Complexity

"This has nothing to do with concern for babies.  It has to do with power over women."  The second sentence (from a letter to the New York Times) is clearly true, the first sentence is demonstrably false – just talk to some of those passionate, committed women on the picket lines outside abortion clinics.  Their concerns may be sentimental, biologically incoherent, and often rooted in an unquestioning religious faith, but they’re genuine.  What purpose is served by blurring them to nothing but a rigid patriarchal intent?  Or does the rhetoric of power become a mechanism for erasing them from the debate altogether?

"The Republicans don't give a hoot about what happens to an unwanted baby after it is born.  They don't give any thought to a young woman's life being entirely derailed by a forced birth."  Also demonstrably untrue.  Witness the various organizations and people devoting time and resources to pregnancy centers that purport to supply pre- and post-natal care to mother and child.  These efforts are pathetic, inadequate, stupidly idealistic, and have next to no useful political backing.  But they are part of the complexity of the people who are committed to the anti-abortion cause.  Why deny it?

Kathryn Janus, the letter writer I've been quoting, ends her piece "If women don't turn out in droves to vote these people out, then we deserve what we get."  She is surely correct about that and her anger is surely a much better motivator than my musings about the worldviews of the heartsick women tramping around outside the abortion clinics harassing other women who are likely even more heartsick than they.

Why does it matter to me?  Surely any political strategist would school me on the necessity of crisp and compelling messaging.  But I'm not campaigning here.  I'm trying to understand why people believe the things that they do, particularly when those beliefs are so contrary to my own. 

That the sole intent of the anti-abortion movement is to exert control over women has been a standard rhetorical trope for decades.  Certainly the image of elderly white guy politicians piously declaring that they know best what should be done for all women in all cases exemplifies this.  And perhaps it’s only these politicians that Janus has in mind when she rails against “the Republicans” (but I hope she’s not forgetting the very many women who echo them).  Maybe she’s not thinking at all about the rank-and-file who actually make up the movement.  But if it weren’t for the muscle, the voices, and the boots on the ground provided by those who are passionately devoted to protecting the innocent babies, those politicians wouldn’t have anyone they’d feel the need to pander to.

There’s a little more traction to the claim that the anti-abortion forces don’t care what happens to the babies after they’re born.  Let's say they don't seem to care enough.  In the wake of Dobbs there was a brief flurry of articles by anti-abortion activists about the need to expand pre- and post-natal care and to do a better job of providing safe alternatives to abortion, but those people are a faint minority within the movement.  Their efforts are hamstrung by the fact that marshaling the resources required to do those things well conflicts with conservative anti-government views.  It’s one thing to use government to make abortion illegal, it’s quite another to use government funding to expand financial assistance to poor women.  So the efforts that exist are community and church based, without sufficient financial backing, and rife with manipulation and deceit.  Judge Coney Barrett’s belief that all these unwanted babies can be happily adopted may be grotesquely ignorant of the facts and those pregnancy centers may provide just a pale shadow of the support that many pregnant women actually need, but some degree of worry for the well-being of mother and child is undeniably a part of the psychological complexity of those who would still willingly force both into lives of misery and regret. 

Why do these nuances matter to me?  Is there any practical benefit?  The immediate, practical need is to motivate enough people to get to the polls in key races to insure that the Senate, at least, remains in Democratic hands after the midterms.  Lindsey Graham’s ham-fisted attempt at pandering was a welcome gift,  highlighting the dangers that a Republican majority in the Senate will bring.  Surely nit-picking about the varied motivations driving those in the anti-abortion movement is a waste of energy and effort?

But I don’t seem to be able to help it.  It’s not that I think recognizing and acknowledging these complexities will lead to some tactical advantage in the fight.  Maybe even the opposite – if  we grant that some of our antagonists are motivated by other desires than simply crushing women, does that make it harder to get the voter turnout that, at this particularly critical moment, is the thing that matters most?  We don’t need to change anybody’s minds (at least in the short run).  Poll after survey after poll after survey consistently show that the majority believes that abortion must remain available.  Protecting that right isn’t a matter of persuading the electorate; it is entirely a matter of getting people out to vote.

Nonetheless, there is something corrosive in burnishing away the complexities of the arguments of our political opponents.  It might feel like clarifying the issues, cutting away the extraneous material and getting to the heart of what’s most important. The abstraction creates a clearer target, one that’s easier to strike.  But it’s not the truth.  We demean those we disagree with when we turn them into caricatures and we weaken the force of our own arguments.  I'm not willing to go there.  I’m not trying to understand those people because I think that’ll make me feel more kindly to them.  I just want to see things as they really are.  So I cringe when I read pieces that engage in that over-simplification.  Those on the right and the far right and the fringe right have always been so good at demonizing their opponents through caricature.  How can those on my side of the fight justly revile those excesses if we fall into them ourselves?

The inescapable dilemma of the abortion question is the lack of a shared understanding of what moral and legal rights the fetus has and how those rights develop during the period of fertilization to birth.  The anti-abortion forces, in their aversion to ambiguity, have decided that those rights are fully inherent from the moment of conception.  Dilemma solved.  But there is at least as much logic and science and history in the position that those rights are not fully in place until birth (or at least, viability).  In the absence of any consensus about which of these views is “correct”, the state has to stay neutral.  It may not be the most comfortable position, but it’s the only one that obeys the principle of not privileging one particular religious or ethical point of view.  That this is completely unacceptable to those who “know” in the core of their being that the zygote is a full human being is no surprise.  They’ve simplified all the ambiguity out of their position.  It leaves them no choice but to act as they do.

Insisting that the issue is entirely one of maintaining power over women is an equivalent simplification.  It scrapes away the difficulties around handling competing rights in a secular society.  Those complexities make the pro-choice position a challenging one.  In every individual case the choice to have an abortion requires making predictions about likely futures, balancing rights and potential outcomes.  It’s serious stuff, very different from the satisfying simplicity of those who claim to be pro-life.  It’s not always a difficult decision – often the circumstances make the right choice very clear.  But whether she agonizes over it or not, the choice requires a series of judgment calls that have to be made in full consideration of the impact that the decision will have on the mother and everyone in the mother’s orbit.   Only she has the ethical standing to make those calls.  When the state interferes, it takes a side, imposing the frightening moral certainty of the abortion foe.  The ethics of our Constitution demand that we resist.  Fortunately, most Americans agree.  Now those same ethical imperatives require that they vote.  If not, as Janus writes, "then we deserve what we get!"


Age Appropriate

Josie was six when she met Mark and Philly.  Was it too soon?

Lynn and her daughter Marian (Josie’s mom) had a conference in Maui.  Josie and I tagged along. It was our usual arrangement, me tending to the grandkid while they took care of whatever the business required.  Mark and Philly were living on the Big Island in those days.  We took a puddle jumper over and stayed with them for a couple of nights.  Mark met us at the airport, we had lunch, then swung by to pick up Philly for some sightseeing.  Josie’s always been an open and friendly kid, but you’d’ve thought she’d known Philly forever.  We stopped at a Quick Mart so he could pick up snacks and bottled water.  Josie said, “I’ll go!” and we watched them walk in hand in hand.  Mark said wryly, “Looks like your six year old and my six year old are getting along just fine”.  Philly was genuinely interested in Josie, no condescension. Treated her like the full human being she was. Some adults have a hard time doing that.  Josie recognized a kindred soul.

Mark and Philly had been married seven years by then (I’d been the best man, back in Boston) and together nearly ten years before that.  They had a pretty little house on the lower slopes of a dormant volcano.  There were feral kittens in the yard and we talked with Josie about what their names might be.  One night we all went outside and watched the Perseid meteor shower, an explosion of lights and drama that we’d never be able to see in Alabama.  We looked into the caldera of Kilauea and went swimming with the sea turtles at Waikōloa Beach. 

I think Philly’d had some sort of high-powered job when I first met him (insurance? finance? something lawyerly? I never paid it much attention), but on Hawai’i he’d settled into early retirement and domesticity.  He and Mark had an easy, teasing rapport, the patterned rhythms of two quite different people who’ve been making a life together for a long time; Mark, the entrepreneur, the instigator, the innovator, the adventurer, the social director; Philly, a little shy, perpetually bemused smile, alert to the sensibilities and sensitivities of the people around him.  It was easy to be there.  They liked having guests, knew how to tend to their comfort without any undue fuss.  One night Philly fixed a fabulously elaborate dinner while Josie followed him around, ostensibly helping.  He gave her little tasks, praised her, listened to her.  She was content, happy, secure and at home.  When Mark drove us to the airport, Philly stood on the doorstep sobbing while Josie waved goodbye out the back window snurfling her tears.

A year later (2012), Mike Huckabee organized “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day” and Josie’s dad & step-mom (she was spending every other weekend with them) were eager to show their support for the corporation’s anti-marriage equality stance by joining the throngs getting sandwiches.  Chick-fil-A was one of Josie's favorites and they offered to take her even though it was mid-week.  Marian asked her, “Do you know why they’re having a special day to buy Chick-fil-A?”  “Because they love the food?” said Josie, a little puzzled by the question.  “No, it’s because they don’t think people like Mark & Philly should be able to get married because they’re both men.”

