Fighting The Wind

 

I awoke from troubled sleep thinking of Miniver Cheevy and Don Quixote.  In all of this “Make America Great Again” nonsense, America seems fixated on a past that never existed.  There was no perfect America.  America, and democracy, have always faced challenges and difficulties.  It takes work to be free.  We have, indeed, lost something along the way, but no cheap slogan will heal our divisions now.  No stuffed shirt, with a fake tan, and bird’s nest hair will fix what is broken.

“Miniver Cheevy” is a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson from his classic The Town Down The River.  In it, Cheevy spends all his time dreaming of the knights of old.  He despairs his current situation, weeping he was ever born.  He lives fully in this dreamscape past, which only exists in his mind:  “When swords were bright and steeds were prancing,” as Robinson characterizes it.  He clings to the “vision of the warrior bold,” even while he timidly approaches his real life, one far less colorful and exciting.  He does not want to put the effort in to change; he just wants everything to be as it was, but what it was consisted of a fantasy.  A Neverland.

He also traps himself in thought.  He mulls over in his brain the dearth of heroism, the “gold he sought,” and his misery without it.  He is the classic negative version of the man of thought, a person who spends so much time dreaming that real life in the present leaves him in the dust.  The poem ends with a taut summation:

Miniver Cheevy, born too late, / Scratched his head and kept on thinking; / Miniver coughed, and called it fate, / And kept on drinking.

Don Quixote also dreams of a past that never existed.  He longs for chivalry and the knight hero who vanquishes his enemies.  Cervantes was genius enough to devise a new genre in literature, the novel.  But his true gift to the canon is Don Quixote himself, a classic character, so much a part of literature and culture that his name has become a touchstone.  Quixote is a fool, a dreamer, an anachronism.  He refuses to see the world as it is, and instead, constructs a world of fantasy and imagination.  Of course, everyone is familiar with the classic phrase “tilting at windmills.”  In Quixote’s mind, those windmills must be challenged.  Quixote’s idealism must be protected and nurtured, even though it is misplaced in time and truth.

Don Quixote ends his life with an epiphany—his magical world does not, could not, exist.  We learn that a life of make-believe is no life at all.  This makes Cervantes’ work not a comedy, but a tragedy.  Quixote is both a sad figure, broken and disappointed by the end, and a painfully comic figure, a misguided nincompoop exposed by his fallacies and the wit of his sidekick, Sancho Panza.  The windmills are unvanquished, as enemies often are in real life.  We must live with our disappointments, our dreams, our Sturm und Drang of daily life.  The struggle continues.

Why was I dreaming of these two characters from literature?  It is easy to romanticize the past.  “The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” another poet, William Wordsworth, wrote.  We look around us and see the dark clouds on the horizon, the coming eclipse at noon.  We fear the shadowlands, the islands of our desperation.  Why can’t the world be the way we want it?  Why are we so afflicted?  We see ourselves as the biblical figure of Job, a righteous man tortured by Satan until he curses God for his misfortune.  Like Miniver Cheevy, Job rues the day he was born into this valley of tears.

Yet, this is life.  Good or bad, reality or dream, the past is past.  We are here, now, and only in this moment can we act.  Many people refuse to believe any action in the moment can alter what is to come.  But that is our fate as finite beings, to “rage against the dying of the light.”  We cannot “make America great again.”  Historians will define the nature of epochs.  We see the past as some perfect land, and we cannot help ourselves but want to get back to it.  The past of our dreams does not correspond to history.  And it is irrelevant anyway because it is gone.

I do not want to be Miniver Cheevy or Don Quixote.  There are enough dragons and windmills to go around these days, and they are real.  We must fight in the moment for what is sacred to us, what we want to happen in the now.  If chivalry and honor return, it is because we have made it so.  If we have the future of our choosing, then we have acted in the present tense.  That is all we can do.  To those who are like Job, no one ever said this would be easy.  No life is free from sorrow and angst.

I do not want my life to be caught in the web of the past, afraid to confront the present and what is to come. 

From Edgar Lee Masters and The Spoon River Anthology, come the words of his character, George Gray:  

 I have studied many times / The marble which was chiseled for me— / A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor. / In truth it pictures not my destination / But my life… / To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness, / But life without meaning is the torture / Of restlessness and vague desire— / It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

This is truth.  The only response to it is to act now.

The Smallest Lights In The Universe by Sara Seager

 

Astronomers tell us that every atom of our being originated with the celestial cataclysm of the Big Bang.  And every element and fiber, sentient or not, also has its origins there.  We are a multiverse of chemistry and matter, a plethora of particles and nuances.  When we look up to the heavens on an end-of-summer night, we see ourselves reflected back in the light of the stars.

Sara Seager, in her book, The Smallest Lights in the Universe:  A Memoir (Crown, 2020), has spent her career visualizing distant galaxies to find exoplanets, bodies that orbit distant stars, not unlike our sun, and who mirror the planets in our own solar system.  “There might be thousands of billions,” she writes, all “circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars.”  Hers is a study of light and dark, combing through space to get a clear glimpse of one of these exoplanets that might share some secret of what exists there at the very edge of what we see through the lens of a telescope.  To find this mirror earth would require us to see the “smallest lights in the universe.”  She searches for chemical signatures of life—water, oxygen, and other elements, but life elsewhere may not even incorporate the same elements as Earth.

