I’ve never formally studied Walt Whitman’s poetry, despite a graduate degree in English. That’s because I made Victorian Literature my major interest, with modern American and British Literature secondary. Still, I’ve read his landmark Leaves of Grass many times, America’s psalmody in its pioneering free verse; in its robustness, an encomium of America were it doing more than lip service to the American dream.
It says much about Whitman, out-of-joint with his generation much like contemporary Emily Dickinson, uncomfortable with the cultural shibboleths of middle class Amherst. Perhaps influenced by his father’s radical views on politics and religion, Whitman emerges an essential element of America’s constant of progressive rebellion, resistant to mercenary interests that gave us slavery, wealth inequality, desecration of nature, racial injustice, and imperialism.
If you’re looking for a summation of Leaves of Grass, nothing excels his “Credo” in the poem’s Preface. Conscious of America’s failure to live up to its promise, “Credo” exemplifies its gulf and champions its realization:
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, andyour very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
I remember Japan fondly, falling in love at first sight. It was twelve years after WWII and a place remarkably different from anywhere else and, in large measure, it has remained so.
It had been a long flight from Travis AFB in California, a brief stop in Honolulu for a crew change, then on to Wake Island, where President Truman had a few years before confronted a defiant General MacArthur, then on to Yamoto Air Station, 23 miles from Tokyo.
I was 17, an airman headed for Korea for the next 12 months. Yamoto meant processing before continuing on a C-47 for Osan AFB near Seoul.
Japan was then this kaleidoscope of sensuous bombast—human drawn rickshaws, coolies in straw conical hats, buckets suspended on long poles between their shoulders, and everywhere, women garbed in flowery kimonos on densely packed streets.
I would return to Japan twice on rest leave, the first time centering on Tokyo and its Ginza, even then, bustling with elegant department stores, game shops, restaurants, art galleries, theaters and night clubs, illuminated at night by a swarm of neon lights rivaling those of Vegas and New York. I would visit the grounds of the Imperial Palace, the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial, and the Great Buddha of Kamakura bronze statue originally cast in 1252.
One of the supreme highlights was keeping company with American Quaker friends in Tokyo, who arranged a get-together with university students, fluent in English. They gave me a different war vista in narrating the American fire bombing of Tokyo, March 9-10, 1945, killing 100,000 civilians and leaving 1,000,000 homeless. I learned that it’s the victors who write the history we imbibe and I remain moved by their civility to me, an American serviceman.
A few days later, I journeyed by car with my friends, laboring up twisting mountain roads to the shrine city of Nikko 97 miles from Tokyo, where I lived several days in traditional Japanese manner, sleeping in minimalist fashion on a tatami soft mat made with rice straw fill, rolled out on the floor, then layered with a Shikifuton, or thin mattress, and a buckwheat hull pillow. To keep warm, an added Kakefuton , or soft quilt.
Following a hot bath, dressed in kimono, served a fish-seaweed meal, no links to an external world, I slept soundly.
I’m not certain how prevalent this ancient sleeping mode survives in modern Japan, though I know traditional inns abound in Kyoto, that magical city of April cherry blossom.
On my second visit, I took a long distance train from Tokyo to Fukuoka, one of Japan’s most populated cities on the southern island of Kyushu. I wish I could remember what I took in there, but I draw a blank, though I recall being dazzled by its department store elevators, on each floor, a young girl, often giggling at this lanky Westerner, helping you get on and off the escalator, and from my train window a passing landscape of brick houses contrasting with the fragile wooden structures dominant in central Honshu, Japan’s largest island.
There’s much I admire in the Japanese culture, still unique in spite of the cultural leveling you see in other nations, or what can be called Americanization, hastened by film and TV.
They’re surely the most hygienic-centered people I’ve known, indulging nearly daily in the hot bath and painstaking to remove their shoes before entering your home.
Streets are free of trash, yet you won’t find trash cans.
