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Sunday, June 15, 2008

From the Land of Sky Blue Waters

"We have no chance of being here when the sun burns out. There must be something heroic about our time, something that lifts it above all those other times. Plague? Funny weather? Dire things are happening. People have made great strides at obliterating other people, but that has been the human effort all along, and our cohort has only enlarged the means, as have people in every century. Why are we watching the news, reading the news, keeping up with the news? Only to enforce our fancy-- probably a necessary lie-- that these are crucial times and we are in on them. Newly revealed, and we are in the know: crazy people, bunches of them. New diseases, shifts in power, floods! Can the news from dynastic Egypt have been any different?"

-Annie Dillard, "For the Time Being," first published in Notre Dame Magazine (1998), reprinted by permission of the author in "The Best American Essays 1999," Robert Atwan, Editor (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 76. Reprinted here by permission.

"Born a poor young country boy--Mother Nature's son
All day long I'm sitting singing songs for everyone.

"Sit beside a mountain stream--see her waters rise
Listen to the pretty sound of music as she flies.

"Find me in my field of grass--Mother Nature's son
Swaying daises sing a lazy song beneath the sun.

"Mother Nature's son."

-Lennon, John and Paul McCartney. "Mother Nature's Son." The Beatles (The White Album). Parlophone, Capitol, EMI, 1968.

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May 12 an earthquake in China killed 10-thousand people.

According to
Voice of America News, “Thousands of Chinese troops and medical teams have been dispatched to areas of Sichuan province, where the country's worst earthquake in decades struck Monday.

“Authorities say the quake killed at least 10,000 people in western China and that thousands are still buried under collapsed buildings,” the report said.

On the
IBNLive.com India news Web site, a 27 May report says, "China plans to evacuate 100,000 people threatened by rising waters of lakes and rivers blocked by the Sichuan earthquake.

"Officials say 35 'quake lakes' in China which were formed in the wake of Sichuan earthquake and can cause enormous damage if they burst [sic].

"The earthquake has left a new mountain of debris, big enough to dam a river and create a new lake, already 70 meters deep."

Rising waters in the Kuhzu dam submerge a power station.
Photo: Reuters, from "The Age," online.

A Wall Street Journal article, datelined, “BANGKOK, Thailand,” by James Hookway and Roger Thurow (May 7, 2008, Page A1) said, “The cyclone that swept through Myanmar last weekend left more than 22,000 people dead. Tens of thousands more remain missing. Now the disaster threatens to set in motion a second crisis: one of deepening hunger in Myanmar and across South Asia.

“With food shortages and rising prices already triggering riots in poor countries world-wide, Cyclone Nargis disrupted the harvest in one of Asia's richest rice-growing areas. Myanmar, which until last weekend expected to export rice this year, could be left lacking. Shortfalls could also hit Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and other regional neighbors that counted on importing Myanmar's rice. Traders suggest that in the cyclone's wake, world rice prices, already soaring, could be sent higher,” they reported.

June 5th,
NPR reported in a story headlined, "Rejected by Myanmar, U.S. Aid Ships Turn Back," that "four American Navy ships filled with relief equipment and supplies for the victims of Cyclone Nargis turned around and left the country."

The
International Herald Tribune reported that Paul Risley, a spokesman for the U.N. World Food Program, said, "For political reasons, the Myanmar government was reluctant to approve their use."

The article reported, "Risley said the need to charter large civilian helicopters was making his agency's relief program very expensive," and "In previous large scale disasters-- such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Pakistan's 2005 earthquake-- helicopters on loan from friendly nations' militaries were used to meet the immediate emergency requirements... Nearby Thailand and Singapore have many helicopters on hand, he said."

In the same anthology as the Annie Dillard quotation above is an essay by Joan Didion about Ernest Hemingway, the 20th-century American writer. Hemingway was a novelist, short-story writer and journalist whose contributions to English writing, while currently somewhat discounted in critical circles, were nonetheless profound and long-lasting. His life was a chiaroscuro of adventures, somewhat decried, nowadays, as masculine posturing. Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun in 1962.

The essay was about Hemingway's heirs, and how they not only packaged, sold and published his uncompleted manuscripts and private letters-- against the detailed instructions he left for them-- but also, "according to the House & Home section of the New York Times," licensed his name to "Thomasville Furniture Industries," which then "introduced an '
Ernest Hemingway Collection,' at the International Home Furnishings Market in High Point, North Carolina, offering '96 pieces of living, dining and bedroom furniture and accessories' in four themes, 'Kenya,' 'Key West,' 'Havana,' and 'Ketchum.' 'We don't have many heroes today,' Marla A. Metzner, the president of Fashion Licensing of America, told the Times. 'We're going back to the great icons of the century, as heroic brands.' Ms. Metzner, according to the Times, not only 'created the Ernest Hemingway brand with Hemingway's three sons, Jack, Gregory and Patrick,' but 'also represents F. Scott Fitzgerald's grandchildren, who have asked for a Fitzgerald brand.'"

What is one to make of this? True enough, dead men have no standing in law: Hemingway's legal request that after his death words he did not think fit for publication not be published he could not enforce, nor in its breach, remedy. Mary Hemingway, his wife, finally gave ground to the first biographers who convinced her of her obligation to history and the study of literature, and after the fall of that single crystal onto the snowy slope, the avalanche accumulated, until in 2000 and beyond we have the novelist authoring a line of sofas, ottomans, and easy-chairs. From the essay it is unknown whether before his death in 1940 Fitzgerald made a similar appeal. Googling "F. Scott Fitzgerald," reveals only books, no bedroom sets. One wonders what consumer products would best fit the "F. Scott Fitzgerald," brand?
Shirts, possibly?

From the
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog, ("Writing on writing") I find this Hemingway gem, culled from his selected letters (plundered no doubt from the correspondence the publication of which Didion decries):

"The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

Natural disasters, according to
Natural News, have increased by a factor of four in the last twenty years, but trivial political considerations still dominate the means and timing of humanitarian assistance. Hemingway's and Fitzgerald's heirs, the sturdiness of their bloodlines, apparently, sadly vitiated by the intervening generations, spines like rubber-bands, slack-jawed and avaricious, conspire to ream the last vestiges of honor from their forebears. My tolerance and affability suffering even at second- or third-hand these transgressions are sore strained.

When I consider these random facts, connected as they are with both the external reality of our world, and the internal life of my mind, frustration sets in, like a pail of wet Portland cement ignored too long in the sun. The notion that the world is a cesspool of iniquity sets and hardens.

As for the individuals in it, the idea concretizes that loyalty to principle and the duty to maintain some personal character in the face of temptation and under duress is a rare flower. Recently cracks appeared in my sanity and composure (already on volatile foundations), and I am afraid that like one of those old Tex Avery animations, after being shocked one too many times by certain recurrent and petty particulars, my eyes bug out, and the rest of me is about to, simply, explode.

_____________________________________________

During one of these near-disintegrative moments my wife arranged a camping trip to a cabin in the woods near the Illinois-Wisconsin border. Although the jingle, "From the land of sky-blue waters," refers to Minnesota, not Wisconsin, and certainly not Illinois, I thought a little poetic license might be forgiven. The waters were sky-blue, and although beer-- or any form of alcoholic beverage-- is strictly forbidden in Chain O' Lakes State Park, as shall be seen later this did not quarantine us against its effects, and justifies the choice to include this
happy lyric, originally used by the Hamm's Brewery of St. Paul, to title this post.

The land now included in the Chain O'Lakes Park was once under a glacier.

According to the Web page, "
Geology & Environmental Geosciences," put online by faculty and students in the Department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences at Northern Illinois University:

"During the ice ages of the Pleistocene Epoch, ice sheets up to 8000 feet thick advanced and retreated several times in North America and Eurasia. With the exception of Alaska, only 20 cubic miles of glacial ice remain in the continental United States, the majority of which can be found in the Rocky Mountains. The evidence for glacial and interglacial stages can be found in till deposits and in soils formed during interglacial stages. Deep-sea core samples show that there were eight or nine recognizable changes in climate over the last 850,000 years, and twenty-six oscillations between cold and warm climates. In North America, there were at least four major glaciations separated by warm interglacial periods during the Great Ice Age beginning 1.6 m.y.a. Glaciers spread from two centers of ice accumulation in Canada into northern sections of the United States. These advances include the Nebraskan, the Kansan, the Illinoian, and the Wisconsinan glacial cycles and the Aftonian, Yarmouth, the Sangamon and the present interglacial. Newer studies reveal that there may have been at least seven continental glaciations before the Illinoian, collectively called pre-Illinoian. No one is certain on the number because more recent glaciations destroyed many of the remnants left by older ones."

Here is an illustration of Illinois glaciations:


According to the Resource Rich Area Inventory of the "
Illinois Natural History Survey," "the guardian and recorder of the biological resources of Illinois:"

"The Chain O' Lakes-Fox River RRA encompasses the area of most recent glaciation in Illinois. Significant natural features in this poorly drained area include glacial landforms, natural lakes, and wetlands. Many wetland types are found in this RRA, such as bogs, fens, seeps, and shallow and deep marshes. Some rare species and community types are limited in their distribution to this area of the state. Urban expansion from the Chicago metropolitan region continues to put severe pressure on the natural resources in this region."

In "Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Les reveries du promeneur solitaire)," Roussau wrote, "Secluded meditation, the study of nature, and contemplation of the universe force a solitary person to search with tender concern for the purpose in everything he sees and the cause of everything he feels."


Although we were two, and not solitary, so it was with us.
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"To urge you toward responsible citizenship is to say that I do not accept either the technological determinism or the conventional greed or the thoughtless individualism of that world. Nor do I accept the global corporate empire and its economic totalitarianism as an irresistible force. I am here to say that if you love your family, your neighbors, your community, and your place, you are going to have to resist. Or I should say instead that you are going to have to join the many others, all over our country and the world, who already are resisting – those who believe, in spite of the obstacles and the odds, that a reasonable measure of self-determination, for persons and communities, is both desirable and necessary. Of the possibility of effective resistance there is a large, ever-growing catalogue of proofs: of projects undertaken by local people, without official permission or instruction that work to reduce the toxicity, the violence, and the self-destructiveness of our present civilization."

Wendell Berry, “Commencement Address” (
speech, Bellarmine University, Louisville, KY, May 12, 2007).

In the woods, the encroachment of civilization borders us on all sides. We wish to be arboreal, we wish to be close to nature, we all wish and hope to mesh and meld with the transcendent spheres, but we are merely human, neither fully crow nor fully cougar as wild animals are fully themselves.

We over packed, of course, like every other tenderfoot. I wore a brushed-steel Gerber multi-tool on my belt, given to me by our city neighbor, a recon Marine and Chicago cop; we had become friends. We packed extra socks, boots, moccasins, boonie-hats, kerchiefs, and cell phones, cash and credit cards. I packed my iPod, I packed my Blackberry (but not the charger-- some limits, I thought, some limits, please). We took sleeping bags, blankets, fishing rods, my tackle box, and rain ponchos, and a camera. We packed a cooler, Ramen noodles by the case, cooked chicken, frozen hamburger patties, frozen pork chops, oatmeal, skillets and saucepans, maple syrup, cans of beans, chips, coffee, bottled water. Even after this litany too much remains to continue to list, here, without being tiresome. Imagine the labor packing it all with us! But we were afraid of not having everything we needed, we were afraid of not having enough.

The notion of "enough," as a form of actual, not imagined, sufficiency, reminded me of my early schooling in woodland ways, fishing with my father at about six on Lost Lake, the stationary iridescent dragonflies, the lap of water, and us wading into the shallows to cast.

We ate cold grilled-cheese sandwiches with tomatoes and bacon, and sometimes we cooked eggs on the reflector stove, but only after we had brought in a few fish: silvery white bass, lake perch, or a mess of crappies. We were a Spartan and efficient team, and by mid-afternoon were on our way back, through the woods, and rowing across the big lake to our cottage, the soft thump of the oars in the locks muffled with the oil-soaked tongues of my late grand-dad's old brogans, doing a final posthumous duty of which the old man would have approved.

Supervision.
_____________________________________________

If we live our lives right, like "Buck," the hero-dog of Jack London's "The Call of the Wild," we may find again our aboriginal selves, and be true to our nature. But is that what we want?

"... Buck was wildly glad. He knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again, now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead."

-from Chapter VII, "The Sounding of the Call."