Josie was shocked.  “But they love each other!  They belong together!” she sputtered, outraged at the wrongness of it.

She was in 2nd grade.  Imagine, if you will, that Alabama’s HB322, signed into law in the spring of 2022, was in place back then.  It commands that teachers in kindergarten through fifth grade “shall not engage in classroom discussion ... regarding sexual orientation or gender identity in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate...”

Picture her talking with her friend Troy, expressing her outrage, but to her surprise, Troy says, “Two guys can’t be married!  Jesus says so!”  “Does not!” says Josie, stung, although now she’s not sure.  They go running to the teacher.  “Miss Emily!” says Josie.  “Troy says my friends Mark and Philly can’t be married, but they love each other!”  Troy interrupts.  “Tell her it’s bad, Miss Emily!  My Dad told me!”

What is poor Miss Emily to do?  What can she say that’s “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate”?  She’s diligently combed through the Alabama Core Teaching Standards and the Alabama Educator Code of Ethics as instructed by the State Board of Education. No clear guidance there.  What she knows very well, however, is that if a parent complains, disciplinary action with the very real possibility of being fired is likely.  Perhaps it’s safest to derail the topic entirely.  “That’s not something we talk about in school.”  Maybe that’s the best she can do.  Maybe it’s what she believes anyway.

The kids will talk, of course.  They’ll fill in the gaps as best they can, aware they’ve touched on something forbidden and not quite sure what to make of it.  Josie’s confused now.  Has she done something wrong?  How is it possible that her teacher could think there was something wrong about Mark & Philly, something so bad that it can’t even be talked about?

These laws (Alabama’s is based on Florida’s) are billed as protecting parents’ rights, but which parent’s rights being violated now?  Marian wants her daughter to grow up to be loving and accepting and supportive of people who are trying to make their way through a complicated world.  Doesn’t she have a right to expect the public schools to reinforce this?  Why are the rights of the parents who want to shield their children from even knowing about the existence of homosexuality more important and worthy of being enshrined in law than Marian’s? 

Was it developmentally inappropriate for Josie to get to know a married gay couple when she was in the first grade?  It’s true that this exposure had a big impact on her.  Having spent a couple of days in Mark and Philly’s company, for ever after it will be impossible to convince her that there’s something wrong about two men who love each other being married.  Is this what the law is trying to prevent?  Is this what those parents are afraid of?

“Age Appropriate”.  Such a loaded phrase.  What does it mean?  Educators spend a lot of time examining the research on child development, psychological and physical, to make recommendations about what sorts of material across all subjects is “appropriate” for kids at different ages.  But the freaked out parents and the politicians who pander to them aren’t looking at research and they certainly don’t trust education experts.  Who knows better than me what’s best for my kid? 

The fundamentalist Christian belief train runs something like this:  Sex outside of marriage is wrong.  Children are impressionable, easily tempted to do the wrong thing.  Tell them not to do something and that’s what they’ll want to do.  Tell them about sex at all, and about deviant sex in particular, and they’ll want to try it out.  It’s the wickedness in their natures.  At home, the parent can at least try to control what they hear and see.  (For digital natives in 21st century America this is, of course, impossible, but parents have always been good at fooling themselves about the control they have over what their children know).

Is the fear that if a teacher speaks approvingly of a homosexual relationship it will somehow entice the child to become gay?   Or is it more insidious – that the teacher secretly wants to turn the kids gay and is seductively nudging them into it. They’re groomers!  It’s the homosexual agenda.  They can’t have kids of  their own so they have to take ours!  Groomers are everywhere!  (Three years ago, Twitter averaged 940 “groomer” mentions a day; by the time the Governor of Florida signed his version of the bill it was up to 11,000; a week later, 80,000.)  Does it seem strange that these parents have so little confidence in their children’s sexuality that they believe the kids can so easily be turned?  If you need to try that hard to keep the kids properly rooted in their assigned gender with the proper opposite sex attraction, doesn’t that imply it’s not all that hard-wired to begin with? 

There’s a bit of sleight of hand in the way the law is phrased.  It seems to say that discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity is allowed, as long as it’s done in an age appropriate or developmentally appropriate way.  Isn’t that reasonable?  But the people behind the law are more straightforward – Senator  Shelnutt, who introduced the amendment, said, “We don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about homosexuality and gender identity in schools, they should be learning about math.”  Not appropriate ever.  Which keeps the decision making easy and unambiguous.

The only sex education that Alabama’s ever required is that at some point between 5th and 12th grade kids have to be told about HIV/AIDS, presumably for the purpose of terrifying them that sex equals death.  Beyond that individual school systems are on their own.  Up until 2021 it was required that if there was any sex education it must emphasize abstinence and stress that homosexuality is socially unacceptable and illegal in the state.  That latter point has not been true since the Supreme Court ruling in 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas) but the law stayed on the books.  The clause about homosexuality was finally removed when the law was revised to require students to use the restrooms of their assigned birth gender.  Grandmotherly Kay Ivey, who’d been Lt. Governor before being propelled to the Governor’s chair when the previous occupant was kicked out due to a sex scandal, said, “There are very real challenges facing our young people, especially with today’s societal pressures and modern culture. I believe very strongly that if the Good Lord made you a boy, you are a boy, and if he made you a girl, you are a girl.”  It’s that revised law to which Senator Shelnutt attached his amendment.

All of which makes me think I’ve been asking the wrong question.  I wanted to understand better what these parents are so afraid of, but maybe that’s not it at all.  These parents aren’t just motivated by an irrational fear of what might happen to their darling children, they’re responding to an unquenchable determination to do what’s right.  And not just for their kids, but for all kids.  For the good of the nation.

The Christianist (Christian nationalist) tendency has always been strong in this country, particularly here in the South, but it is now in the ascendent nationwide, more overt than ever.  Here’s Colorado Representative Boebert, “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk. ... The church is supposed to direct the government.  The government is not supposed to direct the church.  That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it." 

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," says the Constitution, and how very difficult this has turned out to be in practice.  The Christian High School coach who performatively prays on the 50-yard line after each game and invites any student who wishes to join him is ostracizing those who refuse the invitation, but the Supreme Court ignores what that does to their right of free exercise. The secular humanist expects the state to be neutral.  It expects that the governor should not let her very strong belief on the nature of boys and girls lead her to sign laws infringing on the rights of those who believe differently.  The Christianist thinks such neutrality is absurd, ungodly, dangerous.  There can only be one truth.

In Miami-Dade County the County Citizens Defending Freedom has successfully led the drive to revoke the approval of two sex ed textbooks for middle & high school.  The CCDF is a fledgling Christianist organization determined to “empower citizens to defend their freedom and liberty, and place local government back into the hands of the people.”  The sentiments sound lofty, but in practice it's all about sex and what kids are exposed to in schools and libraries.  Particularly critical is making sure there is no mention of abortion or homosexuality.  What is especially chilling, and revealing, is that the CCDF leadership either homeschool or put their kids in private school.  So they’ve already got their own kids protected.  Miami-Dade has an opt-out policy for any parent who is uncomfortable with any portion of the approved sex ed curriculum, but CCDF’s defense of liberty and freedom does not extend to empowering parents who want their children to get an education the CCDF leadership disapproves of.  They’re determined to protect all the children even if the kids’ own parents won’t.  Similar actions are occurring all across the country as Christianist activists take over local school boards.

There was an essay recently in the NYT about the importance of good sex education throughout grade school.  The authors describe the research, all the data showing how teen pregnancy is reduced, domestic violence and bullying are less frequent, people are happier and healthier, society as a whole is improved.  They’re not wrong, but they're missing the point.  They’re presuming a shared interest in the outcomes.  The Christianist is focused on keeping their child (and yours) from sin.  All that other stuff is distraction.

People like me want Miss Emily to say that what Mark and Philly share is just as good and valuable as what any other happily married couple have.  That’s all.  But Troy’s father is determined to see that Troy grows up believing the opposite.  He can’t protect Troy forever from “today’s societal pressures and modern culture” but he is damned well going to try.  That’s his job as a good dad.

Every parent wants to protect their kid, wants them to grow up to do what’s right.  Troy’s father wants him to be a good Christian.  Marian wants to protect Josie from the meanness that comes from intolerance.  They both know that homosexuality exists.  Troy’s father wants to protect him from that knowledge as long as possible.  Marian wants her daughter to know it’s okay.

There isn’t any way to reconcile these.  A more modest Christianity remembers Jesus’ admonition to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the thing that are God’s” and thinks it means being mindful of the two separate realms (this is how I was taught it in Catholic grade school).  The Christianist rejects this interpretation utterly.  There can be no compromise on the things that are God’s.

