A Pilgrimage to Oshawa

I made a pilgrimage last week back to Ontario, or, it may be better called a “sentimental journey home.” It's the place where I have had the most loved ones and whose people with whom I can most easily identify, even though I've never had a legal address there.

Robert Frost's famous definition of home as “the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in,” has always seemed a travesty to me and I've often wondered why people quote it or think it's funny or something.

There was one grave site in Oshawa in particular where I prayed during this pilgrimage that felt like real home. This was the grave of a lady who lived a very difficult eighty-four years of hardship capped off at the end with a few years of Alzheimer's. She had no formal education, no money, no worldly fame nor power, but she did the true things all along the way and was utterly humble. Whenever I pointed out to her the magnificence of something she had done for someone, she would reply something to the effect that God had just put it in her path to do, that no credit was due to herself.

She adopted an infant whose parents had died shortly after his birth and raised him alone, as well as caring for many other children. It's a long story of many difficulties, but of a true woman. She taught me so much.

Here is a photo of her that I took one day when we went for a pilgrimage back to her own childhood home shortly before her death. I would take her places in my big truck whenever I was in Oshawa, even to church, and she was never embarrassed by it. I always found it very refreshing that she never felt embarrassed by me, who am distant from respectability and rich people.

She was only about four years old when her mother died and often thought of her mother as she went through her difficult life. I think she silently hoped that they would meet again on the other side. I trust it's so.

New Teacher Advice: “Don't smile until Christmas”

“Don't smile until Christmas.” That used to be standard advice to any first-year teacher in secondary school. If you smile, they'll discover that you're human and then you'll really be in for it. You will have “discipline problems.”

It was one of those things that they didn't usually tell you in the Fundamentals of Teaching course at teacher's college, but rather was just practical, experience-derived, realistic, friendly advice.

I remember one particularly difficult student during my first month of teaching in a secondary school. This poor kid was constantly causing trouble, so I talked with him, respectfully, about it after school one day. The following were his exact words:

“You really want to know why I do it? You really want to know? It's because you have these big soft eyes that just ask for it.”

It was a magnificently human moment, for me, and I hope and believe for him, too. I would love to talk with him now, fifty years later, to learn whether or not our talk made a difference in his life.

I resigned from the job, and from secondary-school teaching, after Christmas. The world was too big, with too many people and places to see, for me to stay in that job.

One of my students, who was particularly funny, laughingly said to me after a study hall – one of my duties was to “patrol” a study period in the auditorium filled with 200 energetic high school students - “What you really need is a German Shepherd dog that will go after them as soon as they move.”

Some of my students felt by that time that I was “a prophet” - their word – and others felt that I was from outer space.

But certain parents became really hostile, demanding of the principal that I be fired. “I don't want my son to grow up to be a hippie.” Exact words. There had to be more to life than fighting this particular battle.

I laugh to myself now because I have come to feel, after all these years, that probably the large problem of “inhumanity,” of which the above is just a particular example, is the central work of my own life and our times.

There are two articles in today's New York Times - In Ferguson and Beyond, Punishing Humanity – NYTimes.com and How Righteousness Killed the World Economy – NYTimes.com - which were very much about our situation after thirty-five years of conscious, programmatic, considered, selfishness. These articles are only two among many new indications that the whole Margaret Thatcher “There's no such thing as society” and Ronald Reagan “Government is the problem” thing is showing cracks.

Sheer, Simple Humanity

The above photo taken by Koran Addo in St. Louis is the centerpiece of a blog by Shaun King at Daily Kos today.  King asks, “What does the photo mean to you? What connects with you most about it?”

The Kossacks had some excellent responses, but the photo is so good that there is a lot more to be said.  Two main thoughts immediately came into my own mind on seeing it.

The first thought that came to my mind was that this is a magnificent little boy and that “they” will see it, too, but would want to shoot him with their precious, powerful, state-of-the-art, automatic weapons. There is something about sheer, pure, simple humanity that drives them crazy.

And my second thought that immediately followed was of a passage at the end of Abraham Johannes Muste's essay “Of Holy Disobedience” that goes as follows:

Precisely on that day when the individual appears to be utterly hopeless, to 'have no choice,' when the aim of the 'system' is to convince him that he is helpless as an individual and that the only way to meet regimentation is by regimentation, there is absolutely no hope save in going back to the beginning. The human being, the child of God, must assert his humanity and sonship again. He must exercise the choice which no longer is accorded him by society, which, 'naked, weaponless, armourless, without shield or spear, but only with naked hands and open eyes,' he must create again. He must understand that this naked human being is the one real thing in the face of the machines and the mechanized institutions of our age. He, by the grace of God, is the seed of all the human life there will be on earth, though he may have to die to make that harvest possible.

