Elbow, Elmo, uncle

A year and a half old and just learning to talk, it's not always clear what Meja's trying to say. Is it elbow? Elmo? uncle? It's amusing for his doting parents and adoring grandparents, but serious work for him. He hears words that he wants to use but it's difficult to figure out exactly how to form the vowel and consonant sounds that make his words recognizable.

Part of my job is teaching the complex ballet of throat, tongue and face required to produce even simple intelligible expressions in English. Everything has to be coordinated and sequenced properly. Configurations have to transition from one to the other smoothly and without hitch.  Any habitual moves of the tongue or lips that aren't part of the process have to be suppressed. The final product has to be tested against the expected reaction of the audience--in Meja's case, mum, dad,  uncle.

Native speakers (usually) achieve this pretty early on and, apart from nervousness or shock, have no trouble producing long, graceful strings of words like the alternate blade tracks of a long distance skater. Not so learners. It's as if they jab the ice, tangle their blades, overbalance, stutter-step, and only go forward haltingly and with great effort.

I've been teaching now for years, and finally I think I'm beginning to express intricate thoughts clearly without having to limn them out mentally beforehand. I'm sometimes surprised at my success in arriving at what I actually meant by the end of the sentence. ("You were always a talker," I can hear my mother say.) It's almost as if I've done so much spouting (as well as writing and reading) that I can let go and let my meaning unspool without having to worry about exactly how.

Some days I'm tongue-tied, of course, and on others, my expressions are too long-winded, too awkward, off the mark. Still, these not necessarily perfect nor elegant but precise sentences do emerge at odd moments, and to my delight.

Language for Meja is a tool he is learning to wield. He's soon be able to use it effectively, depending for his fluency on muscle memory. I feel now I'm drawing on the reservoir of tacit knowledge that I've filled over a lifetime of language and stored in the matrices of my mind. Something, I know not what, is now, finally, practiced at making the sentences I want to have said and delivering them fluently to my clacking jaws for delivery.

Lux lucre

It can be easy to forget the otherness of money; when we have enough, it's an expression of ourselves, as beautiful as we are; when we don't, it's a iron door that reflects our dismayed faces, mocking the impotence and in-consequentiality we see on them. This comes to mind as I process the news a friend told me today of a rent hike that is going to throw a precarious but balanced set of arrangements into chaos.

Money is something we personify: if you love it, it will love you, and we objectify: inflation/deflation is happening and to be avoided,/promoted. It represents an indefinite potentiality in terms of fulfillment of desire, but at any moment has only the value given it by common consent. As a medium of transaction, it flows like water; as a record of debt, it is as obdurate as stone. It is the soil in which enterprises root and the rain by which enterprises are nourished. Its smell is everywhere. In its absence, it is most present. It is the breath of the world. It is nobody's and everybody's.

For me, money is something forever dwindling; for others, it is forever proliferating. One reason, perhaps, why I don't like to review my accounts is the a priori assumption that the news will be bad; there will be less than wanted, less than expected, less than needed. Money treats me with disdain, and I'm sometimes happy to only look and not spend so as to spite its agitation to be in circulation.

This is all silly talk; money comes from hard work and prudent investment (and other pious behaviors), of course. But there's also birth, crime, monopoly, sheer luck. Money mocks those who recommend only one way to woo her. And there must be at least fifty ways for money to leave her lovers. But if she (why she?) appears again unexpectedly one sunny day and wants to dance, who will not drop everything and step out with lightsome foot.

It's tempting to anthropomorphize, but there's nothing theoretical about my friend's predicament. The desire for profit on one hand and inadequate income on the other are threatening to wreak havoc. This irresponsible goddess should get out of those glamorous gowns and tiaras and into overalls and bandanna and get to work helping my friend.

But, like a cat, money doesn't care, cannot care. It's me who must. With or without money, it's somehow up to me to practice generosity, constancy of caring and courage as my encounter with my friend evolves.

Non disputandum de gustibus?

An encounter with otherness? How about listening to Elliot Carter's music. The grand old man of American concert music who died a year or so ago at the age of 103 is composer universally respected. So why do I find listening to (especially) his later works so unsatisfying, even irritating?

Driving home from Connecticut this afternoon, I encountered his Clarinet Concerto of 1996.  First listening: clearly episodic, clarinet range either low or high, other instruments percussive in style, no recognizable motifs.

Second listening: after reading the booklet, I learn there are seven movements called Scherzando (dancing), Giocoso (playful), etc., I can hear the clarinet playing off against different ensembles of instruments--tuned percussion, untuned percussion, muted brass, unmuted brass, etc. Drum tattoos, string pluckings, clarinet dancing up and down, whirling around, more hollow thumping. Again, no audibly convincing organizing principle.

Third listening: Now I can hear the parts readily, signaled by all the instruments playing tutti. Clarinet still seems somewhat manic rather than expressive. Lots of snare drumming. Everything playing according to its own rhythm. After more thumps, and clarinet very high, very low, a sudden cessation. Some middle sections seem quiet and winsome but they're framed by instrumental trampolining.

So I've listened three times; I can hear the structure, appreciate the musicianship of the players, and enjoy some of the different timbres of the instruments. Commentator Bayan Northcott in the album booklet says  the clarinet 'continuously ripples, cavorts, soars' as set against the 'colouristic possibilities of one group [of instruments] at a time.' Yep. It does. But, after three dedicated listenings, so what?

Am I too serious? Isn't this all anyone should reasonably hope from music? Isn't music a game like filling in square with different designs? Isn't music just the sound it makes any moment?

Where is the pleasure? is my question. I'm sure those who enjoy this piece do so sincerely. Perhaps the deepest way we can be different from one another is in what we delight in. I don't understand, for instance, why some folks love melons; I can't stand them. I get the concept of wine connoisseurship. The pleasure of different styles of music must be more than just personal preference. It doesn't have to be ineffable. Well, I'll keep on trying to see what gives people pleasure, keep on asking why they get excited. I don't want to forego any good thing available. In the meantime, I just discovered a wonderful piece American Landscapes for Guitar and Orchestra (1989) by Lukas Foss. That I look forward to hearing again.

Life Links

Oh, the white sleeves on the branches of the plum tree.

It's been easy so far in this blog to talk about incidental encounters, the chance meetings, the short-term engagements, the Other that doesn't hang around; but what about the long-term encounters of family, or perhaps marriage? I mean parents and children, siblings, spouses and all the many people we know for years through good times and bad.

I'm thinking of the celebrations and the crises, the vacations and the  jobs, the fallings into and out of love, the career advancements and the health declines, the birthdays and anniversaries, the memories (Oh, I forgot my daughter's birthday two days ago! How could I? Stupid! Stupid!)  What I'm talking about are the complex, evolving relationships that knit us and grip us year after year as our beards grow in and our hair falls out. (Okay, my beard, my hair)

What about sisters, for instance, each loving each other deeply, and yet able to irritate and exasperate the other like no one else. Affection, guilt, pride, anger: there is no emotion sisters can't feel about the other; yet they can never not be connected, never not vulnerable to the joys and sorrows of being linked. The first glimpse of the new baby in the bassinet by her older sibling--curious, resentful, cautious, adoring--is just the beginning of years of looking at and looking away from each other. Each brings out in the other what neither like and both love. There are betrayals and failures as well as loyalties so solid as to make even rocks look squishy.

