Thanks and Thanksgiving
I’ve had so many wonderful and supportive comments from people who read about my Mum’s fall that it seems only fitting to acknowledge the generosity of those people right here. It has warmed my heart.
I got to England just at the right time - something to be thankful for right there - since my Mum seemed to be at that perilous point of trying to decide whether to keep on getting better or to slip into helplessness. My Aunt Iris and cousins Monique and Martin had done a magnificient job, but Mum had caught some sort of virus the day she left the convalescent home, and was in a fragile state… My arrival helped to tip the balance in the right direction, I think, if only because Mum was outvoted, outnumbered, and couldn’t escape. So I spent most of Thanksgiving week persuading her to eat small amounts of something - anything, really - and to build her strength up. And it worked. When I left England she was beginning to complain about things like the National Health Visiting Nurses (who are magnificent, by the way) and so I knew she was getting back to her usual self. I think the point I really felt comfortable was when she got critical of my cooking. It showed she was well in touch with reality again.
Still, it was an anxious time. I can smile about it now from the safety of having got over the bump, even though it was a bit scary in the moment, to say the least. My Grandmother, I recall only too well, had a fall at about the same age, and her response was to give up. She died about a week later, and she’d been much fitter than my Mum at the time. I was only about 14 at the time and bewildered at how that strong, ornery lady had crumbled.
My gratitude is immense - and to MaryLou, Cheryl, Jean, Cathy, Andrew, and others, it is on-going.
The Motorcycle Diaries
Last night I relaxed with this 2004 movie, which the box said had won a foreign language Oscar, so I figured it must have some real quality. It tells the story of the young Che Guevara’s motorcycle and walking tour of South America. Motorcycles, Memoir, history - it sounded like my thing.
Even so, I was unprepared for just how good it would be.
The movie is based on Guevara’s own diaries, and on the memoir written by his companion, Alberto Granado, as the two of them travel vast mileages across South America to visit and work at a leper colony. Some of the time they’re on a 1938 500cc Norton that ‘pisses oil’, until they wreck it and then continue, unlikely as it may sound, on foot.
Many of the things I liked about this movie can be summed up, emblematically, in the way the motorcycle is treated. I shudder to think what Hollywood would have done with such material. One of the things I always disliked about ‘Easy Rider’ was that the gleaming machines felt like stageprops. The physicality of moving along a road was never real to me in that movie. Fortunately in the case of ‘Diaries’ director Walter Salles decided to treat the bike as a real object, one that occasionally goes moderately fast, mostly lumbers along, and frequently wobbles or falls over. The riders (for they are doubled up on one machine) tumble, dust themselves off, are genuinely annoyed, and wobble off down the atrocious roads again with extra bruises. The sense of their quixotic mission is never lost, and the feeling of the vastness of the Southern Americas never leaves us. And when the bike is finally too bent and worn out for further use they decide to walk - which surely speaks of the fire to explore that simply will not be pushed aside.
In the middle of it all came the unmistakable signs of the six archetypes, full strength.
Guevara leaves home as an Orpan, but it isn’t until the motorcycle lets them down that he becomes a real Pilgrim. Suddenly it’s not just a lark anymore. And when he and Granado finally arrive at the leper colony their openness and lack of pretence means they refuse to wear the regulation rubber gloves when treating the patients. They greet them as real people, shake hands, organize soccer games (in which they play, and joyously hurling obscene insults at each other, while the nuns smile) and insist on just being themselves. The scene in which Guevara swims the river to say his farewells to the colony is miraculously under-stated. If ever we had an image of a man who was prepared to put his life on the line for those he loves, just because he loves them, this would be it. The Warrior-Lover stands before us, exhausted, dripping wet, in this beauteous piece of poetry.
When the friends part, Granado to take up a good job in Caracas and Guevara to continue his travels, we see the parting of the ways that is inevitable for the Warrior-Lover who elects to stay in that space. And Guevara did. We don’t see it in the movie but we are told Guevara went on to make his dream larger as a revolutionary - covering not just healthcare but human rights throughout South America, until a CIA sponsored plot had him assassinated.
Whatever we think of Guevara’s politics his heart was assuredly in the right place. He made at least part of his dream come true, working with Castro, as well as leading social reforms in Bolivia as true example of the Monarch. And his example is profoundly inspiring - he touches the Magician stage.
As Memoir the story works brilliantly: it describes a moment of profound change that led on to a different life. As a movie it succeeds because it refuses to slip into glamor or melodrama. And in it are those same six stages, if we care to see them.
‘That time of year in me thou mayst behold…’
Shakespeare did say it remarkably well, comparing the dying year to the aging process.
