Author: asitoughttobemagazine

William Eastlake: The Lyric of The Circle Heart Trilogy

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   William Eastlake was a highly regarded American novelist in the 1950s and 1960s, but his reputation began to sink like a stone in the late 1970s and by the time of his death in 1997 he was a forgotten figure. I would argue that this obscurity was largely undeserved, yet understandable. After all, the author himself is on record as saying, ” When you’re dead, you’re dead. I don’t care what people will think of my work when I’m dead.’ But it is undeserved because Eastlake began writing about the American Southwest long before Cormac McCarthy or even Tom Robbins. His Southwest was one “whose comic and tragic dimensions, as well as its hard beauty, encapsulates American myths and nightmares much in the way that Faulkner did with his Yoknapatawpha County.”

 Biography

  Eastlake was born in Brooklyn in 1917 to English parents. His family soon relocated to Caldwell, New Jersey. A few years later his mother would be permanantly confined to a mental institution and William and his younger brother would be sent to  a boarding school, where they would remain until graduation.

   After high school, Eastlake took to the road and worked his way across the country. He ended up in Los Angeles in the early 1940s and worked as clerk in Stanley Rose’s bookshop. This shop was a hangout for West coast writers such as John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Clifford Odets, and Theodore Dreiser. Eastlake ‘s time there was important for two reason’s. First, it was while working at the shop that he first committed himslf to writing. Secondly, he met Martha Simpson, a painter, who he would marry in 1943.

  In 1942 Eastlake joined the army. After basic training he was assigned to Fort Ord to “look after” Japanese-American draftees. This proximity to Japanese -American troopes would lead him to express his frustration and contempt for the suspicion and racism that Japanese -Americans faced during World War II.

  As American involvement in the war increased, Eastlake would later be transferred to a replacement company. He would see action in D-Day, and having survived, would fight in France and Belgium.  He received a Bronze Star for his actions during the Battle of the Bulge, where he was seriously wounded.

   After the war, Eastlake and his wife travelled around Europe for several years. In 1950, the Eastlakes returned to Los Angeles. In order to support his writing and her painting, he borrowed money and became involved in real estate speculation.  During this time, Eastlake often visited his brother- in -law at his summer home in the Jemez mountains. This inspired Eastlake to buy his own four hundred acre ranch in the Jemez Mountains near Cuba, New Mexico.

   Eastlake’s ranch was located between a Navajo Reservation and an Apache Reservation and he became especially friendly with the Navajos. He often hired them as ranch hands. More importantly, he would learn much about Navajo customs and beliefs from his friends and neighbors that would mark his fiction.

   It was during his time in New Mexico that Eastlake began to appear in print. His first stories were published in 1954 and in 1956, his first novel Go In Beauty was published. In 1958,  he brought out The Bronc People. In 1963,  Portrait of the Artist With Twenty-six Horses saw daylight and in 1965,  Castle Keep.   Eastlake subsequently published four more works of fiction before his death in 1997.

  Lyric of the Circle Heart

  Eastlake’s first thre novels form a trilogy which he would later  title  Lyric of the Circle Heart.  I will try to smmarize their contents.

   Go in Beauty (1956) is the story of two brothers, George and Alexander Bowman, who fall into spiritual, and in Alexander’s case, literal death. The book is set in the New Mexico part of the Four Corners region , which Eastlake fictionalizes as the Checkerboard, and the story revolves around the troubled relationship of the brothers. Alexander runs off with his younger brother George’s wife. The wife, Perrette, is a fancy easterner who has never warmed up to life in the sticks and George really doesn’t protest too much. Paracelsus, the oracle-like medicine man, has predicted that something out of the ordinary will be stolen from Indian country and with this theft will come drought that will plague the land. And so it does. The prophecy becomes the reality around which the story revolves.

 Alexander and Perrette flee to Europe where they lead a life that is almost a parody of the Lost Generation. Alexander does succeed as a writer, penning stories set in the Checkerboard region. As he wears out his material he wears out his life, because his guilt will not allow him to return home to recharge as a man and artist. He evetually becomes more and more dissolute until he commits passive suicide by allowing himself to murdered in a Mexican back alley, which is the closest he can come to home.

   Alexander’s inaction  has upset the balance of nature at home, which results in drought. Perhaps he is not guilty of theft, but he is guilty of allowing himself to be stolen, and the results are the same. The plot is more complicated than this , for it involves a sin of omission on George’s part, one which he allows to consume him, rendering him as unable to act as his older brother. Alexander hides in writing and George hides with the Indians.  Writing and helping the Navajos are ways of avoiding the self. Even so, Eastlake ends the novel on an affirmative note. What was stolen from Indian Country- Alexander- is returned for burial and the rain has returned. From nature’s perspective, balance has been restored.  The people of the Checkerboard, can “go in beauty.”

   The second novel of the trilogy,  The Bronc People (1958), is a rite-of-passage story that focuses on the quest for selfhood of another pair of brothers: Little Sant Bowman, son of Big Sant and Millicent, and Alastair Benjamin, the African-American boy the Bowman’s take in after his flight from an Albaquerque orphanage. alastair had been placed in the orphanage by Indians who had witnessed his escape from the burning house in which his father died. His father, called the Gran Negrito, had been the proprietor of the Circle R Ranch and the owner of a watering hole much needed by George “Big Sant” Bowman of the Circle Heart Ranch for his thirsty cattle. The novel opens with the argument between the two, escalating into a gun battle that sets off the fire at the Circle R. Two Indians serve as commentators on the fight, which neither man wanted,  but  leaves the Gran Negrito dead  nonetheless.

   As the novel unfolds, Alastair discovers the details of his father’s death. He must come to terms with his anger at his adoptive father and Big Sant must deal with the guilt he has carried around for years. Meanwhile, Little Sant searches for an identity as a bronc rider, and his mother, Millicent, sifts through several religions trying to find her place in the world. The book is also peopled with a broad cast of characters, including a priest who has gone native; Afraid of his Own Horses and The Other Indian, friends of Little Sant and Alastair;  My Prayer, the old Indian shaman; and most notably, his white counterpart, Blue-Eyed Billy Peersall, an old Indian fighter who now realizes that the frontier people and Native-Americans should have joined forces to combat the “civilized” easterners instead of each other.

  The final novel of the trilogy, Portrait of the Artist With Twenty-Six Horses, appeared in 1963. Eastlake again depicts the coming of age of two young men set against the backdrop of Indian country. The action takes place in a single day as Ring Bowman and Twenty-Six Horses undergo rites-of- passage. Furthermore, like the central characters of  The Bronc People, one of the protagonists must come to terms with a father figure while the other seeks fulfillment with his own calling in life.

   Portrait is episodically structured around Ring Bowman’s recollections during the eight hours he is trappped in arroyo quicksand.  His life does not flash before his eyes, but meanders, as does the story, through his consciousness as he struggles with questions of identity. He wants to know why this is happening to him. In coming to terms with himself he learns the lesson of coming to terms with nature as well. At the same time, Ring’s father and Twenty-Six Horses, his artist friend,  search the desert for him and in so doing confront their own questions of identity.

