Category: People

A great talent: Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts

fermorI’m always eager for a good read and get ecstatic when I find one.  There are so many possibilities out there that I try to choose wisely, usually from several sources such as NPR, The Times Literary Supplement, and my favorite with its nearly 200 reprints of notable works, The New York Review of Books.

The latter is the source for my newest read, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s standout travel saga, A Time of Gifts (1977).  I’m embarrassed at missing out on Fermor these many years, liking travel narratives as I do, but then that’s why I keep the NYRB close-by.

Fermor was just an amazing guy in explorer Sir Richard Burton mold, fiercely independent, assertive and bold; linguistically gifted, courageous and cunning.  Joining the Irish Guards In World War II, he fought in Greece and served with a guerrilla unit on the isle of Crete, where he disguised himself as a shepherd for 18 months, living in mountain caves, while successfully master-minding the abduction of a German general.  He was knighted in 1994, for his service to literature and promotion of British-Greek relations.

In A Time of Gifts, Fermor begins his recall years later (age 62), of his three year walk across Europe to Constantinople as a 19-year with little more than a backpack in 1933. He actually only gets half-way by the close, and so there’s a sequel, Between the Woods and the Water, but even then, you don’t get to the Bosphorus.  It little matters, for what we have is splendid, as we follow this young man hobnobbing with rich and poor, gypsies and priests, occasionally sleeping in ancient monasteries.  His account of Germany in 1933, which saw Hitler becoming Chancellor, fascinates.  On one occasion, he strays into a beer hall filled with Nazis.

What attracted me to A Time of Gifts amid a plethora of can’t go wrong choices were multiple reviewer comments on Fermor’s stylistic talent, one reviewer likening him to Sir Thomas Browne as the best of the best prose masters across the several centuries. As a former teacher of English for some forty years, I’m an aficionado of style, or the mastery of the cadence of the English sentence.  Talented writers know the weave of sentences spun into art, exemplary in the literary world, especially in the 19th century in the likes of Newman, Ruskin, and Pater.

Of course, I’ve only begun A Time of Gifts, but his writing already excites me with its prowess, not only in its trenchant rhythms, but through its sensory capacity for total awareness.  To possess such talent for minutiae down to a grain of sand like this would make Flaubert (le mot juste) proud.  Let me try out a passage on you:

The gables of the Rhine-quays were gliding past and, as we gathered speed and sailed under one of these spans of the first bridge, the lamps of Cologne all went on simultaneously. In a flash the fading city soared out of the dark and expanded in a geometrical infinity of electric bulbs. Diminishing skeletons of yellow dots leaped into being along the banks and joined hands across the flood in a sequence of lamp-strung bridges. Cologne was sliding astern. The spires were the last of the city to survive  and as they too began to dwindle, a dark red sun dropped through bars of amber into a vague Abendland that rolled glimmering away towards the Ardennes.

Informed mastery like this, housed in rhythmic sentences acute with colorful detail, sets Fermor apart as one of our greatest travel writers since John Ruskin.

You can read more about him in Artemis Cooper’s magnificent biography (2012).  Having full access to his papers, she tells us that Fermor left behind a completed draft that gets him to Constantinople and that it will be published soon.

Despite losing some of his sight and hearing, he remained active almost up to the day of his death at age 96 in 2011.

In a book he had been reading, he wrote:  “Love to all and kindness to all friends, and thank you for a life of great happiness.”  Now that’s an epitaph we can only envy.

–rj

Happy Days are here again: and the banks roll on

obama

If you’ve been watching the headlines on the economic front, you may have seen the news about record bank profits in the first quarter of the year to the tune of $40.3 billion, an all time high.  In fact, profits surged 15.8% over the same quarter a year ago. This marks the 14th straight quarter of bank gains. In short, the bailed out banks (you and I paid for that), are making money hand-over-fist.  Not so, mainstream America.

Meanwhile, in the past 12 months, scandal- ridden JP Morgan has garnered $24.4 billion in net profit, evidencing once again that banks could evade laws with impunity.  The precedent, after all, had been the release of the 2000 page examiner’s report on Lehman Brothers in 2010,  suggesting fraud had brought about its bankruptcy, yet nothing was done.

