Of Tall Pines and Virginia Creepers

Posted on October 5, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels.

Dylan Thomas, Poem In October

In the center of the turnaround in front of our home is a hillock surmounted by a very tall deciduous pine with lacy needles, which is home to our resident Virginia Creeper. The vine has ascended high into the tree, and tree and vine appear to be living in symbiotic harmony. By early October, the vine becomes a dark maroon leafy boa interwoven among the mid-green needles of the tree, its ends drooping near to the ground as they seek to return to the earth from which the vine originated. Seen from our kitchen window, it is as if we are blessed by a living Christmas tree decorated solely and miraculously by nature alone.

For most of the year, our Virginia Creeper is pleasingly evident but not showy. Its main stem is largely invisible within the body of the tree, while its nascent tendrils stream vigorously in the violent storms of Spring and their mature versions wave lazily and nonchalantly to the tune of the zephyrs of Summer. During the long months from April to early September, I sometimes wish the vine was a bit shorter, but never enough to complain aloud to my wife for it is no more than a pleasant distraction at worst, and, at best, a reminder of life’s constant urgency to extend itself, even in seemingly absurd niches. In the words of songwriter Marc Cohn:

Without Elvis
Without Jesus
Life goes on
Without anything it pleases
Life goes on*

But, come late September, our resident Virginia Creeper suddenly turns a deep maroon seemingly overnight and, in so doing, changes from an integral symbiotic component of tree and vine into a vibrant, stand-out tree trimming, its main body materializing from its previous invisibility among the combined greenery. It is only now that the true extent of the Virginia Creeper becomes clear to the untrained botanist’s eye as the red/green mix of needle and leaf becomes fully exposed. For most of the year, host and visitor are separately magnificent, but during these few short October weeks, they merge into a singular, standalone, patchwork being: no longer a symbiosis, but a single living harbinger of Fall’s beauty and instigator of memory.

The Virginia Creeper is almost exhausted this morning, many of its leaves fallen to the tarmac and mixed, in death, with the many needles already shed by the pine. But the vine clings on to the tree and to life, its very weariness nothing more than another expression of life’s constant struggle. The vibrancy of its peak colors are now diminished to the shriveled grace of a season well lived as it prepares itself for hibernation during the coming Winter. The pine continues to stand tall, now more spare for want of many needles, but yet green in the manner that only a pine can be, deciduous or not, throughout the coldest months of the year.

This annual transformation always reminds me of the many other Autumns stretching back to those of my childhood. While walking by a pile of early-shed leaves a couple of weeks ago on my way to lunch in the city, I received this year’s initial enjoyment of leaf mold. The evocative smell was elusive and tantalizing then, but with the reddening of our Virginia Creeper I know it will become prevalent in days to come.

And, as in each previous year of my orphaned adulthood, when I walk our property enveloped by leaf smell, I will be mentally jumping into the self-same leaf piles my parents watched me jump into during those long-ago family walks down tree-lined, small-town, eastern Washington streets – even while they are now at rest and I am too stiff to do so in reality, and even while my grandchildren are doing so in company with my children down tree-lined streets elsewhere in time and place.

* Marc Cohn, Life Goes On, Join The Parade

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Messing Around Unconsionably in a Sordid World

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

Truth shifts and changes like a cataract of diamonds; its aspect is never precisely the same at two successive instants. But error flows down the channel of history like some great stream of lava or infinitely lethargic glacier. It is the one relatively fixed thing in a world of chaos. It is, perhaps, the one thing that gives human society the stability needed to save it from the wreck that ever menaces. Without their dreams men would have fallen upon and devoured one another long ago—and yet every dream is an illusion, and every illusion a falsehood.

H. L. Mencken, The True Immortal, Smart Set, October, 1919

Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

Edward R. Murrow

The recent events surrounding Pastor Terry Jones of Gainesville, Florida once again raise the question of what constitutes a responsible Press. It would appear that the entire controversy surrounding Mr. Jones’ declaration of retaliatory Koran burning was manufactured by an un-holy alliance of Mr. Jones himself and an irresponsible Press that should have known better than to have paid attention to Mr. Jones. While I could care less about Mr. Jones and his beliefs, I care very much about the standards used by the Press in reporting “news,” especially in this time that we call the Information Age.

The post-Jones Saga commentary has focused more about how a head of steam built up around the event, rather than upon whether the Press should have reported about it in the first place. To my knowledge, there has not been a public discussion among the Press about the standards and ethics of reportage as applied to the Jones Saga. For that matter, to my knowledge there is little, if any, discussion among the saner members of the Press over whether there should even be shared standards and ethics of reportage. While such discussions may well be taking place within the ivy covered halls of journalism schools in our major universities, there is distressingly little evidence that these discussions have translated into anything more tangible than class credits for those partaking of the courses where the issues were debated.

While Mr. Jones clearly has responsibility for manipulating the Press for the purposes of enhancing his own notoriety, the question, plainly put, is why did the Press fall for the ravings of a single man who is either a lunatic, a headline grabber for purposes of self-aggrandizement, or both?

Mr. Jones is the pastor of a church of approximately 50 people in Gainesville, Florida, which, in turn, is a city of less than 125,000. Mr. Jones recently became the center of the world media’s attention when he threatened to burn copies of the Koran on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks as a protest against what he sees as Islamic terrorism. Somehow, this insignificant man of less than stellar intelligence, operating from a base not usually thought of as the Paris, London or Rome of Florida, became, for one brief, morbid moment, the center of an international clash of religions and cultures that featured Presidents, a Secretary of Defense, Generals and general outrage. He could not have done it without the Press, for if he had acted without the benefit of a spotlight, his yard signs would have been nothing more than a local joke rather than a municipal embarrassment, and the actual Koran burning (had he even bothered to undertake it in the absence of publicity’s glare) would have been nothing more than an unfortunate footnote in the “Local News” section of the local Gainesville newspaper.

The first question that members of the Press should be asking themselves is why did they fall for the line this charlatan was offering and turn it into a news story in the first place? The second question they should ask themselves is why, after falling for it in a small way, did they subsequently allow it to escalate into an international crisis?

One could also ask why many of our politicians fell for Mr. Jones’ offering once the Press decided to give it legs, but I will let someone else deal with that issue. Suffice it to say that there are times when I truly wish for a national politician with the plain speaking ability of Harry S. Truman. Harry, were he still with us as President, would surely have reduced the Jones Saga to a non-event by saying something publicly to the effect of why was anyone listening to this nut in the first place. Present day politicians lack the courage to engage in plain speaking. For them, vote counting is far more important than telling it like it is.