Please write your own response to the photo in the comment box below and let me know what you think.

Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren has many fans, including me, who would like her to be President of the United States, but fully understand her refusal. We have an immediate appreciation of her.

And her opponents abhor everything about her.  She relates in her new, tenth, book, “A Fighting Chance,” how President Obama's senior advisers explained to her why he wasn't going to nominate her to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which she conceived, created, loved and chaired in its first months. They acknowledged her competence and appropriateness for the job and said: “But ...for some reason, you are like a red-hot poker in the eye of Republicans.”

Now, when Elizabeth, or anyone,  draws out such strong emotional responses like that from both sides of aisle, you can be fairly confident that she is touching very basic issues. I think also that our emotional responses to her are of such great depth and strength that they must be “over-determined.” That is to say, there has to be more than just one item, one reason, one cause, of feelings of such depth and strength.

Elizabeth is not trivial, inconsequential, game-playing, bought, beholden, stupid, uninformed nor emotionally stunted. She confronts her opponents with the real issues that go deep, basic issues that they don't want to face, and she doesn't leave anyone an out.

One of those issues is that  the system is rigged, “hijacked by the rich and powerful,” rigged in favor of the “haves,” but the “haves” simply do not want to admit this. An example of this is the fact that the big banks, and she is quite knowledgeable about them, can easily buy off publicly-elected politicians. There is absolutely no denying this fact on the conscious level. She writes of preparing to give her talk at the Democratic convention in Charlotte:

“The system is rigged. That's what I wanted to talk about. For me, that captured what was wrong with the country, how our government has been hijacked by the rich and powerful. How it didn't have to be this way. How we could do better.”

Another issue Elizabeth presents unavoidably is the woman question. She is so far ahead of her opponents in her clarity and standing on the issue that they don't have the remotest conscious clue of where she is. I mentioned Christina Romer's comment in a previous post on first meeting Elizabeth: “Why is it always the women? Why are we the only ones with balls around here?”

There is a male strutting that goes on by men who consider themselves important, superior, more experienced, more knowledgeable, wiser, tougher, and all that. They dress and posture for the role, and feel free to talk over you when you are talking, and they cultivate a million ways to express how superior and important they are. Sometimes it's hilarious even and sometimes it is just pathetic. In any case, they pick up fairly quickly when you're not buying into it and therefore are not pleased with you. Not a bit. You are then a lethal enemy to everything they “are.” You are like a red-hot poker in their eye.

Jimmy Carter, “A Call to Action”

Jimmy Carter says in his new book, “A Call to Action,” that the most important issue the world needs to face is the enhancement of women's lives. The first sentence on the flyleaf reads: “The world's discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: This is President Jimmy Carter's call to action."

I thought several times as I was reading the book of Diane Ravitch's writing that the the first step in true reform of education is to assure adequate prenatal care for women.

Carter went on the Charlie Rose Show recently to promote and to discuss his book, but Rose seemed just to want to discuss Israel. Carter politely told him a couple times that he wanted to discuss the book, but Rose clearly was not interested. However, I heard enough to know that I had to read the book.

Jimmy Carter has an awe-inspiring list of accomplishments. Just his eradication of Dracunculiasis, called guinea worm disease (GWD), in Africa is inconceivably magnificent, in my eyes. He has done so much more and is still very much doing it at ninety years of age.

He writes a lot in his first chapter about the misinterpretations of religious scriptures that promote the destruction of women's lives. Rightly so, but I was more struck by the passages later in the book in which he points out that it is actually women who make things work.

