2000 Deciduous Trees : Memories of a Zine (9781937316051) (17 page)

My mother has so many folds. I admire and
envy them but am so afraid to attain similar traits, suspecting the
strange recesses and edges of their origins. On one hand, a foolish
person might think, she was an explorer who brought great treasures
of the mind to reality. Patience with oneself in adversity and
triumph. Humility without weakness. But these trophies are met with
disbelief in our time. And like other pioneers she feels only
rejection for her efforts on frontiers. And though I would love to
be a fool, I know that to be insane, even if only for a short time,
is no great journey. It is hell. Such that cannot be represented.
If we are all accustomed to shimmering mirror waters that slosh
one-inch waves quietly against the sun-warmed shore, insanity is
that most furious storm which tosses seized seas against the earth
with such a destructive force that boulders rain down from the sky
as sand through God's hands while the winds sing anguished songs of
survival.

So my mother is not a triumphant warrior
returned from a victorious battle. She is the small sand shrimp who
emerges after the storm happy to have been spared.

No. Perhaps the explorer analogy is more apt
and the warrior, too. For it is the explorers who have seen the
furies of the sea and the warriors who have seen endless death.
Perhaps then nothing can be explained of hell. Words must be
understandable and we do not understand storms or war or insanity.
And my mother knows this. So for the most part she stays quiet,
there in her life, like a soldier home from war sitting in peace
and never really believing in it. But never apologizing for having
earned it back.

WHITE TRASH
GLAM

Can someone please explain
to me this latest craze of White Trash Glam? I opened up a
new
Cosmo
, my most
precious moment of the month, only to be met with what could have
been seen at any point in my Rensselaer childhood: a scrawny blond
wearing a ripped slip. She stands in a sunburnt lawn of a small
ranch house. White siding, blue unhinged shutters, broken blinds,
chipped trim, broken door—every indication of personal neglect. On
top of it all are remnants of careless barefoot children: two BMX
bikes lying in the lawn; one smaller bike with training wheels and
tires full of mud (a prologue to drunken days of muddin' in
supercharged pickup trucks perhaps.) Against the house a toddler’s
toy and a fine example (carefully chosen by a committee of
Cosmo
designers, no
doubt) of that strange household refuse that seems to surround so
many smaller lower-middle class homes. A large piece of something
yellow. It might be old carpet or a tablecloth, possibly even a
uniform of a fireman—the father? It is an example of so many
uncompleted or unfulfilled thoughts. It is a rug which could have
been thrown out in a fit of rage: dirty, water-damaged from a leaky
roof, pissed on by an untrained dog, or perhaps rescued from a
family friend’s home improvement project to later line a
still-unbuilt tree house.

Minus the model's go-go boots and flawless
skin, it is a believable image of wilting life.

But why is it there
in
Cosmo
, a
fashion magazine supposedly representing the cutting edge of
glamour? I think much lies in the fact that it is there. Perhaps it
is that magazines such as this pursue not glamour but extremity, so
that whether the images portray
haute
couture
or destitution they have equal
impact on the mainstream readership.

Beyond this I think the images of the photo
shoot foretell a huge economic backswing. A definite trend toward
the conservative. The glorification of the underdog and failure
which fuel the backwoods egos of militias. And a primal call to the
senses stimulating the sex appeal of the woman-child. The sex
appeal of abuse which is being represented more and more often in
extremely acceptable circumstances: movies, magazines, talk shows,
etc.

What are we to do? In the same series of
magazine photos a blond wanders aimlessly. A country road, farm
equipment, railroad tracks, pickups, and a dusty Texas road sign
support her in the role of a bored teenager in tight cut-offs.
Another photo is black lingerie in a cheap motel. Then black
leather fringe and a fully-stocked bar. A crocheted tablecloth and
a blue lace shirt.

But who is paying for this look? Who are the
buyers of destitution?

It seems white folks have
turned on ourselves, attacking groups within our own group.
Confused innocence asks, "But having made the pages of
Cosmo
hasn't the poor
white country girl arrived?"

No. She has been purchased. In a world of
physical labor, slaves were once bought and sold, used and killed.
And now in our world of images visual identities—represented
symbols—are bought and sold. It might be too extreme to compare
slavery to a game of dress-up. No doubt it is. But with
intellectual property becoming more and more important and with
intangibles gaining on physical commodities the apprehension of
identity has taken a different form. And still such apprehension is
the destruction of human rights. Because there is something
important in living the lives that create who we are. That create
what we look like. And it is inappropriate for someone to don the
look toward the purpose of insinuating they have lived the life
that created the look—that they have known the hard days and
impossible-to-endure nights of poverty.

I see a wealthy woman—as
haggard by sun and cigarettes as any working-class woman—slide into
a beach club chair and order a vodka on the rocks. She wears the
dress shown in this month’s
Cosmo
and is careful that her two-carat platinum doesn't
snag the $480 cap-sleeved cheap chic dress from
Moschino.

It is as if in a last-ditch effort to
maintain dominance the rich whites say, "We can't all survive." And
then draw a line in the sand. Those on this side will be on top.
Those on the other side are the same as Indians, Africans,
Guatemalans, and Jamaicans have been in the past: toys, games,
playthings. Their cultures are breeding grounds for fads and
deserve not respect and acceptance but denigrating acquisition.

