6 posts tagged “texas”

Sunday, I ran a 10K trail race called "The Maze." It winds through the Walnut Creek trail system in Austin, TX, which looks like this:

The course is a labrynth, virtually unnavigable without a guide or directional flags at every branch in the trail. It's full of tight switchbacks, sharp climbs, loose rocks, and tree roots ready to trip you at every turn. Three creek crossings make sure you get your feet good and wet.

Flying over rocks, tripping up sharp inclines, splashing through streams, planting my foot and darting around a sharp corner, swinging on a tree trunk. I can't explain why running such difficult terrain feels so exhilarating to me, in spite of pain and exhaustion and breathlessness. Or why I'm immensely proud that I finished 12th out of 99 women in the race. Or why I feel like Iron Woman today.

But I do. 

I am Iron Woman.

I have been reading, slowly, Matt Brown's excellent work on the devotional reading practices of early New Englanders, The Pilgrim and the Bee. Mostly for my scholarly work. But his chapter on ritual fasting practices resonates with me at a more personal level.

Fasting rituals needed to be followed carefully, but could also turn into a kind of "theater"--insincere in its motivation, and focused on bodily display. So Jesus admonished fasters to engage in a kind of reverse theatricality by pretending that they were not fasting: "hypocrites . .. disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast. . . . But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly" (Matt. 6.16-18).

You can imagine the contortions which all of this produces: follow correct ritual when performing humility, but be constantly anxious, and try to make sure that you don't feel good about following correct ritual. Because perhaps you are only pretending to feel humiliation. You shouldn't feel good about how good you are at being humble. In fact, you should pretend to be not humble while in reality being inwardly humble. That way you can avoid taking any credit for your humility . . .

Brown continues to probe this wound: "Inner abjection is always suspect, with an overriding sense of the 'almost' or a thorough troubling of the 'sincere.' " (125-26). As if it weren't enough to be abject, abjection must be thoroughly troubled.

What would it look like if you were successfully abject? Something like this, (and this quotation is from a bestelling conduct book of the period, Henry Scudder's The Christians Daily Walke, 1635):

"The soule is then humbled, the heart rent, and truly afflicted, when a man is become vile in his owne eyes, through conscience of his owne unworthinesse, and when his heart is full of compunction and anguish, through feare of Gods displeasure, & with godly sorrow and holy shame in himselfe, and anger gainst himselfe for sinne. These afflictions stirred doe much afflict the heart."

 
All of that sounds pretty messed up, I realize. When I teach Puritan theology, students are horrified. But these ideas are not relics from the past; they remain alive and are intimately familiar to me from my years of trying to be a "good" but "humble" Christian. What is the appropriate subjectivity of a Christian? How should you feel about yourself, how should you view yourself, how can you constantly correct your natural inclinations to instead "cloathe yourself with humility"?

As a wiser, older adult, I've decided that these are impossible questions to answer. In fact, the contortions of humility can deform your personality. I let go the abjection before the contortions stuck. But I went through that ringer, and so did many of the people I grew up with. A kid preacher from my school gave the baccalaureate service address before I graduated from high school; it was all about Jesus's gory wounds on the cross, and how we killed him, and how we need to feel our unworthiness for his blood. It was a rousing way to gear us up for commencement.

I'm not sure how all this Puritanical humility fits into being a Texan. But boy haddy, I tell you whut. It's part of the warp of the place, and you can bet your britches on that.

Note: The artwork above was created by Jay Morales, a colorblind artist. Read about him here.

"Native Texan" bumper stickers seem to be spreading around Austin.  Texas Monthly magazine tries to reflect positively on the topic here. Texans' pride in their state is so well-known, and so overblown, as to seem harmless: a regional joke. But in the current social and political climate, nativist claims still seem insidious to me, sneaking around under the guise of "pride" in local culture, a subtle expression of "Auslander Raus!"

Or am I just being humorless?

Somewhere, scattered across collectors' cabinets and musty antique shops, are exactly all of my grandparents' things.

