Category Archives: personal

Graveside Service

Today is the 59th birthday of an old friend who died last January 2.  A few days later I joined an amazingly large group of people who went out to the necropolis, snow-covered that day but generally looking like a golf course with a few trees, to help bury a very likable man.

Tomorrow, if the determined widow’s July 21 email requesting a favor and mentioning the date is still accurate, is the unveiling– the Jewish custom of returning to the grave about a year after the funeral and pulling a veil off the engraving that memorializes the departed’s life.  In this case, because of this particular burial ground, it will not be a tombstone unveiled, there are no raised markers there.  A plaque at the head or foot of Steve’s grave will be revealed, and his oldest friend, a rabbi and wonderful speaker, one of the best, will read the inscription and say a few words.  As our friend speaks the large crowd will nod, and sigh, and smile, and cry, and laugh, and they will go somewhere to eat and catch up and then, in their comfortable cars afterwards, life will continue on.

I didn’t agonize long before deciding I won’t be making the trip to the unveiling, outside Boston.  There are a variety of reasons, I suppose.  For one thing, nobody reached out to invite me, outside of the demanding widow’s slightly unreasonable July email requesting that I write, within the next few days, not about any specific memories from the time her husband and I actually spent a lot of time together, but about our conversations in the months before he died, after not seeing each other for decades.  At a loss, and unable to pull something together in the sudden and arbitrary four day window I was given, I didn’t write back and haven’t heard a peep since.

I think of their wedding, and how my friend stood next to his bride and sobbed as the rabbi performed the wedding ceremony, and I remember mumbling to a friend “it is the right of every man to choose the noose into which he slips his head.”  As far as I can tell Steve’s thirty year marriage to this demanding woman was a very happy one.  Though both were amputees from their respective cancers, they continued to have sex right up to the end.  I think that detail I’m probably not supposed to mention speaks remarkably of their love and devotion to each other. 

None of our small circle of old friends has contacted me about the unveiling, on the theory, I suppose, that I could just as easily contact them.  Fair enough.

An objective case could me made that it is difficult for people to reach out to me these days, as most people are reticent in the face of tragedy.   Steve and I once talked briefly about how many people were unable to call him during his decline, or, if they did call, talked of everything but his cancer, although he remained consistently upbeat and much more cheerful than anyone could have expected through the long crucifixion that was his cancer death.  I suspect something similar operates with me, though I feel like I’m as personable as I ever was.  Lurking, behind my deft evasions about how I’m doing, is the unmistakable and terrible tragedy of someone doomed to not truly live in the same world as everyone else, despite having all the tools to flourish in that world.  Like a dying man, the things I am wrestling with are not the carefree playful ones a hard-working, productive person likes to be surrounded with on a day off.

So, happy birthday, Melz.  You were a good man and I salute your success, your many talents, your loving wife and your two beautiful, talented daughters.  In other circumstances, I’d pay a call tomorrow.  But you, as well as anyone and better than most, know the deal, old friend.

Uncanny Echoes of Babel

The following are from survivor accounts in the Vishnevets Yiskor book. They sound uncannily like the characters and narrators in Isaac Babel’s wonderful, terrible tales (in the incomparable Walter Morrison translation). Many of the worst, and the best, of these finely compressed little stories are set in benighted, bloody little towns like Vishnevets.   

My grandmother fondly recalled the Red Army men who were billeted at her family’s home in Vishnevets.  I think she said they were Cossacks, who were generally White and not Red, and rarely friends of the Jews. Babel’s Cossacks fought for the Revolution, and eventually came to tolerate the Jewish Babel, though occasionally raping or killing Jews here and there.

This doomed pregnant woman’s plea is right out of Babel, who may well have been in Vishnevets with the Red Cavalry at some point during the Revolution.  
 
“Vasye,” she said. “Look, Vasinke, look at my condition. I’ve never harmed you. Have mercy on me and my baby, have mercy, Vasinke.”  
 
(Vasye did not have mercy)
 
And this grimly poetic narration, right out of Babel, by a nameless survivor: 
 
One day I stood by the window looking through a crack and saw a young man around the age of 17 returning from work. He left the group, approached the fence, and threw a package over into the ghetto.

