Merwyn on Moyers

I teach Sunday school. One of my students plays football, acts, sings AND tries to make sense of the world. What a kid!

Then he told me how much he loved poetry.

Jeezus! The kid is living up to standards I couldn't even remember.

Happily Bill Moyers had the great poet W. S. Merwyn on his Journal so that I could partake without any effort.

Having lost my father last November after a year and a half of failing health the episode was really hard. Here's one poem that illustrates why.

W. S. Merwyn

My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand

he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know

even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes

he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father

he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me

oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father's hand the last time

he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me

oh yes I say

but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here

I say nothing

he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep you

I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know

though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do

An Heroic Story Obscuring a Deeper Truth

In her op-ed piece in today's Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan laments the disreputable state in which Wall Street finds itself. She recounts 9-11 and the heroic effort that followed to get the market back on its feet. And it was an heroic story.

I admire of Peggy Noonan's talent. She's a really good writer and an excellent storyteller. Remember 'Morning in America?' That's the kind of stuff she used to write for her old boss Ronald Reagan. But while we were admiring that beautiful idea Reagan and his minions stripped away the regulations and the regulatory structure that allowed us to get where we are today.

So why draw on the heroic tale of eight years ago?

I loved the book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges and its lessons are relevant here. To wit: it is ennobling when our desire for meaning, our desire for being part of something larger than just ourselves is invoked by an attack such as occurred on 9-11. But who we are at core does not necessarily change for the better after such an attack. Violence doesn’t just invoke the better angels of our nature. Violence begets violence, a desire for revenge, a fearfulness and paranoia that can infect what we do in subtle ways.

She seems to say that these guys are heroes so that which opposes them -- like those sissified regulators -- must be evil. (That's the Manchean world view that found full paranoid manifestation in President Bush's thinking.) I'm sorry, life isn't that simple.

In truth, I think Peggy is blind to her own illusion. Indeed, all of us can be blinded by the power of a beautiful idea, a powerful story. But what if that story, which contains some truth, serves to divert our attention from another more pervasive – and much less pleasant – story?

Self interest drives a market in predictable ways. The problem is that human nature is much more complex than that. We can be driven by higher things beyond self interest, among them a shared search for meaning, belonging and the selfless regard for others. But there are darker, more irrational impulses by which all humans can be driven and that's the reason we are where we are now. After all, the market is just a bunch of humans connected on a trading floor and by phones and computers and so on. Those humans all have greater and lesser angels of their natures that compel them to do what they do. No matter how well it's told, a story about a week’s heroism does not change that fact.

The Most Perfect Music Ever Written

My counterpoint teacher was a small, frail man who doted on his elderly mother and lived in the suburbs with a half dozen cats. He taught composition at Temple University in northern Philly. By the time I studied with him in the mid-‘70s he looked almost too much like what you would expect from a teacher of 17th century composition: a very gentle man, mostly bald and sporting overlarge glasses. But you could also see how much he loved the music he taught.

As a young man he had served in the Army during WWII. By the end of the war he was stationed in Berlin and on the day that fighting ended in Europe, he suddenly disappeared. He was AWOL for several days. After he re-emerged he explained that he had traveled behind what would be called the iron curtain to visit the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig. My professor had said that the choral refrain from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion ‘Wahrlich, dieser ist Gottes Sohn gewesen.’ or ‘Truly this was the son of God.’ was the most perfect music ever written.

And I think he was right.

That's Marketing!

My Window

It had started to snow in clumps like dandelion seeds, half falling and half rising, caught between the buildings. Above the tarred skylight the sky was pale blue with opal clouds. But higher, it was grey and brown like slush.

A little while later I looked again and the sky was a bright blue with great cloud mountains passing improbably above. In the distance other clouds stood still like white walls of a colossal room.

If the Medium is the Message...

This is Alexis Gorman, 26, who 'works in marketing' in my hometown of Manhattan. Here she is on the front page of today's New York Times (August 2, 2008). The picture is sort of a re-creation, I suppose, of Ms. Gorman calling her boyfriend and telling him that they were through ... on his voice mail! On purpose!

