Of Dichotomous Thinking and Michel de Montaigne

I know. I skip out on any meaty blogging for a month and suddenly-wham-I super-saturate a title with two awkwardly opposed ideas.

Others could include: Fried Chicken and Waffles; Bacon & Chocolate; Subtlety and Fox News.

This evening, I attended the River Writers' event. It's a bimonthly reading series at Boudreaux and Thibodeaux's in downtown Baton Rouge. Recently, the series experienced a kerfluffle within this kerfluffle-sized writer community, thanks to local arts mag Sweet Tooth's publication last month of Tracey Duncan's "The Bearded Men Have No Legs."

Basically, the magazine's call for topics on the 'other side of the philosophical divide' from its contributors provoked a sassy send-up of River Writers' male-centric content/vibe/attitude/gestalt. Scantily clad female thighs a la A Christmas Story serve as podium in the crowded, often attentive but rowdy second-story bar to the main B&T.

Divisions are a funny thing. Since the article bemoaning the chauvinistic tendencies of the 'homosocial scene' was published, women writers (all of whom, including the writer of the article, are friends of mine I respect and admire) in the B.R. (also known as the Red Stick) have expressed intense division regarding whether to support or not support the R.W.

One female poet who performed there this evening declared dismissively that Duncan is "a girl she knows," though she's been in the same MFA program with her for the past two years, and is "no friend of mine."

Vince, the emcee and founder, reminded the audience that the series was there to assist in artists' experimentation, regardless of what form that took. And, acordingly, the poets who read ran the gamut from 13 year old boy fart jokes to compelling performance poetry.

Oh, politics. Oh, sex. Oh, women and men. Oh, dichotomies. When people speak for other people, those people will either agree or disagree--forcefully. It's a "you're either fer us or agin' us" (to use my regional diction) fall-out within our kerfluffle. I feel torn about getting caught up in the Great River Writers' Divide of 09, which will be remembered as: Are They Women Haters? even though I think more accurately, this is about What Do I Have to Do to Feel Accepted Here?

This reminds me of another schism you may be aware of: The Great Bates Dormitory Snafu of '95, which took place at Wellesley College. Several black students who lived in Bates organized a party to, among other things, draw men of color from area schools who wouldn't ordinarily attend mainstream Wellesley mixers. The party had men, beers, music, and laughter. The party had maybe three white faces in the ninety-person crowd. The white students coming in and out of the dorm that night (for they resisted attending the party) felt uncomfortable. They weren't used to being outnumbered in race. They were used to being enveloped into a majority in order to feel accepted. One girl announced at our dorm student government meeting that she did not "feel accepted" or "included" and this diagnosis was delivered with fear. Fear of not being accepted. The conversation that ensued, and the tears, and the yelling--Was the party racist against white women/Are white women too racist to tolerate black men in their dorm--was all about how a white woman at Wellesley College goes about feeling accepted, and a black woman at the same school must use a different recipe.

Here's where Michel de Montaigne comes in. He was a defender of contextual truth, not as a deformity of nature, but as its very essence. (I highly recommend "On Vanity" and "Of Presumption.") He was torn between his Catholic heritage and an increasingly insistent Protestant populace in his town of which he was mayor. He thought we were all a bit too hung up on dichotomous thinking, the old Either/Or, which depended on agreed-upon rhetoric used in the public sphere, when instead we ought to be exploring and accepting the particularities that make up our individual perspectives. Though he was a Catholic, he mediated between the warring religious factions and supported a Protestant king. True, he was no politician. And yet.
Kings pleaded with him to remain in the public service--even partisan opponents valued his logic. He must have been doing something right.

I don't fancy myself a little Montaigne--that would take some seriously repressed homosexuality, a large room of my own, and access to whittling knives (he liked to inscribe fave quotes on the ceiling beams of his study).

Could the female divisions over suspected misogyny be re-directed into a conversation about how one goes about gaining acceptance and what expectations are part of the ritual? Maybe.

I'd love to pull out my women's college Magnifying Glass of Problematic Gender Tropes and decide whether a true feminist should or should not support this homegrown reading series. But alas, I have no such possession, because that tool is in the moment's employment of the user, in the day, time and place she chooses to use it.