This is a slightly longer version of the piece that appears in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight of October 26, 2003. It can be found
The spectre of nuclear war dominated politics, culture and insinuated itself into daily life for decades after Hiroshima. But in recent years it seems to have lost its potency. Yet though the stories are tucked in back pages or hardly reported at all, the dangers continue to slowly grow. Israel modified American-made cruise missiles to carry nuclear warheads on submarines, to counter suspected advances in Iran's long range missiles and the possibility of Iran acquiring nuclear arms. This new element of an atomic arms race in the highly volatile Middle East joins the continuing threat of North Korea to make and even export nuclear weapons, and the continuing danger of two known nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, facing off over disputed territory at their borders.
Few North American news outlets even noted the recently revealed Russian plans to consider using nuclear weapons to fight terrorism, though the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki noticed it, and sent protests to the Russian government. But the U.S. could hardly object, since the Bush administration just pushed through the Senate its plan to develop low-yield nuclear bombs for battlefield use.
A chief reason for today's indifference probably is the belief that the fall of the Soviet Union meant that thermonuclear holocaust is no longer possible. But a recent RAND study asserts that due to disorganization in Russia as well as other factors, the threat of a devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia caused by accident or miscalculation has not lessened but increased.
Newer, more exotic Weapons of Mass Destruction may seem more alarming, while there hasn't been a visible nuclear bomb detonation in many years, and no atom bomb has been used against an enemy since World War II, resulting in a diminished appreciation for their power. But continued proliferation of weapons in a world where hostility is increasingly open, violent and unrestrained, may change that, to our certain horror.
It could also be because the size and power of conventional weapons has grown (and some are radioactive), while new nuclear weapons seem smaller and more precise, there doesn't seem to be as much difference. But California Senator Dianne Feinstein said recently of the Bush initiative, "The administration is saying we can make nuclear weapons less deadly, and acceptable to use. Neither is true." According to an article this August in New Scientist, the U.S. is exploring an entirely new class of gamma-ray nuclear weapons, which are thousands of times more powerful than chemical weapons and (the article stated) "could trigger the next arms race."
That is the greatest danger, as Senator Feinstein noted: a new nuclear arms race. Which is precisely why it is so important to remember the nuclear test ban treaty 40 years ago. It did more than ban the ever-larger nuclear explosions pouring radioactive poison into the atmosphere shared by the whole earth, though that alone is worthy of respectful celebration. The test ban broke the momentum of the arms race, which seemed to be out of human control, propelled by its own deadly logic of inexorably escalating force and counterforce.
The Cuban Missile Crisis sobered the U.S. and Soviet leaders into seriously negotiating a treaty. But what made the difference was President John F. Kennedy's eloquent and persistent attack on this irrational logic of the arms race, and his insistence that humanity begin preparing for peace with the same courage and diligence as it prepares for war.
He expressed the logic of peace most fully in his American University speech. To those who believed that peace is unrealistic in a world of conflict, Kennedy countered that to believe peace is impossible 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."
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."
In its most quoted phrases ( spoken more recently, without attribution, by a fictional Russian president 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."
How different these words are than any we have heard recently:
"What kind of peace do I mean?" Kennedy asked. "Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war..."
"I am talking about genuine peace," 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."
"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."
The test ban treaty was negotiated in the midst of the suspicions and fears of the Cold War, just as today's world is permeated with suspicions and fears of terrorism. The situations are not precisely comparable, but there are several important parallels. The first is the willingness to enter into international agreements. After the limited test ban, other nuclear proliferation and arms reduction treaties were signed in ensuing decades. But the momentum stopped when the United States failed to ratify a total test ban in the 90s that other major nations had signed, and has since refused several meaningful international agreements, notably on global heating and on international law. This sends a message--it's every nation, every group, for itself.
The second parallel is the logic of force that again rules the world. Kennedy’s example is pertinent not because of the treaty itself but because of his efforts to break the logic of war. The treaty was, as Kennedy said, "an important first step---a step toward peace---a step toward reason-a step away from war." After the Soviet Union signed, and substantial opposition to U.S. Senate ratification was overcome, the treaty went into effect on October 10, 1963. It was of course that November 22 that President Kennedy was assassinated. Kennedy campaigning on behalf of the test ban was one of the last images many people would have of him, and a prime reason that his memory was so revered around the world.
The U.S. refuses international agreements, and its recent actions and policies encourage other nations and factions to escalate their capacity for violence and their willingness to use it. We desperately need to remember this first step towards peace, how it happened and why it was necessary. We need to remember than an American President once spoke these words. The threat of nuclear weapons, of becoming captives of an arms race and a psychology of war, belong not just to history.
Tuesday, October 28, 2003
Monday, October 27, 2003
Fool’s notes
“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”
William Blake
“Oh, yeah. Like when?”
William Kowinski
Pulling into a parking lot, I found myself screaming to myself, “what you’re doing is not working! Do something else!”
Later at home checked the email to find that a piece I’d almost forgotten about was going to be published on p. 1 of the following Sunday’s Insight section in the SF Chronicle. I’d rewritten this piece at least six times since June, submitted versions of it to a dozen newspapers and magazines over that time, including three separate versions to the Chronicle.
I rewrote it the last time, knowing it would be the last attempt, trying to find what button to push, and why? Because I wanted these words—not my words, but JFK’s words---to be heard again. I didn’t feel the piece was really right, really finished, but I was tired and there was no sense in working on it any more, since it had a track record of rejection. So I sent it. My editor there was moving to another section, so I didn’t know who would see and judge it. Usually I got enough time after a piece was accepted to make some changes, but not this time. The piece was edited, tightened, but still incomplete, to my mind. But there it is.
So it appeared, page 1, left column, no graphic. The page was dominated by two articles on another story entirely. As usual when I have a piece appear in the Sunday Chronicle, not a thing about the day changes. No one I know reads the Sunday Chronicle, and the phone never rings. In times and places past, I used to sometimes get calls when a piece appeared, from friends or fairly often from a radio or TV show wanting to do an interview or segment. Not much of that kind of TV left, or even that kind of radio, not in the Bay Area, and not where I live.
In the evening I did get a call about the piece, as I have gotten on two or three pieces (usually in Insight) over the past year or two. The caller is always a stranger and older---older even than me. This time the caller was an 88 year old man, a retired doctor from Eureka, who read the article, and took the time and trouble to get my phone number and call me up, just to say he liked it. It was a two or three minute conversation.
In a week or ten days, or maybe three weeks, I’ll get a check for the article. It won’t be much. It won’t be in itself a justification for the time and effort put into it. Not even by WalMart standards.
It is hard to know how to think about any of this—the articles that get published, that don’t get published, that appear only in blogs. The ones that exist somewhere in the world, the world of paper, the world of cyberspace, the world of strangers, of unforeseen and unforeseeable possibilities, including the quite reasonable and foreseeable possibility of phantomhood, of inconsequence.
What I do know: I am in awe of knowing that something I wrote entered the world of a stranger, an 88 year old man, with a life I can’t imagine. I would be content to write for no other response, if it were possible to keep doing so.
What I also know: a piece of writing that does not pay for the sustenance it draws is a gamble. The gamble is that other pieces will, or that one of these pieces will lead to something—some more financially sustaining opportunity. It used to happen. It has not happened in a long time. As someone in the writing biz said to me in San Francisco, it takes just one good thing---one BIG good thing--- to happen every ten years to get you through. Failing that, and failing any other means of sustenance (requiring skills and opportunities I alas have not), it will eventually stop.
What’s the point? There is no point. There is just life as it is. What’s the point of writing about this? There is no point. Writing is my life.
“The fool who persists in his folly will become wise.”
William Blake
“Oh, yeah. Like when?”
William Kowinski
Pulling into a parking lot, I found myself screaming to myself, “what you’re doing is not working! Do something else!”
Later at home checked the email to find that a piece I’d almost forgotten about was going to be published on p. 1 of the following Sunday’s Insight section in the SF Chronicle. I’d rewritten this piece at least six times since June, submitted versions of it to a dozen newspapers and magazines over that time, including three separate versions to the Chronicle.
I rewrote it the last time, knowing it would be the last attempt, trying to find what button to push, and why? Because I wanted these words—not my words, but JFK’s words---to be heard again. I didn’t feel the piece was really right, really finished, but I was tired and there was no sense in working on it any more, since it had a track record of rejection. So I sent it. My editor there was moving to another section, so I didn’t know who would see and judge it. Usually I got enough time after a piece was accepted to make some changes, but not this time. The piece was edited, tightened, but still incomplete, to my mind. But there it is.
So it appeared, page 1, left column, no graphic. The page was dominated by two articles on another story entirely. As usual when I have a piece appear in the Sunday Chronicle, not a thing about the day changes. No one I know reads the Sunday Chronicle, and the phone never rings. In times and places past, I used to sometimes get calls when a piece appeared, from friends or fairly often from a radio or TV show wanting to do an interview or segment. Not much of that kind of TV left, or even that kind of radio, not in the Bay Area, and not where I live.
In the evening I did get a call about the piece, as I have gotten on two or three pieces (usually in Insight) over the past year or two. The caller is always a stranger and older---older even than me. This time the caller was an 88 year old man, a retired doctor from Eureka, who read the article, and took the time and trouble to get my phone number and call me up, just to say he liked it. It was a two or three minute conversation.
In a week or ten days, or maybe three weeks, I’ll get a check for the article. It won’t be much. It won’t be in itself a justification for the time and effort put into it. Not even by WalMart standards.
It is hard to know how to think about any of this—the articles that get published, that don’t get published, that appear only in blogs. The ones that exist somewhere in the world, the world of paper, the world of cyberspace, the world of strangers, of unforeseen and unforeseeable possibilities, including the quite reasonable and foreseeable possibility of phantomhood, of inconsequence.
What I do know: I am in awe of knowing that something I wrote entered the world of a stranger, an 88 year old man, with a life I can’t imagine. I would be content to write for no other response, if it were possible to keep doing so.
What I also know: a piece of writing that does not pay for the sustenance it draws is a gamble. The gamble is that other pieces will, or that one of these pieces will lead to something—some more financially sustaining opportunity. It used to happen. It has not happened in a long time. As someone in the writing biz said to me in San Francisco, it takes just one good thing---one BIG good thing--- to happen every ten years to get you through. Failing that, and failing any other means of sustenance (requiring skills and opportunities I alas have not), it will eventually stop.
What’s the point? There is no point. There is just life as it is. What’s the point of writing about this? There is no point. Writing is my life.
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Mutando riposa
"Changing, it rests"
Herakeitos, in Italian as recalled by Francesco Clemente to Michael McClure
In the parking lot outside Staples a man shouts into his cell phone, "You wasted my miles!" He listens for a brief moment and then repeats it, "You wasted my miles!"
At the St. Vincent DePaul Store counter, a young man in a leather jacket explains that he is buying a lime green blanket for a homeless person, instead of giving him money, "which he might spend on beer." The clerk says it is probably a good choice. They agree he will be warmer with the blanket.
But the young man walks alone down the street a long ways carrying the lime green blanket in a rumpled paper bag. Is it really for a homeless person that far away---there were closer candidates near the store---or was it a story, because for some reason he was embarrassed to be buying it for himself?
For several days now I have been possessed by the idea that I should be permanently wearing a dunce cap.
I wonder if anyone in Chicago is sleeping well this week. The Cubs, who haven't been in a world series for nearly a century, blew a 3-1 lead in the league championship series. They had been four outs from the World Series at one point, with one of their two best pitchers on the mound. He got into mild trouble in the eighth inning with a 3-0 lead, and then a foul ball drifted toward the short left field stands. It was a high pop, and the fans in the first few rows were knotted together looking up. One guy stuck out his hand and the ball bounced off of it---and also away from the Cub fielder's glove waiting below these massed fans' hands. It would have been the second out. The player-third baseman I think-- was furious. The pitcher asked the umpire to call fan interference, but the ball has to be on the field of play, not a foot or so in the stands.
At that point everybody had the same bad feeling. The pitcher was unnerved and walked the batter, throwing into the dirt and moving up the runner in the process. The fans around the man who deflected the ball pelted him with beer. Park officials had to rescue him. They kept him hidden for an hour after the game was over. The Chicago Sun-Times then printed his name and occupation. By the next afternoon his phone was disconnected. I'm guessing he'll be moving out of town, his life distorted and impossible, all because of a moment in an exciting baseball game when he was trying to catch a foul ball.
Because the next batter hit a routine grounder to shortstop, an easy out, a difficult double play. But the shortstop muffed it, got nothing. And the floodgates opened. The Marlins scored eight runs. They had beaten one of Chicago's best starting pitchers. The next day they faced the other one, the most consistent and brilliant. They hadn't been able to hit either of these guys the first time they faced them. But they hit Kerry Wood in the seventh game, and they won their third in a row.
It's something that happens in sports, mysterious, fatal, and it can be painful for years and years. It happened to the SF Giants last year in the World Series, when they were a handful of outs away from winning it all in the sixth game, with an even bigger lead. Then one thing led to another and they lost that game, and they looked pretty flat in the 7th, which they lost. The Marlins did it to them this year, but what were freakish screwups and bad judgments last year became inept and dispirited play this year. Last year the Giants should have won. This year they played poorly and so their bad luck was not so surprising.
The most painful such moment for me was in the early 90s, when the Pittsburgh Pirates had their last good team, probably the best in the majors that year, with Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy van Slyke in the outfield. They were about to go to the world series in a game against the Atlanta Braves, a team I despise, not just because they were the nemesis of the Pirates (and later the Giants), but for their racist name, mascot, song and tomahawk chop. The Pirates had to get just one out, and at least twice they had to get just one strike. But they didn't. They lost. The last shot on the TV was those three outfielders, who knew they would never play another game together, lying flat on their backs on the grass.
The Pirates that year were the beginning of a trend-the Last Year for the Good Team. Not in retrospect either-you knew it then, because of money. The Pirates couldn't afford to sign their best players, and they began a process of letting them go and trading them that continues through this year---in fact some of the better Cubs started out this season with the Pirates. The same thing is going to happen to the Giants for next year. From this year's team there will be Barry Bonds and the batboy. Perhaps the most bizarre case is the Marlins. One year their owner bought up the contracts of all the best players he could get, and he got the best manager in baseball-Jim Leyland, the manager of that Pirates team with Bonds and Bonilla. Leyland took them to the World Series and they won it. I rooted for them because Leyland deserved a World Series ring. But right after they won, the owner totally dismantled the team. The fans were betrayed and they knew it, and even though this year's Marlins are going to the World Series, they have just about the lowest home attendance in the major leagues this side of Montreal.
That Pirates collapse began with the same kind of eerie moment as the Cubs', though it wasn't so bizarre. One of the best fielding second baseman in the majors booted a grounder in the ninth inning. That started it, and postponed Barry Bonds playing in the series for more than a decade.
The Cubs collapse was even more total and more humiliating, because it occurred over three games, especially the final two. How does a freak moment turn into inevitability? How quickly a dream almost fulfilled becomes a nightmare that won't stop. Was this the "inferiority complex" psychology of the loser who can't believe he deserves to win? You have to wonder about Dusty Baker, an inspirational manager who took the Giants to the Series last year and the Cubs to the league championship series this year, and saw ultimate victory collapse in the same fashion. Is this coincidence, or is there something fatal about his managing, a flaw that comes out in these situations, maybe even the other side of the virtues that gets him to these games... It's just a game: you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. But even within the chalk outline, life remains mysterious.
For the other side of bad luck is the team that gets the break, and then goes on to heroics to win. The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates may not have had their chance in the seventh game if a ground ball didn't take a hard bad bounce and hit Tony Kubec in the throat, instead of in his glove. It was a small moment in an otherwise fantastic game, but Bill Mazeroski might never have been in position to win the game with a home run otherwise.
The breaks of the game...whatever that really means.
For longtime or even lapsed baseball fans, this could have been a World Series to remember: the Chicago Cubs against the Boston Red Sox, two of the oldest franchises in baseball, playing in two of the oldest and most fabled surviving ball parks in the majors, and two teams with very early glory and decades of futility, heartbreak and self-inflicted disasters.
Instead we may get the most boring of possibilities: the Yankees and the Marlins. Well, more time to read.
"Changing, it rests"
Herakeitos, in Italian as recalled by Francesco Clemente to Michael McClure
In the parking lot outside Staples a man shouts into his cell phone, "You wasted my miles!" He listens for a brief moment and then repeats it, "You wasted my miles!"
At the St. Vincent DePaul Store counter, a young man in a leather jacket explains that he is buying a lime green blanket for a homeless person, instead of giving him money, "which he might spend on beer." The clerk says it is probably a good choice. They agree he will be warmer with the blanket.
But the young man walks alone down the street a long ways carrying the lime green blanket in a rumpled paper bag. Is it really for a homeless person that far away---there were closer candidates near the store---or was it a story, because for some reason he was embarrassed to be buying it for himself?
For several days now I have been possessed by the idea that I should be permanently wearing a dunce cap.
I wonder if anyone in Chicago is sleeping well this week. The Cubs, who haven't been in a world series for nearly a century, blew a 3-1 lead in the league championship series. They had been four outs from the World Series at one point, with one of their two best pitchers on the mound. He got into mild trouble in the eighth inning with a 3-0 lead, and then a foul ball drifted toward the short left field stands. It was a high pop, and the fans in the first few rows were knotted together looking up. One guy stuck out his hand and the ball bounced off of it---and also away from the Cub fielder's glove waiting below these massed fans' hands. It would have been the second out. The player-third baseman I think-- was furious. The pitcher asked the umpire to call fan interference, but the ball has to be on the field of play, not a foot or so in the stands.
At that point everybody had the same bad feeling. The pitcher was unnerved and walked the batter, throwing into the dirt and moving up the runner in the process. The fans around the man who deflected the ball pelted him with beer. Park officials had to rescue him. They kept him hidden for an hour after the game was over. The Chicago Sun-Times then printed his name and occupation. By the next afternoon his phone was disconnected. I'm guessing he'll be moving out of town, his life distorted and impossible, all because of a moment in an exciting baseball game when he was trying to catch a foul ball.
Because the next batter hit a routine grounder to shortstop, an easy out, a difficult double play. But the shortstop muffed it, got nothing. And the floodgates opened. The Marlins scored eight runs. They had beaten one of Chicago's best starting pitchers. The next day they faced the other one, the most consistent and brilliant. They hadn't been able to hit either of these guys the first time they faced them. But they hit Kerry Wood in the seventh game, and they won their third in a row.
