We are about half way into the latest Harry Potter. Margaret and I read chapters to each other in the evenings, as we did the first four books several years ago when friends introduced us to this practice.

As advertised, this novel is darker, and Harry is more angry and emotional. He is fifteen in this book, and Rowling has brilliantly matched the story to the kind of challenge an adolescent is more likely to see, and more able to respond to. The younger Harry had to deal with threats from outside the Hogwarts school, and though he had some troubled times within it, with several teachers and with some other students, basically he found comfort and support there. Now he is confronted with official authority that is despotic and insidious, and yet has absolute control over his school life. Some of this actually reminds me of my own adolescence, in Catholic junior high and high school. But what's also interesting is that this presents challenge that might have been overwhelming for the younger Harry. Along with emotional turmoil, Harry shows signs of moving towards awareness of his strengths. It takes a wise writer to see this, and a skillful one to make it feel real.

There's an interesting and ambitious long essay in the July issue of Harper's by Jack Hitt, a contributing editor of that magazine. Perhaps I'm projecting (or on the other hand perhaps it's always been true) but it seems that more and more of the magazine reads as if written by Lewis Lapham, its editor. This is not the most exact example, though it does have the Lapham tone.

Called "A Gospel According to the Earth," it is clever and learned, has many provocative things to say about religion in history and the contemporary world, and there are passages of great insight and elegance. But I find I can't agree with his apparent conclusion, that the spiritual realm once claimed by established religions is now being displaced into such endeavors as environmentalism but without real spiritual content. Or at least that's what I take as the meaning of one of his concluding strophes, "We live in end time, all right. But it's not the end of the world that's coming; it's the declining power of the sacred word to reach our hearts as something other than shibboleth."

I might agree that traditional religious forms, such as Christianity, are perched on the edge of irrelevance. But Hitt ignores the the nature-based religions that flourished in Europe well before the Greeks, and in Asia and other parts of the world, particularly evident in the last indigenous cultures of Africa, Australia and the Americas. (His references to pagan religions are more learned than I could manage but still historically limited.) The Native traditions I know something about provide a spiritual context for contemporary ecology. The survival of these cultures, and their sacred places, is closely linked to the survival of natural environments. But beyond this, there is a spiritual quality to quite a bit of ecological consciousness and just plain tree-hugging. There is more to the environmental movement than rationalism, and displaced guilt and pale projections of resurrection. The whole concept of resurrection comes not from Christianity but from the natural world, from the cycles of plants, the mysteries of gestation and birth and death in childbirth, and the emergence of the bear from a winter's deadness.

I don't think that spirituality depends on belief in a superhuman creator and guardian figure, or a priesthood of authorities, their angels and their saints. Spirituality to me can simply be acknowledging greater mysteries, and the sacredness of what we are given, what sustains us in our life, which is our planet and our universe and its life and mysteries. We are not limited by our understanding of it all, yet we must be responsible to what we do understand, which right now has led us to realize the effects we are having on the fabric of our planet's life, as well as the violence we do to each other, often from a great distance and without direct knowledge. We must be responsible as well to our best understanding of ourselves, and what we do to each other and why.

Perhaps as Hitt cleverly suggests the act of recycling is our equivalent of an act of contrition. But I don't believe that recycling as a form of prayer is necessarily empty, and I think that in their hearts people know it is not empty, and that it is a prayer.

Bring on the Night

Over the past couple of days I've watched (in pieces) one of my favorite movies, "Bring on the Night," directed by Michael Apted. It follows the construction of the band and first album of Sting when he first went solo in the late 80s. It's a great band, made up of mostly jazz musicians, all of them non-white:Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland (who has since passed on) on keyboards, Omar Hakim on drums, the definitive backup singers of Dolette MacDonald and Janet Pendaris.

It's a skillingfully done movie, made especially enjoyable by the locations (all in and around Paris), the musicianship and personalities of the band members, and how articulate they are, which of course also extends to Sting, the star of the show. (There's also the post-Don't Look Back required scenes of the semi-slimy manager, in this case castigating the designers for the bland clothes the band is wearing, while he is wearing exactly the same colors and style.)

It also means a lot that this album constitute Sting's best in merging political/historical content with great songwriting. So two scenes near the end of the movie, the only ones in which Sting is near tears, occur one after the other. The second is the on-camera birth of his son, with him in the delivery room with his wife, Judie Styler (very brave to appear pregnant in the whole film; what she looks like normally can be seen in one of Sting's best song videos, and perhaps one of the best anyone made in the early, most creative days of such videos, for "We'll Be Together" from his next album, "Nothing Like the Sun," which is pretty much an extension of this one, "Song of the Blue Turtles.") It's done with great potency to Sting's song on this album and in this show, "Russians." It is so simple that at times it is simplistic, but at times it is the poetic essence of the reality. "We share the same biology/regardless of ideology..."

(There's probably not a more complex yet powerful political song than "We Work the Black Seam," also on this album and in this film.)

The first is his sit-down interview answer to the question, was there a moment when you knew your dreams were going to come true? Yes, it was when he was waking up after a gig (with the Police presumably) in a hotel room in northern England and he heard the man washing the windows singing his song, "Roxanne." (This moment is referenced in his video for "Every Breath You Take.") He said he nearly wept, and nearly did as he said it. To have someone sing a song you wrote is, as he says quite precisely, "a great privilege."

It is a dream that I share. It sort of happened to me at least once, though I still dream of hearing children I don't know sing a song I made up. I guess the meaning of it is hard to explain to someone who doesn't share it so intensely. But I agree, it is akin to something holy and can't be really sought after. It is a great privilege.

On those days, in those moments I am conscious of living on the far edge of my life, I do things realizing they may be my last opportunity. In these very close to desperate times, what I thought I was doing was completion. Finishing and getting it out there. But there were also things I was starting, things I am in the middle of; there were and are things I've held onto.

I suppose there still are things I will hold onto for awhile, a few ideas, for instance, like the concept I have for a new image for the arts. But I now realize that what I am doing is giving away. Holding on or holding back is itself a kind of death. Give it the chance of life, even if that means giving it away.

So I will give away more. I will send my ideas out there, freely, but also without fear or favor.

I will give what I have to give. Partly this is because I believe you make your best contribution by doing what you do best, especially if it is markedly different from what else is available. Partly it is like that conversation between the Woody Allen character and the space aliens in "Stardust Memories." Woody (playing a comedian who makes arty movies) asks them if he should devote his life to doing charitable works with the poor, or something like that. They tell him something like: You're not the type, you'd never last. If you want to help humanity, tell funnier jokes.

Maybe it's just that we give what we have to give, because we cannot give what we do not have.

As much as I disparage the obsession, the addiction, the insidious tyranny of consumerism, I don't follow any party line. For example, I like some designer label clothes. There is something to be said for them. If I could afford it, I would wear a lot of Armani. Perhaps this comes from being the grandson of a tailor (an Italian one at that), because what I like and value about Armani clothes is their style, and that they are well made.

Of course there are certain names that are pure bull and marketing, that are no better and may be worse than non-name clothes. But some do mean something.

And many people, it seems, wear designer label clothes for the label, not the clothes or the designer. But to refuse to wear these clothes because of these people is to play their game.

In fact, my suits, shirts and some of my ties (none of which I have the opportunity to wear much these days) are designer label, although without exception I bought them either on deep discount or more typically in thrift stores. But even second-hand, they are in better shape than a lot of full price clothes. They are made in France, England and Italy, of good fabric. They are probably not as well made as the more expensive designers, and may even be as well made as the suits my grandfather tailored for his customers, in the small American town where he had his shop.

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RIP Gregory Peck, David Brinkley

Gregory Peck and David Brinkley, who both died this week, were in different ways heroes of my early adolescence. I admired and identified with many actors, including some not very good ones, but my favorite was Gregory Peck. He was tall, and I wanted to be tall (and yes, it had something to do with basketball.) But I wanted to be tall as Gregory Peck was tall, looking out over everyone's heads at something only he could see, something only he could feel. It was that something he saw that made him different, wiser, more decent, even when he was troubled and beset.

Of course I identified with him as the hero of "To Kill A Mockingbird," even though it was one of the first movies I saw that I'd read the book first (the Readers Digest Condensed version anyway), so had already formed a hero in my mind. It was an important movie for me at that time. I was about 17 when I participated in the March on Washington.

But I especially admired him in other roles, including and perhaps especially very minor films, like "Captain Newman MD" and "Beloved Infidel," in which he played F. Scott Fitzgerald. In these and other roles ("Roman Holiday" especially) he reassured me that a man can be masculine and still thoughtful, be attractive to women but still gentle and caring. He could be self-deprecating and funny without losing any of his masculine strength and presence. In films like Captain Horatio Hornblower and "On the Beach" and The Guns of Navarone he was a model for leadership in somewhat the same way. His characters could be impetuous and stubborn and they were men of action, but they were also honest and intelligent and sensitive (at least in a rueful masculine sort of way.) His courage was usually quiet, with lots of forebearance. At times his characters could be awkward and stiff, but it came out of an authentic, earned dignity, and so these were idiocyncracies to be noted with affection. What made him angry was intolerance and injustice. When Gregory Peck looks out over the heads of everyone, you know he's taking the long view.

