Category: essay

Speaking Ill of the Dead

This week’s freshly-dead celebrity is being simultaneously vilified and sanctified.

One of my social media pet peeves happens when someone famous dies. Half or more of the posts on my Facebook newsfeed will suddenly be “RIP so-and-so, sad emoji.” This happens seemingly on a weekly basis, as so many people who’ve had a moment in the spotlight when I was young seem to be passing these days.

It can be a challenge to find the right words when a celebrity one admires passes on, and “RIP” is at least an acknowledgement of a death that feels significant. But those three letters, repeated ad infinitum and at every opportunity ends up feeling less like a tribute and more like a reflex: a meaningless formality. I’ve gotten crap from people for saying so, but my desire in pointing it out is actually to ask that the observance of these passings feel more personal, more weighty, more sincere, and perhaps, I admit, a little bit less prevalent.

The phrase “rest in peace” carries with it some unpleasant associations. As I understand it, the expression came into common usage centuries ago, borne out of fear that a lost loved one might have just been in a deep sleep or a coma. There are folk tales of some poor soul’s body being exhumed and the diggers discovering claw marks all over the inside of the coffin and hunks of flesh missing out of the deceased’s forearm, self-inflicted out of starvation and madness. Because of that, I read “RIP (insert name of deceased person here)” as “Gee, I hope we didn’t bury you alive!”

I know that’s not what people are thinking when they say it, but I can’t escape the association, because someone told me that when I was impressionable. It’s where my mind unfailingly goes.

We ritualize the remembrance of the dead as a sort of lay beatification of people who were not so nice in life. “Don’t speak ill of the dead,” we say, reflexively. As if it matters to them.

Maybe it’s just the thought that they can’t defend themselves, being that they’re no longer around. To my mind, lies of omission that make a person who’s passed seem better than we thought they were in life is still an attack, a distortion of the truth of who they were. We don’t remember the flesh-and-blood human by doing this, we create a chimera and give it the name of the person who’s no longer there to set the record straight.

This week, I’ve been observing this phenomenon applied to former President George Herbert Walker Bush, who died this past Friday, November 30th. I’m also seeing a raft of postings online about how terrible a person he was. The truth must be more complex than either view.

If there is any shred of truth to the idea of a “Deep State,” there has been no more public representative of it that Bush 41. I remember him speaking to a gathering of Wall Street CEOs on September 11th, 2001, in the immediate wake of two planes striking the old World Trade Center towers, another flying into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashing into an empty field in Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, foiled by passengers from reaching its destination, the Capital Dome.

The message of his speech, imprinted as indelibly in my memory as the image of claw marks on the inside of a coffin, was that “we need to unfetter our intelligence services.” Against any potential enemy of the state, the intelligence community needs to be given free reign to act.

My thought then was that this country would move in the direction of empowering the state against the needs of the individual. There is nothing about the history of this country since that contradicts that insight.

There’s been a debate for the last decade or so as to whether there is an actual guaranteed right to privacy, despite the clear assumption of it’s existence in the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 5th Constitutional amendments, and allusions to it in landmark court decisions like Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas. Bush 41 publicly iterated the intention to infringe on that right within hours of the attacks, both in what he spoke about and who he spoke to.

I won’t go into other knocks against the man being repeated all over the web, other than to echo one that is of particular importance to me as an transgender woman, and someone who lost a brother to HIV/AIDS during the 41st Presidency: his utter silence and inaction as the plague was ravaging the country. That lack of response feels like innate homophobia and a callousness that renders his call for a “kinder, gentler nation” hypocritical.

Yet, much of the mainstream media has presented a much different picture of the man, speaking of his civility, even his warmth, and calling him a moderate. I think there’s validity to that last, at the very least. He was a Republican President who had the will to raise taxes. In these times, that seems like remarkable courage. He paid for it with any potential for a second term as President. It seems to me that he acted with intention for the good of the country.

The reactions I’m seeing among those who knew him suggest that he was likable. I suspect that if you knew him at all, your impression of him was likely to be positive.

Once again, there has been a huge amount of discussion along these lines in the media: I don’t feel the need to recapitulate all of that here. This post is already longer than I would like.

