Of Mockingbirds, Wounded Girls, Ideals and Realities

Warning: If you haven’t read Go Set a Watchman and want that experience to be pure, stop now. Then after you’ve read it come back and tell me what you think.

            I waited for the release of Harper Lee’s old-new-sequel-prequel novel, Go Set a Watchman, the way you’d wait for the birth of a much-wanted child. I counted the months, the weeks, the days. Before I went to bed on the night before its release, I considered waking at midnight just so I could watch the download appear on my Kindle’s home page. Like damn near everybody else in the country, it seemed, I had pulled up my old and tender feelings for To Kill a Mockingbird, and worried about how badly they were going to get hurt by what was about to transpire. I’d even reread the book for the first time in years so that I could have the taste of Scout, Jem, Dill, Boo and Atticus fresh in my mouth as I was being inundated with tidbits of escaped information and opinion. And boy, was I inundated. “Atticus a Racist!” “Harper Lee the Victim of Elder Abuse?” “A Mess of a Novel!” When I woke up on July 15^th and turned my Kindle on, I had many voices in my head alongside Miss Nelle’s and my own.

            I read that book in a single day, with feelings that ranged from deep pleasure and delight to puzzlement and, ultimately, compassion and empathy, for its characters, for its author, for the whole upset world, and for myself. Go Set a Watchman is as important as it’s been imagined to be, but for reasons far more broad than can be conveyed in a tweet or a post or a minute and a half on the national news. Reading it in the context of today’s delicate dealings with race, and with the instantaneous and reactionary nature of opinion sharing, is quite an experience. More personally, reading with the eye and experience of a writer and a small town Southern girl who left its culture for a far different one, Miss Nelle’s newly published work was, for me, far more than simply the breathtaking story that Mockingbird was. This wasn’t just a book. It was literature as a social and psychological construct. It was old wounds and the attempt to heal them. It, and we, the people reading and reacting, have become partners in a piece of art that far exceeds the tale of a young woman’s disillusionment with her upbringing.

            I’ll admit that I’m the perfect audience for this book. Like a million other kids, I wanted Atticus to be my father. I wanted his tolerant wisdom, his secret and mysterious abilities, his vulnerability wrapped in a strength that it seemed could never fail. He was the exception to all the false things I heard about my people as I grew up in the South of the 1960s, and to the parts I knew to be true. I wanted to be the girl who could sit in the secure, loving lap of a hero, the one who was different from everyone else. I wanted the one who not only wouldn’t spew hatred and wish harm to anyone, but who would defend those hurt from those who did the hurting. I wanted the good humor that Miss Nelle mentioned again and again to be in the eyes of the man to whom I could go with my hurts and indignities. I, along with a generation, poured all my wishes for unalloyed goodness and tolerant love into the ideal of Atticus Finch, even as I dealt with the realities of my own father and the people all around me, people with whom my relationships were, as most are, far more complicated.

            Southern people, like all people, are never pure and never simple. The idea that we can be is wonderful, seductive, and immature. At their best my own father and the folks I grew up with were intelligent, interesting, hard working, loyal, brilliant storytellers and funny as hell. They saved me, as they did the fictional Scout, when my mother was dead and I never doubted for an instant that I would be taken care of and loved. At their worst they were separatists, conservative to the point of paranoia and every bit as haughty about people—including black people—having a natural place in the world and needing to keep to it, as Aunt Alexandra is in the new work. And as much as I sometimes wanted to tell some of them to, as Jean Louise tells her aunt, “Go pee in your hat,” I know I was shaped by those attitudes in ways that pop up as nervousness and anger around people whose ways are different from my own. I can be as reactionary toward others as I hate seeing in others. I can carry the haughtiness of the liberal the way my people carry it as conservatives.  I aspire to do better and I both succeed and fail every day. One of the reasons I write is to try to make it, and myself, better. And this, ultimately, is the lesson Jean Louise has to learn as well. I could be wrong, but I expect Miss Nelle was having a long conversation with herself as she wrote.

The title of Go Set a Watchman was taken from a Bible verse, Isaiah 21:6 For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. The idea of being that watchful eye, the conscience of rather than a participant in a small Alabama town during those tumultuous times, must have been seductive beyond belief. It must also have been dangerous, because Harper Lee, whom I have come to think of as a combination of Miss Nelle and the editor who saw her rough struggle with her feelings and essentially advised her to regress to the unconflicted feelings of a child for an ideal father, gave us a most beautiful fantasy instead of the hard reality with which we all struggle. It is beautiful beyond measure. And it isn’t false. It’s just fiction, a story that we want to be the story. Now, with Go Set a Watchman, that story has a sibling, one who sees things differently, who isn’t the innocent, idealizing one. She’s the smart one who can’t live forever in her perfect father’s lap, and points us toward the realities and foibles of our own. And now that we’ve got the two of them, we all have to figure out if we can love them both.

I Got Clickbait, You Got Clickbait, All God's Children Got Clickbait

I spend way too much time on Facebook. I’m not sure I really understood the term “addiction” until I discovered that I could, at any time of the day or night, tap into a source of instant gratification both for my curious mind and my desire to talk to people and have them talk back. It interferes with my writing, with my reading, with getting enough exercise, and I’m pretty sure it has a deleterious effect on my attention span. And it is incredibly hard to stop.

            Every morning I get up with renewed intentions. I make coffee, take a few moments for the feeding/bonding ritual with Bunny the cat and Pidge the parrot, check my email and the local news to be certain things are still mostly holding together, and get to work. Or not.