David Brinkley was half of the Huntley-Brinkley Report team around then. His voice and the cadence of his speech were unique, and they fit the unique way he constructed sentences and turned a phrase. I was so enthralled that when I started announcing the news on my college campus radio station as a freshman, I found myself imitating him to an almost embarrassing degree. (That is, I might have been embarrassed if I thought anyone was actually listening, and if I wasn't having so much fun doing it. I had different voices for my jazz show, my folk music show and when I filled in for the classical shows.)

He was held up as a model of wit-something now just about unheard of for a news anchor. That is, genuine verbal wit, not the witless funning around that's become a local and cable staple. I recall Time or Newsweek doing a profile of him and preserving two of his witticisms. He repeated the cliché of the time that if the Democrats won the south it was tantamount to victory. He said that the Republicans were going to try to slay the tantamount. The other was his comment on the controversy over the proposed re-naming of the Boulder Dam to the Hoover Dam. He suggested the problem could be solved if Herbert Hoover would only change his name to Boulder.

Throughout his career he had a way of cutting through the cant and summing up a situation in plain but graceful English. He did tend to fall back on a few expressions, like "What the outcome will be...no one can say." Even when I thought he was oversimplifying, I had to admire the grace with which he expressed it.

I don't know what others are saying about these two men, but these are my memories, and my thanks for their presence.

On Having An Ear

Part of a longer work-in-progress...


I have an ear for music, an ear for voices, and for certain other sounds. That may be because I have an ear for everything--- that is, one ear that hears. The other one doesn't hear anything at all.

No one knows exactly how I became half deaf, or deaf in one ear. It was officially discovered around the time I started grade school. I complained that I could not always hear the stories that Sister Kathleen told every morning---some of them charming little Bible stories, or fantasies based on the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus, or more memorably, grisly stories about martyrs for God and those who suffered sores and risked madness to convert pagans in dirty heathen countries. She also told cautionary tales about otherwise good children who thought they could get away with lying and staying home from school when they weren't really sick, and having reckless fun with their bodies doing gymnastics on the bed, and wound up with broken necks as God's punishment. She described these horrors in a soft singing little voice, and it was important to hear every word, for my soul was at stake.

This problem of hearing rang a bell with my mother, who remembered noticing that when I put the telephone receiver to one of my ears to talk to my grandmother, I would immediately switch the receiver to the other ear. (I'm not saying which ear; such information could be dangerous in the wrong hands, and I'm not kidding.)

Hearing tests with earphones hooked to consoles in little rooms, as well as machines that looked to me like big old-fashioned radio receivers, confirmed it. I was almost entirely deaf in one ear, with better than average hearing in the other. It was a middle ear problem, and no treatment, device or surgery could correct it. Though I subsequently prayed for a miracle, once while staring at crutches stacked up at a particularly famous shrine in Montreal that we visited it in the course of a family vacation, the only change over the years is that the bad ear went from almost completely deaf to entirely stone deaf.

The doctors told my mother that I could have been born that way, or the damage might have occurred as the result of a childhood illness. Though I eventually got all the old-fashioned illnesses like measles, mumps and chicken pox, I hadn't yet at age six; but I can remember bad colds, sore throats and earaches before then. But I now think it was neither such an illness nor a genetic birth defect. Although my parents' descriptions were as vague as they were about most important things, I know I was born with an Rh factor problem, and required a blood transfusion shortly after birth. One of the side effects of the condition I probably had (or its treatment, for infants rarely survived without the transfusion) is deafness.

The result, as described by one of the hearing doctors consulted at some point, is that I would have some problem hearing that was chiefly directional---if I was on the wrong side of a sound source, or if the room were noisy. So there would be sounds I wouldn't hear at all, but mostly sounds I heard, but not well enough to interpret them correctly. That is, sometimes I wouldn't hear a person's voice, but mostly I would know the person was speaking but I couldn't understand what they were saying.

So when Sister Kathleen was told, she tried to make adjustments, such as seeing that I sat near the front of the room. There was only so much she could do: my first grade classmates and I were the sharing a classroom with the second grade, and they were all on the side of the room I should be in order to place Sister Kathleen in better range of my hearing ear. But after a solicitous few weeks, she forgot about my hearing problem, and so did I.

It was probably then, in the first grade, that I became aware of it as a problem, a disadvantage, but not a completely disabling one. Some activities were more difficult because of it, but there wasn't anything I wanted to do in my daily life that I couldn't manage. It was like being left-handed or skinny, though at times a bit more consequential.

Sometimes I had to remind myself to be aware of it. This became especially crucial when I started dating. If I went to the movies with a girl and somehow allowed her to sit on my deaf side, I would wind up smiling and nodding madly at everything she said.

I don't remember any change in how I heard at any point in my early childhood. At least as far as I know, it was always part of me. So everything I learned, everything I know about the world, every perception that involves hearing, has been affected, influenced, shaped, characterized, by the fact of having one working ear.

Only in recent years have I really thought about its larger effects. Guided by my ear, it's possible to rewrite my life. I think for example of the baby in his crib. Did he discover in the phenomenon of hearing from one side only, his first solitary game? With one side of his head on the mattress in his crib, the world was silent, or rather made up of muffled uniform sounds: the soft rush of his own blood, the rhythm in his temple. And when he turned over, the world turned on! Sounds: voices, footsteps, the gentle jangle of the mobile above his head, accompanying the music of motion, shadows, glinting light.

He could hide from mummy that way. He hears her talking on the phone, then turns over on his side, his ear pressed against the pillow and he is gone, into the shadows of silence. Then he suddenly turns over, and peekaboo! When he hears he is there, no longer hidden.


ii

Folk wisdom has it that those deprived of one of the major perceiving senses often possess extraordinary powers of one or more of the remaining senses. That is, those who cannot hear can see with almost impossible acuity, and the blind can gauge the identity of a woman from the smell of her perfume. Scientists say it is nonsense but folk wisdom and anecdotal evidence is rarely wrong completely. It's probable that the sensory apparatus itself is not so much better in compensation for what does not sense at all, but that the quality of attention to the remaining senses is compensatory, and developed to an extraordinary degree.

In my case, being half deaf has not afforded me better vision. Perhaps paradoxically it has made me extraordinarily sensitive to sound.

Hearing less means I must listen more. My ear relentlessly listens for pattern, for the meaning in the sounds. Listening involves instantaneously shifting through the possibilities, filling in the gaps to assemble the patterns of meaning out of the fragments I hear.

This is not really different in kind from how others hear. The brain works by assembling images from sensory data. But with less data, it is a process that requires more work and perhaps more imagination: educated intuition, quick thinking, entertaining of multiple alternatives, provisional probing and playacting (to gain time, get more data, keep up the other's comfort level, or just rest awhile). At times it's so shambled and improvisatory that I've become conscious of the process. Most people are rarely conscious of all they go through to register a perception, to reconstruct the intended meaning out of another's expressions, be it garbled words or a horn blaring from behind you.

This requires a near constant state of alertness, and application of attention that requires expending a great deal of effort and energy. But it must appear to be normal. I must concentrate, decode, filling in the missing sounds, the meaning, but unobtrusively, while playing the game required by the circumstances. That is, seeming to be the person it's appropriate to be, in proper relationship to the person or people speaking.

Because not hearing is not understanding, and not understanding is evidence of stupidity. Deaf and dumb equal dumb and dumber.

But interrupting the flow with questions throws everybody off. It's often better to suspend judgment for awhile on the meaning of what's said until there are more clues, more cues, than it is to stop the speakers cold, make them back up, and start again. Something might get explained, but then they can get confused, unsure, suspicious. Of course there are times when this must be done, when it's crucial to clarify immediately. But it's best all around if there's not too many of those times. It's best to play along, to fake it if necessary. It's best if it is secret.

It's not an obvious handicap that both stigmatizes and separates, yet that's largely because it's invisible, unknown. But I know. It's an inner stigmata, that reminds me I am always separate, always nearer to isolation.

Guided by my ear it's possible to rewrite my life. I had an uncontrollable temper as a child. The biggest tantrum I remember from my preschool days was a birthday party for me at my grandmother's, a surprise party probably, begun with a shock of loud sound as shouting children suddenly appeared in their dependably and peculiarly quiet house. I was probably very upset by this, and confused by the delight of my mother and grandparents. In any case I remained testy and miserable for the rest of the party. I remember lying prostrate on the back porch stairs, kicking and screaming, my mother amazed-no one had ever seen a child throw a fit at his own birthday party. There are photographs of the moment.

What is the self other than the locus of knowing, of perceiving, discerning, ordering? It begins with the basic what's what, who's talking, what are they saying, what's going on.

The effort to hear is the effect to interpret, fill in, guess. And that effort so seldom pays off in anything much worth the effort that I lose patience and begin to despair. People are therefore exhausting.

Fortunately from early childhood I had my own room. It was sanctuary from the threat and violence that set me off. It was not the only violence I experienced acutely, but it was an important one: the violence of noise.

iii

Noise is unintelligible sound. When it becomes insistent, a cacophony of multiple sounds from multiple sources, it is profoundly disturbing. It can represent the dangerous, mask sounds of danger, and if loud enough it is dangerous in itself to my remaining hearing. Noise turns the world into an attack and a confusion.

