bradley manning and the microcosm of the american myth

with so much huge stuff going on in the world--the tsusami's, the various rebellions in the Middle East--i feel my emotional reactions clogging--it's millions of people dead, millions being destroyed.  at least with the tsumais, i know what i want to happen; the bad guy is nature, though a nature possibly abetted by human abuses.  i want it to stop and go away, and everything to go back to what it was before.  with the middle east, i don't know enough about any one government to know whether the rebellions are good for the people or not.  some of the dicatators are american puppets, which perhaps means it's good that  they fall.  but will the western countries allow that to happen to their puppets, or allies?  further, i don't have a sense of what might take their places.  years back, when our puppet in iran was ousted, we took care of him; he flew to the US [gold toilet seats in his plane intact] where he lived out his life in luxury, wholly held unaccountable for the thousand of iranians he had tortured and killed during his reign.  but he wasn't replaced by anything better, only more religious.  the ayatollah was a monster on his own, and the country has been ruled by fanatics ever since.  so i find myself caught in mixed emotions and mixed hopes, and the sum total is numbness.

as all this goes on, i have been leading my own comfortable life, which includes grading papers for my classes here at the castle.  as we do every year, we study among other works anne frank's diary.  reading their midterms, i see again and again how anne's story personalizes the unthinkable, reminds us that the 6 million jews were 6 million humans, living their different lives, good, bad, dull, interesting, the whole human glut.  hardly an original thought, that microcosm illuminating the macrocosm.

but today reading the news, the grief and anger i have not felt at any of the large destructions reminded me of where i do feel anger, the one individual who for me encompasses the suffereng of the wronged.  he is none of the people involved in these huge incidents, and it is possible he won't even be murdered.  but when i read today of obama's approval of this man's mistreatment, all those feelings of hurt for betrayed humanity broke through.

bradley manning, the 22 year old soldier arrested by the CIA and kept in solitary for months, isn't even the hero of the big news story he has been caught up in, which will be back in the headlines once we've gotten our media fill of more dramatic, or at least more deadly, events.  the dashing, handsome julian assange, founder of wikileaks whose probable sexual misdoings have become an improbable excuse for the various manhunts he's facing, is the protagonist in this story. his drama has all the right elements for media attention, whether he's viewed as the bad guy [betraying governmenr secrets] or the good guy [helping uncover information about events the US is paying for and killing for].

meanwhile, a little side story in assage's drama, remains in prison, facing daily humiliation, degradation, and deprivation, which our president says is just hunky dory.  bradley manning is charged with giving much of the information wikileaks has published.    [one wonders why this unimportant kid had access to such presumably important material, but i suppose that's another story.] 

cleverly, predictably, they are trying to use his own mind against him. locked in solitary, visits even with his lawyers kept to a minimum, he is given no access to other prisoners or other means of communicating with the outside world.  for a while, apparently, he was forced to sleep naked without a blanket. now they seem to have given him a blanket.  he has been called mentally disturbed and so is under suicide watch, with all its attendant restrictions.  there's something so kafka-esque about this; he is put in a position that would after so much time convert the most mentally sound of minds to symptoms of instability  [which, by the way, have not even been proven in his case].  in any case, a 'suicidal' prisoner may be very useful, if he does turn out to know things he hasn't yet shared with wikilinks.  it wouldn't be US history's first suspicious suicide. 

but even if that's too dramatic a possibility, the young man's life will, in the most optimistic scenaro, be permanently damaged.  in our land of freedom of speech, this young man is a convenient scapegoat.

and he is also a microcosm. he is what governments are allowed to do to people, even in the-land-of-the-free.    as we now set about to teach the newly rebelling countries how to become democracies,  it wouldn't hurt to challenge the limits of our own.  and maybe to start with a 22 year old kid who did what he beleived right, and is now huddling naked under a blanket in a cell no one can get to. 

