Wednesday, 14 May 2008
I was recently looking for information on James Wood and stumbled into a bevy of online discontent with which I must, to some extent, concur. I think it started with a long challenge from The Rake in which he takes umbrage at the recurrent suggestion by Wood that there is something morally wrong with the novels he doesn’t like. Rake believes that this moral opprobrium extends not only to the work but also to those who write it and to those who read and enjoy it. In other words, he feels Wood indicts everyone who likes Pynchon or Zadie or Franzen or Delillo.
And to some extent, the Rake is right. It’s quite clear from the works he cites — such as the now famous pair of essays that preceded and reacted to 11 September 2001: the review of White Teeth, and his admonition for American writers to abandon social and theoretical glitter (as The Guardian glossed it) — that Wood does repeatedly call those novel he dislikes morally deficient, because he believes they are not sufficiently human, are not “novels about human beings”. Indeed, he does it again in his response to this Daniel Green complaint (see the comments) about the way Wood dismisses Cormac McCarthy.
Wood privileges feeling in the novel, so much so that he despairs when he reads a novel that he finds insufficiently compassionate. Certainly, emotion is essential for fiction; I tell my students that fiction aims to reveal emotional truth. But I think it important to recognize, as Zadie suggests in her response to Wood in the Guardian, that people are emotionally attached to thoughts and ideas as well as feelings. In other words, I think Wood makes too much of feeling and too narrowly construes, thereby, what the novel might do.
But that’s the sort of thing that can be easily forgiven. What makes Wood seem like a nemesis to so many people is how insistent he is that he is right and they are wrong, that the novels (and writers and readers) are wrong, morally wrong. He makes this claim for moral deficiency but never clearly explains what ethical theory would account for this moral evaluation. I can’t quite fathom how it’s ethically wrong to write a book with a mechanical duck as a character (as Pynchon has done, to Wood’s dismay), especially since the duck has human emotions that are instantly recognizable and so would seem to fall into Wood’s desire to see human feelings depicted in prose. Since Wood fails to make the justification for these pronouncements clear, its easy to assume he simply says mean things about the books that he doesn’t like.
But, if it’s all personal preference, then why all the fuss? And how can he justify such categorical pronouncements? As Laura Miller argued in her review of his first book, the world of literature need not be a narrow one but can easily expand to include lots of different styles and attitudes, genres and modalities. Wood wants to insist on one but refuses to precisely define that one enough to allow for a coherent rebuttal. That hardly seems fair.
Update: On further reading, I found this more recent tidbit interesting. James Wood invited Jonathan Franzen (one of those he has pilloried) to speak to his class at Harvard. Evidently, he was quite gracious. Franzen, for his part, didn’t attack Wood directly but took aim at criticism and Michiko Kakutani instead.
—
andru
@ 5:02pm |
Friday, 28 March 2008
I’ve found my candidate.
“I did not watch any TV” during his quick getaway this past week to the Virgin Islands, he said. Nor did he get much writing done, as he had said he had hoped; instead he said he enjoyed reading a book, Philip Roth’s latest novel, “Exit Ghost.”
— Barack Obama on his recent weekend away
—
andru
@ 10:36am | [4]
Friday, 19 October 2007
James Watson’s recent comments were delivered in that nebulous zone between public and private speech. He was, after all, in his own office, speaking casually with a reporter. The conversation did not focus on his scientific research. Rather, he spoke on a variety of informal topics. But he also knew that his comments would be published. He was speaking to one journalist, but through that journalist he was addressing the world.
It has been important for Watson’s defenders on this matter to cast him as a lone hero, someone who has the courage to say what others haven’t been able to. Defending him in these terms, as hundreds have done on various websites this week, is revealing. What did Watson say? He said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” and “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours—whereas all the testing says not really.” Consider, in addition, Watson’s second statement: that he hoped everyone was equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true.” What do these statements of his mean? I think it might be helpful to examine them structurally.
What Watson is doing in these statements is taking advantage of the gap between public and private speech. Hence the conspiratorial tone, and the offhand manner in which he implicates his interlocutor in his statements. He is using a stage whisper and a megaphone. It is coded language, less carefully coded, perhaps, than what a Republican candidate campaigning in the southern US might say, but coded all the same. Whatever else might be going on here, it’s clear that Watson has an idea of “our” which is distinct from “Africa” or “black.” He gives this binary opposition a further twist when he implies that on one side you have “people” and on the other “black employees.”
