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Zodiacal Light

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 4 Comments

I am drawn toward the early morning hours before dawn, when I feel ahead of the world, and I can sense some small whisper of…what….hope, I suppose, or wonder maybe. To hear life around the river in those moments motivates me, awakens in me possibilities which otherwise lie dormant. Before the sun rises, often just after the first sliver of light reaches up across the bay, I can hear osprey and other sea birds who at that hour never seem to mind my presence.

But earlier, when that glimmer on the eastern horizon is still merely a possibility, I have taken to walks by moonlight, sometimes not even that. In the woods where I live and down along the water, something is going on. There is life out there wide awake and moving through the dark hours like spirits who need to finish their errands before the sun gives them up. Like sneaking up on some grand behind-the-scenes operation, or suddenly discovering the dark web and meddling around a bit, those hours when the rest of our lives are at rest, motionless, recharging, the world around us is in full swing on the midnight shift.

Fox come about the edges of the woods looking for scraps of food or the peels and rinds of bananas and melons. I can stand patiently off the side of the drive and one fox will wander across the yard from the woods behind me to those on the south and stop before disappearing again beyond the laurel, and she will stare at me, relaxed, nosing around the base of a tree I occasionally put food. Then she’s off—not swiftly or in fear, but nonchalantly, demonstrating that she lives here as well and has decided to stretch her legs. That’s all.

Owls, too—some barn but mostly screech owls, perch in the oaks and elms, sometimes swooping down and moving through branches with precision. But my favorite are the geese which cover the night sky in flocks sometimes so enormous the swoosh of their wings alone creates a breeze, and their call to “Go! Go! Go!” is startling.

Closer to home, out front near the edge of the trees, deer nearly always feed on the dew-soaked grass and often the hostas, and if they sense me sitting on the porch or standing in the clearing, they will look up, briefly, ears turned forward—just for a moment—and then return to their grass, not minding me, aware just the same.

And it is then, when I am well acclimated with the night and my eyes have adjusted, and my soul too has adjusted, that I think of my way in the world, the motivation behind the turns and hesitations, my purpose of this passing in time. It’s then my own spirits circulate, pulling aside the thorny branches and leading me through the pathless wood. There’s one friend nodding his head and insisting I follow my own path. I can hear him clearly when I’m out there, see his small sardonic smile as he says, “Come on Kunzinger. You know how to do this, stop waiting for approval or it’s never going to happen.” And there, too, is another friend whose smile is as wide as dawn pressing his sense of adventure into my spirit with an “all or nothing” carelessness about him which brings me up short yet livens my ambition. In one brief moment I am eased by no longer thinking of them in the past tense, but just as quickly, we all move on.

And sometimes sitting there on one of the benches is another friend, subconsciously rubbing her neck, tearing off the edges of her notebook pages, and looking at me with wide brown eyes saying, “Someday I will,” and then laughing and repeating, “Honest, someday I will,” and it makes me sad, deeply sad like dark water, but that moment too passes.

And then the distance across the reach lightens ever so slightly, from dark, almost Navy blue to something slightly more pale, like powder, and I’m alone again—the fox rushing off into the woods, the geese at rest in the harvested field or at the river’s edge, and the murmurs of chickadees and wrens and cardinals chase away what’s left of the stillness, and even my friends bow off, and I have trouble separating memory from imagination. So I go inside and wake my son so we can head to the bay to catch the sunrise.

It’s as if when I wander out in the pre-dawn hours, linear time cuts me some slack. It seems to offer a small reward to some of us who stay up late or get up early to gather as much out of our moments that we can, and I can bend her ever so slightly and talk again with what can best be defined as “unfinished friendships.” Then, just briefly, it eases the almost vague pulse somewhere deep which some have defined as depressive tendencies, as if labels somehow are half the solution.

But predictably and somehow simultaneously surprisingly, dawn returns with that hope I need and says, “Wait, watch. Just watch.”

Just watch.

Higher Education v. Work

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BT Washington and WEB Du Bois

Indulge me this brief history jolt before I get to my point:

In 1930, W.E.B. Du Bois gave the commencement address at what was then Howard College. The title of that speech was “Education versus Work.” In it, he addressed what had been, from the late 1800’s to about 1915, a public disagreement between him and the ideas of Booker T. Washington. In a nutshell, Washington gave a speech in 1895 at the Atlanta Exposition in which he called for “Separate but Equal.” He proposed that the African-American community, particularly in the south, should not concern themselves with the folly of higher education, of learning Greek and Latin, when they could barely read and had no job, no money. “He insisted that the former slaves and children of former slaves should “cast down their bucket where they stand.” They should use what they know–agriculture–to build their lives up and make some money to buy some land. Learn a trade, he insisted. He was right; in fact, the school he principled, Tuskegee, is now one of the leading universities in the world, particularly in aeronautical engineering.

But at the time there was only one source of financial support for this so-called industrial education: Industrialists like J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and others. This in itself wasn’t so bad, but there are some who, though at first supported Washington, started to recognize that he was popular–world famous in fact–with the White leaders of the country because not only was he not threatening, he was downright compromising (in fact, that speech he gave in Atlanta later became known as the “Great Compromise Speech”).

One of those dissenters was the first Black PH.D from Harvard, a man who wrote the treatise on the poor of Philadelphia: Du Bois. He wrote a book called The Souls of Black Folk, and in chapter three, called “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington,” he calls out his friend and colleague for undermining their pursuit of equality in this country. He said that at least ten percent of every race are leaders, the ones who insure the progress of the other ninety percent. He called it the “Talented Tenth.” These were the people who would pull the train. Because no matter how much money they earned, what kind of land they might buy, if they didn’t have CEO’s in the boardroom, representation in Congress, lawyers and judges to defend them and insure justice, they would just be taken advantage of by systemic racism and hatred. He was right. He stated when speaking of Washington’s speech in retrospect, that, “In one five minute speech Mr. Washington set back our hopes of Civil Rights in this country by decades.” He was right again. He was not against industrial education; in fact, he wrote and spoke often of the brilliance of the ideas of Washington. He just insisted those progresses came at a cost, and since the only source of money was going to industrial pursuits, the cost was much too high. “We must,” he insisted, “put all of our efforts into insisting on our rights to higher education, if not for any other reason than to protect our welfare.”

