As The Way Opens

Transient Blue Dreams: Recent Readings

2011-11-24T15:16:00.001-05:00

Work and the news can surely drag you down into places best not visited around the holidays, so I thought I would look at a few books I have had the pleasure of reading lately. There is no unifying element in any of these books, one is poetry, one memoir, one novel and one book of short stories. In all the writing is the kind of stuff that makes you think, makes you stop and wonder and gives you a sense of appreciation at the beauty others can bring into your life at any given moment.

The Star Factory (Arcade, 1997) by the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson is not easy to describe. Using his memory as a form of cartography, Carson travels round the different eras of the city of Belfast in Northern Ireland. He wanders in and out of time periods, from the time of the making of the Titanic (it was built in Belfast) to the current time in which he is writing the book. In his elegiac tone, the tone of memory, Carson presents the life of a city, past and present. He gives its history in both the local, individual sense and the larger, worldly-political sense. Yet at no time does he become political, for this is the stuff of memory. As Carson says:

"Over and over, though we flit incessantly into the moment, our pasts catch up with us, and apprehend us at the endless intersections, where fingerposts are unreliable, and mileages are tilted. I realize, now, that I've travelled back from the secondary to primary school by the arbitrary short-cut of synapse, down one worm-hole of the riddled memory, which stores everything we've ever known, and more, if we could only find the portals to its vast, inconsequential realms, where the laws of time and space work in reverse."

This passage reminds me of Italo Calvino's magical book Invisible Cities. But Carson's city is far from invisible. It exists before you, almost like artifacts in a museum brought very much to life, in the rendering Carson makes of it through his poetic voice.

The next book I would like to discuss is the book of short stories The View From The Seventh Layer (Pantheon, 2008) by Kevin Brockmeier. It would be easy, upon first glance at the plot of some of these stories, to call the writer playful and whimsical. But that would be shortchanging a very gifted and even brilliant writer. There is a fierce quality that turns anything whimsical into the stuff of beauty and sadness, of the sublime, of the deeper places in the heart. These stories exist in very real worlds but step, often, into the world of magical realism. In A Fable With Slips of White Paper Spilling From the Pockets a man buys God's overcoat and finds little slips of white paper written with short notes such as "Please help me figure out what to do with Albert" or "Don't let my nerves get the better of me this afternoon." As he finds more he realizes that these are prayers. What he chooses to do reminds me, in some ways, of that wonderful French film of several years ago, Amelie. It also reminds me how close each of us can be to someone else's sorrow or pain and not always be aware of it. In the title story the character Olivia is a quiet young woman who seems to exist in the intelligence of her own shy world. Her views of the nature of people, based on what they read, are among the most enjoyable aspects of this story. "The people who read Charles Bukowski believe that the only clear vision is a disfiguring one" or "People who read D.H. Lawrence suspect that the forbidden is not necessarily without its virtue, and so are easily persuaded that the forbidden and the virtuous are one and the same." It is easy to get distracted by stories such as The Lady with the Pet Tribble, in which Brockmeier reimagines Anton Chekhov's The Lady with the Dog as a love story set in the world of Star Trek. The story is more than a trick, managing, equally well, humor and pathos. For me, however, the strength lies in the power of stories such as the title story of the collection and stories such as The Lives of Philosophers, Home Videos, The Human Soul as a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story or The Air is Full of Little Holes. These are stories about moments of grace, of the simple humor to be found in odd moments, about the true moments we sometimes miss through inattention and sometimes discover through the accidents of life. To describe the stories themselves too much is to take away from the reader's own discovery of a marvelous writer.

Howard Norman has been writing novels, mostly set in the Canadian Maritime Provinces, for the last 20 or so years. His most famous novel, The Bird Artist, was nominated for a National Book Award. Norman's novels often have a narrator who is retelling some incredible or important event in their life. They often have the simple kind of dialect of the kind of working-class families they represent. In What Is Left The Daughter (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2010) his main character is Wyatt Hillyer, a young sled builder whose parents committed suicide by jumping off the same bridge at separate hours during the day. This kind of almost beyond belief situation is a sort-of trademark of Norman's, as is the jobs often held by his characters, such as "professional mourners" or, as in The Haunting of L., a photographer of crash scenes. Yet, what Norman does so well, in all his writing, is give voice to characters who often go voiceless in our society. Wyatt is a stoic, taciturn man, not given to moments of passionate expression. Yet, when the moment of emotional truth arrives and Wyatt has his epiphany of self-revelation, it carries a powerful charge to the reader, made all the more powerful by Wyatt's reserved and quiet narration. There is much humor in What Is Left The Daughter but it is a wry, almost caustic sense of humor. There are may moments of real beauty throughout the book. "It was as if a fleeting chance was presented to us by mute angels--to reference a hymn--who couldn't later report us to God if they'd wanted to." I 've never been disappointed by a novel by Howard Norman and What Is Left The Daughter is equal in that regard.

As with so many of the poets I extol on these pages, the poetry of Charles Wright is filled with moments of pure zen. Bye-and-Bye, Selected Late Poems (FSG, 2011) is a collection of his last four books: A Short History of the Shadow, Buffalo Yoga, Littlefoot, and Sestets. A good poet mines the moments of revelation, seeking in the most simple, the sublime. Wright does this so well that I found myself, as I often do with poets I like, sticking the pages with torn pieces of yellow post-its, little landmarks for favored passages. As he says in the opening poem, Looking Around:

Thus do we slide into our disbelief
and disaffection,
Caught in the weeds and understory of our own lives,
Bad weather, bad dreams.
Proper attention is our refuge now, our perch, and our praise.

So? So. The moon has its rain-ring auraed around it--
The more we think we understand, the less we see,
Back yard becoming an obelisk
Of darkness into the sky,
no hieroglyphs, no words to the wise.

Or this from Body and Soul:

Walk as though you'd been given one brown eye and one blue,
Think as though you thought best with somebody else's brain,
Write as though you had in hand the last pencil on earth,
Pray as though you were praying with someone else's soul.

He speaks to the ineffable and, yet, finds a way to make this understood or appreciated. He touches on many of the great Chinese poets, such as Wang Wei and Cold Mountain, and Zen poets like Miyazawa Kenji. Such as these passages from Buffalo Yoga Coda I:

That which we leave unspoken is like the hail from last night's storm
Still clustered and white
in the shadowy tall grass, as yet unreached by the sun.
Like unuttered words, they disappear
One by one in the light,
crystal and golden for an instant, then nothing at all.
__________

I think I'll lie down just here for a while,
the sun on my cheek,
The wind like grass stems across my face,
And listen to what the world says,
the luminous, transubstantiated world.
That holds me like nothing in its look.

Compare this to Kenji:

At the very end of the blue sky,
above the atmospheric strata where even the hydrogen is too thin,
there lives a group of eternal, transparent living things
who'd find it too cloying
to think even such thoughts as:
"I am the entirety of this world.
The world is the shadow of a transient, blue dream."

If you love the poetry of the introspective heart and mind, then Wright is for you. Did I say there was no unifying element in these books? Well, I stand corrected for in each of these writers you find examples of Kenji's world, the shadow of a transient, blue dream. The shadow of memory and dream, of sorrow and pain, of life as we live it.

Occupy! It Takes a Lot of Joes to Make a Sound You Can Hear!

2011-10-14T22:42:00.002-04:00

The Occupy Wall Street movement is continuing to gain steam, making it seem more than just some small incident that will just go away (in the hopes of conservatives and businessmen everywhere). On October 15th there will be a planned world event, according to 15th October: United for Global Change. It is about time, is my thinking. As a teacher I have been watching as the moneyed, corporate interests have co-opted education and have tried to turn it into their pet Frankenstein project. Occupy Wall Street is a sign that there is still a sense of what our democracy should be and can be, given half a chance. The thing to keep in mind is that if you are not one of the 1% who possess the majority of the wealth in our country, than you are one of the 99% - regardless of your own financial worth. I have seen some statements made by people who feel they are not part of the 99%, that they are working their way towards the 1%. Good luck, but what if you don't make it? Where will you be then? I have always felt that one of the biggest obstacles to reforming our political system, and getting it back into the hands of the people, has been, not just money, but the hope hat so many have that one day they, too, will be among the 1%. In this hope so many will often vote against their own self-interest, in the hope of an interest they may never get to see.

This brings me to a post I made about 2 years ago this time on my Conducting the Inner Light blog. I simply posted the words to the song Joe Worker by Mark Blitzstein. If you can find the version sung by Audra McDonald, I recommend it. McDonald conveys not just the power of the song but the urgency of the words. Her version, used in the film The Cradle Will Rock (a rather unsatisfactory effort directed by Tim Robbins), is the best I've yet heard. The words have never been so apt. Here they are:

Joe Worker from The Cradle Will Rock by Mark Blitzstein

Listen, Here's a story.
Not much fun and not much glory;
Low-class, low-down,
the thing you never care to see until there is a showdown.
Here it is. I'll make it snappy.
Are you ready? Everybody Happy?
Joe Worker gets gypped. For no good reason, just gypped.
From the start, until the finish comes,
They feed him from the garbage cans, They breed him in the slums.
Joe Worker will go
To shops where stuff is on show,
He'll look at the meat, He'll look at the bread
and too little to eat sort of goes to the head.
One big question inside me cries:
How many fakers, peace undertakers, paid strike-breakers,
How many toiling, ailing, dying, piled up bodies,
BROTHER DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE YOU WISE?

Joe Worker just drops.
Right at his workin' he drops.
Weary, weary, tired to the core,
And then if he drops out of sight,
there's always plenty more.
Joe Worker must know that somebody's got him in tow,
But what is the good for one to be clear?
O, it takes a lot of Joes to make a sound you can hear!
One big question inside me cries:
How many frame-ups, how many shakedowns, lockouts, sell-outs,
How many times machine guns tell the same old story, Brother,
does it take to make you wise?

The other day the philosopher Slavoj Zizek spoke to the Occupy Wall Street protesters. He said:

They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

I have included the link from the Occupy Wall Street.org sight below.

It takes a lot of Joes to make a sound you can hear! Occupy!!

http://occupywallst.org/article/today-liberty-plaza-had-visit-slavoj-zizek/

Yours is the Heart That Saved Me

2011-10-01T14:02:00.001-04:00

Yours is the Heart That Saved Me

There have been times when I have not said enough,
or barely have said anything,
where the room seems filled with the silence of us
where my words are not anything but sounds
where the sounds are not anything but the weight of the unsaid
and the unsaid lives within the tips of our fingers
in such moments I know only this:
yours is the heart that saved me.

We live in the world of our making
each step, each action, a piece of the work
that becomes who we are, both sacred and profane,
some of this is accidental, some not so much
all of it the architecture of our souls.
We are deluded, sometimes, in our will and strength,
into believing we control so much,
when truth be told we are as helpless as children
and yet the true power we posses we often deny
such as love, such as love, such as love,
yours is the heart that saved me.

There is always the knowledge of what lay behind us
of other gray days, other sunlight, other bitter cold or humid warmth,
of other hours in dreams and harsh reality,
in reality and harsh dreams.
This knowledge exists like roads traveled
of landmarks passed,
it leads us to our present place where
yours is the heart that saved me.

I have lived in the knowledge of what I am not,
of my many failures, my almost dids, my whatifs.
I have born the weight of unfulfilled ambition
and the hurt of love both denied and requited.
I have been fooled by the promise of what seemed to be,
of what never really was and by what was really so.
I understand better this weight in my soul,
because of you, because of you, because of you.
No matter the hearts I've encountered in life,
yours is the heart that saved me.

Free Ai Weiwei!

2011-09-25T23:45:00.001-04:00

"...in the digital age virtual reality is part of reality, and it becomes more and more influential in our daily lives. Think about how many people use or are addicted to it. And of course all activities or artworks should be social. Even in the medieval age they all carried this message of a social and politically strong mind. From the Renaissance to the best of contemporary art, it's about, as you said, the manifestos and our individuality. Especially today I think it's unavoidable to be social and political. So in that sense I think Beuys made a very good example to initiate his pupils. I know very little about Beuys because I studied in the United States, but Warhol did it in his own ways: his factory, his announcements about 'popism', about portraits, about production, the interviews he did -- nothing could be more social than that, I think." Ai Weiwei in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Sunflower Seeds Installation, Tate Gallery

Ai Weiwei is probably China's most famous artist known for highly interesting and innovating art, as well as a dedication to activism against what he sees as the wrongs of the Chinese government. While a lot of his fame rests on his work as a consultant for the Beijing National Stadium (known as The Bird's Nest) for the 2008 Olympics, it is a fame Ai would rather not be associated with, having called the stadium a "pretend smile of bad taste". When the 2008 Olympics were taking place Ai, along with many others, tried to bring attention to the abuses committed by China, both at home and by their international policies. Yet, to me, nothing seems to highlight their abuse of human rights more than the fact that they have repeatedly jailed and attempted to silence the artist from whom they derived so much positive media attention.

Forever Fragments

Doors

Ai Weiwei's work does not fall under any one subject. He works in ceramics (notably, taking Neolithic vases and dipping them in modern industrial paint), sculpture, painting, architecture, photography, and blogging. On his blog Ai often posted anywhere up to 100 photos a day. As this Guardian review of Ai's blog makes clear, Ai's stance with the government of China is a moral stance, a demand for ethics and justice, and a refusal to look the other way at the issues that most supporters of China speak of as the price of doing necessary business.

After the initial arrest of Ai in April of 2011, the Chinese government forbade him to speak with any news agencies and foreign reporters. Yet, in June, just after his release, Ai spoke with Hong Kong reporters and continued to talk with reporters all the while stressing that the government had forbidden him to say too much. The government is currently accusing him of income tax invasion (amazing how certain governments, the Russian government comes to mind, uses income tax as a method for destroying those they disagree with). The blog Free Ai Weiwei has current and up-to-date information, as well as connections to other sites that discuss Ai and his art, as well as his politics.

Ai Weiwei Speaks with Hans Ulrich Obrist ( A Penguin Special publication, $9.99, click here to order from Bridge Street Books) is a series of interviews that the curator and writer Hans Ulrich Obrist held with Ai over a ten year period. He has culled these interviews into highly informative and enjoyable book that culls Ai's art, life and philosophy into a very enjoyable read. It is artists such as Ai Weiwei who give meaning to such words as freedom and individuality.

"I have a tendency to open up the personal secrets. I think, being human, that both life and death have a secret side but there's the temptation to reveal the truth and to see the fact that you need some courage or understanding about life or death. So, even if you try to reveal or open yourself, you're still a mystery, because everybody is a mystery. We can never understand ourselves. However we act or whatever we do is misleading. So, in that case, it doesn't matter."

The Last Full Measure of Devotion and the Shame of Michael Bloomberg

2011-09-10T22:03:00.000-04:00

The solemn reminiscing of 9/11 has been on just about every news program this week. It is almost impossible not to catch a piece of it somewhere. For the most part, I have tried to avoid these programs. I find watching them and remembering that day simply too painful. But, given the number of "specials" on TV and the radio, it has been nearly impossible to completely avoid. One quite affecting piece that I caught was on Anderson Cooper's 360⁰. Called 9/11 Children 10 Years Later it is a series of interviews with children who lost a parent on 9/11. If you can watch it and not be moved, then I think you must be made of stone.

Given what I learned tonight, I think Mayor Bloomberg of New York should be tied to a chair and forced to watch it. Perhaps it will touch his cold, soulless heart. It seems that the first responders of New York will not be attending the 9/11 ceremony at Ground Zero. They have not been invited due to lack of space. At first I thought I was being taken in by a fast-moving internet hoax or rumor, but then I found this article from International Business Times: 9/11 Memorial: First Responders Excluded from Ground Zero Ceremony. I was speechless. I am outraged. Bloomberg's decision is appalling in its callousness and complete disregard for the men and women who responded to the call and who gave, in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln, "the last full measure of devotion."

If you wish to sign the Change.org petition demanding the inclusion of the first responders at the ceremony, just click here. In the meantime, let us look again at the words of Abraham Lincoln, speaking in another century, about a very different generation and, yet, with words prescient for those who responded on 9/11 in three different parts of the country:

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

You can be damn certain that the world will little note, and certainly not long remember anything that Michael Bloomberg has to say on that day. They will remember, with gratitude, the actions and sacrifice of those he deemed not worthy enough to attend. There is no shame deep enough for Bloomberg to feel.

Hirokazu Kore-eda

2011-05-08T22:35:00.001-04:00

There are some directors of film, who are able to give the most simplest scenes weight, as if nothing at all needs to happen then what is happening at that moment on the screen. The scene is not getting us from one moment to the next, it is not an interlude before a gunfight or car chase or a love scene. It is simply a moment in time, filled with a pensiveness, a sense of reflection, so that everything carries meaning. Andrei Tarkovsky called it "sculpting in time" and this is exactly what it seems, the director making the very air something tangible, with measurable weight, like stone to be cut or carved.

Hirokazu Kore-Eda is one such director. I have now watched 4 of his films (all that I have been able to find so far): Nobody Knows, After Life, Maborosi, and Still Walking. Each film as different in place and situation of characters as can be imagined. Each film united by the theme of loss and longing, of memory and the pain of unrequited or lost desires. Each film united, as well, by the singular eye of this director. I think of several shots from each film: the twirling, sparkling light in the kitchen scene from Nobody Knows; the shoe and the house-key on the police station table in Maborosi; the cloud enshrouded entrance to the way-station in After Life; the old father with his back to the rest of his family in Still Walking. Images simply shot, focusing on small moments that contain so much in their silent power.

Kore-Eda is an artistic descendant of Yasujiro Ozu. As with Ozu, Kore-Eda has no fear of the long shot, of lingering over a scene or a moment, no fear that staying on a particular shot will bore the audience. He allows his story to gain strength by trusting that each scene enriches our understanding of the characters and gives even the simplest of actions a weight, a hidden power of meaning, the subtlest of implications, that lends even more power to the final denouement. Some of his individual shots remind me, to a lesser extent, of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. Again, the same sense of detail and the same courage to trust the camera as well as the intelligence and patience of his audience. But where Tarkovksy often moves into the realm of dream image, Kore-eda stays within the realm of the real (with, perhaps, the exception in After Life), his long shots staying on an image that exists in everyday life in an everyday setting. An image we may see on any given day that, at this particular moment, we are asked to give more heed.

Maborosi was the first feature film made by Kore-eda, who had made several, well-received documentaries before this. As with the films that would come later, it is a story about loss. Yumiko, a new mother, loses her husband, Ikuo, to what seems to be an inexplicable suicide. Both are young and seem very happy. Kore-eda builds the early part of the film around their very simply life. Ikuo's work at a factory and Yumiko, keeping house and watching the baby. Of the many memorable shots in the early part of this film is of Yumiko looking through the doors of the factory at her husband working. This shot is used later to a most haunting, mirror-like effect to show her pain and loss. Another shot that is repeated in variations throughout the film is what I call the Chaplin walk shot. Most memorable is when Ikuo is walking off to work with an umbrella and he quite consciously imitates Chaplin's Little Tramp walk. In the opening scene of the movie Yumiko is dreaming about running after her Grandmother across a bridge, another shot that reminds me of the Gold Rush scene with Chaplin and the kid walking into the distance. As with Ozu, Kore-eda touches his cinematic roots and leaves his own mark. Each of these scenes touches the loss felt by Yumiko. This loss is compounded by Yumiko's inability to comprehend why Ikuo walked in the path of an oncoming train. This thought troubles her deep down and lies dormant for a while as she tries to make a new life with a new husband, Tamio, in a northern fishing village. But in a return trip to see her brother married she finds herself walking the old places of her life with Ikuo and this nagging thought grips her becomes an obsession. Ultimately, it is a story of the sometimes inexplicable nature of loss and how we may or may not come to some reconciliation with that loss.

After Life (1998) is quite different from the other Kore-eda films I have watched, set as it is in a way-station for souls after death. Yet, it is so firmly grounded in the everyday emotions of longing, love and memory, that he makes what seems a dream-like film into something that seems very true and real, as if it could actually exist. The story centers around a group of people who have just died coming to a kind of station where social workers (we are never quite sure if these workers are angels or people in limbo or what, exactly) are given the task of helping each person find one key moment in their life that they feel is their most beloved, something that they will carry with them into the afterlife and be with them for eternity while all other memories are erased. Two of the counselors, Takashi and Shiori, find themselves reflecting on their own lives and questioning and re-examining the choices in their lives.

Nobody Knows (2004) is a story taken from an actual event that occurred in Japan called the "Affair of the four abandoned children of Sugamo". The real story is much more gruesome than Kore-eda's version. What Kore-eda does is to humanize the situation for us, taking it out of the realm of sensationalist news headlines and making it a story more easily understood and digested. He brings great sympathy to the plight of these 4 siblings, children of different fathers, abandoned by their mother. Centered on the oldest child, Akira, a boy of 14 who seems older and more mature than his mother, we watch as these children attempt to live life on their own and manage their lives as if the adults are merely on a trip and may soon return. The loss in Nobody Knows is less so about death then it is about the loss of a real childhood caused to these children by an overly adolescent mother. Yet, at the same time, this film contains such beauty and moments of true amazement. Kore-eda's eye is sharp and unfailing.

Still Walking (2008) is the most Ozu-like of Kore-eda's films I have watched so far. As in such great classics by Ozu as Tokyo Story, Floating Weeds, Late Autumn, and Late Spring, the theme is family and the complexities that family relationships can possess. The film covers the 24 hours of the Yokoyama family reunion. The family is gathering at the home of the father, Kyohei, a retired doctor, and his wife, Toshiko. The gathering is to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the death by drowning of the eldest son in the family, Junpei. Junpei drowned trying to save a young boy, who survived. Visiting is the younger son, Ryota, a picture restorer who is now 40 and newly married to a widow with a young son, and his sister, Chinami, and her husband and children. Chinami is hoping to convince her parents to let her and her family move back into the house. Ryota is the most anguished, having lived for so many years as the shadow of his brother in the eyes of his father. It is Yoshiro Harada, as the father Kyohei, who is almost mesmerizing to watch. His coldness and disdain for his living children is palpably strong and, at the same time, we see him struggling to find his way back to them. Yet, always, is the shadow of Junpei, literally haunting their memories and thoughts. Still Walking has the exact same kind of simplicity as Ozu's films and, just as much, it contains the same power. It is a film about family and the possibility of forgiveness and recovery from terrible loss.

I have yet to watch a film by Kore-eda and not be moved deeply and not be amazed by his mastery of shot and control of scene. He is a director confident in his ability to use the camera, in taking his time to draw his audience into the story and supremely gifted in his eye of detail and image. There are other films I have yet to see, Distance, I Wish, the odd story Air Doll (a wildly improbably subject for Kore-eda taken from a Japanese manga) and his ghost story in the 4 director film Kaidan. But look I will and, somehow, I doubt I shall come away disappointed in Hirokazu Kore-eda.

To Read With My Brights Full On - Poems by William Stafford

2011-04-14T09:10:00.000-04:00

William Stafford remains a constant in my life. A poet I don't so much return to as I always seem to have him by my side. I simply open The Way It Is and read and, it seems, I am never at a loss to find a poem that strikes the bell within my soul. Although I never met Stafford, nor did I ever see him read, I have met students of his. What they tell me about him as a teacher matches everything I have come to believe about the man from his writings - a sometimes rare thing. I miss him as much as if I knew him. It being National Poetry Month, here are some poems by Stafford.

Places with Meaning

Say it's a picnic on the Fourth of July
and all of those usual at the end of day are there.
While they look at each other they become old,
and from the dark wood of evening a heron
rows forward across the path of sky left
in the west, through the still air.

All of my life I have noticed these appropriate landscapes
where events find their equivalent forms: oftentimes
I see trees hunching their shoulders, leaning toward me,
because in the past I have neglected what should be done;
or a dog hurries forward to lick some hands, and all
at once I see how frightening: they are mine.

There are people who always belong wherever Earth brings
them and gives them over to the practices of the wind;
more slowly, but caught in the same pressure, the rest of us
too, by the end of our days, learn to lean forward
out of our lives to find that what passes has molded
everything we touch or see, outside or in.