Politeness is the hallmark of Japanese culture, san often added to to a surname to render respect. It extends even to the language’s several pronouns, a tier gauged approach to courtesy.
Some of the customs are especially endearing. If given a gift with the donator present, you don’t open it, lest you hurt their feelings or, worse, feel pressured to masquerade your dislike on unwrapping it.
You reciprocate by sending a gift, usually candies.
Etiquette extends to not eating on a train or while walking.
Not interrupting
Not talking loud.
Not bragging.
Then there’s the ubiquitous honesty. Unlike in many countries, you don’t have to safeguard your pockets in a train station, not even on a packed commuter train.
Leave a camera on checking out of your hotel, housekeepers will see it to the registration desk.
You don’t shake hands or hug, bowing instead as a way of modesty and respect.
Sample your rice first, before nibbling other dishes, then go back to the rice, viewed as a palate cleanser.
Japanese gardens obsess me. I’ve always wanted one. With their emphasis on simplicity, harmony, and verisimilitude with nature, they confer sanctuary from everyday bustle and induce an inner calm. Many Japanese homes feature their own courtyard garden, bringing nature close.
Then there’s the tea ceremony, derived from Zen Buddhism, emphasizing mindfulness and bonding between host and guest. Thankfully, it remains a revered ceremony.
As for crime, it’s rare in Japan, mass shootings virtually unknown. Contrast with this, the 400 mass killings (4 or more dead per incident) in the U.S. in the first six months of 2023.
Unlike America, it’s not about doing your own thing. It’s thinking about others and not bringing shame to your family.
But Japan’s changing, inevitably because unless it does, it will simply vanish in several generations. The Japanese aren’t replacing themselves and unless they do, its present population of 124 million will dwindle to 87 million by 2070.
Consequently, traditionally xenophobic and homogeneous Japan has turned to immigration to solve its labor needs and sustain its population. 3,000,000 immigrants now call Japan home, triple the number in 1990. They come from not only Asia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia especially, but from Africa and the Middle East. There are cities where 10-15% are foreign born. Today, you’ll find 113 mosques across Shinto-Buddhist Japan. In 1999, there were 15.
Will Japan’s new citizens bring their resentments with them, as in France, England, and Sweden?
Will they end-up in ghettoes of the unassimilated?
As their numbers swell with immigration and higher birthrates, will they overwhelm the world’s most exemplary society?
Will the Japanese fade like countless fauna and flora into memory, their substantial contributions to civilization relegated to history books like those of the fabled Pharaohs’ Egypt or Nebuchadnezzar’s Hanging Gardens of Babylonia?
In sum, what happens when the Japanese don’t look Japanese?
I grew up a New England child and though I’ve lived many places since, my memories of its moods abide: salt spray air; the nocturnal thunder of pounding waves as I drifted into sleep; Yankee villages, replete with white steepled churches and verdant commons; stone walls; Concord’s Old Manse, its bridge, and Lexington, where my country labored into birth; summer expeditions to Rockport’s boat-laden harbor and wharf artistry; harvesting clam shells on a Salem beach; warm chowder on cold days; Cape Cod and sand dunes; Martha’s Vineyard and sea-drenched Nantucket; Ted Williams, the Celtics and Bruins; the Boston Pops and Freedom Trail; undulating rural roadways framed by mountains, freshly painted in autumnal hues; snowfall and hushed landscape; my beloved Newburyport, where I went to school and schoolmates, their faces luminous, triumphant over time. My speech betrays its accents. This summer, it’s Maine again—lighthouses, pristine beaches, Camden, Bar Harbor, Acadia. Ice cream! The poet Wordsworth wrote that “the child is father of the man.” I can’t speak for others, but in my case, it’s true. —rj
A year ago today, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. Bravely, the Ukrainians have held out, despite massive loss of life and daily drone and missile attacks on civilian infrastructure. Fighting remains intense in Bakhmut, with many killed on both sides.
