Portland

The University of Portland Magazine

Summer 2016

Australia & America

By

by Martin Flanagan

Bark painting depicting a man spearing a kangaroo
Man With Spear, 20th Century bark painting depicting a kangaroo and a hunter; the specific form of cross hatching served to endow the objects painted with spiritual force.

You are American and I am Australian. We’re the same but different. What’s the difference?

I think there are some general points we can agree on. The modern state we call America started as a Puritan settlement, a place of hope and liberty for religious dissenters. The modern state of Australia started as a penal colony. To give but one example of how I think this difference has worked through our two cultures, your politicians frequently appeal to or cite God in making political utterances; ours rarely do. You had a revolution. Our flag still has a colonial emblem in the corner. You declared your independence and framed a constitution around the rights of man. Our constitution was a political and commercial settlement. There is not and never has been, for example, a constitutional right to bear arms in Australia.

We didn’t have slavery as such — but 60,000 Pacific islanders were tricked and/or kidnapped to work on sugar plantations in northern Australia, while the system whereby convicts were assigned to work for landowners was surely a kind of slavery. We haven’t had the calamity of a civil war — but nor have we had the sort of drama that produces a leader of the stature of Abraham Lincoln, a leader of humanity, not just his country.

In claiming Australia as a British possession, the British government declared that the Australian land mass was terra nullius — a Latin term meaning the land of nobody. This was a lie. There were people who had been in Australia for many thousands of years: Aboriginal people. Not until 1967 were Aboriginal people included in the Australian census. A sense of absence, not presence, permeated Australia’s early sense of itself and continues, I would argue, to today.

…

Near the end of that wonderful American novel The Great Gatsby, there is that famous passage: “And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

That passage, to my knowledge, has no parallel in Australian literature — certainly not in an iconic work. Australia was strange to the first Europeans in a way that America, a fellow Northern Hemisphere dweller, was not. We had animals they had never seen the likes of before like the kangaroo. America was born of idealism, an idea to do with freedom. From the mouths of some Americans, it sounds like an idea of God-ordained liberty. I don’t associate Australia with any idea. Australia is a place, I would argue, that is well suited to agnosticism.

…

I grew up in Tasmania, the island off Australia’s south-eastern coast. For over fifty years, the island was one big prison. Anyone seeking to understand the psychology of such a place should read Kafka’s short story, “In the Penal Colony.” I grew up in a place that had no memory of either my people, the Irish convicts, or the people who were there before them. My Flanagan convict forebear,
Thomas Flanagan from County Roscommon, then in a state of famine, stole meal and a sum of five pounds to feed his starving family in 1847. Fifty years later, during what is called the Victorian period, having convict forebears in your family became a source of acute social shame. Within three generations there was no memory whatsoever of their songs, stories, dances. That was the first silence I grew up with.

…

What remained of the convict culture was a disrespect for authority that flared spectacularly around the rebel outlaw Ned Kelly. There was also a belief that actions speak louder than words, a belief that at its best finds a Biblical echo in the idea that by the fruit of their actions we shall know the people most deserving of our respect. Traditionally, Australian culture was introvert. Viewed through the prism of your cultural exports, American culture has always struck me as thoroughly extrovert.

Within thirty years of white arrival in Tasmania in 1803, the British government had shipped the surviving remnant of the Aboriginal population to a small island in Bass Strait. There are people of Aboriginal descent living in Tasmania today, but when I was growing up we were taught that the last one died in 1876. There was no memory of their songs, stories, dances also.

…

The one thing that made sense to me growing up in Tasmania were the local football matches. Australian football is not the game you call soccer. Nor is it rugby. Nor is it Irish football. It is a wholly Australian game with a long and interesting history which has some parallels with the history of baseball. This is the game which absorbed me and it was through football, and the folklore that surrounded it, that I first encountered theater, mythology, and a certain sort of comedy based on character.

Later, when I was wandering the world, sport was my second language, shielding me from loneliness, whether it was by playing street soccer with kids in Yugoslavia or hitching a ride in Germany with a man who had no English and finding a common link in Kevin Keegan, the Englishman then playing soccer with Hamburg. After I returned, sport gave me a passport to enter Aboriginal Australia.

…

The other silence I grew up with was my father. During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army used slave labor to put a railway through from Thailand to Burma. More than 100,000 men — some say 200,000 — died laying 400 kilometers of track. My father survived that. He was left weakened, perhaps permanently, by cholera, malaria, and malnutrition. He had a close friend bashed to death. I could go on indefinitely. In one of my books, I described my father, the man I knew growing up, as a hard old monk. He was gentle but he was not easily impressed. I liked him; in fact, I thought he was cool. He didn’t say much but what he said was always struck me as being really well thought out. But if a paternalistic father is one who tells you who you are, where
you come from, and where you’re going, then he was the opposite. He didn’t tell me who I was, he didn’t tell me where I came from, he didn’t tell me where I was going. I had to work that out for myself.

I did a law degree, worked in a prison in welfare, I travelled the world. When I returned to Australia, I still had many questions. How did I fit into this land? How and where did I belong? When I finally met people who understood the questions I was asking, they were Aboriginal people. From the start, they seemed to implicitly understand the journey I was on. They had every historical reason to view me as their enemy but I found that if I approached them in a spirit of humility and respect I was, by and large, accepted. I also found I had more in common with them than I’d imagined. For example, my father and a number of other Burma railway veterans I got to know were people who’d seen a lot, suffered a lot, and had great compassion. When I started
meeting Aboriginal elders, I met people who’d seen a lot, suffered a lot, and had great compassion. It seems to me that the wisdom of the elders is much the same in all cultures.

