Review of Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer

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Review of Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer

by Letitia Trent

I had a professor during my undergraduate years (one those old-fashioned liberal arts professors who believed that intimately knowing Milton’s Satan or Shakespeare’s Lear was a prerequisite for being a fully-functioning citizen of earth) that defined a great book as a book that shows you what it means to be human. He meant the great, big (and, unfortunately, primarily European or American) books, like War and Peace or Middlemarch, in which an enormous cast of characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, figuring out what it means to be a citizen, part of a family, a soldier, an artist, a lover, or a parent. I appreciate these kinds of books, too, books that are willing to explicitly wrestle with questions about how a person should be in the world and do not fear the explicitly political or philosophical. I don’t know how anyone writes books like this anymore. As Matthew Rohrer writes in the first poem from his book Destroyer and Preserver:

The oldest songs are
breaking apart
like a puzzle in a basement

What kind of writer has the gall to tell people how to live now, when there are no fixed certainties and no unassailable truths? This is not an original question, but one that I find myself bumping into over and over again as I read contemporary literature and poetry that dares to directly touch on the political as Destroyer and Preserver does. While I’ve read many contemporary poetry books that comment on the paranoia and rise of some fervid, defensive American identity that happened post 9-11 (Christian Hawkey’s Citizen Of comes to mind in particular), I don’t see many poets writing in what comes close to straightforward confessional lyric touching the issue of politics aside from Rohrer. Sometimes, when writing about war from the distance of a relatively safe place, the lyric, personal “I” can seem limited, small, stupid, unable to fully grasp anything important from the perspective comfort. Perhaps this is why many poets who are fairly privileged (I know that I am one of them) and who have never seen battle try not to tackle something as large as “the war”.

Destroyer and Preserver tries to show us something about what it means to be a middle-class, materially comfortable human in this particular time in the United States, one in which foreign wars and news of slaughter in countries in which we are linked by politics and war filter in and out of our consciousness through reports from Twitter feeds and Facebook updates, seeming both incredibly important and completely divorced from our everyday lives. I specify that the book is about middle-class life because it differs from many other overtly political books from the standpoint it takes: the speaker is comfortable, white, male, and a father. This is not a book that howls from the edges or speaks as a witness to political and social turmoil. I don’t mention this to belittle the book, but to make it clear from what perspective the book addresses the political. In Carolyn Forche’s introduction to The Poetry of Witness, she writes about the privilege of being a North American in the 20th and 21st centuries: “Wars for us (provided we are not combatants) are fought elsewhere, in other countries. The cities bombed are other people’s cities. The houses destroyed are other people’s houses.” This space is where Destroyer and Preserver comes from.

Part of the book is about the dance between enjoying the privilege we have as North Americans to live our lives relatively unscathed by war and the responsibility to acknowledge that our privileged lives are partly built on the backs of the suffering of other people. Rohrer’s book differs from those big books about morality in that it’s a product of its time, and therefore the poems don’t tell us anything definitive about how to balance joy and responsibility: the subject is not knowing, of feeling guilty for running away to poetry or family life or dreams (the book is full of dreams), and of being politically engaged but not politically engaged enough to leave what is comfortable behind. The speaker in these poems spends his days taking care of small children, recovering from hangovers, and walking around a city as news of what’s happening in the Middle East filters in and out of the central consciousness of the poems. For example, in the poem “Casualties,” the poet’s small son asks “are soldiers good or bad?”, and the speaker meets his son’s confusion with his own:

I see his face, his eyes
right in front of mine.
We are drowning together

in the hold of the ship.
He looks just like me.

The poem leaves us with an image of the plane, having just dropped a bomb on the house and desert, gliding through the sky and being returned to the United States, “to be washed and put away”. Throughout the book, images of war are and desperation are washed and put away and then continually taken out again to be examined, as with the speaker of “Poets With History/Poems Without History”:

… and the melting icebergs crumple

like the prisoners shot in the side

I move through the days remarkably sinuously

and spinning inside

I washed the dishes two or three times a day

with hot water on and on

like a dream behind the yellow gloves

from which I too cannot awaken

though my son is done with school

and holds my hand on the walk home

the feeling of falling backwards

into the bed at night fills me

each time

with sweet content

all the people rounded up in camps

have a look in their eyes

that can’t reach us now

Rohrer is at his best when the speaker of the poems sees this point of tension between a comfortable life and the knowledge that so many other people are not able to have that comfort: the poems are electric when the speaker is both conflicted and ultimately a failure at keeping the high moral ground. They falter, though, when the speaker seems to imply a particular stance is the “good” one: in “For Which I Love You,” the speaker congratulates a lover for a fairly standard, simplistic affirmation against “hate” which reads a little bit like self-congratulation for having the “right” political point of view.

It would be unfair to say that this is only a political book: several short, lyric poems punctuate the book, ranging from records of sad, contradictory moments to poems that seem like sheer celebrations of everyday life, such as “The Smell of Frying Fish.” It’s the context of these poems that makes them political: images of war surface throughout the book in poems that at first seem to be about something completely outside of war, and so these moments of domestic bliss mean something more: is the speaker giving in to forgetfulness or resisting despair by living in the moment (as cliché as that can’t help but sound) by fully embracing the given world around him?

Rohrer’s poems are largely dreamy, personal lyrics that roll from matter-of-fact observation to gentle surrealism, creating poems that seem casually tossed-off yet completely controlled within one lyric event, world, or emotional/narrative moment. You could call it domestic surrealism, but Rohrer’s observations are more about finding the literal strange in the familiar than in creating strangeness. Still yet, reading the book felt too easy: the poems are easy to read and pleasing because Rohrer is good at this kind of poetry and knows what he is doing. I couldn’t help but feel that Rohrer was coasting and that these poems are a slightly toned-down, less boisterous versions of ground he’d already covered in his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, and his subsequent books. Only in the long poems of the book (“Believe” and “The Terrorists”) does Rohrer seem to stretch beyond his familiar gently joking, gently serious tone.

I can’t say that Destroyer and Preserver left me with anything definitive about how to be a conscientious person in a complex world, but it left me with a useful confusion and the realization of how often I, too, retreat into what’s comfortable in order to forget my own great fortune. I’m not the soldier who crumples, the face behind the cage, or the person whose home has been bulldozed. I have the privilege of forgetfulness, and I exercise it far too often.

***

Letitia Trent‘s work has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, The Black Warrior Review, Fence, and Folio, among others. Her chapbooks are Splice (Blue Hour Press) and The Medical Diaries (Scantily Clad Press). Her first full-length poetry collection, One Perfect Bird, was published by Sundress Press in early 2012. She was the 2010 winner of the Alumni Flash Writing Award from the Ohio State University’s The Journal and has been awarded fellowships from The Vermont Studio Center and the MacDowell Colony.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: TERRI KIRBY ERICKSON

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DEPRESSION
By Terri Kirby Erickson

Her knees nearly buckle with the weight of a new star,
but oh the sweet relief when one of them falls or when
the sun pulls up its rays like rope ladders because light,
even light is too heavy for her to carry now. And look

at her loose grip on the baby’s stroller, as if any minute
she might let go. Other mothers’ eyes follow their children,
glisten like the wet clay of a newly fashioned Madonna,
but her expression never changes. She sees nothing but

the dull, brown jar where she spends her days alone, its
walls slick and impossible to climb, the lid screwed shut—
feels nothing but cold glass against her back, the tightening
in her chest when she tries to breathe what little air is left.


Today’s poem originally appeared in Tryst, is included in the poet’s latest collection of poetry, In the Palms of Angels (Press 53), and appears here today with permission from the poet.