A Ukrainian saw it and grabbed the youth – the boy. And the boy didn’t realize that he had seen him. I knew the Ukrainian; he was a reptile but not one of the worst. I called him.

He came to me, and I said to him, “Vaske, what are your intentions?”

And he said to me, “He’s done something that deserves punishment by death.”

I asked him to give him a fine. Punish him with money and let him go, strongly warn him, and in this way, he would satisfy his “conscience” as keeper of the law. But he held on his own and explained to me in a beautiful way:

 “You have to understand, he doesn’t have any money. If I punish him with a fine, he’ll have difficulty paying it. Why should I enforce something that will make his life more difficult and cause him trouble with the Germans? It’s better for me to kill him. It’ll be a lot better for him.”

   
 

The possibility that most of them are sadists

On his deathbed he expressed tormented regrets, spoke for the first time of things he’d found impossible to talk about, tried to make his peace.  “I must have been insane to believe I was doing something good when I machine gunned those people into that ditch.  I pray that God will forgive me, for that one, at least,” he said.

“You did the best you could,” his son said, “God will understand.”  He gave the old man some water.  “Besides, since when do you believe in God?”  

“It’s not God so much I believe in now, but justice.  It seems impossible that there is no reckoning for the bad things we do here.”

“It is our pain that makes us do the bad things we do here,” said the son.  

“Pain also brings forth the best of some people,” the dying man observed sadly.  

The son nodded, heard the rest of the old man’s unspeakable confession.  He listened with special attention to the detailed apology for the years of truly regrettable cruelty to his own family.  Knowing that death was about the dying man’s needs and not his own, he mildly told him he would have done better if he could, closed the old man’s eyes after the dying man breathed his last.

At the time he thought of this belated conversation as a blessing to both of them.  Years later he realized the blessing had probably been much greater for the old man, being forgiven and let off the hook as he opened up, for the first and last time, to express his regrets for the pain he’d caused.  He’d given the man an easier death.  “Why was I so mild, letting the old killer off the hook?” he sometimes wondered.

Eventually the son looked at patterns in his own life, questioning his largely unnoticed attempts to be mild above all else.   Mildness is easily mistaken for passivity, which is widely hated in a competitive society where people are judged largely on their ambition and accomplishments in the marketplace.  He wondered if he’d been unconsciously attracted to people like his father, collected as his friends a group of unrepentant sadists who would possibly be filled with regret on their deathbeds, but not a moment sooner.   Had he surrounded himself with smiling but angry friends who were the least equipped of anyone to understand his desire to be mild, the first to point out what a pussy he was when he got in a tight spot and resisted lashing out, as any self-respecting person would?

“It’s an oversimplification to call us sadists,” said the dead man from his grave.  “Do you think we derive pleasure from defending ourselves and our righteousness at all costs?  It’s a reflex to protect ourselves, first and foremost.  It’s not about sadistically taking it out on our victims, for our pleasure.  We feel they would have done it to us if we didn’t strike first, so we hit them hard to keep them off balance.  It’s paranoia, maybe, but not necessarily sadism.  The entire pleasure, if any, is in not being victimized again.  Plus, we are completely overwhelmed by our own demons, it’s not about others, it’s about us.”  

The son was sick of hearing the dead man’s opinions, but they had to be considered nonetheless.  “On the Asperger’s spectrum is probably a better way to think of some of them.  A chap who calls to report on and get solace about his problems but seldom inquires about his friend’s troubles.  ‘Ah, but your troubles are well known!’ he’ll exclaim, full of bonhomie, then back to his recitation, the reason he called.”  

“I have to talk to you, at least you listen,” one tells him, “nobody else lets me talk. Do you have any idea how painful it is not be be listened to?”  

“I never worry about you,” says another, truthfully, but oddly nonetheless.  

There was one with a great sense of humor, an unappreciated person of great talent with an even greater need to be right, who decided the best course, when he was trying to be funny, was to look at him with a slightly disgusted expression and slowly shake her head.  Why laugh at his attempts to make her feel better when it was so much easier, and so much more satisfying, to make him feel like an asshole?  Nobody ever gave her anything.

