Leaving Egypt

Family legend has it that our ancestors didn't leave Egypt with Moses and all the other Jews because great-to-the-nth-grandfather was playing cards with Pharoah at the time. Instead, we waited until 1953; one year after the abdication and exile of King Farouk, a year after the last hand of gin rummy had been played at the Montazah Palace in Alexandria. My father always remembered the card game at the palace when Farouk’s four kings trumped his four aces. ”I have five kings,” said King Farouk as he fanned four of them onto the card table, “these four,” and placing his hand on his heart, fixed my father in the eye, “and I am the fifth!” Not for long, thought my Dad.

I am standing on the deck of a large ship under the strong Egyptian sun, surrounded by odors of hot deck paint, salt, wet ropes and fuel. My shoes and socks look very white, and I feel very small next to Yasme, my Turkish nanny. She is round and a little shifty. My mother is crying and hugging Uncle Mohammed. He bends down to kiss me and gives me a pink and gold bag full of chocolates. “Have a good vacation, I will see you soon. Don’t eat the chocolates until the boat is far away from the shore. Do you understand?” I nod, and kiss him goodbye. The steam horns blow, the ship shakes off its ropes, we pull away from the crescent harbor into the sapphire sea. I can no longer distinguish Uncle Mohammed waving on the dock. Dolphins dance round the boat. It is time to eat the chocolates. I pass the bag to greedy Yasme. When she finally gives it back, I peer into the bag to see what's left, and feel a stab of disappointment to find the chocolates gone and, instead, my mother's jewelry glinting at me through the empty bits of gold foil.

I had been told that we were going on vacation, but we weren't. It was 1953 and we were fleeing Nasser's Egypt. I was two. We had no papers and no home. Just a chocolate bag of jewelry.

For the next two years we lived in many places. Istanbul, where it was so cold that the Bosporus froze, and where a lobster Yasme was cooking lunged from its pot and grabbed my sweater. Paris, where we stayed with Aunt Vicky, Uncle Edouard and my three older cousins in a building with a triangular front, like the Flatiron. You could see the Eiffel Tower from the kitchen where Uncle Edouard sang 'It ain't gonna rain no more, no more' in a Scots accent while making us fried eggs for breakfast. I can smell the butter, hear it sizzle, taste that intensely yellow yolk on my baguette. So many years later, it is still the ultimate egg.

We lived in Lebanon in the mountains above Beirut where the air was fragrant with cedar and the forest was peopled with porcupines and gypsies with dancing bears. There were scorpions under rocks and fields fat with grasshoppers. We ate ice cream flavored with the resin of the cedars. In Switzerland, we lived in Vevey, at the Beau Sejour, where Henry James wrote Daisy Miller, and you could pick your trout from a tank in the dining room. At the Palace in Gstaad, I tortured the slugs in the elegant gardens with my salt shaker, and drank the world's best hot chocolate. I'm sure they made it with cream.

Hotels, usually rather grand ones, were home. My father loved luxurious hotels, but we stayed in them without him. He was off working, trading rice, mostly in India, which was much farther away then and not a place you brought your wife and child. My mother, Yasme and I lived the strange half-life of refugees. Reasonably well-off political refugees, yes, but none the less people without passports or permanent address.

We have an album full of photos of me smiling and my mother looking brave, surrounded by people whose names we never really knew. I ate meringue swans at birthday parties for children I'd met the day before and never saw again. I honed my table manners at dinners in hotel dining rooms where expatriate American jazz musicians played wondrous music while the haute bourgeoisie of countries that no longer existed ate their meals in silence. There was an antique Russian couple in ancient evening clothes, (I may be imagining her tiara), who each night sadly raised their glasses to the Czar and his poor family in lugubriously accented French. These were my companions, now memories, their legacy a sense of intimate kinship with deposed nobility. Believing what I was told that children should be seen and not heard, I sat silently and ate up my surroundings.

