Italics are mine

JFK on Robert Frost

  I learn a lot of things from my Twitter feed, and most recently this: in January 1963 JFK gave a speech at Amherst College in homage to the poet Robert Frost, who had taken part in his inauguration as President and had taught at Amherst on and off for forty hears. Frost had died in January of that year - fifty years ago, plus or minus a few weeks. Of course, JFK's coming to Amherst after Frost's passing serves as a moving counterpart to Frost coming to DC for the President's inauguration, and the circumstances are made even more harrowing by the knowledge that JFK had less than one month to live when he addressed the Amherst crowd.

The National Endowment for the Arts foundation provides an excerpt of the speech on its website and explains: "In this speech, President Kennedy made clear the need for a nation to represent itself not only through its strength but also through its art... Two years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, creating The National Endowment for the Arts." So perhaps the speech had more long-lasting consequences than most discussions about the relevance of humanities, as important as they are. The full transcript is available here.

I care about art in all its forms because, quite simply, it makes us see the world we hadn't imagined before, and that's what I want to do with my life. You might argue this is the reason I went into research as well, although it involves a much different part of my brain: the purpose remains to see things that others have not yet noticed, make connections where others have seen none, and share our findings with the world.

Frost appears to have struggled with depression, something JFK touches upon right away when he quotes the poet as saying "I have been one acquainted with the night." And perhaps some level of night is necessary for the individual to see things anew - a sense of isolation perhaps, of outsiderness. In the same vein, I also liked JFK's point about the artist as a solitary figure. The speech is full of quotable sentences, such as: "In pursuing his perceptions of reality, [the artist] must often sail against the currents of his time." What a fantastic trove of inspiration.

Given the parallels between JFK and our current President, it is interesting to note how one (in very different economic times) stressed the importance of art and the other emphasizes science, technology, engineering and especially manufacturing. JFK stresses science too (insert obligatory reference to Sputnik here), but I can't think of any other US president who advocated for the arts the way he did - the very reason for the Arts Center being renamed John F. Kennedy Center for the Arts in 1964.

I feel we need to be reminded of art today because art makes us human, and certain groups seem to lean more and more toward exploiting other people: finance professionals out to make a quick profit or indulging in Ponzi schemes, employers using recent graduates as unpaid interns under the pretext that they should already be glad to be getting some work experience. Sadly, with the fragmented nature of our society and the habit of some artists to shock just to get attention, we lose opportunities to learn from what we see and simply dismiss what we don't understand with a shrug. (Or like a docent in New York City once told me, I paraphrase: "People really should realize that if an object is in MoMA's collection, there must be some sort of reason."

I'll end with quotes from the speech:

"When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment." - JFK.

and:

"The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation's greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable." - JFK.

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UPDATE : for readers interested in Frost's poetry, I highly recommend "The Art of Robert Frost" by Tim Kendall, which I discovered in a bookstore in Bethesda shortly after I wrote this post. It provides selected poems by Frost along with elements of analysis, and helps tremendously in understanding Frost's talents, techniques and themes. From the Yale University Press website: "In addition to close readings of the poems, The Art of Robert Frost traces the development of Frost's writing career and relevant aspects of his life. The book also assesses the particular nature of the poet's style, how it changes over time, and how it relates to the works of contemporary poets and movements, including Modernism." I usually find YUP's books ridiculously expensive and priced for the academic/university library book market, but this is one occasion where the $35 price is warranted for. Tim Kendall, professor of English literature and Head of English, University of Exeter, has done a fantastic job.

 

And for those of you who'd like to hear Frost read his own poems instead of having other people talk or write about him, below are two YouTube videos where he reads "Birches" and "The road not taken", respectively. (Full video credit goes to the videos' owner, awetblackbough. You can watch his channel and subscribe here.)

Holistic Life Foundation

  I recently picked up the premier issue of Mindful at B&N, a new magazine  on - you guessed it - mindfulness (subtitled "taking time for what matters"), and discovered a wonderful charity: the Holistic Life Foundation, which teaches yoga, mindfulness, as well as urban gardening and teamwork, to Baltimore children from under-privileged families.