Okay. Now this:

This meme has been circulating with what looks like a very cool version of The Village People with the tag, “Promote trade schools with the same passion we promote college.”

No, I don’t believe I will. I support them, of course. I absolutely support trade schools; the vast majority of the people I know are in the trades: electricians, HVAC, construction, mechanics with auto and marine specialties for which they went to trade schools. For thirty years I taught retiring military who first learned a trade and led constructive, successful lives, making a greater contribution to their community and this country than most I’ve ever known. Then they went to college. Of course I support trade schools. On any given day for the past three decades I have recommended students abandon their course of action in higher education and pursue a trade since that is where their passions truly lie.

But my passion is not. My passion is the exchange of ideas, philosophies, and civil discourse. My skills and my support go fully behind learning the thoughts and ideas of the Renaissance, the Classical age, the Greco-Roman period, from when we learn to consider how to argue, how to understand validity and the difference between facts and opinions, where we learn fallacies and how to recognize the intricacies of human behavior and understanding from philosophy to psychology and, of course, the humanities. It is in higher education where we learn the significance of history and its relevance to what happens next; it is where we understand constitutionality and precedents.

Trade schools are essential and those whose ambitions are to pursue excellence in the trades should have the support of everyone. Of course. But do I support the trades with as much passion as I do higher education? Again, absolutely not. When it comes to discourse from experts to dissect what is accurate and what is fable, experts who can check the authorities and keep them in line, balanced, experts who pull the train, I put all my energies behind higher education. Without these experts to study the trends and changes in society, in particular in a global market where trades are no longer simply “local,” the working class, which is made up mostly of tradespeople, would not have a fighting chance in congress, in unions, in contracts, in employment security, benefits, and fair workplace conditions.

There is a place for them both, and we should all support them both; but I’m not going to pretend I don’t first believe in the necessity and power of higher education. I am not proposing, hopefully obviously, everyone should pursue a higher education. People in my life I am closest too and love the most never did. One’s a musician, one a photographer, one a technician, several are watermen, one an electrician, one a contractor. Come on, we need them all.

But we need the study of classical music, of jazz, of literature, of impressionistic art; we need knowledge of the philosophers and the understanding of social sciences; people should know who Albert Schweitzer was, who Emmanuel Kant was, why Bach as so important and how Hemingway not only changed how we write but what we read.

Why? I’m sorry but I’m going to have to quote John Keating again, the character based upon my colleague in writing Sam Pickering: “These are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

The Reach

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
One of a huge fleet of boats hauling up nets of menhaden for Omega Protein of Reedville

Four men in their seventies are at another table at the café. For a while they talk about a trip one of them took to the mountains, and he describes the farms out there, the slopes and crops, the height of the corn and the how dry the air is and the effect of the lack of humidity on the growth. He saw some pheasants and deer, and he saw some cottonwoods which if you cut it up for firewood will quickly rot if it gets wet. It was a bus trip, and he must admit he spent a good deal of time sleeping on the bus. 

Then they talk about dead friends, two of whom passed last week. Both had cancer and one is believed to have caught it in Vietnam. The dead vet’s wife is in hospice and doesn’t know he died. “Doesn’t know he was sick,” says another. “Doesn’t know she was married!” laughs a third and they all laugh until one shakes his head and says, “Shame really. Such a loving couple.” They are quiet a bit and sip their coffee. It’s raining today, and it isn’t hot. It’s cold in the cafe and I wear a sweatshirt. 

Then they talk about boats. 

People in Deltaville for the most part are farmers or watermen, often both. Corn, butter beans, soybeans, tomatoes, wheat, flounder, bass, oysters. Crabs. Inevitably, the talk turns toward the commercial fishing conglomerate in Reedville up the bay that’s been fishing the mouth of the Rap for menhaden for well more than a hundred years and were out there in their fleet of ships again this morning. Omega Protein cooks and grinds the fish for nutritional supplements as well as feed for livestock. No one eats menhaden except the larger fish, in particular bluefish and bass, but they’re a cash cow for fish oil. Still, the watermen will tell you the truth, that the fish of the bay are being starved off because of the over farming of menhaden. One guy’s grandson is working out there on the boats holding the tubes that suck up the millions of small fish out of the nets and pumps them through a filter system and then into the hold. The fleet pulls out five hundred metric tons of the little suckers every year.

“Down at the mouth of the bay, and up bay in Maryland, those fishermen doing okay. We’re dying here in mid-Chesapeake,” one says. He eats a breakfast wrap the sole worker walks back. She hands him a small bag of chips and says she didn’t forget, and they all laugh.  

Then one of the men sees the college sticker on the back of my laptop. 

“Bob, you work at that college? I heard you’re a professor.”

“I am.”

He nodded. 

“My wife read one of your books. Got it at the library.”

“Well. Thank her.”

He nodded.

“Wayne would read it,” says another, “but he only knows so many words.” They all laugh. Oh, these men read. The details and depth of their knowledge of weather, sea conditions, fishing practices, equipment updates, agricultural spill, fertilizer, engines, oyster conditions, and more is extensive, and I’ll turn toward them for what the weather will be like in the next week quicker than any other source. 

“So you been to Siberia?” Wayne asks. Before I can answer, another points out the obviousness of the question, but Wayne says he’s just making conversation.