The Pilgrimage that Wasn't

luckily for me, i'd been to prague several times before--had even considered not joining this semester's group tour. but other plans weren't coming through and it's a gorgeous city, so i planned my personal journey there, to visit again the street where jan neruda had lived, and to get to the cemetary where he and other luminaries are buried. i spent a lot of happy time on google trying to learn more about the cemetary and how to get there.  we arrived friday afternoon, and the class trips begun. one was being led by an old and beloved colleague whom i hadn't seen in years [since he decided tht part-time teaching at the Castle was delightful, but a bit less so than the directorship of one of Europe's great museums, the Rijksmuesum in Amsterdam. ] i went along on his tour, knowing it would be interesting and wanting to spend as much time as i could with him. when that tour was over i would join the group going to see Madame Butterfly, then do my one gig for the occassion the next day, the Kafka Museum, and would devote sunday to hunting down the spirit of my beloved neruda.

the tour was wonderful, and seeing peter again was exciting.  it was i who suggested he end his tour at the Charles Bridge so our group of students would be more familiar with it on their later excursions. in that, at least, i was successful. the kids saw the bridge.  what i saw was the concrete step before the bridge, onto which i promptly and thoroughly fell.  oddly i didn't lose consciousness at all; even more oddly, my glasses went flying but  didn't break. i could hardly get them back on my face though, since the cheek under my eye had developed a huge hump.  which probably didn't matter since the eye closed and wanted to stay closed, though i was able to persuade a slitful of light to make it through.

caretaker roles were at once, and dramatically, reversed. i wouldn't let peter end his tour, but 2 of the kids insisted on helping me; they got me to a bar and got the waiter to bring me ice, and were preparing to bring me home when the program director, dulcia, and her group walked by, saw me, and joined the kids in taking care of me. someone bought me a whiskey, dulcia got us a cab and wanted me to go to the emergency room, which i refused.  nothing seemed broken, it wasnt the top of my head, and anyway i just needed to lie down.  caroline and joel got me back,  brought me to my room,  settled me in, left emergency numbers for me and didn't leave till i'd promised to call if i needed anything, anything at all.  later in the evening some other kids came by to see if i was alright, and 4 of them brought me flowers along with one of the sweetest notes i've ever gotten.  several others, and a couple of staff and faculty members, came by later.  i felt enormously cared for and protected.

the next day some of the swelling was down, but the eye was still very puffy and i couldn't see underneath it; it was like a purple shelf had grown between lower lid and cheek.  i did get to do the kafka tour, though it would have been impossible without one of the student-staff members, rene, who got the kids to the museum, sent them into it on their own, then taxied back to get me,  organized the students around me outside, listened with apparent fascination to my lecture on kafka, taxied me back to the hotel, helped me pick up some groceries, and got me back into my room.  he did this all with such grace and cheerful  kindness that you'd have thought that he couldn't imagine a pleasanter way to spedn a saturday afternoon in prague.
i didnt go out again til we left for home; i spent the  rest of the weekend icing my face, sleeping, reading,  and looking out the window, with its wonderful view of baroque hotels and scurrying people.  and chatting with students and staff who dropped in when they could to see how i was.

i was unhappy, but surprisingly undepressed [that began the monday we left and i felt it coming at the airport; but knowing the signs i was able to keep it well under control].

i was lucky through the end. i became completely convinced that when i got back to the busstop  for the castle, the long walk in the dark would cause me to fall again, and no amount of logic would allow me to believe it remotely possible that wouldn't.  it turned out that ralph, one of the teachers, who lives in germany, had left his car at the castle.  ralph walked with me, and in spite of my gloomy foreshadowing i didn't fall.  when we got there the huge castle door, closed only when the place was empty, had been locked.  ralph phone dulcia, she phoned the ground manager, he phoned his assistant, and a near disaster, thanks to ralph, had shrunk to a small inconvenience.  and the depression never came on fullscale.