My mother pined for my father and for Egypt, became ill with hepatitis that was treated with spoonfuls of olive oil. She was sick and unhappy. I was blissfully unaware; completely oblivious in that totally self-absorbed way that only very young children can get away with. Eventually our visas came through, and we were notified that we would be allowed to enter the US under the Swiss quota, my mother having by chance been born there, since the Egyptian quota was filled. We left for Genoa and set sail for New York on the Cristoforo Colombo after a hotel Christmas. We celebrated New Year's of 1955 with champagne, caviar and gorgeous balloons while an Italian band played Old Lang Syne in the snowy North Atlantic.

We settled in New York after I complained to my mother that I didn’t think much of our hotel, and when were we moving. Instead of going to Rio as planned, my complaint to my mother backfired and we stayed in New York for good.

I was enrolled at the Spence School, where I spent the next dozen years. Spence taught me to love to learn simply for the love of learning, and remains the source of my endless love for the written word. It was a very rarified atmosphere, to say the least, where my classmates had museums named after them on Fifth Avenue, slept in Abraham Lincoln’s camp bed, had their great grandfather’s statue gracing Grand Central station.

My grandfather wore a fez, was a scholar of Arabic literature and either knew TE Lawrence or simply loved The Seven Pillars of Wisdom above all other books. On Father’s Day at school when I was a child, I wanted desperately to have a father like my classmates who wore big ugly shoes with holes punched in them called wing tips, that looked suitable for the gamekeeper, who lunched at their clubs, and worked, or seemingly did nothing at something mysterious called “being in bonds.” My father, with his European accent and fine Italian shoes spent his time on the phone doing business in six languages, and pacing the hall at night hoping his deals would go through. He was very foreign, Italian my friends said, and a terrible embarrassment to me. I dreamed of waking up named Penelope Appleby, having straight hair, and with any luck, a grandmother with a house in Bermuda.

In 1965 I fell love with a long haired Australian boy who went to Collegiate at a Lester Lanin subscription dance at the Women’s Republican Club. We hung out at the Night Owl, the Five Spot, Gerde’s Folk City, the Café Wha? Our days were spent in Washington Square. We played the guitar and listened to Dylan; Peter, Paul & Mary; Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel. When he went back to Australia, the bottom of my world came unscrewed. To cheer me up, my parents sent me to summer school.

And cheer me up they did. They sent me to study at Christ Church College, Oxford, in 1967, the summer of Carnaby Street, Sergeant Pepper, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…The Summer of Love, for goodness’ sake, and a wonderful place and time to be sixteen with a broken hear and a thirst to sample everything. I have no idea what my parents were thinking.

Amazingly, I went to class, and fell in love with the Romantics, and when I wasn’t riding my bike through miraculously, heartrbreakingly beautiful Oxford, or punting with English boys, I threw myself headlong into the bad boys, Shelley, Keats, Blake, Byron, and the even worse boys, the degenerate Restoration guys, De Quincey, Wilde….Not to mention the very worst boys, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, Cream, and the Who.

By the time I returned to junior year at Spence, I had expanded way beyond the confines of Spence. We cut school and hung out at the Modern in front of Picasso’s Guernica, the best place in town to meet smart guys. On another day, my friends and I cut school and went to a peace rally at Columbia, where everybody was smoking pot. A Spence teacher busted us and we were hauled in to see the Head of School, a Victorian lady who had barely adjusted to the 50s, and didn’t even want to hear anything about tuning in, turning on and dropping out. I opted out of Spence and went off to boarding school in Switzerland where a rigorous academic schedule and lots of skiing kept me on a self imposed straight and narrow. It was an extraordinary year.

That year at Montesano I completed either two or three British A Levels, a Diplome Superieure de Langue et de Civilization Francaise through the Unviversity of Nancy, France and a couple of AP tests. The one thing Montesano lacked was a college advisor, which instead of seeming like a drawback really appealed to me at the time. Although I had wanted for years to study archaeology at Yale, and they were accepting women for the first time that year, I didn’t even apply. My parents, who subscribed to the out-of-sight-out-of-mind school of parenting had never once in the entirety of my eighteen years and academic career never asked me what I would like to do with my life, or where I would like to go to school.

