Our Bodies, Our Lives

Of all the upheavals which happened in people’s personal values in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, none can really compare with the revolution in how we viewed our bodies. When I grew up, discussion of bodies was almost taboo. One’s attention was constantly directed inward, toward inner virtue as opposed to external beauty. We tried to look as nice as we could with our limited circumstances, and cleanliness was certainly next to godliness. But all of our family’s resources were directed toward education and inner value.

Only in the late 1960’s did people begin to take a finely-tuned look at the body instead of ignoring it. In my case, as for others, in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s feminine honesty broke new ground. If she could discuss menstruation, the clitoris, writing the words down in a novel everyone was reading, perhaps we could discuss them with each other. Not that I did. The prohibitions for me were much too strong. But I began to think about myself physically in a different way.

I never owned a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1970 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective to give accurate health and medical information to a broad audience of women, but I think all my friends did. Wilhelm Reich’s phrase “the body is the unconscious” also contributed greatly to this new way of looking at oneself. For if this were true, people were whole, all of one piece. There was no separation between body and soul. The one reflected the other completely.

What followed was a wealth of new ways of thinking, spawning interest in many new and old fields. All of the hippie traveling we did helped, leading people to understand that what we were doing in the West was not the only way. The mind/body connection was explored in physical practices such as yoga, hard and soft martial arts, massage, quigong and meditation. Alternative healing, birthing and dying were all opened to examination and experiment. Food and diet were finally admitted into the health picture.

We had new attitudes about what was attractive, such as natural looking bodies, and people began to understand that emotional weather was part of one’s personal picture as well. People began to sort out what could be cured and what you must live with. Chemical imbalances could now be treated. Handicapped people were helped to achieve their goals. Sexual orientations of all kinds were tested. Everything could be talked about, and generally was!

Line, Marty and Paul live through this change. Each of them is reticent about their own physicality, but they begin to see its importance. Line becomes a nurse, working first in gynecological wards and then in oncology. She studies herbal remedies and practices such as Reiki, and is fully awake to the extraordinary journey people take from birth to death. She becomes a midwife in later years, sharing all that she has learned.

Marty, who has always thought of herself as unattractive, moves into a stronger relationship to her body as she studies tai chi and disciplines her voracious, intellectual mind. She takes photographs which show that consciousness is fully present in the body. Paul, who spends the 1970’s in Alaska, contributes as an educator with an open heart. He marries a French-Canadian woman who insists on treating her early cancer in her own way. Paul also has to deal with his own post-polio syndrome as he gets older.

All of this change was welcome. It complicates things to have so many choices, but also enhances one's ability to give of one's particular gifts. By this time we have come full circle and focus too much on surfaces. We need to get back to an understanding of how much inner values affect our external selves. But time and our ever-renewing culture will probably take care of that.

With One Hand Waving Free

Yesterday, before lunch, I finished a first draft of With One Hand Waving Free. Unlike last year when I celebrated the end of a draft of Fit Company for Oneself with a fire, a glass of wine and some chestnuts, this year I took a nap in the sun in the hammock! Yes, in October in San Rafael, California, the sun is strong in the middle of the day and, though it has moved far to the south, it falls full on the hammock that is the furniture of our front garden ‘room.’ Sweet sun lies upon me like a human hand, blessing me with its warmth.

The title of this book, from Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” is apt for Line, Marty and Paul. Each of them, in his own way, finds a “diamond sky” to dance beneath, intent on seizing the day and letting tomorrow take care of itself. Indeed it is inherent in their understanding that if you embrace the gifts and needs of the day, tomorrow will follow naturally, resulting in the life you are meant to live.

Line uproots herself from Chicago, taking her small son but leaving her husband who is embroiled in growing violence. She takes a train to San Francisco, where Marty is already living. Marty goes to California to live with a family she met in England, but then takes a clerical job which frees her to read and think as she likes. She falls for an enigmatic young architect whose absences and silences Line distrusts. Paul finishes college, at last brought face to face with the fact that he cannot become a Lutheran pastor as is expected. He takes a teaching job in Fairbanks, Alaska. The end of the book finds Sparky (Line) reunited with her gang in San Francisco when Paul stops briefly on his way.

So now that you know what happens, do you want to read the book? When I read fiction, I go straight to the end to get it over with. Then I am free of the plot and can read to find out what the writer thinks is important, and how the characters embody his or her values, or not. I am reading for values, plain and simple. Needless to say, many books do not stand up to this kind of reading! But that doesn’t stop me. I write for values too.

Robert Pirsig states in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals that the world is nothing but value, that value in fact drives evolution. He asks whether quality is to be found in the subject or the object, and when he realizes that it is in neither, he decides that it is independent of either and the source of both. He states that “without Dynamic Quality an organism cannot grow. But without static quality an organism cannot last. Dynamic liberals and radicals need conservatives to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded change. Conservatives also need liberals and radicals to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded stagnation [http://robertpirsig.org/MOQSummary.htm].”

This is a big topic to drop into a blog post crowing about finishing the draft of a novel! Nevertheless, in trying to place what my novels are doing in the world I think about it a lot! They are clearly not providing heroes and heroines fighting obvious good and evil. They do not sponsor the received ideas of any nation or creed. They are a sincere attempt to watch my characters muddling through experience based upon my own and that of my friends and relations. Line, Marty and Paul make mistakes, have successes and failures, which are often not understood until much later. In a complex world such as ours, growth is not always in one direction. People grow up, down, around and through.

And it is slow! With a great deal of luck, my characters will be in their fifties before I let go of them. Maybe even older. What does it mean to become whole? To become a real person? These questions open a look into the dynamic values in which I am interested and which I hope that Line, Marty and Paul’s lives embody over time.