            Somewhere right after email, while the coffee is kicking in, I notice the little blue “f” on my phone and something at the base of my brain makes a fizzing sound, like a bottle rocket about to go off. Even before the excuses for just havingaquicklookyouneverknowwhatmighthavehappenedwhatifsomebodysaidsomethingthatneedsareply have half formed, I tap the surface—it’s so smooth, and why does my finger feel a little numb on the tip these days?—and I’m down a rabbit hole faster than you can say “What’s Your Game of Thrones Name?” Next thing I know an hour has passed, I’ve gotten into three arguments with complete strangers and three more with people I love, and my word count ambitions have shrunk from a thousand to “I hope I just get that blog post in.” I’ve succumbed once more to my desire to know what’s going on now, and now, and how about NOW, and to talk about it to anyone who will listen and talk back. I have to crowbar myself away to do the one thing I have wanted to do since I was a child—and it wasn’t to look at baby goats. Adorable, adorable baby goats.

I know I’m not alone in being ridiculously addicted to social media, but in a lot of ways I’m its perfect rube. Some of my earliest memories are of being told that I talk too much, and that I wanted to be all up in everybody’s business. In part I think it’s genes; when I recently did a little family research I found that, back as far as I could find, my families are rife with (most recently) therapists of various kinds, police, and preachers. In other words, people who love to be all up in other peoples’ business. Those professions aren’t ones in which you punch a time clock. They’re lifestyles.

 It’s lonely being a writer. It’s not like being a musician or actor, or even a preacher or a cop, where you’re able to perform and have an audience right there with you. Lots of great “psychology of creativity” books have been written about the temporal disconnect between writer and reader. We have to make you people up in our heads as we tell you things that are dear and revelatory and irritating as chiggers under our skin. Depending on how important people from long ago responded to little, talkative kids like me, we might imagine all kinds of things about what you think of us, some kind and receptive, and all too many scathing and full of scorn. I don’t know a single writer who doesn’t have to swim a river of demons to get to the one smiling face that makes the whole thing worthwhile, or who isn’t willing to, again and again and again. That’s writing. It’s hard.

And, dammit, social media is not. For all it might push your neurotic buttons, pleasure is just a click away, and an invitation to say something shallow and reactionary with it. You click it and it clicks you. Facebook, Twitter, anywhere you can blurt out some verbal cotton candy will get you a little hit, will either confirm your worst fears about how you’re never going to be loved or convince you you’re golden, so fast and so easily you might forget all about doing something bigger, something that will make people think longer than it takes them to hit the send button and go on. It worries me. And it is so, so seductive.

And now it’s time to go share this with all y’all. Like and share. I’ll bet 99% of you won’t.

             

Bruce and Chuck and Harry and Me and All Y'all Too

“We are all simply more human than otherwise.”

--Harry Stack Sullivan

Quite a few years ago Bruce Springsteen was interviewed in the wonderful documentary about Chuck Berry, Hail, Hail Rock and Roll. Springsteen talked fondly of, before he became any kind of Boss, having been in a pick-up band that played backup for Berry once when he came to town. Apparently the great musician liked to travel solo and just call ahead and have someone round up people who could back him. Berry was not, apparently, worried about rehearsing with them.

“About five minutes before the show was timed to start,” Springsteen says gleefully, “the back door opens and he comes in by himself. And he’s got a guitar case, and that was it, he’d come in his own car, no one was with him. And he comes in the band’s room… and we’re like, ‘Is the show gonna go on? What songs are we gonna play?’ And he says, ‘Well, we’re gonna play some Chuck Berry songs.’”

            I’ve been trying to come up with an explanation of what I want to write in this blog. I know what interests me, and I’m variably comfortable that some of it will interest readers as well. I’ve always had a love for my native Gulf Coast and New Orleans, and I spend a lot of time mentally gazing in a Southeasterly direction from my home in Seattle. The tension between those parts of me itches like crazy, and I scratch it with words whenever possible.  That’s part of what I’d like to do.

           

In fact, the tension between me and the world in general has always been strong and interesting to me, not because I think I’m so fascinating, but because we all are. We’re a complicated and remarkable species, bordering on magical, more often than not rubbing right up against crazy as we hold onto the things from which we’ve created our sense of who and what we are. We depend on one another for love and assurance, even when we’re fighting—sometimes most especially when we’re fighting. I like that about us. We create and relieve tension and seek comfort in sharing that experience. I like it so much I have spent the last fifteen years talking to people about it in my psychotherapy and psychoanalytic practice, and a lifetime talking to an imagined bunch of people in my poetry and fiction.

            Talking to that imaginary audience has produced a pretty good body of work. I’ve got a lot of published poetry (more later on that), and an award-winning novel, The Last of the Pascagoula (a lot more later on that), I’m writing a sequel to the novel, have a lot more itches to scratch, and I just closed the doors on my private therapy practice so that when I die I can at least tell myself I gave the writing all I had. This blog is part of that.

            But I’m still an analyst. I couldn’t make this leap without some company, so I brought along the words of an analytic forebear, someone I think felt a lot like I do about people, the wonder and the craziness and the sheer magic of what we do, our fragility and beauty and strength. His name was Harry Stack Sullivan. He worked with the most difficult of people, those whose realities are way out on the borders of most of our own. He was one of the first people to realize that, no matter how many varieties we come in, no matter how much tension there is among our ways of being, “We are all simply more human than otherwise.” I like that. After talking to hundreds of people and slyly watching thousands more, and after being a human myself, I agree with it. Beneath our cultural differences and the dearly held convictions that cause us to make everything from art to war, beyond the things that keep us apart are the things that keep us together. We are very much alike. And we’re fascinating.

            So with that broad idea in mind and with an appreciative nod to both Chuck Berry and Harry Stack Sullivan, I’m going to write some Rebecca Meredith posts. Let’s see what happens.