In the world the Christianists are trying to create there are no blurry edges at the borders of a binary sexuality.  There is no ambiguity about right and wrong.  People understand what their place is and the only legitimate use of government is to enforce the rules of behavior.  Troy’s dad wants his son to grow up straight and true.  But much sooner than he imagines, the boy will see the disconnect between the real world he lives in and the world his parents wish it to be.  The books he’s not supposed to read, the videos he’s not supposed to watch, the people he’s not supposed to meet, all will show him a real world that is far more complex, strange, and wonderful than the narrow world of his father, tightly bounded as it is by fear, anger, self-loathing and hate.  He’ll have to learn to deny one or the other. What will that do to his sense of self, of family, of how he ought to behave with other people?  How will he try to protect his own kids, if that time ever comes?  And from what?

Josie is a senior now and encouragingly sane.  She’s been doing some work for me afternoons this summer, so we talk.  “Are you sure you’re not hiding some deep trauma,” I tease?  She laughs and assures me she’s fine.  Asked how she’d like to be described she says, “optimistic”.  She prides herself on being a good friend.  She’s the peacemaker among her group of Southern girls.  She tells me how she and her friends use social media, as an enhancement of their IRL relationships, not a substitute.  They stay away from the drama and the hateful stuff.  She keeps her phone nearby but never makes me feel I’m competing  for her attention.  I ask what kind of sex ed she’s gotten, and she says, “The basics, in 5th grade.”  A bit in a hygiene class when she was a freshman and there’ll be a bit more this year.  Never a mention of contraception or homosexuality.  But in a world awash in sex and romance and pornography she thinks that she and her friends – male and female – have a pretty accurate and healthy knowledge about sex, “about how people ought to treat each other.”  She has high standards for relationships, won’t put up with disrespect or deceit from the boys she’s been involved with.  Where did this knowledge come from?  She’s thoughtful.  “I don’t really know.  It’s just... there.”

A great deal from her Mom, for sure.  Some from me and Lynn, who’ve been with her since the day she was born.  And certainly some has roots in a pretty little house on the slope of a volcano where she met her friends Mark and Philly at such a terribly inappropriate age.


This Deadly Simplicity

Ambiguity is tough for a lot of people.  They crave the bright lines that separate good and evil.  Wrestling with moral questions is frightening and hard and you’re never sure you’ve gotten it right.  Who’d want that?  Much more reassuring to have simple and unambiguous principles to determine your decisions.  Hence the moral rectitude of the anti-abortion activists.

It is only when we inject into the issue questions of subjectivity (like wantedness) or religions (like ensoulment), existential ones (like sentience), theological ones (like human dignity) or sociological ones (like quality of life), that we find ample room for uncertainty and disagreement. These are important, enduring questions. But they are not questions upon which the basic, inalienable right of an individual life should depend.

But why not?  This is from an NYT opinion piece celebrating the downfall of Roe v. Wade.  The writer (a research professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary),  believes “that abortion unjustly ends the life of a being that is fully human, a life that exists independently of the will of the mother, is self-organizing and unique, developing yet complete in itself...”  She comes to this belief by explicitly refusing to consider any of those subjective, religious, existential, theological, or sociological questions that she rightly says might cause uncertainty.  On what does this “basic, inalienable right of an individual life” depend?  She doesn’t feel the need to say.  For her, it is so clearly and comfortingly obvious that it completely eliminates any need to consider those challenging questions (important and enduring though they be).

What fascinates me even more than the incoherence is the blinding arrogance.  Having clarified that her belief is not subject to questions subjective, religious, existential, theological, or sociological, she is nonetheless so committed to the truth of it that she has no hesitation in calling on the full weight of the secular state to enforce the consequences of her belief upon the majority of people who do not share it.  What a comfort it must be to have such an unassailable moral core.  But how intellectually weird.

“If you believe as I do...” she says, the chain of consequent actions is clear.  But what if we don’t believe as you do?  On what basis does your belief carry greater moral weight than mine?  She doesn’t appear to grasp that this could even be an issue.  She’s been liberated from ambiguity.

Their opponents accuse the anti-abortion activists of hypocrisy.  “If your dedication to the sanctity of life were as fundamental as you say it is, you’d be objecting to capital punishment and war and advocating for more comprehensive gun control with just as much passion as you bring to marching back and forth in front of abortion clinics.”  They smugly think they’ve won a point.  But I understand why the activists won’t take those issues on.  They don’t provide the clear freedom from ambiguity that saving those innocent babies does.

The woman who chooses abortion also chooses to accept the moral responsibility for the consequences of ending the potential of that human life.  She accepts responsibility for weighing the difficult questions and making the best moral choice she can.  Does the anti-abortion crusader accept responsibility for the wrecked lives her successful campaign will result in?  More women will die.  More children will be born into poverty and misery.  More will spend their blighted childhoods in the over-burdened foster care pipeline.  More healthy, happy babies will not be born because an abortion that would have given a young woman a chance for a secure and successful life was denied her.  The crusader chooses not to live with any of those consequences.  She can lay the responsibility off on the poor choices the woman made in the first place, or the family that didn’t step up, or, if all else fails, the surety that “God has a plan”. 

She's absolved herself from considering those uncomfortable subjective, religious, existential, theological, and sociological questions.  She keeps her thought processes clear.  She keeps her focus narrow.  She’s saving babies.  That’s what matters.  God will sort the rest out.  It is all so unambiguously clear.


Carbon

She was dazzled by the carbon paper.  "I don't understand how this works!" she said, running her finger down each side.  I showed her how to put it between two clean sheets of paper in order to make a copy.  She's fascinated.  Astonished.

It's the summer between her sophomore and junior years of high school.  She had a month between commitments so I hired her to help me sort through old files.  We got into a cabinet that I haven't opened since moving it into the keep-out room 22 years ago.

There was a fat file labelled "poems in redundant drafts."  Many versions of poems I was working on in the mid-eighties.  (Why I felt compelled to keep all of the drafts is a question I don't feel qualified to answer.)  "I wrote on a typewriter," I told her.  "Typed out a poem, and then I made revisions in pen or pencil and then I typed it again."  Three or four versions in a day, according to the dates at the top of each sheet.  I used carbon paper to keep a copy of the one I mailed to the magazines.  She can't quite visualize it.  The unconnected world.

I tell her about traveling with a heavy portable (luggable) computer back in 1990.  About modems and phone lines and disk drives that had their own power supplies.  "You don't know what a floppy disc is, do you?"  She shakes her head, trying to peer through me into the distant past.  I tell her about taking the silver dip pen and a bottle of ink and a volume of Tom Jefferson's complete works into the class I was teaching about the internet and copyright.  That was in 2000 and the students were in their late teens. The kids passed the pen and bottle around and gingerly wrote their names. I held up the book, "Now imagine using that to write all of this." They were impressed, but they still had bits of memories of a pre-internet world.  But Josie was born in 2005.

Carbon paper.  Typewriters.  I didn't attempt to explain a mimeograph machine.  She'd had a similar reaction a year and a half ago when her Mom gave her a Crosley turntable and a vinyl record for Christmas.  She'd turn the record over.  "Why does it have two sides?  I don't understand how it works!"

In my study, with the amazing carbon sheet in hand she said it again, but then, "But my phone, the CDs, DVDs, I don't understand how any of it works!"  She's brilliant at using the devices in her world, of course.  But she has no comprehension of how they work.

I turned her age in 1971.   When my Dad told me about the world he lived in as a boy, thirty-five years earlier, I could understand how it worked.  We lived in the same electro-mechanical world, principles established during the industrial revolution.  Television wasn't around yet, but you could imagine it as an extension of the radio.  When it arrived, he knew how to tinker with it.  Jet engines were built from the same underlying dynamics as automobile engines.  Things got faster and more efficient from his boyhood to mine, but the technologies were fundamentally the same.  He understood how the things in my boyhood worked, and I knew the same about his.

The half century following the invention of the moveable type press is the incunabula period, European civilization being reshaped by the impact of inexpensive, uniformly replicable books, and the technological and cultural transformations they set in motion.  Our Gutenberg moment, analogous to the days those first printed books went on sale, occurred in the fall of 1994 when Netscape was released -- the first widely available graphic internet browser. 

By 1500, printed books were no longer curiosities, game attempts at emulating the handmade books of previous centuries.  They were the standard means of knowledge transmission, with dozens of printers and publishers across Europe vying to tap into the new markets.  Among the crucial innovations was the widespread adoption of the size called octavo – a book that could easily fit into a saddlebag.  New knowledge spanning the continent as fast as a rider could take it.

Our incunabula period ended when the iPhone launched, barely a dozen years after Netscape.  Now Josie carries the internet in her hip pocket.  That feels natural.  A world of carbon paper and typewriters is nearly inconceivable.   I straddle the two worlds, writing in my leather-bound journal with a good fountain pen, then shifting to my laptop to write things I can easily share.  I'm not nostalgic for the world we're leaving behind.  I feel lucky that I get to taste them both and that I can tell Josie tall tales about the ways of the world before.

