I suppose one must admit the primal landforms shimmering in lovely light, with cool dawns and dry warm days, and towns full of rugged individuals.
But underfoot, the entire desert southwest of the United States is one big catbox; everywhere you walk off the road, it feels like kitty litter.
(thanks to Kathleen Mary)
For one day, the weather finally clears in Oslo, and in the lingering evening from my tiny 15th floor balcony (reminiscent of a hot-air balloon basket – I have the sickening feeling that my evil twin is going to grab my body, leap to the railing and jump wildly for the waterfall) I can finally see more than the pounding spray below me. A sliver of cupped moonlight follows the sun to bed, and far to my left, the harbor – I didn’t know I had a sea view until this moment - reflects the last orange of the daylight.
By tomorrow, according to CNN, it will be cold rain again, and Patreus and Crocker will be tossed softballs by Congress for an easy hit into more war, more lives lost, more disruption for the poor people who were unlucky enough to be in Dick Cheney’s way. The way they got this war started – Rummy and Cheney and Perles and Wolfowitz – that’s got to be a form of cheating? It is hard to keep going sometimes, having faith that the political and the environmental degradation will not overwhelm this human experiment before the work that we do – preparing the next generation of children for this 21st century world - has a chance to take hold.
Each day I travel down the hill to the class in the town center on a five-minute tram ride. The ticket is 30 kr., about $6. No one checks whether you have a ticket,. My American sensibility suggests that $12/day is a bit much, and for reasons too complicated to explain, I have trouble getting Norwegian cash. In any case, I confess to jumping on and off again without a ticket some mornings.
The ethic that we grew up with in the hippie era – it’s ok to stick it to ‘the man’, including the phone company, the government, or anyone corporate, while maintaining a high personal ethic with our fellow individuals. (Supposedly – in fact we were sexist in our treatment of both women and gays.)
Nowadays, this kind of petty cheating is very rare for me – this one was remarkable for its appearance. Nobody wants to pay more taxes than they have to, so that’s simply a form of disguise. But not only can I afford the things I used to rationalize cheating on, but decades have shown me the humans in the corporations – and of course I have a few of those corporations myself these days. I still think ‘the people’ are getting screwed, but the sharply-drawn blacks and whites have all gone for the gray wash like those a friend showed me on some drawings in a museum in Edinburgh.
I have spent nearly $1300 replacing 2 shirts, 2 pairs of pants (a shirt has two sleeves, but it’s not a pair of shirts – why is that?), underwear, and a belt and a toothbrush, toothpaste, and shampoo – and not even high quality clothes. Surely that’s enough? Doesn’t that justify some cheating? But what does the Oslo Transit Authority have to do with British Airways?
In some form of poetry, British Airways coughs up my suitcase in my literal last hour in Oslo – I collect it and drop it onto my flight to Munich. BA offers to pay me £35 ($70) for having lost my luggage – surely that’s a form of cheating? Not even worth filing for, as it will take more time than it’s worth.
As the plane peels out over the rugged and extraordinary coast, I contemplate what constitutes cheating, and rapidly move from the convoluted but navigable pathways of the mind to the wild and stormy uncharted domain of the heart.
I recently had to tell a good friend that he hadn’t made the cut for a team. From the brain’s point of view, it was a straightforward call, but my heart – my compassion and my fear all mixed up – blew the communication, and the friendship was shot out of the sky. I never did team sports as a kid, and I guess I missed out on how to do these things kindly but quickly and clearly.
More recently still, I had to tell another friend - who was much younger emotionally than I ever suspected – that her fantasies about our ‘deep connection’ were just that. This was a blow, as I had thought I had a good friend, with none of the clutter that can gum up the easiest cross-gender friendship (at least in my generation – Misty seems immune to the problem and has equal friends in both genders). But the empathy and charm I use to create the bonds of friendship is all too easily mistaken for seduction, so - all unintended – I was the cheat. I must be so careful, and I hate having to be so watchful, so closed-hearted, so vigilant. Must I so close my heart to live as I am in this world?
But: Thou shalt not commit pain.
And I did.
My dear, sweet, infirm and insane wife understands the pathways of the heart better than anyone I know. A lot of good it has done her (not). Some people ‘get’ her and celebrate her wisdom, some (like my family) see only the surface and shake their heads in disbelief that I am with her, and gloriously happy with her, despite our differences, despite the frustrations, despite the fact that in learning her, I have committed pain.
The human heart is minefield, a battlefield, a stormy ocean, and a nightmare of phantasms all rolled into one. Of course it’s an Alpine meadow, a calm Aegean sea, and an exhilarating flying dream as well. Right now, though, with my body breaking down and my mind running on fumes from too much travel and too little reflective time, my heart and everyone else’s seems terra incognita, ultima thule, one of Dante’s circles of Hell.
