The Eyes Have It--Or Not

I disappeared from this blog last September thinking it would be a short term hiatus to get through the beginning of school, but the year certainly hasn't gone the way I expected.  This is probably true for a lot of others as well.

I spent last summer feeling puzzled because my sight was blurry but the eye doctor said that my prescription should be correct and she couldn't figure out what was going on.  Fortunately she had me come back in October and then immediately sent me to a retina specialist.  I had laser surgery on a torn retina in the office at the end of November and then had a vitrectomy in early December.  They then had to do two very painful "clean-up procedures on my left eye.  At this point I have sight-inhibiting cataracts on both eyes, and I will be having those taken care of in July.

None of this has been easy, and working online for school has not been easy either.  We went through the whole year teaching virtually, which has been challenging and stressful in ways we could not have imagined a year and a half ago.   We also learned all sorts of wonderful new skills, and each of us learned coping mechanisms to get through.  

I was planning on working part-time at school this past year, and I was going to take advantage of some time to think about what I want to do next.  The pandemic and the eyes put me is a bit of a holding pattern, but I have learned that retiring from formal teaching is the right thing for me to do at this point.  Doug and I have had much more time in the same physical location than we have had in years, and this has given us time to think about the timing and priorities of the next few years.  

So, I am back--as long as my eyes cooperate.  

Face Palm!

 Good morning.  This has been another morning for coming to sudden realizations about why I am the way I am.  (You may or may not feel that the way I am is a positive thing!)  

Yesterday I was explaining what I do to someone, and I said that being at least partially accepted by the very tight-knit closed community here has been one of the honors of my life.  There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of reasons why I am an unusual community member here.  First, I continue to be the only white person here, in both the staff and students populations.  Then, I am not Muslim--I am not the only non-Muslim, but I am certainly in a minority here as well.    Three years ago, when I started here it truly felt like a new world.  Currently, nine days out of ten it is a delight and honor.

So, on the way in to school this morning I was thinking about odd things in my life (many) and I started thinking about the three summers that I went to Alaska to help in the Yupik villages that have a strong Moravian church hisgtory and presence.  Please know that I am well aware that the Christian church has had a complex and often negative history in the North, as in other places where missionaries have gone. I will try to write about some of this in another post--particularly the weight of spiritual darkness that hangs over the Artic, but that is another whole set of thoughts.  

Short term mission so othen takes groups and dumps them into a place and then jerks them out with no contact ever again, which is destructive for both groups.  Because the Moravian church has a strong presence and relationships in Alaska, I was able to have the luxury (I learn after the fact) to go back to the same area for three years in a row, and the same village twice.  To put some persepctive on this, the coastal villages I went to are twenty or so miles from the Bering Sea, and the only way in is on a plane.  Most of these villages are in danger of having to relocate because of global warming.

Mission Lake, Bethel

                                                                    


                Janice and I                                       Church Bell, Kipnuk                        Kids, Kipnuk

                                            Houses up on piles because of freeze and thaw

                                                                                        Nowhere but Alaska!

It is a devestatingly isolated landscape and world, but it is also one of the most beautiful places I have seen--as long as being wet all the time and smelling like mud and fish are ok with you.  There is nothing over knee  height growing and really no colors but brown, green, and white.

It is one of the joys of my heart that I was able to get off an eight-seater plane in the far North and have people say "Welcome Back" and know my name.  These are worn people who speak slowly with lots of pauses.  We from the lower 48 ush through all conversations we have.  Indigenous Alaskamakes us slow down and think.  

                                                            Low tide in Kipnuk

                                                            See Kipnuk in lower left

Just getting to be in that place was enough for me--to walk and watch and be invited to people's homes to eat and to have the kids yell to us and then not want to go home and follow us back to our little house.  Even boiling all water and having no plumbing was ok.  I had the time of my life.

Sometimes you don't realize quite how unusual a time you are really having when you go out like this.  On another day I will tell the story of the Throwing Party and how I suddenly learned that NO ONE from outside sees and participates in that.  

So, what I love is the places in between--the communities on the edge (like my immigrant kids and their families) and the people who exist apart (although with bigger tv sets and satellite dishes than I will ever have or want.)  I am fascinated by this often cruel, forever beautiful world we live in.

This Virus May Hurt Us More Than COVID

Usually the beginning of school brings some happy exhaustion with it and an overall sense of things being right with our little part of the world.  This year I am increasingly feeling that we are wandering in a thick fog and can't see the way ahead.  It seems to me that every decision we make about the virus is wrong in some way.    I fear that we will be in our current fog and isolation for quite awhile.