Alternative Spirit

The list of people leading alternative spiritual practices in 1969 when I arrived in California is so long, I can’t do more than name them in a blog piece. But even to name them evokes the rich spirit of aspiration, exploration and controversy rife at that time at the edge of the continent, where, as my Dad said, “all the loose nuts and bolts in the country had rolled!”

Two Episcopalians probably opened Pandora’s Box. Bishop James Pike, who led Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill only a few blocks from where I lived, had just died. But his charismatic personality and challenges to orthodox belief were legendary. He advocated the ordination of women, racial desegregation and the acceptance of lesbians and gays as leaders, things so common now we cannot imagine the heat they generated in his day.

Alan Watts was on the radio so often in the early 1970’s, I could hardly bear to listen. (I would be more receptive now!) He had been an Episcopal priest, but by this time was living on a houseboat in Sausalito and interpreting Eastern philosophy for the West both as a teacher in the American Academy of Asian Studies and a programmer for the radio station KPFA.

Murshid Samuel Lewis gave up his inheritance to embrace mystical and spiritual teachings, becoming a teacher in the Chisti Sufi order. Known in San Francisco as Sufi Sam, a voice told him, “I will make you spiritual leader of the hippies.” He developed the all-embracing dances which were the beginnings of the Dances of Universal Peace, now done all over the world.

Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu Suzuki headed the burgeoning San Francisco Zen Center. His book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was read by almost everyone. (Still is!) When he died in 1971, Zentatsu Richard Baker enlarged the focus and reach of the Zen Center, leading it to become an institution with monasteries at Tassajara, San Francisco and across the Bay in Muir Beach, as well as opening Green’s restaurant. The Zen Center became a huge educational, and even a political force during Jerry Brown’s governorship of California.

Though not associated with traditional spiritual groups, Esalen Institute, located near Carmel and in San Francisco, played a huge part in our cultural life. Studying consciousness using countless psychological and physical methods, the Institute fostered everything from meditation to organic food! Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, it is still going strong with public workshops exploring the sciences and humanities.

By the time I arrived, the Diggers, founded by Peter Coyote and Peter Berg, who met at the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had left town. The Diggers were an anarchist group which provided free food, health care and shelter in the Haight Ashbury, but then merged with other communal groups to form the Free Family.

Steve Gaskin, 1969

Steve Gaskin, a teacher at San Francisco State, was giving Monday Night Class in an auditorium on Ocean Beach (also used for rock concerts), attended by hundreds of people up and down the coast. He had been greatly affected by his psychedelic experiences and was a proponent of right livelihood and ecological practices. One night, Alan Ginsberg introduced Swami Bhaktivedanta to the group, unleashing the Hare Krishna movement upon the city! I certainly never went to Monday Night Class, but we were all very aware when Gaskin collected a caravan of over 60 vehicles in 1970 and left San Francisco, traveling across country and forming an intentional community at The Farm in Tennessee.

Werner Erhard started his est seminars in San Francisco in 1971. After a Dale Carnegie course and teaching Mind Dynamics, he felt he could develop a course of his own. Hundreds of thousands of people took est training which fueled the personal growth industry of the 1970’s.

I felt inoculated from much of this discussion by my powerful Lutheran background and I was too independent to become involved in communal movements. Being able to support myself meant that I could think what I liked, and in the shifting friendships and involvements of those years, world literature was my guide.

Neither Line nor Marty are bowled over by the self-styled gurus arising around them. Line goes Sufi dancing which leads her to herbal healers and teachers as well as the early women who worked with natural childbirth. But she is pragmatic and working at a hospital. Marty plots an aesthetic course, studying photography and reading Russian literature in addition to working full time. Nevertheless, the winds of exploration blowing through the Bay Area, the storms of controversy, and “the sunshine of your love” all wafted through their lives to some effect.

First Computer

In 1970 I got a job with the legal publishing company Bancroft-Whitney typing case summaries dictated by attorneys. In a large light-filled room on an upper floor of a brick building south of Market in San Francisco, eight of us did this work day after day. (In truth, work was secondary to the lively cultural traffic in the office! Probably no different than it is today.) In the corner was a large computer terminal, which came to life when a computer at the home office in Rochester, New York, called it through a WATS line. When the beautiful girl who ran this behemoth quit, I got the job.

The point of this particular dictation was to composite indexes. Thus, an attorney could cite subjects of a case, dictate a page number and the computer in Rochester compiled the page numbers into a list, an index at the back of a book. This exacting work was done by only one attorney as the subjects must take a particular form. The job introduced me to the life many of us now have, in that we are at the mercy of the internet! (“You were doing cloud computing back in 1970,” says Don.)

It was frustrating to wait for the call which was supposed to happen each day at the same time. It didn’t always. Often one end or the other would lose communication, dropping the line. I had to figure out what had gotten saved and what hadn’t and how much work to re-do! I would be fuming in my corner, trying not to disturb others who were humming along at their work. The terminal used pin-fed green-and-white-lined paper. Due to deadlines, I sometimes worked Saturday mornings, though I took off another day of the week to make sure I was only working 40 hours.

Computers played a big part in my work life from then on. I typed and retyped manuscript on mag cards, cassette tapes (frustrating because when the writer added a paragraph, you had to go in and reformat a lot of data when it was stored in a limited, linear fashion!) and finally random access floppy disks. I ran Fortran programs written by the crack programmer Pat Schilling whenever she wanted to accomplish something. I was even part owner of a company which introduced computing to architects, the unique Design Logic, which contracted computer-aided drafting among other services.

