Loyalty

Wildwood, NJ 1978

In a recent email to a friend, I remarked that she was one of those people who can “truly be remarkably loyal and dependable.” (I won’t recount my comment about the other kind of people.) She very kindly replied that I was “worthy of loyalty.” If you read my blog regularly then you know that I believe that words matter…those words mattered enormously. They mattered both because I hope to be a “loyalty-worthy” person and at the same time winning this particular friend’s loyalty is a valuable achievement…I’m as happy for her to think me loyalty-worthy as I am to have her loyalty.

This led me to realize that a few human relationships must be two-way—dual—or they fail. Loyalty must be met with loyalty-worthiness to be a completed act of loyalty: an intersection of complementary emotions. To attempt to be loyal to a person who is loyalty-UNworthy is sadly misguided; such intended loyalty is only an act of delusion or foolishness or ignorance. Or worse, the target of the loyalty may be guilty of intentional deceit, duplicity, or hypocrisy…on one side, the intended loyalty is pitiable; on the other, the deceit is contemptible. Such a relationship—devotion met with deceit—is still dual: an intersection of conflicting emotions…called “betrayal.” 

The same must be true of Trust, Dependence, Faith, Belief…all are devotions or commitments to someone of perceived worth. By definition, they must be two-sided relationships…they are paired, complementary emotions whose participants mirror one another. And they are all equally vulnerable to betrayal.

But I choose to enjoy and return my friend’s dual compliments to me: her loyalty to me and her belief in me. I’ve known betrayals, but I prefer to enjoy the loyalties, given and received. I could suffer the betrayals all over again and, to quote Shakespeare, “grieve at grievances foregone.” But I choose remembrances of good things past, so “All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.”

I love to remember my early summers in Wildwood, NJ, where I worked many years for a very loyalty-worthy man—Sid—and we enjoyed the dual qualities of loyalty. I worked in a boardwalk arcade where tourists played for coupons to claim prizes from the elaborate showcases. I got to know the “regular” customers who visited every night of their vacation and returned summer after summer for the familiarity of the arcade. I remember the night that an older couple, who had been very dedicated annual customers, asked me in hushed tones to “spot them” some extra coupons; their luck was falling short. I remember how scared and angry I was that they would ask me such a thing and put me in such a position. What I thought had been their loyalty to me and to the arcade instantly vanished. “You have one more night to play,” I answered. “Maybe your luck will return.” When I told Sid about their request and how angry I was, he looked at me with a sense of confident wonder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.” At that moment, we each recognized our dual sense of loyalty to each other. 

The next night when the couple returned, Sid assigned me some inventory busy-work in the backroom; he handled the couple and their coupons and prizes…I don’t know if they’d been lucky or disappointed that night. I know that Sid and I were very lucky that night…and a dozen more summers that I worked for him. 
 

Beauty

The idea of reading “antique” poetry is as foreign to today’s general public as reading a work in Russian. That is not the fault of the poet or the poem…it is our fault as modern readers. We have neither the patience nor the interest in what antique poetry offers. First, we have no interest in “difficult” language…we are unaccustomed to careful, elegant, and artful words.  Second, we don’t really value beauty as a talisman anymore…there was a day when the pursuit of beauty was its own reward…conceptual, emotional, spiritual, and actual. 

Beauty of any kind used to be an end in itself…beauty was seen as an aspect of the divine, of God, of heaven, and of human redemption. Artists sought to discover and express beauty as a vision of the divine. Dante in his Divine Comedy writes that seeing God was even more beautiful and wondrous than he could describe…after 12 years and 14,000 lines, Dante just couldn’t describe it! Loosely translated, he wrote, “'But what I saw therein no words could tell, no human memory from God's citadel retire with plunder of its wondrous store.”

Sometime in the early twentieth century—many have guessed that the terror of the First World War finally ended the delusion—beauty was overpowered by terror and suffering and Man’s inhumanity to Man. Society—and art as its expression—turned to “self-expression” as a core value. Look at me, look at my struggles and my sufferings against the world! Today “self” has become the talisman, and we implicitly feel that “self” is beautiful. Even if the self is ugly, we proclaim it beautiful…although we don’t really think about it in those terms. Where once mankind looked to God and Nature for beauty, now we purse our lips, take a selfie, and call it beauty. 

John Keats “selfies”

I’m inviting my readers to attempt antique poetry for a minute, to think about a divine sense of beauty…by considering a poet who called himself a “man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.” John Keats, in the early 1800s, sought the idea/ideal of beauty…seeking and finding beauty, even if only conceptually, was a reward to him. As one of the premier Romantic poets, he fills his poetry with the careful, elegant, and artful language, images, and concepts to which we’ve become unaccustomed. Two of my smartest friends claimed, when presented with the poems of John Keats, that he was too difficult! If he is difficult, I have found him very worth the struggle…

One of his most famous lines—“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”—clearly states his belief: beauty is an absolute value. In nearly all his poetry, he pursues this idea and ideal, seeking the beauty all around him. The Romantic in him longs to capture beauty in his mind and hold it there for its redemptive quality…it elevates his thoughts, it enriches his life, it satisfies his soul. Many of us know his poems only by title…too bad, because he seeks and finds a divine sense of ecstatic beauty: he hears the song of a nightingale and he creates “Ode to a Nightingale,” a tale of a bird “pouring forth thy soul abroad / In such an ecstasy!” He sees an ancient vase and he creates “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a tale of a captured moment of ecstasy…the image of lovers about to kiss: “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal yet.” He beholds the beauty of autumn on a riverside in England, and he creates the voluptuous and sensual “To Autumn,” a delicious tale of how the “warm days will never cease.”

Yes, Keats’s language is lush, his images are rich and ecstatic, his ideas are ideals…he is an antique poet to us today. But his passion and his ideas, for me, are the kind of ideals I want. The effort to understand and appreciate the beauty in the world around us—not just our self-indulgent selfies—is an effort that will elevate our thoughts, enrich our lives, and satisfy our souls. His famous line with which I opened this blog goes on to tell exactly that...how a thing of beauty can become a place of reverie for us: where thoughts create a “bower,” a “dream,” and a “health.” Maybe this is an antique ideal, but it sounds like a very modern need in our very modern world. 

A thing of beauty is a joy forever: 
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Excerpt from “Endymion” 1817

Complexity

I’ve been fooled by simplicity, or what I had thought was simplicity, before. I’ve known people and situations, I’ve read books and poems, I’ve seen movies that I’d thought were simple—readily perceived, clearly understood, free from symbol or translation, easily dismissed. Oftentimes, I’ve come to realize too late that I hadn’t understood the complexity hidden in the simplicity. I’d been fooled—or I’d been the fool—to accept things right at the surface. Afterwards, I’ve recognized complexities hidden in the simple words or actions or diversions.

Such complexity-hidden-in-the-simplicity is what I’ve come to enjoy in reading Emily Dickinson, the third poet I’ll discuss in this Poetry Month of April. Emily is widely “known” as a quaint New England recluse poet from the mid-Nineteenth Century…she lived a nearly cloistered life by today’s standards. Dickinson is widely known for her simplest, most quaint poems, such as “I’m Nobody! Who Are You” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” If you read those poems as “simple” or “quaint,” I believe you’re missing their beauty and value.

“I’m Nobody…” is often read as a shy statement of a hidden personality who tells another “nobody” that anonymity is best. It is easy to read the second stanza as a denouncement of a Public life: “How dreary—to be—Somebody!” But there is a complexity underneath…the narrator “Nobody” finds an immediate connection with the other “Nobody”: “Then there’s a pair of us.” Public? Maybe not. But shy? Definitely not…the Nobody ironically isn’t anonymous and immediately makes a connection and invites a conspiracy: “Don’t tell.”

For me, therein lies the beauty of Dickinson’s poems: a deep complexity to her simple expressions. At first, her poetry wasn’t even thought of as poetry and wasn’t published the way she’d written it: her punctuation, vocabulary, and syntax were too idiosyncratic for contemporary publishers. But her idiosyncrasies create surprises.

For example, Dickinson proclaims a quick and powerful four lines about a “Glory,” in fact her “one Glory”:

'Twas my one Glory —
Let it be
Remembered
I was owned of Thee —

But is her Glory a statement of personal subjugation to a powerful owner: has she surrendered to her owner, her controller? Or is her Glory a statement of pride and equality, that someone whom she values or loves—“Thee”—acknowledges and accepts her? Her concept of Glory turns on the word “owned.”

