An Event In The Forest

Tuesday's storm rolls in.
Photo for The Athens Messenger by John Halley.

In this living world
the body I give up and burn
would be wretched
if I thought of myself as
anything but firewood.

---Ryonen

Teach me, like you, to drink
creation whole
And casting out myself,
become a soul.

---Richard Wilbur

Truth is not far away. It is nearer than near. There is no need to attain it, since not one of your steps leads away from it.

---Dogen

I've recently given up all attempts to understand the weather. I didn't say predict it. Somehow I still believe we can do that. I said understand it. Maybe you can---and do---but my mind is hopeless at it. The Old Farmer's Almanac this year has an exhaustive article about How The Oceans Affect Our Climate. Pages 88 - 102...with lots of pictures and charts and diagrams. And arrows. All about La Nina and El Nino...and how to tell them apart, and which is happening when, and what they do to us. I read it all, over and over. I couldn't understand a word of it. I look at the swirling ocean, and know there's a tide coming in and going out. I look at the whirling clouds, and know there's wind blowing this way and that. That's about it for me.

So it was, in this condition of mind, that I confronted a hair-raising storm on Tuesday. Ilona was swimming at the municipal pool in town, and we were puttering about at home. Dana was doing her computing, and had agreed to drive in and pick our daughter up at 4:00. Shortly before time to leave she decided to look at weather radar I guess, and then let out a whoop. She said, "I'm going now!" There was a big red thing on the screen, headed right for us and moving with ferocious speed.

I'm more philosophical about these weather warnings, coming as I do from an inland, northerly, temperate climate. I could look out across Lake Chautauqua, and if I saw a dark cloud I knew I had enough time to bicycle the hour home and not get wet. Down here in the Bible Belt things are different. Everybody remembers that strange black cloud that formed over Bubba's property last summer...and the next thing we knew the whole place had been carried off. Churches were full the next Sunday.

So Dana piled into the car, and I rode down the drive to the road with her to check on a couple things. The sky was indeed looking very rough. I began the walk back up to the house...and then the wind hit. When a cold front blows in around here, and bashes up against a hot, wet, heavy, sticky front that's had us exhausted with 90 degree temperatures, the collision is furious. I knew that much, and I started to run. The thunder that had been 40 miles away a minute ago was now splitting the sky overhead. The trees began to wave like palm trees...only these are oaks! I got into the house, and headed out onto the deck...which is elevated some 20 feet off the ground, and well up the trunks of surrounding trees. I was nearly blown away...so got back inside, and headed for the basement.

I pulled the plugs on the computer, the phone lines down here, and the TV antenna. There was so much thunder by now that I had difficulty telling the difference in sounds that came in the next second. The wind hit the house like a freight train...I thought it was trembling on our hillside...and at the same time, I heard the unmistakable crack and huge thump of a tree going down. We hear that often in these woods, but this was so close as to be on top of me. I heard no sound of crashing through the roof, and the deck still was out there...so I went on to worry about the eaves and drainage.

Back in my day and area, a thing like this was called a cyclone. You know, like Mom says, "Your room looks like a cyclone hit it." When I was a kid, a cyclone went down the street just a block over. I remember it sounded just like a locomotive. Little wonder, as you have all the ingredients of a steam engine flying through the air. You've got fire in the lightning, you've got water, you've got a screaming wind. The resistance of that hot, soggy front it's pushing out makes the whole situation like a pressure cooker.

As I say, I do not understand these things...but I believe that a cyclone produces much the same effect as a tornado...only it's the opposite. There's no visible funnel, tearing everything up. This phenomenon swirls the other way...and pushes stuff down, grinding things into the earth. I went out onto the deck, and could see the small sassafras and dogwood branches bent over where the wind had hit the side of the house, dragged them down and left them there. The eaves had held and drained well. The antenna still was up. Most of the water had gone straight into the thirsty earth, so no trouble with flows down the hill. But then I noticed the tree that was missing. A silver maple, easily a hundred feet tall, at least 60 years old probably, and an arm's reach from the deck. Gracefully, it fell down the hill rather than on top of us. Suspended from a branch high above had been our sunflower seed feeder, which I could reach and fill quite easily. A major food source for the birds around here, it was buried in the vegetation below now.

The weather around here is quite peculiar. The storms often are violent and unpredictable, we think more so now as the effects of Global Warming become obvious. We are on an unglaciated plateau, about midway between where the glacier stopped and the Ohio River flows. The 3-mile high glacier melted about 30 miles north, and the flow of all that created a terrain of numerous ridges running every which way. The ridges are hill-sized, and there's a fair distance between them which shows us how wide and swift those melting rivers were all through here. Storms that come from the west just have a field day travelling through. They're even worse down on the River itself.

This storm came from the westsouthwest. The wind bounced off the ridge at my neighbors, flew a ways, before it roller coastered to the ground just this side of our creek. The cowcatcher of that freight flattened all the grass down there where it hit. Almost immediately it took out an old wild cherry that grew there. It threw it off to the side, and changed direction only slightly more to the east. In an instant it cracked down the maple...and went right over our house---not tearing off a single shingle or stone from the chimney---and still climbing our ridge, rolled over a tall poplar in front of the house. Three large trees down, and of course they took other smaller ones as they fell. The devastation was touch and go from here on into town. Dana and Ilona were safe.

Yesterday morning I took my walk down the drive and out to the road. There in the meadow, suspended between 2 stalks of joe-pye weed, was a perfect and delicate spider's web, bejewelled lightly with dew. I marveled at the quiet perfection of that creation. Here was the same Nature that a dozen hours earlier had torn my world apart. And then I had what my friend Ivy calls an I GOT IT moment: it's all perspective. From the standpoint of a small, flying insect that web is a calamity, a horror of violence and death. I see it as lovely because I'm not being wrapped up in it at the moment. Were I miles in the sky or in a satellite, that cyclone would appear to me with all the beauty and grace of the lacy web.

PS Dana wants you to know that in these parts and nowadays, the weather we experienced is known as a "downburst." Here's the definition she Googled up: A severe localized downdraft from a thunderstorm or shower. This outward burst of cool or colder air creates damaging winds at or near the surface. Sometimes the damage resembles tornadic damage. Well, it just goes to show ya this weather stuff is incomprehensible!

The Liberal Bias

From the free wallpapers at http://www.creativeclassicssales.com/wallpapers.html


Love the pitcher less, and the water more.

---Sufi saying

No one can live your life except you.
No one can live my life except me.
You are responsible. I am responsible.
But what is our life? What is our death?

---Maezumi Roshi

The point is to perform every activity, from playing basketball to taking out the garbage, with precise attention, moment by moment.

---Phil Jackson

Saturday evening we went to a party at the home of some new friends at Ohio University. Our host is from Bangladesh, and he and his wife, of Irish descent, had brought together a most diverse group of individuals, tentatively to warm their new house and check out the construction of his wine cellar...as well as its contents. There were couples from Bengal and Serbia, the local rural counties around Athens, and teachers at every level of education, many hailing, like me, from the Northeast. Faizul teaches in the College of Business, and some of his colleagues were invited. Dana and I agreed we wouldn't be talking politics in there. This would be a social occasion and we'd be on our best behavior.

But there was a young math teacher from Cincinnati, raised in Rhode Island of conservative Jewish roots, who had come to the party fresh from a round of golf. I noticed he and Dana had become engaged in intense conversation...and it was going on for quite a while. I continued becoming acquainted with the various fascinating folks, but eventually found myself close enough to Dana and her new friend to catch phrases like No Child Left Behind and that idiot Bush. They weren't arguing. I stepped in, ostensibly to change the subject, but they seemed to welcome my arrival. He is not a liberal, considers himself a centrist but has a history of voting Republican. However, he works in the public schools and finds his career increasingly hampered by conservative policies.

We commiserated for a while and the conversation began to move into the broader political spectrum. He said something very interesting to me. He said he thought liberals should stop being so defensive about the conservative charge that the news has a liberal bias. The very idea of news itself is a liberal idea, he continued. You aren't going to hear any news inside a closed institution. Why are we surprised the right wing wants government press releases published without question? Why the shock if reporters are hired and paid with tax dollars to spread the word about government programs? What if probing, dissenting, minority (like women?) reporters don't get called on at press conferences and find access difficult? Conservatives like to work hard and trust the hierarchy from which their orders come. Liberals are confused, disorganized hysterics, and why waste time on them? They just should shut up.

The notion of a free press being a liberal construct has been rather inspiring to me during the ensuing days. The conversation refreshed some thoughts I haven't had in rather a long time. I guess I've been looking at a lot of trees and not the whole forest. For many Americans the entire basis of our society is a liberal one, born from the Ages of Enlightenment and Reason. Has there ever been another nation that believed in an educated citizenry? Surely, feudal lords wanted the peasants as stupid as possible, but as Representative Ted Strickland added recently to that comment of mine, ready to go to war whenever the powerful say so. Among the first priorities of the young United States was a system of public, tax-supported schools. When radio and the telegraph and telephone were invented, the airwaves through which the technology travelled was considered public property. Our government was the steward to watch over the process for us, along with our public resources. Representative government is a liberal idea.

