Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Jack Gilbert's poetry

Years ago one of my sons introduced me to the poetry of Jack Gilbert. I remain grateful. Gilbert's Collected Poems has just been published. I'll celebrate the occasion by recalling one of his poems that moved me when I first read it, and still does.

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled 
around the apartment, crying hard, 
searching for my wife's hair.
For two months got them from the drain, 
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator, 
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came, 
there was no way to be sure which were 
hers, and I stopped. A year later, 
repotting Michiko's avocado, I find 
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.

 

The mental health of American veterans

A few days ago I drew attention to Nicholas Kristof's story in the New York Times describing the number of suicides among American veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Veterans Administration has decided to increase its mental health staff by 10 percent. That may not be sufficient.

A report released two days ago by the VA's inspector general revealed that veterans "are waiting far longer for mental health care than the department has been willing to admit. A new applicant for mental health services is supposed to receive an evaluation within two weeks, a standard the department says it meets more than 95 percent of the time. But the inspector general said that fewer than half of veterans received evaluations within 14 days. The rest waited an average of 50 days."

That's a terribly long time to wait if one's suffering is acute.

Violinist in a subway station, Washington, DC, 2007

In Greek myth Icarus, the son of Daedalus, sought to fly with wings made by his father, fashioned of feathers and wax. Daedalus warned his son not to fly too close to the heat of the sun, lest the wax melt and the wings fail. Icarus, in the excitement of flight, ignored his father's warning, fell into the sea and drowned. 

The poets William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden were drawn to a 16th century painting long thought to be Pieter Bruegel's portrayal of the fall of Icarus. Further analysis suggests the painting was by someone else, but in the master's style. If Bruegel created an original it is lost. 

There are in fact two such paintings, both in oil, one on canvas, the other on wood. They are much alike, but in the version on wood the figure of Icarus appears flying in the sky as well as drowning, as if the pedantic painter didn't trust his viewers to understand the significance of his scene. On canvas (below), only the legs of Icarus are visible as he falls into the sea. It is the version on canvas, I believe, that Williams and Auden found so intriguing.

Extraordinary events often escape our notice, accustomed as we are to our daily rounds. A man falls from the sky into the sea. The suffering of others is easy to miss. 

 

The ploughman continues to plough.

The shepherd, leaning on his staff, is daydreaming. (In the painting on wood he may be looking at the figure of Icarus in flight.)

There is a third human figure closer to the sea in the lower right corner of the painting, more ambiguous, less easy to interpret. His right arm is extended in some gesture we cannot know. 

 

            Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

                    — W.H. Auden

 

The image and text below were sent to me today by a friend. They brought the paintings and Auden's poem to mind.

THE SITUATION

In Washington, DC, at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about an hour. During that time, some 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After about three minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule.

About four minutes later:

The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and without stopping continued to walk.

At six minutes:

A young man leaned against the wall to listen, then looked at his watch and started to walk again.

At ten minutes:

A small boy stopped, but his mother, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the violinist again, but the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk, turning his head the whole time. This action was repeated by several other children, but every parent, without exception, forced their children to move on quickly.

At 45 minutes:

The musician played continuously. Only six people stopped and listened for a short while. About 20 gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a total of $32.

After one hour:

He finished playing and silence ensued. No one noticed and no one applauded.

The violinist was Joshua Bell. He played one of the most intricate and sublime pieces ever written, with a violin worth $3.5 million dollars. Two days before he played the same music at a theatre in Boston where the seats averaged $100 each.

This is a true story. Joshua Bell, playing incognito in the DC Metro station, came as part of an experiment sponsored by The Washington Post intended to explore perception, taste and people's priorities.

The experiment raised several questions:

• In a commonplace environment, at an unlikely hour, do we perceive beauty?

• If so, do we stop to appreciate it?

• Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context?

 

One possible implication of the experiment could be this:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world, playing some of the finest music ever written, with one of the most beautiful instruments ever made....

How many other things are we missing?

Enjoy life now. It has an expiration date.

. 

PTSD and our nation's shame

Nick Kristof wrote a fine, wrenching story in the New York Times last week describing the suicide of a veteran with PTSD. The numbers are telling:

"For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands. An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began."

Reading and reflecting upon Kristof's story brought this response from one psychiatrist familiar with the difficulties of treating PTSD:

To the Editor:

As a psychiatrist working in the California Department of Corrections, I see many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. Reading Nicholas D. Kristof’s column, I wondered whether the American public has a clear notion of the challenge that this condition presents to the clinician.

PTSD is one of the more difficult psychiatric diagnoses to treat. No particular medication is highly effective, and therapy is almost always long and arduous.

It’s painful to have to acknowledge this, particularly if one suffers from PTSD or is related to someone who does, but rarely does it pay to ignore reality. Perhaps this fact should figure in the balance when we are deciding to send our kids off to war.

ROBERT B. LEVIN
Capitola, Calif., April 15, 2012

 

We still have a tendency to believe that physical and psychological illnesses are separate categories. That distinction, like the underlying separation of body and mind, is often convenient but essentially false. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is indicative of changes in the neural circuitry of the brain that controls emotions. As another neuroscientist has recently written, "Disorders of neural circuit function, even if one cannot see them under a microscope or in a brain scan, are every bit as 'physical' as the consequences of major head trauma. The false distinction between 'psychological' and 'physical' bases of mental illness encourages the public’s [and sometimes the patient's] inclination to 'blame the victim' and the insurance industry’s resistance to providing adequate coverage for treatment." 

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s When I Was a Child I Read Books

By ANDREW DELBANCO

New York Times Book Review

April 20, 2012

In her celebrated novels, Housekeeping (1981), Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), Marilynne Robinson gives us “isolated towns and single houses” where the afternoon sun draws “the damp out of the grass and . . . the smell of sour old sap out of the boards on the porch floor.” It is a laconic world where adults conserve “syllables as if to conserve breath” while children brave an “outsized landscape” by day and seek shelter by night even as they long to break away from the “regime of small kindnesses” that makes home both comforting and confining.

Marilynne Robinson

WHEN I WAS A CHILD I READ BOOKS

By Marilynne Robinson

206 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

Robinson grew up in Idaho and now lives in Iowa — places where, as she puts it in her new collection of personal and critical essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, “ ‘lonesome’ is a word with strongly positive connotations.” In her lexicon, lonesomeness means the opposite of isolation. It envelops the mind and heart in unsullied nature, allowing focused apprehension of the miracle of creation, as when she remembers kneeling alone as a child “by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion — feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.”

