tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-183184162024-03-12T18:57:22.807-07:00Fade to QuietOn being courageous enough to feel fear, bold enough to surrender and open enough to the whole of life to know when to shut the distractions out. This is a blog about alchemy drawn on the work of ancient philosophers set in motion in the modern world.Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.comBlogger122125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-77581098974874107022020-03-25T16:40:00.003-07:002020-03-25T17:13:36.575-07:00Teaching Creative Nonfiction in PandemicThree weeks into my own, two week's into my daughter's isolation, I am teaching a class on Creative Nonfiction. We are nine weeks into the semester. Over Spring Break, everything in the world changed. The students "returned" tonight.<br />
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I have been teaching in class in Zoom basically since I was told about Zoom. For me, it was the perfect solution to what then were my life's problems. I hated traffic. Zoom. I am deaf and require hearing aids, and listening in rooms of people is impossible. Zoom. I like to teach without interruptions. Zoom. Also, because I live in the mountains of Western North Carolina, often some students can't make it to class. They would Zoom. Some nights, none of us could come to class. We Zoomed. All of us. And that was the end of teaching in a classroom.<br />
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I still carried the slight stigma of being an "online professor." It held a similar stink that "online dating" used to before everybody did it. It wasn't a "real" date. It wasn't a "real" relationship if it lacked that origin of meet-cute in a cafe where the waiter switched your orders so you giggled over a danish. This week, everybody's online. Zoom.<br />
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Everything has also changed about the Creative Nonfiction book we use, aptly titled <i>You Can't Make This Stuff Up, </i>by Lee Gutkind. For the past 8 weeks, we have been moving this excellent text. We have talked about what we need to know in order to write good CNF. And what the challenges are. The main question used to be (used to=week before last) how do write about something that matters to you but that might be of little or no interest to anyone else?<br />
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This evening's lesson plan was simple. Take ten minutes. Go through the book and find a lesson we have learned and share with the group how the pandemic impacts that lesson.<br />
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Our class includes a retired surgeon who now teaches medicine at University of Iowa's esteemed School of Medicine; an actor and poet who inherited 300 acres of family land and is learning to be a farmer; a lactation specialist; two recent graduates of university; an editor; and an EMT. This cross-section of a world provided beautiful reflections on how the pandemic impacts everything about writing Creative Nonfiction.<br />
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The value of scene is, as always, at a premium as we move past "seeing" into "witness" in everything we view.<br />
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Finding the universal in the particular isn't such a challenge now that the universal is particular now. Nothing is outside of <i>this. </i>See also: relevance. Everything is relevant, from the most particular detail of one student's seeing a man load up three enormous military backpacks in a bread aisle at the grocery store to another's having to explain to person without symptoms why he can't bring them in the ambulance to the hospital to a doctor's message citing the increase from two to all patients in the ER being Covid patience, and how they don't need 100% oxygen but entirely new sets of lungs. We are in tears by the end of the exercise. I explain no one teaches teachers how to teach through such things. We just teach and fall apart as we need to, with the students.<br />
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As with writing Creative Nonfiction, nothing, not even the teacher, is outside of this.<br />
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My students are writing to a prompt from Poets and Writers magazine:<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="background-color: aliceblue; font-family: "minion" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "dejavu serif" , serif;">When asked the question, “What kind of writing is possible in a time of crisis?” by the </span><em style="background-color: aliceblue; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">Guardian</em><span style="background-color: aliceblue; font-family: "minion" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "dejavu serif" , serif;">, author Bhanu Kapil responded, “That is a question that people have been answering with their bodies all over the world for a very long time. But here we are. Let’s see what unfolds. What is a page for? What is a sentence for?” This week, open up a new page. Take a deep breath. Ask yourself what </span><em style="background-color: aliceblue; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: minion, Georgia, "Times New Roman", "DejaVu Serif", serif;">this</em><span style="background-color: aliceblue; font-family: "minion" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "dejavu serif" , serif;"> page can be, for you, right now. What will your first sentence offer? What about the next? Allow a story to pour or trickle out until your page is full. Perhaps you will be surprised with what there is to say</span></span><span style="background-color: aliceblue; font-family: "minion" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "dejavu serif" , serif; font-size: 21.0001px;">. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "minion" , "georgia" , "times new roman" , "dejavu" serif , serif;"><span style="background-color: aliceblue;">This is my page.</span></span>Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-38564180936479573762018-06-21T14:40:00.001-07:002018-06-21T15:38:34.488-07:00The Hauntings of Internment, with job descriptions for working with interned children at the border<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;"><br /></span>
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<span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #a1a1a1; font-family: "adelle" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">An aerial photo of immigrant children at a recently opened facility in Tornillo, Texas. </span><span class="featured-image-credit has-space" style="background-color: #f9f9f9; border: 0px; color: #a1a1a1; display: inline; font-family: "adelle" , "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">(Reuters/Mike Blake)</span></div>
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<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ninaW5Idtg8/WywktzSNJeI/AAAAAAAABq0/Y1dOnb4JypQmMmcxEnu-Exyx24-OwBJAACLcBGAs/s1600/Weifang.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="600" height="254" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ninaW5Idtg8/WywktzSNJeI/AAAAAAAABq0/Y1dOnb4JypQmMmcxEnu-Exyx24-OwBJAACLcBGAs/s320/Weifang.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<em style="background-color: white; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #888888; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 16.4475px; line-height: 1; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;">Courtyard of the Happy Way 樂道院 (le dao yuan) – picture and corresponding map – courtesy of Weihsien-Paintings</em></div>
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Several letters from the British Crown urged him to return to England from China. My grandfather had been living in Hong Kong, Swatow, and Tianjin since the early 1930s, working as a physician for the Kailan Mining Administration. News of Japan's seizure of Nanking and Shanghai in 1937 did not motivate him to leave. During the bombings of neighboring Swatow, he worked with locals to build makeshift hospitals in the streets to treat the wounded, and still he did not leave China. His colleagues had boarded the ships back to England, but China was his home by then. He had matured professionally and socially more at Shing Moon in Hong Kong than any of the clubs in Kensington.<br />
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He wanted to join the 8th Division Army fighting with the Koumintang. It would not have been for the martial law Chiang would become known for, but for China. It would have been as an enemy of the Axis nations and as an ally of China. But with a wife and two very small children, he remained in Tientsin (now Tianjin), with servants "above and below table" (as my grandmother described them) amid the British Concession's rows of stately Victorian homes, and working as a physician.<br />
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He did not believe the Japanese would ever be a threat to the English residing in China. He was certain he was safe.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">Must be prepared to administer emergency First Aid, CPR or CPI techniques to clients, regardless of the time of day or hour of the staff’s shift, the size of the client, or the staff’s level of personal fatigue.</span><br />
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I reach moments in my life where I don't think about it anymore. I don't think about the cotton badge with the Japanese characters that my grandmother wore stitched to her jacket and that I now have framed with a photo of her younger, smiling self sitting on the steps of her adolescent home in Manila. I don't think about the electric barbed wire my father was instructed never to touch or of the image of my toddler father and uncle licking plaster walls of their compartment within the compound to get calcium into their systems. I don't think of all the prisoners arriving by train in their minks and tweeds, having been told by the soldiers of The Empire of the Rising Sun they were being taken to a resort. Or of their surprise when the toilets backed up and no one came, for three years, to fix them so they built latrines they themselves had to empty with shovels, just one of the jobs they arranged in a schedule everyone participated in because the time of having servants was over. I don't think about my grandmother's stories, for brief periods of time, and I attempt to live my own.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">Must be at least 21 years of age at the time of hire.</span><br />
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A trigger is an invitation to explore, again after respite, what it means to be a granddaughter and daughter of trauma. As a survivor of any trauma can choose to "black-box" it for a period, that box has to be reopened and explored for the self to continue growing. Otherwise, that box, in the word of Langston Hughes, explodes. Images of children being led into detention centers recalls the stories of the three hundred children who were separated by war from their missionary parents and transferred to The Courtyard of the Happy Way. I have read their stories as adults. Now I see them as children again. Little girls with their arms reaching all the way up to hold the hand of someone who works in the center--someone whose job description asks for someone capable of working long shifts under challenging conditions in uncomfortable weather, someone with a GED (as opposed to a Masters Degree in Child Care Services). The stories, the time-frame conflate.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">Preferred • Bilingual (Spanish/English)</span><br />
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I understand that my family's is a trauma of privilege: if my grandfather had not been a wealthy doctor trained in Scotland and granted an esteemed position in one of Britain's mining operations in China, benefitting from Chinese labor, Chinese land, a beacon of Colonialism, he would not have been in a prison camp. His is also a trauma of hubris: had he not possessed that Edwardian perspective that indeed it would never happen to England, he would have returned when advised.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">High School Diploma or GED with experience working with youth either through paid or unpaid positions preferred.</span><br />
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Trauma doesn't recognize race, gender, or 'class.' Despite the privilege, the internment camp tormented its inhabitants for three years of life (and long beyond) under a bayonet's gaze, starvation, malnutrition, hypothermia in winter, sunstroke in summer, illness, and death. In one of my grandmother's notes she wrote, TORTURE, in capital letters. In one of her stories, my uncle was put in solitary confinement at age 5 in a bamboo box placed in the sun. 2250 people in an area of roughly 50,000 square meters. There were no facilities after the first day. War and cruelty equalize, particularly through long-term effects. I think of the children at the border. I particularly think of the 2000 captured by the United States between the start of the separations weeks ago and the executive order to end them yesterday. The 2000 children.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">Must be able to stand, bend, or stoop for the entire duration of the shift, as necessary.</span><br />
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I taught GED at a facility for incarcerated youth in Black Mountain back in the late 90s. I saw how being in a facility like that can bring out the worst abuses of powers in the adults positioned there to supervise. No human being is equipped to treat another human in captivity well. The duress of the shifts, the intensity of the conditions, the entire matrix of the work all nourish nothing but violence. The guards placed bets on which inmate would win a fight the guards would then instigate by stealing from one and placing it under the mattress of the other. My students came to class with broken wrists and still tried to write so they could get out of there. It would take years of deep meditation and spiritual education to prepare anyone to nurture within such a place. Instead, they hire 20 year olds with no education of the soul to recognize the soul in others.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">Staff must be able to maintain clarity of thought throughout the entirety of a shift and be able to respond quickly to duress or circumstances requiring immediate action.</span><br />
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What we know of trauma is enough to know that this experience has already broken a part of these children's minds. What part? Aren't children resilient? Don't they all heal? The part that welcomes the world in bit by bit, truth by truth. The part that builds a story of the world, beginning with the love and support immediately around them and developing into an understanding of finding this love and support beyond the realm of the family. This story is now fractured if not blasted: this part now is a gash in the narrative of world-making. All children are not resilient. Children break. No one wholly understands how some children thrive and others do not. Alice Miller observes that Hitler and Wittgenstein attended the same prep school. Explain about nurture and nature again. She also observes that for children to survive and thrive, a benevolent witness must appear at some time during development.<br />
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I tell the children in a whisper, the entire world is watching.<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;"><br /></span> <span style="background-color: white; color: rgba(0 , 0 , 0 , 0.87); font-family: "roboto" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-line;">Staff must be at all times physically able to run, jump, lunge, twist, push, pull, apply SWK-approved restraint techniques and otherwise manage or coerce the full weight of an adolescent.</span><br />
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Source of job description:<br />
https://www.google.com/search?q=southwest+key+jobs+casa+padre&oq=southwest+key+job&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j69i59l2j69i60j0l2.4803j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ibp=htl;jobs#htidocid=Vpl-TR6D6UvYTbakAAAAAA%3D%3D<br />
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<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-65721011937324325852018-06-11T20:36:00.002-07:002018-06-11T21:02:52.942-07:00Summer Reading: or, My Daughter's Modeling Gig, with Auschwitz Survivor, Henri Landwirth<div style="text-align: left;">
As with many parents, I have always tried to let my daughter know that I'll listen to her wishes. In keeping with this, I submitted her photograph to a modeling agency when, at age 7, she said she wanted to be a model. By sending one photo I'd taken of her at Niagara Falls, I felt I was keeping my promise while also not being quite so dogged about it as to lead anyone to think I actually wanted this path for her.</div>
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Within two months of submitting the photograph, I got a call. Someone wanted her to pose for a statue. Yes, fully clothed, holding a stuffed animal, the agent replied. As a poet and artist, I felt this was as good a modeling job as I could wish for. I accompanied her to the location where I was informed of the nature of the assignment: she would hold her teddy bear (named Oatmeal) and smile at a man. The man was Henri Landwirth. While a photographer took pictures for the sculptor to use, Mr. Landwirth's assistant told me his boss's story of how as a teenager he had been in Auschwitz. My daughter's first (and so far only) modeling job now had taken on a meaning deeper than I could possibly have imagined. The statue was to commemorate his leadership in developing a Disney-adjacent-though-little-known amusement park for terminally ill and developmentally disabled children, entitled Give Kids the World. It would be life-sized, bronze, and a permanent part of the park. </div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSwThB5Y4Ns/Wx8s0nuIUII/AAAAAAAABpQ/y0WKlmfGUVclTY_dDwJ28n0X_9Y_vzfUQCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/GKTW-give-kids-the-world-village-lifesize-portrait-bronze-sculpture-Henri-Landwirth-little-girl-statue-Tom-White-7.png" imageanchor="1" style="text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-MSwThB5Y4Ns/Wx8s0nuIUII/AAAAAAAABpQ/y0WKlmfGUVclTY_dDwJ28n0X_9Y_vzfUQCK4BGAYYCw/s320/GKTW-give-kids-the-world-village-lifesize-portrait-bronze-sculpture-Henri-Landwirth-little-girl-statue-Tom-White-7.png" width="240" /></a> </div>