But our country has another side to it, another tradition. Like Australia, the United States was founded by people who weren't getting along where they were. Some were criminals or paupers, sent here to work off their debts and sentences. Some were dragged here in chains. Others came to take advantage of opportunities, strictly for the greed and fun of getting rich. Some came here to practice crime. We take pride that good conservative values and hard work can raise you up here through the class system. And we glorify the Wild West, our great outlaws, and even our more recent gangsters and celebrities of notoriety. We don't like people who "rock the boat," but we are attracted to headline-grabbers who perform deeds of outrage. We're a nation of law, but we seem also to believe that if you can get away with it, go for it. We're a nation that has experienced tragedy---wars, assassinations, catastrophes---but don't have a philosophy or religions really to account for tragedy and to include it and grow from it. Maybe we're a nation still in adolescence, without a rite of passage to adulthood yet in our tribal formula. We're a country that likes being kids, likes to play, a country of players. We're still getting to know ourselves, and whether or not we like rules...and how much of the playground is going to be ours.

Initiation

The photo, with my son Jeroch, was taken a year ago immediately following the final performance of a play I was in...so there's still a touch of stage makeup visible.

The greatest thing in the world is to know how to be oneself.

---Michel De Montaigne

I have full faith that even when you are down you will not sink, you will not falter, you will not crawl because you will be that special child who understands there are moments in life when there are no answers, no rhymes, no reasons but to grow beyond yourself.

---Grange Rutan

You are relaxed and ready. You are prepared for the operation. It is an initiation. You are being initiated. Such initiations have been practiced forever, under other names. You are safe.

---Indira Parsons

That particular thought of Renaissance philosopher Montaigne has been among my favorites for many years. Grange and Indira are 2 personal friends, who emailed me their encouragements a little over a year ago, before the "operation." I printed out their complete messages and have carried them with me in my wallet ever since. I don't usually do that, so I must assume it was only the first of the new behaviors since---initiation.

We guys who've endured one procedure or another for deranged prostate greet each other with the secret handshake of the service club or 12-step group. We say things like, "I'm still at .11" or "I'm holding off for 8.6." These are PSA numbers and refer to where we are on a certain lethal level of understanding. After he's been diagnosed, a man starts thinking this way and talking this way because from now on an aspect of his life will be living from one periodic blood test to the next.

The initiation has to do with how one deals with such a reality. A few months after my operation to remove the offending gland, I learned my body still was in battle against tiny demons and we would proceed to shoot radiation in there after them. On Friday, even though my specializing doctors think it's too soon to tell, I got Dr. Conjeevaram to give me my first numbers since that therapy concluded 6 weeks ago. When I read I'm down to .27 I felt a new kind of relief. Oh, we want that number lower...and hopefully in another 2 months that's where it will go. But in the meantime, it's like my life is on vacation and the vise of anxiety is loosened a couple of turns.

Immediately after my appointment, Dana, Ilona and I piled into the Hybrid and tooled up to Barcelona, New York, on Lake Erie, which is one of our favorite hangouts. From there we visited with my sister---and by golly, did find the stand of trailing arbutus our mother used to look for each Spring, and a couple other rare wildflowers too---and had a wonderful family cookout the next day in Sugar Grove, Pennsylvania, with Dana's aunts and cousins. We especially enjoyed lollygagging our way home yesterday when everyone else was hard at work at school. OK, maybe Ilona didn't so much because she still had that honors English homework to do in the back seat.

It's not part of our family tradition or work ethic to just take off like that. The people we visited kept asking us what urgent business really brought us up there...and we found ourselves saying we just wanted to see them. Who drives 6 hours just to say hello? Should I tell them that maybe I've completed my initiation? Do I have a chance right now to see my life in a new light? A new Light? Is it safe to Lighten up? This may be the first time I've allowed myself to feel I'm on a journey.

My generation may have gotten the idea we're supposed to have drive and ambition. We have to go somewhere. We're Americans and actually can amount to something. Many of us choose not to be too aggressive about all that, but to get those good grades and job evaluations you ought to have some kind of balance with a forward edge to it. Too much friction and you may burn out...but the right stuff can set you on fire, a shooting star, a leader of the people. But you have to do the driving...unless you are one of the lucky ones, and I for one never think about luck.

Now I am feeling more that I am letting things lead me along. I am appreciating a spaciousness in time. I am looking around more, enjoying the scenery, and feeling that's OK. At 65, that should be OK, but the drive to keep going---on into my 70s---is strong these days. But I'm allowing the drive to take me now. I'm on cruise control, and there's some relaxation possible in that. Even surrender. I think I know myself well enough that I'm not just on a Cloud 9 of relief. This is a new side of me to get to know...and of course I need to see how others react. But other people may not have as much influence on what I do as before. There seems to be a new voice calling me, leading me.

I like how men continue a sense of humor about our conditions. Garrison Keillor, who is around my age, seems to understand it...and gave us some real hilarity on Saturday about the prostate and urinary difficulties. How can such matters be funny? Listen for yourself about 9 minutes into the show~~~ http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/programs/2005/05/21/ in Segment 1, under "Nice Script."

I know that women have a similar initiation. Perhaps it comes with a diagnosis involving the miraculous female physical organization. I talked with women in the waiting rooms, and there seemed to be a similar communication together as I have enjoyed with men during our particular therapies. I don't know whether women experience the same possibilities of humor in their situations. I know one who does...or did, because I haven't seen her since her procedure a couple weeks ago. I need to find out.

What America Means To Me

Sun rising over
the mountain path---
scent of plums.

---Basho

Everything is miraculous. It is a miracle that one doesn't melt in one's bath.

---Pablo Picasso

I learn every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: PATIENCE is everything.

---Rainer Maria Rilke

Remember when the American Legion or the Daughters of the American Revolution used to sponsor that essay contest for schoolkids? They probably still do, and maybe the prizes are the same---and the best behaved student in the class still cranks out that same essay...and even reads it to us at some compulsory assembly. I never tried to write one because, even as a kid, the topic seemed so huge I just couldn't get my head around it.

Tuesday night, teacher and writer William Rivers Pitt unloaded bigtime at a meeting up in Cambridge. If you get your news online since 9/11, you've heard of Mr. Pitt...no matter if you're liberal or conservative. He used to write for Online Journal and now keeps us hopping once a day, it seems, at Truthout. He's also written a couple of books about Iraq and the great silence of the American people---which void seems to be what America means today.

His topic Tuesday night was supposed to be corporate control of the formerly free press. But what happens if there's also corporate control of the White House and the other branches of our government, and all the media does is spin out their scenarios? I believe that all Americans know this has happened, and that a few generations have come along, since Reagan, who don't know the United States can be any other way than the storybook we're living in now.

Many people I know, including managers and administrators, no longer pay any attention to the "news" or even elections anymore at all. I really don't know by what Hope they live, except whatever patch of ground they can carve out to call their own---and the next memo from a supervisor. I understand the dilemma of a money-manufactured reality (instead of Freedom) and their silence, but I cannot live that way. It's not what America means to me. Here's a taste of what William Rivers Pitt had to say the other night...and the link to the rest of the talk~~~

"For me, that's it in a nutshell. That's what ails us as a nation. The corporate media does not report the news anymore. They create consensus, they manufacture the common fictions under which we are expected to live. With the TV media, this behavior is all the more insidious because TV reaches everyone.

"Television is the most extraordinarily effective tool of mass control that has ever been invented by anyone anywhere.

"If this MSNBC producer (mentioned earlier) is an appropriate example - and I think she is, because she was asking me to basically be yet another Bush administration mouthpiece - the fictions they create do not merely soothe and placate the populace. They kill. They kill in large numbers, and a few people (who coincidentally own large chunks of the corporate news media) get paid handsomely for that killing.

"The print media is not in any way immune to this. Their disinformation does not have the reach of television news, simply because nobody reads anymore, but it is there all the same. My most recent brain cramp actually came up this morning, and has to do with the venerable New York Times. It was the Times that allowed the Bush talking-point about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to be broadbanded across the media spectrum.

" Times reporter Judy Miller hunkered with convicted embezzler and alleged Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi, and reported on the pages of the Times that Iraq was absolutely covered with weapons of mass destruction. This helped Chalabi, you see, because he had been chosen by the Bush folks to run Iraq after the war. So far, he has only gotten to be the Oil Minister...yes, the embezzler is now the Oil Minister, but that's a whole different mess.

"The point is that like it or lump it, the Times is the flagship of American journalism. If they say it, it must be true, and so when Miller reported that Iraq was covered with weapons, it became axiomatic. Then the TV outlets felt safe in saying it, and we were off to the races.

"Well, my brain cramp today came when I read the Times' response to the fallout from this situation. They were duped by a Bush administration lackey, the published gross fabrications, they empowered the war rhetoric...and in response to criticism, they have decided to move their perspective farther to the right. Yes, you heard me, and welcome to my brain cramp.

"The frustration I feel personally knowing that I and everyone else are being deliberately deceived and misdirected is topped by only one thing: The rage, horror and sorrow I feel when I finally do manage to carve through the crap and get to the truth. Because the truth, friends and neighbors, is so much worse than you can possibly imagine."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/051105A.shtml

A Subtle Shift

Photo of Ilona and the author on Easter Sunday.

