Highway 59

Bluebird, Bluebird and Heaven, My Home - Attica Locke

   Last week I heard an interview with Attica Locke on the radio...I think it was during a mid-day errand, so maybe the interview was from "Here and Now"? I can't remember. But I do remember how fascinating her latest book, Heaven, My Home, sounded. 
   The seedbed of this series, she says, is the region itself, east Texas: scraggly pines and farms, ranches and bayous, stretched along Highway 59, Houston to Texarkana. She needed a character to plant in this soil, to show us around, and along came Darren Mathews - Black, Texan, Ranger. How do those three identifiers define him? inspire him? afflict him? confine him?
   Equally fundamental to the story is the social landscape, race and racism in the fall and winter of 2016, just after Trump's campaign and victory. What happened with Trumpism and racism? "Something feels different." Lots of people keep saying that, including myself, and "feel" is the word I most want to understand. Yes we know he emboldened folks to be more blatantly racist, but it has felt different in quality, not just quantity. Different. It's not just that the toxic racist soup we have left on the stove boiled over once again; there might be a new ingredient in there.
   The third leg of her story's stool is an ongoing argument between Darren's twin uncles, William (now deceased) - a Ranger - and Clayton - a lawyer and academic. Both men want to protect and serve their black family and community. William thinks that is best accomplished from inside the legal establishment. Clayton believes that the law and law enforcement are too fundamentally biased against black folks to be of any help. This argument continues in Darren's soul and career - do I protect black folks with the law? or do I protect black folks from the law?
   The plots of these two books are good, the characters are solid, the idioms are fun, and Locke can turn a most handsome phrase. But her sharp racial awareness is the gold leaf of these books; Locke illustrates race and racism a foot, in process, on the move, in the flesh. She can jump right into the sticky 'tar' of stereotypes without getting stuck; catch the butterfly of identity without breaking its wings; pin the tail on racism while still blindfolded-in-love with Texas.



Bluebird, Bluebird notes

• .In the wake of Obama, America had told on itself
• Southern fables usually went the other way around: a white woman killed or harmed in some way, real or imagined, and then, like the moon follows the sun, a black man ends up dead.
• ...for every story about a black mother, sister or wife crying over a man who was locked up for something he didn't do, there was a black mother, sister, wife, husband, father, or brother crying over the murder of a loved one for which no one was locked up. For black folks, injustice came from both sides of the law, a double-edged sword of heartache and pain.
• He got it confused sometimes, on which side of the law he belonged, couldn't always remember when it was safe for a black man to follow the rules.

Heaven, My Home

• Daily, he marveled with a befuddled anger at what a handful of scared white people could do to a nation.
• After Obama, it was forgiveness betrayed.
• ...It gave Darren an odd feeling of dislocation; for a second he actually didn't trust his visibility. He felt as if he'd wandered onto a movie set. He could see the actors, but Darren was reflected in non of the action around him.
• But Darren did not suffer from the peculiar affliction that felled many a well-meaning white person - an allergic reaction to race talk, emotional hives breaking out and closing the throat completely...
• "Don't let anybody steal your grace"
• ...because even here, even in the house where he'd grown up, home was always a reach back in time, glassed as it was in memory. It was still an idea he couldn't exactly touch. Food could sometimes reach it, a pot of peas and ham hocks on the stove. Stories too. But music did it every time. Texas blues were the way home.
• "There is no redemption, there is no future free from their past sins. You give 'em an inch, they'll take a town."
• "...the gilded-lily-white amnesia that is the tourism industry in this town."
• "Perpetuating and profiteering off a fraud - the friction of bloodless prosperity, an antebellum life of civility and grace - while conveniently forgetting the lives that made this town possible."

Acedia and Me

Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life - Kathleen Norris

The Wisdom of the Desert - translated, edited, and introduced by Thomas Merton

What's the angle?
   Norris is a poet and writer, and dedicated student of the Christian monastic tradition. She investigates the role of "acedia" - some combination of despondency, listlessness, depression, restlessness, and irritability - in monastic literature, culture, and her own life.

What is depression?
   For Norris, depression is best understood in a modern sense, either as a disorder or illness: long periods of low mood, low energy, lack of motivation, worthlessness, and hopelessness potentially treatable with therapy and medication.
   She is very aware of the overlap in descriptions of "acedia" and "depression," not to mention "melancholia" and "ennui." But early on in the book she tries to distinguish them ethically: depression is not a temptation or vice, it's not something that you can turn from [repent] or refrain from; acedia on the other hand is the temptation to follow a well-worn trail of irritable and depressive thinking and behavior.
    Perhaps, if we take a cognitive-behavioral and desert wisdom approach, we could say that acedia is one possible cause or contributor to depression. And/or we could say that acedia is an especially tempting and destructive vice for people who are depressed or depressive.