…

I’ve learned so much from Aboriginal people. It intrigues me, for example, that many Western artists from affluent backgrounds over the past 100 years have depicted the world in dark and often violent ways. Then I look at paintings by traditional Aboriginal artists, people whose lives have been subjected to violence on so many levels, and see colourful, free form, harmony. Notwithstanding the insults and injuries inflicted upon their culture, so many Aboriginal people that I have met have also been compassionate and with that quality comes a shrewd
understanding of human nature. And Aboriginal thinking, as I’ve encountered it, often comes back to an idea of oneness — the sense of a common origin. It was Aboriginal people who confirmed me on my path as a writer. “You’re alright, brother,” I was once told. “You come from the heart.” I have learnt that if you come from the heart, as best you can, you have your best chance of relating to people from other cultures.

I know the terms “black” and “white” are not used in your country as they once were. But during the period they were, the terms black and white in my country meant something quite different. Aboriginal people were called “blacks,” but to engage with them is to engage with an indigenous, earth-based, place-based culture. The equivalent in your country are the tribal peoples. We hear very little about tribal peoples in our country.

The word Aboriginal is really two Latin words — “ab” meaning from, and “original” meaning the start. My relationship with Aboriginal people has brought me closer to my land, both the whole of its human history and its vast beauty which ranges from Tasmania, which looks like Norway, to central Australia, with its orange sand, to the wet jungles of the north.

…

Do we Australians have problems? An abundance. Do we have the same problems as you? Yes and no. We have not yet come to terms with the environmental problems of the 21st century nor with the global crisis of mass migration. Our methods in dealing with illegal migrants — in particular placing children in detention centers and attempting to out-source the problem by deflecting illegal arrivals to third world countries like Cambodia — has cost us the respect of people whose respect I would prefer to have. We do have broad consensus on gun control. In Australia, I am part of what is called the reconciliation movement — the movement seeking to reconcile Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australia. In some ways things are better, but in critical ways the plight of traditional Aboriginal Australia is no better or worse than it was when I started 30 years ago. I take my faith from a statement made by Patrick Dodson, a great Aboriginal leader and the father of the reconciliation movement. He said, “The struggle never ends — the reward is the people you meet along the way.” It’s true; I’ve met giants and been led into other reconciliation initiatives, one between Israelis and Palestinians, for example, and, more recently, between Australia and Japan.

…

Australia is very nearly the size, physically speaking, of the United States, although our population is less than a tenth of yours. I enjoy living in Australia and like a lot of
people that I meet. There is an Australian sense of humor that is hard to explain at the best of times, and certainly not in polite company, that I love. I’d also like to think most Australians can still identify what a good bloke is. Bloke is a word that came to Australia from England and then grew, I like to think, new meaning. A good bloke wasn’t a good man. That implies virtue. Traditionally, a good bloke treated you as he wished to be treated. The measure of a good bloke was his consistency. A really good bloke was someone who was a good bloke to a lot of people. And, yes, a good bloke can be a woman. So can a mate be a woman. A mate is someone you are obliged by a wordless oath to care for and protect. Or that’s how it is for me.

…

One of the things that saddens me about Australia is that so many Australians choose not to explore their country, but remain hemmed in by their city environments clumped around the coastline. Six months ago I went into a classroom of 18-year-old students in Melbourne, the city of four million people in Australia’s south-east where I live, and asked how many of them knew where Darwin is. Darwin, which has a population of 100,000, is in Australia’s tropical north on the lip of Melanesia. About a quarter of the kids in the classroom put up their hands saying they knew where Darwin is. I asked them how many knew about Pearl Harbour. Most of the hands went up. “It was bombed!” one girl cried. And I said to them, “Do you know the Japanese dropped more bombs on Darwin than Pearl Harbour during World War 2”. Nobody knew that. Not one kid.

During 1942, Japanese aircraft conducted 63 raids on Darwin, then a town of 2,000 people. The first attack was planned by the same man who planned the attack on Pearl Harbour and employed 200 aircraft, bombers and fighters. There was no air defense. Ten American pilots flying Kittyhawks had just flown in from Manila. The Japanese destroyed five of the Kittyhawks on the ground, but five got up into the air and flew at the Japanese. Five against 200. Forget them? I certainly won’t.

The Japanese bombed widely across northern Australia, and if you drive north to Darwin from the red centre of Australia, you start seeing old airstrips built during the war, many of them by American troops. And here’s another sort of Australian story, a story Aboriginal people tell. South of Darwin is a tribe called the Gurindji. And the Gurindji watched American troops building an airfield on their land — in particular, they watched the black American troops. What they saw was that the black troops in the U.S. Army were treated better than the Gurindji were treated
by the British pastoral company which claimed the Gurindji land as their own and then worked them as stockmen for little or no money and scraps of food. Emboldened, the Gurindji went on strike for better conditions. The strike morphed into a claim for their land. They won. It was the first big land rights victory in Australia. Their story still reverberates like a note from a didjeridu.

My father lived to within a few months of his 99th birthday. Not long before he died he said that God was all the good people that had ever been in the world. He was moved to this statement after his grandson was diagnosed with schizophrenia. That threw him because he thought he’d seen cruelty in the prison camps but being stricken with serious mental illness at the age of 21 to him seemed even crueller. He lost what conventional faith he had left and then, in his aloneness, found himself surrounded by all the good people he’d ever known.

In Aboriginal culture, when you leave your tribal country and enter the country of another people, you must pay respect to their spirits. The Aboriginal belief and my father’s belief sort of amount to the same idea and that is why I would like to finish my talk tonight by saying, as we do in Australia: I wish to pay my respects to the elders of this place, past and present. Thank you.

The great Australian journalist Martin Flanagan, author of the classic The Game in Time of War, was the University’s Schoenfeldt Series Visiting Writer in Fall 2015; this was his talk to a packed crowd of students. 

