Possum Pouch

Alan Gilbert and Dale Smith--Part III

AG—I don’t know about you, but since Sophie’s birth I’m lucky if I get two or three hours of lucidity a day, and that tends to be around midnight, after the household has gone to sleep, and I’m at my desk popping handfuls of chocolate covered espresso beans. I need to keep reminding myself that there were plenty of times in my life prior to becoming a parent when I only had a few hours of lucidity a day. However, they tended to be more in the afternoon, when I was fresher. People have been urging me to consider getting up early in the morning to write (before the baby wakes, Sylvia Plath style [!]); but even when I was a kid, I was never a morning person. So it’s not going to happen for me now; though from what you’ve told me, I gather that your most lucid time is in the morning. I also noticed that most of the emails I receive from you are in the morning, whereas mine tend to be sent late at night (when I’m not stealing time at work).

It can be a struggle—a mostly positive struggle—to find time for one’s own writing, no doubt about it; and as much as Kristin and I try to share parental responsibilities, I know it’s much more of a struggle for her. We’ve learned to cut out certain activities in an effort to regain vanished hours. Watching TV is now at a bare minimum. The magazines I subscribe to tend to be read a little less closely. Obviously, working around an infant’s schedule means more selective socializing. As a result, one picks up time here and there that used to heedlessly slip away. And even if there are days when I don’t get a lot of my own work done, since Sophie’s been born I have yet to have the experience where I say to myself, "Where did the day go?" or, "I can’t believe January’s over already," which were common enough sentiments in more carefree years. I attribute this change—which I assume isn’t permanent—to what I mentioned earlier about how much an infant keeps one focused on the present.

What does this have to do with feminism? It’s a complex topic to address, but I do know that feminism taught me about ethics in a way no other critical discourse did—including those, such as Kantian or Levinasian philosophy, that purported to be rigorous examinations of the ethical condition. And I think one of the primary reasons why feminism works as an ethics is because of its focus on the everyday. Feminism was really the first to argue that one makes constant political decisions in the home, in the workplace, in the social sphere, and, as you point out, in language. As such, it’s also part of a larger civil rights movement. Does our ability to speak about these matters—especially male parenting—point to feminism’s success, as the reader you quote suggests? Is it because of some previous dismantling of patriarchy? Patriarchy’s grip is tenacious, fanatical. But there’s nothing like parenting to make one not want to repeat certain behaviors and actions of one’s own parents, however difficult it is to unlearn ingrained responses. If the parenting one received was structured by patriarchy (as mine fundamentally was), then there might be an inclination to resist this, while at the same time perhaps taking other feminist concerns for granted. It’s very easy for both men and women today to take feminism for granted, and I know progressive young women from my generation and younger who aren’t even sure if they want to be called feminists.

DS—Yes, I’m a morning lucidity kind of guy. But really, that’s because of the schedule Hoa and I have made around her work hours. I’m free to do my thing until early afternoon when I take over with Keaton. During his first year though I worked a graveyard shift as a security guard, so the wee hours were my periods of most productive work. I prefer late night for the quiet, as you mention. But after a while, it takes more than espresso beans to survive that. And I’ve never had trouble getting up in the morning.

It gets easier as the infant grows into a toddler. You’re able to reclaim some time for yourself as the child becomes more independent for short stretches. I carry notebooks around for moments when Keaton is absorbed by something and I can write. Reading is more difficult and fractured, but certainly I get more done now than I did a couple of years ago. I’m a bit nervous about how time will change yet again with the arrival in a few weeks of our second babe.

The ethical, day-to-day influence of feminism is important, as you say. Our roles, certainly yours and mine in our current situations, have been influenced by it. Around children you see quickly how power relations are formed and how they play out. To treat each other with decency is an extraordinarily complex thing, it turns out. Feminism’s influence on child rearing is crucial too, and valuable for the inclusion of men in the practice of raising kids, once solely women’s domain. I don’t think my father, for example, ever changed a diaper in his life. I’ve learned in the last couple of years with Keaton a kind of provisory existence, where I read each situation according to the context and demands of that environment, mood, need, etc. It’s exhausting but it’s also liberating in that I’ve come to attend each relationship as vital and essentially dynamic. It’s much like poetry and language. You learn not to impose your will on someone or something, but to listen, feel through it, make subtle negotiations. And failure’s also part of that package. There are days that just suck.

