Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Note to a friend at The Redwoods, my community

I feel grateful for what you say today, and what you said 40 years ago. Yes, Rich's poem "What kind of times are these" is indeed shockingly powerful.

All of what you say feels true in the best sense of that often poorly used word.  Your note prompts me to re-imagine the much-remembered line with which Robert Frost begins his poem "Mending Wall." 

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

I don't like to speak or read poetry independently of the whole poem. Seeing that single line hanging out there on my mental clothesline feels unkind to the poet and so much of my own and others' experience of "Mending Wall." The setting is Frost's own, New Hampshire or Vermont.

Because I don't know how you may know that poem, or come again to know it, I am including it for you here as a small gift of thanks.

Many thanks, my friend,

John

Mending Wall

by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

 

In memory of Edward R. Murrow

"Good night and good luck." It was his sign-off phrase. I shiver when I remember his distinctive voice saying those words when he closed his radio and later his television report of the news. He was a man of integrity unafraid to speak truth to power. He should be an exemplary presence in American journalism today.

I'm putting together this small tribute to Murrow for that reason, and because it's been six years since we saw the fine film narrated by George Clooney (it may be bought, rented or streamed from Amazon).

It has been much longer — before the beginning of World War II in Europe — since Edward R. Murrow's reporting career began, in effect bringing a revolution to American radio journalism with his short-wave broadcasts sent from London and aboard Allied bombers to listeners in the United States. He was a pioneer of a kind of journalism we see too little of in these days of media empires and news that must make its way by its entertainment value. 

Murrow began a new kind of radio news, CBS's "World News Round Up." H.V. Kaltenborn, who narrated the program from New York, could be heard with anxiety in his voice because the quality of radio connection was uneven and unpredictable, "Come in Ed Murrow, Come in Ed Murrow." During the Blitz, when German planes rained bombs on London, Murrow sometimes spoke from the steps of damaged St. Paul's Cathedral. Air raid sirens could be heard in the background.

Murrow and other journalists followed Allied troops into the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald in April 1945, as it happened on the very day President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs. Georgia. Murrow, obviously shaken by what he saw, described the exhausted physical state of the 21,000 concentration camp prisoners who had survived (many died of their starvation in the following days and weeks), mentioning "rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood." And he refused to apologize for the horror of his words:

"I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it I have no words. If I've offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I'm not in the least sorry."

   

 

It is now more than a half century since, in his pioneering television reporting on "See It Now," Murrow courageously took on Joe McCarthy, the junior Senator from Wisconsin who had made a career of irresponsible, bullying and dishonest red-baiting. On that program Murrow said something that bears repeating in 2011, in every time and place.

"We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason.... No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices."

Edward R. Murrow in his office, 1957

Later he initiated a program called This I Believe , an opportunity for ordinary Americans to speak for five minutes on their fundamental values. Fifty-three years ago he gave a memorable speech in Chicago on October 15, 1958. It is a speech as pertinent now as it was then.

A chain smoker throughout his life, Murrow was known for almost never being seen without his trademark Camel cigarette. He evidently smoked from sixty to sixty-five cigarettes a day, roughly three packs. His own television program See It Now was the first to have a report about the connection between smoking and cancer. Murrow said during the show, "I doubt I could spend a half hour without a cigarette with any comfort or ease." 

His last major TV milestone was reporting and narrating the CBS Reports installment "Harvest of Shame," on the plight of migrant farm workers in the United States. 

Edward R. Murrow died on April 27, 1965, two days after his 57th birthday. His colleague and friend Eric Sevareid said of him,

"He was a shooting star; and we will live in his afterglow a very long time."

 

A letter to my rabbi son about poems and poetry, truth and fiction

Joshua, I thought of you when I read an Orion blog posting by an unlikely Miami denizen, Karen Russell, author of two books for children with intriguing titles: a book of short stories called St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and the novel Swamplandia!

Ms. Russell quotes a great poet and an even greater novelist, both women, both memorably creative and of highly distinctive voice, whose words evoked my memory of your sermon about the number of poems we don't understand on the way to the one we do. First, the brilliant Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”  And then Marianne Moore calls poets "literalists of the imagination" and poems themselves "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Marianne Moore in turn brings to mind a thought apropos of your sermon. Like William Carlos Williams, she had a second vocation, like being a rabbi, that served household economy, social justice and the nourishment of her art. After her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1909 she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until 1915, when she began to publish her poetry. Afterward she served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial.

