These are post-election notes relevant to the election day post which follows.
After a hopeful weekend, a frenzy of election day activity, and even a first flurry of very promising exit poll numbers, everything slowly fell apart. David Gergen, counsel to Republican and one Democratic president, commented as the hoped-for Kerry victory was slipping away, that his university students were going to be devastated, they would not be able to understand this.
How could they understand it when it doesn't make any sense? Beyond that recognition is the intensity of effort and commitment many of them gave. Young people worked for Kerry and voted for Kerry in record numbers. In Ohio, some stood in line for up to ten hours just to cast their votes.
I got an email from a young Kerry activist in California that is well worth quoting. I won't name her because I haven't yet solicited her permission, but this was an email sent to a number of Kerry supporters. Read it in conjunction with the story that follows.
I feel like I’ve been punched in the chest. Like I did after September 11th. Like I did when my mother died.But it’s not because of any self absorbed pity for us having put so much blood sweat and tears into this campaign. It’s because John Kerry should be President of the United States. And America will realize that only when it’s too late. John Kerry is a man of integrity, grace, strength and maturity. He embodies the America of my dreams and distant memories.
I was honored and deeply transformed by participating in the massive mobilization to get this man elected. I was also honored and deeply transformed by working with, and getting to know and love all of you, my compatriots. Your dedication, humor, professionalism and goodness reassures me that this nation cannot and will not suffer for long. She will once again be a beacon to all who want to be shown the light. But it is up to us.
I truly believe that in order to see our vision for this country realized, we must stay unified, energized, organized and positive. There is much work to do both locally and nationally, politically and culturally, physically and spiritually.
Take the month to mourn, rest and regroup. Spend Thanksgiving truly giving thanks for a fight well fought, and a man worth fighting for.Then, I invite all of you to join me as we look to the future and begin that work. We here in Southern California will keep our structure, though we will shift our focus. To those elsewhere, please keep in touch, let me know how you are staying engaged. What groups you recommend, people you believe in that may need support as they run for office, issues and news that needs to be investigated and exposed. Help communicate our values and reframe the debate with those who have been misled by a political and media machinery that is broken and needs to be replaced. Continue to give of your talent, time, money and networks so the foundation upon which we stand will be the only dry, solid, high ground left when the flood comes. Thank you again, and God bless us all.
Friday, November 05, 2004
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
The Future of Hope
We get hope in various ways from various places, inside and outside, in good times and bad. But there's often learning involved, and models. Something that we've seen work in the real world, and someone we could observe in some way, if even from a distance, and perhaps if even through a glass too brightly.
I'm reminded of this because in my meager campaigning efforts, I made some calls to swing states through the Kerry "phone corps" organized on the campaign website. I talked to a woman in Florida (I think it was), whose fifteen year old son was on the volunteer list, and my call to him hadn't been the first. She was a Kerry activist herself, and her son was involved in a political campaign for the first time, though she seemed to feel he wasn't ready for canvassing and phone banking activities. But John Kerry had sparked his interest.
I was fourteen when I got involved in my first political campaign, for John F. Kennedy. It was in a way the last of the old fashioned campaigns, and the first of the new media-dominated ones. I participated in what would be the last election eve campaign parade for many years in Greensburg, Pa. I imagine they've revived them now. John Edwards was speaking there yesterday.
It wasn't called a swing state in 1960. Greensburg was a pretty reliably Republican town inside a heavily Democratic county and region. We lived outside the city limits, in Democrat country. Unions were powerful, and though the tiny city hall was Republican, the big county courthouse was Democrat.
Now I'm out here in California, in a town where there are five Green candidates for city council, one of them named Harmony Groves, another Phoenix Fyre; three unaffiliated, one Democrat, and no Republicans. California was the key to Kennedy’s election, but this year nobody has even visited, certainly not in this little town. We're not a swing state. My sleepy little hometown of Greensburg was one of the first stops for John Kerry and John Edwards after Edwards was selected as the v.p. candidate.
But I know that in Greensburg now, as in Florida now and in Greensburg then, some young people are focusing their hopes on John Kerry, even as they are learning to define what they hope for. If he wins, as JFK did, they will be invested in learning even more. For instance, how to make their hopes happen. And what happens to hopes as they meet the present.
My hope is that they get that chance this time. The 1960 campaign was really formative for me, as was the thousand days of JFK's presidency. It happened to coincide with my experiences in high school forensics, in the system of extemp speaking and debating in competitions. I learned quite a bit from those experiences in those few years.
So in honor of all that, and in hopes that things will turn out well for John Kerry, I want to reproduce a column I wrote for the In Pittsburgh weekly in 1988, about those hopes on an election night when they were cut short.
Young Hearts
For awhile, there was hope. As the sky darkened to dusk beyond the glass wall of the Dukakis headquarters in Chatham Center [Pittsburgh], staffers started hearing about heavy turnouts and early strength in the key states.
The news sent another pulse of energy through the last hours of effort, as staffers collecting numbers from key precincts dispatched their troops---many of them college, high school and junior high students---to where they were most needed. Some volunteers had been up all night hanging leaflets on doors that said "Good morning! Vote Today/Dukakis-Bentsen." They'd been on the phones at the United Steelworkers phone bank, or canvassing and passing out flyers, knocking on doors and stopping people on the street, or simply standing at major intersections waving signs at passing cars. They returned for new instructions to this temporary office, where the message boxes for staffers were white Styrofoam cups tacked to a room divider. They picked at the wilting cold cuts and the pasta salad in the makeshift kitchen, then grabbed their maps and headed out again. For most of them, this was their first campaign.
I was fourteen when John F. Kennedy ran for President. That was my first campaign. I learned about primaries when he ran in Wisconsin; I learned poverty's name when he ran in West Virginia. I thrilled to my first roll-call of the states as I watched the 1960 Democratic Convention, and I taped his acceptance speech on a clunky cut-rate reel-to-reel: "But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises----it is a set of challenges. It sums up, not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not their pocketbook---it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security..." This was the speech that Vice-President Nixon thought was over the heads of the American people.
I went to the local "Citizens for Kennedy" headquarters. The director there may have been the first adult in the public world to take me seriously. He gave me a copy of Kennedy's book, "The Strategy of Peace," which I still have. I handed campaign literature to strangers outside supermarkets and on the street. Once my two best friends and I were sent by bus to a nearby town, Kennedy posters affixed to our persons, front and back, and we stuck leaflets in doors in the pouring rain. I'd read those pamphlets---I was prepared to discuss the issues with anyone. I'm sure we won a few votes---we were so young and enthusiastic, and so completely devoted. And so soaking wet.
Around 8:30 pm, the young Dukakis volunteers began returning from the polls and streamed into the Hyatt ballroom, under the big banner that said, "The Best America is Yet To Come." By then the staffers already knew the score, and their eyes had that peculiar shining---part tears, part defiant excitement. I asked Peg McCormick, the western Pennsylvania campaign director and CMU professor, what effect a Bush victory might have on the young. "If I were sixteen years old and George Bush was President, I wouldn't have excitement about the future---and that's what this is all about, it's the future, it's for them."
I asked the same question of Margaret-Anne McKibben, who teaches some of these high school students. "It could be emotionally devastating," she said. "It's like first love. You believe it with all your heart. And that's why these kinds are here---they really care. They believed that if you work hard, it'll happen. And all these young hearts---they really did work hard."
I stayed up all night to watch the election returns, because it all came down to California. After a few hours sleep, I awoke in mid-morning to watch JFK read, in a voice thick with a morning cold, Nixon's concession telegram. My candidate had won. I had relatives in Washington and I took my first long bus trip alone to visit them on Inaugural weekend. We watched the parade on Friday, toured the monuments on Saturday, and on Sunday we went to the Georgetown church where JFK was known (by me) to go. We lucked out. We sat several pews behind him, and on his way out, the brand new President of the United States---my President---shook my hand.
When I was 15 I knew the names of everyone in the Kennedy cabinet (with a little time, I can recite them still.) I knew his speeches, filled with allusions to philosophers and statesmen; speeches about courage, commitment and moral responsibility, challenging the country to look beyond their immediate present to the future they created with every decision they made. I watched his press conferences, filled with fact and wit. I knew details of his programs---the minimum wage increase, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America---and I followed his battles with a reluctant Congress. I learned about the many facets of leadership, as I learned about the world. The next time I was in Washington was for the great Civil Rights march, but I never thought of this as opposing him. He understood dissent. He was my President. I imitated him in my extemp speeches. I played touch football, and learned to like Boston clam chowder, and to aspire to be educated and seek after greatness.
I was 16 when I watched the world almost end in the Cuban Missile Crisis. (When we came back to homeroom one day, someone had drawn a big mushroom cloud on the blackboard, ha ha.) I read and listened to everything about those events, and learned about decision-making, about strategy and the interplay of personalities, and about different kinds of strength. Then came the nuclear test ban treaty, and I learned what the presidency could be as a force for good, from a President who was so obviously learning and expanding his horizons every day, as I was.
I was 17 when my President was shot to death in Dallas. Kennedy had appealed to our youth with his sense of urgency, and held out to us the opportunity to make a difference, to move forward and not just fight to keep from slipping back; to get at what he always called the unfinished business of America. That sense of urgency filled those three years, the only three years in my conscious lifetime when I looked to a President for leadership. Then the man he defeated for his party's nomination became President and escalated the Vietnam war; then the man he had defeated in the general election became President and prolonged it, and lied and cheated and subverted the Constitution. The nightmare had begun.
That was 25 years ago, as a spate of television documentaries will remind us this month, interspersed with the dopey grin of George Bush, a President-elect whose campaign makes him impossible for me to respect; and the vice-president-elect of the United States of America, Dan Quayle. To me, the history of the presidency since JFK has been a prolonged insult, a black comedy, a tragedy of the absurd, starring twisted or ineffective men.
Even several of the Dukakis staffers from out of state were very young, just out of college. Reagan had been President for more than a third of their lives. Vibrant, intelligent and eager, they've never had a President to emulate, to respect. But there was no overwhelming pall of gloom in the ballroom as the networks made their fatal projections. It wasn't like Boston in 1972, when McGovern workers sat stunned in front of TV monitors, and the ballroom was empty and as quiet as a tomb. The Dukakis kids ran to the TV sets in the four corners of the room to cheer the good news they got, including the fruits of their own efforts: a 120,000 vote plurality in Allegheny County. They talked about catching up on sleep and laundry, and took snapshots of each other, and cherished the bonds they'd made and the feelings that only those who have fought together know. They found what strength and hope they could in each other.
But still...two college students watched Lloyd Bentsen speak to his supporters in Texas. "Mike Dukakis and I waged a campaign that's worthy of the American people," Bentsen said. "Too bad the American people weren't worthy of the campaign," one of them said. "The American people suck," said the other. This was their first campaign. The first one (she's a freshman) said it will be her last. The second (a junior) said she'll be back.
At one point, when Teddy Kennedy was being interviewed, I turned and looked at those who were watching the TV---there was something special in the eyes of the older ones. They remembered.
The young campaigners listened to comments from the podium by Peg McCormick, and County Comissioner Pete Flaherty, and United Steelworkers President Lynn Williams, all of whom took pains to tell them of the progress and the contribution they'd made, and gently urged them not to be discouraged. And when the ballroom became quiet and everyone clustered in the four corners to hear Mike Dukakis make his concession speech from Boston, he also singled out his young supporters, and urged them to realize the satisfaction of working to help others and---a specific Kennedy echo---of making a contribution. He called politics " a noble profession." In Boston, the crowd started chanting, "92!" In the ballroom here, a young voice shouted, "Don't give up!"
When Mike and Kitty Dukakis disappeared from the screen, Kenny Blake's band played again, and the young staffers and volunteers clustered together and hugged and said goodbye. Then they danced. And then the music stopped.
* * * *
Now the young Lieutenant Governor in the Dukakis administration is the repository of the hopes of young hearts like those in 1988 and 1960. Our hope is that as a result of their efforts, the music won't stop so soon. It'll still be playing on Inauguration Day.
We get hope in various ways from various places, inside and outside, in good times and bad. But there's often learning involved, and models. Something that we've seen work in the real world, and someone we could observe in some way, if even from a distance, and perhaps if even through a glass too brightly.
I'm reminded of this because in my meager campaigning efforts, I made some calls to swing states through the Kerry "phone corps" organized on the campaign website. I talked to a woman in Florida (I think it was), whose fifteen year old son was on the volunteer list, and my call to him hadn't been the first. She was a Kerry activist herself, and her son was involved in a political campaign for the first time, though she seemed to feel he wasn't ready for canvassing and phone banking activities. But John Kerry had sparked his interest.
I was fourteen when I got involved in my first political campaign, for John F. Kennedy. It was in a way the last of the old fashioned campaigns, and the first of the new media-dominated ones. I participated in what would be the last election eve campaign parade for many years in Greensburg, Pa. I imagine they've revived them now. John Edwards was speaking there yesterday.
It wasn't called a swing state in 1960. Greensburg was a pretty reliably Republican town inside a heavily Democratic county and region. We lived outside the city limits, in Democrat country. Unions were powerful, and though the tiny city hall was Republican, the big county courthouse was Democrat.
Now I'm out here in California, in a town where there are five Green candidates for city council, one of them named Harmony Groves, another Phoenix Fyre; three unaffiliated, one Democrat, and no Republicans. California was the key to Kennedy’s election, but this year nobody has even visited, certainly not in this little town. We're not a swing state. My sleepy little hometown of Greensburg was one of the first stops for John Kerry and John Edwards after Edwards was selected as the v.p. candidate.
But I know that in Greensburg now, as in Florida now and in Greensburg then, some young people are focusing their hopes on John Kerry, even as they are learning to define what they hope for. If he wins, as JFK did, they will be invested in learning even more. For instance, how to make their hopes happen. And what happens to hopes as they meet the present.
My hope is that they get that chance this time. The 1960 campaign was really formative for me, as was the thousand days of JFK's presidency. It happened to coincide with my experiences in high school forensics, in the system of extemp speaking and debating in competitions. I learned quite a bit from those experiences in those few years.
So in honor of all that, and in hopes that things will turn out well for John Kerry, I want to reproduce a column I wrote for the In Pittsburgh weekly in 1988, about those hopes on an election night when they were cut short.
Young Hearts
For awhile, there was hope. As the sky darkened to dusk beyond the glass wall of the Dukakis headquarters in Chatham Center [Pittsburgh], staffers started hearing about heavy turnouts and early strength in the key states.
The news sent another pulse of energy through the last hours of effort, as staffers collecting numbers from key precincts dispatched their troops---many of them college, high school and junior high students---to where they were most needed. Some volunteers had been up all night hanging leaflets on doors that said "Good morning! Vote Today/Dukakis-Bentsen." They'd been on the phones at the United Steelworkers phone bank, or canvassing and passing out flyers, knocking on doors and stopping people on the street, or simply standing at major intersections waving signs at passing cars. They returned for new instructions to this temporary office, where the message boxes for staffers were white Styrofoam cups tacked to a room divider. They picked at the wilting cold cuts and the pasta salad in the makeshift kitchen, then grabbed their maps and headed out again. For most of them, this was their first campaign.
I was fourteen when John F. Kennedy ran for President. That was my first campaign. I learned about primaries when he ran in Wisconsin; I learned poverty's name when he ran in West Virginia. I thrilled to my first roll-call of the states as I watched the 1960 Democratic Convention, and I taped his acceptance speech on a clunky cut-rate reel-to-reel: "But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises----it is a set of challenges. It sums up, not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them. It appeals to their pride, not their pocketbook---it holds out the promise of more sacrifice instead of more security..." This was the speech that Vice-President Nixon thought was over the heads of the American people.
I went to the local "Citizens for Kennedy" headquarters. The director there may have been the first adult in the public world to take me seriously. He gave me a copy of Kennedy's book, "The Strategy of Peace," which I still have. I handed campaign literature to strangers outside supermarkets and on the street. Once my two best friends and I were sent by bus to a nearby town, Kennedy posters affixed to our persons, front and back, and we stuck leaflets in doors in the pouring rain. I'd read those pamphlets---I was prepared to discuss the issues with anyone. I'm sure we won a few votes---we were so young and enthusiastic, and so completely devoted. And so soaking wet.
Around 8:30 pm, the young Dukakis volunteers began returning from the polls and streamed into the Hyatt ballroom, under the big banner that said, "The Best America is Yet To Come." By then the staffers already knew the score, and their eyes had that peculiar shining---part tears, part defiant excitement. I asked Peg McCormick, the western Pennsylvania campaign director and CMU professor, what effect a Bush victory might have on the young. "If I were sixteen years old and George Bush was President, I wouldn't have excitement about the future---and that's what this is all about, it's the future, it's for them."
I asked the same question of Margaret-Anne McKibben, who teaches some of these high school students. "It could be emotionally devastating," she said. "It's like first love. You believe it with all your heart. And that's why these kinds are here---they really care. They believed that if you work hard, it'll happen. And all these young hearts---they really did work hard."
I stayed up all night to watch the election returns, because it all came down to California. After a few hours sleep, I awoke in mid-morning to watch JFK read, in a voice thick with a morning cold, Nixon's concession telegram. My candidate had won. I had relatives in Washington and I took my first long bus trip alone to visit them on Inaugural weekend. We watched the parade on Friday, toured the monuments on Saturday, and on Sunday we went to the Georgetown church where JFK was known (by me) to go. We lucked out. We sat several pews behind him, and on his way out, the brand new President of the United States---my President---shook my hand.
When I was 15 I knew the names of everyone in the Kennedy cabinet (with a little time, I can recite them still.) I knew his speeches, filled with allusions to philosophers and statesmen; speeches about courage, commitment and moral responsibility, challenging the country to look beyond their immediate present to the future they created with every decision they made. I watched his press conferences, filled with fact and wit. I knew details of his programs---the minimum wage increase, the Peace Corps, the Alliance for Progress in Latin America---and I followed his battles with a reluctant Congress. I learned about the many facets of leadership, as I learned about the world. The next time I was in Washington was for the great Civil Rights march, but I never thought of this as opposing him. He understood dissent. He was my President. I imitated him in my extemp speeches. I played touch football, and learned to like Boston clam chowder, and to aspire to be educated and seek after greatness.
I was 16 when I watched the world almost end in the Cuban Missile Crisis. (When we came back to homeroom one day, someone had drawn a big mushroom cloud on the blackboard, ha ha.) I read and listened to everything about those events, and learned about decision-making, about strategy and the interplay of personalities, and about different kinds of strength. Then came the nuclear test ban treaty, and I learned what the presidency could be as a force for good, from a President who was so obviously learning and expanding his horizons every day, as I was.
