So there’s a Bible story that just really chaps my hide.
Vermeer, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, Scottish National Gallery
It’s Luke 10: 38-42.
***
38 Now it came to pass, as they went, that he entered into a certain village: and a certain woman named Martha received him into her house.
39 And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus’ feet, and heard his word.
40 But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.
41 And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things:
42 But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.
***
Many women consider themselves Marys. They sit at the feet of the teacher and discuss needful things.
Many women consider themselves Marthas. They provide the indispensable sustenance for the consideration of needful things.
According to the Gospel of Luke, the Marthas feel resentful of the Marys. But let’s think about who’s telling the story because it sure as hell wasn’t Martha or Mary.
If you asked either one, I bet they’d be pissed off at the men sitting in a circle, feeling the weight of their consequence, pitting the one woman against the other. (Sorry, Jesus, if you’re reading this, but I mean COME ON.)
Today, I sat in a meeting where a significant chunk of volunteer work I’d performed for the last 10+ years was ignored and erased. A Big Thing (sorry, I’m going to be vague here) that was accomplished by hundreds of people working together in concert, collaborating, supporting each other, utilizing each person’s strength and bolstering each person’s confidence, was claimed by a handful of men.
I don’t think any of these men were being purposefully arrogant. I don’t think they meant to erase the work of this broad cross-section of people that had performed this Big Thing. These men also had given huge chunks of time, energy, and dedication to The Big Thing.
But they each claimed The Big Thing was the work of these men around the same table at which I sat. The same table other women who’d also made The Big Thing happen. Those women were unacknowledged as well.
Some of those women were Marys. They sat around the table and talked of needful things.
Some of those women were Marthas. They actually did the things that the others talked about and planned for.
The Big Thing needed the Marys and the Marthas.
And it needed the men, too. The men who talked of needful things and did the needful things.
But the men don’t get to take all of the credit.
While we were doing the Big Thing, I was a Mary and a Martha (nobody’s either/or, after all, except in stories).
And speaking as a Mary and a Martha, I’m saying in my loud voice: I was there. I worked. I planned. I sacrificed.
I want to share some memories about one of the coolest nights of my life, when I met and shared a meal with one of my heroes, Ursula K. Le Guin.
I’m not even going to try to be clever in this post (I usually try too hard at that anyway). I’m surprised by how kind of raw I feel about her passing, and I feel like it would be good to share these stories still sharply etched in my mind and heart.
Ursula K. Le Guin came to our small, poor, rural library with her friend Roger Dorband. They had collaborated on the book Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain, and they were coming to Grants Pass because it was where Roger had grown up.
I was asked to be the facilitator.
I was terrified.
How do you share a stage with a woman whose writing had consumed you, whose stories had taken up residence in your brain and soul?
How do you do it? Easily. Ursula K. Le Guin was kind, and generous, and warm. She was smart, and funny, and passionate. She loved libraries, and she spoke fervently about the magic and wonder of books and learning.
She made sure any children in the audience (clutching their Catwings books) had extra time with her. She asked them questions and whispered to them that Catwings had been her favorite books to write.
She agreed to go to dinner with several of us who volunteered for the library. I got to sit next to her husband, Charles. He asked me about my children and clapped when I told him my oldest daughter played the cello. So did his, he said humbly (not letting on that she is the accomplished cellist Elisabeth Le Guin, professor of musicology at UCLA and a founding member of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the Artaria String Quartet). He told me the story of his daughter arranging to have her whole string quartet fly to Portland to play for them because they didn’t feel well enough to travel on airplanes anymore. I think he teared up a bit.
(He and UKLG lit up when talking about their children. It was a joy to see.)
All this, and then Ursula K. Le Guin pretended to lick my husband.
We, the group at dinner, started talking about book signings, and how in some ways it’s kind of a weird phenomenon. “I’ve just given my readers several thousand words. What’s a couple more?” she said. We all agreed a signature was like a souvenir at the atomic level—a sense that the page had touched the ink that had touched the pen that had touched the hand of the writer. It was incarnate, immediate.
