Category Archives: musing

And To Be Patient in An Emergency is A Terrible Trial

BILL MOYERS: When did you know you were free? And I ask that because of the poem you wrote, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

WENDELL BERRY: You’re free when you realize that you’re willing to go to the length that’s necessary.

BILL MOYERS: Then read your own poem.

WENDELL BERRY: This….this was a long time ago. “The Peace of Wild Things.”

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

BILL MOYERS: The grace of the world, take that a little further for me.

WENDELL BERRY: I meant it in the religious sense. The people of, people of religious faith know that the world is, is maintained every day by the same force that created it. It’s an article of my faith and belief, that all creatures live by breathing God’s breath and participating in his spirit. And this means that the whole thing is holy. The whole shooting match. There are no sacred and unsacred places, there are only sacred and desecrated places. So finally I see those gouges in the surface mine country as desecrations, not just as land abuse. Not just as…as human oppression. But as desecration. As blasphemy.

BILL MOYERS: Let me read you this. “No amount…” This is you. “No amount of fiddling with capitalism to regulate and humanize it … can for long disguise its failure” to conserve the wealth and health of nature. “Eroded, wasted, or degraded soils; damaged or destroyed ecosystems; extinction of biodiversity, species; whole landscapes defaced, gouged, flooded, or blown up … thoughtless squandering of fossil fuels and fossil waters, of mineable minerals and ores, natural health and beauty replaced by a heartless and sickening ugliness. Perhaps its greatest success is an astounding increase in the destructiveness and therefore the profitability of war.” That’s as powerful an indictment of the consequences of runaway capitalism as I’ve ever read and surely if that’s happening as we know it is, it takes more than reverence, and it takes more than words to try to reverse it. What do you say to those people who say Wendell, please tell me what I can do?

WENDELL BERRY: All right. Well, you’ve put me in the place I’m always winding up in and…that is to say well we’ve acknowledged that the problems are big, now where’s the big solution? When you ask the question what is the big answer, then you’re implying that we can impose the answer. But that’s the problem we’re in to start with, we’ve tried to impose the answers. The answers will come not from walking up to your farm and saying this is what I want and this is what I expect from you. You walk up and you say what do you need. And you commit yourself to say all right, I’m not going to do any extensive damage here until I know what it is that you are asking of me. And this can’t be hurried. This is the dreadful situation that young people are in. I think of them and I say well, the situation you’re in now is a situation that’s going to call for a lot of patience. And to be patient in an emergency is a terrible trial.

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-wendell-berry-poet-prophet/

It Makes No Sense

Had lunch yesterday with an old friend from High School I haven’t seen in decades.  He was going to our fortieth HS reunion, I wasn’t, so he stopped in for lunch on his way to the reunion.  His life has gone in a logical line, the next in several generations of engineers, he’s been studying or working, mostly happily, in the field for several decades since graduating high school.   For the last twenty years or so he’s been at the same company, working on inventions that will do many things, including make smart bombs smarter and more precise in their targeting.  There is good money in those government contracts, the company he works for values his work, and many of his co-workers there feel like extended family to him.   He can narrate the events of his resume over appetizers, as he demonstrated nimbly over the vegetarian lamb satay.

When it’s my turn, I am at something of a loss.  Neither my life nor my description of it goes in a straight line, it jumps from my years as a bike messenger, too angry to consider any way to participate in a society that seems sick beyond redemption, to the 1981 meeting I had with a dean at CCNY who told me it was no problem to waive some requirements so I could get the remaining seven credits on my BA (magna cum laude, it should be noted).  He could not waive gym, he explained, so I took volleyball and led my team to the championship.  

The dean, a physics professor, if I remember correctly, a kind looking man with a resemblance to Kurt Vonnegut Jr., took care of the paperwork quickly and then gave a concerned look.  “That part’s easy,” he said, leaning forward and looking mildly concerned “but, I have to ask you, on a more personal level– what is someone as obviously intelligent and thoughtful as you are planning to do  with your life?”

