by
Eula Biss
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We’re driving through the mountains of France talking about affluence. Looking at the map this morning, John noticed that affluence is the French word for the tributaries of a river. He wonders if the word once suggested a great river of wealth flowing into smaller affluences. Was it comforting for people to think of money replenishing itself in a regenerative cycle with the rains? Along with affluence, there are liquid assets, and trickle-down economics, and the rising tides that float all boats. Why is water so often a metaphor for money? Perhaps because we like to believe that our economic system is naturally occurring, not man-made. Maybe the movement of money feels inevitable if you imagine it as water, with only blameless gravity participating in the accumulation of wealth.
ok kinda cool
The poets gave away their own books, handbound sometimes, and letterpress broadsides made on antiquated machinery, they gave their time to editing each other’s work in their bedroom offices, they paid to have it printed, they carried each other’s books in suitcases to give to other poets, they used their day jobs at copy shops to print chapbooks and zines, they performed their work for nothing but applause, and they gave each other places to stay, couches to sleep on. Not for profit, but for literature. I guess, I tell him, it’s easy for me to believe there’s an alternative to capitalism because I feel like I’ve lived it. Within capitalism, of course.
Sara gives me The Unquiet Grave, the book Cyril Connolly wrote the year he turned forty, when he was struggling with the question of what he wanted out of life. I can give this to you, Sara says, laughing, because you’re not unhappy with your work. She means my writing. “Approaching forty, sense of total failure,” Connolly writes. He has spent his life on comforts, traveling and running up debts. He likes soft cheeses and warm baths, but he fears that he is losing himself to pleasure. He sloshes with alcohol, as he puts it, and his mind has become “a worn gramophone record.”
Pleasure is not necessarily harmful, he writes. But it “outrages that part of us which is concerned with growth.” He wants to be more than he is. He is stagnating in his gin and whiskey, and in his memories of long afternoons in Paris. He wants to write a great work. He thinks he might have to give up his pleasures and suffer like the writers he admires. But he’s not entirely convinced, as among his pleasures is the pleasure of writing: “O sacred solitary empty mornings, tranquil meditations—fruit of book-case and clock-tick, of note-book and arm-chair; golden and rewarding silence, influence of sun-dappled plane-trees, far-off noises of birds and horses, possession beyond price of a few cubic feet of air and some hours of leisure.”
Our bodies were born into hard labor. To people who Grandma Betty would say “never had to lift a finger,” that might sound like something to be pitied. But there was a beautiful efficiency to it—form in constant physical function with little energy left over. In some ways, I feel enriched rather than diminished for having lived it.
I know the strength of this body that helped hoist an air compressor into a truck, leveraged a sheet of drywall alone, carried buckets of feed against prairie wind. I know the quickness of my limbs that scaled a tall fence when a bull charged and that leapt when a ladder fell. But while I worked in those ways, like my mother and father I wrote poetry in my mind.
There’s an idea that laborers end up in their role because it’s all they’re suited for. What put us there, though, was birth, family history—not lack of talent for something else. “Blue-collar workers” have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as “white-collar professionals.” To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body’s intelligence, too.
The frustration at the dangerous crossroads of gender and poverty was sharpened for my mom in a couple of ways, I think. She had a mind that wanted books, ideas, and sketch pads—things she sat with privately but didn’t get to share with the world. And, because people considered her beautiful, she got a constant stream of attention about her body, at work and elsewhere. Being physically objectified that many times over—as a labor machine, a producer of children, and a decorative object—all while being aware of your own unexpressed talent can make the body feel like a prison.
Along with the freedom and the space, that is a blessing you would have received from the feral way that children among us lived: seeing blood every day on a kitten’s neck, a father’s hand, the ground beneath a slaughtered hog hanging from a hook. Knowing in your own bones how fragile and fleeting a body is.
When the temporary job at Boeing ended, Dad found more work in Wichita, this time for a national company that supplied and disposed of industrial cleaning products. He drove a van around the city and surrounding small towns, delivering cleaning solvent and equipment to mechanics’ shops. He then collected their spent chemicals, such as engine oil, into a large barrel in the back of the van to dump at a designated waste site.
He’d been working for them all of ten days when, driving alone along an interstate, things started moving in slow motion. By the time he got back to the company yard, saliva was frothing from his lips. Another employee drove him to the Minor Emergency Center at the mall where Mom sometimes worked holiday kiosks.
[...]
“It took three years to get my body, mind, and soul cleaned out,” Dad told me. It was such a traumatic event that decades had passed before we ever discussed it.
That cleaning-solvent business—a billion-dollar corporation, when Dad worked for them—changed the design of their trucks because of him, he told me, but he couldn’t say where or how he heard that. Maybe it’s true. Maybe it was just a passing, hopeful, or misleading comment by an attorney, and Dad held on to it—giving some meaning to what he had gone through.
He settled with the company out of court. He walked away with about fifty grand after attorney fees and signed papers saying he wouldn’t seek further damages. Through the Kansas Workers Compensation Act, he also collected disability payments for almost two years for a total of about $22,000. But he was back to work much of that time—messed up yet working anyhow—so the state cut him off.
he got chemical poisoning from driving a truck wtf
It’s a hell of a thing to feel—to grow the food, serve the drinks, hammer the houses, and assemble the airplanes that bodies with more money eat and drink and occupy and board, while your own body can’t go to the doctor. Even though no one complained or maybe even realized it, I could feel that the people around me knew they were viewed as dispensable.
When I was a kid, the United States was a few decades away from reckoning with the reality that the next generation would be worse off, not better off, than the one before it. But my community had been facing dwindling odds for generations. They knew that children like me likely wouldn’t and shouldn’t aim for life on a farm. Few country kids were pressured to keep a farm going.
Well ahead of middle-class America, for all my family’s emphasis on hard work, on some level we’d done away with the idea that it always paid off. Being as we got up before dawn to do chores and didn’t quit until after dark, it was plain that the problem with our outcomes wasn’t lack of hard work. The problem was with commodities markets, with big business, with Wall Street—things so far away and impenetrable to us that all we could do was shake our heads, hate the government, and get the combine into the shed before it started to hail.
President Dwight Eisenhower, a native of rural Kansas, said, “Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as “flyover country,” is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.
i like the phrasing of the last sentence