i'm sad that i didn't get to do my pilgrmage, but i'm sure neruda doesn't mind.  i got some rest today, and am still a bit sad.  but the swelling has been going down, sending black bruise-blood own my face; the effect is very attractive.   but it could have been so much worse.   not just the fall itself, which didn't seem to break anything.  but i could have felt totally alone and isolated.  instead, through it all, there was so much care and kindness, it's hard not to feel a little blessed [though i'd prefer my blessings henceforth to manifest with a little less oomph].  and still the fun of seeing the students going off to their big breaks remains.  caroline is staying in prague, to be joined by her boyfreind from home, and i loved her beaming face when she told me he was coming.  i do hope they're having a great time in that exquisite city.

and i hope they watch their step when they get to the charles bridge. caroline has had enough nursing for one week!

jimmy we hardly knew ye

for 7 years, conductor james levine pulled off the remarkable challenge of running both the metropolitan opera in new york and the boston symphony  orchestra. during these years, for which boston classical music fans owe him a huge debt of gratitude, he had numerous health problems and was forced to cancel numerous performances.  now, at 67, he has decided he can't maintain both jobs.  boston, understandably, is the loser. he has been with the met for decades, and has always 'belonged' to them.

an opera lover of fairly recent years, i discovered the bso when levine arrived and did a few concert operas. he was such a brilliant director, and knew so well how to work with actor/singers, that his concert operas appeared almost as full productions.  they were breathtaking.

i'm disappointed that we're losing him, but grateful that we've had  him as long as we have.  i hope the decision improves his health; i hope that the bso will find as creative a replacement in time.

the article in the Times sai he might come back to boston for an occasional  guest appearance.

good luck, mr. levine--and come visit us often.....

A Carnival of their own

i just got back from America Night in Well, the Netherlands.  This is the night that one of the local bars, Onder de Linden, dedicates to the Emerson College students; they bring the music they like to dance to.  Bars and college students aren't always a good mix, but they're an inevitable one, and somehow hanging out  with each other in a different venu than the castle they [and i] live and study in seems to make many of the students happy, and the proprietors are pretty good about not letting their young patrons get too 'trashed.'

but the linden folks did something this night that moved and pleased me. for love or money, they made this american night Carnival night.  In the southern netherlands, catholic through the centuries, carnival is a big deal, and in a little town like ours, the annual parade is a major community event.  like Mardi Gras, the idea is historically to provide one last fling before the sacrifices of lent start their 6-week reign.   (Years ago, when this was first explained to me, my dutch colleague added, "Of course, no one does the sacrifice part any more.")  People work for months creating elaborate floats  and corresponding costumes, all reflecting aspects of the town's current events and history.  The carnival parade is always a joy to me, and one of the few authentic local expereinces the students have: we are heartily welcomed to join in the festivities, but they will take place with or without any foreigners around.  This year, unfortunately,  carnival weekend coincides with the required class trip to prague.  no, i don't feel sorry for myself or even the students:  having to go to prague doesn't quite qualify as a hardship.  but still, i'm sorry they get to miss this unique expereince: i at least get to participate in carnival every year.

enter the linden.  simply by calling it carnival night and changing the rules--no student-chosen music; all carnival songs, which sound sort of like dutch polkas. with  the week being a leadin to carnival anyway, most of the dutch patrons wore costumes, and all the castle students came in hastily created  costumes. [so did i, of course].  i didn't stay long, not being much of a party fan, but long enough to see the students having a taste of carnival fun.

in reality, they did what they do every american night--drank a little or a lot, danced a little or a lot, laughed a lot. but they did it in the context of a special carnival night, and i think that does make a difference. 

it made a difference to me too. i pulled together a variation of last year's costume, stuff i had stored here when i left. last year i had been,as  i thought, a court jester, but  with a couple of bright boas, i looked more like a parrot, or so one of my students told me. this year i ignored the jester and declared myself a parrot. so i too had my taste of carnival. 

and we still get to see prague.  i manage to have my cake and eat it.  if i can get the damn feathers out of my mouth......

