What to do on Thanksgiving

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Take

the torch

down from the wall

and bravely wake

the sleeping giant

of your soul

Stir

dormant magnificence

out of her crouching

fraction of light

Strengthen

hibernating

hips arms and legs

into stomp

and thunder

on the dance floor of

your particular praise!

This is my daily goal, not just on Thanksgiving.

Friends around the world do not necessarily know about American Thanksgiving, how it began and why we celebrate, what we celebrate. Here's an explanation I wrote to a friend in another country. It's the traditional, happy, non-NativeAmerican view of the holiday:

Legend is that it began with the first European settlers to America. They didn't know about the New World's agriculture. The Native Americans befriended and helped them understand and raise the crops that were new to them, like corn. So when harvest time came, they had a big feast and included their new friends, celebrating together. Every year they celebrated again, and so the tradition continued. Abraham Lincoln made it a national holiday in the 1860s. Since then it has become the most beloved holiday in the U.S., because there is no religious affiliation, no gifts to buy, no commerce outside of food, no complications (except family). People just gather and express thanks for what we have. Traditionally we eat a turkey, which they would have eaten in the 1600s, along with fish and other meats and vegetables like pumpkin, squash and corn. It is a beautiful idea.

BUT the truth is that the European immigrants to the New World brought the most horribly annihilating devastation to the Native Americans that it almost seems like a cruel joke that we celebrate with thanks today. (I also sent this information to my friend.) I don't know how to reconcile these two perspectives, and I don't think there is any reconciliation. I do think the day provides an opportunity to face straight on what has been done in the name of God (the Pilgrim settlers thanked God, not the Native Americans), commerce, and "progress." You can watch a powerfully honest look at the Native American view of Thanksgiving here; I warn you, it isn't pretty or happy.

So, this is what we do. We investigate our shadow and destruction. We do what we can to make it right. We wake up. As Rob Brezsny says, we can always, always be thankful for all our blessings, both the pleasurable ones, and the painful ones, because they wake us up.

Wake up, wake up, and be thankful that you are awake. Love your family and friends, love your neighbor, love your enemy, and celebrate when you stop seeing them as your enemy. Isn't that something to dance about, in wild abandon?

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My response to the killing of Osama bin Laden

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What color is prayer?

In December we saw an installation by visual artist Jitish Kallat at The Art Institute of Chicago called Public Notice 3. (The Art Institute's page about it is here.)

In thousands of LED lights, Kallat spells out words on the risers of the stairs in the Woman's Board Grand Staircase — an open, radiant space. The brightly lit words were intentionally designed in the five colors of the United States Department of Homeland Security alert system. At first, seeing the neon-like letters mounted on the Beaux-Arts stairs felt jarring. The Art Institute is my favorite museum, and the multi-directional staircase under a skylight has always been a magnetic center of the million-square-foot building where I love to sit and watch people, listening to the echo of voices and footsteps. Once I learned the content of the words illuminating the risers, I read up and down and watched people climb, descend, sit, stand, and snap pictures. We were surrounded by words like stock exchange tickers (though not in motion, and not driven by commerce).

Kallat said,  "Treating the museum’s Grand Staircase almost like a notepad, the 118 step-risers receive the refracted text of the speech. I see Public Notice 3 as an experiential and contemplative transit space; the text of the speech is doubled at the two entry points on the lower levels of the staircase and quadrupled at the four exit points at the top, multiplying like a visual echo."

 This photo from the Art Institute of Chicago web site;

more photos here

What speech? The words Kallat mounted on the stairs were spoken by Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda to 7,000 delegates more than 100 years ago, in the first attempt to address religious tolerance worldwide: the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. (Detailed synopsis of the Parliament at Boston University's Encyclopedia of Western Theology's site here.) This art installation was opened last year on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, September 11, 2010. Part of what captured Jitish Kallat's imagination was the fact that the gathering of delegates of different faiths in 1893 in the museum's Fullerton Hall happened also to be on September 11 that year. Below is Vivekananda's speech, words that light the steps of the grand staircase like prayers rising and falling, adjacent to the hall where he addressed the hopeful delegates. (The building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair — officially the World's Fair: Columbian Exposition — with the agreement that it would house the Art Institute thereafter).

When you get to the last sentence of his speech, what do you feel?

