Trivial Pursuits

One can try to think, feel, experience and communicate everything, but the moment such expressions see the light of day they are robbed of their significance and meaning and are thrown in the dump.

Such a heaviness lately. A felt sense of futility. 

We Are Not Going Back may have been a comforting campaign slogan for a moment or two – but I am  now contending with the visceral experience of being sent back. Back in time. My lifetime of attempting to escape, avoid, battle, extricate myself and others from patriarchal abuse feels, (again for the moment as I have come to consider my emotional response as fluid, and self-calibrating) like it has hit a brick wall and ground to a dead stop.

I was raised in the belly of white patriarchy. Before no-fault divorce, before women could have their own credit line. Before words like sexual abuse, date rape, grooming, , yes means yes or no means no were words used to describe inappropriate, abusive or potentially criminal actions. When sexual harassment was simply called “going to work.”  When boys were just being boys and that was a universal reality that no one challenged out loud.  

I lived in households overflowing with white men: brothers and step-brothers, business associates, family friends, funny uncles, coaches and best-buddies, young and old men who played sports, sailed, tennis, or hockey, who screamed at judges and referees, who were never stopped, never defeated, never disrupted. Who owned their expectations and entitlements with casual confidence.

Meals were prepared to suit my Dad’s palette and served to him first at the head of the table before they passed around to feed all the growing boys next.

Middle school through college meant negotiating a minefield of male teachers regularly “making passes”  - more than I could count on two hands.  And rumors of girls who were having sex with teachers, who sometimes became pregnant and shunned for their moral folly, and others who married their freshly divorced paramours the minute that they graduated.  An era where a classmate who was raped by strangers (that was the only kind of rape we knew of) committed suicide because she was so ashamed of the circumstances she had “put herself in.”

A world of young princes and old kings  who elevated their own interests as essential and did what they pleased and were never stopped, challenged. Who never, to this day, experienced consequences.

Everything, everyone else  - was lower division, of no account, equal to zero.

Trivial.

My step-mother once told me that I didn’t need to bother working so hard at school, or worry about a career because if things went well for me, if I was lucky…

I wasn’t a classic beauty, she said. My nose and my cheeks too round, my figure too prone to chubbiness, but I was cute enough to find a rich man to marry, like she had, and then he could worry about money and work.

A few years later my actual mother sent me off in a pick-up truck, to drive across country on my own with my cat and all of my belongings from California to New York.  I had no idea this was dangerous. I thought it was an adventure. Before I pulled away, she hugged me through the driver’s side window and whispered: “You’ll have an amazing life in the city! You’ll become some great man’s muse!”

And it took me a few years of abusive restaurant work with male managers who would suggest that the best stations and shifts could be had in exchange for a blow job,  and several terrible boyfriends who also behaved like young princes – who told me how cute and sharp and funny I was but who would all leave me for taller, blonder “classic” beauties before I learned to avoid any man, institution, organization, that demanded that I tend to white male egos.

I had an allergy it seemed. That allergy was of course a cumulative post-traumatic response – but PTSD was only for Vietnam vets at the time, and maybe people who had experienced “violent” rape.

I recoiled  from academia, I avoided psychoanalytic institutes where teachers regularly “had affairs” with their supervisees,  I went nowhere near churches and seminaries filled with predators.

I had no desire to be a great man’s muse, assistant, protégée, daughter, sister or helpmeet.

And I took up my own work. I self-employed myself, without protections or benefits or the income streams associated with institutional support, but I at least knew that my boss wasn’t a creep or an abuser. There was no gain, no money, or status for me in these patriarchal systems that was worth having. I just wanted to exist without being degraded all the time, without needing to be lucky enough to secure some idealized, rare or non-existent man’s beneficent de-sexualized approval and protection to exercise my agency.

I worked in precarious, peripheral spaces that powerful men had little interest in.

I still do.

Little security, little to no professional respect or status, less income. No power.

Trivial pursuits were where I found some freedom at least.

The relevance of any expression of life now depends on what it can yield in the exchange of power and money. Everything else is trivialized away. 

I’ve been working my way, slowly and contemplatively, through Dorothee Soelle’s The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance  - and I only got as far as page thirteen where she considers trivialization as a tool of dominance. This word struck at my core, rang through me like an enormous deafening bell.

I couldn’t read further. I just sat there and breathed deeply into all the unnamed unnoticed “normal” exchanges, all the allergic reactions, all the nausea episodes that were suddenly summoned with this language.

All that has been trivialized.

The only permissible ambition that my maternal figures could imagine for themselves and for me – to become the consummate, indispensable most attractive possible accessory to a powerful man.

The exhausting and self-diminishing detours that I felt I had to take to avoid becoming any man’s muse or disciple or ward, and that also permitted me to avoid all the women who aspired to become adorable, loyal pets, and who were often baffled or disapproving of me  me because I wouldn’t wear high heels or pluck my eyebrows or stop using big words or let a man win an argument.

The trivialization of women exists as an ongoing, malevolent belittling: whatever is consistently and without opposition declared to be irrelevant – like so much that women experience, feel and come to know – loses its language; perhaps it may echo for a while within a person, but it creates no response.