These Eager Leaps

By

by Madison Bowman

In the beginning, it was only music. That first day, I stretched my legs out on the cool tile floor of the empty chapel and watched his right hand flit over nylon strings while his left hand stroked at the neck of his cheap guitar.

…

He touched me only once in the first nearly year and a half that I knew him; it was a handshake, firm and brief and introductory.

…

Once when making a curry, I spent minutes mincing the celled flesh of a hot pepper, and for hours afterward, when I scratched my nose or brushed back my hair with those pepper-soaked fingers, any skin I touched turned fiery and produced a heat of its own. The second time David and I touched, it felt like that.

…

Years earlier, I had followed a whim to a skydiving center, signed up for a jump, and found myself, almost as though I had just woken up there, crouching parallel to the open door of a light aircraft. I was not alone; my instructor was strapped onto my back, holding me in position. Do we jump? I yelled over the whoosh of the wind. We let ourselves fall, he responded, and tipped our bodies over the threshold, headlong into the rush. When I married David, and the question was asked of me, I said Yes, I said, my voice cracking like a beaten bell. And again: Yes.

…

We married young, with faith-filled confidence and perhaps optimistic naiveté; then quickly we lost our nerve. We argued and second-guessed and wondered if we were a poor match, if hearts should be steadier. On holiday in Paris, city of lovers, we fought. “Did we jump into this too quickly?” I asked him, tracing the damp circles where raindrops had fallen on my sleeve. “No,” he said. “But I think we’re too quick to get scared by the weight of it.”

…

When we returned from Paris, David took job in San Francisco. We packed our possessions into our car and drove to a new ocean across a vast landscape. Weeks later, in a muffled morning full of fog, we walked straight west from our apartment until we reached the sea. Then we looked out on that bay of moving marble — the shift and the sway, the drift and the drown — and down we sank like anchors into the sand. “Has it been only a year?” he said.

…

The day my son was born the midwife knelt at my shivering side and pressed her palm to the swell of my belly. This is the labor, she said. This is your work. From this you emerge a mother. I walked circles in the gathering dusk, traced prayers across the floor of a room made holy by the presence of an ancient anguish. We made our descent together, my baby and I; we wound our way down from Eden. A time to be born, says Ecclesiastes — oh, how we long to be born! Bones shift to make way, flesh rips, my body becomes pure yield, and I am delivered.

…

My son was born and my body, having worked so diligently at openness, refused to close. My blood poured out and out, I wept blood, I leaked life, and the nurse pressed our baby into David’s arms and hurried him out into the hall where, he later told me, he heard them yelling we’re losing her!, and watched our son’s blinking and bewildered eyes.

…

Our boy falls asleep only in our arms, his ear pressed to one of our chests, a pulse as his balm. As he drifts into sleep, we wind slowly around the room, lit by pinstripes of dusk through the blinds’ slats. We sing to soothe and to pass the time until his sleep is deep enough that we can ease him into the bassinet next to our bed without waking him before tiptoeing out of the room. While he is sleeping, we move gently, silently, speaking in whispers rooms away. We lie on the couch, pressed together, remembering our lives before him and before each other, how easy they were, how alone. We are in awe, of each other, of how existence comes about from a touch, how we are permitted these acts of creation, these eager leaps.

Madison Bowman is a writer in New York; this essay is drawn from a longer work called Love: a Chiasmus.

Into the Fire

By

by Sallie Tisdale ’83

Every winter night of my childhood, my father built a fire. Each element of the evening’s fire was treated with care, with the caress of the careful man. The wood, the wood box, the grate, the coal, black poker, and shovel: he touched these more often than he touched me. I would hold back, watching, and when the fire was lit, plant myself before it and fall into a gentle dream. No idea was too strange or remote before the fire, no fantasy of shadow and light too bizarre

But for all the long hours I spent before his fires, for all the honey-colored vapors that rose like smoke from that hearth, these aren’t the fires of memory. They aren’t my father’s fires. When I remember fire, I remember houses burning, scorched and flooded with flame, and mills burning, towers of fire leaping through the night to the lumber nearby like so much kindling, and cars burning, stinking and black and waiting to blow. I loved those fires with a hot horror, always daring myself to step closer, feel their heat, touch.

My father was a fireman. My submission to fire is lamentably obvious. But there is more than love here, more than jealousy — more than Electra’s unwilling need. It is a fundamental lure, a seduction of my roots and not my limbs. I am propelled toward fire, and the dual draw of fascination and fear, the urge to walk into and at the same time conquer fire, is like the twin poles of the
hermaphrodite. I wanted to be a fireman before, and after, I wanted to be anything else.

…

At odd times—during dinner, late at night—the alarm would sound, and my father would leap up, knocking dogs and small children aside as he ran from the house. I grew up used to surprise. He was a bulky man, and his pounding steps were heavy and important in flight; I slipped aside when he passed by. The fire department was volunteer, and every fireman something else as well. My
father was a teacher. We had a private radio set in the house, and we heard alarms before the town at large did. It was part of the privilege of fire. Before the siren blew on the station two blocks away, the radio in the hallway sang its high-pitched plea. He was up and gone in seconds, a sentence chopped off in mid-word, a bite of food dropped to the plate. Squeal, halt, go: I was used to the series; it was part of our routine. Then my mother would stop what she was doing and turn down the squeal and listen to the dispatcher on the radio. His voice, without face or name, was one of the most familiar voices in my home, crowned with static and interruptions. My mother knew my father’s truck code and could follow his progress in a jumble of terse male voices, one-word ques-tions, first names, numbers, and sometimes hasty questions and querulous shouts. She stood in the hallway with one hand on the volume and her head cocked to listen; she shushed us with a stern tension. She would not betray herself, though I knew and didn’t care; in the harsh wilderness of childhood, my father’s death in a fire would have been a great and terrible thing. It would have been an honor.

