Origins: Valentine's Day

As is often true, the ultimate origin of Valentine's Day is unknown, though there are plenty of juicy legends repeated as fact, all disputed by at least some scholars.  But the one makes the most sense to me is this: its roots are in the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalia, held on the Ides of February (February 15.) 

 Lupercalia was an early spring fertility festival, ostensibly in honor of a god of agriculture but also of Rome's founders, Romulus and Remus.  According to that origin legend, they were twin boys abandoned in a cave and raised by a wolf (Latin and Harry Potter scholars will recognize that "lupa" in Lupercalia means a she-wolf.)  The festival traditionally began with a rite at that legendary cave.

But the rest of Lupercalia was dedicated to different sorts of fertility, with naked drunks running through the streets (some suggest the day also honored the god Pan), past married women who hoped they would become pregnant or have an easy delivery if they were touched by the goat's hide strips the men brandished. 

Yet another custom--more related to today's holiday-- was a lottery in which unmarried women dropped their names into an urn for unmarried men to randomly extract.  The two would become a couple, presumably including sexual favors, either for the course of the festival or (according to other sources) the entire year.  This even speedier variation on speed dating often (it is said) resulted in marriage. 

All of this went on for centuries, until the Catholic Church finally predominated.  In the fifth century, the Pope banned Lupercalia, and replaced it with St. Valentine's Day.  Some sources claim that the choice of St. Valentine was simply because he was officially martyred on that date.  Maybe.  But whenever the Church replaced a pagan feast day, or built a church over a pre-Christian sacred site, the replacement is often related to the earlier intent-- especially since Indigenous and other pre-Christian special days were related to natural cycles of the calendar, such as when birds and other animals begin mating in the early spring.

Besides, there are stories of at least three St. Valentines, all supposedly martyred, and none proven to have existed.  But by the Middle Ages the Church had a great cover story to relate Valentine to the Lupercalia, without saying so.  According to this legend, it all started when the third century Roman emperor Claudius II banned marriage.

Claudius had risen through the military (the first Emperor to have done so, and the first to be of "barbarian" birth) and thought marriage made soldiers weak and fretful, distracted by wives and children at home. And Claudius was often at war.

 But a Christian prelate in Rome called Valentine continued to secretly marry couples, until he came to the attention of Claudius.  During Valentine's imprisonment, he and Claudius had lively discussions, each trying to convert the other to their religion.  But only one of them was the emperor, so Valentine was executed.

Did any of this happen?  Outlawing marriage was not entirely unknown in Rome, but the encyclopedia entry that Wikipedia uses doesn't mention Claudius II (also known as Claudius Gothicus) doing so.  There is a further addition to the legend that says while he was imprisoned, Valentine had some sort of relationship--perhaps even fell in love with--his jailer's daughter.  Before his execution, he left her a note, "from your Valentine."  Right--at least a degree of cuteness too far.  

But by the Middle Ages, Valentine was a popular saint across Europe, and St. Valentine's Day became a day for celebrating early love, a sanitized--or at least euphemistic-- version of the Roman holiday.  The tradition of the card now called the valentine may have also derived from the age-old traditions of  Lupercalia.  Denied their lottery, it's said that young Roman men sent handwritten greetings to women they admired on the mid-February date.

But the first documented (and still existing) valentine card was sent by Charles, duke of Orleans in 1415.  He sent it to his wife, who happened to be a prisoner in the Tower of London at the time. 

 Handmade cards began to bear the image of Cupid (also related to Roman love customs) and to include amorous verses.  The printing press made the "mechanical valentine" a thing, and lower postal rates in 19th century England meant they didn't need to be hand-delivered, and could even be sent anonymously.  This led to more explicit imagery and racy verses, to the extent that in 19th century Chicago, some 25,000 valentines were deemed too obscene to deliver.  

Among the rude cards of the 19th and early 20th centuries were "vinegar valentines," that expressed insults--doubly so, since it often was the receiver and not the sender who had to pay the postage. Meanwhile, erotic valentines--intended as humorous or maybe not--survive into the 21st century.