You’d never have expected hand-outs from the Obama administration, given their campaign pledges to look out for us po’folk and their left of center politics.  Their hand-outs, not loans, to banks and other fiscal institutions, are shockingly in the trillions, with $85 billion dished out every month from the Federal Reserve.

But then again, we can better understand the forces in play when we look at the cohorts Obama gathered about himself:  Jacob Lew, former Citigroup executive, appointed deputy secretary of state, with a cool $900,000 bonus in his pocket from Citigroup;  Mark Patterson, Goldman Sachs lobbyist, made chief of staff at the Treasury, despite a ban on lobbyists;  Timothy Geithner, who became the architect of the bailouts, appointed as Treasury secretary, even after it was discovered he hadn’t fully paid his taxes;  Larry Summers, who authored many of the pro-bank policies of the nineties, recruited as a mainstay economic advisor; and Rahm Emmanuel, appointed Chief of Staff, after gleaning $16.5 million as a Chicago investment banker in just 30 months in-between government jobs. All of them Democrats.  All of them with dirty hands.  

At the present moment, Larry Summers is being touted as the next Federal Reserve Chairman, replacing the retiring Ben Bernanke.  A long time Goldman Sachs executive and trader, he played a primary role in deregulating Wall Street in the Clinton administration.

So far, and probably never will happen, not a single bank or CEO has been brought to account for their criminal mismanagement of the people’s money, leading to the 2008 meltdown and consequent suffering for millions of Americans. Their suffering continues.

Now you would think from the President’s major address on the economy this month that happy days are here again for you and me, what with his boast of 7.2 million new jobs created in the business sector in the last four years.  But politicians do prevaricate, and it’s up to you and me to hold their feet to the fire.  Fact is, long term unemployment is at its highest level since the Great Depression, and of the newly minted jobs, most are low wage (often in the service sector), temporary, or part-time.

Curiously, nowhere did the President mention the plight of Detroit facing bankruptcy and the possible erosion of pension and health benefits for the city’s workers, including police and fire personnel.

To give him his due, he did allude to the growing income disparity between the rich and the majority of Americans:

Even though our businesses are creating new jobs and have broken record profits, nearly all the income gains of the past ten years have continued to flow to the top 1 percent. The average CEO has gotten a raise of nearly 40 percent since 2009, but the average American earns less than he or she did in 1999. And companies continue to hold back on hiring those who have been out of work for some time.

But how did this happen?  He didn’t mention government’s largesse to the wealthy through bank bail outs, corporate tax breaks, and reduced wages for autoworkers.  In the first two years of the President’s tenure, or after the downturn of 2008, the richest one percent enjoyed an 11% increase in income, unlike the rest of Americans whose incomes declined.

Again, nobody’s been minding the store.  In 2011, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee  noted Wall Street’s culpability just prior to the 2008 market collapse as “a financial snakepit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing.”

While it may appear that things are humming along nicely, the banks booming, the real estate market up, stocks at their peak, the reality is that more than 3 million of us can’t find work.  Those who do, work for less, often part-time.  Many, particularly those 50 and over, may never work again.  Black youth unemployment is currently at 42 %.

Several million Americans have been foreclosed upon by the banks, losing their biggest investment stake and, sometimes, a whole lot more.  Many others owe the banks for houses purchased at inflated prices, now worth considerably less.

But the banks roll on, too big to take on, as Attorney General Eric Holder recently let slip. What’s more, their lobbyist legions do their work well, busy button-holing members of Congress.  It’s a game of money, always has been, money spelling influence.  It’s America, you know.

This just  in:  The President remains committed to slashing Medicare by $400 billion and Social Security by $130 billion in his projected 2014 budget.  (In 2008, candidate Obama had pledged, reiterated by Biden in 2012, that he wouldn’t cut Social Security.)  Apparently, the bankers are a privileged class; the people, expendable to the exigencies  of  power and influence.

