Only Connect

Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him

to the building of the rainbow bridge
that should connect the prose in us
with the passion.


Without it we are meaningless fragments,
half monks,
half beasts,
unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.

With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve,
glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.


Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.


Only connect the prose and the passion,
and both will be exalted,
and human love will be seen at its height.


Live in fragments no longer.


Only connect,
and the beast and the monk,
robbed of the isolation that is life to either,
will die.




E M Forster
Howards End (1910)

Nothing Will Ever Be Out of Print

This recorded conversation takes about half an hour ... and if you were ever fretful, concerned, curious, or amazed at the way electronic media is taking over the world of books, this is a conversation worth hearing.

Watch the full episode. See more The Open Mind.

Stephen Fry, I love you

...but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with JOY at language?"

Life's Little Ironies

Today's task: write a PLA essay for the course, Interpersonal Communication. Today's challenge: write, dammit! Write! It's all uphill today. I can feel it beginning to gather momentum, though. I remember how to do this. It's taken me all day to get to this remembering. Ugh.

And I want the library to send me a copy of the book, Improv Wisdom : don't prepare, just show up, by Patricia Ryan Madson. It has suddenly hit me that what I was talking about was "improv" - the way musicians and comedians think about it.

Okay. FVRL. (Fort Vancouver Regional Library)

Log in.

Title search.

Good. There's a copy on the shelf. Maybe I can get it by tomorrow when I'm working at the library anyway. Super.

Place hold.

So ... need to go back to the essay now. Really don't have any extra time here. Already running late.

Hmmm ... so ... what is near it "on the shelf," in this search engine?

Oh good grief.

Confused about communication and life skills? Maybe this is part of the reason. These are the books next to each other in the library, which means they're about the same subject.

Book #1: Improv Wisdom : don't prepare, just show up

Book #2: Today matters : 12 daily practices to guarantee tomorrow's success

(I shouldn't have looked)

Do you know this book?

Cynthia Voigt - know her? I do. I mean to say, I know her books. She writes. She wrote the Tillerman series, beloved in our house, and a lot of other things too ... but this is an adult novel, and I love it. I found it in the sale rack at a tiny little bookstore in Seattle a long long time ago, and I bought it and I've read it several times.

And I want MORE of this. Another one. I want another one, do you hear me? But my Ms. Voigt only wrote this one adult novel, and apparently "it didn't do very well," which means that the audience that would have have been clamoring for more if they'd just known about it didn't know about it. I know about it. I want another one.

I read somewhere that she wrote it like an old movie - a Cary Grant sort of movie. It most certainly feels like that. The reader isn't sure exactly what's going on until the very end, and it's quite romantic in a non-gushy, brisk and art deco kind of way, and the main character is a butler - or is he?

Do you know this book? If you do, do you know another one like it?

Poetry Paint Play

Ever heard of Marla Olmstead? The 2007 movie, My Kid Could Paint That, is a documentary about this child prodigy and the adults who go a bit nuts around her and in the art world.

I discovered it just a few minutes ago - when I was looking for images of "playing with paint." I wanted images of playing with paint because I have been thinking about Anon.'s comment about my absurdly difficult time with my Poetry final. (I've been thinking about the comment whilst writing the paper - I'm almost done - a short concluding section, and I'll be ready to let it rise overnight so I can punch it down tomorrow)

See the kid's face on the movie poster? That's how I feel when I'm immersed in this poetry. I'm having a good time. I feel exuberant. I love love love what poetry does. I like to play in it. But ... well ... writing a paper about it means someone else will watch me playing. I'm being caught with a brush in my hand. It just feels ... weird. I'm a little chagrined. (It helps to bleed off some of the energy and nerves here, on my blog. And that's weird too. Because I need words to get onto the paper, I also need to bleed off a whole bunch of extra ones. I get all jammed up.)

But I do love these poems. Rosmarie Waldrop's "Conversation I: On the Horizontal," from her book, Reluctant Gravities, and Anne Sexton's "Her Kind." I don't think my kid could paint like that. I'm pretty sure I can't either. But it sure is fun to play with the paint.

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Oppression Creates Opportunity

Is there anything more beautiful in all the world than the nobility of the human spirit in the face of impossible oppression? Here's a new story to inspire the world.

The life Kamila Sidiqi had known changed overnight when the Taliban seized control of the city of Kabul. After receiving a teaching degree during the civil war—a rare achievement for any Afghan woman—Kamila was subsequently banned from school and confined to her home. When her father and brother were forced to flee the city, Kamila became the sole breadwinner for her five siblings. Armed only with grit and determination, she picked up a needle and thread and created a thriving business of her own.

