Rainy Thursday

And I am revising some older work and making packing lists for our trip to Seattle next week. On the subject of rain, here's a poem that came after driving through a storm on Iowa Hwy. 1, en route to Iowa City. I guess Iowans are used to these harrowing weather events. I was not.

JULY STORM

Thunderheads hunker

over the highway like professional

wrestlers before a match: posing,

strutting, talking trash. The first

heavy drops spatter the windshield as lightning

zags to the ground in the distance, electrifying

corn and alfalfa, turning the sky

to the colors of an old

bruise. My nostrils open

to the bleachy-clean scent

of ozone and the car slows

from the weight of rain, this wall

of liquid glass. A truck passes

and we shudder in the wake

thrown up from its tires.

Momentarily convinced

of my unprepared end, my mind

travels home, to a load of wash left

to mildew in the machine, the  past

due date on the milk my daughter

will pour over her cereal

tomorrow. 

--RZC 

Free the Mind

I'm not a very good Buddhist, though I attend a weekly meditation class. I still struggle with the daily practice, even knowing that when I regularly do it, I feel more balanced and everything in my life goes better. In fact, it occurs to me frequently, reading my daily tweets from the Dalai Lama and listening to the monthly teachings of Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, teacher and founder of Tergar International and author of The Joy of Living, that it may be these Buddhist leaders and teachers who save the human race from itself.

 Among the other fascinating stories in the recently released documentary about the work of University of Wisconsin professor Richard Davidson, Free the Mind, a preschool-aged boy struggles with intense feelings of fear and anger that are interfering with his ability to navigate the demands of school and developing social relationships. A mindfulness meditation practice designed for preschoolers -- a key factor of which is the development of compassion -- is significant in helping him cope and ultimately overcome a phobia. Likewise, the film follows two veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars who participated in meditation training in a study designed to measure its use in helping to heal PTSD.

Seeing photos of the thousands of people who showed up to see and hear the Dalai Lama on his recent tour of US cities makes me hopeful. As does noticing that every week, regardless of what other things may be going on in my city, scores of student meditators show up for Joy of Living meditation class and group practice. The practice is about quieting the mind and opening the heart for the benefit of ourselves and for everyone we come into contact with. This is how the Buddhists believe we change the world, by first changing the patterns in our own minds and hearts.

It doesn't make a very interesting cable news story, apparently, but the sheer numbers of people who are reaching for loving kindness and compassion is a powerful counterstory to the hot messes of crisis politics, the disintegrating social safety net, climate change.

The Dead Woman (La Muerta)

I first became aware of this Neruda poem when an excerpt from it was used in the wonderful 1990 film, Truly, Madly, Deeply, and I have gone back to it often since. Aside from so gorgeously capturing the imagery of grief, it is a moving statement of what it is to recognize one's connection to humankind -- and a shared responsibility to see things made right. It seems a fitting coda to a few weeks thinking about individual freedom vs. the responsibilities of human community. I know where I fall.

THE DEAD WOMAN

If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you no longer live,
I shall live on.

I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.

I shall live on.

For where a man has no voice,
there, my voice.

Where blacks are beaten,
I cannot be dead.
When my brothers go to prison
I shall go with them.

When victory,
not my victory,
but the great victory comes,
even though I am mute I must speak;
I shall see it come even
though I am blind.

No, forgive me.
If you no longer live,
if you, beloved, my love,
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain on my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping, but
I shall stay alive,
because above all things
you wanted me indomitable,
and, my love, because you know that I am not only a man
but all mankind.
--Pablo Neruda

Baltimore Oriole

I spent this past weekend at a workshop in southern Michigan, in a rural setting half way between Ann Arbor and Toledo. There were many remarkable things about the place, not least of which the abundance of birds that came to the feeders set up just a few feet away from the back windows of the house. I saw my first Baltimore oriole, many times more splendid in person than the lovely little fellow above. It is no doubt a sign of how citified I've become that I felt so moved by my first oriole sighting, by the vividness of him and his glorious gold markings.

I had intended to blog about something else today, but instead, I'm headed out to get my little garden plots in order to plant some herbs and flowers this afternoon. We've had a tough spring weatherwise in Wisconsin; it seemed more an extension of winter. But the world is well and truly green again and all the more precious for the wait.

Question Authority

A few days ago, a FB friend posted this quote on her page:

The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

On first reading it, I couldn't help thinking about all the ways that the culture of the individual has made life in this country difficult, particularly in recent times. The cult of Libertarianism has great appeal these days -- every man for himself, free markets, no government interference. And there is a way in which the political discussion, regardless of the issue, has been co-opted by shouts of individualism over community. This worship of the individual is a big piece of what makes it so difficult for our government to function now.  I have become suspicious of the value of individualism for a functioning society.

