How to say a year . . .

To sum up a year is an impossible thing. This year has brought us joyous joys and heart-rending sorrows and the  host of ordinary, nondescript days that have stitched them together.

So I will let the words of others capture the spirit of this year for us. And because it is poetry most of all that has the power to compress and crystallize and and illuminate human experience, these words come in the form of three poems.

We lost our last two old dogs this year, in quick succession as the nights grew longer at the tail end of the year. From his volume Aimless Love (Random House, 2013) former poet-laureate Billy Collins offers us "A Dog on its Master:"

As young as I look,
I am growing older faster than he,
seven to one
is the ratio they tend to say.

Whatever the number,
I will pass him one day
and take the lead
the way I do on our walks in the woods.

And if this ever manages
to cross his mind,
it would be the sweetest
shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass.

(to hear Collins read this poem, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVc10aF7_gw

And I always remember the words of Martin Luther, incised on the tombstone for a dog named Spritz in a tiny German graveyard.

"Fear not, Little Dog, for in Heaven you shall have a tail of gold"

We also celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, with good food, glorious performances of Shakespeare's comedies of mis-aligned lovers, Love's Labours Lost and Much Ado about Nothing, and time spent on 'the remembrance of things past.'

Young poets Sarah Kay and Phil Kay (both b. 1988) are with others co-founders of Project V.O.I.C.E, which "uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate, and inspire," motivating young people to find their own voices and to share the stories of their lives. (See the Project V.O.I.C.E. website at http://www.projectvoice.co/project-voice-our-program and Sarah Kay's TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live)

Their own poetry gets something of the serendipity of love, its fragility and its strength. This, the last stanzas of  Sarah and Phil Kay's long poem "When Love Arrives"


Love is not who you were expecting, love is not who you can predict.
Maybe love is in New York City, already asleep;
You are in California, Australia, wide awake.
Maybe love is always in the wrong time zone.
Maybe love is not ready for you.
Maybe you are not ready for love.
Maybe love just isn’t the marrying type.
Maybe the next time you see love is twenty years after the divorce, love is older now, but just as beautiful as you remembered.
Maybe love is only there for a month.
Maybe love is there for every firework, every birthday party, every hospital visit.
Maybe love stays -- maybe love can’t.
Maybe love shouldn’t.

Love arrives exactly when love is supposed to,
And love leaves exactly when love must.
When love arrives, say, “Welcome. Make yourself comfortable.”
If love leaves, ask her to leave the door open behind her.
Turn off the music, listen to the quiet, whisper,
“Thank you for stopping by.”

In October Vermont poet-laureate and Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Galway Kinnell died (1927-2014). His work combines a love of nature, the destructiveness of cruelty and indifference, and a spare unwavering gaze toward the deepest human relationships. Our lives this year have been filled with books and authors and words old and new, and from his 1990 collection When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone, Kinnell's poem "Oatmeal" captures some of the delight we have found in our long-time literary companions:


I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary

companion. 

Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal -- porridge,
as he called it -- with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him: due to its glutinous
texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness
to disintigrate, oatmeal must never be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion,
and that he himself had,enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund
Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
"Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it -- those were his words -- "Oi 'ad
a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his
porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through
a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a
Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay
itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move
forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas
of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came
to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him -- drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
furrows, muttering -- and it occurs to me:.
maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and
simultaneously gummy and crumbly,
and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.


So that is our year in three poems. As I write this, I hear of the death of Joe Cocker (1944-2014), whose gritty voice (someone said he was sure that Cocker gargled gravel every morning) was for many of us of the Woodstock Generation the sound that in an instant could bring so many memories flooding back.

And, like Cocker, we too "get by with a little help from our friends," this year and every year.

And for each and every one of those friends, at this the darkest time of the year, we are truly and everlastingly grateful.

Radio Days

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a radio junkie. I have been a radio-lover since the 1950s, hooked for life by the first radio I can remember: a 1938 Zenith console which lived in an alcove in the house in which I grew up. To me it was a box of wonders. A flying carpet. In addition to a regular AM band, it also had multiple long-wave bands, each one designated by a faraway and exotic place-name: Moscow, Jakarta, Paris, Havana, London, Lisbon.

From about the time I was 8 years old, I was a sort of  latchkey kid. And upon arriving home to the empty house, I would grab a glass of milk and then I'd park myself in front of the Zenith. Fiddling with the dial, I would catch snatches of foreign languages on the long-wave bands until the time would come to tune in to the radio version of The Guiding Light, which came on each day just before my parents arrived home from work. This peek into the adult world in Selby Flats, California was both exhilarating and terrifying. That world, too, was a foreign country.

