Culture

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— Michael J. Fournier, Guest Editor
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Should You Go First

Should you go first and I remain
—To walk the road alone,
I’ll live in memory’s garden, dear,
—With happy days we’ve known.
In Spring I’ll watch for roses red
—When fades the lilac blue,
In early Fall when brown leaves call
—I’ll catch a glimpse of you.

Should you go first and I remain
—For battles to be fought,
Each thing you’ve touched along the way
—Will be a hallowed spot.
I’ll hear your voice, I’ll see your smile,
—Though blindly I may grope,
The memory of your helping hand
—Will buoy me on with hope.

— Albert K. Rowswell

 

With the passing of George H.W. Bush, I am reminded that the love of his life, Barbara, died only 8 months ago. I recall an interview she gave, saying her husband was the first boy she ever kissed, and how she loved him more at the time of the interview than when they first married.

Love or hate his politics, the Bushs loved one another and this nation.

Their love story and his recent passing reminded me of a poem, “Should You Go First.”  I found the poem and attached a cartoon. The child you see is their daughter, whom they lost early in their marriage.

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I am reminded that there is more to life than conflict and despair.
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— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD

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I write this while news sources frantically piece together the circumstances of a school shooting in Florida.  At least 17 people, students and teachers, killed.  At least 14 wounded.  The death toll will likely rise as the critically injured succumb to wounds.

Kids shot and killed by another kid in school.  It’s no longer surprising.  It seems to happen weekly.  Something’s wrong.

I don’t have answers.  I’m not going to preach “gun control” or probe the role of social media, video games, and the Internet.  Not here, not now.  I can’t do a damn thing about guns, social media, video games, or the Internet, and neither can you.  Not do I care to.

What I can do is this.  I’m an adult.  I am not about to abdicate my role as an adult.  These are very troubled kids doing these shootings.  What we know is that they always vent their deranged thinking on social media and generally among acquaintances.  Well before they show up on campus and begin blazing away, they typically post images and messages of themselves as a kind of avenging superhero about to annihilate the vermin around them.  (The vermin they refer to are their classmates, by the way.)
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This is where I am offering my services.  My services as a former university professor who has written numerous books on the philosophy of history, this being merely another way of saying the “philosophy of human behavior and thinking.”  (One of my books was titled “The Way of the Human Being.”  Another, “The Great Forgetting.”)  I think I can get through to some of these kids.  At least I’m willing to try.

What I propose is this.  If you or your kids know of another kid who fits the above profile, somehow get the message to me and I will do my damndest to meet with this person and begin a one-on-one crash course on humanness—his own and that of the vermin he wishes to rip apart with bullets.
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You see, I have taught (pro bono) at two state prisons.  Some of the men were

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Two little mice
Swift, soft, furry
Scurry from some recess
Or hidden little nest
In the palace of my mind

Two little mice
Feet padded
Noses pink
Whiskers long
Teeth razor sharp

Two little mice
One called Fear
The other Anxiety
Explore
Every corner
Of the palace of my mind

Two little mice
Play, hide
Tease, fight
And slowly
Slowly conquer
The castle of my mind
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— Susy Cantwell

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— Susy Cantwell*

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For two centuries my homeland, Hungary, was a province within the sprawling Ottoman Empire.  As a child, I thrilled to tales of skirmishes between heroic Hungarian patriots and villainous Turks.

Time has a way of healing old wounds. Hungarian bitterness toward Turks would eventually be displaced by hostility toward more recent invaders.  Hence, when the opportunity arose to spend several days in Istanbul, I seized it.

Paul and I took a direct flight to Istanbul from NYC, arriving in the late afternoon — fifteen years ago.  We had reserved a room at the luxurious Intercontinental Hotel, featuring a spectacular dining room (serving traditional Turkish cuisine) on the top floor with live music and breathtaking panorama of the city.

The restaurant was indeed superb, the food excellent and music delightful.  But this is not what won my heart.  We were stirring our evening’s last cup of delicious Turkish coffee when the musicians left for a break and another trio took the stage.   Picking up their instruments, my heart stopped as the plaintive strains of a Hungarian gypsy violin filled the room.
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So began my love affair with Istanbul.

It’s one of the oldest cities in the western world.  The city’s strategic position, overlooking the Bosphorous, straddling Europe and Asia, combined with an extraordinary mix of cultures going back three thousand years, ensures its geographic significance.

