My Mother, My Mountain

The Bustle in a House
The Morning after Death
Is solemnest of industries
Enacted upon Earth--

The Sweeping of the Heart
And putting Love away
We shall not want to use again
Until Eternity--

Mr. Quirk read this Emily Dickinson poem aloud in my senior English class when I was still in shock from finding my father dead.  No one dared to speak about the space left at the table, the great gap that prevented me from swallowing food for weeks on end.  Mom modeled marching on.  If she cried, she was very private about those tears.  But Emily Dickinson said, in only eight lines, everything that I needed to hear.  To cope with loss or avoid coping, human beings "bustle": they sweep the hearth and the heart.  Okay.  So maybe my family wasn't that strange.  This stowing away of feeling is ritualistic, part of the grieving process.  It is possible that the poem helped me understand my mother's stoicism instead of merely feeling outraged by it.  Furthermore, because the poem so quietly and sparely stated just what happens "the morning after death" and because it ends with a dash, it seemed to ask for my input, maybe even invited shouts of anger.  "No!  I will not put my love away.  I will not have grief that way ... not if I can help it."  At the time, I didn't dare stay with the poem long enough to think it through.  I heard it and knew.  It's true.  It just is.  Skittish like a frightened deer, I leapt away.  In the same way, I stole a furtive glance at my stone-cold father--Dead--on the pull-out sofa bed.  The existence of poetry as the real grace and the only meaningful speech in a very hard world was established from then on.

My father died suddenly.  My mother is dying slowly.  She fell and broke a hip, and she has continued to fall ever since ... pneumonia and urinary tract infections are weakening her.  She can barely handle a cigarette and has trouble feeding herself.  "She's not the same person we grew up with," said my brother in a phone conversation from the ER where Mom was taken after a bout of nausea from nerves.  As I listen to him, I think about how there are many ways that people begin to sweep the heart even before death.  Putting a parent in "Assisted Living"--a waiting room for the inevitable--is part of the clean-up job.  I didn't disagree with my brother, but I felt he was wrong.  Mom is very much the same person.  In her eyes--lashless and sky-blue--I see the bright ongoing everness, that same pinprick of absolutely lasting light .  Inside the body or beyond the body, there is something absolute and unchanging, and in Mom there is a fierce tenacity.  The day after her ER visit, I attempt to take her home for a party with family and neighbors in her kitchen.  I had my doubts whether she could make it up the front steps.  I positioned the wheelchair so that if she could raise herself up enough to grasp the railing, she could, just maybe, pull herself up the two steps, and I'd be at the top to catch her.  She gripped the railing and with who-know-what reserves of strength, lifted herself.  One step.  There you go, Mom.  One more.  She was up!  Oh me of little faith!  Her arthritic hand clamps down on the wrought iron railing that runs along the top of the porch.  "Let go, Mom, I'm right behind you.  You gotta trust me.  Just let go."  She doesn't let go, and a flash of frustrated anger is eclipsed by pride in her ability to hold on ... for what? ... for the blessing of more and better life.

When I visited Mom last week, I stayed in a cottage on Indian Lake.  My dad died in a similar cottage just down the road.  I struggle to remember his face, the sound of his voice, the feeling of his presence.  I didn't intend to forget him.  I tried to resist putting love away.  And I don't want to prematurely box up my feelings for Mom.  After tossing around on the waves of a rough internal sea and listening to rain all night mixed with calls of loons coming through the open window, I went out for an early morning walk in mist and drizzle to search for my parents.  My cousin Melissa remembers that after my dad died, his daughters and nieces stood on the porch and wailed like loons.  On this particular morning (38 Augusts after Pop went away), I saw three loons swimming close to shore.  Why three?  I know that paired loons winter separately and return to the same lake.  They find each other and spend the summer diving and mating.  It would make sense for two loons to be trolling the shoreline, but there were three.  Suddenly I see Mom's face as it appears when my daughter and I walk into her room at the Good Shepherd.  "Oh, thank God," she always says, visibly relieved that we've found each other.  Normalcy restored, the three of us head outside to let her have a "relaxing cigarette."