Discovering databases was something of a watershed for me. Before relational databases came in, I could cause quite a bit of structure, slicing, dicing and reporting on data using dBaseIII and IV. (I made up databases for the characters in the novel I was working on as well!) Ditto for spreadsheets. For a while I worked at one of the early computer help desks, aptly called Computer Hand Holding.

Without a clear career path or even a desire for one, this becomes Marty’s experience. In her artistic life, she journals and takes still photographs. In the full flush of her new intellectual freedom, she doesn’t want to write for a living or get into the technical demands of professional photography. She gets better and better work in offices as her computer skills increase. But it isn’t without hazard or frustration, as most of us now know!

Food Revolution

Line, Marty and Paul’s mother was not very interested in cooking. She was a superb baker. She always started with the best ingredients and taught her kids to bake exquisite pies, cookies and delicious breads full of interesting grains (some they ground themselves). But for meals she provided the meat, potatoes and vegetable diet common to the post-war era. After a few years in which she researched Adele Davis’ ideas, she went back to using the prepared ingredients and frozen foods which were so available at the time. This was especially true after the older kids went to college and she began full-time teaching. The younger Mikkelsons recall that almost every recipe she used called for a packet of Lipton’s dried onion soup!

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, big gardens played a part in the Mikkelsons’ lives. In Montauk, a fictional town in northeast Iowa, a half-acre garden was attached to the parsonage. Though planting in the spring was exciting, everything from the usual vegetables to sunflowers (to feed the big cardinals and bluejays in the winter), corn and peanuts, the kids’ enthusiasm for weeding and hoeing was tepid. The bounty from the garden was never wasted, however. Many of the vegetables were partially cooked and frozen for eating in the winter. Dad planted apple trees at each parsonage, but the Haroldson parsonage had no garden. Only a rhubarb patch.

Line’s cooking develops from living around so many people who came up from the South to work in Chicago. She learns how to cook okra, collards and fried chicken, to fry up hoecakes and make delicious cornbread. Money is short, and Line becomes expert at getting the most for her money at the new food co-ops run by activist groups. From ex-Texans, she learns how to soak and cook beans, refry them and wrap them with onions and tomatoes in tortillas.

Marty learns the romance of cooking from a year-long stay in Oxford with a family whose European values dictate great food every day. When she moves to Berkeley, the exposure to fresh and raw vegetables educates her palate even further. She doesn’t like salad, but she finds that no California meal is complete without it.

When Line joins Marty in San Francisco, they become even more excited about food. Any Saturday that someone with a car turns up, they go out to the farmers' market on Alemany Boulevard in the southern part of the city, and buy the fresh produce of the season. They were not necessarily vegetarians, but the cookbooks of the time celebrated the peasant meals that world travel was introducing to people with a desire to live lightly and well on our fragile earth.

Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery by Alan Hooker, which appeared in 1970, contained recipes influenced by Indian and peasant cuisines all over the world. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, showing how to get complete proteins needed for health using particular vegetarian and sometimes dairy combinations. Laurel’s Kitchen, by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey first came out in 1976, again providing much information about vegetarian nutrition. The Moosewood Cookbook, completely hand-written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen, came out in 1977, reveling in the “health food” cooking of the restaurant collective she was part of in New York. Versions of all of these books are still in print and tattered copies can be found in my sisters’ and my kitchens even today!

It is hard to convey how exciting this revolution was, as today farmers’ markets abound and everyone at one point or another gets excited about real food. To the Mikkelson kids, however, who grew up on canned and frozen foods, packaged meats and Betty Crocker baking mixes, the idea that you could start from scratch and everything would taste better, and perhaps make you healthier, was heady indeed.

Hannah Arendt, Boris Pasternak and Us

The film Hannah Arendt dramatizes the controversy which raged around Arendt’s reporting for The New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. Though she lost friends and alienated family members, who misunderstood her reporting as lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust, she continued to insist that individuals should be seen as persons, rather than members of “a people,” a tribe. Eichmann, the organizer of transportation for millions of people taken to concentration camps during World War II, was found in Argentina and taken back to Israel for trial for war crimes. He was hung in 1962.

Because Eichmann insisted he was simply obeying his superiors, Arendt did not see that he could be convicted in a court of law, though she wrote that he must hang because he had “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth” with others. Arendt coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe those who are simply thoughtless, who refuse to connect their actions with the consequences, who refuse to be persons.

I am currently reading the new translation of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This book helped set me on my path when I first read it in 1966, but some of it, especially the philosophical discussions, were fuzzy in the earlier translation. In this one they are extremely clear! The first time I read it, I gravitated to the powerful story of a man who remained a person in the face of the monumental pressure of the ideological revolution in Russia. In the first translation, the story was wrapped in thick romance about love and art. [The movie, of course compounded this!] In this translation the romance is pared away, revealing a story which is set not only in history, but is about all of us.

Here in the West, too, we’ve been buried in ideology. If you think you are free, have a look at the BBC production "The Century of the Self", a four part series on how corporations have used Sigmund Freud’s and his nephew Edward Bernays’ theories to subliminally affect your life. In order to be free, to be a person, one must look deeply into one’s reasons for doing things. Most of us, in order to work, to have friends, to contribute to society, make some compromises with our innermost beliefs. But, being a person involves drawing boundaries and acting on them. Our global economy and information system relentlessly inform us of the effects of our actions. Do we pay attention?

