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Of Love and Dandelions

            One night, Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda are huddled together in bed, and Pecola asks as question: “How do you do that? I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” To this, Claudia says in her inner monologue, “But Frieda was asleep. And I didn’t know.” And I find myself saying, you’re you, and if someone finds you love-worthy, then you’re loved. Simple as that. But some people don’t have that ingrown belief that they are special, worthy, and consider the simplicity of the answer, which is Claudia at the moment. 

            Said love, or rather, relationship, between a famile is explained through Claudia’s eyes: “They slipped in and out of the box of peeling gray, making no stir in the neighborhood, no sound in the labor force, and no wave in the mayor's office. Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making his own patchwork quilt of reality--collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other." I’ve never thought about family in this way, only as a type of foothold and balance in the basis of understanding and love. But Morrison describes family as a group of people who unknowingly affect and are affected by those around them, people who are touched by the people closest to them and in a way molded to who they are.

            As for the conflict of the story, a certain paragraph caught my eye. Claudia is scrutinizing dandelions and begins with the following: "Dandelions. A dart of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.' Preoccupied with that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her; it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth." Here we see some of the reasoning behind the main conflict of the story. The fact that if she loves something and said entity doesn’t feel the same way, then Claudia responds by “hating” them. In a way, it the means by which she protects herself from pain. Anger is better. When something happens that leaves you raw and sad, maybe it’s better to feel anger because it is a powerful sentiment and not so much a helpless one. In hating dandelions, she is protecting herself. As for the white, blue-eyed perfection, the opposite is true. She begins by hating them, but then turns her feelings into love because you have more control over love.

           

Inspiration

For some reason, we tend to have an idealistic view of poverty and what it entitles. Or some of us do. The ambiance of poverty makes a love story all the more fervent. A film wrapped in the trials and turbulences of economic shortages aspiring a greater ending makes one passionate because if someone can do that with said background, then maybe we ourselves can somehow prevail. It’s the poetry of poverty as it blankets musicians, artists, writers in their journey through madness. It’s the idea that no matter the circumstances, there’s certain sweetness to the act of  feeling happiness no matter what. Claudia romanticizes poverty and hard times when she describes her mother’s routing singing:

            If my mother was in a singing mood, then it wasn’t so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty that I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin ti-i-me to my name (27).

            And it’s understandable. Claudia’s life is mixed with unfeelingness, a bland numbness, that she craves some time of passion, whether it be positive or negative.  And this makes me look back on a commencement speech that J.K Rowling did at a Harvard graduation where she said, “Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools.” And maybe in this case, Claudia isn’t so  much a fool as much as she is a girl naïve to the hardships in life outside of her own, kind of like all of us. She goes on to say that “Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, but sweet.” I think about in describing her mom’s beautiful voice, she uses the colors blue and green to describe it. No brown, no black. The fact that Morrison manages to convey the argument and conflict of the story with the sole description of the main character’s mother’s voice, is lovely. In using those adjectives to describe what she deems a beautiful voice, the reader gets the fact that she herself finds blue and green to be beautiful, which points back to the obsession with being white, perfection. Also the fact that the beauty of her voice took out the grief of the lyrics left me thinking. Is that possible? To live something horrible, to liv pain, and yet find a way to make it softer, even a good thing? As for the last line, it follows that same trail of thought, and is enlightening in its own way. Pain is not only endurable, but sweet. That is inspiration at its best.

Loving Hatred

            It’s safe to say Toni Morrison is a great writer. Beautiful, even. Just her words and their imagery as well as the deeper meaning and thought carve out a beautiful statue of the human conscience, even if a very specific one. She ends one chapter by saying, “There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” And while it refers to a specific account, I can’t help but ponder the veracity and wisdom behind those words. Because it’s true that when we’re hurt, that when things happen to us that prickle our skin until the light graze turns into bloody torture, we want to know why. We want to know why our significant other left us, why we were rejected from our dream school, why our parents don’t love us. We want to know why. But why is painful. We can’t handle the fact that he left us because we’re not pretty enough or because our impulsiveness drove him away, we don’t want to know we didn’t get in because sometimes ‘good’ just isn’t good enough. We don’t want to know our parents don’t love us because we’re us and that’s explanation enough. Why hurts. How is less painful. How would be our lover’s leaving as a slow waltz out of our lives on a plane to Paris, How would be getting a college admissions letter saying, ‘thank you but no thank you.’ How would be gentle. And Claudia is saying that the why is too painful, the reason her hopes can’t come true. But I’m pretty sure she knows why, I’m pretty sure we all do.

           

            And it was this pain from the unfair why’s and the unalterable aspect of it all that I’m guessing led to her relationship with white, blue-eyed dolls. “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs--all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. "Here," they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day 'worthy' you may have it.’” Here we see the internal conflict that plagues Claudia’s mind in a society where she’s set up to be inferior. Because who’s to say what is beautiful? Who has that right? Blue eyes are just that. Blue. But in that time, it was the idea of perfection and freedom. Beauty. It was the bright sign saying Claudia was anything but.