Ever since I decided I wanted to move to the Greater DC area, I've become very interested in DC, Baltimore and the surrounding neighborhoods - Baltimore not as much as a potential place to settle down but as a city with grit and perhaps a more vibrant artistic core community than DC. (Because of my own family history, I find myself drawn again and again to stories of people beating the odds and making it out of poverty, to one extent or another. Most people like underdog stories, but living it is a different ballgame altogether. For starters you're much more willing to recognize the homeless person on the street or the welfare mother could be you if a few strokes of good luck hadn't decided otherwise.)

In some ways, DC and Baltimore remind me of the New York - Philadelphia pair, especially for the gritty part and the risk of one neighbor to be overshadowed by the other. Philly, though, loses a lot of its creative talent to New York, while I have more hope that a large part of Baltimore-born artists prefer to remain in their hometown rather than DC. When artists begin to move to Baltimore from other parts of the country, then perhaps the city will have turned a corner.

Baltimore has more than its fair share of problems, especially related to poverty and crime, as anyone who has ever watched the TV series The Wire will be aware of, and also enormous fiscal struggles. What I most liked about the Holistic Life Foundation is that the three men who created and have been running the charity since 2001 are former children from the neighborhood, now in their mid-thirties and close enough in age to the children to serve as potential role models, in an environment where many households are without father figures, either because of drug addictions, jail sentences or family abandonment.

They have a real track record of doing this because it matters to them, instead of doing it because of the ego-driven high of "look! I'm doing great things in the world, I'm such a spiritual person" that some charity leaders exhibit at times. They simply want to help their neighborhood in the best way they found. You can learn more about the foundation and its work in these two short videos from YouTube and Vimeo.

Some program graduates (the oldest ones seem to be in their early twenties) now volunteer for the charity, thus providing the children with more supervision, giving the graduates more skills useful in the workforce  and, perhaps, inspiring them to continue on this positive path.

The endeavor has swallowed much of the founders' money and their meager income, and the journalist isn't shy in letting us know at the end of the article that the charity - which has received small grants but nothing big, it seems - still doesn't have stable cash flows. Hopefully this will change with the media attention HLF has received, for instance on NBC Nightly News.

I'm particularly thrilled to hear that one of the founders (Ali Smith, now HLF's Executive Director - incidentally, a college graduate from the University of Maryland, College Park with a BS degree in Environmental Science and Policy) will speak at the Wisdom 2.0 conference in San Francisco in a few days. The audience will hopefully have the financial resources to make a difference in the life of the young volunteers for the program and its current students, showing them they're not forgotten, they're not alone, and some people do care.

"Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits"

 Last month I read "Dorothea Lange: A life beyond limits" by Linda Gordon. I'd seen the book in bookstores many times but had not bothered buying it because I wasn't familiar with Lange's work and I have an enormous amount of books I have to read already. What changed my mind was that Gordon's biography was selected by one of the Politics & Prose book clubs as their January selection, and I'd thought I might be able to attend. (In the end I did not, having other commitments in Pennsylvania on the same day.)

I'm so glad I bought - and read - the book. In hindsight I would've known right away that I would love "A Life Beyond Limits" if I had spent just a few minutes researching its subject: from Martha Gellhorn to Lillian Hellman to Lee Miller, I've always felt particularly interested in biographies about women artists with strong personalities (next on my list: Lee Krasner).

Lange's story, with its beginnings in the middle class followed by the double trauma of polio at age seven and her parents' separation when she was twelve, her apprenticeship of photography and her move to San Francisco to become a commercial photographer doing society portraits at a time where women got married and stayed home raising babies, and with its core documenting the plight of the Depression (as well as, to a lesser extent, the Japanese-American internment camps a few years later) made for a highly compelling story.

By the time Lange marries noted painter Maynard Dixon, I couldn't stop reading - and found in the biography another element that I find myself fascinated by: the dual sides of its main character, who captured poverty in photographs that remain breathtaking to this day, and also more or less left her children grow up by themselves, if not outright abandoned them.