  In telling this story, the author employs a technique in which the narrator weaves disparate strands of story which in the end become “of a piece.” In this way, the loom that Twenty-Six Horses uses to create his Navajo rugs is an apt motif in the book. Structurally, Portrait consists of Ring’s present tense commentary (set off in italics) interwoven with a number of apparently unrelated stories from the past. Although these chapters and parts of chapters  appear extraneous to the thrust of the novel, they all involve the common theme of death or near-death in some fashion: the death of Tomas Tomas, the death of Tom Tolbek, the near deaths of a poet, a Nazi, and the passengers of  Clearboy’s white Lincoln- not to mention the near death of Ring himself as he fights to stay afloat in the arroyo for eight hours- all point to an existence that is hanging by a thread. This understanding of humanity’s tentative existence is an essential element in Ring’s coming-of -age.

    Go In Beauty,  The Bronc People, and Portrait of the Artist with Twenty-six Horses all went out of print in the 1980s. To rectify this situation, the author revised these works and sought to publish them in a single volume under the title The Lyric of the Circle Heart: The Bowman Family Trilogy. The volume would be published by The Dalkey Archive Press in 1996. Once again a great piece of fiction would be available to new generation.

THE SPIRIT OF SARTRE

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The Spirit of Sartre

by Peter Gabel

Taken as a whole, the work of Jean Paul Sartre is that of a sensitive man with a good heart gradually coming to understand the distinctly social aspect of human reality—that while we appear to ourselves as alone and struggling to make sense of things from within our own isolation, we are actually always powerfully connected in our very being to each other and, through the networks of reciprocity that enable our material and spiritual survival, to everyone on the planet.

Sartre’s early work for which he is best remembered in mainstream liberal culture–the period in his thirties and forties which produced the novel Nausea, the philosophical work Being and Nothingness, and the plays The Flies and No Exit among many, many other writings—were all addressed to “the man alone” struggling to find authentic meaning in a world without God and in a world pervaded by false images and false conceptions of what matters in life.  To a young person like me gradually emerging into the radical awareness of the 1960’s, this work was thrilling.  I was brought up within the image-world of upper middle-class New York culture, taught by word and gesture to accept that artificial world of the bourgeoisie as if it conformed to some real “essence,” as if the right thing to do in life was to do well in school, dress nicely, acquire my share of wealth by entrepreneurship or inheritance, get married, fit well and admirably into this or that pre-given role, and have a solid obituary. But to use the famous phrase drawn from one of his lectures, Sartre showed that “existence precedes essence”—that all of these pre-constructed forms or identity, worth, and value were actually made up, that it was “bad faith” to allow our longing for superficial security to rationalize draping them over ourselves as if they would safely install us in some kind of “reality,” that we are free to accept or reject every form of received wisdom and, even more that we are personally responsible to make these choices and by these choices to give our own stamp to reality and take our own stand for all of humankind about the kind of world we ought to be creating.

As important as these insights were—as empowering as they were to me as a young man trying to find the strength to choose to align myself with the idealistic aspirations of the movements of the 60’s and take the risk of rejecting the class destiny to which I was bound by the erotic ties of family loyalty and devotion—Sartre himself came to realize that they were skewed and limited by the liberal individualism of his own upbringing; these early insights illuminated the world from within the pathos and solitude and psycho-spiritual struggles and relative material privilege of the floating or unanchored bourgeois intellectual. Thus his early philosophical understanding of “relations with Others” as elaborated in Being and Nothingness and in his early plays reflected the Fear of the Other that he came to see later as the unconscious foundation of “individualism” itself. To the early Sartre, the Other is mainly a threat whose gaze “steals my freedom” by pinning me in an image-for-the-Other that is colored with pride or shame and from which I must recover myself as a free being through a kind of ontological struggle, a struggle captured in the famous concluding line from No Exit: “Hell is Other People.”  In many ways, as radical as Sartre’s early ideas were in rejecting the conformity of inauthentic social life and its mores, roles, and hierarchies, they remained quite consistent with the aspect of liberal Western society that defined “man” as a free being inherently separate from and in conflict with the freedom of the Other—no doubt one reason that his “existentialism” is today taught in every liberal university while his later conversion to Marxism and social commitment and his brilliant reconciliation of the insights of existentialism with those of Marxism are almost nowhere to be studied and learned.

That later integration began to take place when Sartre served in the French army in World War II and through his conscription began to grasp that he was involuntarily bound to others by social forces much larger than the mainly two-person interactions that he was in those very years exploring in his philosophy, and his deepening awareness of the inherently social nature of each individual’s existence was accelerated by the encounter that every serious intellectual had with Marxism and its “really existing” embodiment in the Soviet Union following World War II.  But in spite of the sympathy that Sartre had for the Soviet Union’s egalitarian ideal in the face of McCarthyism and the increasingly reactionary cast of western capitalism in the early 1950’s, he knew that the Soviet Union was grossly distorted manifestation of Marxist ideals and that its distortions were in no small part the result of the limitations of the state of Marxist theory itself—indeed, of its very failure to give sufficient ontological priority to the subjective, qualitative experience of actual human relations that was the central concern of his own work.  Thus he felt it fell to him as a kind of moral responsibility to throw himself into showing how Marxism had become false to its own human aspirations by the hyper-objectivity of its own pseudo-scientific theory, how its transformation from a culturally complex and human historical materialism into a mechanistic and externalized “dialectical materialism” had led it to rationalize a new form of class society and social oppression as if it were a near-messianic embodiment of social progress.

Published in 1960, Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason was an effort to show that while Marxism was correct in giving primacy to materialism—to the need for food, clothing, and shelter as being the key shaping force that had thus far connected all humans to each other and mediated their relationships to one another in a milieu of material scarcity and the struggle for survival—it had to incorporate into itself the relatively independent longing for human freedom and the transcendence of the inter-subjective and distinctively social facts of oppression, exploitation, and alienation of self from other to accurately understand and portray the truth of social life and offer a path to improving it.  In this later philosophical work and in his later plays like The Devil and the Good Lord and The Condemned of Altona as well as several volumes of essays and a three-volume biographical study of Flaubert, Sartre replaced his earlier emphasis on the “man alone” struggling for freedom and authenticity with the social individual bound to all living others through the necessities of economic production and also to prior generations through the medium of the world of “worked matter” that we have inherited from them and which directs and limits our possible forward motion.  In place of the floating and unanchored individual seeking to recover his or her authentic being from the inauthenticity of a fallen society living in bad faith and in flight from itself through a kind of ubiquitous personal and moral inadequacy, Sartre makes a powerful and original argument for a collective, intersubjective, distinctively social recovery of our authentic human capacities through the “praxis” of collective action to transcend class society and the alienating reciprocal conditioning through which we have enslaved ourselves and each other to dehumanizing socio-economic forces over which no one has control.

John Gerassi’s new book Talking with Sartre is a transcription of a fascinating series of interviews conducted with Sartre by Gerassi over the period from 1970-74, just as Sartre himself was coming to question whether his own later theory of existential Marxism was adequate to either offer a new path to human liberation for the Left or account for the extraordinary dynamics that had been sweeping the world in the form of “the 60’s” during the previous decade.  Gerassi, the son of longtime family friends of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and already an established independent left intellectual in his late 40’s at the time of these interviews, serves as a comradely inquisitor of Sartre. The great philosopher was approaching his 70th birthday and could not but see the shortcomings of the social movements of the 60’s beginning to manifest themselves in historically decisive ways. The interviews are in a certain sense a first-person evaluation of the state of the Left world-wide, as they reflect Sartre’s thoughts on his own visits to the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Castro’s Cuba, as well as his own participation in the radical groups in France—in particular the gauche proleterienne whose newspaper, La Cause du Peuple, Sartre had become the editor of.