Then my husband grinned and said, “Maybe next time, you should just lick the books.”
It was funny, but oh god. I held my breath. I looked at Ursula K. Le Guin–a Library of Congress “Living Legend” and a recipient of awards from PEN and the American Library Association. Winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. A National Book Award winner. A freaking Pulitzer Prize nominee.
What would she think?
She was roaring with laughter.
When dinner was done and it was time to leave, my husband went to shake her hand. She looked at him with a mischievous smile and gave a quick, lizardy lick to the air.
When I went to shake her hand, she instead wrapped me in a hug.
“OMG,” I shrieked after she left the room, “Ursula K. Le Guin hugged me!” I fangirled for days, weeks. Okay, I’m still fangirling.
And I’m not at all embarrassed by my excitement about that moment. Because I am a fan not just of her piercing, evocative, magical writing, or her ground-breaking, deeply human storytelling, but of her.
May she rest in peace.
***
Edited to add: I forgot about this, but about a year later, as we were gearing up to ask voters to approve a library district (we were operating just on donations and grants–long story), our library director asked her to write a letter to the editor. She did. I was stunned, and still am, that she would take the time and energy to write a letter in support of a smallish library system some 300 miles away. Here it is.
To paraphrase Borges, I hope her paradise is a kind of library.
Hi. Just checking in with you all. It’s been a while.
I wonder if you’re having a rough time, too.
Have you, like me, had a tiny little festering ball of worry in the pit of your stomach since November 8, 2016?
That’s the date we elected this man president of the United States.
. . .
Wow. I didn’t expect that. As I was typing out that last sentence, I started tearing up. It’s been a long few months.
. . .
Anyway, maybe, like me, you’ve put your life on hold a little (or a lot). Maybe you look at your retirement accounts (such as they are) and for a few seconds wonder why you bother since the stock market’s going to crash any day now, probably a few days before the nuclear bombs fall.
No? Am I the only one who thinks like that?
Oh.
I wonder about a dear friend’s daughter, on the cusp of adulthood, excited to go off to college to prepare for a career as an environmental lawyer. I love her enthusiasm and positivity, even as I worry that there will be no more national parks, no old-growth forests, no coral reefs to protect.
I wonder why I write. Why bother? Why make plans for more than a few months out when a megalomaniacal toddler has access to the nuclear codes?
I used to be able to get swept away by things I thought were cool and interesting. The history of science and medicine. Renaissance literature. Libraries.
Now, in Trump’s America, the only things that help me forget that our country is being run by a cadre of kleptocrats and Putin’s “useful idiots” are cat videos and chocolate.
Here you go, reader:
But at my core, like it or not, I’m an optimist.
(I know that history is littered with optimists who said everything was just fine right before the most horrific acts of violence and hate. So please know that I am trying to talk about the good while also keeping watch for the bad.)
We have our families, those beloved souls who, whether or not they are linked to us by genetics, are connected to us at some metaphorically cellular level, the people who hurt when we hurt, laugh when we laugh, cry when we cry. The people who embrace us despite our fears and our faults (and sometimes because of them).
We have our friends, our kindred spirits, the people who spark our inner joy, who embrace us in difficult times. Our tribe, our +1s, the people who open their doors and their hearts to us every day.
We have our communities. This is harder: a lot of times, our communities don’t think like us, feel like us, have the same values or opinions. But for whatever reason—geography, a shared faith, a shared interest—fate has brought us together.
And we still have, for now, the idea of America. A place of equality, of opportunity, of promise. A place where our shared humanity links us together.
Sorry, this is going to be really self-indulgent. I mean, who fills up a blog with their New Year’s resolutions as though anybody cares?
Resolutions:
Stop apologizing for being self-indulgent. Especially about my own blog. (Actually, I should stop apologizing quite so much all around. My friend Teresa pointed it out to me once and I told her I thought I was being kind of charmingly Britishy, like occasionally saying “I reckon” or “that’s rubbish.” But I think she’s right. I reckon it’s probably a way to forestall other people finding fault with me first.)
