The Morning

Would I love it this way if it could last

 would I love it this way if it

 were the whole sky the one heaven

 or if I could believe it belonged to me

 a possession that was mine alone

 or if I imagined that it noticed me

 recognized me and may have come to see me

 out of all the mornings that I never knew

 and all those that I have forgotten

 would I love it this way if I were somewhere else

 or if I were younger for the first time

or if these very birds were not singing

 or I could not hear them or see their trees

 would I love it this way if I were in pain

 red torment of body or gray void of grief

 would I love it this way if I knew

 that I would remember anything that is

 here now anything anything

 --W.S. Merwin

Happy Holidays

Beatles Now and Then

 

On November 2, a new song recording by the Beatles was released, the product of three recordings over 50 years or so: a demo cassette tape that John Lennon made at home in the mid-1970s (latest guess I've heard or seen was 1977, just three years before he was killed), then an aborted attempt to make the song into a Beatles record by Paul, George and Ringo in the mid-1990s, during the time they crafted "Free As A Bird" and "Real Love" from another Lennon tape, and now the final version created this year of 2023.

Technology that filmmaker Peter Jackson developed for the Get Back TV film (Machine Assisted Learning, or MAL--named for the Beatles longtime road manager) made it possible recently to extract Lennon's voice from the piano and extraneous noise on the 70s cassette, which was one of the problems that led to the song being abandoned in 1995.  But George had recorded a guitar track before they gave up on it, so that was available for this recording.  With Paul playing bass and slide guitar, and Ringo on the drums, this song--now titled "Now and Then"--includes all four Beatles.  Since there are no known recordings of new songs with both John and George (who died in 2001), this is in effect--and officially--the last Beatles song.  

The song was first played on BBC radio, and became available on vinyl, together with the Beatles first release, "Love Me Do."  The official version appeared on YouTube with just the plain blue and gray box, with the song's title in white.  Although John's demo has been unofficially available, I'd never heard this particular song before.

The first thing that got to me was the clarity and vitality of John Lennon's voice.   At a time when death seems all around, this was less a revival than a resurrection.  The melody is enchanting, and the production is seamless.  I liked the quickly neglected 90s songs more than many others did, but this is a contemporary Beatles record--part now, and part then. 

The song itself has been edited from the demo version (partly because John hadn't finished the lyric), given a slightly faster tempo, and generally gets the Beatles treatment, with guitar solo and a string orchestra section.  Paul and Ringo do new vocals but high harmony backgrounds by George, Paul and John are taken from previous recordings, notably "Because" on Abbey Road.  There is one entire section of the demo that was dropped (which furnished its bootleg title, "I Don't Wanna Lose You,") that's now the center of online debates among Lennon enthusiasts.  There were probably technical reasons for this as well as musical ones, but the song is given a classic Beatles shape, and I love it.

On November 3, the official music video by Peter Jackson was released.  It contained a few images never seen before, but that isn't its main contribution.  Jackson crafted these few minutes to celebrate the Beatles career but most tellingly, he does so in the context of this song.  "Now and Then" can seem to be a wistful meditation on a delicate love relationship, perhaps a lost love (The interrupted relationship with Yoko is an obvious possibility.) But the video presents it as a commentary on the bond among the Beatles themselves, estranged as they were for a time in the 1970s. (Though throughout that decade, two or three or even all four of them continued to work together on solo projects, and the big break between John and Paul was largely healed by the late 70s.)

Instead of just intercutting clips from the past with some shots of the 2023 and 1995 recording sessions, Jackson created dazzling combinations in which Beatles from different eras interacted with each other, and even versions of themselves from another time, just as memory is part of the present.  The video suggests the power of playing together over time, with the visceral effect of presence even in absence.  Now and then exist together. 

 (Another layer is added with the brief shot of Giles Martin, co-producer of this record and son of George Martin, who produced all the Beatles records.  In this shot he even looks like his father.)

The video starts with the reality: Paul and George working out guitar for the song in 1995.  While John's voice is heard, the first images aren't of him but the gauge that measures the sound level, moving with his vocal.  He's present through the machines.  And yet...

To get inside the song, the first image of him is a kind of silhouette, in which a scene of sunset (or sunrise) on the sea is reflected in his glasses, and a mirage appears of the four very young Beatles clowning around.  The first time today's Ringo and Paul sing the chorus, after the lines "Now and then, I miss you," we see a clip of John and George in semi-hysterics during the Shea Stadium concert.  Soon we see the surviving Beatles bookended by a Sgt. Pepper era George and John in a white suit, the band together again.

Then the dizzying combinations of all four of them in different times, mostly playing together (suggesting a higher octane version of the subtly surreal baggage car scene in A Hard Day's Night, and some scenes in Help!) The images of young Lennon are so bright and full, though Jackson presents only John the cut-up and clown, rather than his more intense or gloomy or distant moments.  In fact, the others are also seen frequently being silly. (Even present-day Paul gets in the act, mocking his shot playing bass, with a mugging young McCartney behind him.)

The video ends with a series of images that go backward in time to the four as young boys, and then the famous early 60s black-and-white bow from the stage with the bright Beatles sign behind them.  Then their images disappear and the light goes dark.  

(It's the last Beatles song, but unlikely to be the last Beatles release. A number of remixed albums are in the works, and I look forward to some machine-learning magic applied to those 1995 vocals, and a new tech update to the accompanying videos.) 

