Worthy Words, Part 7: Grace Schulman

In her remarkable memoir, Strange Paradise: Portrait of a Marriage, Frost Medal recipient Grace Schulman writes this of her husband of 57 years, Jerome Schulman, an epidemiologist, as he struggled with a terminal disease:

Jerry was crafty at hiding, even from himself, the gravity of his illness. That skill, famously called denial, had obvious drawbacks, but did offer a way of going on. Although he knew that his heart was pumping at a small fraction of the minimum, Jerry phoned in February of what would be his fatal year for tickets to see a new play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the following autumn. He ordered new novels online, and bought tailored, no-iron chinos for the following summer. 

Reading this paragraph reminded me of my beloved father-in-law, Peter Kostares, a World War II veteran, who from his New York Hospital bed as he was dying of stomach cancer with hours to live talked about how he was looking forward to attending his niece's wedding five months into the future. We have at least two ways of looking at Schulman and Kostares. One is to say they were ridiculous optimists unable or unwilling to face the inevitable end of their life; the other is to say they were experiencing life at its most intense fullness, a mindset that looks forward to the future in a never-ending, life-affirming present.

Grace Schulman's prose, like her award-winning poetry, inspires us to realize that regardless of our circumstances, we want to go on. We want to plan as if we will live forever, which is not a bad thing, provided we experience life as if we have only this moment.

Worthy Words, Part 6: Thich Nhat Hanh

If one must carry the burden of being a genius in a particular discipline, I suppose the most useful to society would be one of the human condition. Composers, musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers—they all have their huge place in inspiring and entertaining us, and you could rightly argue that such artists are themselves communicators of the human condition. But as much as I love the performing and fine arts, I do not know a quarter from a sixteenth note, can barely draw stick figures at best, and dance more with my hands than with my feet. Yet, I breathe. I think. I look at and listen to the world around me. I encounter life's mysteries. I have no words to describe to you the moments my senses experience so that you can experience them the same way. 

These remarkable capabilities are the specialties of Thích Nhất Hạnh (1926-2022), and from what we can tell of his voluminous writings, he bore his genius with grace. Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who traveled globally to promote peace and teach the Way of the Buddha, had a singular influence on many other renowned authors, including Daniel Berrigan, bell hooks, and Thomas Merton.

In A Lifetime of Peace: Essential Writings by Thích Nhất Hạnh appears this excerpt from one of his many best-selling books, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (1987): 

Keep your attention focused on the work, be alert and ready to handle ably and intelligently any situation which may arise—this is mindfulness. (p. 76)

This simple statement may seem too obvious to acknowledge as wisdom, until we realize that we spend most of our waking hours pursuing personal goals, attending business meetings, and running all sorts of errands. Nhất Hạnh insists that we can be mindful in those situations as well. One of the keys to mastering mindfulness is focused breathing, a practice beyond the scope of this brief post. My intention here is to draw attention to a master of life who shows us that living at peace requires exercises that are rather easy to practice, but not so easy because of their demand on our persistence.

Worthy Words, Part 5: Edward Said

Edward Said's collection of 46 essays, "Reflections on Exile" and Other Essays (2000) appeared in print three years before his death. One of those essays, "On Defiance and Taking Positions," begins with this sentence:

Compared, say, to most African, Asian, and Middle Eastern universities, the American university constitutes a relatively utopian space, where we can actually talk about the boundaries of the academy. (page 501)

Knowing how candidly self-reflective Said was, I wonder in this age of gotcha journalism if he would retract this statement. We have seen the results of accusatory rhetoric following Harvard's Claudine Gay, MIT's Sally Kornbluth, and Penn's Liz Magill testimony before the United States Congress, as well as numerous legal cases challenging employers over alleged discriminatory practices as a violation their free speech.

During my undergraduate years in the mid-1970s and graduate years in the early 1980s, I would have backed Said's observation. But I had already begun seeing signs of a reversal of freedom of speech on campus during my Rutgers doctoral years throughout the 1990s. Two instances come to mind. I failed one of four essays for my qualifying examination. The reader who failed me was a tenured political conservative professor who disagreed with my socialist approach to the education topic. He said, "Your paper got to the wrong reviewer." Fortunately, I passed the essay the second time around. Then a tenure-track liberal professor, recommended for my dissertation committee by the committee chairperson, said of my position, "You know that's a racist viewpoint, don't you?" I replied, "I could see how some people might agree with you, but ..." "I said it's racist," she interjected preemptively. The next day I asked my committee chairperson to remove her from the committee. He did so, but if he had not, I am certain I would not have attained a doctorate.

As you can see, there's plenty of blame to be shared by both political persuasions. A quarter century later, we are living in times when free speech is endangered. We need more thinkers like Said to swing the pendulum toward Americans' First Amendment rights.  

Worthy Words, Part 4: Galway Kinnell

American poet Galway Kinnell (1927-2014), Pulitzer Prize and Frost Medal recipient, wrote many poems in his six-decade career, from haunting dreamlike sequences like the 13-line "Promissory Note" to sweeping epics like "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World." One of his poems in particular, "When the Towers Fell," about the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, contains two haunting lines in the first stanza that still strike me to the core of my soul. Describing the Twin Towers, the poet writes we: 

grew so used to them often we didn't see them, and now, not

seeing them, we see them.