To readers of Tikkun who today are working toward the creation of a spiritual-political progressive movement, the most important sections of the book deal with Sartre’s evaluation of his own ideas about how we are to overcome the social alienation that at the time of these interviews and still today seems to separate us from each other and disable us from banding together to create a more loving, egalitarian, solidaristic world. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre had developed two important ideas that remain relevant to us to day as we try to build a new movement and understand the psycho-social dynamics that inhibit our efforts.   One is the idea of “seriality”—the idea that when we are thrown by socio-economic forces into relationships based on competition for survival and are conditioned by the weight of historical traditions and social ideologies to accept our situation as necessary and even desirable, we each become stuck in a kind of social quicksand in which other people seem to be constantly receding away from us like threads in an inside-out shirt and in which we ourselves each become “one of the others” to each receding other, collectively casting one another into a mutually distancing, one-and-one separation that we can’t seem to get out of. Whether we are languishing in the passive rituals of family life, or passing each others with blank gazes on the street, or carrying out the repetitive routines of work in offices or on assembly lines, when we are trapped in the one-and-one “series”, we exist as passive occupiers of social slots without a common active or creative purpose that unites us in any sort of original collective project:  We cannot seem to translate our longing for vitalizing social connection into any form of meaningful action that would allow us to recover our spontaneity and freedom. A key question for Sartre in the Critique had been what form of collective action was possible through which we could manage to lift ourselves out of this self-reproducing separation that actually was the central dynamic reproducing capitalism itself, an anti-human system that we all feel trapped in as if it were coming from “outside” us, like a non-human force over which we have no control.

Sartre’s answer to this question in the Critique had been that under certain favorable conditions combining the right material circumstances with the right spark of cultural (or countercultural) inspiration and also the irreducible power of human freedom exerting itself against its own self-reproducing constraints, human beings could break through reciprocal imprisonment of “the series” to form what he called “the fused group”—a movement toward mutual freedom and solidarity would overwhelm the external conditioning that renders us passive, atomized, anonymous (in the sense of lacking in authentic presence and lost in robotic roles and routines), and interchangeable. Drawing on the inspiration of revolutionary historical moments such as the seizures of the Bastille and the Winter Palace, the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors, and the spontaneous sit-down strikes through which workers during the labor movement suddenly reclaimed their own sense of collective power and agency from the factory machines and their owner-operators that had turned them into passive objects, Sartre’s description of the emergence of the group coming into fusion provides a social- ontological and intersubjective foundation for the possibility of transformative social change that goes beyond the external categories of much of social theory—for example the external category of “class struggle” within the history of Marxist theory itself which could not account for how the revolutionary class would recover its agency as a living social process.  And Sartre’s new concept prefigured exactly what would take place five to ten years later during the upsurge of the 60’s, when human beings (like myself) who had been trapped in the passivity and distance of our socially separated and artificial lives, would emerge into authentic groups in which our essential Presence to each other could suddenly become visible, and through which we could generate an extraordinary, social energy that could “move” into a movement, ricocheting invisibly but decisively from Berkeley, to Mexico City, to Prague, to the general strike of Paris ’68.

The social paralysis of being trapped in and of being an unwitting agent of “the series”, and the always potential transformation of the series into the group-in-fusion through which we can overcome our alienation and recover our reciprocal presence to one another as Here and as One (or as “the common individual” in Sartre’s terms)—these are very important ideas that Sartre has contributed to establishing the link between the transformation of spirit and the egalitarian and ecological transformation of the material world.  But as Gerassi brings out in his interviews, there was something essential that was lacking in these later formulations that was becoming apparent in the world itself in the early 70’s—in the very decay and gradual dissolution of the movements of the 60’s that was beginning to take place at the time of the interviews and that is palpable in them.  In one key exchange, Sartre has been describing as a kind of illustrative mini-example of the group-in-fusion a bus ride in which a group of bus passengers who had previously been merely a disconnected series, a line of people waiting for the bus at the bus stop, had transformed themselves into a fused group by persuading the driver to go off his normal route and to drop each of them at their destinations, which in turn leads to the able-bodied passengers taking pleasure in assisting an old woman in a wheelchair to get off the bus and get into her home, and to an overall atmosphere of joy and free conversation erupting into the dead space where there had previously been merely a collection of anonymous strangers. Gerassi responds by saying, in effect, that’s that’s all well and good, but those passengers will inevitably go home and the next day they’ll be back in line, the weight of historical forces will again overwhelm and condition them, and their hot moment will go cold—just as the sans-culottes of the French revolution returned their power to the elites and lost their transformative energy, just as Paris Commune had failed to sustain itself, and just as the youth of the 60’s were seeing their groups dissolve into internal squabbles or get coopted by the political parties or become overwhelmed, as we would say in Tikkun, by the legacy of generations of Fear of the Other that is more powerful than the momentary unity made possible by the moment of fusion.  “To avoid defeat the group-in-fusion must remain in fusion, “says Gerassi: “But how?…If the group-in-fusion is always bound to fail, no matter how much of a residue it leaves around the edges for historians to contemplate, why risk starting it again?”

It is difficult to read these words and not feel that this is exactly the world-wide dilemma of the present moment, that because of the failures of prior social movements and the defeats or distortions of the fused groups that these movements were formed by and inspired, we are unable to risk starting it again and to surrender to the radical hope that this requires of us without a new step in theory to guide and express some new form of social practice.  Sartre’s own answer to Gerassi is that the process is not circular or hopelessly repetitive, that each such transformative experience is internalized as a historical memory that is passed on, however silently in the culture and moves the ball forward and furthers the liberatory development of humanity.  But even if there is some hope and validity to be found in that response, it seems clear to me that the Sartre of the early 1970’s could not yet have grasped that his own thinking was inherently limited by the secular nature of his own conditioning, by his failure to realize that the breakthrough permitted by the fused group can only truly be sustained if it is accompanied by a distinctly spiritual elevation of the heart that requires other another and deeper form of communal self-recovery than is conveyed by the idea of the revolution, the rebellion,  the instantaneous and sudden rupture of the artifice of the status quo.  What is needed is a theory and practice of human connection that has sufficient spiritual depth to gradually heal the Fear of the Other that has been installed in our hearts by the shocks of our generational and personal conditioning and to elevate the fused group into a beloved community. Sartre helped us by showing that we are always connected even when imagine we are most separated and that by turning toward each other in meaningful, life-giving social action we can become the source of each other’s completion.  When will we have gone far enough beyond his formulations to actually take the next decisive steps toward this redemptive end to “risk starting it again”?

–Peter Gabel

Peter Gabel is former President and Professor of Law at New College of California and is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine. He is also Co-Director with Nanette Schorr of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics.

This piece was first published in the September/October issue of Tikkun magazine. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.

Andreas Economakis

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Broken Glass (photo by Andreas Economakis)

DEATH UPSIDE DOWN

by Andreas Economakis

I’m sitting at my desk in my room upstairs.  The light from my desk lamp casts trembling shadows against the pale cream walls, just like in a monk’s cell.  In front of me, a calendar counts the days until my departure.  I cross out and count the remaining days each morning.  I am alone in the quiet house, alone except for the dogs.

