Clif > Books: memoir‎ (86)

I had always thought of India as the land where the spiritual and the mystical are a natural part of everyday life, where astrologers and mystics plied their trade along with the fruit stallholders; perhaps my perception was distorted. (p.222)

I had been trying to use meditation to transport myself for a brief moment of time to a state of oneness with the spiritual realms, in the sure belief that this was where Michael now lived. I had hoped that if I could just once reach this place and feel the bliss he lived in I would be satisfied that he really was safe and happy and in no need of his dad. I hadn't got there; instead, in a back street in Pushkar, the God-force had come down and visited me and poured just an egg-cupful of its essence into me and as it had bubbled and fizzed joyfully throughout my system I knew that this was enough, I had my proof. (p.241)

The years have passed and with a lack of practice my abilities have faded. ... I know life continues on the other side of the door we call death and that one day I will walk through that door and be reunited with Michael and all the other people I have truly loved who might go before me. As it will be for me so also will it be for you, I am no one special. (p.247)

Maybe old age is when many of us love the sunset most. We lose people, and life crushes us in its various ways. Hope can seem like a dark star in another solar system. Yet, every night, the sun once again offers us all that it has. It whispers, "Take these coins of gold these shafts of light and these pink and orange silk scarves of sky." (p.213)

I was stunned by the image of my mother ... . The woman in this photograph is not my mother, I thought. I recognized her proud profile; otherwise she bore little resemblance to the person I had known all my life. The mother I knew was frugal and practical. ... But it was not just the elegance of her attire that startled me so. The most striking difference was that the woman I knew was never still. ... She was on guard, jumping at the sound of a car horn, snapping with impatience if you kept her waiting. The woman in this photograph is calm, poised, self-possessed. She is at home in the world, and in herself.

We both knelt on the ground, listening and breathing until words came. "May all be forgiven. May everyone be liberated from an burden of blame. May the pain between my mother and her family be put to rest, no more hatred to be carried from this day forth.

May the trauma between German and Jew acknowledged and brought to completion. From this day forward, no victim, no oppressor. May all beings be free of suffering. May this land be free to nourish new life."

I reached into my pocket and took out a rose quartz stone I had brought with me from home and placed it on this grave that had remained without a visitor for seventy years, probably since my mother left Germany in 1935.

Michael and I closed our eyes, each with our own prayer. Then I spoke.

"I am sitting on the bones of my grandparents. They have crossed over to another plane and the things they did or did not do, the words they said or did not say, are no longer relevant. They are my grandparents and I thank them for the gift of life they gave to Alice, and she in turn, passed on to me. I acknowledge the pain that they may have inflicted, and forgive them for anyway they caused my mother to suffer. Now Alice is also free. ... she has returned to her pure spirit."

... I didn't need to accept everything she gave me, like her fears that people would let you down when you needed them, or the conviction that danger lurked behind every unguarded moment. This part of my inheritance I gently buried in the Leipzig cemetery.

“By looking deep into the brains of people in love, we discover that this complex neurobiological phenomenon activates not just the brain’s mammalian pleasure centers but also our cognitive system, the most evolved, intellectual parts of the brain that we use to acquire knowledge and make sense of the world around us.”

... love is much more expansive concept than we give it credit for. We must begin to view this phenomenon not as an isolated and ineffable emotion but as a cognitive and biological necessity, one that is measurable but ever changing, one that has the power to make us not only better partners but also better people.

I began this book alone and I'm ending it ... alone. Yet by coming full circle I believe that I found the key to lasting love both as a neuroscientist studying it in a laboratory and as a human being experiencing it in life. The key is to have an open mind. That is far, far, easier said than done, but the process of opening the mind begins by understanding how it works. That is exactly what you and I have tried to do in this book.

When my dad said he wanted to find a structured way to facilitate more casual interactions with his kids at the House. I had an idea. "What about a cooking class?" I suggested. It could be like your own cooking show!" My dad loved cooking shows. … "I would even help," I promised.
He … said he was interested. "That would be neat."

Books are supposed to have calibrated worlds and endings that make sense, where heroes you root for don’t die, and boys whom you meet in the beginning — the ones who make jokes while cutting chicken and help to feed other people and keep showing up to do it again — get to be heroes by the end of the story. This book doesn’t make that kind of sense.