As a poet, Dickinson knows well the power of language—for loading meanings and sensibilities and surprises into the reader’s perception. What you perceive at first may have more depth beneath…or different meaning behind…or may be twisted into contradiction. 

Look at this piece: the sea parts to show another sea and then another…or is it just a “presumption” of the viewer…is it all one sea and did the sea part?

As if the Sea should part
And show a further Sea —
And that—a further—and the Three
But a presumption be— 

Look at this piece: a prism is the polished glass that bends light and it is the resulting splay of colors of the rainbow…but Dickinson ignores that relationship and converts the concept from vision to sound:

The Prism never held the Hues,
It only heard them play—

Look at this piece: Dickinson lays out the separation of day from night—suggesting the movement of the “supreme” Sun—but changes the resulting image to one of personal existence…she finds it supreme “to be” no matter where she is.

The Day she goes
Or Day she stays
Are equally supreme —
Existence has a stated width
Departed, or at Home —

Sometimes, of course, her lines are very simple…rich in simplicity that makes life plain, such as “Forever — is composed of nows — / ‘Tis not a different time —” and “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.” They are the phrases and images that, for me, say things “just right.”

Dickinson holds a unique place in American literature…in world literature, one of greatly idiosyncratic poetry and observation. So often, she serves up small poems whose simplicity belies their depth of thought and expression, belies their complexity and richness. 

Translation

“The Peasant Dance” (1568) Pieter Bruegel the Elder

It’s very common when seeing a movie that is based on a book to be asked, “Was it better than the book?” Very, very rarely have I ever answered “Yes” to that question; in fact, I can’t think of a single example when the movie was even as good as the book. But my point is that we are used to making that kind of comparison: the translation of one art form into another: art in a dynamic audio-visual form compared to art in text.

I have experienced a translation where I’d answer “Equal” when asked to compare the two forms: Peiter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, “The Peasant Dance” and William Carlos Williams’s poem, “The Dance,” based on that painting (the full poem is below). Even though the painting predates the poem by nearly 400 years—1568 compared to 1962—I find something equal between them…very different, but equal. Despite the fact that the painting is guided by Medieval religion while the poem is guided by modern objectivity…I find them equal. Despite the fact that the painting is de facto a visual medium while the poem is per se an auditory medium…I find them equal. Despite the fact that the painting expresses a somber mood while the poem portrays a joyful dance…I find them equal.

Bruegel captures “a moment in time” in the painting, portraying peasant life on a Saint’s day celebration among the common people—no pompous royalty here: the peasants are seen mid-step enjoying their festival of dancing, feasting, drinking, arguing, kissing. He limits the scene within the town square surrounded by buildings, importantly including the church in the background…the revelers literally turn their backs on the church and Bruegel includes images of most of the Seven Deadly Sins. He gives us a lively, lusty moment of abandon with only slight editorial comment on the sinfulness of the world.

Williams works to equal the painting itself through lyrical language and vivid images. He pays no attention to possible symbols and focuses on the actual visual effect of the painting. He contains the scene, not in a town square but within matching first and last lines; he captures “a moment in time” with his run-on lines (few sentences end at the end of a line) and rhythm that pull the reader continuously through the poem…don’t pause at the end of a line, run on and on, like the figures in the painting. The rhythm gives movement to one’s reading…try reading “dancers go round, they go round and around” without feeling musical movement. The sound is repetitive—round, around, grounds, sound; and lusty—hips and bellies and butts; and kinetic—tipping, kicking, rolling, swinging, and rollicking. I think that Williams portrays exactly the response we all have to the Bruegel painting—the thought, the sense, the feeling—and puts it into poetic words.

Two media—one visual, one auditory—but equal portrayals: lyrical, playful, lusty, kinetic, continuous, self-contained. Maybe it is something unique to Bruegel’s style that makes his work translatable—Williams tried it in a second poem and W.H. Auden wrote a famous poem that focused on Bruegel paintings, "Musée des Beaux Arts." Or maybe it is something about modern poets who want to capture in their own words an idea that may be antique, but remains true.

The Dance
William Carlos Williams
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.

Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) 

Poetry

I’ll report a little known and little cared-about fact: April is “Poetry Month,” started in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets.  Thus, I am gladly turning my April attention to poems and poets I enjoy. Poetry was once the main written medium, but today it has fallen to an academic or esoteric pastime. For me, I continually find nuggets of gold…even diamonds…in poems: phrases and images that say things “just right.” For me, that is the value of poetry: capturing/expressing a pure idea in a perfect economy of words…expanding or enforcing the idea’s meaning with sound or rhythm or image. I feel that poetry has given me a rich vocabulary, because I call on poetic phrases and images regularly to illustrate my meaning.

I have referred to the poet T. S. Eliot multiple times in this blog…I find that he often says things perfectly. I would not recommend that novice poetry readers begin with T. S. Eliot, but if you want strong, beautiful images, ideas, and phrases, you’ll find them in his poems. He was born in the U.S. but became an English citizen in 1927 for the last 38 years of his life. Although he wrote relatively few poems, he is credited with writing some of the best-known poems in the English language and some of the most influential poems of the twentieth century, including The Waste Land (1922). I find Eliot’s poetry so rich in so many ways that I habitually appropriate his ideas. Naturally then, I start my Poetry Month blogs with Eliot. 

As I began this piece, I was struck by an irony in one of my favorite poems, “East Coker” (1940), one of Eliot’s Four Quartets. He champions the idea of rebirth throughout the poem— “Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended…/Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires.” He stresses how rebirth gives us something new, but he stresses that it is very new, not simply a recurrence of what came before. He worries that the poem itself is “a worn-out poetical fashion,” but goes on to explain that “the pattern is new in every moment/And every moment is a new and shocking/Valuation of all we have been.” He sees the old made new again…but newly different. His poetical fashion may be worn-out, but “every attempt is a wholly new start.”

I began to worry that by trying to discuss poetry, I may be foolishly trying to resurrect a dying or dead academic pastime. In “East Coker,” Eliot warns us about the ideas of the elderly…that there may be no value to “the wisdom of age.” He wonders if the elders have simply deceived us and themselves, that their “dead secrets” are “useless in the darkness.” He wonders if there is “only a limited value/In the knowledge derived from experience.” The passage below describes his worry, poses the question, and wonders if all we really get from the elderly is “a receipt for deceit”:

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hope for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.

(excerpt from “East Coker”)

But he relents…a bit. While he doesn’t give complete relief to his worry, he gives us—he gives me—a moment of hope: Maybe we just haven’t recognized our own wisdom yet, we haven’t recognized yet that the pattern is new and shocking. He urges patience and openness of mind…a patience that might allow us to recognize all that we don’t yet recognize:

Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

(excerpt from “East Coker”)

I worried that my love of poetry and its insights may be just my own dead secret…but then again maybe the darkness into which I’m peering is really just a different kind of light. Ironically, Eliot’s poem gave me both ideas! 

Tragicomedy

In college, I learned about “tragicomedy” when I studied Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, which was first performed in 1953. Roughly, it is a constant mixture of tragedy and comedy and pathos and empathy and satire…sometimes a character’s saddest moment is what causes us to laugh. I took to the form right away.

Then last year, I started watching a show on the FX network called Baskets…it is a perfect example of tragicomedy; in fact, I think the show is perfect. Not for everyone, but that adds to its perfection…it doesn’t pander to an audience via formula, it doesn’t go for the easy series of jokes, it doesn’t rely on a laugh track. Baskets pools a group of characters in places and situations and then lets the tragedy and comedy of life unfold and intertwine. Sometimes the comedy is absurdist, over-the-top…like when the twin brothers Chip and Dale (both played by Zach Galifianakis) ruin their mother’s home in a senseless fight; sometimes the tragedy is shocking…like when Morpheus (Tobias Jelinek) makes a bad decision to dangle from the side of the train; and sometimes the tragedy is comic…like when the mother, Christine (Louie Anderson…no kidding) finally gives in to her pain at the death of her mother—her scene in the bank should win Anderson another Emmy.

I find myself unable to appreciate the humor or the attraction of most other “sitcoms” today. I understand that they aren’t targeting me as their audience, but I wish they aimed higher for their own audiences…they should create a humor and characters and a story that bring their audience along for the quality. Many of today’s dramas seem to aim higher, seem to push the limits of drama and intrigue…but they can become intense; a friend’s recent comment claims that watching The Americans is, indeed, too intense. So where does that leave us when we want a good, comic, engaging show to watch? For me, Baskets has filled that void excellently: an innovative, tragicomic tone; expertly written; sensitively acted; always surprising.