The Dressmaker of Khair Khana tells the incredible true story of this unlikely entrepreneur who mobilized her community under the Taliban. Former ABC News reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon spent years on the ground reporting Kamila's story, and the result is an unusually intimate and unsanitized look at the daily lives of women in Afghanistan. These women are not victims; they are the glue that holds families together; they are the backbone and the heart of their nation.

An interview with the author on Morning Edition, and excerpts here

Befriend Your Anxiety (yes, really)

Sign up!!

Karla McLaren's newsletter just came into my inbox. It's my first one, and I've just perused it with the jaded eye of an inveterate and compulsive newsletter subscriber. Email newsletters are almost universally boring and/or minimally useful. But this one? Wow! Here's an excerpt.

"Befriending Anxiety in 2011"

... Dr. Lamia contrasts procrastinators, who put things off until their anxiety kicks in and makes them do their work with do-it-aheaders, who do their work ahead of time. I’m a do-it-aheader, and we’ve got a joke in our family about thanking Karla from the past. We’ll find some job I finished weeks ago, or unearth finished pieces to a project that is crucial, or we’ll find important papers in my filing system, and we’ll say, “Thanks, Karla from the past, for making things easy on us!” Clearly, this thanking is a great motivator, because in each day, I think of all kinds of cool projects and jobs to do for the future happiness of my friends, my family, and myself. It’s a total win-win. It’s time travel that works!

Before I heard Dr, Lamia, I would have said that I didn’t do anxiety, but now I’m realizing, “Ooohhhh, I’ve got plenty of anxiety, but I’ve been been responding to it at very early points in its appearance, so it rarely gets to the level of a mood.” I have mistakenly thought of my very subtle level of do-it-ahead anxiety as, I don’t know, conscience, foresight, responsibility, or perhaps just being organized. I missed the fact that I was feeling an emotion that was trying to prepare me for the future. Whoops!! We live and learn, so I’m now taking anxiety out of the shadows and asking it questions, looking at people who run anxiety in its mood state, and focusing on anxiety more clearly.

Go to her site! Sign up for this stuff! Learn to understand the information, messages, feedback, and motivations your emotions are trying to give you!

McLaren on YouTube

Click here for a YouTube recording of Karla McLaren, talking about the difference between being empathetic and empathic, the problem we have due to our "professionalizing" of emotional difficulties, boundaries (the difference between you and me), and her new book. (What a shiny woman!)

The video is clearer than the book, in a lot of ways. Highly recommended, perhaps as an introduction to what she's doing.

She's also a fan of The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, which I discovered in some of my research recently.

This stuff's not easy - but I'm so deeply grateful for her work. I need to write her a letter.

Go, Carl!

Letters of Note is "an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos." This one is a letter from astronomer Carl Sagan, regarding the admission of women into The Explorers Club. It was written after "IBM's withdrawal of support due to the organisation's continued exclusion of women within its ranks," in ... (get this!) 1981. Eighty-one. Not fifty-one, 1981.

So much could be said about this. But I'll just post the last two paragraphs, and the link to the letter itself.

The supposed parallelism between our situation and those of other organizations seems to me strained. The Bohemian Club is a resort; The Explorers Club is not. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are for children. Their membership derives almost exclusively from adolescent and pre-adolescent youngsters, who have not yet fully accomodated to the opposite sex. But we presumably are adults, with a special responsibility for interacting with all humans on this planet.

I do not believe that the primary function of our organization is to promote male bonding or to serve as a social club -- although there is certain room for both. I believe that the fundamental dedication of the club is that stated on the masthead of every issue of The Explorers Club Newsletter: "To the conquest of the unknown and the advancement of knowledge." If this is our purpose, then admission should be open to all qualified members of the human species.

Cordially,
Carl Sagan

Third Day Thoughts: That Thing I Do

I need to get this stuff written down.

Yarn fibers and hanks of thread.

Twisting maybe strands of belts or straps and
I cannot figure out what it is and
I know it is important
because it was given
to me
this past weekend.

I keep teasing the strands apart
running my fingers through it
like hair I'm trying to braid
behind my head.

Embroidery thread. First,
pull apart the strands.
Lay the threads against each other
so that their spun nature aligns

It is impossible to attend (be attentive, be in attendance) for a weekend of Testimony, Night, Woman at Point Zero, The Little School, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Death and the Maiden ... the palpable answering pain of my fellow students ... without being permanently changed. I was right. I'm back from The Village, and everything here is the same, but I am not the same. So everything's different now for me.