No member of my immediate family had ever gone to college, and women, after all, were going to marry anyway. As I grew older, my father’s deeply middle eastern views clashed more and more with my life. I moved in with a guy I knew, and got a job selling poetry at Brentano’s. My father did not speak to me for over a year, he told me I was dead to him. Not long thereafter, a situation arose where my roommate suggested we marry. Woodstock had come and gone, the world hadn’t changed. He was a sweet guy, and an excellent poet but the Irish in him made him write his verses on cocktail napkins which dissolved before last call. I married him, only to find out years later on my father’s death that he had entered into a financial agreement with him and had paid him to make an honest woman out of me. My father had secretly orchestrated my marriage to a man I didn’t love in order to save face.

Breakfast: New York: October 23rd, 1967

Isabel was already dressed when the clock radio clicked on and Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell burst into Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. She checked the mirror and rolled the waistband of her plaid uniform skirt up several times, shortening it a good six inches. Throwing on her blazer, she dashed to the bathroom, where, ablutions made, she examined the collection of diet and sleep aids in her parents’ medicine cabinet and popped a pill. She tossed a couple of Valiums in her pocket as an afterthought. Courage thus screwed to the sticking place, she entered the kitchen, where the family breakfast was underway and the wall clock announced that 17 minutes remained until the start of school.

Raf Hakim, her father, the Grand Master of Rice, sat at the far end of the breakfast table hidden behind the Times opened to its fullest extent. Elegant fingers and crisp French cuff glided out to retrieve coffee and retreat with it to the sanctuary of the financial pages. The lavender of his cologne mingled with coffee, toast, and maple syrup. Her mother, Daisy, chatted on the phone with either her sister in Paris or the one in Geneva, exchanging overnight gossip in French sprinkled with Italian, Arabic, Spanish and English depending on the degree of privacy certain bits required. Only the curly telephone cord tethered her to morning in New York.

Isabel took in the front page that faced out at her: 680 protesters arrested at weekend’s 100,000 strong Washington peace march; attempted levitation of the Pentagon by Allen Ginsberg unsuccessful; 83 American soldiers killed yesterday in Vietnam; Dow Jones Industrial Average to open at 700 something; a photograph of hippie chicks offering flowers to MPs pointing bayonets at them.

Isabel’s parents had refused to even discuss letting her go to the weekend peace march on Washington. Forced to act, she’d told a convincing lie about a Saturday school newspaper meeting, and went to the one in New York instead, despite being grounded. She’d gotten busted when a couple of sycophantic childless friends of her parents –Raf and Daisy preferred them that way-- came for cocktails the previous evening waving the Sunday Daily News with anticipatory relish. The picture on page one of a girl passing what looked like a joint to a long-haired guy in Central Park couldn’t possibly be anyone but their friends’ impetuous daughter, they declared. Raf and Daisy instantly agreed.

In point of fact, it wasn’t Isabel, just an inconvenient doppelganger, but the resemblance was so uncanny that it wasn’t worth arguing. She was screwed either way. The violation added another three months --not to be served concurrently-- to the grounding sentence that now stretched sixteen months ahead to winter of 1969 and what by then would be the second half of senior year and the start of Bobby Kennedy’s first term as President. Free at last. She yearned for that better time to come.

“Maman!” Edward grabbed his mother’s chin and used it as a rudder to steer Daisy’s attention to Isabel. It was his regular MO and his preferred target. He pointed to his sister’s hiked up skirt. “Regarde, Maman.” Exposure to the Babel of home had left Edward unable to speak English properly, and his classmates at PS 6 made fun of him. Fearing permanent psychic trauma, since he was already a crybaby and a liar, or what Daisy called sensitive, it was decided that Edward would focus on learning one language only and that it would be French. So Daisy --with Raf in agreement, of course-- yanked him out of public school and sent him to the Lycée Français where the teachers smoked Gitanes and so did a lot of the kids, although not that many in lower school.

