About My Mother and Me

So already, this is a tale of two sixteen-year-old girls and a movement. The movement was second wave feminism. The two sixteen-year-olds were my mother, who turned sixteen in 1944, and I, who turned sixteen in 1971. So this is also the story of a mother and a daughter.*

 

My mother, Thelma Soble, passed away earlier this month on October 2 at the age of ninety-six, and since then, I've been doing a lot of remembering and thinking; hence my realization that this is a tale of of two sixteen-year-old girls and a movement. My mother was very nice, and I was usually pretty nice--and we locked horns a lot when I was in my twenties and thirties. I suspect that that had a lot to do with who we each were and the messages we each received as teenagers.

At sixteen, I was often sad, sometimes angry, extremely cautious, quite self-conscious, often judgmental, and very good at one thing: learning. I was also surrounded by female friends and female teachers who were basking in the promises of equality and self-realization offered by the women's movement. The first issue Ms. magazine** came out in 1972, but it was Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens, and Woman's Day that kept arriving at my house monthly.

My mother, who herself had been a very good learner, never aspired to be, as far as I could tell, anything but a very smart wife and mother who, I believe (though my sisters might disagree), saw herself as raising three daughters who would be wives and mothers, even if they did something else besides that--but not anything that would ever vie with their commitments to home, husband, and family. 

 

Meanwhile, my friends were reading The Feminine Mystique and The Female Eunuch, and even though I was not, I was listening to what they said about them. 

Then in 1973, my color-inside-the lines self got into Radcliffe. Of course my parents were proud and excited--but for very different reasons than my female teachers were, especially my French teacher, Mrs. Mederos. "What a moment in time to be going to Radcliffe," she told me. "The whole world is changing, and you will have choices I never had."

Then, of course, I made the same choice she had made, and became a high school teacher. But I didn't become a wife until three decades later, and I never became a mother.

With my dad at Marina Bay on her birthday

And my mother was never disappointed in me. Worried, yes, about how I would navigate the world without a responsible man to guide me or take charge altogether. Worried, yes, that I might be lonely. Sad, I think, that I wouldn't be a mother, but not because she felt I owed it to her to produce grandchildren. But never disappointed in me. I give her so much credit for that. Flexible, loving, and insightful, she was able over time to adjust to and genuinely support the life I had, which probably wasn't the one she'd imagined I'd have.

 

No, the person who was chronically disappointed was I, in her. I first felt this way when I was sixteen. While I was having my secret thoughts about my feminist future, my mother was often sitting at the kitchen table playing double solitaire with her mother while her father watched his afternoon shows in our family room.

I hated that my grandparents were at our house so much of the time doing what I thought were stupid, useless things. Plus I loved doing my homework at the kitchen table, and when my mother and grandmother were playing cards there, I couldn't.*** So I angrily told my mother one afternoon, "You have to decide what's more important to you, being our mother or their daughter." Pretty brutal, I know.

 

Once my sisters and I were grown up and out of the house, I wondered why she didn't seize the opportunity to make her world bigger. She did expand her world briefly--to take an adult-ed Hebrew course, an adult-ed Mandarin course, and a part-time job at the local bookstore. And she was out of the house plenty, always busy transporting local elderly relatives--we had many of them--to their various doctors' appointments, the pharmacies where their prescriptions had just been filled, and the department stores where they needed help buying something they couldn't bring back home without having someone younger and stronger available to carry it inside.

 

Over the next two decades, we generally got along and had plenty of good times, but often bumped into those places that made us know how different our attitudes were. When I told her I relished being independent, she told me that she loved being dependent. When I told her that I loved having good friends, she told me she didn't feel the need for good friends because she had family. When I told her I liked coming up with ideas for what to do and getting others to join me in doing them, she told me she preferred waiting for others to come up with ideas and then being invited to join them. "I like to follow someone else's lead," she told me. 

 

A visit with her grandson and great-grandson

Most often, she followed my dad's lead, and the two of them were enthusiastic attenders of every concert in which I sang and every school event in which I was any way involved. And she was always game to travel to Maryland to visit her grandchildren, who were crazy about her, just as she was crazy about them.

 

But mostly, she happily stayed home and, from my point of view, kept her world small, family-focused, and familiar. Periodically, despite my knowing she wouldn't change, her habit of saying no to so many invitations and opportunities frustrated me. After all, she was smart and curious, so why not take the next step? Why not spread those wings? 

 

It wasn't until about eight years ago, not long after I had stopped working at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, that I understood her resistance to saying yes to the new, especially the new and potentially challenging. 

 

That morning, I was taking her to a cardiologist appointment, and she was still adjusting--or not adjusting--to my father's and her new life at Orchard Cove, the senior living community in Canton.  It was a terrible time in her life. She was at the beginning of dementia--no one had used the word Alzheimer's yet--and she knew and could feel that something about herself was different and wrong. It still breaks my heard to think of how lonely and frightening this must have been for her, and I'm only glad that in the later stages of the disease, she seemed no longer to suffer with this sense of not being herself. 

That morning, while telling me that she was struggling to remember things, she told me a story she'd never told me before. When she was sixteen, her father had said to her, "I would never tell you anything important because you forget things." Mind you, my mother was an excellent student, had no cognitive disabilities, and was especially adept at learning languages, which generally requires memorization and the application of rules.