I spent much of the vacation week gazing at the mountains and appreciating the way they hold the lake year after year, unchanged.  They stay because they are made of hard, hard stuff--granite bedrock, visible in the havoc of rocks in river beds and in the boulders that litter the footpaths.  Mom is something like my mountain--hard and ultimately mysterious, yet somehow promising ... in the way that the barren central highlands fated for Abraham were preferable to the lush Jordan valley chosen by Lot.  Having come of age in the foothills of these Adirondacks, one idea persists:  dominating the mountain, conquering it by racing to the top, is not the best way to know it.  Every mountain has a difficult-to-access inside.  I walk around it like a Buddhist monk.  I visit it, with no ulterior motive, as I visit friends.  My brother and sisters and I grew up making our own ways and places inside living mountains.  We learned early that to turn over a rock is to find an orange salamander, to sit quietly for a minute is to invite something to happen, to watch any part of the natural world is to see it arch its back and bristle.  And so it is with the maternal mountain.  I know from observation that this is, without a doubt, the same woman who fought the Niagara Mohawk workmen, who came into our back woods to cut down the tallest tree--our axis mundi, our tree of life--around whose trunk Pop built us a tree-hugging fort.  Made partially in Her image, we, her daughters and son, will not (even if we should) let go.  We will fight on against fate and one another, struggling (hopelessly perhaps) for an elusive blessing, waiting for water to flow from rock.


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p.s.  to my brother Jim (and any other siblings who might chance upon this):  after reflecting on what I've written, I realize something about my rejection of Pineview (the cemetery where he's buried).  To me it seemed like an anonymous or impersonal place, and there was something hard about seeing his name on the stone.  Now I see that what was really impersonal and hard was the way his death was handled.  Why should it have felt somehow taboo to talk about the love we felt from the living man?  That enforced silence has made it hard for me to take hold of the reassuring hand that was always ready to pat my leg or hold my shoulders and to feel the love that beamed from that ruddy face with the broad gap-toothed smile.  Joseph Kietzman was a real father who loved his children and wanted, more than anything else, to go to the lake with them.  I hope that all of you have had an easier time finding your way back to life before and beyond our great loss.  I am learning to understand--too late--that just as each of us experienced his death differently, we've each had different relationships with our parents.  What I write may not be true to how you have felt, but that should be okay.  I have to hope that that awareness may one day transform the gridlock of rivalry into love.

Real Life In Flint

Real Life in Flint

            I walk through Flint’s poor neighborhoods nearly every day.  On the East side where the streets are named for states, probably fifty percent of the houses are burned out shells.  Chimneys stand like the pistils of tulips after the petals drop off.  Trees of Heaven grow in the cellar holes.  There is the occasional altar of candles and notes on the porch steps that remain—prayers and love for family members who died in the blaze.  Graffiti on one house reads “R. I. P. Grandpa—Gone But Not Forgot.” 

Life goes on in the occupied homes, evidenced by the plastic backyard kids’ toys, the open windows, the dogs tied up and sleeping in the sun or standing at attention.  There’s one house that seems more like a homestead with a bright green John Deere tractor, a vegetable garden, and bee hives that are painted in Crayola colors.  A homemade sign on the corner of the property places it at the corner of Kansas Street and Kansas Street.  Every time I pass, I feel like I may not be in Flint anymore.  As I walk, I often wonder why I am drawn to neighborhoods like these and why I could never live in Grand Blanc or Flushing or Davison or even in the desirable neighborhoods of the city proper.  Why?  The simple answer is that poorer neighborhoods feel more real to me than perfect houses sitting on perfectly manicured lawns or those monstrous beige tract houses that we used to call “McMansions.”  I’ve lived in different cities around the world, and in each one, I gravitated to the poorer places:  the squatters’ shacks on the hillsides around Ankara, Turkey and the wooden Russian houses in the outskirts of Semey, Kazazkhstan.  When I was lucky enough to be invited inside, the furnishings were nonexistent or very simple, but the fabrics, the colors, the cooking, the crude bathhouse in “kitchen garden” with bushes of black currants spoke of life.  I feel the same thing in Flint:  in ruined neighborhoods, life shines out because it isn’t being choked off by middle-class conceptions of what is good.  When you think about it, aren’t most of our conceptions of what is desirable inspired by magazines and fostered by the media.  They are image-driven, but life is found in the blowing clouds, the running stream, the jumping dog—life is active—doing, making, thinking, being.  I can hear the objections:  she is romanticizing poverty!  There are real people suffering in Flint without clean water, without access to nourishing food.  How is there more life in such blighted, forgotten places?  I maintain that even in the miserable poverty of many Flint neighborhoods there is the force of direct human experience, misery, compassion, ignorance, and warmth all mixed up together.  There is an honest life there.  And there are backyards with homemade ponds and beds of flowers that a couple works hard on together.  There is a swing where a lonely teenager goes at night to listen to her music while fireflies rise and fall around her.  Life itself is damaged, and nothing which is perfect can be truly alive.

