A retriever retrieves. In fact, he’s not fully comfortable without something in his mouth, and bigger is better. Although it’s easy to wonder “what are you thinking?” as he calms his stress with a mouthful of stuffed toy (called his baby), his lack of a complete cerebral cortex tells me whatever his “thoughts,” they’re not “I am a retriever.”
The act of defining oneself is decisively human.
He has a pedigree. It’s a sideways tree and he is the final limb. A glance can determine if he is the son, grandson and generational descendant of champions or performance masters. The number of breed-championships behind him might cause him to conclude “I’m a beautiful representation of my breed.” Or a retriever with no hunting-titled antecedents should wonder “Am I a retriever?” Again, without that cerebral cortex, he probably isn’t even wondering “when is my next opportunity to be the retriever that I am?” He has never read, asked about, or worried over his pedigree and wouldn’t recognize his mother. His life unadorned by the need for identity.
I have a pedigree too. Mine has blanks.
What am I looking for?
It began as a gift for my father, to make a basic family tree, and it started with a simple problem: he didn’t remember his grandmother’s name. She had died before he was born.
No, maybe it originated before that: when my mother gave me a xerox of the ancestry project researched by one of her cousins, whose venture was a quest to prove a relationship with the Earl of Mar. So my mother’s maternal ancestry was already well-developed, complete with a heady story involving the Earl’s bastard son facing accusations of treason in England and escaping to the New World before the Revolution, followed by generations of sea-faring or Civil War exploits, Maine lighthouse-keepers and the expected involvement in lighthouse legends like a baby thrown from a sinking vessel who washed ashore between two featherbeds to be adopted by the Marr lightkeeper on shore who’d built a bonfire of hope for those going down into the tumultuous sea. Researching, fitting legends into known history, imagining combined possibilities were fodder for a novel, Waterbaby.
In the novel, the ancestry-quest was complicated by a character’s desire to find the source of her own epilepsy (and lifelong self-determined identity as “disabled”) not even being aware her older brother was diagnosed with schizophrenia in his early 20s. The character learns, as an aside, that her father died of an epileptic seizure, and thus what she was seeking was on the other side of her family tree.
Schizophrenia made no appearance in the novel’s imagined story of lighthouse lore, perhaps because I already knew it was in my father’s family — the broken tree that couldn’t even name my great-grandmother, while my maternal/great-maternal tree went into the 1700s, births, deaths, lives, legends … a playground for living vicariously in history.
Maybe I perceived my father wanted to see the same grand lineage done for his family. And so I embarked, via computer which my mother’s cousin couldn’t have used. Similarly I discovered research already done — on my father’s maternal side. Again, via a cousin … this one had married into the Mormon Church, so on the ancestry site run by the Latter Day Saints, the immigrant Caprigliones stretched back into Italy to the 1840s before Italian databases gave out.
The Mazzas, a more common Italian surname, were still the stunted part of my tree, but I persisted until my first modest quest was reached: my great-grandmother listed on a ship manifest with her husband and children, misspelled but not in immigration-lore manner where a gate-keeper at Ellis Island gives the family a new name. Simply an error in a handwritten entry on the manifest when the scribe heard Marza instead of Mazza.
The error was discoverable partially due to the particular list of children’s names fitting my father’s list of aunts and uncles — except my father wasn’t aware that all three of his aunts had the first name Maria. Their middle names fit the information he’d given me, and matched the steadily-becoming-Americanized versions on subsequent census documents. But the ship’s records also had a typed list of “aliens held for medical clearance,” which included all the Mazzas, with the same first-and-middle names. The fact that my father’s grandmother was listed with the surname Mazza did not cause a question. She was married. The ship would list her that way. So although in the practice of genealogy women are listed with their original surnames, Fortunata Mazza went into my tree with her husband’s name. I didn’t find record of her death after arriving in New York in 1910 and I left genealogy research for a few years.
What called me back was an inquiry from someone who shared my surname and was researching her genealogy. She had come across my incomplete tree. What allowed her inquiry to return me into the obsession was the ever-present need to escape daily reality, which had made me a novelist in the first place and had become more poignant after 2016.
My new genealogy-partner proved more skilled than me at cross-checking other sources, including her willingness to call and contact individuals for verbal evidence. With her help, we discovered not only had my father not known (or failed to remember) the existence of his oldest paternal uncle (who’d immigrated in advance, thus was not on the ship manifest), but also that two of his aunts had married the same first-cousin (one aunt died young thus the 2nd marriage); and that my father’s grandmother didn’t need a maiden name on the genealogy because she was already a Mazza as well.
We’ve not yet determined exactly how my great-grandmother was related to her husband, and my Mazza-partner in research has not yet found the connective tissue between her tree and mine.
