National ______ Day

 

I hope this week that everybody has dutifully eaten Chocolate Parfaits, Tuna, Truffles and abandoned their diet. Also recited some nursery rhymes, went to the gym, tipped their babysitter, appreciated their school principal, went to the museum and read the collected works of Doonesbury. According to the calendar of Special Days, the above and more was worthy of your attention: 

 

• May 1: International Labor Day (also known as May Day), Loyalty Day, Law Day, National Chocolate Parfait Day, National Mother Goose Day, and School Principals' Day. 
• May 2:  National Brothers and Sisters Day, World Tuna Day, Baby Day and National Truffle Day
• May 3: World Press Freedom Day, World Asthma Day, Sun Day
• May 4: International Firefighter's Day, Intergalactic Star Wars Day, and National Weather Observers Day. 
• May 5: Cinco de Mayo, Museum Lovers Day, Cartoonist Day
• May 6: International No Diet Day, International Space Day. National Teachers Day
• May 7: National Babysitters Day, National Fitness Day, and Astronomy Day. 

 

Yesterday was Teacher’s Day. This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Oh, how we love to give something a day, increase Hallmark’s revenue, mention something in passing and never think about it again while we continue to organize our society around thoroughly disrespecting teachers and do nothing to support the extraordinary demands of motherhood. The hypocrisy is stunning.

 

But it is possible that soon we’ll grow nostalgic for at least pretending that we cared about such things. Now there seems to be something new under the sun. Simply posting a sign about welcoming all students can get a teacher fired, kindness is now spoken out loud as a weakness, empathy is deemed (actual Republican quotes) as "toxic and sinful" and an "existential threat to Western civilization." 

 

It's possible that a new calendar in the near future might be as follows:

·      National Elect a Fascist Day

·      National Deport Innocent People Day

·      National Get Away with Bribery, Sexual Assault and Treason Day

·      National Celebration of Ignorance Day

·      National Bullying Day

·      National Mass Shooting Day

·      National Opioid Addiction So Drug Companies Get Rich Day

·      National Homophobia Day

·      National Preserve the Patriarchy Day

·      National Storm the Capitol and Get a Pardon Day

·      National Lying Day

·      National Denial of Climate Change Day

 

We may soon look back in nostalgia at National Chocolate Parfait Day. Oh, wasn’t that a time!

  

Back to Earth

Where does one look to for solace, for insight, for some sense of meaning in times that defy common sense? For me, music, poetry, teaching, walks in the park—and mythology. Discovering Joseph Campbell in the late 1980’s was a turning point in my intellectual life, intellectual insight married to soul. I still turn to some myths from all times and all cultures that astoundingly, speak to today’s news, carrying truths far beyond any particular time and place. 

 

With some friends at dinner last night, one was talking about a recent article about our rapidly careening out of control technologies. Titled An Age of Extinction Is Coming by Rous Douthat, it gives us dire warning about how the technologies we’ve given our souls to in some Faustian bargain are slowly eliminating everything that is truly valuable in this life. Friendship, romance, family life, art, literature, culture and more. Well, yes, I’ve been saying the same for a long time and it has only gotten worse. But still in my world, I see kids still delighting in making elemental music with their own body and voice, navigating through instruments made from wood, metal, skin and string both playing elemental music and creating their own. I see them still capable of working well with other kids, asking good questions, following their curiosity to answers that lead them to the next question. And the adults I teach in workshops also. Of course, I also see the toxins in the electronic air we breathe affecting us all in concerning ways. But like the call to American citizens to grow their Souls larger in the face of diminishing freedoms, so does the call to humans everywhere ask us to step up and claim what is truly valuable in the face of its erosion and possible disappearance.

So the myth that rose up for me was the old Greek one of a wrestling match. 

Antaeus is the child of Gaia, the Goddess of the Earth. He wrestles with Hercules and every time he is thrown to the ground, he rises up stronger. That contact with his mother the earth, with the very ground of his being, is what gives him strength and courage. But Hercules figures out what’s happening and lifts up Antaeus, spinning him around in the air and ultimately crushing him in a bear hug. 

 

Well, there it is. When we exchange our three-dimensional physical contact with Mother Earth for the virtual cyberspace that has us in its bear hug, we grow weaker. All the tastes and textures and smells and touches of our world are narrowed and reduced to the two-dimensional screens. To slip towards another myth, they are the bewitching Sirens calling us to our doom and we’re forgetting to tie ourselves and the children to the mast. 

