Hope for the Unknown

I’m always amused by those who think that, because I’m the projectionist, I know why things do or do not happen in a film, or that I know what happens to the characters after the credits roll.

Do they think I see an annotated version of it? Or that I’m privy to all that landed on the cutting room floor?

Before I saw Women Talking, I was in the lobby following three showings as audiences left. Each time there were women charging right at me, demanding more than asking:

“Where are the men?”

At first I thought they meant the lack of males in the audience, and the very title of the film dares one to joke: “Maybe they hear enough at home?” Held my tongue on that one, though I couldn’t resist the crack that it may be the most redundant title I’ve ever heard.

So when I did see it, I was already looking for the answer, only to find a cast of women already looking for their answer. Rather than an accumulation of evidence, Women Talking goes right to the verdict. Or, the vote: Do nothing, fight, or leave.

Director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name is as terse as film gets. It doesn’t matter where the men are, though it heightens tension and hints at a backstory when “attackers” return to the colony–unnamed and unlocated–in the dead of night, both in flashback and within the 12-hour span of the story.

That terseness allows Women Talking to stand for all human rights conflicts whether within nations or families. How many Native American tribes took that same vote in the 18th and 19th centuries? How many individual women, married or single, make that choice today? And what about parents in violence-torn Central America? Or parents in Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi?

We might think that the film is set in the 19th Century if not for a car with loudspeakers blaring “Daydream Believer” cruising down the colony’s dirt roads to take the 2010 census. Two preteen girls chat with the driver whose face is just one of two adult males we see–if only in his rearview mirror.

We see a dozen women of three generations make the final choice for about a hundred who were evenly split between fight or leave. One wonders if the “do nothing” option was there only to remind us that a few still take it, as does Frances McDormand’s character, Scarface Janz, whose case must be compelling to those who stand knee-deep in the cement of religious dogma.

The rest must act. They debate. After so much worry for what might await them in the outside world, Ona, played by Rooney Mara, muses:

Hope for the unknown is good. It is better than hatred of the familiar.

Says the young narrator:

It was all waiting to happen before it happened. And it happened effortlessly.

Oh, it’s a serious film verging on a graduate seminar covering the nature of evil, free will, forgiveness, and faith. In a time when Roe v. Wade is revoked and a political party condemns what is “woke,” we could call this film the 21st Century version of Thelma & Louise.

But Women Talking comes up for air at just the right times when one of the two grandmothers, Greta played by Canadian actress Sheila McCarthy, asks to tell a story about Ruth and Cheryl.

These are the two horses who draw her wagon. If there’s an obstacle in the road, they don’t quibble over it, they go around. Later we learn that, if she has trouble steering them where they are, she need only look down the road as far as it goes–a remark also indicative of the film’s hypnotic cinematography and soundtrack.

Women Talking offers an equally subtle, humane touch in Austin, played by Ben Whishaw, the colony’s boys-only school teacher who the women recruit to “take the minutes” of their meeting. His relationship with them, both in backstory and in the moment, is memorable enough for a review of its own–which is to say, better left to the film.

That, by the way, is the answer to the question I went in with, “Where are all the men?”

I’ll leave it to the film’s narrator. Yes, pay close attention to the narrator–and don’t be late.

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Manifest Identity

Among American history’s most misquoted lines is, “The British are coming!”

On his horse over a year before independence was declared, Paul Revere was himself British as were all the townspeople and farmers along his route. Using that word would have been nonsensical. Since the troops stationed in Boston were commonly called “Regulars” by the colonists, it is likely he used that term. Of course, by the time the first talking film was made, the word “Regular” fell flat and “British” seemed more to the point.

To this day we forget that the revolution did not begin with one united population seeking independence, but with a confederation of 13. And even after Thomas Paine coined the galvanizing name, United States of America, people still thought of themselves according to colony or region, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, or Carolinians and New Englanders.

A new book, Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism, traces the evolution of how we perceived ourselves from our break with England to our break with each other. Gradually, our identity was defined less by state than by region, North and South, with the slave economy as the wedge between all attempts by John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and others to make E Pluribus Unum come true.

Others, most notably John Calhoun, were determined to maintain the South’s distinct identity of white supremacy and slave economy, and a skewed Constitution enabled the South to do exactly that: The wildly disproportionate Electoral College, the equally disproportionate composition of the Senate, and the 3/5ths clause which counted enslaved people as 60% of a person for the sake of a census upon which representation in the House and the Electoral College was based–while not allowing those enslaved people themselves to vote.

Today, the 3/5ths rule is long gone, but a disproportionate Electoral College and Senate remain in a document that many Americans–especially Southerners for much the same reason they did two centuries ago–consider sancrosanct.

Enter a third region into the mix, the West, and the countdown to Civil War begins. According to author Joel Richard Paul, the South wanted to counter the spread of Northern industry into the Great Lakes region with a spread of their own slave economy into Mexico (and Cuba). At the time, Mexico stretched north all the way into northern California and what is now Wyoming. The South wanted more slave states, and with Tennesseans flooding into Texas–and with Southern presidents such as Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and John Tyler calling the shots–a fabricated war that would result in at least one new state was inevitable.

Polk’s rallying cry of “American blood on American soil,” was as false as the absurd retroactive claim that Texas was part of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, but the imagination of the nation was captured by the idea of a unified and enlarged identity. Writers at the time responded to a call from Ralph Waldo Emerson for a national literature, especially Herman Melville who set that identity on ships that sailed the world, and Walt Whitman whose “Song of Myself” was sung with America as his persona. As if to galvanize the whole “Young America” movement, a New York newspaper editor coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.”