My mother and her two sisters on her 80th birthday

Growing up, I had never thought that my grandfather was a particularly nice man; I'd always felt that he preferred to reign over his family rather than to be an equal member of it, and my mother, aunts, and grandmother always seemed to me to be overly concerned with pleasing him. So all I could imagine was how devastating his comment must have been to my mother. Whatever she was struggling to remember seventy years later, she had no trouble recalling his wounding words to her teenage self.

And to think of how such words would have played over time, despite her academic achievements and so many other indicators of mental acuity. I'd always felt my mother lacked confidence, that she wondered if she really measured up, and now I understood at least part of why she shied away from situations in which she might fail, might risk hitting some kind of wall,  might somehow prove that he was right and that she couldn't be trusted with anything "important."

At around the same time, I was writing a lot, having continued the habit of writing morning pages I'd begun while doing Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Difficult as the years were as my mother's Alzheimer's worsened and she necessarily progressed from Independent Living to Enhanced (assisted) Living, and finally to Skilled Nursing at Orchard Cove, I realized in retrospect that I had written my way into a new, more nuanced, and definitely kinder understanding of her, three pages at at time. Leave it to writing to surface all the possible perspectives through which any one person might be seen, appreciated, and understood--especially if you believe, as I had come to believe during my years as an educator, that everyone is always pretty much doing the best that they can. Including my mother.

One day when we were visiting my mother on Skilled Nursing, my younger sister Lauren remarked to me, "I'm surprised to see you being so loving with Mummy. You always seemed so angry at her." I explained to her the important role all those morning pages had played in my ceasing to sell my mother short in some very important ways. She had always done the best she could.

All of that set me up to be a really good companion to my mother over the last five years of her life. Of course, the fact that she quickly became one of those very sweet, cheerful, loving Alzheimer's patients--so many people don't--certainly helped. And so I close with the words I said at her graveside burial service a few weeks ago, feeling so grateful that her long life gave me ample time to love her without anger and to be with her: she deserved nothing less.

 

First of all, just to say how nice it is to see all of you here. Thank you so much for being here with us.

 

Before we start sharing memories of my mother from before she had advanced Alzheimer’s, I wanted to talk you about who she was during these last few years. Because it’s too easy and incorrect to think that Alzheimer’s erased her altogether, even though it definitely changed what she could take in or do, and what she could express.

 

I’d like to talk about that expression part for a minute because my mother always loved language, loved words, loved wordplay and word craft. If you saw her obituary, you know that she adored crossword puzzles and that she was very good at writing clever rhyming poems. She was a French major in college, so when she arrived on the Skilled Nursing Floor at Orchard Cove, she regularly spoke French with the staff members from Haiti and Cameroon. And up to the very end, if you were wearing a T-shirt with words on it, she could and would read those words aloud, though I don’t know how often she understood them.

 

One of the ways I knew the mother I had always known was still very much there was because of the deliberate ways she used the language that she did have—and what it said about what she thought mattered in life. For example, if I told her that Scott and I were going to visit his dad, or that my cousin Nancy [her niece, the daughter of her sister Elayne] was hosting everyone for the Seder, or that one of my college roommates was coming to visit—anything involving spending happy time with the people who mattered—she always said, “That’s nice.”

 

My mother at twenty or twenty-one

When I told her about something I was going to do that was going to take effort, that was going to require me to learn something new—like taking a poetry-writing course or rejoining the choral group that I’d been singing in before COVID--she always said, with authority, “That’s good.”

 

And when I gave her a good, long hug, she would often say, almost dreamily, with her blue eyes sparkling, “That was lovely.”

 

Then there were the words that, according to the Orchard Cove staff, she usually said with a smile whenever any of them helped her with something: ”Thank you.”****

 

I want to end by telling you that two days before my mother stopped eating and drinking, she and I had a really wonderful visit. She greeted me with an exuberant, bright-eyed “Hello, honey,” and then we watched part of an episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” As many of you know, even though there’s a lot of Jewish content in it, it’s not a family show—there’s lots of swearing in it, and sometimes even some partial nudity. And my mother LOVED it! Every time someone swore, every time something racy or off-color happened, she said, with a really gleeful smile, “Oh my goodness!”

 

I’m going to cherish the memory of my last visit with my mother as much as any of my older important memories of her.

Despite her long years as someone with Alzheimer's disease, I can attest that in some of the most important ways, she was always herself. This morning, as I've been preparing to post this blog, I keep hearing in my mind's ear the first line of a Theodore Roethke poem: "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones."***** My mother was lovely, and I feel proud to have been her daughter--and proudly very much her daughter. 

 

P.S. And one more thing: be careful what you say to sixteen-year-olds. They remember.

* Screen shot of painting accompanying the following blog post: thisihumblyspeak. (2021, October 28). To the memory of mom. thisihumblyspeak: moments of thought and life reflections. https://thisihumblyspeak.com/2021/10/28/to-the-memory-of-mom/ [Note: this painting is by Donna Ashworth and is called "SOMEWHERE INSIDE OF YOU IS A LITTLE GIRL.]

** Screen shot of the cover of the first edition of Ms. Magazine; from the Ms. website: https://msmagazine.com/about/

*** Screen shot of banner drawing on blog called Lev Hardware: Lev, A.M. (2022, January 27). i am not painting even when i am painting. Lev Hardware: ghost girl. https://levhardware.wordpress.com/

**** The nurses and aides at Orchard Cove didn't just take good care of my mother. They loved her, and they were explicit about that. I will always think of them as family as well as truly compassionate professionals.

***** Roethke, T. (1975). I knew a woman. The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (p. 122). Anchor Press/Doubleday.