The town siren was a broad foghorn call that rose and fell in a long ululation, like the call of a bird. We could hear it anywhere in town, everyone could, and if I was away from our house I would run to the station. (I had to race the cars and pickups of other volunteer firemen, other teachers, and the butcher, the undertaker, an editor from the local newspaper, grinding out of parking lots and driveways all over town in a hail of pebbles.) If I was quick enough and lucky enough, I could stand to one side and watch the flat doors fly up, the trucks pull out one after the other covered with clinging men, and see my father driving by. He drove a short, stout pumper, and I waved and called to him high above my head. He never noticed I was there, not once; it was as though he ceased to be my father when he became a fireman. The whistle of the siren was the whistle of another life, and he would disappear around a corner, face pursed with concentration, and be gone.

Oh, for a fire at night in the winter, the cold nocturnal sky, the pairing of flame and ice. It stripped life bare. I shared a room with my sister, a corner room on the second floor with two windows looking in their turn on the intersection a house away. The fire station was around that comer and two blocks east, a tall white block barely visible through the barren trees. Only the distant squeal of the alarm downstairs woke us, that and the thud of his feet and the slam of the back door; before we could open the curtains and windows for a gulp of frigid air, we’d hear the whine of his pickup and the crunch of its tires on the crust of snow. The night was clear and brittle and raw, and the tocsin called my father to come out. Come out, come out to play, it sang, before my mother turned the sound off. He rushed to join the hot and hurried race to flames. We knelt at the windows under the proximate, twinkling stars, in light pajamas, shivering, and following the spin of lights on each truck — red, blue, red, blue, red — flashing across houses, cars, faces. We could follow the colored spin and figure out where the fire must be and how bad and wonder out loud if he’d come back.

There were times when he didn’t return till morning. I would come downstairs and find him still missing, my mother sleepyeyed and making toast, and then he would trudge in. Ashen and weary, my father, beat, his old flannel pajamas dusted with the soot that crept through the big buckles of his turnout coat, and smelling of damp, sour smoke

…

Prometheus stole more than fire; he stole the knowledge of fire, the hard data of combustion. I wanted all my father’s subtle art. I wanted the mystery of firewood and the burning, animated chain saw, the tree’s long fall, the puzzle of splitting hardwood with a wedge and maul placed just so in the log’s curving grain. I wanted to know the differences of quality in smoke, where to lay the ax on the steaming roof, how the kindling held up the heavy logs. What makes creosote ignite? How to know the best moment to flood a fire? What were the differences between oak and cedar, between asphalt and shake? And most of all I wanted to know how to go into the fire, what virtue was used when he set his face and pulled the rim of his helmet down and ran inside the burning house.
It was arcane, obscure, and unaccountably male, this fire business. He built his fires piece by piece, lit each with a single match, and once the match was lit I was privileged to watch, hands holding chin and el-bows propped on knees, in the posture Gaston Bachelard calls essential to the “physics of reverie” delivered by fire.

…

I build fires now. I like the satisfying scritch-scratch of the little broom clearing ash. I find it curious that I don’t build very good fires; I’m hasty and I don’t want to be taught. But at last, with poorly seasoned wood and too much paper, I make the fire go, and then the force it exerts is exactly the same. That’s something about fire: all fire is the same, every ribbon of flame the same
thing, whatever that thing may be. There is that fundamental quality, fire as an irreducible element at large; fire is fire is fire no matter what or when or where. The burning house is just the hearth freed. And the fire-trance stays the same, too. I still sit cross-legged and dreaming, watching the hovering flies of light that float before me in a cloud, as fireflies do.

…

How I wanted to be a fireman when I grew up! I wanted this for a long time. To become a volunteer fireman was expected of a certain type of man — the town’s steady, able-bodied
men, men we could depend on. As I write this I feel such a tender pity for that little, wide-eyed girl, a free-roaming tomboy wandering a little country town and friend to all the firemen. I really did expect them to save me a place.

Every spring we had a spring parade. I had friends lucky enough to ride horses, others only lucky enough to ride bikes. But I rode the pumper and my father drove slowly, running the lights and siren at every intersection and splitting our ears with the noise. We had firemen’s children perched on the hoses neatly laid in pleated rows, bathed in sunlight, tossing candy to the spectators
as though, at parade’s end, we wouldn’t have to get down and leave the truck alone again.

He would take me to the station. I saw forbidden things, firemen’s lives. On the first floor was the garage with its row of trucks. Everything shivered with attention, ripe for work: the grunt of a pumper, the old truck, antique and polished new. And the Snorkel. When I was very small, a building burned because it was too high for the trucks to reach a fire on its roof; within a year the town bought the Snorkel, a basher of a truck, long, white, sleek, with a folded hydraulic ladder. The ladder opened and lifted like a praying mantis rising from a twig, higher and higher.

Above the garage was the real station, a single room with a golden floor and a wall of windows spilling light. The dispatcher lived there, the unmarried volunteers could bunk there if they liked; along one wall was a row of beds. No excess there, no redundancy, only a cooler of soda, a refrigerator full of beer, a shiny bar, a card table, a television. I guess I held my father’s hand while he chatted with one of the men. In the corner I saw a hole, a hole in the floor, and in the center of the hole the pole plunging down; I peeked over the edge and followed the light along the length of the shining silver pole diving to the floor below.

