Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
'Til it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
"Big Yellow Taxi"
Joni Mitchell, 1970
He is long dead now, but he still deserves his privacy, so I'll call him Mr. Smith. He was a weathered old mountain man from deep in the coves and hollows of western North Carolina.
He and his wife lived a few miles down a dirt track carved into steep hillsides. At one edge of it, rock faces jumped up so close you could touch them without stretching in your seat. At the other edge, the land dropped sharply to a river bottom far below. The little road was not wide enough for two cars to pass. Shallow turnouts had been scooped out of the hills here and there. If two drivers met, one backed up to the nearest turnout to let the other by.
You walked the last 50 yards or so to the Smiths' place. The slope up to their dooryard was too steep to drive. Their little cinder-block house was tucked against a second slope. Around it, the walls of a small valley swept up and out. I once asked him how much of it they owned. He said everything I could see had been in his family for generations. He called it "my mountain."
Mr. Smith was in his '80s when I knew him, born and reared almost all the way to manhood in the late 19th Century. He knew all the old mountain ways, and still kept many. He knew how to make a toothbrush from a sugarbush branch, and a broom from nothing more than a hardwood tree limb. I suspected that Mr. Smith knew how to make a little liquor, too, but he never said and I never asked.
He had piped a cold mountain spring through the rear wall of his house. It pooled in a broad concrete basin, then flowed out to a creek that bubbled through his front yard. Jars of food stood in the basin, which served as their refrigerator.
The best spot for a barn was split by that creek. Mr. Smith had felled tree trunks across it, and built the barn upon them, straddling the stream.
During his working years, he had farmed the flatter parts of his land. In old age he turned to building houses now and then. That was how I met him. He was putting up a vacation house for a friend of mine. He'd designed it in pencil, on a shirt cardboard that he carried in the bib of his overalls. He built it with only the help of an 18-year-old lad who ferried him to the site and did the heavy lifting.
It was a complete, three-bedroom job with a barn-style, gambrel roof (Mr. Smith called it a "roundin' rafters" roof.) On one end were two floors of living quarters. On the other was a great room open all the way to the roof line. Much of the end wall was covered by a stone fireplace with a massive wooden beam for a mantel. Mr. Smith had fashioned the beam from wood on his land. He had built the fireplace himself from field stone that also came from his land.
I was never sure how well Mr. Smith could read or write. But his gifts with stone and wood were remarkable. He added to my friend's house touches we could never have imagined. The door-latching mechanisms were hand-made of wood in the old-fashioned way. They worked as well as any you could buy. The gutters and downspouts were of wood in the old way, too. And to carry water away from the foundation, he made spillways from slabs of wild stone. Nature could have placed them herself.
In time, I asked Mr. Smith to build a little cottage for me. My friend had recommended me. You had to be recommended to Mr. Smith.
And my friend advised me: The mountain people have their own way about some things. They take pride in doing a proper job of what they're paid to do. But their attitude is that they are working with you, not for you. At some point Mr. Smith will make it clear, with words or some kind of gesture, that this is his view. It will be important for you to respond.
I asked: How will I know when that is happening?
My friend said: You'll know. If you pay attention, you'll know.
Sure enough, one very early morning, Mr. Smith roused me with an insistent knock. He said: I need your help with this ladder.
Still in my pajamas, I helped him carry a ladder down the lane from my unfinished place to my friend's. When we put the ladder down, Mr. Smith looked me in the eye for a conspicuous extra beat and said: Thank you. I'm grateful for your help.
I paid him by the hour. (He kept track on the back side of that shirt cardboard in his bib overalls.) And I began to sense that he spent more time at my site than I was paying him for. When I asked about it, I discovered that he didn't charge me when rain stopped him from working. But neither did he go home. If he thought the rain wouldn't last, he and the helper sat in the cab of their truck, sometimes for hours, waiting to get a little more done before they left for the day.
I asked him to let me pay at least a little something for his hours on my site, even if he wasn't able to work the whole time. He wouldn't hear of it.
