Das Stundenbuch

I am writing elsewhere at the moment, so I am borrowing from those who came before. This is from Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favorites.

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.
You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Perfection Wasted by John Updike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slantadjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packedin the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

Why Newspapers Still Matter--A Tale in Two Parts

“This is the story of how we begin to remember.”

Paul Simon from Graceland

Part One

What’s black and white and read all over? This is the sort of riddle that doesn’t work so well in print, or, without a trick of spelling. It’s the sort of riddle that is meant to be told because it teases the listener: You hear two things at once, or rather, two possible meanings. It is the first riddle I can remember hearing in grade school. I was entirely puzzled by it. Okay, yes, naturally, it’s a riddle. That’s the point, right? But then I figured it out and, of course, just as naturally, proceeded to torture anyone who would listen by repeating that riddle over and over and over and…well, you get the idea. To be honest, it remains the one riddle I can always remember to tell when forced to come up with one. (I do have a favorite elephant joke, but it tests the limits of the esoteric and is best told when alcohol has been imbibed, or, as my husband insists, not at all.)

Now I laugh differently about this grade-school riddle. As it turns out, newspapers are not read all over anymore, or at least not in the original form recognized by this riddle. I’m afraid no trick of spelling will change that. In fact, I wonder how long before home delivery will be marked off the business spreadsheet as an affordable expense. Personally, I look forward to hearing the sound of our paper hit the street, out there in the dark, and usually before I am out of bed. That sound has long been a particular comfort in those early morning hours that have found me wrestling with something in need of resolution. Like a lighthouse beacon to sailors, the sound of the paper being delivered at dawn is a promise that the day will begin again--no matter what--like all the other days before it, and that my neighbors and I, for better or worse, are all in this together. Already on our street, that familiar morning sound has faded. What I can hear from my bed in that dark before dawn is that only three of us on the street still receive the morning paper, all folded, and though not quite mutilated, most certainly in danger of extinction.

One of the most difficult parts of all of this, and there are many difficult parts to this, is that I still have a hard time believing this happened so quickly. And as speed is everything now, and always being redefined, let me clarify by saying in the time it took for me to graduate from college until now, in other words, in 27 years. What Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein perhaps could not have predicted in the wake of Watergate, was that journalism, and particularly investigative journalism, would morph into something that had to be both appealing and entertaining where the reporter’s truth would have to be imbedded along with her sponsor’s credo and where ultimately journalism’s purpose as another check on the balance of powers would be leveraged against tomorrow’s corporate numbers.

Part Two

It is no surprise to me that I chose to study journalism. I have always loved words about as much as I have always enjoyed a lively conversation. Because I learn things. And that, I think, is the greatest thing there is about words. They make you learn things; they make you consider things from another perspective; they make you, just maybe, decide to use them to change your small part of the world. This is part of the speech I give to my students every semester as I set about the task of teaching college reading. But this is not where my love of words began for me. You see, despite the fact that I studied journalism in college and wrote for my college newspaper—and other assorted printed media after that—and that I immersed myself equally in the study of English and French, once upon a time I had a grandfather who spent hours sitting quietly reading from his newspaper. Just as Scout observed of her father Atticus in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill A Mockingbird, I believe my grandfather “subjected every crisis of his life to tranquil evaluation behind” his paper, which in my grandfather's case happened to be the Aurora Beacon. More than anything else, it was this view of my grandfather, or rather, this partial view of him behind his paper, that has contributed to my pursuit of a life with words. I will also attribute this particular attitude of my grandfather’s to my perpetual fondness, when people-watching, for men who read a newspaper. There is nothing more appealing to me than the promise of a good conversation with a man. And there is no better medium for it than a discussion of the daily news. Here's a bulletin, men: Opt for a subscription not a prescription.