Ulysses Grant, a young officer of low rank when we attacked Mexico, would later call it “a wicked war” in his post-presidential memoirs, and there is a reason that the Mexican War is the only war with no plaque or monument anywhere in Washington, DC.

Still, as we learn in Indivisible, the Mexican War began our turn from regional identities toward a national one even as the standoff between North and South spiralled toward secession. War can do that. This where Daniel Webster played what may be called the lead role in the tragic drama.

There were others. John Quincy Adams, the only former president to later serve in Congress, was a leading voice of abolition in the House for 17 years, spending much of that time fighting Southern gag orders on the subject of slavery. Henry Clay worked as long and as tirelessly for compromises that, while not challenging slavery where it existed, would prevent its spread westward. Andrew Jackson’s military victories–some by way of his deceit of Native American tribes that trusted American treaties–made him a popular hero who advocated a strong union despite his uneasy alliance with the rabid Carolinian Calhoun necessitated by Old Hickory’s support of slavery. And then there was Martin Van Buren “whose obsequiousness and flattery were unmatched” but who “never drank his own poison.”

Above them all, Webster was the orator who drew the crowds, with a charisma that often made his opponents a bit more accomodating. His “Second Reply to Hayne” in 1830, a 30,000-word blaming the South’s economic problems on slavery while “arguing that the prosperity of the North and West was due to their reliance on free labor,” became required reading for decades in public schools. To this day, historians regard it as “the greatest extemporaneous oration ever delivered before Congress.”

Indivisible is generous with quotes of pointed passages Webster aimed at South Carolina’s quest for nullification, of rhetorical flourishes describing the cooperative country to be passed on to future generations, and barbs that made the chamber roar:

If we were to allow twenty-four states each independently to decide what laws were valid, he joked, “it should not be denominated a Constitution. It should be called, rather, a collection of topics for everlasting controversy.”

Paul does not shy away from one of the most controversial disputes of American history: Did Webster betray his Northern constituents and his own humanitarian principles when he endorsed the Compromise of 1850 with its abhorrent Fugitive Slave Law?

The short answer, clearly, is yes. Less clear is that the South would have split in 1850 without it, and so Webster, at the behest of Clay who appeared at his Washington door with a hacking cough on a stormy January night, reconsidered his firm, long-time stand that gave abolitionists hope. Webster’s mantra, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” was about to separate the man himself. For the sake of Union, Webster caved and sacrificed a liberty that Northerners held dear.

Other historians have vascillated on the truth and consequence of this move of a man who, from an early age, had his sights set on a presidential bid. Was Webster calculating that political gain in the border states and the South would more than compensate for losses in New England? Or was he sacrificing himself for the sake of avoiding a Civil War?

According to Paul, Webster was buying time. In 1850, industry in the North was not developed enough to prevent secession. Ten years later, that changed. Paul suggests that secession would have been successful had it happened a decade sooner. Given the amount of cotton and tobacco traded to England, Europe, and–as a result of a treaty engineered by Pres. Tyler in 1844–China, the South likely would have had allies that would not import manufactured goods from the North at that scale for at least another five years.

Indivisible ends with the death of Webster in October, 1852. Just months earlier he was vying with incumbent Millard Fillmore for the Whig nomination for president. Fillmore was the second Whig vice-president to ascend to the presidency after the death of a military hero within months of their inaugurations. Back then vice-presidents tended to be hacks chosen for their appeal in a region opposite the presidential candidate. Remarks Paul:

It would not be the last time a polarizing president from New York relied on southern and nativist support for his reelection.

That coincides with descriptions of Andrew Jackson that, if you remove the military references, echo descriptions we hear today. If you ever wondered why Jackson’s portrait was so often a backdrop for White House pronouncements from 2017 through 2020, and why the plan to replace him on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman was scrapped, consider this one:

Jackson… regarded the federal bureaucracy with suspicion. He feared that civil servants formed a shadow government or deep state that would impede him. The president set to work to “clean out” the embedded elite… He vaguely alluded to “widespread corruption” in government and insisted on firing civil servants… Jackson did not claim that these men were incompetent or corrupt. He simply wanted to replace them with civil servants who would be beholden to him.

Other presidents fare much worse in Paul’s estimation. When Whig stalwarts Webster and Clay vied for the presidential nomination in 1848, the party opted instead for Gen. Zachary Taylor, well-known to the public as “Old Rough and Ready” despite his dubious conduct of the Mexican War. Says Paul, “once more, inexperience and ignorance proved to be a winning combination in presidential politics.”

Many other passages in Indivisible you could file under, “History repeats itself,” or “Doomed to repeat,” or “The Past is not Dead.” As well as two blurbs on the back cover, not for what they say, but for who wrote them: Jamie Raskin and Anita Hill.

During a month when the governor of Florida signs a bill forbidding the teaching of African-American history in the state’s public schools on the grounds that it has “no educational value,” we might wonder if we are repeating the decade leading to the Civil War.

We may no longer think of ourselves according to our native states or geographic regions, but it is clear that, our nationalism notwithstanding, we have yet to think of ourselves as “American” in any honest sense of the word.

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https://www.harvard.com/book/indivisible/

Fittingly Unfitting

There’s an adage attributed to everyone from Elie Wiesel to Pope Francis, from John Le Carre to Leviticus:

The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

With a title that describes Charlie, an obese English teacher hoping to reconcile with Ellie, his estranged and beyond troubled daughter, The Whale illustrates that point as well as any of those writers or clerics could have.

