Page Two: A Time of Peace and Light
Snapshots for swiftly passing days
By Louis Black, Fri., Dec. 19, 2008
Cambridge, Mass., 1975/76: She had been the longtime girlfriend of a friend, a natural leader of the pack. He had started out as a friend of a friend of mine from high school, but we had grown tight. They met as freshmen at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland while I was going to school in Boston. A couple of years down the road, a whole group of them would move to Boston.
They were one of those great couples: Both of them were charismatic, intelligent, vivacious, and engaged in everything around them. They lived with a pedal-to-the metal intensity, constantly moving, always leaning forward, looking ahead, knowing the best was just around the next corner. They were always trying to grab more out of life – learn more, do more, love more.
They could have been insufferable; the air around them could have been too dense, drenching those near them with contact jitters and edginess, when the body's smells are of chemicals, not sweat. Both of them, however, had an inner grace that allowed for calm even in the midst of chaos; sharing a determination toward humor, an endless capacity for friendship, and a taste for the absurd, they embraced a silliness that leavened traits that easily could have been unbearable.
Sometime later they grew apart – death and religion, mortality and heritage drove him in directions in which she had no interest in traveling. The chronology of all of this is fuzzy and getting fuzzier. Sometime after that "sometime later," she called and asked me to help her out of a jam. We met at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City – only I was hours late because one of my sisters disappeared with the family car.
I fought with my sister when she returned, but at the museum my friend and I just laughed. After I helped her out, we drifted into a friendship without any expectations, one driven more by chance and coincidence than anything more determined. We'd hook up here or there, hang out for a while, enjoy each other's company in those short times together. Then we'd each head off in very different directions.
She would tell me the stories of her life; these almost always involved men seemingly randomly scattered about the country. When we talked, I had the sense – one not at all uncommon to me for so much of my life – that she was telling me stories of her life in the world of adults. This was still a realm I found foreign and distant. Trapped as I was by an almost startling immaturity, I had not yet drifted too far from where I had started and still remained stuck. This made her seem even more cosmopolitan and worldly.
In 1975 or 1976, friends of mine in Cambridge invited us to house-sit for them while they traveled; they lived just a couple of blocks south of Massachusetts Avenue near the Orson Welles Cinema. They were academics to the core – between them they had degrees from Williams, Oxford, Harvard, Bennington, and Brandeis – so it was no surprise that, floor to ceiling, the house was stacked with books: endless, towering stacks of poetry, novels stashed all over, with a heavy sprinkling of most every other print category all about.
The Harder They Come was well into a seemingly unending run at a local theatre. Consequently, during those years, the film and its music were everywhere and ever-present in Cambridge, seeming to permeate the air. Maybe 50,000 copies of the film's soundtrack album had been sold in the States, with about 40,000 of those sold in Cambridge alone. Going out for a walk of any duration during those times meant hearing the songs on that album drifting out of any number of houses, block after block, wherever you went.
During that time in particular, while house-sitting, we ended up spending unseemly amounts of time in bed, especially during the day. This is not to brag of any kind of sustained romantic encounters but rather to illustrate far more mundane and subdued activities. She was devoted to her soaps; determined not to miss them, she would watch all afternoon. Lying next to her, I endlessly drifted in and out of sleep, as is now and has always been my wont. When I would briefly come into consciousness, she would carefully explain to me the convoluted narrative and multilayered personalities of the characters in whatever soap she was watching. Almost immediately, I'd fade back into the great dreaming. Awakening sometime later, I would try to figure out what was going on in the soap by considering the information she had previously shared. As soon as I would ask her a question, however, she would quickly point out that this was a different soap, the one that my questions regarded being long over.
There was a steadiness to those days, probably heightened by all the steady sleeping I managed to achieve. Toward the end of our stay there, the soaps had so crowded into my head that there was mass confusion – a gridlocked traffic jam littered with convoluted storylines and multidimensional characters, all spiced with a heavy seasoning of betrayal, unrequited love, and affairs drenched in treachery and tragedy.
