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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

As well as some chat about L. K. Abbott's short stories, Strangers in Paradise, summer reading for hell, at Books in Heat, here comes the link.

Get'cha red hot review of the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets DVD at Soul of Star Trek, right heah.

Review

At the moment, the Barnes and Noble web site is quoting two of my reviews for books they're selling. One of the reviews was published in 1972 (of Dow Mossman's novel, The Stones of Summer) and the other a few months ago (of Einstein in Berlin.) That's a span of some 30 years, during which time every cell of my body has changed at least four times.

Now in addition to feeling ancient I can feel virtuous. I got a letter from the marketing director of Copper Canyon Press up in Port Townsend, Washington, handwritten: "Thank you so much for your perceptive review of One Man Boat: The George Hitchcock Reader, recently published in the San Francisco Chronicle. I was with George on the Fourth of July and he was very pleased with the review. In my humble opinion George is a national literary treasure, and your review goes a long way to spreading that news. My deepest appreciation-Joseph Bednarik."

As far as I can figure out, Hitchcock must be in his late eighties now. I'm happy he was pleased, and glad to be the one who showed him the respect he deserves. Despite the fact that it took me an uncommonly long time to fight off certain surprisingly lively feelings based on his rejection of some of my poems more than thirty years ago. I could have been a contender, George! But maybe you were right.

According to Meister Eckhart, a good person is one who praises good people. I agree that it's a good thing to do and I'm glad I did it, but it seems more like justice to me.

With any luck, you can read the Hitchcock review by clicking here.

Writing Degree Zero

I've got two main jobs in this little period of time. One of them a semi-journalism story, the other something more unusual for me.

The story is for a university alumni magazine, which makes it part journalism, part PR. I try to take into consideration the PR requirements, which are to accentuate the positive and include as many alums who might donate as possible. But basically it's reporting and writing a story. I become more aware of the dynamics of that process when they push against other agendas. Every story grows organically into itself. I'm given an assignment, certain parameters and requirements. Then I apply my own analysis, ideas, experience, and skills to the research: what to look for, who to talk to, what to ask. It's a complicated process. For example, when you are talking to the first people, you're still pretty much in the dark. You're getting information-sometimes basic information-and testing your assumptions, and the assumptions of the assigning party-against what you're hearing and finding out.

Each interview sheds different light on facts and other available presentations (books, articles, web sites), so that become a back and forth dynamic. And at a certain point each interview helps shape the next: you refine your questions, perhaps taking a different approach to the subject based on what you've learned, or filling in details, or getting differing views. That dynamic sets itself going.

Interviews are themselves dynamic and sometimes delicate matters. Some people are media savvy. Some look at tape recorders as if they were poisonous snakes about to strike. Some of the dynamic is affected by how badly the interviewee has been burned by journalists before, journalists misunderstanding, misquoting and generally misusing them (or so at least they feel) or just wasting their time. In any event the interview is a kind of dance that begins with preparation. You want to be prepared enough to ask the right questions, and indicate some knowledge of what it is the interviewee is talking about, and does for a living, so you can get to better questions with better answers.

At the same time, you are there to get that person's words, explanations, views. They have to do the talking, preferably in complete sentences. So they have to say what you may already know.

Besides, it's dangerous to assume too much. So you have to be willing to sound dumb by asking elementary questions you think you know the answer to. Often enough, you find that you actually don't know, or you had it wrong. And if you have your conclusion confirmed, so much the better. It means you've understood something, so you can take the interview to the next level, and feel more confident that you can construct the story.

Later interviews can confirm, nail down those loose ends, answer more incisive and pertinent questions, add color and breadth and depth. When you're hearing the answers you've heard before, it's time to stop and write the piece. CONTINUING

I place a high value on the interview. I regard it as a relationship, even if you never see that person again. By interviewing them, I take on the responsibility to accurately reflect their meaning. I take that responsibility seriously. And by doing so, I allow the story to grow organically out of what people say, and what I observe.