Instead of asking itself the questions posited above, The New York Times, in a recent front page article, decided to focus instead upon a reasonably detailed recitation of the series of events that led to the September, 2010 weekend when Pastor Jones, in a state of highly inflamed self-importance, flew off to the Times’ hometown with full expectations of being interviewed and lionized by the self-same press corps that he had so shamelessly manipulated into having to interview him in this last sorry segment of a Saga that should never have been. Despite the evocative title of its article (“Coverage of Koran Case Stirs Questions on Media Role” – to be found here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/us/10media.html?_r=1&scp=9&sq=Terry%20Jones&st=cse)

the article discussed only the chronology of the media’s role and failed utterly to explore the ethics of the media’s involvement.

Well, in fairness, perhaps “utterly” is too strong an adverb. The very last paragraph of the article did, in fact, read in its entirety as follows:

The episode has given rise to at least a little soul-searching within news organizations. Chris Cuomo, an ABC News anchor, wrote Thursday afternoon on Twitter, “I am in the media, but think media gave life to this Florida burning … and that was reckless.”

Sadly, insofar as I am aware, it seems as if something as insubstantial as a Twitter quotation is as close as the Times – or any other major newspaper or journalistic organization in this country – has, as yet, come to a self-examination of their role in this sorry mess. From afar, I can hear the sounds of significant amounts of spinning going on in the cemeteries where Mr. Mencken’s and Mr. Murrow’s graves are located.

The article did contain a brief discussion of the announced refusals of several news organizations, in advance of the threatened burning, to broadcast pictures of burning volumes of the Koran. This paltry discussion began by noting that the Associated Press had declined to distribute such pictures, giving as its reason its “policy not to cover events that are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend.” Why shouldn’t this policy apply equally to written reportage of the Jones Saga just as it should to the pictures of burning holy books? Who knows, since the article never thought to raise that issue. The Times’ own editorial staff could only manage the following:

“A picture of a burning book contributes nothing substantial to a story about book-burning, so the offense seems entirely gratuitous,” Mr. Keller continued. “The freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish.”

I have to point out to both the A.P. and to Mr. Keller that there are the seeds of a viable journalistic standard and ethic here, and it is high time that journalists got together and figured one out. If the freedom to publish includes the freedom not to publish, if a responsible journalistic organization should refuse to report upon events which are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend”, and if, as is true in the age of the Internet, news flashes around the world faster than Superman’s speeding bullet, then why can’t the Press arrive at a shared set of standards and sense of ethics about what is appropriate to print and what isn’t? When the broadcast of “news” of this kind can result in harm and even death to innocent people around the world who are simply going about their daily business, shouldn’t the Press consider its obligations to exercise its powers responsibly?

For those in the Press or elsewhere who will immediately conclude that I am trying to suppress reporting and deny free speech, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe strongly in free speech. I believe equally strongly that Terry Jones has a right to spew his hatred should he wish, just as much as I believe it is the right of various organizations who believe in a wide variety of disgusting ideas to march in public. In my experience, these kinds of actions usually secure the type of attention they deserve – a local mild reaction of dismay that such things can happen “here,” and a nearly universal dismissal of the disgusting ideas by means of a collective head shake of disbelief that anyone could be so stupid as to believe such things in the first place. Only by bottling up these actions can you give them a mystique and an accompanying credibility.

In fact, should the Press simply defend its role in the Jones Saga as an exercise of freedom of the press, they will be doing nothing more than engaging in the use of shibboleth as red herring. No one engaged in a serious intellectual discussion about the role of the Press in the Jones Saga is going to argue for curbing freedom of the press. While I understand that there are those in positions of power of the caliber of Mr. Ahmadinejad who might well argue for curbing the power of the press in general, note that I said that no one engaged in serious intellectual discussion would raise the issue. Mr. Ahmadinejad lacks intellectual capability and certainly can only be taken seriously because he has somehow managed to usurp a position of authority in a country of importance. While I could have well understood Mr. Ahmadinejad having a private tete-a-tete with Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones’ ensorcellment of the Press is simply incomprehensible.

Trumpeting that freedom of the press is an essential freedom that cannot be denied when faced with a call for journalistic standards and ethics would be nothing more than an excuse for a collective unwillingness of the Press to examine its own soul. The failure of the Press to find an ethical center – or to even begin the debate over what such an ethical center might look like – is astonishing in an age where “information” flashes and rattles around the globe in nanoseconds and is likely to be instantaneously elevated to the status of “Truth” by a credulous populace. And, if my belief that the Press is mostly composed of people predisposed to be gossip mongers holds any merit (see my prior posts on this topic), the more sane members of the Fourth Estate have an obligation to the rest of humanity to develop such an ethical core and an agreed-upon set of reporting standards and to set an example for the many members of their profession who feel that gossip is news. The Press is an inverted profession in the sense that while most professions suffer mightily from the actions of a few rotten apples who prove an embarrassment, the Press suffers from the actions of a super-majority of its members, since only a minority of its membership seems to have any real sense of the obligation that accompanies the unbridled power to publish that most civilized nations accord it.

The Jones Saga can still be put to good use, notwithstanding the sordidness of its occurrence. If the Press can simply acknowledge to itself that it has the power to seriously inflame international tension in the Information Age by publishing stories which are “gratuitously manufactured to provoke and offend”, then it ought to be able to come up with standards and an ethical code that will allow it to responsibly discern when events are newsworthy and when they are a mere attempt to manipulate attention. Not every challenge need be accepted; not every crackpot’s pronouncements are worthy of being force-fed to the public.

Personally, I would have preferred never to have made the acquaintance of Mr. Terry Jones. While I defend his right to speak in Gainesville, I equally defend my right not to listen to his ravings here in Humptulips County – or anywhere else, for that matter. I find his ideas offensive, his rhetoric wooden, his thought processing ability questionable and his mutton-chop mustache deplorable. If the Press is going to develop an ethics code which will allow for the featuring of nutcases on international news streams, at the very minimum please be certain to give us, your loyal reading and viewing public, nutcases with at least some sense of style.

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Vacationing at Home

Posted on August 28, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

I took this week off for a variety of reasons: the Summer is ending and I wanted to catch what’s left; many of my clients take the month off; and the Humptulips County Fair begins this week. For my wife and I, attending the county fair is akin to a religious experience. There will be many farm animals, harvest displays, quilts, homemade foods and flower arrangements, extraordinary appliances and gadgets to admire, and a great deal of bad food to eat willingly and eagerly. There is nothing like a visit to a county fair to celebrate the end of Summer, but we may not make it this year simply because we have found too many other things to do during my week off.

We had no plans to go anywhere specific. Since I work in the city, a week at home can be a true vacation. I can catch up on odd jobs, take day trips, run errands or simply watch the world go by in a place where I ordinarily spend too little time. I live quite a distance from my place of work and, between the commute and the brevity of the daylight hours, I see far too little of the land where my home is located. My home and my place of work are simply worlds apart.