I look forward to time off the road, out of this plane, in the arms of the one who sets straight the paths, calms the storms, and sorts the complexities out in simple, direct, and refreshingly earthy terms. Quan, I celebrate you.
With the typical English superficial horror of / secret delight in inefficiency, the newly opened Terminal 5 at Heathrow went from ‘All hail!’ to shambolic within hours of its grand opening. I had seen it on the news from my hotel in Edinburgh, and so took the precaution of checking the bag only to Heathrow. I fetched it, rechecked it again to Oslo so it wouldn’t get lost, and went back in through security. Since the plane from Edinburgh was an hour late, I was running and puffing through this process and made it just in time for the Oslo flight.
Terminal 5, handsome though it is, is, was indeed a mess – hundreds of men (and a few women) in security yellow coats with BA (British Airways) or BAA (British Airports Authority) on the back - were wandering up and down the corridors, in and out of those doors you and I may not breech, carrying flashlights or clipboards, but obviously lost, trying to look busy so no one would ask them anything or send them on an errand even more foolish and hopeless than the one they were currently on.
Passengers, meanwhile, with no information, no luggage, no signage or anything to help them along, went to pieces in queues or in corners, manifesting all five stages of grief.
I needn’t have bothered with my extra trouble – they lost my bag anyway. So here I am, high in an apartment building over the Aakers Elve Falls with only the sweaty clothes I threw on to make the trip, and BA has no idea, this next day, where my bag is or when it might arrive. CNN says there are 28,000 lost bags in Heathrow, so it could easily be weeks.
Oslo feels a bit lonely and sterile – and I am bound to this apartment for the evening in any case, since I have washed out my only clothes and have hung them to dry for the morning. (I hope). The falls are my straw to clutch at the moment, a beautiful cataract whitewater feature running full force down through the city, the old mills that line it now gentrified into boutique apartments and clever little shops. I look down on it wondering how one would run it in a kayak, a feat I will leave to younger bodies and reflexes.
The constant tumult of white water and spray is a balm to the eye, and background noise so like and yet so unlike the roar of an airplane, which I would welcome if it were the one bringing me my bag with the phone charger, the visual aids I need for class, my shaving brush, and a hundred other things that it will, in the fullness of time, be possible to replace, but I would really rather not.
You can have haggis. Like the pig intestines in Taiwan, everyone urges me to try it, each assuring me that this recipe or that restaurant transcends the bad reputation to achieve edibility, while each one actually manages to approximate a different kind of cat food. I will somehow survive without delving further into this line of nutrition. I don’t expect you to try raw oysters or urchin roe or clam chowder when you come to my house either.
I walked up on Costorphine Hill this dawn, ahead of my presentation for 100 or so therapists. It was colder and windier than it looked, ruffling my shirt so I buttoned my cuffs and sought out a pathway up through the woods. After a sleepless night (there was a wedding at the hotel, and the DJ had the whole building thumping until well after midnight), it felt good to let the muscles loose and the mind coordinate to the rhythm of feet on the ground. At the top was a beautiful view east over the zoo to Edinburgh, certainly one of the most comely cities on this planet.
Walking along the ridge among the mossy trees and lichen-covered rocks, I scared up a bunch of rabbits, small like Quan’s, and similarly poised between curious and scared. The wild rabbits at home – used to hunters and beagles – are seldom seen and disappear like a shot if discovered, but these fat and happy little beings were clearly protected, as they loped calmly out of my sight in the ferns and rocks of the glen.
God knows if I used the word ‘glen’ right. It means ‘shallow’, as in glenoid fossa, the shallow shoulder joint, but these Scots are as fiercely protective of their language as they are of haggis, so my natural tendency to imitate is not received kindly, but rather with severe looks, declarations, and dismissals. It is with joy, not ridicule, that I affect assimilation, but they have had enough of English dominance, and American attempts at badly-accented chumminess are about as welcome as ‘MacDonalds’ – a perfectly good Scots name that is known the world around for the bland reliability of its mediocrity. .
Ducking into the men’s room in the midst of the Schipol polyglot after my ride over the pond, I came across something I had heard about, but had never seen. The report said that putting a fly in the urinals improved men’s aim. Sure enough, they had etched or somehow engraved a black insect shape into the white ceramic. Despite the fact that it looked more like a trout fly than a real one, and despite the fact that I clearly knew it was a simple image, it was irresistible. One’s aim is indeed truly drawn toward trying to hit the fly, even though one ‘knows’ it will do no good.
Of course it does do some good, because the fly is placed where it is on purpose, as this is the spot with the least ‘sprayback’, so aiming there reduces cleaning and public hazard. So simple, and such a strong psychological effect.