-rj

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My favorite speeches

Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the Unite...

I’ve always liked a good speech.  If you asked me to make a list of favorite speeches I’d be hard pressed.  In fact, what I’d worry about most was leaving out some real gems simply because of memory lapse or not having been exposed to them.  It’s complicated, too, because there are countless good speeches to be had across the years, even centuries, like Socrates’ defense before the Athenean court.

Probably the best way to go about it would be to catalogue speeches by genre; for example, political, social, and historical, though the categories might occasionally overlap.  I think of “Washington’s Farewell Address,”  despite it’s now quaint formalism, one of the standout American speeches in our history with its warning of the dangers of political parties turning into self-centered warring factions.  A historical classic, it surely falls under the political canopy as well like Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”

By the way, commencement addresses offer a rich source of substantive speeches before limited audiences.  I think of Steve Job’s address to the Stanford student body (2006) as the finest of its kind with its counsel on living in the context of mortality.

But what makes for a great speech?  I’d offer things like appropriateness, wisdom, counsel, candor, caring, inspiration and eloquence.  The best speeches not only inform and persuade, they move us to take action.  I think of Martin Luther’s King’s “I Have a Dream” speech (1963) as such a speech, perhaps rivaling Lincoln’s”Gettysburg Address” in its moving majesty.

As Americans, I think many of us would include Patrick Henry’s “Give me Liberty or Give me Death” (1775) and John F. Kennedy’s “Inaugural Address” as among the foremost of American speeches as well.

If you pinned me down, however, to a list of five personal favorites, I’d complain about how unfair you are.  Still, with apologies to the likes of Socrates, Cicero, Frederick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, and even Patrick Henry and Kennedy, I’d offer the following personal favorites:

  1.  Lincoln:  “Gettysburg Address”
  2.  King:  “I Have a Dream”
  3.  Churchill:  “We Will Fight on the Beaches” (1940)
  4.  Washington:   “Farewell Address”
  5.  MacArthur:  “West Point Address”

I think of Winston Churchill, a Renaissance man living in the Twentieth Century, as the finest orator I’ve come upon with his ebullient, yet disciplined pathos as in “We Will Fight On the Beaches” (1940).  I think, too, of “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat” and “This was their Finest Hour” as speeches transcending any I’ve encountered.

I included General Douglas MacArthur here as a supreme orator.  The rhythmic cadence and rich metaphor of his farewell West Point Address to the Corps”(1962), delivered while in his eighties and without notes,  still moves me:

The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen then, but with thirsty ear, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield. But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

I should mention as a kind of postscript, my liking for the compassion and eloquence typifying President Obama’s speeches.  It hasn’t anything to do with politics.  Not since Ronald Reagan “the great communicator,” has any President done it so well.

Before I leave off, there’s one speech, this by Eisenhower, that didn’t make my list, since  you squeezed me down to five picks.  It’s the speech in which he warned of “the military-industrial complex.”  Often quoted, Eisenhower had originally drafted “the military-industrial-congressional complex,” but then blinked.  No longer idealists, we now know the dismal reality of vested Congressional pecuniary self-interests in shaping today’s Realpolitik.   Had he kept it in, wow!

–rj

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Courage: life’s highest elegance

One who becomes agitated
sacrifices his mastery (Lao Tsu)

The astute Jane Austen wrote a book called Sense and Sensibility in the early 19th century.  By sense, Austen meant qualities like reason, good judgment, self-control; in contrast, sensibility dealt with feelings, impulsiveness, and passions.

In our own time, I would include under sense that consummate affinity some few people possess as social observer Joseph Epstein wonderfully put it for “unerringly true taste–with perfect manners, easy elegance of dress, an eye for the beautiful in nature and art, a penetrating instinct for judgment of people, and an independent spirit that accepts only those opinions learned in one’s own heart” (Snobbery:  The American Version, p. 81).