It’s a ruthless enemy, resorting to crimes against humanity, as the mass burial sites of Bucha and Izium bear witness, hundreds of civilians shot, their bodies evidencing torture and mutilation. Wheat fields have been bombed, Ukrainian children deported to Russia.
Western military assistance has been crucial to the Ukrainian resistance. That’s now in jeopardy, given increasing malaise in the West to support Ukraine. In the U.S., a newly elected House majority of Republicans presses for a funding cutoff.
If this happens, Ukraine loses the war and previous Russian imperialism (Chechnya, Georgia, Moldavia), continues and its contagion spreads. Think China, Iran, North Korea.
Loss of Western political will is demagogue Putin’s best hope.
I don’t know if he still walks the planet. He’d be at least 85. I tried looking him up on the Internet, but there were hundreds with his name.
He was just a young prof teaching an evening course, IntroductiontoLiterature, at Eastern Michigan University. He would change my life.
The course featured OedipusRex, GulliversTravels, TheGreatGatsby, AFarewelltoArms; short stories by Mansfield, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Jackson.
He had a unique way of teaching, like a language teacher, parsing a verb cluster, focusing on verbal inflection. Literature became electric, pulsating with nuance.
It was beautiful! It was inspiring.
He taught me to see behind the literal—that good writers, like their poet kin, weave multiplicity; that the literal isn’t the text. It’s what lies underneath. Hemingway critics dubbed it “the iceberg technique,” three quarters hidden.
Words were never simple things. They were latent with connotation.
He taught me the subtlety of irony, the discrepancy between statement and meaning, expectation and event, appearance and reality; the role of symbol in undergirding theme and prognosticating outcome.
In short, he taught me how to read: Good readers were translators. Literature exhibits its own grammar of codes and rules, imposing a specific exegesis.
He and I clicked. He had wanted me to take a creative writing course with him, but I had other priorities then.
He urged me to pursue a Ph. D. and join the profession.
Two years later, I began the long journey that would define my life.
Being an English prof won’t get you riches, but making hoards of money was never my life acumen. Ironically, the money pursuit may make us poorer. Saul Bellow, my favorite novelist, conveyed my aversion to the Faustian wager aptly in SeizetheDay: “Uch! How they love money, thought Wilhelm. They adore money! Holy money! Beautiful money! It was getting so that people were feeble-minded about everything except money. While if you didn’t have it you were a dummy, a dummy!”
I owe considerably to a young zealous professor with Keatsian fervor for the aesthetic dominion, who gave me entrance to “the milk of Paradise” (Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”).
I’ve always had this curiosity about art, but feel I’m an outsider. I simply lack the wherewithal needed to unlock its portals. On the several occasions I’ve visited art galleys, whether in LA, Santa Fe, Paris, Florence, Rome, and Madrid, I tried vainly to stare paintings down, hoping a mindfulness approach might unleash an avalanche of revelation. A good many of the contemporary paintings could be hung upside down and I wouldn’t know the difference.
Scroll back to summer, 1978, and a graduate course in Southern California. A classmate invites me to go with him to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a treasure trove of art, in fact, the largest in the U.S. west of the Mississippi.
An hour in, I grow bored, regretting my hasty acceptance, hoping my friend will share my mood.
Another hour idles by when he tells me he’s exhausted. He’s looked at three paintings. Really, just three! “There’s just too much to take-in,” he says. What does he see that I can’t? Fetch me my sunglasses and tin cup!
Over the years, I’ve tried to close the gap, taking students to Aix-en Provence and its Cézanne vestiges, picnicking on a sun drenched afternoon with Mont Sainte Victoire, beloved haunt of many of his paintings, looming in the background.
We visited Arles, where moody van Gogh and tempestuous Gauguin put up with each other in the Yellow House in 1888, now gone, and take-in the local museum housing many of van Gogh’s renowned paintings.