Terri Kirby Erickson is the award-winning author of three collections of poetry, including her latest book, In the Palms of Angels (Press 53), winner of a 2012 Nautilus Silver Award in Poetry and the Gold Medal for Poetry in the 2012 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the 2013 Poet’s Market, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, JAMA, The Christian Science Monitor, storySouth, and many other publications. She lives in North Carolina.

Editor’s Note: Terri Kirby Erickson has a way with direct, straightforward narrative poetry. You are at once within the scene she is painting, carried along by her skill with the lyric and the image, amidst a palpable world where you feel you could actually pluck the fruit from the trees of her invention. Today’s poem captures the inner workings of a sometimes secret condition, yet Erickson’s words bridge the shame gap by giving rise to empathy in the reader.

Want to see more by Terri Kirby Erickson?
Terri Kirby Erickson’s Official Website
Press 53 Author Page
Buy In the Palms of Angels on Amazon
Buy Telling Tales of Dusk on Amazon
Buy Thread Count on Amazon

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: JOHN PAUL DAVIS

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MYSELF, WITH THE NIGHT ON MY FACE
By John Paul Davis

For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.    – The Gospel of John 5:4

If I had known more grace. Heartwinter,
& all the locks frozen over. The songs
I should have been able to sing. I no
longer want to know the answers
to any of the questions. My body
less reliable now that I’m older,
& the doctor tells me I’m fit
for my age. Healthy, but not whole.
Like how I have forgotten
how to pray, the muscle that yearns
for God gone slack in my mind
after all these years. I have stopped
expecting the world to deliver magic
to me, yet it continues. Like the clouds
over Brooklyn the morning after I face
the difficult thing & deliver the bad news,
the perfect play they make with the light.
Like being awakened after midnight
by the memory of the song,
only when I listen in the bedroom’s cavedark,
the music is sweeter
than I had recalled, it is a deeper
taste. The music inside the music.
I tell you, I have been granted
the more costly victory. Like love, again.
Like a lame man on crutches to the water
expecting to beg for the day’s provisions
& what waits for him terrifies
him most: unseen,
fingers armed with heartbreak,
about to trouble the pool, the angel.


Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.


John Paul Davis writes poems. Learn more about him here: www.johnpauldavis.org.

Editor’s Note: John Paul Davis is a badass wordsmith with a real knack for blank verse, which is no easy craft to master. I have had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Davis read several times at NYC’s louderArts, and am often moved—if not breathtaken—by his poetry. Today’s selection confronts the human condition as Davis often does, with words that aim straight for the soul of the reader and do not fail to find their target. From the micro of the inner workings of one man to the macro of humanity’s relationship with God, Davis is the poet taking one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind: “Like how I have forgotten / how to pray, the muscle that yearns / for God gone slack in my mind / after all these years.”

Want to see more by John Paul Davis?
John Paul Davis Official Website

Basket

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Basket

by Angie DeCola

Once held a pile
of biscuits. Since then sits
still in the corner, a tabby
watching marbles roll
and sound across the floor.

Next to the table now not on it,
basket’s useless as ripped pages
of a tablet, an unchewed chiclet,
a glass of sweet muscat when the meal
needs something dry and viscous.
Basket’s as mistaken as a misread cue card—
muskrat instead of whisker, mascara for mosquito.

Basket feels as much a quitter
as the secondhand guitar—two unused
props in their corners, gritty and tired
on the grained pine planks.

Basket needs purpose—to fall like Niagara, to topple
the notion of blending the way Fallingwater house does.
Basket wants to go back to the prairie, to belong
there with the prairie dogs, who might be prey
for cliques of birds and cats but still
prove themselves daily, digging hole after hole,
rising out of them to scan the grasses and,
in the nick of time, going under again.

Basket doesn’t know what it’s here for.

***

Angie DeCola’s poems have most recently appeared in Crazyhorse and Copper Nickel. Assistant poetry editor at storySouth, mother, and freelance pastry chef, Angie currently resides in the tiniest little town she’s ever lived in, in southern Michigan. Her poem “Basket” was first published, in a slightly different version, in The Greensboro Review, and is in the process of reinventing itself as a children’s picture book.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: WILLIAM REICHARD

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PALIMPSEST
By William Reichard

The dead call to say they’re not dead, or they are, but in any case, would I please stop writing about them? All of my old lovers call to say they prefer their privacy, so maybe I should stop writing about them. My brothers and my sisters call, then my mother, then my partner, all to ask, would I please stop writing about them? All right. But what then? This morning I sat in an office surrounded by a sea of papers. They all had to be put in order. So I put them in order, in neat little piles, then larger groups, then into the folders and the files where they belong. This is what I’m good at when I’m not writing about the lives of those I love, have loved, may love; when I’m not borrowing heavily from the lessons they’ve learned through pleasure and pain. This afternoon I stopped for the things we need to keep our house running: cleansers, cat food, laundry detergent. I pick them up week by week, we use them up week by week and then I go and get more. This is what I’m good at when I’m not remembering the fields of my youth, the evenly spaced rows of green and black, plant and soil, the odd sunflowers that sprang up because hungry birds carried the seeds from feeder to nest and dropped a few along the way; the sudden tall yellowness of such flowers in the cultivated order of things. This is what I’m good at when I’m not recalling a former love, the bend of his back, shoulders sculpted by afternoon light. This evening I made dinner, something not too good but edible. This is what I do when I’m not reliving the scenes of a childhood I remember more from stories than experience. I feed things: my partner, my cats, the strays in the garage. This is what I’m good at: taking care of people and things that need taking care of. This, when I’m not thinking of my parents, their lives intersecting at just the wrong time in order to make each of us, my brothers and sisters and me. When I’m not dwelling on this then I’m washing the dishes, washing the clothes, taking out the garbage. This is what I’m good for: running my little life, when I’m not locked away in my room, trying to write about all of the things I’m told I shouldn’t, yet must, and do.


Today’s poem originally appeared in Midway Journal, and appears here today with permission from the poet.


William Reichard is the author of four collections of poetry, including Sin Eater (2010) and This Brightness (2007), both published by Mid-List Press. He is the editor of the anthology American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice (New Village Press, 2011). He lives in Saint Paul, MN.


Editor’s Note: Today’s poem contemplates what it is to be a writer, and William Reichard obviously gets it. If you are being asked to stop writing about the ones you know and love, you are probably doing something right. If you are not writing, there is plenty to do to comprise a life—chores, errands—but what kind of a life is it when you are merely surviving, as opposed to living? Amidst the clarity and logic of today’s prose Reichard breaks into beautiful lyric imagery. In so doing, he lets the reader know what always lies beneath the surface—even of the mundane—when one is a writer.


Want to see more by William Reichard?
William Reichard’s Official Website
Mid-List Press
New Village Press
Knox Writers House
Interview in Literary Magpie

Diving For Dear Life

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“Diving For Dear Life”

by Ashley Browne

 

Thirty years ago I sat on a battered Royal Navy destroyer somewhere off the Falkland Islands, listening to the BBC World Service announce that the Argentine forces on the Falkland Islands had just surrendered.  It was traditional for the BBC to tell us (and the Argentines) things before our own command did, simply because the U.K. Government usually told the BBC first.

Some three months earlier, my friends and I had been merrily drinking our way around the bars of Gibraltar, celebrating the end of a long and fairly tedious naval exercise in the Atlantic.  There had been glimpses in the news of the forthcoming trouble in the South Atlantic but when the story finally broke of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, our initial reaction was one of ‘where?’  In all honesty, the majority of us had no idea where the place was, there was a rumor that the navigation officer may have known but even that couldn’t be verified.

