"A Truly Humble Cottage"

I finished the first draft of Pulled Into Nazareth today. Finishing a draft is always a memorable occasion. I will spend the rest of the year editing it, but at least some of the suspense of is over. Five years ago I laid out the over-arching scenario of the series of books I am writing. But the details! I never know how the details are going to go until I write each chapter for the first time.

As I write, I keep in mind my desire to be “truly humble.” Christopher Alexander writes: “I say that even humble buildings cannot be made, because the infection which comes from our mechanistic cosmology is mainly one of arbitrariness – and the arbitrariness breeds pretension. In the presence of pretentiousness, true humility is almost impossible. A truly humble cottage even, seems beyond the reach of most builders today.” [Footnote, p. 24, The Luminous Ground, volume 4 of  The Nature of Order]

This small paragraph, an aspect of Alexander’s research and attempt to get beyond a mechanical world view to one in which value has an objective place, strikes me as getting to the heart of the problem writers have as well. Much of current literature certainly seems arbitrary to me, the corollary being that pretension is required to insist on its importance. But pretension doesn’t get you very far.

Of course striving for humility too can also be a dangerous. I keep in mind Neil Innes’ (of Monty Python fame) “Protest Song,” which he introduces by saying “I’ve suffered for my music. Now it’s your turn.” As Don says, “When you give people something it should be a gift, not an invoice.” I certainly don’t suffer as I write, and I do hope my work is a gift to others, and not a demand for attention.

This month also, through the heroic efforts of my brother and sisters, nieces and nephews, the small beach house my Dad built at the edge of a Minnesota lake was reconstructed. The little one-room beach house was a blessed retreat for many of us, but it had become uninhabitable for the last few years due to rot and foundation problems. It is no longer possible to build so close to a lake in Minnesota, but existing buildings are exempted from the rule.

My sister Naomi wrote of her stay in the beach house in 1981, “Never having had a chance to stay down there by the water before, I was overwhelmed by its magic. A small square room with a bed, a rocking chair and a lamp, it perches above the shore. The only thing you can see out of any of the windows is trees and sky and lake. At the head of the bed there is a low window so you can lie on your stomach and look out at the stars over the lake at night. The effect is rather like living in a treehouse – the breeze blows in and out the windows and sings in the branches. And at night if it’s rough you can hear the sounds of water lapping the shore as you lie in bed – or if its quiet, sometimes there’s the eerie cry of a loon echoing across the still space.”

The beach house is indeed “a truly humble cottage.” It of course plays a part in my fictional writing, as do many other aspects of my extended family.

Patterns of Wholeness

Christopher Alexander published A Pattern Language in 1977. It turned up at my architectural firm almost right away, its thin Bible-paper pages dense with ideas, photographs and diagrams. He felt that he and his associates and found a ‘timeless way of building’ which enabled people to design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities.

The impact of this, and other books by Alexander, has been far-reaching, going to the heart of a larger debate about ways of making buildings. Alexander followed up with a four-book series The Nature of Order [2002-2004], in which he pointed out that the limited mechanistic view of the world we now use must begin to include statements of value as matters of objective truth. Though skeptical himself, he tried to show in these books how this could be done.

In 1990, Christopher Alexander’s “unique, world-class Oriental rug collection” was placed on display at the deYoung Museum in San Francisco. It began to be clear that Alexander’s study of ancient rugs and carpets was an essential part of his work. In 1993 he published A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art: The Color and Geometry of Very Early Turkish Carpets. In it he writes, “to study wholeness we must have an empirical way of distinguishing it from preference”[p. 27].

It did not escape my notice that, throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, the architects who were able to were buying Oriental [for lack of another inclusive word] carpets. Rooms generally had white walls and modernist furniture made of leather and steel, sitting on colorful patterned floor coverings as ancient as the person could afford.

In 1971, long before I knew anything about Alexander, I bought a camel bag at the Alameda flea market because it was there, because it was lovely and I could afford it at $25. It had a small piece of masking tape attached to it at the back with the word “Caucasian” on it. The camel bag has hung on the wall of every apartment or house I’ve lived in since. As you can see from the photograph, it has strong natural colors, and wonderful designs. Having lived with it so long, I surely take it for granted, but at the same time it has probably influenced me immensely.

Nowadays we must be sure that the carpets we buy are not being made by children who are not getting an education. The Rugmark Foundation in India has set up a certification process to ensure that a rug has not been made by child labor. Other groups, such as Azerbaijan Rugs, strive to bring life to forgotten traditions, studying ancient designs, returning to hand spinning, carding and natural dyes.

Georges Gurdjieff, whose books we also read in the 1970s, traded in carpets throughout his life. A more beguiling description of wholeness than what he told P.D. Ouspensky of the rug-making process would be hard to imagine! Gurdjieff “spoke of the ancient customs connected with carpet making in certain parts of Asia; of a whole village working together at one carpet; of winter evenings when all the villagers, young and old, gather together in one large building and, dividing into groups, sit or stand on the floor in an order previously known and determined by tradition. Each group then begins its own work. Some pick stones and splinters out of the wool. Others beat out the wool with sticks. A third group combs the wool. The fourth spins. The fifth dyes the wool. The sixth, or maybe the twenty-sixth, weaves the actual carpet. Men, women and children, old men and old women, all have their own traditional work. And all the work is done to the accompaniment of music and singing. The women spinners with spindles in their hands dance a special dance as they work, and all the movements of all the people engaged in different work are like one movement in one and the same rhythm. Moreover each locality has its own special tune, its own special songs and dances, connected with carpet making from time immemorial.” [P.D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, 1949, Chapter 2]

Paradigms New and Old

I went to college a little before structural analysis set in, so I didn’t know what a syntagm was (though I had some idea of paradigm) until I met Don Starnes. Don went to San Francisco State in filmmaking. I’ve seen him, when editing a piece, plot the paradigm, what the piece means, against the syntagm, the sequence of things that happen. This is the simplest way I have been able to understand it. In filmmaking, it means that a visual language delivers the meaning, plotted against things that happen on the film’s “timeline.”

