Alice Walker Returns from Gaza

At an Oakland event entitled, "The Siege of Gaza is an Attack on the Common Heart," Alice Walker, author of THE COLOR PURPLE and other books, gave a grim account of the horrendous injuries and devastation resulting from Israel's 22-day bombing and invasion of Gaza. "An old woman sitting in the ruins said to me, 'May God protect you from the Jews.' I answered, 'It's too late. I married one.' You've got to keep it real." Ms. Walker suggested that Israel is "like a big Ponzi scheme" -- so many investing so much for so long in something, expecting esteemed values to result, only to end with the legacy left from "grinding a people into dust."
Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink and Global Exchange, spoke after Ms. Walker. She said that people in Gaza would bring them the shells that had destroyed their houses, the shells all marked "Made in the USA"

Robert Haas, Poet, Translator, U.S. Poet Laureate

At the Center for the Art of Translation on 14 April 2009, poet, translator, and U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, Robert Haas, who has a sweet and amiable presence, recited some of his translations. Learning Japanese in order to translate haiku, Haas discovered greater details about the haiku form. It is generally known that every haiku refers to a season, but Haas learned a more detailed code; for example, that a reference to plum blossoms suggests the end of winter; cherry blossoms indicate the fullness of spring; etc. -- information is detailed in his book, The Essential Haiku. He recited several of the published haiku with interesting commentary on most of them, or sometimes an ironic pause or a twinkle in his eye was commentary enough. He also recounted the decades-long personal relationship that has facilitated his translations of the work of Czeslaw Milosz.



I intend to write an account of the journey one takes beginning with an original verse in a language other than English and ending with the final version in English. For the artist, and others perhaps, art in the highest sense is in the process of making what ends up as a "piece of art." On the exploration that takes place In the art of translation, you will often find that you have taken the wrong path and have ended in some cul-de-sacs; you must retrace your steps and take a more likely path. In the process of not finding the right way to express the verse in English, you see that forest of that verse from many angles, and some of them are true shadings of the original verse that you would not have discovered without going through the process of translation. Yet you cannot include every shading in the final verse. With the final translation, you have accumulated a personal subtext that contains the multiple layers that cannot be included in the final choices in the final lines. For the translator, the journey of the translation is a three-dimensional structure. The better the verse, the more you are able to walk into it and walk around in it. It can be maddening at first to realize that your true experience of the verse must be truncated, remain a private experience. There is at least one verse where I regret that I did not keep every failed translation of the verse as they record that journey. For that verse, I wished I could make a sculpture of it. I suspect that some of the Mayan stella may reflect that wish – Perhaps after you read each flat surface, you can also read through from one side to the other. If not true of Mayan stella, it is certainly a possibility for some artist.

Tai chi on the pier…
Cormorant drying its wings,
the first position.

Me and Obama

O.K. -- Obama and I... Or is it a strange delusion?


.

Gregg at Mountain View Cemetary

13 March 2009, Fountain Activity, San Francisco

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Poet, Fady Joudah

Friend Martha and I went to the Center for the Art of Translation on 10 March 2009 to hear 2007 Yale Younger Poet, Fady Joudah. He read his translations of Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish, who died in August 2008. ("His lyrical poems of exile and longing speak eloquently for displaced persons everywhere, at once evoking his Palestinian homeland and transcending national borders." The translations of Darwish combined three of his books as THE BUTTERFLY'S BURDEN, published by Copper Canyon Press. Mr. Joudah also read from his own beautiful verses, THE EARTH IN THE ATTIC (Yale University Press).

It may sound decadent to say so, but I have always felt that esthetics and ethics can be said it to be the same thing. It sounds superficial to say that certain political attitudes and actions show "a lack of taste" or "poor taste," but I think it is as true as to speak of "good" and "evil." And isn't a lack of taste that Hannah Arendt is speaking of when she sees in "the banality of evil."

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While he was born in Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugees, Joudah sanely realizes that he is a step away from the plight of the world's oppressed people. He rejects compliments for his work as a field member of Doctors Without Borders, seeing that work as natural responsibility, common decency, not a particular heroism. What he has seen of terrible human conditions around the earth is implicit in his verses, yet he sanely knows he cannot speak with perfect truth about such things, that he lives a step away from the misery he witnesses in the earth's great mass of displaced persons. His attitude toward words, writing poetry, and translating is equally modest. It was a treat to listen to what he said, with a wonderful grace and intelligence, when he paused to make comments between the verses he read.

Swan

We have a solitary swan on Lake Merritt (Merritt Estuary) at the moment:

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The Way (yin and yang = tao)

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Saint Obama

"St. Obama Candles Spark Priest's Ire," reports John P. Connolly, of The Bulletin, a Roman Catholic publication, 18 February 2009 -- referring to events in Noe Valley, San Francisco:

"A San Francisco priest has called on his parish to boycott a local shop that has decided to sell devotional candles to 'Saint Obama.' The candles, which sell for $15 apiece at a local shop called 'Just For Fun,' were originally devotional candles to honor St. Martin de Porres, widely considered the first black Roman Catholic saint in the Americas. President Barack Obama’s face has been pasted over the head of St. Martin, making it appear that Mr. Obama is the object of veneration. Fr. Tony La Torre of St. Philip the Apostle Church, is calling for a boycott of the store.