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I read Mr. Landwirth's books, which he gave to me as a gift. In Auschwitz, he writes, his engineering skills allowed him to stay alive while building rockets for the Germans. As part of the Resistance within the camp, he miscalibrated rocket after rocket at degrees so miniscule no one would notice until the missiles simply failed. Because of his work, he discovered tablets for his typhoid fever under his pillow when he fell ill.</div>
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Upon D-Day, the guards given the command to execute the last of the Jews simply opened the gates, as though weary from killing, pointed toward Belgium and said, "Run." Henri ran. At one point he encountered a nazi soldier on his path beside a lake. He felt he could kill the soldier, or he could pass by him, and in the feeling he was aware that each choice would shape the rest of his life in entirely divergent ways. He passed the soldier and continued to Belgium.</div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-plvwryaM7oc/Wx8xebrX7mI/AAAAAAAABps/OD__mnZXjuQFj34QO0Y0XUXvOL4-NjrUgCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/GKTW_Media_Kit_Page_01-728x410.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-plvwryaM7oc/Wx8xebrX7mI/AAAAAAAABps/OD__mnZXjuQFj34QO0Y0XUXvOL4-NjrUgCK4BGAYYCw/s320/GKTW_Media_Kit_Page_01-728x410.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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Henri's first job in the United States was as in reception at one of the first Holiday Inns in Orlando. As German engineers collaborated with American ones in more rocket-making, Henri once had to deliver "more towels" to one of the hoodwinked yet torturous commandantes from Auschwitz, and did so.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l4Oe0uO2TTg/Wx8yyhAXpJI/AAAAAAAABp8/V3z3Uut_r3Q7u4oFIfyzDGBdAJ8cXXwmwCK4BGAYYCw/s1600/Landwirth-300x290-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-l4Oe0uO2TTg/Wx8yyhAXpJI/AAAAAAAABp8/V3z3Uut_r3Q7u4oFIfyzDGBdAJ8cXXwmwCK4BGAYYCw/s400/Landwirth-300x290-1.jpg" /></a></div>
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Soon, Henri bought his own hotel, as the space race surged, and as Disney World emerged on the Florida inland, soon Henri owned several. He hosted astronauts and film stars. These guests became the benefactors of Henri's dream of a universally designed amusement park for children whose medical conditions prevented them from enjoying Disney World. Disney characters, Jonas Brothers (my daughter's eyes widened), and all the free ice cream anyone can eat all awaited the guests at Henri's park, all of whom received, with their families, free travel, free accommodation, free admission, and free food, all paid for by movie stars and astronauts.</div>
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My daughter's summer reading this year is <i>Night </i>by Elie Wiesel. When she told me, I went to my antique letter-writing desk to retrieve the one book that always stands in one of the compartments. The desk itself belonged to my grand-father when he lived in China, a British surgeon attending the health of miners in a British mine. When the Japanese seized their belongings, servants hid the desk with other fine pieces in a secret room below the basement of their house in Tientsin's (now Tianjin) British concession. After my grandparents were freed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the internment camp in Weishen (now Weifang), the servants shipped the antiques to Canada. From the compartment, I pull my beloved copy of <i>Night</i> and hand it to her. </div>
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We worry together that summer reading is so often material that is most needed to be read in a community, with witness and guidance. Instead, our children last summer read <i>They Killed My Father First</i> by Loung Ung with no one to ask questions to, no one to hold space for the horror, the real meaning of horror. Worse, they read it with awareness that there would be a reading quiz to test to make sure they'd "done it" rather than a colloquium for mission statements, witness-bearing, a teach-in. </div>
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My daughter announced this summer's selection with the complaint that summer reading is so sad all the time. I consider this. <i>So sad all the time. </i>The 30-years-of-experience teacher in me recognizes that the safer books are taught in the syllabus while the memoirs of genocide are placed outside the school year, presented as the one school thing children do in the off-months. For my daughter, and many of her friends, books like this should <i>be</i> the syllabus. The questions that emerge from them should <i>be</i> school. She recognizes quite clearly that while we make the space to laugh together and enjoy our friends, the world <i>is sad all the time </i>and these stories don't lie to us. But their placement in the reading calendar does.<br />
<br />
My daughter knows about the children being snatched from their parents and daycares and detained in cages in abandoned Wal-marts and unmarked spaces. She knows the world she lives in and understands that "summer camp," "internment camp," and "death camp" are three very different things and all three are occurring in her world right now, somewhere, maybe here. </div>
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When I hand her my beloved and beaten copy of <i>Night, </i>I imagine her face as she will read, one rainy afternoon at camp, about Juliek and his violin, about the long walk in the snow, about that drink of water toward the end. I realize I can't let her read it alone. I say it: "Don't read this book alone at camp. Let's read this out loud to each other this weekend or next week. My darling, this book holds a story that broke open a silence, and I don't want you to be alone when it breaks in you." All the English teacher me sort of startles her with intensity. I recognize the look as that of my students as they thought, "Wow, Ms. Hope is a bit crazy." I tell her, "This is about the camp that Henri was in." I remind her of the numbers on his wrist, and the meaning of her first modeling gig expands. </div>
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I tell her, "I love this book with my whole heart."</div>
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I discovered while writing this and gathering the photos here, that Henri Landwirth died in April of this year, just over a month ago. He lived to be 91. I haven't told my daughter yet, and I'm having trouble accepting for myself the death of man who actually did give kids the world, a world that he as a child was robbed of, a world so many of us still seek to save. At the very least: to remember.</div>
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And I'll keep my promise to her to read <i>Night</i> again beside her. There are books in the world that, just as there are experiences that cannot be endured without a witness, should not be read alone. If Elie Wiesel taught me anything, if meeting Henri taught me anything, it is to give what I can. In the case of reading <i>Night,</i> it is to hold the words with my daughter, because they are too heavy, for her, for anyone, to hold by herself. And as I read, I'll hold up the words in my heart for not only my child, for all the children who are missing tonight, for all the children in the world.</div>
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-13835595193408197782018-06-09T15:07:00.002-07:002018-06-09T17:19:47.321-07:00The Suicide Push<br />
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In the two days that presented us with celebrity suicides, I have been quiet. I saw the posts and acknowledged the tragedies. The fame and fortune of both Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain--and also the charm each possessed--nestled in with the personal notes from friends and relatives to script fragments of stories together that will never be whole. Like the poems of Sappho salvaged from ancient ruins, this is all we are left with. I had nothing to say, and I'm often one who can say something.<br />
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My silence indicated to me that it wasn't a reflection of not feeling anything or not having anything to contribute to the communal grieving and raising of awareness. It indicated that there was a block in me. I was blocking the grief and even the witness.<br />
<br />
Back in the 1990s, I was engaged to Tom Andrews, the beautiful poet. The story I tell most often about this <i>fait-incomplit</i> of an engagement is that at his memorial service a friend of his turned around in his chair and asked me if I was "one of the fiancées." Sure enough, there were five of us there, including the one on whose wedding day Tom had slipped into a coma that would turn into his death from a rare blood disease. Tom was a hemophiliac, but he did not die of hemophilia, a fact that rather fit tidily in his own self-recognized narrative of having been the one that beat the odds repeatedly, and this narrative he celebrates in the collection <i>The Hemophiliac's Motorcycle </i>and later in<i> Random Symmetries </i>and stunning medical narrative, <i>The Codeine Diary. </i>He had been one of the 2% of people who had received blood transfusions and survived when the blood supply was discovered to carry HIV.<br />
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When his best friend, who was going to be Tom's best man perhaps at all his almost-weddings, called to tell me he had died, the first thought through my mind was "he finally did it." I didn't mean he'd finally had a fatal bleed. I meant he'd finally succeeded at suicide. I don't tell the story of Tom's suicide attempt because the "five fiancées" story is such a winner, complete with all of us being seated together at the reception and his father's commenting "my son had such great taste in women." That story is a killer. It's the other story, the one I don't tell, that kills me.<br />
<br />
The story I can hardly bring myself to tell is the one of how he broke off our engagement. Abruptly. We had bought a house together and had just adopted a puppy. We had rented a villa in Tuscany for the honeymoon, and Tom had bought me a grand piano as a wedding present. There were pieces in place that looked to be a wonderful picture. One afternoon I was listing off prices for various flooring options for the new house when he told me blankly, "I can't do it."<br />
<br />
"Parquet?" I asked. "Well, we can go with the berber."<br />
"Laura, I'm not talking about flooring."<br />
<br />
I didn't fight. I dislike scenes and have long known I'm far too good at them and that my words can eviscerate when set loose with anger. I told him I'd take the puppy, and I loaded up my truck with the items I'd moved into our house months before. He was resolved that he didn't want to marry me. I was resolved that I didn't want to convince him. If he changed his mind, he'd call me back to him after a time. Why risk ruining everything with words now? I drove east over the Ohio, stoppping every few hours to let myself and the puppy pee.<br />
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I found out weeks later from our best man that the day I left, Tom had driven out to the new house and attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car, sealed it with duct-tape then fed it through a slightly opened window and duct-taped all open air out. A neighbor had come by to meet the "new couple" who'd bought the place. Tom was unconscious and rushed to the hospital then admitted into psychiatric care.<br />
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I had been hating him the whole time, telling myself with every day that he didn't call me that Wow I really should have let him have it.<br />
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After hearing what had happened, I wondered if I had expressed my feelings, if maybe I'd been harsh, if maybe I had done what I tried hard not to do and said something that had driven him over the edge.<br />
<br />
Two years later he was seated next to me on an airplane, a 6 a.m. flight from Cincinatti to Asheville. I was returning from a visit with friends in L.A. He was arriving to teach creative writing at the school where we'd met. The chances of our being placed side by side astonished us both enough to over-ride any awkwardness. I felt his arm's strength through his leather jacket. He'd put on weight. He was happy, in love with a woman in Athens, Greece. They were engaged.<br />
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We met for a walk with "our" now full-grown puppy, Zoe. He told me that he had gone off his medication when we were together because "I was finally happy." He had told me shortly after we'd met that he was a "citizen of Prozac nation" and was on other anti-depressants. He now told me he'd gone off them months before breaking up with me--around the time we visited friends in frozen Minneapolis I thought as I pieced the narrative together, remembering I'd driven home in Spring. In short, he said, I hadn't stood a chance against the depression that was swallowing him. He was saying it wasn't me.<br />
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A few months later I got the call from our best man: he was dead. The blood disease he must not have known was emerging when we walked had taken him. It was his second death, I felt. If not his third, if you count the near-miss on the infected blood supply. I thought about how maybe he had willed his own death, having failed at suicide years before. I caught myself. He was dead. I had to grieve him, not understand him. Months later at his memorial, I was surrounded by his other fiancées. Again, I had to grieve him, not understand him.<br />
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He is the boyfriend my mom and step-father agree was the One. Charming, brilliant, hilarious, kind, blessed with excellent social skills and capable of long, meandering, insightful conversations. I remind them: Bipolar. Off-meds.<br />
<br />
What would have been enough, I wonder when I allow myself to wonder.<br />
He was smiling and waving at me as I drove away. Smiling and waving. He was pushing me out of his life so he could end it. Smiling and waving. Making room. And rather than being able to tell me and express his fear of what he might do to himself, the suicide was already in control. The suicide had seized him weeks or months before. It saw me as its enemy, something in the way. Maybe before the new house or the puppy, and he had been fighting back against it with these tokens of a life we'd create together. But he had not won. Smiling and waving.<br />
<br />
The suicide was already there. In our lives. In our bed. In our story.<br />
<br />
My silence at the deaths of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain are because of this. I think about the people surrounding them. I think about the urgency with which we are told to reach out, to support, to be there for each other and know from my experience that that wasn't what it was about. The scariest thing in the whole world to me is that there wasn't a single ask. Not a single request that I sit and listen. No request for help and no sign of suicide that would happen that same day. There was a wedding gown, a puppy, a villa in Tuscany. These were the signs of suicide for Tom.<br />
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This is my story of Tom.<br />
You can see why the other story I often tell is the favored one.<br />
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This one is just too terrifying.<br />
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<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-6925264575369134572018-06-05T07:24:00.002-07:002018-06-05T07:24:36.584-07:00"We Don't Give Bad News On Friday"<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="63go9" data-offset-key="5a8eq-0-0" style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; font-family: system-ui, -apple-system, system-ui, ".SFNSText-Regular", sans-serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="5a8eq-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Thank you, friends, for asking about my trip yesterday to Hope Breast Cancer Center. It is timely that this happened as I was gazing at a deadline for a grant for a conference on Narrative Healthcare--because these past three days have been vexed by an experience that shows me just how badly we need narrative training for doctors. In the end: I'm fine. It is, as I suspected an infected spider bite or an infected blister from a Canon camera strap. Because some bites can be very poisonous, I went to a GP on Friday afternoon to get some nice antibiotics so I didn't slip into a coma in my sleep as the worst stories go. I left with a worse worst story. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="5a8eq-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">My regular GP wasn't available so I went to another. Seeing the infected bite, she was taken aback and immediately said it could be inflammatory breast cancer then left the room to make an appointment for ultrasound and mammography, leaving me there with my phone which I immediately googled IBC on: presents at stage IIIb, highly aggressive, rare, basically really hard to treat. Doctor came back into the room and was surprised I was crying, "Oh, you're crying." She handed me an appointment sheet for Monday. In three days. She said it might not be cancer and left. As I drove to meet my mom at the steps of All Souls Cathedral, I went through the details of dying in my head: will is done, power of attorney is done, daughter's trust is done, I can jump off the bridge over the French Broad to save everyone the trouble. . . these thoughts. Thoughts that perhaps come with every possible Stage IIIb (line from WIT comes to mind, "there is no stage V") diagnosis or possible diagnosis. I spent the weekend holding my daughter close and fading in and out of naps and Parks and Rec episodes. Not thinking about double mastectomy and head-shaving (both of which I'd do in a heartbeat if Monday came back positive). On Monday, I made my first trip to the breast cancer center. I am third generation, that we know of, so I felt that this was my natural progression of events, only more aggressive and challenging than my mother and grandmother's. Maybe this was my turn. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="bd4gc-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">It wasn't. But here's the narrative side of things: in medical school people learn to diagnose, but they don't learn how to share that diagnosis. It gets delivered like the answer on a multiple choice test (because it once was), not like the incredible life change that, in cases like cancer, it is. Cancer was the first reaction. In narrative training, that first response is a quiet starting point then the "reader" inquires more. Practitioners learn that the diagnosis is a plot-twist and that plot-twists challenge a character on every level. Reading more about inflammatory breast cancer and seeing the actual oncologist on Monday, I learned how many more questions there were to ask, and how telling my story about photography and the possible spider bite directed his attention to polysporin and bandaids, a much more welcome treatment. </span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="45cqd-0-0" style="font-family: inherit;">Yes, the GP ought to have considered cancer, yet the way she revealed it (first impulse--surprised outburst) and the way she managed the situation at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday were damaging, difficult beyond belief, even traumatizing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That GP is part of my story now forever, the story of the Friday I heard I might die. She could be another character in another story: the story of the Friday the doctor asked me about what I had been doing lately, suggested bandaids and </span>polysporin<span style="font-family: inherit;">, and then gently suggested that I call back on Monday as my other medical office does because "we don't give bad news on Friday." </span></div>