 

 

 


Heaney At The Hirshhorn

Watched him chat politely.  They'd hand him a book.  He'd ask a question, then nod, sign, hand it back smiling.  Then he’d look out over the big crowd loosely lined up, inching toward the table. Cloud of curly hair, the thickets of sideburns framing his face, kind eyes, inquisitive, the rectangle glasses perched on the big nose.  So familiar.  It was a loud space, excited happy chatter bouncing off the polished surfaces outside the auditorium.  The reading had been a great success.  He was funny and self-deprecating, leaven for the deep seriousness of the poems.  He enjoyed performing.  He was good at it.  His voice rolled across the cadences, the troubled history of Ireland wound round his own humble beginnings, the precision of his Belfast accent on the d, the clackety-clack roll of the r.  He was still eight years from the Nobel, but he was the most famous poet alive.

When Sandy and I were half a dozen or so people back, a quizzical look crossed his face as he saw us.  Now, after each signing, he cast the same look toward us.  Bit of a smile.  Trying to remember.  Finally at the table, I handed him Station Island.  He said, apologetically, “I know we’ve met before…”  I was shy, tentative.  “Yes, I brought you to Oshkosh…”  “Oshkosh!” he leapt up, huge grin, laughing, grabbed my hand with both of his.  “Oshkosh!  That was the wildest night I’ve ever spent in America!”  He signed “for Scott & Sandy  Yippee for Oshkosh!  Seamus Heaney  1.2.87”  We pledged to write to each other. 

I’d no idea what I was doing five years earlier when I invited him.  I was the editor of The Wisconsin Review, the school’s lit mag.  I had some money for programming.  He’d recently started teaching at Harvard and signed with an agency to do a college tour.  I booked him. 

A year before that, fall of 1981, we’d been going to Fred’s every Wednesday night to listen to Fire & Ice, the jazz quartet.  Fred, taciturn Chippewa, had a little dive near the river, and there were plenty of nights when the number of people in the band exceeded the number of us sitting along the bar.  So we got to know the regulars.  Segnitz taught at UWO, the local outpost of the vast state university system.  He was the Review’s advisor and eventually he told me he could arrange for me to take over as editor when I started grad school in January.  If I was interested.  Willing.

When I was six and home with a fever, upstairs in the small bedroom on the east side of the house, I wrote my first poem.  It was about Superman.  I remember feeling giddy seeing how rhythm and rhyme bounced against meaning.  Mysterious and perplexing.  Thrilling.  It baffled and excited me.  From forever I needed to write.  But what?  But how?

By the time I was spending those Wednesday nights at Fred’s, talking with Segnitz about my literary aspirations, I’d been imagining myself a fiction writer, poems on the side.  There’d be novels and short stories, although I had only the vaguest notion of how to construct either.  I was immersed in science fiction and fantasy.  In the big enclosed front porch of the apartment Sandy and I rented on Washington Avenue I strung cords from window to window over the table and paper clipped character sketches and maps and mini-histories of a world and culture that I was trying to create, inspired by Fritz Lieber and the dozens of SF and fantasy books I’d read through my teen years. It was building worlds that fascinated me.  I had shades of characters, vague plot concepts.  But I didn’t know how to make it cohere.  I had a few stories that I was sending out to the magazines.  They kept sending them back. 

More than a decade before that, once I got my early teen hands on a guitar, I’d thought I’d be a songwriter.  I wrote dozens of ‘em.  Not that I knew anything about song structure or about chord progressions.  My lyrics were primitive angst.  “Twisted shadows in the rain…”  “Every time I think of you / I start to cry…”  That kind of thing.  But I learned.  My lyrics got a little better, my guitar chops and composing skills improved.  By the time I got to JFK Prep for my junior year of high school, I was a better singer and player than most of my contemporaries.  I played the standards of the time – the Bob Dylan songs, Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young, Crosby Stills & Nash, James Taylor – interspersed with a few of my own.  Fewer as years went by.

I was serious enough about music that after I fled high school in the wake of the cocaine scandal and spent an aimless half year at the plastics factory (finishing my courses by mail), when Kevin persuaded me to go on to college I decided to be a music major.  The structure fascinated me.  The puzzles of keys and progressions.  Tension and release.  Why did that sequence of sounds compel that series of emotions?  A tug beyond words.  I wanted to know how to make it happen.

At the community college, studying with Frank Doverspike, it seemed plausible.  My parents managed to rent a good upright piano.  I took lessons.  I wrote simple compositions, pored over Bach and Beethoven scores.  I could see myself as if I had a future as a composer.  Davey and I fantasized about writing a rock opera.  But then I got to UW-Milwaukee, which had a very serious music program with serious, distinguished music faculty and very serious and cutthroat music students.  It became quite clear quite quickly that success in this world required a single-minded devotion to the art and craft that I was unwilling to make.  I was too interested in too many things (and too intimidated by the other students).  By the middle of the next semester I was no longer a music major.  I loaded up on Philosophy and English classes.

I kept writing, looking for my beat.  Songs, poems, stories.  I took a class with James Liddy, the Irish poet.  The San Francisco Renaissance.  Read Spicer, Duncan, Snyder, Ferlinghetti.  Ginsberg.   Nights, after supper and getting stoned with my housemates, I’d make my way to Axel’s to carouse with Liddy and the poets.  Loud and profane and mad with the love of language.  Scandalous Penglase and his tales of student seductions. One night, to the great amusement of the assembled, Joe Henry, the IRA gunrunner, showed up with Miriam Ben-Shalom, the lesbian Zionist who was suing the US Army for kicking her out (for being a lesbian, not for being a Zionist).  Apparently the fires they recognized in each other were much stronger than the obvious differences and contradictions – for one passionate week, at least.  (And how did I end up one night in Miriam’s leather jacket?)  I read Ulysses for the first time.  I read it for pleasure because the poets talked about what a rollicking and wild fun read it was.  I loved it.

I wasn’t trying to make it as a poet.  I didn’t bring my drafts along, as some of the other youngsters did, hoping for encouraging words.  Whatever poems or stories I was dabbling with I kept mostly to myself.  I was still imagining the singer/songwriter.

Sunday evenings it was the Gasthaus open mike.  Wisconsin was eighteen for beer and the Gasthaus, in the basement of the student union, poured more than any other bar in that beer-drenched city.  We’d sign up for 30 minute sets.  I was popular.  I’d spent a semester’s lunch money on the Framus 12-string.  I could fingerpick on it, which dazzled the other guitar players.  I could do the long songs – the whole monologue from “Alice’s Restaurant.”  “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”  “Tangled Up In Blue.”  I still sprinkled in a few of my own.  On stage, behind the microphone, I was bold and comfortable.

Offstage, not so much.  My comfort zone was very small, and, though I didn’t see it at the time, it was getting smaller.  My shyness, building since I was seven, was inching relentlessly toward the pathological.  My professors were amazed when I’d come to their offices for one on one.  I was articulate and insightful and fully engaged.  My papers were brilliant.  But I never said a word in class.  I was okay with people I knew.  I could manage groups of two or three.  But to spontaneously speak up in front of a classroom of faces?  Not happening.  I could get on stage and sing to a full room, because the guitar and the songs protected me.  Finish my set and go over to the table where the other guitar players were drinking and joking and sharing tips and teasing each other?  Not happening.  I couldn’t impose myself.

Still, I managed to arrange a couple of local auditions, was infuriated by the bar owner who said I was okay but needed to stop overdoing the Dylan stuff.  I was pissed because I’d only sung one Dylan song.  But of course everything I played or wrote was suffused with Dylan, even if I refused to own it.  I got one gig, playing and singing while people ate in a little café.  It went well, and the audience seemed to like it, but I wasn’t happy.  I didn’t want to be background music even though I knew that’s how you start.  But it was all terrifying and unsettling and after a bit I didn’t have any more auditions lined up and I didn’t make any more calls.  I was getting married and moving to Oshkosh.

The guitar playing and the singing, writing my own songs, everything I’d rested my character on in Milwaukee, drifted away.  I didn’t know how to hustle for it in Oshkosh.  Maybe, I thought, it turns out the guitar playing was just a phase after all.  A high school and college thing.  Just one more kid with a teenage dream.  I was wistful about leaving it behind, but okay!  Sandy and I could still be artists together.  Mutually supportive.  I’d start with a factory job and write late into the night.  She’d finish her art degree.  When she graduated, she’d get a job, I’d leave the factory and write more.  Poems, novels.  Maybe short stories (although how they worked perplexed me even more than poems some days).

In the candle factory I’d have a book of poems in one hip pocket, a little notebook in the other.  My job was “material handler” – to get the right packaging materials to the end of the line where the women gathered the wrapped candles skittering down the shoot and lined them up in their boxes and packed those boxes into larger boxes and stacked those boxes onto wooden skids that I’d scoop up with the forklift and bring out to the warehouse.  The supplies were kept in a mezzanine where I had my perch looking down across the factory floor, the six production lines, where I could see who needed new supplies or who had a skid about ready for the warehouse.  There was plenty of slack time.  I’d go into a back corner for a couple of hits off a joint, return to my perch to write in a pocket notebook, or to pull out Howl or Four Quartets.

My shift ended at 10:30.  The factory was a mile and a half from our apartment and when the weather was fine I’d run, just for the sheer physical joy of it.  The factory work kept me in the best physical shape of my life.  Sandy’d be in bed and I’d fix myself something to eat.  Sometimes I’d bake something – I made a fine chocolate soufflé – and I’d wake her up for a snack.  And I’d write.  I’d study Poets & Writers Magazine, pore over Len Fulton’s Directory.  Sent out my stories and poems.  Plotted my fantasy novel. 

