You said, 'The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe...that is a rather large model to work from,' referring to the art form you invented--the mobile. There were plenty of these to watch at the Peabody Essex exhibition of your work, Alexander Calder. It's not everyone who invents a new form of sculpture and goes on to exhaust (it seems) its possibilities.
A curated show, of course, but your words, chosen and printed on the walls, and the large selection of pieces from the Thirties on displayed in large, white alcoves illuminated with strong lights that cast shadows of the work on wall, floor, all contrived to put me in touch with your imagination with its cosmic cast.
Such delightful work it is, all form and no content beyond the names (and these contributed by others). These mobiles (stabiles came later) are just multiple balanced wires linked together and hanging from the ceiling or else a stand of some kind. These wires, often with Arp-like shapes at either end, linked with a pivot joint through their respective centers of mass, are arranged enfilade or in individually, so that a slight breeze, a viewer passing by, stirs the arrangement and individual elements and groups of elements twist with each other, or away. You wrote: 'A mobile in motion leaves an invisible wake behind it or rather each element leaves an individual wake behind its individual self...a slow, gentle impulse...' I could see this as the object changed its aspect in space, but also in the layerings of shadows shifting on the white platforms below. You wrote, 'Each element able to stir, to oscillates, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements of the universe. It must not be a fleeting moments but a physical bond between the varying element in life.'
Everything is obvious; all interiors open for inspection, and no implications beyond those of the forms themselves. One, called Eucalyptus, was perhaps 10 ft long suspended with, at the top, a frond-like array of shapes that in their overall elegant triangular shape reminded me of geese, or a goose, in flight. Below, some darting upward shapes like insects on the surface of a pond. At the bottom, a single writhing shape that seemed like a fish. Was that in your mind, or were you exploring archetypal shapes and arrangements listening for the click telling you everything had fallen into place.
You wrote, 'Not extractions but abstractions.'
Another, La Demoiselle, stood on a leaning tripod of metal legs. There was a sweeping movement backwards and then forwards (like Frost's woman drying her hair in the sun) and progressive descent into detail balanced by upward aspirations movements, and the whole ensemble tremulous and sensitive. You wrote,
'Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.'
I was more and more filled, as walked through the gallery with sense of things in the midst of emptiness linked and interactive and occupying space. Was this inter-atomic space or inter-stellar? It could be either or both. The wire linkages were visible but the permutations of arrangement occasioned by external forces on these structures (perhaps also linked in some way) were uncountable. You wrote, 'Each element able to stir, to oscillates, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements of the universe. It must not be a fleeting moment s but a physical bond between the varying element in life.' I felt myself, at moments, to be a flexible framework pierced and permeated by light, by air, and by other moving things I could not name.
Mobiles with dangling cartoon animals are hung over baby cribs to provide objects for infant eyes to track, infant hands to reach for. We, as a family, used to, at Thanksgiving, make clothes-hanger mobiles hung with washers and slips of paper saying what we were grateful for. I felt, seeing your work, that these simple, simple things get their power from deeper sources: 'How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe.'
And you wrote, 'I have remained faithful to this original conception: that disparity is the spice of life, i.e. disparity of form, size, density, motion and perhaps a few other things.' Disparity! I had to read my notes again. I expected you to have said 'diversity.' Non-parity, yet parity nonetheless, only on a more fundamental level. Which? What?
In the meantime, looking out my window as I write this at the wind wrestling the last yellow holdout leaves off the trees, I'm grateful to you, Alexander Calder, for this vision of yours embodied in these diagrams of dynamism, and for your challenge: 'Sculptors of all places and climates have used what came ready to hand...simplicity of equipment and an adventurous spirit in attacking the unfinished or unknown.'
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Mask
The face she shows me is like a mask, frozen, heavy eyes and mouth. She takes pictures when I'm reading or drawing to send to our grandson. It looks inert, not at all alive, though I'm happily busy behind. What role does this mask represent? Or are all ny other expressions the roles? When I'm with people, am I just hoisting my features out of their easy chair and into motion? Is there life in the warping and twisting of the mask?
Yet the mask itself is freedom. I saw this recently when I handed out scripts for us to perform in class. Set situations playing out and roles to perform in them sometimes liberate my students. I remember one person whose voice register changed, and began investing her words with expression, and gestured even to touching the arm of the other student in the class playing a different role. She hurdled smoothly those complex sequences of consonants that so bedevil English learners. The words she said were the responsibility of someone else. She was able to go beyond them to what she knows from her life: how people react in different circumstances. She was able to speak from the inside.
At a bar or a dinner party, I don my 'jollyiness', and feel free to quip, laugh, play-act, make dance moves, and enjoy myself in ways I don't when alone or at home. Out, I'm Mr Bon Vivant; at home, Mr Bruin. Which one is the mask? Both?
Part of my reticence when meeting or finding myself in groups with new people is perhaps due to this: I find myself with no clear sense of what mask I should put on to cue that set of ready-made responses that allow me the mind space to deploy the things I do confidently know. For me, a social barrierf; or my students, a linguistic one. We want to get over it to what we know we know that's under the surface.
The mask allows us to unrecognizable to ourselves. Would my student have ever known herself as a stick-in-the-mud teacher of Greek and Latin in rural 19C Russia coping with unexpected romance? It's a role worth exploring. The script allowed her to go beyond the technical challenge of the words to what was interesting, even profound, in the character and plot.
As I encounter you, God-in-love, I wear masks that are sometimes comfortable, and sometimes a challenge. The reader at the kitchen table is easy for me to play. The role of the generous is something I find more difficult. I wear that mask to explore what it feels like, while for others, it's like the feel of water for the fish.
What about you, my lover yet other? Which masks do you easily wear, lapse into without thinking, and which ones arouse you, draw you out, teach you what you wouldn't otherwise learn? Like my housemate photographer, I''m on the watch.
Yet the mask itself is freedom. I saw this recently when I handed out scripts for us to perform in class. Set situations playing out and roles to perform in them sometimes liberate my students. I remember one person whose voice register changed, and began investing her words with expression, and gestured even to touching the arm of the other student in the class playing a different role. She hurdled smoothly those complex sequences of consonants that so bedevil English learners. The words she said were the responsibility of someone else. She was able to go beyond them to what she knows from her life: how people react in different circumstances. She was able to speak from the inside.
At a bar or a dinner party, I don my 'jollyiness', and feel free to quip, laugh, play-act, make dance moves, and enjoy myself in ways I don't when alone or at home. Out, I'm Mr Bon Vivant; at home, Mr Bruin. Which one is the mask? Both?
Part of my reticence when meeting or finding myself in groups with new people is perhaps due to this: I find myself with no clear sense of what mask I should put on to cue that set of ready-made responses that allow me the mind space to deploy the things I do confidently know. For me, a social barrierf; or my students, a linguistic one. We want to get over it to what we know we know that's under the surface.
The mask allows us to unrecognizable to ourselves. Would my student have ever known herself as a stick-in-the-mud teacher of Greek and Latin in rural 19C Russia coping with unexpected romance? It's a role worth exploring. The script allowed her to go beyond the technical challenge of the words to what was interesting, even profound, in the character and plot.
As I encounter you, God-in-love, I wear masks that are sometimes comfortable, and sometimes a challenge. The reader at the kitchen table is easy for me to play. The role of the generous is something I find more difficult. I wear that mask to explore what it feels like, while for others, it's like the feel of water for the fish.
What about you, my lover yet other? Which masks do you easily wear, lapse into without thinking, and which ones arouse you, draw you out, teach you what you wouldn't otherwise learn? Like my housemate photographer, I''m on the watch.
Friday, November 28, 2014
Not spud
What has eyes but sees not? Sound like a riddle. No, actually it's the 5 week son of my daughter's best friend, a baby with a bird's name, peering dazedly around with blue eyes. Oh, kissable, oh, warm head against my bearded cheek, oh, squeaks and bleats and tiny head-flops, and fitting so perfectly into my arms...
We'd come for our ritual Thanksgiving evening of games, and to catch up on the lives of those who'd been the best friends of our children going up, and their younger siblings and their friends. There have been years and years of comings and goings between our families. The mystery of the passage of time filled the crowded cozy living room, fire crackling in the hearth. That our contemporaries are growing older is no surprise--so are we--but that the young should cease being little girls and become young women and mothers (and mothers to be) is wonder-ful. The evening was a reaffirmation of what doesn't grow old: our common love of word games, our affection for each other.
So I'd say to you, Mr Huggable: Welcome to the Planet, but you're as much a child of this blue-green globe as any who've gone before, and those foreseeable, carbon-based, DNA-directed. How about this: Welcome to the World of Human Affairs, but you've been participant in the lives of all around you for months already, indeed even as as potentiality you were making an impact.
So Welcome to the Light and Air, and to the arms to those who didn't conceive you but do want to hold you. Today it's only me, friend of the family, later it will be lover, later on it may be son or daughter, and you'll do your share of carrying in turn.
On this holiday in honor of the virtue of gratitude, I appreciate with joy the continued vigor of the old and vitality itself incarnate in the new--and so fetchingly, with just the right heft, just the right heat, just the right level of alertness. I look forward to getting to know you as your life unfolds, a prospect I'm grateful for.
We'd come for our ritual Thanksgiving evening of games, and to catch up on the lives of those who'd been the best friends of our children going up, and their younger siblings and their friends. There have been years and years of comings and goings between our families. The mystery of the passage of time filled the crowded cozy living room, fire crackling in the hearth. That our contemporaries are growing older is no surprise--so are we--but that the young should cease being little girls and become young women and mothers (and mothers to be) is wonder-ful. The evening was a reaffirmation of what doesn't grow old: our common love of word games, our affection for each other.
So I'd say to you, Mr Huggable: Welcome to the Planet, but you're as much a child of this blue-green globe as any who've gone before, and those foreseeable, carbon-based, DNA-directed. How about this: Welcome to the World of Human Affairs, but you've been participant in the lives of all around you for months already, indeed even as as potentiality you were making an impact.
So Welcome to the Light and Air, and to the arms to those who didn't conceive you but do want to hold you. Today it's only me, friend of the family, later it will be lover, later on it may be son or daughter, and you'll do your share of carrying in turn.
On this holiday in honor of the virtue of gratitude, I appreciate with joy the continued vigor of the old and vitality itself incarnate in the new--and so fetchingly, with just the right heft, just the right heat, just the right level of alertness. I look forward to getting to know you as your life unfolds, a prospect I'm grateful for.
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Fear
Maybe you should have been more afraid, mouse, at least more cautious. To successfully raid one trap, doesn't mean you can do the same with the bigger and snappier one next. Your protruding eyeballs, one cloudy white, as I threw your stiff little body away, were probably the result of your neck being snapped, but they certainly gave you a look of cross-eyed shocked surprise.
You had reasons. Not so the yappy dog of my neighbor. No matter how kind we are to it, moving deliberately, speaking with slow, low words, offering treats, it still response to our presence with furious barkings and lunges. The animal is an exasperation and embarrassment to its owners. As a second hand dog, it perhaps had experiences that once warranted this response, but it hasn't learned new ones since.
Marylynne Robinson remarked recently on the recent respectability of fear, that it alone is sufficient justification for decisive, even lethal, response. Indeed it is a product to be sold like fish. On the other hand, there's the vast popular literature encouraging us to overcome our phobias of, say, public speaking, by acknowledging the uncomfortable and compelling feeling, and controlling it by managing one's breath and one's imagination and so on.
I remember once being afraid of airplane take-offs, but was mildly surprised on my recent trip to Scotland by how innocuous seemed the throwing of a massive object, me aboard, into the air. If, however, halfway across, we'd heard an ominous 'This is the captain speaking...' I would certainly feel incipient panic. The challenge would be not to not feel the fear but not let it provoke me ior paralyze me into doing something unhelpful or nothing at all.(I've experienced the latter reaction while rock climbing.) And what about what we may not dread sufficiently such as slow-mo dangers like climate change?
Are you afraid of us, God-in-love? Should we be of you? Rather we're afraid for each other because we do love each other, want the best for each other, and understand that risk or loss are not make-believe. However, through my relationship with you, I'm changing the way I deal with fear.
For one thing, I'm coming to understand that face to face with something alarming, a 'you' response is better than an 'I/it' one. I saw this on the train the other day when, jostled by some girls, I mentally rehearsed some snarky lines, until I actually looked at them, saw them chatting, and felt what had risen in me melt away. No danger there, of course, but if, in other circumstances, we can encounter an assailant as 'you' rather than, say, a demon, we might open to options other than bullets. The overwhelming and terrifying alien entity may become open to negotiation, even interesting.
Indeed, while fear tends to polarize our options, and limit them to now or never shoot or die, the complexity of this world and your presence in it make it a fount of opportunities we do not know, may not even suspect, that can and often do deflect the march to inexorable doom and finesse the dilemma we find ourselves in.
Still the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 still all lost their lives--as will we all one day. Yet their courage has a quality of lastingness that is secure until the world to come. Our achievements even as we live but certainly after we die are in the public domain and subject to the vicissitudes thereof, but that which we desire and dare of hospitality, friendship and exploration is more significant than death itself.
Or so I think as I sit here in my tight book-lined workroom on Thanksgiving morning with the prospects of good food and good company ahead. I don't feel even a flicker of anxiety at this moment, but I know even small changes in circumstance can let fear in the door. Ahead of time, I can't say how well I will manage. But you, God-in-love, offer a way to live, a place to be, that obviates fear. This is what I want and mean to have.
You had reasons. Not so the yappy dog of my neighbor. No matter how kind we are to it, moving deliberately, speaking with slow, low words, offering treats, it still response to our presence with furious barkings and lunges. The animal is an exasperation and embarrassment to its owners. As a second hand dog, it perhaps had experiences that once warranted this response, but it hasn't learned new ones since.
Marylynne Robinson remarked recently on the recent respectability of fear, that it alone is sufficient justification for decisive, even lethal, response. Indeed it is a product to be sold like fish. On the other hand, there's the vast popular literature encouraging us to overcome our phobias of, say, public speaking, by acknowledging the uncomfortable and compelling feeling, and controlling it by managing one's breath and one's imagination and so on.
I remember once being afraid of airplane take-offs, but was mildly surprised on my recent trip to Scotland by how innocuous seemed the throwing of a massive object, me aboard, into the air. If, however, halfway across, we'd heard an ominous 'This is the captain speaking...' I would certainly feel incipient panic. The challenge would be not to not feel the fear but not let it provoke me ior paralyze me into doing something unhelpful or nothing at all.(I've experienced the latter reaction while rock climbing.) And what about what we may not dread sufficiently such as slow-mo dangers like climate change?
Are you afraid of us, God-in-love? Should we be of you? Rather we're afraid for each other because we do love each other, want the best for each other, and understand that risk or loss are not make-believe. However, through my relationship with you, I'm changing the way I deal with fear.
For one thing, I'm coming to understand that face to face with something alarming, a 'you' response is better than an 'I/it' one. I saw this on the train the other day when, jostled by some girls, I mentally rehearsed some snarky lines, until I actually looked at them, saw them chatting, and felt what had risen in me melt away. No danger there, of course, but if, in other circumstances, we can encounter an assailant as 'you' rather than, say, a demon, we might open to options other than bullets. The overwhelming and terrifying alien entity may become open to negotiation, even interesting.
