On reading “In the Quick of Time”

Returning home to Coleman Road I found Dru’s book of poetry on my desk, dedicated and promising surprises.  This is what I found.

“Humble hollyhocks to hokey for affluent gardens”

Never know what to tell people when they ask me where I’m from.  Much too complicated, but “born in California” usually fixes it… at least for the inquirer.  So much of fromedness, however, has to do with nature.

I have always told myself that the 12 years that I resided in Berkeley were the most formative of my life, that I am really from the Bay Area, even though I was born in Los Angeles.  Truth be told, the “cloud combing redwoods” of Northern California never cease to seem other to me (if only there were a word in English for forastero), despite –or maybe, because of– their enchanting stateliness. No, rather, the botany of my childhood coincides with that of my other patria, Spain, and rooting myself in my father’s homeland has sensitized me in totally unanticipated ways to a zone of my life that I thoroughly rejected when I took leave of L.A. in 1967: “tierra ingrata, entre todas mezquina y espuria, jamás volveré a ti.”

Goytisolo’s harsh invocation is tinged by a patchwork of images –nasturtiums, geraniums, roses, hibiscus, cannas, asparagus fern, acanthus, and hollyhocks– poorly dispersed around a gray and dusty (“polvorienta”) life, a patchwork that for me, as a child, symbolized mediocrity, underdevelopment, marginalization.  None of these plants cohered for me into any meaningful narrative of beauty, into any sense of self-worth.  They represented a hodgepodge of the the futile aspirations of peasant/working-class parents in search of… something more, something other, something not us.  The literatures and holiday myths of my childhood did nothing but reinforce this feeling, in their reverence for pine forests and snowy landscapes where children skated, where they traveled to grandmother’s house in a sleigh.  (Give me a Christmas legend set in the deserts of Palestine and not in the Swartzwald!) The memory of my mother trying hard to cultivate a lily –my job was to through the ice out on it each time we defrosted the refrigerator– captures the meaning of my yard.

The humble hollyhock indeed.

That has all changed, and now the image of a young, 5-year-old, climbing up the trunk of the fig tree to explore of magic of that sticky, milk-like substance that oozes when you break the stem: an image that has become, for me, the essential “local lexicon of loss.”

On beards

Tread lightly on this quintessential sign of the fragile male ego!

As a student at Berkeley in 1968, I was unable to fathom the logic of the “student strike” –striking against what? my education?– my leftiness notwithstanding.  A protestor circling in front of Dwinelle Hall (“On strike, shut it down!”) yelled out to me as I entered the building: “You’re a disgrace, turn in your boots!” It could just as well have been my beard instead of my Fryes that he was exacting in payment for my treachery.

So the story of my beard is rooted (!) in Berkeley ’68. This was made palpable by my parents’ reaction, when I returned home to Los Angeles (Lomita, to be exact; even worse!) after classes ended.  The memory is vivid in my imagination.  We are in the kitchen, where all family dramas unfold.  I have just climbed the steps from the driveway. As I open the door to enter, my mother smiles awkwardly, nervously, exclaiming: “I don’t think that your father is going to be too happy about this.” Recreating this drama from memory, for the first time, I realize now how painful it must have been for her to be caught in the vice of the Oedipal battle that was waging between her husband and son.  My ego, of course, blinded me to her anxiety at the time, even more so to my father’s.  She was right: dad arrived home from work, took one look at me, shook his head, and went silent.  That was the last time he looked at me for months…

That is, until I returned home again from Berkeley clean-shaven.  It is interesting that I cannot recall WHY I shaved my beard off, but I believe that vanity had something to do with it.  My ego does not allow me to think that it had anything to do with acceptance. In any case, it broke the paternal silence.

I spent the following year (1969-70) studying in Italy, arriving in Padova after my sister and I made our epic journey back to our family homestead: Chaveanciños (Galicia).  In August 1969 I abandoned the razor, not to take it up for another 17 years. During that period I met my future wife, finished my college education, married, had children, and took up my post at Wesleyan University.  The decision to (at long last) shave off the beard that, by this point (1986) was soon wedded to my identity, was, needless to say, a difficult one.  I remember wanting yet not being able to, my hands held back as if by some invisible vise. It was the taunt, my wife’s final dare –“we, if you want to do it, just do it”– that sent me up the stairs to the bathroom, as if in a mad fury, beyond myself, driving by some superior force, determined to show that I was NOT being controlled by superior forces keeping me from doing what I wanted to do.  Quite funny, in retrospect.

By the way: never shave yourself when you are out of control.  It is not good for the face.  Ouch!

Oh, and by the way, when I returned home from Europe with a beard, it didn’t matter so much to dad any more.  By this point, my having bonded with his family in Galicia made everything different.  Berkeley, for him, was secondary.

My children’s reaction to a face they had never seen is another story.

On war

It was in the 1980s, early 1980s I believe.  Augusta had gone off to California for a family visit and took Sergio and Talía with her.  I was alone in our basement, watching the evening news, the dedication of the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. When the report was over, I was bathed in tears.

Where did those tears come from? Where did that subconscious guilt of mine reside? This was a new and, on some level, terrifying experience. My understanding of myself, my past, my upbringing, and of self and history, was profoundly transformed by this experience.  It would take me so long to understand just how generational this all was.

On surprises

The surprises one experiences in literature always have to do with the unexpected insights into the self that reading exposes.