Due to current events in my personal life, I have been thinking again about how poorly our culture prepares us to deal with death and with people who are dying.  Not strange, I guess, for a nation founded on the pursuit of happiness.  People wonder why I put Thomas Jefferson in hell in To Join the Lost.  Mostly, it’s because of his hypocrisy as a slave-owner who not only knew that he was doing wrong, but knew the degree of evil that it involved.  But I could have put him there for this seemingly benign phrase as well, which shackles the body politic to a warped, limited vision of the human condition, easily subverted into greed, lust, and the quest for satiation.  A people dedicated to the pursuit of happiness is not going to have a lot of time and thought to spare for such unpleasant things as death.  They’re going to shove it aside into hospitals and nursing homes; prettify it in funeral parlors; hide it in closed caskets that no one is allowed to welcome home from Afghanistan and Iraq; have broadcast journalists censor it from Syrian twitter feeds as too upsetting for the average viewer.  We have no emotionally satisfying rituals for grief and mourning, which we regard as disturbed conditions to be “gotten over” as quickly as possible and otherwise to be presided over by quasi-medical specialists.  We use the word “closure” a lot, as if the process of accepting a loved one’s final and permanent departure were similar to putting a bunch of stuff away in a closet.  You hear it from the relatives of MIAs – “I can get closure once he’s properly buried.”  And the reporter holding the microphone nods sympathetically.   “How does it feel?” she asks.

Okay, I’m being unfair to TJ.  Late nineteenth century America, after all, was obsessed with death, and saw – I mean saw in its most literal sense – a lot of it.  That was a nation no less dedicated to the pursuit of happiness than is our present McRepublic, so obviously it’s not all Tom’s fault.  Some time in the twentieth century, among the many wrong turns our country took in the course of its unfortunate rise to becoming the World’s Preeminent Empire, we were moved to sweep mortality into the corner with all the other unexamined dust bunnies of our lives.  At some point, death was transformed from a fact of life, as it were, to a  mostly avoidable unpleasantness; from something waiting just around the corner to an unusual and distant aberration.  I’m a poet and lawyer, not a historian, but I would be willing to bet that this devolution in consciousness occurred about the time that medical science took its huge strides forward with the introduction of antibiotics and other technologies for the management or reversal of evitable forms of morbidity.  With every step forward, after all, we leave something behind.  In this case, it was the daily, present awareness of where we’re each and all of us going.  There’s always the hope, which no sane person in the age of curing by leeches and bleeding could have entertained, that Dr. House will apply the paddles and find the right pill and revive us to go forth and consume again.

Concurrently and probably not entirely coincidentally, people drifted away from traditional religion.  I think this is overall a positive development, but it also involved jettisoning the churches’/synagogues’ role in guiding survivors through the aftermath of a death without anything substantial to take their place.  Maybe the current evangelico-protestant revival has something to offer here.  I wouldn’t know; but my impression of those megachurches is that they have more to do with building community, providing unguilty entertainment, and policing sexual morality than with meeting the needs of the bereaved.  Maybe we could look to our new scientistic quasi-religion.  There is the medicalization of grieving, but I don’t think that a Valium prescription is really a viable replacement for socially sanctioned wailing and gnashing of teeth and tearing of clothing and draping of mirrors and dressing in black.  There are psychological counselors, but that is merely another form of medicalization, the treatment of an individual disorder – “I am going to help you return to functionality after the death of your mother.”  What we lack are social institutions and cultural procedures focused on the fact that we are going to die and the people who are important to us are going to die, too, probably before we do.

The whole thing makes it harder to die, of course.  Not only is the person with a terminal illness deprived of the support of someone who has skill and experience in dealing with the non-medical needs of someone in her situation; a scrim of medico-technological optimism descends between him and the recognition of what is actually going on.  Fortunately, in many places there are hospice programs, staffed with people who have lots of relevant expertise and, in my experience, who are full of lovingkindness and wisdom gleaned from a range of traditional and nontraditional emotional, spiritual, and technical resources.  One can see the process of cultural reinvention at work here.  We had abandoned the dying, but the dying are still in the world, and they have needs, and our culture is devising ways to meet them.  So far, so good, if you are a dying person and you have geographic and financial access to hospice.

That leaves everybody else.  Where do you go to scream?