Note the John Deere tractor behind the house and the corn shoulder high

Beehives in the same backyard

            I moved to Flint from a very desirable city, Boston, where I’d lived for ten years while I was in graduate school.  I was very happy to be offered a job here, and despite Flint’s bad press—my mother and I had watched Michael Moore’s Roger and Me at Easter after I’d accepted the job—I was so thankful not to be moving to a college town like East Lansing or Ann Arbor.  Something told me that I needed to be in a “real” place to begin a “real” life.  So that gut feeling about Flint being more “real” has been with me for a long time, but I didn’t really take my own thought seriously until I encountered related ideas in a couple of books I happened to read for pleasure this summer.  News flash:  that’s why good books are essential:  they help us attend to our own experiences, to take them seriously, and to make something of them.  In short, literature helps us learn to think.

Summer Reading

Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (1854)

For years I’d wanted to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I finally read it the first week of June and found it to be much deeper and more challenging than I’d anticipated.  The main take-away for me was that all of us ought to live more purposefully.  As you may recall, Thoreau, who’d lived in the village of Concord decides to give up village life and build a house on Walden Pond.  His was an experiment in discovering what he really needed to live a satisfying life.  He believes that most people don’t think they have a choice in how they live but spend the best part of their lives earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of life—old age.  Thoreau recommends that we take a deeper interest in the things we love to do—in our reading, our gardening, our thinking, our walking.  “With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits, all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.  In accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor accident.”  Thoreau arranged his life so that he had time to walk, to fish, to swim, and lots of time to read, reflect, and study.  Because the cost of housing and the cost of living is significantly lower than in Flint than in many other American cities, it is possible, with a little conscious effort, to arrange our lives so that we are not slaves to our jobs or our needs for a certain high lifestyle.  We can, if we desire, live in Flint as lifelong students—of Truth.

As I read Walden, I had a strong desire to buy a ruined house on the east side and rebuild it.  But the more I thought about this urge, the more I realized that I can work on the house and garden I occupy on Avon Street in the East Village.  Thoreau’s book actually did move me to clean out my closets—to pitch and purge—to work my way through the layers of delusions and illusions to see if the life that I am in is “real”—and by “real,” I mean a life that I am choosing.  Here is how Thoreau puts it:

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d’appui (a base), below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer*, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.” 

“We crave only reality,” Thoreau writes; and when I read those words, I could not help but think back to the feeling that led me to Flint.  I wanted a “real” life.  But I hadn’t the courage to push my thought further, and it was only general feeling of dissatisfaction or desire for something else that Thoreau’s words worked on.  One day when I was reading the book, I happened to be walking in Kearsley Park, and I asked myself: “why can’t real life be found in Ann Arbor?  What do you have against college towns and ‘cool cities’?”   The answer I came up with is that in such places, the good life, comes ready-made.  As long as you have enough education to get a job that pays six figures, you can buy a really “nice” house.  You can eat in very good restaurants.  You can go to concerts, lectures, arts’ fairs—events where you can meet other interesting, educated people.  Your sliding debit card satisfies all of your needs.  You don’t have to make up a life, you don’t have to pull it out of yourself, you don’t need other people ever.  In short, you don’t have to feel hunger, cold, pain.  You will be living in padded comfort—warm in winter, cool in summer; and you will never think that this sheltered life is not terribly dissimilar from a padded cell.

