Time for a change. Feeling it in a lot of ways. After months of steady workouts, I’ve been finding too many convenient ways to let the day slip by. Still feel better than I have in years, but the days seem to have got the best of me. Excuses, procrastination and sometimes sheer lethargy and exhaustion got a foothold.
The next few days will be busy as hell, too. Got to get to school early and pay the piper and keep paying…
That means getting to bed here before 1:00 a.m. And that means this writing—which I have been avoiding too—has to put to bed before any real thoughts flow. Tomorrow is a new day.
Like birds of a feather, we gather together, ‘Cuz they’re feeling exactly like you…
~John Prine
I am not afraid of being a white minority.
I had lunch today with a Jamaican drummer, a Ugandan farmer, and a Senagalese potter. I don’t say this out of pride, for we gathered together simply because we are the old guys working in a young persons’ place. Our conversation was far from noble (unless unpretentiousness is noble) but simply eating together was an experience of nobility–a subtle reminder of what is possible. I have lived long enough and broadly enough to recognize the essential principles of goodness–‘and that has been my continuing consolation. Sappy as it sounds: we are all practically the same. But, this fear of being a minority is the core of what is powering the republican campaign. It is a profound irony for a platform that cherishes individual freedom, but it is still a stunning reality. Our 350 years or so of democratic experience has revealed both the sublimity and baseness of majority rule, so much so that I am equally fearful if either party gains the upper hand, but it does not appear that any true and noble warrior will arrive on the battlefield to save us.
So we are left to ourselves and whatever core of nobility that is within us.
As a white American, I am not immune to the angst of possibility. White America has distorted and abused the inalienable rights of minority Peoples time and time again, and if life teaches us anything, it is that the day of reckoning will always come. I remember reading one day the words of some European philosopher who wrote, “that which is not sustainable cannot continue.” These words have lingered in my consciousness for many years. Ever the optimist, I used this sentence to deny and belittle the fatalists among us: the seas will not rise; the next apocalyptic war till not happen; famines will not engulf us, and change will not destroy us because I believed in the power of collective wisdom to act before the tipping point of inevitability.
I don’t believe that anymore.
As a teacher at a pricey independent school struggling to be inclusive, I have been forced to sit through dreary and pedantic seminars about our white privilege. At the time, I despised being lectured to and admonished by pathetic apologists for my race. In my mind (or at least my previous mind) the sins of our fathers and mothers is not passed on to the sons and daughters, most of whom are belly-full of optimism and are freshly bound by enlightenment to a new paradigm of equality and justice. My whiteness is not a blemish any more than a deformed branch is a tree. It is, however, a dark and menacing shade to any non-white who lives “beneath” it. To not see this, recognize this, and not be appalled by this is to be a sub-human dirt-bag.
It is the tribalism of race that makes us racist. To ignore this is fantasy and hyperbole. Moving beyond that tribalism is a monumental task, but also a necessary journey—an odyssey—that we must make to create a pure democracy in line with the original nobility of our Constitution. For the most part, the word “racist” is obsolete. No one really knows what it means, and we throw the word around with reckless and dangerous volleys of stinging venom. Racist has become more of a root word, a prefix we attach with casual abandon for the purposes of expediency to whatever suits our point of view and whatever belittles those who oppose us. Here and now, the loose and reckless “racist” word is being thrown about with righteous smugness by the left and attached to any person who expresses an inkling of solidarity with the republican platform. Incessant derision only widens the gaping maw between people and parties, and friends and communities until the very notion of free speech becomes a pathetic and gratuitous mockery of itself. Your life–and the way in which you live your life–needs to be your first, last, greatest and most memorable statement.
There is no race that can or should be proud of their history if that history is to be looked at in its totality. We are evolving creatures at odds with our instincts. We stubbornly preserve our own in the cycle of creation and we will try to overpower anything that stops that cycle. This instinct to survive and perpetuate our own is deeply embedded through the millennia of generations and is not easily undone. It seems to be our incessant folly to deny this, so we are now entwined and paralyzed in a sluggy mud of our own making. T.S. Eliot once wrote in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:”: “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,/ have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”
If you’re not blind, you will see we are at the tipping point of our crisis. We cannot have our tea and cakes and blithely go about eradicating the narrowness of our tribalist thinking. What is real is not hard to see. We are now an enmeshed world of races that needs to act–for the sake of ourselves–as a single tribe of humans–a tribe that can still remember and sing the many songs of our many races that does not mistake and reword prejudice for pride. It is not an artificial globalism; it is a reality we have to embrace and breathe into the actions of our lives. Our melodies may start out discordant, but maybe, somehow, we will at least find a common rhythm to which we can march together. It will never happen if we sing in the narrow halls and conventions of our own minds or huddled within gossiping flocks of sameness, consoled by a common and dull conformity. It will only happen if everybody is in the bigger hall together, searching and floundering for a common key in which to start singing.
And if you don’t, fate has the upper hand, and you will get what you get, and, sadly, you will be left out of the right side of the inevitable.
I have been following a Facebook thread about the movement in my beloved hometown of Concord to ban plastic water bottles, plastic bags and styrofoam cups. I am trying to discern whether or not my initial responses are pure and true and not simply reactionary and cynical, for I’ve often wondered where I stand on things like this. I am blessed and befuddled by my ornery nature. who can argue with arguments that are intrinsically true, but practically misplaced and reek of privilege and righteousness.
