The Amazon Trail - Night Owl
It all started when I wouldn’t get up on Sunday mornings to go to church. I was an energetic, nervous baby dyke, and I simply could not sit still that long with nothing to engage me. And the old guy up front was talking Latin, for pete’s sake. So, over some of my most formative years, say 10 through 13, I got in the habit of staying in bed really late on Sunday mornings until my mother finally gave up trying to unearth me.
Sleeping late on Sundays led to the complete and utter pleasure of staying up really late on Saturday nights. That became my time. Listening to the alternative radio station, watching horror movies on the $15.00 used console TV and, by high school, writing love poetry to my girlfriend and my crushes.
It didn’t take long before I was staying up Friday nights and as many other nights as I could get away with. That usually depended on when my mother got up to wake my father in his recliner, turn off the TV and make sure he went to bed. Then she’d sleep a couple more hours before discovering my light was still on. The poor woman. Riding herd on her Lynches was an unwinnable battle. I remember her warning me, “You’ll read your eyes out!”
So here I am all grown up - or so I'm told. My night still doesn't end until three or four in the morning. For most of these years I've fought myself, acting as my own insomniac mother and ordering myself to bed, then not complying. Mornings I was wont to beat myself up for starting work so late yet again and I'd tell myself I’d go to sleep earlier that very night, only to be lured by the sirens of stillness and solitude into another rendezvous with an absorbing book or a project I wanted to finish.
So sue me: nights are when my inner owl awakens and challenges my intellect. I get ideas then and work out knotty writing quandaries. I dream then, of what I might achieve given leisure and a long enough life. I read my eyes out. I delight at the 3:00 A.M. madness of the cats and try to quiet them so they don't wake my wife, sleeping all lonesome in the next room.
But there I go, beating myself up again. My sweetheart doesn't. I fear creating a rift in our relationship by abandoning her to the night, when in fact she is the one with enough insight to recognize and accept - and still love - this night-fired insomniac. Just make sure you sleep long enough to get at least seven hours, she urges. What a simple revelation: be who you are.
I work on west coast time so I don’t have to be at my desk and my job till noon. Why not answer the call of my nature, she reasons. When I force myself toward early sleep, I come wide awake next to her, wriggling and itchy and grabbing index cards or the iPod to jot notes. The early hours of the morning, the rich dark of deep night, fan the fires in me. Their light flares and I’m up again, much to the cats' delight.
It's taken most of a lifetime and a perfect match to understand this quirk of mine. My wife is teaching me what love really is as she embraces this flawed being. She’s teaching me that flaws are not flaws: they are what make us ourselves when we're not trying to conform to someone else’s agenda of normal. What makes me this way? I don't know the answer any more than I know why I'm gay or how I came to be able to put pretty words on a page or how my wife got so wise and understanding.
With August's wilding of England; America’s confusion between religion and power, people and corporations; with people drunk on hate of gays and colors; with the abandonment of wildlife to bulldozing developers - how I wish my sweetheart had a counterpart who could marry the world and steer it, also, to simply love all its parts and stop trying to quash the differences among living things that make this earth whole in its glorious self.
Copyright Lee Lynch 2011
August 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Friday, August 5, 2011
The Amazon Trail - Beggar of Love
The Amazon Trial - Beggar of Love
The highest recommendation I can give Lee Lynch’s writing is that you will not mistake it for anyone else’s. Her voice and imagination are uniquely her own. Lynch has been out and proudly writing about it for longer than many of us have been alive. In her new novel, Beggar of Love, she creates a protagonist, Jefferson (known by her surname), so fully realised that the story seems to distill the last several decades of lesbian life.
Since The Swashbuckler (1985), Lynch has unapologetically written novels about and for dykes. As Nicola Griffith has said about ‘lesbian fiction’ (asknicola.blogspot.com), it would not be a compliment to suggest that Lynch transcends the genre; good books are not a genre. A good book can make the reader laugh, feel desire, and think, sometimes all in the same scene. Lynch does this with pithy sentences that can convey an entire relationship and more: ‘The occasional harshness that remained in Ginger’s accent grated on Jefferson, who’d been raised to sound like a class, not a location’ (p. 88). Here she describes a phenomenon this reader never had words for, but recognised instantly. Lynch is that rare US writer who knows that class—not race or sexuality—is the great American taboo. Her fiction can be relied upon to show us characters not only of different classes, pace American denial, but of different ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds—and she introduces them effortlessly, because her dyke world cuts across all those lines. This diversity is one of the things lesbian and feminist literature was supposed to deliver. Lynch delivers.