Istanbul is huge, overcrowded, and noisy.  Buildings reflecting centuries of conquerors line the narrow streets, thronged by people speaking many languages and selling all manner of goods. Strange and unfamiliar smells fill the air.

We would revisit the city several years later.  Things were different this time.  There was a palpable tension in the air.  Street life was less freewheeling.  People were subdued and many of the women wore the Moslem headscarf.  Religious fundamentalism was on the rise.
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We booked into a tiny hotel close to the historic Old Town and were received  by the concierge with the warmest of welcomes.  This was a good start.

Since we had missed visiting the cisterns on our previous visit, they were the first stop on our

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Editor’s note:  When I read the newspapers about the Middle East my reactions run from horror to incomprehension to anger to sorrow.  Somewhere in that pile of news — that mess — there are real people living real lives, or at least trying to.  I yearn to meet these people — the ordinary people.  I yearn to smell and experience these places.  To eat the food.  Talk to people.

But I’m a chicken.  I’ve never been off this continent.  (Don’t tell anyone.  It’s sort of embarrassing.)

Then I made a wonderful discovery.  Susy Cantwell.  I’ve known and admired Susy for years.  What I didn’t know is that she and husband Paul travel the world.  They’re as comfortable in Lima as they are in Istanbul or Prague.  They “get into it.”  The food, the bazaars, the local people, the crazy cab drivers — the works!

Susy’s Hungarian.  Grew up in Hungary.  How on earth she made her way from Hungary to Malone and married Paul is a story I’d like to hear someday.  (Mail-order bride?)  In any case, the cultures of the world are an endless source of fascination to her and Paul.

I contacted her recently, asking if she would share her fascination with our readers.  I was especially eager for her thoughts on the Middle East and Moslem culture.

She responded with the essay, below.  In a handful of paragraphs, she humanized the Moslem world.  (Who else do you know who compares underwear with Moslem women at a visitor center outside Cairo?)  I stopped seeing Middle Easterners as stereotypes and — presto! — began recognizing real human beings.  (Though, I must say, I never compare underwear with strangers at visitor centers.  Never ever.)

I’ve asked her to continue her reports, wherever her airline ticket and pen and her courage take her.

 

— Susy Cantwell

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Like everybody, I am in awe of Egypt’s wonders.  Paul and I have visited the country twice over the past 20 years.

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On our first visit, Cairo seemed subdued.  There were many devout Moslems, especially in the countryside.  Most were reserved.

Though not all.  At one

— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD

 

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How much would you be willing to pay to spend a night in this?  (Here’s a few close-ups.)

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Still undecided?  This might sway you.
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Imagine waking up to the dawn chorus of larks and sparrows, and gazing out on the rolling, bucolic landscape through this splendidly arched window.  A mug of hot, steaming coffee in hand.
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Still wondering?

Don’t bother, ‘cause you don’t have a chance of staying here.  For starters, it’s booked solid through December 2017 — at a cool £475 per night.  That’s 475 British pounds sterling.  That’s $732 USD.

Obviously, I left something out of this little story.  Omitted was (a) someone with a vision and (b) someone with skilled hands.  People like this:
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A visionary and a pair of hands, the two ingredients missing from my little story.

Think of Rodin’s hands.  Fingers that, from indifferent, unyielding marble, created “The Kiss.”  Think of the mind of Steve Jobs, the visionary who could thrill an audience with the challenge, “Let’s go invent tomorrow, rather than worrying about what happened yesterday.”

With these two ingredients, we’re ready to reconsider that pile of rubble, above, currently renting at $732 per night.  We’re ready because somebody like Steve Jobs looked at that pile of rock, and didn’t see a “mess”; he saw “possibilities.”

The visionary happened to be 3 men, and this is what they saw:
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To make it happen, they needed a pair of hands that could perform magic on that crumbling mass of stone and mortar.

They got lucky.  They found a master mason.  (Actually, they found a number of master craftsmen.)  And this is what their hands built:
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Look carefully.  What you’re looking at is a 21st-century building erected within a ruined, 13th-century castle in Warwickshire, England.  It goes by the name “Astley Castle.”  Strictly speaking, it was never a castle; it was a manor house that was added onto over the centuries, including the addition of decorative parapets (i.e., “gingerbread”).

Ingenious!

Okay, how much would you pay to spend a night here?

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— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD

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Winter solstice.  Christmas eve.  And I am a hibernating bear, deep within the cave of winter dreams.

All my life I have sensed a strange convergence between solstice and Christmas, like two vast planets wheeling into near collision.  Then each slowly spinning off on its separate course into darkness, the dream of deep space.

