The Garden of the Word: A Novel that Lights Up the Dark Ages

            I've had the pleasure of stumbling on another great writer and another great book, "Hild" by Nicola Griffith -- set in seventh century AD England among the Anglisc (or Angles), one of the Northern European tribes that found new homes in the British Isles after driving the inhabitants into the hinterlands. This century is also known as "The Age of Conversion" as the church of Rome made a major effort to bring the island's barbarian kings, and therefore their peoples, into the Christian church.

            Asked in a "Paris Review" interview about the origins of this novel about a seventh century Anglisc woman who became a Roman Catholic saint, Griffith replied, "the more I discovered about the world itself, about the seventh century, the more I wanted to write how it actually was. Not make it fantastical, just really go there, really live there for a while."

            That's exactly how this novel feels. We get to live there too. The book is set during what used to be commonly called "the Dark Ages," though that term appears nowhere in the book or any of the writing about it that I've discovered, so maybe 'dark ages' has become a taboo term for the period's authorities and researchers. Still, the seventh century falls within the period that followed the 'fall' of the Roman Empire and a decline in the civilized institutions and technology that flourished in the Classical period. You don't expect to find scenes recalling debates in the Roman Senate or the philosophical discussions of the School of Athens (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), and neither the ruling classes nor the common folk had much knowledge of those earlier civilizations because almost nobody could read.

            That's what the "dark" in Dark Ages meant: the light of learning had disappeared from the Western world.

            One of the tools that Hild, the child who becomes the high king's seer in a north of England Anglisc kingdom, is the ability to read. She learns it from a priest -- who else could teach her? And it's surely meaningful that Griffith has her heroine raised by her "game of thrones"-playing mother, a brilliant character in her own right, to believe herself "the light of the world." Hild brings light to her world by seeing what others don't; both by seeing the signs and understanding what they mean -- a process Hild thinks of, in another resonant term, as seeing "the pattern." That's what the NSA and all the other spies or "intelligence" agencies try to do today.

            But nothing can beat a truly self-trained mind. That's what Hild possesses and, while writing and reading are valuable tools, literacy doesn't supply the greater part of her knowledge -- the utter absence of books from her world poses a serious limitation. Hild learns, attains knowledge -- and in flashes of insight grasps a pattern that others cannot see -- by closely examining and learning from both the natural and the human worlds around her: her seventh century low-tech, non-literate world. The way of life her people have fashioned by learning how to make use of nature's resource; and the world of nature, its plants and animals and elemental furies, that follow their own laws with little regard for ours.  

            The Britain of this time is a largely wild, harsh, lovely and varied place. Anybody who spends time in our own tamer woods will love what author Griffins does with her hero's 'feel' for the plants, birds, others animals, seasons, and moods of of nature. Hild is a hero who spends time alone in the wild because she loves being there, because she reads the world like a book, and because some part of her knows that contact with the elements will help her "see" what a seer needs to know to give advice to a king and help her people, particularly those closest to her, to survive. Hild can watch the birds and tell what the weather will be -- not tomorrow, but weeks and even seasons ahead. She looks at how high the crows build their nests and knows to expect a hard winter. She watches bees gathering pollen in the summer and tells her farm manager to plant more red flowers. More red flowers means more bees: more honey: more mead.

            Insights like these, not always so pointed or practical, recur throughout the author's account of the ordinary flow of day-to-day life in seventh century England. Hild can look at the fat on a cow or the length of the hair on the sheep to know how happy or prosperous the people who own them are. When she discovers a nest -- she climbs trees with a facility that adds rumors of "flying" to her legend -- holding two baby starlings -- and two doves!, it's a sign, an omen. What that omen means you'll have to read the book to find out (no spoiler here).

