Geographica

"Here are your waters and your watering place.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion."

Directive, Robert Frost, 1946

Harsh, unfiltered sunlight on a Tampa, Florida street. The glare bounces from the asphalt road surface. Off street, stucco houses liquify in the heat, vegetation wilting. Google-gazing at the street where my sister lives, I'm transported back to memories of light in my Florida childhood. Grueling, merciless light. I think about how place informs who I am and how I behave. I wonder about the geography of anxiety, how physical place is an ineluctable part of one's psychic landscape. I ponder the difference between the vast United States and the compactness of the United Kingdom where I now live. I look for links between my interior map and the asphalt roads I've travelled.

I muse on the notion that my neighbourhood -- North London's Stroud Green--is much like the 'hood in which I grew up. It's downscale, the bodegas of New Jersey supplanted by wig shops serving a London-wide Afro-Carribean population. Lots of neighborhood delis, cafes, pharmacies and greengrocers. Charity shops offering goods both delectable and cheap. I fear the impact of a hideous development adjacent to the tube station,a glass and metal highrise development sure to bring an influx of yuppies. For now, though, we're safe, vulnerable to corporate marauders but not yet overrun.

Each place I've inhabited has its own memories, stowed all over my psyche. Some are tied in with the light of different seasons, fluctuating temperatures, wind, sunlight and rain. Others are rooted in the soil of relationships begun, continued, broken. The strongest imprints are from my early years in south Florida and over thirty years in northern California. Midwest memories of eight years in Chicago are less embodied. That middle American place didn't implant itself; it served as staging place between young widowhood and the chores of finding meaning in the years after loss.

Before London, California was the main event. In the Berkeley of the late seventies, I thought of matters not previously considered: how to act as a committed Jew (now I Jew in name more than actions); how to take care of my body; how to push the boundaries of what I thought I could do; how to cope with anxiety and not let it overwhelm me. The temperate California climate, it's translucent light, astonished me. Even now, I recall a California sky with longing.

But the very vastness of California overwhelmed me, the geographic and psychological boundlessness too much to conjure with. California is at the very end of the western United States. I could go eight miles from my house and step off the continent, into the huge Pacific Ocean. The Bay Area, as it's called, is surrounded by water, a force both fluid and confining. Bridges link the three main urban areas. You get in your car and enter a stream of people moving slowly over vast wetnesses. When you arrive on dry land, bright stuccoed buildings are set wide apart. No crowding on this western land, and not enough housing either. No lush greenery, but the ocean and lovely diffused sunlight and the belief you can be anything you want to be. No boundaries make it hard to know how far you can push the notion of self and not be in danger of imploding.

There’s pressure to fulfill one’s potential, be all you can be, overcome all obstacles to self-fulfillment. Such ideas are both a goad and a reprimand. How far must one go to become a liberated, self actualized woman of twenty-first century California? At times, I flagged under the unceasing demand to keep pushing myself to do and be more. In truth, I became a much fuller human being because I lived for thirty plus years in northern California’s limitless atmosphere. But now, I wish for less.

In Stroud Green, I have anchors and a sense of limits. The country containing my neighbourhood is about to make itself even more limited. If Brexit happens, the United Kingdom will be reduced to a small country in the Atlantic Ocean. This smallness will be felt acutely, the cut-off from the European Union not ushering in a new glory day for this island, but constrictions and shortages. I will not find this geography comforting. It will hammer my diverse, alive streets. I am deeply distressed by this. But north London is now my piece of the planet. As I move further into old age and begin my own shrinkage, it's an okay geography with enough light and space for now.

Rose Levinson

A Song of the South

The road is never straight, the way is seldom clear. I went to Savannah, Georgia, to take part in a Jewish wedding. I ended making a journey to America’s racist past--and present. In 1790’s Georgia, the 13th and last British colony (the name Georgia is after King George), enslaved persons were thirty-five percent of the state’s population. Over the course of forty-eight years, Savannah was an integral part of trading in people. Toiling as urban slaves, those human beings, from both Africa and the Caribbean, enabled Savannah to prosper. Though the United States Civil War (referred to by some die-hard southern nationalists as the War of Aggression) ended most physical slavery, the psychic wounds continue one hundred fifty years later. In 2019, I am reminded of that part of my American psyche bound up with the story of enslaved human beings in the country in which I was reared.

The reminders come from a tour around Savannah, led by a passionate African-American who insists that slavery cannot be forgotten. I see squares where blocks of up to four hundred humans were sold . I look at carriage houses in which humans were locked in after their day’s work. In one of Savannah’s most beautiful parks, I gaze at a statue of an unrepentant Confederate soldier. At the Ralph Mark Gilbert Civil Rights Museum, I stare at a wood and plaster replica of a 1960’s lunch counter, complete with a seated African-American awaiting a cup of coffee that never comes. Looming over him, arms crossed and pistol at hip, stands a law enforcement officer. An audio of a waitperson informing the seated man he is not welcome plays in the background. She is shouting insults.