As a literature student in grad school, I was familiar with the art poems of Keats, Browning, Rossetti and Ruskin’s aesthetics. Among modernists poets, Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Art, for all its brevity, haunts me almost daily in its depiction from Breugal’s “The Fall of Icarus” (1560) of human indifference in a context of suffering.
In the early 1980s, I invested in a Time Magazine multi-volume edition of art books, each volume with its illustrated slip case cover. Replete with photos, biography, and salient details of art masterpieces, it was the closest you come to the paint by numbers art kits I delighted in as a child.
When we moved to New Mexico in 2018, I grieved to have to donate these exquisite volumes to the performing arts school library where my wife previously taught. The moving cost was already mind-boggling and we had to jettison items replete with memory, especially my many books.
Why am I telling you this? Simply because art still engages me. Today, I came upon a poem by beloved poet Mary Oliver, commemorating German artist Franz Marc’s “Blue Horses” (1911) painting. I had never heard of him.
Franz Marc was a dedicated painter who pursued his craft assiduously, living several years in Paris and studying the great masters. Post impressionist Vincent van Gogh influenced him greatly in his broad brush strokes and vivid colors. Marc’s paintings often feature animals, especially horses, in combination with landscape to achieve an organic whole.
He shunned their objectification, contending for their mystical import: “I never, for instance, have the urge to paint animals ‘the way I see them,’ but rather the way they are. The way they themselves look at the world and feel their being.”
Marc was a color symbolist, colors having individual nuance: “Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two.”
This helps elucidate his latent purpose in “Blue Horses” (1911). He told his wife it dealt with his foreboding of an imminent war, though this was three years before Sarajevo, leading to the Great War that would result in a combined twenty million military and civilian dead.
In the painting, horses symbolize freedom and vitality: blue is the color of calm and peace and the male principle at the spiritual level; yellow, the female principle, gentle and sensuous; red, the inharmonious and conflictive.
Marc adored animals, seeing them as harmonious with nature and representing the good in the world.
In contrast, mankind has adulterated that natural tranquility through deceit and corruption. Only by reconciling with nature and art can Man find restoration to his better self.
Marc was right in his premonition of war and was called up. He would die of a shrapnel head wound at Verdun in 1916. He was 36.
Oliver’s poetry, like Marc’s art, is nearly always centered in nature, so scarce wonder Marc’s painting would lead to her moving poem tribute:
“FRANZ MARC’S BLUE HORSES”
I step into the painting of the four blue horses. I am not even surprised that I can do this. One of the horses walks toward me. His blue nose noses me lightly. I put my arm over his blue mane, not holding on, just commingling. He allows me my pleasure. Franz Marc died a young man, shrapnel in his brain. I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses what war is. They would either faint in horror, or simply find it impossible to believe. I do not know how to thank you, Franz Marc. Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually. Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us. Now all four horses have come closer, are bending their faces toward me as if they have secrets to tell. I don’t expect them to speak, and they don’t. If being so beautiful isn’t enough, what could they possibly say?
I may sometimes feel locked out when it comes to art, but as Oliver says so well, “Maybe the desire to make something beautiful is the piece of God that is inside each of us.” It explains why art engages me still.
Once again, fundamentalist Islam has shown its ugly side in the attempted slaying of Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. After two decades in hiding, he thought he was safe from Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa (1989). He was wrong.
We expect secular regimes to impose imprisonment and death on those who quarrel with their governance. Think Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and, currently center stage, Kim Yong- un, the Myanmar military regime, Xi Jinping, Putin, Maduro, and Ortega.
But religion sponsoring terrorism? For the most part, no; but not when it comes to much of the Islamic world.
Ironically, Islam has remained a largely medieval faith, inimical to change. A PEW Center Analysis (2019) surveyed 198 countries and territories and found that 40% had laws prohibiting blasphemy, defined as irreverence against God and sacred objects. 11% had laws against apostasy. Most of these countries are Muslim.