Tuned In Late One Night

Listen--this is a faint station
left alive in the vast universe.
I was left here to tell you a message
designed for your instruction or comfort,
but now that my world is gone I crave
expression pure as all the space
around me: I want to tell what is...

Remember?--we learned that still-face way,
to wait in election or meeting and then
to choose the side that wins, a leader
that lasted, a president that stayed in?
But some of us knew even then it was better
to lose if that was the way our chosen
side came out, in truth, at the end.

It's like this, truth is: it's looking out while everything
happens; being in a place of your own,
between your ears; and any person
you face will get the full encounter
of your self. When you hear any news
you ought to register delight or pain
depending on where you really live.

Now I am fading, with this ambition:
to read with my brights full on,
to write on a clear glass typewriter,
to listen with sympathy,
to speak like a child.

Is This Feeling about the West Real?

All their lives out here some people know
they live in a hemisphere beyond what Columbus discovered.
These people look out and wonder: Is it magic? Is it
the oceans of air off the Pacific? You can't
walk through it without wrapping a new
piece of time around you, a readiness for a meadowlark,
that brinkmanship a dawn can carry for lucky people
all through the day.

But if you don't get it, this bonus, you can
go home full of denial, and live out your years.
Great waves can pass unnoticed outside your door;
stars can pound silently on the roof; your teakettle
and cozy life inside can deny everything outside--
whole mountain ranges, history, the holocaust,
sainthood, Crazy Horse.

Listen--something else hovers out here, not
color, not outlines or depth when air
relieves distance by hazing far mountains,
but some total feeling or other world
almost coming forward, like when a bell sounds
and then leaves a whole countryside waiting.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Today is Poem in Your Pocket day. You find a poem that you love, carry it in your pocket, share it with others and celebrate poetry. If you go to this page at Poets.org you can find 52 different poems to print out and share. Or you could just open a book you have to your favorite poem and share. If you have anything memorized then you are all set. Enjoy.

Stepping Stones Interviews with Seamus Heaney

2011-02-05T23:12:00.000-05:00

My most enduring memory of reading Seamus Heaney is a crisp, fall morning when I was a sophomore in college. I am walking across the Lacrosse practice field from the parking lot to the building of my particular school. The university I attended is in a small, rural, Pennsylvania town not far from Philadelphia, but far enough to seem an eternity away. I have the first book of his I ever picked up, Poems 1965-1975: Death Of A Naturalist, Door Into The Dark, Wintering Out, North. I read as I walked, enjoying each poem along with the fall weather. The ground has that somewhat damp, earthy feeling, the grass, the mud, some fallen leaves. To my right a huge willow tree dominating the other portion of the field. All this made for the perfect atmosphere in which to read a poet like Heaney who, in his poetry, makes so much reference to nature, to rain, to the earth, to stone and wood. I read through Poems 1965-1975 and the following book of poems, Field Work, along with his book of essays, Preoccupations Selected Prose 1968-1978, in this manner. Or at least the memory I have of reading these books is hitched to the memory of crossing that field.

When I was a year out of college I had the wonderful opportunity of seeing Heaney read at the University near my hometown. This was at a time when his name was very far from a household name. There were maybe 12 people in the audience. Heaney read from several of his works including some new poems that had just come out in Station Island, which regrettably I did not have at that time. Heaney was around 45 then, his hair long and gray, his face unlined and incredibly affable. He read with a nice, somewhat deep voice, gentle and melodic with his Northern Irish accent. I cannot remember all the poems he read (and again I regret my lack of forethought in not writing down each poem read) but I do remember clearly his reading his most famous poem, Digging. I also remember, quite well, his reading of The Tolland Man and Punishment. Before the poem Punishment he gave a brief history of the circumstances surrounding the poem which dealt with a woman's mummified body found in a bog, an adulteress, presumably, who had met the consequences of her time for her actions.

Punishment

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the bloating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.

When Heaney read his voice held this quiet sense of compassion, a tone of both regret and wonderment and a sense of his own failure as a human being when confronted with such seemingly simple, yet complex, situations. Between each poem Heaney would give a short talk about the genesis of the poem, where his mind was, the history surrounding the poem, his own current thoughts. He was as erudite as one could imagine, incredibly witty and very charming. For myself seeing him read remains one of those indelible memories that I will always cherish.

I am reminded of all this after having read Stepping Stones Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll (FSG, 2008). O'Driscoll, a poet himself, conducted most of the interviews through writing and by post with the exception of two interviews that were recorded before a live audience. Yet the book has such a fluid and smooth movement that it seems very much as if the two men were sitting around a table in the kitchen, mugs of tea before them, having a quiet and lively discussion about poetry.

And what a discussion it is! Whether talking about his own poems, or the poems that influenced his poetry, or the poetry of his contemporaries, Heaney has such a perceptive and critical eye and ear that a reader cannot help but be influenced by his insight. You will find yourself drawn to read poems you might never have read before and brought anew to poems you thought you knew but now look at with a different eye.

Stepping Stones is divided into three sections. The first is called Bearings and deals with Heaney's childhood and upbringing and move towards poetry. The son of a farmer (famously remembered in Heaney's first major poem Digging), Heaney talks about the farms he lived on as a child, the influence that this life had on his work and the joys, strengths, and sometimes tragic sadness of his family life. In this section you feel the immediacy of Heaney's childhood, the sounds, smells, colors and light are made vividly real for the reader.

The second section is called On the Books and this is the heart of Stepping Stones. O'Driscoll charts a course, chronologically, through Heaney's books from Death of a Naturalist through to District and Circle (the most recent book published at the time of publication. Human Chain, Heaney's first since District and Circle, just came out this year). It is here that Heaney explains the background to his poems, much in the way I remembered him doing at the reading I attended all those years ago.

The last section is called Coda and, much as the word itself suggests, it offers a chance for Heaney to look back over his life and work, make sense of it all and give to his readers a kind of balance of his work. He talks of the funerals and memorial services for such friends as Ted Hughes and the novelist and short story writer John McGahern and about where he might like to be buried one day. But ultimately it is, as with this entire book, all about the poetry. When asked what poetry has taught him Heaney replies:

"That there's such a thing as truth and it can be told - slant; that subjectivity is not to be theorized away and is worth defending; that poetry itself has virtue, in the first sense of possessing a quality of moral excellence and in the sense also of possessing inherent strength by reason of its sheer made-upness, its integritas, consonantia and claritas."

These last three words, taken from a quote by Thomas Aquinas used by James Joyce in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, could also be used to sum up Seamus Heaney himself as well as his life's work.

"Aquinas said: Ad Pulcritudinem Tria Requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so: Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance."

One by Merwin from The Shadow of Sirius

2010-11-06T12:54:00.001-04:00

Heron by Gakusai

Gray Herons in the Field above the River by W.S. Merwin

Now that the nights turn longer than the days
we are standing in the still light after dawn

in the high grass of autumn that is green again
hushed in its own place after the burn of summer

Hiroshige

each of us stationed alone without moving
at a perfect distance from all the others

like shadows of ourselves risen out of our shadows
each eye without turning continues to behold

what is moving
each of us is one of seven now

we have come a long way sailing our opened clouds
remembering all night where the world would be

the clear shallow stream the leaves floating along it
the dew in the hushed field the only morning

(from The Shadow of Sirius, Copper Canyon Press, 2009)

Hokusai

Let My Eyes Suffice Me, and My Heart: The Songbook of Umberto Saba

2010-10-17T23:17:00.002-04:00

Umberto Saba by Carlo Levi

Songbook The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan, Yale University Press

Umberto Saba was a poet of solitude. Some might say loneliness, and I would not disagree, but solitude is the more apt word, the just right word that describes Saba. In some ways his dedication to poetry seemed almost Japanese, like Basho or Issa, living a life centered on the poetic world, with all outside distractions being diverted from that life. Saba, in his essay "What Remains for Poets to Do" says: "It remains for poets to write honest poetry... This honesty is possible only for one who has the religion of art and loves it for itself, not in the hope of fame." So, in essence, Saba was a monk to Calliope, the muse of poetry.

I think what makes Saba so beautiful to me is the way he uses the ordinary, the everyday in life and weaves his poetry around it and makes the ordinary more profound by this act. His poetry reminds me of other poets who do this as well, William Stafford, Miyazawa Kenji, Jane Kenyon, just to name a few. But Saba is all his own, as any true poet is, an original, singular in his solitude. And here we come back to that word, solitude. A word that seems to come up often in his poems, such as in this title poem:

Solitude

The changing seasons, sunlight and darkness,

alter the world, which, in its sunny aspect

comforts us, and with its clouds brings sadness.

And I, who have looked with infinite

tenderness at so many of its guises,

don't know whether I ought to be sad today

or gladly go on as if a test had been passed;

I'm sad, and yet the day is so beautiful;

only in my heart is there sun and rain.

I can transform a long winter into spring;

where the pathway in the sun is a ribbon

of gold, I bid myself "good evening."

In me alone are my mists and fine weather,

as in me alone is that perfect love

for which I suffered so much and no longer mourn,

let my eyes suffice me, and my heart.

(from Songbook The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan, Yale University Press)

It is almost as if he ambles along, talking about a rainy day and then gets to that stanza in which he says "In me alone are my mists and fine weather..." Suddenly the singing is loud and whatever feeling of loneliness or depression Saba is feeling suddenly is replaced by the light his poetry creates within his heart. Saba struggled all his life with depression but felt that poetry did just that - transformed and even transcended whatever dark mood he may be in and helped him to a better place. He believed in poetry that much.

That is not to say that there aren't poems that do not rise from the abyss, there are, but they are suffused with the balance of love and warmth that Saba manages to bring to these very poems. He lives, he struggles with life and he loves and is filled with gratitude for that love. Listen to this:

The Egoist

You wonder at me and at the thing

so firmly locked in my heart

that I keep hidden from others' eyes;

because the human whirl may be peace to me;

Because I seek the calm of meditation

even as bodies and minds are consumed by war,

I seem to you a really wicked man.

But wicked I am not, nor am I good.

You should know, then, that I am a poet.

Things tempt him, but not much,

that men make on the face of the earth

either with blood or in play.

He digs deep, deep is his treasure,

at the heart of the Earth, the golden heart.

Saba was born in Trieste at time when it was part of Alsace and the Austro-Hungarian empire. He had Italian nationality through his mother and his father was Jewish. He was, in many respects, born for the life of an outsider. He fought in World War 1 and had to go in hiding for World War II. Other poets and writers helped him out, including Giuseppi Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, and Carlo Levi (whose painting of Saba is at the top of this post). From about the end of the First World War until the beginning of the second, Saba owned his own bookstore - a kind of perfect place for him to be able to support his poetic gift. He had to give the bookstore up, however, when fascist laws came into effect in Italy just before the war. He was always, even surrounded by others, alone.

The Last

I observe your dog, lady, being adored

it adores you. And I... when I consider my life!

I did odd jobs, whether for good or ill

I don't know. God knows, maybe no one.

I never belonged to anything or anyone.

I was always ("your own fault," you will answer),

I was always a poor stray dog.

Just Imagine

2010-10-09T12:42:00.001-04:00

Photo: Yoko Ono
John Lennon should have turned 70 years old today, October 9. Hard to imagine, isn't it? Just as hard to believe. I remember the night he died as if it were yesterday. On December 8th I was getting ready for bed. I was setting the radio alarm and just before it performed the automatic click-off I heard the news announcer say "...the singer songwriter was pronounced dead at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City. He was 40 years old." I don't know why I knew but, somehow, I knew it was John Lennon. I went downstairs, turned on the t.v., and every channel I turned to was showing his image and playing the music - the solo stuff, the Beatles stuff, all of it. I spent the rest of the night watching the news and thinking that this could not have possibly happened. I wanted desperately to go back a day in time and not have this happen, to change the events. If wishing and praying fervently could have changed things my prayers would have reversed time, make those bullets fly back into the gun from which they were fired and have Mark David Chapman turn the gun on himself. I think my prayers were not alone in the world that night.

Lennon was not a perfect human being. I knew that then, I know it more-so even now. But he still inspires me through his words and music. The poster above is about 10 years old now, so that number of deaths from guns listed on the poster has definitely increased. Every day there are more. Every day we read or hear stories, in this country alone, wherein angry people go out and shoot people. Mark David Chapman had a history of mental illness, was obviously delusional, and yet was still able to get a gun and shoot John Lennon four times in the back. Anti-gun control folks will often point out that Chapman could just have easily stabbed Lennon to death. I agree. There is nothing more true than the fact that crazy people who want to kill others have a variety of means towards doing so. But it is also an irrefutable fact that the ease and access that people have towards acquiring guns in this country makes our high death by gun statistics one of the worst in the world, coming in 4th behind South Africa, Colombia, and Thailand. Between intent and accidents and impulse there are so many deaths that would not have happened otherwise.

"Imagine all the people, living life in peace." Those words were first heard on the album Imagine released in October of 1971, John Lennon's 31st year in life. He should have had at least 40 more. Just imagine.

Imagine on YouTube

Moments of Grace

2010-09-19T22:52:00.000-04:00

The poet William Stafford means a lot to me. I have the book that came out after his death, The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press) marked all over with yellow post-it notes. I have given this book several times to friends as a way of introducing them to a poet I think brings a kind of gentle, reasonable sanity into my life. I turn to him often, in good times and bad. His words never tire in my heart and I never tire of hearing them repeated. Always, that pivotal moment at the end, they seem as fresh as the first time I read them. His poems are moments of grace and you can abide by them. I think I will give one here and there as a way of reminding others what we lost when William Stafford wrote his last poem (written on the day he died). The poem I am about to quote is an earlier poem.

Grace Abounding

Air crowds into my cell so considerately
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I am alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here come grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn't need to be.

Such times abide for a pilgrim, who all through
a story or a life may live in grace, that blind
benevolent side of even the fiercest world,
and might - even in oppression or neglect--
not care if it's friend or enemy, caught up
in a dance where no one feels need or fear:

I'm saved in this big world by unforeseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth
may teach me how to join earth and sky.

The Blessing of Freedom

2010-09-11T10:30:00.001-04:00

September 11, 2010

No, the dead are about us, shut out by our metaphysical denial of them. As we lie nightly in our hemispheres asleep by the billions, our dead approach us. Our ideas should be their nourishment. We are their grainfields. But we are barren and we starve them. Don't kid yourself, though, we are watched by the dead, watched on this earth, which is our school of freedom. In the next realm, where things are clearer, clarity eats into freedom. We are free on earth because of cloudiness, because of error, because of marvelous limitation, and as much because of beauty as of blindness and evil. These always go with the blessing of freedom.

Saul Bellow
Humboldt's Gift

Photos by Zbigniew Kosc

The Antoine Doinel Inside Me

2010-08-28T15:11:00.001-04:00

For many years, when I lived in New York City, I had a poster on my wall of Jean Pierre Leaud as Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows. The poster showed Doinel at the end of the film staring out on the shore of the beach, his face a study in sad introspection. On the bottom of this poster was a quote by Orson Welles "J'adore Les quatre cents coups!" Well, j'adore Antoine Doinel! Je suis Antoine Doinel!

Who is Antoine Doinel? Well, for those of you who are unaware of Le Nouvelle Vague, or the New Wave, in French Cinema, Antoine was the main character of 4 and half films by the director Francois Truffaut. The first two and half were filmed during the beginning and height of the New Wave movement, a movement predicated on rejecting the classical notions of film directing, trying for a more realistic, everyday life feel to their films. There was a youthful exuberance to these movements, a sense of wonder, an excitement. Among the directors of this movement were Jean Luc Goddard, Agnes Varda, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jacques Rivette. The New Wave was never a formal movement but was based on the Italian Neorealist movement in which non-professional actors were used in place of established actors - Visconti's La Terra Trema is a perfect example, using not only a real fishing village but the actual villagers as the actors in his film.

Doinel was played by a first time actor, Jean Pierre Leaud, who Truffaut picked after many auditions with 12 and 13 year old boys. Leaud shared many similarities with Truffaut which made him a natural selection for the part. There was a savvy quality about the boy, a sense that he had seen more things at 13 than most people see before they are 40. He was the perfect choice for the role. Truffaut had based the character on himself. Like Truffaut, Antoine is an only child in a loveless marriage. The mother harbors a mixture of love and anger towards her son but the anger toward Antoine is something she often can barely contain. Antoine is also filled with this anger mixed with love and the heart-breaking desire to be loved unconditionally by his mother, something that remains unrequited.

Antoine is so much like many of the children I have had come through my classroom over the years. I see him in so many of their faces. If I were to simply take a snapshot of their eyes and edit a photo of Doinel's eyes in the film the similarities would be astounding. Anger, love, hope and resentment all reside in these eyes. They want so much to be loved and accepted and yet are so afraid of the possibility that they will be rejected or abandoned that the anger is there ready to lash out. The hurt is ever present. The eyes speak more eloquent than any words could manage.

The wonderful thing about Antoine is that, as bleak as the ending may seem in the first film, there is hope. With each succeeding film we see him growing and finding his own place in the world and making his way in a much more positive environment in comparison to the first film, and at least an environment that he constructs for himself. He makes mistakes, he is not perfect, he is, very much, human. That is probably what is to me the best thing about these films - his humanity and the reminder that we are none of us perfect, that our lives are messy things fraught with decisions that we don't always manage as well as we should.

As the series progressed, the films moved further and further away from Truffaut's own life and yet still orbit around his life, a self-created satellite. In Antoine and Collette we see a young, 20 year old Doinel fall in serious love for the first time. The film was a short that belonged to a film series called Love at Twenty. Five directors from five countries directed films about love at twenty. The directors were Truffaut, Andrzej Wajda (Poland), Renzo Rossellini (Italy), Shintaro Ishihara (Japan), and Marcel Ophuls (Germany). Much like more recent films I Love Paris and I Love New York, in which a variety of directors make films based on one theme, Love at Twenty is like watching short stories brought to life.

Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board are the two middle Doinel films and highly enjoyable. In Stolen Kisses Doinel is dishonorably discharged from the French army (just as Truffaut was), gets a variety of jobs - private detective, shoe store salesman - has an affair and finds true love (or so it seems but, as in life, it is more complicated than that). In Bed and Board we find a married Doinel working as a florist (the scene where he spray paints flowers different colors is one of many amusing scenes in this film) and embarking on an affair with a young Japanese woman he meets. His wife is played by the actress Claude Jade (who was also a lover and fiance of Truffaut during this time). Jade's portrayal of Doinel's wife is excellent. Her ability to silently portray both love and hurt, desire and knowing amusement are part of what makes this film so appealing. Leaud is her equal in the ability to express without saying a word the variety of emotions going through his character. There is a life behind the eyes of each actor that expresses so much and makes a scene as simple as the two of them reading in bed be invested with both humor and pathos. By the end of Bed and Board Doinel embarks on a life as a writer.

The last film in the series, Love on the Run, is really a throw-away. It follows Doinel at 38, now divorced still writing novels but working as a copy-editor. Many of the characters from the earlier films make appearances and the film is filled with flashbacks to the other movies. Truffaut had, from the time of The 400 Blows, acted as a brother/father figure to Jean Pierre Leaud - even setting him up in private schools and in foster-type homes that he would arrange. Their relationship was as complex as any one can imagine. Truffaut had in Leaud his very own golem or Pygmalion, a being he could try to shape and create and use cinematically. He would do so in many other films outside the Doinel cycle and Leaud would become more associated with Truffaut than any other director he worked with - despite being in films by Goddard, Jean Eustache, Olivier Assayas and Bernardo Bertolucci.

Love on the Run never quite works on its own merely whetting the viewers appetite to return to the more enjoyable earlier films. Still, and this speaks to the triple strength of Truffaut, Leaud and the quality of Antoine Doinel's appealing character, Love on the Run is enjoyable and has many affecting moments. Doinel in many ways is the representative of the child that remains in us all. The child we often try to grow out of or escape but is nonetheless present within us. This child cannot exist as an adult, which is why life is as difficult as it is for Doinel. In a way we can watch Doinel and think this is what we would be if we gave reign to that child within us. I think of this as well when I face the young children in my class. How many Antoine's are there sitting before me?

According to Annette Insdorf in her book on the films of Truffaut, francois truffaut, a theater in Copenhagen once had an Antoine Doinel day in which they showed throughout the course of the day all the films in the cycle, up to that time. This inspired Truffaut to make Love on the Run. Now, thanks to the Criterion Collections glorious box set, The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, you can take that journey in your own place and at your own time. It is a journey worth taking. Simply watching Leaud go from a 13 year old boy to a 38 year old man is an extraordinary experience. Truffaut's "experiment" is amazing just for this. The Up Series are the only other films I can think of in which you get to watch individuals over the course of so many years. Truffaut's films, all of them, deal with the real - even when they might be a futuristic film like Fahrenheit 451 (a film he came to hate) - the everyday life of emotions, of love, of desire and the contest between what we want, absolutely, and what we are willing to compromise on. His films are human, flawed as humans are, and as beautiful. I cannot think of my own life without Antoine Doinel. I was excited the first time I read about The 400 Blows and find myself returning to these films over and over again. J'adore Antoine Doinel

W.S. Merwin - The Nomad Flute

2010-07-27T22:42:00.000-04:00

If you read poetry you have, or should have, read at least one poem, translation, essay or piece of prose by W.S. Merwin. Merwin is one of the most prolific of poets, having over 30 volumes of poetry to his credit, over 20 books of translations of other poets, several volumes of prose and three plays. If you have picked up an anthology or book on modern American poets you more than likely have a poem of his in your possession. It is one thing to be prolific, it is another thing entirely to write as much as Merwin has with such a high degree of both excellence and imagination. It was with great delight that I heard of his having been named the 17th Poet Laureate of the United States for the year 2010-2011.

I saw Merwin recently at a Folger Shakespeare Library reading. At 82 he has the calm and distinguished air of a Buddhist monk, which is in keeping with his own Buddhist beliefs. The evening was delightful. Fellow poet Stanley Plumly reversed the normal order of the evening and had a wonderful conversation with Merwin followed by questions from the audience. Then Merwin stood up, tall and graceful, went to the lectern and read from his poetry. If you would like to hear some of this yourself just click here. There are three poems out of the more than 15 that he read. I kept notes for that evening but then lost the notebook recently. Merwin would probably see this as a form of Zen. His voice, tinged with the gravelly quality of age, gave each poem the gravitas each deserved. There were no lost words here. I speak for the audience as a whole when I say that we all sat there, entranced, listening to a song maker sing his songs in a way that no one else could do.

I first came across Merwin in his work as a translator. My copy of Osip Mandelstam's Selected Poems translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin, is among my treasures. I have always felt that these translations of Mandelstam's poems are among the best ever done. Here is an example:

   No, I was no one's contemporary ----ever.
   That would have been above my station.
   How I loathe that other with my name.
   He certainly never was me.

   The age is a despot with two sleepy apples
   to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth.
   When he dies he'll subside onto the numb
   arm of his son, who's already ageing.

   As the age was born I opened my red eyelids,
   My eyes were large sleepy apples.
   The rivers thundered, informing me
   of the bloodshot lawsuits of men.

   A hundred years back,
   on the camp-bed, on a drift of pillows,
   there was a sprawled clay body: the age
   getting over its first drunk.

   What a frail bed, when you think
   how the world creaks on its journey.
   Well, we can't forge another.
   We'd better get along with this one.

   In stuffy rooms, in cabs, in tents,
   the age is dying. Afterwards
   flames will flutter like feathers, on the apple-skins,
   on the curled wafers of horn.

   (Osip Mandelstam Selected Poems translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin, Atheneum 1973, NYRB Classics 2004)

The First Four Book of Poems: A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, The Drunk in the Furnace

In his own poetry Merwin has transformed over the years. One of the pleasures of reading him from his earliest work to his most recent is to watch the nature of that translation. If you read The First Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2000) you see a young poet working in a very formal, classical style. I have to admit that there are only a handful of poems I really care about in these first four books (A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, and The Drunk in the Furnace). Most are simply too formal, at times too wordy for me. That is not to speak to the quality of the poems but more to my own personal taste in style. The closer Merwin moved to what became the style he is most known for the more I liked the poetry. The poems I enjoyed the most in the first four books were Sestina and Herons from A Mask for Janus; In the Heart of Europe from Green with Beasts; Bell Buoy, The Bones, In a Cloud of Hands, and Catullus XI from The Drunk in the Furnace. As we move towards the fourth book the sense of Zen starts to make itself felt in Merwin's work. Here is an excerpt from In a Cloud of Hands:

As you knew, you knew, born into hands,
To be handed away, in time.