We’ve been pooping and peeing for 350 million years, and we’ve been dealing with the result of waste accumulation due to crowding since Hammurabi wrote out the first law of sewage. We’re still not doing every well. As I walked away from the from the wall of gleaming porcelain mouths, my unit tsked, clanged, and whooshed a couple of gallons of water through, mixing a pint or so of liquid waste with perfectly good water, and then dumped the whole lot into a system that produces nothing but cost.
We do the same with solid waste, and back at home, we are about to spend a great deal of money for the privilege of mixing our waste immediately with tons of good water and running it gradually out through our dense Presumpscot clay ground to filter it. The first builders of latrines and privies had to deal with the smell, which isn’t, of course, pleasant. The invention of Sir Thomas Crapper’s toilet, on which modern toilets are based, had the wonderful advantage of allowing you to void waste inside your shelter without having to put up with the smell.
Today, the waste of good water is more a problem than the waste itself. What we now have available to us is technology that could rapidly dry out the waste (thus eliminating the smell also) which would give is a net gain in good water, and incidentally, give us the basis for a dry composted material. This may sound disgusting, but the composting toilets my father installed in 1972 still produce, over time, a dry and odorless dirt that can be added to a garden without penalty.
Why should we mix our bodily waste with clean water and then run it underground to settle out without using it again? It is another of the ways of human beings that make no sense. Pollution is just a resource in the wrong place at the wrong time. If we could capture some of the resources we waste, everyone – even the poor Zimbabweans trying to vote today – would succeed.
Comes a time when one more storm adds naught to the glory of winter. While we imagine the rest of you crowing over crocuses, envasing daffodils, or even awed by your azaleas, the snow continues to sweep over us: fluffy, then wet, then sodden, then mud, then frozen, again and again. Pity your neighbours to the north - the Canadians, us Mainiacs, the Inuits, mountain folk of Vermont and New Hampshire – who for reasons unknown to even themselves fail to migrate south with the rest, who stay wrapped away from the winter winds through the long dark.
Such a month I have had at home, waking day after day in my own bed, sheathed in the warmth of Quan’s and my fifteen years. We’re all caught up with taxes, the book manuscript, garden planning, summer strategizing – but still the storms roll over us one after the other, leaving us looking longingly out the window.
Spring has come for me, however, whether the weather says yes or not, and so between the high dirty banks of snow I exit from our rabbit burrow into the travel tunnel – the grey smells, ambient audio irritations, terminal plasticity projecting the interminable sense of delay - all the more sour on the tongue for having been abandoned for a month of hearth, wood fires, the whisk of skis in the latest snow, the fitting together in our large bed like a couple of old coffee spoons in the silver drawer.
As a smack dab baby boomer, I feel quite sorry for Hilary Clinton. She has worked so hard all these years and taken so much heat. Who would have thought that a junior senator could have come out of nowhere and so upset her carefully arranged apple cart? I didn’t like her before, but she has earned my grudging respect over this year, and from that respect comes the sympathy I now feel - watching her wave, spent, pull away from the shore.
I would have pulled the lever for her over war-horse McCain (or the mannequin Romney or the cadaverous Giuliani), but she is undeniably tied to the past, to the Democratic political machine, to her own set of special interests who paved her way, and Bill has revealed that he can still be a liability as well as an asset.
As she recedes, I find that risking our polity on Barack has me just a little queasy - he may really have to study the foreign policy manual she wouldn’t have to do more than review. But he has shown that he learns, and learns fast, so I have hope - an attitude my politically jaded and socially jaundiced wife laughs at.
I first voted in ‘72, but I was old enough at Kennedy’s election to feel the electrical charge, and of course felt his death. I fear for tall Obama and hope his security detail is attentive. But, like Kennedy, may his deft touch and his instincts not fail him during this long and grueling campaign process, or in the years of office if they are, as I now expect, granted to him.
Weird wizard wonderland
Winter way away in the wizened woods
Weft of woven branches, withered wracking runes
Written on a wan washed watercolor
Boughs bound down wound
Grounded in the mantle of snow
Gobbets of glacine wanton wax
Like a candle in Grimm’s Hansel
Writhing wraiths whisper ‘tween the trees
Gusts sweep the dust, crust scoured breeze
Waving winter wall of white
No wildcat, wolf or weasel
All the whining wicked wanderers
Nowhere to be witnessed
Even the Wascawy wabbits
Have gone to earth,
No tracks at all, no tracks at all
Only the owl, the silent owl
“Who? Who? Who cooks for you?”
Waning lune on black
Wending my warped way home
‘Tween tattled waste of cat-o-nine-tails
Loose lint lithping my sleeves as I path
Whither home, and whither danger?
Who is known and who’s a stranger?