“ 'I am appalled that in such a family-oriented neighborhood, any retailer would be so bigoted and so hateful [as] to carry such merchandise just to "make a buck",' Rev. La Torre declared recently in his parish newsletter."

The Good News: While the "store owners Robert Ramsey and David Eiland say they’ve sold more than 700 candles since putting them on display over the Christmas holiday," sales have really exploded because of the disapproval of the Catholic church. I am waiting for one celebrating Saint Harpo Marx.

Walt Whitman Faces Financial Depression

In the U.S. financial depression of 1873, Walt Whitman wrote, "Wandering at Morn":

Wandering at morn,
Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my thoughts,
Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine!
Thee coil'd in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay,
with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,
This common marvel I beheld -- the parent thrush I watch'd
feeding its young,
The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic,
Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

There ponder'd, felt I,
If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs be turn'd,
If vermin so transposed, so used and bless'd may be,
Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;
Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?
From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
Destin'd to fill the world.

What's That You Say?

A Fellow Hoosier Turns 200

Abraham wrote one verse, when he visited the terrible landscape of early childhood in Indiana:

The very spot where grew the bread
That formed my bones, I see.
How strange, old field, on thee to tread,
And feel I’m part of thee!

Lincoln recorded this nightmare:
“About ten days ago I retired very late. I had been up, waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into slumber for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible.
“I went from room to room: no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. It was light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards, and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully upon this corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. Who is dead in the White House? I demanded of one of the soldiers. The President, was his answer; he was killed by an assassin! Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which awoke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and though it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.”


"There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” (Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, 27 January 1838)

" Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today." (Notes for a Law Lecture, 1 July 1850)

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
” (1 July 1854)

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.” (ca. 1 August 1858)

"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed." (Lincoln-Douglas Debate at Ottawa, 21 August 1858)

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” (Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861)

"Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." (Lincoln’s First Annual Message to Congress, 3 December 1861)

"In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free - honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just - a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.” … "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. (Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, 1 December 1861 or 1862)

“In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity. (1 December 1862)














“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.” (Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, 4 March 1865)

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863)

"Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.” (Speech to One Hundred Fortieth Regiment, 17 March 1865)

"Perhaps a man's character is like a tree, and his reputation like its shadow; the shadow is what we think of it, the tree is the real thing."

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people, some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

“Improvement in condition is the order of things in a society of equals.”

Happy 200th Birthday, Uncle Abe

FATHER ABRAHAM ON ALCATRAZ



I would like my Lincoln-On-Alcatraz to look even more elongated than the actual Abraham Lincoln, stretched out of history into myth and fairy tale, impossibly tall.

I would like the skin of this monumental statue to be metal, perforated with large openings so that people ascending or descending internal stairways may look in all directions at the surrounding landscape, city, ocean, bay, bridges, etc.

Two elevators in the center would stop at various landings, with winding stairs throughout the statue connecting the landings. Some people will challenge themselves to climb or descend all the stairs. Most of the interior would be empty space, with nothing on the various landings, unless some food vendors. The ocean wind and fog would blow through the statue.

This Lincoln would require an excellent sculptor to take the stiffness out of the figure I have drawn, or to exaggerate it even more. It would require great engineers: Alcatraz is called The Rock, but is the rock deep and strong enough to anchor such a tall statue? able to withstand the strong winds there?

My Lincoln should not face San Francisco precisely, nor face the Golden Gate Bridge directly, but face in a direction a little south of the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge.

All right, my fantasy is absurd, and the notion of having a Peace Center on Alcatraz may sound more attractive, but the absurdity is intentional. I want a droll representation of Lincoln -- We've had enough of the historical Lincoln, which is already turning to myth -- So let him be a fantastical creature, a gateway to the imagination, a stick figure Wizard of Oz...

The Lincoln stovepipe hat, of course, must have terraces on the brim and at the top of the hat; an inner observation room when the weather is too fierce; a cafe or restaurant; restrooms; etc.:

Afghanistan Actions

The 30 January 2009 Bill Moyers Journal had a good observation on U.S. plans for Afghanistan. If you have time to read the transcript...
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

The Bryan Harrison Band, with Elisa Welch

The Bryan Harrison Band at Jack London Square: Elisa Welch, Bryan Harrison, Dave Coan (playing djembe), Jim McLaren.

The Two Wolves

Perhaps everyone heard the "parable" a woman minister presented in the church the Obamas attended on the morning of the Inauguration:

THE TWO WOLVES

An elder cherokee was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, "A fight is going on inside me. It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves.