The image comes to mind of double-stars circling each other in the vast volumes of space, streams of fire pulled out of each, spiraling into the other, plumes of incandescence shooting out into the cosmos--a grand vision for such a humble, heartfelt interaction.

What has God-in-love to do with this Bayeux-like tapestry of small-scale occasions? What if the relationship of God-in-love and the beloved Other, the one already here but coming into being, is similar in texture and intricacy?  What if it's the overall character of a a lifetime of desiring and the doing of deeds of hospitality, friendship and exploration in their many manifestations between siblings, between spouses, between any life-linked that has heft, lastingness, even unto the world to come? Can it be that the cruelties and condescensions just fall away in the end? What if just being in such encounters, open to the way they change and we change, is itself the point, the glorious culmination?

I have respect for the sisters I know, but want to extend that to families and friends generally, and put these extended encounters, which are the warp and woof of our emotional, relational existence, into the largest of all contexts. Persistence in encountering the sunshine through  rain will never not matter.

Finger pointing one way, eyes pointed the other

"Join the national conversation on..." is a frequent invitation, but what is this conversation and where is it being conducted?  I sit down with my friend Rodo to spend a lunch hour reviewing what we both think is going on and going wrong in politics, but is that part of  that larger conversation. We talk about the political Other who are people not very different but talking about us; are we encountering them?

Often the 'national' conversation is conducted in conducted online, in the news mediia, through TV ads, on billboards, and the like, where usually each speaker figuratively stands with one arm outstretched (and outraged) trained on the opposition, but the head turned to track the gaze of our folk following the pointed finger. It's an indirect conversation, often conducted by proxy.

The Other we encounter in, say, politics, we see more and more as an anti-Us. It's not so much that the Other is different as the Other is opposed. What I take to be true, this Other is convinced is false. Where I propose to go, the Other is committed to putting up a block. That which I take to be valuable, this Other thinks is useless, even detrimental. Words that mean a certain thing to me mean the exact opposite for this Other. The least relaxation of assertion is like leaving a sally-port unbolted, unguarded. This constant skepticism of and opposition to my basic working premises irritates and enrages me, and especially if I suspect that it is done in bad faith or with malicious intent.

This is an Other who seems like that chess player who, maddeningly, always finds just the moves that put us again and again in check. This otherness thwarts us; denies us freedom to move, even to be; makes us self-conscious in a way that leads to constant second-guessing; forces us to define ourselves in the face of one distrustful but disdainful. Reciprocally, the Other experiences the same in and through us.

This is a zero-sum otherness. It feels like trap, claustrophobic, exhausting, ultimately futile. Worse than the winning or losing is the having to always play the game, having to always care about winning and losing, when what we really want are fresh-air encounters of friendship, exploration, hospitality. I've experienced the glee of victory, of triumphant self-assertion, and it feels great for a while, but it's not as interesting to me as open conversation. I'm not as interesting to myself.

Winner-take-all contests often produce this other/anti-other (me as the anti-other) interactions and are favorites modes of encounter if we see the world in the 1st-3rd person terms. I'm more interested in 2nd  person interactions that God-in-love's perspective vis a vis the beloved Other. Is there a way to engage in national conversations in 2nd person mode?

Is there a way forward in that portion of the God-in-love prayer: "Forgive us when we do that doesn't honor you/As we forgive those who disappoint, dismiss or despise us"?

Magnificent (if also ridiculous)

Bright sunshine.  Skin-scraping cold wind. Whitecaps on the Charles. Flags stiff as an outstretched arm of accusation. A crowd of nervy, young male rowers in red and black elastic togs milling around the Union Boat Club. "We're supposed to race." Easily foreseeable risks: lee shore wreckings, capsizings. At very least, soakings and extreme physical discomfort. Still the contestants are there. The marshals hesitate to cancel; meanwhile, thinking, waiting, they furl and unfurl red starting flags and waggle them in the air.

This was a day of fierce wind so strong that, later on, even heavy people reported feeling nervous about their stability in the teeth of it. So putting the shells in the water on the windward side of the dock could be a challenge. Still these were young, resourceful, dedicated guys; it could be done.

Why do we overcome obstacles just to put ourselves into situations of danger or discomfort? What do we meet out there on the water, for instance, with the wind shoving us off course and into the shore, the waves breaking across the bow, the spray from the dripping oars blown against our faces, the sharp wind lashing us as do birch twigs in a sauna? "Are we crazy?" we ask ourselves, and answer with wild glee: "Of course, what else?"

We're in for it now. The time of decision is past. No way out but ahead. Afterwards, bragging to ourselves, and perhaps others. Now, here in the midst, high on the geyser of energy, emboldened by our audacity, exhilarated by our disdain of pain and fear, we enter the heroic space of sheer magnificent (if also ridiculous) deed. The race itself an excuse for storming transcendence.

There are sensible voices enough, usually, to deflate our swelling ambitions of glory before we launch. But I wonder: what do we meet out there beyond the point of no return? Something within us that we need regularly to encounter? Something beyond?

What a plant knows

What A Plant Knows is...a lot, if we broaden the concept of knowing. This book by Daniel Chamovitz has introduced me over the last couple of days to the realm of sessile brainless beings that, nevertheless, are "acutely aware of the world around them...of their visual environment...of aromas surrounding them....of when they are being touched...of gravity...of their past--past infections and the conditions they've weathered."

The experiments by which we have learned these things are presented in detail, and fascinating; Darwin would be famous for his work in this area if for no other. Still the mind-boggling aspect of this book for me is the new world I find I live in: the plants around us, grasses, trees, flowers and bushes, stems, roots and leaves, not just growing but knowing. "A plant is aware of its environment and people are part of  the environment,' says the author, who is at pains not to anthropomorphize the vegetable kingdom.

So my plum tree, planted last year, with its spindly branches knobbly today with wen-like buds already cracking open into white blossoms, and the pear tree in the opposite corner of the yard with the dusty khaki eruptions on its twigs, puffing out leaves as clothes too-tightly packed might erupt from a suitcase, and the poppy that, without my noticing it happen, has extruded long hairy plume-like leaves (oh so brilliant flowers by Memorial Day), and the wand-like vines untorn from my fence last November now squirting forth green leaves like toothpaste, all these are monitoring their surroundings and responding to it in subtle and intricate ways so as to better survive. Never passive (though sometimes still), plants are now not insensate.

Talk to them? Sure, but they are deaf actually, though leaf to leaf, plant to plant, they do communicate with each other. There's no secret channel of sympathy that unites us. There are some surprising elements of our chemistry which are also represented in plants, but basically we are very different. What unites us is our being alive, a challenge in response to which we are pursuing very different strategies.

Yet, contemplating the 'awareness' of plants, I have a sense of strangeness. Outside my window this evening, out in my yard, there are plants inhabiting their special sensorium which are poised to receive, perhaps already responding to inputs from our common environment. Plants now seem more engaged than they had before, more interested, therefore more interesting.

Hope it will, wish it would

The hope of this blog is the introduction of a fresh, positive element into world discourse: the God-in-love conceptual framework and it's new account of the meaning of life--Whew! What a lot of words--and it proposes to realize this hope by exemplifying the way the framework can work in one person's daily life (mine (for now)).

