Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — February 1, 2004

In an otherwise conventional speech (reported
here) [sorry, that link is no longer valid -mh 6/22/2010]
justifying an abortion she
had in the 1950s before she was married, the novelist Ursula Le
Guin recently made an odd and extremely sad statement:
that if she had not been able to
abort her first child she would have been “another useless
woman.”

That this statement implies a great deal of contempt for women
whose principal occupation is motherhood is clear, and no
surprise. Or at least it shouldn’t be a surprise.
It’s always been clear that one of the fundamental
convictions of the feminist movement is the belief, once held
mainly by men, that the traditional tasks of mothers and wives
are trivial, really little more than a form of idleness, and a
waste of time and ability for any but the dullest. Yet I always
am surprised, just a little, when I encounter it. I think
that’s because I persist in expecting women to stick
together somehow, at least about this particular matter, since
male disrespect for women’s work is such a basic component
of the battle of the sexes. I have always imagined that women
once shared as a secret the knowledge that what matters most of
life is in the small, quiet, and obscure, not in the crashing and
strutting of great deeds and fame, and that this knowledge was a
comfort to them in the face of male disdain and condescension. If
that was ever the case, it is no longer.

But these ironies and contradictions of the feminist movement
have been worked over pretty well, and there is not a great deal
more to say about them. What is more striking in Le Guin’s
remarks is her approach to the question of what might have been.
She believes her life would have been ruined if she had given
birth to a child at the age of twenty; presumably she believes
her consequent “useless” life would not have included
her becoming an esteemed writer of fiction. And she is disturbed
to think that “her three wanted children” would not
have been born. But of course she doesn’t know, and
can’t know, that things would have worked out badly. Why
should she not have, eventually, become a writer?—if she
would indeed have been “unmarriageable,” she might in
time have found herself with more freedom to write. I’ve
always been skeptical of the idea of the “mute inglorious
Milton.” To a young woman intent on becoming, say, an
Olympic gymnast, motherhood might indeed mean a definite end to
that ambition. But writing has no such biological limitations.
Perhaps she would have been a very different writer if she had
not given birth at twenty, but I see no reason to think she would
have been a worse one; she might well have been a better one.

The question of the “three wanted children” is
more difficult. One of the paradoxes of Christian theology and
indeed of Christian life is the role of sin in bringing about the
good. The Resurrection required the Crucifixion, and the
Crucifixion required Judas’s betrayal. Those of us who have
sinned not only gravely but in such a manner as to change the
course of our lives find our repentant selves in an impossible
position: we wish with all our heart we had not sinned, and yet
in the years that follow the sinning—I speak as one well
along in life— there may be much that we cannot wish undone
and which, so far as we can see, would not have happened had we
taken the right path at some long-ago juncture. We might have
lived elsewhere and in other ways, might have married someone
else, and would then not have had the same children. We cannot
sort this out and soon abandon the attempt and place it all in
God’s hands.

But that of course is something a person like Le Guin, who
has, or so I’ve read, described herself as firmly
anti-Christian, cannot do. She has things she loves: her writing
career, her marriage, her wanted children. If aborting her first
child brought her these things, she cannot repent of, and thus
repudiate, that action. She cannot simultaneously, as a Christian
in her position would be obliged to do, affirm that the action
should never have been, yet accept the good things that
nevertheless followed upon it.

Nor, it appears, is she willing simply to write the whole
thing off as an example of the tragedy inherent in human life.
She must say that the action which led to the good things was
therefore also good. To repent of the abortion would be to wish
her other three children not to exist and would therefore, I
suppose, seem contradictory to her. Or (to look at it the other
way around) to affirm the lives of her “three wanted
children” is to affirm the death of the unwanted. If the
effect is good, the cause must also be judged essentially good,
as being at worst a regrettable necessity. This is the logic of
pragmatic paganism, and it has at least a certain cold
consistency. But it is a consistency which solves the apparent
moral contradiction by eliminating it, declaring to be good that
which was formerly considered evil. Perhaps this is a
psychological necessity when forgiveness is believed to be
unavailable.

From the Christian point of view this dilemma is an instance of the
way apparently opposing truths are dealt with: not by eliminating
one or blending the two or explaining away their opposition, but
by insisting on both and contemplating the God in whom they are
mystically reconciled. That which seems in the eyes of the world
a mere contradiction becomes, when consigned to the vast sea of
God, a healing paradox, like the wounds of Christ.

******

Dancing in the Aisles (of the Grocery Store)

I was pleased to find, on my last visit to the local Food
World, that the management has resumed its former practice of
using oldies—that is, the pop music of the ‘50s and
‘60s—as the store’s background music. All
right, I’ll grant the abstract argument that the world
would be a better place without background music in stores and
offices. But if we must have it, this is great stuff to have, at
least for something as dull as shopping for groceries. This store
had used oldies for some years, and I once complimented a cashier
on the selection. “A lot of people say that,” she
replied.

And I also expressed my regret when they decided a couple of
years ago to move ahead a decade or two and use the much less
engaging radio pop of the ‘70s and later. “A lot of
people say that,” replied the cashier this time as well.
Now this error of judgment has been corrected, and it really is
surprising what a lift in mood some of this music can produce. I
once overheard a friend of one of my then-teenaged children say
that he had been listening to the oldies station because he
wanted to hear something that would make him feel good. One might
suppose that affection for this music is only nostalgia, and for
me there may be some truth in that, but when this young man was
born the music was already a generation in the past. No,
there’s something about the music that has proved
—against all reasonable expectation— to be evergreen, as
capable now as then of inducing good cheer. I’m not sure it
would require much instigation to get a few people dancing in the
aisles of Food World when they hear a song like “Roll Over
Beethoven.” Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers,
the Drifters, the Platters…we’re going to have to
call them artists, after all.

And what does this say about the despised 1950s, that time
when, as we are constantly told, a crushed populace moved timidly
through a minefield of political fear and sexual repression? The
effervescent popular music of the time stands defiantly in
contradiction to that silly view.