The Lovely and Loveable World

...which quietly persists

I appreciate that the title of this post may seem absurdly inappropriate right now. It’s a phrase from an essay by V. Nabokov called The Art of Literature and Commonsense; the author, in case you don’t know is someone who was driven out of his country, whose father was murdered by an assassin aiming for someone else and whose brother died in a concentration camp. The essay is a playful piece of serious writing that reverences the apolitical and non-pragmatic nature of art; it is meant to describe a “home for the spirit,” a divine and irrational place that is present in human life while extending past it, that which remains untouchable by “war gods,” dictators and various stupid yet crudely pragmatic human-made horrors.

I’ve been gone awhile, and not because I’m indifferent. I’ve been having a lot of thoughts and too many feelings about the same things everyone is thinking/feeling about, particularly regarding the election, Ukraine and the Middle East. I haven’t written anything about any of it here because it’s been hard to crystallize these thoughts (these discordant bits of mental detritus borne along by boiling feelings like lawn furniture in lava) into anything anyone might benefit from reading. This is mostly the case with the election; right now I don’t feel I have anything to say that thousands of other horror-struck Harris supporters haven’t said. Indeed I’m not sure what I have to say at all right now—I’ve paused work on the fiction projects I have going, one of which is about a Devil-possessed therapist, the other a tale of masculine woe (circa 2017) aptly titled And This Is Pain. At the moment, focus on fictional demons and pain almost seems indulgent and laughably redundant.

So I’ve asked myself, what might I want to read now? Either something ridiculous that illuminates the mad-awful ridiculousness inherent in human life or…something more rare in literature, that is, a realistic story about the goodness also inherent in human life. It would be natural or at least understandable for you to think Well then Mary why don’t you write something like that? Because: I don’t think that for me to set my jaw/gird my loins for such a straight-forward artistic moral purpose would result in a worthwhile story. (Note: there must be fiction writers who create excellent work when driven by the will to advance a positive moral vision; I am not one of them.) Fiction is most compelling when it has a strong element of moral ambiguity because it puts us into contact with a mystery of our existence—what I called, in my post on Alice Munro “the knot of us,” where good and evil are sometimes unpredictably mixed. As I put it in that post, this is for me the primary value of art, that it reminds of us of this paradox and the need for humility before it. There are convincing good characters (see my description of Maureen Sun’s Esther in my August 5th post Something Beautiful) and truly uplifting moments in scores of great stories and novels. But such characters/narrative moments achieve their power and reality by dramatic contrast with the chaos of blundering brutality, heartless procrustianism and tragicomical error by which they surrounded.

In terms of fiction, I don’t feel equal to it right at the moment. But in this moment, on Substack, I want to do something simpler. I want to relate stand-alone stories of non-fictional goodness I’ve experienced. These events happened decades ago but I’ve never forgotten them; they came to mind recently when I was having an email conversation with a friend about niceness—a quality I would compare to a common and often overlooked flower. It’s a generic word that can function either as a kind of place-holder for “he’s alright” or a dismissive indicator of insipidity. When I use the word I usually mean something like reflexive kindness.  Which, true, is often not that deep or interesting.  Still in a pinch, its a very good thing.

But what I’m talking about is kindness that goes beyond reflex, that is nourishing—in the case of these stories I’m about to tell they were even formative. The first happened when I was sixteen. I was hitchhiking from Montreal to Toronto, something I did a lot of back then. (Note: this was something a great many people did during the late 60s into the mid-70s. Because it was so common it was accepted as mainstream teen behavior and was therefore a lot less risky than it would be now, for both hitchers and drivers. Not that it was risk-free.) While most of the people who picked me up were, well, nice, I had a few close calls, meaning a few times when I had to get out of a car very quickly. So I was basically trusting but wary; my M.O. was to be very quiet, talking only in response to the driver; to be respectful but not actually friendly. It was, I’m sure, not at all charming, but it served its protective purpose; a strong aura of distance makes a boundary that sometimes even aggressive people will hesitate to cross.

On this particular occasion, the man who picked me up was Middle Eastern. I couldn’t tell where he was from and I would not have asked. In my young mind people from that part of the world were extra-foreign and extra-sexist and I was probably even more reserved with him than usual. Even though he drove me most of the way, in my memory we barely spoke until we were coming into Toronto. He asked “Do you have family in Toronto?” No, I didn’t. “Do you have friends in Toronto?” No, I didn’t. He asked where I would stay. I said I didn’t know yet but that I would find somewhere. (This was not as hapless as it sounded; there were cheap hostels and other more casual options too if you knew where to go.) He was silent for a moment and then told me that I was welcome to spend the night with him and his family. I’m not sure why I said yes but I did.

He lived in a suburb on the edge of the the city. In my memory, his wife already had dinner on the table when we arrived. He had a daughter, maybe a bit younger than me. In my vague memory they were more formally dressed than I was used to, possibly they were wearing some kind of traditional garb. They seemed exotic to me; to them I must’ve seemed feral, even gross, in jeans, a T-shirt, no makeup, no bra and long unkempt hair. We barely spoke. But they welcomed me into their home. They fed me and gave me a bed. The next day the man drove me to the subway. I don’t remember how we parted, but I’m guessing I said a cursory “thanks” and went on my way. I didn’t know how to appreciate such kindness then, or even to fully take it in. I have since thanked him many times over in my heart.

