Mother's Day 2012

This day finds you still

Locked in a struggle you cannot win.

Defeat thickens in a lowering fog

Yet you will not concede one inch

In battles that are marked by bowls of oatmeal,

Peanut butter and grape jelly on a piece 

Of pumpernickel bread.

Each step from couch to kitchen is accomplished

Through a diminishing grip on purpose,

A desperate need to hold one more moment 

Of who you are and who you were

Within your tattered mind

Where memories of pain and loss 

Steal your joy.

I am awed before the fierce and stubborn banner

You will not surrender.

Gem stone: amethyst

SO?

I tuned into some PBS program last night with a priest talking about god and the problem of evil and it all sounded more or less nonsensical. Or maybe it was making way too much sense: like somebody parsing a poem and draining all the life out of it although each particular was perfectly reasonable and logical. He said you might explain Auschwitz by saying that God takes the longer view and makes the apparent and timely evil into something unpredictably good in the long run. So what? Is that a comfort to anyone there but the Nazis? Another view the priest put forward is that God is an artist and like Seurat paints in little dots and humans can’t see the big picture only the dots. Again, so what? If the world is your dot, that’s what you need to pay attention to. Of course, then he had to read from the Book of Job, and don’t get me wrong, I love the grandeur of Job. It’s marvelous and moving and puts me in mind of what I loved about Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” particularly with its cosmic imagery and the questions that have bedeviled (begodded?) Westerners for centuries. But that cosmic view is the problem - what difference does it make? People like the priest always make it seem as if the point is to decide whether there’s a god or not, but while they work on figuring that out, life goes on and you might just as well do a crossword puzzle for entertainment. If that god has nothing to do with here and now and good and evil and such, then fine, let that god fool around with the universe and I’ll get on with whatever I’m about. The last story the priest told before I went back to watching something more entertaining was about William James, I think. How James looked around at all the things in his library and then looked at his dog and thought how the dog could see those things but never understand them. The priest’s obvious point was that we were the dog in God’s library. Well, I don’t know if James said that really, but I can imagine his dog thinking, “Poor Will, he’s too nose blind to smell the mouse trails at the corners of the room, he can’t just sit quietly, stare into the fire, and savor the moment but always has to be scratching at paper with his little stick, and when we go walking, he’s so slow and clumsy. But he tussles my ears and I love him.” This last is because the dog gets the important things about inter species relationships. I don’t pretend that this is some final word on the subject, it's just that what I tuned into seemed to ignore any particularly human reason for caring about the matter.

Gemstone: Hawk's Eye

Ten Years On

As I watch the commemorations of that September day, the feelings that come to me are much as they were then. There is disbelief at the sheer scope of the tragedy, sorrow for the pain of the victims and all who loved them, pride in the humanity of the many brave souls who risked everything to aid others -- risked and lost but in the losing won so much. I remember watching several days later as the stars of America gathered to support the families of victims and knowing bone-deep that on that day there had been not a dime’s worth of difference between me and them and indeed much of the world as we watched the 11th unfold. And I took comfort in the messages of commiseration that came from everywhere, from the offers of a village in Kenya to send cattle to the condolence of Queen Elizabeth of England.

But now there is a new feeling, a kind of resignation. What I feared then might happen as a result of that day became reality, and now must be lived with. The rush to flaggery that alarmed me then continues to undermine the vision many of us cherished of a world moving toward peace and justice. I feared that a peculiar patriotism would react by becoming jingoistic and the record of that happening is too long to cite. A blank check was given to people in a position to use 9/11 to further their own aims of power both personal and national.

And so, to use a homely metaphor, both shoes dropped and life went on. I have a private set of beliefs that are somewhat religious and they are: when there is a huge tragedy then the sacrifice is meant to awaken in the living a common purpose toward righting wrongs. Ten years on I believe that any hope of a better world requires still more sacrifice.