I applaud anything that is forward thinking, but I always have a visceral response to anyone who tells me what to do and how to live my life. Some of my initial responses are pretty narrow-minded, but maybe the new revolution is much more subtle and needs bold models to frame a new paradigm of thinking, but it is just very hard for me to see the economic excesses of the “new” Concord and to try to reconcile it with a greater sense of a world that is by and large just struggling to survive.
Perhaps, it is simple jealousy. I don’t want to call it hypocrisy because it is not: these are people who are sincerely arguing for a better approach to living in a sustainable way. Who can argue with that? The greater irony, however, is that economic privilege almost invariably distorts our views of what is truly essential and important. To live in a million home and lament plastic water bottles and styrofoam cups seems a bit disingenuous to any family that is simply trying to make ends meet and raise a family in a dignified–and sustainable–way.
This said, I do agree with what they are trying to do. We do need a sustainable planet and we certainly have to start somewhere, but that will only happen with a “sustainable” economy that floats the boats of the poor and lessens the excesses of the rich. Otherwise, this change is only gesture and not progress. Sell your second and third cars; sell your summer home; forgo your trips to exotic places; open your door and not merely your hearts, and then maybe your arguments will have a resonance that is pure and real and, most importantly, convincing because it may be it is you who is not living in an ecumenical and sustainable way.
While I have always been a storyteller of sorts, I am not much of a writer of stories–but I have always been intrigued by the relative simplicity at the core design level of most books and movies. A lot of it is tied to my love for Joseph Campbell’s work on the Heroic Cycle, which shapes so much of my teaching in 8th and 9th grade. I am also curious about ways to successfully “break” the common cycle of stories–and still produce a piece of worthy and memorable literature. When I read Jayber Crow, by Wendell Berry, I was simply in awe of the beauty of the language, imagery and simple exploration of a time and place.
In my own writing of Hallow’s Lake (unfinished of course) I am trying to create a novel that is a mosaic pieced together by a narrator and aside from the narrator no character greater or lesser than any others. Every chapter is a slice of life lived by some character tied to a remote community around a lake in New Hampshire. I only work on the novel sporadically.
At any rate, I only opened up this blog to post this Kurt Vonnegut video about the shapes of stories that I found in (of all places) The Daily Mail. It is a short, humorous, and not very academic video, but I thought my students might like to see it when we start our short story units.
I woke up this morning almost too fearful to read the news. I stayed up late into the night just watching for the breaking stories and updates. Now, I am simplyconfused about how to act. I feel incredibly small and pointless, unsure of where I stand and how to move forward. But I and we have to start something new.
There needs to be a movement towards a unified love, respect, empathy and unmitigated courage in the face of all that is evil. Words of hate, anger and myopic righteousness simply dampens the light of possibility. I am heartsick at what is happening in this world that is as equally disconnected as it is connected. We are in a true crisis of humanity, but few seem to have the strength or humility to make every action an evolution towards a true and genuine inclusiveness. Anger and fear passes off as wisdom, and our humanity diminishes in equal proportions.
Thoreau once wrote that “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root.” The root is deeper and stronger than the branches, but that is where we have to go. Start now. Do good, mean well, and start wherever you are in whatever you are doing. In spite of everything that is happening and has happened, we are hardwired to love even in the most trying of times. These words are feeble substitutes, and our pointing fingers simply ignite a lightning storm of hatred with its obvious and repugnant consequences. If you have a moral code that justifies murder, it is not a moral code. If your first response is to take sides and pontificate from a distance, the divisions will only grow deeper and the spiral will worsen, so take the time today to do good things wherever you can. It can only help our future–shaky as it now seems. We don’t have to like those we should love.
I’ve been somewhat lax about posting in here of late, but I have been giving myself a bit of a break from writing. In fact, I spent the last month or so just living–and that has been just fine with me. I set a simple goal for myself this summer to get in shape. PJ and I started day workout program in the spring that includes a mix of walking and running. I was a bit worried about my knees as I had both my knees replaced four years ago. But by starting slow and doing a lot of stretching, I feel pretty good right now. Now I’m going to try and add a bit of cross-training by doing some hiking, kayaking, weight lifting and tai chi–if I can remember what I learned some 30 years ago while living in China.
Other than that, I’m spending my time with my family at a summer camp in New Hampshire. Windsor Mountain International Camp. We have been going there for the past 13 summers. Four of the kids work there, two of them are campers, Denise works in the health office and I pitter around doing whatever needs to be done: I teach some music classes; I sing at campfires; I spend time whittling with the campers, and I build things that the camp needs built. I drive back home to Maynard once or twice a week to sing at the inn and anything else to make a bit more of the ever elusive cash.
In years past, I ran online writing programs, which while fun was also very time-consuming–though also pleasantly lucrative. I am home right now sitting on my back porch looking over the expense of my dry and parched landscape, happy that I don’t have to try to start our ancient lawnmower to mow the lawn. There are, however, plenty of projects to tackle around here. I have a dream that someday all of these projects will reach a point of simple maintenance and not rebuilding, but time and money always seems to rule the day. Still, I count my blessings every day for the gift of the life I have and lead.
This summer is an opportunity for me to be guided by whatever wisdom is within me. It is as simple as knowing what I need to do and doing it with continuity and discipline, guided by the power of an awesome family and an equally awesome unfolding evolution of the days.