Fight Trumpism. This is different from fighting Trump himself. The bloviating Cheeto has given birth to his hideous progeny, this loose conglomeration of ideals and values, and now it can exist independently from Trump himself. How do I see Trumpism?
Valuing personal success over the good of the community
Devaluing of constitutional rights
Normalization of vicious stereotypes based on ethnicity, religion, and country of origin
A self-serving and cynical treatment of facts and of truth-telling
Treating women as objects to be viewed, grabbed, used, and cast aside
Horrible syntax
Adulation of the strong, rich, and powerful
Disdain of the weak, poor, and disenfranchised
Kleptocracy
An unhealthy obsession with the size of one’s hands
Exercise.
Exorcise. My inner demons, that is, mostly the twins insecurity and perfectionism.
Write more. Because FFS, how can I call myself a writer if I don’t write? No more namby-pamby excuses. What I produce may be garbage, but it will be MY garbage.
Refuse to allow anybody else to tell me to worry about Thing A instead of Thing B. I am perfectly capable of worrying about climate change and petulant PEOTUS tweets and Hamilton and SNL and fascism and whether the cashier at the grocery store thought my jokes were weird. When it comes to worrying, I contain multitudes.
Worry less.
Eat more vegetables. Ancillary to this: stop counting No-High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup Strawberry-Banana V-8 (“contains one whole serving of vegetables!”) as a serving of vegetables.
Get a thicker skin.
But not so thick I become hidebound or insensitive.
Be a better wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend. (If you’re reading this, you’re probably one of these. Let me know how I can do better, ‘kay?)
Be better at asking for forgiveness when I can’t do or be any of the above (like, pretty much always). That includes forgiving myself.
Love to all of you, and I hope you have a joyful, fulfilling, peaceful, and prosperous 2017!
There are those who think it was disrespectful for the cast to call out a member of the audience. “You go to the theater to be entertained,” those folks say, “not to have politics shoved down your throat!”
If that’s your take, you might want to stop reading now. You’re not going to like what I have to say.
There are others who will argue that by focusing so much on this Hamilton controversy, I’m falling into Trump’s trap of redirecting attention from his other scandals, especially the news, announced the same day, of the $25 million fraud settlement in the Trump U case.
Those folks have a point: we need to pay attention to as many of Trump’s misdeeds as we can. But this critique implies the theater is somehow not a part of the larger political world, that it is a distraction from “the real world.” I couldn’t disagree more. Theater is a distillation, not a distraction.
I can worry about all of this and still have thoughts about what happened at Hamilton. As I tweeted on Saturday, when it comes to worrying (paraphrasing Whitman) “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Okay, now that all that is out of the way….
I have always thought that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is like a first cousin to Shakespeare’s Henriad (which comprises Richard II, Henry IV, Part I; Henry IV, Part 2; and Henry V). Like Richard II, Hamilton depicts the overthrow of a king. Like Henry IV, Part I, Hamilton addresses the aftermath of that overthrow and subsequent internecine conflicts. Like Henry IV, Part 2, Hamilton embraces the place of the tavern and the commons.
But most of all, Hamilton reminds me of Henry V with its looming questions of succession and its grappling with ideas of nationhood, national identity, and pluralism, the political role of the center and the periphery. Where Henry V expands the definition of “Englishness” with its inclusion of Welsh, Scottish, and Irish soldiers, Hamilton defends an inclusive and expansive meaning of “Americanness”–insisting on the fulfillment of the promise of equality–by casting people of color in main roles.
But with the aftermath of the performance on November 18th, these days Hamilton is reminding me most of Richard II in the way the play has adapted to and entwined with contemporary political crises.
The staging of Richard II has a history of being famously controversial. By depicting the deposing of a king (in very immediate and symbolic ways), the play skates perilously close to treason. Elizabeth I has long (if erroneously) been reported to have said, “I am Richard II know you not that?” And supporters of the Earl of Essex paid the Chamberlain’s Men to perform Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion.
