I can never be reminded enough of what’s genuine in the world: music, art, literature, love, nature. That I shall take with me on my walk today, so often a way of synthesis. And thanks for the mention of my essay and photo of your Caragana (perhaps from Siberia?). We could spend days with those lichens and little tufts of moss, still not learn half their secrets, but find among them story and meaning. At the very least, that orange lichen, probably in the genus Xanthoria, which lives so many places around the world, is my first of two sunrises today.
It seems to originate from Siberia, yes? The hedge was full grown when we bought this place and full of deadwood and seems old, but I don't know when it was planted. I thoroughly enjoy the popping seeds later in the summer. They land in my bedroom if I keep the window open!
And I'm chagrined to say I hadn't even noticed the lichen until you pointed it out. Another reason to enjoy your perspective and attention to all the life around us :)
I feel like other people's stories impact me much more than constructing my own stories. Like hearing about your father's, for instance, or some of your other anecdotes. To the extent that I construct any story for myself at all, it's a pale imitation and it always stays the same, almost like a script. But if I tell my stories to other people, they get fuller and more interesting even as they become less true. I'd much rather hear their stories, though. I like the way your father's account complicates the typical stereotype of living under a totalitarian regime having no degrees of freedom. Maybe it's the uncertain and inconsistent degrees of freedom - partly a function of people's own attitude, like your father's boldness in enjoying what he could - that is difficult for some, almost as much as the overt repressions.
You never told us what the Persian translation said!
I enjoy hearing people's stories, too. It's actually one of the things I like about writing, is that it can -- not always but often enough -- invite people to share their experiences. I like that.
And your comment about the inconsistency of freedom is more insightful than you might realize. My father and I had a conversation about this very recently. He said that living in Russia now is much more difficult than it was during Soviet times because the boundaries are murkier. Things feel riskier because you're unsure what's allowed and what's not. My stepmother said the same. they both remember living in the Soviet Union as being more clear-cut as far as the doublethink goes. They're finding the current situation more difficult.
This jumped out at me: "We knew that what you talk with friends about, you don’t talk to everybody. The official life was completely separate, and officially you would be somewhat a different person. And that’s what I call kind of schizophrenic society."
It speaks to how similarly totalitarian so many people allow this "free" society in the U.S. to be, and how so many live in fear without even realizing it, in service to jobs, commerce, whatever.
Someone just posted this in a private forum elsewhere and I am kind of kicking myself for not using it:
From the Nobel lecture given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
"The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions. His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art."
You probably remember the part from Nick Estes’s book where he writes about the Pick-Sloane dam projects, and how part of their purpose was to get people “participating in the market economy,” which there was no reason to do as long as the land provided for them.
That freedom, and how it got taken away starting in England hundreds of years ago, is the main thing that got me interested in land ownership. Once you’re forced into having a job to support yourself, you worry about losing it. Because what other options are there? And so we get tied to clocks and performance metrics and making sure we don’t piss off the wrong people. How many people would walk away if they knew they really had a choice?
But take something as simple as anger around the Pledge of Allegiance and it’s easy to see how control starts to slip in.
The progression is so methodical! ~ Tie people to the market economy, forcing them to get a job to make money, then tie their health insurance to their job so they are trapped there, no matter how miserable or dangerous or abusive it is. Withhold basic support systems, judge and blame people for struggling financially. Rinse and repeat.
That's 100% the story of the allotment era too. Carve up a reservation and "give" the land to individual Indians and families instead, but then start charging them taxes for that land – which they never had to before nor really had a concept of – which either forces them into that economy or forces them to sell it for a pittance to "get out of debt" or they just lose it flat out for failure to pay those taxes.
Thank you for this! I love that image of the loose pages, the careful, devotional reading. As I read your essay, I wondered if freedom and choice are inversely proportional to this sort of deep appreciation of literature. It’s too easy for people to choose some other form of “entertainment,” especially the easier, mindless forms, when no one is forbidding them from any of it. Videos of empty bookshelves in Florida schools are making the rounds - everything boxed up until certified librarians can certify the books contain nothing offensive to the white Christian nationalists’ agenda. Maybe we’re closer to those Soviet times than we realize.
And your thoughts on translations of Rumi are fascinating! Of course, how could our lens *not* distort his subtle layers of meaning? I wonder if Daniel Ladinsky is any more faithful to Hafiz’s meaning? 🤔 I will say, many a Rumi and Hafiz have shaken me to my core - in the best possible way. “Say Yes Quickly” changed my life and I knew it in that moment. Love the idea of translation being a conversation. It certainly made those mystics accessible to more people.