Meantime these soft gordians
The fists of infants, these hands,
Padded crabs raining their prints
As on charts the contours of islands,
Vulnerable as eyes, these fans
Without feathers, knuckled sticks over
Breasts flowing like shawls or seawater,
That can learn flights exact as swallows,
Make music, pain, prayer, these
Rags dangling like moss from ancient wrists,

Looses, are sometimes generous,
Closed, can hold fast for a time;
Uncurled, as in supplication, empty
As crystals and shallow as dry lagoons
Scrawled over by water bugs, what have they
To offer but love in ignorance,
Uncertain even of its own questions,
As of the maps on its hands, whether
They lead anywhere at all.
   (The First Four Books of Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2000)

The Bones is an extraordinary poem that gives one a sense of the connectedness of all things. Again, this reflects the Buddhist mind view of being aware of the nature of each thing and how each thing connects to us in some way.

   ...Shells were to shut out the sea,
The bones of birds were built for floating
On air and water, and those of fish were devised
For their feeding depths, while a man's bones were framed
For what? For knowing the sands are here,
And coming to hear them a long time; for giving
Shapes to the sprawled sea, weight to its winds,
And wrecks to plead for its sands. These things are not
Limitless: we know there is somewhere
An end to them, though every way you look
They extend farther than a man can see.
   (The First Four Books of Poems, Copper Canyon Press, 2000)

The Second Four Book of Poems: The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment

"By the end of the poems in The Moving Target I had relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions, a move that evolved from my growing sense that punctuation alluded to and assumed an allegiance to the rational protocol of written language, and of prose in particular. I had come to feel that it stapled the poems to the page. Whereas I wanted the poems to evoke the spoken language, and wanted the hearing of them to be essential to taking them in."

You can feel the change in the poetry almost the minute you enter the pages of The Second Four Book of Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1993). From the almost haiku-like Separation,

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

to the longer poems like The Saint of the Uplands:

Their prayers still swarm on me like lost bees.
I have no sweetness. I am dust
Twice over.

You see Merwin moving in a new direction in an almost trance-like state, as if possessed by the spirit of the poetry inside him. Fifty pages into The Moving Target the punctuation disappears and you feel the sense of the poet unrestrained, giving in to his gift and allowing it the full range of expression. Many of the poems here on out have a dream-state quality. For instance from The Crossroads of the World Etc.:

With my dead on your
Calendar with my eyes
In your paint
Opening
With my grief on your bridges with my voice
In your stones what is your name
Typed in rain while I slept

During the interview with Plumly at the Folger Merwin spoke to how you cannot really "understand" poetry, how poetry exists between two mysterious places - the origin of the poem by the writer and the reader's own experience of that poem that allows them to relate to it. If they try to explain why they relate to that poem they "rapidly reach a point where they can't answer the question." He explains this in more detail in a Bliss Interview with Lindsay Ahl. This is certainly true of Merwin's poetry during this period. If you try to search for meaning in many of the poems you will be stymied. Merwin believes that a poem speaks to you in a way that is indefinable and inexplicable but that affects you. You don't know why it is so but you recognize the strength of the poem. The sound is what will draw you in and what you will connect with in the poem - if there isn't that then there is nothing.

from Envoy from D'Aubigne

Book
burn what will not abide your light

When I consider the old ambitions
to be on many lips
meaning little there
it would be enough for me to know
who is writing this
and sleep knowing it

far from glory and its gibbets

and dream of those who drank at the icy fountain
and told the truth
   (from The Carrier of Ladders)

As he moves into Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment Merwin becomes less enigmatic and a bit more concrete, at least as concrete as Zen can be. The sounds are still so important here (after all, we are talking poetry) but the mystery of what is being said is a little easier to fathom. Here are just two examples:

Dogs

Many times loneliness
is someone else
an absence
then when loneliness is no longer
someone else many times
it is someone else's dog
that you're keeping
then when the dog disappears
and the dog's absence
you are alone at last
and loneliness many times
is yourself
that absence
but at last it may be
that you are your own dog
hungry on the way
the one sound climbing a mountain
higher than time
   (from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)

To The Rain

You reach me out of the age of the air
clear
falling toward me
each one new
if any of you has a name
it is unkown

but waited for you here
that long
for you to fall through it knowing nothing

hem of the garment
do not wait
until I can love all that I am to know
for maybe that will never be

touch me this time
let me love what I cannot know
as the man born blind may love color
until all that he loves
fills him with color
   (from Writings To An Unfinished Accompaniment)

Now it could very well be that you find these two poems just as enigmatic as the earlier ones and it is merely the case that these poems speak to me. So bet it. When I read a stanza such as the last - touch me this time/let me love what I cannot know/as the man born blind may love color/until all that he loves/fills him with color - I say, my God, what gorgeous writing. Yes, it speaks to me in very loud words. I hear Merwin's voice so strongly here. But I also see this period in his writing as the moving toward the more Buddhist centered aspect of his work. As he began to study Buddhism more and more, eventually moving to Hawaii in order to study it more fully, I find Merwin's writing reaching me more and more.

Merwin won a second Pulitzer Prize for poetry with the publication of The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press 2009). It demonstrates very well that, at the age of 82, Merwin is still very much in control of his gift. If anything his mastery is even more extraordinary.

My Hand

See how the past is not finished
here in the present
it is awake the whole time
never waiting
it is my hand now but not what I held
it is not my hand but what I held
it is what I remember
but it never seems quite the same
no one else remembers it
a house long gone into air
the flutter of tires over a brick road
cool light in a vanished bedroom
the flash of the oriole
between one life and another
the river a child watched
(from The Shadow of Sirius)

In the poem Gray Herons in the Field above the River Merwin seems to weave together several Haiku-like images into one tapestry.

Gray herons in the Field above the River

Now that the nights turn longer than the days

we are standing in the still light after dawn

in the high grass of autumn that is green again

hushed in its own place after the burn of summer

each of us stationed alone without moving

at a perfect distance from all the others

like shadows of ourselves risen out of our shadows

each eye without turning continues to behold

what is moving

each of us is one of seven now

we have come a long way sailing our opened clouds

remembering all night where the world would be

the clear shallow stream the leaves floating along it

the dew in the hushed field the only morning

Merwin is a poet rich in discoveries for any reader and he has so much work out there of such high quality that no book will fail to satisfy. He is a poet who can delight in so many different ways - in the sound of the poems, the allusions, the intellect, and the atmosphere. I have spent so much time reading Merwin's poetry that I have neglected the prose. I am hoping to rectify that soon, beginning with The Miner's Pale Children. I have heard that is another country with delights and discoveries of a different currency.

Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times

2010-05-23T13:29:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you simply need a good anthology of poetry to get you through things, to get you through the lunacy that is everyday, your work, your life, your love, or lack of, your turmoils and even your triumphs. Poetry can be such a fine and excellent way to find release, to find expression through the words of another but words that, once read, seem as if they were born in your own heart. Poetry has this transformational quality, this ability to come from one person but become wholly your own, or, at the least, seem to. Keats said "It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance." I got that quote from one of the finest anthologies of poetry I have ever stumbled upon, Staying Alive: real poems for unreal times edited by Neil Astley (Bloodaxe Books, London). Broken down into sections that go through the stages and emotions of life: Body and soul; Roads and journeys; Dead or alive; Bittersweet; Growing up; Man and beast; In and out of love; My people; War and peace; Disappearing acts; Me, the Earth, the Universe; and The art of poetry; it is wide ranging with poems coming from current poets such as Charles Simic, Mary Oliver, Carolyn Forche and Billy Collins, just to name a few, along with your old standbys such as Auden, MacNeice, Sylvia Plath and Rilke. In fact, there are so many poets in this anthology that it is almost overwhelming except for the fact that this book is so amazingly accessible. I have been devouring Staying Alive since I purchased it in early April.

There are so many incredible poems to quote from in this anthology, but I will try to restrain myself and maybe do a one or two from each section. Take for instance the poem used as a preface to the Body and soul section, 'Wild Geese' by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal fo your body
   love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I started out wanting only to quote a line or two, but that is the thing with almost all of the poems in this book, they demand more than excerpts, they demand the fullness of their sound, their power. In this same section is Osip Mandelstam's 'Eyesight of Wasps' where he says:

I don't draw and I don't sing,
and I don't play the violin with a black-voiced bow.
I drive my sting only into life, and love
to envy the powerful, cunning wasps.
   (from 'Eyesight of Wasps', translated from the Russian by Richard & Elizabeth McKane)

Or this, from 'Saint Animal' by Chase Twichell:

I'm not a bird but I'm inhabited by a spirit
that's uplifting me. It's my animal, my saint
and soldier, my flame of yearing,

come back to tell me
what it was like to be without me.

I almost quoted that one in full, again, so powerful is its totality. But I must leave you something to read for yourself and see and decide for yourself.

Neil Astley has an introduction for each section that summarizes, quite well, what that section is about. The section 'Roads' is about "important life decisions..." Therefor it is not surprising that the poem that starts off this section is Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'. This might seem a tired choice, is there any American modern poem more quoted than this? Or used as much whether for graduation speeches or inspirational cards? Yet, juxtaposed against more modern poems such as 'Not Waving but Drowning' by Stevie Smith or 'Begin' by Brendan Kennelly or 'Snow' by the Czech poet Vladimir Holub, Frost's old standby is given a different perspective and you may come to it anew and realize, again, the true power of that poem. Here is Holub:

Snow

It began to snow at midnight. And certainly
the kitchen is the best place to sit,
even the kitchen of the sleepless.
It's warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wine
and look out of the window at your friend eternity.
Why care whether birth and death are merely points
when life is not a straight line.
Why torment yourself eyeing the calendar
and wondering what is at stake.
Why confess you don't have the money
to buy Saskia shoes?
And why brag
that you suffer more than others.
If there were no silence here
the snow would have dreamed it up.
You are alone.
Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.
   (Translated from the Czech by Ian & Jarmila Milner)

There are anthologies and then there are anthologies. For every anthology that is a kind of generic aspirin for the spirit (I am thinking here of so many of these anthologies of love poems or other, theme-tied, books) there are anthologies that light a fire within your soul, that speak to you in a far deeper way and cause you to seek out many of the poets you encounter for the first time, within the pages of these books. I knew many of the poets in Staying Alive by name or reputation without ever really having read much of anything by them, a poem here or there, but never a full book. Names like Oliver, and Sharon Olds and even Ted Hughes. After reading Sharon Olds 'True Love' I will never pass by a book of hers on a shelf again without picking it up and reading.

From 'True Love'

...I wobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex - surely this
is the most blessed time of my life...

The layout of this book can be somewhat deceptive. The cover, a photograph of a young woman, hair demurely partially covering one eye, gazing straight out at you, along with blurb quotes from a rather eclectic group of people - from John Berger to Anne Michaels to the young adult writer Philip Pullman and even Meryl Streep - can make you question just what or who this anthology is aimed towards. But this is truly a case of not judging a book by its cover.

Staying Alive is like this, it is an anthology that you will find yourself going to again and again and using as a sort of guide to other poets. Slowly your shelves will fill up with the books of many of these poets. As a teacher who uses poetry in many of the lessons I do with students I know that I will turn to this book again and again, a kind of compass for the direction my lesson may take. I will return to this book again and again, regardless, my copy will become beaten and dog-eared against its will, as it becomes for me another compass to find my way by. Or, as Seamus Heany says in his poem 'Postscript'

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Staying Alive will certainly do this, it will catch your heart off guard and blow it open. Enjoy.

Poetry and Breathing

2010-04-01T18:07:00.004-04:00

Poster from the Academy of American Poets

We make a dwelling in the evening air,

In which being there together is enough.

from Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

"Poetry is like breathing, it happens all the time." William Stafford

I first began reading poetry, really reading poetry, when I was about 14 or so years old. I had walked down to the Old Smoke Shop, a tobacco store that had a great selection of paperback books, and bought The Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, the one with the drawing of Eliot with the droopy eyes and big nose. I remember walking down to the reservoir. There was a wall you could sit on and look at the water and the stars and the moon, if they were out. You could see the trees against the sky and the lights from the buildings downtown. I would read the poems by the streetlight that sat directly above me. As often as not it was particular lines that struck me. The Preludes: The winter evening settles down... Or from Gerontion: Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season. I found these poems (we are talking pre-Cats before Lloyd Webber would somewhat degrade the quality by twisting the words into a Barbara Streisand song) intoxicating at the time. I've only gone back to him here and there as I've become older. I have found far to many other poets who match my sensibilities and, despite telling myself not to judge the poems by the man, I never could reconcile myself to Eliot's anti-Semitism nor his misogyny.

My next poet was Dylan Thomas and, even now, that seems only natural. It is hard not to like the musical quality of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. I used to mumble this poem to myself as I walked to classes. Later I memorized all of Fern Hill all because of my love of that last stanza:

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

No, nothing I cared in my lamb white days and that is how it went with my reading of Thomas. I also loved Should Lanterns Shine:

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

Thomas is musical, the music is evident the minute you start reading him aloud. He makes you want to declaim. He also lived that very romantic, poet life. The drinker/poet, the man who died drinking at the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street in NYC. Supposedly his last words were "I've had 18 straight whiskies, I think that's the record."

And of course there was ee cummings. But I think everyone has cummings at one time or another - and they should. The simple, charming beauty of somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond is evident no matter how many times I read it, hear it or hear it used in a movie. Or i carry your heart with me, isn't this how love feels, is, and should be?

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

These poets were my early college days. Then one day I took a course in Irish Literature. It was a course for Lit Majors but I took it anyway. One day my professor said "The finest poet writing in the English language today is Seamus Heaney." That was the first I heard his name, over 30 years ago. Heaney marked a major step away from the more obviously romantic poets to poets who seemed more grounded in everyday life. W.B. Yeats had the quality of straddling both worlds. His early, incredibly romantic work followed by his more prophetic, apocalyptic work. Still, with Heaney, I found a poet who engaged me in a constant conversation. Each poem was a kind of search, an examination of life and at the same time witness to life.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
so that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffeings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Heaney's poetry is a dialogue. He speaks to you. Asks you to listen and perhaps even come back with something. His poetry is about life, the celebration of life, the witness of life.

Since that time I have found a great number of poets I enjoy. I think that is how it is, you find a poet and that poet will lead you to so many others - all writers do this, really, or should. Heaney led me to Joseph Brodksy who led me to Anna Akhmatova - "separation is dark and raw", Osip Mandelstam - "the age is a despot with two sleepy apples to see with and a splendid mouth of earth", and Marina Tsvetaeva - "Love is a shrine------or else-----a scar". Oh the Russians! A world of poetry like no other, except like all the others. Like all poets they exist in their world of words, in sounds, in rhythms, in the chains of their songs. They owe allegiance to none - which is why the Russians suffered so much under Stalin. He could not stand their individualism, their defiance. How few made it to old age under his time. Akhmatova alone of the three mentioned above died of natural causes. Mandelstam said "Only in Russia is poetry respected----it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?"

What brought me to this rambling, love letter to poetry (besides the fact that it is April and therefore National Poetry Month) is a conversation I was having with a friend. We were talking about people we have known for whom poetry is a waste of time, a worthless endeavor that brings nothing into your wallet nor gives one any material gain. I guess they do exist. I've listened to them countless times. I hear what they say but I cannot help but dismiss them. They are, after all, ghosts. Spiritless beings condemned to walk the earth and not understand in the least the miseries they are afflicted with. There are no mysteries in their lives, they have nothing that moves them. Their success is measured in material gain, in the size of their bank account, the make of their car, and their place in the heirarchy of their job. All material. As for things of the spirit, Rilke's heirarchies of angels, they simply do not know what he is talking about.

"Poetry is like breathing," says Stafford, "It happens all the time." Poetry is life. Poetry celebrates life. It is life as seen through the prism of another's thoughts, of their process of thinking. Poetry doesn't give answers. It asks questions but the answers are elusive. But in the poetry, in these questions, these perspectives, we find ways of coping, ways of venting, ways of release from all the vicissitudes that life presents us with. Or, as Mary Oliver says in Wild Geese:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Sound of One Hand

2010-03-14T00:57:00.001-05:00

I was never a huge fan of The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the way some people I know are. I liked it fine, found it enjoyable reading and even felt a connection with Holden Caulfield, but it was not my favorite Salinger book nor did I feel its cult-like pull on my psyche. For me, the Salinger books I felt a sense of reverence for were the stories he wrote about the Glass family: Franny and Zooey; Raise High The Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction; and Nine Stories (especially For Esme with Love and Squalor, which isn't a Glass family story but is one I simply hold in especially high regard). Someone once wrote that Salinger loved the Glass family more than God. I never understood the derision. The Glass family was, in my estimation, one of the most real families I've ever read in literature. I wanted to be part of their lives just as I wanted to be a part of the Rostovs in War and Peace. A friend of their inner circle, a beloved member of their family. Quirky and intellectual, opinionated and even pedantic, this family was fascinating for me. They also lived in New York City, something that also filled me with awe. I wanted their lives - or so I thought. When I finally was able to get my own apartment in Greenwich Village I could not but help and think about those stories. Salinger's depiction of New York in those stories was my first taste of NY. I fell in love with the city and life in the city, from these books.

The other thing that Salinger introduced me to was Zen Buddhism, something I followed in a slow, but steady fashion through much of my life. Salinger himself seems to have never stayed with any one religion long, jumping from Zen to Hinduism to Christian Science, on down the line in search of something. But then, given the tenor of most of his writing, he was always in search of something. For me, however, the introduction to Zen was something that stayed with me. I didn't jump right into any practice, I simply flirted, dabbling with books here and there, sort of reading a little and not learning much. I have found it to be the religion that speaks closest to who I am as a person. Salinger's stories had the same effect on me.

When I read that Salinger died on January 27th a part of me felt quite sad and another part of me said that, after all, he was 91 years old. Salinger famously quit publishing in 1965 after his last story, Hapworth 16, 1924, appeared in the New Yorker. However he never quit writing. According to one account he had written at least 15 or so novels before his death. I have to admit, a part of me was thinking how nice it would be to be able to read a new work by Salinger. His life in recluse was genuine, his distaste for fame and acknowledgment seemed equally genuine. In essence he never really left Zen, he began, in his own way, at least in regards to publishing, to live it. One of the Zen koans that is repeated more than any other (usually incorrectly) is "What is the sound of one hand." For Salinger the last 45 years were, in their own way, an attempt to answer that koan.

The No Zen Baggage of Bill Porter

2010-01-09T11:33:00.000-05:00

Since 1983 Bill Porter, who translates under the name Red Pine, has been accumulating an astonishing body of work in Chinese translation. I am reminded of Thomas Cleary, another great translator of eastern texts, when I think about Porter's work. His most recent work is Zen Baggage: a pilgrimage to china (Counterpoint, 2009), a hard to classify book - the dust jacket description calls it travel literature but that hardly encompasses Porter's achievement with this book. It is a weaving of history both modern and ancient, folk tales, personal histories, interviews and philosophy that in the end is more like a tapestry than a book. In 2006 Porter went on a pilgrimage to the main sites associated with the six patriarchs of Zen in China. It is a phsyical and spiritual journey and at the same time a very human journey. Porter speaks in a clear, simple and direct style, sometimes blunt but never without sensitivity or compassion.

Porter gives a wonderful history lesson and speaks equally well about modern China. The interviews with the Buddhist monks and nuns, as well as laypeople who are interested in Zen, or even truck drivers and tea-sellers are delightful and even invigorating. I found myself following Porter as if I were there, lingering over passages the way you might over a certain vista on a trip, and not wanting this journey to end. He has so much knowledge about the history of Zen, about Chinese poets and hermits and Zen masters, and such a graceful, easy way of imparting this knowledge that you feel as if you are sitting at tea in a wonderful conversation - it may be a one-sided conversation but there will be no complaints. Such is the joy of this book. I know that it is a book I will read more than a few times. Porter also has a book on modern day Chinese hermits, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits (Mercury House, 1993) that I plan to read.

Towards the end of the book Porter is handed a photograph by a Buddhist monk named Yi-ch'ao. It is a photo of the monk when he was fourteen years old as a novice monk standing next to the great Zen master Hsu-yun (Empty Cloud). Empty Cloud is legendary for having suffered under Mao but perserving and preserving the practice of Zen in China. Yi-ch'ao writes a poem on the back of the photo:

Layman Red Pine,

When your mind dwells nowhere

no corrupting thoughts arise

when you don't cling to the world

suffering and joy have no place to grow

every thought you think

becomes the cause of life and death

understand impermanence

and find your ever-present body.

Porter recounts staring at the photo and trying to remember what he was doing when he was 14. Towards the end he says:

"There is so much baggage we burden ourselves with over the years that keeps us from seeing things the way they are. Some baggage we carry with us for a single thought, some for years, and some for lifetimes. But there isn't one piece that isn't our creation."

It is such moments as this meeting with Yi-ch'ao and such thoughts as those expressed above by both men that make this book a deeply moving journey of the heart for the reader.

Poetry Translations

I would also recommend Porter's translated work under the name Red Pine. These works are a slowly building treasury of Chinese Zen literature. His translation of poetry has the same clear and direct style as his narration, and his footnotes and commentary on the poems are invaluable.

This is from his The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2000):

I've lived on Cold Mountain now

already a few million years

trusting fate I fled to woods and springs

to linger and gaze where I will

no one comes to the cliffs

white clouds keep them shrouded

fine grass serves as a mattress

blue sky does for a quilt

happy with a rock for a pillow

let Heaven and Earth transform.

Or this from In Such Hard Times: The Poetry of Wei Ying-wu:

Visiting the Ferry in the Western Suburbs Again

Where the river winds I reflect on my travels

a traveler lost in reminiscence again

the moon last night was so lovely

I've come back to see it in the waves

birds won't roost where they feel afraid

or a fragrance spread where it's cold

when will I hold someone's hand again

the flowers overhead look like sleet

Here is passage from The Zen Works of Stonehouse (Mercury House, 1999)

Autumn on the Chin River Road

Everywhere the west wind rains down leaves

chance led me back to Lake Temple's shelter

among those I knew how many remain

of a thousand worldly cares not one of them is real

all of life's turmoil turns out to be a dream

clearly every harvest depends upon the seed

knowing the truth has helped make me free

I've never followed those who harm their minds

Not knowing Chinese I have no idea how well these poems are translated, I only know that the simplicity of style has, for this reader, a breathtakingly astonishing quality. I take each poem slowly, like a cup of tea.

Zen Translations

Last of all I cannot recommend enough Red Pine's translations of some of the significant sutras of Buddhism. The Heart Sutra (Counterpoint, 2004), The Diamond Sutra: The Perfection of Wisdom (Counterpoint, 2001), The Platform Sutra: The Zen Teaching of Hui-Neng (Counterpoint, 2006), and Lao-Tzu's Taoteching (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) are all significant translations with excellent commentary, Pine's as well as a variety of other Zen scholars. Even if you already own other translations of these works you may find these a welcome addition to your library, such is the research and insights offered by Red Pine.

Bill Porter lives modestly off of his royalties as well as the occaisional grant (although, for whatever reason, the Guggenheim translation grant keeps eluding him). He does not complain and seems to have found a simple way to live that allows him to follow his own path without too much trouble. It is a path I join him on, at least as a reader, with great joy.