It's something that happens in sports, mysterious, fatal, and it can be painful for years and years. It happened to the SF Giants last year in the World Series, when they were a handful of outs away from winning it all in the sixth game, with an even bigger lead. Then one thing led to another and they lost that game, and they looked pretty flat in the 7th, which they lost. The Marlins did it to them this year, but what were freakish screwups and bad judgments last year became inept and dispirited play this year. Last year the Giants should have won. This year they played poorly and so their bad luck was not so surprising.
The most painful such moment for me was in the early 90s, when the Pittsburgh Pirates had their last good team, probably the best in the majors that year, with Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla and Andy van Slyke in the outfield. They were about to go to the world series in a game against the Atlanta Braves, a team I despise, not just because they were the nemesis of the Pirates (and later the Giants), but for their racist name, mascot, song and tomahawk chop. The Pirates had to get just one out, and at least twice they had to get just one strike. But they didn't. They lost. The last shot on the TV was those three outfielders, who knew they would never play another game together, lying flat on their backs on the grass.
The Pirates that year were the beginning of a trend-the Last Year for the Good Team. Not in retrospect either-you knew it then, because of money. The Pirates couldn't afford to sign their best players, and they began a process of letting them go and trading them that continues through this year---in fact some of the better Cubs started out this season with the Pirates. The same thing is going to happen to the Giants for next year. From this year's team there will be Barry Bonds and the batboy. Perhaps the most bizarre case is the Marlins. One year their owner bought up the contracts of all the best players he could get, and he got the best manager in baseball-Jim Leyland, the manager of that Pirates team with Bonds and Bonilla. Leyland took them to the World Series and they won it. I rooted for them because Leyland deserved a World Series ring. But right after they won, the owner totally dismantled the team. The fans were betrayed and they knew it, and even though this year's Marlins are going to the World Series, they have just about the lowest home attendance in the major leagues this side of Montreal.
That Pirates collapse began with the same kind of eerie moment as the Cubs', though it wasn't so bizarre. One of the best fielding second baseman in the majors booted a grounder in the ninth inning. That started it, and postponed Barry Bonds playing in the series for more than a decade.
The Cubs collapse was even more total and more humiliating, because it occurred over three games, especially the final two. How does a freak moment turn into inevitability? How quickly a dream almost fulfilled becomes a nightmare that won't stop. Was this the "inferiority complex" psychology of the loser who can't believe he deserves to win? You have to wonder about Dusty Baker, an inspirational manager who took the Giants to the Series last year and the Cubs to the league championship series this year, and saw ultimate victory collapse in the same fashion. Is this coincidence, or is there something fatal about his managing, a flaw that comes out in these situations, maybe even the other side of the virtues that gets him to these games... It's just a game: you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. But even within the chalk outline, life remains mysterious.
For the other side of bad luck is the team that gets the break, and then goes on to heroics to win. The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates may not have had their chance in the seventh game if a ground ball didn't take a hard bad bounce and hit Tony Kubec in the throat, instead of in his glove. It was a small moment in an otherwise fantastic game, but Bill Mazeroski might never have been in position to win the game with a home run otherwise.
The breaks of the game...whatever that really means.
For longtime or even lapsed baseball fans, this could have been a World Series to remember: the Chicago Cubs against the Boston Red Sox, two of the oldest franchises in baseball, playing in two of the oldest and most fabled surviving ball parks in the majors, and two teams with very early glory and decades of futility, heartbreak and self-inflicted disasters.
Instead we may get the most boring of possibilities: the Yankees and the Marlins. Well, more time to read.
Wednesday, October 01, 2003
On the Road II
Back now. The last day in San Francisco began with what's becoming a quintessential city experience, the trip to reclaim a car from city towing. Not enough to give a ticket at a little past 9 a.m. for parking in a zone a bumpkin like me has never heard of, which mandates you disappear your car between 7 and 9 a.m. during the morning commute. It was stupid, but the stupidity-or at least the oversight-was shared. Fortunately, reclaiming the car was fairly painless, except for the repulsive cost. The city of San Francisco does it very efficiently; it's apparently just another part of the car business, like that particular car's home, a rental lot.
The drive back included an unexpectedly close view of a forest fire in southern Humboldt. It was a flare-up of a fire that had been under control. From 101 we could see rivelets of smoking trees and at one point some flames at the top of a hill. It was a small enough fire that 101 remained open, and also that we could be so close to it. Even a fire this small in scale was an awesome, as also in awe-ful and awe-inspiring, sight.
The good news of the trip is the on again, off again assignment for a story on a project investigating the influence of Buddhism in the arts is on again, this time in probably the best possible venue, the Sunday Datebook section of the Chronicle. It was neat meeting people at the Chronicle, some I'd worked with by phone and email, some not. And getting reacquainted with Kenneth Baker, who I haven't seen since I was his editor at the Boston Phoenix in the early 1970s. Nice to know that my younger self made a lasting good impression.
My day in the Zen Center was a mixed experience. I didn't feel like I spent much time there really---I had hardly settled in my very pleasant room in the afternoon (and a brief moment in the lovely Japanese tea garden) before I had to go off to Berkeley again to attend a performance for this story. When I got back I could read for only awhile before sleeping, since I was to be up early for meditation instruction and the Saturday lecture and discussion. I did pick up a few pointers on the sitting meditation, and the lecture was good. I liked being in the group for meditation and lecture, but I have to say that as a fervently lapsed Catholic, even though I believe in ceremony and ritual, the priesty robes and apparent hierarchies, the bowing before statues etc., made me a bit nervous.
The day took a different turn when more or less on the spur of the moment I headed down to the ballyard, bought a great seat from an independent vendor, and saw my first Giant's game at Pac Bell Park. Two spiritual experiences in one Saturday! I watched Barry Bonds many times as a Pittsburgh Pirate, from his rookie year to his last in the burgh, but this was the first time I'd seen him since. The crowd was fun, there were some nice fielding plays, but it was not a good game for the Giants or Barry. It's a great park. ESPN's exhaustive survey rated it the second best in the majors, with PNC Park in Pittsburgh being the best---which is where I saw a game last summer. I liked this park better, but I suspect it was because of the feeling in it---people knew the Giants are a good team, and they're on their way to the playoffs. There were some great teams in Pittsburgh when I went to games at Three Rivers and Forbes Field, but that was a long time ago.
So that's the chatty blog stuff about the trip. Still a bit fatigued, but I'll be back to my usual trenchant blather soon.
Back now. The last day in San Francisco began with what's becoming a quintessential city experience, the trip to reclaim a car from city towing. Not enough to give a ticket at a little past 9 a.m. for parking in a zone a bumpkin like me has never heard of, which mandates you disappear your car between 7 and 9 a.m. during the morning commute. It was stupid, but the stupidity-or at least the oversight-was shared. Fortunately, reclaiming the car was fairly painless, except for the repulsive cost. The city of San Francisco does it very efficiently; it's apparently just another part of the car business, like that particular car's home, a rental lot.
The drive back included an unexpectedly close view of a forest fire in southern Humboldt. It was a flare-up of a fire that had been under control. From 101 we could see rivelets of smoking trees and at one point some flames at the top of a hill. It was a small enough fire that 101 remained open, and also that we could be so close to it. Even a fire this small in scale was an awesome, as also in awe-ful and awe-inspiring, sight.
The good news of the trip is the on again, off again assignment for a story on a project investigating the influence of Buddhism in the arts is on again, this time in probably the best possible venue, the Sunday Datebook section of the Chronicle. It was neat meeting people at the Chronicle, some I'd worked with by phone and email, some not. And getting reacquainted with Kenneth Baker, who I haven't seen since I was his editor at the Boston Phoenix in the early 1970s. Nice to know that my younger self made a lasting good impression.
My day in the Zen Center was a mixed experience. I didn't feel like I spent much time there really---I had hardly settled in my very pleasant room in the afternoon (and a brief moment in the lovely Japanese tea garden) before I had to go off to Berkeley again to attend a performance for this story. When I got back I could read for only awhile before sleeping, since I was to be up early for meditation instruction and the Saturday lecture and discussion. I did pick up a few pointers on the sitting meditation, and the lecture was good. I liked being in the group for meditation and lecture, but I have to say that as a fervently lapsed Catholic, even though I believe in ceremony and ritual, the priesty robes and apparent hierarchies, the bowing before statues etc., made me a bit nervous.
The day took a different turn when more or less on the spur of the moment I headed down to the ballyard, bought a great seat from an independent vendor, and saw my first Giant's game at Pac Bell Park. Two spiritual experiences in one Saturday! I watched Barry Bonds many times as a Pittsburgh Pirate, from his rookie year to his last in the burgh, but this was the first time I'd seen him since. The crowd was fun, there were some nice fielding plays, but it was not a good game for the Giants or Barry. It's a great park. ESPN's exhaustive survey rated it the second best in the majors, with PNC Park in Pittsburgh being the best---which is where I saw a game last summer. I liked this park better, but I suspect it was because of the feeling in it---people knew the Giants are a good team, and they're on their way to the playoffs. There were some great teams in Pittsburgh when I went to games at Three Rivers and Forbes Field, but that was a long time ago.
So that's the chatty blog stuff about the trip. Still a bit fatigued, but I'll be back to my usual trenchant blather soon.
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
On the road
Can't resist the temptation to blog for the first time on the road. I'm in San Francisco for the week, ostensibly to do a story and conduct other writerly business, much of which has fallen apart or never materialized. But here I am. This is the second full day being here, as opposed to the day getting here. I spent most of yesterday in Berkeley. The second theme of this trip is Buddhism, in that the story I'm doing is on the ongoing program of Buddhist related arts events in the Bay area (also in LA, NYC, Boston and other places.) And in that I'll be spending one night at the San Francisco Zen Center.
I had two interviews scheduled in Berkeley, one of which actually happened. (Later I got an email from the editor at the SF Chronicle I thought I was doing this story for who had changed his mind-the old "no more freelance budget for the year" refrain. I'm visiting the Chronicle offices tomorrow, to meet people I have already written for, some I haven't, and one old acquaintance I haven't seen in xx years.)
After the interview, which involved seeing a new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, I went down to Telegraph Ave. to check out the changes. I lived in Berkeley for a few months in 1969, and Telegraph Ave was where I hung out. In memory it is all bookstores and cafes, but even if it was then it certainly isn't now. There is one place that is still there, that has been there continuously,as I've noted on other visits. It's a little Mexican restaurant, called La Fiesta, on a corner across from Cody's Books. I remember this restaurant well. I used to go in there, order coffee and sneak as many chips as I could, while reading (I specifically recall Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrine Quartet, the memory of which is flavored by those chips and that coffee.) There were street people then too, and I was very close to being one. I had a place to live but very little money, so the kindness of the waitresses there, not only to me but to street people worse off, is something I clearly remember.
So I had dinner there, and the food is still great, plentiful and very cheap. I don't imagine it's a gourmet paradise but I'm fairly peasant in my tastes, and a taco, a tostada, beans and rice that filled a big plate, starting with a generous bowl of soup, was all the dinner I could eat, and it was under $7 (though more with taxes and tip.) I don't know if the ownership is the same, but the décor is-same tiled tables and iconic art on the walls.
I stopped in Cody's then, inquired for the rest rooms (I guess because of the prevalence of homeless people, restrooms are at a premium here now too; every town is becoming Urine Town, where you have to pay to pee.) I also confirmed that Maxine Hong Kingston was reading there on Wednesday night, as the SF Chronicle said. Turns out that was wrong, she was reading in a half hour, on Tuesday night. Plus it wasn't this bookstore-it was the Cody's on 4th St. I got directions, but the person giving them must have assumed I was driving, because it turned out to be a long, long way. I eventually caught a bus after walking a few miles. I got there in time for the second half of the reading, and hung around until the line of people getting books signed had dwindled. I had reviewed Kingston's new book for the Chronicle but had never met her. (The review is over at http://booksinheat.blogspot.com )
So I did talk with her very briefly. She had liked the review. She said "I felt I was understood" and further, thought it was well written.
When I was younger I delighted in writing scathing reviews, and I still am pretty blunt about deficiencies I find, usually in books I am assigned to review (I try to choose books I want to recommend.) But these days my point of view is generally that if a book is "awaited"-that is, by a known author and people know about it, and are already wondering if it's good or not-then a negative review is legitimate. That book is, in a sense, news, and that information is sought. But when review space is limited and now that life is especially short, I don't see the point of picking an unknown book and bashing it. But I think the real difference-if it is a difference, let's just say it's certainly more conscious now-is that I really want to get across what I believe the author was trying to do, and what the book does say, at least to me.
That' s perhaps a long way around of saying that I can think of no higher compliment, as a writer as well as a reviewer, that someone saying "I felt I was understood." As a writer, I know how important that is, and how rare.
Whatever happened to signs? It's pretty difficult to get around without them, but they are generally hard to find. I noticed this first on the BART system. Signs are hard to find, the maps are in the wrong places, there is poor indication of what trains are going where and in which direction (no Uptown/Downtown as in NYC or Inbound/Outbound as in Boston). So I spent a lot of time getting places and being lost.
Still, it's a city, you know. Coming back from Berkeley I saw people obviously coming back from a baseball game cross paths with people obviously going home from the opera.
So now it's off to make reservations at the Zen Center, try to find someplace that sells phone cards (I forgot mine, of course) and visit an agent in Orinda.
Can't resist the temptation to blog for the first time on the road. I'm in San Francisco for the week, ostensibly to do a story and conduct other writerly business, much of which has fallen apart or never materialized. But here I am. This is the second full day being here, as opposed to the day getting here. I spent most of yesterday in Berkeley. The second theme of this trip is Buddhism, in that the story I'm doing is on the ongoing program of Buddhist related arts events in the Bay area (also in LA, NYC, Boston and other places.) And in that I'll be spending one night at the San Francisco Zen Center.
I had two interviews scheduled in Berkeley, one of which actually happened. (Later I got an email from the editor at the SF Chronicle I thought I was doing this story for who had changed his mind-the old "no more freelance budget for the year" refrain. I'm visiting the Chronicle offices tomorrow, to meet people I have already written for, some I haven't, and one old acquaintance I haven't seen in xx years.)
After the interview, which involved seeing a new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Museum, I went down to Telegraph Ave. to check out the changes. I lived in Berkeley for a few months in 1969, and Telegraph Ave was where I hung out. In memory it is all bookstores and cafes, but even if it was then it certainly isn't now. There is one place that is still there, that has been there continuously,as I've noted on other visits. It's a little Mexican restaurant, called La Fiesta, on a corner across from Cody's Books. I remember this restaurant well. I used to go in there, order coffee and sneak as many chips as I could, while reading (I specifically recall Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrine Quartet, the memory of which is flavored by those chips and that coffee.) There were street people then too, and I was very close to being one. I had a place to live but very little money, so the kindness of the waitresses there, not only to me but to street people worse off, is something I clearly remember.
So I had dinner there, and the food is still great, plentiful and very cheap. I don't imagine it's a gourmet paradise but I'm fairly peasant in my tastes, and a taco, a tostada, beans and rice that filled a big plate, starting with a generous bowl of soup, was all the dinner I could eat, and it was under $7 (though more with taxes and tip.) I don't know if the ownership is the same, but the décor is-same tiled tables and iconic art on the walls.
I stopped in Cody's then, inquired for the rest rooms (I guess because of the prevalence of homeless people, restrooms are at a premium here now too; every town is becoming Urine Town, where you have to pay to pee.) I also confirmed that Maxine Hong Kingston was reading there on Wednesday night, as the SF Chronicle said. Turns out that was wrong, she was reading in a half hour, on Tuesday night. Plus it wasn't this bookstore-it was the Cody's on 4th St. I got directions, but the person giving them must have assumed I was driving, because it turned out to be a long, long way. I eventually caught a bus after walking a few miles. I got there in time for the second half of the reading, and hung around until the line of people getting books signed had dwindled. I had reviewed Kingston's new book for the Chronicle but had never met her. (The review is over at http://booksinheat.blogspot.com )
So I did talk with her very briefly. She had liked the review. She said "I felt I was understood" and further, thought it was well written.
When I was younger I delighted in writing scathing reviews, and I still am pretty blunt about deficiencies I find, usually in books I am assigned to review (I try to choose books I want to recommend.) But these days my point of view is generally that if a book is "awaited"-that is, by a known author and people know about it, and are already wondering if it's good or not-then a negative review is legitimate. That book is, in a sense, news, and that information is sought. But when review space is limited and now that life is especially short, I don't see the point of picking an unknown book and bashing it. But I think the real difference-if it is a difference, let's just say it's certainly more conscious now-is that I really want to get across what I believe the author was trying to do, and what the book does say, at least to me.
That' s perhaps a long way around of saying that I can think of no higher compliment, as a writer as well as a reviewer, that someone saying "I felt I was understood." As a writer, I know how important that is, and how rare.
Whatever happened to signs? It's pretty difficult to get around without them, but they are generally hard to find. I noticed this first on the BART system. Signs are hard to find, the maps are in the wrong places, there is poor indication of what trains are going where and in which direction (no Uptown/Downtown as in NYC or Inbound/Outbound as in Boston). So I spent a lot of time getting places and being lost.
Still, it's a city, you know. Coming back from Berkeley I saw people obviously coming back from a baseball game cross paths with people obviously going home from the opera.
So now it's off to make reservations at the Zen Center, try to find someplace that sells phone cards (I forgot mine, of course) and visit an agent in Orinda.
Friday, September 19, 2003
Elders
People keep dying. Older than me, some younger, well known names. Known to me if not to you, for example, was John Henry Redwood. Known as an actor, some on screen, mostly on stage, he's been a developing playwright for the past decade or so, and a good one. Also a great person. A big man with a big heart and a big smile. I met him in Pittsburgh when the Pittsburgh Public Theatre put on one of his first plays. He was very interested in the craft of it. Actually we may have met when he was in an August Wilson play there. It's been awhile: I remember a patio party at someone's house where he and I sneaked off for a minute to check the Lakers playoff score---and Magic Johnson was playing then.
Anyway, he died recently. Not as heralded as John Ritter or Edward Teller or Warren Zevon or even Sheb Wooley (of Flying Purple People Eater fame), but a man whose presence and talent in this world will be missed. We will be lesser for his absence.
Which got me to thinking, not very originally, that we ought to honor people when they're still alive to hear it. I've picked some Elders I wish to honor. Some aren't in fact very much elder to me in years, but certainly in achievement.
Norman Mailer. He seemed to have retired during the Clinton years but Bush has brought Norman stormin back. Sure he's flawed in big ways, but he's a huge talent, and someone who has given me key thoughts and prompts over many years. I wasn't all that crazy about his book on the Pentagon march, though in 1968 that a writer with his credentials (and military novel) could write about anti-Vietnam and anti-draft youth with such conviction was important. His novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam?" was riveting. I loved his defense of Henry Miller when he was a notorious target of Womens Lib in the early 70s. For good or ill he's carried the torch for the heroism of writing and especially the aspirations of the novel during my lifetime.