An Irishman and a Catholic, my grandfather was a consummate word’s man. His cultural heritage links him to writers like Yeats and Joyce and Beckett. But he was not your stream of consciousness, theater of the absurd type, rather my grandfather was drawn more to the resolution of a crossword puzzle than to the plot for a novel or a play. For my grandfather, next to the Bible, the dictionary was a sacred text. So it was on one of his trips from Illinois to California to visit his transplanted grandchildren that my grandfather presented to us as a gift for our college-bound years, a great big hardbound copy of Funk and Wagnall’s Standard College Dictionary. Naturally, it landed in our grateful hands with a very loud thud. This was back in the day, long before cell phones and ipods would have rendered this heartfelt gift completely arcane for a modern preteen. But despite my adolescent’s greed for something more exciting, I could still see this gift for what it was: My grandfather’s way of endorsing our higher education--boys' and girls'.

As my mother has told it, this was a gesture of atonement on the part of my grandfather. In 1942 when my mother finished high school, the fifth child and third girl in a family of six children, my grandfather saw no need to send his daughters to college. What was the point of such an expense, my grandfather reasoned, for girls who would soon marry and raise children of their own? This was not an uncommon consideration at that moment in time even if he was a man who read the daily paper. I like to reason that it is precisely because my grandfather continued to read the paper, and read it avidly throughout his 96 years, that he came to put this particular gift into our hands. It is the reason why I bought, as a young single woman and as my first adult piece of furniture, an antique reproduction of a Queen Anne’s chair. Such was the pedestal upon which my grandfather sat, and from which I admired him. It also became the subconscious image against which I would come to measure the intelligence of the future men I would meet: My grandfather reading in that chair. You see, I learned from my grandfather a great thing about this solitary act: The importance of being thoughtful. Atonement, perhaps; but, I prefer to call my grandfather's gesture all those years ago, a moment of clarity.

Part One--Reprise

This summer, along with the diminishing sound of the morning paper being delivered in my neighborhood, I watched the gradual reduction in the size of my daily and Sunday newspaper. I persevered and continued to read it as more writers and editors resigned or were laid off or bought out by the most recent round of cuts made by investment-minded owners. But what is this new investment? As a subscriber, I am investing more money into the paper. In the 10 years I have been receiving the paper at my current address, I have seen my cost go from $7.20 a month to $21 for the same period of time. When you consider the cost of a high-speed internet connection and cable television, the price of receiving a daily paper at your door remains a real bargain. Not to mention that I truly feel as though I am receiving something of value with the newspaper. Make no mistake. I am happy to pay because I understand too well the cost of not having one at all. Consider the following story that appeared in the August issue of In These Times. This story comes out of Bill Moyers’ article in that issue, which was adapted from the keynote address Moyers presented at the National Conference for Media Reform held in Minneapolis in June.

Moyers begins his article with a story he heard growing up in Choctaw County, Oklahoma. I love this story for its timelessness and for its ability to cut through class and culture and go to the very heart of what it means to be human, or, put more succinctly, to battle our innermost demons. Author and educator Thomas Foster would call this “that one story that has been going on forever and is all around us.” It is a story told by a tribal elder to his grandson. The elder is fighting a battle within himself. He tells his grandson about the opponents of this battle. “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf (and filled with) anger, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf (and is filled with) joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The grandson thinks about his grandfather’s story for a moment and then asks him which wolf won. “The one I feed,” says the grandfather.

Yes, indeed.

Moyers proceeds to compare democracy to this battle of the wolves, underscoring the fact that the one that wins is the one we feed. He warns that in our particular social experiment, the entity providing the feed is the media. The unfortunate truth about the media, Moyers explains, is that they have gone to bed with the wicked wolf and our democracy is reaping the effects.

Well put. And confirmation from a respected source that a sad day has indeed dawned.

After the trial and associated death of Tom Robinson in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, Mr. B.B. Underwood, the newspaper editor of The Maycomb Tribune, fires off an editorial about Robinson’s senseless slaughter. This is the newspaper of the fictional town in which the events of this novel take place. According to Scout, the narrator of the story, this piece proves to be the editor’s bitterest and most poetic. “He couldn’t have cared less who canceled advertising and subscriptions.” Scout adds the following parenthetical: “(But Maycomb didn’t play that way: Mr. Underwood could holler until he sweated and write whatever he wanted to, he’d still get his advertising and subscriptions….)”

