Monday, September 30, 2002

Today's text belongs to Ashley Montagu, who gave a talk at a conference the North Dakota Humanities Council had with its sister organization back in the early 1970s. I sat with him over dinner — the conference was on coal development, and I'm not exactly sure why we brought in Ashley Montagu, but he was great. He told me that the secret of successful speakng was to understand that the audience was rooting for you — that everyone wanted a speaker to succeed. That is neither here nor there — Montagu did once say, "The idea is to die young as late as possible." That, I'd say, is pretty hard to disagree with.

More about Montagu another time, perhaps — but on this last day of September 2002, I want to consider haunting melodies that make sense of words, which, alone, wouldn't offer much.

My nomination for the most haunting melody, one that tugs with tension and undergirds the words with gut-wrenching awareness of the fleeting nature of time, of youth, and of undaunted vigor, is one called simply "Hymn," the final cut on a 1975 album by Janis Ian, Aftertones. The other day, I noted an old Janis Ian Internet auction site — listing item 191:

BEGIN DESCRIPTION:
HYMN (AFTERTONES): Annotated session lyric from vocal date with Odetta & Phoebe Snow, with handwritten chart with old title "Time and the River" and handwritten bass part; 1975. With Aftertones CD. I wrote "Hymn" for others to sing, hoping audiences would sing back the harmonies to me. Unfortunately it came out a little too long, a little too slow for that. Still, this session was one of the thrills of my life, working with two great singers. The parts were hard, and the ladies did great.
END CITATION

Janis has her own extensive web site, of course — find it here. And, she's 50 and some. But I digress — the haunting tune. The voices, in order of appearance, are Janis Ian & Claire Bay, Odetta, V. Martin Fink, and Brooks Arthur. The obligator solo in the chorus is by Phoebe Snow.

And here are the words--

When we grow old
and love grows cold
and time runs down
like a river
that calls us home

The eyes grow dim
the light grown thin
and time will
end here forever
Long time gone

Then time and the river
must stop in their tracks
or roll on forever
There's no turning back
I've waited too long
to be left here like this
Long time gone

Then weep no more
The heart is pure
These hands are sure
like a river
that clings to shore

The love we learn
The love we burn
A love that burns
in the darkness
will weep no more

Dreams die young

Sunday, September 29, 2002

Esther Mackintosh wrote me a great note about her father the other day. He was a farmer - as was mine - and Esther's father had memorized a good deal of poetry so that he could always have company as he slopped the hogs, milked the cows, and went about the daily routine on one of those farms like I grew up on - a little of everything - "diversified," I learned one day in 4-H. I don't know how it was for Esther's family, but what went on in North Dakota west of the Missouri had more to do with survival and making maximum use of too-little land where it didn't rain enough. So, we grew a bit of wheat for cash, but mostly feed grains (barley and oats), a bit of corn, and alfalfa or sweet clover. We milked cows, separated the milk from the cream, fed hogs ground barley and skim milk, kept chickens, and made do from cream check to cream check for the few necessities - and paid the bigger bills by selling the hogs and the wheat - but, of course, you could never depend upon the wheat. Nor could you depend on a price for anything you sold, but that's an old North Dakota story, where there's high hopes for this next-to-the-last-day of September. We had a delegation of farmers and political leaders in Cuba this past week. Castro stopped by and ate some pasta, had lunch with North Dakotans and praised them for our leading high-school graduation rate and the high percentage of high school students who go on, and bought some peas. There's also a chance we'll be selling them seed potatoes again, as we did before the Revolution. If the visiting farmers and politicians talked about the what poetry and music North Dakotans enjoy, it didn't make the news.

​Esther Mackintosh is Vice-President of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, the organization created a quarter century ago to help those of us who work in public humanities, especially the volunteer citizen members of boards, learn from each other. We have also come together in order to lean on Congress from time to time in order to continue the national commitment to the life of the mind and spirit. The leadership of the Federation includes Gail Leftwich, who serves as President, and Jamie Doggett, a Montana rancher who serves as the Chair of the Board of the Federation. I count all as kola, friends - and more, they are indeed fellow travellers, committed to nothing less than a grand national revolution, a nation that both subscribes to and practices the ideal of the establishment of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the mid 1960s, to wit, "The humanities belong to all the people of the United States." Just how much Esther, Gail & Jamie think about and work for this end came in wonderful notes this past week.

They would have nothing less than the best of what some fifty-five states and territories do with a few federal dollars - and at our best, we in state humanities councils bring together citizens like Esther's father to talk about what the poems they recite while mucking out the hog barn mean, what they say about life worth living or death with dignity - the big humanities questions.

I thought about Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet, "On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven," the other day when I was traveling back and forth in a CT scanner getting mapped for radiation - "blued and tattooed" in preparation for daily treatments. I thought about how great it would be if they had some great music in the place - or a way to play a CD one brought in so one could listen while getting the chemo or radiation. Seems to me that it might make those daily does a bit easier to take if one could hear a rousing rendition of the choral finish to Beethoven's Ninth, for example.

It took a long time for the academy to recognize Millay - in fact, she was long gone before she got into most anthologies. She still isn't in many of the snootier ones. Born in 1892, she was gone a couple of years before her sixtieth birthday - 1950. Her poetry is online in many places on the Internet - including one of my favorite places to visit: click here for the home of the Academy of American Poets. Here's Millay's sonnet on music -

Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease!
Reject me not into the world again.
With you alone is excellence and peace,
Mankind made plausible, his purpose plain.
Enchanted in your air benign and shrewd,
With limbs a-sprawl and empty faces pale,
The spiteful and the stingy and the rude
Sleep like the scullions in the fary-tale.
This moment is the best the world can give:
The tranquil blossom on the tortured stem.
Reject me not, sweet sounds; oh, let me live,
Till Doom espy my towers and scatter them,
A city spell-bound under the aging sun.
Music my rampart, and my only one.

Well, Edna, music is indeed a rampart. Perhaps not the only one, but a great one. 'Twas once something of a rage to have famous folks bring their favorite music to programs entitled some variation of "Desert Island" - if you knew you were going to be stranded on a desert island, and you could bring but five albums (CDs, whatever), what would they be? Why?

