209. Retreat

temenosretreatcenter.org

Classes are over, the tulips are already blown, and the spring breeze carries with it murmurs of sultry summer afternoons—elsewhere.

The prospect of getting away is delightful but the reality is daunting. All the planning, booking, advance arrangements, packing—it tires one out just thinking about  it. I never understood those people who spent half the year planning their next vacation and the other half talking about it. Now I sometimes wish I had one of them to take care of it all for me. Surely it would be easier, and almost as enjoyable, just to set up a tent in the nearby conservation area or sling a jungle hammock between two trees in the back garden. Or, easier still, to swing my feet up onto the sofa on the front porch with a cold drink and simply allow myself to drift.

But no, getting away—really away—is imperative. Sometimes to establish the conditions in which to relax fully, one has perforce to engage in a period of planning.

It’s not that I want to escape from reality, but rather that I want to slip out of the rut of everyday thinking, making the time to come alive more fully in a setting where there’s nothing to do but to be. One doesn’t need to go very far from home, but sufficiently far to be out of reach of that never-ending To Do list and sufficiently close that getting ready to go doesn’t have to be such a big hoo-hah.

That place is Temenos, a retreat at the top of a hill just half an hour’s drive from home, but one whose remove has been attended to with such thoughtful, loving care that it seems worlds upon worlds away. Just bring yourself, a sleeping bag, food and drink in ice-filled coolers; the caretakers of the trust provide the rest, making themselves scarce so that a space opens up for you to step into, but giving you quiet assurance that they are close at hand should you find yourself in need. After dispensing with your car a sufficient distance away, you load your things onto a little wagon and trundle it to your cabin, where you will find already-cut-and-split wood in all sizes should you wish to fire up a woodstove, but a propane cookstove as well. A metal-lined, heavy-lidded box keeps your food safe from bears, and there’s bedding, a simple wooden kitchen table, a hurricane lamp for light—no electricity or running water—and a little writing desk complete with log book in which those who have come before you have written over the years. Everything is clean and simple, basic but well-stocked. Large screened windows open up to the woods all round for light, air, and insect-free communing with nature. A sufficient walk away, just down the path from the woodshed,  is the outhouse; but oh, what an outhouse, screened, sturdily constructed, scrupulously clean and fresh, with utter privacy and a view of the woods. There are no lights from the surrounding towns.

photo: Tiffany Hrach (hrachgarden.blogspot.com)

That’s it. Outside and down the road apiece there’s a pump where you can fill gallon jugs with a rust-colored minerally water (the spot used to be a health spa many years ago, and after all, it’s on Mount Mineral); a small pond where you can take a dip with the turtles in the heat of the summer; a small, homemade labyrinth for meditative walks; a bog walk, silence but for the rustling of the wind in the trees, and little red efts everywhere.

I’m gone.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

207. The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

The first book I remember owning was Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear. My mother must have bought it for me, along with a few other English children’s classics, like The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, to take back to India with us when I was four. I still have the book today, countless moves later, and have read and recited the rhymes in it so many times that their deeply humanistic nonsense is an integral part of who I am. (By the way, my father told me just the other day that the Marathi folk tradition is full of nonsense rhymes, too, which I didn’t learn as a child because when in India we lived clear on the other side of the country and I went to English-medium schools.)

Picture books and board books were not as prevalent as they are now, so my first book was a beautifully printed hardcover, which I regret to say I drew and wrote on, though thankfully only on the end papers. But in so doing I made it all the more my own, by bestowing upon it special marks of my affection.

The two most well-known of Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes are The Owl and the Pussycat:

They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible [Lear's own neologism] spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

and The Jumblies:

Far and Few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a sieve.

These I soon learned by heart, including the song in the case of the former, although the tune has now escaped me. Just about every poem in that entire collection is weird and wonderful, including The Pobble Who Has No Toes, Mr. and Mrs. Spikky Sparrow, The New Vestments, and Mrs. And Mrs. Discobbolos. But perhaps the quirkiest, the most touching, and overall the most perfect of them all, the one lodged most deeply in my brain, is The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

First of all, the story is set on the Coromandel Coast. All I knew was that it had a certain ring to it; little did I realize that it was in fact the southeast coast of India, a Portuguese corruption of the original Cholamandalam. It was the saddest of love stories, not unrequited love, but love fully requited yet impossible because of the ridiculous strictures of society. At the same time it was hilarious, exemplified by the verse reproduced below, in which the Lady Jingly Jones reluctantly turns down the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò’s proposal of marriage.