Idefix is lying on my bed, shuttering in a dream, emitting an occasional whimper.  I wonder if he too is counting the days.  He will be dead in less than a month.  The bad smell that has been coming from his mouth for weeks should be a sign to me.  I take it for simple bad breath.  Occasionally, I put toothpaste on my finger and coat his palate to cover up the smell.

The room is very still, the kind of still that is thick, padded, drugged.  Like antihistamine, like trying to breathe through a damp wool blanket that’s been draped over your face.  The woods outside are quiet.

Suddenly, a loud skidding noise fills the room, my ears, my skull.  Like a knife cut.  It’s the kind of skidding you know will result in a metallic crunching sound, a heart-skipping, life-shattering crunching sound.  I brace for it.  It comes, deafening, piercing.  I am startled out of my seat.  Idefix awakes abruptly and looks at me with that strange ruffled look he has when waking suddenly from a dream, one ear pressed warm against his head.

I jump up and run down the stairs in two bounds, out the front door, down the dark driveway, to the empty street.  I look to the left.  Smoke and glass and red light and liquid are everywhere.  It is surreal, a silent dream in daytime.  Only thing is it’s night.  I run to the wreck.  A car is lying upside down on another car.  How did it get there?  The smell of gasoline fills my nostrils.  I am the only one here.  No.  A man runs screaming down the street, fading into the darkness.  He runs in slow motion.  Everything is in slow motion.

I creep up to the cars.  The top car is billowing smoke.  Is it going to blow up?  I go to the car’s broken window.  A woman is trapped in the driver’s seat, suspended upside down by her seat belt.  She is crying.  Upside down.  Dark tears trickle down her forehead.  Her eyes are open.  She keeps looking at me.  Her eyes don’t blink.  We look at each other for what seems like an eternity.  Do we recognize each other?

“Go call 911!” says a voice behind me.  “GO!”  It’s my neighbor.  I turn and run back to the house.  By the time I get back to the wreck, the police have cordoned off the intersection.  I look at the neighbor.  “She didn’t make it,” he says.  I walk back to my house and lay on my bed, hugging Idefix.  I wonder… is he still counting the days?

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

The Coming Crisis of Global Food: Hunger, Crisis and the Canary in the Coalmine

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By Liam Hysjulien


In his seminal 1890 novel, Hunger, Knut Hamsun wrote, “I suffered no pain, my hunger had taken the edge off; instead I felt pleasantly empty, untouched by everything around me and happy to be unseen by all.”  In writing about issues of food, food prices, and hunger, I have become painfully aware that both hunger and the hungry remain largely on the edge of our social consciousness—a problem that seems at times to be untouched and unseen by all.  Occasionally we hear about the continuing increase in food stamps participants.  Or food banks like Second Harvest overwhelmed by longer and longer lines of America’s new poor.  Arizona, a state that pre-recession ranked second in national job growth, has now seen demand on food banks double in the last 18 months.  Throughout this entire recession, I have continued to return to the writings of Piven and Cloward and their utter condemnation for the hatred and blame that American society inflicts upon the poor.  You would think that a recession of this magnitude would have challenged this ideological narrative that the poor, largely facilitated by failed HUD policies during the late 90s, somehow created the mess that we’re in today.  Forget about 60 to 1 leverages, the Ponzi-like bundling of mortgage backed securities, or the one trillion dollar recapitalization of “too big to fail now too rich to lend” banks under TARP.  No, the fault of this complex economic crisis, as proposed by conservative and libertarian pundits, rests mostly at the feet of the poor, and the malice unleashed by these pundits toward them—I’ll also include immigrants in this category—remains quietly unchallenged and accepted.

Global hunger seems to be following a similar trajectory, and I fear new kinds of economic investments in food, coupled with an utter contempt for the hungry, will lead to an even more nightmarish future for food.   While I am largely a true believer, no matter how naive it might seem at times, in a sustainable food revolution, I have not fully bought into how this Schumpeterian process of creative destruction will be brought about.  Of all the future sustainable food projects, the one proposed by professor of microbiology and public health Dickson Despommier seems to be both the most promising and garnering the most national recognition.

Recently heard on the Dianne Rehm show, Despommier likens his vision to the stacking of greenhouses, one on top of the other, into vertical farms for densely populated urban locales.   In Despommier’s vision, “High-rise food-producing building will succeed only if they function by mimicking ecological process, namely by safely and efficiently re-cycling everything organic, and re-cycling water from human waste disposal plants, turning it back into drinking water” (Despommier 2010). The success of Despommier’s idea centers on the construction, to use cybernetic language, of an agro-closed system loop in which water would be purified and filtered throughout an entire vertical structure.  Abandoned skyscrapers could be retrofitted into these multi-level farms with food grown by using sustainable greenhouse and hydroponic techniques.  Despommier’s idea is brilliant, visionary, and absolutely necessary for our future.

Urbanization—the shift from the rural to the city— is not a fad of the 20th and 21st century but a permanent reality.  As Despommier cites, by 2050, nearly 80% of the world will be living in urban areas, and the necessity for cheaper, locally grown food will help to reduce Co2 admissions and control chaotic fluctuations in food prices.   However like any grand scheme, funding—how we go about creatively destroying a project into fruition—becomes the essential question.  Despommier is obviously aware of this reality and concludes that, “strong, government-supported economic incentives to the private sector, as well as to universities and local government to develop the concept” will be required to fund this project (Despommier 2010).

As unemployment continues to remain painfully high, especially in the construction field, the creation of vertical farm pilot projects could work to offset some of these numbers.  In cities ranging from Detroit to Miami, the different variables of each place (weather, population density, and temperature) could lead to the development of a myriad of vertical farm prototypes, and in the process link together start-up companies, universities, public research grants and private investors.  The technology developed out of these projects could be streamlined into cities as unique as Cairo, Mexico City, and Shanghai—America would be laying the foundation for the future of global food development. As a side note, I should add that I see this as one of many strategies for creating a new global food system paradigm. I would also include returning to local and traditional forms of agricultural practice, reducing meat consumption in highly-developed countries (HDCs), and reprioritizing, in the words of Graham Riches, the idea that access to healthy and safe food is a basic human right.

As November rolls closer, I am less than optimistic about this prospect. And while 2010 may be the beginning of the age of austerity — I thought that’s what the last thirty years were — 2050 will more than likely be seen as a demarcation line for global food production.  With the recent recessions pushing global hunger back to the 1 billion person mark, the UN has concluded that food production, in order to keep up with 3 billion additional people, will need to double in production capacity by 2050. The blueprint now being developed, largely by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), seems to be more line with Monsanto than Vertical Farms.  Let us take, for example, Dr. Jacques Diouf, FAO Director-General, who says that while, “[organic agriculture] produces wholesome, nutritious food and represents a growing source of income for developed and developing countries. But you cannot feed six billion people today and nine billion in 2050 without judicious use of chemical fertilizers” (FAO 2007).  Instead, the FAO reports—using the World Bank’s World Development numbers—that “low fertilizer use is one of the major constraints on increasing agricultural productivity in Sub-Sahara” (FAO 1997).  While this may be quantitatively true, it is indicative of an “agro-revolution” mindset that the green revolution of the future—the one which we will need to advance greatly over the next 15-30 years—will mimic the “green revolution” of the 1950/60s: i.e. high chemical inputs, genetically modified seeds, price fixed into a global market, heavy usage of pesticides, and all brought to you by an oligarchy of transnational corporations.