I can’t say I’ve met anyone completely encompassing this kind of daily venue of social grace, call it class, fitted seemingly for every season.  I know I’ve always wanted it, but failed miserably pursuing what often has seemed a retreating horizon.  I’d like to know the right wine; sauté like a Chelsea Hotel chef; be up-to-date on timely, important things; be fun, but not silly; empathetic; compassionate; forgiving.  And even more.

But I also ask myself how well does all this pan out when life rears up, hurling impediments across our way, suddenly, unexpectedly, as in contexts of distress or suffering.  In a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway famously dubbed such raw courage that defies circumstance as “grace under pressure.”  Musing about this, my memory retrieves just now a photo I had seen somewhere, featuring a rugged Hemingway, his fingers entwined around a rose.

I saw it last night, a beautiful thing, watching on cable a handsome young man with buoyant smile, in a wheelchair, legs severed in Boston’s marathon bombing, throw the first pitch at Fenway to loud cheers, an inspiration.  So young and such transcendence!

I think this is what Hemingway meant in calling such courage grace.  For me, it’s life’s crowned jewel.  Better, its highest elegance.

Be well and do good,

rj

One brave poet: Osip Mandelstam

I’ve always hankered after Russian literature since first imbibing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky as a teenager, supplemented by later readings in Chekhov and Pasternak.  For a while, I even took up Russian and can still read the cyrillic script.  On several occasions, I’ve taught Russian literature:  Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Cherry Orchard.  In 1986, I was offered a government stipend for an advanced seminar in Russian literature, though I turned it down because of other interests at the time.

Tolstoy House
Tolstoy House

In 2000, I took a group of students to Russia in the cruel month of January.  We saw where Chekhov composed most of his plays and stories during his short life.  One of my students was allowed to play his piano.  In St. Petersburg, we visited the apartment in which Dostoevsky spent his final years and saw the desk on which he wrote his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov.  My own big moment came when we traveled 120 miles southwest of Moscow, traversing cratered roads of an unraveling post-Soviet nation, to Tula and nearby Nastaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s lovingly preserved residence.

Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam

Though the triad of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov spring to mind when we think of Russian literary prowess, the truth is that poetry may be its greatest legacy, beginning with Pushkin and continuing into our modern era with poets like Akhmatova, Pasternak, Brodsky and Mandelstam.  I think it was Mandelstam who said that Russia is the only country that takes poetry seriously enough that you can get killed for it, which is just what happened to Mandelstam in the Stalin purge of 1937.

I started up again about Russian poetry after reading a 2011 GuernicaNadezhda Mandelstam interview with my favorite contemporary American poet, W. S. Merwin, in which Osip Mandelstam’s name came up in connection with the complexities of translation.  Initially exiled, Mandelstam  covertly composed subsequent poetry in his head, repeating his verse to his wife, the remarkable Nadezhda Mandelstam, who committed them to school exercise notebooks and then to memory in the event of police seizures, preserving his legacy following his death in the Gulag in 1938.

She would later write two remarkable books (Against All Hope and Hope Revived) in the late 1960s, detailing the sordid story of Stalinist repression of the arts and her efforts to preserve her husband’s mature legacy.  It was thought that his work was done after 1928 prior to his initial exile to Voronezh, but thanks to Nadezhda, 200 of his exile poems have survived. Today, Mandelstam is largely regarded as Russia’s principal twentieth century poet, though he died at just 47.

Here is his most famous poem, clearly an attack on Joseph Stalin, that began his troubles.  Mandelstam never cowered defending freedom.  At the outset, you should be aware that poetry generally suffers greatly in translation.  In Russian, it packs a wallop with its density of nuance that the average reader would pick-up on immediately.  (See notes.)

We live without feeling the country beneath our feet,
our words are inaudible from ten steps away. (1)
Any conversation, however brief,
gravitates, gratingly, toward the Kremlin’s mountain man. (2)
His greasy fingers are thick as worms, (3)
his words weighty hammers slamming their target. (4)
His cockroach moustache seems to snicker, (5)
and the shafts of his high-topped boots gleam.
Amid a rabble of scrawny-necked chieftains,
he toys with the favors of such homunculi.
One hisses, the other mewls, one groans, the other weeps;
he prowls thunderously among them, showering them with scorn.
Forging decree after decree, like horseshoes,
he pitches one to the belly, another to the forehead,
a third to the eyebrow, a fourth in the eye.
Every execution is a carnival
that fills his broad Ossetian chest with delight.