Richard II may or may not have been written with these intentions in mind. Art is funny like that—it morphs and mutates, takes on a life of its own.
Similarly, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton was written before Trump’s election, but the social and political ideas running through it have unintended connotations and consequences.
The first occurred in this famous exchange between Lafayette and Hamilton in “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down)”:
COMPANY:
The battle of Yorktown. 1781
LAFAYETTE:
Monsieur Hamilton
HAMILTON:
Monsieur Lafayette
LAFAYETTE:
In command where you belong
HAMILTON:
How you say, no sweat
We’re finally on the field. We’ve had quite a run
LAFAYETTE:
Immigrants:
HAMILTON/LAFAYETTE:
We get the job done
That line (“Immigrants/We get the job done”) caused the audience to erupt in cheers. Small wonder when Trump has been declaring that he will deport immigrants, build walls, and deny Muslims entry into the country based on an unconstitutional religious test.
The other big moment of the night, though, shows how Hamilton has adapted to current political crisis: King George singing “What Comes Next.” According to this account of the performance in Fortune,
“The audience members weren’t the only ones reacting to Pence’s presence. King George III, played by Rory O’Malley, reportedly sang portions of “What Comes Next?” directly at Pence and had to pause the song for a standing ovation after he sang the words, “When your people say they hate you.”
My view: Trump’s response had little to do with any concern for Pence. Rather, Trump took the audience’s reaction as a personal insult. I don’t know whether Trump has seen Hamilton or read the lyrics or heard the music. But I can imagine Trump seeing himself in the portrayal of King George: rich beyond the imagination of the people he represents; unwilling to listen to criticism; petulant, childish, and out of his depth.
So far Trump has only claimed to be King of Debt, but he is not far from some Trumpish version of “I am King George III know you not that?”
The AP just announced that Donald Trump will be President of the United States.
The man who has declared that America’s top priority will be walling ourselves off from our neighbors and who thinks climate change is a hoax. The man who wants religion to be a litmus test for citizenship. The man who helps himself to women’s bodies even when they object.
The man who has done nothing for America will now be its leader.
And that fact is making me feel small and sad and helpless.
I don’t know what to say to my teenage daughters to make them feel better. “Work hard and you’ll succeed”? “This is the land of opportunity”? This election has shown those to be feel-good lies. Hillary Clinton worked hard and was one of the most qualified candidates in American history. And yet her 30 years of public service meant nothing when faced with a man with no political experience, no policy expertise, and no concern for America’s position in the world.
I keep wondering what tomorrow will look like. For me, on the surface, it will be much the same. I am a privileged, white, heterosexual woman: sadly, these things make me safer than other Americans. My fears are not immediate like those of my loved ones, my dear friends and family, who must worry about their fellow citizens, emboldened by a Trump victory to act on their racism, homophobia, and transphobia.
What can I do? What can any of us do?
I have no idea. I don’t know what it will look like to push back against xenophobia and fear and small-mindedness.
For now, this is what feels radical and revolutionary: to be good, kind, and loving. To be logical and reasonable. To open my home and my heart with courage and love. To talk and, more importantly, to listen.
And to do this, I’ll need your help, friends. We’ll need to protect each other from harm and love each other through times of misery and pain. We’ll need to celebrate our joys and laugh with each other.
We’ll need a radical and transformative love that will save us from ourselves.
One of the best things about being an independent scholar (whatever that term means) is that my enthusiasms are no longer policed by the academy.
Note: Which is not to say that academics are unenthusiastic about their topics. It’s a truism that academics have a proprietary relationship–well, really, they fall in love with–the subjects of their research. One need only go to an academic conference and watch people unabashedly nerding out about Chaucer or planetary rovers or chaos theory to know that’s true.
No, this is all a very long way of talking about how I saw some of John Dee’s books—and the doodles, notes, and marginalia within—and am unconstrained in saying that it was pretty freaking magical.
Portrait of John Dee. Sixteenth Century, artist unknown. Original in Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.