Edward had ended Isabel’s run as an only child nine years earlier when she was seven. He was an avid nasal spelunker and trailed a faint whiff of canned peas. Since school had started the month before, he’d been decorating the wall shelf where the toaster sat with little snot balls he rolled between his thumb and forefinger. He glowered and flicked the work in progress at her, but it landed in the syrup pooled round their younger brother’s waffle.

Charles was four and profoundly deaf. He wore hearing aids the size of Penguin Classics fore and aft in a leather harness buckled over his shirt. Thick wires connected them to large beige knobs twisted into his ears. Daisy wouldn’t hear of his going to a school for the deaf or talking with his hands. If Helen Keller had learned to speak, then so would Charles. He just needed his own Annie Sullivan. For this purpose, Ivy Sparrow, a tiny British Montessori governess who dressed only in royal blue and bore a striking resemblance to her avian namesake, was hired and charged with civilizing the wild child, from breakfast to bedtime, day in and day out.

Isabel soon discovered that Miss Sparrow read the Christian Science Monitor naked in the kitchen late at night, and that she was, at that time, always eager to discuss the writings of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy. Isabel was nonplussed by these sightings. All she wanted at 2 a.m. was a soothing glass of milk and an uneventful trip to the kitchen. She had a pre-ulcer condition, which was not helped by this new concern about running into the bare, forked nanny. She already worried about everything, and the thought of developing satellite anxieties distressed her further.

Charles beamed at Isabel and held her eye as he ripped an ear knob out of his head and dropped it into his mother’s cup of the chicory blend that was sent up each month from New Orleans.

“Bad boy,” he enunciated, much more clearly than Helen ever could have.

Miss Sparrow’s relentless cheerfulness, combined with her unshakeable belief that anything could be a learning opportunity, exhausted Isabel. The woman never passed up a chance to educate. With alacrity, she snatched the earpiece by its cord from Daisy’s coffee. It arced brown drops across the marble kitchen table.

“Well, Charles, tell me, which one of your hearing aids is wet?”

He pointed to the one dripping in her hand.

“Yes, that’s right, but we want to speak, not point, don’t we?”

The boy nodded.

“Say ‘wet’, let me hear you. And let’s speak up, shall we?” She favored the forward momentum and implied threat of the hortatory subjunctive.

“Weh,” said the boy in his peculiar disembodied tone.

“Wet. With a T.” She exaggerated, articulating the words so he could lip-read better. Everybody was supposed to do it, but most of the time they didn’t bother and just bellowed at him.

“Wed.” He smiled and showed the gap between his front teeth that people used to say meant he was born lucky. Since he had started wearing hearing aids nobody said it anymore.

“Wed,” he offered again.

Daisy was oblivious to her deaf son’s act of defiance, and Isabel wanted to escape while she still was. Signing a conspiratorial I love you to Charles, and receiving the kiss he blew back, Isabel emerged from the shadow of the pantry into the kitchen. The fluorescent overhead fixture buzzed the high pitched whine of a distant dentist’s drill – a sound that agonized Isabel, but which no one else in the household admitted to even being able to hear -- and the too yellow wallpaper accosted her with bogus morning cheer.

“Good morning, everybody. Hope you all have a good day. Sorry, must run. Goodbye.” She flashed a peace sign at her assembled family, intending to convey a breezy teenage insouciance very foreign to what she felt, then zipped out the back door to wait for the elevator. Daisy came after her moments later, gold mules clacking on the granite landing. The phone cord stretched all the way to the elevator –twenty feet at least. Isabel concentrated on willing the doors open before her mother reached her.

