Landscape and the body in Mary Karr's Lit

Our goal is to use Mary Karr's memoir Lit as the lens through which we consider landscape, ecofeminism, writing the body, and women-focused ways of being/seeing. We do this, in part, anticipating that Karr's voice will be distinctly different from Terry Tempest Williams, allowing an alternate, yet equally provocative lens for experiencing self in the world.

Body Earth -- Karen Morrill-Bryan
Fishing Spaces -- by Diane Embry
21 Meditations on the Catholic Body -- Trisha Collopy
Righting: Women-Focused Ways of Seeing and Being -- Elizabeth Brenner




Body Earth

“I Hate Nature” Mary Karr declares on page 219 of her memoir, Lit. “I don’t mean to, I just never felt much about mountains and trees and shit.” Karr grew up the daughter of an alcoholic, seven-times married mother in gritty blue collar Texas. Her heritage of “West Texas dirt farmers” (27) seems to fit with Karr’s dry-as-Dust Bowl wit. Her flippant style and jaded perspective might be what lead her to make the nature-hating remark. On the other hand, perhaps she isn’t making an off-hand quip. Perhaps she really does hate nature, and since Karr has emerged as a distinctly contemporary female voice, her view on the subject is worth exploring.

To better understand Karr’s rejection of nature, I turned to Barbara Gates and her essay, "A Root of Ecofeminism." Gates summarizes and simplifies French feminist writer and thinker, Francoise d’Eaubonne, who advocated “a new way of seeing old problems: the linking of devaluation of women and the earth” (8) and she calls this “the Male System”, one that needs overturning (11). In spite of this, d’Eaubonne refutes the notion of men being less linked to the land, arguing “since all life is nature, neither gender of human beings can be closer than the other to nature” (13). So technically, she does not blame men, but “the Male System” for devaluing both women and the earth.

Has Karr subconsciously bought into this devaluation? She doesn’t behave as if she feels de-valued. She is bold, and even when confessing her mistakes, unapologetic. In fact, her matter-of-fact, this-is- who-I-am persona could almost be a template for the contemporary “I don’t care what society thinks” modern woman.

Karr seems more distant from nature than most, but perhaps her distance is not so uncommon. Sure, we in Minnesota claim to cherish our ten thousand lakes, the verdant Northwoods, the inspiring Lake Superior shore. But, living up close with nature is relatively rare. Karr wouldn’t be believable had she had long, Terry-Tempest-Williams-like healing, introspective treks through some beloved nearby nature park. Readers would roll their eyes in doubt. But, in light of d’Eaubonne, does Karr’s declaration indicate something deeper and more universal than a mere claim to disdain? Perhaps she is really saying: “In spite of my big ego, I hate myself.”

Karr might not hate who she is, but she certainly has self-destructive tendencies. These seem to be made worse when she has her son. D’Eaubonne makes the point that “women have historically been wedded to … nature though a social imperative requiring caring and consideration” (10). However, it is in the mother-role that Karr (and her own mother) fail miserably, at least at first. After the birth of her son, Karr descends into the worst of her addiction and madness, hitting an alcoholic rock-bottom. Becoming a mother is, for many, a loss of control. But d’Eaubonne is careful to point out that caretaking isn’t innate — there are no “mother-buttons” that automatically turn women into good caretakers. Yet, society, “the Male System” suggests that there is. And it certainly lets men off the hook — as if biology gives them a pass. Most women, myself included, learn to give up a sense of control, turn our bodies over to the care-taking role, and to some extent, subjugate our identity in ways not required of men. Writing has been Karr’s identity since she was a young student — one she props up with alcohol. And men are her role models. But once a mother, she must change her nature, toss out the old identity along with old habits, and invent something new.

So, does Karr really hate nature or is she expressing self-doubt about the nature of herself? On page 219, Karr says that she has “ a genetic memory of pulling a plow or tilling the soil that repels me from dirt and green glowing things.” Perhaps the plow is a really more of a metaphor for the difficult nature of her growing up, her alcoholic mother, her sick father, and her abusive relationships. By the book’s finale, Karr seems to have reconciled herself to her past, her mother, and her failures; in the process, she creates poetry and prose, green glowing things — an elixir — not from a bottle, but from some fertile spot deep within. I am reminded of d’Eaubonne’s call: a new way of seeing old problems. It seems that is exactly what Karr had to do — take a fresh look at old issues, and in the process, reconcile and forgive.