Kyoto Journal Interview with Bill Porter

Mercury House

Copper Canyon Press

Counterpoint Press

Andre Agassi and the Search for Truth

2009-11-14T13:43:00.001-05:00

"The search for truth is not the search for desire." Albert Camus

"It might not be the perception people want of me and it's not be the perception I want of myself but it is my true self and that's what we're left with. If my story can help one person, let alone millions, who wake up in a life they didn't chose, wake up in a marriage they didn't want, if it can help a teenager about to step into the pitfalls I stepped into – it's an easy price to pay if the price is some judgements, or some loss of reputation or some false image." Andre Agassi in an interview with Michael Donaldson of the Sunday Star Times of New Zealand

"Peace of heart is something you have to fight for every day and it has very little to do with your circumstance." Andre Agassi, ibid

Andre Agassi is a story in two parts. It is a story that Dickens or Dostoevski could have told. The first part is about the boy from childhood up to the realization of what it is to be an adult; the second part is what that man does with that realization. It is a story about character and the building of character, of depths of hell and of redemption. It may seem a bit much to put on a sports figure but it does fit. His story is that amazing.

When Andre first appeared on the tennis scene I did not like him. I didn't like the flash, the dazzle or the whole "image is everything" attitude. I didn't like his hair, his clothes nor his game. I felt his game lacked what he lacked - substance. When he disappeared and dropped to 140 in the world I thought it was a kind of justice for the lack of any integrity in his game and I thought he would disappear like so many other flash-in-the-pans that have littered tennis with their less than substantial brilliance.

When he returned - head shaved, clothing almost monk-like in austerity, attitude so calm, so reserved - I tried at first to ignore it. I wanted to hold on to my prejudice I had for the teenaged boy he was. People rarely change, after all, and when they do isn't it always suspect? Yet, I found myself drawn to this different person. First of all, the boy was gone. Maturity seemed to have settled comfortably within. His game reflected this aspect. He was calmer in matches, determined, resilient - all the things I have admired in other players, were there. I found myself drawn in to this new character and thinking that the shaved head was emblematic of his change - a reverse Samson. Shorn of his locks Agassi was more real - a stronger person.

It is interesting to me that Andre seems to have felt the same way about himself. I watched 60 Minutes last Sunday because I had heard about the startling revelations in Andre's autobiography Open. Crystal-Meth use, drinking, tanking games, hating tennis, a hairpiece, a first marriage he didn't really want - I can't recall a sports figure or celebrity of his stature revealing so many damning and embarrassing things at one time. Andre talks about how much he hated tennis, how his father, abusive and over-bearing, forced his boy to play - even to the point of deliberately missing school. School was a waste of time according to his father. That first Agassi, the image king, hated himself. No wonder he drank, no wonder he treated tennis with such contempt, no wonder he eventually found himself ingesting drugs. "I couldn't feel any worse about myself" he says. Anyone who has ever hit such a low point in their lives knows exactly how this feels.

What is so great about this story is the way in which Andre turned it around. He says in the interview how, when he had reached rock bottom, had been bounced out of the French Open in the first round, his coach gave him an ultimatum - quit or start over - that he reassessed what he wanted. Now a choice was before him, a choice that was his own to make - not his father's, not anyone elses. He chose to embrace his choice and make the most of this choice and to respect and appreciate what this would bring to him everyday. He carved for himself a redemption of his former life.

There has been a lot of condemnation of Andre's revelations. Other players have responded with comments of pity, some of outright anger and disdain (the worst being Navratilova). In the 60 minutes interview Andre answers them in such a beautiful way saying that he would hope for a little more compassion for the person he was at that time, a little more understanding, than anything else. Compassion for this boy who didn't know who he was, who was told what and who he would be by his abusive father, who never had the chance to make the normal kind of choices for his life until he was well into his twenties, who truly had wanted to disappear from life and almost succeeded in doing so. Compassion. What a beautiful thing to ask for.

We often forget that many of these players come to us as teenagers. Their lives are put under such scrutiny and the expectations are that they will be perfect. They have to be because they see daily what happens to those whose lives do not measure up. To make a wrong step is to be on the front page of the papers or the lead story on the evening news. It is an unforgiving world we live in. Andre's actions as a boy, as a young man still discovering who he was and what he wanted, were no different than so many students I deal with everyday. They lie to everyone around them and to themselves, they fear discovery, they want to disappear. They often do not know how to seek help. Andre found a way out of that hole. He clawed his way out and made the choice to use the very thing that put him in that hole to make his life a redemption of that existence.

Andre has handled so much of the response to his revelations with grace and dignity and, yes, compassion. I can't recall the last time I have been so moved by the story of a life. In the Sunday Star Times interview quoted above he goes into greater detail than he did even on 60 minutes. What comes across is a man of great self-reflection and humility who possesses a well-earned wisdom and sense of gratitude. I have even more admiration for him now than I did before the revelations of Open. He is still, very much, a champion.

For me here is the most amazing aspect of this story: now Andre runs the Andre Agassi Foundation For Education. He hasn't devoted his life to tennis - the sport his father pushed on him - but to education, the very thing his father considered worthless. This year was the first graduating class of his academy in Las Vegas - an academy for the poorest kids in Las Vegas. Every student is going on to college. If that is not redemption and justice than neither exists. Andre deserves not only compassion but respect.

A Beggar Rails

2009-10-11T11:32:00.002-04:00

"Well, whiles I'm a beggar, I will rail,
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue than shall be,
To say there is no vice but beggary."
Shakespeare, King John, II, i, The Bastard's speech

It is time to rail. I open the paper every day (perhaps a mistake) and see comments about how we are becoming socialist thanks to this or that government plan, Obama, the Democrats, etc. Usually these comments are made by people who will only give up their own social security or medicare when you pry their governement provided plans from their cold dead fingers. The illogic of so many doesn't make sense. Our country has been a socialist country for a long time now. The recipients of our socialism are the richest among us. Every time a bailout occurs Goldman Sachs gets richer. The tax cuts of the last 30 years have favored the rich. Tea bag protests coming from people who own million dollar beach houses and people who can't even afford to stay one week in that beach house join in the protest worried about a chunk of the pie they will never see. Now that is logic that defies description.

There was a time when people didn't forget where they came from. You hear stories about the old movie stars who were so afraid of ending up being poor again that they would clutch every dollar as if it were their last. Now people spend every dollar as if there is an endless supply coming from some magical well in their back yard. Or the nearest ATM. Pretentions are killing us. We need to get back to the idea that most of us are not and never will be among the elite in terms of wealth and power. Why then should we continue to support taxes and programs that favor that elite? Talk about being bamboozled.

Remember that show Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous? They should bring it back again and call it Lifestyles of What You Will Never Be. That would be a closer reflection to the truth. When you hear about executives in the insurance industry having homes twenty times the size necessary for a family's needs, of having personal zoos, of personal planes and yachts and... Oh hell, you know. You Know! I cannot fathom not only the lack of outrage but the abbetting of manipulation that continues. Barnum said a sucker was born every minute but, as a friend once said to me, at least a sucker is born every minute. We are that nation.

We believe the self-promoting myths of charlatans such as Donald Trump and believe that one day we will be that man (God knows why). We believe that we must protect not our current interests but interests that, more than likely, we will never possess (but just happen to be the interests of 1% of our nation). It's why strikes are not anywhere near as effective as they were a half century ago - the general public has been convinced that the strikers are being selfish. Instead of identifying with the working stiff the public identifies with the corporate execuctive. The Reagan revolution. Guess who wins? We truly do get the country we deserve.

I know, I know, not everyone believes this. There are plenty out there trying to open the eyes of walking dead. Maybe I am being pessimistic. It comes from watching my local newspaper, The Washington Post, once known for bringing down a president, engage in the worst form of ethical behavior in their advocacy of educational reform. It comes from watching how the right continually plays the rest of our country for fools by making the moves of Bush seem as if they have come from Obama and then cry "Socialism!". It comes from watching people who cannot tell that their pockets have just been picked, reaching into their savings and handing more of their money over to the pickpockets.

Yes, I am a beggar railing today. There should be so many more.

A Butterfly Gone

2009-09-21T23:15:00.000-04:00

"Ma. Ma! Mother! Hullo. How are you, old woman? What’s that? You don’t recognize me? Well, well, well. Take a guess (Shakes his head.) No. (Shakes his head.) No. Try again (Shakes his head.) What’s the matter with you, Ma? Don’t you recognize your own son? (Shakes his head violently.) No, no! Not him! It’s me, Zach! (Sweeps off the hat to show his face.) Ja. Zach! Didn’t think I could do it, did you? Well, to tell you the truth, the whole truth so help me God, I got sick of myself and made a change. Him? At home, Ma. Ja. A lonely boy, as you say. A sad story, as I will tell you. He went on the road, Ma, but strange to say, he came back quite white. No tan at all. I don’t recognize him no more. (He sits.) I’ll ask you again, how are you, old woman? I see some signs of wear and tear. (Nodding his head.) That’s true . . . such sorrow . . . tomorrow . . . . Ja . . . it’s cruel . . . it’s callous . . . and your feet as well? Still a bad fit in the shoe? Ai ai ai! Me? (Pause. He struggles.) There’s something I need to know, Ma. You see, we been talking, me and him . . . ja, I talk to him, he says it helps . . . and now we got to know. Whose mother were you really? At the bottom of your heart, where your blood is red with pain, tell me, whom did you really love? No evil feelings, Ma, but, I mean, a man’s got to know. You see, he’s been such a burden as a brother. (Agitation.) Don’t be dumb! Don’t cry! It was just a question! Look! I brought you a present, old soul. (Holds out a hand with the fingers lightly closed.) It’s a butterfly. A real beauty butterfly. We were traveling fast, Ma. We hit them at ninety . . . a whole flock. But one was still alive, and made me think of . . . Mother . . . . So I caught it, myself, for you, remembering what I caught from you. This, old Ma of mine, is gratitude for you, and it proves it, doesn’t it? Some things are only skin-deep, because I got it, here in my hand, I got beauty . . . too . . . haven’t I?" from The Blood Knot by Athol Fugard

Zakes Mokae is gone. I saw him perform in 1985 in Philadelphia. He was playing Zachary in Athol Fugard's Bloodknot. Fugard was playing the pass-as-white brother of Zach, Morrie. I went to the performance on a Sunday night and was mesmerized from beginning to end by the two actors on stage. Two actors who were so completely in synch with each other that they were truly brothers. I came out of that show in a trance, went home and the next day bought tickets for two more perofrmances that week. Each performance, Fugard and Mokae were as great as they were in the first performance. No let up. Extraordinary. Each performance was one of those magical moments in theater when you feel you are watching a high-wire performance. You are taken in by the danger and the grace of the performers in the face of that danger; you are entranced. The spine tingles, the hairs stand on end. You almost hold your breath in anticipation and excitement. In such moments you realize why theater is what it is, not film or tv but of the ethereal world. God, I would give anything to go back in time to that point and relive that performance again!

There are examples of his work on tv and film. He appeared on Monk and West Wing. There are the films, Cry Freedom, A Dry White Season, and there is the filmed stage version of Master Harold and the Boys. The last comes closest to capturing what Zakes Mokae was like as an actor. No film that I can think of came close to doing that. But for me, in my heart, close to the tears, is that performance 14 years ago in Philadelphia. Mokae holding the stage, the audience so quiet you almost didn't know they were there as Zach held his imaginary conversation with his mother, talking about butterflies.

The Idle Educator in a Place of No Greed

2009-08-12T12:50:00.004-04:00

"If you live with the commandment on no greed and face colors, all the blue, yellow, red, and white are sufficient to nourish your eyes; all the pine winds and water purling, like string and pipe music, are sufficient to please your ears." Jiun Sonja (1718-1804), a monk of the Shingon (True Word) school of Buddhism

On the beach reading the poetry of Miyazawa Kenji. The quote above is a note within his own poem, Commandment on No Greed. Kenji mentions the educated idler. I play on that as I am an idle educator waiting for the resuming bustle and noise of a new school year. For now, though, I practice solitude and contemplation. I am an idle educator. The waves are small today. Not big and crashing but small and steady. I enjoy every moment. The sun on my skin, the sand on my feet, on my legs, everywhere. The sounds. The voices, the waves, the birds. I close my eyes lying on the towel and simply listen to all the sounds that lull, lull, lull, like the waves, slowly coming in. "The world is the shadow of a transient, blue dream." From Kenji's unamed poem from 1927. The sky is this poem made manifest. Kenji in my head, in my heart. The words of his time and world a part of this time and world. The small, articulate, concise sense of universal, a recognizable truth.

Kenji is awareness. His writing reflects an attention to the small things that we sometimes do not notice, but should. The feel of the wind. The recollection of the turpentine smell of fresh pine needles in a poem he writes to his dying sister, Pine Needles. The touch of rain on the skin, the touch of nature, everywhere he gives the sense of the leaves quivering in the wind, of the sounds of rain and sunlight, of stars. Raindrops hitting the face. The quiet whispering of moments in a field. Reading him on the beach, feeling him in everything around me, I go for a walk along the shore.

I see the world through the lines of his poems. Or I am simply made more aware of the simple things around me. The pattern the water drying on the sand makes. The bird flying off to my left. This small, deserted area of beach, only a few people here or there. I am open to every sensation and relish each as a sign of living. I enjoy the moment. I watch the small plovers and a few gulls. I feel the sand, sometimes dry and hot, sometimes wet and cool, and enjoy both feelings. I have no complaints. I take each moment with a definite gratitude. I am in a place of no greed. In Spring & Asura Kenji says:

As I breathe the sky anew
lungs contract faintly white
(body, scatter in the dust of the sky)
The top of a ginkgo tree glitters again
the Zypressen darker
sparks of the clouds pour down.

Was it because of experiencing his sisters death so acutely or because his own health was so fragile (dying at 37) that he "sees" the world with such grace and harmony? The sense of what matters most. A sense of the impermanence of everything, of the reciprocal nature of all things, the touch of the sea to the sand to the rock to the grass. The grace of all things around us.

I come across an injured plover. It's left foot drags, bent at an unnatural angle. The bird continues to peck at the sand and run from the waves. It continues impervious to it's irregularly bent claw. It sometimes hops on one leg, sometimes gently leans on the bent angle, and still moves with agility and, oddly enough, grace. This is Kenji walking in the woods of his native Iwate dying of pleurisy, taking in everything and turning it back out with such intense focus. Iwate becomes Ihatov in his writing. He relates to Chekhov, another dying writer. A doctor among people. A doctor who is a writer. William Carlos Williams. Chekhov. The teacher of agriculture, Kenji.

I continue my walk moving towards and along the dunes. Illegal footsteps run into the dunes ignoring the posted signs. Clouds speckle the sky like small brushstrokes of white paint. Clouds figure in so many of Kenji's poems. Entire poems dedicated to clouds. The Prefectural Engineer's Satement Regarding Clouds. You cannot but help when reading Kenji to turn around the very things you have read and feel them in everything you encounter. I look up at the clouds, at the blue sky, at the crowds of people far away gathered in one area of the beach, of the sand, of the birds both on the shore and in the sky, of the sea grass moving in the wind, the kites flying above, and I feel every word he writes as if he is the painter of this world. Or, as Kenji himself wrote:

At the very end of the blue sky,
above the atmospheric strata where even hydrogen is too thin,
there lives a group of eternal, transparent living things
who'd find it too cloying
to think even such thoughts as:
"I am the entirety of this world.
The world is the shadow of a transient, blue dream."

(All quotations from Poets for the Millenium: Miayazawa Kenji Selections, edited by Hiroaki Sato, University of California Press, Berkley, 2007)

A Clean and Well Named Place

2009-08-08T13:46:00.000-04:00

In a small beach town named Hualien, on the central eastern coast of Taiwan, there is a bookshop called Time. It is a place that fulfills that Hemingway requirement of being a clean and well-lighted place. It is a quiet place with tables to sit by a window and read a book, a small counter where tea and other drinks are served, a back reading room for the more serious worker, an upstairs room for book groups and readings, and books. There is a zen-like quiet to the place, a serenity that almost compels you to sit down with a cup of tea and a book and read or write until the place closes. If you click on the sign up left you can go to the owner's blog.

The building itself is one of those old, Japanese colonial houses you find scattered around Taiwan. These are wonderful and beautiful old buildings and the sin is that there are not more buildings with this esthetic in Hualien. Once they were everywhere but now you have to find them scattered throughout the city (although there is one cluster near the temple on the hill called the Japanese Generals' houses which are all together and gives you an idea of what this city must have once looked) often punctuated between a couple of ugly modern structures.

Time sits on a sort of corner and almost seems by itself which enhances its quality. The first time I saw it, as my friend brought me around the corner with a smile on her lips (because she pretty much knew what my reaction would be), I could not help but feel a sense of awe. I prayed that inside it was as perfect as it was outside. It was. When I speak of bookstores being temples Time is the perfect example of that ideal. It didn't matter to me that 99% of the books were in Chinese. I browsed anyway, an illiterate looking at pictures, and enjoyed the ambient feeling of peace. I could sit there for hours and do nothing but read with a cup of tea by one elbow and my notebook and pen by the other. I will do this the next time I am in Hualien.

Time is the perfect name for such a place, for all you want to do there is spend time.

The Burn: Vassily Aksyonov 1932-2009

2009-07-15T23:51:00.001-04:00

"All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: What is the self? How can the self be grasped? It is one of those fundamental questions on which the novel, as novel, is based." Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel

Vassily Pavolovich Aksyonov, one of Russian literature's great explorers of the "enigma of the self" is dead. He died on Monday after a year-long illness. His death hid quietly in the shadows created by the overwhelming light of the Michael Jackson death saga. In Russia many mourned the passing of one of their great writers. In the U.S., where Aksyonov lived in exile for almost 20 years, it was noted in the New York Times and The Washington Post but if you stopped someone on the street and asked them about Aksyonov's death they would not know who you were talking about or why he was important. He did not create any great dance moves or fashionable music. He merely wrote books and taught literature and lived. Lived a life much like the title of his most famous work - he burned with life.

The first book I read by Aksyonov was The Burn. It was 1986 and I remember, quite vividly, reading this on the NYC subway and people near me staring at the cover (the half-naked woman probably drawing their eye). Normally I was quite self-conscious about things that drew attention to me but I was too engrossed in the novel for that to matter to me. The Burn is the novel that caused the Soviet authorities to revoke Aksyonov's citizenship. It is a hyper-realistic, fantastic rendering of life in modern Moscow (late 1970s) following 5 characters - a jazz musician, a writer, a scientist, a doctor, and a sculptor - each of whom share the same middle patrionymic, Apollinarievich, and also the same childhood memory of life in Siberia as the son of parents who have been labeled enemies of the state. Applying Kundera's definition of the novel to The Burn is an interesting experiment. After all, here you have five versions of one person, 5 distinct but essentially linked personalities - it is like following, in one novel, the five possibilites a single live can take under given circumstances. If that is not an examination of self I don't know what is.

I always thought the title, The Burn, was perfect as it describes the level of searing intensity that you feel from this novel, it does not let up on the reader. You wonder through the maze of Moscow with each of these characters who are fueled by alcohol and lust and their tortured memories of childhood. Many of the cultural references I did not get at the time, being unfamiliar with aspects of modern Russian culture, but that didn't matter to me so exhilerating was the reading.

Years later in DC I read Generations of Winter. This novel has a monumental feel to it and has often been described, quite favorably, as a modern War and Peace. It tells the story of one family's fate during the Stalin era and follows them from Stalins rise to power in 1925 (roughly) until his death in 1953 (the first book, Generations of Winter ends in 1945 during the war, the second book, Winter's Hero, continues to 1953 - Winter's Hero is hard to find in the U.S. due to poor sales and publisher apathy). This novel gives a history of Russia for the first half of the 20th century and quite beautifully, and at times magically, conveys the struggles that a normal family had in the complexeties of life under Stalin.

I was given a copy of Metropol by a friend, something I treasure to this day. Metropol was a collection of Russian writing put together by 23 Soviet writers. Among them, Andre Bitov, Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Popov, Vladimir Vysotksy and Aksyonov. This collection was refused publication in the Soviet Union but circulated clandestinely, like much good writing at that time. Eventually it was picked up in the West. Several of the contributors and editors resigned or were expelled from the Writer's Union and Aksyonov found his citizenship revoked (due also to the publication of The Burn in the West). Many of the writers are still not so easy to find in English, like Vysotksy and Popov, so it is a treasure to have this book in my library.

Around this time I decided to re-read The Burn. This time I knew many of the references Aksyonov made, not to mention I had been to many of the places described in the novel, had walked the same streets. One of the things I learned in the second reading was how close The Burn was to Aksyonov's life. Aksyonov's parents were high ranking Soviet officials who were arrested in one of the early purges and sent to different cities in Siberia. Each thought the other had died. Aksyonov's mother was Evgenia Ginsburg. Her memoir of the time in Siberia, Journey Into the Whirlwind, is one of the finest works about the Gulag. Aksyonov's portrayal of his childhood through the character of Tolya von Steinbock is the most moving and tender part of this remarkable novel. It has the raw, vivid feel of painful truth - the hard memories of a boy who is now a writer.

The second aspect of the novel I understood better was Aksyonov's use of his friend, Vladimir Vysotsky. Vysotsky was an actor, poet, and singer. His performances were legendary. His Hamlet was still spoken of with amazing regard a good 20 years after his death. His music was banned during his lifetime, only available through homemade cassettes. Now he is available on cd and heard on the radio. He sang and played the guitar; the singing sounded as if it were ripped from his soul and he strummed the guitar in such a way that you wondered whether there would be anything left of the instrument when he was finished. Vysotksy was married to the Godard actress Marina Vlady and lived, amazing for his time, an almost jet-set life, flying between Paris and Moscow. This, also, is reflected in the book. When I first saw Vysotsky I was entranced. When I re-read The Burn and saw that he was a character, I was delighted.

Recently I began reading The Island of Crimea. This was Aksyonov's fanciful imagining of what would have happened had Crimea been an island instead of a peninsula. Could the White Guard, in their retreat from the Reds during the 1920 Civil War, have made a last stand and held out on this imaginary island much the way Chiang Kai-shek held out on Taiwan? I must quote the whole of his preface here because it gives you an idea of both the beauty of his writing but also the wonderful sense of humor that invested everything Aksyonov wrote.

"Every peninsula fancies itself an island. Conversely, there is no island that does not envy a peninsula. Every Russian schoolboy knows that Crimea is connected to mainland Russia by an isthmus, but not even every adult knows how flimsy an isthmus it is. When a Russian rides along it for the first time and sees it for its narrow, swampy self, he can't quite suppress a seditious "what if."
What if Crimea really were an island? What if, as a result, the White Army had been able to defend Crimea from the Reds in 1920? What if Crimea had developed as a Russian, yet Western, democracy alongside the totalitarian mainland?
The southern coast of Crimea is a subtropic zone protected from the firece Russian winter by a range of mountains. During that winter the mountains are covered with black clouds seemingly fixed in time, while down below the sun is shining. If those isolating, doomful black clouds remind the Westerner of Stanley Kramer's film of On the Beach, the Russian can't help thinking that selfsame seditious "what if."
A month after I completed The Island of Crimea, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. I must admit the invasion was not the only factor that made me wary of submitting the novel to a Soviet publisher. The Soviet authorities maintain a firm and realistic view of geography. They know that the world rests on three whales and two elephants."

I was fortunate to meet Aksyonov once. I told him about reading The Burn for the second time and how delighted I was to not only know who Vysotsky was but to have been able to watch a couple of his movies and see his tv performance when I was in Moscow. Aksyonov immediately started talking about how incredible Vysotsky was as a performer. He mentioned how one of his own students, a young man from Jamaica, had become obssessed with Vysotsky, collecting every recording he could find and learning the songs by heart. He said how incredible the effect that Vysotksy had on people that he could reach across such a different culture and race and still connect. He also talked about their friendship and how much they used to talk with each other whenever they were together. "I still miss him," he said, "even after all these years. I still miss him." The look on Aksyonov's face was wistfull with meloncholy. You could see that the pain of his friend's death was still with him. The same should be said of Aksyonov. We should all miss him.

Solitude

2009-06-20T02:54:00.002-04:00

When I was younger I used to have fantasies about disappearing. Not magically but realistically, disappearing like Richard Kimble, the character in the old tv series (and film) The Fugitive. I used to think it was a great thing he had going. He would just up and leave everything behind - no real possessions to speak of - and take off for the next town, the next promise of a new start. There was something about that idea, something so strong that I used to think I would do the same thing. After all, when you do so you leave behind all the accumulated worries that your life has become. The other choice, and one that has similar appeal to me, is shutting myself away, like a hermit. But then, for all intents and purposes, I have done this. I live by myself in this place, a small apartment nestled in the back of a building, cuddled next to a green area and a wall, almost like a cave. If I don't use the phone no one knows I am here. No one calls unexpectedly - those days are long gone. You don't come here by accident or in passing. I like the idea. It is like being a monk and yet, anytime I wish, I can always step out among the living.