Warlocks skulk and witches mutter
Wilder tree wisps crack and stutter
Vast winter waste, vale of weeping death
Keep your starkened beauty to yourself
Henry Gray (the original anatomist, not the TV show) notes that “fascia” is Latin for “bandage”, a simple fact that conveys the helpful image. Like bandage, fascia wraps around, covers, protects, and binds.
Your friendly local etymologist must take issue with this statement. Fascia, as every good student of the Roman Empire knows, does have the overt meaning of bandage or streak of cloud, but it comes from fasces meaning ‘bundle’. A bundle of sticks - faggot - derives from this, as does the bundle of reeds called a basket.
The fasces in Roman life comes from a story in which three sons were fighting over a putative inheritance, and their father, discovering them, showed how one stick could be broken easily, but a bundle of sticks could not - and so,in this Aesopian way, urged them to band together. This story led to the fasces, a bundle of sticks tied together with an ax handle in the middle and the ax blade sticking out of the top. This was supposed to symbolize the united and powerful nature of the ‘bundled’ Roman empire, and one of these things followed the emperor everywhere for some time.
There was even one on our money - the mercury dime had a fasces on the ‘tails’ side, but the rise of modern Fascism led us to the Roosevelt dime without such an imperial symbol.
Mussolini, determined to resurrect this power of the Roman empire, had a simple idea: the power of government ‘bundled’ hand in hand with dominant corporate interests. That’s what fascism is - government working together with large corporations. Bush’s idea is simple: get the telecom companies to help out with the fight against terrorism. The bundling together of the U.S. government with information companies is, in fact, a very powerful control mechanism, and the legislating of immunity for those companies that helped the government by disclosing our information is a very fascist act.
Who cares? Any good citizen would say “I have nothing to hide”, and besides this is protecting us from terrorism. In fact, dear friend, Bush and his government have plenty of tools to stop terrorism, and do not need this extra power. Every tyrant uses an external threat to scare their people into giving up their rights. And every time it works, because it is just the thin edge of a wedge that gets wider and deeper each increment it is driven in, until we no longer live in a land of laws.
“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” “Those who give up their freedom for security deserve neither.” “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants.” The words of the founding fathers still speak to us across the centuries.
Will Congress go along with this new bid for fascism? Remember, Eisenhower only at the last minute left ‘Congress’ out of of the ‘Military-Industrial’ complex he warned us about in his outgoing speech. Congress is an essential part of the deal, and it leads to a fascist handshake between the profiteering of the large corporations and the continued power to entrenched interests in the government. 50 years after Ike left, and our current president wants telecoms legally protected from laws they broke in helping the government spy on Americans (though he even equivocates as to whether they did help), and our vice-president is openly an arms dealer.
I don’t know enough about the current situation to know whether Verizon and AT&T should get a pass on this one. But I do know that we are turning feudal, with democracy meaning less and less - despite the fun of this year’s election - as the real fiefdoms and vassals and serfs are not determined by the political realities but by the transnational corporate needs.
We are getting used to the hologram of democracy, because the reality is disappearing gradually as we speak. I still like the old bumper sticker: “It’ll be a great day when schools have all the money they need, and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to build a new bomber.”
As I write this, Super Tuesday is underway. I hoped to get this in earlier but what influence do I have anyway? Whatever the outcome, this is the ineluctable logic of the election:
Setting aside, for a moment, the attractive candor of John McCain (because his war policy is more of the same, and I wish he was as liberal as the chorus of talk-show hosts from Rush to Fox are trying to paint him today - ad nauseam, wall-to-wall, how can they hate a war-hero so?), and the crisp haircut masquerading as a businessman politician named (until he changes it to gain some other endorsement) Mitt Romney, the choice is uniquely and historically between a sister and a brother.
Though I respect Hilary’s hard work and long service, and Barack is indeed an unknown, I fall (with my daughter but opposed, I think, to my wife) to the Obama camp. Here’s how it parses for me:
For the nomination: If Barack wins the nomination, everyone who was going to vote for Hilary will vote instead for Barack. If Hilary gets the nomination, not everyone voting for Barack now will vote for a Clinton in the general election. Therefore, Barack is more ‘electable’.
For the election: If Barack is elected, Hilary will be offered a prominent role in his administration, so we get the best of both. If Hilary is elected, Barack is likely to get a ceremonial role in her administration, so there we lose his commanding presence and audacity of hope. Hilary - hard worker that she is - is bought and paid for, and though Barack may be also, there is more chance of his not being weighed down by a career full of political favors.
Therefore, though I will pull the lever cheerfully for either in this ‘anybody but the jokers we have now’ mood I’m in, I have been nursing a secret hope that Obama will make it, and make it big.
A woman president is important, and it will happen in my lifetime I am sure, but the look forward instead of the look back is a crucial and telling symbol at this particular stage.