This is not, however, what my friend was thinking about when she posted the Nietzsche quote. She was thinking about the way that people allow themselves to be absorbed by tribal thinking. Witness all the political talking heads using the same talking points on gun control, Benghazi, health care, immigration. Witness the news that Republicans in Texas seek to ban the teaching critical thinking.

My parents had many faults, but they did not include wanting their children to be mindless ciphers. My father in particular was a believer in the liberal arts education, with its emphasis on critical thinking. No belief was worth having if you couldn't think flexibly about why you held to it. He wanted us to ask questions, to understand the whats and whys of our world, to see how things are connected. A watchword of the 60s and 70s was "Question Authority." 

We are living in a time that demands as much clear, independent thinking as we can muster. Which is not the same thing as worshipping at the altar of individual freedom. But where, really, are the lines between freedom and oppression? Individual freedom vs. rules/laws for the welfare of the community? Talk among yourselves.

On Likeability, Part 2

After writing yesterday's blog, I recalled a huge fight with my dad over Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist in Charles Webb's 1963 novel The Graduate. The famous movie that was made of it came out in 1967, so I'm thinking that was why the book appeared on my radar that year. I was a freshman in high school and my dad and I were often reading things the other had left lying around in those days. I don't remember who brought the book into the house.

Webb's writing was nothing to write home about, but I do remember being absorbed by the story -- lots of dialog -- and loving the character of Benjamin Braddock. I'm not sure how much of his ennui I fully understood at 14. Certainly some. The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement were on my radar. I had observed enough bored and depressed suburban housewives -- including my own mother -- to understand there were cracks in the wall of the American Dream.

My father despised Benjamin Braddock. He couldn't have hated that character more if he'd shown up a live person on our doorstep. Benjamin Braddock was an insult to everything he believed in. The American Dream was very real to my dad. He and his family immigrated from southern Italy at a time when that economy was still pretty feudal. My dad came to America as an Italian-speaking small boy, got educated, and become a lawyer. That he was overworked and miserably unhappy was irrelevant. No one got to shit on the American Dream, or insinuate that there might be anything soul-killing in the pursuit of capitalist achievement.

The Graduate may not even have been a very good book (though it made a great movie), but I keep thinking about the power of that character to instill such strong and contradictory feeling in us. The question of Benjamin Braddock's likeability really does seem quite secondary.

On Likeability and Fictional Characters

 The conversation among book people last week was Claire Messud's interview with Publisher's Weekly, in which she took the reviewer to task for essentially asking whether a reader would want to be friends with Nora, the main character in Messud's new novel The Woman Upstairs. The author answered:

For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “is this a potential friend for me?” but “is this character alive?"

The notion of characters being likeable is one that follows female authors around. I've seen women writers shredded in workshop for presenting stories with female characters that were were not likeable or "relateable." It's a criticism that shows up in reviews of novels by women authors, and in interviews like the one above, though the likeability question is only implied.

I love Claire Messud's answer to the question. I am especially admiring that she had such a true and brilliant response to it seemingly on the tip of her tongue. But as I've absorbed that interview and its implications over the last week, I began my own train of thought about the likeability of characters.

When I teach my unit on character development to my middle school-aged creative writing students, I start by asking the question, "Do characters always need to be good or do good for us to love them?" They are quick to assert that the answer is "no." In that age group, Professor Snape from the Harry Potter books has often come up as a character about whom we can feel ambivalent. With notably few exceptions, the children are quite clear that they somehow want to read about Snape, though he is dramatically unlikeable, even when doing what they would regard as the right or noble thing.

Though the children are not confused about "likeable" characters needing to actually be likeable, we still -- or perhaps I still -- tend to use this way of talking about the characters. "Who do we love and why do we love them?" I am always asking. There is some way we really do want to like or or even love the characters in our favorite novels, though it does not neccessarily hinge on them being good or right or even someone with whom we'd like to be friends.

I think Messud is right when she says what we really want in good fiction are characters who are alive, who come off the page with their life. We love that life, and no matter how these characters might make us feel, we can't part ways with them until the end of the story. I would argue, though, that that life is what makes us like the character, in spite of bad or annoying characteristics. We can't help ourselves.

The question, asked the way it was asked of Messud may certainly have sexist overtones. And yet, I don't know myself how to get around talking about great characters -- no matter how relateable or spectacularly flawed and difficult -- without using the vocabulary of like/love. I will have to live with that congitive dissonance.