As I recently realized, this priority of responsibility to the person I interview has made me very popular with the people I write about. But it has not always made me popular with editors. We've recently seen some high profile scandals of reporters who faked stories in small and outrageously large ways. They were able to do so because they were meeting their editors' desires, and secondarily because interview subjects are so used to shoddy treatment that they didn't complain when they were misquoted or distorted, because they thought that was normal.
Pleasing editors, including their competitiveness and their prejudices, is the path to success. Interview subjects are fodder to a lot of them, and therefore to a lot of writers.

Not to me. I am very often impressed about how much people know about their jobs, how sincere they are, how hard they work, and what good stories they represent that seldom get told. Either they and the work they do is ignored, or certain aspects of it are ignored.

Celebrities of one kind or another are examples of the second category. A lot of famous actors, for instance, are quite serious about acting, about storytelling, about theatre and theatrical tradition, and about the various issues they might advocate. But mostly what you read about them is gossip. Check out Bravo's Actor's Studio interview series. Sure, there's a certain amount of silliness and pretension and show biz, but I defy anyone who has seen a reasonable selection of those programs to continue believing the only thing these actors care about is salary and stardom, or more to the point, that's the only interesting thing about them.

And of course, the first category includes just about everybody who isn't a celebrity. The only kinds of work that get covered are politics---mostly Washington politics---and sports. Business gets covered on an entirely different level, along with a lot of political coverage: a level that is hard to describe except as abstracted and coded to the point of being
delusional. Science is covered superficially except in specialized publications. Law, justice, government---only scandal, superficial coverage of crime, gossip. Which means there are millions of stories not being told, that are actually much more important to our common life than a lot of the here-today, gone later-today reportage of politics, the economy, etc.


I've done stories that involve setting contrary views against each other, and I've quoted people to their detriment. But most of the time I've done stories that profile people or a process and explain what they do, and something of what it means. I place people and processes in various appropriate contexts--- often historical in some sense.

One of my guides is my assignment (or basic idea, if it originated with me) but my chief guide is what the reader would want and need to know.
The question," what is the story?" is in part a question of narrative form, in part a question of "news" or otherwise a journalistic question, in part a question of getting at the essence, and in large part is a question of what will attract, inform, entertain, enlighten the reader.

So that's the process I'm in the middle of for an assigned story. It has other difficulties at the moment, including a lot of people on vacation, and a number of agendas that are supposed to be addressed in a short time and a quite limited number of words. So we'll see.

My other project is different in one major respect: both of the people I am writing about cannot be interviewed on account of their mortal coils having been shuffled off some time ago. An agent is interested in my idea for a series of biographies for young readers, the subjects being figures in science fiction and fantasy, and the gimmick is that I'm approaching them in pairs. Can't give away more than this, but I have done a draft of a sample chapter for the first proposed book. Suffice it to say that it was weird to have a semi-real excuse to be writing about Star Trek. CONTINUING

I don't want to jinx this by saying how much it means to me. But I will say two things.

I've long since come to the conclusion that the only long term hope for the future resides in the young who want to learn how to do it all better. I'm hoping to at least pass along some of what I've learned and maybe some enthusiasm for learning and reading. I suppose I'm also trying to fulfill my genetic mandate in a different way.

This past Sunday's newspaper came with yet another dire warning that writing books is utter folly if you expect to make a living that way. I am personally urged to find something else to do. I wish I could, but what? I don't seem to be suited for much else. Everything else I can do, others have been pursuing careers doing all their lives, and they're looking for the same jobs. Plus all those employers who want your enthusiasm, your loyalty, your total commitment to their questionable or utterly boring activity. Your work is not enough, they must have your soul. If you'd rather not, there are always plenty of others ready and willing.

My worst moments are fearing that I have backed myself into a corner by sticking to this, but at the same time I have squandered the talent and potential I was given. I have failed to either make a decent living at writing, or to write anything transcendently good.

But life is what we do every day-some would say "also", some would insist "only." All I know is that one afternoon I was finally ready to start the actual draft of this sample chapter. I sat in the sun on the porch of Wildberries with my coffee, and on a yellow pad I wrote the first paragraph. And then I rewrote it, again and again, changing a few words, or maybe only one word, each time. And it was the happiest I've been.

Today's fireworks are over at soul of Star Trek with a July 4 essay on the movie, "Independence Day."

