“You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

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          The late Professor Michael S. Reynolds, a Hemingway scholar who seemed to metamorphose into the writer along the arduous path of composing five volumes of biography, once told my American Lit' classmates and me, “There is no such thing as truth.” “Cool,” I said to myself, “This dude’s so cool.” He confessed in the same lecture that he was feeling particularly good that evening because his anti-depressants were working. I just wanted to hug the guy! Then, he shared a story from his Hemingway research days when several of his colleagues had convened with him along the Michigan shoreline, an area that acts as the setting for a number of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. “Adams was right here,” one of them said excitedly. The group apparently nodded in agreement and shared enthusiasm, except Professor Reynolds. “No, my friends,” he contradicted. “What you’re referring to occurs on page forty-nine.”

            When you enter the main library at Georgetown University, the Latin words pictured above greet you. The school is one of several Jesuit universities around the country, and the Jesuits take their truth about as seriously as one can. In fact, the famous protesting priest from the ‘60s, Daniel Berrigan, who co-founded the Plowshares Movement and was on the FBI’s most wanted list with his priest brother, Philip, is a Jesuit, as is Father John Dear, another proud, vocal, and busy peace activist. The Berrigans used civil disobedience, the bullhorn, and the pen to tell the world that the Vietnam War was wrong, and J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like it.

            So, what is this truth that sets you free? Most Christians, I imagine, would say generally that Jesus (as noted by John, 8:32, in the Christian New Testament) refers to the freedom gained by accepting him as one’s savior. The words officially posted over the gateway to the university library, however, must refer to any truth gained from within the bound contents stacked throughout the building, from Marxism to evolution to neuroscience to Balzac. Or maybe knowing truth is like what Supreme Court Justice Stewart famously said about pornography, that he couldn’t define it, but he knew it when he saw it. When I speak with friends of freedom gained from truth, I usually mean hearing what your body, your true self, tells you. If you quake at the thought of some proposed plan for your future, and you know it isn’t simply nervousness but dread, that’s truth. You may not like what that truth means for your future, but eventually, you enjoy the acceptance of it and feel its freedom. The body knows its nature. Then, of course, there’s the Keatsian version of truth, that truth is beauty. And vice versa. And it’s all we need to know.

            It seems Professor Reynolds spoke the truth.

Illustrated Man

In the prologue of Ray Bradbury’s famous collection of stories, The Illustrated Man (1951), a stranger covered in tattoos meets our narrator, a man taking a “walking tour of Wisconsin.” The tattooed man explains that his tattoos predict the future, and that at night, the figures change to reveal at times a violent death ahead for someone the Illustrated man has recently met. In fact, anyone who sits with him long enough will see his or her fate unfold on the man’s skin. And people don’t like it, whatever it is that awaits them. They see themselves and their future in the shifting ink and either flee or demand that the Illustrated man leave immediately.

Bradbury’s painted character addresses the nature of fate, the way things are, a common subject even among the ancients like Sophocles in Oedipus the King (429 BCE) or the Roman Epicurean, Lucretius. But is this the nature of tattoos? Do they tell us who we are or what we will be? Does a butterfly shifting with each stride along the curve of someone’s spine say who that person is? What about a flaming skull burning down that man’s shoulder? A tattoo artist I knew in Raleigh many years ago received classical training in the arts. His work was exceptionally detailed and nuanced, and he refused service to the random fraternity brother who wanted a Yosemite Sam tattoo. I’m not sure if doing that kind of artwork were beneath the artist, or he guessed the brother would regret getting Sam as a permanent mark (pretty sure it was the former), but he had high standards. Another artist I know has ink on both sides of her head, including ancient text along her face. I don’t know her well, but she seems to be a kind, genuine, and wise person. She tells me of moms uttering words of horror when they see her. I imagine maternal arms wrapping and pulling gawking children close to maternal breasts. That tattooed woman must be wicked, I hear them saying.

But hey, I guess that’s just the way things are.

   

