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!