Doctor Zhivago is filled with moral quandaries and ideas, a long rumination on life and art. Tolstoy’s social doctrine of the Kingdom of God on earth was part of the huge ferment of revolutionary thinking at the end of the 19^th Century. Pasternak’s Tolstoyan character Misha Gordon, a childhood friend of Zhivago, believes that personhood began with Christ. For him, the Gospel began as a “naïve and timid suggestion. The suggestion was: Do you want to exist in a new way, as never before, do you want the blessedness of the spirit? … In that new way of existence and new form of communion, conceived in the heart and known as the Kingdom of God, there are no peoples, there are persons.”

It doesn’t matter where our personhood, our responsibility comes from. It is a gift which we must not refuse. Eichmann and Pasternak are good examples of the poles which may be lived out with relationship to one’s culture and society. “Life,” Zhivago tells the partisan leader who has imprisoned him, “has never been a material, a substance. It is, if you want to know, a continually self-renewing, eternally self-recreating principle; it eternally alters and transforms itself; it is far above your and my dim-witted theories.”

It was this trust in life which initially thrilled me about Pasternak’s book. Harrowing experiences awaited its characters, as they await us. That trust did not desert Pasternak, even as much that he loved was taken from him. It was a good thing for me to learn as I was setting off into the future.

The Zorba Method

In telling the stories of Line, Marty and Paul, I believe I’ve been quite brave, showing their sibling rivalry, their misery at being unusual as teenagers, their youthful passions and misconceptions. It seems now that as we go into their lives as adults, I must continue to be brave. Braver.

As the 1960’s became the 1970’s, the peaceful revolution went underground. People began to explore their inner selves, believing that if they raised their own consciousness, the world as a whole would benefit. A fair bit of self-indulgence went along with this!  Line, Marty and Paul are no exception. I am going to have to describe the part in their lives played by sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

We were certain that “the body was the unconscious” [Wilhelm Reich], that the body expressed one’s innermost self. Everything one did, how one dressed, how one moved, what one said, was revealing. We were certain we could start with a blank page, express exactly what we wanted to be, that the potentials for being human had scarcely been scratched, that we could move further toward investigating their limits. Desire was, for each of us, an earnest of truth.

From the movie Zorba, the Greek

We developed what I used to call the “Zorba method,” named for Nikos Kazentzakis’ character, Zorba the Greek. The philosophy was: act freely, fear nothing, live in the moment. Trust your desires to show you yourself. Know that you will come to end of them. Don’t avoid or go around trouble. Go through it! In those early days in San Francisco, it could be considerable.

Like the young English teacher in Kazentzakis’ book, I arrived in San Francisco full of book learning, shy, disciplined. As the eldest in a large family, I was not indulged. I was sure that the only way to become who I wanted was to do what I was told and work very hard. And only as I served others would they love me. I needed to let go, get into trouble, trust myself and learn to dance.

I did that. Delight, beauty and awe seemed to be around every corner. The intensity and variety of the music took us there, as did unexplainable, diverse friendships, and as many experiences as we could pack into a weekend and still get to work on Monday morning! Exploring a town Herb Caen extolled every day in the newspaper as Bagdad by the Bay (at the time meaning a place of unimaginable splendor!), we reached a shining coastline in three directions. We had enough money to eat interesting things, buy second-hand clothes and indulge ourselves in many and various arts. The flip of a thumb took you far from the city into natural wilderness preserved for all of us by diligent men and women.

The young people I know today could not read Zorba the Greek without commenting on his attitude toward women. But political correctness is a poor substitute for passion, I believe.  And one learns from neither literature nor life if his or her tea cup is so full there is no room for more.

In exploring our desires, I doubt that we were worse than many others. Certainly the culture as a whole has slid into a prurient interest in each other’s darkness, which everyone assumes is there. Self-indulgence does have its consequences and I don’t want to shy away from describing them. Line, Marty and Paul now tremble in that early and dangerous time of openness between the ages of 20 and 30. I want to emphasize the bright sides of my characters, the astonishing beauty of each upstanding person, flowering in so many and various ways. Brightness and shadow make up the whole, helping them grow into real people.

Poor People's Campaign

As a young, barely-politicized person, I ran across a notice inviting people to come to Washington, D.C., with a group studying non-violence. Leaving from Ann Arbor, the plan was to stay in churches and college dorms for a week, participating in marches and meetings in Resurrection City, built along the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I signed up with the group of eight or so people.

The campaign had been Martin Luther King’s idea, but he was killed in April, 1968, and the campaign started in May. It was left to Ralph Abernathy to head up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I recall how tired Abernathy appeared to me, sitting across from him in a poorly attended meeting. By contrast, Jesse Jackson was everywhere! He was only 27 and had been leading an SCLC operation in Chicago. His upstart, attention-getting ploys caused a rift with Abernathy later. But Jackson’s attempt to downplay race in the struggle against poverty and the grass-roots organizations he created were certainly affected by his experiences at the Poor People’s Campaign.

In addition to poor black people, Dr. King had reached out to Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and poor white Appalachians, all of whom came to Resurrection city. Multi-cultural experiences and classes for all were held in the “Soul Center” tent in the middle of the city. I’ve since learned that the Highlander Folk Center and the Smithsonian Institution assisted.

Every night, under the Lincoln Memorial, with acres of people around the reflecting pool singing along and dancing, groups played pop music. It seemed to mostly be a Motown Sound. Marshall Tate, who became a friend that week, drew me instead to the tent nearby where the old blues and bluegrass people were playing and Pete Seeger moderated the evenings. Seeger had been blacklisted from being on television in the early years of the 1960’s when I was watching, so I’d never seen him though we were all singing his songs. I don’t remember exactly who we saw, but probably John Lee Hooker, Flatt and Scruggs, lots of banjo pickers.