But a recent critique of 'blind hope' compels me to reevaluate the very concept of hope.

What we need in the face of what Nietzsche calls 'a strict, hard factuality,' is not hope, but 'courage in the face of reality,' wrote Simon Critchley recently in the Times (4.19.14), speaking against a 'blind hope' that represents 'a form of moral cowardice that allows us to escape from reality and prolong human suffering.' He seems as critical of political hope-mongers as of fear-mongers. 'The theological idea of hope has migrated into our national psyche to such an extent that it blinds us to the reality of the world that we inhabit and causes a sort of sentimental complacency that actually prevents us from seeing things aright and protesting against...moral and political lapses...'

'The remedy...is a skeptical realism, deeply informed by history. Such realism has a abiding commitment to reason and the need for negotiation and persuasion, but also an acute awareness of reason's limitations in the face of violence and belligerence...'

'Thinking without hope might sound rather bleak; it needn't be so. I [Critchley] see it rather as embracing an affirmative, even cheerful, realism.' He goes on,'You can have all kinds of reasonable hopes, it seems to me, the kind of modest, pragmatic and indeed deliberately fuzzy conception of social hope [of, say,] Richard Rorty.  But unless those hopes are realistic we will end up in a blindly hopeful (and therefore hopeless) idealism.'.

So what is the hope of my blog succeeding, and even more significant, what is the hope of the hope that the framework posits will remain relevant in the days ahead?

An important distinction in this regard, it seems to me, is between wishing and hoping. Wishing is an expression of forlorn desire: 'I wish I were rich; she wishes I would stop drinking'. (Note the association with the subjunctive would). Wishing is closely related to the "something will turn up" hopefulness that Critchley scorns with justification. The "It'll all turn out somehow" denial of what we can clearly see and reasonably calculate going on around us is a prescription certainly for disappointment, often for disaster. This is when indomitable turns dumb.

Hope is a more agile attitude: something good that can happen will happen, as in 'She hopes to be here tomorrow; I hope it doesn't rain.'  What exactly that something is may change as its grounds change or are forsaken by facts; but that there will always be grounds for grounds for hope is a fundamental premise of God-in-love. (By grounds for hope, I don't mean the coffee that brightens my outlook every morning.)

Hope, like a thing with feathers, can flutter to a new tree when the branch it had rested on is foreclosed by an emergent impossibility or very long odds. It may be hopeless, for instance, to expect someone to recover fully from a mental illness but maybe not to look for something new arising which improves the situation. (I'm hoping this at the moment.)

Hope spurs action, and action sometimes reveals new loopholes in impossibility and systems for beating the odds. At the very least, it prepares the situation for new grounds which may host new flocks of hopes for encounters of hospitality, friendship, exploration.

The Other of hope is the 'strict, hard factuality' that confronts my expectations of something good to come. The frontal zone between the two is dynamic and often contested. One hope for 'something good to come' may be replaced by or transformed into another, but hoping goes on (as well it might).

Why not? Reality is still being mapped; the future is certainly not fully predictable. The grounds for this or that hope may change or disappear (let's be alert to this) but the grounds for hope itself may have deep, deep foundations. I certainly hope so.

On the outside

It would have been a remarkable experience: immersed in the exultancy of the million people cheering on 40 thousand runners of the Marathon this superb April afternoon, this day of triumph, this truly a splendid day.

I love the high emotion; I remember once weeping on Memorial Drive once following note by note the last measures of Mahler's 2nd symphony, and glad, even proud to be so moved. Today a real chorus of hundreds of thousands was singing its own 'Resurrection,' scripted, for sure, but truly heart-felt. This was a real event, not just a performance. If I wanted to experience the tight chest, the caught breath, the wet cheeks, why was I not there? It's not enough to say I had students to teach. I was in some way aloof to the memorable occasion and to the crowd which had given itself to it.

There are pernicious crowd phenomena, of course, that one must resist the appeal of,  but this was not one of those; rather it was a moment of trans-individual bigness that included everyone who loved the city and the event. Of course, it's the business of TV to make all things into everything. Sure, there must have been issues of parking, access, crowding, obstructed views. Still this was undeniably a great day (even if the Red Sox lost), and part of me wanted to be carried away with it--except I wasn't.

To such events, these powerful community events, I have intellectual responses and private reactions but I'm generally swept up in communal celebrations or griefs even ones like the Red Sox victory or the dread during the lock-down following the Marathon (Confession: I had to escape that day; what a relief to drive over the line into Dedham). On the other hand, political victories leave me giddy, and losses, disconsolate.

I don't feel superior to the high spirits of the glorious day, but rather envious. How wonderful to be enraptured as many were today. Am I left out of the transcendent communal moments that the mass of mankind sometimes experiences simply because of my congenital reluctance or incapacity? What can us en masse see I cannot; what feel that I don't.?

Anthropologists report an 'on the outside' feeling when they describe the expressions of grief at the funerals of a family they are studying. Of course, there's a requirement to be and a satisfaction in being cool, dispassionate; we all in our world of mediated experiences know well how to be distant, analytical. This is my training too. But sometimes passing up a chance to be actually jostled and jubilant can mean missing an encounter with an Other that is all of us, the Other in which we all are.

(I didn't expect this post to turn out as it did. It's a little embarrassing to have to confess a childish desire to be included in the form of 'Oh, that I had...' So be it.)

Stories of the season

These are the days when key stories of the Jewish and Christian scriptures are retold and I'm impressed by how many are about meetings and conversations between individuals and deity (seen as such then or since).

Two encounters particularly interest me at this time: the story of Moses at the burning bush, and the story of Mary Magdalene at the tomb. Some things I notice:

-One an introduction, the other a reunion

-People acting first: Moses turning aside; Mary going to the tomb first thing in the morning and then later stooping to looking in after the men had gone

-People (and perhaps deity) confronting otherness and experiencing perplexity, bafflement: 

       ‘This is amazing” from Moses; Mary: 'Where have they taken him?'

-Deity addressing: God saying 'Moses'; Jesus saying 'Dear woman'

-Revelations and recognitions of identity: ‘I am who I am, ‘Rabboni’

-Each urgently engaging: informing, questioning, replying, requesting, warning, protesting: 

       ‘Who am I?’protesting Moses; ‘What about your brother?’countering Yahweh; 

       ‘Why are you crying?’asking Jesus; Mary's outstretched hand implied in Jesus' 'Don't touch me.'

-No disdain, no dismissal 

-Both intensely dramatic scenes, resonant in terms of consequence (and not just for the relationship) and also implication

Leaving aside the historicity of these accounts, these stories exemplify principles of encounter that apply generally. I think about some my encounters yesterday: giving an invitation to join our cross-country crossword, a service call for my ornery washing machine, a phone call with my mother, delivery of popovers to my neighbors... Certainly not with the same level of numinous poignancy or potency, my stories are recognizably similar interactions. The stories of this season point to an openness, a courage, an authenticity, a mutuality, a dignity, a power that I can learn to cultivate in my encounters. 

"There was a ship"

While sitting outside reading in the sun, "and smale fowles maken melodye,," I got a call from Duma:.

It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.'

He holds him with his skinny hand,
'There was a ship,' quoth he.