Swami Vivekananda's speech to the First World Parliament of Religions, September 11, 1893 in the Art Institute of Chicago's Fullerton Hall:

Sisters and Brothers of America,

It fills my heart with joy unspeakable to rise in response to the warm and cordial welcome which you have given us. I thank you in the name of the most ancient order of monks in the world; I thank you in the name of the mother of religions, and I thank you in the name of millions and millions of Hindu people of all classes and sects.

My thanks, also, to some of the speakers on this platform who, referring to the delegates from the Orient, have told you that these men from far-off nations may well claim the honor of bearing to different lands the idea of toleration. I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth. I am proud to tell you that we have gathered in our bosom the purest remnant of the Israelites, who came to Southern India and took refuge with us in the very year in which their holy temple was shattered to pieces by Roman tyranny. I am proud to belong to the religion which has sheltered and is still fostering the remnant of the grand Zoroastrian nation. I will quote to you, brethren, a few lines from a hymn which I remember to have repeated from my earliest boyhood, which is every day repeated by millions of human beings: "As the different streams having their sources in different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

The present convention, which is one of the most august assemblies ever held, is in itself a vindication, a declaration to the world of the wonderful doctrine preached in the Gita: "Whosoever comes to Me, through whatsoever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me." Sectarianism, bigotry, and its horrible descendant, fanaticism, have long possessed this beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilization and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now. But their time is come; and I fervently hope that the bell that tolled this morning in honor of this convention may be the death-knell of all fanaticism, of all persecutions with the sword or with the pen, and of all uncharitable feelings between persons wending their way to the same goal.

After reading this speech, I feel as I did when I woke up early Monday morning, before Don, to his hand written note from the night before after he'd heard the news and I was in bed. I feel: empty. Not joyful. Not sad exactly. Not hopeful, not hopeless. I'm somewhere floating in a noxious ether of mystery. How have we come to this? How did we get even further away from Vivekananda's closing wishes in these decades since he spoke them?

To watch and listen to an 8-minute video of artist Jitish Kallat's interview with the museum curator about his installation, go here.

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Oscar night and Hobson's Choice in Black & White

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I have a story from our first trip to the grocery store when we moved back to the States from Istanbul. Breakfast in Turkey had been pretty black and white: fresh white oblong-round bakery bread delivered warm by the doorman, fermented black olives, white goat’s cheese, and black tea. Take it or leave it. Lesley and Peter were five and four when we moved to Istanbul, and they remembered breakfast cereal in the States. They kind of missed it. Well they missed it a lot. Except for the occasional scrambled eggs with onion, green peppers and tomatoes (Don made them irresistible as “cowboy and Indian eggs”), black and white Turkish breakfast was the only option.

We came to enjoy it, but when we moved back to Michigan when they were seven and six, we promised to take them to Meijer where they could each pick out any box of breakfast cereal they wanted. We four turned the corner into the breakfast aisle with our cart. It stretched before us into the distant future, the far end in the chilly fog of the dairy shelves. The kids grabbed the first box that looked appealing and threw it in the cart. Within a few inches there was Tony the Tiger on a box of Frosted Flakes, and they grabbed it and put the other one back. Then we came to the Leprechaun and Lucky Charms, and another switch. Stretching on through the long gallery of cardboard art there were Cap’n Crunch, and Fruity Pebbles, Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Sugar Smacks, Apple Jacks, Kix, Chex and Trix, Honey Nut Cheerios, Count Chocula, Golden Grahams, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Coco Puffs, Rice Krispies, Coco Krispies, Frosted Mini Wheats, Sugar Crisps, Corn Pops, Alpha Bits, Ghost Busters and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Swap swap swap from the cart, then back to the shelf and back to the cart. By the end of the cereal aisle they were in a sugary chaos coated with salty tears. I have no idea which cereal boxes we took home.

Sometimes I wonder how long we’ll have all the choices we have, or if they’ll increase! I learned when the kids went through finicky eating phases to just say, This is dinner, take it or leave it. I think it’s a relief not to have choices all the time. At the end of a draining day at work, I do not want Don to ask me Do you want Indian? Mediterranean? Thai? Mexican? I just want him to tell me, Let’s meet at Maru for maki rolls.