Part of the Baskets troupe.

In a nutshell, Baskets is about people who are more edgy than real, but too real to be ignored. The anchor to the story has been Christine, matriarch of the unlikely Baskets family, which includes her own twins Chip and Dale; her adopted twins Cody and Logan (Garry and Jason Clemmons); her mother, Grandma (Ivy Jones); and Chip’s ubiquitous friend, Martha (Martha Kelly). Even the smaller parts are strong and fresh, including Penelope (Sabina Sciubba) the French wife, Eddie (Ernest Adams) the rodeo owner, and Juggalo (Adam Zastrow) another would-be clown who ends up working at Arby’s.

Zach Galifianakis as Baskets the Clown. 
 

The characters may come across at times as one-dimensional, because each has a focus of personality: Cody and Logan are millennial DJs; Dale runs a failing business college; Martha is an insurance adjuster; and Chip—ostensibly the center of the story—pursues his dream to be a clown, except that he realizes, “I don’t think clowns are needed as much since the world has become so clownish.” But like the overall mixture of tragedy and comedy throughout the show, each character surprises in any given episode with multiple dimensions. Chip proves to love his mother, despite his frustration with the apron strings; he is jealous of his twin and Martha, even though he dismisses them each regularly; he wants to pursue his dream, even though he recognizes that it is a nightmare.

Louie Anderson as Christine Baskets
 

Louie Anderson as Christine has proven to be a stroke of genius for creators Louis C.K., Zach Galifianakis, and Jonathan Krisel. Anderson won an Emmy and the Critics’ Choice Award for the show’s first season, partly based on the writing but certainly based on the depth and complexity of personality that he infuses into Christine. He credits his mother and his sisters for a lifetime of inspiration and raw material…but I believe that the richness of his performance comes directly through him, directly from his heart: it is too genuine to be an imitation.

Baskets has completed its second-season run of ten episodes, and I’m thrilled because it has been renewed for a third season. I admit that I had doubts during the very first episode…I remember thinking, “Is this going to come together? Is this going anywhere?” Part of what confused me—in hindsight—was the tragicomic mix of both story and characters. Soon my confusion gave way to fascination…and to laughter and tears. I re-watched the first season as a binge-frenzied preparation for the second season; it was even better the second time around, and then the second season was better than the first. Find it online and binge on it…it’s not for everyone, but it may be for you, too.

Thought

I listen to what my wife calls, “the weirdest collection of music” that she’s ever heard on one iPod…we were driving long distance and she half-napped in the passenger seat while I enjoyed my music collection played at “random.” I think of it as an eclectic collection…not weird. But playing my list of several thousand songs at random has created occasional weird pairings: 1940s Big Band tunes before current noise pop cacophony; folk ballads followed by polished movie themes; highly original tracks after a cover song. Last night, I listened to Brian Eno’s “Bone Bomb”—inspired by a news story about a Palestinian girl who becomes a suicide bomber; it was followed by The Inks Spots’ 1941 classic, “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” I found a certain irony in the juxtaposition…a modern threat of terrorism followed by a 1941 innocence, a pairing of bomb and fire, a surrender to death followed by a wish to be “…the one you love.” I enjoyed the juxtaposition because I thought about each song with a strange sense of the other, thought about them together as an irony, thought about the world then and now. 

In contrast, while watching the Academy Awards recently, I was stunned at the horrors of the documentary that won the Oscar for Documentary, Short Subject, The White Helmets (2016). I watched a very tearful producer, Joanna Natasegara, and a sincere Director, Orlando von Einsiedel tell in their acceptance speech about the 82,000 lives saved by the White Helmets, Syria's volunteer rescue force. Their speech ended and after a blink of the camera and a flourish of dramatic music, a politically charged Cadillac commercial followed, then a promo for Grey’s Anatomy. I don’t think they came as any kind of juxtaposition, because all the images and messages and emotions simply confused me, overwhelmed me. The power of The White Helmets clips was lost in the preachiness of the Cadillac commercial and then the absurdity of Grey’s Anatomy. I lost any thoughts about any of it as my mind struggled just to keep up. I had been so overwhelmed by the constant input that I had to go to Google to remember the name of the documentary.

It happens all the time because of the constant input of inputs…smart phone, internet, television, radio…in the car, in the waiting room, at the bar, at the restaurant…billboards and signs on the outfield walls and the ice hockey rink walls and shrink-wrapped buses and trucks. One’s thoughts are prevented virtually without interruption. I often have no time to think about the impact of what I read or hear or see. When I watch the evening news, I’m left with a confusion of frightening war images and political disputes and economic crises and dramatic weather video and sports clips and heart-warming human-interest stories…all underscored by a ticker at the bottom of the screen with other ideas and facts and punctuated by commercials. My thoughts about any single one of the stories never have time to take shape…which is fine because right after four more commercials, Jeopardy! comes on.

Open Facebook and see the posts that piled up since you last checked it: someone’s birthday, someone’s complaint or rant, a child’s success story, a pet’s trick on video…buy from this site, buy from that site…no time to think or assimilate or understand. Fortunately, Facebook lets us click the “Like” button to show that we saw the post…an instantaneous click about our instantaneous attention.

I enjoy the value of serendipity and how—like the songs I heard in the car—certain things can illuminate new aspects of other things. I enjoy thinking of one movie in comparison with another or old movies in comparison with new movies, or thinking about the book and film versions of a story…comparisons and contrasts and juxtaposition. But such thoughts are best gathered through focus and purpose…I like to take time to think about things, to weigh ideas, to evaluate meanings and intentions and process. I’ll challenge my readers: think about this post for a short time before clicking back to Facebook or heading off to another site and another topic. Think about the height and width and depth and quality of your thoughts…before you rush off to other ideas, images, and input.

Motion

When I was 11, my grandmother gave me a small telescope. With it, I’ve viewed the Moon, planets, stars, and galaxies. I learned to sight objects through the small finderscope on the side and then track them in the main lens for some amazing views. It’s not a great telescope, but it showed me the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, beautiful views of our Moon. I remember looking at the Moon the night that man first landed there…and I could plainly see the Sea of Tranquility and imagine men walking around there. 

Watching any object over time, I’d have to adjust the telescope every half-minute or so because the object would drift out of the small circle of sight. When I’d look directly up at the sky, nothing seemed to move; but when I focused on anything through the lens, it rushed across the field of vision and disappeared past the rim of sight. I knew—but didn’t really understand—that the world was turning under the heavens and moving my point of view. I also learned how the Moon moved slowly across the sky each month to wax into Full and wane into New; I couldn’t see the constant motion, but when I made a point to notice how the Moon was in a new place in the sky each night, I understood that it was moving. Then I grew to understand that watching carefully in the telescope, I could actually see the constant motion. It took me years to realize that I was seeing both the turning of the Earth and the motion of the Moon…but it required my careful attention and a telescope. 

Reykjavik, June 21, 2014: Looking north, the Sun sets from west to east.

Later—much more recently—I was in Reykjavik, Iceland on the longest day of the year, the Summer Solstice when the northern pole of Earth is leaning toward the Sun. Some friends and I watched the sunset that night. As I watched, I realized that I was seeing the sunset apparently to true north and it seemed to move from west to east…it was completing a celestial circle around the pole of Earth and I was far enough north to see it. Watching sunsets in Pennsylvania has always been a matter of seeing it rise upward in the east and set downward in the west. But in Reykjavik, the Sun made a circle in the sky that night and I watched it set due north, moving west to east and then rise continuing its motion in the same direction. I could actually see that I was on top of the world. It didn’t take long to realize that I was seeing something that I’d read about and understood…but careful attention now allowed me to see it.

In one of my favorite poems, The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot, the very timid narrator says, “I’ve measured out my life in coffee spoons.” Sometimes, that line is the logo of my life: I’ve been cautious and methodical and conservative and I’ve lived in a very measured way. Sometimes, I can’t sense that things are moving at all…the motion is very hard to discern. Sometimes a morning in October seems exactly like a morning in the preceding April: same kitchen, same table, same chair, same coffee, same mug. I used to drive to work along back roads through the quasi-farmlands and suburbs outside Philadelphia, back roads that seemed not to change as well. The seasons changed, but even they are largely predictable. October has the same colors as April, except that it’s dying leaves of color rather than sprouting blossoms. 