Actually it was a Prius. Duma and her daughter-in-law had driven down to Washington from Connecticut for a few days, Pika for a conference, Duma to visit her sister. The car ran like a top, economizing like crazy, and everybody had a good time until... The car wouldn't start after a few days of idleness. What gives? Tow to the dealership: :"Leave it here; we'll get to when we can; if it's the transmission, it could run you...," and all the other comfortable words mechanics and managers use to soothe people feeling distress

Finally, three days later, the diagnosis: not a tranny but something gnawed the wires bare, shorting out the entire systems. What? Squirrels? Rats? Washington squirrels or rats? Anyway, wires replaced, long after they'd hoped to be home, the two got on the road...only to find stop and go traffic all the way to the Jersey Turnpike. The cherry trees had been in bloom around the Jefferson Memorial and all America had come to see, and now all America was on it's way home. Aaaaaah!

In northern Jersey, just before the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson, late at night, snow! Big, flabby flakes flopping down on the Saw Mill Parkway obscuring the lane markings. "I couldn't do anything--Pika was driving and she's an excellent driver--but I was peering as hard as she was at the road. It was awful. You couldn't see anything." Well after midnight the exhausted pair rolled in.

I love such stories. You want to tell; I want to hear. I feel I live in stories, some piping hot from the oven of experience; others smooth, cool, satisfying over and over. Like a bell tolling and resonating through me, your stories live your life in mine.

Some advice from a master:

How to Tell a Story

Take your time. 
Tell it slowly.
There is nothing to be gained
By huddling words, by watching me to see
If I grow inattentive; which I shall, 
I swear, if you believe I should, 
If you have doubts yourself, if you race on
When all I want to have time do is stop
Dead still
So I can be there with you, feeling, seeing.
Start over then and tell your tale
As the clock ticks: Grandfather's clock,
That listens to itself and grins
When we forget to do so; as I would
This hour; which waste for me.
You understand? I want it wasted--
All of it, and not this little bit, my friend,
That in our hurry you already have.

--Mark Van Doren

Symbols and slogans

The clouds were grey white as if shot through with slivers of ice, Patches of snow from Tuesday's storm lingering in shady spots in Charlestown near Schrafft's. The wind from the east hard and rasping as I went over the Mass Ave bridge. When I stopped to retie my shoes, my fingers were stiff with cold and fumblely. Yet the normal crew of runners had been supplemented with people getting ready for the marathon Monday. One runner stopped me to ask if this beside us was MIT. And was that Boston University over there? Lean men loping by alone looked tough. A trio of Ethiopian (? ) runners looked lithe. Caps were pulled well down.

The marathon, already famous, has become even more of a symbol and we Boston folk have chanted ourselves into a slogan.

Later, I was behind a thick white pillar, sitting on a beautifully shaped wooden pew, gazing down past my shoes at beautiful wood flooring glowing with sunlight, meditating in the white spaces of the service on the words of one put to death by (pretty much) due process. Also a symbol, also a slogan.

We need symbols and slogans, thirst for them when the literal and ordinary--the strong enough (for most purposes) gallumpher that I am, the country-side crowd-gatherer that he was--doesn't inform, doesn't inspire as we require. And, indeed, there is often more to the mundane than appears on the surface.

These examples aside, the weight of symbolism can seem sometimes less a natural transcendence than a mask which feels other to the face, the slogan less real character than caricature. The perceptions of others, even as we accept them, can make us alien to ourselves, formal and false to them. To have real conversation, we can't be symbols and slogans. Symbolism et cetera should be worn lightly, glimpsed fleetingly, known intuitively. In the meantime, hurrah for the down to earth.

Leading the way

We three, about our mothers, a chance conversation: the loss of memory, of awareness of the present, of the markers of their special belovedness, more and more with this one, time to time with that, sure to come with the other. They whom we love are steadily going on, turning the corner ahead, moving out of sight, leading the way, we following behind.

There is no glamour in this adventure; The drama in this next stage of love is muted. Oh, dear ones, let us do for you what we will wish for ourselves: the grace of hospitality, the dance of friendship, the freshness of exploration in each meeting, between meetings, beyond meetings, forever.

No promise, but

It would be nice if the God-in-love framework promised happiness, but I think it doesn't.

Daniel Haybron  of St. Louis University writes of happiness, not as pleasure (vs pain) but as an appreciation of the fulfillment of our needs as persons (vs anxiety or depression), needs such as "a sense of security, a good outlook, autonomy and control over our lives, good relationships, and skilled and meaningful activity." (New York Times, 4.13.14) His analysis seems sound: happiness as a kind of judgment (vs an event or condition).

Yet life being what it is, our safety, our moods, our freedom, our companions, our tasks are not always what we choose, don't always affirm our personhood. One of the most moving genres of story is that which tells of the discovery of fulfillment where there had seemed none; it's a tale often enough true to keep us trying, and crying.

What's on my mind, however, are those people who don't find happiness, those who are often not "in good spirits, quick to laugh and slow to anger, at peace and untroubled, confident and comfortable in [their] own skin, engaged, energetic, full of life." Many wish they were happy this way but find it unattainable; many cannot even conceive it. Many limp through life; many are raw. This 'happiness' is beyond their grasp. Let them try harder! achievers say. Give me a break.

At times, of course, we all contemplate our lives and conclude: this configuration is not satisfactory; but sometimes also, unexpectedly, we reach the opposite conclusion. I'm a happy person, but who knows now what will befall?

The dynamic space between God-in-love and the beloved Other (each seeking the best of and for the other) is expansive enough, I feel sure, to include not some, but all, even the miserable. If encounters of hospitality, friendship and exploration are the currency of that relationship, anyone can do worthwhile deeds of lasting significance, no matter their happiness status.

Does, then, the framework have any contribution to make to happiness? For me, it's a context, a program, a method, and an assurance within which and by which my life flourishes. This very blog, a new, surprisingly positive adventure, is a direct product. I'm grateful. I'm going ahead.

Waiting for what is to come

Snow this morning: granular snow tucked around the daffodils and hyacinths, the new hard green of the grass pastel, snow grains thrown hard by the north wind against the magnolia buds and my face.

Just finished Charles Emmerson's 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. It's a visit to the most 23 significant cities around the globe, giving us a sense of what it felt like to be there in 1913: what had just been happening, what people were talking about, arguing about, worrying about, looking forward to.

Starting with Europe, where the tinder would soon burst into raging fire, to the Americas, and Asia, this world tour reminded me that the world always has the same kind of feel to it: much to hope for, much to dread, much to shake our heads at, occasions of pride, poignancy and deplorability in each place. Every age of mankind's existence is somebody's golden age or ghastly omen.

1913 doesn't come across as a specially dysfunctional year; indeed many of the unresolved issues of that year are with us today. The brutalist misogyny of today may find its paternity in the Edwardian resistance to women's suffrage. The perplexing issue of Japan's place in the world, for instance, was felt acutely in 1913, but not resolved until the mid-century. Certain pressing issues survive even catastrophic war, will not let go of us short of resolution or extinction.

The Minkowski interpretation makes the past, the present, and the future a single block of space-time, where the limits of what can happen in any subsequent second must fall within the cone representing how far light can travel in that second. The future is already there,  just unpredictable.  The God-in-love framework is based on the conviction that the future is radically open: what will emerge might have not. In each second kindling is laid up and seeds planted from which whatever does burst into flame or bloom will come.