Unfortunately, I live in a county where the library system is undergoing similar kinds of attacks. I don’t know, it’s hard to always comprehend what freedom and choice mean to different people. Where I live--not my town, which is the opposite, but the larger county--elected officials have been clear that freedom is only something to be had within the Christian nationalist framework. It’s easiest to go after children’s access to literature first. (Though as my sister pointed out, the library board must have no idea that the internet exists. I mean, the Babysitter’s Club is also a show on Netflix.)
What’s hard is seeing the erosion happen. We all adapt because most people are just trying to survive. It doesn’t always take a revolution or invasion to lose these things. It can happen slowly, while most people are just trying to pay the bills.
I recently read a Hafiz book by Ladinsky and then set it aside in a flood of feeling betrayed, because every reference to it I found spoke to it as not being Hafiz at all but Ladinsky's work "in the spirit of" Hafiz. What bummed me out about it was his not owning that in the first place. I felt baited and switched and a bit foolish for being duped. I have a book deeply influenced by and largely dedicated to Matsuo Bashō, for example, but I'm not claiming it as Bashō's work.
So I unloaded my copy of Hafiz just as I did my Barks translation of Rumi (per a previous conversation with Nia on this very subject). Coming from a people whose words and culture are regularly appropriated and repackaged for feel good consumption by others I just don't have it in me to abide this kind of thing.
It’s the appropriation that gets me with Barks. I deleted a line about that because it felt like it needed an entirely different essay, but I thought the New Yorker article was slightly too kind on the subject. Because would Barks have had such success with that poetry if it weren’t being sold with a kind of mystique, given by Rumi’s name and story? When we respond to one of those poems, is it the poem we’re responding to or the wisdom we think the poet imparts? We probably all know the answer.
I did eventually give away that book. Every time I opened it I got stuck on thinking about Barks’s motivations.
Unless I absolutely have to, unless it is required by forces beyond my control, I try not to do much regretting. But I've wondered from time-to-time what it would have been like to have family and friends who would be willing to read poetry together, or sing together, or do just about anything that doesn't involve television and mindless commercial culture.
A few times in the past when with others I've suggested reading poetry or a short story. Nobody has ever taken me seriously. They just laugh. Maybe they're afraid of the intimacy, or of the thoughts and feelings that a good piece of writing might evoke. Heaven forbid. Heaven forbid we should mingle our minds and our hearts in the pursuit of beauty and truth.
It sounds as though you have a wonderful and rich heritage from which your soul and your writing have blossomed. I know you cherish it. Thank you for sharing a little glimpse with us.
You’ve reminded me that my family used to do a lot of music and singing at home together, though that was more of my mother’s influence. She plays piano and guitar very well, and has a beautiful soprano voice. I didn’t realize until we lived in the Soviet Union that much of what went on in my household in Montana was influenced partly by her childhood, but possibly even more by the culture of playing folk music on guitars and singing in Russia, which was part of my father’s culture that my mother enjoyed a lot when she was there (she’s fluent in Russian and sings a lot of Russian folk songs).
Culture must be a big part of it. I have one friend locally who’s also a singer and musician and who hosts a caroling get-together every year, but other than that it’s hard to imagine any of my friends reading poetry or playing music together by choice.
Do you think it’s possible that that’s what ubiquitous book groups in the U.S. are trying to fill, that craving for gathering and sharing something cultural together? I never thought of that until this moment but am now wondering. And if that’s so, it seems like a hesitant foray, at least the groups I’ve been in. What would it take for the same groups of people to shift to Julie’s described gatherings below, reading poetry to one another?
I wish I knew the secret. Maybe it's just a matter of not taking no for an answer. Once people experience the joy and intimacy of exploring a fine piece of writing together and they realize there's not much to be afraid of. My limited experience with book groups has been pretty lukewarm. People show up having not even read the agreed-to sections (or whatever) and want to chit-chat about everything but the book; while others, though they did the reading, prefer to linger in shallow waters and have nothing to offer beyond, "I liked it," or "I didn't like it." Okay, that's very interesting, but tells us how you like the bean dip.
Several years ago I met a woman who, for our second date, wanted to come to my home and read together--out loud. We started by reading the first part of To Kill a Mocking Bird. I don't quite remember how we arrived at that decision. Ultimately the relationship didn't pan out, but that was one heck of a way to spend a date. Our first date was a long walk.
One can find committed reading groups, oftentimes affiliated with the local university, I just wish this sort of activity would be more the norm within friends and family. Unfortunately our collective mental space has been corrupted and trivialized by corporate propaganda and consumer culture. Maybe I just need to be more assertive about leading the way. Sometimes that's the very thing that people are waiting for. But then there's always the problem of who is going to make the bean dip.