We’re all much more complex than any one person can know. Those who know us best don’t know everything. We all have dark little corners in our souls and little points of light that shine only in certain directions, along with the larger, more obvious facets of ourselves others can either see or dispute. To reduce someone, like this week’s celebrity example, to only the nice things one can say about them, or only the complaints we have against them, or, Cthulhu help us, “RIP,” seems criminal. I want all of the gritty realism. I want to remember whole, complex human beings once they leave this world. That’s how I want to be remembered, all of the good in me is negated if one denies the bad.

In the words of another massively complicated, now-deceased celeb, just gimme some truth. All I want is the truth.

Happy Thanksgiving

I’m traveling today, and my suspicion is that not too many eyes will fall upon these words, as this is not the sort of day when people surf the web looking at blogs by fledgling writers. I will keep this short, in case these words do reach you somehow. I don’t want to keep you.

I live in Massachusetts, where this whole tradition began, under a dark, bloody cloud. I’ve attended the National Day of Mourning in Plymouth. I know some of the history of King Phillip’s War and its aftermath. So much of the history of this country I call home is built upon horror and hatred, wholesale misery and profound suffering.

For my family, as it likely is for yours, this day has been and continues to be about togetherness and appreciation, and maybe a little bit about overzealous eating. I embrace this tradition, because it’s a good and important thing to do — to honor family and to be thankful.

But we should also remember King Phillip, and the churchgoing Indians who were the first and most devastated victims of the war that bears his name. We should remember a time two hundred years later, when Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé, ran for their lives across the frozen Northwest, starving at the same time that American families were having Thanksgiving feasts, thanking the Lord for the bounty they had, not even knowing the name of King Phillip. If they thought about Chief Joseph at all, those thoughts were not in any way warm with gratitude, or tinged with remorse.

They should have been.

Perhaps we can hold some humility in our hearts along with our joy? Perhaps we can also hold to some vision and some intention towards a better, more inclusive, more compassionate future? We can’t change the past, but what if we do these things?

  • Remember your loved ones, and in that context, remember the value of human life.
  • Share what you have with those around you. This is the spirit of family that I remember as the central tenet of so many Native American tribes.
  • Remember the price that has been paid for this bountiful life. It is the debt that goes with the gratitude of the day.

May you be blessed, and may you recognize your blessings and where they’ve come from.

In that spirit, I thank you for your attention to these words.

The End of an Empire

In the example of the medieval Roman Empire, I see lessons for us in the modern era.

It took centuries for the Byzantine Empire to fall. In fact, Constantinople was sacked on 4 separate occasions: in 1081 when Alexios I Komnenos wrested power from Nykephoros III Botaneiates, in 1204 when the Latins — agents of the Holy Roman Emperor in Rome — took the city from the Byzantines, in 1261 when the Nicaeans under Michael VII Palaiologos retook the city and made it once again the seat of the Empire, and then in 1453 when Sultan Mehmed II finally ended the Roman Empire for once and all time.

I have been thinking about the process by which the Empire failed, and trying to contextualize what happened nearly six hundred years ago against what is happening here and now, in the US. There are a few points I linger over: things that cause me both trepidation and hope.

When Alexios came to power, some of the factors that led to the demise of the Empire were already in place. The Empire had been stable for centuries in part because succession to the throne was generally orderly. Alexios took power by coup: he had been a successful general, and from that platform was able to raise enough support from the army to mount an attack on the capital. For most of the history of the Empire to that point, civilian and military leadership had been kept separate. Alexios was one of a stream of Generals to have risen to power in the years preceding his ascension to the throne. One thing that can be said of Alexios is that he fostered a period of apparent stability: he himself held power for almost 40 years, and his next two successors had similar reigns.

In addition to altering the power structure of the Empire, Alexios also created a situation, out of apparent necessity, which contributed greatly to the eventual demise of the Empire. The Emperor Nykephoros, whom he had supplanted, had drained the Empire’s finances. At the time that Alexios took power, the Empire was facing an invasion threat from Robert Guiscard, a Norman who had risen to power on the Italian peninsula and then set his sites on the throne of the Byzantine Empire. In order for Alexios to meet the threat of invasion by Guiscard, he had to negotiate help from another foreign power: the Venetians, who had a substantial navy. He made certain promises to them, including the privilege of importing and exporting goods to Constantinople without paying any tax. The Venetians also gained control of a section of the capital. Eventually, similar deals were made with other Italian city-states, including the Genoans, and the Pisans. This caused the Empire to lose a crucial revenue stream, and they were never able to recover from the loss. In the end, it also gave the Latins entrée into the city so that they could take it from the Byzantines themselves in 1204: the second sacking of Constantinople.

