February 3, 2013:
Strange things, poems. They come out of an image or a phrase that emerges, as John Keats put it in a letter once, "like a whale's back in the sea of prose," unexpectedly, out of depths you cannot imagine, and it demands your attention and you know that it would be morally wrong not to respond, not to write it up, make something of it. You have no idea what yet, and it may take a very long time to develop. But if you're wise you will hold on to that first unformed message from your unknown inner life, because it appears for a reason. Because you're stupid and you don't really know your own heart. Because you're in pain, or in love, and you haven't gotten the message yet. Because something in you needs to speak. Because your body has a mind of its own. Because you're a poet, you have talent, and this is a command.
Of the twenty-five or thirty poems I would like to preserve I find, looking back at the little pile of them that I keep track of in my incredibly crowded, messy office, that many of them were written during my first marriage, which on the surface was, I thought, reasonably happy, as good as I could hope for given my own difficult personality--moody, dark, bookish, lonely. I expected to be lonely. My first wife and I were very unlike, and I thought that was the way it was always going to be; it was just the way of the world, love bridging unbridgeable gaps as best it could. My first wife had adopted sunny as her disposition but I knew her well, knew it was her own attempt to disguise from herself who she really was. It was the who she really was--passionate, more than a little bitter, struggling to keep her disappointments down--that I loved; it was the woman who, when she discovered you couldn't broil flounder fillets, took a spatula and beat them with it until fish fragments were flying all over the kitchen. But I couldn't abide the sunny surface. It was merely surface, never real, and it came across as a lie.
Those early poems when they arrived made it clear what that marriage really was. Here is the one I like best:
WALKING ON WATER
Of the place itself I remember most
clearly the frozen corrugations
in the snow, their settled patterns
and what they seemed to reveal about
the wind; that, and hearing the water
running deep under our feet near the dam.
We were always best in winter. On ice
or snow there's no place to rest
and the cold keeps talk to a minimum.
This poem came out of an actual experience when we found ourselves walking over a frozen pond, probably in Fahnestock State Park in Putnam County, not far from where we lived then. Other poems came from walks in the country. We lived for a while when the children were very young on a winding road with few houses along it that followed a small valley bottom. Hunter Brook Road. I remember a meadow on one side, thick woods on the other, and we used to take long walks up and down this road on warm evenings, to see the light fade on the meadow, listen to the birds shutting down for the night. The following poem sprang from a walk I took by myself on that road, and the way it turned dark, and who I was then. This is one of the poems I have worked on most of my life, to get right. When poems are really short like this you cannot waste even a comma; everything has to be as perfect as your talent and attention can make it. I'm probably still not quite done. But I offer it anyway. It's called
MOOD INDIGO
While the puffy clouds slowly sponged away
the light, while birds sang from their refuges
in the darkening woods, I lost track of the time;
and the country road behind me, the old trees
leaning over it, seems to have burrowed into
the night.
Have you felt this way, friends? Do
you know how it feels to wander unthinkingly
into the darkness?
Dawn always seems so far
away, while what we call headlights plunge
and careen like the Batmobile through your mood.
Friends, yes. Anyone willing to work through a poem is a friend. The marriage lasted eighteen years but we did not come out of it friends. I see that happen with some couples and I envy them their ability to talk to one another, but it was never going to happen in our case. By leaving her I seem to have awoken the bitterness she had worked so hard to hide. I am sorry for it all, every bit of it. But I couldn't have stayed. Staying would have meant living more and more lies, hers and my own, and I believed at the time, and believe it still, it would have put my soul at risk.
Or maybe not. Hearts are devious by nature. This is why so many seem to need a god, to watch them, know them, love them despite their duplicity. It must be a great comfort. I find it hard to live without comfort, and sometimes seek it out. Great art is a comfort. Lorraine, my second wife, and I find ourselves crying at the movies of late at sentimental moments, or any moment that depicts kindness, compassion, forgiveness, love, and this is a comfort, too. Looking at Rembrandt's self-portraits, which so profoundly understand what is in a human being, this is a comfort of a higher order. Writing poems is a comfort; the process takes you out of yourself, into another space, seldom visited. I wish I had written more of them. This last one is fairly recent, written in the last four or five years, sprung from a walk downtown to the water on a summer night in Sag Harbor, where I sat by myself on a bench staring at the boats while a band played in the distance.
DEATH BY WATER
Wild music beats against the surface of the harbor
with an absolute minimum of response. It is the same
with the moonlight; watch, it is in constant motion,
like a Pollock painting, yet perfectly still. Look also
into the shadows of the boats, darkness resting on darkness.
Near Maracaibo I saw dead dogs adrift among the stilts
supporting the houses. We think there is a story
to everything, like Natalie Wood's drowning, or anyone's.
Yesterday she said she loved him, too. Today he saw her
cruising. I think it is all background, atmosphere.
The small waves they allow in here have absolutely
nothing to say, do not speak of anyone's anguish.
It is the same thing again and again: moonlight, shadows,
inappropriate music the impenetrable water drowns out.
Now what is that about? I cannot say. The whale's back emerges from the sea of prose, but whales speak with their strange music only to other whales. "If a lion could talk," Wittgenstein once wrote, "we could not understand him." Poets search for a music, a form of speech that approximates the feelings and the intuitions that hover beyond the edge of language, that call out of the darkness. Sometimes we find it, sometimes not. You must judge for yourself, friends. For me it is all background, atmosphere.
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
THE EXPERIENCE OF ABORTION
January 23, 2013:
Well, how would I know, right? I'm a man; men don't have to bear the burden of childbirth, and they can't have abortions. But I've been close. I read a piece the other day, I think in the NYTimes, about what would happen if women lost the right to a legal abortion. What would happen? They would go back to having illegal abortions, without the protection of medical assistance. The descriptions were graphic: clothes hangars: poisons of various kinds; scalding hot baths; deliberate starvation--anything to shed themselves of an unwanted foetus. And I have indeed been close to this experience. Before I was Anthony Brandt I, too, was a foetus, and my mother did all she could legally do to rid herself of my particular lump of clay. Scalding baths, she told me, were one means. She jumped up and down a lot, hoping, I suppose, to loosen my grip. She ate the foods that were supposed to be abortifacients. I'm hoping my father didn't punch her in the stomach, supposedly another abortifacient; that's too painful to think about, not only for her but for me.
Actually I've often thought about it. She must have been desperate, and scared. A miscarriage has to involve a lot of blood loss, a lot of psychological trauma, and pain anyway you think about it. The year was 1936, my parents had one child already. My father, like almost everyone else in America, lived in constant fear of losing his job. They didn't think they could afford me, and probably they were right. But apparently I was meant to be. Meant in what sense who can say, but there I came, weighing eleven pounds, an extremely difficult birth at that size, born at 3:05 a.m. on Nov. 21 after an epic struggle. They did not put me up for adoption. They raised me, they were exemplary parents, tough by today's standards but loving and funny and caring, and models of stability and reliability in our none-too-stable extended family. What luck. My mother told me about her efforts to abort me when I was in my late twenties. It felt a bit strange, but I had no complaints about my upbringing, and had she succeeded in aborting me, there would have been no complaints about that, either, because there would have been no one to complain. I loved them both very much. It was all good.
And then I was married and the father of two, both born by Caesarean section, another lucky accident; my head was too big for my wife's hips, which meant the children were likely to be too big in the head to emerge without doing serious damage to my wife's body, and when her abdomen was opened and the children emerged one of them had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck--must have been my son--and would have choked to death in childbirth. My daughter's cord was twisted; something might have gone wrong there, too. And then came the accident. My wife, a visiting nurse, was driving down a road and a truck, driven by an Italian immigrant who spoke no English, ran a stop sign, made a left turn right in front of her and nearly killed her. As it was the car was totaled and my wife was rushed unconscious to the hospital for X-rays. She turned out to have a cracked skull and a broken kneecap. They X-rayed her entire body while she lay there. No one, including us, knew she was two weeks pregnant. When she missed her period and got tested, it was a month later. She's a nurse. She knew what it meant to be X-rayed when your foetus is two weeks old. It means that there's a fifty-fifty chance of major developmental problems in both the body and the brain. Neither one of us hesitated. Time for an abortion
It was 1969, however, in these good United States, and abortion was illegal. We went to her gynecologist, one of the best in New York City and an advocate of abortion rights. He suggested we go to Puerto Rico and talk to a taxi driver. (She never went back to him.) She asked around among her medical colleagues. Nobody would tell her anything. In the end we had to borrow money from my parents and fly to England for her abortion. My parents, having been through this themselves with me, were understanding. The English doctor was understanding. The whole thing was over in an afternoon.
How many women have I known who have had abortions? I can't cite figures, but I know a number of them, including a few who had them before abortion was legal. The illegal abortion one of those endured made her sterile; another had to endure being raped by her abortionist before he performed the abortion. Prelegal abortion was a nightmare.
But women will have abortions, nightmare or not. They have been having abortions for as long as there have been records, and it's not going to stop just because certain Republican lawmakers think they have the right to prevent women from controlling their own bodies. No wonder women are moving away from the Republican party in such numbers. Power is nothing if it does not include power over your own body, and what sensible woman would want to give that up? Maybe we should rewrite the Constitution, as some people have suggested. If so, we should write abortion rights into it. Plain as day, First Amendment plus one. Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of the reproductive rights of any person, including the right to an abortion. In other words, get your filthy mind out of my sex life, Paul Ryan. It's my business, not yours. This is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I've lived through the nightmare, not in my own person but in the persons of women I've loved and cared about. I would do anything in my power to prevent us going back to the Dark Ages on this issue.
Well, how would I know, right? I'm a man; men don't have to bear the burden of childbirth, and they can't have abortions. But I've been close. I read a piece the other day, I think in the NYTimes, about what would happen if women lost the right to a legal abortion. What would happen? They would go back to having illegal abortions, without the protection of medical assistance. The descriptions were graphic: clothes hangars: poisons of various kinds; scalding hot baths; deliberate starvation--anything to shed themselves of an unwanted foetus. And I have indeed been close to this experience. Before I was Anthony Brandt I, too, was a foetus, and my mother did all she could legally do to rid herself of my particular lump of clay. Scalding baths, she told me, were one means. She jumped up and down a lot, hoping, I suppose, to loosen my grip. She ate the foods that were supposed to be abortifacients. I'm hoping my father didn't punch her in the stomach, supposedly another abortifacient; that's too painful to think about, not only for her but for me.
Actually I've often thought about it. She must have been desperate, and scared. A miscarriage has to involve a lot of blood loss, a lot of psychological trauma, and pain anyway you think about it. The year was 1936, my parents had one child already. My father, like almost everyone else in America, lived in constant fear of losing his job. They didn't think they could afford me, and probably they were right. But apparently I was meant to be. Meant in what sense who can say, but there I came, weighing eleven pounds, an extremely difficult birth at that size, born at 3:05 a.m. on Nov. 21 after an epic struggle. They did not put me up for adoption. They raised me, they were exemplary parents, tough by today's standards but loving and funny and caring, and models of stability and reliability in our none-too-stable extended family. What luck. My mother told me about her efforts to abort me when I was in my late twenties. It felt a bit strange, but I had no complaints about my upbringing, and had she succeeded in aborting me, there would have been no complaints about that, either, because there would have been no one to complain. I loved them both very much. It was all good.