“Good morning, Nelson,” she greeted the elevator man and slid in before it was fully open. Daisy was getting near, speaking Arabic, whatever she was saying top secret. Isabel checked her watch.

“Please hurry, Nelson, I can’t be late for school today.”

“You know I gotta open the gate all the way before I can shut it again, Izzy. I taught you how to operate this cab when you were ten. Hold your horses.”

“Buenos días, Nelson. Momentito, por favor.” Once Daisy ascertained your mother tongue, she addressed you in it forever. She stuck her Love That Red fingertips in the door to prevent him from shutting it. Isabel made herself small behind the elevator man.

“Get out of there right now, young lady. You do not leave this house that way. What do you think this is, a hotel?” The phone cord uncoiled as far as it would and seemed intent on pulling her back. Isabel’s little terrier, Hippie, flew out the kitchen door and ran into the elevator. He sat up and begged to be taken away; anxiety danced in his round brown eyes.

“Poor little beastie,” Isabel murmured, rubbing his strawberry blond head. Daisy yelled at the dog to come here now. Her voice echoed down the shaft.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hakim, people are waiting for the elevator.”

“This is not over, Isabel,” her mother hissed. “Come home straight after school. I needn’t remind you that you are grounded for the foreseeable future. And roll your skirt down immediately.”

Hippie’s nails scrabbled on the polished stone landing as he tore out of the elevator into the house. Daisy withdrew her hand and Nelson slid the brass gate closed.

Good Hair Day

I laughed at Candy, my beloved hairdresser of 25 years, when she said to me on July 22nd that letting her straighten my hair would change my life. Brazilian Blowout, she told me, would result in the swingy, frizz-free, carefree tresses I've longed for my whole life. Or at least since I first ironed my hair in 7th grade.

"And," she said again,"I swear it will change your life."

I snorted or chortled here, my Diet Peach Snapple threatening to exit through my nose. Changing my life is something I've been working hard at, and it has nothing to do with anything as trite as straightening my hair.

"You know I've given up on trips to Lourdes. I've come to terms, in a mature, Zen kind of way, with the fact that my hair, rather than be chemically forced to be something that by nature it isn't, is to be cherished for what it is. It must be embraced."

My hair is ridiculously fine, but I have a lot of it. Left to itself, it corkscrews in the underlayers and the top ones pouf into electrocuted poodle fuzz. I've been wearing my darkish blonde hair shoulder length in its natural state of curl/frizz since returning to New York aeons ago from boarding school. That was in Switzerland, a wonderful country, not only for the obvious alps, watches and chocolates, but for its crisp, dry air and very high annual percentage of good hair days.

New York weather is ideally suited to a penal colony. A hybrid of Siberia and Devil’s Island, it is either frigid or broiling and always too damp. Manhattan is the worst place on earth for my hair, except for Indonesia in August. My hair was so bad in Sumatra, that I became convinced I'd done something awful in a previous lifetime. My move from NYC to Boulder many years ago, was prompted as much by the lure of being able to ski at A-Basin every day, as by the enticement of how great my hair looked whenever I went out to Colorado to visit The Skier.

At the very best of atmospherically benevolent conditions --usually three or four days in the dead of winter here in the city, when even the humidity is too cold to go out-- my hair, I've been told, has a certain Botticelli angel look, although I think it is more pre-Raphaelite myself. But why quibble? Hair is evanescent, and of no importance in the greater scheme of things. Actually, that's not even remotely true: hair is hugely important in terms of evolutionary biology, but we can discuss that another time.

I know that having frizzy hair is not important; that looks are not what matters. People don't commit suicide because they can no longer deal with the lifelong curse of untameable frizz; they find ways to deal with it. Death by frizz may exist, and, come to think of it, probably does on reality TV,Obese, Pregnant, Underage & Frizzy,but my experience with it has been more along the lines of deep seasonal depression, terminal avoidance of mirrors, and buying endless miracle hair products. I have justified spending so much money on hair stuff that uses the words hair, frizz, humidity and control in one sentence, that it merits its own 12 step program.

