Testing 1, 2.
Testing.
Good evening.
I'm Lynn Fleischman.
And on behalf of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women
and my conference co-director Judy Lensing,
I'd like to welcome you to the opening
event of our conference, Midlife Crisis, funded by the Arizona
Humanities Council.
Tillie Olsen's reading tonight is also
co-sponsored by the Poetry Center.
Following the reading, you are all
invited, as Lois Shelton usually stands up here and says,
to meet Tillie Olsen and have some punch and cookies.
Before I introduce Tillie Olsen, I have a few announcements
to make.
The Midlife Conference will run tomorrow from 9:00 AM
until 4:30 PM.
It will feature a variety of distinguished U of A
and visiting scholars including Lily and Reuben, Loretta
Coleman, Daniel Callahan, and David Maldonado.
The panel on work will begin at 9:00
followed by a panel on family at 10:45 and one
on health at 1:15.
Four workshops, in which you'll have the opportunity
to speak with each of the visiting scholars,
will run from 2:45 until 4:15.
And the panels and workshops will address such topics
as family and career changes at midlife, multicultural
perspectives of midlife, media images, midlife sexuality,
and the ethics of the youth cult.
Programs detailing all speakers topics, times, and locations
are available here tonight right over on this chair, as well as
tomorrow at the conference.
All panels will be held in the Gallagher
Theater of the Student Union.
And workshops will be in various meeting rooms in the Student
Union.
Incidentally, copies of Tillie Olsen's books will be available
for sale between twelve --
noon and 4:30 tomorrow.
Also, tomorrow night at 8 o'clock
in the Junior Ballroom of the Student Union, speech
communications doctoral candidate Cynthia Meyer
will present a recital of Tillie Olsen's short story
I Stand Here Ironing.
Tillie Olsen will herself be available after the performance
for discussion and questions.
And Lois has asked me to announce, first,
that the April 12 reading by John Williams
has been canceled, and second, that the next Poetry Center
reading will be in the terrace lounge of the Student
Union on Wednesday, April 13 at the usual 8 o'clock time.
Students whose work appears in Persona,
the university's undergraduate literary magazine, will read.
Tillie Olsen has lived much of what this conference is about.
She completed more high school than most of her generation
although she did not finish.
She wrote and published during this time,
educating herself in public libraries.
Supporting and raising four children,
however, created in her a 20-year silence.
It wasn't until she was in her mid-40s, her mid-life,
that she began to write and publish again.
Since that time, her works have become classics.
She is the recipient of Ford Foundation
and National Endowment for the Arts grants,
a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an award for, quote,
"very nearly constituting a new form of fiction"
from the American Academy and National Institute
of Arts and Letters.
She has been awarded two honorary doctorates
and has taught at Amherst College and Stanford
University.
She was writer in residence at MIT, distinguished visiting
professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston,
and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute.
Her books have been published in many European countries,
the USSR, and Japan.
Her stories are available on numerous recordings.
And her list of readings and speaking engagements
is about that long, and I'm not going to tell you about them.
Tillie Olsen has also been instrumental in bringing
eclipsed and forgotten books of importance
back into use and into print.
In 1980, in conjunction with their issuance of stamps
commemorating Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot,
and Elizabeth Gaskell.
The British Post Office selected her for a special award
as, quote, "the American woman writer best exemplifying
in our time their ideals and literary excellence."
Her books include Tell Me a Riddle whose title novella
won the O. Henry Award as the best story of 1961,
and critics have said permanently changed
and expanded American fiction.
The four pieces in this collection
have been anthologized 72 times, performed numerous times,
and adapted into three films and an opera.
Yonnondio from the '30s is a novel
written originally in the 1930s but not published until 1974.
Thought lost, portions of the original manuscript
were unexpectedly found, and the novel
reconstructed by in Tillie Olsen's words
"the work of this older writer in arduous partnership
with that long ago younger one."
And finally, Silences, a collection
of her essays along with testimony
from other writers that attests to the power of circumstances
including class, color, and sex to determine the flowering
or withering of creative capacity.
What Tillie Olsen has said of the informing purpose
and passion of Silences could be applied equally to its author's
purpose and passion in life.
"Love for my incomparable medium,
literature; hatred for all that, societally, rooted,
unnecessarily lessens, and denies it; slows,
impairs, silences writers.
It is written to rededicate and encourage."
It is an honor for me to introduce to you Tillie Olsen.
[APPLAUSE]
I never quite recognize myself in those introductions.
That was wonderful, and thank you.
It may be that I shall have to hold up this book Silences
and exemplify it because even in an age, old age, I'm 70 or 71,
one has virgin experiences.
And tonight, for the first time, I do not have my usual voice.
This is not going to be the kind of reading it would have
been if the Poetry Center--
is my voice all right?
Yes.
Had sponsored it.
It's not going to be a pure reading.
It is at the service of the Midlife Crisis question
mark, that's what they have on the program, Conference.
I do believe that literature can,
that the best literature, that does not necessarily mean I
include myself in it, though, I am as good as I can be.
But to me, one of the great purposes of literature
is to help us comprehend reality so that we
may know what is good, what is harmful, what we wish to cling
to, what we need to change, and arouse
in us our capacity as human beings
to make changes when they are necessary.
I am going to do what really mutilates my work, in the sense
that I am going to take shreds and patches of it.
And only those of you who are familiar with it
will be able to fill it in completely, but perhaps
even so, enough will come through
so that it will have some meaning.
I've spent all day between saltwater gargling,
honey and lemon, a little swig of whiskey
just as I left, [LAUGHTER] vitamin C, all the other home
remedies including a wonderful turkey
soup made by your director of the Poetry Center.
If all these have failed, it is perhaps
retribution for writing a book called Silences.
All right.
Many years ago, I used--
I still like to walk in cemeteries,
but in my native Omaha, Nebraska,
there was a certain part of the cemetery near our house
where of that vintage, many people or their families
wrote their own epitaphs.
And never will I forget the one that said--
there were many that said rest at last or sweet rest at last.
It was that period of very hard work, which really has not
changed all that much.
But one said after the hard living, rest at last,
the crisis, the crisis of living is past.
Whether or not, how to separate out
what is the crisis of living from what may or may not
be a midlife crisis, it is of use
I think to go back to what lives were before us.
I'm not going to go back to the beginning of the century
when certainly our midlife crisis, if we had one,
would have been at the age of 25 as a woman.
But I am going to go back.
And I also hope my voice will last so I can talk a bit.
Can you all hear me?
It bothers me to have to cling to that.
I do want to have my opportunity to say just a little
about what I feel is inherent in a time that
is close to the middle of our lives,
that is, assuming that we live out lives
according to the so-called normal span of our generation.
But I'm going to start by reading
a little from I Stand Here Ironing 1955, 1956,
skipping so often.