In 2019, Pakistan sentenced seventeen individuals to death for blasphemy, though the sentences haven’t been carried out as I write.
Iran executes “blasphemers” regularly as public policy, often as means to quell dissent, i.e., to oppose the regime is to oppose Allah.
Iranian execution doesn’t exclude stoning, usually for adultery. Human rights groups report that between 1980 and 2009, 150 people have been stoned to death. Currently, leaked prison documents reveal 51 individuals slated for execution by stoning, 23 of them women, 28 of them, men (thesunco.uk).
We are, indeed, back to ancient ways.
The publisher, Penguin, kept a stiff upper lip in pursuing publication of The Satanic Verses, despite death threats to its executives. An anomaly in a film-dominated time, books still had power to move the needle!
In 1989, Iran’s supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa and $3m award for killing Rushdie for blasphemy in writing The Satanic Verses (1988).
This is the same holy man who sanctioned the execution of up to 5,000 Iranians accused of conspiracy in 1988. He would die a natural death four months after his fatwa.
What followed the fatwa was a bloodbath, forcing Rushdie into hiding under protection of British intelligence. Though he would apologize, the current Ayatollah, Ali Khamenei, rejected his apology. (Rushdie has long since recanted his apology: “The worst thing I ever did.”)
Subsequent to the fatwa, thousands of Muslims assaulted bookstores, threatening to bomb those selling his book.
In 1991, the book’s Italian translator was knifed, but survived.
A few days later, Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death.
In 1993, the novel’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was shot, fortunately surviving his wounds.
In Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, two clerics protesting the fatwa, were fatally shot.
Riots broke out in Iran, India, and Pakistan. An estmated sixty people died.
Then, as now, many of Rushdie’s writing cohorts came to his defense, among them, Martin Amis, Joan Didion, Ian McEwan, and Christopher Hitchens.
I like how Steven King took on J. B. Dalton, one of three book chains refusing to sell Rushdie’s novel: “You don’t sell The Satanic Verses, you don’t sell Stephen King.” It reversed course immediately (vanityfair.com).
There were holdouts, arguing we should refrain from offending the sensitivities of others, much like what we hear in today’s cancel culture.
Among the holdouts was John le Carré, who wrote in The Guardian that “nobody has a God-given right to insult a great world religion and be published with impunity.”
In similar vein was former American president, Jimmy Carter, who wrote an op-ed in the NYT: “While Rushdie’s First Amendment freedoms are important, we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated.”
Rather strange, I think, for someone who permitted the detested shah to enter America, commencing the seizure of embassy hostages and the bringing to power a theocracy of repression and terror that remains with us still.
They were not isolated cases. Children’s author Roald Dahl depicted Rushdie in a letter to the London Times as a “dangerous opportunist” who “must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims.”
In a tear-down New York Review of Books piece, “The Salman Rushdie Case,” author Zoë Heller wrote that “a man living under threat of death for nine years is not to be blamed for occasionally characterizing his plight in grandiloquent terms. But one would hope that when recollecting his emotions in freedom and safety, he might bring some ironic detachment to bear on his own bombast” (NYRB, Dec. 12, 2012).
It seems a strange twist of fate that there should erupt a groundswell of sympathy for perpetrators of violence rather than for a fierce defender of freedom of speech. But such are the times in which we live, trolls abundant and thought police, both Left and Right, ready to pounce and, not infrequently, message death threats to those it deems adversaries.
The climax in sympathy for rampaging Muslims seen as victims occurred in the aftermath of the French satirical magazine CharlieHebdo being awarded a freedom of expression courage award by PEN America. You may remember that eight of its staff and four other people, including two policemen, were murdered in Paris by Islamic terrorists (January 2015). Some 200 prominent writers wrote to PEN, criticising it for “valorising selectively offensive material” (“Observer Opinion”: The Guardian, 14 August, 2022).
