Quotes | Alison Oatman

Is King Lear on Your Bucket List?

April 5, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

Edgar:

Hadst thou been aught but gossamer, feathers, air
(So many fathom down precipitating),
Thou’dst shiver’d like an egg: but thou dost breathe,
Hast heavy substance, bleed’st not, speak’st, art sound.
Ten masts at each, make not the altitude
Which thou hast perpendicularly fell:
Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.

–from Shakespeare’s “King Lear”

Dr. Natalie Elliot–a Political Science professor at St. John’s here in Santa Fe–gave a talk tonight on “The Weight of Pathos in King Lear” and it was so hefty and lumbering (the most zaftig of discussions!) that I rushed home to unburden myself of a passion to reread the play immediately.

When Shakespeare was writing the play in 1606, falling body experience (the theory that all bodies fall at the same rate) was all the vogue in scientific circles.

So when it comes to the scene above from the end of Act IV (in which Edgar–disguised as a beggar–leads his suicidal father–the blinded Gloucester–over what Edgar pretends are the cliffs of Dover–and then makes his father believe he has survived a great fall) it is a sort of science experiment. Gloucester cannot trust his senses–and at the same time the language is all about “weightiness” and “welling up”–the “pathos” in the title of the lecture.

Six years ago, my father was hospitalized next to a Shakespeare scholar who had been run over by a taxi. (Leave it to my Dad to find his match as a conversationalist in his hospital roommate.) The two got to talking about “King Lear” and the academic said it was Shakespeare’s best.

“King Lear” is the classic father-daughter play. (Though I always feel sad when Shylock’s daughter Jessica runs off with his money and breaks his heart in “The Merchant of Venice.”) Cordelia is Lear’s heroic and truthful daughter.

At the time, my father had terminal cancer, and he had never read “King Lear.” What a perfect book to bring him, I thought to myself. Pretty heavy stuff but sort of a primer on mortality.

But when I handed him a paperback of the play, he was horrified that his roommate might see him reading it. He didn’t want to seem that uncool. Anyhow, he was reading a thick volume about World War II that he had just started digging into.

At first I felt sad that he was missing out on what I felt were “key” books–everything from “Anna Karenina” to “Middlemarch”–and so on. Shouldn’t he be burning to read the “classics” (i.e., all the books I held dear) before he died? This was more than a little self-righteous!

In the end, my father never did read “King Lear.” And was he the worse off for it? Probably not. His life didn’t need more heaviness and pathos. He was plenty wise. And if I had been very sick, would he have brought me a door-stopper of a book about World War II to cheer me up in my hospital bed? No, he would have brought me something I liked–just as he brought me comic books when I was a little kid with bronchitis.

And in the end, as Shakespeare wrote, “Thy life’s a miracle.” You don’t have to read “King Lear” to know that much.

Risk of Deportation Looms

February 16, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

The last week or so has thrust the family into a state of extended emergency. On Feb. 5, Ms. Vizguerra called a family meeting over dinner, banning electronics from the table to convey the seriousness of the matter. The family cats, Miranda and Zayra, meowed as she explained the plan.

If officials were to come to the home in the days before the meeting at the I.C.E. office, no one should answer the door, she said. If they gained entry, Luna, a reedy middle schooler with braces, should use her phone to film the events. Roberto should open the emergency contact list in his phone and begin to call family friends and advocates. And Zury, the youngest, should go straight to her parents’ bedroom, close the door and stay there. “I told them, ‘I know it’s going to be difficult for you,'” Ms. Vizguerra said. “‘I want you to be brave.'”

Three days later, the packing began, with the children stuffing their mother’s leggings, sweaters and shampoos into suitcases and boxes. Terrified by the prospect of familial separation, Ms. Vizguerra began to consider taking refuge at the First Unitarian Society church in Denver, whose congregants previously gave sanctuary to another immigrant.

She reminded Luna which drawers belonged to which child and told her it would be her job to make sure her siblings dressed properly. She showed her where the extra soap, toothbrushes and toothpaste were kept.

Then Ms. Vizguerra stocked the refrigerator with microwave dinners, something even a 6-year-old could make.

–“Immigrant Mother in Denver Takes Refuge as Risk of Deportation Looms” by Julie Turkewitz in today’s New York Times

As the Trump administration takes a wrecking ball to our democracy, it is hard to examine each individual crack.

Yet soon we will experience an unraveling of our immediate communities and the society at large if the deportations continue.

As the Trump administration bullies the press and treats news organizations as the opposition, stories like that of Jeanette Vizguerra–mother of three–serve as authentic news.

The image of twelve-year-old Luna preparing to take care of her younger siblings is a sobering dispatch from a cruel world. It looks like her youth is officially over.