The ways women now approach the raising of children are different too. Extended breast-feeding is much more accepted now (the World Health Organization now recommends at least 2 years). By the way, right here, in all fairness, I have to say that Hoa has done a tremendous amount of research on childhood issues. Much more than I have done. She picks up the practical info on herbal medicines, whether or not to vaccinate and other basic approaches and information. She’s in direct conversation with a supportive network of women and can quickly find answers to our questions. In that sense, things have still not changed that much. I don’t know of any fathering communities, at least none I’d want to be a part of. So that brings up basic differences of social commitment and exchange.

It’s hard for me to examine broader power structures in abstract terms like patriarchy. I don’t think the capacity for evil is exclusive to one sex. And expressions of power are divers, complicated and not always visible in ways that are obvious. In terms of cultural evolution, Sauer and others claim that men were domesticated much later than women, and that domestication conflicts continue to be an issue. So there’s the whole psycho-pathology of the species still transforming, adjusting in a short time, maybe a million years or so, to agriculture, trade, complex societies and the like coming to the present. Our tools are advanced, our critical tools as well. But our ability to raise children and interact with each other have roots in our pre-history. That hasn’t changed. Our psyches are tenuous within the complex social environments we inhabit. We may not worry about where the next meal’s coming from, but there are basic insecurities: am I raising my child right? how should I respond to this fucked-up situation? And in this post-metaphysical, global situation, fueled by an expanding technocracy, we’re living now within biopolitical frameworks that code and trace our every move. Modernity demands a certain social, technological and political conformity and the old male / female roles fail to deal with that. Each day is full of complex oppositions of feelings and needs. Finding ways to live as a global subject while also preserving individual creative practices is challenging, to say the least. Our instincts recoil at mind-killing conformist patterns of coercion and discourse while at the same time we get to work on time, pay our bills and do countless other tasks that are essential to the continuation of the post-industrial West. Feminism, as I understand it, helps inform the ways men and women can work together to push the boundaries of meaning within these technological and systematic spaces. And in the absence of broad political movements or opposition, this more subtle, day-to-day engagement with our environments seems one of the few possibilities left to us in shaping the world we live in.

AG—Agreed. As I mentioned earlier, this idea of micropolitics is very important to my own thinking about culture, politics, and the ranges of engagement poetry’s capable of. At the same time, micropolitics can’t become a substitute for "broad political movements or opposition," however absent the latter may seem, but instead needs to be integrated with them. Adolph Reed Jr., has an insightful essay on these issues, entitled, "Why Is There No Black Political Movement?" In it, he defines a political movement as: "a force that has shown a capability, over time, of mobilizing popular support for programs that expressly seek to alter the patterns of public policy or economic relations." Reed points out that of course people have "daily confrontations" with power; yet these confrontations don’t necessarily lead to broad-based social movements nor should they supersede them.

There’s a need to constantly revise our notions and language of political intervention in order to keep pace with rapid social and technological change. I wonder if anyone knew at the time that a handful of people refusing to leave a lunch counter would help instigate the massive social upheavals that occupying factories once did. Did the various trade representatives, supported in the streets by global justice protesters, who walked out on the US at the World Trade Organization talks in Cancún last fall signal a decline in US geo-economic hegemony? The multifaceted international resistance to dictated neoliberalism looks like a pretty big movement to me, and one that’s making an impact. At the other end of the political spectrum is the organized right, which has definitely influenced recent US social and foreign policy. If Bush is defeated this fall, it will be the result of a political movement to depose him supplementing "regular" Democratic voters. Are the only broad-based political movements ones recognized by the mainstream media?

Again, feminism and related civil rights movements seem to provide a model, one that combines a politics of the everyday with a widespread social politics, including electoral politics. Of course, feminism had to keep adjusting its strategies, ideologies, and language as it own exclusions were called into question by working-class women, minority women, and lesbians. Similarly, I think our own discussion of parenting has to recognize the homophobia in US society that won’t allow same-sex couples the general rights, access, or "official" recognition granted to those deemed heterosexual. Being a parent has made me even more aware of choices people make and are not allowed to make—perhaps because being a parent seems like the biggest choice I’ve ever made, more so than the ongoing choice to be a writer, with its accompanying marginalization, lack of financial recompense, enforced discipline, and solitude (to list some of the less glamorous traits . . . ). And near the top of this list would be the institutions one chooses—consciously or unconsciously—and chooses not to affiliate oneself with.

Posted by Dale at March 11, 2004 04:16 PM