The song soon became a Number 1 hit in the UK, breaking the record for the time between number ones by any artist or group (54 years) and the record for the most time between an artists first number one and the most recent (60 years.)  The record also hit number 1 on the Billboard digital songs, and broke into the top ten on the Billboard US charts.  The song is included on the newly reissued  Blue album, which together with the Red album, feature the latest remixes of Beatles hits and standards, just in time for Christmas. 

Clearly there is a lot going on in Peter Jackson's mesmerizing video, so I suggest that in addition to watching it, you also listen to the song with no visual accompaniment, as I did the first day of its release, to feel its full effect. Either way, joy and tears, now and then. 

Inevitably, the song applies to us as listeners, for however long the Beatles have been part of our lives.  For me there was a time I thought of them every day.  I needed their rhythms to face everyday life. These days I think of them only now and then, and I miss them. But I know they will be there for me.  

Words Matter: Less Than Fewer

 

What are the human and political
implications in the difference be-
tween "fewer migrants" and "less
migrants?"

“where will the meanings be

when the words are forgotten”

--W.S. Merwin

 A number of years ago I began noticing that in print and common speech, there were fewer and fewer instances of “fewer,” and more and more of “less.”  By now, “fewer” has more or less disappeared.  And our language is the lesser for it.

 It used to be that people wrote and said “less water” but “fewer people”; “fewer fingers” but “less hair.”  There was a reason for the difference.  For generations we learned in school that you used “less” for quantity, and “few” and “fewer” for numbers of individual entities. “Less” was about measurement, “few” about counting.  Therefore: less cement and fewer bags, fewer parties and less dancing.  (There are a few complicated cases, but that's the basic--and meaningful---difference.)

 Few and fewer even held a kind of pride of place.  Because less covered more things (including abstractions etc), the words that merited “fewer” were fewer, and their individuality and specificity were emphasized.  

 Today everything is less.   I knew we reached the nadir when I recently read the expression “less units.”  That sounds like the death knell of the distinction between number of individuals (or units) and quantities.

 It’s ironic that it is happening in the computer age, which is probably responsible for it in part, with its vast power to quantify everything.  For the digital age is based on digits, meaning numbers.  Most lives now center on various but precise numbers of zeroes and ones strung together. 

 As far as I know, nobody simply decided that there was less need for fewer, but the implied argument is that the opposite of both few and less is “more.”  So why not get rid of the complication, the possible confusion and embarrassment of using the wrong word, by getting rid of the word? It’s one less word to worry about, right?  

 As “fewer” has disappeared into “less,” so “number” has disappeared into “amount.” For instance, Bill and Luke Walton are the only father and son to both win two NBA championships, or as Wikipedia puts it, Luke’s two rings are “the same amount as his father won.” 

 The disappearance of the few/less, or number/amount distinction isn’t just an American phenomenon. A quick Internet search yielded examples from most English- speaking countries, including articles from UK’s Economist (“less people, more water”) and AllAfrica.com. (“Less People Buy Bibles as Condom Sales Soar.”)

  “The use of ‘less people’ etc. is so common in British English that there seems little point in claiming it as an error,” wrote a teacher in Great Britain to her listserv. Another agreed that “fewer” is archaic.  “…Less means the same as fewer,” wrote someone in a different discussion on the subject. “ So what is wrong with plain English, simpler English?  Want to write a Victorian novel?  Use fewer.”

Apart from the dismissive scorn, the implied point is that we moderns understand that fewer words makes more sense. In plenty of cases this general notion is demonstrable, but depleting the language of a meaningful and useful word only lessens the ability to make the distinctions that a sophisticated language is built to express.  That’s important in a complex society as well as a democracy.  

The other argument for less is the natural evolution of language, but not every change is better, let alone necessary.  We’re clearly in the midst of a pendulum swing from the sternly prescriptive model to the mindlessly (or should I say robotically) descriptive, which will only accelerate as hyper-descriptive AI programs rule the information world. 

Unfortunately, words are not objects of fashion.  They aren’t handbags or hats. They are text and subtext of communication and meaning, and in the end they tell us who we are.

Just as the relatively sudden elimination of the fewer/less distinction may have subconscious causes, the effects of it may also seep into how we see the world. There may even be an attack on certain values of our society reflected in this elimination.  Perhaps we need to ask what has changed with the phrase “less people.”  Is it only the grammar of “fewer” and “less,” or is it our underlying idea of people?   

In changing how we express the outcome of a count, are we changing our conception of what we are measuring?  Do we see people only in aggregates, and not in affiliations?  Do we now consider people not as integers with integrity, but as quantities that are classified according to common characteristics?  

 Perhaps in our marketing-minded society, numbers of people translate too easily into quantities of money, or of votes. If votes are just quantities, then stealing them is just theft. But if votes are individual commitments added up, to cheat is to dishonor the people who stood in line at the polls for hours in the rain.  “Count the votes” means the voters must count more than the outcome.

  Quantity applies to objects, implying a passivity, of being acted upon.  Number and counting suggest subject, capable of action:  “Stand and be counted.”  Few can become many. When quantities of money have overpowering political effects, only numbers of people can balance it.

 “Fewer” has a dignity lacking in “less.”  By treating persons as quantities we send a message of disrespect, which then becomes a deficit of self-respect.The cause of human rights is based on the individual as significant, not as an indistinguishable element in a quantity that doesn’t count. When justice or health depend more on quantities of money and power, individuals count less.

  Turning people into quantities denies their individual qualities, and their individual stories.  Individuals must be judged on their merits. They must be counted.  Quantities don’t count—they can more easily be objectified, the first step to othering.  