1968

Later, when I grew up a little, I was in the Boy Scouts of America. In trying out for "The Order of the Arrow," I underwent the Ordeal, the first step toward full membership. The Ordeal was meant to be a model of how, under the duress of the wilderness, the competent woodsman may make do with less. The rules were to eat little, not speak, improve the campsite, and sleep in a remote spot, away from everybody else.

Before sleep the night before my ordeal, at the 1968 Scout Jamboree at Lake Tamarack, at Wood Lake Scout Reservation, between Jones Michigan and US 12, Meeks, Jordan, Claeys and I (we all called each other by our last names) sat on the rocks and logs around the campfire, polished by the pants-seats of generations of boys, and talked in the offhand, easy way of boys who take each other's company for granted, as permanent, deathless, reliable and unchanging. In the intervening years, after grade-school, I never saw them again, but their faces come back to me, unchanging in their youth, the sparse beginnings of beard, the sunburn, the sharp, sweet smell of sweaty boys dried before a wood-fire.

We were concerned about skill at mumblety-peg, the difference between the square knot and the granny, rock-scissors-paper, riflery, archery, the Bears (Dick Butkus) the Packers (Ray Nitschke), the disabled boy winning Scout of the Year (again), and getting caught smoking grape vine by Mr. Bruggner, the Scoutmaster, an enormously heavy man with thinning hair who chain-smoked Newports and swigged constantly from a bottle of Maalox. Mr. Bruggner was by profession a haberdasher in South Bend, but an expert fisherman, skilled in building camps and fires, and cunning in all the ways of boys, of the fox, kingfisher, spider-monkey, coyote and hedgehog varieties.

"That's not a square knot," Meeks said.

"Yeah it is," I said.

"No it ain't," said Meeks. His dad was a refined and well-spoken attorney. The Meekses were from New York, and had moved to the Midwest when the company for which Mr. Meeks lawyered, Bendix Brake, acquired a new facility in South Bend. Mr. Meeks always wore a waistcoat and necktie, even at the dinner-table in his own house. I think Bill (that was Meeks's first name) liked to sound more rustic because of it. I think he felt like it put native Midwestern people at ease, more, if he mangled his English, although in story-telling and debate Meeks was nearly as good as me. At his house one night for dinner, I asked for the spaghetti sauce, and Mr. Meeks said, "You mean the gravy?" and I said, "no, the sauce." Before I could bite my tongue, I said gravy went on turkey, but sauce went on spaghetti.

"Well, now," he said, "we'll just have to define terms. Little did I know when Billy invited his friend ovah for suppah, that friend would argue like a Philadelphia lawyer," and he smiled kindly at me. Still, I was embarrassed and ducked my head, so Mr. Meeks put his hand on my crown and said, "a little moah sauce for the gandah, here, Mrs. Meeks, because we know what's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gandah," and I was relieved. I had heard that one, before.

"Gosh darn it," I said, and Meeks and Jordan laughed. I could do two half-hitches, and a taut-line hitch, but I kept messing up the down and under and under and over of the square knot. I had already moved on, to the sheetbend and fisherman's knot, so it was especially galling that the perfect symmetry of the square knot eluded me, in the execution.

Claeys was playing with his two GI Joe dolls. "Fucking playing with dolls," Jordan said, and Claeys flushed red and said, "they're action figures, Jordan, you moron, not dolls." He was putting them together, one on the back of the other. We watched, fascinated.

"It went the other way," Meeks said.

"No, it didn't," said Claeys. "The left arm pulls back the chin, and the right hand draws the blade." Claeys was serious, and carefully positioning the dolls. Each doll looked identical, with an identical saber-scar on the right cheek, like the scars that I read about in which Prussian officers prided themselves, sometimes rubbing salt into them to raise their welt and profile.

Claeys's brow was furrowed as he manipulated his miniature soldiers. His close-cropped reddish head replicated the hairline on the plastic-resin dolls, although his face was freckled and smooth. We watched him, rapt. Claeys's older brother, Rudy, was in Viet Nam, and I think we all remembered this fact at odd intervals, and our regard for him alternated between awe and pity. The calls and laughter of other boys echoed through the background of trees.

The news reports on TV trickled down to us. We heard about the massacre at My Lai in Viet Nam that winter, and my uncles and my dad argued about it. "War is war," was repeated over and over, and accounts of German atrocities in Belgium, and Japanese atrocities in Nanking. The deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were in the spring, and my father had bought a small TV for the kitchen. Quite often he and my mother and I would stop eating, and the food would get cold on our plates as yet another outrageous report came on the screen. My mom and dad finally moved the little black-and-white TV to the garage, on a shelf in the workshop.

The nightly TV news reported on the battle of Khe San, the Battle of Saigon, the demonstrations at UW Madison, President Johnson's signing of the Civil Rights Act, his refusal to seek another term as President, the student take-over of Columbia University in New York, the seizing of the Pueblo by the North Koreans and the accidental death of the ninety-nine crewman of the submarine Scorpion. All the world, it seemed, was fighting. Hearing and seeing these events, we were unhappily locked in childhood, anxious to be out of it, and wished to learn to fight. Fight for what, we were unsure.

The increasing stridence of the pop music we heard on our transistor radios ("Born to be Wild," "Revolution," "All Along the Watchtower"), James Brown appearing on TV after Reverend Dr. King's death, and the generally-heard advice to "not trust anyone over thirty," made us suspicious and worldly before our time, although we were, still, callow and provincial Midwestern boys, and did not know who, really, we trusted. Our parents were survivors of the Depression and the Second World War, and we lionized them. We knew about the Dust Bowl and breadlines, Pearl Harbor and The Bulge, rationing and Victory Gardens, but our pop-culture heroes belied all that, with their long hair, defiant poses, shout-outs to personal freedom, and encouragement to revolt, all, in an oddly synchronous way, perfectly attuned to breaking out of the reality of, yet in deep sympathy with, the hardships our parents had endured, which we endured hearing about, at suppertime.

At Boy Scout camp, a dozen or more tents were pitched in the middle of a clearing. The grass in the clearing was long and dark green. The height of the grass was about as tall as a man's hand is wide, but with deeper spots where water pooled in little kettles and the grass grew deeper and wilder. A raised circular area of packed, raked sand was at one end of the field, its diameter as wide as a fence-rail is long, surrounding a charred inner circle, for the making of bonfires. Native American-like ceremonies were performed for the boys around the fire, there, and the scoutmasters and boys told stories in front of it.

Most of the afternoon I had lay on a cot in a tent. As the sun fell, I began to feel more like myself, again. During the day I had been sick with some kind of malady, which resulted in nausea and a headache, but I had recovered by dinner-time, and before the light of the day had fully left the sky I tied on my sneakers, and adjusting my BSA 'kerchief, stretched out of the tent and walked away to find the stray members of my troop, in time for the visit of two Army Green Berets.

The troop were sitting cross-legged, Indian-style, in a circle a few yards away from the bonfire mound, their backs to it, equidistant between it and the shadowed trees, facing the dark woods. In the center of the circle two tall, rawboned, uniformed soldiers performed a kind of dance, in the fading light.

Walking face-on toward one another, one of the soldiers held a K-bar knife up against the inside of the forearm that would pass the other soldier as they crossed parallel to each other, making the blade invisible from the front. As they closed with one another, the two soldiers slowed, and the soldier carrying the K-bar turned his forearm out, and with two slow but deliberate strokes brought the flashing blade up against the other soldier's solar plexus, and as he passed him, thrust two equally deliberate, exacting strokes backwards, past the other soldier's hips, into the space just above his waist, between the other soldier's arm and torso. He then dropped the knife, which fell with a whispered thump into the grass, and walked on, without looking back, as the other soldier kneeled. Then both soldiers turned and glanced toward the scoutmaster, Mr. Bruggner, sitting in a lawn chair in the circle, smoking, and began speaking to the whole circle of boys.

"Two thrusts into the chest cavity, approaching. Two thrusts into the kidney-area passing, then drop the knife and continue walking. You just walk away, dropping the weapon as your arm naturally swings. The target will fall, and whatever interest this causes will be directed toward the target, on the ground," said the tall soldier who had used the knife.

"You just leave that knife behind," he said, walking back to where it lay, invisible, in the grass.

"Taking out a sentry is different," said the second soldier. The soldier who had held the knife retrieved it from the grass and slid it into a scabbard in his boot. Then he stood to attention, his back to the other soldier, who slid his knife from a scabbard hidden in the small of his back.

"Walk with your knees bent, silently, walking on the outside of the soles of your shoes, and folding them to the ground as the ball of your foot rolls under your weight." He hefted the knife in his right hand. As he approached the first, taller soldier, he reached high up and around his head at the neck, and cupped his left hand around the taller soldier's chin.

"In one move, cover the target's mouth and nose with your left hand and with the right, draw the blade deeply across the base of the throat in an arc-ing action," he said, pulling back the taller soldier's head, exposing his thick, veined neck, the knife turned edge-out as it drew past the veins. The taller soldier turned with the action and knelt, and then stood tall again as the knife disappeared from the shorter soldier's hand, into its backside scabbard.

"In both these exercises, the walking-kill and the sentry take-down, it's important that you not bury the blade of the weapon," said the taller soldier. He crouched slightly, and when he stood up again, his knife was in his hand. He hefted it in front of him, and pivoted it so the blade was, once again, against his inside forearm.

At my side, I saw Meeks staring up at the soldier, his mouth open. He was playing with the lanyard attached to his compass and his belt. Jordan was back on his elbows, an expression on his face like consternation, as if there were a problem, here, but he could not quite define its terms. Claeys watched intently, still and expressionless.

"In both the chest area and the throat, there is a lot of cartilage," said the taller soldier, who spoke with the elongated vowels of the South, "and for any of you boys who may have any hunting and dressing experience, you know even the sharpest blade can get jammed up in the cartilage. This is complicated by muscle-reaction in live targets, so it's important to always keep a smooth radial motion in the blade during the cut, and to slightly torque the weapon during the thrust and withdrawal," and here he turned the knife on its longitudinal axis, and twisted his wrist slightly.

"That's why it's also important to keep your muscles and tendons toned up," said the smaller soldier, as the taller soldier slipped the knife back into its boot-scabbard. "Wrist-strength is very important. Physical and mental conditioning go hand-in-hand," he said, and the taller soldier crossed his arms, glanced at the ground, and then up at us all.

Mr. Bruggner stood up, brushing the cigarette ashes from his shirt front.

"Well, boys, that's about it. Sergeant Hines and Sergeant VanderLeun are going to have a Coke and a smoke over by me, so if any of you want to stop by with questions, well, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to talk to you boys, isn't that right, boys?"

Yes sir, both soldiers answered in chorus. Yessir.

"And let's say a big Troop 532 thanks to these servicemen and to their home base, Fort Bragg, home of the 18th Airborne Division, and their outfit, the Special Operations Command."

"Thank-you," we all called out in unison. Both the soldiers ducked their heads and smiled boyishly, glancing at each other, all their warrior ferocity gone in an instant. They could not have been over twenty-five years old.

It was full night, now, and three or four scouts were up on the mound, using bows and sticks to strike up a spark for the bonfire to come.

"They call themselves, 'the Quiet Professionals,'" Jordan said, as we walked back through the chill grass to our tents.

"That's so cool," I said.

Claeys said, "De oppresso liber."

"De oppresso liber? What the fuck does that mean?" said Meeks.

"'We free the oppressed,'" Claeys said. "It's the motto of the Special Forces." He increased his pace and walked on ahead of us.

"You gonna go play with your dolls?" called Meeks, after him.

Sometime before dawn, I was zipped into and swept up in my sleeping bag, and carried into the woods, in darkness. All I could hear was the heavy respiration of boys, and once, the voice of Todd Needham, the assistant scoutmaster, saying something like, "North, see, sight along your bearing," and then more hours of silence, but for the puffing and breathing of those who carried me, and the sometime thrash of their tread through the underbrush. Through the green rayon of the bag I knew when the sun came up, and when we passed from the deep woods into a clearing. Then it became cooler, and I heard thunder and the pat-pat-pat of raindrops on tree leaves. Finally, the motion stopped, and I was slowly lowered to the ground.

"Count to five-hundred," said Needham, his voice whispered through the sleeping-bag, and I felt him step back, saw his shadow withdraw, and felt three small thumps on the surface of the bag, and then a fourth, lighter thump, that seemed to jingle. I heard a step or two, retreating, and then only the whine of mosquitoes and once the scamper of small feet in the leaves. I began counting.