Seager traces her life from the moment she knew she wanted to be an explorer of the stars.  On a camping trip as a child, she leaves her tent one night to gaze at the sky above her.  “My heart stopped,” she tells us.  “All these years later, I can still remember the feeling in my chest.  It was a moonless night, and there were so many stars—hundreds, perhaps thousands—over my head.  I wondered how such beauty could exist, and I wondered, too, why nobody had ever told me about it.”  She goes on to trace how in science, one investigation leads to another.  She has the epiphany that “scientists are explorers,” and she must follow her interests up into the heavens.

An important person in her formative years is her father.  He was a medical doctor who helped her focus on the things that matter, but she learns that “where you are changes everything.”  The first great tragic loss of her life is when he is diagnosed with cancer.  He tries to comfort her with platitudes:  “Death is a part of life…We start to die the day we are born.”  To the end, he supports her pursuit of her vocation.  “When the door of opportunity opens, you have to go through it,” he tells her as she contemplates taking up a challenging position at MIT.  As he approaches death, he pulls her to his side to tell her, “You are the joy of my existence.  You are the best thing that has ever happened to me, and you have exceeded all expectations.”  His loss profoundly affects Seager, and through her strong writing, impacts the reader as well.

The second major loss of her life is that of her husband, Mike.  They meet and form a bond, one that helps her navigate her world.  Later in life, she realizes that she is on the autism spectrum; in her days with Mike, she can be a bit standoffish and a loner.  He helps her socialize, and the two often journey into the wilderness to hike and canoe.  Together they have two sons, Max and Alex.  Their family is an even-numbered unit, complete and whole.  Mike takes care of most of the home duties leaving Seager to pursue her career.  Yet, he, too, is diagnosed with cancer, and as he fights the greatest battle of his life, Seager struggles to hold things together.  Her sons are very young, and she tries to shield them from the coming death.  The boys see the toll the disease takes on their father.  Seager wants them to remember their father.  She tells them that “memories are important,” and “All things live until they are forgotten.”  In the end, Mike’s passing leaves them an odd-numbered family, a group of three.  From studying her own grief through the lens of life after Mike, she realizes that we do not lose the dead all at once.  “You lose them a thousand times,” she writes, “in a thousand ways.  You say a thousand goodbyes.  You hold a thousand funerals.”

The saddest moment in the book and the most life-affirming is when she must let go of Mike’s memory to start a life with a new man, someone she was not looking for, nor did she think she would find.  In many ways, he seems like a better match for her, or maybe it is just that she has been changed by the confluence of elements in her life.  She is different, shifted, more light and sure of her world.

“I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a mirror at the heart of every large telescope,” she writes at the end of the book.  “If we want to find another Earth, that means we want to find another us.  We think we’re worth knowing.  We want to be a light in somebody else’s sky.  And so long as we keep looking for each other, we will never be alone.”

The strength of Sara Seager’s writing is the way she takes us into her life.  We gaze through the mirror lens to see the poetry of the stars, and through the light, come to see ourselves.

 

Stressors

 

Out here in the smoke and flames, the California State University system has announced they will be online for the spring 2021 semester.  Now the wait begins to see what the University of California system and the private colleges decide to do.  There is Covid-19, the raging fires, the civil unrest, the increasingly armed and dangerous conflicts between citizen groups, and the abject, duplicitous administration in Washington.  All this and the switch to remote learning:  is it any wonder students and teachers are stressed?

Across the country, parents, students, and teachers are trying to figure all of this out.  Parents are trying to balance their new roles as teachers’ aides while continuing to work from home.  Teachers are dealing with their children at home while attempting to teach others.  Older siblings, at the expense of their own learning and course work, take care of younger brothers and sisters so parents can work at home or in person at a job site.  This means that Zoom sessions often have chaotic backgrounds and noise, with several people in the household logged on to remote classrooms.  Bandwidth is precious and often limited, knocking students off in the middle of a lesson or exam.  Students continually struggle for equipment, textbooks, resources, and a stable internet connection.  Reported absenteeism is high while some college students are withdrawing and taking a leave of absence.  In many cases, teachers must revise methods and curricula on the fly, leading to even more confusion.

The long-term consequences of all of this are clear.  There will be lasting damage as Covid-19 continues to interrupt the focused, intensive, sequential education of students.  Will these students return in a safer time?  Will they have the financial resources to wait out the virus and continue their education?  For students in their formative years of elementary education, we are looking at the possibility of a generation of disenfranchised, under-educated students who will go on to drain federal and state resources as under-performing working adults, leading to unemployment, discontent, and anger.  There is a psychological impact in addition to the physical impact on a student due to the virus and the existential threats like fire and civil unrest.  And when does civil unrest become a civil war?  We may need an answer to that question very soon.