Today means boundless and inexhaustible eternity. Periods of months and years and of time in general are ideas of men, who calculate by number; but the true name of eternity is Today.

---Philo

Example moves the world more than doctrine.

---Henry Miller

In Buddhism there is no place to apply effort. Everything in it is normal---
you put on clothes to keep warm and eat food to stop hunger---
that's all.

---Yuan-S'ou

A year and a week ago I underwent major surgery for removal of a prostate gland that had been determined to be a bit cancerous. I wrote about it and talked openly. Cancer is as terrifying to people of our civilization as just about anything we think of. I learned in the waiting rooms, however, that it makes brothers and sisters of us in treatment, as men and women struggle with their own varieties. The silence in those rooms is broken with great relief when we start talking together. I thought writing and letting people know what happens to me might serve some purpose---at least for research because so much effort is going into finding a cure...or even a cause.

But lately I guess I've gotten silent too, and occasionally I'm reminded of that, when a faraway friend or relative writes, "What the heck is going on with your health?" I haven't meant to be secretive, but there are some contributing factors. For one thing, I was raised not to talk about ailments. My parents didn't tell us much about theirs, and when they felt it was time to cash in their chips and go, that's what they did. As a kid, I got the impression that what chiefly marked the elderly was they always were talking about hospitals and stuff being taken out of them...and the long convalescence. LBJ showed us his scar. So despite my resolve to let you know, I may have slipped back into my more natural reserve about some things.

Furthermore, I sense there is a bit of a stigma about getting sick this way. People do NOT want always to ask me how I am...with that sympathetic tone. But if they don't ask me, then they might worry I'll think they don't care. So sometimes I feel they avoid me altogether. Easier. And I may sense their sensitivity and try to help them out by avoiding them too. Then I think maybe I've changed into someone more resentful and bitter...and that's why people don't smile in my direction so much. That's a dangerous downward spiral always available. Perhaps I slip into it sometimes.

And then have come intervening personal matters that really don't have anything to do with cancer...although, once you've got it, as terminal or survivor, everything seems to have to do with it. There was the Presidential Election, and I believe it was the second stolen one in a row. Obviously I went ballistic with my conviction, and wrote about it as long as I could hear so much as a peep of protest in the media or on the Internet. More recently our daughter suffered an injury in gym class that required reconstructive surgery. It's cost Ilona a lot of time from school, her grades have gone down---although in the old days a kid would have been extended extra help and time to catch up---and we have needed to care for her. (Her last visit to the surgeon and physical therapist will be today...so her life is returning to normal.)

But mostly I think I have been experiencing a shifting of my life's gears. Having never had a serious illness before or been in a hospital for anything, I'm new to this kind of dropout. I remember kids used to get something, like rheumatic fever or a touch of polio, and just sort of disappear for a year or two. The rest of us would operate like the herd animals we were, and move on without giving our ailing comrades a second thought. Only a few were curious about the kind of change in life and time the situation requires. Time changes remarkably when you're always waiting for the next test result.

Three months after my operation, very slight prostate cell activity still was located in my bloodstream. We held a vague hope it might be residue from the surgery. Nope, a couple months later it still was there...but it was about the same amount. It was so small that even the latest microscopic technology wouldn't be able to find it. Two more months, however, and there was a bit more going on. Something had been left behind, and we needed to try to eradicate it. Radiation was selected as the therapy. We... Well, since stuff is left up to the patient to decide now (to avoid those lawsuits) I have to say "we." THEY consulted the statistics and told me that most often, when this occurs, the bladder is the next place the cancer goes. More tests and another bone scan ruled out activity elsewhere...so a section of the bladder is where the radiation was aimed.

I got 37 radiation treatments, every weekday. Those treatments concluded a month ago. Mostly I had no side effects. Others report burning and pain, particularly toward the conclusion of the series, as tissue become increasingly sensitive. The amount and location of the radiation remains the same...I think, or at least in my case. Everyone is different, and because of that and the incredible technology and staff required, it is very expensive. It cost more than the surgery. People who work in this kind of radiology have a very special challenge in their career, but I found we really seemed to like each other...and I think that must have helped in my process.

But now, we wait again. I'm going to see my regular doctor next week, just for the couple-times-a-year checkup, but I asked her to write an order for a PSA in the blood test because I want to know what's going on. My radiologist cautions it's too soon for an accurate readout, and he's not seeing me again until October! My urologist and surgeon has ordered a blood test and appointment in July. We're looking for 0% activity 3 or 4 blood tests in a row. If that happens, I'm out of the woods...for now anyway...or for that type...or something.

Uncertainty steps in where always there has been a complacency taken for granted. Well, I'm 65...and most of my life development has been right on schedule---although usually I'm the last to know just what is happening. I suppose that could be a disastrous history, if enough hadn't worked out pretty well and I weren't so content (despite the grousing around that I do) and I didn't find life's progress so wonderfully amusing. So I guess I haven't kept up with writing about the cancer because everything has gotten so gradual...and all we seem to do is wait. When would be a good time for essays about this to conclude? Hmmm, I may have started a series here with only one inevitable ending. At this point, the uncertainty and anxiety are tough, and I admit it. I sincerely hope I'm not too much trouble for other folks to be around. I think that fear may be what really causes age to kick in. Thanks for reading.

Turtle Island At 30

Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

---Walter Lippmann

Regardless of long you sit, the Buddha Dharma never appears because it is already here! Reveal it! Do not cover it up!

---Maezumi Roshi

If on earth there be
a Paradise of Bliss,
It is this,
It is this,
It is this.

---Firdausi

In 1975 Gary Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize For Poetry with a book entitled Turtle Island. My favorite poem in the whole world is in there, and last evening at dusk and by lanternlight I had the opportunity to read it aloud to friends and family down by our creek. This morning I found it online and have reproduced it here---with a link so you can buy the book. I hope Gary wouldn't mind.

He's 75 today. Two years ago I wrote about him, included a few poems, and sent it to him. I was thrilled when he replied. http://www.upsaid.com/jazzolog/index.php?action=viewcom&id=42 Maybe I'll see if I can find him again today.

WHAT HAPPENED HERE BEFORE
by Gary Snyder

— 300,000,000—

First a sea: soft sands, muds, and marls
— loading, compressing, heating, crumpling,
crushing, recrystallizing, infiltrating,
several times lifted and submerged,
intruding molten granite magma
deep-cooled and speckling,
gold quartz fills the cracks—

— 80,000,000—

sea-bed strata raised and folded,
granite far below.
warm quiet centuries of rains
(make dark red tropic soils)
wear down two miles of surface,
lay bare the veins and tumble heavy gold
in streambeds
slate and schist rock-riffles catch it –
volcanic ash floats down and dams the streams,
piles up the gold and gravel—

— 3,000,000—

flowing north, two rivers joined,
to make a wide long lake.
and then it tilted and rivers fell apart
all running west
to cut the gorges of the Feather
Bear, and Yuba.
Ponderosa pine, manzanita, black oak, mountain yew,
deer, coyote, bluejay, gray squirrel,
ground squirrel, fox, blacktail hare,
ringtail, bobcat, bear,
all came to live here.

—40,000—

And human people came with basket hats and nets
winter-houses and underground
yew bows painted green,
feasts and dances for the boys and girls
songs and stories in the smoky dark.

—150—

Then came the white man: tossed up trees and
boulders with big hoses,
going after that old gravel and gold.
horses, apple-orchards, card-games,
pistol-shooting, churches, county jail.

We asked, who the land belongs to.
and where one pays tax.
(two gents who never used it twenty years,
and before them the widow
of the son of the manwho got him a patented deed
on a worked-out mining claim,)
laid hasty on the land that was deer and acorn
grounds of the Nisenan?
Branch of the Maidu?
(they never had a chance to speak, even,
their name.)
(and who remembers the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.)

the land belongs to itself.
“no self in self: no self in things”

Turtle Island swims
in the ocean-sky swirl-void
biting its tail while the worlds go
on-and-off
winking

& Mr. Tobiassen, a Cousin Jack,
assesses the county tax.
(the tax is our body-mind, guest at the banquet
Memorial and Annual, in honor
of sunlight grown heavy and tasty
while moving up food-chains
in search of a body with eyes and a fairly large
brain—
to look back at itself
on high.)

now,

we sit here near the diggings
in the forest, by our fire, and watch
the moon and planets and the shooting stars—

my sons ask, who are we?
drying apples picked from homestead trees
drying berries, curing meat,
shooting arrows at bales of straw.

military jets head northeast, roaring, every dawn.
my sons ask, who are they?

WE SHALL SEE
WHO KNOWS
HOW TO BE

Bluejay screeches from a pine.



http://www.savesfbay.org/docUploads/What%20Happened%20Here%20Before.pdf

Turtle Island is a poetry book that belongs in every home...and especially would be in my pocket if I had no home. Hopefully it still is available in every book store. Otherwise http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0811205460/qid=1115548934/sr=8-1/ref=pd_csp_1/002-3305821-3916868?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

Transfigured Tagliabue

Giotto's Ascension, 1310

When we understand,
we are at the center of the circle,
and there we sit
while Yes and No chase each other around the circumference.