The 53 Percent

February 13, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

For now,the factions of the left seem to have found an accord. But to regain any power in Washington, they will need to sway the center too–including some of those women who voted for Trump. The white women of the left, many of whom are just now finding their footing as activists, have been eager to dissociate from that group. Mention the 53 percent, and they’re quick to tell you that they’re of the 47. But of all the people who marched in Washington last month, they may be among the best positioned to reach across that aisle. “I know of no other time when it would be more important,” Barbara Smith, the black feminist and leftist, told me. “That’s not my work to do, but somebody ought to do it.”
–from the 2/12/17 NY Times Magazine article “How a Fractious Women’s Movement Came to Lead the Left” by Amanda Hess

Who are those 53 percent of women who voted for Trump?

I attended a town hall meeting yesterday sponsored by the Retake Our Democracy group here in Santa Fe. It was informative and quite frightening at times. A woman who teaches listening skills got up and said “Either we are all going to die, or we are going to learn how to live with one another.”

After about an hour, the room broke up into discussion groups. The choice was between a “Rattle the GOP” group (by far the most popular), a “Community Conversations” group, a “Youth Outreach” group, a “Cultural Outreach” group, and a “Soda Tax” group (this last one convened to discuss taxing sugary drinks in order to fund a universal pre-k program).

I chose the “Cultural Outreach” program because because my other choice–“Rattle the GOP”–just felt like tapping into more of the same perpetual outrage “we all” live and breathe now.

“Cultural Outreach” was a small group of about ten people–mostly white women over fifty. We went around the circle and introduced ourselves. The only skill I had to offer was a pitiful command of Spanish. (Earlier a politician had announced that there was a dearth of Spanish translators when it came to important legal documents.) Others spoke of the Native American and Muslim communities they were peripherally connected to. A Mexican-American woman emphasized how much fear immigrants are in.

Then a woman of color spoke up and said “outreach” was exactly the wrong word. Before you just enter our communities, you’ve got to undercover years of your own conditioning to the “invisible” tenets of white supremacy. There has to be trust, and it takes a long time to build that trust. She suggested getting people to come together over food or through art projects. There was absolutely no need for “white knights” to come in and save the day. This all made perfect sense and I was glad she had spoken her mind.

Then I read the NY Times article and it resonated–especially the words, “Mention the 53 percent, and they’re quick to tell you that they’re of the 47. But of all the people who marched on Washington last month, they may be among the best positioned to reach across that aisle.”

Is it my calling to hang out with conservative white women who voted for Trump?

Would that make an impact in the undercover spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickle and Dimed”?

I don’t know, but it’s a bizarre notion on the verge of an idea.

Truth, Lies, and Democracy

February 10, 2017 by Alison Oatman Leave a Comment

A hand went up in the back of the room. “How can he do that?”
“Who do what?” asked Miss Gates patiently.
“I mean how can Hitler just put a lot of folks in a pen like that, looks like the govamint’d stop him,” said the owner of the hand.
“Hitler is the government,” said Miss Gates, and seizing an opportunity to make education dynamic, she went to the blackboard. She printed DEMOCRACY in large letters. “Democracy,” she said. “Does anybody have a definition?”
“Us,” somebody said.
I raised my hand, remembering an old campaign slogan Atticus had once told me about.
“What do you think it means, Jean Louise?”
“‘Equal rights for all, special privileges for none.'” I quoted.
“Very good, Jean Louise, very good,” Miss Gates smiled. In front of DEMOCRACY, she printed WE ARE A. “Now class, say it all together. ‘We are a democracy.'”
–From “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee

David Frum has a good article in the March issue of The Atlantic called “How to Build an Autocracy.”

This is one of its scarier paragraphs: “Civil unrest will not be a problem for the Trump presidency. It will be a resource. Trump will likely want not to repress it, but to publicize it–and the conservative entertainment-outrage complex will eagerly assist him. Immigration protesters marching with Mexican flags; Black Lives Matter demonstrators bearing antipolice slogans–these are the images of the opposition that Trump will wish his supporters to see. The more offensively the protesters behave, the more pleased Trump will be.”

At the same time, the press will be weakened into nonexistence: “…modern strongmen seek merely to discredit journalism as an institution, by denying that such a thing as independent judgment can exist.”

From quotes Russian-born journalist Masha Gessen: “Lying is the message…It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself.”

The article ends with a (not too specific) warning that we must defend liberty “with an unwearying insistence upon the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them.”

Like the former speechwriter for George W. Bush that he is, From makes his last words dazzle with a “what-can-you-do-for-your-country” pinch in the rear: “What happens next is up to you and me. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.”

What would Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch say? Finch would have said something morally uplifting like this to his precocious daughter Scout–the protagonist of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” What I would pay to be in his soothing company right now.

There are always people on the right side of history. That’s why I’ll be focusing on social novels here. (According to Wikipedia, a social novel is “a work of fiction in which a prevailing social problem, such as gender, race, or class prejudice, is dramatized through its effect on the characters of a novel.”) We are talking about everything from “Hard Times” to “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Native Son”…and pretty much every book Dostoevsky wrote.

I took a long hiatus to prepare for some courses this semester, but I hope there are still a couple of readers out there!

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