I passed through the former World Trade Center hundreds of times as a student, employee, or business owner during its brief 28-year history. While I remained awestruck by its underground network of shops, restaurants, theaters, subways, and commuter trains, I was never impressed by its exterior design. Thus, I looked only at its shadow as I walked past it. But after it fell, I wanted it back. I wanted to see it. I don't want the Freedom Tower. I want back what I cannot have. It is not there, yet I still see it. I sometimes feel that I still have not moved past the anger or depression stages of grief. Kinnell's two lines speak for how I live with this loss.

I am grateful that The New Yorker makes "When the Towers Fell" available on its website.

Worthy Words, Part 3: Walker Percy

In Walker Percy's 1991 essay collection Signposts in a Strange Land appears a previously unpublished, thought-provoking article, "Is a Theory of Man Possible?" containing this sentence:

Ignorance, if recognized, is often more fruitful than the appearance of knowledge. (page 113)

Percy's sentence seems prophetic more than a quarter century before the truth became relative in American politics and beyond. Philosophers have sought to define and describe truth for more than two millennia, but all their work has vaporized in a time when polemicists and even academics refuse to ground their observations and summations in commonly accepted principles of morality and ethics. 

We can surely find many more examples of prescient wisdom, such as comedy writer Robert Orben's oft recycled 1974 aphorism, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I suppose we have always known this "truth," but what are we doing about it?

Worthy Words, Part 2: Albert Murray

Albert Murray (1916-2013), soldier, scholar, teacher, cultural commentator, music critic, and community leader of Harlem, where he lived his later years, came to my attention because of my love of jazz. Murray was a cofounder of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, a beautiful multivenue facility where I have seen numerous shows. So how could I not love him too? Arguably, his most famous nonfiction work is his collection of essays The Omni-Americans (1970). In that book , he writes this 73-word sentence:

In all events, it is not only possible but highly probable that the “cultural dislocation trauma” suffered by Africans transported to frontier America was considerably less than European-oriented polemicists imagine, precisely because the African’s native orientation to culture was less static or structured than they assume, precisely, that is to say, because the African may have been geared to improvisation rather than piety, for all the taboos he had lived in terms of. (Library of America's edition of Murray's Collected Essays & Memoirs, page 158)

This assertion is only one of Murray's many insightful observations in The Omni-Americans, a provocative reflection on Black identity in its many forms as perceived within and outside the race. We see examples of cultural dislocation trauma appearing in the United States whenever refugees land on its shores. But the first Blacks here were not refugees choosing to flee to America for their safety; they were unwilling arrivals subjected to slavery. In casting a spotlight on the Africans' vibrant and organized orientation to culture, Murray forces his reader to imagine not the European's polemicist or the dominant culture 's viewpoint but to reckon with Blacks as equals, human beings who think, create their own culture, and live and die by their own mores. Note the phrase improvisation rather than piety, whose context is better understood by reading the entire essay. As for the taboos Africans had lived in, think first of their past in their native continent, a past over 250 years in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, virtually impossible for any of us to fully comprehend, as well as the interdictions imposed on them in their new continent. Murray fashions a quandary that his readers will contemplate long after they close his book.

Worthy Words, Part 1: Wallace Stevens

With this post, I begin a series of memorable words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, dialogue, or stanzas by writers who continue to inspire and inform my own writing. 

Ever since I started reading the poetry of Wallace Stevens in 1988,  I have expected surprise. While I understand that by definition, surprise must be unexpected, I hope this post explains the oxymoron of the previous sentence. 

Stevens's poems are so deep in their reaction to experience and their immediacy of feeling that their full meaning might not penetrate my senses until a second or third reading, sometimes ten years apart. When I do capture glimpses of their essence—I doubt I ever get their complete meaning— I look back realizing I just was not ready to accept his message, I misunderstood it, or I dismissed it too quickly. For sure, I can read any one of his poems a dozen times wondering about what he was trying to accomplish. 

Take "Chocorua to Its Neighbor," his 130-line poem comprising 26 quintains. The title of the poem itself is laden with ambiguity. Does Chocorua refer to the 3,500-hundred-foot mountain in New Hampshire or the 500-person community at the mountain's base? Is Chocorua talking to its neighbor, is Chocorua's neighbor forming an impression of it? Is Chocorua's neighbor the closest mountain to it? The sky? The forest embedded in it? Is it the poet or the mountain speaking? Or is it we who are perceiving what the poet describes? Consider the first verse of the poem:

To speak quietly at such a distance, to speak

And to be heard is to be large in space,

That, like your own, is large, hence, to be part

Of sky, of sea, large earth, large air. It is

To perceive men without reference to their form.

After a recent reading of this poem, nearly four decades after reading it for the first time without much of an impression, I emerged from this stanza feeling larger than humanity itself, a maker of mountains, an omniscient being. Perhaps not even a being, but something that comprehends without availing itself of senses.

Let's look at the oft-referenced nineteenth stanza, which struck me in an entirely different way after reading the poems decades later:

To say more than human things with human voice,

That cannot be; to say human things with more

Than human voice, that, also, cannot be;

To speak humanly from the height or from the depth 

Of human things, that is acutest speech.

Upon first reading, I took this stanza at face value, interpreting it literally. I assigned great worth to its denotative meaning. Once I reread it, the eighteen stanzas preceding it as well as the seven following it, brought a greater metaphysical, existential connotation to my consciousness.  

I do not see my job here as clarifying any of Stevens's poems, but simply (or not so simply) as explaining my reaction to them in the hope that you might read some of his verse as well. Reading his brief poems "The Reader," "Debris of Life and Mind," or "Human Arrangement" would be a good starting point.