Next from the san antonio public library, home of this years san antonio book festival, hispanic essayist Richard Rodriguez, talks about his memoir darling. Well, good afternoon everyone. Thanks for coming to the san antonio book festival. We welcome all of you. This has been a year in the making, but months in preparation and its been an Incredible Group of volunteers that made this all possible. So thanks for coming and participating. Remember that just after this session, that Richard Rodriguez will be signing copies of darling and any other broughts you brought in the mezzanine level. So he will be there to do that after we finish today. Im john santos, it is an extraordinary honor to be here with two writers who i really regard as mentors, so its an honor to be given an opportunity to just introduce them. Whose work will be known to many of you here from san antonio, theologian, international thinker, international scholar, his works included, life where cultures immediate. The galileian journey, the god of incredible surprises and a dozen other ones you probably know as well. Virgils work has always been an inspiration for many of us in terms of connecting our experiences here in san antonio to a broad theological, maybe even cost moilingal understanding who we are as human beings, and the opportunity to have him here today to engage in a conversation with richard is a privilege for all of us. Indeed, to have Richard Rodriguez here is a great honor. Its really a longawaited. He claims to have visited here quite often, but he has been very selective with who he has visited. So we can judge ourselves lucky to have time with him today. Richs work has been an extraordinary testimony to the complexity of american identity, from the beginning of his career as a writer with hunger only memories, brown, and days obligation, and now darling. Connected an american understanding coming out of a mexicanamerican experience and engaged with a broad historical, literary, philosophical and theological reflection. Challenges us always in his writing and his work to expand the scope of our imagination to expand the send of our understanding. So, its a great honor to introduce Richard Rodriguez. [applause] thank you very much. Im going to i was talking to you in new york after september 11th and he said to me, when i proposed i wanted to write about religion in this very dangerous age. He said that if you write too style issuely about religion the pieos will not read and it if you write too piously about religion, the stylists wont read it. So ive wherein a book that is best stylist and pious. So god help me. After september it struck me i knew almost nothing about islam except some Cartoon Version of islam. Gathered from maybe a british movie, like lawrence of arabia or wherever it came from. And my journey to the middle east was in some ways just to satisfy my own hunger of knowledge. I didnt know who these people were. What their grievance was with us as americans, and so forth. And i think what id learned from living and even worshiping with muslims is that, as a christian, i am i adore a desert god, and they reminded me that these religions of abraham. Judaism, slam, and christianity, arells and god revealed himself to abraham, revealed himself to us, and revealed himself in a landscape of such desolation that we almost do not we do not dare to confront witness las vegas. The city constructed on every sort of evasion of the deserts conclusions. One of the things i wanted to do with this book is i wanted to introduce the people who walked through my soul. So Elvis Presley is in this book, tina turner, st. Theresa, the prophet mohammad is in this book, the famous british athiest who told us all that god is dead, having left england, where god is very much alive. The hindu god and me muslim god came to the United States to tell us god is daughter, and more teresa, in a magazine that gaves interviews to movie stars with no department publish wrote that brother teresa was ugly. So were both in an elevator in new york. He smells of very expensive liquor when he walks into the elevator. We worked on a bbc project together some years earlier but i never forgave him for his treatment of Mother Teresa, how ugly she was, he said in the pages of vanity fair magazine, and on his knees picking up the paper because he pushed the button and all of his papers came to the ground. What do i want to read to you about this going on . I didnted i wanted to read a few pages of this chapter. The central chapter, called darling in this book called darling about my friendship with a woman who is now dead, on the day her divorce was finalized. She and i had lunch in malibu at a cafe a restaurant we used to go to often. I call it the garden of eden of that not the real name but thats the name i give it. One thing that is interesting about our friendship is that as a gay man, almost all of my closest friendships have been with women. And the majority of them have been heterosexual women, and that has been since my 20s. And now im on the eve of my 70th birthday. That friendship is one that preoccupies me, and i know there was somebody watching on cspan who is drifting off and who oh, gay man, religion. This is a book about justifying homosexuality, but its not. Im not interested in justifying myself to religious traditions that reject me. I am more powerfulfully interested in women and women in religion. This book is dedicated to the irish order of nuns that educated me, the sisters of mercy and conclude with Mother Teresa going to heaven. Ive slipped out and told you the conclusion so you dont have to read it. I dont think anybody, except maybe this remarkable new pope, pope francis, is just what is riling women and their denver comfort and dissatisfaction at a point in america where the majority of american women are living without men and the majority of children now are being raised without men because theyve gone somewhere else. So, my lunch