Appropriation/Appreciation: An Essay on Theft & Gift

The risk of the aphoristic lies in its coming across so conclusively, declarative statements asserting themselves if they know they’re correct.

We think we know what we know, and are right about what we know. We don’t even know what we do know, much less what we don’t know.

Anosognosia: our shared pathology; like mortality.

•

Discovering we don’t know what we thought we knew can precipitate a necessary epistemological crisis, of the kind that has you pacing the sidewalks of Tempe, Arizona in one summer, 120º F by day, dropping to just above 100º after midnight. You will finger palo verde fronds in bafflement, trying to get them to furl closed. Crepuscular sphingid moths assault the flowers of Peniocereus striatus, which is the only way you can see it — it’s almost invisible underneath nurse plants in the daytime desert, it only blooms, glows white and moony in the dark.

(Don’t talk to me about the creosote when it rains; I have a small jar of salve which is still fragrant four years later and I take it out every few months and huff it, mouth watering.)

You thought you knew; but you didn’t know anything. And now how can you ever think you know anything again? You can’t, certainty itself is broken, knowledge an emptied container, what poetry can be written after Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo.

An argument concerning lineage may proceed anecdotally as well as etymologically; usage comes to life via stories. If you consult the OED, aren’t the citations worth more to you when you’ve read some, if not the entirety, of the work from which they came? A rich penumbra of context worth more than reels of synonyms. Read Measure for Measure to understand belongings, Macbeth to grasp the situation behind multitudinous. It helps to know about India’s sophisticated royal culture, colonialism, and the British Raj to understand the joke behind Hindi-derived words like punch or shampoo or juggernaut.

•

Divigatory, the professor warned me, almost twenty years ago. The danger of it is you could cut it off by the yard, another cautioned. I considered this, inwardly shrugged and carried on along my strange route.

“An appropriate response is the practice of a lifetime,” my dear old roshi taught us, quoting Unmon from Case 14 of The Blue Cliff Record, 碧巌録:

She meant: keep trying, fine-tuning, adjusting your range, aiming arrow at target; keep missing, falling short or overshooting; above all keep responding.

Very likely only by reason of propinquity, for me this teaching ties closely with two other Blue Cliff Record koans:

Here the student is asking a senior monk why Guanyin or Avalokiteśvara (the Buddhist equivalent, roughly speaking, of Nuestra Señora) has so many hands in iconography (standard answer: for doing good deeds). But his friend says instead: “It’s as easy as turning over your pillow at night.”

Roshi taught us: no separation. You don’t have some big idea when you turn over your pillow at night to find the cool side, like: oh, look at me being compassionate! I’m an ally, I’m such a good person, so kind and helpful — no, you just do it, automatically; you tend to what needs tending. Thus compassion isn’t all over the body, on its surface — it’s within the body, it pervades it — in fact, it is it. Love is what you are, not a thing you have. Finally:

And again, Roshi’s commentary — as soon as someone would say something wistful like “I want to be useful to others” or “I want to do good” or “I want to help save the world,” she’d say simply: “Show me ‘the world.’”

Where is this world out there that’s somehow separate from you? Where does it start, where do you stop? What is the world?

As soon as you say “I’m going to help X,” you’ve made a division — yourself as separate, set apart from X — and immediately created a problem: now there’s a person who needs helping and you, the helper, who have something to give, something they don’t have, something to offer or to withhold.

•

[Still sneaking up on appropriation by means of appropriate.]

Roshi declared on more than one occasion, the training slogan for our temple should be, hanging over the gate: JUST SHOW UP.

Don’t question, don’t make improvements, don’t argue: just follow the simple schedule. (It’s similar to what Joseph Brodsky taught me as a very young poet: forms and meters know more than you, they’ve been around far longer. Before you have better ideas, submit to them, learn from them.)

I repeat this slogan to my beloved undergraduates when they start haggling over absences, excused versus unexcused, wanting to parse out exactly how many late appearances equals a plus-or-minus grade drop (a conversation beyond ironic given my own chronic inability to just show up where either fluorescent-lit basements or groups of more than two people are concerned). I cut off their frantic bargaining and spreadsheet-worthy calculations by beaming and telling them: You must be present to win.

This isn’t about getting bonus points for coming to your own class, I sometimes add (more dramatically, I’ll indicate the door: you’re not in high school! Truant officer’s not coming after you! Free to go at any time! — except they’re not, and they didn’t get to choose their enrollment; but).

I ask: Are you going to equivocate like this with your boss, your best friend, your life partner? Can you show up for your life? Do you show up for your friends, your family, your pets, your houseplants? What about for yourself?

Show up for your life, I tell them, channelling Roshi shamelessly (they’ll never know I’m quoting a Zen priest). Give life to your life.

(Then, because this is really what they want to know, I wearily repeat what my ex used to tell his high school math students at the start of every day: Come to class, bring your stuff, do the work — you’ll get an A.)

•

None of us can actually do this — just show up — but we’re all on a shaping continuum, bending our maladaptive behavior toward its attainment. What I sarcastically call the Patriarchal Industrial Complex (cf. bell hooks’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) has maimed us all and yet we, humanly phototropic, naturally selected for our ability to self-correct and adapt, trend upward, tend irreversably toward showing up, trying to give life to life.

A thousand hands and eyes. Respond appropriately.

•

Àpropos [of nothing] is, I find, an extremely irritating idiom. I myself salt everything with French helplessly because it occupies a special place inside my brain, which is already sordidly, incurably macaronic; so it’s not that I think this usage is pretentious because just it’s not in English, as you clearly couldn’t say it as concisely in English. You’d be left with some awkward approximation like “So, by the way, this has nothing to do with anything we were actually talking about, but, uh,” — an idiom that is in use, but which immediately positions its speaker as adorably awkward or embarrassingly eager or just unable to conduct a smooth transition and resorting simply to blurting out the new topic. (I’m reminded of David Foster Wallace, in a lather of relational anxiety, finally just telling his guest bluntly, “I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore,” with predictable results.) (He recounts this to interviewer David Lipsky.)

So it’s not that àpropos of nothing doesn’t serve its purpose, which is to effect a transition without drawing attention to that transition. That’s exactly what bothers me about it. It’s too seamless, smarmily so. When Sheryl Crow uses it in her song “All I Want to Do” (the verses of which are made up almost entirely of repurposed lines from a poem called “Fun” by an acquaintancce, who now lives off the residual royalties from that song), that “àpropos of nothing” is the speaker’s attempt to position himself as exactly that kind of casually smooth conversationalist. Why do I find this gross, like Frank Strang in Equus, who continually leers “if you receive my meaning”; or Bill Lumbergh, the Uriah Heepesque boss in Office Space, whose oleaginous catchphrase is, “If you could just…that’d be great, mmmkay.”

•

But, as another unctuous public speaker would say, make no mistake: appropriating French is an affectation. More than one professor has dashed out irritated strike-throughs when I insisted on using quand même or au fond in some paper or another (actually the first time I remember this happening, it was a paper on Anouilh’s Antigone so perhaps my bilingual lapses arose from the text itself). It’s impossible to explain how French is my adoptive mother’s tongue, how it’s one of the few things I have left since Maman died, it’s impossible to explain either her life or her death, I don’t try.

I just blunder on, and when I can’t think of the word I’m trying to think of, invariable stall for time by mumbling ça veut dire and ignoring the fact that everyone rightly thinks I’m a pretentious git.

Which I am; but not because I lunge out and grab desperately at words that aren’t English, when English simply won’t suit.

[Sometimes I think of a fellow monk, a German who would translate herself: “what means…” When with trusted friends, I too will say, “what means.”]

•

When I was a little girl, I fell madly in love with a song. This is the song.

My grandmother, Geneva Myrtle Ferguson, had been a seamstress, in a time when the American South still had cloth mills and garment factories. She started in Arkansas as a girl weaving baskets and, after many years at a clothing manufacturer named Shirey’s, retired as a pattern maker (a coveted and challenging position in the industry, particularly for someone who’d dropped out of middle school to pick cotton and was functionally literate).

[NB I can’t find any evidence now that Shirey’s ever even existed; I think it was in Greenville, TX, but searches on the name just turn up various gospel-singing groups and, horrifically, a company that sells replica Nazi apparel. ]

When she retired, Shirey’s gave her a stereo, and her picture was in the paper. My grandmother was a morbid woman, in the way of her hill country people, and loved to tell me and my cousin Pam that when she died, I would get the stereo and Pam would get the sewing machine. We’d beg her to stop talking about dying, wind our skinny kid arms around her telling her fervently that she was never going to die; and maybe that was the point.

She knew us well, though. Pamela wound up getting a bachelor’s degree in art and runs her own photography studio, has always been a maker of things; and while I can sew well enough, and quilt (translation: sew jagged pieces of silk and cotton to other jagged pieces, making strange useless artifacts), I turned out to be…whatever I am. Someone more interested in sounds and words, pitches and tones, lyric and melody and harmony, than made objects.

Inside her prized stereo, Grandma had rows of country music and (white) gospel albums, from the specific era and ethos that had captured her attention: Jim Nabors, Freddy Fender, George Jones, the Statler Brothers, Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash, Glenn Campbell, Porter Waggoner, Buck Owens, Charlie Pride, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette, Elvis Presley, Roger Miller, Pat Boone) but I found this style of music predictable, lugubrious, self-pitying and overproduced.

[Not that I was critical or anything.]

She also had, however, a thick stack of 45s and it was there that I discovered the B-side to Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” — which was presumably why my grandmother owned that particular 45, because it had been so popular, even with white seamstresses from Arkansas who mostly liked hymnal music.

I wasn’t interested in the hit song at all, but I played that B-side over and over and over, even though by doing so I risked drawing attention to myself, and there were sharp mystified looks and under-the-breath comments of the kind in which she specialized. I knew I wouldn’t be allowed to play it as loudly as I wanted to (with the volume all the way up), so I settled for half-volume and then would kneel by the enormous stereo console, cramming my ear into the scratchy metallic fabric concealing the speakers, for hours at a time, playing it over and over, listening like sucking down water.

Franklin’s voice mixed against the drums, electric guitar, and wavery slightly out-of-tune piano created chiaroscuro loops that roped me in; when she belts, “I been a-lovin’ and a-lovin’ and a-lovin’ you too long, you must be crazy if you think I’m gonna stop now, no — ” and the backup singers agree, “Don’t wanna STOP!” and then begin their purposive upward march through the scale again — to this day my brain almost shorts out from pleasure.

I didn’t know about Otis Redding‘s original recording; much less the Rolling Stones’ version (which I find offensively white and unlistenable — see how we approach appropriation, circle around behind it like shy wild game — ).

Ike and Tina did it, Percy Sledge did it, even Cat Power attempts it — but to this day all other recordings seem derivative to me, even though it’s clear that Aretha’s was slapped together and pressed with a minimum of effort.