I would have to have some Beethoven - it would have to be the Ninth. Beethoven finally finished it in 1824 - but that was after 25 years of thinking about how to set Schiller's "Ode to Joy" to music. God help me, when the chorus finally breaks through with the full song, my spirit soars -

Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Joy, fair spark of the gods, ... ...
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Be embraced, Millions!
Diesen Kuss der ganzen Welt!
Take this kiss for all the world!
Brüder über'm Sternenzelt
Brothers, surely a loving Father
Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Dwells above the canopy of stars.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Do you sink before him, Millions?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
World, do you sense your Creator?
Such'ihn über'm Sternenzelt!
Seek him then beyond the stars!
Über Sternen muss er wohnen.
He must dwell beyond the stars.

So, kola, what music would you take with you to the desert island - why?

If you've a mind to, listen to the last four minutes of Beethoven's 9th. It brings tears to my eyes and a sweet swelling to my chest every time I hear it.

'Tis small wonder that Debussy said of the work — please note, cause this may well contain the most exquisite praise ever offered a fellow artist (it will be in quotes):
“It is the most triumphant example of the molding of an idea to the preconceived form; at each leap forward there is a new delight, without either effort or appearance of repetition; the magical ​blossoming, so to speak, of a tree whose leaves burst forth simultaneously. Nothing is superfluous in this stupendous work."

Think I'll do a greeting card along those lines — how about one for college graduates: "May your life's work be stupendous but never superfluous."

Friday, September 27th, 2002

​Thank you, all you dear friends who have been calling and writing - and thank you for taking time to read what, I fear, may almost approach the turgid, at times - but, hey, these are somewhat "titty chimes," so to speak.

The past day or two I've had another look at Philippe Régis de Trobriand's Military Life in Dakota. His is the text for today - with a few others. About fifty years old when he came up the Missouri in 1867 to serve on the Dakota military frontier, the French-born Trobriand spent a couple of years at Fort Stevenson, located where Garrison, North Dakota, is today. Garrison is home of a big plastic walleye at the entrance to a fine park, an annual Dickens Christmas celebration, and a web press - BHG - that prints many of the newspapers for towns in central North Dakota. Just off the eastern edge of Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, on the northern shore of Lake Sakakawea behind Garrison Dam, Garrison didn't make very much of the 1860s fort that sat between Fort Berthold to the west and Fort Totten (at Devils Lake) to the east in the past, but they there's going to be a new interpretive center in a replica of a guard house at the site - well as close as they can get - the original fort is under water.

Trobriand had served in the Civil War. He became a United States citizen in 1861 when he joined "the ranks of these volunteers marching to fight for a cause which had immortalized Lafayette." He came to Stevenson at a time that the Army was still disbanding following the end of the Civil War. Moral was not good - there were drunk commandants and officers at Fort Totten and Fort Buford. By the army's count, there were about 26,360 Native Americans in Dakota - a territory in 1866 that had finally been dwindled down to the present-day states of North and South Dakota (once Montana and Wyoming were part of the Territory as well). The native folk did not always get along with each other back in the 1860s and the years following (Custer came to Dakota in the 1870s and rode west in 1876).

Trobriand lived long and prospered - in fact, he lived to be over eighty years old. After his retirement in 1879, he spent summers in Paris and winters in New Orleans, where he died in 1897.

Trobriand's journal gives us an extraordinarily honest look at the place no one in the world thought was particularly good for anything back in the 1860s. Curiously, his early impressions of the place - and it was a warm late summer and early autumn when he came in 1867 - 90 degrees F. late in September at Fort Stevenson - his early take was of a place that was something of a "No Man's Land" - especially the fifteen-mile stretch between Fort Stevenson and Fort Berthold. He says (references are to a 1951 edition published by the Alvord Memorial Commission in St. Paul, Minnesota: Military Life in Dakota: The Journal of Philippe Régis de Trobriand translated and edited from the French original by Lucile M. Kane. The University of Nebraska Press edition, 1982, is out-of-print. It shouldn't be!) -

Trobriand, page 80:

". . . The country is far from being without character; on the contrary, it has a very distinct stamp, but somber, inexorable, it grips the soul much more than it pleases the eye.
"The plains are not like this. They give a different impression. More than anything else, it is an impression of immensity, of open space, and of an individual left to his own resources in the midst of nature where nothing belongs to anhyone and everything belongs to everyone. Nothing here suggest limitation or division of the common land. It belongs to whoever crosses it, the white man as well as the red man, the buffalo, the wolf, the bear. Against personal dangers, the protection of government is a myth; the only real protection is in a steady heart and a good carbine. But although these badlands have a bad reputation because of the facilities they provide for an Indian ambush, the danger is but an uncertain eventuality and does not change at all the feeling of freedom under the sky that almost always exults one."

Well, there are times that Trobriand is less than exulted - he was not totally happy on August 22, 1867, when the temperature rose to "+ 110 degrees F. in the shade during day." But he quickly goes on to praise the relative comfort of this place: "However, I do not suffer as much as in a temperature of 85 to 90 degrees in New York. Why is that? It is not because of the light breeze that usually blows on the edge of the water. Rather, it must be because of the atmospheric condition. The air is very pure and dry; the sky is clear and spacious. There is always fair weather. Here it never rains from the months of June to the month of November. To make up for this, there are terrible windstorms from time to time. Last week the whole camp just missed being blown into the river. Almost all the tents were knocked down, the furniture was upset, the dishes were broken, and a sheet-iron stove was rolled up to the foot of the plateau by the storm. All that in the midst of terrible whirlwinds of dust, and not a drop of rain. Yesterday the weather was stormy; we thought there was going to be a deluge, but there is still nothing but violent wind. This time, at least, all the tents held down."

Trobriand's August entry (page 24) is among the earliest - but not, certainly, the first reference to the hot air and wind - real and metaphorical - of my Dakota home. Fact is, there's an almost puerile preoccupation with flatulence around these parts, but that's another story. Except to say, it does go with the territory, it goes with the territory, as the Music Man said. There are great Sioux tales that could be told . . . and will, I suspect.

What Trobriand found here was place elemental - beyond the unnecessary trappings of much of what we call civilization. In July 1868, after nearly a year in Dakota, Trobriand writes (page 317),

"Last night, the body of Col. Powell, which his brother came to claim in the name of the family, was disinterred to be put in a metal coffin, hermetically sealed. Disgusting! I do not understand people who, in order to have it near them, are so set on raising from the ground a thing as foul and disgusting as a body in full decay. The operation was most sickening. The details I got the next day are enough to turn the stomach. Who in the devil can find sentiment in that!