My companion at lunch nodded, his eyes wide open.  A scientist and human being, approving of the humanity of his fellow scientist, going beyond his role and asking a good, compassionate and very logical question.  I proceeded to try to answer, weaving the story of my father’s life and death among the different periods of my life and times.  There was no line to follow, except for the evolution of my resolve to avoid argument and conflict, to be direct, and remain as mild as possible.  There was no pay-off to any of this, certainly nothing monetary, outside of  a life with somewhat less anger and violence.

Odd to say, while we walked after lunch and chatted, never once did the image of, not three generations of engineers, but three generations of angry, depressed people, seventy years ago virtually all of them murdered in ditches, burned, gassed, one of the lonely survivors whipping and sobbing over her first born, clinging in fear to a God who had clearly turned his back, come into my head.  

Just a single brief description of this enraged little redhead I know so little about, other than how she violently sowed the seeds for her baby’s tormented life, the baby who grew up to be my father.

I had a pleasant few hours with my HS friend and was left with the feeling I haven’t figured out how to make sense of much of it.   My HS friend looked at my current program through logical eyes and didn’t see why I wasn’t working as a middle school art teacher.  Better pay, benefits, same basic work.  

The finer distinctions I tried to draw about the uniqueness of my program, the integration of teamwork, children taking complete ownership of the collaborative process, peer-teaching, creative problem-solving, seemed pretty much lost on him, reminding me again how important it is to find a few people who grasp essential things about the program that cannot be quantified in a lab.  

Having said that, and not to suggest an inherent contradiction, I also need to quantify the claims I am making in a lab, in order to demonstrate to people who have money that this idea is worth funding.

That said, the only logical conclusion might well turn out to be that it makes no sense, this flickering idea of mine.  In time I will either discover this for myself, to what end I know not, or be pleasantly surprised to see a program I’ve long dreamed of alive and walking among the living, and inspiring them.

Chained to my old Rockin’ Chair

Beautiful song by Hoagy Carmichael, called Rockin’ Chair.   Louis Armstrong did several great versions of it over the years, with his friend Jack Teagarden and with Hoagy himself (Teagarden sang much better than Hoagland) among others.  Jerry Garcia did a plaintive version with David Grisman.  The point is, the old guy narrator sings about how he can’t get out of his cabin, how’s he’s grabbin’ at the flies round his old rockin’ chair, and chained to it and so forth.

I hit on this line because I’m chained today to my desk chair and this old typer.  Every time I get up to go outside, get a little air, a constitutional, run an errand or two, clear the head, it’s a few circles around the crowded apartment and plop, back into this ol’ swivel chair.   A few times I picked up my guitar (I feel like playing Rockin’ Chair now, all of a sudden, I dare not) but most times I did things I needed to do, checked off a few items on my checklist, moved things incrementally forward, with any luck.

Devised a trick to get my fevered self out of the cabin just now, well, almost six minutes ago.  Grabbed the timer off the refrigerator, set it to ten, told myself “go!” and off I went.

Forget Hoagy, Louis, Jerry, music, the soul, the rest of it.  Forget everything but the 4:40 left on the clock and a little tale to tease out.  Walking down Broadway last night with a friend of more than 40 years I mentioned something about a post here on this covert blahg.  “I don’t read the blog, I haven’t been able to find it lately, I’m sorry to say,” said the American I assumed was my other reader– most days there are the American and the Polish reader, two pinpricks on the map each 6 hours to one side or the other of NY time.

“Who the devil….?”  I began musing.  No idea  who that second sphinx on the grassy knoll is anymore.  The likeliest suspect is mildly apologetic, telling me how much he used to enjoy the old blagh, look forward to it each day, but somehow…. and his voice trails away.