I can sit here and listen to the sounds of my city. Not too far away a group of people are sitting together on their porch, drinking and talking. I hear them every so often. The women are particularly loud, their voices emphatic in what is otherwise the silent evening. If not for them all I would hear would be the chirping or singing of birds, the whirring of insects, the occasional passing of cars. Their voices are loud, though, and sometimes strident. They cry out "Oh God!" or "Yeah, yeah, like that!!" with the rising inflections of schoolgirls and not women. I want to scream back at them, respond to their voices and embarrass them into silence. But I don't. I ignore them and soon the insignificance of what they are saying is matched by my attitude towards them. I am, despite this enjoying my solitude.

I recently watched the film The Station Agent (2003). This film was more like something you would see from Europe or Asia, a simple film about people living their lives. That the main character is a dwarf is really incidental. It is really about a person who wishes to be left alone but life keeps intruding. Life keeps getting in his way. This is what happens with solitude, quite often. Solitude demands that we spend time to ourselves, isolated, able to think without interruption. But life intrudes, demands attention and forces us, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes needfully, out of the cave we place ourselves in. It is not always such a bad thing, this intrusion, anymore than shutting oneself up is necessarily good. Balance is the key, I would guess.

There is a wonderful book of conversations between Thich Nhat Hanh and Daniel Berrigan called The Raft Is Not The Shore: Conversations Toward a Buddhist-Christian Awareness. The book is an incredible collection of conversations between the Buddhist monk and the Jesuit priest held in 1975, just after the Vietnam War had ended and Berrigan had been released from prison (for his involvement in burning draft cards in Catonsville, Maryland). The conversations are stimulating, to say the least, and push one to think deeply about so many questions involving religion and spirituality, faith and commitment.

One of the comments I took away from this book is one made by Nhat Hanh. He says "In order to save the world, each of us has to build a pagoda." He goes on to explain more deeply what he meant.

"There were people who thought that I was urging them to build more pagodas so Buddhism would become a national religion. But this pagoda cannot be built by stones and sticks and things like that, because this pagoda is a sanctuary where you have a chance to be alone and to face yourself, the reality of yourself. If you don't have a pagoda like that to go into each day, several times each day, then you cannot protect the Eucharist, you cannot protect yourself, and you cannot protect the world from destruction." (The Raft Is Not The Shore, Orbis Books, 1975,1982)

I think this idea, of having a sanctuary within oneself in order to contemplate who you are, is a powerful idea. In many respects we do need both the physical as well as the spiritual sanctuary. Sometimes we need that place that helps us to achieve that degree of self-reflection in which we can be honest about ourselves. And yet, at the same time, we need to be able to do this regardless of what location we are in. After all, life does not always afford us such places whenever we need or want them. Better to be able to use any place and delve within for discovery. Much as Finbar McBride in The Station Agent finds his search for solitude constantly interrupted by the people of Newfoundland, New Jersey and yet he finds for himself a richer, more rewarding life and seems to find through these connections the very best kind of solitude, so, too, do we need to carry within us our own pagoda.

I accept this contradiction. This desire and enjoyment of the solitude of my cave and yet the understanding and need for contact with others. I am enriched by both. I hope it makes me a better person. I will hear the voices outside my window not as petty annoyances but as songs being sung. The song of humanity alive and buzzing.

Six Dash Four

2009-06-04T19:31:00.000-04:00

Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground. Mother Earth is calling you, lay your body down.

Stephen Stills

The Chinese governement would like us all to forget this day but I hope that many are thinking about Tainanmen Square today. I remember watching what happened as if it were yesterday. It was impossible to stop watching the news all during May of that year and into June. The images stay with me - the Tank Man, Lady Liberty, the students starving themselves and being carried away unconscious, the people of Beijing rushing out to try and stop the army from moving in on the students - small acts like miracles. I remember the sense of hope felt in discussions with friends during those days. The glimmer of hope that perhaps there could be a peaceful move towards democracy in a country where freedom wasn't known. Our voices held a sense of awe and admiration. These students were truly risking all for what they believed. I cannot remember ever witnessing people putting so much on the line. They were astonishing in their determination. Their Lady Liberty, flattering in its mimicry, was a poem, so remarkable was it to watch it rise.

I have often been disillusioned that nothing much ever happened to China for that day. The outrage never quite matched the enormity of what happened. 20 years later and Beijing gets the Olympics and this very same square is dressed for prime time and made to look as if nothing ever happened. In the Washington Post today there is an article about the different meanings the word "freedom" has for people in China now. One woman says there is too much freedom; another, a 22 year old student says "I am not very interested in democracy or something like that" and then goes on to make a statement galling in its level of selfishness. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised given how history is taught in Beijing. Thank God for Wang Heyan, a journalist, who says: "I believe freedom without democracy is fake freedom. There should be free speech, freedom to publish, a right to march, assemble and organize. Although those freedoms are in the constitution, they cannot be realized in reality."

The Post's article was, in essence, a throwaway. A bone tossed to a memory. The New York Times did a much more comprehensive job. Several articles, an audio memory by Nicholas Kristoff and a photo essay. Whichever way you find to reflect on this day I hope you do so. I teach my students every chance I get that remembering history, remembering the events both good and bad that are part of our history, whether national or world history, is a way of shaping how we view our world, how we come to terms with our world and what choices we make for ourselves in relation to our world. 6/4. Remember.

A Sincere and Delighted Heart

2009-04-25T13:42:00.003-04:00

"The best teachers are not merely the technicians of proficiency; they are also ministers of innocence, practitioners of tender expectations. They stalwartly refuse to see their pupils as so many future economic units for a corporate society, little pint-sized deficits or assets for America's economy, into whom they are expected to pump 'added value,' as the pundits of the education policy arena now declaim. Teachers like these believe that every child who has been entrusted to their care comes into their classroom with inherent value to begin with." Jonathan Kozol, Letters to a Young Teacher

I don't often write about my life as a teacher in this space but a teacher is what I am and teaching often informs much of what I write about on this blog whether it is about film, literature, art or politics. I tend to view everything these days in terms of what part of this thing I am reading, seeing, investigating could I apply to the children I teach? Or how does what I have learned today about my students affect what I am reading, seeing, investigating now? The correlation between everything invests what I do with more significance for me. I am reminded of Robert Coles insightful book The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism, a minister running a volunteer program for the poor says:

"I'm often asked what kinds of lessons we teach our children about the inner city and the people who live there. I answer, Most of our teaching is about ourselves. If we can look at the kind of people we are, and what we're hoping we get from this kind of charity, then we'll stand a better chance of behaving ourselves out there with the people we meet. " (Coles, p. 59)

This idea, that the service one gives is also a form of receiving, is prevalent throughout the book. I have tried to approach my teaching with this in mind (even before I read Coles' book). It keeps me grounded, reminds me of my limitations as a teacher and helps to control the urge to be the one with all the answers. I have been taught a lot from the students I instruct. I once said that being a parent is a truly humbling experience because every day one is confronted with the disparity between how your children see you and the truth, or what you see as the truth, of how you really might be. One can ignore this difference and pretend to be the supermom or dad, the super teacher and become insufferable to others, or one can recognize the difference and try and correct the faults or improve on the limits of our person, striving towards the better angels of our nature and gain a modicum of modesty and compassion towards those we teach.

I am thinking about this because of the ongoing battle (and I find I have to use that word) that is happening in my school system, and many others, regarding reforming our schools. I read a lot of teacher blogs that cover the reform movement, both pro and con. The arguments made on these blogs usually swirl around the talk about what is in the best interests of the children we teach. Some are ardently pro-union, some adamantly anti-union, and some recognize the faults without desiring the abolition of the unions. That's kind of it in a nutshell. Around this idea of pro/anti union blows the winds of ideas that inhabit the reform movement - testing of students, accountability of teachers, restructuring of the school year and, ostensibly, improving the education of our students.

Charter schools factor heavily in many of these arguments. One of the things that I learned in all this blog activity is that the idea of charter schools was strongly embraced by Albert Shanker, the legendary/infamous founder of the United Federation of Teachers and president of the American Federation of Teachers. I find it highly ironic that the man who famously said that he would start worrying about the interests of school children when they started paying union dues advocated for the very thing that has seemed anti-union in so many respects. But then Shanker was a walking contradiction of terms. But despite these contradictions, or despite the disparity between how he may have viewed himself and how others saw him, Shanker wanted charter schools to be models of teacher empowerment, wherein teachers could investigate and experiment with instructional practices that could be vigorously assessed for effectiveness outside the often restrictive bureaucratic regulations that seem to strangle most public schools.

This is a great idea and it is understandable to me why so many are attracted to this particular idea of charter schools. But what, it seems to me, has been lost has been this idea of teacher empowerment. Certainly the people who seem most to champion charter schools do so often at the expense of the idea of unions. Often their denigration of the union comes with a limited knowledge, or a willful disregard, of the history of the labor movement, especially as it concerns teachers and the kind of treatment teachers have been subjected to, even after unions were formed. To some extent it reminds me of an employer I once had, a person who could be quite unfair in their treatment of employees and, when their behavior was pointed out, used to sneer "What are they complaining about? They have a job don't they?!"

It is not surprising that several charter schools in New York and California have decided to unionize. When I read the articles in the NY Times and the LA Times that chronicled the situation and the feelings and thinking of the teachers who decided to take this step I saw the same problem being identified - teachers being disregarded for their input, being told to, basically, shut up and teach and leave the real thinking to those that know better. I would like to say that most charter schools are paradigms of teacher empowerment but, unfortunately, the more I read and hear the more I am disappointed in this hope.

Certainly our public schools are no better in this example. In some districts teachers are not only told what to teach in terms of curriculum but even what to say, working off a script like some automaton that doesn't have the sense or ability to figure out what to use for lessons nor how to present the material. It is almost ironic that our nation talks so much these days about democracy and freedom, and we as teachers are supposed to not only teach this but demonstrate how democracy works to our students, and yet so many in the reform movement seem to feel that teachers do not need to have a seat at the table when discussing how education can work at their schools or even to make decisions concerning their classroom. This comes with the easy scapegoating that occurs, the blaming of teachers for the failure that really belongs to our society.

Paolo Freire talked about "redirecting our educational practice toward the goal of an authentic democracy" in his book Education for Critical Consiousness. He says:

"I was convinced that the Brazilian people could learn social and political responsibility only by experiencing that responsibility, through intervention in the destiny of their children's schools, in the destinies of their trade unions and places of employment through associations, clubs, and councils, and in the life of their neighborhoods, churches, and rural communities by actively participating in associations, clubs, and charitable societies.

They could be helped to learn democracy through the exercise of democracy; for that knowledge, above all others, can only be assimilated experientially. More often than not, we have attempted to transfer that knowledge to the people verbally, as if we could give lessons in democracy while regarding popular participation in the excercise of power as "absurd and immoral." We lacked --and needed--sufficient courage to discuss with the common man his right to that participation. Nothing threatened the correct development of popular emergence more than an educational practice which failed to offer opportunities for the analysis and debate of problems, or for genuine participation; one which not only did not identify with the trend toward democratization but reinforced our lack of democratic experience." (Emphasis mine)

"Those who can't do, teach." I actually had this quote thrown at me by one of my students quite recently. He misunderstood, in a generous way, the definition of the phrase. He thought it meant that when athletes become old they can no longer perform so they become teachers of their sport. I explained how that phrase is used by many in our society as a way to say that teachers are incapable of success in other walks of life so they are left with teaching. I said that this phrase goes hand-in-hand with that old chestnut "If you're so smart why aren't you rich?!" There has always been a very open lack of respect for teachers in our society. Oh, we talk about the importance of education and how important it is to have good teachers but listen to the talk out there, look at the comments on articles about education on the website for the Washington Post, or any newspaper for that matter, listen to the callers on talk radio. The denigration, disrespect and utter disregard for teachers is pretty powerful.

In all the talk about doing what is best for the children one important fact gets lost: that we cannot do best for our children if we do not do best for our teachers. It is a two way street that involves treating everyone with the respect, consideration and compassion that they deserve. I said once, on a comment on another blog, that when so much is thrown out about how terrible our teachers are, that over half our workforce needs to go, that the problem with our educational system lies with the teachers, that these remarks or held beliefs reflect on all the teachers in our system. It's not as if we can wear a sign that says "They don't mean me." Low moral and bitterness sets in and everyone suffers - especially the children.

What needs to happen involves true leadership. Not the leadership of "waning statesmen and chinless kings" (to quote Don DeLillo), not the leadership of benevolent dictators (those that prefer to decide what is best for the rest of us because "they know better, trust us"), but true leadership wherein the leader meets with the very people they wish to lead - the parents and the teachers and, in the case of high school, the students - hear what is said, listen to suggestions and formulate a plan that makes everyone feel invested in the outcome.

Teachers especially need to be heard. Why more-so than others? Because we are the ones who spend 6 hours a day with the future citizens of our country. I prefer the positive presumption by Jonathan Kozol, quoted above, that we are the "practitioners of tender expectations" and that when I say teacher I don't need to say to anyone that "of course I mean the good teachers". When people refer to the medical profession by and large they do not do so in such a derisive manner as they do with teachers despite the existence of charletons and quacks that operate under the banner of a medical degree. Give us the respect we deserve and the "genuine participation" that our positions as teachers in our communities demands.

To our respective leaders I leave this quote of Mencius (4th century B.C.E., Confucian sage):

"To pretend force is Humanity - that is the mark of a tyrant, and a tryant needs a large country. To practice Humanity through integrity - that's the mark of a true emperor, and a true emperor doesn't need a large country... If you use force to gain the people's submission, it isn't a submission of the heart. It's only a submission of the weak to the strong. But if you use Integrity to gain the people's submission, it's a submission of the sincere and delighted heart."

Mr. Stewart Goes to Washington

2009-03-15T00:00:00.003-04:00

"I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine. All you people don't know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for. And he fought for them once, for the only reason any man ever fights for them. Because of just one plain, simple rule: "Love thy neighbor."

And in this world today full of hatred, a man who knows that one rule has a great trust. You know that rule, Mr. Paine. And I loved you for it -- just as my father did. And you know that you fight for the lost causes harder than for any others. Yes, you even die for them -- like a man we both knew, Mr. Paine." Jimmy Stewart as Jefferson Smith in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington

"You know, so much of the time we're just lost. We say, "Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what is true."

I mean there is no justice. The rich win; the poor are powerless. We become tired of hearing people lie. And after a time we become dead, a little dead. We think of ourselves as victims -- and we become victims. We become weak; we doubt ourselves; we doubt our beliefs; we doubt our institutions; and we doubt the law." Paul Newman as Frank Galvin in The Verdict

"I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!" Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network!

One of my all-time favorite movies is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington by Frank Capra. Yes it is hokey as hell but I love it none-the-less. I love the idea of the everyday guy, the common man, who takes it to the ones in power and turns things around for the little guy. I love the filibuster scene where Stewart holds the senate floor in an unrelenting display of bravado and determination. And I love that he is willing to fight to the point of utter exhaustion for what he believes. People sometime laugh when they hear that I love this movie so and that I love the very character of Jefferson Smith in all his hokey naivetee. I don't give a damn. I'll take one Jeff Smith to a thousand of your savvy Senators and men of means. We could use a few like Smith right now.

Thursday night, as almost everybody knows, Jon Stewart lambasted Jim Cramer, from CNBC's Mad Money, with a grilling that asked some of the toughest questions I have seen any interveiwer ask in a long time. I don't need to rehash the interview, here it is, you should see it if you haven't already. The Washington Post this morning had an article on the interview on the front page below the fold. They portray Stewart as a truth teller, a man unafraid to speak truth to power, the man who "punctures the balloons of the powerful with a cuastic candor that reporters cannot muster."

To me that last statement is the one the writer of the article should have been following. Why aren't reporters able to muster the same kind of caustic candor? Or hell, why can't they just ask the tough questions?
What has happened to the fourth estate? I think Stewart has a pretty good idea - they have become too cosy with the people they are supposed to be covering. "Who's side are you on?" he asked Cramer. There was a time, albeit brief, when reporters saw themselves as one of the people. But at some point they stopped afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted and somehow reversed the order. Perhaps this is really the reason newspapers are failing so miserably right now, not just from the internet but because newspapers lost the reason for their being - that they should be the fourth wall in the process of our governement, the ones who would hold our institutions, our leaders accountable for their actions, the ones who ask the questions with caustic candor. They did not do this during the run-up to the Iraq war and they did not do this during the entire time the money was flying fast and free leading up to where we are now. There were a few reporters who tried to sound warning bells, Steven Pearlstein and Gretchen Morgenson were notably mentioned by the Post, but what good are a few when every newspaper in the country and CNBC and every would-be business reporter is telling the world that the money will never stop rolling in and we should all get on the gravy train now or be forever lost?

Reporters, at least in the mainstream press and tv, have stopped doing what they were meant to do and they have ceded the ground to Stewart. I watched that interview with amazement. With each question I thought, finally, someone is doing what should have been done long ago. So, a comedian has the temerity to speak truth to power and demand answers. God bless him. I was worrying that the demise of so many newspapers would be a kind of small disaster for our country. That there would be no one that could take up the fights, the lost causes, that need to be fought. Our newspapers are owned by some of the wealthiest men in the world, our TV stations as well - in some cases the same guy owns one of each. Perhaps, over time, reporters forgot what they were really meant to be doing - demanding answers, investigating the very people whose decisions and actions have such extraordinary effect on all our lives. If they are a little embarrassed that a comedian is doing their job for them, well... they should be.

The Ogre Inside Us All

2009-03-08T15:58:00.005-04:00

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing. Use the pain as fuel, as a reminder of your strength.” August Wilson

"If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster” Friedrich Nietzsche

In a recent post at Standards and Stems, a blog by a DC teacher that I am coming to have increasing respect for, the question was asked “do we create monsters out of people who aren’t?” Given the tenor of the times we live in where people are demonized so easily and their humanity denied so forcefully I think this is such an important question. The doubt shown in this question is an essential quality missing in much of our dialogue these days – whether about our communities, our country, our schools or, especially, our selves. So much of what is said is spoken with the absolute certainty of conviction that one would think the speaker encountered a burning bush and was given stone tablets to deliver to the rest of us.

It’s not that I think there are no ogres to battle with. I do. There are ogres among us. These are people who have buried their humanity beneath piles of self-contempt and anger, of insecurities and denial, of frustration and thwarted ambition or love to such an extent that seeing the human being is an impossible task. We meet these people and their behavior has reached such a point and is so deplorable that the easiest thing for us to do is to cry “Monster”! But what good is it really for us to turn these people into monsters? What end does it serve? If they are a monster than the only way forward is in their defeat, their destruction. How can there be any compromise? Any resolutions? Any opportunity to help the person to change or for ourselves to change?

In his book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote:

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all. Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, to desire the truth. (I still dare to speak of man as “an intelligent being”!) but actually, what we desire is not “the truth” so much as “to be in the right.” To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us, but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature. What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices, our limitations, and our selfishness. This is not “the truth.” It is only an argument strong enough to prove us “right.” And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong? Because we need them to be wrong. For if they are wrong, and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned. We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as “truth.” What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved “right,” and our iniquity be vindicated as “just.” This is what we have done to pervert our natural, instinctive appetite for truth.

No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war! And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us. Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie, and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.” (Truth and Violence: an Interesting Era, p. 78 from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Image Books, 1989)

I don’t think Merton is suggesting that there is never a time when you can be right in any argument, merely that when we demonize others in an attempt to prove our argument we often have lost sight of the truth. We want so badly for ourselves to be correct that we see any attempt at argument as being a refutation of what we are saying. We don’t take apart our belief in something; examine it, testing the strength of our belief because we are afraid that it may be more fragile than we could possibly want. “The search for truth is not the search for desire” says Albert Camus. In other words what we want is not necessarily what we need.

Another quote I have often used on this site is from Ibsen, “To live is to war with trolls.” I used to keep this quote posted near the desk of every place I have ever worked. I kind of mantra as if I were some knight errant going off to battle the dragons. I wrote about the transformation of my view of this quote here back in 2006 when I was working under an administrator who was causing me much duress. I often denied that person had a heart; I was so used to demonizing her and making her the reason for the terrible state of the universe of that school. I don’t think I was completely wrong in feeling that she was the source of those problems but I do think that I was wrong in making of her such a monster. I allowed my anger, both my anger at myself and my anger with her actions, to create a monster out of a human being. I became as much a monster as I felt she was simply by denying her the barest modicum of respect for her humanity. Even if her arguments or observations were correct I could not see them as so simply because monsters can never be correct.

We do the same thing when we place people on pedestals. We deify them to such an extent that every action they take has a good, valid reason behind each action and we cease to examine these actions in any kind of critical, helpful light. Conversely, this same person will be demonized by others and every action they take is a product of evil thought and intention and any validity their action or argument may have is lost as well. Adherents and detractors are born and suddenly we have a cult of personality. This is true everywhere, whether the office or the schoolyard, whether a football team or a political party. We have it in our schools in DC with some of our colleagues, our principals and, most notably, with our Chancellor. We all lose when we allow someone to become some kind of paranormal being – a god, essentially. We stop listening to arguments and ideas and instead allow our feelings for this person to rule our mentality. Julio Cortazar’s last line from We Love Glenda So Much should be remembered here: “One does not get down from the cross alive.”

I will refer again, at the risk of being perhaps too self-referential, to another post I made two years ago. In this post I was wrestling with the concept of how we live inside the hearts of the people we encounter in our lives. I was spurred by this quote from Albert Camus:

"When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him; and you are torn by the thought of the unhappiness and night you cast, by the mere fact of living, in the hearts you encounter."
Albert Camus from Summer in Algiers

We need to remember the humanity of those we encounter, physically or mentally, in our daily life. We need to listen to the heart that beats beneath the skin and never forget that there is a heart there, no matter how damaged or atrophied we may feel that heart to be. We must not let our own hearts be demeaned or lessened by the frustrations we encounter when we feel we are dealing with an unreasonable or even malicious person. We must remember the potential that exists within each of us to be a monster or god in our own right. Rather than allowing that instead let us look for the humanity in ourselves as well as in others. Again, to quote Camus, “blessed are the hearts that bend, they shall never be broken.”

In Praise of Books and Independence

2009-02-14T22:57:00.000-05:00

When I was just out of college and still living at home trying to save my money for the big move to NYC, I used to travel to the Big A for daytrips. Sometimes I would drive, sometimes I would take the train. I would do many, many things - sight see, shop, go to great restaurants - but I always ended my trip with a visit to the Scribner's & Brothers Bookshop on Fifth Avenue. This was the bookstore for the publisher who famously published Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe in the 1920s, among many others. I loved the fact that I was walking the floor and shopping from shelves where these writers had been. I never left the store without a bag of books. Part of the joy was getting titles I didn't often see in my own hometown but part of it was definitely shopping in Scribners. I still have one of their old paper shopping bags, reluctant to part with this relic of my passion. I love books.

If there is one thing I have never been able to deny myself it is the purchase of a book. It doesn't matter where I buy it - in a store, at a garage sale, on the street as it lays on some homeless guy's carpet - if the book interests me (and so many do) I will plunk down the change for that object. I can often remember where I purchased a particular book, as if the time and place were included in the reading. My edition of John Richardson's Picasso biography, volume 1, I bought from a street vendor in front of the Fale's Library at NYU on 4th street. My first edition copies of We Love Glenda So Much and Change of Light by Julio Cortazar that I bought at Griffin's Rare and Used Books at 81st and Broadway in New York (is it still there? I hope so but don't think it is). So often the book is tied to me to a time and a place, to smells and sounds, to the very fabric of my life's history.