Fatwas need not emanate from distant ayatollahs. They can be home-brewed.
Rushdie got it right in his 1990 essay “In Good Faith,” that “individuals shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee whether to gods or to men.”
Let us hope that our wounded freedom warrior mends well and soon. Early medical reports say he will likely lose an eye, that nerves in his arm have been slashed, and his liver stabbed.
Freedom of speech defines a vital tenet of civilization as essential as the air we breathe, yet many of us take it for granted. We need voices like Rushdie’s to remind us that it can slip away and one day be gone if we forfeit being its sentries.
As for the repressive theocracy that prioritizes hate over love and its apologists, my sentiments lie with writer Jill Filopic’s eloquent summation:
Religion is a belief system. If yours cannot stand up to criticism, interrogation, and even mockery or insult – if you need to threaten or punish, up to the point of death, those who insult an idea you hold dear – it is perhaps worth asking if your beliefs are as strong as you believe they are. And this is the lesson of Salman Rushdie: it is courageous and necessary to stand up against tyrants and those who would use violence to suppress words and art – even when those tyrants claim to have God on their side” (The Guardian, 14 August, 2014).
Mornings are best for me, sun filling every recess, my thoughts teeming into overflow. I am one with the universe and find peace in the stillness it confers. And so let me share with you my morning musings:
Good writing doesn’t come easily, but not daring it stifles who we are and wish to be, for it’s with words we share ourselves, inspire others, find ourselves, and discover we’re not alone. —
Ancestral, marauding voices of nurturing hover like ghosts in the thoroughfares of the present, haunting our happiness. Only when we rebel and cease our clinging can we be free, and discovering freedom, make friends with ourselves.
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Good poetry observes Dickinson’s dictum to “tell the truth, but tell it slant,” for artifice sows the sensory and when we show and do not tell, we plough the soul.
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Think of good poetry as a bouquet and you’ll not go wrong, a unity of balance, imagery and shape, coalescing into what pleases and is, therefore, beautiful.
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Good poetry mines deeply, unafraid to tap crevices in obdurate darkness, cutting away the unessential, with right tools pursuing every line, digging earnestly, buoyed by passion and not a little of intelligence.
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I am in love with the stillness of every sunrise, elbowing the darkness and wakening the earth; its gift of new beginning, putting away yesterday’s might-have beens; the grace of another day to forgive and to love and be thankful.
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A good poem likes to think, but avoiding prose, sings its truth with beauty dressed in feeling.
—+
Why is it I must pass things by without seeing a thing once? This sky, for instance, pageantry of mercurial mood, of cloud, wind, storm and calm, pink dawns and flaming sunsets, pitch fork lightning and rolling thunder, starry nights and lunar mystery—the majesty of it—our imperial dome, to which we owe the breath of life.
—
If that lunar beacon we call the moon borrows its silvery brilliance from reflected light, so on earth we’d do well to debit blessings often owed to others.
—
Poetry has an uncanny way of happening, reviving the sensory, meant for survival, not truth dulled by habit, thriving on vagary. Through metaphor, our exile ends, we find connection, and receive benediction.
—
In every dawn I am like a newly lit candle, my thoughts spilling everywhere. I rejoice in the cardinal’s song, emissary of a new day redolent with promise, the chance to meet up with blessings I had overlooked yesterday.
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I admit to being passionate, sometimes to excess, sensitive to the disenfranchised, the voiceless, whether human or animal, strident in contesting a world that often plays unfairly and mutilates the Earth. I do not repent!
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May I cherish each day’s renewed grace and seek virtue only, knowing I cannot own what was never mine to keep, and that what matters lies in the present, for the past I can remember, but not retrieve and tomorrow I may not wake to see.
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Nothing wise hasn’t been said before, but the doing is hard, making it necessary to repeat.
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Good writers, like all artists, celebrate their audience, and not themselves, recreating the human stream that succeeds when readers exclaim, “I’ve been there!“ All else is but an unlit candle.