So this post is a toast (remember Post Toasties?) to Hobson’s Choice now and then! Which means, This is it, take it or leave it. There's no choice really, only one option, but you don't have to take it. Here's how it began:

Thomas Hobson, 1544-1631

Etching by John Payne at the National Portrait Gallery, London

What's in his bag? Remember letters? Hobson was a mail carrier between London and Cambridge, England, where he had a livery stable near St. Catharine's College, one of the constituent colleges of Cambridge. He had around 40 horses in his stable, and he rented them to Cambridge students. Some of the horses were very fast, and the young whipper-scholars always wanted to ride those fast ones. But Hobson didn't want them to wear out his best horses, so he developed a strict system of rotation. When a student came to the stable to rent a horse for a few hours, he had to take the next horse in line at the front of the stable: This one or none, he said. Take it or leave it.

John Milton, 1608-1674

Long before John Milton wrote the epic poem Paradise Lost in his sixties, he was a mere witty Cambridge student at Christ's College and soon afterward wrote humorous poems about Thomas Hobson. Milton must have rented a horse or two from Hobson's livery, for after Hobson died, Milton and other Cambridge alumni made up satirical poems and illustrations with horses, carriages, puns and witticisms, poking fun at the old guy. In fact, it was Milton who made him famous, "you can have any horse you want, just so long as it is the one nearest the stable door." Henceforth in literature, this was known as a Hobson's choice.

Henry Ford, 1863-1947

A couple of centuries after Milton and Hobson, carriages became horseless, and another man with a livery, Henry Ford, famously said a Hobson's choice: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

Charles Laughton as Henry Hobson
in David Lean's comedy film "Hobson's Choice"

I never knew until a few weeks ago that David Lean didn't just make epic films like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago." We watched his brilliant 1954 comedy "Hobson's Choice" and it is now one of my favorite shows ever. I had not heard of the term "Hobson's choice" before seeing the film, hence this post about its provenance. Lean's movie is about Henry Hobson, an arrogant shopkeeper who sells boots with his daughters and gets the rug pulled out from under him when his eldest daughter gives him an ultimatum one day: Take it or leave it. I am going to embed a clip from the movie below, so you can see how lithely a big man like Laughton can fill the screen as a swaying, slapstick drunk.

John Mills was absolutely fantastic as humble Willie Mossop, Hobson's prize bootmaker.

John Mills as Willie Mossop in "Hobson's Choice"

I take my leave with a movie clip from "Hobson's Choice" where Charles Laughton shows the grace of a ballerina as the drunk and annoying Henry Hobson. Take it, or leave it. Or as Dorothy Parker said, Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

In light of the Oscars tomorrow, I'll also remind you that David Lean "was nominated for a total of nine Academy Awards: seven for Best Director, one for Best Adapted Screenplay, and one for Best Film Editing, the latter two being for 'A Passage to India.' Out of these nominations, Lean won two Oscars, both in the category of Best Director, for 'The Bridge on the River Kwai' (1957) and 'Lawrence of Arabia' (1962). With seven nominations in the category of Best Director, Lean is the third most nominated director in Oscar history, tied with Fred Zinnemann and behind Billy Wilder (8 nominations) and William Wyler (12 nominations)." (wiki)

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Story of Detroit: Motown ~ "What's Goin' On?"

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Original Motown Records site on West Grand Ave in Detroit

In the junior department at Sears, buying school clothes for my sophomore year of high school with my stylist (my sister Nancy) and Mom, I heard strings and French horns out of the store’s music speaker of a song by then so familiar and adored that my eyes closed involuntarily and my head fell back in a feigned swoon fifteen-year-olds do so well, resulting in a look of disdain on the face of my mother. The song was “Just My Imagination” by the Temptations, one of the many musical groups with countless hits that burst out of this little homemade studio called Motown.

My high school years spanned some of the most thrilling, volatile and frustrating times of my country’s history: 1970-74. We learned about the Watergate scandal and listened to impeccably dressed men testify in hearings on TV (and watched that one wife). Daily on our living room couch we listened to Walter Cronkite behind his TV news desk announce the number of American soldiers killed that day in Vietnam. My brother Bennett wore a black armband in his 1970 college commencement in protest of the war. That year The Temptations of Motown practically spit out the lyrics of their song “War”: War . . . huh . . . what is it good for . . . absolutely nothin’!