One inference to be drawn from Robinson’s essays is that her novels contain a good deal of self-portraiture. When she was young, she seems to have been a prairie version of one of J. D. Salinger’s Glass children — except that rather than urbanity, her precociousness took the form of piety. “I looked to Galilee for meaning,” she tells us, “and to Spokane for orthodonture.” Only such a reverent child could have felt, as Ruth, the narrator of “Housekeeping,” feels when the boat she’s in seems about to capsize, that “it was the order of the world that the shell should fall away and that I, the nub, the sleeping germ, should swell and expand.” This kind of high-mindedness can appear a little chastising to those of us who would have worried about drowning.

But if Robinson writes with a devoutness that can alienate those who don’t share it, she also avers that wisdom is “almost always another name for humility.” Not only in Christian Scripture but throughout the Hebrew Bible, she finds a “haunting solicitude for the vulnerable.” Like many conservative critics, with whom she would otherwise disagree, she is angry at America for its putative betrayal of its founding principles. She condemns “condescension toward biblical texts and narratives, toward the culture that produced them, toward God.” She decries the diminution of religion as “a primitive attempt to explain phenomena which are properly within the purview of science.” But her anger arises not on behalf of some fanciful notion that America was once a monolithic Christian nation. She is angry, instead, at our failure to sustain the capacious conception of community with which, as she shows in a brilliant essay entitled “Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism,” America began — a community founded not on the premise that human beings are motivated primarily by greed, but as an experiment in building a society on the principle of love. She persists in believing that this experiment has not been futile: “The great truth that is too often forgotten is that it is in the nature of people to do good to one another.”

As the credo of a liberal Christian, Robinson’s new book of essays stands on its own. But it is also an illuminating commentary on her novels. In “Gilead,” for instance, the preacher who tells the tale says of his “unreposeful” grandfather that “to be useful” was his great hope and “to be aimless” his “worst fear.” In her new book, Robinson revisits this theme of Christian restlessness by decrying Max Weber’s “unaccountably influential” book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” for portraying Puritans as early-to-bed, early-to-rise drones, driven to material accumulation and convinced that worldly prosperity is the best measure of worth in God’s eyes. (This version of Weber is something of a straw man, but given its popular prestige, Robinson is right to knock it down and burn it up.) Later in the volume she describes the abolitionist evangelical Charles Grandison Finney as an exemplar of what “unreposeful” has meant in the history of Christian activism — just the sort of man she had in mind in “Gilead.”

It’s not a bad idea to read Marilynne Robinson’s novels with a Bible concordance and a theological encyclopedia close at hand. In “Housekeeping,” for instance, she tells us (this reference is familiar enough that many people may not have to look it up) that “if one is lost on the water, any hill is Ararat.” More obscurely, the preacher in “Gilead” recalls reading “somewhere that a thing that does not exist in relation to anything else cannot itself be said to exist.” This is an allusion, I think, to Jonathan Edwards’s “Notes on the Mind.” But the best companion of all to Robinson’s novels may be her own essays. When, for example, in the essay on “Freedom of Thought,” she invokes John Calvin’s metaphor that “nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed,” we comprehend better the devotional descriptions of nature in her fiction.

The book also registers Robinson’s debt to the schoolteachers who gave her the gift of culture during her Idaho childhood — culture not in today’s degraded academic sense of “a system of signs and passwords, more or less entirely without meaning except as it identifies groups and subgroups,” but as a precious resource for living. “As a bookish child in the far West,” she tells us, “I was given odds and ends — Dido pining on her flaming couch, Lewis and Clark mapping the wilderness — without one being set apart from the other as especially likely to impress or satisfy anyone. We were simply given these things with the assurance that they were valuable and important in no specific way.”

She has put these gifts to good use. As one reads through her learned essays, a dash of leavening humor now and then would have been welcome, something like her report in “Housekeeping” (with Luke 22:51 in mind) that Christ “restored the severed ear of the soldier who came to arrest him — a fact that allows us to hope the Resurrection will reflect a considerable attention to detail.” But by and large this collection is a rewarding reminder that the author’s faith infuses every word she writes.

“I think we all know,” she remarks near the beginning of the book, “that the earth might be reaching the end of its tolerance for our presumptions.” In that word “presumptions” there is great force, amplified by the plural possessive pronoun that precedes it and that underscores everyone’s “inevitable share in human fallibility.” Like every good preacher, Marilynne Robinson judges others while including herself — in theory, at least — in the judgment.

 

Recent research on the dynamics of personal and social change

The following short reports are useful and interesting, revealing valuable new research on the effectiveness of cognitive psychotherapy and meditation in dealing with depression, the impact of violent video games on mental health, and the paradoxical but long recognized fact that explicit attention to feelings commonly thought to be negative —  fear, anxiety, anger, rage — is a prerequisite to dealing with them constructively and accomplishing personal and social change. 

The First Step to Change: focusing on the negative

"If you want people to change the current system, or status quo, first you have to get them to notice what's wrong with it. That's the idea behind a new study to be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds that people pay attention to negative information about the system when they believe the status quo can change.

"'Take America's educational system. You could find some flaws in that system,' says India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University who did the new study with Professor Kentaro Fujita. 'But we have to live with it every day, so people tend to focus on the positive and reinforce the system. Sometimes, though, people are motivated to change things—that's what brought about the U.S. civil rights movement and the changes in Tunisia and Egypt this year, for example.'

"'In order to actually change the system, you've got to know what's wrong with it,' Johnson says. So she wondered, 'How can we get people to stop looking at the positive information and kind of shift gears and focus on the negative information?' Psychological scientists have found that people who want to change—to do better at work, for example—are willing to take the short-term pain of hearing negative information about themselves, if they actually believe that bearing this pain will actually help them improve in the long run. Johnson wondered if the same was true for thinking about the whole social system.

 

How Our Brain Works

by Carole Carson

(originally posted on the AARP website)

Our brains may be one of the last frontiers for explorers of human physiology. The past few years have seen remarkable breakthroughs in understanding how the brain works. New discoveries in the field of neuroscience are helping us understand how and what we perceive and feel, how we learn and store memories and how reasoning and decision making are processed. Here are four new insights:

Concrete Thinking Treats Depression: Concrete thinking, or concreteness training (CNT), is a technique that replaces a dysfunctional thinking style with a more constructive one.

Patients who suffer from depression tend toward abstract thinking that focuses on overgeneralized negative events—a minor setback or mistake is blown out of proportion to its importance. CNT helps individuals recognize this tendency and instead think more specifically about problems. The refocusing process results in a shift in perspective that alleviates depression.

