Open Hearts, Open Minds #6: Of Herons and Hearts

So already, in my last blog, when I talked about the power of the "entrances" of phenomena that jolt us into consciousness, I mentioned the appearance of a blue heron as an example of a natural phenomenon that might catapult us into a state of elation.

I write with a heron update today. Mid-day on Wednesday, though I had lots of Thanksgiving cooking to do, I took one of my usual marsh walks because it was one of those gray days that intensifies the marsh's November goldness. 

When I came out of one of the Merrymount Park's wooded trails, I immediately saw a blue heron tucked in close to the grasses on the opposite side of Black's Creek. He was having a pretty good fishing day.

More remarkably, he didn't seem to notice me at all and to take sudden, immediate flight: in my experience, herons are much more apt to move on when they sense a human presence than egrets are. 

I'd almost not taken my "real camera" with me, and then I'd reminded myself that you just never know what you're going to see, even when you walk the same walk multiple times a week. Realizing the heron seemed to be taking my presence in stride, I walked forward, taking my chances. No problem, it seemed; we were good with each other. Maybe he'd seen me around on days I hadn't seen him. I got a few really close shots of him and walked on; he just kept fishing.

A chance encounter? I don't know. But I tend to think not. 

As I've been thinking about the "serendipity" of Wednesday's meeting, I've thought of others' encounters with animals in nature on television and on film.

I think of Sister Monica Joan's encounter with the white stag in the 2019 Call the Midwife holiday special. One blogger captures the intensity with which the sister, resourceful as well as aging, plots and acts to encounter the white stag:

In Call the Midwife, the midwives travel to the Outer Hebrides Islands.  Sister Monica Joan, the aging mystic, wants to go along but is left at home.  She sneaks away from London and joins her sisters on the island where, pressing her hand to a standing stone, she sees a white stag and believes she’s had a vision of The Lord.  It’s glorious and I can’t imagine too many Pagans who watched the scene weren’t aware of exactly what was going on.*

The blogger doesn't believe Sister Monica Joan (my quasi-namesake, who's played by Judy Parfitt) saw "The Lord," but she and I would both agree that Sister Monica saw the white stag, and it was a peak experience for her, both joyful and settling. 

I also think of the encounter of Queen Elizabeth (played by Helen Mirren**) with the stag near Balmoral Castle soon after the death of the Princess Diana in the movie The Queen. As an NPR story explained,

The weight of recent events — the violent death of Princess Diana; pressure from Tony Blair and her own son to address the nation; an extremely hostile press — actually cause the stoic empress to break down in tears. Suddenly, a gorgeous, imposing imperial stag appears on a nearby hill. 

And for a few seconds, Mirren's face changes completely, showing, by turns, wonder, joy, recognition and fear at the animal's beauty. It's a stark contrast to the seemingly stone-faced woman we see throughout the film.***

My Black's Creek encounter wasn't as defining or transforming as Judy Parfitt's and Helen Mirren's characters' experiences were. Still, as Wordsworth might have put it, my heart leapt up.**** The heart does open.

* HecateDemeter. (2020, January 15). Must Be the Season of the Witch. hecatedemeter. https://hecatedemeter.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/must-be-the-season-of-the-witch/. Screenshot of photo in that blog.

*** Photo of Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth: https://cdn.theculturetrip.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/screenshot-02.jpg 

*** Blair, E. (2007, February 23). Glimpsing a Queen's Soul: 'The Stag Scene'. NPR. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7577583. 

**** "My Heart Leaps Up" by William Wordsworth: https://poets.org/poem/my-heart-leaps

Open Hearts, Open Minds #5: Entranced by "Entrance"

So already, there is no truth to the rumor that the verb "entrance" and the noun "entrance" are related by etymology. That rumor was alive for several days, but only at my dining room table, where I do most of my writing and thinking during these pandemic days.

I wouldn't have thought about this had I not misread the word "entrance" in a moment of reading-context brain-deadness--also a pandemic-era problem.

My question about this possible connection--and with it, the possibility that entrances are intended to lead us to entrancement--led me to the Etymology Dictionary Online, where my theory crashed and burned.

entrance (n.)