Today it is raining quite steadily at our house – that sort of doggedly determined rain that soaks everything thoroughly while not beating down the plants. The rainfall is soft but relentless, leaving puddles on the tarmac in our driveway that become reflected worlds for me to admire from our kitchen window. The plants seem to be enjoying a good bath and their leaves and needles are glisteningly free of Summer’s accumulated dust. While the grass in our fields is still brown and sere, if the rain lasts more than a day or two, it will shortly become green again. The grass has simply been lying in wait since mid-July for this and future rains.

On Wednesday, we drove into a steaming early morning on our way to Leavenworth, a small town in Eastern Washington just beyond Stevens Pass. Our drive took us up the Snohomish River valley and the fog over the river guided our way. Seen from the ground, the fog is splotchy and intermittent but always hovers near the river’s course. I suspect that from the air the fog would appear inextricably connected to the river. I would love to fly over the valley early some morning to see if my suspicion is true and whether I could detect any patterns to the fog’s sideways creep.

We go to Leavenworth once a year to look around and repeat our often voiced complaint that there are too many trinket shops and too few true artisans, but mostly to enjoy the drive over the Cascade Mountains. Even dry and wary of a spark from any source, the mountains’ forests have a life of their own – foreign enough to make a simple drive seem like a visit to a country abroad. The wind in, and the smell of, the pines combined with bird song and dappled light forcefully remind me of childhood Summers spent in the Blue Mountains of Southeastern Washington. For me, all forests project a sense of wild sanctuary that asserts itself each time I visit, for they are as much places of the human soul as they are a living ecosystem foreign to humanity’s modern ways. I have a strong suspicion that we were once residents of these forests and that, as we continue to build indiscriminately, we are decimating our original home. At least for me, in this time, the forest is still close by and accessible. I can only hope that it remains that way for my grandchildren.

I have spent a good deal of time reading, not in an attempt to lessen the height of my ever growing to-read pile, but for the simple pleasure of the rhythm of well-written passages. A portion of our day trips always includes a visit to a well-loved book store, so the to-read pile’s growth continuously manages to out pace its diminishment through reading. Books are a constant solace to me, and a well-written book draws me into worlds I can never know first hand – worlds closed by time or simply non-existent except in the mind of their creator. I seem to travel a lot from my home, all while never leaving the confines of our beautiful library. This week I have variously been to 12th and 19th Century England, modern Norway and Los Angeles, and am currently resident in Caroline Graham’s fictional Midsomer County. Who knows where I will next go, as not even I yet know which book I will next choose when it is time to do so.

This week, I have found myself struggling with the question of retirement – it’s timing and the manner of its enjoyment. Much of my imaginings about retirement center around my home and how I may enjoy it more often than I currently do with the reduced capacity that comes with age. Weeks like this past one only make me think that retirement should come sooner than later. The land of which I am privileged to hold the current stewardship will remain the same while my ability to husband it carefully will only diminish with time’s passage. Perhaps the time for me to give the land more of my attention is nearer than I would have imagined at the beginning of my home-bound vacation.

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The Changing of the Light

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

“Daylight… in my mind, the night faded. It was daytime and the neighbourhood was busy. Miss Stephanie Crawford crossed the street to tell the latest to Miss Rachel. Miss Maudie bent over her azaleas. It was summertime, and two children scampered down the sidewalk towards a man approaching in the distance. The man waved, and the children raced each other to him.

It was still summertime, and the children came closer. A boy trudged down the sidewalk dragging a fishing-pole behind him. A man stood waiting with his hands on his hips. Summertime, and his children played in the front yard with their friend, enacting a strange little drama of their own invention.

It was fall, and his children fought on the sidewalk in front of Mrs Dubose’s. The boy helped his sister to her feet, and they made their way home. Fall, and his children trotted to and fro around the corner, the day’s woes and triumphs on their faces. They stopped at an oak tree, delighted, puzzled, apprehensive.

Winter, and his children shivered at the front gate, silhouetted against a blazing house. Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog.

Summer, and he watched his children’s heart break. Autumn again, and Boo’s children needed him.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

The Summer – to the extent we have enjoyed one in Humptulips County this year – has begun to languish and drift. Summer never seems to just die overnight or to surrender itself suddenly in a stormy fit; instead, it just seems to decompose slowly into softer light and a smokey haze.

Summer’s disintegration begins with a subtle shifting of the angle of the sunlight, an agonizing shift generally felt subliminally prior to its visual manifestation. At some undefinable moment in this adjustment, we come to realize that we no longer see the sun as the high, harsh, furnace-like orb of mid-July but, rather, as the slightly overripe, softened, often blowsy melon of late August. The gradual softening of the sunlight that continues from late August to early October will eventually expose the first tendrils of a not so distant Autumn; tendrils which will eventually multiply and combine into the haze that marks the final transition zone between Summer and Autumn.

Summer’s disintegration is but a single scene in the annual drama of the seasons, a scene which, like all of the others that annually combine to form that self-same drama, bears repeating because it never bores or seems trite. The thought of four distinct seasons is, frankly, a woefully incomplete description of a year. There must be a scene change between each of the four seasons for the drama to play out, and each scene changing period has a life and a story of its own. While Spring-To-Be is forward looking in its trumpeting of the impending birth of Spring on the heels of Winter’s demise, Summer-Soon-Gone is both intensely present tense in its singular enjoyment of the fruits of a too lush world and nervously anticipatory in its faint foreshadowing of Autumn’s nostalgia. And thus it is that there is no clear boundary between any of the seasons, such that a Master Stage Hand might close a close a curtain on one only to open it anew on another moments later. Instead, we inhabit a Möbius strip, an infinitely circular dance of light and darkness, wherein one is always in the ascendancy and the other always in decline, with their relative proportions always changing incrementally, but meaningfully, without finite or abrupt changes of scene.

About now I would usually call my friend Tom, the water color artist, and tell him that the light is, indeed, changing. We usually celebrate Summer-Soon-Gone’s changing of the light by phone call, even if it seems that a glass of champagne might rather be in order. It has become our custom to notice and acknowledge this event to one another; me, because the change slowly comes to my notice as I navigate franticly through a world of business, and Tom, because it is his profession to notice light and to render its effects for the edification of others. But this year, maybe I will just post this little piece to see if Tom is paying attention.

Or, maybe he will call me before I break down and call him.

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Pray There is Intelligent Life

Posted on August 2, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

I have come to believe that much of the thinking that humanity considers “intelligent thought” is really nothing more than a convenient rationalization for why we, as a species, compulsively do things we are neurologically hard-wired to do and is, therefore, not a form of thought that is intelligent. Put another, more ominous way, except for a select few trained in scientific methodology, we prefer to explain away many of our more questionable interactions with our environment and each other using strained logic, rather than closely examining why it might be that we consistently engage in certain kinds of behavior that continuously yields poor results. This tendency allows us to continuously legitimize and repeat destructive behavior that causes harm on a large scale, rather than undertaking the necessary self-examination to learn why it is that we repeatedly behave in such a manner so that we might avoid causing such harm.