In 1994, when my dad's father died of Alzheimer's, the family faced sorting through Grandpa's Missouri house. Sortings like this are an ordinary part of death. Less ordinary was the fact that Grandpa's house had become a kind of museum over the years. A one-house ghost town.

After Grandma Helen died in 1975, Grandpa went on living in his old Sedalia house just as he always had: leaving all the housework to a woman who no longer lived. He didn't dust. He didn't sweep. He left some styrofoam cups from Sonic stacked in the hutch alongside pieces of china, squeezed between canned goods, all from 1975 or earlier. On one wall was pinned a long, rectangular 1974 cloth calendar from a local business; it hung there every year of my life. By 1994 all the dishes and spoons featured lacework patterns of cracks and grooves. Grandpa never installed plumbing in the kitchen, and he never replaced the curtains that hung instead of kitchen cabinets. The cheap mattresses in the metal bedframes were the same as those that my dad and aunt had slept in as children. By the time I began sleeping in those beds in the 70s, they were already deeply concave from the weight of years of bodies, cavities that grew a little deeper on our semiannual visits. The dresser mirror was so clouded with age that it reflected only mottled blobs. A cheap commercial picture of an anonymous baby, caked with the dust of decades, still hung on the wall. My brother and I played with my dad and aunt's toys, still scattered around the house: wooden milk truck on wheels, metal pop gun, a cracked-face doll.

I had nightmares in that house. Apparently, so had my dad and aunt. My grandparents were not altogether nice people, and my grandmother, in particular, had been mentally ill for years before she died.

When they faced the task of sorting through this stuff, almost all of which dated directly back to their own painful childhoods, my father and aunt balked. And then, they stumbled upon a way out. A buyer for the house approached them, but he only wanted the house if he could have all of its contents, too. All, or nothing. My mother was the only one who harbored any sentiments for the dead (she was not related by blood); she asked if she could take the old treadle sewing machine. "No."  My aunt, who had been tormented in that house, only wanted the brand new phone, a recent purchase for grandpa, and asked to take it. Surely it would have no value for the collector. "No."  He would only buy the house -- the house without kitchen plumbing, with minimal insulation, with only four creaky rooms but full of "original condition" 50s and 60s-era stuff-- if he could have it ALL.

So, they sold it.  Without hesitation and without looking back.

In Where I Was From, Joan Didion explores the tendency in Californian history to "jettison weight"; "keep moving" -- to, among other habits, consign vast populations to insane asylums and prisons rather than to care for them or confront them. She presents this as a trait endemic in Californian history, but perhaps more fundamentally of western migration. Perhaps she's right. Like my grandpa (who jettisoned his own family history), and my father (who sold his as a package deal), that is my own story, too. . . . . And it may be the story of Amarillo, as well--a town that celebrates its  ranching history but has sold itself for a stockpile of plutonium.

NPR reported today on the research of an obscure Harvard Ph.D. student in the history of science, Alex Wellerstein. Wellerstein has uncovered an archive of patents filed during the Manhattan Project's race to design an atomic bomb. Click here for the report. The image at right is taken from Wellerstein's site.

It boggles the mind to imagine physicists and engineers working all day to design the most destructive weapon the earth had ever seen, and then at night, filing patents to protect their intellectual property rights. But it shouldn't -- at least it shouldn't boggle mine. What is perhaps far stranger is how the nuclear weapons industry has become just another workaday job for so many scientists. I know one of these scientists well, and he tests nuclear warheads by day, then serves as a church president all weekend. Topics of the Week: Sunday - mercy and grace; Monday -  precision-guided mass destruction.

Today is also the 29th anniversary of the Three-Mile Island meltdown.

You are wondering what the atomic bomb has to do with Texas. But that's another day's story.

Because one of my writing projects is about Texas, I hope I can excuse myself for posting this delicious article
about Bayou Bob selling a "snake vodka". If rattlers can kill us, why can't they save our eyesight and improve our sexual potency?