Nevertheless, a 2009 FAO’s article, How to Feed the World by 2050, articulates succinctly many of the problems and reality facing food production in the early 21st century.  The two most significant points raised in this article are as follows,

“Purchases and leasing of agricultural land in Africa by foreign investors for food production in support of their food security…This development involves complex and controversial issues –economic, political, institutional, legal and ethical – that need to be addressed by policy”

“[Less development countries] become more exposed to international market instability with the result that poor households are extremely vulnerable to the risk of short-term increases of prices of basic food stuffs” (FAO 2010).

The FAO’s first point is about the recent rise of foreign countries “landgrabbing” arable acreage throughout predominantly sub-Saharan Africa.  Critics of landgrabbing have likened the process to a new frontier in “agro-colonialism,” where foreign countries buy land leases for the purpose of exporting crops back to their own countries—largely seen for these countries as a preventive measure for hedging against fluctuating food prices.  Along with the process of landgrabbing, the investing in food may lead to further food price volatility—mostly in staples like corn, wheat, and soybeans—possibly making the post-recession period even worse for many developing countries.

Two years after the 2007/08 food crisis, wheat and rice prices have still not returned to anywhere near their pre-crisis levels.  The drought that has decimated wheat crops in Russia, the world’s third leading wheat exporter, and the Ukraine, is now being compounded with news of less than stellar harvest reports in the US corn industry, creating new spikes in the cost of wheat and corn.  And, since large quantities of meat produced in the world are fed these two grains, increases in cereal prices invariably raises the price of meat.

The next frontier of investing may soon be shifting away from gold, which is at an all-time high, toward grain, as increases in population and the expansion of food production create a lucrative environment for speculation and investing.  As one investor notes, “We’ve already seen trouble. There were food riots in some countries two years ago. Wheat, coffee and sugar prices have rocketed this summer. Canaries in the coal mine? ‘We expect to see a resource war around 2020’”(Arends 2010).  For Forbes financial contributor, Joshua Brown, “The food riots of 2008 were just the shot over the bow, in my estimation. The recent bullish action in ag commodities may be the start of the actual melee” (Joshua Brown 2010).  Is this where the future of food now rests?  A new bubble to speculate on?  A new war to fight over?  New profits to be made at the expense of health and human life— no matter the cost?  And the nightmarish reality of food should be even more self-evident: the financial world is betting on a more chaotic and unstable global food system future.  To quote global food reporter Jessica Leeder, “instead of a supply crisis, what has dawned is a new era of increased volatility.  Unpredictable spikes and tumbles in some of the world’s most vital food commodities, most of them grains, are becoming more frequent” (Leeder 2010).

In the end, the 2007/08 global food crisis may become emblematic of a larger shift, a geo-political repositioning of food as the next battlefront both internally and between nations.  In June of 2008, after more than a week of riots over the rising cost of food prices, the Haitian government ousted then Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis.  As the world prepares for another potentially devastating food shock, it should come as no surprise that developing nations are beginning to hoard food surplus reserves.  As countries begin buying up arable tracts of land throughout Africa, the future of food appears to becoming increasingly more hostile than cooperative.  What many leaders in these countries seem to have learned from the 2007/08 food riots is how food shortages can so easily threaten a government’s legitimacy.  As the famed historian E.P Thompson once wrote, “It is notorious that the demand for corn, or bread, is highly inelastic. When bread is costly, the poor (as one highly-placed observer was once reminded) do not go over to cake” (Thompson 1971:91).  People can deal with all sorts of abuse, all sorts of traumas administrated by their own government, but everyone must eat, and this reality seems to be driving, even more than issues of hunger, the future of food development.

I fear a future that has become pleasantly empty to the plight of the hungry.  A future where divisions between people are no longer determined by class or geographical position but between the fed and the unfed.  A world where the obesity rate in certain countries pushes well past 50 and 60 percent mark (it is predicted that three fourths of Americans will be either overweight or obese by 2020), and it will be normal  to read about a 2 billion or even 4 billion people starving daily.  As we look toward 2050, we must continue to be both creative and simple in our approach to food, and strive for a future in which food is truly recognized as a basic human right.

References

Arends, Brett. 2010. “Farmland: The Next Boom?” Wall Street Journal. September 24.

Brown, Joshua. 2010. “Grain over Gold.” Forbes. September 27.

Despommier, Dickson. 2010. “The Vertical Farm: Reducing the Impact of Agriculture on Ecosystem Functions and Services.” [Retrieved October 23, 2010] http://www.verticalfarm.com/more?essay1

FAO. 2007. “Organic Agriculture Can Contribute to Fighting Hunger: But Chemical Fertilizers Needed to Feed the World.” [Retrieved October 23, 2010]   http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/ 2007/1000726/index.html

—. 2010. “Feeding the World in 2050.”

Hamsun, Knut. 1890. Hunger. London, UK: Cannongate.

Leeder, Jessia. 2010. “Food Shock: Market Volatility a Bigger Threat than Grain Shortage.” The Globe and Mail. October 7.

Thompson. E.P. 1971.  “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.” Past and Present 50:76-136.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: NATHAN REICH

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SOMEWHERE IN COLORADO
by Nathan Reich

I see it here
In the way the leaves are moving
A hurricane will be coming
Though I don’t know how soon

I close the window and try
To get some sleep ’til the morning
While the clouds outside are forming
Will I ever feel prepared?

Somewhere in Colorado
I am drowning in a bottle
I see the sun
But I know it don’t see me
Somewhere in Colorado
I am drowning in a bottle
I see my home
But I know it don’t see me

A thousand miles
Could I make it any farther?
I don’t want to be a martyr
Is there something I could trade?

And there was a time
When I thought that we were something
But now we’re a little more than nothing
So can you blame me for my fears?

Somewhere in Colorado
I am drowning in a bottle
I see the sun
But I know it don’t see me
A thousand miles
From the edge of California
I see my home
But I know it don’t see me
Oh I know it don’t see me
Oh I know it don’t see me

Nathan Reich was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and began studying guitar in earnest at the age of 12. At the age of 22 Nathan was accepted at the Berklee College of Music as a guitar performance major, where his unique style of playing predominately with just his thumb earned him the nickname “Thumb Kid.” In 2006 Nathan began songwriting, and later that year wrote and recorded his first EP “Paper Planes.” Just before graduating in May of 2009 he released his first full length record entitled “Arms Around A Ghost.” He now lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Editor’s Note: Recently a friend of mine played me some songs on his iPod as we ambled through the streets of New York in search of a decent bar. Instantly I was taken with the music – singer/songwriter music that was guitar-centric and full of meaningful powerful lyrics – exactly my cup of tea. I was in love with Nathan Reich at first listen. A few days later my friend shared a YouTube video of a cover of Nathan Reich’s “Somewhere in Colorado,” and I’m pretty sure I haven’t listened to anything else since.

