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lligkv · 2 years ago

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the admission of complicity; the extension of grace

Are there principled contrarians worth respecting? Ones who don't make a fetish of their contrarianism—make it into a compulsion in which they take special pleasure? Or is “principled contrarian” a contradiction in terms? If your tendency to buck the trend is at the point where people give it a label, you might already be making it a fetish.

I was thinking about this question as I read Jessa Crispin's book My Three Dads: Patriarchy on the Great Plains, an account of her return to her native Kansas to grapple with various ghosts there. Some of the ghosts are emotional or spiritual: memories of growing up the odd one out in an evangelical family shrouded in misogyny; the specter of a childhood teacher whose support of her interests and intelligence gave Crispin great comfort—and who later killed his entire family in a murder-suicide; the legacy of the patriarchy that Crispin feels drove both her teacher's and her family's behavior. And some of the ghosts are literal; the book opens with an account of her experience in a house with the ghost of a man named Charlie, who seems to both feel affection for her and want to control her. Ultimately, “contrarian” might be a bit strong to describe Crispin—but pieces of hers I've read, most notably on the heels of her book Why I Am Not a Feminist, gave me a sense she prides herself on a perceived willingness to say things no one else will say, and sometimes speaks as though she's the only one who's ever had a certain thought. Parts of this book did too.

Generally she writes from a place of radical individualism relative to a neoliberal culture that, while putatively individualist, often encourages conformity via all the means you’d expect: foreclosing more and more access to affordable housing, welfare, healthcare, and free time and thus all possibilities for life besides the possibility of eking out a living in an increasingly precarious market. She encourages the practice of eclectic, individual gnosticism over fidelity to organized religion, for instance, and the practice of a kind of cosmopolitanism that accepts a multiplicity of ways of living and being without collapsing into liberal bromides. Broadly, I can forgive the stance. The experience of being alive in a Western country now is basically the experience of being let down by every institution you know and cast adrift in a sea of bad-faith actors jockeying for your allegiance—and next to that, an urge to cultivate trust in yourself and in what you know to be true seems natural and necessary. But the voice Crispin assumes in elaborating her position is often so hectoring, aggressive, or snide.

Early on, as Crispin talks about the Rosenstrasse protests in Berlin in 1943—when a group of two hundred Aryan women staged a protest outside the building where their Jewish husbands were being held for the camps, demanding their return—she adds,

It's heartwarming, isn't it? To think of women putting their lives on the line to save the men they love. It's a good story, but I always want to interfere with a good story, get in its way, break its narrative spine.

In this case, the interference in the story is merited: Crispin notes how many men chose to divorce their Jewish wives rather than protest as the Rosenstrasse women did, and how few people protested on behalf of Jewish people who were not their spouses, not related to them by the mechanics of the family, which reflect darker, harsher realities of history and human nature we can’t afford to elide. But from the opening question, with the turn it forecasts and the way it judges sentiment that it assumes the reader will feel, to the way Crispin casts herself as the one who’ll break the story’s spine...

Reading so many passages like this one, I was reminded of a line from Andrea Long Chu’s review of Maggie Nelson’s book On Freedom—the idea of “position[ing] the subtlety of one's own views against the crudeness of those who do not share them.” It also reminded me of the parts of Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour that most rankled me, the ones on the “fixers” whom Heti alleges flatten reality’s complexities and thus obscure truth. Which makes me think there's a Gen X angle to all this too. And it makes me think, can we stop publishing these books in which white women of a certain age and artistic background tell us how to feel by hectoring us? Advertising how much better they are?

I don't mean to make that the sum total of my judgment of My Three Dads. It's an honest enough examination of a world in which I too live; many of the thoughts Crispin has are ones I've had, even the uncharitable ones. She has a gift for storytelling; her account of arriving in Lincoln, Kansas as a child, and getting to know Mr. Pianalto, the teacher who’ll later kill himself and his family, is riveting. There are many moments of interest, complexity, and beauty in the book.

I appreciated the distinctions that were made—say, between what Crispin calls community and society. The former, she argues, is premised simply on affiliation and implies or even requires homogeneity; the latter works on a shared sense of obligation toward others and responsibility for each other that serves to preserve room for difference. (Though she doesn’t say what creates this sense of obligation or keeps it going.) And I appreciated Crispin’s insight into why so many putatively liberatory communities, like Womantown, a separatist refuge for lesbians in 1980s Kansas City, come to fall victim to their own oppressions (in the case of Womantown, racism)—a desire on the parts of those who’ve been wounded for protection, the easiest means for which is to exert control—as well as the solution she proposes: that we all learn to gain the “internal organization” of true individuation; the ability to see and know our own selves clearly, to be able to acknowledge our own pain so we can learn to see ourselves and others as whole beings—and, crucially, acknowledge the pain of others. I also appreciated the discussion of the Dutch beguinage, which allowed women in twelfth-century Amsterdam to escape marriage while preserving the interdependent fabric of truly nurturing life—as opposed to the independence that Crispin has won through capitalist means now, which can be so isolating—and her subsequent argument about the potential for family and society both to be structures of care rather than mere setting for the performance of roles or the exchange of money.