Quite apart from the inaccurate assertions he makes about differences in intelligence, Watson commits a more fundamental error here. He seems to genuinely believe that there’s an in-group that is not and cannot be the same as African people. It certainly would not seem so to someone who has a lifetime habit of thinking of his in-group in terms of whiteness and maleness. It would not seem unethical at all. It would seem normal. That is the problem.
Watson is a geneticist. As such, he knows that the genetic diversity on the African continent far surpasses anything outside it. As difficult as it is to generalize about Europeans in genetic terms, it is even more difficult to generalize about Africa. Whereas Europeans represent a movement of selected populations from East Africa, via the Levant, into the European peninsula, the African population is largely what it has long been: a staggeringly complex web of human diversity. To compare the two in general terms would be like comparing a pair of Tiepolos with the entire artistic output of the Netherlands in the 17th century. It would make no sense.
Watson no doubt knows these things in theoretical terms. However, his urgent need to defend his privilege trumps this knowledge. He talks about Africa, but it means nothing, really. It is merely a word denoting the despised Other. It means only that his own whiteness is a valuable source of self-esteem to him. That Watson does not anywhere in the conversation say “ white” or Europe is, I think, also signal. For him, these categories constitute normality. To be white, to be of purely European descent, is to be “we.” He talks about “our social policy,” and so on. The “our” in question is a racialized in-group that includes the white journalist in conversation with him, the all-white readership he imagines for the Sunday Times, and also includes the world of work where the “people” who do the hiring are white.
What Watson’s “our” does not include is scientists of any other race, or readers of the paper who might be black or Asian, or indeed most of the population of the world. These nodes of exclusion will be familiar to any non-white person who has had to function in a majority-white environment.
Watson’s insinuations are intended, foremost, to provide comfort to just the sort of people who have appeared in large numbers all over the internet to support him. Insecure people, the sort who believe that, as the most widely used study suggests, Nigerians have an average IQ of 67. People who are happy with the insinuation that the average African is mentally retarded, and that to be normal and fully human is to be white.
Watson is wrong here, not only because he gets the facts wrong, and not only because he treats a ridiculously antiquated concept like IQ-testing with incurious respect. For a scientist, these are damaging gaffes, but they are forgivable. He is more egregiously wrong because he does linguistic violence to entire populations of people. In other words, he’s not wrong like Copernicus, he’s wrong like Goebbels.
His “our” denotes a world split into black and white. Blacks don’t belong. Whites are intelligent and they are the employers. They, the whites, are really the “people,” the “gens” from which both gentry and genetics are etymologically derived. But what about the thousands of Chinese-born researchers and professors in molecular biology today? Aren’t they people too? What about the thousands of Indian physicians in the US? What is served by pretending that the world, or the scientific world, is only black and white? Watson’s binary view is unconnected with reality.
My younger sister holds a doctorate in Microbiology and has presented several papers at Watson’s institution, Cold Spring Harbor. That he might cast aspersions on her intelligence is simply laughable. More troubling, however, is that he, from his position of power, continues to aggressively exclude people like my sister from the conversation. He is not alone. His is only the latest nasty and unwarranted attack on a group of people that is, and has been for so long, under constant attack.
Long after the Watson brouhaha has died away, the old question of who belongs will remain. The question of who owns what, the question of who the “our” in “our social policy” is, will have to be tussled with. It would be a mistake to see the Watson case—or any of the other rash of racially aggressive incidents in the media this year—as a question of free speech or political correctness. The issue here is ethical. When Goebbels said, of the Jews, “it is true that the Jew is a human being, but so is a flea a living being—one that is none too pleasant. Our duty towards both ourselves and our conscience is to render it harmless. It is the same with the Jews,” the ethical response is not, “We need to do further tests to figure out whether there’s any scientific truth to that.” It was a social statement, and it was intended to degrade and to humiliate. When James Watson declares, likewise, that blacks are less intelligent than “us,” he is speaking pseudoscientifically, and with a view to humiliation. What is a “black”? What is “intelligence” and how does one test it? The statement is a social one. It is a social intervention, a masked way of saying “I like our kind. And I don’t like blacks.” Watson’s people, those who share such views, understood the code right away.
It goes without saying that Watson would be unable to speak intelligently about the points of comparison and contrast between Scottish folksong, Yoruba oriki and Carnatic music. He would have no access to the depths of intelligence and subtlety contained within each. Such specific knowledge is outside his ken. He doesn’t know it, but he doesn’t even know that he doesn’t know it. Why would he wish to get bogged down in such specificities? He simply wished to air a prejudice.