Even muffled in the bag, I could hear the woods around me creaking to life. The weeds and leaves rebounded around me from where my troop's feet had crushed them. The call of a mourning dove sounded softly, and then was replaced by the keening of blue-jays, the click-click-click of grackles, and the buzzing of flies and the humming transport of a bumblebee coasting past. Reaching five-hundred, I looked at my watch. The radium dial glowed and the arms pointed to 9:30. I quietly unzipped the bag and crept out.

On it were three Hershey chocolate bars, and a whistle on a lanyard. The topographic map from my pocket, where I had put it the night before, did not offer any immediate notion of where I was, and I did not know how long before dawn my journey started, but I had no doubt I would figure it out. I felt my pocket for my pocketknife, and took it out. Sitting on a fallen tree, I pushed the clip blade of my pocketknife into the soft wood and took a deep breath.

My solitude was absolute. I knew that somewhere within the five-hundred acres that made up the camp woods were Mr. Bruggner, Claeys, Meeks, Jordan, and the others, but the present thrill of self-reliance left me light-headed. I had to sleep tonight in the woods, and find my way back to our troop's campsite by night of the following day. Anything could happen, and I was cautious, centered, excited and already dreading the night, almost twelve more hours ahead. In the cargo pocket of my pants I had a fishing line and a book of hooks, and I plotted to find Little Wood Lake and make a catch. I plotted to find cattail, clover, blackberries, and dandelion to eat, and when I returned to the troop campfire the following night, to nonchalantly hand off the Hershey bars, untouched.

The canopy of trees was high above me, a huge fallen hemlock to the left, and a stand of slim ash to the right. I was in a small valley full of yellow birch, basswood, and white ash. Deep blue sky was above the ridge, opposite, and sunlight glinted over the ridge in front of me.

"East," I said, softly, and the sound of my voice was strange to me, and oddly frightening. I decided I would not say anything else out loud, while I was alone. I knelt to bundle up the sleeping bag.

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We are not, as Conrad's character Stein said, in "Lord Jim," "masterpieces."
"I respected the intense, almost passionate, absorption with which he looked at a butterfly, as though on the bronze sheen of these frail wings, in the white tracings, in the gorgeous markings, he could see other things, an image of something as perishable and defying destruction as these delicate and lifeless tissues displaying a splendour unmarred by death.

"'"Marvellous!" he repeated, looking up at me. "Look! The beauty-- but that is nothing-- look at the accuracy, the harmony. And so fragile! And so strong! And so exact! This is Nature-- the balance of colossal forces. Every star is so-- and every blade of grass stands so-- and the mighty Kosmos in perfect equilibrium produces-- this. This wonder; this masterpiece of Nature-- the great artist."

"'"Never heard an entomologist go on like this," I observed cheerfully. "Masterpiece! And what of man?"

"'"Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece," he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the glass case. "Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass?..."'"

When we got to the cabin we hauled out and inventoried all this junk and I drove down to the commissary to get some more drinking water. A Blackberry, we had, but I had shorted us on drinking water. When I got back, my wife was sitting at the table, smiling at me.

"Well," I asked. I set down the gallon jugs of water.

"Would you mind going back for marshmallows?" she asked.

"You didn't bring the marshmallows?" I asked her. We had talked for days about marshmallows, graham crackers, and chocolate bars for the fire.

"He got' em," she said, and pointed to a spot across the road, next to a big red maple tree just behind the latrine. Under the shimmer of a spider-web, in the late afternoon shade, I could barely discern a plump shape, with pointy ears, and the defining black mask of a raccoon.

She laughed delightedly.

"I was inside laying out the sleeping bags and I heard a rustle and when I came out he didn't even run away! Shoo! I said, and he zipped across the roadway and took our marshmallows with him," she said, laughing.

"You!" she yelled. The raccoon stayed where he was, mumbling through the plastic to get at the fluffy white stuff inside. "I hope you get sick!"

When I got back from the commissary the second time, it was nearly sunset. I had bought a Styrofoam container of night-crawlers for the next morning's fishing, and Lisa laid out the materials for a fire. In the cabin south of us, a compact little woman with brown hair in a pony-tail got out of a beat-up Pontiac two-door, with a little boy. They steadily unloaded their car. Soon we had a nice fire going. I was going to make some coffee, and recalled the Hemingway story, "The Big Two-Hearted River," about Two Hearted River, four-hundred miles away, north by north-east, above the eastward arc of Lake Michigan, in northern Michigan's Upper Peninsula, near Lake Superior.
"He dipped the coffee pot half full, put some more chips under the grill onto the fire and put the pot on. He could not remember which way he made coffee. He could remember an argument about it with Hopkins, but not which side he had taken. He decided to bring it to a boil. He remembered now that was Hopkins's way. He had once argued about everything with Hopkins."
Like woodland creatures, themselves, the boy and his mom approached us cautiously. Sam, the boy, was first. I had (with the help of the Blackberry), recalled how to bend a bobber, sinkers, and a snap hook swivel onto a fishing line, finally remembering the double-loop, six-hitch method my dad had taught me, and was practicing side-casts and drop-casts into the grass just this side of the roadway.

"We're going out tomorrow," Sam said, in that forthright way of boys.

"So are we," I said.

"Well, seeya," Sam said. My wife came out and when the other woman saw her they waved at each other. Young Sam stacked firewood near the steel fire-pit, and got out two fishing rods and snapped them together. Soon night was upon us, and Lisa ritualistically covered us both with Deet, for the mosquitoes. Just as this process was completing, with Lisa's back turned toward me as I sprayed her, we saw Sam's mom come across the grassy sward between our cabins in a fast walk.


"Oh, I'm sorry," she said, "but could you help us? I'm afraid we have a little problem, sorry to impose."

"Sure," Lisa said, and extended her hand. "Hi, I'm Lisa, and this is my husband."

"Oh, hi, hi," the woman said, "I'm Dorothy, and look. Look!"

She turned toward the gun-blue Pontiac, and in the dim glow of the dome light, we could see a raccoon diligently using the steering-wheel to steady himself as he nosed across the dashboard, along the sill of the driver's-side window, his striped tail flashing as he rolled over into the back seat.

"Holy cow," I said, and got the big D-battery MagLite flashlight and a pot and a lid.

"Hey-hey-hey!" I called, flashing the light and banging the cooking gear, and the raccoon crept, slowly, unhurriedly, out of the car's open passenger-side door, coming around the driver's side to pause and watch me approach him. When he hadn't moved as I continued toward him, I began to get a little nervous, and then he trundled off into the brush and the woods beyond, glancing back occasionally, his eyes reflecting the light of the torch like silver coins.

"Oh, thank-you so much," she said.

"Yeah, thanks," Sam said. "Holy cow." Clicking off the torch, I walked over toward the little car, and Sam followed, while the two women watched us, arms crossed. I slammed the car-door closed and we walked back to our fire.

"They're bold, huh?" Sam asked me.

"They sure are."

"Where're you guys from," I asked.

"Madison," Sam said. "How about you?"

"Chicago," I said.

“Wow,” Sam said.

"Well, there you go," I said.

We sat together as our fire built, and after a few minutes watching me Sam went back to their fire pit and built a fire for the two of them. Lisa and I made some beans and chops in the old blackened stainless-steel boy-scout skillet I had brought along, drank bottled water, and talked.

After a while the conservation officer drove past us, south, along the road, in a flatbed truck with a white cab, with the DNR logo on the door. Then the same ranger drove back north, past us, again. Then the same truck came back, and just before passing us a third time, stopped just north of our cabin and got out. Hip-hop music had been playing at the campsite across from ours and a little to the north, across the roadway. Now we began to hear snatches of conversation.

"Who the hell do you think you are," said a strident, angry woman, somewhere off in the darkness.

Cups halfway to our lips, Lisa and I looked at each other. The music abruptly stopped, and we heard a metallic clanging, like cups clattering.

We clearly heard a man’s voice, saying, "Ma'am, ma'am..."

And then:

"Fuck you, get the fuck away from us!"

Then:

"Baby, take it easy."

"Fuck you, Jeremy, you've never been on my side, you gonna let them get away with this?"

"Ma'am, it doesn't have to be like this."

"You can kiss my ass."

"OK, I’m citing you." Then, the crackle of a radio, the flat, official request for additional officers, more resources. Doors slammed, and then:

Wham! Wham! WHAM!

"Ma'am, ma'am, that's state property! Now you're just going to have to settle down, just take it easy, you're just making a bad situation worse."

"You can kiss my ass, you fucking bastard, I can have you fucking killed, you fat prick, and your whole goddamn family, you don't know me, you have no idea how fucked you are, you sonofabitch."

"Now baby--"

"Shut up, Jeremy, shut the fuck up! I fucking hate you!"

By this time Dorothy and Sam had come back to our fire. Dorothy had wrapped herself up in a shawl, and Sam's eyes were huge in the firelight.

"Wow," he said.

"Well," I said.

"I'm going over there to check it out," Lisa said, her voice full of mischief and amusement, and she pulled her sweatshirt on over her shirt.

I would not even turn and look. It was all so tawdry and disgusting. We had left our neighborhood in the city to get away from this stuff.

"Aw, jeez, honey, just stay put," I said.


"Hell, no," she said, and crept stealthily up behind our Jeep Cherokee to watch, from behind the hatch-back, the events across the road. By this time another conservation vehicle had cruised into the area, and the crackle of radio transmissions was everywhere. The Department of Natural Resources truck had turned on an amber Mars light, which flashed orange light across the road and into the deep woods beyond.

"Hey! HEY! That's enough!" a male voice demanded, followed by a peal of high, raucous, female laughter.

"You're in big trouble, now, lady," said the voice. "You're-- you're going to jail."

"The fuck I AM," said the woman, followed by a man exclaiming, "HEY! God-DAMN it!" Then we heard the sound of feet shuffling on the asphalt roadway, and, finally, something banging against a car body.

"Now, NOW! That's it. You are under arrest. Tommy, get the goshdarned sheriff, I'll be darned, this is unbelievable," said the voice, and another, younger male voice, spoke a series of letters and numbers into the radio.

Before long, we heard the wail of a siren in the distance, and within minutes a black-and-yellow Lake County Sheriff's car cautiously drove up the roadway. The siren was off within the park, but the red-and-white emergency lights flashed, reflecting off Turner Lake, and the green fiberglass light-wells of the latrine. Lisa and Dorothy had their heads together, watching the goings-on from around back of the Cherokee.

"So, just you and your mom out camping, huh, Sam," I said.

"Yep," he said. "Mom's great. She baits a hook, and rows, and everything."

"Where's your dad?"

Sam paused, slightly, hardly perceptible.

"He left, we never see him anymore."

"I see," I said. "Well sometimes having a great mom is better."

"I think so, too," he said. "I have an Uncle Dave who stays with us and we throw the football around."

"You play football," I asked.

"Yep. I am a center and an end," Sam said.

"Sounds like that girl's going to jail," I said. "That's the local jurisdiction, she's going to jail."

Lisa came back to us from the darkness behind the Cherokee.

"They've got the cuffs on her, she's in the car, and she tried to kick out the car window. Then she got in the front seat and broke the computer," she said happily, and then went back to her post, where Dorothy was still watching and listening.

"I've never ridden in a police car," Sam said.

"I have," I said.

"For fun?" Sam asked me.

"Nope," I said. "For real.”

“What’d you do,” Sam asked me.

“Me and some friends broke in, somewhere, when we were sixteen years old, and I got caught," I said, and it seemed like I had gone too far, because Sam's eyes got big, with a flicker of fear back of them.

Then, I laughed. "Hey, it was thirty-six years ago," I said, and smiled at him. His face relaxed. “That’s a long time ago, I’m a way different person.”

"Still," Sam said.

"Yeah, it was a big mistake."

One by one the official cars left. Soon, the only vehicles left were the flatbed truck with a white cab and the DNR logo on the door, and a bulky white GMC four-by-four that belonged to the unknown couple, now gone, I had every reason to believe, to the jail, the hoosegow, the pokey, stir, ol’ stony lonesome, the lockup. The headlights of the conservation truck illuminated the abandoned campsite, with its picnic table still laden with food and condiments, the fire-pit smoking with the dregs of their campfire, an expensive six-man dome tent, and a Bean Bag Toss game still set up.

