Tag: Arts & Letters

PAINFUL NEUTRALITY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

At the least, the pursuit of objectivity has meant that news reporters and editors cannot engage in political activities. Even community-wide charity drives become suspect. I learned early on I couldn’t wear political buttons or put a bumper sticker on the car, much less participate in a protest line. The ethics policy at the Kansas City Star was famed for telling its personnel that the only organization where they could vote was their church. (And, presumably, public elections, although some journalists have argued even that would taint their professionalism.) To be honest, even though we Quakers never take a vote in our business sessions, I felt some relief to know that my church was taking public stands in my stead.

It’s not that we don’t have values or don’t believe that reforms are needed. Rather, it’s an awareness that to report all sides fairly, we need to have some distance from participating in the battle itself. We have to be able to report shortcomings even in the places where we feel most sympathetic.

Still, I’d like those who accuse journalists of bias to try living under such strictures themselves. Maybe they’d even see a bigger picture.

STACKING FIREWOOD AS A METAPHOR

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Because we rely on a wood stove to heat part of our house, one of my annual rituals involves ordering and stacking timber. Living where we do in northern New England, there’s plenty of forest to draw on and we can anticipate suffering through an extended winter. With the advance of “renewable energy” sources, however, we’re also competing with the local electrical utility, which has begun using wood to fire some generators. Since we reside in a small city and have full-time occupations (though not always of the paying variety), we depend on the services of independent entrepreneurs who proclaim, as the saying goes, CUT – SPLIT – DELIVERED. Cordwood, for the stove, being a couple of inches shorter than fuel for the fireplace. It’s a crucial distinction.

This is not something I grew up with. Nobody we knew had a working fireplace, or if they did, it wasn’t used in our presence. My appreciation of wood fires originated in Boy Scout outings with a troop dedicated to backpacking and primitive camping – quite a feat, when you think of it, for a troop based in southwestern Ohio. My first-hand experience with working fireplaces came later, with my residency in an ashram in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania, in a single winter of living in town in Washington State, and in the house I owned for a couple of years in the Rust Belt – a half-dozen years, altogether. Thus, my sustained encounters have been largely in the past dozen years in New Hampshire, though I suspect the applications are fairly universal.

Ordering in itself is an act of faith. You find a phone number – perhaps in one of the weekly neighborhood newspapers or perhaps on a kiosk in a local store or perhaps by word of mouth, and eventually dial (one of my delays is making sure I could pay for the wood on delivery; the timing of our income-tax refund is often a factor); usually you wind up leaving a message on an answering machine and hoping for a reply. Even then, there’s no guarantee the woodcutter will reply or follow through on a promise to deliver. For the dealer, arranging for trees can be iffy – a warm, wet winter, for instance, may keep cutters out of the woods. One year, this meant our pile never arrived, and we were stonewalled on our inquiries. These days, our firewood comes from a man in his early seventies. How much longer he’ll continue, of course, is in question. In typical Yankee farmer tradition, he shows up when he’s ready – anywhere from a month to three or four months after he’s expected. We don’t need to dicker over price – he’s well in line with the going rate, and I’ve always been impressed with the quality he delivers.

After some irregularity in our annual pace, we’ve settled on ordering four cords a year, green wood we hope will arrive in time to lose much of its sap before late autumn. Since we’ve been burning about three-fourths of that amount, I’m hoping to get ahead enough to have enough well-seasoned wood, having had more than a year to turn from yellow to gray, to sustain us – a goal that still eludes me. Maybe we won’t have the creosote buildup this year that has afflicted our chimney by March the past two years, but I can’t convince my wife that the savings in purchasing green wood outweighs the cost of the chimney sweep, something she says we have to do anyway. Seasoned wood also burns hotter and catches more easily. Maybe this year will be different. I keep hoping.

The delivery comes in two parts, each one dumped in our driveway to produce a lovely, chaotic heap of timber that also releases a heavenly aroma, especially after a light rainfall. And then I typically set to work, between my required rounds at the office (who knows what will happen, now that I’m retired) and usual household activities. Let me admit, I don’t rest easily while the driveway is covered; I’m like a beaver when it hears running water. So stack I do, probably more than is healthy for a largely sedentary creature of my age and condition.

By now, I have something of a routine down – maybe that’s in the nature of a ritual, too. The location of the two firewood stacks has been determined, in part as a consequence of landscaping decisions by previous owners of the property and in part as a result of my own tinkering. Half of the wood will go on one side of the house, by the lilacs; the other half, on the other side of the house, well be behind the barn and our shed.