The rejections mounted.  An occasional encouraging note, but no successes.  The factory work was mind-numbing, far, far worse than I’d romantically imagined.  The novel wasn’t coming together.  Editors weren’t interested in my stories and poems.  I wasn’t emotionally capable of the hustling that a freelance writing career requires.  I was 24 and trying to come to grips with the fact that, after giving up the notion of making it as a composer, or a singer songwriter, I wasn’t going to make it as a writer, either.

It brought a kind of weird relief.  Because if I no longer had to deal with the pressures of trying to make it as a writer, I could use my free time for whatever I wanted.  And what would that be?  Well, writing, of course.  But for myself, without worrying about publishing or selling.  That seemed pretty safe.

I was turning further and further inward.  I rarely saw my Kaukauna or Milwaukee friends anymore.  Emblematic was me at the post office.  To stand in line waiting to buy some stamps was torture.  I’d start to sweat, my face would get flushed.  When it was finally my turn, I’d stammer out what I wanted but it was painful.  I was so afraid of getting it wrong.  It was like that everywhere I went.

Social phobia.  Social anxiety disorder.  Selective mutism.  Plenty of diagnostic slots for it all now, but I knew none of that then.  I only knew the fear of being pointed out.  Of being noticed.  And disapproved of.  Embarrassed.

But I had to get out of the candle factory.  If I wasn’t going to be spending my stony nights being A Writer (as opposed to just writing poems), I was going to need to find a new way of making a living. Sandy was getting itchy about financial security.  My fantasy about mutually supportive struggling artists wasn’t quite as shared as I’d thought.

I’d been a science snob in high school and college.  I’d managed to avoid calculus (to my everlasting regret).  Everything I knew about physics and chemistry I’d gotten from Isaac Asimov’s columns in Fantasy & Science Fiction (which was quite a lot, actually).  But high school science classes?  College?  Unh-uh.  And I was stupidly proud of that.

Computers were interesting, though.  The science fiction I’d been inhaling all through the seventies and into the eighties featured computers.  And I’d come across articles occasionally about how a career in computers was a promising choice for somebody looking for a path in 1980.  My dad’d had a Sinclair ZX-81.  One kilobyte of memory, expandable to eight.  Membrane keyboard.  Hooked up to an old B&W tv.  Did just about nothing and was absolutely captivating.

But when I looked into computers as a trade it seemed as narrow and limiting as classical music had been.  I was too interested in too many things. 

I quit the candle factory.  Spent six months plotting my next move.  When had I ever had a job I liked?  At UWM I did work study in the reserves & periodicals section of the Golda Meir library.  I’d loved that.  I’d felt obviously at home.  And wouldn’t you know, the local campus of the University of Wisconsin had a library school!  Well, no, not a school – a program.  Started by a couple of women who’d been faculty at the very well regarded School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan.  Unaccredited (which meant nothing to me), half a dozen faculty, students mostly school librarians looking for a credential boost.  My ignorance about what I was doing was profound, but I figured it’d work out.

I started running a linotype machine at Miles Kimball, the mail order outfit, in order to raise money for school.  Made the lead slugs that were used to imprint personalized pencils and napkins and Christmas cards.  Felt connected to Gutenberg.  The guy who trained me was taciturn and focused on the work, which suited me just fine.  I liked the process.  I liked the machine.  I liked the order and the mechanicalness of it; the slight whiff of danger from working with molten lead.  The complexity of steps leading to the finished product.  The solitude. 

I’d come into work with the crowd and leave with them but I didn’t have to make eye contact, didn’t have to  talk with anybody.  The breakroom was too terrifying, so I never went.  On my lunch break I’d go out to walk, eating a granola bar I bought from the vending machine. 

I knew I was in a bad way, even if I didn’t know there were diagnostic categories for it.  The day after Segnitz brought up The Wisconsin Review I shuffled through the fallen leaves trying to figure it out.  It was sunny that afternoon, the fall air crisp, the familiar and welcome earthy scent of the crumbling leaves.  It was a little chilly but I was sweating under my light jacket, miserable.  I knew it was a turning point.  If I said no, then my fears would determine my choices for the rest of my life.  If I said yes, I had a chance to do something I desperately wanted to do, to engage with the world of literature outside of my room.  But I would be putting myself into the world in ways that I’d spent the last few years trying to avoid. 

I take it as given that most of the daily decisions that stress us out are actually completely inconsequential.  Whatever we decide to do about today’s crisis will end up having very little impact on the actual course of our lives or the lives of those rippled by those decisions.  (“Don’t sweat the small stuff.  It’s all small stuff.”)  But then there are those occasional days when the divergent paths are indeed momentous and irrevocable.  So there I am, all by myself, on a pretty, cool, sunny, brisk autumn afternoon in Oshkosh, nibbling my granola bar, on respite from turning molten lead into the names of young people whose grandparents will see that personalized pencils get into their Christmas stockings.  The branches of my life are before me.  It has never been so clear.  Never before and rarely since.  What does it mean to say that I made a choice?

Unpublished and unpublishable I might be, but now I’d decide who got into print and who didn’t.  Thirty-two pages an issue.  Three issues a year.  I said yes.

I sat with each of the editorial staff, the half dozen students who helped select and organize the content.  What did they want?  What did they bring?  This one was pretty and blond and oh so sure of herself.  She was one of the Flaherty groupies, Flaherty being the English department’s resident boho poet.  He’d been the Review’s faculty advisor before being ousted by Segnitz in a typical bit of academic skullduggery about which I knew nothing.  Selecting the poems was easy, she said.  You looked at them and picked out the good ones.  I sighed, inwardly.  “And what makes the good ones, good?” I asked.  She didn’t stay long.  I wasn’t much fun.  I added editorial advisors of my own.  John Harmon, composer, pianist, and spirit guide from Fire & Ice; Davey & Doc, reliable friends from my hometown.

The Review was organized as an independent student activity group so we had a budget of a few thousand a year for programming.  Segnitz had seen the flyer from whoever was repping Heaney and said we should get him.  He’d just started teaching half years at Harvard and every article about him included the Lowell quote calling him “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.”  He told me later that he'd been expecting some greybeard professor from the English department to pick him up at the airport, not this 26 year old kid with a scraggly beard and skinny tie.  Have I mentioned that I didn’t know what I was doing?

Segnitz had a fishing shack on the shores of Lake Winnebago, which is where we ended up after Heaney’s reading.   I’d never been to a reading by a famous author.  The Review wasn’t connected to the English department.  (We heard later through the grapevine that few of the English faculty bothered to come to the reading, figuring this Heaney guy was some Irish ne’er do well friend of Flaherty’s).  I didn’t know that the standard routine would’ve been a wine and cheese reception at the faculty club afterwards.  We got a bottle of Jameson and some six packs of Guinness and eight or ten of us headed to the shack.  We had a great time.  Echoes of Axel’s with beer and an Irish poet and conversation rolling over and on top of each other.  Davey had the wickedest wit of us all and was in particularly fine form, needling our distinguished guest about the Yeats quote.  Heaney cringed at that, but once he got over the shock of realizing how different this evening was unfolding from what was typical, he gave as good as he got.

The hotel I’d booked Heaney into was a fleabag near campus that had hourly rates.  I did manage to get him back to it safely, but had to rouse him only a few hours later.  Sandy was doing feature articles for the local paper in those days and she’d arranged for him to do a press conference / reception at mid-morning the day after the reading.   We dragged our hangovers back to campus, to the Pollock House, the fancy Spanish Revival building from 1920, gifted to the University by the president of Oshkosh B’Gosh (when it was the Oshkosh Overall Company).   The press consisted of Sandy and an over-eager kid from the student newspaper.  The reading had been a great success, despite the non-interest of the local English faculty (the liberal arts school down the road – Lawrence University – sent a busload of students), and the place was mobbed.  Sandy and the kid talked over each other asking questions, while students pushed books and slips of paper his way to sign.  He smiled and answered and signed, patient and affable, seeming only a little bewildered.  I sat next to him, trying to orchestrate the madness until I could see his veneer thinning and figured it was time to get a drink into him before heading to the airport.  I knew which joint on Main opened the taps at 11:30, so we piled in, me and Heaney and bits of my crew and hangers-on from campus.  Boilermakers standing at the bar and then back to the airport and then he was off to whatever college town was next on the list.

Heaney went on to his next gig, but then he cancelled the rest of the tour.  I felt responsible for that, in a good way.  Perversely proud of it in fact.  I never knew if he cancelled the trips because he was afraid there’d be more nights like that in other little college towns or he was afraid that there wouldn’t be.  We traded post cards, but the correspondence never took off.  My fault.  I could carouse with him, drink with him, tell stories with him, but in the quiet of my apartment I was too shy to write to him.  I couldn’t quite feature that he’d actually want to hear from me.  I dreaded being a nuisance; or, even worse, a bore.

