TATIANA RIABOKIN PLAYS THE BANDURA

With her left hand she plucks a clear
bass line, with her right brushes
plangent sounds from the fifty-
four strings of the bulky, asymmetrical
instrument in her arms.  Her fingers dance
octaves, delicate, precise, rich.
National instrument of Ukraine.
Bandura players, called kobzars,
many of them blind, carried
the traditional folk songs
of the Ukrainian people.  When
Stalin moved to crush Ukrainian
national identity, he rounded
up the kobzars for a "Congress
of Folksingers of the USSR"
in Moscow.  The train stopped outside
the Kozacha Lopan station.  
The bodies were buried in lime
trenches, the banduras burned.  
Two years later, the Holodomor,
Terror-Famine, starved millions.
So told Tatiana, proud
in her embroidered Ukrainian
blouse, as her exacting hands
lifted us from horror to beauty.  
My mother's father was a "German
Russian," invited by the Tsar
to Crimea.  His family
emigrated to the US when
the Tsar conscripted the German
guest workers.  Are distant relatives
of mine fighting the Russians now?
In Time I notice a photo
of Ukrainian youth in camo
in a classroom studying war.
Such a sorrow, I think,
remembering the Youtube video
of earnest young Ukrainians
taking up the magnificent old
instrument five years ago
in a peacetime no one dreamed
would fall victim to that revived
disease of Stalinist cruelty.
"A time is coming when there will
be no war, but that time is
not yet," says Tatiana
Riabokin, her hands calling
forth from the bandura's strings
full octaves of grief and hope.

    I've been obsessed with a Tolstoy story, "Alyosha the Pot," since encountering it in George Saunders's wonderful book on the Russian short story and the art of reading, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.  For those unfamiliar with this very short tale, here's my synopsis, with quotes from the Clarence Brown translation Saunders uses:

    Alyosha is a younger brother who has been nicknamed "the pot" after a childhood incident in which he tripped and broke a pot of milk.  An awkward, homely boy and slow learner, Alyosha faces dim prospects.  His father hires him out at age 19 to a merchant in town.  Despite the merchant's exploitation of his low station, Alyosha works tirelessly and cheerfully at whatever tasks he's given.  Alyosha's rewards and pleasures are few; when he's saved enough money to buy a new jacket he "[can't] keep a straight face" for his happiness.  Alyosha lives this way for a year and a half, and then a momentous thing occurs:  he and a cook in the merchant's house, Ustinya, fall in love.  It's the first time in his life that Alyosha has felt valued for himself and not for his usefulness to another.  He and Ustinya talk of marriage, but Alyosha's father, catching wind of their plans, shoots it down.  With Ustinya listening from behind the kitchen door he tells Alyosha he won't have him marrying "one of these town sluts."  Alyosha offers no resistance, and immediately gives up his plan, though he weeps, the one moment in the story when he shows his grief.  Alyosha doesn't mention marriage to Ustinya again, and one day, cleaning snow off a roof during Lent, falls and is fatally injured.  On his deathbed he thanks Ustinya for "being nice to [him]."  He continues, "it's better they wouldn't let us get married, it'd all be for nothing.  Now everything's fine."  He speculates that if one is good and hurts no one "down here . . . then it'll be good up there too."  He seems to glimpse something surprising and dies.

    Saunders expertly turns the events in the story over and over, viewing them from multiple angles.  Near the end of his ruminations, Saunders proposes that "Alyosha" either 1) "makes a beautiful case for cheerful obedience" or 2) "makes a beautiful case for the argument that making a beautiful case for cheerful obedience is a gift to tyrants."
    Inspired by Saunders, I'd like to do some ruminating of my own about this story, this deeply troubling, problematic story.
    Let's begin with the title:  "Alyosha the Pot."  Almost the first thing I notice in the story is that Alyosha is being identified with not simply a pot but with a broken pot.  That detail feels significant.  Broken in what way?  Alyosha appears throughout the story to be what we might consider pathologically accommodating, apparently unable to assert his own basic needs and desires.  Some core volitional part of him seems defective or missing.  As his nickname suggests, he's seen by others in strictly utilitarian terms, as a thing to be used.  He lacks the capacity to rebel against this ab-use or act decisively to further his own human happiness and fulfillment.
    In his commentary, Saunders cites as "one of the most painful things in the story" Alyosha's acquiescence to his father and especially his failure to defend Ustinya from his father's slander of her as a "town slut" which Ustinya overhears from behind a door.  Painful, indeed, and at this point the reader may want to throttle Alyosha almost as much as his crass, domineering father.
    It's tempting to read some human sympathy for Alyosha's thwarted marital prospects into this scene, but before we assume such, we'd better take a quick look at the later-life Tolstoy who wrote this scene.  
    Around age fifty Tolstoy underwent a crisis of conscience that resulted in a famous conversion to Christianity, after which he became elevated in the eyes of his followers to a guru preaching a radical Christ-inspired gospel of nonviolence, simplicity and voluntary poverty.  The dark side of Tolstoy's conversion was a puritanical joylessness that condemned ordinary pleasures, chief among them the pleasures of sex, even within marriage.  In 1889, sixteen years before "Alyosha the Pot," Tolstoy published a blatantly anti-sex, anti-marriage short novel called The Kreutzer Sonata, which drew widespread condemnation in the intellectual circles of his time for a perceived hostility toward life.  Worse, on a personal level, was Tolstoy's rejection of his wife Sonya, who'd borne his thirteen children, raised and educated the nine who survived, managed their household and hand-copied the massive War and Peace seven times.  In fact Tolstoy ignominiously died on the run from her in a station-master's house in Astapovo in 1910, five years after "Alyosha" was written.
    This later Tolstoy wrote in The Kreutzer Sonata:  "What I find more contemptible than anything else is the theory that love is something ideal and lofty in practice, love is vulgar and swinish."  These sentiments weren't just those of a character in a literary fiction -- they were Tolstoy's.  They led G. K. Chesterton to comment, "It is difficult in every case to reconcile Tolstoy the great artist with Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer."  As the psychologist Karl Stern notes in his study The Flight from Woman, Tolstoy espoused a more genuine Christianity before than after his conversion.
    Can we be sure we're reading Tolstoy's sympathies accurately?  Did he in fact view the quashing of Alyosha's marital desires as a bad thing?  Within the up-ended value system of The Kreutzer Sonata, such an intervention could be seen as a positive good.  Before Alyosha dies at the end of the story, he tells Ustinya:  "See -- it's better they wouldn't let us get married, it'd all be for nothing.  Now everything's fine."  Initially I heard that "it'd all be for nothing" as a bit of defeatist self-deception to rationalize the bad hand Alyosha had accepted, but now I'm less convinced of that.  If your view actually is that sex is wrong and that, as Tolstoy also ranted, "Children are God's blessing, children are a joy!  It's all a big lie...." it would follow that being compelled to forego the whole thing could be perversely viewed as "fine."  (Tolstoy continues the above passage:  "The joy which the baby gives to his mother, by his charm, by his tiny hands, his tiny feet, by his entire little body, means much less than the suffering caused, not only by sickness or loss of the baby but by mere apprehension at the possibility of sickness or death.")

    Examining my first responses to "Alyosha," I see that I'm being too psychological, giving Tolstoy credit for a modern self-scrutiny of which he may not have been capable; his fanatical embrace of simplicity and purity strikes me as profoundly pre-psychological.  But what about the possibility of a psychological dynamic at play in "Alyosha" below Tolstoy's conscious threshold?  Tolstoy's personality was powerful and charismatic; obviously he had no difficulty in asserting his agency.  But as Jung knew, everyone has a shadow, and it seems likely to me that somewhere in that vastness of light and shadow that was Tolstoy, a "broken" Alyosha lurked.
    Such "minority" parts of ourselves develop cunning over a lifetime of masking.  Could it be that Tolstoy's personal "Alyosha," deeply secret, rose up in the writing process to claim for himself a little more sympathy than Tolstoy's dominant or "majority" personality intended?  These things happen while navigating that right-brain-left-brain storm called writing, and there's no reason to believe they don't happen to geniuses along with the rest of us.
    Saunders mentions that Tolstoy drafted "Alyosha" in a day, finally declaring the work "very bad," and never came back to it.  Could Tolstory have felt embarrassed at having to look at his inner broken person in the stark light of the story?  Alyosha is known to have been based on a real-life cook at Yasnaya Polyana.  I believe that Tolstoy very much wanted to elevate this simple person to an idealized Christ-likeness, but that something else in him set up the dissonance in Alyosha we feel between saintliness and debility.  
    I could suggest that Tolstoy ended up writing a different story than he'd set out to write, but I can't prove it.  I can only pay attention to the way the story acts on me personally with its shadows and tensions.  "Alyosha" riles and confuses me.  From the beginning I watch this good-hearted, hard-working kid in one pathetic situation after the next in which callous, cold-hearted people take advantage of his defenselessness to essentially treat him as a thing to be used instead of as a person.  Reading on into this escalating sequence of small and large cruelties, I watch my anger against Alyosha's oppressors grow.  I sense not morality but impairment at the heart of Alyosha's inaction.  By contrast, the Christ on whom Alyosha is supposedly modeled has volition in excess -- got any money-changers you'd like scourged from the temple?  For me the story becomes a little tango of anger and pity, in which these mixed emotions cloud like squid ink in water, obscuring from conscious view any clear picture of what I think Tolstoy might be wanting me to see.  
    In 1905, with revolution in the air, perhaps "Alyosha the Pot" was intended to function as a little pre-emptive sermon cautioning against violent revolt.  We moderns cherish a narrative in which an oppressed underdog finally casts off restraints and rises to grasp the golden ring of freedom.  For films, think Lasse Hallström's What's Eating Gilbert Grape.  An example from 20th century American literature is John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, featuring one of the most liberating endings of any novel I know.  A breeze of sweet release blows through the stories we like to tell about redemptive freedom and our belief in its possibility for even the most downtrodden underdog.  "Alyosha the Pot" is not one of these, and therefore profoundly out of sync with our contemporary liberationist leanings.