Yet besides the example of his engagement and standards he tried to uphold, I'll remember specific things he said or wrote almost as asides. "Totalitarianism is the interruption of mood." I heard him say that on a talk show (talk shows used to have actual writers on them) and it blew me away. Later I found it in one of his books, Advertisements For Myself I think. It's still a very profound personal and political formula for me.
And an offhand comment in his prose-as I recall he was narrating that someone had apologized for not having read one of his books and he said he understood entirely-that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other. That too is a guiding light to me. It says so much about books and life, and about how we continue to have new and illuminating experiences, how books speak to us in the course of our lives, they are there as resources for us, and how even the books are treasures at the end of the hard roads of life, a kind of payoff in wisdom and light and depth for all that we've seen and felt and been subjected to.
I wonder if his more recent work has spoken to young people at the time. I haven't read him in recent years. Maybe I'm just not ready yet.
Robert Bly. Another writer with flaws, perhaps more lovable ones, but not entirely. But I doubt there's been anyone more important to poetry in America in the past sixty years. He's been at the forefront from the sixties on, with his personality and enthusiasms and in recent decades his transparency, his honesty and courage. He still gets dogmatic once in awhile but that's the kind of flaw that integral and forgivable and lovable. His powers of promotion have brought many wonderful poets to wider attention. He's kept that up, from Neruda in the early 70s to Machado and Rumi and more. He's been close friends at different times with two of the best poets of the age, James Wright and William Stafford.
He's taken a lot of heat about the men's movement from people who have entirely distorted what's he said and what he's done. I respect him as an elder and I will always listen to what he has to say. He's written some fine poems, and he has done more than anyone to revive the performance of poetry, except perhaps Allen Ginsberg (who took up the squeezebox at about the time Bly took up his stringed instrument.) He's one of the connecting points between so many important places in our culture and consciousness.
Bill Moyers. Bly was but one of the voices of our age that Bill Moyers introduced to millions of people. The range and quality of his work over the years is nothing short of astounding. I have transcripts of his programs and books from his various programs and series' going back to the sixties. Political, imaginative, artistic, thoughtful life in these decades would be so much poorer without him. Even today, his PBS series "Now" is virtually alone on television as a quality news program of relentless probity, leavened by intelligent enthusiasms in art and thought. Bill Moyers is really the hero of the television age.
Leslie Marmon Silko. She's not much older than me, but she's an elder in many ways in what she knows and writes. She's the most profound and political of the many excellent Native American novelists, poets and nonfiction writers. Her generation that came of age in the 60s with an explosion of writing turns out not to have been an anomaly. American Indian writers remains vital, and beats new paths. But the continuing energy of this generation's writers, especially Silko and Linda Hogan, still inspires me.
Doris Lessing. A writer who would never let anyone else define her. "The Golden Notebook" made her a feminist heroine, but she refused to be limited or defined by any political agenda. Her science fiction novels are amazing in their conception, though she got little credit for them-puzzling both mainstream fiction adherents and s/f fans. I don't find her much of a stylist, but her energy and intelligence propel you forward. She must be a model for other strong women writers like Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin. Atwood has a takes no prisoners intelligence, yet she's witty and civilized, and she sure can write (some of her short stories in particular are outstanding.) LeGuin is heroic as well, although she's offended me with some of her sexist talk, but like Lessing she's her own person, and quite forthright-and often right.
Maxine Hong Kingston. Again, an elder in example and inspiration, but not elderly. Her new book is courageous, not for what she's endured or even done, but in her honesty with herself, and honest attempt to tell us the truth. But not only that: it is the textures of her telling that ultimately are the most inspiring. I'll bet she's a great teacher, and I'm glad that her books are so popular on campuses. She believes in literature, in story, imagination; her new book unites the world of literature with the attempt to unite inner and outer peace-for example, by using meditation in her workshops with war veterans.
I need to add two or three more---there are many more, of course, but I can't neglect these: James Hillman , the most important of the post-Jungians, who lately has turned his attention to the subject of elders and aging. I just listened to the audiobook version of his print book (which I read when it came out), The Force of Character. It is a great listen as well as the usual rivetting and admirable read. He quotes another elder who has valuable and inspiring things to say about aging, Theodore Roszak. I've written about both these men and their work in this and other blogs.
Then there is Paul Newman , who acted in important movies as a young man, in middle age and in his later years. Then he parlayed his fame into a business that simultaneously offers good, healthy and tasty products and helps support good causes and artists. He's been a model in so many ways for so long, that his few lapses---that oil company commercial, and the promo suggesting that "Washington Week in Review" is something more than the march of cliches by timid journalists mouthing conventional wisdom very occasionally enlivened by new information or analysis---are easily forgiven. Now he's helping to bring Thorton Wilder to TV. He's been admirable in many ways, in his personal trials as well as modest in his triumphs, and so it's fitting to end this tribute to all elders with him.
Finally there's someone who exemplifies the elder perhaps best of any I can think of, and that's Gary Snyder. A poet of mythic power, whose life and work have forged crucial links important to the future, in his pioneering synthesis of Buddhism, Native American worldview, practical ecology and much more. His prose works such as The Practice of the Wild, The Old Ways, "Four Changes" and the interviews and essays in The Real Work and A Place in Space are essential as any body of work created in my lifetime. He is the elder teacher of our time, who introduces, connects and interprets knowledge as a guide on our individual, collective and planetary journeys.
I hope all of these people are around for a long time. But in my life they've been inspirations and so I testify to this, while others can still take advantage of their live presence.
Wonderful
Things are still pretty unsettled in my little world. But I've got two moments that I'd have to classify as wonderful, and both happened on the same day.
The first was a small and so far solitary personal victory. For something like five or six years now, I've had this little musical play that I wrote---a play for (I figure) junior high age kids, about smoking. It's a musical, and I wrote songs for it. I really liked it, but I've had to pick my battles-those things I tried to steel myself to send out into the world of rejection, misunderstanding, envy and heartbreak. Some of those items perhaps deserved not to be published or produced or whatever, but when you start out and believe in what you've done or at least the potential of it, you have to go forward and see what happens. But I have to be selective, not really just in terms of what I think is the quality of what I've done, but in the kind, the quality and the quantity of shit I'm inviting. For example, I can expect a nonfiction book proposal to get at least a little respect from somebody, since I've published a nonfiction book, and I'm an Author and a Freelance Writer. But if I try springing a musical play for kids-look out! Blank stares, or just total blankness. Cause you see I'm not a career playwright, I don't have my PhD in Advanced Dramatury nor have I workshopped and networked nothing but plays plays plays for ninety years---let alone musical playwright OR kids writer. In this world you write childrens books about stamps, and that's your identity for life.
And not only is the rejection more likely, it's harder to take, because I'm also insecure, for the same reason---I've got no track record. Maybe it really is shit. But I never believed this play or the music was shit. However, I could never get a recording that represented the music to my satisfaction. Because I couldn't afford the time or the money to do it, and there wasn't anyone else interested and able to help make that happen.
Then technology sort of caught up. Several years ago I got an inexpensive four track recorder. I had an electronic keyboard-not a great one, but not a real cheapo either. I composed the songs on that keyboard, with all that instrumentation, using presets in my own way. Over the course of a couple of years, when I could stand to spend all that time and belief, I recorded the songs. Actually I recorded the three songs people who heard them liked best, and they did seem like the obvious "hits"to me, too. And I recorded short versions of the other songs, just to indicate how they would go in the script. This wasn't easy.
Then I had to listen to all the takes, choose the best ones, redo several vocals, sometimes whole songs. And then, I didn't have the equipment to mix these recordings to my satisfaction. By then the programs to mix on the home computer were coming along, and so were the computers. Finally I found a program cheap and easy enough to use just to make a decent CD. It took hours more, and two computers, but just when it looked like---or rather it sounded like---it was never going to happen, it did happen. I now have a CD that sounds pretty good. Not perfect but (as we used to say) good enough for this band. It's musically okay and gets the idea of the song across. So finally, after all this time, this much exists, and that's about as wonderful as it's been in such things.
The second wonderful thing also has to do with music and technology and specifically, this laptop. On it I watched and listened to the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night" I borrowed from the library. You know how many times I've seen this movie in theatres? I stopped counting at 20. Then came the video restoration (which I have) and now the DVD. And it's the best yet. Moments as terrific as some moments in the theatre. But as an overall viewing and listening experience, better.
You can now see all the flaws that the big screen hid, but you can also see all the little subtle things. And mostly it's the presence. The immediacy. A combination of the visual image and the music through the earphones. (A lot of Beatles stuff at a certain point was in true stereo, which makes earphones worse than useless for me, since I can hear only in one ear, and therefore only half of the song---the drums and the backup vocals, or switch to the lead vocals while the rhythm cuts out-very frustrating, torture really.) But this is mixed so I get stereo through both earphones. (Something I picked up from the recording program was what added echo/reverb sounds like, and so I could identify that reverb was added to the songs the Beatles play in the concert in the end, so the music sounds like it's being played live in a hall---though of course in that hall the music wasn't heard at all, just the screaming.)
It's a nice DVD package, with interviews with everybody they could find, including the woman who did makeup, but those Brits talk so well that even all these bits were interesting and fun. I can't figure out why they didn't include the "I'll Cry Instead" footage they added in the video version, but other than that, it's a fine two DVD set. But the movie-that the thing. That's the wonderful thing.
I remember long ago---1969 to be exact---I was walking with a college friend in Berkeley, and I happened to mention Wallace Stevens' statement that the purpose of art was to make people happy. My friend, a philosophy major on a heavy political and psychological trip, laughed at me. I doubt if that's why many artists do it, he said.
Kurt Vonnegut said something like that in his novel Timequake. "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'the Beatles did.'"
They didn't do it alone in this movie, and finding the right people at the right time and inspiring them was part of their genius, their success when it worked, and their bad times when it didn't. They rescued Richard Lester from making commercials for the rest of his life, and he turned out to be a very fine director, with several of the best films of the 60s and early 70s. They inspired the camera people, the editors, the other actors, etc. In some ways, this movie is like Shakespeare for the 60s-full of clichés, because the lines became part of the culture. I could recite the times even in recent years that people have quoted from this movie. Yet I had forgotten some of the funny bits.
I've got to take the DVD back to the library tomorrow, so as soon as I post them, I'm going to watch it again.
People keep dying. Older than me, some younger, well known names. Known to me if not to you, for example, was John Henry Redwood. Known as an actor, some on screen, mostly on stage, he's been a developing playwright for the past decade or so, and a good one. Also a great person. A big man with a big heart and a big smile. I met him in Pittsburgh when the Pittsburgh Public Theatre put on one of his first plays. He was very interested in the craft of it. Actually we may have met when he was in an August Wilson play there. It's been awhile: I remember a patio party at someone's house where he and I sneaked off for a minute to check the Lakers playoff score---and Magic Johnson was playing then.
Anyway, he died recently. Not as heralded as John Ritter or Edward Teller or Warren Zevon or even Sheb Wooley (of Flying Purple People Eater fame), but a man whose presence and talent in this world will be missed. We will be lesser for his absence.
Which got me to thinking, not very originally, that we ought to honor people when they're still alive to hear it. I've picked some Elders I wish to honor. Some aren't in fact very much elder to me in years, but certainly in achievement.
Norman Mailer. He seemed to have retired during the Clinton years but Bush has brought Norman stormin back. Sure he's flawed in big ways, but he's a huge talent, and someone who has given me key thoughts and prompts over many years. I wasn't all that crazy about his book on the Pentagon march, though in 1968 that a writer with his credentials (and military novel) could write about anti-Vietnam and anti-draft youth with such conviction was important. His novel, "Why Are We in Vietnam?" was riveting. I loved his defense of Henry Miller when he was a notorious target of Womens Lib in the early 70s. For good or ill he's carried the torch for the heroism of writing and especially the aspirations of the novel during my lifetime.
Yet besides the example of his engagement and standards he tried to uphold, I'll remember specific things he said or wrote almost as asides. "Totalitarianism is the interruption of mood." I heard him say that on a talk show (talk shows used to have actual writers on them) and it blew me away. Later I found it in one of his books, Advertisements For Myself I think. It's still a very profound personal and political formula for me.
And an offhand comment in his prose-as I recall he was narrating that someone had apologized for not having read one of his books and he said he understood entirely-that a book and a reader have to be ready for each other. That too is a guiding light to me. It says so much about books and life, and about how we continue to have new and illuminating experiences, how books speak to us in the course of our lives, they are there as resources for us, and how even the books are treasures at the end of the hard roads of life, a kind of payoff in wisdom and light and depth for all that we've seen and felt and been subjected to.
I wonder if his more recent work has spoken to young people at the time. I haven't read him in recent years. Maybe I'm just not ready yet.
Robert Bly. Another writer with flaws, perhaps more lovable ones, but not entirely. But I doubt there's been anyone more important to poetry in America in the past sixty years. He's been at the forefront from the sixties on, with his personality and enthusiasms and in recent decades his transparency, his honesty and courage. He still gets dogmatic once in awhile but that's the kind of flaw that integral and forgivable and lovable. His powers of promotion have brought many wonderful poets to wider attention. He's kept that up, from Neruda in the early 70s to Machado and Rumi and more. He's been close friends at different times with two of the best poets of the age, James Wright and William Stafford.
He's taken a lot of heat about the men's movement from people who have entirely distorted what's he said and what he's done. I respect him as an elder and I will always listen to what he has to say. He's written some fine poems, and he has done more than anyone to revive the performance of poetry, except perhaps Allen Ginsberg (who took up the squeezebox at about the time Bly took up his stringed instrument.) He's one of the connecting points between so many important places in our culture and consciousness.
Bill Moyers. Bly was but one of the voices of our age that Bill Moyers introduced to millions of people. The range and quality of his work over the years is nothing short of astounding. I have transcripts of his programs and books from his various programs and series' going back to the sixties. Political, imaginative, artistic, thoughtful life in these decades would be so much poorer without him. Even today, his PBS series "Now" is virtually alone on television as a quality news program of relentless probity, leavened by intelligent enthusiasms in art and thought. Bill Moyers is really the hero of the television age.
Leslie Marmon Silko. She's not much older than me, but she's an elder in many ways in what she knows and writes. She's the most profound and political of the many excellent Native American novelists, poets and nonfiction writers. Her generation that came of age in the 60s with an explosion of writing turns out not to have been an anomaly. American Indian writers remains vital, and beats new paths. But the continuing energy of this generation's writers, especially Silko and Linda Hogan, still inspires me.
Doris Lessing. A writer who would never let anyone else define her. "The Golden Notebook" made her a feminist heroine, but she refused to be limited or defined by any political agenda. Her science fiction novels are amazing in their conception, though she got little credit for them-puzzling both mainstream fiction adherents and s/f fans. I don't find her much of a stylist, but her energy and intelligence propel you forward. She must be a model for other strong women writers like Margaret Atwood and Ursula LeGuin. Atwood has a takes no prisoners intelligence, yet she's witty and civilized, and she sure can write (some of her short stories in particular are outstanding.) LeGuin is heroic as well, although she's offended me with some of her sexist talk, but like Lessing she's her own person, and quite forthright-and often right.
Maxine Hong Kingston. Again, an elder in example and inspiration, but not elderly. Her new book is courageous, not for what she's endured or even done, but in her honesty with herself, and honest attempt to tell us the truth. But not only that: it is the textures of her telling that ultimately are the most inspiring. I'll bet she's a great teacher, and I'm glad that her books are so popular on campuses. She believes in literature, in story, imagination; her new book unites the world of literature with the attempt to unite inner and outer peace-for example, by using meditation in her workshops with war veterans.
I need to add two or three more---there are many more, of course, but I can't neglect these: James Hillman , the most important of the post-Jungians, who lately has turned his attention to the subject of elders and aging. I just listened to the audiobook version of his print book (which I read when it came out), The Force of Character. It is a great listen as well as the usual rivetting and admirable read. He quotes another elder who has valuable and inspiring things to say about aging, Theodore Roszak. I've written about both these men and their work in this and other blogs.
Then there is Paul Newman , who acted in important movies as a young man, in middle age and in his later years. Then he parlayed his fame into a business that simultaneously offers good, healthy and tasty products and helps support good causes and artists. He's been a model in so many ways for so long, that his few lapses---that oil company commercial, and the promo suggesting that "Washington Week in Review" is something more than the march of cliches by timid journalists mouthing conventional wisdom very occasionally enlivened by new information or analysis---are easily forgiven. Now he's helping to bring Thorton Wilder to TV. He's been admirable in many ways, in his personal trials as well as modest in his triumphs, and so it's fitting to end this tribute to all elders with him.
Finally there's someone who exemplifies the elder perhaps best of any I can think of, and that's Gary Snyder. A poet of mythic power, whose life and work have forged crucial links important to the future, in his pioneering synthesis of Buddhism, Native American worldview, practical ecology and much more. His prose works such as The Practice of the Wild, The Old Ways, "Four Changes" and the interviews and essays in The Real Work and A Place in Space are essential as any body of work created in my lifetime. He is the elder teacher of our time, who introduces, connects and interprets knowledge as a guide on our individual, collective and planetary journeys.
I hope all of these people are around for a long time. But in my life they've been inspirations and so I testify to this, while others can still take advantage of their live presence.
Wonderful
Things are still pretty unsettled in my little world. But I've got two moments that I'd have to classify as wonderful, and both happened on the same day.
The first was a small and so far solitary personal victory. For something like five or six years now, I've had this little musical play that I wrote---a play for (I figure) junior high age kids, about smoking. It's a musical, and I wrote songs for it. I really liked it, but I've had to pick my battles-those things I tried to steel myself to send out into the world of rejection, misunderstanding, envy and heartbreak. Some of those items perhaps deserved not to be published or produced or whatever, but when you start out and believe in what you've done or at least the potential of it, you have to go forward and see what happens. But I have to be selective, not really just in terms of what I think is the quality of what I've done, but in the kind, the quality and the quantity of shit I'm inviting. For example, I can expect a nonfiction book proposal to get at least a little respect from somebody, since I've published a nonfiction book, and I'm an Author and a Freelance Writer. But if I try springing a musical play for kids-look out! Blank stares, or just total blankness. Cause you see I'm not a career playwright, I don't have my PhD in Advanced Dramatury nor have I workshopped and networked nothing but plays plays plays for ninety years---let alone musical playwright OR kids writer. In this world you write childrens books about stamps, and that's your identity for life.