I understood, through that song, the kind of bliss I was supposed to feel in church or during services on the land/our commune, speaking in tongues or being slain in the spirit. If our music were more like that — or like Holst’s Die Planeten, or the Goldberg aria plus all thirty variations, or Wagner’s horn prelude to Tristan und Isolde, I felt I would be a much better daughter.

[As it was, I was an obvious fake Christian, a “churchian,” and at some point would be discovered, spewed out like quail through the Israelites’ nostrils, unveiled, found out, revealed on the day of judgment, lukewarm and stale.]

•

Since I wasn’t allowed to listen to non-church music, watch television, listen to the radio, or read newspapers or magazines at home, visits to either grandparents’ house became raids on the elderly lower-middle class’s cultural capital. I plowed through copies of TV Guide, Reader’s Digest, and Saturday Evening Post like they were required texts; watched network programs like Ironside and Little House on the Prairie (“why, that’s the cleanest show on television!”), all the soap operas I could reasonably be allowed to see (grandparents took naps, which aided my habit), and the ’60s and ’70s westerns and war movies on continual UHF circulation; very likely I have seen almost every John Wayne film ever made. My mother’s father, in addition to his many other faults, had a weakness for Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood, as well as Zane Gray and Louis L’Amour pulps, so I consumed those indiscriminately, as well as battered hardcovers by authors no one reads anymore, like Gene Stratton Porter, or Albert Payson Terhune.

Out of all my maternal grandparents’ albums, which were even less interesting than all that easy-listening country and western, I preferred a brooding selection by Frank Sinatra, a 1955 album I still love: In the Wee Small Hours. You could tell that was exactly when they’d been recording.

And from my paternal grandmother, Geneva Myrtle, I took away those two life-altering singles: an odd little Schubertian art song by Judy Collins, “Nightingale” (1970, again a B-side, to her more well-known but, to my taste, extremely boring rendition of “Amazing Grace”); and Aretha’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” Strange mothers, but the ones I chose.

the wind swept the sunlight through the wheat fields
in the orchard the nightingale sang
while the plums that she broke with her brown beak
tomorrow would turn into songs

Oddly, though, I found I could sing one perfectly, but not the other.

I could pick out the Judy Collins on piano and when I was brave enough, I could sing it. (I would only sing when my parents left the house; perhaps on an errand to the feed store. I knew it took them 25 minutes to get to town and 25 minutes to get back, so at a minimum I had one hour; and in one hour I could get through almost all of Barbra Streisand’s Broadway Album or the soundtrack to Yentl, half of West Side Story (the version with Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras and Tatiana Troyanos), or maybe half of my Lily Pons collection, with a couple of arias by Frederica von Stade or Maria Callas, or the Renata Scotto’s last aria in Madama Butterfly. I smuggled in all these albums from the public library, put them on cassette by scotch-taping over the broken-out tabs on old tapes of sermons. Obviously I couldn’t sing Italian or German, or at that time French; I approximated the accents as best I could, studying liner notes and memorizing sounds.

It confused me, though. Why could I sing Judy Collins and not Aretha Franklin? What made her voice black, and mine unable? I knew that the song was off-limits to me. It wasn’t allowed. But I could love it, and I did love it. I could press myself trembling against the stereo speakers and nearly pass out listening to it, almost orgasmically, that tremulous gospel piano.

Despite the song being about love I knew it was really gospel, and I knew this because we also had an album by Andraé Crouch and I adored the song “Take Me Back,” with its unhurried backbeat; but I also couldn’t sing that one, and we didn’t. When we sang in church or on the land it was different. My grandmother sang what she called gospel and it was quavery and dour, songs like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” with its grim narrative about hearses and undertakers, with too much tremolo and no vocal assurance.

When I was 17, I got into junior college, a place where most people got two years out of the way cheaply before transferring to A&M or a UT branch campus, studying something like agricultural science or business. My parents let me enroll because I’d finished homeschool, and I could live at home and they could watch me and make sure I didn’t become worldly.

When I was 19 I graduated from that place with a 4.0 and was off like a shot. I’d been on exactly one date, had never been kissed or even held anyone’s hand, had never heard the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, had never been drunk. I still pulled my hair into a long tight braid, half-ballet school half-Christian cult, wasn’t allowed to wear skirts above my knees, and secretly devoured Kirk/Spock slash and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s lesbian science fiction. I have an handwritten essay from my honors English class at that junior college, in which essay I refer to a black woman as a “Negro,” presumably under Faulkner’s influence; it was 1986; no one corrected me. Thanks to a women’s magazine at my grandmother’s house I’d worked out what a clitoris was but my staunch belief was that this was unwholesome knowledge to be discarded if one were to make one’s husband happy and secure in his primacy and importance. Inconveniently, I had fallen in crashing, destructive love with a closeted gay guy who directed plays at the community theater; I acted opposite him, taught children’s drama with him, none of it made sense, he married a woman and moved to the Panhandle to teach theater at some cow college and I wrote prim thesaurus sonnets and moved my bed outside, to the screened-in porch, so I could lie awake nights vibrating against the moonlight, listening to Chopin on my Walkman.

That song by Aretha was mine and part of me but it was not mine and not part of me, it was not for the likes of me, but how could that be, when it spoke so clearly into my ear, directly into my ear, reddened and roughened from being shoved up against the speaker —

[insert: Dad playing for Johnny Paycheck and George Jones, until he quit under some combination of religious, economic and marital pressure]

[insert: piano being mine because guitar was his; but primed for Joni Mitchell by harsh prophetic Franciscan monk John Michael Talbot]

This mine-but-not-mine never stopped being confusing, in fact it became more so, the more popular music (or per Miles Davis, “social music”) I was exposed to and was able to devour. The first songs I taught myself on guitar were Joni Mitchell and Suzanne Vega, and theirs were voices I could pattern my own after; I’d inherited a predictably weedy soprano, with a lot of range probably thanks to shrieking along with opera records, but not much stamina, and without any timbre, just barely in tune. A talking kind of voice.

But everywhere was music I loved and I found it. Not just The Smiths and The Sundays and Cowboy Junkies and The Innocence Mission, but —

Antecedents. Origins. Not just grandparents but great-grandparents.

Rory Block had taught herself every song Robert Johnson had ever written and recorded. Who was Robert Johnson? Bonnie Raitt listed her influences as being Son House, Sippie Wallace. Could I find recordings by them?

Somehow I came across a tape of Mississippi John Hurt, playing live at Carnegie Hall in 1964. When he sang “talk about trouble, I had it all my days,” I believed him. I could never play guitar like that, ever. For one thing blues guitars all sounded like they were strung with baling wire. For another he clearly had those gnarled giant hands that I’d seen my whole life, on men who worked outside. My own stupid girl hands were weak and it was hard for me to grip even light-gauge strings. (This love-hate with the mechanics of a guitar has lasted my entire life, it comes of having begun on piano and being always half-annoyed by the inscrutable mutability of frets.)

I love the little patter at the beginning of this and the other songs — you can hear that the audience laughing good-naturedly at his jokes is entirely white.

So this was both not-me (I could never understand the hard life that had brought him to the point of being able to write and perform these songs) but also me (I knew what it was like to “wake up some morning couldn’t hardly find my Monday morning shoes, you know. Just feelin’ for ‘em”).

Nietzsche says that if one is not born to one’s father, one must find him. Make him. Who are our parents? Why can’t I assert that Judy Collins and Aretha Franklin were my parents, as much as the guitar and the piano were?

•

At the same time, in this effulgent fulminating unfurling period of my early twenties, I fell headlong into Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and David Bradley’s unsettling novel The Cheneysville Incident, which I think no one reads anymore. I understood with unexpected facility and anger that Beloved was The Trojan Women; and that the United States had executed an elaborate, ongoing, particularly cold-hearted and sadistic form of genocide which, unlike the persecution of indigenous Americans, had torn its victims from homeland and language and family, and cunningly left them alive and creating capital, receiving no reward for having been drained to marrow.

For no reason I’ll ever be able to understand, it was The Temple of My Familiar that broke through to me in the deepest way (another unpopular fiction, faulted for being too didactic). I reread it every summer and told people I wouldn’t date them unless they also read it. I’d try to get them to read Bastard out of Carolina, Written on the Body, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Three Guineas, The Waves, Sylvia Plath’s journals. I made a joke of it, that before sleeping with someone I’d give them these books as a boxed set and they’d have to pass an examination before they getting in, as we said back then, my pants.

[The list of things you had to read and hear to get in my pants grew, and included Sontag, Elaine Scarry, and Jung; but was never adhered to.]

I wrote a long tortured essay for the campus leftist rag, about my ignorant, horrifying betrayal of a black school friend named Louise, the last year I was in school, before my parents pulled me out and started homeschooling me. I tied this to my grandmother’s similar story about a friend she’d rejected—another little girl named, improbably, Pusher, though my grandmother evinced no regret for the loss of that friendship or her behavior.

In Temple of My Familiar, one of the main characters, a black professor at Berkeley named Fanny, is tortured by violent images of beheading white people. She’s in therapy for this and other issues when she decides to visit Tanya, a white childhood friend, who reminds her of what happened, why they had stopped playing together, a memory Fanny has utterly repressed: that Fanny, who came from a very kissy and affectionate family, had kissed Tanya, whereupon Tanya’s grandmother had slapped her until she fell backward, saying “If I ever catch you putting your black mouth on Tanya again, I’ll knock your little black head off.” The two girls cry and cry together, but Tanya doesn’t know how to comfort her friend, and while she is ashamed of her grandmother, and angry, she begs Fanny not to say anything that would call down the wrath of Fanny’s mothers; so she doesn’t.

Fanny tells the story to her therapist and they have this exchange:

Maybe reading about betrayal from someone else’s side helps even slow people, who think in 1986 it’s still okay to refer to African-Americans as Negroes, to understand and catch on. [My first boyfriend, who referred to himself as half-Mexican — he was from San Jose — shamed me for that ignorant handwritten paper for years. I didn’t realize he’d been abusive until several years after he left me, telling meI wasn’t “healthy and normal,” or his intellectual equal, and that I could speak to him someday maybe if I’d read Leo Strauss. The funny thing about this guy is that he had me utterly intimidated; but of course after he graduated from Cornell he became an IT manager and now lives in Pearland with three kids and a pediatrician wife. He was going to be EM Cioran, and now he lives in Pearland. In trying to be smart enough for him, I sort of overshot the mark. That‘s happened a lot.]

Anyway somehow in the early ’90s, not least because of Alice Walker, I caught up. I radicalized on every axis I could find, and I vowed to be a decent white person, if a hopeless one.

Divorced and in my mid-thirties I met an avant-garde jazz percussionist and improvisational pianist who still hadn’t read The Temple of My Familiar, but he owned the entire Bollingen Jung. As well as a stunning LP collection of jazz and popular music, almost every single album by black artists — his favorites Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Archie Shepp, of course Coltrane, Mingus, Rollins, Albert Ayler. He’d taken drum lessons with Andrew Cyrille. And he was a scrawny white Irish Protestant Philly boy; 45 years old, a journalist and theater critic.