            I will give a warning, though. As rewarding as this read is, it took me about a hundred pages to get the hang of it, and then the growth of my understanding was greatly abetted by frequent recurrences to the glossy of "old English" words at its end -- the sort of reader's aid I generally skip over; but foolishly here. I would also encourage readers to look to the author's note at the end to discover what few facts are known about Hild's life from the Christian records and I would recommend looking at the map at its front to understand what a small piece of the British Isles her 'high king' actually controls even while he, and she, and everyone else who matters, tries to figure out what is going on politically, dynastically, and economically in all these other regions of Britain that will affect the balance of power and the security of their own lives. Also, interestingly, what is going on among "the Franks" (trading partners and sometimes meddlers), the Irish (enemies), and even in Rome where the Bishop of Rome is fast becoming the most important player of all in this complex European 'game of houses.'

            People in the seventh century turn out to be much like us, like people everywhere. They're just playing the game with a different deck. And it's fascinating to see what they make of life in the wake of the decline of a vast imperial civilization.

Prosegarden Stories: Couch Potato With Cat

       The story "Couch Potato With Cat" was recently published by an online literary journal called "The Earl of Plaid."
       The journal publishes all its work -- poems, short stories, flash fiction -- in a single lengthy PDF file.It's a bit of work to find anything in this format. You have to look up the author's name in each category and then scroll down to the appropriate page number. Here's the link for the journal:

http://www.earlofplaid.com/uploads/2/6/2/4/26247627/royal_purple_final.pdf

        But to make things easier, I'm reposting the whole (not very long) story here.

                                Couch Potato With Cat

            I am arranging a selfie. There ought to be an easier way to do it than the ways I have tried. I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror. My best light, my best side. But only, it appears, when I am not seeking to immortalize an image.

            It spoils things to know a picture is being taken. This has always been true for me. Why is this not true for everyone? How is that all the world's models and pretty people are able to tell themselves 'look natural' and then achieve a desirable imitation of this state -- at ease, unself-conscious, natural -- when the image is captured on a lens.

            If you try to capture the real, it will escape you. The act of trying pushes it away. The act of observing changes the object being observed. Heisenberg said that.

            I've never seen a self-portrait of Heisenberg.

            I catch sight of myself in windows, passing by on the street. I'm displeased by what I see. Is that what I look like? Why don't I stand straighter? Throw my shoulders back? Who belongs to that sad-sack profile?

            Better, I conclude, straight on.

            On a computer screen, late at night, no one else awake in the house, I see my moment and determine to seize it. The computer screen has gone dark, but a desk lamp has been left on in the room. I catch a shadowy image on the darkened screen. A shadowed visage, but my own. This shadow, this diminution of light is natural; far better than Photoshop. Who is this dark stranger? With his unexpressed longings, his air of melancholy, but also some deeper intimation, a slight inkling of hidden joy. A secret, perhaps.

            What secret?

            Whatever the secret is, it's harder to capture on a lens than my hidden wannabe joyful self could ever imagine. You don't wish to betray the mechanism, the camera, do you? You don't wish the hand that holds the camera to be seen, either, I suppose.

            Awkward, artificial, unnatural.

            That means the arm holding the camera will have to be hidden from the image produced as well. I shift my image to one side of the darkened computer screen. Even better, truer. I am always an off-center, unsymmetrical person. I do not like center stage. Leave that to the shallow, push-forward types. They make jokes, the girls titter. I stand back and observe, with my secret smile.

            They don't know what I know. What I know is suggested, hinted at by the image on the screen. It's as if I don't know myself what's producing it.

            The ultimate prize: the candid self-portrait.

            I lean toward the edge of the screen, extend my hand outside the screen, press the button.

            I consume the result: I've gone too far from the center, my momentum has carried me off -- halfway off. The image cuts my face in two, the right side gobbled up by the universe in which all reflected imagery ultimately disappears. I have given that part of myself to everyone, to all existence, or to the nothing that exists outside of the self: my image, myself.

            Still I am not too displeased. I call this photo, this self-portrait: "Split Personality."

            It appears to be the best I can do.

            I see my image in dark windows. Night has swallowed the world on the other side of the glass but interior light, half-light in quiet rooms, gives back a slender image. Sometimes a multi-layered one. A shadow of me. Other objects in the room float into the reflection as well; a bookcase, a floor plant. My self, my surreality.

            I sit and watch TV, images on a screen.

            My wife goes to bed on her early-schedule life, leaving me alone except for the cat.