 

So whether it be music, dance, poetry, art, literature, deep friendship, beautiful romance and of course, time out in the world in company with birds and bugs and flowers and trees, we all would do well to remember that ground of our being and spread out the picnic blanket. Often. Screens are designed for addiction, tapping into our ancient survival brain that reacts to loud noises, bright lights, excessive movement and those damn IT developers who know exactly what they’re doing sleep in their fancy houses oblivious to the way they’re sucking the soul out of our lives. The only antidote is when we train ourselves to appreciate the slow, the sublime, the splendid simplicity of that things that feed our genuine deep hungers and thirsts. 

 

So beware of Hercules and the Sirens and let’s refuse the mass lemming drive over the cliffs to our demise. Consciously walk the path down to the beach instead. Without our phones. 

Intoxicated Woodpeckers

“Confucius supposedly said that the rectification of society starts with the rectification of its language. This suggests that a careful use of words comes before new laws, new programs, and new leaders. Laws and programs begin in words, and if the words of our leaders are entangled in garbled speech, intoned as nasal whining, bereft of inspiration and wit, and flatter than the commercials that surround them, then we can’t expect the society to prosper.”

-       James Hillman; The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart

 

 Amidst all the horrors of our current time, the debasement of language gets scant attention. Lunatic ravings on Twitter that would draw the disapproval of any elementary school English teacher now are par for the course for the leaders in the land. While people are struggling for their very livelihoods and in some cases, lives, worrying about poor speech seems rightfully low on the list of proper fuel for our anxiety. But it is a significant part of the whole catastrophe. In contemporary vernacular,” it, like, really sucks!”

 

I had the supreme pleasure yesterday of watching my nephew Damion’s superb performance in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. 

Besides the fine performances from all the casts and the engaging comedy-of-errors story, it was so refreshing to hear the “inspiration and wit” so typical of times gone by and so sorely lacking in our “awesome” contemporary culture. 

 

This on my mind having looked through an intriguing book on my shelves titled The Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers Since Beethoven’s Time by Nicolas Slonimsky. It is a collection of reviews by both critics and fellow composers of new works by composers who became famous. On one hand, it reveals the critics’ inability to accept and understand new developments in musical language as they lambast works that went on to become classics in the repertoire. It likewise exposes their abusive mean streaks as they thoroughly deride in no uncertain terms the composers’ sincere attempts at sublime musical expression. 

 

But, oh, the eloquence and wit with which they do it! Sheer poetry! Far beyond the reach of their contemporary counterparts. At the same time that one might laugh at how wrong they were and criticize them for being so mean-spirited, one can’t help but admire their genius in describing the musical sounds they found intolerable. Here is a short list of how they described pieces by giants like Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Mahler, Gershwin and more:

 

 “Absolute bewilderment, acoustical shock, agonized bravura on a pocket handkerchief, agony, alcoholic stimulus of a big baboon, babblings of a deranged man, ballyhoo vulgarity, bassstubathetic, bestial outcries, bloodcurdling nightmare, caterwauling catastrophe in a boiler factory, communist traveling salesman, creaking of rusty hinges, crime against music, curiosity shop of tangled harmonies, demented eunuch, demons struggling in a torrent of brandy, etiolated and emasculated shreds of sound, fierce whiskers stained with vodka, filthy pencils writing on lavatory walls, frog-legs thrown into violent convulsions, gallery of harmonized abortions, hideously writhing dragons, hurricane of wrong notes, inebriated persimmons, intoxicated woodpeckers, masochistic aural flagellation, mass snoring of a naval dormitory, mournful banqueting on jam and honey, outrageous agglomeration of unresolved discords, pandemonium of cross-eyed devils, puffs and snippets of melody, putrefactive counterpoint, raging satanic fury, regurgitation of a water closet, scotch terrier worrying poultry scratching of a glass plate with a sharp knife, self-torture of a flagellant, sticky frog-like sexuality, stuttering tonal delirium, tortured mistuned cackling, ungreased wheelbarrow, wheezy hurdy gurdy…”

And that’s not even the half of it!”

 

So if you feel the need to put other people and their work down, the least you can do is be inventive and expressive. And if you need a cheat sheet, there is one about Shakespearean insults where you choose one adjective from column one, another two-word-hyphenated adjective from column two and a noun from column three, with some 50 words in each column and all their possible combinations. Next time somebody irritates you, feel free to call them a beslubbering beef-witted boar-pig or a craven clapper-clawed clack-dish or a saucy swag-bellied strumpet.

 

Hopefully while listening to the intoxicated woodpeckers in Edgar Varese’s composition Integrales. 

Refuse Refuse

I like to think of myself as an active, doing, person and as a teacher, I have to be. But as these Blogposts testify, I also enjoy roaming the landscape of the mind and thinking about (and then writing about) things. When it comes to action for social justice, I feel that the things I write about it are an action of sorts, posing questions and giving information that helps others consider points of view that help build a narrative that can deeply influence action. 

