Category: Blogging

Well, I’m off to Cannon Beach, not Dover Beach, and on a family trip, not a romantic tryst, but I’ll be with some of people I love most in my life (it’s only too bad Tyson and Jen can’t be with us), but somehow this trip still reminds me of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach:”

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, ‘nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Although I spent my first honeymoon at the Oregon Coast, I associate the coast with much more than romantic love. It’s too immense, too awe-some to limit it to just romantic love, not that romantic loves isn’t awesome.

To me, though, the ocean has always been a place to think. There is something both inspirational and moving about the ocean. As it turns out, I spent my first honeymoon at the beach, but I also drove down to the beach to clear my mind the night I decided to leave my first wife. Perhaps it is the sense of timelessness you sense at the beach that makes it such a good backdrop to make important decisions.

At times I, like Arnold, have felt the “eternal note of sadness” in the grating roar of the waves hitting the beach. I’m afraid I continue to hear it today in the sounds of war from a far shore.

I wish I could have the faith of our leaders that we will ultimately destroy evil, but I find it difficult to have faith that all is well and we can rely on God’s blessings to ultimately solve our problems. God probably wants us to take care of that by ourselves, and it’s increasingly unclear that we are really capable of doing that.

Today, just as on the day when Arnold wrote the lines nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, “we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

As a younger man, I might have put my faith in a lover, but now a wiser, older man, I’ll put my faith in Leslie, Dawn, Rich and, perhaps, most of all, my grandson, Gavin who finds joy wherever he is. (Though I’m sure hoping he doesn’t cry too much at bedtime in that small cabin.)

Perhaps after a week walking the beach, eating at restaurants, and flying kites, I’ll be ready with Jeff Ward’s recent help to come back and tackle transforming this blog into the MT masterpiece that Jonathon seems to expect of me.

(Besides it’s a good thing I’m leaving for a week or I’d be far too tempted to reply to Glenn Reynolds’ quote from Brenden O’Neil that “Rather than indicating a real opposition to Western intervention, our dislike of war seems to capture our fear of doing anything too decisive or forceful. . . . Surely there’s more to being anti-war than just not liking bloodshed…?” and I really don’t need to get dragged into someone else’s battle now, do I, Bb?

If you’ve read these pages very often you might have guessed that although I have some strong opinions I seldom come right out and support causes.

I guess part of that comes from having taught in the public schools for so long. In my role as a teacher I didn’t feel comfortable taking sides out of fear that I would unduly influence students. I didn’t want students to blindly accept or reject my views; I wanted them to be able to examine causes rationally and make an intelligent decision on their own.

I guess this reticence to support causes still carries on, but one cause I can support whole-heartedly is the Banned Book Project.

Even while teaching I took pride in the fact that several of the books I chose to teach in my classes were banned. I was proud to include Huckleberry Finn, Grapes of Wrath, and Catch-22 in my Honors American Studies class. My modern literature class included classic works of depravity like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird. How in Heaven’s name do books like this make a banned list?

Although I thoroughly disliked the self-centered Holden Caufield, I couldn’t imagine banning Catcher in the Rye, and often recommended it to kids who I thought might like it and who were doing book reports for extra credit. I even created an extra credit report once that had students examine the claim that Holden was a modern-day Huck Finn. While I thought the claim was pure bull, I was perfectly willing to give an “A” to any student who could make a good argument proving his view.

The reality is, though, that I was affected by attempts to censor what was taught. I once voluntarily withdrew a poetry book I liked a lot because of a poem by Ezra Pound. But the same complaint also cited such controversial poems as Emily Dickinson’s “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed.” Obviously the district patron was too stupid to understand that line because he s/he didn’t know what a metaphor was, and s/he obviously didn’t want her/his kid to understand either. God forbid that a kid should actually learn more than the parent.

What’s worse is that I realized after the fact that I and the rest of the English department self-censored what we taught to avoid having to go in front of the school board to justify each and every one of our curriculum choices.

In the end, of course, it’s the students who suffer from such censorship because they see an unrealistic version of the world, a sanitized version that makes them less capable of dealing with the world that really does exist.

If there’s shit out there, and there’s no denying that there is, you’d better be aware of it or you’re going to step in it and make a mess.

Then, again, of course, the patrons can blame the schools for not educating their children.

::Thursday, August 8, 2002::

:: I Get by with a Little Help from … ::

As a Romantic, and an introvert, I would like to believe that, as McLeish says in “Speech to a Crowd,” I can simply “tell myself that the earth is mine for the taking,” that I can reinvent myself to adapt to the world of constant change that threatens to alienate me from myself and from others, making life meaningless.

Unfortunately, judging from past experience, I’m not sure that’s true. I suspect that as Jeff Ward suggests much of what we learn we learn through dialogue with others, whether those others are real people that we know and deal with or “virtual” others, authors who we can only dialogue with through reading and internal discussion.