            The cat has curled herself, her body, into my lap, as she does each night. The high point of her day, she buries herself into the cocoon of my seated form. Am I softer than anywhere else available to her? I sense the distant presence of some matronly super-cat from which all kittens in their essential Platonic Idea of Catness derive. Her presence there keeps me longer in front of TV screen than I would otherwise choose to remain. I am faceless, mindless. She burrows her head into the crook of my arm, a fetal-like position that suggests also a newborn, as if in some imagined self-portrait of her own she is able to nurse from the inner fold of my elbow.

            I stay put because she does, fingering the television remote, searching for another viewing of the winning shot in the basketball game. The last highlight; or joke; or pithy remark from the late night blatherers. But I grow bored. I am more than a lap. The rest of me demands new stimulus to feed on. The cat does not know this, who in the wisdom of her great age wishes only to sleep.

            I extend my arm again (not the one she has hidden her face against) and discover the camera left beside me on the cushion of the couch. I pick it up and aim it, pure guess work alone, at the dumb middle of me where the black cat has collapsed like a dead mink, a fur piece, across my abdomen.

            I press the button:

            Couch Potato with Cat. A self-portrait. 

[A note: This is fiction. I never did take a picture of myself with the cat in my lap. It seemed impossible; I never even attempted it. The photo below is an attempt at my "seduction by computer screen" selfie.]

           

The Garden of Poetry: A Poem a Day

            Just what you needed! -- Another poem. An online literary journal called "The Rain, Party, & Disaster Society" accepts new poems for publication each month and then follows the unique practice of publishing one new piece each weekday throughout the month.

            The editors send contributors a calendar so we'll know when to expect our poem to show up on the site. And, as they optimistically put the matter, so we can share this information with "your family, friends and followers." The word 'followers' always has a sort of cultish ring for me, but I understand it has a more precise meaning in the online universe for us bloggers and other virtual life forms.

            Anyway, my poem, titled "Commanding the Sun," will appear on the journal's website on Monday, Feb. 9, at 8 a.m. (I'm hoping it will stay up there for a while as well.)

            This poem comes directly from the garden. It imagines every man as a "sun king." One of the slogans of the French Revolution was "Every man a king" and of course the most powerful of the French monarchs, Louis XIV, was called the "Sun King." Then the poem goes on to suggest, more or less indirectly, that everyone who seeks to follow the advice of Voltaire -- cultiver son jardin; "grow your own garden" -- is also attempting to 'command the sun.' No sun, no garden.

            I noticed one line "Hence, rude thoughts of winter!" that has some particular (though unintended) relevance to our current condition. I wrote the poem at the time of year that falls almost exactly opposite to where we are now in the cycle of the seasons. Six months from now we will again be sitting in our gardens, wherever we find them, perhaps imagining under the spell of that balmy time of year that we 'command the sun,' when of course it is always the other way around.

            Here's the link to the place where you will be able to find the poem:

            http://www.rpdsociety.com/latestissue 

            The photo I've included here pretty much sums up the time of year when, for me at least, it feels like the sun is in its heaven and all is right with the world. As, in some fundamental way, it always is; though it's surely a lot harder to feel that way underneath four feet of snow.

            Anyway, thanks for listening. 

Selma: Inconvenient Truths in the Garden of Race

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." -- Martin Luther King Jr.

"... This is an illegal march. It's blocking the highway," Selma sheriff Jim Clark

"... it means disturbing the peace, it means unrest, it means resistance." -- Martin Luther King, in Selma.

            Among the uncodified civil rights brought home by the movie "Selma" is the right not to be mistreated, beat up or killed by society's guardians simply because the society you are part of regards you as "the other."

            Ava DuVernay's recent film is a largely accurate account of one of the most famous, important battles of the Civil Rights Era, the march from Selma to Montgomery to force a federal law to protect voting rights for blacks in the South.

            One of the truths forgotten or overlooked in our official canonization of King and the era of Civil Rights sit-ins and other protests is how intentionally provocative they were. The movie makes this point very clear. At its start King laments that a protest in Augusta, Georgia, has garnered no national attention because authorities have treated protestors nonviolently and civilly, even while they have refused to give in on the issue -- the minefield of local rules designed to prevent black citizens from registering to vote. We see these voting "requirements" illustrated in an opening scene when a would-be voter is asked to name the 62 district court judges in the state of Alabama. She's already recited the preamble to the Constitution. But the clerk stamps her application "denied."