“Who the devil…?” I ask the cluttered desk, the groaning shelves, the overburdened Lazy Boy.   Ninety seconds on the clock means I’m unlikely to solve this puzzle any time soon, but at least, with luck, I’ll be up out of this chair, like a NASA space craft being launched, straight up in a foamy jet of smoke and steam, into the atmosphere and into a shirt, down the two flights into the street and saying “damn, why the hell did I not do this five hours ago when I first proposed this excellent idea to myself?”

Time.

Sometimes it takes a long time to see the obvious

There are things we say, thinking they are everything we need to say.   A year or more later, sometimes, we realize there was something important we should have added, but left out.

I’m thinking about this, oddly, as I begin to keep a Gratitude Journal.   I’ve written down about, well, let’s see, 28 things I feel gratefulness about so far, collected last night during a long train ride home.  I hope to form the habit of noting my good fortune, and increasing my ability to see the small miracles that are quite common, but easy to miss if you’re not looking for them.  The love between that child and his mother on the train the other day, for example.  Or the fleeting smile on the face of the tough guy on the other side of the subway car when he saw the same thing I was smiling about, a second before he put his mask back on.

Out of the blue recently I thought of a missed chance to add a sentence or two when I should have, and it haunts me slightly that I didn’t add the important sentiment I realize now was missing from my answer.   Sometimes, in the effort to come to the point smartly, the larger point is missed.

An old friend was in town, a very talented musician and wonderful improviser, someone I love to play music with.   He was moving to the other side of the world, I don’t know if he was truly happy about it, but he was gamely moving to the other side of the world.   It would be a long time, if ever, until I saw him again.   

He and I had a mutual friend, a very good friend for many years, famously demanding and difficult.  This friend was increasingly unhappy as the years went by, and critical, and humorless. His demand for attention, inflexibility and inability to listen made him more and more difficult to be around.   He called at the worst times and always needed to have a long conversation, he always had a long, usually aggravating, story he needed to tell.  He was angry when he was not depressed, and expressed his disgust at a series of betrayals that began to look eerily identical.  He fought about being angry, claimed he was not at all angry.  Although he was extremely intelligent, quite talented and had other good qualities, those things became harder and harder to see.  The relationship became toxic to me and it finally came to a head in the weeks after my father died.  

I’d tried valiantly to have a better friendship with him, over literally several years, long letters, long conversations, but in the end I could not save the relationship.   We brought out the worst in each other and it was time to stop being  constantly reminded of what he considered my failures, hearing over and over about his endlessly repeating betrayals at the hands of virtually everyone he met.  His mother was very understanding of my position in the end and asked helplessly what, if anything, she could do to help him.

My friend the musician was in NY visiting an old friend who has always been an older brother to him.  He and his wife stayed with this old friend on the eve of their move to the other side of the world and while they were in town I was invited to join them for a quick lunch and then, a day or two later, to spend an afternoon walking over the Brooklyn Bridge with them.  

At the end of that nice walk, as we drove up the West Side Highway, my friend mentioned he was probably going to visit this former friend of mine.  They’d been out of touch a long time, he said, but he was planning to drop in.  I told him and his wife that the guy would be delighted to see them, lived in a beautiful place they should not miss while touring America, would surely show them a good time.  

The driver, my friend’s older brother, smiled at me from the rear view mirror and asked me pleasantly why it was I’d stopped being friends with him.  I smiled back and said “Truthfully, I came to realize we brought out the worst in each other.”  And that was that.  I never heard from any of them again.

I might have added that it pained me greatly to have things come to that sad end after decades of friendship, and that I’d tried mightily, and made every effort to improve things.  I might have spent five seconds to impress on them how seriously I take friendship, that I am not the categorical, black and white hanging judge who cuts off an old friend the way saying “we brought out the worst in each other” might have made me seem.   Probably would have changed nothing, but I regret not adding that bit of my humanity as my character was being weighed.

Truthfully, it was long in dawning on me that I was on a kind of trial in that moment.