Perhaps this state of affairs is coloring the way I am reading--or perhaps it has suddenly given me clarity of something.  I am doing a read-along of I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), by Beth A. Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland.  I'm not too far in to it, but a quote from the Introduction has stayed with me all week: 

 "We are choosing division.  We are choosing conflict.  We are choosing to turn our civic sphere into a circus.  We are choosing all of this, and we can choose otherwise."  

In the same way COVID is a virus that seems to morph so that every symptom becomes part of it and it is constantly changing, seemingly just ahead of anything we can do, we seem to have become infected with a zealous social virus that is becoming stronger every day.  I have said for a long time that we will need to be patient and wait for things in the big political world to re-set themselves because politics is a cycle, but I now believe that we have allowed ourselves to catch a virus of rage and despair, and division, and we have chosen to use the current medical model as our paradigm for this as well.

We have chosen to quarantine ourselves with those we feel--rightly or wrongly--agree with us, and, at a faster and faster rate, if my social media accounts are anything like the rest of yours, we are culling those who are not like us from our herd.  

To quarantine ourselves in this case means that we are choosing not to change.  The quarantine model keeps us frozen, unable to be creative or to connect with others outside our tiny sphere.  This ensures that change will not happen.  Let me say that again--This ensures that change will not happen.

This is a summer where many people feel that enough is enough and we need to change our country.  My fear is that our social virus is working hard to maintain the status quo.  I would go so far at to say that this virus underlies all of the systemic horrors of our world.  We have chosen to ignore that there is a threat or quarantine, not to put a mask on and go out safely.  We aresaying  no to any vaccine suggested to us.  

This may seem very simplistic, but it has been something of a revelation to me this morning.  We must change our paraidgms or  we will be hurt by our social virus more than by COVID.  We are at the tipping point.  

" osing wedivision. We are choosing conflict. We are choosing to turn our civic sphere into a circus. We are choosing all of this , and we can choose otherwise."

The Books of August

 The Books of August

For the first time in the season of the virus I have slowed down a bit with reading.  I did a re-read of a book I love, found a new author, and continued my diversity reading.  All great books--just not a lot of them.

My re-read was Driftless, by David Rhodes, which I loved ten years ago and reead again to see if it was as good as I remembered.  It is actually better this time around--a true Wisconsin rural book with quirky interesting characters, some parts that make me cry, some that made me laugh out loud even when I was re-reading, and truly wonderful male characters.  Rhodes' men are three-dimensional, make mistakes, but we always learn why, and they grow so much.  I haven't read a book that empathizes with its male characters so much in a long time.  David Rhodes has written a sequal, Jewelweed, which I have not read yet.  

For a long time I kept lists of books that were set in or had characters from the places I have lived.  I will digress for a minute and say that the other book that is quintessentially Wisconsin for me is Midnight Champagne, by A. Manette Ansay.  She writes a lot, and Oprah has picked up some of her books in the past.  They are excellent but tend to be rather dark.  This is, for lack of a better term, a ghost story set during a wedding at a venue that used to be a strip club or brothel along the stretch of I-94 between Kenosha and Chicago.  For those of you who have not visited this territory, it is a no-man's land of cheese, fire works, tatoos, truck stops, etc. This slim, simple story grabs you by the throat. The rather unexpected wedding of people who have known each other four months takes place at the same time that a ghostly woman, somewhat accidentally killed by her abusive husband in another part of the lodge, roams as a ghost, trying to figure out what has happened.  So, wedding, ghost, and murder--a fascinating mix on a snowy night.  The characters could be from nowhere but Wisconsin.

This month I discovered M. K. Jemison.  I read The City We Became, which needs to be put on the New York list mentioned above.  Jemison says it is her first book set in the real world, and she said it was so much harder to work with reality than to create a new world.  This book is a fantasy love letter to NYC.  I can't recommend it enough.  

I just finished Jemison's The Fifth Season,  This world is incredibly grim, but Jemison's strength is that she makes you believe in the otherness of it from the start.  It is the first of the Broken Earth Trilogy--she seems to write trilogies regularly, and The City We Became is also going to be a trilogy.  If you are just finding her, as I did, I would read The City first and then branch out to the other worlds.  

Finally, for my fiction reading this month, I finished Long Bright River, which I started in the spring when Lucy and I were walking a lot, and I finished it now that I have time in the car again.  I have heard a few people comment that this is a book without a lot of diversity.  I think this might be being a bit unfair, since it is a book that is VERY grounded in a particular place and community, and that is part of its message.  I think I have come to this book a bit late--like I am late to N.K. Jemison, so I won't go in to a lot of plot summary here. There are so many social issues included in this book, but what struck me the most was that the narrator has all the best intentions but ends up being so wrong about so many things and having to suffer guilt for those things as well as all the other burdens she carries.  She isn't exactly an unreliable narrator, but she has based her life on some beliefs and doesn't seem able to move beyond.  There is a hint of a happy ending, but so much has been lost here.