This failure seems to explain why we generally ignore the lessons that our own history would otherwise teach us – lessons that repeat themselves with exceptional frequency, but from which we never seem to acquire any lasting wisdom.

What do I mean by this? By way of illustration, take the subject of racial discrimination. From the vantage point of 2010, our conventional, societal wisdom is that we have taken great strides in dealing with the evils of racial discrimination and that we currently are a much more tolerant society than formerly. In this regard, Americans point to specific pieces of legislation (the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Americans with Disabilities Act), Europeans point to the European Convention on Civil Rights, and many, if not most, governments point to some form of a “Bill of Rights” as an integral part of their basic constitutional authority. All of these laws start from the presumption that each human is, in fact, equal before the law, even if unequal in financial resources, intelligence, basic abilities or other innate attributes. When these laws are seen in conjunction with the fact that many of our major cities seem, at least from a higher level, to be composed of almost magically diverse cultures, the combination drives the assumption that we are better off than we were in the “bad old days,” whenever they might have been.

But, it is equally true that just in the first half of 2010 (a) Oliver Stone, a popular movie director, can rant publicly about Jewish domination of the media and subsequently issue an unconvincing apology, (b) Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, can publicly order the mass closure of Roma camps and the deportation of illegal Roma from France to underwhelming condemnation, (c) the State of Arizona, to substantial popular acclaim and in defiance of our national government, can see fit to legally authorize its police to find and deport illegal aliens through the mechanism known derogatorily in other contexts as “racial profiling” (in fact, my use of the verb “authorize” is incorrect, since the legislation in question mandates that the police engage in this behavior), and (d) while the State of Kansas can find guilty and incarcerate the murderer of a medical doctor engaged in operating an abortion clinic, there are many everywhere in our country who view that very same murderer as a martyr and who would unquestioningly follow his lead given the least opportunity.

In short, we are busy patting ourselves on the back for having a “better” racial climate than we formerly had, while simultaneously engaging in activities that are a repetition of actions that have led to harm of enormous scale. Oliver Stone is certainly not of the 18th and 19th centuries, but his message is an echo of the stuff of 18th and 19th century Jewish pogroms. Nicolas Sarcozy is not Serbian, but his effort to purge France of a large number of a specific group is an echo of 1980′s ethnic cleansing. Arizona is not a 19th century American Northeastern coastal city, but its new law clearly focused upon Hispanics and its citizenry’s rants about the Latinization of its culture are echoes of the New York and Boston Irish-hating mobs of the 1880′s. And the fact that anyone can accept and condone the murder of one person as a legitimate tactic in the general promotion of right-to-life values, tells me that, along with Dorothy and Toto, I am not in Kansas any more – at least not the Kansas of Dorothy’s childhood as expressed by L. Frank Baum (and, in this context, Kansas is no more than a euphemism for the entire United States and is not being singled out; after all, Kansas courts said and did all of the right things in this case and did so with efficiency and dispatch).

So, why do we go to such extreme lengths to rationalize the kinds of actions listed above and differentiate them from those that created the Holocaust? The answer to this question (as well as the most likely explanation for the fervor with which we assert each rationalized difference and express abhorrence against anyone who even remotely suggests even a faint connection) is undoubtedly because even as we engage in such behavior, an underlying, deep-seated sense of psychic guilt is asserting itself at some level of consciousness. In other words, we subconsciously know that we are doing “it” again, even though our conscious mind has become convinced that “it” is somehow right and appropriate in the current, specific context.

But as interesting as this question is, it is not the right question to ask of ourselves about these matters. The real question we ought to be asking ourselves in the face of these and other recent events is why, as a species, do we keep returning to actions or pronouncements that reek of past bad behavior and harm to humanity and, in some cases, came to be almost universally reviled when they first became generally known. What is there in our make up that causes us to repeat actions we know in our hearts to be unacceptable, while merrily rationalizing them as we begin to repeat them again? Are we, as a species, neurologically hard-wired to act in a certain way in each similar situation such it is inevitable that we will, absent conscious thought and hard work to the contrary, usually act in a similar harmful way? Can we learn to break these neurological hammerlocks by (a) first acknowledging that we are so hard-wired, and (b) then learning techniques to break ourselves free of the these evolutionary limitations? Or are we just demagogues and liars, and the persons we lie to with the most frequency are ourselves?

I have long thought that, as a species, we are neurologically hard-wired to behave in certain ways and that we react instinctively in certain situations without thinking. This is the only explanation for why we undertake actions that are so exactly wrong when viewed from an historical perspective, but which feel so absolutely right and correct at the time we take them.

A caveat is in order here: this reasoning is not offered as an excuse or justification for acting badly, but is, instead, offered for consideration by others in the firm belief that unless we first understand why it is we behave in the objectionable fashion, we will never be able to learn new and different behavior. After all, how can you change if you don’t first understand why you act in the way that you act?

Over the centuries of man there have been many reasons not to undertake such a scientific examination of ourselves. For many centuries we simply did not have the tools or even self-awareness to perform such research. In our later history, our religions have always gotten in the way of scientific self-analysis to the extent that they argue that we are unique within the animal kingdom, either because we are a higher order of life or the sons and daughters of God. After all, how can we possibly examine ourselves as if we are just another form of animal if we are somehow closer to God than the other forms? There may be other reasons as well, but, except for the lack of the proper tools or self-awareness with which to perform such analysis, they all smack of the sophistry we usually employ whenever we would rather not come to grips with the ethics of a chosen course of action because it is easier to explain them away contextually.

Research is now underway to determine if we are, in fact, neurologically hard-wired in ways that cause us to consistently make the wrong choices given specific facts. For example, Laurie Santos of Yale University in engaged in the study of primate behavior which demonstrates that when faced with the possibility of a guaranteed gain vs. a choice between a gain or a total loss, primates will usually take the guaranteed gain. However, when given the choice between the selection of a guaranteed, quantified loss vs. a selection which will unpredictably yield either a lesser loss than the one guaranteed or an absolute, total, catastrophic loss, the primates will usually go for the possible lesser loss, thereby risking total loss on what we humans would call “a roll of the dice.” In other words, when faced with gain, the primates take the safer, calculated choice, but when faced with loss, they take the much riskier gamble. It is Ms. Santos’ thesis that humanity engages in these same behaviors, behaviors which she believes help explain the frequency and depth of periodic economic recessions.

Could there be similar neurological hard-wiring that explains our reactions toward other members of humanity who don’t look and/or think like us? It seems very likely to me that this may well be the case. One of the activities that humanity engages in that sets us apart from other animals is the ability to classify. Classification is one of our more advanced skills and is undoubtedly a survival technique – something that has served our species very well over the long centuries of our existence. Discrimination is simply the obverse side of the classification coin – once you get good at classification, it becomes inherently true that certain classes of things are inferior to other classes for a variety reasons that make sense to the classifier. We accept the logic of this kind of reasoning since it verifies what our evolutionary experience tells us to believe, and we accord it the status of intelligent thought even when, in certain contexts, it is little more than a rationalization of a primal urge.

