SISYPHUS

SISYPHUS is an online magazine that values original thinkers and honest inquiry.

Articles

Summer Air

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The impulse to remove all clothing, become
congruent with landscape, willow tree
innocent of guile or: it never has to think,
“Are these ruffles fashionable?  Is my collar
too stiff?  Oh me, the matrons are passing,
do they gaze at me or ignore?” 

                                      Even the rose,
though we might envy it, has no décor.
Stepping toward the lake, the two women
take the summer air on bare thighs and
buttocks, the breeze subtle through their
body hair, they follow the billowing green-
grass path, their minds fitted sweetly
into the pocket of their flesh.  At least,
that would be the ideal.  That would be
what we wish for them. 

                                         Are they maidens,
fifteen, sixteen?  If so, we must ask,
“How did they achieve such a practical lack
of modesty?  Who raised them to be at peace
with their small or large breasts, with the
folds of fat around their ribs?  Or do they
disrobe to titillate their skin, send a shiver
through the slick lips of their vaginas?”

                                        If they are old,
fifty or sixty-five, we hope they love the liberation,
we hope they’ve come to accept that perfection
is a fool’s errand, the air a robe better than silk,
lake water a set of jewels decorating every
crook and dimple of skin until their bodies
shine like fish or angels or reality.

 

Jerusalem Now

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Sometimes, a poem or piece of prose lends itself to the lyrical nature of music. Please enjoy listening to Alicia Vandevorst’s “Jerusalem Now” on Soundcloud.–Ed. 

In May of 2018, the US decided to move its embassy to Jerusalem. This symbolic move heightened for me the ongoing rivalry over that ground and what it represents. That specific power attributed to that specific place, I believe, can be encountered elsewhere, anywhere, by the person with a sensitive heart. When Blake calls us to build Jerusalem “in England’s green and pleasant Land”, I hear him calling for humanity to recognize the presence of Jerusalem within itself. Why fight over a holy place anymore? Why be bound by such limiting stories? Instead we could tell the story of peace to ourselves.

And see her wild hair is the wind, the day of crossed scents on the hill adorns her as here blows feral rosemary, daphne and rose, and bitter hawthorn and musty broken leaves, and tar fumes and snot and semen and musk glands of snakes and the sweat of the city and the depleted country, the bitters of smoke. She, Jerusalem, will greet her lover, anywhere.

Smell her hands within the fire, in the bakery, in the gym, the court, the temple. She is the field of scent devoid of preference. See her newly woven gown like the table, the bed, the screen. See her heaving every sinusoid. She is the field of vision devoid of preference. Touch her wherever your blood flows and however your skin pricks. Hear her bridal shudder, louder, louder, into words and meandering sounds. She feeds herself to you, anything at your lips can be known as Jerusalem. You choose to savor her in a limited way as your own flesh or as every body.

This Jerusalem of every city, her flesh of every sidewalk, is unveiled to the gentlest footfalls, to those who know she’s there. And they shake and shudder freely anywhere. And wail or kneel or sing or do what they must do, but with an undeterred smile, these lovers.

And does she stand, shimmering at the southern border? White gown in the red dirt that we tread on the bridge, she, the damsel who some fight the dragon-immigrants as if to save, stands among the immigrants, unseen by the newest patrol. A shimmer like heat, she waits with us. She, the mothers and fathers who shade their children with their bodies, whose sweat anoints them. She is the shiver through the mind that checks fear, that opens the way for care at 9 AM at 9:15 then at 10 at noon at midnight at 9 AM again.

And the patrolling soldiers hear her cries— the children in cages cry mama, mama! In their skin, the agents feel the urge to stoop, to sacrifice their badges and stoop and gather them into their arms and find, through mazes of paper and questions and walking and apologies, their mothers, their fathers, the child’s Jerusalem. But they lie to cover the urges. They call the children instruments played, an orchestra, then a bunch of horns to silence. But that is Jerusalem, the beloved place, mislaid, misconceived, abandoned at the altar. A different knot tied.

And is she revealed in the loose gowns of jellyfish that hover where the ocean dies? Is she regal in the clutter of satellites and trash within the planetary orbit?

Does she stride forward across the cleared Amazon with cow hooves round her neck? Or with the slowed atmospheric river like a draping boa? None of these are her wedding gown. These mark how we refuse her, but still she exists, jangling the trash and trashed like a mirror-gown that catches our eye like nagging, or as an echo catches the ear and makes you attentive. You want to find her, even there. You want to shed the blindness of suffering and set aside demands and see her. You want to go to Jerusalem. You want a place to kneel. A pure place. Her bridal descent. A place without any contaminant, not even a trace of pollution. Not a jot of separation. The site of reunion.

And now if the bride emerges, Jerusalem, in every city, on every lane, and the dingy wastes we amassed erupt as art as she emerges, like butterflies the dark, sullen heaps will develop into apologies: Kodachrome valances of plastic, pillars of marbled plastic from melted straws, prosthetic arms from salvaged waste, microbes we cultivate will eat the traces and the cleaned ocean will sway and bask and grow new swaths of plankton.

The River Siren

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Standing on the river bank— an apparition
that has escaped from the pages of Vogue
or from a mysterious mythical cave where
the gods keep their secrets—long streams
of gold and silver flowing around the golden
glow of her face, with a smile that could swallow
us all, guiding the boats onto her beach,
and soon she will be guiding us down the river
through the treacherous rapids, balancing the boats,
balancing the crew, her presence charming
the treacherous river, creating calm in the midst
of chaos, frenzied water bouncing
off her body, the boat riding on air.
 
Evenings, once we have gone ashore, settled
the boats, and set up camp, she sheds her
ungainly life jacket, shapeless river slicks and
transforms herself back to goddess, her long wild
strands of gold and silver shimmering in the setting
sun, her body sheathed in form fitting sleeves,
floating through the camp, doing what a good
goddess does, ensuring that all is well with
the world, that we are at peace and well fed.
I am drawn to her like a wandering moth
to a dangerous flame, fluttering my attentions,
bathed in her smile and her mysterious
soft resilient sweetness, wanting to possess
this divine creature, companion to this wild river.
 
Once, when we were hiking up a hidden
canyon, I slipped.  She steadied me
holding me lightly with her slender
fingers and I sensed hidden strength
in those fingers.  I realized that if I had fallen
she would have held me effortlessly,
if she wanted to she could have tossed me
over her shoulder, she could have swung me
and tossed me over the canyon wall,
this glamorous creature had a strength —
hidden, contained—capable of explosion.
I sensed that if she exploded she could
change the weather, the river could flow
upstream, and rocks would slide down
the canyon walls, I didn’t want her angry,
I only wanted her smile, her smile
encompassing the world—
or at least me.
 
At the end of our voyage, this guide
this goddess hugs me, I hug her, caressing
her soft body, sensing her hard body, stroking
fingering her seductive hair, her golden
and silver strands enveloping me
entwining me, entangling me.

And then she dismissed me.
 

Four Waves of Feminism

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It is common to speak of three phases of modern feminism; however, there is little consensus as to how to characterize these three waves or what to do with women’s movements before the late nineteenth century. Making the landscape even harder to navigate, a new silhouette is emerging on the horizon and taking the shape of a fourth wave of feminism.
 
Some thinkers have sought to locate the roots of feminism in ancient Greece with Sappho (d. 570 BCE), or the medieval world with Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179) or Christine de Pisan (d. 1434). Certainly Olympes de Gouge (d. 1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (d. 1797) and Jane Austen (d. 1817) are foremothers of the modern women’s movement. All of these people advocated for the dignity, intelligence, and basic human potential of the female sex. However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the efforts for women’s equal rights coalesced into a clearly identifiable and self-conscious movement, or rather a series of movements.
 
The first wave of feminism took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. The goal of this wave was to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage. The wave formally began at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 when three hundred men and women rallied to the cause of equality for women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (d.1902) drafted the Seneca Falls Declaration outlining the new movement’s ideology and political strategies.
 
In its early stages, feminism was interrelated with the temperance and abolitionist movements and gave voice to now-famous activists like the African-American Sojourner Truth (d. 1883), who demanded: “Ain’t I a woman?”

Victorian America saw women acting in very “un-ladylike” ways (public speaking, demonstrating, stints in jail), which challenged the “cult of domesticity.” Discussions about the vote and women’s participation in politics led to an examination of the differences between men and women as they were then viewed. Some claimed that women were morally superior to men, and so their presence in the civic sphere would improve public behavior and the political process.
 
The second wave began in the 1960’s and continued into the 90’s. This wave unfolded in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-awareness of a variety of minority groups around the world. The New Left was on the rise, and the voice of the second wave was increasingly radical. In this phase, sexuality and reproductive rights were dominant issues, and much of the movement’s energy was focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing social equality regardless of sex.
 
This phase began with protests against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City in 1968 and 1969. Feminists parodied what they held to be a degrading “cattle parade” that reduced women to objects of beauty dominated by a patriarchy that sought to keep them in the home or in dull, low-paying jobs. The radical New York group called the Redstockings staged a “counter pageant” in which they crowned a sheep as Miss America and threw “oppressive” feminine artifacts such as bras, girdles, high heels, makeup and false eyelashes into the trashcan.
 
Because the second wave of feminism found voice amid so many other social movements, it was easily marginalized and viewed as less pressing than, for example, Black Power or efforts to end the war in Vietnam. Feminists reacted by forming women only organizations (such as NOW) and “consciousness raising” groups. In publications like “The BITCH Manifesto” and “Sisterhood is Powerful,” feminists advocated for their place in the sun. The second wave was increasingly theoretical, based on a fusion of neo-Marxism and psycho-analytical theory, and began to associate the subjugation of women with broader critiques of patriarchy, capitalism, normative heterosexuality, and the woman’s role as wife and mother. Sex and gender were differentiated—the former being biological, and the later a social construct that varies culture-to-culture and over time.
 
Whereas the first wave of feminism was generally propelled by middle class, Western, cisgender, white women, the second phase drew in women of color and developing nations, seeking sisterhood and solidarity, claiming “Women’s struggle is class struggle.” Feminists spoke of women as a social class and coined phrases such as “the personal is political” and “identity politics” in an effort to demonstrate that race, class, and gender oppression are all related. They initiated a concentrated effort to rid society top-to-bottom of sexism, from children’s cartoons to the highest levels of government.

One of the strains of this complex and diverse “wave” was the development of women-only spaces and the notion that women working together create a special dynamic that is not possible in mixed-groups, which would ultimately work for the betterment of the entire planet. Women, whether due to their long “subjugation” or to their biology, were thought by some to be more humane, collaborative, inclusive, peaceful, nurturing, democratic, and holistic in their approach to problem solving than men. The term eco-feminism was coined to capture the sense that because of their biological connection to earth and lunar cycles, women were natural advocates of environmentalism.
 
The third wave of feminism began in the mid-90’s and was informed by post-colonial and post-modern thinking. In this phase many constructs were destabilized, including the notions of “universal womanhood,” body, gender, sexuality and heteronormativity. An aspect of third wave feminism that mystified the mothers of the earlier feminist movement was the re-adoption by young feminists of the very lipstick, high heels, and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the first two phases of the movement identified with male oppression. Pinkfloor expressed this new position when she said that it’s possible to have a push-up bra and a brain at the same time.
 
The “grrls” of the third wave stepped onto the stage as strong and empowered, eschewing victimization and defining feminine beauty for themselves as subjects, not as objects of a sexist patriarchy. They developed a rhetoric of mimicry, which appropriated derogatory terms like “slut” and “bitch” in order to subvert sexist culture and deprive it of verbal weapons. The web is an important tool of “girlie feminism.” E-zines have provided “cybergrrls” and “netgrrls” another kind of women-only space. At the same time — rife with the irony of third-wave feminism because cyberspace is disembodied — it permits all users the opportunity to cross gender boundaries, and so the very notion of gender has been unbalanced in a way that encourages experimentation and creative thought.
 
This is in keeping with the third wave’s celebration of ambiguity and refusal to think in terms of “us-them.” Most third-wavers refuse to identify as “feminists” and reject the word that they find limiting and exclusionary. Grrl-feminism tends to be global, multicultural, and it shuns simple answers or artificial categories of identity, gender, and sexuality. Its transversal politics means that differences such as those of ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, etc. are celebrated and recognized as dynamic, situational and provisional. Reality is conceived not so much in terms of fixed structures and power relations, but in terms of performance within contingencies. Third wave feminists breaks boundaries.
 
The fourth wave of feminism is still a captivating silhouette. A writer for Elle Magazine recently interviewed me about the waves of feminism and asked if the second and third waves may have “failed or dialed down” because the social and economic gains had been mostly sparkle, little substance, and whether at some point women substituted equal rights for career and the atomic self. I replied that the second wave of feminism ought not be characterized as having failed, nor was glitter all that it generated. Quite the contrary; many goals of the second wave were met: more women in positions of leadership in higher education, business and politics; abortion rights; access to the pill that increased women’s control over their bodies; more expression and acceptance of female sexuality; general public awareness of the concept of and need for the “rights of women” (though never fully achieved); a solid academic field in feminism, gender and sexuality studies; greater access to education; organizations and legislation for the protection of battered women; women’s support groups and organizations (like NOW and AAUW); an industry in the publication of books by and about women/feminism; public forums for the discussion of women’s rights; and a societal discourse at the popular level about women’s suppression, efforts for reform, and a critique of patriarchy. So, in a sense, if the second wave seemed to have “dialed down,” the lull was in many ways due more to the success of the movement than to any ineffectiveness. In addition to the sense that many women’s needs had been met, feminism’s perceived silence in the 1990’s was a response to the successful backlash campaign by the conservative press and media, especially against the word feminism and its purported association with male-bashing and extremism.
 