A Fat Rich Elderly White Guy Who Wants To Be President

It is gratifying, for those of us who enjoy our schadenfreude warm, to watch the Republican presidential contestants expend upon each other the slyly ad hominem vitriol they normally save, to the betterment of our political discourse and in service of the nation’s preservation,  for the defacement of their electoral adversaries from the other party.  One can perhaps attribute this delightful leveling of the playing field at least in part to the recent return to prominence of Newt Gingrich, a character who sometimes seems to have sprung straight from the pen of Charles Dickens on one of that Master of Snark’s more sardonic days.   Newt has the gift of bringing others to his own level, just like what happens when you flush.  I’m prompted to these thoughts by the recollection that last week, television ads aired in support of Gingrich famously twitted Mitt Romney for the sin of speaking French.  Today we learn, from David Bromwich’s article in the New York Review of Books, that Newt’s Ph.D. dissertation relied on sources in that very language.   What a nice smile he has, though: a shark with a full belly.

The first couple of months of displacement were hard.  I don’t mean to compare our plight with that of people who lost their homes or businesses to the floods, but the fact remains that the lives of the state employees who had been based in Waterbury were profoundly disrupted.  The familiar spaces and procedures in which we had spent the majority of our waking hours most days were gone, swept away, finished.  In their place were makeshifts and make-dos.  One doesn’t realize how much our semi-conscious routines smooth the way through life, until they are gone.  Step out the door (which door?) to the bathroom (which way?) and then remember the way back.  Where’s the copy paper?  What are the six new passwords I need to know to work my computer?    Multiply these questions by the number of minutes in an eight hour day.  It’s exhausting.  On top of that, the work load stays the same, but one’s efficiency is shot to hell.  Tasks which would take a couple of hours… well, I remember the first time I tried to write a letter and get it printed, it took me two days, and that was not for lack of trying.  Meanwhile, tasks stacked up.  It would be easy to say, “So adjust.  Get over it,” but adjustment is not all that easy even when it is voluntary; and there was so much to adjust to; and we kept on being reminded, this was all temporary – the prospect of further change, welcome or unwelcome, loomed in the imminent but indeterminate future.

My work unit of attorneys and administrative assistants was assigned temporarily to Montpelier.  At first I was located in a hastily converted printer closet.  I felt lucky because unlike others I had a space to myself, once we got the noisy printer out.  After a couple of weeks I was moved up the stairs to share a small conference room with a colleague.  We got along fine; that was okay, sort of.  A couple of days after that, some guys from the telephone company came by to see whether lines could be installed for us.  Despite which, I never got a phone during the months I was there.  That was okay, sort of; I used my cell phone.

Yes, it was all okay, sort of, and the people in Montpelier among whom we had landed, graciously moved aside to make room for us, and bent over backwards to provide us with the tools we needed, and were generally welcoming and kind.  And yet, and yet.  There was the feeling, as a displaced colleague of mine put it, that “nothing is right.”  There was a constant emotional undertow of frustration, anger and annoyance.  It seized on small things and added them up.  One colleague was really pissed at a memo discouraging staff from eating at their desks and reminding us what office attire was considered appropriate here in buttoned-down Montpelier, far from Waterbury’s dissolute laxity, where, lacking air conditioning, summers had seen us in shorts and sandals.  Now we were breathing Montpelier’s stale, processed air in ties and prim business suits.  Another colleague couldn’t stand her roommate.  Another, stuck in a spare space several floors away from everybody else, felt isolated and lonely. Another, shuffled from room to room to room as permanent residents came and went, felt disrespected.  Extra commuting time rankled some.  I found grating the need to swipe a security badge every time I passed through a door, the stricter dress code, the huge number of parking spaces reserved for people like Assistant Deputy Under Secretaries, so important they didn’t seem to need to come to work and so their spaces stood vacant all day as ordinary schmos like me drove by.  For everybody, there was some constant reminder of what had been lost.  We all hated Montpelier; not so much for its own sake, but for what had been taken from us.