Observing present day Savannah as an outsider, I note that Blacks and Whites move in equal but separate spaces. African-Americans have full access to public places, but it feels as though ‘separate but equal’ still prevails. Two parallel non-intersecting tracks,with an occasional nod or conversation between individuals and groups. The predominant sense is of separation, an agreed upon boundary which keeps people from seeing themselves as part of the same neighborhood, let alone the same nation.

A Savannah resident remarks on the city’s bigotry, suggesting one can quadruple the normal racial tension in any other city and have an accurate gauge of what racial life is like in Savannah.

I don’t live in the US now. Its wounds impact me less than when I lived there, and felt, even in incredibly open northern California, the profound racism which is as much a part of the American psyche as motherhood and apple pie. It’s hardwired into the US citizen’s brain. One of America’s premier African-American intellectuals,Toni Morrison, writes “In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” In one of her many brilliant books, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, she argues that every white American carries a shadow Black person in their interior. It’s an Other upon whom one can locate inner savageries too difficult to own up to in oneself.

I was a young woman in the Civil Rights era, the days when Martin Luther King made his clarion calls for racial equality, when young people came from all over America to march against segregation, when too many died trying to break apart America’s insistence that Black lives don’t matter. Sure, we had a Black president in Barack Obama. But that was an anamoly. In today’s climate of exclusion and hatred and racists at the highest levels of government, including presidential, it feels like nothing has really changed and that Black lives still don’t really matter.

……………….

Rose Levinson, July 2019

Ruminations on Exhaustion

.".. in the centre of our lives, this time, this day... this spring among the politicians playing cards. In a village of the indigenes, one would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung, one would continue to contend with one’s ideas." Wallace Stevens, The Glass of Water.

RUMINATIONS ON EXHAUSTION

Just when I think it can't get worse, it does. 'It' is the current state of world politics, particularly the western world with which I'm familiar. More specifically, the US and the UK. A crushing sense of weariness threatens to drown out my belief that futility is not an option. At the moment, it feels like everything I assumed is no longer correct. In short, all bets are off.

How could I have been so stupid as to believe in the idea of progress, things getting and staying better? How could I have thought if I struggled hard enough, I'd be happy instead of tormented by an endless hunger to comprehend? How did I naively assume I'd cease struggling to reconcile endless contradictions? From what can I draw sustenance as I confront my own personal mortality along with the knowledge of the infinitesimally small part I play in the unfolding human drama?

Okay, this is a wail of anguish from a person whose own life is in pretty good shape. I'm a member of the intellectually elite middle class. I live in a city-state I love (London) with another house in northern California from which I emigrated. I have more than enough money. I have a loving life partner who emotionally supports me despite his difficulties with my restless searchings. I have surrogate sons and daughters and grandchildren who fill the gap left by own (unregretted) childlessness. I have much for which to be grateful. I try to practice this difficult emotion.

But along with gratitude and weariness, I'm enraged. I cannot take in how two such despicable human beings as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are leaders of so-called first world countries. I cannot forgive Jeremy Corbyn's stand on Brexit, (rigid spinelessness [sic] ), his refusal to make clear what a disaster Brexit will be for this small island. I'm baffled that an old white guy like Joe Biden, who plays to destructive nostalgia for the good old days, looks like the Democratic frontrunner. I'm overwhelmed by finally understanding how corporations really do run the world, how Big Tech and Big Pharma are nearly untouchable behemoths.

I'm sickened by fake news, false advertising, relentless distortion of truth, shilling on all sides by those with more money than they'll ever need extracting even more from those who can least afford it. And I'm stunned as I realize it's not inconceivable climate catastrophe will wipe out multiple species, including humans.

I react out of my own temperament which is quick to judge, to form opinions. to insist on my rightness. I recognize this to be a limitation as well as a strength, so I struggle to take in views of others who are not in agreement. I try to take a longer, larger view, and sometimes succeed. I strive to nurture others and to be generous. I find my smallness comforting. The realization I'm insignificant in Deep Time is less a matter of distress than of comfort.

I believe if history doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes (as Mark Twain reputedly said). Human beings are continually messing up but then finding ways forward. And I think there are wondrous things happening in discoveries around space, time, connectedness--enlargements of the human imagination that will lead to new openings.

That is if--if we don't destroy ourselves and our earthly home before the next period of stability arrives--whenever it does and however it looks. It will take some time for this tumultuous upending of the old order to balance into new solidities. I'm sad and furious I won't get to witness what arises from the ashes of today's crumbling certainties.

Rose Levinson, July 2019