The title also refers to a most unusual plot device, a high-schooler’s essay on Moby-Dick, although the film bears more resemblence to a later Herman Melville novel, The Confidence-Man, than to the one which was originally published in England under the title, The Whale. For that reason, any detailed account of what the five characters do would be as much of a spoiler alert as a review. Suffice to say it is well acted, and Brendan Fraser is now picking up the awards to prove it. Hong Chau’s Liz is as memorable as her Elsa in The Menu, and Samantha Morton’s Mary is as riveting as her brief role as a victim being interviewed in She Said.

Fittingly–and, in this case, equally unfittingly–the English teacher keeps his video off during his Zoomed classes, a blank, black square in the middle of 14 youthful faces. Later on, that will change in one of several scenes in The Whale that plays like a horror film.

With unrelenting intensity, even the sight of a bird feeding outside Charlie’s window feels ominous.

In a story of deception that would do Almodovar proud, assumptions are easy to make about characters when we meet them–Liz is a care-giver, Thomas an evangelical–only to take us by surprise when we hear their backstories. But The Whale is as much about the great divides of modern life: Despite his morbid condition, Charlie’s optimism is as boundless as his belly, contradicting Ellie’s cynicism even as she throws it in his face. If Charlie is a shadow of Uncle Vanya, Ellie is his anti-Sonya.

Nevertheless, he persists. In a tone that begs for affirmation, he asks Liz:

Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?

Whether to grant that affirmation is left to the audience when the film ends. Does he break through Ellie’s indifference? Is that indifference a defense mechanism? Or is it pure hate? Her own mother calls her “evil” after all. Rather than answers, the screen turns white and the credits roll.

We’ve seen this before. In 1999, Limbo, a film set in Alaska, ended with a stranded family awaiting the arrival of a plane. Two possibilities have been set: Rescue? Or execution? Neither. The screen went white and we were left to debate which was likely. The very title of the film should have warned us: “Limbo (n): A condition of unknowable outcome.”

As a title, The Whale may not hint at an inconclusive ending any more that it does at the characters’ layered identities, but the essay that Charlie keeps reading and having read to him, and sometimes reciting does. Like a typical high school paper, it’s filled with simple observations: Ishmael and Queequeg share a room. Pure filler: … written by a famous author named Herman Melville. Absurd misnomers: In a seaside town. And errors: A pirate named Ahab. But it has one line that might raise the eyebrows of scholars who still debate whether Melville wrote one unified book or combined an adventure story with an industry manual:

I think Ishmael wrote the boring parts to give us some pause from his own sad story.

As with the film’s characters, the identity of the essayist is unknown at first and then later unravelled more than revealed. That may be the best reason to see The Whale. It invites assumptions to give us pause from assumptions.

No matter what the daughter thought of the bird feeding off the full plate Charlie leaves outside his window, this film is the opposite of indifference.

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Post Script: With an evangelical character, The Whale was bound to contain the line, “Everything happens for a reason.” A Bible-adhering friend back in my South Dakota days took that a few steps further when he insisted every chance he got, “There’s no such thing as coincidence.” Today, it occurs to me that readers of my most recent blogs are wondering about the coincidence of this one.

For those just tuning in: Two weeks ago I was among the 211 readers in the annual Moby-Dick Marathon in New Bedford, Mass. While there, I attended two of the three side-sessions called “Chat with the Scholars.” Also while there, I was unnerved by the sight of myself in a full-length mirror while walking out of a men’s room and into a corridor filled with paintings of whales. Days later I began daily workouts at a gym after months, actually years, of procrastination. Days after that, the Screening Room opens The Whale.

Let me hasten to say that, by comparison, Charlie makes me look anorexic, nor do I need any reminder to keep walking three miles a day. I’m already feeling better, and I have some nice shirts I’d like to button once again. Still, I waver between the idea that this is coincidence or that it has played out with purpose.

If the former, it’s a joke on me that I can laugh at. If the later? One year will be a painful amount of time to wait before I can ask those scholars what they think of the “pause from (Ishmael’s) own sad story” theory.

Workout by the Numbers

Made my first trip to a gym yesterday.

Signed in six weeks ago at the urging of more than one friend. Knowing that my admission and membership would be fully covered by my insurance, I had run out of excuses not to.

Still, New England’s fairly tolerable weather through December and into January kept me walking in the wildlife sanctuary just outside my door on most days. On others, windchills turned me around after barely half a mile, at times at the end of my driveway where I achieved nothing more than retrieving my mail.

Yesterday was raw, rainy, so in I went. I thought about leaving as soon as I stepped into the locker room. Not because of guys walking around wrapped in towels, or having to change in front of others–I’ve been a Renaissance faire performer for 22 years for God’s sake. No, it was the pounding disco or hip-hop or whatever the mindless thump-thump we hear out of speakers everywhere is called these days. Off those tiles it was so loud, I still wonder if its purpose is to prevent loitering.

Instead, I changed quickly and was in the vast gym looking for a basic treadmill. In retrospect, I was too quick, forgetting my water bottle in my “gym bag,” actually a touristy canvas tote-bag my mother used back in the 90s with names of California and Nevada cities and towns all over it, a motel chain it appears.

Before long I stepped onto a treadmill and asked the first person who happened by to show me how it started. He set it at 1.5 mph and showed me how to increase and decrease the speed. Presto! I was off. What I realized right away was that by leaning on those two handles in front of me, I was taking a fair chunk of weight off my feet, and I liked how it felt. I gradually notched up the speed and had it at 3.0 mph for the last 20 minutes.

My mistake was not bringing the water bottle, and I feared that I would not return if I took a break for water–as I do on the bench in the reserve where I have no choice but to walk back, save for a few days when I couldn’t resist the offer of a ride. So I plowed on until I reached 2.1 miles (about the round-trip distance of my walks on Plum Island) in 47 minutes, and had worked up a sweat that doesn’t happen in the reserve at this time of year.

