Mom enjoyed our visit. Asked if she knew who I was, she smiled and said, "He's my friend."
For our Christmas dinner, she seemed very happy until suddenly she said, "Let's get out of here." I suspect that the chatter at the table had been too much about her without involving her. Will make mental note of that.
She comes from a background of literalist Sunday school teachers and college professors for whom any inconsistency in Scripture must be explained away, lest the whole faith be vulnerable to scientific attack.
I replied that the difference she'd noticed could show that the community that revered Moses had developed new understanding with experience. The simplest explanation for inconsistencies in the scriptures is that the Bible is a scrapbook collected and edited over 1000 years. "So we're reading more than the story of God's people," I said. "We're also seeing the story of the story, as the idea of what it means to be the people of God changed over the centuries."
She brightened. "And we're still living it!" I told her that she can now forego the other three - and - a - half years of the program, ha ha.
An Episcopal Priest named Joseph Yoo wrote about the same idea in the introduction to his book When the Saints Go Flying In (Precocity Press, 2023):
Stories are powerful tools. LIves can be transformed when stories are shared. THe most effective way to transform someone's mind isn't to bombard them with facts and figures but to tell them a story. Jesus absolutely knew this. It's why he told stories. He connected things that were familiar, things that were ordinary, to God's truth. People listened and were transformed. We still listen and lives are still being transformed because these stories aren't just about what happened centuries ago. They are still happening to you and me today. - Joseph Yoo
Subtitled Stories About Faith, Life, and Everything in between, the book is the story of Yoo's path from Methodist boyhood to Episcopal priesthood wrapped around the stories of numerous saints. In that one paragraph about stories, he pretty much sums up what we do in EfM, where we put our own experiences into dialogue with our studies of scripture, 3000 years of Judeo-Christian history, and theology.
With both of these encounters in my head this past week, I've been trying to remember the source of a rhymed couplet equating faith with living a story. Then I remembered: it's from my own self-portrait as an introverted writer inside his own shell:
We love, we hurt, we forgive, and we're forgiven.
My faith's not just a creed; it's a story I live in.
(from Interview with Box Turtle)
[Photo: Print of my alter ego purchased by my friend Susan at Marietta Square's annual arts fair, for a gift. It's been up on my kitchen wall ever since.]
These past several months, I've felt swamped by the competing narratives of dire consequences if the other political party wins. Now that the election's over, I feel, not happy, but relieved. I've turned the radio to classical music programming, I've quit scrolling the news feed on my phone, and I've concentrated on the story of God's people. I've re-read Joseph Yoo's book, and yesterday I bought poems from Mary Oliver's long career selected in a best seller called Devotions. I feel much calmer about the national story, financial anxieties, and my own aging when I remember God's story wrapping around all of it.
Of related interest:
Having read her piece, I myself walked my dog in a parking lot where we repeatedly encountered a homeless woman named Brenda. Three Sunday mornings in a row, she had politely rebuffed offers to buy her sandals, coffee, food -- but she brightened up considerably on Mothers Day when I asked if she was a mother. She wanted to tell me about her children and grand-children.
The writer struggles with Matthew 7.18, "Everyone who asks receives." How does that sound to families in the youth hospice where she was chaplain? She thinks, "There is not a one-to-one correspondence between what we ask in prayer and what we receive." (That, I'd say, would be magic -- harnessing God's power to do our will.) Pray specific prayers, anyway, she says, to make yourself aware of God's presence. "The victims are in our thoughts and prayers" has come to mean "We're not going to do anything," but she admits prayers at least prepare us for action and open us to God's will.
She "gets worked up" over public figures who won't deal with important issues. Responding to Psalm 37.7 ("Be still ... wait patiently for the Lord") she admits that getting worked up "is unhelpful at best, and at most, leads to evil." Besides, as Jesus asked in Mt. 6.27, "Can anyone by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?"
Public figures who disgust her need prayers more than anyone, she admits, and she needs to be the one to pray for them. She gets "likes" for snide comments about those leaders, but she hasn't "built up" anyone or anything by writing insults (Ephesians 4.29 "Let no evil come out of your mouth, but only what is useful for building up.")
There's humor and joy in some of her observations. Jesus is like a stand-up comic when he points out, "when John and his disciples ate nothing, the Pharisees said he had a demon in him, but when I and my disciples have dinner, they say we're drunkards and gluttons." The great line about "Leviathan that God made for the sport of it" (Psalms 104.27) reminds her how we know more about outer space than about the oceans that occupy most of our planet, and how much more there is to "the strangeness and untouchability of God."
In Beyer's stories, the Holy Spirit manifests as a Holy Irritant.
The pharisees seem to have irritated Jesus. Their demand for a sign reminds Beyer of a sign he received during a morning run when he was feeling low. The voice of a cardinal caught his attention, then the bird suddenly appeared, lifting Beyer's spirits. He asks us if we've had such an experience.
Indeed: Riding my bike on the Silver Comet trail, I approached a couple from behind as they walked side by side. The woman was talking, gesturing, re-enacting some big confrontation. At something she said, the man turned his head towards her so quickly that his dred locks shook, and I saw his eyes open wide on her, his broad smile, his admiration and delight. I caught that spirit of love vicariously and I carry it with me to this day, as often as I recall that moment.
