I won’t be offended if you hurry through the first couple of quite personal paragraphs after the railroad picture, but I’d like you to read carefully my fantasy cure for the gridlock that infects Congress.
Don't expect the photographs to match the writing... Marysville is one of California's oldest and most "American" towns. Located at the confluence of the Feather and Yuba rivers, Marysville is a twin city with Yuba City.
This week I’m in Yuba City, California, where I taught English in the High School from 1957 to 1969 -- with a two-year break for graduate school from 1959 to 1961. In the two-year break from teaching, I attended classes and wrote papers during the day, and worked as a guard at San Quentin Prison at night... and I read and thought and read and thought some more... Of course, I couldn’t read while I was on duty at the prison, but sometimes when duty required standing or sitting alone in a dark tower or on a wall post, I learned to be an active thinker to keep from falling asleep. Having sometimes worked in cell blocks and having managed to stay awake through lonely eight-hour shifts in dark prison places, I am convinced that the San Quentin experience surely informed my work as teacher and administrator every bit as much as those years of graduate study... and, looking back on it, I recognize those years at Yuba City High School as invaluable learning years for me. I owe a lot to this place... to those people who were my students in those years and to my colleagues.
I put out the flags in front of my Sister’s and Brother-in-law’s house in Yuba City on Saturday to begin the Memorial Day Weekend. In addition to the usual military and governmental heroes, I’ve decided to pay homage this year to literary heroes as well. I’m remembering what Steinbeck, for example, taught me... and through his writing what he taught my students at Yuba City High School in the sixties and in all the subsequent schools... about the great migration of economically depressed and distressed people from the Middle Dust Bowl states who poured into California in the 1930s. Some of America’s greatest writers, especially those from the middle of the 19th Century forward, described hardscrabble life in the great Central Valley and the Salinas Valley and in the foothills and mountains of central and Northern California, a very different world, then and now, from the lower third of the state where I live today.
Friday, driving up from San Diego, I listened to Trevor White reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. Wow... I’m tempted to say, the way old men who love literature tend to do (knowing that it can’t be true), that America’s writers like Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Dreiser, Faulkner and many others were the best writers making the best stories the world is likely ever to know. Of course, they developed their craft out of that long history of great writers with whom they shared a clear sense of the importance of literature learned from reading the stories of other writers who lived and reflected on their thinking... and invented stories to describe what life is all about.
I’m wondering if our people in government know American literature at all... like the letter of Chief Seattle (correctly, Seathl) in response to an offer from U.S. Government to buy Indian land (http://www.csun.edu/~vcpsy00h/seattle.htm). If I could make a required reading list for people in Congress, I’d include on it Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. I’d like them to know that Steinbeck, raised an Episcopalian, made clear in what he said and in what he wrote that his spiritual sensibilities were not found in established religion but in nature; and I’d make sure they know that Dreiser’s parents were German Catholic immigrants who lived in abject poverty after they came to America. I’d make sure they learn to recite the homosexual poet, Walt Whitman’s “I hear America Singing...” and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.” I’d require them to know by heart Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” so they’d understand what responsibility goes with being hog butcher to the world. I’d like them to sit, or perhaps stand at attention, and listen all together, Democrats and Republicans, to the music of Aaron Copland and learn by listening to his “Fanfare for the Common Man” to be grateful for simple gifts and to value an Appalachian spring. I’d like them to remember that Copland was the son of conservative Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. I’d introduce them to the American Armenian William Saroyan,born in Fresno, who could teach them that loving American doesn’t mean giving up love and respect for another country (Half of his ashes were buried in California, and the other half in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia).
I’d try to hammer into Congressional heads the importance of recognizing how very long it took in our country to recognize the at-least-equal participation of women in building our nation, and to acknowledge intelligence and wit in their literature and their importance in the processes of local, state and federal government. I’d like them to get reacquainted with Emily Dickinson, that quiet cheerleader for women who choose to stay mostly at home and think and write. I’d require them to write an essay explaining what Louisa May Alcott, Sojourner Truth, Betty Friedan, and Hillary Clinton have in common besides their gender identification. I might follow up with a required essay on why Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin don’t belong in a category with Alcott, Sojourner Truth, Friedan and Clinton. I’d give them a pop quiz every Monday morning, no excuses accepted for absence from the floor... beginning next week with a list of women to identify by naming at least one title: Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickenson, Elaine Showalter, Frances Harper, Louisa May Alcott, Anne Bradstreet, Edith Wharton, Phyillis Wheatley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Fuller, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, Kate Chopin, Sandra Cisneros, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Willa Cather, and Sylvia Plath. I would try to be kind by allowing them with no loss of points to leave two of the women off their list as long as Edith Wharton is not one of them. For anybody who can’t identify Edith Wharton I’d come up with a special detention.