I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves
tormented back and forth with the iron.
I wish you'd manage the time to come in and talk
with me about your daughter.
I'm sure you can help me understand her.
She's a youngster who needs help,
and who I'm deeply interested in helping.
Who needs help.
Even if I came, what good would it do?
You think because I am her mother, I have a key
or that in some way you could use me as a key?
She's lived for 19 years.
There's all that life that has happened outside
of me, beyond me.
And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weight,
to estimate, to total?
I'll start, and there will be an interruption,
and I'll have to gather it all together again.
Or I'll become engulfed with all I did or did not do,
with what should have been, and with cannot be helped.
She was a beautiful baby, the first and only one of our five
that was beautiful at birth.
I skip.
She blew shining bubbles of sound.
She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music
and textures.
She'd lie on the floor in her blue overalls
patting the surface so hard in ecstasy.
Her hands and feet would blur.
She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old,
I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs
to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked
for work and for Emily's father who could no longer endure,
he wrote in his goodbye note sharing want with us.
I was 19.
It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression.
I'd start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running
up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake
or asleep to startle awake.
When she saw me, she'd break into a clogged weeping
that could not be comforted, a weeping I can yet hear.
After a while, I found a job hashing at night
so I could be with her days, and it was better.
But it came to where I had to bring her to his family
and leave her.
Again, I skip.
She was too old enough for nursery school, they said.
And I did not know then what I know
now, the fatigue of the long day and the lacerations of group
life in the kinds of nurseries that are only
parking places for children.
Except that it would have made no difference if I had known.
It was the only place there was.
It was the only way we could be together,
the only way I could hold a job.
And even without knowing, I knew.
And I skip again.
Apologizing to those who do not know this.
Ronnie is calling.
He is wet, and I change him.
It is rare there is such a cry now.
That time of motherhood is almost
behind me when the ear is not one's own
but must always be racked and listening for the child cry,
the child call.
We sit for a while, and I hold him,
looking out over the city spread in charcoal
with its soft isles of light.
Shoogily, he breathes and curls closer.
I carry him back to bed asleep.
Shoogily, a funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily,
invented by her to say comfort.
In this and other ways, she leaves her seal,
I say loud and startle at my saying it.
What do I mean?
What did I start to gather together
to try and make coherent?
I was at the terrible growing years, war years.
I do not remember them well.
I was working.
There were four smaller ones now.
There was not time for her.
She had to help be a mother and housekeeper and shopper.
She had to set her seal.
Mornings of crisis and near hysteria trying to get lunches
packed, hair combed, coats and shoes
found, everyone to school or childcare on time,
the baby ready for transportation.
Running up to that huge school where she was one,
she was lost, she was a drop, suffering over unpreparedness,
stammering, and unsure in her classes.
Again.
I skip about Emily.
She is coming.
She runs up the stairs two at a time with light graceful step,
and I know she's happy tonight.
Whatever it was that occasioned your call didn't happen today.
Aren't you ever going to finish the ironing, Mother?
Whistler painted his mother in a rocker.
I'd have to paint mine standing over an ironing board.
This is one of her communicative nights,
and she tells me everything or nothing
as she fixes herself a plate of food out of the icebox.
She is so lovely.
Why did you want me to come in at all?
Why were you concerned?
She'll find her way.
She starts up the stairs to bed.
Don't get me up with the rest in the morning.
But I thought you're having midterms.
Oh those, she comes back in, kisses me,
and says quite lightly, in a couple of years,
we'll all be atom-dead.
They won't matter a bit.
She has said it before.
She believes it.
But because I have been dredging the past and all that compounds
a human being is so heavy and meaningful in me,
I cannot endure it tonight.
I will never total it all.
I will never come in to say, she was a child seldom smiled at.
Her father left me before she was a year old.
I had to work on outside jobs her first six
years when there was work, or I sent her home
and to his relatives.
There were years she had care she hated.
She was dark and foreign-looking in a world
where the prestige goes to blondenes and curly hair
and dimples.
She was slow where glibness is prized.
We were poor and could not afford
for her the soil of easy growth.
I was a young mother.
I was a distracted mother.
There were the other children pushing up, demanding.
There were years she did not let me touch her.
She kept too much in herself.
Her life is such she has had to keep too much in herself.
My wisdom came too late.
She has much to her and probably little will come of it.
She is a child of her age, of depression, of war, of fear.
Let her be so all that is in her will not bloom, but in
how many does all of it?
There is still enough left to live by.
Only help her to know, help make it
so there is cause for her to know
that she is more than this dress on the ironing board
helpless before the iron.
1953, 1954, and still, and still that
world and that threat to the end of all life.
Though now, there's half a million times
the explosive power of when that was written.
And still the need to rouse in ourselves and in the young,
the knowledge that we are more than the dress
on the ironing board, helpless before the iron.
Part to me of the midlife time, when
is there time to sift, to weigh, to ponder,
to estimate, to total?
For those who are in the motherhood years
and have the older ones, some sense already
of that life, some looking back.
And much else, I shall not speak of.
With this mother, at least, freedom from guilt.
She knew she was not experiencing guilt.
She knew what the institutions were, what the world was,
that world into which our children must grow.
And they are to that world no miracle at all.
A world not always fortunately for some children,
but to most, hostile or hard for human unfolding.
And what I wrote the title piece Tell Me a Riddle
in what is still--
I am not a sociologist.
What I assume, and I may be in error, is midlife--
and already, though, it begins some years before,
I was close to 50.
In my late 40s, when I began and wrote the title piece of
Tell Me a Riddle, the sense of mortality
that comes partly because of the beginning
of the dying off in numbers of the generation before us.
That generation to whom we were young, who knew us as young.
The sense of time fleeting.
That need that was already written
into that first beginning story, I
Stand Here Ironing, that time to weigh, to sift, to estimate,
to total, to comprehend.
And among that generation before us.
I'll read only two things from Tell Me a Riddle.
Now this is when the old woman--
the old woman who is really, when
I wrote this, two years younger than I am now.
So long ago was it.
Now one by one, the children came, those that were able.
Is my voice all right or should I give up?
No.
Something comes through.
That's the marvelous thing about effort.
Even if it's not perfect, something comes through.
I've had to like the rest of us, most of us
learn to live by that.
Now one by one, the children came, those that were able.
Anna Paul Sammy.
Too late to ask, and what did you
learn with your living mother, and what do we need to know?
Clara, the eldest clenched.
Pay me back, Mother.
Pay me back for all you took from me.
Those others you crowded into your heart.
The hands I needed to be for you, the heaviness,
the responsibility.
Is this she?
Noises the dying make, the crablike hands
crawling across the covers.
The ethereal singing.
She hears that music, that singing from childhood
for cotton sound.
Not heard since, since.
