Monthly Archives: April 2012

Identifying a Civil War Soldier

Posted on by
6

For those interested in Civil War history, there’s a marvelous story on NPR.org today.  A collector and his family donated 1,000 photographs of enlisted soldiers from North and South to the Library of Congress, and reporter, Ramona Martinez tells of her quest to learn the identity of one of these men who intrigued her with his flamboyant uniform and dashing pose.  You can read the story and see the photograph here:  http://www.npr.org/2012/04/11/150288978/unknown-no-more-identifying-a-civil-war-soldier.

The collector, Tom Liljenquist, gave Martinez her first clue, pointing out that the young soldier had carved his initials, T.A., into the stock of his rifle.  At the West Point Museum, Martinez learned that the Zouave-like uniform belonged to just one regiment, the 14th Brooklyn, sometimes called the “Red Legged Devils, for the bright red pants they wore.  The 14th Brooklyn served in some of the fiercest fights of the war, including Antietam and Gettysburg

Martinez plugged this information into the National Park Service’s Civil War Database http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers.cfm, and found just four men with initials, T.A., in the regiment.  A National Archives researcher helped her narrow it down to two possibilities.  Armed with vital statistics, including the height of the men, Martinez found an antiques dealer in Gettysburg who owned a musket like the one shown in the photograph.  Using the gun as a yardstick, they identified the soldier as Thomas Ardies, who stood 5′ 4 1/2″ tall.

Ardies was wounded at Chancellorsville, but survived the war.  He emigrated to Canada, where pension record notes, “He was always considered a bachelor by all who knew him in the community where he was widely known and most respected.”  Ardies married at age 75, five years before his death, and is buried in Ontario.

Those who have followed this blog for a while know I am fascinated by Civil War history.  Ramona Martinez search for the details of one private soldier’s life highlight an area that’s not as well known as the stories of generals and major campaigns.

I wonder a lot about the lives of private soldiers, during and after the war.  The battles were as horrendous as those of the First World War fifty years later, but history does not record a “lost generation” after the earlier conflict.  Bitterness, economic hardship, and instances of violence,yes, but not the world-weariness that characterized veterans of later wars.  More Viet Nam veterans died of suicide after the war than were lost on the battlefields – nothing like that happened after the Civil War.

We always see history through the filter of our own sensibility.  It’s easy for us to believe the casual brutality we find in the pages of Cold Mountain. It’s harder to imagine the idealism we see in pictures of men like Thomas Ardies.  Maybe that’s why the old photographs are so haunting.

Give It Away to Keep It

Posted on by
8

The title of this post comes from Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, who tried repeatedly to get sober and only succeeded when he helped another problem drinker.  “In order to keep it, you have to give it away,” became an AA motto.

The title could have just as well come from Lama Thubten Yeshe who said, “According to Buddhist psychology, unless you dedicate yourself to others, you will never be happy.”

I could have quoted Jesus:  “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.” (Lk 17:33).

In my previous post, I tried to name something distressing I sense as part of the vibe of our time:  “a miasma of anger and greed, driven by fear and disillusionment.”  When I wrote it, I was recalling a couple of drivers I’d seen playing chicken for parking places earlier that day.  Gotta get mine – there might not be enough to go around.

In psychology, anger is understood as a “secondary emotion.”  The question becomes, what is hidden beneath the anger?  In a lot of cases, I think it is fear, which also drives greed:  it’s a jungle out there; a dog-eat-dog world;  a zero sum game.

Back in the eighties, before the Berlin wall came down, a retired military officer told me that if the Russians prevailed, they would soon “arrive on your doorstep and take all your private property.”  We still operate from that mindset; fill in the blank with the name of your favorite villain(s).

The problem is, fear and scarcity-consciousness often lead to bad decisions, individually and collectively.  During the 30’s, Paramahansa Yogananda taught that generosity creates a “prosperity consciousness” that is one of the keys to surviving difficult times.  He believed we attract what we hold in our minds, and he told a story that illustrates where grasping can lead:

In villages near the jungles in India, farmers used a simple trap to capture monkeys, a favorite source of meat. They would drill a hole in a gourd, just big enough for the monkey’s hand to pass through, then fill the gourd with rice and attach it to a stake.  When a monkey happened along, it would reach in and grab a fist full of rice and find it couldn’t withdraw its fist. The villagers would have it.  The monkey would die because it couldn’t let go of a handful of rice.