The first printed valentines in America were pricey, but when greeting card companies produced less expensive versions, the practice of sending them became almost obligatory, rivaling only Christmas for predominance.  Through the 20th century at least, many faced Valentine's Day with anxiety and dread, counting the cards they got from fellow fifth graders, or mourning the first February 14 that their mailbox was bereft.  

As for the Xs denoting kisses on valentines and other written notes--which likely makes it the first emoji--they seem to be a remnant from illiterate times when many could sign their name only with an X, and sealed it with a kiss. If present trends continue, those days may not be gone forever.       

Origins: The Jungle Gym

 The Jungle Gym turned 100 years old last year, sort of.  The patent filed by Sebastian Hinton was approved in 1923, starting off its worldwide replications.  However, Sebastian Hinton was not really an inventor -- he was a patent attorney in Illinois, so he wrote a good patent.

  The idea and the basic structure was dreamed up and built many years before by his father, Charles Hinton, who was an inventor (he created the first baseball pitching machine.  Unfortunately, it was powered by gunpowder.)  Charles Hinton also wrote scientific romances in the era of H.G. Wells' classics, but chiefly he was a mathematician.  And so the purpose of his jungle gym was to...teach his children math.

Charles Hinton came from a radical but highly educated family in the UK.  His mathematical interest was what he called the fourth dimension, within which exist the three dimensions we know.  Or something like that.  (It wasn't the Wells' version of the fourth dimension, which was time.)  In the late 19th century, when he proposed his ideas (more influential now than then), he came to believe that people couldn't understand his fourth dimension because they really didn't know the mathematics of three dimensions.  

So to teach his children how three-dimensional math works, he built a backyard structure to illustrate it, and encouraged his kids to identify the junctures of the x, y and z axes by climbing to each point and calling it out.  They climbed all right, but they ignored the math lesson.

Charles Hinton built his structure out of bamboo, since he was in Japan at the time.  Later he moved to the US, taught at Princeton (where he invented the pitching machine), and worked at the US Naval Observatory and the Patent Office, though he never bothered to patent his "climbing frame."

Years later his son Sebastian suddenly remembered it, and described it to an educator at the progressive school system in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, who encouraged him to build a prototype.  It was tweaked, and eventually kids in Winnetka were climbing on the first jungle gyms (one of which still exists, also made of wood) and Hinton filed his patent.  He didn't personally profit by it or see its success, for this is also the centennial of his death.

The patent referred to the structure as a version of tree branches upon which "monkeys" climb.  Experts say it's really ape species that do this kind of climbing, but kids are often called monkeys. and the name stuck for one part of the jungle gym: the monkey bars.  The jungle gym has been varied over the years, getting more elaborate and more safety- (and lawsuit-) conscious.  But something like the original still features in many if not most playgrounds and a lot of backyards.

There have been a few notices in the media of this centennial, notably the NPR All Things Considered segment by Matt Ozug.  But no one answered the question that I had (nor did they ask it):  The name "Jungle Gym" seems like an obvious pun on "Jungle Jim," of comic strip, film, radio and TV fame.  But is it?

Nope.  Sebastian Hinton patented what he called the "junglegym" in 1923.  Jungle Jim didn't appear in the newspaper comics pages until 1934.  Jungle Jim was created by comics artist Alex Raymond (with writer Don Moore) as a lead-in to Raymond's other famous hero, Flash Gordon--they both appeared for the first time on the same day.  The other thing that seems obvious about Jungle Jim is true: he was created to compete with the wildly popular Tarzan, who started out in a series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, then swung into the movies (the first Tarzan in silent pictures was Elmo Lincoln, of Knox College) before dominating the funny papers starting in 1931. 

So is it the other way around?  Jungle Jim comes from the Jungle Gym?  The official story is that Jungle Jim Bradley was named after Alex Raymond's brother Jim.  But did the brothers ever play on a jungle gym as boys?  I await the definitive Alex Raymond biography to answer that question.

New Year's Guides

 

The new year (which began really as the winter solstice passed in December) is traditionally a time for looking back and looking ahead but at a deeper level.  New Year's resolutions are the most familiar expression now, and though they tend to be superficial and repetitive (hence the boom in weight loss and exercise products this month), they at least suggest this impulse to reevaluate and resolve.  

