170. HIGHWAY 90. THE JOBS ARE GONE

From the Archives

(November 2005) Southern fried rocker Charlie Daniels sings a song about missing the Carolina of his childhood that includes a little boy with a waggledy-tailed puppy, thus rivaling Mary Chapin Carpenter’s song about the short-lived kittens that were born on her old demin shirt in manufactured hokiness.

Despite Charlie’s hokiness though, he does include a line that captures perfectly my response to driving through the rural low country last week: Carolina, I knew you before the highways got to you.

It is impossible for me to drive those rural roads now without hearing Nanci Griffith singing Hwy 90. The jobs are gone. I see lights in farmhouse windows way out in the middle of nowhere and imagine the graying couple inside, getting by on their Social Security checks and what they can grow in the garden now that the mills and factories have moved overseas.

These days, they’re resigned to the fact that their children have moved to Raleigh or Atlanta or Chapel Hill or Charleston or maybe Portland or New York or Seattle and they won’t ever return to Smallville Carolina. Ever.

The rural roads of my childhood are beautiful, are holy to me, with Spanish moss hanging off the knuckles of gnarled old oak trees and winding mysterious roads set between wide trees that make music when the wind blows through their branches.

The low country, then and now, smells like wisteria and honeysuckle and it sparkles with fireflies. It is lush and occasionally magical and the seafood is fantastic. But, boy, is it ever conservative.

Those country stores that sold Nehi’s and boiled peanuts and pickled pigs feet are gone. Ditto the peach stands run by large black women with paper church fans or those vegetable stands run by a toothless white men who want to talk about Jesus.

Now there are Arby’s and Subways and Wendy’s and Walgreens and the occasional Ruby Tuesddays, just as there are on any northern highway.

And how can I begin to describe the tackiness that is Myrtle Beach?

Imagine a white sand landscape slathered in giant plastic water slides bursting out of brightly painted concrete-block buildings with the jaws of a giant shark constructed around a cheap Lowe's door in between the ubiquitous Hooter’s or XXX Gentlemen’s Clubs; add a million multi-colored fire-breathing putt-putt courses and too many Calabash-style (fried) seafood restaurants to count and you get the general idea.

I took those local roads to a spiritual retreat center and, let me tell you, it felt as if I had returned to paradise when I finally turned off the main drag into those woods. The retreat is on 500 acres of virgin forest with lagoons and lakes and wetlands and, of course, a private beach.

Their message: go inside yourself and find silence in order to grow spiritually, but recognize that you can get there through any number of different spiritual paths.

It’s been an exhausting semester, and this silence allowed me to see glimpses of myself again.

I stayed in a lakefront cabin with a screened-in porch across the front—an excellent place for writing and observing snakes crawling down pine trees.

My bedroom door opened onto this porch, so I opened my eyes in the morning to gorgeous pink sunrises over the lake.

And the place was quiet! Very few people were on the land and most of them were gentle souls trying to live authentically in a plastic, throwaway culture ... if only for a week.

I have to admit that returning to civilization has been more than a little jarring.

135. CRICKET AND BULLFROG LULLABIES

From the Archives

(August 2005) I’m reading My South: A People, A Place, A World of Its Own and trying to convince myself to go to sleep, but thunder is rolling across the sky and lightning is flashing in jagged electric spasms and, just as when I was a kid, here I sit mesmerized by it all and I just don’t want to go to sleep and miss anything.

From the book:

My South is a tree comforting me. Its ivory velvet blooms emitting fragrances of exotic places. Lemon verbena fondly familiar from sea islands to grand plantations. Standing through centuries of hurricanes and sultry evenings silhouetted by the Carolina moon.—Carol Furtwangler

and

In my south, crickets and bullfrogs are my lullaby.—Edward Jack Smith

and

In my South, secrets are heirlooms and politeness is a way of life.—Carol Furtwangler

So one of my rabidly Southern Baptist aunts is determined to cure me of my uh choice to be a dyke and is offended now because I took a lesbian to my uncle’s funeral.

(Yeah and we touched your Baptist doorknobs too so WATCH OUT or we just might rub off on you.)