Another thing Beggar of Love does, that novelists rarely achieve, is to keep the outcome for the hero in genuine doubt until the very last page. The reader comes to know Jefferson in all her charming, sometimes infuriating butch complexity, and Lynch honors her readers’ intelligence by giving Jefferson many dimensions. In bringing these fully to life, she also does justice to her character.
Nor is gender diversity absent from Beggar of Love. Like much of Lynch’s work it celebrates butch and femme, especially butch sexuality, as more than fixed references to one point in time. There are few male characters, although there are hints that Jefferson’s father, Jarvy, sought the company of other men while married to Jefferson’s mother. Jefferson seems to have inherited her father’s roving eye, as surely as his alcoholism. Jarvy’s story brings to mind the father’s tragedy in Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (in the sense of drawn media) memoir.
What takes the reader through the years and pages of this novel is, finally, the writing. ‘She'd been in love before, of course. Angela was still like ivy entwining her heart that some day would leave impressions, fossils of love, but her sensations now moved inside those ivied walls’ (p. 85). Jefferson’s feelings, if not her experiences, are universal. ‘Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She'd discovered that she couldn't trust herself to honor what she'd thought she'd believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?’ (pp. 101-02)
Lee Lynch finds the words.
The highest recommendation I can give Lee Lynch’s writing is that you will not mistake it for anyone else’s. Her voice and imagination are uniquely her own. Lynch has been out and proudly writing about it for longer than many of us have been alive. In her new novel, Beggar of Love, she creates a protagonist, Jefferson (known by her surname), so fully realised that the story seems to distill the last several decades of lesbian life.
Since The Swashbuckler (1985), Lynch has unapologetically written novels about and for dykes. As Nicola Griffith has said about ‘lesbian fiction’ (asknicola.blogspot.com), it would not be a compliment to suggest that Lynch transcends the genre; good books are not a genre. A good book can make the reader laugh, feel desire, and think, sometimes all in the same scene. Lynch does this with pithy sentences that can convey an entire relationship and more: ‘The occasional harshness that remained in Ginger’s accent grated on Jefferson, who’d been raised to sound like a class, not a location’ (p. 88). Here she describes a phenomenon this reader never had words for, but recognised instantly. Lynch is that rare US writer who knows that class—not race or sexuality—is the great American taboo. Her fiction can be relied upon to show us characters not only of different classes, pace American denial, but of different ages and racial/ethnic backgrounds—and she introduces them effortlessly, because her dyke world cuts across all those lines. This diversity is one of the things lesbian and feminist literature was supposed to deliver. Lynch delivers.
Another thing Beggar of Love does, that novelists rarely achieve, is to keep the outcome for the hero in genuine doubt until the very last page. The reader comes to know Jefferson in all her charming, sometimes infuriating butch complexity, and Lynch honors her readers’ intelligence by giving Jefferson many dimensions. In bringing these fully to life, she also does justice to her character.
Nor is gender diversity absent from Beggar of Love. Like much of Lynch’s work it celebrates butch and femme, especially butch sexuality, as more than fixed references to one point in time. There are few male characters, although there are hints that Jefferson’s father, Jarvy, sought the company of other men while married to Jefferson’s mother. Jefferson seems to have inherited her father’s roving eye, as surely as his alcoholism. Jarvy’s story brings to mind the father’s tragedy in Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s graphic (in the sense of drawn media) memoir.
What takes the reader through the years and pages of this novel is, finally, the writing. ‘She'd been in love before, of course. Angela was still like ivy entwining her heart that some day would leave impressions, fossils of love, but her sensations now moved inside those ivied walls’ (p. 85). Jefferson’s feelings, if not her experiences, are universal. ‘Now that she knew she was capable of betrayal and inflicting pain in order to have what she wanted, she suspected everyone else in the world was capable of the same thing. She'd discovered that she couldn't trust herself to honor what she'd thought she'd believed in. How could she now trust anyone else?’ (pp. 101-02)
Lee Lynch finds the words.
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