“I have.”

“I ain’t been nowhere. The mountains on a bus trip. Fredericksburg once.”

“And Richmond, Wayne. You went to Richmond that time.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this contrast. I’ve been around the block, and a significant number of my neighbors have not been very far at all. Growing up it perplexed me. The world is massive, with so much variety in people, vistas, foods, customs, and more that to spend your life not exploring seemed a waste of a life, like vacationing in London but only going to see Big Ben every day. 

But we’re just curious about different things, is all. I can navigate easily through more than a few foreign countries. So can these men; foreign to me, anyway. From Reedville to Havre de Grace, Tangier to Cape Charles, and Windmill Point to Point Comfort and on, dead reckoning if they must, navigating the depths and dangers beneath them, the changes in the tide, the wind, the mood.

Oh these men read. They read the clouds and can communicate the narrative arc of storms, they read the waves and the tides and can tell what the antagonist will be today, when the skies will clear, when the flounder will return, when to head home early and when to push it.

They are masters at their lives, and while they are often prisoners to the weather (and international conglomerates), they are, most of them, still their own bosses with boats much more costly than my home.

These guys killing time at the café are part of the backbone of this country, and we’re sitting a few hundred yards from the famed Stingray Point where, according to spurious accounts, John Smith was stung by a stingray. They walk into the café or the convenience store or IGA in work boots, sometimes raincoats.

One complains again about Omega. “I saw them out off Windmill again, five am.”

“Come on Jimmy. You know as well as me if you had the money to get one of them boats they got you’d be sucking up the menhaden too. Sheeet.”

“You go out today?”

“Yeah, Out and back.”

“Anything?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I suppose.”

They sit quietly and Wayne shows a picture on his phone of the bus he rode with his wife and a group to the mountains.

“You working on some new bestseller Bob?”

“Not today,” I say.

“Tomorrow then,” he says, and nods.

The Space Between

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Earlier today my brother and I walked around Colonial Williamsburg and through the old part of the College of William and Mary. Of course, most of CW is recreated, rebuilt, and replicad to death, but I’ve been going there since I’m fourteen-years-old, and I never tire of the landscape, the costumed near-historians acting their parts, the oxen in the field, and the horses and sheep.

This is, after all, the same ground, the very same foundations, as our Colonial counterparts. In fact. Bruton Parish, in particular, is original and you can walk the same stairs and sit in the same pews as this country’s forefathers. Original, too, is the Wren Building on campus, where Thomas Jefferson among others studied. As a professor, I can’t help but imagine the late 18th century classroom filled with such minds in a building already one hundred years old at the time. As a writer I want to communicate how real it all is, how those figures are not characters in an historical graphic novel or songs on a Broadway stage; they were real, and it happened immediately here, beneath our feet today, only earlier.

Once back home, I filled the birdbaths thinking about the rest of eastern Virginia during those times. To get home we pass several former plantation houses still surrounded by fields where enslaved women and men were whipped, raped, denied rights to family, education, life itself. Such a contrast to the “wisdom” wielded in those hallowed halls forty miles southwest. And here at Aerie, this land was the Powhatan hunting ground, and the “Great Shellfish Bay” provided Chief Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas with sustenance in their village on the other side of this narrow peninsula. It sat, actually, just across the York River (called the Pamunkee River then) from what would become Williamsburg. This river here at Aerie, the Rappahannock (“River of Quick, Rising Water”—makes me feel safe—one of only four rivers in Virginia to still use the name given it by the Native Americans who lived here), was farmed by the Powhatan and Europeans alike for oysters for centuries.

It’s hard to walk about here and in Williamsburg and not think about what was, what people back then saw when they crested the hill out on the road and headed down the hill to the river. And at the river, which was narrower then, with Parrot Island—a mere marshland today just offshore—large enough then to maintain an agricultural community, they would have looked east past the cliffs along what is now Deltaville, past Stingray Point where John Smith was stung while swimming—and who knew Chief Powhatan—then out across the Chesapeake.

As I did this very night with my son and some dude fishing. We knew what was about to happen. We all stood and looked northeast, just across Windmill Point on the other side of the river, and across the Bay to where Wallops Island sits just offshore on the edge of the Atlantic, and we watched the explosive fires from the engines of the Antares rocket carrying a payload of supplies to the International Space Station.

Powhatan missed this one.

Time is slippery. Ten hours ago I wondered about men in wigs a few hundred years ago wandering about the college, walking to the courthouse just past the parish, perhaps on to the Colonial Capital building. This evening I thought about astronauts onboard a spinning building two hundred and fifty-four miles in space waiting to catch a tube of supplies sent from a small island fifty-six miles from me. Add to this the fact that earlier in this very day, NASA regained communication with the Voyager Two spacecraft which left our solar system six years ago and is tumbling through interstellar space. Tonight seven people who pass by every ninety minutes inside paper-thin casing separating them from temperatures outside bouncing from 250 degrees below zero to 250 degrees above are waiting for that tube of stuff.

Humans have done so much since Aerie was a hunting ground and the roads of Williamsburg were filled with people during the Jacobean Era.

Yet still this world is dying, and the people of this planet seem dead set on ending humanity’s reign, despite all of the gained wisdom, harnessed possibilities, and collective ambitions of the most brilliant people on earth; people who figured out how to send a tube into space to dock with a station run by humans spinning about the planet.

How cool is that?

How very sad is that?

Remember When the Music

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with Mike Bonanno

It’s Sunday night and I’m at my desk and it is quiet this late. Earlier today I texted briefly with a friend, Sean, who sometimes is not simply a close confidant and a new grandfather, but a twenty-five-year-old resident director at college, two floors down from my sophomore year dorm room.