And yet, truth is not the same as fiction. Fingers crossed, right, Mr. Orwell? Although things may have played this way in newsrooms when Lee, who worked as a journalist herself for a short time, wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning novel in 1960, such a beast rarely exists today. At the close of the speech and subsequent article I reference of Sir Moyers, this fine gentleman and reporter issues what I consider not only a perfect closing statement but a call to arms. “Democracy,” Moyers writes, “only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.”

All those years ago when my grandfather gave us, his grandchildren, who happen to be in any family the most tangible part of one’s legacy, that big heavy dictionary, he wrote inside its front pages “Happy School Days.” Maybe this explains to me why writing and teaching have become intertwined objectives for my professional life. It is certainly the reason I vent, as Underwood did in his editorial, to my students who come to my remedial reading classes straight from high school honors’ classes still struggling to read and write. Every semester I attempt to get my students to see the dictionary and the newspaper as sacred texts. In keeping with the formation of a more perfect union, they do indeed play a part. By (re)arranging a few handfuls of words from that book, or reading a few handfuls of words from the daily news, we can reestablish our rights and stake our claim.

"A (human's) work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened."

Albert Camus

Epistle from a Tuesday

All my life, a ripening…. --Anonymous

Look at your eyes. They are small, but they see enormous things. --Rumi

Two Lessons: Polishing the Mirror and Returning Into Thin Air

Our wise yoga guru often reads from the works of the great Persian poet, storyteller, and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi at the close of our Ashtanga practice. While his participating yogis lie in Savasana, our teacher recounts one of the tales from this dervish-inspired master, and my mind is at once engaged and detached, whirl, whirl, whirling into the void, into the thinnest of air, and, then, all at once, I am back on the mat looking out from that big small place inside my chest, feeling a little like the tin man after he’s been to see the wizard.

a polished mirror cannot help reflecting….

Rumi’s words are beautifully rendered by our guru’s readings. In fact, I enjoy the mystic’s words all the more because of our guru’s accented English, which gives certain words a particular stress or adjustment—caresses all—signaling one native tongue surrendering to another. And vice versa. A male Scheherazade, our teacher. And I am each time transported across sand dunes and into an ancient world where I sit at the feet of our storyteller as though his tale has just been set down, and I have been invited to hear it, first, along with everyone else. And all of us are so thirsty, again, for another episode of reality.

a polished mirror cannot help reflecting....

On a recent Tuesday, our teacher reads to us Rumi’s tale entitled Polishing the Mirror, and I recognize in it the image of our larger Self within our smaller self—our “jeweled inner life” that longs to be reflected. The story helps explain to me how my yoga practice, this path of least resistance, exposes all of my resistance, all my harbored years of restraint, all that I have fought against and how little I have surrendered. It explains why I often feel broken open, and just why, after practice, I have wanted to cry as often as I have wanted to sing. Of the art of writing, Annie Dillard wrote that the blank page will teach us how to write. The blank page. In other words, practice…but ever so gently. Or by siege if must be. You will learn either way. It is the same thing with the mat. We come to the mat to practice. And there I am try, try, trying…to shine, to show, to be the jewel reflected. And each time I laugh or cry because I discover that I have hidden it again. According to Dillard, I am still aiming at the wood and not the chopping block.

a polished mirror cannot help reflecting….

On the same recent Tuesday, I watch a documentary that revisits the tragedy on Mount Everest in May 1996. Three climbing teams had pushed to summit Mount Everest, and eight climbers died. I hesitate to say, as the filmmaker does, that these deaths, tragedies all, were the result of a fierce and fast-moving storm. The storm certainly added to the tragedy, but after listening carefully to the stories of the survivors, I am surprised, as only another feeble human could be, at how strong is the voice of our smaller self.

a polished mirror cannot help reflecting….

While Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to summit Mount Everest, along with his Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, was quoted as saying on his descent that (of Everest) “We beat the bastard,” Hillary also admits that he was never certain that he and Norgay would reach the top. In other words, the potential for retreat was just as possible as the potential for a summit. As someone experienced in the ways of the mountains, and especially the mountains of high altitude, Hillary both respected and accepted this lack of certainty as part of the attempt. Hillary may have climbed Everest because it was there, but he also had enough experience (or practice) to understand that you do not go into the mountains thinking “winner takes all,” i.e., summit or die, because you might have to accept the consequences of such terms. In an interview for the Guardian in 2003, another skilled and successful high-altitude mountaineer Reinhold Messner, who was the first to summit Everest without the aid of oxygen, believes that failing is more important than having success. “I think we go up so we can come back down again. This coming down is a very strong experience.”

a polished mirror cannot help reflecting….