For the half-deaf, nothing is more disturbing than noise. When you can't hear as much or as clearly as others, the brain must work hard to process and interpret sounds, match them up with expectations and patterns, to make sense of the world moment by moment. Noise creates chaos and confusion and overload, the glands flip into fight-or-flight mode, or just generate dismay.

For me noise is exhausting because I must make sense of it, and out of what it masks. What others find easily intelligible, I must puzzle out with effort.

An odd constant of my life: when fatigued or overanxious, I am more sensitive to noise, more disturbed by it. In this sense I "hear" better. This again seems counterintuitive-could I really be hearing better? No, my normal defense is weakened-which is my ability to quickly sort sounds I'm hearing, or even half-hearing.

Noise is a scattering, of dissipation of self, of myself as center of order, of coherence, of paying attention. Noise, the exhausting onslaught, slaughtering me.

Noise is a deeply offensive and deeply personal assault; it assaults my brain formed to be so sensitive to sound and especially to ascertain its meaning; and it assaults me physically, with the fear of losing the hearing I have.

The world is mostly noise.

Guided by my ear it's possible to rewrite my life. I remember the home where I grew up as loud, as homes of the working class culture often are. Powerless voices must be loud to be heard. I fought with my sister, my father yelled, mealtimes were not especially pleasant.

Any group of relatives was loud, but my father's family was especially loud. When I was very young, my parents used to play canasta with them. I would sometimes hide in the closet to get away from the loud voices, but I would also hide there to listen to what they were saying.

We lived in a kind of suburb, and the noise around our house troubled me especially as a teenager. The quiet of the suburbs on a Sunday was a cruel joke, as motorized divisions of lawn mowers maneuvered all around. As motors became more powerful and plentiful, and as the arsenal began to include weed whackers and leaf blowers, the noise was maddening.

For me the need for a secure range in which sound is either absent or of my choice and controllable is part of my sense of personal space, my territoriality. It is necessary for my sanity.

Lack of sound space made me angry and full of aggression. From boyhood on, noise would drive me to my room and if I was still subjected to it, send me to pacing, helpless and furious.

Holidays became especially tainted. All holidays celebrate one thing: noise. From the noisemakers on New Years to the fireworks of Independence Day, to the lawnmowers and speed boats of Memorial Day and the tuneless bell ringing of the Salvation Army at every store entrance during Christmas shopping season. American can't seem to do anything without making a lot of noise.

For me there is always this layer. There is the layer of conviviality, of celebration, of festivals of color and music, and the warmth of smiling people. And constantly, below the threshold of consciousness, but almost inevitably coming into mood---to thread a layer of melancholy, or to dominate with impatience, gloom and the need to escape---it is all perceived as noise.

The ear is the least of it. Brain, glands, emotion react to the abrasiveness, the abuse that is noise. Noise is always threat. The cacophony, the loud chaos, blinds me to what could be attacking, even as it attacks, confuses, bewilders. In this context, an attack can be simply the demand for my comprehension and response: sounds I am supposed to respond to appropriately, which means I have to know precisely what they are, what they mean.

There is also the single, insistent noise. Even when identified---the whining saw next door, the throbbing bass from the parked car, the barking dog--- it won't go away, it forces itself on me, it rapes. It so overwhelms the rhythms of my internal music of thought that I am no longer who I am. I become mad. And in rage I become madness. There have been occasions when an insistent imposition of noise which I couldn't grit my teeth and tolerate has driven me beyond self control. If I cannot escape I've been known to lash out. It becomes a matter of self-preservation.

But noise doesn't have to be overtly loud to eventually become disturbing. For me, small talk can also be noise. I find my impatience is greater in groups, with a number of conversations or participants, but these aren't the only components of my impatience. In information theory, I believe, noise is simply that which isn't meaningful. Since understanding speech requires attention and effort, I'd like some payoff for my pains. My mind craves some nourishment, and I can put up with only a certain amount of talk that is nothing more than bonding ritual, or expression of personality.

I understand that small talk is social lubrication, that it conveys information through body-talk and so on. But at times its repetitive nature and essential triviality and banality of expression make me very impatient and testy, because it takes extra effort to understand speech, and I'd prefer some meaning or at least wit in expression for my efforts, something energizing rather than wearing and wearying.

But not all sound-not all noise really-is noxious noise to me. Some of it is a kind of background music, a soothing melody of the everyday. I enjoy sitting in a café especially, a relatively quiet one, but not noiseless: a minimal music, the suggestion of rhythms. The aural rhythms of comings and goings are accompanied by visual rhythms of color and movement. They might would help jog the rhythms inside, give me a beat and the suggestion of a melody, to which the instruments inside would improvise, would make songs these external hints evoked.


Hearing less means I must listen more, listen always. This in itself leads to idiosyncrasies. For instance, I don't know how people with two working ears can sleep. I can sleep only with my good ear muffled deep in the pillow. Otherwise I would be alert to every sound, my brain would try to register it. It would palpably disrupt my internal tempo, destroying the lulling rhythm of rest. Perhaps the brain of someone used to hearing well, and equally whichever way they face, has a "don't listen" switch. But I'll bet that brain has kept a subconscious monitor apprised of the kinds of sounds that would indicate danger or another's distress, or some other reason for juicing up into alertness. But my brain knows I might not accurately hear such a sound, and so it must listen harder, even if it means disturbing sleep.

Sleeping with my good ear cut off from most ambient sounds is just a trick, though. My brain is supposed to believe in the silence, and it usually plays along. But almost any sound loud enough to register will wake the monitor, and if the sound persists, the monitor will wake me.

Hearing less, listening more, is all very wearing. It gets exhausting. Alertness becomes anxiety. The paradox is only apparent, the irony a twisted staircase of emotion and pain: what might be thought the enemy of an unhearing ear is instead my haven, which is silence.

Fortunately such a sanctuary exists. You call it night.

My night time---I can concentrate after an unbroken period of quiet, and in unbroken quiet---the security of quiet. In an odd way, this security is probably also why in the daytime I gravitate to public places with minimal noise but lots of visual stimulation, like cafes. There is order, and privacy. The activity is neutralizing-none of it really necessitates anything from me, whereas at home, the quiet is an invitation for interruption by the phone, or something I should be doing. This is beyond conscious control, but I think it has something to do with how I am better able to focus and concentrate in these two situations-in the daytime in a public place, in the silence of night.

But such sanctuaries are easily violated. The more consistent the silence, the easier it is for noise to destroy. It takes only a single barking dog to lacerate the night. There are few dependable zones of silence left. Airplanes drone across the wilderness sky. Snowmobiles and dirt bikes desecrate the mountains and deserts. Here in far northern California, we quickly learn that the quiet of the country is a cruel joke.The sounds of motors carry far and loud through the echo chamber of the woods. And there are always motors.

Having an ear, I am especially attuned to sound, but others are not immune to its peculiar properties, and how it interacts with the brain, the mind, the heart. I don't believe our societal blind spot to the effects of noise as pollution is because noise doesn't affect even the evenly hearing. It may be that an extravagantly extraverted society, based on outrageously elaborate denial, on daily agreements that don't bear close examination, actually welcomes noise. Welcomes it as distraction. "Noise protects us from painful reflection," C.G. Jung observed. "Noise is so insistent, so overwhelmingly real, that everything else becomes a pale phantom."

In the sanctuary of night, in the sanctuary of my own room as a boy, I live in an intelligible universe. I can set the rhythms, I can hear the sounds; I can hear myself think. There is nothing that demands attention and interpretation and the correct response, nothing to fight off or contend. There is much to listen to.

It's a fantasy world, of words and pictures, of the umbra of light as I do my homework at the old dark wood desk, the radio tuned to "Nightwatch" on WHJB, the local station, which is the only station my supposed short wave radio reliably plays. There I can guide the lamp over the globe, performing the experiments from my astronomy book, and scratch out my science fiction novel and its illustrations in my brown notebook. It's the fantasy world of the novel I'm reading in bed, cold hands gripping the book over the covers, as I follow Stephen Dedalus through the sounds of his life and its duet with mine.

It's the fantasy world of the words I type and read on the computer screen, and of the worlds I construct in my head, that I see and hear come into the world when I write or sing or play the keyboard or guitar. For I do have an ear for music.

The movies I watch, the music and recorded talk I listen to, in the bright glow surrounded by darkness and silence. It's the worlds of books I enter, that I make in tandem with the author and with the silence and the night. It is the fantasy world I make in which I recognize myself, I recognize the rhythms and the voice, I hear from the center, and I find hope again.

Hi there sports fans. Apparently people are bored to death by the NBA finals this year between the San Antonio Spurs and New Jersey Nets. The ratings are terrible through four games.

You can save yourself having to watch any more of them by reading this: the Spurs have won the past two series in the same way-they've had pretty good games and stinky games through the first four, and then they won the fifth and sixth games to win the series. And that's just what's going to happen in the finals.