The other campers that had gathered to observe this whole altercation stepped away, shaking their heads, and soon the conservation officer, in the cab of his truck, was the only person left. Covering the lens of my torch with my fingers, I approached the cab.

"Hey," I said.

The officer looked up from his paper-work.

"Hey," he said. Hurt registered in his eyes. He was an enormous man, at least two-hundred and seventy-five pounds, probably six-feet five inches tall. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and had a nearly bald head, with a bristly crew cut. The truck had a diesel engine, and as it idled it clanked like diesels will do, but with that reliable solidity, like a tractor or an earth-mover: steady, uncomplicated, firm, collected.

"Probably a bad time, but spare a minute for a question," I asked him.

"Sure," he said, sucking in a little air through his teeth, in a "now what?" kind of way.

"Any chance of these folks coming back and raising hell again, tonight," I asked, "because I'm kind of hoping it's over."

"No, it's over," he said. "It's way over. They won't be coming back here, and I don't think they'll be getting to go anywhere, anytime soon."

"Ok," I said, "I'm just concerned because my wife and neighbor were over here watching the whole thing, and you know, people like that, if they see you were watching ‘em, maybe they get an idea."

"No," the ranger said. "They’re done. They’ll be in jail for several days I would imagine. Now I got to pack up all this and inventory it all, and the tow-truck's coming for their vehicle. It's over."

Then he looked at me, purposefully, right in the eyes.

"You ever swear?" he asked me.

"Well, sure," I said.

"OK," he said, "because I don't mean to offend." Then he drew a big breath, his big chest expanding all the way out to the steering-wheel. He leaned his forearm, the size of small log, on the truck's door frame.

"Why'n't they just take the fucking seventy-five dollar ticket? All this goddamn waste, and for what? I saw open beer on the table, and I came up to 'em and told them it was against the rules, and the next thing I know the park service is gonna get sued, and the Mafia's coming to kill me and my family."

He paused and drew in another big breath through his nose. He pushed his glasses up and glanced at the clip-board in his huge hands, preparatory to getting back to his work. Then he looked back at my face.

"Now I got to tear down, inventory, and impound all their stuff. I tell you, my heart's just thumpin' in my chest," he said, "and for nothin'. Just a waste, just a big waste, for nothin'." I nodded my head, looked at the night sky. There was a crescent moon, and the clouds skidded by.

We exchanged first names, I shook his hand and thanked him, and walked back to our fire. Dorothy and Sam and my wife were describing and acting out all the night's capers. Sam was all charged up, the night’s events had fired his imagination, and he was excited and happy.

Later, with a cup of cold coffee, I saw the ranger sitting at the couple's deserted picnic table, choosing an item carefully, looking at it, writing something down, and setting the item aside. Still later, he emptied the big dome-tent. Across the roadway I heard the pop-pop-pop of him dismantling the rods that bowed the tent into a dome, and watched him carefully and expertly roll it up. Then he drove away. A few minutes later a big tow-truck came, and hooking up the fancy white four-by-four, rolled away with it down the road, emergency lights flashing.

Before sleep I went back to look at the campsite of the man and woman who had been taken away, and it was completely empty, swept neatly, and except for a faint, angry orange glow and lacy wisp or two of smoke from the fire-pit, was as if they had never been there.
"The coffee boiled as he watched. The lid came up and coffee and grounds ran down the side of the pot. Nick took it off the grill. It was a triumph for Hopkins. He put sugar in the empty apricot cup and poured some of the coffee out to cool. It was too hot to pour and he used his hat to hold the handle of the coffee pot. He would not let it steep in the pot at all. Not the first cup. It should be straight Hopkins all the way. Hop deserved that. He was a very serious coffee drinker."

_____________________________________________
A LOVER of the moorland bare,
And honest country winds, you were;
The silver-skimming rain you took;
And loved the floodings of the brook,
Dew, frost and mountains, fire and seas,
Tumultuary silences,
Winds that in darkness fifed a tune,
And the high-riding virgin moon.

Robert Louis Stevenson, "IX. To K. De M," from A Child’s Garden of Verses and Underwoods. New York: Current Literature, 1906; Bartleby.com, 2000. www.bartleby.com. Visited 11 June 2008.

We worked together at a Chicago nightclub, a comedy place up in Old Town. Arthur was the son of the piano player. I was escorting out the trash and the occasional drunk with another guy, Billy Seven, a Greek lunatic from Detroit, and helping keep order in the room, which could get insanely rowdy, what with the raucous brand of humor coming off the stage, the college-age crowd, and the alcohol being served. Arthur was a bartender. Arthur’s old man and I shared a pretty fierce alcohol, tobacco, pot and cocaine habit, although he was three decades older than me.

A Greek lunatic from Detroit

Somehow, the old man and I had formed a bond on first sight.

As I have said so many times, blogiation is a forced outing of innerness. Dear readers, I had washed out of the traditional news business after a year at a wire-service and a year each at two magazines. Since then, punishing myself for my professional ineptitude and my lack of discipline in journalism school (where I had actually been asked to leave, and did so without a degree) I had been knocking down black-pipe—the black lead pipe that carries waste out of buildings. Since black-pipe is joined by fitting two sections together, and sealed by pouring melted lead into the union, a sledge-hammer is the only way to get it down. In basements all over the Near West side, I worked on the second-lowest rung of the construction-trade ladder. The lowest rung was chipping bricks after a razing, and I had not yet gotten down that low.

As a freelance writer, working with an Olympia manual typewriter my late mother had bought for me in college, I had written some small pieces for the city’s free weeklies, and lately for construction magazines. I made the rounds of every publication in Chicago, one of which was a struggling theatrical journal published as a sideline by this comedy club's box-office manager, Don.

Recently I took a swing at a guy, and instead connected with a door-frame when he ducked, and had broken the third metacarpal in my left hand. When I went to talk to Don about writing for his little journal, I was wearing a filthy tattered cast. I was perpetually pissed off, even without a broken hand, and always ready for more. I met Don down on Wells street, and he gave me a Coke. Don was kind and understanding, and after he told me they were still looking for on-spec work, or work-for-copies, and he had no paying writing work for me, he sat back and crossed his arms, taking me in.

“How would you like to work, here?”

It was 1985, and the Chicago nightclub was “The Second City,” famous for alumni John and Jim Belushi, and Chris Farley, and now for Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell and a host of others.

“Doing what,” I said. Jobs! They were all the same, just bossed by assholes with different names. I sometimes walked all night because I hated the crappy, empty apartment I had on Huron and Ashland, the stinking gas space-heater, the neighbors fighting in the other flats, the baseball-bats against the fenders and the skulls out on the street; I was twenty-five and never expected to see thirty. I had lost my family, fucked up college, and had nowhere to go.

“We need a host for the room,” he said, “and maybe some other stuff.” This was the first time I ever heard the place where the stage and audience were called, “the room,” and at first I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I chewed the inside of my cheek, and then said OK.

My first night, Arthur’s old man came wheeling out of the room like he was walking on the deck of a ship at sea, pitch-black Ray-Bans and a fisherman’s cap on his head, and (because I thought I was invisible), I watched him quietly, standing at the end of the bar while he went up to the soda-gun to splash a little ginger ale into his Martell. I was just watching him, like I was in a duck-blind and he was some clueless woodland creature, just a brain-stem, like I thought of everybody else. It never occurred to me this was the place where young actors, comics, and comedians from all over the country came to make connections, get a job, and make a name. To me, it was just another fucking place. Suddenly the black lenses flashed over at me, like the face of Darth Vader, and he growled loudly through his beard:

“You want somethin’ from me?” His shades locked onto my face, and I was caught completely off-guard, which was to me an utterly unfamiliar sensation.

“No, man, I’m cool,” I said, and my insides jumped around in a way they hadn’t since I was a boy. He kept looking at me for a half-second, and then wheeled back into the room.

(In the years that followed, I realized that old man had been exactly right. I had wanted something from him. I had wanted the extension of paternal affection that was taken from me when I was too young, and ultimately the extension of that love into adult friendship. I wanted the respect and comradeship of an older man. I wanted that natural culmination of growing up, for which all of us boys search, until we find it in ourselves).

Naturally, his son Arthur and I became friends. Now, of course, I see how inevitable this was. Arthur’s old man was the kind of guy whose musical talent and its magnetic attraction (like all real talent, to do effortlessly what no one else can do at all), served, too, to keep all those who loved him at arm’s length, and Arthur—and I—were no exceptions.

Arty had been sent up to Quetico Provincial Park, in Ontario, every summer since he was a boy. Now, with his gnarly beard and shoulder-length hair, a little paunch and a smoke-and-coffee habit we both at that time shared, he had brought up to me the idea of splitting the cost of the trip, and heading on up there.

"Arty"

In 1985 the Space Shuttle “Discovery,” crew included Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a Payload Specialist, and Route 66 was officially decommissioned. Later on that year my girlfriend and I moved in together to a roach-infested bungalow on West Division, in one of Nelson Algren’s roughest neighborhoods. Soon after, her sixteen-year-old little brother ran away from home in St. Louis and showed up at our door, and within six weeks tried to slit his wrists.

1985

After a few months, besides working the comedy crowd six nights a week, I spent my days at “the Club,” too, repairing the iconic cane-backed chairs used in the room, and on the stage.

(Arthur’s father’s appellation of “the Club,” for the Second City, was utterly appropriate for those who worked there, on stage and off. It was a club with a limited membership, which the nightly crowds only got to observe. We were all one, in the club, slept with each other, drank and got high with each other, mourned together when one of us died, and fought and hated each other. The Second City is really a place that defies single-word definition. Theater? Yes and no. Nightclub? Yes and no. Haven for the tragically misunderstood, angry, young, overcharged flotsam of small-town ambition tossed up on the shore of the show-business Third Market? Maybe, at that time, yes.)

As a freelance hack, I had written a few largish feature stories for the Chicago “Reader,” encyclopedia entries, and a couple of educational films, and was trying to break into magazine writing. “Outside,” magazine was then based in Chicago, and beginning to attract a loyal readership. The then-
editor, who later went on to develop the now-popular “Men’s Journal,” agreed to help me out with the expenses for a “spec,” article on Quetico, so I agreed with Arthur and we went.

Quetico was famous for cataclysmic thunderstorms, impenetrable clouds of black flies, moody, thousand-foot deep lakes, and challenging and unreliable portages. “Portage,” which Arthur insisted we pronounce “por-tahzh,” its French pronunciation, was the term for carrying your canoe overland from one lake or stream to another. The term originated with the French “voyageurs,” which besides being the French word for traveler, in the era of the fur trade in Canada, meant the canoeists and porters who trapped and sold pelts, starting in the 18th century. Voyageurs National Park, along the Canadian border, was named for these French or French-Canadian (and British, German, Russian and-- in the beginning-- native Iroquois, Ottawa and Ojibwa) businessmen and adventurers.

My hope was for sufficient hardship to make for an exciting story. As it happens, the weather was beautiful, the black flies nonexistent, and the work of canoeing and portaging utterly manageable. Although I strove mightily to cobble together an exciting narrative of north woods adventure, after I got back and wrote it up, in the words of Liz, the editor assigned to me, “nothing happened.”

Quetico Provincial Park is located just west of the 90th degree of longitude, in Canada, about fifty kilometers above the western toe of Lake Superior. The 4,655 square kilometer park is maintained by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. It is south of Atikokan, between Fort Frances and Thunder Bay. In it are over 14-hundred kilometers of canoe routes.

A map of Quetico leaves you with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach. The waterways dive down to the southwest from the trenches left behind the glaciers, which left big striations in the land throughout Quetico, which lay on the southern extreme of the Precambrian Shield, on the Canadian Shield, one of several remaining segments of the earth's original crust. As the ice retreated, differential uplift created a topography varying from 1000 to 7000 feet above sea level. Tall lean scowling scaffolds of granite, topped and shadowed with trees and underbrush, are everywhere. Because of Quetico's lively seismic past, there are fault lines in the park, primarily in the southeast, near Agnes and Man lakes, adjoining Superior National Forest in northern Minnesota.

Quetico supported a great wealth of trapping, trading, logging and mineral interests since the arrival of the first European settlers in the late 17th century. Logging continued in Quetico until 1971, when public concern for the environment resulted in its ban. In 1973 Quetico was classified as a wilderness park. The water is eminently potable-- anything you could put in it to purify it would pollute it. Motorized boats are prohibited in all but a few of the lakes, on the park’s perimeter.