Fishing Spaces

1. A Cool Railing: Home

Freckled cinnamon-red brick, almond storm windows for protection, evergreen trim beginning to crack.

My mother’s soapy fingers are a natural, inexpensive perfect. Flip them over to the palm to see recent use. She stares out the window to the fields as she scrubs a blackened pot.

Dirty-blonde corn stalks, cracked clay soil, in the distance are tiny strokes of deep green.

My father’s forearms are a dark tan, covered in black hair and made of the kind of muscle one has from destroying everything, then trying to fix it. On the edge of the land, watch him cleaning the martin gourds with great love.

Triangle wings and shiny, dark-forked tails, sky-blue truck with filthy streaks of white and blackberry-violet shit, in and out of currents fly the blackish-purple martins.

My brother’s Port-wine stain flushes dark in the sunlight. He’s washing and waxing his S10 for the fourth time this month. When his radio is loud, he only has to listen to Godsmack. Nod and understand this. The arborvitae trees vibrate disdain.

Light-green shoots with streaks of yellows, the bodies of the charcoal bagworms, their cocoons a triangular tunnel made of amber dying leaves.

I’m down the dirt road at the hidden lake, after picking bagworms for hours and putting them into buckets. I dangle my legs off the dock, my toes grazing waves as I fish. I am never trying to catch anything, you see. It’s a kind of cleansing. I’m finding the space between land and air and water.

2. Dark Edge of Water

I seen Diane’s daddy Ronnie yesterday, Brian says. His age spots weave like freckles in and out of suspenders, which smell like the bottom of a lawnmower. He looks at his son, Carl, who is tying a weight to his line. A perfect knot.

Yeah? What’d he know? Carl says, stabbing a minnow onto his hook through the eye socket. The eye falls onto the floor of the boat, sticking on a twig and watching them both closely. Carl casts to bottom fish, trying to ignore the eye.

She’s away in Iowa or one of them places up north, Brian says.

Whadden’t she s’posed to be some kind of doctor? Carl asks, his pole curving.

Ronnie said she’s writin’. Ya got somethin’ there? Brian nods his head at Carl’s line.

Little girl, I’m guessin’. Can’t quite grab what she’s after. What the hell Diane gonna write? Fishin’? That ain’t somethin’ gonna take her real far, not like a doctor, Carl says, quickly tapping his bare foot against the motor handle the number of times he’s thought of the word “away.”

Yeah, well it ain’t like you did a whole lot neither. You’re here, though, ‘stead of Canada or wherever the hell she is. You’re helpin’ out at the house. Ronnie says she picked money over family the minute she went to that college up in Indy, Brian says.

How’d she go, anyway? He works at the factory with you, dudn’t he? Carl asks.

She got a scholarship or somethin’… Hey, hey, there! Brian yells and points. He jumps from bench seat to bench seat to get the cooler ready for fish to clean.

Carl pulls up hard, and the hook sinks into the mustached lip of the catfish. When he brings her to the surface, she garbles angrily, wanting to be the kind of clean that water brings her, but she’s stuck in his hands. Once the hook is out, though, Carl drops her instantly into the water, shrugging at his father.

3. The Wind: Away

When I move to La Crosse, I live on the purple bridge connecting Wisconsin and Minnesota across the massive Mississippi River. Sometimes the water is an abused blue-black, and other days it’s a greenish-brown, a dying moss in mud. But there’s more life in that beaten, moving body than up here. Every day I lean against the railing that doubles as a gnat cemetery, their graveless tiny bodies stamped by car grilles. I flick them off into the wind one by one to clean the bridge off, ticks of a second hand as I build the courage to jump. I don’t want to die—I strain to be both half-alive and half-dead. I want to feel the in-between of the cool railing, the wind rushing beneath the bridge, and the dark edge of the waters below. I am fishing for a space where moments aren’t defined as here or there, home or away, but as fluid, clean currents between imperfect places.


21 Meditations on the Catholic Body

1
My aunt once told me that she wished she lived in the Middle Ages, so she would only have to take a bath every two years. Don’t you hate touching your body? she said.

2
Turn everything upside down, inside out, back to front. Rack it with radical convulsions, carry back, reimport, those crises that her “body” suffers in her impotence to say what disturbs her.

3
In 1962, the doors of the church swung open. Religious flooded out. My aunt’s older sister and brother left their orders.

