Tag: Culture

A LIVELY CAST

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

One of our favorite TV comedies has been Little Mosque on the Prairie, a Canadian series about a small, struggling Muslim community the fictional prairie town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. I’ll let those of you in other faith traditions weigh in on the parallels, but I suspect you’ll find each of the show’s characters already existing in your own congregation.

You’ll also see many of the same dividing lines and tensions. Traditionalists versus modernists, for instance, or those bred to the faith versus converts. There are even the basic questions of identity and self-identity or motivation and discipline.

As I look at my own Quaker circles, I sometimes see a line between those drawn to the hour of worship itself and those drawn to the peace-and-justice witness, such as gender and racial equality, global non-violence and fair trade, prison reform, environmental concerns, and the like. Sometimes the difference shows up most sharply in the announcements that come at the end of our period of silence – those who want to leave quietly, savoring the calm, and those who instead urge us to attend all kinds of lectures, discussions, demonstrations, fundraisers, and other gatherings in the coming weeks.

Sometimes the lines even cross.

THOSE LIVE BROADCASTS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A confession: I’m one of those rare aficionados of radio, rather than television. It’s not radio in general, however: rather, it’s for classical music, essentially, along with jazz and folk music and, these days, Boston professional sports coverage.

At its best, there’s an intimacy – the host speaks directly to you, in your home or car or, during the summer, as I sit outdoors in the shade. There’s a sharing of good taste, too: here’s a new recording, a composer you ought to know, a fresh performer.

Unfortunately, ever since the Federal Communications Commission changed the ownership rules to allow a few companies to monopolize all the commercial stations, the overall variety and vitality of the airwaves has plummeted. Apart from athletics events, there’s little live coverage, especially at the local or regional level. As for the call-in programs, I’m left yearning for civility and balance. Please!

What survives as radio done well happens on the noncommercial stations. I’m fortunate to be within range of one that makes a special effort to present live concerts, including the Boston Symphony and Boston Pops as they happen on Saturday nights from fall into spring and their Tanglewood performances Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays through the summer – plus groups that come to play at the station itself or live recordings from concerts throughout New England. The extra touches, too, are important: interviews with the performers, delving into the archives for historic recordings, or news of upcoming events. I love the quirkiness of their late-night host, as well as his comments on the changing weather.

Likewise, the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts have undergone a remarkable transformation. As one who began listening when the legendary Milton Cross was host, I find the Margaret Juntwait and Ira Siff announcing booth team an exciting – and often unpredictable – leap forward, along with all the live backstage links during the intermissions. As you could say, it’s Good Radio.

Now, if I could only get the truly eccentric Harvard station to come in on the air – we’re just out of range.

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.

THE SHRINKING PAGE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

l look down on the newspaper page and think how narrow it’s become – about half of the width of the pages I designed at the beginning of my career. The broadsheets of today are about the width of tabloids back when.

It’s all cost-saving measures, of course. Like the shrinking candy bar. Yes, I remember when the joke circulated, “It’s hard to find a nickel candy bar for a quarter these days.” Ditto, for the cola.

So we keep hearing the economists warning about inflation. Not a word, you notice, about the corresponding deflation of the product itself.

ON THE PICKET LINE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I said at the time, carrying a picket sign, after all those years as a professional journalist, crossed a barrier. We don’t take sides, in public, so what does one do in a labor impasse? I realized this is what my younger stepdaughter, the political activist, called a “viz,” for visibility event, and that we could add more posters to our sticks, to create a “totem pole.” I also recalled a Friend, speaking of driving along and seeing a vigil and then stopping and opening his car trunk for the sign he always carries, just so he’d always be ready to join in anywhere. There was something liberating in this, even if it was an “informational picket” rather than a straight-out strike line.

Now, having retired from the profession, I sense another opening. A return to an earlier calling. My entering journalism, as a public witness and service, is restored to its original prompting of advocacy and reform, before it was confined by corporate media – the very bottom-line organizations right-wing critics overlook when they accuse “liberal media” of, well, reporting both sides. Maybe I’ll become a Quaker agitator, after all. (As the retiree activist, I might say: Thank you, Megan. And Iris. Especially.)

EPHEMERALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Much of the delight in life comes as surprises, especially when you’re paying attention. Moreover, they’re often of a very short time, a fleeting breath. Even when you’re anticipating an event, a certain unpredictability remains. You might be watching the sinking sun along with a bank of clouds, for instance, but a slight shift in conditions can spell the difference between a spectacular sunset and a dull glow in a woolly pile. And that glorious sunset, when it arises, changes second by second before dimming within five minutes.

The same can be said of family life or even a party or artistic endeavor. Much of the time, though, we’re too engaged in other matters to revel in the brief thrills. We need a bit of openness — what some call margins — in our daily activities to allow for such curiosity and wonder.

After the long, slow months of winter where I live, signs of quickening are appearing. In the early morning, the male cardinals, who have been singing defiantly from mid-January, now erupt with an insistent joyfulness, inciting other birds to join in, with hints of what’s just ahead. I haven’t been out in the woods after dusk, but any day now, the peepers will begin their sparkling chorus in their vernal ponds — the pools that will shrink to nothing by midsummer.

In our own yard, the first of the spring ephemerals (how I love that word, as well as the phrase “vernal pond” — they’re such fun on the tongue!) are now blooming, however timidly, even though most of the yard’s still covered in six inches of snow or more. (And rapidly melting.) I could present a checklist of what I expect will follow, but there are no promises — winter takes its toll, after all.

For me, this has been the first winter in a long, long time in which I can admit to suffering cabin fever. I’d have to go back to my “sabbatical” of writing more than a quarter century ago, or the ashram a decade-and-a-half before that, to find a stretch in which I didn’t have the demands of an office away from home weighing upon me. That is, requiring me to leave the house daily for hours on end. Admittedly, this winter hasn’t been completely job-free: November and December were still quite busy on that front. But the New Year turned toward retirement and new focus. What I’m experiencing is not boredom — far from it. I’ve had a full plate of writing and reading, for one thing, and I’ve enjoyed more evening and weekend social activities than I’d been able to attend in, well, it seems like forever. Rather, this strain of cabin fever feels like a time of recharging, getting ready to burst forth with the warming weather, in any number of surprising ways, if I’m lucky. So you see, this affliction is actually a kind of luxury. For now.

WHAT SILENCE? WHERE?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

Yes, we’re called a silent meeting. But there’s silence and, well, then there’s silence. As nuns would tell parochial school students at the beginning of chapel, “Quaker meeting has begun, no more talking or chewing gum.” Who knows where that originated, much less why certain people – such as the priest – might be considered exempt. Let me declare, I know of no authentic silence. Nowhere on this planet! (Outer space, maybe? Deafness?) Even when we have no spoken messages arising in our worship, we still have the pulses of breathing, to say nothing of the clock, with its measure annoying some and reassuring others. Waves of restlessness, late arrivals, and traffic and sirens along Central Avenue, too. In summer, birds and crickets. Maybe a bagpiper at the edge of the cemetery. In winter, the furnace kicking on, children murmuring, a cough or sneeze. A coat crackling as it’s taken off or put back on.

There’s even silent noise arising in stray thoughts. Imagined lists of things to do. Recollections of things done in the previous week or decades earlier. News reports echoing through our minds. Sometimes, rain. Or simple wind. Maybe “stilled” is a more accurate description than “silent” or even “unprogrammed.”

Yes, I’ve heard stories of city dwellers who come to the countryside and are soon troubled by its relative quiet. I have to chuckle, realizing how much they miss. I think of a meeting for worship one May morning along Broadway in upper Manhattan, when I heard little else outside the room but birdsong, countered a week later in rural Ohio by loud farm tractors and semi-trailer rigs. Remember, too, a few Mays before that, when the kids came into the meeting room, saying that the boom heard a little earlier was Mount St. Helens exploding. Their classroom faced the west and the volcano eighty miles away, with its inky squall line soon blotting out the noontime sun.