It's becoming a theme for the year.
2010: The Suffering of Others.
2010: The year my soldier came back from Afghanistan.
2010: The Year of Nazareth House. (Give if you can. Please. Click on the link and give if you love the people who love without condition of litmus tests. Color, creed, politics or past - none of it matters to these people. All they do is love.)
2010: The year I heard the pain of men whose women are destructive - several such men, concurrently and all in this year
2010: The Literature of Resistance




Pull apart the strands and feel
the places where it grabs
every tiny scratch or hangnail or rough
place on your fingers.

I hear you. I can feel you here
in the palm of my hand
and along the inner edges of my own touch
You are no longer

Softly faded into the neat and woven
threads of destiny and the history channel
is not pausing for a commercial
and I hear you now.



I find myself wondering if there is anything in the natural world that has its layers peeled back over and over, and yet neither dies nor hardens. Are cork trees like that, I wonder? Cinnamon, perhaps? I know why I was not peeled to this depth before now. I would have died in some way. I think the sounds of this sort of pain would have caused me to turn away in self-protective need ... and maybe that is what happened. Maybe we can stop our ears and block the sounds if we are not yet strong enough to hear them.

But now I've heard them. I cannot un-know, and I cannot un-hear. I got back off the island, left The Village again, I'm back at my flat in London, and I have no idea what to do about what I know and heard. How do I give this into the safe keeping of another?

I think this is becoming a "thing I do." A few weeks ago, my adult daughter called me from the army base, and asked, "What 're ya doin?" I was not yet fully back into the room in which I'd answered the phone -- I mean to say, I was still in the last clutches of my thoughts. And so, to give myself a few more seconds to become conscious again, I said, "Ruminating." She laughed and answered, "Yeah - because that is a thing - that you do." I suspect now that finding ways to help people hear is becoming a thing - that I do.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God
walking in the garden
in the cool of the day
and Adam and his wife hid themselves
from the Presence.

The knowledge of good and evil
the innocence of not hearing
and now it's gone
and there is nothing left to do but listen.

I heard Your voice
in the garden and I was afraid
because I was naked.
And I hid myself.

Lord, teach us to pray.

A Note Before Proceeding

Wow.

Every instrument in the symphony of my life is playing on key, in tune, and in concert right now. The course in self-assessment is ratifying my inner foundations, while the course in literary theory is teaching me to assess the literature, using Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a model, and the course in the literature of resistance and pain and injustice and atrocities is giving me the practicalities I need to be a valid witness ... and whether or not I teach at the community center this winter, I will - I know now - I will find ways to be a witness to the stories of others.

This is a thing I could not do before now. I knew I was not strong enough to stand as witness to the testimony of pain in this way. I wasn't born with the filter or the separator that makes some people so utterly capable of volunteering for Hospice or working in the cancer wards where children are the patients or doing art therapy for the PTSD sufferers. I couldn't do it, not because I didn't want to, and not because I would rather be deaf, blind, and dumb to the suffering of others ... I couldn't do it because I couldn't figure out how.

I know what bruises feel like in my body, and I know what injury means to my own loved ones. For them, I can stand as a witness and I can ratify and record their pain when they need a witness. But for strangers? For the people with whom I share no past? All I have ever been able to do for such people is -- well, nothing, really. And nothing else in my life pulls and tears at me like this knowledge - that I have done nothing. That I feel helpless to change such appalling inaction. I am ashamed of my cowardice and humbled by my helplessness.

But now -- because of this book required for The Literature of Resistance -- because it was written by a psychoanalyst and a lit professor who teamed up to "examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust," and because in this book they have found a way to teach what they have learned, now I have tools. I'll have to practice to become any good at this, but here is what a witness needs to do for the one giving testimony. The list begins on p. 72.

• Accept the sense of paralysis, brought about by the fear of merger with the atrocities being recounted.
• Accept the sense of outrage and anger, unwittingly directed at the victim, knowing that this tearing apart is happening because of our inadequacy to respond and a consequent desire to make the pain the fault of the sufferer.
• Accept the withdrawal and numbness in one's own reactions.
• Know that the flood of awe and fear make it natural to endow the speaker with a kind of sanctity, and that this is a way to avoid the intimacy entailed in knowing.
• Avoid hyperemotionality, which superficially looks like compassion, but in actuality floods the testifying victim in the defensive affectation of the listener.

and mostly ... for me, mostly ... for me, the missing piece ...

Avoid attempting "foreclosure through facts, through an obsession with factfinding; an absorbing interest in the factual details of the account which serve to circumvent the human experience."

