Travelers

With all the attention the movie version of The Odyssey has been receiving my thoughts have turned to another intrepid traveler, Barry Lopez.

Homer’s Odysseus met with every possible temptation, threat and struggle to return home. On one level it is a triumph over what we now call PTSD. Ten years recovery, after ten years as a warrior.

It could also be read as a testosterone-driven adventure for young adults. But it is better understood as an allegory with his ordeals representing a series of psychological states of mind. Each challenge is met with ingenuity, courage, expediency and reason, asserting himself against the fury of the gods. Ultimately, there is a yearning, above all else, for the feminine principle in order to gain his full humanity. 

Barry Lopez died six years ago. His genius ranged from great writing to geology, anthropology and photography, with a fearless exploration of harsh ecosystems, from equatorial deserts to polar tundras. He lived with arctic wolves and survived forty feet waves around Antarctica, as well as witnessing the wonder of one hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

Unlike Odysseus he wasn't seduced by lotus or sirens. He didn't need Circe to lure him into untamed and unknown. His quest was for the felt experience and the people who live on that margins of survival. He walked into an old-growth rainforest to feel the sense of being lost. At the same time he tested himself enduring spatial closeness. 

His brilliance as a writer cannot be overstated. He was able to transport readers to confront their elemental selves and discover their own inner wilderness. His body of work erases categories. He was an essayist, author of eight works of fiction and winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. His final book, Horizons reads like a memoir as he recounts six of his previous excursions into nether regions.

Above all else he was a humanitarian with a voice both urgent and lyrical. He wrote of the perils facing our planet even as he delivered affirmations with a reverence for life. I heard echoes of Thoreau and Loren Eiseley, as he noted that undisturbed land not only heals but brings a state of transcendence, releasing us to appreciate the wonder of otherness. He warned that violence to the earth, as in mining or drilling, begets violence to ourselves.

Lopez showed us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez was. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists was a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our xenophobia, he pled for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

It isn't my intention to conflate the lives of Odysseus and Lopez. One was, arguably, the prototype of modern man in an epic poem and the other a real life national treasure. The former made his way to his imagined home after vanquishing all manner of foe while our contemporary polymath found his home among inhospitable locations on the map.   

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.

 

Monarchs

No, not him again. True, they both have a thing for Mexico and favor orange with darkness around their edges, but the ones I’m thinking of have wings and they flap across the border, undocumented. As far as I know none are rapists.

Our subspecies potentate just prances around his gold-gilt bathrooms eyeing spigots and hurls verbal spitballs or gets ridden around the greens putting balls into holes.

Aside from all the other ills of this fragile planet, monarch butterflies are facing eviction from their winter home. The next time your order avocado toast, think again. The fir trees where millions go to cuddle in the winter, are being systematically cut down. Farmers on that land are planting avocado trees in their place. There is no money in butterflies but Mexico produces 80% of the world’s guacamole which fed sports fans while watching the World Cup. There were more tree stumps left than goals scored.

Here I am, trying to catch the butterfly of the moment even though the best I can do is note all the flutterbys I failed to net. Why butter, I wonder? Flutter is better than butter, so say I and now I know the answer though I wish I could withdraw the question: Because their excrement looks like butter says Google, as if it were flying cows. From now on I’ll take my toast dry, thank you, and that could be my butterfly moment with patterns made by my toaster oven on the low-carb, high fiber Keto bread, but hold the excrement, and besides what other species is named after their poop, I ask you?

Monarchs migrate 3,000 miles from eastern Canada to the High Sierras in Mexico. However it takes 4-5 generations for a round trip. They feast on toxic milkweed. Apparently, one creature's poison is another's banquet. Predators find out that monarchs are devoutly to be avoided.

They are defenseless, however, against human predators with our nets and pins. We seem to have cultivated predation into an artform. I can’t imagine that butterflies enjoy being pinned. After all, life is short enough orchestrating their choreography among the wildflowers. Their lifespan is about 6-8 weeks. They must die of exhaustion, a week being a decade but who's counting?