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-72127126361287330662017-02-21T15:57:00.003-08:002017-02-21T16:07:04.045-08:00About Poetry in Times Like These<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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(I tried to find the artist of this. If you know, please tell me.)</div>
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At an AWP conference in Chicago, I encountered a vast ballroom filled with writers and poets. They were listening to one poet, Marie Ponsot, whose talk, a sign by the door announced, was entitled "The Poet's Responsibility." When I had seen the title in the conference schedule I had shuddered. I wouldn't go, I told myself.<br />
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Why go when I know I don't fulfill my responsibility? Why go when I know it will leave me feeling utterly and profoundly irresponsible. Yet, I had stumbled into the very ballroom I'd vowed to avoid (those who go to AWP's perhaps know this form of disorientation). Rather than lambast us for not doing enough, though, Ms. Ponsot said this:<br />
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"A poet's job is to pay attention and to write good poems."<br />
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She repeated this.<br />
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"A poet's job is to pay attention and to write good poems."<br />
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I ponder it still because I paid very close attention to that. I still work on the "write good poems" part of the equation. <i>Pay attention. </i><br />
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Since going deaf, paying attention has become a constant action in my life. In order to lipread well, I must be focused and calm and attentive. If I stray for a moment, I lose the whole minute. Attention is a slight step from its French counterpart: attendre, <i>to expect. </i><br />
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So, how do we expect? How do we pay expectation? In lipreading, this is accomplished by guessing and intuiting, based on the facial expressions and the gestures of the person talking. Without sounds, I can tell.<br />
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For poetry, perhaps it is the same.<br />
You attend to what is, and you expect what it is to come. In one swift gesture, one movement of the lips. That, too, is how to write a poem. To attend to the moment, and to allow that beautiful sense of the expectation without even knowing what it is.<br />
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And doing this again and again, constantly, persistently.<br />
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"A poet's job is to pay attention and to write good poems."Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-77464597101149075582015-06-12T09:18:00.000-07:002017-02-21T16:08:26.614-08:00How Asheville Can Win The Battle of Busk<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When a friend asked me while we dined on salads what I thought of the busking situation in Asheville, I almost choked on my salad. "We have a busking situation?"<br />
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He told me he'd seen the article in the <i>New York Times</i>. Again: almost choking, "New York Times is writing about buskers in Asheville?"<br />
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I love this so much for so many reasons.<br />
<br />
The fact that we are in the 9th most food insecure city in America, the fact that people can walk around this town and not know we have a large African-American population scuttled away on the outskirts as a result of demolishing 2000 homes in the city center, the fact that we don't have affordable housing in town, all this aside: we make the Times for our "busking situation."<br />
<br />
This is why I love Asheville. This is why you really should move here: we have a busking situation.<br />
<br />
We have music everywhere. We have music outside t-shirt shops that print quotes by great songwriters on their organic cotton and complain about the musicians outside on the their sidewalk. We have music outside banks. We have music in the alcoves of galleries and jewelry stores. We have music in the park all the time, and we have music all night long on the sidewalks to sing you back to your parking deck where you will no doubt also hear music in your car.<br />
<br />
As an (ahem) award-winning historian of this lovely city, I have to tip my hat to the people who feel the need to "do something" about our "busking situation." I am not wearing a hat though so I will not. The busking situation is classic Asheville. It simply is. This is a city that is so rooted in music that no one will ever ever stop the busking because it is actually impossible to stop the music. These mountains are made of music. The people here--well, the people who have been here a long time--have been raised on music. Music just is part of the brickwork of our early 20th century architecture, and it's just part of the gorgeous landscape we look up at through our office windows then escape into when evening comes.<br />
<br />
To get more specific, Asheville was designed for healing and for song. This is the land of breathing, where people who could not breathe came to so they could. They came here also to drink moonshine, to dance on the verandahs of gorgeous hotels. They came here to play.<br />
<br />
That kind of energy does not change.<br />
<br />
People made money elsewhere and simply brought it here to make beautiful homes and to get in touch with the one of the strangest natural resources known to man: mountain magic. The best translation of this magic has always been either in the cooking or in the music. Last I checked one would have to have some health department permission to serve up the first of these on the sidewalk, but last I heard one needs no such permission for the second, and that's because music poisons nobody. Music hurts nobody. Music doesn't even touch you, unless it's in that, yes, magical sense, in your heart, your soul. Maybe it makes you move. But that's not harmful. That's what we call beauty (even when it's not perfect!) and it is good for you.<br />
<br />
There's beauty in the simplest presence of the slightest attempt at making music. It's the beginning of something. If someone has a song to offer, well they are in this world welcome to sing it. Rather than viewing it as an affront to the image of the city, we'd be much better off accepting it as the city, because that is exactly what it is.<br />
<br />
This is a city of music. Before it was a city, it was just the music. Sometimes, if you're in the right frame of mind and heart, you can hear that. And maybe if you're really in the right frame of mind and heart, the frame in which this city was first formed and the frame it really wants you to remember as a vital and still-needed part of your life, you can dance to it.<br />
<br />
<br />
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/us/with-this-many-buskers-in-asheville-a-discordant-note-was-inevitable.html<br />
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-591883304489067342015-06-01T07:37:00.001-07:002015-06-01T07:37:45.919-07:00Free Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
Remember in elementary school when after an in-class exercise was completed the teacher just said, "Now you can have free-time?" Maybe it was just three minutes, but the idea of it felt like a patch of blue sky through a firmament of cloud. During free-time, I could doodle without being told not to. I could lay my head on my folded hands on my desk, I could talk with my best friend quietly in our third row seats.<br />
<br />
My daughter mentioned free-time to me yesterday. Having completed a two-hour standardized test in less than one she had two hours of free-time in which to de-standardize. Disallowed markers for drawing, she was permitted a book, which she was happy to have some quiet time read. She also folded her blue sweatshirt on her desk and took a little nap. "It was nice to have some free-time."<br />
<br />
I had forgotten about free-time.<br />
<br />
I have had unscheduled time. Plenty of it. As a university professor my classroom time is far outweighed by what has become nearly constant prep time as I read, update, prepare course content and, most importantly, keep up with my students' lives and stories. Sitting at my laptop to accomplish all this, I also am checking emails and notifications on social media, often opening several channels of my varied lives at once, and they accumulate on my screen until I am actually doing ten things at once. This makes me feel inspired, on top of everything, and I'll often get two or three ideas for new projects (this blogpost for instance) so that by day's end I have consumed my time with busy-ness even in moments when I might have taken a break.<br />
<br />
I am reintroducing the concept of free-time to my vocabulary to prevent this from happening every day.<br />
<br />
Free-time means I am not at the computer. I am not even writing (because writing, for me, is work-adjacent).<br />
<br />
I am at the piano or in my car on the Blue Ridge Parkway (after dropping my child at school). I am sitting in a chair or the hammock in my garden with a cup of coffee or tea. I can be reading if the book is not a book for a course I am teaching. I am lying on the grass letting my thoughts drift.<br />
<br />
Right now I am aiming to have 90 minute segments of free-time in both morning and afternoon. The purpose: to break free of technology's accumulation, to let my brain relax, to bring a little bit of childhood forward into my adulthood, and for no other purposes than these.<br />
<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-88720635441621271762015-05-25T17:22:00.002-07:002015-05-25T17:22:47.394-07:00Kissing the Water (an excerpt from a memoir about my grandmother who'd been in a prison camp in China)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">. . .</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Three days a week we did this. I did it for a whole semester until one day I didn’t wake up and meet the van outside. I let it just go the way I let the balloon rope go once the burner had filled the silk. I never gave any of the team my phone number. Arthur had no idea which dorm was mine. I wish I could say it was because I didn’t need it anymore. I did need it more than ever. Everyone needs it--those early mornings of blackness, that uplift of seeing heat raise something so enormous simply by being itself up into the sky.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>There was a “move” I learned about in one of the very few conversations I had with my balloon people. We parked the van with a view of the balloon just as it lowered toward the earth. Normally, when we saw it descend, we tumbled out and started the most violent 500 meter dash over thorn bushes and yucca and pyrocanthus and every other miserable Florida plant that Florida produces to seize the ropes the Captain tossed down to us and which we grabbed hold of with every fiber of muscle tissue we had in our small little human hands. The rope burned through the heavy canvas of my gloves. The brambles tore at my denim jeans and poked through my thick socks as I held on with the others. But no balloon wants to come down. No balloon wants to be trapped on the ground. The slightest updraft would pull us soaring into the air, sometimes twenty or thirty feet (I never counted, but I never let go either) back up into it then it would end and send us plummeting to the sand, with our only goal not to get smashed by the basket. You’ve seen the peaceful flight of hot air balloons over where you live. You’ve imagined the quiet of the air, the view. What you didn’t imagine was the bone-threat of being lifted by one of those blasted beautiful things and being thrown back to ground on the whim of something so harmless as a morning breeze, a soft lilt of air. This one morning, though, we didn’t run. <br /><br />
</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">“Shouldn’t we be running?” I said to Arthur.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
“Just watch.”</div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The balloon approached a lake in the middle of the vast field, a man-made lake but a lake about the size of a similarly man-made shopping mall. The captain lowered the flame in the burner, and the balloon gently descended.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">“Shouldn’t we really be running?”</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Arthur shook his head.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The balloon came down to the water then just in time the captain flared the burner once again, lifting the balloon back into the sky.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">“It’s called Kissing the Water.”</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The seven of us stood in a line like we were watching something die and come back to life.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">“He only does it when the conditions are perfect.” </span></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I never saw him do it again, but the phrase stayed with me. It was something that could happen.</span></div>
Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-20639061150394044942015-03-15T18:02:00.001-07:002015-03-15T18:02:15.132-07:00Cinderella and the Glass Hearing Aids<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
It's been a while since I've written about deafness. When I started this blog some seven years ago or something, that's what it was about. In the in-between years, I've gathered my life up and moved it into a new life, a quieter one. Things about deafness that frightened me then don't anymore: I can sit through dinner parties and not get much of the conversation and still honestly say I had a wonderful time. I have good hearing aids that let me hear my students read their work. I can take them out at the end of the day and have a very quiet world. For most situations I have accepted deafness into my life.<br />
<br />
That is.<br />
<br />
Until I have a horrible exchange with a young woman working at the cinema over the quality and performance of assistive listening devices after watching Cinderella.<br />
<br />
Cinderella keeps saying "have courage and be kind and all will be well."<br />
<br />
But I found myself today in a situation where I understood why "the disabled" are grouped together often as being a grouchy lot. I didn't start out grouchy, though I have become accustomed to a certain degree of inconvenience when I request one of the assistive listening devices at the cinema. The manager or staff attending the little customer service kiosk always behave as though I have asked to see the holy grail or some other precious thing that few have the authority to handle.<br />
<br />
"They haven't been charged," said one manager about the closed caption device that sits in a cup holder.<br />
<br />
"It will take me a moment to figure this out," said the one today as she toiled with the cords of the closed captioning lenses. I also asked for the t-coil device because the lenses don't always work.<br />
<br />
I stood waiting for 10 minutes, then she started to wipe all the cords with alcohol.<br />
<br />
That was the beginning of my bad mood. Yes, I want clean devices, but I don't want to miss ten minutes of my movie.<br />
<br />
I understood she was polishing the grail so didn't interfere.<br />
<br />
The t-coil device was crackly, and the lenses didn't work.<br />
I left the movie to get help, but it was another10 minutes so I left the devices with the usher, saying please have the manager come help me.<br />
<br />
The manager did, and the lenses still didn't work. She fiddled with them, then they worked. But they missed about 20% of dialogue.<br />
<br />
****<br />
Before I went deaf, I was included in just about everything that white women are. I could enjoy movies, restaurants, move around in the world with a pretty decent ticket to everything. That ticket went away when I lost my hearing due to a congenital disorder that lay dormant til my late 20s.<br />