The ritual sets in as I fill my wheelbarrow and begin moving the wood, piece by piece. Immediately, I search out pieces that are squared off, having four sides rather than three; these are essential for constructing the corners. Some are flatter than others, and will be used for the lower levels of what has some resemblance to a filled box or brickwork – three pieces set at a right angle atop three more, alternating as high as needed. Eventually, the warped pieces begin fitting snuggly, and if there’s any lean to the line, I want it to slant toward the pile itself to let gravity add to the stability of the stack. At first, the task of reducing the pile appears overwhelming; there’s no visible progress at the source, and little on the other end. Here I must rely on previous experience, remembering that it’s something that is accomplished, one step at a time. The hard work has already been done – the cutting, moving, and splitting of the wood.

A rhythm sets in. I recognize that each piece has already been handled multiple times. Now I handle it at least twice – once to put it into the wheelbarrow, and again when I add it to the stack. There, it may be turned or jiggled for a secure fit in the emerging puzzle. It will be handled at least twice more, once to be carried to the kitchen and then to be placed in the stove. The ashes, of course, will be carried out and spread on the garden. For now, I regard the wood itself, trying to identify the species (maple, birch, oak, ash, beech, mostly) as well as the color and shape. No two pieces are exactly the same, and some that are gnarled or curved are placed aside, reserved for the top of the stack, where stability won’t be quite as essential.

A pattern emerges, or rather a fascinating movement of visual design. Not that visible harmony is on my mind as the pieces amass; instead, my concern is for engineering security and solidity against settling and the elements. I long learned that no matter how stable the stack feels now, it will slip in the months ahead; while one stack will begin dwindling by Christmas or my birthday, and its interlocking tensions need hold only so long, I am planning on the other stack staying in place a year beyond that, so its lines need to remain shipshape. If anything, I try to anticipate the many small shifts, so that the weight of one row will brace another. Still, there’s a degree of chance on how any of this will fare, no matter my care. A Zen Buddhist saying flits through my mind, “In nothingness, form; in form, nothingness,” though “chaos” or “chance” substitute well for “nothingness” here. In other words, look and see: things come together.

The labor also has me reflecting on how I write a poem – or many other works, for that matter. I usually start with a pile of debris – observations and scattered thoughts I’ve jotted down and collected. I’m not one for formal structures or invention; to my senses, that’s more like carpentry or cabinetry, and the related ritual would be stacking 2x4s from the lumberyard. No, I’m sticking closer to the grain, or the quest of exploring wilderness. The irregular spaces in the stack, resulting from half-moon ends and triangular thrusts and other geometric possibilities coming together fascinate me more. The negative gives dimension to positive, shadow plays into light, and small critters will likely find shelter somewhere in the heart of all this.

I can also see the woodpile as a metaphor for my faith community, though there the number of craggy pieces may be multiplied, and I keep hoping for more new greenwood – we seem to be seasoning a bit too much for a good mix, and I’m not alone in that observation.

Either way, you work with what you are given.

So here I am, pleased to have two woodpiles in place by early July. One measures roughly six by six by six, the other 3½ by ten by six – each about 210 cubic feet, in other words, short of the purchased measure (a cord being 128 cubic feet), but fitting the normal practice. I’m not complaining. Besides, I pack tight in my stacking, unlike the typical woodcutter. With the promise of winter comfort, of caring for my family, of coming home from the office (as I often did) around midnight and loading the stove for the remainder of the night, I stand back for a moment, admiring my sculpture. Yes, Jesus did warn against the man who built a huge barn, expecting to hoard forever, so my regard of my woodpiles is tempered. Still, I know the arrangement will go too quickly, and the process will happen all over again next year, if I’m blessed.

WINDY CITY PERSPECTIVE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In 1922, the Chicago Tribune conducted an international architectural competition for the design of its new headquarters. The World’s Greatest Newspaper, as it proclaimed itself, could have erected a landmark modernistic tower envisioned by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer or an impractical giant lectern styled by Adolf Loos but instead went with a neo-Gothic bullet by Howells and Hood.

By the mid-‘80s, when I was employed by the paper’s syndication service, the grimy gray building was surrounded by many much newer buildings that resembled the glassy proposal the publisher had rejected. Maybe that says everything, in the end.

By then, though, the newsroom had definitely changed. Gone were the typewriters, long replaced by computer terminals and keyboards. Tours were guided through glass-shrouded catwalks overhead, where they could look down on journalists at work. I remember being fascinated to recognize there were four semi-circular copy-desks below me, each one ringed by copy-editors and a single “slotman” at the center, just as it had been when I started. I’d heard, too, that none of those seats were ever vacant long; this was a paper edited ‘round the clock for its many editions. But then I noticed that the editors on one of the rims were doing nothing except writing and editing photo captions. Nothing else for the entire shift. I’m sorry, but I’m used to far more variety when I’m editing. How did they ever stay awake?

Since we were really there to see two of our cartoonists, we headed for a set of elevators serving floors six through 32. And we were headed to the top, Jeff MacNelly’s suite, which sat just under the floor of microwave gear.