The Other of the year 1913 looms over the book, what happened next, the awful spawn of world war. In fact, each subsequent year is the offspring of the one before, delightful and devastating, the great themes running through the generations, but the futures unfurled or foreclosed in times each unique in profile and particulars.

Tomorrow as Other. It may pick up tiny mistakes, say, and amplify them into huge blunders, or not. It may make achievements potent or sterile. It will fulfill our wishes and defy them. What tomorrow will do to what we are expecting today is also a kind of encounter. Hospitality, friendship and exploration can be practiced, forward and backward.

Yesterday as Other. Thinking about 1913, I want to say to that year a century past: "I can understand what it was like for you. It's not too much different today. We'll do our best to carry on so that, perhaps, 2113 will look mercifully on us."

Breezy, lilting

A Haitian woman on the train this evening singing French (Creole?) songs to herself in a soft, mid-range voice, hers the only voice raised in the train, she unconcerned by the social proprieties that demand that we keep quiet if we're not talking to someone. She seemed to sing to please herself.

The songs, perhaps ten or more between State and Forest Hills, had the rhythmic lissomeness, the sprightliness, I associate with French folk song. Were some hymns or carols? Were some songs of the farm? Were some songs of girls and boys joking affectionately with each other? Her repertoire seemed endless and her voice had soft vibrato that made listening to her more and more pleasant. Off the train at the Hills, she walked into the melee at the foot of the escalator, her hand swinging loosely at her side in time with the tune that she sang.

Others may found her disturbing or irritating, and I might have too if her voice had been sour or her behavior erratic, but singing through the songs one knows seems as worthwhile in some sense as reading through the book on one's lap, learning things one doesn't know. I was taken. The songs, the breezy, lilting quality of their melodies, leave me with a light lily-like perfume of a memory.

Surprised by song

The late Mickey Rooney had a smooth, very serviceable singing voice; check out his 1948 version of Rodgers & Hart's Manhattan on YouTube. Perhaps it's not so surprising, really. Lots of Hollywood folk in those days could and did sing, as well as dance. Up to the fifties and beyond, it was part of the skill set of many  performers. (The other singer, though, in this Manhattan number was lip-synched.)

When I mentioned this at the checkout desk at the library, prompted by a nearby timely display of some of his movies, it wasn't to denigrate today's performers, but it must have seemed that way. The young woman with crisp features checking me out was studiedly neutral. Very evenly, she noted that some of today's performers do sing. We mentioned Les Miz, as an example. But that singing was news, I said, whereas before it had taken for granted. A middle aged guy with a white mustache leaning nearby on the counter chimed in agreeding with me. Vaudeville, he said; those actors came out of that tradition of live variety entertainment.

I walked away with lots of movies and music tucked under my arm, thinking about the reaction of the young woman (I want to say 'girl' because she was so much younger than me, but she must have been in her twenties.) Perhaps she's tired of old gaffers like me deploring the decline of the current generation. What next? she might wonder. Today's performers illiterate, inarticulate? We boomers are already monopolizing the wealth space; why not the cultural space too?

Today's music is very different in style from that of Rooney's era. That  music was explicitly written for singing, not proclaiming. Harmony was valued, as was wit in the lyrics. One could whistle the melodies. Yes, yes, old man. You've just dated yourself. I confess I really don't know how much these are a part of the songs of today. I'm sure I don't know even what I don't know.

But the more interesting question for me is singing itself as an activity. Our anatomy hasn't changed. A surprising, by today's standards, number of people trusted their voices in publicly recorded song. Rooney may have started with an ordinary voice, and just trained it. Singing was an important part of his career; he dueted with Judy Garland and others.

Singing could be a much bigger part of our lives, but too often we respond to any suggestion that we sing by demurring: "You'd be sorry if I opened my mouth." Are our voices really so bad, so incorrigible, or have we lost some faith in them, perhaps in our songs, perhaps in song itself.

Still the young woman must have seen in me one more Other spouting off about his generation. She knows how to damp down her affect in order to not provoke further ranting--especially with a mustachioed generational henchman nearby. A good strategy for working with people we disagree with--I do it myself sometimes--but it's no door to conversation. As I walked away, I was sorry I hadn't offered a better one.

"Boundless Realms of Joy"

A Saturday-long symposium on "Exploring the Neurological, Therapeutic and Social Benefits of Community Singing."  The first beautiful spring day of the year, and inside Lowell Lecture Hall, my mind was being blown.

The Red line agonizingly late, then slow. The actual venue hard to locate in the welter of Harvard buildings.. But I arrived in time to hear two passionate evangelists for choral singing, then to participate in a sing-along with chorus of people young and old with 'cognitive disabilities', such as Down's syndrome, from New Jersey: Joyful Noise. Then after lunch outside in the glorious sun, I heard three professionals, a doctor, a researcher and a music therapist, on the power of music to change lives. The finale, a composer and flautist, on turning her cerebral palsy into music. Category after category of otherness was claimed to be, shown to be, susceptible to community through the power of music. This symposium was a an exploration of new frontiers of hospitality.

So many powerful images: the older parents of Joyful Noise chorus members so proud of their children; the young woman in the wheel chair swinging her head and barking as she controlled a computer that expressed in a clear artificial voice funny and insightful remarks on her novel  'Opening the Cover'; the flautist showing off the gait that forms the fundamental structure of a concerto written for her; the music therapist telling how music has provided a work-around for the aphasics, and has eased and smoothed the breathing of the terminally ill. I don't know about the 50 or so other people, mostly older women, in the hall, but I felt confronted: "Does the affect of this person in front of you mean that conversation is not possible or profitable? Let me prove you wrong, mister." Only it wasn't a confrontational gathering but a celebratory one.

At times I was almost moved to tears (I tear up easily), at times I was fascinated and dazzled. By the end I was replete. My mind could barely 'chew' what it had taken in; even now, I realize that I have much to reflect on. The barriers against conversation seems to fall one by one through the day. A wide open vista for possibilities open up with those whose humanity is easily, sometimes persuasively, ignorable.

Of course, I personally had direct encounters only with the professional people. Also, beyond these showcase situations, there's the the taxing and perplexing responsibility of caregivers. But if in recent posts, I have longed for more palpability in the presence of God-in-love, I got it in spades yesterday.

Discovering through doing

 After telling him of my commitment to contribute a post a day to this blog, my friend Doro's thoughts were:  philosophy makes nothing happen; doing is the reward of doing. So he encouraged me to carry on with my discipline, as he himself pursues his own--experiment in photography, motivated only by the sheer joy of discovering through doing, not to propound any framework of ideas.

I wanted to say philosophy is not quite as feckless as he suggests--but in one way he's not completely off the mark. I love philosophy with its mission of inquiry and its frameworks of thought. Finding out what one really thinks and testing that again and again for internal coherence and correspondence to experience is not just fun mental work but an effective way to orient myself in and get traction on  this jumbled world. When, for instance, the news is either repetitively shocking or persistently ominous, a philosophical justification of hope can be a godsend muscularly resisting despair. When things seem pointless and banal, an a priori conviction of significance to be found is rousing. I need both.