---Chuang-Tzu

We say that someone has the wondrous ability to play the zither or the lute, but if we ask where that art resides, not even the wisest man can answer....This art, produced by something we cannot fully know, is like the innate nature of the mind that operates in all our daily activities.

---Hakuin

Merchants---
who will buy this hat,
glazed with snow?

---Basho

Tomorrow is a day of considerable spiritual significance. It is Yom Hashoah, a solemn day of remembrance of the Holocaust. It is Cinco De Mayo, another celebration of the dead that can jar the outsider with its often festive atmosphere. In Mexico it also marks the defeat of French forces there in 1862. And it is Ascension Day throughout most of Christendom. For many Christians the picture of an actual and tangible living body of Christ rising up into the air to be with the Father in Heaven overhead is a bit of a reach...but perhaps it always has been so.

I find myself thinking of these things as I reread the latest folio of poems to arrive the other day from my teacher and mentor, John Tagliabue. Approaching 82, Tagliabue, once so quick and light, now is slow...but still and always light. He is not allowing himself to be slow enough yet, for he says that again he has fallen...this time breaking his left arm and elbow. But he writes on in longhand, and must have to peck out the poems on his typewriter with extra difficulty. He must do it everyday, it is his instinct, his nature. He still refuses to use a computer to write or send out poems to friends---just as he always refused to learn to drive a car. He gets others to do these things for him...and I'm a guy he's glad shares his work out into the world, like apple blossoms showering upon us.

As usual his letter begins with concerns about why I don't write to him more, and commiserations about our health situations. Inevitably there is a booklist of amazing titles I ought to read...probably instead of buying all those DVDs that I do and sit and watch. Watching is so different from reading. And yet perhaps the best thing to do with one of John's poems is just to watch it. Anyway, he goes on to mention how he tires more easily these days...and then he begins to write rather differently than he normally does. His letters tell of news and accomplishments and other friends, mutual or otherwise, and he reserves great wisdom for the poems. But now comes a section of pondering the great realities~~~

"The universes & we have the lives of flowers. We blossom, wilt, change. Sure we pray, sing, doubt, etc etc as we change. And beyond the change of seasons, the various stages of our game, our more or less vitality, what do we know? For me my poems give some of the answers. Are they answers or songs. Kiss a doubt or joy as it flies---& live in eternity; sunrise. Sensible sensational wise dramatic Shakespeare stayed within certain limits. But can a physicist or philosopher define a limit? I wouldn't try to do that though especially in old age I sure know I have my limitations. Natural---as a flower or bee. To buzz or not to buzz. I buzz while I can. Now back to my stimulating reading; I seek stimulation as a youth seeks a bride, as a poem seeks a poet; and here I am seeking to stimulate a response from you."

**********

With the subtle breeze as prompter

Good looking nameless
almost naked young people doing their exercises,
in shorts,
bending over, in much breeze, in light and shadows
as the sound
of many young leaves on nearly trees are like whistling
or dervishes;
pansies wink yellow and purple at my feet, as bicyclists
whizz by.
A black sweating rehearsing athlete walks by talking in
his cell phone.
I believe that Krishna with one finger has lifted the world up.

**********

"I had written other notes and poems praising Mark Van Doren after I heard his lectures about Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Yeats and others while a student at Columbia (1941-45) and later when Grace and I met him in NYC and a few months before his death in Connecticut. What follows was written just a few weeks ago (2005). Then I started reading the 1973 issue of VOYAGES published the year after Mark's death; it includes writings about him by Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, Allen Ginsberg, Mortimer Adler, Donald Keene and others. And it includes my journal responses to Mark's THAT SHINING PLACE. I like what Keene reminds us: 'Mark remarked once in class, in connection with some passage in Saint Augustine that no action was more specifically human than to praise.'"

Brightening active continuing Influence (a note for
artist grandson Adam Van Doren)

I think of your remarkable
well contained purposeful grandfather Mark
going from Greenwich Village down into the subway
with a few books that continued to enlighten him and
riding in the rattling noisy train sometimes crowded with
a motley democratic crowd of all sizes and shapes from all
castes, many countries, Mark developing his thoughts related
to his Shakespeare or Dante or Yeats lectures of the day, those
poets' images, thoughts free and active like bees in a bright
field in his respectful mind; then at 116th Street he
ascends continuing his thoughts and I am one of the
thousands who eventually hear what he's discovered
in the dark and in the enlightening dramatic poems;
I listen and write poems, and years
later go on to lecture with those
four poets more or less
brightening in my mind.

**********

Now in old age can you figure out the name of the
station and figure out its "meaning"?

The train
and the train of thought
are going to stop sometime, I guess.
Now late in life I guess I don't know much -
after all lusts, day dreams, forms of silliness,
ecstasies even,
after the unpredictable procedure is punctuated by
occasional
physical pains, staggering thoughts, disappointments,
desires for
what not; you console yourself with Brahms
and friends
that you hope will be a little balmy;
lyrical life
more or less goes on and then as has
been said
before time must have a stop.

**********

Tagliabue, in many ways a realized being, nevertheless remains attached to being remembered...unlike the apple blossom or even the tree. He always mentions he hopes some friend will read a poem and especially one of his...and even buy a book. So dutifully and with much gratitude I pass along, for the international reader this time, a link to John's wonderful collection~~~

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/094337345X/qid=1115192156/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_8_3/026-5602149-6912438

Trailing The Arbutus Blossom

The old photos are of my country grandmother in her garden, and of little Dickie learning about the flowers from Mom.

Stand in awe, and sin not;
commune with your own heart,
and in your chamber, and be still.

---Psalm 4:4

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
In the loved presence of my cottage-fire,
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

---William Wordsworth

The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of a spiritual truth.

---Harry Emerson Fosdick

Whenever I attempt an essay about my early days in Western New York, I usually can expect an email of corrections from my sister, Ann. She seems to remember the facts of what, where, and when better than I do, burdened as I was of course with being such a visionary. And also she's a few years younger than I am. (Correction #1 may come regarding the word "few".) But last evening she wrote me a note requesting some things out of my memory. Here it is~~~

"Dear Brother,

"Here's a subject for an essay for you. One of the girls at work recently moved to a house on the Fluvanna Townline Road. She and her husband have a fairly large lot and she has been exploring the property. She came to work one day last week and said she had found some wildflowers and didn't know what they were. She described them as little yellow bells with funny spotted leaves. I said right away that they must be Adder's Tongues. She then asked me how it was that I happened to know this stuff, because the week before someone else had said they noticed a patch of woods on the way to Warren that was filled with white flowers. I've noticed the same patch for years and said they were Trillium. I was amazed that so few of the people at work knew what a Trillium was. Anyway, it got me to thinking about the family springtime walks in the woods in Frewsburg. Do you remember where we used to go? All I remember is that we used to drive out Frew Run Road or Bone Run Road or somewhere in that vicinity. We'd park by the side of the road, walk uphill through a field and into the woods. And there we would find Adder's Tongues, Hepatica, Spring Beauties, Trillium, and May Apples. If we were lucky, we'd find a Jack-in-the-Pulpit, but the rarest of them all was Trailing Arbutus. Do you remember any of this, and do you have any idea where it was?

"By the way, I looked up Adder's Tongue in my Audubon Wildflower book, and there it's called either Trout Lily or Dogtooth Violet. It says that the Adder's Tongue is a pink variety found only in Minnesota. Now why do you suppose Mom called the yellow ones we have here Adder's Tongues?

"Love, Ann

"P.S. I'm still wondering how your radiation treatments went. What's the next step?"

(On the radiation thing, I have to wait now for results of a blood test to be taken around the middle of the month. Then we'll know if the rays hit anything we'd like to be rid of in there. Waiting, waiting...)

Ann and I often are struck by the value of having had parents who maintained at least some connection with roots stretching back into the 19th century. We wish they had preserved even more, but the pressure of middle class membership in the 1950s was powerfully involved in being 100% average American. They really went for that, but fortunately had enough quirks of individuality to give both of us a different understanding of the world around us than the radio and TV told us to have. Many of our colleagues at work throughout our careers do not have parents like ours, and therefore fit in better and look at us weirdly when we bring up something like Adder's Tongues...the younger ones, who like to mow everything in sight, especially.

Our father, J. Ralph, came from city Swedes, involved in commerce, politics and law. Our mother was a country girl. Her name was Rhea, and where her mother Dora Johnson came up with that classical mythology name we'll never know. She was raised on a working farm outside Frewsburg, New York, run by Dora, her husband Edward Johnson, and the other daughters Lucille and Leora. That life for Mom came crashing to an end when Edward died suddenly of cancer on her 13th birthday. Dora had to sell the farm and move into the "'Burg," where Lucille got a job teaching in a one-room schoolhouse somewhere out in the hills. Lucille's sacrifice contributed to her remaining a single schoolteacher all her life, but Leora was able to marry into the Anderson and Long farm family and Rhea went to nursing school. (Ann may have corrections for all this.)