My hair makes me very unhappy. That's the bottom line.

So when Candy told me that this new Brqazilian hair straightening would change my life, and that it would cost 500 times the average daily wage in Central Africa, I rejected it out of hand because I just don't do things like that. You should know that I am a long (twice) divorced mother of two. My daughter is 21 and was born when I was 37. Old. My son is 15 and was born when I was 43. Really old. I was finally brave enough to take them and leave their alcoholic father, the Sperm Donor, 8 years ago this month. I've been a headhunter for the past 15 years, but the business of getting people jobs is dead right now. I'm a junior at Columbia, starting my second year at General Studies, the most fabulous school in the world. I will get my BA in Writing in 2011, when I turn 60. It's frightening to write that down.

I know that nothing worthwhile involves instant gratification. The notion of being able to buy something that would immediately --three hours from now-- change my life was enticing but not believable. Candy kept swearing it was true. She kept pushing. Sometimes you need to do something risky and out of character. Just to shake things out of a rut. Unmeployed student, divorced mother of two, responsible for staggering amounts of tuition, care of a handicapped sibling and an 85 year old mother with dementia, I did the only thing I could think of. I pulled out the credit card I hadn't used in almost in a year, and said the magic words, charge it.

My life has changed.

I love my hair. I don't really believe it will stay this way, although apparently it really will, for 6-12 months. It is shiny and swingy and straight. My hair is so fine that it has no weight at all. This gravity defying aspect is completely gone: my hair is now heavy and falls like hair in the Pantene ads on TV. I have found the Holy Grail, the Pouf-B-Gone I've hankered for since I first ironed my hair in 1963.

My hair and I went out to East Hampton on the Jitney to visit Thelma & Louise. We sat on the sand at Georgica beach, where my hair always looks like a Chia-Pet. It remained smooth, lustrous, completely free of frizz. Fog rolled in and enveloped us; I sat in my sand chair casually flipping my hair and running my fingers through its silkiness. We were caught in two different rain storms. My hair got wet and didn't frizz! I can't believe it. I shake my hair and it moves. My hair is in better condition than it's ever been.

I walked in to writing workshop and the women, not prone to warmth, stopped in mid sentence and told me I looked great, really put together, and how was I was managing to look so cool in this weather. They couldn't hide their astonishment. It is, of course, the hair. Having Jennifer Aniston/Network anchor hair goes a long way to helping me project that confident wasp chic I've always secretly longed for.

My Inner Anarchist & Me:Reuntited and it feels so good

Again I’m struck by how this class has led me to ponder the facets of point of view, to consider differently and to see with new eyes. Ways of seeing are as variable as everything else, and those based on the goal of the getting of wisdom rather than on the accretion of power will be more true and authentic. The object seen through that lens will be presented with greater disinterest -- although there’s no such thing as pure objectivity since the simple act of naming it disqualifies it from itself--but at least it may be examined more fairly. The human agency that powers the arc of desire to know essential truths about things is fueled by a deep need to uncover their numinous hearts. It’s what the examined life demands and Socratic method supports. In that way, Pre-Columbian Histories of North America as facilitated by Sev, Barnard’s Keeper of the Shamanic Trace, with the help of fascinating, well-chosen readings, becomes not just a course but, a journey of the spirit to the things that matter most. Truly psychedelic, without even loading the effigy pipe.

I entered the class a liberal Democrat, which I remain for practical purposes for the time being, but came out transformed, and fully reunited with my inner anarchist. It was a part of myself long buried but never extinguished, hidden from sight by the accumulation of debris that the soul-killing hierarchy of capitalism produces in exchange for freedom. I served as a carrier of baskets of soil for far too many years, and have no intention of ever doing so again. The accumulation of material goods and economic clout should never be an end in itself, but now I’ve come to realize that one cannot dip into the system without being trapped by it.