Machine said 188 calories, and when I mentioned this to a couple guys in the locker room, I could tell that they both resisted laughing. Instead, they assured me with wide smiles that it’ll go up when I keep at it. Yes, they said “when” not “if.” One said it was likely wrong and that I must have burned more. Both said that the only important thing was that I got there and did it. That’s what those friends wrote in response to the bragging emails I sent them last night. A variation on the old Woody Allen line, just showing up is victory.

None of them mentioned the “no criticism” or “judgement free zone” of which Planet Fitness and other gyms boast to encourage new members no matter how out of shape we may be. Both phrases are all over the walls, but neither mattered much to me, as I enjoy self-deprecating humor. When anyone moves to the side of an isle of the supermarket or anywhere else as I approach, I can’t resist: “Oh, I’m wide, but I’m not that wide.” Yesterday, I made a point of wearing the t-shirt I just bought at the New Bedford Whaling Museum with a white whale on it, as if I was inviting ridicule.

That was my second trip to the annual marathon reading of Moby-Dick. Before the first one three years ago, the Newburyport Daily News interviewed me for a story, and when asked about my interest, I didn’t hesitate: “Call me Ishmael! Everything about him is true of me.” That was then. Now, I’d be more accurately cast in the title role.

Never an athletic specimen, I was always in fair shape thanks to busking and the Renaissance faire, always on my feet keeping a beat, sometimes dancing. Then I quit cigarettes in January, 2007, and by April of that year, I had gained 35 pounds I never shed. Three years ago the pandemic shut me down, and I indulged my appetites. Potato pancakes with sour cream every morning; hamburgers laced with molasses every evening with India Pale Ale to wash them down. Before long it was another 35 pounds, and only now am I intent on bringing those numbers down.

So it makes sense to have numbers in front of me–and numbers that I want to go up.

Today I made sure to have the water bottle with me. Those machines have cup holders on both sides of a screen with all kinds of controls that I’ll ignore for at least a month. There are also machines that do other things, such as de-escalators that people climb. No thank you. And a weight room. No way. Television monitors showing all kinds of stations line a wall in front of rows of various machines. I think of stories to fit the pictures; weather maps I imagine as military campaigns–which, thanks to climate change, they often may as well be. The brainless thump-thump is broadcast, but the place is so huge that the sound dissolves long before it bangs your eardrum.

Today’s numbers were 2.45 miles, 51 minutes, 206 calories, and I had the speed up to 3.0 mph within five minutes of starting and kept it there. As of today, I have set two goals: 1) to have all three numbers at least match the previous workout; 2) to shower and get dressed in noticeably less time than I workout. The first seems relatively easy, but the second? Even the obnoxious thump-thump has failed to hasten my departure.

That’s why this is strictly a winter habit, though it will also serve as a rainy-day option year-round. When the weather is tolerable, I’ll be back on the Refuge Road. I’ll miss the handles to lean on and numbers to increase, but I’ll take the sights and sounds of the marsh over so many indoor distractions, no matter how enticing some of them may be.

More than anything, I’ll welcome once again ending my workouts right here at home where I can fall on a bed for as long as I want before having to shower and get dressed.

All in blissful silence.

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Harpooneers of this World

More than anything, I wanted Chapter 62, “The Dart,” a more common word by which whalers called a harpoon. To get it, I asked for a ten-minute slot on the ungodly midnight watch.

That’s how the Moby-Dick Annual Marathon is divvied up. Each of the 25 hours it needs is a watch, all of which starts at noon Saturday and concludes at about 1:00 pm Sunday. Since 62 falls midway in the 135 chapters, I put in for 12:30-12:40 am and got it.

Three years ago, I guessed too late and read 69 and 70, “The Funeral” and “The Sphynx,” both strong stuff, as is every chapter in a long book that frequently bounds from comic to ponderous, from whimsical to confrontational, at times all at once. In 2020, I was mesmerized all the way to dawn’s invasion of the 3rd-floor windows of the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s reading room, inhaling as much as hearing every word.

True, I twice sat in the adjacent coffee room, conversing with a young couple who drove up from Maryland, and then with the owner of a boat shop who flew in from Chicago. He told me that there were readers from California and Europe. I don’t think there was as much of that this year, as there were noticeably fewer people listening in the wee hours, and far fewer sleeping bags in the wide corridor to the elevator. But, as Ishmael doesn’t hesitate to sometimes admit, I could be wrong.

Following the Sunday morning “Chat with Scholars,” one of several sideshows held during the main event, I had a memorable conversation with a recent graduate of College of the Atlantic up on the Maine coast. A Texas native, she’s now working for the National Parks Service in New Bedford, and may be the only person who has ever noticed that Ishmael describes an object that “fell to Ahab’s feet,” and remembered that Ahab had just one foot.

If only the world would pay a fraction of that attention to detail.

Details draw me to “The Dart.” The first of two compelling reasons is something that no one writing newspaper columns, as I’ve been doing for 40 years, can resist: Decades, perhaps a century before the term was coined, Herman Melville wrote an op-ed column.

In the persistent voice of Ishmael, one who challenges conventional wisdom every chance he gets, it opens with a description of how the whale boats were manned as they leave the ship in pursuit of a whale. He then finds fault: The harpooneers participate in the rowing, leaving them exhausted when it’s time to throw a 25-lb. spear. He offers proof: Low success rates. A solution: Leave them idle. Followed by a litany of reasons–“no wonder…”–that states a need. Followed by a concession of what will be compromised: The speed of the whaleboat. Countered by a claim of why the loss is negligible compared to how much more will be gained: Accuracy and efficiency.