I don't know that there's a secret, just people. Everyone has their expectations as well as their hesitations and uncertainty and hopes. My experience with book groups has been hit and miss as well. I mostly prefer to choose my own reading and talk about it with people who happen to have read the books, too. But I do wonder if book groups started to become a thing because people are looking for the kind of connection you're talking about and are unsure where to get it.
I was in one book group that's still ongoing (I had to stop because I'm just way too overcommitted) that has a great format: instead of everyone reading the same book, one person per month presents on a book they read. I thought it was a great way to talk about books, introduce new ideas, and not put pressure on people to read something when they might not have time or interest.
That sounds like a wonderful couple of dates! I'm sorry the relationship didn't pan out but it's hard to imagine a nicer way to start.
I remember reading a Nero Wolf novel -- short detective stories written by Rex Stout in the early- to mid-1900s in which his sidekick Archie is investigating at some rich person's house, and talks about how television has ruined detecting because someone suggests turning on the television after dinner and then he can't talk with people or observe them interacting. I suppose the trivialization of human interaction has gone on for a long time.
I forgot to respond about the phone -- that was a land line in his old apartment. They've moved since then and I think don't have a land line anymore. But I'll have to ask. It was the worst, so loud!
I was in a poetry group for a while with five or six other friends. It was lovely. Just sit around of an evening and take turns reading poetry to each other. Appreciate it then move on to the next. The images and phrases flit and glitter over the gathering like a benediction.
>>"It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something."
Well, this landed on me like a ton of bricks.
Because: so many of we modern Western folk don't have "an outlet" because absolutely everything is an outlet? It's an invisible privilege for us, to own a book and read it for fun. So it's so easy to not notice how precious that freedom is. To read for enjoyment, as well as for useful information, personal development, civic awareness etc. So easy to forget how oppression often includes the oppressors coming for the storytellers, by way of removing everyone's access to their work. Which of course is still happening, including in certain parts of the US...
And yet there's always that unspoken "make-believe stories are throwaway entertainment" hanging in the air with some folk (very often young upwardly-focused dudes extremely intent on only doing "efficient" things). Really? If they're so 'unimportant', why make a fuss over them?
How easy it is to forget that a story can deliver an incredibly powerful message all the way into someone's bones in a way nothing else can - sometimes under the guise of A Bit Of Light Entertainment. How dangerous, to forget.
This is very well said and if you wrote a longer post on it with more thoughts, ahem, I'd be delighted to read it! "How easy it is to forget that a story can deliver an incredibly powerful message all the way into someone's bones in a way nothing else can - sometimes under the guise of A Bit Of Light Entertainment. How dangerous, to forget." That, in particular. It is dangerous to forget. Stories matter in so many ways.
Even in societies we don't think of as authoritarian, much of what you say here can be true. My father-in-law told the story many times of his experience running down to the book shop the moment the uncensored version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" became legal and was published. Which was something like 30 years after its initial heavily censored publication? It meant something to him not just for the graphic content, but because like him Lawrence was a working class boy from Nottinghamshire.
>>"if you wrote a longer post on it with more thoughts, ahem, I'd be delighted to read it!"
I'm not sure I should! I mean, I'd love to, but I can think of folk far more qualified - like yourself. Because of everything you brought into that comment. In particular: the way we can identify with characters in stories and the writers of them, how we can feel seen and understood. Bonus points for those stories crafted with such skill that when we return to them later in life as subtly different people, they say something new to us *then*, as well - like the story somehow showed a new way it can fit us, like a different side of a jigsaw-piece, even though it actually didn't change shape at all?
An example of this that I want to write about sometime: my love of Le Guin's "A Wizard Of Earthsea" - I loved it initially for the usual reasons a 14-year-old boy loves fantasy novels, all while it taught be some very subversive ideas (eg. sometimes the point of holding powerful is about not using it, particularly when you don't know how the effects will play out). After a while, I started seeing male protagonists in fantasy novels as selfish fools, which I owe to Le Guin. And now I see the flaws in the story, particularly the ending - and Le Guin herself was enormously critical of her earlier efforts: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/ursula-k-le-guin-documentary-reveals-author
What a journey we can take with a good story. *What* a journey.
Oh great, I went and wrote lots of words anyway. So much for "I'm not sure I should!" See: men, excitability, Extreme Online behaviour, etc.
(Hey, maybe this would be a fun thing to do sometime as one of those Substack Letters things? https://read.substack.com/p/letters A back & forth between your newsletter and mine?)