 Marianne Moore 

The Orion Blog

Bookshelf: Swamplandia (with thanks to Orion Magazine, a wonderful publication entirely without advertisement; see http://www.orionmagazine.org)

November 04, 2011, by Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of the book of short stories St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia! , reviewed recently in the May/June 2011 issue of Orion. We asked Karen a few questions about the intersecting roles of place and fantasy in her writing.

Whenever I’m asked about the ratio of the real to the fantastic in my work, I will shamelessly plagiarize Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.” Another quote that comes to mind comes from the poet Marianne Moore, who calls poets “literalists of the imagination” and poems themselves “imaginary gardens / with real toads in them.”

When I first started writing stories, eons before I ever did any reflecting on “craft” or “process,” I would just sort of naturally begin with setting, usually an aqueous or a densely wooded one, a literal, concrete place that I could see in my mind’s eye. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, the story “The Stargazer’s Log” I imagined as being set on a sleepy beach like Marco Island, on Florida’s Gulf coast; “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” was set on a failing alligator park in a kind of haunted version of the Everglades; and “Z.Z.‘s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers” was a camp on an island of pines where it seemed always to be twilight or midnight, aMidsummer’s Night Dream of a woods.

In Florida, fantasy is our big industry, so I think it’s natural that in my writing I keep returning to settings where the boundary between the real and the fantastic, the natural and the artificial, gets effaced. I was very influenced by the theme parks that surrounded me as a kid in South Florida, these artificial worlds like the Miami Seaquarium that fronted the real ocean, or the Gatorland park in Orlando where you walk through a gaping, cartoon-green archway built to look like an alligator’s jaws in order to see the real thing. Here’s a creature that hasn’t changed in millions of years, and who survived its ancestors, the dinosaurs. It’s like a splinter of time. And while this Mesozoic monster is swimming around an artificial lagoon, children are wandering around the park with balloons, and infants are sucking on rubber pacifiers in their strollers while their dads push them, talking on cell phones.

Flannery O'Connor at the age of 39, well before publication of her mature works of fiction in the 1950s and 1960s.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

I think the geography of my childhood conditioned me to be drawn to fiction that was elastic enough to contain multiple universes, to juggle many worlds at once. Because that was daily life in my homestate. That collision of different kinds of time and natures and realities. For example, it took us forty minutes to drive from the Dadeland Mall, with its frenzied music and Food Court and zillions of people from every country you can imagine, and the “Hurry! Hurry! Buy! Buy!” vertigo of all malls, down the Dixie to the Everglades National Park, which felt dizzying in a very different way. I was an anxious kid, and somehow going to the Everglades could cure me of that shallow-breathing feeling. There is so much sky. And green spots of color on the horizon, these hammocks, tree islands, that appear to be floating in a sea of dark yellow grass. Even as a nearsighted child with a short attention span, I think I realized the sublimity of a sky that huge, of birds and trees as comically strange as the pelican, the royal palm. The Everglades, compared to the high-speed, honkadelic retail at Dadeland Mall, felt like a timeless, mythic setting: palm trees and gumbo limbo, big flame-red poinciana, mangroves and sawgrass, white ibis and great blue heron, anhingas frozen on pylons, turtles, manatees, and the grinning alligators, of course.

As a reader, I’ve always been attracted to books with settings that feel both wholly real and wholly other. Siamese-twin universes, where the daylit world we know is connected to an underworld or alternative reality. When I was a kid, so many of my favorite books seemed to simultaneously occur in a world that I recognized and some alternate zone—a bunch of anemic, pink-eyed British kids walking through their closet door to become the heroes of Narnia, say. Or siblings tesseracted through space to a different dimension, explorers plummeted in a submarine to an alien, liquid realm. A Midsummer’s Night Dream is set in both a real woodland and an enchanted fairyland where all ordinary laws are suspended.

So long as you have a human character interacting with a landscape, all those dreams zipped up in a skinsuit, I think you’re going to end up with an amalgam of fantasy and reality. Every tree and rock is filtered through that particular human’s eye. Any physical setting, in whatever book you take down off the shelf, whether it’s Venice or a Martian bear cave, reveals these other dimensions: the fantastic, subjective, invisible dimensions of the material world.

In Swamplandia!, I often found the physical settings through which Ava and Kiwi and Ossie travel to be analogous to their emotional states—when Ava has to escape from the swamp, for example, I pictured her trip across the vast floodplain as the literalization of what it feels like to move through grief. Similarly, when Kiwi gets “swallowed” by the Leviathan slide at the mainland World of Darkness theme park, I thought of that as symbolic of what it feels like to be digested by an impersonal institution: to become anonymous. Setting for me almost always operates on both a literal and a figurative plane, but only over the course of drafting does it become sort of shockingly obvious to me. Grief in a swamp, you don’t say? I’m always the last to know!