He quoted Hugo Ball from memory. He read entire novels to me aloud in bed — As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absalom; Riddley Walker. He read Whitman to me and his voice cracked over “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking”:

For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me,
So faint — I must be still, be still to listen;
But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me.

We lived together almost five years, merging libraries and musical equipment, and I tell you this because he told me this story:

That when Peter was still a teenager, just before college, he had gone north one summer to visit family, staying with cousins whose father was a park ranger somewhere, I know nothing about upstate New York. But he’d taken his records with him, a passionate young skinny cokehead music fanatic, all that Monk and Miles Davis and Hendrix; and his blonde beer-drinking cousins were so disconnected from his reality as to ask him, with utter unselfconsciousness, why he only listened to nigger music.

After Peter was done fainting, he had just enough sense to think: I have a chance here to get them to see something they might not have seen before.

So he did not freak out or scream, but explained precisely what it was about Miles that spoke to him whereas their white hair bands did not. And the two male cousins listened, brows furrowed, drinking beer without comment. They weren’t stupid, or even particulary hostile, just grotesque in their ignorance and privilege. Which is exactly always what’s most — what’s worst.

When he finished, they accepted his explanation and never called his music (his?) by that name again. But it still bothered them; they left the house when he’d put his records on and the screeches and squeals and anguished sounds of Jimi’s guitar began.

•

I finished my undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke, which has a number of specialized common spaces, mostly old faculty houses that’ve been taken over by clubs and organizations, serving different populations. There’s the Betty Shabazz House, into which I’ve never set foot, right or wrong. There’s a kosher/halal kitchen, where Palestinians and orthodox Jews cook side by side — it’s an astonishing beautiful thing (also completely logical if you think about it for half a second because the dietary laws are all but identical); and they share their food with the community and it’s incredible. My first college girlfriend ran a weekend coffee house in the basement there, and that’s where I first started belting tequila and playing songs for other people. I had pastiched together a blues riff with lyrics from a Langston Hughes poem and I loved it and felt vaguely terrible every time I played it:

baby if you love me
help me when I’m down and out
oh baby if you love me
won’t you help me when I’m down and out
I’m just a poor girl
nobody gives a damn about

— So far so good, all true to my experience as a bewildered depressed twenty-something queer girl who’d grown up in a Zionist doomsday cult and was drawn to critical, emotionally abusive if not outright sadistic lovers.

But then the other verse was more problematic:

the credit man’s done took my clothes
and rent time’s nearly here
I said the credit man he done took my clothes
and rent time’s nearly here
I’d like to buy a straightening comb
and I need a dime for beer

While I’d been so poor that I’d kept my few items of clothing in a cardboard box, having no dresser, no one had ever repossessed them. And as much trouble as I had keeping clean and dealing with unruly hair, I was at least half-clued in enough to know that black women and their hair were a whole arena of suffering and difficulty I would never, ever be able to understand.

I meekly changed the lyric to “pocket comb” and kept singing it.

•

Around this time I walked past the TV room in our dormitory and saw a student I knew bending over the television, I called her by name and she turned around side-eyeing me, snapping: “I’m Sierra.” Of course she was Sierra, I’d lived with her in the same building for almost three years. Seeing her from behind with a similar hairstyle; that was no excuse for calling her the wrong name. How could I pretend otherwise to myself but that I’d called her the wrong name because still, even at my age, with almost a decade separating me from my abhorrent background, They All Looked Alike to me?

Once, before our existentialism class, I asked my friends and fellow philosophy majors Kalyani and Ratna if they were maybe related (they were both surnamed Menon, and had identical pixie cuts and a particularly sooty cast to their skin that I associate with people from Bombay, and the same enormous round eyes). They sneered at me openly, which didn’t actually bother me much because they were both brilliantly intelligent and sarcastic funny women, the kind who sneer as a matter of course: “You’re just saying that because we’re Indian.” “No,” I retorted, because I was friends with them and felt I could get away with this, “I’m saying that because ever since Kalyani got her hair cut you guys look like sisters.” They rolled their eyes and waved me away and we settled down to Heidegger or whatever it was.

And I could wave these things away as learning experiences, but that I’ve struggled with student names of all ethnicities for decades; and at the beginning of the semester party, at j. Kastely and Lynn Voskuil’s house, Jules and I were in the kitchen holding court, and after Selena talked to us for awhile and then left, I beamed up at Julia and said, “I like Adrienne a lot.” “That’s nice,” said Julia, unfailingly polite no matter what crazy-ass bullshit stunt I’m pulling, like idling at a green light or a stop sign for five minutes talking and waving my hands; “but that’s not Adrienne. That was Selena.”

There was pretty much nowhere to go from that one. I went ahead and died, quietly, as I felt was only understandable given how bad it was, what I’d just done, much worse than sitting at an intersection forgetting to drive the car.

Especially given that another grad student, an Asian writer, had just been in the kitchen complaining that he hated Halloween, that it was the most racist holiday because there was always some white person wearing some outrageously offensive racist costume, like blackface. “Really?” I asked, shocked. “People really still do that?” He just looked at me pityingly.

A couple of hours later, Jules and I gave a ride home to a pair of very unhappy, very young master’s students in lit whose car had been towed. On the drive to their apartment, the (also very drunk) young man bragged about his Halloween costume: he’d dressed in “a red Chinese robe, silk, and one of those pointy straw hats, you know, like a cone, that you pick rice in.”

I didn’t dare look at Julia. “Oh, have you been to China?” she asked politely. “No,” said the young man, confused.

I don’t know why my friends of color put up with me. It’s a miracle they only take space for themselves when they do, and not every five minutes.

Ratna is a dear friend to this day. I’ve probably been in love with her for twenty years, but she’s straight, and anyway after grad school she moved back to Delhi, works as an editor there, and last year when I was in the hospital she sent me the most incredible pashmina, woven wool that’s warm but softer than down, a light dove gray with a wide teal border. It was my armour in the hospital, my protection, a bubble of safety. The diagnosing psychologist wrote practically an entire treatise on how I hid behind it as if I had no skin, no other buffering border between me and the world (what is the world). I pulled it up over my face during difficult encounters, just my eyes showing, the way I’d seen my Punjabi mother-in-law do, many years later or many years ago, in another lifetime, in Hounslow, Southall, London.

“Jennifer is always hiding in plain sight,” gruffed X., one of my favorite unit residents. He was a Cuban real estate developer in Florida, an alcoholic and recovering sex addict, and while these diagnoses made others nervous, I actually trusted him completely, because what he was on the surface, and wasn’t hidden in plain sight. He knew what he knew about himself and he also had come to know what he didn’t know. The ones who didn’t know what they didn’t know about themselves, those were the ones I mistrusted.

In the hospital we had a sedate New Year’s party with sparkling cider and I pushed back all the furniture so we could dance and made a playlist with all my favorite songs about being crazy. Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” obviously, and Patsy Cline, and Joni Mitchell’s “Twisted,” and best of all the latest Eminem single (“my OCD’s conking me in the head / keep knocking, nobody’s home / I’m sleepwalking / just relaying what the voice in my head’s saying”) which features Rihanna wailing the chorus like she‘s been chained to a wall:

I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed
get along with the voices inside of my head
you’re trying to save me stop holding your breath
and you think I’m crazy yeah you think I’m crazy

Alone, I danced wildly around the unit living room, where we’d shoved all the sofas and coffee tables and ping-pong table against the wall. Everyone else sat watching me, utterly depressed by not being with their families, not being with their friends, the fact that they couldn’t get drunk. I can’t not dance, though; people always come up to me and say oh my god honey you’re really hammered, and I laugh because I’ve just been drinking ginger ale.

I sweated and gyrated and flung myself around and snatched tinsel off the Christmas tree and waved it like I had a feather boa and it was Mardi Gras. Since no one else was dancing and they didn’t care what I played, I switched to Prince and Janet Jackson and Madonna and Erasure and danced all my favourite late ‘80s college dances. Thanks to the overexposure of Janet’s videos on VH1 I know every gesture, every jerky move from “Miss You Much.” Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis mixed those songs on Rhythm Nation 1814 to within an inch of their lives, bulking up the slight pop melodies with aggressive industrial sounds straight out of the Eraserhead score.

If I can copy every movement Janet makes during “Black Cat,” (while never looking as desperately hot as she does in that white shirt and tall boots, to say nothing of the deliberate wardrobe failure halfway through), is that song mine, or hers, or borrowed, or am I stealing it? Or did she steal it, since it’s basically a Pat Benatar/Nancy Wilson rock song, unlike every other R&B inflected single on that album? If I dance to it (which I do, like an idiot) am I going to appropriation hell? What’s the difference between appropriation and appreciation? The practice of a lifetime is the appropriate response.

[It’s strange, watching those videos now. She’s everything her brother seemingly tried to be; pale-skinned, straight-haired, high-cheekboned. So different from her corkscrew mop and darker skin, just one album prior.]

By the time I finished dancing to “Kiss” and looked over at the sofas where everyone was slumped, they were all asleep — passed out from night meds, hadn’t even made it to midnight. My best-friend-on-the-unit C., a veterinary surgeon from Bogotá, was at the computer creating playlists of obscure-to-me but profoundly sexy-sounding Latina club music. I couldn’t dance to any of it but I came and sat next to her, sweating and panting, and listened.

That’s how 2014 started. In the hospital, a dozen people on a sofa fast asleep, and C. and I whispering and giggling over cute Mexican pop chanteuses. The shift change having been at midnight we’d missed meds, so I couldn’t sleep, and lay there thinking about Janet’s straightened hair.

•

When Selena Quintillana Perez died, my parents were insufferable; because as we all know the Liberal Media is racist against white people, so as long as the local news in Texas was all Selena, my mom would say indignantly “well I’ve never heard of her before, she can’t be all that famous, why are they making such a big deal out of this,” and the antecedent of “they” wasn’t entirely clear, — did it mean the Dallas news teams or the publicly grieving Hispanic fans; my dad would add “and this musical style they keep talking about, saying it’s so popular—conjunto? Tejano? I’ve never heard of it.”

I’d been listening to Tish Hinojosa and for that matter Canciones de Mi Padre (appropriation or appreciation?); so I’d heard of Tejano, yet said nothing.

I spend my life around them saying nothing and it doesn’t get me anywhere, but it also means I can keep them in my life, even peripherally, as good, strongly moral, amazingly generous people who simply can only ever know about a fifth of me, because if they knew more they would feel compelled to disown me, and that wouldn’t do any of us any good. I’m their only daughter so I visit for two to five days, maximum; help my mom milk the cows and make butter and cheese, play guitar with my father and sing harmony with him in cowboy church, or with mom at the opry; watch the worst television, NCIS or CSI or other acronym police procedurals, or fantasy movies like Lord of the Rings or How to Tame Your Dragon or, worst of all, Avatar (through most of which I had to sink my teeth into my arm to stay silent; leave it to James Cameron to make a gabillion-dollar movie about BLUE PEOPLE which still manages to be as racist as anything by DW Griffith or Riefenstahl), and eat fried chicken and okra and biscuits and potato salad.