An odd thing about the present, is that you don’t know the significance of what you are doing until later. It is only now, forty-five years later, that some of the pieces click into place. For instance, marching in a long, winding column throughout the capitol alongside a nondescript middle-aged white man, I heard the whispers, “That’s Dave Dellinger.” I knew he was a peace activist, but it is only now that I am aware of his power and significance. He was 53 at the time and had been a conscientious objector during the Second World War. All through the 1950’s and 60’s he participated in freedom marches in the South and hunger strikes in jail, eventually coming to apply the principles of nonviolence to the anti-Vietnam war movement. He was indicted later in 1968, along with the rest of the Chicago Eight.

June 18, 1968, Washington, D.C.

Marshall and I stayed on in Washington when the others left, marching, exploring and going to the Smithsonian. I recall the warm rains which left mud everywhere and getting arrested (actually taken to a police station!) because I was jaywalking, barefoot and looked like a hippie. Delicious bread was baked in coffee cans day after day by an older couple in blue denim. On June 6, hitchhiking back to Ann Arbor, we got into a car and heard that Robert Kennedy was dead. Marshall says that when speaking to groups as part of his work for the Pacific County Democrats, he always mentions this. “It was a life-defining moment for me,” he says.

The Poor People’s Campaign is generally seen as a failure because it did not produce anti-poverty legislation, it didn’t get much press coverage and the campaign died out in the middle of June. Residents were divided about whether they wanted to share in America’s “culture of abundance” or revolt against it. One of the mule trains, however, did travel to both the Republican and Democratic conventions that year. And the campaign’s legacy lives on in the indelible experiences of those who were there.

None of my characters attends the Poor People’s Campaign. Marty is in California in 1968, Line is pregnant and working, and Paul is in Minnesota. But my own involvement informs the writing and everything that happens in With One Hand Waving Free.

"What's Happening, Man?"

In the process of finishing the book With One Hand Waving Free, the task I set for myself this year, I can report that I just finished Chapter 14 and thus am half way through the book. The part I’m working on, set in 1968, is intense for Line because she finds herself accidentally pregnant and is not at all sure her politically-active boyfriend Stephen wants to become an involved parent. Marty meets Erik, a student of architecture at the University of California, who will mystify her for years. And Paul moves further north, into a larger Minnesota college to finish his B.A.

Line, Marty and Paul do not know that it is “1968”. Their own awakening lives absorb them. Paul does not know that when he plays the guitar and sings “Take my hand, Precious Lord,” that it will be sung at Martin Luther King’s funeral in April. Line does not know when she sees Tom Hayden, his sad, charismatic face all broken out from living on peanut butter and coffee, sitting on a stairway in a hall where Democratic convention tactics are being discussed, that he is the poster child for the year. Marty does not know that watching Janis Joplin perform with a boozy passion, accompanied by her band Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Carousel ballroom above an auto showroom in San Francisco, is a historic event.

June 24, 1968 Washington, D.C.

1968 “rocked the world” according to those looking back. As a student in a Master’s program, I spent most of the year on the active University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. I marched in Washington, D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, traveling with a group studying non-violent action. In August I took a job in Chicago just as the Democratic convention was getting underway. The urgency behind me was more directed toward earning a living than working toward social justice, but I did what I could. Nevertheless, by the end of the year, having moved far from my origins, I was too sick to work and landed back in the bosom of my family. I was grateful they took me in and took care of me until my next foray into the great world.

The world is very large. In 1968 it was knit together by television, which provided nightly news almost raw, lifting events into a visibility upon which people could place their own value. At the time we did not know that the tide was turning, that there would never be another 1968. It was just what was happening. A question which we began to ask each other frequently! “What’s happening, man?” Because something surely was.

Balcony Seat

When I first began to live in cities in the late 1960’s, the heady feeling of intellectual freedom I found there was very much associated with coffee shops. Coffee was delicious, especially dosed with lots of cream and sugar, and the accompanying toasted bagel or pastry was inexpensive, my love of sweet buttery wheat a tie to home. Most of all, I was purchasing a seat at the endless street carnival of the city while connecting it to the extravagant life I lived in my head and put down in the notebook in front of me.

Caffe Mediterraneum, Berkeley, CA

I usually had a favorite cafe, associated with the places and times I worked, though they often changed. If it disappeared it was like losing a friend. For writing, one of the best was on Sutter Street in San Francisco, on the second floor above an art supply store. The tables were not so close together that you couldn’t overhear others if you wanted to, but far enough apart that you could hear yourself think. Best of all, you could sit at a window and look down into Sutter Street, watching people. The light at a particular time of day, the shape of the room, the demeanor of the server, all made up the atmosphere which acquired an almost religious significance. The mystique had to do with the brioche they served, the people I had seen from the windows walking up the street, the friends I met there.

Not least, were the words I read and sometimes wrote in these hallowed spaces. Writing was an evocation of the senses. As in drawing, the more detail you noticed, the more evocative the piece became. I was addicted to writing, to putting on paper words connecting mind and world. Not so much as a letter written to the world, but to my growing self. It turned out I wasn’t alone!

By the time Natalie Goldberg made writing in restaurants almost a cliché, I was done. Not with journaling, of course, but with sitting in public places to do it. These days, while bookstores close, Moleskine, whose revived notebooks are world-famous, is opening its own stores! In their words, they represent, “around the world, a symbol of contemporary nomadism.” It turns out your notebook can tie your whole, roaming life together!

For Marty, the middle sister who has always loved books and whose horizons widen to California in about 1967, coffee shops are thrilling. She lives with a Jewish family, the members of which enlighten her about politics. She is homesick, but family life eases the difficulty of crossing yet another cultural divide.