However, the second wave only quieted down in the public forum; it did not disappear but retreated into the academic world where it is alive and well—incubating in the academy. Women’s centers and women’s/gender studies have becaoe a staple of virtually all universities and most colleges in the U.S. and Canada (and in many other nations around the word). Scholarship on women’s studies, feminist studies, masculinity studies, and queer studies is prolific, institutionalized, and thriving in virtually all scholarly fields, including the sciences. Academic majors and minors in women’s, feminist, masculinity and queer studies have produced thousands of students with degrees in the subjects. However, generally those programs have generated theorists rather than activists.
 
Returning to the question the Elle Magazine columnist asked about the third wave and the success or failure of its goals: It is hard to talk about the aims of the third wave because a characteristic of that wave is the rejection of communal, standardized objectives. The third wave does not acknowledge a collective “movement” and does not define itself as a group with common grievances. Third wave women and men are concerned about equal rights, but tend to think the genders have achieved parity or that society is well on its way to delivering it to them. The third wave pushed back against their “mothers” (with grudging gratitude) the way children push away from their parents in order to achieve much needed independence. This wave supports equal rights, but does not have a term like feminism to articulate that notion. For third wavers, struggles are more individual: “We don’t need feminism anymore.”

But the times are changing, and a fourth wave is in the air. A few months ago, a high school student approached one of the staff of the Center for Gender Equity at Pacific University and revealed in a somewhat confessional tone, “I think I’m a feminist!” It was like she was coming out of the closet. Well, perhaps that is the way to view the fourth wave of feminism.
 
The aims of the second feminist movement were never cemented to the extent that they could survive the complacency of third wavers. The fourth wave of feminism is emerging because (mostly) young women and men realize that the third wave is either overly optimistic or hampered by blinders. Feminism is now moving from the academy and back into the realm of public discourse. Issues that were central to the earliest phases of the women’s movement are receiving national and international attention from mainstream press and politicians: problems like sexual abuse, rape, violence against women, unequal pay, slut-shaming, the pressure on women to conform to a single and unrealistic body-type and the realization that gains in female representation in politics and business, for example, are very slight. It is no longer considered “extreme,” nor is it considered the purview of rarefied intellectuals to talk about societal abuse of women raped on college campuses, Title IX, homo- and trans-phobia, unfair pay and work conditions, and the fact that the U.S. has one of the worst records for legally-mandated parental leave and maternity benefits in the world.
 
Some people who wish to ride this new fourth wave have trouble with the word “feminism,” not just because of its older connotations of radicalism, but because the word feels like it is underpinned by assumptions of a gender binary and an exclusionary subtext: “for women only.” Many fourth wavers who are completely on-board with the movement’s tenants find the term “feminism” sticking in their craws and worry that it is hard to get their message out with a label that raises hackles for a broader audience.

Yet the word is winning the day. The generation now coming of age sees that we face serious problems because of the way society genders and is gendered, and we need a strong “in-your-face” word to combat those problems. Feminism no longer just refers to the struggles of women; it is a clarion call for gender equity.
 
The emerging fourth wavers are not just reincarnations of their second wave grandmothers; they bring to the discussion important perspectives taught by third wave feminism. They speak in terms of intersectionality whereby women’s suppression can only fully be understood in a context of the marginalization of other groups and genders—feminism is part of a larger consciousness of oppression along with racism, ageism, classism, ableism, and sexual orientation (no “ism” to go with that). Among the third wave’s bequests is the importance of inclusion, an acceptance of the sexualized human body as non-threatening, and the role the internet can play in gender-bending and leveling hierarchies. Part of the reason a fourth wave can emerge is because these millennials’ articulation of themselves as “feminists” is their own: not a hand-me-down from grandma. The beauty of the fourth wave is that there is a place in it for all –together. The academic and theoretical apparatus is extensive and well honed in the academy, ready to support a new broad-based activism in the home, in the workplace, and in the streets.
 
At this point we are still not sure how feminism will mutate. Will the fourth wave fully materialize and in what direction? There have always been many feminisms in the movement, not just one ideology, and there have always been tensions, points and counter-points. The political, social and intellectual feminist movements have always been chaotic, multi-valenced, and disconcerting; and let’s hope they continue to be so; it’s a sign that they are thriving.

 

This piece was originally published online in conjunction with the Fall 2008 issue of Pacific magazine (http://magazine.pacificu.edu)

C’Mon Back Cafe

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It’s 96 degrees
iced coffee, early afternoon
diligent millennials inside at their laptops
I’m outside in the warm shade
of a large sycamore, a wilting, tired angel
barely able to breathe.
Some of her leaves
collapsed into themselves crisp as dried out bats
but she’s hanging in there.
 
How I depend on her! Her massive splotched
trunks cantilevered over the sidewalk
hold.
So long as she stands, I can make it
in this heat, blissfully peaceful in spite of it,
practicing my listening:
 
A workman intermittently tosses torn-out sinks
and old fixtures into an echoing dumpster
gutting a defunct barber shop. In this strip mall,
an older one, that somehow
manages a homey feel, a sort of plaza — its shabby ivy
twists up the wood posts of the overhang testifying
to its tough struggle—
 
there’s a nail shop, a dog-grooming salon, even
that endangered commercial species, a used
bookstore —all
within range of this silent sycamore’s presence.
 
Where do sycamores come from?
Where do angels come from?
Where have we all come from
blown into a strip mall like scraps of paper
clustering together
on our devices, separately
at the C’mon Back Café?
 
The demolition sounds
irritate me until I let them go
into the surf of passing tires,
 
into the silence suddenly reverberating
when the motorcycle stops.
Strange, I hadn’t even heard its throbbing idle
until it stopped.
Every moment’s a culmination.
John Cage would be all for it.
 
I have docked at this space-station
on my way to the far reaches of the universe,
my wife back home on earth, perhaps
doing laundry or reading. Heaven help us
if strip malls keep proliferating.
This wasteland’s so literal it’s worse than Eliot’s.
 
Have architects all lost their imagination?
Of course, it’s fiscally driven,
integrity’s out the window. Amazon
and Walmart have us so hooked on convenience
and price, to be a local now
is to be a refugee
 
in a lower-middle class strip mall—souped up
but temporary and insulting and hideous
as immigration detention centers, not as horrendous
of course, but similarly degrading—all of it
created by international corporations.
It’s a bloodbath. But you know all that.
 
I am visiting my daughter and grandsons
who were able to buy a house on this planet
a little too close to the sun for comfort.
Thank God it has a Y, with a great pool
protected by very expensive fighter jets breaking
the sound barrier several times a day.
 
You always know there’s a war
going on somewhere, even as I sit here
poised in solitude, I’m surrounded by rehearsals
for war—that are supposed to make you feel safe!
I’d feel a lot safer if they’d just give me whatever it costs
to fuel one of those jets for a week.
To think we’ve been at war since 1990—
Twenty-eight years!
 
This is apparently an indifferent
chaotic universe, but I bet
there’s an underlying order
I imitate by temporarily sipping iced coffee
in peace. There’s a core of peace
at the center of this universe. I can feel it
just sitting here in the warm shade. It’s paid for
 
by my small breathing
that in turn attracts a weak breeze
that causes you, my uncomplaining angel, a bedraggled tree
to ache and lift the whole
garbage-producing population of human beings
with your burning wings.
 
I had to get out of the house.
The Trump pimp, federal circuit court Judge Kavanaugh
in the Senate Supreme Court Confirmation hearings on TV
was slaughtering language with phrases such as
enhanced interrogation techniques (meaning torture
used by Bush administration in Guantanamo)—
 
compared to that, writing poems
even if they’re mediocre or shitty
is a way of sharing the shade of a sycamore tree.
 
Now a garbage truck’s backing up, it’s beeper going
the guy on the ground
beckoning it back with his hands, says
 
C’moan back . . . moan back, now, that’s it, keep comin’ . . . moan back . . .
 
that’s the news for the day
from the Moan Back Café.

Issue 5.4 Call for Submissions: Inequality

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in·e·qual·i·ty inəˈkwälədē/ noun
 
1. difference in size, degree, circumstances, etc.; lack of equality.
 
“The only way to move forward,” says Alex Ocasio-Cortez, “[is] to change for the better or for the worse because status quo is not an option anymore.”
 
Ocasio-Cortez is right about the status quo. Complacency is dead. Putin’s puppet made sure of that when he signed the order to open ICE’s child zoo. If we, as a nation and as individuals, want equality, we have to demand it—louder than the fossil fuel shareholders, louder than the climate deniers, louder than the xenophobes. The sham of a Senate Junicial hearing for the Supreme Court made the issue of inequality glaringly clear.
 
How does individualism intersect with community? What does freedom mean in an unequal world? What is economic justice? Does climate change disproportionately affect the poor? How does wage inequality—gender, educational, racial—affect society? What about access to medical care? How does residential segregation affect class and opportunity? What is white privilege? How does de-regulation of the labor market affect your life? Immigration, incarceration, homelessness?
 
For this issue, we seek poetry, stories, and essays that recognize and respond to how issues of inequality affect our perceptions and worldview—ideological, environmental, political, scientific, societal, global. We seek writing that starts the conversation about this new world order as we are coming to know it.  As Canary editor Gail Entrekin shares so eloquently in an article  about the impact of art: “I believe that there are other occasional readers who are just now receiving this news in a visceral way that argument and scientific information have not been able to impart.” Share a piece that exemplifies a cause you are passionate about. Remind readers of the simple things that freedom ensures. Pay attention to the details of a thriving society. A solid civilization and vibrant community look to art for their inspiration.

Editor’s Notes

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com·mu·ni·cate kəˈmyo͞onəˌkāt/
verb
 
1. share or exchange information, news, or ideas.

 

What is a misunderstanding? It is a failure to communicate. Communication is the simple tool that allows us to live together. Communication is also infinitely complex: verbal, non-verbal, visual, digital, handwritten, media-generated. Communication is the intersection between language, truth, and trust; the cornerstone of community; and a keystone of civilization.

And with the internet, it is now instantaneous. Facebook. Twitter. Snapchat. Instagram. How has digital communication affected inter- and intra-personal relations? How does the latest net neutrality affect the corporate internet and how will it alter our ability to communicate?

Communication is both helped and hindered by the media. How are we supposed to relate to, or operate within, a government managed by leaders “untethered to the truth”? Immanual Kant says that all humans have a moral responsibility to speak the truth. Without the truth, we threaten the ability to understand each other, threatening civilization itself. Lying depends on a mutual understanding of what is true and what is false.

Are there objective truths? How is the truth determined? Personal belief, scientific process, societal agreement? Is politically correct speech a clarifying tool or a deliberately obscurantist one ? 

What does it do to communication to live inside an echo chamber? If all the news you hear is from politically-inspired Fox News or (alternately) community-supported National Public Radio, what is the value of that “news” without the balancing viewpoint? Is that news or propaganda?

How do the sub-genres of predetermined language that rely on precedent—legal, medical, engineering—affect the open nature of American English? As a corollary, why is accent, posture, or presentation indicative of social status?

In this issue, authors explored philosophy from the Roman Empire that shaped modern ideology, confirmation bias, the controversy of the Fairness Doctrine, the physicality of language, the language of natural world, gender in the military, and the failure of American institutions for the 99%. We also looked at the nature of consciousness and happiness. Conceive, believe, achieve.

AMENDMENT I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Ode to Lucretius

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This is an ode to a poet who created a work that has influenced thinkers over the millennia, guiding societies and ideologies. Titus Lucretius Carus inspired Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others with his last surviving work, the didactic Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things. Despite the many attempts to suppress the work as heretical , it is still being read today: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) tracks Lucretius’s influence from his inspiration for creation to the poem’s sociopolitical influence from inception to present. “Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena.” Lucretius’s philosophy is also said to have inspired C.J. Thomsen to create research categories of artifacts, widely known as the Three Age System: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. The communication of ethical and societal theory has survived over 2000 years and its ripple effect on civilizations is enormous: widespread and compelling.

Ode to Lucretius (99-55 BCE)             

I have been listening to one of the old masters,
a Roman poet
singing the truths of Epicurus, who tells us
about the way of all things.

Everything comes into existence,
everything goes out of existence:
rocks, trees, seas, mountains, people.
All things are made of atoms.
There is no such thing as eternity.
There is no such thing as certainty.
There are no deities who gave you life.
There is no sacrifice to make.
There is no fate you cannot break.
Death has no claim on you;
banish the fear of the hereafter.
Do not fear the dark of mind.
Tear the mask of fear aside.
The mind is man-made.
Do not give away your freedom.
Let go all the old religious stories.
Set them free.
They do not belong to you.
These are but dreams and scams.

Friendship, service, and civility
light the passageways to a good life.
Discover the world as it is.
Enjoy the morning light;
balance and stability thrive
in a harmonious life.

He is well
who sees himself
at peace in the present.
When you embrace what is,
the tranquility of self is kept alive,
wherein all delight resides.

 

The Fairness Doctrine: How We Lost It and Why We Need It Back

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American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

— Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927 (KPFA, 1/16/03)

It has been one hundred years of technological advancement and America is squarely in the information age. Yet it seems we have come full circle and we are now discussing the same moral and ethical public policy issues that we were discussing in 1927. How did we backslide into such divisiveness as a nation? Was our national goodwill hijacked for commercialization that completely polarized a nation? Why can’t the “red and blue” even talk across aisle any longer?

I was recently listening to a Sam Harris podcast in conversation with Ian Bremmer (Bremmer created Wall Street’s first global political risk index (GPRI) and is the founding chairman of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Geopolitical Risk). The podcast was about the failure of globalism and the distinction between globalism and globalization. For the discussion, Bremmer clarified globalism as a political ideology of free trade, open borders, and global security that has been promoted in the West by the political, corporate, media, and business leaders, guaranteed by the United States and its allies. By contrast, globalization is a positive and effective economic process—exchanging goods, services, and ideas around the world creating global wealth. The difference is that the former scenario attempts to establish a world order.  Globalism is an ideology that has largely failed the American public because of the inherent elitism of its policies—corporations taking advantage of structural inequalities of wealthy and poor nations around the world for profit and exploiting its own citizens in propaganda-driven marketing. “America First” is simply a failed ideology. Harris and Bremmer discussed national and global inequality and explored the problems of an “us vs. them” media landscape. The controversy that swirled around the media, the First Amendment, and the Fairness Doctrine comes to mind.