She is now advising me to

please read the enclosed Scripture. You are a great influence to your family. They love you very much and so do I. We can all repent and see our loved ones again for eternity.

She also sent the program from their church service held the Sunday after my uncle’s funeral with its so-called Message from God’s Word entitled “What The Bible Says About Homosexuality: Isaiah 5:20.”

(Was it our nose rings that gave it away? Glad we made such an impression!)

So here are some extra Bible verses that my auntscribbled onto her envelope: 1 Tim 1:9 • Leveticus [sic] 20:13 • Deuteronomy 23:17 • Romans 1:26 • 1 Cor 6:9 • Jude 1:7 • Matthew 7:1-6 (because you can never say that Medea fails to keep you informed).

I’m toying with the idea of donating Stranger at the Gate to their church library, but suspect they’d never actually place it on the shelves. Maybe I’ll donate a book in honor of my aunt too!

BEST OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: burden creole

(Hmmm. I might have to write a poem about Burden Creole. Maybe one similar to that Wander, Indiana, poem ... and THAT’s an obscure poetry reference that only a few people will get. Sorry.)

15. BODY HOLLOWS

From the Archives

(March 2005) Sunday night. I pulled out clay yesterday but never got around to sculpting anything. Have been wanting to shape something with my hands, which is a very different creative process than painting or drawing, less cerebral.

There’s something very satisfying about digging your hands down into your medium, getting them dirty, something very sensuous about molding a human form accurately out of clay.

Shaping it with your hands really makes you think about the hollows and curves of the human body, makes you pay attention. Tactile.

Or maybe this is just sexual frustration....

Guess I won’t get to experience this sensuous pleasure for a couple more weeks though, since I’m off to the lowlands soon and the process is really not very satisfying if you can’t complete at least the basic form in your initial sitting.

A sculpture is like a poem that way. I fine-tune poems to the nth degree after writing them and am always walking around with them in my head, trying to find a more precise word or phrase or image that will make them a little cleaner, a little tighter, that might scan a little better while providing deeper meaning, better music, nuance. Whatever.

I edit them on an ongoing basis, but really have to get the whole poem down on paper in my initial sitting or it’s lost.

Got up at 6 this morning and worked for nearly 7 hours on the second edition of my completely subjective compilation of poems that I think are good. The book is 200+ pages long and there’s at least one beautiful photograph on every spread.

I got the idea for the compilation a couple of Christmases ago after several friends said they would like to read more poetry, but wished I would give them some idea of where to start.

So I pulled poems together quickly, typeset the pages, made 20 or so funky leather covers, and handed the first, homemade books out as holiday gifts.

Like all rush projects, though, my initial edition contains errors (gasp!). I’ve promised books to other pals and some have reminded me that I haven’t yet delivered though, so it is high time that I finish a new edition.

This collection works very well sequentially, although the only real themes I used when compiling it were the moon at the beginning and rain at the end. I do cringe every time I discover another typo though.

Thought I could proof the whole thing and complete the rest of the updates yesterday morning, but I included some of my own poems in the collection and an unexpected result of proofreading was that I stopped proofing and instead reworked three of my own poems.

The changes are minor—just two words in one poem, a new stanza in another, and several new lines and phrases in the third—but improvements nonetheless, and two are already published in their earlier form, but at least I know they’re better now.

Have pondered one of the poems for a long while but couldn’t quite put my finger on what to do to make the meaning so clear that even an editor on the Sinister Wisdom collective would comprehend my meaning.

Now that’s not a very nice thing to say, I know, but the editorial collective of that fine journal rejected the poem and actually returned it to me with a condescending lecture along the lines of um, you probably don’t know this, living in the South as you do, but the word "nigger" is considered offensive in most circles and MLK and other activists worked and died in your region to make you people aware of how offensive you are when you use that term.

Guess it was clearly time they raised my consciousness about these facts since, excuse me, I’ve been living in a holler with all my barefoot and pregnant sisters and rapist brothers drinking moonshine these last forty-some years.

Let me back up here and say that a one-time colleague of mine actually founded Sinister Wisdom (the first lesbian journal in the US) many, many moons ago and she’s the one who suggested that I send this poem there.