But the project of this blog, the exploration of encounters based on the conviction of the presence of God-in-love in encounters, is fully fulfilled if I actually do sense that presence. My prayer declares God-in-love is 'present wherever I, or any, open to your energy, potentiality, power.' These can be inferred from encounters but presence is to be felt, perhaps the way characters in Wim Wenders movies sometimes sense the presence of angels standing beside, behind them. Philosophy as an investigation should be consummated in philosophy as wonder. It's said that Thomas Aquinas after a mystical experience felt that what he had learned from the experience far outweighed what he had argued intellectually; " all that I have written seems like straw to me."

To document encounters and deliberately inquire where God-in-love might at work be in each sometimes seems to me a mental calesthenic, like running on a treadmill versus running headlong into the embrace of my love. I feel justified continuing the workout but it is not effortless or thoughtless. I'm not a mystic and don't expect to be transported; I would like however to hear the 'still small voice' betokening the presence. Even a breeze, even a gentle redolence would be welcome.

In the meantime I have this script, these stage directions, all very improvisational, for encounters of hospitality, friendship and exploration, and I expect that if I play the part well, I'll sense the playwright behind, within, my words and deeds. To my amazement and delight, each post in this series has in fact taught me something new. I'm I'll come back to some of these encounters and discover more each time I do. Reflection won't end, nor should risk.

Neighborhood natter

A clear, windy evening. The neighborhood community meeting in the basement of the nearby Home for Little Wanderers. Bright lights, yellow walls, wooden chairs, round tables. A dozen or so people including representatives from the mayor's office, the police, our city councilor, and an articulate young man talking about solar energy installations. Announcement of spring cleanup day, review of local police activity (domestic violence, motor vehicle stuff, petty theft), upcoming public hearing on trailer classroom coming to Haley School, etc. Most people were silent but some spoke at considerable length ("When does she breathe?" my friend Yori wants to know) about drainage, trash, school parent drop-off behavior ("the worst people on the planet"), 3 am drag racing. The officials calm, respectful, surely even more bored than me, placatory but making no promises beyond their normal duty: "Call the office...call 911...get a tracking number."

"If you want to get something done, you need to enough people at such meetings to impress the politicians," said one old-timer. "This place used to be filled with people. Why is attendance these days so low?" he inquired querulously. The answer is simple, I think; these meetings are boring. I have no pressing concerns; I pitch in on clean up days but my worries are on the scale of the city (pending permits for the infectious disease study lab in the South End), the state, the nation, and, heck, what about global warming. Neighborhood issues are small bore (except 3 am Sunday mornings.) So why spend to much time talking about it. In thirty years of living here, I've attended maybe a dozen meetings.

Yet I found out a lot about what goes on around where I live, especially when I'm at work. I got some ideas of the issues that rile my neighbors. I learned how something could be fixed that hadn't occurred to me as a problem (return our voting site to the armory across the street).  Looking around the room I saw (mostly) quiet older people  black and white committed to improving the quality of, let's call it, the pedestrian scale.

The stakes were low; the temperature was low (though that lady could talk), yet this is how we (see my uninvolvement above) manage our community business; It doesn't get more grassroots; and I found it impressive. For all the complaints, there were also acknowledgement that things are better these days and this community meeting had contributed much to that.

"Thanks, thanks for coming," Yori said as he got up finally and we all walked out into the gleam of the waxing moon. He tells me every meeting is different; I'm not sure I'm going to test the assertion soon. As encounters go, this could have been better (at least more entertaining), but that it happened at all seems like a kind of miracle, one of the ordinary, everyday kind, like breathing.

'Very pretty'

My neighbor Las is miffed at the weather. He keeps tropical trees in his garage over the winter to protect them from killing cold. Now it's April and he'd like to roll out the wooden tubs with his ficus, and especially his lemon tree. He's afraid that if he delays, the strengthening sun will burn unprotected juvenile leaves, and kick the whole process back to the beginning.. How much later in the summer, then, will the mature glossy leaves appear, and the thick fragrance of the blossoms, and the pendulous yellow citrus fruit?

And yet, he says, it's still too cold, at least too iffy. Las knows all about this. Botany is all about location, and he's been cultivating his for years. His garden is a paradise of showy flowers and exotic plants, many of which he generously shares. My wisteria, due to bloom this year, was from him. He's been through refoliation once before, and what he wants is to get his plants out now to prevent it again.

Las is a generous man to everyone. As host, Las treats this lemon tree tenderly, watches out for its well-being. We might be moved to say 'lemon trees are for the tropics; leave them there. ' But the same can be said of many of us. What are tropical people, for instance, doing in (this winter) subarctic New England. What is anyone's natural place? And especially, what is our natural place when there's someone is willing to watch out for us? There may be lemon-tree spirits among us who just need a little protection at times from the cold and the sun, the exigencies of a particular situation, but who respond with rich color, redolent fragrance and sharp flavor--the gift to us of pure zestfulness.

Making a home for something, beyond even making space for something, opens doors to often unsuspected possibilities. Las, the lemon, and I all say to Spring: come! come!

Closed and open

On the subject of hospitality, two things:

1.

"...For Islet Sarajlic

Convert to my new faith crowd
I offer you what no one has had before
I offer you inclemency and wine
The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun
People nothing is forbidden in my faith
There is loving and drinking
And looking at the Sun for as long as you want
And this godhead forbids you nothing
Oh obey my call brethren people crowd

The defense of Radovan Karadzic just rested in his trial at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague; sooner rather than later then, a verdict will be handed down in the case of this accused war criminal,  former president of the Republika Srpdka, and implicated in genocide, massacre, ethnic cleansing the Bosnian war of the nineties.

I remember being shocked by the hard mercilessness of this man, and his military henchman Ratko Mladic, also now in custody, as they bombarded the city of Sarajevo day after day in the name of...oh, they had lots of reasons for the carnage they wreaked. Snipers picked off men and women in the city as they scurried from hiding place to hiding place in their efforts to survive. Children were fair game too.

This first part of a  poem by Karadzic, quoted by Slavoj Zizek in Poetry Magazine, April 3, written I don't know when, translated by I don't know whom, and punctuated I don't know how, reeks of the megalomania. The people, his people, are called to join him in a life of sex (in practice, rape), alcohol (and other intoxicants) and history hero worship that licenses anything they want to do. Many did respond to this call, perhaps not in the poetry, but in the philosophical attitude informing it, and took as their mission the practices of torture, humiliation, burning and destruction, separation and exclusion, the cultivation of death. "This godhead forbids you nothing," he said; just poetry, just words, but in practice a concentrated rejection of hospitality, of the generosity that gives each of us right and room to be..

2.

Compare this with the tall young man I saw today walking into the store holding the hand of old, bent, open-mouthed man. Perhaps a job, perhaps a duty, perhaps a friendship, the gesture smote open what Karadzic sought to close.

Saggy baggy sweat pant self

A stranger to myself all day. My alert and active self, the responsive part of me that knows me as myself, not to be found.

Where are you, lively one? You've left me here with this saggy baggy sweat pant self whose best idea is sitting gazing numbly out of the window. It feels like fatigue, but not of the body. You, my better and certainly more interesting self, the one wearing the proudly lettered sweater, are elsewhere.

Can an Other's absence be encountered?  Jack Miller, I think in his book God: A Biography, speaks of different kinds of absence, one being the scent left lingering in a room. Such an absence implies a recent removal hence, a presence elsewhere. Perhaps an imminent return, hopefully before the perfume has dissipated, and the memory has nothing to rely on but itself.