I read one book for my ongoing re-education on race matters.  This month it was White Negroes:  When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation. by Lauren Michelle Jackson, who is a wonderful cultural critic.  If you have puzzled with how to think about the Kardashians, Paula Dean, and Christina Aguilera through a racial lens, here is your chance to have a clear, cogent analysis of how they fit into the bigger framework of race in America.  

Again, What We Aren't Taught Continues To Hurt Us

I teased this a little in my last post and said that just because we don't know something doesn't mean we, particularly here in The United States, as able to ignore it.  We, I am speaking white American here, have so many excuses for why we don't know things.  

Some of them are objectively, sadly true.  As a child, I desperately wanted to learn history--I grew up in a family that put a great emphasis on history, although my mom (now 90) and I have been talking about all the things she did not know as well.  I was disappointed that we did very little "history."  We learned a watered down version of "social studies."  I believe that our text book had about four pages about slavery and post-slavery times, concentrating on George Washington Carver and Eli Whitney. High school was not a lot better.  I am blessed in having realized early on that I was going to have to educate myself because school was not providing me with an appropriate education.  I am largely self-educated, up to starting college.  Much of the self-education was encouraged and reinforced by a strong Quaker community that stressed free thinking, diversity, and non-violence.  

I don't think I am in the minority for having had a deficient education, even in an affluent consolidated school district.  But, does that give any of us the choice to remain blissfully ignorant?  Muslims say that the crowning glory God has given us is the human intellect, and I thnk we have often been sloppy with this, to our shame.  This is compounded in my current teaching because I work with African immigrants, who have only recently come to the United States, in addition to learning very little history, African or American.  On many days we spend much more time on history and current events in my English class than on anything else,and I consider that time well spent.  Sometimes it is excruciatingly difficult and painful, but it is some of the most important work I have ever done.  

So this brings us to Stamped From the Beginning.  It is beautifully written, lovingly researched, and unflinchingly de-mythologizing.  There is not much that I can say about this book that hasn't been said in a much more eloquent way in recent weeks, but reading it has been another corrective to the "Don't Know Much About History" that we suffer.  Read it and stop and let it wash over you and then make new choices, and don't choose to be quiet anymore.

If anyone is scared by reading a dense 583 page book of "scholarship," much of it reads very smoothly.  We need to use our wonderful human intellect.  If you want to ease into this work, there is a wonderful podcast called Scene on Radio (Season Three) that is about Seeing White.  It covers a lot of the same history and background in a compelling and fast-moving way.  

I have also been reading Imani Perry's Breathe:  A Letter To My Sons.  In many ways that has been a tougher read for me because it is achingly personal.  It brings history down to the cellular level.  Both Stamped and Breathe  discuss George Washington's false teeth.  This morning I was brought to a complete halt by this quote from Breathe:

"George Washington's false teeth were not wood, as you may have heard.  They were actually made from .a variety of materials,including Black humans' teeth.  The father of our country stole our teeth.  Our bite.  Think about that.  What did Washington feel and think when the dentist inexpertly shoved Africans' teeth into his mouth.  Was it the anxious trepidation one feels with a sloppy technology, or just one in many rituals of taking every bit of use value from the Africans?  Did they pull them off cadavers, like entitled grave robbers, or was it a form of torture?  One of the many rituals of slavery?

 ...The fear of body snatchers is warranted." (pp. 112-113 of my kindle version)

We recoil from the Nazis, but this is a lot closer to home.

I guess I am sorry that this is a tough post, but, again, we need to wake up.  I wanted to touch on one more thing this morning.  We often hear that protesting is fine, but why do "they" have to be violent?  I have two answers this morning, one from right now, and one from history.  The historical one is taken from a discussion of the successful rebellion of Haiti in Stamped: "As historian C. L. R. James explained in the 1930's, "they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.'"  We need to think about that.  Today's answer comes from the Chicago Tribune, in an column called "Today's social justice movement was born out of anger, not hope.  There's nothing peaceful about it."  I recommend it.   

Oh, The Places We Have Never Gone....