He was able, without rancor, to shed the most destructive of these old friends when the time came to cut the ties.  No need to curse or express disappointment, it was a rational act of delayed self-preservation.  If a friend acts consistently hurtfully, is unrepentant and ignores requests not to behave that way, it is time to take your leave.   Wish them well and head for the door. Few will wrap their arms around your legs as you go, experience teaches that their pride always prevents this.

As a result of being more selective in his friendships, there were days when the only voices he heard were his own, often asking himself out loud who the hell he was talking to, and the dead father’s voice.  It was a heck of way to take a vacation, but better than fighting, he reasoned.

He could see the old man as a strong young man, setting up his machine gun, hear him cursing the people he was about to shoot, and going about his business feeling quite justified.  “These people were scum, they’d have done the same to me in a second, if they could have,” he said, acrid smoke hanging in the air, his accomplices shoveling soil into the ditch.

My father’s take

As a boy, when I first learned of the Nazi period, and saw black and white filmed documentation of the worst of their handiwork, I vomited.  An appropriate response for a nine year-old that seems as appropriate now, almost fifty years later.  Some nightmares followed and then, the reality that Nazis come to power from time to time and lead mobs to do unspeakable things, and that many enraged sociopathic types scattered through daily life are glad to do their personal versions of these things with whatever power they can amass, became the background of my life. The continuing news from all over the world, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, El Salvador, East Timor, Syria and too many other places to list, keeps the reality alive and sickeningly well.

Hitler is supposed to have reassured his colleagues, some time before the meeting in that villa in swanky Berlin suburb Wannsee where the Nazi brain-trust secretly worked out the best way to go about the “Final Solution” — a plan that sounded like a possible public relations nightmare to some of them — “Don’t worry, gentlemen.   After all, who today remembers the slaughter of the Armenians?”   An excellent question, Mr. Hitler.  What about them?   He was speaking twenty-five years after the massacre of an estimated million Armenian souls, by the Ottoman Turks.  

It is now a hundred years later and the story of the genocide against the Armenians (the word ‘genocide’ was coined, in 1943, to describe what was done to the Armenians) comes as a surprise to most people who hear of it.   I myself knew very little about it, beyond the death marches, mass starvation, concentration camps and the fact that German officers witnessed, sometimes in horror, the brutal deportations carried out by their allies, the Turks, during World War One.  Then ambassador to Constantinople Henry Morgenthau wrote of the sickening slaughter, and how it was smiled on by Ottoman officials, in terrible detail.   The ongoing massacre was apparently regularly written about in the NY Times and widely deplored.  But the world was too busy strafing and gassing each other, and cheering the carnage or dying of typhus, to notice as trainloads of Armenians, packed in cattle cars, were taken to concentration camps where they could be gathered to die more efficiently.  

Today genocide is so common we use the shorthand “Ethnic Cleansing”, a phrase almost as innocuous sounding as “collateral damage”, the shorthand for that unfortunate externality of war, the murder of non-combatants like babies, five year-olds and senior citizens.  In recent years revisionist “scholars” have been claiming the Nazis didn’t really kill people in death camps and surely one day there will be those who deny these other sickening atrocities ever really happened.  Like the state-sanctioned mass killing of the Armenians, though it clearly happened, it’s very controversial now, to some.   Tutsis mass murdered by Hutus? What?

I saw my father cry twice.  Once was at the seder table where he was overcome while dedicating a cup of wine to those slaughtered by the Nazis.  His face turned almost purple as he struggled not to cry, and he wept suddenly and violently before quickly pulling himself together.  My little sister and I watched helplessly as this etched itself indelibly in both our souls. 

“Those people were abstractions, for Christ’s sake, you can’t claim that we were personally effected by Hitler, we never knew any of those people, their letters just stopped coming one day, that’s all, it didn’t effect our family,” my father insisted dismissively (and ridiculously) years later when I brought up the murder of our entire extended family, on both sides.  He had been a twenty-one year-old Jewish kid stationed in Germany immediately after the war, a war that had wiped out his mother’s entire town and his father’s as well.  Of his feelings about being there he said little, though my sister can also tell you the name of the little dog they adopted on the air base, Schickelgruber, and what happened to the poor mutt when it got under the moving wheels of some heavy vehicle, maybe a plane.