1520s, "act of entering," from Middle French entrance, from entrer (see enter). Sense of "door, gate" first recorded in English 1530s. Meaning "a coming of an actor upon the stage" is from c. 1600.

entrance (v.)

"to throw into a trance," 1590s, from en- (1) "put in" + trance (n.). Meaning "to delight" also is 1590s. Related: Entranced; entrancing; entrancement.*

My next step was to look at the etymology of "trance." What I found fascinated me: 

late 14c., "state of extreme dread or suspense," also "a half-conscious or insensible condition, state of insensibility to mundane things," from Old French transe "fear of coming evil," originally "coma, passage from life to death" (12c.), from transir "be numb with fear," originally "die, pass on," from Latin transire "cross over, go over, pass over, hasten over, pass away," from trans "across, beyond" (see trans-) + ire "to go" (from PIE root *ei- "to go"). French trance in its modern sense has been reborrowed from English. As a music genre, from c. 1993.**

Not much to suggest delight here--and yet most people I know who would say that they were "entranced" by something would be speaking glowingly of whatever it was. I have to wonder how all these fear-, death-, and suspense-related etymological roots have led us 21st-century types to assign positive connotations to the verb "entrance." Are our daily lives generally so monotonous, so mundane, so stultifying that any experience of being transported out of them would be joyful? Suddenly, I'm thrust back to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire--the last stanzas of "Au Lecteur" and "Le Voyage": is ennui, a kind of listless boredom, so common an experience for us ("Au Lecteur")--especially during the pandemic--that we'd willingly journey anywhere to find something new ("Le Voyage") and captivating--even if that meant turning our fates over to Death, the captain of the ship. 

Maybe death is always the captain of the ship.

But let's forget death for a few paragraphs. I still believe that though many of are dying to transcend ourselves and our daily realities, we're not ready to die.

And death's not the only way to escape. Still, if I couldn't go out walking these days and my life was limited to this dining table, depriving me of the chance, for example, to feel enchanted by the sunset I saw last night on Wollaston Beach, I might be willing to journey almost anywhere to change things up--not a good idea during a pandemic! But thankfully there's nature and walking, at least for some of us.

But wait--suddenly, I have to think about "entrance" and "enchant," since I'm starting to use those verbs synonymously, whether or not I should. Here's what the Etymology Online Dictionary has to say about "enchant."

late 14c., literal ("practice sorcery or witchcraft on") and figurative ("delight in a high degree, charm, fascinate"), from Old French enchanter "bewitch, charm, cast a spell" (12c.), from Latin incantare "to enchant, fix a spell upon," from in- "upon, into" (from PIE root *en "in") + cantare "to sing" (from PIE root *kan- "to sing"). Or perhaps a back-formation from enchantment.***

Much of the magical-supernatural to be found here, more than we find in the roots of "entrance" the verb. A little more potential for the benign and delightful. Here's my analysis:

• When we're entranced, we may actually be paralyzed literally, in some intense state of apprehension that we can't escape; particularly at the moment we realize we can't move though we'd like to, we experience fear and desperation. Imagine yourself frozen to the ground as you watch your first (and maybe your last) tornado barreling toward you . . .
  
• In contrast, when we're enchanted,  we might at least temporarily revel in our powerlessness: during the many years I taught The Odyssey,  my students always wanted to talk about how much Odysseus actually enjoyed his long stay with Kalypso. Yes, he pined for home, but all that sex with Kalypso might have taken the edge of his pain, they surmised.

Whatever we're experiencing, we like the idea of communicating our immersion in states of intense delight by using the words "entrance" and "enchant." It may be our tendency to exaggerate just how delighted we are, and I wonder about that, too: do we have too much need to convey how "peak" our peak experiences are--or does pandemic-era life make every "less narrow" experience feel like a peak experience in contrast to the routine narrowness of our days?

So what about the noun "entrance," which is partially responsible for my journey down these etymological rabbit holes today? As I look at the stage-related language in the etymological information, I realize that sometimes we're the ones making the entrances, and at other times, we're encountering the entrances of other people and other things into our lives--for example, the entrance of the blue heron we startle into flight because we didn't see him wading silently in shadows. 

