The Blackberry Blinders: It's a Small World After All

Classes start in a couple of days at the university where I work. The streets of this small Midwestern city are full of the scantily clad bodies of twenty-somethings, tanned to perfection, waxed and manicured and most of them disturbingly overweight; they obviously didn't spend their summers doing farmwork or construction and if they spent the last three months waiting on tables, the traditional late night eating and drinking afterward more than made up for the exercise of dashing from table to table. These are my students.

One of my colleagues, who has yet to go through parenting completely, which teaches you much more than how to be scathingly accurate in  your assessment of the level of pheromones and hormones in any given room full of teens and twenties, is already despairing vocally of the returning students. "The information is all on our website!" he rants at the conclusion of his tenth call in a row asking how to declare a major in our department. "I spent all summer designing that website and not a single student has bothered to check it!" It's lucky his hair is trimmed very short, and I suspect his wife may have suggested it, since his temperament is the kind that tends to pulling out hair in the midst of agonizing frustration.

A half hour later he's back at my desk. "Do you think it might help if I put a big, bold-faced line on the homepage as an active link to the information on degree plans? Something really big and simple they couldn't possible miss?" Poor man. His daughter is four. He has so far to go before he really knows what is going on with our students. For they don't come from his world at all really, even though he grew up in this state just two decades before they did.

Today's twenty-somethings don't send emails and they don't check websites, despite the fact that most of them have the ability to do so right on the sleek, smooth phones that are always within easy reach and heard even though they always, absolutely always, have the white cords of earbuds hanging from their ears to their shoulders. Emails (which is now so old it has officially lost its once mandatory hyphen), along with the entire internet including but not limited to Google Search, is too big. Instead of email, this generation texts. Instead of searching the internet, they wait for a relevant Twitter stream.

It's as if this whole generation now filling the sidewalks of my town and which will soon ooze into the hallways of our classroom buildings has pulled its collective collar up and tucked its neck into its shadow like a turtle might, to protect itself. This generation never had a chance to avoid the information explosion. This generation cut its collective teeth on the rawhide of Wikipedia, of collective intelligence for which everyone and no one is ever held responsible...but everyone must be held to account. They grew up knowing they could know everything, and that some of us actually expected them to do just this: Know Everything.

The sea of information is vast, endless, and its horizon, knowledge, is never reached. No one knows that better than today's 20-somethings. And so they've pretty much stopped sailing for the horizon; they've put in their earplugs and fastened their eyes on the small screen of their iPhones and Blackberries. If it's not a small piece of knowledge, don't offer it to them. If it doesn't fit in a text without a break, if it doesn't tweet: Toss it. It won't be read. There is no time. If they open the door even a crack, all that knowledge out there will come rushing in, the floodwaters of history, from the ancient scrolls to the monks in mountainside monasteries to children in Africa walking barefooted across scorched grasslands to get to school for one more day. These lush and overly ripe American students are supposed to know it all.

And so they've shut down. They seek to know only what they have to know. To get a job, to get an A. Welcome back, students.

(I realize, of course, that there are amazing and marvelous exceptions to this, and I thank and bless each one of you and wish  you happy sailing.)

Remembrance and Mindfulness and Things Past and Future

A professor emeritus in my department just emailed me to ask whether I had written up an account of my time in Egypt this summer. He'd lived there for a while back in 1952 (!) and retained an active interest in Cairo ever since. It made me wish I had written up an account on my experience there, a wish I may yet turn into a wish come true. All I really have in written form are entries in this blog, all of which recently seem affected some way by the experience of Egypt in this year of widespread uprisings. But these are not really accounts of what I saw, what I heard, what I felt and thought and wondered. These are just components of my life filtered through the experience of Egypt in the winter of their discontent and the spring of their jubiliation and now the long summer of their tribulation and trial, of impatient necessary patience. And I sense that from now on, all my doings will have this filter, my own malaria of memory that will be with me uneradicably.

Perhaps this is what the saying means, "Once you drink of the water of the Nile, you will always come back to its banks." Perhaps one never really leaves its banks. Or perhaps, as in the Libyan poet Mattawa's poem, "The Two River Ledger," the waters of the Nile are the waters of Lethe, of forgetfulness. Another way to put this is to say the waters of unmindfulness, in other words, the exact opposite of the Buddhist exortation to a state and life of mindfulness. Living in the US as I do, I cannot help but think of unmindfulness as being somehow related to the pursuit of The Rapture. Is unmindfulness related to all fundamentalist religions perhaps?

