Know stuff

Now I can address both of my gkids, you, my (yet to come to light) granddaughter, as well you, my bumptious two and three-quarter year old grandson. Though it will be years before you read anything, much less what I write, and maybe decades before anything of this matters to you, I want to start my end of a conversation that later on I hope you'll join.

Why am I thinking about your education when one of you is still in utero and the other just mastering u-trow? Because I want you to understand something from the beginning: your minds are yours, yours to cultivate, yours to use, yours to enjoy, yours to share. Laudable and necessary as formal education is, your minds are your responsibility.

I say this as a self-teacher (autodidact) who has been learning all his life, especially when teaching. I suppose I have the classic gaps and imbalances that are supposed to impair the knowledge of the self-taught, but what to do but keep filling in and repacking what I know.

Oh, my gkids, what glorious fun awaits you as you put your minds to work exploring and coming to understand all that is around to be known. It's been and remains a profoundly satisfying component of my life and I wish it for both of you.

I've remarked elsewhere on the three projects of education: mastering (as reading, playing music, calculating), mapping (as organizing and formatting information for the purposes of navigation and ready access) and missioning (as in discovering and pursuing one's personal themata with one's personal style.) Pursue these and your self-education will be healthy and vigorous.

It occurred to me as I ran this morning that I can also speak of three kinds of work involved in this: thinking, memorizing and contemplating. Thinking as in thought projects pursued in the three modes of creativity, conjecture and criticality (oh, how much I've written on just this); memorizing as in impressing on our bodies and brains, that is to say embodying, information and stories and skills; and contemplating as in consciously being face to face with things.

In fact, all of these forms of exertion are about presence: memorization, the reconsitution of presence; contemplation, the appreciation of presence; thinking, the creation of presence.

You may have noticed the word 'work' and I mean this self-education as the necessary effort of good life. I haven't mastered, mapped or missioned as much as I could have, should have, nor do I engage enough in thinking, memorizing or contemplating. I could use help, and right now I want to pledge my help to you in all these things.

I could say more, and probably will, but I've said enough to sketch in a life-time's worth of self-education.

I'm just now about half way into a thick book by Peter Watson, The Modern Mind, an Intellectual History of the 20th Century. Many of the names and stories in it I recognize but others are new to me, so my memory is constantly tweaked and my ignorance regularly dispelled. I wish this regularly for you, gs and gd, so that the world and all that's in it and can be in it is yours.

To this end, may I do as Jawaharlal Nehru did when imprisoned, and write to you about things intriguing and impressive to me that perhaps will help furnish your minds? He had no reference books and wrote a history of the world more or less from memory to his daughter. I won't be able to do anything like that, but let me serve, as it were, as regent of your minds until they come to majority, a process happening more and more day by day rather than a single moment.

Oh, my children, and all children, and all people grown and overgrown, I wish for you lives of  'knowing more and more stuff.' Sufficient for a good life? perhaps not. Necessary? I'd argue yes.

Ticks

When I was a boy, there was a big spreading tree in the  front yard that used to drop wood ticks on my brother and me as we played under it.

In the evening my mother would sit us between her knees and dig through our thick (then) hair to find sometimes dozens (I seem to remember) of the flat brown arachnids them out and flush them away.

 The tree must have rained them down on us. It was worse for our red setter Whiskey in whose long  hair ticks hid and fed until they were swollen like little blood balloons.

All this came back to me this weekend when I found two of the relentless creatures crawling up my legs. The next morning I found another which had escaped detection and-what is that brown lump in my chest hair? - was feasting on my right breast.

I view you with distaste but not disgust, ticks. Still I know how many diseases you carry. Spotted fever is only the best known. Flu-like symptoms, aches, memory loss, these are just a few of the maladies your salivary microorganisms inflict on us in your quest for our blood.

I haven't seen such as you for years. My concern has been deer ticks and Lyme disease. l must have picked you wood ticks up when I pushed through the brush on the power line right-of-way  when I got lost. Hanging, waiting, you must have sensed my blood heat and let go onto my socks, planning to climb, find some sheltered nook and dig in.