In the meantime I have been watching tapes of previous playoffs, most recently from 2001, when the Lakers won every game of every round except the first game of the finals, which they lost to the 76ers in overtime. It's been very interesting, and I hope somebody on the Lakers staff is doing the same thing.

Because there's lessons for what they need to do in the off-season evident from watching them in their heyday of dominance. Shaq was more active, athletic, focused and motivated than he was most of the time in 2003. He probably will return to form next year, and apparently Phil Jackson and he have already talked about this, about Shaq earning another MVP as well as another championship ring.

Kobe Bryant was brilliant at times, and at times over-excitable. He's gotten more mature and though he can still be uneven, he can be even more brilliant. He's having shoulder surgery soon, due to an injury early in the playoffs (2001 was also the only year he didn't have some kind of injury or illness during the playoffs in the last four years) but the change in his off-season routine may do him good. At least he's getting his surgery early enough that he'll be recovered before the season starts.

But the real lesson is what else they had in 2001. A strong and experienced power forward in Horace Grant. The Lakers are well aware of that problem. But what I learned to appreciate more was speed. The 2001 Lakers were faster than the Spurs, but the reverse was true in 2003. And though the 76ers won the first game of the finals partly because of the speed of their game on both offense and defense (and the Lakers' rust and bad conditioning after being off for 10 days), they were able to come back because they reasserted their speed. Against the Spurs and especially against the 76ers, they added speed to their lineup off the bench, with Tyron Lue. (I doubt that I'm spelling that right.)

I remembered Lue did a great job guarding/hounding Allen Iverson, but I had forgotten the contributions he made with other elements of his game. He brought the ball up through pressure, used speed and quickness to drive and pass, and he could shoot the 3.

He must have impressed Doug Collins, who was on the NBC team broadcasting the games, because when he became the coach of the Washington Wizards the next season, Lue was playing for him.

Now Lue is available and is said to be very interested in returning to the Lakers. This is a real no-brainer---they've got to get him. He's played their system before, he's gotten even better playing with Michael Jordan, and he's still fast.

So Kobe, I know you read this blog faithfully, so whisper his name in the correct ears, and let's get Lue for the Lakers next year.

Ears? Is this some kind of theme?

What Kind of Peace Do You Want?



"What kind of peace do I mean?" said the President of the United States, speaking at the commencement of American University. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war..."

"I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children," he continued. "Not merely peace for Americans, but peace for all men and women; not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time."

There was plenty of attention paid to the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis last year. It will be interesting to see if any attention at all is paid to the 40th anniversary of the first arms control agreement between the superpowers, the nuclear test ban treaty of 1963.

In particular, we need to revisit the most dramatic moment of the test ban debate: the address delivered by President John F. Kennedy at American University on June 10, 1963, that began with the words quoted above. It remains one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, though one of the lesser known. Though the Cold War is over and more arms agreements have been made, the dangers of war, of nuclear war and even total nuclear holocaust remain. Especially considering the aggressive policies and rhetoric of the Bush administration, Kennedy's words are worth listening to again.

It was the sobering prospect of imminent nuclear war in October 1962 that created the conditions leading to that treaty. Apart from the immediate survival of humanity, this historic acknowledgement of the world’s mutual interest in peace was the major positive result of that crisis. Considering recent events—--such as the India-Pakistan confrontation that nearly led to the first atomic bomb exchange in human history, North Korea proclaiming its readiness to produce and even sell nuclear weapons, the use of near-nuclear weapons in Iraq and the Bush administration's plan to expand the American nuclear arsenal—--the test ban treaty and especially what it clearly meant to the leaders who negotiated and signed it are extraordinarily relevant.

The Cuban Missile crisis had forced all nations to consider what nuclear war would really mean. America was clearly the foremost nuclear power in the world, yet a nuclear exchange would have meant complete destruction anyway. Kennedy spoke about this to aides during the crisis. At one point Khrushchev sent a letter to Kennedy which sadly and graphically portrayed the consequences of nuclear war on both countries and the world.

Once the crisis was resolved, Kennedy saw a rare opportunity to change the paradigm of the arms race. He had been calling for talks on nuclear arms control since his first state of the union address in 1961. Now he revived his proposal for a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviet Union, and staked his presidency on it.

At first the Soviets were receptive, but reflexive mistrust between the two nations and opposition within both their governments imperiled the negotiations through the winter and spring of 1963. It was then that Kennedy dramatically refocused the terms of the debate. He announced two initiatives at American University designed to advance the test ban negotiations, including a unilateral American commitment to end tests in the atmosphere until the Soviets resumed theirs. But it was the speech itself that provided the greatest impetus.

With blunt and sweeping assertions couched in characteristic Kennedy rhetoric (speechwriter Ted Sorenson mined previous statements for their best lines, and included phrases cut from the 1961 Inaugural Address), he went far beyond arguing for the specific test ban treaty to the heart of the matter: peace in the nuclear age.

"Total war makes no sense," Kennedy said, repeating the phrase several times, emphasizing devastation so extensive it would be visited on "generations yet unborn." "I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men."

"I realize that the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war," he admitted. "But we have no more urgent task."

Some opponents regarded negotiating arms agreements as a sign of weakness-to them, the test ban efforts were "defeatist." Kennedy deftly reversed the charge. He said believing peace is impossible is defeatist, because it means "that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. " Then he used the phrase that more than any other sums up the Kennedy faith: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

Though he acknowledged the value of dreams and hopes, he advocated an attainable peace "based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions...Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts...For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

Kennedy called for cooperation based on a certain historical objectivity that has since been borne out more dramatically than he could have dreamed. "However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem," he said, "the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

For many Americans at the time, Soviet Communists were incomprehensible and threatening. But Kennedy suggested that, just as the Soviets misunderstood America, Americans had a distorted view of them. He then made an assertion that might well have shaken and angered some of his listeners, as it would today: "No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue."

Kennedy acknowledged the evils of Communism, but also complimented the Soviets on their achievements in science and culture. In speaking of the abhorrence of war that the two nations had in common he eulogized Soviet suffering in World War II. No act of honoring could have meant more to the Russian people.

The speech subtly links this theme of suffering with an assertion of mutual interest in ending the arms race itself. Kennedy pointed out that both nations are "devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease."

All of these were truths that many found uncomfortable, and were rarely acknowledged by people in power. Kennedy added another one--the "ironical but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours."

Peace, he concludes, is a primary interest for both nations---indeed for all nations. In the most quoted phrases of the speech (most recently, put into the mouth of a fictional Russian president, without attribution, in Tom Clancy's film, "The Sum of All Fears") Kennedy said: "For in the final analysis our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."

But in June 1963, the immediate impact of the speech in America was blunted by an ongoing domestic crisis---police violence against non-violent demonstrators and whites rioting and firebombing in black neighborhoods of Birmingham, Alabama had pushed the civil rights struggle to a new level. Then Alabama Governor George Wallace announced he would personally bar the admission of the first two black students to be enrolled at the University of Alabama under federal court order.

The drama, which turned out to be little more than a ceremony of defiance for cameras, played the day after JFK's American University speech. Kennedy spontaneously decided to speak to the nation that night. With little in the way of prepared text, he delivered a speech on civil rights as perfectly timed and morally clear as he had the day before on world peace. Equality is a moral issue "as old as the scriptures and...as clear as the American Constitution....In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated..." The day before he had urged empathy for the Soviet people; now he asked white Americans to imagine themselves in the place of black Americans. "Who among us then would be content with the counsels of patience and delay?"

But while civil rights absorbed media attention in America, the American University speech became instantly famous elsewhere in the world. In England, the Manchester Guardian called it "one of the great state papers of American history." Most importantly, the full text was printed in the Russian press, and its Russian language broadcast by the Voice of America was the first western program in fifteen years the Soviets did not attempt to jam. Khrushchev told Averell Harriman, in Moscow to negotiate the test ban, that it was the best speech by an American president since Roosevelt. Negotiations moved swiftly forward. Some six weeks after the American University address, the nuclear test ban treaty was signed.

It was, Kennedy told the nation on July 26, "an important first step---a step toward peace, a step toward reason, a step away from war." But the treaty required Senate confirmation, and conservatives as well as prominent military figures were decrying it as a threat to national security. Kennedy invited public debate, "for the treaty is for all of us. It is particularly for our children and our grandchildren, who have no lobby here in Washington."

In his June 11 address to the nation, Kennedy had announced the civil rights legislation that would become landmark law under Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy knew (as LBJ did later) that such forthright and principled support for civil rights would doom the Democratic party in the previously solid South, perhaps for a long time. Though he was equally prepared for defeat because of his stand on the test ban treaty, Kennedy believed that opposition was not as strong among voters as rising conservatives claimed. By September, it was clear that he was right. Overwhelming public sentiment in favor of the treaty led to Senate confirmation.

As Kennedy traveled across America in late fall, he spoke often about the issue of peace, to increasingly enthusiastic response. This was the last image, and the lasting image, held by many Americans and certainly many people around the world, when Kennedy was assassinated that November.

Forty years later, the world is dangerous in different ways. Soon after the American University speech, Kennedy spoke at a press conference in Germany about nuclear proliferation. "When Pandora opened her box and all the troubles flew out, all that was left in was Hope," he commented. "In this case, if we have nuclear diffusion throughout the world, we may even lose hope."