The Fairness Doctrine (whose precursor was the Radio Act of 1927) was enacted into law in 1959 and repealed by Ronald Reagan in 1987. An attempt to reinstate it could not withstand Reagan’s veto in 1988. Since then, political monologues proliferate the airwaves. Could the casualty of undermining this doctrine, originally meant to support non-biased dialogue, be maximizing commercialization over the public good and turning the news into entertainment for profit-oriented businesses, rather than being a platform for important issues of a diverse American populace? Americans like to see themselves as cosmopolitan. But a citizen of the world can’t concurrently support a populist, reductionary agenda.  Is polarization a direct result of cable news, which ultimately results in America-first reductionism? How much is data mining, targeted internet searching, and social media advertising is responsible for the “me-first” American ideology?–Ed.

The following article is an concise and articulate consideration reprinted from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (January 2005)

A license permits broadcasting, but the licensee has no constitutional right to be the one who holds the license or to monopolize a…frequency to the exclusion of his fellow citizens. There is nothing in the First Amendment which prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others…. It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.

— U.S. Supreme Court, upholding the constitutionality of the Fairness Doctrine in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

When the Sinclair Broadcast Group retreated from pre-election plans to force its 62 television stations to preempt prime-time programming in favor of airing the blatantly anti-John Kerry documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal, the reversal wasn’t triggered by a concern for fairness: Sinclair back-pedaled because its stock was tanking. The staunchly conservative broadcaster’s plan had provoked calls for sponsor boycotts, and Wall Street saw a company that was putting politics ahead of profits. Sinclair’s stock declined by nearly 17 percent before the company announced it would air a somewhat more balanced news program in place of the documentary (Baltimore Sun, 10/24/04).

But if fairness mattered little to Sinclair, the news that a corporation that controlled more TV licenses than any other could put the publicly owned airwaves to partisan use sparked discussion of fairness across the board, from media democracy activists to television industry executives.

Variety (10/25/04) underlined industry concerns in a report suggesting that Sinclair’s partisanship was making other broadcasters nervous by fueling “anti-consolidation forces” and efforts to bring back the FCC’s defunct Fairness Doctrine:

Sinclair could even put the Fairness Doctrine back in play, a rule established in 1949 to require that the networks—all three of them—air all sides of issues. The doctrine was abandoned in the 1980s with the proliferation of cable, leaving citizens with little recourse over broadcasters that misuse the public airwaves, except to oppose the renewal of licenses.

The Sinclair controversy brought discussion of the Fairness Doctrine back to news columns (Baltimore Sun, 10/24/04; L.A. Times, 10/24/04) and opinion pages (Portland Press Herald, 10/24/04; Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 10/22/04) across the country. Legal Times (11/15/04) weighed in with an in-depth essay headlined: “A Question of Fair Air Play: Can Current Remedies for Media Bias Handle Threats Like Sinclair’s Aborted Anti-Kerry Program?”

Sinclair’s history of one-sided editorializing and right-wing water-carrying, which long preceded its Stolen Honor ploy (Extra!, 11-12/04), puts it in the company of political talk radio, where right-wing opinion is the rule, locally and nationally. Together, they are part of a growing trend that sees movement conservatives and Republican partisans using the publicly owned airwaves as a political megaphone—one that goes largely unanswered by any regular opposing perspective. It’s an imbalance that begs for a remedy.

A short history of fairness

The necessity for the Fairness Doctrine, according to proponents, arises from the fact that there are many fewer broadcast licenses than people who would like to have them. Unlike publishing, where the tools of the trade are in more or less endless supply, broadcasting licenses are limited by the finite number of available frequencies. Thus, as trustees of a scarce public resource, licensees accept certain public interest obligations in exchange for the exclusive use of limited public airwaves. One such obligation was the Fairness Doctrine, which was meant to ensure that a variety of views, beyond those of the licensees and those they favored, were heard on the airwaves. (Since cable’s infrastructure is privately owned and cable channels can, in theory, be endlessly multiplied, the FCC does not put public interest requirements on that medium.)

The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows or editorials.

Formally adopted as an FCC rule in 1949 and repealed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan’s pro-broadcaster FCC, the doctrine can be traced back to the early days of broadcast regulation.

Early on, legislators wrestled over competing visions of the future of radio: Should it be commercial or non-commercial? There was even a proposal by the U.S. Navy to control the new technology. The debate included early arguments about how to address the public interest, as well as fears about the awesome power conferred on a handful of licensees.

*

American thought and American politics will be largely at the mercy of those who operate these stations, for publicity is the most powerful weapon that can be wielded in a republic. And when such a weapon is placed in the hands of one person, or a single selfish group is permitted to either tacitly or otherwise acquire ownership or dominate these broadcasting stations throughout the country, then woe be to those who dare to differ with them. It will be impossible to compete with them in reaching the ears of the American people.

— Rep. Luther Johnson (D.-Texas), in the debate that preceded the Radio Act of 1927 (KPFA, 1/16/03)

*

In the Radio Act of 1927, Congress mandated the FCC’s forerunner, the Federal Radio Commission (FRC), to grant broadcasting licenses in such a manner as to ensure that licensees served the “public convenience, interest or necessity.”

As former FCC commissioner Nicholas Johnson pointed out (California Lawyer, 8/88), it was in that spirit that the FRC, in 1928, first gave words to a policy formulation that would become known as the Fairness Doctrine, calling for broadcasters to show “due regard for the opinions of others.” In 1949, the FCC adopted the doctrine as a formal rule (FCC, Report on Editorializing by Broadcast Licensees, 1949).

In 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to enshrine the Fairness Doctrine into law, rewriting Chapter 315(a) to read: “A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”

*

It is the purpose of the First Amendment to preserve an uninhibited marketplace of ideas in which truth will ultimately prevail, rather than to countenance monopolization of that market, whether it be by the government itself or a private licensee. It is the right of the public to receive suitable access to social, political, aesthetic, moral and other ideas and experiences which is crucial here. That right may not constitutionally be abridged either by Congress or by the FCC.

— U.S. Supreme Court, Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC, 1969.

A decade later the United States Supreme Court upheld the doctrine’s constitutionality in Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969), foreshadowing a decade in which the FCC would view the Fairness Doctrine as a guiding principle, calling it “the single most important requirement of operation in the public interest—the sine qua non for grant of a renewal of license” (FCC Fairness Report, 1974).

How it worked

There are many misconceptions about the Fairness Doctrine. For instance, it did not require that each program be internally balanced, nor did it mandate equal time for opposing points of view. And it didn’t require that the balance of a station’s program lineup be anything like 50/50.

Nor, as Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly claimed, was the Fairness Doctrine all that stood between conservative talkshow hosts and the dominance they would attain after the doctrine’s repeal. In fact, not one Fairness Doctrine decision issued by the FCC had ever concerned itself with talkshows. Indeed, the talkshow format was born and flourished while the doctrine was in operation. Before the doctrine was repealed, right-wing hosts frequently dominated talkshow schedules, even in liberal cities, but none was ever muzzled (The Way Things Aren’t, Rendall et al., 1995). The Fairness Doctrine simply prohibited stations from broadcasting from a single perspective, day after day, without presenting opposing views.

In answer to charges, put forward in the Red Lion case, that the doctrine violated broadcasters’ First Amendment free speech rights because the government was exerting editorial control, Supreme Court Justice Byron White wrote: “There is no sanctuary in the First Amendment for unlimited private censorship operating in a medium not open to all.” In a Washington Post column (1/31/94), the Media Access Project (MAP), a telecommunications law firm that supports the Fairness Doctrine, addressed the First Amendment issue: “The Supreme Court unanimously found [the Fairness Doctrine] advances First Amendment values. It safeguards the public’s right to be informed on issues affecting our democracy, while also balancing broadcasters’ rights to the broadest possible editorial discretion.”

Indeed, when it was in place, citizen groups used the Fairness Doctrine as a tool to expand speech and debate. For instance, it prevented stations from allowing only one side to be heard on ballot measures. Over the years, it had been supported by grassroots groups across the political spectrum, including the ACLU, National Rifle Association and the right-wing Accuracy In Media.

Typically, when an individual or citizens group complained to a station about imbalance, the station would set aside time for an on-air response for the omitted perspective: “Reasonable opportunity for presentation of opposing points of view,” was the relevant phrase. If a station disagreed with the complaint, feeling that an adequate range of views had already been presented, the decision would be appealed to the FCC for a judgment.

According to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of MAP, scheduling response time was based on time of day, frequency and duration of the original perspective. “If one view received a lot of coverage in primetime,” Schwartzman told Extra!, “then at least some response time would have to be in primetime. Likewise if one side received many short spots or really long spots.” But the remedy did not amount to equal time; the ratio of airtime between the original perspective and the response “could be as much as five to one,” said Schwartzman.

As a guarantor of balance and inclusion, the Fairness Doctrine was no panacea. It was somewhat vague, and depended on the vigilance of listeners and viewers to notice imbalance. But its value, beyond the occasional remedies it provided, was in its codification of the principle that broadcasters had a responsibility to present a range of views on controversial issues.

The doctrine’s demise

From the 1920s through the ’70s, the history of the Fairness Doctrine paints a picture of public servants wrestling with how to maintain some public interest standards in the operation of publicly owned—but corporate-dominated—airwaves. Things were about to change.

The 1980s brought the Reagan Revolution, with its army of anti-regulatory extremists; not least among these was Reagan’s new FCC chair, Mark S. Fowler. Formerly a broadcast industry lawyer, Fowler earned his reputation as “the James Watt of the FCC” by sneering at the notion that broadcasters had a unique role or bore special responsibilities to ensure democratic discourse (California Lawyer, 8/88). It was all nonsense, said Fowler (L.A. Times, 5/1/03): “The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.” To Fowler, television was “just another appliance—it’s a toaster with pictures,” and he seemed to endorse total deregulation (Washington Post, 2/6/83): “We’ve got to look beyond the conventional wisdom that we must somehow regulate this box.”

Of course, Fowler and associates didn’t favor total deregulation: Without licensing, the airwaves would descend into chaos as many broadcasters competed for the same frequencies, a situation that would mean ruin for the traditional corporate broadcasters they were so close to. But regulation for the public good rather than corporate convenience was deemed suspect.

Fowler vowed to see the Fairness Doctrine repealed, and though he would depart the commission a few months before the goal was realized, he worked assiduously at setting the stage for the doctrine’s demise.

He and his like-minded commissioners, a majority of whom had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan, argued that the doctrine violated broadcasters’ First Amendment free speech rights by giving government a measure of editorial control over stations. Moreover, rather than increase debate and discussion of controversial issues, they argued, the doctrine actually chilled debate, because stations feared demands for response time and possible challenges to broadcast licenses (though only one license was ever revoked in a dispute involving the Fairness Doctrine—California Lawyer, 8/88).

The FCC stopped enforcing the doctrine in the mid-’80s, well before it formally revoked it. As much as the commission majority wanted to repeal the doctrine outright, there was one hurdle that stood between them and their goal: Congress’ 1959 amendment to the Communications Act had made the doctrine law.

Help would come in the form of a controversial 1986 legal decision by Judge Robert Bork and then-Judge Antonin Scalia, both Reagan appointees on the D.C. Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Their 2-1 opinion avoided the constitutional issue altogether, and simply declared that Congress had not actually made the doctrine into a law. Wrote Bork: “We do not believe that language adopted in 1959 made the Fairness Doctrine a binding statutory obligation,” because, he said, the doctrine was imposed “under,” not “by” the Communications Act of 1934 (California Lawyer, 8/88). Bork held that the 1959 amendment established that the FCC could apply the doctrine, but was not obliged to do so—that keeping the rule or scuttling it was simply a matter of FCC discretion.

“The decision contravened 25 years of FCC holdings that the doctrine had been put into law in 1959,” according to MAP. But it signaled the end of the Fairness Doctrine, which was repealed in 1987 by the FCC under new chair Dennis R. Patrick, a lawyer and Reagan White House aide.

A year after the doctrine’s repeal, writing in California Lawyer (8/88), former FCC commissioner Johnson summed up the fight to bring back the Fairness Doctrine as “a struggle for nothing less than possession of the First Amendment: Who gets to have and express opinions in America.” Though a bill before Congress to reinstate the doctrine passed overwhelmingly later that year, it failed to override Reagan’s veto. Another attempt to resurrect the doctrine in 1991 ran out of steam when President George H.W. Bush threatened another veto.

Where things stand

What has changed since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine? Is there more coverage of controversial issues of public importance? “Since the demise of the Fairness Doctrine we have had much less coverage of issues,” says MAP’s Schwartzman, adding that television news and public affairs programming has decreased locally and nationally. According to a study conducted by MAP and the Benton Foundation, 25 percent of broadcast stations no longer offer any local news or public affairs programming at all (Federal Communications Law Journal, 5/03).

The most extreme change has been in the immense volume of unanswered conservative opinion heard on the airwaves, especially on talk radio. Nationally, virtually all of the leading political talk show hosts are right-wingers: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Oliver North, G. Gordon Liddy, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Reagan, to name just a few. The same goes for local talkshows. One product of the post-Fairness era is the conservative “Hot Talk” format, featuring one right-wing host after another and little else. Disney-owned KSFO in liberal San Francisco is one such station (Extra!, 3-4/95). Some towns have two.