Don laments the lack of meaning in much of our current “entertainment.” This morning he told me about a reality show he has agreed to work on briefly. “It’s horrible,” he tells me. “Philosophical people don’t make good television,” I remind him. “They don’t even make good Facebook!” Nevertheless, people are hungry for stories that involve them, that encompass the complexity they live in without demeaning their sense of themselves and their possibilities.

Duane Elgin has taken this problem head-on. He notes that we are in a time of transition. New stories could involve the ideas that the human race is growing up; communication is awakening our consciousness to a global, rather than a local scale; and the hero’s journey could now be a story of return to living in harmony with the earth and each other. He suggests that the despair and destruction we see around us may be part of the difficult birth we are all going through. The project on which he collaborates to develop new stories is described here.

We will always need new stories. But, like most people deeply involved in literature, I am also happy with the old ones. Humans and their patterns have not changed very much, and a richly told story invites us in to watch. As Kenneth Rexroth says, in his book Classics Revisited, all great fiction is “the story of the immensely difficult achievement of personal integrity.” He is here referring to The Dream of the Red Chamber, sometimes called The Story of the Stone, a novel written in China between 1754 and 1764. In it, Cao Xueqin looks back at the aristocratic family he came from, writing in poverty at the end of his life. I am reading an English translation by David Hawkes.

Bao-yu, the protagonist, is surrounded by a hierarchical family structure which requires daily filial obligation. He lives in a beautiful garden, and knows the poetry of China so well he excels in composing allusive poems. His father, however, wants him to study the Four Books, the basis of the Confucian philosophy which structures Chinese society. When Bao-yu doesn’t, his father beats him badly “for the honor of the family.” His friend says, “I suppose you will change now.” But Bao-yu is intransigent. “Don’t worry,” he says. “I shan’t change. People like that are worth dying for. I wouldn’t change if he killed me.”

The paradigm of this book is unlike any Western novel. The syntagm is well-populated! One thing happens after another, the action shifting from one part of the huge family complex, in which more than 300 people live, to another. Servants and masters all take their turn. Characters die and are mourned. The family fortunes sink. Infighting and chaos begin to undermine the household. It’s a big melodrama which draws you into it with its lively characters, said to be based on real people.

Though willful and mercurial, gentle Bao-yu struggles against the hate that results from the difficulties around him. Rexroth suggests he embodies the Taoist principle of non-action, that of water seeking its own level and eventually wearing away mountains. It is a feminine, yin principle, reflecting the way the Chinese people see and interact with nature. Neither yin nor yang is evil. They alternate, each containing a little of the other. Knowing it cannot last, Bao-yu is determined to enjoy, appreciate and celebrate his young life.

The yin/yang interaction of the rise and set of phenomena is a more grown-up way of looking at the world than seeing it as black and white, good and evil. It does not pit people against nature, as we somehow do in the West. Evil certainly exists, and heroes and heroines must fight it where it arises. But the interaction is messy and our heroes and heroines would do well to look into their own hearts and motives as they go forth into battle. The paradigm of fighting and battle itself should be questioned. As Duane Elgin suggests, the hero’s journey might now be more about a return to harmony.

Songwriters

Buffy St. Marie

The great writing of my generation does not always appear in novels or poems. It’s mostly been spent on songs, which, in performance or recorded, had a lot more audience. The great opening out of American culture in the 1960’s and 1970’s absorbed amazing lyricists. Especially if you count the Canadians among them! It is hard to write about the music of this time in a short blog post, but also impossible not to mention how much we lived, and learned, from the messages in songs.

Civil rights marches and the protests against the Vietnam war were powered by song. I’ve read how the Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, starting point for all of the civil rights marches out of Selma, reverberated with songs and spirituals. All of the marches I was on began and ended with speakers and singers. A friend of mine was in love with Phil Ochs, whose songs were very much to the point at the time.

I bought a cheap record player to be able to buy and listen to albums. Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell albums were the first two, and after playing them over and over, I knew the songs by heart. This became a pattern. I didn’t listen to the radio or buy pop singles. I bought the albums of songwriters for whom the lyrics were as important as the music. That doesn’t mean I didn’t love a good rocking beat. I remember how we danced! But the albums I knew best were about the words.

Bob Dylan and John Lennon were perhaps the most influential songwriters. We had The White Album and George Harrison’s triple album All Things Must Pass.  We waited for Dylan’s albums: Nashville Skyline and Blood on the Tracks. I loved Kris Kristofferson, for both his writing and his acting. He wrote some of the anthems of our lives, such as “Me and Bobby McGee.” I knew all of the songs on Music for Big Pink, many written by Robbie Robertson. The title of my current book, Pulled Into Nazareth, comes from one of his songs.