No wonder I am drawn most to the kind and gentle ways of the followers of Buddha. There is no god; there is just the wonderful body, the repository of the compassionate spirit and the light. As Egypt struggles to make practical the ideals that led its January uprising to topple Mubarak, in other words, to make an uprising into a genuine revolution, wouldn't it be nice if mindfulness was kept a part of the progress?

It worries me to see news about movements afoot to ban swimwear on Egypt's great beaches, at least for women and to cover the Sphinxes and pyramids, symbols of an ancient and pre-Muslim civilization. I think of what happened in Afghanistan five years ago, when the Taliban blew up statues of the Buddha for the crime of being un-Islamic. Happily, some reconstruction of those precious statues has begun now. Mindfulness. Like the retired professor, I will be watching Egypt forever now.

Khaled Mattawa: Poet of Libya

The rebels are finishing their six-month ousting of Muammar Qaddafi by claiming Tripoli. In the West, we have grown jaded about Qaddafi, even though, he has, from time to time, served the interests of those who have economic interest in stability in the Middle East and Northern Africa. Our attention spans here are notoriously short, and Qaddafi has been around too long. Few of us could give a good reason to oust him or to support him. For a while now, Libya has seemed self-contained. Its troubles haven't seemed to affect us. We don't really know what the sides there mean right now.

But you know a man's bad when the poets all leave town, and Libya's poets have been out of the country for years now. Khaled Mattawa was one of many who have made their homes in other nations of the world since Qaddafi took control of his birthplace. We were lucky enough to have Mattawa's family come to the States. He now teaches in my next door state of Michigan. I  hope to get to hear him read in person some time, and I trust his poems in English because he writes in both Arabic and English.

Here, to remind us that Libya really does deserve a chance to be free, is some of Mattawa's work. Here's to people like Mattawa soon feeling they have a choice about returning home again. More of his poetry is available in his books or by clicking on any of the live links herein.

TWO-RIVER LEDGER

Joke used to be:

if you don't like it,

drink from the sea. Now

drink from the Nile.
Year 2030 all the fish will die
before reaching Dimietta.
Sometimes the world breaks
into shards aiming for your face.
Before they reach you
they turn into bubbles
and what joy to see them burst!

I'm talking about Lethe,
not the neighborhood in Benghazi,
five kilometers from the airport
where my father is building a house--
no architect, no map,
no contractor, no frills.
My mother says too big;
my brother, just
like the old house;
my sister, too far.
My father tells them:
Go drink from the sea.

Sadly, Fadil recites
"The waves beat ceaselessly
against my heart."
His neighbors console
"O Eye, be brave!"
Which do you think is resurrection,
the soul chiseling its way
back into the body,
or the body like a doughnut
rewrapping itself around a hole?
Is there such a thing as the art
of farewelling? Is there any other art?

Fadil now cries from a minaret,
"How I wish to drink
from the waters of Lethe,
how I wish to die
on a mountain of fruit."
His neighbors hand him
a spoonful of hashish.

Here's my father again,
drowning in his own water,
tubes out of arms and nose,
mouth open, lavender tongue.

What do you make of the dead,
their voices drifting to outer space,
and the radar we've built
to recapture them?

"Do not forget the blue shoes
I bought you when you were four.
Do not forget the nights
I carried you to the doctor,
frail, choking with coughs.
Do not forget to love your mother.
Do not forget the rosemary bush."

The Answers Are Still Blowing in the Wind

Today is my daughter's birthday. I wrote this poem while she was in Egypt this winter, watching and listening as best she could given the lack of internet and phones in her desert home, the revolution blossoming in Cairo. I was, at the time, deeply involved in our smaller manifestation of democracy right here in Wisconsin, protesting along with tens of thousands of my fellow citizens the anti-middle class regimen being bulldozed through our state like a grim reaper of small, unimportant people. We faced blizzards. In her world, in Tunisia and Egypt, the winter winds whipped up the desert sands. It was the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fires right here in the USA, one of the sadder moments resulting from the collision of democracy and capitalism.

And now it's her birthday. She is back in the US, starting a doctoral program and grappling with acute culture shock still. Meanwhile, to the immediate west of Egypt, right between it and Tunisia, the rebel fighters in Libya are tonight celebrating the downfall of Muammar Qaddafi in Tripoli.

Happy birthday, my darlin' daughter. I love you deeply. Here's your poem:

"Answers in the Wind"
February 1, 2011

Where did this wind, this tumult,

begin? Some say Tunisia. Others

say it began in the exhaled cry

of a hitherto unnoticed

martyr: Shaheed.

                                     A child, but

what did she know, ventured
that it came from a tall dark angel,
smelling distinctly of rosewater. The
internet forecasters,meanwhile,

looking nervously over their

shoulders, pointed their

noticeably stocky forefingers
at the Front Range of the

Rockies like low pressure is

all we are talking about here.