I discovered a lot of the places that ended up seeping into my fiction between the ages of ten and fifteen, when I would go on these long bike rides. I was a little bit of a loner, and I’d ride my bike to Matheson Hammock almost every day after school—it’s one of the last remaining hammocks in Miami, and right in the heart of the city, a really quiet oasis where I liked to pedal fast through this truly eerie mangrove tunnel. Sometimes I’d be the only one there and I’d see this beautiful heron that I swear looked as tall as me, just standing stock-still in the water. James Merrill has that beautiful line: “the world beneath the world is brightening.” Whenever I saw that great blue heron, that’s exactly how I felt—like some mystery was drawing closer to the surface, where you could almost glimpse it. And I think that’s the power of the richest settings in fiction—they take you to where the world beneath the world begins to brighten.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation in 2009. Her novel Swamplandia! was published in February 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Love,

Dad

 

FDR's Four Freedoms then and now, 1941 and 2011

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union Address to Congress on 6 January 1941 deserves renewed attention today. 

It became known thereafter as one of his most eloquent and important speeches. FDR proposed four essential human freedoms people throughout the world should enjoy, and went on to say more concretly what they imply for any of us.

We might begin by reading and reflecting upon his own words, and listening, as  we still can, to his resonant clarion voice.

More important, we have both reason and opportunity to read and listen as if we heard the same words spoken today, for Roosevelt evoked values and needs, fear and thanksgiving, deeply of this day as well as his own.

He spoke of freedoms grounded in the U.S. Constitution — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship. Then Roosevelt added two more, drawn from his New Deal for an American people suffering from the Depression:

• freedom of people everywhere to enjoy economic security, and 
• freedom from aggression, as he memorably put it, "freedom from fear" at home and everywhere in the world.

Norman Rockwell's painting of Freedom from Fear

In the autumn of 2011, this nation — 99% of us — know too little economic security, and have reason to fear, with others of this world, the political and military policies of our own American government, a corporate and military oligarchy as much as or more than a democracy.

We need the energy, transparency, clarity and leadership represented by Franklin Roosevelt as deeply as did the nation he addressed in the war-shadowed and war-torn year of 1941, seventy years ago.

It is valuable, then, to assess the relevance of the four freedoms to this earth's and its people's well-being.

In the next few days and weeks, I hope to do that, and I welcome response from others.

The Occupy movement is at a crossroads; we must not let it wither in the face of oligarchic opposition and suppression.

 

Below are the critical moments in FDR's address. (Emphases are mine, added to draw out for the reader unfulfilled needs in our own time.)

Eleanor Roosevelt, in her own right one of the most admired people of the 20th century, was an important voice in her husband's conception of the four freedoms. She went on, after his death in April 1945, to serve their accomplishment — everywhere in the world — for the remaining years of her life, until her death on November 7, 1962.

The nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America.  Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.

Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.

The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

• Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
• Jobs for those who can work.
• Security for those who need it.
• The ending of special privilege for the few.
• The preservation of civil liberties for all.
• The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:

• We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
• We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
• We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and

• the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay 

should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the Congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

1. The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
2. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.
3. The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.
4. The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. 

That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. 

Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. 

Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

 

W.S. Merwin's "To the New Year"

Read at the conclusion of a memorial service in Tucson; posted here on Martin Luther King Day 2011

 

To the New Year

 

With what stillness at last

you appear in the valley

your first sunlight reaching down

to touch the tips of a few

high leaves that do not stir

as though they had not noticed

and did not know you at all

then the voice of a dove calls

from far away in itself

to the hush of the morning

 

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

 

RECKONINGS: A brief introduction

Blueberries and granite, photo by John R. Boettiger

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, economic, environmental.

Attention to such themes is typically expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckoning is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos than chronos. They are linear only in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said they are circular. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others -- ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly, john@reckonings.net. Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (I trust needless to say, your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

Listening, and listening

I don't think my Amherst College classmate (1960) Dave Wood would mind my repeating here a short Facebook exchange he and I had in response to my earlier post of Scott Russell Sanders's reflections on listening to trees. And speaking of the pleasures of one thing putting another in mind, I am reprinting below a moving and closely related poem by David Wagoner, who still spends a lot of time listening in his beloved Pacific Northwest.