    We can agree that no matter what position you take on this story, Alyosha is an underdog, though probably not a consciously motivated Christ-figure.  My feeling for Alyosha reaches its peak intensity when, dying, he tells Ustinya, "Thanks ... for being nice to me...."  That's the point where my anger yields completely to pity and I want to cry.  Poor Alyosha!  Did it really have to be this way?
    No matter what Tolstoy's conscious agenda may have been in writing this story, he must have clearly felt the utter pathos of this scene.  How could he not have been touched by the loneliness and sadness in what he was writing?  While pity may not have been his intended emotional focus in recording Alyosha's last moments, pity is what spikes above the saw-toothed constant of my anger at Alyosha's abusers.
    Pity is a complex matter.  No emotionally healthy person wants to be an object of pity, not least because hardly anyone wants to suffer enough to inspire pity.  And there is often an element of superiority on the part of the pitier.  Webster notes as a connotation of the word pity a "sometimes slightly contemptuous sorrow for one in misery or distress."  Pity descends through the Middle English pite, from the Latin pietas, piety.  Some in-built piousness in pity tends to keep the pitier on a higher level than the pitied sufferer.
    I realize, along with Saunders, that part -- perhaps most -- of the story's power depends on Tolstoy's refusal to declare his intentions outright.  I still believe Tolstoy may have judged the story unsatisfactory because he'd let slip a little too much of an Alyosha in him that he'd kept under wraps.
    Isn't it likely that we each have an Alyosha somewhere inside us?  Part of the story's value may be to help us see that one more clearly so as to know his or her struggles and sufferings and then, ideally, to treat more kindly and compassionately the Alyoshas of the world, who include ourselves.
    Thinking a step beyond this, what if there's an Alyosha in our past -- and given the cruelty of childhood, isn't that probable? -- whom we used in some heartless way so as to treat them as a thing?  Maybe in grade school, say, or high school?  "Alyosha the Pot" may cause the memory of our neighborhood Alyoshas and our dishonorable behavior toward them to surface, and, for all I know, Tolstoy might have anticipated and approved such a response.
    In the end I'm left to wonder whether, in its author's eyes, "Alyosha" is tragedy or comedy.  Clearly, the story has gotten under my skin as a kind of moral or spiritual irritant.  If the main point here is that Alyosha has been systematically deprived of his birthright of love and an ordinarily happy/sad human life, I'd say tragedy.  If on the other hand Tolstoy wants us to mainly see the salvific tale of a holy fool rescued from the "whole catastrophe" of life, then we'd have to say comedy.  As repugnant as that feels to us, this latter might really have been Tolstoy's point.  Conflicted and confused, we may find ourselves admitting, with Chesterton, "We know not what to do with this small and noisy moralist who is inhabiting one corner of a great and good man."

(Note:  George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain:  In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life was published by Random House in 2021, enjoying time on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.  Besides Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov and Turgenev are also represented with marvelous stories and close readings by Saunders that encourage the reader to live them more deeply and discover their true richness.  Writers in any genre can benefit from this brilliant "master class."  Thanks, George, for showing me the way in to my own deeper reading of Tolstoy.)

The invincible shield of caring
is a weapon from the sky against being dead.
--Lao Tzu (trans. Witter Bynner)

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think.
--Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

Power on.
--Dr. Evermor

    Invincible Shield

Early April, the land beneath rain and sun raw as our newly laid-bare feelings after winter.  Driving south from Baraboo on US 12, we see to the east, close by the Wisconsin River, the decommissioned Badger Ordnance plant.  West of the highway, giant metal -- bugs! -- gangly, brightly painted -- stride the ditches.  A twenty-foot-high iron heart skewered by an ornate arrow calls to mind Lao Tzu's "invincible shield of caring."  We leave the car among spring-fountaining trees near a sign announcing Dr. Evermor's Sculpture Park.

    Around the Bend

Up ahead scrap-heaps flank the dirt road, glimmer among delicate young leaves.  On the path into Dr. Evermor's populous, constructed world, inquisitive presences press from all sides, from bushes, from the deep, dead grass: Hundreds, maybe thousands of metal creatures -- whiskered, horned, beaked, wingèd, pincered, finned -- motionless yet quick with whimsical personality, exude no menace, only playfulness, not an army but an eccentric village, welcoming winter-worn travelers into the light.

    Forevertron

It all radiates out from the Forevertron -- four hundred tons of soaring, sprawling, baroque engineering, part carnival midway, part Victorian science fiction, part Gaudian excess, spiral-staircasing, telescoping Machine Age collage, according to Dr. Evermor's writings an earth-sky harmonizer, bad karma neutralizer, the elegant copper-encased glass egg above the Tesla coils designed to one day "perpetuate" its creator "back into the heavens."

    The Doctor Is In

Near a welding station, a speaker hoisted on a pole pipes circus music.  A hammer taps rhythmically nearby in April air peppery with spray paint.  Drifting out past the Forevertron, constellations of sculptures all sizes: impish crab and lobster hugging the ground, dueling swordfish, flies huge as helicopters, towering birds with steel-guitar bodies.  A smiling woman introduces herself as Lady Eleanor Every.  "The Doctor enjoys meeting visitors.  Stop and say hello!"

    Fox

While Krista chats with Lady Eleanor I venture into Dr. Evermor's rusted minibus office.  He's talking loudly with a younger man in coveralls.  It's as though a fox has spotted me from his lair!  There's an atmosphere of conspiracy, of plotting some friendly mischief for the world over a bag of chips.  A cat on the sun-splashed caramel-colored seat is in on this too.  "We're having a discussion," the Doctor tells me.  "Sit down and shut up until we finish."  He adds, "Then we'll get to your problem!"

    Jails

Dr. Evermor looks dapper in his purple shirt and silk ascot.  His golden belt buckle is shaped like a scallop shell.  Deep vertical brow-furrows, a head of dark, thick hair, blunt, inquisitive nose.  A life dealing in scrap has knit an ironic shrewdness above his eyes, which droop like Neruda's.  What kind of doctor is he anyway?  Maybe an Industrial Metaphysician?  He sketches loosely in a notebook on his lap, plans to cut up some old jails he bought in Illinois.  "Why jails?"  "Because I hate jails!"

    Salvage

Tom Every got his start in the scrap business at age eleven.  In his forties, through with demolition, he began his monumental life's work of reclamation.  Call it art or what you will, his genius for animating the cast-off and obsolete attracted attention, some of it unwanted as when pornographers attempted a photo shoot in front of the Forevertron (he ran them off).  And by the way, has he mentioned that the Bird Band, built with old musical instruments, comes alive and plays on nights of the full moon?

    Names

Finally the Doctor turns his curiosity toward me.  "What's your name?"  I tell him.  "Bullshit," he snorts.  That unnerves me, as if I've been caught using a fake ID.  Could a name also be a kind of jail?  This man salvaged his "Tom" and built from it "Dr. Evermor."  And what about this "problem" of mine he's mentioned?  Does he just mean that I'm past fifty, and it's springtime?  The Doctor notices my abashed silence, and softens his look.  He fixes kindly, sad sea-turtle eyes on me, and asks, "Are you happy?"

    Heavenly Hope

During World War II, the federal government uprooted generations-old farms on prime land to build the munitions factory; some say the community never recovered.  Dr. Evermor has devised a plan to heal that long-standing wound by moving the Forevertron, his monumental peace generator, across the highway to the site of Badger's old compressor plant.  He's a romantic, a Parsifal with a welding torch, dreams of powering the modern-day wasteland back to bloom.

    Time-Binder

Dr. Evermor hates things that imprison imagination -- like television and alcohol -- and grieves the loss of craft-work in the modern world.  "I think of all these" -- his sweeping gesture takes in the whole of Everland -- "as time-binding devices."  Nineteenth-century ironwork is especially beautiful to him.  He brings in semi-loads of dead farm machinery each week.  He points proudly to a culvert-sized cylinder.  "The aerospace industry paid a million bucks for that, but I got it for a hundred."

    Salt

The Sufis tell this story: A teacher mixes a handful of salt in a jar of water and asks his student, "How does it taste?"  "Bitter!"  Then he throws an equal amount of salt in a lake and bids his student drink.  "And how does that taste?"  "Sweet!"  The master says, "The salt is human pain.  Every life has the same quantity.  To surmount your pain, be a lake, not a jar."  Sitting here I sense how the work creates the man, makes the Doctor himself the medicine -- makes him a lake, or even an ocean.

    Heart of Hearts

We've been here two hours.  It's time to go.  Leaving, we admire up close the giant metal heart, its left ventricle open as Dr. Evermor says hearts should be.  It leans, hearts being easily pushed over.  I'm still not sure what my "problem" is, but I do feel happier.  The Heart of Hearts aims its love-arrow across Highway 12 at wounded Badger from some place in ourselves we long for and often sense just out of view of the roads we travel, new leaves sparking through trees as earth tilts into another spring.