What we have, of course, is a practice of acute listening, capable of detecting far-off explosions as well as the motions of the heart. What we enter is not silence exactly but something I often find more akin to swimming underwater. Something that can be calming, peaceful, refreshing, renewing, good – as in good to eat, too. Filling. “Has thou been fruitful?” as they used to say.

My description of what we have is QUIETIST worship, rather than “silent” or “unprogrammed.” Hushed, still, clearing, typically peaceful, not showy, and unobtrusive being a few of its earmarks. Though this hardly covers the experience, either.

While Quakers traditionally did not hire preachers, they did recognize individuals who had abilities as lay ministers and others with the spiritual gifts of elders (that is, bishops, within the congregation) and still others whose skills might help the members in their everyday struggles. When Meeting gathered for worship, these “weighty Quakes” would sit at the front of the room, in what we know as the “facing benches.” Somehow, their presence still lingers in the room, sweet as it is.

NOT QUITE SILENT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

We speak of silent Quaker worship, though it’s not exactly silent. If I refer to it as meditation, or even group meditation, others may quibble. Let me explain.

First, within the gathered silence of traditional Quaker worship, someone may begin to speak or, more rarely, sing or pray. It’s a response we call vocal ministry, and it’s usually brief. Ideally, it’s a prophetic response, a Spirit-led message that takes the assembled body deeper into the mystery. At others times, the message is not in the stream of the day’s worship, and the sounds can disrupt that flow. In larger or more established meetings, including Dover, the individual rises from his or her seat before speaking; in smaller circles, the Friend may remain seated.

Second, the understanding of meditation, especially from Asian religious tradition, has it being an intensely personal practice. In one branch of Zen Buddhism, for instance, the sitters face the wall and away from the middle of the room. Typically, any physical movement is prohibited, and the practitioner’s focus is increasingly inward, leaving the physical surroundings behind. While Quaker worship demands a similar personal engagement, which we call centering, there is an expectation that it will open into a group experience involving everyone in the room, even if not one word is spoken. Not everyone centers through meditation, as such – some may sit with an open book, others may simply drop into deep reflection; some may sit with their eyes closed tight, while others gaze softly across the room. Whatever the individual approach, the result is Quaker meeting.

Actually, this blending of inward and outward might not be all that far removed from some of the Asian disciplines. There, the period of group meditation itself may run between twenty and thirty minutes, and be followed by scripture reading, chanting, or a lecture from the teacher. In Quaker practice, the first half-hour often – but not always – remains silent, with vocal messages appearing in the second half of the hour.

Still, with or without any words uttered, it’s group meditation, in my book.

I love the simple elegance of old Quaker meetinghouses.
Touches of good design, reflecting care, without ostentation.
How beautiful the wood itself can be, left unimpeded.
Elements we see echoed in the most exemplary architecture of our own era.

THE DISAPPEARING INDIVIDUAL

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Not too long ago, the pharmacist owned the drug store, the corner bank had its own president, the local publisher owned the newspaper, and so on. Each one knew the community, and each one could make independent decisions. Each one also had a desire to be respected by those he or she served. Often, too, it was a family affair.

Now, of course, the pharmacy is headed by a manager who reports to a district supervisor who may report to an assistant vice-president somewhere who reports to a president of a subsidiary who reports to another vice-president of a conglomerate who reports to a president who reports to a CEO who probably has little real decision-making power, thanks to all of the policies that must be followed, thanks to a board of directors beholden to the major stockholders. As if you could name any of these people. Ditto for the bank and the newspaper and what used to be the local department store.

At each level of hierarchy, there’s little room for discretionary action – it’s all a matter of enforcing policy, especially as it relates to maximizing short-term profit.

Important local leaders have been reduced cogs following orders from afar. And the big money follows. Note, too, that the emphasis is on stockholders, not shareholders, who would include the workers, their communities, and even the faithful customers.

How, then, do we reclaim our full community, and heal the damage? It’s a basic question for democracy, after all, if the American Experiment is to continue, especially with any sense of equality and fairness.

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.