DW

This puts me in mind of the sounds we hear at night at our remote lakeside camp in eastern Maine--historically, Wabanaki (Penobscot and Passamaquoddy) land. The loons--and there are many--are there as soon as the ice is off the lake in the spring, and stay (at least the young ones do) until late in the fall. They have an other-wordly and complex language, one that clearly has social significance for them. Each night, an hour or two after sunset, they begin calling from all over the lake, as if trying to locate each other as they settle for the night. This goes on for several minutes, then quiets down. Then (if the night is still) we can sometimes hear barred owls ("eight hooters"), and bullfrogs croaking from the marsh across the lake. During the day, the ravens are raucous--and their language, too, is complex. By mid-summer the mergansers that we see courting in May parade proudly up and down the lakeshore with a dozen ducklings in tow, the mothers clucking orders to their brood (the males seem to disappear after their job is done). It's a wondrous world.

JRB

Many thanks, Dave, for your stories of living with the birds of eastern Maine. I share your love of loons, who feel like lifelong companions - along with mourning doves - I listen for them wherever I am, wonder at their voices - most vividly on early morning and evening kayaking on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where I lived for several years. Ravens, too, are special companions of a different sort - I'm influenced by Raven's large and problematic place in Indian legend, not unlike a winged Coyote. It is indeed a wondrous world. My gratitude for membership is unbounded.

Here is David Wagoner's poem:

The Silence of the Stars

 

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him.  They looked at him,
Half-smiling.  They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them.  Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened.  One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No.  They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now.  On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

 

~ David Wagoner ~

50th Reunion Book, Amherst College, 2010

In 500+ words, a summary of one's life, view of the world and the impact of Amherst:

The poet David Wagoner was 28 when, at his friend Theodore Roethke’s suggestion, he moved from his Indiana homeland to the Pacific Northwest. He was awestruck by the green luxuriance of life. “When I came over the Cascades and down into the coastal rainforest for the first time in the fall of 1954, it was a big event for me, it was a real crossing of a threshold, a real change of consciousness. Nothing was ever the same again.”

I didn’t travel as far – just a few miles down the Notch road, in fact. But I felt a similar new life in the offing at about the same age, when I resigned my faculty position at Amherst to join the intrepid little band just down the road in the apple orchards of South Amherst, preparing to give birth to Hampshire College.

Mapping those liminal or threshold times is one way I’ve imagined the character and consistency of my life. It serves in this instance to say something that must be true in a sense for all of us.  The four years from the fall of 1956 to the spring of 1960 were an extended coming-of-age experience, with attendant pains, pleasures, accomplishments and missings of the mark.

The first months at Amherst were mostly excruciating. I did my shame-ridden best to hide the fright, but my skills of hiding seemed – to me, at least – to have deserted me with all the rest. Everything felt stripped away but the soft underbelly. At Thanksgiving I told my mother I was going to join the Army; it had to be more forgiving of my deficiencies.

My mother thought not, and I returned to Amherst. A kind of competence began to take hold, and an interest in the wider world reawakened – especially at that time the world of politics, my Roosevelt family’s delight and pride, bread and butter of the dinner table. Alongside a few Amherst friends and memorable teachers – foremost, Henry Steele Commager and Leo Marx – my real mentor was my grandmother, whose home became mine in those years. Her compassion and canny wisdom, her belief in the United Nations, social justice and human rights, fed me and shaped my values and choices. I didn’t begin my undergraduate years with social conscience or consciousness, at least none focused or articulate. Thanks largely to her I graduated with some measure of both.

For me, Amherst seemed – and seems still – effectively to have done what it promised, or at least that which the College most prized. I learned how to think more carefully and usefully, to apply discipline, practice, and the rules of evidence to the intellectual challenges I encountered, to find satisfaction in words that fit what I needed to describe and understand.  

God knows – and my mother, sister and girlfriends knew – I didn’t grow up. Emotionally I was as callow a youth at 21 as at I’d been at 17. For me at least, and I think for the Amherst culture I knew, maturity in that deeper sense was not among the liberal arts. I later sought, with middling success, to make it so in my designs for Hampshire College.                 

Speaking of God, while I learned something about the application and misapplication of imagination and metaphor in those years, I learned next to nothing about their essential applicability to spiritual life. Intuitively I knew otherwise, but I didn’t find my way until later to those who would reawaken that hunger, help me understand that religion was more than the blessing of a no longer required attendance at Chapel. Soul and psyche – the central re-pairing of my adult years of teaching and learning at Hampshire and after – hadn’t yet come into conscious focus.