I appreciate all these discussions because in them, Crispin is working toward elucidating something, not just advertising her own unique intelligence or insight.

It was also interesting to read Crispin’s discussion of John Brown and the way Kansans simplify his complicated legacy to better be able to sanitize their own conservatism in the present with an antislavery past. But the parallel drawn between Brown and Scott Roeder—the antiabortion activist who bombed the clinic of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009, killing him—as men who, being “disappointing” in ordinary life, as workers and fathers, used politics to compensate for that disappointment—feels perhaps too provocative. The two worked toward radically different aims; do those aims not matter? And the savage verdict Crispin delivers on all revolutionary violence feels like claiming moral superiority at the expense of a full spectrum of action. On principle I can agree that, as she puts it, “there should always be institutions that allow people to both see the evil of the system and their participation in it, and then they should be helped to take responsibility”—but anyone alive now or ever can see how rarely such institutions really emerge. I don’t mean to write as though this question is simple, or without stakes, or as though I have engaged or will engage with revolutionary violence in any way beyond the theoretical. But—if you're not willing to entertain the possibility of revolutionary violence against an oppressive system, what might you do to change it when it doesn’t respond to democratic means?

More valuable, to my mind, because it's more sensitively done, is Crispin’s discussion of the human damage that can be wrought by fanaticism, and the way that a violent liberatory cause that fails—as with the Provisional IRA’s attempt to see a free, united, socialist Ireland—renders the violence purposeless: “The act of killing no longer had its original meaning, and those deaths could no longer be disregarded as a terrible necessity. The ends didn't come, so they were stuck with the means, and not all of them could bear it.” That’s what I want discussed in considerations of revolutionary violence. A clear-eyed assessment of the arguments for it and the costs of it, knowing we live in a world where it's possible, that some cases of it may be justified in ways others are not, and that its undertaking has material and moral consequences.

I also appreciated Crispin’s discussion of the counterculture, whose loss she laments. It's a space of collectivity and experimentation—and it’s not necessarily meant to create something new and durable. Rather, it’s a place for people to land when they realize society is in many ways sick, and from there attempt to do new things—some of which are meant to be coopted; some of which are meant to fail.

Crispin goes on to argue today’s left has abandoned such space in favor of criticizing culture, rather than building it. It’s a hackneyed critique as she makes it—she never defines the wokeness she seems to rail against, nor talks about the neoliberal market and government as uniquely powerful agents for coopting what counterculture might try to make and withdrawing the material resources they might use to make it—but it’s not without its core of truth. Especially against her point that the right, broadly, moves to appease grievance—against neoliberalism, against consumerist culture, against the sense of enervation in society that results—in the assertion of social control through law and order, in the reassertion of Judeo-Christian morals as a source of meaning, and at the extreme, in allegiance to fundamentalist or White nationalist futures.

Finally, Crispin’s account of resolving her struggle with faith in gnosticism is also beautiful—particularly the endpoint she reaches, asserting that the seeking of truth is the point of life, rather than a means by which to get to the Protestant end of salvation, as she has been told since she was a child. At the start of the book, Crispin describes a love ritual she seeks from a witch she knows, Katelan, to break herself of a pattern of involvement with married men—one that she realizes comes from experience of an abusive relationship. (It’s one of the book's most electric insights: “Once you've been knocked around a bit, or screamed at and humiliated in public places, or stalked, or trapped in a car with someone who isn't sure whether he should be pointing the gun at himself or at you, the full attention of a man in love can seem too dangerous. Better to deflect it a bit, get another body in there to hide behind at times…”) The pair mix flowers and herbs, write on a piece of paper the kind of man Crispin wants, burn the paper and a little wedding candle of a couple in effigy, and summon the spirits; they look to the shapes that form in the wax to see what the relationship will be like. Later, as Crispin leaves Katelan’s home, a storm sprouts up; proof, she says, that the spirits heard them. “Four months later,” Crispin writes, “I was married.”

It sounds too simple or strange to work—and generally, Crispin expresses doubt about the occult as often as affinity for it. But in the end, she sides with the perspective that people can “move through symbol and metaphor to ritualize the natural world and our role within it and find a way to understand [their] own mortality,” and there is something beautiful in that.

When I went to that witch and asked for a ritual for love, it wasn't out of a belief that it would work. It's easy to disprove magic. I did it out of faith that there was something not inherently disgusting and unforgivable about myself, and that that part of myself might be loved.

Which is to say, the ritual is meant less to achieve a result than to consecrate this nascent sense of self Crispin feels emerging, or to incarnate it, to give it the strength it needs to manifest.

But again it's hard to miss how so many such lovely, courageous moments on Crispin’s part are dogged with harsh judgment of others. Right after the story of this beautiful ritual, and Crispin's account of her interest in Wicca and Tarot as a teenager, comes a passage in which Crispin viciously judges the witches on TikTok who, in 2020, gained minor notoriety online for an attempt to “hex” the moon:

The TikTok witches, it seems, decided to hex the moon. And the Twitter witches got upset, saying you can't hex the moon, there are consequences to that kind of impertinence. Some of the Twitter witches insisted they had, in their rituals, talked to Apollo, and now Apollo was pissed and wasn't going to do things for them. They didn't say what those things were, but it was probably along the lines of getting Justin Bieber tickets.

For some reason the whole thing sent me into a rage. “You did not talk to Apollo!” I wanted to yell. Who do these girls think they are, lighting candles in an Ohio basement, thinking the god of poetry is going to take their call? Thinking they won't face madness or torment while trying to find the language of the divine? Thinking the saints who wandered in the desert for years begging god to speak to them must just not have used the right crystal? You don't get to talk to god and then just go to your job at the mall.

It's all so spiritually thin, this generation of witches making demands without devotion, looking to the stars to tell them when things will get good for them rather than asking what they can offer of themselves...

To which I ask: why so harsh? Yes, the whole thing is a bit stupid; everything on TikTok is at least a little dumb. But the witches are effectively seeking for meaning, even if their expression of seeking feels goofy. And how much offering of herself was Crispin doing when she was young, anyway—a misfit in a conservative Kansas family, dying her hair black, hunting down books on Wicca and astrology, turning to paganism as part of a project of figuring out what she really believed, how powerful she really was?

In the end, what really distinguishes the kids on Tiktok from Crispin's own teenage self is a sense they're still subject to illusions she's broken free from. It's that radical individuality again—but deployed in the service of judgment of others, in a spirit that seems to contradict the generosity of the internally organized individual that Crispin elsewhere counsels us to cultivate. Let kids do the work of individuation, I say, however stupid it seems. As for those of the TikTok witches who aren’t children, well, I think love and not judgment is what helps spiritual thinness flesh out.

Late in the book, after she’s settled in Kansas City, Crispin sees an old church across the street that will soon be torn down for condos:

I imagine that when a developer looks at this building, they see lost profit. They see the structure transformed or replaced, filled with young professionals, maybe with a coworking space on the ground floor. I imagine that when a priest looks at the building, they see lost souls. They imagine it filled with the wayward sheep lost to a secular culture, the ghosts of the godless filling the pews. I imagine that when a community organizer looks at the building, they see a space for organizing. They see it filled with the work of local artists, or support groups for a very specific marginalized population…

Here one sees the drive to classify, to split society into types (developer, priest, organizer) or sectors of society (the religious right, capitalist money culture, the right, the left). These labels do describe legible demographics, and a certain degree of such abstraction is necessary for a polemic, or any piece of nonfiction about society broadly—but they become so reductive when all they're used to do is harangue. The building is renovated, and an arts nonprofit moves in. “But of course people don't dream of adequately feeding someone,” Crispin says:

they don't go to med school in the hopes of providing basic care in exchange for a sustainable income. They dream of expansion, not maintenance. They dream of art, not groceries. They dream of leading a movement, not participating in one. They dream of the glorification of their own desires, not the meeting of other people's needs. Or they dream purely of profit, which means selling low quality in high quantity with little overhead, and of course treating employees decently and making sure they don't drop dead of a preventable disease counts as overhead.

Who is “they” here? I think. Anybody but you? And without any clear referents, what is anyone supposed to do about this? Who are they supposed to target, to change the way things are, and how?

I wonder how this passage might've been different if Crispin had named the nonprofit, or identified the bourgeois biscuit shop that later moves into another abandoned building in her part of town. Put someone's skin in the game. It would be a small move toward the kind of specificity in analysis that might actually make change happen; it could also be less alienating than what we get.

People often complain about the “personal essay industrial complex,” or they criticize “informed exceptionalism”—Amber Husain's excellent term for the kind of writing, a la Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror or Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, in which the writer uses the admission of their own complicity to effectively excuse that complicity. But reading this book, I missed the specificity of those writers’ subject positions, the pains they often took to elaborate them and to locate themselves in the networks in which we're all culpable, and to do these things with humility.

Ultimately, if informed exceptionalism is the midpoint in a continuum of autobiographical writing—and the position of ambivalence that refuses absolution that is assumed by, say, Natasha Stagg in Sleeveless, per Husain’s argument, is a progression (though, crucially, not an endpoint; there’s more progress yet to be made)—the stretches of pure harangue we get in this book mark a regression. And next to them, I'll take an honest admission of the writer’s own complicity—and the extension of that same grace to even the witches on TikTok hexing the moon—any day.

#literary #books #jessa crispin #sheila heti #maggie nelson #andrea long chu #natasha stagg #amber husain #informed exceptionalism #contrarianism

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