I know that void, that silence, that lack of response too well.

I chose it and preferred it over a landscape of abusive and belittling response.

After I read through page thirteen and sat staring into that void for an hour or so – thinking about what I had been able to build for myself, and what I have not been able to build for myself at all – I went to bed, still with this heavy pit in my stomach and I had this dream:

I dream I am Donald Trump’s daughter. A lesser more invisible one. Like Tiffany.

I am a different person entirely. I am younger,  tall, my hair is lighter and have long Fox-news coiffed hair.  I wear a long, flimsy gown, navy blue, covered with rhinestones. I am wearing high heels that have been dyed to match my dress.

I look like –  in Tressie McMillan Cottom’s recent words –  a woman “absolutely willing to be molded by patriarchy.”

I have to appear at some working-class event with my father. Just appear in the background. I won’t have to say anything.

I have decided that I am too tired to uphold the estrangement/fire-wall I had set up for his first term – that had required that I erase my entire digital footprint and live practically off-grid.

He is my father, and I just have to deal with that reality somehow.

I don’t have the energy to pretend that I do not know him.

I don’t have to talk to him – or even really make eye contact – but as we leave, I am escorted to an official car, and we drive off in separate directions – although I am still under his Secret Service protection.

Somehow the journey goes awry, and I am on my own – without money or ID or assistance trying to get back to NYC. I take an airplane, a helicopter, a ferry and end up on foot walking on a forgotten, obstacle ridden path along the shoreline of the Atlantic coast. My gown is getting raggedy, losing rhinestones with each new scenario. The tiny rubber stoppers at the bottom of my heels are wearing thin, the uppers snagged and wobbly. I am exhausted. I don’t know if my dress and my shoes will hold up through all the hours and days of walking ahead.

I am in Philadelphia, the City of Brother Love. I am slogging, dragging and it feels like I am stuck walking in place. I suddenly realize that some man has hooked  his finger in the back of my dress and is actually manually holding me back so that I cannot walk forward.

I turn around and scream: “Do you know who my father is?!  Do you have any idea who my father is?! He will DESTROY you!” – although I am not at all sure that he will, but this bluff and bluster feels like the only recourse available to me.  

He lets go and I continue on, up a flight of white public stairs, exhausted but still en route, in these precarious shoes and this ridiculous dress.

I wake up strangely relieved to feel so enraged instead of defeated, because I know that the heavy feeling of futility would have kept hanging over me until I located the volcano underneath it.

Over the decades I’d become nearly inured to the constant, collective trivialization of the work that I see as mine and that I am most passionate about. Sharing what I can freely. Asking for folks to donate what they can. Writing informally and for free on my own website instead of publishing. Dealing in dreams, interdependence, mysticism, community care, building discernment and respect for human intuition. Passing on the kinds of knowing that my grandmother and her grandmother before her had done their best to preserve through a world that claimed to value reason and rationality above all while our public policy remains utterly unreasonable.

Such experiences are explained away as an overactive imagination, indigestion, over-excitement and the like... the trivialization of life is perhaps the strongest anti-mystical force among us.

The proximity to masculine power as the only potential leverage to safety.

The suppression of women’s agency, labor, income. The unsupported, unpaid, underpaid and health damaging care provision and support that women are required, namelessly to provide to the community at large. The trivialization of those who cannot or will not participate in the King of the Hill games, accumulating assets and authority.

The attempt to wrest control over the bodies of all those who have been historically trivialized.  The elevation of a cadre of extremist supremist masculinists to high office.

The voicelessness. The erasure.

Again.

 The most vital, essential aspects of our humanity – our health, our joy, our capacity for love and woundedness, our grief, our hopes are of no value to these entities, these individuals, these systems.

“It amounts to nothing” expresses exactly the reality of this domination. It is of no value because it does not pay.

I am too tired on the rising cusp of this administration to keep the trivialization at bay, to avoid it any longer.  I trivialize myself, like my mother and step-mother  by framing my work as silly, pointless, trifling. I dream of being dressed in a tacky gown and shoes that make me toddle about like prey.

I become a trivial object. I struggle with the futility of a lifetime spent either in hiding or forced to travel the longest and most precarious routes alone, only to be held back once again.

The rage in the dream moves me past the sensation of futility and I expect the psychological labor ahead of me is this:

To remember that the accumulation of worldly power and hoarding wealth are the ridiculous actions of those most terrified by reality.  The game of dominance and supremacy is actually the most trivial, temporal, and futile undertaking in a life-span that is merely the tiniest speck in the eye of eternity. None of these powerful abusive men and the collapsing systems they have created as barricade around them mean anything at all in the scope of a complex living and interdependent universe.

Reality is always the most powerful force.

How silly, how trivial, how worthless is a project of dominance in this grand schema?

I know what love is. And what it means to labor for love’s sake.

And all the truths that they have trivialized  - caught up in their grandiose and princely illusions, driven by terror at how small and insignificant their lives truly are – has driven this era’s mad, destructive foolishness, truly the most trivial of pursuits.