Beyer's experience in Haiti after the earthquake could be a parable. Beyers despaired of finding building materials for the parish church, but the priest didn't seem to be doing anything about that. As they toured the parish, the priest just hugged people and smiled and listened to their problems. Again, Beyers was irritated. But the next day, people showed up with materials enough to rebuild.
 |
| Scott Smoot on his bike in the Red Sea, virtually. Of course, Moses is going north, and I'm going south. |
On my virtual bike tour of the world, I pause for a selfie wherever I have lived or have felt a connection. God's parting the Red Sea for the Hebrews' escape from slavery is certainly a great story, but I struggled to find a personal connection.
When I studied the photo of the iconic scene from the film The Ten Commandments, suddenly it resonated with the most recent period of my life. Those last years of teaching seemed so relentless, a couple of classes were so contentious, and the pandemic upended so much of what I had relied on for 39 years of my teaching career, that retirement is very much like what we see in Cecille B. DeMille's film. Oh, I do feel a clearing of my path to my end.
Enough said.
Miles YTD 1931 || 2nd World Tour Total 18,549 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA
←← | ← || Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
There's Jimmy Quinn, wealthiest man in the county and most hated. He's already food for catfish in the Alabaster River when the novel begins, but we get to know him by how he bent his family's lives to his. There's also Jack Creasy, a man like used motor oil: "If you tried to get a grip on him, he slipped through your fingers, leaving you with the feel of grit and dirt and a desire to wash yourself clean" (214). Creasy whips up the town with his theory that Quinn's killer was Noah Bluestone, because Quinn recently fired him, and because Bluestone is "an uppity Indian."
Bluestone is admirable and fascinating. He lives away from town with Kyoko, the wife he brought home from the war in Japan. Before the war, he had played football with many of the other characters, including Sheriff Brody. He admits to a confrontation with Quinn just before the murder took place. "He was a big man," Noah tells Brody, "but he had a small spirit. He fired me instead" (95). We wonder why Bluestone won't say a word in his own defense, even when Sheriff Brody Dern arrests him for circumstantial evidence.
Brody lives with his dog Hector in quarters above the jail, where a print of Hopper's Night Hawks is his only decoration. Though the investigation takes Brody to dark places, there's a romantic comedy current to his story: while he continues to see his first love, married to his brother, he's growing to appreciate Angie Madison, proprietor of the diner next door. Around her, he's shy as a middle-school boy.
Angie's 14-year-old son Scott is an especially appealing character. He delivers meals to the jail for Brody and anyone in the jail. Born with a hole in his heart, Scott can't be as active as he would like to be. Scott has no father -- his mother's back-story makes an engrossing novelette-within-the-novel -- but in Brody, Scott finds a surrogate. If he can understand Brody, he thinks "maybe, even with a hole in his heart, he might feel like he was finally a man complete" (192).
All the currents of the story run through a a scene in the jail. Bluestone is being held for murder. His accuser Creasy is there, jailed for disorderly conduct. It's a week after Scott risked his own life to rescue a girl drowning in rapids of the Alabaster River. Now he has brought dinner to the jail. At Bluestone's request, Scott has also brought a branch from a cottonwood tree. Bluestone asks for the branch, then asks Sheriff Brody for a sharp knife.
Brody considered the request, the man who’d made it, and the boy. He said, “Step away from the cell, Scott.”
The boy took a step back. Brody reached into his pocket and brought out a folded barlow knife. He handed it to Bluestone through the bars. Creasy gave a snort of disbelief but said nothing. Bluestone drew out the blade and carefully cut the thin cottonwood branch in two. He folded the blade and handed the knife back to Brody.
“Take a look at this,” Bluestone said. He turned the cut end of the branch toward the boy. “See the star?”
There it was, inside the branch, dead center. A dark, five-pointed star. Brody could see it, too.
Scott’s eyes grew large with wonder.
Bluestone says that his people say that stars are born in earth, are absorbed into the roots of the cottonwood, and are all waiting for the time when the Great Spirit will release them by wind that shakes the branches.
"They fly up and settle in the heavens, where they shine and sparkle and become the luminous creations they were always meant to be.” Bluestone looked seriously at the boy. “Do you know why I wanted to tell you this story?”Scott said, “No.”
“When you saved that girl, I told you that you’d received a gift. The gift is like this star at the center of the cottonwood. It’s inside you now. Someday, when you need it, it will come out, like the stars when the wind shakes the cottonwood trees, and it will shine for you, well and truly.”
The boy seemed to think about that.
“What a load of horseshit,” Creasy said.
The story moves on to an action-packed conclusion. Before it's over, Scott has had cause to be ashamed of himself, and an opportunity for redemption. All the characters' stories have their own finish apart from the denoument of the mystery.
Links to all of my responses to William Kent Krueger's novels, including his Cork O'Connor series, are listed with short descriptions at my Crime Fiction page.
 |
| Scott Smoot at Petra, virtually, holding Susan's Kodak print |
In the land now called Jordan, Petra is what remains of an ancient city that was carved into sandstone cliffs. Wikipedia says Petra's heyday was 2000 years ago, but I know nothing more than that. It lies on the line that I'm tracing on a map of the world, mile by mile, as I ride bike trails around Atlanta. My rule for this virtual world tour is to aim for places to which I have strong connections.
My connection to Petra is the snapshot I'm holding in my virtual photo. My friend Susan took that snapshot in March of 1999 during a tour of the Holy Land. Susan actually enjoys touring extraordinary places to see extraordinary things in person.
For me, these virtual visits are enough. I prefer my round of visits to the store, to the church, to Susan's house, to the restaurant we visit each week, to my sister's home, to my Mom's room, to the bike trail. "Same old same old" sounds to me like a good thing.
Besides, there's room for the extraordinary in that routine. For my recent birthday, Susan treated me to our annual dinner at Spring, a restaurant we can walk to from her house, where each course is a special experience. Dessert this year was the apotheosis of humble rice pudding, a mix of textures and flavors I'll not forget.