Today’s post continues our ongoing discussion on where the lines are blurred between poetry and music. For me, what makes a song fall within the realm of poetry is its lyrics, which is why most of the songs I love are lyric-based with lyrics that hold their own on paper. Today’s post is no exception. A story of heartbreak, of unrequited love and longing, the lyrics to this song fall square within the realm of those elements that, for me, make up a great poem. The lyric that kills me most in today’s post? “And there was a time / When I thought that we were something / But now we’re a little more than nothing / So can you blame me for my fears?” It’s moments like this that set Nathan Reich apart from the pack and earn him his reputation as not only a fantastic musician and songwriter, but as a talented poet. When it comes to lyrics of this caliber I think Mr. Reich says it best when he asks “Will I ever feel prepared?”

Want to hear more by Nathan Reich?
Nathan Reich’s Myspace page
Somewhere in Colorado (Nathan Reich cover)

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: BONNIE NADZAM

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By Bonnie Nadzam:

TATTOO

When she told the tattoo artist where she wanted it, he sat her down, pulled up a chair, and leaned in close. The alphabet was written across his chest like a talisman. She could read it through the open collar of his shirt.

“Listen,” he said. “Are you sure? That would really be permanent. And it’d hurt. A lot.”

“You listen,” she took him by the front of his shirt. “If I don’t have his name printed on my body, I’m going to die.”

“What about your arm? Your hip bone?”

“I’ve made up my mind.”

“What about the bottom of your foot?”

She sat down and unbuttoned her shirt. “Do it,” she said.

So he tied her ankles and wrists to the chair, opened up his pocketknife, and sliced a wet red line from the hollow of her throat to the smooth white plate of her sternum. Her body arched and she inhaled sharply.

“You’re open,” he said. “I’m going to use my tattoo gun to separate your ribs, okay? Just a little pressure,” he said. She felt her bones crack apart from the middle, then a long pause.

“What?” she asked. “What is it.”

“His name is already there.”

“I knew it,” she said. “Put it on again. Make sure you capitalize his first and last names.”

“You want it on there twice?”

“Yes. And don’t rush. I want to be able to picture it there very clearly. Be really careful with the vowels.”

So he bent over her and went to work with his needle and ink, carefully tracing each letter in fine and even print until it was stamped across her heart, twice. Like a question posed and confirmed. Like two quick punches to the chest. Like a stutter—a name she could scarcely utter out loud if she dared. So perfect a name that—as with all the beautiful things she’d seen in her short life: soft brown birds flying in cursive loops against a paper blue sky, a hundred thousand black ants crossing the blank sidewalk in a spill of broken words—it was compelled to repeat itself, to write itself in typescript again and again across the wet muscle of her heart, the word thoroughly inextricable from the flesh.

 

YOU TELL YOURSELF A STORY

Wet night,
One cold beer.
Ok—
Whiskey.
And ok.
One kiss.
Arches of my socked feet pushed
Against your hip bones.
Ok
ok

 

Bonnie Nadzam has published fiction in The Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Callaloo, The Mississippi Review, and several others. Her first novel, “Lamb,” is forthcoming from The Other Press. Bonnie lives in a stone house on Melville Island with her beloved and their three horses, four pigs, one mule, six goats, twelve hens, and two German Shepherds. They farm primarily turnips and alfalfa in the short growing season.

Editor’s Note: I am a sucker for poetry that hits you “Like two quick punches to the chest.” Especially when that poetry is about love, and within that qualifier, particularly when that love poetry is about sex. Is there anything older, any instance where, to paraphrase Ms. Nadzam, the word is more thoroughly inextricable from the flesh?

Whether exploring this human connection through prose or through a poem quick and sharp as an incision, Ms. Nadzam is a spot on artist of the heart. A poet unafraid to paint us a picture of the inner workings of the female mind. Reading her poetry is a bit of a guilty pleasure, as if it were a forbidden magazine read behind my parents’ backs.

(“Tattoo” and “You Tell Yourself a Story” were originally published in The Loudest Voice Anthology, vol. 1 and in The Offending Adam. These poems are reprinted here today with permission from the poet.)

Want to read more by and about Bonnie Nadzam?
The Big Something
Storyglossia
The Offending Adam

OPEN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI

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Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi watching the San Francisco Giants play at AT&T park in San Francisco, October 7, 2010.

OPEN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI

by Matt Gonzalez


October 12, 2010

Representative Nancy Pelosi
California’s 8th Congressional District
Washington D.C. Office
235 Cannon H.O.B.
Washington, DC 20515


Congresswoman Pelosi,

I write you because a large number of your constituents, myself included, are tired of your leadership.  As Speaker of the House, and representative of California’s 8th Congressional District, you have failed to offer a satisfactory explanation for many of the political choices you have made. Even your most ardent supporters are at a loss to defend your escalation of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan after you became Speaker (despite your promises to end the war), and for your support for the Patriot Act, its subsequent reauthorization, and for your support for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among other things. Equally reprehensible was your vote on March 21, 2003, two days after President Bush authorized the Iraq War invasion, in support of a resolution declaring “unequivocal support and appreciation to the president…for his firm leadership and decisive action.”

Recently, it came to my attention that your opponent in the 8th congressional race, John Dennis, had challenged you to a debate and that you had declined his offer.

The press reported that when John Dennis spoke with you in Washington D.C., on September 23rd, you said you would “not be in the District enough” to debate him. You did not offer more details explaining why that was the case. You also did not suggest the alternative of holding a debate in Washington nor did you make other arrangements to accommodate the democratic process.

As a matter of fact the excuse you did give, that you wouldn’t be in San Francisco, is unconvincing. The press reported that as recently as October 7th, you attended a baseball playoff game in San Francisco. A public debate could be completed in 2 hours, which is less than the length of an average professional baseball game.

Regrettably, your refusal to defend your congressional voting record does not come as a surprise to me. You also declined to debate anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan, when she challenged you two years ago, and you have not debated any of your opponents in the over two decades since you were first elected to office (a race you won despite not having held prior elective office).

A democratic society cannot flourish or long endure if our elected representatives avoid articulating and defending their views, or otherwise subjecting their political beliefs to public scrutiny. Debate among political opponents has a long and healthy history in the United States; one that you apparently have little regard for and/or disdain.

Although you may want to dismiss your congressional opponent John Dennis because he is a Republican, I assure you that he is a serious candidate with views worthy of consideration. In addition to being firmly anti-war and committed to defending civil liberties, Dennis is pro-gay rights, opposed the Wall Street bailouts and has joined in the populist call challenging the legitimacy of the Federal Reserve. Recently, in the Capitol Times, liberal commentator John Nichols posed the question of whether John Dennis was a “Prototype of the new urban Republican.” He noted that Dennis

presents a credible alternative to Pelosi when it comes to issues of war and peace. In the tradition of old-right Republicans like Ohio Sen. Robert Taft and Nebraska Congressman Howard Buffett — and their heirs, [Texas Congressman Ron] Paul and a handful of others, such as Tennessee Rep. John Duncan Jr. and North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones Jr. — Dennis calls for “ending both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and withdrawing our troops as safely and quickly as possible.” And he says: “I do not believe that our troops should be forced to be policemen of the world. Our troops, first and foremost, should protect Americans where they live — in America.”

John Nichols goes on:

In an anti-war town like San Francisco, that’s a more attractive position than Pelosi has articulated in this campaign. It positions the Republican as a genuine alternative to the Democrat in a liberal district.