    Fifty years ago this August, I and five other intrepid adventurers climbed into a Chevy II Nova and drove all day and all night from River Falls, Wisconsin, to one of the defining events of our generation, what was then known as the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, but which time quickly shorthanded as simply Woodstock.  Over the years I tried to condense the events of that sprawling, quintessentially counter-cultural weekend into the space of a poem, and finally, about ten years ago, decided I'd done well enough by my experience.  Putting the cart before the horse, here's the poem as it's settled out:

WOODSTOCK

That August morning fifty years ago
in Wisconsin, we six mismatches,
refugees, and orphans piled into Linny's
Chevy Nova with no food, no change
of clothes, almost no money, though lots
of reckless, desperate, spontaneous
youth, and drove all night to upstate New York,
where, becalmed in traffic to Yasgur's farm,
we joined a seven-mile foot caravan,
passed joints, drank jug wine laced with only
God knows what, got separated, rained on,
and didn't find each other again
until it was over.  For three days we lived
hand to mouth on whatever came to us,
got lost, got found, befriended others who were
wandering.  The first night I shared a tarp
with some Philly hippies, the second an
Army surplus tent with a girl from a New
Hampshire commune, her feet dirtier than mine.
Our movie stood in awe of its own soundtrack:
Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone,
the Who, fringed Daltry twirling his mike like some
golden god of the dawning Woodstock nation.
When on Monday morning Hendrix blasted
his scorched reveille, we found ourselves still standing,
victors in some improbable battle,
though it might have ended differently
had a particular Pennsylvania state trooper
known two kids in the car were underage.  
(One whiff of our gear and he hastened us
on without searching the trunk where our stash
lay swaddled in debris of the pilgrimage.)
Straggling back to tell the tale to small-
town friends--our nerve-endings, it may be, set
permanently tingling--we split up again
and this time didn't regroup for decades,
though when we did, we understood that each
had in his or her own way smuggled
back home a tiny piece of the Garden.
Now I think, what a crazy, lucky,
right thing it was for us to do.
We didn't keep our adventure waiting.
We didn't worry how we'd get home.
We just jumped in that Chevy Nova
and drove.  That time will never come
again, though for us it will last as long
as we need it to, the rest of our lives.  

For Linny, Leo, David, Carol, and Mike

    Of course no such brief accounting can tell the definitive story of so complex a happening as the phenomenon of Woodstock.  And after the passage of fifty years, muddled memory isn't going to supply any very complete picture either.  Still I and my fellow Woodstock veterans have spent enough time retracing our individual steps and missteps that I think it would be fun to literarily muck around that trampled ground at least one more time.
    In the world of 1969, long before the instantaneous connectivity of social media, hippies, "freaks," and rebels of various stripes managed to communicate by means of an underground network of local, regional and national print publications.  In order to keep up, one had to read.  If we hadn't been at least a nominally literate generation, it wouldn't have worked.  We'd clipped a coupon from an ad in Ramparts, the leading national radical-left magazine of the day, and sent for tickets by mail.  Postmarked New York on Monday, they reached my address in River Falls on Thursday morning.  Somehow we six were gathered and ready to go, a feat of timing that still somewhat baffles me.  Leo Sanders from North Dakota had met up in the Twin Cities with Linny Siems, the owner of the Chevy Nova and her younger sister Carol, who'd also brought in tow from their hometown of Cumberland, Wisconsin, Mike Tappon, the kid brother of an older hippie friend of ours, John Tappon (who also attended Woodstock, though I never encountered him there).  These four pilgrims and the River Falls contingent, consisting of myself and Dave Wallin, converged on my house on Dallas Street and without further ado hit the road.
    With the energy and exuberance of youth, we drove straight through until Friday afternoon, off the expressway amid the astonishing freak caravans jamming the country roads leading to the actual site of "Woodstock," Max Yasgur's farm near White Lake, New York, we had to abandon the car and hike a distance of what turned out to be about seven miles to the festival site.  Up until that point, I think it was anticipation of the stellar musical line-up that had energized us, but by the time we fed into that psychedelically-hued river of hippie foot traffic, finding ourselves among so many like-minded was a high in itself beyond any other circumstance of our gathering, be it righteous weed or music.  "Woodstock Nation" was quickly taking shape, and it was exhilarating to be in the majority for once.
    Camaraderie was instant and effortless in that mind-blowingly vast crowd, and I'm sure it was the overall friendliness and gregariousness that contributed to our inadvertently splitting up and not finding each other again until it was time to leave on Monday morning.  It would never happen that way in our present moment of universal smart phones, but in 1969 "by the time we got to Woodstock," our little band of six was thoroughly factionalized with high mathematical odds against reconstituting our ranks in an ocean of nearly a half million souls.  
    Today I marvel at how little anxiety this fragmentation of our party seemed to generate.  Maybe it was the "go-with-the-flow" ethos of the times, but so far as I can remember, no one was very worried about having lost the others.  Maybe the whole gathering was so essentially trusting and peaceful that such worries just didn't find sufficient emotional ground for taking root.  However it went (and almost none of us are too sure, after the passage of a half-century), we were able to roll with it and have a good time.
    Much has been made of the availability and use of drugs at Woodstock.  It would be disingenuous not to admit that in that counter-culture a casual attitude toward drugs prevailed, but for our crew ultimately it was the music that rightly took center stage.  How thrilling the line-up with its pantheon of 60s giants:  Joplin, Hendrix, CSNY, the Who, the Band, Credence Clearwater, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Sly and the Family Stone, Ravi Shankar, the stuff of dreams!  To add speculative fuel to the fire, the Woodstock site was virtually Bob Dylan's backyard.  Would the great genius himself make an unadvertised appearance?  I believe that the perceived possibility, inflated by desire into likelihood of a rare showing by the reclusive Dylan was a prime motivator for many a Woodstock pilgrim.  
    Whatever the controlled substances being consumed, I retain many vivid instants of musical bliss vividly in memory, and it's hard to separate their intoxicating effect from the general chemical ambiance.  On the low-keyed end of the spectrum, I sat with less than a hundred others before a little outdoor stage back by the Hog Farm's kitchen listening to a relaxed Joan Baez sing and chat in the most intimate setting imaginable.  On the high-voltage side, I can still recall the body-rush of Pete Townshend's windmilling power chords as the Who blasted out an abbreviated version of Tommy, one of Woodstock's most transcendent performances.  These memories, among a galley of others, are clear and unmuddied, leading me to suspect that drugs informed them far less than the sheer excitement of the music itself.  
    Sorting out the sequence of events with my fellow Woodstockers, I've become acutely aware of how spotty and incomplete our memories of even peak experiences like Woodstock can be after fifty years.  There's a certain comedy in our general lack of agreement or clarity as to who stuck with whom during the initial split-up.  Dave remembers stopping at a roadside grocery to buy a bottle of wine and getting separated from the rest of us.  Somewhere along the way, I lost the main group too, but who with -- or without -- I no longer recall.  Leo remembers some of the same Friday events I do but not my being a part of them.  And I can add, vice versa.  We both remember coming into the main concert area during Tim Hardin's evening set.  Apparently on Saturday there was a hike back to retrieve some things from the car with another Wisconsin friend, Charlie Uehlin, but I know I wasn't in on that.  I was still "lost" on Saturday.  In one of my few jottings from the trip, I noted that by the time the Who hit the stage in the wee hours of Sunday morning I'd sat through 18 hours of previous acts.  
    From our comedic attempts to reconstruct our adventures that weekend, it occurred to me that maybe we keep the most fixed memories of people we know best.  In fact, some of us had hardly known each other at all before setting out.  Three of our crew --Linny, Leo, and Mike -- were completely new to me.  I had previously met Carol, who had occasionally visited River Falls, and Dave I knew best, from our college proximity in various bands to which we'd belonged.  When Dave dropped out of sight on the way in, I lost my familiar moorings and from that point on it was all unexplored territory.  Our group split into three and possibly four separate factions, but exactly who and how many we still haven't collectively pieced together.  It makes me wish I'd kept a better journal in those days, but at age 21 I tended to record fantasies rather than facts.  I had not yet shed the self-involvement of adolescence; that development would take a while longer, in fact a lot longer.
    Meanwhile, what can I say at this late date that would shed any new light on that massive gathering?  My story is the story of thousands, hundreds of thousands.  By the time I reached the festival gates, the fence had already come down and anyone who had made it that far was in, paid or no.  That's why I still have my pristine set of Woodstock tickets, $6 for each day, printed with their red images of, respectively, a right-slanting diagonal line, a five-pointed star, and a crescent moon, kept safely in the envelope they arrived in with its purple version of the now iconic bird-and-guitar Woodstock logo.  
    By that time, food and drink were being freely dispensed by the festival organizers.  Leo remembers Hostess fruit pies handed out.  I availed myself of the Hog Farm's free vegetarian meals.  And of course, in the hot August sun, beverages of every description were passed from stranger to stranger, and one soon gave up worrying over what surprise ingredients they might contain.  This could well have developed into a disaster; the miracle of Woodstock is that it didn't.  Only a short time later, the Altamont festival in California devolved into murderous violence, but Woodstock occurred in that brief grace period before the darker forces moved in on the counterculture.  Notably short on incidents of violence or the uglier mishaps that might have resulted from such a large concentration of immature human beings in a small space, Woodstock did pretty much live up to its advertised goal of "3 days of peace & music."  
    One dissonant note not recorded in my poem (and in fact generally not known because it took place at a break in camera work for the film) will serve to round out this reminiscence.  On the internet you can now read about this incident, which occurred in the middle of that legendary Who set.  The Who's hour-plus-long performance was heavily front-loaded with a shortened version Tommy, which, by its omissions became even more potent than it was on vinyl, every moment stirring, the songs memorable, the performances spine-tinglingly electric, especially considering that the Who opened at around 5 a.m. after waiting all night to perform.  The Who had held the audience rapt for the first ten selections, through Tommy's great hit, "Pinball Wizard," when, between songs, it happened.  Seemingly out of nowhere, a lanky, leather-jacketed figure with unruly curly hair grabbed one of the mikes.  Whoever he was, he had only a few seconds, just long enough to snarl, "I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison!" before Pete Townshend, like a maddened bull, head down and guitar neck extended in bayonet position, rushed from (to our orientation) the right side of the stage, and struck him in the back with his weaponized guitar, sending the interloper sailing into the pit.  It was a deeply un-peaceful display of vintage English working class hostility, and made by far the most uncomfortable moment of the official program.  Gradually word got around that it had been Yippie activist Abbie Hoffman who'd briefly commandeered the P.A. to plead for imprisoned White Panther poet John Sinclair.  Townshend was actually sympathetic to Sinclair, who'd been busted for possession of a mere two joints and was widely viewed as a political prisoner.  But no one, no matter on what side of the issues, violated what Townsend later called "the sanctity of the stage" with impunity, not on the Who's watch.
    At the time, it was possible to speculate that what I'd just witnessed was a calculated piece of guerrilla theater, and in a sense it was.  But only one person on that stage was in on it.  Townsend, wielding his aggression so nakedly, challenged the peace-and-love vibe of Woodstock to its core.  Coming at a time when revolutionary rhetoric was running feverishly high, the "Abbie Hoffman incident" (so-called by Wikipedia) exposed a fault-line of our generation's contradictions.  We imagined we could have a revolution without the hard, dirty work of revolution.  In a way, Townsend's successful ejection of Hoffman represented a triumph of passive entertainment over active engagement.  The relief I felt when the Who tore back into their set after Hoffman's thwarted interruption didn't prevent me from going on to righteously proclaim "Free John Sinclair!"  Such were the times and our ambivalent loyalties.
    Woodstock was, when all is said and done, people, people, people, endlessly shifting masses of them, a sea in which for a while our tiny individual drops lost themselves and were still OK.  Getting anywhere in the vast bowl of the natural amphitheater itself was to learn to step carefully across an infinity of blankets and outstretched limbs.  Attendees were enormously patient and polite with the complicated maneuvering it took just to get to one of the long ranks of porta-potties.  Only younger bladders could navigate those multitudes without fear of humiliation.  As Linny said in a recollection of her own, "I don't remember going to the bathroom once in the whole weekend.  Do you?"
    However it happened, on Monday morning after the crowd had begun to thin, all six of us were together again.  Woodstock magic!  I have a feeling that by Sunday I'd run into at least a couple of the gang.  We must have had a plan, or else luck was on our side.  Maybe both.  As if our six weren't enough, we even picked up a hitchhiker, a hippie improbably named Kit Carson, who needed a ride back to the city.  I had never been to New York before (I don't know whether any of us had) and we ended up at an apartment strangely bare but for floor-length red velvet curtains on the then-ungentrified upper West Side, kept by Kit's father, who, as Linny recalls, peeled off a couple of big bills to send us out for provisions.  We bought jug wine and fixings for spaghetti, eaten sitting on the floor, and hung out in nearby Central Park before moving on to Philadelphia to visit Mike's brother John and Charlie Uehlin, who had also been at Woodstock.
    Then the trek home as chronicled in my poem, and years and years of not seeing each other again.  Linny and Leo reconnected in the 80s, but it was around the mid-90s when Linny noticed my name listed at a poetry reading and called the bookstore.  This soon led to our first group reunion, 25 years after the fact.  How wonderful to discover that we were all alive, all well, and eager to rehash that intensely concentrated long weekend we'd spent together, more or less, on the road.  Now it feels as though we've all been friends forever, a special bond having risen out of experiencing that generationally defining, crowning event of the Sixties.  
    To conclude, let me flash back to the last morning of Woodstock.  Exhausted, I didn't make it to Jimi Hendrix's set at the very end, though I do have a half-memory of hearing distorted strains of his guitar in the groggy morning-after distance, maybe his iconic "Star Spangled Banner."  (Hendrix's manager insisted that, as headliner, he play last; consequently most Woodstock-goers missed him, since only about 40 or 50 thousand are said to have remained on the grounds by that time.)  Gathering myself out of the canvas Army surplus tent I'd ended up in that night, I unceremoniously set out in search of my comrades, piqued by the urgency of finally having to locate each other for the trip back.  
    As more and more people left I could see, besides the familiar wasteland of littered turf and mud that had been Yasgur's pastures, a copious scattering of green-covered program books, and stopped to slip one of them into my backpack.  With the foresight to harvest a few dozen, I might have financially eased my golden years!  The 50-page program read like a cross between an issue of Rolling Stone and a volume of bad stoned poetry.  Each act or artist had a page, with an arresting graphic and a few lines that read (as in the Grateful Dead's entry) thus:

"purity with the dead" in
reach frisco tokay atman
the last molecule madness
maybe the final fillmore upanishads . . .

No blame, as the I Ching would say.  The program bard was hardly alone; we were all writing like that in those unfocused, undisciplined days.  (The program's one real poem, by imprisoned John Sinclair, was in a different league altogether.)  I learned only recently that the programs didn't make it to the festival site until Sunday, and that whole bundles just got carelessly dumped along the way. Though I lost my original Woodstock poster in a move a couple of years later, I still have my program booklet, in good shape despite the rough-housing of travel.  I keep it in a thousand-pound safe surrounded by a piranha pool and electrified razor wire in an undisclosed location.  

Postscript:

    One of the most pleasurable aspects of writing this remembrance was the participation of my five fellow Woodstockers in supplying forgotten details, correcting those I'd gotten wrong, and generally helping to put the memory house in order.
    This involved dozens of emails in which wonderful and quotable things were said by all.  Ideally we should each be writing our own account for posterity, be it for relatives, friends, or the simply curious who would like to deepen their understanding of the Woodstock experience.  What I found most disappointing in the process of writing was the paucity of my own recording of that trip in my notebooks from 1969.  That lapse somewhat shakes my confidence in my own memory of Woodstock.  At the same time, it makes me realize that what I think of as "my" memory of Woodstock is actually part of a group memory built up among us Woodstockers and reinforced by our many conversations over the years.  Neuroscientists know that revisiting a memory changes it, and so in a very real way what I present in this prose is a composite story the six of us have built and polished together in the fifty years since the relative innocents we were ventured with half a million others onto the rural highways of upstate New York.  This story belongs to all of us who've had a hand in creating it.
    While I was putting the finishing touches on these paragraphs, an almost impossibly marvelous thing happened.  Mike emailed, reporting that in a book his wife Karen had given him, Michael Lang's Woodstock:  3 Days of Peace and Music, he had discovered a photo of Linny, Carol, Leo, and himself sitting on the side of the road to the festival site.  I remember how in the year or so following Woodstock, all of us who had attended obsessively combed the group photos in hopes of spotting ourselves in one of them.  No one I knew had any luck.  And now here, clear as day on page 61, were the majority of our party, photographed all by their lonesome by Rolling Stone photographer Baron  Wolman.
    "On the way in or the way out?" someone asked.  Mike answered, definitely, the way in.  "I knew that because the big canvas sleeping bag in front of me didn't make it back with me.  It was my Dad's and had survived North Africa, Italy and France in World War II, but was swallowed by the mud of Max Yasgur's farm!"  Both Linny and Dave, it turned out, had also lost sleeping bags at Woodstock, evoking a vision of dumpsters full of sodden, abandoned gear hauled to the nearest landfill.  
    And so we continue to build our story of Woodstock.
    After several email exchanges had made the rounds, Carol wrote:  "It's all like a sweet dream to me."  Good words to end with, for now.

Around 1988 -- I am trying to fix the date, so if anyone knows, please get in touch -- my friend John Krumberger and I made a pilgrimage from Minneapolis to Duluth to take part in a workshop with one of our favorite poets, Mary Oliver.  In those years Oliver was not the literary celebrity she became, though in American Primitive (1984) and Dream Work (1986), the former of which won her a Pulitzer, she had already achieved two of her greatest artistic triumphs.

To say that Oliver wasn't fashionable in those years is something of an understatement.  American poetry -- and especially poetry in the Twin Cities -- was enjoying one of its periodic romances with identity politics.  Oliver chose to keep her focus on the world, particularly the natural world, rather than herself.  She was foremost a nature poet, and therefore consigned to a literary ghetto reserved for those dealing with Lesser Matters in the eyes of the urban arbiters of culture.  And so, despite her honors, awards, and growing recognition of her excellence, Oliver had never, to my knowledge, brought her work to Twin Cities audiences.  It fell to that northern outpost Duluth to introduce her to Minnesota with a free workshop and reading at the historical Depot venue, a still-functioning train station, expanded to serve as a community cultural center.

Minnesota figured crucially in my familiarity with Oliver and her work in more ways than one.  In fact, it was in Minnesota poet Robert Bly's influential Sierra Club anthology News of the Universe (1980) that I'd first encountered Oliver.  Her poem in that volume, the wild, ecstatic "Sleeping in the Forest," put me on the trail of Twelve Moons (1978) the breakthrough collection in which it had first appeared.  I would guess that appearance in Bly's anthology served as entree to Oliver's work for many other readers as well.