William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)

It’s in a prison cell that the eponymous hero of Godwin’s novel—a book I, thankfully, chanced upon this summer—has a key insight, and it is this:  with his mind, alone, he can transcend the abjection of his lower-class position.  I’ll summarize the plot in a few sentences:  Caleb is a very intelligent young servant who enters the employment of Ferdinando Falkland, a cosmopolitan and benevolent country gentleman.  Falkland is subject to fits of unexplained melancholy, and Caleb discovers that he harbors a dark secret:  he is guilty of murder and, worse, he let two poor men take the rap and be hanged for his crime.  When Falkland discovers that his servant, Caleb, knows his secret, he accuses him of robbery and has him locked up.  When after his prison awakening, Caleb uses his ingenuity to escape, Falkland pursues him relentlessly.  It is a compelling read and offers a searing critique of Britain’s legal system and social system.   

But what captured my attention was Caleb’s prison awakening to the reality that, even in the most hopeless-seeming situation, he can be his own master if he learns to control his thoughts.

“I found out the secret of employing my mind.  I said, I am shut up for half the day in total darkness without any external source of amusement; the other half I spend in the midst of noise, turbulence and confusion.  What then?  Can I not draw amusement from the stores of my own mind?  Is it not freighted with various knowledge?  Have I not been employed from my infancy in gratifying an insatiable curiosity?  When should I derive benefit from these superior advantages, if not at present?  Accordingly I tasked the stores of my memory and my powers of invention.”

Had Caleb Williams not been imprisoned, would he have been forced to fall back on his own ingenuity?  Had I moved to Ann Arbor instead of Flint, perhaps I would have had so much mental stimulation coming from without that I would not have had to use my own mental powers to write two books, many articles, keep a blog, and come up with writing projects and classes to convince students from working-class backgrounds … and you, dear readers, that literature is essential for living a good life.  If we don’t discover that “the mind is its own place” perhaps we will never escape the various forms of tyranny that continue to subdue us even in this so-called democratic country.

William Godwin understood society as constituted and maintained by strategies of inclusion and exclusion.  Because Caleb was born into the lower-class, it is almost impossible for him to prove his innocence in the face of Falkland’s accusations.  A victim of “class profiling,” he will always be vulnerable to lies that derogate his character and criminalize him.  Sound familiar?  Sure.  It’s the injustice that the Black Lives Matter movement was created to address.  But Godwin offers a slightly different solution:  he thinks that each individual must speak out and share his or her experiences in conversation and in writing.  In the course of the novel, Caleb becomes a writer:  from hiding, he writes the lives of criminals to make money, and in the climactic trial scene when he confronts a Falkland (radically transformed by guilt and malevolence to the resemblance of a corpse), he decides that the only thing to do is what writers strive to do—”lay the emotions of my soul naked before [his] hearers.”  His story  proves the strength and goodness of his character to the jury, to Falkland, and to the reader.  Black lives matter—yes!  Poor lives matter—certainly!  But how many individuals, in the throes of loneliness or depression or addiction, wonder if their own life matters?  I wager that many of us fight this battle every day.  If we would only take the time to read more and better books, novelists and poets would help us be more interested in our own experiences, help us value and pursue our own unique lines of thought, and help us sing--

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.*

Inspiring Flint

Flint is a Realometer that we must check everyday.  Some days it can feel like a prison from which we want nothing but to escape.  Other days it feels like a laid-back mother that gives us the time and freedom we need to play at what we love.  Everyday Flint is, for me, a muse or an angel of Reality that will, if we I her, help me see the earth again, “cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set.”*  What I felt twenty years ago is true:  real life is more possible in Flint than in Ann Arbor because Flint, minus the easy-ride of GM factory jobs, throws us back on our own resources, while the city awaits the much-needed creativity of her people.

*Nilometer, a device used by ancient Egyptians to measure the rise and fall of the Nile.

*W.H. Auden, “Elegy for W.B. Yeats”

*Wallace Stevens, “Angel Surrounded by Paysans”