Throughout the 1960s, Iranians had been coming to attend American colleges and universities at an extraordinary rate. In the middle 1950s there were only a few hundred but by 1979, there were just over fifty-one thousand Iranian students studying across the United States—at the time it was by far the largest group of foreign students studying in the States. In Iran, there was sort of cachet connected with being able to send a child to the United States for school. It didn't really matter what school. A student visa came easily if a family could pay for it. It was a way of showing off a family's wealth and clout. (p.62)

Then, once Khomeini and his allies started to consolidate influence, what my mother had thought might be an exuberant new Iran was over. By the time I was born, in October 1979, Khomeini and his inner circle had locked down power and arrests, executions, and torture were daily occurrences. (p.114)

Race is at the heart of the South, and at the heart of the nation. Like the conquest of Indigenous people, the creation of racial slavery in the colonies was a gateway to habits and dispositions that ultimately became the commonplace ways of doing things in this country. They came to a head at the dawn of the Civil War, only to settle back into the old routines for a hundred years before reaching a fever pitch again before receding. (p.14)

… race remains the most dramatic light switch of the country and its sorting. And yet "racism," despite all evidence of its ubiquity, is still commonly described as "belonging" to the South. (p.14)

Critical theorist Walter Benjamin once distin-guished between two types of storytellers: one is a keeper of the traditions; another is the one who has journeyed afar and tells stories of other places. But there is a third, and that is the exile. The exile, with a gaze that is obscured by distance and time, may not always be precise in terms of information. Details get outdated. But if the exile can tell a story that gets to a funda-mental truth and also tell you something about two core human feelings, loneliness and homesickness, along with a yearning for a place where they once belonged and/or a reality that has evaporated, then they have acquired an essential wisdom, earning them the title of storyteller. (p.166)

The South is extremely diverse and complex. It is multilingual, speaks different dialects, and has different histories. But we do call certain things Southern in a broad way, some because they are quintessential and some because they're a marker of "not that." as in not Northern, which really means not Midwestern, Northeastern, mid-Atlantic, Northwestern, Californian, or far Southwest in general. (p.179)

What make a secret a secret? It really isn't who knows—somebody always knows, usually a bunch of people outside of the secret holder. What makes it a secret is that it cannot be spoken about above a whisper without something breaking. Much of the South's conservatism is little more than an effort to zone where we place the yearnings that we don’t know what to do with. Every time a pastor faces a scandal, remember that. No one thinks these things don't happen, but many, if not most, think they are supposed to be hidden. And as long as they're hidden, we are prohibited from creating more loving ways of being with one another; we aren't allowed that joy on the other side of secrecy. We cannot correct the imbalance and violence that happens in the shadows with shame lashing out all over the one who is supposed to be beloved unless and until we decide the truth can be spoken. (p.198)

How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary—but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey—I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail. (p.255)

The South has remained the region where the majority of African Americans live. And even with the declining population in the Blackest South, the Blackest Southerners remain. So the question I always ask is not why did Black folks leave, but why did they stay?
The answer is home. If everyone had departed, no one would have been left to tend the ancestors' graves. (p.275)

One of the difficult side effects of desegregation—and you'll hear it again and again from Black people who lived in the before time—is that something precious escaped through society's opened doors. Even acknowledging how important desegregation was, the persistence of American racism alongside the loss of the tight-knit Black world does make one wonder. What if we had held on to those tight networks ever more closely, rather than seeking our fortune in the larger White world that wouldn't ever fully welcome us beyond one or two at a time? Such reflection often leads to a sorrowful place, though not what I would call regret. Black folk knew they had to push the society to open its doors. They just didn't know how much it was going to cost. (p.318)

People make a big to-do about the fact that there are gradations of race throughout the Americas, as though the one-drop rule in the United States is somehow crueler. But one thing I know is that the residues of empire, colonialism, and the transatlantic slave trade mean that no matter where you are, the Blacker you are, the lower your status, and any sort of Blackness at all can sometimes serve as a reason to kick you out, … (p.432)

My mother's family are Swiss-German Mennonite, my father's Somali Muslims. (p.9)

How often I've been told I'm false, impossible, unreal. Somali and Swiss Mennonite: no one can make it work. How often I've been told that everybody will look like me once time has ushered in the blessed, post racial kingdom.