Let's be clear.

                                  We are not

just talking about a snowstorm,
even though the slashing
snow is presently lacerating my

wool coat like the needles

of all those pale and pinch-faced

shirtwaist workers, wielded like

bayonets on New York's Lower

Eastside one hundred years ago.

Long ago.            

                           This wind

goes from my world of ice and
drifting snowdunes and the
monstrous scraping plows barrelling
down the wide avenues with
some tangible sense of superiority to
your world: Sun and sand and stone,

highrises and pyramids and

tanks topped with implacable

soldiers barricading museums full of

our earliest artifacts.

                                           Yes, ours.

Yours and mine. Yours and mine and

yes those of the skinny, hungry,

angry seamstresses on Hester Street
whose relatives are right now
watching Cairo from comfortable
kitchens in Haifa and Tampa, clucking
their tongues and clacking their
knitting needles, saying how
Mubarak wasn't really all that
bad, was he? He kept the peace,

now didn't he?

                                   He was; he didn't

he. He locked the door on the
seamstresses when the Triangle
factory caught fire way back
then, and he still smells like
sulfur when he passes. Let us
hope he passes soon. He blows,
and the sands of the Sinai
slowly cover the bleached bones
of his tenure. He blows, and the
shingles of my old house yearn
and pull at their ancient moorings,

remembering.

                                 In Egypt, my own

daughter waits for the wind to
pass, for the sky to clear.
Here in the snowy north, I
too wait for this violent storm
to subside. But not tonight. This
wind howls like wolves only do
when starving, and I have
nailed up all my heavy blankets
to keep the desert sand from

drifting in my doorway.

                                            Across the

wide world, Hope, my white dove
in the distant Sinai, tucks her

head under a sprouting wing in

her made-for-the-Arctic downbag,

while beyond the flap of the
fabric door,a circle of all male
Bedouins puff and chortle around
their campfire lighting the side

of Mount Moses.

We All Come From There

The promised "next post," regarding the over-achieving cohort of Indian college students and its relationship to the sky-rocketing suicide rate of this same cohort, will have to wait. Israel has suffered another suicide bombing and so, as is their wont, they are bombing Gaza again and, as is their wont, the Palestinians are throwing rocks again.

OK, okay. That is a very bad attempt at self-deprecating humor. The Palestinians have protested more mightily than by lobbing stones; they are firing rockets. Some have even landed. Ok, okay. I'm just trying to point out that there's a reason the Israelis were able to successfully evict a majority population of Arabs from the land of Palestine and herd them, along with their armies, into two tiny and unproductive plots of land in the fifties. The Palestinians, no matter how Israel tries to depict them as desperate threats, don't really have a credible, well-operating army. How could they. They're basically prisoners, in their own country.

On a completely serious note, what is happening right now is that following the terrorist attack on a bus in Southern Occupied Palestine aka Israel, Israeli soldiers chased the perpetrators (minus the two who blew themselves to pieces along with the Israeli bus driver and several passengers) to the nearby border shared with Egypt and right over that ever-precarious line in the sand into the Egyptian Sinai. In the course of their pursuit they shot, depending whose news source you read, Haaretz or El Jazeera, three or five Egyptian patrolmen on duty at that border.

I would like you to think for just a moment what Israel's government might order if Egyptian officers pursued Israeli citizens across the border the other direction and (oops!) inadvertantly shot and killed, say, offhandedly, three to five Israeli soldiers who were not offering any resistance. I don't think there's anyone over 18 and literate on this whole planet who does not know this reverse situation would be the tipping point of a major, resumed armed conflict.

So instead of talking about brighter than bright Indian students who are sent to American universities to bring home all the honors, I would like to doff my figurative cap for a minute of silence and offer a couple of poems.

"I Come From There"

by Mahmoud Darwish

(translator unknown)

I come from there and I have memories

Born as mortals are, I have a mother

And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.


I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up

To make a single word: Homeland.....

and here's another one, from a Palestinian American woman, Naomi Shihab Nye:

"Blood"

"A true Arab knows how to catch a fly in his hands,"

my father would say. And he'd prove it,

cupping the buzzer instantly
while the host with the swatter stared.

In the spring our palms peeled like snakes.
True Arabs believed watermelon could heal fifty ways.
I changed these to fit the occasion.

Years before, a girl knocked,
wanted to see the Arab.
I said we didn't have one.
After that, my father told me who he was,
"Shihab"--"shooting star"--
a good name, borrowed from the sky.
Once I said, "When we die, we give it back?"
He said that's what a true Arab would say.