As we parted company with friends on other ships (a couple of whom, sadly, we would never see again), none of us could really imagine where this journey would take us.  Being as heavily trained as we were, the extra exercises had little impact on us mentally and the accompanying soundtrack of the ongoing negotiations had the misleading but comforting effect that it would all be sorted out before any fighting broke out.  The chilling reality dawned on me when I had to donate two pints of my own blood to be held in the sick-bay chillers “just in case”; nothing hits your 18 year old sense of invulnerability more than watching your own life-force being stored to possibly save your life at a later date.

Fast forward four weeks and we now found ourselves in a truly frightening shooting war and the ship was now very much in the front line and remained so throughout the rest of the conflict. During a series of hard fought air-sea battles against the very useful Argentine air force, this same ship sustained heavy damage and a number of my ship-mates were wounded.  Two of those ships that had been with us in Gibraltar were now at the bottom of the South Atlantic with some of our friends in them.

As might be expected, those dramatic events are still sharply etched in my memory and even after thirty years I can still capture the feelings and sharp emotions that surged through me at the time; the clenched, controlled fear of doing your job under fire, the deafening and intensely metallic sound of battle and the odd sense of almost zombie-like detachment that comes after the adrenalin surge of combat winds down to be followed by twitchy, nervous exhaustion and a few hours of comatose sleep if you were lucky enough that the watch system was in your favor when stood down from action. The general sense of enduring was always there; constant fatigue, cold, damp weather and short rations are my abiding memories of the time but always sweetened by the constant piss-taking humor which can still make me laugh today looking back.  We knew we were far from being an invincible war machine but just had to tough it out, the Royal Navy’s overbearing tradition of not giving up saw to that, rarely mentioned but tangible just the same.

With hindsight, our sound training (the end result of the Royal Navy’s torrid experience during the Second World War) and an ingrained sense of (at times black) humor saw us through physically and mentally. Petty differences were put aside for the duration.  Of a crew of near five hundred, only two men were taken off the ship as a result of what could be considered to be nervous breakdowns.

The Falklands are back in the news here in U.K. and the recent coverage of veterans’ issues combined with a long talk I had with a younger friend who has completed several tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, got me thinking about the effects of the high level of exposure to active service and direct combat on British service personnel and their families and associates in recent years.

Like the United States, the United Kingdom has had one arm or other of its armed forces engaged in active service on a more or less permanent basis since the end of the Second World War, from Korea to Afghanistan, in conflicts ranging from full-blown conflict to policing and peace-keeping operations, some as a result of savage civil wars, such as Bosnia in the mid-nineties.  Putting the politics and rights and wrongs of these conflicts aside, this has resulted in worrying levels of mental disorders among the young men and women involved and has directly impacted families, friends and colleagues who have to pick up the pieces, often with very little help from official channels in the shape of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the National Health Service.

All modern armed forces train their personnel to a point where they can cope physically and mentally to be able to carry out their allotted tasks while under extreme conditions that mirror as closely as possible combat situations .  Men and women will be exposed to harsh physical conditions, tiredness, limited rations and repetitive exercises. All of which are designed in quasi-Darwinian way to filter out those incapable of “making the grade” and expanding the concept of what is possible for those that do.

While this induced mental and physical hardening is an obvious prerequisite for men and (more frequently) women engaged in combat, the enforced bottling up of natural emotions and the subsuming of personal feeling into that of the team is almost certainly one of the main root causes of later mental problems including PTSD.  Modern military training is targeted at helping men (and increasingly) women in combat (and other dangerous military situations), overcome the immediate and natural reactions of a human being when faced with a danger.  Programs such as the U.S. military’s “Battlemind” initiative and similar programs in other NATO forces, have been highly successful in preparing troops for a shooting war but are not geared for helping those same troops wind down and rehabilitate into society, when their services on the battlefield are no longer required.  Although the U.S. has recently updated “Battlemind” to take into account post-deployment rehabilitation and help for spouses.

It is probably fair to say that although every major conflict throughout the 20th and 21st centuries has produced casualties with wounded minds, the Vietnam War was the one which really focused the Western world on the potential for long term mental harm to troops involved in modern warfare.  The shameful treatment of “shell-shock” sufferers in the First World War is indicative of how poorly the subject was understood at the time, although some effective pioneering work was carried out during that war, particularly by W.H. Rivers and others at Craiglockhart in Scotland (as readers of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy will be aware).  Although the condition was recognized at the time, little or no follow-up research was done on those men that returned from the trenches of France or the Middle East and many of these men lived the remainder of their lives alone with their condition unable or unwilling to share what they had seen with their families.

By the time of the Second World War, advances in clinical psychiatry and the large scale involvement of psychiatrists with the armed forces, had bought about some recognition that men in combat had a limited “shelf-life” if they were not going to suffer long-term mental harm.  This thinking was borne out by later analysis, the fighting effectiveness of troops that had been in combat for 30, 40 and 50 days fell away exponentially, until at 60 days they were effectively incapable of continuing to fight.   Units had to be rotated out of the front line as regularly as could be allowed, in order to recover, both physically and mentally. These men often recovered quickly and one of the key factors in this was that unit integrity was maintained. Surrounded by friends and colleagues of a similar mindset and experience, they were able to reconcile their experiences and recognise that their unit provided a support mechanism, effectively a surrogate family.  I can remember conversations with my own grandfather (a veteran of France, Dunkirk and the Western Desert) on the subject and recognizing from my own experience, the importance of the bonds of those friendships to our well-being. Nothing describes it better than Shakespeare’s ‘Band of Brothers’ speech from Henry V, at that moment in time it is genuinely a form of love.

The Vietnam War produced its own set of special problems for the troops involved.  After the early phases of the war, men were drafted into units piecemeal with little acclimatisation time, the unit integrity and support mechanisms of the Second World War were often lacking and the war ultimately became unpopular at home, leading those doing the fighting feeling that they were lacking in true purpose.  Added to this (and this is true of present day Afghanistan) the fractured nature of the fighting and the lack of a clearly defined front-line, meant that even when out of combat, true relaxation was never easy.

Perhaps because these issues were so widely known combined with the sense that a generation of America’s male youth had been badly let down by the system and the later high level of interest shown by the media, writers and film-makers (some of whom had served in the war), the Vietnam War is now viewed as something of a turning point in the recognition and treatment of war related mental disorders.

The term Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was created by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in the 1970’s and listed in their (then current) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 3 (DSM-III) at the behest and prompting of the Vietnam Veterans Against The War organization and their supporters.  PTSD is part of a larger categorization of mental disorders and while being far from exclusive to war veterans, it has provided psychiatrists, clinicians and general practitioners with a set of clearly defined set of symptoms that can be identified and possible cause can tracked against the patient’s history of traumatic events.  This has been of particular use when dealing with combat veterans.

The key factor in this is recognition of the symptoms and early treatment; a rape or assault victim may receive counseling as part of any criminal investigation and subsequent assistance program, in essence they will rightfully be expected to have been traumatized by their experience and hopefully any symptoms of PTSD will be picked up quickly and can be treated sympathetically. This kind of counseling, unfortunately, is rarely the case with returning combat troops in the U.K. at present.

The U.K. has lagged badly behind other Western countries in its approach to identifying PTSD symptoms amongst servicemen and women, there are no longer dedicated military hospitals in the U.K. and the facilities at Selly Oak Hospital in Birmingham are effectively (and rightly) dedicated to the treatment and initial rehabilitation of those physically wounded.  This means the onus falls on an often overworked chain of command and chaplaincy to recognize when servicemen and women are displaying any of the classic symptoms of PTSD. Turn around times between deployments is often rapid and those same men and women cannot easily be monitored when on leave.

