for/pq

A production stretches its tentacle roots a long way down through time and dreams. I like to imagine the roots as dwelling in the special room of the soul, where they lie maturing comfortably like mighty cheeses. Some, reluctantly or quite enthusiastically and quite often, come into view; others do not emerge at all. They see no necessity to take part in this perpetual production.

This store of slow ideas and swift flashes of inspiration begins to ebb away now, but I feel no sense of sadness or loss.

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.

The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote this in her last complete book before she died of ovarian cancer, but I didn’t know anything about Rose when I picked up the copy of Love’s Work that Sara had left in the living room. I was awake early that day, glad to be alone but also wondering how long I was going to be this glad to be alone. As if it was urgent business I needed to take care of, I surrendered most of the day to this short, circuitous mediation on love and death and sex and longing.

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage … You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.

Yet there remains even in Lasch’s late books, and especially in his final book, True and Only Heaven, hints and portents of what a truly engaged and “radical” social criticism might look like. A test for this criticism would be its ability to provide a vision of the good life that rejected a progressive fantasy of abundance without sliding into nostalgia for yesteryear. Already in the early Seventies, Lasch had begun to explore how Americans could be made to wake from the dream of perpetual progress:

It is only therefore when we find ourselves imprisoned in our private cars, marvelously mobile but unable to go anywhere because the highways are choked with traffic; when we find ourselves surrounded by modern conveniences but unable to breathe the air; provided with unprecedented leisure to fish in polluted rivers and swim at polluted beaches; provided with the means to prolong life beyond the point where it offers any pleasure; equipped with the power to create human life, which will simultaneously destroy the meaning of life—it is only, in short, when we are confronted with the contradictions of individualism and private enterprise in their most immediate, unmistakable, and by now familiar form that we are forced to reconsider our exaltation of the individual over the life of the community, and to submit technological innovations to a question we have so far been careful not to ask: Is this what we want?

By connecting the big questions of liberal progress and perfectibility to an even larger, more pressing question—“Is this what we want?”—Lasch challenged his readers to search for a way out of the impasse where the only two options seemed to be a crackpot realism that insisted on technological degradation as a necessary corollary of progress, and a glazed-over utopian drive for perfection. As was so often the case, Lasch looked to the past—and to the populist past—for help articulating such a path. In place of the idea of history as linear progress, he argued for “concepts like nemesis, fate, fortune, or providence.” Instead of “luxury for all,” he endorsed “competence, as [American populists] would have called it—a piece of earth, a small shop, a useful calling.” Competence, Lasch believed, “was a more reasonable as well as a more worthy ambition” than consumerism or perfectionism, embodying “a humbler set of expectations” in addition to “a more strenuous and morally demanding definition of the good life.”

“One night after a meeting she asks me if she can talk to me. I nod sure, she sits down and starts to tell me, very hesitantly, that there’s this man she’s in love with. I think she’s about to tell me she’s afraid to sleep with him, and I start to tell her if you’re in love there’s nothing wrong with. . . . ‘Oh no, no, no,’ she interrupts me, ‘it’s nothing like that. Of course, we’ve been sleeping together. It’s that he’s Chinese. I’m terrified to tell my father we want to get married.’

“I stare at her. What the hell do I do with this? Finally, I say to her, ‘Look, if you’re afraid to tell him alone I’ll go with you.’ ‘You’ll go with me?’ she says. ‘Not only me,’ I say, ‘we’ll take a delegation if that’ll make you feel any better.’ ‘A delegation?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I say, getting into the swing of it, ‘we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party. Why not? You got a right.’ ‘I’ll think it over,’ she says, and she goes away.

“Well, of course, I forgot all about it, the work went on, and a month later, after another meeting, Lilly suddenly comes up to me again, and she’s beaming from ear to ear. What happened?’ I say. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it took me all this time to get up the nerve to say anything to my father, but last week I came home from work one night and I marched into his room and I stood in the doorway and I said: “I’m getting married.” He looked up at me and he just stared at me for a long time. Then he said: “Is he Jewish?” “No, Pa,” I said, “he’s not, he’s Chinese.” My father stared at me in such a way I knew he was thinking one of us had lost his mind and he wasn’t sure which one it was. But after a while he was sure. “I’ll kill you,” he said. My knees started to buckle. Then all of a sudden it was like you were there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: “If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?” He hasn’t said a word to me since. Li and I are getting married next week.’

An executive of the United Fruit Company, a Mr. something Stites—she couldn’t remember his first name and simply called him “you”—took her east to Oriente in his private plane. She’d been hesitant to go. He seemed like a person who was dangerous because he didn’t know which parts of him were rotten, or even that he harbored rot. “All this belongs to us,” he said, as they hedgehopped over green cane fields. “Three hundred thousand acres. Those are our boats, anchored off shore there. You see them?” Maybe he wasn’t dangerous after all, she decided. He simply wanted a showgirl to marvel over his sugar empire. They landed at company headquarters and she ran through a canopy of banana groves near the airport, trees with long, flat leaves, taller than she was and loaded with dank and heavy clusters of bananas, a strange purple flower dangling off the end of each cluster. She put her hand around a banana stalk. “They’re full of water, pure water,” the executive said. It felt like a chilled human limb with a cold pulse.

Vovô Lipo would be the leftwing governor of the State of Pernambuco three times. As history books say, in 1962 he was elected by a coalition of rural sugar cane workers, urban workers and the leftwing bourgeoise of which he was himself a member. Vovô Lipo’s great promise was land reform and literacy. Workers, who were at that point tenants of the sugar cane landowners, wanted to own their own land. They wanted to work their own land. After five hundred years of serfdom and slavery and early deaths and beatings and eating dirt to try to die (approximately: generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation after generation) they wanted their own land. No masters and no slaves. And they wanted education. More than half of Pernambuco was illiterate. There were fires over the sugar cane fields.

When Vovô Lipo became the new governor of the State of Pernambuco he was strong in his body; thick limbed and thick furrow-browed and thirty-nine years old. For two years, he governed with his sleeves rolled up and, for the first time in the history of the state, union leaders stepped into the governor’s palace. Feet on the marble. The landowners called him a communist.