And then I was married and the father of two, both born by Caesarean section, another lucky accident; my head was too big for my wife's hips, which meant the children were likely to be too big in the head to emerge without doing serious damage to my wife's body, and when her abdomen was opened and the children emerged one of them had the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck--must have been my son--and would have choked to death in childbirth. My daughter's cord was twisted; something might have gone wrong there, too. And then came the accident. My wife, a visiting nurse, was driving down a road and a truck, driven by an Italian immigrant who spoke no English, ran a stop sign, made a left turn right in front of her and nearly killed her. As it was the car was totaled and my wife was rushed unconscious to the hospital for X-rays. She turned out to have a cracked skull and a broken kneecap. They X-rayed her entire body while she lay there. No one, including us, knew she was two weeks pregnant. When she missed her period and got tested, it was a month later. She's a nurse. She knew what it meant to be X-rayed when your foetus is two weeks old. It means that there's a fifty-fifty chance of major developmental problems in both the body and the brain. Neither one of us hesitated. Time for an abortion
It was 1969, however, in these good United States, and abortion was illegal. We went to her gynecologist, one of the best in New York City and an advocate of abortion rights. He suggested we go to Puerto Rico and talk to a taxi driver. (She never went back to him.) She asked around among her medical colleagues. Nobody would tell her anything. In the end we had to borrow money from my parents and fly to England for her abortion. My parents, having been through this themselves with me, were understanding. The English doctor was understanding. The whole thing was over in an afternoon.
How many women have I known who have had abortions? I can't cite figures, but I know a number of them, including a few who had them before abortion was legal. The illegal abortion one of those endured made her sterile; another had to endure being raped by her abortionist before he performed the abortion. Prelegal abortion was a nightmare.
But women will have abortions, nightmare or not. They have been having abortions for as long as there have been records, and it's not going to stop just because certain Republican lawmakers think they have the right to prevent women from controlling their own bodies. No wonder women are moving away from the Republican party in such numbers. Power is nothing if it does not include power over your own body, and what sensible woman would want to give that up? Maybe we should rewrite the Constitution, as some people have suggested. If so, we should write abortion rights into it. Plain as day, First Amendment plus one. Congress shall make no law abridging the free exercise of the reproductive rights of any person, including the right to an abortion. In other words, get your filthy mind out of my sex life, Paul Ryan. It's my business, not yours. This is the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I've lived through the nightmare, not in my own person but in the persons of women I've loved and cared about. I would do anything in my power to prevent us going back to the Dark Ages on this issue.
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
AMERICAN VIOLENCE
December 18, 2012:
When I enrolled at Princeton my brother, four years older and at Cornell, advised me to join ROTC in order to avoid the draft and fulfill my military obligations as an officer rather than an enlisted man. I did. Princeton happened to have an artillery unit and I trained for four years, once a week, to become an artillery forward observer. We used to fire steel balls out of miniature howitzers in the Princeton Armory, and I got good at it. I found out how good when we spent six weeks between junior and senior years at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, in field conditions, firing practice missions with 105 howitzers, using old tank and truck bodies as the targets. I fired six perfect missions over the six weeks, then a seventh as a demonstration before 700 fellow cadets from all over the country. Six other cadets also fired demonstration missions. They all messed up. Not me.
I was also good handling the guns. A 105mm. howitzer was the Army's standard artillery weapon then and we trained on them, learning to get rounds off within ten seconds of receiving the fire order. That meant aiming the weapon, putting the right number of powder bags into the cartridges, loading the weapon and pulling the lanyard. We were between wars then. I never had to fire a shot in combat, go to Vietnam, put myself in danger. But we wound up in the Reserves and you never knew whether or when you might be called to active duty. I spent my active duty training cannoneers at Ft. Sill, teaching them to do what I did so well.
And loved doing. You can stand directly behind a howitzer and watch the shell climb into the heavens until it reaches the top of its arc and starts to descend. It's a beautiful sight. I used to wonder when I was directing fire on tank bodies whether I could direct fire on living human beings. I never had to, but I was honest enough with myself to know that if you love doing something and are very good at it, you will love doing it no matter what. Besides, those people you're killing are trying to kill you first.
I've never owned a gun, but I have hunters in my family and I have no objection to hunting; I once shot six skunks that were living under my house in a crawl space, killed them one by one at night over the course of a summer with a neighbor's borrowed .22. They used to wake us up at night trapping mice. The smell got into your clothes, your sheets. I had no trouble killing them. It's in me. It may not be in everybody, but it's in me.
It's also in the culture. American culture is saturated with killing, and we watch it all the time: in video games, in movies, on TV. The military even kills children, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they become part of the collateral damage. One of our best euphemisms, "collateral damage." Little kids getting their arms and legs blown off is what it actually is. But there's nothing new about that. We've all heard of Wounded Knee, right? The Sand Creek Massacre? Indian women, Indian children, and old men like me, killed by United States Armed Forces.
For some Americans the killing in our culture is a principal form of entertainment, especially for the teenage boys so much of American cultural production is aimed at. It has been this way since we started killing Indians in the seventeenth century. Is Billy the Kid a hero, or a villain? In our hearts, do we root for him, or against him? A talent for killing is very cool. James Bond has a license to kill, and he does it with panache, in between those martinis. We the audience have a real life, and a fantasy life. Gary Cooper, going out to face down death in High Noon, and the dozens and dozens of others like him. It hardly matters which side of the law they're on. D. H. Lawrence said that the typical American hero is silent, a loner, and a killer. Deep in our minds, for a great many of us, this is who we are. We want to be that cool, want to maintain our courage under extreme pressure. And too many of us see gunfire as the solution to all our problems. Here's a story about that. True story. I had lunch many years ago in New York with the retired commander of all U. S. forces in the Pacific, who served in that capacity in the 1950s. He told me that during the battle for Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, which the French were about to lose, the French had asked Washington to use tactical nuclear weapons on the Vietnamese forces surrounding the French base there. Washington radioed my general and gave him verbal permission to do so "at his discretion." My general, no fool, radioed back that he would require written orders to so something so drastic. Written orders never came, and the event never happened. Nuclear weapons, of course, are the ultimate in gunfire. A whole lot of American diplomacy has been based on American weaponry, and the willingness--no, quite often the eagerness--to use it.
So a young man goes mad and shoots twenty little children and six adults with his mother's--his mother's--guns. Are we surprised? Outraged? Saddened? Yeah, sure we are. But only because we refuse to know ourselves. Much will be said in the next few weeks about this young man's madness, but it will all be speculative. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people's minds. I spent eleven days in a mental hospital as a patient--they didn't know I wasn't a nut case; I faked my way in--in order to write my first book, a muckraking book about the mental health system. I got to know the patients on my ward pretty well, and I discovered what I already knew from research was true. Mental patients are not as a rule more violent than the rest of the population. They're too screwed up to be effective at anything, in fact, and that's their main problem. But there will always be crazy people as there will always be war. That, too, is in us--craziness, insanity. Breaking points.
Stricter gun control laws would help. There's no doubt about that, and only the soulless flacks of the NRA and the Senators and Congressmen they've bought will stand in the way. Guns should be licensed, regulated, and controlled the same way cars are, and for the same reasons: to increase public safety. We'll see what gives with that. But don't, in the meantime, stand next to me at a party and tell me you just don't understand how this could happen, or we should do something about the mentally ill, or we should ban guns entirely. Because more than likely it's in you as much as it's in me. There's a reason that in the United States more than 10,000 people a year die by gunfire, while the figures in other civilized industrial countries run to 100 a year or less. Gunslinger Nation, one historian called us years ago. Until that changes--and what are your suggestions about that?--this sort of thing will happen again and again and again, with the same horrified reaction and the same cowardly refusal to face ourselves, to know who and what we really are.
When I enrolled at Princeton my brother, four years older and at Cornell, advised me to join ROTC in order to avoid the draft and fulfill my military obligations as an officer rather than an enlisted man. I did. Princeton happened to have an artillery unit and I trained for four years, once a week, to become an artillery forward observer. We used to fire steel balls out of miniature howitzers in the Princeton Armory, and I got good at it. I found out how good when we spent six weeks between junior and senior years at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, in field conditions, firing practice missions with 105 howitzers, using old tank and truck bodies as the targets. I fired six perfect missions over the six weeks, then a seventh as a demonstration before 700 fellow cadets from all over the country. Six other cadets also fired demonstration missions. They all messed up. Not me.
I was also good handling the guns. A 105mm. howitzer was the Army's standard artillery weapon then and we trained on them, learning to get rounds off within ten seconds of receiving the fire order. That meant aiming the weapon, putting the right number of powder bags into the cartridges, loading the weapon and pulling the lanyard. We were between wars then. I never had to fire a shot in combat, go to Vietnam, put myself in danger. But we wound up in the Reserves and you never knew whether or when you might be called to active duty. I spent my active duty training cannoneers at Ft. Sill, teaching them to do what I did so well.
And loved doing. You can stand directly behind a howitzer and watch the shell climb into the heavens until it reaches the top of its arc and starts to descend. It's a beautiful sight. I used to wonder when I was directing fire on tank bodies whether I could direct fire on living human beings. I never had to, but I was honest enough with myself to know that if you love doing something and are very good at it, you will love doing it no matter what. Besides, those people you're killing are trying to kill you first.
I've never owned a gun, but I have hunters in my family and I have no objection to hunting; I once shot six skunks that were living under my house in a crawl space, killed them one by one at night over the course of a summer with a neighbor's borrowed .22. They used to wake us up at night trapping mice. The smell got into your clothes, your sheets. I had no trouble killing them. It's in me. It may not be in everybody, but it's in me.
It's also in the culture. American culture is saturated with killing, and we watch it all the time: in video games, in movies, on TV. The military even kills children, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where they become part of the collateral damage. One of our best euphemisms, "collateral damage." Little kids getting their arms and legs blown off is what it actually is. But there's nothing new about that. We've all heard of Wounded Knee, right? The Sand Creek Massacre? Indian women, Indian children, and old men like me, killed by United States Armed Forces.