I remember one singular Fourth of July. It was pitch dark on the fairgrounds, in a dirt field far from the exhibition buildings and the midway. Far from anything. It was the middle of nothing and nowhere out there on a moonless night, strands of dry grass tickling my legs, bare below my shorts. There was no light at all but a flashlight in one man’s hand, no sound but the murmurs of the men talking to one another in the dark, moving heavy boxes with mumbles and grunts, laughing very quietly with easy laughs. My father was a silhouette among many, tall and black against a nearblack sky. Then I saw a sparkle and heard the fuse whisper up its length and strained to see the shape of it, the distance. And I heard the whump of the shell exploding and the high whistle of its flight; and when it blew, its empyreal flower filled the sky. They flung one rocket after another, two and four at once, boom! flash! One shell blew too low and showered us with sparks, no one scared but smiling at the glowworms wiggling through the night as though the night were earth and we the sky and they were rising with the rain.

…

Only recently have I seen how much more occurred, hidden beneath the surface of his life. I presumed too much, the way all children do. It wasn’t only lack of sleep that peeled my father’s face bald in a fire’s dousing. He hates fire. Hates burning mills; they last all night and the next day like balefires signaling a battle. He hated every falling beam that shot arrows of flame and the sheets of fire that curtain rooms. And bodies: I heard only snatches of stories, words drifting up the stairs in the middle of the night after a fire as he talked to my mother in the living room in the dark. Pieces of bodies stuck to bedsprings like steaks to a grill, and, once, the ruin of dynamite. When my mother died I asked about cremation, and he flung it away with a meaty hand and chose a solid, air-tight coffin. He sees the stake in fire. He suffered the fear of going in.

…

I was visiting my father at Christmastime, years ago, before he died. There are always fires at Christmastime, mostly trees turning to torches and chimneys flaring like Roman candles. And sure enough, the alarm sounded early in the evening, the same bright squeal from the same radio, for a flue fire. There had been a thousand flue fires in his life. (Each one is different, he told me.) As it happened, this time it was our neighbor’s flue, across the street, on Christmas Eve, and I put shoes on the kids and we dashed across to watch the circus, so fortunately near. The trucks maneuv-
ered their length in the narrow street, bouncing over curbs and closing in, and before the trucks stopped the men were off and running, each with a job, snicking open panels, slipping levers, turning valves. We crept inside the lines and knelt beside the big wheels of the pumper, unnoticed. The world was a bustle of men with terse voices, the red and blue lights spinning round, the snaking hose erect with pressure. The men were hepped up, snappy with the brisk demands. And the house — the neighbor’s house I’d seen so many times before had gone strange, a bud blooming fire, a ribbon of light, behind a dark window. Men went in, faces down. My father didn’t go in anymore. He’d gotten too old, and the rules had changed; young men arrive, old men watch and wait. He was like a rooster plucked.

…

I live in a city now, and the firefighters aren’t volunteers. They’re college graduates in Fire Science, and a few are women, smaller than the men but just as tough, women who took the steps I wouldn’t — or couldn’t — take. Still, I imagine big, brawny men sitting at too-small desks in little rooms lit with fluorescent lights, earnestly taking notes. They hear lectures on the chemistry of burning insulation, exponential curves of heat expansion, the codes of blueprint. They make good notes in small handwriting on lined, white paper, the pens little in their solid hands. Too much muscle and nerve in these men and women both, these firemen; they need alarms, demands, heavy loads to carry up steep stairs. They need fires; the school desks are trembling, puny things, where they listen to men like my father, weary with the work of it, describing the secrets of going in.

Sallie Tisdale ’83 is the author of many books, among them the Northwest classic Stepping Westward. This essay is excerpted from her new collection of essays, Violation, from Hawthorne Books in Portland.

A Full-on Achy-Hearted Miracle

By

Tall trees in forest, looking up toward skyby Christie King Boyd ’05

Before that sunny afternoon in July, I trusted my body to carry me. It was a strong body, a confident body. It had pedaled a bicycle across the country. It had hiked through the Himalayas. It had birthed a baby. The healing is more about regaining that trust than it is about physically mending tissue and bone.

A tree fell on me one clear, windless afternoon in July. The top of a tree fell from the sky, some forty feet, to rake skin, to crush bone. Ten inches in diameter, the paramedics noted, as I lay on the rocks, grasping for painful breath after painful breath. My husband had taken my baby girl down the creek, as if, by keeping her out of my fear radius, it might calm her down. I remember searching his eyes from afar, hoping for steady, and finding only desperation.

Before the accident, I was a new mother. I was a middle school teacher. I was an artist and a wife. I was a backpacker and a runner. I was a dancer, a baker, a writer, an aerialist. I depended on my body and loved what it could do for me. After my back was broken, I felt betrayed. Maybe that’s a strong word. But I don’t know what else to call the frustration that came with not being able to hold my girl, not being able to get out of bed without help, not having control over the mutinous muscles in my legs.

Learning to walk again is a project. My baby and I were learning to use our bodies at the same time — bum-bling limbs that don’t follow commands. I watched with respect as she would crawl across the house, roll around on the bed, stand up from the ground with ease. I was child again. Forced to depend on my own mama for everything — bathing, dressing, helping me roll over in the middle of the night. From autonomous adult to helpless infant, like the last thirty years had never happened, like the life I had been living was pounded out of me. Squeeze and pulp.