That is all you need to know. It is patently obvious that the illustrations are inseparable from the text, both having come out of the zany head of Mr. Lear. Here’s a curiously English 1966 recording of David Davis reading it aloud, I leave you with another picture from my beat-up old edition, still holding together after all these years. Now just read, reciting it out loud, again and again, whenever and wherever possible; and, if you have any human feelings at all, shed a few tears for the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

206. Xenophobia

hermanusrainbowtrust.blogspot.com

Xenophobia: an undue or irrational fear of foreigners or outsiders

Okay,  some will say, but this is a natural human fight-or-flight response, stemming from the days when outsiders were a threat to one’s very survival; for that matter, they still can be, and are.

Fair enough; but allow me to make just three points.

First, note the “undue” and “irrational” in the definition:  a natural instinct to be a little wary of outsiders at first encounter is understandable; but a paranoia that persists even after the outsiders are a known quantity is unreasonable.

Second, ask yourself if you know who these outsiders are. Do you mean the people who come from outside your community or country or who speak a different language from your own? I submit to you that any of us can feel like or be perceived to be an outsider, even if we share the same nationality and language as our peers and have lived in the same community from birth. Once you recognize the impossibility of knowing who the outsiders are, xenophobia becomes all the more irrational.

The third point is the kicker. I propose that the fear of foreigners or outsiders often stems from the secret knowledge that you are an outsider yourself.  A story from my own experience, not a pretty one, may serve to illustrate.

When I was at boarding school in India two new students, a brother and sister, thirteen, perhaps fourteen years old, joined us. It might have been mid-year, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that they had just come from England where they had been living for a time, their parents having returned to India. Naturally, everything was new and strange to them, and they couldn’t help but compare much of what they were encountering with their experience in England.  It seemed to us, though, that every five minutes they were saying, “In England this” or “In England that.” We claimed to find it intensely irritating and started jeering, “In England,” whenever they opened their mouths.

They were pleasant, quiet, and good-natured, those two. The problem was ours, not theirs, but we made it theirs by the way we treated them. Why were we so unkind and intolerant? The obvious answer is that in the 1960’s, barely 20 years since Independence from British rule, we didn’t take kindly to anything Indian getting compared negatively to its English counterpart. But if I search my own motives, a still more troubling—and telling—explanation emerges. I was arguably at least as much of an outsider as the two newcomers were, perhaps more, in that I was half-English, had been born in England, and, at 13, had lived outside of India for almost half of my life. Of all people, I ought to have had some empathy for them, to have been able to reach out and make them feel welcome. But I didn’t, however ashamed I feel about it now. If they ever read this story, I hope they will be able to forgive me.

I could attempt to justify my behavior with the protestation that at the time I was unaware of the personal motivation for it, for the fears about my own belonging that made me challenge theirs all the more vehemently. But that is precisely my point: I contend that many of those who engage in xenophobic behavior are unaware that what drives it is their own insecurity about their status as insiders.

We are all foreigners. And it is our human task to help one another feel a little more at home.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

205. Weeping Willow

There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down,
And drinks his wine ’mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me.

[Chorus] Fare thee well, for I must leave thee,
Do not let the parting grieve thee,
And remember that the best of friends must part, must part
Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, adieu, adieu,
I can no longer stay with you, stay with you,
I’ll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree,
And may the world go well with thee.
— F. J. Adams, 1891

I don’t remember having seen any weeping willows in my childhood in India, and knew of them only through There’s a Tavern in the Town, a song my mother used to sing. Although she would never have said so to us children, she was probably homesick for England when she sang these old songs. That hidden emotion and the longtime association of the weeping willow with parted lovers imbued my image of the tree with sentiment, deep, but non-specific.

It was not until we immigrated to the United States that weeping willows became a common feature of the cultivated landscape, and not until we moved out to the farm in Winchendon and started homesteading ourselves that we learned of the practical dangers of planting them anywhere near a house.  Although the tree is beautiful—one of the first to turn a delicate yellow, then green, in the early spring—and useful for preventing erosion, it craves water, and its large, thirsty roots gravitate toward septic pipes and storm drains, work their way in through cracks and crevices, and soon block them.