For some Americans the killing in our culture is a principal form of entertainment, especially for the teenage boys so much of American cultural production is aimed at. It has been this way since we started killing Indians in the seventeenth century. Is Billy the Kid a hero, or a villain? In our hearts, do we root for him, or against him? A talent for killing is very cool. James Bond has a license to kill, and he does it with panache, in between those martinis. We the audience have a real life, and a fantasy life. Gary Cooper, going out to face down death in High Noon, and the dozens and dozens of others like him. It hardly matters which side of the law they're on. D. H. Lawrence said that the typical American hero is silent, a loner, and a killer. Deep in our minds, for a great many of us, this is who we are. We want to be that cool, want to maintain our courage under extreme pressure. And too many of us see gunfire as the solution to all our problems. Here's a story about that. True story. I had lunch many years ago in New York with the retired commander of all U. S. forces in the Pacific, who served in that capacity in the 1950s. He told me that during the battle for Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, which the French were about to lose, the French had asked Washington to use tactical nuclear weapons on the Vietnamese forces surrounding the French base there. Washington radioed my general and gave him verbal permission to do so "at his discretion." My general, no fool, radioed back that he would require written orders to so something so drastic. Written orders never came, and the event never happened. Nuclear weapons, of course, are the ultimate in gunfire. A whole lot of American diplomacy has been based on American weaponry, and the willingness--no, quite often the eagerness--to use it.
So a young man goes mad and shoots twenty little children and six adults with his mother's--his mother's--guns. Are we surprised? Outraged? Saddened? Yeah, sure we are. But only because we refuse to know ourselves. Much will be said in the next few weeks about this young man's madness, but it will all be speculative. Nobody really knows what goes on in other people's minds. I spent eleven days in a mental hospital as a patient--they didn't know I wasn't a nut case; I faked my way in--in order to write my first book, a muckraking book about the mental health system. I got to know the patients on my ward pretty well, and I discovered what I already knew from research was true. Mental patients are not as a rule more violent than the rest of the population. They're too screwed up to be effective at anything, in fact, and that's their main problem. But there will always be crazy people as there will always be war. That, too, is in us--craziness, insanity. Breaking points.
Stricter gun control laws would help. There's no doubt about that, and only the soulless flacks of the NRA and the Senators and Congressmen they've bought will stand in the way. Guns should be licensed, regulated, and controlled the same way cars are, and for the same reasons: to increase public safety. We'll see what gives with that. But don't, in the meantime, stand next to me at a party and tell me you just don't understand how this could happen, or we should do something about the mentally ill, or we should ban guns entirely. Because more than likely it's in you as much as it's in me. There's a reason that in the United States more than 10,000 people a year die by gunfire, while the figures in other civilized industrial countries run to 100 a year or less. Gunslinger Nation, one historian called us years ago. Until that changes--and what are your suggestions about that?--this sort of thing will happen again and again and again, with the same horrified reaction and the same cowardly refusal to face ourselves, to know who and what we really are.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
WHAT I DO IN MY SPARE TIME
November 20, 2012:
My birthday tomorrow. Since it's also the day before Thanksgiving, it will be a busy day. Every day is busy, in a way, because my mind is the classic Buddhist monkey mind, flitting from subject to subject, seldom quiet, never empty enough for what Buddhists regard as enlightenment to find room. Crossword puzzles, reading, writing, more reading, errands, an occasional walk, meals in and the cooking thereof, meals out and the time they take, seeing friends, avoiding enemies, garden work, connecting with people on FB and via email, worrying about money, driving hither and yon, the movies, TV: thus my days get frittered away. Right now I'm writing a long contemplated book about Rome, started more than a decade ago, now returned to, with no prospect of publication but necessary to that feeling we all need that one's life has not been entirely wasted.
And then, once in a while, I take the time away from all this bother and to-do to write something that's purely for fun. Poetry is one such pastime. And recently, inspired by a contest in a local paper, I've started to write short stories of 25 words or less. Here's my second try, in its entirety:
"Oh, hi" [that's the title]
She was very pretty before the accident.
He dated her twice more, to be kind.
Now he has trouble recalling her name.
The first such mini-tale went to the newspaper, where it will appear soon, I'm told.
It's a real discipline, to get something that, a, makes sense, and b, has some bite, into such a short frame. Hemingway did it with six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." That's a classic. I'm going to keep on doing it, because it's such a pleasure to work with the language just for its own sake. Poetry is that way for me, too. I decided after publishing some poems many years ago to forsake it as a career and write it strictly for myself. I couldn't make a living at it; to do that you have to teach, and I didn't want to teach, didn't think I would be good at it. That same impatient mind, mentioned above. I did teach for a year. Felt like a failure. Couldn't suffer the discipline of the hour, would let my students go when I was done, not when the hour was done. Very sloppy of me. No, not just sloppy: arrogant. I was arrogant when I was young.
And then the poems. Here's one, published in TLS as long ago as 1968:
The French Revolution
At night in my garret room a crowd gathers
and you speak to them and sway them
until what they know and what they don't know
are the same thing, if it is you.
You
speak: to them it is falling in love.
What is it to you? You are walking
on the surface, on the backs of crocodiles;
you are air, or airy; you are a Queen.
One way they hold their heads up is on pikes.
Here's another, published in the old, not the new, New York Quarterly:
Airplanes at Dusk
The jets take off from Newark,
Boeings more beautiful than mathematics,
and turn west.
Angels could not seem
more single-minded, climbing the heavens.
Beneath them, turning east, and blue,
vast stretches of the imagination
lie quiet, mooning, unoccupied.
And there you go. Because they've been published they have an air of authority about them, the cachet of some editor's approval, but in both the first and the last analysis it is you yourself you have to satisfy, and I have about thirty of them that make that grade, maybe six or seven of which have been published, the rest not. (Anybody out there want to print a chapbook?) And sometimes I think, not much for a life's work. But I know poets who survive on the strength of a single poem. The anonymous poet who wrote this, for example:
O westron wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down doth rain.
Christ if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
It dates from about the 14th century, "small" in this case means "thin," nobody knows who the author was, and the first time I heard it was in R. P. Blackmur's poetry class at Princeton. Blackmur was a great critic and he read it with such feeling that I have never forgotten the moment. Who would not give a life to have written so great a poem? I spent years, off and on, in my spare time, translating just four lines of Rilke that I thought were as perfect as poetry gets. Here they are, from a poem of his called "Liebeslied," which means "Love Song":
A stroke of the bow
draws one voice from the two strings.
Whose violin are we stretched out upon?
What virtuoso has us in his hands?
This is my final version, and I'm satisfied with it.
Rilke survives in a whole body of work, prose as well as poetry, but there are other poets whose work survives in a single poem. Tichborne, for example, who wrote a poem in the Tower of London the night before he was beheaded, or was it hanged? for some political crime. It's unforgettable; I keep my anthology of Elizabethan literature specifically to have access to that poem. Or there's Thomas Nashe, whose collected work fills four volumes but who is remembered mostly for a song he wrote in one of his plays whose refrain runs, "Brightness falls from the air / Queens have died young and fair / I am sick, I must die / Lord, have mercy upon me."
Can you feel it? The language takes flight in such words. What we write about, Roland Barthes once said, boils down to just a few emotions--love, hatred, despair, sorrow, guilt, fear; and what great writing aspires to is to evoke them in such a way as to say something meaningful about life and death. What I love about poetry is that it aspires to do this in the most condensed, intense way, so that the words explode in your mind, like a sip of great wine on your tongue. To make that happen is the most challenging task a writer will ever face. All writers want to be famous, very few achieve it, but for me, I would be satisfied if just one poem, written in my spare time, endures somehow. Maybe this one, which has never been published:
The Fast
In the evening the light flattens
against the walls, but it is empty
of meaning or expression. The darkness
that follows is empty in itself,
like a long absence. If you have
a soul it grows thin waiting.
My birthday tomorrow. Since it's also the day before Thanksgiving, it will be a busy day. Every day is busy, in a way, because my mind is the classic Buddhist monkey mind, flitting from subject to subject, seldom quiet, never empty enough for what Buddhists regard as enlightenment to find room. Crossword puzzles, reading, writing, more reading, errands, an occasional walk, meals in and the cooking thereof, meals out and the time they take, seeing friends, avoiding enemies, garden work, connecting with people on FB and via email, worrying about money, driving hither and yon, the movies, TV: thus my days get frittered away. Right now I'm writing a long contemplated book about Rome, started more than a decade ago, now returned to, with no prospect of publication but necessary to that feeling we all need that one's life has not been entirely wasted.
And then, once in a while, I take the time away from all this bother and to-do to write something that's purely for fun. Poetry is one such pastime. And recently, inspired by a contest in a local paper, I've started to write short stories of 25 words or less. Here's my second try, in its entirety:
"Oh, hi" [that's the title]
She was very pretty before the accident.
He dated her twice more, to be kind.
Now he has trouble recalling her name.
The first such mini-tale went to the newspaper, where it will appear soon, I'm told.
It's a real discipline, to get something that, a, makes sense, and b, has some bite, into such a short frame. Hemingway did it with six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never used." That's a classic. I'm going to keep on doing it, because it's such a pleasure to work with the language just for its own sake. Poetry is that way for me, too. I decided after publishing some poems many years ago to forsake it as a career and write it strictly for myself. I couldn't make a living at it; to do that you have to teach, and I didn't want to teach, didn't think I would be good at it. That same impatient mind, mentioned above. I did teach for a year. Felt like a failure. Couldn't suffer the discipline of the hour, would let my students go when I was done, not when the hour was done. Very sloppy of me. No, not just sloppy: arrogant. I was arrogant when I was young.
And then the poems. Here's one, published in TLS as long ago as 1968:
The French Revolution
At night in my garret room a crowd gathers
and you speak to them and sway them
until what they know and what they don't know
are the same thing, if it is you.
You
speak: to them it is falling in love.
What is it to you? You are walking
on the surface, on the backs of crocodiles;
you are air, or airy; you are a Queen.
One way they hold their heads up is on pikes.
Here's another, published in the old, not the new, New York Quarterly:
Airplanes at Dusk
The jets take off from Newark,
Boeings more beautiful than mathematics,
and turn west.
Angels could not seem
more single-minded, climbing the heavens.
Beneath them, turning east, and blue,
vast stretches of the imagination
lie quiet, mooning, unoccupied.
And there you go. Because they've been published they have an air of authority about them, the cachet of some editor's approval, but in both the first and the last analysis it is you yourself you have to satisfy, and I have about thirty of them that make that grade, maybe six or seven of which have been published, the rest not. (Anybody out there want to print a chapbook?) And sometimes I think, not much for a life's work. But I know poets who survive on the strength of a single poem. The anonymous poet who wrote this, for example:
O westron wind, when wilt thou blow?
The small rain down doth rain.
Christ if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
It dates from about the 14th century, "small" in this case means "thin," nobody knows who the author was, and the first time I heard it was in R. P. Blackmur's poetry class at Princeton. Blackmur was a great critic and he read it with such feeling that I have never forgotten the moment. Who would not give a life to have written so great a poem? I spent years, off and on, in my spare time, translating just four lines of Rilke that I thought were as perfect as poetry gets. Here they are, from a poem of his called "Liebeslied," which means "Love Song":
A stroke of the bow
draws one voice from the two strings.
Whose violin are we stretched out upon?
What virtuoso has us in his hands?
This is my final version, and I'm satisfied with it.