When I go to the mountains nowadays, I think of Mr. Smith. I think of that morning of the ladder, when he and I silently agreed that I had bought his time but not him. I think of his refusal to accept pay for idle time, and of learning to understand that the refusal was for his own sake and not for mine. I remember his knowing how to get a living from hard land, and how to make from a length of wood or a mute rock something that did a job and pleased the eye, too. I remember the smile in his eyes when he looked up the slopes of "his mountain," and the warmth in his voice when he described remote spots where the rhododendron blooms were just right and the mountain laurel covered whole hillsides.
When I go to the mountains nowadays, I think of all the craft of life that was in Mr. Smith and is now gone. I'm reminded of what we're covering over with our golf courses and theme parks and bars and boutiques. We are covering not just a landscape but a culture.
We who were priveleged to glimpse it should erect markers. We should declare: Something else was here before. Something worthwhile. Something that mattered.
I hope this counts a little in that direction.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
Lifted Pinkies
The good news is, we discuss public art in my town.
That's also the bad news.
My town is a pretty place, by and large. The streets are clean, the shoulders mowed and trimmed. Plentiful parks are well kept. A widespread tree canopy is valued in civic tradition and protected by local ordinance.
In towns as in people, an essential regard for appearance is a virtue. You and I may differ on particulars. Our standards of fashion, decor and maintenance may not match. But below a certain threshold, a slob is a slob, an eyesore is an eyesore, and a dump is a dump.
With an eye toward maintaining a pleasant community aspect, the government of my town uses a fraction of its tax income to purchase works of art for display in public places. These objects are placed on major street corners, in parks and the medians of boulevards. One interesting set is spread along the right-of-way of a commuter rail line.
Opinions of these selections are, of course, not unanimous. In my own view, some of them are fine indeed, and some look like the runner-up entries in a grammar school craft contest. Eye of the beholder, and all that. Overall, they are a valid investment of public money. They are a nice dash of seasoning in the quality of life hereabouts.
From time to time, new purchases are announced. On these occasions, some taxpayers object to the selections with extra vigor. Then, trouble begins. Then, the culture mavens emerge from their salons to scold the common folk. (In the squall of condescending cliches, one perennial and mystifying favorite is an assertion that "good" art should "provoke." This standard does not distinguish, for me, an experience of good art from an experience of interstate gridlock.)
Let us leave to its perpetrators the odd notion that taxpayers should hot have -- or at least should not express -- opinions about the uses made of their money. Consider instead the proposition that taste is the province of the refined few, who will let the rest of us know what should be admired.
Taste prescribed by others is not taste at all but only conformity. We are allowed to have independent tastes, and in fact we do. They may be refined by experience or education, but they are instilled by neither. Our tastes are part of us.
We all can cite examples that refute elitist stereotypes. Mine include a waterfront laborer whose knowledge and grasp of opera were stunning. One of my favorite paintings was done by an inmate of San Quentin's death row. A Midwestern undertaker wrote a book of essays in some of the most graceful prose I have ever read. ("The Undertaking: Life Studies from The Dismal Trade," by Thomas Lynch).
Such examples hint at something essential in us. We are makers and partakers of patterns and images, of poems and songs, of narratives that seek to explain the way things happen and the way things are. We want to apply from within ourselves some suggestion of order and sense to our existence. We feel that we should, we feel that we can, and from the first time an image of a stag was painted on the wall of a cave, we have always tried.
Others bring to this idea far more than anecdotal evidence. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright is one. In the first pages of his multi-volume look at the concept of God as perceived through the Christian New Testament, he makes an interesting choice of foundation stones to lay down before his readers. He does not begin with theological concepts. He beings with a detailed explication of the nature of storytelling: "Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life. ... Stories ... provide a vital framework for experiencing the world."