We’re born yearning for companionship and community, and I’m still growing in their realization. My wife and I now live and work as members of a gifted community of healing in southern Norway - psychiatric hospital, research institute, community outreach program for couples and families, pastoral and professional retreat centers for clergy, physicians, psychologists and nurses.

This past March all of my immediate family – Leigh and I, four children and their spouses, and seven grandchildren – gathered on a Pacific Northwest shore, my birthplace, to celebrate Grandpa’s 70 years. My first great-grandchild - a girl, we already know - is expected at Christmas time. I worry a lot about the state of the earth; I’m very happy to anticipate sharing it with her.

2 photos bridging five years of taking pictures

I'm posting two phographs:The first is one of the very earliest I made when I returned to the craft in early 2004. I remember vividly that spring day as I slowly bicycled around Concord, New Hampshire. The presence of lilacs, like that of peonies, has a special place in my heart. In this picture, they seemed to offer a kind of floral vessel of welcome.

The second is a picture of Villa Prinz Carl, home of the Forskningsinstituttet (Research Institute) at Modum Bad Psychiatric Center in Vikersund, Norway. My wife Leigh is the Institute's director, and I consult. I took the picture this past spring, clearly with more attention to the apple blossoms, which were in their full glory.

You may click on either one to see it full-size.

Lilacs, Concord, New Hampshire (2004)

Apple blossoms and Villa Prinz Carl, Modum Bad, Vikersund, Norway (2009)

A hole in the floor

I had an exchange of notes the other day with one of my sons, thinking of the many homes he and I shared over the years of living together and then the visits with each other as he grew into adulthood and began to find and live in his own homes. My mind lingered, as it will, on the sheer number of comings and goings and the frequency of moving, the complex tangle of feelings and forces at work in leaving a home and breaking new ground. I was astonished, dumb wondering as I counted from memory 43 homes in 70 years. I can still walk through all but the very earliest, the first two. Too many comings and goings, I wrote. And he replied, from his own memory drawn from the well of experience we share,

"I remember you saying once when we were hiking in Wonalancet – that day we got lost, remember? - and looking over the mountains and you saying, ‘another place in that interminable succession of places’ -  and the best we can do is to be present for them – their grief, their promise, their tears of joy, forgiveness, loss, return. And when we cannot be present, to try to greet that, too, with compassion. So maybe life is this interminable succession of places, that is, of comings and goings. Thank God we can witness each other through this, and share many of those places."

As I was ruminating on his words I thought of a poem of Richard Wilbur that had not come to mind for many years, the powerful and so deeply evocative image of a carpenter's hole in the parlor floor, gazing down and down, an archeological find, kneeling, looking "where the joists go into hiding,"

A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.

and in the end, "the buried strangeness," the spring "which nourishes the known," source of danger, host of life.

A Hole In The Floor
     
      for Rene Magritte

The carpenter's made a hole
In the parlor floor, and I'm standing
Staring down into it now
At four o'clock in the evening,
As Schliemann stood when his shovel
Knocked on the crowns of Troy.

A clean-cut sawdust sparkles
On the grey, shaggy laths,
And here is a cluster of shavings
From the time when the floor was laid.
They are silvery-gold, the color
Of Hesperian apple-parings.

Kneeling, I look in under
Where the joists go into hiding.
A pure street, faintly littered
With bits and strokes of light,
Enters the long darkness
Where its parallels will meet.

The radiator-pipe
Rises in middle distance
Like a shuttered kiosk, standing
Where the only news is night.
Here's it's not painted green,
As it is in the visible world.

For God's sake, what am I after?
Some treasure, or tiny garden?
Or that untrodden place,
The house's very soul,
Where time has stored our footbeats
And the long skein of our voices?

Not these, but the buried strangeness
Which nourishes the known:
That spring from which the floor-lamp
Drinks now a wilder bloom,
Inflaming the damask love-seat
And the whole dangerous room.

- Richard Wilbur

A Wendell Berry poem, for contemplation

No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over a grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.

~ Wendell Berry ~

Memento Mori

                                                          PERSONAL HISTORY

                                     MEMENTO MORI

                                   "The port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."

                                                                            - Henry James

Preface

It is nearly thirty years since I wrote a book about my parents and the extraordinarily different families and personal histories from which they came [A Love in Shadow, New York: W.W. Norton, 1978].  I had made a conscious decision at that time to tell their stories as truthfully as I could, and to venture as modestly as possible into the realm of autobiography.