In the best op-ed style, he ends the chapter with a “kicker” to drive the point home:

To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

Coming at the end of about 650 words–standard op-ed length–that line by itself is the second reason I wanted “The Dart.” I memorized it long ago, a metaphor that applies to anyone if you replace the two nouns, “dart” and “harpooneers” with others that share the relationship of an object and the people who use it. To ensure the greatest efficiency of art, the artists of this world… To ensure the success of any attempt to influence a distracted public, the activists of this world… Call it an echo of Hamlet’s “the readiness is all.” At the reading, I was able to look up from the book and scan the audience. Most had their eyes down, reading along. Those looking at me sat bolt upright.

Not bad for people who had been up some 17 hours and counting. I was lucky that a friend from King Richard’s Faire read not long after, Chapter 66, “The Shark Massacre,” describing what happened to a whale’s carcass after it is stripped of blubber and oil and dropped back into the sea. Vinny, the tour de force of Toe Jam Puppet Band wildly popular with children in southeastern Massachusetts, might have been typecast for it:

[A]ny man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought that the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

We broke for the coffee room after he was done. Much of our conversation was about how Ishmael’s jokes, his whimsy and mischief, are much more prominent when heard aloud. And, oh, how they make Ishmael’s portentous and profound passages more palatable. He stayed until past 4:00 am when another friend of his read.

Another mutual friend was with Culture*Park Theater performing “Midnight on the Forecastle” (Chap. 40) on the museum’s auditorium stage, the only chapter performed rather than read, and with song and dance. Elizabeth, formerly of King Richard’s Gypsy Dancers, played Tashtego, one of the harpooneers, as she did three years ago.

But there was a new cabin boy. This year’s Pip, a New Bedford fourth-grader named Josiah Bodden, gained a fan club in the former whaling capital of the world when he faced the audience, jolted forward, fell to his knees, slid toward the front of the stage, threw his head back, shut his eyes, clasped his hands over his head, and closed the chapter with a prayer:

Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men who have no bowels to feel fear!

An hour or so later, the co-founder of the Newburyport Melville Society read “The Chart” (Chap. 44) which describes Ahab, alone in his cabin, studying maps rolled onto with their corners pinned into the wooden table. My bare description may make it seem like dry stuff, but Patricia, like so many of the 211 readers, made Ishmael’s mystical narration so vivid that the chapter’s kicker landed with the full force and relevance of any pronouncement today:

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Not long after that, the Newburyport Melville Society convened across the street in the Moby Dick Brewery for clam chowder and pints of Ishm-Ale. That, plus the unlimited coffee supplied by the museum overnight, the presence of Vinny, and especially the extra rush of adrenaline after delivering “The Dart” made it easy to stay awake past dawn.

Had planned to start home at sunrise, as I did last time, but couldn’t resist a Portuguese omelet at Tia Maria’s European Cafe, also across the street. Refreshed, I went back in for another scholarly session and a chat with my Newburyport friends before starting home well after 11:00.

Halfway home, I had to stop at Starbuck’s in Braintree, just off the highway, and sat for half an hour with a tall, black, dark roast before finishing the trip. How’s that for poetic karma? Starbuck helped guide me home from my pursuit of the White Whale.

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Screenshot by Richard K. Lodge, cropped by Lenovo.

Vinny Lovegrove, Photo by another reader, Cora Peirce of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts & Rhode Island.

A Child on Refuge Road

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

I’d go crazy if I didn’t, unless I’ve already gone crazy without noticing. Or I’d quit, as many folks, including a few good friends, think I should.

Some of the laughter takes effort, but I’m so used to it that I can make it look and sound natural–like the Irish fiddlers who pride themselves on appearing as relaxed as professional gamblers while playing the most acrobatic jigs and reels at breakneck speed.

Those laughs are my way of deflecting the implied criticism of those who tell me they like my writing except when I write about politics. You know who you are, and you have me outnumbered. Way outnumbered. My laughter says “Fine, skip it. Enjoy the rest.”

My vignettes of Plum Island and Newburyport gain laughs I can share outright. Maybe that’s why I thought I’d experiment with a recent blog about the walk I took into Plum Island’s wildlife reserve on New Year’s Day.

An unseasonably mild day set the mood for an amble to a bench where I would sit and watch clouds eclipse the sun, and duck glide upon the marsh. Genesis 1:2–…and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

All very easy-going, whimsical, and light-hearted, with a photo of two black duck as a cover, but I did headline it “A Powerful Transfer of Peace,” and so there was bound to be some kind of civic or political content.

It begins with the mild transition the weather has made from 2022 to 2023 here on the Massachusetts coast. The plot thickens when I muse about being stuck on column that I was writing for the local paper, an anticipation of the anniversary of Jan. 6. I look out the window. A view of a convertible with the top down snaps me out of my chair. I go for a walk and write with my feet. While sitting on the bench, I find–I see–what the column needs: contrast.

“Of, by and for the Empty Seats” ran in the Daily News the next day, the “holiday observed” as we call those Mondays nearest the real deal, a very busy day at the Screening Room where several patrons let me know they approved it.* It also drew five emails, as many as I ever get for a newspaper column. Four expressed approval, each of them signed, one from a neighbor I haven’t yet met who took the implied point of “empty seats”:

I am at fault as I did not attend the meeting at City Hall with [US Rep. Seth] Moulton. I will try and attend the next time. If for no other reason than to balance off the QAnon folks who believe that, if they scream louder and wave their flags higher, they must be the voice of America.

Catch you on Refuge Road.