None of which answers what I might be looking for, other than the next target, the next important birth or death date, and on to the next generation. Narrowly focused attention that has possibly kept my cuticles from being bloodied by my teeth. No longer doing it for my father who’d passed away after my first venture when I found the “three Marias” and his grandmother’s evocative name — none of it had elicited the exclamation of thrill/appreciation I’d craved. But I was now making discoveries the rest of my family, at the twig ends of the growing tree, might appreciate. Except I’ve decided not to share … yet.
Certain of my family members, fully aware of our Aunt Marie, her entire life spent in a mental hospital, actually crave [self-]diagnosis of mental illness, using these serious afflictions (if actually diagnosed by a reputable psychiatrist who seeks to do more than collect insurance payments) to justify rude or selfish behavior, to allow them to take their dogs everywhere, to explain (and get drugs for) the pressure and fear that are a natural part of life in this explosive century (or human life in general), and even to excuse failures and disappointments among deceased ancestors — pursuing a diagnosis for him to explain why we were afraid of our grandfather.
There is no way I’m going to add fuel to those embers by exposing multiple first-cousin marriages (some of which don’t even touch our exact bloodline).
What, besides the misuse of service animals, (or minimizing our aunt’s unadulterated life experience) does it hurt to play along with their desire to be diagnosed?
Besides the homogenization and attenuation of the severe actualities of mental illness, it’s part of pervasive victim-culture, which is part of a larger cultural jostling: let-me-be-considered-unique-by-joining-this-mass-chorus, a fad-desire to be special and distinctive by joining styles of language, dress, and (mostly) identity until there’s not a thing special or exceptional about it.
In funny photos of dogs being shamed with signs for their naughtiness — eating their own poop, ripping a whole room to shreds, secretly stealing their pack-mate’s food until found-out by obesity — the charges range from anti-social, deranged, narcissistic … to abused, anxious, traumatized … but truly, none of these diagnoses are included in the identity of canine. In a pack, one stands out by surviving. One fits in by … surviving. The reward for standing-out or fitting in: Surviving. Is that what’s going on in Social Media?
Besides the number of people not only willing, but in a damn rush to post news about doctor visits, diagnoses, hospital stays, often with photos during the medical event — and we can only presume their motives circle various forms of sought-after attention, from sympathy to congratulations and more complex forms in between — I’ve also observed:
When I read this kind of sharing, I can’t help but ponder my cousin’s “episode” in his 30s, in the 1970s, the only specific I was privy to: that he’d piled all his belongings outside his house and was, currently, in a hospital.
But I remember the milieu of the week my aunt stayed with us in the 70s; her face drawn and pale, so unlike her usual flamboyancy, after her daily hospital visit to her son; the tacit worry she and my father must have shared based on their own sister having been committed permanently to a state mental hospital in the 1930s when she was 12 for bizarre behavior that blossomed into paranoid-schizophrenia (and flashforward: culminated in her becoming comatose within a frozen snarled body for years before she died); her [probable] lobotomy and sterilization surgeries, and no one was seeking Aristotle’s mark of “superiority” for artists and intellects.
Now (retired and caring for his mother), my cousin did “do his work.” And what he did — milling custom doors, as well as his virtuosity at lathe-turning wooden vases, as well as his love of fishing — became his identity, without a footnote of his diagnosis.
Writer, dog trainer, professor, gardiner, novelist …
I once had a landlady who was a Realtor. But it always amused/annoyed me when she would say I’m a cabinet maker, and I’m an organic gardener. She did those as hobbies. I don’t think she even made cabinets for the crummy little house she was renting to me. Those are real professions, requiring training, practice, knowledge, and I didn’t think a hobbyist should usurp the identity. Consider photographer. We all have cameras, we even had cameras before smartphones.
But we weren’t photographers unless we strived for our own gallery exhibits or were hired by a newspaper or portrait studio or other professional venues that need images. How often at post-literary-event gatherings, will a guest (with —ER, —ORs, or —IST of doctor, therapist, or banker) say to the author, “I plan to write a book,” or “I’m writing a book,” or even “I’m a writer too”? Once I grumbled to a photographer, “everybody’s going to write a book ‘in their spare time.’ That’s when I’m planning to do brain surgery,” he said, “How d’you think it feels to have a Fotomat on every corner?” This “feeling” has, of course, mutated to vaster dimensions, as newspapers eliminate photographers in favor of reporters-with-smartphones … and the images included with this document have no by-lines.
I was even uncomfortable referring to myself as a writer until after my first two books, collections of stories, and wouldn’t use novelist until two of those were on a bookshelf. Perhaps it was more comforting for those words to always be in the future: I’m becoming a writer. I plan to be a novelist, still well aware of the —ER and —IST I’d failed to earn: secondary-teachER and journalIST.