The frustration I felt at having my motherhood taken from me proved the most devastating. Clamshell brace. Rods and screws in vertebrae. A leg that doesn’t work. Pain that brings hot tears and gulping breath. These things I could do. Just let me hold my baby chest to chest. Let me put her to bed and go with her to get her shots. Let me rush over and scoop her up when she falls on her face. Let me grab her out of the bath and wrap her in a warm towel. Let me scurry around on the floor with her and make her crack up. I had four broken vertebrae, three broken ribs, a punctured lung, and nerve damage in my legs. These physical predicaments heal much quicker than the achy knowledge that accompanies them. My body knows how fragile it is now. It remembers. There is a specialness in this knowing, but there is also a fear. I am alive. I am a delicate human life in a delicate human body. This knowledge com-mands respect. It forces those of us who have been through this kind of trauma to slap ourselves (gently) across the face and shout whoa! from the top of the nearest metaphorical mountaintop (or treetop, as the case may be). Because
I am grateful. I am. I am grateful in this particular order: I’m still here. I still have my brain intact. I can still walk, albeit slowly and awkwardly. I have a beautiful family that took care of me with love and humor and respect and grit. Can’t I be thankful and hate this at the same time? Can’t I be thankful in the very same moment that I am shaking and shrieking with rage?

After you pass through something like this and you’re standing on the other side, looking back over the vast landscape you have just crossed, there is a knowledge that comes into the heart that says, Of course. I see. It couldn’t have been any other way but this way. As if everything in my life had always been hurling towards that singular moment. Now, I see fragility everywhere — in the birds that collide with our living room windows, in the curve of my daughter’s spine, in the homeless man’s frozen breath. Sometimes it feels terrifying, this fragility, but mostly it just feels like a miracle. A full, achy-hearted, rich-beyond-measure, so frustrated, so grateful, MIRACLE.

Going After God

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by Father Kevin Grove, C.S.C.

Tonight, we are going after God, and we will take up that adventure by means of desire and memory, in that order.

Now, Genesis describes three desires that would have been intelligible across ancient near eastern civilizations. The first is the desire of the flesh — food, drink, sex. The second is “delight to the eyes” — the desire for ownership of things of the world, anything that one might see with his or her eyes and seek to have, control, or use. And the third desire was for that which would make one wise — pride, worldly ambition, etc.

I am not here to throw a theological wet blanket on human desire. I do not want to squelch or repress it. No: I want to claim that it is at the core of our tradition, that desires were created as good, but that they very often are out of balance. You know the struggle, as I do: We are always flopping back and forth between self-denial and self-indulgence. We do whatever feels good, sometimes at the expense of what is good (desire of the flesh), want more than our fair share (desire of the eyes), and always run the risk of becoming all about us (pride of life). Jesus, before he ever calls disciples, or performs miracles, or preaches, goes out into the desert to face his three desires. (That it lasted forty days indicates that it was no small undertaking). But his desire for God trump-
ed his other desires. Later, when he does preach, he gives his famous Sermon on the Mount and then continues on to describe how it is that people might live out this blessedness. He gives instruction on three practices and how to do them with integrity. To counter desire of the flesh, fast and abstain. To invert the desire to own and to control, give away possessions and control. To counter the desire for self, give away the self; he or she who truly prays Thy will be done places the will of another before that of themselves.

Interestingly, the entire religious life — priests, brothers, sisters — is built around this system of trying to work out these three desires. At its best, the religious life is understood as a school wherein its members, by their vows, might learn to desire — to love — well. It is not the only way, of course, but it is an ancient one, and sometimes admirable.

…

This brings us to the heart of the matter, memory, which is a term that we use to describe much more than what we had for breakfast or where we hope we left our car keys. Memory is a term for how you and I have any sense of a stable reality. Because, if the present is just an instant that is constantly slipping away, we have to stitch together our expectations of the future as well as our recollections of the past, to have any coherent account of who we are right now. “Memory” is part of our most intimate self; we are not who we are without it.

And memory gives identity to desire. Memory is a way to participate in the past. That’s why attending a Jewish seder meal is about more than consistently eating bitter herbs for three millennia. It is about participating in the same freedom which God gave to his people in the Exodus. Or, in the case of Catholic Mass, the Eucharistic narrative of the last supper is a not a historical recreation of the upper room in Jerusalem, but a present participation in the very same event on account of the substantial presence of the very same God.

Remember Jesus’ few last words? Remember “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” He’s remembering. He is not delivering a newly crafted line that will be quoted for all time. He is remembering the Psalms, and quoting the first line of a prayer he’d known his whole life. Yes, at the hour of his death, there was poetry on his lips… but what an odd thing to remember, isn’t it? And if Jesus was God, as we believe, how could he ask God a question? It would be like the divine aspect of Jesus and the human side were chattering among themselves. Or, as your theology professor Michael Cameron has put it, it could be like “divine ventriloquism” — divinity using humanity like a puppet. But no: as Saint Augustine, helpful as
usual, points out, when Christ cries out in abandonment and commends
his spirit to God, he has never stop-ped being the creator of the universe. He has taken up more than our skin — he’s taken up our life, our voice, and our death. He cries out in a human voice the sound of human agony at its very worst. Christ, who suffers unjustly, speaks in our flesh, in our words, so that we might speak in his. Suffering doesn’t disappear in our world. But no longer will the suffering of sinners ever be undergone alone. We will cry out in him, with him; when we suffer it will be in him, with him; when we breathe our last, yes, that too will be in him and with him.

In that moment the cross became hope.

But such closeness of our human with his divine could not even be conceivable unless… we remember. We remember Christ’s death not to hear a story, but to listen to him speak in our flesh — listen to him speak in us, uncomfortable though his words of agony may be. We remember so that we might then practice speaking in him: that whenever we might need to cry out “my God my God why have you forsaken me?” it will be because our savior speaks and hears our cry with us.

…

Not quite a decade later, Augustine works through another version of the same question of memory, when he heard the same Christ say, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” You know the story: a Pharisee named Saul binds the followers of Christ in chains to haul them before religious magistrates. Somewhere between Jerusalem and Damascus, he is blinded by light and hears a most amazing question: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He asks the voice to identify itself and Jesus says that it is him.