A Memoir of My Imaginary Life

today i was grading papers for one of my literature classes. 3 of the students had done response papers to one of my favorite short shories, Jan Neruda's "Saint Wenceslas Mass," the tale of a young boy who sneaks into Prague's Saint Vitus Cathedral and hides there all night. He has done this because of a local belief that St Wenceslas comes to his chapel every midnight to say mass. the boy plans to be the first to actually witness this. as the story moves on, we get a magnificent if slightly crazy description of the mass as the boy imagines it must be. it's a long, complicated, perfect evocation of the imaginative life of a little boy;  my students found it as perfect as i did.

as i sat there looking at those papers and at neruda's words, i thought about my own make-believe life as a chlld. idly, i began tracing my later imaginary worlds, through my teens, young adulthood, middle age, and through the present.  I've thought about those fantasies from time to time, of course; now i realized i'd never seen them as a contium, a kind of parallel to my real life.  walter mitty, in progression.

They started, as such things do, with imaginary friends.  I suspect they have continued with such friends, transformed into images of real people in my life.  My first imaginary friend i don't remember at all, except through my parents' tales.  I was apparently quite dedicated to Boidy Grief, whose odd name my father thought must have been inspired by my hearing the phrase 'void of grief.'  i love that story, but don't regard the unremembered Boidy with affection.  i was still pretty young when my next imaginary friend arrived, from the face on a poster for some child's product.  her name was Polly Pigtails, and she was cutely girlish in a way i never could be.  Still, she had the good sense to share my every belief, and she liked to do what i did. We spent a lot of time together, and soon acquired a third party for our happy little consort.  Marie was fuzzier looking than Polly; I must have seen her on an early TV show, or a comic book.  she wore the same A-line dress every day, and had long blond hair.

Our big project together was to build a huge mansion, in which we lived in a household of all children, with no adults around.  it was not, however, an anarchist heaven: i was the ruler, polly the second-in-command, and marie the third.  all the kids who lived there were fuzzier even than marie, but they were very happy with our rule.

as polly and marie faded away, i had, briefly, an identical twin, and we understood each other much better than our parents or brothers did.  we both looked like a 1950s movie star in a bathing suit, never mind that we were under 10 and that i had buck teeth. i think the image came from a coloring book; my nameless twin had a distinct cartoon-lady look.  i don't recall any adventures or projects we shared; she just spent all her time understanding me.

Strangely, i don't recall any imaginary freinds in my high-school years--which is odd, because with one exception i didn't have any freinds at school, which was a ghastly catholic institution that certainly called for any escape mechanism possible.

by college, i had become politicized through the civil rights movement, at which time my pretend world didn't include made-up people.  i never followed the freedom riders south, and it's probable that i pictured myself going to someplace like mississippi, where i taught all the illiterate negroes how to read and fought off  men like bull connor.   if i did have such fantasies, they faded in the events surrounding  the real-life civil right heroes, like the 3 young men murdered during 'mississippi summer.' the fact that one of them had gone to my school and i had seem him around made imagining his fate far too grim, and imagining myself in their position but surviving would have been far too trivializing.

but the 60s counter-politics provided "scope for imagination" in other areas.  for a long time, i saw myself in a nameless but embattled north american country, whose dictator was supported by US dollars and US political leaders.  I lived in the mountains and i was the leader of a strong group of indigenous freedom fighters.  Why they had chosen as leader a 20-something weakling from new york was never clear.  Of course i had learned a lot in my brief but torrid affair with Che Guevara, so that must have helped.  As did the fact that I had been tortured hideously without ever breaking down and given information that could threaten my comrades.  In the process of the torture [which never occurred as part of the fantasy] i had gotten a nasty cut on my face, which left a fetchingly fascinating scar on my cheek.  When i returned to new york and showed up in slinky silk gowns to fashionable society parties, people were curious about my scar.  but like the scarlet pimpernel, i could never reveal my true story, and besides, i disliked the attention.  [that may well be the most absurd aspect of the entire fantasy.]  Because of me, the nameless country finally succeeded in overthrowing their dictator and the CIA, which made me a heroine of the revolution, though my modesty forbade my accepting any formal acknowledgement of my role. [alas, i wish i could send that fantasy self  to the mideast today, so i could resolve all their problems and come back in time to get the right wing out of power in America.  i personally have no interest in being president, but i might be able to convince the country to elect bernie sanders.]