 Notes:

1.    our words are inaudible from ten steps away:  Need to be judicious in conversation.  Stalin was reputed to use listening devices in the Kremlin to check on colleagues.

2.   mountain man:  allusion to Stalin’s coarse background.

3.   greasy fingers:  It was widely circulated that Stalin employed listening devices to keep tabs on his Kremlin colleagues.

4.   his words weighty hammers:  Stalin had a marked Georgian accent.

5.   cockroach mustache:  obviously refers to Stalin’s landmark mustache.  Derives from a Russian fairy tale in which a cockroach and a cat confront one another.

Mandelstam wasn’t your likely hero.  Frail with a weak-heart and clearly aware of the dangers of the Stalin regime, he nonetheless devoted his art, not only to beauty, but to human freedom.  Somehow I had missed out on him in my Russian pursuits.  Maybe now I can make amends.

–rj

The Smile that Hides the Soul

I have a number of books that supposedly clue you into discerning the personalities of people based on their physical gestures, things like hands on hips,  the turned up corners of the mouth, the wrinkling of the forehead or lifting of the eyebrows,  etc.  The problem is that body language can differ from one culture to another.  While close spatial contact with lots of touching may convey caring in, say, a Hispanic culture, it’s apt to raise the specter of territorial invasion among white North Americans.  I know families, for example, that simply don’t touch.

My take on kinetics, or body language, is to approach the subject with caution.  But it’s more than this, too.  I’m simply suspicious of reductionist approaches that promise us a mirroring of the human psyche and, often as not, a means to its manipulation, if we just read the body cues right and fine-tune our approach.

No, we humans are offspring of eons of evolutionary survival stratagems that camouflage thoughts, and with good reason in a world that often cannot tolerate a baring of the soul with its sonar witness to salient distress as a life component we’re uncomfortable  acknowledging.  We feel safer behind walls.

Thus we’re prone to exercising considerable dissembling skills to avoid alienating our fellows and exacerbating our isolation, for no matter what form physical pain, anguish, and grief assume, there’s always the immense individuality of suffering which even the greatest empathy cannot transcend.

Emily Dickinson, like all gifted poets grounded in sensory acuity, knew this well, typically drawing upon Nature for analogies of  concealment, undermining the conflation of appearance with reality in “The Wounded Deer Leaps Highest” with its successive examples of a deer’s leap, a gashed rock, a sprung trap, and, in the human realm, flushed cheeks and even laughter, suggesting a dynamism masking covert wounding:

A wounded deer leaps highest
I’ve hunter the hunter tell;
Tis but the ecstasy of death,
And then the brake is still.

The smitten rock that gushes,
The trampled steel that springs;
A cheek is always redder
Just where the hectic stings!

Mirth is the mail of anguish,
In which it caution arms
Lest anybody spy the blood
And “You’re hurt exclaim.

As the closing stanza poignantly bears witness, we put on a brave act hiding our grief, as though expressing it were a weakness, with resulting pity simply reinforcing our isolated fate.  Culture has insisted men, in particular, should be very good at this.

We are complex in our emotions and body language.  In the space of three years, Dickinson  would lose 26 friends and relatives to death; but she also knew that life goes on and the game must still be played.

–rj

 
   
   
   
   
   
 

Exploring the motives behind the Boston bombings

In Kentucky, this week brought news of a prisoner at the Eastern Kentucky Correctional Complex dead of stab wounds to his neck inflicted by another inmate.  Authorities are presently still investigating the incident, but what baffles even more is learning that the perpetrator was up for parole this June, or just two months from now.  Once again, human motives entice with their mystery and form the bedrock of modern psychology.