Having found a life I love and no longer so much in need of intellectual refuge, I nevertheless still enjoy the balcony seat at a wonderful coffee shop on occasion. No laptop sits in front of me, separating me from the world. The cup of coffee, the buttery croissant, my pen rather connect me to it, my hands moving between them with delight.

Hitchhiking

In the late 1960’s I did a lot of hitchhiking with friends. We did get into trouble sometimes, but nothing we couldn’t get out of. And the stories of the astonishing variety of people who picked us up and took care of us would make a novel in itself. I note that it is still common in Europe.

In the spring of 1967 we didn’t have backpacks. My friend Jean Olson and I, just 21, left Oxford, England in April for a few open-ended weeks, planning to visit friends stationed in the Army in Germany, and hoping to get as far south as Greece. We each carried a train case, with a change of clothes, a student hostel membership, and the Let’s Go: Europe guidebook. What I can’t remember is whether we actually wore nylon stockings! Skirts, flats, for sure, but nylons? Maybe.

Although, With One Hand Waving Free is something of a Bildungsroman, it doesn’t have a lot of space for a three-week trip on the continent of Europe. Marty hitchhikes with a friend down to Greece and the openness she gains from it definitely goes in the book. With little experience of the world, what unfolds in front of her is full of terror and delight. But here is one story from my trip with Jean which won’t make it into the book:

After a few days on Corfu and in Athens, we got rides with truckers on the long haul up through what was then Yugoslavia. One of them deposited us at the Hotel International in Zagreb (now Croatia), where we rested. We had been up all night in the cab of a truck, regaled with a big slab of chocolate and Turkish coffee for breakfast!

The next day we made it to Ljubljana (now in Slovenia), but as we stood that afternoon on a busy street, thumbing, we were approached by two girls, one of whom spoke excellent English. “You’re not going to get a ride there,” she said. “It’s Sunday! Come with us to a coffee house and stay with us tonight. Tomorrow we’ll show you where we usually hitchhike from.” They liked to go up into the mountains to the north to ski.

The two blonde girls took us to a large room open to the air where, at round tables, with many small glasses in front of each of them, people sat talking. Musicians played in a corner, accordion and fiddles, and often people got up to dance. Rounds of liqueurs began to be set in front of us, astonishing me. I had never had these small brandies and spirits, flavored with all kinds of fruits and herbal infusions. “Try this one, try this one,” we were asked. Exotic Americans as we were at the time, many wanted to talk to us. Places at the table kept shifting and the light settled into evening in the festive, open cafe.

When it grew dark, we were taken to dinner at the younger girl’s apartment. She spoke less English and it was a little hard to understand who lived there, but certainly her father and siblings. Fed meat (though our pale girlfriend didn’t eat any) and given beds with embroidered linen coverlets in the guest room, we felt we were getting the royal treatment in this odd, socialist country.

The next day, the girls indeed found a better place for us to hitchhike. Their only request was that we send them sunglasses. We did try, but we never heard whether the sunglasses arrived at their destination. All through the Bosnian War, I wondered about these girls whose faces I haven’t forgotten. Where were they and what happened to them when Yugoslavia split up into so many countries?

I no longer have any documentation for this trip, but many of the faces, the smells, the places, our fears and our delights are as vivid as anything that happened recently.

Choral Music

“I have an affinity with Arctic places. Mediterranean passion has been documented very well, it has been fashionable for centuries. But the Artic brand of passion is different. Not more or less passion, but it lies differently. It’s a lot deeper. So it’s more a sort of submarine passion and it won’t burst out easily to the open.” Bjork, 2003 interview on “Inside Bjork.”

One of the ways in which northern passion is channeled and expressed, I believe, is in choral music. While Line comes to terms with politics and life in Chicago and Marty attends lectures at Oxford University in England, Paul goes on choir tour. Though I was never in a touring choir myself, my brother and sister (and nephews!) have been. In at least one case, the easy camaraderie of choir tour had a lasting influence in the form of a spouse!

The great American Lutheran church schools across the Midwest were blessed with extraordinary choir directors. Weston Noble at Luther College led the music department for 57 years and was guest director for over 800 music festivals on four continents. F. Melius Christiansen, Norwegian-born but trained in Leipzig, Germany, led the St. Olaf College choir for 30 years, a pioneer in the art of a cappella, or unaccompanied, choral music. His son Olaf led the St. Olaf choir after him, and his son Paul J. Christiansen led the Concordia College choir. The Christiansen choral tradition was spread throughout American Lutheranism, partly through hundreds of choral compositions and arrangements.

Here is the Augustana College choir singing a Paul J. Christiansen arrangement of one of my favorite hymns:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIBNWZmb6y8

Choral music developed out of the mass, of course. In the Anglican tradition, choral masses are sung regularly. Marty, in Oxford, England, is blessed to be able to hear Evensong sung by wonderful boys’ choirs at Magdalen, Christ Church or St. John’s almost any evening of the week. Several of the ancient colleges which make up Oxford University were founded with a provision for a choral foundation and school, with scholarships for the boys who attend.

It has been said that the Lutheran chorale hymn tune was the basis of much of the work of J. S. Bach, born 140 years after Luther. His music cannot be overrated for its intellectual and artistic depth. Among countless choral works, cantatas, concertos and masses, he set music to Luther’s famous hymn based on the 46^th Psalm, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God.” His “All Breathing Life Sing and Praise Ye the Lord,” a complex fugue moving from one voice to another, was frequently presented by Lutheran college choirs.