"In contrast," Trobriand continues in his journal entry fro July 26, 1868, a sunny Sunday in Dakota, "a wedding was celebrated tonight a eight o'clock, a simple and primitive ceremony in keeping with our country and our position in the desert. A musician named Hantz married a young girl, sister of one of the laundresses of Company I. She was in the employ of Mrs. Walborn, in whose home the wedding took place. When the officers were gathered in the main room, and the adjutant took his place a little in advance of the group, prayer book in his hand, the future husband entered, offering his arm to the future wife, and both took their places facing the official. Then, addressing the couple: 'Do you, of your own free will, take for your legitimate wife this woman?' 'Yes Sir.' 'Do you, of your own free will, take as legitimate husband this man?' 'Yes Sir.' 'Join hands. All right, I now pronounce you man and wife in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.'

"After this, everyone shook hands with the couple, and cakes and refreshments went around. The company drank to the health of the newly-weds, who then withdrew into an apartment prepared for them for the night by one of the traders, at the request of the officers. And that was all. After a few gay remarks and insinuations, required by the event, 'everyone went home,' as did Marlborough. It is certainly possible to reduce the celebration of a marriage to a more simple form. A formula pronounced, and everything is said: but Hantz and Annie Noble are just as legitimately and firmly united as if priests, ministers, magistrates had taken part in it, with all the pomp of ceremonies and all the solemnity of formulas, masses, prayers, readings from the law, speeches, etc. It is the same with most things in civilization. A great many complications and useless things. One must come to live in Dakota to get things back to their real value and primitive simplicity."

This bears repeating, or, as my friend Jim Ronda likes to preach, "Let me read this again (and here's a little larger type to help you, friends)" -

"It is the same with most things in civilization. A great many complications and useless things. One must come to live in Dakota to get things back to their real value and primitive simplicity."
It is not an easy place, sometimes, and, perhaps, more years than not. This is a bad one for many ranchers. Dry. Damned dry. One of those years when Trobriand experience rings true, for there's been no rain in some parts since long before June, and there's not a lot in sight. Trobriand writes of similar times in July 1868 (pages 312-314). After he distributes food among visiting Indians from Fort Rice to the south stop for provisions on their way to hunt the buffalo on the Yellowstone. Trobriand honors an old treaty (1820) by distributing, among seven chiefs of 300 lodges, twenty-two boxes of biscuits and a pound of coffee, two pounds of sugar, and piece of salt pork for each of the seven chiefs. He doesn't address the problem of the extra box of biscuits - seven for each of the seven bands, but then what? Must have been something akin to trying to divide up a couple of loads of hay send west from generous eastern farmers - how do you divide up too few of those big, round bales?

Trobriand continues, "Another incident occurred during the day, which I cannot leave out here: the heat was overpowering; the thermometer went above 105, F., or from from forty to forty-one degrees centigrade. Around noon, clouds of grasshoppers began to show up in the sky. A multitude of these fearful insects flew skimming along the ground, and the layers seemed to thicken as they rose in the air. In the direction of the sun, these innumerable multitudes, more visible to the naked eye, looked like a thick dust of white specks which drifted, passed each other, and multiplied in the air. Finally, the last and fatal symptom, a great murmer like the steady rumble of far away carriages filled the air all around. It was the droning of this traveling ocean of winged insects. Our gardens and pastures would be all gone if this cloud came down to earth. Two or three hours would be enough for complete and absolute devastation; everything would be devoured, and nothing could prevent it.

At this tme, a black storm began to come up on the horizon to the north. Heavy clouds mounted one on the other, lighted by brilliant and repeated flashes of lightning, which were followed by rolling thunder, nearer and nearer. The noise of the grasshoppers seemed to be its feeble echo. When the storm came up almost above our heads, blasts of violent wind began to blow in squalls, sweeping everything before them, and great flashes of lightning rent the air. Then all that winged dust which was making the sky white passed over us rapidly. Carried by the storm, it crossed the Missouri, and scattered far out on the plains. Our gardens and pastures were saved, at least this time.

"The storm, before reaching its zenith, went east, and swept around far toward the south, where it finally disappeared, without moistening the soil of Fort Stevenson by a drop of rain, although it fell in torrents in other places. Great blasts of wind, fierce bolts of lightning, one of which killed an Indian mule grazing on the prairie; finally, a great roar of thunder; all the storm did for us was to drive away the grasshoppers, but it did not water our vegetables."

By the time Trobriand showed up in North Dakota, the thriving cultural centers of the Mandan/Hidatsa at the confluence of the Knife and Missouri Rivers had moved, reduced to a fraction of their population by small pox, and turned into what Trobriand considered nations of beggars who were starving because they refused to work. The Indian men preferred to hunt. And Trobriand was outraged that women had to do all the work (he wasn't around later when the settlers and ranchers came to Dakota - the comparative work load of men and women in immigrant farming culture was bad enough, but, the fact is, folks, there's not a single ranch that would be operating were it not for the women). On June 15, 1868, Trobriand was supervising the unloading of supplies at Fort Berthold (pages 301-302):

The chiefs, who had been in this way warned of my coming and of the cargo that the boat was bringing, immediately came to meet me in full regalia, some of their warriors being painted with black, a sign of war, because of their recent victory over the Sioux. While the men were unloading the cargo, which consisted of flour, biscuits, pork, plows, wagons, a forge, iron, farm tools, and implements, I went to the fort to estimate, approximately, the amount of oats to be loaded. I quickly saw that with ten men and three six-mule wagons, it would be a several days' job. In order to cut the time down as much as possible, I asked for sixty women, twenty from each nation [Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara], and immediately I had more than eighty of them to load and unload the wagons. However, since the work was going too slowly, I hired a trader's cart for the next day. The interpreter did more than I would have asked. He had the strongest squaws carry the sacks of oats themselves. Now the weight of each sack varies from 130 to 160 pounds, and the distance from the fort to the boat was not less than five or six hundred yards. These Indian women are so accustomed to hard labor, particularly to carrying loads, that tiring as it was, especially under a scorching sun, they did not seem to consider the task too hard. So, single file, they went down the hill on which the fort is located, following a rather steep path, bent over under the burden which was held on the back by a double thong of buffalo hide, fastened around both the forehead and the upper part of the chest. For this hard work, I promised only to feed them while they worked. It lasted two full days (Saturday and Sunday), three hours Friday afternoon and two hours this morning, two days and a half in all, during which time 4,039 sacks of oats were taken from the storehouses, loaded on the wagons, and hauled to the wharf. The crew of the steamboat took charge of loading them. I have distributed to the squaws three barrels of biscuits and three quarters of bacon, weighing forty-four pounds each. Then, when the work was finished, I had divided among them thirty sacks of damaged oats, the canvas having rotted and the grain molded. But what is not good enough for our horses and mules is still all right for the Indians, who even now are cooking oat cakes. They consider this a piece of good luck, for want is so common among them."