And the hardness breaks like a cry.
Where did we lose each other, first mother, singing mother?
Annulled: the quarrels, the gibing,
the harshness between; the fall into silence
and the withdrawal.
I do not know you, Mother.
Mother, I never knew you.
Lennie, suffering not alone for her
who was dying but for that in her, which never lived,
for that which in him might never live.
From him too, unspoken words.
Goodbye, Mother, who taught me to mother myself.
Not Vivi, who must stay with her children.
Not Davy, a dead son killed in war,
but he is already here, having to die again with her this time
where the living take their dead with them when they die.
Of that time of motherhood and that time of motherhood,
I believe is still and has come back, and it's different.
But even more than ever, the old form in which difficult indeed
was it ever to have time to mother
because you were at the maintenance of life
and the getting of the living tasks in one way
or another when the older children had
to so often be the mothers to the younger ones.
And of that time when much more than those of us who
now may or may not be in midlife crisis
but certainly are in mid-life when so much more in them
did not bloom.
And yet, what great expression of self and of a capacity
was there in that life that to the outside
might seem only tradition or sacrifice of self.
I hope to flesh out some of that when I read you of Anna now.
This was something that before there was a midlife crisis,
many of us can remember when there was an empty nest
syndrome.
That was before there was a women's movement.
And underneath that, underpinning
that, an economic necessity that again
drove but in a recognizable form a paid outside of the home
form.
Except we know of course that for many, many women,
particularly women of color and many working class women,
you also were in both places, had to be in both places,
but nobody having invented cloning oneself
at the same time.
But this was written before even there was talk of an empty nest
syndrome.
And yet, that younger writer, that almost quarter
of a century younger writer, who was I, wrote of it differently.
I will read a little more than is necessary.
And it is strange for me to read only for--
let's call it-- they call it a didactic purpose.
Of a sociological value, I believe
is the put down term for literature that concerns itself
primarily with these things.
All right.
This is in the midlife time of this story,
but not of this woman, who has not yet
been told that she is dying of cancer although her body knows
it.
And she's being taken on those trips
to child after child, the farewell trips.
And she comes now to the home of her youngest daughter, the one
who, in a way, has the dearest and the most loving
memories of her mother because she is the youngest
and remembers her mother too.
Well, I shan't go into that, but they put a baby
in her lap, a new baby.
Oh Vivi, was so happy to be having this baby because as she
remembered her mother, a baby was
going to make her mother happier than anything else.
And to her, of course, she wished
to keep that mother intact, the mother of that time.
She was not yet enough in a midlife time to know
that in her mother too, there might
be other aspirations, other possibilities, other needs,
other growth.
And this is about that.
You see, I do not need to do this
if I could have read you all of Tell Me a Riddle,
but it's necessary and excerpting in this harmful way.
In the aeroplane-- no.
A new baby, how many warm seductive babies?
She holds him stiffly away from her so that he wails,
and a long shudder begins and the sweat
beads on her forehead.
Hush, shush, croons the grandfather, lifting it back.
You should forgive your grandma, Little Prince.
She's never held a baby before, only seen them in glass cases.
Hush, shush, you're tired, Ma, says Vivi.
The travel and the noisy dinner.
I'll take you to lie down.
A long travel from, to, what the feel of a baby evokes.
In the airplane, cunningly designed to encase for motion.
It's her first airplane trip.
No wind, no feel of flight.
She had sat severely and still, her face
turned to the sky through which they cleaved and left no scar.
So this was how it looked, the determining, the crucial sky,
and this was how man moved through it,
remote above the dwindled Earth the concealed human life.
Vulnerable life that could scar.
I must skip.
Now they put a baby in her lap.
Do not ask me, she would have liked to beg.
Enough, the worn face of Vivi, the remembered grandchildren.
I cannot, cannot.
Cannot what?
Unnatural grandmother, not able to let herself embrace a baby.
She lay there in the bed of the two little girls,
her new hearing aid turned full, listening
to the sound of the children going to sleep,
the baby's fretful crying and hushing, the clatter of dishes
being washed and put away.
They thought she slept.
Still she wrote on.
It was not that she had not loved her babies, her children.
The love, the passion of tending,
had risen with the need like a torrent.
And like a torrent, drowned and immolated all else.
But when the need was done, oh, the power
that was lost in the painful damning
back and drying up of what still surged but had nowhere to go.
Only the thin pulsing left that could not quiet,
suffering over lives one felt but could no longer hold
nor help.
On that torrent, she'd borne them to their own lives.
And the riverbed was desert long years now.
Not there would she dwell, a memoried wraith.
Surely, there was not all.
Surely, that was not all.
Surely, there was more.
Still the springs.
The springs were in her seeking.
Somewhere an older power that beat for life.
Somewhere coherence transport, meaning, community.
If they would but leave her in the air
now stilled of clamor in the reconciled solitude
to journey on.
And they put a baby in her lap.
Immediacy to embrace and the breath of that past, warm flesh
like this that had claims and nestled away
all else and with lovely mouth devoured.
Hot living like an animal, intensely and now,
the turning maze, the long drunkenness,
the drowning into needing and being needed.
Severely, she looked back, and the shudder seized her again,
and the sweat.
Not that way.
Not there.
Not now could she.
Not yet.
And all that visit, she could not touch the baby.
Know I'm going on to Yonnondio.
In that time of that kind of motherhood--
and I don't want to place it only in the past
because I do believe it still goes on.
But now you see there are re-entry programs, community
colleges, state colleges, city colleges that
take students of all ages back.
There is much else that was not there in that particular far
more restricted time.
And never was there the kind of ceremony,
the kind of celebration, the kind of ritual that took place
supposedly in some societies when a girl gets to be 13 or so
in our time.
Right now, I guess it would have to be 10 or 11.
No graduation ceremonies, no commencements,
no kind of recognition of the years put into that.
And now, one had commenced onto something else.
I like to say these things in fictional form when I can,
but sometimes it's necessary to say them not so gracefully.
I want to read a little bit more than a bit from Yonnondio.
Again, about the-- and I speak primarily of my sex
although Jim too is in this.
The two great silencers of humanity
are the bearing and rearing of another generation,
the maintenance of life on Earth,
and the work that makes ongoing life possible.
And of course, this has had most to do
with those who do that everyday work, working people, half
of whom are women.
And that bearing and rearing of children and the maintenance
of life, in other ways, has been the special work of our sex,
although we shared with men the other work
of the world in that universal farm time
or in that time that never got into the economic records
when so much of our work was at home.
We're very close to the taking in of borders, of washing,
I mean my generation, of sewing, of other children,
of invalids, of doing this, of doing that.
Yonnondio, I will explain the title to you.
It is from a short poem by Walt Whitman,
a poem he explains-- the only poem he
has an explanation of its title in parentheses.