I have always been given to brooding, and thinking too much, it must be admitted.  “Think less– do more!” is a mantra I would do well to get in my heart, like today when I am writing this instead of researching and writing things much more practical and badly needed.  Still, reading yesterday, for the first time, what actually happened to my grandmother’s large family, and my grandfather’s, and seeing the names of family members in survivor accounts, chills me too much and I cannot do otherwise. 

Marched to a prepared ravine on the northern end of town, after two years of random killing and death by starvation, ordered to undress (but for some reason to leave their underwear on) and lie face down, they were shot and covered with dirt by local haters who were paid in the clothing of the murdered to make a devilish layer cake of fresh corpses and earth.  Then another terrified group was ordered to undress, lie on top of the previous thinly covered layer of dead bodies, be shot, another layer of dirt, more bodies, repeat as necessary until, by the time I was born, all that would be left of the local Jews was a canyon full of loose bones on the outskirts of Vishnevets.  Among them the scattered bones of every member of Sam and Yetta’s families who were still alive in August of 1943.

Abstractions.

Map of My Grandparents’ little town

Vishnevets

It may be too small to see here, and the half image is oddly distorted and cropped (click on it to see entire map), but on the key provided with this hand-drawn map of Vishnevets you can see, along with the post office, synagogue, cemetery and hekdesh (poor house) a large blot on the northern end, top left center of map, marked in Hebrew “brothers’ graves”, where the victims of the most recent slaughter in that town were buried together in a pit. The English words printed on the map there, “mass graves”, need no translation.  The mass grave was necessitated by “Nazi brutality and cruelty”, (enthusiastically carried out by local Ukrainians), in (August) 1943, according to the monument at Mt. Hebron cemetery in Queens, NY, erected by the Wishnevitz Brothers Benevolent Society and the Wishnevitz Ladies Auxiliary. 

Other information about the unlucky town is summarized in this on-line excerpt from the book of memory:

In 1500 the town was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible. In 1653 the Jews were killed by the Tartars. By 1765 there were 475 Jews in the Old City and 163 in the suburbs. In 1847 there were 3,000 in Wishnowitz.

I could not stop myself from reading the gut-wrenching survivor accounts, determined to get a clear picture of exactly how my grandparents’ families were murdered.  It chilled me to read their names mentioned in one survivor account:

March 16, 1943

On that date, which was a Tuesday, the order was given to set up a ghetto. The buildings to be included in the ghetto were marked. According to the order, the ghetto had to be constructed in three days. The Jews were assigned to build the ghetto with their own hands and with materials they had to supply.

To make sure the order would be carried out in full, two hostages were taken: Yakov Markhbeyn and the writer of these lines. Any diversion from the details of the order would jeopardize their lives.

The ghetto encircled a narrow part of the town and the length of one long street. It extended from Alter Layter’s house to Beni Mazur’s house and from the road leading to Lanovits to the entrance to the Old City.

The gruesome details of the massacre, which I learned for the first time a moment ago here:

At night we could talk, and we asked the two young men from Vyshgorodok to tell us what had happened. And the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me what they had seen with their own eyes-how Vishnevets Jewry had been destroyed-and here is their story.

All the people were brought to a ravine behind the Old City on the road leading to Zbarazh. The ravine served as a readymade grave, with a capacity that met the Nazis’ needs. The ravine had been prepared by Ukrainian farmers. They stood with their tools, clearing the surface of the ravine. They leveled it, removed small mounds, scraped the stones from the sides, and dug the walls. They covered the bottom with the stones and soil they had removed from the walls in order to create a kind of crushed-soil foundation for the victims.

Once the foundation had been prepared, the first group of Jews was led to their burial place.

Two policemen ordered them to take their clothes off and remain in their underwear. They undressed, piled up their clothes on the side, and were then ordered to lie down in a row in the ravine, face down.

When they were all lying face down, the policemen ran over them with their submachine guns in their hands, shooting bullets into the heads of the people who were lying down.

Afterward, they inspected. They walked from person to person and with a handgun killed those who didn’t die immediately, using the gun butt or a bullet shot into the center of the skull.

When they were done with one group, they brought the second, and so on.

The Ukrainians walked over the bodies inside the ravine with horrifying skill. They lifted the bodies that were not level and laid them straight. The Germans sat on the walls of the ravine and supervised the work. They gave the orders, and the Ukrainians executed them.