Recognition of any potential problem becomes even more difficult upon a man or woman leaving the armed forces and the loss of security and new stresses and strains may often act as a trigger for any latent problems.  Unrecognized and untreated the outcome for PTSD sufferers and their families can be tragic; by 2007 more Falklands veterans had committed suicide than had been killed in the actual conflict. Divorce rates are higher than the national average for the same group and the high level of ex-servicemen amongst the homeless in the U.K. is perhaps indicative of the level of untreated mental illness.

Fortunately, there are charities in the U.K. which are leading the way in dealing with combat related PTSD for ex-servicemen and women, chief among them being Combat Stress.  These organizations provide assistance to PTSD sufferers, advice to general practitioners and support to partners and families.  Diagnosis and some basic Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is often all it takes to help someone. Recognition that what they are experiencing in civilian life is not necessarily a result of their combat experiences is often the first step to stability for most.

As a result of a rising profile of combat related PTSD in the U.K. due in main to campaigning by ex-service groups and the likes of Combat Stress, some research into the condition is now being carried out at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.

In 2004, after some 17 years of keeping a lid on my own symptoms post-Navy, I finally sought out some counseling.  At the time, I doubt many people would have thought I had a problem but I was starting to recognize in myself some of the odd and at times, disturbing behavior I’d seen in some of my old Navy friends whenever we met up.  I was one of the lucky ones, my symptoms were (and occasionally are) pretty mild and I had the financial wherewithal to address the problems. Others aren’t so lucky.

I don’t think anyone comes through war unchanged, some less than others but providing help for those most affected by the wars, that our politicians send us to, is a lesson that this country and specifically its government needs to learn quickly.

The Gift of the Wise Man

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The Gift of a Wise Man

by Janet L. Factor

myrrh  n.  An aromatic gum resin obtained from trees and shrubs of the genus Commiphora, valued in the ancient world as a perfume and as an embalming agent. Traditionally, gift of the Magi to the infant Jesus.

This set down / This: were we led all that way for / Birth or Death? -T.S. Eliot, “Journey of the Magi”

Not so long ago I found myself an inadvertent party to a conversation at my health club. A woman was complaining about a video she had recently rented for her daughter. The movie was Old Yeller, and she had rented it because it had been recommended to her as a classic, something that every child should one day see. Her daughter had been very upset by the story, and the mother was indignant.

This movie is the tale of a stray yellow dog that is first rejected and then adopted by a farm boy on the frontier. The two grow to love one another and become inseparable. Then one day the boy’s family is attacked by a rabid wolf. The dog successfully defends them, but is badly bitten by the wolf. The boy’s mother warns her son that the dog is doomed and must be put down, but the boy cannot accept this verdict. He quarantines Old Yeller until one day, the virus wins and the maddened dog turns on him. Then he recognizes his mother’s wisdom, and reluctantly he carries out the now clearly merciful sentence.

The angry woman summed up this plot scornfully: “A boy loves his dog and then he has to kill him! What kind of lesson is that for a child to learn?” At the time, I had no ready answer, although I felt a passionate desire to defend the movie. I had seen Old Yeller when I was perhaps 8 years old, and had anyone asked, I should have said that it was one of my favorite movies. Yet I was just as upset then as her daughter was now. Although it has been decades since the one and only time I saw the movie, I can still vividly see the climactic scene and feel the bitter anguish I felt then. But I loved the story and have always valued my experience of it. What profound lesson had it taught me, that I should even now feel so strongly about it?

After much discussion and soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that the lesson of this story is a stark and yet a very necessary one. What I learned from Old Yeller without ever consciously realizing it was this: the price of love is loss. No matter how happy, no matter how perfect and true the love, it will one day end in tears, for we cannot escape our own mortality. It is a lesson about the fundamental nature of the human condition that we all must master to become truly adult. In the movie, it is the mother, mature, who foresees death, and the young boy who seeks to deny it. In accepting at last its inevitability and indeed necessity, he takes a step forward into adulthood. And I, watching, took that painful step with him.

Why, then, did this modern mother object so strenuously to her daughter’s experience? Perhaps she was like the other parents of whom I recently heard, who, when it was time for the old family dog to be put out of his pain, told their children instead that they were taking him to live with a family on a farm, where he would have lots of room to run and other dogs to play with, a place where he would live happily ever after. Love can sometimes lead our hearts astray. For while it is natural to wish to spare our children pain, in doing so too assiduously, we deny them indispensable knowledge.

I believe that acceptance of one’s own mortality is the root of all wisdom. In both Eastern and Western cultures, the precious gem symbolic of wisdom is the pearl, for in converting the grain of sand within its shell into a pearl, the oyster takes inescapable pain and uses it to create a shining beauty. Likewise, it is only because our time is short that anything we do in our lives truly matters. If we do not see an end to life, we remain always children, living in an eternal world of make-believe where nothing makes any real difference because the play will go on and on, and can always be re-imagined another time.

Without the understanding that we are mortal, we cannot appropriately value our own lives. Unless we know that life is fragile, and brief even in its luckiest prolongation, we will not treasure each moment of joy that comes our way; we will not hasten to seize precious opportunities before they pass beyond our grasp. We may not always cleave to those we love, not thinking how our time with them is limited. Until we understand that we must die, we cannot begin to live.

Many times I have turned these thoughts over in my mind, for on July 20th of the summer of 2000, my father died. As I sat upright in the front pew at his funeral and listened to my older brother tell the tale of Dad’s life, I thought to myself that if the pain then in my heart was the price I had to pay for this man’s love, I would gladly pay it again, a thousand times over.

My father was not a rich man, he was not a famous man, he was not especially handsome nor at all proud. Yet there was a greatness in him, for Dad was wise as few men are ever wise. Of all the people I have known in my life, and I have had many beloved teachers, he is the only one I would honor with the ancient title of Sage. Thoreau says, “To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” This my father did, from childhood through the moment he died, suddenly, unexpectedly, but as befitted such a wise man, not unpreparedly. For what is death but the greatest problem of life?

Dad was born into rural poverty in South Dakota in 1919, the youngest of three illegitimate children at a time when that status was still a curse. At the age of two, already scarred by his drunken father’s abuse, he was abandoned along with his siblings at the grim State Public School in Owatonna, Minnesota; his desperate mother had found a man willing to marry her but unwilling to support another man’s children. The searing experience filled Dad not with bitterness, but sweet compassion. “Kindness is the most important thing in the world,” he told us. “I learned that at a very early age.” He resolved to be a better man than those his mother knew. He had no patience with macho posturings: a real man to him was one who had the fortitude to stand by his wife and support their children. Correspondingly, he was a vocal supporter of feminism and of reproductive choice.

At five he was taken from the orphanage to live with a farm couple; when he was nine they adopted him. He was forever grateful for and returned the love they gave him. Later when Grandma, aged and long widowed, was no longer able to live on a farm, it was Dad who took her in.

Growing up in that tiny town, conscious of his outsider status, Dad set to work to discover who he was and what he could make of his life. Long before he finished high school, where he was a star athlete, he had read and re-read every book in the local library, seeking a broader view of life’s possibilities than could be had from the dirt roads that converged there. “There is no such thing as a good role model,” Dad told me. “I knew as a boy that we are all unique individuals and there is no reason to try to be like anybody else. I only wanted to be the best me that I possibly could.”