On this point Bishop Wright's outlook was shared by American drama critic Walter Kerr. His 1962 book "The Decline of Pleasure" argued that the fine arts had been consigned to second-class citizenship in modern American culture. This he lamented as a fundamental loss. He said that music and art and literature emerge from -- and therefore speak to -- our human nature. If we diminish our regard for them, he said, we permit a part of ourselves to wither.
In this view, Kerr wrote, the highest tastes can never be the province of the few. They are inborn and personal: "For taste is either personal (yours, mine, Henry's) or it does not exist. There is no chemical element in the universe that invariably produces it in a certain solution ... . Taste is never a law. It is always an entirely private love."
So, for my own part, I will go on being glad that the leaders of my town buy us a little adornment from time to time. I will go on hoping they buy more of what I like and less of what I don't. I will cling to the view that beauty belongs to everyone, and that wonderful gems may be cut and polished for us by the ordinary people next door, to wit: a passage from Kerr's book that he attributes to an unnamed columnist in an unnamed, small-town American newspaper:
"Saw three birds abreast, wheeling leisurely in great circles, the movements of six wings synchronized and perfect ... as they momentarily held the morning sun and then winged away into the distance. .. Had I been an ornithologist, I would have identified these creatures on the wing by name, delved into their family tree, and explained something of their habits. Seeing them in the eyes of a weather prophet, I might have announced them as omens of fair weather or of rain and related stories of the past that would prove my predictions. As a philosopher perhaps I would see them as symbols of peace and harmony and would expound at length the examples that nature has set for mankind. Being none of these, I saw them only as three white birds in a morning sun and thought them beautiful."
That's also the bad news.
My town is a pretty place, by and large. The streets are clean, the shoulders mowed and trimmed. Plentiful parks are well kept. A widespread tree canopy is valued in civic tradition and protected by local ordinance.
In towns as in people, an essential regard for appearance is a virtue. You and I may differ on particulars. Our standards of fashion, decor and maintenance may not match. But below a certain threshold, a slob is a slob, an eyesore is an eyesore, and a dump is a dump.
With an eye toward maintaining a pleasant community aspect, the government of my town uses a fraction of its tax income to purchase works of art for display in public places. These objects are placed on major street corners, in parks and the medians of boulevards. One interesting set is spread along the right-of-way of a commuter rail line.
Opinions of these selections are, of course, not unanimous. In my own view, some of them are fine indeed, and some look like the runner-up entries in a grammar school craft contest. Eye of the beholder, and all that. Overall, they are a valid investment of public money. They are a nice dash of seasoning in the quality of life hereabouts.
From time to time, new purchases are announced. On these occasions, some taxpayers object to the selections with extra vigor. Then, trouble begins. Then, the culture mavens emerge from their salons to scold the common folk. (In the squall of condescending cliches, one perennial and mystifying favorite is an assertion that "good" art should "provoke." This standard does not distinguish, for me, an experience of good art from an experience of interstate gridlock.)
Let us leave to its perpetrators the odd notion that taxpayers should hot have -- or at least should not express -- opinions about the uses made of their money. Consider instead the proposition that taste is the province of the refined few, who will let the rest of us know what should be admired.
Taste prescribed by others is not taste at all but only conformity. We are allowed to have independent tastes, and in fact we do. They may be refined by experience or education, but they are instilled by neither. Our tastes are part of us.
We all can cite examples that refute elitist stereotypes. Mine include a waterfront laborer whose knowledge and grasp of opera were stunning. One of my favorite paintings was done by an inmate of San Quentin's death row. A Midwestern undertaker wrote a book of essays in some of the most graceful prose I have ever read. ("The Undertaking: Life Studies from The Dismal Trade," by Thomas Lynch).
Such examples hint at something essential in us. We are makers and partakers of patterns and images, of poems and songs, of narratives that seek to explain the way things happen and the way things are. We want to apply from within ourselves some suggestion of order and sense to our existence. We feel that we should, we feel that we can, and from the first time an image of a stag was painted on the wall of a cave, we have always tried.