On the other hand, I’m also unsure how much we can learn from others. I guess I’ve always subscribed to the idea that authors really can only help us to clarify our own ideas rather than converting us to totally new ideas. I’ve long suspected that it’s dramatic events in life that force us to change our views of the world, not literature per se, though literature may give us new insights if we’re ready for change. Sometimes, perhaps, we don’t even realize how our values have changed until we read an author who can articulate what we’ve been feeling.

Maybe I’m the exception rather than the rule, but I suspect that I didn’t change very much from five years of age to twenty-two of age. Although the grades I earned in high school and college show I gained a greater knowledge of the world, my basic personality and view of the world stayed the same throughout this time period. In other words, knowledge by itself didn’t change either me or my views in any significant ways.

What did change me dramatically was my two years in the Army and not just the six months I spent in Vietnam, although that did have the most dramatic effect upon my views. My introduction to the South and the racism and poverty that existed there in the 60’s shocked me to a new awareness. The following six months in Vietnam where I realized how fragile life truly is and how men could change from loving, family providers to killers in a matter of days certainly had the most profound effect upon me.

When I returned from Vietnam, I not only changed my life plans, but I also found new literature that helped me see the world in different ways. At first I found insight in Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Later, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 became my mantra, confirming my view of a world where capitalists “cashed in” on every good human quality that people showed. Later, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seemed to reflect the changes in attitude that had occurred in my own life.

It was only after the birth of my two children that I returned to a more optimistic view of the world, though certainly never again as optimistic as the view I held before Vietnam. I found hope in novels like To Kill a Mockingbird where, despite his failure to save the innocent black man, Atticus Finch stands out as a realistic hero in a world that desperately needs heroes.

My divorce after seventeen years of marriage brought new realizations and attitude changes, though I’m not sure I’ve ever found a literature to reflect the resulting changes in my attitude. Caught up in the demands of merely surviving and trying to ensure that my children didn’t suffer from their parents’ mistakes, I had little time to reflect on life for quite awhile. This divorce crushed nearly all the illusions I still had about romance and love. Fifteen years later and remarried, I’m still trying to make sense out of the feelings generated by losing the last of my childhood illusions.

My recent throat cancer was probably my closest brush with death, though Vietnam at 24 was certainly more profoundly moving. Still, the inevitability of death was never clearer, demanding new insights to carry me through this stage of my life. What is the role of a man whose children are raised and who neither wants nor needs to work to survive? Six months haven’t been enough time to come to terms with those issues, but I continue to search for answers.

Perhaps as McLeish argues I could, and should, find these answers for myself. But I suspect that a more realistic approach is to read those who have experienced similar feelings and examine their conclusions. After all, the greatest advantage of being a “social animal” is having others to help carry the load.

As I tried to avoid thinking about my upcoming discussion of Walt Whitman’s poetry, I spent considerable time surfing today. And since I’m a Mac fan I couldn’t avoid the swirling controversy over recent charges that Apple announced.

Now I’ve been an AppleAddict since I bought my first Apple IIe many a year ago. I also bought the first Mac, and I’ve steadily upgraded ever since, right up to buying an iBook last year when I couldn’t take my G4 along on my trips.

I’ve never veered in my loyalty to the company even when friends told me how inferior Microsoft Word and Excel was to some writing package long since forgotten and to Lotus spreadsheets. I also use Adobe products like Photoshop, GoLive and Illustrator.

Obviously I’m not going to switch over to Intel machines any time in the near future. Nor is it likely that I will refer any of my friends to those machines, despite the fact that my stepson writes code for Microsoft.

I can accept the fee increase for iTools, but, of course, I’ve never felt particularly compelled to use those. They’re a neat place to store a file for sharing, and I’ve used the mail box as an alternate mailbox but I use my AT&T account for my mail and my web page. It’s unlikely, though not out of the question, that I’ll sign up for .Mac.

I recently spent a considerable amount of money upgrading all of my programs to run on OSX. And I must admit I’ve been profoundly happy with the stability of this new operating system. I’ve only had one system crash since moving all my programs over to OSX after Photoshop and GoLive finally arrived.

That said, I’m still not happy with the recent price increases introduced by Apple, particularly the upgrade to OSX. I consider OSX anything but a complete operating system. It’s still slow, even compared to OS 9, particularly on the iBook. Any attempts to speed up the system should have been considered a simple upgrade, not a new program.

Now if Apple wanted to sell two different versions of OSX, one that simply upgraded the underlying system and another that included new features like iSync, iCal, etc. I would have no problem with that. The fact is, though, that I neither want nor need those programs. Microsoft Office, with Entourage, handles all of these perfectly well for me, and I don’t see why I should have to pay full price to upgrade an operating system that is considerably less than a year old.

I’m not particularly mad at Apple over these charges. The company obviously needs to make money to continue, but I’m certainly not happy. As it stands, I’m no longer encouraging friends to upgrade to OSX. The cost simply outweighs the benefits. It remains to be seen whether I will even continue to encourage them to switch to Apple.