            But when police don't manhandle protestors, King complains, "there is no drama." You mean, a young community organizer, puts in, "No cameras." That's it, exactly, the movement leaders agree. They then decide to move their efforts to Selma, Alabama, where a particularly nasty, thick-headed local sheriff, Jim Clark, is likely to give them the brutality they need to draw the cameras.

            Now King's movement was famously non-violent, and it's portrayed that way in the film. But the movement's strategy is knowingly to provoke a violent over-reaction from racist authorities in order to show to the world what American's black citizens are up against in the racist American South.

            That is, the protest is intended to provoke the violence. It's the only way to exposes the injustice of a status quo most of the country -- white citizens; white authorities -- allow to stand.

             The Selma campaign's courthouse protest and highway march do provoke the reaction the organizers expect. Brutality, the clubbing of women and old men, police and white citizen violence against defenseless protestors.

            It also leads to some murders. Even before the big march, a smaller local march is broken up by police who chase some demonstrators into a restaurant and shoot to death a young man in front of his family. Interestingly, in view of current events, the officer claims he thought the victim was reaching for a gun. Since I was completely unfamiliar with this crime, I researched its accuracy. It happened -- though the victim took 41 days to die. Perhaps that's why this death didn't get the national play other killings did.

            And after King appealed for supporters from the rest of the country to come to Selma to take part in the march, many hundreds did, mostly white Northeners. Three ministers were attacked by local racists, and one -- a minister from Boston -- died from his beating. Again, the dramatization of this incident in the film is almost exactly true to the historical facts.

            The Selma March was a great victory for civil rights -- but not a bloodless one. The mist of sanctification that hangs over King and his movement causes Americans, particularly white people, to forget other such unpleasant truths. In the film "Selma" as in the national memory, most people, especially Northern whites, were firmly in King's corner.

            However, as Jordan Lebeau points out in an essay on Boston.com, "Gallup polls, hate mail, voting records, and the desire to keep blacks out of voting booths paint a different story of common sentiment towards King."

            "In the 1960s [Lebeau states] Gallup asked Americans to rate King. If they held a favorable view, they were to assign him a rating between +1 and +5, and, if their view was unfavorable, -1 to -5. In 1963, 37 percent of Americans polled had an unfavorable rating of King. By 1965, it had jumped to 46 percent, and, in 1966, 63 percent of Americans had an unfavorable view, with 44 percent holding a highly unfavorable view of a man who led nonviolent protests in favor of access to basic American and human rights." [http://www.boston.com/entertainment/movies/2014/12/18/selma-and-america-convenient-mlk-myth/a6sgdFgR6mqLegBEPtx90L/story.html]

            As these polls indicated, the majority of Americans did not rush to support the civil rights protest movement. In truth racism was common and widespread in the North, if less virulent and codified in the South. In opinion polls most Americans said the demonstrators "should obey the law" and should not "disturb the peace," and if they did should expect to face arrest. This was largely George Wallace's point of view.

            It took the violent response of many white southerners and racist authorities such as Sheriff Clark of Selma to breed sufficient political support for the landmark legislation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That law gave the federal government the power to step in and assure that blacks could register to vote in places where they had been denied that right.  

            The comparison of those times to the troubles of our own times -- when blacks are protesting the de facto racism of police shootings: why is it that the great majority of deaths at the hands of police are black men? -- is apparent to some people. But not, it appears to me, to most.  

            "Today," Lebeau writes, "the hatred exhibited toward those among us who have crafted movements very much in the likeness of King’s, affirms our nation’s hatred of the original King. It also affirms our commitment to his myth."

            Acts of "hatred" to demonstrators protesting the Ferguson case have taken place.