Others bring to this idea far more than anecdotal evidence. Anglican theologian N.T. Wright is one. In the first pages of his multi-volume look at the concept of God as perceived through the Christian New Testament, he makes an interesting choice of foundation stones to lay down before his readers. He does not begin with theological concepts. He beings with a detailed explication of the nature of storytelling: "Stories are one of the most basic modes of human life. ... Stories ... provide a vital framework for experiencing the world."
On this point Bishop Wright's outlook was shared by American drama critic Walter Kerr. His 1962 book "The Decline of Pleasure" argued that the fine arts had been consigned to second-class citizenship in modern American culture. This he lamented as a fundamental loss. He said that music and art and literature emerge from -- and therefore speak to -- our human nature. If we diminish our regard for them, he said, we permit a part of ourselves to wither.
In this view, Kerr wrote, the highest tastes can never be the province of the few. They are inborn and personal: "For taste is either personal (yours, mine, Henry's) or it does not exist. There is no chemical element in the universe that invariably produces it in a certain solution ... . Taste is never a law. It is always an entirely private love."
So, for my own part, I will go on being glad that the leaders of my town buy us a little adornment from time to time. I will go on hoping they buy more of what I like and less of what I don't. I will cling to the view that beauty belongs to everyone, and that wonderful gems may be cut and polished for us by the ordinary people next door, to wit: a passage from Kerr's book that he attributes to an unnamed columnist in an unnamed, small-town American newspaper:
"Saw three birds abreast, wheeling leisurely in great circles, the movements of six wings synchronized and perfect ... as they momentarily held the morning sun and then winged away into the distance. .. Had I been an ornithologist, I would have identified these creatures on the wing by name, delved into their family tree, and explained something of their habits. Seeing them in the eyes of a weather prophet, I might have announced them as omens of fair weather or of rain and related stories of the past that would prove my predictions. As a philosopher perhaps I would see them as symbols of peace and harmony and would expound at length the examples that nature has set for mankind. Being none of these, I saw them only as three white birds in a morning sun and thought them beautiful."
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Settling For Bafflegab
Years ago, before the Soviet Union collapsed, a friend of mine worked in Washington for his hometown newspaper. At a diplomatic reception he found himself standing in a corner with a reporter for the official Soviet press. My friend had taken a few extra drinks. Part of their conversation went roughly this way:
My friend: C'mon, Yuri, you've been in our country for a couple of years. Surely you have to admit that our system is better than yours.
Yuri: Noncommittal grunt.
My friend: You've seen our system up close. We have representative government. People can choose their leaders.
Yuri: Mildly irritable grunt.
My friend: C'mon Yuri, how can you possibly say you don't like our system?
Yuri, with a cold glare: If you were honest with yourself about "your system," you would admit that your elected leaders have far more in common with each other than with the people they supposedly represent.
Politicians of every kind have this ethic in common: They are willing to have power over the rest of us, and they are disposed to keep it to themselves and their fellow party members. Thus Yuri would not be surprised by the polarization of today's public affairs. While it rises from cultural and economic tensions that test the public's sense of well being, it is stoked by an ugly struggle for partisan tenure in the driver's seat.
The partisan ethic elevates the interests of political organizations above the interests of the public. And it creates a vocabulary -- an idiom -- that adulterates democratic process.
Idiom is useful in private and public conversation. It helps us make certain kinds of points economically. But with overdoses of the partisan ethic, idiom strays into caricature. Politicians on the right are painted as flint-hearted plutocrats who would gladly grind the faces of the poor. Politicians on the left are called addle-pated do-gooders who like to fund their good works with other people's tax money.
These images cross an important line. They invite disregard and distrust. In this way, electoral and public policy decisions come to be styled as good- guy/bad -guy contests: It is not necessary for us to do the work of making informed decisions. We need only give power to the folks in the white hats.
The notion that our nation's options can be so simple is silly on its face. Likewise the notion that this political party or that one has transcended the limits of human nature and can be relied upon, ipso facto, to Do The Right Thing.
