Tuesday
A friend asked me recently how I get my ideas for this column, and I thought I’d try to answer by making the question the subject of today’s blog post. In the process, I share my mixed feelings about the U.S. men’s hockey team, recent winner of an Olympic gold medal.
We process the world through our past experiences, so for one who has spent his life with his nose in books, it’s natural to see the world as literary narrative and poetic image. Given that many of the texts I cite are world treasures, there is potential for profound insight.
Once I link a news item or life incident to a particular text, the words begin to work their magic. While I often don’t know where the connection will take me, time and again I am impressed with the knowledge that ensues.
Making the initial connection is often the difficult part. Fortunately, sometimes someone else makes the connection for me. An essay mentions Milton or Voltaire or Yeats or T.S. Eliot or Tolkien, at which point I’m off and running. But sometimes an image or phrase hovers just outside my consciousness so that hours or even a full day go by before I can pin it down. This happened with the aftermath of the hockey victory.
This was a great year for the Americans as both the men and the women triumphed over the nation that owns the sport. Both victories occurred in overtime. Applying a culinary metaphor, I savored them both.
I thought of the “savor” metaphor, however, only after I tasted the bitterness of what happened next. The sense of biting into something foul was so visceral that I knew I had encountered the image somewhere. It took me several frustrating hours before I recognized the source.
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the unnamed narrator (let’s call him IM) has just moved to New York after getting kicked out of college. When a middle-class Black man in the south, he differentiated himself from lower class Black men (what he calls “Field Niggerism”), but in Harlem he suddenly finds himself freed from these social expectations. He can buy, without apologizing, a buttered yam, which like chitterlings, mustard greens, pigs’ ears, pork chops, and black-eyed peas are the the fare of the unrespectable. He savors the taste as I savored the U.S. victories. First, there’s the anticipation as he encounters a street vendor selling them:
The yams, some bubbling with syrup, lay on a wire rack above glowing coals that leaped to low blue flame when struck by the draft of air. The flash of warmth set my face aglow as he removed one of the yams and shut the door.
And then the taste:
I took a bite, finding it as sweet and hot as any I’d ever had, and was overcome with such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control. I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom — simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought.
Yet this momentary freedom gets him reflecting on how his likes and dislikes have been foisted on him. Much of his life, he realizes, has been wasted by accepting “accepted attitudes.” Suddenly the yam doesn’t taste so good:
Yet the freedom to eat yams on the street was far less than I had expected upon coming to the city. An unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth now as I bit the end of the yam and threw it into the street; it had been frost-bitten.
After the nectar of the hockey victory, an unpleasant taste bloomed in my mouth. First there was FBI director Kash Patel chugging beers in the after-party celebration. Then it was Trump believing he had to denigrate the American women’s team in order to celebrate the win. “I must tell you,” he told the men when phoning in and inviting them to his State of the Union address, “we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.” After that he added, “I do believe I probably would be impeached.”
In other words, those who are woke will victimize me if I say that you deserve more public accolades than than your female counterparts. To which most of the hockey players cheered.
The last bitter taste was seeing the team then used as a prop in Trump’s hate-filled speech, which among other things blamed bribery, corruption, and lawlessness on the Somali community and on African immigrants in general. The team’s borrowed valor, in other words, was used to bolster white nationalist jingoism.
Applying Invisible Man to Trump is appropriate since the man, as much as anyone, looks through people rather than seeing them. He has a “peculiar disposition of the eyes” (to quote IM) that renders them invisible. In his inhumanity, Trump demonizes everyone who disagrees with him, especially (but not only) women and people of color. Ellison’s remarkable novel explores the impact that such blindness has on Americans, white and Black both.
So that’s one way that I generate posts for this blog.