To test the effectiveness of concrete thinking, researchers divided 121 patients suffering from depression into three groups. The first group received CNT in addition to regular treatment; the second group received relaxation techniques and regular treatment; and the third group continued to receive regular treatment only. After eight weeks, the individuals who received CNT were significantly less depressed, while the group those who simply continued regular treatment showed no sign of improvement.

The success of this self-help therapy raises an interesting question: could we take the same approach in helping individuals change their lifestyle habits?

Meditation Increases Happiness: Yale researchers found that meditation is associated with an increased feeling of happiness and a sense of living “in the moment.” Brain scans of both experienced and novice meditators showed that experienced meditators had less activity in the section of the brain referred to as the “default mode network”—an area that has been associated with disorders such as anxiety, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Further, the brain scans from experienced meditators showed decreased activity in the default mode network even when they weren’t meditating.

Commenting on the significance of these findings, Judson A. Brewer, lead author of the study, said, “Meditation’s ability to help people stay in the moment has been part of philosophical and contemplative practices for thousands of years. Conversely, the hallmarks of many forms of mental illness is a preoccupation with one’s own thoughts, a condition meditation seems to affect. This gives us some nice cues as to the neural mechanisms of how it might be working clinically.”

Negative Focus Triggers Change: Researchers reporting in Psychological Science assert that focusing on the negative is a necessary first step in the process of implementing change. India Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University and coauthor of the study, notes that “in order to actually change the system, you’ve got to know what’s wrong with it.” While this study focuses more specifically on societal change, its conclusions might also be extrapolated to the realm of health and fitness. Can we use negative information (the rising number on the scale, for instance) to push us to commit to a healthier lifestyle?

Violent Video Games Alter Young Brains: Parents and educators have long worried about the negative effect of violent video games on brain function of young players; however, until now, these fears had little scientific evidence to back them up. Image scans presented by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine show that the brain suffers changes in the areas associated with cognitive functioning and emotional control after only one week of exposure to violent video games. The study, which focused on young men ages 18 to 29, revealed that after one week of playing violent video games, participants’ ability to successfully complete tasks targeting these two centers after was reduced when compared with the control group.

Dr. Yang Wang, an assistant research professor in the Indiana University Department of Radiology and Imaging Sciences, said, “For the first time, we have found that a sample of randomly assigned young adults showed less activation in certain frontal brain regions following a week of playing violent video games at home. The affected brain regions are important for controlling emotion and aggressive behavior.” The upshot? Protect your teen’s mental health by limiting the use of violent video games.

With history as our guide, we anticipate that new technologies will expand the boundaries of human knowledge about the workings of the brain. Future tests will be less invasive. And because the machines that perform the tests will be less expensive, these tests will be available to an increasing number of researchers.

While we wait for future advances, we can use the insights from current research to enhance our mental and physical well-being.

 

The life of trees

Like many others, I have long felt a kinship with trees.  I speak to them still. As a child I wanted to be a forest ranger, stationed on the top of a tower in the midst of a forest. Many of the traditional tales that fed my imagination were set deep among trees. So I have gathered here some of the poetry, prose and imagery attending to the life and meaning of trees for those who have lived with them.

Woods

I part the out thrusting branches
and come in beneath
the blessed and the blessing trees.
Though I am silent
there is singing around me.
Though I am dark
there is vision around me.
Though I am heavy
there is flight around me.

             — Wendell Berry 

 

The Presence of Trees

I have always felt the living presence 
of trees

the forest that calls to me as deeply 
as I breathe,

as though the woods were marrow of my bone 
as though

I myself were tree, a breathing, reaching 
arc of the larger canopy

beside a brook bubbling to foam 
like the one

deep in these woods, 
that calls

that whispers home

 

        — Michael S. Glaser

 

 Pruning

I prune my lime tree
under the luminous moon
of early evening. The citrus
smell of broken leaves
is pungent and wonderful.
I know the cutting will make
the tree stronger, more beautiful.
It trusts me and responds to the pain,
for already, even the order of shaping
has produced a different mood for us;
the discarded sprigs on the ground
ring the tree like a variegated lime lei,
my offering to this faithful tree,
my promise that things will change
between us.

As I pause in the process —
breathe, observe, feel —
I encounter the tree, ceasing
to be an "it" and transforming
itself into Buber's "Thou."
In this new, reciprocal relationship,
we move toward holiness, the tree and I,
as I whisper, "You, tree."

 

            —   Johanna Herrick 

 

 

Lost 

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

 

            — David Wagoner

 

 
Under the Walnut Tree

When I face what has left my life,
         I bow.  I walk outside into the cold,
                rain nesting in my hair.
        All the houses near me
have their lights on.  Somewhere,
                  there is a deep listening.
         I stand in the dark for a long time
        under the walnut tree, unable
                   to tell anyone, not even the night,
         what I know.  I feel the darkness
                   rush towards me, and I open my arms.

 

                    –– Lynn Martin

 

The Sound of Trees    I wonder about the trees. Why do we wish to bear Forever the noise of these More than another noise So close to our dwelling place? We suffer them by the day Till we lose all measure of pace, And fixity in our joys, And acquire a listening air. They are that that talks of going But never gets away; And that talks no less for knowing, As it grows wiser and older, That now it means to stay. My feet tug at the floor And my head sways to my shoulder Sometimes when I watch trees sway, From the window or the door. I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some day when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on. I shall have less to say, But I shall be gone.                 — Robert Frost

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

                - Robert Frost

 

 

 

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

 

     —  e.e. Cummings

 

 

Some Trees

These are amazing: each 
Joining a neighbor, as though speech 
Were a still performance. 
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning 
From the world as agreeing 
With it, you and I 
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are: 
That their merely being there 
Means something; that soon 
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented 
Some comeliness, we are surrounded: 
A silence already filled with noises, 
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 
Place in a puzzling light, and moving, 
Our days put on such reticence 
These accents seem their own defense.