Gem: black onyx

The Rich and the Ruthless

Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer [dvd: 2010]
Once again I am reminded that the ruling class is actually the predator class. Even the benign image of the good shepherd glosses the truth that the flock is kept for fleecing and eating. This documentary is the story of Eliot Spitzer who might have been president, who almost forestalled the Wall Street tumble that pulled the whole economy into the avalanche. I will never understand what could make someone pay thousands of dollars for sex and I will never understand how a man who had made such powerful enemies would give them a way to bring him down. This film is much like a travelogue, a trip to a faraway world where the very rich and ruthless live.
Gem: meteorite

And Still

The Tillman Story [dvd 2010]

And still. After seeing documentary after documentary on the perfidy of the powerful, after living through decades of history, it is still as if I forgot to take my reality pills and so I am once again astonished at the rulers’ audacity, at their capacity for deception. This story, which focuses on Patrick Tillman but is about his entire family, begins with suggestions of dire news to come yet takes time to celebrate the life of a son, a brother, a husband, a young man whose joy of living in an athlete’s body is irrepressible.

The basic story is well known: Pat Tillman was a rising star in the NFL who set aside his football career in order to join the army rangers with his brother after 9/11. First sent to Iraq, the Tillman brothers were then transferred to Afghanistan where Pat was killed. The first reports were that he died heroically and was awarded a silver star, but reports were later amended to state that he was killed by friendly fire. A thoroughly tragic event to be sure but not appearing all that weighty with import.

The first realization that the Tillman family is blessed with a gift for truth came for me at the scene of the memorial service for Pat Tillman which opens with a platitudinous eulogy by John McCain who solemnly states that everyone will meet again in heaven. Pat’s youngest brother takes the podium and, speaking from a heart you know is broken, calls this bullshit, that his brother never believed in heaven and is just dead. Later in the film, after the army realizes that the Tillmans, particularly Pat’s mother Mary, want the truth of his death, the full and honest truth, an army recording emerges that has one voice referring to atheism as “religious” and saying that it is perhaps this religious difference that won’t let the Tillman family just let go. In an often chilling film, I found this one of the colder episodes and I am still pondering all the implications. Another moment came when I paused my dvd player in order to read from an M-4 report shown on-screen that the truth of Pat Tillman’s death should be kept from the public so that POTUS and the Secretary of Defense would not be embarrassed for making untrue statements when they used the young man’s death to whet the nation’s appetite for more war. That would be George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld.

By the time he reached Afghanistan, Pat had become more than disillusioned with the war, he planned to speak out against it when he was out of the army. That position has been taken by his brother, Kevin, who has published a small book with a very big message: The Transparent Pillage.

While watching generals and congressmen at the hearing on the Tillman coverup, I was reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago which showed a drawing of a very bland, suited man and was captioned something to the effect: Often the predator evolves to appear indistinguishable from its prey. Today, I have difficulty believing that the rulers are the same species as the rest of us, that they use words like honor and integrity as anything other than bait.

Gem rating: Obsidian

Warring Thoughts

The word warrior once held a dense meaning for me. Unlike viridian and iridescent and saffron which decorate the language like twinkling lights in pine branches on a dark night, warrior came with an entire mythology. Warrior was a portal through which I entered a different world, a magic term that released a cornucopia of vision and emotion. This was in the Eighties and Nineties when the concept of a woman warrior was still a novelty. Much of the women’s movement was rooted in the left and the left still took a large measure of its self regard from having opposed the Vietnam War and many leftists had done so by donning a pacifist mantle. A woman warrior was certainly a contradiction for an anti-war pacifist.

Yet how could I give up the Amazons, woodland Artemis or armored Athena? In the conversation that sparked this essay, I was reminded that I was not the only one who was attracted and inspired by these archetypal figures. They inspired Monique Wittig, Sally Gearhart and Mary Daly to name lesbian women’s movement writers, and speculative fiction writers like Suzy McKee Charnas, Marge Piercy, CJ Cherryh and Marian Zimmer Bradley. The concept of the woman warrior gained traction until she leapt fully leather-armored into the cultural zeitgeist in the form of Xena: Warrior Princess.