And then there's "entrance" as doorway--all those openings that beckon to us, and that we either walk by or pass through.

"Entrance" can take real courage, whether we enter by choice or not. Sometimes we stumble through or upon an entrance into another world or place, just by luck or accident, though some would dispute that such "opportunities" were merely random. Sometimes we pass through into a place that entrances, at least initially--think of Dorothy's first reactions to Munchkinland.  Sometimes we pass through into a place or state that we can make lovely and transformative, which may be one variety of enchanting or entrancing--think of the secret garden in Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel of the same title. 

Other times, an entrance leads us into a place filled with challenge and adventure, even danger. In a blog post entitled "The Most Magical Doorways in Literature," Rose Moore talks about Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy:

More doorways without literal doors, Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is heavily influenced by the concept of other worlds and the possibility of doorways between them. The first such doorway appears at the end of the first book, The Golden Compass, when Lord Asriel blows apart the sky, creating a bridge between worlds. This dramatic creation is a one-off, however, and the (many) doorways that appear throughout the later books are made with the subtle knife – surgically cut between worlds, rather than roughly blasted through. The knife, wielded by Will Parry, can create a door to any other world – even into (and out of) the land of the dead.*****

The Subtle Knife is the second book in the trilogy; my copy actually has an "entrance" cut out of the front cover through which the subtle knife is visible. The book contains imagery of the Garden of Eden and the Fall. Let's just say that Odysseus and Lyra, the main character in Pullman's trilogy, share something besides multiple entrances into lands of dangerous enchantment: they are both the subject of prophecies. They also both have enemies who want them dead.

It may be that there's an important link between "entrance" and death always--just the other day a good friend of mine introduced me to a poem by Elizabeth Spires called "In Heaven It Is Always Autumn." I've been sharing it ever since. It's a happy, lovely poem about death, and also about November, one of my favorite months. Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Perhaps it's true that we can't open our minds and hearts to the deepest kind of loveliness of things without opening them to the naturalness and inevitability of death. Maybe I'll have more to say about this later.

* “Entrance (v.).” Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, 2001, www.etymonline.com/word/entrance. 

** “Trance (n.).” Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, 2001, www.etymonline.com/word/trance.  

*** “Enchant" (v.).” Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper, 2001, www.etymonline.com/word/enchant. 

**** Screen shot of book on Burnett, F. H. (1970, January 1). A Little Princess My First Classics. AbeBooks.com. https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Frances+Hodgson+Burnett. 

****** Moore, R. (2016, November 25). The Most Magic Doorways in Literature [web log]. https://www.quirkbooks.com/post/most-magical-doorways-literature.

Open Hearts, Open Minds #4: Snow the Day Before Hallowe'en

So already, no one in Massachusetts was dreaming of a white Hallowe'en.* But we got one this year. The snow fell in Quincy and Weymouth before it reached south to Hingham and Marshfield Hills on the Friday morning the day before Hallowe'en. Meeting on Zoom, the members of my poetry writing group, The No Name Poets, divided our attention between the snow falling outside our windows and our own faces on our individual computer screens.

I believe that everyone--not just the members of my poetry writing group --has been hungering for and prizing those moments when, for whatever reason, the pandemic temporarily recedes, and we're able to recall other ways of being and feeling in the world. That snowfall created such a moment. 

Susan Trausch on Zoom

At our most recent meeting just last Friday--three weeks after that snowy Friday morning--Susan Trausch shared a poem about it. That pre-Hallowe'en snowfall--and really, any weather event that captivates and enchants--works on us, "opening the heart." We begin by watching, but then we sense changes and insights. We feel better.

So here is Susan's poem. With her permission, I share "First Snow, 2020."

It came early,

Happy Halloween

From Mother Nature

Dressed in white,

Making children laugh,

Making grownups join

Faces pressed to windows,

Entranced by transformation.

 

It came early,

Quietly, gently,

Antidote to toxic talk,

Plague fatigue,

Television burnout.

Watching weather

Painting landscapes

Felt so easy on the eye.

 

It came early,

When we needed a break –

Just before election day,

Before Standard Time dark –

Friendly, cleansing cold

Jolting us awake,

Opening the heart

To a little optimism.