Such couldn't happen in the twenty-first century in North Dakota, of course. We are more than a century past such exploitation. In some ways, we are nearer to the first peoples of this place than Philippe Régis could be - we daughters and sons of immigrant farmers. For example, Trobriand was flabbergasted with natural childbirth among Indian women (page 146-147):

". . . I might mention a peculiarity of Indian women which should have had a place in the account of my visit to Berthold: the extraordinary way in which they bring their children into the world. The fact will seem unbelievable to our civilized ladies, but it is strictly and absolutely true. The Indian women, burdened, as we have seen, with all the rough work that among other peoples is left to the men [not all 'other peoples', Philippe Régis, not all], do not stop any of their activities during their period of pregnancy. Up to the last moment, they go after wood, carry the burdens, and take care of the horses. When the pains come, they stop and give birth to their child wherever they are, wash themselves and the baby if there is water near by, and return to the lodge, carrying their papoose upon their load. The next day they take up their work again as if nothing had happened. If the thing happens in the winter, they will break the ice to proceed with the washing of the child and themselves in the ice water, and the mother and the child seem to be only the better for it! The fact is so well known, so well authenticated, that there can be no doubt of it. This is what mother nature does for her children. Let us compare this with what civilization does for hers: long torture, medical attendance, intervention of chloroform, puerperal fever, two weeks in bed, thirty days in the bedroom, and such precautions. And the indispensable cares! We have made for ourselves in society not only a conventional life, but an artificial constitution. Physically and morally, we have corrupted the work of nature, and our women sometimes die in childbirth and are always martyrized. The Indian woman gathers up her baby on the prairie and goes on her way.

The children do not seem to be affected by it, for they are generally robust and well informed. It can even be contended with some degree of certainty that infirm or crippled children are much more rare among the Indians than among us. . . ."

There's nothing so astonishing about the practice to a boy from Oliver County, North Dakota. When I was growing up in the 1950s, I recall the story told of Old Man Sk___________, a German patriarch who ruled his household like Otto von Bismarck. He left for town one day - and as he drove away, he yelled to his wife, who - in spite of being full-term with child - was hoeing the potatoes in the hot August sun. "Try to get it done before milking this time, woman," said he. "I'll be back by about 9:00 tonight." When he drove up just before 9:00, he saw his wife in the potato patch, just two rows over from where she was when he left. "What the hell have you been doing, woman?" he demanded. "The baby came," said she. "But I got the cows milked right on time, anyway - but I might not get the potatoes hoed until tomorrow, because I have to feed the baby and show Gertie (the oldest daughter) how to take care of him." "I'm hungry," said he, "what's for supper?"

Trobriand, like that more famous French-speaking observer of American culture, Tocqueville, was convinced that American Indian culture and American Indians themselves would disappear. He writes, on February 4, 1868 (page 231),

"But the race of American Indian seems to have had its day and to have fulfilled its fleeting mission in the march of humanity. Its resistance to any assimilation with the whites is a seed of destruction which the race carries in itself and which grows with great rapidity. The American aborigine, no longer protected as the African race has been up to the present by the vastness of impenetrable deserts, will be the first to disappear from the great human family. It will die out in the age of man just as so many created beings have died out in the ages preceding this one, even after having been dominant on the face of the earth. And to take its place in the chain of eternal progress, some other race will rise in a future time, as superior to the Caucasian of today as that race was to the American which is now dying out."

Trobriand was wrong - about both the imminent demise of American Indians and about the superiority of white culture. But he was remarkably insightful about a great deal, including the influence of this place on one's very soul. It is a place that invites introspection, especially during those long winter nights. On the last night of the year, December 31, 1867, alone with journal, Trobriand wrote (200-202):

"The year 1867 has come to its last moments. In two hours, it will have ceased to be and will join in the abyss of the past some millions of other years of which only a few thousand have left on us their distinct marks and of which scarcely forty - a nothing - have their place in my memory. II have neither family nor friends around me to bid it goodbye. For me no clock will strike the twelve strokes of midnight at its passing. No familiar sound, no family celebration will mark the portentous moment when 1868 succeeds 1857."

Trobriand does an overview of his life by year, beginning with 1840, when he was twenty-four, and ending with "1868-Fort Stevenson, Dakota" and "1869-????-Who knows?"

Then, in something of the fashion of an older and more comfortable-in-his-skin visitor to this place than Meriwether Lewis writing the review of his much shorter life on August 18, 1805 at the Great Falls of the Missouri, Trobriand does a personal inventory:

And in going back over the thread of these dates, how many happenings, great and small, I find there! How many evolutions in the life of nations; how many sudden changes in my life! How pleasure is mixed with grief, light with darkness! How many clouds passed over the sun which seemed to be lasting shadows and which disappeared without leaving a mark! How many people met, how many things seen, how many thoughts provoked, how many ideas acquired in these trips from one world to the other; on one side across France, England, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and on the other across the United States, Canada, and the island of Cuba! And what a school in philosophy is four years in a gigantic war [American Civil War] to crown the experience and knowledge of a nomadic life of twenty years. But what do I know? After all that, in comparison to what I should still be able to learn, if life were not too short and if one did not forget with the years half of what is learned. The little Greek that I knew I have forgotten, I do not know when, since I never had a chance to use it. Latin-I lost it the day I learned Italian. I should have forgotten Italian while studying Spanish if I had not stopped myself in time. And now I am learning Sioux, which will make me forget nothing.

"How many things have I forgotten about history, mathematics, and ancient literature! So much that I sometimes wonder if the total of my knowledge acquired in thirty years is much greater than that which I have lost in the same period of time. In any case, what I remembered is a good deal more important and practical. This is what causes progress and improvement. Youth dreams about life; age achieves the practical. Age knows life thoroughly; youth hardly suspects it. With what a feeling of pity I take myself back today to that phase of my first youth and to those trivial things and vain illusions which then took up my time and fascinated me. . . ." . . . . Trobriand writes a magnificent tribute to his departed wife, and ends his New Year's Eve journal entry (202):

"The night is half clouded; the stars glimmer uncertainly, half disappearing behind the floating mist as if they were afraid of revealing the secret I am asking them. But when there is doubt, there is till room for hope-and hope which slumbers before death awakens after."

