Riding the Bus with My Sister by Rachel Simon

Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey 
(Goodreads Author

3 STARS

Aug 12, 12

"Mentally retarded. Words we said about my sister, but never said to her."

As children it hadn't mattered to Rachel Simon that there was "something wrong" with her sister Beth. Beth was only eleven months younger and they were good playmates. But over the next two decades their lives went very different ways. Rachel was shamed and embarrassed at school where other children laughed and mocked the "retards," which led her to a sense of separateness and difference, even resentment. Then their father, a college dean, left the family, pointedly not taking the four children: he'd "met someone." The profoundly depressed mother eventually lost all semblance of function and one by one the older children left, but Beth stayed with her. The mother's circumstances disintegrated, until at last Beth was rescued by her father from a nightmarish situation, but not unscarred or unscathed. Rachel was nearly fortywhen she began to get to know her "retarded" sister  again.

There was far too little in the book about the father's ordeal over the next twenty years as he tried to do his best with the maturing Beth. She was not docile; she was not cooperative; she definitely did not fit that cliche about the retarded: "God's little angels." Rachel Simon tells maybe too much of her own personal story instead of the larger picture, but it's the larger picture—with Beth as the heroine, not Rachel—that makes this book worthwhile.

Beth is at last living independently in an urban setting when her sister, the author, decides to try to get to know her again. It is not an easy decision because Beth is neither mild nor sensitive. She is—at 39—overweight, loud, very often obnoxious, especially to anyone from whom she detects criticism. She wears the clothes an unsupervised nine-year-old might choose, including shorts and flip-flops if the weather's "over forty." Her diet is also similar to that of a nine-year-old. She is not healthy. Her main interest and activity is the city buslines which she rides from early morning to night. Its drivers are her social world and their schedules are her schedule. Although Beth has learned to read and write, and could conceivably hold a menial job like clearing tables at fast-food restaurants, she doesn't, and from what we see of her, it would be unlikely that she would work in public smoothly. What she does is ride the busses. Her other friend is her boyfriend Jesse, also mentally retarded. Jesse rides bicycles instead of busses. And yes, they are lovers—that is, the forbidden and fearful topic of "sexual congress" is part of their lives.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the book is what seem to be accurate transcriptions of the bus trips Rachel takes with Beth; Beth's behavior and conversation were vivid in Simon's writing and certainly underlined the main point of the book: there is no easy categorization of people afflicted with "mental retardation" according to some abstract scale--"mental age," extent of disability, or any other single factor.

But in the same way in which the narrator hovers on the threshold between loving acceptance and frustrated rejection of Beth, so the book also hovers on the line between an empathetic portrait of Beth and objectification. It's tricky any time a writer tries to sketch someone whose experience is foreign to both writer and reader. However well Simon succeeds in disabusing her own ignorance and thereby the reader's, she remains—and thus the book does—noncomprehending. She learns, and communicates, why "mental age" is an inadequate measure of the quality of life for any given individual and just how individual, even unpredictably eccentric, a developmentally disabled person can be.

She also learns how little she actually had ever understood the challenges facing Beth at every level, as well as how difficult is any assistance effort that respects the individual's freedom of choice. And why such respect for that freedom is important. The beginning of coercion is always the beginning of a bad story. The portraits she draws of Beth and of her boyfriend Jesse enlighten us about those challenges. Beth is childish in her resistance to seeing a dentist, choosing a healthier diet for her weight and cholesterol, dressing "sensibly," or foreseeing danger or sickness, or understanding how her behavior offends and bothers other people because of the boundaries she violates with an almost utter lack of empathy. But she is also childlike in her indifference to appearances, to judgments of others based on her manners and niceties; she is childlike in her energy and enthusiasm, her enjoyment and eagerness, her tenacity and her concern for those she cares about.

We don't get to know Jesse as well although he seems more serious, more aware of consequences and sensitive to the nuances of relationships. A display of his startling skills in a martial arts routine gives both Simon, and the reader, tangible evidence of the unpredictability of each "disadvantaged" individual. and of the complexities that should unsettle easy stereotypes.