Thanks, Susan, for letting me share your poem here--and for reminding us all how something as common as uncommon weather can reconnect us hopefully to the world and to one another. The heart does open!

* Photo accompanying Yahoo! (2014, November 11). Arctic blast in the Midwest. Yahoo! News. https://ph.news.yahoo.com/photos/actic-blast-in-the-midwest-slideshow/woman-shovels-snow-minneapolis-photo-235348877.html.

Open Hearts, Open Minds #3: A Morning about Reparations, Lynchings, and Restorative Justice

So already, yesterday morning, I attended an online convening hosted by Northeastern Law School's Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ). I first became aware of the CRRJ some years ago through its work with Cambridge Rindge and Latin School's Kimbrough Scholars Program.* Over the years, I've continued to pay attention to the CRRJ's efforts to seek legal and other forms of justice for the victims of racial injustice and their families. I've especially appreciated the CRRJ's commitment to "saying their names"--to asserting the individuality and humanity of victims--and to dignifying them and their families with respectful, responsive attention.

Yesterday morning's event was part of an all-day program called "Lynchings: Reparations and Restorative Justice."** Members of the public could register to attend the morning session, which created multiple contexts for understanding the need for reparations and the status of current reparation efforts; invited (not me) guests participated in an afternoon session the intent*** of which was "to lay the foundation for the launch of a formal organization designed to advocate on behalf of individuals and communities harmed by historical lynchings." You can read more about the event in this article**** on News@Northeastern, published just today.

It was an awfully good morning--awful in that many of the awful stories that needed to be seen and told were seen and told, good in that institutional efforts are being made and designed to do right by lynching victims and their families.

I write about the event today because it did so much to open both hearts and minds. I commend the designers of the event for their multi-generic approach to getting the audience to feel emotionally and to grapple intellectually. What better way to garner support and commitment?

During the day, there were four photomontages,***** two in the morning and two in the afternoon, one called "Lynched" and one called "Reflected" in both sessions. So the abundance of spoken language that dominated the day was punctuated by visual language that penetrated our consciousnesses in different ways.

The first part of the morning was dominated by visuals and visual art. We as participants looked at photos not only of lynching victims, but also of their family members, the inheritors of the loss, the memories, the emotional trauma, and the financial hardship associated with those lynchings, even if they hadn't known the victim personally. The mind opened, but the heart especially opened.

After that, we heard the artist Dread Scott talk about his very highly affecting visual and performance art. His installation representing the death of James Byrd in Texas in the late 1990s, called "Jasper the Ghost,"****** which he talked about, brought me right back to that moment when I first heard of James Byrd's brutal murder--and when I'd had to wrestle simultaneously with the inhumanity of the perpetrators, the dehumanization of James Byrd (shades of Hector's body being dragged around the walls of Troy by Achilles, but without the gods to interfere to preserve it, keep it intact), and the truth that "this is still happening." I share with you a photo of one detail, and I hope you'll go to the web site and see the whole installation. Let's face it: we have to squirm and feel queasy if we're going to reckon with the unacceptable hideousness of lynching and insist that there be a collective tangible response to it. The mind opens, but the heart especially opens, even though it wants to run and hide.

After Dread Scott's presentation, there was a panel of family members of lynching victims whose stories were different factually but often consonant thematically. The panel's moderator asked wonderful questions of the participants, allowing all of us as to wrestle with questions about the effects of learning of a "lynching in the family" at different points in one's life. But stories always exert a certain emotional force: there was no lynching in the family that didn't somehow mark family members, shape their relationship with the world. Again, the mind opened, but the heart especially further opened.

So my heart was good and open by the time some of the more academic, political, and career activist speakers began to speak: their important statistics and analyses of trends and challenges didn't hang in the air as depersonalized generalizations, but came alive in relationship to the names, faces, and events that we'd heard about in the day's preceding segments.

By the time I heard Joey Mogul talk on the panel entitled "US Reparation Movements: Applying the Lessons" late in the morning session, both my heart and my mind were fully engaged. I was completely inspired by the work being done--not without roadblocks at times--by Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, which he co-founded. As the organization's web site explains,

In 2013, a Reparations Ordinance was drafted to provide redress to approximately 120 African American men and women subjected to racially-motivated torture, including electric shock, mock executions, suffocation and beatings by now former Police Commander Jon Burge and his subordinates from 1972 through 1991. . . .