It was my wife who brought this anomaly to my attention, and I replied that maybe it was poor impulse control, which some experts have suggested lies behind a great deal of violence and criminality.  Having worked with juvenile youth in trouble with the law, I find much to support this view.  I also know that people, any of us, have different thresholds or breaking points, for acting out unconscious motives.

This leads to the great question as to whether human beings are fundamentally rational creatures.  The great Irish writer, Jonathan Swift, apparently didn’t think so, writing Gullivers Travels to debunk such pretense.  You’ll remember that in this precursor to Planet of the Apes,  the horses are invested with rationality in contrast to the Yahoos, or human kind, swayed by their passions.  Voltaire wasn’t far behind Swift in harboring a similar view in Candide, in which humanity’s misdeeds obliterate any claim to rationality.

In modern literature, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, and Golding’s Lord of the Flies continue in the same vein.  You might say it’s Thomas Hobbes’ philosophical dismissal of Man put to fiction:  “The source of every crime is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions.”

Freud and Jung, though perhaps relegated to the back burner these days, established that there lies in all of us powerful, unconscious dynamics motivating our behavior.  We are not always who we seem to be and, thus, may not always comprehend our own motivations.

Last week began with terror in Boston instigated by two brothers supposedly in their embrace of a militant, or jihadist, Islam.  I would quarrel with this, for their motives may again lie deeper in the quagmire of the psychological.  After their violence, the younger brother returned to campus and gave a lift in his car to another student.  Neighbors have commented on their surprise that these two could commit such mayhem.  The wife and in-laws of the older brother have expressed shock.

I think we’ve all seen this script before.  People can be masters of disguise, fooling neighbors, families and friends.  Now comes word from the New York police commissioner that the brothers may have been planning on skipping down to New York to party in the aftermath.  Such callousness, of course, reflects a total lack of conscience that made their savagery possible.

My point is that they may have been in denial of their true motivation, rooted in envy and personal ineffectuality and living primarily on welfare. Now the survivor is offering the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as shallow justification, not radicalization by foreign sources.  More likely, in my mind, they were out to make headlines, buoying up their low self-esteem.  Humans, however, are frequently unable to deal with dissonant truths about themselves and thus will resort to rationalization.  As Sir Walter Scott aptly put it in Marmion, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”

I haven’t read him, but Dr. Mark Leary of Duke University has written richly on the subject of motivation, twelve books in all.  One of the biggest motivators, according to Leary, seems to be our need to impress our fellows.  This helps explain the lust for social status–the big house, luxurious car, making big bucks, obtaining power.  But for those who can’t find entry, low self esteem may result in a murderous spite bent on inflicting pain.  Misdeeds like those of Aurora,  Virginia Tech,  or Newtown and, now Boston, are  wrought by losers seeking to get even.  As such, they will always constitute a clear and present danger.

Come to think of it, it was the Tsarnaev uncle in Maryland who publicly called his nephews “losers. ” He got that right!

–rj

Of Emily Dickinson and Spring Blooms

Foxgloves in the Homestead garden
Foxgloves in the Homestead garden

The opening and the Close Of Being, are alike
Or differ, if they do,
As Bloom upon a Stalk–(1089)

I’ve always liked Emily Dickinson’s poetry.  She has this pithy way of putting things in a few, well-chosen words; a prism mind that turns things over for a thorough look; a quiet defiance that goes its own way with surprisingly modern skepticism;  a willingness to break free from fettering meter; best, a probing of the human heart in its pangs of love and grief.  I admire her honest wrestlings with God and matters of eternity.  She wanted to believe, but not by forfeiting her intelligence.

I  like how nature finds its way into virtually all the nearly 1800 poems she largely wrote in her upstairs bedroom at the Homestead, looking out on the main street of Amherst.  Every sort of plant and creature seemingly populates her poetry, including not only birds, flowers, butterflies and bees, but caterpillars and even snakes.  She kept an album of pressed plants and often slipped a flower in with her many letters.  While few Amherst villagers may have known the woman in white was a consummate poet, everyone knew she kept a great garden.