These two made my day

|
|
|
Blessings are where we find them.   The gift is in learning to recognize them.
                                                                                                                                                                                            |
                                                                                                                                                                                            |
Yesterday as I headed toward another fairly disjointed and disappointing animation session with six boys (makes me realize how important a coed group is for a good workshop– the girls are more creative and take more chances and it spurs the boys on, and the energy is much better than in this weird little boy’s club– ten is also a far better number than six) I was feeling like crap, physically and emotionally.  
                                                                                                                                                                                            |
                                                                                                                                                                                            |
An affable but irresponsible idiot from a local film school was coming in to shoot the session, against my better judgment, and I’d had to draft a legal paper for him to sign to protect myself if he tries to do anything more with his half-assed student project than submit it for his grade.  I was really feeling up against it, up against everything.
 
On the crosstown train, toward the end of my trip,  a woman sat next to me with her 3 year-old son.  What I saw filled my heart with wonder and joy, it changed my mood instantly and completely and the rest of the day I’d been dreading went fine.   I wrote this afterwards in my journal:
 
Climbed up on
his large brown mother
his small hands reaching
his small bright face tilted up
reaching
kissing the top of her large upper lip,
her nose, her cheek
balled in a beautiful smile
and she kissed his small
smiling face
and he held on as she 
brushed her lips over his profile
and began to sing
softly and kiss him back
as he kissed her
and stroked her face
 
I was reminded
hours later
after telling her
“you two are a blessing
to everyone on this train” 
and as she smiled
another beautiful smile
and told her dumbfounded 
young son to thank me,
as the doors closed and I walked on, 
after colossal patience
with idiot school boys
and listening long
to unhappy details
from an old friend, 
my friend reminded me
 
the lives of the children 
of the wealthy
ain’t no crystal stair neither
and I should keep in mind
the stress, neglect and childhood pain
I might soothe
in them too
 
neither should I scorn
their possibly unlikable parents’
money
which would help ease 
the unbearable worry of poor Sekhnet
who righteously agonizes
over my great gift
for not making a living.

What We’re Doing Here

It’s a mystery, why we don’t greet each day as the unequivocal blessing that it is.  My mother, her internal organs riddled with a million tiny cancerous tumors, was given a few months to live back in 1992; she lived another 23 years.   It is unfair to single her out, but outside of loving opera, and laughing when something was funny, and seeing the dark humor in things sometimes, she did not greet every new day as a blessing.  Unfair indeed to single my poor, dead mother out, because she was by no means alone in this.  I am trying to think of someone who greets every day as a blessing, and I’m not coming up with anyone that I know.

But, look at it seriously.   Everyone has reasons to complain, feel bitter, cheated, to hold on to anger about many things that are truly aggravating.   All this is true, work often sucks, people are often thoughtless, or worse, the world is increasingly distracted, run by greedy, sometimes evil bastards, and it’s hard to get a thoughtful grunt most of the time out of most people, even those closest to us.  Everyone has their list of grievances.  But look at it seriously.  A hundred blessings every day.  Seriously.  

As a young man, delivering envelopes and packages on a bike so as not to take part in a corrupt and hateful materialistic society, I found myself in an elevator that wasn’t moving.  I was paid per delivery and this had been a day of endless delays.  I wasn’t paid for waiting, unless I waited more than twenty minutes.  I’d waited nineteen times for nineteen minutes that day and I was doing a slow burn in the dingy service elevator that sat, doors closed.  The corrugated metal cell smelled of sweat and urine.   I grumbled to an older woman that it wasn’t my day.   She was quick to correct me, “Don’t say it’s not your day.  If you’re alive, it’s your day!”  I nodded, gave her something between a grimace and a smile and eventually the elevator began its slow climb to the floor where I dropped off the important envelope and got a signature on my ticket so I could get paid.