The fourth email was anonymous, sent under the name “Newburyport Guy” with the subject line, “Your childish drivel”:

It’s clear you have a child’s understanding of the world.

It is unpleasant to begin the year with your Democunt (sic & sick) observations.

With the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other[,] we Republican patriots are invincible. We own the Court and the House. In 2024 we will own the Senate and the White House. It is God’s will.

I suggest you utilize your time and energy investigating and reporting why our so-called “public library” hires only women. How is this legal? Why is the library director always female? Where are the male librarians at 94 State Street? I thought you Democunts were all about equity, diversity and inclusion. Investigate and report on this scandal.

I hope 2023 is a year of learning and maturity for you. Write about something important.

God is life!! Abortion is the holocaust of our time.

For all our talk about the separation of church and state, we are up against the union of church and hate. Anonymity? That, as one friend calls it, “is the KKK of speech.”

For the record, there is at least one male employed at the Newburyport Public Library, and no one needs a sociologist or optometrist to tell them that far more women go into that profession than men. But there are far more pressing issues in this email than the gender distribution of librarians.

Rather than sorting through Newburyport Guy’s agenda, I’d rather return to the first email from a neighbor vowing to get involved in civic life. That describes not only my last column, but my next to coincide with the upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday prompted by a quote of his to rattle my I-don’t-want-to-hear-about-politics friends:

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

My response to Newburyport Guy? Well, I’m relieved he didn’t say anything about catching me on Refuge Road, but honestly, I just laugh.

Still, he may be right that I have a “child’s understanding of the world.” I have grandchildren. Other grandparents and parents may prefer not to connect the indelible dots of the present to the inevitable blot they spell for the future. By contrast, I have no choice but to call attention to the world that the young, the innocent, the meek are about to inherit.

That’s why all that deflective laughter takes more effort than I care to admit.

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Martin Luther King (Photo via history.com)

*The column: https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/as-i-see-it-of-by-and-for-the-empty-seats/article_34bc2fe6-8877-11ed-a05c-4b3eb2603ae1.html

A Powerful Transfer of Peace

A Powerful Transfer of Peace

A string of mild days has both ended 2022 and commenced 2023 here on New England’s coast.

Sitting here with a view of the entrance to the sand dunes and marsh of a wildlife refuge out my window, I’ve spent New Year’s Weekend watching lines of cars, mostly SUVs, roll by as they do on a late spring day.

For a couple weeks before this front moved in, Plum Islanders were bundled up and hunkered down against unabated Arctic blasts over the marsh that turned freezing temps into single digits with minus signs on the shortest days of the retiring year. With plenty to write while sitting at my laptop, more to read while lying in bed, and no end of college and pro football on the tube, I was content to remain indoors.

As I was Friday morning when I noticed several cars heading toward the gate. That was enough to tell me that I could tolerate my daily two-mile walk on the refuge road–something that I had suspended for longer than I care to admit, using Christmas gatherings as much as the weather as an excuse.

But I had an idea for a Daily News column that demanded to be written, and a deadline coming up, albeit self-imposed. And that Kenyan coffee that arrived in the mail tasted so good! So I kept writing and sipping until, stuck for a precise adjective or a clever analogy, I looked up from my keyboard and out the window to see a convertible drive by–top down.

Well, I wasted no time closing tabs, logging out, shutting down, getting dressed, filling my water bottle, turning the heat down, and getting out the door.

Yesterday was damp and overcast, and today had a slight wind-chill, but I made it to my mile-marker bench that overlooks the marsh each day and was able to sit awhile watching a few black duck float on a salt panne, so still they could have been sleeping.

Maybe it was their complete lack of effort–no flapping wings, no plunging beaks–that made something clear to me on this first morning of a new year: Our weather has given us a peaceful transition of years.

The thought reminded me of the November day following Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984. We all knew he was going to win, but the fact of it was devastating for anyone who cared about the environment, about the accessibility of health care and higher education, about workers’ rights and occupational safety. For anyone who cared as much for line-items as for bottom lines, it was a day of mourning.

Until you opened the Boston Globe or any other paper that carried a syndicated column that day penned by Eugene McCarthy. A former Minnesota senator and a presidential candidate in 1968 most attractive to college students and faculty with his “Clean for Gene” campaign, McCarthy seemed the perfect choice to write the post-mortem for the doomed campaign of his fellow Minnesotan, Walter Mondale.

And then I read it. Not a word about the election, nor about government or politics in any form. As I recall, he mentioned no person nor any place to be found on a map. Instead, he described a place I’ll never forget: his garden. Yes, he seemed to be saying, life goes on, so let’s make the best of it, plant these seeds, train that vine, pull these weeds, water that thyme.

This, from the guy who single-handedly forced Lyndon Johnson to abdicate his bid for re-election.

I thought of the draft column I had waiting for my return home. It’s subject is the peaceful transfer of power, or rather America’s loss of that hallmark of a free and self-governing people two years ago this week. By the time I left the bench, I was thinking: Maybe the precise adjective is “powerful,” and the precise noun “peace.”

Look to the duck on the marsh, if not to the gathering clouds that threaten rain. Or to the tomatoes in your garden, if not to the rabbits who run through it. Consider the lillies of the field, if not the developer who builds on it.

Nature offers analogies, both clever and precise, for all we do.

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*Black Duck pair, photo by Michael J. Parr* https://abcbirds.org/bird/american-black-duck/

By a Marsh on a Rainy Day

On the year’s shortest day, Robert Frost famously watches a villager’s woods fill up with snow. On the second, I hear a menacing forecast. On the third, I awake to see a saltmarsh fill up with water.

Frost’s horse thinks it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, but I’m still at home upon a hill in bed before a window watching grasses disappear.