Don't know why, in particular - but I'm reminded of The Reverend Eli Jenkins' Prayer from Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, that great, profane, and at the same time, spiritual drama - the story of that fictitious Welsh town, Llareggub [spelled backwards of course, it's ?????????]

Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please to keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die.

And every evening at sun-down
I ask a blessing on the town,
For whether we last the night or no
I'm sure is always touch-and-go.

We are not wholly bad or good
Who live our lives under Milk Wood,
And Thou, I know, wilt be the first
To see our best side, not our worst.

O let us see another day!
Bless us this night, I pray,
And to the sun we all will bow
And say, good-bye-but just for now!

Sorry, Philippe Régis de Trobriand, but I simply do not share your easy dismissal of youth, nor can I dismiss those passions as trivial or those preoccupations "vain illusions" - and I don't regret for a single moment the time I've spent with such as Thomas' Under Milk Wood in a not-very-BBC-like production for a most limited audience on the campus of Colorado State University at Fort Collins back in 1967-68 - in fact, just about 100 years exactly after you wrote your New Year's Eve piece.

In fact, I'm not ready for the "practical that age achieves."

I'd rather say, with the Reverend Eli Jenkins, "Good-bye my friends, but just for now!" - Tomorrow - more tomorrow.
Ev Albers

Thursday, September 26th, 2002

My apologies — Trobriand on Indians of Dakota in the 1860s has to wait for another day, because I've been waylaid by Shakespeare, specifically Bottom from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Tomorrow, perhaps.

About as many years ago as the number Jesus of Nazareth drew breath as a human, some thirty-three and a few more months, I trod the boards heavily at what was then Lake Region Junior College at Devils Lake between teaching some twenty-four or twenty-eight hours, including five sections of freshman composition, 150 students, and a world literature class and a couple of others. On Lake Region's stage, I played Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream — very badly, I recall — ah, but what a great time!

This past month, I have begun to understand the ineffable nature and meaning of certain humanities texts and the way in which they serve as instruments of grace when we need them most and how they come to us almost miraculously from someone who offers them as a totally undeserved gift and how totally appropriate they may be — it’s enough to leave one breathless and hopeful, even optimistic, in the face of death itself — for as Lysander and Theseus exchange after Bottom’s long death scene as Pyramus in a play within the play:

Lysander: Less than an ace, man; for he is dead; he is nothing.

Theseus: With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover, and prove an ass.

Many of my friends are probably thinking, “Albers, you’ve alredy proved that.” I mean to rise to my full potential, however — and to get to the bottom of some curious coincidences that would appear to be a bit strange.

Among my family’s good friends are Jerry & Jean Waldera, retired from teaching at Dickinson State where Jerry taught political science and history and Jean theatre arts — where both mentored so many over decades of service. They summer at a cabin on Lake Melissa outside Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and at this place of refuge my wife, Leslie, our children, Albert & Gretchen, and I would come for a glorious week most summers for fishing, fine food, great stories, and the kind of fellowship that only happens with the finest of friends.

Recently, Jean, who keeps in touch with former students and a host of folk who call wherever the Walderas are their second home, sent out a note to some of her students, including Robbi Neal of Ponte Vedra, Florida — who remembered me as a humanities teacher at Dickinson State some thirty years past. Robbi has written me several kind notes, including one invoking Dylan Thomas and another wishing me all of the courtesies Titania commanded her fairies give Bottom. Turns out that Robbi played Titania recently. She also recalled lines from A Merchant of Venice, a play that was presented at Dickinson State about thirty years past — with Sam Jaffe as the guest actor in the role of Shylock.

I really don't care to discuss how bad I was in the role of Antonio, thank you very much. Probably not too many folks remember Sam, although he did live long and prosper — born in 1891, he lived to 1984. Among other roles, he played Dr. David Zorba in the Ben Casey series in the early 60s — who can forget Sam intoning “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity,” as he wrote the symbols on the blackboard in the opening of the programs?

But back to Shakespeare — when a student from thirty years past takes a moment to write with thanks for introducing her to Dylan Thomas and wishing me the sentiment of his “Do Not Go Gentle” and then finds a way to remind me to seek the wisdom of the fool ala the Shakespeare I spouted — well, folks, there's something going on that warms the cockles of my heart on this autumn day.

It is, after all, the birth date of George Gershwin, and I've been reminded of the great contralto voices who have sung the blues — but today's featured music is "Nice Work If You Can Get It," the Gershwin tune rendered by Carroll Gibbons and The Savoy Hotel Orpheans (not to be confused with any orphans, mind you — these are Orpheans.

We are not born with minds tabula rasa. Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious is among the best of the human attempts to explain how it can be that we come into this world with ideas: “Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it. . . . Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.”

The notion of an unconscious collective mind, nonetheless, has profound implications for how we see ourselves in relation to others. It gives a new twist to the old idea, “Mitakuye Oyasin!” - “we are all related.”

Moreover, the concept transcends time and space. It explains, in part, the complexity of human encounter and the enormous possibilities of learning from each other, of transcending the prison of our egos and the loneliness of ourselves — those moments when humans recognize each other; when, together, they explore a common mind.

Most often, we are no more than vaguely aware of such moments of communion. We may feel profoundly moved - as was Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He awakes from his transformation into an ass beloved by the doting fairy queen, Titania, and her attendants and proclaims:

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was — there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, — and methought I had, —but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom. . . .”

In the words of Walt Whitman, “I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

Put another way — there’s no getting to the bottom of this business.

Walt was visited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, by the way — on a March day in 1860, the year Emerson published his Conduct of Life. Although Emerson had written Whitman praising his Leaves of Grass four years before, he spent two hours in 1860 on the Boston Commons trying to convince Walt to tone down the sex in Leaves.

And just what does that have to do with anything? — you well may ask. Only this, and nothing more — this tidbit is part of the official chronology of Emerson's life in the Library of America edition of Emerson's essays, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Why some scholar chose this tidbit over all else that happened to Emerson in 1860 is curious, indeed — but that's the glorious nature of the humanities.

To all the teachers of literature and philosophy — to all those of you who toil in the vineyard of the humanities, ’tis nice work if you can get it, indeed, indeed.