<br />
And I know this is what I sat with during Cinderella.<br />
<br />
When the technology for accommodating deafness doesn't work. deafness is brought into high-relief once again. I am driven to remember it, to recognize that my world is limited.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
After the movie, I delivered my device to the manager and suggested she have a staff member accompany the user into the theater to make sure the devices are tuned to the right channel. That way the user won't have to miss a chunk of movie-time. This blew up very quickly into a very different conversation.<br />
<br />
"They did work. They were the same ones I gave you at the start of the movie."<br />
<br />
It isn't possible to trace the logic of this response or how emotionally she delivered it. What was happening was beyond the devices and their administration. She was not trained to help, and the ADA is about helping.<br />
<br />
And just as quickly, I lost my temper. I was in tears after the exchange, having been brought face-to-face with the exclusion deafness has introduced into my life, this thin shaft of the whole spectrum of exclusion and its many forms. And it hurts terribly. It stings the blood.<br />
<br />
Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act requires all places of public accommodation to comply with ADA standards. Current rulemaking is addressing the inclusion of closed captions within this title. Legal matters aside, though, what I feel as a result of this situation is beyond legislation.<br />
<br />
I was told tonight, "No, I will not help you." I was told, "The machine works."<br />
<br />
The machine doesn't work.<br />
And I needed help.<br />
<br />
***<br />
When Cinderella is given the glass slippers, we know it's a losing deal. The shoes are glass. We know they can be lost. We know they can be shattered. And we know that at midnight, they will turn back into the little canvas dirty things they started as.<br />
<br />
When deaf-tech fails, when accommodations fail, when justice fails, even in the microcosm of the cinema,<br />
<br />
when help fails . . .<br />
<br />
that is the coach turned back into pumpkin, the shards of illusion that the world is open to everyone.Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-27463569198641011392015-01-10T16:18:00.001-08:002015-01-10T16:18:03.788-08:00Through the Beloved We Talk to God <br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">“Where there is sorrow, there I dwell.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Where there is grief in the world, love has its dwelling.” </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">― Mir Sayyid Manjhan Shattari Rajgiri, <i>Madhumalati: An Indian Sufi Romance</i></span><br />
<br />
<br />
The world is frightened tonight<br />
of the last thing it said.<br />
<br />
My daughter tries on her first Valentine’s dress.<br />
When asked what color it is she said, “It’s the color of the galaxy.”<br />
(We found the jewelry to match on the moon.)<br />
<br />
I read tonight about the Muslim man who when the extremists<br />
took over the kosher grocery store in Paris<br />
hid the Jews he could in a freezer and turned out the light.<br />
<br />
The largest part yet of a fallen airplane was found in the sea,<br />
having flown where it wasn’t supposed to.<br />
<br />
The tree is still up. Each year I am more reluctant to take it down.<br />
This is not a religious statement but a statement on the art<br />
my daughter has made and which decorates all the branches.<br />
<br />
Each year I want to hold her closer than the last.<br />
Each year I let her go into the world a little bit farther.<br />
<br />
She sprays glitter across her shoulders so she resembles the winter sky<br />
outside the window, four degrees and falling, but she is warm and singing.<br />
<br />
A world enlightened by the dark might work better I often wonder<br />
considering Isaac Newton’s unpublished works were still about magic,<br />
the thing he’s credited for taking from this world.<br />
<br />
A man who asked questions in Saudi Arabia received the first 50<br />
of a thousand flogs today, and in the coils of sound that travel the earth<br />
through pain and sorrow I heard him.<br />
<br />
In Paris, everyone had to stay indoors yesterday.<br />
The first siege since 10th of May in 1940. I flipped through the photographs<br />
of the Seine last July when Les Berges opened and the lovers and the artists and the children with their families and the young and the old gathered along the Seine,<br />
<br />
and I photographed them without their knowing<br />
because I did not speak enough French to join them.<br />
(This is true for me in all languages, sometimes even my own.)<br />
<br />
But when I hear the rough-throated howl of my dog at the night’s pant-cuff,<br />
ready to chase down heaven,<br />
<br />
or when I listen to my daughter’s voice describe a really cool trick<br />
involving a coke bottle and three-point-five hours,<br />
<br />
I think of a Sufi story about the bird of love who finds no place to land<br />
so alights in the inmost human heart.<br />
<br />
and I take a sip of this wine<br />
that tonight only tastes of the hope humanity has sipped at every day’s end<br />
for all time,<br />
<br />
that which is dark and heavy and sweet.<br />
A Sangiovese, the blood of the sky god,<br />
out of this glass blown of thunder.Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-76348612460837023332014-12-25T18:35:00.001-08:002014-12-26T11:57:22.346-08:00Hula Dancer on a Square of Flesh: Scene from my Father's Medical Education<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
" . . . dismiss whatever insults your own soul"<br />
--Walt Whitman<br />
<br />
I often hear people mention that "a lot of doctors are poets." The list begins confidently with William Carlos Williams. It often ends there. My interest in Narrative Medicine moves from another list, the list of doctors who never wrote poems. At the top of this list is my father, an endocrinologist, a Fellow of The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. My father is a brilliant physician. His patients adore him. Though he is retired a decade now, his patients friend me on Facebook to ask me how <i>he is feeling. </i>We don't often ask how doctors are <i>feeling. </i>More often we accuse them of <i>not feeling</i>.<br />
<br />
While my father is in assisted living in Sedona, we talk often about Narrative Medicine, me as the poet, he as the doctor. To summarily arc his career: he started in research and was happy there, teaching and discovering insulin's effect on adipose tissue under varying circumstances. Publishing ceased in the late 1970s, at which time he decided to move to the U.S. and enter private practice. He grew his success to multiple locations and real estate holdings and lost it over two decades, leaving the U.S. in 1992 and opening a single-examining-room office in Hamilton, Bermuda.<br />
<br />
He wanted me to be a doctor. I knew I could not. We fought about it. In that argument I threw a Royal Doulton coffee cup at his head. I missed by a centimeter. Ten years later I reconsidered and told him I would leave my MFA in Poetry program to study Medicine. This time, he argued:<br />
"Don't do it. Poetry is the superior means of finding the truth."<br />
<br />
I didn't withdraw from the MFA program. Another fifteen years later, I am developing the field of Narrative Medicine, a practice whereby doctors are trained to develop empathy by engaging literature. My father is my greatest ally. For years, I felt that I needed to justify poetry to him. Now, though, we justify medicine to poetry.<br />
<i><br /></i>
Poetry and Medicine both heal, one the soul, the other the body. Our fields have always connected by an obscure parallax. How far apart we were can only be perceived by blinding oneself in one eye momentarily, but we are connected. Now I talk with him to learn how he learned to be a doctor then I follow up with an email asking him about the story he has told. <span style="background-color: white;">He told me the other day <span style="color: #141823; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">the story about his first day at University of Toronto College of Physicians and Surgeons when one of the more advanced students stood in the hall stretching a "square shape" which as my father got closer he realized was a large piece of flesh cut from a dead person's stomach featuring a tattoo of a Hulu dancer, making it "dance." I wrote after:</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #141823; line-height: 17.5636348724365px;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
Hi Dad,<br />
<br />
I'm excited about our writing project. I'm going to ask you questions about your medical school experience to begin. I know the story of the tattooed flesh cut from the cadaver's belly. But I don't know how you felt as you walked down that hall. It was your first day. You see a more-senior student, or just a person down the hall . . .</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
Can you tell me your thoughts as you discovered what this was?</div>
<div style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">
What did seeing this "do" to your ideas about medical school. It's a bit horrific to someone who hasn't been in medical school.<br />
<br />
Love,<br />
Laura</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
When we spoke today he told me he had never thought about this. He referred to John Irving's <i>Door in the Floor</i>, paraphrasing the writer's task as being one of paying attention. He said that a physician's task is to get information and "get out of there." He told me he was astonished by my three-dimensional thinking. I had to check the email I had sent to see if we were talking about the same thing. I wasn't aware I was being three-dimensional or astonishing. I was asking how he <i>felt</i>. </div>
<div>
"I mean, wouldn't seeing something like that insult your soul?"</div>
<div>
"Insult your soul. That's Whitman, isn't it?"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I remember the first time I heard my father deliver an order to disconnect a patient's life support. We the family were gathered for supper when his beeper beeped. He dialed the hospital using the phone on the kitchen wall. I could hear him.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Is the family gathered?"</div>
<div>
Silence as person at hospital replies.</div>
<div>
"Okay, then. Go ahead."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Then, he sat down and continued eating. I knew what had just happened. I stood and walked to my room. He followed.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"How could you just sit down after that?"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
He told me the story of the first patient he "lost." He was devastated. His attending physician told him that he could choose to either be devastated each time a patient died or he could choose to be a doctor. That was the lesson. My father chose the latter. Hearing the story helped somewhat. We both returned to supper.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<div>
"Yes, Dad, it's Whitman."</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"Did it insult my soul? If it did I never thought about it."</div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
I told him I didn't think my questions were that astounding, that I thought they were the most obvious questions to ask. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
"No, don't sell yourself short, kid."<br />
<br />
I have always sold myself a little bit short. It started the night the coffee cup shattered against the plaster of the dining room wall. It started when I chose to be a poet instead of a doctor. </div>
<div>
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Now, to think that my consideration of seeing a human being holding another part of another human being (with a cartoon image of yet another human being inked upon it) in a joking, detached manner is unique or amazing, I would have to think that my father and I approach life from two extremes. Is it possible? Would others not be mortified by this image? Is poetic reasoning so different from clinical as to effectively render such a sight readable as two very separate texts? One seeing it as okay and acceptable? The other seeing it as a horrendous and vile act?<br />
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The conversation ends with no judgment or even answers. And will continue.</div>
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-59694713878878544792014-12-21T09:19:00.001-08:002014-12-21T09:50:49.689-08:00DENVER, a short story (wishing everyone a blessed holiday filled with kindness)<div class="p1">
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<span class="s1">I arrived in Denver late at night, having flown across the U.S. losing hours along the way. Stella was four months. Her father and I had just ended it. I’d flown to Denver to spend Thanksgiving with my best high school friend, Audrey. Audrey’d said she’d leave the key under a flower pot on the front porch and would come back from Boulder in the morning, where she was presenting a paper on Kerouac. There was a snowstorm. She didn’t want to drive. The key, though, froze into the ice that gathers between the holes at the bottom of a flower pot so when I knelt (with my baby in a Snuggie inside my corduroy coat) to pick it up and feel around on the cold wood for the metal key I didn’t feel anything. I checked the flower pots on the steps and saw one at the far end of the front porch. When I lifted each of these, I moved my hand around on the snow planning to find that metal shape. I removed my gloves and felt the snow gathered under each one burn my fingertips.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I carried a lot with me that year everywhere I went. Having an infant was like being a bedouin burdened with brightly colored things. Part of this was out of necessity: I had to have a car seat for the shuttle, and I had to have a stroller because Audrey didn’t have a child, and I knew she’d want to show me all the places that Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy had hung out, got drunk, left one another behind. Maybe the Snuggie would have been enough, but sometimes I’d want to be able to do something without a baby strapped to my chest so I took the stroller. I also had to have a breast pump because once I’d breastfed on an airplane and forgotten to re-snap my nursing bra and pull down my shirt before getting up to get something out of the overhead. You only have to do that once to realize that milk-brain is a thing, a thing much more daunting than pregnancy brain which merely subtracts verbs from one’s vocabulary. Milk-brain subtracted minutes and hours from memory, a primal strategy no doubt to keep us always wondering if our offspring have fed, ceaselessly calling us back into the nursing rocker, the only furniture in the modern world other than a toilet wholly dedicated to one bodily function. Stella and I were still in that zone where when she was hungry my uterus contracted with all the tension of early labor. I needed a breast pump because if a pain is both unbearable and avoidable, one must do whatever it takes to serve the latter quality, even if it means toting a complicated bomb-resembling device cross-country. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I had a four-day supply of Huggies Swaddler diapers because it does make a difference, two blanket sleepers, a pink snowsuit about four inches thick into which she was now safely stuffed, a week’s supply of onesies and “outfits” which I was into because I was a new, first-time mother willing to spend, if not fully in a financial position to do so, $50.00 on ensembles she’d outgrow in two weeks, and a peculiar contraption comprised of a brightly colored mat with two bendable bars that attach by arching over it much like the poles of a geodesic dome tent one might pitch on the side of Everest but without the nylon and instead with little clips from which hung a purple hippopotamus, a giraffe which had some kind of rattle inside it, a grey elephant, and a crinkly sort of zebra, and at the transept of these two bending bars attached a star with lights that flashed slowly in time to a little song that might not exist outside the realm of this one toy. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">My baby loved the star and the giraffe, and because Audrey didn’t have any children of her own, I doubted the presence of stars and giraffes in her home. I wanted to have something to keep Stella entertained. That’s the way I thought then, that the baby had to be entertained, as though the experience of being in a world for the first third of the earth’s cycle round the sun might not be stimulating enough. I had all this stuff divided between one suitcase for clothes and one very large duffle bag for Baby Things, including the stroller. Between these two objects I huddled on the floor of Audrey’s porch with my baby sleeping inside my coat and snow streaking the air. <i>Where the fuck is the god-damned key, </i>I swore at my scholarly friend.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I had a cell-phone, but the battery was dead. The houses on the street were all dark. It was after midnight. Families in Denver went to bed early. I regretted not telling the shuttle driver to wait until I was inside before driving off. Then I hated him for not thinking of it himself. The last hotel he’d dropped passengers at had been at least twenty minutes away, by vehicle. I wouldn’t be able to walk it. I pulled my hat down over my ears and double wrapped my wide wool scarf around my neck and shoulders, keeping the winter from Stella’s skin. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Had I been alone, only me, I might have stayed there through the night. In the same way that before I found out I was pregnant I smoked cigarettes, I would have done something stupid. But as much as breastfeeding and the actual process of growing a baby inside of you make your brain a little slow, it makes you really smart in matters of life and death. There was no way I was going to let my baby stay outside all night a mile above sea level. I gripped the bannister and slipped down the steps and along the sidewalk and knocked on the un-illuminated next door. </span></div>
