Recently a San Diego-based colleague and friend invited me to sit at her table for the local celebration of National Philanthropy Day. I found myself wavering about whether or not to accept the invitation* because I assumed she had invited me as a dialogue and leadership development practitioner, a role I am downsizing, and not as a writer, a role that still feels baggy around me, that I am still exploring, and that didn’t seem terribly relevant to the purposes of the event. A few days after the invitation, I had the opportunity to discuss my professional-identity-related ambivalence with her, and, in addition to being slightly puzzled by the intensity of the question (a puzzlement I heard from others as well, mostly in the form of “who cares”), she told me she’d invited me as a “philanthropist” to celebrate what I and others contribute, to our region and world, in whatever ways we do – with money, volunteer activities, dialogue work, writing. I was delighted by the large ontological frame her use of the epithet “philanthropist” constructed for my different professional identities, indeed, for all my identities as a social being.
Mentioning this delight to another (not-San Diego-based; indeed fabulously global) friend, I initiated a prolonged argument on the meaning of philanthropy. My easy adoption of philanthropy as an umbrella that would encompass my various professional and personal identities was vigorously rejected on the grounds that philanthropy has a strictly technical meaning that separates it from its roots in the massive sloshing phenomenon of human-love-for-human, a vast not-misanthropy that exists beyond an imaginary zero line. I didn’t waver. Nor did she. We ran out of time, so the discussion ended. Eventually, somewhat gleefully, since my philanthropy is larger, at least in conception, than her philanthropy, once my cortisol level dropped, I let it go. So now I return, non-polemically, happily higher on oxytocin than on cortisol, to imagining writing as philanthropy. Does it work even if my writing is not intentionally philanthropic, as it often isn’t? A sentence pops into my immediate response, drawn from Ben Jeffrey’s review of Michel Houllebecq’s dispiriting novels “… if it feels true, it will be better writing than something that only feels like it ought to be true—literature isn’t essentially normative.” There’s a piece of my answer in there. But writing as philanthropy calls for a whole blog post of its own, so more on that another time. * It turned out I wasn’t free at that time.
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In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty tries to find an economic driver of structural inequality that might be amenable to policy control; he finds that capital income contributes strikingly to increasing inequality and that, potentially though not easily, its effects can be reduced by tax policy. Most discussions of his book focus on his academic work of data gathering, analysis, and theory-building.
A second intention gets less attention. This is the intention to engage directly in public discourse: not simply informing public discourse, nor simply a written form of public speaking, but seeing himself and his work as direct participants in a marketplace that includes ordinary, not-scholarly, not-official people and, presumably, their language and ideas. “Social scientists, like all intellectuals and all citizens, ought to participate in public debate…. It is illusory, I believe, to think that the scholar and the citizen live in separate moral universes, the former concerned with means and the latter with ends.” For me, the charm and importance of his work, well beyond the competence of his (and his team’s) data-gathering, analysis, and theory-building, derives from this engagement, unabashedly personal, with a systemic moral universe that includes the scholar and the citizen. I started reading Piketty’s Capital around the same time that I read the transcript of Marilynne Robinson’s conversation with Barack Obama, and immediately promised myself that I would write this post, because Robinson and Obama’s conversation has the same quality of ranging outside the lines of conventional or official categories. In a back-and-forth that comfortably meanders from careful phrases to sentences that try to capture a truth so intensely they immediately reveal their own limits, then on to rambling words strung together thinking-out-loud, Robinson and Obama discuss the importance and meaning of Christianity in Robinson’s life and writing, the language and role of Christianity in contemporary politics, the gap between ordinary decency and mean-spirited politics, and race in the US, among other things. It’s not that such discussions are unusual or that the content is extraordinary; what is remarkable is the ease with which Robinson and Obama make the ordinary* commute with intellectual, author, President, in a public conversation. So, why am I writing this post? Because I was invigorated by Piketty’s, Robinson’s and Obama’s smudging beyond the boundaries of expertise and the lines of disciplinary language. I loved their engagement beyond the professionalization of their, and our, lives. In his book and in their conversation, these three people – Piketty, Robinson, and Obama – bring intellect into direct contact with ordinary life, in the public sphere. I hear their words bringing to the fore, in a wonderful way, an obvious but usually subdued understanding: that all people – social and political beings, whether “intellectual” or not – have equal stake in the moral universe that human society necessarily is. * here a noun Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama chat on Sept 14, 2014 Part II of Robinson and Obama Chat We don’t have what Narcissus wrote, even if only in his mind, so we are left with mocking his self-absorption.