Arthur and I brought a seventeen foot aluminum Grumman canoe, and three paddles. The third was for fending off rocks, an old unfinished AMF model with someone’s name cut into it with a wood-burning stylus. The other two were sleek, square, and angled at the blade, made out of cedar and hardwood by the Sawyer Company, and laminated with polished fiberglass.

Our first destination was called the Batchewaung Portage, an 840 meter reinforced trail, leading down hand built steps to Batchewaung Lake. The wind was against us through the entire Batchewaung area, Batchewaung Lake, Little Batchewaung Lake, and Batchewaung Bay. The word “O-ba-tchi-wan,” means “a current going through narrows,” in Ojibwa.

We turned north at Mosquito Point and entered the Pickerel Narrows, where we camped on an unnamed island. The Narrows is a system of streams and islands west of Pickerel Lake. Pickerel Lake is thirteen-hundred feet deep. A forty mile-per-hour wind reached around from the east and zoomed through our campsite.

1985

With its surrounding crown of red and white and jack pine, black and white spruce, balsam fir and tamarack, the lake, reflecting the sky, got dark like an auditorium draining of sound and light. The wind disappeared. We saw the aurora borealis in the north, the aurora corona in perfect outline, increasing steadily in movement and intensity until about nine o’clock and then disappearing. Ursa Major and Cassiopeia were visible. Once, when the air was absolutely still, Arty played a light across the fallen spruce we sat upon, and a deer-mouse, eyes and ears disproportionately huge, flickered back at us, a quick little furtive flame of life.

The next day in the water Arty showed me a pictograph he had first encountered on a trip with a group from the Field Museum. He splashed water on the rocks, making the image darken. The pictograph was a stick-man in a canoe, bending back with a weapon in his hands, at the waist, far back toward the stern of his canoe. The pictograph was five feet above water level on a cliff that rose another thirty or forty feet.

At the end of the next portage we found a steam-boiler and screw from a barge dating to Quetico's logging days, buried in white sand. Minnows clouded the water, nosing up to my pants-leg and taking off.

That night we camped on another nameless island south of the dividing point of Twin Lakes, in the southernmost of them. The Deux Rivieres portage prior to this camp was an historic portage of the French traders, 690 meters long, a mastic river of muck that pulled off our shoes and rode up into our pants, leaving us with a lot of weight in mud, and a few leeches.

Ravens were in the sky for a few hours every evening, and we could always hear the call of distant owls. We found masses of moose spoor, cylindrical and fibrous inside and Arty told me, amused, that this was collected and sold in Atikokan for fertilizer.

Mosquitoes were everywhere. Our tent, exhaling gales of carbon dioxide, collected mosquito advance men like crazy. They hot-rodded around the vents like distant racers. The beavers were making a croaking sort of yawp, pleasant in a Marlene Dietrich sort of way. Our slumbers were punctuated by the race of tiny feet on twigs (there are no snakes in Quetico), and the jet like whine of incoming mosquitoes, pulsating with larval energy.

At seven o’clock in the morning one day, breakfastless, unwashed, silent, we looped around the island to the southeast into the reedy waterway. We had to lift the canoe over rocks in some spots, and noted a lot of timber wreckage, largely due to beavers. The granite reached out to us and in under the canoe, a restless giant, covered with moss and freshwater mollusks and underwater plants, like a whale’s skin is covered with patches of white barnacles, and orange whale lice. The rock rolls an ancient shoulder, and the trees abandon their moorings.

We meandered up the Deux Rivieres, and at a fork in the stream encountered a small brown duck with a brood. She noticed us, and scolded her ducklings into the reeds. She was completely preoccupied with making us follow her and leading us away from her ducklings, and consequently, after going too far upstream with us, was forced to paddle furiously back to relocate her brood. We travelled the entire length of the river and circled back at Sturgeon Lake.

Upon our entrance to the channel, we again encountered the duck, at least I think it was the same one. Her attitude was quite different. She darted in and out of the reeds, scant feet from our gunwales, occasionally successful in finding a duckling and driving it out into the stream. Bigfoot pointed, I followed, and a little duck, about as big as a girl's fist, tiny wings and body raised in that well-known water-walk webfoot flapping that ducks do, disappeared. Something dragged it beneath the surface. It happened as if the little fowl had been caught in a piece of machinery. Slap, clap, smack, then just a fine trace of bubbles and an angular current toward the reeds.

That night we trolled. I used my dad's old Heddon reel on a collapsible rod, and pulled in a couple of fish. One was a five-pound walleye. A member of the perch family, the walleye is named for its "wall" eyes, which are marble-white, evolved to see and feed in near darkness. He had an undershot jaw, full of sharp teeth at random angles, the line of his mouth in that grim, permanent frown.

The next morning we packed up the canoe, conscious as we tied down the load we were well into the downward glide back. We had some rain chase us, but the weather remained beautiful, and unremarkable.

After a twelve-hour day on the water, we had a night at Voyageur Wilderness Camp to recoup. We had a sauna and a swim and a home-cooked supper prepared by Jean, whom Arty had known for twenty years, spiced by war-stories told by Ed, her husband, who had piloted B-29s in the Second World War and worked in intelligence in South America in the 1950s. The island library was full of ecology books, an edition of the Harvard Classics, a great deal of anthropological material pertaining to native peoples’ literature and history, and a copy of Alan Paton's, “Cry, the Beloved Country,” seventy or so pages of which I read before sleep.

We put the canoe on the car and drove along the Lake Superior height of land to Grand Portage, a culmination point for several historic trapping and fur-trading routes. Customs waved us through.

Copyright Nina Simonowicz & NorthShoreVisitor

_____________________________________________

The particulars of American experience in the here-and-now float along on the surface of the rest of the world. The brief, shining moment, the flash in the pan, the strictly local phenomenon of several generations of a population of men and women and children growing up in a purely market-driven society, largely without interaction or understanding of the natural or aboriginal world around them, has been the blessing and the damnation of the United States and her people.

As market economies mature, worldwide, the American phenomenon is less spectacular. As the industrial plant of the rest of the world matures, world literature will be widely published and appreciated, and the rest of the world is significantly bigger than the nations of English-speaking people.
English may or may not continue to be the lingua franca of media, and among the premier languages of the arts (think Shakespeare, or Wordsworth, or possibly Steve Martin), but it is a near certainty that in the setting and context of that literature, the books one might have once termed, "great literature," like Tender is the Night, or To Have and Have Not will never again be written in the English language and universally accepted as masterpieces. Maybe another Lost Generation will arise, not in the cafés of Paris, as in the 1920s, but in the jaded ruins of LA, or Haifa. This presupposes English-- or English translation-- will be appreciated as something besides the talk of air traffic controllers.

Once upon a time, history provided a continent to an audacious contingent of intrepid and voracious predatory insects, with all the courage and mechanical efficiency of insects, borne of superior technology and of firepower. Since the laws creating the National Park Service, Americans have been in the interesting position of visiting nature for recreation, instead of having the travails of nature visited upon them, in the manner of the Third World, as crushed and unwitting victims of nature's inhuman power, Nature with a capital "N," the rolling over of the tigress in her lair, who overlays and kills her own cubs. Even
the recent floods in the Midwest, while economically destructive, are viewed by Americans as problems a magnitude greater than usual, to be overcome with a proportionate remediation effort. Where, in the rest of the world, have the predations of nature been so casually managed?




The overwhelming beauty and potency of wind and rain, the massive and ungovernable power of the oceans and the atmosphere, and the mysteries of their interaction are impenetrable to us, a lesson the rest of the world has learned, and continues to learn, perhaps better. Americans' greatest strength may be-- may have always been-- the Yankee determination not to necessarily be uninformed, but if so to take a stubborn pride in being uninformed. In other words, the stoic Iowans who doggedly bailed out their living-rooms uncomplainingly after the June 2008 Midwestern United States floods simply did not know any better. The residents of New Orleans, in the aftermath of the Atlantic hurricane of 2005, being far more cosmopolitan, wisely saved their strength, and waited for their government check (as if they were already part of the EU).

Still, this pioneer spirit and hardness of Americans has been diluted and weakened, not by the hardship of a hundred years of world war, but by its rewards. The American population now, hooked on broadcast reality and cholesterol, has a long trail back. The American culture of "camping out," the Boy Scouts, and the faux "extreme," sports like the ones covered routinely in magazines like "Outside," illustrate eloquently the difference between living in the bush and visiting it for fun, with a boom box (and a Blackberry).

In his masterpiece, "Nostromo," Conrad wrote of his character Charles Gould, the Englishman whose family had been established in the fictional South American nation, "Costaguana," for three generations, and whose mission it is to save a silver mine, there:
"There was no mistaking the growling mutter of the mountain pouring its stream of treasure under the stamps; and it came to his heart with the peculiar force of a proclamation thundered forth over the land and the marvellousness of an accomplished fact fulfilling an audacious desire. He had heard this very sound in his imagination on that far-off evening when his wife and himself, after a tortuous ride through a strip of forest, had reined in their horses near the stream, and had gazed for the first time upon the jungle-grown solitude of the gorge. The head of a palm rose here and there. In a high ravine round the corner of the San Tome mountain (which is square like a blockhouse) the thread of a slender waterfall flashed bright and glassy through the dark green of the heavy fronds of tree-ferns. Don Pepe, in attendance, rode up, and, stretching his arm up the gorge, had declared with mock solemnity, 'Behold the very paradise of snakes, senora.'"
As he wrote in "The National Interest," in the spring of 1998, Robert D. Kaplan, "a contributing editor of 'The Atlantic Monthly,' and author of five books, most recently The Ends of the Earth (Vintage, 1996),'" in the peroration to his excellent exegesis of Nostromo:
"...so many students who gravitate to political science and journalism these days tend to come from well-off backgrounds and hold idealistic views-- as opposed to other young people I have encountered at universities and in the corporate world, from harsher backgrounds, who are unashamed about just wanting 'to make money.' It is ironically the latter-- those with no interest in political science but who have been conditioned as realists-- who may be better equipped psychologically to comprehend the situation in many troubled places in the world."

Also in "The Best American Essays 1999," on p. 224, "Outside," writer David Quammen, in "Planet of Weeds," says a young Canadian policy analyst named Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, "author of several calm-voiced but frightening articles on the linkage between what he terms 'environmental scarcity,' and global sociopolitical instability," cites a conversation between Homer-Dixon and Kaplan, as quoted in Kaplan's The Ends of the Earth, in which Homer-Dixon said, "Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction."

_____________________________________________

Pickerel Lake, 1985

Hemingway said (infra), "What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

At Grand Portage Arty and I walked out onto the dock and met Captain Siebertson, of the “Wacondah,” a glitteringly white-painted diesel cruise vessel about sixty-five feet long, with a bright red-painted waterline. The “Wacondah,” drew eight feet of water, and seemed proportionate to Siebertson himself, a big, wide man with white hair and a red face and a very red nose. He was all alone at the end of a one-hundred foot dock, which looked like bran-new concrete and steel.

When he saw us coming he threaded up his fishing rod and walked back toward us and the gangplank. We talked easily and not too lengthily, three men equally dwarfed by the lake, which was smooth as glass and surrounding us. A mile out a trawler was as small as a toy, halfway to the horizon, the merest chip on the immutable surface of the water.

"People come out here and say, 'Big? What's Big?'" Siebertson said. "'Everybody says it's Big out here. Where are the shopping malls? Where can I buy a souvenir?' I can't understand it," he said. "People figure nothing's big that don't have pavement on it," he said, and shook his head.

We drove one-hundred and ninety miles along the lake to Duluth. Rain was intermittent. A sign on the southbound highway about fifty miles south of Thunder Bay said that thenceforth all waters flowed to the Atlantic watershed, away from the Arctic Circle.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Othello

Richard Wright (originally written in 1943), from "American Hunger," p. 77. (Harper & Row, 1977):

“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.”
________________________________________

Recently, according to habit, I was reading George Orwell. Although dead by 1955, Orwell was clairvoyant, ahead of his time in predicting the character of men and women, the behavior of politicians, the nature of media, and the quality of literature.

Orwell's prescience is not limited to his metier, political thought, but extends to the mood and sentiment of populations, like England's; subgroups, like the homeless, journalists, artists, soldiers, and politicians; the nature of mass media; and the banalities of gardening, buying used books, and weather observation.