Gordon early in the book also mentions the fate of other women photographers, whose career petered out as soon as they found a husband. The challenges faced by Lange shouldn't be underestimated, although the way she chose to deal with them had strong consequences on her children. Thankfully she also benefited from a stable, grounded second marriage to the Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, who played an important role in introducing her to the plight of Main Street America during the Depression.

This interview of Gordon on CPAN-2 (Book TV) gives a good overview of Lange's early life - CPAN-2 probably has the full-length interview in its archives somewhere, for those of you who want to learn more about Lange without having to read the book. If you do choose to read the book, don't let the first chapter, where Gordon has to make a lot of assumptions about Lange's early life due to the lack of documentation, turn you away from this fascinating story of a complex, talented woman passionate about social justice.

The rest of the book is much stronger than the (not bad) first chapter and Gordon has a very enjoyable writing style that makes the five hundred pages fly by. At no time did I feel she got bogged down in unnecessary details, in spite of the length of the book. "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits" eminently deserves its 2010 Bancroft Prize and its place as finalist for the 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.

Further reading (links to reviews of the book):

• Los Angeles Times
• Chicago Tribune
• NPR
• New York Times
• The Guardian

Further watching: book trailer.

In the words of the New York Times reviewer: "Gordon’s elegant biography is testament to Lange’s gift for challenging her country to open its eyes." Five stars out of five in my mind.

Home

Tara Brach asked where I was from, when she signed my copy of True Refuge at the end of her day-long seminar (see my previous post for some highlights). Of course that was because I'd written my first name on a sticky note for her to autograph the book and I'd also just exchanged a few words with her in my French-German accent, but in the spur of the moment I didn't get that was (probably) what she was asking for. I just said that I split my time between Pennsylvania and the DC area, and she invited me to join her Wednesday class whenever I was in town.

I wanted to write a post about it because this for me touches upon the concept of home, the fact that I don't know where home is at the moment, and that even if I settle down somewhere and buy a place and stop traveling and take the American citizenship, I'll always have an accent that broadcasts I wasn't born in the US. When I visualize a place that feels like home, I imagine the garden of my grandmother with its enormous tree, but I haven't returned there since her death fifteen years ago. I'm not even sure the tree still stands. I don't view myself as primarily European anymore - home is on the East Coast, although I don't know where. I hope it's the Greater DC area. In fact I suspect that what I'll do, when I finally put down my bags, is to adopt wherever I am as my new home, once and for all, and stick to my commitment no matter what.

Day-long on "True Refuge"

I recently had the good fortune to attend a day-long seminar led by one of my favorite meditation teachers, Tara Brach, on her new book "True Refuge", so today's post will be about my experience of the event. (I've also written about Brach here.) The seminar was very well attended - full for the Unitarian church where it was held, although the space didn't feel crammed. The majority of attendees were women, especially women in the 55+ age group, but with enough men and younger women - and enough people of various races - to make for a diverse crowd where everybody felt welcome. Before I begin, I apologize in advance for any mistake I might make in providing some highlights of the day - hopefully my little summary will be true to Brach's philosophy and her incredible talent as a teacher and spiritual role model.

The event began promptly at 9:30am, and Brach led the whole seminar in spite of what she said was a bad cold, until 5pm-ish when the seminar ended and she signed books, including mine. (More about that in my next post.) There was free coffee/tea/water and light snacks throughout the day, while we'd been instructed beforehand to pack a lunch. The church also had Brach's books and CDs on sale - I already had her books and one of her CDs, but I indulged in the 3-CD set based on "True Refuge", which I've listened to twice by now and very much enjoy. In the CD set she doesn't simply read from the book but provides a real audio course based on what she wrote, so the CD set complements the book very well.