This failure to see it is a failure of neither the motion nor my life…the coffee each morning is new and the roads of Pennsylvania change even in their constancy. It is purely a failure of my perception—maybe a failure of my coffee-spoon-measured caution—that prevents my seeing it. Because when I use the right tool or stand in the right place and look carefully enough, I see that all is in motion....we're all going somewhere.

Unequalled

My mother, 1949.

I am well aware of the statistics that overflow the media and the marchers on International Women’s Day: women are underappreciated and undervalued and disrespected…all the statistics tell us so. I know that in many places in the world, women are truly treated as second-class citizens or worse, unprotected by law and policy and practice. Because women traditionally—and, dare I say, by instinct—care for the family, it is women who unequally assume the burdens of poverty.

However, my experience doesn’t reflect the numbers—I’m missing something or simply not understanding, and I don’t want to be ignorant. In my experience—overwhelmingly, women are shoulder-to-shoulder with me all the time, at times well ahead of me! I’ll start with my mother…she shared the weight of a four-children family with my father; I never doubted their equality nor witnessed an inequality (Did she “wait on” my father at times? Yes. But did he support her steadfastly? Yes…shared service.). At times, I saw her holding my father up with her strength on the few times his strength failed him, just as he held her up when she needed it. They played different roles, they shared the burdens and joys…they were equally invaluable to us and to each other. I don’t know what the statistics might tell me about her, but my mom was unequalled.

My sisters were supported and loved and excelled each in her own way. They both went to college and held jobs and built lives and families with husbands who respect and love and share the burdens and joys with them. I don’t know what the statistics might tell me about them, but my sisters are unequalled.

My wife shared the weight of raising our two-children family (and carries it still)…she carried the weightiest at-home part of the burden because I traveled often for work. She was—and is—always supporting our children; at the same time she supports her family, volunteers to help abandoned or injured animals, and is the truest friend to her friends. She is smarter than I am—she has a Master’s degree—but we stand shoulder-to-shoulder every day. I love her and respect her because her person commands it. I don’t know what the statistics might tell me about my wife, but she is unequalled.

I have a daughter in whom I have the utmost faith and for whom I have the utmost love…she excelled through high school and made the Dean’s list in college and now is starting her career in a city far from her home, demanding the best for and of herself. She is smart and funny/sarcastic and dependable and worth everything that any job will pay her. I don’t know what the statistics might tell me about her, but my daughter is unequalled.

I have a goddaughter/niece who has also created her life in a city far from her home…an apartment, a job, new friends and loves, a daily routine of her own making. She is artistic and musical and funny and generous. I don’t know what the statistics might tell me about her, but my goddaughter is unequalled.

Equals, 2012.

I’ve worked in a woman-dominated industry for 30 years…worked with, worked for, hired and fired, relied on, been overwhelmed by, partnered with remarkable women. Editorial Directors who are accomplished pharmacists, managers, writers, peers; Medical Writers and Editors who are skilled and smart and personable and passionate; Account and Project Managers who carry the weight of whole teams on their shoulders and drive business and keep clients happy; Operations and Finance Directors who are smart and skilled and determined. Beyond knowing them at work, I knew them with their families and understood their tremendous 24-hours-a-day accomplishments. I don’t know what the statistics might tell me about these ladies, but they are unequalled.

In hindsight, I realize that none of these ladies ever felt compelled to demand or even ask for my respect.  They never once had to assert “We are equals.” It would have been superfluous…because as “people”—not as “women”—as people, they had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with me and that’s where I naturally and proudly met them: unequalled equals. 

That has been one of my important realizations, that dealing with someone as an equal means not relegating them to a “type”…a woman isn’t just a woman. A woman is a daughter and perhaps a sister and perhaps a mother and perhaps a business person or teacher or writer or editor or a cancer survivor or any of a million things in a million ways. 

Ayn Rand (© 1962, AP)

If you want a taste of multiple possibilities of remarkable women, unequalled remarkable women, watch A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945); Katie and Francie Nolan are two strong, weak, humble, proud women struggling in poverty, struggling with their male counterparts. Or read about the book’s author, Betty Smith, who rose from the tenements of Brooklyn to become an accomplished author. Or read about Dagny Taggert, the heroine—businesswoman, lover, visionary—of Atlas Shrugged. Or read about the book’s powerhouse author, Ayn Rand, a creative, intellectual dynamo who, I think, never asked to be respected or asked to be an equal. To quote Rand, “The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it is who’s going to stop me.”

Eloquence

As Oscars night approached, I began my annual rush: “better get to the movies and see the nominees.” At the same time, I’d been enjoying TCM’s "31 Days to the Oscars," their 24/7 showing of Academy Award nominees and winners over the decades. I’ll state the obvious: movies have changed over the nearly 90 years that the Academy has given awards: sound, color, acting technique, subject matter. 

This year, I’ve realized another difference: today’s films often rely much more on the empathy and emotional investment of the audience. Today’s films frequently require the audience to interpret and create a character and the character’s inside story. The audience has to perceive and understand the story rather than hear it told.

I watched the classic, All About Eve (1950), on TV. It is beautifully acted and it opens with a tight, narrated sequence, which shifts back in time to start the story. The story is driven completely on dialogue and some strong soliloquys; the script is rich in language with theatrical and movie references…the monologues and dialogues elevate the story and reveal the characters. Margo’s (Bette Davis) lines comingle sarcasm, anger, and resignation; Addison (George Sanders) is cutting, highly theatrical, and eloquent—a pompousness that drives his character. The audience has to tune into the language, or lose its way into and through the story. Watch the caustic party scene of Davis, Sanders, Anne Baxter, and Marilyn Monroe and hear the sophisticated banter; watch the intense moment when Addison blackmails Eve (Anne Baxter) by exposing her web of lies…and listen to his eloquent self-reproach before he walks out. The acting is excellent, but the language is rich, sophisticated, eloquent.

Moonlight (2016), on the other hand, moves forward almost without language. Key to the characters is their inability to understand or describe their state in life. The actors show us what they feel, invite us to understand their frustration, their inability to explain, their inability to communicate. The lines are few and very pointed…and often carry two or three times as much meaning as words. When the drug-addicted mother (Naomie Harris) demands money from Chiron (Ashton Sanders), the audience wants him to scream, to refuse, to revolt…but the words don’t come. The characters and the drama are driven by a lack of words, an intense inability of the characters to articulate in words…but the film articulates eloquently through situation, editing, and acting.

Once I’d made this realization—where words once served, now technique communicates—I found it over and over again. The romance of Casablanca (1942) unfolds in language that the characters speak—Rick (Humphrey Bogart) explains his pain to a glass of liquor and to Sam in the shadows of the late-night bar; the end of The Maltese Falcon (1941) is 15 minutes of excellent banter and quips and explanation…if the audience doesn’t listen, the story confuses them; Norman (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (1960) is revealed largely though his conversation with Marion (Janet Leigh) among his taxidermy or through the psychiatrist’s (Simon Oakland) prolonged explanation at the end of the film. 

Among the other Academy Award nominees that I saw for this year, Lion and Manchester by the Sea both featured characters and stories that develop and communicate through situation, editing, and acting. Lion’s main character, Saroo—whether young (Sunny Pawar) or old (Dev Patel)—was often mute in witnessing his own life: the boy’s silently joining the other children in the underground or the man’s searching the internet and his spiderweb of maps on the wall. Manchester’s characters suffer and support in near silence. Lee (Ben Affleck) bears the weight of an unbearable tragedy, but never really articulates it in words; even when his ex-wife (Michelle Williams) reaches out to him from her own pain, his answer is, “You don’t understand.”

Audiences should acknowledge this difference—just as obviously as they distinguish between black-and-white or color films. Typically, older films will tell you what they want you to know; newer films, more and more, will show the story and the audience has to watch closely to discover it.

Reverie

Today’s world is a constant input of inputs—newsfeeds, weather updates, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn—everywhere the world feeds us input (I don’t say “information” because the input is fact and fancy, information and opinion, important, diversionary, entertaining). I do not decry the input because I participate in it fully and constantly…why watch only a game on television when I can watch the game and see scores and injury reports on a constant ticker at the bottom of the screen? Or when I can use the remote to toggle between two games? Sometimes I feel like Bowie’s character, Thomas Newton, in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), watching a dozen TVs at once.

But this constant input comes at a cost of something that I value, something I recommend: “reverie.” Do we take time—actually take time, seize it, steal it for ourselves—to be alone in personal consideration of what and how we think? Reverie: to be lost in one’s thoughts, to daydream. Freud called daydreaming “infantile;” schoolkids are reprimanded for it; Walter Mitty is considered a fool for too much of it…but therein lies the richness of each of us. Yes, the world forces input on us constantly, but what’s on the inside already? What are the riches of our thoughts left alone to wander and grow by themselves…and how do we discover them?