Then there was another time that happened a few years later, also when I was hitchhiking. I’d just come across the border from Canada into Detroit. It was later than I’d planned to arrive and starting to get dark. There weren’t many cars in the area and those that I saw were surely not traveling outside the city; I remember a family driving past me with little kids in the backseat, openly gawking at the ridiculous sight of me, in my leather-patched jeans and backpack with my thumb out—a crazy white girl just like on TV!

Pedestrians walking past, most of them likely on their way home from work, also stared perhaps with contempt—except for this one guy, a middle-aged black man in a suit. He walked past me, then stopped and came back. “Excuse me,” he said. “Don’t you know that you shouldn’t be doing this?” I said yes, but I didn’t have money for a bus ticket. He sighed and deliberated for maybe a second before he asked me where I was trying to get to. I told him. He took me to his car, drove me to the bus station and bought me a ticket. At least my manners were better by then; I put my hand out and thanked him profusely.

The next time I’m thinking of I was a 21-year-old stripper in Canada, mostly Toronto. The stripping world at that place and time (late 70s) was very tame compared to now; the two main clubs in Toronto (Starvin’ Marvins and Le Strip) were a cross between an old-school burlesque theater and a go-go bar. The older women had traditional costumes (negligees, feather boas) the younger ones were more into fetish lingerie; no one was allowed to touch you and tipping, if it happened at all, was a guy handing you a twenty (sometimes more) on your way off stage. It was low-key and sweet but it didn’t pay well; there was better money to be made “on the road,” meaning the many small hotels and bars in the rural surrounding area; some of these places were rough and more likely to involve expectations of prostitution—occasionally you’d hear rumors of rape. I rarely did those gigs, but sometimes if I needed the money, I would venture out.

image by Susan Meiselas

This is how I wound up at a dive hotel bar in Thorold, Ontario doing lunch and dinner “shows.” The gig was different from others of its type in a couple of frankly shitty ways: as usual I was expected to stay the week in the hotel; quite unusually they had stuck me in a room with no bathroom (meaning I had to go down the hall to find a pot) and no lock on the door. The first night I barricaded myself in with a heavy dresser and stayed awake listening to drunk people laugh/talk/cough/stumble around in the hall outside. The next day I discovered that before and after each show I had to walk through the working kitchen first in my costume and then naked except for a g-string while the cook, this huge, deranged-looking guy, waved a meat-cleaver and declared stuff like “Dinner tonight: fricasseed Bambi!” (Yes, that is what I called myself.)

But the cook had an assistant, a maternal middle-aged lady who told me “Don’t worry about him, he’s got a sick sense of humor but he’s harmless.” On the third day, I opened up to her about my situation (the carpet of my room had gone damp with rank-smelling water, making it harder to push the dresser into place) and she didn’t hesitate. “You can’t stay in the hotel,” she said. “It’s not safe.” She invited me to spend the rest of the week at her house with her daughter. Her generosity was made more piercing when I learned that they had just suffered a tragedy: the woman’s former husband and younger daughter had died together in a fire while the girl was visiting him. That’s why they had a room for me. I also learned (from her surviving daughter) that her co-workers had told her she shouldn’t let me stay in her house because I’d probably rob her. But her goodness was unstoppable.

I’ve experienced various kindnesses over the course of my life but I think these incidents are the ones I remember vividly because they were so generous and because they happened when I was very young and vulnerable—and in the first case, with nothing visibly likeable about me. I had nothing to give in return (though I did leave the cook’s assistant an envelope with $50 in it—I know, it wasn’t enough) and no social power to wield. There was no advantage for these people in extending such generosity.

I’ve thought of them when, as an adult, I’ve had the chance to pay it forward, including the chance to let a stranger in trouble stay at my place. I think of them too when I hear other tales of non-pragmatic kindness, for example this story of Lebanese animal rescuers who’ve devoted themselves, while being bombed, to saving trapped and abandoned animals, including a lion cub which they were miraculously able to relocate to South Africa. (Animals are extremely vulnerable in such contexts and there is no advantage to be had in helping them either.)

There is another story that I want to tell, even if it is almost an inversion (or perverse version) of the two stories I just told, even if it is touching/excruciating in equal measure. I’ve wrestled with whether or not it is appropriate to include it here because it is so much deeper and more dire than the anecdotes I’ve related, and so far beyond my experience. In the end I decided that it should be told, but in a separate post which will come in a day or two.

Meanwhile I want to end with this song from 1966:

It’s something I used to listen to with the transistor radio against my head at night, when I was 12 years old. I was feeling like the song said, that “life [was] filled with much confusion” that “happiness [was] just an illusion.” It supported my belief that in the world people could help each other, that beauty was there—that there existed a lovely and loveable world, a “home for the spirit” that these voices made manifest. Of course I didn’t think those thoughts. But I felt them. The wonder of something that should be cherished even if it can’t save us, and will continue even if we don’t. Its something we are going to need to remember in the coming days. I know it’s not enough. But it matters.