4
You say secular, I say counterculture.

5
In 1974, Belgian feminist Luce Irigaray was fired from her job at the University of Vincennes for publishing her thesis, Speculum de l’autre femme, in which she psychoanalyzes Western thinkers, including Freud and Plato, to show their male bias.

6
I can still smell my aunt’s distinct aroma of rose perfume, talcum powder and polyester. I can still feel the delicate crackle of the onionskin letters she began sending me when I was 15 and she was 37. At the time I had no sense of the dark forces looming behind our debates.

7
You say moral relativist, I say deconstructionist.

8
The problem, she wrote to me, is that you see everything in shades of grey. You say there’s no right or wrong. Would you let an ax murderer go unpunished? Upon receiving this letter, I immediately began to find reasons to sympathize with the ax murderer. As I read the letter, I saw my aunt’s mind as two bars of black and white, dark and light. Something in me began to resist.

9
You say culture wars, I say open doors.

10
In my twenties, I went through a wild period, my aunt tells me. I try to imagine what this means. I see her getting off work from her shift as a waitress at the all-night pancake house. She’s wearing a polyester skirt and blouse. In the front pocket, her fingers worry her notebook for orders and the night’s tips.

11
In one long letter, my aunt quoted Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Thomas More. I recall the words “natural law.”

12
One day I was standing on a corner in a miniskirt, my aunt told me, when a man came up to me and grabbed my crotch. I wasn’t mad at him, he was right! I was dressed much too provocatively. I was asking for that kind of attention.

13
Insist also and deliberately on those blanks in discourse …

14
At some point in her mid-twenties, my aunt returns to the church. I see her, not at church, but in her second or third apartment. I see her in a dark underground hallway lit by harsh orange light.

15
By sheer force of will, she starves her body into submission. Her baby fat, her soft chin, her round arms, diminish. Her body becomes thin, ascetic. Her hair shorn.

16
Mary Karr, a late convert to Catholicism, describes it as an embodied religion: I think of how ancestors on both sides of (my son’s) family sought this sacrament, which is painfully carnal if you think about it. The body of the god is absorbed by the human body to nourish the spirit.

17
My aunt misses Mass in Latin. She has become a lay Carmelite nun, with a cross around her neck and a thick ring on her finger. When praying, her forehead creases, almost in pain.

18
Thick drip of beeswax. Wood polish. Ebb tide of incense. The bank of candles gutting in a side chapel, flames sunk in red glass. The brilliant cream and yellow robes of the priest, which swing as he walks.

19
One night in November, in her car, I try to tell her about my first heartbreak by a woman. She begins talking, faster and faster, about a mouse that jumped out of her desk at work.

20
Postmodernist, post-structuralist, post-idealist, post-1970s. Post culture wars, post Religious Right, post-Me Decade, post naivety.

21
Take, eat, this is my body.


Righting: Women-Focused Ways of Seeing and Being
Elizabeth Brenner

Young people from all over the United States, even the world, flocked to the University of Michigan, bright and moneyed (or so I thought), hard working and poor (or so I thought), and all aspiring to create a better world (or so I thought). I was studying nursing and women’s studies. For a young woman going into a traditional and traditionally female profession, original alchemy was brewing, only to be revealed with time. But in any event, I was certain I’d arrived at the intersection of the universe, and it was in Ann Arbor.

The war in Viet Nam dominated news. In contrast to home, on campus war sentiment was distinctly antiwar, and on this particular day we were all drawn together, seated or standing before a handful of dorm television sets. It was January 27, 1973, and the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, announced the end of the draft. A whoop went-up. Nineteen fifty-four’s sons, and those who loved them, would not have to sit through a nail-biting lottery. And I’m not talking about the 50-cent green game lottery, coincidentally created by the state of Michigan, fall of 1972, the first million-dollar winner pulled the next year. I’m talking about the birthday-match—one number paired against one anniversary, the first third of birthdays surely called-up for duty, the second third, perhaps a 50-50 chance of being called, and the last third, just plain lucky. Over forty-nine thousand inductions had come out of the previous year’s lottery.