Moeder’s in Amsterdam is covered floor-to-ceiling with customer-contributed pictures of mom.

My reverie comes most readily when I’m driving long distances…to the Jersey shore, for instance—a drive of some hour or hour-and-a-half. For years, I’ve enjoyed that drive late at night to avoid the traffic, coursing the dark, flat stretches of road that cut through the Pine Barrens until I fall into a reverie.  A reverie as if I were spying or eavesdropping on my own mind, all the events and memories, people and places tumbled together and newly perceived. I’ve written before about the enjoyable power of memory, but in reverie, I can blend an historic past with an imagined future and find new ideas, rich new thoughts, surprises: my morning in Amsterdam when I visited the Anne Frank house and later visited a restaurant that accepted for display a picture of my mom…the memories morph into ideas about my sisters and mother and visions of a future Amsterdam trip with my family; a race climbing the stairs to the top of Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre with my friend and his son—no real race at all because I was dragging behind, panting, and thinking, “At least I’ll die in church!”—the memory expands into concepts of vision (the city of Paris spread out below) and religion and death and redemption…in reverie, my mind gets whirled up with blended ideas and observations, truths mixed with hopes mixed with plans.

The church of Sacré-Cœur towering above Paris.

But in today’s world, I’m forced to steal the time and steel myself to get lost like that—to shut off the radio and television, to turn away from the computer and smartphone, to let my mind disconnect from the input—to get lost and find what’s inside already. 

Somewhere

On a brief walk on a beautiful afternoon last week, I noticed three jet vapor trails in the sky, each headed in a different direction. I found myself wondering where everyone is going and why aren’t I going, too. I couldn’t actually see the jets except as quick glimmers of reflected sunlight, but the vapor trails were plain-to-see, very high, very long, and going somewhere. It was another theme to which I became attuned...another theme that echoed through my weeks.

In a day or two, my playlist happened onto Brian Eno’s “Spider and I,” a quasi-ambient tune from his 1977 album, Before and After Science. I remember even then imagining the world beyond that the lyrics evoked, hearing a hymn to a distant vision. The spider hopes to catch a fly…an emissary from somewhere, and the singer dreams of a ship going to that place, going somewhere:

We sleep in the mornings,
We dream of a ship that sails away, 
A thousand miles away.

© 1996 Disney Enterprises, Inc.

In my mind, that song is linked with Tim Burton’s film version of James and the Giant Peach (1996), where one of James’s first visions of a world beyond—he dreams of going far away to New York—comes as he befriends a spider on her web in the window, to whom he sings his introduction. It’s a fantastic scene of introduction to and definition of the character, James: a frustrated, gentle heart; a youthful visionary; a dreamer…it expresses the same theme of longing to go somewhere, with a quick glimpse to the horizon and James’s “dream balloon” sent adrift:

There's a city that I dreamed of
Very far from here
Very very far away from here
Very far away

Hearing Eno’s song, my mind drifted to a time when I visited Taormina with my family…Taormina itself a world beyond for me, a somewhere.  On our first night there, we walked the main shopping street to a piazza and balcony 500 meters above the water. A masted sailing ship lay in harbor; we had noticed it earlier (everyone noticed it…it was beautiful!) as we drove in on the winding, cliff-hugging road to the hotel. From the piazza, we saw the lights outlining the masts in the blackness of the nighttime water. Later when we returned to the hotel, I sat on the balcony to relax and rest from our long travel-day; just then, the ship silently set sail and slowly, gracefully glided across the cove in front of the hotel and disappeared past the rocky point to the north…it could not have been more provocative. Who was on it and where were they going and why were they going? So silently, so darkly…had it had no lights, it simply would have vanished in the night! My trip was a bit of an escape for me, but such a ship on such a night in such a place…going somewhere.

Old-time New Brunswick, NJ train station.

Long ago when I was in college, the New Brunswick, NJ train station had a platform that was down at track level; today the platform is raised so that one directly enters the train at compartment level. Back then, one entered the train by climbing stairs up from the gravel-tracks-ties level. Whenever I was feeling a sense of frustration or adolescent/collegiate angst, I would go to the station and wait and watch the trains roar by. The signal lights to the south would change to vertical—train coming—and I would watch to the north as the express would come within minutes around the curve. Despite its size and power, the trains came in silence until they were nearly at the station. I could stand just feet from the track (foolishly standing on or beyond the yellow STAND BACK OF YELLOW LINE marker) and get punched by the force of air that the train drove out ahead of itself, feel the rumble of incredible mass—tons of steel at high speed. The Metroliners would rush through the station at 90 miles per hour…giving an enormous exhilaration that always dispelled the angst. While waiting for the next train, the next exhilaration, I would look down the tracks with a sense of reverie, tracks that ran straight for miles and narrowed and narrowed until they seemed to meet at the horizon. The tracks disappeared beyond the curve of the world and I wondered, where did they go and how far could they take me? 

Without knowing any connection, last weekend I began reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged…I am completely enjoying it. The theme of “going somewhere” announced itself again. I came across a passage about one of the main characters’ dreaming at the images that pass by outside her train window:

“As men on a dark prairie liked to see the lighted windows of a train going past, her achievement, the sight of power and purpose that gave them reassurance in the midst of empty miles and night—so she wanted to feel it for a moment, a brief greeting, a single glimpse, just to wave her arm and say: Someone is going somewhere…”

This theme for me is as old as me. As a little boy in rural Clementon, NJ, I would hike with friends and against my mother’s wishes along the train tracks for as far and for as long as we could dare. We would leave “civilization”  behind and follow the tracks through the pines and—while we were only a town or two away—we never felt that we had gotten quite anywhere, only that we were headed somewhere.  
 

Monstrous

© United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
 

Can’t tell if it’s a blessing or a curse…but once I recognize a theme, I seem to find it over and over again. My mind seems easily to adopt a pre-sensitivity to certain ideas, and then I find them echoed in reality and stories and movies.

Two weeks ago I watched a powerful documentary about photo albums of the people at the Auschwitz death camp, photos of both the captors and the victims. The story of the documentary went on about how the photo album of the German soldiers showed “plain people living regular lives.” Officers and soldiers and their families were gathered at picnics and relaxing and singing and even lighting their Christmas trees. Rebecca Erbelding, a Holocaust Museum archivist, characterized it this way, “Without the context of what they’re doing in Auschwitz, this is an album of fun.”

The second album, photographed on exactly the same days, examines the process by which the Jews were delivered by train, “selected,” dehumanized, and marched off to death…mercifully for us, the murders aren’t depicted in the albums. Seeing the albums, I found myself realizing completely how individually “human” each person was. What must have been the terror in the hearts and souls of the victims…husbands separated from their wives, parents (young and old) separated from their children?

Just as frightening was the question posed by the makers of the documentary: the album showed the soldiers to be humans…not monsters from whom we would expect only horrors…but humans who somehow were capable of monstrous things. “Why do people kill? Why were so many people able to do this in the heart of such a civilized nation?” asks the narrator. The narrator says that thinking of the soldiers as “monsters” makes the answer too easy: monsters kill. But realizing that human beings can do “monstrous” things is terrifying.

© 2013, Dave Bell

In the weeks since then, I’ve come across the same theme in very different contexts; but the question is clear: what evil lives within each human? And how do we overcome it? I watched Fredric March play Dr. Jekyll in the 1931 movie version of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Some of it was as corny as we expect a 1930s movie to be…but at its core, and central to Fredric March’s Oscar, is the question of a monstrous evil within. March does an excellent portrayal of both Dr. Jekyll—intelligent, respected, and polished; and the monstrous Mr. Hyde—unrestrained, lecherous, and dangerous. Stevenson examines the question in his novel in 1886 and we continue to be fascinated by the theme…movie versions retell the tale in 1912, 1920, 1931, 1941, 2008, and 2017. It occurred to me that this is a similar theme that brought us The Wolfman (1941) and maybe even Marvel Comics’ The Incredible Hulk. Beware the kindly Lawrence Talbot and Bruce Banner when the inner monsters are released!

The Temptation of St. Anthony (Detail) c. 1502.