White girls with
henna-painted hands and midriffs. White girls in African tribal
dress. White girls carrying Guatemalan bags. White girls with
Jamaican wrapped hair braids. And now rich white girls dressing up
like poor white girls. Maybe not. Maybe there is no effort to avoid
confrontation with 'the other.' But it seems a reinforcement of the
deepest rift in U.S. culture. That quiet insistence against equity,
that there is an
other
. And that the other is inferior, with some degree of
dominance and submission at stake, and like warriors taking scalps
a woman in another woman’s clothes signifies nothing if not that a
conquering has occurred.

I may well be wrong. And hopefully I am
wrong. I hope that white girls wearing all sorts of multicultural
garb reflects acceptance and integration. I do not wish to support
segregation which by my argument seems necessarily part of the
case. But somehow the appropriation of images of other cultures
without also taking on the responsibility of their meaning does not
signify real acceptance, understanding, and integration to me.

Just clothes. Yes. But
still bright, bold images. The miscast representation and offering
of the rural poor to the minds of upper-class suburbanites. Twice
today, living in New Jersey for this internship, I explained where
Indiana is to people who make a minimum annual salary of fifty
thousand dollars. These are the people who buy the images in
Cosmo
but who have no
interest in what created the represented worth.

But these things: Stereotypes. Bigotry.
Prejudice. Simplifications. Generalizations. Toxins. The country
woman looks at the page as I did today and sees reflected there on
page 211 a woman similar to herself yet lifeless—clichéd. If she is
not careful she will be satisfied by this image. Even overjoyed by
these pretty pictures, for the beauty is certainly there.

But on another day, a harder day, she
thinks, "What does she know about any of it? How many people did it
take to make her look like that? And how much money did she make
trying to look like me?"

There is no resonance. Only echoes from a
deep hollow where character, integrity, and self-awareness should
exist to make any woman what she is.

But hollowness is nothing to most people.
Nothing to worry about. And yet so many housewives realize
themselves locked in an image-life, which is constantly enveloping
them. And somehow they feel their lives ending. Somehow they know
what has been robbed from them. The same as Indians, Africans,
Guatemalans, Jamaicans, and even the White Trash Girls before
them.

A friend. A red-roses-and-dancing friend met me at
a bar full of regulars. Regular clothes. Regular drinks. Regular
customers. And their regular conversation. A banker. A lawyer. And
an insurance salesman. Living the beginning of every regular joke
there. In that red bar. Discussing the regular South Jersey
God.

THE PILOT

Can you believe there's

nothing there,

no strings or cables or

fraudulent illusion

attached over, under, and

around the clouds he

has to breathe?

PROPHET’S ROCK

He hushed me, condescending. "They died
here." But his silence was the inviting kind, which tries too hard
toward something profound. And as we walked toward the end of dusk
crossing the September battlefield, I listened to screeching hawks
echo each other from sycamore cliffs, warning us of some small
gossip.

I looked out through a goldenrod sea and
sank into it up to my shoulders looking for buoys of purple aster
and letting my eyes float up to the sky for a rest. Clouds as coals
of a smoldering sunset—deep gray and cooling.

I did not accept his shadowed voice or
believe the scoldings of his words. Because death is everywhere.
They have died everywhere. Every footstep takes us through the
cemetery of someone's lonely child. And if not a person, then a
wolf, muskrat, or sparrow.

Each takes turns. Moving slowly, one by one,
on out of life. The only remorse is solitude. Journeying eternity
would perhaps not seem so impossible if traveled with a friend. But
we die alone. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. And the dust piles up.
Dunes of used heartbeats and seasons and dreams blanket our quiet
acceptance that the earth is passed-on life.

Gravity is that weight of our eyes, our
helpless wishing-to-be-guilty eyes, resting accidentally on the
rising monument of this great tomb. We hurry by for some reason.
Blinding our lives with rush, smog, and schedules as the sun
obscures so many stars by day—their distant eternities also so
singular and same. Too real and constant a reminder, I guess.

So for me the battlefield is a great
reassuring beauty. And the tribute is made not because they died
but because they died for the same reason, of the same blows, in
the same rotting pain. And whether quiet or with screams damning
God, they died under the same coals of a sunset cooling.

And if I hadn't known he was leaving, I
might have said, "But they died here.”

BEAR BELLS FOR
AUGUST:

And Genny will go too, just in case, for the
company of birds, black flies, and sky. North there, to a summer
short-wedged down into an arctic year where the aging Earth gets
most dizzy from spinning small circle days. Let him look up and
hope. Let an absent hand drift over his old white glacial cap as he
tilts back, blinking, to catch sight of one snowy owl or tundra
swan.

LOVE
NEAR A FIREPLACE IN WINTER

Love was never meant to stand alone. Love is
as a season. As dependable as the seasons. As true. As ancient. As
natural. As real. Yet as transient. People blind themselves to
this.

It is not at all uncommon to hear of
relationships disposed of because Love has passed.

But what fools would we be if we ran toward
the snowbank screaming that it could not melt in spring? How
foolish were our tears if we believed the leaves falling meant
death of the trees every year? And how stupid if we ceased to
believe in the sun as the earth spin-slants toward night.

But we do insist snowbanks not melt in
relationships.

Love could be any season. Love is as much
spring or summer bright with new life or drenched in sun as it is
fall or winter fraught with released potential and dormant hope. As
we are born every day so Love joins us. Then Love is something of
the beginning and something of the melting snow and something of
the falling leaves and the leaning roll of Mother Earth nodding
herself to sleep.