That farm, out on Oak Hill Road, was the focus of many a Sunday drive for us kids...and I still go out there whenever I return home, taking my children with me. There's not much left of the buildings now...and the orchard is in total ruin. My mother used to weep whenever she saw the apple trees untended even 50 years ago. Our mother's tears were frequent and plentiful...and understandably many of them were in eternal mourning for her father, whether she knew it or not. But somehow they also were connected with the passage of time, the seasons, and a love of Nature so strong and pure that we kids simply took it in like air and water. Father lovingly took us on tours of her old rambling pathways at least a few times a year. The Spring search for the Trailing Arbutus was an annual affair.

Frewsburg is about 5 miles southeast of Jamestown, in the Town of Carroll, which is the most southeast township in Chautauqua County. I understand the word "Chautauqua" is the language of the Seneca inhabitants of the land, and means "sack tied in the middle," referring to the shape of the prominent lake that dominates the life of the county. The Town of Carroll is bordered on the east by Cattaraugus County, which must be another Seneca name, and the State of Pennsylvania to the south. When we took our drives we went around through there. Oak Hill Road runs east into Cattaraugus County, and generally that's the way we went, turning north at the end of it and onto the road where, a couple miles further, the Trailing Arbutus grew...and probably still does. I'd need my Cattaraugus map to identify that road, but it's out in the garage somewhere---and we don't want to think about the mess the garage is in just now. If Ann drives out there today, she may find it from ancient memory...but I still know where it is, and we'll see it when I come up there this summer, though it won't be blooming then.

I'm not as good with the names of flowers and trees as I am with birds and insects. I don't know why. Boy stuff and chasing around maybe. And some of it may have to do, as Ann notices, that a flower in one part of the world can be named something else somewhere else, and that makes it all confusing. Flowers also have heavy connotations about them sometimes...and maybe I leave it to women to know all those romantic and emotional images. There's a fascinating book called "The Meaning Of Flowers," by Claire Powell, that was published in London in 1977, and over here almost immediately by Shambhala(!). In it we learn that during times like the Victorian, when women might faint at the mention of a word like "flesh," flowers were sent in letters to convey different messages of emotion and intent. What a particular flower might mean, should you receive it pressed in a book or letter, is defined and the flowers shown in brilliant woodcuts. Apparently the language of flowers is even more pronounced in Oriental tradition.

Ann mentions the Trout Lily. Why would that flower be called that? We think it's because the pattern of coloration on the leaves looks a bit like that on a trout. The Dog's Tooth name comes from the shape of the root. I don't know about the Adder's Tongue, but maybe it's what Swedes called it since that's the name in Minnesota, although there aren't any adders in Sweden. I remember being confused when I moved to New England, and had to learn Trout Lily instead of what Mom called them. I was thinking just yesterday, as I walked through our woods, where did the Rattlesnake Orchid get its name? Everybody says it's because of the pattern on the leaves, but did somebody name it that when they became afraid they were stepping on a rattler out there?

There seem to be more impenetrable mysteries in the names of flowers than in those of---say---butterflies, at least for me. Maybe that's another reason why I don't know them so well. Perhaps you all know the one about the Forget-Me-Not. Mrs. Powell is most thorough in her book. She says that Victorian English used to travel all the way to Luxembourg to see this symbol of true love in full flower. It was most abundant on the banks of a small stream there at locations called the Fairies' Bath and the Cascade of the Enchanted Oak. Can you imagine such places? She says girls used to dance on a carpet of blue flowers, and make wreaths to wear from the blossoms. Tennyson wrote of "The sweet forget-me-nots, That grow for happy lovers."

But the origin of the name is fraught with disaster. "The story began in Austria. Two lovers, on the eve of their marriage, were walking on the banks of the Danube. A flower, blue as the deepest sky, swung upon the waves, which seemed ready to bear it away. The young lady admired its beautiful colour and sighed that the flower was to be swept away. Her sweetheart leapt into the river to retrieve it, but the fast waters overcame him. With a desperate effort he threw the flower on the bank, and then sank back, crying with his last breath, 'Love me. Forget me not!'" (p. 73) Over on this side of the pond, always-hungry Americans found the thing didn't taste good...and we named it that so you'll remember not to eat it. Enjoy the Springtime!

What Really Worries Me

It is no more surprising to be born twice than it is to be born once.

---Voltaire

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

---Niels Bohr

A general in ancient China came to see a Zen master. He drew his sword and pointed it at the teacher, and announced: "Don't you know that I am a man who can run you through without blinking an eye?"To which the Zen master responded instantly: "Don't you know that I am a man who can be run through without blinking an eye?"Deeply impressed, the general sheathed his sword and remained for the teaching.

---Zen story

My wife sends me a few emails every day. More often than I like they are about how I can become a better husband for her than I am already. But sometimes she finds a political item or entry as she browses the Net that nails the direction our nation is taking right to the wall. When that happens I find little alternative but to put aside everything I am doing...and really take an inventory. I'm sure she'd like it if I did that with the health and diet articles she sends too, but that is a different essay.

I know people who feel politics deeply. They are my friends. It may surprise you they are on "both sides of the aisle," so to speak. In fact, I often enjoy discussion with a conservative more than a fellow liberal. We all agree on two basic principles: 1) the polis, being humans striving to maintain community, is the best idea the species has come up with for getting along with each other, and 2) open and free political debate is the only way to resolve disagreement.

Since the Election of 2004, which maintained President Bush apparently, I feel that healthy political debate is quieting down among my friends...and being furiously discouraged in the public arena. I sense whatever the political leanings and convictions of my friends that they are troubled by questions they have and a distrust of the world that is growing. And they are suffering this anxiety in silence and maybe denial.

Let me give you a very public example of what I mean. Last weekend Senator Kerry made the following remark before a meeting of the League of Women Voters: "Last year too many people were denied their right to vote, too many who tried to vote were intimidated." Here we have a serious concern. The more tainted with corruption a nation's election process becomes, surely we know the more horrifying existence for those citizens becomes as well. We scold other nations and move our armies to spread democracy and destroy tyranny.

What response did the remark of the former candidate for the presidency of the United States inspire? In an article on Monday entitled "John Kerry tries out a new whine," Republican National Committee spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt is quoted as saying, "While President Bush and members of Congress are working to move our country forward, it's disappointing that some Democrats are focused on rehashing baseless allegations more than five months after the election." http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_6563.shtml

Apparently Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal.com editor James Taranto went even further with 2 columns that brought us into the middle of the week. He surmised that Senator Kerry's sources of concern were actually leftwing satirical pieces...and that the poor candidate couldn't even tell that his own people were joking with him. http://mediamatters.org/items/200504130001

I suspect what is wrong with this picture is the same thing that accounts for the increasing silence among my friends, liberal and conservative. There is neither respect shown to the man who conceded the close election, nor quiet deliberation regarding his concern. He is deplored and mocked. His very grasp of reality is questioned. Now honestly, if you are an American reading this, have you felt anything like a questioning of your "attitude" among acquaintances if it is known you have similar questions? Is it better for your popularity at work and sense of job security if you conceal and deny your questions? How healthy is a society that allows itself to get into such a fix...if that is what has happened?

It is at this point that my wife introduced me to a new columnist. I should have bumped into him before because the same piece Dana sent me was referred to last week at The Brad Blog...but I didn't quite see it. The guy's name is Chris Floyd...and he writes regularly for a publication in Moscow...Russia! Now wait a minute, this isn't the Cold War anymore...and their leader and ours have looked into each other's souls and like what they see. But still...there's bound to be a stigma in there somewhere. I think the essay is very well written...and is a good, although alarming, summary of the United States' political path these past 6 months. If you like, see what you think. It begins...

"Let's face the facts. The game is over and we -- the 'reality-based community,' the believers in genuine democracy and law, the heirs of Jefferson and Madison, Emerson and Thoreau, the toilers and dreamers, all those who seek to rise above the beast within and shape the brutal chaos of existence into something higher, richer and imbued with meaning -- have lost. The better world we thought had been won out of the blood and horror of history -- a realm of enlightenment that often found its best embodiment in the ideals and aspirations of the American Republic -- is gone. It's been swallowed by darkness, by ravening greed, by bestial spirits and by willful primitives who now possess overwhelming instruments of power and dominion.

"A gang of such spirits seized control of the U.S. government by illicit means in 2000 and maintained that control through rampant electoral corruption in 2004. The re-election of President George W. Bush last November was a deliberately shambolic process that saw massive lockouts of opposition voters; unverifiable returns compiled by easily hackable machines operated by avowed corporate partisans of the ruling party; and vast discrepancies between exit polls and final results – gaps much larger than those that led elections in Ukraine and Georgia to be condemned as manipulated frauds. Indeed, a panel of statisticians said last week that the odds of such a discrepancy occurring naturally were 959,000 to 1, the Akron Beacon-Journal reported."

http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/04/08/120.html orhttp://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8484.htm

There is a crummy picture of Mr. Floyd here http://www.peacearchive.org/floyd.htmand a writeup of his history and credentials here http://www.globaleyefloyd.com/about.htm

When I went to junior high and high school, the debate team was among the most exciting extracurricular activities in which to involve oneself. I went to college on a debating scholarship. During political campaigns in my small city in western New York, we had whole school assemblies in which the candidates appeared and debated their views. The hallways were full of imaginative and original posters made by students, who were encouraged to learn to express themselves in a rational manner. I remember an election season in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I went to graduate school in the early 1960's, in which citizens were out on street corners talking politics. It is one of the great memories I have of what America is all about.

