Teresa Podlesney's
The Scapegoat
I see that at the bar is converged a gaggle of Filipina prostitutes wrapped in gorgeous sari-type outfits, tight-fitting, shiny, with their hair long and black and they are loud, speaking a language I don't understand and I am going to wait for my dad and hold his arm as we go through there but then I don't, I realize he can make it through himself he's a big boy. I remember he was in the Navy, and he was in Morocco. As soon as the women see my dad they begin to ululate, which I take in my dream as the kind of come-on sound that prostitutes make, each trying to get the john's attention so each louder than her neighbor, but awake of course I know that ululation is the wailing for the dead.
The pariah still lives in or adjacent to the community that has excluded him. The way he lives, as pariah, is visible to all as a comforting reassurance that they will never be like him. His presence, always outside the walls of the town, makes the people know that the wall exists and is sound.
I have very recently started to fear my mother's death, which means I suppose that I am starting to love her again after so many years. It also means that I still mourn the loss of my father and this time of year will always be that for me. I am drowning in losses both achieved and incipient and strangely I feel that I am in my element. So much nostalgia and melancholy. Yet some aspect of life is missing even in this satiety or is it that lack that educes the sense of fullness from such unlikely residue?
By Teresa Podlesney
I remembered another dream last night, or early this morning as the case may most properly be. Just before the lightning and thunder, or maybe coincident with them. I in fact woke myself out of my dream as I was reciting the Hail Mary, and I was reciting the Hail Mary because they were taking my father's coffin out of the hall to bring it to the cemetery. I had already made it through one strong rendition of the verse, and others were beginning to say it again with me. My cousin Lisa was there, saying it. I was standing. The hall was like a parish hall, probably reminiscent of the hall where we ate sandwiches after Ava's funeral a few weeks back, but it was dark inside, better lighting, although the paper tablecloths were the same.
We were eating snack foods I don't know cookies, bar cookies and such, coffee, probably somebody made dip as somebody always does, while the casket was in the room. Now that is the realm of the untouchable, right, the corpse and the food in the same location. Earlier in this same dream I was driving my mother and perhaps someone else along these crumble-streeted back alleys of a tight city, third-worldian, looking for a café to which I'd been before, couldn't find it, getting frustrated, my mother speaks up nicely from the back Turn Here and she's right. Thanks mom. We go in the back door of what really is a schmancy restaurant, through the bar area, we're meeting a whole bunch of people for a big dinner, my dad's walking behind me and I see that at the bar is converged a gaggle of Filipina prostitutes wrapped in gorgeous sari-type outfits, tight-fitting, shiny, with their hair long and black and they are loud, speaking a language I don't understand and I am going to wait for my dad and hold his arm as we go through there but then I don't, I realize he can make it through himself he's a big boy. I remember he was in the Navy, and he was in Morocco. As soon as the women see my dad they begin to ululate, which I take in my dream as the kind of come-on sound that prostitutes make, each trying to get the john's attention so each louder than her neighbor, but awake of course I know that ululation is the wailing for the dead.
Long after I gave up believing in God I believed in Jesus. As historical figure, as revolutionary, as visionary and as vision. I'd see him on the side of the road. Or at least I did once, in the desert. As locus of the eat-my-cake-and-have-it-too quandary of humankind, at once both sacred and profane, at once mind (or spirit, if you need to) and body, at once holy and lustful. Jesus as representation in Western art practices, then by extension those Westernized practices of colonized peoples, embodies other contradictions too. Look closely at his rounded belly, his modestly-draped state of undress, his sloping shoulders, the wound that never heals: Jesus is the Bearded Woman. Male and female, saviour and victim, alive but dead (let's just say undead), Jesus is truly The One, that figure that makes possible the sublimation of the heterogeneous.
I wrote: I think it’s your protestant upbringing that consigns you to think of your status as that of pariah. If you were catholic, you’d be able to consider your position as that of scapegoat, too a loathsome and reviled figure but one with a sacred function and a constitutive relation to that community from which you are expelled. The pariah simply is the excluded, unable to ever become anything else. There is no act that excludes him, no ceremony of being thrown out of the bar. The status of the pariah is not due to his individual thoughts and deeds but is in fact hereditary. He partakes of a lineage of untouchables and therefore should never take his status, or more materially, his station, personally. And that which is excluded from the community with the pariah, those aspects of human being that are too combustible to be allowed within the borders of the community, are eternal qualities that have been excluded from the community since its beginning.
The scapegoat’s role is invitingly more dynamic. The scapegoat is made, not born. She can be of the best family or the worst. She is chosen for the role, and sometimes the fit is not good, but she is made to fit because that is what the tribal elders have decided and what the elders decide the tribe concedes. Like the pariah, the scapegoat does hazmat work, removing from the tribe those inflammable aspects of being human that could, if left untended, ignite a blaze that would destroy the community. But the scapegoat is an historical figure, meaning that the ideas of toxicity that she is identified with and made to bear out into the wilderness and away from the gates of town change within the community over time, and between communities in space. You could never trust her daughter to do the job she did those years before, unless of course her daughter embodies those aspects of being human that the daughter’s community now abhors.
