No Riverbank Here: How the Courts And Culture Really Let the Stuebenville Rapists, the Young Woman, And Everybody Down

There's this remarkable moment in Huck Finn when Huck realizes his own moral universe runs counter to his nation's.

“The pride of human affection has been touched, one of the few prides that has any true dignity. And at its utterance, Huck’s one last dim vestige of pride of status, his sense of his position as a white man, wholly vanishes."

I taught boys at an all-boys boarding school for ten years. Teaching approximately seventy students a year, that rounds out to be about seven hundred Huck Finns, all of them on a similar quest on their own murky river, a river that flows between the certainties of society and culture, a river that flows in a boy's own soul.

As the land banking it shapes a river, and as a river sometimes rises to destroy the land banking it, a boy, too, can be a wonderful purveyor of civilization or a menace to it.

For Huck, the laws and mores he could not abide were themselves corrupt. For Trent Mays, 17, and co-defendant 16-year-old Ma'lik Richmond, the laws and mores they could not abide were the very core of "human affection," respect and care for a vulnerable friend in need who happens to be a girl.

A boy gets shaped by the world he inhabits.  This shaping occurs through a series of actions and consequences and nothing else.

While boys are not sociopathic as a rule, a boy will develop sociopathic behavior without guidance and/or clearly administered punishment proportionate to his misbehavior. By nature, boys are thrill-seekers. This is why people are so quick to forgive or even celebrate "boys being boys." The thrill is not the end in itself, though.

I might have thought that when I first started teaching, shaping all that adolescent male madness, sensitivity (though don't tell them I noticed) and energy. But live among 200 of them for ten straight years and you, too, will learn.

The boys didn't ride bikes down steep hills to flip into the raspberry brambles or a lake for nothing. They didn't hoist dead animals up from the lower meadow and leave them by the dorm for no reason. They were looking for limits, either of their bodies or of the school rule book (which had no rules for any of these).

Boys hunger for the limit.

They seek the map they know must be there someplace.

Leniency withholds the thing they want more than freedom: affirmation that there is indeed justice in this world.

When a boy doesn't get the punishment that "matches" his actions, he has been denied.

The boundaries blur. The world loses, in part, its meaning, the very thing Huck was searching for.
 
By coddling these boys with one-and-two-year sentences and a pity-party from community and media, the culture has withheld the greatest gift it could give itself and to them: understanding of justice. Not slap-on-wrist justice. Not even paper trail justice. Hard-faced, difficult, core-of-being-human, meaning-of-life justice.

The Courts failed Trent Mays, 17, left, and co-defendant 16-year-old Ma'lik Richmond by not punishing them hard enough. They acted. They acted publicly. In those actions, they were demanding a signal from the culture. They wanted evidence that some parameter was in place.

Huck's pride in being a white man acquiesces before "the pride of human affection, one of the few prides that has true dignity" when he sees through the politics and propaganda and perceives Jim as a real human being. Mays and Richmond will never see their victim as a human being. No one has made them do so.

Mays and Richmond's sense of pride in having been born male remains untouched, adrift, free and clear of any "true dignity" at all.

As perhaps do we all as a result.  

They will perhaps find the parameter later, in some other way, perhaps at the expense of another woman or many, or perhaps even a whole group of strangers through a finance scheme or a released virus. Who can tell? So far, all we have told them is that what they did is bad but not too bad.

We have told them, There is no riverbank here.

Fade to Quiet, Fade from Quiet--Story and the Body and the First Asheville Ability Arts Fair

It's not an easy conversation for many without disabilities to have. This is an opening.

For people who are living with disability in their lives, either directly or with a loved one, it is a meaningful, rich, and often humorous conversation. This is a sharing.

I started this blog after I learned I was going deaf. I look at the name I gave it and reflect on how I viewed my diagnosis of late-deafness. A Fade to Quiet. A sort of vanishing. Also, a movement into something mysterious and unknown, unspoken, and unheard.