I was 17 when my President was shot to death in Dallas. Kennedy had appealed to our youth with his sense of urgency, and held out to us the opportunity to make a difference, to move forward and not just fight to keep from slipping back; to get at what he always called the unfinished business of America. That sense of urgency filled those three years, the only three years in my conscious lifetime when I looked to a President for leadership. Then the man he defeated for his party's nomination became President and escalated the Vietnam war; then the man he had defeated in the general election became President and prolonged it, and lied and cheated and subverted the Constitution. The nightmare had begun.
That was 25 years ago, as a spate of television documentaries will remind us this month, interspersed with the dopey grin of George Bush, a President-elect whose campaign makes him impossible for me to respect; and the vice-president-elect of the United States of America, Dan Quayle. To me, the history of the presidency since JFK has been a prolonged insult, a black comedy, a tragedy of the absurd, starring twisted or ineffective men.
Even several of the Dukakis staffers from out of state were very young, just out of college. Reagan had been President for more than a third of their lives. Vibrant, intelligent and eager, they've never had a President to emulate, to respect. But there was no overwhelming pall of gloom in the ballroom as the networks made their fatal projections. It wasn't like Boston in 1972, when McGovern workers sat stunned in front of TV monitors, and the ballroom was empty and as quiet as a tomb. The Dukakis kids ran to the TV sets in the four corners of the room to cheer the good news they got, including the fruits of their own efforts: a 120,000 vote plurality in Allegheny County. They talked about catching up on sleep and laundry, and took snapshots of each other, and cherished the bonds they'd made and the feelings that only those who have fought together know. They found what strength and hope they could in each other.
But still...two college students watched Lloyd Bentsen speak to his supporters in Texas. "Mike Dukakis and I waged a campaign that's worthy of the American people," Bentsen said. "Too bad the American people weren't worthy of the campaign," one of them said. "The American people suck," said the other. This was their first campaign. The first one (she's a freshman) said it will be her last. The second (a junior) said she'll be back.
At one point, when Teddy Kennedy was being interviewed, I turned and looked at those who were watching the TV---there was something special in the eyes of the older ones. They remembered.
The young campaigners listened to comments from the podium by Peg McCormick, and County Comissioner Pete Flaherty, and United Steelworkers President Lynn Williams, all of whom took pains to tell them of the progress and the contribution they'd made, and gently urged them not to be discouraged. And when the ballroom became quiet and everyone clustered in the four corners to hear Mike Dukakis make his concession speech from Boston, he also singled out his young supporters, and urged them to realize the satisfaction of working to help others and---a specific Kennedy echo---of making a contribution. He called politics " a noble profession." In Boston, the crowd started chanting, "92!" In the ballroom here, a young voice shouted, "Don't give up!"
When Mike and Kitty Dukakis disappeared from the screen, Kenny Blake's band played again, and the young staffers and volunteers clustered together and hugged and said goodbye. Then they danced. And then the music stopped.
* * * *
Now the young Lieutenant Governor in the Dukakis administration is the repository of the hopes of young hearts like those in 1988 and 1960. Our hope is that as a result of their efforts, the music won't stop so soon. It'll still be playing on Inauguration Day.
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
The Burning Bush
I had a curious reaction to seeing George W. Bush in his third debate with John Kerry. I felt sorry for him. I'd never seen anyone look so uncomfortable and frightened as he had seemed over the three debates. His famous smirk and defensive sneer, and his dissociated fumbling of answers in the first debate were replaced by overcompensating anger in the second. In the third debate he grinned with the desperation of a trapped animal showing good will so he wouldn't be abused. When he watched Kerry, his eyes were blinking so rapidly I thought he might faint.
I saw a man stripped naked and afraid. I saw a weak person trying to survive until he could once again be sheltered and loved. Putting him up against even a tired John Kerry, with his serious intent, his command of the issues and his full adult humanity, was almost cruel. John Kerry is flawed, as we all are. But John Kerry is a man. George W. Bush is a wounded boy.
We've seen that frightened wounded boy before, sitting in front of children of grade school age, a child's book in his hands, immediately after he'd been told that a second airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center, and it wasn't an accident. He was then, and still is, President of the United States.
The debate was last Wednesday. This past Sunday, an article appeared in the New York Times Magazine that electrified Washington and the blogosphere. It was by Ron Suskind, who authored the best selling book in which former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil chronicles Bush's obsession with Iraq and his willing ignorance of anything that contradicted his preconceived views.
Suskind begins by quoting Bruce Bartlett, a Republican official in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations, speaking about G.W. Bush: "This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence."
Bush explained his decisions by saying he went on instinct, on intuition. But soon he wasn't explaining his decisions at all. The circle of advisors grew smaller and tighter, and knew not to question. Because Bush is Chief Executive, his faith-based initiatives were no longer a personal quirk. They were holy writ.
The article quotes Christie Todd Whitman, former Secretary of EPA as saying on the day she announced her resignation, "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty."
(Suskind notes that Whitman, "her faith in Bush...renewed," now denies saying this, and heads the Bush campaign in New Jersey. Which is evidence why Suskind's initial premise---that a Bush victory would mean a civil war within the Republican party-is wrong.)
The article states that Bush really sees the war against terrorism as Christians against the heathens. It quotes Bush talking to a private dinner of fat cats and suggesting his second term priorities will be faith-based initiatives, drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness, mollifying the Saudis, and that he expect to make up to four appointments to the Supreme Court. Suskind writes that Bush's appeal is his sense of certainty, gained from his faith-based decision-making. In perhaps the most widely quoted portion on the blogosphere, Suskind writes:
"And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community. "
This final observation has already become such a rallying cry that one well-known left-leaning blogger, Atrios, has added to the title of his blog the legend: Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.
But the opposition of faith and reality doesn't quite get to what really is going on in Bush, or even in the Bush followers, it seems to me. I see it in different terms. I'll express it in the simplest, shortest possible way: when G.W. Bush believes he is listening to God, he is listening to his own unconscious. Bush is a captive of his own shadow: at least his personal fears and rages, and perhaps by now something of the collective fears and rages.
Because he is ruled by his unconscious, when he looks at the Other he sees mostly his own projections. He can't discriminate in realistic terms, to discern who is an enemy and why. He sees only the evildoers, the projections of his own shadow.
He is a captive because he does not know this is happening. He believes the source of his certainty is elsewhere. He must have certainty, because he is a wounded mess, and fundamentally has a weak ego, which requires constant reassurance and approval. The only place he can go for certainty is his unconscious. It speaks to him. But even if he could understand this, he couldn't face it. He can't face that he could be wrong. Not any more.
Many now enable him, for their own benefit. Without his protectors, flatterers and supporters, he is naked, he reverts to the behavior of a scared child.
Many people who had their doubts about his intelligence were reassured when he named Dick Cheney as his v.p., and then Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. They would tell him what he didn't know. But the essential problem with George W. Bush isn't his lack of knowledge. It is his lack of self-knowledge.
For one thing, it's why he doesn't listen to anyone like Colin Powell when they tell him what he doesn't want to hear.
But his well-known disdain for introspection is not just the personality preference of a clearly extraverted executive. It is essential to his equanimity. He couldn't remain sober, let along function, without the certainty that his projections provide.
All that is bad enough. It means that the most powerful human on the planet is in very meaningful ways a buried child. If he had been President of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, none of us would be alive today.
And that may not even be the worst of it.
Also this week, I took another look at the play I wrote two summers ago, which features a fictional meeting between H.G. Wells and C.G. Jung in New Mexico in 1940. This sent me back to reading a biographical account of Jung in the years preceding and during the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II. That in turn sent me to related texts.
The similarities of issues and ideas in 1940 to the present political context have definite echoes in my play, and they would be quite clear to a contemporary audience, if any ever had the opportunity to see the play performed. But after the debates and reading Suskind's article, reading an account of Jung's activities and thoughts in those years by someone I hadn't read before (Barbara Hannah, a student and later long-time friend of Jung) took on new textures of relevance.
Jung was horrified by the rise of Hitler, and it influenced the course of the last series of books he wrote, in the 1940s and 1950s. They all concerned the conjunctions of conscious and unconscious. I don't pretend to understand very much of what little I've read of this work. But Hannah's biographical account makes it clear that Jung believed there were times when the unconscious predominated in society, and one of those times was the 1930s and Hitler's Germany in World War II. Germany was possessed. "It's no use saying you are not at war with the German people, you are," Jung told Hannah, who was English. "They are all possessed like Hitler and absolutely unapproachable."
Hitler, a fundamentally weak person who flew into childish rages, used modern propaganda techniques and other emotional manipulation to convince Germany he had the simple, correct answer, and he was the strong leader who would protect them and make them conquerors again. They would have control over their lives, and take their rightful place in the world. They would avoid injury and humiliation by smashing their enemies before their enemies could attack them.
Now suppose you were reading or seeing a fiction, in which an American President, in office by virtue of a Supreme Court decision that stopped a vote recount and endorsed his victory by a handful of votes out of millions, took the nation to war against a smaller country that hadn't attacked the U.S. or even a single U.S. citizen. Suppose that later, when the U.S. armed forces are bogged down in that country, and violence and terrorism are increasing there, it is discovered that every single pretext this President gave for going to war has turned out to be not true. Further, there is informed suspicion that much of the evidence was known to be false.
Still, this President announced that he would attack any nation he deemed a danger, without provocation and more or less without evidence. Whenever anyone within his administration or even near it questioned his premises, strategy or public relations imagery, his minions would vilify them without scruple, and attempt to destroy them utterly by any means possible, including lies.
Suppose this war continues to go badly, at the same time as enormous deficits are accumulating, and the economic well-being of the country is in question. There are grave questions about the continued vulnerability of the country to terrorism, while some measures taken to prevent terrorism have turned out to be inept intrusions, randomly violating civil liberties and punishing innocent citizens without system of redress or justice.
Suppose as well that most citizens are economically worse off, and there is widespread dissatisfaction with the system of medical care, which seems on the verge of collapse. Public education is unequal, and mostly very bad; Americans are becoming the worst-educated, least-healthy citizens in the industrialized West. Then gasoline prices go through the roof, signaling a grave energy crisis in the near future. At the same time, a shortage of flu vaccine just as the flu season starts, not only threatens the health of vulnerable people, but suggests the public health system is itself highly vulnerable, if not in shambles.
Suppose corporate greed is unchecked and is rapidly being consolidated in a few hands. Financial institutions practice usury with impunity. The U.S. government improperly imprisons both foreigners and citizens for years, and engages in torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons and Guantanamo prison. America, once admired throughout the world, became feared and hated by most of the world, all in the course of two or three years. And hovering above all of this, is an atmosphere inexorably heating, threatening all life on the planet, but which this President ignores, while he denies that he is ignoring it.
Confronted with all this, you would be justified in saying this plot is over the top. Any one of these things in the past would have been sufficient to bring down a presidency. Yet the president in question is apparently leading in the polls, and has at least an even chance---some say a likelihood---of being returned to office.
How can this be? Some are now looking to the faith-based versus reality-based model. I believe that's too simple, and it is not entirely accurate. Evangelical Christianity is to Bush what German nationalism was to Hitler. It's the form taken by the appeal to the collective shadow, the national unconscious.
The unconscious is itself a reality. It is part of all of us. In many ways it nourishes us, and is the source of much knowledge. But consciousness is crucial, to be aware of what comes from the unconscious, to judge and discriminate, to decide. To tap the unconscious is vital. To be dominated by the unconscious, to be unconscious, is fatal.
Why might it be erupting now? The ecology of ignorance, and its constituent parts (the contemporary forms of "modern propaganda"), is a contributing factor. My intuition, my instincts tell me there is also a class component. Middle class Americans are uncertain about their status. Many came from (and are headed back to) the lower middle class or working class; in the recent past they had money, but they weren't sure they had class. Now they don't have money but they still have some stuff, and the uncertainty is joined by whiffs of fear only symbolized by the bogie man called terrorism. Bush has wounds like theirs, the lack of self-knowledge like theirs, (though probably worse) but his inferiority feelings are linked to a legacy of superiority from his very certain ruling class upbringing. They feel his pain. But they see his certainty. Their inferiority needs his sense of superiority, and the confidence he gets from his projections, from his shadow in the unconscious.
Jung took a longer view, analyzing a dynamic of opposites and how they turn into one another over eons-as, for example, "the dilemma of Christ and anti-Christ." The reversal of dominants, called enantioendromia, was a tendency Jung explored in his last books.
Those familiar with the Biblical Apocalypse may note that the anti-Christ appears to be the Second Coming. Perhaps those of a strictly reality-based rationality cannot admit the possibilities of eras of evil erupting and possessing entire peoples. Fortunately, if that is indeed what happened in the 1940s, there were nations strong enough to stand up to Hitler and his Germany, and their allies, and defeat them. Hitler appeared to be a tower of strength and resolve. But like most bullies, he was actually a coward. Perhaps even a wounded child. Nevertheless, much of Germany followed him. And his followers crushed anyone who dared to oppose them.
I had a curious reaction to seeing George W. Bush in his third debate with John Kerry. I felt sorry for him. I'd never seen anyone look so uncomfortable and frightened as he had seemed over the three debates. His famous smirk and defensive sneer, and his dissociated fumbling of answers in the first debate were replaced by overcompensating anger in the second. In the third debate he grinned with the desperation of a trapped animal showing good will so he wouldn't be abused. When he watched Kerry, his eyes were blinking so rapidly I thought he might faint.
I saw a man stripped naked and afraid. I saw a weak person trying to survive until he could once again be sheltered and loved. Putting him up against even a tired John Kerry, with his serious intent, his command of the issues and his full adult humanity, was almost cruel. John Kerry is flawed, as we all are. But John Kerry is a man. George W. Bush is a wounded boy.
We've seen that frightened wounded boy before, sitting in front of children of grade school age, a child's book in his hands, immediately after he'd been told that a second airliner had crashed into the World Trade Center, and it wasn't an accident. He was then, and still is, President of the United States.
The debate was last Wednesday. This past Sunday, an article appeared in the New York Times Magazine that electrified Washington and the blogosphere. It was by Ron Suskind, who authored the best selling book in which former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neil chronicles Bush's obsession with Iraq and his willing ignorance of anything that contradicted his preconceived views.
Suskind begins by quoting Bruce Bartlett, a Republican official in both the Reagan and Bush I administrations, speaking about G.W. Bush: "This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts. He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence."
Bush explained his decisions by saying he went on instinct, on intuition. But soon he wasn't explaining his decisions at all. The circle of advisors grew smaller and tighter, and knew not to question. Because Bush is Chief Executive, his faith-based initiatives were no longer a personal quirk. They were holy writ.
The article quotes Christie Todd Whitman, former Secretary of EPA as saying on the day she announced her resignation, "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty."
(Suskind notes that Whitman, "her faith in Bush...renewed," now denies saying this, and heads the Bush campaign in New Jersey. Which is evidence why Suskind's initial premise---that a Bush victory would mean a civil war within the Republican party-is wrong.)
The article states that Bush really sees the war against terrorism as Christians against the heathens. It quotes Bush talking to a private dinner of fat cats and suggesting his second term priorities will be faith-based initiatives, drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness, mollifying the Saudis, and that he expect to make up to four appointments to the Supreme Court. Suskind writes that Bush's appeal is his sense of certainty, gained from his faith-based decision-making. In perhaps the most widely quoted portion on the blogosphere, Suskind writes:
"And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community. "
This final observation has already become such a rallying cry that one well-known left-leaning blogger, Atrios, has added to the title of his blog the legend: Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.
But the opposition of faith and reality doesn't quite get to what really is going on in Bush, or even in the Bush followers, it seems to me. I see it in different terms. I'll express it in the simplest, shortest possible way: when G.W. Bush believes he is listening to God, he is listening to his own unconscious. Bush is a captive of his own shadow: at least his personal fears and rages, and perhaps by now something of the collective fears and rages.
Because he is ruled by his unconscious, when he looks at the Other he sees mostly his own projections. He can't discriminate in realistic terms, to discern who is an enemy and why. He sees only the evildoers, the projections of his own shadow.
He is a captive because he does not know this is happening. He believes the source of his certainty is elsewhere. He must have certainty, because he is a wounded mess, and fundamentally has a weak ego, which requires constant reassurance and approval. The only place he can go for certainty is his unconscious. It speaks to him. But even if he could understand this, he couldn't face it. He can't face that he could be wrong. Not any more.
Many now enable him, for their own benefit. Without his protectors, flatterers and supporters, he is naked, he reverts to the behavior of a scared child.
Many people who had their doubts about his intelligence were reassured when he named Dick Cheney as his v.p., and then Colin Powell as his Secretary of State. They would tell him what he didn't know. But the essential problem with George W. Bush isn't his lack of knowledge. It is his lack of self-knowledge.
For one thing, it's why he doesn't listen to anyone like Colin Powell when they tell him what he doesn't want to hear.
But his well-known disdain for introspection is not just the personality preference of a clearly extraverted executive. It is essential to his equanimity. He couldn't remain sober, let along function, without the certainty that his projections provide.
All that is bad enough. It means that the most powerful human on the planet is in very meaningful ways a buried child. If he had been President of the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, none of us would be alive today.
And that may not even be the worst of it.
Also this week, I took another look at the play I wrote two summers ago, which features a fictional meeting between H.G. Wells and C.G. Jung in New Mexico in 1940. This sent me back to reading a biographical account of Jung in the years preceding and during the rise of Nazi Germany and World War II. That in turn sent me to related texts.
The similarities of issues and ideas in 1940 to the present political context have definite echoes in my play, and they would be quite clear to a contemporary audience, if any ever had the opportunity to see the play performed. But after the debates and reading Suskind's article, reading an account of Jung's activities and thoughts in those years by someone I hadn't read before (Barbara Hannah, a student and later long-time friend of Jung) took on new textures of relevance.
Jung was horrified by the rise of Hitler, and it influenced the course of the last series of books he wrote, in the 1940s and 1950s. They all concerned the conjunctions of conscious and unconscious. I don't pretend to understand very much of what little I've read of this work. But Hannah's biographical account makes it clear that Jung believed there were times when the unconscious predominated in society, and one of those times was the 1930s and Hitler's Germany in World War II. Germany was possessed. "It's no use saying you are not at war with the German people, you are," Jung told Hannah, who was English. "They are all possessed like Hitler and absolutely unapproachable."