Indeed, while fear tends to polarize our options, and limit them to now or never shoot or die, the complexity of this world and your presence in it make it a fount of opportunities we do not know, may not even suspect, that can and often do deflect the march to inexorable doom and finesse the dilemma we find ourselves in.
Still the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 still all lost their lives--as will we all one day. Yet their courage has a quality of lastingness that is secure until the world to come. Our achievements even as we live but certainly after we die are in the public domain and subject to the vicissitudes thereof, but that which we desire and dare of hospitality, friendship and exploration is more significant than death itself.
Or so I think as I sit here in my tight book-lined workroom on Thanksgiving morning with the prospects of good food and good company ahead. I don't feel even a flicker of anxiety at this moment, but I know even small changes in circumstance can let fear in the door. Ahead of time, I can't say how well I will manage. But you, God-in-love, offer a way to live, a place to be, that obviates fear. This is what I want and mean to have.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Beastie
Just the quickest glimpse of this morning as I entered the pre-dawn kitchen to get breakfast and prepare for school. Just the merest flicker in my periphery; it might have been an eyelash falling. A few minutes later, there!, a definite tail attached to a tiny animal scurrying into the side room. A few strides forward and I was in time to see it disappear into a closet.
A mouse, maybe one of several. This is the season for brown field mice to find their way inside. Perhaps because I've been sealing the house for winter, this one which may have been reconnoitering is trapped. Not unattractive, mice nibble, nest, leave droppings, can carry disease, and do stink. They've got to go.
This one, however, seemed oblivious to our ancient enmity, for it came out of the room with the closet and ran under the stove whence it assayed an excursion into the center of the room. With tiny bead-like eyes, active and uplifted tail, it seemed reckless. Hadn't its teachers instructed it in caution? A quick stamp of my foot and it beat a hasty retreat back under the stove from which it peeped out.
This house is no stranger to animal visitors: ants, spiders, moths (these last few evenings) make their way in through their secret entrances and exits, so too mice this time of year. It's small house with room enough for two empty-nesters, but, sorry, none for you.
You are, though, such a pretty little creature: compact, delicate, quick, and with a boldness suggesting youth and callow inexperience. Though you're not quite the 'wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim'rous beastie,' I can still say with Robert Burns:
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
It's not with pleasure that tonight I set the traps.
A mouse, maybe one of several. This is the season for brown field mice to find their way inside. Perhaps because I've been sealing the house for winter, this one which may have been reconnoitering is trapped. Not unattractive, mice nibble, nest, leave droppings, can carry disease, and do stink. They've got to go.
This one, however, seemed oblivious to our ancient enmity, for it came out of the room with the closet and ran under the stove whence it assayed an excursion into the center of the room. With tiny bead-like eyes, active and uplifted tail, it seemed reckless. Hadn't its teachers instructed it in caution? A quick stamp of my foot and it beat a hasty retreat back under the stove from which it peeped out.
This house is no stranger to animal visitors: ants, spiders, moths (these last few evenings) make their way in through their secret entrances and exits, so too mice this time of year. It's small house with room enough for two empty-nesters, but, sorry, none for you.
You are, though, such a pretty little creature: compact, delicate, quick, and with a boldness suggesting youth and callow inexperience. Though you're not quite the 'wee, sleekit, cowerin, tim'rous beastie,' I can still say with Robert Burns:
I'm truly sorry Man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An' fellow-mortal!
It's not with pleasure that tonight I set the traps.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Plans
How do you plan the first day of school for your child in a new city? How, a daughter's wedding? How, a trip to a store or a new career? What should be thought out well in advance, what some time ahead, what just before, what at the last moment? What about a funeral? How do you plan for that? How about a divorce?
That was when, you, almost the most private person in class, told us the story of your divorce. Not pretty, not ugly, not even very sad, it was your contribution to the stories that had been told of wills and wedding dresses. I'd planned small group discussions but it had turned into a big circle with questions directed to each point of the compass to keep everyone on their toes.
On that basis, after respectful questions, your story became part of the general rollicking discussion, the kind that makes student feel that English can be place they feel at home in.
I'm frequently struck by how people speak of the some of the most important events in their lives, some of them more than a little amazing, in such a matter-of-fact manner. People who have had adventures as exciting as anything imagined by a writer are often off-hand about them. And concerning episodes of poor judgment, it's as if whatever pedagogical pus in the story has been drawn, and though ineradicable as a scar, the tale is no longer proud or prominent, serving just as illustration.
So with my youthful escapades and the damage thereof. What to say about them except that they made me who I am (leaving aside the other characters who've long since forgotten.) Our lives have moved on (classic phrase) and here we are, not so much sadder or wiser, but wondering: 'Was that me?'
As I read history, beyond my occasional postmortem regrets and counter-factual speculations, I contemplate the migrations, the maneuverings, the manipulations, and all the bustle of the past as wonderful: that it was, that it was what it was, that it was what it was for me, for us.
Just so we, you my quiet student and I, may ponder the stories we tell. Thank you for sharing yours.
That was when, you, almost the most private person in class, told us the story of your divorce. Not pretty, not ugly, not even very sad, it was your contribution to the stories that had been told of wills and wedding dresses. I'd planned small group discussions but it had turned into a big circle with questions directed to each point of the compass to keep everyone on their toes.
On that basis, after respectful questions, your story became part of the general rollicking discussion, the kind that makes student feel that English can be place they feel at home in.
I'm frequently struck by how people speak of the some of the most important events in their lives, some of them more than a little amazing, in such a matter-of-fact manner. People who have had adventures as exciting as anything imagined by a writer are often off-hand about them. And concerning episodes of poor judgment, it's as if whatever pedagogical pus in the story has been drawn, and though ineradicable as a scar, the tale is no longer proud or prominent, serving just as illustration.
So with my youthful escapades and the damage thereof. What to say about them except that they made me who I am (leaving aside the other characters who've long since forgotten.) Our lives have moved on (classic phrase) and here we are, not so much sadder or wiser, but wondering: 'Was that me?'
As I read history, beyond my occasional postmortem regrets and counter-factual speculations, I contemplate the migrations, the maneuverings, the manipulations, and all the bustle of the past as wonderful: that it was, that it was what it was, that it was what it was for me, for us.
Just so we, you my quiet student and I, may ponder the stories we tell. Thank you for sharing yours.
Monday, November 24, 2014
One night
Little flakes the color of soil, weightless, invisible when dropped into the dirt. To expect anything from such was an act of faith. Maybe mustard seeds are smaller, but these cosmos and zinnias planted in my front garden...?
First a shoot, then a leaf, a few leaves, and inch by inch they grew. The zinnias soon produced flowers--big garish-colored petal-dense beauties. The cosmos just sprouted quantities of hair-like leaves, with a lavender flower here and there, until just recently when flower heads have popped out everywhere. The garden a week ago was vibrant, even this late.
Then a night of frost and what a transformation: the color of the flowers had darkened and dissipated to brown, vibrant green had turned gray, the turgor of the leaves relaxed and they drooped hangdog. Plants that had stood face to the sun expectant had become, in an instant, standing corpses.
This is what annual means: seed to weed in a season. Invisible yet vigorous life in the summer when I planted you, visible but vivid death after one night's sweeping of cold's scythe. Maybe in your accounting, cosmos and zinnias, it's been a good year: seeds were set and dispersed (ideally) and another generation is ready. But the forlorn assortment of sticks festooned with tattered leaves standing aghast, never more to move, grow, seek the sun, flower, gives me pause.
It wasn't as if you were sick or senescent. No matter, you've been stripped and skeletonized overnight. The garden has become a cemetery and you stand like your own markers.
Cue reflections on the transitoriness of life, the fragility of existence, and so on, but what strikes me is how, ahead of each seed is this story: effulgence of life and rigor of death with but a single night between them. No drama, no reprieve; simply, it's over.
Worth it, would you say? Of course, it's our way of life. It's what we do.
First a shoot, then a leaf, a few leaves, and inch by inch they grew. The zinnias soon produced flowers--big garish-colored petal-dense beauties. The cosmos just sprouted quantities of hair-like leaves, with a lavender flower here and there, until just recently when flower heads have popped out everywhere. The garden a week ago was vibrant, even this late.
Then a night of frost and what a transformation: the color of the flowers had darkened and dissipated to brown, vibrant green had turned gray, the turgor of the leaves relaxed and they drooped hangdog. Plants that had stood face to the sun expectant had become, in an instant, standing corpses.
This is what annual means: seed to weed in a season. Invisible yet vigorous life in the summer when I planted you, visible but vivid death after one night's sweeping of cold's scythe. Maybe in your accounting, cosmos and zinnias, it's been a good year: seeds were set and dispersed (ideally) and another generation is ready. But the forlorn assortment of sticks festooned with tattered leaves standing aghast, never more to move, grow, seek the sun, flower, gives me pause.
It wasn't as if you were sick or senescent. No matter, you've been stripped and skeletonized overnight. The garden has become a cemetery and you stand like your own markers.
Cue reflections on the transitoriness of life, the fragility of existence, and so on, but what strikes me is how, ahead of each seed is this story: effulgence of life and rigor of death with but a single night between them. No drama, no reprieve; simply, it's over.
Worth it, would you say? Of course, it's our way of life. It's what we do.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
Groaning board
My students think American cuisine is hamburgers, coast to coast and north to south, 'not like my country,'they say, and that Thanksgiving is just, just turkey.
America, you're a country rich not only in foods of all kinds but traditions of cooking from all over the world as well as culinary adventurers trying new things, making new combinations. In the lead up to Thanksgiving, that singular American feast, the paper (The NY Times, Food section) published holiday recipes from all fifty states as well as DC and Puerto Rico.
Alabama Oyster Dressing, Alaska Russian Salmon Pie, Arizona Cranberry Sauce with Chiles, Arkansas Heritage Turkey (yes, but one of the older breeds of bird), California Sourdough Stuffing, Colorado Pecan Pie Bites (dipped into leftover turkey gravy)...all these based on tradition and local comestibles with just that twist which makes it contemporary.
After Connecticut's Quince and Delaware's DuPont Turkey, there's Garam Masala Pumpkin Pie from D.C., a fusion food created for the visit of the Indian Prime Minister. There's Florida's Mojo Turkey with a Cuban sour orange marinade (a second style), Georgia's Pecan Pie from front yard nuts, Hawaii's Mochi Rice Stuffing with Chinese sausages--am I making my point?
Consider Idaho's Hasselback Potatos, Illinois' Pumpkin Soup, Indiana's Persimmon Pudding (I've got to try some of that) and Kansas' Candied Sweet Potatoes (oh, scrumptious). The Kentucky entry was a Pocket Dressing, a stuffed pastry for hunters to eat out in the field. Then there's Louisiana's Shrimp Mirlitons, a kind of squash stuffed with.chopped shrimp. From Maine, comes Lobster Mac and Cheese, the very thought of which makes me swoon. Maryland Sauerkraut with Apples because 'turkey without sauerkraut is unthinkable.' Well, I'm thinking now.
Imagine all the bustling kitchens across the country where these treats are being put together: the slicing, the whipping, the basting and anxious timing, the chattering and laughing, the growing sense of serious abundance.
Massachusetts is my home but I've never had Clam and Chourico Dressing combining two local specialties: bivalves and Portuguese cooking. there's German Potato Salad from Michigan based on Old World recipes, Minnesota Grape (be careful not to burn the brown sugar) and Collard Greens with Ham Hock from Mississippi (nothing more down home). This on Thanksgiving tables across the country!
Missouri offers its St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake, and Montana Marinated Venison Steaks (else what is hunting season for?), whereas from Nebraska Standing Rib Roast (for those for whom it isn't a meal without beef). There's Nevada Turkey French Dip Sandwich (for a post-prandial snack). New Hampshire's Sage Stuffing Turkey is classic Yankee, while New Jersey Crepe-style Manicotti, reflects that state's Italian heritage, and New Mexico offers a Red Chile Turkey (which surely would have made Yankee noses turn scarlet.) Double Apple Pie from New York and Sweet Potato Cornbread from North Carolina. The board is groaning. Who is going to eat all this?
The Scandinavian influence shows in North Dakota's Potato Lefse. What's behind Ohio's English Pea and Onion Salad, or Oklahoma's Green Bean Casserole, or Oregon's Cranberry Sauce with Pinot Noir or Pennsylvania's Glazed Bacon? Puerto Rico comes up with Mofongo Stuffing with plaintain and pork rinds, and Rhode Island proffers Indian Pudding, baked cornmeal and molasses, as traditional as it gets.
Think of the awe everyone feels looking at the laden table, the colors, the aromas. The summons to 'Dig in' is clarion. The noise of "Pass me, please"s along with the clatter of plates and the high spirits of reunion and hospitality.
The Salty Pluff Mud Pie of South Carolina has the same texture and dark color as tidewater ooze, but that's the only similarity. Pear Kuchen from South Dakota, and Roasted Brussels Sprouts from Tennessee: I know the order is wrong but the eating sounds great whichever end of the meal you start from.
Texas offers Turkey Tamales and Utah, a Caramel Budino (a kind of pudding). Hurray for good old Vermont and it wonderful Cheddar Cheese Mashed Potatoes (almost a meal by itself). I imagine a trestle table extending across the country with all these steaming dishes waiting for grace to be said.
Virginia Corn Bread and from Oregon's forests Shiittake Mushrooms with Bok Choy. West Virginia presents PawPaw Pudding (from local trees) and Wisconsin's Wild Rice (here with mushrooms) is legendary. Wyoming's Three Sisters Stew features the classic triumvirate of squash, corn and beans, the foundational food of the continent.
Replete, there's the talk, the jokes, the old stories, the questions, the appreciations of the meal and kudos for the cooks. The more-than-enoughness of the moment astounds us. The thanksgiving is very real.
All this is just the tip of the culinary iceberg; other occasions, other dishes. My country, you are so rich in all things that contribute to good living, not just food, but fellowship around the abundance. Too many don't know these pleasures; too many can't partake. What are we going to do about that?
America, you're a country rich not only in foods of all kinds but traditions of cooking from all over the world as well as culinary adventurers trying new things, making new combinations. In the lead up to Thanksgiving, that singular American feast, the paper (The NY Times, Food section) published holiday recipes from all fifty states as well as DC and Puerto Rico.
Alabama Oyster Dressing, Alaska Russian Salmon Pie, Arizona Cranberry Sauce with Chiles, Arkansas Heritage Turkey (yes, but one of the older breeds of bird), California Sourdough Stuffing, Colorado Pecan Pie Bites (dipped into leftover turkey gravy)...all these based on tradition and local comestibles with just that twist which makes it contemporary.
After Connecticut's Quince and Delaware's DuPont Turkey, there's Garam Masala Pumpkin Pie from D.C., a fusion food created for the visit of the Indian Prime Minister. There's Florida's Mojo Turkey with a Cuban sour orange marinade (a second style), Georgia's Pecan Pie from front yard nuts, Hawaii's Mochi Rice Stuffing with Chinese sausages--am I making my point?