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Booking the flight to see Audrey was an automatic response to suddenly being alone, like turning on the lights when entering a room or buckling a seatbelt when entering a car. I hadn’t seen her in years, but it was the only thing that made sense. I had a baby. I wanted my best friend to see her. Then I’d arrived on the porch of a stranger’s house about to beg to be let inside, like the Virgin Mary begging to be able to give birth in the barn. <i>Not for me. For the baby. </i>I was alone and vulnerable and part of a story in humanity that aligned me with the one no one could deny assisting on a winter night. If no one answered, I’d make my way to the next house, and the next, and the night would go like that. Me, the woman in the snow with the baby’s heavy head against her breast inside layers of corduroy and wool. </div>
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<span class="s1">The porchlight came on, and a man in red Royal Stewart plaid flannel pajama pants and a cream-colored long john shirt and great thick hiking socks and a kind, long, pale and unshaven face answered. I didn’t have to say anything once he saw the little brown haired head emerging from my coat. I was a story that didn’t have to talk. He opened the door wide. <i>Come in Come in.</i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">The door opened into a universe of Family. The wooden floors peeked up through archipelagoes of toys, sweaters, coats, textbooks, notepaper, and wool socks of varying sizes. Sheet music lay on the floor around the piano, with one sturdy page standing straight in the place sheet music belongs. <i>How long have you been outside? </i> The man’s wife, wearing also a cream-colored long john shirt and plaid flannel pajama pants and wooly socks , poured hot chocolate from a well-used saucepan into a dark blue mug with the word “LOVE” engraved some sunny summer camp afternoon. I was sure if I peeked at the bottom I’d see the name of the pilot of the plastic helicopter on the fireplace mantle or the hockey player whose black skates hung from a hook screwed into a two-by-four nailed to the wall by the front door. Worn blankets lay across the backs and arms of worn sofas to the degree where it was impossible to tell what was upholstery and what was adornment. A cuckoo clock on the wall had two little doors above the place the bird came out at 1 a.m. and out of which popped a little man who danced to a little song with a little woman then cheerily went back inside their instrument of time. I took Stella out of my coat and the Snuggie as I sat down, <i>not long, just a few minutes. </i></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Here, I’ll hold her, </i>she said, holding her arms out the way women hold their arms out to infants, this ancient thing, this “oh-please-give-her-to-me” favor, the desire of love itself. I didn’t hesitate. Stella was deep in the sleep infants can access in times of stress and extremely cold weather. She was moving her lips in a gentle pulse. Soon she’d want to nurse, but I’d have time to drink hot chocolate first. The marshmallows released their form. The warmth from the heating vent wrapped my legs under the long wooden table.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Wade and Leslie were my hosts’ names. They had two sons and a daughter, Jim, Drew, and Alice. all sleeping upstairs in their rooms, rooms I could picture as they told me about each one. Alice, it turned out, was the hockey player. Drew was the pilot at age 7, and Jim preferred improvising jazz to learning classical on the piano. Alice was 11. Jim 13. Nobody said anything about the way everything was everywhere the way other people always apologized for “such a mess” when their homes were almost spotless. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">When Stella unsettled and started to mouth the air like she was seeing angels, Leslie showed me to the room where I’d be sleeping. I sat on the bed and started to nurse while she simply swept a pile of unfolded laundry back into its blue plastic oval laundry basket and kicked it toward the corner of the room where already an ironing board stood with a pile of un-ironed shirts on top of it. I didn’t imagine the shirts would ever get ironed or that Wade was a man who would require them to be. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Leslie opened the closet and wheeled out a white lacy bassinet with a pale blue star, a pink moon, and a golden mysterious other figure from the solar system bobbing from a musical device that also spun these around when Leslie pressed a white almost-invisible button on the side of the basket. The song was a lullaby I knew the words to, “slowly the big silver moon rises and peeks in the room . . . . “ It was the prettiest bassinet I’d seen. I was almost jealous I hadn’t found it myself. Leslie reached up to the shelf in the magical closet of baby things and brought down a silk blanket printed with pink sailboats and blue sheep. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I told her about the bags I had left on Audrey’s porch. We’d completely neglected them. By now they’d be covered with ice and snow. <i>Don’t worry about it. </i>But Leslie left and there was a conversation and soon Wade was bringing the duffle and my suitcase to my little guest room. He picked a towel out of the laundry basket and wiped off the melting snow. Stella was on a break from nursing. I pulled down my sweater before he saw. <i>I found the key,</i> he said, <i>It was frozen to the bottom of the flower pot by the door. But your friend didn’t leave the heat on. I booted it up, but it won’t be warm enough for you and the baby for an hour or so. Sleep here. We’ll move you over in the morning.</i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">He drew down one feather duvet and two heavy blankets from the magic shelf and placed them on my mattress. <i>I’ll leave you two. Good night. Glad you’re safe. </i>He looked at Leslie, <i>Love you.</i></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Leslie held out her arms to hold Stella again, <i>Why don’t you take a shower. I put some pajamas next to the sink. They should fit just fine. </i>I pulled a pale purple blanket sleeper from my suitcase and placed it on the bed. I didn’t understand how Leslie could think her pajamas could possibly fit me, but the ones she’d placed on the shelf did fit, large enough for a woman who’d eaten the world in order to produce a healthy baby. It didn't at all feel strange leaving Stella with this stranger. I felt that I was in a house that was made for keeping children safe. If anything ever went wrong here it would be the result not of human neglect or human action. It would have to be something of an eerily impossible and terrible chain of events. The hot water melted the last bit of winter from my body. I hadn't taken a long shower since before giving birth.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I returned to my room where Leslie held Stella close. She'd dressed her in the blanket sleeper from the suitcase, and rocked where she sat at the edge of the bed. She’d placed a bag of Pampers next to the bassinet, for 3-6 month infants. I climbed under the blankets and felt the feather duvet and blankets smother me into safety. I welcomed Leslie’s rocking. She might have done it all night as I slept. </span></div>
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-86753168894264357072014-12-17T08:31:00.003-08:002014-12-18T07:58:14.000-08:00We Thank You Very Sweetly: My Father's Favorite Patient and the Wizard of Oz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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In thinking about patient narratives in healthcare, I think of my father's patient who had played the munchkin who hands Dorothy flowers in Wizard of Oz. One of the few munchkins with speaking lines, he was also one of the few of my father's thousands of patients whose story flowed over into my life. I think of the countless others, the faces in the shadowy rooms he visited "on rounds," (I sometimes went with him when I went to the hospital instead of walking home.) If I think of hospitals as libraries of human stories, with some of the books with spines broken open and others barely browsed, then Mr. Cucksey was fully made into his own feature film.<br />
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He was practically a part of our family, a mysterious circus and movie star uncle, though I only met him once.<br />
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Mr. Cucksey lived in a community for the retired performers in Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota, Florida. His mobile home was connected by a small bridge with a bell on it to his wife's mobile home. According to my father, he and his wife lived separately but would ring the bell on the bridge when one wanted to see the other.<br />
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My father adored Mr. Cucksey and his wife. There were days he came home and told me he'd seen Mr. Cucksey and had shared with him various events from my own life.<br />
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Mr. Cucksey was a window in my father's medical practice, a world that otherwise dwelled behind the boundary of his white lab coat, tethered to strangeness by the yellow-rubber stethoscope cord around his neck. He is the evidence that my father loved his patients. On one occasion, my father cancelled a weekend trip we were scheduled to take: he was afraid Mr. Cucksey would die without him.<br />
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On one of those trips, Mr. Cucksey did. My father was heart-broken. We didn't take any more trips.<br />
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In designing a Narrative Medicine course entitled Patient as Hero / Doctor as Human, I often remember Mr. Cucksey as he stood in the dining room of our home tickling himself and cracking up, and cracking us up, a circus performer to the end. I also think often of my father and the sorrow he endured when Mr. Cucksey died. Looking at both sides of the chart that hangs at the end of the bed in the thousands of hospitals in the world, the shared vulnerability care invites us into comes to life, I am moved by the tensions story creates, the clinical ease its absence creates.<br />
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The course begins January 13.<br />
And while I add, subtract, shift, and shape the syllabus, I think of Mr. Cucksey and my father, the doctor that loved him.<br />
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If you want to take the class, let me know. laura.hopegill@lr.edu or just register at www.lr.edu.<br />
If you want to hear Mr. Cucksey singing "We thank you very sweetly. You killed her so completely," here is the link: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlAOQKjoIaU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlAOQKjoIaU</a><br />
<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-47703806283061852332014-08-31T16:48:00.000-07:002014-08-31T19:52:41.398-07:00Losing Vivaldi<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The other day I was listening to my playlist. Vivaldi's Four Seasons came on and every note sounded so flat that if it weren't for the rhythm I wouldn't have known what it was. I couldn't over-ride it with imagination. I couldn't correct it by adjusting my hearing aids. This means I have to go back to the audiologist and get my ears tested in the dark little booth. Clinically, it means my hearing has declined considerably. Aesthetically, it means I have lost Vivaldi.<br />
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I have been listening to Vivaldi all my life. I know the Quattro Stagioni like I know the lullabies my grandmother sang to me and which I have sung to my daughter. I know them like I know Beatles songs.<br />
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Hearing aids are digital denial. They delay the actuality of deafness. Mine are excellent, and when I get them adjusted, I will hear Vivaldi again and enjoy that illusion that I can hear. However, here at the middle moment between technological cover-up and neurological over-ride, my degenerative hearing loss is laid bare. And all week I have felt dreadfully mortal, dreadfully frightened, and dreadfully sad.<br />
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I've covered it up with everything. From flirtation to food, I've compensated for the loss of this magnificent aspect of life, hearing Vivaldi naturally, with other faces of the life-force, love and nourishment.<br />
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Under it all though, and why I'm writing it here, in this blog that started out as serving this very purpose, my deafness is expanding.<br />
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I don't have an answer. And I don't have a desire to gloss over this, find the golden fleece. I don't want to tell you I am okay with this, and I don't want to hear any of the slightest attempts at telling me there is a good side to this. For this, just listen. And I'll try to do the same: just simply listen to deafness.<br />
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I've been fearing this moment for ten years. When I was first diagnosed at age 32 the first fear was losing music. Such beauty. The miracle of the song. These particular works I comprised in a list and played over and over again so I could remember each note. If I remembered each note, I believed, then I'd always hear them.<br />
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I didn't think I would hear something different, that the notes would lose parts of themselves. I didn't know enough about sound to foresee that. Lesson one in deafness: it's not about silence. It's about shape. The shapes of the sounds change long before the sounds vanish. That's the practice of losing hearing: it's a constant re-learing of the sounds sounds make.<br />
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Now, in order to hear Vivaldi's Four Seasons, at least until I get my audiogram then the adjustments to my hearing aids, I close my eyes in a quiet room.<br />
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Here, I hear it.<br />
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This is where I am now. With the memory of that music.<br />
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The beauty of Il Quattro Stagioni invites me to remember that they are, after all, about the seasons of life as well as the year. And this is an early autumn for me, the first of my five senses to go. I can hear as I write this the storms of those violins, tearing away the once full-sap shreds of summer. And that has always been my favorite part. And this is that. This is what that sounds like when I live it.<br />
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<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-58017031977471320752014-08-19T08:46:00.001-07:002014-08-19T09:19:31.238-07:00The Yellow Chair: The Time I Taught at the Juvee<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Back in the 90s I taught at the Juvenile Evaluation Center out in Black Mountain. My students were teenagers locked up for anything ranging from possession of marijuana to sexual assault to assault with a deadly weapon.<br />
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All my students were working on a GED so they could get out before they turned 18. All had committed their crimes while high. All were in drug programs at the center--all in recovery and trying to see a new life.<br />
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It is illegal for me to write their names, but trust me when I say I know their names, and I know their stories, and I know what they dreamed of getting for Christmas.<br />
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I wheeled a piano out of a broom closet and played music on it while they did math. Some of them learned by ear and played for the others. I taught them equally, and I cheered them on. Next to my desk I had a yellow chair where any student could choose to sit if they needed to "chill out" and not be bothered or asked any questions. It was a place of sanctuary within an otherwise horrible place where, basically, we lock up children.<br />
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For the teachers who did not respect these students, these students did not behave very well. They made life very difficult for the librarian who didn't let them touch the books or turn on more lights.<br />
They knew when they were being talked down to. They recognized a teacher who was "phoning it in" like the one who had memorized every answer in the back of the textbook. The teacher I was replacing was in the hospital for a pencil wound to the kidney. My pass rates on the GED were far and away better than any other GED instructor they'd placed out there.<br />
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My students learned from me because I taught <i>them</i>, not just the material.<br />
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We recognize when we're being treated and seen as people. We also recognize when we're being perceived through a false lens of judgment and thinly veiled superiority. I experience it when I know some guy is just checking me out but has no interest in my thoughts. I am a total bitch to such people. I shut down inside and feel a hatred for what they've allowed themselves to become. I even feel moved to a kind of violence I know isn't worth the consequence. Being seen as less than we are moves us to be less than we are. But like my students, when treated with respect and even challenged to rise to someone's good idea of us, I tend to open up and be kind and more myself.<br />
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I saw this every day in my students. Other teachers--with the exception of Ms. A---- who loved the boys and consistently held them accountable and told them to Stand Up Straight--experienced conflict with them, sometimes had a boy hog-tied in the foyer while the cops drove over, but for me they worked hard.<br />
