Reading Malamud with my parents

(or, I am what I am granted to be, and at present the completion is in the future)

To be clear, my parents weren't reading Malamud. Not lately, anyway. But I was, and I was with them, visiting them on vacation in Florida. In a wonderful conversation before I left town, Matt had suggested that I read Malamud's short story "Angel Levine." Many thanks, Matt, for taking the time for tea and for pointing me in Malamud's direction. Incredibly, I'd never read him.

One of Matt's comments was that "Angel Levine" seems to have an been an influence on Kushner's thinking about his Angel. Definitely. Here is the first encounter between Angel Levine and the old tailor Manischevitz, in the tailor's living room, where Levine has materialized in apparent response to Manischevitz's desperate prayers (Levine is black, Manischevitz is white, the story is circa 1955):

"Who are you?" Manischevitz at last asked uneasily.

"If I may, insofar as one is able to, identify myself, I bear the name of Alexander Levine."

In spite of his troubles Manischevitz felt a smile growing on his lips. "You said Levine?" he politely inquired.

The Negro nodded. "That is exactly right."

Carrying the jest further, Manischevitz asked, "You are maybe Jewish?"

"All my life I was, willingly."

The tailor hesitated. He had heard of black Jews but had never met one. It gave an unusual sensation.

Recognizing in afterthought something odd about the tense of Levine's remark, he said doubtfully, "You ain't Jewish anymore?"

Levine at this point removed his hat, revealing a very white part in his black hair, but quickly replaced it. He replied, "I have recently been disincarnated into an angel. As such, I offer you my humble assistance, if to offer is within my province and power---in the best sense." He lowered his eyes in apology. "Which calls for added explanation: I am what I am granted to be, and at present the completion is in the future."

"What kind of angel is this?" Manischevitz gravely asked.

"A bona fide angel of God, within prescribed limitations," answered Levine, "not to be confused with the members of any particular sect, order, or organization here on earth operating under a similar name."

There's much that's painfully wrong about the story (what makes Levine tick, the exploitation of the sense of oddity surrounding black Jews for Manischevitz, the depictions of women, Harlem, the other African American characters) but also so much that's interesting in it. And in the humor of the exchange, in the angel's seriousness, his language, his humanity, the seeds of Kushner's Angel, surely.

I took Malamud's collected stories with me to the beach, figuring reading them would be a good way to stay in my working brain without absenting myself from my parents to write. I was able to fill my ear with the sounds of Yiddish, its syntax and grammar, its particular framing of the world. But after two whole days of reading Malamud, I felt worn down. The constancy of frustration and sorrow, the infrequency of redemption, the wrong notes in his explorations of black/Jewish relations, the commonplace misogyny--the nagging Jewish wives, the inevitable descriptions of women's bodies, their meaning only in relation to men, as a man's solution or downfall---it got old.

I will be glad to be getting my Yiddishkeit from Grace Paley when her collected stories arrive in the mail. (Just rereading that linked interview with Grace makes me smile with love for her. But that's another post.)

And even as I type this, I know it's arguable: Malamud's stories are recognized for their redemption. But what I know in my body is that reading them all at once, I felt exhausted and sad. When I think about Kushner taking Malamud as one of a thousand and three starting points, I wonder about what stayed the same and what changed. What stayed the same: suffering cannot be redeemed. But, for Kushner, sex can redeem and be redeemed. The body, broken-down and miserable, can redeem and be redeemed. Hope can redeem and be redeemed. So can art. And, improbably, maybe even life.

Kushner's Prior, from the end of Angels In America:

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.

Bye now.

You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins.

Queer Ethics

One of the things I got to wondering about when we were out at Alma: where is the queer in my piece? Thoughts from my college-era women's studies classes kept chasing each other around in my head: Does the piece need to have a queer character to have a queer presence? Isn't a it queer piece because I'm writing it? Do I write queer? What does a queer aesthetic mean? Does there have to be sex? (Now that's not a question I usually ask! María's shift of "have to" to "get to" would maybe be good here!)

And then Ana started talking about remembering what queer meant when we first came out. And then I read this, from a link off Ana's blog. (Thank you, Ana!)

It is depth of radical imaginary possibility that has been made possible through the very fact of subjection that is the place of ethics. Which is to say most simply that a group of people that is subject to norms must, in order to survive, come up with new ways of existence. Wherever there are limits there is an imagination of transgressing these limits -- and that is the radical potential of being queer. That our entire lives are basically a series of limits, and the fact of having all those limits in that kind of distance from the moral centre of the world, forces us, enables us, and allows us to imagine things constantly. That is the ethical possibility of being queer.