Let me explain what I’m listening to right now: A few years ago I found an old cassette tape. You see, forty years ago I was only able to get through college with the help of another best friend—an old 12 string Takamine guitar. I played in my dorm. I played at a nursing home, at a few local pubs, at three am in the ministry center when no one was around, up at Merton’s Heart—an old clearing in the woods on the hillside across the river–and mostly in the campus café where once every two months or so the musicians on campus would gather and play for a packed house. As those few, short years passed those sessions became more and more fun, and of all the activities I did during those four years, those coffeehouses with fellow musicians were easily some of the most memorable. The stories I have from those gigs could fill a hundred pages and just thinking of a few of them while sitting here gives me goose bumps and makes me all at once feel very young, ready for the world, and very old and tired. That was so long ago yet I can hear every note, the sound of the crowd, the lights above the stage, the odd backdrop of an Olympic size swimming pool behind the curtains and glass, and some anecdotes I could never properly capture in a blog. For me, it is the ultimate “you had to be there” situation.

A lot of musicians came and went during those years but one in particular stood out; Mike was a resident director on campus who played guitar. We played a lot of music together. He and I once drove to Rochester to buy a piano and bring it back in a van, and we talked the entire time, stopping at Letchworth State Park to rest and watch the waterfalls and talk about dreams and hopes and fears. We stood at the scenic overview and talked about music and the passing of time. We talked about Walt Whitman and Thoreau. We just talked. There were no messages to check, no communicating with friends from high school, no games to pass the time. We talked.

On another occasion we went to an International Coffeehouse competition. Out of a hundred or so participants, Mike and I both made the final five and he won. What a time that was. After my junior year he took a new job somewhere else, but during my senior year, the college had him back to perform a coffeehouse by himself. He was a mixture of James Taylor and Paul Simon. The café filled to capacity again and he played. I played a few songs to open, but then the night was all Mike and a room filled with friends who we were certain we would know the rest of our lives. Of course, that wasn’t the case. A few of us remained close, a few others I’ve been back in touch with and it has enriched my life with the only thing that matters in the end, the love of friends. Still, I didn’t know what happened to Mike.

But I found this tape of that night at the café when he returned to campus, and I burned a few cd’s from it, sent one to Sean, and then with some Googling and cross referencing a man whose name is not uncommon, I found Mike and sent him a copy as well.

And tonight I’m sitting at my desk listening to where I was and who I was forty years ago. I can’t imagine many people do things like pull out the wedding video twenty years later and reminisce. Or high school yearbooks for that matter. Does anyone peruse old tapes of childhood birthdays? Perhaps. I generally don’t. I watched a video once of Michael when he was five riding his bike around the property yelling gleeful things, while on the porch you can see my dad, my uncle and aunt, all laughing and talking with the energy of the ages. Quickly I was sorry I pulled the tapes out—maybe I’m too melancholic to drown in the sentiment of “back then.” I like looking ahead, I really do.

Still, sometimes it is okay to look back carefully, because as Jackson Browne depressingly points out, “There’s still something there for me.” It can’t be a bad thing to get a glimpse of the good parts of the past, especially moments loaded down with love.

At the café all those years ago, I know I sat next to my friends Maria and Jennifer, and on the tape I can hear Sean and his now wife Debbie at a table on the other side of the stage cheering Mike on. The entire resident staff was there with a case of beer. I recognize a lot of the voices on the tape from the crowd as they called out. It is odd to find proof of a different version of myself. Photographs are too static, and video can be a bit too animated and distracting as we comment on clothes or hairstyles or the lack of lines on our faces. But just audio—the lost art of listening to audio only—of an old tape on which my voice is the same as it is now, is like standing outside of twenty-two again and overhearing who I thought I was. I can almost hear my dreams of then just below the surface. Do people that young today still dream like that? As a professor I have stared at twenty-two for thirty-three years now and I don’t see the spark and raw ambition I remember when I was young. Maybe it’s there, but a lot of what we did back then was the result of a rare combination of passion and lack of distraction. For the most part technology was not in our lives, so we were able to be more a part of each other’s. Something was different then; we actually believed in the craziest part of ourselves.

I am closer now to ninety-years-old than I am to that night.

Most of what he played was original, but one song, playing right now, is a Peter Yarrow song, and in the refrain Mike sings “Must have been the wrong rainbow, because I don’t see any pot of gold. All I see is a man too old to start again.”

Okay, so tonight this can go two ways: I can drown in the used-to-be’s of that energy in our innocent youth, or I can get up tomorrow and smile and know parts of who I was back then are still here, a bit more weathered and a little more tired, but here just the same.

For the record, I wasn’t very good. We made so many mistakes. But what we were excellent at back then is the one element I only occasionally recognize in my students: we weren’t afraid to embarrass ourselves in pursuit of a passion. We laid it all out there for better or worse, mostly worse, and said, “This is who I am and what I’m feeling right now.” I was so anxious, every single time. So was Mike. But we kept doing it because that comes with the territory. If you’re going to be in the arts, whether music or writing, visual arts or the art of being fully human, you have to step in your own direction despite the urge of those around you to push you back in line. So we played and we weren’t afraid of making mistakes.

And you know what? People kept showing up. Just like in real life; when we make mistakes, people who love you, who care about you—they keep showing up.

I suppose that even at twenty-two I was simply more terrified of falling into a rut than I was of embarrassing myself in front of others. I was going to be the Greater Fool, the “other” one, the guy who wasn’t afraid to embarrass himself in an effort to pursue a dream. Some of it worked out, most of it didn’t. But it is good to sit here tonight and remember me.