            She clearly harbors a strong antagonism towards the blue-eyed pale porcelain dolls, and by definition the humans that represented them. She says, “I could not love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable.” And this makes me question the rest of the novel, seeing as the premise is supposed to be Claudia’s obsession with said object of hatred, her aspirations to be the former. Because she even destroyed them: “If I pinched them, their eyes--unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll's eyes--would fold in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.” And so here, so simply written, we see the shift of hatred to the love that will encompass the novel. One would think that would help her cope, her not drowning in embitterment. But it turns out that the change was “adjustment without improvement,” and, if possible, it only became worse.

           

Seeds of Hope

            I have this about metaphors. I’m all for them. But, I have to admit, the words, “We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow,” didn’t really alert me to the fact that I would soon be confronted by one. Quite honestly, I was just wondering if the words were literal and a girl was actually having her father’s baby. In which case I cringed at the thought and later went on to imagine just what family terms would be deigned in the situation. The baby’s grandfather would be his father as well and his grandmother would be his father’s wife.

            On that note, let me just say that it left me deeply troubled. But what captured my interest was when Claudia began to talk about the seeds.  While on the subject of Pecola’s baby, Claudia says, “A little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody's did. Not even the gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola's baby we could think of nothing but our own magic: if we planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and everything would be all right.” It’s difficult to decipher just what she means by the seeds. But my best guess is that she isn’t talking about babies, about physical entities you place in dirt. She’s talking about hopes and ideas, goals. The ability to make things happen, kind of like Pecola’s dad made the baby happen. And that if you take those hopes, those goals, and dedicate a lot of time to them to nurture them, they might just sprout. We might just get what we hoped for and that might just be enough to make us happy. The fact that most people’s seeds didn’t sprout says a lot about the social situation of where Claudia lives. The fact that she herself admits to think of nothing but her seeds demonstrates that she has a lot of hopes, and we might just find out what they are.

            Claudia later says, “It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds.” In that I take it that the ‘greener pastures’ of new beginnings and better-ness are far from her reach, or so she says, stating her life to remain in its isolated cave from achieving bliss. She goes on: “Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame. For years I thought my sister was right: it was my fault. I had planted them too far down in the earth. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.” When she says she planted her seeds to far down the earth she probably means that she cradled her hopes and locked them tights as a means of protection, dirt, that they are unable to reach out and grow. And that the earth itself is unyielding, life is just not willing to make those hopes grow when it comes to her, when it comes to this lifetime. What really got to me was the pun of the phrase, “We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt,” where she uses the seed and black dirt metaphor to later prove the literal sense of Pecola’s father’s sperm, seed, into his African American daughter, black dirt. That pun in itself just blew me. But it is just now that I understand what she means when she says she had ‘dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt.’ That they had lost the possibility of any of their seed’s growth, of any hopes and wishes and goals coming true, by being black. And while the words themselves are beautiful, their meaning is ugly. 

Mundane Irony

            I have an unhealthy fascination with light eyes. Unhealthy is putting it harshly giving that said obsession is in no way harmful to my health. But there’s something with the direct contrast of such color to someone’s skin that is just so beautiful. But my interest with light eyes is a trivial matter, not rooting itself in any other reason than pure beauty. It is not in any way based on interior political or social concepts or insecurities. Which is what I infer to be the case when it comes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. The fact that it has to do with the social aspect of African Americans during a period where equality was far from what it’s defined as in the dictionary, shows itself in the title. The longing to have blue eyes, usually encased with the Caucasian and white persona, demonstrates the inner conflict of an African American girl who longs to attain them, and in attaining them, attaining the life, the respect, and the freedom they symbolize. But that’s just me wrapping myself in conjecture.

            The opening lines of the novel are sharp and abrupt sentences like, “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play.” The structure makes it so that the juvenile thoughts and childlike perspective is palpable. Fine, I said. She wants to show the reader that she is actually speaking from her childhood. But then the paragraph that is made up of these words is repeated sans any periods whatsoever, creating an effect of eternity and someone loosing their breath, a run-on of a sentence. A run-on of a life. And so now I feel that this is not just a blatant demonstration of the character’s age, but also a clear portrayal of how said character views her life. After that, the same sentence is repeated but with every single word glued to each other, attached as if binding to form one whole unending word. And that just makes it seem as if Claudia, the protagonist, has repeated the former paragraph so many times that it just becomes ingrained in her mind until it is but mere words, not meaning anything, just a routine, common in its normalcy and blandness.

            And while anyone else might just skip over the same three paragraphs with mere differences in punctuation and spacing, figuring them mere repetitions, I slow my pace and focus all the more. Because in those three ‘similar’ paragraphs, I think the entire generality of the novel lies naked in front of us. The words themselves are mundane, “Dick and Jane”, “Mom and Dad”, Father is “big and strong”, dog goes “bowwow.” The words themselves are so cliché and ordinary that they should be overlooked, but in reality they highlight themselves. They provide the reader with a semblance of normalcy but they really mean just the opposite. The protagonist’s life is anything but that picture perfect paragraph. It’s ironic. And the structure of the paragraphs lies in a way so that they resemble not only her thoughts, but her desires. The way it slowly comes together in one thread shows how much she has repeated that story to herself, how it is one of those recurring dreams that plague you and crawl on you in their reality in in their ability to consume you. Those three paragraphs show how distanced she is from her life, and how much she wishes for something else.