Hitler, a fundamentally weak person who flew into childish rages, used modern propaganda techniques and other emotional manipulation to convince Germany he had the simple, correct answer, and he was the strong leader who would protect them and make them conquerors again. They would have control over their lives, and take their rightful place in the world. They would avoid injury and humiliation by smashing their enemies before their enemies could attack them.
Now suppose you were reading or seeing a fiction, in which an American President, in office by virtue of a Supreme Court decision that stopped a vote recount and endorsed his victory by a handful of votes out of millions, took the nation to war against a smaller country that hadn't attacked the U.S. or even a single U.S. citizen. Suppose that later, when the U.S. armed forces are bogged down in that country, and violence and terrorism are increasing there, it is discovered that every single pretext this President gave for going to war has turned out to be not true. Further, there is informed suspicion that much of the evidence was known to be false.
Still, this President announced that he would attack any nation he deemed a danger, without provocation and more or less without evidence. Whenever anyone within his administration or even near it questioned his premises, strategy or public relations imagery, his minions would vilify them without scruple, and attempt to destroy them utterly by any means possible, including lies.
Suppose this war continues to go badly, at the same time as enormous deficits are accumulating, and the economic well-being of the country is in question. There are grave questions about the continued vulnerability of the country to terrorism, while some measures taken to prevent terrorism have turned out to be inept intrusions, randomly violating civil liberties and punishing innocent citizens without system of redress or justice.
Suppose as well that most citizens are economically worse off, and there is widespread dissatisfaction with the system of medical care, which seems on the verge of collapse. Public education is unequal, and mostly very bad; Americans are becoming the worst-educated, least-healthy citizens in the industrialized West. Then gasoline prices go through the roof, signaling a grave energy crisis in the near future. At the same time, a shortage of flu vaccine just as the flu season starts, not only threatens the health of vulnerable people, but suggests the public health system is itself highly vulnerable, if not in shambles.
Suppose corporate greed is unchecked and is rapidly being consolidated in a few hands. Financial institutions practice usury with impunity. The U.S. government improperly imprisons both foreigners and citizens for years, and engages in torture and abuse in Iraqi prisons and Guantanamo prison. America, once admired throughout the world, became feared and hated by most of the world, all in the course of two or three years. And hovering above all of this, is an atmosphere inexorably heating, threatening all life on the planet, but which this President ignores, while he denies that he is ignoring it.
Confronted with all this, you would be justified in saying this plot is over the top. Any one of these things in the past would have been sufficient to bring down a presidency. Yet the president in question is apparently leading in the polls, and has at least an even chance---some say a likelihood---of being returned to office.
How can this be? Some are now looking to the faith-based versus reality-based model. I believe that's too simple, and it is not entirely accurate. Evangelical Christianity is to Bush what German nationalism was to Hitler. It's the form taken by the appeal to the collective shadow, the national unconscious.
The unconscious is itself a reality. It is part of all of us. In many ways it nourishes us, and is the source of much knowledge. But consciousness is crucial, to be aware of what comes from the unconscious, to judge and discriminate, to decide. To tap the unconscious is vital. To be dominated by the unconscious, to be unconscious, is fatal.
Why might it be erupting now? The ecology of ignorance, and its constituent parts (the contemporary forms of "modern propaganda"), is a contributing factor. My intuition, my instincts tell me there is also a class component. Middle class Americans are uncertain about their status. Many came from (and are headed back to) the lower middle class or working class; in the recent past they had money, but they weren't sure they had class. Now they don't have money but they still have some stuff, and the uncertainty is joined by whiffs of fear only symbolized by the bogie man called terrorism. Bush has wounds like theirs, the lack of self-knowledge like theirs, (though probably worse) but his inferiority feelings are linked to a legacy of superiority from his very certain ruling class upbringing. They feel his pain. But they see his certainty. Their inferiority needs his sense of superiority, and the confidence he gets from his projections, from his shadow in the unconscious.
Jung took a longer view, analyzing a dynamic of opposites and how they turn into one another over eons-as, for example, "the dilemma of Christ and anti-Christ." The reversal of dominants, called enantioendromia, was a tendency Jung explored in his last books.
Those familiar with the Biblical Apocalypse may note that the anti-Christ appears to be the Second Coming. Perhaps those of a strictly reality-based rationality cannot admit the possibilities of eras of evil erupting and possessing entire peoples. Fortunately, if that is indeed what happened in the 1940s, there were nations strong enough to stand up to Hitler and his Germany, and their allies, and defeat them. Hitler appeared to be a tower of strength and resolve. But like most bullies, he was actually a coward. Perhaps even a wounded child. Nevertheless, much of Germany followed him. And his followers crushed anyone who dared to oppose them.
Monday, October 11, 2004
Christopher Reeve
I never met Christopher Reeve, although I knew people who had, and I came within a few hours of crossing paths with him, years before his riding accident. That was on Martha's Vineyard, where a friend was managing a residential resort (where, she said, the rich who owned homes would send their less prestigious guests to stay.) It had its own dining facilities and Reeve had dined there the evening before my visit. (He liked the chef's chocolate souffle, and he was sure right about that. I've never tasted anything like it.) So people were still talking about him, how friendly and genuine he had been.
I saw him in a play in New York once,accompanying another old friend who had worked with him on a movie. It was "The Fifth of July" and he was playing a paraplegic veteran. This was after the first few Superman movies and he was doing parts as far away from the Man of Steel as he could find, my friend said.
I also remember the premiere of "Superman" in New York City. It was the first of the big event special-effects movies. (It also started the trend of the endless credits, so now the gaffer's hair stylist's caterer gets named, even on films with six special effects houses.) It was the big deal of 1978, and the press premiere had two showings. I was in New York and got a ticket; on my way to the second showing I ran into Jon Landau (later Bruce Springsteen's manager, at some point film critic for Rolling Stone, and before that, a movie and music reviewer in Boston; that's where I'd known him, and where we'd seen a few films together.) He was with director Brian DePalma (who he introduced) and DePalma's squeeze, actress Nancy Allen (who he didn't.) So it was a prestige event as well as a popular movie.
That first Superman movie was the purest American myth the cinema had seen in a long time. A lot of the credit belongs to Christopher Reeve. One of the sillier conventions of the Superman story was that nobody could see that Superman looked exactly like Clark Kent without the glasses. Reeve made that a little more believable with his voice, his posture and mannerisms. He made Clark Kent and Superman seem like different people (even if they still looked a lot alike), and besides adding to the verisimilitude, this illuminated an important element of the myth. The "secret identity," the theme of the superhero inside the timid bumbler was basic to the myth and its power, linked in this case to the classic American story of the country boy in the big city.
For common to both Clark Kent and Superman was a purity, an innocent belief in simple values---honesty, equality, justice, helping others and using violence only as a last resort--- that tradition places at the heart of being American. In Superman, those values were brought from the country to the city, and in a way, from the 1930s origin of the Superman myth, to the contemporary city.
The 1930s story also symbolizes the immigrant's journey, which also was often from rural peasantry to the city, but even when it wasn't, involved being different, out of place in an alien environment. Yet the essence of Superman's power comes from a higher realm, symbolized by his Krypton origins (linking this myth to both the divine origin and the royal child abandoned and raised by peasants.)
This meaning of this origin is also reflected in Superman's most thrilling power---and the one everyone wanted to see if the movie could really pull off. The conflicted boy becomes (in Francois Truffaut's words, talking to me about the movie later that year) "the man who flies." It is our dreams' favorite transcendence.
In the first film as in several that followed, Superman is conflicted, his nature divided against itself, just as aspects of our natures are in continual conflict. Christopher Reeve played these conflicts, including a battle with the dark side of his super-herohood. He created one of the great American film characters, in a series of often witty and mostly entertaining films. (Richard Lester, director of the Beatles films, brought some of that wacky energy to the second and third Superman films.)
Between the second and third Superman movies, Reeve made his other memorable film, "Somewhere in Time," (1980) his most romantic movie, opposite the surpassingly lovely Jane Seymour. (They became close friends, and Seymour named her son after him.) He combined his love of theatre with his film career in the witty "Deathtrap" with Michael Caine. (1982)
His confident, nuanced character part in 1993's "Remains of the Day" seemed to signal a new turn in his film career, suggesting he wouldn't have to either accept the Superman-like roles or the opposite. His life changed soon after, when a fall from a horse in 1995 left him paralyzed. He continued to act and also to direct, but much of his public life was devoted to raising money and encouraging research to be applied to spinal chord injuries. He had been politically involved before; his self-produced Superman IV was called "A Quest for Peace." Now this medical research became his passion, and as testimonials today reiterate, he was perhaps an even greater inspiration in this role than as Superman.
Reeve insisted a cure was close, and he vowed he would walk again. Last Friday, Senator John Kerry mentioned him in the second debate, in connection with the stem-cell research issue. Reeve and Kerry were friends, and Kerry said that Reeve continued to exercise every day, to keep himself ready to take advantage of new therapies.
But as photographs show, time was catching up with him. Only 52, Reeve seemed to age 20 years in 24 months. Weakened and stricken by a sudden infection, he died Sunday.
One of the last phone calls Christopher Reeve made was to John Kerry on Saturday, to urge him to continue to keep the stem cell research issue at the forefront of his campaign for the presidency. As Kerry said today, we have the power to try harder to help others before their time runs out.
This applies most specifically to stem cell research, but it also applies to affordable health care. Christopher Reeve lived as long as he did, and as comfortably, because he was well-off and a celebrity, and had so many famous friends to help him. (Those friends, by the way, stuck by him even outside the limelight all these years.) But people without those resources suffer as much or more, from conditions that medical science can already cure or alleviate. Yet in this, the wealthiest nation in human history, we are among the last to recognize that medicine needn't be reserved for only the highest bidders.
I never met Christopher Reeve, although I knew people who had, and I came within a few hours of crossing paths with him, years before his riding accident. That was on Martha's Vineyard, where a friend was managing a residential resort (where, she said, the rich who owned homes would send their less prestigious guests to stay.) It had its own dining facilities and Reeve had dined there the evening before my visit. (He liked the chef's chocolate souffle, and he was sure right about that. I've never tasted anything like it.) So people were still talking about him, how friendly and genuine he had been.
I saw him in a play in New York once,accompanying another old friend who had worked with him on a movie. It was "The Fifth of July" and he was playing a paraplegic veteran. This was after the first few Superman movies and he was doing parts as far away from the Man of Steel as he could find, my friend said.
I also remember the premiere of "Superman" in New York City. It was the first of the big event special-effects movies. (It also started the trend of the endless credits, so now the gaffer's hair stylist's caterer gets named, even on films with six special effects houses.) It was the big deal of 1978, and the press premiere had two showings. I was in New York and got a ticket; on my way to the second showing I ran into Jon Landau (later Bruce Springsteen's manager, at some point film critic for Rolling Stone, and before that, a movie and music reviewer in Boston; that's where I'd known him, and where we'd seen a few films together.) He was with director Brian DePalma (who he introduced) and DePalma's squeeze, actress Nancy Allen (who he didn't.) So it was a prestige event as well as a popular movie.
That first Superman movie was the purest American myth the cinema had seen in a long time. A lot of the credit belongs to Christopher Reeve. One of the sillier conventions of the Superman story was that nobody could see that Superman looked exactly like Clark Kent without the glasses. Reeve made that a little more believable with his voice, his posture and mannerisms. He made Clark Kent and Superman seem like different people (even if they still looked a lot alike), and besides adding to the verisimilitude, this illuminated an important element of the myth. The "secret identity," the theme of the superhero inside the timid bumbler was basic to the myth and its power, linked in this case to the classic American story of the country boy in the big city.
For common to both Clark Kent and Superman was a purity, an innocent belief in simple values---honesty, equality, justice, helping others and using violence only as a last resort--- that tradition places at the heart of being American. In Superman, those values were brought from the country to the city, and in a way, from the 1930s origin of the Superman myth, to the contemporary city.
The 1930s story also symbolizes the immigrant's journey, which also was often from rural peasantry to the city, but even when it wasn't, involved being different, out of place in an alien environment. Yet the essence of Superman's power comes from a higher realm, symbolized by his Krypton origins (linking this myth to both the divine origin and the royal child abandoned and raised by peasants.)
This meaning of this origin is also reflected in Superman's most thrilling power---and the one everyone wanted to see if the movie could really pull off. The conflicted boy becomes (in Francois Truffaut's words, talking to me about the movie later that year) "the man who flies." It is our dreams' favorite transcendence.
In the first film as in several that followed, Superman is conflicted, his nature divided against itself, just as aspects of our natures are in continual conflict. Christopher Reeve played these conflicts, including a battle with the dark side of his super-herohood. He created one of the great American film characters, in a series of often witty and mostly entertaining films. (Richard Lester, director of the Beatles films, brought some of that wacky energy to the second and third Superman films.)
Between the second and third Superman movies, Reeve made his other memorable film, "Somewhere in Time," (1980) his most romantic movie, opposite the surpassingly lovely Jane Seymour. (They became close friends, and Seymour named her son after him.) He combined his love of theatre with his film career in the witty "Deathtrap" with Michael Caine. (1982)
His confident, nuanced character part in 1993's "Remains of the Day" seemed to signal a new turn in his film career, suggesting he wouldn't have to either accept the Superman-like roles or the opposite. His life changed soon after, when a fall from a horse in 1995 left him paralyzed. He continued to act and also to direct, but much of his public life was devoted to raising money and encouraging research to be applied to spinal chord injuries. He had been politically involved before; his self-produced Superman IV was called "A Quest for Peace." Now this medical research became his passion, and as testimonials today reiterate, he was perhaps an even greater inspiration in this role than as Superman.
Reeve insisted a cure was close, and he vowed he would walk again. Last Friday, Senator John Kerry mentioned him in the second debate, in connection with the stem-cell research issue. Reeve and Kerry were friends, and Kerry said that Reeve continued to exercise every day, to keep himself ready to take advantage of new therapies.
But as photographs show, time was catching up with him. Only 52, Reeve seemed to age 20 years in 24 months. Weakened and stricken by a sudden infection, he died Sunday.
One of the last phone calls Christopher Reeve made was to John Kerry on Saturday, to urge him to continue to keep the stem cell research issue at the forefront of his campaign for the presidency. As Kerry said today, we have the power to try harder to help others before their time runs out.
This applies most specifically to stem cell research, but it also applies to affordable health care. Christopher Reeve lived as long as he did, and as comfortably, because he was well-off and a celebrity, and had so many famous friends to help him. (Those friends, by the way, stuck by him even outside the limelight all these years.) But people without those resources suffer as much or more, from conditions that medical science can already cure or alleviate. Yet in this, the wealthiest nation in human history, we are among the last to recognize that medicine needn't be reserved for only the highest bidders.
Friday, October 08, 2004
Relevance of Ignorance
In an email response to the "Ecology of Ignorance," (posted below) an old college friend mentioned the fate of the great library of Alexandria, where "the wisdom of the ancients was burned for heat because the authors failed to make the knowledge relevant and the burners saw no value in the knowledge. The modern twist is that today we have agents who intentionally turn the scrolls into firelogs before marketing them to the cold and hungry."
Bill Thompson, who is currently counseling factory workers in a dying plant in Hamilton, Ontario, recalls this interpretation of what happened in Alexandria from Carl Sagan's TV series and book, Cosmos.
According to Sagan, Alexandria was a city devoted to knowledge, beginning with its founding by Alexander the Great in 300 B.C. The library was "the brain and glory of the greatest city on the planet, the first true research institute in the history of the world.... The Alexandrian Library is where we humans first collected, seriously and systematically, the knowledge of the world."
The library reflected the city's zealous commitment to books. Ships in port were searched, not for contraband but for books: in those days, prized handmade and often unique repositories. When found, the books were seized, copied and returned to their owners, and the copy became part of the library's huge collection.
But it was more than a repository of the known or proposed: the library contained "ten large research halls, each devoted to a separate subject; fountains and colonnades; botanical gardens; a zoo; dissecting rooms; an observatory; and a great dining hall, where, at leisure, was conducted the critical discussion of ideas." Among the community of scholars were Euclid, Ptolemy and Archimedes, and lesser known names like Herophilus (who first located the thinking functions in the brain), Dionysius of Thrace (who defined the parts of speech and "did for the study of language what Euclid did for geometry,") and Heron of Alexandria, who invented gear trains and steam engines, and wrote a book on robots.
Alexandria was the cosmopolis, where people of all nations came, lived, traded, studied: Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, Italians, Arabs, Iberians, Syrians...This amazing city and its library thrived for six hundred years. Yet we know almost nothing about the library, because it was totally destroyed by a mob composed of the city's own citizens. Not a single scroll out of thousands survived. Because many were rare or unique, that destruction meant the complete loss of the works themselves, in mathematics, physical sciences and the arts. All the works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were there, and most were lost forever. Of the 123 plays Sophocles is known to have written, we have but seven. A three volume history of the world by a Babylonian author was lost entirely.
The Christian/Catholic Church is usually blamed for the library's destruction, and indeed it was the Archbishop of Alexandria who inflamed followers, leading to the murder of the library's last great scholar, Hypatia, and the burning of the library itself. The Church was trying to obliterate rival "pagan" beliefs and practices, and it was here that learning and science became identified with godlessness and specifically paganism.
But even though Carl Sagan saw what we would call fundamentalist religion as a perennial threat to science, he did not attribute the loss of the Alexandrian library, which set the human race back centuries, only to the Church. By this time Alexandria was under Roman rule, and there was slavery. As to why this library and its knowledge were destroyed, Sagan writes (in the book version of Cosmos) "I cannot give you a simple answer. But I do know this: there is no record, in the entire history of the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not."
"Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little."
Sagan sums up: "Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them."
There are three points here: the scholars did not involve themselves in the issues of the day that affected the whole society; they did not explain their work in ways that people could understand; they made no practical applications of what they learned that would benefit people.
The third point is complicated in our time, for science certainly does lead, rather too quickly at times, to practical application. It's the nature of those applications (along with the honesty of the science leading to them) that is the public issue of our time. Carl Sagan's own career showed how seriously he took the first two points: he was perhaps the greatest popularizer of science of his generation and since, especially in translating and transmitting his enthusiasm and wonder. And he was foremost as well in applying science to political issues, notably nuclear weapons.
Though his comments on mysticism were problematic at times, and his faith in science perhaps excessive, the lessons Carl Sagan drew from the burning of the Alexandrian library are pertinent to our time. If we are suffering through a period of decline marked by a sappy cynicism personified in every television commercial, part of the ecology of ignorance is the gap between those in the academies of knowledge, and those who are not. If we are to truly learn from history, we ought to recognize that as different as our world now is, the relationship of the academy to society and to other institutions has roots and echoes in Alexandria.