The farmers took over after the Ukrainian policemen were done inspecting and leveling the layer after the last round of shooting. They covered the layer of bodies with soil in order to place another layer on top. They used shovels to do this. They covered it with a thin layer of soil, and the area was ready for another row of bodies. The clothes piled up on the side were given as a gift to the farmers in exchange for their work. Immediately, they collected the victims’ clothes and loaded them onto their carts, and while the others were busy with their work of killing and taking care of the bodies, they set off to sell their booty.

That was what the two young men from Vyshgorodok told me, and it is the utmost truth, because while they told us their story, they were very detailed and corrected each other so as not to distort what their eyes had seen.

========

It was with another shuddering thought of ruthless fate that I recalled that Beni Mazur’s house was likely the same place where my grandfather Sam grew up, and narrowly escaped death by typhus during the epidemic after World War One.  If my grandfather had not escaped death from typhus (which killed at least one other family member and caused the deafness of one of his parents, and which he referred to as a “very bad item”)… you know the rest.

From A Heck of A Book of Fate, Brownie

It’s a book about the invisible hand of fate, extending its fickle finger here, tickling a cooing baby there. 

In 1921, or possibly 1923, Yetta Marchbein, Yetta “Marrowbone” (her father was a butcher), about 20 years old and full of ambition and idealism (the Bolsheviks billeted in her home during the Revolution had been gentlemen and also inspired her), crossed the Atlantic Ocean from some European port, having made her way there, alone, far under the deck, terrified for life by the rats who walked the partitions there between the bunks.  She, alone, of her large family in a muddy little shtetl in the Ukraine called Vishnevitz, would be alive twenty years later.   The rest disappeared without a trace into the nightmare that was Hitler’s fondest dream. In the U.S. she’d take the Americanized name of her cousins, Miller, and two years later, long before the slaughter of her family and town, marry her strong, frightened fiance Sam Mazur, also from Vishnevitz, who followed her to the U.S. on a ship that embarked from Bremen during the presidency of Warren G. Harding.  The Mazur family, Sam’s six brothers and sisters, father, mother, extended family, was murdered along with the Marchbeins and the rest of the Jewish town of Vishnevitz.  There is a monument in the cemetery in Queens, behind the gates of the Vishnevitz Benevolent Society, where Sam and Yetta are buried, commemorating the slaughter there.

Sam and Yetta Mazur were my mother’s parents.  They had one child, a girl they named Helen, who, as soon as she was able, changed her name to Evelyn.  Evelyn grew up on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx, a once thriving street with one end at the stylish Grand Concourse.  Eastburn Avenue, at some point in my mother’s childhood, was cut in half, literally, and its neighborhood destroyed by Robert Moses and his Cross Bronx Expressway.  In that apartment house, where the Mazurs lived on the first floor, a family named Stamper also lived.  Yetta and Dinch Stamper (who called each other “Mazur” and “Stamper”) became lifelong friends.  There is a great photo of the Mazurs and the Stampers, probably from before they had children, relaxing on the grass somewhere, in front of dense trees, dressed in the style for going out on Sunday in the early 1920s.

Dinch Stamper had been born Dinch (Diana) Gleiberman in a town in Belarus called Truvovich, a Jewish hamlet about 300 km. north of Vishnevets.  The Jews of Truvovich met the same terrible fate as their landsmen in Vishnevets, wiped away with barely a trace, Truvovich now erased from the map.  Dinch had come over by ship years earlier with a cousin named Chava Gleiberman, youngest sister of my father’s Uncle Aren.   Aren had arrived here a decade earlier from Canada after fleeing involuntary service in the Czar’s army and the Russo-Japanese War.  Chava, a good-looking, deeply religious red-headed Jewish girl, had her hopes for a happy marriage dashed when Aren’s wife broke up a romance with a Jewish postman in Peekskill who’d fallen for Chava.  When Chava’s indentured servitude to Aren and his wife ended a marriage was arranged hastily with a man named Harry Widem, a man my father described on his deathbed as “an illiterate country bumpkin completely overwhelmed by this world.”  What my father probably didn’t know about were the routine beatings, with club-like boards, that young Harry had received daily from his step-mother in the mud-floored farmhouse in Connecticut where he was raised.   What I didn’t learn until recently was that Harry spoke English with no accent, unlike Yetta and Sam whose Yiddish accents and inflections spiced my childhood.  I never met Harry and Chava, both died before I was born.  I am named after my father’s father Harry (Eliyahu in Hebrew) and my sister after Chava.  What is now well-known is how much Chava despised her husband, and that she whipped her oldest son, Israel, without mercy, from the time he could stand.