Your recrudescence has complicated my life.  Another layer of vigilance is now required. You ticks don't care as long as I'm full of the excellent fluid you need for reproduction. To you, I'm just host or prey.

Other? That's how you and your ilk seem to me. I feel unclean just writing about you.

Lessons

If clambering up a mountain tests one's stamina and fortitude, coming down is an exercise in canniness. Balance is the key; putting one's weight firmly down on the right rock or ledge is the challenge.

As I stood on the slope of Sandwich Mountain in the morning sun, I calculated at each new turn how to negotiate the pattern of stacked boulders, or to navigate the huge chunks of toppled granite toppled hurly burly from the top, or just how much to slither down over bulging stone brows to find footing.

 Stretching one's legs, dropping one's center of mass a little down but also propelling it a little forward, trusting friction and momentum enough but not too much, it's easy to slip or overbalance. The rock may teeter; I may totter. When it does bad things can happen. And I was alone.



How beautiful it was on the Black Pond Trail as I came down through the gnarled spruce and fir that clung like wool to the slope. The wind blew ceaselessly over the summit above me. The patterns of light and shadows were exquisite. The massive rocks had a presence which made me aware of mine.

As I finally stood and looked around after lowering myself carefully, sometimes backwards face to the rock or sliding on my butt, I'd find myself with another problem to solve, a whole new aspect of the mountain to engage with. I wasn't shy to hold on for balance to the stiff but pliable tree boughs that protruded into the space of my passage. In fact, often I hung on hard.

First there was the zone of crags, dry and rough, then the zone of water heard trickling deep in the ground and issuing in slippery, mossy runnels, and after that the zig-zag jump and stride down to the pond.

Lessons? Ah, yes. Well, it occurred to me as I picked my way that life's journey also presents us with these special problems of progress: should I go there to the left? is maybe the best course beside me on the right? should I hang on and swing around this way? what's the next step after that? how should I launch?

And sometimes, in the midst of these calculations, to lift the eyes and see how beautiful the shapes and shadows, wonder about the depths of the crevasses, admire the light on the water on the moss tucked into the crack in the rock, feast on the vision laid out below and away of forest and hills, more forest, more hills.

When I got back home and stopped by the Memorial Day garden party, I didn't say any of these things to you, name-brother, when you asked about the scratches on my legs and head. You called me fortunate for being able to walk in, spend the night on top (in a moose yard) and walk out--at my, our, age.

'You're in good shape,' he said. 'I know it. I can't take credit,' I said, 'but I can take advantage, and I will.' I answered as I showed him pictures of views from the top, and movies of rustling leaves and falling water.  It's beautiful, I told him. Every little while, it's as if you're in a new place; one journey, but a succession of scenes. In each, the world and I have a new relationship.

The conversation veered to the subject of religion, triggered by the word 'Obey' on my wife's hat. Obey whom and regarding what, you asked. God?

I thought back to the mountain of the morning. There's no choice about coming down (I'm not a hermit) but doing it is thoroughly engrossing. Perhaps it's also a bit like getting older: many little adventures in coming down. Uh-oh, too glib a moral that.

What I didn't tell you either, Peter, was about how I fell into a foul mood as I walked out to the road. I'd left Beebe river which had been companioning me with its pleasant purling conversation, and started down an old logging railroad right of way.

Somehow I got diverted onto a power line right of way thick with scratchy bushes, muddy morasses, and hot, to boot. Somehow I'd lost my tent poles (snagged out by some bush I suspect). Somehow the people I'd seen lounging at the pond were there ahead of me when I got back to the right path (which would have been obvious if I hadn't been overthinking.)

What an impression I must have left as I pushed by, angry faced, shoelaces untied, straps dangling, sleeve of my fleece tucked behind me hanging down one side. I was thirsty, but punished myself by not stopping to drink until I got to my car two miles down the road. You would have laughed at me, and yes, I was ridiculous.

I guess, and you could have told me, that lessons come in every flavor, sweet and sour.