A holdout in that era’s high tide of Christian belief, she adopted her garden as her daily church, a  place of intimacy with the divinity of life:

Some keep the Sabbath going to church__
I keep it staying at home
With a Bobolink for a Chorister–
And an Orchard for a Dome–

Some keep the Sabbath in surplice–
I, just wear my Wings–
And insterad of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton–sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman–
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last–
I’m going, all along (236)

That garden and its seedlings had disappeared by 1915, when the Homestead’s attached conservatory, her father’s gift, was also dismantled.  Fortunately, beginning with 2005, that garden has been lovingly restored, based on diligent research, to its likely layout and, along with the Homestead, is now owned by Amherst College.

I bring up the subject of gardens because gardening is something I’m fond of as well. Every spring I re-thumb my garden magazines and books, looking for new ways to retool bloom and beauty.  This year, I thought of Emily Dickinson and my several visits to the Homestead.  Since it’s rare I can get back to Amherst in my birth state of Massachusetts, why not the next best thing and find room for a Dickinson look-a-like in my backyard, a space swimming in the flowers that Emily loved like violets and arbutus, daffodils, tulips and crocuses, daisies and roses.

Flowers, “Nature’s sentinels” (912), launched meditative moods in Dickinson, who drew upon metaphysical poets like Herbert and Vaughan for nuances of the Infinite.

For her, nature’s seasonal rounds resonated life’s own temporal rhythms with its undulations of joy and sadness; the immediacy of nowness and the anguish of letting go; the fact of mortality, and yet hints of something more.  That works for me as well. –rj

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Overthrowing the tyranny of custom

I have always cared a great deal about animals.  I don’t know where it comes from, but I remember as a child wanting to take in every stray dog.  In 1996, I adopted a vegetarian diet to align my lifestyle with my conscience.  I wish I had done so much earlier but, for too many years, I had simply subscribed unquestionably to a pervasive culture.

The role of culture, often reinforced by religion, makes for an interesting study, since it may well be the primary instigator of human behavior and, unfortunately, a seminal source for a myriad repertoire of injustice, malice and cruelty practiced by humanity pervasively across the centuries.  As moderns, while we’ve made progress, we’re still on a steep climb.

In India, a land bound by tradition much like other Southeast Asian nations, practices sanctioning discrimination inherent with an age old caste system fell with the birth of an independent India in 1947, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and led by its first prime minister, Jawarharlal Nehru.  There are no more Untouchables, a formidable achievement that hints humanity can often mend its ways.

Earlier, in the United States, slavery was abolished through the courageous intervention of Abraham Lincoln, though it took a civil war, 600,000 deaths, and Lincoln’s own life.  Not long after, in 1867, Tsar Alexander III emancipated Russia’s serfs.

Not long ago, but only in 1920 under the 19th Amendment, did women achieve the right to vote in the United States.  It was as late as 1971 before women could vote in progressive Switzerland in national elections and not until 1991 that they could vote on local issues in all cantons.  At last, conservative Saudi Arabia will allow women to vote, beginning in 2015.  They’re still, however, prohibited from driving cars under penalty of imprisonment and/or flogging.  Disenfranchisement of women extends to many orthodox synagogues and Roman Catholic constituencies as well, barring leadership and voting privileges.  Catholic women cannot become priests, bishops or cardinals, the latter obviously eliminating their inclusion in selecting a pope.

In my lifetime we’ve made considerable inroads against the weight of traditional custom that forbade birth control, abortion and equal employment opportunity.  I grew-up seeing the last vestiges of segregation fall before activist resistance and court decree.  Currently, gays and lesbians are on the threshold of gaining their own civil liberties that include same sex marriage and adoption rights.  Looking back to a little more than a century ago, it seems incredulous that someone like writer Oscar Wilde would be tried in court and sentenced to a multiple year jail term, which ultimately broke the man.