A friend gave me Drehrer's "Live Not By Lies" a few years ago and I read it. I have several criticisms for the book, but one of it's merits is the volume of oral history he collected from religious dissidents in soviet bloc countries who describe what they did "underground" to keep and transmit their faith in the face of suppression. Growing up in a situation where going to Family Night at church every Wednesday, that mechanism seemed so bland, maybe even ineffectual. But, the people he interviewed described how they would hold "seminars" at families' houses, crowding maybe nine people into a kitchen and get lessons from someone in their spiritual community who had studied. Nine. That's a tiny audience. Barely worth the time. Or maybe not. The impact of little things like that, or like a family passing a novel around one sheet at a time, which will eventually get returned to the friend who loaned it, who will loan it out again to another family, and another, until the paper is creased and smudged- maybe there is something as culturally powerful in that than in a blog or podcast that I experience alone.
And, thanks for posting that tape, Antonia! Let me know when you are ready to start your podcast. Your audio intuition is excellent. :)
Oh, dear. Thank you! But if I tried to start a podcast, when would I have time to listen to podcasts?!
There is much in the story of keeping and transmitting faith under oppression. My stepmother, who is also Russian, was raised as and is still a deeply faithful Russian Orthodox devotee. I remember in her tiny apartment in Moscow (when my parents were still married; this is a long time ago in the Soviet Union) seeing a religious icon hidden in the back of the lone kitchen cupboard, as was the case in many apartments.
And I know most people aren't going to take on the many hundreds of pages of Walter Echo-Hawk's book "In the Courts of the Conqueror," but I kind of wish more would because it has a lot of relevance for these ideas. He writes a lot about the religions of different Native American Nations in the U.S. and what they mean and the specifics of how they were suppressed for so long. In one Supreme Court case in particular (Employment Division v. Smith) he writes about the use of peyote and how the religion it's used in had to be practiced hidden and underground for decades. How hard it was to practice but also to even keep alive for subsequent generations. I didn't expect so much emphasis on religious freedom in the book, but it quickly makes a lot of sense.
I like that thinking about the story pages themselves creased and smudged and passed along carrying their own weight of the importance they have in that kind of society.
Inspiring to think of people craving reading like that, in community, around the table, page by page. I'm also fascinated by the many layers of translation, particularly with poetry. Have you read Christian Wiman's translations "inspired by" Osip Mandelstam? They're glittering and brilliant. Wiman talks of his translations as 'versions' of Mandelstam's poems, about how any translation is a conversation between writers, a 1 + 1 = 3 situation, where it's not word for word but there is a core of meaning that gets exposed. reverberated. Really love thinking about translations of poetry in that way.
As a child I was 'enschismed' as your father reports having been, but from the other side. The McCarthy period of anti-Communism in the U.S. was a regime of, if not outright terror for people and their children who resided politically to the left of center, at least of profound and sometimes debilitating fear and anxiety. While incomparable in degree to the terrors of the Holocaust, Stalinism, or the napalming, search and destroy , and saturation bombing of Vietnam, the effect on free expression of thoughts and feeling was similar to what your father described in Russia. A clear boundary between the persona acceptable to the regime and the authentic one reserved for safe spaces developed to cope, and provides a link to the experiences of those whose situation was a great deal more perilous.
That's very well described. I think a lot of people who've been through something like that can, if they think about it, begin to feel out the boundaries of what they know will not be allowed to speak, or even to think. I spend a lot of time these days thinking about teachers in universities or public school districts where certain phrases, words, books, and ways of approaching history are being banned. This is the psychological choreography they're suddenly being forced into.
I have not but that sounds lovely! In fact, my father's birthday is coming up, so that gives me an idea for a gift for him. (When I was in Moscow taking an intensive Russian course, years ago, I'd come home and practice the poems we had to memorize and translate, and my dad and stepmom would chime in with me, from memory. Didn't help me learn much but it was amazing to hear them recite Mandelstam and Pushkin from their schooldays.)
That 1 + 1 = 3 is such a great way to put it. That core of meaning, because how can you really translate *words*? It's fascinating to me.
I can never be reminded enough of what’s genuine in the world: music, art, literature, love, nature. That I shall take with me on my walk today, so often a way of synthesis. And thanks for the mention of my essay and photo of your Caragana (perhaps from Siberia?). We could spend days with those lichens and little tufts of moss, still not learn half their secrets, but find among them story and meaning. At the very least, that orange lichen, probably in the genus Xanthoria, which lives so many places around the world, is my first of two sunrises today.
It seems to originate from Siberia, yes? The hedge was full grown when we bought this place and full of deadwood and seems old, but I don't know when it was planted. I thoroughly enjoy the popping seeds later in the summer. They land in my bedroom if I keep the window open!
And I'm chagrined to say I hadn't even noticed the lichen until you pointed it out. Another reason to enjoy your perspective and attention to all the life around us :)
I feel like other people's stories impact me much more than constructing my own stories. Like hearing about your father's, for instance, or some of your other anecdotes. To the extent that I construct any story for myself at all, it's a pale imitation and it always stays the same, almost like a script. But if I tell my stories to other people, they get fuller and more interesting even as they become less true. I'd much rather hear their stories, though. I like the way your father's account complicates the typical stereotype of living under a totalitarian regime having no degrees of freedom. Maybe it's the uncertain and inconsistent degrees of freedom - partly a function of people's own attitude, like your father's boldness in enjoying what he could - that is difficult for some, almost as much as the overt repressions.