Yes, we have many scientists and journalists who popularize science with great conscientiousness and skill. There is probably more quality work available than ever before, especially with the addition of video. But beyond stars and dinosaurs, genes and brains, what fields of knowledge are popularly explored? There have been fine efforts in ecology (like David Suzuki's tv series on the web of life) and environmental issues that call for political response. But what about the intersection of economics and ecology that society finds most difficult to deal with? Here the science as well as the communication are the problems. The same is true in another crucial area, psychology and society.
Within academia a variety of points of view is one thing, but self-referential confusion and inner directed concentration on careerism and academic politics is another. In some instances, clear communication would reveal mostly the essential confusion and irrelevance in the discipline itself. Only obscurant vocabulary and self-consistent but dubious systems of analysis mask it.
For in the end, ignorance does go both ways. The cubicle worker may be ignorant of academic concerns, but there's trouble too when the academic is ignorant of the cubicle worker's life, let alone the lives of the struggling families at the frayed and jagged edges of the self-sustaining middle class, or black children who have few elder men in their lives because so many black men die young in America.
Then there's Bill Thompson's additional point: "that today we have agents who intentionally turn the scrolls into firelogs before marketing them to the cold and hungry." There is the echo of the old Church in the fundamentalist right's insistence on ignorance of everything that they interpret as not being part of their revelation. But academics who get apoplectic on the subject of religion, are missing the bigger picture (and obscuring potential allies if they don't differentiate better.) The politicians who serve and are served by the rabid right (in its fundamentalist or other true believer mode, or simply in its strategic guise of dogmatism) are also in thrall to the corporate faith in the obscuring power of public relations, advertising and marketing. These are the primary tools of dominance in our day (apart from the often less successful military and economic oppression) and they require an audience that is satisfied to be ignorant.
We have some evidence at the moment that when reality impinges too painfully on the carefully constructed shared fantasy, people get restless. Right now they are watching the presidential/vp debates in uncommon numbers. The Bush campaign is throwing everything it has into attacks that have less and less to do with reality; not only the reality of Iraq and the economy, but specifically the reality of what their opponents said or did. Whether enough voters see through these lies and resist their comforts will determine the election, which will determine the course and speed of the evolution of ignorance.
We have new voices out there, using knowledge to focus issues and choose solutions. Voices like Dale Mahharidge, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Homeland, who gets his views on the social consequences of today's economics from talking in depth with real people where they live, beyond the platitudes and badly informed generalizations. Yet his research has focused and inspired broader ideas. For instance, he advocates what others have called the next industrial revolution, in renewable energy technology, specifically embodied in the new Apollo Project.
Voices like Robert Kennedy, Jr., who in his book, Crimes Against Nature, brings together environmental science, politics, corporate power and law as they combine to affect the lives and health of people---including the health of his own children. Long an environmental advocate in the courts and in his community, he seems to have concluded that it is time for him to become more involved in national politics because corporations keep nullifying his court victories against pollution by having the law changed. In a Kerry cabinet, he would be a dynamic Environmental Secretary who could very well make a dramatic difference.
People like Maharidge (a university professor as well as author) and Robert Kennedy Jr. make their case by honestly gathering and applying knowledge, and clearly articulating its relevance. Perhaps restoring faith in the honesty of knowledge, and its relevance, can help to restore it to cultural value. While we continue to create new ways to communicate knowledge in ways that develop a sense of wonder and an abiding fascination, not just in specific findings but in the activity, the pursuit. Ignorance may lose some of its cache, as well as its distracting and destructive power. Maybe Alexandria is due for a comeback.
In an email response to the "Ecology of Ignorance," (posted below) an old college friend mentioned the fate of the great library of Alexandria, where "the wisdom of the ancients was burned for heat because the authors failed to make the knowledge relevant and the burners saw no value in the knowledge. The modern twist is that today we have agents who intentionally turn the scrolls into firelogs before marketing them to the cold and hungry."
Bill Thompson, who is currently counseling factory workers in a dying plant in Hamilton, Ontario, recalls this interpretation of what happened in Alexandria from Carl Sagan's TV series and book, Cosmos.
According to Sagan, Alexandria was a city devoted to knowledge, beginning with its founding by Alexander the Great in 300 B.C. The library was "the brain and glory of the greatest city on the planet, the first true research institute in the history of the world.... The Alexandrian Library is where we humans first collected, seriously and systematically, the knowledge of the world."
The library reflected the city's zealous commitment to books. Ships in port were searched, not for contraband but for books: in those days, prized handmade and often unique repositories. When found, the books were seized, copied and returned to their owners, and the copy became part of the library's huge collection.
But it was more than a repository of the known or proposed: the library contained "ten large research halls, each devoted to a separate subject; fountains and colonnades; botanical gardens; a zoo; dissecting rooms; an observatory; and a great dining hall, where, at leisure, was conducted the critical discussion of ideas." Among the community of scholars were Euclid, Ptolemy and Archimedes, and lesser known names like Herophilus (who first located the thinking functions in the brain), Dionysius of Thrace (who defined the parts of speech and "did for the study of language what Euclid did for geometry,") and Heron of Alexandria, who invented gear trains and steam engines, and wrote a book on robots.
Alexandria was the cosmopolis, where people of all nations came, lived, traded, studied: Greeks, Egyptians, Hebrews, Persians, Italians, Arabs, Iberians, Syrians...This amazing city and its library thrived for six hundred years. Yet we know almost nothing about the library, because it was totally destroyed by a mob composed of the city's own citizens. Not a single scroll out of thousands survived. Because many were rare or unique, that destruction meant the complete loss of the works themselves, in mathematics, physical sciences and the arts. All the works of Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were there, and most were lost forever. Of the 123 plays Sophocles is known to have written, we have but seven. A three volume history of the world by a Babylonian author was lost entirely.
The Christian/Catholic Church is usually blamed for the library's destruction, and indeed it was the Archbishop of Alexandria who inflamed followers, leading to the murder of the library's last great scholar, Hypatia, and the burning of the library itself. The Church was trying to obliterate rival "pagan" beliefs and practices, and it was here that learning and science became identified with godlessness and specifically paganism.
But even though Carl Sagan saw what we would call fundamentalist religion as a perennial threat to science, he did not attribute the loss of the Alexandrian library, which set the human race back centuries, only to the Church. By this time Alexandria was under Roman rule, and there was slavery. As to why this library and its knowledge were destroyed, Sagan writes (in the book version of Cosmos) "I cannot give you a simple answer. But I do know this: there is no record, in the entire history of the Library, that any of its illustrious scientists and scholars ever seriously challenged the political, economic and religious assumptions of their society. The permanence of the stars was questioned; the justice of slavery was not."
"Science and learning in general were the preserve of a privileged few. The vast population of the city had not the vaguest notion of the great discoveries taking place within the Library. New findings were not explained or popularized. The research benefited them little."
Sagan sums up: "Science never captured the imagination of the multitude. There was no counterbalance to stagnation, to pessimism, to the most abject surrenders to mysticism. When, at long last, the mob came to burn the Library down, there was nobody to stop them."
There are three points here: the scholars did not involve themselves in the issues of the day that affected the whole society; they did not explain their work in ways that people could understand; they made no practical applications of what they learned that would benefit people.
The third point is complicated in our time, for science certainly does lead, rather too quickly at times, to practical application. It's the nature of those applications (along with the honesty of the science leading to them) that is the public issue of our time. Carl Sagan's own career showed how seriously he took the first two points: he was perhaps the greatest popularizer of science of his generation and since, especially in translating and transmitting his enthusiasm and wonder. And he was foremost as well in applying science to political issues, notably nuclear weapons.
Though his comments on mysticism were problematic at times, and his faith in science perhaps excessive, the lessons Carl Sagan drew from the burning of the Alexandrian library are pertinent to our time. If we are suffering through a period of decline marked by a sappy cynicism personified in every television commercial, part of the ecology of ignorance is the gap between those in the academies of knowledge, and those who are not. If we are to truly learn from history, we ought to recognize that as different as our world now is, the relationship of the academy to society and to other institutions has roots and echoes in Alexandria.
Yes, we have many scientists and journalists who popularize science with great conscientiousness and skill. There is probably more quality work available than ever before, especially with the addition of video. But beyond stars and dinosaurs, genes and brains, what fields of knowledge are popularly explored? There have been fine efforts in ecology (like David Suzuki's tv series on the web of life) and environmental issues that call for political response. But what about the intersection of economics and ecology that society finds most difficult to deal with? Here the science as well as the communication are the problems. The same is true in another crucial area, psychology and society.
Within academia a variety of points of view is one thing, but self-referential confusion and inner directed concentration on careerism and academic politics is another. In some instances, clear communication would reveal mostly the essential confusion and irrelevance in the discipline itself. Only obscurant vocabulary and self-consistent but dubious systems of analysis mask it.
For in the end, ignorance does go both ways. The cubicle worker may be ignorant of academic concerns, but there's trouble too when the academic is ignorant of the cubicle worker's life, let alone the lives of the struggling families at the frayed and jagged edges of the self-sustaining middle class, or black children who have few elder men in their lives because so many black men die young in America.
Then there's Bill Thompson's additional point: "that today we have agents who intentionally turn the scrolls into firelogs before marketing them to the cold and hungry." There is the echo of the old Church in the fundamentalist right's insistence on ignorance of everything that they interpret as not being part of their revelation. But academics who get apoplectic on the subject of religion, are missing the bigger picture (and obscuring potential allies if they don't differentiate better.) The politicians who serve and are served by the rabid right (in its fundamentalist or other true believer mode, or simply in its strategic guise of dogmatism) are also in thrall to the corporate faith in the obscuring power of public relations, advertising and marketing. These are the primary tools of dominance in our day (apart from the often less successful military and economic oppression) and they require an audience that is satisfied to be ignorant.
We have some evidence at the moment that when reality impinges too painfully on the carefully constructed shared fantasy, people get restless. Right now they are watching the presidential/vp debates in uncommon numbers. The Bush campaign is throwing everything it has into attacks that have less and less to do with reality; not only the reality of Iraq and the economy, but specifically the reality of what their opponents said or did. Whether enough voters see through these lies and resist their comforts will determine the election, which will determine the course and speed of the evolution of ignorance.
We have new voices out there, using knowledge to focus issues and choose solutions. Voices like Dale Mahharidge, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Homeland, who gets his views on the social consequences of today's economics from talking in depth with real people where they live, beyond the platitudes and badly informed generalizations. Yet his research has focused and inspired broader ideas. For instance, he advocates what others have called the next industrial revolution, in renewable energy technology, specifically embodied in the new Apollo Project.
Voices like Robert Kennedy, Jr., who in his book, Crimes Against Nature, brings together environmental science, politics, corporate power and law as they combine to affect the lives and health of people---including the health of his own children. Long an environmental advocate in the courts and in his community, he seems to have concluded that it is time for him to become more involved in national politics because corporations keep nullifying his court victories against pollution by having the law changed. In a Kerry cabinet, he would be a dynamic Environmental Secretary who could very well make a dramatic difference.
People like Maharidge (a university professor as well as author) and Robert Kennedy Jr. make their case by honestly gathering and applying knowledge, and clearly articulating its relevance. Perhaps restoring faith in the honesty of knowledge, and its relevance, can help to restore it to cultural value. While we continue to create new ways to communicate knowledge in ways that develop a sense of wonder and an abiding fascination, not just in specific findings but in the activity, the pursuit. Ignorance may lose some of its cache, as well as its distracting and destructive power. Maybe Alexandria is due for a comeback.
Sunday, October 03, 2004
When Elsewhere is Nowhere
Somewhere on the East Coast a woman I've never met is getting phone calls today prompted by something I wrote. At least this is what I imagine and expect, based on past experience. A substantial positive review in the Sunday review section of the San Francisco Chronicle, the big cheese in a book-buying town, can be a fairly big deal for an author, especially of serious nonfiction, even one as already celebrated as Kay Redfield Jamison.
Friends probably called her, and if her agent or editor hasn't, they will likely mention it in their next conversation. (I did hear of another best-selling author who happened to be in San Francisco when my review came out, and he called his editor and read the complete short review to him over the phone.) I got an email from Leonard Nimoy on my New York Times Star Trek piece which he said was "a fun read for me" and "I've had a lot excited calls from folks who enjoyed it." Needless to say, I got no excited calls myself.
A quote might be taken from today's review for an ad or a blurb on the paperback edition, but more likely than not, it will be attributed only to "San Francisco Chronicle." That's happened before, and it's how this game is played---I've done it myself: if the reviewer isn't a national name, the name of the paper is more impressive on a blurb. An article or review might get reproduced on web sites and be a cause for a blog comment here and there, but unless I write something else on exactly that subject covered by the site, it won't happen again.
These are ways in which some of what I write becomes consequential in the world. It happens elsewhere. Hereabouts, just silence. I got no calls today, and never do; even though I got some nice emails from people I interviewed or were otherwise involved in the Star Trek story, I got no calls from anyone else about it.
Nor are there usually any other consequences to my life, apart from getting paid, and that's seldom very much. The jury is still out on the further adventures the Star Trek piece might lead me on, but most everything else has had no direct or discernable effect here. Today's review didn't, and won't.
Even though I should be used to this, and probably would be undone if I did get calls, I still find this a bit alienating. You know, feeling alien to this place. A familiar feeling.
Musing on this is prompted by something else. In reading my own review I noticed something I didn't like. Though on balance it's solid and has some music to it, I detect some slackness here and there in the writing. Especially things I should have caught, and probably would have if I had gone through it once more, a day or so after I finished it. And I realize that my state of mind at the time I wrote it had some effect. For one thing, I've concluded I have no immediate future and probably no future at all with the Chronicle, beyond writing for minimal payment. I've contacted other papers who pay better for reviews, but haven't gotten a response. What I have now taken note of is that my feelings regarding this have affected my work, although so far only in small matters of style that few others are likely to detect.
So the motivation of building something isn't there to compensate for the lack of motivation from my immediate environment, or let's say my life. There's not much motivation anywhere for the quality of the writing. Even where this review or that article might be consequential, it's not because of the sentences. It's whether it is a positive or negative review, and whether it has a selling line in it or not. For an article it's whether it is good press or bad press for the subject. (In fact it seems that the reviewers who themselves get attention get it for writing biting negative reviews.)
I am exaggerating a bit---I know that when people say they enjoy a piece that they are in part feeling the effect of the writing. Just as I'm exaggerating about lack of response: I've had subjects of reviews and articles contact me and express gratitude for the attention, the quality of it, and for being "understood." I sometimes even get phone calls and emails from readers,usually no more than one per piece, often from a stranger with a strange story to tell; I am usually discomfited by these calls though I hold them in awe as well. A complete stranger going to all that trouble means some chord was struck, something important to that person. I value all those responses very much.
But most of the motivation for writing as well as I can, comes from an inner compulsion, an inner dialogue (I write things I hope to enjoy reading), and principle. Maybe even some writerly fear and/or superstition, that if you abuse the gift you lose it.
I also wonder if my new-found equanimity about editing that detracts from my work (subject of an earlier entry on 9/09) is the other side of this. I had a piece recently that was essentially strip-mined for a newsier and stylistically blunt and forgettable collection of information. It didn't bother me, at least not as it would have in the past.
Standing on principle seldom gets approval from others when it means offending somebody with power, or cutting off a source of income. I see pretty clearly that caring so much about the integrity of the final product has done me and my "career" far more harm than good. And I take note that the work I feel closest to, that I consider my best, is not generally so approved. So the worth of what I defend is questionable, especially to others. So what do I do?
As the editor of a Japanese art magazine once said to me when I asked him when I would be paid, "good question!" Certainly attending more rigorously to the writing that I am commissioned to do, at whatever price, is an obvious lesson and not that hard to heed. Being able to publish my work myself on the Internet helps enormously. I get more feedback from doing that, especially from the people on my email lists, than from anything else. But for the larger questions, it's hard to say.
There is a sense in which I've always felt it is out of my hands. We are servants of the gifts we're given, and whatever value they have (or are supposed to have) is probably more to the whole than to us. Whatever the "whole" might be. I suspect it includes other times and other places.
Just as the ants probably don't suffer from angst about searching out sugar and not finding much, we just do what we are compelled to do, regardless.
Somewhere on the East Coast a woman I've never met is getting phone calls today prompted by something I wrote. At least this is what I imagine and expect, based on past experience. A substantial positive review in the Sunday review section of the San Francisco Chronicle, the big cheese in a book-buying town, can be a fairly big deal for an author, especially of serious nonfiction, even one as already celebrated as Kay Redfield Jamison.
Friends probably called her, and if her agent or editor hasn't, they will likely mention it in their next conversation. (I did hear of another best-selling author who happened to be in San Francisco when my review came out, and he called his editor and read the complete short review to him over the phone.) I got an email from Leonard Nimoy on my New York Times Star Trek piece which he said was "a fun read for me" and "I've had a lot excited calls from folks who enjoyed it." Needless to say, I got no excited calls myself.
A quote might be taken from today's review for an ad or a blurb on the paperback edition, but more likely than not, it will be attributed only to "San Francisco Chronicle." That's happened before, and it's how this game is played---I've done it myself: if the reviewer isn't a national name, the name of the paper is more impressive on a blurb. An article or review might get reproduced on web sites and be a cause for a blog comment here and there, but unless I write something else on exactly that subject covered by the site, it won't happen again.
These are ways in which some of what I write becomes consequential in the world. It happens elsewhere. Hereabouts, just silence. I got no calls today, and never do; even though I got some nice emails from people I interviewed or were otherwise involved in the Star Trek story, I got no calls from anyone else about it.
Nor are there usually any other consequences to my life, apart from getting paid, and that's seldom very much. The jury is still out on the further adventures the Star Trek piece might lead me on, but most everything else has had no direct or discernable effect here. Today's review didn't, and won't.
Even though I should be used to this, and probably would be undone if I did get calls, I still find this a bit alienating. You know, feeling alien to this place. A familiar feeling.
Musing on this is prompted by something else. In reading my own review I noticed something I didn't like. Though on balance it's solid and has some music to it, I detect some slackness here and there in the writing. Especially things I should have caught, and probably would have if I had gone through it once more, a day or so after I finished it. And I realize that my state of mind at the time I wrote it had some effect. For one thing, I've concluded I have no immediate future and probably no future at all with the Chronicle, beyond writing for minimal payment. I've contacted other papers who pay better for reviews, but haven't gotten a response. What I have now taken note of is that my feelings regarding this have affected my work, although so far only in small matters of style that few others are likely to detect.