War was at a distance. I had no brothers or personal friends fighting in Vietnam. I lived in a small Michigan town far from peace protests in big cities, although Kent State was awfully close in the next state of Ohio, and there were campus protests at our local university. It was through the music collected by my brothers that I felt the war, and it was how my worldview and politics were shaped. I never saved enough money from babysitting to buy my own record albums, so I listened to the radio and played my brothers' albums on the turntable in the bay window while I ironed pillowcases, t-shirts, handkerchiefs and boxer shorts in the dining room. Besides Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon and Blue albums, I also listened to folk songs of peace by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger, Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine,” Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, my favorite band in those days, had a protest song following the Kent State massacre called "Ohio." There was even a band named "War" with a song "Why Can't We Be Friends." Along the way were sprinkled funkadelic love songs and war songs out of Motown, like The Temptations’ “War.” 

The Temptations' song "War" was so popular that fans wanted a single (remember those?). Motown songwriters Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong decided to release a new more blatant version by Edwin Starr, a different artist, so as not to upset conservative Temptations fans. It's awfully hard to sit still when you listen to music out of Motown, something has to move. I can feel myself wanting to get out on the street in protest when I listen to this song. "War can't give life, it can only take it away!" Someone said Music is the language of lovers. I'll talk more about that, in relation to Motown in another post, but truly, music was one of the healthiest and most powerful ways my generation responded to the travesties being orchestrated in the world.

I was almost oblivious to the fact that some of the music I loved best was being produced down the road in Detroit at Hitsville, U.S.A.: Motown Records, founded by Berry Gordy Jr with an $800 loan from someone in his family. It was the first record label owned by an African American. I just took this music as it came, loving it, but not claiming it as part of my local geography. My older sisters and brothers had heard little Stevie Wonder sing in Lansing when he introduced himself at a Youth for Christ rally: I’m Stevie Wonder, and I sing for Jesus. He signed on with Motown at age 11. Stevie Wonder is now the only remaining artist from the early days on the Motown label that included Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, The Temptations, Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Jackson 5, Gladys Knight & the Pips, among many, many more.

The Chrysler ad that recently inspired me to turn my attention to Detroit got me out to visit the Motown Historical Museum Saturday, which just happened to be Smokey Robinson’s 71st birthday (February 19). The museum duplex was the original site of Motown Records 1959-1972, after which Berry Gordy moved it to Los Angeles. Smokey and his musical group The Miracles provided the foundation for Motown’s artistic success, and Motown’s founder, Berry Gordy Jr was Smokey’s mentor. Berry made Smokey Vice President of Motown, which he remained until Berry sold the company in 1988 (for $61 million, not including music rights sold later). I'll tell you more about my two hours in this beautifully preserved, humble space that produced some of the most electrifying and long lasting music ever, in future posts.

This Thursday the Obamas will host Smokey Robinson and other Motown singers in another of their  "In Performance at the White House" concerts, this time honoring Motown’s music. They have already honored other American music genres with concerts and workshops for students: classical, Broadway, Latin, country, jazz, and music from the Civil Rights movement. It will be aired on PBS March 1. I don't know if anyone will sing what Rolling Stone ranked as the fourth greatest song of all time, but the man who co-wrote and recorded it won't be there to sing, sadly. The song was written and released under Tamla, the original Motown label, and one of the multiple subsidiary labels Motown eventually created. It was a turbulent time of war and race tensions. You can see some of that history in the photograph montage in the version I've chosen, below. Marvin Gaye himself had a troubled life, and it ended in a terrible episode of domestic violence on April Fool's Day in 1984 when he tried to intervene in a fight between his parents. His dad had a loaded gun. It went off, killing Marvin the day before his 45th birthday, making this song an incessant question that never seems to live into an answer.

I'll post more about Motown, and Detroit, in the days ahead.

What's Goin' On

Mother, mother

There's too many of you crying

Brother, brother, brother

There's far too many of you dying

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today - Yeah

Father, father

We don't need to escalate

You see, war is not the answer

For only love can conquer hate

You know we've got to find a way

To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs

Don't punish me with brutality

Talk to me, so you can see

Oh, what's going on

What's going on

Yeah, what's going on

Ah, what's going on

In the mean time

Right on, baby

Right on

Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong

Oh, but who are they to judge us

Simply because our hair is long

Oh, you know we've got to find a way

To bring some understanding here today

Oh

Picket lines and picket signs

Don't punish me with brutality

Talk to me

So you can see

What's going on

Yeah, what's going on

Tell me what's going on

I'll tell you what's going on - Uh

Right on baby

Right on baby

~ Written by Renaldo "Obie" Benson, Al Cleveland, and Marvin Gaye

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A different kind of uprising

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Diego Rivera's "Detroit Industry" murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts

It was like a new bird was born out of the burnt ashes of the phoenix Sunday.

