Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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The Ways of Man

October 17, 2005

From the Gordon Bok song:

The ways of man are passing strange
He buys his freedom and he counts his change
Then he lets the wind his days arrange
And he calls the tide his master

I had dinner at the Black Dog with my father last night; he's on the island through tomorrow. We do OK as long as we stick to cosmic principles and avoid all the messy details of the years we have in common. He's writing a book on livability, which seems to be a hot topic among planners and such. (My father's an architect.) A couple of dinners ago, I made the mistake of saying that I didn't see how he could write a book about livability without addressing the remarkable/unremarkable unlivability of the household I grew up in. He got testy and said, more or less, that personal experience has nothing to do with what he's writing about. I backed off.

Slight detour: Few things get people madder than being forced to acknowledge something they deep down suspect but have managed to keep under tight wraps until the moment you brought it up. This is survival knowledge for anyone who isn't calling the shots, which is to say most women, children, people of color in a white-ruled society, and new kids on the block -- any block. Faced with an imminent meltdown by someone with more power than we have, most of us quite wisely back off. This is one reason that white guys are so clueless.

Back to main road: If I were going to write about livability -- if, hell: under a bunch of different names, it's what I've been writing about for more than 25 years, so make that . . . -- when I write about livability, I start from the household I grew up in. If I'd grown up in a livable household, I would take livability as a given; I sure as hell wouldn't be driven to sweat blood writing about it, and I probably wouldn't have developed this compelling interest in feminism and 12-step programs. Several books could be written about that household, four at least: one by my sister, one by each of my two brothers, and one by me. My mother might have written one had she lived long enough. My father seems to have erected a high barbed-wire and likely electrified fence around the subject. The signs on the fence do not say DANGER DANGER DANGER. They say IRRELEVANT IRRELEVANT IRRELEVANT.

My father's book about livability, it seems, deals at some point with the origins of the universe. When I write about livability, the subject never seems to come up -- though I am fascinated by the theories we humans come up with, cling to, and/or bash other people over the head with in order to make our lives livable. I might, if I were still young and rash, suggest the possibility that herein lies a clue to "the difference between men and women" that gets people so riled up, but probably the difference has more to do with who has their feet in the mud of a place and whose feet are perpetually a few feet above the ground because they don't want to get them dirty.

My father did venture a cosmic theory about men and women, which is risky in my presence because my knee-jerk reaction is to either guffaw or start sputtering. My better self knows that it can learn from these cosmic theories, but my better self is a long-distance runner and not known for getting off the block quickly. The cosmic theory is that men seek freedom and women seek security.

Well, I've been messing around in this mud for some time now, and I think this theory is a crockuseful primarily for what it discloses about the theorizer and, by extension, men and privileged people in general. As Susanna never tires of saying, "Everyone is the hero of her own story." In my father's scheme of things, freedom is cosmic and security is a little muddy. In my scheme of things, freedom and security are so closely entwined that either one is meaningless in isolation. Not to mention that the interplay is the really interesting thing, which is why I was singing "The ways of man are passing strange" on the way home last night.

Men do talk a lot about freedom, but I can't help noticing that their freedom often depends on distinctly unfree institutions, like the military and various patriarchal religious institutions, and it doesn't include your freedom to point out the limitations in their thinking.

Women did not invent the Department of Homeland Security.

The freedom of men, white people, the upper class, the colonizers (etc., etc., etc.) generally depends on the unfreedom of women, people of color, the lower/working classes, and the colonized (etc., etc., etc.).

Without a certain amount of security, like having a roof over my head and knowing where my next meal is coming from, I am not free to write. If my livelihood depended on shutting up, I would shut up.

This whole "war on terror" thing, or "war on terra," as Molly Ivins calls it, is about men tearing down laws, forests, whatever gets in the way, in search of security. Which, by some mental prestidigitation, they call "freedom." Most women learn early on to live with lack of security, much of it traceable to the threat of male violence. Men could learn a lot from women about how to live with uncertainty and fear.

Got another song running through my head now: "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose / Nothing ain't worth nothing, but it's free."

 

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