And not only is the rejection more likely, it's harder to take, because I'm also insecure, for the same reason---I've got no track record. Maybe it really is shit. But I never believed this play or the music was shit. However, I could never get a recording that represented the music to my satisfaction. Because I couldn't afford the time or the money to do it, and there wasn't anyone else interested and able to help make that happen.
Then technology sort of caught up. Several years ago I got an inexpensive four track recorder. I had an electronic keyboard-not a great one, but not a real cheapo either. I composed the songs on that keyboard, with all that instrumentation, using presets in my own way. Over the course of a couple of years, when I could stand to spend all that time and belief, I recorded the songs. Actually I recorded the three songs people who heard them liked best, and they did seem like the obvious "hits"to me, too. And I recorded short versions of the other songs, just to indicate how they would go in the script. This wasn't easy.
Then I had to listen to all the takes, choose the best ones, redo several vocals, sometimes whole songs. And then, I didn't have the equipment to mix these recordings to my satisfaction. By then the programs to mix on the home computer were coming along, and so were the computers. Finally I found a program cheap and easy enough to use just to make a decent CD. It took hours more, and two computers, but just when it looked like---or rather it sounded like---it was never going to happen, it did happen. I now have a CD that sounds pretty good. Not perfect but (as we used to say) good enough for this band. It's musically okay and gets the idea of the song across. So finally, after all this time, this much exists, and that's about as wonderful as it's been in such things.
The second wonderful thing also has to do with music and technology and specifically, this laptop. On it I watched and listened to the DVD of "A Hard Day's Night" I borrowed from the library. You know how many times I've seen this movie in theatres? I stopped counting at 20. Then came the video restoration (which I have) and now the DVD. And it's the best yet. Moments as terrific as some moments in the theatre. But as an overall viewing and listening experience, better.
You can now see all the flaws that the big screen hid, but you can also see all the little subtle things. And mostly it's the presence. The immediacy. A combination of the visual image and the music through the earphones. (A lot of Beatles stuff at a certain point was in true stereo, which makes earphones worse than useless for me, since I can hear only in one ear, and therefore only half of the song---the drums and the backup vocals, or switch to the lead vocals while the rhythm cuts out-very frustrating, torture really.) But this is mixed so I get stereo through both earphones. (Something I picked up from the recording program was what added echo/reverb sounds like, and so I could identify that reverb was added to the songs the Beatles play in the concert in the end, so the music sounds like it's being played live in a hall---though of course in that hall the music wasn't heard at all, just the screaming.)
It's a nice DVD package, with interviews with everybody they could find, including the woman who did makeup, but those Brits talk so well that even all these bits were interesting and fun. I can't figure out why they didn't include the "I'll Cry Instead" footage they added in the video version, but other than that, it's a fine two DVD set. But the movie-that the thing. That's the wonderful thing.
I remember long ago---1969 to be exact---I was walking with a college friend in Berkeley, and I happened to mention Wallace Stevens' statement that the purpose of art was to make people happy. My friend, a philosophy major on a heavy political and psychological trip, laughed at me. I doubt if that's why many artists do it, he said.
Kurt Vonnegut said something like that in his novel Timequake. "I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, 'the Beatles did.'"
They didn't do it alone in this movie, and finding the right people at the right time and inspiring them was part of their genius, their success when it worked, and their bad times when it didn't. They rescued Richard Lester from making commercials for the rest of his life, and he turned out to be a very fine director, with several of the best films of the 60s and early 70s. They inspired the camera people, the editors, the other actors, etc. In some ways, this movie is like Shakespeare for the 60s-full of clichés, because the lines became part of the culture. I could recite the times even in recent years that people have quoted from this movie. Yet I had forgotten some of the funny bits.
I've got to take the DVD back to the library tomorrow, so as soon as I post them, I'm going to watch it again.
Monday, September 01, 2003
William Stafford, August 1993
A generous spirit pours through the luminous lines of his poetry. William Stafford wrote a poem just about every day. One of his many books, There's A Thread That You Follow, is comprised of poems he wrote in 1993, with the dates of their composition. He was 79 that year, ten years ago.
There are poems that evoke place, and a few that are savage in their politically charged commentary, as the one he wrote in June
Somewhere up there God has poised
the big answer to the new doctrine
written all over this country in concrete
by the corporation everyone has bought into
that leads to where the minotaur waits,
Waits just over there by the new mall,
or at the end of your carefully planned
university course, your Moloch Award,
your honors, your degree fastened like
a dogtag around your neck for life...
It so happened that in 1993, a slim volume of his poems selected by Robert Bly appeared. In his introduction, Bly used as a theme an image in a poem by William Blake that he and Stafford had discussed in a public conversation that was videotaped. Blake's lines are:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.
Bly wrote that he asked Stafford, "Do you believe that every golden thread will lead us through Jerusalem's wall, or do you love particular threads?" He replied, "No, every thread."
A reviewer noted that in the tape Stafford points out that every thread leads to a poem, not just the good ones--if you don't pull them too hard. Bly replies, "I hear you."
There are ten poems in There's A Thread That You Follow that Stafford wrote in August 1993, including one of his most famous---perhaps the quintessential Stafford poem. It was evidently written after the discussion with Bly and probably after Bly's book of Stafford's poems went to press. He wrote it on August 2. I can't think of a poem that means as much to me as this one does.
The Way It Is
There's a thread that you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you can do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.
In the book, there are three short poems written on August 25, one on the 26th, one on the 27th, and then a slightly longer one on August 28, 1993.
"Are You Mr. William Stafford?"
"Are you Mr. William Stafford?"
"Yes, but..."
Well, it was yesterday.
Sunlight used to follow my hand.
And that's when the strange siren-like sound flooded
over the horizon and rushed through the streets of our town.
That's when sunlight came from behind
a rock and began to follow my hand.
"It's for the best," my mother said---"Nothing can
ever be wrong for anyone truly good."
So later the sun settled back and the sound
faded and was gone. All along the streets every
house waited, white, blue, gray; trees
were still trying to arch as far as they could.
You can't tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends." I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.
Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,
Why
It came.
Across the top of the poem he wrote to his wife, "with all my love." He didn't usually do that. Then he went into the kitchen to help her make dinner. A few minutes later, on August 28, 1993, William Stafford died.
A generous spirit pours through the luminous lines of his poetry. William Stafford wrote a poem just about every day. One of his many books, There's A Thread That You Follow, is comprised of poems he wrote in 1993, with the dates of their composition. He was 79 that year, ten years ago.
There are poems that evoke place, and a few that are savage in their politically charged commentary, as the one he wrote in June
Somewhere up there God has poised
the big answer to the new doctrine
written all over this country in concrete
by the corporation everyone has bought into
that leads to where the minotaur waits,
Waits just over there by the new mall,
or at the end of your carefully planned
university course, your Moloch Award,
your honors, your degree fastened like
a dogtag around your neck for life...
It so happened that in 1993, a slim volume of his poems selected by Robert Bly appeared. In his introduction, Bly used as a theme an image in a poem by William Blake that he and Stafford had discussed in a public conversation that was videotaped. Blake's lines are:
I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate
Built in Jerusalem's wall.
Bly wrote that he asked Stafford, "Do you believe that every golden thread will lead us through Jerusalem's wall, or do you love particular threads?" He replied, "No, every thread."
A reviewer noted that in the tape Stafford points out that every thread leads to a poem, not just the good ones--if you don't pull them too hard. Bly replies, "I hear you."
There are ten poems in There's A Thread That You Follow that Stafford wrote in August 1993, including one of his most famous---perhaps the quintessential Stafford poem. It was evidently written after the discussion with Bly and probably after Bly's book of Stafford's poems went to press. He wrote it on August 2. I can't think of a poem that means as much to me as this one does.
The Way It Is
There's a thread that you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn't change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can't get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you can do can stop time's unfolding.
You don't ever let go of the thread.
In the book, there are three short poems written on August 25, one on the 26th, one on the 27th, and then a slightly longer one on August 28, 1993.
"Are You Mr. William Stafford?"
"Are you Mr. William Stafford?"
"Yes, but..."
Well, it was yesterday.
Sunlight used to follow my hand.
And that's when the strange siren-like sound flooded
over the horizon and rushed through the streets of our town.
That's when sunlight came from behind
a rock and began to follow my hand.
"It's for the best," my mother said---"Nothing can
ever be wrong for anyone truly good."
So later the sun settled back and the sound
faded and was gone. All along the streets every
house waited, white, blue, gray; trees
were still trying to arch as far as they could.
You can't tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends." I listened and put my hand
out in the sun again. It was all easy.
Well, it was yesterday. And the sun came,
Why
It came.
Across the top of the poem he wrote to his wife, "with all my love." He didn't usually do that. Then he went into the kitchen to help her make dinner. A few minutes later, on August 28, 1993, William Stafford died.
Saturday, August 30, 2003
The Wealth of Neighbors
I'm sure the smell of tomato plants in the summer is a very early memory. My grandparents Severini grew tomatoes in their garden in the back yard. I don't remember those tomatoes as well as the plants in the garden between our back yard and the house directly "above." (It was above because a series of hills making up at that time one long ascent pretty much ended at our back yard, and there were four more streets behind us on that plateau.) That garden belonged to the Petroys, one of which was a relative of my Severini grandfather. There were lots of Italians in our area, many of them from the same village or region of Italy, and lots of them related by blood and marriage. Where there are lots of Italians there are lots of tomato plants, and they became a standard for other people as well. That was our world: we ate chipped ham sandwiches, skyscraper cones and Klondike bars from Isaly's (before the rest of the planet knew about them), and we had gardens and tomatoes.
The Petroy's garden was huge. All of the Petroy's-Katie, Jimmy, and Uncle Frank-- lived a long time-I hear Katie is alive still, she must be 100 by now. But as they got older the garden got smaller, especially the rows of tomato plants. Of course, as I got older the garden also seemed smaller. I remember running through the rows when the plants were taller than I was, and being yelled at by Katie or Jimmy. That garden was a small neighborhood adventure.
We didn't have a garden, or at least not much of one. My mother wasn't the outdoor type I guess, and my father wasn't interested (besides, not Italian.) But about this time every year, baskets and boxes of tomatoes and peppers would begin appearing in the kitchen. Neighbors would sometimes bring them and visit with my mother, or just exchange a few words at the back door. If we weren't home, tomatoes and peppers appeared on our back porch. Later on I sometimes cooked up some for myself, tomatoes and peppers in olive oil.
I remember these gardens when I smell Margaret's tomato plants. I water them, and I pick the tomatoes. The little orange ones will tell you when it's time---they'll fall into your hand with just a touch, or a slight twist of the stem.
I also think about the tomatoes on the back porch when I read the latest tortured explanations of the selfish gene and Darwinist natural selection. I don't argue with evolution, I just don't think it's necessary or realistic to think of everything only in terms of competition, of the struggle to survive. It doesn't take much more than common sense to see that cooperation is also essential.
Sometimes they're related, I'll grant you that. Sharing your bounty of tomatoes, like sharing your deer meat when you've come home with a buck across your car hood, is a form of bragging, of boasting of your skill and luck. But the good feeling you get from sharing your good fortune is a good feeling you can get from sharing and cooperating in other ways, and that rush of lovely chemicals must be pretty much part of our standard equipment by now. It encourages you to share. It also encourages you to excel, so you’ll have something to share.
Some Native cultures associate wealth with sharing, to the point that when somebody gets too wealthy they hold a give-away and give it all away. It’s an anti-envy move as well, but then virtues and vices are invariably related.
One more thing about the Petroy's garden. It got bigger when Katie's daughter Lucy moved in next door, and the combined garden crossed their backyards. She had married Corky Cocheletti, and they had a son also called Corky. He was younger than me so I didn't play with him much, except that his father had some boxing equipment in the basement and we got interested in that for awhile. I did go with both Corky's to my first high school football game, a thrilling experience---under the lights, all the sounds, the band, the cheerleaders, hot dogs and so on. And football with real equipment not on TV or a mile away from you sitting high in some stadium.
Anyway, young Corky grew up to be a model, for awhile the top male model in America. There was at least one magazine in the 70s that had an article by me and a picture of him. He was also trying to be an actor (he had some movie parts, and shows up even now on commercials occasionally), and he dated Pam Dawber when she was the costar of Mork and Mindy. He brought her to the neighborhood one day. I wasn't there but I hear she really liked the garden.
I'm sure the smell of tomato plants in the summer is a very early memory. My grandparents Severini grew tomatoes in their garden in the back yard. I don't remember those tomatoes as well as the plants in the garden between our back yard and the house directly "above." (It was above because a series of hills making up at that time one long ascent pretty much ended at our back yard, and there were four more streets behind us on that plateau.) That garden belonged to the Petroys, one of which was a relative of my Severini grandfather. There were lots of Italians in our area, many of them from the same village or region of Italy, and lots of them related by blood and marriage. Where there are lots of Italians there are lots of tomato plants, and they became a standard for other people as well. That was our world: we ate chipped ham sandwiches, skyscraper cones and Klondike bars from Isaly's (before the rest of the planet knew about them), and we had gardens and tomatoes.
The Petroy's garden was huge. All of the Petroy's-Katie, Jimmy, and Uncle Frank-- lived a long time-I hear Katie is alive still, she must be 100 by now. But as they got older the garden got smaller, especially the rows of tomato plants. Of course, as I got older the garden also seemed smaller. I remember running through the rows when the plants were taller than I was, and being yelled at by Katie or Jimmy. That garden was a small neighborhood adventure.
We didn't have a garden, or at least not much of one. My mother wasn't the outdoor type I guess, and my father wasn't interested (besides, not Italian.) But about this time every year, baskets and boxes of tomatoes and peppers would begin appearing in the kitchen. Neighbors would sometimes bring them and visit with my mother, or just exchange a few words at the back door. If we weren't home, tomatoes and peppers appeared on our back porch. Later on I sometimes cooked up some for myself, tomatoes and peppers in olive oil.
I remember these gardens when I smell Margaret's tomato plants. I water them, and I pick the tomatoes. The little orange ones will tell you when it's time---they'll fall into your hand with just a touch, or a slight twist of the stem.
I also think about the tomatoes on the back porch when I read the latest tortured explanations of the selfish gene and Darwinist natural selection. I don't argue with evolution, I just don't think it's necessary or realistic to think of everything only in terms of competition, of the struggle to survive. It doesn't take much more than common sense to see that cooperation is also essential.
Sometimes they're related, I'll grant you that. Sharing your bounty of tomatoes, like sharing your deer meat when you've come home with a buck across your car hood, is a form of bragging, of boasting of your skill and luck. But the good feeling you get from sharing your good fortune is a good feeling you can get from sharing and cooperating in other ways, and that rush of lovely chemicals must be pretty much part of our standard equipment by now. It encourages you to share. It also encourages you to excel, so you’ll have something to share.
Some Native cultures associate wealth with sharing, to the point that when somebody gets too wealthy they hold a give-away and give it all away. It’s an anti-envy move as well, but then virtues and vices are invariably related.
One more thing about the Petroy's garden. It got bigger when Katie's daughter Lucy moved in next door, and the combined garden crossed their backyards. She had married Corky Cocheletti, and they had a son also called Corky. He was younger than me so I didn't play with him much, except that his father had some boxing equipment in the basement and we got interested in that for awhile. I did go with both Corky's to my first high school football game, a thrilling experience---under the lights, all the sounds, the band, the cheerleaders, hot dogs and so on. And football with real equipment not on TV or a mile away from you sitting high in some stadium.
Anyway, young Corky grew up to be a model, for awhile the top male model in America. There was at least one magazine in the 70s that had an article by me and a picture of him. He was also trying to be an actor (he had some movie parts, and shows up even now on commercials occasionally), and he dated Pam Dawber when she was the costar of Mork and Mindy. He brought her to the neighborhood one day. I wasn't there but I hear she really liked the garden.
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Postscript to August
So I've finished the play and sent it off. What can I say about it? It is a thing now that more or less exists, called Dance of Souls. I know there's a reasonable structure there, dramatic movement, characters to play, some potentially moving moments and some (meant to be) funny bits. All in what is basically pretty high falutin dialogue. But how good it is, I have no idea.
What else? It started out as a dialogue between Jung and Wells, but some of the best lines came from a completely fictional character who arrived much later in the process. The serendipity and synchronicity of the early stages of writing it carried through to the end, or to the point where I had to abandon it and call it finished. I spent the better part of a week housesitting, taking care of a couple of cats while still close enough to visit my own every day, seeing no one and working on the play. The house where I sat has a large deck facing a hill and trees, with nothing on it but a white table and chairs. Such a table is where most of my play centers, and out there one day I worked out the ending by walking through it---or, actually, dancing it. (The deck was also a great place to lie down to watch the Perseids on the one clear night, though I saw only a couple of streaks. But even on the next semi-cloudy night, the moon and Mars were clear.)
What's bothering me now, as I wake up from this extended dreamtime and face the collapsing freelance market, etc. is that all my luck got used up in writing that play, with none left for the outside world of money and paid work. It's been my suspicion that this is my fate, but I suppose I will still be surprised if and when the hammer does definitively fall. Not looking forward to it, in the last of strawberry summer, and the August of one of my oldest connections, the smell of tomato plants. Maybe there’s salvation in September? Stay tuned…
So I've finished the play and sent it off. What can I say about it? It is a thing now that more or less exists, called Dance of Souls. I know there's a reasonable structure there, dramatic movement, characters to play, some potentially moving moments and some (meant to be) funny bits. All in what is basically pretty high falutin dialogue. But how good it is, I have no idea.
What else? It started out as a dialogue between Jung and Wells, but some of the best lines came from a completely fictional character who arrived much later in the process. The serendipity and synchronicity of the early stages of writing it carried through to the end, or to the point where I had to abandon it and call it finished. I spent the better part of a week housesitting, taking care of a couple of cats while still close enough to visit my own every day, seeing no one and working on the play. The house where I sat has a large deck facing a hill and trees, with nothing on it but a white table and chairs. Such a table is where most of my play centers, and out there one day I worked out the ending by walking through it---or, actually, dancing it. (The deck was also a great place to lie down to watch the Perseids on the one clear night, though I saw only a couple of streaks. But even on the next semi-cloudy night, the moon and Mars were clear.)
What's bothering me now, as I wake up from this extended dreamtime and face the collapsing freelance market, etc. is that all my luck got used up in writing that play, with none left for the outside world of money and paid work. It's been my suspicion that this is my fate, but I suppose I will still be surprised if and when the hammer does definitively fall. Not looking forward to it, in the last of strawberry summer, and the August of one of my oldest connections, the smell of tomato plants. Maybe there’s salvation in September? Stay tuned…
Sunday, August 24, 2003
The March on Washington 1963
I was there. I went as part of the delegation of the Greensburg Diocese Catholic Interracial Council. The Council's membership was composed of two young priests, who also made the trip: Father John Conway and Father James Petonic. The rest of the delegation was: me. I was about to begin my senior year at Greensburg Central Catholic High School.