So the motivation of building something isn't there to compensate for the lack of motivation from my immediate environment, or let's say my life. There's not much motivation anywhere for the quality of the writing. Even where this review or that article might be consequential, it's not because of the sentences. It's whether it is a positive or negative review, and whether it has a selling line in it or not. For an article it's whether it is good press or bad press for the subject. (In fact it seems that the reviewers who themselves get attention get it for writing biting negative reviews.)
I am exaggerating a bit---I know that when people say they enjoy a piece that they are in part feeling the effect of the writing. Just as I'm exaggerating about lack of response: I've had subjects of reviews and articles contact me and express gratitude for the attention, the quality of it, and for being "understood." I sometimes even get phone calls and emails from readers,usually no more than one per piece, often from a stranger with a strange story to tell; I am usually discomfited by these calls though I hold them in awe as well. A complete stranger going to all that trouble means some chord was struck, something important to that person. I value all those responses very much.
But most of the motivation for writing as well as I can, comes from an inner compulsion, an inner dialogue (I write things I hope to enjoy reading), and principle. Maybe even some writerly fear and/or superstition, that if you abuse the gift you lose it.
I also wonder if my new-found equanimity about editing that detracts from my work (subject of an earlier entry on 9/09) is the other side of this. I had a piece recently that was essentially strip-mined for a newsier and stylistically blunt and forgettable collection of information. It didn't bother me, at least not as it would have in the past.
Standing on principle seldom gets approval from others when it means offending somebody with power, or cutting off a source of income. I see pretty clearly that caring so much about the integrity of the final product has done me and my "career" far more harm than good. And I take note that the work I feel closest to, that I consider my best, is not generally so approved. So the worth of what I defend is questionable, especially to others. So what do I do?
As the editor of a Japanese art magazine once said to me when I asked him when I would be paid, "good question!" Certainly attending more rigorously to the writing that I am commissioned to do, at whatever price, is an obvious lesson and not that hard to heed. Being able to publish my work myself on the Internet helps enormously. I get more feedback from doing that, especially from the people on my email lists, than from anything else. But for the larger questions, it's hard to say.
There is a sense in which I've always felt it is out of my hands. We are servants of the gifts we're given, and whatever value they have (or are supposed to have) is probably more to the whole than to us. Whatever the "whole" might be. I suspect it includes other times and other places.
Just as the ants probably don't suffer from angst about searching out sugar and not finding much, we just do what we are compelled to do, regardless.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
The Ecology of Ignorance
"If this is the Information Age, "a woman asks the befuddled man in a suit at the usual cocktail party in the 1980s New Yorker cartoon, "why doesn't anybody know anything?"
That's one aspect of the paradox. It isn't just information overload. It's surrender.
Ignorance is fashionable. One of these days somebody at Vanity Fair will start calling it the New Ignorance. It seems to go right along with the New Normal.
We're in the midst of a political campaign where one candidate is pilloried for being too nuanced. He believes complex problems are complex, and the other guy---the guy who appears to be winning the hearts and mindlessness of America---believes complex problems can be made simple if you only pour enough blood and money on them, and hire people who get their kicks from lying viciously and outrageously, and getting away with it. Intelligence is unfashionable, dude.
Historian Richard Hofstader published a book called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that linked the tradition to what we'd now call fundamentalist religion. Intellectuals are individualistic, and individualism is an invitation to sin. The church and the community keep everyone on the path of truth and virtue. It was an idea suited to the 1960s, in revolt against the conformist, outer-directed fifties.
I found that book in my hometown public library, on the shelf for new books in 1963, when I was in high school. In those days, you signed your name on the library card, and when you took the book back, that card went back in the pocket of the book. So in those innocent, pre-Patriot Act days, you knew who was reading what.
Some 20 years later, when my hometown library had moved to bigger quarters but hadn't updated its system, I chanced on this very same book while visiting the stacks. I looked at the card in the back. My name was there, and there was no name after it.
But small town anti-intellectualism, at least as old as Sinclair Lewis (who in fact seemed mighty contemporary when I read him, also in high school) isn't the whole story. Here we've got the Internet, inter-library systems, an amazing variety of periodicals and books available almost everywhere, and hundreds of channels of what was once sold to the public as the greatest educational device ever (television, which came after the similarly sold radio and before the ditto computer). And we're as dumb as posts and getting dumber. Ignorance this profound takes some effort. This is learned ignorance.
In the nineteenth and early 20th century, aspiration to wealth implied aspiration to knowledge, sophistication and taste. The immigrant Scottish boy Andrew Carnegie writes rapturously of his first raise, his first investment, but also his first reading (and first library), his first taste of Shakespeare and Wagner, and how his outlook changed after seeing the best new paintings in Europe. That’s how we got Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Museum and all those libraries.
Slaves in America worshipped literacy and risked their lives to learn to read; Wynton Marsalis talks about how the cultured, well-spoken and erudite man was the epitome of style in the black culture of New Orleans.
We think of certain immigrant groups as devoted to education, and not always only as a way to get ahead, and other immigrant groups as indifferent. Probably the differences have as much to do with whether the immigrants came from poor and rural areas, or middle class and urban. But ignorance was not a positive value for any immigrant group in the past, at least not completely.
There is the phenomenon of the working class hero to consider---at the same time as working class kids may be encouraged to get an education to get ahead, they are also cautioned not to get too fancy or go too far. It's the separation from the values of the group, the family, the community, and the church again. Who do you think you are? You think you're better than us?
The break point might have been my parents generation, when a solid middle class life became possible without much education, and the culture began to minimize the value of non-ignorance, except as credential or job training. The first baby boomers had clearer access to college than any generation before or since, and we took advantage of it. But what did it really mean? So the paradox begins, as non-ignorance becomes a freakish aspiration.
Lots of books have characterized the phenomenon, from William Whyte's Organization Man to R. S. Scorer's 1977 The Clever Moron to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Even more books have seen it as part of society's apocalypse, like John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization, Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture, and Jacques Barzun's elegy for western civilization, From Dawn to Decadence.
Is it decadence? The decay of the wealthy classes is hard to measure, since it's hard to recall when the wealthy weren't decadent. Today a lot of people like to act wealthy and think of themselves as such. But there's nothing inherent in a richer society that says it has to value ignorance. The 1960s began with a different vision of wealth, and a different vision of where our society and democracy were going. John F. Kennedy had money, but also intelligence, knowledge, wit, charm and style. He laced his speeches with quotations, often from distinguished writers he had actually read. Contrary to today's propaganda, the New Frontier wasn't about muscling the Russians. It was about solving problems reasonably, and applying knowledge to problem-solving.
My generation had those models for awhile. Robert Kennedy could recite long passages and poetry from memory. He cherished the company of poets, writers and thinkers. Eugene McCarthy was something of an intellectual. There were others in public life; there were in the 60s even public intellectuals, and we used to actually see them on television, on nationally broadcast talk shows---and not just on Sunday morning. Even Barry Goldwater was pretty well read, and no fan of ignorance.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century America of George W. Bush, and it's pretty frightening. This is the future?
Probably nobody will believe this now, but at that first televised presidential debate in 1960, voters were interested in which of the candidates was smarter. Who knew more. Who had intelligent solutions.
Today of course the Republicans win universal praise from the political experts for a campaign that has exactly one message endlessly repeated. Does it matter that they avoid issues that will decide the future? Does it matter that their message is a lie, and they know it is, and so do the experts? Of course not. The experts deride other campaign for not doing the same thing.
According to the conventional wisdom, ignorance is the new normal. Or the new morality.
Our society could have valued knowledge and intelligence. Our best are getting better; there are amazingly intelligent books out there written for non-specialists, by people who sincerely want to apply intelligence to an understanding of life, as well as to solve problems. But we never made that commitment to intelligence, at least not for very long.
You could call what's happened to our standards for public dialogue a kind of decadence, though it's not the product so much of lassitude as rapacity. Some say there was an American Establishment that kept the public dialogue civilized, but that it fell apart when it was unable to restrain Nixon and what came after. Maybe. But there's no sense of responsibility replacing artificial standards and enforcers, especially since dog eat dog became enshrined as the American Dream in the 1980s. That's the only kind of individualism left.
Ignorance is useful when you're trying to fool people, and with a consumer economy so dependent on advertising, fooling people is a basis for this apparent prosperity. Ignorance is even more useful to gain political power when your policies are actually harming the electorate. You have to fool them then. It's apparently pretty easy. How can an administration that squandered a huge surplus and put the country in ascending debt for generations, while making things economically worse for most voters, partly by engaging in a war it said it had to fight, but every reason it gave has been repeatedly and authoratatively discredited, and that in less than four years made America hated in most of the world and terrorism more of a threat to American security and safety ---how can these folks not be laughed or booed off the stage? Are we living in some dissociated sort of continuous panic? Don't we believe any of this really matters, so we can elect our favorite clown? Whatever happened to won't get fooled again?
G.W. and his crowd speak in the simplistic and inflammatory language that generations and generations have argued and demonstrated is destructive and self-destructive, not to mention inaccurate. Those generations built a level of knowledge we should be standing on, to get to the next level. People bled and died, slaughtered and were slaughtered, suffered outrageous fortune, made horrendous errors and learned from them, and left us knowledge, and works of art and thought so complex and yet so grounded that we can learn from them at every stage of our lives and of our society.
Such knowledge and the desire for it were always minority concerns, for people who could afford such things, the elites. The promise of American democracy and its economic implications, especially in the abundance of our era and with its instant communications, was that everybody could have access to that knowledge. Everybody could be the elite. There are plenty of problems with our democracy and current economy that imperil this promise, but there also seems to be a lack of demand. For the opposites of ignorance.
We're going to need even more sophisticated knowledge and a synthesis of new concepts and old wisdom if the civilization built at such a high price in costly knowledge is to get out of this century intact. H.G. Wells said our civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Catastrophe is winning. But never mind: where's my cheese?
Here's a little theory: when a society is building and ascending, it aspires to knowledge. But when it is on the way down, ignorance is bliss.
Our society is racing to the bottom. Economically, that became clear when Wal-Mart became the largest and most powerful corporation in the world. In the 50s and 60s, the talk about factory jobs was that they were dehumanizing, alienating. The assembly line was a living metaphor for tedious semi-slavery and brain-death. Today those factory jobs are held up as a lost paradise, because they disappeared, leaving behind jobs that pay much less and are even more dehumanizing. Instead of being a human robot on the auto assembly line, you get to be a talking robot serving the assembly line of other mindless human robots lined up for tasty mass produced patties of fried fat and rainforest-destroying cow meat. And that's just one of your three jobs, maybe the best one.
In his book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank tried to discover why middle America votes against its own interests, particularly its economic interests. Why do the so-called social issues trump? A species of anti-intellectualism, the Nation reviewer suggested.
Maybe. Dale Maharidge, author of Homeland, makes a telling observation. He writes a lot about race, and he realized that almost everyone he interviewed who was violently racist, had some enormous problem---huge medical bills they couldn't pay for, long-standing unemployment, and so on. They directed their anger at others who they believed---who they were told---were getting a free ride while they suffered. (A white man with $200,000 in hospital bills believed that immigrants automatically get free health care.) But Maharidge's point was this: What if they all had good jobs and health care? "Would they be so enraged? I don't think so."
So people in power keep their power by enforcing the ignorance that lets them lie and hammer away with simpleminded statements and slogans, and people buy it. And the very suffering they cause helps them, which they probably know. So things are never going to get better for the people near the bottom, and they're on their way to the very bottom.
That helps to explain why television and popular culture has become so vile, vulgar, and stupid. It's ignorance that's got production values, plastic surgery, bright empty smiles and brittle irony. If television advertising can successfully weaken the higher brain functions, it can go straight to the glands. And it is apparently important that people be kept down, mired in anxiety and in pain, so they will look for scapegoats and believe the ignorant lies of radio talk shows. Ignorance sells. But eventually no one will be able to afford to buy.
Part of this may be time. The population of the U.S. in 1960 was 180 million. It's about a hundred and ten million more now. After World War II, the lower middle class grew so fast into the middle class that its tastes became the dominant ones in the culture. Funny isn't it, that even the filthy rich are living a tawdry lower middle class cultural life. Thank you, Andy Warhola.
Little girls are growing up, wanting to be just like Paris Hilton.
On the other hand, when I was growing up, English muffins were foreign food.
Problem is, time is one of the many things we're running out of. We do, however, seem to have an endless supply of ignorance. All those cell phones. And not a damn thing worth saying.
So this is our cultural epitaph: we actually were halfway to a better world. We began to understand what we were wrong about, and what we needed to do. We had even reached something of a cultural consensus on some of what is right: things like racial equality, the environment and so on. That's why our leaders have to call their rapacious policies to cut down trees by the name of "Healthy Forests." They can't any longer come out and say what they're doing. They are counting on our ignorance, and our weakness (we'll feel good about the title, and we'll be glad we don't have to change or sacrifice anything, like colorful cardboard boxes around everything we buy.)
But we couldn't quite commit to knowledge and discernment. We couldn't quite take on the discipline of separating our unconscious from our conscious decisions. Jung warned us in the 1950s that our civilization hangs by a slender thread. It's fraying to the breaking point.
Sure, there's elitism, political correctness, class snobbery and a lot of intellectuals and experts so out of touch with themselves that they don't even know how irrational they are. There are schematic thinkers who use big words, charts and graphs to tell well paid lies, and right wing think tanks who can spin out pithy theories and heartless systems in abstract language with the best of them. But those aren't reasons to worship at the catheral of ignorance.
Is there a way out of the ecology of ignorance? You gotta see it to believe it.
And you could go vote against it.
"If this is the Information Age, "a woman asks the befuddled man in a suit at the usual cocktail party in the 1980s New Yorker cartoon, "why doesn't anybody know anything?"
That's one aspect of the paradox. It isn't just information overload. It's surrender.
Ignorance is fashionable. One of these days somebody at Vanity Fair will start calling it the New Ignorance. It seems to go right along with the New Normal.
We're in the midst of a political campaign where one candidate is pilloried for being too nuanced. He believes complex problems are complex, and the other guy---the guy who appears to be winning the hearts and mindlessness of America---believes complex problems can be made simple if you only pour enough blood and money on them, and hire people who get their kicks from lying viciously and outrageously, and getting away with it. Intelligence is unfashionable, dude.
Historian Richard Hofstader published a book called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life that linked the tradition to what we'd now call fundamentalist religion. Intellectuals are individualistic, and individualism is an invitation to sin. The church and the community keep everyone on the path of truth and virtue. It was an idea suited to the 1960s, in revolt against the conformist, outer-directed fifties.
I found that book in my hometown public library, on the shelf for new books in 1963, when I was in high school. In those days, you signed your name on the library card, and when you took the book back, that card went back in the pocket of the book. So in those innocent, pre-Patriot Act days, you knew who was reading what.
Some 20 years later, when my hometown library had moved to bigger quarters but hadn't updated its system, I chanced on this very same book while visiting the stacks. I looked at the card in the back. My name was there, and there was no name after it.
But small town anti-intellectualism, at least as old as Sinclair Lewis (who in fact seemed mighty contemporary when I read him, also in high school) isn't the whole story. Here we've got the Internet, inter-library systems, an amazing variety of periodicals and books available almost everywhere, and hundreds of channels of what was once sold to the public as the greatest educational device ever (television, which came after the similarly sold radio and before the ditto computer). And we're as dumb as posts and getting dumber. Ignorance this profound takes some effort. This is learned ignorance.
In the nineteenth and early 20th century, aspiration to wealth implied aspiration to knowledge, sophistication and taste. The immigrant Scottish boy Andrew Carnegie writes rapturously of his first raise, his first investment, but also his first reading (and first library), his first taste of Shakespeare and Wagner, and how his outlook changed after seeing the best new paintings in Europe. That’s how we got Carnegie Hall, Carnegie Museum and all those libraries.
Slaves in America worshipped literacy and risked their lives to learn to read; Wynton Marsalis talks about how the cultured, well-spoken and erudite man was the epitome of style in the black culture of New Orleans.
We think of certain immigrant groups as devoted to education, and not always only as a way to get ahead, and other immigrant groups as indifferent. Probably the differences have as much to do with whether the immigrants came from poor and rural areas, or middle class and urban. But ignorance was not a positive value for any immigrant group in the past, at least not completely.
There is the phenomenon of the working class hero to consider---at the same time as working class kids may be encouraged to get an education to get ahead, they are also cautioned not to get too fancy or go too far. It's the separation from the values of the group, the family, the community, and the church again. Who do you think you are? You think you're better than us?
The break point might have been my parents generation, when a solid middle class life became possible without much education, and the culture began to minimize the value of non-ignorance, except as credential or job training. The first baby boomers had clearer access to college than any generation before or since, and we took advantage of it. But what did it really mean? So the paradox begins, as non-ignorance becomes a freakish aspiration.
Lots of books have characterized the phenomenon, from William Whyte's Organization Man to R. S. Scorer's 1977 The Clever Moron to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. Even more books have seen it as part of society's apocalypse, like John Ralston Saul's The Unconscious Civilization, Morris Berman's The Twilight of American Culture, and Jacques Barzun's elegy for western civilization, From Dawn to Decadence.
Is it decadence? The decay of the wealthy classes is hard to measure, since it's hard to recall when the wealthy weren't decadent. Today a lot of people like to act wealthy and think of themselves as such. But there's nothing inherent in a richer society that says it has to value ignorance. The 1960s began with a different vision of wealth, and a different vision of where our society and democracy were going. John F. Kennedy had money, but also intelligence, knowledge, wit, charm and style. He laced his speeches with quotations, often from distinguished writers he had actually read. Contrary to today's propaganda, the New Frontier wasn't about muscling the Russians. It was about solving problems reasonably, and applying knowledge to problem-solving.
My generation had those models for awhile. Robert Kennedy could recite long passages and poetry from memory. He cherished the company of poets, writers and thinkers. Eugene McCarthy was something of an intellectual. There were others in public life; there were in the 60s even public intellectuals, and we used to actually see them on television, on nationally broadcast talk shows---and not just on Sunday morning. Even Barry Goldwater was pretty well read, and no fan of ignorance.
Fast-forward to the twenty-first century America of George W. Bush, and it's pretty frightening. This is the future?
Probably nobody will believe this now, but at that first televised presidential debate in 1960, voters were interested in which of the candidates was smarter. Who knew more. Who had intelligent solutions.
Today of course the Republicans win universal praise from the political experts for a campaign that has exactly one message endlessly repeated. Does it matter that they avoid issues that will decide the future? Does it matter that their message is a lie, and they know it is, and so do the experts? Of course not. The experts deride other campaign for not doing the same thing.