Today we have that nuclear diffusion, with every indication that it will become worse. Yet while pressuring others to forgo nuclear weapons or to prevent proliferation, the United States is itself attempting to test and field a new generation of nuclear weapons. Even the the latest treaty, signed this month to absolutely no fanfare by President Bush and President Putin in Moscow in early June, is actually a step backward from previous agreements, such as Start II and the ABM treaty which the Bush administration unilaterally abrogated. Kennedy knew that to win the confidence of other nations, the United States had to lead, to tangibly demonstrate its willingness to sacrifice the nuclear arms it insisted that others forgo.

Nuclear weapons are still a major danger to humanity. Even with the reductions the new treaty calls for, enough nuclear firepower is aimed and ready in the U.S. and Russia that both nations can still destroy each other in a single hour. A new RAND study asserts that due to disorganization in Russia as well as other factors, the danger of a devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia caused by accident or miscalculation has not lessened but increased.

As Jonathan Schell illustrates in his instantly indispensable new book, "The Unconquerable World," the Bush administration strategy of preemptive warfare to maintain American supremacy and enforce its will is the most radical international policy in western history since imperial Rome. It seeks to create precisely the Pax Americana that Kennedy renounced. He renounced it partly because other nations would feel severely threatened by such a prospect. With nuclear, chemical and biological weapons-and perhaps soon, genetic weapons-- of inconceivable destructiveness becoming more readily available, such a policy invites catastrophe and guarantees a violent future.

Kennedy also understood the limitations of power. As the current chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan already demonstrates, even the current supremacy of American military power cannot effectively rule the world.

Yet in the midst of the Cold War, with the United States at greater risk of greater destruction, Kennedy took this step towards peace, and many in America followed. The popularity of the test ban treaty is most forgotten, but it may have proven to be the issue that contributed most to Kennedy's reelection.

As America emerges from this peculiar post-Gulf War II mood of vengeful triumph, we might remember that upwards of 10 million people marched for peace around the world in the weeks before the war, and in no European nation that the Gallup Poll surveyed did prior support for the American invasion rise above 11%.

Kennedy called for empathetic understanding of current enemies, not for sentiment's sake but to aid in objective judgment. He invoked history for the same reason. The contrast of Kennedy's realism with the fundamentalist absolutism of President Bush's rhetoric is obvious. The basic difference is that Kennedy saw the long-term national interest in finding common interests and common ground. The Bush doctrine is to force other nations to bend to interests his administration dubiously defines as American.

Kennedy was criticized for the hubris of believing that humans could solve the problems they create. But even in a different world, that faith, like the intelligent pursuit of peace, is without meaningful alternative.

Inside Sports: Lakers (Final Edition)

This is a blog, right? I can do what I want.

Last week the San Antonio Spurs took away the Lakers chance at a fourth straight NBA championship. There was a certain symmetry to it. The Lakers had regularly humiliated the Spurs during the playoffs for the last several years, often because the Spurs collapsed in the fourth quarter. This year in the sixth game the Spurs were very determined to win the fourth quarter, and it was the Lakers who collapsed. The series was essentially won in the fifth game. Last year it was clear to me that whichever team won the fourth game in the Lakers-Sacramento Kings series would win that series, and would then win the NBA championship. I felt the same way about the fifth game of this year's Lakers-Spurs series. Last year the Lakers won the fourth game on a last second three point shot by Robert Horry. This year the Lakers lost the fifth game on a last second three point shot by Robert Horry that went in, and came out. Their admirable comeback from 25 points behind in the third quarter fell just that short.

In the end it may have been sheer exhaustion that did them in. But now that Dallas has won the first game in the western conference finals, the Lakers should be really kicking themselves. If Kobe Bryant had hit that late fourth quarter free throw in the first game, they would have won that one. If Robert Horry's shot had gone down, they would have won that game. Despite losing one of their starters (Rick Fox), having his replacement miss a game and a half and be hobbled for much of the rest of the series, watch their coach go off for a heart operation, plus play at an intensity they are no longer used to, every other day, with nagging injuries to Shaq, Kobe, Horry and probably Derek Fisher, they still almost beat the much deeper and younger Spurs. They handled Dallas pretty readily in the regular season, and might have had a far less stressful conference finals once they got past San Antonio.

But it was not to be, and now the Lakers team that won three championships will slowly or quickly break up. (Samaki Walker is certainly gone, and Robert Horry probably is.) There are precedents for teams that miss a year in a string of championships, but it's likely that next year is the Lakers last chance for awhile. If they pick up some superior young talent (if you consider Juwan Howard young) and perhaps one of those still able but aging free agents out there, like Karl Malone or Scottie Pippen (Pippen knows the system but may want too much bucks; anyway, my personal favorite is still getting Michael Jordan to play one more year for his favorite coach, who is probably will be coaching his last year), they can still make a run because they can still compete with San Antonio, Sacramento and Dallas. This was the iffy year anyway, since they couldn't afford to seriously improve the team because of salary caps. They have more room next year. We won't know until the finals if any of the eastern team can yet compete with almost any team from the west. But it would be a surprise.

As for me, my season is also over. Fortunately I've got three years of playoff victories on tape, to watch with pleasure and with no tension from the comfort of an exercise machine.

With thanks to all who responded to my Skills of Peace article in the SF Chronicle, here and in the following (or, datewise, preceeding) entry, are two "sidebar" pieces that didn't get into the published text.

DIALOGUES OF PEACE


If dialogue is to really lead to peace, it must be inclusive in all relevant realms. It must represent the complexity of issues and interests through a diversity of voices and experiences.

That might be the message of the "Dialogues of Peace," organized by Angara Chatterji, professor in the Social and Cultural Anthropology program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.

The fourth dialogue so far was held in April at the CIIS campus on Mission Street and included Norman Solomon of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Abdul JanMohamed of UC Berkeley, Kurdish Human Rights activist Soraya Serajeddini and representatives of the Middle East Children's Alliance, among others.

The series began in 2001 in response to September 11. "I watched students struggle with it," she recalls, "and I watched other students be targeted."

"We made it very clear that we did not want to have a flashy event that says, 'here are two sides, pro-war and anti-war.' I don't think that there are necessarily only two sides to any issue. It's not enough to say you are for peace. We want to discuss what are the issues of justice that need to be linked to peace."

The emphasis was on exchanging information that reflects the complexity of issues at the center of conflicts in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa and the United States. Each dialogue began with songs or prayers, and featured diverse panels of scholars, activists and journalists with intimate knowledge of those regions.

For example, they know the history. "In the present, concerns are taken literally as right or wrong, but they are not seen through the histories that produced them," Angana said. "I keep telling people that if you understand history, you would act from a place where you cannot talk about justice through any form of annihilation. You can't make justice by means of injustice."

Accommodating complexity often means listening to different points of view that emanate from different experiences. "Concerns of justice should dictate how we honor difference. When we are faced with difference we don't silence it or expect it to conform to our expectations of it. We honor what it is, and we force ourselves to change because of it."

"Through the Dialogues for Peace, the commitment is to address injustice and ally with those marginalized, and to support non violent struggles," she wrote in an official announcement. "We seek to build communities of peace, hope and solidarity. We seek to address and give voice to issues that are under represented at CIIS and in the Bay Area. "

Angana Chatterji also works with communities in India, where she was born, to foster social and ecological justice. She is the Director of Research with the Asia Forest Network, and her passionate writings appear in a variety of journals and newspapers.

Contact: Angana Chatterji
California Institute of Integral Studies
website: http://www.ciis.edu

SKILLS OF PEACE CONTINUED

Not everything I prepared for my “Skills of Peace” article made it into the San Francisco Chronicle of May 4, 2003. I asked almost everyone I interviewed for their definition of “peace.” What follows is a selection of those quotations…


WHAT IS PEACE?


"For me world peace and inner peace are closely connected. It's creating a sense of well-being in the world that comes from a realization that we're all connected to one another. It isn't just not making war, or not firing weapons. It has to do with really acknowledging the interconnectness of all things and of all beings, and living with a realization of the importance of that connection, so that if a child dies in Iraq, part of me dies there. We're all part of one another. The absence of peace comes, and war comes, when we make believe that we're not connected and the other person is expendable."
Paul Roy


"Peace has to start with us as individuals. For me peace is holding myself accountable to communicate from a non-defensive base at all times, so that I am living and modeling and working towards resolution, rather than attempting to control or punish other people."
Sharon Ellison

For me peace is when people trust that we're all conscious that our well-being is interdependent. We can never benefit at one another's expense. To the degree that we have that consciousness, we'll be at peace. We'll trust that other people see that our well being--- as people and with nature-- is one and the same."
Marshall Rosenberg

"Peace is being able to deal with conflict. As long as we see conflict as negative and peace as good, it's not a useful paradigm. Even in peace there's conflict, and in conflict there is peace. There will always be conflict, so the question is how can we work with conflict to tap into its innate energy for change, growth, insight and new understanding."
John Ford

"Peace is a way of being, a preferred mode. You have to live it everyday. It's not something I've ever pulled off completely, but it's part of that ideal self. But you have to work at it."
Betsy Watson


"If you accept that human nature is truly mixed and has pieces of good and bad, real peace is being able to accept equally what's good and bad in oneself in relationship to what's good and bad in another. It wouldn't be eradicating evil but accepting it and one's part in it and the other person's part in it, and coming to some solution. Coming to such a peaceful resolution in personal relationships requires an enormous amount of psychological work, so one can multiply exponentially the work required to find peaceful resolutions at the level of the group psyche which governs the relationships between rival nations."
Dr Tom Singer

On Being A Lakers Fan


I grew up near Pittsburgh, PA, and my first sport as fan and player was baseball. The voice of Bob Prince, recognized as one of the classic baseball announcers of all time, was a background to my summers even before I was sure what the difference between "balls" and "strikes" was. I became aware of the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1958, when the team finished second to the Milwaukee Braves. Left fielder Bob Skinner batted .321 that year. Roberto Clemente batted .321 in 1959, a disappointing year in the standings. Then there was 1960.

