SILENCE

Over the last couple of days I devoured Terry Tempest Williams' new book When Women Were Birds.

Devoured is the right word. The meditative form of the book was, as my friend Alex Caldiero has said, "the food that fits the hunger": "Fifty-Four Variations on Voice."


Devoured is the right word because I was hungry for this women's voice: "I am fifty-four years old, the age my mother was when she died. . . . 'I am leaving you all my journals,' she said, . . . 'But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone.'" She looks at them a month after her mother's death and they are all blank, empty, untouched. 


Twelve blank, white pages follow before variation II begins: My mother's journals are paper tombstones.


Devoured is the right word because Williams describes a life hungry for voice, a voice silenced by male politicians and by male church leaders and even by a crazy man intent on sacrificing a supposed virgin Williams with an ax.


I'd like to quote the entire book.


From Variation XXV:


[In the Mormon temple experiencing a ritual "endowment"]


"As I listened to this biblical text being read on the eve of marriage, the only word inhabiting my mind was fuck. I blushed. This was not a word within my vocabulary as a chaste nineteen-year-old woman. Shocked by the betrayal of my own imagination, I tried to clear my thoughts, keep my countenance clean and pure. But the word kept pressing me, fuck, fuck, a word I had never spoken out loud. . . . 'In the beginning was the Word.' Nobody warned me about which one."


Devoured is the right word because Williams' experience here is my own. The last time I entered a Mormon temple, there for the marriage of my oldest son, I was asked to be one one of two official witnesses to the ceremony. The man performing the ceremony began with something like "before Gods, angels, and these witnesses. . . ." My mind flooded with profanities of the worst (or best) sort, uninvited, disturbing, and revelatory of what my subconscious already knew: this place and this ritual was antithetical to the person I wanted to be.


From Variation XXVII:


"My body is my compass, and it does not lie. As women, we are quiet about our personal lives, especially when it comes to sex. We are quiet because there is a history of abuse and harm committed toward those who tell the truth."


. . .


"When we were children, we visited Mother in the hospital. We were told she was having 'corrective surgery.' Later I learned she made the decision to have her tubes tied, not a common practice among her peers. 'Freedom,' she said.


"Birth control gave me my voice. It is perhaps the only thing in my life about which I have been utterly responsible."


. . .


"If a man knew what a woman never forgets, he would love her differently.


"What a woman never forgets is when she allows a man to make love to her, she enters a pact with angels that should a child be conceived in that moment, she holds the life of another. A man can come and go, he pulls out and walks away. But a woman stays. . . . Until she bleeds, she imagines every possibility from pleasure to pain to birth to death and how she will do what she needs to do, and until she bleeds, she will worry endlessly, until she bleeds."


My mother's journals tell me nothing.


My mother's journals tell me everything.

Fraternal Geotheobiosociopersonal Musings

The other night, up Provo Canyon, at Steve Peck's reading from his The Scholar of Moab, I met George Handley.

This weekend I have read his book, a dense and thoughtful and poetic and troubled and deeply Mormon text that has done what a good book ought to do: awaken thoughts and feelings in a reader.

I'm aware of the ironies involved when a reader responds positively to a deeply Mormon book while drinking a bottle of Squatters' hoppy IPA (last night) or while drinking an invigorating cup of Cafe Ibis' Guatemalan Organic Shade Grown coffee (this morning). But I'm going to enjoy the barrel-aged irony and note that it has hints of sego lily and sage, notes of trout, and an aftertaste of youth.

Handley writes about flyfishing the Provo, about his family's history in the region, about Mormon history and theology, about taxing adventures in canyons and mountains, about his marriage and children, about his brother's suicide and his own continuing complex responses to that tragedy, about depression and exhilaration, about relationships between humans and the environment, about living liminally between heaven and earth, body and spirit, about the stories we tell and about how they determine how we live.

I might quote any number of memorable sentences, retell any number of memorable stories. But I'm going to quote this passage to stand for the rest:

"No one is responsible for my imagination except me, and while institutions are often guilty of historical distortion and intentional error, and while historical inquiry is always valuable, I can only blame myself for failing to understand that I am always in time's flow and that historical memory is always rhetorical. I don't need fewer myths, only better ones, spawned under the conditions fate has allotted me. The only potent thing is imagination" (84).

It's true, I think, that we're responsible for our own imagination and true that we need better myths.

Handley's book is full of better myths and I'm better now for having woven them into my own stories. As a result, however, Handley has become responsible for my own imagination. And the churches and political institutions around us in Utah Valley, especially as we are young and without alternate stories, are also responsible for our imaginations. And then (this is eternally circular), I'm responsible again for my own. And for Handley's.

I'll add a footnote to the story he tells of the battle between Utes and Mormons that ended with Utes taking temporary refuge up Rock Canyon, under the guns of snipers on canyon walls. An Indian woman climbed one wall and then jumped to her death (a suicide that, in this book, echoes that of Handley's brother). The peak above where she jumped was subsequently named Squaw Peak.