Finally on May 6, 2015, after decades of grassroots struggle, the Chicago City Council passed the reparations package for the Burge torture survivors and their family members.*******

The work of CTJM--I screen shot this slide during Mogul's presentation--excited me because it's designed not only to provide financial compensation, but to extend itself into the community--particularly into the schools and counseling centers. Once the COVID-19 pandemic isn't dominating the world and daily work of Chicago and everywhere else, perhaps all of the plan's aspects will become reality, especially given that Lori Lightfoot is now the mayor.

So what's my latest hearts-and-mind thinking? For those of us who design programs that are about reaching out and being sure people are seen and treated with dignity, we need to remember the power of art and the power of storytelling to get people feeling as well as thinking. We also need to think of the power of various genres and "languages" to engage various people. Finally, we need to think of how we sequence experiences. The Center for Civil Rights and Restorative Justice created a program with excellent architecture: it did a great job of respectfully but demandingly bringing us into the problem-and-possibility space yesterday morning.

* Northeastern University School of Law. The Kimbrough Scholars Program. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. https://crrj.northeastern.edu/the-kimbrough-scholars-program/. 

**  Screen shot of image on Northeastern University School of Law. The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project. https://crrj.northeastern.edu/.*** . . . according to the agenda I could print up while I was participating in the webinar!

**** Callahan, M. (2020, November 17). Ta-Nehisi Coates, Angela Y. Davis make the case for reparations for families of lynching victims. News Northeastern . https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/11/17/ta-nehisi-coates-angela-y-davis-make-the-case-for-reparations-for-families-of-lynching-victims/. 

*(5) I think there were four different photomontages, but I can't say for sure since I didn't attend the afternoon session.  

 *(6) Screen shot of photo of one detail of this installation on Scott, D. (2020, September 6). Jasper the Ghost. Dread Scott. https://www.dreadscott.net/portfolio_page/jasper-the-ghost/. 

*(7) (2020, August 21). About. Chicago Torture Justice Memorials. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship. https://chicagotorture.org/.

Open Hearts, Open Minds #2: Ali Velshi Across America

So already, as I've been thinking about open minds and open hearts from a political, American-unifying perspective--not the only perspective from which to view them--I've been thinking a lot about the Ali Velshi's "Velshi Across America" series that ran every weekend during the last couple months. Each weekend, Velshi visited a different swing state and spoke to six voters: two who intended to vote for Donald Trump, two who intended to vote for Joe Biden, and two who either hadn't made up their minds or weren't planning to vote this year.

I watched almost all of these segments, so I got to listen in on what people "across the divide" were thinking in Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona and North Carolina. 

The first thing that encouraged me in all these segments was the civility I saw--I didn't see any overt or more covert disrespect being exhibited, even though I could sometimes sense impatience and personal frustration in people's masked body language.

The second thing that encouraged me was the evidence I saw--I should say heard--that the participants were listening to one another--maybe because they were as interested in understanding others as they were in having others understand them; maybe because engaged civility requires listening, not just staying silent while others claim their slice of the air space.

As someone who taught for a long time in a  democratic alternative school that placed great value on shared decision-making and authentic exchange across difference, and also as a former teacher-researcher with Project Zero's Making Learning Visible Project, I've learned to look and listen for listening over the years. 

Carlina Rinaldi is a Reggio Emilia Educator

The silence of one person while another speaks may or may not indicate engagement; something said in response or at a  later time may be what reveals that the silent person was listening. 

In the actual moment when one or more are speaking and others are ostensibly listening, the evidence of listening often comes in what the next speakers say: "Like Bob said, . . . " or "I agree with Kelly that . . . , but even so, . . . " or "I can only imagine how hard it must have been for Juan to  . . . , and that's exactly why I think it's important to . . .."

This morning I was washing my breakfast dishes, again with my television turned to MSNBC. Again I was listening to Ali Velshi, and on my mind were the questions I'd raised the other day in my first Open Hearts, Open Minds blog. 