I had started collecting baseball cards, and I also had a favorite American League team, the New York Yankees. Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, Moose Skowron, I had them all, and would lay out the cards in the diamond shape according to their positions for games of swatting a spitball sized wad of paper with the cardboard cards.

How well did I know the 1960 Pirates? For years I could go through the lineup and demonstrate the batting stance of each player. I can still list them by position. I saw games at Forbes Field, one of the old classic ballparks, the kind the new parks are trying to emulate. I shook hands with Roberto Clemente, Bill Virdon and a number of other players down on the field before a game. There is one game, or part of one game, I remember vividly. I was half asleep at a night game, the spray of beer from popping cans visible in the lights, in the tenth inning. Roy Face got us out of a jam and in the bottom half, somebody was on second base when Clemente came to bat.

Here's where the fan part comes in: if you were a Pirates fan, you knew the Clemente drill. He never hit the first pitch. He would often swing at it, swing so hard that his batting helmet would fly off, and so would his cap underneath it, and he'd probably fall down. But of course he often got spectacular hits later in the count. So everybody in the stands was just settling down, not paying a lot of attention to the first pitch. I know I wasn't, but I heard a clap of thunder, the roar, and looked up: and the game was over. Clemente had swung at the first pitch, and connected. He smoked a line drive that hit the chalk line on the right field fence. It really was chalk, and he'd hit it so hard that a cloud of chalk dust was still rising in the lights, like smoke from a cannon. The run came in from second, the Pirates had won.

My two favorite teams played each other in the 1960 World Series. But there was no question which one I was rooting for, was living and dying for. There was a kind of lottery for World Series tickets---you sent in your money, and you might get seats by the luck of the draw. I had good luck and bad luck. The good luck was getting tickets. The bad luck was getting them for the sixth game. The Pirates could have won the series that day, but they lost the game, 14-0 or maybe it was 16-0. It was awful. We sat in the left field bleachers and by the late innings, left fielder Gino Cimoli was talking to us. But I did get to see some of the Yankee greats, like Mantle and Maris, Tony Kubec, Bobby Richardson, Berra and so on. The next day the Pirates won the series on Bill Mazeroski's incredible ninth inning home run.

I was in my first year of high school. Some teachers let us listen to the game, most didn't. But the news of each inning, each batter, was passed from row to row, as the kids near the windows heard from radios in other rooms above and below. School was over just as the game was tied. Most of my classmates heard the final inning in the school bus, if at all. Drivers in Pittsburgh were refusing to go into the tunnels where they would lose radio for a minute or two, and pulled off the road. Our football team was gathered in the biggest classroom on the third floor watching it on TV, and that's where I saw the most famous hit in Pittsburgh history.

I played baseball every day in the summers, a few times at the Little League level (one team I played for was called the Ghosts. We played the Zombies and the Vampires) and I pitched for a Pony League team. At first I tried the elaborate windup of Wilmer "Vinegar Bend" Mizell, then Whitey Ford's, before settling on the more modest windup of Harvey Haddix (all lefthanders, as I was.) I hadn't thrown three pitches before I could hear the men who came to all the games---some of them fathers of players, but not all---commenting on my Haddix windup. I was a relief pitcher mostly (which had something to do with the fact that my father had no pull and seldom came to the games. Our coach worked for the father of our starting pitcher.) I won 3, lost none, saved a couple. I kept my own stats.

Football came into my life when I went to my first high school game with a neighbor kid, Corky Cocheletti, who became a famous male model in the 70s, and was engaged for awhile to Pam Dawber; we still see him on TV commercials. The NFL was small potatoes then; most of the excitement was for college football: Pitt and Penn State, Notre Dame, Army and Navy. Seeing the game live was much more exciting. I don't know how old I was then, but I do remember nervously ordering an ice cream cone from the Hempfield Spartans' star quarterback at the Silvis's Dairy store where he worked in the summer. He got it wrong.

I was an avid fan of our high school team (the Greensburg Central Catholic Centurions), even though I wasn't on good terms with a number of the players. Besides daily games of touch football at school, I played in various informal and intermural games in junior high and high school, and had a few moments of anonymous glory catching passes and running back kicks.

It wasn't until after college and a period in my life when sports seemed irrelevant if not warmaking in another form, and while I was living in Boston, that the Pittsburgh Steelers became a very good team. When I returned to western PA I was amazed at how thoroughly Pittsburgh had been transformed into a football city. Of course I became an avid Steelers fan, too, in the 1970s when they won four Super Bowls. Between the last two, the Pirates won the 1979 World Series. I got myself a story assignment that led to meeting the stars of both teams: Terry Bradshaw, Mean Joe Greene, Lynn Swan, Willie Stargell, etc. I've even got Dave Parker on tape threatening me. (Unlike a lot of Pittsburghers, I liked Dave Parker, and I knew he was playing me.)

Those are the easy years to be a fan. But there were many other years of suffering and dying for games cost by a lost fumble on the last play, a string of errors that I would obsessively replay as I tried to get to sleep that night, or two bonehead interceptions that lost the damn Super Bowl.

But those are my hometown teams, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pittsburgh Pirates, and they're my hometown teams for life, good or bad, win or lose, live or die. I follow and root for other teams closer to where I live now---the San Francisco Giants, the As, the Niners, even the Raiders---but never against the teams from Pittsburgh.

(It helps that a player I often went to Three Rivers to see wound up in San Francisco. Barry Bonds wasn't the most popular player on the Pirates, but I always liked him. His last year there was the last I went to games at Three Rivers, not long before I left the city. The last game I saw there Bonds got four or five hits, all line drives hit unbelievably hard, to different fields. But my best 3 Rivers memory was sitting behind home plate when Bobby Bonilla hit a home run. I was in the perfect position to watch his swing (left handed, like me), and watch the ball---it was the closest I came to feeling what hitting a major league homer was like.)

But Pittsburgh doesn't have, and never had, a National Basketball Association team. (The Pittsburgh Penguins with Mario Lemieux won several championships when I lived in Pittsburgh, but though I watched a few of the Penguins' Stanley Cup games, and that famous U.S. Olympic team in 1980, I've never liked hockey.) Pittsburgh had pro basketball teams a time or two, before pro basketball was anywhere near as big as it is now. For awhile they had one of the better teams in a long-gone league, but it didn't make much of a ripple in the city. The Pittsburgh Pipers played at the Civic Arena, and attendance was so bad that they had to sell tickets by scheduling high school games there as preliminaries. My high school played there, which is how I got to see one of the all-time basketball greats, Connie Hawkins, who played for Pittsburgh.

I played basketball at about the same level as those other sports---small time or semi-organized leagues and teams. My few moments of glory as second-highest scorer playing for the intermural champs of my high school (the joke being that we were the National Honor Society team, who beat the Letter Men Club of athletes except for varsity basketball players, two years in a row) were played to utterly empty stands. There's nothing like the echoes in an empty gym. My feelings about sports are tinged with this melancholy: being sort of good, sort of athletic, but never good enough, or tall enough for basketball, or heavy enough for football on a varsity level. You learn very quickly that it's the athletes who play well early, rather than those who might have potential, that get all the attention from coaches and so on.

I like basketball as a sport, and it's a great sport to watch on TV. Without a hometown team I'm free to pick the team I follow. After a brief look at the Celtics, I went with the Los Angeles Lakers, mostly because of Kareem Jabar and Magic Johnson. When they retired, I followed the Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan. When the Bulls team was broken up, and after a decent mourning period, I started looking at the Lakers again, with Shaq and Kobie.

My feeling was simple: you can't pick your hometown team but when you have a choice, why not the best? Why not pick a winner, and save yourself a lot of aggravation? Besides, the joy of the sport is in following those who play it best. It's not for nothing that when Michael Jordan retired (again) last night, he was given several standing ovations by the fans of a team he didn't play for. He was the best. He was an artist, who changed the art form.