The Devil of Perfectionism

So already, when a word comes up in multiple places in a short period of time, I pay attention to it. Last week, I read the word "perfectionism" in three different places, all of which warned people away from it.

 

In my experience, perfectionists invariably want something good, and want to do something good. What separates them from others similarly motivated is their belief that doing everything right, that doing every little thing "excellently" and to the highest standards, is the best path toward their cherished aspirations. 

 

Being perfectionists, they're often both comforted and intimidated* by the word "best." They're often accustomed to doing things very, very well, and they fall back on the old habit of striving to meet high individual standards when they don't know what else to do in pursuit of their goals.

The irony is that according to what I read, pursuing perfection is precisely what gets in their way. Too much attention to doing things perfectly often blinds them to other possible if less "certain" ways of working toward their goals. Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves listening more to others, thinking more about  others (as opposed to the idea of others); writing really rough, really terrible rough drafts; or wondering at length what the neighborhood crows have been cawing about all morning.** Forsaking perfectionism, they might find themselves in less self-inflicted pain, even if there's other pain to be felt.

So what kinds of problems and challenges make us nervous and uncertain enough to fuel our perfectionist tendencies? pull us out of our comfort zones? proclaim to us that we're not fully in charge? make us feel stupid and small, even lost--and sometimes, dangerous and harmful?

I wasn't surprised that Julia Cameron talked about perfectionism as counterproductive in Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity:

In light of all of this, I am not sure where we got the idea that in order to be 'real' artists we had to do things perfectly. The minute we see the world 'perfect' . . . , spontaneity goes out the window. . . . . (78) ***

When the goal is creating art, regardless of the type of art, we absolutely need to play and to experiment--and need to appreciate that "Anything worth doing well is worth doing badly" (79). In fact, creating bad art is generally believed to be a prerequisite for making good art. And the good news is that bad art, generally kept out of sight and earshot of others, usually doesn't harm them.

 

The next place I saw a take-down of perfectionism was in Rabbi Daniel Klein's column on the Hebrew College website. In "Elul: Beginning the Journey Home," Klein encourages his Jewish readers to examine their customary approaches to "teshuvah (repentance/returning)," often understood exclusively as "the process of reflection on and assessment of our actions and direction in life, making amends for misdeeds, and striving to live better lives."**** Having recently read in "a contemporary Hasidic book on spiritual practice" that "proposes that the core of teshuvah is not the self-assessment elements that lead to behavioral changes," Klein reveals that he is focusing his teshuvah efforts this year on "living with and in response to the God we find within ourselves and, of course, everyone we encounter"--and encouraging us to consider doing the same.

 

Not that how to do that feels obvious to all Jews. But relegating self-assessment to a secondary position makes being Jewish less intimidating during the annual High Holiday season of God's "judgment."***** The good news, according to the book Klein read, is that “'The Holy Blessed One does not require perfection, rather that we strive to serve with all our might….'" When it comes to teshuvah, the combination of sincere, effortful striving and loving intent atones, brings us closer to God, even when it doesn't yield "results." 

And that's the purpose of teshuvah: "reconnection to our unconditionally loving Source."  The key word is "unconditionally"--not conditioned on our achieving certain behavioral standards--which is not to say that we shouldn't strive and that we won't feel "regret for and sadness about our misdeeds." But perfectionism misses the point.

It misses the point in schools, too, where education--students' learning itself, students' coming to trust in their capacities to learn--cannot transpire outside of the relationships among teachers and students, each of whom bring with them each day the realities of their "traditional" positions in schools and society. And it misses the point in schools in which primarily BIPOC****** (black, indigenous, and people color) student groups, historically systemically deprived of the same quality of education as their white peers, are taught by white teachers.

 

I mention this because the third place I saw a critique of perfectionism was in From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity, co-edited by Chris Emdin and sam seidel. Unlike so many educator critics who pick up their pens to call out the failures of school policies, political leaders, and other educators, the educators whose essays appear in this book put themselves under the interrogator's spotlight and share personal painful, discouraging educator moments. These moments led them to understand that their commitment to social justice and educational equality, especially as pursued by questing after mastery of their teaching craft--teaching perfection--could not make their whiteness a neutral reality for their students or themselves.

 

In the book's first essay*******, Maya Park discusses how, as a first-year teacher, she came to view "my imperfections as a teacher as inseparable from my racism," which led her to embrace perfectionism as "my tool against racism" (4). After a particularly disturbing and probably harmful interaction with a student, she concluded that "To pursue perfection was to dehumanize us both" (6). Needless to say, she needed to try something different; and she did.

 

In a later essay, Adam Seidel also explores the temptation to resort to perfectionism, even when it doesn't seem like the best response to a perceived problem, because what a better response might be seems vague and potentially self-incriminating. Seidel describes a moment in a summer staff meeting when, instead of trying to make sense of some disturbing data about the college graduation rates of their former students, the teacher group recommitted to their usual approach to preparing their students for success in college: "we are going to have to work harder to make sure our lessons are vigorously prepped and practiced, our school systems and expectations are tight, and we build a culture that celebrates academic achievement" (128).********* In a nutshell, they said to themselves, "Let's get even better at what we're always trying to do better rather than even think about doing something really different."