Another way to look at it is to pause in the journey to reflect on it, and perhaps make more conscious use of our commitments and our guides.  I recently saw what to me was an unusual interpretation of the Buddhist (also Hindu) concept of dharma, as "a particular purpose and work in the world that is unique to us and of benefit to others."  For some of us, that purpose is defined and defining.  For most of us, it is complex, multiple, ambiguous, hard to define even to ourselves.  But we can define some of our guides on the journey, and hope the rest takes care of itself.

Three of my guides are represented here by concepts from other cultures, in other languages.  The fourth is an American way.  Though they are personal values, they govern my relationship with others: other people, other beings, others of any description I share this planet and this universe with, in my time.  

 Ahimsa is a Sanskrit word which literally means non-harming, the most basic Buddhist precept.  Poet Gary Snyder, who studied Buddhism for many years, defines the concept as “do the least possible harm.” "Least possible" refers to contexts as well as physical limitations.  So it is less restrictive than total non-violence, but it is broader in application.  It means do the least possible harm to everything—not just humans but animals, plants and even rocks.  It turns out to be an ecological as well as a moral principle. In life it means a change in assumptions—that is, think first before making a harmful change, not exactly second nature to western civilization.  Personally it means being mindful, respecting the other, and sincerely evaluating whether causing harm is necessary.  This is a key to the sacred attitude towards eating and other aspects of ordinary life that nevertheless have profound meaning.

 Hozho is a concept from Navajo culture, part of the Beauty Way.  A Navajo character in a Tony Hillerman novel explains it with an example: In times of drought the Hopi and some other cultures will pray for rain. But the Navajo do something else, based on a different approach to life.  “The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought…. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.” 

This does not eliminate trying to right wrongs, address problems, or change what needs to be changed.  But where it applies, this concept is not only a profound act of humility, but a necessary human response of adjustment to reality.  It’s something that other animals do instinctively—they find ways to cope with drought, for example. They adapt to the environment.  Instead of being angry or frightened, or obsessing on things as unjust and taking them personally, people accept the conditions and work within them to make life better—by conserving water, for instance.  Being in harmony is not easy.  The Navajo ceremonies take days.  But as a general principle, it only makes sense.

The third concept is Italian, and so part of my own Italian American culture.  Sprezzatura can be defined in various ways, but it can come down to making a personal style part of life, an elegance that is natural and appears effortless.  Tony Bennett applied it to music, but outwardly it can most often be seen in modes of dress.  There are places where such expression is noticed and valued, but more places where it isn’t.  But that doesn’t matter so much, because sprezzatura is an attitude, and expression (playfulness, authenticity) for its own sake.  Or to quote another Italian saying: Niente senza gioia.  Nothing without joy. 

The fourth concept I regard as the basis for all community.  It is expressed in the common phrase: "You'd do the same for me."  It expresses not only a commitment but a confidence that this commitment is shared.  It is a phrase of the people, by the people and for the people.  Which brings us (in a way) back full circle to ahimsa. 

R.I.P. 2023

 Honoring some of the prominent people who died in the past year as I usually do seems a little hollow this time, for my thoughts are heavy with people prominent in my life who passed away in 2023, even if they are not so famous.  They were all good people, and they live in my memory.  So I can't go on to more generally recognizable names without at least mentioning them. 

 I've written previously about my uncle, Carl Severini.  I've mentioned my friend since high school, Joyce Davis (my first prom date, and first teenage kiss.)  Towards the end of the year there were more: Bernadette Cheyne and Charlie Meyers, friends from Humboldt State drama department (I wrote about them here); and most recently, Janet Morrison, who I knew first at Carnegie Mellon drama and as Margaret's close friend, and who we saw a few times more recently.   The world is a lesser place without them.

But here's at least a curtain call for people who were part of many lives, some of whom will continue to live in films, books and recordings, and some of whom will remained anchored to a particular time in our memories.

So a last hurrah to Harry Belafonte, as admirable a man as he was talented.  After stardom with The Band, Robbie Robertson explored his Native roots and wrote tantalizing film scores. He must have been an interesting guy to know.  Michael Gambon was masterful in so many roles, from his early work on The Singing Detective to the great French detective Maigret in a British TV series, to international fame as the second Dumbledore in the Harry Potter films, with lots of wonderful supporting roles as well (I recall expecially his role as Mr. Woodhouse in the 2009 BBC/PBS series of Jane Austen's Emma.) 