The pariah still lives in or adjacent to the community that has excluded him. The way he lives, as pariah, is visible to all as a comforting reassurance that they will never be like him. His presence, always outside the walls of the town, makes the people know that the wall exists and is sound. The scapegoat, driven away from town with threats of violence, is not allowed to eke out an existence outside the walls. She has to put some distance between herself and the town. But because they can’t see her, the townsfolk just have to take it on faith that she’s really been excluded. Some worry that they might be next, because you never know who will become a scapegoat. And if travelers come into town with stories about her, living some weird life in the wilds, she may gain notoriety and still retain her threat to the community.
All this by way of trying to understand exile, even if it’s now understood to be self-imposed. I was going to say that we don’t start out not wanting to be part of it all. I was going to say we all want to fit in to the community at some point, share in the life of the community and its celebrations, but after watching Sophie tonight at the birthday party I’m not so sure. Other kids there, her age-ish, with whom she gets along one-on-one, but this evening Sophie was the consummate outsider. I had more interaction with the group than she did. The frenetic physicality engaged in by Scott and Jessie did not engage her, nor did the room full of products where Cody spent all of his time. The toddling girls she tried to push away from the rocking chair she had set up as her vantage point, grabbing toys out of their hands just because. Her main interaction with the other kids was to tell them with stentorian delivery the dangers and consequences of the activities in which they were engaged. It was striking, something that her teachers had told me about at the conference last week but that I hadn’t quite seen in motion. At home with me she is pure ego, sometimes id; in the company of the world she is superego. She lurked in the shadow of the adults for the most part, until food was presented and she became one of the happy feeding horde. She ignored me most of the evening. She is clearly partaking of my legacy, and I’m tempted to think it’s more genetic than socially constructed. But then I’m always tempted to think it’s my fault, really. All of it.
I guess if you find yourself in exile, consistently, begrudging the community but not really interested in (re)joining it, then (in our country at least, in our time, in our economic bracket and with our education) it matters less how you got there than how you plan to live there. You can embrace your outsider status, reveling in the freedoms of the solitary life, or you can seek out others like you, because they exist at the margins and borders of every community everywhere (see: subculture). Conversely, you can try to work your way back in to the community by forcing yourself to participate in its rites, even if they bore or alienate or insult you, until your resistance crumbles and you embrace them (see: Prozac, Xanax etc. See also: marriage and parenthood). Or you can sulk and seethe, I suppose, doing neither. Or buy weapons and learn how to use them.
Part of the desire to travel in a country and culture where you don’t really speak the language or know the customs is to impose an exile on your self. Generally this mini-exile is conceived of as a freeing-up, since the outsider status that you will inhabit there is of course based on the material differences between yourself and the locals (differences in language, dress, stature, retirement plans etc.) and not on the mysterious and ephemeral reasons that you feel exiled from your own community. In another country, it will be okay for you not to respond to the inane prattle of strangers because you won’t understand what they are saying. In another country, you can stare at people because you’re a tourist. In another country, you can sit for hours in a café because you’re on vacation. In another country you can without guilt eat meat or take drugs or pay for sex with strangers because you are attempting to expand your horizons and “experience” another culture.
Have you ever traveled with anyone? I mean like backpacking travel, travel to a foreign land with foreign customs and foreign food where you didn’t really understand what was going on and your travel partner didn’t either only maybe spoke the language a little and had a couple of outdated funky guidebooks written in French? Travel is very trying on a relationship that has been formed elsewhere. The person you thought you were is different under dislocative stress, and the person you thought you knew gets different too, but differently from you, has his own periods of despair or elation according to his own clock. I suppose that these conditions might be ameliorated if the travel was free of certain restraints; namely, the demands of a return ticket, but also the understanding that every thing was going to be different, even the travelers, traveling. Maybe it’s just best to travel alone and make relationships along the way with other travelers whom you don’t constrain to their pre-travel identities, or they you to yours.
I am currently reading 100 Years of Solitude for no better reason than my mother's purchase of the book with a gift certificate she received for her birthday because she heard that the book was recommended by Oprah and she is ready to read something a little more "substantial" than the contemporary novels she usually reads and she told me to take the book because she had to finish another book from the library first and as I had nothing on the docket I did. Not in the original Spanish though. It's exhausting writing because it's so damn filled with detail and joyousness. I have very recently started to fear my mother's death, which means I suppose that I am starting to love her again after so many years. It also means that I still mourn the loss of my father and this time of year will always be that for me. I am drowning in losses both achieved and incipient and strangely I feel that I am in my element. So much nostalgia and melancholy. Yet some aspect of life is missing even in this satiety or is it that lack that educes the sense of fullness from such unlikely residue?