It could be argued that the purpose of Darwin’s oeuvre was to provide natural scientific support to the ideas Rousseau presented in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1754 and The Social Contract in 1762, and that The Origin of the Species was their natural and inevitable successor. One might also suggest that Darwin’s book moved to clarify and offer an alternate viewpoint to the overarching principal of the Industrial Age that humankind climbs inexorably up the rungs of civilization’s ladder from savagery to complex social organization, as codified later by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Societies (1877), and that what is higher is always better. This concept stands in stark contrast to the emotional aesthetic, creativity, and communion with Nature and our better intuitive selves that defined the concomitant ideals of Romanticism.

It is this tension between the disciplines of science on one side and the realms of philosophy on the other that allows spandrels to hang in the space between them waiting for all the diversity of human creative thought from finest flowers to most poisonous fruits to flow into them and develop. Here, between what is and what might be, a brave new world that has such beauty in it shares a bed with visions of the End of Days, clutched in a headlock for the ultimate prize, the success or obliteration of the human race.

The great revolutionary year of 1848 straddled the waist of a century that simultaneously spanned both the Romantic Movement and the Industrial Age. The time was torn by the advances of science and industry crashing constantly into the spiritual longing to stay true to the morally right and good. At no other period, except, perhaps, our own, have the possibilities of what might be weighed as heavily on the imagination of the present that is. Nor have the potential outcomes of theses ideas mattered as much to humanity’s greater combined future as they do now.

We are at such a point in history now, ready to move away from the economic system that has ruled human lives in ways as bad as, and at times far worse, than the Colonialism it replaced, but whose patrimony it conserved intact. One simply replaces the star of nationalism at the top of the tree with that of lucre, and 90% of the resources still remain in 10% of the same hands. It becomes Chapter 11 & 13 recombinant voodoo economics repackaging the same old shit in a crisp new cover, as is happening now with AIG and Chrysler. Sometimes you simply have to pull the plug. But there can also be revolution from the bottom up, and not from the top down, as described by Christopher Boehm in Hierarchy in the Forest: the Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. It can be relatively bloodless, and is essentially a change from within. The problem with that type of overthrow of power is that you have to get all the other slaves to work as one against the overseers, and that never work.

The numbers of past civilizations that reached Icarian heights only to crash and burn leaving no suicide notes explaining their sudden and complete departures is astonishing. But, there is another alternative, the one Wilson recommends, and that is to simply walk away and start over, as it seems possible the people at the bottom rung of Chacoan and Cahokian civilization(s) may have done. We all have the choice to refuse to help construct the pyramids of others. If enough people at the base remove themselves, the center will not hold. The society will collapse leaving behind only the monuments of man’s inhumanity to man.

Sylvia V.T. Calabrese

Personal Archaeology:Changing One's Point of View

Earthmother said...

I love a book that forces me to reassess my point of view and adjust the knobs accordingly. So it is with David Hurst Thomas's Skull Wars, which has made me examine filters that color views long held but never consciously acquired. We all have some less than pretty notions, which like souvenirs lugged back from happy times prove cheap and inappropriate when examined in the light of home. It wasn’t very long ago that I underwent a paradigm shift in my understanding of colonialism under similar circumstances. I had blithely cruised from political refugee immigrant child to Caribbean traveler and connoisseur of the comparative virtues of ex- British, French, Spanish or Dutch Caribbean islands and their luxurious Colonial flavored post-Colonial resorts. Then I read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place about Antigua, my favorite island, and its tourist industry viewed from a native’s point of view, and everything changed forever. I realized as I finished the book that I had spent my life until that day seeing everything through the lens of a post Colonial apologist.