Velshi was talking about some aspect of the election when he made the following statement about the purposes of his reporting--maybe of MSNBC's reporting, too, but I'm not sure. I rinsed the soap suds from my hands and ran to get a pen and piece of paper so I could jot down the two purposes he identified, which I believe I captured verbatim: to bear witness, and to hold power to account.

But that clearly wasn't the purpose of what he had been doing with those swing state voters. Some weeks ago when I mentioned how much I was enjoying these segments to a college friend who knows Ali Velshi, she told me with some disappointment--I couldn't tell if she was disappointed or if Velshi was disappointed--that not one voter's mind had been changed as a result of these sessions. I told her that that mattered far less to me than that the voters had treated each other with attentive civility. 

I also told her that just because people didn't change their minds on that day didn't mean that they wouldn't or didn't change their minds later. As my Making Learning Visible and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School colleague Jennifer Hogue often used to ask, "When is learning?" Some students seemed to "get it" or "get something" on the day of we hoped they'd learn it; it clicked for others much later--and we were never quite sure why then or how, even though we used to ask about it. Sometimes it didn't click at all.

So there is journalism that hopes to open minds, to stimulate further thinking, and maybe even to change minds, and some of that journalism is even designed and produced by journalists who generally see themselves as bearing witness and holding power to account. Right before the election, Velshi did a follow-up news story about what he learned over his weeks of interviewing swing state voters in settings where they were able to hear one another speak. The last part of Velshi Across America: What I Learned From Speaking to Voters in 8 Swing States* says an awful lot about the possibility of bridge-building, which may sometimes be even more important than changing minds and votes.

* Velshi, A. (2020, October 31). Velshi Across America: What I learned from speaking to voters in 8 swing states. MSNBC. https://www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/velshi-across-america-what-i-learned-from-speaking-to-voters-in-8-swing-states-95074373941.[Note: all photographs contained here are screen shots of moments in that video.]

Open Hearts, Open Minds: #1: Do We Need Both?

So already, in 2016, I wrote a series of blogs about perspective-taking. At the time, I was wondering about the degree to which a person could actually understand--"take"--another person's perspective, whether it was really possible for someone to walk in, fully inhabit, someone else's shoes.

To understand, really understand how another person walks in the world--sees it, experiences it, makes sense of it--what a challenge! Still, maybe with deep listening and humility we can come to understand "enough" about another person or group's viewpoints to be able to build on that understanding and to do something positive with it.

In the last few weeks, I've been thinking about how America might become a country in which people, through talking about and across their divisions, come to experience themselves as one nation. Consequently, I've also been thinking a lot about open hearts and open minds. Is opening one of them enough? If we open our minds but don't open our hearts, will we be able to talk across those differences in a way that brings us together "enough"? If we open our hearts but don't open our minds, will we have any better success at building those needed bridges? Do open minds lead to open hearts, or vice versa? Or should I not be talking about open hearts and open minds at all--should I be talking about policy instead?

Lately as I've been watching the news on various networks, I've been thinking about its purposes. I think that while the aim of the news has often been to educate viewers about differing perspectives, to inform us of their existence, less often has its aim been to open our minds to those perspectives. This has been especially true when newscasters have intentionally or unintentionally signaled their opinions about those perspectives. 

Despite the fact that most networks routinely share stories of victims and heroes of COVID-19, of hurricanes and tropical storms, of race-based violence, I can't say that I think opening people's hearts is a major aim of most news show. But should the news be responsible for opening my or anybody else's heart? 

Perhaps this question is occurring to me only because I suspect that in these stressful times in which news breaks continually, most Americans spend far more time consuming news than they do immersing themselves in art, music, literature, prayer, or nature--those things they often say open their hearts.

So can we build those needed bridges without opening both hearts and minds? I ask this having said nothing at all about what each "side" might do before the first conversations to assure the other side that it intends to participate in good faith. Still, I'd like to know what your first thoughts are about this.

For the next weeks, I am going to write more and shorter blogs that provide more questions than answers. Their titles will all begin with "Open Hearts, Open Minds." I hope you'll read and respond.