She also presented me with her painting of my dog Brandy that captures the eyes alive with interest, the ears cocked in curiosity, and a single white hair that rises from the tip of Brandy's copper-brown tail.
In an ordinary week, we'll cover an extraordinary range of topics in conversation over take-out dinners and homemade pizza and walks with the dog.
So let my visit to Petra be dedicated to Susan in gratitude for her extraordinary friendship.
Miles YTD 1543 || 2nd World Tour Total 18,161 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: The Red Sea
←← | ← || Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
 |
| Scott Smoot joins a bike tour of Jerusalem, virtually. |
As I've pedaled 17,987 miles on trails around Atlanta these past four years, I've traced those miles on the globe, making virtual stops at "places I've lived or loved." My goal this year was to reach Jerusalem on my 65th birthday. A thunderstorm nixed that, so it's one day later.
Though I've never actually been to Jerusalem, it's a place I've lived or loved because I've been there in my mind before sunrise every day for at least 10 years. The morning service of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer opens with a choice of Psalm 95 or 100, which both tell us to enter Jerusalem's gates with thanksgiving. Then the BCP assigns readings in other Psalms, the prophets, and New Testament scriptures. Then I read the day's meditation from the quarterly Forward Day by Day.
Just last week, Jerusalem was subject of a meditation in Forward. The writer, Rev. Erin Morey, commented on God's instructions in Exodus for building a worship space. The Tabernacle is modeled on the future Jerusalem temple. Minute details include the patterns on curtains. Morey reminds us, "Those texts were compiled during the period of exile in Babylon. [The editors] far from home, were describing a physical space that no longer existed in this world." So, "the words became a worship space for God's people" [italics mine].
That's the Jerusalem I enter every morning. If it's not a story of Jesus or a prophet in Jerusalem, then it's one of the psalms. In some of those, Jerusalem sounds a lot like middle school, with judges at the gates, the bullies from the "popular" clique, and former friends spreading rumors behind your back.
But I love the Jerusalem of God's promises, where nations will stream to your light, where the gates will always be open. See my blogpost about the inspiring vision of Jerusalem in Isaiah, and how it in turn underlies America's origin story, City on a Hill: Vision for America (06/2018).
One of my favorite lines about Jerusalem comes at the end of Psalm 87. It tells how people from all over the world will want to claim Jerusalem as their birthplace, concluding, the singers and the dancers will say [to Jerusalem], "All my fresh springs are in you." The editor of the Oxford Study Bible speculates that a line may be missing, but the verse makes complete sense to me, as I've practiced arts all my life. The psalm says that the city has the drama, the beauty, the lamentations, and the promise of glory, to make Jerusalem an endless inspiration.
Miles YTD 1369 || 2nd World Tour Total 17,987 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: TBA
←← | ← || →
Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
Yet I felt funny preparing to write about Clint's Above Ground. His voice is so engaging in these poems, and he tells so much of his daily life, hopes, and memories that reading him is like listening to a particularly entertaining friend over cocktails and a good dinner. To pull out a legal pad and make notes felt wrong.
So I'm looking back over his poems the way I look back over a satisfying conversation.
First, he shares snapshots of the kids -- lots of them -- mementoes of joy, wonder, laughter, exhaustion. Kids at bed time, at bath time, a baby in the womb no bigger than a fingernail, a baby strapped to Clint's chest as he dances in the grocery store -- before the manager asks him to stop alarming the customers. His boy wonders about space and the ocean. "Prehistoric Questions" about what killed the dinosaurs lead to the boy's asking, will he die, too (94). The father gives an inspired honest answer that's one of the biggest laughs of our time together. Ok, there was one bigger laugh in "You Ask Me What Sounds a Giraffe Makes" (78), but I won't spoil it by repeating his son's hypothesis.
Smith gets wistful when he sees reflections of earlier generations in his children. Setting his infant daughter into her grandfather's arms, he writes I saw the way your brows / furrowed just like his, how your eyes carry the same pools of wonder ("Roots" 25). He tries without success to explain to his son how we see stars as they were millions of years ago, but he does explain that he can see the "stardust" of his grandmother in this child she never met ("The Andromeda Galaxy is the Closest Galaxy to Our Milky Way" 92). He marks the day when he was no longer able to recall her voice (69).
He keeps coming back to his family tree - literally. It's in a park in New Orleans where his mother brought him to climb as a child, where she climbed as a little girl. In "Tree Rings" (40) he remembers how its branches bent down to the soil as if it had long been waiting to scoop us up. He shares what sounds like a memory about that tree, Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow ("All at Once" 3). His grandmother's voice, he tells his daughter, was the shade under an oak tree / and her laugh was the branch that / stretched down to let you climb it ("Legacy" 51). The tree also brings up bitter reflections about Katrina and its aftermath.
He tells how he's carrying on "Tradition" making French toast with his kids, as his father and his father's father did, though he doesn't remember the recipe so much as the feel of his father's hands wrapped around his (26-7). When he hears a tone of anger creep into his voice in "Across Generations," it's the echo of men attempting / to unlearn the anger on their father's / tongues.
So his conversation sometimes turns towards anger, but Smith keeps cool. He finds indirect ways to express what's bothering him. He lets us figure for ourselves that the customers alarmed by his dancing were white. He doesn't cite studies that show that doctors are likely to discount the concerns of black women when his wife's pregnancy goes awry. He detaches himself from the story, focused on her determination to save herself and their child while the professionals tell her "It's All in Your Head" (9). He gets a "Gold Star" from onlookers for being such a good dad, leaving unspoken the stereotype of the absentee black father (72). (For a white man's perspective on a black father, see my poem Behind Prejudice, written before I saw Smith's book.)