We should spend more time, money and effort upon research of the kind that Ms. Santos is engaged in if we want to actually make substantial progress in overcoming our inherent limitations. This is especially true in an era when, because of superior technology, we can, and do, make decisions without the benefit of any significant contemplation about our motivations or consideration of the long-term consequences of our choices. We must come to understand what it is about ourselves that makes certain behavior feel inherently right and good when, in fact, it is deleterious to our long-term happiness and survival. We must have this information firmly in mind each time we need to make important decisions about our future or we will most likely continue to make consistently poor decisions.

Given the fact of advanced technology and communications, the speed with which we are faced with this kind of decision-making will only increase. It is an old maxim that bad news travels fast, but in our current society bad news travels with the speed of electrons and is everywhere almost instantaneously. We no longer have the luxury of having to rely upon sail to bring rumors of far despairs to our ears and to transmit our responses to them to the affected part of the world; they come here and our responses go back within moments of such rumors being initially reported, with the luxury of contemplation having been foregone due to the lack of a decent interval for thought and contemplation.

Future improvements in technology and communication will likely mean that the time span in which we are able to react to the behavior of others will continue to decrease, with the inevitable consequence that we will increasingly use mere knee-jerk reaction, rather than conscious thought, in undertaking a response.

Historically, the time between inherently poor decisions that lead to mass conflict seems to be shortening. After all, how else can one explain the fact that George W. Bush, a member of the Vietnam era generation, could send troops into Iraq and Afghanistan without remembering the hard-learned lessons taught by those of his own generation. He and his administration explained those lessons away with patriotic rhetoric, while clearly retaining no actual knowledge of the lessons taught by over 58,000 deaths in our own armed services or by the many thousands of other Vietnam veterans who returned home only to find themselves unappreciated and their lives rendered dysfunctional. Note that my own argument ignores completely the estimated 4,300,000 civilian dead as a result of the Vietnam war, a fact which President Bush and his handlers also ignored.

I am certain as I write this that those that refuse to accept humanity’s classification as a member of the animal kingdom will, if they were ever to read this piece, revile my thoughts as debased and lacking in the moral aspects that their favorite religion imparts. Why we can accept theories about why physical differences between ourselves and other animal life forms (opposable thumbs allowing us to grasp, different shoulder mechanisms allowing us to throw) have given us evolutionary longevity and superiority, but cannot accept the believe that we may be neurologically or spiritually similar is beyond my comprehension.

I can only say that I am proud to be a member of all of the forms of life (whether animal or vegetable). It is the concept and simple possibility of life itself that fascinates and intrigues me. All living things have discovered innumerable, creative ways to adapt to, and to survive in, environments that range from truly voluptuous to spare, harsh, and incomprehensible. Humanity is still finding forms of life of which we had no previous knowledge in locations we either had no previous ability to investigate or where we were convinced life could not survive. Humanity has much to learn from our compatriots who share the beneficence of life.

I am as certain as I can be that somewhere there are lessons already learned by other life forms that can help humanity understand and overcome its own shortcomings. Only stupidity can keep us from the investigation.

In this regard, humanity must always remember the teachings of Monty Python as expressed in The Galaxy Song:

“So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure
how amazingly unlikely is your birth
and pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space
because there’s bugger all down here on earth.”

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A Treasury of William Faulkner

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

The University of Virginia recently posted a website of recordings of William Faulkner from the period in which he served as Writer-in-Residence in the late 1950′s. I have just discovered and begun to listen to the recordings, but I strongly suspect I will listen to all of them over time. His very voice fascinates me – its cadence, its Southern drawl, its tenor notes and, most of all, its softness.

His ideas are truly fascinating and thought provoking and seem to be informed by a consistent, master philosophy. Each of his novels and stories is but a different, singular attempt to express his vision of mankind. Faulkner, himself, makes this point when, in response to a question about “The Sound and the Fury,” he declares it his most “magnificent failure.” He goes on to explain that each of his novels and stories is yet another attempt to explain a particular truth and that each attempt must, of necessity, fail because of the complexities inherent in that truth. A true writer, Faulkner declares, must try again and again to get his message across by writing another novel or story, but the message contained in each attempt is always essentially the same – even if seen from a different point of view.

Reaction to some of Faulkner’s statements on the website must be tempered by his placement in history and his extensive Southern heritage. He is a true creature of the Southern American culture of the first half of the 20th century (a culture in which the Civil War is still very much alive and real), and his racial beliefs are fully informed by this experience. Hearing some of his beliefs about things racial from the vantage point of 2010 makes at least this admirer cringe at times, but, as with all things historical, he must be seen and judged in historical context. Using the thought, culture and history of any given “present” time to label an historical personage as “racist” (or any other epithet one might care to use) is simply unscholarly and lazy; the true scholar must make the incredibly difficult effort to evaluate that personage within the context of the thought, culture and history of their own time before judging. The Virginia of the 1950′s is not the Virginia of today, as the website takes great care to make clear.

It is clear from the first lecture that Faulkner spent his life trying to express a singularly consistent view of mankind and its place in the firmament. His is a philosophy of survival and his books are each an expression of one man’s, or one family’s, struggle to survive. He is less interested in individual means and methods of survival as he is in the overwhelming variety thereof. Consequently, he can write equally compellingly about the less-than-admirable survival techniques of the Snopes family and the magnificent death struggles of Addie Brunden. Notwithstanding the nature of their fictional lives – generally selfish and despicable in the case of the Snopes and extraordinarily complex and contradictory in the case of Addie – each character is sympathetically drawn and the survival technique employed by each eventually fails in a unique manner. Because of Faulkner’s innate ability to develop a character to the fullest and to make them real rather than imagined, the reader eventually comes to identify fully with each character, no matter how base nor how magnificent the character’s individual attempt at life may be. For in each of Faulkner’s characters are tiny bits of the reader’s own self writ large and exaggerated, such that the reader eventually realizes that, given a different set of circumstances or triggers, he or she might have walked a similar path in a similar manner.

I have long been enamored of Faulkner’s writing and of the philosophy behind it. They are equally compelling and one could not survive independently of the other. Faulkner is a staunch believer in the fragile durability of the life force, specifically as embodied in the human species. As I listen to him struggle in the recordings to answer the literary questions asked of him by his audience, I am struck by how his replies return – again and again – to simple acts of living and the deeper meanings he has drawn from them. He is tolerant of each reader’s interpretation of his own writing, while vigorously defending his own, possibly differing interpretations. It is as if he sees a sort of divinity within each human life and dares each of us, as readers, to contemplate our own divinity as expressed in our day-to-day actions and thoughts.