When I sang in choirs, one of our directors worked with us on the extraordinary Benjamin Britten compositions which began coming out after World War II. Britten was a leading 20^th century composer from England. I particularly was fascinated with the odd Rejoice in the Lamb, in which Britten took words from the 18^th century poet Christopher Smart, written while in an insane asylum. Set to electrifying music, the strange accents and rhythms of the words point out that cats and mice and other creatures all praise the Lord in their own forms. Here is one of many versions on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY4L72dSLDU

Even for those who were not formally music students, these rich musical traditions underlay our northern sensibility. I frequently find my characters breaking into songs both sacred and secular with which they channel their young passions!

Subverting the System

In asking the question, how did young people who started with the nonviolent civil disobedience ideals of Thoreau and Gandhi get to the point of street fighting and making bombs, I’ve been reading a bunch of memoirs about the later Sixties. Fascinating people pass through these memoirs, people you may not have heard about, but whose influence or leadership was strong at the time. And because these books are reflective, looking back on a time almost fifty years ago, it is a question many of the writers ask themselves.

Tom Hayden and Dick Flacks, SDS organizers who wrote the Port Huron statement in 1962, were inspired by courageous civil rights fighters and philosophers such as A.J. Muste, to seek social justice using participatory democracy and non-violent civil disobedience. A broad-based student group, by 1965 it had begun to dawn on SDS members that, as Todd Gitlin says in The Sixties, “Suppose the New Left were only apparently small? Suppose it were actually the thoughtful, active vanguard of a swelling social force?”

Frustrated by Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, by 1966 the draft and the complicity of universities in the military-industrial complex began to take top priority on the SDS list. Greg Calvert, elected national secretary, gave a speech in early 1967 describing the difference between being liberal and being radical. Liberal reformists were always “fighting someone else’s battles.” In contrast, “radical or revolutionary consciousness is the perception of oneself as unfree, as oppressed. It leads to the struggle for one’s own freedom in unity with others who share the burden of oppression.”

“From protest to resistance,” became the rallying cry of 1967. Later that year, at the Oakland Induction Center, a demonstration against the draft led to the first heady feeling that demonstrators could take on the police and control the streets, even if only for a few hours. In the same month, October 1967, demonstrators at the Pentagon were narrowly prevented from a suicide charge by Greg Calvert and Dave Dellinger, who had intended nonviolent confrontation.

By 1968, the more radical members of the left were reading Franz Fanon, who found that in colonial settings, those who acted on their anger were more emotionally healthy and whole; and Regis Debray, who described small guerilla fighting foco groups. Some members of SDS organized themselves into guerilla fighting cadres, which were in action during the confrontations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

After the convention, impatience and anger led away from open-ended problem solving to ideological commitment, as described by both Bill Ayers in Fugitive Days and Cathy Wilkerson in Flying Close to the Sun. SDS split into several factions including the Weathermen, who aimed to be the most militant, aggressive, outspoken voice in the area, thereby attracting alienated young people. “This confrontational strategy seemed like it might move our aims much faster,” said Cathy Wilkerson. The group also wanted to divert police attention from black activists, who were being brutally harassed and threatened. The “Days of Rage” demonstration in Chicago in October 1969 directly confronted police but turnout was very low.

Fred Hampton, the bright, young Chicago chairman of the Black Panthers, told the Weathermen they were provoking confrontation with law enforcement in a way that was dangerous to themselves and the community around them. Hampton was killed in 1969. That same year, Dick Flacks, the least militant radical, was almost killed by an unknown attacker. Dick and his wife Mickey moved to UC Santa Barbara, where through his classes on social movements and his work with student groups, Flacks inspired young people to go into the world and “make history” for the next 37 years.

Though many people took up street fighting, the fascination with bombs can be traced to only a few. The secrecy and tight hierarchical organization of the cadres the Weathermen developed also kept many of its members from knowing what was going on.

From participatory democracy to ideology, protest to resistance, surrounded by a women’s movement which grew out of the highly-charged political atmosphere, the ongoing struggle for civil rights by blacks, and changes everywhere induced by experiments in new lifestyles, the political left did succeed in “bringing the war home,” until April 1975, when the U.S. finally left Vietnam.

My characters, Line and Marty, are driven by the necessity of finding their ways in life and earning their livings. Though Line does fall in love with a “Movement heavy” and lives in Chicago where heated political action echoes around her, her own activism turns to health and healing. Marty arrives in Berkeley in 1967, where she embraces new aesthetics and the fact that the Left Coast looks across the Pacific Rim to Asia. They both become part of the yeasty process of cultural change and its implications for the future.

Constructive Language

One’s writing comes from some deep place which is non-negotiable. Certainly it comes from forces and influences you cannot name, but which can be traced to the place, culture and times into which you were born. Perhaps our conscious, educated mind guides us, refines and edits, but in the end our language reflects, embodies exactly who we are.

I have strong reactions to books because I feel their authors so intensely, particularly in the language they use, even in a very small piece. Novels which have become well-known in the last century, sometimes referred to as the “century of the self,” have dealt mostly with the inner lives of characters. As John Bayley says, “if the early novel saw the individual as part of the social whole, the post-Dostoevsky novel has come to represent his awareness of himself as a solitary being, who wishes to dream and to act ‘as he likes.’”

Writers ride the crest of a cultural wave. The wave throughout most of my life has raised up those who plumb the depths of their existence, who examine themselves and their struggles with the social world around them. A writer who found herself, somewhat to her surprise, surfing the wave of the Sixties is Edna O’Brien. Her characters wish to dream and act as they like!