 

-       John Ashbery

ONE TREE Terry Tempest Williams Originally published in Natural Home Magazine, May/June 2000.
	I want to speak about a tree. One tree. A cottonwood that arches over the road to our house like a great matriarch welcoming her children home. I love this tree. I love her massive, gnarled, weathered trunk that, when I touch it, reminds me of how life shapes us. It takes three, maybe four, human beings holding hands to circle her completely. I know because once, on a clear October day, my three nieces, my father, and I wrapped our arms around her. You may think I have fallen into cliché by hugging a tree, but isn't love always threatening to undermine our most sensible, skeptical, and cynical selves? In the presence of this tree, I am reduced to exactly what I am, simply another form of life that benefits from her generosity. Be it a flicker in her branches, a line of ants departing from her trunk, or a wood moth resting with splayed wings against her bark. Our community of two hundred or so people in this redrock valley of southern Utah honors this tree. At Christmas, someone quietly places a red velvet bow on her trunk. On New Year's Eve, fireworks fly past her crown and explode, creating a momentary flash of frosted boughs and limbs against a starlit sky, exposing her architecture. In the spring, it is not uncommon to find individuals simply sitting and reading under the chartreuse buds; no shade is too small not to be savored here. And in summer, the cottonwood expands to her full eminence, green leaves trembling in the slightest of breezes, bending in the most wicked of storms, her enormous branches lifting and stretching and framing the eroding buttes and mesas around her. Even in a flash flood, the waters part around her. This tree stands where two roads-one dirt, one paved-take different directions. Sometimes I take the dirt road just so I can see this magnificent tree from another point of view. I recognize it as a Fremont cottonwood, one of the signature trees of the Colorado Plateau that promises the presence of water nearby. And there is water, just below, a small creek that runs through the valley carrying melted snow from the LaSal Mountains to the south, which will eventually empty into the Colorado River just a few miles north. In the hands of the Hopi, the roots of cottonwoods become kachinas carved out of the soft, yielding wood. Crow Mother stands on my desk. She is Cottonwood. She is Root. She is the ceremonial kachina with her turquoise-painted face and black triangular mask hiding her eyes, nose, and mouth. Black wings fan from her ears like flames. A woven blanket drapes over her shoulders, black, green, and white, just like the tree. She holds in her hands a basket of seeds. This tree was once a seed, blown by the wind, which settled in red sand and began to reach downward and upward at once. We are all here by some gesture of grace. Or perhaps Crow Mother planted this Spirit Tree a century ago. The elders who know say this is one of the oldest trees in the American Southwest. I believe them. Roots. Trunk. Branches. Leaves. Growing still, this cottonwood continues to guide and remind us of what it means to live in place. This tree brought me home. Here, now, she stands, her deep quiet registering as the patience I so wish to learn. Here, now, I live, forever mindful of the presence of one tree. I think about her death every day. And then I see her leaves catching light and wonder why we cannot simply be held in the beauty of this moment.   Terry Tempest Williams

 

Why Trees Matter

By Jim Robbins

April 11, 2012

TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

For all of that, the unbroken forest that once covered much of the continent is now shot through with holes.

Humans have cut down the biggest and best trees and left the runts behind. What does that mean for the genetic fitness of our forests? No one knows for sure, for trees and forests are poorly understood on almost all levels. “It’s embarrassing how little we know,” one eminent redwood researcher told me.

What we do know, however, suggests that what trees do is essential though often not obvious. Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrive, so does the rest of the food chain. In a campaign called Forests Are Lovers of the Sea, fishermen have replanted forests along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma.

In Japan, researchers have long studied what they call “forest bathing.” A walk in the woods, they say, reduces the level of stress chemicals in the body and increases natural killer cells in the immune system, which fight tumors and viruses. Studies in inner cities show that anxiety, depression and even crime are lower in a landscaped environment.

Trees also release vast clouds of beneficial chemicals. On a large scale, some of these aerosols appear to help regulate the climate; others are anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and anti-viral. We need to learn much more about the role these chemicals play in nature. One of these substances, taxane, from the Pacific yew tree, has become a powerful treatment for breast and other cancers. Aspirin’s active ingredient comes from willows.

Trees are greatly underutilized as an eco-technology. “Working trees” could absorb some of the excess phosphorus and nitrogen that run off farm fields and help heal the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In Africa, millions of acres of parched land have been reclaimed through strategic tree growth.

Trees are also the planet’s heat shield. They keep the concrete and asphalt of cities and suburbs 10 or more degrees cooler and protect our skin from the sun’s harsh UV rays. The Texas Department of Forestry has estimated that the die-off of shade trees will cost Texans hundreds of millions of dollars more for air-conditioning. Trees, of course, sequester carbon, a greenhouse gas that makes the planet warmer. A study by the Carnegie Institution for Science also found that water vapor from forests lowers ambient temperatures.

A big question is, which trees should we be planting? Ten years ago, I met a shade tree farmer named David Milarch, a co-founder of the Champion Tree Project who has been cloning some of the world’s oldest and largest trees to protect their genetics, from California redwoods to the oaks of Ireland. “These are the supertrees, and they have stood the test of time,” he says.

Science doesn’t know if these genes will be important on a warmer planet, but an old proverb seems apt. “When is the best time to plant a tree?” The answer: “Twenty years ago. The second-best time? Today.”

Jim Robbins is the author of the forthcoming book The Man Who Planted Trees.

 

 

 

Hard Night
What words or harder gift does the light require of me carving from the dark this difficult tree? What place or farther peace do I almost see emerging from the night and heart of me? The sky whitens, goes on and on. Fields wrinkle into rows of cotton, go on and on. Night like a fling of crows disperses and is gone. What song, what home, what calm or one clarity can I not quite come to, never quite see: this field, this sky, this tree.

            — Christian Wiman

 

 

The smog of war

Tom Engelhardt is an astute critic of American warmaking, and this is his latest dispatch. He reminds his readers that we have no evidence that the Vietnam War taught us anything. I use "us" with common looseness, but it grieves me to have even that association with the warmaking policies of U.S. governments from John Kennedy to Barack Obama.

Would Kennedy have taken U.S. troops into Vietnam as his successor did? Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. thought not, and he knew Kennedy far better than I did. I remember asking the same question when I published my book, Vietnam and American Foreign Policy (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1968). It is one of history's "might-have-beens." I would like to believe Schlesinger is right. But I'm not so sure. In 1961 - the year of the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion -  Kennedy sent in an additional 3000 military "advisors" to join the 900 who had already been sent to Vietnam during the Eisenhower years.

I count John Kennedy among the three greatest American statesmen of the post-World War II era, all three of them assassinated in 1963 and 1968. (No, I do not regard that as a conspiracy; it was indisputably a tragedy.) But foreign and military policy were not JFK's strong suit, or at least they had not become so by the time of his death, any more than they appear to be for his gifted successor Barack Obama.

"The lessons of Vietnam" were often articulated, but never learned. The short American century may be over, as Andrew Bacevich writes in his current book of that title, but no one seems to have told the White House or the Pentagon. 