I cried when I read that last night. I have hurt a lot of people by defending myself through my obsession with factfinding, and I could not figure out at the time what was happening. Now I know. And I find that I prefer honest regret and repentance to the horrible knowledge that I was only adding to someone's pain.

Thank you, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub.

Atmosphere

I didn't think she meant it. I didn't think my mom was really irritated at my desire to be left alone with a book. She was, though. She thought this was the height of hostile, rejecting, anti-social behavior. She did not like it one bit.

But who would be irritated with a reader? There are a lot of things a person could interrupt in this house, and the interrupted person would simply have to put up with it - nicely, too! But reading? Huh-uh. Reading and movie-watching. "Don't bug me." It's very very very rude in this house to interrupt a reader or movie watcher.

I'm re-reading In This House of Brede. I've put one of these on hold at Powell's because they had it for a good price in this edition, which is the edition I got from the library last week. I'll pick up my own copy tomorrow. I'm a fully growed woman with fully growed kids, and it's the middle of the day on a Saturday, and I'm not showered and dressed. I've been reading. (Reading, and doing course work, and reading, and talking to friends, and reading and reading and reading, and placing a book on hold, and reading. Now I'm so good at the reading that interruptions don't pop my bubble.)

But now I wonder ... I've resurfaced for awhile - there's stuff I have to do today. And I recognize the air around me as my reading bubble. The atmosphere of the book encompasses me, and it will stay with me like this while I'm reading the book. Next up, all those difficult reads for my Literature of Resistance course - and I'm resisting starting them - it's not going to be a nice atmosphere to live in. This is what reading does for me, and this is what reading does to me, and this is why my mother resented it when I "read too much" as a kid. Reading puts me into another place entirely, and right now I only look like I'm here in this room, typing on this keyboard.

And here's the problem.

Writing does it to me too. Now that I've gotten almost as good at writing as I am at reading, whatever I'm writing is strong enough to make an atmosphere of its own. A weather pattern. A season. Temperature and precipitation and light and dark and wind and pressure.

And so I suspect that my resistance to the writing I love just might be a resistance to barometric pressure changes. When a writer goes inside, deep inside where the real writing is ... it's a long trip back, and it's never to where she started from.

The Siren Call of Easier

Remember this scene from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? The Sirens? So pretty. So ready to "love 'em up" - so ready to delay and stop and drink and slow and distract ... their calls are oh, so attractive - so hard to resist.

The guys were trying to get somewhere. They had stuff to do. They had a treasure to get to before the flood came and swept it away forever. And along the way, they heard the Sirens.

I hear them too.

I think I passed the place where two roads diverge in a yellow wood. I think that fork in the road was several miles back, and I'm already on the road less traveled by.

I decided to go to school, for one thing. And then I decided to create an interdisciplinary degree instead of staying within a discipline. I decided to go back to work - but not because we needed the money (we did - we do). I wanted to work at the library again. I have let everyone know I'm doing it, and I have recruited cohorts to help, and instead of keeping or using the curriculum available now (which is seriously inadequate for the current situations), I have decided to design and write a three, morphing into nine, morphing into 12-year religious education curriculum that I hope will be useful long after my body has returned to dust. The road more traveled by? I can't even remember where the turn-off was.

Last week, when Mary Catherine Bateson was speaking at her Marylhurst stop on the tour, I watched her and listened to the main points - but I also heard her humor and I heard her being a good sport about the stuff we can all complain about.

An aging body does have limits, after all. The woman's not delusional. She's aware that, at seventy, she cannot stand for very long at a time, for instance. So ... what did she do about it? She perched like a 20-year-old college student, and sat on a table! She's not tall. Her feet didn't touch the floor while she sat there - but she did swing them back and forth a bit. Bateson is not young - but she's not "old" either. Her road has been one of the less-traveled-by roads, that's for sure. And today I wonder what her Sirens have sung to her during her life. I wonder if she can still hear them, and if she would sometimes rather have a less profound life. I wonder if she still wonders if easier would have been nicer.

I've been listening to the people my age and older, and I've been hearing something lately. There are two kinds of people after awhile, and they get more and more obvious. There's the more usual type - the type that always seems to be looking for something that's not this. The good old days or the way things used to be or the way (they thought) things were when they were growing up.