Larry McMurtry has a memoir simply entitled books which deals with this passion. I haven't read it yet but plan to. I saw it in my favorite bookstore in Washington, DC - Bridge Street Books. This tiny but amazing bookstore is a gem for bibliophiles. The selection of titles is astonishing and makes me feel as if the buyers for this store had somehow found their way into the hardwire of my brain and found the titles that would make me browse for hours, lost in the joy, desire and temptation to buy every title. I have never walked in that I didn't buy a book. I could easily buy three or four. Recently I came out with Miyazawa Kenji: Selections, a book from the Poets for the Millennium series, Snow Part by Paul Celan, and The Chieko Poems by Takamura Kotaro. If you get the chance stop by this shop located so nicely on M street right next to the bridge as you enter Georgetown. Click the link on the store name to see their website. I've also included their blog on my bloglist.

For myself I have always found bookstores to be the cathedrals of my soul. I enter them with the same reverence one usually leaves for the church. Nothing offends me more than a bookstore that hasn't made of its space a place that acknowledges the importance of books and gives a sense of worship about books. Right around the corner from Bridge Street Books is a used bookstore that has always had this feel - Bartelby's Books. Bartelby's current location is nice but I loved the location they had on M street several years earlier, when they were above the hair salon. I remember seeing a first edition of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch that I still wish I had bought at the time (drat!). Their current location is still quite lovely and the place continues to have that great feeling of people who love books. Bartelby's was once used in an episode of The West Wing, the Christmas episode where Jed Bartlett goes bookshopping.

Another great place is Idle Time Books on 18th Street in Adams Morgan. A very nice selection of used books on two floors. The place is comfortable and makes you feel like sitting down, on the stairs or in one of the many chairs located on either floor, to read for hours.

When I lived in New York City there were many wonderful shops - Coliseum Books (this great store closed in 2007, so sad), Books & Co., Burlington Books, Endicott Books, Scribners Bookstore, Shakespeare and Co., The Gotham Book Mart, the Strand, Astor Place Books, St. Mark's Bookshop, Spring Street Books and so many used places. So few of them are left - I think only St. Mark's, Shakespeare, the Strand and Gotham - that NY can seem like a ghost-town for me. There are, of course, the Borders and the Barnes and Nobles. But honestly, these places are without soul, the books are put on the shelves like so much canned goods, the employees hardly seem to ever look beyond the title.

If you are ever near West Chester, Pennsylvania, on route 100, there is the most unique bookstore of all. Baldwin's BookBarn has been selling books since 1946 when the owners moved their books and collectibles business into the 1822 barn. It is huge and each of the five floors are filled with books. They specialize in American History but everything, and I do mean everything can be found there. It is very easy to walk into the store at 10 in the morning and not leave until they close at 6. It is definitely worth a road trip. Use whatever excuse you need.

These are, of course, indpendent bookstores and in my mind that is really the only kind there is. The idea of homogenization of a place for books seems anathema to what books, and the stores that sell them, should be about - the challenge of the mind to think and see the world from many perspectives. There are many independent stores, as well, that I have not mentioned. These stores get more than their fair share of the indepenent bookseller spotlight. I wanted to talk about smaller, rarer gems.

The Literary Wolf Part II: Don DeLillo

2009-01-24T10:37:00.084-05:00

American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous. Don DeLillo

I remember back in 1986, when I lived in New York City, reading about the 48th Congress of International Pen held in Manhattan (I should have gone to one of the presentations but I was a terrible attendee to events in those days). The writers who attended was a list that is legendary. Norman Mailer was President and the symposium was titled The Writer's Imagination and the Imagination of the State. Attending were a list of Nobel and future Nobel Prize winning authors: Gunter Grass, Salmun Rushdie, Czeslaw Milosz, Toni Morrison, Joseph Brodsky, Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Grace Paley, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mario Vargas Llosa, Wole Soyinka, Susan Sontag, John Irving, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Kurt Vonnegut and the list went on and on. It was powerful. It was contentious. It was a hell of a lot of fun simply to read about. Salmun Rushdie did write a wonderful article in the New York Times describing it. Words flew like enraged birds, accusations, denunciations, harangues, demands, proclamations and on and on. At one point John Updike (who died as I was writing this blog) compared the American writer to the blue mailboxes found in rural America, waiting to exchange their ideas. This last was the thing I remembered most because I thought at the time that this was an incredibly boring way to view writing and the exchange of ideas. It reminded me a bit of Matisse's famous statement about wanting art to be like a comfortable chair.

Don DeLillo was not at this conference. His novel White Noise had been released the previous year and had won the National Book Award. A typically hilarious, vicious send-up of American Academic thinking, the tv media and American life in general, DeLillo was anything but a quiet blue mailbox waiting by the side of the road. He was a bomb thrower.

In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society
that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of
terror may be the only meaningful act. Don DeLillo

DeLillo was raked over the coals by conservative literary critics when he made this last quote, but they missed the point, decidely focusing on the fact that DeLillo dared call terror a meaningful act. I think the quote speaks very strongly to his own work. Whether End Zone, Great Jones Street, The Names, Mao II, or Underworld, or really any of his other work, terror has always been haunting the edges of the page, sometimes between the words, sometimes openly so. I think, also, what they may have not liked was DeLillo's association of terror with those in power as well.

I won't review the books. That has been done extensively elsewhere. I will give a few fleeting impressions of what I took away from these books. As well, I will not look at every book he has done. Simply the ones I remember and liked the most or which had the most lasting effect on me.

Great Jones Street

Bucky Wunderlick and his loft on Great Jones Street in NYC. That street in NY, as I remember it, dark and cobbly and mysterious. The loft, the feeling of all that space. A loft when they were still pretty much former factory floors and not really living spaces. His quietly soft and sexy girlfriend Opal, his crazy writer neighbor and Transparanoia - the corporation formed by his band. The opening sentence "Fame requires every form of excess." The humor, vicious.

The Names

Still my favorite of all of his work. Greece, the sunlight, the blue waters, the heat. DeLillo said an interview he tried to capture through language what he felt from the Greek landscape. The mystery of the serial killings. The filmaker Frank Volterra (who I thought, simply from a feeling, nothing concrete, was based on Francis Ford Coppola). The CIA. The feeling of quiet, of anger, of aridity. The wonderful line about how, if America is the world's myth, the CIA is America's myth. These are the things that stay with me.

End Zone

One word - funny. The idea of football equals war is nothing new but the humor that DeLillo brings to the idea is what makes it so original and fun. Gary Harkness, a kind of career college quarterback, too intellectual for the game but loves it. The coach they call the Hauptfuherer. The philosophical dialogue about the football being aware that it is a football in a game aware of its own footballness. The idea of men of destiny sitting up late at night, having piercing eyes and never being found in phone booths. I open this book at random and find something funny every time.

White Noise

The one most people have read. Still, don't let that stop you. The airborn toxic event. Jack Gladney, the professor of Hitler studies who speaks no German, making his way through his career like an illiterate relying on others. Mass hysteria from the ideas of impending calamity. Stores emptied of products due to coming snowstorms. DeLillo gets under the craziness that comes with the tabloids in the supermarket, the groundless fears and phobias, the endless diets and health plans that provide us with a false sense of control. A feeling of modern life out of control but no one knows it yet.

Underworld

Brilliant. The sense of time scattered over decades - the 50s with the famous Giants vs. Dodgers game with Ralph Branca pitching to Bobby Thomson while Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleeson and J. Edgar Hoover look on from their box seats. The weave through time, the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. Klara Sax, the artist, an amazing character we see as a young, viril woman and later as an aged, Georgia O'Keefe figure. The sense of menace. The highway shooter. A famous baseball's journey. Our world encompassed in tiny, delicate details. Brilliance.

There are many, many other books that I won't go into here. Ratner's Star, Mao II, Running Dogs, Libra and the more recent work. Any book of his is worth the read. I spoke of the ones that touched me the most. DeLillo astounded me the first time I read him. He astounds me with each successive reading. As with Bulgakov he is a wolf. As with Bulgakov, DeLillo is an unlawful phenomenon.

The Literary Wolf Part 1

2009-01-22T22:36:00.010-05:00

The Literary Wolf

The best writers, to my mind, are like wolves: they skirt along the edges of society picking out the fattest among us, the most spoiled, the most overindulged, and they make a meal of it for the rest of us to enjoy. Mikhail Bulgakov and Don Delillo are such wolves. This isn't a comprehensive examination of their work, merely an appreciation. Click on a bookcover to see available editions at Amazon. Other links will take you to informative pages about each writer.

Mikhail Bulgakov

"In the broad field of Russian letters in the USSR I was the one and only literary wolf. I was advised to dye my fur. Absurd advice. You can dye a wolf, clip a wolf ---- he still doesn't look like a poodle." Mikhail Bulgakov letter to Joseph Stalin, May 30th, 1931

Bulgakov never hid behind the dyed fur of a poodle. In his life, in his work he showed the bristly, silvery hairs of the wolf he knew himself to be. Denied the ability to publish, teased by having his plays rehearsed but never given an opening night, he responded by writing a novel at once brilliant, beautiful, caustic, cynical and romantic beyond compare.

The Master and Margarita starts off as easy as can be. Simple almost, effortless. Two men discussing whether Christ actually existed. Then they meet a third. A stranger who tells them not only that Christ did exist but he, the stranger, was there. Then you are pulled into the second layer of the novel, the novel within the novel, the Christ novel written by the Master. The voice grabs you instantly. It is the powerful voice of the omniscient narrator, a voice that commands respect, that doesn't let you look away. It is sublime. Alternating between the chapters of 20th century Moscow with the year of Christ's death, Bulgakov makes the most unexpected combination work - a story of satire about the state of Russia under communism, a heartfelt love story about a Margarita's faith in her love and her lover, the Master and the Master's story of the relationship of Pilate and Christ - a novel that, because no one will publish it, has driven the Master to a nervous breakdown. A friend once said to me that it is the ultimate story of good and evil and the necessity of evil in order for there to be any good. "Manuscripts don't burn." Says the devil to the Master. This proved to be prophetic of Bulgakov. His manuscript of The Master and Margarita confiscated by the secret police, was discovered in their archives after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Bulgakov's other novels and short stories don't get quite as much attention, and definitely not as much adoration, as The Master and Margarita. But his isn't a case of a one-trick pony. These other works, written as a one time shot by any other writer would still be worth their place on the library shelf.

The White Guard

"Great and terrible was the year of our Lord 1918, of the Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth, its winter with snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shephards' start, eventide Venus; and Mars -- quivering, red." The White Guard

This opening sentence is one of the loveliest I have ever read. I often simply open the book to read this and marvel at how adroitly, artfully Bulgakov brings us in. A year of extremes, of love, of war. The story is about one family, the Turbins, in Kiev during the 72 days in 1921 that the Ukraine was caught between the Germans on one side, the fleeing Whites from Russia and the oncoming Reds. The government was functioning under the illusion of autonomy but their leader, called the Hetman, was really just a puppet for the Germans. It is one of the finest books about war, revolution and love that one can read. In its own way it is a kind of more intense War and Peace with more war than peace and happening over a shorter time span. But Bulgakov's depicition of this family, of their lives, their loves, their thoughts is equal to Tolstoy so vivid will this family remain in your mind's imagination.

Heart of a Dog

Easily the most strange of all Bulgakov's work. Professor Fillip Fillipovich Preobrazhensky inplants the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into Sharik, a stray dog. As the dog becomes a man, takes on the wonderful name of Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, becomes a member of the apartment board and gets a job on the Moscow Cleansing Department getting rid of cats, the Professor watches his life become hell. As a satire it is perfect. Bulgakov shows the corruptness of the Soviet system and the greed and avarice of human beings in general. Slim, compared to his other books, but powerful.

A Country Doctor's Notebook

In 1916 - 1917, just before and then during the revolution, Bulgakov worked as a doctor in the northwest Russian countryside - "32 miles from the nearest electric light." The stories are atmospheric, describing winter snowstorms, the night, the frigid cold and the entire landscape in a way that almost feels more like Chekhov's Russia than Revolutionary Russia. The stories are dramatic, humorous, scary and even, with the story Morphine, hallucinogenic (Bulgakov was addicted to Morphine during this time). I remember reading these stories while living in Moscow during the winter. A marvelous experience. But I have read it again since and enjoyed it equally and didn't miss Russia in the winter one bit so vivid does Bulgakov make his descriptions. With this book, with each book by Bulgakov, I realize how extraordinary he is as a writer.

Black Snow

Often called his "theatrical novel", Black Snow was unfinished when finally published. It is a highly satirical account of Bulgakov's time working at the Moscow Art Theater under Stanislavski as a writer and dramaturgue for the company. Bulgakov acquired the job throught he intercession of Stalin after Bulgakov had written Stalin that he wanted to emigrate because he could not make a living. The book's humor is dark, at times bitterly so, and yet it has such a degree of out and out hilarity that I often found myself laughing out loud. It helps, also, to know the history of Stanislavski, the Moscow Art Theater and the style of acting known as The Method because Bulgakov's rendering of all of this is so well done. I was reminded of Chekhov's letters wherein he would complain about Stanislavski, his "method" and how Chekhov's plays were being ruined. Bulgakov's depiction of the feuding theater directors - Stanislavski and his partner Nemirovich-Danchenko - his depiction of Stanislavski's phobias (for instance not wanting a gun to be shot on stage because of the effect this once had on a member of the audience in the past - presumably referring Chekhov's Uncle Vanya) and the crazy politics and co-opting that Bulgakov had to partake of as a member of the company. Unfinished as it is it is the novel is ample proof of Bulgakov's ability to skewer the people in power by his depiction of the mentality that prevailed during that time period.

There are other books and stories, notably The Fatal Eggs, Diaboliad, as well as a book of his plays. However the books mentioned above are the books I have enjoyed the most and return to again and again for the sheer enjoyment and beauty they offer. At a dinner party given by the writer Vikenty Veresayev Boris Pasternak wanted to give a toast to Bulgakov. The hostess jumped in and said they should toast Veresayev first. Pasternak is quoted by Bulgakov's wife, Yelena, as saying, "No, I want to drink to Bulgakov. Veresayev is a great man , of course, but he is a lawful phenomenon, Whereas Bulgakov is unlawful." (Manuscripts Don't Burn: Mikhail Bulgakov, A Life in Letters and Diaries by J.A.E. Curtis, Bloomsbury, 1991)

Part II: Don Delillo next post

The Content of Our Character

2009-01-20T15:58:00.000-05:00

I walked down to the National Mall today. All along the way the streets were quiet, still, as if a set for some movie about the last man on earth. The closer I got to the mall the more people appeared until, on the mall, it was a sea of humanity. To say this day was historic is to understate what this day really was. It was transcendent. It was astonishing. It was, in the true sense of the word, awesome - inspiring a sense of awe, of almost shocked silence, of reverence. Everywhere I went people were smiling and laughing and seeming so at ease, so relaxed. Our new president is official. He has sworn the oath, given his speech, made the parade and hangs up his scarf in the White House.

I have always been proud about being American. Even in our darkest periods, when our actions strayed so very far from our ideals, I kept my pride. My pride, my patriotism is not of the jingoistic variety. I do not believe in the phrase my country right or wrong or put much faith in the symbols. I believe and put my faith in the ideals of my country. These ideals, formulated 232 years ago, by a flawed but idealist group of men, codified into a Bill of Rights, and made into laws that help us live the way we should, are what has made us so very different from other democracies. Martin Luther King, Jr. called it a promissory note and demanded that it be paid. Today was a big step in regards to that payment.

I remember teaching English in an Eastern bloc country many years ago, just after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was around the time of the first democratic elections in this country. They had lived under a communist dictatorship for almost 75 years. I remember the young people I was teaching telling me how nothing would change, that their vote did not matter, that their leaders would do as they wish and the people would follow like sheep. These were their words. They had no faith because there was nothing to base their faith on. Their country had never known honest elections. I tried to explain to them how democracy works and how they must believe that they could make a difference but it was useless. In a country so long used to being without the basic freedoms that we enjoy the idea that one person can change things doesn't go very far. Barak Obamas have no chance in such a place.

You see, this is what I love about the United States, that every so often, and sometimes when the light seems most dim, we make good on the promise of the ideas that formed our country. Every child knows the lines from King's I Have a Dream speech, the one that demands "judge me by the content of my character, not the color of my skin." Today we saw a man who was given that very fundamental right sworn in as President of the United States. By living up to King's demand we also showed the content of our character as a nation. In such moments we show the rest of the world, in the best ways possible, and in ways so much better than we have tried to show these last eight years, how our country can live up to its ideals and deliver on its promises. We show what is best in ourselves. We demonstrate democracy.

Practical Politics Part Two: Wang Bingzhang and Freedom

2009-01-11T12:52:00.000-05:00

As usually happens to me I was starting a rather long blog on two literary figures and came across a compelling article in today's Washington Post about the Chinese political prisoner Wang Bingzhang. Written by his daughter, Ti-Anna Wang, a young college student named after the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, the article is a plea for the release of her father who has been held, illegally, by the Chinese government since June 2002. Dr. Wang was one of the founders of the Chinese overseas democracy movement. He believes that China deserves a true democracy and has been unstinting in his work towards that goal. Kidnapped in Vietnam, near the Chinese border, by the Chinese secret service, he has been held in prison for seven years. Ti-Anna Wang's eloquent argument for both his release and the values of freedom and democracy can be found here: Fighting for My Father's Freedom. The website about her father can be found here: wangbangzhing.com There is a campaign to send Dr. Wang a birthday card. Send one. Let him know that the world outside is aware and that we support his efforts. It is in the actions and sacrifice of such people as Dr. Wang and his daughter that we see what freedom can truly mean and be and also what the cost for freedom sometimes is. Let us hope and work for his release.

January 1, 2009

2008-12-31T18:08:00.002-05:00

Another year passes. I almost think about that old coal mining song "Another year older and deeper in debt." Quite apt given the year that has just passed. But for myself I am no richer nor any poorer than I was before. My status quo - treading water. It is 2 a.m. and I am sitting in a foreign city. It is cold. There is snow on the ground. Fireworks are going off all over the city. I sit in the kitchen and think about this past year and many years before. My mother told me how she used to cry on New Years eve when the band played Auld Lang Syne. Partly because my father was in the band and every year my mother had to sit with the wives of the other musicians and she felt lonely among them, and partly because she simply thought the song sounded so very sad. For me New Years eve has never been the best of nights. It was usually a disaster romantically when I was younger and carefree and in New York. As I became older it seemed more and more a time of melancholy and an effort in keeping regret at bay. I was never a great one for looking forward on that particular night. Now, however, I find it to be a good time to simply think. To reflect on so many aspects of my life. To measure a little to see if I am making headway on the things I want to change, to see what I still need to change, to see what works for me. The last few years have brought enormous pain, and enormous comfort. I have found love and peace and have learned how to live with the pain while not always accepting it as a given of my life. I am learning, slowly, slow learner that I am, how to do things in this world to make it a slightly better place. Slowly I learn this and I am grateful to all who help me learn how to do this. The quiet rebel, the winsome fragrance of some wild flower that lifts your spirit when it needs it the most, the good souls who understand what it means to hold compassion in the heart. I used to learn so much from the books I read. I still do but I have found how to learn so much more from the people I love. The books now have meaning for me. I hope all that read this have a prosperous and happy new year.

2008-12-10T19:45:00.000-05:00

Today is Human Rights Day. A simple thing, it seems, and yet an idea that needs a designated day to get people to even consider it. I was alerted on my facebook page, a friend sent me an invitation to change my profile picture to a picture of an imprisoned Tiebetan. Pictured here are just a few of many: the Panchen Lama: Gendun Choekyi Nyima, the filmmaker Dhondup Wangchen and a peace protester named Gyaltsen Choezom who was imprisoned for 9 years and is still held in Tibet. The campaign is going on until midnight tonight. If you have Facebook then this is where you go: Change your Profile pic for Tibet's Political Prisoners on Human Rights Day. If you don't have Facebook then I might recommend these sites:

Save Tibet
Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy

It's a small thing to change your picture. It may seem so inconsequential in light of the abuses and sufferings that so many are subjected to on a daily basis. But it does serve a purpose. This is one of those small lights that we must shine out in the darkness. It is also a reminder to ourselves to be aware and to remember. Let us remember more than simply one day. Let us remember every day that there are so many places where Human Rights are treated with such cruelty and disdain. Remember all the places, the Darfurs the Burmas, the Tibets, the Turkmenistans, the list goes on and feel free to add to it. Feel free, in fact, to post other sites here. And remember.

I often tell my students that we are faced daily with a simple choice - in the smallest of acts that we may commit - a choice of being on the side of the oppressor or being for the people who need help the most. There are human rights abuses around daily. Tyrants can be very local and sometimes very personal. Sometimes even a small, seemingly insignificant gesture can lift the spirit and offer hope.

Trampled in the Name of the Lord

2008-11-29T10:45:00.002-05:00

Years and years and years ago, so long ago it seems almost an alternate universe, a time different in the feel and smells of the air, with a pace somewhat less tense then today, I was a department store clerk. I was just out of college, I needed work, I had been in a car accident that had totaled my car and therefore whatever job I took on had to be within walking distance. I took on a job at a local department store, now graying but once considered one of the major, high-end stores of the country. This was before the days of PCs or laptops, a time when the high-end equipement was VHS and the cassette Walkman and camcorders looked like something professional news organizations used. I worked there for several years to have enough money to move to New York City. I can still pull up those days in my mind as if they were yesterday.

I remember Christmas at this store quite vividly. Long lines, impatient people, endless minutes ringing up at the register, endless time re-folding clothes at the end of the night, after people left, the store looking as if a tornado had swept through. I especially remember the people waiting in line. Their anger, their rudeness, their lack of civility. I cannot even begin to adequately describe how these people behaved and, believe me, no amount of exaggeration could do them justice. I remember once turning to a co-worker and saying "If this is what Christ hung on the cross for then he did so in vain." I said to her to look closely at these people shopping for presents for a day that celebrates the birth of Christ. I wondered how many would be in Church that day singing hymns to the God they supposedly believed in who preached about immaterialism, about kingdom of heavens residing within, about giving up your earthly possessions and following him, about camels passing through the eyes of needles before rich men would ever gain entrance into heaven. It was a sacrilege to the very God they prayed in to behave this way for a day celebrating his birth. But what did that matter? Presents were needed, damnit, and needed before the 24th.

Isn't it the greatest irony that our television sets will have movie after movie, and tv show after tv show, filled with warm-hearted stories of people transformed by this magical holiday - whether by a man in a red suit or a guy with holes in his hands and feet? It won't matter the source of both of these symbols - the patron saint of sailors who spent his life working for the poor, secretly helping people (thus the gifts magically appearing) so that their pride would remain intact; and the symbol of the Christian faith, a symbol of sacrifice and giving, of compassion and care - has long been lost on the multitude of shoppers who descend upon the stores and wrangle over tv sets and laptops on sale; who scream invectives at clerks and fellow shoppers; who treat the day as a sporting event (so described by one avid shopper). What will matter will be the acquisition of things to exchange with another person. Material, temporal, tranistory things that will really do nothing to make our lives better, only offer momentary respite in some mildly distracting way. A diversion from life's daily grind. Material possessions. Things. Cold and heartless.

Not long after those department store years I was living in New York with a couple of rommates, one of which claimed to be a born-again Christian/Catholic. I say claimed because he never went to church in the time I lived there except when he went home to visit his parents. This despite the fact that there was a beautiful old church one block from our house. He spent most of his time deriding others for either their lack of religion or their lack of his religion, depending on whether they practiced at all or if, by some foolish, misguided choice, they practiced a religion that didn't match his (Buddhists were a favorite target). Most of what came from his mouth was negative, crude, condescending and dismissive. For all his talk of Christ and religion he was not very Christian in his attitude and I often felt that most of what he preached, when he did so, was done for show. In everyday life he showed no justice or mercy towards others, almost no compassion and certainly very little charity. He was incredibly judgemental and hypocritical. A true hypocrite, passing judegment on others while living his own life in a way that would have shocked his parents and anyone else who believed the stream of "Christian" bs that constituted his faith. There were several things that I witnessed that soured me on both my friendship with this person and on the type of person who so easily shouts their faith to anyone within earshot. I remember, once, he had just received his first credit card and he said "I am going to go out now and make some purchases and validate my existence." Those were his words, "validate my existence." I said to him that I thought Christ taught that a person's worth was based on their spiritual life not their material acquisitions. He grunted and dismissed my remark. After all, I was a heathen.

