https://www.dukeupress.edu/beautiful-mystery

Josh Reno: I just finished your book a week ago, and I feel like it is still happening to me. It is so good at exploring anxious, uncertain moments before there’s a sense of shared understanding. It could have been called “There was only now” (p 51), which is one of many lines that I loved. The only now has been the subject of intense phenomenological scrutiny, of course, but I feel like you found a way to recreate the “ache of [social] action” again and again with each chapter, to paraphrase Loïc Wacquant. How did you approach this problem of the only now? Would you agree that the only now is hard to capture anthropologically, or perhaps capture at all?

Danilyn Rutherford: I would absolutely agree that the only now is hard to capture anthropologically and maybe at all. That’s a really great question. I think there are three ways to answer it.

One way is through my training as an anthropologist. My dissertation chair was Jim Siegel. I read Derrida before I read any anthropologist other than Clifford Geertz. I had read The Religion of Java while I was living in Java; that was before I came to Cornell. Jim’s work is really difficult to paraphrase or turn into a soundbite. But one of the things that has struck me in Jim’s thinking, particularly in his book Naming the Witch, is the way that social relations begin with an incursion from outside. This was Jim’s way of thinking about the gift. The gift by definition is something you don’t deserve or expect. And yet it sets in motion a response that can, under certain conditions, be the precondition for creating a social relationship with another person. This view is consistent with the Derridean critique of presence. For Jim, following Derrida, the only now could only ever be a shock, a shock that has not yet been domesticated and turned into something that we think we can understand. So there’s that whole line of theoretical stuff that I’ve always found really interesting. As a little kid, I was always asking, “How do things work? Where do they come from?” I’ve always had a tendency to ask these kinds of questions.

But then there is this second factor, something I try to capture in the book, which is the difference between who I was before my husband died and who I am now. I wrote about Craig’s death as a moment when someone with clear expectations about how her life was going to unfold suddenly had those expectations blown out of the water. The story I’d been telling myself about my future was gone. On the one hand, I try to describe the horror and terror of that—and it was a terrible period of life. But other things came out of that experience that have stuck with me. One of them is the realization that you absolutely don’t know what’s going to happen from one second to the next. That realization brings with it a certain grace. You start asking yourself why you’re getting up in the morning. Why are you in this world?  If you can’t be present in this current moment, what’s the point?

Craig’s death transformed the way I thought about teaching. It transformed the way I thought about my relationships with people. I’m a poodle owner. For poodles, there’s the pack, and then there’s the rest of the world. Poodles bark at the rest of the world. I was not really a barker—I’ve always been pretty well behaved. But I definitely had this sense that my Craig and the children were my pack, that they were my source of support. One of the things that happened with Craig’s death was that I embraced the relationships I had always had around me, with students, colleagues, friends, and a lot of other people who really helped me through this difficult time. The desire to be present in current moment came out of this very personal experience, and it put me in a position to be present with Millie and to recognize, and to narrate to myself, the importance of that as part of what it is to be with her in the world.

So there’s the anthropological, and there’s the life experience. And then there’s Millie. “For Millie, there’s only now.” I wrote this, but it’s not totally fair. I think what happens with Millie, as far as I can tell, has to do with how temporality unfolds for her, which involves a level of attunement and awareness that’s far beyond mine. She is very interested in patterns. She has very keen hearing. No one listens to music the way Millie does. In music, the present moment is never completely the present moment. Listening to music involves anticipating what will come next and retaining what’s just happened. Millie loves listening to my partner play the electric guitar. There are particular chord changes that she really loves. They’re a little bit surprising, but they also kind of make sense. That sort of experience is something she totally digs. And if you want to be with her, she will teach you how to dig it too. That kind of only now, for me, has been more than just an antidote to careerism. Careerism pretty much got thrashed out of me by Craig’s death. Being with Millie has helped me think in a deeper way about sensory experiences, experiences of time and space that we spend a lot of time passing over because we’re so narrative in the way we think ourselves and about our lives. I don’t know if that makes any sense.

Joshua Reno: That makes total sense! And I love that response. And you’ve reminded me to go back and dig up Naming the Witch, because I just picked up a volume on Witch Studies that came out this year. I’m enjoying it a lot, and I’d forgotten about the Siegel book. So, thank you.

Danilyn Rutherford: The Siegel book is quite bold, but I think it’s interesting. It’s connected to what in a sense this book is doing. Siegel wants to make the argument that there is something outside of what we call culture. There’s something beyond society that gives rise to society or bursts it apart. As a sociocultural anthropologist, I’m drawn to that kind of bold thinking. Without wanting to be universalizing or impose my answers on anyone, I’m drawn to those kinds of problems.