Kris Kristofferson

Buffy St. Marie’s voice and her lyrics as well were mesmerizing. They are still wonderful. Joni Mitchell’s lyrics grew tiresome pretty early for me, and Carole King was way too poppy. Carly Simon was everywhere, and therefore uninteresting, though I got to love some of her work later. We all hoped for a lot from Phoebe Snow, but we only got one album. Linda Ronstadt covered Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s wonderful songs, though I didn’t know them until later either.

I resonated to the words of John Prine and John David Souther, as sung by Linda Ronstadt. Sad songs like “Angel from Montgomery” and “Silver Blue.” But also I loved Boz Scaggs, who was from our town (San Francisco) and wrote his own unique music. I had Moments and Silk Degrees, his best selling albums. I cut photos of him dancing out of The Rolling Stone and taped them to the walls of my office! I also loved Ray Charles, who was a little older, but actively writing and performing during this period.

By this time I wasn’t in much control of the stereo. These were the days that, unless you put on headphones and shut everyone else out, everyone in the house (and maybe the apartments above and below you!) listened to the same music. I loved Bob Marley, but only got to know him thoroughly later. Same with Randy Newman and Jackson Browne, whose work I find amazing. These are only a few of the many wonderful songwriters whose lyrics and music soared through our lives.

Recently, Neil McCormick wrote of a 2010 performance by Kris Kristofferson at Cadogan Hall: “At 74, standing tall and straight at the centre of an otherwise empty stage, he held a London audience completely spellbound by the magical power of an open spirit and truly great songs … Now that Cash, his first public champion, has passed away, Kristofferson provides a rare link to an old idea of a mythic, honourable America. His English audience responded with generosity and respect.”

My character Paul is a reasonably good folk guitarist. He is often made welcome because of it and the number of songs that he knows. I can’t help but quote some of these songs in the stories I am writing, and I hope that the songwriters will be happy with my declaration of “fair use” as commentary and criticism, as noted in copyright law. Their great work united us and expressed what we were thinking. Literature may have been the poorer, but public life was enriched.

Molly Hootch Ruling

Public education in Alaska took a radical turn in the mid 1970’s. Previous to this time, kids who wanted a high school education, and even some younger kids, could only get it at large boarding schools. High school was not available in the villages strung out across Alaska. Kids were sent far from home to schools run by the Board of Indian Affairs or to schools in the larger cities. Kids from different native Indian, Eskimo and Aleut cultures were mixed together and speaking their native languages was forbidden.

My aunt Helen Frost established a Lutheran Center for native students attending the Mt. Edgecumbe School, a boarding school run by the BIA in 1955. She especially worked with the students who came from the towns where she had been a missionary: Igloo, Teller, Shishmaref and Nome. “They were far from their home villages and enjoyed having someone they knew to visit and worship with on Sundays,” she writes in Frost Among the Eskimos, a memoir of her time in Alaska from 1926 to 1961. This boarding school still exists and is known for its science programs.

It was very difficult for young kids to leave home, but also for the villages to say goodbye to their children during the school year. Debby Dahl Edwardson chronicles the experiences of her husband in boarding school in My Name Is Not Easy. One of her husband’s siblings was sent to school in Oklahoma without the knowledge of their parents. One was killed when, desperately homesick, he left for home in bad weather and was lost in a small plane crash. The kids learned to stick together during their difficulties, and, according to Edwardson, became the generation which created the Alaskan Federation of Natives. This organization, still a powerful force in Alaskan politics, originally worked on negotiation and implementation of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, passed in 1971.

In 1974, a class-action suit, charging discriminatory practice on the part of the state, was filed on behalf of rural secondary-aged students, for not providing local high school facilities for predominantly native communities when it did for same-size, predominantly non-native, communities. The suit became known by the name of Molly Hootch, a Yup’ik Eskimo student from Emmonak whose family was among those filing. Molly was no longer in school by the time the suit was settled out of court in 1976, with the Tobeluk Consent Decree. It declared the state would establish a high school in every community where there was an elementary school, unless the community declined the program.

The settlement fell at a time when social, political and economic factors were favorable to the success of the program. Alaskan native peoples were becoming more involved in political and social aspects of their lives and Alaska was suddenly wealthy due to pipeline revenues from the oil discovered at Prudhoe Bay. Schools built in small villages across the state quickly became community centers.

As Nick Jans describes in The Last Light Breaking, a record of his years teaching in Ambler, these schools faced enormous challenges. One unexpected result was the prevalence of basketball! Ambler residents “specified that a gym was first on the list, and they got what they asked for: a basketball floor with cramped classrooms tacked on as an apparent afterthought.” Cultural renaissance also came about, with locally-controlled school districts mandating that local language and culture be taught to every child.

Paul sees all of these changes. When he begins teaching at Lathrop High School in Fairbanks, he is especially sensitive to the Eskimo and Indian kids who are boarders, sometimes treated like servants in the houses where they live. During pipeline construction, double shifts are instituted to accommodate all the students. Paul assists in building local schools during the summers after the Molly Hootch agreement is put into effect. In 1976, he moves to the burgeoning West Valley High School out near the university when it opens, behind schedule and with 250 more students than it was built for. Fairbanks is the city Paul hoped for, diverse, complex, but at the edge of a natural wilderness.