Rilke survives in a whole body of work, prose as well as poetry, but there are other poets whose work survives in a single poem. Tichborne, for example, who wrote a poem in the Tower of London the night before he was beheaded, or was it hanged? for some political crime. It's unforgettable; I keep my anthology of Elizabethan literature specifically to have access to that poem. Or there's Thomas Nashe, whose collected work fills four volumes but who is remembered mostly for a song he wrote in one of his plays whose refrain runs, "Brightness falls from the air / Queens have died young and fair / I am sick, I must die / Lord, have mercy upon me."
Can you feel it? The language takes flight in such words. What we write about, Roland Barthes once said, boils down to just a few emotions--love, hatred, despair, sorrow, guilt, fear; and what great writing aspires to is to evoke them in such a way as to say something meaningful about life and death. What I love about poetry is that it aspires to do this in the most condensed, intense way, so that the words explode in your mind, like a sip of great wine on your tongue. To make that happen is the most challenging task a writer will ever face. All writers want to be famous, very few achieve it, but for me, I would be satisfied if just one poem, written in my spare time, endures somehow. Maybe this one, which has never been published:
The Fast
In the evening the light flattens
against the walls, but it is empty
of meaning or expression. The darkness
that follows is empty in itself,
like a long absence. If you have
a soul it grows thin waiting.
Friday, November 9, 2012
WHAT WE LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA
November 9, 2012:
I occasionally write a piece for MILITARY HISTORY in a series they call "What We Learned," which describes major battles and then talks briefly about what we learned from them. The last one was on Gallipoli, a remarkable example of incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, and other "--ences" and "---ances" in World War I in which British and French forces attacked the Dardanelles in an attempt to seize Istanbul and drive the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and were very badly beaten. I've been thinking of it while reading the many analyses of the election this Tuesday in which the Republicans were badly beaten trying to attack deeply entrenched forces in the electorate, about which they were poorly informed, to which they took superior attitudes, and against which they demonstrated remarkable levels of incompetence. The parallels seem striking. Even more striking is the fact that the British and French learned very little from their defeat; and from what I can tell so far, neither have the Republicans.
This is not good news. I come from a Republican family, but none of my forebears would recognize the party now. It was run then by wealthy people who had a social conscience and a sense of noblesse oblige, who were deeply interested in foreign policy, wrote about it intelligently, and did not start wars irresponsibly, or at all. I left the party after college, largely thanks to what I learned in college about what the two major parties stood for. My parents never said anything but I'm sure they weren't pleased. But in any case I understood Republicans; I knew my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and what they stood for and it wasn't what the current party stands for. These were decent people, decent inside as well as polite and well-behaved outside. They did not harbor undisguised antipathies for immigrants, for women, for the poor, for minorities. They themselves had been poor once; they were the sons and daughters of immigrants; they had worked their way up. They were still close to their roots. They were not college graduates; but that doesn't mean they were unintelligent. And I could see where they were coming from.
I no longer understand Republicans. I have been trying for some time now to figure out how they can possibly take the stands they take, what has led them into the impenetrable plastic bubble they have made their home, what makes them impervious to argument, unwilling to engage in any sort of dialogue, what has happened to their social conscience. The more hysterical types, exemplified by the Limbaughs, the Hannitys, the Coulters, have managed to demonize anything and everything outside their bubble, delivering diatribes about "parasites," who seem to make up 47 percent of the population, about "socialism," and so on. We have all seen it. It seems more than a little crazy. And it's sad.
It's more than that, it's dangerous. Their only political strategy now seems to be to obstruct whatever Democrats propose in the way of legislation. That is no longer a two-party system; that is war--and to the death. But it won't work; it will, on the contrary, do enormous damage to the country, and they will lose, for the simple reason that they have refused to recognize, to accommodate to, or even to understand what is happening right under their noses. The United State is no longer a country in which rich white men control everything. In the Federal government, state governments, everywhere, more and more women, blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans are taking part and taking office. Did you look at the make-up of the crowd in Chicago last Tuesday night celebrating Obama's victory? You saw everybody: white men, white women, blacks, Latinos, all the minorities, waving American flags, dancing, clapping, singing. And at Romney headquarters in Boston? With very few exceptions it was all white, and it was mostly male.
I'm not saying anything that original here, but the more voices that are raised the better. We need a two-party system, we need dialogue, not war. Modern day conservatism at its best dates from Edmund Burke, and if you read Burke, he makes a lot of sense. Institutions are indeed important, and it is important that they keep faith with the people, and that people in return keep faith with them. I am not a religious person but I would hate to see churches disappear. Tradition, too, is important. I never bought entirely into the 1960s; I could see that it was going to destroy things that were valuable, as well as reform things that were not. I also understood that most Americans want the same things, whatever their politics: a decent job, a chance to advance, family life with all its pleasures and pains, a nice house in a good community, or a nice apartment in a lively city. The left tends toward the utopian. I don't believe in utopias, or the perfectibility of man.
But I recognize hardly a trace of traditional conservatism in the current Republican Party. I recognize only a worship of wealth, and an absolute determination to keep it to themselves. The Party is living in the past, in a bubble of its own making. Their astonishment at their losses on Tuesday is revealing. Reality has destroyed their myths, and it is very difficult to detach yourselves from your myths. But they must, if they are to survive. Otherwise they will go the way of the Whigs, once a dominant party in American politics, now a memory. Facts cannot be wished away. Reality inevitably sneaks up on you. To continue to believe that we are the most enlightened, the best educated people in the world, that we offer the most opportunity in the world, when none of this is true, when it has been demonstrated clearly and convincingly not to be true, is inevitably to lose your way.
"Know thyself," it read on the entrance to the cave of the Delphic Oracle in Greece. Until you do, until you face the reality of who you are--in this case, a minority--and how ill your attitudes and beliefs accord with the world at large, there is not much hope for you.
I occasionally write a piece for MILITARY HISTORY in a series they call "What We Learned," which describes major battles and then talks briefly about what we learned from them. The last one was on Gallipoli, a remarkable example of incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, and other "--ences" and "---ances" in World War I in which British and French forces attacked the Dardanelles in an attempt to seize Istanbul and drive the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and were very badly beaten. I've been thinking of it while reading the many analyses of the election this Tuesday in which the Republicans were badly beaten trying to attack deeply entrenched forces in the electorate, about which they were poorly informed, to which they took superior attitudes, and against which they demonstrated remarkable levels of incompetence. The parallels seem striking. Even more striking is the fact that the British and French learned very little from their defeat; and from what I can tell so far, neither have the Republicans.
This is not good news. I come from a Republican family, but none of my forebears would recognize the party now. It was run then by wealthy people who had a social conscience and a sense of noblesse oblige, who were deeply interested in foreign policy, wrote about it intelligently, and did not start wars irresponsibly, or at all. I left the party after college, largely thanks to what I learned in college about what the two major parties stood for. My parents never said anything but I'm sure they weren't pleased. But in any case I understood Republicans; I knew my parents, my grandparents, my uncles and what they stood for and it wasn't what the current party stands for. These were decent people, decent inside as well as polite and well-behaved outside. They did not harbor undisguised antipathies for immigrants, for women, for the poor, for minorities. They themselves had been poor once; they were the sons and daughters of immigrants; they had worked their way up. They were still close to their roots. They were not college graduates; but that doesn't mean they were unintelligent. And I could see where they were coming from.
I no longer understand Republicans. I have been trying for some time now to figure out how they can possibly take the stands they take, what has led them into the impenetrable plastic bubble they have made their home, what makes them impervious to argument, unwilling to engage in any sort of dialogue, what has happened to their social conscience. The more hysterical types, exemplified by the Limbaughs, the Hannitys, the Coulters, have managed to demonize anything and everything outside their bubble, delivering diatribes about "parasites," who seem to make up 47 percent of the population, about "socialism," and so on. We have all seen it. It seems more than a little crazy. And it's sad.
It's more than that, it's dangerous. Their only political strategy now seems to be to obstruct whatever Democrats propose in the way of legislation. That is no longer a two-party system; that is war--and to the death. But it won't work; it will, on the contrary, do enormous damage to the country, and they will lose, for the simple reason that they have refused to recognize, to accommodate to, or even to understand what is happening right under their noses. The United State is no longer a country in which rich white men control everything. In the Federal government, state governments, everywhere, more and more women, blacks, Latinos and Asian-Americans are taking part and taking office. Did you look at the make-up of the crowd in Chicago last Tuesday night celebrating Obama's victory? You saw everybody: white men, white women, blacks, Latinos, all the minorities, waving American flags, dancing, clapping, singing. And at Romney headquarters in Boston? With very few exceptions it was all white, and it was mostly male.
I'm not saying anything that original here, but the more voices that are raised the better. We need a two-party system, we need dialogue, not war. Modern day conservatism at its best dates from Edmund Burke, and if you read Burke, he makes a lot of sense. Institutions are indeed important, and it is important that they keep faith with the people, and that people in return keep faith with them. I am not a religious person but I would hate to see churches disappear. Tradition, too, is important. I never bought entirely into the 1960s; I could see that it was going to destroy things that were valuable, as well as reform things that were not. I also understood that most Americans want the same things, whatever their politics: a decent job, a chance to advance, family life with all its pleasures and pains, a nice house in a good community, or a nice apartment in a lively city. The left tends toward the utopian. I don't believe in utopias, or the perfectibility of man.
But I recognize hardly a trace of traditional conservatism in the current Republican Party. I recognize only a worship of wealth, and an absolute determination to keep it to themselves. The Party is living in the past, in a bubble of its own making. Their astonishment at their losses on Tuesday is revealing. Reality has destroyed their myths, and it is very difficult to detach yourselves from your myths. But they must, if they are to survive. Otherwise they will go the way of the Whigs, once a dominant party in American politics, now a memory. Facts cannot be wished away. Reality inevitably sneaks up on you. To continue to believe that we are the most enlightened, the best educated people in the world, that we offer the most opportunity in the world, when none of this is true, when it has been demonstrated clearly and convincingly not to be true, is inevitably to lose your way.
"Know thyself," it read on the entrance to the cave of the Delphic Oracle in Greece. Until you do, until you face the reality of who you are--in this case, a minority--and how ill your attitudes and beliefs accord with the world at large, there is not much hope for you.
Monday, October 29, 2012
IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORM/ELECTION/CHAOS
October 29, 2012:
The wind howls outside, Hurricane Sandy, and who can work? Or even read? The wind creates an internal tension. You know you'll lose power soon and not get it back for quite a while, and the President has just been on the news, having come back to Washington to take over and do his job, and has told us, in effect, not to travel, not to do anything but hunker down, and it's all very tense. And then when the wind won't stop it gets to you. You're always listening for the tree falling on your car, or your roof, or picking up a piece of lawn furniture you missed, or forcing the door on your shed, even though it's well fastened. It's nerve wracking.