According to the conventional wisdom, ignorance is the new normal. Or the new morality.
Our society could have valued knowledge and intelligence. Our best are getting better; there are amazingly intelligent books out there written for non-specialists, by people who sincerely want to apply intelligence to an understanding of life, as well as to solve problems. But we never made that commitment to intelligence, at least not for very long.
You could call what's happened to our standards for public dialogue a kind of decadence, though it's not the product so much of lassitude as rapacity. Some say there was an American Establishment that kept the public dialogue civilized, but that it fell apart when it was unable to restrain Nixon and what came after. Maybe. But there's no sense of responsibility replacing artificial standards and enforcers, especially since dog eat dog became enshrined as the American Dream in the 1980s. That's the only kind of individualism left.
Ignorance is useful when you're trying to fool people, and with a consumer economy so dependent on advertising, fooling people is a basis for this apparent prosperity. Ignorance is even more useful to gain political power when your policies are actually harming the electorate. You have to fool them then. It's apparently pretty easy. How can an administration that squandered a huge surplus and put the country in ascending debt for generations, while making things economically worse for most voters, partly by engaging in a war it said it had to fight, but every reason it gave has been repeatedly and authoratatively discredited, and that in less than four years made America hated in most of the world and terrorism more of a threat to American security and safety ---how can these folks not be laughed or booed off the stage? Are we living in some dissociated sort of continuous panic? Don't we believe any of this really matters, so we can elect our favorite clown? Whatever happened to won't get fooled again?
G.W. and his crowd speak in the simplistic and inflammatory language that generations and generations have argued and demonstrated is destructive and self-destructive, not to mention inaccurate. Those generations built a level of knowledge we should be standing on, to get to the next level. People bled and died, slaughtered and were slaughtered, suffered outrageous fortune, made horrendous errors and learned from them, and left us knowledge, and works of art and thought so complex and yet so grounded that we can learn from them at every stage of our lives and of our society.
Such knowledge and the desire for it were always minority concerns, for people who could afford such things, the elites. The promise of American democracy and its economic implications, especially in the abundance of our era and with its instant communications, was that everybody could have access to that knowledge. Everybody could be the elite. There are plenty of problems with our democracy and current economy that imperil this promise, but there also seems to be a lack of demand. For the opposites of ignorance.
We're going to need even more sophisticated knowledge and a synthesis of new concepts and old wisdom if the civilization built at such a high price in costly knowledge is to get out of this century intact. H.G. Wells said our civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Catastrophe is winning. But never mind: where's my cheese?
Here's a little theory: when a society is building and ascending, it aspires to knowledge. But when it is on the way down, ignorance is bliss.
Our society is racing to the bottom. Economically, that became clear when Wal-Mart became the largest and most powerful corporation in the world. In the 50s and 60s, the talk about factory jobs was that they were dehumanizing, alienating. The assembly line was a living metaphor for tedious semi-slavery and brain-death. Today those factory jobs are held up as a lost paradise, because they disappeared, leaving behind jobs that pay much less and are even more dehumanizing. Instead of being a human robot on the auto assembly line, you get to be a talking robot serving the assembly line of other mindless human robots lined up for tasty mass produced patties of fried fat and rainforest-destroying cow meat. And that's just one of your three jobs, maybe the best one.
In his book, What's the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank tried to discover why middle America votes against its own interests, particularly its economic interests. Why do the so-called social issues trump? A species of anti-intellectualism, the Nation reviewer suggested.
Maybe. Dale Maharidge, author of Homeland, makes a telling observation. He writes a lot about race, and he realized that almost everyone he interviewed who was violently racist, had some enormous problem---huge medical bills they couldn't pay for, long-standing unemployment, and so on. They directed their anger at others who they believed---who they were told---were getting a free ride while they suffered. (A white man with $200,000 in hospital bills believed that immigrants automatically get free health care.) But Maharidge's point was this: What if they all had good jobs and health care? "Would they be so enraged? I don't think so."
So people in power keep their power by enforcing the ignorance that lets them lie and hammer away with simpleminded statements and slogans, and people buy it. And the very suffering they cause helps them, which they probably know. So things are never going to get better for the people near the bottom, and they're on their way to the very bottom.
That helps to explain why television and popular culture has become so vile, vulgar, and stupid. It's ignorance that's got production values, plastic surgery, bright empty smiles and brittle irony. If television advertising can successfully weaken the higher brain functions, it can go straight to the glands. And it is apparently important that people be kept down, mired in anxiety and in pain, so they will look for scapegoats and believe the ignorant lies of radio talk shows. Ignorance sells. But eventually no one will be able to afford to buy.
Part of this may be time. The population of the U.S. in 1960 was 180 million. It's about a hundred and ten million more now. After World War II, the lower middle class grew so fast into the middle class that its tastes became the dominant ones in the culture. Funny isn't it, that even the filthy rich are living a tawdry lower middle class cultural life. Thank you, Andy Warhola.
Little girls are growing up, wanting to be just like Paris Hilton.
On the other hand, when I was growing up, English muffins were foreign food.
Problem is, time is one of the many things we're running out of. We do, however, seem to have an endless supply of ignorance. All those cell phones. And not a damn thing worth saying.
So this is our cultural epitaph: we actually were halfway to a better world. We began to understand what we were wrong about, and what we needed to do. We had even reached something of a cultural consensus on some of what is right: things like racial equality, the environment and so on. That's why our leaders have to call their rapacious policies to cut down trees by the name of "Healthy Forests." They can't any longer come out and say what they're doing. They are counting on our ignorance, and our weakness (we'll feel good about the title, and we'll be glad we don't have to change or sacrifice anything, like colorful cardboard boxes around everything we buy.)
But we couldn't quite commit to knowledge and discernment. We couldn't quite take on the discipline of separating our unconscious from our conscious decisions. Jung warned us in the 1950s that our civilization hangs by a slender thread. It's fraying to the breaking point.
Sure, there's elitism, political correctness, class snobbery and a lot of intellectuals and experts so out of touch with themselves that they don't even know how irrational they are. There are schematic thinkers who use big words, charts and graphs to tell well paid lies, and right wing think tanks who can spin out pithy theories and heartless systems in abstract language with the best of them. But those aren't reasons to worship at the catheral of ignorance.
Is there a way out of the ecology of ignorance? You gotta see it to believe it.
And you could go vote against it.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Barry: More!
Barry Bonds will play for the San Francisco Giants two more years at least, in a contract agreement announced just after he hit his 700th career home run. Only two other players in the history of the game have hit more homers, and it will probably take him until early next season before he surpasses Babe Ruth (at 715), and maybe the season after that to become the all-time home run king with at least 756. (Eclipsing Hank Aaron. I believe I remember seeing Aaron hit his 715th or 716th on TV. Wasn't much of a shot, as I recall. Aaron was steady, stayed healthy and played a long time. Babe Ruth was a giant in his time. He hit more home runs some years than entire other teams.) Bonds is more than durable. He is still the most dominant player in the majors. If he stays healthy for two or even three more years, he'll have the record.
Since Barry hit his 703rd with about another week of this season left, it's within the realm of possibility that he might break Ruth's record, but it's unlikely. The Giants are in contention for both the division lead or a wild card for the playoffs, and especially with the division still unsettled, Bonds will be lucky to see 2 or 3 pitches a game that are hittable. This past week he was walked intentionally 4 times in one game (a record), and a total of 5 walks in another game. So he doesn't see many pitches in the strike zone at all. But he tends to hit them when he does. Since walks don't count as plate appearances, at one point he was 3 for 3 over 3 games: 2 triples and a home run.
What this takes---despite all the chatter about chemical enhancements, live balls and diluted pitching---is phenomenal concentration and a state of mental balance or calm that has to be closer to enlightenment, to "empty mind" as any of us will ever get, even for a few moments here and there.
Bonds has never been a favorite of the sports press, who don't like his "attitude," and criticize him for not talking to them as much as they'd like, and for being remote from his teammates, surly, lording over the locker room with his two lockers and easy chair. But his press conference comments after the 700th suggested what the price is for his success in terms of that concentration. Bonds keeps to his workouts and regimens, and tries to keep a mental calm and concentration on the game. It makes sense to me. Does the press really believe if he chatted with them every day about how it feels to be doing this or challenging that record, etc., that he would have lasted this long, and done so much?
When he does talk for the cameras he exhibits an engaging side that seems a genuine part of him. But to expect him to accomplish what he does every day, and be what the press want him to be, is the trap that too many people are invited to fall into, in the arts as well as sports.
And now he's done a few promos for the Giants and become a kind of poet of the game, talking about the smell of the grass and the dirt, the sound of the crowd, that this is his place of peace.
The Giants probably won't win the division, and though they may get into the playoffs as a wild card, they'll need a lot of good fortune to get far into them. Even with their hitters overachieving as they have been the past few weeks, and their starting pitchers giving them some stellar performances, their relief pitching may not be up to the challenge. But who knows? Barry Bonds may yet get the one prize that's eluded him: that World Series ring.
I missed seeing his 700th in real time (and like most of his landmark homers, he did it at home in San Francisco,) but I was watching on TV when he hit his 699th on the road. He'd been walked several times but when he came up in the late innings he had that look, like he was going to swing at anything close. And he was facing a young pitcher who clearly was going to pitch to him. Apart from the game situation, a young pitcher has to do this: he's got to test his arm against the best. If he strikes Barry out, he's got himself a rep. If Barry clocks one---well, a rookie pitcher may be permanently gone from the majors in a week (especially this late in the season, when rosters expand and minor league players are brought up for "a cup of coffee" look), so this may be his only chance to get in the record books.
This kid showed him some heat. Barry showed him how far a ball can go into dead center field, over the fence, above the stands, to the video screen above which at the time had Barry's picture showing, so he almost hit himself in the teeth. Barry taking a shot at his own image, wouldn't be the first time.
UPDATE 10/02 No More this year for Barry. After their pitiful bullpen couldn't preserve a 3-0 lead in the 9th inning yesterday, the Giants lost their chance at either the division title or the wild card berth. Barry ended up with the National League batting title, and is a strong candidate for Most Valuable Player, though that's getting rarer for a non-playoff team. He also nearly doubled his own record for the most intentional walks in a season. His home run total stayed at 703. Wait till next year.
Barry Bonds will play for the San Francisco Giants two more years at least, in a contract agreement announced just after he hit his 700th career home run. Only two other players in the history of the game have hit more homers, and it will probably take him until early next season before he surpasses Babe Ruth (at 715), and maybe the season after that to become the all-time home run king with at least 756. (Eclipsing Hank Aaron. I believe I remember seeing Aaron hit his 715th or 716th on TV. Wasn't much of a shot, as I recall. Aaron was steady, stayed healthy and played a long time. Babe Ruth was a giant in his time. He hit more home runs some years than entire other teams.) Bonds is more than durable. He is still the most dominant player in the majors. If he stays healthy for two or even three more years, he'll have the record.
Since Barry hit his 703rd with about another week of this season left, it's within the realm of possibility that he might break Ruth's record, but it's unlikely. The Giants are in contention for both the division lead or a wild card for the playoffs, and especially with the division still unsettled, Bonds will be lucky to see 2 or 3 pitches a game that are hittable. This past week he was walked intentionally 4 times in one game (a record), and a total of 5 walks in another game. So he doesn't see many pitches in the strike zone at all. But he tends to hit them when he does. Since walks don't count as plate appearances, at one point he was 3 for 3 over 3 games: 2 triples and a home run.
What this takes---despite all the chatter about chemical enhancements, live balls and diluted pitching---is phenomenal concentration and a state of mental balance or calm that has to be closer to enlightenment, to "empty mind" as any of us will ever get, even for a few moments here and there.
Bonds has never been a favorite of the sports press, who don't like his "attitude," and criticize him for not talking to them as much as they'd like, and for being remote from his teammates, surly, lording over the locker room with his two lockers and easy chair. But his press conference comments after the 700th suggested what the price is for his success in terms of that concentration. Bonds keeps to his workouts and regimens, and tries to keep a mental calm and concentration on the game. It makes sense to me. Does the press really believe if he chatted with them every day about how it feels to be doing this or challenging that record, etc., that he would have lasted this long, and done so much?
When he does talk for the cameras he exhibits an engaging side that seems a genuine part of him. But to expect him to accomplish what he does every day, and be what the press want him to be, is the trap that too many people are invited to fall into, in the arts as well as sports.
And now he's done a few promos for the Giants and become a kind of poet of the game, talking about the smell of the grass and the dirt, the sound of the crowd, that this is his place of peace.
The Giants probably won't win the division, and though they may get into the playoffs as a wild card, they'll need a lot of good fortune to get far into them. Even with their hitters overachieving as they have been the past few weeks, and their starting pitchers giving them some stellar performances, their relief pitching may not be up to the challenge. But who knows? Barry Bonds may yet get the one prize that's eluded him: that World Series ring.
I missed seeing his 700th in real time (and like most of his landmark homers, he did it at home in San Francisco,) but I was watching on TV when he hit his 699th on the road. He'd been walked several times but when he came up in the late innings he had that look, like he was going to swing at anything close. And he was facing a young pitcher who clearly was going to pitch to him. Apart from the game situation, a young pitcher has to do this: he's got to test his arm against the best. If he strikes Barry out, he's got himself a rep. If Barry clocks one---well, a rookie pitcher may be permanently gone from the majors in a week (especially this late in the season, when rosters expand and minor league players are brought up for "a cup of coffee" look), so this may be his only chance to get in the record books.
This kid showed him some heat. Barry showed him how far a ball can go into dead center field, over the fence, above the stands, to the video screen above which at the time had Barry's picture showing, so he almost hit himself in the teeth. Barry taking a shot at his own image, wouldn't be the first time.
UPDATE 10/02 No More this year for Barry. After their pitiful bullpen couldn't preserve a 3-0 lead in the 9th inning yesterday, the Giants lost their chance at either the division title or the wild card berth. Barry ended up with the National League batting title, and is a strong candidate for Most Valuable Player, though that's getting rarer for a non-playoff team. He also nearly doubled his own record for the most intentional walks in a season. His home run total stayed at 703. Wait till next year.
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
Now and soon
It's hot. I haven't seen statistics on the season yet, but this summer right into September has certainly felt warmer than any since we arrived in Arcata almost exactly eight years ago. It feels hot because the humidity on this coastal strip is consistently high. It's not that noticeable most of the time, because the temperatures are cool. But when the temperature is warmer for days and weeks at a time, even a little, you feel the humidity, and so it feels hot. Not New Orleans hot. But maybe Pittsburgh summer hot.
Allergies seem worse this summer, too, for both of us. Whatever combination of humidity, dampness and the year round flourishing of flora and fauna is responsible, the "Humboldt Crud" kind of illness is as much a part of the local scene as redwoods, banana slugs and dairy cows.
It seems to me the warmer weather has had something to do with our bumper crop of tomatoes, too. When we were first here, growing tomatoes in Arcata was almost unheard of. But Margaret works at it, and we do have an apparent advantage in a cement driveway (used exclusively now for container plants with basketball quarter-court), which seems to reflect sunlight. So Margaret planted a number of varieties this year, hoping some would flourish, and some have in the past few years. But they all did this year, so we've got big tomatoes, small tomatoes, round ones, sort of oblong ones, as well as red, orange and yellow ones. And so I've been trying to keep up consumption with lots of salads, tomato sandwiches, fried peppers and tomatoes, and sliced tomatoes over pasta. And I'm not complaining.
Still, I don't like the heat or the allergies. And the forecasts for the future aren't too good. A recently released analysis of California cities shows increasing heatwaves even in San Francisco, with more heat-related deaths expected-as much as a 70% rise by the end of the century.
Sacramento will be worse than that, and Fresno worse still. San Bernadino--forget it. It's global heating, brought home.
Click here for the SF Chronicle story on this survey:
SAN FRANCISCO / 'Cool gray city' projected to turn murderously hot / Temperatures likely to rise by mid-century as a result of global warming, study warns
Like our summer here, there will be some relatively good things as well as the relatively bad things associated with hotter times, and that will help mask the eventual consequences. But of course it's not just heatwave-related deaths we're talking about, but the need for more electricity for air conditioning (one of the problems here when it gets hot is that nobody has air conditioning, not even the restaurants and movie theatres, because nobody needed it before), the need for more water when it may be dryer, and the likely increase in pest-borne diseases where cooler weather used to temper these outbreaks by keeping the insect population down. Then the whole ecology gets thrown out of whack. Wildlife hereabouts is already being affected by the years of drought and now the heat.
At the least it will all mean more demand on civic services, which will cost more money. It's a problem for cities losing population and businesses, and tax base. It's a problem for a state that already has fiscal problems, and an addiction to lower taxes and more services. And thanks to the G. W. Bush crowd, it's going to be a big problem for the debt and deficit-laden federal government for a long time.
We're already seeing that in the states (and countries) suffering the onslaught of hurricanes. Loss of life, of homes, of property are the most proximate and most obvious, but there's also the impact on the economy when so many people are dislocated; the economic impact of a loss of tourism for a year or more in some areas; plus the costs to government and NGOs like the Red Cross, which lessens their resources for the hurricanes yet to come. Somewhat similiarly, the costs to insurance companies will eventually mean more expensive and less available insurance for people and businesses, which will make the next round of hurricanes even more expensive, and so on. For if even if this is the return of an otherwise normal cycle, only augmented by global heating, damaging hurricanes will be such a regular feature of existence there that even the cable news stations will tire of sending reporters out in slickers to try to talk while being manfully blown around.
The hurricanes are dramatic and obvious in their effects, though even there we shortchange them. Florida has certainly been hard-hit but there have been other places too, that got it worse (Haiti) and bad enough, but fewer reporters were there (much of Pennsylvania had damaging floods from rivers and streams---including Pittsburgh and its three rivers; flooding in West Virginia was said to be the worst in its history.) Tornadoes, cyclones, all part of the disturbances, are also part of the larger cycles. Cycles within cycles, and global heating may not even be the largest in scale. However it is still shaping up to be the most telling. Recent research suggesting that carbon from natural sources is increasing because of the carbon from human-made pollution, further multiplying greenhouse effects beyond the usual projections.
The worst of these predicted scenarios for California's future would be mitigated somewhat by real attention to doing what has to be done to lessen global heating. But we've barely gotten to first base on recognizing the climate crisis, let along doing much about it.
John Kerry, with one of the best environmental records in Congress, has usually talked about this issue in connection with the Bush administration's failures in international cooperation (on Letterman, Kerry said the U.S. should rejoin the world on the global warming treaty) and especially in supporting science. He's exactly right in this regard, and only a level of understanding and confidence in science behind public support for the necessary policies has any chance of helping to head off the worst.