Smith channels anger at the way things are into his anxiety for the way things will be for his children. In line at the grocery store, he hears a white woman denounce a black athlete who knelt during the national anthem, blatant disrespect that would get him killed in some places, she says, approval implied, before she tells Smith how cute his infant son is. Thanking her, Smith silently asks his son, will she or someone like her, encountering you years from now, forget you were ever this boy and make you into something you aren't ("Your National Anthem" p.22-3)? Dispassionate lists of medical history "For the Doctor's Records" morph into spiritual anxieties: I run four times a week / but usually it's away from something and another black boy was killed by police, and, I haven't cried in a long time (66). Teaching his kids to marvel at the 17-year cicadas, he's suddenly disturbed to think about the society his adult children will live in the next time the cicadas come "Above Ground" (84).
Telling about his visit to a Confederate memorial (research for his book How the Word is Passed), he imagines what it would feel like to fall asleep in my home, to wake up, and to find my children gone, "When Standing in a Cabin at the Whitney Plantation" (102). The story draws extra power from all we've heard about the delight, hopes, and fears poured into his children.
Maybe it's just my love of language, but Smith's best moments of our time together were his dissections of language itself. In "Nomenclature," he explores his mother-in-law's native language Igbo, in which subtle changes of inflection turn sight into love (34). Putting a child to bed in "Ars Poetica" he explains that poems can be about anything -- a lamp, a door, Pluto. POEMS ARE INSIDE OF ME? the child asks, lifting his shirt to see the poetry in himself. They are, his father says (82), which seems to me like a huge blessing. Most of all, I love what Smith does with "Punctuation," demonstrations of how a little mark can change a meaning,
There is something in your eyes I can't get out.
There is something in your eyes; I can't get out.I am trying to help
or
I am trying to run away
each example better, deeper, more sorrowful than the last (96).
I enjoyed our time together, and I revisit it often. Can't wait for the next time.
Riding my bike through Decatur on my way back from Stone Mountain Park, I paused for a selfie at the football field of Decatur High. 51 years ago this month, I scrubbed every inch of the home side bleachers. (I would've marked the 50th anniversary last summer, but a hernia precluded such an arduous ride.)
Less than a year before, Dad had purchased West Chemical Engineering Company on Huff Road, not far from Tech. Where townhomes and expensive restaurants now stand, Dad and a couple employees (me included) manufactured soaps, disinfectants, and water treatments in a shed behind an old house. Photo: Dad with Mom at the corner of Huff Road and Ellsworth Industrial Boulevard. A shed with 100-gallon mixers was attached to the back. [For more on work at Dad's company throughout my teen years, see my blog post Prep Kid in a Factory (09/2022)]
But Dad gave me a special mission that summer, when I was between my eighth and ninth grade years. Atlanta City Schools were his customers, and the concrete stadium seats at Decatur high were gray and mottled black with thirty-plus years of soot. Dad bought a piece of new technology called a "pressure washer." With a college kid named Jerry who drove and oversaw my work, I scoured the whole stadium, one one-inch strip at a time, from the upper left hand corner of this picture to the lower right-hand corner. Then I repeated the process to "seal" the concrete with a polymer mix that would keep grime from lodging in the surface.
Here's the "before" picture that Dad took on a cloudy day. In the "after" picture (which I haven't located), the concrete gleams white as vanilla ice cream.
The hardest part of my job was to fill the pressure washer's tank with a toxic soap mixture every few hours. I hauled a five gallon bucket filled with hydrochloric acid from the locker room (lower right) back up the stairs to the pressure washer. The acid has a sharp smell that burns your eyes and lungs. I'd hold my breath, advance ten steps, set the bucket down, run from the fumes, gasp, run back to the bucket, and repeat.
Did I mention, there's no shade there?
But looking back, I'm fond of that time. Jerry had little in common with me, so I had eight hours a day to myself -- good thing, for an introvert. He did have a portable radio, so I heard a lot of pop songs -- "Yesterday Once More" by the Carpenters, "Diamond Girl" by Seals & Croft, "Touch Me in the Morning" by Diana Ross -- songs that bring the whole summer back to me with a smile. Sometimes Jerry would give me leave to cross the street to a hot dog joint.
Something else was fascinating. On the right side of Dad's "before" photo, we can see some of the blocks of public housing. We were the only two white guys in a neighborhood where everyone I saw was black, a new experience for me. The homes had no air conditioning, so all the windows were open, and I heard all day the sounds of lives very different from mine.
I once wrote about those summers working for Dad in my resonse to a study about repetitive work. When workers' "executive" brains are engaged in the repetitive action, the rest of the mind is free for problem-solving and daydreaming. I agreed: That's what made heaven out of summer afternoons of hot, sticky, smelly, repetitive work in my dad's chemical company. Tightening lids on hundreds of soap bottles, pressure washing dozens of 55-gallon drums, bleaching the bleachers at South Decatur High School -- I was rapt in my own imagination, writing scripts, imagining alternative futures for myself, replaying scenes from my life with different outcomes.
I didn't see Decatur High again until 2009,when I started riding my bike through Decatur. Aluminum bleachers had replaced the concrete, and the public housing was replaced by expensive condominiums. Time had erased my work. But I'm proud to mark the anniversary.