Where people appear most as quantities is at the border, literally.  Immigrants are not only the most conspicuous other, they symbolize the other as a mass, as quantity.  It is the fear of their quantity that haunts people now, especially a subset of those who define themselves as white people.   Think about the human as well as the political implications in the difference between "fewer migrants" and "less migrants."  As in "Fewer migrants might have drowned had surrounding ships attempted rescue sooner."  Or "There are now less migrants because the ships did not attempt rescue."  

We see what we now call “migrants” as amounts, but seldom look at any—or even pictures of any-- as individuals. If we did, we would perhaps recognize a smile like an uncle had, or a frightened child like we once were. But even if they remain as strange looking as perhaps our own ancestors, we might hear individual stories of fleeing violence, oppression and the ravages of climate disruption. We would have to see that they count as humans like us.  Or like our blood ancestors, even parents or grandparents, when they were immigrants.  This is not to deny that mass migration is a problem for nations—it will become an ever bigger one as climate distortion effects worsen and spread.  But losing a sense of individuals is a poor way to start addressing it. 

 Losing the related sense of number to the universal amount also robs us of specificity and perhaps even poetic impact.  We speak of the amorphous amount of time but the number of days—a more specific and powerful accounting of time, as in the Biblical verse: “Teach us to number our days that we may get us a heart of wisdom.” 

 Our language is less flexible and exact for losing fewer, and so are we as human beings, and as human societies.  I suppose there may be an entire generation by now that has never used or even heard the word “fewer” in many contexts.  But neither that, nor anyone’s snide scorn, will take the word away from me, because I know at least some of its value. This word matters. So I’m proud to be counted as one of the few.

TV & Me: The Power of Moyers (and Series Conclusion)

TV and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Last in a series.

Finally, there is one figure who more than any other provided various television rescue operations, and opened new doors in my life.  Simply in terms of broadcast journalism, there was no more important figure in the twentieth century after Edward R. Murrow than Bill Moyers.  But in his many programs (often produced by his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers) he went far beyond the usual concerns of journalism. 

Born in rural Oklahoma, christened Billy Don Moyers, and raised in Marshall, Texas, he became a teenage reporter for the local newspaper before studying journalism at North Texas State College.  A summer internship in the offices of Senator Lyndon Johnson led to a long association that ended in the White House, where he was President Johnson’s press secretary and unofficial chief of staff.

 But as a young man, after earning a journalism B.A. at the University of Texas, Moyers entered divinity school, and was ordained a Baptist minister and for awhile was a pastor for a Texas church.  In 1960 he rejoined the LBJ campaign and went to Washington to work in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, where he was instrumental in establishing the Peace Corps. 

Then after an apparently compromised tenure in the Johnson White House, Moyers returned to journalism to set a stubborn standard for probity and ethics. This kept him changing jobs, which included stints as commentator on CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts. 

 But it was on PBS, which he helped create in the Johnson White House in 1967, that Moyers operated most often and most fully.  An early (and recurrent) title in his many news-oriented program of reportage, interview and commentary was Bill Moyers Journal, which is the first I recall watching in the early 70s, and even ordered transcripts of some impressive episodes. I also remember A Walk Through the 20^th Century. 

Over the years he cut through official excuses and political obfuscation to provide relevant information and succinct critiques of activities and trends that alarmed and depressed me in the 1980s and afterwards. I especially remember his powerful two hour environmental documentary Earth on Edge in 2001, and his early 2000s weekly program, Now. One episode won the Edward R. Murrow award.

 Moyers also focused on journalism and its responsibilities in relation to political life.  I remember his short series, The Public Mind in 1989 as particularly powerful.

   These programs deepened my understanding, and as upsetting as many were, they rescued me from despair because there was someone else who saw what I saw, but in more context and detail, eloquently expressed. I recall Earth on Edge, on interlocking ecological crises, as a model documentary that ought to be taught.  It was so much better than anything else produced at PBS or elsewhere. 

But much as he once dumped journalism for divinity school, Moyers kept turning to deeper and vastly different subjects-- areas of human life and thought that underlie political realms.  These were the programs that made the most difference to me. There were so many I can only mention the ones that were the most personally important.

 Probably Moyers’ most extensive series was A World of Ideas, begun in 1988: some 70 hour-long interviews, subtitled “conversations with thoughtful men and women about American life today and the ideas shaping our future.” 

 Moyers was responding in part to the impoverished national dialogue, the lack of ideas in the political discourse in that election year, but his interviewees were not in politics: they were scholars and thinkers in anthropology and sociology, linguistics and management, ethics and medicine, religion and history, education, physics and environmental sciences.  They were filmmakers, writers, novelists, poet and playwright. He described his “self-appointed” mission:  “ I was attempting to bring to television the lively minds of our time.” 

They were also—Moyers as well as his guest—excellent company.  There were some misses—I thought Moyers wasted an hour discussing Canada as a funny foreign country with (Canadian) Northrop Frye, one of the greatest minds applied to literature in the 20^th century.  But mostly they were enlightening and inspiring conversations.  I valued equally those with figures I knew and wanted to know more of (like August Wilson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Peter Sellars, Richard Rodriguez, Issac Asimov and Toni Morrison), and with those introduced into my world for the first time (like philosopher Jacob Needleman, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, classicist Martha Nussbaum, educator Vartan Gregorian and historian of religion Elaine Pagels.)  

The timing of these interviews was significant in introducing me to three Native American figures when I was beginning an exploration of American Indian literature and culture that would grow over the next decade of my life: Onondaga chief and national leader Oren Lyons (with whom Moyers also did a separate program), and contemporary American Indian novelists Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (pictured.)  Like everything else Moyers did for PBS, these interviews were rerun several times (especially during pledge drives), and I managed to tape quite a few of them for later study.    