When my parents moved into their current house, there was a small weeping willow down in the far corner of their back field, in the lowest-lying part of their property. It was well away from the house and its roots would be likely to gravitate down and ever farther away, so they let it be. It thrived there, and now, twenty years later, it has filled out the entire corner and grown up to its full, mature height.

The weeping willow (salix babylonica) is native to northern China. Being highly desirable, it was traded along the Silk Route to south-west Asia and Europe, and has now spread worldwide. The tree at my parents’ is now so large that it can be seen from the other side of the world. Here’s how we found out:

My nephew Pinakin came to the U.S. from India for his doctoral studies. When he visited us for the first time and I was driving him over to meet my parents, he asked me excitedly if he could navigate. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve looked you all up on Google Earth.” Sure enough, Pinakin gave me flawless directions across town. When we drew up at the house, he exclaimed with satisfaction, “It’s all here: the house, the fields, and the big tree in the corner!” That weeping willow can now be spotted from India via satellite! I can’t quite describe what that made me feel: the tree that has so long been a symbol of parting and loss is now a landmark that our distant loved ones can seek out, zoom in on, and find us by.

Earlier this evening, in the gathering dusk, when I gazed on that tree clothed in its delicate Spring green, with the last rays of the setting sun lighting the adjacent clouds on fire, I thought of my mother in India half a century ago, long before the days of satellites, singing of her distant loved ones.  When I was a child, I thought that the woman in “There’s a Tavern in the Town” was singing, “I’ll hang my heart [not harp] on a weeping willow tree.” I still think that my version describes best what we have hung on that tree, that continues to seek water and light wherever it is transplanted, regardless of the human heart.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

200. Roots, Rock, Reggae

My first encounter with Reggae music was with Jimmy Cliff’s Wonderful World, Beautiful People in 1969, during lunch-hour at the all-girls Parliament Hill School in London. It was an incongruous setting: in a school community polarized between hippies and skinheads (with the hippie girls wearing long hair and black tights and the skinhead girls wearing very short hair and white tights), it was the skinheads who played the Reggae, while the hippies were playing the newly discovered Led Zeppelin. I was an outsider to both groups since I attended that school for only a few months, though if I had belonged to any group it would have been the hippies. The skinhead philosophy (if you can call it that) was a racist one, so it was odd that they liked Jimmy Cliff. Gangs of skinheads would lie in wait for Asians (“Pakis,” they called them all) and beat them up, kicking them with their Doc Martens, which they called bovver boots. According to their racial stereotypes, Asians were weak and passive, while the Afro-Caribbeans were masculine and liable to  fight back. Hence they left them alone, gave them grudging respect, and listened to their music.

While my sympathies were with the hippies, I thought that Jimmy Cliff’s was unquestionably the better sound; Led Zeppelin left me cold. The previous year, when I had first arrived in England, Desmond Dekker topped the charts with his hit single, Israelites, and I loved that too.

After moving to the United States I lost touch with Reggae music for a couple of years, but when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come (1972) came to the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (for what was to be a ten-year run) I fell in love with it all over again. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that movie and, of course, played the album many times more, over and over again, as was our wont in those days. Every song on it was a winner, from the hard-hitting title track to the achingly sweet Many Rivers to Cross and Sitting in Limbo.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970’s that I discovered the Wailers, but when I did, I became a complete and total fan of Reggae, which seemed to combine the best of rhythm & blues, Third World politics, a voice for the working poor and the dispossessed, and messianic liberation theology with Caribbean syncopation, positive vibrations, and a truly global vision. It was slower and less frenetic than rock-n-roll; it had the beat, but it also had soul. We went to see Bob Marley & the Wailers three times, in 1976 at the Music Hall in Boston, 1978 at the Music Inn outdoors in Lenox, Western Massachusetts, and in 1979 at the Harvard Stadium. In 1979 we saw Peter Tosh in Sanders Theatre at Harvard on his first solo tour. It was around that time, too, that we first got to see Toots and the Maytals, and I accompanied my friend Geno backstage to interview Toots after the show.

When Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, only thirty-six years old, it felt like the end of an era. Peter Tosh was killed a few short years afterwards, in 1987, at age forty-two. The harsh realities of the unequal, war-torn world he sang of in songs like Equal Rights and Rumors of War caught up to him in his own home. We were entering the Reagan era, and we needed all the inspiration, the Redemption Songs, we could get, but we had lost our prophets and bards. Listening to Bob Marley singing Three Little Birds, we sang along:

Baby don’t worry,
’bout a thing

Cos every little thing’s
Gonna be all right

And tried to believe it.

To this day, I far prefer a reggae version of just about any song to the original. If you want proof of the truth of this, listen to Toots and the Maytals sing Country Roads and follow it up with the John Denver original. I guarantee that thereafter the latter will be insipid by comparison.

Listen: Roots, Rock, Reggae: this a reggae music.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents\

199. Quest

For centuries human beings, armed and dangerous, have taken to the roads and seas, setting out for distant lands in search of riches, precious commodities that they can rob and pillage, through trickery and violence, and bear back home as their own. They have subjugated the people whose wealth they have appropriated and sought to convince them—and themselves—that divine Providence, not all-too-human Greed, wields their sword. Their goal, as they swoop down like a plague on their unsuspecting victims, is conquest.

Lao Tzu with disciple (zeigua.com)

But there’s another urge that has impelled the wanderers of the world to its four corners. This impulse is quickened by a desire to meet and mingle with fellow human beings different from themselves, a love of beauty, an ever-renewed sense of wonder. Their goal is not to despoil, to enslave men to toil, to plant their flags in foreign soil. Their road is a not a warpath, but a walkabout, a way; like life itself, a journey; not conquest, but Quest.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

197. O, Oh, and the Wonderful O

Illustration by Ronald Searle (1962 Puffin Books edition)

Years ago, while I was just starting my graduate studies, I attended a talk by the eminent scholar Christopher Ricks. I freely confess that I was able to take away very little from the lecture, but for one thing: the difference between O and Oh. He illustrated this difference with instances of each of their use in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

According to the Grammarist, O is used as a poetic form of address (poetic apostrophe) and always precedes the name of the person being invoked (or the pronoun referring to that person). “O Beloved Guru,” one’s ideal student might say, “O Wise and Wonderful One, vouchsafe to us thy blessing as we go forth into the wide world.”

“Oh” is used much more commonly today. It is an “interjection used to express a range of emotions, including pain, sorrow, hesitation, and recognition. . .usually set off from its surrounding sentence by commas.” Take, for example, the opening lines from Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there. . .

Or—to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous—Sybil’s “Oh, I know” in Fawlty Towers.

But what O and Oh have in common is O itself, without which neither of them could even be uttered. James Thurber’s 1958 story, The Wonderful O imagines, brilliantly, what it would be like to have to live without that most fulsome of vowels. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t yet come across this little gem, but suffice it to say that the benighted Island of Ooroo was reduced to a shadow of its former self, lovers could no longer spoon under the moon, and the unfortunate Otto Ott was reduced to a stutter. O was worth fighting for, and when it was recovered, the islanders learned to value their most precious treasure, previously taken for granted.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

196. Never No More

When you are a little girl and you quarrel with your best friend, one or the other of you storms out of the room, crying, “I’m never going to talk to you again—never, ever!” Fortunately, most of these storms give way to sunshine before long and you are soon arm-in-arm again, all forgiven and forgotten.

Adults have longer memories; they bear grudges, grudges that they hold on to like grim death even though in the process they hurt themselves more than anyone else.  For them, how long “Never” is may depend on how obstinate they are, how long they’re willing to deny themselves the possibility of forgiveness.

One of my favorite Jimmie Rodgers songs is the Never No Mo’ Blues. The singer has lost his lover and he is inconsolable. He declares that his life is a failure, because:

She won’t be my gal no mo’ no mo’ no mo

His last yodeled no mo-o’ is drawn out like a hound howling at the moon. He closes:

Now whether I’m right or wrong
I’m gonna be gone before long
And then I’ll hush this crazy song
And I never will sing
No mo’, no mo-o’ 

It is a devastating thought to me that someone could forever deny himself the joy of singing, one of the chief means by which he might be able to find consolation.

