Thursday, October 31, 2019

The Education Of An Idealist


Samantha Power, in her memoir The Education Of An Idealist (Dey Street Books, 2019), wears that mantle proudly.  She is wholeheartedly idealistic even in the shadow of a complicated, dangerous world where hope has not been in so much jeopardy since the Second World War.  Of course, that is only one of a slew of events in the twentieth century where the concept of genocide became dinner table conversation, and human beings practicing ethnic cleansing, systematic murder, and ritual bloodletting have already set the course for new crimes against humanity in the twenty-first century.  Power maintains her cool through all the tragedies and diplomatic throw-downs, even when she is ignored or dismissed out of hand.  She keeps her positive attitude and stays in the fight, a strong, powerful woman who has absorbed the wisdom of her mentors and her family.  This makes her an admirable figure, someone who stays true to herself and the uniquely American idea that we all must work together for a better world, both geopolitical enemies and friends alike.

Power, born in Ireland, is a natural storyteller.  Evidence of this is readily apparent in her previous book, “A Problem From Hell”:  America and the Age of Genocide (Perennial, 2002), for which she won the Pulitzer Prize.  That book attracted attention with its treatment of the first genocide of the twentieth century, the Armenian Genocide.  She is one of the first historian/journalists to address this murderous event upon which Hitler modeled his own destruction of the Jewish people.

“We make sense of our lives through stories,” she writes, “stories have the power to bind us.”  She believes it is the stories that bring people together and offer a means of acceptance and fellowship.  The story is always front and center in her memoir, often with riveting intensity.  Her personal story is one of “sorrow, resilience, anger, solidarity, determination, and laughter…[but] also a story of idealism—where it comes from, how it gets challenged, and why it must endure.”

Her strength comes from her mother.  As she made her way in her Irish Catholic school, she looked up to her mother who was the first in her family to attend college and become a doctor.  Power describes her mother as “simply curious and intensely empathetic,” traits inculcated in Power as she came of age.  She becomes a voracious reader and student.  Meanwhile, her father sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholism and self-destructive behavior.  He takes his children to the local pub where he drinks and entertains the other patrons with his stories.  Power gets her inquisitive nature from her mother and her storytelling from her father, and later, her stepfather, but tragedy looms that will take a lifetime to comprehend.  After her parents split and her mother takes her and her brother to live in the United States, her father’s girlfriend finds his decomposing body in Power’s former childhood home in Ireland.  He is dressed in a suit “as if ready to head out of town,” in a “derelict, filthy house.”  He had begged her mother to allow the children to come home for a visit, but the conservative nature of Irish courts might have been persuaded to take the children away from the mother since she was fleeing the country, and indeed, he did try to keep them in Ireland on a previous visit.  However, the guilt for Power came from a devastating blow:  her father was found dead in her childhood bed.  For years she believed she, his oldest child, was in some way responsible for her father’s death.

In her adopted country, Power alternates between her fear of the Catholic nuns and the comfort of Catholic rituals.  It is the faith that helps her deal with the challenges in her home life.  She also makes astute observations about her new country.  “The United States was the first place I had been that didn’t seem to want its people to pause and reflect during the day.”  Quickly, though, Power finds success and is accepted to Yale University, but the melancholic threads entangle her in the presentiment that something will go wrong, that she will never escape the darkness of her parents’ failed marriage.

She keeps the darkness at a distance and throws herself into her school work, eventually asking herself the question so necessary to college education and a consideration of the future:  what should she do with her life?  In this questioning, she finds her true calling and switches her major to history where her intensity for her studies multiplies and things begin to click.  She realizes that lived experience is better than abstract history, and this sets her on the path to journalism.  Dignity, she realizes as she covers the war in Bosnia and Serbia, is a historical force.  Mentors she meets along the way tell her to work for the people and to improve their lives.  Constantly seek to answer the question, one tells her, will it do any good?  This altruism seems quaint in the age of Trump and partisan politics, but Power is not naive; her research into ethnic cleansing and the use, specifically, of rape as a weapon of terror, teach her much about the way of the world, so much so that she decides to leave journalism to do something that will influence policy and change thinking.

Being a journalist had sharpened her storytelling skills, and she quickly realizes that bringing these stories to the rest of the world, including those who have the power to effect change, that would be the proper work of a lifetime.  Her research and subject are clear:  the heart of darkness, the violence of mankind.  She begins researching and documenting murderous attacks on men, women and children.  She tells us that in Rwanda, in one hundred days, 800,000 people were murdered.  She writes to define, fully and without equivocation, genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass murder, and how those categories include or differ from, the Holocaust.  The dead in Rwanda accumulated at a rate three times that of the Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust.  In the face of such brutality and human suffering, what constitutes just military intervention?  She feels an “inexhaustible need to learn everything.”