An Iroquois term meaning lament for the lost.
The word itself a poem, a dirge.
I thought it was pronounced Yonnondio
because it sounded right in the two sentences that
made me cling to what my publisher told me truly
was an absolutely non-commercial title.
But three years ago in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
of all places, I met an Iroquois,
and I understood why Walt Whitman
had to write such a poem.
And he tried to instruct me.
But when we were six months old or so, give or take a few
weeks, we made all the sounds, give or take a few weeks,
out of which come all the languages of the world,
that babble, B-A-B-B-L-E, B-A-B-E-L, that we have now.
And some of the sounds, as we become more and more imprisoned
most of us in only one or if we're luckier by cultural
or we're educated more than one, there are certain sounds,
like other things, atrophy cease to be because we have not
exercised them.
And I cannot quite say it right, but this is the way it really
should be.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
Know picture, poem, statement passing us to the future.
Yonnondio.
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
Unlimnd, U-N-L-I-M-N-D, we disappear,
as indeed so much of the lives of those before us and our own
lives still, though, now we have the tools, many of us, to limb,
to picture, to place into the records, into history.
Still, are we midlife crisis or younger crisis
or older crises in our way at the old silencing
tasks, too many of us?
This, for those of you who don't know it,
is about a young family.
The parents in their 20s already with five children.
It was the time before there was much knowledge
of Margaret Sanger.
And women did not know too much about their bodies either.
And even if some of them knew better,
they might like Anna who is pregnant at the time--
I first start to read to you.
I still thought or think that nursing a baby
was going to keep you from getting pregnant again.
28 and 27, five children, and the sixth yet to come.
And this is set in the late '20s, early
'30s, and a family--
I think again of that word crisis.
But in the old way of mobility when
you can have it because what was so criminal with slavery that
once covered most of the ancient Earth
and existed in the last century, as we know in our country,
in the old czarist Russia, and in a few other places,
still in a few places exists.
And serfdom, one was fixed to the land
always, especially in the last century slavery.
There were those also that used at risk of death
that right to pick oneself up and move, run away.
And this family in a different way
of mobility that human beings have
used emigration, not immigration, that brought many
to this country and still is.
But the picking oneself up from one place
in which one was trying to make a living to another place
where it might be better.
Now, with others, it may be changing a college
or going into college or doing this or that.
But they had gone from mine to farm and both places.
Though they loved the farm, it was not
injurious like the mining town and work in the mines.
But they could not make it there,
and now they were in the city in the packing house part.
And Jim, even if it was a prohibition time,
Saturday, six-day week, had stopped off
after a humiliating day at work and had a few too many but not
enough, and had raped Anna.
Anna who then had a miscarriage.
And her oldest daughter, nine, who was one of those mothers,
had to be to the younger children
as well as-- as I read you and that morning of I Stand
Here Ironing, had to be assistant, housekeeper,
shopper, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Here's what is going on and has to go and find her mother.
And her mother is very--
find her mother unconscious on the kitchen floor,
try to wake up her father who's passed out,
run and get a neighbor.
And Anna is very conscious of the fact
that her young daughter will not look her in the face anymore.
And that too is now between them, between the two of them.
And in the scene just before, where she stands in the bedroom
after having had the only holiday that women like
her had, which was when you were so damn sick,
you couldn't really literally do a thing,
so others did for you the best they could.
And life went on in some way.
In that few days, well, little time to sift, to wander,
and to ponder.
And a first experience in a city clinic that she also
had to place behind her, and having
to stop nursing the baby, which they'd instructed
her to do at the clinic.
But in a sudden fury of work, her first one,
which didn't last too long, she gets up,
sees the mess in the house.
And it was that she felt so worn, so helpless,
that it loomed gigantic beyond her, impossible ever
to achieve, beyond any effort or doing
of hers, that task of making a better life for her children
to which her being was bound, because she was before the time
when we thought in terms both of life for others and other life
for ourselves.
Wanted both or perhaps wanted only one or the other.
And now when Jim comes home, she's sitting on the back stoop
directing Will to hook up the stubbly ground.
Hey, what are you doing up, he asks gently coming up to her.
Forget them, take it easy, stay in bed orders?
She clenched her teeth and fists and huddled farther back
into the twilight shadow.
You feeling that much better, Honey?
Then let's go in, hesitantly touching her arm.
And you can set up and tell us how to fix supper,
so it tastes better.
Come on, Anna.
The kids are waiting.
Maybe they'll be waiting for supper someday,
and there will be none to give.
You ever think like that?
We're putting in a garden like you
are supposed to have helped on and never done.
That's what I'm doing up.
And I'm starting laundering work again if I can get it.
Go on in yourself.
Don't get me mad now, Anna, beseechingly.
Anna, you've been so sick.
You know you shouldn't be up.
And shouldn't I?
Pulling herself erect.
And shouldn't I?
Let the dirt stay.
Let the kids run wild and not a decent stitch on them.
Let there be no make and do on the money.
I shouldn't be up.
Don't touch me.
And who's to cook and clean and look after the kids
if I'm in bed?
Who, our servants?
The fine servants we keep?
Stop it, Anna.
Stop it.
You're making yourself sick.
Oh, Anna, Honey, don't.
Don't sweet Anna me.
Who's to do it if I'm not up?
Answer.
Who, who's to look out for--
gasping hoarsely.
Who's to care about him if we don't?
Who?
Fighting off his attempt to unfold her to quiet.
He's broken.
Anna, don't.
Please don't.
Who?
Answer me.
Oh, Jim, giving in, collapsing into his reaching embrace.
The kids, over and over broken.
The kids, what's going to happen with them?
How are we going to look out for them in this damn world?
Oh, Jim, the kids.
Seems like we can't do nothing for them.
And that I think is part of what midlife crisis is embedded
in for those who have to do still with growing life
or responsibility for any other life that
is left with the individual, the committed person,
and the family.
What's going to happen to them?
Well, I want to read a little before I
read the segment on work because I never finished that.
And no one stopped me and said, you
didn't finish out what you started to say.
I guess I did say I would want to read about the two
great, yes, silencers.
You see I'm really not all here tonight,
either it has to do with whatever almost robbed me
of my voice, and certainly robbed
me of my best reading voice.
All right.
Always, while Jim worked--
I'd put him down in a sewer.
Being a young rider, I put him there
before I put him on at the slaughterhouse where
I knew a lot about.
And in this place, he had rendered his poncho, mackinaw
and boots.
Always while Jim worked, down underground
the dripping water diamonds, his hair trickles down his neck,
makes a gay sound on his canvas poncho.
No mackinaw and boots, but it means a buck more a week,
don't it?
It means stuff for the baby, don't it?
Heavy and sore in his breast would
lie the torment of the questions Anna had asked,
and such a sad baffled flame of tenderness flicker above.