Consider Idaho's Hasselback Potatos, Illinois' Pumpkin Soup, Indiana's Persimmon Pudding (I've got to try some of that) and Kansas' Candied Sweet Potatoes (oh, scrumptious). The Kentucky entry was a Pocket Dressing, a stuffed pastry for hunters to eat out in the field. Then there's Louisiana's Shrimp Mirlitons, a kind of squash stuffed with.chopped shrimp. From Maine, comes Lobster Mac and Cheese, the very thought of which makes me swoon. Maryland Sauerkraut with Apples because 'turkey without sauerkraut is unthinkable.' Well, I'm thinking now.
Imagine all the bustling kitchens across the country where these treats are being put together: the slicing, the whipping, the basting and anxious timing, the chattering and laughing, the growing sense of serious abundance.
Massachusetts is my home but I've never had Clam and Chourico Dressing combining two local specialties: bivalves and Portuguese cooking. there's German Potato Salad from Michigan based on Old World recipes, Minnesota Grape (be careful not to burn the brown sugar) and Collard Greens with Ham Hock from Mississippi (nothing more down home). This on Thanksgiving tables across the country!
Missouri offers its St. Louis Gooey Butter Cake, and Montana Marinated Venison Steaks (else what is hunting season for?), whereas from Nebraska Standing Rib Roast (for those for whom it isn't a meal without beef). There's Nevada Turkey French Dip Sandwich (for a post-prandial snack). New Hampshire's Sage Stuffing Turkey is classic Yankee, while New Jersey Crepe-style Manicotti, reflects that state's Italian heritage, and New Mexico offers a Red Chile Turkey (which surely would have made Yankee noses turn scarlet.) Double Apple Pie from New York and Sweet Potato Cornbread from North Carolina. The board is groaning. Who is going to eat all this?
The Scandinavian influence shows in North Dakota's Potato Lefse. What's behind Ohio's English Pea and Onion Salad, or Oklahoma's Green Bean Casserole, or Oregon's Cranberry Sauce with Pinot Noir or Pennsylvania's Glazed Bacon? Puerto Rico comes up with Mofongo Stuffing with plaintain and pork rinds, and Rhode Island proffers Indian Pudding, baked cornmeal and molasses, as traditional as it gets.
Think of the awe everyone feels looking at the laden table, the colors, the aromas. The summons to 'Dig in' is clarion. The noise of "Pass me, please"s along with the clatter of plates and the high spirits of reunion and hospitality.
The Salty Pluff Mud Pie of South Carolina has the same texture and dark color as tidewater ooze, but that's the only similarity. Pear Kuchen from South Dakota, and Roasted Brussels Sprouts from Tennessee: I know the order is wrong but the eating sounds great whichever end of the meal you start from.
Texas offers Turkey Tamales and Utah, a Caramel Budino (a kind of pudding). Hurray for good old Vermont and it wonderful Cheddar Cheese Mashed Potatoes (almost a meal by itself). I imagine a trestle table extending across the country with all these steaming dishes waiting for grace to be said.
Virginia Corn Bread and from Oregon's forests Shiittake Mushrooms with Bok Choy. West Virginia presents PawPaw Pudding (from local trees) and Wisconsin's Wild Rice (here with mushrooms) is legendary. Wyoming's Three Sisters Stew features the classic triumvirate of squash, corn and beans, the foundational food of the continent.
Replete, there's the talk, the jokes, the old stories, the questions, the appreciations of the meal and kudos for the cooks. The more-than-enoughness of the moment astounds us. The thanksgiving is very real.
All this is just the tip of the culinary iceberg; other occasions, other dishes. My country, you are so rich in all things that contribute to good living, not just food, but fellowship around the abundance. Too many don't know these pleasures; too many can't partake. What are we going to do about that?
Solid
Individual wraiths, flimsy, filmy, wafty, but innumerable, incessant, layered and packed, these multitude spectres, individually next to nothing, are, en masse, overwhelming.
A door opens and it is there, a wall occupying all that is beyond, and if the door doesn't budge, it may be shoved in. If a car drives, it may wear it like a hat as big as itself perched atop. It grows roofs on roofs. When a way is cut through it, the looming canyon walls look down implacable. It lies on the human landscape like the 7-foot thick hand of a white Othello smothering.
Where did you come from, so light, so crushing? A bitter cold dry wind, a layer of saturated air hovering over a warm lake, piercing penetration, contact, flash crystallization, and the shepherding of myriad individual flakes into a special corner of western New York.
Under other circumstances, you'd be rain, falling and making your way back to where you evaporated from, and indeed that's where you'll eventually go, perhaps doing a different kind of damage on the way back. But for now you are the inescapable fact, a new entity interposing itself between earth and sky..
Over time you'll evolve. You'll drift, crust, granulate, compact. You'll daunt, not by your uncanniness, but by your sheer, obdurate bulk. You'll be thrown off of this, tunneled through to there, loaded and dumped, but remain an inescapability, maybe the first of many this season, until, earth tilting, the light has had enough of you and says, 'Begone.'
There was nothing, now conjured out of air, a solid presence. You're coming to my world. Best be ready.
A door opens and it is there, a wall occupying all that is beyond, and if the door doesn't budge, it may be shoved in. If a car drives, it may wear it like a hat as big as itself perched atop. It grows roofs on roofs. When a way is cut through it, the looming canyon walls look down implacable. It lies on the human landscape like the 7-foot thick hand of a white Othello smothering.
Where did you come from, so light, so crushing? A bitter cold dry wind, a layer of saturated air hovering over a warm lake, piercing penetration, contact, flash crystallization, and the shepherding of myriad individual flakes into a special corner of western New York.
Under other circumstances, you'd be rain, falling and making your way back to where you evaporated from, and indeed that's where you'll eventually go, perhaps doing a different kind of damage on the way back. But for now you are the inescapable fact, a new entity interposing itself between earth and sky..
Over time you'll evolve. You'll drift, crust, granulate, compact. You'll daunt, not by your uncanniness, but by your sheer, obdurate bulk. You'll be thrown off of this, tunneled through to there, loaded and dumped, but remain an inescapability, maybe the first of many this season, until, earth tilting, the light has had enough of you and says, 'Begone.'
There was nothing, now conjured out of air, a solid presence. You're coming to my world. Best be ready.
Friday, November 21, 2014
Envy
One of my colleagues has a sharp, discerning ear. Another has a gift for working with groups. Another, that detail-oriented earnestness. There's the one whose classes are always laughing and the one with the affable manner that puts everyone at ease. Oh, I wish I had what you have, could teach as you do.
The problem is that when I teach well, I'm proud of what I do. I don't want to give up any bit of what I'm already good at; I just want more of what they have, what makes them so good.
I listen when they talk about what they do, have done. When they are teaching, I lean in to see what's going on. There's always something to learn. Except I'm already busy exploring and expanding what I'm about.
I've found some new business case study materials that I can see potential for. I'm continuing to develop materials on functional grammar that I have yet to fully test. I have some thoughts on the link of prosody to syntax that I want to build out. My head is full, yet I want what others have.
I suppose this is a good ambition: endless improvement of technique, augmentation of skills, expansion of insight until I'm a veritable monster of competence.
Even if I were, my colleagues would be invaluable for who they are, and what that represents for our students. Their generous hearts take technique and make it personally meaningful, and student after student testifies to this upon departure.
The numbers of teachers expand and shrink, and over the many years I've taught, many good teachers have come and gone, each one memorable in one way or another, often some particular classroom strategy that impressed me. Many have gone on to, I hope, success, ideally well-paying. What made their lessons special is deployed elsewhere. I wish their brilliance were here with me; I wish it were mine.
This distribution of excellence is great for our students, and for me. You teach me, my comrades of the classroom, how many different ways there are to be good. If all the apples aren't on my tree, yet I'm proud to stand in such a great orchard.
The problem is that when I teach well, I'm proud of what I do. I don't want to give up any bit of what I'm already good at; I just want more of what they have, what makes them so good.
I listen when they talk about what they do, have done. When they are teaching, I lean in to see what's going on. There's always something to learn. Except I'm already busy exploring and expanding what I'm about.
I've found some new business case study materials that I can see potential for. I'm continuing to develop materials on functional grammar that I have yet to fully test. I have some thoughts on the link of prosody to syntax that I want to build out. My head is full, yet I want what others have.
I suppose this is a good ambition: endless improvement of technique, augmentation of skills, expansion of insight until I'm a veritable monster of competence.
Even if I were, my colleagues would be invaluable for who they are, and what that represents for our students. Their generous hearts take technique and make it personally meaningful, and student after student testifies to this upon departure.
The numbers of teachers expand and shrink, and over the many years I've taught, many good teachers have come and gone, each one memorable in one way or another, often some particular classroom strategy that impressed me. Many have gone on to, I hope, success, ideally well-paying. What made their lessons special is deployed elsewhere. I wish their brilliance were here with me; I wish it were mine.
This distribution of excellence is great for our students, and for me. You teach me, my comrades of the classroom, how many different ways there are to be good. If all the apples aren't on my tree, yet I'm proud to stand in such a great orchard.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
The backs of those in front
I'm not looking over my shoulder at those behind; rather it's those ahead my eyes are fixed on. My question to you who are ten, twenty, thirty, thirty five years ahead of me is, "What do you see from where you are that I can only guess by looking at how you shift your gait to meet it?'
Being the age I am, I can say confidently I've reached some conclusions I trust to carry me through. But the road ahead can be long and I know well the indulgence with which I consider the ideas I held in my forties, thirties, twenties. Not bad, I think; not wrong, good enough for then...
So, you who are far ahead of me, or just a little in front, what do you know that would change the significance of what I think I know? I see you on the train, on the street, and put myself--in my condition now--in your place. 'Don't you know this is possible, and that?' But really what do I know of the good, beautiful or possible as experienced by my elders?
Probably at any age ahead of me, you are each sometimes asking the same questions. The view which is beyond your horizon but not beyond that of those further along may suggest to any of you a conditionality inherent in your conclusions about the way things really are.
Part of the beautiful arrogance of the young (at least when I was one) is the way they know how invalid any insights that prior generations may have deemed fundamental, given. 'What do they know?'
Setting out to climb a mountain, I'm not daunted by distances and elevations; steady exertion will take me far and high, I'm confident. As I travel onward, I only loosen up; the mountain and I seem a match. Coming down, my goal to stand on the summit attained, my legs wobble as they step down from stone to stone. I look back, in a kind of amazement: Did I climb that? Where did I find the energy or courage? So, do the reflections of the end of the day invalidate those of the morning?
Instead, it may be that our primary impression at any point is being where we are, no matter what's behind or ahead. If we have the energy and there's the challenge, well, we're in one experience; if the challenge is behind us and reserves depleted, we're in a different experience space.
The grandfather of a friend of mine, a retired doctor in his eighties, newly widowed, is leaving his familiar Midwestern haunts and driving to Boston, and then taking his granddaughter with him for a vacation in Mexico. Perhaps what he sees looming warns him: Do it now. Maybe he's wanted to for a while, or not even dared to dream of doing, and so when occasion presents itself, he's ready. Perhaps he's still just living in that space of warnings, longings and opportunities which may be our experience every moment of our lives, even to the end.
Aphorisms, those chunks of distilled practical insight, taken in bulk cancel each other out, but can be perfectly on target in their characterization of particular moments. Maybe there's a wisdom for each age, including the one I'm at now. You ahead, you've been here; can you help me find mine and ours, without making it yours? You can say, 'If I were 65 again, I'd...' And I'd say, 'You, gramps, enjoy your road trip as if you were 65.'
Being the age I am, I can say confidently I've reached some conclusions I trust to carry me through. But the road ahead can be long and I know well the indulgence with which I consider the ideas I held in my forties, thirties, twenties. Not bad, I think; not wrong, good enough for then...
So, you who are far ahead of me, or just a little in front, what do you know that would change the significance of what I think I know? I see you on the train, on the street, and put myself--in my condition now--in your place. 'Don't you know this is possible, and that?' But really what do I know of the good, beautiful or possible as experienced by my elders?
Probably at any age ahead of me, you are each sometimes asking the same questions. The view which is beyond your horizon but not beyond that of those further along may suggest to any of you a conditionality inherent in your conclusions about the way things really are.
Part of the beautiful arrogance of the young (at least when I was one) is the way they know how invalid any insights that prior generations may have deemed fundamental, given. 'What do they know?'
Setting out to climb a mountain, I'm not daunted by distances and elevations; steady exertion will take me far and high, I'm confident. As I travel onward, I only loosen up; the mountain and I seem a match. Coming down, my goal to stand on the summit attained, my legs wobble as they step down from stone to stone. I look back, in a kind of amazement: Did I climb that? Where did I find the energy or courage? So, do the reflections of the end of the day invalidate those of the morning?
Instead, it may be that our primary impression at any point is being where we are, no matter what's behind or ahead. If we have the energy and there's the challenge, well, we're in one experience; if the challenge is behind us and reserves depleted, we're in a different experience space.
The grandfather of a friend of mine, a retired doctor in his eighties, newly widowed, is leaving his familiar Midwestern haunts and driving to Boston, and then taking his granddaughter with him for a vacation in Mexico. Perhaps what he sees looming warns him: Do it now. Maybe he's wanted to for a while, or not even dared to dream of doing, and so when occasion presents itself, he's ready. Perhaps he's still just living in that space of warnings, longings and opportunities which may be our experience every moment of our lives, even to the end.
Aphorisms, those chunks of distilled practical insight, taken in bulk cancel each other out, but can be perfectly on target in their characterization of particular moments. Maybe there's a wisdom for each age, including the one I'm at now. You ahead, you've been here; can you help me find mine and ours, without making it yours? You can say, 'If I were 65 again, I'd...' And I'd say, 'You, gramps, enjoy your road trip as if you were 65.'
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Such love
I see in you, God-in-love, a 'Romeo and Juliet' intensity of passion for the Beloved Other, which we in part comprise and participate in. Words like 'smitten' describe the impact of each of you on the other; 'passionate' your reciprocal attraction. And, instead of the doom implicit, some may say, in any such headlong romance, I conceive your love more as a frontier after frontier of ever-deepening, ever-enriching mutual regard enfolding that core of vivid 'adolescent' ardor.
So coming across the popular tale of young love from China, the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, I'm moved to wonder: can I speak of a 'Shanbo and Yingtai' quality to your relationship with the Beloved? Not at a gate-crashed party, the Chinese pair meet at school where, the girl Yingtai disguised as a boy, befriends her classmate Shanbo who never, until told, suspects the deception. Together they enjoy a friendship built around study, music, poetry, philosophical debate. Her feelings deepened from comradely amicability to something more profound, but, intimate as she might the truth, Liang never catches on.
Summoned home, she is pledged to marry a friend of her family. Shanbo, informed too late, realizes his love and the impossibility of its requital, and dies of sorrow. Yingtai gets permission to route her wedding procession past the tomb of he she had loved. Grieving there in the rain, an earthquake occurrs and she is swallowed in a chasm. After the ground closes up again, two large, beautiful butterflies come out of the tomb and, spiraling around each other, fly away.
The force that drives this story is different from that impelling Romeo and Juliet. Despite their poetic words, neither Veronese is presented as cultivators of culture. The love of Abelard and Heliose is a teacher-pupil love and the book of Paolo and Francesca is pander to their passion. Neither of these explore the erotics of intellectual and aesthetic enterprise between peers.Yet, I know enough of the excitement of the mind to entertain the possibility that this too may be an aspect of the affair you're having with the Beloved..