One of the book’s more perspicacious reviewers, Geoffrey Wolff, recognized the fault line in that choice. In revealing little of my own experience, my memories of my own childhood with (and without) my parents, I revealed less of them. This brief essay, then, is an experiment in remediation, a rebalancing of a chapter of my personal book. I write now, as I did then, particularly for my children, that they may know better a part of their own histories.

Each of those children, now adults, two with children of their own, have asked me for memories of my parents, particularly of the grandfather they never knew, around whose legacy an ominous and beguiling cloud still lingers. So much of that memory is gone, casualty of time and trauma. What remains is part of my truth, my story, even as I have inevitably reshaped it through the years, even as it has become difficult to separate the real memories from the stories of others, from the photographs into which I have poured so much of my hunger. For those reasons and others of which I speak here, he must always be the father I barely knew. My children only knew him through the fragments of my telling, and have wondered about his shadowed gifts to me, and through me, to themselves. I did not write or speak much of my loss of him when they were young.

My parents met on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign train in the autumn of 1932, and immediately fell in love. Both were married to others at the time, though separated from their spouses. On that train they were not successful in hiding their liaison from the press corps of which my father was a member.  Had the story of their affair broken, it is just conceivable that the campaign, and perhaps the course of history, would have taken a lurch. Or so, much later, I liked to imagine.

[continued]

Rummaging in the attic (I)

I've been spending time in the attic before the weather gets too cold, rummaging through old files I've carried around through too many moves. I'm not a pack rat who deliberately collects things. I have little patience for filing, so when I do get around to it, what is filed tends to stay filed; I have as little interest in getting rid of those boxes as I did filling them in the first place. Also, moving is traumatic enough without having to make decisions about what goes and what doesn't.

But this month, sitting on the floor in the dim light and the dry, quiet air of disuse and time past that attics everywhere seem to possess, I began to feel something like the old adventure and intrigue of archival research. However likely it was that most of this stuff will become (already was) trash, there is something of my history here, and therefore the history of those I love. With patience, perhaps, a treasure or a painful artifact of years gone may work its way into time present with unpredictable consequences. Who knows? There may be gifts buried here that if freely given and received will renew themselves and create new life.

So I have begun to find, thanks to a first priming experience. I brought a box home, among several that had been stored in a friend's barn, and found it on top of the pile. My friend had alerted me to the fact that it contained something unusual, a special copy of a book written by my father.

John Boettiger wrote one book in the course of his 50 years. It was called Jake Lingle, or Chicago on the Spot, and was published by E.P. Dutton & Co. in 1931. In those years, the 1920s and early 1930s, my father was a general assignment reporter for The Chicago Tribune, then as now Chicago's morning daily paper. For ten years he had known Jake Lingle, The Tribune's senior reporter who had long covered the city's criminal underworld.  Lingle  had long known people on both sides of the law, as well as those--like himself--who plied the shadow world between the two.

John Boettiger, reporter for The Chicago Tribune, at the time he covered the Lingle case

So when Jake Lingle was shot in the back of the head at close range on June 9, 1930 while walking in the Loop on his way to the racetrack, it was assumed that the murder was a gangland execution, and my father was assigned by The Tribune's notorious boss, Col. Robert McCormick, to cover the case. Arriving at the crime scene only minutes after Lingle's death, he spent the next 11 months almost as close to the investigation--and the subsequent trial and conviction of Lingle's killer--as the police themselves. He was on hand, crouched silently in the neighboring apartment, when the suspect was surprised and apprehended outside his door in the Lake Crest Drive Apartment Hotel on  December 21, 1930.

So readers of The Chicago Tribune were treated to a succession of first-hand accounts of an absorbing homicide case, for as my father put it in the foreword of the resulting book, "Never, before the murder of Lingle, had the murderer in a Chicago gang killing been caught and punished."

I read Jake Lingle when I was a boy, and several times since. My father's prolonged absences from the family when I was very young, and his death by suicide when I was 11, precipitated a long search for the man he was, and the book was for a long time one of the few tangible artifacts I had--the kind of artifact that lent itself to the romance I wanted to construct. When I was not much older than he was when he wrote that book, I wrote one of my own, using all the resources I could find to make sense of the lives, families, generations and times from which I had emerged.