I wonder if their brief days are a frenzy or are there patterns, as in toast, we can't see? Jesus, is that you, Jesus or is it Walt Whitman? To be permitted to hold my gaze into those leaves of grass if only for a split nanosecond, seems to me a better use of butter as they flutter by. Put me on the wings of the lepidoptera as it dreams of its past life as a caterpillar, then a chrysalis; always on the verge of its next incarnation.

The Lost Language Of Chirps

It's come to this. Most of my friends have hearing aids. The rest don't know what they're missing. We get to hear utensils drop in restaurants, highly amplified. We also are treated to closed captioning not only for what is being said by humans but for howls and snarls of lurking beasts as well bird's honks, hoots, twirps and chirps. Not that we hear them but we are told they're happening.

Birds chirping seem to be the obligatory opening lines for detective stories set in bucolic England. It translates to, You'll never guess what's about to happen in this quaint Cotswold village. If nameless birds aren't chirping then gulls must be screeching. I prefer the chirp where I can be lulled into somnambulance. 

If the scene is set in Brooklyn we might get boids choiping particularly on Turd Avenue and Turdy-Turd St. Then we’re in for 90 minutes of crooked cops, back alleys, a topless dancer going to night school for a law degree and a car chase destroying a dozen fruit stands and pushcarts. Is that a chirp or a garbage truck backing up?

However nothing compares to the sunny hamlets with thatched roofs, riddled with crime and no one does it as well as the Brits. Their supply of detective stories is inexhaustible. Tough-gentle, scruffy-clean cut, oversized-frail, alcoholic-teetotalers, clergymen, classicists, hard or soft-boiled.

People with fully functioning ears may not know that a chirping bird is often sufficient to set off a mild-mannered septuagenarian on a killer rampage. Who knew what evil lurked behind those bake sales and cricket matches? Maybe it was the white suits that drove Fitzroy Fitzmorris to plot the demise of the former Lieutenant of the 3rd Fusiliers and local headmaster.

For the first 40 minutes every one of the eleven suspects interviewed tells whooping lies. As the truth is grudgingly revealed it becomes clear, from the couch, who the murderer is…..only to be dashed as his body turns up bludgeoned with a fire iron. 

Suddenly each face changes, birds stop chirping and crows start cawing accompanied by organ music. The Detective Inspector overhears a conversation at the pub and has an epiphany. Everyone is to gather in the library. He methodically eliminates the culprits one by one until……..yes, we say, he didn’t fool me for a minute. It is, of course, the retired benign viscount whose cunning chess moves are played, in human scale, out on the village green. The inspector then returns to take tea with his perfect wife and birds can be heard chirping once more.

Of course, the chirping birds knew all along who did the dastardly deed. If we were fluent in the lost language of chirps we could have saved ourselves all this sleuthing.

The formula, set in Albion stone, is reaffirmed. Order has been restored. Truth will out. The gardens are untrammeled. Songs can be heard from the pub. On the lawn of the manor house a croquet ball has been hit squarely through a portal. We shall, for reasons unknown, sleep well tonight.

Deprived are those without captioning. They have to do their crime-solving without benefit of bird calls. Only we hearing impaired get to know that birds are chirping once again.

World Cup Fans In The Stands

I tried to care about the World Cup but suddenly nothing happened. Like Trump at Madison Square Garden during Knicks basketball playoff game, I nodded off. Yet every time I woke up, I had missed something; a penalty shot, a free kick, maybe even a goal. Perhaps if I took the time to learn what an off-side or an infraction is, it might help. But I'm too ossified to enthuse about men, once again, throwing, kicking or clubbing balls into holes. Yes, it is better than throwing each other into pits, but still.

Go ahead, call me an Ugly American. 3.5 to 5 billion soccer fans can't be wrong. On the other hand, McDonalds sells 76 burgers every second, world-wide. They go for up to $25 at a World Cup match. When they sold 300 hundred billion they stopped counting. At my age big numbers no longer impress.