—
abdul-walid of acerbia
@ 4:57pm | [6]
Sunday, 01 July 2007
Without anyone mentioning his recent death, a passing we may or may not even have yet been aware of, Richard Rorty came up in conversation with my colleagues a week or so ago. The philologist asked me if I thought, in light of what I had just said in trying to distinguish Rorty’s thinking from the context in which it had been raised, if Rorty were a follower of Derrida.
Rorty and Derrida agree on a number of things, I said, without Rorty being a follower of the Frenchman. They both believe that philosophy or philosophers, rather, mistakenly see what they do as finding or describing truth, when philosophy is more a kind of literature. Each tries to do philosophy in a distinctively literary manner, and the most obvious difference between them lies in their personal literary styles, which I’ve always taken to be cultural in origin: Derrida almost a symbolist poet (his words divorced from their literal meanings) while Rorty is an American yarn-spinner of a philosopher (homespun wisdom in straightforward prose). Both men wanted to show how philosophy might be done without recourse to metaphysical theorizing and turned to a literary style to do so.
I can’t decide if it’s strange that each died, in the past few years, of the same disease — pancreatic cancer. In an email he sent to friends, Habermas writes, Rorty claimed his daughter joked that it must be caused by “reading too much Heidegger.” I’ve come to understand in recent years that each man articulated positions that resonated with things I believe, even though I fought hard with those who took their positions and advocated complete relativism. I still believe some things are right, some wrong, that humanity shares a great deal across cultures and time, and that we can sometimes justifiably claim to know something, but at the same time, I share many basic principles with Pragmatists and Deconstructionists. Although each of them would consider many of my positions untenable, perhaps even false, I live in the world they described.
Todd Gitlin suggests that Rorty knew only one vice, one value that ought to be opposed absolutely: “the fetish for purity.” I couldn’t agree more, although I would add righteousness to that list of vices. But read what his friends and peers have to say about him — I only ever knew people who knew him rather than the man himself — and I think you might find his pragmatism not unlike your own.
—
andru
@ 3:48am | [2]
Friday, 01 June 2007
Paul Berman, liberal hawk who beat the drums for war in Iraq once upon a time, has turned his attention to failures of nerve in confronting the dangers of Islamism (as he calls it) a little closer to home. “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan” from The New Republic is, if printed, 52 pages long. If I’d known, I would never have started reading it, even though I’m quite interested in who Tariq Ramadan is and why he has be been denied a visa to take up a post at Notre Dame University, but once I began I couldn’t stop. At least thirty of the fifty pages are spent belaboring Ramadan’s pedigree, which ties him intimately with the Muslim Brotherhood, founded by his grandfather and internationalized by his father. All he manages to prove is that Ramadan admires his forebears and refuses to condemn them for their excesses, and refusing to endorse (or even to admit in some cases) those aspects of their thought and actions with which any Westerner would find fault: the condoning and encouragement of violence in the aims of “modernizing” Islam.
A more accurate title for the essay might be “How Ian Buruma has failed us,” for even his discussion of Ramadan is done in reaction to Buruma’s profile of him in the New York Times last February. But his protests about Buruma’s portrayal of Ramadan amount to little more than a litany of innuendo and worries. He has nothing specific to point to that Ramadan has done to make him dangerous, someone who needs to be on terrorist watch lists or to be silenced and feared. If everything that Berman says is true, no one need fear Tariq Ramadan, although it might be wise to disagree and argue with him about some things, as when his anti-Zionism spills over into anti-Semitism. But Berman seems to fear him, or at least think we ought to fear him, because he honors people who condoned or orchestrated mass violence (his family), sometimes makes anti-semitic statements (and other times opposes anti-semitism), and refuses to condemn other Muslims for their treatment of women (though advocating the emancipation of women within Islam). These are all aspects of Ramadan’s thinking that most of us would disagree with, but he has the right to hold the opinions and express them without hindrance (and I think his opinions are, from the details expressed in these articles, more nuanced and reasonable than Berman gives him credit for.) I guess I’m not one to condemn a man purely for reasons of association: the sins of the father (and grandfather) falling on the son. I think it ticks Berman off, though, that Ramadan so often refuses to admit that his father and grandfather bear responsibility for these sins, but I take Ramadan as having developed and articulated a non-violent extension of his grandfather’s ideas by picking and choosing what to take from his forebear’s thought, much as I can admire Jefferson and use his ideas without advocating (or mentioning) slavery.
