The Futilitarians

  DECEMBER

  Sharing Bread

  We found ourselves at the bottom of the year, on the final page of our kitchen’s Saturn Bar calendar, whose blunt utilitarian design has not changed for decades. Every year, the first week of January, I lay my two bucks down on the bar for my calendar and every year it looks exactly the same, the ringed planet remains slightly tilted though centered above the St. Claude Avenue address and phone number, the red border and blue lettering on the white field never vary. Only the days, years, centuries, have changed on it. December is the holdout month—all the others torn away, maybe a bit of March or August snagged beneath the grip of the staples. Tucked between the calendar and wall was Chris’s portentous New Year’s postcard with the Mayan calendar that we kept up all year long. Dad had died shortly after we received it.

  Next to Chris’s year-old postcard was a recent Christmas card from my brother’s client in a chartreuse envelope, stamped DEATH ROW with the same wavering ink across the tops of the letters. He wished Love, Peace and the Joy of Jesus to fill our hearts and homes. His case, like most death-penalty cases, would continue to grind through the system. Ronald had been lucky, the dedication of Dad and his colleagues had paid off.

  With Dad gone, the holidays were fraught. He had been a true patriarch, which meant that his absence created some fraying of relationships and shifting of roles within the family. Growing up in a crowd, you sometimes forget how thick the attachments can become and how they work on you in ways you don’t even realize. In an effort to stabilize, we were spending too much time together, permissive holiday drinking taking on an extra dimension. As middle-aged siblings, our problems were becoming more baroque, and our children’s problems more complex. And now here was December, so dense with familial and social obligation, all the scheduled giving and the annual rituals, much of which I do love, especially now that I have children of my own. Plus I just missed my dad. He loved Christmas, a sanctioned time to indulge his love of excess and family, his outsized generosity.

  Because of the way the civil and Catholic liturgical calendars align, we end the year celebrating the same event we celebrated back in January with the Epiphany: the birth of Christ. But in December, the focus is still pretty much on the human miracle of birth (save the virgin-mother angle), like every other human miracle of birth. Each Christmas morning since we were children, my mother has read us, and now reads to our children, too, the story of the Nativity. Before the presents, before the too-huge breakfast and a day spent recovering from our bounty, selves overextended in so many ways, she focuses us on that one moment, on the humble birth of possibility, of redemption through love and forgiveness, in a straw-strewn stable, animals and angels in attendance. As you got older, that moment was made even more precious because you had to protect it in your heart against what you learned soon followed the birth—thousands of years of bloodshed and intolerance in that babe’s name. But still, the year is bookended with good news, even if suffering is unavoidably sandwiched in between.

  December’s ECRG reading felt like a true holiday offering from Michael L., newish to the group, early thirties, a writer and singer for a band whose music is all dark sustained tension and no release. We taught together in the same department, and with his uniform of black T-shirt and jeans, and a heavy curriculum of Eastern European literature, I’d been surprised to learn he was from San Jose, California. Michael L. had chosen a selection of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s crônicas, published during the late 1960s and early ’70s. The crônica is a literary form unique to Brazilian journalism, like a regular newspaper or magazine column, but short or long, topical or philosophical, produced by some of the most prominent writers of the day, who were given unimaginable freedom of style and content. To American consumers of newspapers, it might seem crazy that Lispector’s intimate, strange pieces appeared in a daily paper. Hard to imagine waking up in the morning, mind fresh and receptive to the new day, reading about local politics, soccer scores, sales on shoes, and then coming across this:

  I wake up in a rage. I am thoroughly dissatisfied with this life. Most people are dead without realizing it or they live like charlatans. And instead of giving, love makes demands. Those who show us affection expect us at least to satisfy some of their needs. Telling lies brings remorse. And not to lie is a gift the world does not deserve. And I am not even capable of smashing crockery like the semi-paralysed little girl when she took her revenge. I am not semi-paralysed. Although something deep down tells me we are all semi-paralysed. And we die without so much as an explanation. And worst of all—we live without so much as an explanation.

  That Lispector crônica, called “Dies Irae” (“Day of Wrath”), read by Brazilians at cafés, bus stops, and kitchen tables on October 14, 1967, goes on from there for about a thousand more words, scorches through the papery layers of the quotidian straight to the bloody heart of the day as you sip your coffee.

  Lispector, considered one of the greatest Brazilian writers of the twentieth century, is a literary figure whose biography sometimes overshadows her writing, because it’s just too interesting and instructive, in a painful sort of way. Her Jewish parents escaped war-ravaged Ukraine months after her birth there, in 1920, after an arduous, years-long journey of privation and anti-Semitic persecution, during which time her mother was gang-raped by Russian soldiers, contracting syphilis, which eventually rendered her “semi-paralysed.” The family ended up in the northeastern Brazilian city of Recife, her brilliant father struggling as a street peddler, her ailing mother reduced to sad statuary in a rocker on their balcony, until she died when Clarice was nine. Lispector never saw her birthplace again, and Portuguese was always her “native” language. From these dramatically muddled geographical origins, identity and belonging were themes that became central to her work. Lispector often claimed that she “belonged to Brazil” while asserting her transcendent “otherness,” which many critics connect to a tradition of Eastern European Jewish mysticism. She seemed to live and write both the tension of the border and the full-feeling of the universal. Identity was one border she tried to dissolve to achieve a kind of divinity or understanding, but of course, it’s also one we need, as people, for our sanity and humanity. So, which borders do we embrace, as individuals? Which do we transcend, as a species?

