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The last time I wrote a SCHMO piece was in 1971. The title was MOVEMENT SCHMOOVEMENT and it was published as a letter to a west coast penpal called Snowshoe. I think her real name was Karen. I wonder if she is alive. Along with other women of newly minted names such as Lake Circumspect, or Raindance and Orange. The latter two were a couple living out west also. I knew them only briefly, after corresponding with them long enough to agree to harbor them at the house I owned and inhabited in the wilds of southwestern Massachusetts until they went somewhere else. Agreements then could be strikingly lacking in particulars—those of my own at least. When Raindance and Orange arrived at my house with what looked like their entire belongings, which were arrayed and piled high throughout my sunporch—a long narrow room lined with windows and running parallel to my living room and an extra room and a hallway—I sent them packing in short order, for reasons long forgotten. It wasn’t that I had some other use for the sunporch. I didn’t. The windows just looked nice from outside the house.
Over my forgetfulness regarding the outcome of Raindance and her friend, I am not too concerned. Lately however I am bothered by a total failure to remember how I got from my grandmother’s house, aged five to eleven, to P.S. 94 in Little Neck Long Island. Moreover, how I got home when school let out. There were no buses, and buses or cars were unnecessary since the school was not more than a half mile away. That was however quite a few blocks distant for a child. And at that time there was a protracted kidnap scare over the Lindbergh baby or the Vanderbilt scandal, maybe both. Now it would take a lifetime to dig up a neighbor who still lives and who could fill in this inexplicable gap for me. Straight-politically speaking, I do remember that FDR was our entity called the president, and that my grandmother loved Herbert Hoover and she had a Hoover vacuum machine, both connected in my mind somehow. I think memory loss, short-term or any other term, is overrated. As an example, at every age I can remember, I have been able to leave a room and head for another room with a precise idea of what I want there, then upon arrival stand in its middle nonplussed over what that was. I haven’t got a streamlined mind. In between a thought and its deliverance, I tend to have a thousand other thoughts, obliterating the original important or pragmatic one. If I stand there long enough trying to remember what that was, it may come to me. If not, I move on to the next hopeful sequence. MOVEMENT SCHMOOVEMENT had sequence of another order, and my memory was all too short then. And there was hardly any tomorrow, like an adjacent room to head for. I was stuck in one room, with no way out but my newspaper column. I called the “room” a SCHMO because I wasn’t having fun there. A leading quote in the column was, “Anyway for sure if you’re having fun you’re not having a movement…” Apparently I had been at a meeting where I threw crackers at the leader. Other features of the incident are not identified. I left them out then, and can’t remember them now—a memory loss of some normal variety, i.e. a blackout of surrounding assumed unpleasantness. I recall every detail of my grandmother’s house, so I know it was an environment of happiness and security. Of P.S. 94, my recollection is quite sketchy, and the remains of that incompleteness are in the category of problematic. My third grade teacher Mrs. Clark who was quite old would sit on her desk and sew her slip. My sixth grade teacher Miss Holmes is planted in my mind like a statue, standing next to our classroom door with her arms folded tightly across her upper chest and her face screwed into Gorgonian. The door was on her left; the blackboard just to her right was cratered and fractured from rages she had, using the door as a lethal weapon. Since I also remember the boys in the class throwing erasers and chalk around, I can link her and them theoretically. A photo of myself at age eight is how I imagine I looked perennially at that time, even in Miss Holmes’s class, where I learned that when I wrote, my pencil eraser was pointed wrongly at the blackboard instead of my ear, i.e. I was left-handed, and wrote upside down. In memory, I was the picture of myself in this photo: ever calm and serene.
My report cards—lovingly glued in a scrapbook by my mother—seemed to say so, with their deportment grades unfailingly A plus.—By 1971, this child was unrecognizable. She was a reluctant revolutionary, throwing crackers at people, saying very wild things, and always trying to run away. Her getup was far from the jumpers and starched white shirts, white socks and polished brown shoes, of P.S. 94. She was wearing a different uniform: workboots, often untied, faded torn jeans, studded bleached denim jackets with ornamental patches du jour. One read, “Crusader,” another, “Vox Clamantis in Deserto.”
She moved from the city to her sunporch house in southwestern Massachusetts, across from a crick river, not another dwelling in sight, seven miles from the nearest town. She still existed, this nice quiet girl, but the world was paying her to be anything but. She left her preemptive retirement in Massachusetts frequently to fly around and go on the road being “anything but.” When she got home to her tranquil environment, she would write up her adventures. The best or most ambitious piece was probably Great Expectorations, with the surely unprecedented length for a
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newspaper of 8000 words, all one paragraph and lower case. So
where was her grandmother’s charge anyway? Or, who are we really? Or,
what becomes of us and why? Ingrid tells me she feels lost in America,
and she never said that before. The POLITICO of my title, Barack Obama,
might by now feel that way too. I never adopted a “politico” before.
