Run Wild!

I’ve never been to a yard sale since I am not the least bit interested in other people’s junk. Not being in the habit of rummaging through anyone else’s trash, however, currently in my neighborhood there have been temptations placed before me such as; office furniture, bicycles, and lawn chairs.  This morning while walking Coco, I passed a great temptation: a thing, covered in a faded floral sheet, with a huge sign pinned to it that read, “Do Not Take.”  

Why not? I immediately asked myself. I don’t know what’s under the sheet, though I thought I glimpsed a bit of wood. I’d like to say I snuck a peak, but I didn’t. There was something about the scrawl of the sign that made me think its writer may have anger management issues. Also, it’s way more fun to think about the endless possibilities.

What could possibly make anyone put up a sign like that? What in the world is it? A broken piece of furniture and the owner is afraid someone will sue them over it. But there must be a legal assumption that trash is broken. Perhaps the owner is dead and in their absence the caretaker has a phobia about other people using their things.  Perhaps the item has a secret or nuclear code of some kind.  Perhaps it’s a broken mirror?  Whoever touches or glimpses at it will have seven years of bad luck.  Perhaps the item is possessed, but then why let the garbage people pick it up. Aren’t they as fallible as everyone else? Perhaps the owner loved that item so much that they can’t bear to think of anyone else using it.  

Whatever it is, I feel confident there’s a juicy story behind it. And isn’t this how stories begin, so often—with something that’s just not quite right and you allow your imagination to run with it.  Have you ever started a story that way?  

Unfinished business

June 19^th – or Juneteenth has a poignant meaning as Emancipation Day. It was and continues to be a day for celebrating the end of slavery and the beginning of a new chance at life.  It was on this day that the Union Army in 1865 brought news of emancipation to African-Americans in one of the farthest corners of the Confederate States—Texas, effectively marking the death of slavery in the United States.

But the date makes me think of something else, of the late author Ralph Ellison http://newsreel.org/video/RALPH-ELLISON and of his career.  His book, Invisible Man, published in 1952, is one of the great debuts in contemporary literature. It delved into the black and white corners of the American psyche and quickly attained the status of legend, exploring the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930’s. Ellison's follow-up, Juneteenth, however, seemed truly bedeviled—not only by its monumental predecessor but by fate itself.  First, a large section of the novel went up in flames when the author's house burned.  Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising and expanding his initial vision. When he died, he left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Yet this mythical mountain of prose was unfinished, far too disjointed to publish. It seemed as if Ellison's second novel would never appear.

Or would it? Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, compiled a smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. Juneteenth revolves around just two characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, race-baiting New England senator, and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister who turns out to have a paradoxical and paternal relationship to his opposite number. As the book opens, Sunraider is delivering a typically bigoted speech on the Senate floor when he's peppered by an assassin's bullets. Mortally wounded, he summons the elderly Hickman to his bedside. There the two commence a journey into their shared past, which unlike the rest of 1950s America, represents a true model of racial integration.

I like to think of the book as a monumental testament to the power of friendship and editorship.  It must have taken courage and dedication for Callahan to sort through notes, and passages of dialogue, and sections of narrative told in the bits and pieces that Ellison left behind, and then to dare to somehow put it all together in some sort of coherent form. And he was left with making authorial decisions about the narrative structure and character development. 

But unfortunately the final result is messy, incomplete, and largely unsatisfying. While there are scenes in Juneteenth that hint at Ellison's lyrical brilliance, the jigsaw puzzle effect of the storyline is sketchy, leaving me with a mixture of emotions—sadness over the destruction of the original manuscript and that Ellison never lived to finish his great life work, and disappointment that Juneteenth, as we have it, missed the mark and is a novel that maybe never should have been published.

Death be not proud

One of the things I first discovered about blogging is that it made me feel connected to the rest of the world in a way that I hadn’t felt for a long time.  Not since the days I trotted the globe, made new friends and they became pen pals. Call it ego or a humanitarian gene but I have always wanted to be a part of something much, much bigger, and I believed blogging to be that missing component.

I also found another benefit—the feeling of connectedness. I would surf the Internet and other blogs, find things to write about, and link to that blogger. They in turn would find out about me and we would exchange a link.  Not always but generally that’s the way it works.

In my blogging classes, I tried to communicate to my students—the unlimited potential of connections to be made—starting in the classroom, across the city, across the country, and across the ocean.  I couldn’t take credit for it, it’s a universal law that I apply to this day in my meditation practice.  Even if topics are on different subjects, there is an inherent power in numbers.  Bloggers then would have something in common. They are sharing their lives and interests, a part of themselves with their readers, the difficulties of getting and maintaining active readers, the frustration with getting their blog designs just right, and the joys of certain posts —all, in my opinion, powerful similarities. 

Funeral Procession

But there was apathy and I often felt my message went unheard.  And without connecting, not everyone could see the value in what I was teaching. The same holds true for my blog posts. When I send out to my list and there is no reaction, no comment it's a dead silence...similar to tapping into your own funeral and seeing those who would attend. Thanks for your many comments Roberta! And for also listing their comments —John, Carole, Annie, and Michael. 

I’ll be looking for a blogging group once I move into a new community. And if I can’t find “my group,” I will take responsibility and form my own.  

Algonquin Round Table

Summer Vacation

I’ve been on summer vacation and until my next post I’ll offer some amusement through these old images.

Transforming readers to other dimensions

Ray Bradbury, author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, died yesterday. Known for his futuristic tales — he never used a computer, or even drove a car.

French film director Francois Truffaut introduced movie audiences to Fahrenheit 451; a bizarre society Bradbury created: one in which firemen burned books to keep the masses completely ignorant but couldn't extinguish their curiosity.

Here’s an excerpt from the novel, Fahrenheit 451.

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked, and the infinitely small sound now, the white stir of her face turning when she discovered she was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.

The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain. The girl stopped and looked as if she might pull back in surprise, but instead stood regarding Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive that he felt he had said something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix disc on his chest, he spoke again.

“Of course,” he said, “you’re our new neighbor, aren’t you?”
“And you must be”—she raised her eyes from his professional symbols “—the fireman.” Her voice trailed off.
“How oddly you say that.”
“I’d—I’d have known it with my eyes shut,” she said, slowly.
“What—the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains,” he laughed. “You never wash it off completely.”
“No, you don’t,” she said, in awe.

Bradbury in my opinion was a true writer—he took us into a journey to the core of the human heart glorifying the potential of humankind.  I would say his work was more social commentary than science fiction. And he found innovative ways to express his take on the world.

Best of all, he continued to dream. He was so certain mankind would land on Mars; he asked to be buried there. And although it didn’t happen in his lifetime, I’d like to think it didn't stop him from believing it was possible.