I work in a junior high school. I won't say political discussion and activity is stifled there...but it certainly isn't encouraged either. There was no mock election for the students...and the one political poster I saw in the school was taken down. What does any of this tell us about the health of political freedom as we have moved through 50 years? In our time of positively athletic patriotism, how is the actual inventory in our political warehouse?

One's Balance In Spring

Ivy Clear, Donna Silva, and Robert Blankshine show perfect balance in Gloria Contreras' ballet "Moncayo I" for the Joffrey, 1966

I have lived on the lip
Of insanity, wanting to know the reasons,
Knocking on the door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside!

---Jalaluddin Rumi

After all, if I can't be myself, who can?

---Auntie Mame

Behind Ise Shrine,
unseen, hidden by the fence
Budhha enters Nirvana

---Basho

Thirty-five years ago, in through April somewhere probably, a tradition of tonic and renewal began in my life, which I continued yesterday---though it appears to have changed drastically. Well I'm 65 now, I was 30 then. In 1970 or so, Ivy Clear and I took a drive into the Catskill Mountains, west of where we were living outside New York. It might have been around Margaretville...or maybe it was further up into the Adirondacks. We frequently were in a celebratory mood when we ventured out into Nature, and usually it didn't matter quite where we were.

At any rate we drove up and down some back road deep in a forest, and as the Spring day was mild and beautiful we parked the car and plunged into the wilderness. The woods seemed dark and ancient...huge trees and boulders planted by a massive glacier. Granite and the new green of another year engulfed us, when suddenly there was a ravine. Deep in the gorge, far below, was a crashing stream---and from one side to the other lay a fallen tree. It had to be an oak, big and sturdy, and the ravine was not all that far across...and we, not being of the soundest mind at the time, decided we should go across. It was far enough down that, had either of us fallen, we'd have been hurt bad---so the only solution of course was not to fall. I'm not sure I remember how Ivy got across, but I think she went first...and probably managed it as I did: sort of hugging and inching along.

The mania just described is not the tradition. What followed was relief and joy...and so of course the only thing for me to do was get to that stream, take off my clothes and jump in. Now, mountain streams in April that far north are a true jolt to the system. I tell you the force and temperature of that water was a reminder of just how alive I really am! After that every year I have tried to get into a stream each April around the time the first butterfly is to be seen. A couple years later it was white water rafting in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. That dip wasn't planned exactly. Another time I was waste-deep in an underground river while caving. I began to notice the activity was becoming a ritual, and one that was good and that I looked forward to.

And so it was that yesterday I took some kitchen compost down the back path to the garden, a bed of which Dana just had dug to plant peas in a couple days at the New Moon. I tossed the leftovers into another area, set down the container and walked the few feet over to our stream. We have 3 and sometimes 4, when the water really is running, that go through the property. This is the main stream we use for the garden, and which later feeds our well. It has been raining and sleeting and snowing a little for the last week, since we got back from Arizona. It's been cold and miserable...but yesterday things had brightened and though winds blew with March bluster, it was a nice day. The creek was really moving, and it's only a few feet across so I stepped over. Jeroch had helped us build a little bridge across, which I've had to reinforce a couple times. (It only washed away once.)

On the other side is a clearing we've made, where we can picnic in seclusion and I can hang my hammock. No thought of my tradition had entered my mind. At another point down the stream a little, I've thrown a log across. There are blackberries and elderberries in there. I looked at that log and wondered if it was still strong enough. I put my foot on it, just to test it a little, when suddenly the bark slimed off it and I lost footing. My right foot dug for the bank...which was mud, and down I went. A few rose briars went part way and then remained behind, scratching as only they can, when I felt the first swell of water into my trousers. These were new Sunday go-to-meetin' pants I'd worn only once I think. But I was more concerned that I felt my wallet and all my IDs in for the soaking. That was a new Western shirt I'd just bought at Spurs in Tucson, but now Spring water was slushing into the collar and down my spine. Surprisingly the water wasn't that cold...but the papers in my wallet prevented my lounging there, so out I got and up the hill bedraggled I walked.

I've always had some pride in my balance and the fact that I don't fall down much. I only broke one bone about 20 years ago...and that doesn't count. But I've noticed lately my reaction time has picked up a delay. A couple years ago, I was playing baseball and decided to steal 3rd base. I remember distinctly the beat between my brain's command and my body's response. That didn't used to be there. Hmmmm. And as I walked through the living room this evening after a refreshing shower, Dana noticed something else that didn't used to be there. "What are those 2 black and blue marks on your behind, dear?" Reminders, I guess, to change the tradition a little and respect the stream bed more. Well, the story is---er---out so I figured I might as well write it.

An Open Letter To The Bush Brothers: Erring On The Side Of Life

In the photo from the Tucson Citizen, Jill Gwinn, 52, and her 13-year-old niece, are detained in connection with an egg-throwing incident outside Tucson Convention Center. The two were cited by police.

Would that life were like the shadow cast by a wall or a tree, but it is like the shadow of a bird in flight.

---The Talmud

In other words, apart from the known and the unknown, what else is there?

---Harold Pinter

A hundred thousand words are flowers in the sky
a single mind and body is moonlight on the water
once the cunning ends and information stops
at that moment there is no place for thought.

---Han-Shan Te-Ch'ing

Hey Guys!

I don't know what it is about George, but everywhere I go the dude shows up. Buddy, my trip to Tucson this week was supposed to be strictly pleasure---and mostly it was!---but the whole place got knocked out of joint, which is typical for your "events", by your decision to have one of your "conversations" with us. We all remember how much you love Ohio and all the times you breezed through last fall. The one time I actually tried to catch a glimpse in Parkersburg, West Virginia, you left orders to greet me with a helmeted, black-uniformed, fully-armed SWAT team ( http://www.upsaid.com/jazzolog/index.php?action=viewcom&id=411 ). Well, I got the hint---so this time I checked my appointment book first---and, sure enough, I was not among the 1500 specially invited "guests" with whom you insisted on being surrounded at the Tucson Convention Center Monday ( http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=032205a1_bushmain ). Let's see, is that taxpayer money that pays for Presidential appearances?

So I spent Monday out in the Sonoran Desert. Wonderful wildflowers in bloom, and I think a golden eagle was calling up in those mountains. But I heard you 2 interrupted your other affairs to take an interest in the tragic Terri Shiavo case. It's certainly understandable because the whole country is talking about it...and the media covers little else. Jeb, I understand your government even extended your strong arm of custody her way to get rid of that husband ( http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/25/politics/25jeb.html?th&emc=th ). Certainly the Christian Conservative thing to do, sanctity of marriage and all! And George, you told us in Tucson that "...in extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wise to always err on the side of life" ( http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=local&story_id=032205trans1 ). I presume that's Life as in pro-life.

Of course boys, from your dossiers on war, interrogation of "suspects", and killing folks on death row, you lead the way in the political expediency of pro-life. (Interesting editorial in today's Forth Worth paper, George, about the 152 people executed in Texas while you were governor http://www.dfw.com/mld/startelegram/news/local/11228257.htm .) But I notice in the whole, difficult debate about the Shiavo case, one element has yet to be mentioned by anybody. Money. Surely a good person would cringe, especially during Holy Week, at the mention of cash in the argument---but its reality does emerge for someone who's been through any kind of significant medical procedure. I remember when we had to remind your father what shopping for a loaf of bread is like, so I know you haven't had to dirty your hands in your upbringing like the rest of us. When I noted to my doctor that recent X-rays she prescribed cost $2000, she said, "But the insurance pays for it." Yeah, and I have work-related insurance---so why do I even read the bills...except for the part that says, "You owe $10"?

My wife and I are in very large health insurance groups. I never was in a hospital until last year, and have paid a share of my health benefits through most of my 45 years of work experience. But this last year, various treatments for me have amassed colossal bills. I envision my attempts to continue to live have affected the potential income of colleagues in the Athens City Schools. I have concern about that and want them to know it. Were I in a smaller work situation, there is no doubt that fellow employees would be aware of my need for their help through our insurance plan. Employers sometimes try to get rid of staff who have chronic claims. Perhaps the Bush boys and their supporters don't need to think about these everyday needs, but I do have to.

I don't know anything about Michael Shiavo's insurance or monetary situation. I have no idea what 15 years of Terri's kind of care has cost---or if this issue even enters in. Boys, it's another angle on this I'm thinking about. Eighteen years ago next month, the issue entered my father's mind. I know it because he said so in his suicide note. I wrote the story about this a while back, and you may read it here~~~ http://www.upsaid.com/jazzolog/index.php?action=viewcom&id=41 . In a nutshell, my father faced a situation of increasing total care for his wife of 50 years. They were lifelong Republicans. At the time there was no insurance compensation for Alzheimer's, because the only diagnosis allowable involved an autopsy. I won't go into the details of his options and help offered by family right now, but I need to tell you ultimately it came down to seeing his savings and estate vanish in a flash. To prevent that (and leave a legacy for their grandchildren, he wrote) they carried out a secret suicide pact.