It's not that the world seems insipid, nor that I am melancholic, but that the point of my attention on what's around me feels blunted, like soft lead on steel plate. How else to register my complaint about being left behind, abandoned?

I don't know where zest comes from, or why it goes. Fatigue has something to do with it; perhaps over-expression requires replenishment. Maybe Monday. Perhaps the livingness of my encounter with this Other self is in my impatience itself to renew acquaintance, to sense the coming quick step, to feel the sudden waft of fresh air, to pull myself up straight in readiness.

Lines and planes

A sketching expedition to Lincoln.  My thought was to work on the sculptures at DeCordova but I got waylaid, first at the Codman House, then at the Gropius House. This last, the work of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, is interesting in all sorts of ways--architectural, historical--but I just wanted to put pencil to paper.

Lines and planes are the elements of the design, then there were the cross-cutting angular shadows. The most welcome of all were the gnarly shadows of oak branches across the verticals and horizontals. (I didn't go inside but it's not much bigger than my own house. It certainly holds no candle to the voluminous bubble houses favored by today's favored.)

Great to be out in the warmth of the westering sun, perched on a wall, undisturbed. What was hard was actually seeing what my eyes were aiming at. Leaving aside the problem of putting 3D on 2D, I found it a challenge to actually resolve how different lines and planes actually intersected. Was my eye lazy or just unpracticed? Perhaps in the same way that words in a foreign language can be spelled but not understood, so too these geometric forms could be identified but not really felt as representing something happening in space.

In the meantime, I took time off from serious gazing to darken a tree trunk, to hint at siding on the walls, to trace a (wisteria?) vine ascending a fence, and so satisfy the puppy-dog friskiness of my hand.

Architecture teaches me about spaces; landscapes teach me about places; but people, walking or riding, and their wonderful faces, that takes me deep and deeper. Not too much of that today but it felt good to wield pencil and brush. Good fun.

"Bravo"

Grey branch, grey squirrel; brown sere leaves, brown crust of pizza: almost perfect camouflage even through binoculars--but why is that black pearl eye trained on me?

Popovers--second batch. Quarter rule. Ten minutes prep. Not crisp and hard outside, puffy and hollow inside, but with brown, leathery hide and white, spongy (tasty) interior. Was the oven not hot enough to harden the top and trap the air? Let's try again later.

A tour, with Dulu's tutee, of crocuses blooming in the side yard; daffodils, stiff green stalks with swollen yellowish tips ready to split into blossom; squat hyacinths rising like a battery of rockets.

Consider these simple and pleasant Sunday morning discoveries vis-a'-vis the ecstatic essay I read in the MIT newspaper The Tech on my way home from my Wednesday tour of that school. It was written by Adam Freeman, graduate student in environmental engineering, about a SRO seminar by Professor Andrei Linde of Stanford to celebrate the recent Bicep2 findings strongly supporting the theory of cosmic inflation conceived by MIT professor Alan Guth and enhanced by Linde.

"I am writing to describe  what it was like to sit in on a lecture that I did not understand but that changed my life," he wrote in the April 1 issue.

"And the craziest thing of all is that despite not understanding a single thing that this professor said during the course of his one hour seminar, I was captivated by the magnitude, integrity and staggering accomplishment of the moment."

"Celebratory spirit...pride in the air...a humbling experience..."

"It was awe-inspiring to be in the presence of such profound truth worn on the face of a man (Linde) who himself was so obviously overwhelmed with genuine honest joy, as he soaked in the grandeur of the moment."

"The pervasive feeling that together we continue our march towards universal discovery and truth as indelibly imprinted on my own identity that day, and having felt it, I am not longer the same...Thank you, Newton [et al]. You have inspired current and future generations of those who dare to question, to answer and to dream. Bravo."

This young man's encounter with the man and the common mission speaks for itself. The livingness of exploration glows from every word. Oh, to live like that daily (if one could survive.)

Missing Mystery

An impasse, it seemed. Yet when I met next with Viig (mentioned a post or so ago), the door was wide open. I had just what he wanted. Added benefit: I explored something that I hadn't thought of before.

Why had I not understood? He'd told me but I hadn't believed it was anything worth teaching. No, the point was no great revelation, and certainly not all that he needs, but it was something that actually got me thinking: there may be more here than expected. Maybe, not just an arbitrary individual fact or instance of usage, but a tiny system driven by a logic of performance, and that I can happily teach. (As I write, the wheel motifs in Wim Wenders' Far Away, So Close, just watched, are resonant in me.)

Clearly I hadn't listened openly enough. Every honest concern is driven by the forces that come from interesting places. I shouldn't have been so afraid of boredom, and not so ready to find echoes of the past in what I encounter. Every minute I'm supplementing the past and creating it new.

I can see that as I teach I'm telling myself a story about myself. In a sense it's part of the lesson. If, in an encounter, one party isn't interested in that story, I have to pick some other one, or pause, wait, wait, until I learn a new story that's interesting to both. (Again: Far Away and Otto Sander spinning like a watch gear in his elastic band trapeze.)

Never not-people

The light must have changed because the cluster of people at the corner set off in all directions: across to City Hall Plaza, down School Street, perpendicularly or diagonally across Cambridge. From my 36th floor classroom, they were only as big as ants, and their sudden dispersal reminded me for a moment of the sudden scurrying I've seen when lifting a log under which a colony of ants and larvae had been living.

Only for a moment though because these people walked in different ways, along and in pairs, were of different sizes (evident even from my perspective) and wore different colors, including hopeful spring pastels. There was no casting about, no circling back. There were destinations in every direction and people went toward them. Soon the corner was empty of that original crowd.

The recognition in this encounter was of the non-ant-likeness of people. Ants are estimable creatures, but the folks on the corner, miniscule as they were, were of my tribe going about their business with an earnestness I recognize, often share.

Later, strap-hanging on the 5:30 subway, just crowded at State, but jam-packed at Downtown Crossing, I looked up from my reading (Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry--really excellent) and directed my gaze one way down the long car, then the other. People! This tube was packed, really full, of organisms. I saw heads, some higher, some lower, bodies standing and sitting, some young couples leaning against each other but people mostly apart and non-communicative.

I imagined seeing as many mammals of any other species taking up the same amount of the train's volume, all stacked and writhing, and I felt a shudder of disgust at the vision. Yes, humans have at times been packed even more tightly and against their will in spaces dark and airless, sometimes literally one on top of another--a true nightmare, but this train journey was not that; this was everyday.

The encounter I had on the train was of us. There are a lot of us and we take up space: each with a body, each with a face, on each face an expression, each expression worthy of consideration. The full variety of human forms was represented there. We had all chosen to be together in that train in order to get to our various destinations and had agreed to give each other privacy on the journey. After a few stops, the emptying began: people pushing their way to the door, others pulling in or stepping aside to let them pass. The up-to-the-brim feeling ebbed and I got back to my reading.

Twice I had skirted the edge of horror, almost seen my fellows as alien beings. Perhaps they can be called ants or wolves or other things, but they are never not-people, which is sameness and otherness enough for lifetimes of encounters.