What Berman seems most worked up about is how Buruma elides what Berman finds troubling about Ramadan while criticizing so harshly Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-African feminist famous for her fierce denunciations of Islam as a whole, but I think he misinterprets Buruma’s goal and methodology in his profile. Buruma seems to have found Ramadan an interesting, earnest Islamic scholar and thinker who we don’t need to fear, and so tried to paint such a picture for his readers. Buruma’s portrayal of Hirsi Ali as a haridan who incites controversy, and thence violence, is unfair but not entirely inaccurate. Hirsi Ali does stir up trouble, and she has every right and reason to do so, given her history and experience. But it does no harm to point out that she goads her antagonists (which is not to say she deserves the death threats or any other trouble; she doesn’t).
But I think Berman (and perhaps Buruma before him) sets up a false dichotomy. It’s not about choosing between Ramadan or Hirsi Ali. We needn’t embrace one and shun the other, for both are important voices speaking from within Islam for change, for modernization. Ramadan calls himself a reformist and he is, and he’s a reformist we can talk and debate with, unlike most of the other prominent figures of Islamic reformism, whose initials are OBL (or UBL for Brits). Hirsi Ali speaks with the authority of experience about the subjugation of women in Islam and, according to people in a position to know, has made a strong impression on many young Muslim women. Both serve to aid the cause of engaging with Muslims about their place and future in the modern world.
I’m surprised, after all his parsing of what Ramadan means by Salafi reformism, that Berman doesn’t address the most salient fact about the future and present of Islam: that it’s in the middle of a religious Reformation on the scale of the Lutheran transformation in Christianity. In 2005, Salman Rushdie called for a Reformation to liberalize Islam, ignoring the fact that one is already underway. Although I’ve not seen its origins pinpointed by the scholars I’ve read (among them Reza Aslan), I suspect the Reformation came about due to the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate followed immediately by the colonial experience, which both hastened it (by challenging traditional ways and introducing modern ones) and delayed it (through force and control). We are, then, about 60 to 80 years into a radical convulsion to Islam and Islamic cultures and societies that may take hundreds of years to sort itself out. I think Berman understands this (certainly he has made it his project to study the origins of the Islamic terrorist ideologies), but he refuses to see Ramadan’s methodology or ideas for what they are: an attempt to talk to Muslims in a Muslim idiom about the modern world and integrating with it.
At the end of his essay, Berman laments, and is right to do so I think, how much we’ve come to accept violent responses from Muslims to anything they find insulting or contrary to their own values: cartoons, books, films, and fashion as much as (or more than) foreign or immigration policy. If we’re not willing to engage with important reforming voices, at least those who eschew violence like Ramadan, voices who can explain why and how Islam accords with our modern world, with respecting other traditions, then what does Berman expect us to do about these violent reactions. His war has already been tried and failed.
—
andru
@ 5:12pm | [3]
Monday, 21 May 2007
Our little one turns seven weeks old this evening. This morning we took her to the U.S. embassy to register her as a U.S. citizen and apply for her passport (height: 1’ 9”, hair: wispy). She passed with ease, even sleeping through the entire interrogation. We can pick up her passport in three weeks.
The first month was difficult, but we had her grandmother around to help out: cooking, cleaning, holding the baby when one needed a break. Her assistance was indispensable but also gave me some insight as to why mothers-in-law are so often butts of jokes and objects of scorn. Spouses may share a number of annoying characteristics or habits with their mothers, but those habits come to seem endearing in a spouse over the course of a relationship, ameliorated by love and necessity. In a mother-in-law, no such feelings of love or necessity temper the perturbed anger you feel when, once again, your own thoughts on the matter have been ignored or conspicuously trampled upon. Conflicts under such circumstances may be inevitable, but everyone weathers the storm.
People told me I would learn to sing to her, so I began to sing to her. Those first weeks, she would go to sleep when I held her close and sang. Since then, though, singing has become less important than dancing. The natural bouncing that all parents adopt when holding their child has developed between jz and me into dances. For a short while, an interpretive dance to March of the Jawas that looked like a loping gait from the Ministry of Silly Walks was her favorite bedtime number. I tried to teach her to appreciate and follow along with a swing triple-step, but she never seemed to get the rhythm. Now her favorite dance is simply a little hip-hop popping to “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, the first rap hit. She never fails to fall asleep by the end of the fifteen minute full version from 1980. She’s also quite fond of “The Girl from Ipanema” (both the Stan Getz/Gilberto version and one by Nat King Cole) and “Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison.