"The Man Who Swallowed a Bird" by Scott Ketcham

But Seidel recognizes the problem with this: "we
were working to turn passion into a pathology--one that builds on a foundational belief that 'better is good enough' or more specifically that 'better than is social justice,'" which he comes to understand "in the context of white supremacy" (129). In light of this realization, Seidel changes his behavior in his own classroom: "on my best days, I shifted my practices, hovering above my interactions with students, listening with a closer ear to my language an how power and whiteness were held between us" (129).

But he doesn't quite know how to lead his staff to the same realization and to co-created shifts in practice that might lead to "true" educational quality and social justice. Toward the end of the essay, he explains, "I wasn't confident enough to try and be wrong. The stakes feel obvious now, and I'd like to think I would do things differently if I could go back, but whiteness and power and perfectionism were holding me back" (130).

Adam is my former student (as is his brother sam), and it pains me to read about his "shame and fear" (130). But I so admire his courage in "going public" with his story of coming up short and regretting it in retrospect. And I also know that his sharing of his story, along with his analysis of what was operating inside of and around him, and his feelings about it then and now, is an act of leadership that encourages the rest of us to be brave enough to stumble into this difficult problem space with others and be as genuine and unguarded as we can be. Again, perfectionism is not the answer, and when it becomes the comfortable fallback when we don't know what else to do, it uses up the valuable time and energy that could be devoted to a critical problem.

One of the biggest problems with perfectionism is that it's too often accompanied not just by disappointment, but by crushing self-loathing.********* There's work to be done--whether it's the work of making art, doing teshuvah, or doing right by one's students. Self-critique must necessarily be part of that work at some point. But this is where Julia Cameron again comes to the rescue, often reminding her readers to "Be gentle with yourself while you grow accustomed to your new mental and emotional terrain" (Cameron, 141). In my experience, the devil retreats when the pressure to be perfect dwindles, then disappears. After that happens, the real work can be done, even if it takes a while, is often discouraging, and almost always refuses to conform to a linear path.

 

* Illustrations and quotations about perfectionism accompanying the following: MacNaughton, W. (2024, April 14.) On perfectionism. DrawTogether with WendyMac. https://club.drawtogether.studio/p/on-perfectionism-69a

** Photo included within the following blog: Petrak, C. (2014, March 4). A murder of crows. Tails of birding . . . and things with wings. http://tailsofbirding.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-murder-of-crows.html

*** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

**** Klein, D. (2024, September 1). Elul: Beginning the journey home. Hebrew College. https://hebrewcollege.edu/blog/elul-beginning-the-journey-home/

***** Original drawing accompanying Green, E.C. (2021, March 5). The triumph of teshuva. Times of Israel. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-triumph-of-teshuva/

*(6) Screenshot of photograph included in the following: Chatterji, R., Campbell, N., & Quirk, A. (2021). Closing advanced coursework equity gaps for all students. Cap20: The center for American progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/closing-advanced-coursework-equity-gaps-students/

*(7) Park, M. (2024). Can we water ourselves and our students at the same time? In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 3-11). Beacon Press. 

*(8) Seidel, A. (2024). Much like all of the last. In Emdin, C.& seidel, s. (Eds.), From white folks who teach in the hood: Reflections on race, culture, and identity (pp. 125-130). Beacon Press. 

*(9) Photo accompanying the following: Sheryl. (n.d.) Say goodbye to perfectionism, and unleash your creative genius. thecreativelife. https://thecreativelife.net/goodbye-to-perfectionism/

Dog Days Reflections--Or What I Read This Summer

So already, first of all, the word "reflections" in the title of this blog is somewhat misleading: I haven't been reflective AT ALL this month. Recently I bought the birthday card shown in the adjacent photo to put aside for the November birthday of a dog-loving friend. All month long, I've been more like the dog on the right--jumping up and looking out and changing my mind about what I'm seeing--than like the philosophical, "looking inward" dog on the left. Consequently, this blog is not profound.

 

Second of all, the phrase "Dog Days" in this blog's title is also somewhat disingenuous. This year I completely forgot about the Dog Days, that time of year when "the Sun occupies the same region of the sky as Sirius, the brightest star visible from any part of Earth . . . [that's] part of the constellation Canis Major, the Greater Dog."*  

 

I suspect that if I'd been out at our cabin sometime between July 3 and August 11, I would have been aware of them: In rural upstate New York, it's hard to avoid seeing constellations in the night-time sky. 

 

But I was in Quincy, living through the final weeks of my kitchen remodel, and then the period of kitchen resettlement, which included not only putting my old kitchen things into their new kitchen places, but eliminating the evidence of the weeks of construction--not so much ashes to ashes, as dust to dust. My mind was ping-ponging, ricocheting between "there or there?" 

 

It was exciting and fun, but it made it hard to settle myself down and be Sirius (okay, bad pun) about writing: the space in my kitchen had taken over the space in my mind. 

 

But seeing out was not just about looking out of windows and noticing squirrels that were really leaves. Or looking into new kitchen cabinets and wondering what object really would be better in a different spot. It also meant looking outside of myself and away from my morning pages (I've been doing Julia Cameron's Walking in This World course this summer, as I mentioned in my July post) and into books. Once I started reading other people's writing, I kept reading. It felt good.

 

Once I'd finished reading Sarah Hurwitz's Here All Along, I picked up Queen Bess by Maria Vetrano. Vetrano's literary agent is one of my former Marblehead High School students** who recently fulfilled a long-held professional dream by founding Green Light Literary + Media, LLC, which she owns and operates. I was honored to receive an advance copy from her, and I loved it. As the Simon & Schuster website explains, "Self-made billionaire Dakota Wynfred is convinced that the only way to save American democracy is by putting the last Tudor Queen in the Oval Office." The book is scheduled for release on October 15. 