For a moment the realms of mythology and history nearly intersect, the one briefly illumining the other.  At that instant we see more of each than we ever do.

In the eerie light of mythology I recognize that Christmas is old mythology.  We fool ourselves that it’s history.  The Kiowa poet N. Scott Momaday taught me years ago that we all live in myth.  We live in history too, but history is veneer.  Beneath the mask of history is the truth that never happened, it just always is.  Scott went back to his grandmother’s cabin and her gravesite at Rainy Mountain to realize this.  I have never forgotten his story and its lesson.

For years I have hunted for the crackup of myth into history—the  shattering of the flawless sheet of glass into shards.   When mind that thought in union with the earth collapsed into the mind that now observed the earth—mankind apart.

Socrates, Plato’s teacher, illustrates the point.  The Socratic method:  we’re all more or less familiar with it.  Teaching by questioning.  But it is more radical than this; it is a clue to the beginning of the modern mind—the collapse of the quantum wave into something stunningly new.  And dangerous.  The teacher would have his students recite truth and mystery, and perforce they would recite myth:  the ancient thing, the unquestioned thing, the thing that got its power through the telling, the repeating, the power in the words themselves.  The thing that never happened, it just is.  Now Socrates questioned it.  “How do you know?”  Over and over, he sowed doubt.  They were dumbfounded, his students.  There was no response.  It is said he created an uproar in Athens.

Words now became different.  Instead of being the thing itself they began to refer to

— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD

I was 17 at the time.  In Southern California.  A college friend, Mike Madden, had invited me to spend Thanksgiving with him and his family, since I couldn’t go home for the holiday.

Mike and his mom lived with his mom’s dad, a retired medical doctor.  I remember sitting in the living room with the old doc.  Just the two of us.  Around 6 pm, Mike’s mom brought his dinner on a tray, turned on the evening news and left the room.  I stayed with him, the two of us reviewing the events of the day around the world.

At one point I happened to glance at the old man.  He was quietly weeping.  Tears streaming down his face.  He said not a word, just tears — which said everything.

“He does it every night,” Mike later explained, obviously embarrassed.  “He insists on watching the news, alone, and without fail he weeps.  He’s getting senile,” he added with lowered voice.

No.  This wasn’t senility, I decided.  The old black-bag healer who had brought children into the world and watched over the feverish and dying — had the courage and wisdom to weep at the horrible spectacle we casually refer to as The News.

Daily, I read the NY Times.  (I don’t own a television.)  The stories appall me.  I am grief-stricken as I read.  Even so, something compels me to read on, day after day.

I read on, even as I am wounded.  And feel helpless.  That is, I felt helpless till I discovered this poem.  Its message whispers to me.  I have fallen in love with it.  It tells me I need not be the hapless victim of human folly and tragedy.

It tells me to wage peace and goodness.

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings
and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children
and freshly mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen
and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:
hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools:

— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD
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Open this video.  Sit with it for awhile.  (Turn up your speakers.)

Achingly beautiful, isn’t it?  You could listen forever, couldn’t you?

(The other day I happened to be in a café, quietly playing this on my laptop. “Oh, so relaxing!” exclaimed the waitress.)

Keep listening.  I’m going to say something you will have trouble believing.  You won’t believe it for the very good reason that you won’t “feel” what I’m talking about.  (Generally I don’t feel it either, despite knowing it’s true.)

That stream is you.  And you do, in fact, listen to it and live it.  Forever.  And so do I.  Although neither of us realizes this, save for rare moments when we sense we’re in the presence of something infinitely larger and more powerful than ourselves — something almost painfully beautiful and yet incapable of being expressed in words.

You have always been suffused with this stream.  Dissolved in it.  Even before you were born and after you die.  For the stream is eternal.  It is the universe.

When I say “universe,” I’m talking about more than deep space, whether it be the breathtaking beauty of a cold, clear February night or the esoteric study of black holes, supernovas and galaxies — the field we call astrophysics or cosmology.  I’m talking about a great, patient Intelligence that created you and me, spring peepers, whales, ruby-throated hummingbirds, and night-blooming jasmine, along with birth and death.

Cosmologists and astrophysicists know a great deal about the mechanics of the universe, such as space-time, gravity, the strong and weak force, dark matter, the Big Bang — phenomena that yield their secrets to mathematical interrogation.  What they don’t know is the answer to Einstein’s famous question:  “Is the universe friendly?”