Even though I helped create a few anthologies, I do not merit the identity of editor. But back in the nineties, when I edited, the introduction I wrote for an anthology of “alternative” fiction by women suggested: Theme possibilities [for an anthology] could be limitless. However, perhaps with the growth of publicity-via-confessional, on talk shows, tabloid news and other media … a prevailing type of theme anthology is a victim theme. I noted this trend was a sales ploy: Identify a group whose members could have personal interest in the book’s theme, and you’ve found potential buyers. I argued that a publisher of non-mainstream fiction producing a book of “alternative” writing should not follow a commercial marketing-gimmick, thus in furtherance of the “alternative” nature of the book, the theme would be “No Victims.”
Another of my justifications for this theme had to do with what constituted “drama” in fiction. I had become aware, by reading 400+ submissions for a previous anthology, that an uber-majority of fiction by women used victimization for dramatic-action. I surface-speculated (i.e. without research) that this trend was not only born of the attention celebrities were gaining with confessions of abusive parents, drug addiction, etc., but that a troubled publishing industry was pushing writers to continue to use what was already proving to be successful. How about, I wrote, just for this book, instead of a fiction’s drama beginning and developing because of something that — through fate or a fucked-up society — randomly happens to someone, let’s consider “fiction by and about women where the movement or tension or intensity stems primarily from who the character is, what she wants, and what she decides or does.”
My mini-movement failed to attract attention onto the swelling victim-culture; instead these anthologies actually incited another fad called “Chick-Lit,” taken from the anthologies’ titles and co-opted into something even more commercial than victim-fiction: urban-working-girls-looking-for-love-weightloss-and-fashion. And the victim-culture I’d almost idly noticed with some frustration in the mid-nineties (and forgot with the onslaught of the chick-lit that stole the title and so drastically changed the mission) has now grown to such fanatical proportions it’s like spoofy TV-spy shows with walls of a room gradually closing in to squish us.
Was the advent, or onslaught, of victim-fiction, overall, a bad thing? No, having the formerly silent start to speak out could never be undesirable, even though the rise of the memoir soon overtook fiction’s dwindling ability to tackle — with any real results — society’s afflictions and injustices. At first, I thought victim-fiction’s negative impact was only in the limiting of possibilities for what could be considered dramatic-action (i.e. a good plot) for women characters, continuing the representation of female-lack-of-agency. But, as memoir took over and fiction has had to emulate it to stay relevant (or even alive), something else happened: victimhood became “status,” victimhood became evidence that the writer was truly an artist, victimhood signaled attention-worthiness for a writer’s work. And, as well, the varieties of what one could claim as their victimhood-identity increased (or splintered).
It’s difficult to understand how or why a person would want an identity — the essence of who one is — based on an unintentional event, episode or experience, congenital accident, or chromosomal outcome. We can call the perpetrator in a rape “a rapist,” because the perpetrator has chosen to act; the act comes from what he or she chooses to do based on who he or she is or has become, so it is an identity. But does the casualty want a permanent identity based on being a victim? To always be known as “the raped”? (Or “The sick,” “The abused,” “the discriminated-against” etc.)? Those identities aren’t what these people do, believe, strive for, achieve, or accomplish. That’s an identity.
My second memoir, Something Wrong With Her — seemingly titled for a victim identity — revealed my lifetime sexual dysfunction, for which I honestly tried to find my own complicity, since there weren’t societally-recognized victim-signposts to explain why I’d had no normal “sexualization,” why I was terrified of sex and resisted despite knowing I was “supposed to like it.” During post-publication interviews, someone brought up asexuality, which I had not considered or pondered while writing the book. Then an independent filmmaker selected the book to be the basis for a film project, one that would not “reenact” the book, but be a sequel to the book. A fictional sequel to a memoir. Naturally the “background” of the film’s story would be the memoir, i.e. nonfiction, and that material was included through filmed monologues, sometimes in voice-over, but also docudrama-style: my talking head, half-shadowed, appearing in the film. The film’s story was the fiction, with me as the actor (another —OR identity I would never claim). In that story, the “character” of me is introduced to asexuality in a fictionalized context. But it’s part of the story, not all of it. The rest of the film was not a “learn to enjoy life by accepting my asexuality” story. The realities of making a (very) low budget film required that most plot elements — committed to film before fully understanding what the real story was (a beneficial process afforded me in writing but not, I learned, in filmmaking) — would have to remain in the film and “worked into” whatever story I was discovering. Simply, the story therefore didn’t conform to a “my misunderstood identity and how I’ve come to embrace it” plot formula. The film’s producer/director decided he would try to promote the film by sending it to leaders of a national asexual-advocacy group, get their endorsement and thereby find an identified group who would be interested in the film, would include it in blogs, would recommend it on group social media, etc. He told me it would help if I researched and joined groups of this sort and started contributing, and from there [self]-promote the film. I didn’t exactly agree to do this.