I am as far from sad or melancholy as can be. Because I’m still here, I’m still doing coffeehouses but instead of music I’m telling stories in which I tend to write things which say, “This is who I am and what I’m feeling right now.” It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same. It might be four decades later, but I’m still embarrassing myself in pursuit of an art, which is, for any artist, a way of exposing something deep inside. Back then I wanted anyone to listen. Now, I write for myself, and if an audience finds something worthy in the words, that’s simply a bonus. I’m just doing what my soul tells me to do, I suppose just like I did at twenty-two when I sat terrified in front of a hundred and fifty people and badly covered Fogelberg:

“Love when you can, cry when you have to, be who you must that’s a part of the plan.”

The Sun Also Rises. Whatever.

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When someone notes that I have been influenced by Hemingway, I need to clarify that I mean his non-fiction; The Dangerous Summer; A Moveable Feast. I like how Hem weaves himself into the material but manages to keep his I’s far apart as it were. I also, because of my own education, admire his journalistic approach to material. It moves fast, and the dialogue is real, like sitting across the bar from him at Café Iruna on the square in Pamplona.

And I know some of his fiction, particularly the early material, is a thin disguise for his own life and experiences.

But.

I just finished listening to The Sun Also Rises on cd, have read it several times, taught it for a while in American lit courses, and can say with complete bluntness what a bloated, pretentious self-indulging piece of crap that book is. For me, anyway.

Before my colleagues jump in and explain the importance of this novel, the representation of the “lost generation” and Paris between the wars and the literary versions of Hemingway himself, and Gertrude Stein, and Scott Fitzgerald, and even a little Joyce, or send me notes about the prose style that turned the literary world upside down, I must reiterate that I get it. I GET IT.

But it is the literary equivalent of the movie St. Elmo’s Fire, where a bunch of young adults—twenties and early thirties in this case—drink heavily, travel freely, were dumped into a new decade unlike any previous one and pretend to have all the answers when they damn well know they don’t and are always just a town away from finding themselves. Realism to be sure, but I can get that at 711 sitting on the log pile out front talking with waterman and migrant workers.

The book captures a young generation coming off of World War One who cannot find their place in a world that now knows massive death, faceless genocide, and unpredictable and unsteady governments. Before the war they knew exactly what life had to offer, and that is all gone. It can be seen as foreshadowing how members of every generation since then feel and will see the world when first out on their own.

Yeah. Whatever.

I used to like the book back when I was the same age as the characters and also found out much too late that “you can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” In the book they keep going, but in reality, we don’t. Maybe at forty, maybe fifty, perhaps sixty-three, but eventually you understand the fears that kept you moving just might have been justified and finding out is difficult.  

My students usually like the book when they can get through it. I do enjoy the Pamplona parts after having spent time there, but, again, that’s because of the “reality” part of this modernist realism that I can relate to more than the literary “realism.” (whew)

Maybe it doesn’t work for me because on a daily basis my twisted mind battles that barrage of negativity—real honest-to-goodness horrific happenings—and finding some silver lining has become acutely difficult. Weather changes, blistering heat, frigid lows, the rapidly intensifying war in Europe, an indited crook with an excellent chance of winning the presidency and shutting the doors on democracy, diseases and tumors and cysts and neurological disorders and heart issues and unprecedented anxiety sweeping through the air for us all to breathe in like the saturation of Wifi waves we drift through that weren’t there thirty years ago when we were smarter and calmer, somehow all trump (sorry) the whiny, pathetic complaining of a group of ex-pats drinking all day. The highlight is a trip to see the bullfights in Pamplona.

It’s a cynical group of people trying to finally find pleasure any way they can, and when they can’t they keep moving. Or, my twenties.

Who knows? Maybe I can write one of these books, this fiction thing people talk about. It can be a group of people in a small town sitting on pile of bags of logs in front of a convenience store, and each day they pursue some new way to keep from being bored to death since the oyster and crab population is weak. This can actually be a big seller. They’re not so much lost as they are avoiding reality, victims of place. These characters can be real and relatable, and of course they can drink, but instead of top shelf champagne by the Count and Lady Brett insisting that the alcohol will clear their heads, it can be some PBR or Miller Lite with Boo and Bubba as someone inevitably explains, “Sheeet! It’s five o’clock somewhere!”

Same thing.

I can do this. I’m starting tonight after heading to Gwynn’s Island to watch the Tractor Races and having a shot of tequila. This can be a good work.

Isn’t it pretty to think so?  

AI AIN’T

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 4 Comments

A student actually asked me if it was okay to allow artificial intelligence (I see no reason to capitalize that) to write his paper. He didn’t try and plagiarize and pass it off as his; he didn’t unintentionally use someone or something else’s material and mistakenly claimed it to be original. No. He sat at his computer, opened his browser, addressed an email to me, and wrote, “Is it okay if we allow ai to write our papers? Will I lose points for this?”

Once again, we have slid right past the founding problem and into the next level, where we have already accepted the premise but now we must fight small issues. It happened with cell phones when we moved from not allowing them in class at all to penalizing students if they use them at the wrong times or for the wrong reasons. What happened to “No cell phones. Pay attention to me”?

We have so much technology in our lives and in our classes that time must be spent powering up and down, downloading, transferring, waiting, and on and on that the actual time a student is truly “present” and looking at who is talking, making notes, discussing, has diminished by nearly eighty percent according to Pew Research and a study at the University of Pennsylvania. The productivity and scores at every level of education in this country suck and we cannot figure out why. Here’s why: No one is paying attention.

Problems:

*As soon as cell phones or laptops entered the classroom, teachers had competition for already questionable attention.

*Students who consumer energy drinks have an attention span nearly twenty minutes shorter than just one generation (pre-cell phone and energy drinks) ago.

*It was proven many decades ago that writing things down, even just once, increases the ability to remember information tenfold. It is called “writing to learn.” But today students do not write down a single note choosing instead to take a picture of the information.

