Also: a couple of excellent things I'm reading when I'm not nursing:
Culkin's book is the closest I've gotten to "spiritual community" so far this Lent -- which is either evidence of how far astray I've stumbled, like Hester Prynne after she had her baby, or is a function of the fact that exploring anything, even faith, is a meaningless endeavor if it doesn't lead to disparate uncomfortable and lonely places.
As the Seventh-Day Adventist faction of this blog's readership (snerrrk) will attest, we don't really do Lent. My former paster, now engaged in his own blogventure away from faith, blames this on our aversion to all things Catholic. I'm only a few years younger than him, but that, combined with my parents' decidedly readerly take on Seventh Day Adventist doctrine (all church and no trips to the movie theater make Sabbath totally effing intolerable!), means that I totally missed the boat on "our" collective hysteria about Catholics. I've always felt like devout Catholics have the best of both worlds when it comes to organized religion: all of the time-consuming ritual, and none (less?) of the intractable craziness. However bizarre the doctrines Catholics officially espouse, the community -- if not the dogma -- seems to allow for a recognition that hey, we maybe don't mean this literally, where "this" is, say, the oft-translated claims of sundry scattered documents from the ancient Near East.
Talking to other extremely religious people often leaves me feeling like I'm talking to a drunk person: it's not that they aren't making sense, but some essential part of them, a part that would enable me to approach them collegially, rather than as I would a client or student, is missing. I have to use all these people skills that aren't required when I'm just relating to another human being: listen actively, studiously withhold judgment, and et cetera. I have to indulge them because they don't know any better. It breeds a kind of condescension that I loathe in myself.
Transubstantiation aside, I feel like Catholicism allows one to say Oh yeah, dinosaurs, in a way that fundamentalist Christianity doesn't. And so, around Catholics, I feel less like I did back when everyone else was under the impression that Santa was bringing them presents, and I was like, No, your mom -- and only if you don't piss her off.
Anyway, Culkin describes herself as swinging between atheism and agnosticism, and yet these incredible moments that I read as spiritual really anchor a book that might otherwise be too painful to read. She moves really seamlessly between the life and death experiences of her patients and those in her personally life -- which are many, since a significant part of her career was spent as a flight nurse in the Pacific Northwest. (This is not a career choice for people not yet reconciled to their own mortality). It is totally, totally beautiful. Read it and then give your copy away -- possibly to me, because I had to return it to the library and I'm already craving a reread.
Speaking of rereads:
I would totally be making an amazon wish list for the sole purpose of adding this book, if a significant subplot of said collection did not address amazon.com's takeover of the book industry. I absolutely will not make any discouraging, held-empty-glass-seeing comments on why this book sticks out in my mind four years after I read it as a rare example of female subjectivity in things I read. I am sure that only reflects the impoverished state of my own body of cultural knowledge and the many happy hours of discovering strong, actualized characters of variant genders and ethnicities I can look forward to!
You can find it here, although I'll point out that Alison Bechdel herself links you to amazon on her website. Whatever.
If you are missing a time and place in which your topics of ultimate concern all revolved around your Platonic ideals of social justice and progress, unadulterated by tedious details like rent and APRs and what box to live in at eighty when you retired -- you know, that golden era between getting your driver's license and beginning to pay off student loans -- Dykes to Watch Out For transports you to a world where all of those concerns exist in a glorious tension. Not that it makes the heroine, Mo, any less crazed -- but for someone currently consumed entirely with not losing her job, damaging her child beyond repair, or defaulting on her student loan debt, Mo and her book-slinging, girl-chasing compadres are basically the literary equivalent of chomping cooking dough and swilling red wine in one's pajama's for an entire weekend. It reminds me of reading before I discovered the particular delights of reading to learn and grow -- back when I read just because it was the only thing that consistently made me happy, made me feel like even if my immediate circumstances could induce catatonic depression in a freaking Zen master, the world, taken in its entirety, was huge and wide and full of excellent things.
No comments:
Post a Comment