"Squaw" has a whole set of hateful meanings. In the 1970's there were even (linguistically questionable) claims that the word meant vagina and was the ultimate insult. Several states have since renamed locations bearing that name.

That our peak still bears this name indicates that we continue to need new myths.

A couple of final thoughts.

I understand what it means for Handley to be obsessed with the early and tragic death of his brother. I am still, twenty years later, thinking and writing and dreaming and agonizing and wishing and wondering about the death of my own brother, at the age of 40, of AIDS.

I won't tell any story, ever again, without flavoring from that story.

I gave up my job at BYU, one year after Handley arrived there, in part because of solidarity with John. To work for an institution that hates him and his kind felt like treason—fraternal treason.

the Provo River painting in the UVU library

My other thought is tied to the previous post about Terrance Malick's film The Tree of Life. Some of the most powerful moments of the film stem from the loss of a son and the cosmic questions that arise. As I watched the images from volcanoes and nebulae and waterfalls and all the rest, listening to the characters wrestling with god, questioning god, haranguing god, and as I read Handley's own heartfelt responses to tragedy in the context of religious belief, I had the sense that god is what we sink to or rise to when there's no other place to go. God is our metaphor (and yes, we believe profoundly in our metaphors) for what is groundless yet has meaning, for what is inexplicable but comforting, for what is achingly beautiful and thus profoundly challenging. "Every angel is terrible," Rilke's Duino Elegy tells us. And yet we need them, I need them, as metaphors, as better myths.

Mrs. Robinson, Jesus Loves You

1966, Farmington, New Mexico

            Late-afternoon light diffuse in the old Mormon chapel. The sacrament meeting is already an hour gone. The man standing at the pulpit intones the word of God. Sixteen-year-old boys and girls sit thigh to thigh in the back row, pass notes, play games on paper, brush hands.

July 1967, Farmington

            DR. GENE SMITH, ORTHOPEDIC SURGEON. I have swept his parking lot, watered his shrubs, cleaned his office, transcribed his tapes, and once almost fainted while I held a basin of warm water into which he squirted fatty yellow fluid drawn from deep inside a man’s knee through an enormous needle.

            Today, I’m working in the red glow of the darkroom, developing a set of x-rays. I pull the film from the chemical bath and hang the sheets to drip dry. I turn on the fluorescent screen behind them.

Gistening reproductions of Claudia Colter’s spine.

The bones curve ever so slightly from the delicate vertebrae of her neck down to the right and then back to the left before disappearing between the bright wings of her hips.

The bright wings of her hips.

            Again I trace the scoliostic curve, ghostly against the black film, deviating so beautifully from the strictly vertical. I study the dim arcs of ribs that frame her spine, the cunningly articulated vertebrae snaking down between the ribs. I picture Claudia in the next room, naked under the examination gown.

The thoughts arouse me, confuse me. I’m feeling what I’ve learned, in church, to distinguish as the fire of the Holy Ghost. I worship these pale images.

The door opens. It’s Dr. Smith: So what have we got?

January 1968, Provo, Utah

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson,

Jesus loves you more than you will know . . .

The Graduate and his girlfriend flee her seductive and wrathful mother to an upbeat soundtrack, and I leave the theater happy for them, free with them, disgusted by "plastics" and convention. But the "Jesus loves you" unsettles me. I wish Jesus and the seduction that had my full attention (Mrs. Robinson’s parting knees!) weren't so snugly intertwined.

J. M. Coetzee's "Summertime": Afrikaners and Mormons

The book is a fictionalized and fragmentary biography. The biographer presents the Nobel Prize winner's notebooks 1972-75, interviews with five people who knew the author, and undated fragments from his notebooks. The accounts are largely unflattering.


This morning as I finished the novel (the genre designation on the title page is "Fiction"), I was left wondering about my own deficiencies, awkwardness, guarded personality, loyalties, and relationships with my parents.


And about my rejections of and identifications with the religion I was raised in and whose tenets I practiced for 40 years.


Here's a passage from Summertime that seems to get at complexities I recognize:


So we have the case of a man who spoke the language only imperfectly, who stood outside the state religion, whose outlook was cosmopolitan, whose politics was -- what shall we say? -- dissident, yet who was ready to embrace an Afrikaner identity. Why do you think that was so?


My opinion is that under the gaze of history he felt there was no way in which he could separate himself off from the Afrikaners while retaining his self-respect, even if that meant being associated with all that the Afrikaners were responsible for, politically.


Was there nothing that drew him more positively to embrace an Afrikaner identity -- nothing at a personal level, for example?


Perhaps there was, I can't say. . . . He had been rebuffed by the Afrikaners too often, rebuffed and humiliated -- you have only to read his book of childhood memories to see that. He was not going to take the risk of being rejected again.


So he preferred to remain an outsider.


I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner.

Prisoner of Zion: "I needed a story, not satori"

 $6.99, I wrote in the previous post. Scott Carrier's "Prisoner of Zion" will be cheap as an e-book.


So I bought it. Unfortunately, I wasn't smart enough to make my mac's old operating system work with a free downloaded Kindle application from Amazon.