Education is easy: Listen intently (that means with intent to learn) to the person who knows what they’re talking about, ask questions of those areas you are not sure you clearly understand, write it down somewhere to see if you will remember it all. This is how it was done by slaves like Frederick Douglass who battled opposition from overseers who would whip him for reading, plantation owners who would kill him for learning, national laws forbidding him to read and write. This is how it was done by the Irish who were forbidden to learn in their own land so they had to hide behind the hedges in small groups to learn reading and writing from their “hedge master.” This is how it was done by immigrants who needed English to get a job and wanted to make a better life for themselves. This is how it is done. All the technology available will not replace internal motivation necessary to achieve your purpose. Nor will it explain to you what that purpose is.

But students today read texts from friends, use a program to write their papers, believe they can only get through the next five minutes with another Five Hour Energy drink.

There is no more quiet, no more earbudless, phoneless people walking peacefully from one place to another, listening to nature, listening to each other, listening to themselves, thinking about the day or about the moment. There is no more sense of now. They don’t yet realize that you have to put down the past and the future if you want to learn to unwrap the present.

There is no more sense that people are paying attention. Not on the highway where distracted driving is the number once cause of accidents; not in the classroom where distracted students are missing nearly eighty percent of the material. Not in our souls, where we need to pay attention to our own compass, our own course.

Artificial intelligence can certainly write a pretty decent paper, but it will read like the blind date pretending to get along with you so that the night isn’t a complete waste of time. Yes, it will fulfill the requirements and might even be acceptable, but I won’t feel it in my soul. When I read someone’s writing, I need to believe they stood in that spot, felt the sand, tasted the old wine. Ai cannot make me believe your heart raced when you got closer to some destination. Ai cannot convince me you actually lived.

Ai is not alive. Cell phones are not alive. The energy gained by ingredients in even the most natural of power drinks is not the fire you need to be truly alive, present.

We are dying. Slowly for certain; but dying equally for certain. And the only way to make that worthwhile is to be absolutely present on the way. To do the work, to grow tired from trying so hard.

Our pace is all wrong. Somewhere we believed that advances were always a good idea. We convinced ourselves that convenience was the best approach. The number of people fighting depression is at unprecedented levels; the suicide rate is increasing nearly daily; the dropout rate is growing exponentially; and our success in English, Math, and Science is nearly out of competition with all other industrialized nations. Our priorities are wrong.

Artificial intelligence assumes some level of intelligence to begin with. But it is not intelligence that is the problem to begin with that we need to use artificial versions like we do with sweeteners and flavors and levels of energy. It is purpose.

On the first day of class I ask my students to put everything away—laptops, cellphones, notepads, energy drinks, earbuds, bluetooths, all of it. We sit and I ask them where they’re from. Then I ask them this: Why are you here? What are you doing here? You can be anywhere–tending bar in the Caribbean, backpacking around Europe, working and making money at some resort hotel, absolutely anywhere you want. But you’re here. Why? And we spend the rest of class exploring purpose.

Does it work? I have no idea. But on my long drive home I ask myself that same question trying hard to answer it before my mind melts and I put on the radio instead, relying upon some noise to fill that dangerous space of silence.

Life is paper thin, Toni Wynn wrote. How are we spending it?

What did I really do with my time?     

133 Years Ago

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment
The Potato Eaters, 1885

Imagine these circumstances:

A thirty-seven-year-old man has not held a steady job since he was twenty-seven, and he was fired from the six jobs he held until then in his adult life. He has fallen out with his father, lived with a pregnant prostitute and her daughter, and his younger brother gives him every dime he needs for food, housing, and supplies so he can paint. He claims (after saying he wanted to be a preacher, an art dealer, a tutor, and a bookstore clerk) he wants to be an artist, but every artist save one believes he simply isn’t at all good at it. The critics dismiss him as an amateur with no control over his craft, and everyone believes him to be a bum, a vagrant, a freeloader. He has a handful of maladies such as syphilis, bi-polar, manic depression, and “fits of dismay” we can today label as seizures, but in his day was simply considered signs of insanity. Four months after turning thirty-seven, he still has no job, sold no paintings, received no sign of hope from critics or artists, and has been rejected by women from his cousin to his landlord’s daughter.

Then on July 27, 1890, he shoots himself in the side (yes, he did it, not some teenager in town, not some unknown soul, he did it), and two days later on the 29th he dies. There seems every reason to consider this poor man has thrown away his life and took advantage of those he loved for some foolish “obsession” only he seems to believe in.

Yet, within a few dozen years he becomes one of the most influential, inspiring, and successful artists in the history of western culture. His letters found later reveal his passion to show others the humanity so overlooked in the poor and destitute of the world. In his day, this greatest of artists was considered the least of our brothers.

How many of us would pay attention to such a character, listen to what he has to say, get close enough to understand what bothers him, motivates him? How many of us would simply walk past this man?

I am not suggesting we are surrounded by genius disguised as misunderstood, downtrodden individuals. But it seems believing in others even when no one else does, especially when no one else does, can change a person’s life, and who knows what kind of ripple effect that might have.

“I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.“

–VVG

Friends of A View: Watch this. Trust me. You’ll cry:

Curious Men

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The piece I wrote which was the fastest to go from concept to completion, in ready to be published form, was in 2016 about Arlington National Cemetery. From the time I sat down to write to the moment I sent the version that would eventually be published in the Washington Post spanned just twenty minutes. We call that a lightning strike.