Two versions of the Lord's Prayer appear side by side in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, one familiar, the other streamlined with one substantive change. In the more familiar one, we pray, "Lead us not into temptation." The alternative is, "Save us from the time of trial." The Catholics have adopted the second version on the grounds that the Lord doesn't lead anyone into temptation. I agree. But that line has spoken to me more and more as the world has seen a rise of populist autocrats and their reactionary politics.
I recently had the opportunity to put into words all the feelings that have been riding on that one line. Our seminar Education for Ministry had been discussing The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. Cone. It was my turn to collect the strands of our discussion into a prayer. Over the next weeks, I wrote:
O God, we affirm your presence, no matter how dark the world is. We know that we must strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. We wonder if speaking up in a time of political polarization will lead to retribution, and we doubt that we have the courage to face that possibility. So we hold on to you in faith that you will steady us in any small steps we take and will strengthen our conviction as we go. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
While this prayer expresses dread I've felt for some years, its strands come straight from that session. We had looked at the connections between Christ's crucifixion and lynchings in America. We put the Biblical event in dialogue with modern history, culture, and our own experiences and beliefs.
Joyce was especially inspired by Mamie Till who left open the casket of her brutalized son Emmett to shock the country into action. Jessica quoted scripture about "obedience even to death on the Cross." I mentioned our Baptismal vow to strive for justice and respect the dignity of every human being. Marilyn spoke of overcoming crippling fear. Nuno quoted DuBois on going forward "no matter how dark the world is." Pete contrasted Niebuhr's armchair faith to MLK's courageous stand against threats and actual violence. We found our focus: Mission as an external expression of internal conviction. Pete recalled how Tom Hanks's character in Saving Private Ryan is reluctant to accept his mission but grows in conviction as he proceeds.
Tom, hearing my prayer, pointed me to Isaiah 59.14-15:
Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands far away; for truth has stumbled in the public squares, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and he who departs from evil makes himself a prey. The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice.
"Is there no one?" asks the Lord. And he sends an intercessor dressed in the armor of righteousness and faith. The Prophet Isaiah. Jesus. WEB DuBois. Mamie Till. MLK. Us.
[Link to our two-part discussions of The Cross and the Lynching Tree, first half, second half.]
[Photo: Susan with a vase of flowers; Selfie with fruit and flies.]
I learned from this exhibit that the genre of still life was born in the Netherlands during the 17th century when Dutch ships were returning home from all over the world laden with riches. The objects display the art patron's imports -- typically citrus from Spain, strong drink from Italy, tobacco from North America, plus silver and coffee from South America. So these paintings do in fact tell us a bit about the characters of the people who paid for them.
The artist, meanwhile, is displaying both his ingenuity, arranging objects to look as if they had not been arranged, and his skill in creating life-like images.
Eyeing example after example was a bit like playing that kind of puzzle where you look for hidden objects. Expect a wine glass so clear you might not see it at first glance. Expect china with its own intricate pattern. I soon learned to expect at least one little creature crawling or flying.
I usually linger over portraits and depictions of cities. Compared to the sharpness and humor of the little still lives, the energy was diffused in group portraits and street scenes.
Two Rembrandt sketches did excite me. They're pencil or charcoal, the size of postcards. One was a self-portrait, with Rembrandt looking cocky. The other is a landscape, wetland in the foreground, country lane and windmill beyond, all summoned to the imagination by just a couple of elaborated horizontal lines.
I also knew Flannery's work, how funny it is when she gets deep into the mindset of people who are quirky, sometimes repulsive. Whether her protagonists are Bible-brandishing bigots or condescending liberal atheists, illiterate or college-educated, they often come to a reckoning when their most precious truth is attacked. That can be at the same time both funny and horrific.
I thought I also knew Flannery. In her essays and published letters, she comes across as highly ironic, magisterial, fierce in her defense of Roman Catholic faith, even against other Catholics who water it down. For instance, “What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.” About her work, she writes, "I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality...." (Both quotations are used in the movie.) I knew that she was confined to her mother's farm by lupus, the disease that killed her father, but I imagined her there a bastion of confidence in God and herself.
What I didn't realize until I saw the movie is how vulnerable Flannery O'Connor was. In the scenes from her life, we see Hawke tremble with fever, cry in anger, flush with embarrassment as Flannery endures chronic humiliations and acute disappointments. Flannery's patronizing editor withdraws plans to publish her novel because she refuses to follow a conventional outline. Near tears, she tells him she won't outline because "I write to discover what I'm doing!" Her mentor makes promises he doesn't keep. Her mother shows disappointment in her daughter with every sigh and helpful suggestion. Then there's Flannery's diagnosis and worsening condition, as climbing stairs and even walking to the mailbox become ordeals.
We see parallels to Flannery's inner life when Hawke also plays characters abandoned, bereft of what's most precious to them, betrayed by people they thought they knew, or staring down the barrel of a convict's gun. We're meant to see resonances between Flannery's experience and her work.
Actor Laura Linney also plays multiple roles as Flannery's mother and characters in the stories. As Flannery's mother, Linney projects smug self-righteousness. She wants her daughter to smile more, and she responds to a story by Flannery with a dismissive chuckle, "Well, it really isn't Harper's Bazaar, is it?"
At the same time, Linney shows genuine concern for her daughter. She forces Flannery to the doctor, then shields her from the diagnosis. Worried by her daughter's depression, she calls in a priest and listens intently from the next room as that priest validates Flannery with an imperative, "Write!"
In Flannery's story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own," she's the mother who sells her mute daughter for the price of a wedding license. Linney's smile shows how the mother is relieved to pass on the burden of caring for the girl, while her lingering gaze at the receding car also shows hope that her daughter will rise to the challenge and grow. In another story, Linney plays a prim bigot whose adult child scorns her, then mourns her -- an intense ambivalence that Flannery may have shared.