 

Just as I was wrapping up Queen Bess, a very different book came to my attention, one co-edited by one of my former Cambridge Rindge and Latin Pilot School students***, and containing chapters written by several others of them.**** I haven't finished all of From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood: Reflections on Race, Culture, and Identity--of course, I began by reading chapters written by "the Cambridge kids"--but already I'm thinking thoughts I haven't thought before, and remembering moments as a teacher when I wish I'd done better or accidentally did well. As one of my former Cambridge bosses***** has said on a number of occasions, "I am always learning from my former students." I am looking forward to reading this book in its entirety and continuing to learn.

Days after the official end of the Dog Days and the arrival of White Folks, my husband Scott and I headed out to our very low-tech cabin, where I tend to do my best reading. Given our quarter-mile walk to the cabin from the road, we think hard about what books to bring since bringing them means hauling them. I brought four books--a work of fiction, a work of non-fiction, and two books of poetry, all of which I read: immersion is so much easier in a place without alerts, notifications, and a beckoning television screen.

 

The first of the books I read was written by a former CRLS colleague****** and published in 2002. Who Will Say Kaddish? A Search for Jewish Identity in Contemporary Poland combines autobiography, history, and on-the-ground inquiry centered around the questions of who is really Jewish and how (and when) Jews choose to identify themselves to themselves and others, Jewish and non-Jewish--questions that persist in 2024 in America, Israel, and elsewhere. Since Scott read the book, too, we had lots to discuss.

The two poetry books I read were perfect reads for rural Berlin. The late Rebecca Elson was an astronomer who wouldn't have overlooked the Dog Days. According to A Responsibility to Awe's back cover, she viewed poetry as "a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it." 

 

My poetry reading group hoped that reading Kathleen Jamie's The Overhaul would let us experience the landscape and people encountered recently by one of our members on her trip to Scotland and northern England.

The fourth and final of my cabin reads was James by Percival Everett. I saved it for last because I was so curious about it. First, because I know The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn so well, having taught it to six years' worth of Marblehead High School white ninth-graders (hardly the same experience as being a white teacher teaching it in "the hood"), ******* I was curious to see what parts of Twain's work Everett would maintain and how. I was also curious what he would add to the narrative because Huck and Jim aren't always together in Twain's book.

Second, I was curious because I'd recently read Everett's The Trees, a history-based novel that managed to be really funny and deadly serious as it dealt with the topics of systemic racism and white supremacy. Would Everett manage that same mesmerizing balance here? The Trees is great, and must-read for anyone who'll never forget Emmett Till, whose body was discovered sixty-nine years ago today.

And James is great, too--funny, terrifying, disgusting, depressing, deadly serious, deeply touching, inspirational. I can't do it justice in one short paragraph. But I can talk about my first impressions briefly. Over the years, I've read a number of novels about the experience of enslaved Americans that made important lasting impressions on my mind, heart, and imagination--most recently Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend. But James layered other sensibilities and possibilities of enslaved experience onto the images I'd accumulated and ideas I'd developed. 

As I read, I found myself using the word "grotesque" to describe many of the manifestations of the institution of slavery that I encountered in the book--and language is very important in the story. Like other grotesque things, slavery was twisted--and therefore twisting of almost anything and anyone it touched. Ironies abound in this novel--and the people in the novel who've become blinded to them, willfully or not, become grotesque. If these grotesque people are white, they become especially dangerous and deadly.

So I missed the Dog Days this year. And introspection was much less pressing than inspection--of my new kitchen by the city electrical, plumbing, and building inspectors. I may not have looked inward much this summer, but I did do a lot of looking outward and through--specifically through the eyes of the writers whose books I read this past month. I enjoyed it and was enriched by it. And if you've made it this far, thank you for reading!

* Farmers' Almanac Staff. (2024, June 7). What are the Dog Days of summer? Farmers' Almanac. https://www.farmersalmanac.com/why-are-they-called-dog-days-of-summer

** That would be you, Maura Phelan.

*** That would be you, Sam Seidel.

**** Those would be you, Adam Weinstock, Adam Seidel, and Eli Tucker-Raymond.  

***** That would be you, Ray Shurtleff.

*(6) That would be you, Larry Mayer. I'm proud to be your writing partner: I learned so much from your book about how to intertwine autobiographical narrative, non-autobiographical narrative, and exposition. And your questions linger in my mind.

*(7) I stopped teaching Twain's book when I got to Cambridge when the only African-American student in one of my classes told me how difficult it was for her to have her white classmates respond to the racism in Huck's world only intellectually. I wish I'd had some of the professional learning opportunities my younger colleagues have had recently to help them become more responsive teachers of literature that elicits strong difficult emotions in our students. I still believe that Huckleberry Finn, is a great book, an American must-read and must-discuss. But that doesn't mean one must read it before the age of 18.

*(8) “Good Smells: A Memoir of A Lifelong Pursuit” by Clancy – image copyright Sue Clancy 2019. Image accompanying and screen shot from Clancy, S. (2019, February 13) reading and books in art. sue clancy -- artist. https://sueclancy.com/2019/02/13/reading-and-books-in-art/comment-page-1/

Whose Soul Can Magnify the Lord?

So already, it's hot out there. In light of this, you may be wanting to set aside more active, physically demanding pursuits for the cerebral, sedentary one of reading.