Generally, when I tell friends that I read and enjoy Faulkner and collect his first editions, their reaction is to shake their heads and complain about the length of his sentences and the difficulty of reading his prose. I will never argue that Faulkner is an easy read, but the satisfaction derived from a challenging read is different from that derived from the latest thriller. The latest thriller may well serve to fill a Summer’s day with pleasure, but it can never inform a lifetime. A careful reading of Faulkner can and will.

Anyone reading my posts may have come to understand by now the place that Faulkner holds in my personal literary pantheon: the title of this blog is a line from one of his short stories; the pen name I use is the name of one of his chief characters; and Humptulips County – that beautiful place where I am privileged to live and work – is both as real and as imaginary as his beloved Yoknapatawpha County.

Few would dare to pretend to write as well as William Faulkner, and I am not one of those. I can only say with some certainty that I understand his compulsion to write, for why else would I consistently post to a blog that few know exist and even fewer read? How could anyone ever pretend or hope to achieve the body of work amassed by William Faulkner over his lifetime or to approximate the magnificence by which he summarized that effort upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature near the end of his life:

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

My thanks and profound gratitude to the University of Virginia for sharing a rare privilege with the rest of us mere mortals. You can find their website here: http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/

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Of Oxymorons and Moronic Ideas

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a piece this morning about Standford University’s Engineering Department’s library going book-less. You can find NPR’s piece here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128361395. As much as I can understand a modern university seeking to save expense and space, the concept of a “book-less library” seems a complete oxymoron and, indeed, moronic in concept. I strongly urge the creation of a new word or term for digital information centers that does not include the term “library”, since the very concept of “library” demands the presence of real books.

I cannot argue with the notion that, if modern students are more attuned to the world of digital information and are not using old fashioned libraries in the way their predecessors did, universities should find other ways to provide their needs for information required by the learning process. So whatever quarrel I am picking, I am not picking it with Stanford’s Engineering Department librarian. I accept the argument that university libraries need to be relevant. To argue that students should be made to read books when they principally understand laptops and the Internet would be to prove, once again, King Canute’s admonition of the powerlessness of kings.

Not that an argument cannot be made for old fashioned, book-driven scholarship, since I strongly believe that one can be made. As powerful as the Internet and its contents are today, they remain little more than a mere drop in the bucket of recorded human thought and it will be a long while before the Internet – or its successor – can claim to store the vast bulk of human scholarship. I strongly suspect that web-based scholarship focuses primarily upon current publications rather than the publications of antiquity, and to overlook that treasure trove is more than shortsighted; it is also poor scholarship. Not to understand current human thought in contrast to that of our forebears, is not to understand such things as history, economics, relevancy to environmental context, the rhythm of philosophy and reason, and a myriad other topics I might have mentioned if I had thought about the subject longer than the time it took to type this sentence.

In short, the Internet is still more soundbite than substance. Of course, the Internet’s content will continue to increase and there may well come a time when the foregoing statement is no longer true – but it remains true today. While I use the Internet possibly as frequently as Stanford’s engineering students, I understand its shortcomings, with my understanding coming from my years of intensive use of traditional libraries. I truly fear that the quality of our comprehension of things human will come to suffer if the Internet becomes the sole source of knowledge for future generations.

But this piece is no more intended as a rant against the Internet than it is intended as a complaint against modern libraries who go book-less in the face of change and challenged budgets. What this piece is really about is the pleasures of a library and the hope that those pleasures will not become forgotten.

First, I must admit to a bias in my thinking. My wife and I recently spent a goodly sum of money to remodel our home to add a studio and a library. Further to the truth, my wife’s studio (she is an artist by temperament) is more library than studio. For we both collect books: I collect fiction and mysteries and she collects children’s books, especially the illustrated variety. Books are an obsession in our home as my children will testify. Our shared obsession is not fully understood by our children, even if they may appreciate it on an intellectual level. I strongly suspect that my youngest son somewhat resents the library, since I confess openly that his former room disappeared in the library’s creation. I do regret that he no longer has the room to retreat to when he is visiting from his home in Eastern Washington, but I hope he understands that home is as much of a concept as a physical place and that our home would be incomplete without books. When one has as many books as we possess and wishes to maintain them properly, a library becomes a necessity and not a luxury.

In truth, our library is much more than a place to maintain books; it is also a sanctuary from real world dilemma and fervor, a place for ordered and considered thought, a source of respite and renewal, and, most simply, a source of enrichment and beauty. There is a peace that springs from amassed books, regardless of their content. I believe this peace arises from the fact that each book represents the culmination of an enormous amount of human effort, arising from the agonies of the writer in creating its content, the business demands upon its publisher in changing creativity into print, and the steadfast determination of its bookseller in the face of ever dwindling profits. In short, the fact of a book’s very existence is as much of a miraculous adventure as is the tale told by its contents. Libraries should honor both kinds of adventures.

I suppose that the owner of a library need not be a reader and might take substantial satisfaction in the fact of his or her possession of books alone, but I am not a believer in that type of book collecting. While I understand the ache to own something of value that is rare and beautiful, I could not revel in a library whose books I had not read as it would seem incomplete and sterile. The world contains many repositories of beautiful things, and there are as many of these repositories that are merely sterile places to visit as there are those that are citadels of joy and wonder. To me, a library of unread books collected only for their having is merely the same as owning a pile of stuff – admittedly, stuff that I might well want to acquire and convert, through reading, into a well-loved memory. A true library is full of memories of the kind that stem from reading and participating in the adventures between the covers; a true library honors its inventory of books as well as their contents.

When I walk into the portion of my library where I keep the books that I have read, I am walking into a well of memories. Each book speaks to me from its assigned place in its own special voice, a special voice that is compounded of equal parts artistic content and physical uniqueness. There is no cacophony, for this is not a Tower of Babel. As I enter and look around the room, each book reaches out in its own way and I either react, or fail to react, as circumstances dictate. I remember where and how I found each book (to me, the joy of book collecting is not as much in the having as it is in the hunt) as well as I remember its contents. Our library is an ever expanding thing – it will not be tomorrow what it is today as it will be made different, and more interesting, by the simple addition of one new book.

Said otherwise, I am a book collector and a reader – I collect what I want to read, and, in doing so, have frustrated many rare book dealers who want to understand my “focus” so that they might better serve my needs and their pocketbooks. Mind you, I have no objection whatsoever to their serving their pocketbooks because if they didn’t exist I could not find many of the books I am still seeking; rather, my objection is to their expectation that I must have a focus and that I should be developing a great collection rather than my own library of well-loved memories. While I understand the frustration I must cause them, I can honestly say that it is their problem and not mine to share.