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Every quest begins with desire, but when desire lusts for possession, it commences our journey into sorrow.
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I knew age had caught up with me when, yesterday, my doctor said, “Now if you were my father, I’d advise….”
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As humans, we often filter what we perceive, influenced by our wishes and fears, born of past experience and, yes, the weight of culture and even our friends, fostering expectations as false as they are limiting. May I learn not always to believe what I sometimes think.
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It’s how I draw the bow and not the target. It’s the journey, not the goal.
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We are all story makers, each day our thoughts composing new chapters in life’s journey; but as in reading books, discerning between fantasy and truth, fiction and non-fiction, is essential to getting the story right and space for choosing action over inertia.
—
Yes, I admit to following a daily regimen that some may call being in a rut; but I much prefer its discipline, the empowerment it confers over my many infirmities, and the peace it affords in keeping chaos at bay and getting things done. I believe the passions must be made obedient to the mind. Or as Epictetus put it, “One person likes tending to his farm, another to his horse; I like to daily monitor my self-improvement.” Virtue doesn’t fall upon us out of the blue. We must toil at it.
—
I stumble in the darkness, the stars invisible, the earth’s silence my companion, but I do not tremble, for I know all things pass and the sun will surely rise and morning’s birds sing earth’s song.
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Letting go yesterday to indulge today and sow tomorrow.
—
A good poem is its own immensity, tributaries of nuance coalescing into unity. It is neither more nor less. It is itself.
Gretel Ehrlich, in her splendid The Solace of Open Spaces, writes that “a person’s life is not a series of dramatic events for which he or she is applauded or exiled but a slow accumulation of days, seasons, years, fleshed out by the generational weight of one’s family and anchored by a land-bound sense of place.”
This brings to mind Israel’s Bedouins, a traditionally nomadic people once populating a vast desert terrain, whom T. E. Lawrence understood and celebrated. And they reciprocated.
In his own time, Lawrence lamented the increasing fate of urbanized Bedouins, their loss of place and a way of life: “The perfectly hopeless vulgarity of the half-Europeanised Arab is appalling. Better a thousand times the Arab untouched.”
Much of that traditional way of life is but memory, especially in Israel, where Jewish settlers in the Negev have frequently seized Bedouin lands and driven out their people.
A vivid example is Twayil Abu Jarwal, one of forty unrecognized Bedouin villages in the Negev. Lying north of Beersheba and off the beaten track, you’ll not find it on any map.
It has no permanent structures for its 450 inhabitants, housed in tents, and clinging stubbornly to place and a way of life.
The village and its fields have been bulldozed so many times that no definitive account exists, perhaps between 25-50 times.
Still they cling to what’s long been theirs for two millennia or more.
After each razing, they re-assess, restore their sheltering tents, and plant anew.
Ilan Yeshurun, who directs the local Israel Land Authority, interviewed in the JerusalemReport, defends these demolitions: “This is not a village. It doesn’t exist on any map or in any legal registration. It’s only a village in the eyes of the Bedouin.”
Critics call it “urbicide,” an Israeli attempt to destroy perceived communities of potential Palestinian resistance. I think it more than that—a quest for expanding settler homesteads, akin to America’s violent history of seizure of Native American lands.
Meanwhile, some fifty illegal settler farms have sprung up and, politics as usual, nothing is done.
There are now just six Israeli authorized Bedouin villages. Presently, an extended Highway 6 thrusts its way into their traditional landscape, with Israeli plans to continue their policy of demolition and resettlement.
Understandably, Trayil Abu Jarwal villagers fear not only a loss of their land, but a way of life.
Thomas Wolfe famously wrote that “you can’t go home again,” meaning that time brings evolution and experience changes us, uprooting past constituents of our nurturing tied to place.
On the other hand, his dictum locates the modern tragedy of living in a mobile society. Home is an extension of ourselves, evoking sanctuary and fostering identity..