After graduation, in the midst of the Depression, he joined the farm crews that migrated from South to North and back again, working the plowing and the harvest, earning money to help keep the farm, which was saved only by FDR’s moratorium on farm foreclosures. (That made Dad a lifelong Democrat.) When World War II came, he joined the Navy, wanting to serve but also seeing it as a passport to the wider world. His intelligence, skill, and cool head-when mental maturity tests were given in training, the results caused officers to exclaim “God! Factor was born old!”, which made Dad laugh-earned him a position as pilot for those trickiest of airborne vehicles, the blimps that ran escort missions with convoys off the coasts, spotting U-boats from on high.

After the war the GI Bill offered opportunity, and Dad seized it with both hands. He attended the University of Minnesota, earning a degree in chemical engineering with such distinction that his professors urged him to stay on and attend graduate school. But Dad refused, for he had met and married my mother. “Life is short, and I am already over 30,” he told his teachers. “I want to have time to raise a family.” Raise us he and Mom did, sending all four of their children not only through college but on to graduate school. Dad also continued his own education, for he remained an inveterate reader, with a special fondness for history, which he studied for the light it threw on human nature. Books were the only material possessions he cherished.

Throughout his adult life Dad worked for his community. He served on the school board, sat on the city council, headed campaigns to pass school tax levies, led the United Way fund drive. One of his last acts at the PPG factory where he worked was to plant the seeds of a project that has since reclaimed to nature large areas previously laid waste by the industry’s by-products, while simultaneously cleverly recycling the city’s treated sewage.

Always Dad loved jokes, especially puns, and was known for his good humor and joie de vivre. “It’s a great life!” he frequently exclaimed. Yes, it was, we agreed, and well-lived; and we made that the theme for his funeral.

As my family rallied to cope with his death, almost everywhere we went, we found that Dad had been there before us. It began even before he was officially dead. As we sat in the dim waiting area of an unfamiliar tourist-town hospital, the emergency room physician came to ask our permission to cease efforts at resuscitation. There was still some small amount of electrical activity in Dad’s heart, he told us, but it had been more than half an hour since he had had a heartbeat, and there was certain to be major brain damage even in the unlikely event that they should succeed in their attempts to restart the beat. Did we still want him to go on? My mother, my oldest sister, and I all said with one voice, “No! He would never want that. Stop! Let him go.” We could speak then without hesitation or guilt because Dad had made sure we knew how he felt. He had foreseen, and smoothed our way.

Once we were home and the dreadful duty of making phone calls to my brother, other sister, family friends and relatives was over, we turned to the more prosaic problems and found most of the work already done. His important papers were gathered together. His will was there, though he had taken care to arrange that his financial assets would pass automatically to Mom. All information my mother needed to claim pension and other benefits at his death was placed in an envelope labelled in large letters “Louise-Important.” His grave and marker, and one for my mother beside him, were long since bought and paid for.

The only omission, which at first I found puzzling, was any expression of wishes about the conduct of his funeral. It seemed a strange lapse. Mom struggled with the decision, then chose to have a traditional funeral at the church, with family selecting the music, and anyone welcome to speak in Dad’s memory. As my siblings and I scattered to find Dad’s favorite books, then settled down to peruse them for appropriate quotations, we found that there too he had gone ahead of us, trusting that we would follow.

In all the books, appropriate passages were carefully marked. In the anthology of poetry that my mother had given him at their marriage in 1949, he had inserted two bookmarks with the name and page number of the poems also written on them (they might have fallen out, you see, and in important matters Dad was always careful to prepare for any eventuality). One piece was Edwin Markham’s great elegy for Abraham Lincoln, Dad’s hero, which I read at the funeral. The other was a love poem, a last farewell left for my mother. Late the night before the service, I found that in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, he had highlighted the ode to Death that occurs in the midst of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” and written clearly beside it “A perfect eulogy.”

Whitman’s ode is perhaps the most eloquent expression in the English language of the adult attitude toward death: understanding that this is the price for the beauty of life, and willingness to pay it. As my husband stood at the lectern and read the lines that Dad had chosen, my heart was torn with the beauty of it and the irony. We sat in the church where my father had been a member for some 50 years, where he had taught Sunday school in the prime of his life and served on the church council into his late 70’s. The pews were full of friends and members of the congregation who had grown old sitting there beside him. Yet almost none of them knew what both the struggling speaker and I knew, knew what depths of Dad’s soul were being expressed in these lines of poetry about accepting mortality, for Dad, devoted family man, staunch friend, amiable co-worker, pillar of the church, and scrupulously ethical public servant, was a lifelong atheist.

I do not mean for a moment that he was a man devoid of reverence; no, he was filled with it. But Dad revered the real world, the one in which we all live and die, this place that is relentless and terrible even as it is beautiful beyond all hope of expression. Humble indeed he was, but when Dad bowed down it was not before some omnipotent autocrat, but before the powerful wonder of this world. He was what is sometimes termed a modern pantheist, one who believes that the Universe and God are but one and the same thing, that life and non-life are united in this overarching order, and that anthropomorphic conceptions of a personal divinity are but primitive and petty imaginings compared to the sublime glory of the real.

         I knew these were the beliefs that shaped Dad’s life, because I shared them. I came to this view through my scientific training, even as Dad came to it through the application of his own meticulous intellect to his vast knowledge and experience. He spoke frankly to me about his philosophy many times. But he confided in very few, only those that he could be certain were spiritually akin to him. It was not until his funeral that I finally understood why.

As I followed the formal ritual of the service and listened to the pastor’s predictable homily about the gift of eternal life, what struck me most about these mythological trappings that I well knew my father had never believed was just their childishness. What a transparent fantasy! How was saying that Dad had gone to heaven where we would all rejoin him someday (provided we were good) any different from telling a child “Rover’s gone to live out in the country. Maybe someday we’ll be able to go visit him, but not right now?” It seemed to me insulting that I should be offered this juvenile fare, like a lollipop, to assuage so deep a pain, as though the death of one’s father were a mere pinprick.

There is no pain like the pain of grief, for its cause can have no remedy. Death is final. It must simply be borne. Sitting there on the unforgiving wood, I thought “There is no consolation possible for this.” Yet many in the church seemed to feel consoled. How could this be?

I saw then what I had never seen before, understood the appeal that religion holds in a new way. For this minister was not, as I had thought, offering us a patently inadequate anodyne for our mortal agony. No, he was inviting us instead to turn our heads away, to deliberately spare ourselves the fearful prospect of the coffin that stood before us, and so avoid suffering altogether. “Let’s pretend,” he was saying. “Let’s all pretend that Don isn’t really dead, that nobody ever really dies. Then we will never have to pay the full price for the love we have enjoyed.” His words were but denial writ large: if it seems unbearable, refuse to bear it. Don’t look; turn your face away.

But closing his eyes to the truth, however fierce its aspect, was the one thing that my father would never do. The sage will always look straight into the tiger’s maw. Dad loved a passage from Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm, one of the books that shaped him as a youth: “All things on earth have their price; and for truth we pay the dearest.” The road to honor is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your own heart.”

Yet he was never hard-hearted nor cynical. To live such a life, a life spent with open heart as well as open eyes, requires courage of the first order, a courage that many of us find hard to summon when pleasanter prospects are dangled before us. It is so much easier to remain as children, playing only in the sunshine, afraid to face the dark.

That in itself, I finally realized, was a truth to which Dad did not close his eyes. That was why he had confided his views only to those who already shared them. Dad knew, because he knew his fellow humans, that not everyone, not even all of those who loved him, would be willing or able to follow where he led. Because he loved them too, he would not cruelly force them there. Dad would never deny to those who loved him, and whom he loved, the comfort they derived from their religious beliefs. Having himself walked through fire, he grudged no one any wellspring.

