The word for today is PERSPECTIVE. Actually, it has been the word for over a week and a half now. I have been carrying the word in my head, letting my thoughts ruminate, writing different phrases for this blog in my head, but not putting anything down or out into cyberspace. From the PERSPECTIVE of anyone who may follow this blog, it would have been reasonable to assume that I had abandoned it. I HAVE NOT.
When I looked PERSPECTIVE up in the dictionary, the first definition concerned depicting spatial relationships on a flat surface; it is a term that concerns art or drawing, a representation on paper or on a canvas of how someone sees a scene. In Webster's New International Dictionary Second Edition there is a wonderful diagram that depicts ground planes and picture planes and base lines and horizons. But the PERSPECTIVE that I'm interested in is "the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance," or "the ability to see all relevant data in a meaningful relationship." (Random House Webster's College Dictionary)
Maybe I have been putting off writing about this because it all seems too complicated. It is just as complicated to explain a mental perspective as it is to depict perspective on a flat canvas. I am trying to get the curves of my thoughts into the flat forum of written expression.
All I know is that I see what I see and I hear what I hear and I believe what I believe. What shapes my perspective? What is the ground upon which I stand, the place from which I form my view?
Not surprisingly, these questions came up in the context of a family visit two weekends ago.
I felt that I had honored my father in my last blog post, so I asked him to read it. After reading what I had written about him, he said "Amy, that's all nice, but I feel like I'm reading about a fictional character. That fellow you wrote about, that's not me."
I have been working on memoir pieces for the last several years, so this piece of feedback was more than a bit disconcerting.
"What do you mean Dad?"
"I never felt apart. I didn't feel different when I went down to Charlottesville. I felt anxious, but not because I was different; I felt anxious because I was doing something new. I thought we're all just people, I'm a person meeting other people."
"Ok," I said. I took a deep breath. I was as open as I could be to his PERSPECTIVE. "Maybe I was projecting," I continued. "Maybe that's how I would've felt. Maybe you're just a lot more well-adjusted than I am. Thanks for the clarification."
My Dad walked back from my sister's den to the dining table.
Later the same evening my parents started talking about how my father had never dated
anyone other than my mother. My parents have been married for more than 54 years. The fact that my mother had many boyfriends before she met my father, and that my father was not as popular with the opposite sex, has become part of the family lore.
"But Dad," I said, "didn't you date someone at law school. Didn't you date a non-Jewish woman. Isn't that why your parents wouldn't go to your graduation?"
"Where did you hear that?" my sister asked. My mother repeated the question. My father, after a long silence, said he never dated anyone during law school. I felt crazy. I felt like pieces of information that I had taken as facts, facts upon which I created a story, a story upon which I based my PERSPECTIVE, all of it dissolved and I did not know where I was or what I was looking at. I could not trust my PERSPECTIVE.
"I know I heard it somewhere," I responded. "Someone told me this, maybe Nana told me." Nana, my grandmother is dead.
"Maybe Nana made it up," my sister offered. "Maybe Nana made that up because it sounded better than saying her son didn't invite his own parents to his law wchool graduation because he was ashamed of them.?"
What, I thought to myself. Who made up what and why and how was I ever supposed to figure it all out?
"Well, there was someone I met once," my father acknowledged, throwing out a small fact, so there was something real that my grandmother or I might have based a story upon. I didn't ask for any more information.
When I got my bearings, as I left the family gathering and drove home to my own apartment, I realized that everyone has his or her own PERSPECTIVE. As a memoir reader and writer, I am learning this. Ultimately, no matter how much research I do, how many other people I consult, the only story I will be telling is my own. That so much of my understanding about life may be based on my own distortions of other people's stories is disturbing. The only thing that is comforting, is that most likely my approach is not that different from everybody else's. Let me know if I am wrong. I am truly interested in your PERSPECTIVE.
Friday, May 22, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Apart
The word for today is APART. This word interests me because putting a space in it makes such a difference. APART means separate, distinct, isolated, independent. The words "a part" usually mean "a part of" something bigger, a part of a whole, a part of a community or family.
Earlier today I felt APART. I was planning yet another MoveOn political event and I wasn't getting the support I wanted. One of our council members left for a rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon; another is visiting family in the Phillipines; another needed to leave with her husband to pick up her daughter from college in Washington, D.C. It seemed as though everyone, APART from me, needed to be somewhere else, not at our event.