The journal is run by a collective these days though, and I suppose those nice urban lesbians saw my southern address, saw that word, and didn’t even bother to determine what the actual poem said.

That’s the only explanation I have for their condescension, since over twenty readers commented on earlier drafts and not one of them had any trouble grasping that the poem actually comments on the damaging pervasiveness of racism and religious bias and poverty in the south.

The poem’s been published elsewhere now, but I guess it’s obvious that their letter still goads me and I pondered long and hard how to beat people over the head with my message without compromising the poetry.

Seemed obvious, once I figured it out.

Derogatory comments about Southerners (or poverty) rarely surprise me anymore, but they do offend me. You can practically watch a non-Southerner register your accent then drop their perception of your IQ score by 30 points.

Once, in the city, I was at a karate party with the great-whatever-granddaughter of—O hell, I’ll just say his name: David Hume—and little Maggie was so condescending to me that, after she said who her great-whatever-grandfather was for about the third time, that I said “O, who’s that?” in a smart-ass voice (to mostly amuse my friends and myself).

She replied “Where did you go to school?” and I told her the name of the southern state university where I completed undergraduate work—one that ranks consistently ranks among the top ten state universities, mind you, but she walked off shaking her Yalie head, satisfied that she’d just verified how backwards the deep South is and I didn’t even bother correcting her.

Now if she’d wanted to discuss the education I received in public schools prior to going to college, then that would have been another story....

3. WAS JESUS AN LGBTQ-FRIENDLY CAPRICORN?

From the Archives

(March 2005) People are funny today and I suspect it’s because this vacillation between gorgeous spring weather and cold-ass winter days is getting to us all.

First, an editor whispered to me in the local java joint “Ever seen the same student here twice? Me either. I think they’re all really aliens.”

Then, as I was waiting to pay for my coffee, someone behind me said “Excuse me” and someone else replied, “Excuse you? I can’t even explain you.”

And all this before noon!

I’ve also been making carpooling arrangements for an upcoming statewide LGBTQ leadership planning session.

One thing I learned at the last session is that local progressive religious leaders have formed a religious coalition for marriage equality. The MCC pastor who was describing their work said that the coalition came about because local leaders understand that effective movements in the south require religious, political, and legal components.

This group currently includes 250+ pastors and other church leaders, many of whom are straight and all of whom believe that “the most fundamental human right, after the necessities of food, clothing and shelter, is the right to affection and the supportive love of other human beings.”

They oppose “the use of sacred texts and religious traditions to deny legal equity to same-gender couples.” They also strategically place straight white preachers in their media spots.

I grew up way down south in the land of cotton and still have trouble fathoming the fact that many southern metropolitan areas now feature at least a few LGBTQ-friendly Baptist churches. I mean, just ponder that reality for a minute.

The Southern Baptist church I was raised in was so rabid that conservative Christianists can still give me eye tics when they begin talking about their god. In fact, I’ve told more than one such person that I am allergic to their god but the fact of the matter is that I’m allergic to their narrow monochromatic version of god and I get really annoyed when they presume to have the right to tell me what I am supposed to believe.

My father is an enigma to me in many, many ways, but one blessing is that he was a free-thinker in a community that was nearly devoid of philosophical variation and I was the child born with my father’s philosophical bent.

He spent much of his free time reading philosophy and talking about it with me so, even as a child, I believed that the Christians got it all wrong.

God is a verb, not a noun, in my book and she always has been.

Discovering personification only cemented this view in my mind. Jesus is an idea, an ideal, a whispered message reminding us of the importance of recognizing and maintaining a common vibe, a world community, connection. No more high or low, babycakes; we’re all in this stew together—including us LGBTQ folks who frighten the straight-and-narrow Christianists so.

Jesus’s message, to me, is about nurturing these connections and respecting each other and tearing down those artificial walls that divide our common family. This makes much more sense to me than some white-bearded old patriarch sitting up on a cloud somewhere just waiting to punish people for masturbating.

LISTENING TO: Lucernarium: Paravi lucernam Christo meo, performed by Chants De L’Eglises Milanaise
READING: Rodale’s Successful Organic Gardening (springs a’coming!) and re-reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Muriel Rukeyser’s Meaning of Poetry