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

A fellow who grew up in North Dakota and now summers/springs/falls/ (but not winters) over in the lake country of east-central Minnesota, a good friend going back to their college days of Jean & Jerry Waldera, Jim Lund retired some years past from 9 to 5, but from nothing else. A great raconteur, Jim has gleaned humor from folks across the state, folks he visits as he travels around, especially when he hunts in the fall.

Winters, he retreats with his lovely wife, Shirley, to burgeoning San Antonio. Jim wrote a note the other day in response to the notion of somehow coming up with a bribe to keep young people in the state:

“The youth have been leaving North Dakota for a long time. I did, 42 years ago. And I've not returned to except to hunt for birds and to relive memories of my lost past. This is not meant to impart that my love for the state has diminished. The heart strings still twang, but for reasons which are mostly economic, along with the fact that my Kentucky-born wife wouldn't be caught dead in a place colder than room temperature, I made my living elsewhere. And, as a man I know often says, there you have it. It is predicted that during the next eight years an additional three million people will move into an area known as the San Antonio-Austin Corridor. This is an area smaller than most North Dakota counties. What will they do there? They'll retire. That's what. And the service industries will grow and grow. Methinks it is high time North Dakota stops worrying about the youthful brain drain. It's gonna happen. I foresee the day that North Dakota will be a massive wind farm, and for three to four months per year North Dakota will become the nation's freezer warehouse where cold will be valued as a natural resource. That's a hell of an indictment, I know, but market forces and creature comfort levels will out.”

The problem with Lund’s freezer is that it’s so damned undependable. All of those of you out there who thought it was all right to stick meat into a snow bank in January only to wake up one morning with a half a hog thawed and an emergency community barbeque raise your hands. We can climb to the 60s in the dead of winter around here, Jimbo.

The most interesting aspect of current population trends (well, OK, current in terms of the last half-century or so) is the fact that the Indian population of the state continues to grow, as do the size of the families of the Chippewa, Lakota, Hidatsa, Arikara, Yanktonai, and the other folk at Three Affiliated Tribes, Standing Rock, Turtle Mountain, and Fort Totten. The reservations are the one place in the state, outside our huge metropolitan centers, where there is no scarcity of young people. Even the school boards at Fargo and Bismarck are looking toward decreasing enrollment, but not the folks on our reservations — our friends there have the opposite problem — too many young people for the educational resources available.

How many times the total demise of the Native peoples of North Dakota has been predicted! How great the effort has been over the past couple of centuries to change the essential nature of the people who were here when Lewis and Clark showed up. They didn’t go away, nor did their culture and its values disappear. We might spend a little time and scholarly energy trying to find out why.

You aren’t going to find any answers in Larry McMurtry’s new Sin Killer, the first in a new series. This one’s the first in The Berrybender Narratives, about an English family making its way through the West, 1832-1846. The first novel features a rather savvy, competent Toussaint Charbonneau, references to Pomp, the historical character “Big White” (the Mandan chief who went to Washington with Lewis & Clark – whose name probably should be translated White Coyote and who did, in fact, get back long before 1832 – but it did take a while), and the artist George Catlin, in the flesh. Of course, McMurtry is entertaining, and, no, he makes no pretense to historical accuracy, and, yes, that’s a great blessing. For all that, however — and for all the high humor of death, dismemberment, and general misery — and the general nastiness of most of the characters, who manage to be remarkably free of human complexity or conflicting values of any kind — McMurtry offers little new. Yes, it’s funny — downright amusing. And, yes, it bespeaks extraordinary craftsmanship.

And there are gems. “Big White” takes off from the boat to wander the banks of the Missouri, much to the consternation of such as Charbonneau, who finds himself responsible for getting him back to the Mandan (no, Virginia, that didn’t really happen that way. Anyway, in Chapter 32, “Near the Little Sioux, not far ahead . . . ” Dan Drew, who knows how to get around this country as well as any white man, finds Big White, who admires the old hunter. Here’s a bit worth taking a look at:

BEGIN MCMURTRY BIT

“I have been gone too long,” Big White said. “Probably my old wives are dead. No one in the village will want to see me. They have a new headman. None of the young warriors will remember my deeds. The young women won’t want me. I am old. Everything that I did has been forgotten.”

He looked at the old hunter, who had pulled off a leg of the duck and was munching it. In fact, Dan Drew was one person who had known him long. Dan Drew would remember his great feats. He wondered if he ought to trust the hunter with a potent piece of information. He wanted to tell it to somebody.

“A bird spoke to me this morning—a meadowlark,” he said. “He spoke to me in my own language.”

Dan Drew had a cold feeling suddenly. He wished he had not found Big White. When Indians spoke of talking birds who could speak in Sioux or Mandan, the message was never likely to be good. Birds only talked to those who would soon be dead.

What business has a meadowlark got, blabbing to people?” Dan asked. “Meadowlarks should mind their own business.”

Big White could tell the old hunter didn’t really want to hear the meadowlark’s prophecy, which had been bad. No one wanted to hear bad prophecies.

“He said I would soon be killed by a man from the south,” Big White said—he wanted to tell someone what the bird had said.

“Birds can be wrong,” Dan said. “Anybody can be wrong.”

Big White didn’t answer.

Dan Drew found that he had lost his appetite for duck [Big White was roasting one when Dan found him]. To be polite, he smoked a pipe with Big White and then got up and left.

END MCMURTRY BIT

Tomorrow, some bits from snippets from Philippe Régis de Trobriand’s Military Life in Dakota, that journal of the way it was here in this place just after the Civil War — especially de Trobriand’s notes on the Native people of this place some sixty years after Lewis & Clark.

Ev Albers

Monday, September 23, 2002

There are no fairer days anywhere in the world in any age than these upcoming autumn days in Dakota, the land of no Spring and long, langourous Fall — what a wondrous word, “langourous”—meaning, as it does, both lethargy of the kind that saps one to near inaction — and that dreamy, deliciously indolent mood.

The text for today comes from the Bhagavad Gita, II, 49-50, to wit:

“O Dhananyaya, work (with desire for results) is far inferior to work with understanding. Therefore seek refuge in the Yoga of understanding. Wretched indeed are those who work for results. Being possed with this understanding, one frees one's self even in this life from good and evil. Therefore engage thyself in this Yoga. Skillfullness in action is called Yoga.”

Jump. Fast-forward to 71: “That man attains peace who, abandoning all desires, moves about without attachment and longing, without the sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’.

