It's 6:30 AM on a Sunday morning. I should be sleeping, but I'm not. Instead, I am sitting here on my living room couch in an apartment that is uncharacteristically quiet, not just becuase my wife and son are still sleeping, and my dog, instead of nudging me to take him out, is curled quietly in the big green chair in the corner, but because there is not much noise coming in from outside. The windows are wide open, but the street is quiet. Only one or two birds are singing; I don't hear the usual barking of dogs out for a walk; and even the main road that sits just on the other side of our northern-facing windows sounds like it is empty of the usual traffic--because even on Sunday morning, there is usually traffic.
I like mornings like this. Before my son was born, I used to get up this early every morning so I could write. It was a habit my wife got me into when she suggested that I change my teaching schedule so that I taught my classes later in the day and freed up my mornings. Before that, I often wrote until after midnight, and I was, of course, exhausted the next day. After my son's birth, however, that all changed. Early mornings became filled with him, and, even now, when he's seven, early mornings are still almost always not my own. During the week, it's about getting him out of bed and into the car so he won't be late for school, and on the weekends, it's almost always giving him the time he doesn't get with me during the week. I begrudge him none of this, but it does make mornings like this one, when I can be by myself and write or reflect or listen to music without interruption, very precious.
One of the reasons I couldn't go back to sleep this morning was the feeling of helplessness that has come over me lately about two issues, one on the stage of world politics and one on the stage of the blogosphere. The first is the current, two-front war going on in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians on the one hand and Israel and Hezbollah (with Lebanon caught in the middle) on the other; the second is a discussion thread I have become involved in on the blog
Alas which has to do with a fundamental disagreement among feminists about the stance feminists ought to take regarding the sex industry. On the one side are those who believe the sex industry is the quintessential expression of patriarchy and needs therefore to be eliminated, completely abolished. On the other side are those who believe that sex work can be a freely made choice and that what needs to happen is, rather, the reform of the sex industry, so that the people working in it can be safe and so they are respected for the work that they do. What makes me feel helpless in these two apparently disparate issues is that resolution just does not seem possible. Neither side in the Middle East conflict seems
truly to be willing to do what needs to be done to achieve peace; and neither side in what the writer of the post on Alas calls the "Sex Wars" seems willing to listen closely enough to the other to hear that they are not, or at least in my opinion that they are not, as far from each other as their rhetoric would suggest.
My point in writing this morning, however, is not to inflict on you my opinions about either of these issues. Rather, what ties them together in my imagination at this moment is the relationship between the helplessness I feel when facing them and why I became a writer in the first place.
To say that I grew up in a home where I felt voiceless would be an understatement. Not that I was quiet. Quite the contrary. I had something to say about everything, but what I had to say rarely reflected what was really going on inside me and, more to the point, I felt helpless to make what was really going on inside me heard. Part of this helplessness, of course, came from the dynamic of my family, the place I occupied within that dynamic and the fact that I did not yet have enough distance to be able to understand how that dynamic worked; part of the helplessness came from the fact that I lacked a vocabulary to talk about either the sexual abuse that had taken my voice from me in the first place or the violence, some of it sexualized, that I had witnessed in my home (I should add that neither of the two men who sexually abused me were family members.); and part of the helplessness, once I hit puberty, came from the fact that, like every other adolescent I have known, I was convinced the world would never understand me anyway.
I have been, for as long as I can remember, a voracious reader. If I did
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Richard Jeffrey Newman sent the following post to customers who purchased The Silence of Men