 In 1989 Moyers visited a biannual poetry festival to record the readings and interview the poets in the series The Power of the Word.  It would be the first of several such series (for instance The Language of Life in 1995, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling with Words in 1999, and interviews with individual poets on his revived Bill Moyers Journal) featuring a broad range of poets. 

poets Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell

The first episode of The Power of the Word with William Stafford, Lucille Clifton Octavio Paz, Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell, shows interactions between poets and students (many in high school) who attended the conference. The atmosphere is warm, and it definitely heats up at the end with Olds and Kinnell trading love poems.

 

poet Li-Young Lee

  The second explores poetry in prisons with James Autry and Quincy Troupe; the third, “Ancestral Voices” highlights the through-line of tradition in contemporary life with Joy Harjo, Barett Kauro Hongo and Mary Tall Mountain.  Then poets Li-Young Lee and Gerald Stern explore the poetry of memory. 

Lucille Clifton

A full hour is devoted to Stanley Kunitz, then one of the most respected American poets at age 84 (he lived to be 101.)  The final program is  “Where the Soul Lives,” featuring W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton and Robert Bly.  Bly ends the series on stage with the Paul Winter Consort reciting a short poem by Rumi, the concluding lines I have since often quoted: “Let the beauty we love be what we do./There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”  

Again, I taped some of these programs and over the years they continued to nourish and center me.

 Robert Bly was prominent in this episode, and he was a focus of the 1990 production of A Gathering of Men. The so-called men’s movement, and Bly’s part in it, were distorted, trivialized and lied about for years.  They were ridiculed, and the men who participated were cruelly shamed.  Moyers showed that this one event was serious, sincere, not political or a hostile escape from women but an exploration of feelings and their denial, particularly about a man’s relationship to his father.  Though others including psychologists James Hillman and Michael Meade not shown in this program were also leaders of these workshops, they all—like Bly-- employed poetry, myth and fairy tales to explore this and related issues. 

 I’ve never attended a men’s group, and I did not always agree completely with Bly at the pitch of his enthusiasms. But whatever other such gatherings were like, the ones these men led were serious attempts that met a need.  This program on its own is a tentative exploration that remains a useful introduction.  When I first saw it, these questions were new to me, but they immediately resonated.  This arrived at about the same time as related discussions about children of alcoholics and forms of abuse felt by children were being explored for a general public, or at least that’s when they were reaching me. 

Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood

These programs foregrounding poetry are among those that were centered on a particular conference or festival, where the Moyers team filmed the public events and some audience response or interaction, and Moyers interviewed principal participants.  Others include the Spirit and Nature program in 1991, which featured an interview with the Dalai Lama, and the Faith and Reason series in 2006, which provided a rare interview with the revered Buddhist monk Pema Chodron, as well as lively and absorbing conversations with Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis.  Apart from providing a permanent digest of these proceedings for the many who were not there, the words preserved in these programs continue to stimulate thought and suggest new perspectives. 

Other programs were pieced together from research and interviews in various places, as the five-part 1993 series Healing and the Mind.  Modern western medicine had long discounted any connection between mind (including emotions) with physical processes and health: it was all about mechanics, all about the plumbing.  Anything else was considered superstition.  When reports circulated of some Buddhist monks being able to control blood pressure during meditations, it was considered at best an unverified mystery, or more typically as occult nonsense.

 This was only beginning to change in the early 1990s, and this series of programs was groundbreaking in revealing how much practical work and theory was ongoing, even in hospitals and clinics, exploring the relationship of brain, mind and body.  Experts and practitioners discussed relations of the brain and emotions with the immune system, the effects of environment and community on healing, and generally a new, broader attitude to treat patients holistically, as well as ways for individuals to provide for their own health.

 Today most of the practices discussed, from mindfulness and acupuncture to support groups and mothers holding their newborns immediately after birth, are mainstream.  Most therapies are such normal elements of treatment that insurance often covers them.  Similarly, the hospice care I first glimpsed in On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (2000) was a rare approach then, but very much accepted now. 

The segment of Healing and the Mind that most stayed with me was Moyers exploring the work of Jon Kabatt-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s Stress Reduction clinic, where he was employing the radical idea of addressing intractable back pain with the practice of meditation.  Kabatt-Zinn’s variation on single-point or mindfulness meditation was still relatively new to America, especially outside Buddhist monasteries and related places like the Zen Center in San Francisco.  His techniques were demonstrated, and he talked persuasively about them.

 The program referred to Kabatt-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, which included instructions on meditation and the “body scan” he employs, as well as a couple of yoga regimes.  I got that book and the associated tapes in which Kabatt-Zinn speaks you through the process.  When it comes to physical movements I am a slow learner, and group instruction just befuddles me.  So I used the tapes in conjunction with diagrams in the book to learn one of the yoga regimes, and I did it regularly for years.  Though I still use aspects of it, maybe it’s time to return to it in a more formal way. 

 The experience Bill Moyers had was similar to mine, and many others: the body scan was a revelation, while meditation was hard and confusing and a bit irritating.  But it opened the door to learning the practice of meditation in various ways, including a deeper understanding of Zen practice.  This has been a major theme in my learning for the past 30 years, and it effectively began with this segment.  And I still use several of Kabatt-Zinn’s guided meditations, and profit from a couple of his subsequent books on the subject.