The other night I was sitting outside the 24 hour laundromat as my clothes enjoyed the amusement park inside, spinning wildly in the dryers.  It was a cool night, a delightful night, really.  It had been muggy, but now there was a mild breeze that was the perfect temperature.  I sat in a chair enjoying it.  A woman walked up, somewhat painfully, put her bags down, sat heavily and looked over at me about to complain.  “I was going to start complaining that my feet hurt,” she said and I smiled.   I immediately thought of that old woman on the elevator thirty something years ago.   I told her she decided not to complain when she felt how good that breeze felt, and she smiled, and agreed.   I told her about what the woman in the elevator said to me, she nodded and looked relieved.

I told her the outline of the story of Wavy Gravy’s life, as told in Saint Misbehavin’.  He’d been a poet, extrovert and a trouble maker and had been beaten by cops at several civil rights rallies.  He had his back broken by cops twice.  The second time was really bad, he was laid up for months, the operation hadn’t seemed to have fixed his back, he was in a lot of pain, couldn’t get out of bed, became very depressed.  A friend convinced him to visit a nearby hospital for kids with cancer and to stop feeling sorry for himself, go help some kids with real problems.   He passed a costume shop and bought a clown nose.  He went to the cancer ward and began performing for the kids.  He said a light went on in the world for him interacting with those kids.  He went every day, rehabilitated his back, soon was walking without a cane.  Went on, with a doctor friend, to found an organization that has restored the sight to countless poor people in Asia, Africa, everywhere.   He learned that going to demonstrations dressed as a clown no cop would ever beat on him again.   What cop wants to be on TV beating the crap out of a clown?

“That’s right,” said the woman two chairs over, and asked me the name of the movie again.  I told her and mentioned how much it had inspired me, and then excused myself to see how my clothes were doing.  They were doing very well.

Home Cure for Anxiety

Set the timer for twelve minutes.  Pretend the computer keyboard is a musical keyboard and blow.   The chords, as you know, are harmonies, instant, under your hands just like that.  Then there are the notes you can play against them and where you can put them.  

Oh, perhaps it is better, you think, to play an actual musical keyboard. There, you reason, you can put your fingers and hear the sounds you imagine, you try to describe.  Music, ineffable as that breeze suddenly blowing the sweat off your clammy face.

Well, there is a point to that, whereas here, where I tap like the fingers-afflicted victim of RLS, the bebopping leg shakes that can’t be controlled, as mine can’t be now, we are flying without a chart, without a map, without an audible clue, rhythmless and bluesless.  Such is the nature of this anxiety I am attempting the home cure for now. There is the best way to deal with it, and then there is the way we are capable of dealing with it in the given moment.

I have to say, it’s amazing the energy with which my right leg is pounding away.

That said, the rest is to be expected.  Sustaining a dream takes a remarkable, and/or, idiotic temperament, particularly when you can’t get others to really see the dream you dream.  That’s the hard work of the dreamer, to prove the dream is more than vapor in the mind of the person who dreams it.   How to show the focused excitement the living embodiment of that dream brings forth?   Hmmmmm.   How to control ze uncontrollable tapping of this right leg of mine?  It’s the damnedest thing.

I am waiting to hear, waiting to hear, waiting.  And because I’m in this holding pattern, waiting to hear, my leg has gone insane.  Lucky for the neighbor downstairs the foot is clad in a soft rubber croc, thus no tap tap tap on the ceiling.  Ah, now the RLS has miraculously stopped, and not a moment too soon.

A beautiful young woman, very talented, described her panic attacks the other day.   She begins hyperventilating and can’t stop herself.  The more fearful she gets, the worse it gets.   She sees a therapist, but so far, the attacks continue.

There is a merciless force at work in the universe, along with life-giving things like good music, kindness, love and hope.  Better to give hope, have it, share it, than to dwell on the merciless force always at work.  That force is busy whittling away at the life of an old friend who hopes to live to see his 58th birthday, this Friday the 13th.   It is busy eroding all of us, unless we tap into the forces that give life, and even then, it’s an iffy proposition at best.

What am I trying to do?