And then there's the type that does life the Bateson way, pursuing meaning and depth and conscious understanding and deliberate choices. This type is honest about challenges, but seems almost never to be ready to complain or whine or doom-say or fuss at life. This type finds things to smile about and approve of everywhere they go. They talk about what they enjoy. They laugh easily. They work hard to make things better, but they don't stop for very long to discuss how they, personally, feel about it all. They just get on with the work - and they know the old days were not something to romanticize and long for. More tolerant of ambivalence. More ready to work for the parts of life that matter.

My Sirens go mute when the voice of people like Bateson is in my ear. This morning, I wonder if she was ever tempted to stay home and watch Masterpiece Mystery instead of getting her books and working on her projects. I wonder if she kept her house better than I do, or if she was as distracted about it as I am. My Sirens are the voices of my peers from days gone by, and they have learned to harmonize with the voices in my present life, and the whole crooning chorus sings as I pass by the water. "Why must you do it the hard way? Why not rest? Why not stop? Be contented. Stay at home. Nest. You love to nest. Nest and write and calm down and stop working so hard. Just nest. Rest. Nest. Rest."

You know what irritates me about the really dangerous Sirens? They tell the truth. I do love to nest. In my own good old days, when the kids were small, we all cleaned up around here together. I taught math, and dictation, and history, and nesting. They can cook, and they can clean (when they want to), and they know how to do their laundry, and they like the Christmas decorations to go up. And now - now that they're off in their own lives and I need not be teaching math or nesting - if I were a person to do it, nesting and hostessing and staying home to write would be my best path. It's a true path for me. The Sirens know their music well.

But I can hear Bateson's voice, and it's getting stronger in my head. "More tolerant of ambivalence." "I'm still me - I am who I've been becoming my whole life." "Experience is the best teacher - but only if you do your homework." "Advocates for the future." We have longer, healthier, more active lives than ever before in human history, and the question before us is this: what are we going to do about it? With it? With this opportunity?

It feels like unnecessary difficulty in a lot of ways, but I will block my ears to the Sirens, and I will keep going. I turned fifty this year. That's how old Bateson was when she wrote Composing a Life. Now she's seventy, and she's written Composing a Further Life, to answer the questions. No ... to think about the questions. To posit some answers. To have the discussion. To wonder - in the deepest and wisest parts of our beings - what are we to do with this long life we're given? Evolution has granted our species a longer and longer period of time for reaching adulthood; active adulthood is so active that there is nearly no time for reflection, but we must make the time so that when we reach the second half of adulthood we are ready for it; and now we are being granted elder years like never before.

My sirens want me to want an olden days that, in truth, I always found slightly constraining. For a couple of decades I could see this freedom up ahead, and I tried to get ready for it. And now it is time. This is the year I begin composing a further life. Rest, in full measure. Reflection, in abundance. Activity to its fullest potential. Expansion beyond my expectations. It's not time yet for Easier.

From the Frontispiece

(although, it's not an illustration, so ... is it a frontispiece?)

Yesterday afternoon, between my appointment for setting up the end of my PLA adventure and the coming Mary Catherine Bateson lecture, I found the library's book sale. I found a pristine copy of The World's Great Letters (1940), and I bought it. Best dollar I ever spent. From the frontispiece,

The post is the consolation of life. Voltaire

The earth has nothing like a she epistle. Byron

As long as there are postmen, life will have zest. William James

In a man's letters, you know, madam, his soul lies naked. Dr. Johnson

The public will always give up its dinner to read love letters. George Jean Nathan

Letters, such as written by wise men, are, of all the words of men, in my judgment, the best. Francis Bacon

I forgot to say that one of the pleasures of reading old letters is the knowledge that they need no answer. Byron

The need of composing letters was the earliest and most constant incentive to terseness, clarity, and exactitude of statement. R. L. Megroz

Let those who may complain that it (the Shaw-Ellen Terry "romantic correspondence") was all on paper remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love. George Bernard Shaw

That Thread

Re-reading In This House of Brede, by Rumer Godden. (The Loyola Classics edition that was at the library is a very nice edition. I may look for one of these to buy.) As I started to say something about it to my husband this morning, it suddenly clanged into my head ... hey! I have several favorite books that have as a central theme a woman ready to reinvent herself. I've never noticed the thread before.

In this book, the main character has decided to enter a convent rather than continue in her successful career in public service. In Elizabeth Goudge's The Scent of Water, the woman leaves a public service career to move out into the country when she inherits a house from a distant cousin (and the house turns out to have been part of the old monastery destroyed by the infamous Henry VIII). In Madeleine L'Engle's book, A Severed Wasp, the main character has retired from her career as a concert pianist, and intends to weave the threads of her life together into something she can know and love. She thinks she will have a quiet retirement in which to do this, but finds herself deeply involved in the ongoing lives of others in and around the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

For awhile now, I've been actively seeking books that will talk to me about this phase of my life. What am I supposed to do with it? I have a reasonable expectation of a second career, decades stretching before me, a wider life possible because of a life so far ... what am I supposed to do? This is very much like the teen years in some ways. It's obvious that some new part of life is on the horizon. I want to get ready. I want to know. Where are the books? Who are the authors?