The hand of fate, gentle reader, spared these two couples, Sam and Yetta and Chava and Harry, my grandparents, while the rest of both of their large families (several of Harry’s siblings and half-siblings in the US survived to produce families, as did Chava’s brother Aren, who has dozens of descendants here and in Israel) disappeared into the night and fog the world remembers hazily as World War Two.  The good war America fought against unequivocal Evil.  

My parents met, of course, in that apartment building on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx where my father, and his younger brother Paul, would visit their cousin Dinch and her family.   During these visits my future father spied my future mother, the beautiful, dark-haired, popular and completely haughty, Evelyn Mazur.   She had an active social life, many boyfriends, and considered the shy, skinny guy from Peekskill a laughable hayseed, and besides, he was clearly poor as a church mouse.  In time she would agree to go out with him (to get the insistent Yetta off her back) and would watch, amazed, as he transformed himself from hick to urbane, witty, increasingly sophisticated boyfriend, fiance and later husband.  They would build a middle class life together, she’d come to think of him as the most secure and brilliant man she’d ever known and he would (when not making her cry) give her all the credit for transforming his life into one worth living and striving to improve.

If Yetta, Chava and Sam had not left Europe before the slaughter of everyone they knew (Chava lost her brothers Yuddle and Volbear and her sister Chaski as well as the rest of her family in Truvovich), had not Harry (who came to the US as an infant) survived the passage and a childhood of blows to the head with whatever wooden truncheons came to hand, Evelyn and Israel would not have been born.  If they had not come to be, and meet, and procreate, neither would I have.   If the bleeding my mother endured one frightening day late in her time pregnant with me had been worse, if this, then that. 

The hand of fate, gentle reader, including its fickle, tickling finger.   More details to follow, perhaps, if fate and the spirits will it.

 

At the Picnic

“So what are you saying?” he asked me, understandably at a loss.

“When I say certain gears aren’t working in my head, I’m not trying to say I’m seriously impaired.  I mean, I can have a conversation, can take care of a lot of things, I have talents, feel responsible to people I love and even people I don’t know, I’m strong, I can be counted on in a pinch and all that, but I am impaired, clearly,”  I could see this was not making things clearer for him.   I felt bad, he is a likable man.

“I’m like 90%,” I said.  “I can do most everything I need to do, but I’m not 100% effective, if you know what I’m saying.”

“So, you’re like 10% off?” he said.

“Yeah, something like that.  I mean, not to say it’s not a problem for me, it’s clearly a problem.  But also, yeah, I’d say about 10%, maybe, things I can’t get myself to do.”

“Can’t get yourself to do or can’t do?” he asked, making a distinction that left it my turn to be confused.

“No, to be clear,” I said, “sometimes ten percent, which seems like a small percentage, takes on a disproportionate importance, like when the top 10% in a society own 90% of everything, things like that.”

“Oh, Jesus,” he said, looking around with a sudden determination to refill his waning red plastic cup of wine.

Magical

“It’s hard to know what to say to you, how to start a conversation with someone in your perilous situation,” she said.

“That’s understandable,” he said, trying to distance himself from me. “What do people talk about? Not their terror, too scary. Not their inner feelings, way too uncomfortable. I have no idea what people actually talk about, I don’t talk much these days.”

A long moment of silence, and swallowing, seemed like it might never end.

“Death, there’s something else we don’t really like to talk about, except maybe for which really bad people deserve painful forms of it,” he said, after a while.

In her struggle to get him off depressing, dead-end subjects, she suggested that there was hope. An introduction had been made by email to a possibly congenial collaborator. “I heard she wrote that you were ‘magical’,” she said hopefully.