I am looking for the kids the system is about to give up on, future public enemy types about to turn their back on a world that despises them.  In a way, they are making the only dignified move available to them by saying “fuck this” and walking away from a system practically designed to make them drop out.   The schools were not made for children who come from endless generations of poverty, certainly not now that there are no decent paying factory jobs left in America.  

Today smart entrepreneurs are using the failure of the public school system, and the drying up of real economic opportunity for millions born poor, to build their own alternative schools, making nice money as they shine a false light on what needs to be done, building small, elite, for-profit  schools, in public buildings, funded by vouchers that come out of the public school budget, instead of working to fix our larger problem– although there is a lot of good work that desperately needs to be done well in our society, there is nothing real for most poor children to aspire to in our kinder, gentler, more global nation.  

The public schools are built on the old factory model and while there are many good people working very hard in the system, it is set up to make many kids tune out and quit, especially the children of the poor, children who have the most reason to be discouraged when they start to fall behind.   These are the kids I’m looking for, trying to reach before they are beyond reach.

“What the hell are you trying to do that for?” virtually everyone asks, and there is nothing fake about how mystified they are.  I have no house, no car, I wear the same clothes I’ve had for years, same winter jacket, new boots once a year.  I don’t care about eating in nice restaurants or going to beautiful vacation spots where poor people will treat me like a king.  I don’t even care about having a really nice guitar, though I play well enough to have one.  I don’t say this out of any sense of virtue, I just truly don’t care very much for these things.  What I care about is becoming the change I want to see in the world– a mild, effective man, nurturing creativity instead of my own bitterness.

“What do you care for?” a caring friend asks, and I tell the story of the kid on the beach. A story I heard years ago at a conference for public school teachers I attended on a half day.  The kids were home, or running in the street, and the teachers were in a convention center, listening to a great speaker inspire us to be the best teachers we could be.

“So it’s low tide, and there are about a million star fish drying out on the rocks on the beach, as far as the eye can see.  And a little boy is bending down and picking up half dead starfish and flinging them back into the water.  ‘What are you doing?’ asks a man in a mildly derisive tone, ‘what difference does it make if you throw a few back?  Do you think you can save them all?  Look, there are millions, you can’t save all of them. What difference could it possibly make if you throw a few back?’  And the kid picks up a star fish and heaves it back into the ocean– ‘it makes a big difference for that one’ he says to the crusty old bastard.”

Only, of course, the man talking to the kid was the voice of reason, the voice of the world, and the inspirational speaker didn’t speak of the mercilessly realistic fuck as a crusty old bastard.  The speaker was probably being paid very well to talk to that huge room full of tired teachers, hell, most of the teachers were getting a hundred maybe two hundred dollars just to sit in that room for half a day, listening to this great speech.  I heard it more than twenty years ago, when I was an idealistic third grade teacher in Harlem, and it still resonates, sings.  It’s a bell of clarity, really.

A brief meditation on gratitude

I’ve been writing largely about aspects of angst here lately — when to know you’re being treated badly, fretting over war plans being made in my name, worry about life plans, (which men make as God tries not to laugh), worry over exactly what kind of idiot I might be.   In all this wrestling (no favor to you, dear reader)  I’ve neglected one of the most important things of all and one of the greatest indispensable arts:  gratitude.

It seems impossible to be impervious to gratitude for perfect sleep temperature, finally, no need for the fan last night.  I was relieved, but didn’t stop to savor how delightful it was and to feel grateful.   The many blessings we take for granted– gratefulness is a much more valuable response than a sullen yawn that things aren’t better.   Things are not perfect, true, but they are damned good.  I am thankful, grateful, appreciative.

Now to remember to carry this throughout the day, in my heart and on my face.   It is a beautiful world, many of its challenges included.  I take a moment, now, to breathe that sometimes subtle truth in. 

Visionary or Idiot?

I worry, sometimes, whether I am some kind of visionary or some kind of idiot.  Both see things not as they are but as they believe they are.

Then it struck me, with some kind of mixed relief:  it’s quite possible to be both a visionary and an idiot.