What I heard in the documentary in these survivors’ tales was a willingness to barter safety for success. According to Messner, high-altitude climbing is about being afraid. Maybe there were too many people on the mountain that afternoon, and the place did not feel so lonely and cold and dangerous. It was no place to be afraid. Until it was. And it was too late. These climbers had forgotten to stay on their edge. As our yoga teacher is quick to remind us: “If you’re not on your edge, you’re taking up too much room.” It is a knife’s blade sometimes, that edge, this path, our particular mountain. It is good to test the tipping point, but not to build a house upon it.

Touch the distance...and when necessary...change the location

“No one is the savior (she) would like to be.” Iron and Wine

A Dedication
For you who came to me not in the ordinary way
as you begin to embark upon
the extraordinary journey of your life

Dear C,

Years ago, when you were 11 and I was attempting to find comfort everywhere as I dealt with the miscarriage of my first pregnancy, I came across a book of Native American riddle-poems in the children’s section of the library. (I confess that going to the library has always been my preferred alternative to seeing a shrink or a psychic. Although I have seen enough of the former to consider the latter the next time I am really desperate and the library is closed.) The title of this book is Touching the Distance by Brian Swann, and because, more often than not, I tend to travel with journal in hand, I was able to record these words, which served as a bit of light in a temporarily dark corner:

“There is that person
whose child
will come out of her middle.
There is that person
whose child
will come out of her head.”

Why should I begin with this riddle, this particular remembrance of loss, and particularly in a letter of celebration and congratulation? Perhaps it is because I have learned that a little bit of light exposes things, brings new life to undeveloped things, things that might just be seeking a way to come into focus. You’re a filmmaker and a photographer, so I think you will know what I mean. Ultimately, I have found these discoveries of exposure to be pure gold, however rife with imperfections they may be. Remember what I told you Almodovar wrote about his own early experiences behind the camera: “…when a film has only one or two flaws it’s merely imperfect; when they are…numerous…they constitute a style.” In fact, I would say that life should be lived in just such a way. In other words, live through your flaws and find your style. It is the best way to guarantee that you’re moving forward.

Touch the distance….

Once upon a time, I was your age, and I started down a path that is my life. A woman’s life, a life, that however many obstacles I have surmounted or achievements I have attained, that however many dreams I still plan to give life to, is and always will be different from the life of any other person. So obvious, right? In fact, I should remember to take my favorite color and make a mark on the calendar on all of those days I have been able to say that I do not wish to be other than who I am (and where I am, for that matter). Because the truth is my life, the path of it, has mostly surprised me. And I think that’s a good thing. All those years ago when I thought about touching what I could see in the distance, I did not yet understand what the Persian philosopher and poet Rumi long before observed, the gradualness and deliberation that vista would teach me. Remember The Tortoise and The Hare.

Gradual. Deliberate.

Touch the distance….

When Margaret Mead wrote her treatise on the generation gap in 1970, she did not write so much about changing the future as she did about changing its location. In this way, Mead reasoned, the Authority over 30 and the young would have some common ground, a place to reckon with and recognize one another, a place of shared commitment. This, of course, would be child's play for an experienced time traveler like Kurt Vonnegut who seems to have understood the deliberateness of Aesop's tortoise when he wrote, "Be patient. Your future will come to you soon enough and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are."

Here it is, then. The future, right at your feet, as comforting and familiar as a warm loving dog. And easy to embrace.

I realize now how often I insisted upon stepping over my future while striving toward it. Maybe I thought I could avoid some of the bumps in the road. Not a chance. And although it feels at times that I have found more bumps and detours, I am beginning to understand that this is what makes up a life. The false-starts, the missteps, the things we lose, and all we struggle to leave behind. It dawned on me the other day while finding similar sentiments expressed in a novel I recently finished that this is how we learn to surrender to life. We let go of all we thought we were. And still we will find the horizon stretching out to greet us--like that warm panting dog--no matter what we are.

