Manners

Growing up, at the same time that it was always my mother and my father, it was also always my mother or my father.

There was nothing Greek about this; it happened at the dinner table and then in my head, as I thought about the one place where the two of them seemed most divided. For while my mother orchestrated meals with the ritual care of a batter about to step up to the plate, my father had haste. He ate like a vacuum cleaner and then started picking things off our plates with the graceful, self-delighted lunges of a velociraptor stumbling upon a field of gerbils. Sensing a soft spot in the usually clear hierarchy of our life, I followed his example – mostly because (unbelievably enough) I actually ate more quickly than he did, at least if the dish in question was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or cereal.

It wasn’t, for the most part, which meant that I had to find a way to get rid of it. Over the years, I refined my technique like an apprentice burglar. Like all great artists, I indulged in flourishes, but only when I felt like they were subordinated to an over all design. My tools were few but effective: a large napkin (preferably made out of a resilient material like cotton or polyester), a glass of milk (to mask the taste of those bits I had to eat in order to make the trick believable), and, if necessary, a pair of very, very deep-pocketed sweatpants (which, unfortunately, I wore a lot of in those days). When caught, I took a quick second to gauge the situation and then pleaded misunderstanding or repentance, depending on the parent.

According to my mom, I had no manners. But the truth was that even then, I was simply confused and, confusingly, perhaps even a little excited by the places in my life where it was not really clear what type of behavior would be normal and what would not. To say that Americans are particularly stupid on this topic misses the point, since it is exactly our lack of manners that makes us the most mannered people in the universe. Live in New York New York, or Portland Maine, and you’ll see this equally: life in these places is a texture of densely woven gestures that exist in and of themselves but at the same time mark the gesturer as a member as surely as a lantern sticking out of said member’s skull would mark him/her/it as a fish known as the deep sea angler, which survives, like a poet in Hollywood, by adopting the manners of something that its prey’s usual environment (water) finds alluring (light).

Another way of putting this is to admit that you’re always either on the inside or the outside of any group - and then looking back, I think that if there was one vulnerability that my mother had and my father didn’t, it was this fear of being on the outside. She didn’t want to be shunned, revealed as an outsider, and because of this she decided that it was much safer and better not to put oneself in harm’s way. America, the same country that had left her this bursting, heartfelt, debilitating idealism, had given her a perfect way to deal with it. Be an outsider. Be unique. Be the single member of a country whose boundaries only you can make out, and then inhabit other memberships with the sort of barely-perceptible disdain that insinuates just how impressive your jacket lining would be, if they could only swim fast enough to see it.

The great southern puppeteer/Bible saleswoman Flannery O’Conner followed Henry James (himself a lifelong expatriate) by parsing fiction’s flow into arterial Mystery and veinous Manners. But aren’t manners – that is, the huge mechanism of what we, as a group and individually, find usual – the greatest mystery of all? A Tolstoyan experiment: right now I am sitting on my couch writing a blog entry as my sister’s dog throws up in his dog bed. Sounds reasonable enough – but then turn the situation just a bit towards the “cowlike gaze” and we see, aha, the mystery of furniture! A lump of shaped and molded softness serving no discernable purpose! A tiny animal that has been bred, over centuries, not for its adaptive capabilities, but for sheer and utter uselessness! It’s all so ridiculous; but at the same time, the heart of the mystery here is the way that, sitting here, doing this ridiculous thing (blogging!) in this ridiculous environment (“Vermont”!) on this ridiculous object (a sofa-bed!) find absolutely none of it ridiculous. In fact, the truth is just the opposite: it is all normal. And it is all normal for me because somewhere in my brain and body lurks the idea that it is all normal for everybody else.

Manners are not the enemy: manners are the door, the jug that invites the water in the way a tree invites birds, or a house people. And there is no other way. Turn from the spirit if you want to, but every break will be partial and every move from that point on an attempt to move to some higher communion, perhaps possible, perhaps not – perhaps only lonely, since the other citizens of your imaginary republic do not yet exist. Milton’s Satan says “Which way I fly is hell/ Myself am hell”, and though it might be interesting for a second to see this as the first artist in Western biblical translation, I think that saying this misses the more massive point of Satan’s fundamental sterility. Adam and Eve broke the rules, and we have a sense that this crack in the world is somehow fundamentally related to our subsequent creativity. But they also repented – that is, they made peace, asked forgiveness, tried to re-enter the family. Satan broke everything, repented nothing, and so ended up creating nothing, except the brokenness.