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Toward the end of my time at the juvee, shortly before a whole chain of abuse stories broke into the public conversation and the place was shut down, the state made this big play for a great big fence with arched steel and razor wire to be constructed around the whole place, which while I was there was open, with children moving from building to building led by teachers and counselors.<br />
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The fence started going up, and my students' performance and behavior started to decline. It was as though they were giving in to the idea they belonged behind the fence. The yellow chair was filled with someone all the time, and I had to bring in extras.<br />
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The truth is the last time any harm had been caused by J.E.C. students' escaping had been in 1976 or something, more than twenty years before. The few times a boy escaped while I was there, they were spotted rather quickly because they'd shed their clothes and try to hitch-hike down the mountain in boxers.<br />
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I drove through the gates and into what looked the inside of a whale skeleton, even I felt I was driving into a place packed with murderous teenagers who held no sanctity for life and would kill me in an instant if I turned my back. But once I got in my classroom, there were my boys. Agitated but still eager to succeed, to take that practice test that would open the door to a new future.<br />
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During a math class one day, a boy asked if I believed in the statistic of the low number of African-American boys who'd live to see the age of 25. No, I said. The statistic, of course, suggests that it's the African-American boys who get themselves killed not that non-black people with guns will shoot them.<br />
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Now, I believe in the statistic while I still believe in African-American boys.<br />
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And I think of that fence.<br />
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I think of the razor wire and the white curves of steel and the message it sends telling everybody who drives by that black youth are killers and need to be locked up this way.<br />
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And I think of how this is how a culture perpetuates racism through solutions disproportionate to the problems. And I think of my students. And I hope they are safe.Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-23099821239529283282014-08-16T15:40:00.002-07:002014-08-16T16:22:22.126-07:00The Teacher Who Taught Me How to Teach<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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As I begin a new school year, I think of the teacher who taught me how to teach. Marianne Weaver.<br />
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The entire educational universe would be a different place if everyone could learn how to teach from Marianne Weaver. In every subject. In every institution. At every grade level. Marianne Weaver is that excellent a teacher.<br />
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I first stepped into Marianne's Muscle Pump class at the YMCA a year after I gave birth.<br />
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I had never lifted weights before in my life, having gone the yoga road through my twenties and early thirties but now suddenly completely uninterested in yoga. I wanted something else. Something tougher. Something that didn't ask me to develop an inner life. If there's anything I'd had enough of in that first year of motherhood, it was interiority, connection with my soul. I wanted pure, unadulterated body.<br />
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When I walked past Marianne's class and heard "Modern English" singing "I'll Stop the World and Melt with You" over a roomful of mostly women holding bars over their heads and moving their hips to the beat like they were holding beach balls, I thought I'd stepped into a Zero-Gravity chamber. I walked in, sweaty from some time on the treadmill, grabbed the gear I saw everyone else had, and I started lifting.<br />
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Most "group exercise" classes I'd tried were parapatetic in their organization: to the beat of techno the instructor rushes students through bits and pieces of routines that left me focusing more on keeping up then actually doing the actions. Marianne had found what worked for me without knowing me. Each song served one muscle group and involved only three or four actions, which I could learn then do while zoning out to the music. <br />
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Her songs were my songs. They were all our songs. Marianne's students loved Marianne's music. And no one loved Marianne's music more than Marianne, who swayed, laughed, and danced while lifting (is that allowed?), and even flirted with the room of us when the lyrics flirted with her. She made working out feel like we were at a slumber party, and she was the one you tried to stay up all night with playing pranks on everybody else but always fell asleep.<br />
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"I know it's getting heavy!" Marianne would say into her headset as we all stood holding our 9 pound bars in front of us for the entire bridge of "China Girl" "It's heavy for the woman standing next to you, too, and if you drop your bar, you'll stop inspiring her, showing her that she can keep holding it--so don't drop that bar. We're going to do this together."<br />
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She wasn't a cheerleader. She wasn't a coach like anything I'd seen before. She wasn't either chipper with encouragement or sadistic with harsh platitudes. She was a philosopher in spandex shorts and t-shirt, sometimes a ball cap. "What does that bar represent to you? Is it your career? Is it your family? Whatever it is, you don't want it to fall, do you?" She connected all the ways we were strong outside the exercise room to what we were doing in it. She built a community out of this hour-long gathering; she made us feel we were on one another's mission, that what we did in that space would determine the outcome of all our efforts between then and the next time we came together.<br />
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And like this, she got us all believing something I myself had never known before: I was strong, and I could get stronger as long as I kept coming to class.<br />
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So unique and effective was Marianne's brand of teaching that when she had to call in a substitute, half of the students just didn't go into class.<br />
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It was the difference between being yelled at for an hour and being supported for an hour.<br />
It was the difference between being challenged to do something and being given a reason to do it.<br />
It was the different between "working out" and "working together."<br />
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I took my Muscle Pump experience with me into my own classroom. In the same ways I had never been told I was strong, my students had never been told they could write or become the kind of person who could pick up a book and really get into it. I understood them better, and I dreamed up ways of getting them to hold their own burdens in a new way, inspiring each other as they did so--because everybody has burdens.<br />
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And our burdens make us strong.<br />
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I now understand that what I witnessed in Marianne's teaching was the difference between the old-school model of scolding and pressure and varying degrees of humiliation and something new, something I had not seen before--but something that definitely worked because I was dancing while doing clean-press-squats and simultaneous leg-lifts and flies.<br />
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That's what a teacher can do: take someone who declares they can't do something and reveal to them they can. Again and again.<br />
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Marianne has left my local YMCA. Those of us in her class see each other from time to time in other settings. We never met for coffee. We didn't develop friendships. We weren't in that space for that kind of community. We were in there to get strong, and when we see each other, we know we are, and we respect each other for what we know we can do.<br />
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So, as the semester begins, as I look over my assessment strategies and syllabi, as I ask myself how high can I raise the bar this time, I picture my students as though we were gathered in that exercise room. And I raise the bar pretty damn high. They can totally do it.<br />
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Thank you, Marianne.<br />
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An added note: Marianne has written a children's book which challenges our children to develop strong vocabularies and strong ethics. If anyone can make our children strong in these ways, it's Marianne. Worked for me.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 20px;">This Is What Love Does - This Is What Love Does is a story about a newspaper delivery girl, named Dubzee, who embarks on an adventure, sharing her gift of selfless love, with the hope of restoring harmony and balance within her surro</span><span class="text_exposed_show" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13.63636302947998px; line-height: 20px;">undings. This story is about values and putting these values into action. The reader is subtly reminded in loving acts of kindness we each have the potential to create a positive impact while understanding we are all connected to something bigger. </span><br />
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<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-21238835377929929542014-08-12T06:52:00.003-07:002014-08-12T21:26:41.560-07:00O Captain: How Dead Poets Society and Robin Williams' Mr. Keating Shaped My Life<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="s1">I saw Dead Poets Society in a theater in Piccadilly Circus in 1989. At the time I was a junior in college, studying theater, literature, and philosophy. My walks to class included passing by the former homes of T.S. Eliot, John Stuart Mill, and Sarah Bernhardt, mirroring my own passions, my own indecisiveness of what I should focus upon. I was acting in a play in a small South Kensington theater, but I was waking up at 3 am with a head full of poems that I'd crawl out my window and write by the streetlamps along Queens Gate Terrace, careful not to wake my room-mates. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">One evening after rehearsal, my director and fellow castmates decided to venture into town to watch a movie. I hadn't ever asked myself what poetry was or considered it to be something of a great gift. I had written it forever and belonged to it and loved it as one feels love for something always there yet forever surprising. But I walked out of the movie with a very clear view of what I would devote my life to, something that would entail all my passions, including theatre and philosophy, and cost me nothing if I held to it fast enough. </span><br />
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<span class="s1">"There's a time for daring and there's a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for," says Robin Williams' character, the beloved Mr. Keating. I finished the play, but after that I gave my life to poetry. And to teaching. Ten years later, I was hired to teach English at Christ School, an Episcopal boarding school for, yes, boys here in Asheville (well, Arden). </span>For ten years I was "that" teacher, the one that spoke of poetry as sacrament, the one that got the boys dashing through the forest dressed in fake fur and mud enacting scenes from Beowulf, the one to whom the boys still send the occasional poem, penned through tears after a break-up. When a new department chair published an article entitled, "An Arsenal of Strategies for Teaching Boys How to Attack Poems," I knew my days of reading "Tintern Abbey" on the branches of a 250 year old oak or <i>Midsummer Night's Dream</i> under the arbors dripping with bees and wisteria were running out.<br />
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Dead Poets Society is a cautionary tale, warning teachers and students alike about the dangers of a life lived at the core of passion, a life lived "deliberately." This excusing of the poetic life from any "pragmatic (a term so often used to escape the aesthetic, when in fact aesthetic consideration is necessary when looking from all sides, no?)" course extends to this day. I can safely say, though, that in ten years spent teaching boys in the Keating Style of Barbaric YAWP-ing, all of my boys survived.<br />
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Twenty five years after seeing a movie that warns against routing out "all that was not life," I still teach in a way that lets knowledge infuse life with meaning and not stay dead on the page, and I still write. I have not abided by the Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D., scale of poetry, as the gruff headmaster commands Mr. Keating do, and I have a full, rich, beautiful, caring, and meaningful life. It takes courage to live such a life, to gather the rosebuds, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. There have been temptations to surrender to an idle kingship. But what kingdom would I rule?<br />
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Dead Poets Society and Robin Williams' performance accomplished the near impossible: into the material heyday of the 1980s, the film stirred a subversive and life-affirming message: live for beauty. That Neil's dad couldn't stand to see his son crowned with ivy and sprinkling water upon lovers' dream-cast faces is the warning any of us face when moved to contribute beauty to the world: a fear of pissing off Dad. But Mr. Perry (the actor of which played Mork's love's Mindy's dad in the actor's TV debut) sees the smoke rise from the cold space behind the stentorian desk and learns the ultimate lesson about life-force for which the film framed poetry to be the very voice. The film said this is a voice that should not be taken from the world, not for all the money in it.<br />
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Thinking through all the actors who might have played Mr. Keating, none comes to mind as any so well-equipped with the depth and joy and mysterious beautiful sorrow and beauty of Robin Williams. If as Mr. Keating says, "No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world," then so can powerful performances. This one absolutely not only changed my life but set its course, so I say from my heart, "O Captain. My Captain."<br />
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-23596169370299790072014-08-07T16:50:00.000-07:002014-08-08T08:30:16.406-07:00Ten Responses to "Do You Read Thomas Wolfe?" That Won't Make You Sound Like an Idiot<div style="background-color: white; color: grey; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, 'lucida grande', tahoma, verdana, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 11.818181991577148px; line-height: 13.963635444641113px; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top: 1em;">
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As Thomas Wolfe becomes increasingly famous, again, and as Asheville rises with the Wolfean tide, again, here are some responses to the question, "Have you read Wolfe?" that won't make you sound like an idiot, even if you don't read Wolfe. The key here is to avoid saying, "His sentences are too long."</div>
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10. The Planned Engagement:<br />
Like a lot of people of my generation, I haven't come across much Wolfe. I plan to pick up a copy of the short stories. Do you have a favorite?</div>
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9. The Deflection:<br />
Oh, you like Wolfe! You can tour his house here! It's just over there on Market Street. You can also stand in his shoes. They've been bronzed!</div>
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8. The Shut Down:<br />
I have indeed! I've read every word, and the journals, and the letters, as well as multiple published versions of Look Homeward, Angel. I found O Lost to be much more satsifying and loved reading the two side by side, highlighting the altered passages. My dream is to spend a summer thumbing through the original drafts, all two million words of them.</div>
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7. The Shame<br />
Oh, you know, living here in Asheville, with so many descendants of the actual characters in Look Homeward walking around, teaching your kids, running the florists and being doctors and all, it's a bit bad of form to read Wolfe. If you do read him while you're here in town, it's best to keep it on the sly. Like a speakeasy, only for books. A read-easy, if you will. We'd be wise not to talk about it further, not in the open like this.</div>
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6. The Passion:<br />
I had a girlfriend who loved reading Wolfe, and we read Of Time and River while we backpacked around Europe back in the 80s. It was the best few weeks of my life, then she dumped me on the Rhine for a Spanish soccer player, and I threw my copy overboard. It's now all soggy at the base of the Lorelei. But I loved every word of it. (Sigh heavily til interlocutor changes subject to avoid your total breakdown)</div>
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5. The Scholar:<br />
At this time, I'm more interested in the criticism surrounding Wolfe. (Then just wait . . . you probably are safe from further engagement. If you discover you are not, run.)</div>
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4. The Side Step<br />