Photo courtesy of Pete Souza / Official White House photo

Of course, the majority of the book is about her time working with Barack Obama and being the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.  Once Power begins working with Obama, the book becomes a bit more like the traditional political memoir.  She hits all the tropes of such a book, the feuds, the missteps, the awkwardness; Washington D.C. is, at its heart, a small town, and Power quickly earns a reputation as a fighter.  With her intensity and ever-present notebook, she continues to fight for the rights of others, and she finds common ground with the future president from Illinois.  She has good things to say about both Joe Biden and John McCain, although the latter gives her a blasting over a nomination and the deteriorating situation in Syria.  One aspect that she makes very clear in the book is that politics are, always, about people.  Because of her strong belief in this guiding principle, she fights hard for the rights of women and girls around the world.

The darkest episode here, though, is the Boko Haram’s April, 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls from their school in Nigeria.  The name Boko Haram itself means “western education is forbidden.”  She decides to journey to the region but while there, tragedy strikes.  One of the SUVs in her security convoy hits and kills a young boy named Toussaint.  This sends Power into a crisis of conscience.  She tells her entourage of security people that she wants to go see the boy’s family, a decision, they tell her, that cannot happen because her safety would be in jeopardy.  “I think no decision in my life up to that juncture seemed like less of a choice than a question of whether to pay our respects [to the boy’s family],” she writes.  The meeting, as expected, does not go well.  In reflection, Power writes “Toussaint’s death forced me to more directly confront a charge often made against the United States—that even when we try to do right, we invariably end up making situations worse.”

Samantha Power’s memoir is a powerful and insightful read offering a front row center seat on the Obama administration and the world in which it operated.  Power adopts her motto from the Koran:  “To save a life is to save all of humanity.”  She also is cognizant, in the latter pages of the book in regards to Toussaint’s death, of the creed to “First do no harm,” the motto of doctors like her mother.  She believes quite strongly, after all she has seen, that “People who care, act, and refuse to give up may not change the world, but they can change many individual worlds.”  This is hope in the face of extreme adversity; this is what it means to look to the horizon not because the sun is setting but because it will rise again.




Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Outpost


Dan Richards, in his book Outpost (Canongate Books, 2019), tells us stories about some of the most remote places on earth.  However, his work here cannot compare to Philip Connors’ Fire Season (Ecco, 2011), Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1990) or anything by John Muir or Gretel Ehrlich.  He cites frequently from all of these writers, but his own work is, when all is said and done, a bit of a disappointment.  Richards is not writing about what it is like to live in these places of solitude, but how he, the writer, traveled to these places.  We get up close and personal with him hitching rides and calling in favors from friends with cars, and therein lies the problem:  we are never allowed to forget that Richards is only stumbling around on his way to these far-flung places.  For a book about places of solitude and emptiness, it is annoying to hear about how Richards waited in a gas station for a ride.

The book starts out promising enough with a poem by Wendell Berry, and that illustrates an important point.  There are so many writers who have done the solitude standing thing so much better.  In this age of climate change and melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, a nature writer must have an extraordinary story to tell.  Richards gives us an observation of those who are actually living in these places.  It is second hand at best.  Berry ends his poem with his resting “in the grace of the world,” his freedom out in the big blue yonder.  We can already guess that there is a lot of empty blacktop and gravel to get away from it all, but that is not the most interesting part of the story.

In his study of people in these places, Richards again does not really break new ground.  We know Jack Kerouac did time on Desolation Peak in Washington state as a fire watcher.  Read Philip Connors if you want to know what that is like or Cactus Jack himself.  Richards spends considerable time talking about the logistics of going to Mars, Utah.  We get it:  the landscape is just like Mars.  It is used as training ground for astronauts. Fantastic.

Richards does make the point that homo sapiens is a destructive species, and we are living in the Age of Anthropocene where humans are ruining the planet.  But there are not enough nuts and bolts here, nor a full explanation of the delicate balance of the eco-system we are supposed to be destroying.  This is something Gretel Ehrlich does so well in her books; she puts us in the muck of it.  With Richards we are always kept at a distance.