Today the headlines clot in my blood.
A little Palestinian dangles a truck on the front page.
Homeless fig, this tragedy with a terrible root
is too big for us. What flag can we wave?
I wave the flag of stone and seed,
table mat stitched in blue.

I call my father, we talk around the news.
It is too much for him,
neither of his two languages can reach it.
I drive into the country to find sheep, cows,
to plead with the air:
Who calls anyone civilized?
Where can the crying heart graze?
What does a true Arab do now?

Saving Freshman Ryan: Dispatches From the Trenches of Academia

College classes on my campus start in two weeks. This has a lot of ramifications for someone like me who works in an academic department of a major public university, and the fact that it's now noticeably harder to find time to post on my blogs is probably among the lesser of them in terms of impact on the planet and its denizens. Up near the top of that list, though, sits one reality: New students. They haven't yet hit campus but they are hitting their keyboards and their phone lines, nearly every one of which, I can't help but observe, has a fuzzy or intermittent connection which makes me suspect that most of the new students are coming from some distant planet whose primary mineral component is lead or uranium.

And then there are the parents of the new students. Their phone calls are crystal clear. They have really good phones and they would rather forget to walk the dog than to neglect recharging their phone nightly. Their phone connections are so good their cultural background is usually unmistakeable, and here it is, like it or not: They are almost all from one of two cultural pools, and in these cultural pools, let me tell you, no one is there for the recreational swim; they are all churning up the waters in well-coached and impressive laps, aiming for the turn that will slice a hundredth of a second off their time to ensure The Final Victory.

Oh. Excuse me. I said, "their time." Excuse me. After listening to a series of these calls today, I have fallen victim to the false premise underlying every single one of them: That the Child is the same as the Parent. The race in question is really their son's, but you wouldn't know it from their phone calls. Here's one. Perhaps you know her.

"Hullo? Do I have the Right Person? I'm calling from New York. My son is coming to your school there in just a few weeks, I don't know why really, he was accepted at better schools, schools not halfway across the country, schools that could actually take him someplace in this god-forsaken world we live in, but anyway he's coming. Didn't even get any financial aid from you out there, though Rutgers and Case both offered him plenty, and they would have been closer, too. But no. His favorite uncle went out there, not that he really amounted to much, my husband's brother not mine, but my son worships him for god knows what reason, though he does have a good head of hair, unlike my husband, not that I mind. Well. My son is having difficulty enrolling in your courses. He took every single AP course his high school offered, and your computer doesn't recognize a single one of them apparently, and it keeps saying he doesn't have the prerequisites. Have you heard of AP coursework out there? We paid good money for these AP courses, you should know; public education is not as free as they'd like you to think, but you should know that; look at the tuition you are charging us to send our son out there to this 'public' university of yours."

This is my day, listening to this. Do you notice how the speaker is not the student who is having difficulty enrolling? No. The student is finishing a summer tennis tourney or on a backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail or sleeping off his introduction to Sangria in some Mediterrnaean province whose nationality he's not even 100% certain is Spanish. He can play tennis and sleep like this because he knows: Mom Knows Best. He gave up trying to curb her enthusiasm for his life several years ago, when she stormed into his high school wearing an extra coating of lipstick just to wag her finger at the drama coach for choosing his best friend for the musical's male lead. At a certain point, the student knows, you just have to cut your losses. It's less humiliating this way, really, and a lot less frustrating if you don't even stay close enough to have to hear how she does this.

And this is why I stick it out with his mother. Because somewhere out there, there is, I'm quite sure, a remarkable young man I will really enjoy having in our university and our department. And away from this woman, whose life is severely deprived despite her imposing collection of handbags and the fact that she's already sailed on every major cruise line north of the equator. She should probably be directing relief efforts or dispensing micro loans in some African nation rather than obsessing about her child's inevitably outstanding education, but despite that thwarting of her talents, this young man is going to blossom. She's right about one thing: He's bright, and he's nice.

How do I know this? I went to school with this  young man several decades ago, and he is now an outstanding middle-aged man, the kind of guy who makes you wonder now why you ever broke up with him then. He's written a few books, he's been mentioned twice in the New York Times, he was on a Sunday morning talk show once, though never on Oprah. So I listen to his mother today and when she is all done and I hear her finally ask, "Are you there? Hullo? Are you with me here?" I answer calmly, "Yes, I'm here and I will be absolutely happy to help your son; please have him call me at his first opportunity. We look forward to having him here with us," and carefully place the phone back in its charger.

School days, school days. Dear old Golden Rule Daze.

Next post: The super-achieving Indian student, or why does India not rule the world?