With his panoramic windows between flying buttresses looking out over Lake Michigan (you couldn’t tell where the water ended and the sky began that day), I wondered how he ever got any work done on his editorial cartoons or his Shoe comic strip.

One floor down, which Dick Locher commanded, was quite different. With its tiny diamond-shaped windows, the suite wrapped around the elevator and service shafts felt more like sitting inside a gargoyle.

At that point, one of my colleagues noticed a framed Pulitzer Prize on the wall. “That’s all it is? A piece of paper?”

Locher, who drew the Dick Tracy strip in addition to his editorial cartoons, had won two.

On the couch, MacNelly, who’d just won his third Pulitzer, grinned. “Yup, that’s about it. A piece of paper.”

OBJECTIVITY, FOR STARTERS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Journalism students used to be told of a reporter writing a weather story in a newsroom. Even though he can look out the window to see that it’s raining, he turns to the guy at the next desk, asks him to look out the window, and then quotes him in the report. It’s probably apocryphal, but it does reflect the kind of training no-nonsense reporters had in turning to sources, rather than their personal observations.

That’s why you see so many direct quotations in a news dispatch.

What you learn along the way is that what you see may not be the full story, much less the real account.

For all I know, it could have been glass falling from an explosion or sawdust, as they do in theater productions.

At least this way, there’s someone to blame if it’s wrong.

THE HUMAN IMPRINT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

In the old days, a newspaper or magazine often had a personal imprint. The publication took on the publisher’s or top editor’s vision, and a certain tone and range of interests followed. We can look at the legendary names – McCormack, Hearst, Pulitzer, Scotty Reston’s New York Times, Ben Bradlee’s Washington Post, the Bingham family’s Louisville Courier-Journal, Tom Winship’s Boston Globe, even Bill Loeb’s Union Leader – and then realize it’s not something you see in the corporate journalism of today, especially where top editors are out the door in a year. Can you name anyone at the helm today?

As for the big-name stars of network and cable news/entertainment, well, let’s just say they’re pale imposters. There’s something to be said for knowing the ropes of a community and its people. Of having roots and depth – and the responsibility of recognition when they’re out in public.

VILLAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

As humans, each of us assumes a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Mason, Protestant, middle class, married. I don’t think “grandfather” was high up in his awareness. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.

The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.

Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.

Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.

When I turned to this is a series of poems, I found myself identifying many of the subjects by occupation, even though their confessions or interior monolog typically reflected the more intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. The resulting poems are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.

What began as an exercise in self-definition breaks out nonetheless into an entire spectrum of personalities. Do we know any of these people? Or are they somehow eluding us, masked by the bits that are revealed? Those we recognize, moreover, happen by accident – none of the portraits are of known individuals, but rather the inventions of the poet’s craft and imagination.

Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. My collection builds on such moments, constructing a cross-section of community like a web of each one of its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, then, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may be more like the part we deny, as well. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.

In the end, I’d say I have a Village of Gargoyles.

BOTTLE FARM

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Among those dim memories from childhood are Sunday afternoon drives, including one on a dull rainy day as we approached Farmersville. As Dad slowed the car, I heard an eerie panorama of tinkling glass and looked out over a seeming junkyard with large, black figures shaped from roofing tin, I suppose – witches, Indians on horseback, perhaps cowboys and the like – and many poles “like cornstalks,” as some have described, but with bottles instead of leaves. Plus, as I’ve read, a number of old church bells mounted somewhere, in addition to the bells of grazing sheep.

Yes, it was the chorus of sound that lingered strongest in my mind.

By the time we got a chance to go back, it had all been razed, declared a public health hazard, I remember hearing, because of the broken glass caused by vandals. Other stories suggested the orgies of motorcycle gangs instead.

One history I’d heard, that this was a relative of the late comedian Jonathan Winters, proved erroneous. The owner’s name was not Zero Winters, but Winter Zellar (Zero) Swartsel (1876-1953), an eccentric who turned his 22 acres into artwork fashioned from discards such as old bedframes and twisted wire. What I retain from that one day is far more cluttered than the clean photographs taken by Edward Weston.

It’s all lost, of course. How much it could have been an installation in some gallery will forever remain conjectural, but Winter was way ahead of his time on his multi-sensual approach to creation.

DANCING IN THE WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In his volume of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall draws distinctions among jobs, chores, and work. The first is done for the pay, the second because it must, while the third arises as a passion, a calling, often an avocation – and is ultimately energizing and life-affirming. Lucky, he says, is the person whose work is also a paying job. So for income, where do we turn? Retreat into farming? Farmers aren’t surviving.

Wendell Berry speaks of two Muses. In Standing by Words, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1983, highly recommended, he writes: “There are, it seems, two Muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say, ‘It is yet more difficult than you thought.’ This is the muse of form.