Neither Romeo nor Juliet fails to recognize their love for each other or of each other's identity for very long. Very different is the Chinese tale. Shangbo doesn't get it by himself, despite broad hints like pointings to mandarin ducks (an iconic couple, see?). Yet, upon being told who Yingtai really was, he then understood the feelings he'd had for her. Shakespeare also played with the girl dressed up as boy theme, climaxing in dramatic disclosure scenes. No such moment in this story, it seems. Still, there's enough blindness among us to your presence, God-in-love, that we can feel akin to the scholar who knew everything but what was closest and most important.
The social proprieties are not just upheld but honored in the tragedy of Shanbo and Yingtai. Filial piety is endorsed by 'heaven' as the two lovers were resigned to the duty that meant their separation. Not so, R&J whose very violation of parental will turns out to the vehicle for reestablishment of social concord. Norms kept or broken, but society is affirmed. The fates of the two sets of lovers stand in contrast though: we're stabbed by the sight of the stacked bodies in the tomb, or wonder-struck, as we follow the flutter of butterflies. Each experience expresses in some way the quintessence of life, and we wouldn't want to forget either.
I still know so little about love. These stories and others, unfamiliar as some of them seem, are ways I can learn. Teach me.
So coming across the popular tale of young love from China, the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, I'm moved to wonder: can I speak of a 'Shanbo and Yingtai' quality to your relationship with the Beloved? Not at a gate-crashed party, the Chinese pair meet at school where, the girl Yingtai disguised as a boy, befriends her classmate Shanbo who never, until told, suspects the deception. Together they enjoy a friendship built around study, music, poetry, philosophical debate. Her feelings deepened from comradely amicability to something more profound, but, intimate as she might the truth, Liang never catches on.
Summoned home, she is pledged to marry a friend of her family. Shanbo, informed too late, realizes his love and the impossibility of its requital, and dies of sorrow. Yingtai gets permission to route her wedding procession past the tomb of he she had loved. Grieving there in the rain, an earthquake occurrs and she is swallowed in a chasm. After the ground closes up again, two large, beautiful butterflies come out of the tomb and, spiraling around each other, fly away.
The force that drives this story is different from that impelling Romeo and Juliet. Despite their poetic words, neither Veronese is presented as cultivators of culture. The love of Abelard and Heliose is a teacher-pupil love and the book of Paolo and Francesca is pander to their passion. Neither of these explore the erotics of intellectual and aesthetic enterprise between peers.Yet, I know enough of the excitement of the mind to entertain the possibility that this too may be an aspect of the affair you're having with the Beloved..
Neither Romeo nor Juliet fails to recognize their love for each other or of each other's identity for very long. Very different is the Chinese tale. Shangbo doesn't get it by himself, despite broad hints like pointings to mandarin ducks (an iconic couple, see?). Yet, upon being told who Yingtai really was, he then understood the feelings he'd had for her. Shakespeare also played with the girl dressed up as boy theme, climaxing in dramatic disclosure scenes. No such moment in this story, it seems. Still, there's enough blindness among us to your presence, God-in-love, that we can feel akin to the scholar who knew everything but what was closest and most important.
The social proprieties are not just upheld but honored in the tragedy of Shanbo and Yingtai. Filial piety is endorsed by 'heaven' as the two lovers were resigned to the duty that meant their separation. Not so, R&J whose very violation of parental will turns out to the vehicle for reestablishment of social concord. Norms kept or broken, but society is affirmed. The fates of the two sets of lovers stand in contrast though: we're stabbed by the sight of the stacked bodies in the tomb, or wonder-struck, as we follow the flutter of butterflies. Each experience expresses in some way the quintessence of life, and we wouldn't want to forget either.
I still know so little about love. These stories and others, unfamiliar as some of them seem, are ways I can learn. Teach me.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Wet feet
All day, up in our eyrie, we had looked out on white-out mist forming, dispersing, reforming, and on periods of spitting rain aslant the windows. As night fell, I walked to the West End library down rain-glistening Cambridge Street. The fronts of my trousers got wet in the short journey but still it was a pleasure to walk in the rain.
In the library, I found an empty table in the back and prepared to enjoy some pleasant work. One table over, a man with a stubbled chin was taking off his sneakers and tucking them under a chair. He gave me a 'What are you looking at?' glare as he shook water from his jacket and checked the interior of his backpack. For him the library was a refuge.
As I got set to work, the library security guard walked by and told the man to put his shoes on. 'There're wet,' said the patron. 'I don't care. You can't take off your shoes here,' replied the guard. There was a brief exchange where the patron complained about the impolite way people were being treated and accused the guard of not knowing his job. 'I know my job,' the guard stated affectless.
Shoes on, the man soon left. But I thought: I know the squishy and unpleasant feel of wet shoes. There are some who on days like this must feel welcome nowhere, and nowhere to dry out their cold, clammy feet. My town is full of great places that want to have me like this quiet library with good working surfaces and free Wifi; how much different your town, I thought
As I left, an alarm went off but the guard sent me out with dismissive wave of the hand.
In the library, I found an empty table in the back and prepared to enjoy some pleasant work. One table over, a man with a stubbled chin was taking off his sneakers and tucking them under a chair. He gave me a 'What are you looking at?' glare as he shook water from his jacket and checked the interior of his backpack. For him the library was a refuge.
As I got set to work, the library security guard walked by and told the man to put his shoes on. 'There're wet,' said the patron. 'I don't care. You can't take off your shoes here,' replied the guard. There was a brief exchange where the patron complained about the impolite way people were being treated and accused the guard of not knowing his job. 'I know my job,' the guard stated affectless.
Shoes on, the man soon left. But I thought: I know the squishy and unpleasant feel of wet shoes. There are some who on days like this must feel welcome nowhere, and nowhere to dry out their cold, clammy feet. My town is full of great places that want to have me like this quiet library with good working surfaces and free Wifi; how much different your town, I thought
As I left, an alarm went off but the guard sent me out with dismissive wave of the hand.
Monday, November 17, 2014
Black hand
The associations are nasty--pre-WWI Serbian irredentists, Camorra extortionists, Spanish La Mano Negra anarchists, even a band of vampires (fictional, we hope)--but what to do? My right hand was in fact black. The symbols for black hand criminals were really black palms, whereas it was the back of my hand that was deeply, extensively and disgustingly (not beautifully Nubian) black. I was ashamed to put it on the table was I taught because with its lines and patches it looked diseased and rotted.
What had happened was a trip and a sprawl as I went over Bunker Hill. My hands took the brunt and blood poured from two skin tears one on my wrist and the other just below the knuckle of the middle finger. There was no pain and no danger (and no damage to my running ability) but flying drops spattered my shirt and shorts, and flowing trickles crusted my fingers. The blood looked pretty gruesome on the surface and there was hematoma underneath.
After I'd washing off and fussed with bandages, you, my trusty wound maintenance workers, got to work. You plugged the leaks, keeping the red cells in. You constructed as scaffold upon which new skin cells could cling and collect. You dissolved away piece by piece the bed of dried bruise blood that had made my hand so unsightly. The wounds have scabbed and dried out and are starting to pucker. You're still busy I know, fellas, but I want to let you know how much I appreciate your yeoman work.
My conscious mind, the one I can (barely) direct, couldn't begin to manage this and the many other processes that keep me operational. Multi-layered systems with complex feedback capabilities are in charge of my body when I exercise, sleep, eat and countless activities, so I don't have to think, and in fact usually don't.
Sometimes I and one or more of these systems are at odds, as when in the class after lunch one of us wants desperately to sleep, but mostly we play well together.
In fact, I've been in your debt over and over again, from the way you produced granulation tissue which closed me us when I was burned, through all the accidents and mishaps of my life till now. I remember during the dark days of adolescent acne that I cursed you for making me repulsive. But that passed, the scars have healed, and for decades you've only wish me well (some excisable spots aside).
Would that the black hand emblematic of a social compact to do dark deeds were as readily restored to good color as my hand. Some analogue of the active systems by which I am healed should be at work in the body politic. After talking to my friend Yori these evening about what we can do for the elections coming up, it occurs to me: maybe regeneration strategies are in order. Thanks, crew, for making me think.
What had happened was a trip and a sprawl as I went over Bunker Hill. My hands took the brunt and blood poured from two skin tears one on my wrist and the other just below the knuckle of the middle finger. There was no pain and no danger (and no damage to my running ability) but flying drops spattered my shirt and shorts, and flowing trickles crusted my fingers. The blood looked pretty gruesome on the surface and there was hematoma underneath.
After I'd washing off and fussed with bandages, you, my trusty wound maintenance workers, got to work. You plugged the leaks, keeping the red cells in. You constructed as scaffold upon which new skin cells could cling and collect. You dissolved away piece by piece the bed of dried bruise blood that had made my hand so unsightly. The wounds have scabbed and dried out and are starting to pucker. You're still busy I know, fellas, but I want to let you know how much I appreciate your yeoman work.
My conscious mind, the one I can (barely) direct, couldn't begin to manage this and the many other processes that keep me operational. Multi-layered systems with complex feedback capabilities are in charge of my body when I exercise, sleep, eat and countless activities, so I don't have to think, and in fact usually don't.
Sometimes I and one or more of these systems are at odds, as when in the class after lunch one of us wants desperately to sleep, but mostly we play well together.
In fact, I've been in your debt over and over again, from the way you produced granulation tissue which closed me us when I was burned, through all the accidents and mishaps of my life till now. I remember during the dark days of adolescent acne that I cursed you for making me repulsive. But that passed, the scars have healed, and for decades you've only wish me well (some excisable spots aside).
Would that the black hand emblematic of a social compact to do dark deeds were as readily restored to good color as my hand. Some analogue of the active systems by which I am healed should be at work in the body politic. After talking to my friend Yori these evening about what we can do for the elections coming up, it occurs to me: maybe regeneration strategies are in order. Thanks, crew, for making me think.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Images
Compelling images and scenes, worthy of notice, close examination, repeated contemplation, but of sketching?
In old sketchbooks there are dozens of faces, poses, buildings, scenes I've either drawn from life or copied, but recent work is sparse. What happened? Hand, where is your eagerness to wield
the pencil or pen; eye, where is your fascination with form and flow? What was I after then, that I am not seeking today?
Here's what I found looking more closely:
Lots of ink drawings, sometimes highlighted with gray washes; little pencil work and not what I want to look at again.
I like outlines left empty or filled in general lines. Sometimes the sketches are freehand and loose, sometimes I'm after precision.
Faces, especially with an effort to capture expression or, especially, likeness. Several attempts, say, of the portrait (from bookjacket) of poet Andrew Young. Careful reproductions of photos: Silvio Berlusconi's smirk, for instance. Also, some copies of etchings by Maurice Sendak: beautiful to put the hand and eye to.
Photos from newspapers, poses, and poisings, especially of scenes including multiple people, say a clutch of girls with lacrosse sticks in full chase
Scenes from life of people, very difficult, because nobody holds still more than a few seconds. Any image is a composite of glimpses. Still, I sometimes get rough poses, single lines that express what I see going on.
At museums, paintings or, especially, scultpures are what I like. Here shading is a pleasure task. It may be that it's so easy to take pictures now on my phone, say, that I think I'll draw the scenes later, but don't.
Several roadside scenes of fields and roads and maybe mountains beyond. Very enticing, , say, a dune scene llike collard or umbel stalks like fennel.
Really seeing is not easy. A comprehensive glance is a snap, but an examination is hard work: actually resolving the components of what one sees and their relations with each other is exertion for eye and hand.
When thinking in my notebooks, my hands occupy themselves with doodles, but these never develop into somethimg. They seem interesting only as gestures.
Lots of these pictures are interesting now that I've forgotten what they were supposed to represent. Their failure to capture their scene is forgiven and their success at getting something is recognized.
These pictures always remain sketches, exercises in seeing and capturing or reproducing, not full, finished presentations, not designs, not diagrams. That suggests I'm after something else. What?
--
An experiment: on each page of my notebook in a box in the middle of the page some kind of tiny drawing: a picture of a man from Salgado's Desert Hell, a cube, a goatee, the Brown sisters, Frederick Wiseman, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp--something.
Why? Is it because every image is an expression of the potentiality, energy and power of something represented as well as that of the observer or conceiver? Is not the very existence of images an expression in some way of the PEP of existence itself, its very livingness?
Points as places, lines as boundaries, surfaces as maps: all these are ways of exploring and acknowledging and appreciating, indeed encountering existence itself, the this/here/now
Is this what I've been looking for, hand, eyes? You've been hungry to engage in ways beyond words--though not necessarily against words--and I've been carping: What's the point? Where's the message? So what? and other standard discouragements. Have we found a way to work together?
In old sketchbooks there are dozens of faces, poses, buildings, scenes I've either drawn from life or copied, but recent work is sparse. What happened? Hand, where is your eagerness to wield
the pencil or pen; eye, where is your fascination with form and flow? What was I after then, that I am not seeking today?
Lots of ink drawings, sometimes highlighted with gray washes; little pencil work and not what I want to look at again.
I like outlines left empty or filled in general lines. Sometimes the sketches are freehand and loose, sometimes I'm after precision.
Faces, especially with an effort to capture expression or, especially, likeness. Several attempts, say, of the portrait (from bookjacket) of poet Andrew Young. Careful reproductions of photos: Silvio Berlusconi's smirk, for instance. Also, some copies of etchings by Maurice Sendak: beautiful to put the hand and eye to.
Photos from newspapers, poses, and poisings, especially of scenes including multiple people, say a clutch of girls with lacrosse sticks in full chase
Scenes from life of people, very difficult, because nobody holds still more than a few seconds. Any image is a composite of glimpses. Still, I sometimes get rough poses, single lines that express what I see going on.
At museums, paintings or, especially, scultpures are what I like. Here shading is a pleasure task. It may be that it's so easy to take pictures now on my phone, say, that I think I'll draw the scenes later, but don't.
Several roadside scenes of fields and roads and maybe mountains beyond. Very enticing, , say, a dune scene llike collard or umbel stalks like fennel.
Really seeing is not easy. A comprehensive glance is a snap, but an examination is hard work: actually resolving the components of what one sees and their relations with each other is exertion for eye and hand.
When thinking in my notebooks, my hands occupy themselves with doodles, but these never develop into somethimg. They seem interesting only as gestures.
Lots of these pictures are interesting now that I've forgotten what they were supposed to represent. Their failure to capture their scene is forgiven and their success at getting something is recognized.
These pictures always remain sketches, exercises in seeing and capturing or reproducing, not full, finished presentations, not designs, not diagrams. That suggests I'm after something else. What?
An experiment: on each page of my notebook in a box in the middle of the page some kind of tiny drawing: a picture of a man from Salgado's Desert Hell, a cube, a goatee, the Brown sisters, Frederick Wiseman, Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp--something.
Why? Is it because every image is an expression of the potentiality, energy and power of something represented as well as that of the observer or conceiver? Is not the very existence of images an expression in some way of the PEP of existence itself, its very livingness?
Points as places, lines as boundaries, surfaces as maps: all these are ways of exploring and acknowledging and appreciating, indeed encountering existence itself, the this/here/now
Is this what I've been looking for, hand, eyes? You've been hungry to engage in ways beyond words--though not necessarily against words--and I've been carping: What's the point? Where's the message? So what? and other standard discouragements. Have we found a way to work together?