with darling. The last three payments of this Chapter Three pages of this chapter, which im proud of. But its a real chapter and i might not be able to make it through the chapter. I write this chapter to darling, the name i always gave her. Though she is dead and has been dead for 12 years when i write this. You were raised catholic. You said you didnt believe. Much anyhow. How one lives ones life is one what believes,ous said. You admitted to downright needing christmas and music. Twice you said you didnt know if you ascented to the notion of god. Notion . Existence, then. You said you believed in mystery. Mystery. You said religion. Any religion you know about was a cult of patriot can i. Many in the bible were better fathers and husbands, you noticed. A friend who sat with you the night one of the worst nights very near the end, recounted to me how troubled you seemed. What a bad person ive been. You said to the friend. To the shadows. To the statutes in the shadows. Wait, are those statues . Turning your face away. What a poor mother. What a poor daughter. No, no, the friend reassured her. Come on. Youre very good mother. Your children loved you. Your children are wonderful. They adore you. Everyone adores you. In the morning, your friends said you opened your eyes, but no one could enter them. You spoke as if from a trance. How wonderful god is. You said. How beautiful it is. I mean, who doesnt love the breast, the throat, the hands, the ring, the laughter, who doesnt love the economy of her ways, her sudden abandonment to joy, the way she can arrange a bed, a sheet, blanket, a pillow, the way she can leave everything better than when she entered. I know plenty of men who can arrange a room but im not talking about taste. Im talking about partly it is the patience for folding material, the patience of square corners, put but partly the carelessness of opening a window and closing a curtain and letting the curtain blow as it will. During world war ii the u. S. Military in its attempt to make men more uniform studied the art of the hospital. The convent. The fem minimum. Men were trained to make up their cots in efficient, spotless, feminine ways, selfless, in other words. Literally selfless, as a grave is selfless. One bed must be exactly like the next. Ensuspecting officers made a metrical fettish of a made bed, a punishment of what should promise ease. Darling, you couldnt wrap a package to save your soul. I watched as you taped together some wrinkleed flowered save remnant of mother reside day, then tied on a wide plaid ribbon. The result was not perfection. It was pretty. Same with your flower arrangements. Plunking a fistful of cut flowers into a vase, any vase, flowers, one would need to study for years to achieve the carelessness of your impulse. An unkempt prettiness followed you wherever you went and i dont understand where crowd came buy it or what it was. Who doesnt love her stockings . You were dead so you missed the plump Jerry Falwell confiding to the gaunt jowled tell eadvantagist patsaturday the islamic attack on america in september 11th was the result not of religious extremism but of divine displeasure with a morally decadent over the United States of america. I believe the paganists and abortionis and feminists and gays and lesbians who trying to make their lifestyle the aclu, i point a finger in your face and say, you helped make this happen. He means us, darling. You and me, and the bar of the garden of eden, pass those long past afternoons. I cannot imagine my free dome as a homosexual man without women in veils, women in red chanel. Women in their mire roars, women saying, honey, bunny, women saying, well see. Women saying, if you lay one hand on that child, i swear to god i will kill you. Women in curlers. Women in high heels. Younger sisters, older sisters, women and girls, without women, without you, darling. [applause] fascinated by your reference to islam. Im always fascinated in studying spanish history how much we owe to islam. How much we forget that islam was the humanizing domination of spain for 800 years. Who has so many things we enjoyed today we dont think about that come from islam. Chess comes from islam. Numbering system. I always tell my finance students how would you finance todays roman numeral inside can you ad xxs and dbm its incredible. We owe it to the muslims. The humanitarian aspect of islam that was so beautiful. And very much part of who we are today in the latino community, because islam was basic to the spanish character. Unfortunately we erased it from our conscious. But ill be interested, richard, just how you see the country of islam. I think islam is part of us. I do, too. Traveling among strangers in cairo, my First Experience of arabic and that kind of crowd, was how much i was hearing spanish. I had the same feeling in africa some years earlier when i was hearing somewhat he lee. I said to an african, do you know much schappish and he said thats arabic. And the same thing i was hearing was in arabic was not spanish but what i carry on my lips in spanish is a remnant of arabic. It is on our tongue. So, there i was in cairo, remembering my mother in sacramento, california, standing at the door as i was about to leave for school, Sacred Heart School and saying, lets hope its not going to rain, and the sale wi will be on at penneys and i can buy your shoes then. It was on my mothers lips the name of allah. I didnt hear it. Right now in this dangerous world, indonesia there are many muslims who do not like the christians habitually using the name of aulai when they refer to god the father. It is now a crime in kuala lumpur when they are not otherwise investigating the disappearance of an airliner, to arrest christians who use the name of allah. In fact it was recently a Catholic Priest who was arrested for such a crime. That is where we have gotten. But when i think of the inherit tenancy, i think it is in mean. I think that there is something you