 Again, I acquired many of the companion books to these Moyers programs (several published by Doubleday thanks to senior editor Jacqueline Kennedy.)  They remain active resources.  Many of the programs themselves are accessible via YouTube, PBS and the Bill Moyers.com website.

 

I have saved the most popular—and for me the most influential—of these many Moyers programs for last. In 1988, Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, previously unknown to the general public, with associated images from his work on world mythologies over six one-hour episodes.  The Power of Myth became one of the most popular TV series in PBS history. 

 I saw it when it first aired (and turned up repeatedly for awhile on PBS fund drives), but a recent re-viewing reminded me of an aspect I hadn’t thought much about: that these interviews took place during the last two summers of Campbell’s life.  This series made him famous, but posthumously. By the time it first aired, this Joseph Campbell-- so alive in personality, knowledge and understanding, who we were meeting for the first time-- was already gone.  He had been dealing with cancer those last years, so mortality was not an academic subject. As I watched it this time I was acutely aware of the additional power in his words on death and its meaning. 

Joseph Campbell was born into a prosperous New York Irish Catholic family in 1904.  Just as Carl Sagan had his defining childhood experience at the World of Tomorrow World’s Fair, Campbell never got over his first glimpses of Native American masks, totem poles and other artifacts at New York’s Museum of Natural History.

 He attended Columbia where he was a world class runner. He took from higher education what he wanted and during the Depression set his own course of study, living alone in an unheated cabin in Woodstock, dividing his day into three reading periods and one for rest. He had his own circuitous adventures-- Joyce scholar (the first book of his I owned was his Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake), friend of John Steinbeck, poet, Sanskrit expert and world traveler--and wound up pretty much inventing his own field of mythological studies.

 His many books, such as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, were influential with scholars and artists.  But it was the six-part The Power of Myth series that made him an icon, as he eloquently explained the patterns of mythology and the meanings he derived from them.

  Though the series included visual illustrations of some myths, the programs were basically little more than Campbell talking, with conversational prompts from a completely engaged Bill Moyers.  Yet the series was enormously popular.  It’s likely that many viewers got their first inklings of Buddhist and Hindu thought as well as traditional stories from Native American and other Indigenous peoples, from these programs. 

 But this wasn’t a mythological travelogue; Campbell distilled his own conclusions and related these stories to questions of the eternal within time, to the importance of the present moment, and the central functions of compassion and the individual experience.  He’d taught college students for many years, and spoke directly to their needs and yearnings. His most famous and therefore most misunderstood statement of “follow your bliss” was a profoundly religious message, shorn of any sense of sectarianism, let alone hedonism.   

Seeing the series again left me with two major impressions.  First, that so much of what has absorbed me in these recent decades in some sense began with this program. I even had forgotten that certain ideas and beliefs that I think of as essential to my life had their origin or at least articulation in these programs. (For example, that religion may have begun when humans dealt with the paradox of killing the animals they revered.)

 This series first aired when I was beginning to explore, in sometimes unrelated ways, Native American cultures and beliefs, the psychology of James Hillman and eventually his source, Carl Jung, and ecology in a deeper way.  This series touched on all of them and more.  Now my bookshelves contain dozens of books on these and related subjects, as well as several of Campbell’s books.

As those books attest, Campbell remains an important and an intriguing figure.  Before his Moyers appearance he gave many lectures and radio talks (as well as a very early Home Book Office series on a Jungian interpretation of mythology.)  The essays derived from these talks published in his book Myths to Live By are both very direct and uncompromising.  They provide probably the best summaries of Buddhist and Hindu concepts for his time.  Campbell seemed to believe he would be understood no matter how complex and unfamiliar his topic, as long as he spoke clearly and expressed the enthusiasm he felt.  On many levels he was a man without fear.

 The second impression is that having explored these topics and these thinkers and writers for the past quarter century and more, I found much more to learn and ponder in re-watching The Power of Myth than I could understand or accommodate back then.   That applies in different ways to other programs that Bill Moyers made.  They continue to nourish, as they once opened up new worlds, rescuing me from becoming mired in the goading limitations of the unembraceable world I was supposed to negotiate. 

These programs represent a small sample of the programs Bill Moyers created, every one of them thought-provoking and informative, and many of them revelatory. Over the years, Moyers and his collaborators have created more worthy programs than any other individual or group, and perhaps more than some entire networks.

 Bill Moyers demonstrated the power of television to expand and deepen our experience.  There should be a thousand Moyers.  But there is only one. 

   With TV as a medium for myth and story, ideas and mysteries and their magic-- examples of television’s potential so rarely realized that they seem alien rather than what you’d expect intelligent people to do with this miraculous medium—this series ends.  From Hopalong Cassidy and Howdy Doody to The Power of Myth—not such an inconsistent journey after all. 

My family's living room 1954

By an accident of history and my birth date, I am one of a dwindling number of those who grew up as television was growing up.  It occurred to me to make a contribution of my recollections, both to evoke memories in my relatively few contemporaries, and inform and perhaps amuse the many who did not spend early Saturday mornings of their preschool years staring at test patterns.

 This series presented memories of secondary things (sometimes called “mediated experiences”) as distinguished from primary experiences with people and the world.  Though as I tried to indicate, these two  categories of experience were not entirely separate in reality.  TV experiences and other experiences had dynamic relationships in my life, as well as the life of my times.

 In combination with other important and more primary factors, I grew up as I did because I grew up with television, with its role models, cautionary tales, morality fables, personalities, implied histories, conventional lies, information and hints at how the world works—as well as its sensory overloads and simultaneous sensory deprivations, its addictive rhythms, its bright and phony hedonism, its careless deceptions, its palliative hypnotism.