  Lispector’s first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, about a young woman struggling spiritually with the conformist demands of marriage, was published when she was in her early twenties, shortly before her own marriage to a diplomat. It was immediately pronounced one of the most important works of modern Brazilian literature, unleashing a cascade of literary comparisons, as such pronouncements do. When she was likened to Sartre, Lispector countered, “My nausea is different from Sartre’s because when I was a child I couldn’t stand milk, and almost vomited it back up when I was forced to drink it. They dripped lemon juice into my mouth. I mean, I know what nausea is, in my entire body, in my entire soul. It’s not Sartrean.” For her, “existence” did not precede “essence.” There was no need to create meaning through our actions, because we were meaning, naturally, bodily. As Lispector biographer Benjamin Moser points out, her philosophical leanings were far more influenced by Spinoza, who believed that as creatures of nature, which is itself part of God, we are all bound to everything by divinity. Living is the navigation of that divinity.

  When Lispector was compared to Virginia Woolf she rejected that, too, not on literary or philosophical but on moral grounds. She didn’t want to forgive Woolf for killing herself, saying, “The terrible duty is to go to the end.” Though born of suffering, and suffering greatly herself, in another of her crônicas Lispector said she “valued life much too dearly” to kill herself.

  Her love of life would become increasingly challenging. As what tethered her to the Trivial Plane fell away—her structured life as a diplomat’s wife after her divorce, the magnetizing beauty of her youth as she aged—she increasingly occupied the Tragic Plane. Her personal eccentricit
y became more pronounced, as if she were giving herself over to the strangeness and difficulty that her creative work was known for. Theatrical makeup, hostess-distressing social anxiety, insomnia, middle-of-the-night phone calls to friends. Her two addictions, cigarettes and sleeping pills, led to a terrible fire one night in her apartment, causing her nightgown to melt to her legs, leaving her with excruciating burns over much of her body and a permanently disfigured writing hand, though her face was spared. Months of hospital convalescence followed. As they removed the stitches from between her fingers, she did not miss the opportunity to scream, loud and hard and long, not only from the pain, but “for the past the present and even the future.” This wasn’t Ivan Ilyich’s wrenching deathbed-revelation scream, but a scream for the knowledge that she seemed to have been born with.

  For someone deeply concerned with the eternal, the mystical, Lispector was also so vain about her looks that toward the end of her life she hired a professional makeup artist to come to her home monthly and apply semi-permanent cosmetics. The power of female vanity should never be underestimated—he was instructed to do the job even if she was passed out from the sleeping pills. He complained that the mascara was the hardest to do when she was in that state. Makeup is one of the most common of identity borders, an acknowledgment of the temporal, the material, the reflexivity of the social self. A beautiful friend in her fifties once told me that one of the worst things about aging was that no one looks at you anymore. You spend half a lifetime taking in the gaze, building part of your identity around it, and then the gaze, tenuous to begin with, disappears, and you’re removed from the larger network of physical desire.

  Years ago, on an uncommonly breezy summer afternoon in the French Quarter, I was having drinks at the Chart Room, doors open to the street so tables and air-conditioning straddled the hot sidewalk. Short skirts and sundresses were being whipped up before hands could subdue them, creating an almost comic, helpless concatenation of male whiplash. Something so animal was igniting up and down Chartres Street, among all types of people, flashing flesh and naked glancing. It occurred to me that whether you find it threatening or affirming when your face, breasts, and ass are checked out on the street by men, you’re just one of millions being fleetingly appraised on the sidewalks of the world, a world perpetually replenished with younger women, more beautiful women, who will themselves age, because one day each of us will gray into anonymity on the gray sidewalks of the world and then what? Lispector’s Spinozan exaltation of the natural must have been complicated by her being so abundantly gifted with physical beauty, only to endure the treachery of nature, indifferently taking it all away. Then again, another friend, on her fifty-first birthday, told me that that’s one of the most liberating things about aging. Not worrying about the gaze anymore, you have more energy to focus on yourself.

  The crônicas appeared toward the end of Lispector’s relatively short life (she died on the eve of her fifty-seventh birthday), some of them dictated from her hospital bed. They were written with the open and fearless vulnerability of someone who has let go of a great deal of worldliness. While she was famous for her ambitious, abstruse novels and short stories, some of which she herself claimed not to understand, many readers connected more readily to the democratic, accessible format of her crônicas, these personal missives to the public: short narratives, memories, anecdotes, philosophical fragments. Some of the pieces Michael L. had selected were only a couple of sentences long, like “The Gift”:

  Perhaps love is to give one’s own solitude to others? For it is the very last thing we have to offer.