The selfish temptations of power touch every ideology. In political parties they excite the institutional instinct for self-perpetuation. They can carry partisan careerists and true believers to destructive extremes, as in today's behavior by one hot-eyed faction of Congressional Republicans. (Adherents of honorable Republican traditions can only cringe, and shelter in the maxim that an idea is not responsible for everyone who claims to believe it.) Playing to one angry segment of the electorate, these toughs commandeer the people's legislature to make their own private war against a duly elected Democratic president. Abetted by a blinkered and inept Republican leadership, they have dragged the Congress of the United States into historic disrepute.
Extremists do not last in American public life. In due time, those now plaguing Congress will be curbed or replaced. Of greater concern for the long term is a chronic, cliche-driven inattention to the realities of our national affairs.
Partisans on the right inveigh against big, expensive, intrusive government. And wariness on this score is warranted.
But the favorite cliches of the right to not acknowledge that truly limited government is long gone. It would no longer be sufficient. The task of running this country is too complex. The dangers afoot in the world are too great. American government is big, and it's going to stay big no matter who's in charge -- witness the record of several Republican presidents who rank high among modern architects of huge government enterprise. The enduring question for our country is not whether government should be big or small. The question is, to what uses should big government be put?
In this connection, partisans on the left call upon us to do a better job with social equity. And well they should. The inequities that persist even yet in this prosperous country are not morally or politically tenable.
But the favorite cliches of the left do not forthrightly own one of their necessary methods: empowering government to take something that belongs to you and give it to me. Nor do they remind us that this power, once given, remains in place to be used in the discretion of the unknowns who will one day succeed the incumbents of the moment. Nor do they squarely face the truth of charges that government programs are inherently vulnerable to waste and corruption.
With rhetoric that advertises false choices and disguises real ones, politicians invite charges of cynicism. Clearly, some of them are guilty. They treat politics entirely as a game of appearances. They aim to succeed by glad-handing the electorate and tricking up new costumes for a single message: Trust me. You can't trust the others, but you can trust me.
If we rest with charges of cynicism, however, we merely join those who traffic in simplistic formulations. A conspiracy theory won't do. Not all politicians are cynical.. Other factors combine to fill our national affairs with partisan sloganeering -- language that is not meant to illuminate choices but only to persuade voters to take sides.
One factor is public indifference. Most people don't regularly vote. Among those who do, not a few vote out of ignorance or prejudice. Earnest politicians who might want to get beyond slogans face a huge obstacle: At any given moment, most of the electorate isn't listening.
I can't render public service if I can't get elected. I can't get elected if I can't get you to vote for the ideas I represent. I can't get you to vote for me if I can't get your attention. And to get your attention in today's America, I need the vivid phrase, the colorful image, the sound bite and the photo op. Nothing else reliably works. A sorry expedient becomes the norm.
The special tensions of the moment are circumstantial: an historic economic swoon; sea changes in the demographics of the population; the newly inescapable closeness of the world community.
These circumstances, and our experience of them, will settle. The chronic failure of better conversation about our national priorities is a deeper thing, and worrisome.
My friend: C'mon, Yuri, you've been in our country for a couple of years. Surely you have to admit that our system is better than yours.
Yuri: Noncommittal grunt.
My friend: You've seen our system up close. We have representative government. People can choose their leaders.
Yuri: Mildly irritable grunt.
My friend: C'mon Yuri, how can you possibly say you don't like our system?
Yuri, with a cold glare: If you were honest with yourself about "your system," you would admit that your elected leaders have far more in common with each other than with the people they supposedly represent.
Politicians of every kind have this ethic in common: They are willing to have power over the rest of us, and they are disposed to keep it to themselves and their fellow party members. Thus Yuri would not be surprised by the polarization of today's public affairs. While it rises from cultural and economic tensions that test the public's sense of well being, it is stoked by an ugly struggle for partisan tenure in the driver's seat.