On top of that we're just days away from an election as important as any since 2000, when a thoroughly politicized Supreme Court put George Bush in office, and a similar kind of chaos prevails now, twelve years later, and the effects threaten to be as dire. From my point of view a Romney victory would constitute a major threat to our well-being and our liberties. He is, what's the joke? a man born on third base who thinks he hit a triple; he has no knowledge or emotional insight into the way most of us live, he's like most people of his level of income, they live in bubbles, in gated communities, they think government is wasteful and overly bureaucratic, they have little or no respect for or understanding of public service and if they do go into government, they go to strip it. They live under the illusion, furthermore, that their good fortune is of their own making, thus failing to acknowledge the interconnections among business and government, the government created infrastructure that makes all business success in this country possible, the governmental programs that fostered industrial growth in so many fields in the first place
Wow! This wind has really picked up. Blowing now at about 50 knots, with higher gusts. I won't be doing this for long. But while I have time--somebody who's a FB friend of my son's asked the other day why anybody would vote for Barack Obama, and I wanted to answer. Here's why: first, because he understands that the huge and growing income gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is very bad for the country, and that it has to change or we'll slide rapidly downhill into a total oligarchy, instead of the partial oligarchy we have now, and people like the Kochs and Grover Norquist will be writing our laws. Second, because he's done an excellent job, although little advertised, in the face of a Republican party that announced that its only goal in Congress was to make sure he did not get a second term; despite that, he saved the auto industry, has begun to reform the educational system, got regulatory reform on Wall Street, which sorely needed it, killed Osama bin Laden and decimated Al Qaeda's leadership, ended the war in Iraq which the embarrassing George Bush got us into to on the basis of a whole lot of lying, and brought intelligence back to the White House. Third, because he's actually lived in Third World countries and knows their problems and is familiar with their style, and it is from there, in some such country, that the future will emerge. Fourth, because he's interracial and demonstrates pretty clearly that interracial marriage is a viable option for people; my own feeling is that only interracial marriage will ever fully change the racists attitudes so many Americans--the majority, according to the latest polls--live by. Fifth, because he believes that no government has the right to interfere with women's natural right to control their own bodies. Which is another way of saying that he has no intention of forcing his own religious beliefs onto the nation; he believes, in other words, in the First Amendment, and Mitt Romney and most of the Republican Party, determined to end abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, obviously do not.
I could go on, but these are some principle points; and of course the final point is quite simple. He's not Mitt Romney. He's not the empty, soulless, clueless human being who is his opponent, who will say anything to any audience to get elected, who thinks nothing of buying companies, selling off their assets and then bankrupting them for his own and his partners' profit, thereby depriving thousands of people of their jobs; Romney, who has never had to scramble for a job, who supported the war in Vietnam but made sure, like so many Republican big-shots before him, that he never had to serve; Romney, who makes promises he knows he can't keep, that no one could keep--12 million new jobs! 5 trillion off the debt! or is that 5 trillion in tax cuts!--and then refuses to explain how he's going to do this (because he hasn't a clue); Romney, who claims to know how to create jobs when his entire business experience has been spent outsourcing jobs to other countries, who has, in fact, never started a business or been a businessman in that traditional sense; and Romney, who won't release his tax returns because he knows they will reveal how thoroughly he has exploited the tax code to reduce his own taxes--offshore accounts; a huge deduction, more than most people make in income in a year, for his wife's show horse--while ordinary people pay at double or triple the rate. I once worked for a very wealthy businessman who had a whole team to figure out his taxes. Some years he paid less taxes than I did, or no taxes at all, and this was when I was on his payroll making about $10,000 a year. Everything the rich say about taxes is pretty much lies. It's well known that the money doesn't trickle down. The rich are not job creators; the economists know that, too. When they make more money, they don't necessarily start businesses. My late cousin's daughter is the kind of person who starts a business; she's got a therapeutic massage business in Florida, she opened a shop, she has employees, she works hard. I can see it growing, expanding, and I hope, for her sake, that it does. She's very proud of it, as she should be. Romney? He has $250 million picked off the backs of people like her. Let us not be fooled. He and his party do not have the interests of the common man at heart--not even close.
I have too few readers to change any votes, and Hurricane Sandy, the experts say, will wipe the election off the map all this week, which is probably a good thing; we're all sick of it. But if you do spread this around to other readers, maybe one person will take heed. That would be a good thing, too. In the meantime, stay safe and out of the wind. The trees are dancing wildly outside, and wind is roaring. Global warming, folks. Storms get bigger and badder with global warming, now we're here, enjoying the benefits. Well, as long as it doesn't tear down my black tupelo, I'll be content.
The wind howls outside, Hurricane Sandy, and who can work? Or even read? The wind creates an internal tension. You know you'll lose power soon and not get it back for quite a while, and the President has just been on the news, having come back to Washington to take over and do his job, and has told us, in effect, not to travel, not to do anything but hunker down, and it's all very tense. And then when the wind won't stop it gets to you. You're always listening for the tree falling on your car, or your roof, or picking up a piece of lawn furniture you missed, or forcing the door on your shed, even though it's well fastened. It's nerve wracking.
On top of that we're just days away from an election as important as any since 2000, when a thoroughly politicized Supreme Court put George Bush in office, and a similar kind of chaos prevails now, twelve years later, and the effects threaten to be as dire. From my point of view a Romney victory would constitute a major threat to our well-being and our liberties. He is, what's the joke? a man born on third base who thinks he hit a triple; he has no knowledge or emotional insight into the way most of us live, he's like most people of his level of income, they live in bubbles, in gated communities, they think government is wasteful and overly bureaucratic, they have little or no respect for or understanding of public service and if they do go into government, they go to strip it. They live under the illusion, furthermore, that their good fortune is of their own making, thus failing to acknowledge the interconnections among business and government, the government created infrastructure that makes all business success in this country possible, the governmental programs that fostered industrial growth in so many fields in the first place
Wow! This wind has really picked up. Blowing now at about 50 knots, with higher gusts. I won't be doing this for long. But while I have time--somebody who's a FB friend of my son's asked the other day why anybody would vote for Barack Obama, and I wanted to answer. Here's why: first, because he understands that the huge and growing income gap between the rich and everybody else in this country is very bad for the country, and that it has to change or we'll slide rapidly downhill into a total oligarchy, instead of the partial oligarchy we have now, and people like the Kochs and Grover Norquist will be writing our laws. Second, because he's done an excellent job, although little advertised, in the face of a Republican party that announced that its only goal in Congress was to make sure he did not get a second term; despite that, he saved the auto industry, has begun to reform the educational system, got regulatory reform on Wall Street, which sorely needed it, killed Osama bin Laden and decimated Al Qaeda's leadership, ended the war in Iraq which the embarrassing George Bush got us into to on the basis of a whole lot of lying, and brought intelligence back to the White House. Third, because he's actually lived in Third World countries and knows their problems and is familiar with their style, and it is from there, in some such country, that the future will emerge. Fourth, because he's interracial and demonstrates pretty clearly that interracial marriage is a viable option for people; my own feeling is that only interracial marriage will ever fully change the racists attitudes so many Americans--the majority, according to the latest polls--live by. Fifth, because he believes that no government has the right to interfere with women's natural right to control their own bodies. Which is another way of saying that he has no intention of forcing his own religious beliefs onto the nation; he believes, in other words, in the First Amendment, and Mitt Romney and most of the Republican Party, determined to end abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, obviously do not.
I could go on, but these are some principle points; and of course the final point is quite simple. He's not Mitt Romney. He's not the empty, soulless, clueless human being who is his opponent, who will say anything to any audience to get elected, who thinks nothing of buying companies, selling off their assets and then bankrupting them for his own and his partners' profit, thereby depriving thousands of people of their jobs; Romney, who has never had to scramble for a job, who supported the war in Vietnam but made sure, like so many Republican big-shots before him, that he never had to serve; Romney, who makes promises he knows he can't keep, that no one could keep--12 million new jobs! 5 trillion off the debt! or is that 5 trillion in tax cuts!--and then refuses to explain how he's going to do this (because he hasn't a clue); Romney, who claims to know how to create jobs when his entire business experience has been spent outsourcing jobs to other countries, who has, in fact, never started a business or been a businessman in that traditional sense; and Romney, who won't release his tax returns because he knows they will reveal how thoroughly he has exploited the tax code to reduce his own taxes--offshore accounts; a huge deduction, more than most people make in income in a year, for his wife's show horse--while ordinary people pay at double or triple the rate. I once worked for a very wealthy businessman who had a whole team to figure out his taxes. Some years he paid less taxes than I did, or no taxes at all, and this was when I was on his payroll making about $10,000 a year. Everything the rich say about taxes is pretty much lies. It's well known that the money doesn't trickle down. The rich are not job creators; the economists know that, too. When they make more money, they don't necessarily start businesses. My late cousin's daughter is the kind of person who starts a business; she's got a therapeutic massage business in Florida, she opened a shop, she has employees, she works hard. I can see it growing, expanding, and I hope, for her sake, that it does. She's very proud of it, as she should be. Romney? He has $250 million picked off the backs of people like her. Let us not be fooled. He and his party do not have the interests of the common man at heart--not even close.
I have too few readers to change any votes, and Hurricane Sandy, the experts say, will wipe the election off the map all this week, which is probably a good thing; we're all sick of it. But if you do spread this around to other readers, maybe one person will take heed. That would be a good thing, too. In the meantime, stay safe and out of the wind. The trees are dancing wildly outside, and wind is roaring. Global warming, folks. Storms get bigger and badder with global warming, now we're here, enjoying the benefits. Well, as long as it doesn't tear down my black tupelo, I'll be content.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
BAD MANNERS
OCTOBER 24, 2012
We normally have breakfast at Starbuck's in Bridgehampton, not every morning, but often. This morning around 9:30 two women came in with a little girl, who proceeded to pop around the room making noise. Can't describe the noises, but they were the kind that children make when they're very young, say around two, and they were relentless. The two women did nothing to quiet her; they behaved as if it were just fine that their child or grandchild or whoever she was was destroying the peace that had hitherto prevailed in the room.
Why do people think it's OK to bring very young children into a place like a restaurant or even a coffee shop and run around like the little maniacs they are and bother everybody else?
We have acquaintances we are reluctant to dine out with because of the way they behave toward the waiters and waitresses. Arrogant, demanding, impatient are words that fit.
On the road, especially in the summer here in the Hamptons, drivers cut you off, tailgate, ignore stop signs, and talk on their cell phones while they're driving. I used to ride a bike for exercise. No longer. I've driven behind too many people who, holding a cell phone to their ear, weave and wander out of their lanes, drive onto the shoulders, unaware of where they are or what they're doing. They are no better in the stores. I once saw an architect who had just put up a hideous modern house clad entirely in sheet metal walk into the Sagaponack General Store and push his way to the head of the line. People stared in disbelief. Wherever they are, people talk on their cell phones. I once listened to a man on a bus to the city talk loudly about his sex life on his cell phone to some woman he had been dating. There were about five people on the bus. We could all hear what he said. It took him some twenty minutes to realize that he was making a fool of himself in public.