You never told us what the Persian translation said!
I enjoy hearing people's stories, too. It's actually one of the things I like about writing, is that it can -- not always but often enough -- invite people to share their experiences. I like that.
And your comment about the inconsistency of freedom is more insightful than you might realize. My father and I had a conversation about this very recently. He said that living in Russia now is much more difficult than it was during Soviet times because the boundaries are murkier. Things feel riskier because you're unsure what's allowed and what's not. My stepmother said the same. they both remember living in the Soviet Union as being more clear-cut as far as the doublethink goes. They're finding the current situation more difficult.
I am sorry to say that I can't remember which ones I came across! I did try to look again but it's been a few years and I was busy at the time and didn't pursue it. All I remember was that the translation bore little resemblance to the Barks version. I've seen this translation from Oxford World Classics recommended as being closer to what Rumi actually wrote, and brings Islam back into his work: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Masnavi-Book-One-Oxford-Classics/dp/0199552312/ref=as_li_ss_tl?crid=27CYSB1AF7JW4&dchild=1&keywords=jawid+mojaddedi&qid=1589717142&sprefix=jawid+m,aps,157&sr=8-1&linkCode=sl1&tag=zirrar-21&linkId=90f587537b0bffb54cb2603850cd209c&language=en_GB
And this blog post on the same subject has some examples comparing lines from Barks with more accurate translations: https://zirrar.com/reading-rumi-in-the-west-the-burden-of-coleman-barks/
This jumped out at me: "We knew that what you talk with friends about, you don’t talk to everybody. The official life was completely separate, and officially you would be somewhat a different person. And that’s what I call kind of schizophrenic society."
It speaks to how similarly totalitarian so many people allow this "free" society in the U.S. to be, and how so many live in fear without even realizing it, in service to jobs, commerce, whatever.
Someone just posted this in a private forum elsewhere and I am kind of kicking myself for not using it:
From the Nobel lecture given by Alexander Solzhenitsyn:
"The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions. His rule: Let that come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me. But it is within the power of writers and artists to do much more: to defeat the lie! For in the struggle with lies art has always triumphed and shall always triumph! Visibly, irrefutably for all! Lies can prevail against much in this world, but never against art."
Oh that’s brilliant. Such courage!
You probably remember the part from Nick Estes’s book where he writes about the Pick-Sloane dam projects, and how part of their purpose was to get people “participating in the market economy,” which there was no reason to do as long as the land provided for them.
That freedom, and how it got taken away starting in England hundreds of years ago, is the main thing that got me interested in land ownership. Once you’re forced into having a job to support yourself, you worry about losing it. Because what other options are there? And so we get tied to clocks and performance metrics and making sure we don’t piss off the wrong people. How many people would walk away if they knew they really had a choice?
But take something as simple as anger around the Pledge of Allegiance and it’s easy to see how control starts to slip in.
The progression is so methodical! ~ Tie people to the market economy, forcing them to get a job to make money, then tie their health insurance to their job so they are trapped there, no matter how miserable or dangerous or abusive it is. Withhold basic support systems, judge and blame people for struggling financially. Rinse and repeat.
💯
💣
Perfectly said. This is EXACTLY how it works.
That's 100% the story of the allotment era too. Carve up a reservation and "give" the land to individual Indians and families instead, but then start charging them taxes for that land – which they never had to before nor really had a concept of – which either forces them into that economy or forces them to sell it for a pittance to "get out of debt" or they just lose it flat out for failure to pay those taxes.
It’s just “these people are too free and we want that land” over and over, and then over and over again.
Thank you for this! I love that image of the loose pages, the careful, devotional reading. As I read your essay, I wondered if freedom and choice are inversely proportional to this sort of deep appreciation of literature. It’s too easy for people to choose some other form of “entertainment,” especially the easier, mindless forms, when no one is forbidding them from any of it. Videos of empty bookshelves in Florida schools are making the rounds - everything boxed up until certified librarians can certify the books contain nothing offensive to the white Christian nationalists’ agenda. Maybe we’re closer to those Soviet times than we realize.
And your thoughts on translations of Rumi are fascinating! Of course, how could our lens *not* distort his subtle layers of meaning? I wonder if Daniel Ladinsky is any more faithful to Hafiz’s meaning? 🤔 I will say, many a Rumi and Hafiz have shaken me to my core - in the best possible way. “Say Yes Quickly” changed my life and I knew it in that moment. Love the idea of translation being a conversation. It certainly made those mystics accessible to more people.