Even after the first television appeared in our house, I continued to be drawn to the radio. I would have completely agreed with the child who, when asked which she liked better, radio or television, answered, "Radio, because the pictures are better."

But before long, my radio-life would be transformed, because in 1957 I was given my first transistor radio, a Raytheon 8-TR-1. For the first time I could carry my radio-world around with me and, much more importantly, I could listen to the radio in bed, which has been unfailing my habit for nearly 6 decades now.

At every significant historical moment, it has been the radio that has brought me the news: the death of John F. Kennedy, routed from the office radio through the intercom system into my junior high school classroom; the death of Bobby Kennedy while driving from Massachusetts to Detroit;  the release of Nelson Mandela from Robben Island prison broadcast by the BBC to my table radio in Cambridge, England; the attack on the World Trade Center, heard through a sleepy haze first thing in the morning on the small Sony radio that lived under my bed-pillow in Fort Worth, Texas. And as I write this, National Public Radio is being streamed through my computer, and I am hearing about run-off elections, roller derby tournaments, newly-published novels, and monks in Tibet. As it always has been for me, the radio is a box of wonders, even when the box has become something else entirely.

Very few of us, I think, have much understanding of how the essential devices in our lives actually work, and it is no different for me with radio. My friend Howard Stone, an ardent collector of old radios and student of radio technology (http://www.stonevintageradio.com), seems to comprehend it all thoroughly, and has tried to explain it to me several times. Howard especially knows all about Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the inventor and engineer who worked tirelessly on long-distance radio transmission. For this work, Marconi was awarded the Noble Prize in 1909 (with Ferdinand Braun), "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."

It was Marconi who developed the system of antennas and receivers that were the underpinnings of wireless radio transmissions, who sent the first ever wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean, who developed radio systems for ships at sea, making travel by ship a much safer prospect that it had ever been, and it was Marconi who broadcast the first radio entertainment program.

With all of this to his credit, Marconi should be a genuine hero to me, given the impact of his work on the past 60 years of my daily life. But sadly, he presents something of a problem: it seems that the great man was a bit of a villian. He was active in the Italian Fascist movement and a member of its Grand Council (Mussolini was the best man at his wedding), he supported Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) during which the Italians bombed Red Cross field hospitals and used poison gas on civilians. (For more on Marconi the Fascist, see Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy [Cornell, 1997]).

Marconi was also an ardent anti-Semite who blocked Jewish applicants from joining the Royal Academy of Italy, and was involved in  a series of fairly shady business ventures. Lest we think that this was just a matter of intellectual 'compartmentalization,' Marconi's radio work and his politics were clearly and inextricably linked: he often argued that the fervor with which one pursued the scientific enterprise should have the same intensity with which one pursued the Fascist enterprise.

So what do we do with our tarnished heroes? Of course this is not only our problem: it was a problem for the Greek tragedians, for those whose stories underlay all the world's Sacred Scriptures, for Shakespeare, for Cervantes, for Dickens, and it continues to be a problem for all the truly great creators of complex characters in literature, on stage, and on film and television. (Doc Martin, House, and Doctor Who all come to mind.) Much as we would like it to be different, the perfect hero is just not a very interesting hero.

But is there a tipping point? Is there a point at which our hero causes so much harm to others that any positive accomplishment is rendered null and void? When is the wounded-healer too wounded to heal? When is the tarnished hero too tarnished to shine?

Of course these are the questions that shape our lives, and sorting them out is our life's work. Conflict, ambiguity, uncertainty are necessary to that grown-up world that I glimpsed as a child in The Guiding Light. Our grown-up world is a world where the good characters are good (most but not all of the time) and the bad characters are bad (most but not all of the time), and the task of the whole and sane person is to negotiate all of this intelligently and fairly. Because to fail in this task puts so much at risk: our personal relationships, our politics, our interfaith and international relations, the future well-being of our planet.

So perhaps we must look upon Marconi as the "patron saint" of the Modern World: so many good things for which we must be ever-grateful, and so many dreadful things which we justly condemn. In himself, Marconi represents the modern predicament. And to find a way of allowing complexity and ambiguity to be what it is, without either simplifying it out of existence on the one hand, or collapsing it into a one-dimensional cartoon on the other, is the main challenge of being alive in the 21st century.

So: Salute, Marconi! (And shame on you.)