As a writer, I am narcissistic, necessarily so; perhaps this is true about all artists. I’m writing this post because, in making my shift from clandestine writer to “I am a writer,” I unwittingly swept away the cover my brave secrecy provided for my narcissism. So I’m getting used to bald, bold, narcissism, though a mild shame and disorientation continue since, before “I am a writer,” I was a dialogue practitioner for many years. I am still a dialogue practitioner, but that’s the muted role now, as I veil and bound the practicality and radical non-narcissism of a good dialogue practitioner’s action-in-the-world. The narcissism of writing was not a conscious choice for me, there was no scheduled moment of “time to look at my face, my self.” Rather, I became aware of this self-regard in grand moments of seeing the world: through myself, in myself, and, of course, myself in the world. These are divine, Bhagvad Gita-esque moments, Whitman-esque moments. Depending on the writer, these moments may or may not have tints of self-consciousness, may or may not have magnificent bursts of megalomania, may or may not implode into despair at the banality and limitations of human being. I’ve come to realize that, as writers, we look into a mirror; and we ourselves are a mirror. We don’t just look at our, and others’, best features, from the best angles, in the best light, but we look at that greying hair on a granular mole in the shadow of a nostril, and write about that. The beauty, from the best angles, yes, but also the mole. This then is my movement – perhaps an oscillation more than a one-directional plunge – from the radical non-narcissism of the dialogue practitioner to the living narcissism, at best the wholeness, the mole-y, whole-y narcissism of a writer. How many generations fill you as you read these words, in this moment?
If you are about twenty-five, have you heard stories from a grandparent about her or his grandparent? That would give you five generations. If you are about seventy, did you hear stories from your grandparents about their grandparents; and do you have grandchildren whom you talk to? That gives you a whopping seven generations. Of course, you can be filled with generations through unrelated people, and that happens all the time, mostly without conscious thought. If (when?) you are alive to this constant filling, I wonder if you feel the expansive exhilaration I do, a kind of “skydiving,” dizzying knowing seeing being in time-words-images. Interestingly, I never sense a symmetrical process of depletion, though generational matter juxtaposed with other generational matter does seem to blur, shift, bank up, and ebb. I mentioned to a friend that my next blog post might be on sentimentality, my own sentimentality, or what does it mean to be “moved.” “Too self-focused,” she responded. “Use that marvelous voice of yours to draw attention to the large and urgent political and social questions of the day.” The last words are mine, not hers, but she said something like that. I’ve tried to do what she said, and have not yet gotten past boredom with my pomposity and analytical self-righteousness.
So I’m going back to the beginning. Why was I moved to write about my own sentimentality? Because my eyes pricked when I read about Pope Francis as he prepares to visit the US, and I felt faintly ashamed of my sentimentality. Feeling tearful about the gestures of one of the most influential men today – an old man, who apparently still has the ability to touch a stranger without transaction, with a simple generosity of spirit, this touch tied powerfully, thanks to his position, to political and economic critique – seemed like the bathetic sentimentality of a suburban American woman, sloshing somewhere between gullibility and expediency, a fantasy of philosophical “good” to offset the helplessness and collusion of her small life in the face of “bad.” But sentimentality isn’t just self-indulgence. And bathos, like tiredness, is underrated. So, beyond self-indulgence and bathos (and false consciousness and what not), what might it mean to be moved? You know that the only answer can be “this and that, it depends, sometimes.” But weaseling aside, so often being moved becomes an alibi for inaction. Occasionally, it is the catalyst for action. And, always, being moved means that you can touch me, I’m not lost, and change is possible. Traditionally, the Moirae, more commonly known as the Fates, were imagined as old. They spun the stories of the world to come, each story fresh, even if not new. Today, when, grey-haired, I begin my official writing career, I find myself wondering how someone will describe the stories I spin. If I were a young author, the phrase “fresh, young voice” would spill out easily, if tritely. They, whoever they are, can’t use “young” with me, so perhaps they can say “fresh, new voice” – too glib, and redundant.
I hope they wouldn’t say “tired, old voice” though “tired” is an underrated quality. If it didn’t have the grey tinge it does in today’s cultures of positive energy, I would claim it proudly. Tired means worked, and worked means stories can come from all those elements of my being that have been active – my fingers, my feet, my womb, my brain, the neurons in my gut, the ineffables of my heart. But I am too afraid to call my stories “tired, old stories,” and I don’t want them to either, because they won’t understand “tired” as I do (the “tired” of my mother who woke up at four, you know the story; the “tired” of the man who cycles 10 miles (to work) before dawn and (home) at dusk each day, which you think you know but most of you, most of us, don’t really, not in the degeneration of our flesh, the worry in our gut). So, now, when I google Moirae, I find many drawings of prepubescent spinners. And, indeed, they too spin the stories of the world to come, each story fresh, even if not new. Moirae are the form of original storytelling, the story constructing the Moira, whatever her age (and gender?). This thought leads me to a happy new phrase, “fresh, old voice” that describes the Moirae of old and the parts of their tattered mantles I want to wrap around my name before it spouts its stories at you. |
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