Unfortunately, I live in a county where the library system is undergoing similar kinds of attacks. I don’t know, it’s hard to always comprehend what freedom and choice mean to different people. Where I live--not my town, which is the opposite, but the larger county--elected officials have been clear that freedom is only something to be had within the Christian nationalist framework. It’s easiest to go after children’s access to literature first. (Though as my sister pointed out, the library board must have no idea that the internet exists. I mean, the Babysitter’s Club is also a show on Netflix.)
What’s hard is seeing the erosion happen. We all adapt because most people are just trying to survive. It doesn’t always take a revolution or invasion to lose these things. It can happen slowly, while most people are just trying to pay the bills.
I recently read a Hafiz book by Ladinsky and then set it aside in a flood of feeling betrayed, because every reference to it I found spoke to it as not being Hafiz at all but Ladinsky's work "in the spirit of" Hafiz. What bummed me out about it was his not owning that in the first place. I felt baited and switched and a bit foolish for being duped. I have a book deeply influenced by and largely dedicated to Matsuo Bashō, for example, but I'm not claiming it as Bashō's work.
So I unloaded my copy of Hafiz just as I did my Barks translation of Rumi (per a previous conversation with Nia on this very subject). Coming from a people whose words and culture are regularly appropriated and repackaged for feel good consumption by others I just don't have it in me to abide this kind of thing.
It’s the appropriation that gets me with Barks. I deleted a line about that because it felt like it needed an entirely different essay, but I thought the New Yorker article was slightly too kind on the subject. Because would Barks have had such success with that poetry if it weren’t being sold with a kind of mystique, given by Rumi’s name and story? When we respond to one of those poems, is it the poem we’re responding to or the wisdom we think the poet imparts? We probably all know the answer.
I did eventually give away that book. Every time I opened it I got stuck on thinking about Barks’s motivations.
My exact feeling re: Hafiz. You took one for our two-person team when it comes to Rumi and spared me the aggravation. 😂
Happy to save you any extra irritation when I can, Chris. 😂🤗
Unless I absolutely have to, unless it is required by forces beyond my control, I try not to do much regretting. But I've wondered from time-to-time what it would have been like to have family and friends who would be willing to read poetry together, or sing together, or do just about anything that doesn't involve television and mindless commercial culture.
A few times in the past when with others I've suggested reading poetry or a short story. Nobody has ever taken me seriously. They just laugh. Maybe they're afraid of the intimacy, or of the thoughts and feelings that a good piece of writing might evoke. Heaven forbid. Heaven forbid we should mingle our minds and our hearts in the pursuit of beauty and truth.
It sounds as though you have a wonderful and rich heritage from which your soul and your writing have blossomed. I know you cherish it. Thank you for sharing a little glimpse with us.
But the ring tone on that phone has got to go.
You’ve reminded me that my family used to do a lot of music and singing at home together, though that was more of my mother’s influence. She plays piano and guitar very well, and has a beautiful soprano voice. I didn’t realize until we lived in the Soviet Union that much of what went on in my household in Montana was influenced partly by her childhood, but possibly even more by the culture of playing folk music on guitars and singing in Russia, which was part of my father’s culture that my mother enjoyed a lot when she was there (she’s fluent in Russian and sings a lot of Russian folk songs).
Culture must be a big part of it. I have one friend locally who’s also a singer and musician and who hosts a caroling get-together every year, but other than that it’s hard to imagine any of my friends reading poetry or playing music together by choice.
Do you think it’s possible that that’s what ubiquitous book groups in the U.S. are trying to fill, that craving for gathering and sharing something cultural together? I never thought of that until this moment but am now wondering. And if that’s so, it seems like a hesitant foray, at least the groups I’ve been in. What would it take for the same groups of people to shift to Julie’s described gatherings below, reading poetry to one another?
I wish I knew the secret. Maybe it's just a matter of not taking no for an answer. Once people experience the joy and intimacy of exploring a fine piece of writing together and they realize there's not much to be afraid of. My limited experience with book groups has been pretty lukewarm. People show up having not even read the agreed-to sections (or whatever) and want to chit-chat about everything but the book; while others, though they did the reading, prefer to linger in shallow waters and have nothing to offer beyond, "I liked it," or "I didn't like it." Okay, that's very interesting, but tells us how you like the bean dip.
Several years ago I met a woman who, for our second date, wanted to come to my home and read together--out loud. We started by reading the first part of To Kill a Mocking Bird. I don't quite remember how we arrived at that decision. Ultimately the relationship didn't pan out, but that was one heck of a way to spend a date. Our first date was a long walk.