But I also didn’t rail against it as a form of “I
Words that negate can be inaudible and invisible.
Naturally (= by nature) there’s no “I am not normal” in canine ‘thoughts’ (= sensory perception synapses), despite his damaging anxiety over guarding his resources (= food, babies and bones). His normal is … his life. If he eats a hole in his leg, that’s just what life is. If he has to be dressed in contrived clothing to let those spots heal … that also becomes his life; he can still hunt squirrels out the window.
But if I say “There’s no squirrel!” he hears there’s [= excitement; likewise where’s, to him the same word] and squirrel [= any small animal]. “It’s not suppertime” only means “suppertime!” Dog commands need to be actions, not the absence of actions. A command for “don’t run in the house” would be “down” or “settle,” a different behavior, not the removal of one.
In 1988, Oldsmobile, facing a dire sales slide, changed their advertising slogan to “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile.” Disaster. Perhaps the beginning of the end of Oldsmobile. We only heard “Your Father’s Oldsmobile.”
Lately, among Boomers and GenX alike, the joke is “I’m becoming my parents.” The meaning not a commendation but I’m thinking and behaving in ways I used to disparage in them. From assuming what we ate for dinner is news, to publicly sharing ailments and medications.
Our parents’ character qualities, their actual identities, are (probably) not genetic. And even traits one might assume by osmosis, may be minimized by our conscious attempts to avoid “becoming our parents.” Whatever the reason, I am not (or can’t be) her:
A joyful person, delighting in children, friends, family-events, travel, food, games and athletics, camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, canning jams, crocheting bedspreads, bridge parties, watercolor classes ... a typical, even cliché obituary. Somehow forgotten when obituary-writing landed on my desk: that she hitchhiked with a girl buddy in the 1940s to go skiing, that she majored in phys-ed at an all-female college in 1944 with no means of turning her education into a MRS degree, that she protested her college’s policy of housing the two African American students separately. But, yes, her edge softened: She stopped protesting civil rights. She “studied” art, but it was night school for seniors. She wanted her watercolor landscapes to be realistic. This one was a reject.
Despite an English degree in middle-age, her preferred reading was serial sagas and mysteries until comprehending just a page might take a half hour. Her TV watching — mostly Who Wants to Be a Millionaire — ended when she could no longer understand the questions. But she would not claim brain-damaged as her identity. She would not refer to herself as a stroke-victim. It had happened by no act of her beliefs, interests, pursuits or talents. Yet, contrary to my views about the range of dramatic action available to female characters besides victimhood, I was unable to contemplate much about her in writing because I couldn’t find a conflict to shape a story. Until her stroke.
His mother is a real bitch, one whose someday-obituary will glow with her status as the highest-ranked national-champion in her performance events. Without that cerebral cortex, he can’t write a memoir searching for whoever victimized him into being unlikely to reach the bar set by his dam. But if he could understand, would I tell him …? About his first owner, who had aspirations to shape his instinctive drive into an equally high-performing champion but who made monstrous mistakes, teaching him that the world wasn’t as he assumed, even that he shouldn’t have the dog-identity he was born with. A burning e-collar told him proximity to humans — especially those who were cooing and encouraging him to visit them — was hot. Told him anyone approaching his crate lair was hot. Told him even his alpha-partner (now me) reaching to touch him was hot. Over two years later, while his original golden-retriever joy in working with a human partner is intact, while his devotion to me is fanatical, his innate desire to be approved-of and fawned-over by other people is still a snarl of conflict. His response to the proximity of unwanted attention, after a round of approach-and-retreat, is to gather a stuffed “baby” in his forearms and “nurse,” although it’s more a pulsating grind.
Occasionally he might also leave a spatter of urine in his wake. Then he moved on to licking and chewing his skin on one foot until “pants” were required to facilitate healing of the repeatedly re-opened wound. Stress may have been increased when I began bringing him to training facilities where other dogs or people might dare to look at him (or his toy or his food-reward, the anguish of resource-guarding combined with his fear). His means of expressing this to me, besides continually re-opening the raw meat on his leg, is to growl. Not at me. Sometimes, when another dog or person enters his very large personal-space, his growl is something I can only feel while he’s standing up against me, front legs encircling my waist, pressing his face under my arm, hiding his eyes.
I conceded my quest to prove that consistent fair treatment would return him to a stable canine identity. His doctor prescribed Amitriptyline for canine OCD.
“Yes, I understand: anxiety and depression: we all have it. We’re all on drugs for it. We still have to do our work.”
Cris Mazza's new novel, Yet to Come, is from BlazeVox Books. Mazza has eighteen other titles of fiction and literary nonfiction, including Something Wrong With Her, a real-time memoir; her first novel How to Leave a Country, which won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction; and the critically acclaimed Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She is a native of Southern California and is a professor in and director of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