On the Move

The 1970’s was the decade in which airline travel became normal for us. Aisf Siddiqi confirms this here, describing how advances in jet engine construction led to new social habits for the middle class: “students were now traveling to Europe for summers, and families were now vacationing in far-off places for a single weekend. By the 1970s, the convenience of jet travel made vast international cultural exchanges a norm.”

The United States is a very large place. Line, Marty and Paul, take up residence far from their parents in California and Alaska. Mother and Dad still have young children at home and do all of their vacationing at their cabin on a northern Minnesota lake. They hardly travel at all. But affordable airline travel allows Line, Marty and Paul to travel to Minnesota to visit every once in a while.

Travel set off all kinds of innovation in luggage and gear to make it possible. Researching questions such as “when did roller bags come into use?” or “when were baby backpacks first used?” reminded me that many of the things we now take for granted were new, or didn’t exist at the time I am writing about.

Ann Moore with her daughter

You could find the first Snugli in the 1970’s. It was patented by Ann Moore in 1969. She had noticed how peaceful babies carried on their mother’s backs were, in Togo where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. With her mother’s help, she crafted a backpack so she could “wear” her daughter and have her hands free. There was no advertisement. People just kept asking Ann, “where can I get one of those?” Ann sent the orders back to her mother in Ohio, who sewed them with the help of her friends. It was then featured in the Whole Earth Catalog, and became a cottage industry for the little town in Ohio where Ann grew up.

About the same time, Owen Maclaren, an aeronautical engineer, heard his daughter complaining about the difficulties of traveling with a baby carriage. Maclaren came up with the idea of a lightweight, safe stroller that could be folded up like an umbrella, getting a US patent for it in 1968. With a strong, aluminum frame the stroller weighed six pounds and took up very little space. Maclaren products, manufactured near Rugby, England, and exported everywhere, led the innovation in strollers that continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

You did not see many suitcases on wheels in the 1970s, much less the colorful little roller bags kids all have now. Bernard Sadow had trouble selling the idea when he first had it in 1970. Mr. Sadow was frequently told that men would not accept suitcases with wheels. “It was a very macho thing,” he said. He did begin to sell them, but big suitcases tipped and wobbled, pulled on a strap on their little wheels. In 1987 Robert Plath, a Northwest Airlines pilot, put two wheels and a long handle on his bag, calling it the Rollaboard. He sold it to his fellow crew members. When travelers in airports saw flight attendants striding briskly through airports with their Rollaboards in tow, everyone wanted one.

I’ve taken airline travel pretty much for granted ever since I took an Icelandic flight from New York to London in 1966. The most hair-raising flight for me was on an ancient airplane upholstered with ruffled green cushions from Chengdu to Chongqing, China, in October, 1990. I didn’t find out what the vintage of the propeller-driven airplane was. It clanked and bumped down the runway, but it did have cabin pressure and cheerful uniformed stewardesses. My heart was in my mouth, as they say, but I reasoned with myself that all of the other perhaps 100 passengers expected to arrive safely, and indeed we did!

I’ve never been in an airline emergency, or even lost a suitcase in all these years. I suspect my experience of the airlines is common, though I travel a lot less these days. One’s suitcase, as it comes bumping out of the baggage handlers and around the moving belt, will always be a welcome sight! And, like the character in Love Actually, I find the meetings of friends and relations in airports forever thrilling.

Half Way Mark

This year’s book in the series about the Mikkelsons, Pulled Into Nazareth, was slow getting started. I was doing more research for the book, as some of it is set in places I’ve never been. And also, things just seemed to get in the way of writing. In May I started worrying. The previous year I had been much further ahead. Would I finish half the book by the end of June? I began to put writing first, and yesterday I uploaded chapter 14 to the location where my first readers can find it, reaching the half way mark.

As I walked through San Rafael yesterday I noticed that the majestic old jacaranda which grows in a street park near the reconstructed Mission was blooming. The mysterious, spicey scent of the blue trumpet-flowers opened up in the hot, sunny afternoon, but the thick branches made a heavy shade and under the tree fallen blue flowers carpeted the grass.

I haven’t lived with many jacarandas, so each has been special. The first was in North Oakland, in a residential neighborhood which I passed through each day on my way to work. I struggled with the name jacaranda, which was pronounced with the ‘j’ sounding more like an ‘h.’ Its origins are lost in time, but is believed to be from a Guarani (an indigenous language of South America) word meaning ‘fragrant’. I especially enjoyed the few weeks in early summer when it bloomed.

Toward the end of those years, I talked to the owner of the tree. She threatened to cut it down as its roots were upending the concrete sidewalk. She was older and had no money to pay for insurance claims. So sad, I thought. Then I worked in Los Angeles for a few weeks in spring and found little ornamental forests of jacarandas on the plaza levels above the downtown streets.

Place is so important to all of us. Jacarandas don’t grow everywhere. Here the coastal morning fog cools us each night and clear, bright days are leaving us a very dry summer. But we are listening to the predictions of an El Niño which scientists perceive developing off the Pacific coast and hopeful that winter rains will alleviate our drought. I have long felt much more related to the rim of the Pacific than to Europe. Does this affect my writing, I ask myself.

When a Japanese-born friend tells me she is reading a lot of the Shishōsetsu, or I-novels written in Japanese, I research these and find that they are a particular genre in which writers used the events of their own lives for their subjects. Beginning in the early 20^th century, the writers wished to portray a realistic view of the world involving real experiences, often showing the darker side of society. Except for the realism involved, this did not sound like my work.