The Education of Little Chihang

This summer, I had the very solid pleasure of spending three weeks in the company of Chihang, a ten-year-old boy from Hong Kong who was here in the company of his parents. Three weeks of his cheerful, engaging and vibrant company, that is, whenever he was not studying. I think that amounted to a handful of hours over the course of those three weeks, the count depending whether you count sleep or reading Harry Potter hours among those.

Chihang was here for his summer vacation from the semi-private school he attends in HK, but he had lessons to do every day. Some were given by his school. Most were structured by his parents. And sometimes, at eleven o'clock at night, when I might say good night to my visitors and make my way upstairs, Chihang and at least one of his good and devoted parents would still be sitting at my dining room table, laptops open, working on lessons. It made me think a lot about the way I'd raised my own children and the way we value or devalue education by way of our disciplines.

I think Americans must value education less than any other distinguishable population on earth, except perhaps opium addicts and Eskimos and I'm really not sure about the latter group; it just seems possible they have other more pressing concerns. I use "education" here in a broader sense than just the formal institution of education; I use it to mean deliberate applied effort to increase knowledge, understanding and mastery. For those of us fortunate to live in societies with formal, public educational structures and institutions we and our children are free to attend, this definition of education also attempts to cover the way we enlarge the education institutionally provided, with lessons and activities and camps and tutorials, with sports and opportunities to practice instruments of music and of science.

Actually, the Purple Baccalaureate is French!

I first realized how lax we Americans are when my oldest daughter was in elementary school. She attended what was, by any standards of measurement, from student happiness to student performance on national tests to eventual student academic success, among the nation's very best schools for children. It was a benefit, a very important benefit, of living in the smallest house in one of the wealthiest little communities in the US. It was a very highly educated community, as you might assume, where even your bike repairman and your real estate agent might very likely hold some form of esoteric doctorate or have travelled to Tibet or Monrovia. It was a community full of scientists imported from nations all across the world, given visas in exchange for their intellectual labor in the big research labs anchored in this affluent little city at the foot of the beautiful Rockies.

Among my daughter's good friends at this school was a Chinese girl, her father one of those scientists. She, and her family, with whom I inevitably became familiar, gave me my first close-up look at the different ways Chinese and Americans treat education. This little girl, whose feet dangled too high from the floor to reach the pedals of the grand piano in her living room, practiced piano three hours every day. I, meanwhile, was struggling to get my daughter to put in the half hour of practice we had agreed upon as reasonable for her clarinet. I asked the girl's mother in a tone that surely betrayed both my wonder and my dismay, "However do you get her to practice so long???"

She may have blinked once before answering in that unruffled, quiet voice I have since come to associate with the Chinese. "Very easy. I sit next to her at the piano." It wasn't long after that my own daughter and I came to a new agreement about her clarinet lessons; she could practice or not as she chose. If she wanted to play it well, she would practice. If she did not care to play well, she would at least put the reeds in the press that let them dry and wipe the clarinet clean before running out the door to play on the jungle gym.

Years later, as that same daughter prepares to start her own PhD program far away from my home, Chihang is sitting at my dining room table working earnestly on a design for a high speed train built of titanium. It's eleven o'clock, and his parents are quietly engaged in their own work in order to make sure the boy keeps to his work, in order to be available for his inevitable questions and to critique his final product. His reward for finishing this will be an excursion to the State Capitol, upon which excursion he will write an essay tomorrow afternoon, reciting what he's learned about our state's history in order to anchor it with the guy wires of his second language, English.

Some of our recent graduates at UW

The girl who practiced the piano three hours a day? She's working for a major American retailer, in New York City, doing some kind of buying or merchandising work. I'm sure she's very successful, and I'd put money on her having graduated with honors from some MBA program at a prestigious American university in record time. I'd put considerable money on this, and I'd win. But I'd put more money on my own daughter, whose path to academic excellence has been somewhat longer and more circuitous than most, doing something momentous and astounding in this world.

Freedom does have its benefits. Creativity is often found to thrive there on its playgrounds. Why is it, do you think, that American universities are the ones that teach the world? That said, maybe it's time we start teaching our own children a little more about the value of education. We have taken it for granted now too long.

Home, Home on the Heat Vent?

 



Homeless man in National Gallery

I'll confess straight out that there's a lot I don't understand about the homeless people I see living on the streets of every city I've ever visited. And I'll specify right from the start here that I am not talking about the newly displaced homeless like the families who have lost their homes to financial crises and who are working earnestly even if without success to end their homeless status. I am talking about the chronic, longterm, professional homeless population I see living on the streets of every city I've ever visited. And the biggest question for which I don't have an answer is a really super-sized question: "Why would anyone living like this want to keep living, especially in Wisconsin, where the weather is almost always atrocious?"