Light Streaming Through Vessels, Magnified Perhaps

Vessel Talk

If that's your decision, and this blog is your choice of reading matter, be forewarned that it meanders even more than my usual wandering posts, ranging from ancient biblical sources to the Bach Magnificat to my kitchen renovation. So you may want to pour a cold beverage into your favorite drinking vessel before settling into your preferred reading spot and putting your feet up on the nearest coffee table or porch rail. Before you do even that, though, please note the array of multi-colored glass vessels through which light gleams in the adjacent photo*--and be forewarned: I am deliberately using the word "vessel" at the start of this paragraph.

 

Ah, vessels! Among the various kinds, there are sea-going ones; blood-carrying ones; shattered ones once filled with Divine light, according to Jewish mystical tradition; and human ones, courtesy of the figurative language employed in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles.  

 

Summer 2024

But wait: let's turn aside briefly from these ancient vessels for a moment for a quick look at the here-and-now. It's been a politically unsettling summer for many of us. And a personally unsettling one for my husband Scott and me since our kitchen is being renovated. Most of our drinking vessels are currently packed in cardboard boxes stashed in our bedroom and closets; other boxes have briefly filled other spaces. Not surprisingly, the project has pretty much swallowed our physical space and disrupted our living patterns.

 

Even before we began this project, I understood that disruption is a prerequisite for major change of any kind. What I hadn't fully understood, though, was that disruption actually creates unforeseen seize-able opportunities when it re-configures time and space.

 

Knowing the first two months of summer would be marked by disruptions of time and place, I decided to use the weirdly placed parcels of time I would have to rediscover, rescue, and jump-start my stalled creativity. The excuses I had all spring for not tackling the questions of "what should I write" and "should I be writing at all" were gone: the Celtics championship season was over, my singing lesson "school year" had concluded, my poetry group had just begun its "summer off," and my periodic deep-cleaning impulses were a complete mismatch with the reality of the renovation moment.

Back to Julia Cameron

As I anticipated having to spend time in my office-kitchen while the power saw wailed and the electric screwdriver revved and punched in the other room, I thought back to the satisfying experience of completing Julia Cameron's twelve-week The Artist's Way course during the summer of 2015. It had provided just enough gentle structure and worthwhile provocation to help me get out of my own creative way.

 

With that in mind, I purchased Cameron's Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity. "Further Steps Along the Artist's Way" the banner at the top of its cover proclaimed, reassuring me that I wasn't the only one who needed a Cameron refresher. I loved that the book's subtitle described creativity as an art, as opposed to describing the book as a practical guide to creativity.

My plan was to start the Walking in This World course right after participating in a vocal recital along with the other students of my voice teacher, Karin Foley. In retrospect, I realize how useful it was to do something artistic, collective, and demanding right before embarking on the next Cameron challenge. For all of us, "serious" solo singing is a stretch that permits us to experience ourselves in new musical ways, creating in each of us a different sense of performance possibility. And we're excellent cheerleaders for one another!

Preparing to Walk in This World

During the week before the recital, I took the time to reread and think about the four poems I'd managed to get published in the past year. When I realized that the two of which I was proudest drew from Jewish sources, I immediately committed to one action step to stimulate my creativity: reading cover-to-cover Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life in Judaism by Sarah Hurwitz, a former chief speechwriter for Michelle Obama.

 

When I'd delved into the book before, I'd marveled at the similarity between Hurwitz's Hebrew School experiences and my own, and at Hurwitz's ability to summarize and distill complex narratives and arguments while making sure that her readers never forget that another Jewish writer might highlight different Jewish ideas as particularly central and transformative.

So the last week of June, serenaded by the sounds of the lower kitchen cabinets' being power-screwed into place, I began reading Hurwitz's book from the very beginning. In the first chapter--in which Hurwitz summarizes Judaism's most sacred text, the Torah (or the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses), in just six pages--I came across an important Jewish idea that, like Hurwitz, I hadn't known originated in the Torah, specifically in Genesis 1:27, in which God creates humans in His own divine image.

 

Made in God's Image

To share it with you, I will quote from Hurwitz, who herself quotes from Rabbi Yitz Greenberg:

The belief that every single one of us is created in the image of God has been cited as the defining Jewish idea, the beating heart of the entire Jewish enterprise. And you don't have to believe in any kind of deity or higher power to appreciate its implications. Drawing on an ancient Jewish teaching, Rabbi Yitz Greenberg argues that this idea is shorthand for three fundamental truths, which he deems the 'three in-alienable dignities':

1. We are each of infinite worth--no one is expendable, and we cannot quantify the value of any human life.
2. We are fundamentally equal--no human being  is any more important than any other human being.
3. We are each totally unique--there is no one else like us, and no one is interchangeable with anyone else. (15-16) **

The first two of the dignities I totally appreciated as rooted in the Creation story. But that third one surprised me. Had it arisen from the language of "His image" and "male and female He created them," I wondered. God's image--the one God's image, His image--was inherently differentiated, made up of two different kinds at least, and by extension many others. 

 

Sparks of Divinity and Individual Difference

And all those different kinds of people so made, according to mystical Judaism, contain sparks of Divinity. Practically speaking, it made sense: if you're going to renovate a kitchen, let alone repair a world, you need people who can do different things: contractors, cabinet-makers, plumbers, appliance-haulers, electricians, inspectors, to name a few. You also need people who want to renovate a kitchen or repair the world. Who want to do a good job of it.