The same goes for civil liberties. Dennis says: “The Constitution was written to restrict the actions of the government, not individuals. That is why we call ours a limited government. Unfortunately, American political vocabulary is filled with a lexicon of different types of liberty: civil liberty, economic liberty, sexual liberty, financial liberty, etc. Yet, in the end, there is only liberty. And if we support some types of liberty but not others, ultimately we will be left without liberty at all.”

Specifically, he says that he opposes “warrantless wiretaps,” “the creation of extra-judicial systems to deal with enemy combatants” and “waterboarding and other forms of torture,”“I believe our government must respect the 800-year foundation of the law embodied in the principle of habeas corpus.” and he says:

Again, on these issues, Dennis’ stances are closer to those of the district than Pelosi’s. As such, he offers a real alternative — even in a liberal district. … Dennis is, as well, genuinely libertarian on a host of social issues. As such, he can’t be painted into the right-wing corner, as so many Republicans are. (10/6/10, The Capitol Times).

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan has called John Dennis “a good person who is truly antiwar and truly wants to make the world a better place.” (9/30/10, Mother Jones). Texas Congressman Ron Paul has said “John Dennis is truly committed to Liberty, personal freedom, fiscal discipline and a more sensible foreign policy.”  (1/6/2010, Business Wire). Dustin Reid, who works promoting HIV/AIDS awareness, wrote an article in yesterday’s Huffington Post entitled: “Beyond Left and Right Why John Dennis Should Be a Liberals Pick in San Francisco”. He noted “despite running as a Republican, Dennis is essentially running on a pragmatic, progressive agenda that brings together the most salient issues across parties. Issue by issue liberals, as well as conservatives, should consider Dennis over Pelosi in San Francisco.” (10/11/10, Huffington Post).

I believe your refusal to debate John Dennis should be openly met with the same disdain you have for public debates. I intend to vote for John Dennis and I will encourage everyone I know to do the same. No candidate who refuses to debate his or her opponent deserves the support of anyone, particularly after a history of failed leadership, such as the one you have exhibited. To do otherwise, is to sanction your refusal and encourage similar behavior by other elected representatives.

To be sure, I do not agree with all of John Dennis’ views, nor he with mine.  But on the most pressing issues facing our country today, I believe we have more points of agreement (than you or I) and I respect his willingness to publicly defend those views.

Matt Gonzalez
Former president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors & 2008 vice-presidential running-mate to Ralph Nader on an Independent ticket.

First published in Fog City Journal, October 12, 2010. 

 

 


Andreas Economakis

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Hong Kong building (photo by Andreas Economakis)

YOUTH IN ASIA

by Andreas Economakis

When I was a kid I kept hearing the phrase “youth in Asia” around the dinner table. These youth were mentioned with guilty tones and frustration. I equated the ambience regarding these youth with another phrase that constantly popped up: “They’re starving in China.” Whenever I didn’t finish my food (a rarity I might add, as I was always hungry and had two voracious older brothers), my mother would smack my conscience with that phrase. I figured that everyone in Asia must have been starving, especially the youth.

I remember looking at my older brother in awe one day when in answer to my mother’s China guilt phrase he calmly replied: “Then go ahead and send them the remnants of my meal.” Obviously my brother was not a famished youth in Asia. He was a youth in Greece, surrounded by tons of feta cheese, ripe tomatoes, warm village bread, lemon and oregano drizzled souvlakis and oven baked moussaka. My mother slapped him upside his head and he ran away in a flurry of overturned tables and flying tri-color penne. But he had a point. The leftovers generally went in the garbage. Was my mom blowing hot air? Did no one care about the emaciated youths in Asia? I made a point of finishing my meals to a rice kernel. I still have this habit, no matter how bad the food is or how full I am.

A week after the “send them the remnants” incident, I finally understood what all the talk about youth in Asia was about. My parents were discussing the rampant stray cat and dog problem in Athens. They said it was our responsibility to stem what they called a “population explosion.” The poor animals were too numerous for the food chain. There wasn’t enough grub for them and they just kept on multiplying. Letting them be was simply hazardous and cruel, not only to them but to everyone. The solution? Euthanasia. I was shocked by the mere thought. To me it sounded like selfish cold blooded murder disguised in a duplicitous cloak of mercy. And to make matters worse, I soon realized that euthanasia didn’t only apply to kittens and puppies. I think that my parents secretly fancied applying euthanasia to Greek taxi-drivers, a few politicians, my dad’s business partner, Turks, a couple of relatives, anarchists, a certain large-framed fisherman in southern Greece, communists, one nationalist dictator who’d emptied the family’s bank accounts, the Olympiakos football team, several booming populations in Second and Third World countries and, dare I say it, youth in Asia.

The contradictions in my parents’ euthanasia philosophy confused me. We had more food than we could eat while millions of people and animals were starving all over the world. My brother’s suggestion to send food over to China seemed far more logical than subjecting anyone to euthanasia. And as for the kittens and puppies, what was even more strange was that my mom was an avid animal lover. Why did she prefer culling animals instead of neutering or feeding them? Was she so detached from reality to not see the folly of her words, of the very foundation of her philosophy? My mom was (and still is) an American woman who has lived most of her life amongst cultures and peoples who have displayed no shortage of prejudice against both women and Americans. Has she never felt the sting of sexism or ethnic bigotry? How would she like to be erased from planet earth, a victim of some chauvinist nationalist’s euthanasia policy? My dad was (and still is) a Greek from Egypt, a racy combination that raised eyebrows in the hallowed white halls of corporate America in his day, and yet he’s always admired the very people, cultures and institutions that considered him and many others like him eccentric, different, “other” and advanced his blue-blooded colleagues over him regardless of merit. It makes no sense to me.

I recently found myself in Hong Kong for work. There I was at last, a tiny speck floating in a veritable sea of youth in Asia. I’ve never seen so many people packed into one city. The apartment buildings are so tall they seem to be reaching for the stars. A walk in Hong Kong is like strolling through a Lady Gaga homecoming concert, only everyone is Chinese. If you want youth in Asia, boy, Hong Kong is the place! I made many friends, met lots of youth in Asia. I sure am glad that there was enough food to go around over the years and that my mom and dad’s euthanasia philosophies didn’t catch hold. But truth be told, I’ve come to rethink my stance on euthanasia. I just can’t figure out why so many people in Hong Kong are obsessed with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. One gander at these two and I finally understand my parents’ obsession with euthanasia.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

Copyright © 2010, Andreas Economakis. All rights reserved.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: CARL ADAMSHICK

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By Carl Adamshick:

HOME

You had been gone a few days.
The place went looking for you,

unaware you were returning.

I remained lonely in the evening
when the moon broadcasted

silence through the dust.

My love was once
a faint blue tear
of thin glass glowing
in my chest.

Now my love is you.

It must be three in the afternoon
and I am trying to sleep
on your side of the bed.

THE CONSECRATION OF AN APRICOT

It has become what was irrepressible
in its nature. It is the color of fire
suspended in a passion of green.
It is ordained the egg of the sun
and when the hull of the moon
rides through a whisper of stars
it is a fever, desirable for its sweet
ache on the tongue. It is the swell
and flesh of a flower, the lost
antecedent of an almond-stone
heart. One after another after another
fills its office and falls into death’s
inception, where it is observed
on the slope of a knoll, lucid,
laid open, and rotting in utter beauty.