This verisimilitude springs, in part, from the unflinching condor's gaze Orwell turns upon events, people's actions, and the forces that drive them. He is utterly unsentimental, although a perceptive and sympathetic observer of feeling, in others. Toward the end of his essay, "Why I Write," he said:

"Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don't want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing ...is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist or understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a window pane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed."

This passage brings us to the central issue of a web presence, like this one.

Professional journalists, writers, and poets of my acquaintance look with incredulity on this effort, the wholesale flushing of my original words and carefully chosen content into the great cataract of the Internet. They think, but out of exquisite politeness do not say, that either I am a fool for giving so much away, or a fool whose work is so undisciplined and poor, anyway, that I may as well do so. Or may be they dismiss me for a charlatan, taking others' work as if it were mine, recycling and obscuring and corrupting the original creations of other composers even as I prostitute my own.

Every image and every word reveals personality (or the lack of one). There is no escaping it. And furthermore, in this case, I find myself objectifying Lee, and Arin, and Colby, Robert, Claire, Michael, Jim, Tia, Paul, Mathias, Luke, Justin, Steven, and Omero. In the act of writing about them, I extract myself from that emotional union which, in current theory, binds us together, acting together. By filming and editing their impressions of their work, below (and necessarily not my own), I draw myself apart from them. In rendering them into objects of my manipulation, my craft, my depiction of the real, my blog, I capture them, imperfectly, and cast them in an amber of my technical and interpretive manufacture: flawed, narrow, and imperfect as my own character.

________________________________________

A year before dying in Paris in November of 1960, Richard Wright completed 4-thousand haiku, producing an 82-pp. manuscript.

Each of the video segments which follow are prefaced with a haiku by Richard Wright, from "
Haiku: This Other World." (Arcade, 1998).
________________________________________

809

Why did this spring wood
Grow so silent when I came?
What was happening?

From Karen Fort, "Director's Notes," the Chase Park Theater production of "Othello," 18 April 2008:

Virtuous women were, above all, to be chaste, silent and obedient. Today cultural norms are different, yet the occasion of a victim of domestic violence blaming herself rings eerily accurate. When Shakespeare wrote Othello, King Henry VIII had beheaded his wife Anne Boleyn within living memory, for unproven infidelity. No wonder their daughter, Queen Elizabeth, never married, and liked a story that implied that her parents loved each other, but were betrayed by another’s lies.

In much of the world, a woman’s suspected extramarital affair justifies and legalizes her murder by male relatives. In Chicago, women slain by an intimate partner numbered nearly 40 in 2007.



"Karen"

Desdemona is chaste, silent when asked who killed her, and obedient. Perhaps she chooses pacifism. But working-class Emilia, who steals the handkerchief and says she would commit infidelity, becomes morally outraged and speaks truth to powerful men, for friendship’s sake.

Othello is an old, sad, frightening story, an exploration of how jealousy can swallow us alive. It shows how race, class and gender privilege can undermine trust and faithful love. Tragedies teach by negative example, evoking our terror and pity.

The mission of Chase Park Theater, classic works for a diverse community, demands that I address this play.

________________________________________

From the website of The British Library:
...the British Library’s 93 copies of the 21 plays by William Shakespeare printed in quarto before the theatres were closed in 1642...

Othello has been dated to between mid-1601 and mid-1602. One important source for Othello was Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny, "Historie of the World," published in 1601. There are several echoes of Othello in the first quarto of Hamlet, published in 1603. These suggest that Othello must have been written by early 1603, and probably before July 1602 when Hamlet was entered on the Stationers’ Register.

The title-page of the first quarto, published in 1622, states that the play ‘hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black-Friers, by his Maiesties seruants’. Othello was played at court by the King’s Men on 1 November 1604. The play was given in Oxford in 1610. The title role was originally played by Richard Burbage, with Joseph Taylor as Iago.

Othello appeared in four editions before 1642.

First quarto, 1622. Believed to have been printed from a scribal transcript of Shakespeare’s foul papers. Othello is the first of the ‘good’ quartos of Shakespeare’s plays to divide the text into acts. The text is also among the few to have page numbers.

First folio, 1623. Believed to have been printed from a scribal transcript (probably by Ralph Crane) of Shakespeare’s fair copy of the play.

Second quarto, 1630. Printed from the first quarto, with amendments probably derived from the first folio.

Second folio, 1632. Printed from the first folio.

Othello was entered by Thomas Walkley on the Stationers’ Register on 6 October 1621. The first quarto was printed by Nicholas Okes for Walkley and appeared in 1622. Walkely transferred his copyright in Othello to Richard Hawkins on 1 March 1628. The second quarto was printed by Augustine Mathewes for Hawkins and appeared in 1630.

British Library copies of Othello containdetailed bibliographic descriptions of all the quarto copies of the play.

Shakespeare’s sources:

Several sources were particularly important for the creation of Othello.

Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi, De gli Hecatommithi (1565). Shakespeare used the 7th novella from the 3rd decade of Cinthio’s collection for the outline of the plot and much of the detail in Othello. He may have used either the Italian original, a French translation by Gabriel Chappuys published in 1583, or perhaps an English translation which has not survived.

Leo Africanus, translated by John Pory, A Geographical Historie of Africa (1600). This work perhaps influenced the character of Othello, and supplied Shakespeare with details for Othello’s description of his early life.

Map of Africa. Leo Africanus, A Geographical Historie of Africa, translated by John Pory, 1600. British Library, G.4258, plate.
Pliny the Elder, translated by Philemon Holland, The Historie of the World (1601). Shakespeare possibly used this work for the exotic details of Othello’s experience.

Gasparo Contarini, translated by Sir Lewis Lewkenor, The Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice (1599). Lewkenor’s work drew on a Latin text by Cardinal Contarini. Shakespeare used Lewkenor for his depiction of Venice and its ruling nobility in the first act of Othello.

Othello is set first in Venice, and then on the island of Cyprus.

(Act 1) Iago, ensign to Othello, complains that he has been passed over as Othello’s lieutenant in favour of Cassio. He and Roderigo tell Brabantio, a Venetian senator, that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with Othello, the general of the Venetian army and a Moor. Othello and Brabantio appear before the Venetian Senate, and Othello describes how he courted and won Desdemona. When she enters and takes her husband’s side against her father, Brabantio is forced to accept the marriage. Othello is posted to Cyprus, to defend the island against the Turks. Desdemona is allowed to accompany him. Roderigo, in love with Desdemona, despairs. Iago persuades him to follow her to Cyprus, and suggests he will be able to cuckold Othello.

John Gielgud as Othello, Act 1, Scene 3. 'Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors.' British Library Sound Archive, 1931.

(Act 2) Desdemona arrives in Cyprus, escorted by Iago, his wife Emilia, and Roderigo. Othello, delayed by a storm, arrives shortly afterwards and greets Desdemona lovingly. Iago tells Roderigo that Desdemona loves Cassio, and incites him to challenge Othello’s lieutenant. He plies both Roderigo and Cassio with drink and sets them fighting. Othello enters, and Iago tells him that the quarrel was begun by Cassio. Othello demotes Cassio. Iago advises Cassio to ask Desdemona to plead his case with Othello.

(Act 3) Othello comes upon Cassio asking Desdemona for her help. Iago suggests to Othello that Cassio and Desdemona may be lovers. When Desdemona appeals to Othello to help Cassio, she drops the handkerchief which was her first and greatly valued gift from her husband. Emilia picks it up and gives it to Iago. Othello, growing ever more jealous, demands that Iago give him proof of Desdemona’s infidelity. Iago tells him that she has given the handkerchief to Cassio. When Desdemona renews her pleas on behalf of Cassio, Othello asks for the handkerchief and she denies it is lost. Cassio finds Desdemona’s handkerchief in his room and, not knowing it is hers, he gives it to his mistress.

(Act 4) Iago reminds Othello that Cassio has Desdemona’s handkerchief, and suggests again that they are lovers. Othello falls in an epileptic fit. Othello looks on unseen as Iago talks to Cassio, and Desdemona’s handkerchief is returned to Cassio by his mistress. When Cassio has gone, Iago incites Othello’s jealousy further. Desdemona renews her pleas for Cassio, and Othello strikes her. Othello questions Emilia about Desdemona, but Emilia declares she is honest. When he questions Desdemona, she swears her innocence. Iago incites Roderigo against Cassio. Othello sends Desdemona to bed, and she prepares sadly for sleep.

(Act 5) Iago sets Roderigo on Cassio. They only wound each other, and Iago kills Roderigo to silence him then declares that the murderer is Cassio. Othello joins Desdemona in her bedroom. She is asleep, but wakes when he kisses her. He questions her faithfulness, but she again declares her innocence. He smothers her. When Emilia calls from outside, Othello lets her in. Desdemona stirs briefly and dies. Othello confesses that he has murdered her, and tells Emilia of Iago’s insinuations. Emilia cries out for help. When Iago enters, she accuses him of lying and tells Othello the truth. Iago kills Emilia and flees. He is captured and, when he is brought back, Othello wounds him. Cassio tells Othello of Iago’s villainy. Othello stabs himself and dies. Iago is taken away to face justice.
________________________________________

Amanda Mabillard, in "Othello Analysis," Shakespeare Online (19 Mar. 2000, accessed April 2008), writes, "According to the Accounts of the Master of Revels (published in 1842), Othello was performed in 1604. The full entry reads: 'By the King's Majesty's Players. Hallowmas Day, being the first of November, a play in the banqueting house at Whitehall called "The Moor of Venice."' Other evidence supports the fact Shakespeare wrote the play in or before 1604. As William Rolfe explains in his book, 'A Life of William Shakespeare':
Stokes (Chronological Order of Shakespeare's Plays) shows that it was written before 1606 by the fact that in the quarto of 1622 (i.1.4) we find the oath "S'blood" (God's blood), while this is omitted in the folio. This indicates that the quarto was printed from a copy made before the act of Parliament issued in 1606 against the abuse of the name of God in plays, etc. So "Zounds" and "by the mass" (in ii.3) are found in the quarto but not in the folio (p. 293).
"In the early 20th century the most acclaimed portrayal of Othello was by Paul Robeson, the distinguished actor and civil rights advocate. Robeson won the Donaldson Award for outstanding lead performance in 1944 for Othello, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters medal in 1944, to name but a couple. James Earl Jones and Laurence Olivier have also made memorable the character of Othello. Othello has made the transition from stage to film over twenty times this century, and from stage to television at least five times. The most recent adaptation for the big screen, starring Laurence Fishborne [sic] and Kenneth Branagh, opened in 1995."

"The main source for Othello is the novella, 'The Hecatommithi,' written in 1565 by the Italian author, Cinthio. A minor source is Leo Africanus's, 'A Geographical History of Africa,'" she wrote.

Leo Africanus
________________________________________
.Lee.

1

I am nobody:
A red sinking autumn sun
Took my name away.

I,3,473
...I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
And portance in my travels' history:
Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
It was my hint to speak,—such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse...


"Lee"

If Othello suffers from a post-traumatic disorder, then Iago sees it. Rather than use this perception for good, to save his commander, Iago chooses to use his insight to drive Othello down, and avenge being passed over for promotion, avenge being cuckolded in his marriage by Othello, avenge a life of disappointment and frustration.

Othello presents little or no resistance to temptation, is eager, excited, is, for all his protestations of faith, won over in a trice. Although Othello is torn and conflicted, as written, in the “temptation,” scene, it is arguable any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago's news, and many men would have been made wildly jealous.

Othello behaves like a normal human being: that Othello retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood seems mistaken; his race and nationality is incidental, and in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important, except as to history.

Amanda Mabillard, in "Othello Analysis." Shakespeare Online (19 Mar. 2000, accessed April 2008), writes, "Othello, unlike the base Iago, is capable of forming strong, loving relationships -- his genuine friendship with Iago confirms this fact. Othello allows himself to be influenced by Iago, and allows Iago to bring out his most evil characteristics. Although Iago may be the more innately evil of the two, Othello does little to prevent his base instincts from becoming dominant."
________________________________________

From, "Leo Africanus: The Man with Many Names," by Pekka Masonen (based on a 7 November 2001 speech at the Finnish Institute in Rome [Villa Lante]):

"Shakespeare wrote Othello in 1604–5 and the first English translation of Leo’s description of Africa was published in 1600. (Lois Whitney, ‘Did Shakespeare Know Leo Africanus?’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XXXVII, 1922, pp.470–83.)