That was why he had made no requests as to the conduct of his funeral. Eight decades of experience had taught Dad well that funerals are for the living, not for the dead. A man so brimming with compassion would have seen it as selfish to insist on a simple, secular service, and Dad would never have his last act be a selfish one. Instead he refrained from saying what he wanted, so that those who mourned him could have what they needed.

But those of us for whom this was not what was required had to find the means to answer our own needs, even as Dad had always done. So to that hallowed platform where so many nativity scenes and passion plays had been staged, we brought our own. For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, we stood up, one by one, and spoke our simple truth.

My brother told Dad’s story: This was a great man, he said. I read Markham’s poem: Great men are born of the Earth, I said. My eldest sister read the final passage from Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers, a lyrical homage to our planet: He will return to the Earth with love, she said. And last my husband rose, coming before us in my father’s stead to read Whitman’s glorious ode: We are mortal, we are mortal, we are mortal, he said. We are all mortal, but be not afraid.

Be not afraid, for behold! this knowledge is a precious gift. It is that myrrh borne by the wise man to the cradle of the infant he adores. Sweetly it perfumes the sheets of lovers; gently it secures the shrouds of the dead. The joys of life and the pains of death are not two things, but one, and can only be wholly grasped together, even as the full glory of Spring can only be known to those who choose to endure Winter.

We are mortal, and Dad did not fear the fact. Instead it inspired him to live his life with vigor and joy, to make what difference he could while he could. “Birth is a death sentence,” he often said philosophically. He needed no divine disciplinarian, no fear of hell nor hope of heaven, to keep his feet on the narrow path of righteousness. Dad was virtuous because he loved virtue, and for no other, no lesser, reason.

We all face a choice. We can go on being children all our lives, even after our parents are gone. We can even pretend that there is an eternal and perfect father, an omnipotent father, up there somewhere where we can’t see him, and that he will always take care of us and tell us what to do. Or, mature, we can accept this difficult gift, though our fingers tremble in the opening. We can willingly anoint ourselves with this essence that unites us with all those who have gone before, and will come after. We can carry it in our turn.

I do not wish to think of Dad as residing in a far-off heaven when he is alive inside me here and now. I do not need to pretend that there is an ideal Father hidden somewhere above the clouds when I have a wise and loving father within my very heart. Knowing that he could not stay, Dad deliberately gave to me everything I would need to face life without him. He showed me how the perils of this world are part and parcel with its loveliness.

Wisdom is indeed a pearl of great price, for the truth of our mortality is the hardest truth of all. But can we not choose to make this understanding the seed for our own pearls, each of us wrapping it about with the shimmering substance of our own lives, so that when we come to die, it will be a thing of beauty that we leave to our loved ones in the treasure house of their memories? Such was the gift that my father left to me.

***

Janet L. Factor is a Contributing Editor for Secular Humanist Bulletin, where she delights in exploring the unity of opposites in her column, Heart & Mind. A student of biology and history, Janet believes that the epic of evolution frames the short stories of our lives. She is Founder and Organizer of the Springfield Area Freethinkers.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: REGIE CABICO

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

IT’S NOT SO MUCH HIS KISS I RECALL AS HIS VOICE
By Regie Cabico

A shy pebble rippling water. Each phrase
a school of startled ginger fish shimmering
through the telephone line. I’d like to invite
you to my place & immediately I became
a frightened puppy in a tropical rain forest.
Only to my surprise, I was in Brooklyn
reading Lorca in his living room, calmly
sipping tea. He played me Joni Mitchell
crooning the lines he loved & even tried
to sing the high notes. His falsetto cracking
midair as we both laughed. That’s when he
rested a photo album on his lap & pulled
a picture of himself, a young boy swimming
in a Buenos Aires blue reflecting pool. I wanted
to lick the nape of his neck instead said, You’ll
have to teach me how to swim. I’m afraid
of water. That’s when he placed his lips
to mine, our most perfect palates open as we
pulled away to catch our breath.. You have
to be relaxed otherwise you’ll drown. I kiss
him again feeling ribs beneath sweatshirt,
our hearts racing the way a diver freefalls
plunging in a sea of pearls


Today’s poem appears here today with permission from the poet.


Regie Cabico is one of the country’s leading innovators and pioneers of poetry and spoken word having won 3 top prizes in the National Poetry Slams as well as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam. Bust Magazine ranked him in the 100 Men We Love & The Kenyon Review called him the Lady Gaga of Poetry. He received 3 NY Innovative Theater Award nominations and won a 2006 Best Performance Art Production award for his work on Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. Other theater credits include the Hip Hop Theater Festival, The Humana Theater Festival & Dixon Place. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and NPR’s Snap Judgement. His work is published in over 40 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution & The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has taught at Urban Word NYC, Poets House, Kundiman, Split This Rock and has been on the faculty of Banff Arts Center’s Spoken Word Program. Mr. Cabico received the Writers for Writers Award for his work with at-risk youth from Poets and Writers. He is former NYU Artist in Residence for Asian Pacific American Studies. He performs throughout the UK and North America & resides in Washington, DC.


Editor’s Note: I had the pleasure of seeing Regie Cabico perform recently at NYC’s louderARTS weekly reading series. He gave one of the most engaging, entertaining, and raw performances I’ve seen—poetry or otherwise. Mr. Cabico rolls up his sleeves and delves into the theater of the real, exploring queer themes and other matters of the human condition, as thoughtful and honest in his humor and wit as with his tenderness. A true performance artist in his own right, Regie Cabico’s words are as riveting on the page as they are displayed before a riveted crowd, his peacock feathers on full display. After his performance, the drowning of today’s poem stayed with me for days. When asked if he had any books for sale he replied, “Nothing for sale online but my body.” The Lady Gaga of poetry indeed, and then some.

For a real treat, watch Regie Cabico perform today’s poem live.


Want to see more by Regie Cabico?
Inspired Word Performance on Youtube
Three poems at EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts
watch Regie Cabico perform “Capturing Fire” live

Saint Turing: A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyrdom on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday

Posted on by Chase Dimock

Saint Turing:

A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyrdom

on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday

By Chase Dimock

 

This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of British mathematician Alan Turing’s birth. In celebration of his enormous contributions to the fields of mathematics, computational science, cryptology, and artificial intelligence, the scientific community has dubbed 2012 the “Alan Turing Year”, commemorating the occasion with numerous conferences, museum exhibitions, a series of articles on his life in the Guardian and BBC, a Google doodle, and even a functional model of his famous Turing Machine made of Legos. By his mid 20s Turing developed his theory of the “Universal Machine”, thus ushering in the age of modern computer science. A decade later, Turing devoted his studies in cryptology toward cracking the German naval enigma. By developing machines known as “bombes” that could decrypt the messages the Nazis relayed to their U-boats, Turing’s intelligence gathering re-shaped World War II. Historians have argued that cracking the Nazi code shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives.

Such accolades coming 58 years after his death evidence not only his importance as a historical figure, but also how his ideas continue to influence contemporary research and debate on computer science in our increasingly digitized society. As the “Father of Artificial Intelligence”, Turing’s 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” foresaw how rapid advances in information science would produce a future in which the line between human intelligence and artificial intelligence would become blurred. Asking, “can machines think”, Turing postulated that ultimately the true mark of artificial intelligence would be whether or not one could tell the difference between communication with a human versus a machine. Turing’s standards for evaluating artificial intelligence have not only framed the scholarly and ethical debate in the scientific community for the past six decades, but they have also proven to be a prophesy of daily life in the 21st century. Living amongst automated phone banks, internet chatterboxes, GPS navigators, and Apple’s Siri app, everyday life has become a series of Turing tests as we increasingly rely upon forms of artificial intelligence and speak to it as if it were real.