Wolfe is such a stunning asset to American literature, and it's exciting to see his legacy revived. While it's been some time since I read You Can't Go Home Again, there's no doubt that it's one of the greatest books in the English language. I just wish they hadn't changed the name from Eugene Gant to George Weber. (interlocutor here will no doubt enjoy a monologue espousing his or her shared sentiments; conversation will very likely veer into the editing narrative, which you can happily let interlocutor control at no expense to your literary profile)</div>
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3. The Techscuse:</div>
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I think all my technology usage has made my brain incapable of reading Wolfe the way it's meant to be read, which I understand is to allow time for each paragraph to wash over you, each sentence to take form in your mind before you move on to the next. I'm eager to remedy this, but my job requires me to be plugged in all the time. (yes, this is dangerously close to "the sentences are too long," but it has a reflective context. Interlocutor might even pity you then walk on)</div>
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2. The Sentimental Journey:</div>
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My father used to read Wolfe to me when I was a kid. I still have his copy of Look Homeward, Angel, all beaten up from his college days. I pick it up from time to time, but it makes me very nostalgic, which I suppose Wolfe would have wanted.</div>
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1. The Best Answer:</div>
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I am two-thirds of the way through Look Homeward, Angel now. I read it at his grave for an hour each day over in Montford, when the weather's nice, and on the porch of the house, if it's raining. With a thermos of coffee and a flask of Makers.</div>
Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-48813653509525492112014-07-21T12:06:00.003-07:002014-07-21T18:48:40.522-07:00The Rise of Valerie Macon<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span class="s1">THE RISE OF VALERIE MACON</span></div>
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<span class="s1">(to the tune of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald")</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The legend lives on from the Catawba on down,<br />
Of the poet named laureate by McCrory,<br />
Folks said O Brother. No one had heard of her,<br />
Not a song, a poem, or story.<br />
Of the governor and crew, none of them knew<br />
Anyone reads this weird stuff they called poetry.<br />
The post it was said was every bit as good as dead,<br />
And he appointed a woman named Valerie.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">(slide guitar in mournful sea chanty moan of Lake Superior)</span></div>
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<span class="s1">The Laurel is the pride of the Creative side,<br />
For whom the work of the words is of value.<br />
The craft of the verse seems obsessive at first<br />
But like love it serves to enthrall you.<br />
And from Valerie’s pen flowed the truth of men<br />
In lines that felt as they fell like renewal.<br />
This was the gift of the poetic shift,<br />
A storm in the soul that will call you.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">(slide guitar in mournful sea chanty moan of Lake Superior)</span></div>
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<span class="s1">When the press release came, the voices weren’t tame<br />
That questioned the governor’s decision.<br />
There was protocol in place and credentials to name<br />
He’d completely ignored for some reason.<br />
From Hendersonville high to Okracoke low<br />
The poets posted on Facebook their questions.<br />
Then the Monitor and then NPR<br />
Gave North Carolina poetry their full attention.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Meanwhile at her desk, our poet laureate,<br />
Valerie Macon, deleted her website.<br />
Erased any clue of any image she once drew<br />
With words that had given her delight.<br />
The poems she loved, felt had come from above<br />
Now trapped her in the harshest of spotlights.<br />
For overnight fame was never good when it came<br />
On the wings of a politician’s oversight.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Things had been quiet on the poetry side.<br />
And since school it'd been easy to avoid it.<br />
But now passions flared and the Governor was scared.<br />
He thought it would be easier than this to destroy it<br />
Within a matter of hours, he came down from his tower<br />
And said Everyone can be a poet.<br />
Like this he'd deregulate the Arts of the state.<br />
By taking them into his pocket.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">For seven long day’s neath the nauseating haze<br />
Of the governor’s unceasing hubris.<br />
Valerie’s pen beckoned Please use me again,<br />
It wasn’t your idea to do this.<br />
But Poetry’s shy when it’s been crushed by the sky.<br />
It’s not something on the ego’s to-do list.<br />
It’s a soul-given task, a beloved craft,<br />
And McCrory’s great stunt abused it.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Now, poets are called hostile and cold<br />
Instead of peaceful folk who like language.<br />
Professor and King are for him kinda the same thing<br />
And they needed to go out with the garbage.<br />
Yet under it all, there’s yet this constant, wild call<br />
Like a prayer that's as old as the ages.<br />
The storm now has passed, and the poets all ask<br />
Valerie, won’t you please come and write with us.</span></div>
Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-88056836707576807752014-06-03T21:53:00.003-07:002014-06-03T21:53:16.425-07:00MAGNIFY<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BStoWsML4Io/U46mGAvUDcI/AAAAAAAAAsI/tTqPFTl_Qv0/s1600/10375020_10152447436093698_2089414299699736774_n+(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BStoWsML4Io/U46mGAvUDcI/AAAAAAAAAsI/tTqPFTl_Qv0/s1600/10375020_10152447436093698_2089414299699736774_n+(1).jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"> for James Shaver</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">I want to live every moment as a promise unbroken and</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">flowing to my grandfather who when we walked to water pump</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">In the park in Orillia looked up and announced in his French</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">Canadian ancestry, “Quelle mélange de couleur” and I asked</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">him what he’d said and he, being deaf and understanding</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">the question to mean I hadn’t heard him, repeated it en</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">Francais and I somehow understood him the second time</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">and didn’t need to hear it the third. Language is its own</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">water underneath the earth of thought.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">From his deafness, now my deafness, he only spoke to</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">illuminate, to magnify some lost treasure the rest of us</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">were missing. Family arguments died under the blade</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">of a Shakespeare quote. Rough waters calmed. “You</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">going to be a poet, pet?” he asked as we clipped the wet</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">laundry onto the line between their cottage and the next.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">There was only one correct answer and I said it, cool cotton</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">heavy in my hands one minute, dancing in the sunlight</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">the next.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">“Genius,” he called me after Alzheimer’s had stolen my</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">name. “Poet,” he stroked my hands as I tried to feed him</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">cranberry juice through a straw he refused. I watched</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">prose dissolve into poetry under the overwhelming tide</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">of mind-loss, beginning the moment he locked his keys</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">in the car without setting the brake so it rolled into the</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">ocean. He stood and watched it, then announced we’d</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">be walking home that day. </span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">There is, he told me, years before, an eloquence</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">to silence, perhaps my hardest lesson as we knelt in the</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">canoe and pushed off from the Simcoe beach, the water</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">droplets our paddles carried over the surface the only sound.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">A whirlpool’s hush from a J-Stroke kept us straight. In the silence</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">he taught me the depth of life, interminable, exhausting. Those</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">evenings we paddled for hours. And when we returned, I had</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">the golden feeling of nothing having happened of value. But he</span></div>
<br />
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">would assure me in his long wordless strides something beautiful had.</span></div>
Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-66090343047350694652014-03-13T05:19:00.003-07:002014-03-13T16:50:00.473-07:00Narrative Medicine . . . Narrative Everything<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v36Na_Ihi_s/UyGiLcER7oI/AAAAAAAAApM/_vSTjgZj2t8/s1600/imgres.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-v36Na_Ihi_s/UyGiLcER7oI/AAAAAAAAApM/_vSTjgZj2t8/s1600/imgres.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
Last February I attended the Columbia University Narrative Medicine workshop led by Dr. Rita Charon and the remarkable faculty of the Columbia Program in Narrative Medicine. I had heard about Narrative Medicine while showing a Lee Gutkind video to my Creative Nonfiction students at The Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative at Lenoir-Rhyne, the M.A. program I direct and get to see unfold. Gutkind was listing the subgenres and applications of CNF. When he said "Narrative Medicine," I knew I'd found my next fascination.<br />
<br />
In Narrative Medicine, care providers develop narrative competence, the ability to recognize, interpret, metabolize, and be moved by stories.<br />
<br />
<i>Be moved by stories.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Something happens when a group of people get together and close-read a story or a poem. It isn't a book club, though book clubs are awesome. It isn't a class, though classes are awesome. It is a community moment, one where strangers move through an experience together and are transformed in the process.<br />
<br />
In reading the story, we are not allowed to self-relate the material. We aren't here to talk about ourselves. We aren't here to make it about us.<br />
<br />
Instead, we stay close to the text. Everything that is spoken is drawn directly from what is on the page. In this manner we identify the plot, the context/frame, the literary devices at work, the temporal scaffolding, and the desire of the story. We catch ourselves drifting into our own stories then remind one another to keep focused on someone else's, the story told on the page.<br />
<br />
This is the seed of the empathic training found in narrative medicine.<br />
<br />
We are not here to show how smart we are, how well we can read, or how well we can analyze literature. It isn't English class. We are here to be moved, to indulge our humility, to allow a story to change us.<br />
<br />
To allow this, we let our guards down. We make guesses at meaning, we bumble about with literary terms, we discover together passages that we might have skimmed when reading at home but which suddenly become revelatory in their significance.<br />
<br />
We expand the story among us, each of us at the table offering a new observation. We contradict and enter the contradictions with the humility of awe and wonder.<br />
<br />
The way stories were "taught" in school led to quizzes, right and wrong answers.<br />
This is different. There are no wrong answers, only new possibilities.<br />
<br />
People who are charged with the responsibility of knowing and certainty indulge the paradoxical and confounding. We are made to feel comfortable in this space, which then prepares us for these spaces as they occur off the page, in day-to-day situations and stories.<br />
<br />
This is Narrative Medicine.<br />
All life is a story. In these sessions, we discover how to read it.<br />
<br />
The next session is March 18 at Lenoir-Rhyne Asheville. The story and free registration is here:<br />
http://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=10422474903<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><br /></i>Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-72292475019564620532013-07-13T08:40:00.002-07:002013-07-13T08:45:29.068-07:00A Resolution for the City of Asheville Written After Seeing a Group of Singers Disbanded Because the Crowd Became Too Large<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FduS5XEE33Q/UeF0ZDPY0gI/AAAAAAAAAho/hAh8a_bDd1g/s1600/asheville-skyline.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="212" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FduS5XEE33Q/UeF0ZDPY0gI/AAAAAAAAAho/hAh8a_bDd1g/s320/asheville-skyline.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-size: x-small;">photo: Derekolsonphotography.com</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville situates itself in one of the most beautiful locations in the world, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville’s founding visionaries E.W. Grove, Fred Seely, George Vanderbilt, Thomas Wadley Raoul were all devotees to the Aesthetic Age which embraced a certain wildness of spirit and allowance for Beauty, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville’s preserved architecture was designed by the masters of the Aesthetic Age finding in Asheville an open space in which to practice the new “Fine Art” that elevated people's character through proportionate balance of order and the unforeseen, and</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, City of Asheville’s favorite son Thomas Wolfe bore witness to the passion and Beauty of the city in words so powerful William Faulkner named him the greatest writer of their generation, and the City did not listen, and </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville’s brickwork of former slaves and their sons create visual music of jazz and blues in the very makings of our buildings, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, City of Asheville father Tony Lord saw fit to plant trees along Haywood Street and other streets so the city would remain connected to the natural world even in the midst of growth, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville stands on Cherokee hunting grounds that yet speak to us of bear and deer and elk, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville was devised by Masonic observation of there being a necessity for mystery and wonder in the fabric of the buildings that reflect the fabric of the earth, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville’s musicians and the artists attract visitors and new residents more than any other attractors, save the earth the city stands upon, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville is comprised of humans who love to dance and enjoy life with all the vivacity and joy being human is the rite of, and</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville is made up of dreamers and poets who do and do not write poetry but who always dream, and</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville is a difficult mix of spirit and matter and of people who see the world in terms of both spirit and matter in different proportions, assigning different values to each, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville’s leaders and law-enforcers are all human and also love to dance and enjoy the city’s romantic and creative offerings, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville is as informed by the wilderness of the Appalachians as it is by rules and laws and governance that may or may not respect the wilderness of the Appalachians which is permeative and inviolate in all of us, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville is a nexus of healing, art, and commerce, and in all of these are woven the currency of life and all that supports life, including fun and upredictablility, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville is never immune to the wonders of creative energy, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, creative energy can at times seem a threat to structures and ordinances man-made and imposed in effort to maintain order out of fear that things might go too far, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, creative energy is not a threat to order if order is dynamic and well-conceived and acknowledging of the human need for delight, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas in all things, even in the City of Asheville, joy is the order by which the soul abides and does not deter, destroy, or harm anyone, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, the City of Asheville was, in fact, created as a place for play, respite, escape, and indulgence in pleasure found less availing in other cities, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Whereas, that spirit of play will forever define the City of Asheville,</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Let it be resolved that the City of Asheville be unafraid of romance and creativity as these elements express themselves in the actions and words of its citizens and that the City of Asheville embrace and celebrate, through allowance and trust of practioners of these elements, rather than constrain and attempt to control them through dissipation and exclusion, and</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Let it be resolved that the City of Asheville is comfortable with and honoring of Beauty in all its forms and will relax in its presence to permit the spirit of the City to surface and enjoy itself unhindered at any time of day or night.</span></div>