“Text messaging someone ‘I would prefer not to see you again’ is really not my style,” she added. [Noble! And thanks for not saying 'That's just not the way I roll.'] “But at the same time, I wanted to avoid an awkward conversation.” [Not so much.]

The article tells of 'Slydial' a service that allows you to avoid having a direct conversation with the person you call, ensuring that you go right to voice mail. As such, the service allows us to communicate without communing. Like email, like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and blogs, we can post information and read what others have posted--all without actually connecting.

So are these forms of communication artifacts of an increasingly alienated age? Or is this just technology saving us the cost of a stamp for the letters we no longer have to write?

2007

First, you must know what you are dealing with...

When I got out of music school, I was afraid I was going to starve to death so I got a bill collector job--of all things! Most of the time I'd sit at my desk with a stack of account cards calling one client after another, asking them to pay. But if I couldn't reach them I had to drive to their houses and try to collect mano a mano.

One fine fall day I drove to this nice little house in Charlottesville Virginia and found my client--a skinny, white man of some 60 years or so--planted on his sofa while his wife--not a signatory--puttered around him. Although it was only just mid-afternoon he had already had a couple of cocktails and was feeling no pain. It was obvious pretty quickly that the guy had no means or intent of paying his bill.

'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed,' he said as he explained that he hadn't worked in six months. He repeated it probably a half dozen times during our 15 minute conversation - 'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed.' Damn It! I thought, We'll never get paid.

Twenty five years later I can still see him sinking into his Early American Herculon sofa with his pants at mid-thorax. Given his age and the likelihood of alcohol toxemia, he must be on a stain-resistant sofa in the sky by now.

But, to me, he resides in a little Cape Cod in my head forever reminding me - 'First you must know what you are dealing with, and then you can proceed.'

And, of course, we never did get paid.

Shoulders of Giants

We understand the world through our direct experience, the shared experience of our communities, and the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before us. But what a jumble this last one is! Let's work on that a little bit. I suppose that should be 'knowledge and wisdom' that have survived the test of time. That's still not enough. It's really what's survived by chance, isn't it? (If you think the phrase 'god's will' might fit in there, what, prey tell, serves god to burn down the library in Alexandria? And what wisdom might have been lost to that inferno?)

Consider the view from here, this generation. We are awash with stuff--cars and planes and cell phones and laser pointers and computers, plastic and magnetic resonance scanners and medicine made by cracking the genetic code, the Internet, and on and on and on. It's everywhere and we use it everyday. So much so it's practically invisible. Two hundred years ago none of it existed. Moreover the science that makes these inventions possible didn't exist. That science, and the engineering and invention, that gave rise to all that stuff, must have a profound impact on how we understand the world. So imagine understanding the world WITHOUT ALL OF THAT!

So, science has changed how we understand the world. Participating in a religion without acknowledging scientific understanding does not return the participant to a purer day, a time closer to eternal truths. It is self delusion and magical thinking. Moreover those that endeavor to do so cannot hope to know how those who lived in pre-scientific times really saw things. Those ancients didn't ignore what their everyday lives told them about how the world works and neither should we.

As Newton said we stand on the shoulders of giants and owe it to those who came before us--in science, in the arts and in religion--to move forward with all the tools at our command.

Addicted to War

Chris Hedges has written a hell of a book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. He describes with significant nuance his experience of war (as a journalist) including his 'addiction' to being in a war zone. For him, with great peril came his most robust life experiences. Recovering from his addiction he writes with passion against wars of choice.

I was raised in a family of Quakers--the Society of Friends, the proper name. While the religion teaches absolute pacifism my father fought in World War II and Korea. I came of age just as the USA withdrew from Vietnam. I do not believe in absolute pacifism but would never have fought in Vietnam or Iraq, wars we undertook inappropriately.

That said even as a 50-year old man I can still hear the call of battle, and almost regret being untested, unproven and unformed by its horrible rigors.

That odd sense of loss has always been stirred by the wonderful movie Patton.

...type, type, type...