Work through, with a heart that ran far ahead of his feet,
he would hurry, hurry home, a nameless fear on him.
And his hello be almost a sob of joy as he flung open the door
and saw that all seemed as it had been.
A gaunt Anna who could not understand
this body of hers that tired so quickly
and quivered like a naked nerve, this stranger self.
One minute, her old competence and strength.
The next, addled, nervous, brutal, lost.
Not managing, having to give under to let things go.
Any effort wearing her out, everything an effort.
Seeing her so, with the look of exhaustion on him,
Jim would ask, is there something I can do to help?
Sometimes she did not answer at all.
Sometimes say, you look right tired.
Why don't you just go ahead and set.
But once she blazed if you can't see what needs doing,
just don't trouble to ask.
You hear?
Just don't trouble to ask.
I read that because she--
in all this book and in the fragments that
are in this book, only once did she ever say that,
but it's on the agenda.
Now these nearly 50 years after, and our crises
are embedded in this too, those of us who are in the situation.
And not necessarily just in the situation
of when one is getting well.
I'm going to skip about the children.
She began to neglect the already neglected
house to go out and weed and work in the garden.
The washtubs and wringer sat out in the yard
now, before, of course, the automatic washing machine,
which having just come from Las Cruces, very close to where
the first--
where we entered the nuclear age.
And I say from time to time, it's
in the second talk, reprinted in Silences too,
the 1971 talk that such was the ignoring of the work of women
that we'd had the technological sublime for 200 years
and had already, had already produced
the capacity for a nuclear explosion
before we got the first automatic washing
machine for women.
And in the 20-year of silence, my hands--
well, I'd have to say longer than the 20-year of silence,
but I'd say at least two years maybe went
into washing before diapers.
And I just learned in an exhibit how recently the mop
was invented.
And I wonder what happened to our sex that
created so much of food, clothing, shelter, language,
and decorated everything, utilitarian as
well, that somehow we waited so long to even have a mop.
And in that time, when your profession demanded,
you were judged by--
I'm speaking in Western cultures primarily,
that you scrub everything, including
sometimes the front steps on your hands and knees.
I remember that.
Forgive all this that I said I prefer just
to have in the reading, but all right.
She began to neglect the already neglected
house to go out and weed and work in the garden.
The washtubs and wringer sat out in the yard
now besides Bess's basket, Bess's baby.
She would have liked to range the stove alongside too,
even cook over an open fire.
Inside suffocated her, outside too
when there was packing-house stench.
But a need was in her to be out under a boundless sky,
in unconfined air, not between walls
under the roof of a house.
The accumulating vision of overwhelming, hostile forces
surrounding, which had come to Anna that week of the clinic,
never left her.
But she was not strong enough to contend with it now.
Only sporadically did she try to order,
do something about their lives.
And a separation, a distance, something broken and new
and tremulous had been born in her,
lying by herself, those long unaccustomed hours free
of task.
One dusk time when Jim got home, she and Mazie
were still wringing and hanging clothes.
Get in and see the dinner, Maze, while I finish up out here,
Anna said, seeing him.
Cheerfully, got my first laundering work again today.
I see that, sinking down heavily onto the stoop
as the light drained.
Bitterly, you ain't well enough to keep us uns clean
or get your other work done like you used to,
let alone do for other folks.
What's well enough or other work got to do with have to?
she asked, and went on hanging up what was left in the basket,
took down blouses, skirts, dresses,
pants from another line.
I said you ain't well enough for what
you got to do for us uns now, he repeated.
We never lived in such a mess.
It's a dollar every time.
Dreamily, that looks nice across the river, don't it?
The mist coming up like way away,
soft laundry blowing on a line.
White.
You fixing to get sick on me again?
Forget that laundering, Anna.
We'll get by.
We ain't starved yet.
She looked at him with an expression
that, in the uncertain light, he thought
might be anger or bitterness, but her voice came humble.
I'm helping Jim.
She came over.
Her arms heaped, sagged beside him.
Feels good to sit, don't it?
You look mighty weary.
Carefully, she smoothed and rolled the garments,
arranged them in the basket.
That's pretty how you do that, said
Ben, rising from the shadows.
Are you making it a sunflower?
Can I try tree and branches?
You touch that wash with your dirty hands,
and you'll never touch another thing.
How long since you washed up?
Bess was laughing and laughing today, Papa, Ben reported.
Looking cross-eyed at her hands, so we got laughing.
When I say Bessie, Bess, Bonny Bess,
she turns and looks for me.
Don't she, Mama?
Do you have a penny for Will?
Your hair's still wet, Papa?
How's yourself, old tricks?
Drawing Ben close.
I got a penny for you, all right.
Jim, a man came by today.
And for a quarter a week if we start now,
a kid gets $300 when he's 16 for a surer education.
Holding his father's hand, guess what, Papa?
We blewed soap bubbles today with green onions.
Mama showed us how.
All shiny.
Mine was the biggest, then Mazie's.
Where do bubbles go with your breath when they bust, papa?
Well, where's gone?
What does nothing look like, Papa?
I want it for Will, then he can help the others.
Finish high school.
A good job, Jim.
You think I don't want it?
Even to be sneaking timekeepers and office people
that treats you like dirt, but you
don't know nothing about it.
Miss one week's pay and you lose it all.
I asked him.
He said the plan allows.
He said it's a buck a month.
A buck a month?
Forget, Anna.
Forget that laundering too.
It's a buck a month.
A buck a month.
I'm sorry.
Voices of children around the corner lamppost.
Alley, alley ats in free, came shrill and sweet.
Mist tendrils curled closer over the river bluff, heavier fog
behind already blotting out the farthest line of clothes.
Mama, Papa, why do people talk and dogs can't?
But last night Shep, a dog from the farm,
came back and talked words.
But I couldn't anymore, just say woof, woof?
What did I say in woof, woof that made Shep mad?
He bit me, Papa, bites all over.
Do you see bites on my neck, Papa?
That was a dream, Benjy, Anna said.
Don't you remember?
Mama, came in.
I held you and showed you there wasn't no bites
and sang you back to sleep.
I skip a little, more questions.
You need a muzzle, Kid, said Jim, spreading his hand gently
over Ben's face to hold it still.
For why and for why, huh, how am I supposed to know?
Yeah, get educated, you get a little respect, no better
than to ask fool questions that get
lies or nothing for answers, like always happen to me.
Rising, what's it all for anyhow?
A buck a month?
Forget it, Anna.
Sharply, you're going to leave this kid out all night
in this damp?
Taking up Bess in her basket, let's eat.
Now in the score of lemon light from the kitchen window,
Anna picked up the laundry basket.
The moistness and dimness were all around now.
Mazie, slipping out to fetch Anna and Ben,
stood transfixed in wonder and fear.