 

My wife, by contrast, is a doer. Her response to the political climate has been to write postcards with a group, work at a foodbank and recently, join a garbage clean-up group called Refuse Refuse. (That’s a verb followed by a noun.). Now she organizes clean-ups once every six weeks or so. I’ve gone to most of them and can report that they’re very satisfying and a good antidote to sitting around in weepy despair. Just get out and do something, even if it be as simple as picking up garbage.

 

Besides the social benefits of meeting your neighbors in a 4 or 5 block radius, I find it super-fun to pick things up with these grabbers. (See the person 6 people in from the left with her grabber.) Amazing how they are so fine-tuned as to easily pick up a tiny cigarette butt. And so I wandered my neighborhood streets, eyes peeled for every scrap of paper or plastic, grabbed it with the grabber and dropped it in the bag. Sometimes we’d pass people who thanked us for our work and that was nice, though unnecessary. No one was doing this looking for credit and praise. It just feels like an easy and satisfying way to be of use, with the benefit that the next day, the streets we walk will be more pleasant to walk through. 

 

So if you’re feeling hopeless and paralyzed with despair, get a group together, put on an orange vest, grab your grabber and go out to make the world a more beautiful place, one cigarette butt at a time. 

Teacher's Oath

Back in November, I was absolutely convinced that we were finally ready to break that damn glass ceiling and elect a black/ Indian woman with a beloved teacher running mate. How sweet that would have been. How different these last few months would have been and the next four years. 

 

The quote that keeps coming up for me is "Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know." I thought we had finally learned it. That kindness is better than cruelty. Simple living better than excessive greed. Knowledge better than ignorance. Justice better than tyranny. Truth better than lies told without shame and believed without thought. Accountability better than privileged immunity. Things like that. 

 

I was wrong. 

 

And so, like so many, overwhelmed by the shock of it all, trampled by the constant assault on every single front—education, immigration, economy, human rights, civil liberties, constitutional rights, outraged at 80 million of my fellow citizens and furious with 90 million more who didn’t vote. My strategy was to carefully monitor my news intake, accentuate the positive in my active teaching life, soothe and comfort myself and others through music, escape through an all-engaging TV series (This Is Us). And recently, go to a rally just about every week.

 

But now I feel something new on the horizon. A slowly growing surge of those genuinely resisting the onslaught and doing it together. The brave individuals and institutions who are choosing not to cave in and ignore, from Costco to Harvard to the thousands of lawyers in cities throughout the country retaking their oaths to uphold the Constitution. The despots trying to take the country down are depending on our silent complicity, their ability to sow fear and strike terror into our hearts to ensure our compliance, our inability to stay focused on what matters as we distract ourselves with mindless entertainment. 

 

But it looks like we’re not going down without a fight. As citizens in a country that began as organized resistance to tyranny, that amidst all its flaws, mostly guaranteed free speech and encouraged lively debate in schools and public discourse, we have a long history behind us that just maybe we’re not willing to give up. The image of the lawyers retaking vows is so powerful. It’s the moment to ride that wave and have every profession do the same. Doctors have their oath—“First do no harm,” teachers have their Mission Statements to promote critical thinking, foster a safe and inclusive environment, the Unions have their old slogan “Don’t mourn— organize.” 

 

I wish I had the skills and outreach to organize teachers. How I would love to see a national outpouring of teachers throughout the country, cities and towns alike, all on the same day, take an oath to re-affirm their determination to teach American students American history, re-instate lively debate, nurture comfort with uncomfortable truths and cultivate genuine critical thinking. 

 

Anyone out there know how to do that? Another Union slogan—“In unity there is strength” —and the tyrants are depending on us to sit quietly afraid for our jobs. We need to all stand up together or they will win. If we don’t, the children we have vowed to nurture and protect simply by becoming teachers will be the losers. Anyone with me here?

 

Surfing the Tidal Wave of Change

For reasons I’ve stopped questioning and just trust, woke up this morning curious about what I wrote on this day ten years ago. Here’s what I found. Note that this was before the Toddler King rose to power. It was a follow-up to a post I had just written about an Iranian officials claiming that promiscuous women caused a recent earthquake, a Nepalese official suggesting that “beef-eating” caused it, a Texas GOP lawmaker claiming that gay people caused riots in Baltimore and the death of a million unborn children. 

 

What is going on here? Why the rise in Fundamentalism? Why the ten steps back just as we were beginning to move forward? Why are so many making such outrageous claims and blaming earthquakes, riots and baby genocide on “promiscuous beef-eating gay women?”

 

Here’s a formula. Rapid change= high anxiety. The one sure thing you can say about the “interesting” times we live in is that things are changing more rapidly than we can assimilate. Heck, I can’t even count on my Niji pen still being manufactured and when offered the new choices at the stationary store yesterday, one was too fat, one too thin, one too tall. It made me anxious. 