If you don't live in the U.S. you might not know about the big hype over TV ads they run during the Super Bowl, the playoff football game between the two conferences of the National Football League. Advertisements cost $3 million per thirty seconds of air time. People like me who don't care about American football watch between touchdowns when the ads come on, for the entertainment, and to see if they spent their money well. For the most part, they're a whole lotta money spent on silly. In fact, the ads were so mediocre Sunday that Don started flipping to other channels during ads. Poor Madison Avenue.

But apparently in the third quarter an ad aired that hadn't hit the Internet ahead of time like many ads had done. It was two minutes long, unprecedented for Super Bowl ads, and cost $9 million to produce and air. (Sounds like maybe they got a bargain.) After the Packers beat the Stealers, the buzz started, and the ad was aired by 2,000 news organizations, including the NBC evening news that we watched Monday night. I immediately loaded it on YouTube and watched. It had 1.5 million views by then after the first 24 hours. At the moment of this post it has 4,740,910 views. The ad was made for the new Chrysler 200 automobile, starring Eminem, but more than being a car ad, it is an ad for Detroit. It's called "Imported from Detroit." Be among the millions and watch the ad here or at the bottom of this post. Chrysler is being criticized for taking the $15 billion bailout from us taxpayers, still being in debt, and then spending so much money on this ad. But as one of the "shareholders" of this loan (which won't be paid back, since they filed bankruptcy), I think the ad might be a good investment. The Chrysler 200 web site traffic has increased 1600%.

Of my 54 years, some of which I lived in Chicago, Oregon, California, and Istanbul, 43 years have been  in Michigan, with Detroit down the road. Two years we lived a couple of miles from the General Motors proving grounds. I grew up when the population shifted from the city of Detroit to the suburbs, becoming one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas of the country, sadly and ironically, as the city of Detroit began collapsing in on itself. The peacock strutted as the phoenix burned. Simultaneously there was the excitement of Motown Records, making black musical artists like Stevie Wonder (from Lansing, where I was born) international stars. After the Twelfth Street race riot of 1967, we felt the heart of Detroit turn sour, as white flight, political corruption, a disappearing tax base, and the decline of the American-made automobile turned a once gilded city into a sepulchre. There was little to be proud of, it seemed, and we felt the shame as the whole world thought of Detroit as the armpit city of the U.S.

Slowly a few have started to invest in Detroit. I've been skeptical, wondering how those with money to invest would want to do so in a still failing city. While our daughter Lesley attended art school in the heart of Detroit's cultural center, the city buses stopped running at night. The workers in the city who had no cars of their own couldn't even get to a night job! Automobile plants closed one by one as imported cars like Toyota and Honda became more and more popular. Unemployment rose, until Michigan's economy was one of the worst in the country. In high school when Lesley went to punk rock concerts at venues in Detroit, I worried about her in Detroit at night, even with friends. In the last few years, when I've wanted to go photograph interesting neighborhood art projects there, Don hasn't wanted me to go alone, even in the daytime. It's just how we think of Detroit.

So when the Super Bowl ad titled "Imported from Detroit" played, a miracle happened. I could feel the city down the road rising up from its nearly burnt out forging fires. You can watch the two minute ad for yourself, and maybe you'll feel something of its power too. As my friend at work said, whose husband was a Detroit cop for twenty years (such terrible tales he tells!), "he was speechless, and I cried." What is so moving to me about this little film-ad is how it gets inside the very aspects of Detroit that we had thought were its weaknesses, and convinces me they are its strengths! The laboring class, abandoned buildings, keeping on with toughness, even when everyone says you're burned up and out.

This little ad has inspired me to turn my attention to Detroit and share things with you. In the ad you can see shots of Diego Rivera's 1932-33 Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts (top photo of this post). I'll write about that eleven month project soon, the only Rivera murals in the U.S., and what he thought of as his most important work. This is across the street from a beautiful art deco hotel where he lived while he painted the fresco in the gorgeous atrium court of the DIA and his wife Frieda Kahlo visited, and where our Lesley lived while she went to art school a block away. I felt such pride as I watched the Chrysler ad, about just these murals alone. I want my friends to know something good about Detroit. But I promise I will show you some of the "sepulchre" along with the "gilt."