  Experiences with people on TV (more clearly double—the person and the person played, but then, real people are also double, at least) at a seemingly intimate distance (though often distant in time as well as space) placed them in the realms of timeless imagination and speculation, as well as becoming presences in my life.

Along the way I read (and wrote) scathing critiques of television.  It's worth remembering that long before the warnings of how the Internet and social media are changing how we perceive the world, and even physically changing our brains, there were many who made similar claims about the dangers of television.  From McLuhan in the 1960s (who masked his own disapproval in language that sounded to others like revelation) to Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television in the late 70s and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death in the mid-80s, these cultural, personal and civilization-scale dangers were enumerated and articulated.  And these authors were not wrong.  Nevertheless, television is what we had. 

 I was not entirely immune to the underlying pathologies of television—to TV as addictive narcotic, to the buy this to be happier temptations, or the hypocrisy of loathing what you nevertheless watch, and loathing yourself for watching it. But almost everything about TV had at least two sides.

Yes, television probably made reading harder by fracturing my attention span (as did hormones, as least as much.)  But television alerted me to new things to read.  And the list goes on from there.

 The rhythms of TV and its characters influenced the rhythms of my day, as well as causing dissatisfaction with the plodding and exhaustion of real life.  And they gave me parts to play in my head, that at best might counter the false parts the world and others insisted on imposing.  They expressed and evoked emotions mirrored but hidden within me.  Books and movies  did, too, but not in such everyday ways.  (Music did as well, but with differences.)

 The real world—and the real me—seldom matched those images, including those that at various times I realized were unworthy.  TV relentlessly, unashamedly oversold the trivial, which made it maddening, even if some of it exposes the triviality and the madness.  

There’s no sense in speculating what I would be like if I hadn’t grown up with TV, any more than I could know how I would have been different without electric lights and Italian food, and a loving mother, Catholic schools (like Joseph Campbell) and butterflies in the backyard of my little town. Or what if I been born into wealth and/or power in a vivid metropolis, not to mention at the other end of that spectrum.  Our time and its contexts shape (but don’t necessarily determine) how we think and feel, as well as how we live.  By this time in my life, it's mostly metaphor.  

In this series, despite its length, I’ve skated on the surface of my growing up with TV, for the depths are still murky.  But I felt compelled to bear witness, and especially to acknowledge and celebrate what meant something to me at a particular time. I enjoyed discovering historical contexts for the television I experienced in the early days I shared with TV. Perhaps some who read this, who may yet read this, whether they share all or some of these times, or view it as partially grasped history, will find something to enjoy in it as well. 

TV and Me: The PBS Oasis

 Television and I grew up together.  This is our story.  Latest in a series.

During the 1970s and especially the 80s and beyond, the vast wasteland of television increased in vastness and waste.  Jerry Springer springs to mind, along with Dynasty and Dallas, Inside Edition, shopping channels, Faux News, and various other forms of supermarket tabloid trash TV, paving the way for our current trash Internet anarchy.

 Television’s potential was being obliterated even from memory, but these dumbed-down shows with their psychotic grins exploiting violent versions of lowest denominator banality weren’t the whole story in those decades. There was, as principal example, PBS: the Public Broadcasting Service, officially founded in 1969.  Fighting off fierce political attack for much of the past 40 years or more, and not immune to the dumbing down and chicanery infecting television in general, nevertheless PBS remained a beacon of possibility.  For me as a viewer it was often an oasis in the Great Wasteland that provided me with the rescue of inspiring and expanding programs.

 As described in the previous post in this series, some of the shows that rescued me originated in other countries (principally the UK and Canada), and were presented to me via PBS stations.  Now this series on TV and me concludes with tributes to some deeply influential programs that PBS created or had a hand in creating.

Fred Rogers with Josie Carey WQED Pittsburgh early 1950s

 More generally, PBS was a persistent highlight of television.  The Pittsburgh public television station I first watched, WQED, was one of the first educational channels (eventually organized into NET or National Educational Television, one PBS precursor) and it was the very first to be community-sponsored in the country (which I guess meant corporations based in Pittsburgh as well as local viewers contributions.)  I was nearly 8 years old when it went on the air.  

Though our signal reception was iffy for the first years and most of the programming consisted of classes, I remember Josie Carey and her The Children’s Hour at 5 pm, just before Howdy Doody on WDTV.  Josie and Miss Francis on Ding Dong School were among my earliest teachers. (Not including Crusader Rabbit and Tom Terrific cartoons which I glimpsed mornings just before going to school.)  Backstage at Josie Carey’s show was puppeteer and organ accompanist Fred Rogers.  Her set would be modified for his show in the 1960s, and many of the same characters would appear.

 By the early 1970s, PBS news coverage would become trenchant and important.  PBS doggedly covered the various Watergate hearings, anchored by Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer, with analysis by Elizabeth Drew and the very young Cokie Roberts.  The daily MacNeil/Lehrer Report was essential.

 But I was mostly in awe of a number of their themed documentary series. I didn’t have regular access to television when the Kenneth Clark Civilization series ran in 1969, so my first experience with this form was  The Ascent of Man, which was first shown in the US in early 1975, before I left Greensburg for Washington.  These two series apparently were designed as counterparts: Clark examined the evolution of art, and Jacob Bronowski in Ascent followed the evolution of science, though each went beyond these borders.  Both were produced by the BBC and Time-Life, under the tutelage of David Attenborough.  This was the first of several series like it that I avidly absorbed.