the nobly acquired scar remained a great part of my imagninary life for years--until i was in the midst of fending off some hero-worshipping leftie while i was walking toward the dentist's office. the 2 lives suddenly merged in my mind, and i knew to my core that the pain of the novocaine needle going into my gum would instantly elicit any secret i might have, whatever the results.

in more recent years, my make-beleive life  has toned down pretty seriously.  my make-believe friends are real  people, who are as impressed with my intellect as my south american comrades were of my skill and daring.  I have spent many happy hours being interviewed by bill moyers, whose producers made him stop having me on so often, because i was so fascinating that he kept cancelling all his other guests.  this has also become a problem for keith olberman and rachel maddow, which will be harder for rachel now that keith is off tv, since it will double her obligation to keep me on the show for the whole hour, at least once a week.

i've come a long way since polly and marie, and from the bathing-beauty twin. or maybe not such a long way. i have never lost my love of reading fiction, and what is a good read but a visit to an imaginary world in which you are implicitly a part?   and if my  young make-believe freind in the neruda tale asked for my advice, i'd tell him to stay away from Saint Vitus church from now on.  If Saint Wenseslas ever does celebrate mass at midnight, miracle though it will be, it won't hold a candle to the boy's vision.  my child,  you've seen what you came to see.  cherish it. real life has its own place, and a very important place at that.  but it will never take the place of your imaginary world, or fill your need for that world.  in the story, the Saint Wenseslas of the boy's imagination places his heavenly hand on the child's head.  Accept, with gratitude, that eternal benediction.

RIP Haila Stoddard

No, of course you don't recognize the name.  Well, maybe one or two of you do, or at least might remember her character on "The Secret Storm" in the 1950s.  I just saw in the NY Times that she died this past week at 97. 

It seems odd to me that i remembered her name.  As far as I know, I hadn't thought about her since i was a little girl and mom watched Secret Storm.  Yet the name jumped at me instantly, and i remembered her face and her character before i saw them confirmed in the obit.  She was beautiful, to be sure, but not in the beauty mold of the early soap heroine.-  more like a harsher- hepburn face. a meanly beautiful face.  but still, why remember her some 60 years after i'd seen her on the show? the only other soap stars from that era that have stayed in my mind over the decades are those who later became famous and visible--people like hal holbrook {ok, who remembers him as greyling dennis  in 'the' brighter day'? )

i can only think it was because of her character, and her perfect portrayal.  aunt pauline was highly sophisticated--brittle, bitchy, always scheming, always coolly on top of everything.  i don't remember her smoking or drinking, but she was the sort of character who should have been doing both---smoking through a long cigarette holder or at least leaving a dark lipstick imprint on the cigarette; drinking either martinis or  something else in a v-shaped, long-stemmed glass. 

the whole feel of aunt pauline came back to me tonight, with that obit.  a trimmed-for-tv version of the film-noir women, except that unlike the film medium, the soap opera format allowed her triumph and survival to continue for years.  what a glorious figure for a girl-child of the 1950s!

Stoddard herself, i  learned, continued living a long, successful, and salty life, as an actor and later as a producer (in decades when women producers weren't plentifold).  among her friends were people like noel coward and james thurber.   she was witty and acerbic, in the dorothy parker style, only unlike parker, she survived.  a couple of her parker-esque lines:  "A fool and her legs are soon parted," she frequently said, though always citing thurber as the originator of the comment.  Her remark after her 2004 stroke, which left her bedridden for the rest of her life, seems to have been unquestionably her own. 'chris,' she told her son,  'i have never been bored in bed.  until now.'

a good long life. Good journey, aunt pauline!