Moreover, to add to the ambivalence, Rachel Simon is only too well aware that at the same time she finds Beth pitiable and criticizes her insensitivity, she sees that Beth has devoted friends among the bus-drivers and her caretaking social workers, and unlike her older sister, does have a settled love relationship. Simon on the other hand was unhappily single, a workaholic, and at burnout flashpoint when the bus-riding year begins.

There are at least four storylines at work here. First, the portrait of a complex adult with mental disabilities; second, the difficulties encountered within the Simon family in relation to Beth; third, the particular dysfunctionalities within that family that further complicate their lives, and fourth, the author's use the story to increase readers' comprehension of the multiple realities of lives of the "retarded." A fifth storyline cuts across these and blurs them: that of the author's evolution and emotional "salvation" during and because of this year of "Riding the Bus" from a lonely, unhappy workaholic to a blissful woman about to be married. True or not, it seemed sappy and detracted from Beth's story.

All of the stories, in fact, come at some expense to the others. The author's happy reconciliation with an ex-fiance was irrelevant hokum to me, no matter how true; I would have preferred more reflection on the general theme of the functionally disadvantaged and their impact on families of origin and vice versa. Her happy ending seemed to me to be of a piece with the "easy cliches" she seems to want to debunk. Now her happy ending probably goes quite a bit further: with the Rosie O'Donnell film directed by Anjelica Huston, the happy ending probably went all the way to the bank.

The book made me ponder how our "advanced" civilization, our "progressive" society, has made wounded, injured, invalid or nonfunctional family members an impossible or nearly impossible burden in the busy nuclear family or its remnants. In Nebraska several years ago legislation was passed which was meant to save unwanted infants' lives by offering safe haven for parents to surrender children at hospitals without penalty. Within less than three months fourteen children were left at hospitals: seven of them teens. Legislators and other conservatives called this irresponsible: "they [such parents or grandparents] were tired of parenting," one person sniffed. The truth is that severely depressed or manic or otherwise mentally ill or disabled children are almost unmanageable by parents, especially since almost all adults must be working to support the family. Laws designed to protect children from abuse sometimes go so far that the guardians are prevented from using the only recourse, physical restraints. And with the absence of universal healthcare so that psychiatric help could be obtained and, of course, since the complete dismantling of public psychiatric care in these neo-con decades, the situation is desperate. If you have not witnessed first-hand the craziness of a grandmother or a single parent trying to help defiant and depressed, and sometimes aggressive, children, you probably cannot imagine the circumstances. The Nebraska guardians surrendered those fourteen children hoping that those young humans would therefore get the care they needed. Of course, Nebraska—the last state to pass a safe haven law—quickly adjusted it to rival the strictness of the law in other states: it now applies only to children under thirty days old. And the discussion of the desperation that had been uncovered was quickly silenced.

I've digressed. This book will make you do that. Which is to say that it is a compelling non-fiction examination of a largely hidden and mysterious corner of society to those of us who don't have intimacy with the mentally retarded, the developmentally disabled.

It was a good book to read for the insights and information it offered. Evaluating books is like evaluating tools. It's not just whether or not it's "good." It's what it's good for. This won't thrill you as literature. But you will probably be glad you read it. 

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat

I wanted to like this book. I am convinced that the more books published by women and by non-European men, the more possible it will be to see the world from multiple perspectives, and the easier it will be to discredit any claim that "we," of course, "know the world," where WE is some monolithic imaginary prejudice.

 I wanted to like this book.  But I didn't.

I couldn't interpret the characters at all. I did not understand why Sophie hated sex with her husband; I didn't understand that what was referred to as "testing" her virginity was experienced as, or intended as, or interpreted as sexual abuse which caused her horror of sexuality. I didn't know until more than halfway through the book that she supposedly was bulimic. I didn't even really understand the overall family dynamics. I hardly understood anything about Tante Atie when Sophie goes back to Haiti, nor about Louise and her pig. I only belatedly perceived there was supposed to be a lesbian relationship involved, or was there? I couldn't empathize with Sophie's fury at her mother's lover after her mother goes berserk, as it were.