Flannery's mother complains when her daughter imports some pea fowl to the farm. They sit on her flowers, she says, and the male doesn't even spread his tail feathers. Flannery smiles and assures her that he will, when he's ready. Thus Ethan Hawke (who co-wrote the script with Shelby Gaines) sets up an inspired conclusion.
Where I've looked on the web, the title of the movie is said to describe Flannery herself, a "wildcat" writer who refuses to be tamed by the doubters who want conventional fiction. That does describe Flannery in the movie, but Flannery's story "Wildcat" isn't about the animal, but the blind man who "smells" it in the vicinity of his little cabin. He can't sleep, he won't go out. There's resonance with Flannery, for whom disability and death lurked every day of her adult life.
Unlike the character in her story, Flannery made a blessing of the wildcat, writing furiously in the fourteen years before it finally got her.
[I toured Flannery's farm in 2016 and finished the day by viewing the movie John Huston made from her novel Wise Blood. See Flannery Would Have Loved it (06/2016).]
 |
| Cyclist Scott Smoot enters virtually into a cave above Matala, Crete |
He was a young American in Crete working at a café. She was a singer-songwriter getting away from the pressures of stardom. When she cleared a messy table and presented him with a tray of empty glasses, he took this passive-aggressive indictment out of her hands and smashed it at her feet. Thus began a beautiful love affair.
It could be a full length romcom, but Joni Mitchell packs all you need to know in the song "Carey" from her superlative 1970 album Blue. Her song is an upbeat celebration of their affair on the eve of her departure. She's leaving because she misses her California lifestyle with "clean white linen / and that fancy French cologne." (Read my appreciation of Blue (07/2020).)
This happened in Matala, a tourist town nestled between a scenic beach and high white cliffs pocked with caves, a hippie haven and celebrity magnet at the time.
Because of that song, I've included Matala in my virtual bike tour of places I've lived or loved. Throughout the worst part of the pandemic, when restaurants served only take-out meals, my friend Susan and I, eating outside on her patio six feet apart, would stop talking when her Blue CD reached "Carey" : you couldn't be anxious or discouraged hearing it.
I've never known Greece or romance, but through Joni I've experienced both -- vicariously.
Miles YTD 761 || 2nd World Tour Total 16,618 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Jerusalem
←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
This was Stephen Sondheim, then 63, to aspiring composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown, then in his early 20s. In 1993, Sondheim was treating Brown and a friend to dinner following the premiere of a new Sondheim show.
Twenty minutes into the dinner, the fact that Sondheim had to ask was itself an answer. Brown's babbling about everything but the show couldn't hide that he was disappointed by it. Sondheim, his hero, was hurt.
When Brown was nearly 40, he reflected on the experience in The Sondheim Review (summer 2010). For creative artists, "The generations coming next are the ones whose approval we need if our lives are to mean anything."
When Brown apologized by phone the next day, Sondheim admitted that he would have done "that kind of stupid thing" at the same age. Then he told Brown, just be supportive. "Say only this: I loved it."
In that spirit, I'm responding to what I've heard since the release of the original cast album of Here We Are, Sondheim's collaboration with playwright David Ives and director Joe Mantello.
[PHOTO: When the CD arrived, I paused for a selfie with it still in its shrink-wrap: this would be my last time to hear a Sondheim score for the first time. As my friend Susan observed, I was sorry-grateful. ]
So, Mr. Sondheim, right away I LOVE the music we hear in the Overture. It's catchy, chipper, playful -- even though we come to associate the first theme with words about "the end of the world." The texture is transparent, the interplay of independent lines delightful, the harmony crunchy. I know how you like Stravinsky and Ravel: In instrumentals and underscoring throughout the show, you have equaled their most fun chamber pieces. Kudos to orchestrator Jonathan Tunick for punching up that connection.
The character Marianne sings "Are we not blessed?" and draws her companions into a little psalm about joys in life such as birdsong, friendship, and Shakespeare. Same here. She sings, "I'm completely undone / by the endless abundance of life." (Love the emphasis of that internal rhyme abundance). She urges her husband to "buy this perfect day / Let it stay just this way / forever." I love how that foreshadows (causes?) the story of friends who do magically get stuck in one day. I love that you and David Ives make Marianne so shallow and yet so joyful. I love how you go deeper into her shallowness in the second act when she sings,
I like things to shine...
I like things to glow.
Why can't I be free
to like what I see
and not what I know?
Can she be superficial and self-aware at the same time? What a pleasure to know her.
I love that you balance all the positive things you write for Marianne with pronouncements of judgment on the world from her grown child Fritz (formerly "Frances"), "Only just the End of the World" for
power brokers, and chiropractors,
and underpaid teachers,
and overpaid actors.
So many things on (his/her/their) list are on mine, too, but mine don't rhyme so neatly and go by so quickly. It's the kind of patter we Sondheim fans have always loved.
I love how Fritz falls in love with a soldier at first sight, and spends the rest of the show in a state of wonder about her sudden uncertainty. Does Fritz -- "gay since I was three" -- really love this man? Now that she has experienced love, does Fritz really want to abet a terrorist plot to bring on the Apocalypse? I love the soldier's voice and his dogged devotion to Fritz.
I love the kind Bishop with a thing for slippers. I love that the music you write for him is an easy two-step that used to be referred to as "old soft shoe."