 

David Brook Illustration Accompanying Chabad Reply

As a Jew who believes that everyone contains a spark of the Divine, I had struggled for years to understand the relationship of my individuality to that spark of God within me. How much, I wondered, could and should I cultivate my individuality, my difference from others, which, for reasons that elude me, I believed existed in opposition to this "equal" spark? Eventually I resolved my conflict, in part because I recognized that Stepford Jews was neither the reality I saw nor the goal of the "Jewish enterprise," as Hurwitz called it. 

 

But I might have resolved it sooner had I come across Tzvi Freeman's reply to a question on the Chabad website: "Why do you assume that the divine spark expresses itself identically in all people? Perhaps the opposite is true: It is that divine spark that makes each of us unique and gives us purpose."***

 

"Different" is therefore natural--and intended for the good of a world in need of repair, or tikkun olam. According to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, "Each person contains sparks that they must elevate. The sparks wait for him to come and elevate them."**** Based on these two teachings, divine sparks give rise to different people, who are bidden, no doubt in their different ways, to lift up those sparks, for world's sake.

Chosen Ones: Moses and Mary

Of course, to read the Torah or anything about it is to encounter Moses, and his sister Miriam and brother Aaron, each of whom was made in God's image, made different from the other two, made important, and made equal to the other two. When Moses--who, like Joe Biden, stuttered--recommended that his brother Aaron lead the Israelites instead of himself, God wasn't having it. That got me thinking about Moses' uniqueness and the whole question of who among all of us equal and important ones is most suited to do a particular job or play a particular role. 

 

And that got me thinking about Mary, Jesus's mother--not surprisingly, given that I had taught "The Bible as Literature" for years and had sung, as choral singer, all kinds of music related to the Annunciation and the Crucifixion. Mary's an amazing figure and character: as a young woman, she takes it relatively in stride when the angel Gabriel informs her that she's the "highly favored one" who will bear God's child, accepting his extraordinary news only after questioning him. 

 

The Magnificat

When not much later Elizabeth recognizes Mary's situation, Mary expresses her joy and understanding, and also reveals her considerable skill as a poet, in her praise poem often called The Magnificat. In it, she employs the multiple kinds of poetic parallelism found typically in the Psalms and other writings in the Jewish Bible. She also borrows themes and motifs from the books of Isaiah and Amos to suggest the urgent need for social transformations that will end oppression and inequality. In other words, Mary, a Jewish girl, expresses herself very Jewishly.

 

She also speaks more personally, acknowledging that she's at once the lowly handmaiden--no more important than you and me--and the favored one chosen to bear and then raise God's child, and then rejoicing in that honor. In this context, courtesy of her good character, faithfulness and spiritual depth, Mary is a vessel "for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work" (2 Timothy 2:21). "A virgin unspotted," as she is called in William Billings' "Judea," she, unlike many other candidates for "vesseldom," hasn't needed to undergo a spiritual cleansing in order to merit the role and honor conferred on her.

 

So what does it mean that her soul "magnifies" the Lord--and please know that not every translator of the Greek in which The Magnificat was recorded chose "magnifies" as the translation of whatever word Mary would have spoken in Aramaic. Still, since connotations matter, "magnifies" is worth paying attention to. 

 

Magnifying God: How and Who?

Can God--who is often conceived as vast and limitless--become larger through the actions of a human soul? Maybe. If so, the lesson to be learned is that people are really powerful.

 

Or is Mary's choice of verb more figurative: is it intended to reflect how deeply and intensely she appreciates and feels compelled to convey God's boundless reach and eternal commitment to his Creation? When I think of the intent of "magnify" in this way, it suddenly makes sense to me why J.S. Bach's setting of The Magnificat, replete with its trumpet fanfares, its many movements of varying moods and levels of intimacy, and its momentous, multi-voiced Gloria, can succeed at representing a humble young woman's personal and nuanced outpouring of gratitude, thought, and feeling.

So does this mean that anyone's soul can magnify the Lord? Well, potentially, yes. But there would have to be caveats. No doubt magnification would require a forceful, confident, enlightened spiritual effort. I could be very wrong about that, though.

 

A magnified section of a Scott Ketcham painting

There's also a related question: would every soul want to magnify the Lord? I can imagine every soul's wanting to magnify something--to assert, announce, or push something meaningful, valuable, and expressive of itself out into the world. But the connection between this intent and God might be far less explicit and central in the world views of some individuals. And for some, it might not exist at all.

 

Magnification and Walking in This World

So with those two questions hanging out in the air, let me digress even further to explain what got me thinking about the word "magnify" last week. In the second session of the Walking in This World course, entitled "Discovering a Sense of Proportion," Cameron talks about the challenge of--and the frequent necessity of--imagining ourselves as "larger" than we're accustomed to. 

 

What holds us back from seeing a magnified and magnifying version of ourselves? Explains Cameron, "Frightened of being big-headed and egotistical, we seldom ask 'Am I being too limited, too small for who I really am?' Expansion can be frightening."***** (41-2). And when we do feel ready to spread our wings and be public about our expanding wingspan, some friends may continue to see us as smaller for any number of reasons, which doesn't help us. "The tricky part about changing sizes creatively is that we want to keep our old friends but not our old identity," says Cameron (43). 

 

"Hidden Anger #1" by Bob Hunt *(6)

As we begin to change, we can become angry at ourselves and at others. But as Cameron explains in third week of the course, "Discovering a Sense of Proportion," "Anger is a call to action. It is challenging and important to let our light shine. It is important to name ourselves [acknowledge our creative selves] rather than wait for someone else to do it, or pretend that we can bear it when we can't." (67).