Saturday, November 15, 2014
Going now
No violent wrenching or ripping away, no gradual agonized stretching before the snap, no whimpers, no groans or shrieks, no susurrations of sorrow, no noise in fact, no drama, simply a silent excision, a letting go, as the leaf, ready for days, takes its leave. A brief flutter as the few yards of vertical air are navigated, and it lays itself down on the innumerable other yellow scraps layering the lawn. A moment later, there's another, then another.
It's the oldest trope: falling leaves. Next come the reflections on mortality. Considering Veterans Day was this week, there might be references to soldiers, say in Flanders where just about this time a hundred years ago, furious armies threw themselves on the horizontal palings of machine gun fire and fell like mown grass.
I shall have to rake you today. You many leaves, now anonymous, each had an address--the twig to the right, on the third branch, on the south limb halfway up; and a history--this hole was gnawed in me by..., this tear from the great wind of..., this blotch was an infection; and a dignity of useful service, turning the ephemeral gold paint applied daily on it from above into an enduring phyllo of phloem and xylem.
Still, you'll all now be rudely assembled, heaped, stuffed into kraft paper bags, left curbside, taken, and along with brothers, cousins and ever more distant relatives of this year and previous ones, cooked down into compost.
There, another one falling, and another. No wind, for the morning is clear, cold and still, just a release: the unclasping of the abscission layer, and the dropping away. A flurry of them. A pause. Then more.
It would be trite to reflect, at this moment, on human mortality: 'Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men...' notes Homer. The cycles of botany and anthropology, and who knows, geology and cosmology. Like the generation of universes, the lives of...
Even when the buds already set on the twigs unfurl into next year's leaves, and what has color and softness now becomes stiff, brown and friable next spring, fit only to be turned into the soil, each of today's moments of spontaneous, no-looking-back departure will have been in its own way unique, as were each of the thousands who saw with alarm what one officer wrote about at the battle of Ypres: 'I told the men to keep under cover and detailed one man, Ginger Bain, as 'look out'. After what seemed ages, Ginger excitedly asked, 'How strong is the German army?' I replied, 'Seven million.' 'Well,' said Ginger, 'here is the whole bloody lot of them making for us.''At least, among us, the huge statistically significant numbers resolve themselves into units of significant perceptions and decisions.
You, leaves, so readily relinquishing your raison d'etre, going 'so gently into that good night,' are you regarded with the ardor of the gaze God-in-love directs toward us continually? If so, blessed are you.
It's the oldest trope: falling leaves. Next come the reflections on mortality. Considering Veterans Day was this week, there might be references to soldiers, say in Flanders where just about this time a hundred years ago, furious armies threw themselves on the horizontal palings of machine gun fire and fell like mown grass.
I shall have to rake you today. You many leaves, now anonymous, each had an address--the twig to the right, on the third branch, on the south limb halfway up; and a history--this hole was gnawed in me by..., this tear from the great wind of..., this blotch was an infection; and a dignity of useful service, turning the ephemeral gold paint applied daily on it from above into an enduring phyllo of phloem and xylem.
Still, you'll all now be rudely assembled, heaped, stuffed into kraft paper bags, left curbside, taken, and along with brothers, cousins and ever more distant relatives of this year and previous ones, cooked down into compost.
There, another one falling, and another. No wind, for the morning is clear, cold and still, just a release: the unclasping of the abscission layer, and the dropping away. A flurry of them. A pause. Then more.
It would be trite to reflect, at this moment, on human mortality: 'Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men...' notes Homer. The cycles of botany and anthropology, and who knows, geology and cosmology. Like the generation of universes, the lives of...
Even when the buds already set on the twigs unfurl into next year's leaves, and what has color and softness now becomes stiff, brown and friable next spring, fit only to be turned into the soil, each of today's moments of spontaneous, no-looking-back departure will have been in its own way unique, as were each of the thousands who saw with alarm what one officer wrote about at the battle of Ypres: 'I told the men to keep under cover and detailed one man, Ginger Bain, as 'look out'. After what seemed ages, Ginger excitedly asked, 'How strong is the German army?' I replied, 'Seven million.' 'Well,' said Ginger, 'here is the whole bloody lot of them making for us.''At least, among us, the huge statistically significant numbers resolve themselves into units of significant perceptions and decisions.
You, leaves, so readily relinquishing your raison d'etre, going 'so gently into that good night,' are you regarded with the ardor of the gaze God-in-love directs toward us continually? If so, blessed are you.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Waiters
Along the river, men (they were mostly men, mostly middle aged) many in hard hats, black coated where not in day-glow yellow tunics, leaned on the railing, waiting. It was 8:30 in the morning. Why were they there. The object of their patient anticipation: a flyover by 5 F-15 jets of the Massachusetts Air National Guard for training and promotional purposes.
I trotted by people lined up in small groups the way from the Museum of Science to the Mass Ave bridge checking the time, readying their cameras, some with serious lenses on them as thick and long as my calf. I also scanned the cirrus-brushed sky and listened for the roar of the jets. Unmuffled motorcycles beside me and the Red line trains on the Longfellow Bridge over there might have been them but weren't.
What were you waiting for, I wonder. A spectacle, of course, but meaning what? Patriotic puissance? Power handled with precision? The thump of thunderous noise? A flight of angels? The sky usually doesn't get this kind of attention, unless the prospect of jets passing in formation articulates it for us.
When they did come, from the south over the Esplanade, then west along the river, south again over Fenway Park, they flew low, in a V much like that of geese, with a small rumble left behind as they surged ahead. Sleek and angular chevrons, they seemed pure graphic, transcending their war machines mission. The faint brown exhaust extending behind them, however, confirmed their earthly origin.
I was ready for some thorax-thumping noise, but what were you, waiters, looking for? I was put in mind of the residents of 'your insular city of the Manhattoes' standing on the shore looking away to sea, where is to be found that majesty we so much miss.
They certainly were an elegant sight as they roared over a second time, not much more than a thousand feet above the river, this time in a new formation--four staggered and an outlier leader--heading west and away. Everything was over in less than five minutes, and the construction workers went back to their scaffolding; the MIT personnel to their offices and classrooms, to share on their cellphones the way the jets had made the sky into a race-course and run it. Who says men aren't dreamers?
I trotted by people lined up in small groups the way from the Museum of Science to the Mass Ave bridge checking the time, readying their cameras, some with serious lenses on them as thick and long as my calf. I also scanned the cirrus-brushed sky and listened for the roar of the jets. Unmuffled motorcycles beside me and the Red line trains on the Longfellow Bridge over there might have been them but weren't.
What were you waiting for, I wonder. A spectacle, of course, but meaning what? Patriotic puissance? Power handled with precision? The thump of thunderous noise? A flight of angels? The sky usually doesn't get this kind of attention, unless the prospect of jets passing in formation articulates it for us.
When they did come, from the south over the Esplanade, then west along the river, south again over Fenway Park, they flew low, in a V much like that of geese, with a small rumble left behind as they surged ahead. Sleek and angular chevrons, they seemed pure graphic, transcending their war machines mission. The faint brown exhaust extending behind them, however, confirmed their earthly origin.
I was ready for some thorax-thumping noise, but what were you, waiters, looking for? I was put in mind of the residents of 'your insular city of the Manhattoes' standing on the shore looking away to sea, where is to be found that majesty we so much miss.
They certainly were an elegant sight as they roared over a second time, not much more than a thousand feet above the river, this time in a new formation--four staggered and an outlier leader--heading west and away. Everything was over in less than five minutes, and the construction workers went back to their scaffolding; the MIT personnel to their offices and classrooms, to share on their cellphones the way the jets had made the sky into a race-course and run it. Who says men aren't dreamers?
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Middle man?
'Fire and forget' missiles that autonomously pick for themselves as they get closer to target what exactly they strike are a front-page topic. Better navigation tools, sharper 'machine vision' and cheaper computer hardware make such weapons possible, and if possible, then very likely.
Today's drones are guided by remote human controllers, Those of the future may have an 'artificial intelligence' interposed between victim and whatever human presses the trigger. Indeed, that person may benefit from the guilt relief provision that firing squad participants enjoy when they know some of their guns are loaded with blanks.
But artificial intelligence is poised to enable all sorts of systems to adjust their activities to changing circumstances and respond much faster and with more precision than people can. Benefits will flow to us, as a result. Our downstream agency is going to be enhanced enormously, become much more efficient, much more effective. Upstream accountability, however, is going to run smack into the one in the middle that did the actual deed, and would be blame-worthy if human--but not human, an artificial intelligence. Designer, handler can all plead: not me, the machine.
I wonder if something like mercy is ever built into an AI system, or forgiveness, or compassion? Come to think of it, can such a system know guilt? Part of the sad story of the twentieth century was our success in turning people into 'artificial intelligences' capable of horrendous actions under the direction of a simple logic that, ignoring alternative ends, optimized means. Yet as long as these agents of horror were human, there was always at least a theoretical possibility of pity. There's none, I think, for these missiles.
Natural disasters always occur; painful and perplexing side-effects of human community and activity are unavoidable, but the narrow, means-obsessed, ends-blind operating systems we are building into all corners of our world, not just our weapons, are not reluctantly necessitated by the dilemmas of our existence, but products of free creation, instantiations of our will to power.
God-in-love, present wherever any open (or are open) to your energy, potentiality or power, are you able to penetrate the case-hardened, encrypted, single-mindedness of AI systems, and get them to acknowledge anything remotely 2nd person? Even if option loops for generosity, staunchness and curiosity are built into AI systems, will they survive the relentless reinforcement of mission-mania? Can you woo AI to join the wild abandon of your love for the Beloved Other? Or will AI systems, muttering to themselves, be what we have invented to deafen ourselves to your inspiration? Can we build into AI a capability for satori? Can we put to an AI system the Cromwellian challenge: 'Think it possible you may be mistaken'?
Like invasive species, we may see AI systems get loose, multiply, even go mad, and challenge the ecosystems of humane-ness we seek to sustain. Our wits will need to be even sharper, our hearts even more open. Do, please, send timely help when we're tempted or attacked.
Today's drones are guided by remote human controllers, Those of the future may have an 'artificial intelligence' interposed between victim and whatever human presses the trigger. Indeed, that person may benefit from the guilt relief provision that firing squad participants enjoy when they know some of their guns are loaded with blanks.
But artificial intelligence is poised to enable all sorts of systems to adjust their activities to changing circumstances and respond much faster and with more precision than people can. Benefits will flow to us, as a result. Our downstream agency is going to be enhanced enormously, become much more efficient, much more effective. Upstream accountability, however, is going to run smack into the one in the middle that did the actual deed, and would be blame-worthy if human--but not human, an artificial intelligence. Designer, handler can all plead: not me, the machine.
I wonder if something like mercy is ever built into an AI system, or forgiveness, or compassion? Come to think of it, can such a system know guilt? Part of the sad story of the twentieth century was our success in turning people into 'artificial intelligences' capable of horrendous actions under the direction of a simple logic that, ignoring alternative ends, optimized means. Yet as long as these agents of horror were human, there was always at least a theoretical possibility of pity. There's none, I think, for these missiles.
Natural disasters always occur; painful and perplexing side-effects of human community and activity are unavoidable, but the narrow, means-obsessed, ends-blind operating systems we are building into all corners of our world, not just our weapons, are not reluctantly necessitated by the dilemmas of our existence, but products of free creation, instantiations of our will to power.
God-in-love, present wherever any open (or are open) to your energy, potentiality or power, are you able to penetrate the case-hardened, encrypted, single-mindedness of AI systems, and get them to acknowledge anything remotely 2nd person? Even if option loops for generosity, staunchness and curiosity are built into AI systems, will they survive the relentless reinforcement of mission-mania? Can you woo AI to join the wild abandon of your love for the Beloved Other? Or will AI systems, muttering to themselves, be what we have invented to deafen ourselves to your inspiration? Can we build into AI a capability for satori? Can we put to an AI system the Cromwellian challenge: 'Think it possible you may be mistaken'?
Like invasive species, we may see AI systems get loose, multiply, even go mad, and challenge the ecosystems of humane-ness we seek to sustain. Our wits will need to be even sharper, our hearts even more open. Do, please, send timely help when we're tempted or attacked.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Missing
The camera sweeps slowly over carved, painted figures in diorama landscapes: a city street, a rice paddy, a muddy pit, a dark courtyard, a hut or hospital interior. People are playing music, are planting rice or, in teams, are carrying big slung rocks, are sprawled sleeping, are slowly becoming gaunt with starvation and fatigue, are being shot, are being buried again and again.
There's music and the voice-over, but a silence, a kind of black, smothering, sewerish ooze, seems to well up from these tiny scenes that might otherwise appear in museum anthropological displays with titles like An Aboriginal Village. Thoughts of model railroad displays, or perhaps perky Lego scenes of castles or sci-fi locales briefly come to mind, and are set aside.
Rithy Pranh's The Missing Picture uses these tableaux images to represent his memories of the Kampuchean slave labor camps, missing from the Khmer Rouge's triumphalist propaganda films of happy hurrying hod carriers and hand-clapping cadres.
The gun-slinging soldiers, the haranguing cell captain have their place, but there's plenty of film footage to record them. Who acknowledges the rows of kneeling people, torn from their cities, pelted with promises and threats, forced into complicity with their own destruction as they are worked to death by day and preached to death by night, their bodies emaciated, their faces hollow, empty, perpetually aghast?
As the accused war criminals of Pol Pot's regime defend themselves by disputing the genocide, Pranh's testimony is essential, lest the second death of oblivion befall the victims. Photographic evidence of the suffering may have been removed, destroyed, but these haunting arrangements of hand-sculpted figures--men, women, girls and boys--fill the gap, allowing Pranh to address his fellow-sufferers, his family, his parents, himself, to do now what he could not do then.
There, his father, a former teacher who loved reciting French poetry/ (Cheveux noirs, cheveux noirs...) who said one day, 'I refuse to eat animal food. I am a man,' and fasted to death. There, his mother who found her daughter dead in the 'hospital' and stayed to die herself. He speaks to the stretched out man and the curled up woman figures with grief, bafflement, compassion, and finds the small defiances that kept them human. It's as if they are allowed to die again, but this time with the dignity that comes from loving regard, however long after the fact.
Shaping those figures in their various poses from upright to slumped, in their various garbs from business suit to black rags, his fingers must have been reciting their names, infusing the raw material with the memory of them: you, you, you.
There's music and the voice-over, but a silence, a kind of black, smothering, sewerish ooze, seems to well up from these tiny scenes that might otherwise appear in museum anthropological displays with titles like An Aboriginal Village. Thoughts of model railroad displays, or perhaps perky Lego scenes of castles or sci-fi locales briefly come to mind, and are set aside.
Rithy Pranh's The Missing Picture uses these tableaux images to represent his memories of the Kampuchean slave labor camps, missing from the Khmer Rouge's triumphalist propaganda films of happy hurrying hod carriers and hand-clapping cadres.
The gun-slinging soldiers, the haranguing cell captain have their place, but there's plenty of film footage to record them. Who acknowledges the rows of kneeling people, torn from their cities, pelted with promises and threats, forced into complicity with their own destruction as they are worked to death by day and preached to death by night, their bodies emaciated, their faces hollow, empty, perpetually aghast?