know, the catholic civilization comes to spain and chases in 1492 chases off the moore and the jew. The same year the catholics come to the new world ask theres both the construction of the world and the expansion of the world. But nothing is over in history. We carry now its like a madness. Now i look at a name like alvarez, good, hispanic name like alvarez, and all you have to do is put a little hyphen between al and varez and youre transported. So there we are in 2014. Aware not a of our difference but the fact that arab is in us and on our lips. I think, richard, really what i think was fascinating was that spain was the place of the three cultures, three religions, judaism, christianity, islam, and for 800 years they were mixed in various ways. You say we speak arabic. Many names in san antonio are jewish, and can ben david. Other names. The whole border was called crip jews. And you had to within the lange already is this ferocity. One says, took about islam at this moment, this calamity in the islamic world is sunni and shia are murdering each other, muslims were saying to me a few years ago when i remarked on it that they are that islam is about as old as christianity was when christians when catholics and pros tet stands began to murder each other, and this habit within religions, not really between religions, this destructiveness. This is i think what haunts me about these religion. About religion maybe in general. How the piety of my god, the prayer of my god, becomes the possesssive. My god used against you. And its that habit. On september 11, 2001, those pilots on the boeing 757s were praying as the planes crashed interest the world trade center. Listen to what i just said. The world could end in some horrible way in the future in prayer. There is always within us, within this claim to this intimacy with god, this fierceness about him and his otherness and his difference. That is the sobering truth, and while i think some people might say, you know, this book is a little bit too flaccid on always wanting to see his connection to the other. I think that its important for us at this part in our history to in every way possible recognize our relationship with each other. Even when it means that we sin in common. I think, richard, that thats precisely the point of what i see in the revival of a real return to new testament christianity. It values the other. Goes not see the as an enemy but a potential friend. His holy father has called us pope francis calls it the sacred ground of the other, and not the opposite. And how do we bring about this new synthesis, a core word in pope francis, new people who encounter each other, how do we work to bring about a new synthesis. One thing you do in thinking about these civilizations, you come back to the earth. Religion is always criticized for being other worldly. But in fact as i began to think about these desert religions, how central the ecology of the desert is so their understandings. We live in a time in the secular west when we are using every excuse to avoid place. So we have this technology that we walk down the street with in order not to even know where we are. Or i was watching one day i was caught in a airport watching Oprah Winfrey and bono and they were talking about making the earth greener before they got on their private planes and headed to another place to talk about the eater being greener. I thought, have they looked at the earth lately . The earth is brun most of it and even in places where the earth is grown in the spring and summer, it turns brown in its fulfillment. Theres a chapter on the death of the american newspaper in darling. And some critics wonder why its there. Its because we no longer live in peoria. We no longer live anywhere. All we have to talk about with each other is National Politics and whether were progressives or conservatives. We have lost a sense of place, of the 4h club, the Little League game down the street, the fire across town last week. And so what happens in that chapter, i write an obituary for the american newspaper and writing also an obituary for obituaries. A number of friends of mine, five out of six best friends i had who died recently did not want an obituary in the paper. When they were buried this is the second resolution they were all cremated. Career make has replaced career make has cremation has replaced burial. And undertakers say, cremate nobody ever the wife will say, honey, our closet is filled with these boxes. There are dead people in the basements of our house next to the Christmas Tree ornaments because we dont have any place to put them. A friend of mine, who had been a Catholic Priest, had left the priest hood toward the end of his life. He reconciled to his order and done on his death bed, but before he died he asked two women friend of his to take his ashes and disburse them someplace. I dont know where they took them. The sea shore, under a redwood tree, buried, whatever. It was once a custom in the world for the living to visit the cities of the dead, cemeteries. Well, my friend was taken somewhere but two weeks after his death, one of a student of his called me and said, im so sorry i was not able to attend the funeral. But i would like to pay my respects at the cemetery where he is buried. And i said, well, would like to pay my respect ted cemetery where he is buried but i have no idea where he is. He is gone. And that disconnection from death, i think, is what is most troubling about the otherness of our civilization. Virgil talk about the connection we have in the new testament. The ecology can connects us, too much the class chapter of the book is about the mountain top, Martin Luther king, jr. Goes to mutt top before he dies. The mountain top, the location where man met god. The valley floor. The desert plain where the jews wandered for 40 years. What i called the plain of where we live our lives. And finally the cave. We are people of the cave. Mohammad has his illumination of the cave. Jesus is born in a cave and he is buried in a cave. Moses is put in a cave by god when he walks past so that he will not be blinded. One of the things about these religions is they trust the dark inch desert cultures the noonday sun is blinding. Its when the light descends into twilight that reflection begins, that rest beginsthat insight begins and it seems to me that one of the things we need remember as we think about our connection to each other, is that we share this landscape. We share the earth. At the end of her life, Mother Teresa was haunted by her disconnection from god. She didnt feel any connection to god. She wasnt an athiest. She felt god removed himself. 