The past few days of this dying year have had a few upsets. My mother, at 84, was walking down a sidewalk to see her granddaughter play hockey for the Australian national team - which is on some sort of tour and stopped in England. One of the safety lights on the pathway was broken and instead of it lighting Mum safely past it tripped her up. Never one to do things by halves she took a spectacular header, worthy more of rugby full-back than of a hockey maven. She broke her wrist and banged herself up severely, and the last five days she’s been in hospitals having the bones set, back home where the painkillers left her feeling disoriented, and perhaps tomorrow she’ll go to a ‘care facility’ for a few days. This is all in England, mind, when I’m over this side of the puddle.
Fortunately I have some cousins, Monique and Martin, who are clearly saints and who are taking care of everything. I also have an aunt, dear Iris, who is roughly the same age as Mum and is taking care of her whenever she can, and will also get my vote for canonization (Just in case the Pope’s listening: these are first rate people).
So I’ve spent quite a lot of time on the phone, which ultimately leaves one feeling a shade disconnected, and definitely leaves one feeling useless.
How we arrange or fail to arrange the end of our lives is not a question any of us can leave until we are old, for at that point we don’t always make the best decisions. Yet we all put it off. Ultimately, though we have to do as Jung suggests: we have to take the time to make friends with death, to recognize that it’s only death. Life itself matters less than the quality of life one has - at least to most people.
I’m putting my money on my Mum bouncing back in a day or two. Of course, at some point she will just have no bounce left, and it will be time. I know it will happen. She knows it will happen. It’s still a bit of a shock to see it coming closer, though.
The Media
When did this simple word become so sullied? And when did it cease to have credibility as a concept? Part of the problem is that we’ve known since McLuhan that the medium is the message, which in those simpler times tended to mean that the information was colored by the way it was presented. But what about information that simply isn’t there? Information that has been removed? What happens when all we have is the medium itself, and the message has been almost entirely subsumed?
What do we do, for example, when a major newspaper like the Boston Globe ignores a Peace rally held on Boston Common, in the very center of Boston, a rally that brought an estimated 10,000 people together? What if our local paper fails to mention it? It did that on for October 27th’s rally. Is the message here that we should only protest directly outside the Globe’s own offices if we want to be noticed at all? Would that be any better?
In contrast there was plenty of coverage of the Red Sox’s triumphal parade – as there should have been, since it was a major celebration, as well as being an event that shut down parts of the city. As I watched some of the TV coverage I noticed that some of the banners held up by young fans, who had certainly skipped classes for the event, were idiosyncratic. ‘Congradulations’ read one. ‘We Beleive’ read another. This, from the kids who are skipping school. Is there a message there, too, perhaps?
To return to the Globe: in Sunday’s ‘Ideas’ section Jeff Jacoby lamented that no one reads newspapers any more. Poor baby, thought I. He blamed it all on TV, predictably enough, and yet another complex problem got reduced to overly-simplistic blaming. When the media stops removing important news, when it ceases from its facile finger pointing, and stops its celebration of the safe and obvious – then we might have a medium that’s worth reading.
James Carroll
I was fortunate enough to hear James Carroll address a gathering of peace activists last week. I knew him mostly frm his memoir - he grew up as the son of the director of the CIA, bcame a priest, left the priesthood, married, and now writes about the way our government has misused its intelligence community, amoungst other things.
Listening to his perfect command of historical data one could not help but be impressed, yet what was even more impressive was the analysis he brought to the situation. In our age of sound bites and quick answers he was not afraid to go into lengthy discussions of complex issues, in the process bringing real illumination to events, politics, and the interface between them.
The most inspiring part was that he was unfailing optimistic. No whining and hand-wringing here! For instance, he pointed out that the US could have used nuclear weapons to end the Korean War, and it could have done the same with Vietnam. One nuke on Hanoi would have changed everything. But despite lobbying from many groups the White House didn’t go that way. Somewhere in even our war-mongering Pentagon/Capitol Hill alliance we shrank from that. So, what has kept us from this last, worst excess? In a word it is the scream of outrage that our political ‘leaders’ know they would face from us, their electorate.
We the people really do have more power than we think. And it’s a power for peace.
The wars the US has engaged in have mostly been about asserting ourselves against tiny nations so that we look like a world power, and that keeps many Americans feeling good about being American. Horrible as those conflicts have proved they’ve actually been mostly about posturing. Our leaders dare not go further.
I left feeling so much better about what I could do to bring more peace into the world.
Carroll is an inspiring speaker. He’s also careful just to present his opinion – he’s not a rabble rouser. In that way he is, perhaps, a genuine Magician figure. He knows that he values peace, the spirit, and decency. He sees his task on earth as being a person who gives the rest of us the necessary, thoughtful, guidance that leads to more hope and so helps us as we work towards these goals. As he does so he grows more peace wherever he goes. Magic.