We are especially vulnerable to high unemployment for graduating college students, even with a paradigm shift from traditional majors like English and philosophy to job-ready majors like social work, nursing, and criminology.  They will attempt to enter the workforce during a tighter economy and job market.  Will graduates be able to find employment with pay equal to their qualifications and college degrees?  Will they be financially secure enough to begin repaying their student loans?  Recovery from the impact of this disease may not happen quickly, even with a vaccine and people returning to some sense of a normal life.  Normal may be a relative term in the post-Covid-19 world.

There are far too many unanswered questions regarding what will happen between now and November, or now and January.  The problems Americans face will not be resolved immediately with a new president or a different party in control of the House or Senate.  To get out of this mess, we will need new, strong, consistent leadership and planning.  It will take a herculean effort of ordinary people pulling together in a united front for the good of the nation.  We have been able to pull that off only on very rare occasions in the past.  Does America have what it takes to pull itself out of such a deep hole this time?

What we are in now is survival mode.  We are trying to keep the ship afloat, but the water is rising.  In the last few days, it feels as if our survival mode is slipping slowly toward anarchy.

With all of this, and trying to educate and be educated, I ask again:  is it any wonder teachers and students are stressed?

Journeys North by Barney Scout Mann

There are many metaphors for life:  a ship upon the open ocean; the solo flight around the world; the long walk across the land.  All are powerful and shamanistic in their own right, important as dreamscapes of our unconscious desires to pack meaning into our brief moments of existence.

Barney Scout Mann, in his book, Journeys North:  The Pacific Crest Trail (Mountaineer Books, 2020), takes us on such an expedition.  His approach is slightly different from previous memoirs of great walks.  The most famous in recent years is Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, wherein the author takes us on a deeply personal, Zen pursuit of personal enlightenment and redemption.  The originator of the genre is the great John Muir, whose journey was about nature, the world, and a human being’s place in all of it.

Mann takes a nonfiction novel approach with characters, a well-paced plot, and a final push to the climax.  His account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) has elements of a soap opera—relationships form and fall apart; characters find themselves in jeopardy; and there is the world on the trail and the parallel universe off the trail.  The characters exchange the day-to-day grind of jobs, responsibilities, loved ones, momentary achievements and resounding disappointments for the singular focus of staying alive on the trail with blistered feet, wounds that won’t heal, aching bodies, and circumstances that push them beyond their limits.

Because he takes a novelistic approach to the story of a group of hikers traveling the 2650-mile PCT in 2007, he sets himself up as the first-person narrator.  There is some difficulty with this.  The hikers spread out along the trail, often overtaking and passing their colleagues only to have them pass ahead the next day.  It is a fluid experience.  Some take what are known as “zero days,” when hikers check into a motel for a day off to recuperate.  Others suffer injuries and must seek medical attention before returning to the trail.  Because Mann has his own experiences, and in the book also relates others’ adventures, he is more of a first-person omniscient narrator, something that does not always work.  He relies on other hikers’ online trail blogs and interviews with them that he later folds into the account.  He does a good job of setting up tension in the plot, hinting at some piece of action to come, sometimes moving back and forth in time to weave in backstory.  Still, the best parts are when he acts as a true first-person narrator with his observations and insights as he encounters people and obstacles along the trek.  He and his wife, Sandy, are the central characters that bind the entire enterprise together.  It is no wonder that hikers consider them the parents or grandparents of the experience.

Each character comes with a trail nickname.  That is how Mann becomes Scout, and his wife becomes Frodo.  The nicknames and real names were confusing at the start, and how they came to have a particular nickname felt like a joke the reader was not entirely in on, since each name comes with a story from the trail.  Because many of the nicknames are not gender-specific, this quirk took some time to define each character.  For example, one of the central characters was a young woman named Amanda, also known as Blazer.  Another named Paul was also known as Bounty Hunter.  A third, who was an accomplished opera singer, was called Figaro.  For some reason, with the trail names, I found it difficult to lock in on the characters and had to keep turning back to find where they were introduced in an attempt to cement their identities in my mind.

The book is filled with intimacies, secrets, pleas for redemption, all of which add to the novelistic approach.  Characters have epiphanies.  They suffer through the epic adventures of people on a quest, each finding his or her way up the trail, an apt metaphor for how we live.  One major plot twist comes in the last third of the book, something that alters forever how we see Mann and his wife.  I did not see it coming, and it reveals our heroes to be deeply flawed.  I kept thinking about it after I finished reading, and when I participated in an author reading online, I found myself wondering about the couple’s more than three decades of marriage.

The strength of this narrative comes from seeing the PCT as a parallel universe.  In an intensely focused, highly personal, and redemptive journey north, one sees our existence in the broader parameters of daily life.  But this is about survival in the moment, something we sometimes lose in the expanse of time.  The PCT has a beginning, middle, and end; in life, we have beginnings, middles, backtracking to begin again, endings, and then, other beginnings.  All of them parallel this one, focused hike from Mexico to Canada.  That is the value of this kind of narrative.  Life happens; we change; and then we go on.  Sometimes, we are forced back to confront our anger or our fears, and then we begin again.  In that way, Journeys North is a reflection of what it is like to test oneself over and over again, burnishing who we are, and discovering what we are to do with our lives.