My windows rattle in gusts of storm, odd echoes of harness bells that shake the old man back awake. But this old man watches, making no mistake, pausing nothing but breakfast.

Nor is there a house in sight from my island to the mainland where Frost’s woods stretch toward a frozen lake. My marsh, now lake, keeps moving north, whitecapped in surging tide.

Frost’s darkest evening becomes my gray day, all grasses now submerged in a shade matching sky, as well as the two-lane road, leaving but a utility pole and the top half of a fire hydrant as reminders of just where I am.

No, that’s not at all Frost, but for the old man who stopped on Plum Island four decades ago, it’s a first.

Frost’s downy flake is my driving rain; his easy wind my gas heat, an easy, welcome warmth up from my floor.

Mouth of a river? Atlantic salt marsh? Arrival of winter? Sea-level rise? Encroaching climate change? A cacophony, perhaps a symphony of ocean, moon, storm, and melting glaciers?

My estuary may be lovely, but it is neither dark nor deep. To tell of its contrary charms, I’ll leave for another day, for there’s an omelet I must eat.

Does way ever lead onto way? All I know is that the tide will turn and the grasses reappear on these darkest days of every year. And I will sip coffee.

And that makes all the difference.

All the difference is what that makes.

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Thelma & Louise Live!

Hard to imagine anyone comparing the film She Said to Romeo and Juliet.

But first things first: She Said is as powerful a film as I have ever seen. While the “reporting twins” played by Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan are most reminiscent of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and while the New York Times‘ pursuit of Harvey Weinstein and Miramax resembles the Washington Post‘s investigation of Richard Nixon in All the President’s Men (1976), She Said‘s impact is more akin to that of an event, a la Little Big Man (1970), Thelma & Louise (1991), and BlacKkKlansman (2018).

Nixon’s crimes in question, after all, had nothing to do with gender or race.

Flush with Director Maria Schrader’s attention to detail, She Said‘s boldest stroke is a dual introduction: first, a brief prologue of a young Irish girl hired for the crew of a film as it is being shot on the Irish coast, followed by her running in terror down a city street; second, a few scenes in 2016 of the New York Times‘ revelations of sexual abuse by a presidential candidate–ending with the announcement of his election.

And then to the full expose of Weinstein and Miramax. Women agonize as they re-live assault and rape, Ashley Judd one of three actresses playing herself. Reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor agonize as they coax those women to tell stories they might hesitate to tell of themselves. Their editor, Rebecca Corbett played by Patricia Clarkson (sounding uncannily like Nancy Pelosi), guides them through their agony by asking them about their families and telling them to go home and get some sleep–all while reminding them to get documentation.

We see them at home with supportive husbands, one of them a reporter with grueling deadlines of his own, and children. Kantor’s pre-teen daughter is starting to ask difficult questions. Twohey’s newborn is rocked by a husband who sashays unabashedly in a public park while listening to her grill a staffer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission over “non-disclosure agreements” via cellphone.

At the risk of reading into it, that’s one of a few scenes aimed at what we call “policy and procedure.” Almost as a sub-plot, She Said exposes the ubiquitous term as an all-purpose excuse not to think. In this case, it’s a gag order on conscience.

As a piece of the larger story, it’s yet another obstacle that women face regarding future employment, reputation, and the threats they must endure. It’s impossible not to recall Christine Blasey Ford’s futile testimony in Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing when the reporters come to a realization in mid-film:

Kantor: The only way these women are going to go on the record…

Twohey: Is if they all jump together.

Cinematically, She Said fills every frame with detail. A scene with any film’s two main characters talking will be as riveting as what they say. She Said passes that test, but adds more when they walk down a sidewalk toward the camera with two construction workers–male–halfway between. After an earlier scene in a pub where Twohey has to scream at a jerk to leave them alone, what do we expect as they walk past the hard-hats and toward us? But what then happens?

When Twohey, after arriving at his home after dark and unannounced, asks an accountant about payouts, the expression on the face of his wife could be a scene all by itself. No matter that the wife’s question to him, “What payout?” is her only line in the film. It’s also one of several reminders that the grievance conveyed by the film is not limited to a list of Weinstein’s 82 victims, or to the hundreds of thousands who signed on to the #MeTwo movement.

From the reporters’ daughters to their editor, She Said effortlessly reminds us that this is about all women–and therefore all of us–today and into the future.

Which may be why, this time, the two women do not drive themselves off a cliff.

A comparison to Romeo and Juliet seems bizarre only because we have come to confuse comparisons with equations. We have lost the distinction: For an equation you need to match everything, for a comparison just one.

Many will insist that for a comparison to be useful, its two objects must have more in common than in contrast. Better to compare She Said to other newsroom films in a storied tradition that runs from All the President’s Men through Absence of Malice (1981) to Philomena (2013), Spotlight (2015), and Bombshell (2019). As an event, I’ll add Network (1976).

All of those would make for good conversation, but I’ll counter that a single point of comparison can be as incisive and enlightening as several. In fact, all the differences might make it moreso.

Differences between She Said and Shakespeare’s most frequently adapted play are obvious: Neither plots nor settings have anything to do with each other; characters live lives that couldn’t be more foreign to each other; and dialogue in a film about the birth of the #MeToo movement is necessarily too graphic for iambic pentameter. If only Father Lawrence had a cellphone!

Moreover, any comparison to the world’s most renowned love story may understandably annoy, perhaps offend women in the #MeToo movement and men who supported it. That, however, is the point: Romeo and Juliet is also literature’s most incisive statement on revenge. From Romeo’s revenge to Weinstein’s accountability, it’s one spectrum that the two stories share.