I read Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian  over ten years ago, and it has stayed with me as a wonderful reading experience.  I read her second book, The Swan Thieves, when it came out, and I had very mixed feelings..  My recollection of it is that it is an ambitious book in its construction and philosophy, but not necessarily a satisfying read.  I have been thinking that this may have been because I read it on a rather emotionally taxing trip to Alaska, which may not be the right backdrop for it, so I may try it again.

On a past episode of the Currently Reading Podcast one of the hosts recommended The Historian and they went on to talk about how Elizabeth Kostova has written very little since.  Lo and behold, here is The Shadow Land,  which was published in 2017.  I have just finished it--it is one of those books that lures you in to "Just One More Chapter...."

One of the most lovely things about Elizabeth Kostova's writing is her slightly melancholy tone and her extremely strong sense of place.  I generally feel the need to go back and check the dates that things are supposed to be happening because both The Historian and The Shadow Land  are set in worlds that are drenched in history.  The history is a character in the books, overshadowing current events.  In SL, Alexandra, our young main character, has been drowning in her personal history since she was sixteen, so her history-logged life and the history-drenched world around her are very congruent.

The majority of us in the United States know very little about eastern Europe.  Elizabeth Kostova is married to a Bulgarian man and runs a foundation for creative writing in Bulgaria.  The world that she describes is just as puzzling to us as it is to Alexandra.  What does all this mean?  Who can you trust? What is the hisotry that we don't know that has an impact on us right now?  We all experience these questions when we travel to new countries, but here this is a profound sense of cuttural unease. For most of the world, the past is never past.  Americans have been allowed to have a naive and inappropriate belief that we are exempt from history because we are such a "Young" country, built on a metaphorical hill.  As I write this, it occurs to me that my question about the history that we don't know impacting today is very topical and immediate.  I will be witing about Stamped From the Beginning this week,, and Kendi's work certainly brings that question home for all of us.

For those who are concerned that this is going to be a WWII book, it is not--the memoir pieces are set in post-Communist Bulgaria, which, again, we know very little about.  All of the characters are dealing with painful, frieghtening events that continue to have current echoes and serve as warnings for us.  The memoirs are difficult to read but not unmanageable. 

I almost just wrote that this is a story of hope and survival.  It is, but with survival and pain often comes guilt.  How do we learn to let guilt go and lead lives that are productive and genuine without letting ourselves be stunted?  One of Kostova's answers is that we create.  Her characters are writers, painters, musicians, and consumately humane individuals.  We each make decisions about how to live every day.

Wine and Bread

                    Thoughts on Euphoria, by Lily King

I have about five blog posts that I have been wanting to write--most of them ultimately important but rather depressing, as I feel like it has been a depressing few weeks.  This one is a bit more positive, I hope.  

I had never read anything by Lily King before, and I am not particularly interested in her newest book, Writers and Lovers, but this is from her backlist, and I really liked it.  It is the story of anthropologists in New Guinea in the 1930s--heavily influenced by the life of Margaret Mead, although it is a slim, bittersweet story of love and loss. 

                                                Margaret Mead, 1939

                                                       

There are several aspects of the story that really struck me.  First, this is a study of the early days of anthropology.  Seeing a new social science evolve was interesting.  The three main characters have significantly different ideas about how to conduct field work and learn about cultures.  How Nell and Fen and Banskston handle interactions with their communities was fascinating.  Do you go native and just live and not take any notes (Fen), do you concentrate on kinship mapping and ways that anthropology mirrors the hard sciences (Bankston), or do you develop deep relationships within the community and document everything (Nell)?   Ultimately, one of these choices leads to disaster for the community and the anthropologists.

Nell and Fen establish a true home in the community--with books, the New Yorker, house help and a clear echo of western civilization.  Banskston, while loving Nell, comments repeatedly and sometwhat negatively on the creature comforts of their living space, while also being desperate for this feeling of home.  Wht impact does it have to bring western culture into the field like this?  Does it skew observations?

However, the most moving part of the story for me was the characters' energy and excitement of intellectual discovery.  This is a love story between a woman and two men, but, even more importantly, a love story about finding a relationship that feeds one's intellect and creativity.  The title describes the euphoria Nell feels when she finds the "key" to a new culture, the euphoria of new love, and the euphoria of intellectual passion.  

Nell brings up a poem by Amy Lowell, called "Decade" and says that there are loves that are like wine and loves that are like bread.  /She ends up saying that she finds both in Bankston.  I was lucky enough in my life to find somewone who gave me the euphoria of intellectual passion, a person who gave me coplete nourishment.  It is a rare gift.  I hope that for each of us.  

Decade, by Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,

And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.

Now you are like morning bread,

Smooth and pleasant.

I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,

But I am completely nourished.