I first became aware of the role of culturally sanctioned wrong doing in preparing to teach Voltaire’s satirical parody of custom in Candide, which I heartily recommend if you haven’t read it.  Slavery, militarism, the abuse of women, the hypocrisy of religion, they all receive their fair share of Voltaire’s scorn.  What really opened my eyes, however, was Voltaire’s taking on the scourge of war that continues to plague mankind, often buttressed with the sanctimonious verbiage of patriotic shibboleths and conferment of divine blessing.  As Voltaire astutely observed in one of his many letters, wars kill and maim far more than all our natural disasters.

As I’ve said, fighting to undo custom is still a steep climb, or hard sell. That’s what makes custom such an insidious threat: “But we’ve always done it this way!”  Like morning oatmeal, we imbibe the prejudices of our parents, who learned them from theirs.  Unquestioning, we adopt the status quo invested by time and institutions. Our brains dulled by habit, we believe what we’re told by our informed guardians: the government and press.  We find fact in the textbooks of our schools, oblivious to their omissions.  We like sameness.  We grow accustomed to our chains.

I give thanks to the avatars that make custom tremble by engendering new ways of thinking rooted in compassion:  the sanctity of animal as well as human life; the right to individuality; the implementing of economic equality; the elimination of political and religious oppression; the accessibility of universal health care; the end of pejorative labeling of the mentally distressed; the right to death with dignity; the healing of a wounded, dying Earth;  the elimination of the scourge of war.

They crowd into my mind:  Gandhi, Nehru, Lincoln, Goldman, Sinclair, Baldwin, Friedan, Sanger, Carson, Singer, Mandela, King, Mill, Voltaire– and so many more–emissaries of Light, their torches lifted high, showing the way to a better world.

I dream most of all of that day when it will truly “be on earth as it is in heaven,” and “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4 [KJV:  Cambridge ed.]).

–rj

Further Reflections on the Mediterranean Diet Findings

Michael Milken
Michael Milken

There’s been a lot of euphoria, I think mistaken, over the recent research  findings evaluating the Mediterranean diet.  (See my earlier post, “On the New Mediterranean study:  Proceed with Caution” [March 1, 2013.])  Not only was the alternative low fat diet administered in pedestrian fashion,  e. g., inadequate counseling, but a substantial number of those on the Mediterranean diet suffered heart attacks or strokes.  We need to remember that none of the participants had a history of either at the outset of  the experiment.

But let me be fair.  We’re all different and there’s no plug-in diagnostic that’s going to yield a universal physical metric.  This applies to diet, surely, and explains the plethora of approaches which work for some, but not others.  What we do know is that following a diet that emphasizes complex carbohydrates, low sugar, minimal saturated fats, and plenty of nutrient dense fruits and vegetables along with reduced sodium intake is beneficial.

The Mediterranean diet thus moves in the right direction, but would be even more effective were it to reduce meat and dairy product content.  We might then see not only reduction in coronary disease, but its reversal, which truly low fat diets (10% consumption of total calories) have consistently demonstrated in extended government studies.

But let me bring up the Michael Milken story.  Do you remember him?  One of Wall Street’s top investors, he was indicted by the government in 1989 for racketeering and securities fraud and served 22 months in prison.  What followed is a story that moves us with its redemption.

Worse than prison, Mike was diagnosed in 1993 with Stage IV prostate cancer at just age 46.  Biopsy indicated it had metastasized and spread to his lymph nodes; consequently, his doctor advised that his scheduled prostatectomy wouldn’t save him.

Mike responded where others might have given-up, launching vigorous research, founding the CaP Cure foundation, and making major changes in his diet by adopting a nonfat, vegetarian regimen.  For Mike, a typical diet will feature mushroom barley soup, a tofu mock egg salad sandwich replete with tofu, carrots and lettuce, and a black bean and corn salad, accompanied by a soy drink.

Mike also founded and heads the Prostate foundation, working closely with Major League Baseball and matching every donated dollar.

It’s now 20-years since that fatal diagnosis.  Mike?  He’s still out there going strong and giving hope to thousands.

You’ll find many of Mike’s favorite low fat, soy-based foods, compiled with the aid of Beth Ginsberg, a grad of the Culinary Institute of America, gathered in The Taste for Living World Cookbook.  With its subtly delicious recipes, it’s a best buy.