The partisan ethic elevates the interests of political organizations above the interests of the public. And it creates a vocabulary -- an idiom -- that adulterates democratic process.
Idiom is useful in private and public conversation. It helps us make certain kinds of points economically. But with overdoses of the partisan ethic, idiom strays into caricature. Politicians on the right are painted as flint-hearted plutocrats who would gladly grind the faces of the poor. Politicians on the left are called addle-pated do-gooders who like to fund their good works with other people's tax money.
These images cross an important line. They invite disregard and distrust. In this way, electoral and public policy decisions come to be styled as good- guy/bad -guy contests: It is not necessary for us to do the work of making informed decisions. We need only give power to the folks in the white hats.
The notion that our nation's options can be so simple is silly on its face. Likewise the notion that this political party or that one has transcended the limits of human nature and can be relied upon, ipso facto, to Do The Right Thing.
The selfish temptations of power touch every ideology. In political parties they excite the institutional instinct for self-perpetuation. They can carry partisan careerists and true believers to destructive extremes, as in today's behavior by one hot-eyed faction of Congressional Republicans. (Adherents of honorable Republican traditions can only cringe, and shelter in the maxim that an idea is not responsible for everyone who claims to believe it.) Playing to one angry segment of the electorate, these toughs commandeer the people's legislature to make their own private war against a duly elected Democratic president. Abetted by a blinkered and inept Republican leadership, they have dragged the Congress of the United States into historic disrepute.
Extremists do not last in American public life. In due time, those now plaguing Congress will be curbed or replaced. Of greater concern for the long term is a chronic, cliche-driven inattention to the realities of our national affairs.
Partisans on the right inveigh against big, expensive, intrusive government. And wariness on this score is warranted.
But the favorite cliches of the right to not acknowledge that truly limited government is long gone. It would no longer be sufficient. The task of running this country is too complex. The dangers afoot in the world are too great. American government is big, and it's going to stay big no matter who's in charge -- witness the record of several Republican presidents who rank high among modern architects of huge government enterprise. The enduring question for our country is not whether government should be big or small. The question is, to what uses should big government be put?
In this connection, partisans on the left call upon us to do a better job with social equity. And well they should. The inequities that persist even yet in this prosperous country are not morally or politically tenable.
But the favorite cliches of the left do not forthrightly own one of their necessary methods: empowering government to take something that belongs to you and give it to me. Nor do they remind us that this power, once given, remains in place to be used in the discretion of the unknowns who will one day succeed the incumbents of the moment. Nor do they squarely face the truth of charges that government programs are inherently vulnerable to waste and corruption.
With rhetoric that advertises false choices and disguises real ones, politicians invite charges of cynicism. Clearly, some of them are guilty. They treat politics entirely as a game of appearances. They aim to succeed by glad-handing the electorate and tricking up new costumes for a single message: Trust me. You can't trust the others, but you can trust me.
If we rest with charges of cynicism, however, we merely join those who traffic in simplistic formulations. A conspiracy theory won't do. Not all politicians are cynical.. Other factors combine to fill our national affairs with partisan sloganeering -- language that is not meant to illuminate choices but only to persuade voters to take sides.
One factor is public indifference. Most people don't regularly vote. Among those who do, not a few vote out of ignorance or prejudice. Earnest politicians who might want to get beyond slogans face a huge obstacle: At any given moment, most of the electorate isn't listening.
I can't render public service if I can't get elected. I can't get elected if I can't get you to vote for the ideas I represent. I can't get you to vote for me if I can't get your attention. And to get your attention in today's America, I need the vivid phrase, the colorful image, the sound bite and the photo op. Nothing else reliably works. A sorry expedient becomes the norm.
The special tensions of the moment are circumstantial: an historic economic swoon; sea changes in the demographics of the population; the newly inescapable closeness of the world community.
These circumstances, and our experience of them, will settle. The chronic failure of better conversation about our national priorities is a deeper thing, and worrisome.
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