Her mother can get her to sleep without my assistance but not without recourse to the narcotic that began to flow from her breasts soon after giving birth. When the dope, known on the streets as Mother’s Milk, hits little jz’s system her entire body goes limp and her eyes roll back up into her head, not unlike how Hollywood portrays heroin addicts. Powerful stuff.
One friend, who herself had a child in the past year, said that eventually I would come to feel I cannot live without my daughter. That probably will come to pass. I’m a master of forgetting; once I’ve adjusted to new circumstances I tend to forget what my life had been like before the change. I have come to appreciate how much she needs me though, and not simply to fall asleep. I’ve become, in no time at all, a critical part of her daily life.
—
andru
@ 7:11am |
Friday, 04 May 2007
Anyone who has difficulty believing in our family relations with the great apes, should see the way my daughter clings to my chest hairs whenever I carry her (which is often since she likes to be moving: walking, riding, bouncing, rolling).
—
andru
@ 3:40am |
Tuesday, 01 May 2007
In Hermoine Lee’s discussion of the
novel, reminded me of why I began reading novels in the first place, halfway through my third decade. She writes:
Ethical and aesthetic controversies over the novel have gone on for many centuries…Our judges’ discussions kept returning to those centuries-old debates, where praise for seriousness, social responsibility, and moral meaning jostled against aesthetic pleasure in a high style or a well-played game.
As a child I had never read much beyond what school required except for comic books and the same dozen fantasy and science fiction novels read over and over. When I went to college, I studied philosophy and politics (the question of justice) which required a lot of reading but not of anything remotely narrative (or especially well-written) in nature. The summer I turned twenty-four, however, it became abundantly clear, through a series of catastrophic events, that I didn’t understand myself or other people very well, and I desperately needed a crash course in the human psyche if I were to survive. And I mean that literally. I had never been suicidal before, but I remember distinctly watching the municipal bus passing through an intersection and thinking how easy it would be to step into its path.
The novel served me in a variety of ways that summer and in the years of study and rebuilding (of my shattered self) that followed. Reading is meditative — don’t let anyone tell you different — even if you are thinking while you do it. You sit and do nothing but let the words in, let them wash over you. That meditative state has been one of the great boons of my turn to literature, something that helps to keep me sane. I become irritable when I can’t read. Most importantly, though, I learned something about humanity and thereby about myself; I learned to feel or at least not to ignore those niggling emotions that so flummox me most of the time. When I couldn’t deal with or understand my own emotions, when they threatened to overwhelm and destroy me, I turned to the novel for solace and for knowledge.
I started, then, on the ethical side of the controversy that Lee highlights in her review. But you are what you do, so as I became increasingly committed to the novel as a literary form, and one that had given me so much (my life), I changed. I came to appreciate and recognize the aesthetic qualities that serve to make a novel better at achieving its purposes, not simply aesthetic or literary but also moral and psychological. I came to believe, and I think close reading makes this evident, that aesthetic excellence makes everything else a novel does — meaning and morality, emotional truth and psychological insight, political and historical analysis — not only possible but also successful. I haven’t switched sides so much as I’ve come to realize that everything in a work of literature must succeed for anything to, so I embrace both sides of Lee’s controversy. My problem with Hermoine Lee (and her justification for her questionable Booker selection) is that she still wants to choose sides and duke it out.
—
andru
@ 5:19pm |
Thursday, 26 April 2007
A week ago we came upcountry to nj’s hometown so that her relatives can see the new addition to the family. Eight hours of driving and four of stopping to feed and change the little one, but it was an easy trip. The baby slept most of the way and only cried when she was hungry — she’s good about that, only crying when she actually wants something instead of to signal general distress.
Even though our daughter looks almost exactly like her mother — same face and features — my wife’s relatives insist that she looks more like me every day. I don’t believe them. She changes some every day and perhaps she will come to resemble me slightly, but her features are predominantly Asian and remarkably like her mother’s. My wife says their statements, in a fashion that may be cultural, are expressions of desire rather than fact, a reflection of how they want things to be rather than how they are. They think that since their prized daughter married a farang the least they can get out of it is a granddaughter with an attractive mix of farang features (especially that white-white complexion Thai fashion so craves).