But then I found that Gish Jen, a contemporary American-born Chinese writer, has written a book entitled Tiger Writing, about the “profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.” She believes that the novel is essentially a Western form that values originality, authenticity and the truth of individual experience, while Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent.

I’ve had trouble thinking of the stories about the Mikkelson kids as a series of novels, though by some definitions, the novel is such a big envelope it can contain almost any kind of fiction. My work is certainly about “cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent.” It’s about family and how our personal and public lives interact, with emphasis on the private aspects. In the end, of course, I am not the one to say what the books become. I must just write them and hope that they eventually find their audience.

Alan Chadwick

Alan Chadwick

The University of California at Santa Cruz opened in 1965. It had a number of experimental ideas, including pass/fail grades, residential colleges, and the innovative cross-disciplinary history of consciousness program. For Paul Lee, however, the university’s first few years, before it hardened into a research institution, were crystallized by the presence of Alan Chadwick and the gardens he made there. Lee taught philosophy and religious studies at Crown College until he was denied tenure. Lee had the idea that a student garden on the beautiful, open campus would be a good addition to interdisciplinary study. Within weeks of a walk Lee organized to look for a possible garden site, Alan Chadwick turned up.

Alan Chadwick had been a British naval officer and a Shakespearean actor but it was as a master gardener for the many gardens he began up and down the coast of California that he made his mark. He used a French intensive biodynamic gardening system which has its roots in Rudolf Steiner and Goethe. When Lee asked whether Chadwick would make a garden for the university, Chadwick went out, bought a spade and started digging without any discussion of contracts, salary or where it should be done!

Chadwick hated industrial farming and gardening, the tractors which had compacted the soil and the profit motive that set them in motion. He preached biological diversity instead of mono-cropping and used companion planting and other techniques to guard against pests. His theme was working with nature, learning its rhythms and mysteries. He was as Paul Lee writes, “the Pied Piper of the reaffirmation of the integrity of organic nature and its carefree abundance, and the lifestyle that went with it.”

Photo copyright by Gregory Haynes

As a person, Chadwick was flamboyant and imperious. Students who became his apprentices never forgot him. Beth Benjamin writes: “He had flaming temper tantrums, told tales, gave us dinner parties, fed us with his own bread and ham and cheese, threw dirt clods at us and laughed as he hid behind the compost piles. He taught us the joy of work, the discipline to persevere in order to make a dream come true, even when we were hot and tired, and the deliciousness of resting and drinking tea after such monumental labors.”

The high point of Chadwick’s residence at Santa Cruz was a series of lectures he gave which had the quality of a revivalist meeting. Chadwick called people back to their own nature and the nature around them, which, he pointed out, was under radical attack. But after about five years of working on the gardens, Chadwick was finished at the university. Paul Lee was told by a colleague, “do you know that [Chadwick’s] garden has done more to ruin the cause of science on this campus than anything else?” Chadwick packed his bags and went on to Saratoga and Green Gulch.

This story and much more is told in Paul Lee’s rambling book, There Is a Garden in the Mind. His insistence that the California organic movement began at UC Santa Cruz with Alan Chadwick is further described on his website. Peter Jorris and Greg Haynes have put together a rich website including many video memories of his dynamic personality and teaching at Alan-Chadwick.org. Alan Chadwick also appears in Wendy Johnson’s book Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, in which she describes Chadwick’s contributions to the gardens at Green Gulch Zen Center just north of the Golden Gate. Chadwick died at Green Gulch in 1980.

For the purposes of my current novel, Pulled Into Nazareth, Chadwick impacts Line’s story when she and her husband move to Santa Cruz. Stephen is getting his doctorate in history and Line, though she has a small child in tow, works in the Chadwick garden before Chadwick leaves in 1972. Line is, of course, part of the choir. Alan has no need to preach to her! I first learned about Chadwick from my sister Solveig, a natural gardener who now does her gardening and birding in Yorkshire, England.

Birth Center

My character Line has been interested in the birth process since her earliest days in high school when a friend allows her to be present when his sow farrows. Even then, she is impressed with the transcendent atmosphere in the barn where her friend has spent the night with the newborn pigs and their mother.

Women in the 1970’s were exploring all kinds of ways to take back power they felt they had abdicated. By this time Line has moved to Santa Cruz where her husband is getting a doctorate in history at the University of California. Of course, when she is pregnant, she finds the Santa Cruz Birth Center that Raven Lang and other courageous women began.

Raven Lang's Birth Book, 1972

Raven Lang was unhappy with birth as she experienced it at Stanford Hospital. In Raven’s case, the delivery room was “urgently needed,” so her doctor enlarged the episiotomy he had already done and in his haste cut through her anal sphincter. When she left the hospital she could not straighten up to walk or carry her own baby. She knew something had gone terribly wrong, though no one would tell her what. She questioned all hospital practices related to pregnancy, labor and delivery.

Raven began to provide classes in natural childbirth and attend local home births. Public health nurses pressured Raven to find out whether she was certified to teach as she did. She gathered together other women she knew who were teaching childbirth preparation and attending home births as midwives. They began to meet and share their education and experiences. They started the Birth Center which was entirely supported by the Santa Cruz community. They kept statistics on all of the births they monitored. Eventually they shared medical knowledge with others up and down the coast, becoming a kind of irregular school, and then the California Association of Midwives.