Is there anything further from our basic notion of being in western civilization than this? Perhaps the greatest curse of our culture is our preoccupation with ourselves and our place in history, a peculiar passion to be recognized as different from and better than our fellow humans.

To the degree that we foster education in the arts and humanities as a means to that end which would allow us to prove ourselves superior to others, we have failed miserably. To the extent that we foster the notion that reading Homer or glancing at the Bhagavad Gita can somehow get a university student a higher paying job and thus be able to acquire possessions as an extension of our ego, we approach the sin against the Holy Ghost.

I make no pretense toward really understanding the Bhagavad Gita — how could I? I have no more than a glimpse, the briefest of glimpses.

Today, I commend you, my friends in the humanities, to an extraordinary humanities text by Clay Jenkinson, Message on the Wind. We would have it both ways, friends; we would pay lip service to the life of the mind and spirit while we lazily get on with “getting and spending” — that Wordsworthian condemnation of our greatest sin. I offer you but two passages from a book of great humor, high style, and brutal honesty.

One is a short characterization of one of our two monuments to sorry times in North Dakota, the place, Fort Union (page 16): “. . . Clark [William, in 1805] suggested that the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri ‘affords a butifull commnding situation for a fort.’ And the forts came. The great Sitting Bull surrendered here at the U.S. Army's Fort Buford in the year 1881. A replica of the commercial Fort Union has been constructed recently on the north bank of the Missouri, a tasteless memorial to racism, imperialism, militarism, epidemia, and the systematic bilking and demoralizing of Native American peoples. Buffs flock to it. it is a beautiful white building with a black karma.”

The second paragraph comes from near the end (page 294-295): “The message on the wind was also a call to thoroughness and integrity that had nothing to do with one's mating rites. It's no good to cleanse the soul and leave a lonely little turd of curruption behind. Whatever the soul's quest — responsible gender or environmental relations, the alchemy of soul transmutation from lead to gold, the search for the essence of coyoteness in the dark abyss of the night — our duty is to pursue that gril with a whole and a pure consciousness. There is no seeking macrobiotic integrity by night and Big Macs by day, no day-trading with Cargill and night-trading with Gaea, no sacramental commitment to eros and a subscription to Playboy.”

Ah, my friends, that's hard, that's hard. And I don't mean giving up Playboy—but to the greater notion of getting beyond “I” — once more, a bit from Second Chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, “Sankhya-Yoga,” or “The Path of Wisdom.”

“52. When thine intellect will cross beyond the mire of delusion, then alone shalt thou attain to indifference regarding things heard and yet to be heard.

53. When thine intellect, tossed by the various conflicting opinions of the Scriptures, will become firmly established in the Self, then thou shalt attain Yoga (Self -realization or union with God).”

And, finally, “70. As the ocean remains calm and unaltered though the waters flow into it, similarly a self-controlled saint remains unmoved when desires enter into him; such a saint alone attains peace, but not he who craves the objects of desire.”

For some thoughts about Emerson and his notion of culture and our educational system in the arts and humanities, check the entry for September 22, 2002.

Be well, friends — enjoy this great autumn, wherever you are. If you are not in Dakota this glorious time of year, think about coming. There's no finer place to be.

Ev Albers
ealbers@nd-humanities.org

Our text this Sunday, September 22, 2002, is the Fourth Chapter of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1860 The Conduct of Life — "Culture." The question before us is the efficacy of education in the arts and the humanities in terms of refining unbridled egotism and turning self-congratulatory individuals into citizens of a greater community.

The poem at the Chapter head could well serve as a text for the upcoming, first-ever, summit on the Arts and Humanities hosted by the University of North Dakota for state-supported higher education in the state. Here 'tis:

Culture
Can rules or tutors educate
The semigod whom we await?
He must be musical,
Tremulous, impressional,
Alive to gentle influence
Of landscape and of sky,
And tender to the spirit-touch
Of man's or maiden's eye:
But, to his native centre fast,
Shall into Future fuse the Past,
And the world's flowing fates in
his own mould recast.

You will recall that Emerson begins by dismissing specialists (wonder what the hell he would have thought of some of the arcane language of deconstructive postmodernism) -- what he calls "harping on one string" -- and offers the example of a freemason who explained the contribution of George Washington to his country with the fact that he was a freemason.
Here is Emerson's great paragraph:

"But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured individualism, by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and bright, sacred and prfane, coarse and finde egotists. 'Tis a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the dstemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady? THe man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world. It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms, is a craving for sympathy. The sufferes parade their miseries, tear the lint from their bruisses, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them. They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to draw attention."

This is, of course, what we are before an education in the arts and humanities. Without the arts and humanities, says Emerson, without the possibility that education can meliorate our egotistical condition, we must live and die with the only "mortal distemper." Says Emerson, "There are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given to your words, or any humor; but remain literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and wit, of seventy or eighty years. They are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of earthquakes."

This sunny Sunday, September 22, 2002, in North Dakota, no few were surprised as hell to learn that student representatives from North Dakota's colleges and universities voted 33-7 against a resolution that would give those people 21-29 who live and work in North Dakota a $1,000 income tax credt each year for five and up to $5,000 in loan repayments over five years in addition.
​
Those of you who meet and greet North Dakota students every day must know that what they want of the place they call home is both all about money and not about money at all. A couple of thousand dollars a year is nothing in terms of being a deciding factor for any young person who would stay here or leave. On the one hand, a couple of thousand dollars a year for two years does nothing at all to meliorate the problem of going to work for less than half of what they can earn elsewhere. Beyond money, of course, is, indeed, the question of culture — and what we as society support to make life more than existence.
You might ask your students.
Ev Albers

Saturday, September 21, 2002

What a glorious day in North Dakota! In fact, a perfect day — friend Jean Waldera planted tulips at Lake Melissa yesterday, that wonderous retreat where my family spent those precious few days during summers stretched over more than a quarter-century. I’m reminded of the last poem in McGrath’s collection of poetry, Death Song, published posthumously by Copper Canyon in 1991. Tom died a dozen years ago yesterday, on September 20, 1990 (you know, some say it was the 19th — must have been late at night, methinks), two months shy of his 74th birthday — Tom was born on November 20, 1916. The last poem in his last book - “Loon” -

Something crying on the empty lake
A cry with long legs
A cry that goes far into the forest;
Into the weedy bottom and deep of the lake;
Out to the stars: and back.