The seminar was a very powerful event in a quiet way, as opposed to, say a live event by this well-known motivational speaker (that one was a present to myself around the time I turned 30, in case you're wondering), but ultimately Brach's seminar has affected me more - for the better - than the few other live programs I've attended and the many books and audio recordings I'm in a position to compare it to. The sessions alternated between her talking (not lecturing - it had more the feeling of a chat, although she faced the audience) and leading us in meditations and exercises with our neighbors. She used many of the concepts she mentions in her talks, but even for an avid listener of her podcasts like myself - who had just finished reading True Refuge for the second time days before the event - the seminar felt fresh and packed with useful information. Yes, she did use some stories she had previously mentioned in her podcasts, but spending a full day in seminar with her was an invaluable experience, which I heartily recommend to anyone interested in meditation and spiritual practice.

One message I particularly enjoyed was something she said early on in the day: The freedom you seek is within you. We all tend to lose track of that once in a while and try to find answers outside ourselves, while we already know the answers if only we take the time to pause. Brach emphasized the importance of a capacity for presence, something that resonated with me, now that I've given 8 1/2 years of my life to a small town far from my own intellectual community, interests and aspirations. For me this capacity for presence means remembering that the only life we ever get is happening right now - not in two or five years once I've finally made it back to my tribe. Making plans to change what doesn't work is good but living in the future isn't, and developing my capacity to be happy in the present moment, even in less-than-ideal circumstances, has played a large role in my appreciating what I already have while I consider the next chapter in my life.

Some of the questions Brach asked focused on the nature of our aspiration, our feeling in the present moment and the feeling we want to experience. (Mine is peace. I need a lot of that.) She also talked about awakening from a limiting story - another big theme of hers I was glad to hear her expand on - and discussed the wake-up calls where we run into trouble, keep getting in conflict, feel we're not ok. The key is to make peace with life as it is, which doesn't mean idiotically accepting everything, but instead making peace with the past that has led us to the present moment so that we don't stay caught in a trance. 

She also went over the process of working through difficulties with R.A.I.N. (Recognize, Allow [the emotion, not necessarily the situation], Investigate with kindness, Non-Identify.) Since she has written and spoken about this many times, including on her website and in the Spring 2013 issue of Tricycle Magazine, and of course in her last book, I won't go over the details there, except to say that pausing before your mind goes into a spin and practicing R.A.I.N. is a very effective practice.

Presence, Brach said, begins by training in waking out of thoughts, especially using breath as an anchor. She encouraged us to look at our negative emotions and recognize that they too were part of the path. She also asked us to investigate where we felt these emotions in our bodies, since people tend to over-intellectualize everything (for instance, "I feel resistance" doesn't mean much because "resistance" is just a word: what do you feel that makes you identify this as resistance?)

We did an exercise where we had to enumerate the sensations we were aware of, such as the soft hum of traffic in the background, or a warmth in our hands, or our back pressing against the back of the chair, or an itch, sore throat, you name it, and I found it very helpful in becoming grounded in the present moment. As for difficult emotions such as anger, Brach encouraged attendees to keep naming them, stay with them without getting lost in the story - recognize the story line and disengage from it. "Without Mara [the Buddha's nemesis] we wouldn't wake up."

Other points she made included:

(i) notice how you leave presence,

(ii) do you know what your false refuges are? (e.g., ways to seek approval or self-soothing),

(iii) we can't heal until we start coming into presence and examine what's there with compassion,

(iv) learn to clear the space: name all emotions and sense what is most calling your attention,

(v) remember what matters.

(As a side note, if you've made it this far in my post you might be interested in one of Brach's recent talks, where she discusses using any hurdle on the path and any struggle - such as her own illness - as help toward awakening.)

She also quoted Viktor Frankl: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." Such a good quote!

The seminar of course involved many more insights and meditation exercises, including on taking refuge when we get stuck and developing open-hearted presence, but the above already gives a good idea - I hope - of the quality, thoughtfulness and transformative power of Brach's teachings.

I have enormous respect and admiration for Brach, who offers her teachings freely on the Internet on a dana (donation) basis and embodies the kind openheartedness, and vulnerable humanity, she writes so beautifully about. Her online teachings, which I only discovered a few months ago, have proved invaluable to my practice, and the day event gave me the space and structure for much-needed intense reflection. I'm a better person for attending it.