We have a way of being which is contingent on my leaving aside four-fifths of who I am, just parking that outside the ranch’s cattle gate and picking it up again on my way out.

When I still lived with Peter (the avant-garde free improvisational pianist), I asked him once how many other people in the US or the world played piano in that style. He thought and came up with some number like, twenty, maybe twenty-five. Cecil Taylor alone probably accounts for five of those.

It’s an utterly inscrutable, to most people unlistenable, percussive, theory-based style of improvisation that can last for hours and feel like an endurance sport or protracted unpleasant medical testing rather than music, much less a form of entertainment. When Peter, trained as a drummer, plays piano it’s aggressive and rudely irreverent; he doesn’t limit himself to reaching inside the piano and playing on its open strings with drumsticks or brushes, or slamming down on keys with elbows or fists. As Derek Bailey observes dryly, such music “has no stylistic or idiomatic commitment.”

The hearer’s frustration and incomprehension is nearly exactly analogous, of course, to that of people in museums glaring at abstract expressionism claiming “I could do that” or “my child could do that”; and yet not, because while I don’t know either you or your child, I doubt that you play six hours of Hanon or Czerny a day to familiarize yourself intimately with your keyboard’s topography, with all its scales and modes, turning differently whether you’re headed up or coming down, all the twelve-tone possibilities given that your fingers can attack at least six keys per hand with precision; and in fact I defy anyone, even opponents of the avant-garde, to listen to this piece by Cecil and still aver that their child could do it.

Cecil is also flamingly gay and righteously black, and his achievements in all these endeavors should have earned him more than a flipping MacArthur. Peter adores him, has admired and studied and, well, crammed his ear against the stereo speaker of Cecil Taylor his entire life. So maybe it wasn’t a surprise he would eventually become the same kind of pianist.

“Why do you do it?”
“It’s just how I play. It’s actually the only way I can play.”

That seems right to me. I can compare it to the first college literature class I ever taught, after a decade of struggling to teach composition, rhetoric, creative writing. I designed an upperclass course in post-apocalyptic fiction and feminist theory, and Arizona State said I could teach it; and after three hours in that classroom every week I would float home, my feet not even touching the ground. It was the crack cocaine, the crystal meth of teaching.

All the crap about me that makes no sense anywhere else, that marks me as a freak and queer and wrong and unstable and not a good citizen — all the confusing contradictory features I can’t quite control or eradicate or even successfully repress, all the blank looks I get all the time from almost everyone, even or particularly in courses I take as a student: when I’m standing or more often perched on the corner of a desk in front of 35 undergrads who’ve just read a novel and a couple of essays and we’re going to talk about those and tease out all the threads and watch a couple of video clips and struggle with competing meanings and offer interpretations and refine them and do it all verbally — suddenly, who I am makes sense.

All the things about me that don’t make sense, suddenly make sense.

As the late Zen monk Robert Winson used to exclaim, around that fourth day of sesshin when everything breaks open and settles down like clear water, “This is how man was meant to live!”

Teaching that class, I realized: I was born to do this. I make sense here like I don’t make sense anywhere else, except maybe slumped at the piano in my underpants at 2 am, sweating and drinking pinot grigio with ice cubes in it.

There’s that story from AA Milne’s House at Pooh Corner, about how Tigger comes to the Hundred-Acre Forest, but because he’s an orphaned lost Tigger, he doesn’t actually know what Tiggers eat. But he’s hungry, and he keeps saying proudly “Tiggers like everything!” So the other animals all ply him with their favorite foods — Pooh gives him honey, Eeyore thistles, Piglet acorns. Tigger samples each offering and then, sadly shaking his head, says, “No, Tiggers don’t like that.” What do Tiggers like to eat, though? Just when the crisis seems impossible to resolve, Tigger accidentally gets a large spoonful of the mysterious “strengthening medicine” that maternal Kanga makes her small irrepressible son Roo take every day; Roo hates the medicine, but Tigger adores it. It’s something malted and nasty, vitamins I expect. He’s exuberant, and overjoyed, leaping around all strengthened, roaring, “This is what Tiggers like to eat for breakfast!”

It‘s taken me years but I did in fact finally figure out what Tiggers like.

(It turns out Tiggers also like writing and presenting academic papers at conferences, but only on certain topics, and it took them a couple of decades to work out what topics those were, unfortunately.)

The problem is, what if what Tiggers like isn’t something they should have? That’s not for them? What does it mean, you should or shouldn’t have it?

We’re still on the topic of appropriation, believe it or not.

I’m implicated. I’m contingent and entwined with all this mess we’re in.

When I go down the grocery store aisle with the sign that says “Hispanic Foods” I always laugh and say aloud to myself, making my bad dad-jokes, “Wow, these foods speak Spanish!” because I’m the literal worst. And I talk to myself in public, like I’m practicing to be the crazy homeless lady I’ll be in a few more years, pushing my rusting shopping trolley up and down the seawall in Galveston, collecting things that look useful, talking to myself, probably even yelling, maybe about Ezra Pound or Cecil Taylor or Tigger.

I have just these goals left, in life: one, get my doctorate before I turn fifty. Two, don’t kill myself, but die of natural causes, so that I don’t mess up anyone else’s life too badly on my way out. And finally, when I get my grocery cart to push around with all of my remaining belongings in it, try to make sure I pick a sturdy one, one that doesn’t have the wonky wheel that makes the buggy wander. I hate the buggy with the wander.

•

When Kurt Cobain died, lots of white college kids like myself were devastated. In one of the last recordings we have of him, he’s on MTV’s Unplugged series with Nirvana, and they close with Leadbelly’s “In the Pines,” which in their version is called “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

It’s an excoriating rendition. Not only is Cobain’s voice pure sandpaper and yet somehow still on-pitch, but his guitar is in a rattly droning unison tuning (DADGAD I think, it’s been years since I’ve played it) which turns the song into an Appalachian dirge — he’s going to make it whiter, he has to because he is white. But the anguish is still there, and the chords turn into straight-up fat Nirvana power chords (part of the secret of those unison tunings, actually, is that it makes it easier to produce these thick wads of D, G, A, Em, Bm — so many strings set to the same pitch with sparse harmony).

He adds things, too; in addition to changing the first lines from “Black girl, black girl,” to “My girl, my girl,” he goes up that lethal octave when he sings the last chorus, and all the hairs on everyone’s body everywhere stand on military end. It’s galvanizing and saliva floods your mouth and your pupils dilate and how can one skinny underfed heroin-junkie body contain all that transpersonal rage and pain and anguish which is somehow coming in a direct unbroken lineage straight from the Middle Passage through Huddie Ledbetter into this twerpy little guy from parochial Aberdeen, Washington, with his lank unwashed blonde hair of depression and his ratty gray too-big thrift-store cardigan and his million cups of chamomile tea and the half-cigarette he sucks down right before they do the song, and all of it tinted backward, retroactively, by the fact that he’s about four months away from blowing his head off in a greenhouse. Depending on what you believe.

[Or maybe he’s not channelling anything and he’s just stricken with jealousy over Courtney, or some other woman; or maybe it’s just a pretty melody.]

Listen to Huddie Ledbetter doing his own song, and you tell me. Did Kurt co-opt this song, or does his passionate love for Leadbelly exonerate the appropriation? If it’s an appreciation, what makes it so? Why can he do this and it’s not as offensive (if it’s not) as, say, the University of Illinois’ mascot being Chief Illiniwek, or the Cleveland Indians, or the Atlanta Braves?

Is Kurt’s appropriation materially different from Elvis’s far more successful version of “Hound Dog,” originally performed by Big Mama Thornton (I first learned about this, not coincidentally, from Alice Walker’s story “1955"). I believe it may be; but why? Because Huddie Ledbetter was already dead?

Before they do the song, Cobain makes the following comments, “This is written by my favorite performer — our favorite performer, isn’t it? All of ours?” at which point bandmate Novoselic says something about passing a basket and Cobain laughs and says, “This guy representing the Leadbelly estate wants to sell me Leadbelly’s guitar for five hundred thousand dollars [his sardonic vocal fry extremely pronounced] but we can’t afford it. I even asked David Geffen personally if he’d buy it for me…he wouldn’t do it.”

Behind this utterance is the fact that Cobain bought most of his guitars at pawn shops. He liked the cheap no-name acoustics that he could destroy without feeling guilty, he liked their uneven, even bad, sound quality.

“Aren’t we supposed to be some big rich rock band with like a thousand guitars?” he croaks snidely, earlier in the set, tuning his own. Tuning and retuning guitars onstage between songs is time-consuming and in fact even relatively minor folk artists such as, say, Patty Griffin, tend to have 3 or 4 acoustics set aside in different tunings so they can simply reach for the right one and keep the show moving forward.

Cobain wasn’t like that, and I’ve known other players who weren’t like that either. They tune effortlessly, having practiced it beforehand, and tell jokes or stories at the same time. Is this more authentic?

What is authentic? Because this is the keyword whose crucial definition underlies the crucial distinction between appropriation versus appreciation.

We have a commonplace that some cultural artifacts are more authentic than others. We have ensuite an instinctive corollary belief that some readings, interpretations, or experiences of a cultural artifact are also closer to its authentic truth or intrinsic self.

Yet no artifact exists outside of our interpretation of it, no story lives apart from our filling it with meaning. Except, paradoxically, when they do.

What is the difference between buying a Christmas present from, say, that annoyingly global free-trade section at Whole Foods, where the objects are made, per Chuck Palahniuk’s narrator, by “the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of…wherever,” as opposed to my picking up tiny Seri baskets for friends on the beach at Bahía Kino, where Comcaác sellers won’t look at me, are bored and angry, count out change into my hand without speaking, my timid efforts at Spanish failing because why the fuck would they want to speak Spanish with an American, none of it makes any sense —

— the insane arrangement of it, of who has what, none of it makes any sense, us staying in the one four-room hotel with moderately hot water while the surviving Comcáac who live in El Desemboque have mud houses with open doors and windows, wool blankets tacked over them, the children dressed in bright colors, dirty-faced, tangled hair, hands buried in mouths, eyes agog, bare feet, every preposterous cliché I’ve derived from National Geographic, peeking out at us as we drive past in Peter’s ratty nearly destroyed 1990 Honda, which he insists on taking off-road in the most remote parts of Sonora and Baja because, in addition to being one of a couple of dozen of free improvising pianists in the world, he’s also a field botanist, so we’re in search of rare cacti (or he is; I sit on a rock in the sun and scrawl in my journal, trying to sort the mixed grains of my brain). We stop at the dusty convenience store and buy food not because we need it but just to throw some pesos into the economy. Back in the States, we store grimy, past-the-due-date packets of pasta in the cupboard for months before we finally throw them away.