Attempting to solve the perpetual problem of gridlock with this Congress around the need for immigration reform, I’d require each of the members of the House of Representatives and each senator to write sixteen sentences explaining the contribution of each of the following immigrants, one sentence for each: Albert Einstein, Ieoh Ming Pei, Madeleine Albright, John Muir, Joseph Pulitzer, Felix Frankfurter, Hakeem Olajuwon, Marina Navratilova, Subranhmanyan Chandrasekhar, Irving Berlin, Edward M. Bannister, Saint Frances X. Cabrini, “Mother” Mary Harris Jones, Rita M. Rodriquez, David Ho, and Ang Lee.
Thinking again about the great world of stories, I am wondering who were the teachers of the people serving now in the Senate and the House of Representatives and why so many of them seem not to know what it is like to be desperately poor in America. I’m wondering if they know about Emma Lazarus’ poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty... or, indeed, if they know any of the stark, clear literature from the world’s great religions. Could the teachings of Jesus, for example, be any clearer about the importance of taking care of people, especially of those who have great need.
I’d like to organize a field trip for members of Congress to find and study in Washington museums the photographs of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.
After viewing the photographs, we’d end the field trip by going to the White House where we’d ask the First Lady to lead the group through James Agee’s directions for reading Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, the book he wrote in collaboration with Walker Evans to accompany Evans‘ photographs. She’d begin by quoting what Agee said about what he had written. “What I have done is not art, don’t call it art. It is something else again-- perhaps a disease, perhaps a fury, and if you are to understand it, you are to listen to it by putting Beethoven’s Seventh or Schubert’s C-Major Symphony on the phonograph and turn it up loud and then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking.”
Then she’d ask us all to lie on the floor the way we’d been instructed to do when we get around to reading Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, but instead of reading we’d hear Michelle Obama announce that she had asked her husband to come in and read Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” She’d tell us to lie comfortably and quietly, and she’s say that while her husband reads she wants us to hear Samuel Barber’s piano reduction of the choral work which Agee’s poem inspired him to produce. Without fanfare, the President would come in, and while we are all still lying on the floor resting, he would begin to read softly...
Now, dear friend, if you've come this far in this BLOG post, please read the poem out loud.
It has become the time of evening
when people sit on their porches,
rocking gently and talking gently
and watching the street
and the standing up
into their sphere of possession of the trees,
of birds' hung havens, hangers.
People go by; things go by.
A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt;
a loud auto; a quiet auto;
people in pairs, not in a hurry,
scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually,
the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, pasteboard and starched milk,
the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber.
A streetcar raising its iron moan:
stopping, belling and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan
and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past,
the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks;
the iron whine rises on rising speed;
still risen, faints; halts; the faint stinging bell;
rises again, still fainter, fainter, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.
Now is the night one blue dew.
Now is the night one blue dew,
my father has drained,
now he has coiled the hose.
Low on the length of lawns,
a frailing of fire who breathes ...
Parents on porches: rock and rock.
From damp strings morning glories hang their ancient faces.
The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums.
On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts.
We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there ...
They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet,
of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.
The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.
All my people are larger bodies than mine, ...
with voices gentle and meaningless like the voice of sleeping birds.
One is an artist, he is living at home.
One is a musician, she is living at home.
One is my mother who is good to me.
One is my father who is good to me.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth;
and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth,
lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.
May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father,
oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble;
and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed.
Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her:
and those receive me, who quietly treat me,
as one familiar and well-beloved in that home:
but will not, no ,will not, not now, not ever;
but will not ever tell me who I am.
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After a while, we’d all get up and thank the President and Mrs. Obama and then go on about our business of being good, responsible Americans.