I haven't been able to locate my notes on the Duluth workshop, whatever they amounted to.  I remember it was informal and low-key, attended by maybe two dozen or so.  Imagine, only two dozen people turning out for a free Mary Oliver workshop!  Oliver herself was matter-of-fact, unassuming.  Her reserve told us that, as an introvert, this wasn't her preferred way of spending time.  She was in her early 50s then, privately coming to terms with difficult personal issues Dream Work hinted at but stopped short of making explicit.  Her style was unfussily neat, out-doorsy.  I thought there was something of the fox in her countenance, a shy yet cunning elusiveness well-practiced in avoiding traps--not furtive or evasive exactly, but delicately wary and cautious, not willing to come close enough to be what one could call "personal."  She had dignity, gravitas, and did not wear her sense of humor close to the surface.  Some of the workshop attendees had brought poems to critique -- I can't remember whether John and I had thought to do that.  Oliver's responses were generous and helpful.  As men, John and I were greatly outnumbered by women in attendance, and I was thankful for Oliver's welcoming attitude toward us.  We weren't able to stay for the evening reading, but left Duluth well satisfied with our time in the company of one of our poetic heroes.

It took two decades for Mary Oliver to visit Minnesota again.  By 2007, Oliver was long established as America's premier nature poet, beloved by many and disparaged by some who weren't able to see past the "nature poet" label to the rich and complicated humanity of her poems.  Now Oliver commanded reading fees usually reserved for popular musicians and sports figures; Jim Lenfestey, heading the Plymouth Congregational Literary Witnesses reading series, had the chops and connections to finally entice Oliver to the Twin Cities, packing 1,400 into the overflowing sanctuary of Plymouth Congregational Church.

The next year Oliver returned for another triumphant reading at the State Theater in downtown Minneapolis.  Those were lucky times for us in the extended Twin Cities literary community, the rare thing happening not once, but twice.  It turned out to be a brief season that privileged us with our close-up view of the formerly distant author, for Mary Oliver never returned to our area.

I had the good fortune to almost literally rub elbows with her during the 2007 visit.  Arriving early at the church where the reading was being held, I first glimpsed Oliver in a small enclosed courtyard with a couple of other people that early-May evening.  She immediately struck me as older, smaller.  Well, she was past seventy now. . . . And she was smoking!  Mary Oliver smoking, demythologized in a single blow!  I saw she was smiling, chatting in a relaxed way with her companions.  It appeared as though the reserve of twenty years earlier had dropped away like some unwanted baggage jettisoned on the road.

The reading was as marvelous as anyone could have hoped, perhaps more so.  She had just published Thirst, poems written around the time of the death of her long-time partner Molly Malone Cook, challenging her regular audience with the introduction of conventional religious language, a stark departure from her usual vocabulary.  Thirst tested that audience who now, rightly or wrong, identified Oliver with her Unitarian-affiliated publisher, Beacon Press.  At least in her reading at Plymouth Congregational, Oliver went light on the new poems, perhaps had already begun to moderate the new concentration on her Episcopal faith.

In notes scrawled during her reading I seized on the still-palpable tension between religious doctrine and the spontaneous self-revelation that animates the vast body of her poetry:

Telling the truth but not willing ever

to give up the hope and desire for paradise.

An allegiance to life so great as to

keep her alive through the greatest grief.

She is a nun grown old in service

to the church of the world.

Funny around the edges of her poems,

but completely serious in them.

Someone very young inside her voice, eternally . . .

otherwise how could she ask all those questions?

Her favorite words are light and world.

Speculation ran that Mary wouldn't attend the reception afterward.  But surprise! she did.  Robert Bly, one of Mary's own heroes, was there and quickly engaged her in private conversation.  Mary's traveling companion and assistant, Daniel Franklin, confided to me that it was time for Mary to circulate a little more.  Shortly afterward I noticed an empty chair between Mary and Louise Erdrich at the kitchen table.  I didn't hesitate to seize the opportunity.

I don't remember a word that was said at that table, only the sheer, heady pleasure of finding myself seated within a hand's breadth of those two superb writers.  I think I wanted simply to size Mary up at close range, get a better sense of her as a person.  There had always existed in my perceptions a tension between who she was in her poems and who she appeared to be in life, a mysterious private person, latter-day female Thoreau, perhaps a recluse, versus the ordinary person who went shopping for groceries and paid the monthly bills.  My glimpse of her that evening reconciled this imagined tension; what I saw, or thought I saw, was a kind, introverted woman who, of necessity, for self-protection, had erected a somewhat forbidding wall of difficulty around her.  As I knew from Jim's efforts, one had to work hard -- and pay much -- to breach that wall.  But the woman inside the protective wall was a generous soul, essentially modest, down-to-earth, utterly genuine.

One moment I do remember was Mary's asking whether we'd mind if she smoked.  With an I-don't-do-this-for-just-anyone smile, our host Susan opened a nearby window and produced an ashtray to lay before Mary on the table.  Noticing Mary's slightly apologetic body language, I decided that joining her would be the gallant thing to do.  With some relief, I thought, she tipped the pack toward me, and we lit up.  By all accounts, Mary Oliver remained a smoker (a "bad" one, she told Krista Tippet in a 2015 interview) even after an episode of lung cancer.  

As much as Mary Oliver loved this world, there were clearly limits to how long and under what circumstances she wanted to stay in it.  In poems she'd made her life look more effortless than it was -- perhaps her cardinal sin in her critics' eyes -- all those moments of delight and revelation, and, unless you happened to be a careful, comprehensive reader, so little of her personal struggle in the lines.  But if you could read between the lines, it was there, clear enough.  Nowhere does that struggle come nearer to revealing its true nature than in Dream Work, in which she wrestles allusively with the childhood sexual abuse that cast its long shadow into her adulthood.  In the last poem in that book, she isn't speaking only of sunflowers when she remarks "the long work / of turning their lives / into a celebration / is not easy."  It's evident that, as the cover copy noted so truthfully, "Mary Oliver's willingness to be joyful continues" in part "by choice."  She chose to be joyful where many would or could not.  It couldn't have been easy.  That she was equipped by temperament to do so was a blessing.

As Mary and Daniel were leaving the party, she warmly hugged and kissed each of us who remained.

"Mary," I exclaimed in a foolish transport of affection, "I hope you live as long as Stanley Kunitz!"  The long-lived poet Kunitz, who had died at age one hundred the previous year, had been a great spiritual and emotional support to her as colleague, mentor, and neighbor in Provincetown.  

She replied, with an ambivalent smile suggesting that one hundred might in fact not be as desirable a goal as I imagined, "In my own way!"

"In whatever way you wish," I amended.

I've come to believe that the prose poem may be defined as much by its degree of relative musicality as by its visible form on the page.  Traditionally, poetry in the West has occupied some midway point on the spectrum of utterance between singing and ordinary speech.  One has only to listen to recordings of W. B. Yeats to hear poetry that registers very near the singing pole on that spectrum.  I've told students many times that Yeats and Johnny Cash aren't so far apart in that respect (to test this for yourself, listen to Yeats reciting "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" and Cash singing "I Still Miss Someone" back to back).  Practically speaking, this means that many poems occupy a middle zone on that scale of musicality, from which they could conceivably edge to one side or the other as free verse or prose poem.

But we have no objective scale for judging such matters.  Yeats's style of recitation falls foreign on modern ears.  We're generally accustomed to a post-Williams plain-spokenness that renders the older, more overtly musical delivery stilted and quaint to our hearing.  It's probably safe to say that if Yeats registers at a position of 8 or 9 on a musicality scale of 10, then the average prose poem registers somewhere between 1 and 3.  This isn't to argue that the musical content of every prose poem is the same or that the prose poem is lacking in music.  In This Journey, for example, James Wright mischievously disguised a fully rhyming iambic pentameter sonnet, "May Morning," as a prose poem, perhaps to test the awakeness of readers, and in any case, to quote Lehman, truly "[making] use of all the strategies and tactics of poetry" save the line break.  (For this revelation, I'm indebted to Kevin Stein's essay in The Kenyon Review, "These Drafts and Castoffs:  Mapping James Wright.")

Although the vast majority of prose poems do not employ rhyme or meter of any kind, much rich sound work can still take place within those print rectangles.  The ability to analyze relative musical content can help poets arrive at appropriate form for their poem.  Oftentimes I've seen my own poems in that ambiguous middle zone on the scale slip from lined verse to prose poem or vice versa, and maybe back again.

         (from "The Prose Poem: A Practice")

(Note:  The paragraphs above are excerpted from the introduction to my book Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Prose Poems, recently published by White Pine Press.   My introduction outlines some of the areas of interest and concern that have come up in my 40 years of working with the prose poem medium.  This book has been a long time in the works, and I'm delighted to see it in print, beautifully designed by White Pine, with cover art by the great Gendron Jensen who created wonderful interior and cover art for Robert Bly's pioneering prose poetry collection This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood.  Though the prose poem is hardly new (its legitimate roots go back at least to the l9th century), some readers -- and poets too -- still feel confused over the elements that make what obviously appears on the page as a paragraph function as a poem.  My comments attempt a partial answer.) 