I wished that I could be somewhere else, that I did not have to lead our council's meeting with a congressional staffer. I wanted to close the door to my APARTment and be APART from the world. Of course, I did not do that. I showed up, I helped the other council members who showed up feel a part of a movement. I did my part.
Because of the way MoveOn works, I often do not know who will be at our meetings. Two men attended who are with the American Muslim Task Force. One of the gentleman has lived in this country for over thirty years and yet he, and other people from his native Pakistan, are treated as though they are apart from the rest of us, different, not to be trusted. Although MoveOn is not a "civil rights" advocacy group, I listened to his complaints about the lack of change in the Obama administration's treatment of detainees and alleged terrorists. I tried to think of other organizations that would be more helpful.
Somehow our conversation turned to the former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. "Ramsey Clark is my role model," said the gentleman. "I love that man. He came with me to visit a detainee being held in jail in Virginia." "I love him too," I responded. The gentleman and I were both holding our hands over our hearts. "When I was a little girl I received an autographed photograph of him. I still have it."
Some people set themselves APART because they are exemplars of truth, justice, and integrity, regardless. To me that is what Ramsey Clark stands for. His photograph has personal meaning to me because I almost met him when my family took a trip to Washington D.C. during the Johnson administration to visit my father's law school roommate, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.
APART from his time in law school and the army, my father, who turns eighty this Sunday (and who is my hero when it comes to integrity), has lived his entire life in what is known as the NY metropolitan area. I have to admit that he has a pretty good perspective on things, despite living so far APART from the rest of the country.
I often think of his time at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. It was the early 1950s. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, NY who got on a train and found himself in the midst of an institution designed by Thomas Jefferson (yet another man who had many parts to his life). After law school my father had difficulty finding a job. Even with a degree from UVa., he was still a Jew, the well-heeled NY law firms found reason to hold him apart. Eventually, he became a corporate tax attorney and spent his career as an executive for a large railroad and a retail giant. He done good.
My father was held APART, kept out, because of his religion, and maybe for other cultural reasons. But he was and is smart as hell. For reasons I never understood, throughout his entire life he held himself APART, from organized religion, from civic, cultural, and political groups. He has always been a very independent man.
I keep looking for the balance between the space in the word. Often I'm APART; yet I yearn to be "a part of." I want to feel together with something, someone, with myself.
In honor of togetherness I offer this adorable but hokey song from my '70s adolescence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEWU25aN67U&feature=PlayList&p=91541ADE5F0B295A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=39
Earlier today I felt APART. I was planning yet another MoveOn political event and I wasn't getting the support I wanted. One of our council members left for a rafting trip on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon; another is visiting family in the Phillipines; another needed to leave with her husband to pick up her daughter from college in Washington, D.C. It seemed as though everyone, APART from me, needed to be somewhere else, not at our event.
I wished that I could be somewhere else, that I did not have to lead our council's meeting with a congressional staffer. I wanted to close the door to my APARTment and be APART from the world. Of course, I did not do that. I showed up, I helped the other council members who showed up feel a part of a movement. I did my part.
Because of the way MoveOn works, I often do not know who will be at our meetings. Two men attended who are with the American Muslim Task Force. One of the gentleman has lived in this country for over thirty years and yet he, and other people from his native Pakistan, are treated as though they are apart from the rest of us, different, not to be trusted. Although MoveOn is not a "civil rights" advocacy group, I listened to his complaints about the lack of change in the Obama administration's treatment of detainees and alleged terrorists. I tried to think of other organizations that would be more helpful.
Somehow our conversation turned to the former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. "Ramsey Clark is my role model," said the gentleman. "I love that man. He came with me to visit a detainee being held in jail in Virginia." "I love him too," I responded. The gentleman and I were both holding our hands over our hearts. "When I was a little girl I received an autographed photograph of him. I still have it."
Some people set themselves APART because they are exemplars of truth, justice, and integrity, regardless. To me that is what Ramsey Clark stands for. His photograph has personal meaning to me because I almost met him when my family took a trip to Washington D.C. during the Johnson administration to visit my father's law school roommate, an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department.
APART from his time in law school and the army, my father, who turns eighty this Sunday (and who is my hero when it comes to integrity), has lived his entire life in what is known as the NY metropolitan area. I have to admit that he has a pretty good perspective on things, despite living so far APART from the rest of the country.