In our gut we feel that life cannot have arisen randomly. But consider other hard-to-believe things proven to be true. For example, we know from a wide range of instruments that the universe is nearly incomprehensively vast. If we could truly understand the scope of the universe, hold its disorienting vastness in our mind, then it would be a simple thing to understand how conscious life arose from a serious of improbable events.

Why?

Imagine that the universe was a practically endless field on which you could lay out every possible combination of events necessary to generate life--presence of raw materials, appropriate proximity to a star, animating events, etc. Given the nearly infinite scope of that imaginary field--the universe--the emergence of life is, in fact, practically unavoidable.

Consider the issue from another angle: it has been said that if you have enough monkeys typing for long enough one of them will replicate the works of Shakespeare. This sounds absurd until you imagine that you have a near infinite number of monkeys and typewriters. Given that, success becomes inevitable. So it is with life.

Is God missing from this picture? No. God's being is the fabric of the universe animated by his grace and emerging from his creative pulse, some 15 billion years ago.

What Are The Chances?

I do this gratuitously philosophical training module, which I might call 'What are the chances?' In it, I step the students through their lives in reverse, noting moments that would have led them somewhere other than NYC in this particular moment ... class, career path, etc. I then extend the exercise to their families, home towns, respective nations, the earth, solar system, etc., back to the Big Bang. (A bit like the scene from Our Town.) From all this we are able to do a rough calculation of how infinitely improbable it is that we find ourselves here and now. I show them a picture of a person standing on the tippy top of a pyramid to illustrate the point. But then I ask them again what the chances are that they are here. It's a trick question in that the answer given that they are here is 100%.

The sense from the ensuing conversation is that miraculously--god or no god--we are here against incredible odds and that means, in a sense we arise inevitably from an environment well suited to bear us up--a beautiful idea. And even if this weren't true, it can be significant if one student hears it and believes it. Because, then, they might take the chance in the next moment to do something truly weird but deeply true to their deepest natures, and from that something beautiful might arise.

Buy!

'Buy the appliance and your life will never be the same,' the salesman said as he drove his pitch to its climax. Pretty corny. But even though the guy had a steely edge, I was hooked. 'I really do need to slice my vegetables a whole new way,' I thought, '…and two for the price of one, no less!' I looked in my wallet and found nothing but dry cleaning slips. Then I noticed it almost 5 o'clock. 'Damn, gotta go,' I sighed thinking of all the potatoes I wasn't going to crinkle cut.

I walked next to the salesman's platform on the way out and looked up at him again. There was something dark in the corner of his mouth. 'That's gross,' I thought, 'What the hell is that?'

It was blood.

Somewhere during his spiel he'd bitten his lip or burst a vein or some such. Whatever it was or however much it hurt, he didn't stop. 'This sales thing is a primal business,' I thought as I waited for the bus. I changed my mind and decided to walk by the stables on on my way to Time Square.

'That's the world, man, you gotta sell or die.'

Where there is despair . . . hope.

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall - think of it, always.

~Mahatma Gandhi

A Sunday Morning Reflection

Really Close ...

"Through dance, we're as close to God as we're going to get — until he calls us home."

--Judith Jamison. artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, New York Times, July 5, 2006

It's the Corporatorial Me!

Okay I had to post this so I could host it so, so; okay, Narcissus? hELLO!?!

Our Pocono House

You Never Know Who You'll Meet in the Poconos

The World as I Found It

As I was walking through the 204th Street A Train station in 'Upstate Manhattan,' I happened to see this. It's a panel where they hang posters. This is what happened after they took down the old poster and hadn't put the new one up.

Is it art?

Well to me it seems beautiful in a way. I wouldn't hang it over my couch but there seems to be artistry here. It arises from the interaction of random patterns left by bits of glue and old poster, and from the choices that someone made to 'decorate' the spaces in between--the random and the intentional.


Perhaps even more interesting is the way nature presents a mix of order and chaos without a visible artist. Having seen beauty arise from the work of artists, do we not require that God exists given so much beauty in nature?

By the way, check out this outrageous site from which I got this picture.