Except JFK in 1960, but only because he and his wife looked so good,
and gave even artists and writers a lift. I never educated myself to
policies. The
word was not in my vocabulary. And later on as a revolutionary, I had
only one such guiding principle, which was to end patriarchy (source of
all policies, after all), an overarching entity so vastly assumed that
nobody seemed to know what it was, not even or especially those
frontpage feminists in a direct line from de Beauvoir and Friedan. Now,
like Oprah if for different reasons, I’m a traitor to women, a fierce
advocate of a man for president. So all the women I know are this kind of traitor, whether before or after Hillary was subdued I don’t know. And I have no idea what my fellow revolutionaries are because I don’t know them any more, and some may be dead. Altogether, I am better educated now. In the “policy” sweepstakes, I understand a single word very well and that is DEREGULATION. When GWB was elected the second time, I focused on that word in his arsenal of domestic terror, and knew bad times were ahead. I wonder by the way who Maria Shriver is for. I’m aware from seeing her briefly on Oprah that with Arnie she has a new life. I doubt she mentioned Obama, whom she must secretly be for. Or not so secretly, considering her tears for her Uncle Ted’s brave appearance at the Dem Convention speaking for our Hawaiian/ Kansan/ Kenyan/ Indonesian/ Bostonian/ Chicagoan/ Christian candidate. I have to say Maria on Oprah reminded me of my sixth grade teacher Miss Holmes, despite her protestations of having arrived at a personal peacefulness. Her hair was Medusan, her angular Kennedy features set somehow in granite, her strident voice more familiar than ever. She said she never dreamed Arnie would run for governor, and that due to a conflict of interests, she had to quit her job as a journalist, thus no longer knowing who she was! Now she has at last found herself again, this time as “a loving compassionate person, someone who hugs her 86 year old mother all the time.” I’m glad to hear that, as who cannot be, but her hair was awfully wild-looking. I believe she’s livid at giving up her career for being Arnold’s first lady. I mean she was good. I’m thinking all she needs is a door at right angles to a blackboard. The more I think of P.S. 94, the more I begin to suspect that something bad enough happened at the school to make me forget how I got there for six years. Possibly I played Rustles of Spring on piano—a piece I was practiced at—on stage in the assembly hall during a student recital, and forgot some or all of the notes. I can conjure this up. A week ago I had a nightmare in which I had the lead role in a Broadway play, as what I don’t know. But the play was about to open, and I had not the slightest idea what my lines were. The director, savage and enraged, his face a conflagration of tortured reds, his body bent into a scythe, was chasing me down aisles and lobbies, out into streets and fields and beyond, about to rape and/or kill me—when I woke up. I described the dream to Winnie, who thought she knew the identity of my bogeyman “director.” She dreams lucidly, an aptitude I wish devoutly to have. Sandra says she has frequent dreams about me. In one, she was telling her long-dead grandfather that I had cooked macaroni and given it to the Rolling Stones. And her grandfather said to her are you telling me that Jill Johnston cooked macaroni and gave it to the Rolling Stones? —I never met an R.S., and I can’t cook anything, much less macaroni. But the dream sounded cool. Dreams infuse all our waking lives. Our lives are no doubt nothing but dreams. “I have a dream” that Obama will win, but just squeak through. SCHMOLITICO surrounds him, and out of two hundred and eighty million plus people in the population, only 12 percent according to Danny are intelligent, a high estimate in my opinion. I’m an elitist through and through. And have no great reason to be. After acquiring two meaningless degrees, I became an autodidact. As such, I have special powers, e.g. to be able to identify a SCHMOLITICAL misinterpretation of an incident. The incident has been repeated so often; it’s close to folk lore. The paper was listing Obama’s failings, including his “discursive answers to questions on loaded topics like abortion” (not “humorous,” “earthy,” or “anecdotal” enough), when “the incident” came into play. At a debate with Hillary, “After she was asked why some people found her less likable than some of her rivals, she adopted a hurt tone and said of Mr. Obama, ‘He’s very likable, I agree with that. But I don’t think I’m that bad.’” Upon which, as lore has it, Obama “looked at her and said coldly, ‘You’re likable enough.’” That isn’t what happened at all. He said “Hillary” at the end of the remark. And he didn’t look at her. And he was far from “cold.” In context, he was appropriate. He turned his head slightly in her direction, looking down, and dropped the remark as a complimentary aside, a nuanced irony, hardly meant even to be heard. Autodidacts are cleverly attuned to nuance. If Obama, Zeus forbid, does lose, I’m getting much further away than I did while trying to escape the revolution. In my SCHMOOVEMENT column, I asserted loftily, “I refuse to go anyplace where my name might be added to the casualty list they call a movement.” I saw myself self-sacrificially “being swallowed by a boa constrictor.” And nineteen seventy-one was so early, considering I gave this exercise in ditching the patriarchy (we actually thought it was going to be over soon) another good four years; and that it isn’t over yet, owing to the fact that I’m found out wherever I go. I could change my name, but that is one thing I really like about myself. Snowshoe and Lake Circumspect, even Raindance and Orange, were precious noms de politique to me, but also somewhat “other.” I never capitulated to that which compromised my writing (and writing was my name); only entertained it as a subject. My latest on England’s Child—widely thought to be a dissertation on bells—is that “the book is a paternity suit with a commentary on patriarchy which makes such a ‘suit’ necessary.” Artists and writers, especially those illegally born, have a one-sided interest in politics. The POLITICOS, including the one we love, don’t care about us. Stood up against other groups in size or numbers and value to their voting machines, we’re a sandbox ghetto. So although I’m dying to have a fatherless elitist with wonderful rhetoric and a funny name as president, all I really want is to see the gummint de-deregulate itself, and bring back the FDR days. It might help me remember how I got to P.S. 94 from my grandmother’s house and back again. The season is changing; I have to remember there are four of them. The phone rings, the screen reads UNKNOWN NAME, a voice says, “Don’t be alarmed.” Good message. I hang up immediately, not wishing to hear another word. Then record one thing to laugh about in the news. Comedian Joy Behar says she doesn’t stand to gain in her career if Obama wins. “He’s not that funny. McCain/Palin—they’re a riot.” |