With that story in mind, and because everyone I want to emulate comes down on the side of generosity and letting go, perhaps I can trust the universe to provide me a parking place.  And take it from there and see where it leads…

An Era-less Era?

Posted on by
4

A critique group friend gives me back issues of The New York Times Book Review.  In the stack she gave me this week, I found a provocative article in the March 11, edition called “Convergences,” by Douglas Coupland.

Coupland noticed something unexpected during TV coverage of the 10th anniversary of 9/11:  nothing appeared very different than it had a decade ago.  The clothes, the cars, the hair, seemed pretty much the same.  This led him to speculate that:  “…we appear to have entered an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once – a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet.  No particular era now dominates.  We live in a post-era era without forms of it’s own powerful enough to brand the times.”

He then says, “The zeitgeist of 2012 is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist.” (To Coupland’s credit, he does a mea culpa for this sentence).  He goes on to say there is something “psychically sparse” about the present, and writers and artists are creating new strategies to track it.  He then reviews Gods Without Men by Hari Kunzru, and calls it an example of “translit,” a new genre that fractures time and space while telling a single story.  In other words, it isn’t time-travel, or intercut parallel tales, like Pulp Fiction, but a singular narrative that unfolds all over the map.

Yet if Translit is a new genre, Once Upon A Time, a popular TV program, got there before Gods Without Men.   Though it doesn’t have as many sub-stories, structurally it’s the same.  Maybe part of our zeitgeist is a world where highbrow and lowbrow forms are equally likely sources of innovation.  (That sentence, containing the word, “zeitgeist,” was payback).

Once Upon A Time

Besides, who says this decade lacks “forms of its own powerful enough to brand the times?”

OK, when I was in grade school, my nightmares were not of winding up naked in public, but in my pajamas [this is true], so this particular fashion crime draws my attention.  But my reason for this post isn’t cultural artifacts – it’s something I’ve wondered about for a long time, that Coupland’s article brought to mind:  how and when the distinctive feel of a decade is formed?

Sometimes there’s a distinctive moment.  What we know as “the sixties” started the day John F. Kennedy was shot.  The last decade began on September 11.

Some decades don’t start with a single event; at a certain point, everyone simply knows the times have changed.  The eighties began when the good times started to roll.  In our current decade, something is rolling, but not good times.  We sense it, though it doesn’t yet have a name.  Read the paper or turn on the news, and you find a miasma of anger and greed, driven by fear and disillusionment.

This morning, with my coffee, I read details of how the New Orleans Saints bounties for injured opponents especially targeted head shots, even as overwhelming evidence points to concussive injuries as the source of higher than average rates of dementia in retired NFL players.  A little while ago I read of women arguing over a Facebook profile outside a waffle house.  Police arrived after shots were fired.  No external foe can destroy us, but we are doing pretty well on our own.

Lately politicians have been touting “American Exceptionalism.”  I first came across the term in Andrew Bacevich’s book, The Limits of Power:  The End of American Exceptionalism, 2008.  Both the politicians and Bacevich mean economic, political, and military superiority, things no country ever retains indefinitely, though they all believe they will when they have it.

President Obama got in trouble for speaking the truth when he said every nation thinks it’s exceptional.  Every nation has the potential to be, if you think in terms of character.  In those terms, our story might fall in the Translit genre – a narrative told across long reaches of time and place.  This decade would be a chapter set deep in the second act, when things are cascading downhill from bad to worse.  The darkness is pretty thick.  Who knows how the story is going to end?

Impending Doom?

Posted on by
9

A bright spring morning after days of clouds and rain. A good night’s sleep. So why did I wake with a sense of impending doom?  There are no foreboding events on the horizon.  I haven’t violated any obvious rules of mental hygiene, i.e., I don’t stay up late watching slasher movies.  A few times in the past, such uneasiness has preceded nasty events, but not very often.

I did some yoga and meditation, which helped but didn’t dispel the mood.  What I really wanted to do was get outdoors, so I took a walk at a local park.  Afterwards, I felt like a cup of coffee and went to Starbucks.