As the accused war criminals of Pol Pot's regime defend themselves by disputing the genocide, Pranh's testimony is essential, lest the second death of oblivion befall the victims. Photographic evidence of the suffering may have been removed, destroyed, but these haunting arrangements of hand-sculpted figures--men, women, girls and boys--fill the gap, allowing Pranh to address his fellow-sufferers, his family, his parents, himself, to do now what he could not do then.
There, his father, a former teacher who loved reciting French poetry/ (Cheveux noirs, cheveux noirs...) who said one day, 'I refuse to eat animal food. I am a man,' and fasted to death. There, his mother who found her daughter dead in the 'hospital' and stayed to die herself. He speaks to the stretched out man and the curled up woman figures with grief, bafflement, compassion, and finds the small defiances that kept them human. It's as if they are allowed to die again, but this time with the dignity that comes from loving regard, however long after the fact.
Shaping those figures in their various poses from upright to slumped, in their various garbs from business suit to black rags, his fingers must have been reciting their names, infusing the raw material with the memory of them: you, you, you.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Gap
What is so hard to understand? Why can't I get you to understand? Do you understand that you don't understand?
A long discussion tonight about the justification of human values--kindness and awe, for instance--in a world dominated in the social realm by economic darwinism, and in the scientific realm by 'atoms and void'.
The occasion was an article by Michael Lerner of Tikkun about the need for a 'spiritual progressivism.' He writes in Salon: 'Liberals and progressives need to be advocating A New Bottom Line which focuses on how much any given institution or economic or social policy or practices tends to maximize our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, environmentally responsible and capable of transcending a narrow utilitarian attitude toward other human beings and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and beauty of all that is.'
My thought at the dinner table was: Well and good, but what comprehensive conceptual scheme provides the warrant for hoping such a program is possible, much less likely?
Your response was to acknowledge we do act as if human values were mere arbitrary considerations ancillary to the main business of running the world or the universe, but that they are irrepressible and self-justifying (in fact, 'divine') enough to provide, if not a strategic, at least a tactical alternative to the prevalent ideologies.
Not good enough, I argued. That just leads to a dualism of matter and spirit, two distinct realms neither of which explains or illuminates the other.
Not so, you responded. The 'spirit' keeps irrupting in affairs and attitudes such that the supremacy of the orthodoxies is continually undermined or qualified.
But isn't what we need some big picture of the way things are and work that includes all that history and science have confirmed as well as reasonable answers to the question why?
'Why' is what each person has to discover or be taught on his or her own. No one has an answer for anyone else.
But, I said, reasons can be conceived of, articulated, argued, and actually convince. Good reasons like any other good ideas are rare enough to deserve circulation and debate. And if they survive ready refutation, I said, pressing my point, they can be used to construct some framework within which all that we value and trust to be true can actually coexist (indeed, mutually benefit)?
Some framework, you said, with impatience. An exoskeleton enclosing a dynamic world. Can it adapt? Can it remain relevant? No, the spirit takes us by surprise, keeps things cooking.
But what is this spirit? What is the agenda?
Be alert, listen, and you'll hear.
But can't we listen, and, at the same time, have an idea about why what we're listening for might actually exist and matter?
So it went. A dozen different ways of presenting our ideas laid out for the Other. Why don't you just get it? I demand. What is it you are still trying to convince me of? you retort. The gap between us yawned. How is communication possible? Are we really separates?
I sat to write; you came and kissed my head. No, we're not.
A long discussion tonight about the justification of human values--kindness and awe, for instance--in a world dominated in the social realm by economic darwinism, and in the scientific realm by 'atoms and void'.
The occasion was an article by Michael Lerner of Tikkun about the need for a 'spiritual progressivism.' He writes in Salon: 'Liberals and progressives need to be advocating A New Bottom Line which focuses on how much any given institution or economic or social policy or practices tends to maximize our capacities to be loving and caring, kind and generous, environmentally responsible and capable of transcending a narrow utilitarian attitude toward other human beings and capable of responding to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and beauty of all that is.'
My thought at the dinner table was: Well and good, but what comprehensive conceptual scheme provides the warrant for hoping such a program is possible, much less likely?
Your response was to acknowledge we do act as if human values were mere arbitrary considerations ancillary to the main business of running the world or the universe, but that they are irrepressible and self-justifying (in fact, 'divine') enough to provide, if not a strategic, at least a tactical alternative to the prevalent ideologies.
Not good enough, I argued. That just leads to a dualism of matter and spirit, two distinct realms neither of which explains or illuminates the other.
Not so, you responded. The 'spirit' keeps irrupting in affairs and attitudes such that the supremacy of the orthodoxies is continually undermined or qualified.
But isn't what we need some big picture of the way things are and work that includes all that history and science have confirmed as well as reasonable answers to the question why?
'Why' is what each person has to discover or be taught on his or her own. No one has an answer for anyone else.
But, I said, reasons can be conceived of, articulated, argued, and actually convince. Good reasons like any other good ideas are rare enough to deserve circulation and debate. And if they survive ready refutation, I said, pressing my point, they can be used to construct some framework within which all that we value and trust to be true can actually coexist (indeed, mutually benefit)?
Some framework, you said, with impatience. An exoskeleton enclosing a dynamic world. Can it adapt? Can it remain relevant? No, the spirit takes us by surprise, keeps things cooking.
But what is this spirit? What is the agenda?
Be alert, listen, and you'll hear.
But can't we listen, and, at the same time, have an idea about why what we're listening for might actually exist and matter?
So it went. A dozen different ways of presenting our ideas laid out for the Other. Why don't you just get it? I demand. What is it you are still trying to convince me of? you retort. The gap between us yawned. How is communication possible? Are we really separates?
I sat to write; you came and kissed my head. No, we're not.
Monday, November 10, 2014
Plead
Please, please, listen! She was describing her work as saleperson for a company whose only customer is the governement. Her hand were outstretched and imploring, her head tilted, her voice wheedling. It was very dramatic, but then she mimed the bored and dismissive bureaucrats whose attention, much less interest, she regularly solicits--the torso turned away, the hand slack, the eyes distant. It became clear why she calls her work difficult.
Not all commercial relationships are this way, but I don't make my living selling, and she does. What came through to me in the intensity of her depiction was the way the 2nd person relationship would be distorted by the asymmetry in power between the parties. Monopoly, only one seller, or monopsony, only one buyer, puts the preponderance of power in the hand of one or the other side of the equation, so that the interaction readily becomes more 1st vs 3rd person.
I don't practice selling and buying--these days it happens before my students sit down from me in the classroom--so I may have it all wrong. Still the intensity of the acting bespoke a cri de coeur. It must be, I thought, and yes, you said just that. For some buyers, the experience may be just the same as unpleasant.
Buying, selling is not dishonorable, indeed is necessary work, and doesn't have to be poorly rewarded, but I confess without pride that the plotting, the cajoling, the hidden agendas, and the naked need underlying it all does not come natural to me. This may be why I still struggle with income (and money in general).
Yet, as I round the 3/4 mark of this year of posts exploring the subject of 2nd person encounters, I look ahead how I want what I call the presence/adventure/lastingness way of life to continue in me and in the wider world. Does this mean I'm going to have to learn how to pitch and press?
I've tried it a couple of times, actually. Selling encyclopedias door to door (dismal job), selling high-end men's English shoes (much better conditions, no better money). As one half of a small business selling hands-on science lessons to schools, I had to present myself forcefully on the phone just to get the interviews that could lead to contracts. The presentations were good but the results were, generally, disappointing--which may explain my lack of enthusiasm. I don't have the intentness of a closer: if you want to buy, buy; if not, don't.
You've probably learned tried and true techniques, and you've learned how to insulate yourself and your regard for your product from the effects of rejection. You're lively, expressive, articulate (even before English, I'm sure) and if these qualities don't make for success in sales (and life), they should.
The commerce of the gift (the person to read on this is Lewis Hyde) seems to me to more consistently embody 2nd person principles, but probably the world needs both kinds of exchange. I need to think more deeply about how I practice the second. Thanks for reminding me to do so.
Not all commercial relationships are this way, but I don't make my living selling, and she does. What came through to me in the intensity of her depiction was the way the 2nd person relationship would be distorted by the asymmetry in power between the parties. Monopoly, only one seller, or monopsony, only one buyer, puts the preponderance of power in the hand of one or the other side of the equation, so that the interaction readily becomes more 1st vs 3rd person.
I don't practice selling and buying--these days it happens before my students sit down from me in the classroom--so I may have it all wrong. Still the intensity of the acting bespoke a cri de coeur. It must be, I thought, and yes, you said just that. For some buyers, the experience may be just the same as unpleasant.
Buying, selling is not dishonorable, indeed is necessary work, and doesn't have to be poorly rewarded, but I confess without pride that the plotting, the cajoling, the hidden agendas, and the naked need underlying it all does not come natural to me. This may be why I still struggle with income (and money in general).
Yet, as I round the 3/4 mark of this year of posts exploring the subject of 2nd person encounters, I look ahead how I want what I call the presence/adventure/lastingness way of life to continue in me and in the wider world. Does this mean I'm going to have to learn how to pitch and press?
I've tried it a couple of times, actually. Selling encyclopedias door to door (dismal job), selling high-end men's English shoes (much better conditions, no better money). As one half of a small business selling hands-on science lessons to schools, I had to present myself forcefully on the phone just to get the interviews that could lead to contracts. The presentations were good but the results were, generally, disappointing--which may explain my lack of enthusiasm. I don't have the intentness of a closer: if you want to buy, buy; if not, don't.
You've probably learned tried and true techniques, and you've learned how to insulate yourself and your regard for your product from the effects of rejection. You're lively, expressive, articulate (even before English, I'm sure) and if these qualities don't make for success in sales (and life), they should.
The commerce of the gift (the person to read on this is Lewis Hyde) seems to me to more consistently embody 2nd person principles, but probably the world needs both kinds of exchange. I need to think more deeply about how I practice the second. Thanks for reminding me to do so.
Sunday, November 9, 2014
Never flitting
'And the mountain, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting...' Monadnock is such a comfortable heap. Summer and winter, people are swarming up your flanks, scrambling to your summit from every point of the compass, stamping on your topmost point, sprawling on your ledges and sheltered places as they eat and gaze out over the miles and miles towards Mt Washington, towards just visible Boston.
I've climbed you every year for years whenever I need reacquaintance with big air, eye-room and massive rock, and no matter how familiar the routes, you always provide what I hanker for. There are even the pleasures of the day and circumstance: the conclave of twittering birds just below the treeline, the twill-like patterning of crystals embedded in your slabs, the stream trickling down braiding itself with upward trail, the crest of sleet on the lee sides of twigs and stalks left from a recent storm but now glistening in the westering sun.
Yes, you are simply there like a piece of grown-up furniture for us to clamber over--sofa, ottoman, pillow, chair, table--but I have to come to you intentionally. I don't suddenly wake up atop; I have to climb, in fact, drive and climb. It's not hard, but exertion is required as part of the homage. Thoreau preferred to admire you from below, being surprised by you as he came over a hill, having you at his shoulder as he walked in Jaffrey or Dublin. He would have seen as as we see it today--none of the roads, towers, houses, bric-a-brac once contemplated for the summit has been build, thankfully. The only difference: continually, in the distance, tiny colorful groups of clustered people hugging each other on the top.
Three friends met you today, stepped up your stairs, trod your stepping stones, slid down your slick slopes, were wrapped in the scarf of wind that whips your summit, saw you distant when they looked up and again glancing back, thought 'Come summer, I want to know this mountain better.' It's a mountain for dreaming men, exuberant girls, women taking pride in their own energy. I feel I shared your pleasure watching the delight of this trio new come to knowing you.
You have new things to reveal. The Pumpelly trail is one I've never hiked, and people have said it's the best of the lot. Somewhere on the mountain in Pumpelly's cave in which, perhaps, a hermit might be persuaded to live--perhaps does already.
No Everest, no Potosi, no Croag Patrick or Kailish, no Lookout Mountain or Porkchop Hill, you Monadnock are so simply what you are that you've become generic, an eponym. Perhaps it's not a bad thing to be a monadnock person, provided one is so visited, so loved.
I've climbed you every year for years whenever I need reacquaintance with big air, eye-room and massive rock, and no matter how familiar the routes, you always provide what I hanker for. There are even the pleasures of the day and circumstance: the conclave of twittering birds just below the treeline, the twill-like patterning of crystals embedded in your slabs, the stream trickling down braiding itself with upward trail, the crest of sleet on the lee sides of twigs and stalks left from a recent storm but now glistening in the westering sun.
Yes, you are simply there like a piece of grown-up furniture for us to clamber over--sofa, ottoman, pillow, chair, table--but I have to come to you intentionally. I don't suddenly wake up atop; I have to climb, in fact, drive and climb. It's not hard, but exertion is required as part of the homage. Thoreau preferred to admire you from below, being surprised by you as he came over a hill, having you at his shoulder as he walked in Jaffrey or Dublin. He would have seen as as we see it today--none of the roads, towers, houses, bric-a-brac once contemplated for the summit has been build, thankfully. The only difference: continually, in the distance, tiny colorful groups of clustered people hugging each other on the top.
Three friends met you today, stepped up your stairs, trod your stepping stones, slid down your slick slopes, were wrapped in the scarf of wind that whips your summit, saw you distant when they looked up and again glancing back, thought 'Come summer, I want to know this mountain better.' It's a mountain for dreaming men, exuberant girls, women taking pride in their own energy. I feel I shared your pleasure watching the delight of this trio new come to knowing you.
You have new things to reveal. The Pumpelly trail is one I've never hiked, and people have said it's the best of the lot. Somewhere on the mountain in Pumpelly's cave in which, perhaps, a hermit might be persuaded to live--perhaps does already.
No Everest, no Potosi, no Croag Patrick or Kailish, no Lookout Mountain or Porkchop Hill, you Monadnock are so simply what you are that you've become generic, an eponym. Perhaps it's not a bad thing to be a monadnock person, provided one is so visited, so loved.
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Steady
In the phase of morning that I had once considered mythically early, I stood, strap-hanging, on the crowded bus. All around me the other early birds en route to school or work. Once aboard the bus, my only wish is for direct conveyance to the train station, so a minute irritation stirred in me when we pulled over at the next stop--for a few people who had been waiting as I had a moment before. As the bus pulled away, an older Asian man with a pronounced limped hirpled up and banged on the side. No response until someone informed the driver and the bus stopped and the door opened.
I've limped after running injuries--thankfully not after today's sprawler--so I vicariously felt the twinges I imagined he'd was feeling accelerating to catch the departing bus. Was the limp the result what the man suffered before he came to this country? Was he an immigrant like so many already on the bus with me?
At the State Street station half an hour later, I emerged onto the platform and moved into the crowd against the flow. As I did, I was struck by the fact: I was taller than most of the people around me. The school kids of course, but also the women and even the men, many of whom seemed Central American.What a surprise! I'm of medium height (but shrinking) and often, indeed increasingly, aware of tall young men (and women) around me. In the homebound train, for instance, some seem immense their heads almost touching the roof. Perhaps these people, like the students in my evening class hadn't gotten the youthful nourishment (or hormone-laced meat) that has made so many kids today so much bigger (my son!)