But why did not Christ say why are you persecuting “my saints,” or “my servants,” “my people” or “my holy ones”? Why me? Augustine’s conclusion is that when Christ spoke to Saul he is saying the equivalent of “‘Why attack my very body, my limbs?”

First, Christ took up the human cry on the cross and transfigured it, made it his own. But his cry did not end with resurrection and ascension. He cries out every time that one of his members is hurt or persecuted. Christ and us form one whole Christ. And inasmuch as you and I or any other member of Christ speaks or prays or desires or acts in him, we become ever more who we are; we are becoming Christ.

Don’t miss that: We are becoming Christ.

This is terribly exciting. We remember Christ in order to become him. It gives a whole new meaning to why and how we bother remembering at all. We remember Christ sacramentally by eating his body and drinking his blood. Augustine’s way of preaching that was “be who you are, become who you receive.” We remember Christ in the poor; they are Christ.

But we cannot remember alone. We do it as Christ — as his very body. It is a way of recalling that moves us beyond ourselves moment after moment such that we might say with Augustine: “I could not have seen it myself if I had not seen it through the eyes of Christ, if indeed, I had not been in him.” By being members of the body, we learn to speak, see, smell, taste, and understand in ways that are characteristic of that body. One sees neighbors in need, one learns to speak the Word that leads beyond words, and one is transfigured into Christ.

This essay is drawn from Kevin’s recent Father John Zahm Lecture on The Bluff. The Zahm Lecture honors the man who, as Holy Cross provincial in 1901, lent us books, money, and men to begin operations. Kevin, now a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, is the author of You Have Redeemed the World and editor of the excellent Basil Moreau: Essential Writings.

Dare to Love

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From a speech to the student League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Father Charlie Gordon, C.S.C., co-director of the University’s Garaventa Center.

I don’t have any jokes for you this evening. What I have to say is serious, and I hope you will give it a serious hearing.

Our identity as males begins with an inconsolable grief. In our infancy, at the first moment that it occurs to us that we are male, we are hammered with the psychological consequences of the terrible realization that in becoming male, we must become something that our mother is not. Oscar Wilde: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.” I don’t presume to say whether Wilde is right about women, but he’s right about men. Whether you are straight or, like Wilde, gay, your masculine identity began with a tragedy. It began with a profound feeling of alienation from the one who first loved and nurtured you. This necessary alienation from our mothers is felt psychologically as a rejection, even as a betrayal, and the experience shapes the persons we become.

If you ever have the experience of being loved unreservedly by a woman, you will come to realize that her love for you has a different quality than the love you have to offer in return. There is an awe-inspiring, almost frightening, depth and richness to a woman’s love. Even if you love her whole-heartedly, even if you are eager to pledge your future to her, even if you would willingly lay down your life for her, you will come to be aware that your love is a shadow of her love for you. That’s why St. Paul urges men to love their wives. Obeying them comes relatively easily to us. As men, we understand obedience. We can do obedience. But to love a woman with a love that is remotely analogous to the love she bears for us — that’s hard. It’s hard because in the depths of our being there is a feeling that we’ve been betrayed before. The origin story of our masculinity teaches us that love can’t be trusted. It isn’t what it purports to be. Anger is perhaps the emotion most associated with masculinity. Male anger is a powerful, terrifying thing. But male anger is a symptom of something deeper. It’s caused by a primal grief for intimacy lost and betrayed. In our heart of hearts, we weep.

Our deep-seated suspicion of the trustworthiness of intimacy has other consequences for us. We feel in-built reservations toward truth claims of any kind. We tend to hold at arms-length any all-embracing system that purports to invest life with meaning, purpose, and value. At some level we shy away from religions and ideologies, even those we profess. However avidly we declare our allegiance to God or country, something in us says, Okay, fine, but remember, we’ve been burned before. This ambivalence toward anything that claims our unqualified adherence may undergird our masculine passion for individual freedom. It may be behind the “commitment issues” so often associated with our gender.

Men are meaning-makers. We decide what will have meaning for to us, and make it matter by force of will. This can be seen even in the way we spend our leisure time. Some of us become incredibly invested in hobbies. The masculine love of sports is the quintessential example. Perplexed women ask, “How can you possibly care so much about sports? They’re only games. They just don’t matter!” The unspoken male response is, “And how exactly does that make them different from anything else?”

In light of all of this, how can you be a good man? Let’s begin with what you shouldn’t do. First, don’t pride yourself on noticing that truth claims aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. A sense of smug superiority at seeing through pretense is about as admirable as being proud of your sideburns. Both are simply part of being male. Your real distinction will be based on
what you manage to affirm in the face of your reservations. Second, don’t punish others for the ache in your heart. Don’t let alienation be an excuse for fecklessness. Don’t inflict real world abandonment and betrayal on others as a consequence of a feeling that is a psychological artifact of a necessary pre-rational stage of development. Don’t use the suspicion that nothing really matters as a justification to use others to gratify your baser instincts. Don’t exploit vulnerability, trust, or innocence in others to try to make yourself feel better. In the end, to do so will only make you despise yourself — with reason.

That’s enough “don’ts.” Now what should you do? First, acknowledge that the feeling that the world is meaningless and that love is untrustworthy doesn’t mean that either is. Your mother didn’t mean to hurt you. She loves you, with a love that has an intensity and richness that you can’t begin to understand. Her love for you is the most real, the most dependable, thing in your world. Treasure her, whether in life or in memory.

Second, employ your innate tendency to question the claims of authority, in the cause of justice. By all means, criticize pompous, self-serving rhetoric, and question baseless assertions. But do so not as an expression of fashionable cynicism, but as a means of bringing about real change for the better.

