Sophia Serve

When a body meets a body...

All the folks in Cornish, New Hampshire protected him from prying eyes and eager grad students. J.D. Salinger lived there peacefully until he died last week amid his papers and letters—none of which were published after his one and only foray into literary fame: The Catcher in the Rye. Apparently once a young man did get past the vigilant postmistress to ask Salinger about something he wanted to write about  (or maybe it was to make a film) and the old man’s response was: “Do your own book.”  The young man called out to Salinger’s retreating back, “Can we stay in touch?” to which he heard, “Whatever for?”

His famous title, one story goes, was based on a mis-hearing of the famous Scottish song. “Comin’ through the rye,” became “catcher in the rye.” When a body meets a body, there’s always room for misinterpretation. And when a body meets a book, well, anything can happen.

My friend Julia found a signed paperback of Updike’s in a local thrift shop once. She sold it on e-bay, but I’m guessing now that he’s dead, it’s worth a whole lot more than she got for it. It keeps me browsing thrift shops, I can assure you. (Julia also is one of the few people I know with her own copy of Jung’s Red Book. You can tell I’m envious in several ways.)

Our whole family has enjoyed reading the John Dunning series about Cliff Janeway’s rare book pursuits. And now Allison Hoover Bartlett’s written a great read called The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. (2009, Riverhead Books). Besides telling a compelling story about antiquarian thefts, you learn a lot from her chapter notes.

 

For instance:

In the early 19^th century a scholar went into a German fish shop only to find the shop keeper tearing out Bible pages to wrap fish in. A Guttenberg Bible.

The oldest and most famous rare book school is at the University of Virginia.

 Some collectors apparently don’t intend to read their prizes—the ones who collect books with uncut pages: virgo intacta.

 There’s a book that documents violence to books. Having a great interest in Alexandria’s libraries, I may have to find it. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books by Fernando Baez.

People think Lewis Carroll invented the dust jacket. This is because his 1876 The Hunting of the Snark is one of the earliest books with jackets that still exists. But Bartlett says earlier books from the 1830s with jackets are still around.

No time for more. I have to get back to The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. Something’s coming through the rye! I just know it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter Quiet

After a few extremely busy days, I yearn for a walk--if only to our mailbox a half mile straight down from our house. It's icy. I take my time.

I often walk back up again to a meditative rhythm. Sometimes it's the prayer of St. Francis: "Make me an instrument of your peace..." A step a word. But today my walking mantra wants to be just two words: re-lax, con-tent...re-lax, con-tent.

Once or twice I stop to listen. Nothing.

The sky takes on a deep lapis-lazuli blue the likes of which I see only on crisp winter days. It's about three o'clock so the sun aims its fiery path behind me toward the western mountains at a pretty fast clip. I'm facing a cloud-moon of light and dark, split exactly in half. It's strange to see the moon during the day. It's as if she's saying, "Whoops. I really don't belong here, but I wanted you to see me equally balanced like this. Later tonight I will be oh so bright against the white empty canvas of your yard, but right now I'm just a wispy-whispery thing sent to share a secret: it's important to be balanced...to keep extremes at bay."

Before my walk, I'd been reading the fourth book in Christopher Alexander's series called The Nature of Order. Now I'm observing the order of nature. Everything has a living center, says this wonderful architect-author. I notice that each shadow lives and falls precisely where it is ordered to fall.  Each tree stands in perfect living relationship to its neighbors and each branch seems expertly placed one to another.  The snow knows how to mold the rocks.

Again, I stop to listen. I hear not one sound. Not a grinding snow machine. Not a bird. Not a dog. Not even the dropping of a twig. But wait. Between heartbeats, I notice  a trickle of water running under the ice.  A tree groans from the cold.

"Who," Alexander asks, "has not had the feeling, listening to Mozart's  40th Symphony or to Bach's B minor Mass that something significant is happening, that in some inner sense, the heavens are opening, and that this structure of sound somehow reaches in and hits the heart?" Who, indeed.

Meister Eckhart, that 13th century spiritual teacher, said "We must learn to penetrate things and find God here."

For that brief walk, the sun, the moon, the trees, and the snow all quietly chorus-up to show me a universe of living beings. I am embraced by nothing I can measure, certainly nothing mechanical, but definitely groupings of living centers that form an unbroken whole surrounding me.

Something significant IS happening and it hits my heart.

 

Empathy Neurons

Jeremy Rifkin who wrote a book called The Empathic Civilization stated in a recent blog that over the past 15 years evolutionary biologists and neurocognitive researchers have been chasing down empathy neurons—those little bits of our brains that allow us to feel and experience another’s situation as if it were our own. Our empathy neurons have been kicked into high gear by all the images and sounds from Haiti over the past agonizing days. The NPR reporter, for instance, whose tear-filled voice brought us a vivid account of one little girl shaking and dying before his eyes because there was no medical care for her. Or those sun-burned faces reporting to us that help is too slow, too removed from where it’s needed. Again we see Katrina faces calling for water. Begging for food.

US texting alone has sent at the time of this writing, $11 million in aid—never mind that credit card companies, obviously devoid of any empathic neurons, are charging a 3% fee for each of those transactions. When people hear the stories their hearts and wallets open.

I find myself wondering what might have happened seventy years ago if the victims of Nazi camps had been able to send tweets and videos. We may have heard first hand from German woman named Irena Sendler, a “plumbing-sewer specialist,” as she smuggled babies and children out of the Warsaw ghetto in her tool box. She knew that it was only a matter of time until they would all die, so she did what she could.

Every day, she brought her dog along in her truck and trained him to bark viciously when they passed through checkpoints. The dog discouraged the guards to check too closely  under the wraps. 