Once an entire family of Comcáac stopped their SUV to help us out, shoveling sand with paper plates and Frisbees to get the Honda unstuck from a dune, very merry at our incompetence, all of us repeating the only word we all knew in Spanish, chingada, as in: what the fuck, we are so fucked.

Ineivtably, Pedro’s favorite songs started becoming mine (we’d met in Santa Fe where everyone called him Pedro, it wasn’t an affectation if it ever had been, just a nickname): like this, by Randy Weston. It’s fucking astonishing.

The most amazing thing to me is that while Weston’s enormous Monk-like hands make these infallible leaps across the keyboard, and go off-beat in every conceivable way, the 4/4 backbone is never gone. Try it yourself: start counting out, or whacking your finger or pencil against the desk or however you keep time, and don’t waver, even when Weston starts going all over the place, just keep the beat. And it may be four or eight or sixteen measures, but when he comes back to the count it will be as if he’d never left.

Another: Alice Coltrane, less-known than her husband, criminally so, a profoundly gifted pianist. Here’s “One for the Father,” which is for John.

Black artists are allowed, anyway by me, to poach freely (it’s not even fucking poaching) from Western traditions, which are their traditions. Cf. the melisma or the various keyboard runs from Nina Simone, classically trained, with her left hand that rivals anything composed by Ravel (the liquid comping, for example, at the beginning of “If I Should Lose You”).

Where I get stuck is when the river of tradition, the karmic lineage, wants to fold or bend in other ways. For example, when I first heard Amy Winehouse I utterly fell for her (as far as I’m concerned the SXSW recordings of “Love Is a Losing Game” and “Back to Black” are the best things she ever did).

Out of love rather than cool political good sense, I then decided her raids on Motown and R&B were defendable because something in that music spoke to her the way nothing else did. She’d clearly been another skinny weird kid misplaced in time and space, probably cramming her ear to a speaker in a house in Southgate, soaking up Ray Charles. Here she’s covering Donny Hathaway and, possibly the worse for intoxicants, doing a solid job of it.

But then, then you have to keep going; this is a curse of “white guilt,” as people label it dismissively, or what I prefer to think of as having a fucking conscience, or just insatiable curiosity—you have to keep going, you can’t stop and be content. Now listen to Donny Hathaway’s original recording.

You thought the Winehouse one was good, right? Then you heard that one.

Then you had to stop whatever you were doing and listen utterly, because the fucking duende is dripping off his tonsils. Why? I don’t know why. Because he has it and she doesn’t. Because his voice is made of sorghum.

Thus Winehouse (along with, don’t forget, the Dap-Kings, the soul-funk band she swiped from Sharon Jones) bridges me to a performance I consider to be “real” (authenticity?) — just because initially I identify with her, or think I do; I imagine that I understand her suffering, have some idea I am seeing beneath corporate packaging, feel that I’ve been that skinny self-destructive miserable girl, displaced in my own culture and racked with the desire to get out of it but not knowing how and winding up with one abusive jerkwad after another, and needing to escape them but also not knowing how, because of some desperate misaligned badly attached simulacrum of safety and love; and then, when also saddled with so much projection and speculation and judgment, it just gets easier to not. Just to not.

Does she have the right to those chords, those phrasings, that tradition?

Who has the right?

•

I used to make this pathetic stock joke that in my next life I wanted to come back and be a big gorgeous giant-voiced gospel singer, like Mahalia Jackson.

This was not only a joke but also true. I would saw off my foot to sing that way, I thought.

At some point a couple of years ago, though, I realized: do I also want the brutal history and unimaginable daily micro- and macro-aggressions of the entire cultural apparatus which make Mahalia Jackson be Mahalia Jackson? Or do I just want to sing “Motherless Child” and sound like Odetta?

Obviously, the latter. If I had to live through the Middle Passage and survive the peculiar institution followed by Jim Crow and the commodification of human labor and the mutilated used-up bodies, the history of rapes and tortures and lynchings, the history of averted eyes and coughs and sniffs and rudeness and people calling me by someone’s name when she’s a foot taller than me and a totally different skintone, if I had to have all the rest of it, the whole baggage, would I still want to be a gospel singer in my next life? What is the entire freight of the weight of the burden that makes those 72 bars by Aretha Franklin so packed with longing and desire and refusal and rage and raw need that I want to emulate them? Do I want all the rest of it too?

No; so I stopped making my unfunny fucking joke.

And now I just say: I love black gospel, because it is beautiful. It’s finally stopped being about me and started being more about it.

•

Similarly in what my beloved friend Julia calls “genetically engineered pop music,” produced by corporations to be appealing in the same way high-fructose corn syrup is — there’s always just a shred or a sampling of that bit of the authentic, the same way that handwoven Seri basket adds its indefinable “something” to a contemporary room’s decor (except it’s not ineffable, we know exactly what it brings, what its purpose it) — the radio-pop top-twenty songs which I find myself in love with, for usually about two weeks, like a weird sexual crush that burns itself out quickly when you find out that person reads Ayn Rand or Richard Dawkins, the lust that evaporates like saliva from your gaping mouth as soon as they make some horrifying half-assed attempt at an argument which includes phrases like “reverse racism” or “why can’t it be called humanism instead of feminism” or “men’s rights” — those songs endear themselves to me precisely because they have a shred of black music threaded through them. And that, to my mind, is not an appreciation or an homage — it’s pretty clearly just flat-out stolen, like corpses from sacred Native American gravesites that activists then have to fight museums and academic departments for forty years to get repatriated.

Radio pop singers this year (my CD player broke) whom I have assumed were black artists until I googled them, and found to my horror they were as white as I am: Iggy Azalea (“Igloo Australia”), Meghan Trainor, Sam Smith.

Bands who swipe black music’s rhythms and riffs and use them to sell billions of dollars’ worth of product, without apology or acknowledgement.

My favorite part of any top-twenty song is always the gospel moment. You can find it in One Republic’s summer single “Love Runs Out” — actually pretty much the whole song is the gospel moment, from the bass octaves on the piano to the backbeat, and the chorus’s falsetto melisma — or in most vintage/Nile Rodgers-era Madonna. I don’t even know the name of that choir singer who solos in “Like a Prayer” but for me she’s the goddamned high point of the song, if you’re not too distracted by Madonna in tatty lingerie dancing in front of disturbingly familiar burning crosses, —

Well, fuck me sideways: turns out the choir’s directed by Andraé Crouch, who’s also singing in it. The singer’s name is Niki Harris; she also appeared in Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat (Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Val Kilmer).

How much money did she get for Like a Virgin”? Is that what it comes down to? Is it accidental that appreciation implies “an increase in monetary value”?

Ms. Adele from Tottenham bothers me in particular — the bridge of “Rolling in the Deep” (starting around 2:30, when all the glasses of water shiver as she stamps and the black backup singers clap on the offbeat) kept reminding me of something. Finally I figured out what: the vocal sample from Moby’s “Natural Blues,” which, it’s hardly fair to call it a sample — it is the song.

But where did that sample come from?

It came from Vera Hall (1902–1964), of Payneville, Alabama. Music ethnographer Alan Lomax “discovered” her (as if she’d been missing!), and wrote rhapsodically: “Her singing is like a deep-voiced shepherd’s flute, mellow and pure in tone, yet always with hints of the lips and the pleasure-loving flesh…The sound comes from deep within her when she sings, from a source of gold and light, otherwise hidden, and falls directly upon your ear like sunlight. It is a liquid, full contralto, rich in low overtones; but it can leap directly into falsetto and play there as effortlessly as a bird in the wind.” Well, good heavens. Romanticise much, Professor Lomax? Let’s see.

From Vera, to Moby, to Adele. Semantic depletion, linguists might say.

From what, though, to what? From something authentic? [Yes.] To something derivative, weaker? Why is the dominant metaphor here one of adulteration, watered-down liquid, homeopathic dilution?

What is authentic? What is the world?

•

This summer I went to Sam Houston State University to see my friend graduate with her bachelor’s degree, and to celebrate with her and her son. Afterward, outside the stadium, different black fraternities were grouped on the wide sidewalks, stepping. She kept trying to talk to me and introduce me to people but I could barely hear her, couldn’t tear my eyes away. The clapping stamping patterns so taut and locked and just bonemarrow-piercingly good. You could feel, or I flattered myself that I could, some direct descent from similar Cape Town gumboot dances. I’d seen a movie once (a terrible rom-com, never to be named) with a traditional black cotillion in it, and the men in that film had stepped, and it was galvanizing. This was even more so, rawer and less polished but more riveting and it shot straight up your spine and I all but shuddered, watching-listening.

Kelly is white and her little boy, Myles, is half-white. His black father is in jail for dealing. He gets out every so often but then fucks up his parole and goes right back in. He remains verbally and emotionally abusive to her and Kelly remains faithful to him and I wish she wouldn’t. I wished he were one of these young graduates, to teach his son this powerful masculine shiver-inducing libidinous dance of achievement and pride. Myles watched the men but hid partly behind Kelly, his orange afro peeking around, his freckles.

In these moments I don’t know what to do with my body or my heart. I want to rip of my shirt and run through the streets screaming in frustration at all of us, all white people, especially me, for the uncountable seditious acts of fuckery and betrayal we have enacted onto the world, not even only unto other humans but life itself, as we face biocide within the next century and at this point have gone too far over the brink to be turned back from that.

•

I never joke when I say someday all of us alive today will be considered part of the same poetic or literary school — if, that is the octopi evolve in such a way that reading the vestiges of our written language becomes important to them. If anyone reads or cares, perhaps cyborgian or so-called artificial or alien intelligences — they’ll label us in a great undifferentiated wad: the Late Carbon Poets; the Neo-Capitalists; the Fossil Fuel School; the Pre-Tech Singularity Era; the Final Neocortexes; the Proto-Transhuman Writers.

*

I also never joke when I say that the Civil Rights Era did not fucking end with the VRA in 1965, that assertion is one of the blindest historical whitewashings in my lifetime. As long as police gun down unarmed black boys in the back of the head, unload clips into them and then leave them in the street for four hours, and aren’t indicted or even sent to trial much less found guilty and sentenced, as far as I’m concerned we’re in as bad a position as we ever were. Worse in fact. We’ll be in the Civil Rights Movement until Congress looks like the rest of the my country, until the cast of the fucking Avengers looks like Harris County, until the department’s faculty photos look like the demographic makeup of the street where I live.

We’re still in the past and anyone who doesn’t think so, I don’t know where you live.

Not on my block, I guess. Not in my department.

•

Why is Alice Walker as important to me, more so in most ways that matter, as Dorothy Allison?

Am I allowed to admit this, why or why not, discuss, 50 points.