Wasted

In the end the worms won out. Despite my concern and my preparations, the petals and swelling ovules of my two tallest pears became black, cobwebby nests for fat, curled-up caterpillars. Up and down the stems, a wasteland of failed fruit as well as leaves perforated and gritty with frass. A debacle.

The same happened last year,  and I swore then that...but in vain. I don't know my enemy. Where do you little tubby tubes come from? From below in the soil near the base of the tree?  From the air: eggs laid by flies? I sprayed soap mixtures bellow but nothing above.

The survivor of last year's attack is doing well. Perhaps you newer trees will also adapt and learn to resist, but now I know what I'm looking for and when: never again. I failed you, though, this spring and I'm sad.


                                       

Test prep

On the bus this morning around 6:45 listening to two boys quizzing each other: What happened on October 29, 1929? What happened in 1933 to factory production? What is infrastructure anyway? Since it's mid-May, the social studies curriculum has finally reached the twentieth century. Now, the students are in the time period of their great grandparents, people they may actually have met. Judging by their answers, however, the boys have no clue that history is anything other than a source of test questions. What do you know of catastrophe, of economics much less economic hardship, of political compromises generally?

The era I know best, from the election of 1960, is mythic but immaterial for my children. Who remembers the nineties, much less the eighties and seventies? Indeed as I review the deep background of current events, I discover how much I've forgotten, wasn't aware of at the time (but could have been) or have plain gotten wrong. Were I to be tested even on the facts of my own lifetime, I could be easily embarrassed (and this without resort to the sly tricks teachers (I among them) employ with multiple choice questions.)

Still, you guys, there is something that I didn't have at your age but do have now. Acquired over decades of much reading of the news and in history, it's a feel for the 'worldiness' of the various eras of the past; that then was a place where people lived and strove and feared and hoped as we do now. My mind has been furnished with atlases, timelines, sweeping narratives, stories of individuals, pivotal moments, menus of great themes, upon which I reflect. Not everything I believe is coherent or resolved, much less organized, but I do have upstairs a framework within which to begin making sense of the human story of different places and times, and within which also to slot various bits (or hunks) of information as I come across them inadvertently or by design.

In fact, I'm still in the middle of world history in the age of Me, since I actively participate in the goings-on of the society, economic, political, intellectual. I contribute to history happening today as did any who lived in the past that you students are getting ready to be tested on.

So too, you two, who now were this A.M. swatting up on names and dates and terms to survive the trials designed for you by your teacher, will be bundled in an age which will be summarized, simplified, approximated,and  stereotyped by the students of tomorrow, even though your experience will be of hard travail through the intricate and perplexing dramas.

Some people of the future, though, will seek to construct a kind of framework by which they can begin to encounter history by making sense of the details by reference to the generalizations and experiencing the generalizations in the character of the particulars, all connections extending, deepening, multiplying and evolving as more information incorporated, more thought applied and more investment made.

You two may be among these. You may get beyond the puerile complaints about history as just 'names and dates' and see it as the most rich, fascinating, fantastic, tragi-comic story ever told or conceived, and see your uncertainties concerning the Great Depression as just part of the story of a bus on its way to Forest Hills on a particular late spring school day.

Jelly

At Carson Beach, standing in warm shallow low-tide water, three of us and the kid looked for shadows on the silty bottom, expanding and shrinking and definitely move along the shore. Tracing back toward our eyes, we saw white, semi-transparent jellyfish, first one, then many, making their way somewhere.

Jellyfish we'd seen in the aquarium a few days before, creatures like frosted glass or clear with lacy hems to their pulsing bell skirts from within which trailed long, long tendrils (sometimes referred to as oral arms), draping and twining (but not tangling, rather sliding) the others in the tank. Beautiful, exquisitely so, but perplexing.

There's seems so little to them, my daughter observed, no complicated innards, everything open to view, no secrets, and yet alive; so alive, in fact, that some suggest the end of the oceans will be the reign of the coelenterata. They are almost nothing, virtually indestructible, but endowed with appetite.