           After the decision not to charge the officer who shot Michael Brown to death (because, apparently, he felt frightened by him), a vehicle drove into a crowd of protestors in Minneapolis, knocking several down and dragging one along the ground. The driver was not arrested. [http://kstp.com/article/stories/s3631519.shtml]

            The racism behind the treatment of black men, and children, by police, and by the larger society that accepts it, is harder to address than segregation in the sixties. How American society demonizes black men, especially in the North, is not codified in law, so we can't simply pass a law against it.

            In my opinion, this racism is endemic to American society and goes far beyond law enforcement. It's part of the way we live. For that reason most white Americans will not "approve" of protest actions intended to change it. As Lebeau points out, most white Americans did not approve of King and his demonstrations back in the sixties.            

            To me the unwillingness to confront the enduring racism in our society -- the de facto segregation in where blacks and whites live; the unequal schooling -- explains the widespread "outrage" against the demonstrators in Boston who chained themselves to cement barrels (Jan. 15) and blocked traffic on an interstate: we're in denial.

            I wrote the op-ed piece below in response to that outrage. For the record, I sent it to newspapers. It was not published.

                                    Our Northern Way of Life

Why should we all have to wait, hundreds and even thousands of us, stalled in traffic because some black men have been killed -- perhaps unnecessarily, certainly in eyebrow-raising circumstances -- by police officers and because American society does not hold the officers, or their superiors, accountable for these misdeeds? OK, let's admit it, if you're a cop you get away with murder, as long as your victim is black.

But what good does it do to take down a busy highway at commuter time and ruin everybody's day by making them late for work, for appointments, for important meetings? Besides, at least one person in an ambulance who needed emergency medical assistance was caught in that traffic. What an outrage! I certainly hope that no ambulances tried to get to a hospital via Route 93 during evening rush hour on Martin Luther King Day, because my wife and I were on that road and traffic was not moving. This happens, I understand, with great regularity.

Nevertheless we are sensibly outraged by this wholly unnecessary, self-indulgent "protest" by a few way-out extremists on the morning of Jan. 15. This nonsense ruined our whole day and -- we are quick to add -- it was dangerous too. We know what else is also dangerous: being black and male while encountering a police officer.

But we are not particularly outraged by a phenomenon that has, after all, been going on for decades. We are particularly outraged -- to the point of ramming new laws limiting free speech (hard on the heels of "Je Suis Charlie") through our legislature -- by people who stop traffic on an interstate screwing up our whole day.

Admittedly, other causes for outrage exist. American police officers tell us that their number one priority when they strap on their gear each day is to protect themselves. We may have naively assumed their number one priority was to protect others, including those they believe they must arrest, such as Eric Garner, who was choked to death when he didn't go along quietly to an arrest for supposedly selling loose cigarettes. Or Michael Brown, who was shot to death for jaywalking. Sorry! But that's not what we're outraged about.

Cops in America should be outraged that they to worry about their safety. They police a civil society in which laws make it easy for any nut to have a gun (such as the one who recently killed two officers in New York City) and even supposedly sane people make a practice of carrying guns around. Americans could do something to make their jobs safer: we could pass a few gun safety laws. Oh, right, we can't do that, because in America the gun industry makes the gun laws. Well, we could all just throw our guns away! OK, that's probably not happening either.

But we're not outraged by that. We're outraged because a bunch of extremist protestors who stopped a highway on rush hour. Hey, they broke the law!

So did Martin Luther King, now that I think of it. Black Americans held prayer meetings over segregation until they were sick of the sound of their own voices. When they took the law in their own hands -- this is forgotten today -- white Americans (in the South) hated those first public protests or strongly disapproved (other regions). White Americans said that police have to enforce the laws, that sit-ins and unpermitted marches disturbed the peace, so if civil rights protestors were arrested and often beaten it was basically their own fault.

Now we say that it was all right for the civil rights protestors -- in the South -- to break the laws because their protests were non-violent. The militant protestors who chained themselves to cement barrels were also non-violent. But we still have a right to be outraged because -- well, we're us, we're not the terrible South and what they did interrupted our lives. Our whole Northern Way of Life. Getting to work on time, cramming the highways, taking care of business, taking care of ourselves.

It's outrageous! Let's pass a law against it. Let's get back to business. Let's go Pats!