Meanwhile, the movers and shakers were moving and shaking.  Although the heat and  lights were back on in Waterbury, and the plumbing was working, and the carpets were all being vacuumed regularly, and the air was breathable, and, in short, the buildings by all appearances had been restored to habitability, the time for us to move back in kept on receding.  A couple months.  Six months.  A couple years.  Maybe never.  Maybe we’ll tear the whole thing down and rebuild it.  Maybe we’ll sell it.  (Who would pay good money for a floodable hundred year old mental hospital wasn’t explained.)  Maybe we’ll move you to Barre as part of a downtown revitalization project.  Despite all the talk we heard from the governor and others right after Irene about how Vermonters pitch in and help each other when they’re down, Barre is lobbying hard to take advantage of Waterbury’s misfortune, apparently with some success, as the governor today announced plans to relocate a good chunk of the former Waterbury workforce there, smack downtown in a yet-to-be-built multiple use “City Place” replete with grocery stores, apartments and floodproofing.  Yeah, floodproofing.  Barre’s a flood plain, too.  If you’re ever in Barre and you get hit by a car, and you’re lying in the street and you see the mayor come running over, watch out.  He’s not going to give you CPR.  He’s after your wallet.

Very early on, the administration invited proposals from developers and builders for what to do with the Waterbury complex, contributing to the feeling that, as usual after a disaster, the carrion eaters would be well taken care of even if nobody else was.  There was talk of turning it into a mixed use space of condos and retail facilities, or maybe a college.  There was no explanation as to why, if the site has suddenly become so flood prone as to be unusable for state offices, it’s a good place for small businesses and educational institutions and people to live.  Or why, if being on a flood plain is the problem, it would be desirable to move to Barre or Montpelier, flood plains themselves with far worse histories than Waterbury.  Or why the existing structures could not be rehabbed and protected, perhaps by a short levee.  Or why the Department of Public Safety is back in business in its corner of the complex, whereas buildings in hardly worse condition are left empty.  The governor repeatedly said he was considering all options and would make the best decision for all Vermonters.  What credible options there are, other than moving back to Waterbury what would be left over from Barre’s larceny, was not obvious; and neither is it obvious how it might be good for Vermont to whisk away an entire town’s economic raison d’etre, or to let the town wither while government dithers, or to plunk a couple of hundred people down in a big box office building in the middle of a dying downtown and hope their lunch money revitalizes the place, while the other town that had grown vibrant with their presence struggles to get by with less.  An Advisory Committee on the issue was announced, constituted of representatives of many interests but completely lacking any representation for the one constituency whose lives are most directly impacted – former Waterbury workers.   I find myself thinking more and more of that line from Stan Rogers’ great song, The Mary Ellen Carter, about “smiling bastards lying to you every where you go.”

Which brings us back to the topic of the opening paragraph.  Last Saturday a few hundred displaced state workers rallied in Waterbury, under the banner “(re)Occupy Waterbury,” demanding to be brought back.  It was a good-natured, high-spirited crowd.  It was the first such event, and I hope it will not be the last.  Stan Rogers may be apropos here, in more ways than one.  The refrain to The Mary Ellen Carter goes, “Rise again.”  Bless you, Waterbury.  We’ll be back.

Update, 1/12/12:  Governor Shumlin stated in his budget speech today that returning state workers to Waterbury is his first choice, but it is increasingly clear from the speech and other statements emanating from the administration that (a) he doesn’t mean to return more than about two-thirds of the workers who were there before Irene, and (b) it’s not gong to happen any time soon, and (c) it may not happen at all, depending on the cost of providing what he deems to be suitably flood-resistant accommodations, based on forthcoming recommendations from a committee of builders and architects.  It’s the kind of good news that doesn’t look so good, when you look at it closely.  Basically, nothing has changed.

I have beheld the end of a life,
the blue eyes turning to the ceiling
and closing, and the strange orange hue that
then suffused the cooling skin,

and a life’s beginning I’ve also beheld,
the mewling, stick-limbed lump of tenderness,
eyes clamped shut, trading the womb for
its exhausted mother’s arms.

It’s odd to hold them both within me,
two pale lights at the ends of a stick
that do not balance: the one cannot
be weighed with the other or cancel it out.

Some console themselves with rhythms,
tell the children the gracefully falling
leaves make mulch for what will rise,
as if the steady beat of days,

of seasons, generation and decay
makes white noise and drowns the silence.
Others flood the quiet betimes with
droning of the eternal.  Others

watch tv.  In the body’s
sealed envelope, we carry
from lips forever shrunken open
to the inarticulate young

a sediment of sentiment.
It gives them heft, to bear their growth.
Devoted as robins to their hatchlings,
we pass it down the straining gullet;

unlike them, we’re no more empty
for giving our young what we had in us.
Passing on is not unburdening.  When
my father died, he handed me

a weight no one could bring into
this world except by leaving it.
My first born bleated her little welcome in
that same building’s other wing.