Yet, less emphasis has been placed on the tragedy of his untimely death. In 1952, Turing was arrested and convicted of gross indecency for a consensual sexual relationship with another man, the same 1885 statute under which Oscar Wilde was imprisoned more than half a century earlier. Instead of serving prison time, Turing chose to undergo an experimental hormonal treatment prescribed by the British government. While this chemical castration via a synthetic oestrogen hormone curbed his sex-drive, it had dire side effects. Turing began to grow breasts and developed a deep depression. His conviction also caused him to lose his security clearance, thus barring him from continuing to work with the British intelligence agencies. The man who did as much from inside a laboratory to defeat the Nazis as any general did on the battlefield was now considered a threat to national security solely by virtue of his sexuality. Two years later, on June 8th, 1954, Turing took a few bites from a cyanide-laced apple–an elaborate end designed to let his mother believe that his suicide was actually an accident due to careless storage of laboratory chemicals. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for Turing’s “appalling” treatment, but a 2011 petition to pardon Turing’s conviction was officially denied by the British Government.

While infinitely more qualified scientific minds have written amazing tributes to Turing’s contributions to computer science and mathematics this year, I am interested in what Turing’s life and legacy mean to gay history and queer thought. I first heard of Alan Turing when I was 14 years old and just starting to reconcile my sexuality with the images and stereotypes of gay men in the media. He was mentioned in Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Persons of the Century” and with just a brief blurb on his life and death my concept of what a gay man could achieve and contribute to the world was forever changed. I came of age in an era of unprecedented gay visibility, but the Elton John and “Will and Grace” imagery of an ostentatious, campy gay world did not seem to fit my shy, nerdy bookishness. Although I never excelled in math and science, Turing became one of my first gay heroes because he proved to me that a gay man—a nerdy man, can change the world through the power of his intellect, invent the future, defeat the Nazis, and stand up for his rights.

This brings me to the first of my appeals for Turing’s importance to the modern gay rights movement: Gay nerds deserve a gay icon. In this month of June, the month of LGBT pride, I am reminded of our community’s production of iconography. From Mae West to Lady Gaga, we have been inspired by strong, sexually transgressive women that challenge gender roles and have supported their gay followers. Entertainers have Freddie Mercury, Ian McKellen, and a new generation of young talent like Neil Patrick Harris to look up to. Literary gays like me have Oscar Wilde. Gus Van Sant’s film Milk sold Hollywood on the idea that Harvey Milk was the gay Martin Luther King Jr. and Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign has launched him as the digital gay guidance counselor for queer teenagers. Yet, no place in the world of gay iconography has been carved for Alan Turing.

As I stood two weeks ago and watched a heavily commercialized gay pride parade trumpet reality TV stars, shill major beer companies, and celebrate banks that crashed our economy, I realized that the notion of gay pride has become more about celebrating the materialism of the present than honoring the past and galvanizing the community toward the cause of social justice for all individuals. This is not to say that we should cut down on the frivolity, merriment, and general debauchery of Pride. One of the most important liberties that the LGBT movement has helped to realize is an expanded right of the individual over the use of his or her own body, including pleasure and bodily expression. Rather, I am arguing for the de-commodification of pleasure (i.e.: using sex to sell) and the integration of the intellectual into sexual. If knowledge is power, and power is sexy, then we must renew our focus on how sexuality informs the genius of an individual like Turing. What made Turing gay and what made Turing a brilliant scientist were not exclusive or accidental traits; they informed and nurtured one another. It is not an accident that the defining essay on artificial intelligence was written by a man who inhabited a human mind that some psychologists and biologists would have deemed degenerate or corrupted by human vice. Rather, it is outsider status—the ability to demystify the “normal” as a gay man, as a nerdy man, that fortified Turing’s genius.

For the balance of this essay I have four arguments for the importance of Turing as a gay icon. The first two are from his biography, what we can learn historically from his persecution as a gay man, and the second two are ways in which his philosophy of determining artificial intelligence have prophesized issues of gender and sexuality in the 21st century. In short, Alan Turing is part martyr, part theorist and an inspiration beyond the sum of those parts.

Turing’s Hormonal Treatment and Sexual Orientation

As mentioned earlier, Turing opted to take hormonal injections as a treatment for his homosexuality in order to avoid a prison sentence. Although the injections curtailed his sex-drive because they amounted to a chemical castration, they did nothing to treat the real root of his homosexuality. The rationale behind the injections conflates homosexual acts with homosexual identity, assuming that annihilating the libidinal desire for sex somehow freed the individual of the effects of homosexuality. In the 1950s, the concept of a sexual orientation independent of all other behaviors was still yet to become universal knowledge. Previously, homosexuality was widely considered a gender disorder. Gender identity was so tied to desire for the opposite sex that it was naturally assumed that a man who would desire another man would have to somehow be a woman on the inside. Homosexuals were often called “inverts”, individuals with the body of a man, but the soul of a woman. Turing, was by most accounts, not particularly feminine and thus he was not legibly homosexual according to the standards of his era. His guilty plea to gross indecency came as a surprise to many because he did not fit the accepted profile of the homosexual.

What we understand today is that a homosexual orientation is more than just an act or an urge. While we know that there is a biological component that predestines most to a proclivity toward attraction to the same sex, gay identity also includes one’s individual history. Same sex desire may be in-born, but the way in which that desire is channeled, what types of men, what kinds of acts, how one thinks of one’s self in relation to other men, and all of the infinite characteristics of our sexuality are products of attachments and affects that we develop over the course of our lives. While the injections may have curbed Turing’s interest in a sexual act, they did nothing to reverse his attachment to men as figures of desire that informed his sense of self and world around him. Turing’s case is a reminder of both the resilience and malleability of sexual orientation and the dehumanization that ensues when we reduce the human mind to a mere organ running on hormones.

Cold War Paranoia and the Problems of Queer Citizenship

Due to his conviction, Turing was stripped of his security clearance and thus he was barred from his work on cryptography with the British intelligence agencies with which he collaborated during World War Two. This revocation of his clearance was not due to having a criminal record, but instead because of fear that his homosexual identity would make him easily corruptible. It is important to remember that Turing’s conviction happened at the dawn of the Cold War. The British government worried that Soviet spies could easily blackmail government agents with shady personal lives. This fear was not unfounded, at least not as a fact. Turing’s conviction came on the heels of the discovery of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean (both gay) as spies for the KGB. This paranoia was echoed in America with the Red Scare ushered in by the McCarthy hearings and the House Committee on Un-American Activities that sought to root out communists from government positions, the media, and Hollywood. The Red Scare was paralleled by what David K. Johnson terms “The Lavender Scare”, characterized by a series of purges of homosexuals from government offices and renewed enforcement of sodomy laws. Johnson writes:

In popular discourse, communists and homosexuals were often conflated. Both groups were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. Both groups were thought to recruit to their ranks the psychologically weak or disturbed. And both groups were considered immoral and godless. Many people believed that the two groups were working together to undermine the government.

During the Cold War, to be homosexual was not just contrary to social standards or vice laws, but many considered it treason. The homosexual’s morality and physiology had always been in question and now his very citizenship was questioned as well.