In short, I didn't "get it." (I even misplaced the book for awhile—a subconscious passive-aggressive attempt to avoid finishing it?)

This is my first Danticat. I hope if I read another, I will better understand it. I kept thinking of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and wishing I were reading it again instead of this one.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country by Louise Erdrich

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country
by

Louise Erdrich 

Feb 01, 09  2 STARS

it was ok. Read in January, 2009

I am a great admirer of Louise Erdrich, so I was disappointed in this quasi-travel memoir. It read more like a series of daily notes: a little bit about the writer, a little bit about how enchanting she thinks her baby is, a little bit about her important lover, and books she reads, and books she took with her, and her marvelous house, and the death of a tree, and ancient Ojibwe rock paintings at Lake of the Woods. And so on.

I was interested in her remarks about rock paintings, and as always with Erdrich, learned more history of the persistent, and ongoing, devastation of the Ojibwe's cultural connection to living simply with their environment. She speaks of the Canadian government's decision
within the recent past (during the lifetime of Tobasonnakwut, Erdrich's baby's father) to remove the Ojibwe, who "had stabilized their lives and partly recovered from the wave of nineteenth-century invasions and diseases, from their lives in and around Lake of the Woods and raise the water levels, destroying their homes, their blueberry and cranberry and wildrice bogs, and inundating many of their sacred paintings"

As a registered Ojibwe with both German and French blood, Erdrich lives in a present where through her blood runs all the past--native and invader alike. She writes with great power and imagination about all. She tells stories with refreshing unfamiliar humor partly derived from a native tradition of earthiness and humorous survival and appetite that reminds me of the Coyote stories of the natives of the southwest. For examples, see her prose folk-tales about Potchikoo in Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, and of course the beloved characters Nanapush and Margaret Kashpaw in the tales that culminate in the greatest of her novels yet, in my opinion: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No-Horse.

Her imagination for stories, for characters, for incidents at once tragic and comic, romantic and lunatic, is rendered in deft language and amazing detail: "tender new labia of phlox"; "the first leaf already, the veined tongue rigid between the thighs of the runner beans"; "two bluebirds pause on shivering wings". She brings us candid reports and an authentic music from beyond common boundaries of contemporary literature. She writes of young and old, men in and out of jail who are not vicious or depraved, men and women and their children besieged by alcoholism, by desperation. She writes of lovers who become irrationally passionate, hungry, starved for more and more of each other, of enemies who simmer their rancor over decades and generations. Her characters, poor, rich, broken, blooming, male, female, native American, EuroAmerican, all have depth and presence and purchase. None are mere figurants. She has no contempt. The only writer I know who equally plumbs depths in every character touched is Shakespeare; they both bestow attentive empathy on every character. They both find something to love and something to laugh at in the heart of all humans.

I read everything by Erdrich because her stories create unimagined worlds for me, expand my sense of the depth of life in the most ordinary of us, surprise me, delight and entertain me. And teach.

Even this book teaches: of John Tanner, kidnapped by the Sioux as a child and raised Ojibwe, a culture to which he returns; of Ernst Oberholzer a bibliophile who passionately loved the north of the American continent, and his home on Rainy Lake where his collection remains. Of the Ojibwe's ancient rock paintings which I long to visit now. And of W.G.Sebald's Austerlitz, a book of remembering.

But Books and Islands disappointed.

An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas by Stephen Jay Gould

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


These book reviews by Stephen Jay Gould first appeared from 1963 to 1987 in The New York Review of Books, a doughty publication if there ever was one, but Gould manages to hold to his infinitely readable style even in the company of the sometimes somewhat grandiose pontificators there. (I mean that in the friendliest of humor for I quite enjoy NYRB. ) And humor, as always with Gould, is a strength in these ruminations, which use book reviewing as another point of entry to lucid and persuasive philosophical gambits. The humor is spiced with drawings by David Levine.