“and back.” Ah, amen, “and back.”
​
Among the great gifts friends have given me is a vinyl record my good friend Ed Sahlstrom, college roommate at Dickinson State when it was still a college, not a university, extraordinary mime and gifted performer. Eddy gave me some records, long ago — more than thirty years — among them a recording from the 60s of gospel singer Mahalia Jackson live at the Newport Jazz Festival. If you have a fast enough connection, give a listen to what has to be one of the great renditions of a gospel song with a sentiment that the weest bit more difficult to live than sing — but a great song — “His Eye is on the Sparrow” — written by Civilla Martin (1869-1948) — isn’t that a great name, Civilla? 
 
Why should I feel discouraged
Why should the shadows come
Why should my heart be lonely
And long for heaven and home

When Jesus is my portion
My constant friend is He
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm free
For His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

"Let not your heart be troubled"
His tender word I hear
And resting on His goodness
I lose my doubts and fears
Though by the path He leadeth
But one step I may see
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm free
For His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

Whenever I am tempted
Whenever clouds arise
When songs give place to sighing
When hope within me dies
I draw the closer to Him
From care He sets me free
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me
His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

I sing because I'm happy
I sing because I'm free
For His eye is on the sparrow
And I know He watches me

In a moment of Jungian synchronicity (as Tom McGrath used to tell his students, if you don’t know what it means, look it up — but it’s that notion of meaningful cocidence ala the I  Ching, et. al.) — I reached down in this messy office I’m trying to clean up a bit and picked up my friend Dave Solheim’s 1989 collection of poetry, published by the venerable Assumption Abbey Press in 1989, the year of North Dakota statehood — West River: 100 Poems. I had just taken a look at Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”  — and that great fourth stanza --

 Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
 And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
 Do not go gentle into that good night.

Alas, but maybe not — this Thomas poem may be better known than any other because of the 1986 movie with Rodney Dangerfield, Back to School (you who suffered through it will remember that Rodney recites the poem during a marathon oral exam — Sally Kellerman was the understanding English professor — and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. did a cameo appearance, remember?

But I digress — I commend to you the voice of North Dakota native son, Dave Solheim, the Centennial Poet (by the way, I have to say, that getting the state of North Dakota and the North Dakota Centennial Commission to go along with the notion of a Centennial Poet was one of the great coups of my professional career — God help me, I loved it! I only wish I could have convinced the state to give Thomas Matthew McGrath the Rough-Rider, but as Henry Martinson says in the film Northern Lights, “But, it was not to be!”

To the point, my friends, to the point. If you have not read Dave Solheim’s poetry, shame on you. Do it this week! Here’s but a small taste — a wonderful gift at a moment of need — Dave’s “Prologue” from the poem “Processional” on page 24 of the publication:

 Death begins for all of us
 When we still think we’re growing up.
 Our bodies push against the earth
 And stretch against the sunlight.

 All our growth outgrows ourselves.
 The blood shrinks back like rubber bands
 When stretched too far, too long.
 Our fingers stiffen, curl and deaden.
 Like our time, we get shorter.
 The blood retreats to heart and head
 And fewer messages come in that far.

 If we could escape the body,
 Grown weaker every year,
 If we could live outside it,
 We might never leave.

Ah, Dave Solheim, what a gift!

And, in a sense, we never do — we never do leave, — ah, Tom — amen, sister Mahalia — the loon cry that goes
“Out to the stars: and back.”

Friday, September 20, 2018

​A few weeks ago — but about twenty days past — I turned yellow, most jaundiced in eye and skin. Damning whatever gods may be, convinced I had somehow contracted infectious hepatitis, I went to see a general practitioner. I did tests, ultra-soundings, CT scans, and ERCP (during which Bismarck physician Dr. Atam Mehtiratta most kindly put a stint in my bile ducts which has since returned me to a more natural color), and a week in the Mayo Clinics of Rochester where I had a test not done in North Dakota, an endoscopic ultrasound (EUS). I also had a little camera inserted into my stomach by a gifted surgeon who looked around. After all this I know what a young general physician trained at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine suspected from the moment he lay eyes on me — I have a malignant tumor on my pancreas that is too large to remove right now — or, as the curious language of pancreatic cancer goes, I’m not a candidate for a whipple at the moment. So, it’s on to a five- to six-week course of radiation/chemotherapy beginning next week with the hope that the tumor can be reduced enough so I can go back and get a whipple — but I have to wait for a month after the end of the treatment before a CT scan to have another look at the size of the tumor, etc.

All of this is offered, my friends, as background to any mood changes and lack of productivity you may notice from me. After sitting around a week in Rochester, spending money at gloomy motels, I’m really ready to get some work done — and to bring my life in the humanities to this little problem before me. Therefore, for what it’s worth, I will be posting some of my meanderings while I continue to do my job as executive director of the North Dakota Humanities Council and executive president of the Great Plains Chautauqua Society — and pay much more attention than I ever have to my wife, children, family and friends — so even this curse is a great blessing.

Among the first thoughts I had after a long weekend last 14-15 September, waiting to hear on Monday afternoon whether or not I was a candidate for the old whipple, were snatches of poetry I thought I had long forgot. When I was growing up in Oliver County, we memorized poetry — some of it pretty damned awful — through high school. Any of you remember William Cullen Bryant’s “Thantatopsis”?

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Tell you what, ‘tis easier saying than doing, I suspect. And I thought of Pliny the Younger and those letters from the first century about what makes life worth living. Finally, I thought about North Dakota’s gift to the millennia, Thomas Matthew McGrath, and that extraordinary short poem so loved by Media Mike Hazard 

How could I have come so far?
(And always on such dark trails!)
I must have travelled by the light
Shining from the faces of all those I have loved. 

As I travel from this place on — and I have no intention of quietly shuffling off to Buffalo in the near future without a considerable fight — I hope for the courage of Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” — especially the fourth stanza:

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night. 

Thank all of you out there for your kind encouragement — McGrath was right about one thing — “North Dakota is Everywhere” — and since we all know that all North Dakotans know each other, there are folks who seemed to have known what was happening to me almost before I did — especially after word was passed along at a certain cultural bastion in Dickinson, North Dakota, the Shamrock. 

I want to talk about the humanities with you from the perspective of someone who has been forced by circumstances to reconsider values and what is really important. Nothing is more important than the extraordinary people I have known. 

The last thing any of us need is any maudlin meanderings or premature eulogies (ad hominem attacks are welcome, however).
​
The Lakota have a great word for the friends I know — I would talk with my kola.