Time of life
"Here we sit like flies on the sugar bowl" was our camp song that flitted across my mind this morning as I watched the osprey nest cam at Grand Lake, Colorado. There are three fledglings, the other two have just flown off, maybe this little guy hasn't flown yet, IDK. When I tuned in it was still dark, and all three of them on the nest watching and waiting for breakfast.
Judging by their evident health and strength, the parents are keeping them well supplied with fish from the lake, large and beautiful, which is across the way, and which the camera trains on from Time to Time during off season. I watched them a while last evening too, and they were waiting for supper.
Matured osprey chicks are about full-size as adult ospreys, but their feathers have a white tip, which makes them look speckled.
Emigrate: they'll fly off one at a Time over a few days as autumn gathers in. With some nests, the mother bird leaves first. The dad osprey doesn't migrate until everyone has left, then stays around a few days or so before himself leaving until he returns next spring to continue the nesting part of Life's cycle. It's sort of a melancholy Time of year, the leaving, and the empty space of Time until life resumes again. I love watching the osprey cycle, that signifies a lot to me personally as a person at this stage of life and Time.
Poignant, never maudlin. Like when summer heat fades into wonderful, welcome brisk chilly mornings of autumn, leaves suddenly brilliant orange, yellow, red, the fragrance of apple cider. In some places we lived, everything was suddenly football - - Gainesville, Athens, Ann Arbor, Columbus, Harrisburg. Generally as life turned for us our years in Rhode Island, Michigan, Ohio, WashingtonDC and Pennsylvania. All places of the heart, and it's all good, better, best.
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Of the half-dozen or so newsletter bloggers that I signed up for and receive free as a subscriber of The Atlantic and The New Yorker, maybe my favorite is "Brooklyn, Everywhere" with Xochitl Gonzalez, couple of others as well, but she's the closest to my heart in how she writes, and experiences life, and psychs out people and culture.
Actually, cultures, plural: with basically just the two, English and Spanish, the United States doesn't have as many cultures, languages and dialects as are spread across Europe; but the cultures, how people experience life, how we live and love and hate and see, perceive, understand what is and what is not, varies and shifts and differs from place to place, neighborhood to neighborhood, color to color, race to race, in some places block to block. Even as one author I've loved, the invisible fence down the center of the street out front, Jews on one side, "Christians" across the street. Xochitl specializes in love of Old Brooklyn as she knew it, more precise, the Puerto Rican flavor there; but she "gets" all of it and all of us.
Today's newsletter (scroll down) is spot on, chillingly. Especially for me, educated and licensed as a pro in one of the world's True religions, watching the horror of the current Salman Rushdie chapter, keeps me mindful of the inhuman evils that religious certainty has cursed earthly life with. Someone, one of my seminary professors commenting, "How does God stand us?"
Still and all, Life is Good, and Everyday is a Beautiful Day, and I'm grateful to still be here as part of it.
RSF&PTL
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 SUBSCRIBER NEWSLETTER | |
| AUGUST 16, 2022 | |
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| As a subscriber to The Atlantic, you have access to all editions of this newsletter, including subscriber-only exclusives. Thank you for supporting my work. | |
Salman Rushdie, Offense and Artistic Expression | |
This is a free edition of Brooklyn, Everywhere, a newsletter that explores the many meanings of gentrification. Most of my newsletter editions will now be subscriber-only exclusives. If you’re not already an Atlantic subscriber, you’ll continue to receive previews of everything I write. Subscribe now for full access. One of the best New York nights of my life was in the early aughts, at a children’s book launch in the basement of the Mercer Hotel. It was a tiny spot, the kind of place where, if you were there, you were inevitably talking to everyone else who was there, too—and the “everyone else” at this event was so random that it was sexy: Joaquin Phoenix, fresh off of Gladiator; Howard Stern and his then-new wife, Beth Ostrosky; Moby, who was inexplicably pole dancing; and so many supermodels, it felt like you were in a magazine. (I really still have no idea how I ended up at this party, but that was the beauty of New York.) And of course, to make it a real New York affair, it required at least a dash of public intellectuals: writers, cultural commentators, novelists. In those days, revered downtown critics like Michael Musto or Fran Lebowitz were the types who typically fit the bill. But on this particular night, it was Salman Rushdie: literary hero. I remember thinking, This is the coolest party I’ve ever been to. Because, as I mentioned, the place was the size of a boot box, it didn’t take long before Rushdie and I were bellied up to the bar at the same time, and I took the opportunity to tell him how much I loved The Satanic Verses. With tremendous humor, he responded, “Did you actually read it?” I had no ambitions of being a writer, but I was an avid reader of fiction at the time and assured him that I’d read that and Midnight’s Children and loved them both. In my naivete about life, and my preconceived notions of what “serious writers” did with their free time, I asked him what brought him to the party that night. To that, he said: “I’m just making up for lost time.” Back then, when I was only in my 20s, I could not have even imagined what it would be like to re-emerge into public life after