My wife’s hometown, in the northeast region of Thailand near the border with Laos, is a sleepy place even though she lives in the center of the district center. People keep asking and worrying that I’ll become bored. Of course I’m bored, I tell my wife, but that’s okay because we’re busy with the baby all day anyhow. In fact, we spend eight hours each day in the room downstairs, occasionally entertaining visitors, then spend sixteen hours upstairs trying to sleep and keep the baby fed. Really the only difference between the two locations is whether we get to eat (which we do during the day while downstairs) and whether we’re interrupted (which also only happens downstairs). Both places are about trying to get the baby to sleep and eat and catch a few winks ourselves.
The locals keep themselves entertained through their work (which is laidback usually and requires only maintaining what’s already in place) and sitting around eating and talking. I listen in sometimes but it’s generally too fast for my Thai language skills so I tend to drift away after a bit. The baby makes a good excuse for my wandering away because I can go to check on her or hold her. I don’t mean to be rude but these are large crowds we’re talking about and I truly don’t understand what they’re talking about, even when I can follow the language, because it mostly involves people I don’t know and times past. Perhaps I am too easily enamored of ideas and too quickly tired of everyday existence for small town life. Must be why I got out of my small hometown as soon as I could and have moved four times now to larger and more populous places.
My wife, though, wants the baby to feel this place, too, is her home; certainly her Thai registration says she lives here (Thai residents must register at the local office and cannot register in multiple places, so many register back home, meaning in their village or town while living and working in Bangkok). And she seems comfortable here, at least so far when her needs are few and easily taken care of in a single room. I wonder if she’ll feel as satisfied here, in this sleepy town near the border of Laos, once she gets older and wants more things from life.
—
andru
@ 9:27pm |
Wednesday, 11 April 2007
A few days before my daughter was born, after nj and I had assembled the baby’s crib, we discussed the pregnancy and the impending prospect of parenthood. My wife expressed her readiness to see the baby and how connected she already felt to the baby. I pointed out that for her the baby was an extension of herself, not separate, that when she helped me assemble the crib, our daughter helped assemble her own crib, reminding her of her words as we worked. She does yoga, so the baby does yoga. For me, our daughter was still entirely abstract, I told her.
All that changed a fews days later, a week ago now, when the doctor precipitously pulled her free of the womb and now she is real, a living, breathing, yearning, despairing being. She may despair at the slightest provocation (a little gas in the belly, the world crumbles), but it’s now impossible to describe her as purely abstract.
A few days ago, while shopping for diapers, I ran into friends of my wife, another couple whose own daughter was born in January. While the mother paid for their items, the father asked me if I felt like a father yet. I told him how I felt compelled to create a space around nj and the baby, a protected bubble away from all other quotidian concerns. I’d been concentrating upon logistics essentially in order to make it possible for nj to bond with and focus entirely upon the baby. But that didn’t really constitute, I thought, feeling like a father. If anything it was simply an extension of my concern for my wife, of my feeling like a husband. Our friend explained that he had just begun to feel it, fatherhood, especially since his wife recently returned to work and he’d been left as the sole caregiver at home. Finally, they have begun to bond.
When I look down on my daughter’s face, that face that so resembles her mother’s if her mother were a fat old man, I know she is mine, that I will teach her and nurture her, guide her into life, into living. But the knowledge feels false somehow, feels forced, like the upturned lips smiling for the camera when the eyes remain flat. I do not doubt that she is my daughter (although I joke with my wife about how little she favors me), but I do not fully understand what it means to say: I know she is mine. Both the knowing and the mine lack a visceral reality; they reside entirely in the mind rather than in the gut.
Tonight, though, I had a long conversation with her, admittedly by intuiting her contributions. We talked about almost anything: I narrated her life (now we need to talk for awhile so your mother can eat; do you want to be changed), we discussed the relative merits of being a cute baby v. a crying baby, and how one of the joys of cuteness is successfully manipulating people to like you. It was fun, and she listened for the most part (although she never looks me in the eye), and stayed quiet, something she’s been struggling with recently, preferring to cry until fed. In those moments when I held my daughter and spoke with her, when I became the only thing in her world other than herself, when I held her and she didn’t cry for her mother, I could imagine fatherhood, could feel its presence beyond the edge of awareness, still out of sight but certainly not long in arriving.
And for those who prefer traditional baby pictures:
—
andru
@ 3:58pm |
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