It was one way of coping with the change, with the "information" my audiologist (now a goat farmer) spoke through a microphone to me on other side of the audiometry booth's smoky glass. It was 2001. Just before September 11.  I was 31 years old, with my mind on a lot of other things than my ears. I had a full-time teaching job at a boarding school for boys. I had a wonderful boyfriend. I had a great dog. Aside from dreams of wanting to become a mother, I had pretty much everything I could want.

I have just returned from the Columbia University Narrative Medicine Workshop at 168th Street in Manhattan. The conversations, plenary talks, and small group sessions reaffirmed for me the impact of diagnosis on a person's life story. It changes it utterly.

"It appears to be sensorineural hearing loss," said the audiologist. "But we'll need to make sure it isn't Lupus or a Brain Tumor."

That was the worst part and the hardest to forgive myself for now. I honestly can't say I considered lupus and brain tumor to be any worse than going deaf.

What was worse, I seemed to consider. Dying or living with something that divides you from life? That was how I saw deafness. It was a wall. It was a bell jar. It was removal of 1/5 of my sensory life. 

It took longer than a week to get the confirmation. 

My diagnosis was not life-threatening. Life-altering, yes. Threatening, no. I felt terrible for having been unable to discern some sort of hierarchy among the three possibilities. Even now, I wonder about the state of my mind at that moment.

Quite simply, I was devastated. And in that devastation there was no discernment. All change, it seemed, was death. I liked my life exactly as it was. Any change to any particular aspect of it equaled an obliteration of the whole.

And that was equal to death for me.

I believe we overestimate our ability to cope with illness and death. We hold ourselves to impossible standards of strength and willfulness. Yet, when a life-alteration occurs, we are equalized to something very rich and human and real. We become authentically connected with the reality having a body presents. It has limits. It will end.

I was insulated safely from any idea that my body would infringe upon my health-bound youth. I did not see disability anywhere in my life save for the occasional student with a prosthetic eye or arm or, of course, a plethora learning-style differences in my classroom. The conversation I never had to have came to me with preposterous hardness and loudness. Words I'd never had to say I found myself saying.

In the craft of Narrative Medicine, this is the story that gets told. This story and the singularly moving stories that hover near it, as told by both the diagnostician and the diagnosed. At the first Asheville Ability Arts Fair, the community has the opportunity to engage this story--through personal experience, through media representation, through conversation and education.

Ten years later, my fade to quiet continues. It is not a death although very little remains of what my life was before and at the time of diagnosis. I see those changes as necessary lessons. As much as I have lost, I have gained in other forms. This is the lesson of diagnosis and of disability. The law of conservation of matter applies not only to matter but to spirit and mind as well. This is what the stories tell us again and again, and this is why it is important to draw them out of the quiet, to fade them into sound.

Three Poems: December 15, 2012


 

The Swan


On the first night my baby was not in my body
she lay in a plastic basinet next to me in my room.
Bundled, she looked like a sweet date. I lay in
the pale lit room and I traced her features with my
eyes, sketching her in my memory, recognizing
that this is what it means to make a person; it will
be someone you’ve never seen before and would
change into anything to protect. I reached my hand to
the plastic’s rim and lay it gently on her chest, through
the blanket, through the hours that would complete
her first rotation of the sun. I understood from now
on I would be in direct competition with every harm
that lives in the world. I would grow great wings
invisible to any but her and me, and I would cover
her when something terrible neared and I would hiss.
The clock on the wall also became something more
real to me. Until then, I had been waiting for her to
come. Now every second was another of her movements
away from my body, away from my blood which I
could control what fed her, what reached her.
Nine, now. Different from me in ways I never would have
expected. A scientist to my artist. As well, a keeper
of her own worlds, always delighted when someone
accepts her for who she is. And every day I drop her
off at school, I watch her confidence, her knowing of
which bell means what class or order, a familiarity with
a classmate who opens her door. Her asymmetrical
haircut, which she wanted, is an expression of who
she is. Everything has been more real she arrived,
every danger, every joy, which is why when you see her
you will also see the single white feather I have tucked
into the back pocket of her fashion jeans, why, when you
speak to her, you always feel something fierce nearby,
great wings, a shadow, a spell I re-hiss every damn day.