Turing’s descent from war hero to potential traitor in less than a decade solely on the basis of his sexual identity dramatically illustrates how deeply society had come to see sexual practices as constitutive of one’s essential identity. Homosexuality signified the complete break from any moral fortitude, leaving the individual not only susceptible to, but also craving of corruption and destruction of all forms, including treason. Turing’s treatment during the Cold War also sheds light on why the modern gay rights movement that developed 15 years after his death was perceived as so radical. If the homosexual’s allegiance to his own nation was in doubt, then seeing gay men exercise their civil liberties as a citizen seemed to be a radical departure from the accepted image of the homosexual. Harvey Milk’s “radical” gay activism, which consisted of public gatherings and running for elected office appeared radical because he was using classic, democratic measures protected by the constitution in order to campaign for civil rights. Turing’s story reminds us that not long ago, the question was not if homosexuals should be granted equal rights to marriage, adoptions, etc., but whether or not they could even be considered loyal citizens.

Gender, Closeting, and Online Communication

In an article from 2010, I used the Turing Test as a way to make sense of a job I once had posing as a female sales agent on an online retail store. What I found fascinating was how when customers typed their questions to me, they conducted their own Turing test to determine if I was real or just a computer program. The fact

that my chats were accompanied by the image of a blonde woman named Jessica attempted to use gender to not only assure them of my humanity, but to use femininity to “soften” internet retail. In reality, “Jessica” was a real person, a marketing ploy, and a computer program all rolled into one. What Turing’s essay on artificial intelligence made me realize is that the difficulty of telling the difference between man and machine resides in the fact that so much of our human responses are practically mechanical—rehashed clichés, talking points, and stereotypes that we employ to make our ideal self legible to and validated by others. Humans try just as hard as machines and in equally artificial ways to prove our humanity. “Jessica” ultimately signifies the co-operation of human and machine to prove “human” to others so as to seem trustworthy and to ease the consumer on the other end into purchasing a product.

Turing’s inspiration for his determination of artificial intelligence was based on a parlor game called “The Imitation Game” in which individuals guess the gender of a hidden individual based on responses to questions. Turing defines it by the following:

“It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator(C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

“My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.”

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make  similar remarks”.

Turing’s model relies upon the subject of speculation being closeted. This closet, which can be seen by the interrogator, presupposes the content of either a female body, a male body, or in the case of the AI test, a machine or computer of some sort. The ability to detect the contents of the closet depends on the player’s ability to visualize a presence, knowing that something must be there to send the notes. Even when the machine is nothing but a box that can produce a tickertape, we project our sense of agency upon it. Because the mind works with sound images and visual signifiers, we cannot possibly imagine pure information without a visualization of authorship or some origin of the words. Therefore, we must attribute some sense of our selves via personification onto the product that produces the information in order to understand it

With the goal of the game as to fool as many people as possible, gender performativity becomes the ultimate modus operandi for victory. Without the context of voice or handwriting due to a neutral individual or teleprinter reading the responses, the only way to prove gender results from the content and phrasing of the information given. Per Turing’s example, if a woman were to have short hair, it would be in her best interest to lie and talk of long hair if she believes that the audience would expect a woman to have long hair. Therefore, the actual woman may not be bodily woman enough to correspond the signifier of woman formulated in the mind of the interrogator and must perform to what the interrogator pictures as a woman so as to prove her own authenticity

Just as artificial intelligence uses repeated programmed responses contoured around the expectations of the user to appear natural, so too does a woman’s gender appear natural as it countlessly repeats the same gestures and affects that we have come to associate with authentic femininity. The more a gesture is repeated, the more natural it feels until that gesture becomes ingrained in the unconscious as instinctual when it is in fact learned behavior. Thus, gender performance is both an unconscious involuntary process and a tactical employment of signifying acts of masquerade

As a final point, what I find additionally fascinating about the Turing test and the gender imitation game that inspired it is how closely it resembles the forms of online communication that we use to meet others on social networking sites. This is especially true for gay men because we increasingly use gay-targeted sites to meet other gays due to the stigma of meeting in public. Just as the gender imitation game occurs in a closet, so too do chats on a gay social networking site happen in a digital closet. We must make our ideal ego (or at least what we think the other man may want) legible and attractive via online communication. We can send textual descriptions, pictures, and even live chat via Skype, but the interaction we have is always managed to present the self in the most flattering light possible and supported by various forms of (soft) artificial intelligence such as the computer programs that broadcast us and the digital manipulation of photos. The person in Turing’s gender imitation game must prove he is male. In the online game of cyber courtship, we must prove through technology that we are a specific type of male that the other would want.

Turing’s Onion Model and the Queer Mind

One of Turing’s most startling, yet overlooked arguments in the aforementioned article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is his questioning of how we define human intelligence and the human mind in opposition to artificial intelligence:

In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations that we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin that we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the “real” mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it? In the latter case the whole mind is mechanical.

Here, Turing creates a distinction between the anatomy of the brain and its compartmentalized functions and what we may call the “mind” as the psychology of the individual composed of thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. The mechanical functions of the brain resemble the capacities of information storage and the mechanical operations of a machine like a computer. Just like how we know which parts of the brain control certain motor functions, so to do we know the role of each part of a machine and where information is stored on it. Yet “the mind”, which we presume a machine not to have, is not merely the sum of these motor functions and stored information in the brain. The mind is metaphysical; it is a social construction, a product of individual consciousness, and a subjective experience. The mind is an onion because it has no true core; just mutually informing layers of consciousness.

What I am arguing here is that Turing justifies his subjective model of determining artificial intelligence by reminding us that the “mind” that we all have that separates us from the artificial is itself a mysterious, socially constructed concept. The brain is naturally organic, but the mind is as artificial as the language, ideology, and various embodied states of subjective consciousness that we use to understand it and inhabit it. In this process, Turing “queers” the mind. Turing reminds us that there is no such thing as a normal or stable mind that we can access or locate if we just peel away the layers of subjectivity. Instead, this subjectivity defines the mind itself and defines our humanity.

For a gay individual, the demystification of a “normal” or a “real” mind is the key toward dismantling the notion that heterosexuality is the natural state of human sexuality and that homosexuality is an unnatural degeneration. As a function of the mind, homosexuality is as much of an invention of the cultural as heterosexuality (both words that did not exist prior to 1869) and thus both are “artificial” or “unnatural” because they are categories we fabricated to describe and categorize human psychology. To call one man’s mind natural and the other unnatural is to attempt to take human constructions and concepts and somehow force the rules of nature to comply with ideology. In featuring subjective judgment as the determining factor between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, Turing opens the door for an argument that all forms of intelligence and all faculties of the human mind including sexuality are products of subjective reasoning and individual consciousness.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: KIRUN KAPUR

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

ANTHEM
By Kirun Kapur

Love begins in a country
Where oranges weep sweeter
And men piss in the street;

Your hands are forever
Binding dark strands
In a plait. Your mother’s

Childhood friend has steeped your skin
In coconut oil, tucked her daughter beside you—
All night the room is a womb, live with twins.

Heat’s body presses every body. Sharp chop
Of your uncle’s cough clocks the hours; your sister’s
Washing, the rush of your thoughts. Morning is nine

Glass bangles hoisting sacks of sugar
From the floor. I’m not talking
About a place, but a country;

Its laws are your mother, its walls
Are your dreams. The flag it flies
Is your father waving away.


Today’s poem originally appeared in AGNI, and is reprinted here today with permission from the poet.


Kirun Kapur grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals and news outlets. She has been a poetry fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and McDowell Colony. This year, her work was awarded the Arts & Letters/Rumi Prize for Poetry. She lives in Massachusetts, where she is the co-director of The Tannery Series.


Editor’s Note: Today Kirun Kapur shares with us a beautiful lyric poem, replete with images you can nearly smell and touch. The dialogue between title and text is poignantly framed with the poem’s raw and honest conclusion.


Want to see more by Kirun Kapur?
AGNI
Beloit Poetry Journal
Beloit Poetry Journal Poet’s Forum
Crab Orchard Review
Clapboard House