Some weekends C-Span's Book TV has nothing I'm interested in, and some weekends---like the past one-there were several hours of stuff which I tape and check out through the following week. I just watched an hour's interview with Steven Wolfram about his book, A New Science.

The interviewer, whose name I forget, was a a TV reporter who got his rep by being able to communicate fairly complex ideas in a creative, clever and ironic way. He wasn't bad, but he kept coming back to this idea of Wolfram's ambition and ego in claiming to be creating a new science. That's the conventional wisdom on Wolfram and his book. (His web site is full of hype, so there's some basis I suppose.) But unfortunately for the interviewer, this was entirely undercut by Wolfram, not just his appearance and demeanor, but by what he had to say. He made a discovery, a very simple one (that complex phenomena, and randomness as well, can be generated over time by a few simple rules applied to the behavior of very simple phenomena), that he came to believe can account for complexity in many of the realms in which science tries to explain why things are they way they are.

I can't even begin to judge his theories (though what he said about how his ideas affect the theories of biological evolution made good sense to me), but I was able to get a feel for the theorist, and it seems to me that his ideas should be judged and debated on the merits, and not on whether or not he developed them in a prestigious university or think tank, or circulated a peer-reviewed manuscript, or even that his claims are large and his ad campaign is obnoxious.

I've read an article that accuses him of misrepresenting the work of others, and taking a lot of credit he isn't due. This is troubling and does damage his credibility. The evaluation of his theories, and whether he makes claims for them that are much too large, is underway, and that's a good thing.

He may turn out to be a genius of the age, or he may not. But doubts about his credibility have to be stated and confronted, not turned into fashionable snideness and follow-the-leader image-making. Evaluate his theories on the merits. Maybe he has hogged the limelight by his ability to buy exposure. But that means that his part of the debate gets stated, and others can answer him, and put these issues of randomness, complexity, and the nature of time, into the public discussion. Considering that relativity and quantum theory began in the early twentieth century, it's about time.

The NBA free agent season has begun. The Lakers are looking at a number of them, though they can dangle less money than championship potential in front of those available. Karl Malone was the first to visit L.A. He would add a third scorer when he played power forward, and even at 40 he can still play. But how much would he play? He can't play Laker defense, and the Lakers defense is crucial in the playoffs. Now that Robert Horry's option hasn't been picked up, they don't have a gifted defender at that position. And I wonder how Malone would fit in with this team, and whether he's coachable anymore.

The Lakers apparently want Gary Payton the most, for their starting point guard presumably. The b-ball savants say they probably won't get him--that somebody will offer him too much more money so the prospect of winning a ring won't override it. I hope so. I don't think Payton would fit into this team. He's always seemed to me to be kind of a jerk.

So Scotty Pippen is beginning to look better and better---a scoring forward who can play intense defense. But the word is that the Chicago Bulls, of all the teams in the universe, are trying hard to get him, and may offer a front office job when he retires as part of the package.

There are a couple of younger mature players---P.J. Brown and Juwan Howard among them---the Lakers would like to look at, but it will depend on the bucks other teams offer. San Antonio has so much room under the salary cap that they can pursue a big name, like Jason Kidd, and still have the bucks to buy off somebody just so the Lakers won't get him. If they get Kidd the question for next year will be how well that team jells---I think it's fifty-fifty that it will improve that much. Sacramento may have peaked as well. I think (and Phil, I know you're waiting for my words of wisdom here) that with the pretty cool draft picks they got, if they get Ty Lue as a free agent, make Medvedenko a starter and re-sign Mark Madsen and Byron Scott, they may not need one of these name free agents. They need a steadying veteran like Scott or Horace Grant, and they could sure use another scorer, but they mostly need the speed and enthusiasm that Lue, Medvedenko, Madsen and the draft picks (including the young Walton) might supply.

Though I still think, Phil, you ought to give Michael a call. One more championship together. Could be irresistable. And he's always made more on endorsements than salary anyway. The league would be ecstatic. Ratings will not be a problem.

But no reason to listen to me. Just because I predicted that San Antonio would win games 5 and 6 and the championship.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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