Instead, we get a meditation on writers’ cabins.  We learn that Roald Dahl wrote in a cabin in his garden.  For Dylan Thomas, it was a shed above his home.  George Bernard Shaw had a hut on his property mounted on a turntable so it could be rotated to follow the sun.  Writers need solitude; do we not know this?

Then there is Theseus’ Paradox:  Richards muses on whether or not an object, such as a boat, if it has all of its constituent parts replaced, is it fundamentally the same object?  All of this is well and good, but I found myself chuckling in skepticism when Richards tells us, “Much of this book examines emptiness, the way particular spaces affect people and vice versa in a creative and explorative sense, but ‘space’ itself, outer space, mankind’s fascination with the heavens, the mechanisms, mysteries and beauty of vaults and worlds unknown, explode such thoughts to a dazzling degree.”  Say what?  The book talks about the roads to those spaces, and the last part of that quote just seems like gobbledygook.  What is “to a dazzling degree?”  Then, he quotes Sylvain Tesson in a footnote:  “To be alone is to hear silence.”  Now we have philosophy; now we have something worth contemplating.  Why, exactly, do we need to hear silence?  What is the value of silence?  Why do we seek such places of solitude?  For the answers, go to Muir, go to Ehrlich, go to Abbey.  Instead, we get Richards on a plane talking with a seatmate, a lawyer for Amazon.  She is looking for a new base for the company away from Seattle because North Korean nukes can hit the city and in a post-apocalyptic world, people will still need to buy stuff.  Is that insight into why we crave solitude?

Richards does not stop there.  He believes, in his informal survey along his travels to these outposts in the United States, that the country is pretty well split with half thinking Obama was the worst president and the other half believing that Trump is the worst.  Is there anything connecting that “fiery” thesis to solitude?  I can tell you that every night when I turn on the news, I want to flee to the Arctic circle, build a snow house, and hide away until the end of civilization has come and gone.  The need for solitude and time to think has never been more sorely imperative.  Then come the clichés about Los Angeles—everyone is working on a screenplay.  Not the freshest of revelations.  In fairness, he does offer an insight into the desire to dump the digital—we need to get in touch with the wild, be present in the moment, concentrate, realize our smallness in the world.  But let’s see that in action.  What do those manning the outposts have to say about that?

I did like his take on stories and storytelling.  It is necessary to the world and how we make sense of this life.  A story crosses cultural boundaries and human frailties.  Stories give us heroes and modes of behavior and the thrill of being alive.  Richards concludes from this, though, that stories make us better humans.  Again, a soft landing to an imperative.  Storytelling in cultures is passion and history.  It is a way to save the memory of the dead, the wisdom of ancestors.  Try that hat on for size.  And he ends the book the way he began, with a fragment of poetry, this time from Gary Snyder:

At the last turn in the path
            goodbye—

All goodbyes are little deaths.  Outposts take us to the edge of that.  They remind us of boundaries and borders between who we are and who we wish to become, of ancestors and future kings and queens who will carry on long after we are gone.  If I am going to travel to the rim of the world, send John Muir and Gretel Ehrlich along as soul companions.  The hike up is just a lot of sweat and steam; the view, the aloneness, the solitude absolute, the great vault of heaven—that is what we came for; only that is worth the loneliness of the last outpost.




Tuesday, October 15, 2019

The Salt Path


During their journey on the South West Coast Path, Raynor Winn, author of The Salt Path (Penguin Books, 2019), and her husband Moth, encounter a Tarot card reader who offers them a free reading.  “Give time for what you know you must do and you will have what you desire most,” the woman tells them.  She then turns to Moth and says, “And you will be well.  She has a long lifeline, and you’re in it.”

This is remarkable because Winn is not giving the time to walk the 630 mile trail from Somerset to Dorset.  She has no choice.  They can be homeless in the English town where the couple’s lost farm was seized by the bailiffs to pay an unfair, court-enforced debt, or they can become like the homeless transients the couple later encounters on the trail itself.  Either way, they are homeless.  So, short on options, they set off walking in the hope that the next step in their lives will become apparent on the journey.  And Moth, well he has a terminal disease which would seem to preclude a long life as well as a long arduous journey on foot through southwestern England.