I'm not one to sneer over sports events. We get to chose our alternative universe. Baseball is in my bloodstream. I can watch a game and write a blog at the same time. I don't scoff at slow. Runs are hard to come by; the average game has about 6-7. 

Basketball has become a too high-scoring game with each team averaging over 100 hundred points. I can handle the last 2 minutes. Football keeps my attention with 30-50 points scored between the 2 teams.  

Fandom makes no sense. I know, I'm one of them. It is an exercise in the irrational which taps into the reptilian brain. It strikes me that the phenomenology of being an avid fan is more pronounced today than ever before. Passions have been sublimated into identification with a particular jersey. Stadiums are bursting with cheers and jeers. The throng is living or dying vicariously with the fate of their team. And yet, nothing in real life changes.

Of course, the fan knows this. We will go home (or get up from the couch) and register the elation or dejection for an hour or two. For those who bet, it's different story. An estimated 50 billion dollars has been wagered on this World Cup. Go figure!

On some level, fans are players in this theater of the absurd. It is a meta world enacting grievances as if the outcome will redress those complaints.

I am taken in by the crowd screaming, praying, rising en masse with each turn, projecting their imagined selves onto the field. The image of 60,000 ardent souls wearing the colors of their team's uniforms, coiled in expectation, is an arresting sight. From a distance it is a Pointillist painting or a Pollock action drip, a splattering of red or smear of green on the canvas. The painter might discover an abstract splash from his palette to capture the vortex of shoe and ball headed for the open net. Or possibly the head of a leaping player altering the trajectory of the soccer ball. 

Half the fans will get drunk in revelry. The other half may also drown their sorrows in drink, cursing missed calls, the refs and their fallen idols who let them down, just like life itself.

Berra Not Serra

An astute friend pointed out that on my list of quotations, I failed to include any words of wisdom by our singular 20th century philosopher Yogi Berra.

Berra elevated common sense to an artform and he did it unwittingly. His blurts became immortal and raised illogic to new heights. When Plato heard Yogi speak, he rethought the shadows on his wall, even though he'd been dead for over 2,500 years. 

It's been said that much of what Yogi is said to have said, he never said. Spinoza would have scoffed and Schopenhauer would have shrugged.

Yogi's most profound statement came when he advised a slumping teammate to try swinging only at strikes. Pause and consider these words to live by. First, it means recognizing when a strike is right in front of you. Then it means not swinging when the ball is out of your zone.

Take it out of the ballpark. We are all standing at the plate with a bat in our hands; we’re all seekers looking for our pitch. Few of us are finders because we are not seeing what we've been waiting for. To be present is to see and listen, to pick up what others let go by. Berra knew when to swing. He was a seer.

As Popes go, the late Francis ranks high on my list. He seemed more catholic than Catholic, yet he chose to elevate Junipero Serra to sainthood in Sept 2015. His papal decree got it all wrong. 

He canonized the colonizer, Junipero Serra. At the time of the American Revolution Serra was busy in California jamming catechisms down the throat of indigenous people whether they liked it or not. (As if they didn't already have a spirituality we could have learned from). There is evidence that he enslaved the Indians and forced them to build nine missions. Beware of anyone with a messianic urge.

The Church was part of the Spanish rapacious power structure; a shameful chapter in European history still with its aftershocks. 

No doubt by some act of providential intervention Yogi Berra chose that September week in 2015 to die.

Yogi was born in St. Louis, played in New York and spent his retirement years in New Jersey. When his wife asked him where he'd like to be buried, he said, Surprise me.

Now here was a man who not only performed miracles, he was one. He took the fork in the road less travelled to get to the restaurant nobody went to anymore because it was too crowded. 

It is also a fact he was among the first to land on Omaha Beach in the liberation of Western Europe. He was wounded but fought on and received the Purple Heart among other citations. This is enough to be sanctified.