I had no boyfriend. But, I was coming to the end of my virgin years, and imagining a husband and children no longer seemed so-someday. I did not believe Nixon, did not believe he wouldn’t reinstitute the draft. For one thing, Selective Service was still conducting lotteries. Numbers were being pulled and assigned (though now no one seemed to pay attention, even when these events continued to be televised). Still, I made contingency plans: if I gave birth to sons I’d take them to Canada. I had relatives in Alberta—not my father’s relatives, who held faith that fighting communism was a cause worth someone’s son dying for. Rather, I’d connect my imaginary sons with my mother’s relatives, social workers and teachers. Their home, Alberta, seemed a thoughtful escape. After all, Canada had once believed in a queen. And one province spoke French. Then, there was all that open space, green trees, indigo mountains, clean air. I’d seen my mother’s family’s photos.

***

Alchemy has brought me to this intersection. Writing. (An MFA program.) The body. (A healthcare background.) Writing the body. (Or righting the body?) I currently study creative non-fiction, lately the writings of Terry Tempest Williams—God in nature, God as nature.

In contrast, Mary Karr, in her most recent book, Lit, writes, “I hate nature…I don’t mean to…I have a genetic memory of pulling a plow or tilling the soil that repels me from dirt and green growing things.” In my mind, I stroll through Karr’s image, and see through the eyes of a woman who feels extraordinary work in nature—whether she means nature in the wide world, or nature within herself, it hardly matters. She does not see the payoff in that work.

***

In ‘72, my women’s studies professors assigned their students, mostly young women, books by Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone. De Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, proposed Hegel’s “other” as a model for how we women were viewed by the dominant culture. Men, then, used this Otherness as an excuse to not understand us. De Beauvoir went on to say that in hierarchical society, where one group was dominant—that is, benefiting from the power structure in some way—the non-dominant group (racial, ethnic, religious, economic, or gender) would always be stereotyped into Other.

Contrast this with Shulamith Firestone, who in The Dialectic of Sex proposed that the only escape for women was the escape from biology, that is, from reproduction. Cybernetics. Laboratories. Technology. Equality, not by honoring the differences between women and men, the “otherness” of women, but by eliminating it.
What I best recall about reading de Beauvoir and Firestone is that their voices seemed so in combat.
Even without the lottery, till 1975 the Viet Nam war continued.

And, I wanted to have babies.

***

“If women were in charge would there be no war?” I asked my mother, a minister’s wife, a farmer’s daughter, and mother of seven children.

“Probably not,” she replied, “or not as many.”

I didn’t think she agreed with my father. I didn’t think she agreed with Nixon. But she never voluntarily spoke of such matters. And her answers were always short.

Another time, I asked my mother’s mother the same question. That day, it was one of many questions. “I don’t know,” Gramma replied. Was she annoyed by my queries? Or entertained? “You’re the one who goes to college. I only went to eighth grade.”

Gramma, in easy concentration, paused.

I heard the suction-pop, smelled the damp green, as Gram opened beans she’d canned from her garden. She tipped some of the pale juice into the sink, then dumped the string beans into a pot. Gramma was working on a sit-down lunch for nine. I hoped I was helping.

“I’ll say this,” Gramma added, “Men get a lot done.”

***

My first real job, papers and all, began when I was sixteen and still in high school. I worked weekends in an extended care facility, a hospital for old people, and for young people with chronic diseases, Multiple Sclerosis, Muscular Dystrophy, Parkinson’s. We admitted veterans, too, paralyzed, brain damaged.

Ed was the older brother of my little sister’s classmate, not the Ed of his youth, before his number was pulled, before Nam. He could no longer speak, though sometimes he seemed to try, as if this time the outcome might be different, his mouth stretched at awkward angles, opening, closing, then laughter, or tears. It was difficult to tell which. His tears no longer worked. Nor did his arms. Or legs, spastic, contracted, his body over six-feet tall, contorted when touched, extended with weight bearing.

One day I couldn’t find help, and Ed needed to be moved, into or out of bed—I cannot recall which. As soon as I got him up, I knew I was not going to be able to make the pivot to his next resting place. And so, I did my best to let him down, gently, gently down, ever-so-slowly to the floor, the cold tile floor, in the hospital room that would be Ed’s home till death he would part. I was one-hundred pounds, five-four, and Ed might have been skinny, but he was well over six-feet tall. But no excuses for the Elizabeth-then from the Elizabeth-then. I did not forgive myself.