You learn about winning and about playing at a high level from winners and people who play at a high level. But it's not all flash and poetry. Who can forget Michael Jordan, so sick he could hardly stand, outplaying everybody on the court, willing his team to win in the NBA finals? How to deal with pressure, how to deal with injuries. Shaquille O'Neal is a dominating player, but when he's been hurt, his vulnerabilities show. Other teams take advantage, and he looks bad. But he plays, and his teammates find a way to use what he can do, and augment with what they can do. Right now Kobie Bryant is the most exciting player to watch in the NBA. These great players-Magic, Kareem, Michael, Kobie and Shaq-are admirable for what they represent in the game and generally as human beings. These teams played as teams, with professional demeanor. They had class.

I could go on. But after three straight titles, being a Lakers fan this year is a different experience. They're vulnerable. Other teams have improved and they haven't. They are a dependably good player short. Winning the title this year is not a given, and will very difficult. It will be especially painful if they lose to Sacramento, a city that is closer to where I live than is LA, but it's a team I don't respect. They're talented but otherwise, they're losers. Chris Weber turns me off. But the Lakers might not even get that far. The conventional wisdom is that they did well to get Minnesota in the first round rather than Dallas. I don't agree. I think Minnesota is more dangerous.

Being a fan, even an elective one, means you don't desert your team in tough times. So I'm still a Lakers fan, and will be as long as Kobie and Shaq play, and Phil Jackson coaches. Of course, Michael Jordan is officially unemployed at the moment. I wonder if he'd be interested in playing for his old coach, just for the playoffs???

In the Middle


"In the middle of the journey of our life, I awoke in a dark wood, where I had lost my way."

Or words to that effect, depending on the translation (of Dante's "Inferno" as it begins.)

This passage has been used to help define what in common parlance is called the "mid-life crisis."

It seems to me every time we pause---or are forced by circumstances to "re-evaluate"--- we find ourselves in the middle of the journey, and most of the time it is in the middle of a dark wood.

Clearly I am in that second half of my life, maybe even in the middle of the second half. I don't know how much time I have left, and how much of that will be with relative freedom and reasonably good health and energy. I face as well a very uncertain immediate future. So I am looking at what I need to do and want to do, assuming I can clear my own path.

The most obvious sort of project, and the one I've been fitfully yet consciously engaged in for several years, is to pass on in the best form I can what I've learned and what I've experienced in five decades plus of sentience. That project continues, and I see it moving into a new phase, in which I share more specifically the elements of my own story.

Publishing a new edition of my mall book was one such effort, especially since it included a personal account of my experiences in the course of writing it and its first publication. So far I can't count those chapters as a stunning success in terms of response, which makes the future look bleaker, but you need a lot of stubbornness in this game. Sometimes people wonder why I'm not more gratified by praise. I am gratified, but I am often puzzled because I never know why I'm praised for one thing and not for something else that I believe is just as good if not better.

I've also been posting old articles and columns on one or another of these blogs, with contemporary comments and contexts. Eventually, if I'm able financially and otherwise, I'll publish a collection in book form.

Also, if I'm able, I want to take this a step further with some personal essays, and eventually go back to fiction and dramatic forms. These are hard. It's easier to be topical and riff on politics. But the journey of my life, if it is my life, should include these.

Besides these and other efforts that have to do with personal history and history in general (I told my first 'historical society' audience that I got really interested in history when I'd lived long enough to have some), I find myself in another place it's becoming apparent I've been moving towards for the past several years.


Jung wrote of changes, some of them revolutionary, which often occur in the second half of life. I don't think I've experienced the flip into the opposite, from extravert to introvert, for example. I'm as introverted as ever, and probably more so. But I do detect one change in emphasis.

I've seldom been accused of optimism. I've been called "cynical," which I'm not, and "skeptical," which by nature and on principle, I am.

I don't trust optimists, as a rule. If they're not conscious or unconscious con artists, their innocence is often unearned, and they can be dangerous. Cheerful people are nice to run into, but I wouldn't necessarily want to live or work in a building designed by an optimist, at least of the kind who believes things will just work out for the best, with or without fireproofing and emergency exits.

Optimism really lets you off the hook. If you say the glass is half empty, they laugh at you and call you a pessimist. But if they drink half a glass and there's no more water, they throw up their hands and say, "We didn't know! Don't blame us!"

Still...the truth is that bitterly enumerating everything that's wrong with the world, proving there's no hope and all is lost with incisive despair, is all much easier when you're young. You may channel your hormonal anger into apocalyptic pronouncements, but your skin tone is telling you that you will live forever and be immune from every disaster that befalls others.

I've been living with the analysis of apocalypse since the 60s. And yes, as Abbie Hoffman said, "We were reckless, we were headstrong, we were impatient, we were excessive. But goddammit we were right." And the decades have rolled out one analysis after another showing just how bad things are, how complex and intertwined and embedded the destructiveness is, how powerful the agents of destruction are.

There will be hell to pay, and there was a moment when I thought I might not live to see it, and that was good enough. I wasn't the only one doing that kind of calculation. I took boxes of my LPs to a used record place in Pittsburgh shortly before I left for California (hauling with me, it must be said, other boxes of old LPs). The place was run by a guy roughly my age, a fellow early baby boomer. At some point in the conversation he mentioned the crap to come we all know is coming and said, "but fortunately, we'll be dead by then," and we both laughed.

I don't think the calculation has changed much since then, in terms of when, for instance, the climate crisis wreaks pervasive havoc, but I don't feel much comfort in that, if I ever really did. For it was at about that time that I really started trying to put together some meaning, some pattern, that could possibly sustain a future, that could be a direction for hope.

Somewhat by accident, or at least coincidence (which should make Jungians etc. all warm inside), I found some directions to at least pursue a pattern of hope. And that became more and more central to the work I wanted to do. It’s not what you would call optimism, but it is an attempt to leave behind a way of hope, which has me in the odd position of accentuating the positive.

Again, I found writing about it, writing that way, is difficult. And again, I'm not getting a lot of positive response to being positive. My first efforts have been in the "Soul of the Future" projects. I've worked hard and written a lot, and so far with little to show for it in finished work. Just a lot of unpaid for time that’s gone.

My most recent efforts in a different but related area are going to show up in some form here and there in the coming months, all concerned with what I've been calling the "skills of peace." Just as waging war requires knowledge and practice, strategies, concepts and attitudes, so does making peace. These skills of peace have little to do with organizing demonstrations or petition drives, though they do bear significantly on how people talk about war. They are the skills required for peace in schools and the workplace, peace in the home, and peace of mind as well as peace on earth.

They are tools of compassion, skills of empathy, strategies of cooperation, tactics of conflict resolution, paths of facing up to the good and evil in each and all of us. I've talked to a number of people engaged in such activities in the past couple of months, and if things work out I may have a book proposal on the subject soon.

Unfortunately, this project is going to have to be more sustaining financially than it has been so far. Or something else has to materialize if I'm going to be able to continue with this program. Or be in reasonable control of just about any program.

Pausing in the middle, you try to look ahead. But you wind up looking back, and wondering how you got so lost, or at least you wish you used your time better when the way was clear. I wonder if I tried too hard to stay in the middle, being too stubborn and at the same time not ruthless enough.

But then, so what? Is the intense masterpiece so important, and kindness isn't?


The difference between publishers and writers, some wise person once said, is that publishers care about markets, while writers care about readers. Which implies that the readers don't have to be many. You don't have to know who they are. They don't even have to be alive until after you aren't. You don't make any money that way perhaps, and you maybe don't get to live as a consequence of your writing and its contribution, but the writing that gets done has some possibility of that life.

But at least one form of publishing---in the sense of making it public, even if there's no financial reward--- is available and not dependent on markets, and you're looking at it.

Doing these blogs and posting on the Internet has been vitalizing. Thanks to the Internet and email, I'm now back in touch with old college friends I haven't seen in decades, and far-flung extended family, including the first person I ever corresponded with, one of my cousins in Maryland. I'm in touch with writers I've read, people I've just met briefly, and people I've never met at all. My writing becomes part of a dialogue, it prompts a response in someone else's thoughts, feelings and memories. And sometimes I find out about it, very quickly.

I hope I can continue. I hope I can continue a lot of things, resume others, and do some new things. I'm sending out chapters of a novel for young readers (I figure middle school through high school) and proposals for a couple of biographies for the same age group. It takes me back to when reading first became really important to me. It would be nice to be able to do some of that. But the chances aren't real good. Saving the postage and putting that into lottery tickets is probably a sounder investment than sending out this stuff unsolicited.

Gee, did that sound cynical, pessimistic? Some say the glass is half full, some say it is half empty. Some say the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Some say it is half full of bilge water and half of hot air. Some say it is entirely empty of fossil fuel. Some say the glass is half full of milk and half full of cream, which makes it entirely full of half and half. Some say the glass is half-naked, some say it is half-crazy.

Here is an opinion on a similar subject by Shunryu Suzuki. Asked the old favorite of philosophy students, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?", he replied:
"It doesn't matter."

This War

In 1954 or so, Carl Jung was asked if he thought there would be nuclear holocaust. His reply: "I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves."

What we are seeing is war. The consequences of releasing the dogs of war. We are seeing the havoc.