"Henry V" at the Folger

Earlier today (February 3) I went to the Folger for a performance of Shakespeare's Henry V... to learn before the show began that the lead had been replaced by his understudy. The "Henry V" of the title, Zach Appelman who received all the rave reviews and apparently put in heroic efforts Saturday evening before stepping down at intermission, has come down with the flu. Those things happen - you know there is a risk a performer may fall sick when you buy a ticket for live theater - but it was particularly unfortunate in Appleman's case, since the PR surrounding the production had relied heavily on his star power. 

His illness led to a game of musical chairs: another cast member (Andrew Schwartz, who usually plays Cambridge/Dauphin) replaced him in the title role, Schwartz was replaced by Pomme Koch, who normally plays Scroop/Constable of France, in the role of Cambridge/Dauphin, and finally Koch was replaced by an understudy (Dylan Myers) in the Scroop/Constable part. Schwartz made for a very convincing and charismatic Henry V throughout the first half, in spite of the less-than-ideal circumstances. Koch and Myers also shone in their new roles - you could've sworn they'd been playing those parts ever since the show opened - but of course the burden of the play fell squarely on the shoulders of the title role, and Schwartz did a phenomenal job on short notice to captivate the audience as Henry V. Frankly, until intermission the performance was stellar.

The efforts that must've been required of Schwartz became apparent after the break, when he showed up with the text in hand for the scene where he disguises himself as "Harry Leroy". I spotted a thick bundle of suspicious-looking papers under his coat and told myself: "this can't be what I think it is"... but it was. He read many of the lines from then on, while continuing to act as much as he could (and he is indeed an excellent actor). I think I heard a collective gasp in the audience when we all realized what the papers were for. I've attended a few performances where the lead role was played by an understudy on short notice, but they've never had to read their lines, perhaps because they'd played the role elsewhere in full production runs or perhaps those roles happened to be famous ones. So I couldn't help but seethe on my chair at the Folger and think not particularly kind words including "train wreck in the making".

Then Schwartz's acting changed my mind. With a bit more time he would've known the role cold, and  he would've deserved just as many rave reviews as Appleman. What he showed on stage proves it, despite the circumstances.

It takes some impressive amount of backbone, either on his part or on the director's (whoever took the decision of having him bring the text with him), to stand in front of us and let us see he couldn't go through the second half of the play on memory alone. He could've tried to "wing" it - how many people know the play line by line anyway? He could've improvised on stage and let the other cast members struggle to follow his lead. Instead, his gesture allowed his fellow cast members to show themselves at their best, even if it meant the audience would single him out for criticism. (The fact that he read some of his lines definitely upset some of the elderly members of the audience, judging by the comments afterward.) He took the risk of embarrassing himself in the second half so that the other members could shine as they deserved.

As someone who loves modern productions, I found this rendering of the play superb, and as someone who loves underdog stories, I think Schwartz did an excellent job and deserves to be cast as Henry V in his own right. Yet, it shouldn't come as a surprise that watching him read the text, while he also kept acting, made it hard for me to be engrossed in the play. (I have no doubt that he will know the full part in time for next performance, if Appelman isn't well enough to resume his role by then.)

I also think the Folger, which has been sending me emails ever since I bought my ticket online, owes the patrons of Sunday's performance a quick apology pointing out that Schwartz did a heroic job, and that as theatergoers we do deserve a production where the lead actor doesn't read his lines from the text. The situation doesn't result from any mistake on Schwartz's part: theater actors nowadays have very short rehearsal times, and it is not his fault Appleman fell ill. As I wrote earlier, the first half of the play was superb, and the second half (including Schwartz's acting) remained very good, minus the reading-from-the-text part that broke the spell of the experience.

I always love moments where someone is given a chance in the very competitive world of live performing arts, because it might make the difference between him getting the recognition he deserves or becoming discouraged and leaving the acting profession altogether. Schwartz, Koch and Myers demonstrated today that they can shine in high-pressure situations (not a bad reputation to have for people who want to work in performing arts) and have the skills and talent to become great actors. In the end that's what I will remember from the play.

"Henry V" at the Folger has been extended until March 10. Whether Appelman or Schwartz plays the lead, it is a production well worth watching.