I’m reading a book about Hieronymus Bosch (c.1450–1516), an artist of “nightmarish details and fantastic painterly schemes,” and I’ve come across the same theme again, what evil lives within each human? And how do we overcome it? In this case, the examination of the theme is 500 years old! At the turn of the 15th Century, Bosch populated many of his paintings with grotesque representations of half-human/half-animals, disfigured humans, and humans doing bizarre and monstrous behaviors. He constantly portrays the evil—in 1500’s terms, the “sin”—of which we are capable. In his world and in his art, Bosch specifically shows the redemptive power of faith to overcome the evil. In his world and in his art, Bosch clearly shows the beauty of the angels and saints in contrast to the “beast in man” that haunts us all.

From 1500’s art through 1800’s books and 1900’s movies, the theme of “an evil within” is continual. More terrifying, though, is finding it demonstrated so readily in reality. From the massive genocide of the Nazis to the current genocide of ISIS and down to the smaller, more personal attacks in Quebec and Charleston…the question remains, “Why are people able to do monstrous evil in the heart of such a civilized world?”

Behavior

I don’t know if she coined the phrase, but my wife is the first person whom I heard speak it…and she has spoken it frequently over the years. Mostly to our children, as they were growing up, she used the phrase as a warning for them to expect and deliver the best of themselves all the time. Especially when life was challenging and one person or another made it more challenging—a bully, a cheater, a liar. Children being children, they usually wanted the world to be “fair,” and so they felt justified or sorely tempted to retaliate. But my wife coined (I think) a pearl: “Don’t let other people make you a bad person.” 

It seems a simple concept, simple enough that my children understood it from their youngest years. Just because someone else does something mean, dishonest, immoral does not give any of us license to do something else mean, dishonest, immoral. The more I heard the expression, the more I liked it; I realized that it presumed that my children were good to begin with…an important perception that we should all have and pursue about ourselves…though that is not always the lesson taken from the phrase.

In recent days, I have seen bad people with bad behaviors make others—many others—behave badly. The political world is aflame with name calling and other inflammatory rhetoric, prejudices, personal insults, and general vulgarity. 

Donald Trump ran a campaign full of insult, prejudice, and vulgarity…I am not speaking politically or judging him politically here; regardless of policy or platform issues, he constantly attacked people on personal grounds, on racial or nationalistic grounds, and often used language formerly excluded from presidential campaigns. Especially in his leadership role, his language and comportment are, in my opinion, bad behaviors.

Serge Kovaleski, investigative reporter at The New York Times.

The world seems to have chosen to meet him in the gutter. Clinton’s campaign against him included the constant re-airing of Trump’s mocking a disabled reporter, Serge Kovaleski. Every day, we got to see that particular bad behavior over and over and over again. Meryl Streep went on to say at the Golden Globes award evening that Trump’s behavior “broke her heart”…but she was also made to relive it multiple times a day on television. 

The Women’s March on Saturday appears to have given many the license for overwhelming self-righteous bad behavior…justified usually in the name of equality or liberty or freedom. People personally attacked Trump and his family in terms as bad—and at times worse—than Trump used. For me, any positive message was lost in the excess of vulgarity.

Facebook has become a feeding ground of mockery and meanness and vulgarity…from the right and the left…calling each other horrid names, attributing frightening motives and frightening debaucheries to each other, wishing unspeakable things. In the name of denouncing prejudice, people deal with each other prejudicially; in the name of denouncing insensitivity, people have been highly insensitive; in the name of political freedom, people have insisted only on their viewpoint.

On a very personal level, recently I’ve been lumped into a group being prejudicially blamed for what’s wrong in the world. “Old white dudes,” writes a friend, are ruining everything. I’m an old white dude and I don’t think that I’m at all responsible for any of the negativity—political or behavioral—going on in the world today. I think that friend let others’ bad behavior affect him, because I know he is not a prejudicial person. In fact, I presume he’s a good guy to begin with.

In fact, I’m going to take my wife’s warning to heart: I won’t let others make me a bad person. I want to see change, I welcome protest, I accept resistance…especially against anyone’s bad behavior.

Facts

There was a time when news reporters prided themselves on reporting only confirmed facts...never just opinions. Their focus on facts may have been an outgrowth of war-reporting during World War II, when an erroneous report could create a false sense of loss or a false sense of security for millions of readers and listeners back home. That “focus on facts” persisted through the early years of television news and became a litmus test for network news.

In the 1950s, Edward R. Murrow, a kind of “granddaddy of news reporting,” grew his reputation by focusing on facts. His legendary rebuke of Senator Eugene McCarthy was based on facts, often citing McCarthy’s own words; when McCarthy defended himself by accusing Murrow of being “a Communist sympathizer,” Murrow’s response was simple: McCarthy “made no reference to any statements of fact that we made.” Facts carried the day, McCarthy was exposed, and the value of network news—and sticking to the facts—was clear. 

In the 1960s, Walter Cronkite ushered in CBS’s Evening News and became “the most trusted man in America.” When Cronkite hosted a CBS News Special, Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?, he began to question the “facts” that he had been reporting about the Vietnam conflict.  He publicly offered his opinion, but made it clear that it was his opinion: “…an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective.” He went on to comment, “…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out [of the Vietnam conflict] then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” He maintained the difference between the facts and his opinions. Cronkite’s opinion carried weight—President Johnson recognized how he had “lost America”—but Cronkite's reputation had been built on his respect for facts.

In 1981, ABC News’s Frank Reynolds struggled to focus on facts as he reported the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. Even as he narrates the video of the attempt, he measures his words to be factual. On live TV, he insists on “confirmation” of information coming to him over the phone. “Wait a minute…I’m on the air and I’m trying to get some more information. You say the president has gone to the hospital. But can you confirm that he has not been taken to a hospital?” Later, Reynolds is clearly shaken that he has misreported information; he says, “He was wounded…” [grabbing his head] “...God. …All this that we’ve been telling you is incorrect. We now must redraw this entire tragedy in different terms.” To Frank Reynolds, his responsibility was to the facts…and reporting the facts to the American public.

Even on September 11, 2001 as tragic events unfolded, Peter Jennings of ABC News was careful to segregate his opinion (at 10:24 in the video) from his factual reporting. “We do not very often make recommendations for people's behavior from this chair but ...I checked in with my children who are deeply stressed, as I think young people are across the United States. So if you're a parent, you've got a kid in some other part of the country, call them up. Exchange observations.” He was in his twelfth hour of reporting, but he maintained the difference of being in “this chair” as a news reporter and maintained the difference between fact and opinion.

In contrast, today's pop-star media feast on delivering opinions and generating controversy. “Facts” are couched within agendas—right- and left-wing—and lost within sarcasm, self-righteousness, and opinion. Rachel Maddow is no more a news reporter than is Rush Limbaugh; Chris Matthews is no different from Sean Hannity…they are commentators and opinionators who unapologetically bring an agenda to anything they present.

I struggle every day to find facts…to ignore the overflow of founded and unfounded opinion on television, the internet, and overwhelmingly on Facebook; to ignore the paranoia and exaggeration and aggression that everyone seems to feel entitled to express. Ironically, “facts" seem to be casualties of our information age.

Snowflakes

Snowflakes falling always capture my imagination. Their whiteness or their fluttering motion or their unhurried pace toward the ground or their silence…I don’t know what it is, but I know that they capture my imagination. If I watch them from the window as they drift down to meld into the snow on the ground, or if I drive through them and see them explode on my windshield, or if I walk among them and feel them instantly melt against my cheek…snowflakes falling hypnotize me.

It is true. My memories are stronger when they are dressed in snowflakes. I remember days even in my youngest years when they include snowflakes falling…more than 50 years ago when I was younger than 10 and walking through the forest behind my boyhood home, I noticed how the pine trees formed caverns beneath their snow-covered branches; on all fours I shimmied into a cavern and, seated on pine needles, “watched the woods fill up with snow,” as Robert Frost says. Snow fell fast, “flakes” of snow that seemed more like cotton balls, and the snow was already deep outside the cavern. Night had fallen, but the brightness of the snow made everything visible; I remember watching my brother and sister pass by my hideout, their feet crunching the snow, their voices dampened by the snow, and a soft hiss of constant snowflakes falling on the piling snow.

I remember waking one morning 40 years ago while on a solo backpack trip to hear the tap of snowflakes on the tent…opening the flaps, I found the ground white with snow and the flakes falling fast. My shivering hampered my campfire-building efforts, because I had jumped out of the tent to start the fire quickly before the snowfall covered everything. Soon, I was warmed by flames, oatmeal, and a cup of thin coffee while being constantly pelted by snowflakes, snowflakes that disappeared above the flames or were diverted by the flow of the hot air rising.