(Yet, think, the cornea, transparent as it is, is endowed with pain nerves.)

So too the roots I unearth these days preparing my gardens for planting. A white stem shaft here, a clump of white roots there, and yet each is ready to put forth shoots, the shoots leaves, the leaves food for more expansion of roots up and out, plus flowers and seeds. Not one of these fragments can be left buried; not zombies but as relentless, they will inevitably sprout and seek to dominate wherever they are.

Maybe some notions are like this--seemingly simple, readily graspable, perhaps mesmerizingly attractive, but voracious, relentless, ready to dominate if allowed. Social Darwinism comes to mind, and, oh, the damage it has wrought.

These weren't your reflections, grandson. You were taken by the brown opaque mud squidging between your toes, as was I.

Breather

Clearing out the house, entertaining Michigan family, especially grandson, resuming normal work and life schedule, finishing up the spring's evening classes: no time to write (an excuse?) and only now time to think.

The point of view, the way of life, the principles and associated practices under examination in this blog are not just for contemplation but for action. Encounters are not just for thinking about but actually having. So, cracking open in early morning the door of the blacked-out room where you were sleeping, sweet grandson, to see your face in the gloomy shining up from among the many stuffed animals at the bottom of the pack'n'play, and to smell the sickly sweetness of a poop needing to be changed, and to hear your suddenly tranquil 'Hi, Granpere,' is pure and direct benchmark quality encounter. What happened thereafter--the management of noxious materials, the cleaning and clothing, the cuddling and reading of story books about animals and animal-like people, the 'Let Grandpere close his eyes for a moment,' and the insistence on another--was part of how we were each hospitable, exploratory and friendly.

Likewise, the negotiations for the conduct of each day--where to go, whom or what to see, what to get at the grocery story, when to take naps or have dinner, who to cook and who to clean up--all were I/you, sometimes we/y'all kinds of meetings. The little tensions, the disruptions, the awkwardnesses, the forbearances, the underlying affection, the urgency to connect in the short time we had defined the texture of the visit.

The stomach bug that came with you Michiganders occasioned in-house encounter for each of us, with purgings, expulsions and extreme fatigue that complicate our time and plans. The open house party for co-workers and neighbors, our very first, that I'd been so looking forward to for Mother's Day eve had to be canceled, based on your virulence, microbe.

Then friends of my daughter and their children, the aquarium and its wonderful denizens, the people that my son-in-law with his extraordinary facility for socializing with strangers brought into our circle represented encounters on their own, that is, meetings requiring me to be present and open to others and otherness.

This is the full court press of presence that now I am relieved to have some relief from. Encounters need to be digested and assimilated; at least, it's true for me. I have notes in my book of things that I want to think more on. Perhaps I want more time between my address and your reply.

Oh, people whom I wish well for, loving hugging, enjoy talking to, playing with, being near, now you're gone as if fallen through a trap door. A sudden drop in pressure left my heart thumping loudly. It'll be half a year before we can reach out to you and touch a face, an arm, or hold a living body.

Encounters are complicated and often bittersweet but also, I believe, the quanta of meaningful existence, never not worthwhile, always to be welcomed.

More than guest

She: I know that we talked about turning the apartment where your mother was before she passed away into an office for you, but I had an idea...

He: You know I need more space. My papers! Where I work now is a closet.

She: But you're out of the office most of the time anyway. And if you let me organize your papers, you'd have plenty of space. Anyway, how much longer are you going to need an office.

He: An office is not just a place for doing business. You know that.

She: Well, here's my thought and I think you'll like it. I've been thinking about co-housing, you know, people living together with privacy but also community. So let's rent it out to another older person, a person we both can live with (and can live with us). Let's try living with someone we like, someone we can have dinner with, talk to, perhaps do things with.

He: Are you thinking of renting out the space? I don't want some college kid raising hell in my house!

She: No, you weren't listening. A person our age or maybe younger, anyway someone who is interested in living with other people--sharing the cooking, the gardening, the house--that kind of thing.