But the particular copy of Jake Lingle I held in my hands yesterday in the attic was indeed a special one. I had thought it a major discovery when I was writing 30 years ago, but it had since slipped from memory. Putnam's had mailed my father several early copies at publication time, and he sent one of them to his parents, who had retired from Chicago to San Diego. I don't know how my father got that copy back--likely from his family after his parents' deaths--but it was passed on to me, his only child. Tucked in among its pages is an envelope dated October 10, 1931, postmarked San Diego, addressed to Mr. John Boettiger, Oakdale Ave., Glencoe, Ill. It contained two long letters, one from his father Adam, the other from his mother Dora, responding to the gift of their son's book.

There is no other surviving correspondence between my father and his parents. Those two letters, full of pride and pleasure, written to the 31-year-old reporter and author whom they both still called "my baby boy," offer but one small window on his meaning for them, small and ambiguous hints in their language, their references and asides to inevitably more complex relationships. They are no less precious for that.

The same could be said of the lines written in my father's hand on the book's fly leaf, lines I thought about often in earlier years, and feel again as I re-type them here:

To my beloved Mother and Dad
whom I could never repay in a million years
for the love and the will to live
and to learn and to write
which they gave to me.

From their ever devoted and grateful son

John.

Pogo Possum

Pogo and the other inhabitants of the Okefenokee Swamp* disappeared from the newspapers' comic strip pages shortly after their maker, Walt Kelly, died in 1973. I grew up with his world in the 50s and 60s.

I still tune in to Doonesbury now and then. I have been devoted to Calvin and Hobbes, Opus, and Gary Larson's wonderful upside down and sideways view of the world. For a time, as a child, the thoroughgoing loving kindness of Al Capp's shmoos captivated me. But Kelly's way with character, setting and especially language  were satisfying as no other comic strip. As Brad Leithauser writes, "Pogo was different. It had depth, a madcap unpredictability, and a restive verbal playfulness; it was, in short, the only comic strip spun through the mind of a poet."

The denizens of the Swamp--Pogo, Albert the alligator, Beauregard the hound, Owl, Porky Pine, the ominous wildcat Simple J. Malarkey (modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy), the blowhard bear P.T. Bridgeport, Miz Beaver and the fetching French skunk, Ma'm'selle Hepzibah, with whom Pogo is shyly enchanted--lent the strip a wonderful range of linguistic warp and woof, lyricism, affection and (mostly) friendly dissension the likes of which we have not seen since.

The pace of life in the Swamp is... well, like a swamp should be: comfortable, slow, yet with unpredictable depth and color.

There are some genuine bad guys among the residents of the swamp--Mole with his omnipresent shades, and his sidekick The Deacon, for example--but they are more like literate rednecks than real evil. The only source of threatened (never realized) violence is the manifestly malignant Malarkey.

Some of Kelly's lines remain with me well over a quarter century after they were uttered. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Whenever I hear "Deck the Halls" at Christmas time, I find myself quietly singing, "Deck us all with Boston Charlie..." And when I tend to go on longer than I should--a common professorial malady--I recall one of Pogo's rhymes:

Riddle you the little dew
And little do you do?
Little did is little done,
Tho' little did'll do.

I hope to weave into these pages at least a little did'll of Pogo's gentleness, kindness, exuberance and nonsense.

For those interested in a contemporary tribute to Kelly and his creation, and a sample of some of his characters' antics, I recommend Brad Leithauser's essay, "Lyrics in the Swamp," in the April 25, 2002 issue of The New York Review of Books. There are several collections of Pogo still available in paperback.

* The real Okefenokee Swamp, thankfully, is still with us, and is a heartening story of environmental intelligence at work.  Covering approximately 700 square miles of South Georgia and North Florida, it is a primitive wetland which harbors thousands of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, many of which are endangered or threatened. The north end of the swamp is bordered by pine forests and thick tangles of vegetation. Small water trails lead south to the open prairies and west to the Suwannee River. Nearly 400,000 acres of the Okefenokee were designated as the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1937, protecting the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Marys Rivers from further human development. For that, Pogo would be proud.

Keepers: a new photo album

I added a new photo album to Reckonings today which I'm calling "Keepers." I've been reorganizing and culling my photo files, being sure I've securely backed up those I know I want to keep. A natural outgrowth of that review was to keep a small folder of favorite pictures, and that's "Keepers." I was reviewing pictures taken, for the most part, during the last three or four years. So far I've only posted 18 photos to "Keepers," as I think there's a useful distinction between those I want to tuck away for future work, for family and close friends, and those that may be of some interest to others, readers of Reckonings.

It's a diverse collection--"motley" was the word that first came to mind, but each of those images reminds me of a memorable experience and continues to stir the pot of my intrigue with seeing and responding more clearly and surely to that which quickens the imagination.

There are evocations of home, of my beloved White Mountains of New Hampshire, a month's trek through Provence in 2005, another visit to the F.D.R. Memorial in Washington, and a few precious moments of dawn and dusk spent with snow geese and sandhill cranes at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern New Mexico. I'll add carefully to "Keepers" over the next weeks and months, and perhaps include some annotation to individual photos.

Friends for Life

I know a little more than the barest sketch of the circumstances of my birth. My mother and I--and surely my father, waiting anxiously a few rooms away--were in Swedish Hospital, in Seattle, Washington. I emerged at 12:43 PM on Thursday, March 30th, 1939. The experience of those primal hours during which I moved from my mother's womb through her birth canal and into the bright lights of a wider world, is a living part of my body's legacy and has its place among the determinants of the person I became. It has a persuasive claim to being the most formative event of my life, as for us all, and remains forever, I assume, beyond my conscious memory.

Whoever else kept my mother company during those hours--her family doctor Richard  O'Shea, attending nurses--I've always been glad to know that my mother's mother, the only grandmother I ever knew, was there, and held her daughter's hand. I have a photograph of my grandmother holding me aloft not long thereafter. Both of us appear happy to be together, to begin what was to be another twenty-three years of one of the most nourishing relationships of my life. (I can't lay my hands on that photo at the moment, but I found a contemporaneous one in which my mother joined the two of us.)

Why the evocation of this memory these many years later? I have been reading and thinking about a short and important essay by Daniel Goleman that appeared in The New York Times two days ago (October 10th). He called it "Friends for Life: An Emerging Biology of Emotional Healing." I'll reprint it below, for it has important connections, I think, with themes that lie at the heart of Reckonings, themes that I'll call the determinants and consequences of kinship.

Goleman's essay describes a phenomenon he calls "emotional contagion"--"the tendency of one person to catch the feelings of another," to experience rapport--evidence for which has emerged from the discovery of a class of brain cells called "mirror neurons."  The emergent field of social neuroscience, Goleman reports, is demonstrating the physiological -- cardiovascular and neuronal -- paths by which two persons, two psychobiologies, as it were, coordinate and merge. An example reminded me of that long ago event of a mother and a daughter holding hands as I was being born, and even suggested something of why the memory continues to give me pleasure:

"A case in point is a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of women awaiting an electric shock. When the women endured their apprehension alone, activity in neural regions that incite stress hormones and anxiety was heightened. As James A. Coan reported last year in an article in Psychophysiology, when a stranger held the subject’s hand as she waited, she found little relief. When her husband held her hand, she not only felt calm, but her brain circuitry quieted, revealing the biology of emotional rescue."

It is a new way of thinking about old subjects literally at the heart of our lives and our relationships with the rest of the world: love, happiness, alienation, neglect, illness and healing, wholeheartedness and broken-heartedness.

_____________________________________

Memories: Introduction

Memory's intricate idiosyncrasies are fascinating, endless sources of study, experiment and rumination, as is the sub-specie of images from memory, not least because they will not remain still but are in more or less continuous movement, accompanied as in a dance by sound, smell, taste, embodiment and emotion. The cracked sphere (in Images) was drawn from memory and redrawn by another. It is a related but distinct accomplishment entirely to create such an image in prose, and in such a way that it quickens in the sensuous imagination of a reader,  and adds, as well, to the fundament of our understanding of memory itself.

AN IMAGE FROM MEMORY

One who does so is Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Here is a favorite example of reflection from his Russian childhood, around 1912:

I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park--as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement. Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts. I note the small helicopter of a revolving samara that gently descends upon the tablecloth, and, lying across the table, an adolescent girl's bare arm indolently extended as far as it will go, with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something--perhaps the nutcracker. In the place where my current tutor sits, there is a changeful image, a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs; the pulsation of my thought mingles with that of the leaf shadows and turns Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the schoolmaster, and the whole array of trembling, transformations is repeated. And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties--smiling, frivolous duties--some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like a background of wild applause.




Memories of one's children and grandchildren are among the most precious of all. Their particularity reminds one of a given time, as well: in the instance below, my daughter and her first child, my first grandchild, safe and together after an adventure that both they and I  will remember as a dramatic and traumatic part of our lives.






A Flower Given to my Daughter

  Frail the white rose and frail are
  Her hands that gave
  Whose soul is sere and paler
  Than time's wan wave.

  Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest
  A wonder wild
  In gentle eyes thou veilest,
  My blueveined child.

                        -  James Joyce