“The first muse is the one mainly listened to in a cheap energy civilization, in which `economic health’ depends on the assumption that everything desirable lies within easy reach of anyone. It is the willingness to hear the second muse that keeps us cheerful in our work. To hear only the first is to live in the bitterness of disappointment.”

Here, then, is yet another slant on work from an unabashedly Christian poet and essayist.

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing. Not even for the inspiration. Certainly for the revision.

And revision. And revision. His estimate, it seems, is quite optimistic.

In the practice, I keep asking: Are my facts right? Is this the most appropriate detail? How will the piece open and what structure will it assume? What is unique and most meaningful here? For whom? Does it boogie?

All of this to guard against shoddy workmanship; anything lazy, even deceitful; the artiste and the counterfeit.

THERE’S A REASON IT’S CALLED WORK

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Perfection: the goal. The end of craft. The essence, completely uncovered. Yet writing is never perfect. Can never be. Not even in its own era, its own place, its own vernacular. So we’re working within a field of potentialities, choosing one aspect over another. Liquids at play. The words themselves will change over time. Energy fields. Northern lights. Sunsets. The mind and flesh, mixing.

Consider a square grid sheet neatly intersected, and then place yourself at the center, where the four quadrants intersect. Take the horizontal line and name it for one continuum, say “highly emotional” at one end and “completely rational” at the other. Now take the vertical line and apply another continuum, say “public” at one end and “private” at the other. As if we could actually measure any such qualities and then scale them on the grid. (We could even consider this as a color field, with white/black as one dimension and red/green or blue/orange as the other.) We could even consider this as a kind of Chinese checkerboard, but stepping outward. The point is, you have to move: to stay at the center produces a muddy gray: nothing unique emerges. The fulcrum remains static and lifeless. As one proceeds away from the center, a kind of balloon or blob may appear on the grid: you’re working somewhere between selflessly emotional and rational, for instance. Or maybe it’s highly focused. In an art – and possibly other areas of life – I see the goal being to move out to an arc from the ends of the horizontal and vertical axis lines – somewhere along an optimal and growing frontier of two qualities. Beyond that, however, destruction awaits. An orchestral conductor, for instance, can emphasize a work’s inner rhythms or its singing lines – or, more likely, arrive at some combination – while counterpoising them with architectural structure or emotional outpouring. The choices determine whether the result is an orthodox repetition of familiar security or an insightful and exciting (and even disturbing) revelation.

So there’s the question of when to stop, on a given piece. When we’ve depleted ourselves. Or when we’ve moved on. Or when it’s more or less accomplished what we set out to do – the less ambitious works having more prospects for success than do those that attempt to soar closest to the sun. Or when the piece moves off into the marketplace, one way or another. Or when we die or grow infirm. Or when we realize we’ve completely missed the mark.

My focus here is primarily on poetry and fiction, although the concepts can be readily expanded outward through all of the arts and probably into a number of other fields as well.

BIAS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Pejorative labels do nothing to advance public discourse. Rather, they’re intended to stifle it. Even worse, they inhibit clear thinking or positive outcomes.

Consider the charge of “liberal media.” Or even “the media,” especially when used in the singular rather than the plural. In reality, American newspapers, magazines, and commercial broadcast stations have long been corporately owned, with the focus on some very profitable bottom lines. Corporations, as the epitome of capitalism, rarely fit neatly into the liberal end of the political spectrum. And so “corporate media” would be far more accurate than the “liberal media” mirage. A closer look would also find most of the editorial pages are of a conservative slant – and nearly all of the political and economic columnists syndicated in the past quarter century have been openly conservative. I’d like to hear of any liberals. In addition, in my experience, the media are highly competitive – there’s no collusion or conspiracy regarding what we’ll cover or ignore, Fox News excepted. For that matter, the media extend into the entertainment media as well – Hollywood, Nashville, Madison Avenue, and Broadway, among others.

Professional reporters and editors, meanwhile, learn to keep their own political and social views out of the way: the goal is to listen carefully and respectfully to all relevant sides of the issue and to present that as clearly as possible, especially in determining what’s new in the event being covered.

I’ve come to the conclusion that those who accuse news organizations and personnel of bias actually have no interest in objective reporting – what they want is bias, of their own right-wing persuasion or even more blatant propaganda. Ideology, rather than fact. The truth be damned, in their hearts.

Perhaps nothing should be more telling than Spiro Agnew’s rabid attacks on a free press, especially when we consider he had every reason to keep reporters off the track of his own criminal actions – and those of his boss, Richard Nixon, all the more. All the while, we covered his attacks on us verbatim and uncontested – had we been anything like he accused us of being, his words never would have seen the light of day, or blasted by critical comment as he spoke them.

If anything, I think of all the years when I willingly suppressed my own convictions – and the price that’s imposed. At last, finally out of the trade, I can truly speak and write freely.