40 years she thought that. And she described her life in continuously as being in darkness. Chris mocks her, the great athiest, he doesnt under that people who believe go to you seasons of disbelief, unbelief, darkness. She talked about living in a tunnel. The night she days in calcutta, the grid around the convent collapses. The convent goes black. There are two emergency generators at the convent and the nuns bring out a generator and they plug her respirator to the generator. Do you understand . That i think is in some way our connection to a landscape that when jesus leaves the relative greenness of the jordan of nazareth, he goes into the desert. He puts on the desert, they emptiness of the desert. He takes the emptiness on and in some way plato marxist, the people of the cave as confusing the reflections on the wall with reality. We are people of the cave those of us who believe. We believe in the darkness. You no i agree with you but i believe we are living the tension between the three images and we live in attention of the cave where the primal events of the new testament are based in the cave. The enunciation. Mary lives in the home. The resurrection came from a cave. Lazarus, when jesus cause lies or is to come forth he comes from a cave so the cave is coming from the depths of humanity the depths of your rated its its going down to the pit bottom of humanity. But then he goes through the desert desert experience and you mention in your luck the desert is a place of nothingness, absolute nothingness. Its a place of vision. You experience that sense of absolute nothingness but then you have vision. You have vision and that is important. You have to let go because as you are walking in the desert you take off every precept and nothing that you need absolutely as valuable anymore. Jewelry, clothing, everything and its the mechanisms of the desert. Today we climb the mountain and the mountain is a place of vision. Its a place where you can see with clarity. It seems to me in christianity we live a combination of the three and we live in the combination for example, one line in your book that i slightly disagree with, you said that jesus was the colossal failure figure or Something Like that. Yes. No, its true. In a way he was the biggest loser and people witnessed miracles and all this stuff and yet they still cried out crucify him. But then in a way i see him as the greatest winner because he didnt allow all the forces against him to stop loving us. That is where i see the transformation of the cross as a symbol of a curse to manatee to a of glory. I think you have to its a paradox. Within these provisions particularly christianity that the humiliation of god comes within also the most glorious moment of its existence. Im interested in the word desert because when we say a place is deserted we mean that something has left it. And the experience of the desert is so terrifying to us. When i referred to las vegas earlier i think its an extraordinary fantasy that americans have created the desert with golf courses and swimming pools and taken the melancholy of the desert which is that nothing lasts. They have decided that means everything is movable so you can put the eiffel tower next to the pyramids across the street and so forth and now that influence is spreading into the emirates. The desert kingdom of the emirates in dubai for example. I can take you to the ice temple in dubai and we could have a snow fight in dubai. And now it has even moved into makkah. There is in makkah now the Architectural Firm of osama bin ladens father which has had the favor of the saudi royals for many years. They have built in a makkah. They have dealt overlooking the most sacred place in islam a Fairmont Hotel that is built in the shape of big ben. Not even las vegas has come up with a hotel in the shape of big ben and you can look from the penthouse. Underneath the hotel is a Shopping Center with 40,000 shops. Let me ask everyone to prepare questions. We will have open questions and answers but before that i want to ask one question. Im curious you talk about where this book sits in your body for. You you talked about some of the difficulties of posing to your editor on writing a book of religion and so many ideas in this book are implicit on your earlier work but there something unique about the inception of the work in 9 11 and the way you set out on your journey to discover some sort of yourself. How do you see this book in terms of your larger literary project and where does it take you next . I do feel as they get older a number of critics have said you know im not sure that he will be capable of another book like this. It takes a great deal of energy to write a book of this density. Even though its a relatively short but. I dont know whether, in some way i was fighting ghosts for many years. I was fighting mexico about whether i was a of mexico which i dont think so or whether i was hispanic. I dont think so. Charlie once asked whether i was and i said no. Ive never been happy with the designations people have given me. All a new beginning with my first memory was that i was a scholarship olean education separated me from the people i loved. No one was talking about education in those terms. Education was opening the World Everybody said