Joshua Reno: In that response, you’ve talked about knowing things about yourself and also knowing what your tendencies are, knowing what your history is with the thoughts you enjoy thinking and the problems that attract your interest going way back. There is a sense in which, even more than Millie, because you’re the narrator, we’re following you, your experience, and your voice throughout the book. Would you agree that your book has as much to say, therefore, about memory as about disability? I think it does, and that’s because you are digging through decades of your life, and that kind of complicated present of the only now is shown to be more than just what’s immediately available. It is also at work in how the past and future live uncomfortably in each of us. Perhaps most poignant, at least for me, is the dream you had. You don’t say that it was a dream about running into Craig. Actually, the way you put it is that you had a dream about running into a memory of Craig. So there’s a memory of Craig at O’Hare that you had, and you had a dream of that memory. Which is an interesting way of putting it. You get lost in some of these memories. You dwell in them like they’re happening still. The cross country one with all the things you’re imagining could have gone wrong. You’re imagining that everything is terrible, even though things turned out fine. And so then the question is, is that the beautiful mystery? Are you also a beautiful mystery to yourself in the process of writing this book and uncovering these memories? Memories that you re-remembered in the process of writing this book?

Danilyn Rutherford: That’s really a great question. I’m a mystery; not sure how beautiful that one is!  But the short answer is, yes, I think that’s absolutely the case.

I’m going to veer a bit into form and the history of this particular book. When Millie was in early intervention, I had this idea that I wanted to write about Millie. I was fascinated by the whole What to Expect When You’re Expecting phenomenon. I was a reluctant mother. I was not someone who grew up thinking that I wanted to be a mother; I got talked into it. So I was like, “Wow, what? Nothing is happening as I expected!” Then I moved to Santa Cruz, and on a lark I went to a workshop for parents of disabled people with a writing instructor, Laura Davis, who had us do something called “writing practice.” I loved it, and I started taking classes with her. I started generating a lot of material.  In writing practice, you don’t outline or think ahead; you just write as vividly as you can about whatever is closest to your mind.

Then I started taking a feedback class with memoir writers. Memoir writers think a lot about this problem of memory and writing and the unreliability of memory. I think Freud talks about this—just because something didn’t happen doesn’t mean it doesn’t have force. It can be not true, but real. This sense of how memory works through you is something I tried to capture in this book. At the same time, there is this idea of flashbulb memory. When dramatic things happen in your life, those moments get imprinted for you. Maybe they’re constructed; all memory is constructed. But they are recalled vividly once you make yourself write in a way that isn’t experience-distant description but actually gets into the positionality of that character, that past self. Stuff comes back. 

For the whole period around Craig’s death, including that dream, I have very vivid memories, some of which made it into the book, some of which didn’t. Because that’s the other side of the question. Beautiful Mystery is very much constructed. It’s a book, right? I had these writing practice pieces, which were out of my life, but then I also had ethnographic materials. I did a really good job of recording and videotaping interviews. I had transcriptions. Word-for-word transcriptions that I would bring into a chapter. Well, word-per-word transcriptions don’t make for good reading. You know? You have to edit interviews for them to actually make sense. So there’s that play of narration, of what you can recover, and what you can’t.

Then there’s the whole question of Millie’s memory. That was at the front of my mind throughout that entire early period, and kind of still is. The mystery of memory, it’s really something. And also the patchiness of memory. There are people I will never forget, people I hung out with the first time I lived in Indonesia. There are other people, American friends who contact me, and I can’t, for the life of me, put my finger on how we know each other. But I have to believe them when they say we do. It’s always kind of embarrassing. Certain things are really vivid. Certain things are not. There’s also the way the past is present in the present, the future is present in the present, there are all those moments when we’re in other places while we’re operating in the world. That’s absolutely part of my experience, and I imagine it’s part of a lot of people’s experience. I’m glad I capture that, because it is an important aspect of human experience. 

The other thing I’ll say is that I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and what happens when you get older and time really speeds up. How memory works for me now. It’s not at all even. That’s the other thing that’s mysterious about memory. Your experience of time passing is very uneven.  Your experience of the length of an interval is very uneven. Any writer who tries to work from memory is going to discover all of this really quickly.

Joshua Reno: I suspect this book covers the largest time span of any book you’ve written. 

Danilyn Rutherford: Raiding the Land of the Foreigners had the 18^th century in it!  But yes, this was the longest period of research. 

Joshua Reno: The time span of the writer’s ethnographic research experience. 

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