He: I heard. I just didn't want to encourage this crazy notion. Are you talking about another person in this house? I like this place just as it is. It's quiet. Everything is where it should be. Our routine is peaceful. Bring another person in and everything will change. It'll be disaster.

She: But that's just it. It's a big house, and, since the kids left and your mother died, too still for my taste. You come home and, sure we talk, but this place feels more empty than it should. Everywhere people are living alone. It's good for the planet for people to live together. And it's less lonely.

He: Lonely? But you're always out on your little projects or on the phone. And you have me.

She: You know a woman needs more than just a husband to talk to. But it's not just talk. I want a companion. Not all the time but sometimes somebody to do things with, you know those little things that aren't worth calling someone up about, but which are so pleasant--like making special breakfasts or watching movies.

He: What guy would be interested in that kind of stuff?

She: Silly, you know I'm not talking about a man. Who would want another man around the house?

He: Thanks a lot, but that can go both ways. Most of the women our age living alone are set in their ways, crotchety, 'can't eat this, don't do that' kind of people. Many of them have pets they treat like children. They've had enough of men, and I'm not going to leave, so there.

She: I'm talking about somebody we both like, somebody you find interesting as much as I do.

He: Are you sure you want another alluring woman in the house?

She: I don't know I'm so alluring, or even so interesting. But I can be if there's someone stimulating around. And besides, its just an experiment. We can stop when we want. What about it?

He: I don't know where you could find that 'sister' you're looking for. And I don't know how one would legally set up such an arrangement or terminate it if it goes bad. It sounds tricky to get right.

She: I'll show you the article I was reading. This kind of thing is happening all over. People our age are doing it more and more. There are a couple of organizations that know all about the technicalities.

He: Another person in the house, morning and night...and weekends.

She: She'd have her own space. We'd have ours. Just sometimes we'd share. We'd arrange it so everybody had as much privacy as they wanted.

He: I don't know where you'll find that special person. I wouldn't know where to look. And I'm not going to agree if I have any reservations whatsoever, you understand. I value my peace and quiet too much.

She: I wouldn't do that to you. You know I wouldn't. We don't have to do anything right away. Let me just keep my eyes open, okay?

Layers

Cleaning out, organizing, secreting away piles, boxes, bags, heaps, stacks, clumps, sheaves, sweepings in preparation for visitors, I think of you, Luciano Faggiano, going in search of the broken sewage pipe in the house you bought to make into a trattoria and uncovering to your fascination and dismay a virtually bottomless litter of cultures and civilizations. Beneath the floor, you found

a Franciscan chapel for the laying out of the dead
a dwelling of the Knights Templars complete with fresco
a Roman granary
a tomb of the Messapians, an Illyrian people from the time of the Trojan War
vases, devotional bottles, rings, hidden frescoes...

in short, the remnants of life on the site going back 2500 years. In the caves of the neighborhood, neolithic wall drawings; elsewhere in the town, baroque churches, German castles bringing the story up to the present day. You must not have been too surprised when the past came wafting up at you from the hole in the floor.

Once each culture you discovered was the proprietor of the place, making the decisions about what and where to build, and with what furnishings and useful or decorative objects to fill spaces. The people who lived in what you've found below must have been aware, if they thought of it, of themselves living in a busy world of people of similar appearance, beliefs and experiences. They knew themselves imbedded in special but familiar structures of authority and custom. Looking more widely around,  they would have seen particular threats they hoped they had power to avert; looking at what they had in hand, dug up while making their own buildings, they would have been bemused...as you have been these last years.

Today, we are the ones walking around, ordering, forbidding, making, doing; the past cannot protect itself. Like the sleeping princess though, it can get us to kiss it awake. The floor that was lain over the abyss of time in order to put up the building you purchased was just a hedge of thorns awaiting someone doughty and obsessed, like you.

Our detritus has not such heritage but it is redolent of our lives. As we dig, the lightly sleeping objects we touch wake to yowling need for attention. I'd rather we were dealing with the stuff of a thousand years ago, used to sleeping, hard to rouse.

