Redemption

Just now, reading  Sex at Dawn  in the Captain's Chair in the living room, I've had one of those Important Moments.

A few years back a friend asked if and how my writing redeems its dark premises. While I stared through the wall, he suggested "beauty" might do it. That answer always sounded like a copout. The words might dress the subject tenderly, but the subject remains dark, bitter, disturbing. Untransformed.

But all this talk of humans fighting and caging our sexuality by institutionalizing "pair bonding" – on top of making me randy as a sonofabitch – is revealing something fundamental. I've been worried this whole time* that I'm painting an unredeemable picture of Northeastern Americans. That we're worse than history-deniers: we devalue and ignore history until it seems to go away, and live on a hinge that swings only present-to-future. That an ultimate reading of The Dredge Cycle concludes, "It's only getting worse from here," or, in short, "We're fucked."

But today I'm officially adding to my hypothesis that the disturbing underbelly of the American historical consciousness has been created only by denying our nature. We're historical creatures. We have both the capacity and need for great memory; personal, cultural, and beyond. We crave it. The road to cultural health, and to justice, is paved in memory.


Redemption is not waiting in some subtle, unknowably or idealistic abstract answer to the book's questions. It's in accepting and loving another aspect of our nature. In reaching for old ways, learning the land's songs, figurative and literal. Wellwater and Tributary are all about this redemption, and I'd never noticed. (I'd explicate, but, you know, you don't have them in front of you yet.) Of course, yes, it's a complex road from there, but my book is a map of the question, and a small dot in the center reads the answer.

And know what else? I've long held that a holistic research approach to this project is the only way things truly move forward. I'm like the Dirk Gently of hometown historians. And there's nothing like confirmation of faith to combust oil into movement. Circularity, serendipity, or the long, impossibly curved arm of God, I trust you. And promiscuous sex. Apparently, I trust that, too.

Let's go, 2011. It's fuggin' on.


*Yeah, for real. 5 years of worry, lifted.
It's also worth mentioning that my dream this morning involved violent conflict, reconnaissance, packing for a move, and waking into another dream. A marker. A hard, muddy passage from one year into the next.