Here is a prose poem for our current season from Windy Day at Kabekona:

SYMPATHY FOR THE WASPS

The woman at the Extension office says that the two dozen or so wasps clustered under the roof eave of our porch are starving.  They die off, she tells me, except for the overwintering queen who starts it all up again in the spring.  They've long ago exhausted the small supply of wasp honey that fed them in the comb, and grope feebly together as though blind, searching for sugar, using up their energy reserves because it's September and the sweets of earth die back too.

In full sun they fan out on the joist, not venturing far from each other, seldom flying.  Sometimes one flexes angular wings as if uncertainly testing the air, then retracts them close to its spindle body.  Sometimes one looks down at me, returns my stare, antennae twitching.

At dusk, they crowd together in a tight clump to conserve heat, withdraw into a shadowy depression.  By day they browse the painted wood dulled by weather, dust, accumulation of tattered spider webs, bits of captured debris.  The low sun is bright and cool.  The wasps are remarkably unaggressive -- we have coexisted peaceably at close quarters for half a month.  In warm hours a few still whirl up against the south side of the house like wild-flung honey.

You can order Windy Day at Kabekona  at this address:

http://www.whitepine.org/catalog.php?show=2017%3E

(To honor the conjunction of two Capricorn birthdays, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on January 15 and Joan Baez on January 9)

I too would have fallen

for your grave purity.

I have always

had a weakness for

a girl with a guitar.

Easy to see you

and Bobby as perfect

partners, too perfect--

sooner or later

you were bound to

crash that mirror.

Wondrously concentrated,

you presented to

a soul-starved world

a picture of soul.

No one's muse,

you became

a truth-teacher,

a courage-teacher,

harrowingly

tested by the bombs 

of Hanoi, the bullets

of Sarajevo.

Watching

old concert footage,

I fall in love--

that seduction of

the past, does it

catch at you too?

Do you also

ponder where

it went, that grace,

that dark wind

collected in the eyes

and in the voice's

unwavering clarity?

What hasn't

changed is 

that you were on

the right side of history.

Into our time, God

sent a Black Lion,

and you walked

a while beside

him on the path.

Because you not only

sang but spoke,

there are people

alive today

who did not kill,

who did not die.

(Originally appeared on the International Times web site, UK. http://internationaltimes.it/ode-to-joan-baez/)

Note:  This essay was originally written for the "Real Words: Real Men" blog on the Minnesota Men's Conference website.  Dr. Moore was a long-time teacher at the conference founded by Robert Bly in the mid-1980s, and I was frequently in attendance of his brilliant lectures.  Many thanks to RWRM editor Mark Gardiner for his probing questions that helped sharpen both my thinking and my sentences.  You can visit the MMC website to see the nifty graphics Mark added, handsomely assisted by layout guru Rick Ferchaud at www.minnesotamensconference.com/2017/06/13/still-facing-the-dragon-reading-robert-moore-in-2017-by-thomas-r-smith/

    Last summer, following the shocking suicide/murder of Robert L. Moore and his wife, Margaret Shanahan, I realized with a sense of muted regret that, more than a dozen years after its publication, I still hadn't gotten around to reading Robert's final completed book, Facing the Dragon:  Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity.  I knew that Robert Bly, with whom I'd been in close contact at the time of the book's appearance, had words of high praise for Facing the Dragon.  He said in his blurb:  "The question is what to do with the God energy [in us] in a time of secularism.  Moore gives frightening answers to questions people haven't even begun to ask."  And since, in the summer of 2016, possibly the most grandiose presidential candidate in American history had just ascended to his party's candidacy, it seemed an appropriate moment to go back and hear what Moore was saying on that subject in the comparatively "normal" early days of Bush II and the second Gulf War.
    Reading Facing the Dragon in 2017 has left me convinced that Robert Moore's examination of grandiosity and the dangerous narcissism that can come with it is a more useful key to understanding the convulsions our democracy is now undergoing than more mainstream psychological analyses, which tend to neglect the spiritual dimension of our crisis.
    Moore's subject in Facing the Dragon is the grandiosity that follows us into adulthood from our authentic experience of the sacred in childhood.  Moore was a Jungian, able to see the dark or shadow side of our luminous apprehensions of the divine.  When one identifies personally with the divine, of which we all carry a small spark -- and which Moore liked to call the Great Self Within -- we enter the territory of pathological narcissism, as opposed to a healthy narcissism which enables "self-esteem and a healthy exhibitionism." (Facing the Dragon, p. 100)  In contrast, pathological narcissism, Moore points out, oscillates "between arrogance and a terrible self-hate."  
    Facing the Dragon is essentially a tool for dealing effectively with the grandiosity that can too easily lead us down a path of personal psychic disintegration while in the process doing great harm to others around us, and even to the structures of democratic government built up by the labor and sacrifices of past generations.  
    As a Jungian, Moore was unafraid to take on the subject of evil, which the more superficial manifestations of New Age philosophy have specialized in avoiding.  In keeping with many religious and indigenous conceptualizations of evil, Moore believes that evil has an agency of its own.  In mythology the vampire that "thrives on the absence of light" is an apt personification of evil:  "It manifests great intelligence, as if it has lived many lifetimes and has methodically developed a capacity to detect and exploit personal weaknesses and blind spots.  It preys in a seductive way on your rightful need for attention and recognition that is not in itself demonic."  (p 6)  Early in Facing the Dragon, Moore lists ten assumptions about the nature of evil distilled from ancient wisdom traditions.  We might especially apply #3 on that list to our political sphere:  "The chief tactic of evil is to present the human individual and community with a false, deceptive representation of reality.  In short, it lies." (p. 5)
    At least as urgent for our present society is item #9 on Moore's list:  "Evil denies the reality of death and all human limitations." (p. 6)  Limitation is a word that comes up frequently in Facing the Dragon, most centrally in Moore's discussion of humility as an antidote to the more reckless, destructive kinds of unconscious grandiosity.  "True humility," Moore says, consists of two things:  "(a) knowing your limitations and (b) getting the help you need." (p. 72)  As he points out, this is the foundation of twelve-step groups' success in countering addiction.  
    Identifying evil helps us to identify what Moore calls the "anti-life" forces operating in our world.  Evil is anti-life, and "tries to destroy relatedness" through "deceit, lying, and illusion." (p. 37)  Evil hates community and the power that individuals gain by banding together for the common good; therefore evil "wants to get you alone and isolate you."  In the post 9/11 world, we recognize evil's great recent penchant for manipulating us through fear and distrust; people who no longer know who or what to believe are especially susceptible to becoming isolated in the darkness of lies chiefly designed to disempower them.
    Moore's wide-ranging book explores these themes from multiple perspectives, with especially insightful chapters on "The Archetype of Spiritual Warfare," '"How Modern Spiritual Narcissism Leads to Destructive Tribalism," and "The Psychological Sources of Religious Conflict."  These broodings all point toward a recognition that the spark of divinity we all carry inside, like a particle of spiritual radium, is real, powerful, and deadly if mishandled.  Moore reminds us that "narcissistic pathology" is "like sin, a condition common to all. . . . psychologically speaking, you shouldn't ask, 'Am I carrying any narcissistic pathology?'  You should ask, 'Where is my narcissistic pathology?  How am I acting it out?'" (p. 147)

*     *     *

    I'd be very surprised if by now the name Trump, Trump, Trump isn't thumping around in the reader's mind like the sound of a flat tire flopping along on a severely potholed street.  There is something uncannily prescient in Moore's anatomy of pathological grandiosity, as though he could see our present catastrophe materializing in the distance.  It would be a mistake to think that Trump and his regime of fear and self-serving greed are something new; we have been here before (think Robber Barons, think Nixon), our "rough beast" slouching back around, as Robert Bly, among others, has warned us repeatedly that it would.  In a 1990 essay, "Form in Society and in the Poem," Bly observed:

    Something in us wants and wants endlessly.  Witches and giants in fairy stories stand for that wanting.  The witch wants a ton of wheat sorted in an hour, she wants all the fish in the river to be laid out by species and in neat rows this afternoon; the giant wants to eat now, now, now, and he can eat for days, he can eat all the food produced in the county this year.  Goya's painting of Saturn eating his son suggests the anguish inseparable from that endless, repetitive, abusing hunger.
    Kohut and the self psychologists have named the source of this infinite hunger infantile grandiosity or psychological omnipotence.  When a two- or three-year-old child is on the grandiose road, it has godlike goals and is not at all sure that it is not God.  Limits, conditions, bounds, confines are something the child doesn't want to hear of. . . .
    