I am reminded of these two periods of my life because of a small news item in today's paper about a man who was trampled to death by holiday shoppers. The man was a temporary store employee of a department store in Long Isand. There were 2000 people waiting in line since before dawn to take advantage of that store's sales. When the doors were opened the crowd surged forward and rushed to get in, breaking the doors and knocking the man to the ground whereupon they literally trampled him to death. This person was killed for Christmas.

I am not religious in the sense of following a religion. I don't go to church on Sundays, I don't pray in any regular, proscribed way. I have my beliefs, which I consider to always be evolving, and I have my own way of praying or contemplating. I have great respect for those that truly try to follow their faith - regardless of what that faith is, because I believe that each faith contains inherent goodness and tries to teach us ways in which to live peacefully with each other. Gandhi said as much, so have many others such as Martin Luther King and Thich Naht Hanh. When I read about such articles I am reminded why I chose my own path instead of following any one group. My own desire for something personal that I could convey into my way of dealing with the everyday world and people on a daily basis. I have striven for many years to divest myself of the kind of people in my life who are like the roommate mentioned above. I keep my associations with such people limited because I find these people to be spiritually draining. They damage the soul. In the same way I have tried to limit putting myself in the position to be around large crowds of unhappy people. This is harder given that we cannot always help where we might be at a given moment - like the airport during a huge delay. However, I have tried so hard to find ways to protect my soul from such moments.

In his journals the Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes:

"The ordinary pleasures of life, properly used, do not need to interefere with a deep interior wisdom: they can even contribute to it. Balance and moderation in social living can permit and even help us to live interior lives."

Merton also quotes Dom Chapman, another spiritual writer:

"Pray as you can and do not try to pray as you can't.
Take yourself as you find yourself, start from that."

(The Spiritual Letters of Com John Chapman, OSB, London, 1935)

This is very similar to the quote on my title page from Dogen about truth being not where you look for it but where you are. I will start with myself, seek the truth that is not my desire (to paraphrase Camus) and find the interior silence that is so necessary for exterior strength. I will remember these negative things not to dwell on such negativity but to convert it to something more useful. As a way of building awareness, a sort of reminder of how things should be, not how they have to be and what I can do, on a daily basis, to help make this better reality so. I can't help but think about the spirit that killed that poor man in Long Island. The spirit that is killing so many in Mumbai. The spirit that kills, daily, so many in the world. It is not a strange connection, the spirit is the same. It is a spirit that denies, that suffocates, that kills. It is a spirit, or really a lack of spirit, that destroys. It can only be countered with a spirit of healing, of love, of compassion. As Gandhi said:

"A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the perogative of the brave."

and:

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."

and:

"As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves."

or as he put it so much more succinctly:

"Be the change that you want to see in the world."

Miriam Makeba 1932 - 2008 The Voice

2008-11-11T17:19:00.003-05:00

(photo: 1955 Drum Cover, The Girl with the Smile in Her Voice, Jurgen Schadeberg)

I first encountered Miriam Makeba from this picture. It was on a postcard in a great little shop, on Bleeker Street, off West Broadway in New York City, called French Kisses. I was impressed by the stance of her body, poised, tensing for the moment when the song would come from her body - for that is how she sang, as if the song were one with her body. I then went to Tower Records at 4th and Broadway and bought the only album they had of her at the time, Sangoma.

I put it on my turntable and the music began, the music being her voice and her voice only. There was never a voice like Miriam Makeba. Her life was a life of singing and protest. She denounced Apartheid in her native South Africa and they made her an exile. She sang. And everywhere she went she sang the song of South Africa. From 1961 until 1990 she was an exile, almost the same length of time that Nelson Mandela was in jail. Appropriately enough it was Mandela who welcomed her back to South Africa. She was Mama Africa. She was the voice.

Watch how she sings the song Amampondo on this YouTube clip. Some singers say that their voice is their instrument - Makeba's voice was an orchestra.

Makeba singing Amampondo on YouTube

Miriam Makeba once said that she would die singing. She did just that on November 9th, collapsing backstage after a concert. Adieu Mama Africa, beautiful voice.

The Most Extraordinary of Nights

2008-11-05T07:33:00.000-05:00

I am remembering events of amazing grace that I witnessed back in the late eighties and early nineties. The fall of the Berlin Wall. Nelson Mandela walking out of prison and, later, becoming the president of South Africa. I remember watching these events with so many others, standing silent, in awe, unable to say much more than a "my God" or "it's so amazing." Last night was like that. As I walked back from a house where an election night party was being held I knew that Obama had won the election when I heard, coming from so many different parts of the city to make this city seem like one big baseball stadium, shouts and cheers such as I have never heard before. There was joy mixed with relief, mixed with tears, mixed with utter disbelief. Barak Obama is President of the United States. This was the most extraordinary of nights.

Benevolence

2008-11-01T11:56:00.002-04:00

A disposition to do good. That is the first definition of benevolence. A disposition to do good. Disposition here is used in one of the later definitions - the temperament that one carries within. So, ultimately, benevolence must come from somewhere deep within us, it must be a part of who we are, something that emanates from our very core. It is an intrinsic value that simply is, having no desire of reward for being what it is. Rewards may come but that would not change the decisions, would not change how one would act. The person in the room alone will have the same heart, perform the same act regardless of being watched.

Why such a seemingly disconnected beginning? I have been thinking about this quality so much of late and trying to write about it and failing. Initially I had thought to call this "There Be Demagogues Among Us", then I came to "Faith, Demagogues and Benevolent Dictators". I was concerned about the demagogic nature that much of this presidential campaign was taking on (a nature I deplore in the left as much as I do in the right) and in some recent comments made by the chancellor of the DC Public Schools in which she accepted the title of benevolent dictator. It was in looking up the exact definition of the word "benevolence" that I decided only one word was truly needed for this post. Why benevolence? I think because the desire to do good seems to me to be such a necessary and direly needed quality for each of us to possess. The desire to do good and the disposition to do good are two different things. One is intention and the other is part of your makeup. The difference can be devastating if one is not aware of it -- the road to hell has well made bricks of good intentions. Let's first talk about the presidential campaign.

Benevolence and Demagoguery

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, talks about cultivating mindfulness, concentration and understanding. "When you live deeply every moment with mindfulness and concentration your understanding, your insight always grows. It is our understanding that brings compassion, that liberates us from afflictions like fear, like anger." This is from his book Buddha Mind, Buddha Body: Walking Toward Enlightenment Fear and anger have been a constant in this current presidential campaign. The speeches of Palin have been nothing if not demagoguery, filled with innuendo, lies and outright appeals to the lowest instincts. Fear has been used as a tool to elicit and provoke anger in people, some of which who see their base of power as being threatened. The racial aspect of these appeals is evident. Jim Wallis puts it so well in his blog on the Huffington Post:

"The fact that Barack Obama is the first black nominee of a major party for president gives all the fear a decidedly racial undertone. YouTube has quickly become populated with video after video of the dark underbelly of American fear and racism. The innuendos and rumors have brought to the surface latent fears and thinly veiled biases that many had hoped were gone from our country. The message of fear is the same: Obama may look okay on the surface, but we don't know what might lie beneath.

"Regardless of whether one favors Obama or McCain, this development should be of concern to all Americans, and especially people of faith. There is now a new spiritual dimension to this election, and it is decidedly evil. Christians believe that "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear..." (1 John 4:18.) There are, of course, good and decent motivations to vote either way in this election. Strong people of faith will be marking different boxes on Election Day, but for people of faith there will be a spiritual decision to be made as well. Will we put our trust in the power of fear or hope?"

It is interesting that one side speaks of hope and possibility while the other speaks to the basest fears of the populace. When I look at both sides I have to ask myself which side has benevolence in their hearts? Which side demonstrates, daily, a disposition to do good? What I remember most about my childhood, my young adult years, all the way up to my years in college and entering the workforce, has been the difference between those who show benevolence and understanding to help those around them and those who use intimidation, ridicule, sarcasm and ego to make themselves feel better about their own shortcomings. The former are the ones who taught me valuable lessons, who encouraged, who instructed; the latter simply hurt and humiliated me, made me feel that I was less than I am - or tried to. Again, ask yourself, which side shows the true quality of benevolence? Who will do the greater good, or at least truly attempt to do the greater good?

As for benevolent dictators, there really has never been such a thing. A dictator takes power and uses it without concern about what the populace may think. They believe their way to be the only way and use whatever means are necessary to have their will carried out. Force is one way, bribery is another, regardless, their will prevails. In looking up the definition of benevolence I came across this Wikipedia definition. It is attributed to David Kelley, an Objectivist who wrote the book Unrugged Individualism. I am not a follower of objectivism or a reader of Ayn Rand but I liked this quote nonetheless. Here it is:

"Benevolence is a commitment to achieving values derivable from life with other people in society, by treating them as potential trading partners, recognizing their humanity, independence, and individuality, and the harmony between their interests and ours."

I like this idea of interaction, of working together, of seeing the good that others can bring to the dialogue in order to make what we achieve for our system harmonious. Throwing money at a problem has never been effective in solving the problem, it has only allowed some to forget that the problem exists. At least for a short while. In dialogue, in interaction, hopes may be heard and realized that otherwise may be ignored and allowed to fester. Let us take the path of understanding and compassion, of mindfulness and awareness.

Anna Akhmatova and Pablo Picasso: Biographies

2008-09-13T11:37:00.006-04:00

I have had the great pleasure this late summer to read two very fine biographies: A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 by John Richardson (Knopf, 2007), and Anna Of All The Russians: The Life of Anna Akhmatova by Elaine Feinstein (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005).

Elaine Feinstein is a well regarded translator of Russian poetry, notably Marina Tsvetaeva, and also biographer of Pushkin and Ted Hughes. Her biography of Anna Akhmatova is so well told it moves like a good novel. Akhmatova was a poet and, in a sense, celebrity of mythic proportions. Myths, gossip, and innuendo surrounded her life and everyone had, and still has, an opinion about her. Joseph Brodsky, who was part of the last circle of her life, considered her, along with Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, to be among the three greatest poets of Russia's twentieth century. In a 2005 review of Feinstein's biography in the British newspaper The Observer, Neal Ascherson wrote:

To me as a non-Russian, her contemporary Marina Tsvetaeva seems as a writer to be richer and more astonishing. I know Russians who now dismiss Akhamatova as 'a minor poet'. But how do you separate the passionate response to her verse, a response which has itself become part of Russian history, from the quality of that poetry?

I cannot imagine any intelligent, discerning Russian making such a statement about Akhmatova. She really cannot be separated from Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. Each wrote poems about, for and to each other. Each suffered the tragedy that was Russia under Stalin. And each are different in their sensibility and tone in such a way as to give voice to the variety of experience in that era. I remember during a New Year's Eve party in Moscow in 1993, discussing with my Russian friends what I, as someone who had only been able to read these writers only in translation or in very poorly understood Russian (with much help from friends and dictionaries), saw as each writer's distinct quality. My friends had asked me how I could really get a sense of these writers in translation and I said that from Akhmatova I got the sense of great events both personally and nationally tragic retold as if from the cooler perspective that distance and reflection can give to events; from Tsvetaeva I had the sense of passion spilling onto the page like small flames, barely able to be sustained by the paper itself; from Mandelstam I felt the overflowing heart of humanity in all its pungent, earthy aroma and all its compassionate and fragile warmth. I said that I cannot think of Russian poetry or 20th century Russian history without thinking of all three. They are a holy trinity. Anyone who would think Akhmatova minor reminds me of the kind of foolishness I would hear when I lived in New York, where some would-be-arbitor of literary taste would declare that really James Joyce was overrated as a writer and that Gaston Leroux was truly the more revolutionary writer (you go figure). Also there is this: if response to her verse was so passionate how does that invalidate the quality? Why would you separate it? Russian's know their poetry and can argue for their poetry better than I have ever witnessed with any other group of people. They have placed the three mentioned above in the top tier of their country's poetry regardless of whether it was Brodsky writing or Yevgeny Yevtushenko (two as at odds with each other as it is possible to be).

Feinstein demonstrates why Akhmatova is major throughout this magnificent biography. She links Akhmatova's life to the life of her country to the distillation of both into her words. Words that every Russian, at one time, could recite extemporaneously. Or, to put the poet's own words to it:

In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad. Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I answered: "Yes, I can."
Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face.

from Requiem
Listen to how easily she sums up the years of terror. Look at how she conveys the fear and anxiety and anguish they were all suffering under. "Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had once been her face." A minor poet indeed!

John Richardson has been writing about Pablo Picasso for most of his life. He began his biography in the 1980s and published the first volume, A Life of Picasso, Volume 1: 1881-1906 in 1991. Random House was his publisher and the book was simply gorgeous. Large in size, between a normal sized biography and a coffee table book, generous in pictures and on paper of art-book quality, Richardson's narrative matched the quality of the pages. He mapped out not just a life of Picasso but a history of the age, giving excellent detail to Picasso's life by truly filling in the lives of the artists and people who surrounded him. The second volume, A Life of Picasso: 1907-1917, The Painter of Modern Life, was published in 1996 and was equal to the first in quality of product and in the writing. Both volumes had a distinct quality that made them memorable for me, that is that on every page of each book were countless pictures on the page or in the margins that made it so easy to follow what Richardson was writing. If he was comparing a painting to the subject of the painting we got the painting as well as a picture or pictures of the subject. If he were comparing paintings we got both on the same page in order to see for ourselves. If there was an important person in his life, Fernande Olivier for instance, we got plenty of pictures of her to compare to the many ways she was represented in Picasso's paintings. For whatever reason, though one would guess money, Random House dropped Richardson and any future volumes. It looked bleak for those of us waiting Richardson to continue his chronicle and then Knopf stepped in and announced publication of the third volume.

Well, here it is, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932 (Knopf, 2007). Richardson's excellence in writing is equal to the previous two volumes. He gives us another history of an era as seen through the life of Pablo Picasso. It is filled with the same attention to detail as the first two. In all three you get mini-lessons in the lives of the other artists who influenced, competed with and loved and fought with Picasso. Richardson is generous in his research and what he brings to his subject. He is also uncompromising in his opinion, not allowing his own friendship with the subject to interfere with his view of the man as both an artist and a human being. The written word of this biography is worth the price of this book alone.

The actual product of the book is another matter. Knopf should be commended for taking this on and roundly chastised for short-changing both Richardson and the public that has been buying and reading these biographies. The quality of the third volume is reprehensible. Reduced in size (although fatter in width) and miserly in pictures and on much cheeper paper, it's as if Knopf agreed to do this not to continue the excellence set in the previous books but as a sop to the writer and a boost to their own ego. But why go so cheap? If you look at the examples above, in the previous volumes you have can find anywhere from two pictures (the least) to seven (the most) on every page! The current volume has 48 pages in the center of color reproductions of the paintings discussed, placed in chronological order comapared to no color photos in the the other two volumes; but you have to constantly turn to the center of the book to follow what Richardson says about the paintings, interrupting your reading and flow of the material. As for photos of the actual people who were part of his life and paintings, there are paltry few. Marie Therese Walter, who from 1927 to 1936 was Picasso's greatest love and figured in most of his paintings and sculptures from that time, has one, pathetic photo from which to judge all the work against. Contrast that to the number of photos of Picasso's wife Olga in the book and it almost makes you wonder if her ghost had a hand in selecting the pictures for this volume. To my mind the first two volumes are more imaginative in design and the third is pedestrian - a standard, run-of-the-mill production for writing that is far from run-of-the-mill.

Still, if you have the opportunity to read this work you should- and now that Knopf has the rights and has produced the other two in paperback you get the chance to read all three at once instead of at 7 year intervals - you will find yourself hooked and transported to another world, exciting in possibilities, people and history. Whether you appreciate Picasso's art or not you will get such a sense of the time he lived, of the twentieth century, than you could from any ten histories of the same age.

Mahmoud Darwish 1942-2008

2008-08-14T00:51:00.003-04:00

I first heard of Mahmoud Darwish from an essay by Breyten Breytenbach. I cannot remember the name of the essay nor which book it was in (I want to say Endpapers but I am not certain) but I remember the feel of Breytenbach's words, the sense that Darwish was a poet that one missed reading at the risk of one's soul. In a used bookstore on Mercer Street in New York City I found a copy of Sand and Other Poems by Darwish. I read it more quickly than I usually take to read poetry. I read it again. I have turned to it a number of times over many years. I have since found other volumes - The Butterfly's Burden, Unfortunately It Was Paradise, The Adam of Two Edens, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone. Always in his writing the sense of pain and the sense of beauty, the witness of both. He lived a life of prison and exile. He understood loss and he beautifully wrote of those fleeting moments of beauty and pleasure and living as juxtaposed against the constant anguish of exile. His home was his language. He says

"I am my language. I am words' writ: BE! Be my body!
And I become and embodiment of their timbre.
I am what I have spoken to the words: Be the place where
my body joins the eternity of the desert.
Be, so that I may become my words.
No land on earth bears me. Only my words bear me,
a bird born from me who builds a nest in my ruins
before me, and in the rubble of the enchanting world around me.

His heart has finally flown like the bird it has always been.

Deception, Desire and Small Acts of Defiance

2008-08-12T11:18:00.004-04:00

"Immanuel Kant once wrote that to will an end was equivalent to willing at least some means thereto, wheras merely to wish for an end was only to dream the length of one's desire while leaving the means alone. In our society, where the murder of the mind is as common and everyday as the comics, in which the lie sets the standard for the truth, in which falsifying ameliorations are epidemic; one thing at least ought to be clear, as the pattern of our public acts betrays it: among us, war is willed, while peace is only wished."
William Gass, The Origin of Extermination in the Imagination

I pulled this quote from my 24 year old, beaten up copy of the late literary journal Antaeus, a relic of a great small journal founded by Daniel Halpern and Paul Bowles. I have quoted these lines so often I should know them by heart. And every time something happens in the world to remind me the truth of these words I go back to them and reread parts of this essay and remind myself how simply and quietly, every single day, we delude ourselves about this world of ours. Delusion is everywhere and the will that shatters that delusion is present as well. We can delude ourselves that something like a world war will never happen again, that history has come to an end, that only small wars or economic wars will be the conflicts of the present, that we are different than generations of the past. And yet... Russia invades Georgia on a pretext (oh how World War I, how World War II) and China puts banners up on Tiananmen Square declaring "Beijing 2008", placing potted flowers and having dance and sports performances in the very square where thousands were massacred on June 4, 1989. I wonder if the flowers add up to the number killed that day?

Delusions. Deceptions. Deft hands? Not really. How many people really believe that Medvedev is the President of Russia? What would the percentages be? In Russia itself I would say zero percent. Outside I am sure there are a few who, blissfully ignorant, believe it when the read the words "president" and "Medvedev" in the same sentence. Ignorant or deluded - choose your poison. And the reason for invasion? Provocation, defending the liberties of another small nation, protecting "Russians" who live in Ossetia - all of these usual suspects were trotted out in the press. How many people also believe that China will find its way to democracy through a kind of socialist capitalism? Or that, if not provoked themselves, if left to find their own way, the Chinese government will allow more freedoms to enter the country until China is a democracy in all but how their leaders are elected - a sort of tyrannical democracy, the government will give you freedom if you promise to leave the government alone? Why not? After all Russia proves daily that such a dichotomy not only is not mutually exclusive but actually mutually beneficial. As long as you don't have what the government wants or thinks you shouldn't have.

History. Delusions. In today's Washington Post an Irish woman in China for the Olympics says: "Obviously, it was the first thing I thought about, that this was where the massacre occurred. I got here and just felt, wow, wow, it's all about the Olympics. There's nothing here about history." In the same article Wang Dang, one of the student leaders in 1989 who was imprisoned for seven years, says "If people do not understand their history, they will become shallow, rootless,... when country is emerging, like China, the passion of nationalism will head in a direction that's more and more aggressive. Only if people understand history -- especially the bad memories of history -- will the nation become more modest."

The bad memories. A friend in Germany tells me how everywhere she goes she sees reminders of what the Germans did in World War II, signs of the war, of the Holocaust. The world won't let Germany forget but, more importantly, the Germans themselves have truly worked at cultivating a remembrance of the horror they created. In Russia their are monuments to poets who were persecuted, there are individual shrines on the very killing grounds where victims were shot, but there has never been a drive by the government to make the public more aware, to atone for what happened, to remember the bad memories and, perhaps, become more modest. Better to not think of these things, better to not remind people of such nastiness, after all what is the likelihood of this happening again?

It is a very difficult thing to remind yourself of the shameful things that you, yourself, have done in life because to remind yourself of these things is to open yourself to the doubts and humiliation you feel about such acts. Yet such remembrance is necessary to keep ourselves from repeating the same acts over and over again and proving that Albert Einsteins definition of insanity still holds very much true("Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."). So much history seems to be haunting the edges of current events - Hitler becoming president and eventually calling the presidency "dormant" as he consolidated power and became a dictator - Putin "stepping down" and becoming the prime minister; the 1936 Olympics, the 2008 Olympics; military pushes into small helpless countries - pick your year and insert here.

"The search for truth is not the search for desire." I've used this quote by Albert Camus before but it is always useful. Are we deluded by our desires? I fear so. Putin desires a Russian map similar to the ones of his youth; China desires respectability and dominance in world commerce; Bush desires historical vindication for the destructive choices of his administration. Delusions or truth. Willful ignorance or wishful thinking? I guess we are all deluded in our own, sometimes not so sweet, individual way. I am deluded into believing that one man can stop a line of tanks. I remember that picture, that day vividly. I remember watching the dance that the "Tank Man" did in front of that line of tanks. I wondered at the time what was stopping them from simply running over this man and crushing him. How foolish of me. They were simply waiting for the moment when they would crush everyone else. Still I hold that moment in my heart. I keep it as a memory that as foolish as such defiance can be it can also be inspiring. That such acts of madness, of Quixotic insanity, are not always in vain. Sometimes we must tilt at the windmills. We certainly must not delude ourselves. One man cannot stop a tank. But the spirit of such an act remembered can, perhaps, arm us with a small aura of protection against the delusions others try to foist upon us.

In Tiananmen of Games, No Trace of Massacre by Jill Drew Washingtonpost.com article/2008/08/11

Four Double Six Six Four

2008-07-17T23:37:00.000-04:00

Happy Birthday Nelson Mandela!

Here is what I remember: I was working at a news gathering agency on 42nd street in Manhattan. Our job was to cull through hours of tapes for different clients, piecing together tapes of anything that mentioned their firm, client, product, etc. Usually we were so busy we barely had time to wolf down our dinner or lunch. But this day, February 11th, 1990 we were all of us glued to the television as prisoner number four double six six four, Nelson Mandela, was released from Victor Verster Prison. I remember standing in awe of this moment, of this man, walking out after 27 years in prison. Unbent, unbroken, standing tall and as proud as the day he went in. And this is also what I remember: that during a time when there were so many terrible, violent events happening - Tiananmen Square, the killings in Romania, the violence as Yugoslavia fell chaotically apart - this man walked his nation through what could have been one of the bloodiest moments in history and showed them how to reconcile and move forward without revenge, without the blood. He lead South Africa and by doing so he showed the world what leadership is.

We owe Nelson Mandela more than birthday wishes. He has several foundations that work for social justice, change, children and the fight against AIDS. Promote them, help them, be involved if you can. Honor the man by supporting his work.

46664.com

Nelson Mandela Foundation

"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." Nelson Mandela

Tied to the Mast

2008-07-03T11:09:00.005-04:00

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

My grandfather was an inveterate smoker of unfiltered Pall Malls. When his doctor told him to quit he did what so many males in my family do, dismissed him with a wave of his hand and a little, cough-like sound that all in my family understood meant "what the hell does he know." That same year he suffered a debilitating stroke that left his entire right side paralyzed for the rest of his life. He went cold turkey the very next day and didn't have another stroke for thirteen years, taking care of himself the way the doctor had originally suggested.