There were no "Negroes" at Central Catholic. I never saw a black face in any Catholic church where I grew up. I did in fact live next door to a black family, all of my conscious life until then. But I never really connected the Robinson family, and my boyhood playmate, to the Civil Rights struggle. He was just a friend (I went to his church once, and to a chicken dinner his church sponsored) and they were just neighbors, each of them individuals, more important in their categories of Parents or Sisters, or as one of the four of us who did stuff together, played out our dramas, played on the same baseball teams and pick-up football games. Although looking back on it, certain elements of racism were part of even those relationships.
For me, Civil Rights was about principle, justice and redeeming the American political system. I was educated in politics by the Kennedy administration. I believed the Kennedy rhetoric on race and I understood the politics: the march was a countervailing force, against the political power of white southern Democrats, who made up a major part of the Washington establishment and the party's electorate. I didn't feel I was disloyal to Kennedy, let alone America. And in fact, in contrast to antiwar demonstrations that followed, the march's leaders were received in the White House by the president.
It was a moral principle as well, which I believed was consistent with Catholicism, even if not with a lot of Catholics. So the nuns and the local church couldn't disapprove. They didn't do anything to support the march either.
I was partly in blissful ignorance of my environment, and partly defiant. I related to worlds I read or saw on TV and in the movies, the music that I listened to. Reality was the Kennedy administration, James Baldwin's impassioned prose, The Law and Mr. Jones, George C. Scott in East Side/ West Side, Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, and Roberto Clemente in right field. J.D. Salinger was in there somewhere too: so it was your working class Catholic Holden Caulfield marching on Washington...
I credit my parents with allowing me to go. They were good about this sort of thing. They helped arrange things so I could visit relatives I didn't actually know for Kennedy's Inaugural. (I did the rest, and operated myself into position to shake the new President's hand, in church.) Later, when I was a freshman at Knox College, they gave permission for me to go with several older students to register voters in Mississippi. The older students and whatever organization it was---I don't remember---changed their mind about taking me with them, but I had been ready to go.
There was some idea that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom might involve violence. Somehow I knew it wouldn't. The marchers weren't marching against anybody; the Kennedy administration may have been less helpful than Civil Rights leaders wanted, but basically they weren't the enemy. (In fact, when JFK made an impromptu television address announcing the voting rights act and his strong support for civil rights, he knew that it would mean the end of Democratic party dominance in the south, with political repercussions that are still being felt.) It was also supported by lots of labor unions, and unions were still a powerful political force, and still a liberalizing one.
So the only violence would come from those who opposed the march. It wouldn't come from the police; by now, the Kennedy administration knew to anticipate and plan for contingencies, so there would be order.
So there I was, on the train to Washington from Pittsburgh, with two priests. They were nice enough but I can't say I was comfortable. But the train was full of people going down to the march. I started walking through the cars, where people sat quietly and smiled tentatively if you caught their eye. Then I whoosed open one door, and everything changed.
It was an entire train car full of young people, all singing. Folk songs, spirituals, political songs I didn't yet know. There were guitars and hand-clapping. The car was packed. Some were even up in the luggage bays. That was one of the true spiritual experiences of my life.
If you've seen the footage they usually run, you've seen us getting off the trains. A lot of people came by train. We were amazed to see each other. I had never seen so many black people in one place before. And they seemed to be amazed to see any white people. There was such a feeling immediately from the train platform throughout the march. An intense peace. Wonder. Awe. Gratitude for each other. Love. It was an altered state of consciousness for sure.
The march itself was wonderful. I just remember the feel of it, the sound of it. The excitement and wonder as people began to realize how many of us there were. There had never been anything like this before, not in the whole history of the country. I seem to recall hearing that the organizers would have been happy with 50,000. Then we heard there were 100,000. Then two. Then three. I guess the number that has become official is 250,000. There was never a moment when violence was even a remote possibility.
Then we were at the reflecting pool for the speeches and the music. I was over to the left as you look away from the platform, about halfway, although I walked around a good deal. It was hot. Real hot. That's basically what I remember. I listened to the music, to the speeches. I thought Martin Luther King's speech was eloquent, but James Baldwin could have written a better one. The truth is I was waiting for Peter, Paul and Mary to sing "Blowin in the Wind." That was the emotional high point for me. The rest was heat and fatigue.
At some point I got some relief when the priest in charge led us to the congressional office of William Moorhead, the Democrat who represented Pittsburgh in the House. We got a chance to wash up and cool off. I don't remember anything about the trip back. I probably slept.
A few days after we got back, when I was still feeling inspired, I contacted the editor of the monthly newspaper of the diocese, the Catholic Accent. I offered to write something about my impressions of the march---I was already setting the pattern of my life by proposing a three-part series. He said one article would do.
I think it was my first publication outside of school papers, and maybe the letters to the editor column of the local daily. The article begins in an interesting way, considering how that day is now viewed. I quoted John Stuart Mill, I see, with dubious appropriateness, but the truth was I was actually reading Mill-something else I picked up from the Kennedy era. But you notice, there's no mention of the King sound bite. "I have a dream" wasn't yet the stuff of legend and TV commercials. So here it is, in full, direct from the scrapbook...
EYES OF YOUTH:
GCCH STUDENT gives his views on march
by Bill Kowinski
Senior, Central Catholic High School
The big shock came to us when we returned home. After all the hours of standing, walking, riding, and marching: after seeing huge masses of dedicated and self-sacrificing people; after hearing the songs and speeches crying for freedom, we were vastly surprised to hear the dispassionate estimates of our effectiveness. The consensus seemed to be that we did little, of any, real good.
Most of these opinions were in reference to civil rights legislation, but to the young people this was not the real issue. The legislation will inevitably come, and it is for future generations to make it work, and to promote the true social integration of the races.
Is this impossible? Had there not been a march, there would be grave doubts about the practicality of realizing this American ideal.
But today, after the march, there can be no doubt. When a mass of people roughly equivalent to the population of Syracuse, comprised of different backgrounds, religions, races, and coming from different regions, could converge on Washington with such dedicated and dignified fervor as to make thoughts of violence absurd, then hope for the future is supremely justified.
It all held special meaning to the young people. They had come from many places, and for many reasons. Perhaps their thoughts were best expr3essed by a favorite folk singing group who sang these lyrics from a popular song at the march:
"How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
From the singing on the Freedom Train, to the slow chant of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the young people brought spirit and compassion to a cause in which they deeply felt.
While all the banners for "Freedom Now!" will have to be satisfied by the present generation, the young people of today will also face a great task.
As John Stuart Mill wrote: "I refuse to congratulate a man or a generation on getting rid of prejudices until I see what is substituted in lieu of them."
Prejudice is based mainly on ignorance. It was evident to the marchers that once the races begin to live and work together, as we marched together, meaningful integration can be achieved. It will fall upon the shoulders of the young people of today to see it through.
I was there. I went as part of the delegation of the Greensburg Diocese Catholic Interracial Council. The Council's membership was composed of two young priests, who also made the trip: Father John Conway and Father James Petonic. The rest of the delegation was: me. I was about to begin my senior year at Greensburg Central Catholic High School.
There were no "Negroes" at Central Catholic. I never saw a black face in any Catholic church where I grew up. I did in fact live next door to a black family, all of my conscious life until then. But I never really connected the Robinson family, and my boyhood playmate, to the Civil Rights struggle. He was just a friend (I went to his church once, and to a chicken dinner his church sponsored) and they were just neighbors, each of them individuals, more important in their categories of Parents or Sisters, or as one of the four of us who did stuff together, played out our dramas, played on the same baseball teams and pick-up football games. Although looking back on it, certain elements of racism were part of even those relationships.
For me, Civil Rights was about principle, justice and redeeming the American political system. I was educated in politics by the Kennedy administration. I believed the Kennedy rhetoric on race and I understood the politics: the march was a countervailing force, against the political power of white southern Democrats, who made up a major part of the Washington establishment and the party's electorate. I didn't feel I was disloyal to Kennedy, let alone America. And in fact, in contrast to antiwar demonstrations that followed, the march's leaders were received in the White House by the president.
It was a moral principle as well, which I believed was consistent with Catholicism, even if not with a lot of Catholics. So the nuns and the local church couldn't disapprove. They didn't do anything to support the march either.
I was partly in blissful ignorance of my environment, and partly defiant. I related to worlds I read or saw on TV and in the movies, the music that I listened to. Reality was the Kennedy administration, James Baldwin's impassioned prose, The Law and Mr. Jones, George C. Scott in East Side/ West Side, Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary, and Roberto Clemente in right field. J.D. Salinger was in there somewhere too: so it was your working class Catholic Holden Caulfield marching on Washington...
I credit my parents with allowing me to go. They were good about this sort of thing. They helped arrange things so I could visit relatives I didn't actually know for Kennedy's Inaugural. (I did the rest, and operated myself into position to shake the new President's hand, in church.) Later, when I was a freshman at Knox College, they gave permission for me to go with several older students to register voters in Mississippi. The older students and whatever organization it was---I don't remember---changed their mind about taking me with them, but I had been ready to go.
There was some idea that the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom might involve violence. Somehow I knew it wouldn't. The marchers weren't marching against anybody; the Kennedy administration may have been less helpful than Civil Rights leaders wanted, but basically they weren't the enemy. (In fact, when JFK made an impromptu television address announcing the voting rights act and his strong support for civil rights, he knew that it would mean the end of Democratic party dominance in the south, with political repercussions that are still being felt.) It was also supported by lots of labor unions, and unions were still a powerful political force, and still a liberalizing one.
So the only violence would come from those who opposed the march. It wouldn't come from the police; by now, the Kennedy administration knew to anticipate and plan for contingencies, so there would be order.
So there I was, on the train to Washington from Pittsburgh, with two priests. They were nice enough but I can't say I was comfortable. But the train was full of people going down to the march. I started walking through the cars, where people sat quietly and smiled tentatively if you caught their eye. Then I whoosed open one door, and everything changed.
It was an entire train car full of young people, all singing. Folk songs, spirituals, political songs I didn't yet know. There were guitars and hand-clapping. The car was packed. Some were even up in the luggage bays. That was one of the true spiritual experiences of my life.
If you've seen the footage they usually run, you've seen us getting off the trains. A lot of people came by train. We were amazed to see each other. I had never seen so many black people in one place before. And they seemed to be amazed to see any white people. There was such a feeling immediately from the train platform throughout the march. An intense peace. Wonder. Awe. Gratitude for each other. Love. It was an altered state of consciousness for sure.
The march itself was wonderful. I just remember the feel of it, the sound of it. The excitement and wonder as people began to realize how many of us there were. There had never been anything like this before, not in the whole history of the country. I seem to recall hearing that the organizers would have been happy with 50,000. Then we heard there were 100,000. Then two. Then three. I guess the number that has become official is 250,000. There was never a moment when violence was even a remote possibility.
Then we were at the reflecting pool for the speeches and the music. I was over to the left as you look away from the platform, about halfway, although I walked around a good deal. It was hot. Real hot. That's basically what I remember. I listened to the music, to the speeches. I thought Martin Luther King's speech was eloquent, but James Baldwin could have written a better one. The truth is I was waiting for Peter, Paul and Mary to sing "Blowin in the Wind." That was the emotional high point for me. The rest was heat and fatigue.
At some point I got some relief when the priest in charge led us to the congressional office of William Moorhead, the Democrat who represented Pittsburgh in the House. We got a chance to wash up and cool off. I don't remember anything about the trip back. I probably slept.
A few days after we got back, when I was still feeling inspired, I contacted the editor of the monthly newspaper of the diocese, the Catholic Accent. I offered to write something about my impressions of the march---I was already setting the pattern of my life by proposing a three-part series. He said one article would do.
I think it was my first publication outside of school papers, and maybe the letters to the editor column of the local daily. The article begins in an interesting way, considering how that day is now viewed. I quoted John Stuart Mill, I see, with dubious appropriateness, but the truth was I was actually reading Mill-something else I picked up from the Kennedy era. But you notice, there's no mention of the King sound bite. "I have a dream" wasn't yet the stuff of legend and TV commercials. So here it is, in full, direct from the scrapbook...
EYES OF YOUTH:
GCCH STUDENT gives his views on march
by Bill Kowinski
Senior, Central Catholic High School
The big shock came to us when we returned home. After all the hours of standing, walking, riding, and marching: after seeing huge masses of dedicated and self-sacrificing people; after hearing the songs and speeches crying for freedom, we were vastly surprised to hear the dispassionate estimates of our effectiveness. The consensus seemed to be that we did little, of any, real good.
Most of these opinions were in reference to civil rights legislation, but to the young people this was not the real issue. The legislation will inevitably come, and it is for future generations to make it work, and to promote the true social integration of the races.
Is this impossible? Had there not been a march, there would be grave doubts about the practicality of realizing this American ideal.
But today, after the march, there can be no doubt. When a mass of people roughly equivalent to the population of Syracuse, comprised of different backgrounds, religions, races, and coming from different regions, could converge on Washington with such dedicated and dignified fervor as to make thoughts of violence absurd, then hope for the future is supremely justified.
It all held special meaning to the young people. They had come from many places, and for many reasons. Perhaps their thoughts were best expr3essed by a favorite folk singing group who sang these lyrics from a popular song at the march:
"How many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"
From the singing on the Freedom Train, to the slow chant of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the young people brought spirit and compassion to a cause in which they deeply felt.
While all the banners for "Freedom Now!" will have to be satisfied by the present generation, the young people of today will also face a great task.
As John Stuart Mill wrote: "I refuse to congratulate a man or a generation on getting rid of prejudices until I see what is substituted in lieu of them."
Prejudice is based mainly on ignorance. It was evident to the marchers that once the races begin to live and work together, as we marched together, meaningful integration can be achieved. It will fall upon the shoulders of the young people of today to see it through.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
August
August: when the world of words takes vacations. Hereabouts, the university folks take their vacations in July, since classes start again in late August. July is when I was supposed to be interviewing university folks for my alumni magazine article, so there were some problems. But that's all over now. The piece is done, and it's August.
August is when book editors take their vacations. I sent out book proposals for Skills of Peace to three editors in late July. The two I sent by email were answered within hours, pretty unusual, since I'm still getting replies on queries I sent out for another project in March. One of those editors expressed interest. Then she disappeared. August.
Almost everything in prospect has ground to a halt. But I am keeping busy by doing something insane. Please don't call the sanity police when you read this admission. But I am writing a play.
These days it is insane for even known playwrights to spend much of their time writing plays. They can't make a living that way. A more or less successfully produced play in some noticeable venue is really only successful when it leads to offers to write screenplays. That's the income source: screenplays, regardless of whether they are produced or not. As long as they pay you. Most playwrights, as most literary writers, teach for a living. Teaching pays better and certainly more consistently than playwrighting, but then so does creative stacking of shelves at Wal-Mart.
Add that to the fact that I am not a known playwright. That's not my niche, my rep, my handle, my gig, what I'm branded for. (If you figure out what that is, however, please send it to me.) On the other hand, the first writing I did was a play. But most playwrights don't list their third grade productions on their bios. (My big year was actually fourth grade, when I had a rep company---otherwise known as my Cub Scout den---that put on my latest script every month, at the pack meeting.)
I had a few productions in college, too, including one which I discovered (from a student doing an archeological dig into the late 60s) was talked about for some years afterward. Legendary, in fact, for awhile.
The last time I pursued this particular muse was in Pittsburgh about a decade ago. One theatre did a staged reading of a play I'd written some years before, and I was hooked. Ten minute play festivals were suddenly the rage, and two of mine were produced (the second was longer than 10 minutes but not quite the length of a one-act.) A one act won a secondary award in the Pittsburgh Playwrights Festival (and, I happened to overhear, would have won a full production had all the participating theaters seen the script.) But for a number of apparently practical and interpersonal reasons, I pretty much gave it up after that.
I pursued other avenues of writing that were potentially more lucrative, and usually judged marginally sane activities. They turned out to be not terribly lucrative and certainly not consistently so. Given a choice of writing grants for free or a play for no good reason, the latter has definite attractions.
Anyway, it's August. That enters in another way as well. I happened to see a call for plays by a theatre in Michigan---a contest really---with a specific subject in mind, having to do with evolution and ancestral voices. The deadline for full length plays is August 31.
The subject happens to be one that comes up often in research and writing I've been doing for other marginally insane projects. It's something I think about, and something several people I've become particularly interested in thought about. What I hadn't thought about before was putting a particular two of them together. When I had this thought, I had the idea for a play.
The premise of this play is a conversation between H.G. Wells and Carl Jung. Those are two of the three main elements. The third is an American Indian point of view. I've been reading about Jung and Wells separately, but I did note that they had met. There wasn't much obvious information about it, but a fictional meeting between them had great possibilities.
So that's what I'm doing, writing this play. I've got about three weeks to finish it, get it into binders, send it off. This includes a week in which life around here will get chaotic, as we must move everything out of several rooms, move ourselves out of the house for several days, then move everything back. Floors are being finished, with nasty chemicals. Enforced vacation time.
Besides circumstances and fallout from my "creative" moods, I fight off the doubts: about the sanity of attempting this, and the half dozen very good reasons I can give you for why my play doesn't stand a chance in this competition. However, I am currently gripped by the delusion that I'm pretty good at this. It feels good. I seem to know what I'm doing, building a bridge twixt conscious and unconscious. This makes a bit of sense, since I have continued to think about and read about dramatic construction, and in fact constructing drama and narrative is part of everything I write. Even grant proposals. Emotionally it also makes some sense, as in preparing my old magazine article about the O'Neill playwrights (see http://kowincidence.blogspot.com) I realized how rapturous my memories were of that experience.
Because I work alone and am decidedly an introverted type, some people have a hard time thinking of me as being happy in a collaborative framework. It's true that I have found participating in theatre to be emotionally exhausting at times. But it is also as close to an ideal situation as I can imagine. I have a strong streak of wanting to participate, to work with people in a collaborative way, on a project I can care about, that makes use of whatever talents I possess that are more or less central to who I am. I can't imagine another venue where this is possible other than a theatrical one. Even more than being an editor, which was as closest as I've come in my working life.
Anyway, there's no collaboration at this point in the process, at least with people I can see. What keeps me going, besides the writerly motivations of expression and solving the puzzles, is that an awful lot is simply falling into place. I challenged my concept by testing it against reality-could or would Wells and Jung have met where and when I wanted them to? In my play they meet in New Mexico in 1940. Wells was in fact in America at that time. Jung was not. It would have been difficult for him to get out of Switzerland during the war, but not impossible. His last visit to America was 1937. Could he have any reason to be where I wanted him to be, going where I wanted him to go? Yes. I immediately found the perfect reason, both for verisimilitude and in support of concepts in the play.