In March, 1974, Linda Bennett and Jeanine Walker were requested to assist in a home birth. They were entrapped by undercover agents (one of them pregnant) who confiscated their kit of birth tools, arrested both women and drove them to jail. At the same time officials from the DA’s office, the sheriff’s office, the state police converged on the Birth Center. Raven and Kate Coleman inside the center alerted radio stations and newspapers. Instead of violating laws about practicing without licenses, the women at the Birth Center believed the real issue was one of human rights.

This story is told in Immaculate Deception, by Suzanne Arms. I got the 1975 version from the library, because I am working with a 1970’s point of view. In this first version of the book, Suzanne, who also had a bad birthing experience in a hospital, does not mince words! “I realized an entire system of medical procedures and interferences had been established to treat normal birth as a risky, dangerous, painful and abnormal process in which pregnant women have no choice other than to submit graciously.”

As a result of women questioning the over-technologized procedures of hospital births and obstetricians’ care, birth practices began to change. When my sister gave birth in the mid 1980’s, she chose one of two midwives practicing in San Francisco. They assisted her in the natural process in birthing rooms provided at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Her husband was in attendance and her new baby was not taken away from her.

Birthing is a cultural, as well as a deeply personal event and there is now a wide array of choices. But it does sound as if many women are again trusting birth to technology. In 2011 the national percentage of cesarean sections was 32.8%. Dr. Martin Blaser in Missing Microbes questions whether babies who don’t come down the birth canal are getting the immunities they need. I doubt I need to tell you where my character Line’s proclivities lie.

Scandia Bakery

Vivian and Marian Brown

Looking back at the 1970’s in San Francisco, the Scandia Bakery on Powell Street looms large for me. Crowded with small tables which threw its patrons into amenable groups, it served good coffee and an array of delectable pastries and cakes. Most weeks, if I went down town at all, I stopped in at the Scandia. My sisters and I used it as a meeting place, and on one magic occasion, I arrived to find my mother, who had not been in San Francisco in my memory, calmly sitting at one of the little tables.

A Swedish baker and his family owned the coffee shop. (Try as I might, I cannot find any reference to their name on the web.) While you sat drinking coffee, you might hear the pounding and rolling of dough on the balcony above you and smell the sweet and yeasty smells wafting out of the oven. The baker was grey-haired, older; his wife was behind the counter most of the time. Once I arrived to find their daughter, dark-haired and vivacious, holding court over a circle of admirers who filled up the tables in front. Dark-complected Eastern Europeans, they looked incredibly full of life to me.

I had a hard time choosing between my two favorite pastries, a cherry or a prune Danish, lightly glazed with sugar icing. The dough for Danish is similar to puff paste, rolled, folded and interleaved with butter. Making it is hard, heroic work. I didn’t try to make it myself more than once. I understand it comes from Austria, though it became wildly popular in Scandinavia. Wonderful Princess cakes of vanilla sponge, jam, and cream topped with a pale green marzipan frosting, and other cakes and puffs filled with pastry cream, as well as cookies were also served at Scandia.

The place was always full of exotic people. European tourists found it quickly. I loved listening to the many different languages at every crowded table. But there were also the regulars. I remember a well-dressed older woman, in hat and gloves, who I often saw there, or the concierge of a nearby hotel whom I talked to several times. I often saw Marian and Vivian Brown, the San Francisco twins, dressed to the nines and happily talking to people around them.

Tame as it sounds, I have a lot of wild associations with this bakery, partly because it was on Powell Street. The rows of sycamores at the base of the street cast light and shade on fair and foul alike, making it look like a European avenue. Those of us who lived in the city were not deceived, however! The street was just north of the Tenderloin, where many of the city’s most unfortunate lived. On Powell Street in the 1970’s you might walk past a derelict person lying face down in the street or see a wasted person who no longer cared that their rags barely covered them.

Because it is here that the cable car drivers push the cars onto a turntable, then turn them around and catch the cable under the street north, long lines of tourists waiting to go to Fishermans’ Wharf attract street musicians and entertainers. An indelible image for me was a thin, long-legged girl wearing woodsy material dancing in the center of a ruffian gypsy band. Tall dark men with long unkempt hair, brown faces and sinewy limbs, wearing ragged accretions of leather and cloth surrounded her. Wild, enchanted, gypsy fiddles made the music. The girl whirled as though possessed with a joy unequaled in the civilized city. They looked as though they had wandered out of a fairy tale.

Beside the bakery was a bookstore, a deep room infinitely filled with shelves and tables graced with books and stationery. I spent long hours there, sifting through the art books, hunting down new writers and decrying the fact that my favorites weren’t in print. The city changes constantly, but for my first years there a few blocks surrounding the Scandia Bakery was its cultural center.

Lifestyle

We began to use the word “lifestyle” in the early 1970’s mostly as a discussion about choice. I had made a few big choices by then, but was just starting to be able to make money enough for daily choices. What to eat, what to wear, where to live and how to get around. These choices all counted, we thought. In was a matter of citizenship in the world. The civil and political efforts of the past decade had led us to ask ourselves how to vote with our dollars and live responsibly.