“Yes, she did, that was the word she used. Said I was ‘magical’ with groups and individuals,” he said brightly. It would only be a second or two, she knew, before he’d manage to turn even this glowing compliment to the dark side.

“Who was it who wrote ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’? If I had a smart phone I could tell you in a few taps, hang on, let’s pretend I do: Joan Didion. You remember that phrase? Magical thinking is a kind of irrational, superstitious belief that if you do things a certain way a bad outcome will be averted. Like Didion thought at one point that she couldn’t get rid of her dying husband’s shoes because if she did he wouldn’t have shoes when he came back from the hospice. By holding on to the shoes she believed she was magically preventing his death, somehow. Grief, derangement, insanity, all very terrible, desperate things, and part of the realm of the magical, you know.”

“What?” she said. “How do you get from a compliment about your ability to turn a group of strangers into a creative, collaborative team into Joan Didion’s meditation on the insane thinking caused by grief and impending loss?”

“It’s really a simple step,” he said, “nobody knows what to say about my program, which nobody, also, really grasps the potential and present reality of. I have seen it at work many times now, how organically my idea works over and over, and I have a few participants who can vouch for how well it works, but to the rest, and everyone I know, absent a compellingly creative and engaging commercial pitch, you have to take my word for it. My word, in a word, magical thinking. You know, if I meet a rich person who generously supports the idea, get the idea to a philanthropic foundation who can picture the vision I present and pay to help make it real in the world, if I can work in the shittiest schools in the city and produce work far better than anything I’ve had them do so far, if… you dig? My word for the odds of success here was ‘miracle’. That’s what it would take for one person to succeed at what I am trying to do alone. Another word is ‘magical.’ The guy is a miracle worker, magical.”

After a moment she said “do you realize how hard it is to have a conversation with somebody like you?”

“Absolutely, I do,” he said, and smiled, after a fashion. He thought suddenly of a man he once met at a friend’s parents’ party. The man was slim, and shy, and had a beaming smile on his face almost the entire night. Every time he looked over the man was grinning like the happiest man in the world. The woman the smiling man was standing next to for most of the evening, also happy looking, was his sister, it turned out. He learned later that they lived together and that the beaming man had died of complications of alcoholism.

“What should I have done at that party?” the ghost of the smiling man asks, “sobbed and wailed about how fucking unbearable my life was? I had one card to play, and I played it, went home and got shit-faced and then, soon after, I was dead. Finally.”

“Whoa,” she said, “that transition was kind of magical, but in a very dark way.”

“Believe in magic and you have to believe in dark magic too,” he said darkly.

“You’ve been painting the floor of this room we’re standing in and we’ve been backing up step by step and now the only door is far across that field of wet paint,” she said, pointing at the tiny door a long way off.

“You’re only now noticing this?” he asked.

“I’m trying to go along with you here,” she said. “You are not the easiest person in the world to talk to, you know?”

“I know, it’s true,” he said softly. What did they tell him at school about writing with adverbs and qualifiers? Fuck if he could recall.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There are no rules in this world, and nothing is for certain. We stand on legs that will be swept from under us one day, under a light that will go dark and never come back on. We are controlled largely by our fears, and most people do what they feel is the safest thing to do. It is much easier to go to work and come home with money than to stay in a room with your thoughts and wavering beliefs as your existence becomes more and more marginal. On the other hand, you have a dream, even a noble one, and it is very hard work, and you’re not young and energetic any more, but you should either be grateful for your passion and your slow but forward progress or give in and find a way to make a living, however meaningless. If your Plan A is too hard, do Plan B. And I have no idea what Plan B would be in your case.”

“I like that!” he said. “And you said it was hard to talk to me!” He patted her arm, the paintbrush hanging down by his side in his other hand as the two stood in a tiny circle of dirty, unpainted floor. She smiled, and shook her head.

“Now, if you will excuse me,” he said, “I have to paint this last bit of floor.”

Better Way to Think About A Situation

A situation is what it is, good and bad and also, seen dispassionately, just what it is, with no inclination either way sometimes.  Wise people teach us that the way we look at things makes them appear good or bad. As we look, so shall we see.  When we look with fear, we see reasons to be afraid.  When we look with compassion, it is easier to play nice.