Tucked in books and magazines here and there, I've found more and more about the actual relationship of Wells and Jung, which was more extensive than is generally known. And as I've written, such information comes to me at the right moment. At times I'm not sure whether I've guessed right and had it confirmed, or I'd come across the information before and forgotten that I had. Sometimes it is a literal coming in. I found out about a book of Jung's interviews and encounters I hadn't known about. I found a copy, cheap, on the Internet, sent for it, and it arrived with astonishing speed, on the very day it proved useful in shaping a scene.
In some ways this play is making use of just about everything I've learned and been involved with and obsessed with on my own since I came to California. So the process of writing it is almost poetic in receiving what I've apparently already learned. As well as hearing the voices of Wells and Jung. (Jung's actual voice is somewhat familiar from docu tapes, but Wells I've heard only in a brief and consciously forgotten newsreel clip). Even the process of creating fictional American Indian characters has been aided by coincidences. It's also the first time I've felt fairly comfortable daring to write such characters. I can hear them.
So this is my August delusion. Though it is warmer than usual hereabouts, and we've had actual thunderstorms (in the past six years, I can remember two before this year. We've had three this past week) I can't blame it on the heat.
It's not the craziest thing I could do. I could join the crowd and run for governor.
August: when the world of words takes vacations. Hereabouts, the university folks take their vacations in July, since classes start again in late August. July is when I was supposed to be interviewing university folks for my alumni magazine article, so there were some problems. But that's all over now. The piece is done, and it's August.
August is when book editors take their vacations. I sent out book proposals for Skills of Peace to three editors in late July. The two I sent by email were answered within hours, pretty unusual, since I'm still getting replies on queries I sent out for another project in March. One of those editors expressed interest. Then she disappeared. August.
Almost everything in prospect has ground to a halt. But I am keeping busy by doing something insane. Please don't call the sanity police when you read this admission. But I am writing a play.
These days it is insane for even known playwrights to spend much of their time writing plays. They can't make a living that way. A more or less successfully produced play in some noticeable venue is really only successful when it leads to offers to write screenplays. That's the income source: screenplays, regardless of whether they are produced or not. As long as they pay you. Most playwrights, as most literary writers, teach for a living. Teaching pays better and certainly more consistently than playwrighting, but then so does creative stacking of shelves at Wal-Mart.
Add that to the fact that I am not a known playwright. That's not my niche, my rep, my handle, my gig, what I'm branded for. (If you figure out what that is, however, please send it to me.) On the other hand, the first writing I did was a play. But most playwrights don't list their third grade productions on their bios. (My big year was actually fourth grade, when I had a rep company---otherwise known as my Cub Scout den---that put on my latest script every month, at the pack meeting.)
I had a few productions in college, too, including one which I discovered (from a student doing an archeological dig into the late 60s) was talked about for some years afterward. Legendary, in fact, for awhile.
The last time I pursued this particular muse was in Pittsburgh about a decade ago. One theatre did a staged reading of a play I'd written some years before, and I was hooked. Ten minute play festivals were suddenly the rage, and two of mine were produced (the second was longer than 10 minutes but not quite the length of a one-act.) A one act won a secondary award in the Pittsburgh Playwrights Festival (and, I happened to overhear, would have won a full production had all the participating theaters seen the script.) But for a number of apparently practical and interpersonal reasons, I pretty much gave it up after that.
I pursued other avenues of writing that were potentially more lucrative, and usually judged marginally sane activities. They turned out to be not terribly lucrative and certainly not consistently so. Given a choice of writing grants for free or a play for no good reason, the latter has definite attractions.
Anyway, it's August. That enters in another way as well. I happened to see a call for plays by a theatre in Michigan---a contest really---with a specific subject in mind, having to do with evolution and ancestral voices. The deadline for full length plays is August 31.
The subject happens to be one that comes up often in research and writing I've been doing for other marginally insane projects. It's something I think about, and something several people I've become particularly interested in thought about. What I hadn't thought about before was putting a particular two of them together. When I had this thought, I had the idea for a play.
The premise of this play is a conversation between H.G. Wells and Carl Jung. Those are two of the three main elements. The third is an American Indian point of view. I've been reading about Jung and Wells separately, but I did note that they had met. There wasn't much obvious information about it, but a fictional meeting between them had great possibilities.
So that's what I'm doing, writing this play. I've got about three weeks to finish it, get it into binders, send it off. This includes a week in which life around here will get chaotic, as we must move everything out of several rooms, move ourselves out of the house for several days, then move everything back. Floors are being finished, with nasty chemicals. Enforced vacation time.
Besides circumstances and fallout from my "creative" moods, I fight off the doubts: about the sanity of attempting this, and the half dozen very good reasons I can give you for why my play doesn't stand a chance in this competition. However, I am currently gripped by the delusion that I'm pretty good at this. It feels good. I seem to know what I'm doing, building a bridge twixt conscious and unconscious. This makes a bit of sense, since I have continued to think about and read about dramatic construction, and in fact constructing drama and narrative is part of everything I write. Even grant proposals. Emotionally it also makes some sense, as in preparing my old magazine article about the O'Neill playwrights (see http://kowincidence.blogspot.com) I realized how rapturous my memories were of that experience.
Because I work alone and am decidedly an introverted type, some people have a hard time thinking of me as being happy in a collaborative framework. It's true that I have found participating in theatre to be emotionally exhausting at times. But it is also as close to an ideal situation as I can imagine. I have a strong streak of wanting to participate, to work with people in a collaborative way, on a project I can care about, that makes use of whatever talents I possess that are more or less central to who I am. I can't imagine another venue where this is possible other than a theatrical one. Even more than being an editor, which was as closest as I've come in my working life.
Anyway, there's no collaboration at this point in the process, at least with people I can see. What keeps me going, besides the writerly motivations of expression and solving the puzzles, is that an awful lot is simply falling into place. I challenged my concept by testing it against reality-could or would Wells and Jung have met where and when I wanted them to? In my play they meet in New Mexico in 1940. Wells was in fact in America at that time. Jung was not. It would have been difficult for him to get out of Switzerland during the war, but not impossible. His last visit to America was 1937. Could he have any reason to be where I wanted him to be, going where I wanted him to go? Yes. I immediately found the perfect reason, both for verisimilitude and in support of concepts in the play.
Tucked in books and magazines here and there, I've found more and more about the actual relationship of Wells and Jung, which was more extensive than is generally known. And as I've written, such information comes to me at the right moment. At times I'm not sure whether I've guessed right and had it confirmed, or I'd come across the information before and forgotten that I had. Sometimes it is a literal coming in. I found out about a book of Jung's interviews and encounters I hadn't known about. I found a copy, cheap, on the Internet, sent for it, and it arrived with astonishing speed, on the very day it proved useful in shaping a scene.
In some ways this play is making use of just about everything I've learned and been involved with and obsessed with on my own since I came to California. So the process of writing it is almost poetic in receiving what I've apparently already learned. As well as hearing the voices of Wells and Jung. (Jung's actual voice is somewhat familiar from docu tapes, but Wells I've heard only in a brief and consciously forgotten newsreel clip). Even the process of creating fictional American Indian characters has been aided by coincidences. It's also the first time I've felt fairly comfortable daring to write such characters. I can hear them.
So this is my August delusion. Though it is warmer than usual hereabouts, and we've had actual thunderstorms (in the past six years, I can remember two before this year. We've had three this past week) I can't blame it on the heat.
It's not the craziest thing I could do. I could join the crowd and run for governor.
Sunday, July 27, 2003
It's All a Mistake
I awoke from another set of bad dreams. Yesterday had been filled, possessed by an idea, which I worked out in some detail but did not speak of. It is a very delicate process. I was aware of my own instinct---supported by James Hillman and others who wrote on this subject---that these creative seeds are fragile and must be protected. We tend to dismiss the idea of anything being fragile, or being allowed to be, in our lives and work today. Get over it, is the refrain. The idea of harboring secrets is judged as criminal.
But closely holding the idea, it may then die for lack of outside air. Today it seems delusional. So who knows what the right decision is. If you speak it aloud and it gets shot down, a lot of the fledgling life in it dies, or is injured and perhaps warped in its development in some way. If you don’t speak of it, it is in danger of being overrun by other things, dismissed without a hearing as whim, a stupid idea, a delusion.
Especially an idea that has so many risks attached to it. An idea for a play---a play!---in this day and age, written by me, the very idea would make people blink three times, swallow hard and try a brave smile. Cause I'm not a playwright. That's not my slot.
On the other hand, what is my slot? Anyway, the time to do it, the risk that it will come to nothing, that it will fail on its own terms and then in the world, is what dominates my mood today. Yesterday I lived in its aura, it seemed so perfect, and of course the dream extended to transformative success. There's some sense in that, of course. Most creative careers are based on one successful idea. Other ideas or variations on that idea aside, there is usually one, that at some point makes the difference and defines everything else. There's no law, fortunately or not, that says when this idea may come. And then the carrying out of the idea must be successful. That's the rub for many, the people with ideas and longings, but not the wherewithal to carry them through successfully, in their own terms as well as convincingly to others.
But the investment of time and concentration and writing energy, it all seems so foolhardy. And then, in some crucial way, it doesn't quite work. Which you don't discover until it's done.
There is a kind of goal outside the play itself, and a deadline, of little more than a month. A full-length play in a month? Well, why not? (Lots of reasons why not. Many more than why.)
What I thought of, however, as I got up was something I'd read yesterday, an account of Jung's last informal talk to friends and supporters at the end of his last visit to America. He told them it was important for each to live his or her life as fully as possible, even if it is based on a mistake. Life is full of errors, no one has found the whole truth, but the point is to live with integrity and devotion.
This idea of mine is a dramatic one, but it is in keeping with a lot of the work I've attempted to do in the past several years in non-fictional ways. I keep inventing variations, re-combinations of this work. This week I came up with two new approaches to it that might work quite well as books.
This too is another nerve-wracking part of the process, which at times seems absolutely crazy. Again, it is so counter to today's received wisdom, which is: move on. If it isn't working, move on. Of course, there is always a time to move on. But there is also a process of finding the best way into it, the best way to express it and communicate it, which is also another way of understanding it, or in fact of defining it.
This thought reminded me of one of the first passages from James Hillman's work I copied out. In fact I remember that I printed the long quotation and tacked it on the wall next to my computer in the room where I wrote in my late lamented apartment in Pittsburgh. I searched it out again today in my computer files, though without a citation. Hillman is writing about psychological analysis, using creativity in the arts as a metaphor. But it was the description of the artistic activity that I was interested in: that is, the literal meaning of the metaphor. I hadn't thought of this "amplification" process in that way before. I knew that more and more I was beginning to orbit my ideas, revisit them and work on them, rather than trying the idea out once and moving on. There's no support for this from the business side of things, to say the least. Work it took years to shape gets dismissed in a nanosecond. Anyway, here it is:
"The method of amplification is rather like the methods of the humanities and the arts. By revolving around the matter under surveillance one amplifies a problem exhaustively. This activity is like a prolonged meditation, or variations on a theme of music, or the patterns of dance or brush-strokes. It has a ritualistic aspect as well, because the dignity of the problem which is being amplified is never wholly claimed by knowledge. One starts off knowing that one cannot know it; one can only hover over it, thrust at it, and pay respects through devoted attention. This permits the levels of meaning in any problem to reveal themselves, and it corresponds to the way the soul itself presents its demands by its iterative returning to basic complexes to elaborate a new variation and urge consciousness on.
Analysis is better served by amplification, because it pries things loose from their habitual rigid frames. Amplification confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. It tends even to build symbols. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical unconscious aspect, than does definition with its exclusively conscious rationality."
James Hillman
I awoke from another set of bad dreams. Yesterday had been filled, possessed by an idea, which I worked out in some detail but did not speak of. It is a very delicate process. I was aware of my own instinct---supported by James Hillman and others who wrote on this subject---that these creative seeds are fragile and must be protected. We tend to dismiss the idea of anything being fragile, or being allowed to be, in our lives and work today. Get over it, is the refrain. The idea of harboring secrets is judged as criminal.
But closely holding the idea, it may then die for lack of outside air. Today it seems delusional. So who knows what the right decision is. If you speak it aloud and it gets shot down, a lot of the fledgling life in it dies, or is injured and perhaps warped in its development in some way. If you don’t speak of it, it is in danger of being overrun by other things, dismissed without a hearing as whim, a stupid idea, a delusion.
Especially an idea that has so many risks attached to it. An idea for a play---a play!---in this day and age, written by me, the very idea would make people blink three times, swallow hard and try a brave smile. Cause I'm not a playwright. That's not my slot.
On the other hand, what is my slot? Anyway, the time to do it, the risk that it will come to nothing, that it will fail on its own terms and then in the world, is what dominates my mood today. Yesterday I lived in its aura, it seemed so perfect, and of course the dream extended to transformative success. There's some sense in that, of course. Most creative careers are based on one successful idea. Other ideas or variations on that idea aside, there is usually one, that at some point makes the difference and defines everything else. There's no law, fortunately or not, that says when this idea may come. And then the carrying out of the idea must be successful. That's the rub for many, the people with ideas and longings, but not the wherewithal to carry them through successfully, in their own terms as well as convincingly to others.
But the investment of time and concentration and writing energy, it all seems so foolhardy. And then, in some crucial way, it doesn't quite work. Which you don't discover until it's done.
There is a kind of goal outside the play itself, and a deadline, of little more than a month. A full-length play in a month? Well, why not? (Lots of reasons why not. Many more than why.)
What I thought of, however, as I got up was something I'd read yesterday, an account of Jung's last informal talk to friends and supporters at the end of his last visit to America. He told them it was important for each to live his or her life as fully as possible, even if it is based on a mistake. Life is full of errors, no one has found the whole truth, but the point is to live with integrity and devotion.
This idea of mine is a dramatic one, but it is in keeping with a lot of the work I've attempted to do in the past several years in non-fictional ways. I keep inventing variations, re-combinations of this work. This week I came up with two new approaches to it that might work quite well as books.
This too is another nerve-wracking part of the process, which at times seems absolutely crazy. Again, it is so counter to today's received wisdom, which is: move on. If it isn't working, move on. Of course, there is always a time to move on. But there is also a process of finding the best way into it, the best way to express it and communicate it, which is also another way of understanding it, or in fact of defining it.
This thought reminded me of one of the first passages from James Hillman's work I copied out. In fact I remember that I printed the long quotation and tacked it on the wall next to my computer in the room where I wrote in my late lamented apartment in Pittsburgh. I searched it out again today in my computer files, though without a citation. Hillman is writing about psychological analysis, using creativity in the arts as a metaphor. But it was the description of the artistic activity that I was interested in: that is, the literal meaning of the metaphor. I hadn't thought of this "amplification" process in that way before. I knew that more and more I was beginning to orbit my ideas, revisit them and work on them, rather than trying the idea out once and moving on. There's no support for this from the business side of things, to say the least. Work it took years to shape gets dismissed in a nanosecond. Anyway, here it is:
"The method of amplification is rather like the methods of the humanities and the arts. By revolving around the matter under surveillance one amplifies a problem exhaustively. This activity is like a prolonged meditation, or variations on a theme of music, or the patterns of dance or brush-strokes. It has a ritualistic aspect as well, because the dignity of the problem which is being amplified is never wholly claimed by knowledge. One starts off knowing that one cannot know it; one can only hover over it, thrust at it, and pay respects through devoted attention. This permits the levels of meaning in any problem to reveal themselves, and it corresponds to the way the soul itself presents its demands by its iterative returning to basic complexes to elaborate a new variation and urge consciousness on.
Analysis is better served by amplification, because it pries things loose from their habitual rigid frames. Amplification confronts the mind with paradoxes and tensions; it reveals complexities. It tends even to build symbols. This gets us closer to psychological truth, which always has a paradoxical unconscious aspect, than does definition with its exclusively conscious rationality."
James Hillman
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
MARS ATTRACTS!
The big show in the sky this summer is our near neighbor, the planet Mars. It is now very near---close enough for amateur astronomers with small telescopes to watch a giant sandstorm that began blowing across its surface in early July. To the naked eye it already is the brightest nighttime non-lunar object, and at the end of August Mars will be closer to the earth than it has ever been in human history.
That's a chief reason for all the Terran attention that's about to be focused on the Red Planet. NASA's recently dispatched spacecraft carrying the Opportunity surface rover will join its twin launched in June. Together with spacecraft from Japan and Europe, they are scheduled to converge on Mars in December and January. They will be looking chiefly for evidence of water and other life-supporting elements, and the European probe will search for actual signs of life. Together with the two U.S. satellites already there, there will be four spacecraft in orbit and three more on the surface conducting an unprecedented simultaneous scrutiny of another planet.
That the planet is Mars is especially resonant. Once scientists began to suspect that Mars had the greatest potential for harboring life of the heavenly bodies they could study, the concept of extraterrestrial beings virtually merged with the idea of Martians. So our speculations, our projections of hopes and fears on the figure of the alien, began in earnest with Mars.
By now much of the public is used to the idea of the space alien as a symbolic figure in story, often telling us about aspects of ourselves we might not see or want to see if we looked too directly. But before much of anyone was conscious of this function, the yearnings and terrors that Mars evoked were raw and real.
These proximities themselves had stirred emotions when the eccentric orbit of Mars brought it closer than usual. The eerie colors and shimmering appearance of Mars caused apocalyptic panic during its near approach in the summer of 1719. But it was a peculiar combination of science, emotion, history and literature that placed Mars at center stage in the late 19th century, and kept it there into the second half of the twentieth.
American astronomer Asaph Hall took advantage of advances in optical telescopes to discover the two moons of Mars during the close encounter of 1877, but it was the observations that year by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli that eventually caused a sensation when his work was translated a decade later. Or rather, mistranslated: he believed he saw channels of some kind on the Martian surface (which there certainly are: one canyon runs continuously for some 3,000 miles), but the Italian ""canali'' was rendered into English as ""canal,'' eventually leading to many fanciful illustrations of Martian civilizations and their irrigation techniques.
Europeans were busily exploring and colonizing distant lands at the time, encountering and usually conquering very different cultures. The explosion in geology and biology in the 19th century (including Darwinian evolution), as well as ascendant technological power, may also have contributed to enthusiastic speculations about life on Mars. Percival Lowell, an American who became a prime exponent of the canal theory, built the Lowell Observatory in part to prove that civilizations did or had existed on Mars. When Mars was close again in 1894, the astronomer M. Javelle of Nice reported ""strange lights'' on its surface which might be signals. This inspired eminent inventors, including Edison and Marconi, to try to devise a way to signal back.