The consequences for O’Brien’s characters are devastating. Set against an all-pervasive Irish Catholic church, which is more oppressive and dangerous than salutary, Edna O’Brien’s language is controlled, but underlaid with violence. The innocence of childhood foreshadows the scars of maturity, chronicling “unflinchingly the patterns of life for women, from the high spirits of youth to the chill of middle age, from hope to despair,” according to the cover material on The Country Girls Trilogy. “My novel,” O’Brien says of her first, “was completed in three weeks. It had written itself and I was merely the messenger . . . The words tumbled out, like the oats on threshing day that tumble down the shaft.”

Out of sync with the cultural wave for most of my life, I first felt it when I wrote a letter to my college newspaper in April, 1966. The letter expressed my belief that people were spending their energy criticizing what went on around them and not appreciating what they had been given. “Must the opinions we voice be so negative generally?” I plaintively ask. (Thanks to an amazing archive program, the letter exists on-line today!) In that year, when the political left was intent on naming and reforming “the system,” this was not a popular sentiment!

Seeing the glass as mostly full, rather than mostly empty, the social whole as invoking the individual, are suspect in literature. The naked inner self and its authenticity still rules. I credit my remarkable parents with giving me the strength of mind, as well as their iconoclasm, to buck the prevailing winds. And of course, my own journey includes a great deal of soul-searching, as well as youthful exploration and rebellion. I do wish to lay claim to language as constructive, however; its ability to build as well as critique. (I'm aware that skirting the edges of platitudes can be dangerous!)

Cultural winds and waves change. I feel it in my bones. Violence and despair are not the only fruits of experience. Language which reflects hard-won inner peace may, at some point, be valued. It depends on where the story stops.

Women

Anyone would think, and I am sure you are no exception, Gentle Reader, that the writer of this blog was only interested in men! It certainly appears that most of the people I cite are men. And among living writers, I have long located myself squarely between Gary Snyder and James Salter, two extremely diverse men whose writing enthralls me.

In fact, thought is androgynous. Shirley Chang, a gifted architect [http://changbenedesign.com/], and I once discussed our determination to be androgynous in our thinking, dedicated to great thought whoever might express it. We were even happy that our first names were, very occasionally, used by men! As in everything, there is a yin and yang to thought, the yang aspects those that catch the eye.

My interest, however, is in women. If a book doesn’t have female characters, I’m not going to read it. And when Don picks out a movie said to be good but more of a “guy flick,” I ask plaintively, “Are there any women in it?” I’ve been threatening for some time to start a blog about the women characters I have loved, who have been my teachers over the years. These characters were created by both men and women, running from Aksinia, in Sholokhov’s series Quiet Flows the Don, to Abalone in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, to Antonia in Will Cather’s book My Antonia, and Komako in Snow Country by Kawabata.

I’ve toyed with the idea of calling it Women and Mountains, because of the associations between mountains and thought, especially aspiration. Also because of the Tibetan Tara’s vow. As Gary Snyder translates it in Mountains and Rivers Without End, Tara says, “Those who wish to attain supreme enlightenment in a man’s body are many … therefore may I, until this world is emptied out, serve the needs of beings with my body of a woman.”

As a thinker, I’m interested in women, and I take Tara’s vow very willingly. The yin position is often in the background, dedicated to service, but in our fractured, corporate, robotic, arbitrary world, what catches the eye is yang energy. Many women have given themselves over to yang pretension. Service is often seen as martyrdom. It is precisely the ageless problem of understanding the less visible yin power which I wish to address in Women and Mountains.

Now, Gentle Reader, I am not promising to begin this blog just yet. I only tell you this because I am afraid you will think I give my attention solely to men. It’s not true.

Turning Over the Compost

Gary Snyder writes that sifting memories should be seen as turning over the compost. “When we deepen ourselves, looking within, understanding ourselves, we come closer to being like a mature ecosystem. Turning away from grazing on the ‘immediate biomass’ of perception, sensation and thrill; and reviewing memory … blocks of stored inner energies, the flux of dreams, the detritus of day-to-day consciousness, liberates the energy of our own mind-compost. Art is an assimilator of unfelt experience, perception, sensation and memory for the whole society.” [from “Poetry, Community and Climax,” in The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-1979, p. 173]

I like this metaphor for working with memory. Getting in there with your pitchfork, turning, aerating and sifting through the past to see what comes to light. I use a lot of plant metaphors for mental flowering. The drive to bloom is universal and the uniqueness and variety of our blooms is constantly surprising. Snyder’s way of looking at things has been an inspiration for me for many years. In the same essay, he says, “All of evolution may have been as much shaped by the pull toward climax as it has by simple competition between individuals or species.” Introducing the notion of ecological climax (the height of one’s blooming) holds implications for how to look at one’s maturity.

In sifting through my generally very sharp memories for the sake of Line, Marty and Paul, I’ve several times been surprised by the new understanding that comes up. Brought into the light, perceptions change, connections are made and ordinary things take on new shapes and meanings. Such as realizing that a relationship upon which I lavished a couple of years of attention, was probably more a mental construct of one of my friends than mine! That my mother was probably less calm and powerful than I generally found her to be. That, after 50 years, the high school girls basketball state championship I was so excited about has lost nothing of its poignancy and heroism. That the come-uppance the character most like me often got was totally deserved!

Nonetheless, memory doesn’t really work to write from. One must be wholly in the moment, the numinous, everyday present, in order to make story. As noted here in a previous blog post, Gertrude Stein states, “The business of art is to live in the actual present, that is the complete actual present, and to express that complete actual present." The present might be seen as “vertical time” as opposed to “horizontal time.” In the present, or in vertical time, the bloom we might become is wholly present as possibility, if not yet visible. But loosening the soil around those memories, giving them some compost, giving the rootlets nourishment, is bound to allow fuller bloom!