I am reminded of this when I read about Starbucks closing 600 stores and laying off 12,000 employees and the sudden (oh surprise)decline in sales and desirability of the SUV. In the same day, Monday of this week, I read two stories - one in which people were finding it damn near impossible to sell their SUV for anywhere near what they had paid for it and being stuck with a $400 a month car-loan payment that had them paying more than the vehicle was currently worth; and another about a company that thought putting three cafes within 30 feet of each other at an intersection in Manhattan made sound business sense. It says so much about greed and selfishness and willful ignorance. It makes me wonder if the age of conspicuous consumption is finally, blessedly over or merely temporarily put off by economics.

I had wanted my next blog to be about Nelson Mandela (and I still plan to do one on him)but this subject compelled me to write for a number of reasons. I never liked the whole SUV and McMansion movement that went on during the 90s and into the early parts of this century. I found these huge cars and huge houses indicative of a spiritual poverty. Everything had to be bigger whether it was needed or not, safe or not, healthy or not. As global warming increased we built cars and houses that not only used more energy but consumed it in the most inefficient way possible - like a glutton spilling half his food over himself. I remember reading about one family that had bought a house of 26,000 square feet for a family of 4. They had a dining room with a table set, at all times, for a service of 24. They never used this room but it was ready in case they ever had a dinner with 24 guests. I think of this every time I see someone sleeping on a grate or a bench in a park with their worldly goods in a box next to them.

Our gilded age included the largest number of homeless people since the Great Depression. Then at least many suffered together - the homeless and jobless ranks were filled with former millionaires now laid low. Movies and journalism then championed the little guy, the guy down on his luck. I think of silly but fun films like My Man Godfrey or Mr. Deeds Goes to Town or Meet John Doe. The average Joe held onto his integrity and remembered what life is truly about. Look hard and see if any films in the last twenty years come close to that idea or if, as so many seem to believe, these old-fashioned ideas are, as Mr. Deeds would say, all hooey.

In the Greek myths and sailor's age-old superstitions, the mermaids sang beautifully, luring sailors to their doom. Odysseus has his men fill their ears with wax and then has himself tied to the mast of the ship so that he can hear the sirens singing without being foolish and destroying his men and his ship. Oh, so many Greek myths apply here, so much history as well, but history and the Greek's wisdom are never as alluring as the siren's song that appeals to our basest desires. It takes a crashing on the rocks for everyone to suddenly become worried about their own well-being.

The folly of Starbucks, much like the folly of the Gap before them, was to think that every block could sustain a cafe. And for a while we didn't give them any reason to doubt this idea. It was a statistical fact that when a Starbucks opened across the street from another Starbucks, the older place had an increase in sales. But the thing about cliffs is that the lemmings don't often see them coming. And the thing about prophets is that nobody wants to really listen to common sense. How many said to themselves do we really need 10 of the same store within a 15 or 20 block radius? I know I used to hear it. But it was said with a shrug and an "oh well" as another double-shot latte was ordered.

Perhaps the rise in the cost of gas and the economic stroke from our own excesses will bring us down to reality. Crashes and calamities have a way of sobering the worst drunks. Yet I always am aware of the fact, as Camus has said, that the "search for truth is not the search for desire" and that human beings tend to search for their desire until the truth slaps them down. So I don't hold out any great hope. The true leaders we need, like Mandela, are so few and far between and so rarely listened to by the lemmings among us. Still, I do what I can in the belief that one person's choice can sometimes be more than a drop in the ocean, that it can matter. I have heard the mermaids singing but I see the rocks they try to bring me to, not the enticing allure of their false promise.

work in progress - Stones

2008-05-04T00:38:00.007-04:00

And so it is the silence. That how it seems at this hour. The silence. The cool breeze coming through the window. The standing lamp shedding its small arc of light, the passing cars in the streets outside. A person hollers,someone else answers. The night moves on in its own, nocturnal arc.

If I knew why my wife treated me the way she did throughout our marriage I would understand a lot of things: why we cause and suffer pain, why people do what they do, why some die who shouldn't and others don't who, perhaps, should. I would understand so many mysteries that life presents us every day. But her behavior towards me was as much a mystery as anything else was to me and how I lost the soul of my being was just one more added body to the carnage that was our marriage.

When she told me she was leaving, that she had accepted an overseas job and that she and the kids would be leaving in 6 months I had nothing to say. What could I say? Nothing, really, that hadn't already been said. We had discussed this possibility in the abstract way we had with conversation - nothing directly approached, everything termed under possibilities, nothing concrete or stated. There was the possibility of this or that with this or that and what did I think. I remember saying I would not quit what I was doing. Silence ensued as if that silence would will one of us to continue but, as with so many other conversations, neither of us took up the thread. Threads always seemed so impossible for us to take up. Our floors were littered with these neglected threads.

But losing her was not the hard part. In fact it was a relief. The weight of her disapproval had become so heavy for me that I didn't want to do anything around the house. It seemed so much to me that I could do nothing right, say nothing right and do nothing to correct either what I did or what I said. I fell into a slough of inactive, apathetic depression. I stole quiet moments for myself where I could revel in doing absolutely nothing and yet, at the same time, I would be consumed by the guilt of such inactivity. To act, to do something, anything required such effort and the effort almost never received a reward - in fact it often received the opposite - a blistering comment questioning why I had done what I had done. No, her going was such a relief. I felt freed.

Where I suffered was the kids. Having been their caretaker for as long as they had been alive, for the entire length of my fatherhood up until then, it seemed impossible that I would be separated from them, that I would no longer have the daily contact that I considered so vital to my being. I couldn't consider this and so, in truly cowardly fashion, I didn't - pushing all thoughts of this eventuality as far from my mind as I possibly could until the day when their absence hit me like an avalanche of rocks and I was buried in my own stupidity and pain.

This is a work of fiction copyrighted by author May 4, 2008

Late Night Thoughts Bordering On Exhaustion

2008-04-21T23:53:00.002-04:00

Sometimes you don't know what to do. About anything. Life is like this sometimes. A friend states that life doesn't always take you where you expect to go. I've forgotten the number of times I have made this remark.

The hour is late. The quiet outside and in is total. You can hear the clicks and clacks and rumblings and hums of all the different pieces of metal and machinery throughout the place. They speak to you in tongues like Pentecostals but their language remains a mystery and tells you nothing. Life is also like this, sending you secret messages to be ignored or misunderstood or that seem just plain foolish. I have sought comfort in so many things, books, drink, music, friends, women and, on nights like this, none seem to have had the desired effect. I am left bereft. How to touch upon the things that matter? How to have their mysteries revealed? How to make good on so many promises? Questions, questions. A poem I like a lot is called Questionnaire of Sleeplessness. It is by the Serbian Poet Miodrag Pavlovic.

Questionnaire of Sleeplessness

Who rattles in the keyhole?
Who builds belfries under my window?
Who weeps over the evil fate of the hero?
Who lets the lambs out of the gate?
Who drives the dwarfs out to pasture?
Who threw the King's dolls into the coffin?
Who gave the alarm clock to the bat?
Answer!
Small night celebrates great night.
Winter. At the inn everyone is hurrying.
The messenger in armor stumbled and fell.
Who will show me tomorrow the way?
Who will cook my lunch and hand me a letter?
Who rings now above my bed
and calls for the doctor?
Or does he summon the pilgrims to witness?
Who lights the big fence of kindlings?
The dawn already wiggles under my pillow.
Who has sent the urgent invitation to suffer?
And why has that invitation been directed to me?
(from The Horse Has Six Legs: An Anthology of Serbian Poetry Edited and Translated by Charles Simic, Graywolf, 1992)

Isn't that how it always feels when we suffer, that we've been given a special invitation? That invitation is unique, that no one knows how we feel? I have been fortunate in life, in the friends I have made, in the love that has come my way. I know how these things have helped me in dark moments. I know, too, how I have helped others as well. It is like this. We help one another. It is that old chestnut from Plato, "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."
Keep that always deep in your mind and heart. Be kind.

Practical Poltics and the Art of War

2008-04-11T09:36:00.003-04:00

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if they didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympics, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles... At the international level sport is frankly mimic warfare.
- George Orwell, "The Sporting Spirit" (14 December 1945)

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry B. Adams

A lot of attention is being paid to the running of the Olympic Torch. A lot of hue and cry on both sides. "Leave politics out of sports!" cry some. Others say to honor the athletes - after all that's who the games are for. Joan Chen recently wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post stating that, after a lovely 4 week trip to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Chengdu she has decided that China is progressing and should not have to suffer outside pressure to change. Must have been a lovely trip. She goes on to say that while most Chinese sympathize with the Tibetans after seeing the riots they understand the need for the government to crackdown "in order to restore order" basically implying that the crackdown is the Tibetans own fault. Gee, if only you would behave in a more civilized manner...

Isn't it nice that a former citizen of the Peoples Republic of China who took on American citizenship in 1989 is able to so freely express her views. Will Hu Jia be given equal time in the Beijing Daily News? The sheer hypocrisy of her piece is galling. She is allowed freedoms denied to the majority of the citizens of her former home and to any in Tibet. Regardless of "how far China has come" they are still oppressing many inside and outside their borders. How is this different than the United States? It's as simple as a civics lesson. I have the right to state here and in any newspaper, on any streetcorner and in any way I see fit to express (with the exception of resorting to or inciting violence)my views on my country. We shouldn't be in Iraq, we shouldn't use torture and parse the laws in order to let torture happen and we should be more diplomatic and less militaristic. I will not be sentenced to any jail-time as a subversive as Hu Jia was on April 3rd.

I think it appropriate to quote Orwell about this matter. After all, almost all the defenders of the decision to have the games in China have mentioned the 1936 Olympics. It was Hitler who invented the very torch relay pageantry that is causing so much debate. How very apt. Hitler tried to use the games to demonstrate to the world Germany's superiority and the superiority of the "Master Race". Jesse Owens, the African American runner, was the United States' answer to Hitler. He won four gold medals and showed those Germans what was what! And then Hitler went on to destroy as much of the world as he could and bring us the Holocaust. Yes, he learned his lesson. By the way, Owens great achievement is used as propaganda to this day to discuss freedom and what it means to be an American often ignoring the fact that Owens had none of the rights, and would not have any for years to come, that his white compatriots enjoyed (as well as the fact that Franklin Roosevelt not only did not invite him to the White House after his Olympic triumphs but didn't even send him a card).

So let's look at the comparisons. In 1936 we have Hitler wanting to show off a Germany rising back to power onto the world stage and wanting to dominate the Olympics in a show of German superiority (despite Owens' wins the Germans did end up winning most of the medals). China is currently enjoying a strong economy and is often mentioned as the sleeping tiger (although I don't anyone believes the tiger is sleeping any longer)in world economics. Hitler suppressed all political opposition, the Jews and other oppositional religions and limited travel to only the "good Germans" - Nazi party members or sympathizers. Do we really need to review what China is doing in the world right now? The only real question is this: after the facade of these games are played on the rigged stage that China has built, what can the world expect? Greater freedoms for the Chinese? Graciousness toward the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama? A handsoff policy for Taiwan? Do you think you know the answer to any of these questions? Remember, look at the actions not the words.

Let us quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, executed by Hitler on April 9, 1945: "The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children." That is a test both the United States and China should consider taking.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/08/AR2008040802907.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hu_Jia_(activist)

http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/2008/01/30/china-hu-jias-state-secrets/

Breytenbach

2008-03-02T01:35:00.002-05:00

He is returned, though he never left. The wanderer. The bird of many revolutions. The songsinger. The windcatcher. The albino terrorist. The once imprisoned bird now free and seeking empty rooms with open windows. The one with the name so softly sounding an echo of itself, Breyten Breytenbach.

In 1982 I read an article in the New York Times Book Review about the South African painter and poet Breyten Breytenbach. He had just been released from Robben Island prison, serving seven years of a nine year sentence on trumped-up charges of terrorism. In the article he spoke of his time in prison, his new found freedom and the politics of the day. I had to find out more about him. His book about the time he spent in prison was released a year later. True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist was a revelation to me,the imagery has stayed with me to this day. I had to read more so I hunted/haunted the bookshops of New York City, where I lived at the time. Used, new, street vendors, anywhere I saw a book being sold I looked for books with his name on the cover. In this way I found so many of his books. I remember the old Scribners bookstore on Fifth Avenue in uptown NY I found In Africa Even The Flies Are Happy I snatched it up. I found A Season in Paradise about his first journey back to South Africa after being outlawed for marrying a non-white. Bit by bit I found volume after volume. Short stories, Mouroir, novels, Memory of Snow and of Dust and more memoirs, Return to Paradise and Dog Heart. He is a painter and poet of extraordinary power - he haunts those places of the mind that skirt the edge of dreams into absurdity and sometimes, nightmare. Reading True Confessions is like handling dynamite. I remember reading it in almost one sitting, unable to put down this volume of pain, of intense personal reflection, a cry to the walls of his prison cell.

His new book of poems, Windcatcher: New & Selected Poems 1964-2006, is a selected history of this remarkable man as told through his poems. Like any book of Breytenbach's you must get it while it is there to be got because, like so many ephemeral things, he is gone quickly and you must wait till the next book to feel and see and hear and... Listen:

Lookback
I too
I too danced
heard the music over the hills
quiver like shaken sky
how the hand leaves its unreadableness on the wall
I deciphered fires in the night
got to frequent love intimately
found the broken-winged god in a book
traveled from tavern to woman to understanding
to mountaintop ecstasy
when the world folded in eternity
and the sun was a moon
and the sun was a singing moon

I also
I also saw how the human is skinned
brandished a fist against the sky
learned how to spell through blue lips
the heart is a rotted dark fruit
had to listen how children with torn-off limbs
howl in their throats
I came across women wrinkled like ancient desert bags
with dead infants at the tit
thought history carried exact meaning
or an eye at least
and saw the snake of obsequiousness suck
the ass of power
slitheringly shiny like a conscience
and the sun was a moon
and the sun was a bloody moon

I too
I also wandered through the looking glases
when aircraft ignited the towers as pyres
how my father was hanged with a grin in the door
and my beloved in the bitterly flowering bush
I also fought the dog for meat
also heard my voice murmuring verse in a hollow cavern
like the white lies of the rapist
like the superstitious prayers of the hypocrite
I also saw my face disappear
and how my body like a worn coat
without protection against cold will forget time
and again
how the sun is a moon
a silent, chilly moon

When such a poet sings all should listen to the song.

A small note added for a friend: I listened, over and over again, to Jeff Buckley singing Leonard Cohen's great song Hallelujah as I wrote this. Nothing seemed more apt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breyten_Breytenbach

The Closing of Doors, The Opening of Doors

2007-12-27T18:46:00.000-05:00

End of the year. What a year. I have been absent from this space, a ghost, haunting its edges but not entering the door. It has been hard to put words to thoughts, hard to find what I wanted to say. So many things in this small, tiny year that have needed expressing but I have been unable or unwilling to take the time to express. I wanted to write something back in August about the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. Then time rushed by and each passing day seemed to make such comments irrelevant or dated. Still, I look at this past year and I cannot let go of the facts of their having died. They were both such a large part of my intellectual development. Their films excited me, had me on edge. I wanted to watch them all, to dissect them, to understand them. I read interviews with both, books by both, their scripts. I did this as well with other directors - Truffaut, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Bellochio, Godard, Rohmer and on and on and on - all the famous directors of the 50s, 60s and 70s. The New Wave, Neo-Realism, and so on. These are among the things that put fire in my soul.

Michael Hamburger died this summer as well. Right around the same time. Most people when you say the name Michael Hamburger laugh and say "is that really his name?". He was a poet of incredible intelligence, a translator gifted beyond compare and a critic able to lift and enrich whatever subject he was writing about. His translations of the poetry of Paul Celan are enough for him to be remembered by. He also translated Nelly Sachs and Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Hoderlin. His book, The Truth of Poetry, is an astonishing accomplishment, covering 20th century modern poetry in such detail and in such a perceptive, clear way that you find yourself using this book as a map to the various poets he writes about. It is also such a clear argument for what poetry does for us - the sense that poetry contains an inarguable truth, a truth necessary for our lives.

It has been quite a year. My year started with a dream in which I felt helpless. A dream where I was being pulled by the wishes and desires of someone else and I had no control, no ability to change what was happening. Like a dream I watched as others scurried over and around my house making changes I did not agree with. This was a strange yet prophetic dream for me. It was more disturbing than it sounds - as dreams can sometimes be. It was a harbinger of my year.

I have thought a lot this year about the trajectory of my life. The paths, the tangents, the straight and not so straight lines. The friends lost, old and new, the friends found, old and new, and the rediscovered friends. I thought about those friends I lost due to some strange event, something also like a dream, that seemed to part us in a way we never meant to happen. I have looked for ways to bring them back to my life but don't know how. I have thought about friends who were simply there, acting as friends always do with love and tolerance and compassion for all our messed up ways. I have thought about the way in which I have also acted as a friend. How important this is, to be a true friend. I have been comforted this year by those close to me during moments when the pain seemed so overwhelming that I didn't know which way to turn. I have given the same comfort to others feeling much the same as I did. This is what we do. This is why we are here.

My year also included one beautiful dream that I return to again and again. Something that is like a touchstone for me. I had a dream about Amsterdam. It was a beautiful dream. In this dream I walked the streets of this city. The sun was shining pure and bright. The air was cool. Peace and serenity walked by my side and my feeling was one of such benevolence that I felt weightless. The city opened before me like a great maze made decipherable by this presence of peace of serenity. It was as if everything was made real and understood. It was a dream that healed so much within me. I woke from this dream a refreshed man, with strength returned to me, with a heart made stronger. I still see this city in my mind's eye, the cobbled streets, the bike riders passing by as if in slow motion, the canals with sun glinting off the top, the sounds - the sounds - the way sounds are in a dream, there and yet not. I had this dream about Amsterdam. Peace and serenity walked by my side. This is what friends do for us, they walk by our side, they give us such dreams.

May your New Year be filled with such things.

A Pocket Full of Firecrackers

2007-06-30T14:18:00.000-04:00

J.J. Hunsecker: What's this boy got that Susie likes?
Sidney Falco: Integrity - acute, like indigestion.
J.J. Hunsecker: What does that mean - integrity?
Sidney Falco: A pocket fulla firecrackers - looking for a match!
[grinning]
Sidney Falco: It's a new wrinkle, to tell the truth... I never thought I'd make a killing on some guy's "integrity."
From The Sweet Smell of Success Directed by Alexander MacKendrick, written by Ernst Lehman and Clifford Odets

If you have never seen the film The Sweet Smell of Success you should go out and rent it right away. It is a film that holds up so well in its darkness, sarcasm and perception of human foibles and strengths. The quote from above is one of the most memorable moments in the film. Burt Lancaster's J.J. Hunsecker wants to destroy a young, popular jazz musician, who is dating his younger sister, because he thinks all musicians are degenerates. Tony Curtis's Sydney Falco sets out to destroy the musician through the man's honesty and naivete, most especially through his integrity. Falco rightly sees integrity as a powerful thing but doesn't understand its true nature. In the end the musician is hurt by the actions practiced on his reputation but he is unbent, unrepentant and determined to go on. In the end he teaches Falco how very powerful integrity truly is.

It is interesting to look at the definition of integrity: 1 : an unimpaired condition: SOUNDNESS 2: firm adherence to a code of esp. moral or artistic values : INCORRUPTIBILITY 3 : the quality or state of being complete or undivided : COMPLETENESS syn see Honesty (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary). It may often seem that our world lacks an unimpaired condition or a firm adherence to a code of moral or civic or artistic values or that it is as far from being undivided as one can imagine and as for honesty... Our leaders in the world, especially in my part of the world, have demonstrated such wholesale lack of integrity that it is hard at times to feel good about my country, myself or the human race in general. The everyday news seems so bleak to me. It is very easy to read the news and think the worst of the world and of people. To think that all is corrupt and lost and lacking in anything that helps our hearts stay strong.

I am fixated by this word today because I have been reading and listening and watching too much news. An article on the underhanded use of power by our vice president; Supreme Court decisions that reverse 50 years of attempts at making education equal for all; children shows in other countries that use a Micky Mouse-like mascot to exhort children to kill Israelis; bombs, bombs, bombs, bombs; a major world leader who seems to lack the mental capability to fully understand the complexities of the dilemmas he is faced with; the broad swath of human failings on show daily. It seems as if integrity is lacking in so many of these stories. Selfishness is there, blind willfulness is there, arrogance, stupidity and hatred are all there. It is enough to make one sit down and give up.

But, you see, that is precisely where the power of integrity, the example of integrity is needed the most. For if you dig deep enough in the news, regardless of where you get your news, you can find those stories that speak to our hearts and teach us about this power, this force, this unimpaired condition we should all strive for. It is in times such as these, in the most dark moments, when the examples of character seem so sordid and bleak, that the person who possesses a resolute heart, determined, with faith (religious, spiritual, philosophical, whatever is their faith), with an incorruptible nature, honest and complete - complete in the sense that they need no one's approbation in order to make their decision, they do not need the approval of their neighbors, friends, classmates or society at large - performs a simple act that is like magic, that gives power to us all. They stand up. They continue on. They get back up from whatever ground they've been knocked down to. They look into the eyes of all those who wish they would disappear, give up, quit and they wave and say "here I am and here I come, I hope you are ready." John Paul Jones, the great American naval hero, stood on the deck of his burning, sinking ship and said "I have not yet begun to fight." That sensibility inside a person who possesses integrity is damn near unbeatable.

I teach. Every day I go into a room full of expectant faces and try to guide them towards this ineffable thing we try to describe as being educated. I don't think it is that easy to simply say that learning how to construct a sentence, learning that 2 + 2 = 4, or learning that the sun hitting a leaf helps to create oxygen is what makes us educated. "Part of the American myth," says John Mason Brown, "is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever." For me what it is about is helping them to discover the deeper virtues that lie within their hearts.

I try to teach them integrity. I point out to my students those in history, in the current news and in daily, local, nearby life, who have striven to make some difference for good in their society regardless of the personal cost. I use Bob Moses, the quiet activist of the civil rights era, working under daily death threats to teach African-Americans in Mississippi how to vote, who now teaches mathematics to underprivileged kids in New York because he believes that Mathematics is the next great fight in the course of civil rights; Aung San Su Kyi staying in Myanmar (Burma) under house arrest, under the fear of being assassinated, fighting for her country's right to have a democracy; Rosa Parks - oh yes, I know, it's easy to use Rosa Parks and everyone does, but, dammit, really read to them about how she came to that decision after much deliberation went into the action because it is a story of great determination and integrity;Nkosi Johnson, the 11 year old AIDS activist in Africa who said "Do all that you can, with everything you have, in the place you are, in the time you have"; so many others, so many others. And, more importantly, I show them people around their neighborhoods, seemingly so everyday, who every day demonstrate integrity whether they win or lose.

I tell them stories about lawyers fighting for seemingly hopeless cases against seemingly hopeless odds, trying to free wrongfully convicted people; I tell them about friends who gave up large money careers to go and work and teach in places where the poverty is so oppressive and the resources so meager that it breaks the heart to think of the children trying to learn in those conditions (and I am talking about America, not some Peace Corps destination); I tell them about those who stand up and speak out against wrongs and how, whether they win or lose, what matters is they did it and by so doing they have done something for those around them. If dying for a cause is the "last full measure of devotion", as Lincoln says in his Gettysburg Address, then what does it mean to continue in a cause against those who have greater powers than even when it seems that loss is inevitable or likely? What do we call this daily measure of devotion that keeps these people striving for the greater good? I call it integrity.

A friend, someone who's integrity has often left me in awe, once wrote a poem that went something like this (this is a translation from the Chinese):

A decent, educated person
careful, alone

She went on to write as a way of explanation for me:

In Confucianism, virtue is of value in itself. A well-educated person should be aware of his behavior even when he is alone and no one is watching.

I placed that on the wall of my classroom. Integrity is the same. It is about doing something right even when no one is there to see it.

For further information on some of the people mentioned please go to these sites:

http://www.algebra.org/

http://www.dassk.com/index.php

http://www.nkosishaven.co.za/

http://www.amnesty.org/