Her mother was walking dreamlike round and round
the yard, laundry basket on her head,
disappearing in and out of the clutching mists,
emerging, disappearing, an enchanted Ben following.
Her voice came dreamy and disembodied.
Yes, that's how they carries clothes, fair Benjy, baskets
on their heads, hands on their hips,
like I can't do, walking like queens.
Hoop earrings big as bracelets in their ears, parrot birds
that talk, flowers bigger than washed-ups all colors
and smells.
Where is it mama?
Where is that place?
I don't rightly know.
I hadn't ever been Benjy.
Only saw it in a picture book.
She put the basket down, bent to him fiercely.
You read books.
You know all that.
That's what books is, places your body ain't ever been,
can't ever get to go to, inside people's heads.
You wouldn't ever know.
There's a place here, a library, where
they lets you borrow books.
Picture books, if you can't read yet.
I want to go see the earrings, talk to the parrot birds
that talk.
Will the streetcar take us?
It's a far place, Benjy.
You have to be rich to go, take trains, and boats.
Or when you grow up, you can go like your Uncle Ralphie,
the one you never did see.
She began stroking Mazie's hair in a kind of langer, a swoon.
Gently and absolutely, she stroked.
Around the springs of gray, my wild route
weaves, traveler repose and dream among my leaves,
her mother sang.
A fragile old remembered comfort streamed
from the stroking fingers into Mazie,
gathered to some shy bliss that shone despairingly
over separating hurt and want and fear and shamings.
The harm of years, river wind shimmered and burnished
the bright grasses.
Her mother's hand stroked, stroked.
I saw a ship assailing, her mother sang,
assailing on the sea.
Mazie felt the strange happiness in her mother's body.
Happiness that had not to do with them, with her, happiness
and farness and selfness.
I saw a ship assailing, and on that ship was me.
The fingers stroked, spun a web, cocooned Mazie
into happiness and intactness and selfness.
Soft wove the bliss round hurt and fear and want
and shame, the old worn fragile bliss, a new frail selfless
bliss, healing, transforming.
Up from the grasses, from the Earth,
from the broad tree trunk at their back,
latent life streamed and seeded.
The air and self shone boundless.
Absently, her mother stroked, stroked unfolding, wingedness,
boundlessness.
I'm hungry, Ben said.
Watch me jump, Jimmie called imperiously.
Mama, Mazie, watch.
You're not watching.
The wind shifted, blew packing house.
A tremble of complicity ran through Mazie's body.
With both hands, she tethered her mother's hand
to keep it stroking, stroking.
Too late.
Something whirred, severed, sank.
Between a breath, between a heartbeat, the weight settled,
the bounds reclaimed.
I'm watching, Anna called.
The mother look was back on her face, the mother alertness,
attunement back in her bounded body.
I skip.
Never again, but once, did Mazie see that look, that other look
on her mother's face.
That look all of you are having now not in bounded bodies.
Work, men and women because, of course, midlife, most of us
have economic imperatives.
And therefore, work is somewhere in midlife and perhaps part
of midlife crisis.
And when I read and there are some places where there's
a single phrase, think that for these people, some of them,
it was years and years at this single task.
And don't think in terms of the past.
Think in terms of right now in the telephone company
or the bank or offices or 1,001 places, industries,
service industries.
All right.
This is the fifth day of a Midwest heat spell.
I'm trying to see-- well, all right.
Not good.
This is Mr. Kryckszi who is the neighbor of the Holbrooks.
Jim is now on the slaughterhouse.
Not good.
This is 6:00 in the morning.
Not good.
110 in kill room.
More in Casings today.
You see.
Oven.
Maybe already afraid for Marsalek, for Mary.
I talked to Misho, to Huff, to Slim.
We have to slow it, I tell him, get break too.
Misho talk for us to Ed.
Shaking his head, no good, that prick Ed, said Jim.
How else did he make straw boss?
Bull Young, tell him no sweat.
We bunch lazies.
Lazies.
That pusher.
Beedo, a speed up system of the '20s and '30s.
Beedo hisself in person.
They're over the viaduct now.
You see, 110, maybe hotter.
Be hell, says Jim, looking down at the plant, be hell, hell.
Choreographed by Beedo, the B system.
Star, speed-up, stopwatch, convey.
Music by rasp crass, screech, knock, steamhiss,
thud machinedrum.
Abandon self all you enter here.
Become component part, geared, meshed, timed, controlled.
Hell, half-seen figures through hissing cloud vapor,
the live steam from great scalding vats,
hogs dangling dancing along the conveyor 300, 350 an hour.
Mary running, running along the rickety platform to keep up.
Stamping, stamping the hides to the shuddering drum
of the skull crushed machine in the spectral vapor clouds,
everyone the same motion all the hours through.
Kryckszi lifting his cleaver, the one powerful stroke,
long continuous arm swirl of the rippers, the gut pullers.
Marsalek pulling leaf lard, already
faint in the sweated heat, breathing with open mouth.
Breathing with open mouth, the young girls and women
in Casings where men will not work.
Year-round breathing with open mouth,
learning to pant shallow to endure the excrement reek
of offal, O-F-F-A-L, the smothering stench from
the bloodhouse below.
Cloying, dinning, jutting, gnashing of noises,
so overweening that only its scream pitch
can the human voice be heard.
Heat of hell year round for low on their heads
from the lowering ceiling.
The plant's steam machinery spurting steam geysers,
slippery uncertain footing on the slimy platform,
treacherous sudden torrent swirling,
and the strong hose trying to wash down the blood, the oil,
the offal, the slime.
And over and over, the one constant motion,
ruffle fat pullers, pluck separators, bladder, kidney,
bung, small and middle gut cutters, cleaners trimmers,
slimmers, flutters, and flitters.
Meshed, geared, geared, meshed.
The kill room.
Knockers, shackers, pritcher-uppers, stickers,
headers, rippers, leg breakers, breast in aitch sawyers,
caul pullers, fell cutters, rumpers, splitters,
vat dippers, skinners, gutters, pluckers.
Ice hell, coolers, freezers, pork trim.
Bone chill damp even in sweaters and over shoes.
Hands always in iced water.
Slippery knives.
The Beedo piecework speed, safety signs,
mockery, and all through the jumble of buildings
old and buildings new of pens, walkways, slippery stairs,
overhead chutes, conveys, steam pipes of death dismembering
and vanishing entire for harmless creatures, meek
and mild, seldom frisky, wild.
Hell.
Today, the fifth day of hell, heat
added 104 degrees outside, 112 in Casings.
7 o'clock.
This is 12 o'clock noon, 106 degrees.
Slow it, Kryckszi sends the message
to Misha, to Huff, to Ella.
We got to slow it.
Ella's a Black woman, by the way.
The 15 minute lunch break goes like nothing.