Siri Nilsen

First, a couple of disclaimers.

Siri Nilsen is the daughter of Shari Nilsen, whom I knew back when she was jus’ plain li’l Shari Gerber back in the ‘hood.  Shari had long straight black hair, perfect olive skin, considerable personal beauty, and one of those pure angelic soprano voices.  Kind of like a short, Jewish, Buffalonian Joan Baez, only more buxom.  She was a year ahead of me at Kenmore West Senior High, and I used to go listen to her play her guitar and sing folk music at the Rue Franklin coffeehouse.  I had a hopelessly unconsummated crush on her, of which she was either entirely unaware or in denial.  But we were good friends.  (Ouch!)  A few years out of high school we lost contact.  She went on to marry and then divorce a Norwegian folk musician, Lillebjorn Nilsen.  No, I never heard of him, either, but he is a big deal in Norway.  Siri is one of their daughters.  Not long ago, Shari and I came back into contact via Facebook.  So that’s how I know of Siri.

The second disclaimer is that I have little or no received vocabulary or context from which to talk about Siri’s music.  That is, I am even more entirely ignorant of the Norwegian folk and pop traditions in which she works, than I am of contemporary American music, which is saying something. I’m like the guy in American Graffiti who said, “Ain’t been no good music since Buddy Holly died.”   A few years ago, my son convinced me that there can be artistry to rap, but that doesn’t mean I listen to it.  Every once in a while he tries to get me interested in this or that band.  Mostly it sounds like derivations of stuff that I had already heard a thousand times twenty years ago, and was tired of then.  Exceptions are one album by Bjork and a few compositions (when I am in the right mood) by Radio Head.  I don’t listen to them much, either.  My daughter has had more success, in that she introduced me to a now defunct Chinese all-girl punk band called Hang on the Box that I think is the greatest rock and roll band there ever was.  Great road music, great music for washing the dishes, great music for scaring the neighbors.  My brother, the professional musician, hates them.  So there you have it.

But I want to tell you about Siri’s music because, after repeated listenings to her second CD, Alle Snakker Sant, I really, really like it.  It holds up for me, and my appreciation of it keeps getting deeper.

So… how to describe it?  Siri’s voice is one of those pure angelic sopranos, a bit lighter and more agile than I remember her mother’s, with a silken quality.  Now it skips playfully up a ladder of notes, now it sighs with understated melancholy, now it rings.  “Silvery” is a word that comes to mind.  Understated: perhaps part of the freshness of Siri’s music for me is that the emotion in it is not shoved in your face, as with almost all current North American pop. It is implicit, for the most part.  The listener is allowed to come to the music, is treated as a listener rather than as a sonic receptacle.  This makes the experience more intimate.  Instead of hearing the singer’s melismatic or screaming ego interpreting the song, you hear the song that she is singing.  In that sense, the illusion of a shared experience is fostered.  Some great singers do this – Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson come to mind.  So does Siri.  Her silken, silvery voice is transparent to the music.

The arrangements are reasonably spare.  Although electronics are not eschewed, the sound is basically acoustic, based on guitars and keyboards.  Against this often arpeggiated background Siri floats melodies identifiably rooted in a folk and classical tradition. Occasionally, layers of lovely harmony are interposed, and a few songs end with drawn-out choral “aah.”  This enterprise is grounded in melody and harmony.   The melodies often sound familiar.  I don’t mean derivative.  One is conscious that one has never heard this melody before, but one also feels that one knows it.  Somebody once said of Richard Thompson words to the effect that he writes tunes that sound as if people have been singing them for three hundred years.  Siri’s tunes often have a similar feel – not quite as if they should be credited to “trad. anon.” but perhaps Trad. Anon.’s Cousin would do.  The melodies are often deceptively light; there’s that understatement again.  But it’s not the tired trope of setting pain to brightness, oh no.  I’ll say it; I am sick of irony.  This music is not ironic.  It may not blast you with its guts, but neither does it hide behind self-consciousness.