Tell your collaborator David Ives that the dialogue between the Bishop and Marianne is funny and real, gentle and thought-provoking. Also, tell Ives I love the greeting of the waiter at the first of three unbearably pretentious restaurants: "Good morning, adventurers. I'll be enabling your table."
Mr. Sondheim, I love what you said to me when we met just once 47 years ago. That was the year after your Kabuki musical had flopped, and you were planning a show about a barber who chops his customers into meat pies. I asked, why not try to appeal more to the public? You wanted to write shows unlike anything else you've seen.
I love the fact that you knew full well the limitations of this material and adapted it anyway. Your collaborators write in the liner notes how surrealism "resists" the logic of a story and undercuts the "deep feeling" so important to musical theatre.
Given that they are so right about surrealism, I love that you took for your final work the greatest challenge of your career.
The virtual biking tour of places in the world that "I've lived or loved" brings me to Athens, repository of stories I've known since Mom sat me on her lap to read me D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths. As I grew, I checked that book out from libraries many times to re-read the stories and lose myself in the illustrations. See my appreciation of the book at The Olympic Universe (08/2021).
So at age eight I was primed to be moved by Star Trek's episode about the Greek gods, "Who Mourns for Adonis?" It hooks us with a unique image: a giant hand, disembodied and translucent, emerges from the stars and grips the Enterprise. It is Apollo, alone on a distant planet, who has waited millennia for earthlings to find him and resume worshipping him. Despite that lame gold lamé tunic, the Drama Club set and a table that some prop guy lifted from a highway rest stop, actor Michael Forest is charismatic. But Kirk and crew don't bow down. They find that Apollo's power has a technological source concealed in the temple and they destroy it. Apollo weeps and fades away.
I mourned the death of the gods and their magical world. The D'Aulaires book, too, ends with an illustration of a ruined temple and the matter-of-fact observation that all things come to an end. That wasn't a message I wanted to accept at age 7. (Losing Santa Claus had been hard enough.) At 65, I'm getting used to the idea, and my faith helps me -- sometimes with the aid of poetry -- to see spirit in the material world around me, the way the Greeks saw gods and demigods everywhere.
Since the last stop on my bike tour, I've gone 680 miles, 80 of them by swimming laps. [To see my virtual visit to Istanbul and other places, including Paris, London, and San Francisco, use the arrows above and below this posting.]
Miles YTD 517, average speed 14mph || 2nd World Tour Total 17,135 miles since June 2020 || Next Stop: Matala, Crete -- where Carey met Joni.
←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire tour from the start.
Robinson owns a set of character flaws that I can identify with. Responding to the parable of the weeds, he writes, "I wish I weren't so defensive. I'm confident God didn't plant that." Nor did God plant his envy, his quick temper, and his need for approval. We may assume that the burning of weeds is an image for God's punishment of infidels, but it's more meaningful to imagine that God rips and burns the weeds in us so that we may grow into our true nature.
Much to his own surprise, Robinson wept in church at the parable of the mustard seed. Why? He had been lashing out at his family in his impatience with rehabilitation following surgery; the parable convicted him of expecting instant results from a tiny seed. When Robinson reviews some hard times in his life, such as when he had to sleep in a barn or bathe in the sink of a public restroom, I could buy in, especially when he admitted, "But I could always call my family and return home." We can all count on God, he says, but we should remember that Jesus at Gethsemane did not call his Father for a bailout.
In one meditation, Robinson imagines how others see him. He is separated from his wife, he once exploded at a pharmacist's mistake, he didn't honor a trans person's pronouns: so much for his faith, they must be thinking. He sorrowfully concludes with a quote attributed to St. Francis, "Remember that you may be all the Gospel your neighbor will ever read."
Robinson doesn't like verses that impute violence to Jesus, such as the swords that shoot from the divine mouth in Revelation 19. Like Robinson, a young woman he knew in seminary downplayed such verses, her reaction to her upbringing in a macho fundamentalist church. But she recognized that the "flower power" Jesus is good only for people of her socio-economic status, shielded from hunger and violence. Justice needs a Jesus who wields a sword. For November 11, Robinson selects a line from Psalm 16, He broke the flashing arrows, the shield, the sword, and the weapons of battle and introduces the saint honored on that date, Martin of Tours, a Roman soldier turned Bishop. Robinson tells us that Martin gave up weapons to use his moral clout to save prisoners from torture and execution, even the heretics.
Robinson applies Micah's words to us: Hear this, you who build Jerusalem with wrong (Micah 3.9-10). Robinson writes,
They all seem like isolated decisions. A church locks the doors, keeping out desperate hurricane refugees. A community makes it harder for people of color to vote or bans books by and about them in our libraries. We allow the income gap between rich and poor to grow ever wider. ...We proclaim ourselves a Christian nation so often that it doesn't seem possible that God could be looking upon us with anger.
Robinson puts a happy twist on parables of the kingdom. In one parable, the kingdom of heaven is like the treasure that a man finds; another begins The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls. The merchant gives up everything he has to buy the pearl of great price. Robinson writes, "In the previous parable, the man is enriched by finding the kingdom. In the second, the kingdom is enriched by finding us. We are the pearl of great value. It is for us that God gives everything." In the bottom line, we're asked, "Have you thought of yourself as the pearl God seeks? How does imagining yourself as the treasure in the field shape your relationship with God?" Let's think on that.
Her very first story responds to Jesus, Whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant (Mt 20.26). She remembers working at a restaurant where the boss joined the guys who unloaded deliveries at the back. That's a good example of the scripture. But there's more: she knows what the boss did only because a co-worker told her about the boss's joining the crew. The co-worker was not religious, but he's the one who taught her what Jesus meant.