Irena the plumber saved 2500 Jewish children. Imagine how many of them have gone on to become empathic adults helping others as Irena helped them. Imagine how many young earthquake survivors may do the same.

After the supply trucks have finally made it through the Port-au-Prince rubble, after the power’s back on, after the dead have been buried, will our neurons continue to empathize with all the poor in Haiti?  Let's tattoo the numbers of the Hatian dead on our arms to remind us that our earth can crack anywhere. Any time. We could be the ones putting toothpaste under our noses to alleviate the stench of decomposing bodies.  

Irena was eventually caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs and arms and beat her severely. But she survived. Being a German, she kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out, put them in a glass jar and buried it under a tree in her back yard.

After the war, she tried to locate any parents who may have survived in an effort to reunite the families. Sadly, most had been gassed. Still she worked to place many of her kids in foster family homes or with adoptive parents. Irena died recently at 98, her empathy neurons still intact.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Afghans and Haunted Houses

A young London-based Pakistani author with piercing brown eyes and a mop of curly hair won numerous prizes for his earlier books and now tells a story set in Afghanistan: The Wasted Vigil. Nadeem Aslam creates a young Russian woman named Lara, whose mind "is a haunted house."

If we could pull that image from Lara and stretch it a bit, we might find our own collective minds haunted as well. Haunted by failed attempts to "set the world right." Haunted by flawed decisions. Haunted by images of still more young people flying into a country where women can be beaten with a tire iron if they happen, as Lara did, to fall asleep with your feet pointing to Mecca.

Aslam (whose name reminds me of Narnia's Aslan and I take some comfort in that) says Afghanistan is "a hub of things moving from one point of the compass to another, religion and myth, works of art, caravans of bundled Chinese silk flowing past camels loaded with glass from ancient Rome or pearls from the Gulf." Now Comanche helicopters drop bottled water. Or worse. For good reason, it's often called a graveyard of empires.

We arrogantly thought we'd change everything by riding in on our white cowboy horses after 9/11. We failed, as Suan Faludi puts it in The Terror Dream, "to perceive the message in Jacob's story of strength and dependency, to fathom the distinction between wrestling with angels and slaying them."  Instead, we "balked," as she puts it, "and summoned John Wayne and his avenging brethren instead...we succumbed to the hauntings of a fabricated past." We threw tons of bombs into Talibaned Tora Bora, the labyrinth of caves in mountains 13,000 feet high. But heroin still bolsters their tippy economy. Bribes still grease the skids. Every man is still armed. We didn't change much and I've of a mind that we never will. That's not fatalistic, it's what I now think might be the truth.

Goethe said, "It's easier to perceive error than to find truth, for the former lies on the surface and is easily seen, while the latter lies in the depth, where few are willing to search for it."

How do we search out the truth in such a tangle of war-knots and bomb-snarls? Maybe the answer lies in a metaphor a reader-friend recently suggested. "Why don't you write about the connection between Afghanistan and afghans?"

I tucked that thought away as I do many that now come in from SophiaServe readers, thinking, "Sure, maybe after I learn Pashto." But thanks to our quickie-Wiki-Pedia I now know that these lap blankets were, indeed, first made in Afghanistan.   

They are constructed in brilliant colors, geometric designs and holes built into the overall effect.  Like the one my Aunt Esther crocheted for me back in 1961 with waves of seasick oranges, yellow and browns. Afghans are always hand-stitched from yarn and if you don't have an Aunt Esther, you're not likely to ever have one. They're called "throws" because with so many holes, they easily fray and people soon just throw them away. Or because you throw them over cold toes this time of year. Take your pick.

If our snarled presence in Afghanistan could be compared to a dizzy afghan, perhaps what we need to throw away is our frayed and obviously astigmatic threadbare concept of how we deal with people willing to blow themselves up for a cause. We need not, in turn, bomb them. Instead we could learn how to spot their crazy design and invite them to drape themselves over some other chair.

 

The wood of a sandal tree, Aslam tell us, never smells like perfume until it's cut down. This leads me to wonder if we thought we'd sniff the fragrance of peace by wielding  axes. 

Islam defines the time when a muezzin begins to call people to the dawn prayer this way: it's when there is enough sunlight to distinguish, without artificial light, a black thread from a white thread.

I pray dawn comes before we all unravel.

Blue Moon Blessings

What does it mean to start a whole new decade off with a "blue moon?" Perhaps "once in a blue moon" we get a "do over." A fresh start.

Lao Tzu  wrote of a vision he had in which he traveled to the World's very beginning. There, he saw Yin. Female energy. If I could have gripped his silk jacket and floated with him into that dark space, what would I have seen? 

I imagine it may have looked something like this. One Vermont morning the fog settled in and my friend Bob Frenier took his camera out for a closer look. Out of nowhere crystals appeared on every surface of every branch of every tree.

Lao Tzu said everywhere he looked, the world was filled with "motionless grandeur."

Then Lao Tzu saw Yang--"rampant in its fiery vigor." As he put it, earth's quiet grandeur reached up to heaven's fire--maybe a blue moon kind of fire--and "the two penetrated one another, were inextricably-blended and from their union the things of the world were born."

A new year began with a blue moon in 1990 and a year won't start with a blue moon again until 2028. Because our solar calendar and our lunar calendar don't quite mesh, a solar year winds up with 11 extra days. Like Baba stacking up pretzels, they pile up until every two or three years we have an extra full moon. For some reason, we've taken to calling it "blue." Some think it's because when the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the moon actually was blue for something like two years.

For whatever reason, blue moons are like that crystalline Vermont winter morning when the whole world became--at least until the sun burned it off--a fairy land of white potential.

We welcome our new decade, pulsing up out of the dark into the quiet saying,

"Make of me what you will."