"...a previously unknown Italian hand-written example of Leo’s 'Description of Africa' unexpectedly appeared in 1931 and it was purchased by the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome. The style in this manuscript (entitled 'Cosmographia & geographia de Affrica') differs greatly from that of the Italian printed edition, but the manuscript is evidently based on the same original text written by Leo Africanus, which was later adopted by his Italian publisher. The importance of accurate geography for successful warfare was well understood at that time; hence the 'great pleasure' of Leo’s work to the Christian lords and princes.

"Ramusio’s Italian edition was reprinted in Venice five times—in 1554, 1563, 1588, 1606, and 1613..."
_______________________________________

From the Royal Shakespeare Company Web exhibition on "Shakespeare and Race:"

"How Shakespeare envisaged the racial characteristics of Othello is a matter of fierce academic debate and like so many questions about Shakespeare's thought processes we have no categorical evidence. The evidence in the play would suggest that Othello is certainly racially different to the caucasian Italians. He is disparagingly called 'thick lips,' 'an old black ram,' 'a Barbary horse,' and 'a lascivious Moor.' Othello himself states that Desdemona's name 'is now begrimed and black as mine own face.'"
________________________________________
.Arin.

75

Spring begins shyly
With one hairpin of green grass
In a flower pot.

IV,2,2917
...If e'er my will did trespass 'gainst his love,
Either in discourse of thought or actual deed,
Or that mine eyes, mine ears, or any sense,
Delighted them in any other form;
Or that I do not yet, and ever did.
And ever will—though he do shake me off
To beggarly divorcement—love him dearly,
Comfort forswear me! Unkindness may do much;
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love...

"Arin"

From the Masterpiece Theatre website, "Essay: Adapting Shakespeare",

"Othello, Desdemona, and Iago play out a drama of race, love, passion, deception, and betrayal as relevant today as in the 17th century. Othello's ill treatment by a racist society and his internalized self-doubt continue to resonate in today's turbulent culture, both in fiction and life (as is evident in Masterpiece Theatre's modern adaptation). Othello's story transcends the color of his skin: it's the concept of the other that Shakespeare writes about, the mistrust of differences that is present in all societies. Desdemona's wifely loyalty, and the physical abuse she withstands at the hand of her jealous husband, are issues that make up today's news. And Iago's envy and treachery still echo in competitive scenarios, from high school elections to government coups."
________________________________________
.Claire.
518

Creamy plum blossoms:
Once upon a time there was
A pretty princess...

IV,3,3112
...it is their husbands' faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is't frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.



"Claire"

From the online Folger Shakespeare Library abstract of the essay, "Unpinning Desdemona:"

Denise A. Walen writes, "…At the Globe, with its practice of continuous staging, the slow, intimate action of Emilia undressing Desdemona provided an essential release from the mounting dramatic tension late in Act IV. …Considered maudlin and ridiculous, the scene eventually disappeared from performance in the nineteenth century for nearly fifty years. Changing performance practices and textual deletions created confusion about Desdemona’s role within the play by presenting a character in performance wholly at odds with the extant Folio version.”
________________________________________

According to the Website, "The Global African Presence," "Al-Hassan Ibn-Muhammad al-Wezzani was born in Granada in Spain in 1493 or 1494 of well educated and affluent Moorish parents. He probably preferred to be called al-Fasi, the man of Fez--the great seat of learning in Morocco to which he owed his education. As a young man, he became a soldier, merchant and ambassador. By the age of twenty-five he had crossed the Mediterranean Sea numerous times, and traveled in West Africa and Southwest Asia. In 1518, while crossing the Mediterranean, he was captured on an Arab galley by Christian pirates. As he was a very learned man, instead of being sold into slavery, he was presented to Pope Leo X. The Pope, very impressed by him, freed the young man, granted him a pension and secured his conversion to Christianity. At his baptism, the Pope gave him his own names, Giovanni Leone, from which he became commonly known as Leo Africanus.

"When he was captured, Leo Africanus had with him a rough draft, in Arabic, of the work which made him famous, 'The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained.' He completed this work in Italian in 1526, three years after his patron's death. In 1550, the manuscript fell into the hands of Ramusio, who published it in his collection of Voyages and Travels. Although Leo Africanus died in 1552, his work was translated into English by John Pory, a scholarly friend of Richard Hakluyt, and published in London in 1600."
________________________________________
.Colby.

303

A balmy spring wind
Reminding me of something
I cannot recall.

I,1,42
O, sir, content you;
I follow him to serve my turn upon him:
We cannot all be masters, nor all masters
Cannot be truly follow'd. You shall mark
Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave,
That, doting on his own obsequious bondage,
Wears out his time, much like his master's ass,
For nought but provender, and when he's old, cashier'd:
Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are
Who, trimm'd in forms and visages of duty,
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords,
Do well thrive by them and when they have lined
their coats
Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul;
And such a one do I profess myself.


"Colby"

George Bernard Shaw once said, "'Othello,' is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera."

Amanda Mabillard, in "Othello Analysis," Shakespeare Online (19 Mar. 2000, accessed April 2008) writes, "Although Iago's actions throughout the play are thoroughly deceitful, there is an honesty that comes with his admission. Iago knows he is a demon - and he acted according to his nature.

"Iago, when he reveals his plan to turn Cassio's courteous behavior toward Desdemona into evidence of adultery:
He takes her by the palm; ay, well said, whisper. With as little web as this I will ensnare as great a fly as Cassio. Ay, smile upon her, do: I will gyve thee in thine own courtesies. You say true, 'tis so indeed. If such tricks as these strip you out of your lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kissed your three fingers so oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in. Very good, well kissed, and excellent courtesy: 'tis so indeed! Yet again, your fingers to your lips? would they were clyster-pipes for your sake!"
From the online Folger Shakespeare Library essay, "Iago's Clyster: Purgation, Anality, and the Civilizing Process," by Ben Saunders, "Iago turns Othello's sweet-smelling love into something less fragrant …confirmed by more than these olfactory associations. Consider Emilia's bitter comment:

"Men are all but stomachs, and we all but food:
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us.
(3.4.105-7)

"Emilia's imagery displaces the inevitable and unmentionable consequence of ingestion upward, but the point could not be clearer: men make waste of women. Although her comment is a generalization, she has identified Iago's basic strategy with painful accuracy."
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Mabillard, in "Othello Analysis." Shakespeare Online, included this translation of Pory:

The commendable actions and vertues of the Africans.

The Arabians which inhabite in Barbarie or vpon the coast of the Mediterran sea, are greatly addicted vnto the studie of good artes and sciences: and those things which concerne their law and religion are esteemed by them in the first place. Moreouer they haue beene heretofore most studious of the Mathematiques, of Philosophie, and of Astrologie: but these artes (as it is aforesaid) were fower hundred yeeres agoe, vtterly destroyed and taken away by the chiefe professours of their lawe.

Likewise they are most strong and valiant people, especially those which dwell vpon the mountaines. They keepe their couenant most faithfully; insomuch that they had rather die than breake promise. No nation in the world is so subiect vnto iealousie; for they will rather leese their lives, then put vp any disgrace in the behalfe of their women. So desirous they are of riches and honour, that therein no other people can goe beyonde them.
________________________________________
.Steven.

721

As my anger ebbs,
The spring stars grow bright again
And the wind returns.

II,2,1116
...every man put himself into triumph; some to dance,
some to make bonfires, each man to what sport and
revels his addiction leads him...
All offices are open, and there is full
liberty of feasting from this present hour of five
till the bell have told eleven. Heaven bless the
isle of Cyprus and our noble general Othello!


"Steven"

From PBS Online, "The Givens Collection," Chapter 3.

"The son of a slave, Paul Robeson was more than an actor. He was a singer, all-American athlete, multi-lingual and a noted scholar. As an actor, Robeson's commanding presence on stage and screen added a dignity to any role he played. In his 1958 autobiography, 'Here I Stand,' Robeson wrote about the community that nurtured his creativity:
In a way, I was adopted by all these good people. Hard-working people, and poor, most of them, in worldly goods, but how rich in compassion, how filled with the goodness of humanity, and the spiritual steel forged by centuries of oppression. Here in this little hemmed-in world, where home must be theater and concert hall and social center, there was a warmth of song.

-Paul Robeson, 'Here I Stand.'"
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Amanda Mabillard, "Othello Analysis." Shakespeare Online, 19 Mar. 2000. (14 April 2008):

The following is from the translation by John Pory (1600):
The inhabitants of the cities doe most religiously obserue and reuerence those things which appertaine vnto their religion ...it is not lawfull for them to wash certaine of their members, when as at other times they will wash their whole bodies. ...Moreouer those which inhabite Barbarie are of great cunning & dexteritie for building & for mathematicall inuentions, which a man may easily coniecture by their artificiall workes. Most honest people they are, and destitute of all fraud and guile; not onely imbracing all simplicitie and truth, but also practising the same throughout the whole course of their liues...

If any youth in presence of his father, his vncle, or any other of his kinred, doth sing or talke ought of loue matters, he is deemed to bee woorthie of grieuous punishment. Whasoeuer lad or youth there lighteth by chaunce into any company which discourseth of loue, no sooner heareth nor vnderstandeth what their talke tendeth vnto, but immediately he withdraweth himselfe from among them.

...the Moores and Arabians inhabiting Libya are somewhat ciuill of behauiour, being plaine dealers, voide of dissimulation, fauourable to strangers, and louers of simplicitie. Those which we before named white, or tawney Moores, are stedfast in friendship: as likewise they indifferently and fauourable esteeme of other nations: and wholy indeuour themselues in this one thing, namely, that they may leade a most pleasant and iocund life. ...Those which we named the inhabitants of the cities of Barbarie are somewhat needie and couetous, being also very proud and high-minded, and woonderfullly addicted vnto wrath; insomuch that (according to the prouerbe) they will deeply engraue in marble any iniurie be it neuer so small, & will in no wise blot it out of their remembrance. So rusticall they are & void of good manners, that scarcely can any stranger obtaine their familiaritie and friendship. Their wits are but meane, and they are so credulous, that they will beleeue matters impossible, which are told them. So ignorant are they of naturall philosophie, that they imagine all the effects and operations of nature to be extraordinarie and diuine. They obserue no certaine order of liuing nor of lawes. Abounding exceedingly with choler, they speake alwaies with an angrie and lowd voice. Neither shall you walke in the day-time in any of their streetes, but you shall see commonly two or three of them together by the eares. by nature they are a vile and base people, being no better accounted of by their gouernours then if they were dogs. ...No people vnder heauen are more addicted vnto couetise the this nation: neither is there (I thinke) to bee found among them one of an hundred, who for courtesie, humanitie, or deuotions sake will vouchsafe any entertainment vpon a stranger. Mindfull they haue alwaies beene of iniuries, but most forgetfull of benefites.
________________________________________
.Robert.

179
The summer moonlight
Gleams upon a blacksmith's forge,
And cools red embers.

II,2,790

IAGO. What are you hurt Lieutenant?
CASSIO. Aye, past all Surgery.
IAGO. Marry Heaven forbid.


"Robert"


From, "Othello, the Baroque, and Religious Mentalities," by Anthony Gilbert, Lancaster University:

"There is, I must dare to assert, no 'extraordinary promptness' in Othello's reflections on Desdemona, but a slow, anguished rational analysis based on the incontrovertible fact that Cassio had many times been Othello's intermediary when he wooed her. What would a man like Cassio be capable of in the corrupt world of Venice? He is obviously promiscuous, and unmarried. Othello can only speculate, governed by the hideous reasonableness of Iago's various general arguments."

From the Website of the Illinois Philological Association, "And What Remains is Bestial: The True Beast in Othello," by Laura King:

"What is left when honor is lost?" This maxim from first century BC plays a pivotal role in Shakespeare’s play Othello. The question serves as a basis for the struggle between Othello and Iago. Both men are engaged in a battle over Othello’s honor. Iago is intent on destroying Othello’s sense of honor and reducing him to a bestial state. Iago views Othello as a beast masquerading in warrior’s dress. He wants to return Othello to what he believes to be his natural bestial state, and he realizes that to achieve this goal he must dupe Othello into violating his code of honor. Ironically, as Iago tries to unmask Othello’s bestiality, it is the beast within Iago that is exposed."