I don't think Michael Shiavo is facing anything like this kind of dilemma for himself, but there are increasing numbers of aging couples in this nation who do face it. Jeb 'n George, you're right: it is a complex case with serious issues. I think everyone's life becomes one, sooner or later...no matter what simplicity we strive for. You guys have stepped up to the plate and put your beliefs on the line. But I don't see clearly what they really are. I wonder how open you are to theological "conversations." Your governments certainly reek of religious dogma, but on this Good Friday what is it about erring "on the side of life" that seems so mandatory? Can you imagine standing on the strength of love?

Happy Easter,
Richard

Support Our Troops

The photo shows Glenn Miller setting up the Army Air Force Band at the Yale Bowl in July 1943.

Old River Mountain a slab of rock
that blue heaven's swept to paint on
and written there an ancient poem
green letters worked in moss.
---Li-Po

And 'tis my faith that every flowerEnjoys the air it breathes.

---William Wordsworth

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.

---Arabic Proverb

The photo shows Glenn Miller setting up the Army Air Force Band at the Yale Bowl in July 1943.
This really is an open letter to an old friend of mine. If he replies and permits me, I'll post it...and perhaps we may have a little forum. My friend is about my age, went to college with me, and even shared a dorm room for a time. We also shared an abiding love of jazz music---a devotion that has carried our friendship through thick and thin for 45 years. Over the past decade we have parted company politically, a much more extreme move on his part than mine. He has voted for Bush and supports the war effort, I guess, wherever it takes us. He has kept me abreast of conservative thought---and I am not going to make a wisecrack there, because he and I both know how daunting profound conservative philosophy can be. He suggested that if I would agree not to send him anything by Arianna Huffington, he would respond by not bothering me with Ann Coulter. He thought it might be better for the serenity of both of us if we stayed away from those women. We've kept that bargain...although since California deemed the brilliant Arnold Schwarzenegger what they needed for that state's salvation, Arianna has fallen rather more silent than she used to be---whereas Coulter is calling Helen Thomas an "old Arab." I'm not sure the deal is even anymore.

Anyway, on to the matter at hand: this is Glenn Miller's birthday (1901-1944) and I'm listening to old records. Miller's band was not a jazz band, and he emphasized that himself. He did not mean to belittle jazz by saying that. He just felt that what he needed to do was somewhat different...and he succeeded as did no one else, before or since. He fashioned a band, full of the very best musicians of the day, that could and did play extremely hot and swinging jazz arrangements, but mostly it was a music dancing in romantic moonlight. My friend and I know we don't keep Glenn Miller in the jazz section of our diverse collections, and we don't look to that band for brilliant soloists or breathtaking arranging breakthroughs. Tex Beneke won some jazz polls for his tenor sax, but his jaunty style really never got adventurous. Bobby Hackett, of course, was a jazz player, but his gentle health never allowed him to keep the kind of hours, company, and environment the music's shamans seem to require...and so necessarily his most popular work was playing his lush trumpet for Miller and Jackie Gleason. In fact, he played rhythm guitar for Miller, only switching to trumpet for solos on pieces like Serenade In Blue.

Glenn Miller had wonderful sidemen, who also turned up in bands after the war that played jazz. Zeke Zarchy, Johnny Best, Billy May, Al Klink, and Ernie Caceres were all capable of careers in jazz, but mostly accepted the security of recording studios to the grueling life on the road. Of Miller's arrangers, both Eddie Durham and Benny Carter were jazzmen but wrote very little for Glenn. Most of the work of cranking out the unbelievable volume of arrangements for this band was divided among Jerry Gray, Bill Finegan, and Billy May. All 3 had bands after the war, but only Finegan ventured occasionally into real jazz work. But all this was the civilian band...and as some of you know, Miller chose another path.

At the very height of his popularity in 1942, Glenn Miller enlisted in the United States Air Force, disbanded, and reported for duty. Maybe we should stop right here and consider what that meant. If you lived through that time, the very feel of what it was like is engrained in your soul. I'm sure that is true for you wherever you were, but Stateside it meant ongoing and constant sacrifice. Gasoline, food, rubber, everything was rationed. If you ran out, you had to wait...and that might mean standing in line all day for whatever commodity it was you needed. For Miller, giving up a wildly lucrative and necessary career to join the Service was not such a reach as it might seem today. The band was "necessary" because it sang songs of romance and hope that represented our optimism and morale. Many of us got our first glimpse of love to a Glenn Miller song. That even reached all the way down to me...in 1951, when I first heard his 10-year-old record of Moonlight Becomes You. Miller was assigned the Army Air Force Band in October 1942, and that meant Uncle Sam was serenading us and the guys in uniform too.

The Air Force Band had a full string section and rather more jazz artists as well. All the recordings that exist of it are from air checks as the band toured bases here at home. A couple of guys from the civilian band went with him, chiefly Jerry Gray to arrange, but mostly it was a new crew. Most significant were Mel Powell, arranging and playing piano, and Ray McKinley on drums. Chuck Gentry and Peanuts Hucko were in the reed section. Bernie Privin and Bobby Nichols played trumpets. It was a huge orchestra to carry around, but Miller wanted to do more---and kept petitioning his command to take it to the Front, in Europe. He kept up that pressure for a year, and finally in June 1944 the whole band shipped out to England. There are recordings of Miller broadcasting from Britain in German, relentlessly encouraging folks who could hear to have courage and listen to the sounds of freedom. As many of you know, in the fall of 1944 the plan was to move the band onto a tour of the continent...and Glenn was flying across the Channel to finalize plans when his plane apparently was shot down. He was lost.

Listening to this music today, and immersing myself in memories of my wartime childhood, I am realizing what supporting the troops meant to us in those days. We had paper drives. We worked on scrap drives. Everything that could be reused was. Bottles were returned to the milkman or the store, washed and filled up again. You even got a few pennies back for a deposit you had left. To a kid my age it was unthinkable to walk past a discarded bottle along the road. You hopped on down to the corner store and got yourself a Hershey bar for it. Scrap drives involved everything---newspapers, tin cans, old clothes..anything that could be fashioned into something to help out the war effort. It was recycling with a vengeance.

These days I can't drive anywhere without seeing the Support Our Troops magnets all over the SUVs in front of me. What are these people really doing to support the troops I wonder? I mean, besides the magnets. What are we being asked to do? I remember before the Gulf War, when Bush's father was president, the Saudis cut off our oil for a while and there was a big energy crunch. The President was up in Maine, tooling around the harbor in his cabin cruiser. A reporter asked him if he wanted to encourage the people to conserve oil. He laughed. He laughed! Today, to support the troops we're supposed to go shopping. We're supposed to buy more stuff. We're supposed to invest our savings in globalized corporations. Since everyone can watch us on TV all over the world now, everyone can see what terrible sacrifice we're going through over here. They see the full parking lots at Walmart and they feel our pain. Times have changed, eh buddy? And maybe the idea of Freedom has too. No more Glenn Millers. I wonder how much body armor could be made out of the metal in those Support Our Troops magnets.

What? The 2004 Election Again?

La Révolution, 1896
Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Right is not right; so is not so. If right were really right, it would differ so clearly from not right that there would be no need for argument. If so were really so, it would differ so clearly from not so that there would be no need for argument. Forget the years; forget distinctions. Leap into the boundless and make it your home.

---Chuang-Tzu

The only preparation I can make (for death) is by fulfilling my present duties. This is the everlasting life.

---Ralph Waldo Emerson

The spiritual life is, then, first of all a matter of keeping awake.

---Thomas Merton

I confess I was caught flat-footed yesterday afternoon when a TruthOut update hit my mailbox containing a bulletin William Pitt had sent out the evening before. I scarcely took time to read it all until this morning so even though I can find absolutely no mention of this in the media or even most of the sites and blogs still awake to the issue, it may be old news to some of you. This is about Election 2004 and the Ohio Recount which most of us thought was dead and gone...and I must say I haven't even visited many of the sites in a long time and my whole computer research system on this stuff is rusty and in disarray. But guess who still is awake and watching! Kerry-Edwards.

Trying to catch up with a case as complicated as this one has gotten is not easy for the layperson, so I may make mistakes in my account. Essentially, it seems to me, we now are in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, the Honorable Judge Edmond Sargus presiding. David Cobb of the Green Party, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party, the National Voting Rights Institute and some others filed jointly last December that the Ohio election recount was conducted by Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell in a manner inconsistent with even his own standards. They call for it to be done again. http://www.nvri.org/about/ohio_cobb_badnarik_counterclaims_123004.pdf (You need Adobe for all these links to the briefs.)