I remember 20-some years ago a night when I pulled my son on his sled through snow-covered streets; we were bundled against the cold and falling snowflakes, but we were cold notwithstanding. The snowfall was heavy enough to halt all traffic through the neighborhood, except for a front-end loader plowing the parking lot at the train station. We watched with equal fascination as the plow plowed mountains of snow, only to watch the ground go white again in minutes. The plowman waved to us from his cab and my son said, “I’m having great fun, dad.”

I remember 10 years ago on my hasty visit to Prague, how I toured the city in a constant halo of flurries. They never came fast enough to cover the ground with anything more than snow-swirls along curbs and around my ankles, or tiny drifts in picturesque nooks. I was surprised to see the reflection of my bundled self in the window of the marionette museum…in my hat and scarf and coat, I looked like the cold marionettes in their elaborate costumes behind the glass, except that I was dusted in snow. I realized how being among snowflakes gives me that unreal sense of being alone in a dream: sounds are deadened, shapes are softened, colors are blanked, place and time and distance are enclosed around me.

Then in 2011, Kate Bush released her album, 50 Words for Snow and I was mesmerized by her song, “Snowflake.” In the melodic, repetitive music, she expresses the dreamlike sense of a drifting snowflake riding its way through the sky earthward; the choirboy vocals of her son, Albert, give a tone of altitude and lightness; and the lyrics question every element of snowflakes that hypnotize me: being lost in silence in graceful motion outside time…only to find oneself “here.”

I found this exact sense, again, this weekend; while it snowed outside my window, I read The Snow Child, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013, by Eowyn Ivey. It is a kind of a modern fairy tale that takes place in Alaska, where snow, obviously, is central to the tale. I found the same dreamlike sense of snowflakes, the same immediacy of them:

The swirl overhead was dizzying, and she began to spin slowly in place. The snowflakes landed on her cheeks and eyelids, wet her skin. Then she stopped and watched the snow settle on the arms of her coat. For a moment she studied the pattern of a single starry flake before it melted into the wool. Here, and then gone.

I think that I have found this to be true: snowflakes falling capture our imaginations.

Resolution

Sunset Beach, Cape May, NJ.

Whether you use the Oxford English Dictionary or Merriam-Webster Dictionary or even the latest Dictionary.com…everywhere, the definition of the word “resolution” includes being “firm” or “determined” or “formal.” Last New Year’s Eve, I resolved an achievable idea…nothing grand, but I chose a real resolution about which I was and could remain determined…

I had talked about starting a blog for a long time, but this year was the year: “I want to assert my continued relevance...” My resolve was not immediately productive…I posted my first blog on May 16. Starting the blog, I had forced weekly discipline on myself, a discipline to craft a correct, meaningful, brief essay. I’ve not reached the readership I wished for, I’ve had pitifully few comments and “likes” along the way, but this is my twenty-seventh entry…I congratulate myself that I was firm and determined in my 2016 resolution.

Importantly, I’ve enjoyed a significant side benefit to my resolution: I’ve learned to pay close attention to even the small things and moments in my life. I’ve enjoyed, suffered, relished, grieved, struggled, savored, resisted, and wondered each of the 366 days of the year! I worry how many days and moments simply passed me by—like letters coursing through the Post Office—in past years. But in 2016, I paid uncommon attention to the days and moments, pursuing my “blog resolution.” Many moments became blog entries: summer storms and rainbows, visits to museums, meteor showers, the election, etc.

But much of that side benefit has simply been to know, every day, that I’m alive and presented constantly with moments worth noticing. Moments worth noticing from the simplest joys—enjoying summer’s South Jersey produce or reading Dante’s Divine Comedy; to the most profound events—a farewell party of friends and family when I left my former job or reading the beautiful eulogy written by my wife at her mom’s funeral. The year took me everywhere, and fortunately I noticed more of it than ever before.

We watched a special presentation of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) at the Kimmel Center, a screening accompanied by the Center’s Fred J. Cooper Memorial Organ…an accompaniment that vibrated the house; a friend and I saw Sophia Loren—still beautiful at 82—interviewed in her charming, broken English; I spent an evening on-the-town in NYC, dining at Gotham Bar & Grill and then startled by American Gothic; my family completed a “pilgrimage” to premium seats to hear Brian Wilson play Pet Sounds; I watched one evening after sunset as Venus and Jupiter met in the sky, even though in reality, they're about 450 million miles apart (They won't meet so closely again until 2065...I expect to be moldering by then, if not completely moldered); I helped a friend through cancer treatment and then, two months later, fished him out of the bay when he fell out of the kayak…all moments worth noticing.

Pay attention—I did—because those moments come and go so quickly. Late in summer, my daughter and I drove across the Cape May peninsula just to watch the Sun set into the Delaware Bay. When we arrived at Sunset Beach, we found a crowd of about 300 other sunset-watchers crowded on the beach; just ahead of sunset, officials lowered the flag and played the National Anthem over a loudspeaker…all 300 paused, many removed their hats, many even put their hands over their hearts. Then the Sun graced us with a dazzling sunset behind wisps of cloud. As darkness fell, we drove halfway back across the cape where we happened upon a quaint little restaurant housed in the back half of a general store. We enjoyed a bread plate to start and a vegetarian gnocchi plate with local ingredients and a local Cape May wine…all made greater by the serendipity of finding the restaurant right there, right then. We cruised around a very dark Cape May Point and climbed the steps over the dunes—large, elaborate dunes covered with sedge to protect the neighborhood—and enjoyed a moonlit view of the ocean meeting the Delaware Bay…all moments worth noticing.

I had made a resolution to blog; keeping the resolution led me to very much more. Happy past year, happy new year!

Birth

Mystic Nativity, (1500) by Sandro Botticelli, in the National Gallery, London, England.

If you are expecting or if someone close to you is expecting at this time of year—especially if it’s late in the pregnancy and people can easily see and are often compelled to touch your belly—then you have a special window into the Christmas season. Too often we lose sight of what is central to the season; we are seduced or tempted or deceived into the “Pop” ideas of Christmas: gifts and romance and Santa Claus. But if you are connected to a pregnancy—a great expectation—then you’re easily reminded that Christmas is about fulfillment, promise, and hope. 

We were expecting at Christmastime many years ago…my wife was in her eighth month, so her belly was big and seemed to invite people’s not-always-welcome attention. “Is it a boy or a girl?”…we had chosen not to find out; “When are you due?” …in about a month, but our first-born came late, so…; “Can I feel the baby kick?” …well OK, but if you’re patient, you can see the baby move! Our excited sense of “expectation” was overwhelming: boy or girl; healthy or no; smart or talented or both; a writer, a musician, a doctor…who knew. But the pregnancy was clearly about fulfillment and promise and hope. We sensed the season differently…better…because we were literally awaiting the birth.

Adoration of the Kings, (about 1470) by Botticelli and Lippi, in the National Gallery, London, England.

I like to remind myself—and I am herein reminding you—that Christmas is all that…the birth of fulfillment, promise, and hope. The promise of Christmas began with the prophets, long before the Biblical pregnancy, long before the miraculous birth. In Isaiah 7:14, written twenty-seven centuries ago, the prophecy was: “Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” John in his Gospel tells us that “God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son.” As Matthew tells in his Gospel, the birth fulfills prophecy after prophecy and the Star of Bethlehem leads three eastern nobles, the Magi, to the place where they recognize the fulfillment, where they recognize God among us…an Epiphany. Luke in his Gospel tells how the birth is announced by angels to shepherds, who “…spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed.” Even the new mother herself, subjected to giving birth in a stable and laying her child in a manger, Luke describes as, “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” 

In that birth is a promise of unequaled size: God loves us. Symbolically, in December when the nights in the northern hemisphere are their longest (in the Philadelphia area, night will last about 14 hours 40 minutes)…the lights of Christmas banish the darkness. If we’re cold or frightened or lonely or lost or feeling helpless, Christmas is a time of fulfillment and promise and hope…feel and share that wonder. Dare to go bigger than “Pop” culture would have you go…drive around the neighborhoods and see the lights; go into the stores and see the excited expectation; listen anywhere and everywhere to the songs of joy and wonder; raise a glass with family or friend and sense the hope: “God so loved the world…”

Even if you aren’t expecting or if someone close to you isn’t expecting at this time of year, I hope a Christmas hope for you: that you can find all around you and in your own heart the fulfillment, promise, and hope of a miraculous birth.