So for those of you who will be alive in 2050, and who will have children who are alive in 2090, I ask you to remember that some of us tried our best to raise the alarm.
That will probably be cold comfort, but anything cold may be a comfort by then.
It's hot. I haven't seen statistics on the season yet, but this summer right into September has certainly felt warmer than any since we arrived in Arcata almost exactly eight years ago. It feels hot because the humidity on this coastal strip is consistently high. It's not that noticeable most of the time, because the temperatures are cool. But when the temperature is warmer for days and weeks at a time, even a little, you feel the humidity, and so it feels hot. Not New Orleans hot. But maybe Pittsburgh summer hot.
Allergies seem worse this summer, too, for both of us. Whatever combination of humidity, dampness and the year round flourishing of flora and fauna is responsible, the "Humboldt Crud" kind of illness is as much a part of the local scene as redwoods, banana slugs and dairy cows.
It seems to me the warmer weather has had something to do with our bumper crop of tomatoes, too. When we were first here, growing tomatoes in Arcata was almost unheard of. But Margaret works at it, and we do have an apparent advantage in a cement driveway (used exclusively now for container plants with basketball quarter-court), which seems to reflect sunlight. So Margaret planted a number of varieties this year, hoping some would flourish, and some have in the past few years. But they all did this year, so we've got big tomatoes, small tomatoes, round ones, sort of oblong ones, as well as red, orange and yellow ones. And so I've been trying to keep up consumption with lots of salads, tomato sandwiches, fried peppers and tomatoes, and sliced tomatoes over pasta. And I'm not complaining.
Still, I don't like the heat or the allergies. And the forecasts for the future aren't too good. A recently released analysis of California cities shows increasing heatwaves even in San Francisco, with more heat-related deaths expected-as much as a 70% rise by the end of the century.
Sacramento will be worse than that, and Fresno worse still. San Bernadino--forget it. It's global heating, brought home.
Click here for the SF Chronicle story on this survey:
SAN FRANCISCO / 'Cool gray city' projected to turn murderously hot / Temperatures likely to rise by mid-century as a result of global warming, study warns
Like our summer here, there will be some relatively good things as well as the relatively bad things associated with hotter times, and that will help mask the eventual consequences. But of course it's not just heatwave-related deaths we're talking about, but the need for more electricity for air conditioning (one of the problems here when it gets hot is that nobody has air conditioning, not even the restaurants and movie theatres, because nobody needed it before), the need for more water when it may be dryer, and the likely increase in pest-borne diseases where cooler weather used to temper these outbreaks by keeping the insect population down. Then the whole ecology gets thrown out of whack. Wildlife hereabouts is already being affected by the years of drought and now the heat.
At the least it will all mean more demand on civic services, which will cost more money. It's a problem for cities losing population and businesses, and tax base. It's a problem for a state that already has fiscal problems, and an addiction to lower taxes and more services. And thanks to the G. W. Bush crowd, it's going to be a big problem for the debt and deficit-laden federal government for a long time.
We're already seeing that in the states (and countries) suffering the onslaught of hurricanes. Loss of life, of homes, of property are the most proximate and most obvious, but there's also the impact on the economy when so many people are dislocated; the economic impact of a loss of tourism for a year or more in some areas; plus the costs to government and NGOs like the Red Cross, which lessens their resources for the hurricanes yet to come. Somewhat similiarly, the costs to insurance companies will eventually mean more expensive and less available insurance for people and businesses, which will make the next round of hurricanes even more expensive, and so on. For if even if this is the return of an otherwise normal cycle, only augmented by global heating, damaging hurricanes will be such a regular feature of existence there that even the cable news stations will tire of sending reporters out in slickers to try to talk while being manfully blown around.
The hurricanes are dramatic and obvious in their effects, though even there we shortchange them. Florida has certainly been hard-hit but there have been other places too, that got it worse (Haiti) and bad enough, but fewer reporters were there (much of Pennsylvania had damaging floods from rivers and streams---including Pittsburgh and its three rivers; flooding in West Virginia was said to be the worst in its history.) Tornadoes, cyclones, all part of the disturbances, are also part of the larger cycles. Cycles within cycles, and global heating may not even be the largest in scale. However it is still shaping up to be the most telling. Recent research suggesting that carbon from natural sources is increasing because of the carbon from human-made pollution, further multiplying greenhouse effects beyond the usual projections.
The worst of these predicted scenarios for California's future would be mitigated somewhat by real attention to doing what has to be done to lessen global heating. But we've barely gotten to first base on recognizing the climate crisis, let along doing much about it.
John Kerry, with one of the best environmental records in Congress, has usually talked about this issue in connection with the Bush administration's failures in international cooperation (on Letterman, Kerry said the U.S. should rejoin the world on the global warming treaty) and especially in supporting science. He's exactly right in this regard, and only a level of understanding and confidence in science behind public support for the necessary policies has any chance of helping to head off the worst.
So for those of you who will be alive in 2050, and who will have children who are alive in 2090, I ask you to remember that some of us tried our best to raise the alarm.
That will probably be cold comfort, but anything cold may be a comfort by then.
Thursday, September 09, 2004
On being and editedness
I'm not as upset as I used to be about being less than well edited. I'm still annoyed when bad editing or mistakes make a piece harder to read, but I don't obsess about it. People do get over the rough spots.
But it's not just the years and the mellowing of age, though they do play a part. And it's not because I no longer care as much about writing as well as I can, and seeing my work presented as well as I wrote it. If not better (which is what good editing can do.)
The other important factor is digital. Thanks to blogs and web pages, I can publish my own work in a way that is a bit more permanent than in newspapers or magazines, with a greater availability---literally a global availability. And what I write, for better or worse, is what you get.
And if I feel strongly enough that I want to fix forever in print some longer work, I can always spring for the relatively modest cost of a print-on-demand book.
Just knowing this is liberating. No editor or publisher has the absolute say, the complete power over what I write.
So when I write for a newspaper or magazine or, maybe someday again, under contract to a book publisher, I now concentrate on two other elements rather than just the finished product: 1. the process. 2. the money.
The process is the research, interviewing, travel, gathering and organizing information. The process is the writing itself, the effort, against whatever deadline pertains, to make it as good as I can.
The process can also include working on the editing: conferring with editors, reading changes, re-working them when that seems right. Sometimes an editor will reorganize a piece but it doesn't quite work. I add, subtract, multiply and divide, shift around and so on, to make it work within the new structure.
But there isn't always time or opportunity for all that, and sometimes I just have to let it ride. It can still be disappointing when something I really liked---large or small---is unnecessarily lost, but then it can also be disappointing when that something is preserved, and nobody really notices.
I've always been especially sensitive to losing the sense of my voice, of a piece no longer "sounding like me." It's part of my larger obsession with sound and voice, hearing through the eyes, etc. which I've come to realize is pretty integral to who I am, one-eared and all. But sometimes I even have to let that go, at least if it's not complete ventriloquism.
So it's best to stay invested in the process, make that as much fun and as rewarding in itself as possible, and make sure in the end you get paid.
For the truth is that seeing it in print (either in some publication or as I want it on the Internet or in a print-on-demand book), seeing that you still think it is as good as when you wrote it, and even seeing others appreciate it, is not a thing in itself but a continuation of the process. At best it's closure but also generative, for you and for others.
Some of the mellowing is probably also the result of just getting worn out, or benumbed. Some of it is just perspective. The echo of time passing, of time running out. Once you're done with the writing, it's really over. It's time for the next task, the next curiosity, the next attempt, the next stretch, the next discovery, the next performance, the next making and re-making, the next surprise.
I'm not as upset as I used to be about being less than well edited. I'm still annoyed when bad editing or mistakes make a piece harder to read, but I don't obsess about it. People do get over the rough spots.
But it's not just the years and the mellowing of age, though they do play a part. And it's not because I no longer care as much about writing as well as I can, and seeing my work presented as well as I wrote it. If not better (which is what good editing can do.)
The other important factor is digital. Thanks to blogs and web pages, I can publish my own work in a way that is a bit more permanent than in newspapers or magazines, with a greater availability---literally a global availability. And what I write, for better or worse, is what you get.
And if I feel strongly enough that I want to fix forever in print some longer work, I can always spring for the relatively modest cost of a print-on-demand book.
Just knowing this is liberating. No editor or publisher has the absolute say, the complete power over what I write.
So when I write for a newspaper or magazine or, maybe someday again, under contract to a book publisher, I now concentrate on two other elements rather than just the finished product: 1. the process. 2. the money.
The process is the research, interviewing, travel, gathering and organizing information. The process is the writing itself, the effort, against whatever deadline pertains, to make it as good as I can.
The process can also include working on the editing: conferring with editors, reading changes, re-working them when that seems right. Sometimes an editor will reorganize a piece but it doesn't quite work. I add, subtract, multiply and divide, shift around and so on, to make it work within the new structure.
But there isn't always time or opportunity for all that, and sometimes I just have to let it ride. It can still be disappointing when something I really liked---large or small---is unnecessarily lost, but then it can also be disappointing when that something is preserved, and nobody really notices.
I've always been especially sensitive to losing the sense of my voice, of a piece no longer "sounding like me." It's part of my larger obsession with sound and voice, hearing through the eyes, etc. which I've come to realize is pretty integral to who I am, one-eared and all. But sometimes I even have to let that go, at least if it's not complete ventriloquism.
So it's best to stay invested in the process, make that as much fun and as rewarding in itself as possible, and make sure in the end you get paid.
For the truth is that seeing it in print (either in some publication or as I want it on the Internet or in a print-on-demand book), seeing that you still think it is as good as when you wrote it, and even seeing others appreciate it, is not a thing in itself but a continuation of the process. At best it's closure but also generative, for you and for others.
Some of the mellowing is probably also the result of just getting worn out, or benumbed. Some of it is just perspective. The echo of time passing, of time running out. Once you're done with the writing, it's really over. It's time for the next task, the next curiosity, the next attempt, the next stretch, the next discovery, the next performance, the next making and re-making, the next surprise.
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Tess
About fourteen years ago, a skinny young female tabby cat spotted Margaret talking with her friend Annie, in Annie's back yard in a Pittsburgh neighborhood. The cat, 6 or 9 months old, ignored Annie and wrapped herself around Margaret's feet.
Annie identified this cat as a stray, a street cat, though it was a residential neighborhood of homes with lots of gardens. Margaret's two children were in the process of leaving the nest, and her house was feeling empty. She decided to give the calico a month's trial residency. That little cat was on her best behavior for those 30 days. She got into mischief later.
Margaret and I were just getting to know each other. I'd had the same three cats since they were kittens in Cambridge, Mass. They all lived past twenty, but were all gone by then. Margaret asked me about names. I advised her to choose one with lots of sibilants---"s" sounds got a cat's attention. Soon when I visited Margaret, she introduced me to Tess.
Tess lived on Worth St. in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, and afterwards in Huntingdon, PA when Margaret taught there. I joined them for a term, although I kept my Pittsburgh apartment at the other end of Squirrel Hill. Once Margaret knew she would be coming to the North Coast of CA to teach at Humboldt State, she gave up her house and she and Tess moved in with me.
Actually it was Tess and Allie, another cat---black with some white, who Margaret adopted to keep Tess company during her long hours at school. But Tess wasn't especially interested in the company of another cat. Allie was sweet and deferential, but Tess barely tolerated her, and seemed to be getting a little neurotic about it. In the fall of 1996, Margaret flew to Arcata, and so did Tess. Tess didn't like riding in cars, let alone airplanes, but we thought she'd like riding in a Ryder truck with me for a week even less. I saw them off at the Pittsburgh airport. Everybody who saw Tess poking her nose against the cat carrier door remarked on what a pretty cat she was. (Allie stayed in PA: my sister Kathy adopted her. I saw her on visits and she was quite happy there.)
Tess had to move only once more, this time only a few blocks, from a townhouse on Hidden Creek Road in Arcata to a house on Ross Street. There she reigned over her home, and policed the perimeter of her backyard garden. Tess had a few adventures in her past by then: a mouse or two on Worth Street, and an errant bat in the house in Huntingdon. But in Arcata she was content to chase moths. A few years ago she gave up chasing anything. In her youth she played with a stuffed spider, we called Spidey. It was gray with eight red legs when she started batting it around, and was down to one pathetic limb when she finally lost interest. It was the only toy she ever liked. She disdained scratching posts as well.
She liked chewing certain blades of grass and leaves of particular plants, and for some reason she really liked drinking rainwater. But mostly she was a house cat. She'd torn up some of my furniture pretty good in Pittsburgh but here she confined herself to a few rugs. She stayed off tables, and generally out of trouble. In her maturity she was economical with her movements, but she always moved with grace. She was not exactly bold--she drew back from even a brisk breeze---but she was sweet and gentle.
She and I developed several rituals. In PA she had a brief nighttime exercise period when she would play hide and seek, and bat at string as she chased after me. But by the time we moved to Ross St., the rituals mostly had to do with feeding-with what kind of food she got at a particular hour-and her participation in our ritual behaviors, like "TV time" in the evening, and bed times. She slept on the bed, either at Margaret's feet or sprawled across my feet or legs. She would take one of those two positions for many nights in a row, and then switch. I could never figure out the pattern or a reason for the timing of the switch. She had her own language for certain communications---a little tail-twitching dance in front of the refrigerator for her evening meal, and so on.
Because Margaret and I had somewhat different schedules, Tess had separate rituals with each of us. She would get up early with Margaret, hop up on a particular chair for her attentions. Sometimes she would come back to bed with me after Margaret left, or else she would just doze on the couch until I got up, then spend a few minutes with me, before wandering back to the bedroom. She didn't react much to my comings and goings, but she always knew when it was Margaret coming to the door, and she would go to greet her. Margaret was her mother, she hardly ever took her eyes off her. At night, if I was up too late, Tess would come and get me, sometimes quite insistent that I come to bed. She'd nag at me until I followed her to the bedroom.
In early July, the seemingly minor and intermittent problems Tess was having with eating became more pronounced. Her body began to change shape severely. The vet told us that she had a large tumor, probably cancerous. For the next several weeks we treated her with medicines that improved her appetite and would have been the treatment as well for a non-cancerous tumor. Margaret took her in for hydrations, and we learned to do it ourselves.
As Tess got thinner except for where she was swelling, I spent more and more time with her. I had the night shift taking care of her, and Margaret took over in the morning. We fed her baby food from our fingers, which she licked with an expression of great pleasure. Until she stopped eating even that. Tess was an education in courage. Margaret worried about her being in pain. I was determined that as long as she was still Tess, and still showed that she wanted to be with us, that I would do everything I could for her. She had periods of distress and confusion, no expressions of acute pain, and long periods of quiet and apparent contentment. She stayed on the bed most of the time, and during the day I stayed with her, reading and writing. When Margaret was with her in the evening I did the work I needed to do on the computer.
There were a few nights I wasn't sure Tess would make it to the morning. Yet I would wake up and see her on the bed, and I was grateful for that day, and sometimes almost hopeful. One exceptionally sunny and warm Sunday afternoon, Margaret and I were both there on the bed with her, reading. When it was just Tess and I, I would talk to her, reminiscing about our past, about Spidey, the bat, and the time Allie alerted me that Tess was out on the window ledge of my second floor Pittsburgh apartment, high above the pavement. The time she and Allie and Margaret had to be rescued from a stalled car in a snowstorm.
I'd look more carefully at the swirls and blendings of browns, black stripes and patches of white. With the white on her face and chin like a beard, we were starting to look alike. Tess had amazing green eyes, and a peculiar thoughtfulness in her expression. Her fur was shiny and soft, especially her underfur. She had a slight sienna spotch on her forehead, in the third eye area. She always looked at me directly and openly.
I comforted her as best I could when she began those long helpless rattling purrs, that she seemed to use to calm herself to sleep, or near sleep. I kept my hand and my breath near her. She still liked to be petted in the ways and places she always had, and now welcomed a kind of full body massage. This contact seemed to strengthen her.
She developed some peculiar behaviors, and began staring off into the infinite at times. But she always came back. When she was still eating, she would end it abruptly by turning on her heels and walking back to the bedroom, leaving me sitting there on the floor, gooey baby food on my finger. But sometimes she would stop and wait for me to follow. When I did she would continue.
Towards the end of July, she began an especially peaceful period. We'd given up all medicines except the hydrations. She now had a little bed of her own next to ours. But then she began jumping up on the couch again with Margaret or me, or both of us. She responded to being petted, and to the sound of my voice. She began going outside again, sometimes just sitting under a chair on the porch, sometimes venturing to the perimeter of container plants, sniffing the air deliberately and eagerly, as if drinking in the world. She began to stop in the "library" and so I made another bed for her there. She seemed calm, and yet determined to gather the moment. And she was determined to be with us. She had trouble getting up on the bed, but she kept doing it nevertheless.
One afternoon when Margaret was out and Tess was on the couch, I put some Bach on the stereo, and we listened together. Every day or night now, I made a point of singing Tess her song. She usually responded to it. I used to think this was some weird thing only I did, but I read somewhere that it's quite common: many people have a special song they sing to their pet, usually a familiar melody with special words.
I talked to Tess about happy times. There was once, earlier this year, when I'd gone to bed late after writing. Tess had been sleeping on my side of the bed, so she got up, went out to the kitchen while I got settled. She left a nice warm spot. As I was beginning to doze off, Margaret turned over and was just touching against me. Then Tess jumped up on the bed, and settled across the back of my legs. That's how I fell asleep. I was aware of that being a happy moment.
But now Tess was skin and bones, except for her distentions. Her ears seemed as large as a kitten's. She was weak, and would sometimes just lie down wherever she was. But Tess was still Tess. She enjoyed being touched. She still wagged her tail. She knew us, knew we were near, and she was determined to be with us. She was also at times clearly on her own journey.
One Thursday night, the night John Kerry gave his acceptance speech, we had guests. Tess was on the couch, and I spent as much time as I could sitting beside her, stroking her as she rested. That night she went onto the bed with Margaret, but later had trouble, going to her box with no result, going to her water dish and only hovering over it, maybe getting a sip or two. She wandered back and forth, and wound up on the couch at four a.m. where she rested quietly.
In the morning I was awakened by a sound---I opened my eyes to see Tess. She'd jumped onto the bed. Margaret was up and gone. I looked at Tess sleepily. I was very happy to see her, but I thought I saw an almost pleading look in her eyes. Dozing and waking, I petted her and talked to her. Margaret came home to pick up some pills she'd forgotten, between finishing yoga and going to school. She stayed to eat something, and as we talked, we heard Tess cry . She was in her bed in the library. She was in pain and distress, having spasms.