When Edward Monks, a lawyer in Eugene, Oregon, studied the two commercial talk stations in his town (Eugene Register-Guard, 6/30/02), he found “80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative talk shows, without a single second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.” Observing that Eugene (a generally progressive town) was “fairly representative,” Monks concluded: “Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society. There is nothing fair, balanced or democratic about it.”

Bringing back fairness?

For citizens who value media democracy and the public interest, broadcast regulation of our publicly owned airwaves has reached a low-water mark. In his new book, Crimes Against Nature, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. probes the failure of broadcasters to cover the environment, writing, “The FCC’s pro-industry, anti-regulatory philosophy has effectively ended the right of access to broadcast television by any but the moneyed interests.”

According to TV Week (11/30/04), a coalition of broadcast giants is currently pondering a legal assault on the Supreme Court’s Red Lion decision. “Media General and a coalition of major TV network owners—NBC Universal, News Corp. and Viacom—made clear that they are seriously considering an attack on Red Lion as part of an industry challenge to an appellate court decision scrapping FCC media ownership deregulation earlier this year.”

Considering the many looming problems facing media democracy advocates, Extra! asked MAP’s Schwartzman why activists should still be concerned about the Fairness Doctrine.

What has not changed since 1987 is that over-the-air broadcasting remains the most powerful force affecting public opinion, especially on local issues; as public trustees, broadcasters ought to be insuring that they inform the public, not inflame them. That’s why we need a Fairness Doctrine. It’s not a universal solution. It’s not a substitute for reform or for diversity of ownership. It’s simply a mechanism to address the most extreme kinds of broadcast abuse.

Murmurations

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“The study of murmurations is part of a larger field of study called ‘swarm intelligence’ or ‘collective animal behavior’ – the spontaneous, synchronous movement of schools of fish, herds of mammals, swarms of bees or locusts, and other animal groups.  The property of a higher order arising out of seeming randomness is a phenomenon called ’emergence,’ and numerous scientists are trying to get to the bottom of it… One researcher who specializes in the study of animal swarms believes that the dance of the dunlins, and other flocks, may be a product of, as well as generate, what is called metacognition, a collective mind that is much bigger and smarter than the sum of its parts.” 

          From THE WONDER OF BIRDS by Jim Robbins

“A drunken fingerprint rolling across the sky.”
       Richard Wilbur

From the beach, suddenly, entrancement!
We call out, point, freeze in our shoes
our warm hats and jackets, as the day wanes
and against its steel grey background, a cloud
of swallows like a spray of buckshot swoops low
to the water, changes direction and color,
black to white, hundreds of tiny simultaneous
impulses flipping like the snap of a Venetian blind
and they are off, swirling behind us up the beach
as we tip our heads back, mesmerized: metacognition,
iron filings pulled around the sky by an invisible
magnet: One Mind.  There is some kind of joy
in what we can’t explain, how they do not bang
their bodies together and fall, how they know
when to turn, lift, flip, no long-necked leader
honking at the apex of a V, and anyway no time;
in 15 milliseconds they alter course, bank and dive
as one enormous being.  Our mouths open grinning,
incredulous, not knowing how to believe in
something that we feel
but cannot possibly know.

 

What Happened to the Age of Reason?

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Previously published in 2017 in The Sacramento Bee.

As a reminder, several of the authors in Sisyphus add hyperlinks to their research (real news!) and we invite you to follow relevant links for interesting articles or books.–Ed.

Last Thanksgiving our family, whose political opinions vary, agreed to avoid any conversation that might bring someone’s hackles to rise. Anytime anyone got close to entering that arena, my son-in-law piped up, “So what do you think of those Cubs?”  It was our clue to change the subject.  It seems most families have an Uncle Charlie, whose opinions the rest of the family agree closely approximate those of Attila the Hun. After the last election, friends who have known each other for over fifty years report they are now no longer speaking.  So why has politics become so divisive? What happened to the voice of reason as part of a narrative addressing these issues?

Social scientists point to confirmation bias as a primary cause of our alienation from those whose views do not match our own.  Simply put, confirmation bias is the term used for data-fitting information that conforms to our own worldview, while ignoring evidence to the contrary. Rather than making fact-based decisions, cognitive psychologists have learned that people look for and find confirming evidence in support of their positions, and ignore any dis-confirming evidence, according to cognitive phsychologists.

In the February 27th issue of The New Yorker, author Elizabeth Kolbert quotes Jack Gorman and his daughter Sara Gorman, authors of Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us. The Gormans, a psychiatrist and a public-health specialist, contend that confirmation bias has a physiological component. “They cite research suggesting that people experience genuine pleasure—a rush of dopamine—when processing information that supports their beliefs.”  Even when that information is incorrect.

Two cognitive scientists, Steven Sloman and Philip Ferbach, agree.  “As a rule,” they say, “strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding.”

Few are immune. Confirmation bias strikes all sides of the political spectrum. So how does a thoughtful person protect against the emotional power of siding with one side, while ignoring evidence-based reasoning?  

It requires time to educate oneself about the issues, though most certainly the obligation is there. If one reads The American Spectator, then also read The Nation.  If one reads The New Republic, then read The National Review.  And know that one’s argument is only as strong as one’s refutation, the acknowledgment of the opposition’s view.

In this day of ‘false facts’–an oxymoron if there ever was one–online sites such as Snopes.com or Factcheck.org offer the truth of the claim.  Likewise, it behooves internet users to investigate the source of online material.  A Google search quickly reveals how to learn the source of a website. Who is the originator of the site and what is his/her agenda?

Let’s say you believe forest pixies are the source of the dew on your lawn in the morning; the visualization of tiny creatures with mini watering cans overrides your interest in the science of the matter.  With over 875 million internet sites available, it’s possible you’ll even find someone who shares this opinion, though you’d be hard pressed to find a consensus of expert opinion to validate this view.

Sadly, with confirmation bias firmly in place, the facts are irrelevant. When one’s views are threatened, instead of a rational discussion of the matters at hand, the end result is often name calling, vitriolic attacks and occasionally even violence.

We can do better.  Rational discourse requires a willingness to truly listen without letting our preconceived notions interfere. It requires a willingness to remain open-minded.  It requires a respect for facts, whether or not we like what those facts tell us about ourselves.

 And it requires a respect for other human beings; a democracy demands no less.

After You’ve Won Your Election

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Someone unexpected will lie to you.
Congratulations, you are now
a means to an end.
 
Surely you have heard the adage
if you want a friend in politics,
get a dog.
Better would be a cat,
which will ignore you;
a necessary lesson in humility.
 
It is not unlike a river.
The questions are how you anchor yourself,
and whether you become entranced
merely
by reflections on the surface.
 
Here’s a secret. A problem does not exist
until articulated in public.
 
Observe
Weigh
Speak

The 7% Rule

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A discussion with Charles Entrekin about nonverbal communication, consciousness, and the sense of self. 

“Multicultural differences in body language, facial expression, use of space, and especially gestures, are enormous and enormously open to misinterpretation.” Susan M. Heathfield

As someone who became visually challenged later in life, what is your experience with how that changed communication for you? Studies imply that a large part of communication is based on visual cues. Do you find any anecdotal truth in that? How?

I think that a great deal of information for conversation comes from facial expression and body language. I have noticed that when I can’t see people’s expressions, I can’t read their intent. When people talk with their hands, they are delivering to you information about their message, when they are smiling with their eyes, they are providing information for understanding. Body language is obscured, isolated out of the conversation, when you can’t see it. Without that, you are left with tone of voice and the distraction of other sounds in the room that also take up your attention. Dr. Albert Mehrabian (Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes), conducted several studies in the 1960s on nonverbal communication. His resultant data has been contested for decades—7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through certain vocal elements, and 55% through nonverbal elements (facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc.)—but the upshot of his and subsequent research is that the majority of communication is non-verbal.

This strikes me, also, as one of the more interesting problems with email and texting, that you don’t have any of this visual information and so it becomes considerably more important that context be provided. Yet email and text are designed for quick communication and don’t lend themselves to the development of context and dependent language to explain what the message is.

In addition, the mind fills in data that is not readily available via perception. We think we know and recognize our world and we base our reactions on pre-conceived knowledge. The Invisible Gorilla observational experiment is an example that, as a species, we miss a lot. Our perceptions change communication and discourse in vital ways.

I was struck by this selective attention experiment in which students were given the task of doing mathematical computations aloud while tossing a beanbag (so they had to be totally concentrated on what they were doing). During the exercise, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked through their midst. When they were shown the footage later, they were flabbergasted because most of the participants didn’t see the gorilla. Did you? It shows you that, when people are distracted, their observational ability suffers.

Confusion as a result of misinterpretation can lead to hurt feelings, missed appointments and misunderstandings, but there are more serious implications about what we see, what we don’t see, and what we know and don’t know much of the time.

This brings me to the notion that psychology traditionally recognizes that each unique individual is, in fact, a combination of selves: a Perceptual Self, a Narrative Self, and a Social Self.

In a recent Sam Harris podcast Anil Seth believes it is important to elucidate the Perceptual Self by subcategory: the Bodily Self, the Perspectival Self, and the Volitional Self.  Seth postulates that the primary job of the brain is to regulate homeostasis in the body. The sensory receptors of the “Bodily Self” receive stimuli from both internal interoception and external experiential inference. Predictive perception regulates the internal state, as well as introceptive inference (the experience of having a body).

The Perspectival Self is the experience of perceiving the world from a first-person point of view.

The Volitional Self is the cognitive process of intention, of agency, of urges. It is one of the primary psychological functions that inspires the individual to be the cause of a particular course of action.

The second and third aspects of selfhood affect me most, in my opinion. The Narrative Self (also referred to as the Autobiographical Self or the Historical Self) is built from a rich set of autobiographical memories over a course of time. This is the part of self-recognition where the “I” comes in—the ego of an organism. As I lose my eyesight—or when I was diagnosed with cancer or Parkinson’s—my fundamental perception of “myself” had to adjust, adapt, evolve. The Narrative Self therefore animates my Social Self.

The Social Self is refracted through the perceptions of others, through a unique social milieu.

“Now, think about this for a minute,” says Anil Seth in his TedTalk. “If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain’s predictions are being reined in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.”

Objective reality is also influenced by tribal affiliation. Human beings tend to rely less on intuition and rely on perceptions of others to confirm what we see and hear and feel. Viewing the Social Self—through the perceptions of others—is the locus of creating confirmation bias. 

The distinction between the Social Self and the Narrative Self is important here. My social interactions are diminished by my lack of vision because of loss of perceptual and experiential information. I am thrown back to a reliance on the Historical or Narrative Self, which is also under duress because I no longer have a Social Self with confidence, which affects my Narrative Self, the story I tell myself about who I am. I begin to doubt who I am, who I am becoming. My Narrative Self begins to be defined by an unreliable experience and perception.

As an example of this phenomena, Anil Seth demonstrates the rubber hand illusion.

“A person’s real hand is hidden from view, and that fake rubber hand is placed in front of them. Then both hands are simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush while the person stares at the fake hand. Now, for most people, after a while, this leads to the very uncanny sensation that the fake hand is in fact part of their body. And the idea is that the congruence between seeing touch and feeling touch on an object that looks like a hand and is roughly where a hand should be, is enough evidence for the brain to make its best guess that the fake hand is in fact part of the body.

So you can measure all kinds of clever things. You can measure skin conductance and startle responses, but there’s no need. It’s clear [the guy in blue] has assimilated the fake hand. This means that even experiences of what our body is is a kind of best guessing –a kind of controlled hallucination by the brain. Just as if it was his own arm, the brain is supplying the information to say what is real and what is not real.”

I have a personal anecdote to further represent this issue. I suffer from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which means that I experience visual hallucinations that are based on my eyes not providing me with enough information. I have a blog post about the phenomenon here. I don’t see clearly what is actually there, so the brain supplies an alternative view.

“Consider that each human eye normally receives data at a rate of about 8.75 megabits per second,” says Allen Bellows, “a bandwidth which is significantly greater than most high-speed Internet connections. The visual cortex is the most massive system in the human brain, and it is packed with pathways which manipulate the rush of visual data before handing it over to the conscious mind. When disease begins to kink this firehose of information, a legion of neurons is left standing idle.”

 For example, when we were driving to an appointment in San Francisco and were surrounded by trees, what I saw were tall apartment buildings from the Lower East Side in NYC. Or when we were crossing the Bay Bridge, I saw meadows and landscapes stretching off into the distance. What was happening here? My brain did not have enough visual stimuli from my Perceptual Self, so it created a new image.

For me, I have learned to make friends with what I see, so that I am not upset with it. It is sometimes funny or amusing. What I am seeing is my brain providing the information to make sense of what I am seeing. My consciousness of the world outside is limited by visual perception, what I can see or what I can’t see. Consequently, I also make up some of the lack of visual perception with auditory or tactile substitution.

How does this relate to communication? My Social Self is altered and my Narrative Self is unsure. When I enter into conversation with friends and family, I often hear their words but have to guess at what they are meaning because I cannot read their gestures—their upturned smile or downturned frown—and I have to go with sound alone and a blurred image of a face that I know really well to guess what is going on. I engage in a lot of guesswork.

Consequently, my Social Self has become quieter and more humble in its interpretation of what is going on around me. In many ways, this has made me be a friendlier, warmer, more open person, more willing to admit mistakes, more willing to forgive, and more willing to be open to new experiences.

In an increasingly digital world, how does verbal acuity define identity in society? How much of the persona, defined in the virtual world, informs our perceptual selves?

A persona is a mask, a version of how we want the world to see us.  We don and remove our mask at will. The more time we spend wearing the mask, the more it becomes a defining part of the self.  However, the digital identity is more removed and more dangerous because it is anonymous. The avatar is not animated by the rich memories over the course of time. Thus, the resultant information—the Narrative and Social Perspective—becomes warped in the vacuum of impersonal relations and has the potential to have weak connections to or be devoid of the empathetic and moral compass to inform social choices and decision-making, no matter how articulate the digital source.

There are very few occasions where one is held accountable for an online digital identity. Without the experience of interpersonal relationships, it becomes too easy to offer empirical evidence (Fake News!) not backed up by factual information. As Thomas Metzinger elucidates in his essay “Intellectual Honesty”:

“The collective self-image of the species Homo Sapiens will increasingly be one of a being caught in evolved mechanisms of self-deception to the point of becoming a victim of its own actions. It will be an image of a class of naturally evolved cognitive systems that, because of their own cognitive structure, are unable to react adequately to certain challenges—even when they are able to intellectually grasp the expected consequences, and even when, in addition, they consciously experience this very fact about themselves clearly and distinctly […] Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of ‘inner decency.’ Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive.”

Our ethical conflicts are created by the unknown variables between interpersonal communication, confirmation bias, defined personal narrative, and social mores.  As my grandmother used to say, “Be careful who you hang out with because they define who you are and who you become.” I want the people I associate with to practice honest interaction, with themselves and the outside world. I aspire to that but, even like a virtuoso violinist, the experience of living in the world necessitates that you have to practice all the time.

Personally, I have received some relief through the practice of mindful communication. Mindfulness makes a huge difference in relocating oneself and the world. From a mindfulness perspective, your historical story is a fabrication, is made up, is unreliable as a guide to future ways of being in the world.  You understand compassion because you are able to let go of attachments to your story, your Narrative Self, and realize your filters are flawed. You must come to grips with the reality you are living in, rather than the reality you want it to be. This was a profound revelation for me, that my “story” is a construct of my brain and subject to modification as information becomes available. By contrast, digital identities are static.

Part of the concept of “letting go of the self” is inspired by my philosophical study of Buddhism. The Buddhist understanding of “no-self” is a comforting concept for me in the light of the other perceived selves that are no longer undamaged by my lack of eyesight.

In light of digital advancement, how could your unique experiences inform understanding of effective communication? How can young people benefit from your experiences to sustain reliable discourse and be effective in management and teams? How do think communication can evolve in a positive way in the global marketplace?

I think that my situation has made me more aware of sensory stimulus and more observational in general. How warm is the room? How cool? Is there air-conditioning? Breeze? Is there background noise or other external stimuli? I have become more proficient in evaluating the ambient atmosphere as a barometer of conversation, like other stimuli I used to discount or ignore.  When the ambient atmosphere increases, context of information is lessened.

“Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” Anil Seth.

To illustrate the point, Dr. Seth creates a sound experiment in which the neurologist plays a recording of a distorted, unintelligible, alien sound. When Seth plays a recording of his own voice, suddenly the voice on the original recording is clear because the brain accepts Seth’s translation. In the same manner, if I come across an object that I don’t see clearly, I will reach out to touch it. When I touch the object, my brain supplies the information necessary to “recognize” it—a book, my phone, or an I-pad.

Recognizing (from studying Charles Bonnet Syndrome) that my brain is augmenting the visual stimuli with tactile information to “see” an object, I have learned to practice avoiding confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories) and base new ideas or projects on empirical data and independent sources of information.

Future technology should and will likely focus on facilitating a communication atmosphere. As we become more global-centric, visual communication technology will be increasingly important because physical cues are a barometer of interpersonal communication. Even on today’s news, audiences listen to the dialogue but also react to visual stimuli—a panelist rolling their eyes or desperately trying to signal an interruption to contest a point. Holograms and other communication technology currently in its infancy will be vital. Face to face communication across global pathways with access to virtual drawers of shared information is the technological path forward.

It is important to back up a bit and think about where we are. If you think about what we have done as a species, when you know how we interpret what is outside of our “bony domes,” it is amazing. It is amazing that we have created mathematics to study the world, astronomy to see it, art to emulate the experience. As a species, we have reached out and touched the world in remarkable ways, figured out how to manipulate and use it, for better or worse. But, in the meantime, we have left behind something important. We have been inventing this world we live in: invented languages to describe it, invented telescopes to see it, invented vehicles to circumnavigate it, invented religions to give us comfort, and invented politics and governments to give us a sense of control, and yes, invented weapons of mass destruction. We forgot to understand what it means that we made it all up. Meaning is human-made. It is not built into reality, but a part of our human world. We engage in atrocities and war because we forget that all understanding is human invention. And these inventions can lead us into a true hallucination that has dangerous and disastrous implications. Or maybe we can wake up and realize who we are, who we have been, and where we are going. The beauty that remains to us lies in our art, our music, and our ability to create as part of the ecosystem on this magical planet we call Earth.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein

 

 

 

America

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“America” is translated from its original Serbian by author Dr. Ljiljana Bibović (1937-1986).  Granted a Fulbright scholarship to study in America, Dr. Bibović was a member of the Berkeley Poets Cooperative in the early 1980s (“A&W Sutter Street” was published in issue #19, p. 60) and a student at the University of California, Berkeley. “America” is from a recently published legacy collection, Stopped Moments. Although the majority of poems are in Serbian, there are also verses in English.

America,
well carpeted.
America silent with no smile.
I am walking along the cold corridors
from one sign to another.
It is silent.
It does not welcome you.
The customs officer weary of questions
is letting you into the new world.
In the nightmare of pieces of luggage,
all of a sudden a human voice,
the voice of a man in uniform beside me.
America has smiled at last.

Happiness Doesn’t Come in Bottles

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Neuroscientists learn that joy comes through dancing, not drugs.

Photo by Bruce Cook, 1989.

This posthumous reprint of Dr. Walter J. Freeman III’s (1927-2016) op-ed was originally requested by Peter Sylwan, Science Editor for Svenske Dagbladet, Stockholm, Sweden 24 May 1996 (in Swedish). Reprinted (in English) in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 67-71. Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley, “Walter Jackson Freeman III [was] a neuroscientist and philosopher known for his pioneering work on how the brain generates our perception of the world…” (Robert Sanders, Berkeley News, 2016). We chose to reprint it here in Sisyphus more than 20 years later because the science is still relevant, the first sentence still rings true.–Ed.

 

Too little has been written about the biology of joy. Most of the articles in the medical literature about brains and emotions are devoted to explaining how we feel fear, anger, anxiety and despair. This is understandable, because we don’t go to doctors when we are feeling optimistic, happy, and joyful. Most of what we know about the chemistry of our emotions has been learned from the disorders and the treatments of people who are sad and depressed.

But we can’t just accept this and say, “Why bother?”, because too many of us are seeking to find joy by taking chemicals. We need to ask, “What happens inside our brains when we experience happiness? Is there a way to stimulate pleasure in our brains, and what really happens when we do that?”

Electrical stimulation

We have known for 40 years what happens in rats, ever since a neurobiologist named Jim Olds learned how to put electrodes deep into their brains, connect the wires to an electric current generator, and give the animals a switch with which to stimulate their own brains. In some locations in the brain, if a rat accidentally presses the switch, the rat jumps away and stays as far distant from the switch as it can get. We call those locations “pain centers”.

At other places, after discovering the effects of the electric current, the rats press repeatedly for hours. They seem to be addicted to self-stimulation. We call these locations “pleasure centers”. But does it make the rats happy? We don’t know, because we can’t know what they are feeling. We can only know what they do.

Some neurosurgeons have placed electrodes into the brains of human subjects, who were suffering epilepsy. The surgeons were trying to locate the places in their brains, in which a tumor or a scar might be triggering the epileptic fits, so that the damage could be surgically repaired. They stimulated the brains with electric current in order to try to control the epileptic seizures.

For some locations, patients reported feeling profoundly depressed, as though they were about to die. One of them said, “Doc, don’t ever do that again!” In different places they reported feeling pleasure, sometimes sexual, but mostly rather bland. Some other patients, who were afflicted with chronic pain, reported that they got temporary relief from their suffering. They were given the opportunity to go home with a battery and a switch, so that they could treat their pain by stimulating themselves and adjusting their own dosage of electric current.

But no one wanted to keep the wires, and no one got addicted. Some doctors feared that a black market might grow, with addicts going to third world countries to get fixed with wires and stimulators. That didn’t happen, because whatever the pleasure was, it didn’t last, and it wasn’t happiness.

Chemical stimulation

But a lot of people do get addicted to chemicals – alcohol, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, and nicotine. Why do they do that, and why aren’t they happy? It is because brains have a variety of chemical systems that regulate their electrical activities in waking and sleeping. The addictive drugs artificially stimulate those systems, but the feelings are not those of joy.

For example, a chemical called ‘dopamine’ is broadly spread through the brain by specialized nerve cells, when a person achieves some kind of reward, such as by satisfying hunger and thirst, winning a game, or passing an examination. Dopamine is often called a “reward hormone”. Its chemical actions are produced also by closely related compounds such as amphetamine and cocaine. They give feelings of buoyant optimism, energy, power, and knowledge.

It is not surprising that people who have no other avenues to success, living in poverty and hopelessness, will spend their food money on some transient chemical bliss. But that isn’t happiness, and even people who are bloated on academic or business success, and who feel elation, aren’t liable to confuse that feeling with happiness.

Other chemicals called ‘endorphins’ act in the brain as natural pain relievers. Their action is imitated by heroin and morphine, and also by alcohol. Again, it is small wonder that people who suffer from the emotional pains of regret, shame, guilt and despair might find relief from their demons in forgetfulness. But that isn’t happiness.

Yet another chemical called ‘serotonin’ is important in bringing mental relaxation as an important condition for getting to sleep. We don’t really know yet what sleep is for, but we know that we can’t survive without it. The relief from agitation and anxiety that is mediated by serotonin leads also to recovery from some forms of depression. That is why the chemical fluoxetine (Prozac) has become so popular. It doesn’t act like serotonin, but it prolongs the action of what little serotonin the brain is producing, if it is in short supply. But return to tranquility from anxiety and depression is not the same thing as happiness.

So, is there a chemical for joy? Scientists are beginning to understand that this is a wrong-headed question. There is no such chemical, and even to ask the question is to expose a deep ignorance about how brains–and people–actually work.

Lonely brains

There is more to brain function than chemistry or electricity. Some pioneer neuroscientists have used the new theory of nonlinear dynamics to build mathematical models of brain function. These far-out dynamicists have come to some remarkable new insights, which at first may seem outrageous, but which are turning out to be much more in tune with human intuition about brains and human nature than anyone had expected.

One conclusion is that brains don’t take in information from the environment and store it like a camera or a tape recorder, for later retrieval. There is no fixed bank of memories in brains, such as we hold in libraries and computer chips. We have been misdirected by the makers of computers and the visionary Canadian neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, to search for the hypothetical “memory banks” in the temporal lobes of humans. Human remembering is notoriously fallible.

A stimulus that excites the sensory receptors, so that they send a message to the brain, triggers a reaction in the brain, by which the brain constructs a pattern of neural activity. The sensory activity that triggered the construction is then washed away, leaving only the construct. That pattern does not “represent” the stimulus. It constitutes the meaning of the stimulus for the person receiving it. The meaning is different for every person, because it depends on the past experience of the person.

Such a stimulus is only successful in triggering the construction, if it already has some relevance to the person, most particularly if it is being sought by the person through paying attention, or if the person has had some previous experience with that class of stimuli.

Each successful stimulus also evokes a learning experience so that the person is changed by each stimulus and new experience accumulates. As the existentialist philosophers from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre have concluded, each of us constructs our self by our own actions, and we know our self as it is revealed to us in our actions. The self is in dynamic readiness to act and bring into play its entire experience at each moment. That is not the way a library or set of look-up tables works. It is far more flexible and rapid, though at the cost of reduced accuracy.

The implication of this dynamical model is that the meaning of a stimulus is different for everyone who receives it because the sum of experience for each of us is unique. Because the sensory activity is washed away and only the construction is saved, the only knowledge that each of us has is what we have constructed within our own brains. We cannot know the world by direct experience of it.

Why not? It is because the world is infinitely complex, and an individual brain can only know the little that it can handle through its own body. It turns out that this view is well known to philosophers. It is called solipsism. Many philosophers have been afraid that it is true, but they couldn’t prove it or disprove it. Now neurodynamicists have proven experimentally that it is true. Cognitive scientists have also proven that it is true, but in a negative way. Every attempt they have made to make a robot or a computer using a fixed memory store that could handle problems in the real world has failed miserably.

One reason that philosophers have been afraid is that solipsism seemed to make it very difficult to account for shared knowledge. If everything each of us knows is made inside our brains, how can we know the same things? The answer is simple. We share almost the same things. Almost. That happens only if we go to the same school, or grow up in the same neighborhood, and acquire the same language and the same culture.

Another reason for fear is that each brain is isolated from all others. No one can truly feel what another person is feeling, though we can empathize through shared experience. This separation has a good side in that each of us has the inalienable right to privacy. The bad side is loneliness. And here, paradoxically, is where joy begins to enter.

Dancing is a way to happiness

Where we humans find joy is in surmounting this solipsistic barrier between us and sharing our feelings and comforts. We cannot ever really cross it, but, a bit like neighbors chatting over a fence, we can be together. However, there is more to this communion than mere talking. There is trust, which underlies true friendships and partnerships. What is the chemistry of trust?

Answers are found when we look back on our mammalian ancestors. Raising a helpless infant to childhood requires intensive parental care, which comes with bonding between the parents and the infant. Now, how does a carefree child, when it has grown up, become a parent? This change in role requires a catastrophic change in beliefs, attitudes and values to make new parents. We humans would say that they fall in love, first with each other, and then with their offspring.

Scientists have learned that, when animals mate and give birth, specialized chemicals are released into their brains that enable their behavior to change. Maternal and paternal patterns of nursing and caring appear. The most important is a chemical called ‘oxytocin’. It doesn’t cause joy. On the contrary, it may cause anxiety, because it melts down the patterns of connections among neurons that hold experience, so that new experience can form. We become aware of this meltdown most dramatically as a frightening loss of identity and self-control, when we fall in love for the first time.