"The 'lessons of Vietnam,' fruitlessly discussed for five decades, taught Washington so little that it remains trapped in a hopeless war on the Eurasian mainland, continues to pursue a military-first policy globally that might even surprise American leaders of the Vietnam era, has turned the planet into a 'free fire zone,' and considers military power its major asset, a first not a last resort, and the Pentagon the appropriate place to burn its national treasure."

The Obama administration has done many things of which we can be decidedly proud, but its continued pursuit of warmaking and the imposition of its terrible costs in human lives and treasure that could have been otherwise used is surely not among them.

Tomgram: Engelhardt, The Smog of War | TomDispatch

www.tomdispatch.com

Children in prison

The New York Times posted an editorial in today's paper to which it is worth paying attention for those who share my interest in reforming the U.S.'s shameful prison system:

Children Can Never Be Safe in Adult Prisons

April 8, 2012

• After an unconscionable delay of nearly three years, the Justice Department needs to issue the final, mandatory rape-prevention policies for federal prisons and state correctional institutions that receive federal dollars. They must improve on the proposed rules issued last spring.

Those rules included more effective ways to investigate alleged attacks, report assaults, and improve medical and psychiatric help for the victims. But they notably failed to call for an end to the barbaric practice of placing children and youths in adult jails and prisons. Children will never be safe without that change.

Thirty-two members of Congress made exactly this point last week in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr., noting that "such a prohibition would be consistent with Congressional intent" as embodied in the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.

An estimated 10,000 youths under 18 can be found in adult jails or prisons on any given day, according to federal statistics. As the members pointed out, data from a 2005 study showed that youths made up only 1 percent of the inmates in jails and prisons, but 21 percent of the victims of sexual violence.

 

Celebrating Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich died on Tuesday, March 27, at her home in Santa Cruz, California. She was 82. 

Katha Pollit writes in The New Yorker:

Rich's career reminds us that poetry can be more than aesthetic, more than lyrics of personal feeling—although she wrote many beautiful lyrics. It can engage with the biggest issues of its day and speak to a large and passionate readership. There are risks in taking those issues on: the poem as sermon, as slogan, as leaflet. (One of her books, in fact, is called “Leaflets.”) Some of her poems, indeed, fell into those categories. But in book after book, Rich triumphed. She took on our gravest perplexities and injustices—inequality of race and gender and sexuality and class, war and its consequences, the despoiling of nature and language—and asked the biggest question about them: Who would we be if we could change our world? I don’t think she knew the answer. No one does. In “Prospective Immigrants Please Note,” she wrote,

The door itself 
makes no promises
It is only a door.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/03/adrienne-rich-katha-pollitt.html#ixzz1rVOw8RmL

Embracing and Letting Go

It may not be often that a written remark one day results in discovery of another’s explanations of reasons therefore the following day.

Or is that wrong? Was Jung onto something important and demonstrable in his positing and description of synchronicity or meaningful coincidence? Diane Ackerman's excellent and fascinating article on interpersonal psychobiology, "The Brain on Love," which I reprint below, stimulated thoughts about themes that have focused conversations in my community in these last few weeks, themes of holding on, embracing, letting go, and the importance of empathy, of walking in one's own shoes and also in those of the other: child, parent, spouse, neighbor, stranger, enemy, the person with a viewpoint different from one's own. 

Embracing and letting go. Passover today, commemorating an ongoing journey from slavery toward freedom, with a lot of awkward stops, detours, distractions, reversals, death and destruction along the way, a lot of loss, and a lot of determination to return to the path of freedom - next year in Jerusalem. For there is a promised land; it just isn't a piece of the earth. It's inside us and between us, in what Martin Buber called the antithis - the flowering - of I and You, not its antithesis of I and It in which, like good capitalists, we objectify our fellow creatures, and with them ourselves, turn them into commodities rather than gifts to be treasured, nourished and passed on, always passed on.

There's the gift of attachment we first know in our mother's body, her womb, her breast, her eye, her hands, and our father's too. We can literally die without that attachment, as did many of the infants evacuated from their families' homes in wartime London. And we can be smothered by it when it becomes manipulative, oppressive, abusive, when we are not let go, do not manage to free ourselves, to walk in our own shoes and in the shoes of the Other, your shoes, my shoes, everybody's gotta have shoes. Just not only our own, lest we bind our feet and can no longer walk.

 

The Brain on Love

by Diane Ackerman

New York Times, March 24, 2012

A relatively new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.

All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self. 

Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams — but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible.

We used to think this was the end of the story: first heredity, then the brain’s engraving mental maps in childhood, after which you’re pretty much stuck with the final blueprint.

But as a wealth of imaging studies highlight, the neural alchemy continues throughout life as we mature and forge friendships, dabble in affairs, succumb to romantic love, choose a soul mate. The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships. Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently discussed groundbreaking work in the field at a conference on the school’s campus. It’s not that caregiving changes genes; it influences how the genes express themselves as the child grows. Dr. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, refers to the indelible sense of “feeling felt” that we learn as infants and seek in romantic love, a reciprocity that remodels the brain’s architecture and functions.

Does it also promote physical well-being? “Scientific studies of longevity, medical and mental health, happiness and even wisdom,” Dr. Siegel says, “point to supportive relationships as the most robust predictor of these positive attributes in our lives across the life span.”

The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible.

We used to think this was the end of the story: first heredity, then the brain’s engraving mental maps in childhood, after which you’re pretty much stuck with the final blueprint.

But as a wealth of imaging studies highlight, the neural alchemy continues throughout life as we mature and forge friendships, dabble in affairs, succumb to romantic love, choose a soul mate. The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt and long for its adult equivalent.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships. Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently discussed groundbreaking work in the field at a conference on the school’s campus. It’s not that caregiving changes genes; it influences how the genes express themselves as the child grows. Dr. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, refers to the indelible sense of “feeling felt” that we learn as infants and seek in romantic love, a reciprocity that remodels the brain’s architecture and functions.

Does it also promote physical well-being? “Scientific studies of longevity, medical and mental health, happiness and even wisdom,” Dr. Siegel says, “point to supportive relationships as the most robust predictor of these positive attributes in our lives across the life span.”

The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful. As imaging studies by the U.C.L.A. neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger show, the same areas of the brain that register physical pain are active when someone feels socially rejected. That’s why being spurned by a lover hurts all over the body, but in no place you can point to. Or rather, you’d need to point to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the brain, the front of a collar wrapped around the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers zinging messages between the hemispheres that register both rejection and physical assault.

Whether they speak Armenian or Mandarin, people around the world use the same images of physical pain to describe a broken heart, which they perceive as crushing and crippling. It’s not just a metaphor for an emotional punch. Social pain can trigger the same sort of distress as a stomachache or a broken bone.