Four, Five

When she was four months, one day,
I could sit her up, and she would stay that way
a few seconds. Then by the end of the day
she could stay that way and just stay. On her face: a smile
that defied gravity.

The developments of her life
have become less defined now. She long-
divides and works multiples of fourteen.
She asks a boy to a dance that's four months away.
When he rebuffs, she holds the pain until she sees me
and asks me what to do with it.
Her lower lip moves backward between her teeth
when she’s being brave. Her emotions
have merged with the moon and she has tides.

I think back to when she was four, five,
I could still pick her up so easily
and swung her over my shoulders when we danced. Mornings, 
she would ask me to carry her from her bed to the playroom
not because she was lazy she said but because
she loved to be held.
She would still ask this if she wasn’t so tall
and has learned to help me in this world we share,
we make together, to pull
something that I suppose is her "own weight" that was
even when I could hold all of her in one arm,
something incalculable to me,
something great enough to knock me over.


*


When She Isn’t In This House


She’s on a playdate or at her father’s house.
She’s still at school or at a piano lesson.
She’s sitting between Ceci and Gracie at after-school
watching a movie involving chipmunks in shirts
but no pants, which bothers me, and we joke.
She’s at her grandmother’s, my mother’s, loving
being there as I loved being at my grandmother's.
She's eating food she won’t eat when I make it.
She’s decorating the Tree.
She’s spending the night at Angelina’s house where older 
siblings teach her about being cool.
She is at a soccer game I had to miss because I have
work to do and will regret choosing when she’s grown.
She’s in the garden discovering something about
rhododendrons.
She's telling a story to the trees.
She’s on a hike with Poppy.
She's at daycamp playing in a waterfall.

The wall by the kitchen
bears the marks of every inch she’s grown since
she could stand, including the time
she cheated and just reached and made a mark.
She'll reach that height by Spring.

There's a Hello Kitty! washcloth sits by her sink 
with a Spongebob tube of toothpaste she dislikes the taste of. 
There are mermaids in the bathtub.
There's a seven-foot high giraffe she’s cut the eyelashes of in her bedroom.
It's there because I wanted something enormous in her life,
something bigger than the two of us,
something that quiet and able to see things far off coming.

She’s on the schoolbus being brave against a boy who says 
mean things to her but insists she can handle.
She’s at the mall with a friend and friend’s mother
building teddy bears out of fluff and red silk heart.
Soon she’ll bring it home and add it
to the collection of non-living living things,
all with eyes wide, unclosing, in her room.

For this, for everything, we are out of tune

I have been listening lately to the conversation surrounding "science communication." In the sustainability movement, this is a hot topic. As we just passed the hottest July in history and now witness the waters rising on New York City, the issues of environmental Armageddon press in on us quite like the black walls of the space trash compactor in Star Wars.

As a poet, though, I have long felt on the far edge of the conversation. In school, I fell through the cracks of math and science education. There was one year--sixth grade--when I was entirely engaged. The school was a small independent, a former peacock farm that still had peacocks strolling between round portables, as well as a small pond hosting two black swans (I'm not kidding) and a lake beyond the playground. At that school, I was permitted to work at my own pace, which was actually faster than my classmates. I was an independent learner, and my teacher recognized and encouraged this in me. In later schools, my curiosity was crushed under the lack of direct engagement with the material, the dependence on a third party, the teacher!, to intercede for me and the world I lived in. Math was similar. I raced ahead when left to my own devices but grew bored and discouraged in the crowd. I found respite in the narratives in English and Sociology. In the margins of math papers, I wrote poems, complementing the numbers with words, completing a story I felt was only being half-told.

It seems the cracks I fell through have only grown wider. And now I am realizing that compartmentalized disciplines in high school turn into continental drifts in adulthood. We can find ourselves miles and miles apart from each other but still committed to the same purposes, simply based on what academic strength we played in adolescence. Post-Babel, I see the different languages that divide us.

There is much to explore in this. I know it is difficult to back track to learn something that turned us off in high school, maybe sooner. Our brains get into these habits as a result of our learning. But maybe we can learn one another's languages--science/art, art/science. Perhaps it is necessary to do so in order to get the messages across the fields.