After our stay there, we headed off in our separate directions. Though we didn't know it at the time, we would never really hook up again. I would always think back on that time not as one of confusion, reggae, poetry, and romance, though those elements were all certainly there. Instead, my memory was tactile and visual; it seemed like a time when each day was graced and defined by light. This light was not the sharp, cutting glare of the sun, nor was it the unwelcome intrusion of the too-bright outside into these lives we were so quietly living. Rather, it was something wonderful and special, though not overwhelmingly so: It was the pleasures and benedictions of light.
In a life that has always craved storms and flourished best in the dark and when I am alone, those weeks have always stood out: the sun streaming through the house, spreading light everywhere – not a harsh and cutting light that exposed the necessary hidden, but a welcome one that complemented our slow breathing. It was a time of peace and of light.
The Austin Chronicle, Austin, Texas, 2008: There are times when it seems that at least some of our readers would vastly prefer it (as well as have a much easier time of it all) if history were more personally crafted, an impressionistic rendering rather than one determined by events and bound by agreed-upon details. Liberating history and its meaning from the past would allow it to be decided by each individual, however he or she conceived and relayed it. This would eliminate the many ways that pedants and pundits have abused history by so often using it to contradict points that one was in the midst of passionately making. It would also contain, rather than expose, the limits of one's knowledge about certain relevant topics.
Many of these readers champion the idea that at the core of history has been the ongoing battle between the (totally pure) good guys, who believe as they do, and the (completely evil) bad guys, whose views are quite the opposite. In their view, the complexities, contradictions, and enormity of history have all conspired to allow too much ambiguity into the discussion. Muddying the waters in this way has therefore undercut the crystal-clear moral certainty that seemed so obvious at the discussion's start and led to the creation of the kind of twisted, uncertain environment in which intellectuals, Marxists, moral relativists, secular humanists, academics, atheists, traitors, impotent thinkers, and the like gather to talk and thrive. Ultimately, the end result of this loss of clarity has been that it served to undermine the vivid, two-dimensional truths of real American patriots: citizens who believe in action and not confusion, in confrontation and not appeasement.
Okay, so I don't really buy this at all, and I believe that the major problems facing our world have far less to do with differing and opposing ideologies of the right and the left, of the progressive and the reactionary. Instead, regardless of specific beliefs, the demonizing of those with whom one disagrees is the greatest real problem. Demonizing and dehumanizing allow one to treat those with differing opinions not as principled and clearly concerned citizens, espousing well-reasoned though different positions, but rather to look upon them as evildoers operating only with the most malevolent intentions.
"Page Two," Dec. 19, 2008: The Republicans remain in lockstep when it comes to describing major problems facing this country, which almost always involves laying blame on the guilty as well. In the current auto-industry crisis, Republican senators and their faithful followers have been happily chastising the unions while ignoring the substantial failures of management. This is not to argue that the unions are saintly or completely devoid of blame. Even those who are the most strongly pro-union must realize that some of the unions' negotiating victories over the years have had substantial if unintended negative consequences. This is especially true when it comes to the benefits to which retired workers are entitled. Not only are people living longer, but health-care expenses also continue to rise beyond all reason. One can be pro-union and still acknowledge that there are troubling issues that need to be confronted.
Next week: more on labor and management.
Meanwhile, here's a Merry Christmas comment on unions posted on the Chronicle's online forums, filled with compassion and understanding appropriate to the season. Consider its charming question: "Why would you even want a job where you need an outside entity to supposedly protect you from getting screwed?" In light of that reasoning, why vote or support a political party in order to protect one's rights? That just evidences a failure of true autonomy and self-reliance:
"So many people with such low self-confidence, and no ambition. I admit, I really don't understand the mindset. Why would you even want a job where you need an outside entity to supposedly protect you from getting screwed? I suppose these union guys just figure the only way to make a decent living is join a brotherhood of fellow incompetents, whose sheer numbers will force the employer to pay higher wages, benefits, etc. Never a thought toward self-improvement, learning new skills, or pursuing a more lucrative profession. All you can do is keep forking over your union dues, hoping the bosses can get you a better contract. Imagine the kinds of cars we could be driving now if only Detroit hadn't been held hostage by the unions for decades, stifling innovation, and rewarding failure. And now the whole country will pay to continue rewarding failure, just because the unions were able to convince enough of their racist workers to vote Obama."
Beautiful work there, filled with love for one's fellow man and true compassionate conservatism!!