Acquiring

What I want to do, I don't; and what I don't, that's what I do. This is my position regarding books: I love acquiring them, but know I shouldn't. Thanks, lady of the library, for your input on this issue.

Especially in these days of library deaccession, books are easy and cheap to get. Friends of the library book sales allow me to walk out with two or three (or more) good books tucked under my arm for just a few dollars. Many of them are the same I pored over as a boy, e.g. Edwin Tunis' Oars, Sails and Steam with its really informative illustrations and fascinating facts. Or, more recent, Peter Watson's The Modern Mind: An intellectual history of the 20th century, which begins at 1900 with a bang: Freud, Picasso, Planck, deVries, and Knossos Evans setting the stage for the extraordinary century following.  How could I not have this comprehensive, well-written, fascinating book?

Well, here it is in hand, but what to do with all the other books which have caught my attention and joined my 'library'? They had their moment in the limelight of my attention but now are on shelves or, more humiliatingly, in boxes, not unloved, not forgotten (strictly) but on hold.

Once my books were in cardboard boxes, then bags, then heaps (I blush to confess) before renovations allowed me put up walls of bookshelves which have long since been filled. Each volume provides something that could filling in some area of woeful ignorance, or teach me how to do something enriching, or serve as a tool for teaching (oh, what I have for you, my grandson!), or just delight me with wit or sweetness or trenchancy.

The problem is space, and time. Do I read as much as I did, much less as much as I want to? No, sadly not. My days are full, and I have projects to pursue (especially this blog) which cut into reading time and mental space. In fact, to speak freely, I'm impatient with just reading; I want to interact with what I encounter, think about it more deeply, write about it, copy it or build on it. There are passages in W.H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago which I want to be able to depict, but I don't know how (yet) nor even why. All this personal response is a kind of friction that slows my reading to its current crawl, no more than a book every week and a half (if that).

The response is, 'Well, everything is online,' but, of course, it isn't. It just isn't. It's a wonderful source of all kinds of information, especially that which is responding to current concerns. What I don't find, unless in some place like Project Gutenberg, is the individuality of obsession or expression one finds in books. Besides (or perhaps because of) their physicality, books provide the time and space for extended presentation, for quirky detail, for illustrations overwhelm our tablets and tablet attention spans. Books are ample, unpressured, conversational; each seems to me a friend, a companion in this walk through life. How can anyone have too many such?

But at the library I've visited for decades now, down in the basement, I saw that you, an older woman with an open manner, had put a book in your pile of old portrait photos that I'd wanted but had left on the shelf. I peered and you noticed. Would you like to have it? you asked.

It's yours, I said. You picked it.

But I just look at these books, you said, and bring them back. I can't afford to keep them. I don't have the space. So when I'm done looking, I'll call you and you can come get it.

I want to do something about those nineteenth century visages, perhaps draw them.

Whatever. I'll give you a call, you promised.

I wrote my name and phone number on the back of a business card you handed me. Text me, I said.

I try to stay as far away from computers as I can, you replied.

I asked your name and left (with my stash), wishing you a good weekend.

Maybe you have an answer, at least for yourself. Let me think. Meanwhile, at least I'll get that book.

Tough lovers

That day, like many recently, was blustery and cold, but mothers have to get their kids out to work off some of their energy, so it was no surprise when I looked out my classroom window and saw a pair of women with children three or five years old in tow.

One mother, I remember, was striding across the street with a girl, hanging off of one hand, and a small boy, arms and legs dangling, under the other, and a cell phone tucked in her neck.

This is the sort of calisthenics that women through the ages have practiced: the foot-dragger-tug, the limp-kid-carry, the cross-the-street hustle, the no-hands-left conversation sustainer; and all this just a matter of course, full-body physical multi-tasking.

We can go farther: what about the multi-bag baby-gear haul, the clinging-kid-on-the-legs shuffle, the car-seat stretch insertion, the struggling-baby-from-carriage extraction? If the Olympics come to Boston, these sports should be represented.

You, Mom, on the street beneath my window, you're one of a tough breed I'm in awe of.