By the 1890s, ""Mars mania'' had resulted in more than 50 popular novels about Mars and Martians. But there was also another popular fiction trend: the invasion story. Though World War I was some 40 years in the future, the idea that a highly mechanized war would soon engulf all of Europe was widely discussed as early as the 1870s. A torrent of frightening but not very good novels followed, beginning with one that dramatized a sudden invasion of England by Germany, but eventually extended to other European countries and America, with their respective enemies doing the invading.
These two subjects came together when H.G. Wells, already famous for using the latest and most dramatic scientific speculations in novels of literary quality and great public interest, took a walk with his brother. Among the topics they talked about was Tasmania, an island south of Australia, where British colonial occupation had essentially extinguished the indigenous culture. Frank Wells wondered how the English would react to being invaded by a technologically superior race.
Using Daniel Defoe's Journal of A Plague Year as a narrative model, H.G. Wells combined his brother's insight and the two popular genres of Mars and invasion novels in The War of the Worlds, first serialized during 1897. A lifelong advocate of world peace (he contributed to the United Nations Declaration of Universal Rights), Wells various fictions anticipated tank warfare, the London Blitz and the atomic bomb by decades. The War of the Worlds dramatized the effects of total destruction by overwhelming firepower unleashed on civilian homes, neighborhoods and cities, a phenomenon as yet unknown in western Europe. By depicting Martians as biologically weak beings who depended on their much stronger and more powerful machines, he suggested the direction of the human future.
Arguments abound on Wells' intentions, but the link to behavior on Earth is explicit. "The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years,'' one of his narrators observes. "Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?'' (That Mars is the god of war is another built-in resonance.)
There are other references to the genocide of indigenous populations, including American Indians. The novel's end (the Martians are wiped out not by war machines but by common Earth bacteria) is itself a reversal of the fate of American Indian cultures decimated by infectious diseases to which they had no resistance, transmitted by European invaders.
A variation on the invader versus the indigenous occurs in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, (1950) a series of stories about earthlings who colonize the ""final frontier,'' and despoil it with the same unconscious abandon as it destroyed previous new worlds, killing off the last Mayan-like indigenous Martians in the process.The only redemption is the conscious awareness of some settlers that they are the new Martians, capable of combining the best of Earth with the best of the Martian civilization they pushed beyond the brink of extinction.
In Wells' description of the invasion's effects on ordinary people, he evokes empathy for the victims of merciless technology. Yet the portrait is complex, for it is one of those ordinary people-identified only as the Artilleryman---who sounds an ominous and inevitable note when he speaks rapturously of humans acquiring the Martians' death-dealing machines: ""Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free!'' Yet Wells complicates the matter further by making the Martians a real threat to destroy humanity, evoking the power of self-preservation.
Except for a few writers like Bradbury, empathy even as an element was seemingly lost in the ensuing decades, as Martians and other space creatures became the potent symbol of the invading alien, the dangerous stranger, a symbolic stand-in for Germans and Japanese in World War II America, the Chinese hordes during the Korean conflict, and the Soviets with their atomic-tipped missiles throughout the Cold War. Pearl Harbor made ""the bolt from the blue'' real to Americans. But the power of the symbolic alien, like the nature of the fear itself, depended on the alien enemy being inaccessible and with unknown power, defined by images of inhuman strangeness and evil.
How powerful this symbol could be was aptly demonstrated by the panic that swept over America during Orson Welles' famous radio dramatization of ""The War of the Worlds'' in 1938, with the Martian invasion transposed from England to recognizable American places, as the real world again teetered on the edge of global war. The classic film version, also centered in the U.S (and this time featuring at atomic bomb that fails to stop the Martians), still had the power to scare audiences in 1953.
For most of the twentieth century scientists concerned with their credibility tended to downplay the possibility of life on other worlds, particularly in the delicate early years of the space program. Believing in "little green men from Mars" became synonymous with hallucination and unemployable madness. But with the popularity of Star Trek and Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on PBS, the idea of extraterrestial life started to become more accepted and appealing. Gene Roddenberry brought empathy back into the idea of aliens, while Sagan revived wonder as a respectable aspect of science.
But "the little green men from Mars" also became a cliché of mockery as well as somewhat nervous laughter. By 1996, when numerous probes had failed to turn up evidence of Martians, the Mars invasion flicks of the 1950s were repeated as parody in Mars Attacks! Thanks to Star Trek, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and the movies and TV shows that followed them, fictional extraterrestrials now had more distant homes. So in the 1996 hit movie Independence Day, an unacknowledged remake of "The War of the Worlds," the space invaders' planet of origin was never named, but clearly it was much farther away than Mars. With alien invasion a kind of cliché, ""Independence Day'' thrilled and amused more than it frightened, at least until Sept. 11. Such is the powerful ambiguity of this story that it now assumes another relevance after the American invasion of Iraq.
Mars made its first movie appearance in several decades in two films released in 2000. Though their disappointing box office may mirror how tame Mars now seems, they are interesting updates of its place in our imaginations. "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet" both involved earthlings traveling to Mars, still a believable premise since it is most likely that if humans do travel to other planets, the first destination will be Mars. But these films also involved plausible Martians by today's standards in their inevitable projections of human hopes and fears.
In "Red Planet," the Martians are insect-like life forms that remained dormant until earthlings seeded Mars with algae to begin creating a new home for humanity, since earthlings finally realized they were choking the life out of their own planet. "Mission to Mars" combined speculation that life on Earth might have been delivered by Martian meteorites with a creative nod to a the late 20th century version of Martian canals: the supposed "face" on the Martian surface caught by orbiting cameras. In this story an ancient Martian civilization left the solar system after seeding the earth with human life, and creating a huge monument of a face to greet Terran visitors. One member of the Mars-faring expedition accepts transport to the new Martian home, rapturously reuniting the riven race.
All these fictional forays wrap their tales of two planets in stories of human relationships, and spotlight individual aspirations to explore the unknown, to find the final meaning embedded in the universe. This, too, is part of what Mars reflects back to us. The stars have long symbolized the eternal mysteries, and our yearnings to explore what evokes our awe. Mars is tantalizing as the attainable planet, an unknown yet achingly recognizable other world. Yet we also value our uniqueness and what we know we have, which is each other.
Such tales also suggest we should value our own planet more than we do. By repulsing the overpowering Martians not through the heroics of a relatively helpless humanity but by a feature of the Earth that can injure humans but also protects them, Wells' war is won by one of the worlds because it is the home that bred the victors. Our world is the interrelated web of life.
In this era when fewer of us see a starry sky each night, we look to stories, mental images, and perhaps the photographs and TV pictures from Mars that show us another place to stand, to view what we do from the outside, as a prelude to getting inside the hearts of others and knowing ourselves. As we look at Mars this summer, facing us in closer proximity than it has for some 70,000 years, we can imagine what Martians would see looking back at us. And as those machines from Earth report back from Mars, we may learn things that will again change how we see ourselves and our world ... and maybe even help to save it.
The big show in the sky this summer is our near neighbor, the planet Mars. It is now very near---close enough for amateur astronomers with small telescopes to watch a giant sandstorm that began blowing across its surface in early July. To the naked eye it already is the brightest nighttime non-lunar object, and at the end of August Mars will be closer to the earth than it has ever been in human history.
That's a chief reason for all the Terran attention that's about to be focused on the Red Planet. NASA's recently dispatched spacecraft carrying the Opportunity surface rover will join its twin launched in June. Together with spacecraft from Japan and Europe, they are scheduled to converge on Mars in December and January. They will be looking chiefly for evidence of water and other life-supporting elements, and the European probe will search for actual signs of life. Together with the two U.S. satellites already there, there will be four spacecraft in orbit and three more on the surface conducting an unprecedented simultaneous scrutiny of another planet.
That the planet is Mars is especially resonant. Once scientists began to suspect that Mars had the greatest potential for harboring life of the heavenly bodies they could study, the concept of extraterrestrial beings virtually merged with the idea of Martians. So our speculations, our projections of hopes and fears on the figure of the alien, began in earnest with Mars.
By now much of the public is used to the idea of the space alien as a symbolic figure in story, often telling us about aspects of ourselves we might not see or want to see if we looked too directly. But before much of anyone was conscious of this function, the yearnings and terrors that Mars evoked were raw and real.
These proximities themselves had stirred emotions when the eccentric orbit of Mars brought it closer than usual. The eerie colors and shimmering appearance of Mars caused apocalyptic panic during its near approach in the summer of 1719. But it was a peculiar combination of science, emotion, history and literature that placed Mars at center stage in the late 19th century, and kept it there into the second half of the twentieth.
American astronomer Asaph Hall took advantage of advances in optical telescopes to discover the two moons of Mars during the close encounter of 1877, but it was the observations that year by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli that eventually caused a sensation when his work was translated a decade later. Or rather, mistranslated: he believed he saw channels of some kind on the Martian surface (which there certainly are: one canyon runs continuously for some 3,000 miles), but the Italian ""canali'' was rendered into English as ""canal,'' eventually leading to many fanciful illustrations of Martian civilizations and their irrigation techniques.
Europeans were busily exploring and colonizing distant lands at the time, encountering and usually conquering very different cultures. The explosion in geology and biology in the 19th century (including Darwinian evolution), as well as ascendant technological power, may also have contributed to enthusiastic speculations about life on Mars. Percival Lowell, an American who became a prime exponent of the canal theory, built the Lowell Observatory in part to prove that civilizations did or had existed on Mars. When Mars was close again in 1894, the astronomer M. Javelle of Nice reported ""strange lights'' on its surface which might be signals. This inspired eminent inventors, including Edison and Marconi, to try to devise a way to signal back.
By the 1890s, ""Mars mania'' had resulted in more than 50 popular novels about Mars and Martians. But there was also another popular fiction trend: the invasion story. Though World War I was some 40 years in the future, the idea that a highly mechanized war would soon engulf all of Europe was widely discussed as early as the 1870s. A torrent of frightening but not very good novels followed, beginning with one that dramatized a sudden invasion of England by Germany, but eventually extended to other European countries and America, with their respective enemies doing the invading.
These two subjects came together when H.G. Wells, already famous for using the latest and most dramatic scientific speculations in novels of literary quality and great public interest, took a walk with his brother. Among the topics they talked about was Tasmania, an island south of Australia, where British colonial occupation had essentially extinguished the indigenous culture. Frank Wells wondered how the English would react to being invaded by a technologically superior race.
Using Daniel Defoe's Journal of A Plague Year as a narrative model, H.G. Wells combined his brother's insight and the two popular genres of Mars and invasion novels in The War of the Worlds, first serialized during 1897. A lifelong advocate of world peace (he contributed to the United Nations Declaration of Universal Rights), Wells various fictions anticipated tank warfare, the London Blitz and the atomic bomb by decades. The War of the Worlds dramatized the effects of total destruction by overwhelming firepower unleashed on civilian homes, neighborhoods and cities, a phenomenon as yet unknown in western Europe. By depicting Martians as biologically weak beings who depended on their much stronger and more powerful machines, he suggested the direction of the human future.
Arguments abound on Wells' intentions, but the link to behavior on Earth is explicit. "The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years,'' one of his narrators observes. "Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?'' (That Mars is the god of war is another built-in resonance.)
There are other references to the genocide of indigenous populations, including American Indians. The novel's end (the Martians are wiped out not by war machines but by common Earth bacteria) is itself a reversal of the fate of American Indian cultures decimated by infectious diseases to which they had no resistance, transmitted by European invaders.
A variation on the invader versus the indigenous occurs in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, (1950) a series of stories about earthlings who colonize the ""final frontier,'' and despoil it with the same unconscious abandon as it destroyed previous new worlds, killing off the last Mayan-like indigenous Martians in the process.The only redemption is the conscious awareness of some settlers that they are the new Martians, capable of combining the best of Earth with the best of the Martian civilization they pushed beyond the brink of extinction.
In Wells' description of the invasion's effects on ordinary people, he evokes empathy for the victims of merciless technology. Yet the portrait is complex, for it is one of those ordinary people-identified only as the Artilleryman---who sounds an ominous and inevitable note when he speaks rapturously of humans acquiring the Martians' death-dealing machines: ""Fancy having one of them lovely things, with its Heat-Ray wide and free!'' Yet Wells complicates the matter further by making the Martians a real threat to destroy humanity, evoking the power of self-preservation.
Except for a few writers like Bradbury, empathy even as an element was seemingly lost in the ensuing decades, as Martians and other space creatures became the potent symbol of the invading alien, the dangerous stranger, a symbolic stand-in for Germans and Japanese in World War II America, the Chinese hordes during the Korean conflict, and the Soviets with their atomic-tipped missiles throughout the Cold War. Pearl Harbor made ""the bolt from the blue'' real to Americans. But the power of the symbolic alien, like the nature of the fear itself, depended on the alien enemy being inaccessible and with unknown power, defined by images of inhuman strangeness and evil.
How powerful this symbol could be was aptly demonstrated by the panic that swept over America during Orson Welles' famous radio dramatization of ""The War of the Worlds'' in 1938, with the Martian invasion transposed from England to recognizable American places, as the real world again teetered on the edge of global war. The classic film version, also centered in the U.S (and this time featuring at atomic bomb that fails to stop the Martians), still had the power to scare audiences in 1953.
For most of the twentieth century scientists concerned with their credibility tended to downplay the possibility of life on other worlds, particularly in the delicate early years of the space program. Believing in "little green men from Mars" became synonymous with hallucination and unemployable madness. But with the popularity of Star Trek and Carl Sagan's Cosmos series on PBS, the idea of extraterrestial life started to become more accepted and appealing. Gene Roddenberry brought empathy back into the idea of aliens, while Sagan revived wonder as a respectable aspect of science.
But "the little green men from Mars" also became a cliché of mockery as well as somewhat nervous laughter. By 1996, when numerous probes had failed to turn up evidence of Martians, the Mars invasion flicks of the 1950s were repeated as parody in Mars Attacks! Thanks to Star Trek, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and the movies and TV shows that followed them, fictional extraterrestrials now had more distant homes. So in the 1996 hit movie Independence Day, an unacknowledged remake of "The War of the Worlds," the space invaders' planet of origin was never named, but clearly it was much farther away than Mars. With alien invasion a kind of cliché, ""Independence Day'' thrilled and amused more than it frightened, at least until Sept. 11. Such is the powerful ambiguity of this story that it now assumes another relevance after the American invasion of Iraq.
Mars made its first movie appearance in several decades in two films released in 2000. Though their disappointing box office may mirror how tame Mars now seems, they are interesting updates of its place in our imaginations. "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet" both involved earthlings traveling to Mars, still a believable premise since it is most likely that if humans do travel to other planets, the first destination will be Mars. But these films also involved plausible Martians by today's standards in their inevitable projections of human hopes and fears.
In "Red Planet," the Martians are insect-like life forms that remained dormant until earthlings seeded Mars with algae to begin creating a new home for humanity, since earthlings finally realized they were choking the life out of their own planet. "Mission to Mars" combined speculation that life on Earth might have been delivered by Martian meteorites with a creative nod to a the late 20th century version of Martian canals: the supposed "face" on the Martian surface caught by orbiting cameras. In this story an ancient Martian civilization left the solar system after seeding the earth with human life, and creating a huge monument of a face to greet Terran visitors. One member of the Mars-faring expedition accepts transport to the new Martian home, rapturously reuniting the riven race.
All these fictional forays wrap their tales of two planets in stories of human relationships, and spotlight individual aspirations to explore the unknown, to find the final meaning embedded in the universe. This, too, is part of what Mars reflects back to us. The stars have long symbolized the eternal mysteries, and our yearnings to explore what evokes our awe. Mars is tantalizing as the attainable planet, an unknown yet achingly recognizable other world. Yet we also value our uniqueness and what we know we have, which is each other.
Such tales also suggest we should value our own planet more than we do. By repulsing the overpowering Martians not through the heroics of a relatively helpless humanity but by a feature of the Earth that can injure humans but also protects them, Wells' war is won by one of the worlds because it is the home that bred the victors. Our world is the interrelated web of life.
In this era when fewer of us see a starry sky each night, we look to stories, mental images, and perhaps the photographs and TV pictures from Mars that show us another place to stand, to view what we do from the outside, as a prelude to getting inside the hearts of others and knowing ourselves. As we look at Mars this summer, facing us in closer proximity than it has for some 70,000 years, we can imagine what Martians would see looking back at us. And as those machines from Earth report back from Mars, we may learn things that will again change how we see ourselves and our world ... and maybe even help to save it.
Monday, July 21, 2003
Devil or Angel
For anyone familiar with Kobe Bryant, the Lakers and the NBA, his indictment on the charge of sexual assault is mind-boggling. For those who aren't, or don't really care, the charge and the trial will become something more symbolic, or else the usual perverse form of entertainment these public incidents of private travails become in the tabloid cable TV talk radio universe. The situation is rife with potential candidates for symbols, with race and gender likely to move to the top past the current contrast (both more and less than meets the eye) of world celebrity from the big city and unknown teenager from the smallest of towns.
But one bifurcation is already emerging, thanks in part to Bryant's admission that he committed adultery with the woman in question, and that's: good guy or bad guy, role model or degenerate, hero or villain, devil or angel.
I don't know if Kobe Bryant is guilty of the charge of forcing sex on the woman whose name we do not know. I believe in a person's innocence until proven guilty, and additionally, I would be surprised if he is guilty. The charge is a matter of law, and will be settled in the legal system. Forcing sex on someone is wrong. But as much as is known about the situation so far leads me to believe that the moral responsibilities will never be clear to anyone but the people involved, if indeed it is ever clear to them. Right now it seems likely that Bryant believes the sex was consensual, and right now the alleged victim believes it was forced. The scary possibility is that they each thought the same thing while it was happening.
Bryant has already admitted to error and very bad judgment. Some people profess terrible disappointment in Kobe because he admitted adultery. Some columnists bray about the fallen idol, the Mr. Clean, Mr. Perfect Image now in tatters, oh how the mighty are fallen. (A friend of mine who is a gossip columnist once suggested that there are really only a few stories people want to hear about stars, and they form a neat sort of arc: The Struggle to Succeed, the Mighty Fall, the Comeback.)
We may insist that our mythic figures follow simple two-dimensional story lines, but as Kobe Bryant pointed out in his press conference, he's a human being. Our insistence that celebrities be one thing or the other is part of what we think should constitute our ideal self.