Yet even from this, the Empire was eventually able to reconstitute itself for a time. Remember: they were Romans. That identity sustained them through some serious crises, and even an apparent collapse. I don’t wish to draw the parallel too closely, but my take on this story includes the suggestion that a great country like the Byzantine Empire, or the United States, does not fall easily or quickly.

That demise the Byzantines ultimately faced at the hands of the Ottoman Turks was centuries in the making. Perhaps the alarmists and naysayers in our own time are too pessimistic. Perhaps this country is not so near its end as they might suspect. And perhaps, given the will and the force of commitment to our better natures and our strengths as a nation, we might yet survive and even thrive in the coming centuries.

Purslane

This is my first writing on the subject of the eastern Roman Empire.

“Americans don’t know about this,” the older woman whose family owns the liquor store near us, who I think is Turkish, told my wife. She pointed to a low, kind of scrubby looking plant that was coming up through a crack in the sidewalk in front of the store. “See that? That plant is delicious, but to an American, it’s just a weed.”

purslane 2

Indeed, we had the same plant in our own garden, and had been pulling it as a weed the whole time. Because our neighbor called our attention to it, we went looking online for information. The woman had called it purslane. We found recipes and botanical information. It is, indeed, a commonly-eaten plant in many parts of the world. Its habitat ranges throughout the middle east, and from India all through the Balkans and other parts of eastern Europe. It also grows through much of North America, though it’s not a native plant.

Purslane plants grow to be about a foot or so in diameter as they lay close to the ground, with juicy, red-tinged vines and succulent green leaves smaller than a dime and teardrop-shaped. It blooms in the morning – little quarter-inch yellow flowers pop up in the elbows of the vines – and then the blooms close by the afternoon.

Morning is also the best time to pick it; you take the whole plant right out of the ground, root and all. Purslane produces oxalic and malic acids overnight, with its pores closed to keep in moisture, then converts those acids to sugar and metabolizes that sugar through the day. Pick it first thing in the morning, and the acid gives the plants a lemony tang. Cut them up, stems and all, and either toss them into a salad raw or cook them for stews and other uses. On the streets of Istanbul, it’s sold wrapped in puff pastry as a street food.

Purslane is first known to have been in North America in the thirteenth century in Canada, which suggests that it may have been brought here by the Vikings, perhaps when Erik the Red first came to the shores of Labrador, perhaps brought either intentionally as a dependable food source – the plants are hardy and low-maintenance — or accidentally as seeds stuck in somebody’s boots or clothes or baggage.

But if the Vikings brought it to North America, how did they come to have it? It’s a desert-adapted plant growing in the opposite corner of Europe from them.

I found that the Byzantine Empire had employed Norsemen as elite mercenaries, some even working their way into the hierarchy of the Empire. I imagine Viking soldiers spending years campaigning in the southern Balkans, then going home carrying the seeds of purslane in their belongings, in the seams of their clothing, boots, or bedding. Perhaps those same warriors then made their way across the Atlantic to Labrador, where the tiny black seeds, barely discernable from grains of dark sand, finally came to rest and began sprouting on the low hillsides of eastern Canada.

Now purslane grows through cracks in the sidewalks, in gardens and fields all over this continent. In it I see a connection to lost Byzantium, which disappeared from the Earth in the first week of June in 1453, destroyed after standing for 1123 years by the Ottoman Turks. I’ve walked past clumps of purslane, or pulled it as a weed from my garden, oblivious to its history, every warm, bright day of my life.

It’s a consequence of having a name for a thing. That naming seems almost to change the physical shape of the thing, as well as what surrounds it. What was a “weed” as I tossed it into a lawn and leaf bag now connects to a world of knowledge I’d never considered. Learning about Byzantium itself has been the same sort of revelatory experience. The hook for that story also comes from learning a better name for the thing.