Maternal Artifact

       
      The machine was small like a toy version of an adult-sized Singer, but the black iron and tarnished steel felt heavy. Its market back in the late 1920s and early ‘30s might have been young girls with little hands who wanted to sew like their mothers, but the machine functioned properly then as it did now, if anyone by chance wanted to sew using a miniature Singer with a hand crank. The base had holes in it, though, so the sewer could bolt the apparatus fast to a wooden tabletop. I imagined my mother as a precocious child leaning over the thing, tongue stuck out the corner of her pursed lips, hair trimmed into a Prince Valiant. She was stitching together small, colored pieces of fabric, expertly crafting outfits for her dolls, the needle head plunging through, down and up, repeatedly and menacingly. The mechanism squeaked slightly with each cycle. Gold letters of the brand and of the official Singer seal proudly said Americana.
       It occurred to me that my mother probably enjoyed her sewing machine as an escape from her mother, not to emulate her. “Granny” we called her mother when I was a youth, and I remember visiting her in Charlotte, North Carolina only once or twice. She had treated my mom horribly with a regular stream of admonishments, verbal slaps apparently born from an acute personal bitterness. My mother’s father had been a successful businessman who owned one of the first cars in Charlotte. One night on a business trip he suffered an attack of appendicitis, and a drunk surgeon stitched my grandfather’s innards into his wound after the emergency operation. He died a year later. That was 1926, and my mother was six years old.
       My mother attended Queens College in Charlotte when she was of age but dropped out to work full time at The Charlotte News as a feature writer. She took bi-plane rides, gigged at night for frogs, escorted Eleanor Roosevelt twice through the city’s projects, and wrote articles on all of her adventures. She was a hit. Then, the war brought a handsome army officer to town whom she married after a month-long courtship and began her life as an army wife and mother.
       Years later, the fifth of five children, I walked alongside my mom through one of those new, gargantuan stores that sold and smelled of everything from shotguns to allergy meds to veggie patties to finely crafted clothes made in China, and she suddenly confessed into a temporary silence as we leisurely walked along, “I always wanted to be a dancer.” To me, she was June Allyson and Claudette Colbert, but a dancer? It never occurred to me. My shoulders slumped forward a little. I felt like an accomplice in the crime of stealing her dream, and I began to wonder how many compromises she had made throughout her life.
       I placed the little sewing machine carefully back on the bookshelf, the sturdy tool now relegated to curious bookend. We were gathered, my siblings and I, in the den of our folks’ home after my mother had joined my father in the ground. It was time to see what artifacts of their lives wound up in whose care. I stared at the small machine from my mother’s youthful southern days. I saw a technology that still worked, if anyone took the trouble.

Lions, Tigers, Bears...and Humans!

Polar bears, as many of us know, are the largest of the bears, males weighing in sometimes at 1,000 to 1,500 lbs. Big! (Imagine one next to your 10-lb. cat or 60-lb. lab.) We know them mostly from endangered species campaigns and as a mascot for Coca-Cola, gloriously white, fuzzy, and charming. Once, I had a similar experience as the green-shirted boy above. I was in the Columbia (South Carolina) zoo in the late Fall -- picture grey skies and hardly a customer wandering the grounds. My friend and I strolled down steps into an underground tunnel and viewing chamber, one wall made of three sections of 8-ft tall and several inches thick Plexiglas. We peered into the blue-watered world of the resident polar bear, and he peered back at us through the giant windows. I placed my hand flush on the transparent wall, and the bear extended his giant paw against mine and held it there. I was astonished! And then, the great white swimmer suddenly scrambled to the surface to suck down a fresh batch of air and just as quickly returned to again place his paw against my friendly hand. Again, the bear swam up and plunged down, and again. Finally, my friend and I decided to go. I left reluctantly and watched the bear watch us as we walked away, a sad and incredulous expression on his broad face. Or, maybe I was projecting. Still, what was that all about? Emerson explains, and rightly so, that Nature would just as soon drown us as stroke us, and if anyone has seen Grizzly Man, she knows that bears see us the same way, basically as something to be ignored or eaten. So, what about this apparently common behavior of reaching for a human hand to paw-high-5 with and connect to its owner? Is it the zoo environment? Are we visitors temporary, surrogate handlers? Possible bearers (sorry) of food? Or is there some mammalian bond borne by our DNA and consequently, our aura? I doubt it, but it's fun to think about.      

My Friend, Wordsworth

The naming of my blog was influenced by a quotation from William Wordsworth (1770-1850): "Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart." Just, uh, for full disclosure.

Back to Nature

On the way to Kenyon College awhile back, I passed this old school house in rural Ohio. I wonder where the students are now, the ones that would have been sitting stiffly on hard wooden desk-seats here, and the ones who graduated many school years ago? This area is farm and Amish country, a pastoral gem. I imagine there's a brick and glass county school somewhere nearby, or maybe not so close by. Either way, one day decades ago, the students and teachers here got up and walked out, leaving their old place of learning for Nature to consume. The former pupils, who may have felt a ruler across young knuckles or pigtails dipped in inkwells or the pride of spelling and math success, now reside all across the state, I imagine, maybe even the country and world. One might be a governor, another homeless, and still another about to be a grandmother. Or maybe they're all as lifeless as their old school. Emerson would have called this building Art, the natural world molded into a structure by human hands. As it came from nature, so it returns.