In the aftermath of a really tragic event like yesterday’s blasts at the Boston Marathon,  it is too soon to speak of forgiveness. In the face of  so much pain, people must draw together protectively. But while I am hearing deep sorrow, disbelief, determination to keep strong and to see justice done, I’m not hearing talk of vengeance or the drum-beat for a scapegoat. We won’t forget this soon. But Never is a long time.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

193. Kindling

kindling (from megscoutguide.nic.in)

I’m speaking of the material one uses to get a wood fire going—dry twigs, thin sticks, or twists and knots of newspaper that will sustain the first, fragile, licks of flame, so that the larger pieces of wood will catch fire.  Having a supply of dry kindling on hand is essential to building a fire, whether indoors in a brick fireplace or woodstove or outdoors in a makeshift firepit.  As a verb, kindling refers to starting a fire, setting fire to something that will burn or, figuratively, arousing emotion. Etymologically, the word comes from cundel, “to set fire to,” thought to be of Scandinavian origin and related to the Old Norse kynda, also meaning “to kindle.”

How to Build a Campfire (npr.org)

There’s something very satisfying about building a good fire, setting it in the shape of a small teepee, carefully positioning the kindling so that it will get enough oxygen to catch fire and the flames are directed to the larger logs above, slipping the lit match in at the bottom, and watching it all flare up and slowly take hold. It warms your body and also kindles the cockles of your heart. Don’t forget, though, that the art of building a fire also includes the art of keeping that fire safe.

I suppose I have to mention (though I refuse to advertise) a commercial product, on the market only for a few short years (since 2007), that has appropriated this ancient word and still more primal human activity. I resent the fact that this brand of electronic reader seeks to be the object that comes to mind  when the word is mentioned. As a book-lover and former co-owner of a small letterpress business, I resent that this device even seeks to supplant the printed book, repository of human knowledge for more than a thousand years.

Amazon Kindle: Digital Book Burning (redicecreations.com)

If you think that this new means of delivering information to readers will be more durable or more enviromentally sustainable, think again. “The printed book is by far the most durable and reliable backup technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CD’s,” writes Kevin Kelly in a New York Times article on the Google Books project, digital technology, and the printed book. Librarian and cultural journalist R. H. Lossin has recently given a lecture on book-burning, Nazis, the 21^st-Century digital library, and the fascinating question of why both major brands of e-reader have names that signify the act of setting something on fire. Thought-provoking, eh?

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents

192. Jam Today

In my mid-twenties I participated with many others in an effort to stop the Seabrook, New Hampshire nuclear power station from being built. We did not succeed in Seabrook, although we did raise awareness about the costs and dangers of nuclear power. The anti-nuclear movement grew and flourished throughout the 1970s, but in 1980, the election of Ronald Reagan, like that of Margaret Thatcher in Britain the year before, began a long period of what we called the clampdown (echoing The Clash’s prescient Working for the Clampdown on London Calling), and put a serious damper on the movement, along with so much else. Early in 1980, though, oblivious of all that was to come, we were making serious preparations for non-violent direct action to occupy the site, in a decentralized system of self-organization based on affinity groups and consensus decision-making. One of the affinity groups, friends of ours, called themselves Jam Today.

I never asked any of the members of Jam Today what lay behind their choice of name, but it seemed clear enough. They refused to go along with a society that demanded endless deferral of desires and their fulfillment to some indefinite future.

illustration by John Tenniel (from thevictorianweb.org)

The phrase “jam today” comes from the exchange between Alice and the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which the queen offers Alice a job with the promise of “twopence a week, and jam every other day.’ Pressed further, she reveals “the rule. . . jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam today.”

‘It MUST come sometimes to ‘jam today,”‘ Alice objected.

‘No, it can’t,’ said the Queen. ‘It’s jam every OTHER day: today isn’t any OTHER day, you know.’

Having been raised to believe in delayed gratification, part of me secretly found the idea of Jam Today a little self-indulgent. But my friends showed me otherwise: they combined concentrated hard work for a better future with an irrepressible joie-de-vivre. They lived in the moment and clearly loved every moment. And time was to prove them right: throughout those long Reagan years, as unemployment skyrocketed, unions were smashed, public services defunded, and environmental protections gutted, the rich only got much, much richer, while continuing to dangle before the rest of us the lying promise of Jam Tomorrow, a tomorrow that would never turn into today.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents