“Things as it is”

So today is the official ebook birthday of my book, but one of the reasons I chose today for the launch was because it’s the birthday of my late Zen teacher, Katherine Thanas. She was one of those once-in-a-lifetime people who arrive in your life like a gift, a real teacher, and she transmitted the flavor of the Soto Zen tradition she received from her teachers with directness and compassion. I found her zendo in Monterey at a fairly difficult time in my life, and it changed me.

She has a book out now, too, posthumously, called The Truth of this Life. The title makes me uncomfortable, if I’m honest, because it sounds pretentious. And Katherine was never pretentious; her subtlety and insight deepened her students’ understanding of zen, buddhism, and life far beyond sweeping summations of “truth.” She offered her own experience, her own uncertainty and questioning that made it impossible for us to settle on too glib an answer, too facile an understanding. She modeled “don’t know” mind in a way that felt absolutely true to the spirit of the teachings.

She often used Suzuki Roshi’s phrase, “Things as it is,” which captures the flavor of that. Slightly off, poking at you grammatically, but there’s a message there, asking you to examine your assumptions about what you think you know, vs. experiencing reality.

The nature of things as it is, is that we don’t really know what that nature is. Or our own. We have to stop thinking and experience it. Or try.

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Katherine. We miss you. I am so grateful to have your book, but even more grateful that I was able to experience your dharma talks and let them percolate into my life.

International Women’s Day and Jane Addams

Yes, I’m a day late, but that’s because I’ve been thinking about this for several days and wanted to get it right.

Jane Addams is one of those amazing women who were famous and revered in their day, and then somehow disappeared from sight, in spite of winning the Nobel Peace Prize, her contributions and influence swept away by changing fashion, and dare I say it, because her social ideals are labeled too “feminine.” Ideals like feeding starving children, providing healthcare and education for immigrants, and keeping us out of World War I (for which there was a great deal of support across the country). Oh yes, and for supporting something as outrageous as the 8 hour working day.

You know, all those girly things.

She was a great hero of mine when I was a child, one of the few women included in my K-12 curriculum. A little hint of 1890s radicalism remained in our curriculum, thanks probably to the influence of Dewey and the Lab School in Chicago, since I grew up near Chicago. When I hear the nonsense spouted about immigration in our country right now, I think of her wise and thoughtful approach to considering the value immigrants bring to their new country, as well as what we owe to them. The same arguments and rhetoric we are hearing now have been used over the last several hundred years with astonishing regularity, from the time California passed a law to expel the Chinese, to deploring the “dirty and degenerate” Irish or Italians or Poles or Greeks in Chicago in the nineteenth-century.

Jane Addams addressed this head on at Hull House, set up to provide assistance to the wretchedly poor and exploited labor pool fueling the wealth of the stockyards, the railroads, and the other companies run by the titans of industry in Chicago.

I read her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull House in college and was surprised at her cultural approach to the immigrant communities. The arguments she was making were anthropological arguments for the differences in how the different communities adapted. And her insights about the embarrassment the children of immigrants felt for their parents’ old country ways were very shrewd. Hull House’s Labor Museum of crafts and industries from the ‘old country” helped the younger generation appreciate the skills and knowledge of their parents:

“There has been some testimony that the Labor Museum has revealed the charm of woman’s primitive activities. I recall a certain Italian girl who came every Saturday evening to a cooking class in the same building in which her mother spun in the Labor Museum exhibit; and yet Angelina always left her mother at the front door while she herself went around to a side door because she did not wish to be too closely identified in the eyes of the rest of the cooking class with an Italian woman who wore a kerchief over her head, uncouth boots, and short petticoats. One evening, however, Angelina saw her mother surrounded by a group of visitors from the School of Education who much admired the spinning, and she concluded from their conversation that her mother was “the best stick-spindle spinner in America.” When she inquired from me as to the truth of this deduction, I took occasion to describe the Italian village in which her mother had lived, something of her free life, and how, because of the opportunity she and the other women of the village had to drop their spindles over the edge of a precipice, they had developed a skill in spinning beyond that of the neighboring towns. I dilated somewhat on the freedom and beauty of that life—how hard it must be to exchange it all for a two-room tenement, and to give up a beautiful homespun kerchief for an ugly department store hat. I intimated it was most unfair to judge her by these things alone, and that while she must depend on her daughter to learn the new ways, she also had a right to expect her daughter to know something of the old ways.

That which I could not convey to the child, but upon which my own mind persistently dwelt, was that her mother’s whole life had been spent in a secluded spot under the rule of traditional and narrowly localized observances, until her very religion clung to local sanctities—to the shrine before which she had always prayed, to the pavement and walls of the low vaulted church—and then suddenly she was torn from it all and literally put out to sea, straight away from the solid habits of her religious and domestic life, and she now walked timidly but with poignant sensibility upon a new and strange shore.

It was easy to see that the thought of her mother with any other background than that of the tenement was new to Angelina, and at least two things resulted; she allowed her mother to pull out of the big box under the bed the beautiful homespun garments which had been previously hidden away as uncouth; and she openly came into the Labor Museum by the same door as did her mother, proud at least of the mastery of the craft which had been so much admired.”

Twenty Years at Hull House by Jane Addams

What has this to do with International Women’s Day? Addams was especially active in the International women’s movement, becoming one of the founders of the organization later known as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. If you read the historical accounts of the conference they held after Hitler came to power in Germany, it’s chilling to realize that every one of their assertions about the danger of Germany re-arming (with American arms and resources) proved true. If the boycott they urged had happened, if Americans had forgone the profit they were making from Germany, who knows how history might have been different. It’s a complex subject and you can read more about it here.

Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem

A reference to this poem appeared in my twitter feed and I had to go reread it. I used to have this posted on my office door, in a clipping from the Christian Science Monitor, back when I was an academic librarian. I kept the yellowed clipping for years because the poem was a story about the power of writing and description, of naming the unspeakable, giving the reader power over it. Her words are matter of fact but powerful, and I was also fascinated by the painting of Akhmatova (above) that illustrated the article. by Nathan Altman.)

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’.
On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there) – ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered – ‘I can.’ It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously
been just a face.
[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

From the poemhunter site

Why historical fiction?

Here’s Hilary Mantel’s take, from her series on BBC Radio Four:

As soon as we die, we enter into fiction. Just ask two different family members to tell you about someone recently gone, and you will see what I mean. Once we can no longer speak for ourselves, we are interpreted. When we remember – as psychologists so often tell us – we don’t reproduce the past, we create it. Surely, you may say – some truths are non-negotiable, the facts of history guide us. And the records do indeed throw up some facts and figures that admit no dispute. But the historian Patrick Collinson wrote: “It is possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence. Because, of course, 99% of the evidence, above all, unrecorded speech, is not available to us.”

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

From “Why I became a historical novelist” in the Guardian.

The lecture is wonderful and especially needed in these times of alternative truths.

Today is Gwendolyn Brooks’ Birthday

That seems like cause for celebration.

One of my favorite poems of hers is Kitchenette Building.

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.

You can hear her read it here at the Poetry Foundation site.

I remember being introduced to her work in grade school in Illinois. That was the first time I realized women could be writers. You’d think it would’ve been Emily Dickinson, but Illinois was proud of its Poet Laureate and made sure she was taught in our classes. Ms. Brooks was alive and part of my world, not part of a distanced past. She was writing about things I’d seen and experienced myself, not Victorian philosophizing.

She and Jane Addams made growing up in Illinois a lucky thing – I was exposed to two extraordinary thinkers and writers at an early age, because they were part of local history. (And, not to pile on here, but did you know Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace prize?)

Bay Area Book Festival

I went to the second annual Bay Area Book Festival last weekend, had a great time and acquired the nifty bookbag above from PapaLlama. A truly interesting mix of topics and speakers – if you read at all you would have found something to your taste. I most enjoyed hearing Susan Griffin and Starhawk speak on this present moment in our culture. I also just liked seeing the entire community of book folks turn out, along with clowns, music, bouncy houses, carousels, food trucks. Pretty much a downtown Berkeley street fair. Also, nifty bookbag.

If you didn’t hear about it and you’re local (I think publicity is the one thing they don’t do well) you might want to get on their mailing list to be sure to catch it next year. Food for the soul.