Such a hodgepodge of anxiety and arrogance I was.  Timid, sure.  Terrified, often.  But sure of myself?  Yeah. Very sure of myself.  I knew people would follow me – they had since kindergarten.  I knew my brain was quick.  I knew I could write.  I knew I had talent.  I knew I was lucky.  I just didn’t know what it was all for.  You’d think I must’ve been insufferable.  And yet, on the evidence of those who’ve loved me, apparently not.  At least not entirely.  I don’t understand it.  I wasn’t humble, but I was kind.  If my arrogance was overpronounced, so was my empathy.  I ignored what I didn’t know and forced myself to go on. 

In my teens, when I was still living mostly at home, I’d sometimes have a couple of beers late at night with my Dad.  He’d’ve had several by then and I was probably stoned, having been out with friends but getting home more or less in time for my curfew.  He’d tell me things about his life and his hopes and the things he wrestled with on his quest to be the good man.  He told me two very important things.  That it was okay to be scared.  Because life was, after all, very scary.  This was astounding coming from that guy, who I would’ve thought scared of nothing.  Not just that it was okay to be scared, it was sensible!  It was the appropriate response to dealing with the world.  Later on I would quote this as “If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention,” although I don’t think he ever actually put it like that.  And he told me about a conversation he’d had with my cousin Michael, who was getting ready to usher a wedding (or maybe a funeral).  Michael was very nervous, afraid of doing it wrong.  Dad told him in most settings most people are unsure about what to do, but they’re afraid to let on, so they hide it.  They’re scared, and they think they’re the only one.  They’re looking around for somebody who looks like they know what they’re doing so they can follow.  Just act like you’re the guy who knows.  That was the secret power.  You’re not the only one who’s scared.

By the time I saw Heaney at the Hirshhorn, we’d been living in DC for three and a half years.  I was getting better at pretending to be that guy. The Wisconsin Review had been a huge step.  Then, with my library degree I got a fellowship at the National Library of Medicine.  I got training in public speaking, worked on group projects.  I had a career now.  I was meeting my responsibilities.  Sandy was getting to be an artist but I was still writing every day, mostly poems.

I bought each of Heaney’s books as soon as they came out, relishing my special connection.  I loved the poems and the translations.  The way his language fills the mouth, reading him aloud was a physical, muscular exercise.  The centuries of sadness and struggle springing from the ground on rhythm and rhyme.  I was never much caught up by his prose, though.  I’ve almost never read anything about poetry that helped me understand how to read it. 

What is it about?  What does it mean?  People want to know.  I want to get away from that need to know.  When Rothko’s kids gifted 1,000 of their dad’s pictures to the National Gallery of Art in the early 80s (just after we arrived in DC) he was not nearly as popular as he is now.  NGA mounted a blockbuster show and after the opening weekend where many in the crowd were actively hostile (“my little girl could do that”), the galleries were frequently deserted on the many days that I went back.  Occasionally there’d be a couple of other people there and I’d hear them whisper, “But what do they mean?”

It seems I’ve been trying all my life to short circuit that pedestrian part of my brain that insists on shellacking meaning on to ordered prose.  Get out of my way, brain!  Psychedelics in my teens helped me see what prose couldn’t touch, that my excessively verbal, excessively rational mind couldn’t get me to.  By the time the psychedelics had begun to bore me (junior year of college) I’d learned that the arts could get me there.  “There” was what was called the ineffable.  That which cannot be described in words.  Sitting in a room full of Rothko’s pictures (Rothko was very precise in his use of language and he always referred to his work as “pictures,” never “paintings,” which tells you inscrutably much about what he was trying to do) I could open my self and shut down the endless internal chatter and experience them.  The translation of the ineffable I called it.  Abstract art.  Symphonies and string quartets.  Coltrane.  Poems.  Poems could do it, too.  How weird is that?

There’ve been years when I worked on my poems every day; there were years when songs or fiction took precedence, but the itch to write the poems were always there.  I was most serious about it in those years around my Heaney encounters.  Not long after the Hirshhorn reading my career took Sandy and me to St. Louis.  But the poems kept tugging at me.  I took some workshops, even applied for an MFA program.  Spent hours with a (female) friend discussing Rilke and Neruda, poems of our own.  The marriage imploded.  Turns out the two mutually supportive artists thing was only my own fantasy.  I moved out, did readings at local open mikes, finally got a couple of poems published in a local magazine.  I joined a band, fantasized about quitting my job, spent my off hours with painters and musicians.  Negotiated mid-30s singlehood.

And stopped writing poems.  No more poems.  WTF?  It happened without much thought and without regret.  I still thought of myself as a poet long after the desire to actually write poems had passed.  It took me a long time to realize it was gone.  Apparently writing this essay has been an attempt to understand why.  Turns out it was the letters.

Frisse said, “That woman has whole cities inside her.”

She was a professional colleague whose job was to build relationships with library directors.  Like me.  After politely avoiding her invitations to dinner for eighteen months, I said yes.  To my surprise I had a wonderful time.  So a month later, yes again.  And then emails.  I could tell her everything.  That had never happened.  I could hardly keep up with myself.

Her boss scolded her because her excitement when my emails arrived was disrupting the flow of things in her office.  (But we were still “just friends”).  So I started writing her a letter every day.  Physical good Crane stationery fountain pen four and five and six pages letters stamped and delivered by mail.  We were colleagues, then friends, confidants, lovers.  It happened fast.

Different cities, busy travel schedules, so for nearly two years I wrote at least one letter every day, many days two, occasionally three.  Who had time to struggle with poems?  The letters became little essays.  I’d found my form. 

We married, I moved.  New town, new job, new level of confidence (although still reliant on my Dad’s secret power).  I still wrote letters to her when we travelled apart, which was often.  My library career blossomed.  I was a success.  An in demand speaker.  And there were the editorials and blog posts and professional articles that I always approached as if they were personal essays.  Every memo I wrote was an exploration of creative writing.  Every multiply revised email an exercise in creative nonfiction.  Rhythm, sound, image.  Looking for the poetry in even the most mundane of bureaucratic tasks.

Very occasionally I’d get the urge to try a line or two of verse, or maybe a lyric for a song.  But then those scribbles sat untouched.  From the age of six I thought I was supposed to be writing poems.  I was wrong.  Why did it take so long?  I’ve no answer. 

I never stopped reading poems, and these days I’m getting better at it, getting good at giving myself over to the experience, getting in on the side, past that linear, analytic rut.  What, after all, did I learn from multiple readings of Ulysses? Of Pound's Cantos?  To let myself float along on sound and emotion without worrying too much about the sense of every line.  To note with delight how each re-reading of a poem is different from all the readings before and after.  To trust the transformation of experience even when I don’t entirely know what’s going on.  I’ve read poetry for insight, instruction, inspiration, enlightenment; while I’ve often been surprised and delighted, I’ve rarely read poems just for pleasure.  I seem to be learning how to do that now.

I recently came to accept the fact that I’m not going to live long enough to read every unread book we have in the house.  (Tsundoku – Meiji slang for letting them pile up.)  That takes a lot of the pressure off.  It doesn’t matter anymore how long it takes me to get to a book’s last page.  Some evenings I'll come across a poem that sits just right and I'll spend the next half hour reading and rereading; listening and watching as it tumbles and unfolds.  A poem is its own object in the world, unlike any other piece of text.  Of course it has meaning – but not a meaning.  To ask what the poem is about is a terrible place to start.  Just as with humans and dogs and spiders and rocks and rivers, the poem is its meaning. 

I found that verse was not my form, but I've never stopped pursuing poetry, looking for it in every line.  What else so well reflects our beautiful human foolishness?  We turn to the arts to try to cut through all the scrims of arrogance and envy and wickedness and loneliness and fear and embarrassment and hope and ecstasy and love and madness to touch the ineffable, to reach that pulsing heart of existence which, by definition, cannot be expressed in words.  We’re desperate for it.  We paint, dance, pound on drums, carve stone.  The translation of the ineffable.  But for our purest, most naked attempts to reach beyond our limits, what tool will we use, we brilliant, perplexing, confused, limited and limitless humans?  Words.  Against all reason, we’ll use words.  You can’t make this stuff up.

Touchstone.  Seamus Heaney, roaring with laughter in a fishing shack on the shores of Lake Winnebago, bottle of Guinness in hand.  We’re all throwing our best words at each other, down for the joy of it. 


Date Night

It’s not our first date, but trying to get the meal just right keeps me nervous.  The worst thing I could do is fix something bland.  (Or, well, serve liver.  Liver would be worse).  She’s carnivorous, but believes in the importance of a green vegetable.  She likes bold flavors, some heat, some spice.  Something a little unusual is good.  I plan the menu a couple of days ahead and during the night before I’ll visualize how I’m going to pull it together.  Which pans, which dishes, how to arrange it for maximum visual appeal.  The wine has to be red.  A southern Rhône might work, or a Barolo, or maybe a peppery Australian shiraz.  Pick out the wine glasses.  While I’m cooking I’m mentally testing bits of conversation, something to ask her that I’m curious about, or something that happened to me during the day that I think will amuse her.  Jazz plays softly in the background by the time I light the Jameson bottle oil lamps, bring out the plates, call her to the table. 