* * * * *

"...'What is left when honor is lost?' (Shakespeare's) answer comes from the mouth of Cassio: 'Reputation, reputation, reputation! / O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial' (2.3.254-256)."
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From Website, "The 153 Club," "The 153 Club is for Sahara Desert travellers. The Club takes its name from the old, "Michelin 153," map of northwest Africa.

"Leo Africanus

"Leo Africanus was born in Granada in 1485 and died in Tunis in 1554. He was educated in Fez and travelled widely in Africa, visiting Timbuctoo twice. The following description of the town is taken from John Pory's translation of 1600 modified in places with that of Francis Moore in 1738.
All the women of this region except maidservants go with their faces covered, and sell food. The inhabitants, and especially strangers that reside there, are exceeding rich, inasmuch, that the king that now has married both his daughters unto two rich merchants. ...Salt is very scarce here; for it is brought hither by land from Tegaza, which is five hundred miles distant. When I myself was here, I saw one camel's load of salt sold for 8o ducats. The rich king of Tombuto hath many plates and sceptres of gold, some whereof weigh 1300 pounds: and he keeps a magnificent and well furnished court. ...Whosoever will speak unto this king must first fall down before his feet, and then taking up earth must sprinkle it upon his own head and shoulders: which custom is ordinarily observed by them that never saluted the king before, or come as ambassadors from other princes. He hath always three thousand horsemen, and a great number of footmen that shoot poisoned arrows, attending upon him.

...He has such an inveterate hatred for all Jews, that he will not admit any into his city: and whatsoever Barbary merchants he understandeth have any dealings with the Jews, he immediately causeth their goods to be confiscated. ...The inhabitants are people of a gentle and cheerful disposition, and spend a great part of the night in singing and dancing through all the streets of the city: they keep great store of men and women slaves, and their town is much in danger of fire: When I was there the second time almost half the town was burnt in the space of five hours. Outside the suburbs there are no gardens nor orchards at all."
________________________________________
.Mathias.

422

My cigarette glows
Without my lips touching it, —
A steady spring breeze.

II,3,1343
Worthy Othello, I am hurt to danger...
Of all that I do know: nor know I aught
By me that's said or done amiss this night;
Unless self-charity be sometimes a vice,
And to defend ourselves it be a sin
When violence assails us.


"Mathias"
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From website, "The Perseus Digital Library Project," Pliny the Elder, "Naturalis Historia":
Chapter 26 - Scythia

Such is the width here of the channel which separates Asia from Europe, and which too, from being generally quite frozen over, allows of a passage on foot. The width of the Cimmerian Bosporus is twelve miles and a half: it contains the towns of Hermisium, Myrmecium, and, in the interior of it, the island of Alopece. From the spot called Taphræ, at the extremity of the isthmus, to the mouth of the Bosporus, along the line of the Lake Mæotis, is a distance of 260 miles.

Leaving Taphræ, and going along the mainland, we find in the interior the Auchetæ, in whose country the Hypanis has its rise, as also the Neurœ, in whose district the Borysthenes has its source, the Geloni, the Thyssagetæ, the Budini, the Basilidæ, and the Agathyrsi with their azure-coloured hair. Above them are the Nomades, and then a nation of Anthropophagi or cannibals. On leaving Lake Buges, above the Lake Mæotis we come to the Sauromatæ and the Essedones. Along the coast, as far as the river Tanais, are the Mæotæ, from whom the lake derives its name, and the last of all, in the rear of them, the Arimaspi. We then come to the Riphæan mountains, and the region known by the name of Pterophoros, because of the perpetual fall of snow there, the flakes of which resemble feathers; a part of the world which has been condemned by the decree of nature to lie immersed in thick darkness; suited for nothing but the generation of cold, and to be the asylum of the chilling blasts of the northern winds.
_______________________________________
.Paul.

175

Coming from the woods,
A bull has a lilac sprig
Dangling from a horn.

I,3,548
...When remedies are past, the griefs are ended
By seeing the worst, which late on hopes depended.
To mourn a mischief that is past and gone
Is the next way to draw new mischief on.
What cannot be preserved when fortune takes
Patience her injury a mockery makes.
The robb'd that smiles steals something from the thief;
He robs himself that spends a bootless grief


"Paul"
________________________________________

From website, "The Perseus Digital Library Project," Pliny the Elder, "Naturalis Historia":
Chapter 26 - Scythia, (con't)

Behind these mountains, and beyond the region of the northern winds, there dwells, if we choose to believe it, a happy race, known as the Hyperborei, a race that lives to an extreme old age, and which has been the subject of many marvellous stories. At this spot are supposed to be the hinges upon which the world revolves, and the extreme limits of the revolutions of the stars. Here we find light for six months together, given by the sun in one continuous day, who does not, however, as some ignorant persons have asserted, conceal himself from the vernal equinox to autumn. On the contrary, to these people there is but one rising of the sun for the year, and that at the summer solstice, and but one setting, at the winter solstice. This region, warmed by the rays of the sun, is of a most delightful temperature, and exempt from every noxious blast. The abodes of the natives are the woods and groves; the gods receive their worship singly and in groups, while all discord and every kind of sickness are things utterly unknown. Death comes upon them only when satiated with life; after a career of feasting, in an old age sated with every luxury, they leap from a certain rock there into the sea; and this they deem the most desirable mode of ending existence. Some writers have placed these people, not in Europe, but at the very verge of the shores of Asia, because we find there a people called the Attacori, who greatly resemble them and occupy a very similar locality. Other writers again have placed them midway between the two suns, at the spot where it sets to the Antipodes and rises to us; a thing however that cannot possibly be, in consequence of the vast tract of sea which there intervenes. Those writers who place them nowhere but under a day which lasts for six months, state that in the morning they sow, at mid-day they reap, at sunset they gather in the fruits of the trees, and during the night conceal themselves in caves.
________________________________________
.Michael.

647

Burning out its time,
And timing its own burning,
One lonely candle.

I,1,131
Sir, I will answer any thing.


"Michael"
________________________________________

From, "Leo Africanus: The Man with Many Names," by Pekka Masonen (based on a 7 November 2001 speech at the Finnish Institute in Rome [Villa Lante]), (con't):

"Leo’s influence did not restrict itself only in scholars. It has been suggested, for example, that Shakespeare modelled the character of Othello on the experiences of al-Hasan b. Muhammad. Similarly, Leo Africanus is said to have had an equally profound influence on Corneille and other famous seventeenth-century French writers. Nevertheless, Leo’s most astonishing appearance in European literature was his connection to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939). From his youth Yeats was interested in mysticism and occult. In the summer of 1912 he participated in séances, in which he started making contacts with a spirit called 'Leo'. Two years later, the contact became closer and the spirit identified itself Leo Africanus and offered the poet his insights and advice. If Yeats wrote to him, Leo would respond through Yeats’s own hand. Yeats considered Leo his 'Daimon', an alter-ego and a heroic ideal. However, Leo’s influence on Yeats gradually waned and the contact ended finally by 1917."
________________________________________
.Tia.

58

Heaps of black cherries
Glittering with drops of rain
In the evening sun.

V,1,3288
I am no strumpet; but of life as honest
As you that thus abuse me.

>
"Tia"
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Amanda Mabillard, "Othello Analysis." Shakespeare Online, 19 Mar. 2000. (14 April 2008):

The following is from the translation by John Pory (1600) (con't):
Their mindes are perpetually possessed with vexation and strife, so that they will seldome or neuer shew themselues tractable to any man; the cause whereof is supposed to be; for that they are so greedily addicted vnto their filthie lucre, that they veuer could attaine vnto any kinde of ciuilitie of good behauiour. The shepherds of that region liue a miserable, toilsome, wretched and beggarly life: they are a rude people, and (as a man may say) borne and bred to theft, deceit, and brutish manners. Their yoong men may goe a wooing to diuers maides, till such time as they haue sped of a wife. Yea, the father of the maide most friendly welcommeth her suiter: so that I thinke scarce any noble or gentleman among them can chuse a virgine for his spouse: albeit, so soone as any woman is married, she is quite forsaken of all her suiters; who then seeke out other new paramours for their liking. Concerning their religion, the greater part of these people are neither Mahumetans, Iewes, nor Christians; and hardly shall you finde so much as a sparke of pietie in any of them. ...The inhabitants of Libya liue a brutish kinde of life; who neglecting all kindes of good artes and sciences, doe wholy apply their mindes vnto theft and violence. Neuer as yet had they any religion, any lawes, or any good forme of liuing; but alwaies had, and euer will haue a most miserable and distressed life. There cannot any trechery or villanie be ijuented so damnable, which for lucres sake they dare not attempt. They spend all their daies either in most lewd practises, or in hunting, or else in warfare: neither weare they any shooes nor garments. The Negroes likewise leade a beastly kinde of life, being vtterly destitute of the vse of reason, of desteritie of wit, and of all artes. yea they so behaue themselues, as if they had continually liued in a forrest among wilde beasts. They haue great swarmes of harlots among them; whereupon a man may easily coniecture their manner of liuing; except their conuersation perhaps be somewhat more tolerable, who dwell in the principall townes and cities: for it is like that they are somewhat more addicted to ciuilitie.
________________________________________

Last night, among the cigarette smoke, beer and wine, I had an epiphany.

We were watching a film. Laurence Olivier was acting in Stuart Burge's movie, "Othello," (1965) and three of us from the Chicago Parks stage production of the play were sitting around talking. Olivier was done up in eggplant-colored greasepaint, acting in front of vast, flatly-lit stage-sets that looked like something out of "Lost in Space." The 1965 TV show - not the movie.

We tried to ignore the shot composition that took every opportunity to contrast Oliver's heavily-made-up "blackness," with something-- anything-- white: his head-dress; the brightly-lit cyclorama ever-present in the background, that placed the setting somewhere between the planet Mars and Lincoln Center; Maggie Smith's face, parchment-pale, framed by the flaming red of her hair. We tried to ignore all of this, but it was impossible. Olivier, it was understood, even in the enlightened mid-60s, was an actor of such monumental stature he remained, even then, remote from the racist onus of blackface.

Seeing this repressed Englishman trying to approximate what he supposed was the affectionate, passionate, physical, equatorial familiarity of what he imagined was a 17th-century black mercenary from the Barbary Coast, Cadiz, Malaga, Oran or points east was fascinating in an anthropological way; but to many of us, the film was unwatchable.

Orwell also wrote, "I have not written a novel for seven years ["Animal Farm"], but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write." Today's transcendent genius may be tomorrow's fool, but one cannot ignore the challenges of the controversial by making good an escape from expression, from creativity. In other words you have to write the book, to be true to yourself, even if you know it will fail.

The epiphany to which I refer was the discovery that authoring this blog seems, by its very nature, to violate-- and validate-- Orwell's advice, "one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality." Writing something as personal as this must violate his advice, but, paradoxically, does not contraindicate his idea. Creativity is always destruction; destruction of old paradigms, of error, of prejudice, of the walls of silence; dismissing the preconceptions of yesterday: shedding one's old way of acting, one's own personality, like a useless caul.

So, I will persevere. My struggle to achieve Orwell's coolness, detachment, and bloodless disdain for sentimentality and irony, both, continues apace. You may well say of my effort, here, "it does not answer to my humour," and yet I would be consoled, since like Shylock, "I am not bound to please thee with my answers."

________________________________________
Othello links, links that informed this post:

http://baheyeldin.com
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.bl.uk
http://www.classical.net
http://www.cwo.com
http://www.folger.edu
http://www.geocities.com/vahey_99/iago.htm?200811
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114057/externalreviews
http://www.islamunity.com/blogs/?p=53
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/othello
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/playanalysis/othello.html
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sources/othellosources.html
http://www.the153club.org/leo.html
http://www.thefreelibrary.com
http://shakespeare.palomar.edu/playcriticism.htm
http://www.eiu.edu/~ipaweb/welcome.htm
http://purl.oclc.org/emls/07-2/gilboth.htm
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Life's Lease

Who's that? A man. Alas, what is a man?
A scuttle full of dust, a measured span
Of flitting time, a vessel tuned with breath,
By sickness broached, to be drawn out by death.
But what's that in his hand? Life's Lease, you say:
And what's a life? The flourishing array
Of the proud Summer Meadow, which today
Wears her green plush, and is tomorrow hay.

-Francis Quarles, (1592-1644)

~