I suppose it is true that I have never fully recovered from the impact of first seeing the library in the screen version of My Fair Lady. As much as I love the music from the show, Professor Higgins’ library impressed me the most. And so, at a later stage of life, my wife and I found that creating our own library was a necessity despite its cost to our treasury. It is a library unlike that of Professor Higgins in that the basic designs are not comparable and neither my wife nor I burst into song when present, but much alike in the sense of comfort and peace engendered by the simple fact of its existence.

And so it is that the concept of a “book-less library” seems moronic to me. I suppose that to some of our friends and acquaintances, our book collection seems little more than a dust trap and a waste of space and its new home nothing more than an outrageous expenditure by folks who have more to spend than good sense. To such detractors I can only reply: ”You do not understand the cry of the soul that is represented by each and every book – the cry of the author who penned it, the cry of those who bound and sold it, and the cry of those of us who have read and enjoyed it.”

Money spent on the fulfillment of the soul is, to my mind at least, money well spent. And while at some level I suppose I harbor minor resentments about those who implicitly, through body language or incredulous looks, criticize our decision to build our new, long awaited library, we rest content in the ease it grants to our souls.

Besides, it will eventually be our children’s job to dispose of all we have put together, and I wish them joy – not pain – in the endeavor.**

** An interesting article that was published a day after I published this regarding the differences in learning from books and digitally:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/opinion/09brooks.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

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On Being A Morning Person

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

Those who know me understand that I am a morning person, and that by “morning” I especially mean the pre-dawn hours. In considering my preference, most of my friends focus on the fact that I go to bed earlier than many rather than ask themselves why I might prefer morning to other times of day. Some of the explanations I might offer might well have something to do with chemistry, psychology or how my nervous system is hard-wired. While I have read several books on body rhythms and am certain that the explanations in these texts have some relevance to my preference for mornings, none of the scientific explanations they contain explain the joy mornings bring to me.

The truth is that mornings exhilarate me. I derive enormous satisfaction from the morning’s chill bite and the growing of the light as it rises and suffuses color throughout the landscape. I revel in the feeling of privacy that comes from being awake in an increasingly vibrant world while most others are slumbering. At my Humptulips County farm, mornings reveal rabbits, deer, and birdsong and shed light upon all of the various vegetational rustlings that add so much mystery to the dark. During my city mornings, the sea-salt laden air mixes with the cries of gulls as I enjoy a chill-enriched, coatless walk while wondering whether my fellow insomniacs-of-the-morning have any other purpose to their perambulations than simple enjoyment of the moment.

In particular, there is nothing more pleasing than a full moon in pre-dawn Summer light. Light suffuses the landscape and sky during these minutes, even though the sun has not yet risen above the horizon. In this setting, the full moon is spectacular – a hardened yellow disk glaring at the landscape, daring the sun to rise and obliterate it. In contrast, the landscape, colored in soft pastels, seems fresh and innocent and awaits its impending advent. While all pre-dawn light comes from the sun, it is a fullsome mixture of moonlight and the steeper rays of an as-yet hidden sun seeping over the world’s rim – a truly unique mixture of indirect and reflected sunlight.

Summer’s pre-dawn period lasts only for minutes, and as those minutes swiftly pass by something startling happens – the moon fades briskly from view as the atmosphere thickens and hides its aspect from Earth, and the landscape’s true colors assert themselves from out of the pastel haze in which they were hiding. In other words, the moon and the Earth quickly swap prominence of place in a ritual changing-of-the-guard: one by fading quickly from view even while asserting itself to its utmost ability, and the other by rising and firming slowly from the night’s haze to eventually reveal itself in all of its dimension, depth of color and glory.

The process of morning is in sharp contrast to a Summer evening’s slow aggrandizement. Over the hours of a Summer evening, night grows organically from the shadows as they accumulate and knit themselves together. Night is the finished product of their knitting, and the reality of the moon’s and the stars’ permanent presence in our firmament is only gradually revealed as Earth’s atmosphere becomes increasingly transparent. As pleasant as a Summer evening’s progress may be, it is, to me, more of a magician’s sleight of hand than the sudden, magical transference of heavenly power that occurs each morning.

Daily visual evidence proves to me that there are fewer morning people than evening people, a difference which suggests that far fewer have experienced morning’s salute than evening’s somnolence. Consequently, I doubt I have much hope of converting evening people to morning people by the simple exposition of the joys of a Summer morning, but I do hope that some of you might, because of this piece, think to rise up early one morning to experience the pre-dawn hours.

I urge all of my readers who are evening people to enjoy at least one pre-dawn moment either by practicing Tai Chi in a city park, walking amid the susurrus of an ocean beach, listening to the “plink” of wavelets in a rural lake while sitting on a dock, or simply drinking in the salt-tanged air of the streets of your favorite port city. In those moments, and in those places or in others you might imagine for yourself, you will find amazing things highlighted by the rising sun.

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A Birthday Wish for Don

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

Yesterday was my oldest son’s birthday. He turned 40. His accession to this age reminded me of what I was doing 40 years ago, which was graduating from law school and moving back to Humptulips County from the Midwest. In two short weeks, I will be able to celebrate 40 years of practicing law – not in the official sense, since I didn’t take the bar examination until July and didn’t receive the results or be sworn in as a member of the bar until October. In the sense of a life lived, however, I immediately went to work as a lawyer my first week after my return to Humptulips County for the simple reason that I was a husband, a father and broke. Work was the only alternative. There was no hardship involved as I was eager to see if I would enjoy my chosen profession – it was brand spanking new to me then and filled with possibility. I was going to be a litigator.

Forty years later I am still practicing law. The joy of embarking on something new has long since become a deep rooted satisfaction that I seem able to help others achieve their goals. Mine is now an office practice – I act as a counselor to many and no longer visit the court room. The thrill that I thought I would receive from litigation was quickly replaced with a sense of profound disgust at the court system – the waste of time and money, the sense of lives stalled while fighting over past events, the realization that courtrooms are full of drama queens whom I found appalling, and the eventual realization that I was simply unhappy in this venue. So, after three years of litigation, I simply announced to my office that it was time for me to build a business practice and if each of the other attorneys (primarily litigators) would just give me their various bits and pieces of business matters that they handled on the side, I would try and make a meal of it and do my best to increase my workload.

This approach should not have worked and surely would not in today’s law firm climate. But, 1970 was a different era and law firms were much smaller and more focused upon being a partnership than a business. My senior partners undoubtedly shook their heads over me behind closed doors, but to my face they told me to proceed. It was another three years before I could completely jettison all trial work, but in that time I became a practicing business attorney, learning what I could from others and teaching myself what I was unable to assimilate. It was hard, slogging work of a kind that most current law firm associates would tire of quickly. But I began to find pleasure in the realization that I seemed to understand the mechanics of business and that I was fascinated with the many ways my clients found to earn a living.