One can find committed reading groups, oftentimes affiliated with the local university, I just wish this sort of activity would be more the norm within friends and family. Unfortunately our collective mental space has been corrupted and trivialized by corporate propaganda and consumer culture. Maybe I just need to be more assertive about leading the way. Sometimes that's the very thing that people are waiting for. But then there's always the problem of who is going to make the bean dip.
I don't know that there's a secret, just people. Everyone has their expectations as well as their hesitations and uncertainty and hopes. My experience with book groups has been hit and miss as well. I mostly prefer to choose my own reading and talk about it with people who happen to have read the books, too. But I do wonder if book groups started to become a thing because people are looking for the kind of connection you're talking about and are unsure where to get it.
I was in one book group that's still ongoing (I had to stop because I'm just way too overcommitted) that has a great format: instead of everyone reading the same book, one person per month presents on a book they read. I thought it was a great way to talk about books, introduce new ideas, and not put pressure on people to read something when they might not have time or interest.
That sounds like a wonderful couple of dates! I'm sorry the relationship didn't pan out but it's hard to imagine a nicer way to start.
I remember reading a Nero Wolf novel -- short detective stories written by Rex Stout in the early- to mid-1900s in which his sidekick Archie is investigating at some rich person's house, and talks about how television has ruined detecting because someone suggests turning on the television after dinner and then he can't talk with people or observe them interacting. I suppose the trivialization of human interaction has gone on for a long time.
I forgot to respond about the phone -- that was a land line in his old apartment. They've moved since then and I think don't have a land line anymore. But I'll have to ask. It was the worst, so loud!
I was in a poetry group for a while with five or six other friends. It was lovely. Just sit around of an evening and take turns reading poetry to each other. Appreciate it then move on to the next. The images and phrases flit and glitter over the gathering like a benediction.
>>"It was, you know, outlet for ability to do creative thinking or enjoy something."
Well, this landed on me like a ton of bricks.
Because: so many of we modern Western folk don't have "an outlet" because absolutely everything is an outlet? It's an invisible privilege for us, to own a book and read it for fun. So it's so easy to not notice how precious that freedom is. To read for enjoyment, as well as for useful information, personal development, civic awareness etc. So easy to forget how oppression often includes the oppressors coming for the storytellers, by way of removing everyone's access to their work. Which of course is still happening, including in certain parts of the US...
And yet there's always that unspoken "make-believe stories are throwaway entertainment" hanging in the air with some folk (very often young upwardly-focused dudes extremely intent on only doing "efficient" things). Really? If they're so 'unimportant', why make a fuss over them?
How easy it is to forget that a story can deliver an incredibly powerful message all the way into someone's bones in a way nothing else can - sometimes under the guise of A Bit Of Light Entertainment. How dangerous, to forget.
This is very well said and if you wrote a longer post on it with more thoughts, ahem, I'd be delighted to read it! "How easy it is to forget that a story can deliver an incredibly powerful message all the way into someone's bones in a way nothing else can - sometimes under the guise of A Bit Of Light Entertainment. How dangerous, to forget." That, in particular. It is dangerous to forget. Stories matter in so many ways.
Even in societies we don't think of as authoritarian, much of what you say here can be true. My father-in-law told the story many times of his experience running down to the book shop the moment the uncensored version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" became legal and was published. Which was something like 30 years after its initial heavily censored publication? It meant something to him not just for the graphic content, but because like him Lawrence was a working class boy from Nottinghamshire.
>>"if you wrote a longer post on it with more thoughts, ahem, I'd be delighted to read it!"
I'm not sure I should! I mean, I'd love to, but I can think of folk far more qualified - like yourself. Because of everything you brought into that comment. In particular: the way we can identify with characters in stories and the writers of them, how we can feel seen and understood. Bonus points for those stories crafted with such skill that when we return to them later in life as subtly different people, they say something new to us *then*, as well - like the story somehow showed a new way it can fit us, like a different side of a jigsaw-piece, even though it actually didn't change shape at all?
An example of this that I want to write about sometime: my love of Le Guin's "A Wizard Of Earthsea" - I loved it initially for the usual reasons a 14-year-old boy loves fantasy novels, all while it taught be some very subversive ideas (eg. sometimes the point of holding powerful is about not using it, particularly when you don't know how the effects will play out). After a while, I started seeing male protagonists in fantasy novels as selfish fools, which I owe to Le Guin. And now I see the flaws in the story, particularly the ending - and Le Guin herself was enormously critical of her earlier efforts: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/30/ursula-k-le-guin-documentary-reveals-author
What a journey we can take with a good story. *What* a journey.
Oh great, I went and wrote lots of words anyway. So much for "I'm not sure I should!" See: men, excitability, Extreme Online behaviour, etc.