Why do people think it's OK to hold private conversations in public, conversations nobody else wants to listen to? It's as if everyone had been given a megaphone to carry on their private lives.
Once I was on a train from New York to Washington and some idiot sat down next to me and proceeded to call somebody and talk to him for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that somebody else was on the same train. Then he did the same with yet another person, also on the train. Think about it. For that person, nobody else exists; nobody else counts but himself and his immediate business. Now I take the quiet car, where the conductor strictly enforces a code of silence; and it's blissful by comparison. But you still find people even on the quiet car who just have to make that call. It's as if their concept of their own personal space extended way beyond everybody else's.
Age has its privileges, and at my age I often don't get up and give a woman on the subway a seat. It depends on the woman and the circumstances. But I always think I should and sometimes do. I hold doors for women and men alike, especially when they're carrying packages, stop for pedestrians crossing the road, don't think of driving as a blood sport. It's training. It was watching my father and other men and how they behaved, both publicly and privately. I don't believe either of my parents would ever have held a public conversation on a cell phone if there had been cell phones then. To them it would have been unthinkable. Social life evolves, I understand that, but people my age look with dismay at the way it has evolved since the 1960s. I blame the 1960s, in fact, for much of this, and the so-called "me decade" that followed. Manners are the visible manifestation of inner attitudes. Good manners indicate respect for other people and their rights, which are the same as yours, and respect for the standards of behavior that prevail in any given society. As respect for public institutions began to decline during the Vietnam War, which was a particularly stupid, evil war, so did respect for other people and their rights; so, indeed, did the kind of empathy that keeps social life endurable. Empathy is now in much shorter supply, and it is the lack of it, in my opinion, that has driven the extremism of the Republican right, with their indifference to the difficulties of the poor and their inability to walk that imaginative mile in other peoples' shoes. Hard-line attitudes, so-called "realism," a turning away from the social responsibility that we all share for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves--this is bad manners on a massive scale, and the two are connected, the large and the small, the social and the individual, each a mirror of the other.
There's a scene in Henry James's novel PORTRAIT OF A LADY where the heroine, Isabel Archer, walks into a room to find her husband, Gilbert Osmond, sitting in a chair while her friend, whose name I forget but who is a woman, stands next to him; and she understands instantly that they know each other in a way that is far more intimate than she had ever been told. In a well-mannered world, no man would sit while a woman stood unless their relationship was unusually intimate, almost like husband and wife. It's a brief moment in a big book, but it's decisive: manners display who we are. We need not be quite so formal now, but without some formality, some set of rules that encode respect for others, what does social life become if not a tangle of each against all, a Hobbesian world, savage at its core, unjust, and without compassion? Such a world is inherently, as it were by definition, fascist.
We normally have breakfast at Starbuck's in Bridgehampton, not every morning, but often. This morning around 9:30 two women came in with a little girl, who proceeded to pop around the room making noise. Can't describe the noises, but they were the kind that children make when they're very young, say around two, and they were relentless. The two women did nothing to quiet her; they behaved as if it were just fine that their child or grandchild or whoever she was was destroying the peace that had hitherto prevailed in the room.
Why do people think it's OK to bring very young children into a place like a restaurant or even a coffee shop and run around like the little maniacs they are and bother everybody else?
We have acquaintances we are reluctant to dine out with because of the way they behave toward the waiters and waitresses. Arrogant, demanding, impatient are words that fit.
On the road, especially in the summer here in the Hamptons, drivers cut you off, tailgate, ignore stop signs, and talk on their cell phones while they're driving. I used to ride a bike for exercise. No longer. I've driven behind too many people who, holding a cell phone to their ear, weave and wander out of their lanes, drive onto the shoulders, unaware of where they are or what they're doing. They are no better in the stores. I once saw an architect who had just put up a hideous modern house clad entirely in sheet metal walk into the Sagaponack General Store and push his way to the head of the line. People stared in disbelief. Wherever they are, people talk on their cell phones. I once listened to a man on a bus to the city talk loudly about his sex life on his cell phone to some woman he had been dating. There were about five people on the bus. We could all hear what he said. It took him some twenty minutes to realize that he was making a fool of himself in public.
Why do people think it's OK to hold private conversations in public, conversations nobody else wants to listen to? It's as if everyone had been given a megaphone to carry on their private lives.
Once I was on a train from New York to Washington and some idiot sat down next to me and proceeded to call somebody and talk to him for fifteen or twenty minutes, and that somebody else was on the same train. Then he did the same with yet another person, also on the train. Think about it. For that person, nobody else exists; nobody else counts but himself and his immediate business. Now I take the quiet car, where the conductor strictly enforces a code of silence; and it's blissful by comparison. But you still find people even on the quiet car who just have to make that call. It's as if their concept of their own personal space extended way beyond everybody else's.
Age has its privileges, and at my age I often don't get up and give a woman on the subway a seat. It depends on the woman and the circumstances. But I always think I should and sometimes do. I hold doors for women and men alike, especially when they're carrying packages, stop for pedestrians crossing the road, don't think of driving as a blood sport. It's training. It was watching my father and other men and how they behaved, both publicly and privately. I don't believe either of my parents would ever have held a public conversation on a cell phone if there had been cell phones then. To them it would have been unthinkable. Social life evolves, I understand that, but people my age look with dismay at the way it has evolved since the 1960s. I blame the 1960s, in fact, for much of this, and the so-called "me decade" that followed. Manners are the visible manifestation of inner attitudes. Good manners indicate respect for other people and their rights, which are the same as yours, and respect for the standards of behavior that prevail in any given society. As respect for public institutions began to decline during the Vietnam War, which was a particularly stupid, evil war, so did respect for other people and their rights; so, indeed, did the kind of empathy that keeps social life endurable. Empathy is now in much shorter supply, and it is the lack of it, in my opinion, that has driven the extremism of the Republican right, with their indifference to the difficulties of the poor and their inability to walk that imaginative mile in other peoples' shoes. Hard-line attitudes, so-called "realism," a turning away from the social responsibility that we all share for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves--this is bad manners on a massive scale, and the two are connected, the large and the small, the social and the individual, each a mirror of the other.
There's a scene in Henry James's novel PORTRAIT OF A LADY where the heroine, Isabel Archer, walks into a room to find her husband, Gilbert Osmond, sitting in a chair while her friend, whose name I forget but who is a woman, stands next to him; and she understands instantly that they know each other in a way that is far more intimate than she had ever been told. In a well-mannered world, no man would sit while a woman stood unless their relationship was unusually intimate, almost like husband and wife. It's a brief moment in a big book, but it's decisive: manners display who we are. We need not be quite so formal now, but without some formality, some set of rules that encode respect for others, what does social life become if not a tangle of each against all, a Hobbesian world, savage at its core, unjust, and without compassion? Such a world is inherently, as it were by definition, fascist.
Friday, September 21, 2012
POEM AGAIN
September 21, 2012:
Readers of this blog may remember that I wrote some time ago about how long it took to write a poem, and gave an example of one of my own called The Inventory that I was still working on after thirty years. Well, since then I've continued working on it, if you can call it work, trying to get the last line or lines right, and I think I may have done it, although you never know with these things. So I bring it before you again, asking your forbearance.
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The four doors out of the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry side table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the evening,
and the shadows under the chairs.
At night, train whistles at the crossings,
darkness pressing its face against the glass.
Now for a little history, an explanation of how these things have worked for me. I started writing poems in college when I became friends with a couple of poets, one who wound up being the Class Poet at graduation, the other who was the only student at Princeton who was ever allowed to write a group of poems for his senior thesis. The Class Poet got a poem into Ladies Home Journal, of all places, while we were still in school, while the other published in the Kenyon Review, an enormously prestigious venue at the time. Talented, no question about it. I wanted to join that little club and they let one of my poems into the campus literary magazine, a fact that has embarrassed me ever since, the poem in question being just plain awful. After college I continued writing poems, partly because it was hard to write a good poem, really hard, and partly because it was all I had time for. I was working full time, supporting a wife, then children--let me add my wife was working, too--and that left little time for writing. But a poem is a little thing, so for years that's what I wrote, and since they were little things I could finish one in a reasonable amount of time. Say a month, when the poem was especially difficult, less when it wasn't.
I think it took about nine years to get the first one published; it went to Prairie Schooner. Then another there, then one in TLS, through that same friend who had first published in the Kenyon Review. At the time he was in England, a Rhodes scholar, and knew Ian Hamilton, who had started the Review and who was also poetry editor at TLS. Contacts mean a lot in the poetry business, as in every business. But by this time I was working full-time writing a business history for a wealthy businessman, I had come to realize I wasn't going to be a major poet, and I wasn't writing that much poetry any more; two writing careers at the same time are pretty much impossible to sustain. And then something about the business put me off. Partly it was the fact that I would have to teach to make a living, and I was not a good teacher. And the poetry world is very small, the rewards are very slim, and the politics were, and are, consequently quite nasty. I didn't want to get involved in it, just in order to make my name.
So I stopped for long periods, but never entirely gave it up. It was the difficulty--good poems are hard to write. It is a great challenge to bend the language, which is intractable, to your will, to say something new or different, to put together images in a suggestive way, and at the same time to leave the poem open, say what you want to say without closing off possibilities so that it can go in unexpected directions, multiply the layers of response. In just a few lines. I have done that about twenty-five or thirty times and now have a collection I'd like to publish as a chapbook. Call it a life's work.
If it happens this poem will be among them. It was always meant to be a gentle, sad poem. You take an inventory after something is over, a life, a marriage, and the passion has washed out of the relationship, leaving only regrets, sadness, and loneliness. Like most mature poems it is both personal and impersonal. I have never owned, for example, a translation of Proust, or a Tiffany frame. My mother, however, did have a cherry side table that my brother and I both wanted; but he got it. It was in her house, when she was beginning to die, that I used to look at the windows and the sunlight in the sheer curtains that had hung there all my life. But none of that matters. It's how it works when you put it all together that matters. That's what we learned in college: poems were made objects, artifacts, not expressions of how we "felt" or of "ourselves" or a record of experience, but works, things constructed out of words. Formed things. Writing poems, I learned how to do endings, how to bring works to a close. Writing poems, I learned what a piece of writing is, and how to make it good.
This poem is about endings, in fact, about sitting alone in an otherwise empty house, counting up your losses. I have never done that in a literal sense. But I have in other ways, and haven't we all? It's an honest poem, despite the artifice. I've been there, imagined the scene. And I have definitely, many times, seen the darkness pressing its face against the glass.
Readers of this blog may remember that I wrote some time ago about how long it took to write a poem, and gave an example of one of my own called The Inventory that I was still working on after thirty years. Well, since then I've continued working on it, if you can call it work, trying to get the last line or lines right, and I think I may have done it, although you never know with these things. So I bring it before you again, asking your forbearance.
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The four doors out of the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry side table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the evening,
and the shadows under the chairs.