Furthermore they demanded all the voting machines and materials be impounded pending investigation. http://www.nvri.org/about/ohio_memo_in_support_122304.pdf The charged tampering by Triad techies is involved in this one. There has been bluster from the Republican administration in Ohio, but no resolution of these charges. Attorney General Petro even decided to sue the plaintiffs for all the time and money they're costing our poor state. On February 11th, Cobb and Badnarik filed for a hearing before Judge Sargus to find out what is going on with these motions. On February 14th, Judge Sargus asked for a briefing as to why the case ought not be transferred to Judge Carr up in the Northern District of Ohio, where the case that expedited the recount was decided back in November. On February 23rd, Cobb and Badnarik responded in opposition and gave their reasons why. http://www.truthout.org/pdf/cobbbadnariktransfertatement22305.pdf

The next day John Kerry and John Edwards added their names officially as Intervenor Counter Plaintiffs in these actions. Donald McTigue is their attorney and he introduces himself to the judge here http://www.truthout.org/pdf/kerryedwardsmctiguedecl22405.pdf . They also present a survey they took of election officials who participated in the Ohio Recount. The contention in the case is the recount was not conducted randomly but rather from prepared vote samples. They present the survey as exhibit of evidence here http://www.truthout.org/pdf/kerryedwardsmotionforhearing22405.pdf and the summary here http://www.truthout.org/pdf/kerryedwardssummarychart22405.pdf . Kerry-Edwards final filing on Thursday was in support of Cobb and Badnarik not to transfer the venue. http://www.truthout.org/pdf/kerryedwardstransferstatement22405.pdf

William Pitt's account of these developments is here http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2005/2/24/183243/756 , while The Free Press' story of moves involving Blackwell and Conyers is here http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1172 , though as of this writing nothing about Kerry-Edwards yet. Ray Beckerman is mirroring the TruthOut story too, as well as continuing to present the staggering list of fraud evidence at this page http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/#110226258199324878 . Of special interest is the featured link to Richard Hayes Phillips' analysis of Ohio's vote that shows Kerry won. http://ohioelection2004.com/WordHost/phillipsestimate.doc (That's a Wordpad document.) David Cobb's site is not updated but does talk about the Recount effort. http://www.votecobb.org/press/2005/feb/pr2005-02-08.php

Finally, Will Pitt wrote last night that no one should get hopes up. He says Kerry blew it when he conceded too soon...and so all that will be accomplished will be for future generations. http://forum.truthout.org/blog/story/2005/2/25/182032/611 But wait a minute~~~if we get another recount and Richard Hayes Phillips' contention is upheld, what then? If Kerry won Ohio...and maybe some other states still in contention, what to do about that buffoon strutting around the world these days? Wouldn't Bush simply have to step down? Or would things have to get rough?

Wozzeck In The White House

The photo is of composer Alban Berg, in army uniform in 1915.


When Governor Lu was about to return to his office, he came to say goodbye to Nan-Ch'uan. The Master asked him: "Governor, you are going back to the capital. How will you govern the people?"
The Governor replied: "I will govern them through wisdom."
The Master remarked: "If this is true, the people will suffer for it."
---Zen story

Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
---William Butler Yeats

Lent, then, is a church institution embodying an exalted idea, the idea of cleansing and disciplining both mind and body toward the end of making them more receptive to the Christ ideas.
---Georgianna Tree West

This essay started out yesterday, Mardi Gras or Shrove Tuesday, as a forward of an amazing link from my friend in Arizona, named Bushman. Well, that's his handle online, and since here's the only place I know him yet I think of him as that. He's a gardener in Sedona, which sounds very poetic and adventurous---and he is that but he's also a graduate of a school for Very Hard Knocks. He has a website http://www.kachina.net/~emprivan/index.html , but mainly I wanted to share this other URL~~~

http://www.halorising.com/epic/

HaloRising seems to be a platform for creating interesting projects, in this case a kind of documentary/news report from the future. It's supposed to be a commentary for some sort of installation at a Museum of Media History in the year 2014. The piece is very brilliant and maybe chilling. If you're stuck with dial-up, as we are, you may lose patience with the load, even though the work runs only 8 minutes. If so, make a note of the site's location and try it at work or a library. Hmm, it just loaded for me in the time it took to write those 2 sentences...so maybe it won't be so bad for you after all. However, there are lapses...so when it's done, replay it by right-clicking and choosing "Play". Its creator is Robin Sloan whose site is http://www.robinsloan.com/ .

But what about Wozzeck and what's this Lent stuff? I could blame it on my fevered brain, but apparently there's no fever with this horrible cold I've got. Yes, Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, 40 days and 40 nights of fasting, penance, prayer and meditation. Most religions recommend some kind of retreat like this. Particularly in the Tibetan tradition, Buddhists observe a dathun which is a month or at least 28 days of meditation practice. If you have such a spiritual pilgrimage in your religion, let me know what it is---or make one up for yourself. This is ours, and in recent years I've begun to take it seriously.

So this morning, I'm stuck at home drinking Dana's cayenne tea---ouch---sweating it out, doing laundry and wondering what music to play. I noticed it's Alban Berg's birthday, and I wanted a couple of CDs for the car...because later, near-dead or alive, I'm going to drive the hour to Lancaster for radiation therapy and then back. It's pledgetime on WOSU, the Columbus classical music station, and I've decided they all should go for very selective commercials to supplement funding, instead of these horrible pledge ordeals. I can't drive along and listen to that, so I picked out some Berg.

Wozzeck orginally was a play written in 1837 by 23-year-old Georg Buchner, who was obsessed with overthrowing the autocratic governments of German states, including that of his own Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt. Buchner already had gotten into trouble with pamphlets he had distributed to peasants, saying such things as "In this year of 1834 it seems as though the Bible is telling lies. It seems as though God had made peasants and artisans on the fifth day and the princes and nobles on the sixth; and as though the Lord had said to the latter: Have dominion over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, as though the peasants and common people were to be counted as creeping things...The peasant goes behind the plow, but the nobleman goes behind the peasant and drives him on as he does the oxen, he takes his corn and leaves him with the stubble...[the peasants'] sweat is the salt on the nobleman's table." This was 33 years before Marx wrote Das Kapital. Buchner contracted typhus and died a month after he completed Woyzeck, as it usually is spelled in connection with his name.

Alban Berg saw the play in Vienna in May of 1914. He was 29 and had written very little music by then. He said the play cried out to be set to music...and began at once. Three months later the First World War began, and Berg soon was inducted into the Austrian army. He wrote more than once in letters, the character of Wozzeck haunted him throughout his military experience, but he would not complete the opera until 1921. The work was premiered in 1925, and astonishingly was so successful that Berg had no financial worries for the last 10 years of his life.

If you've never seen or heard it, you may wonder at my use of "astonishingly." The opera is very difficult, even today. The music is intense and dense, and has not lost the glint of its edge. I have yet to hear the last scenes without dissolving into tears. Otherwise, only La Boheme does that to me. The story is about a quite dull functionary around a military camp, a sort of aide who does barbering and grooming for officers. He has become increasingly distraught and has to see a doctor regularly, an 1837-style shrink. We don't know the nature of his disturbance, but he seems to have tortured visions of calamity and inferno---and sometimes shouts things in the streets. He is married to the voluptuous Marie and they have a little boy. At the end of the first act, Marie has been seduced by the Drum Major, and at the end of the second the guy triumphantly beats up Wozzeck. In the third act, Wozzeck murders Marie, and then drowns in the lake where he threw the knife. The opera ends with the little child, obliviously playing at the front of the stage.

The passion with which Berg wrote the music had not only to do with the identification he felt with the character in his army experience. As he was finishing the difficult final scenes, he himself was in an affair with a woman to whom he sired an illegitimate daughter. He apparently resented his inability to control his own emotions and blamed the woman for it, creating later another infamous female character in opera, named Lulu. Marie, hardly an innocent, was the first manifestation of Lulu, whom Berg described as a "female Don Juan." Before we come down too hard on Berg, we should remember that a certain release from emotional torment had been begun by Freud only recently---and that an entire philosophical movement called existentialism would be trying in a very unique way to sort all this out. The Wozzeck story often is included in commentaries about existentialism and the poor soul pounding on the door of the Unknowable.

There are a number of recordings of Wozzeck now. It often is performed, and the Metropolitan has it in the repertoire. I started listening to it, as a jazz fan---not an opera buff---over 40 years ago, and the recording I had is the one I still prefer. It is a live performace from 1951 at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos, a great friend of jazz. Mack Harrell plays Wozzeck, with anguished madness and a marked peasant quality...that I think is crucial. Fischer-Dieskau also recorded it, and I remember I couldn't wait to hear it especially because it also was going to be in stereo. But I was disappointed, because the great baritone seemed to be trying to make something poetic and existential with the role---and I don't think it works that way. Wozzeck's goodness is in his victimization by everything. He can't figure anything out and the times are hard and dangerous...so he is destroyed.

The most shattering parts of the score are in the 3 or 4 instrumental passages in which Berg delivers his comment on the tragic goings-on. Resist the temptation to find a recording with just that music presented. It's OK that way, but in the context of all the suffering Berg's music is demolishing. Sit through the whole opera, and then be overwhelmed by the music of the end. I found this a very good way to start Lent this morning. I thought I'd love to stage a new updated version. I'd like to put Wozzeck as the camp barber at Guantanamo...or maybe just the guy who gives haircuts at the White House. In the first scene it could be Ralph Reed in the chair. Or maybe Karl Rove as The Captain, in his new elevated role for the Administration. Wozzeck will walk into the Potomac and float out into Chesapeake Bay. Now let's see, who could we have for that Drum Major?