Another way you might put this same question is, "Why shiver on a heat vent through nights that dip substantially under zero in either temperature scale when you could be sleeping on a beach in Mexico?"

 



Cops Arresting Homeless Man

There was an article in one of our dying local newspapers this week talking about the impact of two building closures on the local homeless population. One venue closed this last winter when the new despot of  our state, Governor Scott Walker, ordered his loyal henchman to lock up the State Capitol, which has always been a sort of incredible marble walled haven for the homeless, at least on the basement level. Keeping our beloved capitol building open, as I discussed in an earlier post, has long been a source of pride and joy to many of us who live here. Now, increased security at the building has eliminated the lower level cafeteria from the list of places the homeless can go to warm up or to use the restrooms. And very soon, another building just two blocks away that has been another mainstay of their survival here is going to close: our downtown public library.

OK. I'll admit I don't like to go to the library as much since the rising population of homeless people has squatted and occupied all the computer stations. I am sufficiently squeamish and middle class that I don't like taking a seat next to someone who is not only wearing their entire wardrobe but has been wearing it, day in and day out, in sickness and health, til death or rot do them part, for weeks, months, even years sometimes. And I certainly wouldn't want to set down a cafeteria tray next to someone who is dipping a used teabag salvaged from a neighbor's abandoned tray into hot water for a fifth cup of very weak tea; this ruins my usually nonplussed appetite. I don't give to the homeless who jiggle cups for spare change on downtown streets, and I don't smile appreciatively at homeless men who toss out comments on my appearance as I stroll by: "Like that hat you're wearing, sweetheart." "Hey, smile there, Blondie. Life isn't all that sour." I am not the best friend of the homeless. I barely pass as a sympathizer really, once you exempt the families I cited earlier.

But why do they stay in places like Wisconsin, that are so inhospitable? We are apparently going to have a siege of competition for downtown heating vents this coming winter without the benevolent warmth of the Capitol and the public library. Liberals are worrying about how to serve the homeless, keep them warm, cautioning already, even in the pleasant temperatures of August, that there will almost certainly be deaths among the homeless this winter. Indeed. So again I wonder. Why stay in Wisconsin?

They can't afford to go elsewhere? Not a good argument. They can't afford anything, and yet they manage. They can't afford food, yet they don't starve. They can't afford insurance, yet they are living in rusted old vans parked along low-traffic streets. They can't afford not to leave, yet they stay. I repeat, why stay in Wisconsin.

Family and friends here? Now that's a fairly good reason to stay somewhere. But what family and friends are in the picture here, family and friends who don't offer them shelter? Not even a place in their backyard to set up a tent, access to their homes for the sake of a shower, a toilet, every once in a while a movie or a birthday cake?

It was very interesting being in Cairo this summer, one of the poorest big cities on the planet, and really not seeing anything that struck me as homelessness. I am fully cognizant of the fact that there is a huge amount of homelessness in the city, but it's not obvious, the way it is here. Perhaps it's simply more egregious here, the difference between the homeless and the domiciled a greater chasm than it is in Egypt? Perhaps it's the very significant fact that homelessness here has so much to do with alcohol, while in Egypt a tea or hashish habit may be much more prevalent than alcoholism, it being a nation that's 90% Muslim. Perhaps a nation that's impoverished hides homelessness better, a sort of urban camoflauge.

And perhaps of equal importance, it's a nation that doesn't have cold winters.

To Thine Own Self Be True Blued or Troubled

OK. In case you read yesterday's post, let me say at the outset that it turns out there are two fallacies in the oft-repeated "fact" that grand daddy longlegs have the most poisonous bite of any American house spider but lack the dental structure that allows them to bite humans. They can indeed bite and bite hard, and it hurts like crazy for a while and swells up disturbingly, but you don't die or get feverish or have to make the drive to the emergency room or call up Poison Control, which puts this common spider significantly behind both Black Widows and any species of tarantula in my index. My elbow is better. The bite looks as inocuous as a pimple now, even if it's a strange place for something to pass as a pimple.

I'm beginning work on a little documentary about an octogenarian couple I met recently. They are both visual artists, the man still working steadily on his beautiful and highly realistic oil landscapes and portraits, the woman absorbed most recently in making an incredible wardrobe of stunning, almost life-sized robes, completely two-dimensional, as if for enormous paperdolls, out of a careful collage of gift papers. The two of them have been living together and making art together for over sixty years, in two very different styles. I asked them how they handled what seems to me the very vulnerable moment of the initial revealing of a newly finished artwork, the moment the real or figurative drape is whisked off the finished product, the "Well? What do you think?" moment.