This we do two nights a week.  Two other nights, she’s the one in the kitchen going through a similar process, although it’s still up to me to pick out the wine and light the lamps.  A fifth night is reserved for family dinner with Marian & Josie & Chris, and on Fridays and Saturdays we eat in front of the big screen streaming a movie or whatever series we're binging or catching up on.  This has been our pattern, more or less, for very many years.

I was very comfortable with the notion of being permanently single when she and I first got together.  Wrecked marriage was a few years in the past.  There’d been a couple of romantic dalliances with varying levels of satisfaction.  I was in the process of breaking up with the woman I’d most recently been involved with because she wanted more from the relationship than I did.  She wanted commitments that I was never going to be able to give.  Not to anyone.  It wasn’t about her.  I knew that. 

So why, within six weeks of getting out of Lynn’s bed the first time, was I so sure that she and I would both be better off getting married and spending the rest of our lives together?  I didn’t know then and twenty-seven years later, I still don’t.  She’d been living the life of sequential monogamy that I imagined for myself for a decade and seemed to be quite happy with it.  She was extremely skeptical of my plan.  It took a lot of convincing.

At this point, I think we’re both pretty sure it’s going to last, but I take nothing for granted.

I was reading a lot of Rilke in those days.  One of my failings in relationships had been jealousy and possessiveness.  I knew this was poison.  Rilke was tremendously helpful.  “…a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude.”

In 24 Frames Jason Isbell sings, “And this is how you help her when the muse goes missing / You vanish so she can go drowning in a dream again.”  I’m learning to play it myself and I choke up every time I get to that line.

When we got married and I first moved in with she and Marian, we renovated the basement of her townhouse as my refuge.  She liked telling people she kept her husband in the basement.  When we moved to Lakeridge a few years later, I took one of the upstairs bedrooms as my study.  There’s a full bath attached, so I’m as settled as can be up here.  As far as it concerns Lynn, not much has changed since I retired.  We might say hello in passing in the morning, talk briefly at noon before fixing our separate lunches.  I come down at 7:00 to read for a bit or to fix supper if it’s one of my nights.  But it’s not until we finally get to the dinner table that we fully engage.  And for that hour we are fully present to each other.  Did we get the meal right?  Is the other as pleased as we’d hoped?  What happened in your world today? 

In the best of the conversations we have with those we love, or come to love, I imagine a translucent bell shaped dome of solitude descends around the two of you.  You’re in a semi-separate world of your own, where nothing is as important as those moments with that person. 

Mark Frisse was the first person I told that we were seeing each other.  “Wow,” he said, somewhat flabbergasted (most people who knew both of us had a similar reaction – we weren’t anybody’s idea of the perfect couple).  “That woman has whole cities inside her.”

Very perceptive.  I expect never to fully explore, or even be able to visit, all of them.  So every night is date night.

 


Enough of us

What an audacious, reckless, foolish, improbable, brilliant, and beautiful thing this American experiment is.  As if one needed reminding (and maybe we did), the inauguration day events, very much including the Parade Across America and the evening’s Celebrating America, made it abundantly clear that nowhere else on the planet, now or in history, has something this radical been attempted.  Nowhere else could the great dream of Democracy be celebrated as it can be here.

The day exposed the great MAGA lie, that America’s greatness lay somewhere in the past, and we needed to return.  The day revealed the simplistic fallacy of those who complain that "liberals" are always apologizing for America.  They fail to grasp the great paradox -- that America, in its aspirations, is great, and we can humbly take pride and joy in that, even as we acknowledge our many failings, even as we are ever rededicated to our "unfinished work".  It is the greatness of our aspirations, and our Sisyphian determination to live up to them, that makes us a symbol for the world and that must be the mirror that we use to guide us.  On Rough and Rowdy Ways, Nobel laureate Dylan echoes Whitman saying, “I contain multitudes.”  On Inauguration Day, multitudinous America was very much the evidence of the day.

Lynn and I have been reviewing the transcript of our MLA oral history and feeling quite proud of our professional accomplishments.  We are quite aware, as well, of our failings, of all the times we didn’t do as well as we should have.  We mentally play the do-overs.  I’d never say, “I did the best I could,” if I thought that meant I didn’t think I could have done better.  I know too well the times that I could have, should have.  But just as my pride in my accomplishments doesn’t absolve me from taking responsibility for my failures, neither does my acknowledgment of those failures diminish the good that I managed to get done.  At the core of Trump’s pathetically shriveled sense of self was his terror of ever admitting mistakes or showing any weakness.   He transferred that insecurity to his MAGA mythology and managed to get millions to go along with it.  But I have no trouble carrying the complexity.  I happily contradict myself.  I contain multitudes, too.

These last few weeks I’ve been reading my way through Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (with a copy of Sikoryak’s Constitution Illustrated near to hand for reference).  Eerie to be reading Tocqueville’s explication of the relative powers of the legislature, the President, and the judiciary on those late December days when the tensions among those powers made it feel as if the whole thing might blow apart.  Frightening to be reading Tocqueville’s analysis of how democratic excess can lead to despotism as readily as to equality on the days when the mob attempted to stop American democracy once and for all.  America’s failure to live up to what he hoped for wouldn’t surprise him.  He was very clear about the dangers that beset democracy from all sides.  He was hopeful that we could avoid them, but he knew it was far from a sure thing.  The Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction, the emergence of the US as a mega superpower, the bitterness of the Civil Rights movement, the nearly fatal partisanship of the Trump years – all of this could be foreseen in his analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the American experiment.  He would have been saddened by our failures, but not surprised.

But he would have been astounded by the Parade Across America.  He believed that the shared Anglo heritage of the colonists, and the mores they derived from that heritage, were an essential part of what might hold America together.  The Indians, he believed, were destined to die out within a few decades at most.  And the Black and White races would never be able to live together (although he believed in the positive impact of interracial marriage).  The best thing would be to enable the Blacks to move to the newly established African country of Liberia, where they could take their American ideals with them and live in peace, but that was impractical.  Eventually the evil of slavery would tear the South apart.  

And yet, there on our screens, were dozens of Indigenous, dancing in all their finery; and Pacific Islanders chanting, and Puerto Ricans singing and dancing, and small town residents and big city dwellers celebrating the many ways they reach out to help their neighbors.  There was hip-hop and grunge and country and a beatific Yo-Yo Ma.  There was Lin-Manuel Miranda reciting Heaney's magnificent "The Cure At Troy".  And there was Amanda Gorman:

In every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country,

our people, diverse and beautiful, will emerge, battered and beautiful.

When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.

The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light,

if only we’re brave enough to see it.

If only we’re brave enough to be it.

And there was Kamala Harris, whose inauguration was an American hat trick of the finest kind, being sworn in as the Vice-President of the United States. 

Tocqueville didn't think such a thing was possible.  No idea could possibly be strong enough to take all these people, coming from all over the world, determined to preserve all their own beloved customs and traditions, each so exotic and unfamiliar, and bind them together in the belief that they are all Americans.  Even for all his devotion to the power of liberty and equality and democracy, Tocqueville wouldn’t have imagined that this America could come to be.  Even he didn’t know how powerful that American idea, bringing to life the land of hope and dreams, would turn out to be.  And yet, here we are.

Biden didn’t say, in his plea for unity, that all of us would come together.  His idealism is tempered with a large dose of pragmatism.  What he did say is that in our most dire moments “enough of us have come together to carry all of us forward and we can do that now.”  Enough of us.  Think about that.  Enough of us, to carry all of us.  Even those who don’t agree with us, who are fearful, and distrustful, and resentful.  Millions of Americans will spend the next four years raging about how Biden is destroying America.  Most of them won’t be persuaded otherwise.

That’s okay.  Enough of us will persevere.  Biden said, “The battle is perennial and victory is never secure.”  But as I wept my way through the catharsis of the day, I was reminded again and again of how powerful the American idea is.  Once again the American experiment has been tested.  Once again we are called upon to give the full measure of devotion.  Once again I'm willing to believe.

 

 


White Guilt

You’re not being asked to feel guilty over things that you haven’t done.  No need to get your back up.  You're hollering that your ancestors came from Europe after the Civil War.  They never enslaved anybody.  I get it.  They were immigrants who worked hard to pull themselves up.  You’re grateful for their sacrifice.  You’re a good guy and you’ve always tried to play fair with everybody.  It’s not your fault!  I get it.

“To whom much is given, much shall be required.”  You’re not being asked to feel guilty.  You’re being asked to make a difference.  Well, okay, the demand from the street is stronger than that.  You are required to make a difference.  It’s an old biblical maxim, repeated again and again throughout history.  Nobody makes it on their own.  Everybody has an obligation to lend a hand up.  Why so defensive?