•

When Julia and I showed up at the demonstration last week, there was a palpable anxious energy, in part due to the usual holiday season consumerist feeding-frenzy insanity around the Galleria, but also the not-inconsiderable police presence. A couple dozen cops on pawing, snorting horses, stationed at the four corners of the big intersection, cautioning us to stay on the sidewalk and not so much as lower a foot down into the street where we might obstruct cars. Sheriff’s office in yellow vests, taking over for the traffic lights, ineptly; bicycle cops in shorts; dozens of officers on foot, one already being hollered at by an angry young male protester, most calm.

The usual demonstration crowd. Beardy hippie couples with babies in strollers; white college girls with rainbow dreads; hundreds of black men and women with faces in different stages of emotional shutdown or activation, most with eyes set and determined; tall energetic young men in Pan-African red/green/yellow/black, leading chants, urging and organizing and rearranging us; always those older East Coast or Berkeley white women with short gray hair, probably Jewish or UU or Quaker, scrawny and wrinkled, shrieking into bullhorns the same chants they’ve been chanting for decades, some with dogs on leashes, some wearing give-peace-a-chance type t-shirts they’ve protested in probably since the goddamned Cold War.

The Galleria itself always shocks me. I say this as someone who grew up in north Texas, and I remember when the Dallas Galleria opened; but I’ve never even been inside. My people, we go to Walmart and JC Penney and Sears and Bealls; we used to go to Montgomery Ward, where my uncle worked, for the discount. We don’t go to Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus, and we certainly don’t go to those Italian handbag places where everything starts at $2,995. I should be used to Houston oil money, but I never am, it always gobsmacks me. The line of girls outside the premium denim store, waiting.

This is why it might have been particularly grimly gleefully satisfying, from a classist perspective, to lie down in front of Prada and Fendi and Bodega Veneta and watch the terrified store managers scramble to lock themselves and their big-eyed patrons inside the gleaming glass-and-brass doors.

So Jules and I just kind of threw ourselves, barely hesitating, into the mob of it, and I chanted all the chants and made all the gestures without thinking, just to keep the crowd energy up and the momentum as we ran through the mall, terrifying onlookers and making the police scamper to keep up. Inside every shop, whether the Apple Store or Victoria’s Secret or Jimmy Choo or Armani, at least one employee, usually a black woman, would shoot up her arm ending in a fist and stare at us meaningfully, eyes humid with support.

It did our hearts good to see her, and we screamed the louder.

It was only later, after the mob part had ended and I’d taken Jules home and was driving home myself, voiceless from shouting, bruised from flinging myself down on the tile floor for periodic die-ins, that I had a chance to reflect on how poorly some of my choices had been.

I went to bed in all my clothes, still sweaty, and lay facedown for approximately 48 hours getting a better handle on my faults and wrongs.

Why had those ancient white women had the bullhorns? Yes, they clearly had decades of organizing experience; but pass those things over to a quiet black woman who’s standing there with her heart full and her arms aching and her brain spinning, because it’s her son getting shot down in the thoroughfare, not yours. Hand it over. Hand over the power.

I read that television and newspaper interviews had singled out white protesters to interview. Okay, but why would the white protesters allow that? Why not shake your head and point and say, Nope, talk to that guy?

Similarly, what business did I have chanting, call-and-response style:

WHOSE STREETS? / OUR STREETS!
IF I CAN’T BREATHE / YOU CAN’T BREATHE!
HANDS UP? / DON’T SHOOT!

Without even thinking about it much I’d adapted around the chants, singling out the part that didn’t imply I was the one being shot at. So I could chant YOU CAN’T BREATHE, or DON’T SHOOT; instinctively I’d changed “OUR STREETS” to “YOUR STREETS.” I couldn’t not chant, I knew that, we needed every voice, every decibel, every ounce of energy to maintain that insane momentum as we hurtled through the loops of the Galleria, not sure whether we were about to be arrested or needed to cause more chaos.

NO JUSTICE? / NO PROFIT!

Other chants were less problematic, so by shouting them I lost my voice:

HEY HEY HO HO / RACIST COPS HAVE / GOT TO GO
NO JUSTICE NO PEACE / NO RACIST POLICE
BLACK LIVES MATTER / BLACK LIVES MATTER

—although that last one continues to trouble me, for different reasons. For one thing, since our country continues to behave with concerted judicial and militarized effort exactly as though black lives do not in fact matter, it’s still not quite accurate —

Something more like this: brown lives definitely matter, as long as they can be exploited for economic and political and cultural capital that can then be assumed and appropriated (there’s our word), harvested for consumption and use by privileged whites (that’s a tautology, I can just say “whites”) —

—plus, it’s not that black lives don’t matter to white Americans, it’s really black deaths that don’t matter, black deaths that fail to capture the attention of the 24-hour news cycle or the outrage of the progressive left, until it’s so blatant we pay some attention, but for how long and to what end —

—and it’s also the quality of black lives that isn’t mattering, that doesn’t matter enough. Go ahead, we say: just do your best, this country is a meritocracy so you should be able to bootstrap your way to some kind of fragile economic toehold on stability and security, never mind the fact that 95 percent of even dumbass white folks are teetering there, about three paychecks away from the rusting shopping trolley with the wonky wheel —

—but to this day, this also has not changed since 1920 or 1950 or 1965: we do want your lives, we want your creations, so please write your music, write your books and poems, enact your fabulous magical powerful libidinous dances from inside your anguish and the loss of your children, Rachel weeping in Ramah because her sons are not; or rather her sons are, but they’re in the Harris County jail and they see their own half-white sons the first weekend of the month, but mostly they’re going to spend that time hissing threats at their baby mama, who still managed to get a Sam Houston State degree in early childhood education and is now teaching elementary school, also two paychecks away from financial catastrophe and about half-a-bottle of wine away from a screaming suicidal breakdown, because here you are pouring poison into her ear that’s she’s fat and selfish and doesn’t love you or treat you right, disrespectful and bad and the only one who will ever really love her is you; which is weird, because nothing you’re saying is loving or tender or even marginally, baseline-human-being friendly—

—and it’s just that they kicked you, we know that’s what happened; they kicked you down and left heel prints so deep you don’t even know they’re there, so whenever you can, you kick and bite back, and human bites are nasty, they always infect, our saliva so filled to overflowing with the inhabitants of the microbiome that comprises us, that is us —

•

At my second protest last week, we didn’t chant, we just walked in silence. And when everyone fell to the ground for the die-in, I stayed standing, holding up my stupid fucking sign, BLACK LIVES MATTER, looking at the undergraduate bodies sprawled all on the ground, — my beautiful students, my babies — and it was too easy to imagine them gunned down, the way they are in Fallujah or Gaza or Ferguson or Detroit or downtown Houston — and I fill up with homicidal rage, which doesn’t help anyone; so I just lock my elbows and hold up that sign like it’s going to do some good, like God might read it and take pity on our poor human asses, and we count down the four and a half minutes for the four and a half hours Michael Brown lay in the road, cut down and bleeding out. I start crying, of course. It doesn’t matter.

Walking next to me on the march, a young white women had a tote bag I’d laughed and complimented: THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST’S TOTE BAG LOOKS LIKE. As everyone put their hands up in the air (HANDS UP / DON’T SHOOT), she raised hers at first, then noticed mine death-gripped around my sign and slowly lowered hers. You could hear the gears clicking: It’s not about me; no one’s gonna shoot me. When everyone lay down for the die-in, she stayed standing next to me, arms crossed over her tote bag.

One idea at a time. One white getting a clue at a time. Too little, too late.

•

Two more stories and we’ll be nestled at the sick heart of appropriation.

My best friend from second to fifth grades was Mary Lou Enriquez who lived across the street with her eyes-averted mama who spoke no English and her seven older brothers, all politically active and chronically in trouble in one way or another; and she’d raise her tiny fist and crow CHICANO POWER! but I had no idea what that meant, just that Mary Lou was so much cooler than I’d ever be; she wore tight jeans, pastel yellow, the color of a dandelion, and was about a foot taller than the rest of us from being held back in school so many years, and she had an indefinable accent that we called “Mexican,” and, thanks to her brothers souping it up, her bike had a banana seat and funky chopper handlebars with streamers and a radio, and when she was being coquettish or talking about boys, she would put a hand on her hip and bat her eyelashes and become suddenly sexy; and I lost her when we moved away from Dallas, when my parents moved everyone to the country to start our cult, and I’ll never see Mary Lou again, if she’s still alive, because she would have married and changed her name, so she becomes one of dozens of girls I’ve lost, women like kidnapped slaves disappearing in a tide of renaming — women not having their own names, it’s easy to lose them, like someone’s fingers slipping from yours in the crowd, in the crush —

hay una mujer desaparecita
hay una mujer desaparecita
en chile, en chile, en chile

Am I allowed to sing that song? I did, in college, in my all-white-girl lesbian a capella group. We swooped and swooned over the soprano parts, trying to sound like Holly Near and Ronnie Gilbert and all the Weavers rolled up into one thrumming tender-hearted we’re-the-good-ones white-girl package.

•

Married for five years to Manoj Kumar Gambhir and I swear on a stack of Physical Review Letters, every single morning waking up and rolling over and us smiling at each other and the tiny shock seeing his gorgeous face against the white of the pillowcase, and every fucking time I would think, with great originality, he’s brown! because my own skin never stopped being the default position; until after years, finally the white face in the bathroom mirror began to look strange to me, and it has never stopped doing so, ever since.

I stopped occupying the default position, to the extent that as a queer poor disabled woman I did occupy it (which I did — this isn’t about oppression bingo, it’s about ineluctable, ineradicable, inarguable WHITENESS, which is everything, in the United States, and mostly everywhere else; it means they don’t shoot you, it means they treat you like a human, it means you’re — ).

Look, when we were still at Cambridge, my about-to-be ex-husband, then 22 or 23 and on the verge of having his doctorate in theoretical physics from the Cavendish Laboratory? My genius husband, who’d been born in London and gone to the Royal Grammar School (their class picture, his face and his brother’s dots of brown in a sea of white), and graduated top in his class at University College London? A classmate from Pakistan said to him, “Wow, your English is really good.” And Manoj blinked and said, “That’s probably because I’m British.” And the Pakistani friend just kept going, acting as though, in Manoj’s words, he’d just crawled off the boat and it was a miracle he could sit upright and talk at all, rather than pointing and grunting.

Talk about internalization.

The only way, in the end, not to appropriate, is to assume one has no right to anything, not even to wine or cats or the night or a lover’s skin or the next inhalation.

Which is true; one hasn’t. One isn’t owed a fucking thing. The miracle of being here.

I was given sixteen precepts when I ordained. This is one:

Peacemakers throughout all space and time encounter all creations with respect and dignity. This is the practice of chaste conduct. I will give and accept love and friendship without using or clinging.