 

Anxiety is related to stress is related to a constant low-grade fear. In a world that is unstable, unpredictable, unreliable, anxiety rises, sometimes all the way to fear. Fear of the other, fear of the unknown, fear of the next change just as we were getting used to the last one. 

 

Fear is the lowest form of the brain functioning, the emotion that sends us into the basement of our mind where all we can do is flee, fight or freeze. The access roads to the higher realm of neo-cortical thinking are blocked in such a state. That would help account for the outrageous non-thinking highlighted in my last blog. When we can’t think clearly, we reduce the conversation to blame. And always someone or something else. 

 

Fundamentalism is the home of the non-thinker. The fundamentalist of any religion or philosophy gives up the birthright of the human brain in exchange for an easy (but false) security. And all of this is perfectly understandable given today’s world. When change sweeps us away like a Class IV rapid, we reach out to cling to the nearest rock. Enter religion, dogmatic politics, gang membership (both the street kind and the good-ole- boys clubs). We’re desperate to hold on to something that is sure, dependable, un-demanding. Something that only asks us to believe, not to think. Something that is simplistic and black and white, no bothersome nuance or shades of color. Something that promises protection from the “them” through compliance and complicity in the club of “us,” something that reduces complexity to “good (us)” and “bad (them).”

 

So while such regression is understandable in the light of the way the brain and psyche function, it is counter-productive to what the situation demands. Instead of clinging to the rocks, we need to release to the flow, surf on the tidal waves of change, tap dance on the shaky foundation, improvise like the jazz musician responding to the moment. While the fear and anxiety and stress are real and not to be lightly dismissed, we can turn their energy toward the higher realms of thinking and feeling, transform them through the active imagination and the probing intellect and the compassionate heart. We need to unthaw the rigid mind and exercise our flexible thinking, unlock the fortressed heart and let love begin to breathe again, unbutton the imprisoned body and get dancing. Let’s use all the colors in the crayon box, let the volume move with nuance between soft and loud, let language regain a range larger than “awesome!” and “cool!” 

 

We won’t get much time on the soapbox—headlines don’t do subtlety and ambiguity—but we can stem the tide of ignorance with informed knowledge, move beyond mindless blame to recognizing our own demons, offset sheer stupidity with breathtaking imagination. We can ride out the tsunami of rapid change, find a few eddies and quiet pools off to the side and keep hope alive through the time-honored practices of exalted thought and feeling. No blame, no shame, light the flame, claim your name, play the game. You get the idea.

 

PS I found my old Niji pens online. 

 

PSS Ten years later, Niji pens are nowhere to be found.

  

Crossing the Finish Line

It was an auspicious first day of May, with a brief bout of tears. The happy kind. (Still waiting for the Niagara Falls of Grief that I’ve been holding back since November). 

 

The occasion? Getting to witness my 13-year old granddaughter Zadie win her 200-meter race! There is something stirring about watching people push themselves to the limit to defy some horizontal gravity. Yes, there is a competition with other runners, but for me, the greater focus is each person alone heading down the track with everything they've got. 

When Zadie was 2 or 3 years old, she was walking outside with her Dad and started to run away. Terrified that she might run into the street, he took off after her— and was barely able to catch her! She has been a speed demon her whole childhood, running, running, toward some unknown horizon. And now all of that has found a place and a form on her track and field team. Watching her cross that finish line got the tear ducts flowing and when I went to hug her congratulations, I pointed them out to her. I was a Proud Pop-Pop! And then again, when she ran the last leg of her relay team and once again, crossed the finish line first. 

 

All of this was a surprise punctuation mark to a wonderful four days with Zadie and Malik while Mom was off at a Conference in Cleveland. We only heard of this track meet yesterday and were so thrilled to get the chance to witness it. As for the rest of the time, it was some of the usual go-to activities—Rummy 500, basketball out in front of their house with their new set-up, watching the Warrior basketball highlights together (Game 4, not Game 5!), going out for ice cream (Salt and Straw!). The kids were at school every day, so no big hikes or events out on the town. But Karen and I did get to do an Art Project and a Singing Time with Malik’s class at school, with his teacher who is one of our former students! Weather has been pleasant and today spiked up to 80. Portland is in full bloom with dogwood and wisteria and cherries. We loved walking Malik to and from school each day, in company with a herd of other parents either walking or biking together. Also a grand pleasure to meet up as I always do with two wonderful college friends and discuss grandparenting, music, poetry memorization and our astonishment at the state of the world.

 

My daughter is now home again, we leave tomorrow and have 9 days to prepare for the next adventure of biking in France. And so it goes on…