Last night I watched Adelina enact this. Adelina, with her reimagined Dick Cheney, with her story of that man (as my grandmother would refer, when necessary, to J.C.), and Magdalena/Mary Magdalene. Completely immoral. Utterly ethical.

A working title

Living in the World to Come

Hmm. It's something to sit with ....

Water

Soundtrack

Amel Larrieux/Infinite Possibilities

Slow thinking

In bed with my body. Cedarstruck. First Tuesday. Had my Monday morning meeting this morning, sketching out a first divine week while eating cheese grits that were just a pale imitation of Cheryl's, but still a fine beginning. May not make it through all my choices today. Rest reared up and took precedence.

Want to share this from a book by Matthew Goulish, of the Goat Island performance group. 39 microlectures in proximity of performance

[after speaking of Pina Bausch, Kenzaburo Oe, and Andrei Tarkovsky, receiving their work:]

Slowness of thought requires in individuals either: 1) slow thought by nature, 2) slow thought by practice, meaning patience, or 3) slow thought by sheer force of will, meaning courage. Most of us live in fear of slowing down our thinking, because of the possibility that if we succeed we might find that in fact nothing is happening. I guarantee this is not the case. Something is always happening. In fact, some things happen which one can only perceive with slow thinking.

I am intrigued by this. I recognize in it some of the mechanism of the unfolding of meaning that I have seen from the other side of my thoughts (from inside them, I mean, perceiving what I am perceiving, not my perceptions) --when looking at Senalka's work, Wura's work, watching Laurie Anderson perform live, immersing myself in the water of some of Ana's layered pieces. It's not just that it takes slow thinking to understand/experience the work --- the work itself induces slow thinking. Gives us a clock we can feel, so to speak! I'm embarrassed to realize this, but I think this was the nature of a comment/compliment Ana just gave me on my work. (Shucks.)

Okay, but I'm also thinking about the slow thinking required to create the work. The slow thinking required to create the work that induces the slow thinking that allows people to perceive the work. Perceive the work/the world in another way. The patience and courage that evokes patience and courage. Huh. Because this can't be contradictory, for an artist, to the flashes of inspiration, the spurts of productivity, the sudden connections made in the working. There is speed. But also slowness. A crucial slowness.

Thinking about what this means for my own process and work. Fast talking/slow thinking.

Countdown to bedtime

10:56 the first monday

listening to einstein on the beach - philip glass, michael reisman

countdown to bedtime

first divine task for the piece

cutting cloth

how does it feel

sound

look

the difference between dust and stars

the difference between fire and ash

Hi sweeties!

I'm pretending this page is a blog. How did your Monday morning meeting go? I slept through mine. But I kept the radio off in the car on the way to work this morning and came up with my five daily divine tasks to do. Done 2 and changed 1 and did the new version. 2 more to go before bed.

Stayed up last night till 3:00 in the morning (NOT my new bedtime, I promise) proofreading/editing sweet projects for friends---the creative work of a faraway friend, and the completely inspirational application materials of a young friend who's applying to the nontraditional student program at my (& Cheryl's) alma mater. (Plug for her website: www.girl-mom.com). Felt filled with love and so happy to be sharing some of the energy with them that you all shared with me over the deeply magical weekend.

Also stayed up working on the poem I needed to submit for a poetry project at the Blanton. Thank you, Samiya, for taking the time to sit with me before we went home yesterday. Your clear eye helped me so much. Here's the final version (by which I mean, the one I sent!) and the piece that it's in conversation with:

Timepiece

After Isabel del Río’s ‘2244 Módulos’

On the Electrodynamics
of Moving Bodies, 1905.
Einstein drops the news:
The only now is here
and now. Forget the man
in the floating booth
setting the absolute clock. Time
is a kind of relationship to place,
its only instruments
our earthly bodies.

Build me a clock I can feel.
Every minute is history.
What arrogance to imagine
we can carry time with us weightless,
or weighing only grams or ounces,
easy to slip from a pocket,
grasp with a turn of the wrist.
Dress it up, wear it casually.
A decorative object, accessory
laid to rest in a drawer.

I want an archeology of the living.
Give me a calendar that can record
without reducing. No sheet of paper
pressed thin and dry from the pulp
and pulse of trees, uprooted.

Stay with me in the dark soil.
Show me burden and accomplishment,
the ruined city of my days,
the stuttering promise of more
of more to come,
clay in the creator’s hands,
material of the incipient world.