Here are two poems that speak to the need to regard nature in our lives and plans. They were both written more than a century ago. There are countless more. I'll set about finding them and seeing how the poetic and scientific continents can again connect. For I don't think they are separate at all, but the perception of their being so, the perception that has marked our educations for years, makes them appear worlds apart. And I believe one world without the other is an incomplete path to the truth.


God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

  

The world is too much with us

                                       by William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Some History of the Basilica

(photos by Michael Oppenheim)




Some history of the Basilica:


Paul Roebling Jr,  grandson of the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, (Yes!)  first started development of Haywood Street exactly one century ago with The Haywood Building. At that time, Haywood Street was little more than a ravine running along the base of the resplendent Battery Park Hotel property. This is not the same Battery Park Hotel as the one standing at the north end of the city today. It was a Queen Anne-style green-painted wood and was owned by the Coxe family. Thomas Wolfe spent hours in the lobby watching the guests as they arrived, and he lamented its loss heavily when E.W. Grove purchased the land, razed the hotel and destroyed the mountain it stood on. Both Vanderbilt and Grove first espied their respective mountain real estate legacies from windows of that original hotel.

Guastavino came to Asheville on a commission from Richard Morris Hunt, the first Fine Art architect in the U.S. and designer of the Biltmore Estate. The Spaniard, from Valencia, had devised a method of tiling for which he had secured a patent, a method that revolutionized the making of domes.

Rafael Guastavino, Richard Sharp Smith and James Vester Miller all worked on Basilica of St. Lawrence. This makes it a monument to multicultural and creative collaboration. News of this collaboration has only recently come to light, as is the case with much of Asheville's architectural and social history. The city is still waking from its economic sleep and much needs to be remembered before dashing forward. While Executive Director of the Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County, Martha Fullington spotted Sharp Smith's signature on the blueprints. Other Sharp Smith/ Miller collaborations include YMI, St. Matthias, Hopkins Chapel and many more. Miller was born into slavery and became arguably the most prolific builder in the city during the real estate boom. Each of these men is a legend unto himself. The Basilica is the only structure on which all three worked.

Guastavino died prior to the Basilica's completion and is buried within. His son completed his work. Recently in Manhattan, one of the designer's bridges in lower Manhattan was converted into a restaurant; this means New York traffic was re-directed to preserve his work. Manhattan now features Guastavino's work in tours, including one of the abandoned City Hall subway station. In 1904 NYC Mayor McClennon specifically demanded Guastavino's craftsmanship saying ""My station under City Hall will be more beautiful than the rest." In the Basilica we have the last work of a man to whose work MIT devotes an entire department. The school brought together engineers from Britain and Spain to design a sustainable conference center, Pines Calyx, based entirely on his work.

The Basilica of St. Lawrence was deemed a basilica in 1993 by Pope John Paul II, based on the criteria comprised of liturgical norms, exemplary performance of ritual and compliance with the General Statutes of the Roman Missal. The honor was bestowed, in part, because this is Rafael Guastavino’s only church. By the time he came to Asheville, Guastavino’s American projects included Grant's Tomb, the Great Hall at Ellis Island, Grand Central Station, Carnegie Hall, and the chapel at West Point, the Duke Chapel in Durham, the Jefferson Standard Building in Greensboro, the Motley Memorial in Chapel Hill and St. Mary's Catholic Church in Wilmington, among more than six hundred remaining works around the world and in U.S.

Here is a video celebrating New York's love of its Guastavino legacies. 

Emailing Mother Theresa: On Losing the Art of Gazing

I sent my first email in 1996. My boyfriend at the time had a computer, and the computer had internet. He sent emails all the time. When I was working on a project with PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) to develop a salivary ferning microscope that was cost-efficient enough to be distributed to impoverished women in India and Africa, I was asked for my email address. My boyfriend said I could use his. 