Light, Hidden Light, and Names

Light, hidden light, and names: all very Jewish stuff. If you'll bear with me further, I'll say more about each, and then try to make all of them relate to this question of whose soul can magnify.

1. First, Cameron concurs with the Jewish mystical belief that all of us, equally important and unique, contain sparks of Divine light, and she would probably concur that we're bidden to lift them out of their hiding places and manifest them in the world. Cameron also recognizes that for various ones of us, our interior light has become so well hidden for completely understandable reasons that it requires special techniques to be liberated. Our interior light can need help to expose itself to the light of the exterior world.
   
2. Second, in Jewish mystical teaching, "a name is an intermediary between heaven and earth . . . which defines and shapes the light."*(7) So when, as Cameron says, we name ourselves by calling ourselves artists, we channel our interior Divine light so it can manifest itself in the world in a/the way most expressive of our authentic selves and souls. For those for whom making art is akin to being expressive of God--as it is for Cameron--this idea and Cameron's embrace of it may particularly resonate.
   
3. Third, as I learned today in my pursuit of better understanding magnification, telescopes need light in order to make visible distant objects, which often appear dim as well as small. Telescopes both "Gather light (make things appear brighter than they do with the naked eye)" and "Magnify the image (make things appear larger than they do with the naked eye)."*(8) Light, perhaps, might help us perceive light, even light hidden in the remote recesses of our selves.
   

So what does all of this signify? In my estimation, magnification is essentially a ratcheting up of praise to its highest level--praise on steroids. So the question of whose soul can magnify the Lord--or the artistic impulse, or anything else--has everything to do with the effort, insight and understanding, and intention behind it. Names and praise can exist simply as words in our mouths. Or, fueled by the light within us, they can be drivers and bullhorns respectively, forces that, after registering their presence in the world, influence it, or even transform it.

Liberating the LIght Within

Of course, there's plenty that can bury, obscure, or downright snuff out light. Biblical books of prophecy talk about the refiner's fire that burns away the impurities, the clogging dross that taints our souls and thus dims our inner light. The annual Jewish rite of teshuvah, undertaken before and during the Jewish High Holy days, is essentially a process of removing all that worldly build-up that stands between God and ourselves collectively and individually. Though Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak did not use the word "vessel," he may as well have when he compared the work of teshuvah--deliberate, reflective, and focused-- "to cleaning, repairing and rebuilding a soiled or broken container" (Jacobson, 17).

Similarly, the literature written to guide, inspire, and reassure blocked creatives, emerging artists, or artists in recovery emphasizes the necessity of removing or blocking impediments to our creativity, and cultivating methods for doing so. Like The Artist's Way, Walking in this World prescribes the daily routine of writing "morning pages"--three pages of anything designed primarily as "the daily broom that clears my consciousness and readies it for the day's inflow of fresh thought" (8). Only just now as I was searching for this quotation did I realize that the book's cover drawing depicts a man sweeping next to a vigorously flowing stream.

 

In addition, morning pages can give rise to writing ideas. They served up the idea for this blog post, and when they did, heeding a question and answer in and the Week #1 session--"Do I want to make this? If that answer is yes, then begin" (19)--I got writing. No second-guessing, no putting off. And if you're still reading, please understand that as a way of clearing away all of my usual "'Do I dare?' and, 'Do I dare?'"*(10) self-sabotaging, dross-producing techniques, I determined to write everything I wanted to say, even if this blog got far too long, far too geeky and rarefied, and so wide-ranging in its content that its center would not hold. Thank you, T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats!

And all this because of a kitchen renovation project that created limitations and possibilities, plus a desire to get back on track creatively? You never know what's going to give you the opportunity to get busy cleansing your vessel. If you've read to this point, thank you for your indulgence: I've enjoyed feeling entitled to write lengthily about topics and questions that intrigue me. This blog and I myself have not magnified the Lord today. But I am feeling larger and braver, and that was my goal. A good feeling and a good goal.

* Photograph on Pinterest, chosen by me because I see the light as streaming through vessels, perhaps magnified: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f6/5a/34/f65a34bbcd7f0116388506c5358e0c87.jpg

** Hurwitz, S. (2019). Here all along: Finding meaning, spirituality, and a deeper connection to life--in Judaism (after finally choosing to look there). Spiegel & Grau. 

*** Freeman, T. (n.d.). Individuality and the Divine Spark. Chabad. https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/676238/jewish/Individuality-and-the-Divine-Spark.htm

*** Photograph found on prettyblog.com: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/87/e8/ef/87e8ef5460f999887cf60892be47ff9d.jpg

**** Sparks (Nitzotzot). (2024). SPARKS (Nitzotzot). Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.nitsotsot.com/t-en-us/

***** Cameron, J. (2003). Walking in this world: The practical art of creativity. Penguin Random House.

*(6) Painting: Hunt, B. (2022) Hidden Anger #1. Artspur. Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.artsper.com/ae/contemporary-artworks/painting/1875171/hidden-anger-1*

*(7) Jacobson, S. (2008). 60 days: A spiritual guide to the high holidays. New York: Kiyum Press.  

*(8) Magnification. (2024). Stellarvue. Retrieved July 10, 2024. https://www.stellarvue.com/magnification/ 

 *(9) from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

*(10) Photograph of image fround on Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/516154807269545929/