This moment, to an insecure neophyte like me, is rather like the moment the doctor hands you your firstborn baby or perhaps the plastic surgeon hands you a mirror. Your entire future seems to hang in the balance, on a gossamer thread so fine even a thoughtless exhalation might send it reeling. Given the intricate balance of egos a marriage represents, the possibility for grievous wounding at this moment seemed enormous. But this couple seemed amused I would regard it in this manner.

"Why would we ever be afraid of what the other one would say?" the woman, the more verbose of the two, marvelled as though the thought had never entered her mind. "We have done what we wanted. What others have to say about my work does not affect what work I do; I don't do it for them." I checked. Her husband was nodding in agreement. "I honestly don't know why a person would ever want to ask what someone else thinks of their work. Does it matter?"

They responded similarly when I left them with what I hoped would be a sort of bridge to our next meeting, when the camera will be rolling. "Until I am back here for the official interview," I suggested, in that rarely necessary way mothers have of intervening before there's a problem, "perhaps you could identify one of your works that you'd like to talk about in greater detail, one that seems to speak to your sense of artistic integrity or importance or simply your pride or one that sent you in a surprising new direction or one that embodies what you want to accomplish with your art." Both of them looked at me rather blankly.

"But we're done with all this work here," she explained, grandiosely waving her eloquent hand over the array of incredible art that hung, covered, leaned, stacked, filled and over-filled every square inch of their apartment. "Why would we want to talk about anything that's done? Once it's done, you move on." The husband again (I checked) was nodding. "What matters is what's wet on your easel. None of the rest matters."

I have a lot to learn from this couple, and I've been thinking about it since this preliminary interview. They have what to me is such incredible confidence in both their own work and their own selves. Me, I crave the approbation of others. The fact that I have been writing this blog without anyone's positive assessment is rather amazing to me, and probably good training for me. For I grew up in a home full of people who didn't think any of my individual projects, my poems or my paintings or my play productions, were anything worth mentioning and certainly never worth praising. Eventually, I put away my sketchpads and paintbrushes. It just seemed so unimportant to absolutely everyone except me. Only years and years later, when my life as a wife and a mother had pretty much completely fallen apart at the seams, did I find my way back to my paints and my poems and my prose.

But I am left me with an almost insatiable craving for praise still, all these years later, and a fear of criticism that is at times completely disabling. So here's to parents who not only give their children the time and space to do what they love, to follow their passions, but also, from time to time, nod and smile and point to some small detail and say with meaning, "I like that." For that, when a child loves something, is all that's needed.

One or two sweet crumbs. Never forget to tell people, big and small, when you like something. Even if they don't ask what you think of it.

Cluster Lucks and Fortunes

I am not really a believer in fate or destiny, and I don't actually believe that events in our lives function as traffic signals, telling us which way to turn and how fast to go or when, precipitously, to come to a screeching halt. And yet there are times when I wonder, and times when circumstances seem so pointed or so clustered that one might be a fool not to note their presentation. "Cosmic coincidences," they often seem, or "cluster lucks."

Two such cosmic clusters seem to be operative right now in my life, and if the spider who just bit me as I tried to write on my front porch doesn't turn out to be fatally poisonous, I am really quite provoked by both these seemingly celestial strands. Tonight I'll introduce you to them. Tomorrow, if my right arm, which is now swelling and still hurts an uncommon lot, has not been amputated, I'll tell you more.

The first has to do with the blog post I put up about a week ago about dogs and Muslims. Shortly after posting that, I tracked down the one remaining puppy mentioned therein, put out a few inquiries into a seemingly unresponsive virtual reality, and now it is looking awfully much like this puppy may be put on a jet in Cairo on Tuesday and be taken off the plane in Chicago, where I will be waiting with the usual American armload of toys and food and love.

The second is less material, but perhaps even more important (though I'm sure the puppy wouldn't agree with that assessment). But all this last week, it seemed like everyone and everything wanted to tell me one thing: Follow your passion, and everything will be fine. A movie ("Three Idiots," recommend it highly for almost anyone older than eight and maybe even eight  year olds), some faculty emails, the elderly artists I'm preparing to film, random posts on Facebook coming at me from all parts of the world.

Of course, none of this will matter at all if the spider who just bit me in a way that puts to shame the pain caused by a bee sting or a knife cut, was something deadly, so while I go further investigate this target-like swelling on my elbow with the flaming red hole in the middle of it, let me leave you with one thought that is not bad, in a pinch, for a last thought:

Follow your passion and everything will be all right.

And I'm not talking about falling in love, btw. But you can fall in love, too, 'cause that's the other life element no one should miss.