This beautiful, poetic memoir contains almost unbearable lyrical sadness ending in quiet triumph.  At its heart, the book is about the way life bends and pulls us, and how if we are not flexible and resilient, we will snap and fall off the cliff to the rocks and tides below.  It is also about rebirth, rejuvenation, and enlightenment of a secular Zen nature.  We see these two come back to life and rise from the ashes of what was to embrace the reality of what is and the uncertainty of what will be.  They become “salted” on this salt path, as one of the many curious characters they meet tells them.  She also says they have “the look,” as she passes them “wild camping” along the trail.  “It’s touched you,” she continues, “it’s written all over you:  you’ve felt the hand of nature.  It won’t ever leave you now; you’re salted…but when it’s touched you, when you let it be, you’re never the same again.”

These nuggets of wisdom and metaphysical knowing come from a variety of interesting characters.  A man practicing yoga trailside seems to know all the burden and strife the middle-aged couple carries.  They tell him they are just walking the path because there is nothing more to do after one loses everything.  The man replies, “you’ll travel many miles…You’ll see many things, amazing things, and suffer many setbacks, problems you’ll think you can’t overcome…but you will overcome them, you’ll survive, and it will make you strong.”  Then he offers the strangest of observations:  “And you’ll walk with a tortoise.”  After he is gone, the couple remark on the near total absence of tortoises running wild in the English countryside.  It is a moment of humor in all the extreme challenges facing the two on their journey.  Yet, the prophecy does come true, but how and in what manner is up to the reader to discover.  It is a good story.  The wording of the prophet’s message reminded me of The Odyssey and C.P. Cavafy’s poem, “Ithaka,” and it is not the only allusion to that epic.

This journey-as-healing memoir is popular now:  Cheryl Strayed’s wonderful Wild, (Vintage, 2012) and on a darker note, Jon Krakauer’s tale of Christopher McCandless’ disappearance into the Alaskan wilderness in Into the Wild (Anchor Books, 1997).  However, Winn’s book adds a layer of richness with the infamous stoicism of the English.  There is something about these tales that transcends culture and becomes universal.  We can relate to financial catastrophe after living through the recession.  We can understand sorrow and despair in the face of pain and suffering.  We feel the sting of reprobation when we fail our families and friends.  “How could this happen,” they ask.  “Did you squander your money?”  In the rational thought of most people, we are the architects of our own demise.  However, tragedy strikes erratically in a random universe.  There is no right or wrong path; there is only the path, the one we are on and the one we are trying to navigate to the best of our ability.  And sometimes, we must simply get out and walk away to find where we belong.

In Winn’s story, there is a resurrection of sorts.  Moth seems healed, or at least very much stronger than when he starts the journey.  And he appears to grow stronger as the journey progresses, although he does have moments where he feels unwell.  “He’d changed,” Winn writes, “there was no question, he’d changed and according to the doctors that wasn’t possible.”  This is similar to what John Muir experienced and wrote about in his books.  People pronounced ill by doctors go to nature and find themselves healed.  It is extraordinary, and maybe the result of exercise and reduced calories.  The couple finds themselves starving, subsisting on noodles, pasties and berries, the last disastrous to their gastro-intestinal systems.



Winn crosses into philosophy, as a journey such as this might inspire.  “On a basic level, maybe all of us on the path were the same,” she writes.  “Perhaps we were all looking for something that was missing.  Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was.”  She goes on to say that they are “Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death.  At the edge of existence.”  These philosophical musings go hand in hand with such physical and soulful journeys.  And of course, the real subject of such debate is death.  How do we live in a world where we are destined to die?  Winn finds herself shifting into the autumn season, the gradual denouement into the winter years.  She tells us, “I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold on to, or angry at an authoritarian system too bureaucratic to see the truth.  A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.”

Is that not the point of all journeys?  We must find the place to stand; we must make peace with the raging emotions and angry emptiness inside.  We desire, whatever it takes, to find home.  All journeys, of course, end, and that ending can be, metaphorically or literally, death.  That is the ultimate end of us all.  This is alluded to when the couple comes upon a bench on which a quote is carved:  “Meet me there, where the sea meets the sky, lost but finally free.”

Winn comes to a clearer, more direct conclusion.  “Living with a death sentence, having no idea when it will be enacted, is to straddle a void.  Every word or gesture, every breath of wind or drop of rain matters to a painful degree.”  They thought they would be buried on their farm, now lost.  It has become someone else’s place, another family’s home.  They decide to have their ashes commingled and scattered into the sea, to be together always.  They discover, in short, they are each other’s home.

This is a moving and poetic book, sad yet also life affirming.  Raynor and Moth Winn face heavy blows that nearly take them out of the daily ebb and flow of their shared lives.  But in the face of this adversity, this loss and living on, they find themselves.  That journey is the gift of The Salt Path.