I don’t speak Norwegian, but I have a translation of the lyrics prepared by their author.  Siri’s mother, Shari, is a professional tranlator, and her verbal ability doesn’t seem to have skppped a generation.  If the lyrics are better in Norwegian than they are in English, this girl’s one hell of a songwriter.  The words are spare, clear, eloquent, with a gift for the elegant or surprising turn of phrase and the quietly apt image. They express concerns typical for a twenty-something – what is love and how to find it, how to know one’s path in life, how to deal with adversity.  They do so with intelligence, sensitivity, and the self awareness that results when self consciousness has matured.  I am as aware as anyone that an artist’s statements beginning with “I” are not necessarily autobiographical, but Siri seems to be working from experience.  “Where should you go/when every road leads to a wall/and in the wall is a dent/from old encounters with your head?”

The predominant mood is one of uncertainty and loss, with moments of happiness and moments of quite searing grief, and a playful liveliness running throughout.  It all feels earned and authentic and honest.  She is least convincing, I think, in the happy moments; but that is the thought of a man nearing sixty, who believes that happiness, that is, a sense of the rightness of things, is beyond the grasp of most young people, who experience happiness as some form of gratification.  In one song Siri expresses a deeper wisdom about happiness, but – I am guessing here – it still might be an intellectual insight for her, not yet fully realized.  There is also, I think, a hint that Siri has experienced greater heartbreak than the merely romantic.  The last verse of the last song on the record, Still Waters, says,

for I can cover things up and I
can patch things up and I
can pick up the pieces of everything that is broken
but nobody can save a grown man
who wants to disappear in still waters

Elsewhere, she says, “I have sold the title deed/to the family sorrow, and I will never ever go there again.”  One doesn’t want to read too much into it, but it seems that some family tragedy has touched her, and she has grown beyond it, and it has made her stronger and deeper and wiser.  More power to her, and may she continue to grow and to add to this beautiful, heartfelt, profound record of her growing.

The Tea Party's Bitch

On public radio this morning, I heard three stories whose rapid juxtaposition seems to illustrate perfectly this moment in our society’s life.

First, congressional Republicans were playing politics with extension of tax breaks for the working classes.  The version they passed would have paid for the tax break by freezing federal employees’ wages,  instead of the funding mechanism proposed by the Democrats to increase taxes slightly on the highest income earners.  The GOP bill also contained a “poison pill” provision that they knew would be unacceptable to the Senate Democrats and the President.   The poison pill would, if enacted, force the President to decide quickly whether to allow construction of an unnecessary and environmentally questionable oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, rather than wait until after the election.  I guess the idea is to divert attention from the GOP’s unwillingness to increase taxes on the richest of the rich for any purpose whatsoever, and to allow themselves to say the Democrats oppose both working class tax breaks and “jobs creation.”  As an added bonus, in this age of climate change they get to continue the pretense on behalf of their corporate masters that protection of the  environment conflicts with economic development.  Of course the cynicism is breathtaking.  To add to the bizarro world flavor of our national politics, later today, a Senate vote on the bill was blocked by… Senate Republicans playing politics!  But read on…

The second story was about testimony before a legislative committee by a woman in her eighties, concerning the cuts to the federal home heating assistance program proposed by the Obama administration.  Funding to help poor people buy fuel for heat would be cut roughly in half.  She was talking about what a reduction in this assistance would mean to her, this winter.  Last winter, she kept her thermostat at 60 to save money on heat.  This winter, she’s wondering what she has to give up in order to keep from freezing – food? medications?

The third story was about a local arts center, the Flynn Theatre.  It has just received an anonymous $1,000,000 donation to help replace its  squeaky seats.

Evil Kenyan Socialist Muslims, Beware This Man!

Long-time readers of this blog will know of my affection for Charles Dickens, class warrior extraordinaire and the greatest wielder of snark and outrage the English language has ever known.  Often, reading Dickens, I am struck by the feeling that except for the funny costumes he is talking directly about contemporary America.  Apparently the wonderful blogger Lance Mannion feels much the same way, likening New Gingrich to the evil schoolmaster Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby.  I would quibble with only one thing.  Nobody named “Lance Mannion” has any business making fun of “Newt Gingrich” as a moniker Dickens might have invented.

In this same vein, and with a nod to Newt’s claim that whereas most people think in terms of relatively short periods of time, he himself habitually contemplates vistas of 500 years, I would like to direct your attention to a fairly recently published book, one of whose themes is the unvarying nature of malevolence over the centuries.

In addition to exquisite taste in literature, Ted Lehmann seems to have a fine blog.

The Indextrious Reader joins the chorus.