If to be a Mennonite writer is to be a cultural hybrid, and to be Somali and Swiss is to be an ethnic hybrid, and to be a Mennonite granddaughter of a Muslim sheikh is to be a religious hybrid, then I am not so much a hybrid as a Rubik's cube. (p.131)

During my childhood, people were trying to chart a path between nativism and assimilation. In their effort to decolonize they emphasized the agency of the colonized, who had roots and traveled—usually forced, in some way—on routes. By the time I reached college, this discussion had yielded to the notion of hybridity. Very quickly came creolization, indigenization, and global flows. I studied the methods of crossing: mestizaje, mimicry, and their delinquent cousin cultural appropriation. (p.208)

The retired headmaster tells us how the Mennonites were taken away. It was June 18, 1935. ... Eighteen trucks drove into the village. Each deportee was permitted to pack one sack of belongings. The rest of their things were loaded onto the trucks, separate from the people, except for a few items hurriedly given away, like the one inherited by the retired headmaster's family. It was around lunchtime, very sudden. The Khivans who worked for the Mennonites or lived nearby were in an uproar, running after the trucks, shouting and weeping for their neighbors. And that was the end: a community snatched up, removed in the blink of an eye, in a chilling parody of the Rapture. (p.258)

It's a wonderful grab bag of singers and readers and prodigals and seekers, a miscellany of either/or and both/and. And today, if you asked me to name the strength of the Mennonite Church, I would say it's precisely what looks like weakness and contradiction, the patchwork of people brought together in such different ways, by birth and faith and thirst, to build a house of effort and care. I would say my church almost looks like my idea of utopia. And I'd have to add that on a typical Sunday, with around three hundred in attendance, you can count the people of color on your two hands. (p.292)

And was this trip my I Am event? Did I find the language of wholeness? ... I would call this trip my They Were event. For what was it that made the glow, the excitement that brought me here? I thought it was the promise of integration, of seeing myself as one, of finally claiming emphtically I Am, but instead I saw them, those others, how variously and chaotically They Were.

It wasn't me. It was them. The glow wasn't that I was reflected whole. It was that they were reflected prismatically, as mosaic. (p.303)

And so it was that I began to shift my focus from an anxious search in the forest of religion to a more restful surrender in the glade of simple trust. It was a shift of focus, not an attainment. I began to know a little of what it mean to rest in the grace of the world and breathe free. I was taken back to the whispers of the divine in the beauties of the natural world, the lives of kind and humble human beings, and to the miraculous stories of homeward return—like that of the prodigal son—I had heard in my earliest days. (p.214)

In memory, I can still see my self as a kid floating in the safety of the little white boat. I see a time when I drifted in stillness on the glassy surface of the lake, the beauty around me mirrored in a Beauty within. I see a time when the waters seemed to rise up against me and, even with my brave little brother alongside, I felt vulnerable and afraid. I see a time when a great launch, regal in its trim of polished wood and brass, slowed down its heavy engines and smoothed the angry waves before me. And, as I follow in the wake of this Majestic Apparition, I see—even now—the sun-drenched shores of Home glowing on the farther shore.

That's life: the leopard you see; the one you don't see; and the one that prowls stealthily through your dark places. The first leopard for me, up to this point, is Parkinson's. I know its habits. I know its territory. I know it's cruelty. I know when it's safe to get out of the jeep and when it's not.

The second is the leopard I don't see. It's that gut feeling that something is wrong, very wrong. Something is out there waiting to pounce. No warning, no negotiation no accommodation., This foreboding is a recent development, something that is common for many of us in middle age, and which has intensified for me with the discovery and removal of the spinal tumor.

And then, with my fall in the kitchen a new existential crisis emerged. ... It's the unknown dangers that paralyze: Darkness. Confusion, Solitude. Vulnerability. Essentially blindfolded, grasping for a familiar shape, a handhold that is stable and can be trusted, but finding only the temporary and unstable as I negotiate my way pleading my case before gravity. The stakes are high; not only could I damage myself, I could harm others who share my space. I pray that I'll find my way, however unsure I may be of the path. (p.186)
... ... ...
In that same "nothing to fear" speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt also said, "Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment."

I accept the optimist part, but now, I also admit to its foolishness. (p.187)

So Mama, I remember you picking up your Bible and sitting in that old lime green rocking chair with the wooden back and calling me to kneel down and place the side my of my head on your lap. You prayed, "Lord please help my baby become the kind of man you want him to be." So Mama, I pray that I turned out to be the kind of man you prayed to God for me to be.