The slowest has been “in progress” for more than forty years, but as of a few days ago it headed to the fast lane and dragged my procrastinating ass with it. Here’s what happened:

When I was a freshmen and sophomore in college, I was deeply involved in the planning and training for a great adventure of a friend of mine who had graduated from the college about four years earlier. While it was not my adventure we planned but his, in just a couple of years it unsuspectingly became mine, and I have tried to write about it ever since. A few pieces have been published by journals such as Matador Review and Palooka, and the entire 275-page manuscript became my MFA thesis, Fly. It was more than a little weak, however, and I subsequently attacked it with a pen, markers, highlighters, and anything else to move hard-copy paragraphs from chapter to chapter and front to back. I trimmed it down to a not-so-well written 50 pages. That version, Curious Men, received some decent reviews, but the primary response involved readers wanting to know more. That can be both good and bad, and in this case, way bad. I was never satisfied with the work; I could not capture the excitement—exhilaration really—and anticipation at just twenty-years old, followed by confusion and disappointment. For me it became the quintessential “you had to be there” narrative. The true story goes to emotional extremes, pulling this nineteen-year-old boy out of some catatonic state and into some woke existence of adventure and exploration. The written version, well, didn’t.

Long story short: the long version was way too long, and the short version left people longing for more, indicating I came up short. I can’t get it right.

Honestly, I have been thinking about, writing about, messing with, focused on, and ignoring this story for forty years. I long ago decided that I would never get it right, figuring it would be wrong to put it out there. I have letters, maps, notes, journals, emails, and a half dozen different versions of the same manuscript all saying the same thing, and not very well.

Until last month. On a drive to Florida I listened to the audio version of Beryl Markham’s West with the Night. I enjoyed this version of the book I had read several times decades ago, but somewhere while driving past the dilapidated and very incorrect theme park, “South of the Border,” in South Carolina, my mind drifted back to my manuscripts. And on I-95 South I figured out exactly how to start, what to focus on, and I finally understood the problem I’ve had all along with the narrative: It isn’t about anyone else’s journey, it’s about mine. The book is not about the character I had been writing about for forty years; it is about me; I’m the protagonist.

When I got home, I pulled out the long, bound version that was my MFA thesis, as well as the short version in a binder on the shelves behind me. I pulled up the published versions which focused on one segment of the story, and I reread the longer version, Curious Men, and sat back knowing two essential things: First, they all suck. Second, I know now exactly what I need to do to unsuck them. My energy has returned, some internal motivation has been reignited.

It was a four-hour session that first morning I did little more than read through pages and chapters with a fine-tooth comb much like the NY Times editor must have when he first received the Pentagon Papers. What I believed was a story no one would care about and which I was not telling well at all, I finally knew exactly how to tell so others would be interested.

It was both exhilarating and terrorizing. I am ready to get back to this and get it done right this time, yet doing so means not only facing the possibility of not getting it right yet again but also dealing with some realities I’d almost rather let lie dormant.  

But if my trip to Florida followed by an inspiring trip to western New York ignited some spark, it would be just a few hours later that some bomb exploded in a manner that sent those proverbial chills up my spine.

Long story not so short:

I received a message that very afternoon; I mean I closed the manuscript, got in the car to get a Slurpee, was sitting in the parking lot thinking about the protagonist of the work, me, and I received a message from the sister of the subject of my book. Be clear: I had never heard from her before in my life; I did not know she existed. Yet, she messaged me the very afternoon I had started work in earnest on a book about her brother.

She said in part, “My name is Kim and I just read online one of the stories you wrote about my older brother. I never knew him, he left with you that last time when I was five, and I am now almost fifty. I saw online you are a writer now and I am wondering if you plan to write a book about him.”

Again, that message came just hours after I decided in earnest to get back to it, my desk covered with pages and maps and journals and emails. Insert Twilight Zone music.

Kim wrote that she remembers the leather coat in a picture of him with me and a friend, Annemarie. We’re in a hallway at the college, laughing. She remembers him dropping her off at kindergarten the last week she saw him, and her teacher asked if the man in the car was someone else he happened to look like. She still has an old, worn sweatshirt of his he left behind. I asked what made her write me that day and she said their oldest brother George had recently died and it got her thinking about her other brother who was long gone, and so she found me online and messaged me.

I told her about my day up until then, and she agreed it was more than a little freaky that she chose to write me that day. Strange, but when I read her message, I didn’t picture a fifty-year-old, but instead a little girl.

The most difficult part of writing is getting started. In this case, I started more than a few times, and each complete version begins differently. Chronologically, the story starts in Virginia Beach in the mid-seventies. For narrative sake, it starts in February 1980 in my small dorm room. If I want to put a “hook” at the front, it starts a few years later seven thousand miles southeast of here in a then-peaceful, not-so-small-anymore village in what is now one of the most volatile and dangerous places on the planet. In a few versions it starts with a nightmare I had three or four times—same one—that woke me up. In one version it starts at the end and works its way backward.

None of them worked.

But when I think of that time, that experience; when I recall the “me” of back then and the life that I had, the energy and motivation and confidence I had then; when I think of the times I’ve told this story to others, my thoughts always go directly and immediately to one place: Antonio’s Italian Restaurant on Route 417 in Allegany, New York.

Last week I was in western New York, and I walked along the Allegheny River, followed a path through the woods, and remembered my life in that very spot almost forty-five years ago. I felt younger and vibrant yet somehow tired and disillusioned. The perfect combination for a work of creative non-fiction.

So that is where it starts. Time to wake this narrative back up so I can put it to bed and send Kim her own copy of a book about her brother that in the end isn’t about her brother at all. It truly should not take forty years to finish writing a book. On the other hand, some books, perhaps, should not be written at all, and that may well be the case here.

I have learned that sometimes it is best to not search too long and too deep for a resolution to the narrative, and that in real life sequels are rare. But I’m a naturally curious person, and it seems to me now that Joseph Conrad was absolutely correct: “Curious men go prying into all sorts of places where they have no business.”