Ed’s mouth twisted open. Oh my, he was going to cry. I’d hurt him. I couldn’t speak, crying too, liquid tears. I ran ‘round my charge’s spasmed body-on-the-floor. Pulling up here. Pulling up there. I could find no way into this disaster. The floor was cold, and I could do nothing but cover Ed with a blanket, sit by him and wait for help. He scared me, so young, male, and injured. In the midst of my own powerlessness and self-loathing, I saw Ed, mouth gaping, and he was laughing. No sound came out, but in his eyes merriment frolicked. He looked at me, and his mouth opened and closed and opened and closed, air moved through in short bursts, and though I was ashamed of my failures, failures of strength and courage, I felt seen to my good-core, and pardoned for all else. I loved Ed, at that moment I loved him for his generous heart.

***

Three decades from Michigan, three sons later, I recall the day each of their selective service registration forms arrived. Looking at my firstborn’s name on that indifferent postcard, a number assigned to him, I wept. What kind of world is this, a world of numbers and bombs? By the second and third son, however, it wasn’t that I didn’t care—the moment-at-the-mailbox had just become too familiar, a formality, a to-do, the system. The System. After all, the draft was over. My boys weren’t going anyplace but to college. Right?

***
In finding her own life collapsed around her, Karr feels broken. It is only after recurrent and consequential failures that she looks in, then out. She asks for help. In her introduction, Karr admits to her son, “Your birth altered my whole posture on the planet…for I partly see…through your vantage.”

Would recovery have happened if Karr had not had the lens of her son? I don’t know. I do know, however, children see a lot. How fast they grow-up.

***

There are many theories about the differences between men and women, why such distinctions may exist, and if they do, whether or not they due to biology or culture. Today, googling gender, I look up corpus callosum, the longitudinal fissure that connects left and right hemispheres of the brain. Maybe for men and women the corpus callosum is differently wired? I find some sites that indicate women have increased connections in this area, brain halves super-wired, electric impulses readily shifting back and forth.

Certainly there is consensus, men are often left-brain, moving in, staying in one half of their head, analytical, decisive. This all makes sense for the hunt—or the savannah of war. But women, I see them now, as I increasingly see me, back and forth, left and right, faster and faster, round and round the child, real or imagined, the daughter or son, small or grown; the self-as-child, the nature-of-self; or the child that is nature, this planet, the planet we alternately tend and plunder. Are women different from men, whether we use our wombs or not? And whether or not this perceived difference is due to wiring or culture, does it hardly matter when so much is at stake?

***

I imagine de Beauvoir and Firestone. Mary Karr and Terry Tempest Williams. I imagine my grandmother, and my mother, and me. I imagine legions of women. We hardly care, the framework you want to fit us in. We hardly care to fit ourselves in anyone’s framework, even our own. For we are, collectively, awakening. Looking in. Feeling. Looking out. Seeing. And when we speak, we are saying no more, not like this, what is new begins within. What is new begins with me.



Discussion questions:

1. Does motherhood or being “womb bearers” make women more connected to nature than men, and if so, how might that factor into “writing the body”?

2. Is the “tell-all” confessional memoir, a relatively modern genre, the latest manifestation of “body writing?” If so how does it incorporate French feminist thinking and is it ultimately empowering or navel-gazing.

3. Twelve-step programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, helped Mary Karr's recovery from addiction. What is it about such groups that permits transformation where alone it might not occur?

4. Is the community always stronger than the self-alone? Contrast the community of twelve-step programs with the community of war. What do you suppose are the key distinctions between these two groups?


Writing prompts

1. “Maybe by telling you my story, you can better tell yours, which is the only way to get home, by which I mean get free of us” (6).

Prompt: Make a list of the parts of your past you are trying to shed while writing. Exhume them in a piece confronting each item. Are you walking forward or backward when you write?

2. “We pass through wrought-iron gates, and I look up, wand in hand, to ask, Is this a subdivision? This is my house, he says” (74-75).

“In my house, personal freedom is all, amusement so hard won in that town that the right scrabble for it is inalienable. Also in my house, cruelty was rarely so deliberate, more often the haphazard side effect of being shitfaced” (76).

Prompt: Set two divergent landscapes against each other as a backdrop for contrasting characters in your life.

3. In Lit, Mary Karr backs into a spiritual awakening, resisting it at every turn. Two of her mentors, her sponsor Joan the Bone and the writer Tobias Wolff, engage her in almost Socratic dialogues that allow her to test our her skepticism and growing faith, for example in this exchange, with Joan: “Here, she says, are a bunch of people. They outnumber you, outearn you, outweigh you. They are, ergo—in some simplistic calculation—a power greater than you” (207).

Prompt: Write your own dialogue of skepticism and faith. Who would the two voices be? What would be at stake?