(Hey, maybe this would be a fun thing to do sometime as one of those Substack Letters things? https://read.substack.com/p/letters A back & forth between your newsletter and mine?)
But you just said it all so well! Okay, you said it all with Le Guin's help, which is really one of the best ways to say things :)
And we should totally do a letters thing. I mean, we do that anyway -- why not inflict it on everyone else?!
"You didn't ask for this - in fact, maybe the opposite! - but here it is, readers..."
😅
A friend gave me Drehrer's "Live Not By Lies" a few years ago and I read it. I have several criticisms for the book, but one of it's merits is the volume of oral history he collected from religious dissidents in soviet bloc countries who describe what they did "underground" to keep and transmit their faith in the face of suppression. Growing up in a situation where going to Family Night at church every Wednesday, that mechanism seemed so bland, maybe even ineffectual. But, the people he interviewed described how they would hold "seminars" at families' houses, crowding maybe nine people into a kitchen and get lessons from someone in their spiritual community who had studied. Nine. That's a tiny audience. Barely worth the time. Or maybe not. The impact of little things like that, or like a family passing a novel around one sheet at a time, which will eventually get returned to the friend who loaned it, who will loan it out again to another family, and another, until the paper is creased and smudged- maybe there is something as culturally powerful in that than in a blog or podcast that I experience alone.
And, thanks for posting that tape, Antonia! Let me know when you are ready to start your podcast. Your audio intuition is excellent. :)
Oh, dear. Thank you! But if I tried to start a podcast, when would I have time to listen to podcasts?!
There is much in the story of keeping and transmitting faith under oppression. My stepmother, who is also Russian, was raised as and is still a deeply faithful Russian Orthodox devotee. I remember in her tiny apartment in Moscow (when my parents were still married; this is a long time ago in the Soviet Union) seeing a religious icon hidden in the back of the lone kitchen cupboard, as was the case in many apartments.
And I know most people aren't going to take on the many hundreds of pages of Walter Echo-Hawk's book "In the Courts of the Conqueror," but I kind of wish more would because it has a lot of relevance for these ideas. He writes a lot about the religions of different Native American Nations in the U.S. and what they mean and the specifics of how they were suppressed for so long. In one Supreme Court case in particular (Employment Division v. Smith) he writes about the use of peyote and how the religion it's used in had to be practiced hidden and underground for decades. How hard it was to practice but also to even keep alive for subsequent generations. I didn't expect so much emphasis on religious freedom in the book, but it quickly makes a lot of sense.
I like that thinking about the story pages themselves creased and smudged and passed along carrying their own weight of the importance they have in that kind of society.
PODCAST PODCAST PODCAST
Sorry. I know I'm not helping.
NOT HELPING, MIKE!
SORRY I CAN'T HEAR YOU WITH THESE FINGERS IN MY EARS, SORRY.
NOT VERY BRITISH OF YOU
Inspiring to think of people craving reading like that, in community, around the table, page by page. I'm also fascinated by the many layers of translation, particularly with poetry. Have you read Christian Wiman's translations "inspired by" Osip Mandelstam? They're glittering and brilliant. Wiman talks of his translations as 'versions' of Mandelstam's poems, about how any translation is a conversation between writers, a 1 + 1 = 3 situation, where it's not word for word but there is a core of meaning that gets exposed. reverberated. Really love thinking about translations of poetry in that way.
As a child I was 'enschismed' as your father reports having been, but from the other side. The McCarthy period of anti-Communism in the U.S. was a regime of, if not outright terror for people and their children who resided politically to the left of center, at least of profound and sometimes debilitating fear and anxiety. While incomparable in degree to the terrors of the Holocaust, Stalinism, or the napalming, search and destroy , and saturation bombing of Vietnam, the effect on free expression of thoughts and feeling was similar to what your father described in Russia. A clear boundary between the persona acceptable to the regime and the authentic one reserved for safe spaces developed to cope, and provides a link to the experiences of those whose situation was a great deal more perilous.
That's very well described. I think a lot of people who've been through something like that can, if they think about it, begin to feel out the boundaries of what they know will not be allowed to speak, or even to think. I spend a lot of time these days thinking about teachers in universities or public school districts where certain phrases, words, books, and ways of approaching history are being banned. This is the psychological choreography they're suddenly being forced into.
I have not but that sounds lovely! In fact, my father's birthday is coming up, so that gives me an idea for a gift for him. (When I was in Moscow taking an intensive Russian course, years ago, I'd come home and practice the poems we had to memorize and translate, and my dad and stepmom would chime in with me, from memory. Didn't help me learn much but it was amazing to hear them recite Mandelstam and Pushkin from their schooldays.)
That 1 + 1 = 3 is such a great way to put it. That core of meaning, because how can you really translate *words*? It's fascinating to me.