"Devil or angel?" the old song asks; dozens of old songs ask. We can't admit to ourselves that we are both. Sure, in our American Christian culture, we are good but have sin inside us, which must be rooted out when the devil makes us do bad things. It's that attitude that has turned so many psychological insights into the kind of victimization litanies that earn the ire if not the charity of cultural analysts.
Even the Judeo part of our dominant heritage shades this way. There is no actual Devil in the Hebrew Old Testament, says author Amelia Wilson in her book called The Devil, but there is a figure called "ha/satan" who is more of an adversary than a wholly evil entity.
That's a little better, for there's some symbolic sense that we aren't helpless, we can choose, and we contend against "someone" whose position we consciously oppose. Still, there's the sense that Satan is outside us, and that he's an enemy out to destroy us.
A more useful concept, it seems to me, is the Jungian idea of the Shadow. The shadow is everything we are that we reject in our daily life. It includes being too good for our own good, but mostly it's the dark stuff, that has remained unconscious for perhaps any of several reasons. For example, the Shadow holds emotions, energies, actions, that either once had survival value in our genetic history, or it is the impulse and energy itself that had and still has survival value, but it got linked to behavior that is not beneficial to us now. Not to mention harmful to others.
The Shadow has several advantages as a concept. First, it is inside us (though like all aspects of the unconscious it is at least partially shared with our culture, society, our species). Second, in itself it is morally neutral. Third, it is not all bad. The energies of the unconscious are vital to us as functioning, creating, passionate human beings.
Eruptions from the unconscious feel natural; powerful feelings from the Shadow can propel us to commit bad acts. We want to be good, and sometimes we are bad. ("Sin" as James Hillman tells us originated as an archery term, meaning "missing the mark." Or missing the jump shot.) The Jungian remedy is consciousness. You become conscious of exactly what is in your Shadow, how it manifests, and then you choose: you find ways to control and channel those impulses, without denying them and calling them evil.
It's more complicated than that, of course. There are lots of books on the Shadow, but one of the most useful I've found is also one of the shortest: Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson. "Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness," Johnson writes. But he also suggests ways of expressing the Shadow, of using Shadow energies, and keeping yourself in balance.
And that's the key, and the key benefit of the concept. One of the most effective ways of inviting the Shadow to suddenly erupt in a really bad act is to deny it, is to tell yourself you've conquered it, you're a really good person now; in fact, you're perfect.
Maybe that's the lesson in that celebrity story, that part of the arc: the mighty is fallen. Kobe Bryant seems like an admirable young man---intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, emotionally expressive, morally centered, well-mannered and cultured. But he probably also cultivated an image of the perfect hero. He reportedly was insulted when a reporter joked about the opportunities for sexual misbehavior on a trip to Brazil; he would never commit adultery, he said.
Then he did. That doesn't mean he committed rape, or even that he had the impulse to be violent. It also doesn't mean he's a hypocrite, that he has lost all credibility, that he's not a fundamentally good person who has worked hard at it under pressures most of us will never comprehend. But it is an object lesson for all of us. The more we deny Kobe Bryant's humanity, the more we are probably denying our own.
At his press conference, Bryant sounded like he'd learned this. He spoke of being furious with himself, and humiliated. He interjected the statement that "I'm a human being just like everybody else. I mourn. I cry, like everybody else." Mourning would not seem to be at issue, but it's an interesting and suggestive choice. It is in mourning and going through the valleys, our private trips through hell, that we get in touch with our humanity. That the image of Kobe Bryant will never be the same may not be a bad thing, for him or for us.
(I realize this intepretation depends on granting Kobe credibility, that he's being honest. I am assuming he is. He's no Linda Tripp, saying "I'm you." He's saying who he is.)
But it isn't just the mighty who have a mighty fall once in awhile. James Hillman suggests that one reason the infighting in academia, or among poets or environmentalists, is often so vicious and ugly, worse than politicians who vilify each other and then go have dinner together, is that people in these groups are used to believing themselves supremely virtuous, whereas politicians know what they are. But the Shadow won't be denied.
Jung chiseled a motto in stone above his doorway, that said something like : "Invited or not, the gods will be present." The gods he meant weren't just the good gods. They were the very good and very bad gods of India, the mixed blessings (at best) of the Greek and Roman gods. (They include our internal furies, that can make us furious with ourselves.) We have all those gods inside us, just as sure as we're made of atoms. And invited or not, the Shadow will enter.
It seems to me that our societal refusal to admit the presence of good and evil, of devil and angel within each of us, invites criminal behavior as a consequence of our hypocrisy. You can catch a glimpse of that kind of energy working through psychopaths sometimes; they sneer at society for not admitting its evils, because we can't admit we can be good and still do evil. In some ways they express the violence we deny.
We do admit it indirectly. We love the outlaw hero. We root for the Dionysian energy to be expressed in a movie like "The Banger Sisters" or in the Dionysian rock stars that film references, especially Jim Morrison (and there has hardly ever been a more clearly Dionysian movie than Oliver Stone's "The Doors.") But we want to keep it at a safe distance.
That can be part of a healthy approach to the Shadow. But it can't be our whole agenda. Other cultures have had much more respect for the forces of nature, including the forces within us. The words "terrible" and "awesome" express different shades of that respect: each also means the other. Those forces work on us and in us, but we have these tools: consciousness, knowledge, honesty, discernment, courage, responsibility, conscience, respect, sorrow, regret, patience, joy. In this sense, we are neither devil nor angel because we are both.
For anyone familiar with Kobe Bryant, the Lakers and the NBA, his indictment on the charge of sexual assault is mind-boggling. For those who aren't, or don't really care, the charge and the trial will become something more symbolic, or else the usual perverse form of entertainment these public incidents of private travails become in the tabloid cable TV talk radio universe. The situation is rife with potential candidates for symbols, with race and gender likely to move to the top past the current contrast (both more and less than meets the eye) of world celebrity from the big city and unknown teenager from the smallest of towns.
But one bifurcation is already emerging, thanks in part to Bryant's admission that he committed adultery with the woman in question, and that's: good guy or bad guy, role model or degenerate, hero or villain, devil or angel.
I don't know if Kobe Bryant is guilty of the charge of forcing sex on the woman whose name we do not know. I believe in a person's innocence until proven guilty, and additionally, I would be surprised if he is guilty. The charge is a matter of law, and will be settled in the legal system. Forcing sex on someone is wrong. But as much as is known about the situation so far leads me to believe that the moral responsibilities will never be clear to anyone but the people involved, if indeed it is ever clear to them. Right now it seems likely that Bryant believes the sex was consensual, and right now the alleged victim believes it was forced. The scary possibility is that they each thought the same thing while it was happening.
Bryant has already admitted to error and very bad judgment. Some people profess terrible disappointment in Kobe because he admitted adultery. Some columnists bray about the fallen idol, the Mr. Clean, Mr. Perfect Image now in tatters, oh how the mighty are fallen. (A friend of mine who is a gossip columnist once suggested that there are really only a few stories people want to hear about stars, and they form a neat sort of arc: The Struggle to Succeed, the Mighty Fall, the Comeback.)
We may insist that our mythic figures follow simple two-dimensional story lines, but as Kobe Bryant pointed out in his press conference, he's a human being. Our insistence that celebrities be one thing or the other is part of what we think should constitute our ideal self.
"Devil or angel?" the old song asks; dozens of old songs ask. We can't admit to ourselves that we are both. Sure, in our American Christian culture, we are good but have sin inside us, which must be rooted out when the devil makes us do bad things. It's that attitude that has turned so many psychological insights into the kind of victimization litanies that earn the ire if not the charity of cultural analysts.
Even the Judeo part of our dominant heritage shades this way. There is no actual Devil in the Hebrew Old Testament, says author Amelia Wilson in her book called The Devil, but there is a figure called "ha/satan" who is more of an adversary than a wholly evil entity.
That's a little better, for there's some symbolic sense that we aren't helpless, we can choose, and we contend against "someone" whose position we consciously oppose. Still, there's the sense that Satan is outside us, and that he's an enemy out to destroy us.
A more useful concept, it seems to me, is the Jungian idea of the Shadow. The shadow is everything we are that we reject in our daily life. It includes being too good for our own good, but mostly it's the dark stuff, that has remained unconscious for perhaps any of several reasons. For example, the Shadow holds emotions, energies, actions, that either once had survival value in our genetic history, or it is the impulse and energy itself that had and still has survival value, but it got linked to behavior that is not beneficial to us now. Not to mention harmful to others.
The Shadow has several advantages as a concept. First, it is inside us (though like all aspects of the unconscious it is at least partially shared with our culture, society, our species). Second, in itself it is morally neutral. Third, it is not all bad. The energies of the unconscious are vital to us as functioning, creating, passionate human beings.
Eruptions from the unconscious feel natural; powerful feelings from the Shadow can propel us to commit bad acts. We want to be good, and sometimes we are bad. ("Sin" as James Hillman tells us originated as an archery term, meaning "missing the mark." Or missing the jump shot.) The Jungian remedy is consciousness. You become conscious of exactly what is in your Shadow, how it manifests, and then you choose: you find ways to control and channel those impulses, without denying them and calling them evil.
It's more complicated than that, of course. There are lots of books on the Shadow, but one of the most useful I've found is also one of the shortest: Owning Your Own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson. "Heaven and skid row are separated only by an act of consciousness," Johnson writes. But he also suggests ways of expressing the Shadow, of using Shadow energies, and keeping yourself in balance.
And that's the key, and the key benefit of the concept. One of the most effective ways of inviting the Shadow to suddenly erupt in a really bad act is to deny it, is to tell yourself you've conquered it, you're a really good person now; in fact, you're perfect.
Maybe that's the lesson in that celebrity story, that part of the arc: the mighty is fallen. Kobe Bryant seems like an admirable young man---intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive, emotionally expressive, morally centered, well-mannered and cultured. But he probably also cultivated an image of the perfect hero. He reportedly was insulted when a reporter joked about the opportunities for sexual misbehavior on a trip to Brazil; he would never commit adultery, he said.
Then he did. That doesn't mean he committed rape, or even that he had the impulse to be violent. It also doesn't mean he's a hypocrite, that he has lost all credibility, that he's not a fundamentally good person who has worked hard at it under pressures most of us will never comprehend. But it is an object lesson for all of us. The more we deny Kobe Bryant's humanity, the more we are probably denying our own.
At his press conference, Bryant sounded like he'd learned this. He spoke of being furious with himself, and humiliated. He interjected the statement that "I'm a human being just like everybody else. I mourn. I cry, like everybody else." Mourning would not seem to be at issue, but it's an interesting and suggestive choice. It is in mourning and going through the valleys, our private trips through hell, that we get in touch with our humanity. That the image of Kobe Bryant will never be the same may not be a bad thing, for him or for us.
(I realize this intepretation depends on granting Kobe credibility, that he's being honest. I am assuming he is. He's no Linda Tripp, saying "I'm you." He's saying who he is.)
But it isn't just the mighty who have a mighty fall once in awhile. James Hillman suggests that one reason the infighting in academia, or among poets or environmentalists, is often so vicious and ugly, worse than politicians who vilify each other and then go have dinner together, is that people in these groups are used to believing themselves supremely virtuous, whereas politicians know what they are. But the Shadow won't be denied.
Jung chiseled a motto in stone above his doorway, that said something like : "Invited or not, the gods will be present." The gods he meant weren't just the good gods. They were the very good and very bad gods of India, the mixed blessings (at best) of the Greek and Roman gods. (They include our internal furies, that can make us furious with ourselves.) We have all those gods inside us, just as sure as we're made of atoms. And invited or not, the Shadow will enter.
It seems to me that our societal refusal to admit the presence of good and evil, of devil and angel within each of us, invites criminal behavior as a consequence of our hypocrisy. You can catch a glimpse of that kind of energy working through psychopaths sometimes; they sneer at society for not admitting its evils, because we can't admit we can be good and still do evil. In some ways they express the violence we deny.
We do admit it indirectly. We love the outlaw hero. We root for the Dionysian energy to be expressed in a movie like "The Banger Sisters" or in the Dionysian rock stars that film references, especially Jim Morrison (and there has hardly ever been a more clearly Dionysian movie than Oliver Stone's "The Doors.") But we want to keep it at a safe distance.
That can be part of a healthy approach to the Shadow. But it can't be our whole agenda. Other cultures have had much more respect for the forces of nature, including the forces within us. The words "terrible" and "awesome" express different shades of that respect: each also means the other. Those forces work on us and in us, but we have these tools: consciousness, knowledge, honesty, discernment, courage, responsibility, conscience, respect, sorrow, regret, patience, joy. In this sense, we are neither devil nor angel because we are both.
NBA Update
At the moment, with the charge against Kobe Bryant just officially made, it's a little hard to think about just basketball. But sorting that out will take time. Though it casts a shadow on the upcoming season, and may be felt on the court, there is a great deal that's utterly amazing in almost the opposite way about what's happened with the Lakers in the past month.
The three-time NBA champs (2000, 2001, 2002) entered the free agent market with needs and aspirations and not a lot of money to spend. Not certainly as much as the reigning champs (2003) San Antonio Spurs. Point guard Gary Payton seemed beyond possibility. Nobody much thought it was worth even trying to tempt Karl Malone, since it would take all the money they had, they probably wouldn't get him and if they did, he alone wouldn't be enough.
So what happened? They got them both: Payton and Malone. Malone, a former MVP, is a certain Hall of Fame player. Gary Payton is a fairly likely one. They signed on partly because they wanted to play together, and because they wanted to play on a championship team, with a great coach. They gave up a lot of money (yes-NBA players gave up money!) to play for the Lakers, which of course, was totally unpredictable.
And so far, the Spurs got nada. The team they built last year may jell more firmly next year, but it might just as easily fall apart. Ditto the Sacramento Kings.
The Lakers could start four future Hall of Famers, plus young Deavon George who showed a lot of potential in 2002, had a so-so season last year, but conceivably could have a Hall of Fame caliber career ahead of him. PLUS they still have two more of their key players in those three championships: Derek Fisher and Rick Fox. PLUS they signed two potentially valuable draft picks,who could bring some young energy. And there are still some players out there they might get.
Their only real loss is Robert Horry, who was an indispensable asset in their playoffs runs: smart and skillful on defense and offense. His subpar season last year may mean his knees have finally been played out, so it's hard to say how valuable he would be next year. It's also not clear that either of the two star veterans will quite fulfill the role played by Brian Shaw and Ron Harper; the veteran leader who can come in and settle the team down, get them back in their groove and make a few crucial plays.
It's also not clear whether this group will constitute a team. Some foresee chaos and dissension. Lots of teams complain about Shaq's physical play, but the Lakers never display the kind of on-court thugishness that Malone and Payton have in the past. Of course I'll have to defer to Shaq's friendship with Payton, and Magic Johnson's embrace of Malone, whose comments on Magic and HIV shortened Magic Johnson's comeback as a player. But getting them to all play together and play like a Lakers team will be Phil Jackson's most formidable challenge. If he succeeds, the results could be awesome. The style of the Lakers game will undoubtedly change. With Payton handling the ball, Bryant can fly down the court. With Malone boxing out for rebounds, Shaq can get out on the break, or vice versa: Lakers "showtime" could be back.
But the truly scary thing about this team (for other teams) is its depth. All four of the H of Famers don't have to be on the court at the same time for the Lakers to wreak havoc. They can now sustain an injury or other absense without fatal consequences (their lack of depth last year was obvious in the playoffs.) And Jackson has all year to finetune the particular combination of players he can use for specific situations, match-ups and defenses. Wow.
The NBA brass must be ecstatic. A lackluster season and a barely watched finals are gone. Now the most watched team promises to bring a lot of excitement---and if it all works out, they're gonna score a lot of points.
At the moment, with the charge against Kobe Bryant just officially made, it's a little hard to think about just basketball. But sorting that out will take time. Though it casts a shadow on the upcoming season, and may be felt on the court, there is a great deal that's utterly amazing in almost the opposite way about what's happened with the Lakers in the past month.
The three-time NBA champs (2000, 2001, 2002) entered the free agent market with needs and aspirations and not a lot of money to spend. Not certainly as much as the reigning champs (2003) San Antonio Spurs. Point guard Gary Payton seemed beyond possibility. Nobody much thought it was worth even trying to tempt Karl Malone, since it would take all the money they had, they probably wouldn't get him and if they did, he alone wouldn't be enough.
So what happened? They got them both: Payton and Malone. Malone, a former MVP, is a certain Hall of Fame player. Gary Payton is a fairly likely one. They signed on partly because they wanted to play together, and because they wanted to play on a championship team, with a great coach. They gave up a lot of money (yes-NBA players gave up money!) to play for the Lakers, which of course, was totally unpredictable.
And so far, the Spurs got nada. The team they built last year may jell more firmly next year, but it might just as easily fall apart. Ditto the Sacramento Kings.
The Lakers could start four future Hall of Famers, plus young Deavon George who showed a lot of potential in 2002, had a so-so season last year, but conceivably could have a Hall of Fame caliber career ahead of him. PLUS they still have two more of their key players in those three championships: Derek Fisher and Rick Fox. PLUS they signed two potentially valuable draft picks,who could bring some young energy. And there are still some players out there they might get.
Their only real loss is Robert Horry, who was an indispensable asset in their playoffs runs: smart and skillful on defense and offense. His subpar season last year may mean his knees have finally been played out, so it's hard to say how valuable he would be next year. It's also not clear that either of the two star veterans will quite fulfill the role played by Brian Shaw and Ron Harper; the veteran leader who can come in and settle the team down, get them back in their groove and make a few crucial plays.
It's also not clear whether this group will constitute a team. Some foresee chaos and dissension. Lots of teams complain about Shaq's physical play, but the Lakers never display the kind of on-court thugishness that Malone and Payton have in the past. Of course I'll have to defer to Shaq's friendship with Payton, and Magic Johnson's embrace of Malone, whose comments on Magic and HIV shortened Magic Johnson's comeback as a player. But getting them to all play together and play like a Lakers team will be Phil Jackson's most formidable challenge. If he succeeds, the results could be awesome. The style of the Lakers game will undoubtedly change. With Payton handling the ball, Bryant can fly down the court. With Malone boxing out for rebounds, Shaq can get out on the break, or vice versa: Lakers "showtime" could be back.
But the truly scary thing about this team (for other teams) is its depth. All four of the H of Famers don't have to be on the court at the same time for the Lakers to wreak havoc. They can now sustain an injury or other absense without fatal consequences (their lack of depth last year was obvious in the playoffs.) And Jackson has all year to finetune the particular combination of players he can use for specific situations, match-ups and defenses. Wow.
The NBA brass must be ecstatic. A lackluster season and a barely watched finals are gone. Now the most watched team promises to bring a lot of excitement---and if it all works out, they're gonna score a lot of points.
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