It happens the answer depends on who’s asking — a fact confirmed by quantum mechanics and implied by Einstein’s special relativity.

Let’s go outside and have a smoke.  (Mind if I bum one?)  Yeah, heavy stuff.  If we’re going to ponder death, we must first understand how “reality” works.  Which means we’ve got to come to grips with 

News Flash (November 5th)

Andrea Dumas just won a seat on the Malone Village Board!  New to political office, she ran against two incumbents — and prevailed over both.  (We’re delighted to see Joe Riccio returned to office.  He’s a wise and thoughtful man, and essential on that board.  Brian Langdon did a creditable job as trustee, and deserves our appreciation.  It’s a thankless job and Brian did well.)

RiverCityMalone.com interprets Andrea’s win as big “thumbs up” for Sisters Café and a signal that we all need to take a fresh approach to our village.  (It is indeed ours!  No, it does not belong to the Franklin County Dept of Social Services and the slumlords and riffraff they recklessly and infuriatingly bankroll — hopefully the dept’s new leadership will change this.  Nor does it belong to NYS or Washington, with their outrageous and financially crippling directives, including those damn DSS mandates.  Starting today, with Andrea’s victory, remember this.  Malone is ours!)

Let us work with this gutsy woman to make her vision come true.  Andrea Dumas is the face of the new optimism and determination in town.

It’s a good day in River City Malone — CLM.

 

— Calvin Luther Martin, PhD
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“What this country needs,” began Kansas Senator Joe Bristow, rising to address the US Senate on everything that ailed America — in 1917.  Today, a century later, nobody remembers a word the man said, except for the rasping phrase, “What this country needs  — ,” prefacing each item in his long list of solutions to America’s ills.

Presiding over the Senate that day was Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President, Thomas R. Marshall, a man notable for his wit and fondness for cigars.  As Bristow droned on and senators dozed off, an exasperated Marshall reportedly interrupted, “What this country really needs is a good five-cent cigar!”

I sometimes feel like Mr. Marshall as I listen to local politicians wind on about Malone’s ailing downtown and what’s required to get it “up and running.”  Solutions include:  grant money, state intervention, a hoped-for economic boom, “expanding the tax base,” “growing the economy,” another $20K

 

A warm summer evening.  Fair Week.  The stands jam-packed.  The excitement is palpable.  A rhythm & blues legend is about to perform.

The crowd explodes in applause as four young men take their position on stage.  Four singers who will be inducted, seven years later, into both the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the Vocal Group Hall of Fame.  The group that Rolling Stone Magazine ranks #81 among the “One Hundred Greatest Artists of All Time.”

With this man on drums.  

—Calvin Luther Martin, PhD

 
Detail from dust jacket of “The Horse in Art,” John Baskett

David Minnich, Director of the Wead Library, was honored this week by a gift of books from Dr. Nina Pierpont (my better half).

Pierpont made the gift to celebrate Mr. Minnich’s century of service as Librarian.  (If not a century, it sure feels like one.  And it’s felt good.  Mr. Minnich has run a splendid community library.)

Click on the image, above, to play.  In the new window that pops up, click in the middle of the red box, where it says “Play.”

(Ignore the website itself.  This version of the cartoon was widely available a year ago, Xmas 2007, but seems to have disappeared from the web this year–except on this website.  You can find it on YouTube, although it’s an inferior version.  The Editor.)

And here’s the original:

 —Calvin Luther Martin

 
Watercolor (artist unknown)

First, click here to listen to this tape-recorded message.  I took it off my telephone answering machine a little over a week ago.

You are welcome to post a meditation here. Preferably one you’ve written, though not necessarily.  If you have a short piece written by someone else which has especially spoken to you, go ahead and post it.  Be sure to give the author credit and, if possible, the original source it came from.

Your meditation might be religious, or more broadly spiritual and not identified with any particular religious tradition. It might be something healing, comforting, compassionate. Or sorrowful, wistful, and searching.

This is, withal, a place to meditate. To share life’s joys large and small, its mysteries and pain. Share these with the community of mankind which, despite its follies, remains an endless source of warmth, humor, compassion, and fascination.

—Editor

 

—by John Miletich, Earth Science Teacher, Malone Central School District

Take a quick look around New York State and one characteristic quickly becomes apparent.  The state, as we know it today, consists of a great variety of landscapes and geologic formations.  As a matter of fact only two states in the entire United States, Colorado and Alaska, have more landscape regions than New York.

“High Peaks Layers”

©Carl Heilman, with permission