...Seeking Clarity In A Murky World...

The words are evocative in themselves.

Scarcity. Small, spare, quickly ended, hoarding sound and movement - the final syllables almost blending together in their rush to get out and get it over with.

Abundance. Full and round, rising and falling, this one needs your participation, to the extent that you are able, to the very end - where you must give it that last push and actively disengage in order to let it go.

And then there is Theriomorph. Which is also fun to both say and visualize, but she does much more than play with words. She has taken the two concepts above and expanded on them as models for living and/or operating, in a thought provoking four part series posted at Chris Clarke’s, where she was guest blogging the past few days.

It’s actually a five part series, in my mind, because until I read the post that began it all, the series itself was a little confusing for me. I could understand very well what she was saying, but, for some reason - most likely unfamiliarity with the writer herself - until I knew why she was saying it, it was difficult for me to know how to respond.

Anyway, first off here is her series - none of the posts are very long, so it’s quick reading, but they are full, so much thinking:

The post that kicked off the request for the series:
speaking of disappearing peoples, and language (and alliances)

The series.
Part I: Abundance
Part II: Real World Application of Abundance is all About Cookies
Part III: When Abundance Goes Wrong
Part IV: Relinquishing Scarcity, Offering Abundance

I love talking about this stuff and attempting to figure out how these concepts, and ones like them, can work on a practical, wide-spread basis on the left. I’m not really going to talk about that, though, or directly about Theriomorph’s series at all -I don’t think, anyway.

Strangely enough, this series, combined with two posts of Chris’... one just a photo and a comment on it, and the other about caring for elderly relatives, as well as (yet another) asinine post by a major feminist blogger all got me thinking about abundance and scarcity, of course, and feminism, being considered part of a class, actually having class… and my mom.

You see, one reason Theriomorph’s series both fascinated and puzzled me is my mom has lived her life under the abundance model.

Willful generosity. Stubborn openness. Determined curiosity. Genuine graciousness. Honesty and kindness is equal measure.
The idea, I suppose, is as simple as not only behaving, but actually feeling, like welcome guests at each other’s tables, all the time. Hosting and visiting both, in every interaction.

Yes. Like that.

I should give a little background.

My mom, in her 20’s. I don’t actually like this picture much… too posed, but if I have others scanned I can’t find them at the moment

We are a black family, but my mom is white skinned. She is not white but, had she chosen to do so, she (and a few, but not all, of her brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles) could have “passed”. As far as I know, none did or attempted to. Her grandfather and grandmother, as well as some of his brothers and their wives, were graduates of Fisk University, worked with Booker T. Washington and were instrumental in helping to build and run the Tuskegee Institute. In fact, her grandfather went to Germany -

[- I found this out when we were watching the Antiques Road Show, where a guy had this elaborate sword he was getting appraised, and she casually says, “I wonder what happened to the sword your great-grandfather brought home from Germany. That sort of looks like it.”

“?!?”]

My great-grandfather. He is the one standing, on the right. With the mustache.

- to meet with Kaiser William II, apparently because he was part of the Tuskeegee Institute’s group that went to Togo to teach the Africans there how to farm cotton, and to help colonize the country for Germany. I’m still figuring out how to deal with this knowledge :/

So anyway, to make this next part short (I really am going somewhere, but we need to go through this first to get there) - most all of her family were (and are) solidly middle to upper middle class, college educated professionals. Of just the California contingent that I know of, in the 50’s and beyond one brother was a chemical engineer with Rocketdyne, another brother worked on aeronautic electrical systems with a similar company, and her uncle was an electrical engineer with Lockheed Martin Hughes Aircraft (correction from Mom). They all lived in large (for that time) houses in racially segregated mid to upper middle class neighborhoods, their wives did the black version of the June Cleaver/Junior League type thing - never had to work, stayed home to raise the kids, did charity work, and so on.

Our lives were not quite like that. My mom was a thrice married (and divorced) mother of three - (a child from each marriage…my oldest brother’s father, the first marriage, she won’t say much about; my second oldest brother’s father worked with the Nigerian goverment at that time and was later an Ambassador; my father was (still is) a Nigerian microbiologist and worked with the United Nations, UNICEF).  An entrepreneur, owning her own business and establishing a reputation as the best in her field in California. There was not an awful lot of money in it but when I was young we did live in a large 2 story, 6 bedroom - rented - house, often with a housekeeper, in a mixed income, (and mixed race/culture) working class neighborhood.

Okay, whew… I felt I had to get all that down for a couple of reasons. One (a LOT generalizing coming up) - when you mention “black family”, especially for that period of time, Conservatives seem to have an image of everyone being a sharecropper’s daughter or son… (and that reminds me, I got another shocker from my mom when going through old photos, about an actual sharecropper’s daughter. I’ll have to tell the story one day) or BET or Jerry Springer. White liberals/progressives seem to have an image of poor, beat down, uneducated - and probably BET and Jerry Springer as well, dunno.

I needed to knock all that out of anyone’s head, as I wanted to show that by just about any measure - at that time and place, and within the communities she both lived and operated in, my mom would be considered, in a few ways, to be privileged.  (For a time – she soon began her long slide into mental illness and our lives became very much different, but that’s another story, maybe for another time.)

So. Living in the abundance model. Years ago a British friend who still talks about the miners strike (and still hates Mad Maggie Thatcher) said to me, after a discussion in which he found out that I knew little about the various Labor/Union movements, or this or that book, or this famous lefty person, and so on, finally declared: “Well, you must be a lefty from the heart because you know sod all about being one.” He insisted that this was a compliment and I eventually believed him.

Anyway, he was right. I didn’t come to being a leftist through the study of various political systems or social justice movements or great leftist thinkers. There was no consideration of various options, with a decision made at the end of “I choose this one” or anything remotely like this. There was only my mom, who lived left, lived within the abundance model, and, as a consequence, so did we.

Whether we had a little or a lot, there was always enough to share. I often say my childhood home was sometimes like a mini United Nations because of the wide varieties of people, friends of my mom, who were in and out for visits, get togethers, family meals, needing to stay in one of the spare rooms for a time, and so on. Black, White, Asian, Mexican, African, Jamaican, Irish, Indonesian – you never knew who would be sitting around the living room or the dining room table… and these are just the people I remember. Pearls and heels, furs, manicures, workboots, wingtips, house dresses and ratty slippers, thick sturdy ankles and work roughened hands, fresh from the salon, nappy headed, blonde, inky black, erudite, wordy, monosyllabic, heavily accented, slang, make do – and every single one treated the same.

Never, never once did I ever see her treat anyone as “less than” - in our home, in their homes (and we went to a good many of them, in return visits), strangers on the street, or anywhere else. Or even give any indication, even in private, that she thought such a category existed. 

I don’t seem to be coming anywhere nearer to the end – I haven’t even mentioned the Milky Way yet – well, only sort of, so I think I’ll do a second part where I go more into what living left and living within an abundance model meant to us, because this is getting very long.

[edited slightly and pictures added]