Living simply was high on the list. We did not want to live in highly ornate, single-function rooms. We were quite mobile and minimalist, happily moving into apartments with a mattress on the floor and a few dishes, but we had definite quality standards. We thought older things had been crafted better than new ones. We loved natural materials, cotton, wool and linen, and avoided cheap polyester fibers. And we loved folk arts, things crafted by people from around the world which flowed into the Bay Area.

There was a strong sense of egalitarian camaraderie about these values in San Francisco. We had little money, but we were never hungry or homeless, as Patti Smith describes in Just Kids, about living in New York at this time. We always had jobs, places to live and money to spend on food. When our friends ran out of food stamps, they came over for dinner! People traded grass for stuff. Some of it wasn’t very important. Easy come, easy go. Experience ruled.

In scavenging bits and pieces, we gave preference to older things and anything made with wood. At the time you could find sturdy wooden boxes on Grant Street in Chinatown in which china had been packed. We brought them home, stained them and used them as shelves. We absolutely had the redwood burl slab which became a table when set on a stump. It was kind of rickety, so it mostly stood in the corner, covered with plants. David acquired a red Navajo rug which we used for everything. I bought a small knotted pile rug from the Caucasus at the flea market that had been used as a camel bag. I still have it.

When I first went to work in San Francisco in 1970, women were not allowed to wear pants of any kind. (That changed within the year!) The dresses we could afford in stores were awful, so we bought good cotton and sewed our own. Peasant dresses, often. We could buy cotton tee-shirts and jeans, and they became even more valuable as they aged and grew ragged. The handmade jean patches I made were loved. We all felt that we could make better things than we could afford. Friends became accomplished weavers, potters and embroiderers.

The wealth of ethnic restaurants in San Francisco enabled us to eat out a little, but we were also experimenting with all the kinds of cooking we had never done at home. Beef stroganoff, quiche lorraine, shepherd’s pie, eggplant parmigiana and salmon casserole were some of our specialties. I remember how delighted I was to buy abalone in the store (!) and learn to cook it. I baked breads until my Sunset bread recipe book fell apart, and all kinds of cookies and pies. When we could get our hands on a car, we went out to the produce markets on Alemany St. Of course we did entirely without table grapes or iceberg lettuce, part of a boycott on behalf of the United Farm Workers.

We did not want to spend time and money commuting. Since we hardly ever had more than one car, we moved into apartments close to my job. When I took a shift at a newspaper from 3 until 11 p.m., we moved to South San Francisco near the paper and I bought a 10-speed bike to get back and forth late at night. When I got a job in a building near Fisherman’s Wharf, we moved to North Beach. I could then walk to work.

And yes, there were drugs and music. Everyone was exploring, testing. Parties were epic, rock concerts pervasive, often free in the park. David was terribly interested in, even a purveyor, of drugs. Acid, cocaine, grass and hash of many different provenances (all of which he knew), even heroin. I did my last heraldic acid trip on the island of Hawaii in 1977. It was great. It was wonderful. It was enough.

Volkswagen Bus

Nothing is more emblematic of the 1970’s than the Volkswagen bus! I know. We had several Volkswagens, including the proverbial bus. At the time, those of us who came to San Francisco from other places were rolling stones. Everyone was searching, on the move to find information no one else had, out of sight music, the wilder side, land you could own, or maybe, friends and community. The Volkswagen bus made a turtle out of you, your house on your back. You could fill it with your stuff, sleep in it, pick up hitchhikers, even tune it yourself. It was the ultimate backpack for a fluid world.

David and I had thick pieces of foam cut to fit the back of the bus, so we could lay out our sleeping bags in it and be at home anywhere. Taking a hibachi to cook on, we drove up and down the California coast on the weekends, thinking ourselves kings of the road.

No Volkswagen was complete without a set of metric tools and a greasy copy of John Muir’s “How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.” Drawings carefully demonstrated exactly how to tune the Volkswagen and many other tasks. Not being the mechanical type, I never learned much about the engine, but David (having made friends with a great mechanic named Ernie) did learn to tune ours. He would listen to the purring of the motor, sensitive to all its sounds.

One Christmas we drove the bus down to Baja, hoping for sun and warmth. It was foggy and chill on the Baja beaches, however. And I had to take a plane home to get back to work in time, leaving David to nurse the bus home. The engine on the bus was air-cooled, and a piece of the aluminum foil he had used to try to draw air into the engine got sucked into the pipe. On the way home David drove slowly and stopped often to keep the poor thing from overheating. At least that was the story.

I never had driven much, as I mostly lived in San Francisco and took buses. But when David had a bad car accident and ended up in Crystal Springs Rehabilitation Center in San Mateo, I got my California driver’s license and learned to drive the bus. I liked being up high with not much car in front of you. When David was able, I drove down, picked him up and took him places, reminding him there was life outside.

We had many cars and apartments in the 1970’s. Coming from other parts of the country, we didn’t know how to settle down. There was some philosophy behind our transience, of course. We were trying to see what the basics were, what we did and didn’t need, to live lightly upon the earth. We didn’t collect furniture or anything else. We “borrowed” landscapes and libraries, sat in coffee shops and explored every inch of our city and our world, though we did keep friendships and held down regular jobs. We had acquired the habit of searching and there was always a reason to move.

I didn’t really know I was a rolling stone until I married a native Californian. I’ve now lived in the same place for fifteen years. It puts a different perspective on things to be sure!