Well, it turns out that there are many such books and authors. Tonight I'll go to Marylhurst to listen to Mary Catherine Bateson - one of the experts answering this question. But ... this morning, I see now that I have been reading and getting ready for a long time. I just didn't know it. Godden, Goudge and L'Engle brought me Phillipa, Mary and Katherine, and they've been my friends and teachers all along.

I wonder which one it is?

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Aaahhh... good old Robert Frost. I do love him. I thought of him today, and of this poem that caught my imagination for the first time about forty years ago. I have thought of "the one less traveled by" a lot of times in my life, and apparently, it's come 'round again. Two things, here before me, unexpected, obvious, and both branching off to parts unknown. Which to follow, I wonder? Which one is the one less traveled by? (And - poetic heresy, for sure - do I want to be on the one less traveled by?)

Road the First:

• my still fascinating rock-paper-scissors model of the human person. Somehow, I still want to include it in this degree I'm composing and assembling. We are what we are (the "rock" part); we cover ourselves in socialized behavior (the "paper"); and we choose and can alter our socialized selves (the "scissors"). Our social selves can alter the very composition of our "what we are" selves -- at least, to a point. Our core selves can be used in such a manner as to bend, or even to destroy our wills (prison camps, torture, or the child raised with no limits or guidance ... of these things mess with our basic composition and can smash our will so that we have a very hard time with our choice-making).
• This idea sits like a paper weight on the desktop of my brain, waiting for the best place in the arrangement of things. I still don't know where to put it, but it's just too attractive to throw away.

Road the Second:

• I have only just this weekend discovered that there is a new literary model emerging in the academic world. It's called Darwinian Literary Theory or literary studies.

• (background: I've finally hammered out what on earth the discussion actually says when it comes to evolution and the resistance to the idea of evolution in the natural world (thanks to a class that forced me to find these things out for myself if I wanted an A ... which I did ...). I suspected I would find out that I'd been handed a straw man to defeat, and this was true. Christians really and truly need not fear anything with Darwin's name or the word "evolution" attached to it.)

• Here's are sentences that makes me just about come to pieces in excitement:

  Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another “approach” or “movement” in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study.

• and this bit here, too:

  Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive “play” that enhance pattern recognition. In company with Ellen Dissanayake (Art and Intimacy, 2000), Boyd also argues that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity. Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll (Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated form to the relations among the elements of human experience.

Is that gibberish without some kind of background or a little reading? I'm not sure I would have been able to see this even just a year ago. But I see it now.

My degree is called "Composing the Human Experience." If there are people who are currently figuring out that narrative is as vital to the understanding of humans as more traditionally quantifiable science is, and if I can get in on the discussion ... well, I think sparks have started to fly out of my scalp, and words have failed me.

So ... which road?

Or, better yet, do these two ideas converge?

Today's Challenge: What's in your Art Pile?

So ... something interesting just came of a facebook conversation. It was one of those art, the arts, and trading movie titles conversations.

Here's the Challenge:

If you made a pile of art (of any kind) to represent you, what would be in your Art Pile? These are not necessarily your Top Ten of anything - nor are they titles of things you've enjoyed or even love. Your Art Pile is supposed to be YOU, in Art.

Here's one way I could do mine (there are different ways):
A box of movies would be on the bottom of the pile, and there would be books on top of the box, and on top of the books would be a few poems.

The movies in the box of me are:

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967):

"You listen to me. You say you don't want to tell me how to live my life. So what do you think you've been doing? You tell me what rights I've got or haven't got, and what I owe to you for what you've done for me. Let me tell you something. I owe you nothing! If you carried that bag a million miles, you did what you're supposed to do! Because you brought me into this world. And from that day you owed me everything you could ever do for me like I will owe my son if I ever have another. But you don't own me! You can't tell me when or where I'm out of line, or try to get me to live my life according to your rules. You don't even know what I am, Dad, you don't know who I am. You don't know how I feel, what I think. And if I tried to explain it the rest of your life you will never understand. You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs! You understand, you've got to get off my back! Dad... Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man. Now, I've got a decision to make, hm? And I've got to make it alone, and I gotta make it in a hurry. So would you go out there and see after my mother?"