Keep alert (Mk 13.33) reminds Woodside of a night in her childhood when her mother was sewing in the basement and ran upstairs to get some cloth. She found a door open to the outside and bolted it before going to bed. In the light of morning, the family realized that burglars had entered the house and must've heard her footsteps on the stairs and fled. So, like the teaching of Jesus, we should keep alert. But also, sometimes, you have to "run up the stairs without fear."
Hiking and running up steep hills a lot, Woodside naturally thinks of those activities when she reads 2 Peter 1.3, 5-7 instructs us support your faith with self-control and endurance. She feels the exercise prepares her for service. Bring me to Your holy hill gives Woodside an opportunity to turn the usual lesson on its head: such an experience does stay with us forever, in the decisions you learn from on the way, and in the gratitude for returning to home, running water, and a loving family.
Woodside loves weather, Through horrific scenes of Revelation, she sees the presence of God (21.3-4): The house of God is among mortals... God himself will be with them. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Our consciousness of God should be like Woodside's consciousness of weather: it's more to her than the (in)convenient background to human activity. She remains acutely aware and appreciative.
As Leonard Bernstein went out to the maestro's podium unrehearsed and came back a world-famous conductor, so I went into Maestro a fan of Leonard Bernstein and came back a fan of Bradley Cooper. He co-wrote the screenplay with John Singer, directed the movie, acted the title role, and conducted a real-live orchestra.
By choosing to start where so many biopics end, when the artist becomes a star, Cooper turns a Hollywood cliché on its head. He's telling us that the artist's stardom is not the story.
The focus instead is established in a prologue, when Bernstein (Cooper convincing as Lenny ca. 1990) tells an interviewer, "I still see her sometimes." She is the actress Felicia Montealegre, his wife, who died of lung cancer in 1978.
When Felicia (played by Carey Mulligan) meets him at a party, he has already composed symphonic works and he's at work on a Broadway musical. She enters her relationship with him open-eyed. She knows that he is promiscuous in loves -- of music, theatre, young men, intoxicants, and cigarettes. She knows, and wants to encourage his artistic growth, as he encourages hers. Can such a marriage work? That's the question behind the rest of the film.
One of Cooper's choices was to film this very public couple's story in black and white until the point in their marriage when color TV became a thing.
A TV interview in the Bernstein home reveals how the marriage is going in 1957: not well. Felicia tells newsman Edward R. Murrow that "it's hard" to raise three children while your husband's in concert halls around the world, on Broadway writing West Side Story, in a TV studio producing an educational series. She says she scarcely has time to be an actress. The subtext is, "It's not working," audible in Carrie Mulligan's tense voice through her forced smile. To a question about conducting v. composing, Lenny says one career is public and "extroverted," while composing opens up a "grand inner life." The subtext is, you're there alone -- no wife, no children. Cooper, as Lenny, makes clear that Lenny hadn't quite realized how torn their relationship and his life are until that very moment. After a pause, he laughs that such a life can make you "schizophrenic."
Another of Cooper's choices was to make Bernstein's own music the soundtrack to his life. Seems obvious, but so effective. Lenny's exuberant, jazzy music from both the ballet Fancy Free and its spinoff musical comedy On the Town is used for a scene of Lenny and Felicia watching a rehearsal that morphs into a fantasy as they join the dancers. Lenny and his longtime lover, splitting up for the sake of appearances, kiss in Central Park for the last time to the accompaniment of "To What You Said," Bernstein's setting of Walt Whitman's poem about the end of a relationship with a "comrade" outside "the customary loves and friendships." In another scene, Felicia cries to see her husband at his best, teaching a chorus of young singers his anthem from Candide, "Make Our Garden Grow." At the gala premier of his Mass, while his music wreaths Kennedy Center with overlapping iterations of his melody for the phrase Laude, laudate -- praising God -- Bernstein grasps hands with his latest boy toy, ignoring Felicia at his other side.
A climactic confrontation takes place in their New York apartment during the Thanksgiving Parade. The family's guests can be heard outside the door, the parade can be heard and seen outside the window, while Felicia and Lenny talk over each other in waves of recrimination. I may be wrong, but I remember that Cooper filmed (and performed) it in a single continuous shot, like a prize fight with several rounds.
Cooper's most daring choice was to take six minutes of the movie to show him as Lenny conducting Mahler's Resurrection symphony in Ely Cathedral, England. No dialogue, no cuts to other locations, only the building ecstasy in Mahler's finale, the intense concentration of the orchestra players, the beatific expressions of the singers, and Lenny's full-body immersion in the music -- leaping, breathing the words, sweating, crying. We cry, too, it's so beautiful. Felicia is there, too, also crying. They embrace: it's an artistic consummation, partly resolving the long line of their story.
There is the sad coda of her cancer. For two of the most moving scenes in the film, Cooper chose to have no dialogue. Lenny, holding Felicia in her sickbed, simply breathes with her. Another scene, Lenny leaves the family in one room, closes the door and grabs a pillow to muffle his own wailing and weeping.
[Read my reflection on the composer whose face, name and music I knew before I was five, and about our phone conversation when I was around 30. See Lentennial: Bernstein at 100 (11/2018) That article includes links to my reviews of Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concerts that featured LB's music. I've also blogged in appreciation of two people in Bernstein's life who appear in the movie at the party where Felicia meets Lenny. They are playwright-lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, doing "Carried Away," a song they wrote with Lenny for themselves to sing in the musical comedy On the Town. Comden and Green are lovingly remembered in my blogpost Make Someone Happy (11/2006)]
