Write them.  Film them.  Draw them.  Share them.  Healthy, consensual sexuality is a beautiful gift worth celebrating. 

But sexual assault is about power.  It is a way for people to empower themselves by asserting dominance over other people.  It is the vehicle by which people attempt to assert dominance by saying,  “It is my right to use your presence, your body, your personhood, your existence in this way, and you have no agency to resist.”  Even within those words lies the power of the disenfranchised. When we resist, when we speak, we take back our power.  When we assert ourselves, when we say, both to ourselves and to the world at large, “You did this. You are the problem.  This was your problem until you spewed it all over me.  I did nothing here except exist,” we are reclaiming our own right to be who we are and to think what we think and to want what we want, separate and apart from any one else.

When we, as a society, consume unhealthy sexuality as entertainment, whether it’s in the form of phrases like “boys will be boys,” or “that’s just locker room talk,” or rape jokes, or the glorification of any person’s non-permissive domination over another person, we perpetuate the myth that domination is acceptable, that somehow, when it becomes art, it becomes above reproach. Art is just like life. There is beauty, and there is perversion. Whether it’s art imitating life or life imitating art, it’s time to stop pretending like any kind of domination is just part of who we are.  Speaking for myself, I'm pretty sure I'm going to punch the next person who grabs my ass without permission.  I'll risk the battery charge.