You could say that, for public consumption, R&J is disguised as a love story.

So, too, She Said serves a dual purpose. Cast as an expose on sexual harassment, as was Bombshell three years ago, it also serves as a journalism seminar. In a day when we are too easily led to believe that the press makes everything up, we see the pains taken to insure accuracy. In a day when the refusal to publish unfounded smears is considered by many to be censorship, we see the point and purpose of the First Amendment illustrated. In a day when people fall for lunatic conspiracies and cheer for those who threaten violence, we see people who stand for truth.

I’m not sure which is the disguise and which the incisive statement, but She Said is as much a manifesto for freedom of the press as for an end to sexual harassment.

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L2R: Reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey played by Zoe Kazan and Carey Mulligan; editors Dean Baquet and Rebecca Corbett played by Andre Braugher and Patricia Clarkson.

Actually, there is a second item that this film has in common with all of Shakespeare’s plays: comic relief, mostly in the form of well-placed one-liners. This is one of several scenes in which the reporters knock on the door of someone who has not answered their calls. Success is mixed, as no one at this point wants to be named. This one shuts the door as soon as Kantor (on the right) says New York Times, Harvey Weinstein, and Miramax. Camera shifts to Kantor who turns to Twohey and deadpans: “Think she’ll go on the record?”

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14807308/?ref_=tt_mv_close

Other Side of the Bridge

Lines in the Newburyport Post Office any day in December look like the lines entering a Renaissance faire on a mid-October weekend.

Difference is that, on the holiday that has five names, we rennies and our patrons wore all the color and decoration. In this season of three religious feasts, most everyone is bundled up in dark, thick coats with colorfully wrapped and decorated packages in hand.

Across the Merrimack River on another errand, I swing by the Salisbury Post Office, figuring it can’t be too busy.

Bingo! Just one counter, but I’m third in line, and the two before me are quick. In addition to two small packages needing to be weighed, I need stamps. Forgive me, but I’ve never cared for Christmas stamps or any seasonal postage. If it’s any consolation, I love carols–even the dreaded “Drummer Boy”–and often played many of them with pizazz for many a Christmas past, but on envelopes? No stars, halos, snowmen, or decorated trees for me. Years ago, I made an exception for Gabriel with his alto-sax, but he has yet to make an encore as a thumbnail pic with a serrated edge.

Always asking for stamps with musicians, I mailed everything with Pete Seeger and his banjo on the top righthand corner of the envelope this summer and fall. Though I doubted there would be any left for sale, I asked the Salisbury clerk, who lit up at the question:

Sure we do! Lots!

Wow! Hard to believe. They were issued so long ago, I thought they had to be gone.

Jack, you’re on the other side of the bridge. Can’t sell’m this side.

I buy three panes. She puts at least three back in her drawer.

Salisbury is the northeast corner of Massachusetts, sandwiched between the Merrimack and the state border with New Hampshire while the Atlantic pounds its east side. In a blatant crime against cartography, surveyors sent up from Boston in colonial times decided to ignore the common sense of letting the river, like the ocean, be a natural boundary and claimed a three-mile buffer from the north bank for the Mass Bay Colony.

We can only wonder if this map set the precedent for another Massachusetts invention soon to follow: gerrymandering

As a much smaller town, Salisbury may lack Newburyport’s culture and commerce, but it does have Annarosa’s Bakery with its rosemary & sea-salt dinner rolls I can’t get enough of. If you go looking, it’s on Rt. 110 just across from a memorable billboard for a CBC store: “You have in-laws. We have pot.” Now that’s the holiday spirit! After a short drive, I was still laughing when I arrived at the post office where I would learn of a postage stamp that our neighbors to the north want none of.

Good chance that most Americans born after the Eisenhower years do not know who Pete Seeger was, or know only the name. We children of that decade knew him as a folk-singer. Our parents may have known him as a conscientious objector blacklisted in the McCarthy Era. In the Sixties he was a leading voice in civil rights, anti-war, and environmental movements. At the end of the Sixties, he was one of the foremost reasons that the Smothers Brothers show, a forerunner of all the creative commentary we now see on cable TV, was banned from network television. This was back when all television was network. Censored was his song, “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” clearly aimed at a Democratic president.

Seeger was tireless. He harmonized with voices for humanitarian causes right up to the day he died in 2014 at the age of 94. Though his banjo was inscribed with a combative message–“This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender”–his own statements and song lyrics were always in the spirit of peace and unity, usually addressed to “brothers” and “sisters.” Never cast in anger, his songs conveyed spiritual and cultural messages as much as political. His best known, “Turn, Turn, Turn,” an adaptation of the Book of Ecclesiastes, serves as an example:

To everything – turn, turn, turn
There is a season – turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to build up, a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones
A time to gather stones together

That the people of Salisbury have any of this in mind when they purchase stamps is doubtful. Far more likely they prefer pics of race cars that had a recent issue, or American flags that are always issued. And now there’s one with Johnny Cash walking the (rail) line with his guitar far more likely to sell on either side of any American bridge.

No doubt I would have taken a pane home had Seeger not been there.

Still, there is room for doubt.

Three hundred years after its first crime against cartography, Massachusetts is the bluest of blue states while New Hampshire has been trending purple in recent years. Relative to New England, New Hampshire screams red in a sea of blue, and if you zoom in to our little corner, the change in color is not at the state line but at the Merrimack River. Only the fireworks stores observe the border.

Whether or not the clerk had any of that in mind with her “other side of the bridge” crack is anyone’s guess. But I think she was in on the joke. A wry smile on her face suggested that she would have felt my pain had she no pane to offer.

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