Allegheny River, New York

In My Life

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

My birthday is just a few days from now. I’ve had several careers, experienced life at the extremes, and while I would do a slew of things differently, I am where I am, and the scales tip decidedly toward an incredible journey.

For my entire life, my birthday was marked by picnics and fireworks since we always celebrated a day early. When I was young, relatives and neighbors all gathered at or around our house to watch fireworks my uncle picked up in the city. I was twelve before I understood the festivities were not for me.

Through the years here at Aerie, my son and I have gone down the hill to the river where we can see clearly all the way out into the Chesapeake as well as up the Rappahannock. Some neighbors just down river set off beautiful ones from their widow’s walk, and across on the Northern Neck fireworks light up the sky from Tides Inn in Irvington, the pier at Willoughby Restaurant in White Stone, and all the way down to Windmill Point. On the south shore of the river we can see them rise from Deltaville clear on up to Grey’s Point Campground. It usually starts on the first or second, this year in particular since the Fourth is a Tuesday, though even then it will be spectacular.

But this time the show has been stolen; quite literally something else has taken the light–the moon, which is full on the third this month, sat massive and round and slightly orange from the dust of the Canadian Fires. No matter what fireworks exploded, I couldn’t stop looking at the moon, I couldn’t help but know that everyone was looking at the moon, everywhere they could see it. Our monthly display.

I’m about to turn older. I can remember sitting cross-legged on the grass, almost sixty years ago. I’m still here. Despite some years of bad decisions, wrong turns, and helpless abandon, I just watched an orange moon rise out of the east tonight and felt like a little boy, sitting cross-legged, looking at my life illuminated before me.

First and foremost, birthdays remind us in fine mathematical style that we are alive and are still part of the population which constantly expands like bottle rockets in the deep blue sky. It bends my small mind to think of this reality that I’m certain everyone knows but few contemplate: I shared this planet with every other human who ever breathed the air.

Just in my lifetime: Mother Theresa. Malcolm X. Neil Armstrong. Jimi Hendrix. Pope Paul the Sixth. Lech Walesa. St. John Paul the Second. Thomas Merton. President General Eisenhower. Elvis. Pablo Picasso. Albert Schweitzer.

Rwandan Tutsis. The Lost Boys of Sudan. Steven Biko. Pol Pot.

I shared time with these people; these saints and sinners brushed my sleeve simply by sharing the earth during my stay. We have a loose connection to miracles and massacres.

This world has some serious issues; always has. It is at best, though, a hotel, and every once in a while I take a look at the register to remind myself who else stayed here. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, Mohammed, Ivan the Terrible, Ghengas Khan, all guests just over the slope of the horizon, just beyond some small slice of linear time. On the same human trajectory as mine but before is Geronimo, Moses, Jesus, think about the gentle bend of time, the careen of place that separates me from the disciples, the Visigoths, the founding fathers. All here but just before.

Closer to now, when I look inside the lines of my coming and going, between those two rays shooting off from my birth, I can see the souls who at one time or another shared with me this spinning blue wad. Not short of miraculous, we claim the same particles of stardust, and that’s what keeps me looking around when I walk down some city street; I want to know who else is on earth with me.

I was born a month ago. I waded through foreign rivers last month. My son was born last Tuesday. Fleeting. Swift. Impatient. And my thin life falls on the same graph as Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. And Grandma Moses, who painted her last work about the time I learned to swim, was born during the Civil War. I was alive when someone was alive who was alive during the Civil War.

Carl Jung lectured during my youth, and Ty Cobb watched the same Mets players as me. When I was still cutting new teeth and outgrowing my Keds, I could have headed downtown with my Dad and possibly been on the same train as William Faulkner, ee cummings or Marilyn Monroe. I might have passed them on the street, maybe stood in line at some drug store counter with my mom and behind us because of the blending of circumstance might have been Sylvia Plath or Sam Cooke; Nat King Cole; Otis Redding. We have overlapping lives. On a Venn graph, we share the shaded space.

Judy Garland and I watched the New York Jets in Super Bowl Three. When I was born World War One vets weren’t yet senior citizens and World War Two Vets were in their thirties. Vietnam isn’t history to me; it is my childhood, my early teens. The fall of Saigon was announced over the loud speakers at my high school.

There are empty fields save monuments and markers where soldiers died defending this land against the British, against ourselves, and they stood where I stand and watched the hazy sun rise. Same sun; same beach, same blessed Commonwealth. Don’t mistake history for “back then.” Those people just happened to check out before us. It could have been us. It is us now, watching the orange moon like we do, noticing the calm river, sharing time with loved ones, thinking about others.

And it won’t be long before our lives overlap with the crying call of a newborn Einstein. Did you see that boy running at the park? That girl climbing the tree at her home? Did I just pass by some senator, some Cicero or Socrates, some St Augustine?

Like a couple today buying the same house that young lovers lived in centuries ago, like sour-dough starter. Like a relay race.

My adult son is trying to get a shot of fireworks in front of the moon, but the angle is wrong. When he was just five months old I held him with my hand over his ear, the other ear against my chest, as we watched fireworks out over the Atlantic in Virginia Beach. That was last Friday or so.

What a life. How many times do we reinvent ourselves? How often to we stop in our tracks, get out of the rush and inertia of humanity pushing from behind, and let it all go by, catch the moon over the Chesapeake? Why do we so rarely rest easy in the love of those near and of those still far away when our stay in this world in our time is brief at best. God I love getting older, knowing more people, turning the pages. I love anticipation.

I like knowing the people I know now, these brothers and sisters, whose overlapping lives linger just within my time frame; we share the same air, watch the same news and celebrate the same wins, note the same celestial bodies reminding us of our worth. In some divine book somewhere, these people and I are on the same page. My parents, my siblings, my children, my God what grace to have shared this passage from cradle to grave.