The people who lived within its borders didn’t call themselves “Byzantines.” That was applied to them only centuries after the Empire’s demise by historians trying to make a distinction the people themselves never made. If you had asked those people to identify themselves, they would have told you that they were Romans, right up until the day the Ottoman Emperor Muhammad II broke into the Sanctuary of Hagia Sophia on June the 4th, 1453 and destroyed the altar, the symbolic act ending the Empire.

In trying to better understand the nature of that society, those who study it have made it unrecognizable to the people who lived in it. By learning that one fact, I have become fascinated with the Byzantines and how their civilization has shaped the world we live in, from the seemingly insignificant things like purslane, through the answers to some long-standing questions I’ve had.

For instance, how is it that the Muslims seemed unstoppable and carried their holy war throughout the middle east and northern Africa to the Iberian Peninsula, where they ruled for centuries, yet they didn’t storm across Europe from east to west at the same time? The answer is plain to those who know the history of Byzantium. The Empire was the bulwark that saved western Europe so that it could become the cradle of modern western society.

It sparked the Renaissance as a center of learning throughout medieval times, and when it finally collapsed, scholars and artisans fled to Italy and fostered some of the great thinkers of succeeding generations. We owe much to these people, whom most of us never knew to be Romans, whose civilization fell a mere forty years, well within the living memory of the last of them, before Columbus (who some believe may have been a Byzantine himself) crossed the Atlantic to find a land that had already been touched indirectly by those latter-day Romans, it would seem, in the form of viny, succulent, tangy, little-known purslane.

My “Career”: A Report From the Wilderness

Back in September of 2015, I was accepted into Lesley University’s low-res MFA program. I had applied in two genres: fiction and nonfiction.

I was more interested in fiction at the time, but I sent along the second application, figuring that if I couldn’t get into my first choice, I had another opportunity to advance myself via this other stream of writing that I had begun pursuing.

I got the call notifying me of my acceptance a full week before the deadline for applications, but was told that I’d been accepted into the nonfiction genre, not the fiction genre that I had hoped for. Still, I was pleased to have been accepted into the program. On reflection, I felt that the selectors had been correct, as the nonfiction writing sample I had given them was the stronger of the two I’d sent, and I had applied in nonfiction, so it was entirely legitimate for the school to offer me a slot in that program.

In fact, I was the only nonfiction student in my semester, though beginning in my second semester, another student who had taken a semester off joined me, and kept pace with me until the end.

Still, I was left with some reservations that I had to work through in order to find my way to enthusiastically embracing the idea of being a nonfiction writer. Was it really what I wanted to do? Could I embrace it as a course of study leading me to my beloved genre fiction while bypassing some of the conventions of mainstream fiction? If I were to be a nonfiction writer, what exactly would I write about? I’d been accepted into the program on the strength of a memoir piece: was memoir all I had to offer as a nonfiction writer?

Without a clear answer to these questions, I dove in and began producing new work, absorbing what I could from the seminars, workshops, and one-on-one mentor/mentee work that would be the bulk of the means of imparting my training as a writer. In the end, what I hoped for happened: I left the program a much more confident writer, with a deeper understanding of my craft.

At the other end of that process, I find that I am unclear on my direction forward. I have harbored the notion that my training in nonfiction would stand me in good stead as a fantasy fiction author, and there are stories I mean to write that are of that sort.

But I also have a few essays that I’ve written, a couple I’ve placed in tiny markets here, another there, a couple that I would like to find a home for somewhere, but haven’t yet. I am also about halfway through a book of memoir essays. I think I have some good stuff, but I need that much more to get to something that actually *would* be a full-length memoir.

My few brief encounters with agents through the auspices of my MFA program leave me with doubts as to the salability of that work, though the consensus is that the quality of my work is good. What’s lacking, then, is a sense of mission. My idea of what I want my career as a writer to look like — what I want my work to mean — is less than completely formed.

I don’t know that I should know what my body of work will ultimately look like at this point. But I should have goals, and some sense of how to proceed towards them. I am working in a vacuum. I have described myself as being in that post-MFA wilderness. I haven’t found my way to connect what I do to an audience. I am walking through this desert somewhat aimlessly.

But I am walking, and I am looking for trails and signs that will lead me towards civilization — towards what I want from my writing, which is to be a part of the cultural conversation. My ideas, my metaphors, my stories: I want them to matter in the world.