Flummoxed

The classroom is where what a teacher has is fit to what a student needs. Normally, that's not problematic but it can be an occasion of confusion and frustration. Viig and I had ended two classes staring at each other, red-faced. (My face felt flushed.) It's not that I couldn't teach, nor that he couldn't learn but that we couldn't agree on what he wanted to and needed to learn. In my typical long-winded fashion, I began with conceptual frameworks intending to end at specific instances. After I got to the point most useful and, to me, most interesting, he, jovial yet very serious, looked at me baffled and said "Yes...?" as if what's the point of keeping rabbits in a top hat anyway? Rabbits are obvious and ordinary; what he really needed was... And that was over and over.

Here I was flummoxed. If he already knew it all--and I was skeptical--what then? Details, it seems; enough detailed and practical instruction to allow him to avoid his more habitual errors. (I think that was it.) This meant lots of ad hoc lessons to clarify and fix particular grammar problems without ever resorting to generalizations. It's like making sure I avoid giving an overview of the Boston T while making sure enough information is provided to get of reliably at the Malden station, say, any time he rode the Orange line. I'm sure I'm mis-characterizing his concern, but I didn't really understand his problem; nor, I'm sure, did he understand mine.

In my teaching career I'd run into this before, sometimes with individual students and sometimes classes. I've lost jobs over the more intractable incomprehensions. Big hit to the ego each time, not least because I couldn't see clearly where I went wrong. I felt sometimes on these occasions that I had been blind to key cultural assumption systems, and that my feeling of belonging was an illusion, the ground-shaking realization that I was, in fact, a stranger. I thought I knew but I was deceived. (Coming to these shores as a boy may have contributed to my sensitivity to this feeling.)

I remember one class and one student in particular with whom I could not make contact. My goals and hers for our time together were world apart. All the engaged students I could point to in the class meant nothing to either of us face to face. It was humiliating. I'm not talking about difficult to manage students; what I mean is a failure to find a common language, and with Viig, that language wasn't English because we used English freely in a half-hour of intense discussion about the impasse.

If anything speaks of pure otherness, it is a situation like that. Couples in the middle of an argument; national leaders in the middle of a crisis, parents with a squalling child, politicians facing crowds in the city center sometimes feel this sinking of confidence in the possibility of any communication at all. Where ever can minds meet? Can they ever? Encounters run this risk, not just of failure, but of loss of faith in the possibility, even with well-wishing participants, of really making contact.

We tried again.

To eat or not to eat

A debate's going on inside my friend Anmi. After learning recently she has severe anemia, a diagnosis that explains all sorts of symptoms that have troubled her, she has now to boost her iron levels as quickly as possible. But two voices are speaking in her. One, speaking on behalf of her body and its possible recovery to vigorous health, urges the consumption of red meat, any kind, in addition to iron supplements. The other, championing her moral sensibility, says not just any meat will do but that grass-fed, and not juiced with hormones or antibiotics. Indeed, her repugnance to 'factory farm' meat is deep and visceral. Unfortunately supplements alone may not boost her iron as quickly or surely as she'd like. Equally unfortunately, acceptable beef of this description is, as every one knows, very expensive.

This internal encounter is like the meeting of an irresistible object and an immovable object. That, of course, is a philosophical word game, but we do sometimes find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma, and any proposed tertium quid seems distinctly unpalatable, seen by each side as a betrayal. We take one side of the inner stife, and the opposing side seems like an alien, an Other trying to make untrue to our deepest selves. Then we stand on the other side and see the same. Neither of Anmi's positions is ridiculous nor unreasonable. Anmi herself is at once a partisan and referee, itself a situation of conflict. 

What I wonder is how hospitality, friendship or exploration apply to this encounter of confrontation. The ultimate loyalty of each side should be to the fullness of Anmi herself, that is, the integrity of who she is, can be, should be, though each dead set against the other. Still we do know how to spite ourselves, not just other people. 

To freely and with open-eyes acknowledge the validity of each position and to inquire into the sources of the energy of the two stances can provide a creative tension in one's life if the level of urgency allows time before the choice. It allows us a generous grief if a conviction or an aspiration has to, regretfully, be put down. This brave encountering of inner or outer Others is, I believe, what is most significant about us in the universe, and most lasting.  

Still, this all sounds so clinical. Wrestling with incompatible alternatives is agonizing, a wrenching, night-sweating struggle. The Other is not just with us or in us; it is us. Anmi will resolve it one way or another; she's a smart, brave person. As her friend, I hope I can help.

The man behind the curtain

 Some people resent paying taxes but I don't. I get money back. It's my money for sure, held in a kind of escrow, but nevertheless money in a lump sum (not much) that I can do something with.

In fact, I'm really careless about the money I'm entitled to get back. Recently I learned we had been due a refund several years ago but didn't get it and didn't realize I hadn't gotten it. This came to light when the IRS asked to see our back returns again and sent a belated check. We held onto that check until we talked to the bank about our deposits for that year because, well, using the money would be less pleasant than having to get it together again to send back would be painful.

Still who doesn't dread the chore of tax filing. I can remember collecting forms at the library, one of every kind because I didn't know which I'd need. We had kids in school, loans, deductions, all so complicated, and the papers that certified this or that, or had some special number, were always hard to lay hands on, if not already discarded. Oh, the long perplexed discussions over the meanings of official stipulations. When finally we inked in the forms, assembled all the supporting information, shoved everything (paper clipped, not stapled) into a heavy duty envelope, and bought the extra postage necessary to get it to Andover, we felt like we had performed a complicated religious ritual necessary perhaps to ensure rain or game for the year. We weren't quite sure if all the gestures had been done exactly as they needed to be, but we would find out later when the harvest or the hunting results started to come in.

Things are very different now. Yes, our finances are less complicated now, but when we sat down this Sunday morning to finally tell the government how much we felt they should keep of what we'd sent them, it was still a surprise that the process was virtually glitch-free. Rain. It was raining steadily outside, setting the proper mood for the exercise. The IRS.gov web site sent those of us making less than a certain amount to the left and those making more to the right. Were we the sheep?  Were we the goats?  

We had to chose a private on-line tax preparer and let it prompt us through the federal tax process. What's this?  and we moved seamlessly into state tax filling. Okay, why not? Some health certificate confusion finally resolved and a bill turned into a refund. Great. Send feds off. Whoosh. Send state off--uh-oh--feds are free, state not so. Hooked. Filing is for nothing at the state site but the username and passwords we thought we had saved proved useless. Swallow the pill. Pay to send. Done.

But who or what is this Other that we confront each spring with propitiatory rites, the sacred Kabuki of giving, pleading and getting back? It is said, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.."  I feel something akin as I go through the sacral motions. 

Neither the IRS, nor the government, is divine. Though very strong, they are clearly often limited in their potency, frustrated in their aims, mixed in their motives. If it is the man behind the curtain, pay no attention, we have in fact invested the him with real power to carry out our collective wishes, to act on our collective behalf. If we decide he should do things differently, we can politically order it so, at least theoretically. 

So when I did pay my taxes yesterday, was I encountering, in some form, the assembly of all my fellow citizens? I meet a sample of them every day, but the tax experience relates to all of them as a corporate entity, something more impressive, and yet less substantial in some ways, than any individual. We are not a nation of blood, nor divine election, but of deliberate decision. The founding fathers expressed a kind of awe at what they had called into being. I feel that sometimes when I vote. Perhaps a whiff of it attaches even to my annual consenting to contribute to the common good which is, when I step back to contemplate it, something grand.