Let me finish by going back to the riddle-poem with which I began this message to you. As a woman, your "babies" will take many forms. And these gifts of creation will not always come when and where you might expect. Neither will your work, your art, your dreams. When you are surprised to find all that you imagined falling in to place, remember, there is still the task of reconciliation once all of your choices have come home to you.

Eh bien... assez.

As Goethe says, "Be cautious and daring." Go. Touch the distance. Remember to send out reports now and then.

Much love, love, and love

Now is the Time

“This the day to shape the days upon.”
--from The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

“Change is inevitable and a dimension of time itself.”
--from A Way of Seeing, by Margaret Mead and Rhoda Metraux

“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
--Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

Now is the Time

On August 23, 1963 when the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., gathered together with approximately 250,000 other Americans—black and white—in Washington, D.C., under the symbolic gaze of Presidents Washington and Lincoln, he did not know that in four short years an act of violence would claim his life. He did not know about that particular future, but he knew about the past. And on that August day, the Reverend King reminded this assembly of souls—250,000 strong—of the promise made by our government 100 years earlier when President Lincoln legitimized (and sanctified) the freedom of “all persons held as slaves…thenceforward and forever” by signing the Emancipation Proclamation. And while The Reverend did not know the specific future, he had a dream for it, “a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” and thereby a common dream.

As I reread the text of the speech Martin Luther King delivered that summer day almost 45 years ago, I recognize in it King’s acknowledgement of our tragic past and his hope for our future. But, even more than this--and perhaps as the ultimate reminder of the eternal nature of time--I hear in his speech the message of today.

“I have a dream today.”

I read this and I cannot help but think and feel and believe that this man was speaking to that crowd then, on that day, as well as to me now, on this day.

Today.

King stood, then, in the hallowed presence of Washington and Lincoln “to remind America of the fierce urgency of now” and to remind us that “Now, (again), is the time to make real the promises of democracy.”

Now. Was there ever more an eternal word?

In his journal entry of June 16, 1854, just about one decade shy of Lincoln’s Emancipation address to Congress, the American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote of his disgust for his fellow Northerners when the state of Massachusetts chose to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and returned Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave, to the South and, thus, to slavery. And although it was the last time the Fugitive Slave Act was enforced in that state, Thoreau’s journal entry illustrates his incredulity of the event “to see men going about their business as if nothing had happened.” Here is the man who penned the essay Civil Disobedience that influenced Ghandi and King, and I would have to believe Lincoln, as well. The man who reminds us in this journal entry, as King did, and Lincoln did, as Ghandi and others have done: “The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable.”

Indeed.

Now is the time. Do you hear that?

Last month when Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—both democratic presidential hopefuls, both front runners for the ticket, and both not only speaking in defense of change but definitive representations of it—became ensnarled in the politics of language and politics about a comment Senator Clinton made regarding The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., I had to hold my breath and my tongue, which is something, admittedly, I do not always do, something I certainly recognize as sometimes difficult to do, and something I sincerely wish the pundits, and press, and public would do more routinely. But, I suppose, if we look at the presidential race purely as a winner take all proposition, then the fighting gloves are, unfortunately for us all, not too far out of reach. While Clinton, as a consummate politician—and there are pros and cons to that particular descriptor—recognized that without President Lyndon Johnson’s signature, the Civil Rights Act would not have been passed, I do not believe that she intended to diminish the life, work, or legacy of Martin Luther King when she said “It took a president to get it done.” Neither do I believe that she was attempting to draw a color line that would suggest one color to be more effective than any other in the political court. But, then again, you could make a case that undoubtedly would hold true if you were to say that I am not terribly savvy when it comes to politics.

However, this much I think I do know, or, at the very least, I can connect the dots between the writing and speeches of Thoreau and Lincoln, between the words and rhetoric of Ghandi and the British Prime Ministers, and between all that MLK worked and spoke and marched for and the ultimate action of LBJ. “The effect of a good government is to make life more valuable.” Yes. Yes. And yes. And good government needs the voices of those like Thoreau and Ghandi and King of you and of me to be reminded that we are, indeed, inhabitants of today and of yesterday and of tomorrow.

If there ever was a time, it is once again, Now the time….