I have a meeting tomorrow that could result in some good things at a time when the signs, laid out like the entrails of animals read by soothsayers at the time of Caesar, would appear to foretell mostly doom. I can tell this, in part, because my friends are at a loss when I myself am at a loss to enthuse about this unusual plan I am pursuing, with modest practical skills, that seems so at odds with the times we live in.

I realize there is no reason to see this meeting in a few hours as a high stakes poker game, though there will be some negotiation.   If it is such a game, I could say, I am playing with house money.   But that is only a way to rationalize, make myself feel more comfortable at a time when I feel challenged.

Here is a more important thing and a much better frame to look at it through: the energetic assistant of a very successful economic and ecological entrepreneur, based again in the impoverished neighborhood where she grew up, visited wehearyou.net and was excited about what she saw.  A meeting was arranged.  Tomorrow is the meeting.

I can think about my program, and present it, like this: I have been programming and refining the simplified animation workshop for almost two years now, have worked with around 80 public school kids, in seven or eight workshops, for a total of maybe 140 hours on a once a week basis.   It is not a gigantic sample size, but it’s enough to know that every place we do it kids respond enthusiastically and creatively.   This is not surprising, it is designed to let them play and learn in a fun, interactive, collaborative setting.

The workshop is non-hierarchic, everybody there is a participant, treated with the same respect, including the adults who are on hand to facilitate.  The adults are not teachers, they’re time keepers, organizers, assistants, enthusiastic supporters of the animation the children make.   That learning takes place without teachers systematically presenting material is a radical but also very natural notion, play leads to discovery, wanting to do something leads to invention and mastery of the skills needed.  Young animals of all kinds play, it is how they master many things they need to know how to do.   Human kids are no different, if given the chance to, they love to play.  Give children musical instruments, they will begin to play a kind of music.

In the typical American school play, invention, improvisation, dreaming up ideas, is secondary, if it is encouraged anywhere but at recess — the main work is learning to master the materials tested on standardized exams.  Exams designed by large educational corporations in a way that ensures many young humans are destined to fail.

I have the animation made by a relatively small sample of kids done in a short once a week time format, so far, and you can find many inventive and enchanting moments in that highly original animation.   But what I’ve assembled until now is merely a glimpse at the potential of the program.   I am looking for a few places where my philosophy and methods can be worked week after week, over time, where kids can make real progress in animation, teach each other, work on more sustained stories, if they like, really master the technical aspects to the extent that they extend the boundaries of what kids can do.   I want people to be amazed, the more cynical among them shocked, at what children can create on their own, with their creativity as motivation and just a little guidance.

People are doing this work here and there.   A brilliant and charismatic educational theorist, Sugata Mitra, embedded a computer and track pad in an outside wall of slums in remote Indian villages and illiterate children organized themselves to learn a functional English vocabulary and were soon surfing the internet and playing games.   Mitra calls many of the things that happen when a group self-organizes to learn “emergent”.   Emergence is the appearance of things not previously thought to be part of the system.

Collaboration, invention, increased attention span, peer-teaching and group problem-solving, are not usually thought of as express goals of a school day or even of an art workshop.   Our society stresses individualism and competition and children don’t often get a chance to work together collaboratively over time.   Teamwork is needed in  team sports and encouraged in that context.   It is also necessary for animation.

Children in the animation workshop begin working in small groups very quickly.   We encourage it and like it when the teams shift players regularly.   Animation is made by a small community of interrelated teams working together.  It calls for the integration of many talents and skills, and requires a good deal of learning and peer-teaching to accomplish.

Deceptively simple, what I have tapped into.    Now what it needs is fertile ground to plant the seeds and demonstrate the things it can grow into.   Tomorrow I may find one such plot in this remote community in the South Bronx.    Someone is interested in listening, and I will be interested in listening too.

Thoughts on the uptown A

Gratefulness –
most valuable
where it seems
least possible.
 
The simple math-
addition of all the 
justifcations needed
to explain an otherwise
inexplicable life,
a life as malaise,
misdirection,
drinking invisible Kool-Aid
feeling wise and profound
while others bucked
seeming desperate–
when the ledger is tallied
I would be a fool 
to regret
a single wrong turn
 
clutching to myself
unimpeachable good character
even if
at the moment
gratefulness is not something
I can wrap myself in.