Outside the Closet It's Sometimes Very Cold

A few weeks ago I created a "billboard" celebrating my public announcement of atheism. It was a fun little creative exercise offered electronically by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is headquarted right here in my progressive hometown. Then, pleased with my product/announcement, I posted my billboard onto my Facebook page.

The FFRF calls this campaign of theirs a coming out of the closet, and I think that's appropriate. Christians have always excelled at not only advertising their religion (think the Pledge of Allegiance, uttered by scores of school children and sports fans every day) but proselytizing on its behalf (again, think the Pledge of Allegiance, uttered by scores of non-Christians every day). Conservative Jews as well as Muslims make sure no one misses their religion by wearing yamulkas and veils, long unbarbered beards and skirts that are never quite sufficiently long to obviate the need for dreadfully hot socks and even gloves underneath. Jewelry, beads for Catholics and Muslims, saintly medals and crosses for every brand of Christian, all these announce to the world the presence of religious people. Oh yeh. And then there's the family joining hands to loudly infringe upon everyone else's conversations to say grace around a table in Applebees and the Muslim bowing to pray in a corner of the airport and the anti-abortion fundamentalists with guns shouting about the right to life. These are everyday events, religioius people showing their burnished badges of devotion. But how do we who are irreligious ever get to show our pride? Or don't we feel any?

The response to my posting of my billboard surprised me. Though my sign said nothing about scorn for any other viewpoint, though it said nothing in fact, except that I'd rejected serving the Cruel Man Up High that my own fundamentalist parents raised me to fear and to love or, if I couldn't handle the dichotomy of that, then at least to feel the fear, the responses to my FFRF billboard surprised me. My friends, on and off Facebook alike, tend to be so far left they frequently fall into the margin. They are poets andprofessors and artists and librarians and revolutionaries and sometimes just shabby old hippies with increasingly scraggly, graying ponytails gathered proudly despite the bald pate above it.

No one, not one of my friends, even gave me a casual thumbs-up; no one "liked" it. The comments I got made me feel like I'd just revealed myself to be a blood relative of Genghis Khan or Pontius Pilate. I was so unnerved I actually took the posting down after reading a few of the responses, and tonight I had a heck of a time finding a trace of my once innocent-seeming "billboard" so you could see it. It was rather like announcing an alternate sexuality to a gathering of family and friends and being met with a silence so profound it echoed. At times like these, one is almost grateful for the single voice that finally pipes up, saying something like, "Don't you ever think about being a parent/Don't you think there's a force larger than you in the universe?"

OF COURSE THE HOMO/TRANS/BI-SEXUAL THINKS ABOUT BEING A PARENT! And some of them, like some heterosexuals, will think it's a worthy endeavor.

OF COURSE THERE ARE FORCES LARGER THAN ME IN THE  UNIVERSE!! Gravity, for one; the St. Bernard down the street for another!

Why is it so alarming that I write that I don't choose to serve a Mad Master? If there is a God and this God is omniscient and omnipotent and is just sitting back and enjoying the spectacle of human starvation and war and the way we fight to the death to eat the last crumb of our perceived dignity, then no: I don't choose to serve God.

And if this is not who or what God or Allah is, then I think I will be forgiven anyway, except apparently by my friends who now think that I'm close-minded and averse to anything of a non-material nature.

I leave you with this photo, taken at dawn in a rural cemetary on the way up to my mom's sickbed.

Children of the Earth and Sky and My Heart

"To My Children Out in the Wide Wide World"

What I have feared

is not that the

world or the social
safety nets set by
prior generations would

somehow fail you or that

nuclear or even nucular warfare
or accident would bring human
civilization to some dramatic and
precipitous conclusion. What
disturbed me was not the
rising cost of gasoline or college
or the inexorable rise of ocean
shorelines or the imperturbable rise
of China. I spent no more hours
trying to understand why women in
Baghdad and Aceh and Bulaq
al Dakrur would choose to wear
burkas on sunlit mornings than
wondering why those in Chicago
and Taos and Salem would choose
repeatedly to bed the same men
who just beat them. And how
could I sincerely feel distressed
about violent threats of Islamist
fanatics when I'd heard rooms of

plump, pompous Protestants

invoking God to bless the

slaughter by sword or

starvation of Muslims? No.

I can't worry about these
small things. It's a big, wide
world out there beyond this
bedroom with your white
bassinets, and I worried
as I rocked you, as I
fed you, as I taught you
manners and language and
confidence that you somehow
might not get to know how
high is the sky how wide the
sea how deep the hearts that
will hold you wherever you
go. Now you are gone so
very far away, and I am
sitting, I am knitting, not
dropping a stitch, in case the
wide wide world ever becomes
small enough and close enough

that you can see me again.