Here are some quotes from the book, for the truth of them, and to provoke your interest in the book, and simply for sharing:

p.70. Of even greater significance is what we have learned about the vital role that women can play in correcting the most serious problems that plague their relatives and neighbors. Almost everywhere, we find that women are relegated to secondary positions of influence and authority within a community but almost always do most of the work and prove to be the key participants in any successful project.

p.156. There have been surprising reductions [of Female Genital Cutting] in Kenya and Central African Republic. It is not clear why this is so, but it seems obvious that outside pressure has had little effect except in encouraging the education of young women...A public opinion poll that same year [2008] revealed that only a third of the younger women wanted to see the practice continued, while two-thirds of the the older women supported its continuation. Because the decision to perform FGC is made almost exclusively by mothers, without consulting their husbands, these numbers give hope that the next generation of daughters might be spared.

p.193, quoting Ela Bhatt: “I have faith in women...In my experience, as I have seen within India and in other countries, women are the key to rebuilding a community. Why? Focus on women and you will find an ally who wants a stable community.”

p.35. There are now more than five times as many American inmates in federal, state, and local prisons as when I was president and the number of incarcerated black women has increased by 800 percent! An ancillary effect is that this increased incarceration has come at a tremendous financial cost to taxpayers, at the expense of education and other beneficial programs The cost of prosecuting executed criminals is astronomical. Since 1973, California alone has spent roughly $4 billion in capital cases, leading to only thirteen executions, amounting to about $307 million spent for the killing of each prisoner...Despite the proliferation of excessive imprisonments, the number of pardons by US presidents has also been dramatically reduced. I issued 534 pardons in my four-year term, and in their eight-year terms, Ronald Reagan issued 393, Bill Clinton 396, and George W. Bush 189, but in his first term Barack Obama issued only 23.

Leonard Cohen on Montreal

Beware of what comes out of Montreal, especially during winter. It is a force corrosive to all human institutions. It will bring everything down. It will defeat itself. It will establish the wilderness in which the Brightness will manifest again. [The first paragraph of “Montreal”]

There is a short piece of prose, entitled “Montreal,” in the recent Everyman's Library Pocket Poets selection of Leonard Cohen's poems and songs, a book well worth owning.

The city of Montreal has been particularly important to me because I lived there for four years as a student, attending the same university that Cohen attended. It was an overwhelming experience for me, even annihilating, so I've given it a lot of thought over the fifty years since then, trying to bring bits and pieces of it together.

Now, this "Montreal" poem feels clarifying, solidifying and delightful to me. I find that it pulls together most of my experience of Montreal. I've often thought of how Cohen once said that he “realized” that “Suzanne” was a Montreal song, because I felt that it was, too, but now I see Montreal in many other places in his thought.

I believe also that what Cohen says about Montreal in this poem applies to every other gathering of people I've experienced – annihilation then a protection. Finding or developing the protection can take fifty years or more, however!

Here's the remaining paragraph of “Montreal:”

  

We who belong to this city have never left The Church. The Jews are in The Church as they are in the snow. The most violent atheist defectors from the Parti Québécois are in The Church. Every style in Montreal is the style of The Church. The winter is in The Church. The Sun Life building is in The Church. Long ago the Catholic Church became a pebble beside the rock on which The Church was founded. The Church has used the winter to break us and now that we are broken we are going to pull down your pride. The pride of Canada and the pride of Quebec, the pride of the left and the pride of the right, the pride of muscle and the pride of heart, the insane pride of your particular vision will swell and explode because you have all dared to think of killing people. The Church despises your tiny works of death and The Church declares that every man, woman, and child is protected.

Cohen recently said that his long-term depression "has lifted” but my own view is that we are, or should be, rightly very troubled at how upside down and backward the world has become, or is, and that it takes one's whole lifetime's thought-work to resolve the big questions of our unique souls with regard to the situation.

He has a new album, “Popular Problems,” coming out later this month, on his 80^th birthday.

Joyce on the Infinite and the Infinitesimal

Taking the largest possible perspective on things makes me appreciate them more deeply, even though it sometimes seems like this is a cold, heartless, annihilating approach. Taking the largest perspective possible draws me closer to my loved ones and makes me appreciate them more while I am here.

I happened to be reading James Joyce's “Ulysses” recently and came across a passage in which he is writing about what I am calling “the large perspective.” He writes about the incomprehensible expanse out there as well as inside the small. I've elsewhere read a few attempts (Here is one which also quotes Joyce directly) to express this large perspective which were a little clearer than Joyce's attempt. Yet his is worth reading and goes as follows:

   The heaventree of stars hung with humid lightblue fruit.

   With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

  Meditations of  evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of the equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901; of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

   Were there meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

   Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatazoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

I take this humbling increasingly seriously as I come closer to death, although it is only too easy to lapse into the shorter perspective in which I think that things like “survival” are important.

But it doesn't involve a coldness or lack of love and appreciation. Just the opposite is true. Perhaps there is some way in which the vastness really is not that important or annihilating after all. Perhaps we know immediately that love is the central point and all the rest is derivative or secondary to it.