One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other stands for joy, peace, love, hope, sharing, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, friendship, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.

This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person, too."

The children thought about it for a minute and then one child asked his grandfather, "Which wolf will win?"

The old cherokee simply replied,"The one you feed."

The January 30, 2009, Bill Moyers Journal had a great exchange about U.S. bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

My New Walking Stick

Thank you, friend Carrie, for the wonderful walking staff.




Walking home from BART, I passed the new cathedral in Oakland and decided to go in to see if there was some other photograph I would like to take there. As often happens, something I wanted to photograph -- the bottom part of a stained glass window -- was so low that I had get down on one knee (not to pray!) And, as happens lately, getting up again was quite a challenge -- so it was heaven to have that beautiful, serpentine staff to lean on and pull myself up again. Did I say, "Thank you, Carrie?"

The Bush/Obama Transition Sonnet

The time was dark, the mood was blue.
Did Worry grumble in your head? – that fool,
I know, is hard to shake – the darker me and you.
Our careless hours were shackled by the rule,

so long, of men whose arrogance offended.
(While we felt lost, they just don’t feel.)
For our shame and anguish, they pretended
we need only pray, join the Army, steal.

Our godless night is coffin cold, but safe.
No phantoms of regret or hope to rock
our feelings up and down. Just relief.
Here no ranting priest warns us of the shock
of a hot hell, or disdains our childish fright.
Embrace nothing. Love someone. Shine bright.

Remember Them

I hope everyone had a chance to see the PBS documentary narrated by Peter Coyote, “Torturing Democracy,” a good follow-up to Academy Award winning “Taxi to the Dark Side.” As Joe Klein column said in his column in TIME, 19 January 2009, if there is to be a Bush Memorial in Washington it should feature “a statue of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisoner in cruciform stress position – the real Bush legacy. … On Feb. 7, 2002, [George W. Bush] signed a memorandum stating that the Third Geneva Convention – the one regarding the treatment of enemy prisoners taken in wartime – did not apply to members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That signature led directly to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. It was his single most callous and despicable act. It stands at the heart of the national embarrassment that was his presidency.“

Many will avoid seeing film of the tortures or reading accounts of them, but I hope that no-one will forgot those who made it possible – because in the years to come, these people will show up again, all white-washed, and many will forget who they are, as they have with past villains. They will grow rich, of course, with memoirs and delivering lectures, etc., and will look like perfectly respectable human beings. But remember their names.

Remember that the August 2002 Justice Department “torture memo,” requested by the then White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, was written by John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer, and Jay Bybee. The memo argued that as commander in chief, the president could order torture without fear of criminal liability, and that in any event the torture statute did not prohibit threats of death, as long as the threatened death was not imminent….” Involved all along were Douglas Feith, “a leading neoconservative and undersecretary of defense for policy;" William Haynes, Dept. of Defense General Counsel; David Addington (Dick Cheney’s legal counsel at the time); and Donald Rumsfeld.

As reported in David Cole’s “What to Do About the Torturers?” The New York Review of Books, 15 January 2009, “The tactics used by the CIA in its interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other ‘high-level’ detainess, including waterboarding, were specifically approved in the White House situation room by Vice President Dick Cheney, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft, National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Ashcroft is reported to have remarked that ‘history will not judge us kindly,’ …”

Remember the names of these villains, as later they will be presented as innocents.

As described in the Joe Klein article and in the documentary, “Torturing Democracy,” the program “called Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE), in which various forms of torture are simulated to prepare U.S. special-ops personnel for the sorts of treatment they might receive if they’re taken prisoner” was instead used as instruction on how to torture. “The Bush Administration decided to have SERE trainees instruct its interrogation teams on how to torture prisoners. … Prisoners held by the U.S. were tortured – first at Guantanamo Bay and later in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Armed Services Committee reported details of the techniques used on one prisoner”: Over fifty-four days, beginning in late 2002, Mohammed al-Qahtani [al-Khatani] was interrogated for eighteen to twenty hours each day, denied anything more than four hours sleep per night, threatened by military dogs, stripped naked, hooded, forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, humiliated sexually by female interrogators, made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks, subjected to extreme heat and cold and loud music and loud noises, doused with cold water, and injected with intravenous fluid and not allowed to go the bathroom so that he urinated on himself. And yet this does not convey the nature of the tortures nearly so well as the images shown in “Torturing Democracy.”

Let any make amends in any way they can, but do not forget the history of these citizens (Please add in a Comment the names of any I may have neglected to list):

George W. Bush, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Douglas Feith, William Haynes, David Addington, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, George Tenet, John Ashcroft, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell. They will all show up on your television as if reputable people – you know, like the villains of the Nixon and Reagan regimes.



[The sight of people wearing signboards, or costumes -- living advertisements -- is so reminiscent of the Great Depression, and looks like "slavery continued." But as this man said, "I need to help my children."]

Grand Lake Marquee, Post-Inauguration