As I sat down, a man who looked vaguely familiar said, “Morgan?”

I couldn’t quite place him and had to ask his name.  Turns out he and I were friends almost 25 years ago.  He went to work for the state, and I started taking night classes after work, and we lost touch.  I thought he had moved away, but he still lives where he did back then, little over a mile away as the crow flies.

We talked for a while and traded phone numbers.  He said he built a boat and mentioned fishing.  I thought of baseball once the season starts.  The sense of impending doom was gone.  And yet, if it hadn’t been there when I got up…

I wouldn’t have gone to the park…
and would have made coffee at home…
so I wouldn’t have been at Starbucks to cross paths with an old friend.

When I really pay attention, I find I do not understand how anything works.

Fairytales for Midlife

Posted on by
Reply

Joseph Campbell’s groundbreaking series, “The Power of Myth,” broadcast on PBS in 1988, sparked a tremendous interest in myth and folklore.  A number of fine studies followed during the next few years.  One of my favorites was a series of books on fairytales by Allan B. Chinen, a San Francisco psychiatrist.  In his second book, Once Upon a Midlife, 1992, Chinen discusses stories about the problems and tasks that face us in middle age, “when the Prince goes bald and the Princess has a midlife crisis.”

once upon a midlife

Of the 5,000 fairytales from around the world that Chinen reviewed, 90% were “youth tales,” aimed at young people trying to find their place in the world.  The protagonists leave home, struggle to find their courage, fall love, find a treasure, and come into their kingdom or find a job.  Chinen calls the other 10%, “middle tales.”  The focus is middle-aged men and women, “juggling the demands of family and work, grappling with self-doubt and disillusionment, and ultimately finding deep new meaning in life.”

Allan Chinen

The first of the middle tale themes Chinen explores is “the loss of magic,” embodied in the German tale of “The Elves and the Shoemaker.”  Youthful protagonists thrive when they locate a source of magic; they lose it only if they are mean or greedy.  In middle tales, the magic fades in the course of living.  At some point, we realize we’re not going to write the Great American Novel; we don’t have an unlimited number of do-overs left; we don’t have the skill or the energy to realize all of our youthful dreams.  What is left?  If we listen to the stories, Chinen says, we begin to see other roads between the extremes of naiveté and despair, roads that leads toward renewal.

The next theme is “reversals,” often involving men and women dropping traditional gender roles.  The headline in this week’s newspaper Arts & Entertainment section was, “The Era of the Empowered Princess.”  That may be the theme in Hollywood, but not in traditional “youth tales.”  Where the emphasis is socialization, stories all over the world  praise traditional roles.  Things change in middle tales.  Men sometimes say, “To hell with work,” or quit the army, while women grow more assertive and often save the day, as in “The Wife Who Became King,” a story from China.

The third middle tale theme is a new awareness of death and evil.  Youth stories don’t dwell on either one; bad things happen to others, “out there.”  Dragons die, bad sorcerers die, and sometimes evil step-mothers, but never the hero or heroine, and neither of them are evil.  In middle tales mortality gets personal.  Evil gets personal too; no longer does it simply lie “out there.”  The expansiveness of youth gives way to the psyche’s need for wholeness, which means we have to “confront the shadow,” the darkness we carry within.  The best stories, honed by generations of telling, lead us to realizations by the path of wisdom and by the path of humor.  In “The Tell Tale,” a Japanese story, a woodcutter spies his wife in the arms of a pawnbroker.  At first he is seized by a murderous rage.  Rather than kill his wife and her lover, he concocts a ridiculous story and uses it to trick his wife, humiliate the pawnbroker, and makes enough money to live with his wife in comfort – and fidelity – for the rest of their days.  There is far more of the trickster than the knight-in-shining-armor in these stories.

The final middle tale theme in Once Upon a Midlife is renewal, which in these stories, most often involves descent to the underworld.

“Stripped of all their defenses, individuals come face-to-face with the core of their being.  There they find a primordial source of life, beyond conventional notions of good and evil, male and female.  Whether understood as the inner Self, or God, or the life force, this primal source helps men and women reforge their lives…[they] emerge from their suffering with deep healing – and the ability to heal others.”

To anyone interested in the interpretation of folklore, I recommend this page which lists all of Allan Chinen’s books.