Pulled into Nazareth

This year I’m working on a book entitled Pulled into Nazareth, from the first line of “The Weight,” a song generally attributed to Robbie Robertson of The Band. It was first recorded in 1968 on the album Music from Big Pink, one of the albums I listened to obsessively. Full of allusion and cryptic references, the enigmatic lyrics leave themselves open to many interpretations. For me, without putting too fine a point on it, they suggest the stumbling process of individuation, which for myself and some of my siblings, took up the years of the 1970’s.

This great version features the Staples Singers. It isn’t really a matter of the lyrics alone. The music is very exciting and the combination of the lyric suggestions and the music’s blues and wailing against the drums adds up to an emotional experience which might mean something to whatever place you currently find yourself. And that, is what the Seventies were about: finding yourself somewhere you didn’t expect but which is surely (is it not?) helping you along your very own path.

Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead

I just need some place where I can lay my head

“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?’

He just grinned and shook my hand, "no" was all he said.

Nazareth was at least partly the location of a legendary guitar maker in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, but also the home of a wandering carpenter.

Take a load off, Fanny

Take a load for free

Take a load off, Fanny

And you put the load right on me.

According to Robbie Robertson: “For me it was a combination of Catholicism and gospel music. The story told in the song is about the guilt of relationships, not being able to give what’s being asked of you. Someone is stumbling through life, going from one situation to another, with different characters. In going through these catacombs of experience. you’re trying to do what’s right, but it seems that with all the places you have to go, it’s just not possible. In the song, all this is ‘the load.’”

Titles for books are really interesting. I tried other ones, but kept coming back to this. The song is so well known and has been covered by so many people it can’t help but be recognized. In this book, Line, Marty and Paul have all left home. They all stumble, but their experiences take them deeper into the lives they have been given to lead.

Paul goes to Alaska, determined to find himself in a place none of his family has been. Alaska is the North Country and no mistake. So much is happening there in the Seventies. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 is, at the time, “widely described as the most openhanded and enlightened piece of legislation that has ever dealt with aboriginal people” [John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977]. An oil boom brings people to work on a pipeline laid from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez in the south, a technological feat. And midway in the decade, high schools begin to be built in the villages which had previously sent their high school age kids off to board under difficult conditions.

After a few dicey adventures, Line’s husband attracts her to Santa Cruz, where he is studying for his doctorate and later teaches in the History of Consciousness department at the newly-formed university. During this time, Allan Chadwick introduces French intensive gardening and is called the “Pied Piper” of the organic gardening movement in California. Line spends much time in his garden established at the university. She has more kids of her own and becomes midwife to others.

Marty, doing administrative work in architecture firms, finds herself at the beginning of a tech revolution. She is introduced to databases and word processing and there are rumors that architects will soon begin doing computer-aided drafting. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Erik continues to dabble in drugs on the one hand and architecture on the other. None of this answers the urgent identity questions Marty continues to pursue on her own, but this cannot be helped.

I look forward to the year of research, discovery and writing!

Lightly Held Books

With the preparation of a manuscript, the design of a book cover and a couple of digital uploads, Don and I have become book publishers. Or at least I have. He still has way too much to do with his own film business, but given the turtle-ish speed of the book business, I think I can handle it.

We published a memoir scavenged from the weblog we published from 2002 to 2009 called Living in the Flatlands. We used Amazon’s CreateSpace and an imprint we set up which follows the Lightly Held theme we’ve used for filmmaking. We’ve ordered proof copies, which will arrive in about ten days, but, given Don’s amazing visual sense in designing the book cover, and a CreateSpace template, I expect the result to look like a real book! It’s kind of a trial run, but we didn’t want Flatlands to disappear. The blog came to a natural end upon Jesse growing up and going to college, and our family changing.

Living in the Flatlands will be available as a paperback and also in a Kindle version. I am coming around to self-publishing partly because I have grown to understand the economics of the publishing business. As someone said, “the pie is smaller now.” Any fool can publish, of course, and many do. Marketing and distribution are utterly foreign to me, but it is possible to get your work out and it will just have to take its chances. For Amazon, distribution is partly accomplished by keywords. “The world’s become a big database,” says Don.

I’m well aware of the controversies surrounding Amazon. It does take business from small, local bookstores. But independent bookstores which build on their strengths as community centers are thriving. From my work in the library, I know what best-seller-dom is like. Entertainment! For all those books that the few big publishers don’t want to take a chance on, small publishers step in. Most use print-on-demand technology such as CreateSpace! We certainly appreciated the freedom to put into our book what we wanted. Our ideas are subversive to the corporate culture we are using to get them out.

What this means for So Are You To My Thoughts is not quite certain. I’ve had some interest from agents. A typical response was, “while this sounds like a strong project, I'm afraid it doesn't strike me as a likely fit with me and my particular editorial contacts.” This year I will be working on Book 4 of the series, entitled Pulled Into Nazareth. After finishing it, I am thinking of taking off next year, 2015, to publish the first four books. I would love to have a dedicated editor for them, but it is a lot to ask when there is no financial incentive whatsoever.

As a younger person I longed for certain kinds of books that I usually couldn’t get my hands on. Now, when everything is available yet time is so short, getting people’s attention is difficult. However, I still believe that a book is a Trojan horse. Particularly in a conformist culture, which we are once again becoming. You can still take a book to bed with you and your friends will never know. The ideas in it may change your life.