From 19th-century attempts to find anatomical evidence of hierarchies of race and gender (which merits full and detailed examination in Gould's The Mismeasure of Man) to Carleton Coon's theory of separate human origins, Robert Ardrey's distortions of Australopithecus discoveries, and William Shockley's scaled "racial ratios of IQ," Gould is a kind of flawless GPS to orient the public in the foreign lands of scientific claims. Moreover in spite of accidents and arguments, passions and fashions, Gould's voice and persona retain composure. Although he admits to experiencing anger and disgust and grief at times, he keeps his wits and stands his ground. At the precise point where I become often literally speechless at what seem to me "lies, damned lies, and more lies," Gould proceeds with dignity and a lethal logic to articulate the precise sources of misrepresentations, distortions and misunderstandings. He is thus a model of patient and immovable resistance to the hysterical and antirational. What a gift to spend a couple of hours in his company.

And he has, it seems, "world enough and time," at the tip of his tongue: geological history and social history, biography and biology, the arcana of Bacon, Newton, Hobbes, Descartes, Pascal and Montaigne. He can discourse on Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism and counter it with his own expertise in Darwin verbatim, Darwin in context, and Darwin via Thomas Henry Huxley. He knows the crooks and demagogues just as intimately—concocted "IQ Experiments," the planting of forged "fossil stones" by spiteful colleagues to mislead a German Professor, and other examples of bad faith—hypothesizing about motive, but in the end understanding the human source of all scientific ideas and methods, and the implication of the human heart in interpersonal motives and social ideologies.

The first two sections of the book discuss the "irreducibility of history" and contingency; one strain of argument stresses structuralist and historicist alternatives to what Gould calls "the mistaken functionalist paradigm of adaptation that still [1987] shapes Darwinian theory." His answer to the problems of social images of popular evolutionary teleology is to show how unique and unrepeatable each historic epoch and change has been; i.e., that the path of history was not laid out beforehand as a kind of inevitable "stairway to the stars," if we take the Victorian British Empire to be the major constellation in those stars, or even our illustrious selves.

The third section deals explicitly and directly with the social, political and intellectual ramifications of biological determinism, with essays entitled "Genes on the Brain," "Jensen's Last Stand," and "Nurturing Nature." The books reviewed are Promethean Fire (by Charles L. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson—yes, that E.O. Wilson), Bias in Mental Testing (by Arthur R. Jensen, yes that Jensen), and, a book he much admires, Not in our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (by R.C.Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin) respectively.

Throughout, the book is Gould's plea for rationalism, lamenting "the perilous slide from our current ignorance into a glorification of the nonrational." A recurring target here, as will be true in much of his writing to come over the next dozen years, is "NeoDarwinism," an image or interpretation of Darwinian natural selection that posits a history of "progress" and "teleology," viewing the evolution of humans as if it were the only path, or even a major one, and then calls that path "progress" from lower to higher, from formlessness to complexity. Such a path, of course, would allow one to have credence in Francis Fukuyama's 1989 proposal of "The End of History." Such a version of the grand positive conqueror's history always brings to my mind the Calvin and Hobbes cartoon strip in which Calvin is gratified to realize the grand scheme of the universe, which was all "to produce me!!´ He spreads his arms to say, "Now I'm here and history is vindicated." (Watterson, 1991: Scientific Progress Goes Boink!)

Gould's range of knowledge and interest allows him to spice this rich ideological meandering with references from Kurt Vonnegut and Dorothy Sayers to Groucho and Karl, from Gilbert & Sullivan to Gunnar Myrdal. He gives special attention to dissecting the spurious rise of the idea of a "well-known 80-20 split" between the influences of nature (inherited and ineradicable and unavoidable genetics) and nurture (education and environment)—a mythical belief that is pretty well laid to firm and not-so-gentle rest as one of many fallacies of "hereditarian" arguments for the source of complex human social behaviors. Gould deplores the continued implicit dependence on such debunked data of, for instance, the fraudulent claims of Sir Cyril Burt with which racialist "scientists" like Arthur Jensen and others pad their claims with "It has been shown..." and "Studies have revealed..." He explicitly praises the book Not in our Genes for going beyond the debunking of determinist claims--e.g., about IQ and various artificial measurements for determining social value and hierarchical placement--and attempting a useful model of the actual, and intricate, interactions of culture and biology.