After she'd calmed a bit, and there was clearly nothing we could do, Margaret and I retreated to the bedroom to talk over what we must do. Tess surprised us by once again getting herself up on the bed. She had more spasms. But she was determined to be with us, to show how much she wanted to be with us. She'd had to give into whatever was happening to her, but she wouldn't abandon us.
Now we had a duty to her. It was late Friday afternoon, and we could not let her suffer through a weekend with no other recourse. We bundled her in a sheet. I held her while Margaret drove to the animal hospital. Tess never liked riding in cars, she would meow a constant litany, but this time she only looked around at the world passing by. When we got there and went in, they were not ready for us. There were lots of people there with their animals, and all of the people seemed to be quite old. Despite the kind and professional people who worked there, it was not the kind of place I'd like to spend my last moments.
I took Tess out to the front lawn, talked to her, and showed her the flowers, and the blue sky. She was interested in all of it. People who passed by all said what a pretty cat she was. Her eyes were large and open and she was not distressed. I held her and told her we would have to say goodbye. I told her I'd see her in my dreams.
It seemed to all happen so fast. Did we panic? I don't know. Tessie was never going to get better. She trusted us and we did what we felt was best for her. In the end neither of us could live with allowing her to suffer any more.
But in the late afternoon I was holding her as she nuzzled under my chin. And by early evening I was digging a hole in the ground, the hardest job I've ever done. The first shovelful of dirt on that small cardboard box was like a gunshot to my heart. I'd wrapped her in my shirt, the one I'd worn most often when taking care of her those long nights, and we put some of her favorite kinds of weeds and plants in the pockets, along with some sage and a bit of Pennsylvania soil.
There's a theory that people shouldn't have pets, because it robs the animal of its wild nature. Specifically it keeps them from maturing, they are always dependent as infants, which may be the way we like them. I'm sure that's true. But it's not the worst thing that can happen to a specific animal. And given our inherited way of life in this human society, this is as close a relationship to another species as many of us get.
I've never had children. And I'm ruefully aware of our strong predilection to project onto animals. Since they can't talk (or not in our language) we do their talking for them. Perhaps it is also the relative simplicity of our relationship with pets that makes it so powerful. One can fail or please or disappoint a pet in only a few ways that are usually very obvious, and usually the same each time. With humans sometimes you never know.
Who know why I've taken Tess' death harder in an immediate sense than the deaths of humans who were quite important in my life, including my grandparents and parents? It can be somewhat explained, simply in terms of companionship. Since I work at home, Tess was my almost constant companion for the nearly eight years we've lived here. The last thing I did before leaving the house was to check on her. She would greet me---or I would greet her---whenever I returned. An empty house was never really empty: there was always a beautiful being here. Her beauty inspired me, even gave me a kind of anchor of hope.
We developed a unique relationship, and it deepened in those last weeks. It's impossible to explain, even to myself. Something simple and direct, yet complex and uncertain, as we each tried to communicate and figure out what in the world the other was trying to say. Something earnest, yet everyday, and without the defenses we learn in our encounters with humans, even those we love.
But it may be a combination of the factors I mentioned before that have channeled the experiences of death that in prior human cases were defended against, or complicated by other aspects of a relationship. So the feelings were and are quite raw. For example, for awhile I felt that she trusted me but I failed her, because I could not protect her from becoming ill and dying. I've felt this idiotic anxiety of waiting for her to return. I've felt angry that she can't be here anymore. I've regretted every moment I got annoyed with her. I've felt a lot of the meaning empty out of my daily existence. Tess was a secret reason for going on. We have only a few photos of her, for some dumb reason. But looking at them reminds me that I almost never looked at her without smiling, without feeling delight. Perhaps worst of all, I selfishly feel bereft that I will not have Tess warm on my chest as I pass away.
All of these emotions seem more seemly when applied to humans. No doubt this is a character flaw on my part. But Tess wouldn't be bothered. As long as she could jump up and be petted as she clung to my shirt, under the warm lamplight as I read. As long as she knew I would be there, making sure she was okay.
Why was this harder than losing my other cats? Perhaps because when I was younger there was an unknown future of potential growing and looking forward to blossom. Change could be sad and painful and haunting, but there were the possibilities, the mysteries and destinies. I don't have much of that sense now. Little Tess grounded me, yet her beauty and grace and maybe even the strength of a simple reciprocal relationship reassured some idealistic sense.
In the months before she got sick, Tess liked me to pick her up a lot more than she used to. She was generally friendly with people, but she didn't usually like to be picked up. I always felt honored by this, and pleased. Editors could diss me, employers ignore me, my clients not pay me, the world insult me, and people bewilder me, but held in one arm and petted by the other hand, Tess would still purr. And her warmth across my legs or sometimes in the small of my back would ease me past the anxiety to the surrender of night.
What I learned from Tess in her last weeks I have not yet entirely absorbed, but much of it will be of her courage, of her loyalty, and her love of the world, even as she seemed to be gazing into the next.
Tess, the lion-hearted. It's just not the same without you.
About fourteen years ago, a skinny young female tabby cat spotted Margaret talking with her friend Annie, in Annie's back yard in a Pittsburgh neighborhood. The cat, 6 or 9 months old, ignored Annie and wrapped herself around Margaret's feet.
Annie identified this cat as a stray, a street cat, though it was a residential neighborhood of homes with lots of gardens. Margaret's two children were in the process of leaving the nest, and her house was feeling empty. She decided to give the calico a month's trial residency. That little cat was on her best behavior for those 30 days. She got into mischief later.
Margaret and I were just getting to know each other. I'd had the same three cats since they were kittens in Cambridge, Mass. They all lived past twenty, but were all gone by then. Margaret asked me about names. I advised her to choose one with lots of sibilants---"s" sounds got a cat's attention. Soon when I visited Margaret, she introduced me to Tess.
Tess lived on Worth St. in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh, and afterwards in Huntingdon, PA when Margaret taught there. I joined them for a term, although I kept my Pittsburgh apartment at the other end of Squirrel Hill. Once Margaret knew she would be coming to the North Coast of CA to teach at Humboldt State, she gave up her house and she and Tess moved in with me.
Actually it was Tess and Allie, another cat---black with some white, who Margaret adopted to keep Tess company during her long hours at school. But Tess wasn't especially interested in the company of another cat. Allie was sweet and deferential, but Tess barely tolerated her, and seemed to be getting a little neurotic about it. In the fall of 1996, Margaret flew to Arcata, and so did Tess. Tess didn't like riding in cars, let alone airplanes, but we thought she'd like riding in a Ryder truck with me for a week even less. I saw them off at the Pittsburgh airport. Everybody who saw Tess poking her nose against the cat carrier door remarked on what a pretty cat she was. (Allie stayed in PA: my sister Kathy adopted her. I saw her on visits and she was quite happy there.)
Tess had to move only once more, this time only a few blocks, from a townhouse on Hidden Creek Road in Arcata to a house on Ross Street. There she reigned over her home, and policed the perimeter of her backyard garden. Tess had a few adventures in her past by then: a mouse or two on Worth Street, and an errant bat in the house in Huntingdon. But in Arcata she was content to chase moths. A few years ago she gave up chasing anything. In her youth she played with a stuffed spider, we called Spidey. It was gray with eight red legs when she started batting it around, and was down to one pathetic limb when she finally lost interest. It was the only toy she ever liked. She disdained scratching posts as well.
She liked chewing certain blades of grass and leaves of particular plants, and for some reason she really liked drinking rainwater. But mostly she was a house cat. She'd torn up some of my furniture pretty good in Pittsburgh but here she confined herself to a few rugs. She stayed off tables, and generally out of trouble. In her maturity she was economical with her movements, but she always moved with grace. She was not exactly bold--she drew back from even a brisk breeze---but she was sweet and gentle.
She and I developed several rituals. In PA she had a brief nighttime exercise period when she would play hide and seek, and bat at string as she chased after me. But by the time we moved to Ross St., the rituals mostly had to do with feeding-with what kind of food she got at a particular hour-and her participation in our ritual behaviors, like "TV time" in the evening, and bed times. She slept on the bed, either at Margaret's feet or sprawled across my feet or legs. She would take one of those two positions for many nights in a row, and then switch. I could never figure out the pattern or a reason for the timing of the switch. She had her own language for certain communications---a little tail-twitching dance in front of the refrigerator for her evening meal, and so on.
Because Margaret and I had somewhat different schedules, Tess had separate rituals with each of us. She would get up early with Margaret, hop up on a particular chair for her attentions. Sometimes she would come back to bed with me after Margaret left, or else she would just doze on the couch until I got up, then spend a few minutes with me, before wandering back to the bedroom. She didn't react much to my comings and goings, but she always knew when it was Margaret coming to the door, and she would go to greet her. Margaret was her mother, she hardly ever took her eyes off her. At night, if I was up too late, Tess would come and get me, sometimes quite insistent that I come to bed. She'd nag at me until I followed her to the bedroom.
In early July, the seemingly minor and intermittent problems Tess was having with eating became more pronounced. Her body began to change shape severely. The vet told us that she had a large tumor, probably cancerous. For the next several weeks we treated her with medicines that improved her appetite and would have been the treatment as well for a non-cancerous tumor. Margaret took her in for hydrations, and we learned to do it ourselves.
As Tess got thinner except for where she was swelling, I spent more and more time with her. I had the night shift taking care of her, and Margaret took over in the morning. We fed her baby food from our fingers, which she licked with an expression of great pleasure. Until she stopped eating even that. Tess was an education in courage. Margaret worried about her being in pain. I was determined that as long as she was still Tess, and still showed that she wanted to be with us, that I would do everything I could for her. She had periods of distress and confusion, no expressions of acute pain, and long periods of quiet and apparent contentment. She stayed on the bed most of the time, and during the day I stayed with her, reading and writing. When Margaret was with her in the evening I did the work I needed to do on the computer.
There were a few nights I wasn't sure Tess would make it to the morning. Yet I would wake up and see her on the bed, and I was grateful for that day, and sometimes almost hopeful. One exceptionally sunny and warm Sunday afternoon, Margaret and I were both there on the bed with her, reading. When it was just Tess and I, I would talk to her, reminiscing about our past, about Spidey, the bat, and the time Allie alerted me that Tess was out on the window ledge of my second floor Pittsburgh apartment, high above the pavement. The time she and Allie and Margaret had to be rescued from a stalled car in a snowstorm.
I'd look more carefully at the swirls and blendings of browns, black stripes and patches of white. With the white on her face and chin like a beard, we were starting to look alike. Tess had amazing green eyes, and a peculiar thoughtfulness in her expression. Her fur was shiny and soft, especially her underfur. She had a slight sienna spotch on her forehead, in the third eye area. She always looked at me directly and openly.
I comforted her as best I could when she began those long helpless rattling purrs, that she seemed to use to calm herself to sleep, or near sleep. I kept my hand and my breath near her. She still liked to be petted in the ways and places she always had, and now welcomed a kind of full body massage. This contact seemed to strengthen her.
She developed some peculiar behaviors, and began staring off into the infinite at times. But she always came back. When she was still eating, she would end it abruptly by turning on her heels and walking back to the bedroom, leaving me sitting there on the floor, gooey baby food on my finger. But sometimes she would stop and wait for me to follow. When I did she would continue.
Towards the end of July, she began an especially peaceful period. We'd given up all medicines except the hydrations. She now had a little bed of her own next to ours. But then she began jumping up on the couch again with Margaret or me, or both of us. She responded to being petted, and to the sound of my voice. She began going outside again, sometimes just sitting under a chair on the porch, sometimes venturing to the perimeter of container plants, sniffing the air deliberately and eagerly, as if drinking in the world. She began to stop in the "library" and so I made another bed for her there. She seemed calm, and yet determined to gather the moment. And she was determined to be with us. She had trouble getting up on the bed, but she kept doing it nevertheless.
One afternoon when Margaret was out and Tess was on the couch, I put some Bach on the stereo, and we listened together. Every day or night now, I made a point of singing Tess her song. She usually responded to it. I used to think this was some weird thing only I did, but I read somewhere that it's quite common: many people have a special song they sing to their pet, usually a familiar melody with special words.
I talked to Tess about happy times. There was once, earlier this year, when I'd gone to bed late after writing. Tess had been sleeping on my side of the bed, so she got up, went out to the kitchen while I got settled. She left a nice warm spot. As I was beginning to doze off, Margaret turned over and was just touching against me. Then Tess jumped up on the bed, and settled across the back of my legs. That's how I fell asleep. I was aware of that being a happy moment.
But now Tess was skin and bones, except for her distentions. Her ears seemed as large as a kitten's. She was weak, and would sometimes just lie down wherever she was. But Tess was still Tess. She enjoyed being touched. She still wagged her tail. She knew us, knew we were near, and she was determined to be with us. She was also at times clearly on her own journey.
One Thursday night, the night John Kerry gave his acceptance speech, we had guests. Tess was on the couch, and I spent as much time as I could sitting beside her, stroking her as she rested. That night she went onto the bed with Margaret, but later had trouble, going to her box with no result, going to her water dish and only hovering over it, maybe getting a sip or two. She wandered back and forth, and wound up on the couch at four a.m. where she rested quietly.
In the morning I was awakened by a sound---I opened my eyes to see Tess. She'd jumped onto the bed. Margaret was up and gone. I looked at Tess sleepily. I was very happy to see her, but I thought I saw an almost pleading look in her eyes. Dozing and waking, I petted her and talked to her. Margaret came home to pick up some pills she'd forgotten, between finishing yoga and going to school. She stayed to eat something, and as we talked, we heard Tess cry . She was in her bed in the library. She was in pain and distress, having spasms.
After she'd calmed a bit, and there was clearly nothing we could do, Margaret and I retreated to the bedroom to talk over what we must do. Tess surprised us by once again getting herself up on the bed. She had more spasms. But she was determined to be with us, to show how much she wanted to be with us. She'd had to give into whatever was happening to her, but she wouldn't abandon us.
Now we had a duty to her. It was late Friday afternoon, and we could not let her suffer through a weekend with no other recourse. We bundled her in a sheet. I held her while Margaret drove to the animal hospital. Tess never liked riding in cars, she would meow a constant litany, but this time she only looked around at the world passing by. When we got there and went in, they were not ready for us. There were lots of people there with their animals, and all of the people seemed to be quite old. Despite the kind and professional people who worked there, it was not the kind of place I'd like to spend my last moments.
I took Tess out to the front lawn, talked to her, and showed her the flowers, and the blue sky. She was interested in all of it. People who passed by all said what a pretty cat she was. Her eyes were large and open and she was not distressed. I held her and told her we would have to say goodbye. I told her I'd see her in my dreams.
It seemed to all happen so fast. Did we panic? I don't know. Tessie was never going to get better. She trusted us and we did what we felt was best for her. In the end neither of us could live with allowing her to suffer any more.
But in the late afternoon I was holding her as she nuzzled under my chin. And by early evening I was digging a hole in the ground, the hardest job I've ever done. The first shovelful of dirt on that small cardboard box was like a gunshot to my heart. I'd wrapped her in my shirt, the one I'd worn most often when taking care of her those long nights, and we put some of her favorite kinds of weeds and plants in the pockets, along with some sage and a bit of Pennsylvania soil.
There's a theory that people shouldn't have pets, because it robs the animal of its wild nature. Specifically it keeps them from maturing, they are always dependent as infants, which may be the way we like them. I'm sure that's true. But it's not the worst thing that can happen to a specific animal. And given our inherited way of life in this human society, this is as close a relationship to another species as many of us get.
I've never had children. And I'm ruefully aware of our strong predilection to project onto animals. Since they can't talk (or not in our language) we do their talking for them. Perhaps it is also the relative simplicity of our relationship with pets that makes it so powerful. One can fail or please or disappoint a pet in only a few ways that are usually very obvious, and usually the same each time. With humans sometimes you never know.
Who know why I've taken Tess' death harder in an immediate sense than the deaths of humans who were quite important in my life, including my grandparents and parents? It can be somewhat explained, simply in terms of companionship. Since I work at home, Tess was my almost constant companion for the nearly eight years we've lived here. The last thing I did before leaving the house was to check on her. She would greet me---or I would greet her---whenever I returned. An empty house was never really empty: there was always a beautiful being here. Her beauty inspired me, even gave me a kind of anchor of hope.
We developed a unique relationship, and it deepened in those last weeks. It's impossible to explain, even to myself. Something simple and direct, yet complex and uncertain, as we each tried to communicate and figure out what in the world the other was trying to say. Something earnest, yet everyday, and without the defenses we learn in our encounters with humans, even those we love.
But it may be a combination of the factors I mentioned before that have channeled the experiences of death that in prior human cases were defended against, or complicated by other aspects of a relationship. So the feelings were and are quite raw. For example, for awhile I felt that she trusted me but I failed her, because I could not protect her from becoming ill and dying. I've felt this idiotic anxiety of waiting for her to return. I've felt angry that she can't be here anymore. I've regretted every moment I got annoyed with her. I've felt a lot of the meaning empty out of my daily existence. Tess was a secret reason for going on. We have only a few photos of her, for some dumb reason. But looking at them reminds me that I almost never looked at her without smiling, without feeling delight. Perhaps worst of all, I selfishly feel bereft that I will not have Tess warm on my chest as I pass away.
All of these emotions seem more seemly when applied to humans. No doubt this is a character flaw on my part. But Tess wouldn't be bothered. As long as she could jump up and be petted as she clung to my shirt, under the warm lamplight as I read. As long as she knew I would be there, making sure she was okay.
Why was this harder than losing my other cats? Perhaps because when I was younger there was an unknown future of potential growing and looking forward to blossom. Change could be sad and painful and haunting, but there were the possibilities, the mysteries and destinies. I don't have much of that sense now. Little Tess grounded me, yet her beauty and grace and maybe even the strength of a simple reciprocal relationship reassured some idealistic sense.
In the months before she got sick, Tess liked me to pick her up a lot more than she used to. She was generally friendly with people, but she didn't usually like to be picked up. I always felt honored by this, and pleased. Editors could diss me, employers ignore me, my clients not pay me, the world insult me, and people bewilder me, but held in one arm and petted by the other hand, Tess would still purr. And her warmth across my legs or sometimes in the small of my back would ease me past the anxiety to the surrender of night.
What I learned from Tess in her last weeks I have not yet entirely absorbed, but much of it will be of her courage, of her loyalty, and her love of the world, even as she seemed to be gazing into the next.
Tess, the lion-hearted. It's just not the same without you.
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