But a loving touch is enough to change everything. James Coan, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, conducted experiments in 2006 in which he gave an electric shock to the ankles of women in happy, committed relationships. Tests registered their anxiety before, and pain level during, the shocks.

Then they were shocked again, this time holding their loving partner’s hand. The same level of electricity produced a significantly lower neural response throughout the brain. In troubled relationships, this protective effect didn’t occur. If you’re in a healthy relationship, holding your partner’s hand is enough to subdue your blood pressure, ease your response to stress, improve your health and soften physical pain. We alter one another’s physiology and neural functions.

However, it’s not all sub rosa. One can decide to be a more attentive and compassionate partner, mindful of the other’s motives, hurts and longings. Breaking old habits isn’t easy, since habits are deeply ingrained neural shortcuts, a way of slurring over details without having to dwell on them. Couples often choose to rewire their brains on purpose, sometimes with a therapist’s help, to ease conflicts and strengthen their at-one-ness.

While they were both in the psychology department of Stony Brook University, Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron scanned the brains of long-married couples who described themselves as still “madly in love.” Staring at a picture of a spouse lit up their reward centers as expected; the same happened with those newly in love (and also with cocaine users). But, in contrast to new sweethearts and cocaine addicts, long-married couples displayed calm in sites associated with fear and anxiety. Also, in the opiate-rich sites linked to pleasure and pain relief, and those affiliated with maternal love, the home fires glowed brightly.

A happy marriage relieves stress and makes one feel as safe as an adored baby. Small wonder “Baby” is a favorite adult endearment. Not that romantic love is an exact copy of the infant bond. One needn’t consciously regard a lover as momlike to profit from the parallels. The body remembers, the brain recycles and restages.

So how does this play out beyond the lab? I saw the healing process up close after my 74-year-old husband, who is also a writer, suffered a left-hemisphere stroke that wiped out a lifetime of language. All he could utter was “mem.” Mourning the loss of our duet of decades, I began exploring new ways to communicate, through caring gestures, pantomime, facial expressions, humor, play, empathy and tons of affection — the brain’s epitome of a safe attachment. That, plus the admittedly eccentric home schooling I provided, and his diligent practice, helped rewire his brain to a startling degree, and in time we were able to talk again, he returned to writing books, and even his vision improved. The brain changes with experience throughout our lives; it’s in loving relationships of all sorts — partners, children, close friends — that brain and body really thrive.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing. Its doors of perception swing wide open. The flip side is that, given how vulnerable one then is, love lessons — sweet or villainous — can make a deep impression. Wedded hearts change everything, even the brain.

 

Still love's braided dance

Two poems of late life, of endings, final steps or none, walking this ground "of which dead men/and women I have loved/are part, as they/are part of me." Life is a host of marriages and partings and awful grace beyond chance. A braided dance. Now and again this common ground where you and I, you inexplicably before I — how could that be? — Death is neither friend nor enemy. You stretch out, not unmoved but unmoving as sandstone. What do you feel? A luminous point of change? There is no sky pulsing against your small horizon, nor was there for my mother. Like and unlike someone of this slouching age, do you talk with your machine that offers some distant kin to life? I want to believe there is marriage in this place, still love's braided dance. Memories live. If I bend down perhaps I shall hear and say "touch me." You do not stand again under your last hill, you do not breathe. But perhaps in your time out of mind you have unburdened yourself and, light as you are, you may begin another journey without regret, your own unpeaceable kingdom, your end of endings, "in life's divine, obliterating love."

 

 

 

In a mist of light
falling with the rain
I walk this ground
of which dead men
and women I have loved
are part, as they
are part of me.  In earth,
in blood, in mind,
the dead and living
into each other pass,
as the living pass
in and out of loves
as stepping to a song.
The way I go is
marriage to this place,
grace beyond chance,
love's braided dance
covering the world.

 

~ Wendell Berry ~

 

You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.

 

What did you want
To be? You'll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power,
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.

 

What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveler's dream
Under the last hill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.

 

You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another
Journey without regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings.

 

~ David Wagoner ~ 

 

Obama as a credible foreign policy candidate for re-election?

I like John Feffer, author of the weekly Institute for Policy Studies "World Beat" essay. He's consistently well informed and, for me, on the mark.

He argues this week that while Americans pay little attention to foreign policy compared to domestic issues, Obama has a chance to more clearly distinguish his candidacy from Mitt Romney by making the following points:

"Let’s pretend for a moment that the United States is a different country where foreign policy indeed matters to the electorate. Let’s make another, perhaps more far-fetched assumption that Obama will bill himself in 2012 as a successful, globally minded progressive candidate. Here are the five things Obama could say to confound his right-wing critics and his liberal debunkers to prove that he has effectively promoted progressive causes at a global level."

 

• I promised to engage willing authoritarian regimes. The government of Burma was willing, we engaged them, and now opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will soon take her place in the Burmese parliament.
• I promised global abolition and, now that my arch-enemy Jon Kyl is retiring, we will finally be able to make some concrete steps toward nuclear disarmament.
• I promised to steer clear of dangerous military interventions, and I have pushed hard for a diplomatic solution to the crisis in Syria.
• I inherited the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have completed the U.S. troop withdrawal from the former and pursued the negotiations necessary to remove U.S. forces from the latter.
• The global economy was in a sinkhole when I entered office, and now it has stabilized, in large part through the stimulus policies that I supported along with my counterparts in other major countries.

"None of these efforts has been a clear political win. None could be called an unmitigated progressive victory. But the administration’s policies on Burma, nuclear weapons, negotiated settlements, and the global economy should go a long way toward refuting the canards of Rove and Gillespie and injecting foreign policy in a positive way into the 2012 presidential campaign. It’s not exactly the agenda of the Progressive Caucus. But it’s a far cry from RomneyWorld."

 

John F. Kennedy revisited: an exploration of his interest in rapprochment with Fidel Castro

My good friend Michael and I became interested today in finding an article we had read years ago about John F. Kennedy and his interest in a rapprochment with Fidel Castro.  

 

Michael thought the conservative first generation of Cuban-Americans in Miami might have been behind Kennedy's assassination by Lee Harvey Oswald. Other conspiracy theorists, as I recall, lay the responsibility upon Chicago crime syndicates whose privileges in pre-revolutionary Cuba were considerable, and at least in some measure, upon the Dallas police force, who managed to allow Jack Ruby with a loaded pistol into the locale of their transporting Oswald to another location. Despite a host of inquiries going back to the Warren Commission, no such theory has acquired evidence to sustain its plausibility. The consensus appears to be, however unsatisfactory, that Oswald acted alone, convinced that Kennedy was anti-Castro. A terrible irony in the context of my current investigation.