How do you treat depression?
   In recounting her husband's many battles with depression, as well as her own depressive episodes, Norris recommends seeking help from many different angles. Talk therapies, medication, hospitalization, prayer, exercise, writing, rest, retreats, good relationships. The only type of treatment she's clearly against is heavy drinking.
   As for acedia - prayer, discernment, and faithfulness are the main remedies. 
- Prayer. First and last of all, keep praying. Ask God for help, or at least tell God that you feel despondent, disbelieving, frustrated, if you're tired of life and you've had enough of all this junk. 
- Discernment. If you can discern acedia in your thoughts and actions, then name it, or "confess" it. Ask for mercy and deliverance. This will help you resist and turn from it toward God. 
- Faithfulness. Stick to your calling. Keep your little "rule" as best you can. Be patient with God, with yourself, with those around you. Be diligent with your basic tasks and responsibilities. Be gentle.

The promise of acedia
   For the most part, the books I've read all agree on the basic contours of depression - weeks or months of low or bad mood, low energy, low motivation, sleep disturbances, suicidal thoughts or actions, hopelessness, worthlessness. The authors have agreed that there are a variety of safe treatment options but that it's not clear what works or not, or why it works or not. They have all agreed to some basic factors that make you more susceptible to depression: neurotic or anxious personality, negative experiences - especially in childhood, depression in the family, chronic pain or other chronic conditions.
   The sticky interlocking questions have been:

• Is depression an illness, a disorder, and/or simply a basic human behavior-feeling?
• Is there a main biological cause of depression?
• What's the best way to treat depression?
• To what extent, or in what way is depression behavioral or ethical?

   I think including acedia in my thinking about depression can help me to address the fourth question without heaps of shame and guilt.



notes

• the boundaries between depression and acedia are notoriously fluid; at the risk of oversimplifying, I would suggest that while depression is an illness treatable by counseling and medication, acedia is a vice that is best countered by spiritual practice and the discipline of prayer
• under these circumstances [monasticism] acedia's assault is not merely an occupational hazard - it is a given. It is also an interfaith phenomenon.
• a parody of leisure [restless tedium, lazy fidgety frustrated pointless]
• "aversion of the appetite from its own good" Wenzel
• despair - when God appealing but impossible; acedia - when God possible but unappealing
• anger as the seed of compassion
• both a sin and an ailment...Aquinas recommends a hot bath, a glass of wine, and a good night's sleep
• history suggests that we tend to be overconfident about what we know, and that we never know as much as we think we do
• acedia can flatten any place into a stark desert landscape and make hope a mirage
• "whose specialty it is to take a dislike to staying in one place"
• monastic wisdom insists that when we are most tempted to feel bored, apathetic, and despondent over the meaninglessness of life we are on the verge of discovering our true self in relation to God
• acedia's genius is to seize us precisely where our hope lies
• Reinhard Kuhn, The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature
• Mary Margaret Funk, Thoughts Matter
• All the miracles are in the past, the people see only danger ahead
• This is truth as the devil tells it, using the lure of being free to be myself to enslave me in a sterile narcissism
• If the Church has made too much of the sin of pride, which seduces us into thinking too highly of ourselves, it has not made enough of the sin of sloth, which allows us to settle for being less that we can be, both as individuals and as society
• Godly grief vs worldy grief, "that comes from the enemy, full of mockery, which some call accidie. this spirit must be cast out, mainly by prayer and psalmody" Amma Syncletica
• "What God does in us always produces humility" Ruth Burrows
• conversatio morum
• acedia like "hitting the wall"
• one step toward that blessed receptivity for "the little things" is to discern which activities foster our spiritual freedom, and which do not
• "inside us, we bore acedia's dismal smoke./ we have this black mire now to be sullen in
• a fortunate selfconsiousness awakens in sin - Henri de Lubac
• to pray at the hinges of time, at morning, noon, and night, when we might be most open to God but are also susceptible to acedia and its attendant despairs
• Jesus reminds us, however, that it is not proficiency that heals us, but faith, and faith does not traffic with success or failure
• I could not make him want to live, but I could be his companion in making a life worth living
• the touchstone of God at work is the ability to recognize that God is trying to get us to accept a state where we have no assurance within that all is well...where no clear path lies before us, where there is no way..." Ruth Burrows
• Above all, Solomon encourages us to enlarge our capacity for enjoying the good times in life and to expect that rewards will come after pain
• When I return home I will face the same old battles with restlessness, impatience, and anger, and acedia will urge me to discount my monastery retreat as a shipboard romance
• "the monk perceives in the mirror of the psalter his need for reform" Dysinger
• If acedia is a distorting mirror, we might look for a truer reflection on the soul in what Evagrius calls 'apatheia'...a blessed state of equilibrium, free from distraction or regret. I doubt I will ever know apatheia as Evagrius describes it, but no matter: just the thought of it is enough...
• ...reminds me of what the late poet William Stafford used to say about writer's block. He claimed never to have experienced it, because as soon as he felt it coming on, he lowered his standards