As long as I live in Michigan, I want to pay attention to this city, as it keeps rising and filling its dead, abandoned spaces again with life. Maybe it will be safe one day for me to take my future grandchildren to walk its streets any time, just as we will in Chicago and New York City.

Detroit skyline on the Detroit River, viewed from Windsor, Ontario, Canada
taken the year we went to the North American Auto Show in 2007


The Chrysler ad "Imported from Detroit":

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Horrors transcended

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Happy Halloween! I love how this day gives us a chance to play with fright and pretend we're someone else (and eat Reese's peanut butter cups).

Just before our mid-term elections here in the U.S., while politicians flood the air waves with last ditch efforts to get voters out Tuesday, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a Rally to Restore Sanity on Washington DC's mall, which brought out well over 200,000 people. Was the rally to support a political party or candidate? No. In his comments at the end of the comedic and musically entertaining event, Stewart asks, What exactly was this? What was the point? His point was to pull back from 24-hour media pundit craziness-inducing overreactions of the Left and Right and remind us that we are not made up of those caricature-warped portrayals of us Americans. I take great hope from the success of this rally that called out hate and reminded us not to let ourselves be driven by the media's polarizing takes on reality.

I'd like to use this moment when politics are all we're hearing on the TV and radio, on Halloween's day of pretend horrors, to talk about three of our human species who truly suffered under another kind of horror, the political kind. While I complain about the faulty systems of my country and the inefficacy of politicians to fix the mess, and while I feel myself getting more cynical and disengaged (but I will force myself to stop at City Hall on the way to work Tuesday to exercise my right to vote), there are far worse political nightmares in the history of the world. The three people I'm spotlighting lived through some of the most terrifying realities of the 20th century. Yesterday, October 30, was not only the day of the Rally to Restore Sanity, it was Miguel Hernández's centenary birthday. He is the third person in my spotlight, below. In the poem of his I share, he says something like Jon Stewart said yesterday:

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Besides perspective-taking in today's context of political lunacy, this is also about the power of language and poetry to not only express the inexpressible, but to sustain us, even when life is at its most dire. Whether in the reading of it, or in writing it, these three show that poetry can transcend the worst that mankind offers and lift us on powerful and delicate wings into the shining sun at the core of ourselves.

For further biographical information on each of these three, please click on their names.

Nelson Mandela, Prisoner 466/64, born 1918

After spending more than twenty years working for equal rights for Blacks in apartheid-heavy South Africa, Nelson Mandela was arrested for sabotage and sentenced to life in prison. He served almost 27 years in three prisons – Robben Island, Pollsmoor Prison and Victor Verster Prison, until his release in 1990. He was elected President of the African National Congress in 1991, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and was elected the first black President of South Africa in 1994. He said, “In my country we go to prison first and then become President.”

Nelson Mandela said the poem Invictus sustained him through his nearly 27 years in prison.

Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Anna Akhmatova, 1889 - 1966
"Before this sorrow mountains bow . . ."

Poet Anna Akhmatova lived during the most turbulent time of Russian history, and though she was not herself imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, her first husband, after their divorce, was executed, and her son imprisoned for seventeen months. Most of those closest to her were exiled, imprisoned or executed for their political leanings. Her poetry was banned, she lived under surveillance. Her masterpiece about the horrors and sorrows of Stalin's death camps, Requiem, was written and dedicated to the women she met standing outside Leningrad's Kresty Prison while her son was imprisoned there. The poem was not published until after her death. Please do read the entire poem in the link above. Here is one stanza from Requiem, followed by a poem called Solitude that speaks to her own lack of freedom and the writing that sustained her.

from Requiem

by Anna Akhmatova

5

Seventeen months I’ve pleaded

for you to come home.

Flung myself at the hangman’s feet,

my terror, oh my son.

And I can’t understand,

now all’s eternal confusion,

who’s beast, and who’s man,

how long till execution.

And only flowers of dust,

ringing of censers, tracks just

running somewhere, nowhere, far.

And deep in my eyes gazing,

swift, fatal, threatening,

one enormous star.

(Translated by Yevgeny Bonver)

Solitude

by Anna Akhmatova

So many stones are thrown at me

that I no longer cower,

the turret’s cage is shapely,

high among high towers.

My thanks, to its builders,

may they escape pain and woe,

here, I see suns rise earlier,

here, their last splendours glow.