I was still struggling at that time on two fronts with how to make a realistic fiction of a time and place where both women and men chose the roles they wanted. First, there was the fact that, other than Amazons, I knew of no historical or semi-historical recorded culture to use for reference. So I made one up and far enough in the past for such a place to be plausible. I don’t for an instant regret how much reading I did for this, pushing my knowledge of prehistory farther and farther back. Still, after a few seasons of Xena, I realized that my imagination hadn’t lacked knowledge as much as it had images of women capable of defending their own survival.

As an aside, I’d like to suggest the Boudica series by Manda Scott as what I would have liked to write if I had been a much better writer than I am. The four books are an extraordinary evocation of a Celtic resistance to Imperial Rome. Scott’s story is only one example of the fine fiction that has flourished in the ground prepared by the women’s movement.

Despite learning that a woman warrior was quite plausible, I still had to consider the problem of violence. It was wrong, wasn’t it? For a time I thought of the warrior as answering a call, accepting a vocation. I imagined the shaggy musk oxen creating a circle around the calves to protect them from the wolf pack. I imagined ancestral women donning horned skulls so as to no longer appear easy prey when they stood guard at the edge of the nightfire light. I read of women who took up weapons to resist fascism, colonialism and imperialism. I hoped that etymology might help me resolve the problem of violence by allowing me to merge warrior and guardian. At the root of guardian in Indo-European you will find *wer- which gave rise to watch out for, to ward, to be a steward, all having the meaning of protect and defend. At the root of war is *wers- meaning to confuse, to mix up. The Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories notes that “Curiously, no Germanic nation in early historic times had any word properly meaning ‘war’…. The Romanic-speaking peoples took Germanic werra ‘confusion, discord’ as the closest term.” (p.545)

Perhaps etymology could not absolve the warrior’s vocation, but this would not be the only instance of a need to embody competing purposes, in this case to protect and to harm. Indeed, perhaps that’s why a number of cultures surround the warrior with ritual. In Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko tells of a young Laguna Pueblo man returning from WWII whose experiences must be mitigated by sacred traditions before he can regain his wholeness. In Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron it is said that several generations of peace are needed to cleanse and heal the damage done by war.

Just as images of women warriors proliferated through the Nineties and then exploded in the Oughts, so did the use of the word warrior slip into wider usage to refer to soldiers. Perhaps one of the most poignant meditations I’ve come across is a collection of anguished poems by Frances Richey, The Warrior, centering around her son who became a Green Beret. She remembers her boy, I perceive an arrogant and callous man, not substantially different from others who now call themselves warriors.

I accept that I am not a pacifist, may never truly have been, and that I am not so much anti-war as anti- specific wars. History does not sustain for me a belief that societies and cultures can survive without defenders. Not in the real world. However I can no longer find in “warrior” much of the meaning that once inspired me. My warrior was no soldier and fought for no state.

This is not simply the shifting of a definition. Meaning, for me, is much more than definition. At its best, meaning is the emotion of the instant you understand something, sudden and bright as lightning. Meaning is when you change because now you know, the portal through which knowing takes you to another place, a new land, a further world.

Gem: citrine

Dumb Intelligence

Fair Game [2010]

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune ends his review of this film with the simple tribute: “And it’s about something important.” After Joe Wilson (Sean Penn) published a report that sixteen words in the 2003 State of the Union Address by President George Bush were untrue, someone leaked to the press that his wife, Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), was a CIA operative. The revelation changed the story from “Did the President lie?” to “Who is Valerie Plame?” The film moves easily from the international stage to the domestic as it portrays the lead up to and then the consequences of this strand in the Bush Administration’s determination to force a war with Iraq. Most viewers will appreciate the film’s intelligent handling of large amounts of complicated background information about matters like yellow cake uranium and aluminum tubes, but more problematic is the suggestion that the CIA was the unwilling victim of pressure from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Even so, I still felt a fly-on-the-wall enjoyment at watching the powerful people in the imperial capital wield their massive portfolios. Sean Penn is very good as Ambassador Wilson who will not be silenced by corruption, but Naomi Watts is stunning in her ability to portray a woman whose silences are necessary and nuanced, stoic and ironic, and finally, charged with emotion. I left "Fair Game" wishing it could be required watching for every American.

[Gem rating: Obsidian]