At night, train whistles at the crossings,
darkness pressing its face against the glass.
Now for a little history, an explanation of how these things have worked for me. I started writing poems in college when I became friends with a couple of poets, one who wound up being the Class Poet at graduation, the other who was the only student at Princeton who was ever allowed to write a group of poems for his senior thesis. The Class Poet got a poem into Ladies Home Journal, of all places, while we were still in school, while the other published in the Kenyon Review, an enormously prestigious venue at the time. Talented, no question about it. I wanted to join that little club and they let one of my poems into the campus literary magazine, a fact that has embarrassed me ever since, the poem in question being just plain awful. After college I continued writing poems, partly because it was hard to write a good poem, really hard, and partly because it was all I had time for. I was working full time, supporting a wife, then children--let me add my wife was working, too--and that left little time for writing. But a poem is a little thing, so for years that's what I wrote, and since they were little things I could finish one in a reasonable amount of time. Say a month, when the poem was especially difficult, less when it wasn't.
I think it took about nine years to get the first one published; it went to Prairie Schooner. Then another there, then one in TLS, through that same friend who had first published in the Kenyon Review. At the time he was in England, a Rhodes scholar, and knew Ian Hamilton, who had started the Review and who was also poetry editor at TLS. Contacts mean a lot in the poetry business, as in every business. But by this time I was working full-time writing a business history for a wealthy businessman, I had come to realize I wasn't going to be a major poet, and I wasn't writing that much poetry any more; two writing careers at the same time are pretty much impossible to sustain. And then something about the business put me off. Partly it was the fact that I would have to teach to make a living, and I was not a good teacher. And the poetry world is very small, the rewards are very slim, and the politics were, and are, consequently quite nasty. I didn't want to get involved in it, just in order to make my name.
So I stopped for long periods, but never entirely gave it up. It was the difficulty--good poems are hard to write. It is a great challenge to bend the language, which is intractable, to your will, to say something new or different, to put together images in a suggestive way, and at the same time to leave the poem open, say what you want to say without closing off possibilities so that it can go in unexpected directions, multiply the layers of response. In just a few lines. I have done that about twenty-five or thirty times and now have a collection I'd like to publish as a chapbook. Call it a life's work.
If it happens this poem will be among them. It was always meant to be a gentle, sad poem. You take an inventory after something is over, a life, a marriage, and the passion has washed out of the relationship, leaving only regrets, sadness, and loneliness. Like most mature poems it is both personal and impersonal. I have never owned, for example, a translation of Proust, or a Tiffany frame. My mother, however, did have a cherry side table that my brother and I both wanted; but he got it. It was in her house, when she was beginning to die, that I used to look at the windows and the sunlight in the sheer curtains that had hung there all my life. But none of that matters. It's how it works when you put it all together that matters. That's what we learned in college: poems were made objects, artifacts, not expressions of how we "felt" or of "ourselves" or a record of experience, but works, things constructed out of words. Formed things. Writing poems, I learned how to do endings, how to bring works to a close. Writing poems, I learned what a piece of writing is, and how to make it good.
This poem is about endings, in fact, about sitting alone in an otherwise empty house, counting up your losses. I have never done that in a literal sense. But I have in other ways, and haven't we all? It's an honest poem, despite the artifice. I've been there, imagined the scene. And I have definitely, many times, seen the darkness pressing its face against the glass.
Friday, September 14, 2012
UNFORGIVEABLE CRIMES
September 14, 2012:
I have written about a lot of different things in my career, everything from the art world to ROTC to ethics to sports to adventure, among many others subjects, and for many different magazines. But few of my friends know that for a while I was a contributing editor at Parenting Magazine and wrote about issues affecting children--their education, their upbringing, their moral training, whatever I was asked to do. Usually I was asked to write about the more serious subjects the magazine covered, and in 1990 they asked me to do a two-part series on child abuse: physical, emotional, and sexual. As part of my research I flew out to a center in California that treated the adult victims of child sexual abuse and interviewed a number of those victims at the offices of the center. They brought them in to me one by one, maybe five of them, and I sat with them for at least half an hour in each case, more in some.
It's hard to describe the impact these interviews had on me. These were adults, people in their thirties and forties, yet they were still suffering the effects of what had happened to them. One man in particular, whose own father had introduced him to sex, abusing him from the age of twelve to the age of sixteen, just broke my heart. They all broke my heart. After each interview I had to leave, walk outside for ten or fifteen minutes with a staff member, try to come down from the rage and sorrow these people's experiences left me with. This man, whom I called Phil, said that his father abused all his children, but only him sexually. When I talked to him he was in his thirties. He complied with it, he said, because he didn't know that all fathers didn't do that with their sons. He didn't begin to understand the impact it had on him until he went into therapy and discovered why he had been doing drugs for sixteen years, why he was so desperately unhappy, why his life was an absolute mess. "I've spent over $100,000 on drugs," he told me. "I don't trust people. It's cost me a few jobs because anybody in authority, I fear.... There's part of me that says I can't be attached to one person. I have a hard time understanding what love is, too." And here's the most ironic twist of all. His father, a military man, subsequently left the military and went back to school and became a therapist. Among his patients were people who had themselves been sexually abused as children. You can imagine how effective he was.
You don't forget stories like these, and I never have, and when the scandals about the Catholic Church and its attitude toward child sexual abusers among its priests broke, I took a particular interest in them. I had never been abused as a child, although my mother would spank my brother and me with a yardstick if we had done something unusually bad; but the yardstick almost invariably broke on our backsides, it stung more than it hurt, and neither of us ever thought we were being abused. We thought we were being punished, and we were. Pretty much always justifiably. But sexual abuse is something else entirely. All child abuse is bad and seriously damaging to the child, but sexual abuse is the worst. Children are not ready for sex. They don't understand it, it frightens them, it breaks boundaries they know instinctively exist but can't explain, and the shame associated with them is unbearable. It leads, as Phil explained, to fear, distrust, an inability to love, to a profoundly disturbed life. Priests are supposed to be, and are presented as, exemplars of trust, and trust is absolutely basic to the health of children. If they cannot trust they cannot thrive. The damage a priest could do to a child, I now knew, could be enormous and lifelong. And the response of the Church to these crimes was more than appalling. It was itself profoundly criminal.
And then the business at Penn State, in which a beloved coach, and the University authorities, did nothing to stop a sexual abuser in their midst.
None of this is news, of course, and that's not why I'm writing, to tell you something you don't know. Anyone with any depth of experience in the world knows that institutions will defend and protect their own at all costs, no matter what the price others must pay for their crimes. I saw it in the mental health system when I wrote my first book, saw how a profession rallied around one of its own even though the person in question was incompetent, to the point of monstrosity. But he was one of them. So with the priests. Priests, even a bishop, are beginning to be convicted for these crimes, which the Church treated as if they were minor sins. A few are in jail. But while they may be sins in the eyes of the Church, in the eyes of the world they are crimes, horrible crimes, as life-destroying as murder. And unforgiveable.
Why, then, am I writing? For Phil, and others like him. I got a firsthand glimpse of what child sexual abuse entails from him and those other people I talked to, and that's what's so often forgotten in the news surrounding scandals like these: the effects on the victims. Instead of protecting its priests, what the Catholic Church should be doing is trying to repair the damage, not just paying the victims off with money but repairing the damage, making the major reforms that are necessary to keep abusers out of the reach of children and taking the kind of look at themselves and what they stand for that they are still reluctant to take. There are many ways to destroy a life besides killing it. This is one of the worst, and this, these killing effects, is what should be the first consideration when we deal with an institution like the Church, or a university, or any organization that cares more for itself than the people it professes to serve. No institution should be allowed to be the judge of its own behavior.
I have written about a lot of different things in my career, everything from the art world to ROTC to ethics to sports to adventure, among many others subjects, and for many different magazines. But few of my friends know that for a while I was a contributing editor at Parenting Magazine and wrote about issues affecting children--their education, their upbringing, their moral training, whatever I was asked to do. Usually I was asked to write about the more serious subjects the magazine covered, and in 1990 they asked me to do a two-part series on child abuse: physical, emotional, and sexual. As part of my research I flew out to a center in California that treated the adult victims of child sexual abuse and interviewed a number of those victims at the offices of the center. They brought them in to me one by one, maybe five of them, and I sat with them for at least half an hour in each case, more in some.
It's hard to describe the impact these interviews had on me. These were adults, people in their thirties and forties, yet they were still suffering the effects of what had happened to them. One man in particular, whose own father had introduced him to sex, abusing him from the age of twelve to the age of sixteen, just broke my heart. They all broke my heart. After each interview I had to leave, walk outside for ten or fifteen minutes with a staff member, try to come down from the rage and sorrow these people's experiences left me with. This man, whom I called Phil, said that his father abused all his children, but only him sexually. When I talked to him he was in his thirties. He complied with it, he said, because he didn't know that all fathers didn't do that with their sons. He didn't begin to understand the impact it had on him until he went into therapy and discovered why he had been doing drugs for sixteen years, why he was so desperately unhappy, why his life was an absolute mess. "I've spent over $100,000 on drugs," he told me. "I don't trust people. It's cost me a few jobs because anybody in authority, I fear.... There's part of me that says I can't be attached to one person. I have a hard time understanding what love is, too." And here's the most ironic twist of all. His father, a military man, subsequently left the military and went back to school and became a therapist. Among his patients were people who had themselves been sexually abused as children. You can imagine how effective he was.
You don't forget stories like these, and I never have, and when the scandals about the Catholic Church and its attitude toward child sexual abusers among its priests broke, I took a particular interest in them. I had never been abused as a child, although my mother would spank my brother and me with a yardstick if we had done something unusually bad; but the yardstick almost invariably broke on our backsides, it stung more than it hurt, and neither of us ever thought we were being abused. We thought we were being punished, and we were. Pretty much always justifiably. But sexual abuse is something else entirely. All child abuse is bad and seriously damaging to the child, but sexual abuse is the worst. Children are not ready for sex. They don't understand it, it frightens them, it breaks boundaries they know instinctively exist but can't explain, and the shame associated with them is unbearable. It leads, as Phil explained, to fear, distrust, an inability to love, to a profoundly disturbed life. Priests are supposed to be, and are presented as, exemplars of trust, and trust is absolutely basic to the health of children. If they cannot trust they cannot thrive. The damage a priest could do to a child, I now knew, could be enormous and lifelong. And the response of the Church to these crimes was more than appalling. It was itself profoundly criminal.
And then the business at Penn State, in which a beloved coach, and the University authorities, did nothing to stop a sexual abuser in their midst.
None of this is news, of course, and that's not why I'm writing, to tell you something you don't know. Anyone with any depth of experience in the world knows that institutions will defend and protect their own at all costs, no matter what the price others must pay for their crimes. I saw it in the mental health system when I wrote my first book, saw how a profession rallied around one of its own even though the person in question was incompetent, to the point of monstrosity. But he was one of them. So with the priests. Priests, even a bishop, are beginning to be convicted for these crimes, which the Church treated as if they were minor sins. A few are in jail. But while they may be sins in the eyes of the Church, in the eyes of the world they are crimes, horrible crimes, as life-destroying as murder. And unforgiveable.