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<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-39545503178230959052013-07-04T11:09:00.003-07:002013-07-05T05:47:10.886-07:00A Note to the NC Legislature Regarding MY MENSTRUAL CYCLE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YfvYr7vQqMA/UdW4qzYCqZI/AAAAAAAAAhY/zRGfztCC1Xc/s1600/bodystuff.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YfvYr7vQqMA/UdW4qzYCqZI/AAAAAAAAAhY/zRGfztCC1Xc/s320/bodystuff.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Dear NC House,<br />
<br />
I am certain it is my fault, this recent flurry of women's-reproductive-rights-deflating activity. Because I am a woman, and, as you well know, since the Fall of Man, pretty much everything has been my fault.<br />
<br />
The lack of jobs? My fault. Had I only had the sense to hand in my riveter and overalls after the boys came home from the war, and returned to vacuuming, which once had given me so much joy, we would not have the job crisis we have today.<br />
<br />
The S & L crisis (not SNL, as a friend had to point out to me last week)? I'm sure it's my fault, too, since it seems only women such as Martha Stewart seem to do any time for any questionable Wall Street activity, just as racism is probably my fault, too, since it seems only women such as Paula Deen (not that I defend her but I've seen worse from Donald Trump) seem to suffer any consequences for their ideas while of course men are forgiven because they are, after all, only men.<br />
<br />
So, it must be my fault as well that you know so little about my body.<br />
<br />
And this I understand. See?<br />
<br />
Ever since I got my first period at the age of 12--I'm sorry I haven't told you that before. Yes, 12, while my family was traveling in Europe, also the summer of my first kiss, see how it all goes together? Anyway--ever since I got my first period, I have been very careful to hide it from you.<br />
<br />
In accordance with standard grocery store scripture I have gone to the "baby" aisle to buy my "women's" products which are safely hidden from men's view. I have secretly -- oh so secretly -- stood in conversation with people in public, men and women, while my body felt as though a stegasaurus was being pushed through a fallopian tube then coached to claw my uterine lining from its place during monthly cramp time. I have bled in your presence, and you've not known a thing.<br />
<br />
Even knowing that women in the Netherlands get three days off work, paid, to accommodate their monthly "visitor," "Aunt Spot," "Visit from Mother Nature," their "MENSES," I have taken perhaps one day off in my entire working career even if I had a hot water bottle curled up in my lap under my blazer and skirt and had to wrap a cardigan around my waist to move around the office because it was one of those, ahem, heavy flow days.<br />
<br />
I have used entire tree's worth of toilet paper to wrap and wrap and wrap and wrap . . . and wrap my blood-tinged feminine products to prevent another human being from having to witness the fact that I am a woman, and I bleed, when visiting at friends' or using a public restroom to preserve the illusion that I am not human at all.<br />
<br />
My baby was born entirely from an ideological perspective that has nothing to do with my body.<br />
<br />
So, I understand exactly why it can seem so permissible to you to draw lines across it, to discuss"it" in strange detail as an "it," and not an "I" or "She," because I have kept you in the dark all these years, preserving all this "feminine mystery" in hopes that at last, if I am obedient enough, if I never speak of my body, you will forget I have one and I will be free to live inside it as myself.<br />
<br />
But this contract seems not to be working.<br />
<br />
I think this idealogical division between "women's health" and actual "women," is the very result of my acquiescence. As your teacher in grade-through-high school I should not have hidden the fact that I was ovulating from you. I should have laid down the chalk/dry-erase marker/laser pointer, and have placed both hands over my ovaries and applied gentle pressure as the millions of little follicles worked to emit a singular teensy tiny egg.<br />
<br />
I should have kept a cot in all the offices where I worked so when I felt thunder in my uterus, I could have simply told you I am having my period today and it fucking hurts when you talk to me.<br />
<br />
I should have not pretended to be enjoying dinner on dates with you when I had a 103 degree adhesive heating element stuck to the belly of my granny panties just so I could bear being upright.<br />
<br />
I should have worn pads at the beach. Better, I should have let it run down my legs as I emerged all beautiful and bikini'd from the raw ocean which soothed me.<br />
<br />
Because you wanted to admire me as a woman, I should have told you the whole truth of being one.<br />
<br />
Then all of this wouldn't be such a mystery.<br />
<br />
I wouldn't have deprived you of this opportunity to develop empathy for me, your sister-in-species.<br />
<br />
You would perhaps then understand that for one week of 12 months a year for 32 years, I have gone through more pain than all your semi-finals-reaching high school football team player buddies combined, each month, and that all this qualifies me quite well to decide what I do and do not want passing through my cervix, whether it be you, blood, or a baby.<br />
<br />
So, I hope you will accept my apologies.<br />
<br />
I think you needed this body narrative all along. So here it is.<br />
<br />
I am having terrible cramps today, and because it is 4th of July I am thankful to have a day of rest, to feel each one of them pound through my pelvis, a sort of reminder that I am a woman keeping time, I am the earth's pulse, and I have the power of giving birth if I choose to do so, and also that I am attuned to the phases of the moon and have the gift of intuition and a lot of other stuff that freaks you out because I also don't talk about all that stuff nearly enough.<br />
<br />
As you can see in the photo above, I have purchased, from the secret girl section of the grocery store my "Always" Ultra Thin pads and a great big bottle of Pamprin. The pads soak up the blood, in case you didn't know. The pills help quiet the cramps and lessen bloat. You know about bloat, don't you? It's when you puff up like a balloon and feel you might, at any moment, burst. But don't worry. You only feel like you've gained 20 pounds. Everyone else seems to think I look fine. But thanks for asking.<br />
<br />
I will send another report in 28 days.<br />
<br />
<br />Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18318416.post-73779048011187797552013-07-01T08:07:00.001-07:002013-07-01T08:07:20.887-07:00ODE TO JOY<div class="p1" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="s1"><b>Ode to Joy</b></span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m2WUWwdRahY/UdGacKOJa-I/AAAAAAAAAhI/BqOrbdn_cuw/s284/images-4.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="249" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-m2WUWwdRahY/UdGacKOJa-I/AAAAAAAAAhI/BqOrbdn_cuw/s400/images-4.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">O God! – you have no threefold being and are independent of everything, you are the true, eternal, blessed, unchangeable light of all time and space. . . You are present throughout the whole world and sustain all things. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> A translation by Beethoven of Hindu text*</span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The moon begins below the water, always.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In all things, it begins this way, the left hand the rhythm in</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">an enduring lunar pulse that pulls and draws,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">attracts and yields, however far the right hand ventures</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">closer to the sun then to return, then to succumb</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and venture deeper.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the wall of the dining room in Lawrence Park, Toronto, </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the old, nameless upright stood.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sheet music ragged, yellowed, the notes blackened</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">by endless playings, peeked out from inside the wooden bench</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">like the slivers of sun during an eclipse. The only piece</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">my mother played was the Pathetique, and its horrible chords</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">born of the same first material as the moon itself,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">as the heart itself, as the soul itself, poured out through the home</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">drawing everything inside of them, almost as though inside of her</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">who otherwise was chipper and always home. Home, though,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">when she played, was her world, a burgeoning shoulder of genius</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">edging out the domestic and the doomed. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When my hands could reach an octave I chose to play Moonlight.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Teachers after-schooled me in “Big Chief Crazy Horse” and “See the Bear</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">on the Two Feet Begging for a Bite to Eat,” which I played in recitals</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">wearing a pink dress. But in secret I collected the names of notes, that limited alphabet</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of limitlessness, and carried them home to that wall, that piano darker than night</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and began the metamorphosis of girl into woman at the age of eight.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It would be my song. My place to put things that never made any sense.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My survival, and after a time, my Joy once I learned to see what Joy is:</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">something belonging never to us, but only to the soul.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Beethoven translated two passages from Hindu prayer.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The Illuminati dissolved by the time he was 14, he found his own path</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">to Elysium and scored it with sand and ink, wax and fire. Moving deeper</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">under the water, he rose. Churned the emotions of the godhead into sound, </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">he was Arjuna engaging the battle that carries him inward all the way to God.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Each sonata was another move from light to illumination.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For <i>Ode to Joy</i>, Beethoven used the words of a poem by Schiller, an Illuminati text:</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Those who dwell in the great circle,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pay homage to sympathy!</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It leads to the stars,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Where the Unknown reigns.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="s1"></span><br /></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The cannons at the end are the musical equivalent of <i>Bhagavad-Gita</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Book Four. But what I hold to, still, what holds me the most, in his deaf</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">hands lowering me into the water so gently, like a lover who knows</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the works of my mind so far down, so sounding me that all the notes</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">flow inward, it is the Moonlight’s first movement, the depth of inspiration</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">occluding all surface appearance, that I go into. And it is religion because </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of its awful longing that meets the soul below the space it speaks from</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and carresses it into light. To play it is dreadfully uncomfortable even</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">after nearly thirty years. I’m not that good, and it reminds me I’m even</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">worse, but that’s the lesson of Beethoven. To know perfection is to never</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">possess it, but to work the hands’ skills as they are given, to when the wrong</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">note is played not stand and move from the piano to something so much easier,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">but to stay. The piano wants to be played, and the wrong note pleases the soul. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Discord pleases the soul so much that Beethoven built the discord into the music. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He left some notes for only the soul to play, for us to encounter it there on the page</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and ask, “No, this can’t be right?”And it is right. And the wrong notes</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">open the questions into minor keys that once corrected are still minor until</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the third measure of the second page when the hands land on major</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">again, and for a moment there is knowing, there is correctness, but there’s</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">no God. So he descends us. Again. And this submersion is a sequence of</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the soul’s work, a beautiful subtraction of the certainty the hands must</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">learn to play so the heart can walk in this world, unafraid of the unknown.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The unknown takes practice, and the piece therefore is complicated. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To learn to play this, says Beethoven, (me, having written the question</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">in one of those little notebooks), is to learn how to love.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He didn’t care much for people but gave his life to serving humanity.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“How can I not believe in God when I work so closely with him everyday?” he said.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And that God was the God he bore into using notes like tools for gently</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">brushing away the cosmos. </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fitting this into a small, antique upright in a dining room, my mother</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">work flare denim jeans and a black turtleneck. It was Toronto in the 1970s,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and the boatswain whistle hung round her neck, a model for what my parents</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">saw as a sideline business as my father sought fellowships for research.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The world was disco, but the home was piano. When it was silent,</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">everything was known and certain and would last forever. Snow covered</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the spruce in winter. The spruce re-appeared in Spring. The driveway </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">was gravel. The house was made of brick. It had Red shutters. The address:</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">125 St. Leonards Avenue, the patron saint of chefs, captive women, and wounded</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">animals. French lessons on Wednesdays. Dinner: roast beef on Sunday.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But when she played, the whole of it trembled as the Unknown entered</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">the house, and taking a seat on the leather couches they brought with us </span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">back from England, spread its arms wide and carried us all down into Heaven.</span></span></div>
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<span class="s1"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">*</span></span><i style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Beethoven’s Letters with explanatory notes by Dr. A.C. Kalischer</i><span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> (trans. J.S. Shedlock), 1926.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #999999; font-family: arial; font-size: 10px; line-height: 13.796875px;">Photo: Rex Features</span></div>
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Laura Hope-Gillhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10347335754592712722noreply@blogger.com0