Bonding comes not with the meltdown, but with the shared activity afterward, in which people learn about each other through cooperation. Knowing another person doesn’t come with foreplay and orgasm. It comes in cooperative activities during and afterward. Trust emerges not just with sex, but also with vigorous shared activity in sports and combat, through which people bond into teams by learning to trust each other.

So oxytocin is not a happiness chemical, but a brain tool for building trust. Perhaps a million years ago our ancestors learned how to use this mammalian mechanism to promote social bonding beyond sexual union, in order to form groups and tribes. They did it, and still do it, with dancing, rhythmic clapping and chanting, singing and making music together all day and night, into exhaustion and collapse. When they awaken, they are reborn.

Nietzsche realized this. Emil Durkheim and other anthropologists have shown how people engage in Dionysian orgies and religious ceremonies, as the most effective way in which to create group identities. The joy they experience comes in dancing and singing with each other, thereby forming the bonds of trust. Trust comes when we are able to predict what other people will do, and we achieve that by repeated cooperative actions.

Aristotle wrote: “Happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.” That is rather abstract. We can see virtue as a set of shared goals for the good of ourselves and our children. Joy comes with activities that we share with people we have learned to trust, and that enable us to share meaning across the solipsistic barrier that separates each of us from all others.

So happiness is not made by a chemical. That would be the same as treating a violin sonata as nothing but rubbing horse hair on strings of cat gut in order to make a wooden box resonate. Violin makers have to know their materials to make one, and physicians have to know about the brain chemicals in order to treat patients, when the chemistry of brains has gone wrong, but they can’t give us a pill to make us happy. We create our own joys, and we feel happiest in learning to trust each other.

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Special Thanks:

Department of Molecular & Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-3200

Water Snakes

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The poem transforms an episode from my past, swimming in a pond where a girlfriend and I had to avoid poisonous water snakes. We weren’t naked and it wasn’t at night, but those details raise the erotic stakes in the poem. That’s where Sir Thomas Wyatt comes in. Wyatt’s poem explores the interplay of pleasure and risk, as does my poem. Although sixteen not fourteen lines long, my poem also operates within the idea of the sonnet, partly by creating an echoing couplet by quoting Wyatt at the end.

 

Sliding naked into the pond, you warned
me that the water snakes were poisonous.
But we couldn’t see them. They were as
black as slimy sticks corrugating the dark
surface. We hovered like solemn ghosts;
you, your seaweed hair, floating,
there and not there, an apparition
underwater, a blurred imago wanting
to emerge; and I, an incandescent light,
drained of color, scanning that way and this,
too rattled to appreciate the sensual
enjambment of pleasure and risk, which
is skinny-dipping at night in a country pond.
You laughed at my hesitation, swam over, insinuated
yourself around me, and lavished the kind of liquid kiss
which whispered, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

 

Christmas Lights

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Someone bangs on the front door. I lean forward and turn down the TV. The house goes quiet for a minute. Nothing happens. I look out the window and see fresh snow on the ground.

I get up and walk to the hall and turn out the string of white lights hanging from nails in the wall. The ceiling light bulb stopped working last week so Bud and me strung up some Christmas lights from a milk crate in the basement.

Bud paid the electric bill last week with his own money, but we didn’t buy any light bulbs. He paid it with cash from his job. At least he said he got it from working. I believed him. ”We wouldn’t have any light or any TV,” he said. “We wouldn’t be able to cook food.” I went with him to the office building so I would know where to go if I had to do it next time. The lady at the desk counted Bud’s money twice, and then gave him a receipt. She had fat fingers and bright red nail polish. For some reason, she kept looking over at me while she counted the money.

Then the banging starts up again. It sounds like a hammer, like the door will explode. So loud that the house vibrates.

Sis comes into the room. “Someone is here,” she says.

“No kidding,” I say.

“Where is Bud?” she asks.

“I think he’s upstairs.”

“No one ever comes over. Not anymore. No one that knocks,” she says. She’s still too small, small enough to hide underneath the kitchen sink. Hiding is usually her first option. It’s like she’s a runt, or she hasn’t hit a growth spurt yet.

She turns and runs in her yellow socks toward the kitchen. She saw it in a Christmas movie we watched one night. A small kid would hide under the kitchen sink. She went and tried it right away and that became her favorite place to go. “No one else can fit in there,” is what she said.

I follow her to the kitchen. She’s nowhere to be seen but I can hear her shuffling into place. The dishes haven’t been done in days. There’s pots too. Usually I end up doing them since Bud won’t do it and Sis is too small. She can reach the knobs on the faucet with a chair but she can’t wash the dishes without making a huge mess. She tried once last week and broke two plates.

“This is Keith Douglas from the Sheriff’s office,” a booming voice comes from the other side of the front door. “Please open the door or we will be forced to open it the hard way,” says the voice. He sounds like a giant, like a man with huge hands and gigantic feet in heavy boots.

I run up the stairs as fast and as quiet as I can. I go straight into Bud’s room and see that he is still asleep. Bud is 15 but he looks older. People think he’s 17 or 18 because he has black hair on his chin. He works at the gas station on Route 12 and sometimes he stays out pretty late. Sis and I usually just watch TV and then go to sleep on the floor. There’s a small heater with a fan next to the TV.

I move to wake him up. Shake his legs.

“What the fuck?” he says and tries to swat me with his hand.

“Someone at the door,” I say.

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Around eight maybe.”

“Who is it?” he asks. He sits up and rubs his face. His eyes are puffy and red.

“Someone named Keith.”

“Who the hell is that?”

“How should I know? He says he’s from the Sheriff.”

“Where’s Sis?” asks Bud.

“She’s in the kitchen…”

“Under the sink,” says Bud.

Bud gets up and pulls his hoodie over his head. He’s still dressed in his clothes from the day before. I notice that his bed has been moved away from the window where the cold air comes through the cracks. He’s also covered the window with plastic garbage bags and duct tape. His room is cold enough that I can see my breath. It’s warmer downstairs from the electric heater we keep next to the TV.

Downstairs there is a huge crash, or more like an explosion. Bud and I run to the stairs and look down. The front door is busted wide open. The sheriff is standing just inside the door with a sledge hammer in his hands. We know it’s the sheriff because there’s a badge on his green jacket that says so. There are slivers of wood on the floor.

He looks up the stairs at where we’re standing. “Why didn’t you open the goddamn door?” he yells at us. “And why did you change the locks? You’re not supposed to change the locks without giving a key to the owner.”

Bud and I are standing at the top of the stairs. I feel the cold air blowing in through the front door. How are we going to close that door now?

“Come down here please,” he says.

There is nowhere else for us to go, so I follow Bud down to the bottom stair. Bud does his best to face up to the sheriff who is as big as a bear. His face is red and he’s breathing heavy.

“Where are your parents?” he asks.

“Our mom is out of town,” says Bud, which is true.

“Where is she?”

“She went to visit her sister,” says Bud, which is not true.

“When did she leave?”

Bud and I look at each other. “A couple of days ago,” says Bud. When he lies, his voice goes up just a tiny bit and he lifts his chin. You’d have to know Bud to know when he’s lying.

“’A couple of days,’” he says. “When is she coming back?”

“She’s visiting her sister who is sick,” says Bud. Another lie. It’s true that Mom has a sister, but she married some guy from upstate and then moved to Arizona. That was about 10 years ago. At least that’s what Bud told me.

“When is she coming back?” asks the sheriff.

“She’ll be back any day now,” says Bud. “Her sister is real sick and needs her help to get back on her feet.”

I was home on the day Mom left. It was about three months ago and still pretty early in the morning. She started putting things into her car, suitcases and some milk crates and a laundry basket full of bathroom stuff. I could see that she was in a hurry. She never looked up, so I didn’t get a chance to see her face from the upstairs window. I was the only one who was awake. I usually get up early. Otherwise I just lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. Sis sleeps in the same room as me. Bud has his own room. Anyway, she got in the car and drove away. She didn’t say anything or leave a note. She just drove off.

The sheriff looks around the house and down at the busted door jamb. He doesn’t say anything for a minute and we all just stand there. The wind blowing through the door is making the house colder.

“Is there anyone else here besides you two?” He asks.

“Our sister is here,” says Bud. “She’s probably in the kitchen.”

“Well, go find her and bring her here.”

“You come with me,” he says to me, and we head out the door and stop at the snow-covered walkway that goes to the mailbox. He waves at a white truck that’s parked in the driveway. Three men climb out of the truck, all of them wearing gloves and boots and overalls.

“You boys know what to do,” he says. Then he turns to me and points to the curb and says, “Go make yourself comfortable over there. If you have a warm jacket, then go get it.” Then he heads back over to the porch and staples a yellow paper sign on the door.

Our neighbor from across the street comes out of their house and stands on the porch with his arms crossed on his chest. He just stands there. He’s wearing brown camo hunting gear and a bright orange hat. I go back into the house to get my heavy jacket and my rubber boots and then head back to the front yard.

The three men are carrying our furniture out of the house and putting it on the front yard. Their feet are making tracks in the snow as they walk back and forth. The first thing they bring out is the dining room table and the chairs. Then the couch and the lamp. Then the TV and the table it goes on.

Bud finally comes out with Sis holding onto his hand. She is wrapped up in her pink jacket and wearing her Ugg boots. We just stand there and watch the three men going back into our house and bringing out our stuff. Bud isn’t wearing a jacket. The men carry out my bed and then Bud’s bed and then Sis’s bed. This goes on for about 15 minutes, and then it seems like everything we own is in the yard. Even the milk crates from the basement are stacked up next to the kitchen table. There are colored Christmas lights in the crates and some ornaments.

 One of the movers goes over to the sheriff and speaks quietly so we can’t hear him. The sheriff nods slowly and then the mover goes back into the house.

“You kids have somewhere to go?” asks the sheriff.  “You got family or something like that?”

Bud stands there and says nothing for a minute and then he says, “Yes. We got some people on the other side of town.” I have no idea who he’s talking about, and then I realize he’s lying again.

“Look. You can’t live in a house if you don’t pay the rent,” he says. “It’s against the law to not pay your rent. This here house is owned by someone and if the tenants don’t pay the rent, they have to leave. The owner has bills to pay and they just keep adding up. They have to pay the bank and the bank expects to be paid. That’s the way it is and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

Sis let’s go of Bud’s hand and goes over to sit on her own bed. For some reason, the movers put it back together in the grass. Her hair that she died orange using food coloring left over from Easter is all twisted up in knots, and the cold wind blows it around. She lies down and pulls the covers over her face. Bud goes over and sits down on the bed with her but he says nothing to her.

The sheriff goes back to his car, a white and blue Dodge Charger, and brings us a couple of large plastic garbage bags. He hands them to Bud and tells us to grab whatever it is we need to take with us. “It’s supposed to snow later, and everything will get wet and then it will freeze.”

“Stay here with Sis,” says Bud, and then he goes back into the house. The sheriff answers a phone call, and all I can hear him say is “Yes, of course. Yes, of course. Yes. Of course.” After a few minutes Bud comes back out with both bags full. “I got your clothes in here,” he says to me. “I got Sis’s clothes too.”

Two of the three men seal the door shut by placing a thick steel bar across the front and drilling screws through it into the house and then into the door. One of the men puts the cordless drill down on the railing, and I notice that it’s a DeWalt. The three men stand around on the front porch for a few minutes with their hands in their pockets, and then they come over and the sheriff pays them each in cash. They get into their moving van and back out.

Then the sheriff comes over and looks at me. He doesn’t say anything for a minute and then he lets out a long, white exhale. Bud is sitting on the bed with his elbows on his knees. I can tell he’s thinking hard. I can feel it. The sheriff shoves his hands in his jacket pockets and says, “My hands are tied. There ain’t nothing I can do about this. Nothing.”

Then he turns and walks over to his car, gets in and drives away.

I go over to Sis’s bed and sit down next to Bud.  Everything that was ours that was in the house is all around us. It’s like our house got turned inside out. Our clothes are in two green plastic bags next to the bed. The TV is there on the table.

Even though the sun is coming out, it starts to snow. Light flakes of snow drifting sideways and swirling slowly into our faces and melting.

That’s when Bud says it. He looks at me and says, “We will figure this out.” He says it in a way that sounds like he means it. Like he isn’t lying.

Then Sis pulls back the blanket that’s covering her face and she looks sideways at Bud, like she can’t tell if he is serious or if he’s lost his mind.

CASUS (KELHAM BEACH)

by

 
 
 

 

 

For Charles Entrekin

“Insula, insulae…”
 
As an exercise, exaggerate in Latin.
 
I was getting used to the idea
of walking, reading the text
down through the forest
to the sea—
 
Think how impressed you’ll be
when I can quote Catullus!
 
Passer, Passerculus, Passerella…
The woods are full of sparrows.
 
And sometimes what is called
affectionately
the “real” world
is precisely—
you have to point to it,

as stepping

from the forest, there abruptly is
the sea—
the yellow-green, indigo blotchy cold body
of thought, from which (we have been told)
we have emerged.
 
The soul, peninsular, has wet feet.
 
“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”

 

If you are interested in the Lewis Carroll inspiration for this poem,”The Walrus and the Carpenter,” you can find the link here. The recorded reading is excellent.

Americana

by

photo by Cindy Sierk   

 

Kareem’s real name was Jackson Smith. He was tall and thin with skin the color of an oak tree’s bark. He had a habit of touching all the time – a shoulder, an arm, my back. It made me uncomfortable, but for awhile I still had hope that the military’s housing arrangement would work out. He seemed nice enough, at first.