So I’m faced with how to appreciate and not appropriate, every time I sit at a piano or pick up the guitar or open the laptop or open my mouth.

— What’s the appropriate response? — Not to appropriate.

To give and accept without using or clinging. The practice of a lifetime.

So many of the very familiar shapes my hands know how to make, many if not most of the sounds that come out of my mouth or please my ear so I’m going to curve toward them without thinking — they’re not mine.

They’re not European and they’re not Western. They’re delicious to my ears and they emerge directly out of individual trauma and intergenerational trauma, — and not only because one of my relatives gained profit in the 16th or 17th or 18th or 19th centuries, or all of them, by “selling” raped pregnant women or young scarred men on an auction block; — but also because every other single relative since then, including but not limited to myself, has continued to commit material aggression after aggression, on every scale and in every aspect of life, against the people who nonetheless could not be stopped from doing and creating and writing and singing and making.

So this is on a level converse to microaggression: a microappreciation, or a microrefusal to appropriate; my fingers or voice reaches for a note and then pulls back, hesitant. If I include it despite my reservations, I contaminate it anyway, make it mine, whitewash it, because that’s what I am, that’s how it works, like Midas I make everything into a pallid version of myself, the easy-piano version of a rich complex music I can never hope even to imitate.

Right now, Irish musician Andrew Hozier-Byrne (known as Hozier) and British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran both have top-20 blues/gospel-inflected songs. I love both of those songs inordinately but I know why, and I know who’s getting paid for them, and it’s not the people to whom, presumably, both Hozier and Sheeran came up listening and appreciating.

Led Zeppelin are known for having ripped off (and settled with) Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon, and Howlin’ Wolf. They’re not alone.

Bonnie Raitt had this to say, and I kind of love her for it, and it makes me feel better about coming to John Lee Hooker and Son House via her. I’m going to quote at some length because I’ve never heard an artist say this kind of thing before, or start something like Rhythm & Blues Foundation:

[We] started a program to help with medical and financial assistance for these R&B pioneers who were basically the victims of unfair and dated royalty practices. […] 20 and 30 years down the line you have an entire population that is the foundation of our music business — rock and roll, soul music, and every other form of music that we all make our living from — who’ve still never been paid.

When I heard about the situation, I — and most of the people in the world — didn’t know that every time we bought a new Sam and Dave record those guys didn’t get a piece of it. And it was not only rhythm and blues artists, it was all artists that recorded before about 1970 when royalty rates were customarily low. When the era of the singer-songwriter came in, the high-powered lawyers and managers started to negotiate for a more fair royalty rate.

You know, some people walk the other way when they see me coming. We’ve buried 60 people with the money we have. Some of those artists still went to their graves because they weren’t able to have a lifetime of health insurance. Pretty much all the greats except for a handful of superstars that have always made money have gone their entire lives without getting reimbursed for their work. And people like myself, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, or Rod Stewart, who cover Motown and R&B artists, have an obligation to share our income with those who didn’t get paid the first time around.

So without working for royalty reform and sharing your income, it’s another kind of exploitation. (Pause) Sorry that’s so heavy-handed, but I can’t smile about people going to the hospital that have no health insurance. And that 91 million bucks to build the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is great, but there’s also got to be money for health insurance to pay for teeth and instruments and financial help for the artists that put that building on the map.

At the risk of sounding like a true materialist: that’s appreciation.

•

When I show my rhetoric undergrads Jimi Hendrix playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as a protest song, they’ve never heard it; most don’t like it. They don’t understand why the guitar screams like bombs falling, like wailing sirens. They identify his outfit as “hippie” and it takes a long careful unravelling, stopping and starting the video multiple times, to understand why a guy named Johnny Allen born in Seattle might be wearing the fringed buckskin of a Plains Native, and what that means, in context. “What was happening in 1969?” I ask. It takes us a while to get there, but we get there.

6. Conclusion.

Sometimes Julia can’t or won’t talk to me; and the first time it happened, right after Michael Brown’s murder — as days went by and Darren Wilson wasn’t taken into custody or charged, as the investigation tapered off into nothing and the citizens of Ferguson took to the streets only to be met by their fellow citizens all geared up in hypermilitarized overkill — I was utterly selfishly gutted. Well, I was born with badly wired neurology, and then insecurely attached (they don’t speak of postpartum depression anymore as something that happens solely to a mother; now it’s called infant-mother depression because baby-mom makes a little biome together and affect happens to both of them simultaneously, in their closed feedback loop).

But I dealt with my shit, worked through the selbstmördery shame, and figured out all the reasons why she might suddenly and unexpectedly need a lot of distance from me and not have a lot of lead time and also not have a lot of motivation to explain why, because she didn’t take me to raise.

Never forgetting Charlene Teters, the Spokane installation artist and activist who first (unwittingly) began guiding me through this delicate unhappy business of what we so ruinously label ally (what is the world?) — Char, unwilling protestor, who complained to Kwame Ture that she didn’t want to do it, that she was just a mother and a painter, and he had to be the one to break it to her that it was too bad, but she didn’t really have a choice about it: If not you, then who?—Char who said, rising up to her full height and deep alto: “We need you, we need our allies. You have access to resources we don’t, power and media — ”

[and here I always think of Arendt’s pragmatic, Kantian take on the utility of the “disinterested,” discussed in On Violence—whatever her other blind spots, Arendt saw clearly how those flipped up onto the upper side of the binary could work on behalf of the ones trapped in its lower term — ]

“ — but we also,” Char concluded with dignity, “sometimes just need you to leave us alone. We need each other; we need our Native space.” Having been to two women’s colleges, that made — every kind of sense to me.

Thus, subsequent times when it’s happened, I’ve just worried about Julia.

This last bout I bought her a bottle of Riesling and a box of melba toast and some Laughing Cow and a bar of chocolate to leave outside her door, but then she texted and invited me to brunch, so I’ve just hung on to the Riesling to give to her the next time she has what she calls, her face simultaneously angry and weary and resigned, “a Black Girl Day.”

I have shitty days but I’ve never had and never will have a Black Girl Day.

•

The funny thing, not funny but sort of funny, is that when stuff goes down like Ferguson, or even just a national election, I can’t talk to my parents for several weeks surrounding the event — because the subject will come up, and they’re going to rant and rail to me about it, and I won’t dare speak because anything that would fly out of my mouth would be distancing and hurtful and incomprehensible to them and most of all wouldn’t change their minds one bit about anything. Just like I’m always amused when meat-eaters argue with vegetarians — like, what do you think they’re going to do: stare at you open-mouthed for a second, slowly start nodding, and then call over the waiter and order a double cheeseburger because you’ve changed their mind?

I say this because I haven’t spoken to my folks in a month, and don’t know when I’ll be able to, without hearing something I literally can’t stand to hear, like “looting and acting like animals” — and the funniest part, or again not so funny but sort of, is that my parents, in their staunch militia-member beyond-libertarian hatred of government, actually have no love for police.

•

Here’s how I’ll end talking about appropriation: appropriately, I’ll continue to appropriate Julia, because she’s my best friend (“heterosexual life partner”) and we’re different but also the same and she’s a genius and I love her. And lately I think most of my best thoughts around her, so she’s had to bear, unfairly as usual, much of the burden of this essay’s attempts at itself.

So Julia grew up with a Christian mom who plays piano in church and for choirs and writes gospel songs. She realized as a very small kid (sitting next to her mom on the piano bench, actually) that, in her words, “no one actually believed any of it.” So she was always an atheist — that kid who reads books too old for them, who’s drawn to things apart, things aside — who read Neil Gaiman and listened to Squeeze and Elvis Costello and XTC and Duran Duran, and watched Monty Python and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and was a total anglophile, and wrote words, and wrote songs, all this happening roughly around the same time I was a weird kid in Texas growing up homeschooled in a cult where I had to wear long homemade dresses and headscarves, and learn to clean handguns and speak in tongues, and secretly I’d stay up past midnight to watch Doctor Who and Star Trek and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on channel 39, and ballet or opera, whatever I could get, usually mostly during pledge drives on the PBS station.

(I once spent an entire afternoon at my grandmother’s switching back and forth between two UHF channels because, when I turned the knob, I discovered accidentally that for about two seconds I could glimpse and hear a tiny bit of the film Amadeus, which was somehow bleeding through from a neighbor’s cable channel; and that’s how I watched Amadeus. Whatever cable channel it was, they were repeating it back-to-back, the way they did in the eighties, I guess because they had so few movies; and fortunately so, because it took me three or four go-throughs to get most of the whole film.)

So, like me, Julia was and was not entirely of her time and place.

And hardly any of us are, and here is a poem to illustrate that:

And it is you. You say, yes, yes,
And he throws you a line.

Was Leadbelly throwing Kurt Cobain a line? Was Donny Hathaway throwing Amy Winehouse a line? Was Aretha Franklin throwing me a line?

Brodsky said our real poetic conversations are with the dead anyway; with dead poets. (Then there’s Katherine Manfield, crying desolately aloud in her journal: “Ach, Tchekov! Why are you dead? Why can’t I talk to you in a big darkish room at late evening — where the light is green from the waving trees outside? I’d like to write a series of Heavens: that would be one.”)

But when it is it okay, when is it a lifeline and not something I’m using?

Bonnie Raitt says that it was the white kids who came south with their tape recorders and microphones, eager to preserve the music they loved, that everyone else seemed to have forgotten. Why did they love it? Can you even love something for a wrong reason? Is there such a thing as purifying love?

If you think there are answers to any of these questions, you’re being even more simplistic than I am capable of being. I don’t expect ever to find them, I expect only if I’m lucky to be allowed to practice for the rest of the time.

•

As we marched past the Galleria shops chanting, I looked in a window and saw a serious-faced woman, her skin smooth and young, a very dark-skinned woman, as we strode by, and she threw up a fist at me, and without thinking I raised mine in response, our eyes locked on each other, and all I meant to say was: it is not okay with me that I and mine still cut you down and never pay the price; but that was not my fist to raise, it’s not my child I’ll have to bury.

•

Keywords about which I considered writing:

Implication
Culpability
Contingency
Privilege
#BlackLivesMatter

•

You can’t see what surrounds you, the medium you float in. This is part of the insane paradox of being a Zen student: to become aware, to wake up in flashes, usually just fractions of a second, before you fall asleep again — that is, buy into the story, believe your conditioning, slide back into duality and float there because it’s comfortable and familiar. When you shed that for longer than a few seconds at a time, for minutes or hours or, in some rare cases, days and weeks, it can mimic psychosis, being that thoroughly unmoored and unhinged from “reality,” a fish suddenly aware it’s swimming in something invisible and impossible to sense, that everyone calls “water.”