Why, then, am I writing? For Phil, and others like him. I got a firsthand glimpse of what child sexual abuse entails from him and those other people I talked to, and that's what's so often forgotten in the news surrounding scandals like these: the effects on the victims. Instead of protecting its priests, what the Catholic Church should be doing is trying to repair the damage, not just paying the victims off with money but repairing the damage, making the major reforms that are necessary to keep abusers out of the reach of children and taking the kind of look at themselves and what they stand for that they are still reluctant to take. There are many ways to destroy a life besides killing it. This is one of the worst, and this, these killing effects, is what should be the first consideration when we deal with an institution like the Church, or a university, or any organization that cares more for itself than the people it professes to serve. No institution should be allowed to be the judge of its own behavior.
Sunday, August 26, 2012
DEAR GOD
August 26, 2012:
The New York Times Magazine has a piece today about evangelical, or is it pentecostal, pastors backing away from their religious beliefs and becoming atheists. Organizations are springing up as support groups for these people, who are now worshiping Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other saints of this movement, instead of the usual saints, Peter, Paul, Mark, Mathew and the like.
I feel some compassion for these people. Jesus told his disciples at one point that they had to give up their family and friends to follow him. These apostates are doing precisely that not to follow him. The main focus of the piece, a man named Jerry DeWitt, has seen his wife walk out on him, has lost most of his friends, and has been shunned by his community in Louisiana since he went public with his loss of belief; and that seems unChristian to me. But the community no doubt feels betrayed. Jerry DeWitt once preached the Word to them. He gave fiery sermons that prompted his listeners to writhe on the floor and speak in tongues. One thing that makes a community is a common belief system, and here's this man, not only a believer but a leader, saying, not any more. I've been thinkin'. God doesn't make sense to me after all.
Here in the East we don't have a whole lot of pentecostal preachers, so all this seems quite bizarre. Speaking in tongues? I'd be happy to be fluent in French, but that's not what they mean. Most of my friends are atheists, or else religionless. They don't give God much thought, they don't go to church. Some are culturally Jewish, some, like me, culturally Protestant, still others lapsed Catholics like my wife, Lorraine. A few of them make a point of being Atheists with a capital A, but most don't. Those who do I find myself smiling at more often than not, primarily because their atheistic fervor is so close to the religious fervor they condemn.
I smile, too--no, smile is not the right word. I am bemused by them, puzzled, and by belief systems in general, for what they miss. Both sides. To be a fervent Christian in the fundamentalist mode is to miss the historicity of the Bible, which is a fascinating book precisely because it is such a human product, a bundle of legendary tales, contradictory advice, long, doubtful chronologies, weird Jewish laws, moving stories, and absurd miracles. It is to miss the astonishing growth of science, which is one of the glories of the human mind and the principal reason we now commonly live into our seventies and beyond instead of our forties. It is to miss the great pleasure of thinking for yourself--which, if there is a God, he surely had in mind as one of the tasks human beings were made for.
But the other side misses a great deal, too. They miss the feeling of community that comes with shared beliefs, they miss the help such communities can offer, and they miss the hope of some sort of life after death. But the greatest thing they miss is the mystery. The things we cannot explain, that make no scientific sense. Take psi phenomena. I studied this in high school, for what was called my "senior essay." Way back then J. B. Rhine was publishing books about his experiments with ESP, using cards with symbols which subjects guessed, and those with talent--it seems to be a talent--guessed correctly at odds that were astronomically improbable, while the results as a whole, from people evidently without any great talent, also showed very high levels of improbability. These tests have been repeated again and again and again, always with improved techniques and more controls, with results about the same. I once ran such a test of my own with my first wife, who always seemed to be saying what I was thinking, at the same time I was thinking it. I put her in another room with a piece of paper and asked her to draw whatever came into her head. I then went to another part of the house and drew a diagram on my own piece of paper. When we compared them, they were identical. We did it again. Same result.
The evidence for psi phenomena is quite strong, and there's a lot of it. And no explanation for it. How could it be that an image, a diagram, could travel through the space between my first wife and me with no carrier, no phone line, no energy transfer we know about? What gives with that? Or the evidence for reincarnation. There are a great many cases, all carefully investigated, the evidence run down, all possibilities for fraud checked out and discarded, for which reincarnation is the only available explanation. What are we to make of it? The CIA used remote viewers, people who can see things at a vast distance, to spy on Soviet military facilities; the information they provided turned out to be very useful, and largely accurate. That is another talent. But how does it work? Is consciousness not in fact confined to our brains? Could it be a field, like the magnetic field? We don't know. There is a great deal more we don't know. Why do subatomic particles not obey the laws of physics, except on a statistical basis? The writer Upton Sinclair was married to a woman who once described with extraordinary accuracy the picture on a postcard that a psychology professor from Harvard was carrying in his pocket. She could do this consistently, at large distances. No one has a clue how this works.
Science is full of similar mysteries. String theory? Get your mind around that if you can. The universe appeared out of nothing? According to some astrophysicists, yes.
The point is, we don't know. We have our little minds, our limited perspectives, and it is always dangerous to jump to conclusions. No God? Maybe not. Or maybe. Withhold judgment. Look up at the stars, imagine if you can the billion or two of them in our own galaxy, then multiply that by the billion or so other galaxies in the known universe--that's the visible galaxies--and you begin to realize, it's not about us. It puts a whole different spin on the God business. It encourages modesty on our part, true modesty, an understanding of how deeply insignificant we are. It should fill us with wonder. There is clearly more going on than we can understand at this preliminary stage in our evolution. We don't have all the answers; neither side does. The thing to do, then, is to keep an open mind. Live with what John Keats called "negative capability," the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and not surrender to the need to choose between them. And while you wait for resolution, which is unlikely to come, live like a child. Let yourself be amazed whenever the chickadees come to feed out of your hand.
The New York Times Magazine has a piece today about evangelical, or is it pentecostal, pastors backing away from their religious beliefs and becoming atheists. Organizations are springing up as support groups for these people, who are now worshiping Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other saints of this movement, instead of the usual saints, Peter, Paul, Mark, Mathew and the like.
I feel some compassion for these people. Jesus told his disciples at one point that they had to give up their family and friends to follow him. These apostates are doing precisely that not to follow him. The main focus of the piece, a man named Jerry DeWitt, has seen his wife walk out on him, has lost most of his friends, and has been shunned by his community in Louisiana since he went public with his loss of belief; and that seems unChristian to me. But the community no doubt feels betrayed. Jerry DeWitt once preached the Word to them. He gave fiery sermons that prompted his listeners to writhe on the floor and speak in tongues. One thing that makes a community is a common belief system, and here's this man, not only a believer but a leader, saying, not any more. I've been thinkin'. God doesn't make sense to me after all.
Here in the East we don't have a whole lot of pentecostal preachers, so all this seems quite bizarre. Speaking in tongues? I'd be happy to be fluent in French, but that's not what they mean. Most of my friends are atheists, or else religionless. They don't give God much thought, they don't go to church. Some are culturally Jewish, some, like me, culturally Protestant, still others lapsed Catholics like my wife, Lorraine. A few of them make a point of being Atheists with a capital A, but most don't. Those who do I find myself smiling at more often than not, primarily because their atheistic fervor is so close to the religious fervor they condemn.
I smile, too--no, smile is not the right word. I am bemused by them, puzzled, and by belief systems in general, for what they miss. Both sides. To be a fervent Christian in the fundamentalist mode is to miss the historicity of the Bible, which is a fascinating book precisely because it is such a human product, a bundle of legendary tales, contradictory advice, long, doubtful chronologies, weird Jewish laws, moving stories, and absurd miracles. It is to miss the astonishing growth of science, which is one of the glories of the human mind and the principal reason we now commonly live into our seventies and beyond instead of our forties. It is to miss the great pleasure of thinking for yourself--which, if there is a God, he surely had in mind as one of the tasks human beings were made for.
But the other side misses a great deal, too. They miss the feeling of community that comes with shared beliefs, they miss the help such communities can offer, and they miss the hope of some sort of life after death. But the greatest thing they miss is the mystery. The things we cannot explain, that make no scientific sense. Take psi phenomena. I studied this in high school, for what was called my "senior essay." Way back then J. B. Rhine was publishing books about his experiments with ESP, using cards with symbols which subjects guessed, and those with talent--it seems to be a talent--guessed correctly at odds that were astronomically improbable, while the results as a whole, from people evidently without any great talent, also showed very high levels of improbability. These tests have been repeated again and again and again, always with improved techniques and more controls, with results about the same. I once ran such a test of my own with my first wife, who always seemed to be saying what I was thinking, at the same time I was thinking it. I put her in another room with a piece of paper and asked her to draw whatever came into her head. I then went to another part of the house and drew a diagram on my own piece of paper. When we compared them, they were identical. We did it again. Same result.
The evidence for psi phenomena is quite strong, and there's a lot of it. And no explanation for it. How could it be that an image, a diagram, could travel through the space between my first wife and me with no carrier, no phone line, no energy transfer we know about? What gives with that? Or the evidence for reincarnation. There are a great many cases, all carefully investigated, the evidence run down, all possibilities for fraud checked out and discarded, for which reincarnation is the only available explanation. What are we to make of it? The CIA used remote viewers, people who can see things at a vast distance, to spy on Soviet military facilities; the information they provided turned out to be very useful, and largely accurate. That is another talent. But how does it work? Is consciousness not in fact confined to our brains? Could it be a field, like the magnetic field? We don't know. There is a great deal more we don't know. Why do subatomic particles not obey the laws of physics, except on a statistical basis? The writer Upton Sinclair was married to a woman who once described with extraordinary accuracy the picture on a postcard that a psychology professor from Harvard was carrying in his pocket. She could do this consistently, at large distances. No one has a clue how this works.
Science is full of similar mysteries. String theory? Get your mind around that if you can. The universe appeared out of nothing? According to some astrophysicists, yes.
The point is, we don't know. We have our little minds, our limited perspectives, and it is always dangerous to jump to conclusions. No God? Maybe not. Or maybe. Withhold judgment. Look up at the stars, imagine if you can the billion or two of them in our own galaxy, then multiply that by the billion or so other galaxies in the known universe--that's the visible galaxies--and you begin to realize, it's not about us. It puts a whole different spin on the God business. It encourages modesty on our part, true modesty, an understanding of how deeply insignificant we are. It should fill us with wonder. There is clearly more going on than we can understand at this preliminary stage in our evolution. We don't have all the answers; neither side does. The thing to do, then, is to keep an open mind. Live with what John Keats called "negative capability," the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time and not surrender to the need to choose between them. And while you wait for resolution, which is unlikely to come, live like a child. Let yourself be amazed whenever the chickadees come to feed out of your hand.
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