Spirits

Christmas season is overwhelmingly full of options…here I will limit the options to a few favorite “add-ons,” to use the 21st Century vernacular. Add-ons that highlight both the spirit and the spirituality of the season as well the beauty of storytelling in capturing our imaginations. Both present a spirit of the season—generosity, camaraderie, joy—that is subtle and sentimental and beautifully told.

My first favorite is easy: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I want to challenge people to read the actual story, not just to see it in its many movie, made-for-TV, and stage versions. Dickens’s story itself is very, very rich in language and image and technique. If you dare to read it, you’ll have to ease your mind into a mid-18th Century vernacular…the words are different, the phrases are different, the world was different. No mention of Santa Claus for Dickens’s time, no mention of Black Friday sales or shops open until midnight. A Christmas Carol in its original form is a simple story for a simpler time. The focus is clearly the reclamation of a lost soul, Ebenezer Scrooge, through the inspiration of Christmas. Scrooge may be an icon in today’s world, but he is the singular creation of Dickens in 1843. In his tale, Dickens captures all the frustrated dreams of the poor, all the miserly self-righteousness of the rich, and all the redemptive power of seeing things in a new light. He offers a perfect villain: Scrooge; a pitiful dupe, Bob Cratchit; a hero, Scrooge’s noble nephew, Fred; a feisty heroine, Mrs. Cratchit; a host of scary ghosts, and the purely redemptive Tiny Tim. And, of course, a litany of memorable quotes, such as, ``Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?'' or “Bah, humbug!”

If you already know, read, and enjoy A Christmas Carol, then I will also recommend The Man Who Invented Christmas, the story about both the holiday and Dickens’s own redemption through the book. When he wrote his Christmas ghost story, Dickens’s career was in the midst of a downturn…but the book renewed his fame and focused new attention on an ancient holiday.

©2006, Beth Peck

Another favorite is a Christmas story that again makes no mention of Santa or any of the commercialism of the season that we know and exercise. A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote is an English teacher’s dream…it is a short story written with the language of poetry. Capote uses repetition beautifully, assonance, alliteration, imagery, epiphany, foreshadowing, metaphor, and on and on. The language is beautiful, the tale is beautiful, the spirit of the story is beautiful. Capote creates a mystical image of his childhood where he as a boy enjoys the mysteries of life at Christmastime with an elderly cousin. He describes their ritual of making fruitcakes as if it were a central mystery of life: 

“The black stove, stoked with coal and firewood, glows like a lighted pumpkin. Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke.”

And the pay-off is an epiphany about the meaning of life so perfectly constructed and revealed near the end of the story that I won’t spoil it by trying to describe it. Other than to say that Capote uses blatant symbolism to end his story...this English teacher’s dream of a symbolic image in simile becoming a metaphor. Fantastic. Treat yourself and read it.

I certainly still enjoy all the holiday standards, Charlie Brown’s Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Elf, It’s a Wonderful Life, …I especially love to watch Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol from back in the 1960s. But for me the two stories above offer senses of holiday spirit not available elsewhere. 

I’ll end as Dickens did… “as Tiny Tim observed, God Bless Us, Every One!”

Mission

My father at 17 at Parris Island, SC.

As a date that has been cursed to live in infamy, December 7th was an actual date when real people across America must have felt exactly what we feel today when our newsfeeds and social media and TV networks cover terrorist attacks. But in 1941, the world-at-large was more mysterious to people…it felt larger and more unknown than it does today. For us, any “breaking news” is met with immediate onsite cameras and realtime reports. In 1941, reports of the Pearl Harbor attack were limited to scratchy reports on the radio or fuzzy newswire pictures a day later.

Below is my father’s remembrance of that day and its impact on his, his family’s, and his friends’ lives. He wrote this remembrance years later, but years ago, too.

[Please note that his use of the politically incorrect and offensive “Japs” is only a reflection of the mindset of 1941: the Japanese had immediately become the hated enemy and American society was consumed with that hatred. I must disclose that by the 1960s, we lived next-door to a Japanese family and my father related to them with common, neighborly decency.]

I was about a month short of my 16th birthday when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I lived with my parents, sister, and brother in Southwest Philadelphia. My brother, Bill, and I had been to a big high school football game that Sunday, December 7, 1941. Upon returning home we were told the news. We gave a kind of, “What’s a Pearl Harbor?” reaction. Neither we nor any of our friends had ever heard of it. But of course, we knew it meant war. This was of great interest: Germany and Italy took a backseat, now…all was Japan. The sneak attack made them easy to hate and sad to say, even the comics portrayed stereotyped buck-toothed, bow-legged, little men…the enemy.

The following day was declared a holiday from school…not because of war, but because of our football victory for the state championship! As a result, I was at home and heard on the radio President Roosevelt’s declaration of war. It was his “date which will live in infamy” speech.
 

Frank Conlin in his "shiny black jump boots."

The war became the prime influence in young men’s lives. I was no different than the rest. I lost interest in school, dropped out about May and started talking about joining the Marines. Frank Conlin, a neighborhood friend, was the reason for my interest in the Marine Corps. He—like many others—had enlisted soon after Pearl Harbor. He became a paratrooper and when I first saw him in uniform with his shiny black jump boots and silver wings, wow! 

I took a job with Sun Shipbuilding Company in Chester in July as a shipfitter’s helper and worked on tankers that had been hit by the enemy and needed repairs.

Frank was stationed in North Carolina and was home quite a bit. We would go out together and I thoroughly enjoyed his stories and plagued him with questions. Once I asked him, “Do you really holler, ‘Geronimo!’ when you jump?” He thought for minute and said, “The Army hollers ‘Geronimo!’ Marines holler, ‘Here we come you Jap bastards!’…or something like that.” This enhanced my admiration for him and the Corps and I was itching to go. I had definitely decided on the Marine Corps. 

Frank was the main reason I ended up in the Corps but there were other reasons, too: the movies I saw and the books I read. No sooner had I read about the Marines in Guadalcanal Diary by Richard Tregaskis, than Frank came home with a direct connection to Guadalcanal: an officer who had served there asked Frank to deliver something to his girlfriend on the Main Line. Frank asked me to go along. The house was magnificent and the landscaping beautiful; a maid met us at the door; down a sweeping staircase came this beautiful girl. She stopped halfway and greeted us. I was intrigued…it was like a movie…her name was Mimi and it fit! She was the essence of the Philadelphia Main Line. I was so young and unsophisticated that I associated that visit with the Marine Corps…I thought all Marines’ girlfriends were like Mimi on the Main Line. What a wonderful organization and I had to become part of it…I was seventeen. I began to bug my Dad to let me enlist early.

A small command of Marines on Wake Island, a tiny Pacific island, had been attacked by an overwhelming force of Japanese. Before the island fell, the story went, the Marines received a radio message asking what they needed. “Send us more Japs!” was their supposed reply. If that didn’t rouse a young man’s patriotic fever, nothing could. I pleaded with my father to sign for me to enlist at 17. My mother had died of tuberculosis the preceding year; had she still been alive, I probably would not have gotten permission. But in the climate that prevailed then and the fact that my father felt that he had “missed” serving in World War I, my pleas were working. But my father warned me, “If you don’t like the Marines, you can’t just come home, you know!?” He was dead serious. I told him, “I may be naïve, but I’m not that naïve.”

On November 30, 1943, I went to the Custom House to join the Marines. I was thrilled as I filled out the forms and was given the physical. I remember how nicely I was treated…and why not? I was probably just what they were looking for: 17 years old, six feet two inches, 180 pounds, and rarin’ to go! After being sworn in, I was “assigned to active duty on a non-pay status.” The officer in charge gave me what he said would be my first “order” in the Marine Corps. I almost snapped to attention. He reached into his pocket, handed me a dime, and said, “Go across the street and get me a Coke.”
 

My father on leave October 1944.

I ran all the way. When my mission was complete, I was given the “necessary street car transportation”—an 8-cent trolley token—and sent home to await further orders. On December 16, I was put on pay status and instructed to report to Parris Island, South Carolina. I left by train from the B&O station where my father and sister saw me off. My father’s parting advice, “Be a good boy and remember the sacraments.” I can only imagine how he felt.

I arrived at Parris Island—what the media called “A United States concentration camp”—at 3:00 on a damp December morning in 1943. Finally, I was going to war.

For the record, Corporal Francis P. Conlin Jr. was killed on Iwo Jima, March 10, 1945 at the age of 23. My father served on the battleship USS Texas and participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy, the Cherbourg bombardment, the invasion of North Africa, and the island battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He was home for Christmas 1945.