I often think of his time at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. It was the early 1950s. He was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn, NY who got on a train and found himself in the midst of an institution designed by Thomas Jefferson (yet another man who had many parts to his life). After law school my father had difficulty finding a job. Even with a degree from UVa., he was still a Jew, the well-heeled NY law firms found reason to hold him apart. Eventually, he became a corporate tax attorney and spent his career as an executive for a large railroad and a retail giant. He done good.
My father was held APART, kept out, because of his religion, and maybe for other cultural reasons. But he was and is smart as hell. For reasons I never understood, throughout his entire life he held himself APART, from organized religion, from civic, cultural, and political groups. He has always been a very independent man.
I keep looking for the balance between the space in the word. Often I'm APART; yet I yearn to be "a part of." I want to feel together with something, someone, with myself.
In honor of togetherness I offer this adorable but hokey song from my '70s adolescence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEWU25aN67U&feature=PlayList&p=91541ADE5F0B295A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=39
Monday, May 4, 2009
Margin
The word for today is MARGIN. I was thinking of writing about the word marginal, but I decided to stick with the noun. As a writer, the MARGIN I think of is the space that surrounds the print on a page (these days either a paper page or a computer page).
There are many other margins. The word is used in business in ways I find too complicated to explain here...to describe the difference between the market value of collateral and a loan or the amount provided as security or the point at which a business barely covers the cost of production. It is 7 am in the morning, and this is making my head swim.
MARGIN also means the limit beyond which something (usually abstract) ceases to exist, such as you have reached the MARGIN of my patience or tolerance. To me this sounds mean, a more distinguished form of time's up, too bad, so sad, or something like that. I have reached the MARGIN of my bank account; I have reached the MARGIN of my sloth. What happens when we use MARGIN with something concrete? I have reached the MARGIN of having clean clothes in the closet, food in the refrigerator; I have a one day's MARGIN of cat food or medication. There is a thin MARGIN between sanity, eccentricity and insanity. I haven't heard the word used that way, but I suppose it could be.
But let's get back to the page, which is where I feel most comfortable, because written words are my security. Since I was a little girl, I have noticed margins. I noticed the layout in books and magazines and how the amount of white space on a page gave the words a different impact. When I was in high school and college (a prehistoric time before desktops and laptops and cell phones), we produced the school newspaper by doing mock layouts on pieces of paper; we pasted columns of text on blank paper on top of a lightboard. White space was like one of the ten commandments.
Subconsciously, I knew that playing with margins was the stuff of poetry. (How unpoetic) Playing with margins is part of the whimsical intentionality of poetry. T.S. Eliot wrote that when the lines run all the way to the right the result is prose.
The margin is where the written word ceases to exist, and when words cease to exist, I am in dangerous territory. Or maybe if I can stay present in the emptiness, I will be in the purest territory imaginable. Maybe there really is life in the margins.
may my heart always be open to little
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
ee cummings
There are many other margins. The word is used in business in ways I find too complicated to explain here...to describe the difference between the market value of collateral and a loan or the amount provided as security or the point at which a business barely covers the cost of production. It is 7 am in the morning, and this is making my head swim.
MARGIN also means the limit beyond which something (usually abstract) ceases to exist, such as you have reached the MARGIN of my patience or tolerance. To me this sounds mean, a more distinguished form of time's up, too bad, so sad, or something like that. I have reached the MARGIN of my bank account; I have reached the MARGIN of my sloth. What happens when we use MARGIN with something concrete? I have reached the MARGIN of having clean clothes in the closet, food in the refrigerator; I have a one day's MARGIN of cat food or medication. There is a thin MARGIN between sanity, eccentricity and insanity. I haven't heard the word used that way, but I suppose it could be.
But let's get back to the page, which is where I feel most comfortable, because written words are my security. Since I was a little girl, I have noticed margins. I noticed the layout in books and magazines and how the amount of white space on a page gave the words a different impact. When I was in high school and college (a prehistoric time before desktops and laptops and cell phones), we produced the school newspaper by doing mock layouts on pieces of paper; we pasted columns of text on blank paper on top of a lightboard. White space was like one of the ten commandments.
Subconsciously, I knew that playing with margins was the stuff of poetry. (How unpoetic) Playing with margins is part of the whimsical intentionality of poetry. T.S. Eliot wrote that when the lines run all the way to the right the result is prose.
The margin is where the written word ceases to exist, and when words cease to exist, I am in dangerous territory. Or maybe if I can stay present in the emptiness, I will be in the purest territory imaginable. Maybe there really is life in the margins.
may my heart always be open to little
may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old
may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young
and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile
ee cummings