that it separates you. It costs to become educated, to go back from the university to your house and no longer at ease as the nigerian novelist about going back to his village from college. In some light books write you and this book wrote me at a point in which my life im not a possessed with my homosexuality but im obsessed with his fact that there is violence in the world and the pope in his brilliant moment that i think cavalier generosity said you know who am i to criticize marriage or abortion and i think to myself well thats interesting you say that because there are those two links between the woman who controls your body and men getting married. In some way i am more and more preoccupied by women. The women in my life. Increasingly the women are insisting quietly even incumbents that i know, insisting that the guy is feminine as much as masculine. If you say habla that which gives life you also have to acknowledge and in any biology class ive taken the feminine impulse within the life process. It seems to me to account for that complexity of god and this human error of making god a man which i think in some ways is about making him an american. [laughter] just wait until the microphone gets on the video. See hello. In hunger of memory you talk about being a young boy attempting to clean your face and change her skin color. Can you describe that to us . Speak and i do what . Can you describe that experience of that base of your life . It was an experiment. I wanted to know what this was so i took a razor blade. This is a boy. This is a boy about six. My parents were about to start is this and one sister is darker and two siblings or later. I wanted to know what that was and how deep i would have to go to get it and i found i couldnt get it out. It was shocking to me that its true. I dont want to be a role model. I never wanted to be a role model. I dont know what that is. If Virginia Woolf was my role model i would put a rock in my sweater and kill myself. That is not what writers do. They are not role models. People live life intensely and im prepared to tell her the people about that. Its about the honesty and portrayal. He really did that to himself in writing the biography i was separating myself from that boy. You go to hotels in many years later i went to hotels and i was at the hotel in new york. I have an affection for fivestar hotels, dangerous. The man who was helping with me with my luggage said oh have you been on safari he said. This scan is suddenly leisure. In my mothers eyes if i stayed in the sun too much it was a laborer that she saw. Wear a hat. Dont stay in the sun. There was this preoccupation of mexico. This becomes you know, people like this do not go they dont look like this. They dont look like indians by the way either. You ask about mexico someday. I will tell you about mexico and why i hate her as much as she is my mother. Hello mr. Rodriguez. When you were speaking about memories i was reminded to bed of your commencement address at the college a few years back and in that address you celebrate in a way the risk that writers take in their younger years, how they exude forms of brilliance that supersede whatever they come up with later in life. And i was curious about how you might see that concept within your own career, what do you maybe andy in the younger mr. Rodriguez and what you happy that you left behind . I do envy that. I envy a certain kind of bravery or carelessness. But curiously as you get older because you get really older like me you get careless too. I just dont care. I was coming here and i was thinking oh how can i even talk about any of this and the fire would come down. I thought you know you are too old to worry about that. You are just too old. Im able to go to places and do things with people now that even maybe when i was your age i wouldnt have done. The sisters of mercy the irish order of the educator you step a slogan which ended up in the Richard Burton movie curiously enough and ava gardner says it. He embarrassed by nothing. I have seen so much in my life. Theres nothing you can tell me that will shock me. Of course her priests notice is too. All the confessions over the years. This book is more daring in literary terms and in formal terms the way you combine elements of imagination and dream. Its speaks exactly to this question. One of the things that is charming and maddening about the old man as you can follow what he is saying. Hes talking about kansas in 1922 and then he sort of forgets venue somewhere else talking about his exwife that he divorced in 1962 and you are sitting there bewildered. I found that the essay is the old man chakra. In his retirement he writes essays. He is able to everything is able to be part of the essay because the connection people are making in their thinking process no longer is logical that is almost biological. Did i tell you the one about las vegas and about this hotel in dubai or this hotel in mecca . Yeah is a hotel in mecca built in the shape of big ben and theyll say not that again but thats the business of essays is to make all of that possible. There is a wonderful writer, a great, great, great essayist symbol a german writer who lived in england and wrote a book which i think is one of the great hooks of the last century. It is madness and you that it go and you go with him or you say im not going there. I cant go with you. I cant swim with that current. If you trust your brain and what your brain is doing now, thats an essay already that is forming the way that your brain jumps and moves and the a whale the sparsely wanders into a chapter with Mother Teresa and Caesar Chavez and Saint Augustine and there is Martin Luther king jr. Giving a speech at the lincoln memorial. My halia jackson is saying tell me about the dream, tell them about the dream. Everything pertains because you realize it is all part of the life that created you. Trusted, trusted
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