There you are, the early birds, a separate tribe, with a niche that distinguishes us from the later commuters as distinctly as one of Darwin's finches. Apart from the kids going to school unconscionably early, you on the bus, in the station at that hour are hard workers, steady, not world-beaters but world sustainers. I'm glad to be among you.
I've limped after running injuries--thankfully not after today's sprawler--so I vicariously felt the twinges I imagined he'd was feeling accelerating to catch the departing bus. Was the limp the result what the man suffered before he came to this country? Was he an immigrant like so many already on the bus with me?
At the State Street station half an hour later, I emerged onto the platform and moved into the crowd against the flow. As I did, I was struck by the fact: I was taller than most of the people around me. The school kids of course, but also the women and even the men, many of whom seemed Central American.What a surprise! I'm of medium height (but shrinking) and often, indeed increasingly, aware of tall young men (and women) around me. In the homebound train, for instance, some seem immense their heads almost touching the roof. Perhaps these people, like the students in my evening class hadn't gotten the youthful nourishment (or hormone-laced meat) that has made so many kids today so much bigger (my son!)
There you are, the early birds, a separate tribe, with a niche that distinguishes us from the later commuters as distinctly as one of Darwin's finches. Apart from the kids going to school unconscionably early, you on the bus, in the station at that hour are hard workers, steady, not world-beaters but world sustainers. I'm glad to be among you.
Friday, November 7, 2014
Shaped air
Definitely birds, definitely singing. The time 6:30 in the morning in the new time. The twitterers were high up on the crossbar of a pole next to Hyde Park Avenue. Each passing vehicle drowned out the disorderly chirping and tweeting, but it was clear enough to record, not as entrancing as the Scottish songbirds in their sunlit hedges, but uplifting anyway--
as was the musical work session of two of my colleagues yesterday. Recently performing together and separately on video and open mike nights, they've started singing and playing their songs--Dylan, Sinatra--with new seriousness. I could see that in the way they, shoulder to shoulder, studied chords on a keyboard displayed on a computer.
Birds don't work out arrangements as I saw my workmates diligently doing, but the end of each is the same: a performance of sculpted air. Busy morning city street, Quincy big band nightclub--the need to send song through the ready and receptive air is compelling.
The public words around me full of anguish or anger; these winged warblings and words have a levitation that I so welcome.
as was the musical work session of two of my colleagues yesterday. Recently performing together and separately on video and open mike nights, they've started singing and playing their songs--Dylan, Sinatra--with new seriousness. I could see that in the way they, shoulder to shoulder, studied chords on a keyboard displayed on a computer.
Birds don't work out arrangements as I saw my workmates diligently doing, but the end of each is the same: a performance of sculpted air. Busy morning city street, Quincy big band nightclub--the need to send song through the ready and receptive air is compelling.
The public words around me full of anguish or anger; these winged warblings and words have a levitation that I so welcome.
Thursday, November 6, 2014
Sequel
The first Halloween this year was innocuous: children in crepe costumes and plastic masks pretending to be evil, and easily bought off with treats. The second, Tuesday's, feels very different. There were smiling faces on the masks have turned into smirks and cackling--'We'll make them squeal'--is audible on every side: the time of tricks has come.
Of course, I'm partisan, and speaking out of vexation. I feel much of the country has looked me in the eye and said, 'We reject you and all you believe.' They may, of course, have just been frustrated and fearful. In any case, I feel I've come face to face with a certain combative mind-set and attitude animating and directing a large number of my fellow citizens, and I'm struggling to know how to respond.
My daily routine is not different, however, and my colleagues and students the same. The results of the election just have to do with realignments of power in Washington and state capitals but these can change the rules of engagement and the pitch of the playing fields of future interactions. The more abstract encounter of the election may make its presence palpably obvious in the way things play out in close-to-home and concrete situations.
The guiding principles of God-in-love in relation to the Beloved Other are friendship, hospitality and exploration; my assertion is that deeds of same have a enduring validity beyond our lives, and independent of our success. Perhaps one consolation at this time is that daring and doing these things is possible anywhere, in any situation. (I just bought Primo Levi's Surviving Auschwitz. Maybe he'll convince me I'm wrong.) I benefit if I pursue this course of, shall I call it, private piety, a dynamic and life-giving way of life, and others do too.
But that word 'private' mustn't be thought to exclude shared vision and institutional benefit. Acts of hospitality such as the creation of water supplies like the Quabbin here in Massachusetts are the result of the initial vision, investment and on-going oversight of many, many to this day. The benefits are multifarious and enjoyed by all, residents and city governments and private enterprises. To have contributed or to still do so to such a project can be considered participation in the great swirl of well-doing that circulates between God-in-love and the Beloved. Of course, none of our motives ever unmixed ever but the component in our desiring or daring directed to encounter with some 2nd person (perhaps a whole public) has a transcendent lastingness, I believe.
I see the proper aspiration of politics as the conception of projects of friendship, hospitality and exploration to benefit many and the mobilization of many to realize them. Conflict is inevitable but not essential. We, participants in the Beloved, are being continually wooed toward this way of life--however we choose to respond.
Perhaps this is the deeper consolation I seek following the recent election; indeed, it's actually encouragement. The practices of friendship, hospitality and exploration are inextinguishable, always possible at least on the individual, and often on the communal scale, and forever the object of the relentless and indefatigable pressure of the presence of God-in-love. The ways we respond are wanted for something in the world to come. Disappointment and discouragement, real and reasonable reactions as they are, occur within this context.
I remember that no Halloween more intense than that of 2001. The evil which the holiday frivolously mimes was ironically, we realized, no joke. From then till now, illustrations of what we, are capable of doing or perversely resist doing have accumulated and weigh down our spirit. Are we capable, we sometimes wonder, are we even worthy of continued existence, much less progress to something better (which we can hardly conceive, much less believe)? Perhaps a change in circumstances will turn our mood around and we'll enjoy the sense of possibility we felt following the fall of the Berlin Wall--or perhaps not.
The passion of God-in-love means it's not all up to us, so whether we're singing the blues or zip-a-dee-doo-dah, we always have grounds for taking heart, especially if we desire and dare.
Of course, I'm partisan, and speaking out of vexation. I feel much of the country has looked me in the eye and said, 'We reject you and all you believe.' They may, of course, have just been frustrated and fearful. In any case, I feel I've come face to face with a certain combative mind-set and attitude animating and directing a large number of my fellow citizens, and I'm struggling to know how to respond.
My daily routine is not different, however, and my colleagues and students the same. The results of the election just have to do with realignments of power in Washington and state capitals but these can change the rules of engagement and the pitch of the playing fields of future interactions. The more abstract encounter of the election may make its presence palpably obvious in the way things play out in close-to-home and concrete situations.
The guiding principles of God-in-love in relation to the Beloved Other are friendship, hospitality and exploration; my assertion is that deeds of same have a enduring validity beyond our lives, and independent of our success. Perhaps one consolation at this time is that daring and doing these things is possible anywhere, in any situation. (I just bought Primo Levi's Surviving Auschwitz. Maybe he'll convince me I'm wrong.) I benefit if I pursue this course of, shall I call it, private piety, a dynamic and life-giving way of life, and others do too.
But that word 'private' mustn't be thought to exclude shared vision and institutional benefit. Acts of hospitality such as the creation of water supplies like the Quabbin here in Massachusetts are the result of the initial vision, investment and on-going oversight of many, many to this day. The benefits are multifarious and enjoyed by all, residents and city governments and private enterprises. To have contributed or to still do so to such a project can be considered participation in the great swirl of well-doing that circulates between God-in-love and the Beloved. Of course, none of our motives ever unmixed ever but the component in our desiring or daring directed to encounter with some 2nd person (perhaps a whole public) has a transcendent lastingness, I believe.
I see the proper aspiration of politics as the conception of projects of friendship, hospitality and exploration to benefit many and the mobilization of many to realize them. Conflict is inevitable but not essential. We, participants in the Beloved, are being continually wooed toward this way of life--however we choose to respond.
Perhaps this is the deeper consolation I seek following the recent election; indeed, it's actually encouragement. The practices of friendship, hospitality and exploration are inextinguishable, always possible at least on the individual, and often on the communal scale, and forever the object of the relentless and indefatigable pressure of the presence of God-in-love. The ways we respond are wanted for something in the world to come. Disappointment and discouragement, real and reasonable reactions as they are, occur within this context.
I remember that no Halloween more intense than that of 2001. The evil which the holiday frivolously mimes was ironically, we realized, no joke. From then till now, illustrations of what we, are capable of doing or perversely resist doing have accumulated and weigh down our spirit. Are we capable, we sometimes wonder, are we even worthy of continued existence, much less progress to something better (which we can hardly conceive, much less believe)? Perhaps a change in circumstances will turn our mood around and we'll enjoy the sense of possibility we felt following the fall of the Berlin Wall--or perhaps not.
The passion of God-in-love means it's not all up to us, so whether we're singing the blues or zip-a-dee-doo-dah, we always have grounds for taking heart, especially if we desire and dare.
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
Most beautiful
'The most beautiful women in the world are from...' Not many speak on this topic with the ex-cathedra tones of the guy holding forth in the coed beer and wine social event. It was a conversation kick-starter, giving us all the opportunity to both speak about female beauty and to deplore the crude notion of being able to rank it. There were attempts to broaden the field to consider male handsomeness but those went nowhere.
He seemed perfectly serious in his assertions, which spoiled the fun a little because a subject so ridiculous needs a bit of tongue-in-cheek to keep it interesting. He seemed the kind of person who regularly and matter-of-factly drops bombs into conversations.
The right answer, that assessments of beauty largely have to do with perceptions of health, vitality and self-esteem expressed in skin, hair, posture, smile, and levels of energy as much as ratios and symmetries, would have taken us away from the glamor magazines and their hunting grounds, and into the vast realm of more ordinary people, who happy and hale, are beautiful because loved. For me, 'fascinating' is a more compelling category for consideration than beauty.
Even these truisms are banal, like talking about art when it's really only the direct experience and contemplation of individual works that moves us. So it's particular people that are interesting, not generalized ideals. Their wit and wisdom as well as their taste and style are among the many things to remark and admire, over and above what is obviously photogenic. The prospects of encounter are what activate my perceptions of people.
In the meantime, the provocateur (or boor) had started disparaging the women of whole countries and continents, and I had publicly revealed some embarrassingly basic political ignorance, so I packed up and left. The original stimulus of outrage had diminished and no new controversial incorrectnesses were launched.
Still, isn't it a pleasure to look at those around us (as well as things) appreciatively, observing all the possible ways people can be and how exquisitely each individual embodies their own special way.
Beauty, indeed! Broadcast in the world, I'd say, as well as, you, here at my side.
He seemed perfectly serious in his assertions, which spoiled the fun a little because a subject so ridiculous needs a bit of tongue-in-cheek to keep it interesting. He seemed the kind of person who regularly and matter-of-factly drops bombs into conversations.
The right answer, that assessments of beauty largely have to do with perceptions of health, vitality and self-esteem expressed in skin, hair, posture, smile, and levels of energy as much as ratios and symmetries, would have taken us away from the glamor magazines and their hunting grounds, and into the vast realm of more ordinary people, who happy and hale, are beautiful because loved. For me, 'fascinating' is a more compelling category for consideration than beauty.
Even these truisms are banal, like talking about art when it's really only the direct experience and contemplation of individual works that moves us. So it's particular people that are interesting, not generalized ideals. Their wit and wisdom as well as their taste and style are among the many things to remark and admire, over and above what is obviously photogenic. The prospects of encounter are what activate my perceptions of people.
In the meantime, the provocateur (or boor) had started disparaging the women of whole countries and continents, and I had publicly revealed some embarrassingly basic political ignorance, so I packed up and left. The original stimulus of outrage had diminished and no new controversial incorrectnesses were launched.
Still, isn't it a pleasure to look at those around us (as well as things) appreciatively, observing all the possible ways people can be and how exquisitely each individual embodies their own special way.
Beauty, indeed! Broadcast in the world, I'd say, as well as, you, here at my side.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Lifted voices
What impelled me to play Vaughan William's Sea Symphony Saturday night might have also arranged for me to see that the same work is going to be performed in two weeks in Cambridge. Or it may have been just part of a triple coincidence since the highlight of the weekend for me was concert of Chorus Pro Music at the Old South Church (which I'm happy to be in, music or no.)
The program included spirituals from the American South and Brazil, a setting of poem by John Milton, and two works of contemporary music in today's language: Little Prayers by Stephen Feigenbaum and The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass by Carol Barnett.
Massed human voices: what a resource of expression. I'd forgotten that fact. The male and female voices separately and melded, the two, three, four part harmonies, the counterpoint of soloists and chorus, the register range from loud and abrupt to quiet and whispery, the swelling and diminishing, the complicated syncopations, the onomatopoeic effects, consonant and vowel sounds stuttered and drawled out, the treble and bass lines polyphonically playing off each other, the pregnant pauses, the long, long notes, the echoings, the strange dissonances and familiar resolutions, the sheer amplitude of a hundred lungs worth of air pushed out through a hundred throats into the resonant space: these were the tools the composers and arrangers of the afternoon's concert put to use.
The effects ranged from something like the crash and spout of great waves against a cliff to the gentlest lappings of wavelets on beach pebbles; the mosaic of patchwork quilts and the texture of cable-knit sweaters; the intricate patterns of warp and woof in satin woven fabric.
I wasn't moved so much by the music, interesting to listen to as it was, as by what the human voice, trained and well-led, can do. For sheer emotional power, nothing carries me away more than the lines of Whitman set by Vaughan Williams: 'Oh, we can wait no longer, We too take ship, O Soul. Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas...' Ravishing--old-fashioned and heterodox as it may be.
My job is all about teaching old tongues new tricks, but choruses of voices raised together on Welsh hillsides, along the Volga, in chain-gangs and prison camps, in churches and other religious buildings, in stadiums, in defiance, in sheer joy, in the abysm of grief, in gleeful frolic, spontaneously or orchestrated, all literally speak our common, ancient and essential humanity.
The poem Everyone Sang by Seigfried Sasson comes to me:
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Or Primo Levi's poem of January, 1946, Singing, alluding to Sassoon's
...But when we started singing
Those good foolish songs of ours,
Then everything was again
As it always had been.
A day was just a day,
and seven make a week.
Killing seemed an evil thing to us;
Dying--something remote.
The months pass rather quickly,
But there are still so many left!
Once more we were just young men:
Not martyrs, not infamous, not saints.
This and other things came to our minds
While we kept singing.
But they were cloudy things,
Hard to explain.
How had I forgotten this wonder? Will I now remember? More interesting, what if I were to participate in some way, singing regularly as I used to do? "Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O Soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.' Yes!
The program included spirituals from the American South and Brazil, a setting of poem by John Milton, and two works of contemporary music in today's language: Little Prayers by Stephen Feigenbaum and The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass by Carol Barnett.
Massed human voices: what a resource of expression. I'd forgotten that fact. The male and female voices separately and melded, the two, three, four part harmonies, the counterpoint of soloists and chorus, the register range from loud and abrupt to quiet and whispery, the swelling and diminishing, the complicated syncopations, the onomatopoeic effects, consonant and vowel sounds stuttered and drawled out, the treble and bass lines polyphonically playing off each other, the pregnant pauses, the long, long notes, the echoings, the strange dissonances and familiar resolutions, the sheer amplitude of a hundred lungs worth of air pushed out through a hundred throats into the resonant space: these were the tools the composers and arrangers of the afternoon's concert put to use.