So I bought a Kindle: $139.


$139 + $6.99 = $145.99.


And now that I have read the book, it was well worth it.


"She was looking for enlightenment, prone to losing herself in the moment and falling in love with whomever we met, but I had a deadline and expenses and I needed a story, not satori."


"How can you live there?" [my friends] say, meaning, How can you live surrounded by religious fanatics? This makes me defend the Mormons, as they are much like people everywhere else -- some are bad, some are good. It doesn't bother me that Mormons believe God grew up as a human being on a planet curcling a sun called Kolob. I'm not upset when they tell me He came to Earth in a physical body and had sex with the Virgin Mary. These beliefs, as Jefferson said, neither pick my pocket nor break my bones."


". . . and now I was locked in jail with criminals, cells stacked three stories high in a semi-circle so that one guard, a woman, could sit at an elevated control panel in the center of the circle and see into every cell. . . . It was completely fucked up and I hated it, and I thought for sure the Hindu Kush would be better than this even if they killed me. I took solace knowing I was the only prisoner with a visa to Uzbekistan."


"'What do you you think about America?' 'It looks like a very nice place in the movies, but will you talk to someone and get us some medical help. My backbone is broken.'"


"They all have beards and wear pajamas, shalwar kameez, with a white pill box hat. They are Pastun, Afghans. . . . I've come to Pakistan to write a story for a men's fashion magazine. . . . I have a map and a backpack."


"The first time we saw Iron Cross it was kind of the same thing. We were in a [Burmese] coffee shop for tourists and they were on the television in a live performance. The sound was off, but it was clear they were into something loud and fast. The singer had a shaved head and was screaming into the microphone, the drummer was in a frenzy, and Chit San Maung -- who looked like a friendly head hunter -- was ripping through something dangerous on his guitar. We didn't need to hear the sound to know what the song was about -- sticking it to the man. It seemed very strange these guys were not in jail."


"I figured if he could show a competency in writing then I could argue, or suggest, that he didn't need a high school diploma. And yet I knew he'd learned English from watching American movies -- 'Rush Hour' and 'Rambo' -- and probably didn't have much experience reading and writing the langguage, so I expected that it would take a while to get him up to speed. But I knew he could do it because writing is mainly about the movement of the mind, and Najib's mind moved like a Ferrari."


Scott Carrier's mind moves like a striking rattlesnake, guided by the heat of the prey.


And the prey is the story.


There are lots of stories in this book, the first and the last in the form of haiku, the second and penultimate stories identical retellings of what I take to be an experience in Scott's youth where after church and and a lunch debating God's existence Scott's father is checking a restaurant bill while a man outside the window catches fire. In between are a fond introduction to Salt Lake's MOMOSPHERE that has been Scott's home since he was a child (you'll never see the Joseph Smith statue standing in Salt Lake's Joseph Smith Building the same way after reading this), tales of Elizabeth Smart and Brian David Mitchell, of belief in Pakistan and Afghanistan, of sex trafficking in Cambodia and rock and roll in Burma.


The stories are about very different topics, but they are threaded together by repeated motifs (the panopticon Scott finds himself in Salt Lake and the one he finds in Burma, the Afghan translator Najib who appears late in the book in an essay about his college experiences at UVU in Orem, Utah, etc.) and by the overarching theme of people held prisoner by their beliefs in Zion, a belief Scott describes as having to do with believing you are God's chosen people and that He gave your land to you.


The Taliban are Zionists by this definition, as are the Mormons. And so, for God's sake, is Scott Carrier himself, at least when fear of losing his girlfriend makes him try to control her or when he risks his life in an avalanche to prove he is right. The essay called "The Source of the Spell" is about Scott's own struggles to settle down, to buy a house, to make his girlfriend join him there. It's told in the context of Captain John Gunnison's attempt to force Utes to bow to European-American power and the Captain's opposite impulse to let the Mormons continue on what he thought was a crazy path because he thought persecuting them would make them stronger. "So, I ask you," Scott writes, "what would happen if we left the terrorists alone? What if we pull our troops from their holy land and let them live like in the days of Mohammed? . . . If we're not afraid of terrorists, then they lose."


Who else in America can write like this?


I keep a print of this photo Scott took in the basement of a prison in Afghanistan on the wall of my office. 


[for more the sights and sounds that accompany Scott's essay that originally appeared in Harpers, click here: http://hearingvoices.com/webwork/carrier/afghan/]


It is beautiful until you look closely and realize you're seeing a waterlogged corpse. This man and the men who attacked him, this reader and the writer Scott Carrier -- we're all prisoners of Zion. It's important for me to remember this daily. And where is the prison? Scott answers the question with an epigraph drawn from the Book of Luke, 17:21: "The Kingdom of God is within you."


This is a profound book, profound because of its simplicity, profound because of its humor, profound because of the Mormons and Afghans and Cambodians whose words and stories live here, profound because of the raw wound that is Scott Carrier's tender soul, profound because of the supple sentences with which he tends that wound.