One afternoon, my colleague at PATH forwarded an email from Mother Theresa. She was giving PATH her approval of the device. Once you get an email from Mother Theresa, there isn't much else to anticipate (Note to the 20000 senders of emails I've received since: you understand). The project got tanked along the way, despite my patchwork re-design that involved a cardboard kaleidescope from a child's birthday party and a 50x magnifying glass. I waited another two years to get my own email address, and another two passed before I started to actually "use" the internet, which I did because I was a teacher and had to teach my students how to use it. Now I always use it.

Nicholas Carr is coming to Asheville to speak about his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains on September 28 at 7 p.m. at AB-Tech. It is part of my job as Program Co-ordinator of the Master of Arts in Writing Program at Lenoir-Rhyne University Center for Graduate Studies of Asheville to promote the event. As often happens in tasks relating to writing, it is now a meditation.

I am reflecting on how the internet has changed my brain. I don't like how my brain feels when it has to look at itself and ask this question. It feels wrong. It feels like the first twenty minutes of a therapy session when I don't think I have anything to talk about but sit in the chair anyway. And then it all comes out.


But after that year of emailing with Mother Theresa (which only happened once), I lived (sans boyfriend) in a small cabin on the shores of Sequim Bay, off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. While I suppose I could have had internet since I did have a telephone, I did not. When someone wanted to talk with me, they called me, on a land line, without caller ID. I spent my time sitting on the rocks gazing out at the water, waiting for a seal to break the surface from below or an eagle to break the surface from above. Those were pretty much my choices. Those and the herons and loons and skoters who held the surface, dipping above and below it at will. I learned to gaze.

Gazing was a practice. The longer I gazed, the more I saw. The hours moved slowly, tremendously so. All of nature was my computer screen.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr examines how internet grazing has spoiled our appetite, and threatens altogether our literary digestive tract, for real reading. He also directs our attention toward these other implications of having our very plastic neural circuitry reconfigured through practice of computer gazing. I am reminded that I used to gaze at nature in my free time. This practice has now been replaced by cruising the internet for news and information.  Have I lost my patience with stillness and slowness? Do I really get antsy at the beach? Could I go back to that year I got the email from Mother Theresa and sit still on a rock for hours and not wonder if someone "liked" me?

For more information about Nicholas Carr's visit to Asheville on September 28 at 7 pm at Ferguson Auditorium, a free event, please visit http://asheville.lr.edu/news-events/nicholas-carr. And while this is my job to tell you about the event, I'd love to know if you still gaze?

The Dawn of the Face-Eaters: An Ontology of Terror

Well, the new fear today is getting your face eaten.
Yesterday, the fear was having your rights of partnership
dissolved, your gas price gone over the 4 or $5.00 mark.
And before that it was getting bombed by your neighbor

in the hijab, your other neighbor being shot in a hoodie.
Before this, there was the fear of the hijacker, of the office
building exploding, and before that there was the fear of
the things that happen in farther away places than the

mailbox that may or may not contain the letter laced with
anthrax. Remember when the Tylenol first was “tampered
with?” Remember the way we checked for razors in the
Halloween apples and the candy spilled out from the pillow

cases (because I grew up in a neighborhood where you
could acquire a pillowcase of candy in a night) and a worried
parent held each piece up to the desk lamp, searching for the 
torn wrapper, the steel eyes of death tucked inside the taffy,

and before this there was the terror of the too quiet room,
the blank stare of the darkness a Mickey Mouse nightlight
only seemed to deepen the eyes of, that solitude, that sense
you were prey to things you could not see and, worse, could

not yet think about because your mind was the size of an apple
then, and inside that apple, if you held it up to the light, if some
beast no one had told you about yet, sliced it open, you know
what you would find: that shining ridge, those unclosing eyes,

the thing with teeth that ran at you from nowhere and always
started with your mouth, unravelling your mind from the inside
in one long transparence, sweet and fresh, the juice of young
trees that ought not ever be tinged by blight or scuffed by storm,

much less unwielded by thoughts of such things as this that
now, much like a new string of a once curable disease, dawns
not once by four times in the papers, and tomorrow perhaps
another, making every day a halloween, and every night, at home

safe in your bed, all the other nights, your full, untouched face
pressed into the cool unbloodstained safety of your pillow,
your eyes, permitted to rest against the glaring, mouthless dark.