It's hard to believe that these words weren't written during our ongoing national train wreck under a president who seems to eerily embody these witch and giant energies. 
    It seems likely somewhere in the inscrutable murk of Trump's psyche he is experiencing that anguish Bly identifies in Goya's painting.  Trump's insatiable appetite for recognition is on a collision course with his evident psychological and emotional lack of fitness for the job he has taken on.  It's clear that Trump didn't bargain for the extreme challenges of the office.  "Underestimating what you are dealing with is one of the marks of grandiosity and immaturity," Moore says (p. 34)  When in his campaign, claiming to address America's problems, Trump said, "I alone can fix it," red flags signaling grandiosity bordering on megalomania shot up instantly to tell us that this was not a man grounded in a realistic sense of self.  He'll build a wall, deport undocumented aliens, keep out all Muslims, give everyone health insurance without raising taxes, bring back the coal industry, everything will be wonderful.  Trump has already left behind him a trail of extreme claims incalculably damaging to truth.  In fact, having risen to the presidency is no doubt making the problem worse.  Moore says, "It overstimulates our grandiose energies when we start looking at the large problems facing humanity.  We become very anxious.  It's like having a 300-pound St. Bernard jumping around in your head." (p. 47)
    Moore points out that "Cultures around the world taught that the great engine of evil was arrogance, or hubris, as the Greeks called it." (p. 12)  Trump's arrogance or hubris is psychologically isolating, and one must posit an intense insecurity underlying his notoriously reactive twitters, many of which express a sense of impotence strangely at odds with the magnitude of his office.  Moore pinpoints "sensitivity to criticism" as one of the earmarks of the narcissistic personality disorder:

If you are a narcissist and people criticize you, you may experience great anxiety and fragmentation.  When they are not criticizing you, and especially if they are constantly mirroring you, you may feel pretty calm with little fragmentation anxiety. . . .  Your anxiety level will stay fairly low only as long as you can arrange for everyone to adore you, because that serves as a camouflage and no one can detect how easily you become anxious and subject to fits of rage. (pp. 111-12)

    Trump appears to operate outside the boundaries of ordinary friendship in which one opens up on a deeper emotional level.  If his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz (The Art of the Deal), is to be believed, Trump views even personal transactions as a competition in which someone must win and the other lose:  "Trump felt compelled to go to war with the world.  It was a binary, zero-sum choice for him:  You either dominated or you submitted.  You either created and exploited fear or you succumbed to it. . . ."  Echoing Jung, Moore observes that "Without authentic and grounded relationships, we can easily get a little bit crazy, because you have no one to challenge your inflation." (p. 133)  Insider reports paint the Trump White House environment as one of fear and distrust rather than of cooperation and common purpose; Trump seems to share the right wing preference for family over polis.  Even so, Trump's relationships with his family are very difficult for outsiders to "read."  If we can empathetically put ourselves in Trump's shoes, we may find ourselves in a profoundly lonely place.  It seems a fair bet that his story will finally be seen as an American tragedy.  Whether we as a society will ultimately profit in wisdom from the debacle is anyone's guess.

*     *     *
 
   The "anti-life ego" of the pathologically grandiose narcissist is self-destructive.  "Part of a person's psyche is hell-bent on destroying her and not allowing her to have any love, not allowing her to have any trust, not allowing her to have any successful transformation of her patterns of relatedness and her patterns of human interaction." (p. 40)  This may illuminate a basic disconnect between Trump's narcissistic demand to be universally loved and the extreme administration he has put in place to carry out policies deeply repugnant to the American people and to the rest of the world.  A leader who truly desires to be loved by the people promotes a spirit of compromise and reconciliation.  But Trump as President has persisted in dividing rather than uniting.  This basic incoherence has already led to Trump's becoming one of the lowest-polling presidents in American history and the object of derision world-wide.  And this in turn drives his narcissistic ego into new frenzies. 
    And of course "anti-life" is also harmful to others, whether it manifests in outright hostility or in a programmatic neglect of the social and environmental conditions that sustain healthy life for the individual and the collective.  Robert Bly has often remarked on the "death energy" of our society, and surely our tolerance of openly destructive figures such as Trump and appointees such as Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, and Steve Bannon (a kind of Mount Rushmore of Hell) speaks poorly of our collective values, such as they may be.  What has changed to bring us to this precipice?  Moore remarks that up until the early 1950s, Americans could feel, rightly or wrongly, that we had fought "moral" wars.  Our moral world or "sacred canopy" was still somewhat intact.  "After Korea," Moore says, "it was collapsing, and by the time Vietnam arrived, we no longer had a functional sacred canopy.  In the process of modernization, the sacred canopy of myth has collapsed, and that means we have nothing to return home to." (p. 57)  This has left our society vulnerable to "the fantasy of expecting progress without spirituality." (p. 63)

*     *     *

    I know that in focusing on the relevance of Moore's book to our present spiritual-political dilemma, I have given the reader more "dragon" than "facing."  My emphasis here on the negative somewhat reflects Moore's.  I wouldn't want to give the impression, though, that Moore's outlook is gloomy or hopeless.  While he refuses to sidestep the issue of what he calls "radical evil" -- the evil that is rooted alongside the good in the human psyche -- he suggests various resources for "facing the dragon," which include religious community, active imagination, prayer, and mythological work.  Of the latter he says,

. . . we all need to sit around the global campfire once again and tell stories to each other, tell people what is happening.  With people sitting around the campfire, and the fire burning away, we can say, "Okay, what have you heard about what is happening over in the homeland?"  So the ritual elders, the people who perhaps are better storytellers than the others, will say, "I understand that such and such is happening in the homeland." . . . If we will do [this] . . . our species might begin to wake from its long sleep and repetitive nightmares. (pp. 197-98)

    Moore's chapter on "Dragon Laws" identifies areas in both private and public life where we can be alert to the destructive potential of pathological grandiosity to cause damage and harm.  One item from the second category should cause us to weigh carefully how we respond to our politicians' present abuses:  "Grandiose, disrespectful, and unempathetic behavior by people with social and political power always generates powerful, rage-filled compensatory outbreaks of madness." (p. 210)  Overly reactive responses, lacking self-reflection, can often set back worthy causes.  Moore makes a further, more hopeful generalization:  "When a tribe's spiritual grandiosity declines, it immediately gains more radiance as a portal for the incarnation in history of what Tillich called the 'authentic spiritual community.'" (p. 216)
    Moore especially advises going beyond the myths of our own "tribe" to open ourselves to what he beautifully calls "the entire human symbolic trust" of mythology.  Yet he cautions against the simple-minded goal of finding a new myth to replace an outworn older one:  "When people think they can solve the world's problems with a different myth, they are only offering to make you one-sided in a new way.  The issue is to realize that we need to create a container, a chalice or grail, that holds with reverence the entire human symbolic trust and enables us to cherish it all." (p. 139)
    In our world of fear and division, it becomes even more important to make that effort to "create a container," in ourselves, in our communities, and in our nations, to "hold with reverence the entire human symbolic trust," a wealth that, as Jung argued, belongs to every person without exception.  "Our war," says Moore, is not with each other but with "the pathological infantile grandiosity that seeks to destroy the human species." (p. 134)  Certainly with the past election we have seen the shocking escalation of that warfare.  As we spin into our "rage-filled compensatory outbreaks of madness," we might heed Moore's reply to a famous revelation by the Walt Kelly comic strip character Pogo, "We have met the enemy, and he is us":

. . . psychoanalysis makes it possible for us to refine that.  I would like to sit down and talk with Pogo about this.  I would like to say, "Pogo, I don't think our true human selves are the enemy.  Our grounded and human creaturely egos are not the enemy.  The enemy is that unconscious grandiosity within us that constantly tries to persuade us to forget our limits and forget that we need help, to forget that we need others, or as the Native Americans are able to say, to forget that we are all related and all of one family." (p. 134)

    I could go on and on about this deeply relevant and healing book and its author, but I've said enough.  My approach here has been more suggestive than descriptive, an attempt to capture a few of the connections that fired for me while contemplating Facing the Dragon in the light of events a decade and a half after its publication.  Personally, I'm undecided about Moore's belief in the nature of evil, but I do agree with him that "the demonic is closer than you think." (p. 1)  What the demonic is is another question.  Moore's fellow Jungian, Marie-Louise von Franz, memorably defined the demonic as siding with gigantic impersonal forces against common human concerns like wanting enough to eat and and a place to live.  By this token, "A plague would be good because it would thin the herd" is demonic, and "A war would give the economy a boost."  A good guide for individuals and for nations, I think.
    In closing, we were lucky to have Robert Moore with us for as long as we did, and as we approach the first anniversary of his death, the occasion of this appreciation, let's send out another prayer for his spirit and for his wife Margaret's.  Meanwhile we remain humble in our ignorance of the torments that must have driven them to their final extremity, an ending that in no way diminishes the importance of their lives' accomplishment.  Any book of Robert's will richly reward the time and attention we give to it, but for reasons I hope I've made clear in this essay, it was his last, Facing the Dragon, that best equips us to understand and address the challenges of the grandiosity-driven chaos of our present spiritual-political moment.  It's the next best thing to having Robert Moore here with us now.

(A note on sources:  All page references are for Robert Moore's Facing the Dragon:  Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity, Chiron Publications, Wilmette, Illinois, 2003.  Robert Bly's essay "Form in Society and in the Poem" appears in his book, American Poetry:  Wildness and Domesticity, Harper & Row, New York, 1990.  Tony Schwartz's writings on Donald Trump have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and other publications.  The piece I quote here was reprinted in the Minneapolis StarTribune on Sunday, May 21, 2017.  I would also refer the reader to Alex Morris's thorough psychological analysis, "Trump and the Pathology of Narcissism," in the April 20 issue of Rolling Stone, which examines Trump in light of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.)

 

Well, we die whether we stay together or fall apart.

Finally the world goes on its way without us.

The most scourge-like name alive today will one day

be spoken seldom if at all.  To what purpose 

this sighing and raging?  To what purpose this pain?

The main thing is to be a part of one's time,

no matter which side seems to be winning.  It's OK

to be a noble failure, a fool in the eyes of the world,

to die in the relentless faith of a Pete Seeger

or Rachel Carson.  The big truck taking up so much

space will one day come to the end of its road.

Insults will be forgotten.  Offended decency

will be forgotten.  In a hundred years, new

people and new problems.  And we can be

sure there will be some glory in being alive

in just their moment, as there is in ours.

Even as I write and as you read, the termites

of ruin are chewing day and night at the under-

side of the hypocrite's mask that shines with

such shameless intensity in the national

spotlight.  The time to speak is always now.