 

I hadn't thought of Kennedy or his assassination for many years. In searching for that article, in the improbable magazine Cigar Aficionado, and in the reading and thought that followed, I recalled today what a huge and awful experience of loss I felt with so many of the American people. We all remember just where we were that day when we heard the news of Kennedy’s death, and we all spent the next days in a kind of trance, glued to our television screens, still somehow unwilling to believe. I was in a taxi on Amsterdam Avenue in New York.

I imagine it was very like the experience so many felt in learning of the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. I learned that news on the bedside radio in my room in Bethesda Naval Hospital. I was ill with a staphylococcus infection, and just six years old, so could not absorb the impact. I do remember a nurse running in to turn off my radio, not knowing I had already heard. My mother came later to help me understand that my grandfather — PaPa — had died.

The day Kennedy was elected in November 1960 I was fresh out of college, starting graduate studies for a Ph.D. at Columbia University. I was filled with hope and pride in our capacity to elect him as our president. I went to Washington in the summer of 1963, only months before his assassination, to serve briefly as a desk officer in the State Department.

I realize in retrospect that in losing both Kennedys — John and his brother Robert in their candidacy for president, JFK's tragically short service in the presidency, Robert Kennedy's assassination while trying to overtake Senator Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic nomination in 1968 — and in the terrible death by a third assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., we lost the three finest public leaders of this nation since Franklin Roosevelt.

 It was the last time — a half-century ago — I felt unalloyed pride and optimism about American civic leadership. Yes, I’ve been saddened by a few things I’ve since come to know about both Kennedys and even about Martin Luther King. But they still stand in my mind as I knew them then. No one since them has evoked the same admiration. Youthful it may have been — youthful it was — but it remains a passion I remember with pleasure and sorrow. The might-have-beens of history are tantalizing and ephemeral.

I’m happy that I cast my first presidential ballot for John Kennedy. I have voted for every Democratic candidate since then, with a clear realization that the alternative would have been worse. I admire Barack Obama and much of what he has done during his first term. I also believe it is critically important that he be re-elected. I am not confident of that outcome. David Javerbaum wrote an amusing column in last Sunday’s New York Times, saying that we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician. “Frustrating as it may be, the rules of quantum campaigning dictate that no human being can ever simultaneously know both what Mitt Romney’s current position is and where that position will be at some future date. This is known as the ‘principle uncertainty principle.’” I would be more sanguine if I did not harbor the fear that we also have a quantum electorate.

I wrote earlier today and offer here in a letter to my friend Michael, the fruits of a day of research, reading and reflection for which I've been thankful.

 

 Dear Michael,

I found the Peter Kornbluth article, which appeared in the Cigar Aficionado issue of September/October 1999. You may click on it below. It makes fascinating reading today. Kennedy indeed was actively contemplating a rapprochement with Castro, and efforts, while interrupted by the assassination of Kennedy, were continued under Johnson, then ended, only to be reinstituted under Jimmy Carter. Bill Clinton finally set them aside. There was always much sensitivity about the US being identified as soft on communism, little reference to the Cuban-American community before the 1990s. Lisa Howard, an ABC journalist living in New York, facilitated much of the dialogue, so was probably the "beautiful woman spy" you remembered. Gordon Chase was McGeorge Bundy's assistant.

The only thing specifically about the Kennedy assassination Kornbluth writes, however, was his understanding that Oswald was reputed to have killed Kennedy because he suspected Kennedy of being anti-Castro. Oswald himself was strongly pro-Castro. And indeed there was enough evidence from the public record  — Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, Cuban Missile Crisis, all could easily suggest that Kennedy, like Eisenhower before him, was anti-Castro; regarded as a synonym for anti-communist. Kornbluth makes no suggestion of a conspiracy or involvement of Cuban-Americans.

Here is Kornbluth's wistful conclusion in the fall of 1999:

"To be sure, the 'what ifs' of history are speculative. But the lesson of the aborted Kennedy-Castro initiative toward a rapprochement is clear: at the apex of the Cold War, and the height of tensions between Washington and Havana, diplomacy and dialogue were still possible. Amidst the charged international conflicts of the early 1960s, a U.S. president appeared willing, as one National Security Council memo put it, to 'live with Castro personally and to assist Cuba'--albeit only 'under certain circumstances.'   Those circumstances--an end to Cuba's ties to the Soviet Union and support for Third World revolution--now exist due to the extraordinary changes in the international environment over the past decade. And recent events have created considerable opportunity for reevaluating a policy stuck in the time warp of the Cold War."

Alas, the U.S. still has that thoroughly irrational policy, still stuck thirteen years after Kornbluth wrote. It will surely remain so at least through this election cycle and perhaps beyond. After all, it costs Americans very little; it costs Cubans a lot. Since the Kennedys so briefly led us — indeed even then — we have been a warrior nation built upon the profits of war.

 http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/7300

There is an earlier and even more fascinating - and of course heartbreaking - companion essay by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in the November/December 1998 issue of Cigar Aficionado, "JFK Revisited." He has no comment on the assassination, except to demonstrate the terrible loss of a fine man and a fine president. In his article, Schlesinger writes, "There are those who claim that the Kennedys had an "obsession" with Castro and Cuba. They cite the assassination plots, though they were inherited from the Eisenhower administration, and they cite the Kennedy administration's own Operation Mongoose. But there is no direct evidence that either Eisenhower or Kennedy authorized or knew of the assassination plots....

http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/6018/p/7

 "What is far more likely is that the CIA, like intelligence agencies in other countries, believed that it knew the requirements of national security better than transient elected officials, like presidents, and invoked the excuse of "plausible deniability" to act as it deemed best without telling those to whom the agency was nominally accountable. As John Le Carre, who should know, has said, "Scrutiny of intelligence services is largely an illusory concept. If they're good, they fool the outsiders--and if they're bad they fool themselves."

 "As for Operation Mongoose, which Robert Kennedy kept trying to spur on—not his finest hour—this was not an assassination project but a foolish, futile and costly intelligence-gathering and sabotage effort. As Richard Helms of the CIA testified before the Senate committee investigating assassination plots in 1975, "Mongoose was not intended to apply to assassination activity." [Personally I'm not sure why we should trust the testimony of Richard Helms.]