Those who are against the rules have
crowded into the cooler or the chill damp of pork
trim to eat their lunch find their names up
on the bulletin board with fines posted against them who ratted.
Those who'd sluiced themselves down
with the hoses and the yards for a momentary relief, also
against the rules, suffer other punishment.
Their clothes will not dry, cling, tighten, become
portable sweat baths as they work.
Aitch-Sawyer Crowley, the venerable faints.
Prostration.
By word or gesture or look of the eye,
the message goes out in each department, spell Marsalek,
spell Lena, spell Cleola, spell Salvatore.
However possible, spell, protect those
known near their limit of endurance.
In Casings, it is 110 degrees, a steam kettle, thinks Ella,
who has a need to put things into words,
a steam kettle, an [AUDIO OUT].
Steamed, boiled, broiled, fried, cooked.
Tony, I'm going to skip a little,
Smokey's older brother lugging his hand truck from fire
to chill to fire Casings to cooler to Casings.
Fans the cooler door open for the women as long as he dares.
Each time, the hands never ceasing their motions.
Even those too far away for relief,
turn their heads in unison toward the seconds different
air, flare their nostrils, gulp their mouths,
gulp with open mouths.
The stench is vomit-making as never before.
The fat and plucks, the bladders and kidneys and bungs and guts
gone soft and spongy in the heat,
perversely resist being trimmed, separated, deslimed,
demand closer concentration than ever.
Extra speed, hysterical, helpless laughter starts up.
Indeed, they are in hell.
Indeed, they are the damned.
Steamed, boiled, broiled, fried, cooked.
Geared, mashed.
In the hog room, 108 degrees.
Kerchiefs bound round foreheads to keep the salt
sweat from running down into eyes and blinding, become
saturated.
Each works in a rain of stinging sweat,
almost the steam from the vats seems
cloud-cool, pure by contrast.
Marsalek falls, a heart attack.
Other hearts pound near to bursting.
Relentless, the convey paces on.
Slow it, we got to slow it.
Is it a dream?
Is it delirium?
Arms lifted to their motion, geared, meshed,
have nothing to move for.
The hog has been split, has been stamped, yet still dangles.
The leaf lard, the guts have been pulled,
yet no new carcass is instantly in place to be worked on.
Has life suspended?
Are they dead?
The skull crush machine still stomping down,
sprays out its bone bits in answer.
Fined, fined for carelessness, yells Bull Young.
Who jammed the convey?
Turning instinctively towards Kryckszi, towards Mary.
At that moment in Casings, as if to demonstrate
that there is a mightier heat, a higher superior heat,
the main steam pipe breaks open and hissing live steam
in a magnificent plume in a great boiling roll takes over.
Pegg and Andra and Philomena and Cleola
directly underneath fall and writhe in their crinkling
skins, their sudden juices.
Lena, pregnant, faints.
Others tangle over her, try to rise, to help each other up.
Ella, already at the work of calming, of rescue,
thinks through her own pain.
Steam, boiled, broiled, cooked, scalded.
I forgot scalded.
When the door to the hog room, always kept
closed against the Casings' stench,
the Casings heat is flung open.
The steam boils in so triumphantly weds with the hog
that vapors to create such vast clouds, such condensation.
The running scalded figures of horror, human,
women seem disembodied, flickering shadows
gesturing mutely back to whence they have fled.
Stay where you are, yells Bull.
Carelessness, nobody's getting away with nothing.
You'll be docked for every second you ain't working
and fined for carelessness.
Already, some are in Casings helping.
Carrying Lena out of the scalding fog,
Jim sees, plastered onto her swollen belly, the safety sign
torn from the wall by the first steam
gust, 3 o'clock, 107 degrees.
I just have two more minutes to read.
Anna geared mashed on her assembly line in the kitchen.
But before I go on, having a very dear friend
in a different kind of industrial--
not accident.
It happened over a long time.
Now near blind from having worked
in one of the new printing processes
with certain kinds of light since really
the very beginning, but not that recently,
but it has done terrible things to her eyes.
Though I have such good hearing in this ear,
seldom do you ever notice, but I'm totally deaf in this ear.
Out of the days--
this happened in my mid life.
I didn't even know I was having a crisis.
In the old days of the transcription,
I worked as a transcriber.
You used to have a pedal thing and this thick thing
in your ear sound as waves.
Its vibrations, it destroyed my nerve.
Now, there's some consciousness of what can happen to you,
to your body, the only body you have,
and then you have to live with it for the rest of your life
the best you can.
So I couldn't resist saying that it never would have occurred
to me perhaps to have said--
I sometimes say that, hoping somebody
will decide to do at least a master's or maybe
a doctorate on this.
That if all the books you're given
to read in your literature classes
were fed into a computer to see how much of them
concerned human work, including that other human work
of bearing and rearing and maintaining human life--
and by the way, in motherhood, I include
those who were not biological mothers who had so many more
babies than biological children, than biological mothers ever
had.
I'm referring to some of the sisters, some teachers,
some others whose lives were involved with making
other human beings possible.
Anyway, my guess is maybe 3% of all the books in our courses
deal with those two kinds of human work
that has been most of human life.
So I thought I would mention that and hope.
Well, here is the last part Anna on her assembly
line in the kitchen.
Mazie, her mainstay help after being angry with her mother
again for various reasons.
But Willie her brother, the one right next
to her, the one who's the next youngest
gets to go out down by the river.
And she is supposed to stay all day
and help her mother because it's the day when
you're going to can the peaches, both jelly and canned peaches.
And she wants to know, she raises the question,
why does Willie get to go out and play.
And her mother says shortly, Willie is a boy.
And she says, why can't I get born a boy?
Meaning of course, she didn't so care so much about being a boy.
She just wanted the same privilege.
So her mother lets her go out for just a few hours,
and she becomes sick with the heat and other things that
happen on the dump.
So she too is ill.
And in the humid kitchen, Anna works on alone.
Mazie lies swathed in sweated sleep in the baking bedroom.
Jimmy and Jeff sleep under the kitchen table.
Their exhausted bodies, their hair damp and clinging
to their perspiring heads, giving them
the look of drowned children.
Ben lies in sleep or in a sleep of swoon.
His poor heaving chest laboring on at its breathing.
Bess has subsided in her basket on a chair where if she frets,
Anna I can sprinkle her with water
or try to ease the heat rash by sponging.
The last batch of jelly is on the stove.
Between stirring and skimming and changing
the wet packs on Ben, Anna peels and cuts the canning peaches.
Two more lugs to go.
If only all will sleep while.
She begins to sing softly, I saw a ship assailing,
assailing on the sea.
It clears her head.
The drone of fruit flies, and Ben's rusty breathing
are very loud in the unmoving heavy air.
Bess begins to fuss again.
There, there, Bessie.