 Bronowski’ 13 episode series set the template for these programs: they were personal views (which was Bronowski’s subtitle) and they depicted scenes around the world as illustrations and enactments.  Each host (or in British TV parlance, presenter) was also the chief author.  Their prejudices as well as insights were inevitably part of their narratives. Some viewers now would flag race and gender (and species) biases, and some of what was said on all these programs has since been superseded by later science and discovery.  But to me at the time, these programs were astonishing in their comprehensiveness.  In areas I knew anything about, they went far beyond textbook summations and embedded information in contexts, then linked both in narrative if not causal relation.  At times watching these I could almost literally feel my brain neurons firing—I was galvanized (which literally means to be stimulated by electric current.)  

 Bronowski’s subject was no less than the human story, with subsets such as one of his scholarly fields, the history and nature of science as an heroic human activity.  The moment that remains in memory is at the end of the 11^th episode, in which this otherwise genial, brilliant but conventional older man in a suit and tie is at the edge of a pond at Auschwitz, where ashes of crematorium victims—millions of mostly Jews-- were summarily deposited. 

 He points out that it is not science that turns people into numbers: the Nazis did it here.  “It was done by arrogance.  It was done by dogma.  It was done by ignorance.  When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no tests in reality, this is how they behave.”

 Then he suddenly steps into the pond, with water up to his ankles.  After noting that many members of his family died here, he continues: “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.  We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act.” And as he speaks his final sentence, he digs out a handful of mud and holds it up to the camera: “We have to touch people.”

 There are times when everything just stops, and the first time I saw this moment was one of those times.  It was so powerful that in my memory of it, he flings the mud at the camera (this scene is on YouTube, so I’ve seen this memory was erroneous.)  His words should echo in these times as well.

In 1979 another British series made it to PBS: Connections, created and hosted by James Burke (in his various leisure suits), explored interconnected events and technological innovations that led to major changes in societies. As host, Burke was as unconventional as his history, speaking plainly and with humor, without the scholarly gravitas of Clark and Bronowski, or any other documentary host to that point. 

 This series (and its followup, The Day the Universe Changed in 1986) asserted historical causalities that went beyond the generalizations and simplicities of the explanations we learned in school.  Crucial battles may not have been won just because of a brilliant leader, but because of a technological advantage, like the stirrup. Such was Burke’s influence that this kind of thinking has since become much more frequent.

 Burke made several more programs on the Connections theme but I believe their most important culmination came in perhaps his least known, three-part series, After the Warming in 1990.  In the guise of a citizen of the year 2050, Burke looks back at global efforts to address the climate crisis, and the changes resulting in the society of that time.  This early acceptance of the threats posed by global warming is still fascinating, especially in how it does--and mostly does not--match up with efforts so far.   Within this framework, Burke examines the determining role of climate and its changes in history and ordinary life, much as his Connections series did.  Lack of this perspective—of how important climate really is—remains a crucial and perhaps fatal ignorance.  This is essential information for our world, but unfortunately few people have ever seen these programs (though they are available free on YouTube.)   They are particularly interesting in light of what has and hasn’t happened since they were made.     

 The apex of this era came in 1980 with Cosmos.  In 1973 or so, I was managing editor of the arts at the Boston Phoenix, and interested in expanding our second section cover beyond the usual arts stories.  Celia Gilbert, our poetry editor, told me about a scientist friend of her scientist husband who was frustrated because the non-academic pieces he wrote weren’t getting published, and she asked if I would look at one of his manuscripts for the Phoenix.  I said I sure would.  But it never came. I therefore lost the chance to discover Carl Sagan.

 Carl Sagan’s first experience in the combination of science and show biz was at the age of four, when he was taken to the famous 1939 New York Worlds Fair, the World of Tomorrow.  As a scientist he believed in communicating to a general public the nuts and bolts of current science as well as the wonder scientific exploration engendered. 

 His early efforts culminated in the PBS series Cosmos, which he presented and co-authored with his wife Ann Druyan and Steven Soter.  This 13 part series was produced and directed by Adrian Malone (among others), who had produced The Ascent of Man, and again its subtitle was “A Personal Voyage.” Sagan used the irresistible vehicle of the ultimate starship to explore the cosmos, and human history in relationship to it.  It was the most popular of these programs, and one of the most watched PBS programs of all time.

 I remember it most for the vast timeline surrounding the present, not only of the universe but of humanity,  and its persistent, passionate emphasis on the fragility of human life and knowledge, eventually centered on the threat of nuclear self-destruction. In common with all these series, there was a lot of human history as context (the segment about the burning of the library at Alexandria was particularly potent.)  Again, it was enlarging: mind and soul-expanding.

 Probably just before Cosmos first aired, Jonathan Miller’s British-made series on medicine, The Body in Question, made it to America.  I may have seen some episodes then but remember it also from seeing at least some of it in later years.  Miller was always a stimulating and entertaining voice, and this series reflects his often contrarian view of events and their meaning.  I especially remember the program on the medical fad in France for “mesmerism” or hypnotism, one of many chapters in medical history the medical establishment would like to forgot.

 I did see every eye-opening episode of The Shock of the New, an 8-part series on the history of modern art by art critic Robert Hughes, seen in the US in 1981.  Hughes came from Australia, and at this time was based in New York as art critic for Time Magazine. He was not conventionally photogenic, yet his sun-lined face with its perpetual scowl demanded attention.  With his preposterous 70s hair humidified into strange shapes, and his eyes continuously moving across the camera from right to left and back again like a searchlight, he spoke plainly and yet eloquently.  His judgments were constant and definite.  He spoke from locations (beginning with the base of the Eiffel Tower), and the art of showing painting on TV had advanced so it was an experience in itself.  I learned a lot, including from his presentation on modern architecture, which proved immediately useful to me as I worked on my shopping mall book. 