It was this last realization that has sustained me as a lawyer over the years. People, as a species, are fascinating. We are all born; we will all die. In between, we all want the basics – food, security, shelter, and a sense that the essence of our lives will continue through the lives of our children. While my eastern Washington upbringing marked me with the inevitable prejudices of small-town egocentricity, I was fortunate to go to the University of Washington and meet many people whose variety of origination, color, experience and belief made my prejudices look small and embarrassing. My eagerness to learn saved me from those prejudices, as I found listening to others interesting and enjoyable and realized that the most interesting folks to listen to were ones with experiences and beliefs far afield from mine. I discovered that if I wanted to revel in my past, I could simply go home over a holiday and become re-immersed; if I wanted to learn something new in addition to my formal education, I could listen to others.

Thus began a life long interest in listening to other’s dreams and having the privilege of assisting in their birth and fulfillment. The older I get the more I realize that mankind is inherently looking at itself as a species in the wrong way. Most of us look fearfully askance at anyone different from the self we inhabit – different in things ranging from the big issues such as race, religion, sexual orientation or disability to small matters of distinction, such as dress, manner of speech or physical peculiarities. The practice of law has taught me that the better way is to realize the inherent creativity of all mankind. As a species, we have found we can survive in almost any environment, we have pondered and explained our very existence in myriad ways, and we continue trying to learn and “advance” while remaining limited by the hard wiring of our nervous systems. The struggle to overcome our limitations is the source of our creativity. I see that creativity daily in the ideas my clients bring to me for assistance in implementation, and I sense our basic ability to survive in the dignity of the hard work with which my clients attempt each unknown.

In short, I want to thank my son for the simple act of achieving 40, since it has caused me to reflect upon the many pleasurable years I have enjoyed at my chosen profession. As my son has grown, so have I. He, too, eventually chose a life as a lawyer, coming to the law rather later in life than I did. I wish for him that when he is the age I am now, he will be able to look back and find that his life was one of satisfaction – the satisfaction that comes from achieving many of your own dreams by helping others achieve theirs.

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April and Poetry

Posted on April 8, 2010 by Gavin Stevens

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

April is National Poetry Month. It is a month in which we should both celebrate the wonderful use of words to approach our deepest sensibilities and to decry the space currently wasted on personal laments disguised as poetry. I am much fonder of poets who assail the heights and depths of universal meaning, suffering or love, than of those who simply want us to share in their most recent moment of individual cognition. The former take chances and, even in their failures, say more about the human spirit and the beauty of bundled language than all of those resident in the latter category combined.

This is so because poetry should not just be about a pretty turn of phrase. Clever wording is never enough to turn an ear-pleasing phrase into poetry. Poetry should make us think about, or cause us personally to reflect upon and examine more deeply, something seemingly universal about the human condition, nature, an aspect of time’s irreversible onward march or similar issues of deep imponderability. Pretty phrases may well be pleasing to the ear, but they are quickly forgotten and are invariably impossible to recall a week after being read. True poetry crystallizes a moment, a passion, a truth or a desire in such a manner that each of us – no matter the extent of the diversity of our opinions or our beliefs or our respective levels of education – can relate to endlessly after our own fashion and at all times of our lives. While it is likely true that no two of us receive the same specific information from a piece of true poetry, the overall message we each receive engenders a shared emotional response.

Great poets write in all forms of verse. Many readers of poetry make the mistake of focusing upon a particular style or verse form, believing that their favored style or verse form is what is great and good about poetry. These are the readers who glibly glorify free verse over a traditional sonnet form in all cases, or vice versa. They aren’t listening for the substance of the poetry; they are simply giving voice to their own prejudices without regard to meaning and evidencing their inability to delve into a poem’s message.

Let’s look at poetry concerning the month of April as an example. Most of us can and do quote the first line of T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” It has almost become a cliché, often referring to the fact that in the United States personal income tax returns are due on April 15. But even the most clichéd usage of its opening lines indicates that there is something in the turning of the seasons from Winter to Spring that the month of April symbolically represents that deeply appeals to both humanity’s shared hopes and fears. Why is April the cruelest month in Eliot’s reasoning? He gives us a clear answer: because it mixes memories with desire.

Eliot’s point is well illustrated by “Second April,” a poem written by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

April this year, not otherwise
Than April of a year ago
Is full of whispers, full of sighs,
Dazzling mud and dingy snow;
Hepaticas that pleased you so
Are here again, and butterflies.
There rings a hammering all day,
And shingles lie about the doors;
From orchards near and far away
The gray wood-pecker taps and bores,
And men are merry at their chores,
And children earnest at their play.
The larger streams run still and deep;
Noisy and swift the small brooks run.
Among the mullein stalks the sheep
Go up the hillside in the sun
Pensively; only you are gone,
You that alone I cared to keep.

Millay juxtaposes Eliot’s memory and desire beautifully in this rhymed piece. It begins and lasts as a traditional paean to Spring, only to end abruptly with a sense of loss jarringly inserted in the last one and a half lines – a sense of complete, irrecoverable loss rendered all the more poignant and sharp by its juxtaposition with a lengthy recitation of humanity’s endless fascination with, and desire for, Spring’s rebirth.

Millay again used April as a foil to discuss humanity’s constant fears surrounding life’s meaning in “Spring,” a poem with no discernable rhyme scheme or meter.

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

This time she speaks at length of her sense of loss and her corresponding questioning of life’s purpose, and then suddenly juxtaposes them with a snapshot view of a sillier April cavorting cruelly without purpose.

Both poems are effective in making the reader focus on Eliot’s central theme of April’s cruelty in the mixing of memory and desire, yet, despite this similarity of theme, it couldn’t be more differently expressed in both style or focus – and all by the same poet. These poems are apposite readings of the same cruel mix, and make me, at least, think more carefully about April’s aspects of memory and desire than I would have if I had only read one of the two poems.

And then there is the “April” of William Carlos Williams, a poet who demands all of your attention and all of your mind’s efforts of comprehension. He is never an easy read, and all the more interesting as a result. His April is an overwhelming force almost too much to bear:

If you had come away with me
into another state
we had been quiet together.
But there the sun coming up
out of the nothing beyond the lake was
too low in the sky,
there was too great a pushing
against him,
too much of sumac buds, pink
in the head
with the clear gum upon them,
too many opening hearts of lilac leaves,
too many, too many swollen
limp poplar tassels on the
bare branches!
It was too strong in the air.
I had no rest against that
springtime!
The pounding of the hoofs on the
raw sods
stayed with me half through the night.
I awoke smiling but tired.

Williams’ April is April from the side view, but clearly still an April in the Eliot tradition. He focuses on April’s impact rather than on its inherent contradictions, but the depth of my resulting reaction is as strong to this poem as it is to those of Eliot or Millay.

I am always loath to believe April is the cruelest month since it is the month of my birth, but, if it is, its inherent cruelty is the subject for deep reflection upon the purpose of life’s brevity when measured against infinity’s incomprehensibility. It is also simply a great month to read and enjoy real poetry in all of its guises.

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