T. E. Lawrence had promised the Bedouins emancipation from the Ottomans Turks. But with takeover of Ottoman land by a modern Israel, they languish still, their cries unheard.
My post on Elon Musk yesterday elicited one of the largest Brimmings audiences in its twelve year history. I endeavored to be fair to all sides in assessing this polarizing man.
But I need to do a postscript that may help clarify what lies behind his thinking and purchase of one of the world’s leading media platforms and, notably, his resistance to censorship, whether of Left or Right. As he’s told us, he’ll not please either.
You see, I view him as essentially a libertarian, not conservative. Unfortunately, many conflate the terms. Libertarians agree with conservatives in opposing government interference with free enterprise, curtailing deficit spending, mandated protocols and alleged incursions on free speech.
They also agree with conservatives on a strong miliitary, capable of responding to threats to the nation’s security, gun ownership rights, etc.
On the other hand, libertarians believe abortion is a free choice option, a huge difference indeed. They support same sex marriage, judicial reform, and ending capital punishment. While they support a capable military, they eschew bloated spending and policies of overseas intervention that have led to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. They describe the Bush administration’s incursion in Iraq as “an obscene, depraved act of naked aggression”(libertarian.org).
Libertarians believe we need to follow George Washington’s counsel in his Farewell Address to avoid foreign intervention and alliances. We are not the world’s police or its savior.
Libertarians, unlike many conservatives, are hugely supportive of the environment: “We support a clean and healthy environment and sensible use of our natural resources. Private landowners and conservation groups have a vested interest in maintaining natural resources. Pollution and misuse of resources cause damage to our ecosystem. Governments, unlike private businesses, are unaccountable for such damage done to our environment and have a terrible track record when it comes to environmental protection…..We realize that our planet’s climate is constantly changing, but environmental advocates and social pressure are the most effective means of changing public behavior” (ontheissues.org).
On immigration, there is much that even Progressives could like: “We welcome all refugees to our country. Furthermore, immigration must not be restricted for reasons of race, religion, political creed, age, or sexual preference. We therefore call for the elimination of all restrictions on immigration, the abolition of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, and a declaration of full amnesty for all people who have entered the country illegally” (ontheissues.org).
Presently, Libertarians have grown to be the nation’s third largest party. In 2020, they took 20% of the vote in Virginia; surprisingly, 9.4% of the vote in my native Massachusetts.
As the libertarian label suggests, they advocate a live-and-let live approach with priority on personal liberty and limited government.
Musk is an enigma when it comes to his politics. He says he’s half Democrat, half-Republican; in short, a moderate. Despite his avowal, he exhibits a strong libertarian streak, emphasizing citizen polity over government imposition.
Revealingly, our space-minded mogul has hinted at what a Mars government might look like, or oriented along libertarian lines with people voting directly on issues: “I think that’s probably better, because the potential for corruption is substantially diminished in a direct versus a representative democracy” (metro.co.uk).
We know his friend and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is decidedly libertarian, as Musk admits: “I’m somewhat libertarian, but Peter’s extremely libertarian” (newyorker.com).
In January he tweeted “True national debt, including unfunded entitlements, is at least $60 trillion – roughly three times the size of the entire US economy. Something has got to give” (nationalinterest.com). Libertarians, ardent critics of social security, would hardly disagree.
A libertarian mindsets goes far in contextually explaining his vociferous resistance to censorship and government interference. As a visionary, he outdistances conservatives with his free-wielding views on needful social reforms ranging from judicial, military, environment, abortion and free trade.
Like libertarians, he exhibits affinity with Victorian Britain’s liberals, vociferous advocates of limited government, non-censorship and social reform (e.g., Bentham, Mill, Gladstone).
It may be limiting to label protean Elon a libertarian, but as American poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849–1916) famously put it, “When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”
Brimmings: up from the well 