There, there.
Stopping to sponge down that oozing sores on the tiny body,
there.
Skim, stir, sprinkle Bess.
Pit, peel, and cut.
Sponge, skim, stir.
Any second, the jelly will be right and must not wait.
Shall she wake up Jimmy and ask him to blow a feather
to keep Bess quiet?
No.
He'll wake cranky.
He's just a baby himself.
Let him sleep.
A skim stir, sprinkle, change the wet packs on Ben.
Pit, peel, and cut.
Sponge.
This time, it does not soothe.
Bess stiffens her body, flails her fists,
begins to scream and misery just as the jelly begins to boil.
There's nothing for it but to take Bess up,
jaunce her on her hip.
There, there.
And with her one free hand, frantically, skim and ladle.
There, there.
The batch is poured and capped and sealed
all one-handed, jiggling hip.
There, there.
It's done Anna's knees begin to tremble.
No, she dare not sit.
You know if you sat down, you'll never
make yourself get up again.
One of the jelly glasses has burst.
The amber drips onto the floor, has to be mopped,
and Bess still to be hushed.
Hush you, hush, you'll wake every sleeping one.
There, there.
Transferring her to the other hip,
and one-handed sponging her again
and her own sweating face as well.
There, there, poor baby.
The tenderness mixes with the compulsion of exhaustion
to have done, to put Bess outside in the yard where
she can scream and scream outside of hearing.
And Anna can be free to splash herself with running water,
forget the canning and the kids and sink into a chair,
lay her forehead on the table and do nothing.
There, there, Bessie.
There, there, we'll go out a spell, see what's outside.
If you had seen on a stage--
I did not recognize this when I wrote that.
It was almost 40 years later when
I read that I recognized what I had written.
If you had seen on a stage that perfect synchronization,
that grace, that timing, that execution in the form
of a dance, I mean any superb dance
that demands timing, coordination, grace, et cetera,
you would have broken out in applause.
Every day, every day, and I see it still
and still and still among the granddaughters of the Annas.
Few of whom are dancers, but some are, but so many of whom
are in a triple life where maximum timing, economy
of movement, many, many, many multiple tasks
must be done trying not to miss a beat.
Past what used to be the tasks of the race
demanded of women because few of us
were asked to carry on those other tasks of writing
the books or painting the pictures
or spinning the philosophy or trying to understand of origins
and all that of language.
Although of course, as we know, we did,
indeed speak and tell stories and make up or sing songs
and is now being increasingly recognized and said
over and over again and is buried
in a little footnote in Silences about what we still
need to trace how the great capacities that only are
recognized when they come out in the form of something that's
considered achievement, how they are exercised in every day.
But I lived in a strange time because there
are these remarkable women, women like have never
been on our Earth before, though, indeed,
they are our descendants.
They are us as we might have been
born in their time, bodies, circumstances.
And they, of course, have to think of us,
I'm speaking of all the generations
back, as their lives would have been
if they had been us in our bodies, our circumstances,
our time.
But when it comes to what the world recognizes as
achievement because still are they most--
and I'm not speaking about in Casings.
I don't even know if Casings still exist.
I haven't been back.
Packing houses have changed absolutely.
But in other work, in the work that my generation,
especially fought so hard to bring into being.
Although other generations before us had also
fought where you have teachers in large number.
And we need them because in my time,
there was only one university in all Nebraska
and a few small mostly of religious denomination
colleges.
And as was said in the introduction to me,
I did better than most of my generation.
I got almost through high school.
But now, so many of you are teachers
because all across the land where previously were only
an Aggie college, I was at Las Cruces yesterday,
New Mexico State University, or nothing at all.
And now, there are thousands and thousands and thousands
of students.
So you are the new working class that
are old working class fought to bring into being.
And if you are fortunate enough to have vacations with pay
and maybe are old enough to even have had a house
and maybe have education, those are things
that do not change your status.
You merely have some of those things that
are part of the oldest aspirations in human beings
to have, to lead the most dignified the fullest,
the least, degraded, humiliating, et cetera,
kind of a life.
And we're also in a time, you see, when--
because I'm partly sponsored by women's studies.
And in history, for instance, history has been changed.
Not enough yet, but it has been turned upside down
because women and children and also because so much
of what has to do with women and children
has to do with men, working men, but their contribution,
what their life was like, it's such of rich, rich,
rich, source is coming back.
Anthropology, the knowledge, indeed,
that we were not primarily hunting societies.
Those societies were a small percentage,
that mostly we were food-gathering societies.
And it places an entirely different kind of understanding
of human beings and what we were and where we came from
and how we work together, and so forth and so on.
But so many, many women who are the daughters
and the granddaughters, as there are many men
including in literature, some whose faces
I saw when I walked into the Poetry Center
today, the first generation of their family to come
to the writing of poetry.
But who knows what poetry was there generations
and generations back in O-R-A-L-A-U-R-A-L oral-aural
form.
But there are so many of us, but I'm
going to speak only of these young and middle-aged
and sometimes older women.
Some of them, the women, they were then
called the re-entry women, the women
who went back to school in the more fortunate time
when there might be a place for you in the professions
and a chance for you to go on and get
your doctorate because there was support and all of that.
Anyhow.
But so many of these women, they have
something so special to contribute not necessarily
in the form of literature.
Though, sometimes there, but in their own field
of endeavor and discipline, in psychology, in sociology.
Some of those who deal with literally
thousands of other human lives.
And they come across much that is not in the books
and not in the studies.
And they, like Anna and like June, but most like Anna,
because many of them too are deeply committed
to other human beings, whether in children or some other form.
And they are deeply committed to their students.
And it's a time of cuts and much harm,
and many of their students too are
first and second generation.
And you go through college in a different way
if it is still new to you.
You are migrating into a different world
in so many, many ways.
So you have an added load and responsibility
and seldom, seldom do you have time
to get to finish that particular paper, that particular work.
It gets divided more and more into a few that
have the credentials already and the few books, and therefore,
are enabled to go on and do more.
And that is my contribution as of now
to discussion on midlife crisis.
It is agony to me that still, we are not harvesting,
we are not enabling what is in human beings to be.
So love, don't applaud please.
If you want to have a response and discussion time,
I took longer than should have been.
But I'll be very happy to stand and talk.
And if I see some of you tomorrow night,
perhaps I shall have my normal voice.
And I want to applaud Russian style, the quality
of your listening, because what you read is falsified somewhat
when it does not have the right whisper or the right loudness
or the right texture and accent.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
You should certainly stand and stretch your bodies
for a few minutes even if there are comments you want to make
or questions you want to ask.
[INAUDIBLE] on the city.
I got to the same [INAUDIBLE] hear from Second World War.
What is your name?
My name is Louis.
One goes to [INAUDIBLE]
This one goes with the book.