Skull Wars required me to evaluate how and why I view Native Americans, and forced me to do some necessary personal archaeology before I could once again move forward. This stratigraphic examination of my thinking led me to understand why I’ve always felt more attuned to the 18th and 19th centuries than to my own. But to examine my viewpoint and find to my immense dismay that I think like a Brit educated at Rugby under Thomas Arnold with a grand tour under my belt is flat-out scary. How did someone with my catholic interests and liberal outlook been so willing to subscribe to the blindered notion of Mediterranean & European supremacy in all things touching the cultural and intellectual history of our species? Examining myself, I saw a clear and direct link to Rousseau, the Romantic movement, and the many dead white European males who have formed my thinking, consciously or not. My own personal and ancestral history cluttered any possible objectivity. When Moses was rounding up the other Jews to head out of Egypt, my great to the nth grandfather was playing cards with Pharaoh, so we stayed. Over the next millennia, my family were subjected to Greek, Ottoman, French and British rulers, culminating in the early 1950s in Egypt when Nasser toppled the sham monarchy of King Farouk, and we “Europeans” sailed to the New World.

Arriving in the US as a child I immediately forced my parents to buy me a set of pearl handled six shooters, a leather holster with conchas and tassels and a cowboy hat. I wore these in our hotel, where I spent a lot of time learning English from the refrigerator sized TV that spewed endless shows about Davey Crockett (I soon obtained a coonskin cap for watching that more authentically), Jim Bowie, Annie Oakley and all the singing cowboys and girls, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. Armed with endless rolls of caps, I played in Central Park with the local children –Manhattan natives, white, Upper East Side private school kids- who were also armed with six shooters. We with guns were the cowboys and those without, the kids we repeatedly killed each afternoon in the playground, were the Indians. I shifted from colonized to colonizer by arming myself with toys and hats, a change that has colored my views about Native Americans and pre-Columbian culture until now.

Hats off, Skull Wars.

Sylvia Calabrese

Motherhood

Last night I rose to get a fix of the children. I needed to kiss them,

breathe them in,etch their sweetness on my mind. Jack’s essence is bread, 

a delicious yeasty perfume that’sparticularly noticeable between the

vulnerability of his small downy shoulder and the crook of his curl covered 

neck. He’s my Pillsbury Dough Boy. Smoothing Victoria's covers,

I tuck Woofie closer to her. She had spaghetti with garlic and oil for

dinner, and brushed before bed, yet her breath smells like attar of roses 

and has from the day she was born. I always find myself praying for 

them, wordlessly and passionately, in the dark before I leave. Please, 

keep them safe. Grant them happy lives. Give me time with 

them, please. I neither know nor care whom I petition. I

feel such love for them my solar plexus aches; something so strong I 

could die from it. Now inextricably linked, I doubt I could ever, more than

momentarily, not feel their tug. Exterior, yet part of my very core,

invisible cords moor them to me. It startles me to notice I haven’t 

thought of them for a measureable length of time.

They are the best thing I will ever do.

January 17th, 2009: Sorry I was Right

Just found the post I wrote in April about the lurking economic disaster which has since come to pass. Wish I had that kind of horse picking ability for less Cassandra-like applications, like choosing lottery numbers. Things are terrible, and they are going to get worse for a long time as the after effects of all the big players trickle down the economic chain. We had it coming for a long time. Unbridled greed and blatant disregard for all those who share our Earth led us here.

Nonetheless, I feel enormously positive about the chance we have to refashion ourselves as thoughtful stewards and kinder people who will develop new energies, provide an internationally competitive education to our children, health care for everyone, a return to the land-to farming and cheese making and  artisanal saucisson made from humanely raised and  slaughtered animals- as a viable and honorable option to law or finance. We need to develop  crafts and trades, and set up schools that teach them. I feel more hopeful politically than I have since working for Robert Kennedy in '68, but worry about the nearly terminal apathy that has set in to our society since Nixon was first caught screwing around with the democratic process. We have become so jaundiced to the repeated disregard some of our presidents have shown for the people and the Constitution, that we merely shrug in acceptance. Where are the ramparts? Where is the outrage? In two days we'll have President Obama, who carries the burden of all of our hopes for the future. May he be kept safe.