A Post-Election Heads-Up

"Guarded Opening"*

So already, last weekend, when I learned that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had been elected President and Vice President, I, like so many other Americans, sensed a guarded opening, a possible way out of the pressing darkness and despair that have dominated our national psyche for months.

The paintings of my husband Scott Ketcham were relatively fresh in my mind as I first reacted to the news of the election results. Recently, I'd been looking at Scott's updated web site  because I was thinking of writing about his most recent work, even though it will not be on display the weekend before Thanksgiving: because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 4th Floor Artists Association's annual open studios will not be happening this year.

This year, Scott spends as much of his studio time teaching his Massasoit Community College students virtually as he does painting and drawing. Scott has a lot of heads in his studio that he uses not only to teach his students to paint and draw, but to stimulate his own imagination as a figure painter. This might help explain the presence of "extra heads" in a number of his paintings--or not. I'm much more inclined to think of all those heads psychologically than Scott is. He just likes them.

So now that you know about all those heads, it's time to get back to those election results. As I contemplated them with Scott's recent paintings in mind, I found myself identifying with the central figure in "Guarded Opening" above. How did I know her subtle, tentatively optimistic smile suited me? Maybe it was because for the first time in months, my facial muscles had relaxed enough to hold my forehead's worry lines just a little less deeply and firmly in place. Maybe it was because I suddenly felt myself breathe deeply and exhale fully.

That nest-like ring of faces surrounding the central figure in Scott's painting got me thinking about another potential symbol for myself: the bird who labored "carefully but hopelessly" in Louise Glück's "Nest."** In that first rush of post-election relief, I could easily imagine myself as Glück's poet/bird whose "mind grew sharper" as she "peered out" of the nest she'd finally managed to construct late but not never.

And frankly, in the early innings of digesting that election news, all I could manage to do was peer out from that fearful, anxious inner place that was so familiar to me. I spent Saturday afternoon sitting at my dining room table cutting out pictures of birds for a project I might do someday, and listening more than looking at the television screen as it streamed images of euphoric Americans celebrating the Biden-Harris victory in various cities. Eventually, I experienced those first glimmers of feeling that the news was good, not just understanding that the news was good. But I still stayed at the table.

So many people have already written eloquently about their and others' post-election emotions that I'm not fully sure why I'm bothering to add my own voice right now. In the last few days, multiple opinion pieces in The Boston Globe have featured the sober language of lightness and darkness (highlighted in blue in the adjacent photo), which has certainly resonated with me. The final sentence of Adrian Walker's November 9 column especially resonated with me: "We're lighter. For now, that's more than enough." 

And we are lighter. So given that others' words have already resonated with me, what can I add? I guess I'm grappling with some of the questions raised by these pieces. I'm wondering if and when "lighter" will become "light." I'm wondering for how long "lighter" will be light "enough." I'm wondering about the things that continue to keep us concealed in the darkness or weighted down--how similar and different they are for all of us, and to what degree they will continue to shape our outlooks and energy levels. After all, we're still in the midst of a pandemic.

I'm also wondering what Scott's paintings might have to say about those questions. After all, light and dark, heaviness and lightness often manifest in comparison to each other.  And those many heads--each perhaps thinking something different, or perhaps not thinking at all--might be telling us something about how we we navigate the demands of tough, discouraging times, and even how we create them.

"Embrace Your Ancestry"***

For years, I've thought of Scott's multi-headed paintings as representing a struggle between the living and the dead. For example, the adjacent painting, with its gray, monochromatic palette, contrasts strikingly with "Guarded Opening" and its maroons and golds. Called "Embrace Your Ancestry," perhaps satirically, it may--or may not--suggest the burden of legacy rather than the dead's physical exit from the grave in order to claim the living. Whatever is or isn't intended, I have to wonder who's embracing whom--and who's being given the choice of embracing or being embraced. It doesn't exactly look like a fun game of Twister.

 

"Circle of Selves"****

This year, though, I'm seeing these multi-headed paintings differently because of some the titles Scott's given to them--not that he's particularly invested in the titles he assigns. This week, I'm inclined to understand them as representing the many selves that compose each of us. In the adjacent painting "Circle of Selves," the three heads/figures seem restfully, fluidly content and successfully co-existent; subtle greens and reds wrest them from the skeletal possibilities of the heads in "Embrace Your Ancestry."