Sand and heat were the only two constants in Riyadh. The floors of all the buildings on the military base were marble and almost always coated with a very thin layer of sand. I paid a Filipino man (who makes his living cleaning houses on base) to mop the floors every couple of days, but still the arid grains drifted inexorably through the windows and doors to spread across any flat surface. The air smelled of it, and we breathed it, along with the fumes of the oil refineries on the outskirts of Riyadh. 

I taught for an American university contracted to offer classes on military bases across the world. It was just after the first Gulf War, and the American/Saudi relationship was pretty good, so the university thought it was time to capitalize on the new strong relations between our countries and try to get a visa and send in a woman, alone, there. I volunteered for the job, thinking it would be a great adventure, but you know the cliche: be careful what you wish for. At first it worked out okay, though the logistics were a bit more complicated since women can’t drive or go places on our own. Getting to the base from the airport brought some difficult moments, but the director of all the Education Services Offices (ESO) picked me up at the airport, drove me to the base, and made sure I was settled in. He introduced me to the man who ran the Riyadh ESO. “Call me Kareem,” he said, “I don’t like my real name.”

I had to share a house with Kareem. The Air Force didn’t know where else to put a single, female contractor. The ESO employees were all civilians, too, so I guess the military thought it would be best to put us together. With hindsight, I can’t help thinking that someone should have thought that through better. I wasn’t in a position to say yes or no, so we ended up together in a three bedroom house in Eskan Village, a large American military base outside of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.  A large wall and fence as well as a lot of security systems, including Saudi and American armed guards, protected the base. The ground was all sand and dust framed in concrete sidewalks and black asphalt roads. Beyond the base’s fence was just flat desert with some sparse grasses growing among the gravel and dirt, interrupted by sand dunes, other gated housing complexes, a modern freeway, and in the distance, what little could be seen of the buildings of Riyadh. In the other direction, the freeway went on and on towards the distant towers of oil refineries.

He talked a lot when our paths crossed. He even offered to drive me around if I needed a ride. The military gave him a truck for while he was there. The university, however, paid a driver to chauffeur me around since most of my classes were off base in the evenings at places like the hospital on the other side of the city.  He seemed okay with the potpourri or incense I sometimes burned to cover the smells of sand and refineries that seeped into the house. “I use a lot of it myself,” he said when I asked him if he minded it, giving me an odd look. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time.

One weekend I’d been off-base visiting one of the university’s part-time instructors, Marni, whose day job was working at the hospital in Riyadh as an administrator. Marni decided to help me out and gave me a tour of Riyadh on her day off, then at the end of the day, sent me home with several bottles of her homemade wine as a birthday gift. It was my 30th birthday, but she was the only one I told. I didn’t want any extra attention from anyone. Like many Americans and Brits who lived and worked in Riyadh, she had a small room in the back of her house with small barrels, bottles, and other items that she used to make wine and beer since it was almost impossible to get it any other way there in Saudi Arabia, where alcohol is illegal. She bottled the wine in grape juice bottles so no one could distinguish them from a popular, local grape juice drink. This saved me since the Saudi guards stopped the car I was in and searched it. My driver, Carlos, was a very nice, friendly Filipino with an unwavering sense of humor. We weren’t usually searched when we came and went from base, but it was something the Saudis did randomly, and that was the night they chose to do it.

Instead of waving us through, the guards opened the door and looked inside. Then they made Carlos open the trunk. They took all the items in my shopping bags out and looked at them, then put them back in the bags. They looked under the car with large mirrors on sticks that curve. Finally, they waved us through. As we drove onto base and I could breathe again, I told Carlos what I’d just done. He laughed and said, “Next time, tell me. I have a special space under the floor. I smuggle things on base all the time. It’s a good business,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, breathing in and out, slowly. When he pulled over and let me out, he pulled back the rug on the floor by the back seat and showed me the small compartment. He seemed rather proud of it. ”Good to know,” I said. I really didn’t want to know though. I did not want to get involved in anything illegal, especially after that near-catastrophe.

Back in the house, Kareem was just washing up some dishes. Even though we mostly ate at the DiFac (Dining Facility, where the military and everyone living on base are served meals, free), we had a small kitchen we could use, too. I showed him one of the bottles and offered to share it. He was delighted and got two water glasses from the cabinets. We sat around the small kitchen table and drank. It was potent red wine though somewhat bitter.  “Wow,” he said. “I wondered which one of us would be the first to get some alcohol. Good work! I guess you’ve got connections?”

“No, it was a gift from a friend,” I said, not really sure what he meant by “connections.” “We wandered through the gold souk and market today,” I said.

Kareem said, “I just hung out here and watched TV. One of the soldiers said he’d take me to see parts of the city one of these weekends, but he hasn’t done it yet. I’m feeling kind of lonely. I tried calling my sister back in Virginia today, but I couldn’t get through. I could really use a hug right about now.”

I put the cap on the bottle and put it in the ‘fridge. I had no idea how to respond to that. While I felt kind of sorry for him, I most certainly wasn’t going to hug him. I didn’t know him very well. I’d only been there for about three weeks, and because of our schedules, we weren’t in the house at the same time during waking hours much. ‘Well,” I said. “I’m going to email my boyfriend who’s still on Okinawa, and then get to sleep. See you tomorrow,” I lied, hoping he’d take the hint and back off, though there really was no boyfriend. We’d broken up right before I left Okinawa for Saudi Arabia. He was returning to the US to his new post at the Pentagon.

“He’s black, isn’t he?” Kareem said. “Angela mentioned you have a black boyfriend – a white girl who likes black men.” He smiled at me. I had no idea why Angela, the administrative assistant who ran the Education Services Office on base, would have said something like that to him. To be fair, the university’s gossip grapevine was extensive and thorough, especially since the Internet was now available on most bases and our staff were usually spouses of US military members who have been stationed at a number of bases and know a lot of people. The military community is a very large, wide, scattered network. And it is true that my boyfriend had been African American though I am a white, Irish American. I didn’t see how or why that was any of his business.

I probably stared at him too long, shocked that he would say something like that. “Good night,” I said. I went to my room and locked the door. I told myself I was reading too much into it. He’d just had a bad day. I locked my bedroom door instinctively, I guess. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. Then I realized I had locked it and stared at the door knob, feeling a bit guilty, thinking that was insulting to him and over reacting. I didn’t think I was being racist. He made me uncomfortable because of what he said, I assured myself. And he would never notice unless he tried to open the door while I was in there, which of course he wouldn’t do. Still, I locked the door every night, after that.

The next day I asked Angela why she had told that to Kareem. I didn’t even want to know how she knew it. She apologized and admitted that she had wanted to make him feel comfortable around me. She thought I made him nervous, though she didn’t explain why she thought that. She laughed when I told her he had tried to call his sister but didn’t get through. I didn’t tell her about his hints that he wanted me to hug him. I was curious if the phone lines sometimes didn’t work. “That was his therapist he called, not his sister, and he got through alright,” she said. “I could hear his conversation through the door. He was going on and on about how he didn’t fit in here because he’s black. The guy is paranoid,” she said with no remorse. “It’s a frickin’ foreign country,” she said. “None of us fit in. What did he expect when he volunteered to come here?” She went back to typing whatever it was she was typing. I suspected Kareem had meant he didn’t fit in on base. If Angela’s attitude was typical, he probably did have a hard time of it, though he seemed to have made a few friends among the officers and high ranking sergeants. I sometimes saw him eating and joking around with a few of them in the DiFac at lunch. I usually just grabbed a sandwich or something and brought it back to the house so I could eat it while preparing for that evening’s class. I felt kind of sorry for him.

A few nights later, Carlos dropped me off in front of the house. I’d been teaching over at the hospital, and it was close to 11:00 p.m. I was wearing the long, black abaya over my clothes along with a black head veil. When I wore them, I looked like a moving, tiny black tent with a face. Wearing them when I went off base was important to prevent any unwanted attention from the muttawa, a kind of religious police force, and other Saudi men. It had been a long day, I was tired, and I just wanted to get into my pajamas and go to bed.

The houses were all similar: one floor, three or four bedrooms, and stairs to the flat roof which could be used as a bedroom in the relatively cool summer nights, or as a porch, or even a place to grow potted plants. All were surrounded by high, metal fences with strong gates. The lock on ours was broken, and it could only be locked or unlocked from the inside with a bolt, though sometimes it locked on its own when it was shut. I had asked Kareem several times to make sure the gate was not bolted and to please leave it ajar– there was a big rock on the ground we used to keep it slightly propped open – and we kept it like that all the time. We both had keys to the front door so there was no real need for the gate to be locked.

That night the gate was locked shut. I banged on it and called for Kareem, but he didn’t answer though we kept the windows open at night for the cool air. He must have just forgotten that I can’t open it from this side, I assured myself. Surely it was an accident. He must have accidentally dislodged the rock when he came through the gate. Finally I gave up trying to get his attention and walked across base along dark streets to the military police quarters, hoping they might have a master key to all the gates or something. They didn’t, but one them drove me back and banged on the gate. He eventually climbed up on the hood of his truck and then hauled himself over the top of the gate. He opened it from the other side. Then he walked me to the door and came in to make sure everything was okay. Kareem was watching TV in the den, a room right off of the front hallway. The window was open. “Excuse me sir,” said the MP. “Did you realize the gate was locked with no way to open it from the other side? I had to climb over it so your housemate here could get in. We banged on the gate and called for you. How did you miss all that noise?”

“I’m sorry,” Kareem said, looking up from the TV. He was scrawled lengthwise across the couch in shorts and a t-shirt. ”I guess the TV was too loud. I didn’t hear anything. I thought the gate was open.”

“Please make sure it stays open,” the MP said. “I don’t want to have to climb it again ‘Bye ma’m,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said to him for about the sixth time. He left. I went to my room without saying anything. I lay in the dark, trying to think of nothing, but of course thinking about everything that had happened that day that irritated me, when I heard the door handle turn. It tended to rattle because it was a little loose, even when locked. I could swear I heard someone push against the door. “Hello?” I said out loud. I heard only silence. I lay awake for a long time, listening, breathing slowly and softly, but I must have finally drifted off because the alarm woke me up from a deep dream I couldn’t remember. Angela assured me later in the office that I must have imagined it all.

 A week later, I found the gate locked again. When I left for class that afternoon, I had made sure the rock was in place and the gate was solidly open enough to keep it from locking. Someone had removed the rock. This time Kareem was apparently in his bedroom or out. The house was dark. The same MP jumped the gate, opened it, and saw me inside the front door. He muttered about talking to Kareem tomorrow and then left. I went to bed angry, sure that this time the locked gate could not have been an accident. But how could I prove that? Why would he do that? In the morning, he was gone when I finally felt comfortable enough to confront him and left my room. I never had a chance to ask him about it after that.

           *

7:00 a.m. and already the heat was probably close to 90F. That it was a dry heat didn’t help. All day, every day, the hot air sucked the moisture from my sinuses so I got nosebleeds. It sucked the moisture from my body so I was always thirsty.

I was late. I’d promised Angela that I would grade a pile of English placement tests. The university got permission to teach in the country by agreeing to let local people, but not actual Saudis, take classes. The students were mostly from foreign diplomats’ families. Angela’s assistant had been fired a month ago for accepting bribes to place students into classes they didn’t have the English skills to pass.

On this particular morning, I opened my bedroom door and heard the soft murmur of the television set from down the hall. That was unusual, but I was in a hurry and didn’t think much about it. I walked to the front door, trying to stuff papers into the backpack I used to carry around books and things. I wanted to stop at the DiFac and eat breakfast before heading over to the Education Center.

The sound was coming from the TV in the large den at the front of the house. I looked into the room as I passed and stopped; I don’t know, was it just surprise or a mix of surprise and revulsion, and perhaps even a little fear?  Kareem was sleeping on top of the couch and chair cushions he’d spread out on the floor. He lay flat with his legs spread wide, one arm covering his face, and the other folded across his chest. He had nothing on but a pair of very tight briefs. The size and shape of the erection rising out of them were extremely well defined. I stood for a moment, stunned, though I couldn’t really have explained why, at that moment. It was too intimate and too careless. It implied a comfortable, close relationship with his roommate, me, that we did not have and that I did not want. I fled to the education center.

I told Angela about it. He had not been in that TV room when I went to bed at 11:30 the previous night. The house had been dark and silent. “Maybe he couldn’t sleep and got up to watch a little TV in the middle of the night, but fell asleep,” Angela said. “In his underwear?” I said. “Why wouldn’t he have put on at least a pair of shorts out of respect for me? God, I saw way more of him than I ever want to.” Angela laughed. “How big is he?” she asked, still laughing. I groaned. “Not as big as he probably thinks he is,” I said. Her laughter made me feel better. “Just ask him to cover up more when he lies around outside his bedroom,” Angela said. “If it was just thoughtlessness or an accident, he won’t do it again. If he does do something like that again, then we should probably find you somewhere else to stay. If something happens, the military isn’t going to be on your side. It’s never on the woman’s side,” she said. “It’s better to get you out before something does happen.” Now I was worried, but I was sure it couldn’t be that big of a deal. It seemed only reasonable that we could both agree on certain boundaries. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her he knew I had locked my bedroom door. How else could he have known if he hadn’t tried to open the door? I wondered if I was freaking out so much because he was black. I didn’t want to be that kind of person. I decided to not say anything to him.

That afternoon, I sat in the kitchen grading student essays. Kareem walked in.

“You told Angela you saw me in my underwear?” he shouted. “You’re mad because I was asleep on the floor in my underwear? I wanted to watch the basketball game – it was on at midnight, and I fell asleep. I live here. It’s my house. I let you live here. Just because I’m a black man, you think it’s a big deal to see my dick? I’m tired of those stupid stereotypes about black men with dicks dragging on the ground. Who the hell do you think you are, bitch? Too bad if you don’t like how I relax in my own house. You even lock your bedroom door. Why the fuck do you think you have to lock your bedroom door? You can get out.” He grabbed one of the chairs by the table and threw it. It smashed against the counter with the sink, breaking one of the chair’s legs. He kept shouting for me to get out. I sat there, stunned and incapable of interrupting his tirade. Then he left, slamming the front door behind him.

