I Used to Be Smart.

There is a part in Wuthering Heights where Catherine Linton is preparing to tell a story to Nelly Dean. As she begins the story, she warns Nelly that she must “take care not to smile at any part of it.”

I read Anne Sexton’s Transformations yesterday. As great as Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to the story was, I couldn’t help but think that if I was an editor, I would only preface Transformations with a single sentence — Catherine Linton’s admonition from Wuthering Heights.

It’s been years since I’ve read any substantial amount of poetry that was written by Shel Silverstein (who doesn’t love hearing about Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout who would not take the garbage out?), so when I had to read Sexton for class, I can’t say that I was overjoyed.

What I found when I got inside Sexton’s work was something I had not expected. Upon learning that I was reading a reimagined collection of the Grimm borthers’ Fairy Tales, I was simply curious. When I saw what Sexton had done with those Fairy Tales, I was floored.

There is a very real way in which Fairy Tales are the formative narratives for our childhood. While perhaps not Grimm’s alone, there are any number of morality tales that are used to shape our values and consciousness, to a degree that the stories are told and retold, imagined and reimagined. They have such a high rate of cultural absorption that finding people who cannot recite these tales from memory alone is a difficult task.

What is unique about Sexton is that she takes these formative narratives, and really does transform them. From the formative narratives of innocent childhood, they become the formative narratives of a messy adulthood. Like any successful artist, Sexton’s poems leave her readers staring themselves right in the face. Whether she’s reimagining “Snow White” as a tale of what happens when an institutionalized pursuit of an unattainable standard of beauty drives people to madness, or transforming the tale of the twelve dancing princesses into a story of innocence stolen, Sexton has an uncanny ability to be true.

As stunning and important as all of that was, what I will keep from this book is something completely different. What it seems like Sexton is really engaging is the reality of being weird. It is abundantly clear that Sexton has realized that there are certain people who exist outside of the realms of cultural norms. For whatever reasons they will not (or cannot) buy into the established cultural assumptions. This seems to be the case for nearly all of Sexton’s characters, and she seems to be intensely concerned with what happens with these characters attempt to exist in a framework whose conventions and assumptions they won’t accept.

On my first reading, I felt like that was where the real power of Sexton’s work was, in the way that she was able to explore those places. In lots of ways, Sexton uses Transformation to name what is unnamable, to explore the places of human experiences that are either too painful, too unacceptable, or simply too outside of convention to name with anything other than the language she uses. She faces what is unsayable, and finds a way to name it. It’s rarely attractive, often awkward, and sometimes terrifying, but it is utterly true, and beautiful, and valuable.

And I dared not smile at any part of it.

I have to start with a warning.

This post involves something written by a Bronte. If you’re anything like me, the mere thought of that makes your eyes glaze over. I understand. Just give Emily and I chance here.

If you’ve ever read Wuthering Heights, then you know that one its biggest themes is the treatment of the other. The novel’s (arguably) antagonist, Heathcliff, is Bronte’s other.

A reasonable argument can be made that the novel’s conflicts all happen because of Heathcliff’s otherness, and how other characters react to that state of otherness.

(Okay, so far I’m writing a lit essay, hang with me.)

Because I’m weird, this idea of Heathcliff’s otherness has been knocking around in my head all day — specifically, the descriptions of Heathcliff, and why his otherness was so unnerving to the characters in Wuthering Heights.

I don’t want to give away exactly where I’m going — but while I describe Heathcliff, think about the current American political scene.

The first description of Heathcliff is physical. He’s of dark skin, and of indeterminate, but presumably gypsy origin. He speaks a different language than the family that adopts him. From the beginning, Heathcliff is undoubtedly the other.

This utterly unnerves everyone around him. He suffers constant abuse for no reason besides his status as the other. He never relinquishes that status. He remains so much the other that even at his death, the question of his indeterminable origins haunt the people that knew him, leading them to view him as something demonic.

Pondering all of this in class today, I wondered if this was something we had moved on from — and I was immediately struck that it is not. I found myself becoming….outraged at all of the ways everyone else still treats the other, and how we, as a culture, STILL have a complete inability to deal with anyone that is different than us. We NEED to construct our realities in certain ways, and when things threaten those realities, we are still unable to deal with them.

As I continued to think of this dark character of indeterminable origins, a thought immediately struck me. We’re dealing with the exact same issue right now. A dark man with murky origins is running for the nomination of his party for the office of President — and we are utterly unable to deal with his otherness. We mask it all kinds of ways — we blame his associations with other controversial figures, point to a voting record, or the tiniest of rhetorical inconsistencies. However, most of us are utterly incapable of dealing with Obama’s status as other. He exists outside of the worldview that we have necessarily created for ourselves, and he threatens all of the ways that we have constructed our world. And, 300 years after Wuthering Heights, we are STILL utterly unable to deal with Heathcliff.

I saw the sticker on your truck.

It was dirty, and half torn off, but I’m sure you mean it just the same.

USA: 1
Iraq: 0.

Is that all you think this cost? Our one to their nil? We found some people who were different and defenseless and bombed them into submission, and that’s a win?

Is there no more to the story? Our thousands dead? Their thousands upon thousands dead?

The trillions of dollars that could be used to do good and war diverted into deception and destruction?

Cashing in any good will we had with the world for the sake of some fool’s crusade?

Or is it still just “Mission Accomplished”? Us: 1, Them:0? Good: 1, Evil:0?

Whatever you meant, I sure as hell hope your team won.

I haven’t been to church in months. I can’t say that I miss it. I remind myself that I should go, but it’s mostly out of a sense of duty and nostalgia.

I haven’t thought much about things like God lately, or approached anything that could be considered a “relationship with God.” (Is that ever in the Bible, by the way?)

That’s very odd for me. Those two things have been an incredibly significant part of my life for a lot of years.

So what the hell happened?

I don’t have any problem with the idea of Christianity. In fact, I still find it quite amazing and the absolute best way to live life. Who can have a problem being created by an utterly loving God who is the ruler of the entire universe? Who has an issue with loving the other with the same intensity as one’s own itself? I could go on for days. Looking at Jesus finds little that it objectionable. It finds things that are tough, odd, and downright impossible, but little that one can object to simply on principle.

But yet I am lately finding myself with absolutely no motivation to participate. At all.

That has to be a problem. I don’t think that once can believe in something without believing in community and participating within community. To believe something in solitude is cheap and disingenuous. If faith doesn’t put a person in dialogue with a community, then I think that faith is pretty useless.

But, I have no desire to participate in any of the incarnations of American Christianity that are around me. I could write a novel (and maybe I should) on why I don’t want to participate in those things and don’t find them faithful to the goals of their namesake.

So I don’t participate, and largely grow apathetic. I wish I could believe myself to be strong enough to participate as a dissenting member of a community with the goal of reform — but I know that I will inevitably succumb to the groupthink and conform.

So where in the hell do you even start with something like that?