The Big Kahuna (1994):

"I'm saying you've already done plenty of things to regret, you just don't know what they are. It's when you discover them, when you see the folly in something you've done, and you wish that you had it do over, but you know you can't, because it's too late. So you pick that thing up, and carry it with you to remind you that life goes on, the world will spin without you, you really don't matter in the end. Then you will gain character, because honesty will reach out from inside and tattoo itself across your face."

The Forgotten (2004):

"I had life inside me. I had life. I have a child. I have a son. I have a son, and his name is Sam, you son of a bitch."

The Village (2004):

"Heartache is a part of life, we know that now."

The Family Man (2000):

"I choose us."

Proof (2005):

"How many days have I lost? How can I get back to the place where I started? I'm outside a house, trying to find my way in. But it is locked and the blinds are down, and I've lost the key, and I can't remember what the rooms look like or where I put anything. And if I dare go in inside, I wonder... will I ever be able to find my way out? If I go back to the beginning, I could start it over again. I could go line by line, try and find a shorter way. I could try to make it... better."

On top of the box, I'd stack:

the Emily of New Moon trilogy, by L. M. Montgomery

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, by Joanne Greenberg

The Scent of Water, by Elizabeth Goudge
and

Beach Music, by Pat Conroy

and I'd top it off by some of Pablo Neruda's poetry.

Leaning against the pile are the works of painters who capture a source of light - and from deep inside, there is music coming out.

And I notice something: I notice the triumph of love over confusion, oppression, and fear. I notice the power of articulated love. The honesty of love, and the love that is honesty.

Okay ---- Now YOU go. What's in your Art Pile?

Ask me!

I need to start a book recommendation service - a sort of library's Information Services/Book Advisory for people who aren't in the library at the moment. I need to do this because I am doing it!

Last week at the dentist - the tech was a young mom, and I told her about Nina Planck's Real Food: What to Eat and Why. Her pediatrician had recommended more milk for her children - for the sake of the calcium - which is so far behind current research it made me say, "Well, that never made much sense to me," and then we had this conversation, which included the young mom talking about all the web research she's been doing, and in reference to herself and her husband, "because we don't know" - as if creating the healthy family table is as specialized a knowledge and skills set at building a house or designing a working windmill. Idiosyncratic, even. And fraught with peril because of things like eating disorders and parenting and power relationships and taste buds (kids have more of them than adults do).

I recommend a book to someone every time I'm at the dentist, I think. And I do it in ordinary conversations with people all the time. I do it when I'm getting my hair cut - or talking to one of my kids - or even when I'm working at the library, where all the books are! (And I think it's a little amusing that one of the conversations the coworkers have all day long at the library is the one about books and which ones we are reading and which ones we are waiting for and which ones we have on hold and which ones other people are reading. Libraries are havens for Geeks Like Me.)

I don't think I'm being obnoxious about it. The people I talk to don't smile faintly, nod their heads placatingly, or "uh-huh" me into silence. They write down titles and authors and thank me pretty earnestly. (Or, in the case of library coworkers, they place holds.)

So I think this whole thing might be more useful if I could figure out how to start an "Ask Me" site.

If you could log on to a site and type in a situation or question or interest, and then click the button that says, "Recommendation Please," would you use it? If the real person on the other end was not using a computer generated method, but was personally finding material for you, would you be okay with an email asking for more specifics? I suspect I could generate income for this if I allowed advertisements on this site ... would ads be off-putting?

Whaddaya think? Comment - either privately or on this post. Is this a good idea?

Because the point of the story is the hero

In honor of my daughter's military service, and the service of the other soldiers we know and love;
In honor of every hero who pulled people and bodies from the wreckage on September the 11th nine years ago;
In honor of every mother who trains her child to struggle valiantly, "enduring the cross, despising the pain;"
In honor of everyone who turns away from saying, "They hate us," and turns toward generosity of spirit;

A re-posting of the following, from three years ago:

"Show me a hero,
and I'll write you a tragedy."
F. Scott Fitzgerald

And, of course, Fitzgerald could have written many a heroic story and tragedy. He knew that if you have the thing that gets your attention (the tragedy), then the writer or other artist fills in around it, and that background of tragedy makes the main point visible.

That's how background and foreground work. It is true if you are merely assembling a bulletin board in a classroom - you get the elements together, staple them on the board, and then you can "see" them. Get the elements together, back them with dark paper so that they're framed, and you will see them. It's the edges and the background and the contrast that show us a thing.