***
The circumstances that led up to my sitting in the reading room of the Royal College of Physicians, quietly waiting to pay my respects to Dee’s books, were a perfect example of the kind of generosity of spirit and collegiality among many academics on Twitter. I had heard that the Royal College of Physicians would be doing an exhibit on John Dee, the 16th-century magus and mathematician who is widely thought to be the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero (Scholar, courtier, magician: The lost library of John Dee). Unfortunately for me, the exhibit was ending in late July, and I wouldn’t be in England until late August. I was sure I would miss this chance of a lifetime. I bemoaned my luck on Twitter, tweeting out “Oh, to be in England, while John Dee is there…”
Within a day I was thrilled to have a response from R. Satterley (@rsatterley), tagging the curator of the exhibit, Katie Birkwood. Katie generously offered to show me some of the highlights of the exhibit when I was in London, a month after the official end of the show. Katie spent almost an hour with me, and we talked about a wide and fascinating array of topics: how the books were stolen from Dee’s library and found their way to the Royal College of Physicians; Dee’s wife, Jane Dee, and what her life might have been like (in a word–odd); and Dee’s mathematical interests and drive to codify and record everything from the weather to his wife’s menstrual periods. Katie was so very kind and immensely knowledgeable. Thanks, Katie! <waves>
The first thing Katie showed me was, she said, one of her favorite parts of the exhibition: a doodle Dee had drawn (probably in 1545 when he was a student at Cambridge, as Katie notes in the video below starting around 2:40). It was found in a compendium of Cicero’s work’s, tucked in a corner by a poem about the “foaming, frothing seas.” The drawing is of a ship that seems almost to glide off the page, the perspective foreshortened in such a way that it floats toward the viewer. I had viewed the digitized image before my trip, but seeing it in person had a much more visceral effect. I was embarrassed to say this to Katie, fearing it would be too fanciful, but it reminded me very much of the scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis, in which Eustace, Lucy, and Edmund stare at a painting of a ship rolling on the sea, staring gape-mouthed as it materializes in front of them until they are drawn into the cold, salty ocean.
That idea—of a picture, a doodle, a painting that manifests itself in person, that jumps the dimension between concept and object, the materiality of that idea—captured my imagination. I started thinking about the differences in seeing a picture of an object and the object itself. Why did it seem different, somehow, to experience these books in person rather than to view them on my computer, 7,000 miles away? Do we know, at some deep, molecular level, that we are in the presence of the thing itself? Does that materiality connect us more intimately than an image separated by distance and time? Is it all in our imagination, and if so, is that any less real?
I’m reminded of one of the best stories I’ll ever be able to tell in my life.
Five years ago, the magnificent Ursula K. Le Guin came to my local library with photographer Roger Dorband to talk about their book Out Here: Poems and Images from Steens Mountain Country. At dinner after the presentation, the table talk drifted to how, let’s be honest, there’s something a little weird about wanting an author’s signature on a book. As Le Guin put it (paraphrasing here), “I’m happy to do it, of course, but I do think sometimes, ‘I’ve just given you my words—thousands of them!’” We talked about how the signature seemed like a material proof of connection, of experience. My husband nodded sagely and said, “Hmmm, maybe you could just lick the book instead?” (For the record: Le Guin laughed and laughed, and when it came time to leave, she gave my husband a little pretend air lick.)
It was all great fun, but really, I think there’s something there.
At the risk of sounding as esoteric as Dee, I think books and writing retain some residue of the people they’ve encountered. “Books speak to us,” we say, and sometimes I wonder if we’re being strictly metaphorical. Why else do we run our fingers over their spines, trace the lettering on their backs and covers, flip through pages as though visiting an old friend? There’s something profound about the physical manifestation of our most cherished ideas, thoughts, experiments, and emotions made solid and shared, a way for people to connect across time and space through the simple touch of a pen to paper.
Or you know what? Maybe this is just a flight of fancy of my own. Maybe this deep sense of connection we feel when seeing somebody’s actual writing, or doodling, or jotting of notes, the joy and connection people find when an author has signed their book, is all in our imaginations. But I ask you: If so, does that make it any less magical?