A Candle for Neruda

Jan Neruda, that is--the 19th century czech writer who, a century or so later, lent his name to a Chilean poet who was looking for a pseudonym and found it in a long-dead writer who might have indeed been his literary father.

Several years ago, when I first learned that the upcoming spring semester at the Castle would include a group trip to Prague, I decided to create for myself a quick, personal minicourse in Czech literature so that i could include some in my upcoming castle lit course.  I spent a long time on google, an even longer time in the library, and came up with a respectable number of czech authors, past and present.  they were unfamiliar to me, except for kafka--whom i'd never realized was czech; he was always just kafka--and vaclav havel, the poet-president of the post-velvet revolution days. decent start. soon i happened on another one i had known, but not well--  karel capek, author of RUR, the world's first robot fantasy play.

then came the discovery, someone i'd heard nothing of , very popular in his day, who wrote in czech rather than german [a fascinating result of the complicated history of the much-invaded Czech and Slovakian regions].  So i curled up with Tales from Mala Strana, with which i fell instantly and probably permanently in love.

Prague, i soon discovered, was a splendid city, which had produced some splendid writers.  To one of them, it has given great attention over the years.  Walk around awhile and you will stumble upon a street or a house or a whatever in which franz kafka once lived, ate, drank, or visited.  he even has his own museum, a small but admirably designed one. 

all this is to the good.  but where was my neruda to be found?  unlike the peripetatic kafka, neruda didn't stray from the  neighborhood he grew up in--Mala Strana, the "little town." Knowing I'd get lost on my own, i got a couple of kind students to spendpart of their free time in Prague helping me find the long,  steep block now known as Neruda Street.  there we found the house had had grown up  in: attractive, narrow, and with nothing left of the writer  except a plaque on the wall, proudly proclaiming that he had once lived here.  on the street level was a small store selling post cards and candy and a few 'sundries.' we went inside, because i wanted to stand as close as possible to where he would have stood.  a shy elderly man sat behind a small counter. did he speak english? we asked. 'little,' he said, almost apologetically.  'there was once a writer here,. jan neruda,...' i began.  the man beamed.  'neruda, yes. writer! czech!'  we tried to find out if the man had read the works, but his slight english and our nonexistent czech made it impossible. still, he was definitely proud of his writer and pleased that we americans had come in search of neruda.

before we left,  bought something. i don't remember what it was--a pen, maybe, or some postcards. i do remember that i bought it.

i've been back to prague on several more class trips, but somehow have never gotten back to neruda street. i keep meaning to.  we go again in  a few weeks, and this time i'm determined to get back there.  i've' even found the names of the cemetery where he was buried, in mala strana, and a place not too far, i think, where there is a lone statue of him. i'll shoot for them both, and make a real pilrimage to neruda's spirit. if i can't  wheedle any companions this time, i will certainly get myself--by foot, bus, or taxi--back to neruda street and his old house. if there remains any sort of store there, i will buy something--a pen, maybe, or some postcards.  of course i will. thinking about it this week, i realized for the first time what that tiny purchase had been about.  certainly, a thank-you to the enthusiastic merchant.   but there was something more, though i couldnt place it at the time. now i understood that  it had the feeling i have in a cathedral when, for all the years i have been away from catholic belief, i experience the holyness of the place, and can't leave until i've lit a candle. it's the same feeling i had unexpectedly at the remains of a shrine to Athena, in france, and , not knowing how to respond to it, had hastily thrown some pennies into a hole in the marble.

neruda's house is a chapel to me.  so of course i bought a chachka or two there.  of course i'll buy a chachka or two again.  i will light my candle to neruda.