“Home” first appeared in The Oregonian. “The Consecration of an Apricot” first appeared in the Mid-American Review. These poems are published here today with permission from the poet.

Carl Adamshick won the 2010 Walt Whitman Award. His book Curses and Wishes is to be published in March of 2011.

Editor’s Note: I came across Carl Adamshick’s work in the recent issue of Narrative Magazine and I just about died and went to poetry heaven. Letter, which appears in that issue, is a must-read for any lover of that genre of poetry that intersects with the sexual and the heart, of which I most definitely am one. With the help of Lezlie Mayers, editor of the Friday Poetry Series here on As It Ought To Be, I was able to track down this poet-on-the-forefront and obtain his permission to print the two poems featured today.

According to the poet Dorianne Laux, Adamshick “has not joined the ranks of the M.F.A./Ph.D.’s and has never attended a writer’s conference or residency.” His work speaks for itself, I believe, in showing where nature outshines nurture, and how one can maintain genius simplicity in poetry by remaining outside of the world of literary higher ed. With moments like “It is the swell and flesh of a flower, “My love was once a faint blue tear of thin glass glowing in my chest. Now my love is you,” and “desirable for its sweet ache on the tongue,” Adamshick’s choice of language is a delight to the senses and the heart, a combination that is pure delight to those who love great poetry.

Want to read more by and about Carl Adamshick?
Poets.org
Carl Adamshick Receives the 2010 Walt Whitman Award
The Olives of Oblivion

Upon Reaching the Age of Three

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Myron Unger and his son John, circa 1951.

This is the second of three posts in tribute to my father, Myron “Mickey” Unger, who would have turned 85 in August. Last month, I posted a reaction to an old baby picture of me in a stroller, laughing, with my parents on either side. The piece ended with the rhetorical question, “What could possibly go wrong?”

This month, I continue that story with an essay on life and parenthood by Mickey himself. Mickey studied writing and psychology in college, hoping to pursue one or even both. But when he returned from naval service in the Pacific, he was eager to marry my mother and start a family. He entered his father’s business instead.

Still, he continued to write when he could, and penned this essay sometime in the ’50s. I find it beautifully crafted, unbearably wise, and eminently worth sharing. Next month, I’ll post a reflection on a father’s legacy.

Again, I want to acknowledge and express appreciation to my mother, Lois Zussman, and my adoptive father, Milton Zussman, who remain active in my life today. I am blessed with a heritage from three parents, not just two.

◊

Upon Reaching the Age of Three
By Myron Unger

Upon reaching the age of three, what does a little boy expect from his dad?

Probably very little of what you want to give him.

For what do you tell a little guy that you can barely catch up with as he dashes from room to room helping Mommy fix the party.

You might put your hands around his little waist and lift him high over your head and laugh while he squirms and giggles, but what do you tell him?

Or you might sweep him up in your arms, swing him unto your lap, punch him in his tummy and run your hand through his tangled hair as he struggles to get away, but what do you tell him?

Or you might accept his invitation to play marbles on the floor with me, Daddy …… and he sticks his chubby, dirty hand into his pocket and brings out ten shining, colored symbols of his boyhood and says I’ll loan you one if you give it back to me, Daddy … and when he jauntily sits down on his knees waiting for you to take firsties, you wonder what to tell him.

And then it comes to you that it still isn’t your turn.

Not while God and his mother make his body erect and his mind alert.

And you think that his is really a simple love which comes through in his quick hugs and his warm smiles and his rollicking Hi, Dad when you come through the door. And so he asks little but the confirmation of your love and there remains little you can tell him about this.

And this is probably right.

For what can you tell him that he would understand?

Can you tell him about the dreams you’ve had for him long before he came into your life?

Can you tell him how you remember being a boy?

Can you tell him about your father, your marbles, your birthday cakes?

And then it comes to you that even if he could understand, you couldn’t tell him, because you don’t understand.

And you wonder about this because you wonder what you’ve been doing while he’s been growing up. What have you learned? If this was the right time, what could you teach him?

What happened to all those firm convictions you had when you left college? Were you right about life, about love, about God?

Once in your life you were confused and you asked questions and you got answers and now you’re asking the same questions and you’re not sure you remember the answers. And you begin to think what do I tell myself, the father of the boy who has reached the age of three?

Full cycle ……

Yes, and awareness that the stuff of life is a thin fabric and you can catch it only in seldom moments of quietness …. and the rest of the time, you work on impressions and fleeting recollections of knowledge.

Once, when you first held a girl you loved in your arms and smelled the sweet fragrance of her hair and felt the smooth flow of her body and knew she felt you, you held the fabric.

And once, when you stretched hard and flat on the fantail hearing the spray gently splash across the deck and watching the sun slowly kiss the flowing horizon and then fall softly into the rolling, moving sea and you saw the other ships slipping silently through the dusk and you thought how these ships and these men and this ocean and this sunset belonged together and you were part of it and you belonged too, you held the fabric.

And there was another time, much later, when you stopped your car in the middle of traffic and picked up the dog and carried it to the sobbing girl waiting on the street corner and you gave it to her and she stood on her tiptoes and kissed your cheek and then ran away in childish embarrassment scolding the dog, her tears turned to mock anger. And when you got back into your car and waved to the honking, scowling street, you felt sheepish but warm. And you thought how long it had been since you last held the fabric.

And you think if this is the true matter of life, what is all the other? And you think why can’t you be wise and aware each moment of each hour? And you think why must age bring the callowness of repetition?

Now you remember the pledge of your youth and a bewildering enigma startles you. For when you were young and intense you wished for maturity so that you would understand and mellow. And now that you were older and mature by men’s standards, you have lost the spark and thrill of youth and must go out to search for the feeling.

Is this what God meant?

Or is this what man has done to man in the guise of becoming civilized?

Here are the questions then that you must answer before you tell him anything because maybe it’s not too late for you.

Three years is a wonderful age, you reflect; full of magic and warmth and treats and laughter and toys and bulging pockets and runny noses and red cheeks and wet shoes and band-aids and stuffed animals and playing old, and the wonderment of the whole, huge, whirling world which to a small boy means fun.

Thirty years is a wistful age, full of old dreams and new doubts and old ambitions and new fears, and maybe a good place to stop for a moment to total up the ledger and see where you stand and perhaps revise and rededicate.

And this is about as far as you can go.

Now,

For you have come full cycle and you know again that your life doesn’t have the meaning you looked for, not yet, And you know that somehow, you’re falling short of the mark; that the blend of youth and age is still brewing and hasn’t yet mellowed. The vote is still out and you wished there was a place you could go to get it counted.

Is yours a futile search? Perhaps.

Yet, perhaps to search makes life richer even if you never find the answers. Perhaps life isn’t easy because it is rich.

And so it comes to you that it will be up to no man to answer your questions. That you must search and find yourself.

You’re suddenly very glad your three year old doesn’t question your smile. You’re glad he’s young enough not to doubt you.

When you shove him under the covers and turn out the light and kiss him goodnight, you pray that God and his mother keep doing their work while you look for the fabric.

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Myron Unger died of cancer fifty years ago next week, on October 11, 1960. He was 35.

Copyright © 2010, Myron Unger & John Unger Zussman. All rights reserved.