Glenda Jackson had a superb run as a movie actor, as well as a theatre actor in the UK (the only time I saw her onstage in the US was in a regrettable production of Macbeth.)  The British actor Tom Wilkinson and the American actor Alan Arkin were always worth watching in everything they did.

In an episode of NCIS, DeNozzo asks Gibbs what Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard looked like as a young man.  "Illya Kuryakin," he replied.  David McCallum of course played both, replacing the smoldering enigmatic spy with the vitality and charm of the older doctor.    

I've written at length about the timeless Tony Bennett.  I remember Jimmy Buffett and Randy Meisner (a founder of the Eagles) from the 70s, the dynamic Tina Turner from even earlier.  I met and interviewed David Crosby, not an entirely happy experience, but perhaps as much my fault as his.  I suddenly came face to face with Raquel Welch in a Manhattan bookstore--she seemed shorter than those statuesque poster poses.  

I fell absolutely in love with Melinda Dillon in Close Encounters, and though she got a bit typecast, she played her character well in Absence of  Malice. Andre Braugher and Richard Belzer I will remember from the Homicide series (though I recall Belzer even earlier as a standup comic.)  I was not a Friends fan, but admired Matthew Perry's work on The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.  I encountered Barbara Bossom, a western Pennsylvania girl, at CMU with her husband Steven Bochco.  I of course had watched her on the iconic Hill Street Blues.

Jane Birkin

Mary Quant and Jane Birkin are linked forever to the England Swings 1960s (as is the lesser known actor Shirley Ann Field in several British films of their golden era in the early 60s.)  Daniel Ellsberg represented a different 60s and 70s, as did Tom Smothers of the Smothers Brothers, and Vietnam era pacifist David Harris, while Newton Minnow will forever be associated with "the vast wasteland" of TV he described as FCC commissioner in the 60s.  Astrud Gilberto had a hit with "The Girl From Ipanema" in 1964, influencing a generation of musical talents.  I recall the bold installations of Robert Irwin as part of the liberation of the 60s.

I remember Dick Groat as the shortstop on my beloved 1960s Pittsburgh Pirates world champs (He hit .325 that year and won the batting title and was the co-MVP, and I don't even have to look those up.)  Johnny Lujack was the fabled record-setting quarterback for Notre Dame and the Chicago Bears who had a long career as a sports announcer.  My father told me he was a second cousin, probably through my paternal grandmother's family, but I never met him. 

Even further back, Phyllis Coates was the first Lois Lane in the 1950s Adventures of Superman TV series, and Franco Misliacci was the lyricist of "nel blu, di pinto de blu," one of a few Italian language hit records of the 50s, which later was a hit again for Robert Ridirelli (Bobby Rydell) and others by the title of its most recognizable word, "Volare."  

I've written about writers who passed away in 2023 here. Many of these strangers were part of the texture of my life, so in partial and mysterious ways, you could say I knew them.  May they rest in peace and in our memories.

New Year's Resolution?

  "Are you going to try to improve yourself, or are you going to let the universe improve you?"

Dogen

The Morning

Would I love it this way if it could last

 would I love it this way if it

 were the whole sky the one heaven

 or if I could believe it belonged to me

 a possession that was mine alone

 or if I imagined that it noticed me

 recognized me and may have come to see me

 out of all the mornings that I never knew

 and all those that I have forgotten

 would I love it this way if I were somewhere else

 or if I were younger for the first time

or if these very birds were not singing

 or I could not hear them or see their trees

 would I love it this way if I were in pain

 red torment of body or gray void of grief

 would I love it this way if I knew

 that I would remember anything that is

 here now anything anything

 --W.S. Merwin

Happy Holidays

Beatles Now and Then

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words Matter: Less Than Fewer

 

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

“where will the meanings be

when the words are forgotten”

--W.S. Merwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

poets Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell

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

 

poet Li-Young Lee

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

Lucille Clifton

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

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

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

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

Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My family's living room 1954

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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