My 301st Post

Posted on by
10

Confession time.  I slipped in post number 300 without saying anything. Double-digit posts, like end-of-decade birthdays, make me a little nervous.  Such events seem to require wisdom, but I don’t do wise-on-demand especially well.  So here are some blogging thoughts, commemorating post 301, which I think we can all agree is a more humble and friendly number than 300.

Blogging as a means of discovery.  I’ve experienced this in other modes of writing, notably fiction.   At times I’ve also kept a journal, not to record my thoughts, but to discover what they are.  Because of its public nature, I wasn’t sure for some time that blogging had that capacity.  I discovered once and for all that it does while working on some recent two-part posts.  Every time I ended with, “I’ll share my conclusions next time,” I wondered what those conclusions were going to be.  Typically all I had was a hunch – nothing as solid as a conclusion.  I found in every case that the act of writing itself generated conclusions.  

It’s immensely satisfying to know that blogging can help me discover where I am in the present moment.  Everything changes, and it’s important not to be bound to outworn habits of thinking, feeling, and acting.  If the public nature of blogging sometimes causes self-consciousness, it also demands a rigor that (hopefully) keeps me from entertaining or posting my silliest notions.

Just Blog.  If you visit writing blogs, read writing magazines, or go to a writer’s conference, you’re likely to hear about using social media to “build your platform.”  I don’t want to put this idea down, just look at it critically.  I’ve met several successful ebook authors who work very hard to promote their fiction and think up inventive ways to do it.  But the reason for their success is compelling fiction.  Promotion works because they have something worth promoting.

I started this blog because I’d been told I should get a platform.  That idea lasted only a week or two.  Curiosity about blogging as a unique medium took over.  There are lots of Zen stories advising us to do what we’re doing with single minded focus.  Just run.  Just cook.  That kind of thing.  My effort here is, “just blog.”  If the day comes when I need a platform, I’ll do what I have to do.  Like I said in a recent post, I’m skeptical of “whisperers.”

What to write about my social and political concerns?  I don’t like blogs that harp, yet I find it hard not to write about these issues.  I’ve never had so much concern about the future of our democracy, or feared that the very word, “democracy,” is an artifact of nostalgia, like a Norman Rockwell painting.  Consider the following definition from Webster’s College Dictionary:  oligarchy:  a form of government in which the ruling power belongs to a few persons.

Back in the ’90’s, my employer, like many others, provided free training in Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Success.  One of the concepts that stayed with me is “circle of influence vs. circle of concern.”  Covey taught that outcomes I can affect lie within my circle of influence.   My circle of concern, however, includes things I cannot change.  If I spend my time worrying over these, I miss the chance to do what is in my power.

It’s like the serenity prayer:  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the power to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Covey goes a step further.  He says that changing the things I can will grow my circle of influence.  For example, complaining about the government is a useless hobby, but it is within my power to write to elected representatives.  All of them say direct communication carries weight because so few bother.  If I do so, my circle of influence grows a little bit.

Growing one's circle of influence by acting within it

What about blogging? Does this activity alter outcomes?  I believe it can, by carrying information if nothing else.  Have you heard about the “99% Spring,” initiatives starting on April 9?  Here’s a link: http://billmoyers.com.  Elsewhere on the website, Bill Moyers offers these words of hope:

Many of you have asked what you can do to fight back. Here are some thoughts. First, take yourself seriously as an agent of change. The Office of Citizen remains the most important in the country.

Second, remember, there’s strength in numbers. Find others like you in your neighborhood, apartment building, community – and act together. The old African proverb is still true, “If you want to walk fast, walk alone; if you want to walk far, walk together.”

Amen to that!  There is strength in numbers and strength in sharing hope.  As bloggers, that lies within our circle of influence.

Writings.  I appreciate all of your comments; they are one of the main things that keeps me going.  I’ve been especially happy with the response to recent articles on mythology and folklore.  This is like returning to something I lived and breathed 20 years ago.  In one way, it seems like a new emphasis for thefirstgates, but in another, it clarifies what I’ve been reaching for all along.  I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, for it has really become my mission statement:  To discover the reality in our fantasies, and the fantasy in our realities.

Thanks to you all and stay tuned!  Here’s to the next 101 posts.