 Probably the least remembered of these 1980 series was playwright Ronald Harwood’s history of western theatre called All The World’s A Stage. Its 13 episodes aired in the UK in 1984 and in the US probably a year later.  It, too, was a personal view, and was shot on appropriate locations. But its singular contribution was not only to tell what productions looked like in various times and places, but to show them—and not just in photos and diagrams, but with real sets and real actor speaking the words as they had more or less been spoken, sometimes presenting an entire scene or part of a scene.  Though I had a theatre history course in college, this series (which I taped) proved invaluable, especially when I began to write regularly about theatrical productions.  This series deserves more respect and renown than it apparently received. 

 By the mid-1980s, public television budgets had been reduced, due in large part to politically motivated cuts in funding by the federal government and some state governments, and the pinch was felt in productions. Something similar also happened in Thatcher’s UK. So the era of these ambitious multi-episode programs was largely over.

 While PBS still produced quality programs, they seldom were of this particular type: the elaborated vision of a single author.  These were television’s version of another vanished form: the long story presented by the New Yorker in full, in one issue or more often in several parts, written by John Hershey (Hiroshima) and Rachel Carson (Silent Spring), Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in The Lake) and Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth), John McPhee and Janet Malcolm.  

I can remember one more such series just as the form was disappearing, eventually to be replaced by (for example) the Ken Burns histories.  It was called Millennium: Tribal Wisdom in the Modern World, funded largely by the natural cosmetics company The Body Shop, which gets lavish mention in the series, and once again produced by Adrian Malone.  

This series arrived in the US at the perfect moment: when Native American writers and activists were transforming the 500^th anniversary of Columbus into a classroom on Native history and the especially relevant traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples in a time of ecological crisis.

 It was created and narrated by David-Marbury-Lewis, an anthropologist who’d lived much of his life among Indigenous peoples in remote places. He also founded the organization Cultural Survival, which still exists. Ranging across Africa, Asia, Australia, South and North America, this series centered on vignettes of actual people in the present, which were created after producers took “care to ask them for the stories and incidents that they think are significant, and to elicit their commentaries on them.” 

 The vignettes tend to dramatize common human experiences but within contexts very different from the overdeveloped world. The themes of connectedness and ecological responsibility as crucial to physical and cultural survival have only become more critical since this series aired, and seemingly was forgotten. They are likely to become even more essential as the climate crisis begins to dominate.

 All of the aforementioned series seen on PBS also produced books based on them, and I got many of them.  Generally they expanded on ideas and information presented on TV, and became lasting references. I’ve read and consulted them many times over the years, so the influence of these programs on my life and my work have been considerable.   

Alastair Cooke, the long-time host of Masterpiece

Along the way I appreciated many of the ongoing PBS umbrella series.  Several brought over plays from the UK (playwright Tom Stoppard used to joke that these plays appeared there on such television programs as Play of the Month, but when they came to America they were Masterpiece Theatre and Great Performances.) There were American productions as well, providing me with most of the professional theatrical experiences I had, with much better than my usual rush seats in New York.  Great Performances was also one of the umbrella shows for dance and music of various kinds. 

These were also venues for dramatizations of classic (and not so classic) literature over several episodes, with the capability of more generously treating the characters, subplots and subtleties of a classic novel (a Dickens, an Austen) than a two hour movie would. The big hit in that era was the original Upstairs Downstairs.

  One of the first instances of this that I recall was the miniseries version of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.  This portrait of a woeful working class young man with aspirations to education and higher things who was diverted and ultimately destroyed by a tragic marriage, scared me to death in my early 20s. 

 Other PBS umbrella programs presented various biographies, histories, exposes, political analyses. PBS excelled in biography (often done by independent filmmakers) and explanatory journalism.  Their nature documentaries mostly suffered from the drawbacks of the genre: emphasis on conflict, action, pretty pictures, superficial narrative.  I learned less from these than other types of programs, though there were exceptions.

 Their explanatory programs on science could be breathtaking. In perhaps the early 80s or even the late 70s I vividly recall seeing a program (perhaps a Nova or a stand-alone) that went back and forth between new scientific discoveries in physics of the very large (black holes, etc.) and the very small (quarks, etc.)  The program described relativity and quantum physics, the four fundamental forces (gravity, the electromagnetic force and the strong force and the weak force within the atom) and the struggle to find the “grand unified theory” of how they all interrelate. 

 The climax of the program was the revelation of the one scientist who might yet put it all together. He was Stephen Hawking, then unknown to the general public (years before his bestselling book), or at least to me.  Most of what this program covered was new to me, and as I struggled to keep it all straight and deal with my increasing wonder, I was confronted with my first glimpse of a man twisted by disease (ALS) who might hold the answer.  This was before Hawking got his voice synthesizer, so I heard only the strange sounds he could make, comprehensible (the program said) only to a few.  It was an amazing moment.

 This program was a vivid introduction that allowed me to read further and more widely in related areas with some confidence, which eventually led to reviewing some new books covering some of these subjects for the general reader.  

These were just some of the ways that PBS was a meaningful part of my life.  This relationship continued beyond the 1980s and 90s, into the new century.  In my next post I isolate on one figure whose PBS shows were especially important to me over those decades: Bill Moyers.  This TV and Me series concludes next time.