The street isn’t saying that everything bad is the fault of every individual white person.  But you can’t shirk your responsibility by claiming it’s not your fault.  That’s not the point.  If you are white, you benefit from a society that has been designed, in some cases very explicitly, to maintain white supremacy in economic, political, and social matters (check out the 1901 constitution of the state of Alabama, among others – the documentary trail is exhaustingly long).  Maybe you don’t feel that you benefit very much, but ask yourself this (and try to be honest), would you readily change your white skin for a black skin if it came with a 50% increase in your income?  Would the extra burdens of being Black be worth the tradeoff?  You seem to be squirming.  Is this making you uncomfortable?  That’s good.  It should make you uncomfortable. 

Those feelings of guilt that you have (if you didn’t have them you wouldn’t be protesting so strongly) aren’t arising from something you didn’t do a century and a half ago.  They’re the faint stirrings of your conscience telling you that you’re not doing enough right now.  That’s your better nature tugging at your own complacency.  Better listen.

It’s Huck Finn lying to the men in the skiff when he has a chance to give Jim up (chapter 16).  He feels terrible about it.  He lies in order to help a runaway slave!  He’s “feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong.”  But he just can’t help himself.  He knows he should turn Jim in, he knows he shouldn’t’ve lied.  Have all of Miss Watson’s efforts to teach him right from wrong been a miserable failure?  But he realizes that doing what he’s been taught was right wouldn’t make him feel any better.  He’s too young to make sense of it, so he decides he’ll just follow his innocent American heart.  He doesn't know he's a hero.

Nobody is telling you to feel guilty over the things that were done by others in the past.  What matters is how you live up to being an American right now, here on the raft that's carrying us all down the river somewhere there might be freedom.  You don't have to atone for what people did that was wrong; you have to live up to how much they did that was right.  We hold these truths…

 


The problem isn't bad cops

For a few minutes, Rayshard Brooks might have thought he was going to make it, that the cops were going to let him go to his sister’s house, pick up his car the next morning.  There’d be hell to pay and he’d have to deal with that, but he knew it was his own damn fault.  At that moment, the cops could've walked him to the sister’s house.  They could have given him a ride.  But they brought out the cuffs.  And he panicked.  We can’t know what he was thinking, he’d been in trouble before and it’s no stretch to imagine him thinking of other black men beaten and killed once they were handcuffed and put in the back of a patrol car.  So he panicked, he fought back, he grabbed the taser.  And he ran.  At that moment, he was done for.

Former DC cop Ted Williams was interviewed on Fox explaining why this was a pretty clear cut case for the justification of the use of deadly force.  I am very much afraid that he’s right.  Suppose that Rolfe isn’t a bad apple, isn’t a rogue cop.  He did what he was trained to do.  He started to arrest someone for a misdemeanor.  That person resisted, took one of his weapons, struggled, ran, fired the weapon at him, and at that point everything in Rolfe’s training said to take him down.  He did what he was trained to do.

This is why the entire edifice of standard policing in the United States has to come down.  No amount of additional training, no body cameras, no transparency in disciplinary reports, no banning of choke holds would have changed this.  We sent heavily armed men, whose primary tool is the use of force, to address a minor problem.  Subdue and arrest.  Dominate the situation.  The system worked exactly as designed.

Then Rolfe is fired and the police chief resigns.  Why fire Rolfe?  Immediate scapegoat.  A clear signal to the community that this was only a case of bad cop.  The chief resigns because she hasn't done a good enough job of weeding out bad cops.  

There’s no way to tell if the outcome would’ve been different if Brooks had been white, but it’s hard not to imagine so when there are so many cases on record where a white perpetrator is subdued without grievous harm and so many cases where a black person dies. But the racism that pits the edifice of policing against the community isn’t a problem of rabidly racist cops hating black people.  The structural racism that insists on using force to dominate and control will always result in the deaths of those we keep at the margins.

The images of impassive Chauvin squeezing the life out of George Floyd was the spark that ignited simmering rage and protest around the world.  It should outrage you.  But what should engage your determination, what should make you join cause to insist that we rethink what we pathetically refer to as “public safety” are the two bullet holes in Rayshard Brooks’ back.


Grover's Basement

“I’ve got some guitar players coming over tomorrow afternoon.  I’d love it if you could join us,” said the message from Grover.  I thought, “I used to be a guitar player.”  I breathed dread, but I’d disappoint myself if I didn’t go.

I left my walker in the upper hall.  Held on to the rail, steadied myself with Bobk, the Ukrainian cane, gingerly made my way to the basement.  Buzz was working out the chords to a Django Reinhardt tune.  Jazz manouche.  Swing.  Joe was playing clean melody lines over the rhythm that Buzz set up.  They paused while Grover introduced us.  “Scott’s a guitar player -- although I don’t know if you still play much…”. “Just a bit,” I said.  I had a couple of Josie picks in my pocket.  “But I brought some harmonicas.”  I gave the thirty second explanation of how the short circuit in my spinal cord had messed up my hands.  They’d just seen what it’s done to my legs.

I sat across from Buzz.  Watched, listened.  Grover’d moved in four houses down when he married the widow Doreen.  I’d met him a year before, at the wedding reception.  We’d talked briefly about guitars and maybe getting together sometime, but it hadn’t happened.  Then, a couple of weeks earlier, Doreen invited us to go see him play at Joe’s Pizza.   He did some James Taylor, a Billy Joel song.  Some Jim Croce.  Hank Williams with a few jazzy flourishes.  Other than The Weight  and one or two others, they weren’t songs that I’d played, but they might’ve been.  Lynn said that his setlist intersected ours.  He sang in a smooth, comfortable tenor.  I went to his basement expecting more like that.  Songs I was familiar with.  Guitar players who did the kind of stuff I knew.  It wasn’t like that.

Grover picked another tune from Buzz’s fat book of jazz guitar.  They worked out more chords.  Lots of chords.  Chords with 9ths and 13ths and flatted 5ths.  Diminished and augmented chords.  Chords I knew about, but had never attempted to play.  My genres were “three chords and the truth.”  I was decent at fingerpicking, but I’d never improvised lead or played the jazzy tunes where each beat takes a different chord.  They were comparing different fingerings and moving rapidly up and down the necks of their guitars.  I could follow what they were talking about, but I had nothing to contribute.

We were going around the circle and it was my turn to call the next tune.  I said I’d pass for a bit and listen.  I liked what they were doing, but I couldn’t see a place for me in it.  I wondered how long I should stay before making a graceful exit.  But when it came back round to Grover he picked It’s A Wonderful World.  That was familiar so I tried singing it.  The key fit. “Can we run through that one again?”  I sang stronger, starting to feel a little confidence.  Buzz went into Ain’t Misbehavin',  and I picked up a harmonica and found some space for it.  Nothing fancy, but it worked.  When we were done, the others grinned and nodded encouragingly.

When the turn came back to me, Grover asked if I was ready to pick one.  “Okay, but I’ll have to go in a different direction.  More along the lines of what you were doing at the pizza joint.”  “Sixties and seventies?” Grover asked.  “Sure.  Let’s try something simple.  Neil Young’s Helpless?”  Grover nodded and explained to Buzz who Neil Young was.  Buzz is 87.  I picked the tempo.  Joe played lead.  Buzz found some fancy chord variations.  I sang, played some harmonica.

Joe did a jazzy instrumental version of a Beatles tune.  Buzz went back to Django and I fit a bit more harmonica.  We did some Billie Holliday.  Grover backed me while I sang Angel From Montgomery and my slow, dark version of All Along The Watchtower.  He noticed that I’d rewritten some of the lines.  I shrugged.  “Dylan changes it every time he sings it.  I just made some updates.”

Here’s the thing.  Even at my best as a guitar player, I’d never have been able to keep up with them.  I’d’ve gone over, seen what they were doing, been completely intimidated, never even taken my guitar out of the case, never gone back, and felt miserable about the whole thing.  But Boutch had given me his harmonica and said, “You may not be able to play guitar again, but don’t ever stop playing music.”  Josie had given me the guitar picks with her picture on 'em to push me to keep struggling with the Telecaster.  So up in my study I strum rough chords and sing, finding ways to compensate for my weakened diaphragm.  I record those rough chords into GarageBand and play harmonica.  Boutch died, so I’m obligated.  The Josie picks obligate me, too.

We tried more songs I didn’t know, or barely knew, and finding harmonica lines was exhilarating.  I was way outside my comfort zone and it was good.

Django Reinhardt Django had only two good fingers on his left hand, the others badly damaged in a fire when he was eighteen.  So he invented a new way of playing jazz guitar that has influenced every player since.  When 493px-Pierre-Auguste_Renoir_036Renoir’s hands became so arthritic that he couldn’t hold his brushes, his assistants tied them on and he created the late, burnished paintings, full of joy and grace and light.  When Wilma Rudolph was five and stricken with polio, the doctors said she probably wouldn’t ever walk without the leg brace.  Her mother said she would.  Rudolph said, “I chose to believe my mother Rudolph,” and won three Olympic gold medals in track at the age of twenty.

I’m not quite willing to say that my sense of gratitude extends to the fact of my transverse myelitis.  And yet.  And yet.  Without it, I would’ve left Grover’s basement feeling intimidated and embarrassed and I wouldn’t have gone back.  This is better.

Django played.  Renoir painted.  Wilma Rudolph ran.