And often winds from northern seas

fill the windows of my sanctuary,

and a dove eats corn from my palm…

and divinely light and calm,

the Muse’s sunburnt hand’s at play,

finishing my unfinished page.

(I'm sorry, but I don't know who translated this version of "Solitude") 

Miguel Hernández, 1910 (October 30) - 1942

Yesterday was Miguel Hernández' centenary birthday. I didn't know about Hernández until my dear friend Lorenzo of The Alchemist's Pillow offered a beautiful look at him in his post called Cicada Dirge. This special birthday was hugely celebrated in Spain and around the Spanish-speaking world this weekend. Coming out of poverty and his father's adamant rejections of his literary and poetic interests, Hernández beat incredible odds to become one of the most admired Spanish poets. As a supporter and soldier of the anti-fascist Republican forces against Franco's Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, he was arrested and sentenced first to death, and then life in prison when Franco took power. He didn't survive long in prison, as the terrible conditions led to his death by tuberculosis at the age of 31.

Post script: Lorenzo at The Alchemist's Pillow has posted a new commemorative essay called Milking a goat and a dream, tenderly showing more intimate details of Miguel Hernández's story. He plans to continue his series on Hernández in future posts as well.

The world is as it appears

by Miguel Hernández

The world is as it appears

before my five senses,

and before yours, which are

the borders of my own.

The others' world

is not ours: not the same.

You are the body of water

that I am— we, together,

are the river

which as it grows deeper

is seen to run slower, clearer.

Images of life—

as soon as we receive them,

they receive us, delivered

jointly, in one rhythm.

But things form themselves

in our own delirium.

The air has the hugeness

of the heart I breathe,

and the sun is like the light

with which I challenge it.

Blind to the others,

dark, always remiss,

we always look inside,

we see from the most intimate places.

It takes work and love

to see these things with you;

to appear, like water

with sand, always one.

No one will see me completely.

Nor is anyone the way I see him.

We are something more than we see,

something less than we look into.

Some parts of the whole

pass unnoticed.

No one has seen us. We have seen

no one, blind as we are from seeing.

(translated by Don Share)

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Thirteen ways

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The Jungfrau in Switzerland is one of dozens of primary peaks of the Bernese Alps,

where I am standing in 1975 during my college study trip mentioned in the last post.

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

~ from the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" written in thirteen haiku-ish stanzas and published in 1917, was one of the first poems Diane Wakoski taught in my poetry class (in East Lansing, not Lauterbrunnen, alas). Thirteen Ways is an imagistic poem, a Modern (as in, the period) way of writing poems with clear, sharp language, unlike the focus on lyricism of the previous so-called Romantic period. Another famous Modern imagistic poem is Ezra Pound's short two-lines "In a Station of the Metro," written four years earlier after Pound was touched by a visual moment coming out of a Paris metro train:

    

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

It's so zen. William Carlos Williams, another Modernist, suggested that when writing good poems there are no ideas but in things. In other words, paint images with things instead of descriptions. Show, don't tell.

Back to Thirteen Ways. Marvel-ous as our eyes are, we can't see twenty snowy mountains all at once. Our eyes have to scan gradually. We can't see the eye of the blackbird either, in a scene like that. Our brains are censoring what we perceive every second. I suppose most often our eye catches what is moving, like that blackbird's eye, if the moving thing is big enough to be perceived. But we can imagine the scene painted by Stevens in that stanza. It's one of the thirteen ways he paid attention to a blackbird. I've posted the whole poem below. I hear you sigh, either out of bliss, or out of poetry fatigue. Is it long? you ask. See, about the different ways?

Feel the mystery in each way he looks. In some of his lines I don't know what he means. What is Haddam, without looking it up? But it doesn't really matter, when he writes:

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

Because he's not just writing about looking at a blackbird. Bien sur. We live in days of change and mayhem and people knowing about it like we've never known before, more than the terrible decade of WWI when these poems were written. There are "thirteen" ways of looking at anything. I kind of like how that slows things down.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

Terresa's sensual womanly-writerly post Random Marigolds and Yosemites reminded me of this poem this week, which led to the post. 

Read more Wallace Stevens poems here. My favorite is The Snow Man, because I have a mind of winter too.

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"They've messed with the wrong one now!"

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To read more about the Montgomery Bus Boycott, go here.
To read more about Rosa Parks, go here, or read her autobiography, Rosa Parks, My Story.
To see the story of the restoration of the bus, go here.
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