 "Those who are themselves obsessed with the theory of the Kennedys' alleged anti-Castro obsession must deal with the stubborn fact that, given by the Soviet missiles the best possible excuse for invading Cuba and smashing Castro forever, an excuse that would have been accepted around the world, it was Robert Kennedy who led the fight against military action and John Kennedy who made the decision against it. A year after the missile crisis, Kennedy was exploring through Ambassador William Attwood (United States) and Ambassador Carlos Lechuga (Cuba) and through the French journalist Jean Daniel the possibility of normalizing relations with Cuba. Some anti-Castro obsession!

...................................................................

 "JFK touched and remolded lives and gave young people the faith that individuals can make a difference to history. Inspired by his words, they dedicated themselves thereafter to public service, whether in government, in civil rights and human rights movements, in nonprofit sectors, in community organization, in their own hearts and souls. His irreverence toward conventional ideas and institutions provoked a discharge of critical energy throughout American society. He gave the country back to its own best self and taught the world that the process of rediscovering America was not over.

 "One is bound to speculate how America and the world would have been different if Kennedy had lived. For individuals do indeed make a difference to history. In December 1931, a British politician crossing Fifth Avenue in New York City was struck by an automobile and nearly killed. In February 1933, an American politician sitting in an open car in Miami was fired upon by an assassin; the mayor of Chicago, sitting beside him, was killed. Would the history of the twentieth century have been the same if the New York automobile had killed Winston Churchill and the Miami assassin had killed Franklin Roosevelt?

 "Had John F. Kennedy lived, his New Frontier program would have been enacted, he would have pressed the attack on poverty and racism in America, would have pursued détente in Europe, would most probably have withdrawn from Vietnam,and would have urged on the global crusade against nuclear proliferation. The republic would have been spared much of the trauma, disorder and violence that disfigured the raging 1960s.

 "And there remain memories of the private man. He was not, as some claim, a bearer of grudges--the "don't get mad, get even" idea. He made Lyndon Johnson his vice president after Johnson had said unforgivable things about his father. He took most of the Stevenson-for-President crowd--George Ball, Willard Wirtz, Thomas K. Finletter, William Blair, Newton Minow, J. Edward Day, William Attwood, Clayton Fritchey--into his administration though the Stevenson campaign had seemed for a moment to imperil his nomination.

 "Nor was he, as claimed, a spoiled rich man who used and discarded people and treated his associates as if they were indentured servants. He was one of the most unfailingly courteous and considerate men I have ever known. I did my share of creating trouble for his administration; and a couple of times, after one scrape or another made headlines, I told him that maybe the time had come for me to resign. He would laugh and dismiss the idea: "Better that you're the target than me."

 "He was easy, accessible, witty, candid, enjoying the clash of ideas and the ripples of gossip, never more relaxed than when sitting in his rocking chair and puffing away on a fine Havana cigar. He was, in his self-description, an "idealist without illusions." He was the best of my generation. It is good for the country that he remains so vivid a presence in our minds and hearts."

Floyd Beaver's poem, "You Taunting Sea"

Floyd Beaver is a good friend and neighbor. He has written several books I have admired, including particularly his memoir of service in the U.S. Navy from 1939 to 1945, before and during World War II, Sailor from Oklahoma (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009).  Over the course of that war he served in fifteen ships, saw combat in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific. He barely escaped with his life when Japanese aircraft sank his ship near the Solomon Islands in April 1943. He was discharged in September 1945 as a Chief Signalman, having been promoted for meritorious conduct in action.

 

 

 

 

I asked Floyd if I could publish in Rekonings a poem that had struck me. He graciously agreed, and added the following brief introduction:

 

"Everywhere, in all lands and in all times, there are men serving
through the hard and narrowing ending years of their lives. Some lucky few
of these men will have the comforting and still glowing memories of youthful
times spent beyond the sea's horizons, no matter how long before, to ease
their ways from the world of living men. It is for these men that this
little poem is written."

 

You Taunting Sea

Relent, you cruel and taunting sea,

    And lift from me your blighting curse.

Just let me be content to live

    Away from wars and storms and worse.

 

Oh, close my eyes to flaunted lures

    Of trade wind clouds in foreign skies,

Of weaving masts among the stars,

    And heaven's fires where pack ice lies.

 

And dull my ears to siren songs

    Of buoy bells in foggy nights,

Of cry of gull and crash of surf

    And lookouts' call for harbor lights.

 

And cleanse my heart of pagan thrill

    At thrust of decks against my feet

And wipe away remembered years

    That chain my mind in cold defeat.

 

Oh, let me lose this haunting urge

    To sail again in dripping dawns.

Please, let me find the quiet and rest

    That others know on peaceful lawns.

 

               - Floyd Beaver              

 

 

Google Tap and Google Fiber: revolutionary products

Google Tap! A terrific Google spoof for April Fool's Day. Just imagine, writing two letters at once to two entirely different people, with only two buttons, while you're seated on the pot taking care of yet a third piece of important business. And perhaps a fourth, chewing a piece of Google Fiber! Available at www.gmail/tap and www.gmail.com/fiber. Well, the G-Fiber may already be sold out, or run to your local Apple Store. Get them while (if) they last.

There's a serious side to this spoof. If Google Tap is still in the offing and most of us are not about to relearn Morse Code, there are existing applications for our computers, iPads and "smart" phones that point in that direction. Nuance Communications, a large corporation which a recent article in the New York Times called "the leading force in voice technology, and the speech-recognition engine behind Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the Apple iPhone 4S," has also created an app called Dragon Go, and is hard at work on Dragon TV. 

"Humans are wired for speech and tend to respond to talking devices as if they were kindred spirits, says Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

“I’m not saying voice recognition is bad,” Professor Turkle says. “I’m saying it’s part of a package of attachments to objects where we should tread carefully because we are pushing a lot of Darwinian buttons in our psychology.” A curious phrase to use in this context, but I suspect she means there is the possibility that if we spend more time talking with machines we'll spend less time talking with each other. And pushing those buttons could indeed be dangerous to human health and well-being, say to friendships, marriage, and parents and children, for starters.

Think of how many well-dressed men and women you've seen walking down the sidewalk talking into the air, more or less oblivious to their surroundings, or teenagers in a corner of a coffee shop huddled over their cell phones. I've been known to do it myself. Maybe more amusing than dangerous, but I think Professor Turkle is right: we should tread carefully and consciously. 

Sven Birkerts writes in the current (April) issue of Poetry Magazine, “We are glued to our screens of all sizes not for amusement or business, but because we think something is going to be announced. We can’t bear to miss it,. We are waiting for the oppression of  ’what’s next?’ to be lifted. We are, in a deeper sense, waiting for our poet.”