Human frailty (call it prejudice or venality) will "infect" scientific claims, data, and so-called discovery, which is not to say that there is nothing useful or valid about science, but often not what the public thinks. Just as Quantum Physicists admit that any attempt to observe, witness, record, or measure phenomenon will influence the results, there is no disconnect between observer and observed. (Which Buddhist philosophy has always posited.) When there is observation, there is presence. Human presence. Which changes "things." Stephen Jay Gould would—and did—claim that the best we can do is to put our beliefs, fears, and expectations under the microscope of our consciousness to find out where our biasses lie, and then do our best to disprove the very conclusions we like so well. If nothing else, we should communicate our social, personal and ideological position in order to at least alert the reader's caution.

Why Buddhism?

If you like your spirituality to be a deep cosmology without superstition, and your mental health practice seasoned with logic, close observation of your own thinking, and a non-fanatical social outlook, you could do worse than studying Buddhism.  Besides, there's no reason to 'give up' a theistic religion for Buddhism.  If you approach the non-magical side of Buddhist practice, you can still be, as many Buddhist practitioners are, Christian, Jewish, Islamic--whatever.

My own favorite commentator and translator is the Vietnamese Zen Master (and poet and artist) Thich Nhat Hanh, whom his followers fondly call "Thay," a Vietnamese term variously pronounced "Tie" or "Tay" as nationality dictates perhaps, meaning  "Rabbi, Teacher, Maestro"-- that kind of title. But you can sample from perhaps hundreds of writers and lecturers and leaders.  What's important, I think, is to differentiate between the psychological/philosophical practice and the religious beliefs and rituals.  I know many Buddhist teachers and practitioners think that you "MUST" believe in spirits, deities, gods, demons and magical formulas and rituals.  Most of all, the most common non-rational tenet is reincarnation.

I can't say any of that is wrong.  It's just that, to quote an apocryphal remark of the scientist LaPlace to Napoleon, "I have no need of that hypothesis."  Somewhere (it's written) that when Buddha was asked by one of his students whether or not there was life after death, he responded in the same vein:  his teachings were not invitations to speculate about invisible and immaterial theories.  His teachings were how to practice supreme and sublime sanity.  Yes, such practice can and must become, to some extent, psychedelic:  i.e., we can all agree rationally that everything is connected to everything else, but when you grasp it deeply, it is said to "make you one with everything."  At that point life and death are no more separate than you and the air you breathe.  It is said.

YOU ARE NOT YOURSELF ALONE

Buddhism, overall, is a system of thought and behavior directed toward reducing suffering--suffering in and of one's self as a direct result of and cause of suffering in "the world."   For if you can grasp deeply and intuitively that within-the-self and outside-the-self is a false dichotomy, you see that every action is an action in the world sum of suffering and delight.  The "self" as a being delimited by the boundary of the skin then becomes an illusion.

Buddhism is inherently consistent with a common First-Americans' belief that the earth is our body, its rivers our blood, its air our life.  Buddhism agrees.  Agrees literally.  No single thing exists entire and to itself alone.  Thay calls the realization of this mutually dependent web of being "Interbeing" as an equivalent of the more complex Buddhist phrase "Interdependent Co-Arising."  "This is because that is.  And vice-versa.  Not just a causation through time, a causation through space. Interbeing.

Louise Erdrich wrote that the Ojibwe word "Manitou" does not name a 'primitive god,' but is the reverent word for that mystery in which all things have their being.  Not primitive at all, but much more comprehensive than most Christians' idea of "God."