Say your truth if only for those who may be

listening from the galleries of dead and unborn,

if not the childish public locked in their

death tango with destruction.  Reserve for yourself

days of uninterrupted silence in which to hear

those things that have settled in your heart most deeply

sing their faithfulness beneath time's altering sky.

(Note:  This poem originally appeared on the New Verse News web site on October 8, 2016, a month before our disastrous election.  At rare moments a poem one has written can return to comfort, as though a past self speaking to the present.  I feel this to be the case with "Note to Self" on this very dark morning of November 9, 2016.  Courage and perseverance, friends, for the difficult road ahead.  May we, as Thomas McGrath wrote in his poem "Epitaph," "journey together joyfully, / Living on catastrophe, eating the pure light.")

    Reading John Berger's collection of essays, Hold Everything Dear, a number of years ago, I became fascinated with the concept of "the wall" as developed by the British novelist and critic.  Berger, who has lived for many years in a small French village, is probably the pre-eminent Marxist art critic of our time.  He is also a subtle thinker and a Marxist "amongst other things," as he carefully describes himself.
    Berger, when he wrote down his thoughts in 2007, was brooding over the increasing tendency of global elites to insulate themselves from "the wretched of the earth" via literal and figurative barriers, the wall cordoning off Palestinian Gaza a prime example.  In recent times the "wall" has taken on the added negative symbolism of a fear-ridden nativism that would exclude the growing refugee populations of our world from the hoarded resources of the more well-off countries.  Need we mention Donald Trump's proposed Mexican border wall as our current most egregious literal example?
    I first became a fan of Berger's writing with his trilogy, Into Their Labours, which charts the transition from the old peasant way of life to modern global urbanism (or should I say, modern urban globalism).  In this fictionalized account of the exodus into cities of people who have traditionally lived on the land, Berger found a way of metaphorically telling one of the secret stories of our times.  His work thus provides a skeleton key to unlock our own sense of exile and unbelonging in a world increasingly friendly to money and hostile to human life and perhaps to life itself.
    In Hold Everything Dear, Berger homes in on the economic exile we experience as colonial clients of the multinational corporations which have, already to a large extent, supplanted national government entities as the ruling powers of our world.   
    In the end, Berger's subject is what is being done to us all by those corporate lords and their purchased politicians, and how we respond (or do not) to their often unrecognized control of our lives and fortunes.
    My purpose here is not to take that subject up directly, nor to give an overview of Berger's collection of essays, but rather to think a little more about one particularly striking image that looms over Hold Everything Dear like its restless spirit, which perhaps it is.
    Berger does much gnarly rumination over the world we have become in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001.  He has much illumination to shed on the fear tactics by which we have been ruled since that time, and he strongly suggests that the whole deceptively named "war on terror" is really a strategy for further consolidating the power of the rich few over the poor masses, the war of the haves against the have-nots.
    These themes crystallize and converge in Berger's image of the wall, which he elaborates in his essay "A Master of Pitilessness?" on the painter Francis Bacon.  The art criticism context of his remarks need not be summarized here in order to appreciate the profundity of the analysis.  "The present period of history," Berger writes, "is one of the Wall."

. . . Concrete, bureaucratic, surveillance, security, racist walls.  Everywhere the walls separate the desperate poor from those who hope against hope to stay relatively rich.  The walls cross every sphere, from crop cultivation to health care.  They exist too in the richest metropolises of the world.  The Wall is the front line of what, long ago, was called the Class War.  (p. 94)

    The wall divides our world into two camps or realities.  If we are at all aware of the world as it exists beyond the narrow consumer viewpoint legitimized by our media conglomerates, we will recognize the two realms as Berger defines them:

    On the one side:  every armament conceivable, the dream of no-body-bag wars, the media, plenty, hygiene, many passwords to glamour.  On the other:  stones, short supplies, feuds, the violence of revenge, rampant illness, an acceptance of death and an ongoing preoccupation with surviving one more night--or perhaps one more week -- together.  (p. 94)

    Reading Berger challenges the reader to ask of himself or herself the question, Where do I encounter the wall in my life?  Leading up to the great financial meltdown of 2008, shortly after Berger's book appeared, workers in the American auto industry found themselves on the "stones" side of the wall, as did the millions of home-owners experiencing foreclosure.  In more recent times a growing awareness of gross income inequality has served to define the 99% on the "stones" side of the wall versus the gated 1%.  Politicians endlessly attempting to repeal the Affordable Care Act stand on the protected side of the wall against the under- or uninsured who live one medical emergency away from poverty.  On the world stage, cynical right wing politicians play on the fears of their constituencies to erect more than figurative walls against the growing number of refugees generated by the Mideastern wars that have done so much to enrich the transnational 1%.  The worst wall of all is the one that has been raised to block the flow of love and compassion from the hearts of a frightened populace.
    For each of us, Berger says, has in some way internalized the wall.  Perhaps the single most arresting point Berger makes in his essay is that how we choose to align ourselves in relation to this internal wall makes a very great difference in our ability to find a meaningful and honorable place for ourselves in the quickly changing contemporary world:

. . . Whatever our circumstances, we can choose within ourselves which side of the wall we are attuned to.  It is not a wall between good and evil.  Both exist on both sides.  The choice is between self-respect and self-chaos.  (p. 94)

It's this final sentence that shocks me awake, and from which, no matter how many times I read it, I never quite recover my balance, so upsetting its truth on both visceral and intellectual levels.
    We see many Americans in a state of "self-chaos" today--in fact, we would have to say that the country as a whole has been in a state of demonstrable "self-chaos" for at least the past decade and a half, if not longer.  Self-chaos exists when one's beliefs and opinions do not serve the actual conditions of one's life, when the results of one's politics actively undermine one's best interests and the real interests of one's country.
    One can be in "self-chaos" when one is mentally on the rich side of the wall but materially on the poor side of it.  There is another, perhaps less destructive form of self-chaos when one's opinions are on the side of the poor but one's material circumstances are on the rich side of the wall.  There is at least some consistency--though with its own toxicity--for those who are, in both their mental and material circumstances, on one side of the wall or the other.
    We know that many wealthy people fight generously on behalf of the poor.  And being poor and oppressed doesn't necessarily make for virtue.  The biggest losers of all, it seems to me, are the working poor who mistake the interests of the ruling and media elites for their own.  These are the real victims of Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump, the politically incoherent underclass (or so-called "low-information voters") who can't seem to avoid being manipulated, by way of fear and anger, into sabotaging their own well-being.
    In this still-young, desperate century, whole countries and peoples now live on the stones side of the wall, including, we must note immediately, since it is host to our longest-running war, Afghanistan, where the average life expectancy is now 24 years, thanks to decades of exploitation and siege at the hands of powers from the rich side of the wall.  The wall also figures prominently into the problem of global climate change, in which the poorest nations--those on the stones side of the wall--pay most dearly for the consumption and pollution habits of the richest nations--those on the armed or tanks side of the wall.  In 2009 Kofi Annan's Global Humanitarian Forum estimated that weather-related disasters resulting from climate change were already killing 300,000 people annually, with the numbers projected to rise to 500,000 by 2030.  Given the collapse of farming which has flooded some Mideastern cities with internal economic refugees, it's no stretch to attribute the recent refugee exodus into Europe in part to climate change.
    More and more, these ugly and disturbing facts indicate that the dominant conflict of our time is, beneath its diverse manifestations, a war of ownership waged by the world's privileged elites against the poor.  The conflict is, as Berger has pointed out, the current guise for what a more politically astute era knew as "the Class War."  But where, prior to the 20th century, that war was fought society by society, our present War of the Wall finds the global elites joined in de facto solidarity against the increasingly hungry, desperate, and therefore threatening masses.
    To seriously contemplate the depth of the trouble we face as a world is to risk the paralysis of silence.  Every day, in the most practical terms, greater numbers of economically and politically betrayed Americans are wrestling with a realization that the wall is not only, as we may have believed, a wall between America and the rest of the world, but also a wall erected in our midst, separating bankers from the foreclosed, employers from the jobless, the insured from the uninsured, "dark" money sources from grassroots donors, and politicians from their nominal constituents, to whom the former often appear maddeningly deaf.
    We must first come to the awareness of this wall and all it implies for the future of democratic society before we can hope to actively address it.  The wall itself is neither Republican nor Democratic, but has been maintained by politicians on both sides.  The Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision has aided many anonymous efforts to build the wall higher.  
    During the demoralizing destructiveness and lawlessness of the Bush years, many more of us began to realize the extent to which our government has become not a government beholden to "we the people" but a government beholden to shadowy money interests that have, so far, successfully enriched themselves at our expense behind the 1-percenters' wall.  Unfortunately, the election of Barack Obama as President did not substantially change this.  In our present best-case scenario, we now face the prospect of Hillary Clinton as American chief custodian of the wall.  This is not to say that Clinton is not infinitely preferable to Trump, only that the wall is bigger than any president.  No president by himself or herself possesses the political clout to decisively change the relationship of tanks side and stones side.  That power belongs, as it always has, only to the people, and then only if they can muster the will to wield it.

(Note:  This unpublished and newly updated essay was written a few years before the current absurd wall-talk.  Our present national moment, when an alarmingly significant segment of the American public seems to take such isolationist fantasy seriously, is as good a time as any to add the above thoughts to the conversation.  God save us from the possibility of what conservative columnist David Brooks has called the "American Putinism" of Trump.)