So with that idea in mind, I begin to imagine my own various selves/heads, all of which think, strive, and speak up: there's the daughter head, the wife head, the friend head, the good-citizen consumer of news head, . . . I could go on. Given my propensity to think a lot--often too much--and to say what's on my mind, my head is full of verbal heads who often contend for space and dominance.

"Cable Stitch"*****

My favorite of all of Scott's multi-headed paintings, though, is "Cable Stitch." Perhaps Scott called it that because the most basic cable design requires six stitches, and there are six heads in this painting. 

This, of course, got me thinking about Skylla, the six-headed monster that ate six of Odysseus' men in The Odyssey. It's good to remember that multi-headed creatures do not always embody beneficence. 

"Cable Stitch" suggests to me another interpretation of all those heads. Maybe rather than representing selves, they represent the consuming problems that fill our heads. Here I am this morning balancing the demands of several "heads"--the head that's angry and worried about Donald Trump's attempts to stay in office, the head that's worrying about taking my dad to a doctor's appointment on what will be his first outing beyond the walls of his senior living community since the pandemic began, the head that promised to draft a fundraising appeal by tomorrow morning--and that's lacking any ideas for how to begin it. Some of these problems are more important than others; some of these are more in my control than others. But they all are taking up headspace.

As I look at the relatively monochromatic group tethered to a central point in "Cable Stitch," I'm reminded of a bunch of unusual balloons or a bouquet of strange flowers. These associations allow me to think of the space, the opening, that would be created if one of these weighty balloons or flowers were to separate or lift away from the others. Those remaining would all have more space, more breathing room; it would ease something, even if it didn't completely change the tensions and dynamics among the group--just like last weekend's election results didn't flick a switch and, with one dose of light, transform the tensions and dynamics that characterize our country.

A Head from Scott's Collection, in Nature

Yes, I think and worry a lot. But thankfully, positive feelings make their way through pretty regularly. Such was the case last Sunday: when I woke up, I had a different kind of energy and optimism than I'd had in weeks. It was as if someone had pulled a twenty-pound bag of flour from my backpack: suddenly, I could walk upright, could actually see the sky rather than the pavement toward which I'd been bent for the last months.

It wasn't that I'd been divested of the worries that are always in the room for me --I still was concerned about the emotional and physical welfare of my elderly parents, whom COVID-19 is preventing me from seeing very often; I still was worrying about several friends who are grieving over the recent deaths of loved ones; I still was concerned about the the direction the national pandemic numbers are heading--and worried that pandemic fatigue might cause all of us to forget to do what we need to do to keep ourselves and one another safe.

But still, something was better. Actually, the first encouraging development had been on election day itself: there had been no violence, confrontation, and death at the polls. The second was on Saturday afternoon: no one had driven a car into a crowd of revelers.

Now it was Sunday morning, and the task of the day wasn't going to have to be to learn to move forward under the weight of further setback and despair. Instead, I woke up early, eager to walk near my favorite salt marsh--and with the first lines of a possible new poem in my head: "There was no blue wave—/Just a muted blue-beige tide."

There's so much that's wrong right now that needs our energy and attention. That's why it's really good news that Biden and Harris won, even if the fact of their election can't create a completely heady feeling (yes, that pun was intended). But like Adrian Walker said, "We're lighter. For now, that's more than enough." And anything that gives us hope and energy is good: we'll need a lot of both in the weeks and years ahead, not to mention plenty of headspace.

* "Guarded Opening": https://www.scottketcham.com/image/171832606472

** Glück, L. (1999). "Nest". In Vita nova (pp. 37-39). New York, NY: Ecco Press. I blogged about this poem a while back: https://soalready.blogspot.com/2019/04/seeking-late-but-not-too-late.html

*** "Embrace Your Ancestry": https://www.scottketcham.com/image/166968266692

**** "Circle of Selves": https://www.scottketcham.com/image/633416427939020800

***** "Cable Stitch": https://www.scottketcham.com/image/171832680042