What we are seeing is all wars. The state of the art violence, death, heroism, blunders, unforeseen consequences, adaptations, lies, crimes,hysteria, back-biting, glorifying, vilifying, relentless unfolding of havoc. People become their group, because they are attacked and because they are attacking. Most do what they must do, to stay alive, which at times is the same as winning, the same as killing, and at other times and places is the same as escaping, surrendering. Many do what they must do as captives of their allegiance in a particular situation, which is to kill and die, to glorify and vilify. There are always those seeking personal advantage from death-dealing and dying, while in lofty safety elsewhere.

War evokes love and unleashes hate. It dictates behaviors that generate hate and liberate love. War is not necessary but when we will not understand ourselves, war will happen to provide us with object lessons. As this war began, it seemed to make sense that the best chronicles of World War II were the works of absurdity, of black humor or gallows humor: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. But they were written two decades after the war. The absurdities of the moment are much too grim. They are cause for shock and awe.

War unleashes and liberates everything inside us, especially from the unconscious. We act with emotional certainty that appears even to us to be rational deliberation, and react with rage, fear and impulse, whether fighting the war, fighting against the war, reporting the war, running the war. We are immersed in events. The events matter, but they will control us until we understand ourselves.

Everything soon becomes the good guys against the evil ones. And so at the moment every war begins, it is lost. It doesn't have to be that way, even as a consequence of defending against the evil that men do. But until we can understand that this tension exists, of the opposites within ourselves, every war will do what every war has done, which is to prepare the ground for the next war.

Living with this tension is essential. Acknowledging it is basic to taking effective action. Sometimes taking a step back is to take a step forward. In our world taking a step back is to look more deeply in the mirror.

On the Sunday before the war...

On the Sunday before the war, Margaret and I walked down to the Arcata plaza to participate in a candlelight vigil for peace that had begun, I'm told, in New Zealand, and circled the world until it got to us. You can't get more than maybe five miles any farther west than we were, anywhere in the lower 48 states, so as Margaret said, we were sending the light back across the Pacific towards where it began.

When we arrived shortly before seven p.m., some people had already gathered in the center of the plaza, a concrete circle ringed with planters, and around an absurd statue of William McKinley. Even though it's mid March, our coastal climate doesn't vary much, and there's always something growing. The Iris were conspicuously in bloom; they are Margaret's favorite flower.

Margaret carried in her backpack a tall candle in a glass tumbler, a clear-glass version of the candles usually decorated with the images of saints that are apparently favored by Mexican Catholics. Until recently, it was possible to buy them pretty cheaply in the ethnic food section of the Safeway supermarket. But somebody caught on to the fact that they've become a bit stylish---now they're with other decorative candles, and they've doubled in price.

These candles burn for days, and Margaret's idea was to light it at the vigil and keep it lit on the mantelpiece at home, where she would always have such a candle lit, until there was peace again.

I carried a bare white candle, very cheap to buy and also long-burning, the kind that many people had at the vigil I attended just a few weeks ago. That vigil was an annual event, a memorial for the Wiyot slain on Indian Island during their "fixing the world" ceremony in 1860. That vigil had also begun at around dusk, a few feet from Humboldt Bay. The candle was the very same one I had held from dusk into darkness that evening. For the last several years it had rained---a couple of times it really poured---but this year it was clear and bright. We watched geese fly over in V formation. Then it got windy and eventually cold. I was colder than most; I was in the middle of some strange flu or cold or whatever bug it was.

But on the Sunday before the war, the evening was pretty warm. At the Wiyot memorial there had been prayers and talk, songs of a half dozen Indian cultures, and drumming. Here there was only silence.

We stood in the silence, a nearly full moon sliding in front of clouds. I thought of the first candle-light demonstration against a war I had attended, in 1965 or 66, in Galesburg, Illinois, also in the town square. There couldn't have been more than ten of us, a mix of students and young faculty from Knox College. It was not a popular thing to be doing, and people hooted at us from cars and trucks and nearby sidewalks. There was real danger in opposing that war too visibly. I seem to remember we huddled a little closer together, for more than warmth, for more than shelter against the wind for the flickering candles.

Eventually there were several hundred people in the Arcata Plaza. I'd say 400 at the peak. That's a pretty impressive number, since Humboldt State was on spring break, and when the students leave the population of the town drops by half.

There was a little noise around us---people smoking in front of the bars across the way, and there was one camper that circled the plaza a few times, with an American flag waving from the radio antenna. But that was about it.

I noticed that the flag at the post office seemed to be at half mast.

This was a day after the largest peace march in Eureka-lots of color and noise, clever signs and rhythmic chants, then a rally and speeches.

But in the Arcata Plaza no one said anything. There were no signs. Just people holding candles, people of all ages, descriptions, pairings, groupings. Most candles were more practical than mine---if they weren't in glass, they had little aluminum foil wax-catchers. I had to keep spilling the wax from mine or it would drip down over my hands. This was a new problem--I'd never been able to keep my candle lit for very long out by the Bay.

We stood for an hour in silence, holding small flames, small scratches of light. A few people sat on the concrete or on the grass. Some meditated. I stood and watched, watched the camper circling the plaza, watched the faces of all these strangers, watched the moon through the bare branches of a tree.

(Later Margaret remarked that she recognized only a few people and we didn't see anyone either of us knew. I remarked that it must be a peace demonstration for introverts.)

The silence started to seem a little strange, a bit surreal after an hour. I was thinking that in the old days people would at least sing "We Shall Overcome," but I thought that idea probably just dated me. And then it started, very softly from the other side of the statue, until it got to the verse that says "we shall live in peace, someday," and then it got louder. After wanting to sing it, I was so moved I couldn't.

As we walked home, I noticed some light down a side street. There was a traffic circle there, something of a new addition to Arcata culture, and the neighborhood had turned the center of it into a flower garden. Now it was ringed with candles. Perhaps they'd had their own vigil there a little earlier, and left the candles there.

I heard a reporter next evening on Bill Moyers remark that in walking around Washington on Monday she'd noticed people standing in small groups here and there, silent, holding lit candles. I crossed the plaza in Arcata on Wednesday afternoon, before the bombing started, and a scattering of people were standing, facing outward, silent. They were standing on the corner where Women in Black assemble on Friday evenings, facing that same way, silent. But these weren't just women, and they weren't all in black.

Silence and candles. To me the message---and certainly my thoughts when I was standing there---was part memorial, and part hope, the endurance of hope. I was thinking of the people who were going to die, as I looked at the children with their parents holding candles. People who got blown to bits suddenly out of the silence would be the lucky ones. Yet some in Baghdad would endure, would rebuild, would have children who would endure. Some of the children of America would come home, and though few would ever be the same again, some would endure, and have children. And those here would still be here, and some through whatever disasters are unleashed, would endure.

The candles burn for the living who might soon be dead, they burn as the light of hope. There is reason to hope, even in this moment of peril. Though so much of what is happening has happened before, and some have learned nothing from the suffering and stupidity of the past, some have learned something.

I've spent much of the last several weeks learning that there is reason to hope, in the work that people are doing towards furthering compassion and cooperation, in creating systems of communication and participation, in schools and organizations, in daily life. They've been working at this all along, when few of us were looking.

There's reason to hope in what we were doing there, we silent strangers, holding candles, on the Sunday before the war. That George II didn't heed us does not mean that what happened here and around the world for the past several months is meaningless. Not at all. The worldwide opposition to a war expressed openly in huge demonstrations is a reason for hope.

Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation magazine about the demonstrations on February 15: "When terrorists attacked the Pentagon and knocked down the World Trade Center on September 11, everyone marveled that nineteen men had coordinated their actions for evil with such efficiency. On February 15, 10 million coordinated their actions for good. February 15 was the people's answer to September 11."

Parts of Schell's new book have been published in the last two issues of Harper's Magazine. After reading the first one, it became much clearer to me why people in Europe, by from 85% to 92% in polls, opposed this war. He describes some of what has been going on in Europe, and put it in historical perspective. This is the part of the world, he reminds us, that was mostly at war for centuries, and plunged the world into horrific warfare twice in the twentieth century. But the nations that fought those wars are now becoming so intertwined in the European Union, that war among them is virtually impossible.

These are nations where the wreckage of world war is still physically present. Nations that lost generations of young men. Nations stripped of their fondest and proudest notions, stripped of illusions in bitter pain, and still wounded by the pain they caused each other and themselves. The Holocaust, the terrors of empire. The denial is not over, new illusions replace the old, not every part of Europe is there yet, it isn't the perfect society, and yet...look at what they have done. The nations of "old Europe" have banished war. Yet they are economically strong, culturally alive, and socially much more responsible and enlightened than the self-satisfied North Americans. They know something we apparently don't.

Schell wrote one of the best and most hopeless books about the prospect of nuclear war, "The Fate of the Earth." At least I experienced reading it with hopelessness. But his new work strikes me as hopeful. A few years after "The Fate of the Earth" was published, the apparently fatal blind alley the U.S. and the USSR had gone down suddenly opened up. It was the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire in a few short years that changed everything. The Reaganites have tried to take credit for it, but as Schell writes now, it was really the people of eastern Europe who did it. We forget the changes of the twentieth century for the better that happened in the same way, from the liberation of India from the British to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the end of the Cold War: they were brought about by the people, and they were brought about without war.

I don't know that I'll go back down to the Plaza on the Sunday after the war has started. But there will be a candle burning.