His feats on the field also left the crowd scratching their heads. His strike zone seemed to extend from one dugout to the other. He swung at pitches from his shoelaces to his helmet. Yet he never struck out more than 38 times in a season. Compare this with today’s sluggers sometimes whiffing over 200 times. As Yogi said, 90% of the game is 50% mental.

I can think of no other person whose legacy is to encourage aphorisms from others and, by public acclaim, have it attributed to himself, though he denied it. He has become a repository of twisted common sense, even posthumously with no end in sight. As Yogi said, the future ain't what it used to be.

At the mention of Yogi Berra’s name, a certain bemusement crosses our face. While Father Serra stole the native language, Father Berra's casual erudition is well on its way to immortality. Yogi not Junipero, Berra not Serra should have been sainted.

Choice Words

Here are a few quotes I've picked up along the way:

Rumi said, If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light. __________________________________________

The only aristocracy is that of consciousness. 

D.H. Lawrence

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The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. -Vincent van Gogh

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The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, 

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Fascism can no longer be seen as an evil force visited upon the public from above but a sickness that lives within each individual and could easily be tapped given the appropriate circumstances and timing. Sherill Tippins

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Voltaire wrote, God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. -Arundhati Roy

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“I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point. Man was made for action and for bustle.” Abigail Adams

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All children are poets

until they stop reaching for

butterflies that are not there. Dunya Mikhail

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The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. -George Marshall

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. -Federico Fellini

So we buy handbags and hats and other overpriced appurtenances of successful people because we have to nurture our confusing identities. Wan A. Hulaimi

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Colum McCann said: "I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small."

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Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege. -William Beveridge 

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The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." Albert Einstein

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You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday

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In the end, the poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see--and what we see is life. -Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (24 Apr 1905-1989) 
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The world-wide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day of modern warfare.  Peter Ustinov

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Charles Simic said:  Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

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It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -Edmund Hillary

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Adrienne Rich said, Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone."

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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" Vita Sackville-West

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 "There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army." John Ashbury

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A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love.  Yehuda Amichai

Independence Day

The irony is inescapable; celebrating the birth of our nation as it was in the maternity ward, even as it is now in the emergency room. Our job is to keep it from the morgue.

In fact, the signing in 1776 did not declare the establishment of a new nation. It declared the severing of ties with our mother country. At the time we were a loose confederation of colonies. The word nation first appeared in 1783.

250 years ago was not all that different from today. The division between blue and red states is deep. Our country is almost as fissured as in the antebellum period. 

The legislative branch is dormant. The judiciary contorts itself to find justification for the dissolution of our democracy as it grants the president authoritarian powers with impunity. We are witnessing an imperial presidency which our Founders would have disavowed.

Surely, we did not break with one monarchy to embrace another.

Back in those good ole days of 1776 the colonies were split into three camps. The four New England States, (NH, MA, RI and CT were founded largely by those seeking religious freedom. They became more literate by reading the Bible. Too cold for growing crops in inarable soil year-round, they lived on logging, fishing and shipbuilding.

The middle ones, PA, NJ, NY and DE furnished wheat and grain. Their population was more diverse with settlers from Scandinavia, Germany and Holland and were known for greater religious tolerance. The upper Midwest might be regarded as our purple states in today's electoral map.

The five Southern States were home to four of our first five presidents, aka Founding Fathers. They relied on slave labor for their wealth and were later ardent supporters of state's rights.

The racism of the 18th century in all its virulence, poisons the air again today, with discriminatory hirings and firings as well as denial of voting rights. Until we confront our sins of human bondage, racist behavior will continue.

At the same time, we are also a country born out of the Enlightenment. Our founders were deists who relied on reason, rejected dogma and the divine right of kings. This new experiment called Democracy was a beacon for those seeking new opportunity and in flight from oppression.

We have always been a fractious country. As we celebrate our document of aspirations, we must also acknowledge the stains in our heritage. The tree of Democracy demands watering and custodial care as well as action against the blight which threatens our beautiful country at its roots.