  Or “Searching”:

  A cat did so much wailing during the night that I have rarely felt such compassion for the living. It sounded like grief, and in human and animal terms that is what it was. But could it have been sorrow, or was it “searching,” that is to say “searching for”? For everything alive is searching for something or someone.

  The search. There it was again. At every ECRG meeting wine bottles are uncorked, quotes on pages located, reading glasses adjusted, and the search reasserts itself. Preacher-kings, philosophers, scientists, suicides, swimmers, lawyers, chanteurs, traveling salesmen, poets. All searchers. As Lispector points out, searching is a natural state for us animals. In a world that’s constantly endangering our natural state, the search is made more difficult, even as searching has become such a routine function of our daily lives. We now have “search engines” prowling a vast conglomeration of human knowledge and information, but those same technologies, while helpful and world-expanding, are also vastly exploited to sell us stuff and dazzle us with our own self-fascination. The real search gets shut down.

  But what is the “real search”? Every few meetings someone inevitably asks, with varying levels of exasperation, either mock or gentle or intense, “What’s the point?” What were we trying to achieve? That night in December when the question lanced the discussion, the room quieted as responses pooled at the surface of our thoughts.

  Well, Michael L. finally said, all he knew was that he’s happiest when he’s having these types of discussions about art or literature, or having sex. I totally understood. That was all part of the search, animal and human. If done properly, with the right people, both are ways of connecting with others, a sort of enacting what we’re here for in a larger sense, of contributing to the elevation of the self through the dissolution of the self. I’d add spending time with my kids and family to Michael L.’s happiness equation.

  Lispector claimed that she had “three experiences” in life: “I was born to love others, I was born to write, and I was born to raise children.” For her, being a mother trumped the other two experiences, though it was the most fraught and difficult, the one that you have the least control over and that has the deepest moral resonance. “With the birth of a child every woman puts her hand to her throat and knows her child will have to fall as Jesus did, bear the cross and fall under the weight of it.”

  Since this is a feeling I experience with such abiding dread sometimes, I wrote that quote in my daily planner, alongside chores and household projects and reminders. When Mom and I were driving up to Angola to visit Ronald, riding through ghostly winter swamps and fallow farmland, the refineries enervating every horizon with their confounding systems, I took advantage of those captive highway hours to ask her the questions that pile up between visits, ones I’m always forgetting to ask at breakfast. I read her that Lispector quote and asked her if she’d ever felt that same nagging apprehension of having given birth to a being that is going to suffer and die. Eight of them, actually.

  She’d insisted on driving up, and watching her face in profile, I immediately felt bad for asking. She said no, never. She remembered so clearly that when she took Rebecca and Rachel for their first checkup, she walked through the examination room doors with the babies and our pediatrician said, “Those are your jewels you’re holding.” Mom teared up, and paused, hands even on the steering wheel. “And I always felt so positive about you all and never dwelt on the negative. Children must all be loved, fully, not knowing what they become. Like when God puts us out in the world, knowing that some of us will fall greatly. He loves us all equally.”

  We had turned onto Highway 66, the final, most bucolic stretch of the ride to Angola, cinematic pastures with wide-chinked, canted sheds and tractors rust-frozen somewhere in the last century. Mom seemed to have moved on from the conversation, and ruefully pointed out the sign for Solitude Road, and another for the Cat Island Wildlife Refuge, home to colossal thousand-year-old bald cypresses, which we absolutely had to visit the next time we were here. I was still mulling. Why hadn’t I inherited Mom’s positivity? Could I will it into me? Why did my mind seek out the trouble, the problem, the threat? And even though unconditional love couldn’t save her two youngest, her faith in it never wavered—she still reaches back through all of those harrowing, difficult years to her two jewels. When we arrived at Angola’s visitors’ building, Mom, the most mothe
rly mom I’ve ever encountered, remained chatty and cheerful as she was processed with so many other mothers who’d traveled long distances, some of whom knew their sons would die in Angola, chatty and cheerful as she was closed into the plywood box and sniffed by a drug dog, guided through metal detectors, sent back to the car to put on a sweater because her white long-sleeved cotton shirt was too sheer, patted down by guards and paperwork-checked, as suspect as any of us.

  But Mom’s positivity is not without pain. She does share the same knowledge as Lispector—that of the inevitable fall. Lispector’s firstborn son was schizophrenic, and she helplessly watched his decline from brilliant precociousness to screeching madness. Having witnessed Susan’s struggle with her firstborn’s addiction and Mom and Dad’s decade-long grappling with the twins, I approached motherhood with caution, knowing that no matter how hard you try, sometimes genetics or chemistry or evolution works against your maternal love. You can only love your hardest and do your best. Since I associate my own experience of childbirth with the wholesale destruction of Hurricane Katrina, the bureaucratic language of disaster response came naturally to my attitude toward child rearing, akin to an Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson at a press conference: “managing expectations” and “mitigating hazards.”