•

All this semester I’ve been trying to memorize Sappho 31, “Phanetai moi,” in Greek. This is fully as pretentious as it sounds because I’ve only had one semester of Greek, but it’d be nice to bust it out at a poetry reading or party; although also, because of having Joseph as my teacher, plus being raised in a doomsday cult, I tend to assume that at some point I’ll be jailed or institutionalized for many years and then I’ll be sad I didn’t memorize more poems. (He had us learn thousands of lines for his class, mostly Auden and Frost and Hardy, but I remember hardly any of it, only in snatches. Same with all the Shakespeare I memorized for the Cambridge exam. They come back only in fragments, usually inappropriately out of context — for example, a couple of months ago I was glueing glow-in-the-dark stars to my bedroom ceiling when the adhesive came loose and some dropped down onto the bed below, and I said darkly, “Stars, I have seen them fall,” which is the first line of an AE Housman poem; and then I never stopped laughing.”)

The thing about “Phanetai moi” is that it’s as true or truer now than it was then, as far as we know. Greek has a burning purity which probably means we’ll never get it, at all, it’s like reading something written by a genius alien race; but to the extent we can get it, we get it. You sit and you watch as he whispers something in her ear and she smiles and glitters in the light and you want to rip off your own skin and run through the streets screaming incoherently because she will never be in your arms —

If I can feel that close to Sappho’s burning jealousy — upadedromâken, epirrombeisi — those stunningly enacting words that summon something far beyond mere onomatopoeia — they’re dark magic, brujería; they spellcast, en-chant (chanson = song), ensorcell; they create what they describe —

If I can feel that close to an agoraphobe in Amherst when she writes her preceptor the most devastating two-word letter in the history of epistle —

If can feel that close to a fictional African-American women’s studies professor in a minor, mostly disliked novel by Alice Walker, a character who means so much to me I reread her story every summer and buy the novel practically in bulk so I can give it to friends and force them to read it (along with Written on the Body and, perversely, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim? )—

Then I don’t know anymore what it means for one culture to belong to one people, or one people to have access to that culture.

I know these three things:

1. A student of mine, a Pine Ridge Sioux man named Sidney Bad Moccasin III, came to class one day with a drum he’d made and it was beautiful, and without thinking I reached out my hand and said, may I see? — and then drew it back in horror, because this wasn’t a TOY, it was sacred; and he hesitated, and then said: are you on your period? And I said no, making it officially the weirdest conversation I’d ever had with a student at that point; so he said, okay; and then I had to take it and admire it, even though now I just wanted a hole to open up and swallow me. I dreampt vividly a few nights later of one of Sid’s ancestors sweeping by on a mustang pony, yanking me up out of the long prairie grasses by the roots of my hair and slicing my scalp away cleanly with a long bright knife, and how real that felt, and how — yes — appropriate, fitting, my body in its sprigged muslin dress falling back again into the grass as the horse galloped on, nostrils flaring at the metal smell of blood —
2. Brodsky said, and I decided to believe this with every fiber of my being, “If you think that there are other recipes [besides self-criticism] for successful poetic operation, you are in for oblivion.” But at some point I decided that was also the only recipe for moral success, whatever success means, or maybe I should say survival — that the only way I could “teach” brown people all day long (what is the world?) and wind up at home that night not wanting to pull out my own eyes, would be ceaseless, merciless self-interrogation. Though I did not stop to think at the time that this might also make it hard to find joy, peace, or self-love again.
3. And Mark Helprin noted that we are all in for oblivion anyway.

In the meantime, every word, every gesture, every cultural artifact — film, song, book, poem, sentence, news article, television show, video, facial expression — has to be mined and examined and pored over and not overlooked, above all it must not be overlooked — because when I stop doing that, and I try to rely on my corrupt instincts, I very quickly become someone I cannot live with, someone I would rather kill.

As in this case:

•

Last week or week before last or maybe three weeks ago or a few decades ago, in workshop, I happened to be seated next to a student who, surprise, annoys me greatly. (This also means that they are in a position to be a great spiritual teacher to me, so I try to pay close attention to everything they say and how I react to it, and study on what the hell that’s all about. Depending on how undermedicated, underslept, or premenstrual I am, I am able to do this with varying degrees of success.)

Since the topic on the table was one writer’s concern that their poem might be racist (and I felt that it kind of pretty much was, or at least it was otherizing to an unsettling problematic degree which was going to need to be addressed if I were ever going to read the completed book without rolling my eyes and chucking it across the bedroom), most of us white students were engaged in that sad familiar demonstration of falling all over ourselves trying to prove that we’re not what we in fact are: also otherizing, and racist.

Be real: I was born in Dallas in 1969 and grew up in a cult in rural Texas and didn’t extract myself until I was 19; there’s no fucking way I’m not racist.

I’ll always be racist. My first instinctive thought about seeing or speaking with a brown person will always be too horrific even to say aloud, but at least I get a chance to remediate myself internally, before I say or do something equally horrific. And I’m more used to it now, the inner horror.

But we still want a cookie just for being baseline humane, just for being not-assholes, not-totally-terrible. We crave the approval of people of color and will contort ourselves absurdly and behave preposterously to get it, because we think it absolves us of our inner prejudice, think it gets us off the hook.

At any rate, here was this young person wittering on about minorities and something about how even though they were “in the racial majority” they certainly would never blah blah blah, to be honest I pretty much stopped paying attention after “minority” because the condensed Reader’s Digest version was: I’m not one of the bad ones! I’m one of the good ones! and the point of this story is how I’m not a racist! even though I’m actually telling the story using racist language, because that’s the only language I know.

We’re all where we are on our journey. I get that. I worked one summer at a New Age bookstore where the clerks used to make fun of the customers, how they’d come in asking for crystals and books on crop circles, until the manager (who was a white guy, former district attorney turned Theravadan Buddhist monk) yanked us aside and lectured us fiercely on not judging people wherethefuckever they were in their spiritual journey, because how did we know what they were headed for, or what kind of ignorance they were coming out of? We got it and were abashed or anyway we shut up.

Or, in another dharma story, there’s this one particularly argumentative guy who comes to hear the Buddha but always picks fights with him and then storms out in a huff, and the disciplines complain to the Buddha about this monk, that he’s not really getting the message; but the Buddha shrugs and points out that he’s on a spiritual path anyway, whether he wants to be or not — even if he disagrees and wants to turn back now, he’s heard the truth, so it’s actually too late for him. He’s doomed to enlightenment, eventually.

[Oh but wait third one’s the charm — the story about the student of G.I. Gurdjieff’s who’s so impossibly difficult and so uniformly loathed by all the other students that when he finally loses his temper and leaves, the students are beside themselves with relief, all but ready to throw a party — until they hear that Gurdjieff has gone after the dude, begging and pleading with him to come back, and even pays him to do so. Because, he says, they need this person there. Because he is — wait for it — their great spiritual teacher.]

After I’d mouthed minorities?! disbelievingly and then, ashamed, clapped my hand over my mouth and gone back to reading about the Eric Garner verdict and trying not to pass out/throw up, this individual continued wittering on, and at some point I must have decided that anyway I’d had enough, so clearly they really needed to be brought to heel; thus I jerked my head up and, as I thought, aimed an eloquent glance at the professor, what means: Hey, you’re in charge here, are you going to cut this off at the pass or what.

But to my surprise the professor was already looking directly at me.

I was startled but I didn’t know what it meant. Had I been unconsciously doing something obnoxious? Did I seem restive or twitchy or like I was about to burst into flames, which is sometimes how I feel when particular students are verbally offgassing? Had I continued mouthing things rudely to myself? Did I have marker on my face, as my students often tell me I do?

I didn’t know how to interpret the look so I promptly and conveniently forgot it.

I was at home folding laundry about four hours later, thinking of something else entirely, when it hit me so hard I had to sit down right where I was:

He had been waiting for me to say something. I was trying to give the power to him (“you’re the professor”) but in fact there I was, the white person who was sat right next to them, and it’s not up to brown people to police our shit, they have enough crap to deal with, it was up to me to find some gentle, compassionate way of indicating to my colleague: okay first of all let’s look at the actual composition of the actual fucking world, or even just the city of Houston, at which point we can probably ditch “minorities” because what does that even mean, maybe you mean “underrepresented” or I don’t know what, but we can work out some way to be more precise than this leftover media term from the ’90s that’s now about as meaningful-slash-offensive as colored; and second of all, what the hell, my talky white spiritual teacher so similar to me, with our massive insecurities and massive vocabularies, what are you actually trying to say, because we’re not here today to collect merit badges of approval from our professor, and everyone else in this damn room is as white as we are, so what is actually going on in your head right now — ?

I was the half-assedly half-conscious maybe vaguely more clued-in white person — maybe — sitting next to the quarter-conscious quarter-century thrashing-in-their-own-syntax white person, and it was up to me to bring them up right, not look to the professor to bail me out of my responsibility.

That, too, then, was a kind of an appropriation. A lazy taking, rather than an active working-toward. Because it’s always easier to expect brown people to do the heavy lifting, since that’s what we were subtly taught they ought to.

•

When I walk with a group of protesters and see all those earnest college kids with their white hands raised in the air, I want to bark out, “Children, lower y’all’s fricking hands, ain’t nobody shooting at your white ass.” But I don’t; I’m not the organizer, I’m a guest in this movement. I’m irritable, though.

What I can do is, when the young Latina journalist student approaches me with her giant-lensed camera and says shyly, “Can I photograph you?” (why? because of my personality-disorder hair?), I grin and spin her around and point to a group of gorgeous tall earnest young men who are unfortunately next in fucking line to be shot in the head if they don’t interact flawlessly with cops or convenience-store owners or neighborhood-watch yahoos — or, frankly, even if they do — and I say, “Go photograph them, not me.”

And then the next thing I can do is grab any inevitable inner spasm of hey- look-I-did-good! and punch it in its glass jaw; it’ll go down right away.

It’ll come back up again two seconds later, but that’s okay.

I’ve had years of practice at batting aside unwanted thoughts and shrieking voices and insistent chunks of narrative that demand to be heard, claim they’re telling useful truths, as if they have anything to contribute. Much of what passes for my internal thought process at this point has devolved to “yeah yeah, uh-huh, great, thanks for that, super-helpful, change of subject now okay” — and then tuning that shit out, so I can actually have a thought.

If you think there is any other recipe for sanity, kindness, usefulness, or writing a song that doesn’t shamelessly thieve the cultural capital of an entire oppressed people — you are in for oblivion. Though you may make a lot of money on the way there.

But you’ll wind up there anyway.

And I don’t want a goddamned honorable skull like Yorick’s. I just want a shopping cart that doesn’t wander, and not to die by my own hand at the end of the play. Everything besides that is, per Raymond Carver, gravy.

I would also settle for the appropriation-free world I naïvely thought I would grow up into, as a kid. Not with flying cars, maybe, or robot butlers; but the one where Lieutenant Uhura would be president of the Federation?

Instead, we got this world. It’s still way more than white people deserve. And we don’t even really appreciate it; not the way the world calls us to.

Mary Oliver wrote this, which I’ve always wanted on a memorial stone: