unfairness

I didn't vote for Jimmy Carter, I couldn't forgive him his comment that "Life is unfair." (I've learned from that experience to hold my nose and vote for the least worst candidate; there isn't much other choice in South Carolina).

But I'm thinking today not about politics but about fairness. As a child I believed I deserved the mistreatment I got. I've heard it said that children tend to believe that because that gives them some sense of control when it is too unbearable to feel powerless. At the moment, though, it seems to me that what is unbearable is not being powerless but injustice. If life is that unfair then how can we live it?

balance

Today:

I was afraid I had lost my touch--at first I was trying to stand up the rock that became the top rock and it wouldn't balance well. Then I had the idea of trying the other one, and balancing it on a single rock rather than between rocks. The thing that most felt like magic, though, was when I put the top rock on the standing rock and it balanced right where I first put it down, first try.

Communism

The New Yorker has a review of an autobiography by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, which concludes with the unkind words "The fact that you’re the last one left doesn’t mean you have to turn out the light." I read that last night after a conversation in which I wanted to use the phrase "let a hundred flowers bloom" (I couldn't remember whether it was a hundred or a thousand). I knew it came from Chairman Mao and I associated it with the Cultural Revolution and felt it had turned out to mean the opposite of what I meant.

So I found myself being defensive about having been attracted to communism when I was a college student and graduate student (mid to late 1970s). Feminism ended up more important to me, but I did see myself as in the community of fellow-travelers. I remember defending sometimes the Soviet Union and China, and that leads to my current embarrassment about those views.

In principle... Is principle possible? In principle I am attracted to direct democracy--let the voters make the decisions. It is another way of valuing the people on the bottom. Living in the south I know the problems of that--around here voters are definitely pushing us in what I consider the wrong directions (the Southern Baptist Church is another example). I do believe that the government should provide more basic social services, starting with universal health care. I suppose the basis of my sense that I no longer hold the views I did when I was in college is that while I am a critic of big business, I do conclude that a centrally planned economy proved to be a bad idea.

balance

Today I tried big rocks:

Diver

Diver go down
Down into the green
Inverted dawn
To the dark unseen
To the never day
The under night
Starless and steep
Deep beneath deep
Diver fall
And falling fight
Your weed-dense way
Until you crawl
Until you touch
Weird water land
And stand.

Diver come up
Up through the green
Into the light
The sun the seen
But in the clutch
Of your dripping hand
Diver bring
Some uncouth thing
That we could swear
And would have sworn
Was never born
Or could ever be
Anywhere
Blaze on our sight
Make us see.

Robert Francis, Come Out Into the Sun: Poems New and Selected (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1968). more poems by Robert Francis

Germs

I've been reading Nancy Tomes: The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life. It focuses one of the dilemmas of women's history--new ideas about housecleaning seem to have been both a way to keep women down by setting impossible tasks for them and something women embraced as a way to achieve goals they valued. What intrigues me most is the remnant practices: my parents built a sleeping porch because my mother grew up with one, but I had no idea that the original reason for sleeping porches was to fight tuberculosis.

rain

We had a wet summer and then the rain stopped. So heavy rain all this evening is a sound I am not used to. It is a winter sound, reminding me of the cold of winter rain even though it isn't cold yet.