spending nearly a decade underground, wandering from place to place, living under a pseudonym, with 24-7 government protection. I could not grasp how so much living could be sacrificed for writing a work of fiction. Not that I wasn’t aware of the fatwa on Rushdie’s life—the bounty on his head was international news that had played out on the covers of all the New York tabloids. It was just that, having barely lived at all at that point, I hadn’t understood all that he’d been made to give up for his art. Of course, all art requires sacrifice—of time, of spirit, of sanity. And art requires risk of rejection, of critical misunderstanding, and of pissing people off. How could it not? Art is a reflection of the lived life of the artist—no matter the art form—and the quest to express or find some expression of personal truth about that lived experience. For some of us, including Rushdie, this often results in touching on the controversial or, at the very least, disagreeable. As a writer he’s often concerned with the politics and history of his native India; his second book resulted in a lawsuit by Indira Gandhi and his third was banned in Pakistan. In many ways, the story of Salman Rushdie, the artist, is a universal opera that all artists can relate to: risk, reward, and sacrifice—all of which have played out on the grandest possible scale. As Martin Amis wrote in Vanity Fair of Rushdie’s predicament in 1990:
Certainly, this was true for me when I heard the news of his stabbing on Friday. I am not a writer friend of his, but by virtue of being a writer, I understood that—by simply existing as an artist—there but for the grace of God go I. Here is where my thoughts turn more cynical, and probably more controversial: As his condition stabilized and my concern and horror turned to analysis and assessment of the larger situation, I was forced to ask myself what would have happened had The Satanic Verses come out in 2022. In addition to the bounty on his head, would Rushdie have also faced a metaphorical death in the form of so-called cancellation? A recoiling of the literary and intellectual world that had so vocally supported him in 1989? In 2013, Rushdie himself predicted that the answer would be yes. Commenting in response to the American writers of PEN America protesting the recognition of the journalists from Charlie Hebdo, Rushdie said: “[I]f the attacks against Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.” By his own admission, Rushdie didn’t write the book with the intention to offend, as he wrote (in the third person) for The New Yorker:
Regardless of his intention, his tome was and is offensive to many Muslims.Perhaps today the book would not have even been published for this reason. Or if it had, I can picture a scenario where Western liberal society en masse likely would not have condoned violence, but mightn’t have rushed to his defense, either. There are very real right-wing attacks happening on free speech right now, including homophobic attemps to add “ratings” to TV programs that feature gay characters, book bans, and threats of violence against librariansfor carrying and recommending these books. Still, on the left today, there is little appetite within liberal discourse to support freedom of artistic expression that might be deemed offensive to anyone—intentional or otherwise. In the current moment, our concern for Rushdie’s freedom of speech feels like a case that’s been grandfathered in—one that, in considering oneself liberal, we are meant to have a certain opinion about, but that opinion is actually completely out of whack and inconsistent with the actual discourse of the moment. It's a bit of a throwback—like the kind of book party I chance encountered him at—of a moment in time that’s past us. Or perhaps it’s an opportunity to revisit the past and question if perhaps we might not have thrown out some of the baby with the bathwater in the past 30 years since the bounty was put on Rushdie’s head. The fatwa is an extreme expression of a still-familiar threat; physical exile from your home country is extreme. But the truth is that artists and creators of all races, genders, and sexual preferences are living in a time of trepidation, at best. At worst, we live in fear of cancellation—not of our personas, but of our art. Of the limitation of our forms of expression. Of a kind of creative assault. (Public apologies aside, as a friend pointed out to me this weekend, Will Smith really seems to have opened the floodgates to retaliation against public figures at their most vulnerable.) I know this from media case studies I can point to, and by way of personal stories—whispered to me in bars, or experienced through pulled book contracts and requests for edits of scripts or storylines. Before I am misinterpreted, I want to be clear that this is not a defense of bad actors who happen to be artists. That people whose behavior as individuals outside of the creation of their art is criminal, bigoted, or hateful are being held accountable for that behavior in the court of public opinion or the marketplace is a good thing. But when the art itself is bothersome, to some or many, and faces backlash, this becomes a different question. As I see it, the bravest thing Salman Rushdie has done as an artist is to continue to make his art while knowing, better than almost anyone alive today, that radical truth-telling in a time where we are allergic to nuance holds great risks. Yes, it is our job to be courageous. But, when artists feel stifled by a climate, or are holding back from exploring their art to its fullest expression out of fear for how that art might be received, we all lose something. I say this even as I find some of the artmaking happening todayupsetting, offensive, discomforting, or questionable. Because we either believe in supporting free artistic expression, or we don’t. | |
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