Mental health?  No such thing as one person's mental state in isolation.  So your path to personal 'salvation' has to be via an effort for everyone's salvation, everyone's happiness.  Compassion for all, the self included.  Salvation, or 'Enlightenment,' thus cannot be achieved by someone in isolation, because there really is no isolation except a delusion of separateness.

NOTHING IN THE COSMOS IS PERMANENT

All human suffering springs from that delusion, and its twin:  the desire to make things last.  To oppose death, to oppose change, to try to build up a store of things that are yours unchangingly and forever.  Illusion of permanence.  Illusion of separateness.   When/if you read or hear about Impermanence in Buddhism and Emptiness, those words refer to the antonyms of humans' desires to make things last, and their delusion of separateness.  There is no separate self.  That separate self is 'empty' as a concept.

So there's no contradiction between spiritual practice and social practice.  Christ put it like this:  "Even as you do to the least of these, so you do to me."  Or, as he died, tormented by Roman guards, he said, "Forgive them.  They know not what they do."  They don't know that I am one with them and so they languish in ignorance and suffering.

The marks of spiritual and mental health are generosity, compassion, stability, happiness and peacefulness, and stability--equanimity.  These are not considered to be 'feelings' but character traits that come with deep meditation, especially on one's own thoughts.  They are not virtues, as in good behavior that can affect one's value or worth.  The compassionate person is more fortunate than the selfish person, but not "better."  There is no hierarchy in practical Buddhism, Zen Buddhism.  And maybe the hardest habit for a contemporary American to break is the habit of perceiving everything by comparison in a hierarchy:  good and evil, worst and best, least and most, superior and inferior.

There are degrees of freedom from suffering.  That's it.  So if I feel compassion for others who are suffering, it may break my heart but it will not contribute to the world's suffering.  I may grieve for the destruction of the web of life through pollution, waste, greed.  But I do not increase my suffering.
To grieve, to know what one's pain is, is to be free of it becoming a permanent knot in my guts, anger in my mind.

Of course if one holds the goal of decreasing suffering in the world, it's easy to see that compassion is a useful tool.  But it is not a virtue that makes me or you better.  It's not "praiseworthy" so much as it is plain good sense.  In that connection I remember an episode of the "Friends" tv series in which Joey and Phoebe try to find how they can do a good deed that doesn't benefit themselves.  They find it impossible.  I miss Joey and Phoebe.

To perceive reality with good sense, one must be capable of good sense.  Good sense requires a mind that can hold focus and can separate itself from waves of mental chatter and tsunamis of emotions.
To achieve a focused mind, one must train it not to chase after every whim nor wobble with every moodshift and fancy.  Mind-training.  Who or what can train a mind?

FOCUS ON BREATH TO TRAIN YOUR MIND

As in theatre training, the first available physical tool is awareness of breathing.  Instead of worrying about the lines or the audience, turn your attention to the physical sensations of simple breathing.  As you experience breath, the mind is given something practical to do that helps it escape nonsense.  The actor may indeed experience breathing with an increased vitality.  That increased vitality could become nervousness if the mind was given over to looking at it and describing it and worrying about it.  But that increased vitality is mere excitation: it is the same physical sensation as preparation for receiving a football pass, as playing music, entering a stage, or focusing on deep contemplation of what the mind is.

It's intense.  Intensely alive, deeply alert, enlivened.  It is a discovery mode.

 The practice of conscious attention to breath helps a person to locate 'home base,' from which they can see how the will-o'the-wisps and mirages sweep over the surface of the mind like reflections of clouds in a lake.  You don't stop the clouds.  You just don't obsess about them and mistake their transience for the deep inner silence of the water.

Meditation can be as simple as that.  Training the mind to know itself.  Quieting the ideas of passion and finding the physical site of feelings.  Once you can 'feel' your feeling, it can pass. You don't have to keep complaining about it to yourself.  You feel your feeling, you cradle it as if it were a distressed child or whimpering puppy.  And it calms down.

The mind matters.   More on that later.