And this is true for heroes. Heroes are the ones that stand out in the foreground against the background of tragedy. During the last century, these have had names like Schindler - a Sudenten-German Catholic businessman who saved the lives of over one thousand Polish Jews during the Final Solution; and tenBoom, whose Dutch family helped Jews without forcing conversions, and even provided Kosher food and honored the Sabbath; and Rusesabagina.
Paul Rusesabagina.

This from Roger Ebert: In 1994 in Rwanda, a million members of the Tutsi tribe were killed by members of the Hutu tribe in a massacre that took place while the world looked away. "Hotel Rwanda" is not the story of that massacre. It is the story of a hotel manager who saved the lives of 1,200 people by being, essentially, a very good hotel manager.

It would have been possible to reverse the effects in this movie, and to have filmed it so that the background was the heroism of this good man - but that is not the story they told. They told the story instead of a very good hotel manager. The background of genocide was the chaos against which the clarity of his goodness was startling.

And yet, being able to see the thing in the foreground seems to be a learned skill. We have to figure out what it is we're looking at. We have to train our inner eyes to see.

As youngsters of about the ages of ten and fifteen, my little brother and I went together to the theater and we saw the movie they'd made about Corrie ten Boom's life. A worse day I have rarely had. While I watched in an agony of nauseated fascination, poor Clark had to leave the theater over and over, going out to the concession stand to get more napkins for us to wipe our eyes and blow our noses on. (To his credit, he did keep bringing his stunned and terrified self back to the seat after these short breathers.)

When it was over, the scenes that haunted me for years afterwards were all scenes of helplessness in the face of great evil. I did not remember the foreground. To my youthful inner eye, that was a movie about evil. Good people try to stand up to it. Of course they do. What else would they do? And the evil crushes everything in its reach, killing babies in front of their mothers, and crushing hands with the butt of an angry gun. I tried to be brave. I tried to identify with the obvious heroes of the story. But to my inner self, that was a movie about the helplessness of good people.

Now I think I know why I heard a story of evil. Look at that poster! Does that look like a story of the power of a hero? Thinking back on it, I wonder now if the movie makers drew the background so much for effect that the foreground was lost to it. Now look back at the movie poster for Hotel Rwanda. Look at the way the main character is larger, and rises above the horrors he takes action to stop.

And what does the poster for Schindler's List say about the movie? Look closely. The list of Jews slated for death (or worse) in the prison camps marches across the trusting hand of a child, joined together with the grownup person who will rescue the little one. The threat is there. The menace is there. It's horrible. But it's not the point. The hero is the point.

And shame on the people who made the strength and power of evil the point of the beautiful and courageous story of Corrie ten Boom and her family. I can admit that my sheltered teenage life was little preparation for her story at all. But now that I have seen that poster again, I think I was not the only one with an unfocused inner eye. Shame on them.

Stories of heroes are by necessity stories of wars and disasters and great and grave difficulty. Of course they are. Heroes do strive for goodness in the face of evil. That is what a hero is. But the point of the story is not the background. The point of the story is the hero. There is nothing for Kenneth Branaugh to do (or Sir Laurence Olivier before him), and no story of Henry V to tell if there are no soldiers dying in agony on the fields of Agincourt.

Look at that poster. What is that story supposed to be about? War? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. The agony of dying men? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. The difficulty of knowing one's own courage in the face of terror? That is in the movie, and that is not what it is about. This is a movie about a heroic leader. A hero.

In the past few decades, I have heard these things about hero stories:

"When we saw The Sound of Music in the theaters, we really thought it would only be a little while before that would happen in America." (!!!) "What would happen?" "Communists would take over, and we would have to flee."

Uh-huh. A story about Nazis marching across Europe, and occupying Austria is to the viewer's inner eye a story about "Communists" on another continent coming across the ocean and ... marching us around? A story about restoration within a family and what it really means to serve God - a story about sacrifice and love of country and what romantic love is for ... that's a story that says to you "the Commies are coming, the Commies are coming"? Really? Wow. What kind of inner distortion sees that?

Here's another one, re: the movie Schindler's List. "Well, it was pretty good, but they didn't need to include all that nudity." Nudity? In a story about the heroism of one man in the face of the Nazi menace, amongst the terror of angry soldiers, and the horrors of the death camps, the viewer remembers gratuitous nudity?

Background and foreground. Getting them mixed up makes for some very bad story telling, and apparently it also makes for some very bad story hearing. Mythical or otherwise, modern or ancient, well-known or unknown, a hero is a person who "feels the fear and does it anyway." And the point of the story is the hero.