I called Marni; I suddenly didn’t trust Angela. Why did she tell him what I’d confided in her? I didn’t know who else to turn to since I couldn’t get through to the university’s main office in Germany from a base phone, and apparently some of the phone lines had melted from the heat because they were strung across the black tar of the houses’ roofs. I explained what had happened. “Call Carlos, pack your things and come here to my apartment. Stay there until the director back in Germany can sort things out. This guy sounds crazy. You shouldn’t be anywhere near him right now.” 

Carlos helped me pack up my stuff and haul it all out to his car. He drove me to Marni’s house, helped me move my stuff there, and made me promise to call him if I needed anything. Marni handed me the phone. “I got through – it’s Dr. Hichten.”

My boss, Dr. Hichten, at the university’s main office in Heidelberg, told me to write down everything, explaining what had happened, and fax it to Kareem’s boss at the ESO on the base in Dhahran. I did, and he helped us find an alternative housing arrangement in temporary female officer quarters. I had my own bedroom and shared the house with four other women. I rarely saw them since my schedule was very different from theirs, but when I did meet them, they were friendly and very nice.

Several weeks went by. Angela apologized. She had shared what I’d told her with a woman who worked part-time for Kareem, who had then shared it with him. I should have known Angela would pass it on. She clearly loved to gossip.

I purposely avoided going into the Education Center so I would not have to run into Kareem. But then Angela called and asked me to work with a few students who needed help to pass the placement test. I spent a couple of hours there, tutoring. As I was finishing up with the last student, I heard a banging noise from outside and looked out the window. In the small alley between the Education Center and the house next to it, Kareem was stacking chairs, pushing them over, then stacking them again. The student left, and I started packing up the books and papers. Kareem walked in and stood in the doorway.

“I hope I didn’t scare you,” he said. “I was just checking the chairs to make sure they were in good shape. I don’t want you to go sending a letter to Tim that I was trying to frighten you or something. For the record, you’re not my type – I like thin women.” Then he turned around and left.

After he left, Angela, who had been sitting at her desk and heard it all, said, laughing, “But do thin women like him? He clearly has difficulty relating to women at all. That’s probably why he acts the way he does – what do you wanna’ bet he’s actually gay but refuses to admit it?” She laughed again. “Besides, you’re not fat. You’re what, 5’7” and 135?” 

The next day I got a letter from Kareem’s boss, the director of the ESO. He had sent a copy of my letter of complaint to Kareem for him to respond to it, and enclosed a copy of Kareem’s response so I could respond to that. Essentially, Kareem claimed I was “oversensitive” and “misunderstood” his “intentions,” to the point of being “paranoid,” which was probably an effect of “all the marijuana” he claimed I had been smoking. He wrote that I had been using incense and potpourri to cover up the odor in the house, but he could still detect the scent of it. My biases toward “Black Men as a White Woman” made my “paranoia” worse, and, therefore, he, the abused “Black Man,” had become the victim of my “White Woman” hysterical delusions.

When I was done ranting and swearing to Angela, the only person around to listen, I wrote my response, denying that I had been smoking marijuana on base and pointing out that I wasn’t stupid enough to smuggle it into a country that is so rigid about Sharia law and drug smuggling. The penalty is decapitation. Why would I risk that? Apparently some Americans do risk it. I’m not a gambler, I wrote.

A few days later the ESO director called me to say he had decided to chalk it all up to “personality differences.” Since we were no longer living in the same house, he considered the problem solved.

Dr. Hichten didn’t like that, but couldn’t do anything about it. She said, “Be careful. A guy like this is volatile. Keep a record of everything he says or does to you. I’m going to tell Angela to keep a record of whatever he says to her about anything regarding you. You only have a few weeks left there, and then you move on to Germany. You will love it there, I promise!” Then she said, “Call me anytime you need to talk about all this. Sexual harassment is difficult to deal with. I know. I’ve been there.” I was grateful for her support and understanding, but the word “sexual harassment” stretched a moment between us. “Thanks,” I said. I guess I hadn’t really thought of it in that way. I’d been thinking just that Kareem was a sick, creepy, lying, kind of guy. But maybe they’re just different words for the same thing.

*

Angela needed help. The Education Center phone wasn’t working, and she thought maybe it was because the phone lines, strung across the flat roof, were melting again in the heat. Somebody had to stay at her desk to deal with the string of students wandering in to register for the next term’s classes or to take a placement test. She asked me if I would go up on the roof and check the lines. I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted me to do about it if they had melted, but she was desperate to get the phone working again. The Internet was her link to the rest of the world. She was addicted to it. She needed those phone lines back up, and the military guys who maintained them wouldn’t be able to get there for several days. She was grasping at anything and anyone whom she thought could help. So I climbed the stairs to a door that opened outward onto a small, stone landing and then the roof.  I walked around, looking at the wires. I picked up a few and shook them. I couldn’t see anything wrong, but what did I know about telephone wires? I turned around and started toward the door, then stopped. A guy I only vaguely recognized as one of the staff sergeants on the base stood there. He was tall, muscular, with broad shoulders. He looked Irish – he had blue eyes and pale, freckled skin pink from the desert sun. When I first arrived at Eskan, he’d been friendly to me in the DiFac. At that moment I couldn’t remember if his name was Murphy or Gallagher – something obviously Irish like that. He was friends with Kareem. I had seen them walking across base together or talking in the DiFac.

“So I hear you’ve been having some problems with Kareem,” he said. “You don’t like black guys, is that it?”

 I just stared at him. The air felt twice as hot, almost un-breathable. “What?” I said.

He walked over to me. I stepped back a couple of paces. He kept moving forward so he was only an inch or two away from me. My eyes were level with his collarbone. I had to look up to look at his face.  

“You’ve been giving him a hard time,” he said. “I should teach you what sexual harassment really is. I’d like to see you report me. There isn’t a military guy anywhere that would take you seriously or care. If it’s my word against yours, I’m going to win.”

He grabbed my left breast with his left hand, and the hair at the back of my head with his right hand. He squeezed my breast so hard the pain made me want to vomit. I tried to scream, but choked and gagged instead as he pulled my head back farther. He stuck his knee between my legs and kicked them apart. I fell backwards, but he wrenched my head to keep it from hitting the ground. Pain seared down my head along my neck, down my back. I gasped for breath and then, finally, screamed.

He kicked my legs out from under me and then he was on top of me, his hand pressing my chest down to the ground as he kept squeezing my breast, painfully.

And then Angela was there, shouting, “What the hell are you doing? I’m going to report you, you asshole! Get off of her! I’m telling my husband! You know he’ll get you!” He shoved my head a little harder onto the tarred ground of the roof.  Then he got up. I lay there, disoriented, trying just to breath normally again.

“Mind your own business,” he said. “I’m teaching her a lesson.” Angela ran to the edge of the roof and screamed, “HELP! CALL THE MP’S!” over and over. Then he was gone. Angela knelt next to me. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Should I get the medics?”

“No,” I said. “Just help me up, please.” She gave me her hand and pulled me up. I couldn’t stand upright. I leaned on her arm as she helped me down the stairs. “He won’t be there,” she assured me. “He can’t be that stupid as to stick around.” No one was in the office. I was grateful for that. “I’m calling Marni to see if you can stay at her place till you leave Riyadh. You only have what, another week left here? If you can’t, then you can stay at my house. My husband, Frank, won’t mind, and too bad if he does. He’s a staff sergeant, himself, so he doesn’t have to worry about that asshole doing anything to him for it. He can protect you. But you’re better off not staying on base. Every guy will know what happened by the end of today. That asshole will tell them because he thinks he fixed things for Kareem. You can’t stay on base. Someone else will go after you next. Marni’s complex has its own security and is walled in. It’s all hospital workers. They’ll take your side.”

I didn’t say anything; I just nodded. She helped me sit in one of the chairs by her desk, then called Marni. I wasn’t listening. I was just breathing. Inhale, exhale, I thought. And swallowed, trying not to vomit. My stomach burned. I hurt everywhere. The back of my head felt as though I’d been bludgeoned. I was surprised, when I touched the spot where he’d grabbed my hair, that there was no blood. There was no blood anywhere. I thought there ought to be. It felt like I was bleeding from my head and my stomach, but there was no blood. Later there would be large, dark bruises all over my waist, chest, breast and legs, but right then all I knew was that my whole body burned. I guess I was in shock. I just kept thinking that if I focused on my breath, I wouldn’t throw up. And then I thought, what if he comes back? Angela helped me down the stairs. I was afraid to go into the office. I insisted on going outside and sitting on the sidewalk.

And then, Carlos was there to take me back to my room. Angela went with us and helped me pack everything. I had two large suitcases full of stuff. My life was condensed to two large suitcases, I thought, how pathetic.

I don’t remember much more about those few hours. Angela packed up my bags while I pointed to things that were mine. Then Carlos took me to Marni’s house. She left work early to be there. She brought a friend, a Saudi doctor, who was also a woman, who examined me. The doctor wanted me to go to the hospital, but I didn’t want to leave Marni’s house. She left Marni instructions about what to watch for. She was afraid I had a concussion and perhaps internal injuries, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t leaving Marni’s apartment. I took one of the pain pills she left. I showered. A long, hot shower. Then I curled up in Marni’s spare bed. I heard her talking on the phone. I assumed it was to Dr. Hichten. I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted to sleep. I took another pain pill. I heard Marni come into the room, talking to me. I don’t really remember much else until the next day when I woke up, bruised all over.

*

 I slept. I went to class. I slept. I gave final exams. I slept. I graded the exams. I slept. I turned in the exams. I slept. Angela picked up the exams and gave them back to the students. She arranged my flight back to Germany, where our main office was, and where I was to be teaching for the next year. Carlos picked me up and drove me to the Ed Center to get the tickets, before taking me to the American military’s section of the airport. While I was there, Kareem walked in.

“I hear you’re leaving today,” he said. “I want you to know I forgive you. My therapist says I need to forgive people to let go of my anger, so I forgive you.” Then he walked into his office and closed the door.

I felt as though a furnace had gone off in my stomach, sending the fire up and outward into every cell of my body. Angela grabbed my arm and pulled me out the front door to Carlos’s car. “Don’t respond,” she said. “He’s either trying to get you to do something stupid he can get you in trouble for, or he’s just a really sick person, but either way, you need to stay away from him. He’ll get his. Frank is plotting something for both of those guys. I promise.” It took me a moment to remember that Frank was her husband and high up in the ranked chain of enlisted soldiers. I got in the car, still so angry that I was sure my face was bright red and I was breathing too fast. I spent the drive to the airport breathing slowly and deeply.

*

I got on a military flight to Ramstein, Germany. Dr. Hitchen’s staff helped me find a nice apartment there and a car. She made me write up a report about what happened. We sent it off. About a month later I got a call from a military lawyer in the JAG. He asked questions like, “What did you say to lead him on?” and, “Don’t you think that was over reacting?” His last comment was, “I’ve talked to Mr. Smith and Staff Sergeant Gallagher, as well as other witnesses. They all say you are a difficult person.”

“Excuse me?” I said. 

”I have to say, our conversation here doesn’t make me think anything different. I’ll send you a copy of the final result of our investigation.” Then he hung up. I hadn’t said much more than “That’s correct,” in response to some of his questions. A month later I received his report. The military rejected the complaint for lack of evidence. I slept a lot. I drank a lot of German wine and beer. I taught. I slept. I drank.

I got a letter from Angela saying Frank couldn’t do anything to Gallagher because of his rank, but Kareem got sent back to the US. She wrote, “I told Tim Lander what happened, everything from the locked gates and so on. I think Kareem got Gallagher to attack you. They probably knew Gallagher was pretty much immune to anything our office could do because of his rank and, frankly, because he’s white. He outranks Frank. It’s possible Kareem just wanted him to scare you. I don’t know. Tim came to Riyadh, finally, to talk to Kareem and see for himself what is going on with the guy. Several students complained about things Kareem said to them, and apparently he got caught having an affair with the wife of one of the soldiers. She worked part-time here in the Ed Center, briefly.  The military considers adultery a crime, so they are both in a lot of trouble. Tim was pretty angry after I told him what happened, especially when Kareem started ranting to Tim about how this was all because he was black. I was in the other office and overheard Tim shouting at Kareem: “I’m black too, yet I don’t have these problems! What the hell were you thinking?’ He was talking about the affair, but I think he meant it about everything. He left and Kareem’s orders came through a few days later saying he was being sent back to the US.” It didn’t make me feel better. I thought it would, but it didn’t.

I’m sitting at a table in the outside section of a café in the small, German town of Kaiserslautern, slowly drinking a glass of a local pilsner, watching the crowds of people walk along the marktplatz. It’s spring, warm, and people are out enjoying the sun. Sometimes I like to sit out here among all these strangers, people who don’t even notice my presence. The crowds wrap around me like a protective veil, hiding all my emotional bruises in the black folds of anonymity.  Other times, I’m afraid of loud noises and the words of other people, which seem to grab my hair and pull my head down, down, down. I hide in my apartment. I write things down then stare at words that have no power anymore to elicit help.    

           

Bringing Back Water

by

Thank you, poet and dear friend Jack Crimmins, for going out to bring me water that winter night I was doing a reading at the Quicksilver Gallery (where they only served wine). It was dark and raining and yet the only water to drink might have traveled the seas all the way from the Sitka Glacier to China and then back. 

That night you went down the street
to bring back water – sweet
smell of rain
on your shirt, the good water
from who-knows-where
in its killer-plastic bottle.  Wind
through the open door — leaving
returning.  Now stars,
too early for the old moon. 
There is a wilderness of pure joy
beneath all sorrow.
It’s where things begin.

 

Originally published by On the Commons (2013)