Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.
My guiding thought for the new year. Or any year.
It might seem like a sign of sad disenchantment to say that people generally aren’t good and kind, but outside of Disney movies that has always been the case.
Some time before Christmas I had an interesting conversation about censorship and “smoothing out” fairy tales. All those cut tongues, cropped toes, missing fingers were taken away from us. And in exchange we got Bambi. Not even close to a real deer. Not like the ones I watched as a child run through the orchard, the ones I’d meet on a walk in the fields near our family house. Where my parents live has become suburbia: Bambi and Desperate Housewives. Neat laundry, controlled scream.
In my deep wintry sleep at my parents’ this Christmas I dreamt of toads and snakes coming out of my mouth, like in the uncensored Grimms’ tales. What doesn’t have to be kind by decree, may still discover its own kindness. Coughing roses doesn’t bring you closer to your truths, while toads and snakes make good company when what you think or say suddenly gets the stamp of vulgar and unacceptable.
Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, or don’t let the bastards grind you down, as the Wikipedia translation reads. The Handmaid’s Tale was published over twenty years ago. My last angry letter to a newspaper was in response to an interview with Atwood on the occasion of the anniversary. The interview is hardly worth mentioning, the interviewer wasn’t even skillful in concealing that she hadn’t read the book. She got the number of Polish editions wrong, unaware of the first one in the 1980s. The epitome of idiocy was reached with the question “What is the idea behind your writing? As most (sic!) readers, I’m interested in the thoughts underpinning the prose”… more than in the text, she should have added, because I can’t be bothered to read. Because critical insight, no, mere skepticism is too much to ask. We want Bambi, an easy conviction that if not “good” then at least everyone is “OK.” That all the ranting is useless, that apocalyptic visions belong to cold-war sci-fi, that what a woman wrote in Canada over twenty years ago has no connection to where we are heading.
I didn’t reread The Handmaid’s Tale over Christmas. As always during my visits, I tried to catch up with Polish press. The Republic of Gilead was dripping from the pages of weeklies and women’s magazines. Neo-Nazi rightwingers temporarily removed from power but lurking in the shadows. All-powerful clergymen checking the wires on their brainwashing machines, getting government funding for their latest whims. Celebrity women talking drunken nonsense about how they wish they were housewives, locked away with their kids in a space between the kitchen and the church. Single women as the new plague and a theory to put their sexuality in a box labeled “disease.” Feminist politicians laughed out of court for their lack of “dress sense.” A sex scandal victim shamed for not being pregnant with the corrupt politician who abused her but with someone else (in the zany world of prim and proper logic she probably should have been “faithful”)… and the rape jokes, the rape jokes that crop up everywhere… The Republic of Gilead adds bricks to its walls. We can’t be bothered to read, so we don’t know we’re not even original in this madness. And of course, let’s bow our heads and be nice in an eternal Christmas, let’s cough roses and say things are changing for the better.
Toads and snakes are creatures of the margins that remind us that darkness exists. There’s no place for them in the well-lit world of Bambi and newspaper rationalizations of everything. Where all the people are wonderful and our culture is our home, our religion is our law, and our thinking is anathema to the happiness that lies in complicity. I don’t believe any country and any people can be sane if they simply rename their totalitarianism. Is being ruled by a one-sex hierarchy claiming power over souls really any better than living under the boot of a foreign working-men dictatorship? This Christmas we didn’t even have snow to cover it up.
I want toads and snakes, a space for the genuine, so that smiles are not merely painted, but the tension of muscles could be felt under the fingers when you touch someone’s face. Not crowds frogmarched into churches but believers and non-believers and outright heretics safe from clergymen’s home archives’ all-seeing, all-punishing eyes. I don’t want a morality that comes from religious tribunals and our corrupt traditions but from people’s lives. In fact, I don’t want to write about how my visit to the country brought me down. I want toads and snakes, uncensored stories, uncut minds.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
Don’l let the bastards in you get you.
Happy new year, everyone.