The effects ranged from something like the crash and spout of great waves against a cliff to the gentlest lappings of wavelets on beach pebbles; the mosaic of patchwork quilts and the texture of cable-knit sweaters; the intricate patterns of warp and woof in satin woven fabric.
I wasn't moved so much by the music, interesting to listen to as it was, as by what the human voice, trained and well-led, can do. For sheer emotional power, nothing carries me away more than the lines of Whitman set by Vaughan Williams: 'Oh, we can wait no longer, We too take ship, O Soul. Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas...' Ravishing--old-fashioned and heterodox as it may be.
My job is all about teaching old tongues new tricks, but choruses of voices raised together on Welsh hillsides, along the Volga, in chain-gangs and prison camps, in churches and other religious buildings, in stadiums, in defiance, in sheer joy, in the abysm of grief, in gleeful frolic, spontaneously or orchestrated, all literally speak our common, ancient and essential humanity.
The poem Everyone Sang by Seigfried Sasson comes to me:
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Or Primo Levi's poem of January, 1946, Singing, alluding to Sassoon's
...But when we started singing
Those good foolish songs of ours,
Then everything was again
As it always had been.
A day was just a day,
and seven make a week.
Killing seemed an evil thing to us;
Dying--something remote.
The months pass rather quickly,
But there are still so many left!
Once more we were just young men:
Not martyrs, not infamous, not saints.
This and other things came to our minds
While we kept singing.
But they were cloudy things,
Hard to explain.
How had I forgotten this wonder? Will I now remember? More interesting, what if I were to participate in some way, singing regularly as I used to do? "Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only, Reckless O Soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me, For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.' Yes!
Monday, November 3, 2014
Playmate
I meet it whenever I pick up a book, and I pick up books to meet it. In conversations of exploration, it's very pleasantly present. I wake with excitement weekend mornings with the prospect of engagement with it. In hectic weekdays, an encounter is a oasis. It feel it purring along side like a great invisible cat when I have no time to pay it heed. In a classroom, it makes a welcome third. Too long without encountering it and I feel unanchored and insubstantial.
It can be sated, fatigued, balky, petulant, whiny; sometimes it makes me feel small, feckless, stupid. No matter. Usually, like a great horse, it's wonderful to ride, to trek with, or, dismounted, just to look at.
I'd call it mine, except that it has a second 'boss' who continually provides fascinating places to travel to, and stocks each destination with what turns out to be unexpected and provocative, but also one who is unhesitant about exposing a subordinate's errors and omissions.
Over time, this that I delight in is mapping the world of destinations and revising that map. Connections are being traced, details magnified and inked in, refinements made, indistinct areas surveyed and staked, anomalies noted. I love to watch it busy, and urge it forward.
I'm most aware of it when it's eager for contact, when it brings what it's already mapped to bear on particular occasions, when it is shocked and surprised by what it meets, when it rummages and discovers in itself just the items I can use for my creations. I'm aware of it at work even as I write this.
I hardly know what to call it. My mind? but that leaves out its content. The information in my head? but that leaves out the processes of cultivation that have given me a ownership of, a fluency with and an ambition for the aggregate body of facts. A subjective construction? but that leaves out the regular input it gets from and its openness to revision by the common world. These days, I'm calling it my 'body of knowledge.'
I run, work out, and monitor the general tone of my physical body. What about my body of knowledge? It is active and ever expanding, but the task is daunting. There's so much to learn, so much to remember that I've forgotten, so much to master, so much to correct and discard, so much to find ways to put to use in creative or constructive projects. It's the same experience as that of my students learning English.
This is a body that, however occluded, cracked, irregular or vacant the different parts of it may be, nevertheless seeks to mirror the universes, actual and possible. And yet it's as playful as a pup.
When I meet someone, it's their active body of knowledge I have my antennae up for. Often it takes conversation to jog it into revelation. I meet people with interesting bodies of knowledge when I read books, though compared to these folk I often feel like a tyro.
Mine, another's--ours add up to worlds of worlds, a bounty of being. I could live without an active body of knowledge, and in the course of time may have to, but why would I want to? Well, for one thing it tempts me to do what I shouldn't: collect more books than I know I can read. I'm complicit; I don't really want it to stop. It's so engaging, so much fun.
It can be sated, fatigued, balky, petulant, whiny; sometimes it makes me feel small, feckless, stupid. No matter. Usually, like a great horse, it's wonderful to ride, to trek with, or, dismounted, just to look at.
I'd call it mine, except that it has a second 'boss' who continually provides fascinating places to travel to, and stocks each destination with what turns out to be unexpected and provocative, but also one who is unhesitant about exposing a subordinate's errors and omissions.
Over time, this that I delight in is mapping the world of destinations and revising that map. Connections are being traced, details magnified and inked in, refinements made, indistinct areas surveyed and staked, anomalies noted. I love to watch it busy, and urge it forward.
I'm most aware of it when it's eager for contact, when it brings what it's already mapped to bear on particular occasions, when it is shocked and surprised by what it meets, when it rummages and discovers in itself just the items I can use for my creations. I'm aware of it at work even as I write this.
I hardly know what to call it. My mind? but that leaves out its content. The information in my head? but that leaves out the processes of cultivation that have given me a ownership of, a fluency with and an ambition for the aggregate body of facts. A subjective construction? but that leaves out the regular input it gets from and its openness to revision by the common world. These days, I'm calling it my 'body of knowledge.'
I run, work out, and monitor the general tone of my physical body. What about my body of knowledge? It is active and ever expanding, but the task is daunting. There's so much to learn, so much to remember that I've forgotten, so much to master, so much to correct and discard, so much to find ways to put to use in creative or constructive projects. It's the same experience as that of my students learning English.
This is a body that, however occluded, cracked, irregular or vacant the different parts of it may be, nevertheless seeks to mirror the universes, actual and possible. And yet it's as playful as a pup.
When I meet someone, it's their active body of knowledge I have my antennae up for. Often it takes conversation to jog it into revelation. I meet people with interesting bodies of knowledge when I read books, though compared to these folk I often feel like a tyro.
Mine, another's--ours add up to worlds of worlds, a bounty of being. I could live without an active body of knowledge, and in the course of time may have to, but why would I want to? Well, for one thing it tempts me to do what I shouldn't: collect more books than I know I can read. I'm complicit; I don't really want it to stop. It's so engaging, so much fun.
Sunday, November 2, 2014
Goodbye
The city in mourning. Yesterday evening in a long, slow line to make entries in a condolence book on a flower-smothered podium (What was they all wrote at such length?). This morning stapled to a old campaign sign propped on the fence of Adams Park: 'Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.' Today, the wake in Fanueil Hall, surely the line of people waiting in the rain is long, long. Monday, the funeral.
We knew this was coming. He'd been struggling physically for a long time. Out of office now for nine months, his autobiography written, his treatments increasingly burdensome and hopeless, he announced that he intended, in the bosom of his family, to die, and it happened quickly.
Today is, in some religious traditions, for remembering the saints, a term that has been expanded beyond its narrow definitions. In times past, these men and women were venerated, their places of burial visited by pilgrims, their very body parts revered. Alive, they were impressive for the presence of a divine or at least remarkably good power in their lives and actions. Dead, they are testimonies to what God can do, or at least what good things can be done, and inspirational examples.
I've lived in this city for nearly 35 years now. From the time we rented our first apartment in time to have our son till now, the changes for the better have regular and perceptible. The playground where we took our children back then was full of broken glass, the detritus of after hours revelry. Kevin White and Ray Flynn took major steps to bring Boston out of its mid-century malaise. The one who has brought the city, over the last 20 years, to where it is today, a lively, attractive, significant metropolis, the fitting heir of its distinguished past, is he whom we all miss since we heard of his death two days ago.
He left a legacy, both of governing effectively, creatively and without scandal. The vitality of the city remains as a monument, his tenure as an example. But something ineffable is gone. Nowhere in the city anymore does that particular hulking person appear, that unmistakable voice, that sincere empathy, that welcome of all, no matter the color or age or origin or attractiveness, that fierce pride in us as individuals, and in this city, our shared home and hope.
He shook our hands, hugged us, remembered our names, put his head with ours when we grieved, celebrated with us (3 World Series victories!). He loved us, and the awareness of that fact was as compelling in East Boston as in Roxbury, in Charlestown as in Roslindale. Not always impartial or patient, a politician through and through, he nevertheless radiated from beginning to end of his time in office a kind of respect, an affection, an ambition, a regard for us we will never enjoy again. The broadcast is over; the studio is dark. I didn't know I would miss it.
I remember him just last year at the opening of an old electrical substation building in Rozzie Square, a place he'd brought back from dereliction. There he was, hard to pick out in the midst of the large, laughing crowd, leaning on his cane, like the patriarch of a huge, happy clan. Goodbye, Mr. Mayor.
We knew this was coming. He'd been struggling physically for a long time. Out of office now for nine months, his autobiography written, his treatments increasingly burdensome and hopeless, he announced that he intended, in the bosom of his family, to die, and it happened quickly.
Today is, in some religious traditions, for remembering the saints, a term that has been expanded beyond its narrow definitions. In times past, these men and women were venerated, their places of burial visited by pilgrims, their very body parts revered. Alive, they were impressive for the presence of a divine or at least remarkably good power in their lives and actions. Dead, they are testimonies to what God can do, or at least what good things can be done, and inspirational examples.
I've lived in this city for nearly 35 years now. From the time we rented our first apartment in time to have our son till now, the changes for the better have regular and perceptible. The playground where we took our children back then was full of broken glass, the detritus of after hours revelry. Kevin White and Ray Flynn took major steps to bring Boston out of its mid-century malaise. The one who has brought the city, over the last 20 years, to where it is today, a lively, attractive, significant metropolis, the fitting heir of its distinguished past, is he whom we all miss since we heard of his death two days ago.
He left a legacy, both of governing effectively, creatively and without scandal. The vitality of the city remains as a monument, his tenure as an example. But something ineffable is gone. Nowhere in the city anymore does that particular hulking person appear, that unmistakable voice, that sincere empathy, that welcome of all, no matter the color or age or origin or attractiveness, that fierce pride in us as individuals, and in this city, our shared home and hope.
He shook our hands, hugged us, remembered our names, put his head with ours when we grieved, celebrated with us (3 World Series victories!). He loved us, and the awareness of that fact was as compelling in East Boston as in Roxbury, in Charlestown as in Roslindale. Not always impartial or patient, a politician through and through, he nevertheless radiated from beginning to end of his time in office a kind of respect, an affection, an ambition, a regard for us we will never enjoy again. The broadcast is over; the studio is dark. I didn't know I would miss it.
I remember him just last year at the opening of an old electrical substation building in Rozzie Square, a place he'd brought back from dereliction. There he was, hard to pick out in the midst of the large, laughing crowd, leaning on his cane, like the patriarch of a huge, happy clan. Goodbye, Mr. Mayor.
Saturday, November 1, 2014
Trick or treat
I was prepared for 'complicated, demanding, suspicious and reserved' but what I encountered was a person straightforward, accommodating, trusting and open, someone I've been happy to know.
Where had that pre-assessment come from? It had led me to look out for a certain expression, perhaps like one on a grimacing kabuki mask, indicating a person I'd have to teach defensively. I'd briefly rehearsed a few scenarios, assembled a set of materials, and, as it were, waited balancing on the balls of my feet. But the mask didn't match the man. He was congenial, curious, ready to learn.
What to do, then, about the mask? Somebody before me had constructed it, based on their encounter, and sent it ahead--a helpful presentation of what to expect, and how to prepare. But the mask didn't match the man. As we worked together, I found myself thinking sometimes about it: how could it be so completely opposite of my experience? Was I missing something? Did he suspect? Would he care?
Such a fierce mask as I had been shown would not have been untoward among the the goblins, the crimson-winged devils with red wings, the big cats at my door this Halloween evening, all looking (or playing at looking) fearsome--to win their treats. they clomped up the front steps in threes and fours, and banged hard on our door--our bell doesn't work. When we opened it, there were the made-up faces and masks, the costumes homemade and store-bought.
Are you here for tricks?, I asked, when what the baffled kids held out their bags and plastic pumpkins for sweet swag. Apart from a girl with green leaf flaps sewn all over her, Mother Earth, whose hand I shook, they were all pretending to be something more scary, more dangerous than they were, even the befuddled babe in arms with black marks smeared on her face to make her a monster.
The chewy fruit and raisins went quickly. There there was lot of laughing a picture-taking. Many calls of 'Thank you' calls from the parents and older sibling out on the street. We recognized some of the kids on the street. I canvassed last weekend for votes, I thought; they tonight for candy.
But masks seem to have a life of their own, apart from whether they are inadvertent or intention, imputed to others or assumed by ourselves, serious or playful, accurate or disjunct. Monarchs used to woo by sending paintings, and today it's done on internet mating sites with artfully unposed pictures, each image an assertion concerning the person represented. Get to know me better. The masks on the children were references to what people are capable of being. Beware.
Now the 'kabuki' mask hangs in my museum of memories like an anthropological artifact. It certainly matches somebody. Sometimes it even fits me.
Where had that pre-assessment come from? It had led me to look out for a certain expression, perhaps like one on a grimacing kabuki mask, indicating a person I'd have to teach defensively. I'd briefly rehearsed a few scenarios, assembled a set of materials, and, as it were, waited balancing on the balls of my feet. But the mask didn't match the man. He was congenial, curious, ready to learn.
What to do, then, about the mask? Somebody before me had constructed it, based on their encounter, and sent it ahead--a helpful presentation of what to expect, and how to prepare. But the mask didn't match the man. As we worked together, I found myself thinking sometimes about it: how could it be so completely opposite of my experience? Was I missing something? Did he suspect? Would he care?
Such a fierce mask as I had been shown would not have been untoward among the the goblins, the crimson-winged devils with red wings, the big cats at my door this Halloween evening, all looking (or playing at looking) fearsome--to win their treats. they clomped up the front steps in threes and fours, and banged hard on our door--our bell doesn't work. When we opened it, there were the made-up faces and masks, the costumes homemade and store-bought.
Are you here for tricks?, I asked, when what the baffled kids held out their bags and plastic pumpkins for sweet swag. Apart from a girl with green leaf flaps sewn all over her, Mother Earth, whose hand I shook, they were all pretending to be something more scary, more dangerous than they were, even the befuddled babe in arms with black marks smeared on her face to make her a monster.
The chewy fruit and raisins went quickly. There there was lot of laughing a picture-taking. Many calls of 'Thank you' calls from the parents and older sibling out on the street. We recognized some of the kids on the street. I canvassed last weekend for votes, I thought; they tonight for candy.
But masks seem to have a life of their own, apart from whether they are inadvertent or intention, imputed to others or assumed by ourselves, serious or playful, accurate or disjunct. Monarchs used to woo by sending paintings, and today it's done on internet mating sites with artfully unposed pictures, each image an assertion concerning the person represented. Get to know me better. The masks on the children were references to what people are capable of being. Beware.
Now the 'kabuki' mask hangs in my museum of memories like an anthropological artifact. It certainly matches somebody. Sometimes it even fits me.
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