Finally, dare to love. Make your pain a wellspring of empathy and a spur to virtue. Suffering has been part of the fabric of your being from the beginning. Choose to suffer for others. In this you may take Christ as your model, or, if you’ve been fortunate, your father. My father suffered from a painful, debilitating illness during the last decades of his life. Nevertheless, he had a wife to love and a large family to support. So early every morning, he got out of bed, put on a business suit, and trooped downstairs and out the front door to work. He was a man — a meaning-maker. He had decided what mattered to him, and he accomplished it by force of will. He suffered manfully, and in the process created a space for us in which we could be safe and grow and learn what love is. I pray that you and I will do the same for those entrusted to us.

I can only tell you what I believe to be true. But even if I’m wrong about its origins, the pain and alienation are unquestionably real. What will you do with yours?

One Minute Ago Twenty Years Ago One Minute Ago

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by Brian Doyle

Was driving past my children’s grade school the other day and started to laugh, thinking of all the entertaining and hectic and chaotic and hilarious moments our children had enjoyed there, and I pulled over behind the school, where the muddy field and wood-chipped playground and moist basketball court and dense fringe of forest all crowd together with their edges spilling over gently so that moss marks the boundaries of the court and hawthorn trees finger the field, and I wandered around remembering stuff.

In my experience, if you wander around long enough with your reasoning software disabled, you might be plunged back thrillingly through time, and find yourself grinning as you watch your small daughter do soccer drills in the mud, and your elfin sons playing wall-ball with a ball very nearly as large as they are, and your tiny daughter swinging so high on the swings that you quietly position yourself to make the catch of a lifetime if necessary, and your headlong sons thrashing through the understory picking blackberries, and your exuberant daughter leaping from Utah to Ohio on the huge painted map of the United States on the pathway, and your grinning sons taking heroic cuts at a stationary baseball perched innocently on a tee, and your shy daughter and sons holding your right hand as you walk them up the hill to kindergarten, and bringing them their forgotten lunches, and looking all over the field and playground for lost jackets and hats and gloves and sweaters and basketballs and shin-pads, and a thousand other moments like that, all floating in the misted air over the scraggly field and along the uneven pathway and among the snowberries in the fringes of the forest.

They rocketed along on their bicycles and flung footballs and hatched conspiracies and gazed tongue-tied at girls and ran in packs and troops and gaggles. They played every sort of game most of which I will never know. They were scratched and bruised here and they sliced open their knees and elbows here and they bled here and surely they wept here and I know for a fact they laughed so helplessly here that their cheeks and stomachs hurt from laughing. There were field days and carnivals and picnics and assemblies and lines of burbling children ambling back into the school in that wonderfully motley way that lines of children move, two or three kids in cadence and then the next two gawking at a hawk and the ones behind them shoving and the next bent over tying his shoelace and the next kid trips over him and there is a pileup and the teacher at the back of the line says hey! and in a minute it will start to rain so incredibly hard that kids inside will press their faces against the windows in awe and leave perfect fading circles of their holy and magical breath.

I saw and felt and heard all these things as real and powerful and immediate and tender as the instant they happened ten years ago fifteen years twenty years ago and I wanted to weep and laugh at the same time and I had to go sit down on the swing where my daughter was swinging one minute ago twenty years ago one minute ago. The swing was rocking ever so gently when I went to sit down on it, and you might say it was the wind, or a flicker of breeze from a heron walloping by overhead, or the butterfly effect, whereby a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state, but you know and I know that my daughter had just leapt off the swing to run giggling through the tunnel of immense truck tires, and the swing still felt her slight weight, and always will.

What is Wild?

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by David James Duncan ’04 hon.

Clark Fork River, late September, and I’m kneeling in a patch of forget-me-nots. The light is reddening: a fast-setting fall sun. Fly rod in hand, I’m working a vast sliding glide of strikingly silent water.

Kneeling pays. A fish begins rising not two rod-lengths away. I flip out a mahogany-colored mayfly. The take, my strike, and the leap are simultaneous. A trout and my face are suddenly side by side, the only sound in the world the wild pulsing of its body in still air. We hear nothing so clearly as what arrives out of silence. The trout’s airborne pulsing is like a word clearly spoken in an empty hall. There is no bottom-of-the-boat indignity in this airborne thrashing. Trading water for sky, meeting no fluid resistance, the trout’s swimming becomes a spasm of speed, its whole heart and fear and body producing a sound like a bird taking flight. The trout leaps again. I hear wings again. Leaps again. And now I feel them. My heart lifts; body vanishes; mind flies into a jubilant spasm, and I suddenly know a litany of things I can’t know: that the souls of trout too leap, becoming birds; that trout take a fly made of plumage out of yearning as well as hunger; that an immaterial thread carries a trout’s yearning through death and into a bird’s egg; that the olive-sided flycatcher, using this thread, is as much trout as bird as it rises to snatch the mayfly from its chosen pool of air; that Tibetans, using this thread, locate departed lamas returned in the forms of young boys and, if they’d look closer, girls; that the flycatcher that was the trout was before that the mayfly that was the river that before that was creeks, last year’s snowpack, last year’s skies, eternity’s ocean… and that leaps are exhausting.

Still kneeling in forget-me-nots, I forget.

Played out, the trout turns on its side.

I ease the fish into my hands, and unhook the fly. The trout streaks for the depths with purpose. I stand in the shallows with nothing of the sort.

There are no rises now on the big silent glide. The one trout’s leaping has spooked things for a time. If I were a younger man I’d say the show here was over and rush, before light failed, to the next likely water or showing fish. But there are desires the vaunted energy of youth conceals. What I most often want now is to be more present where I am. There are tricks to this, as with any kind of fishing. Here is one. When trout rise in rivers, the rings of the rise drift quickly downstream. For this reason a fly fisher must cast not to visible rise-rings, but to an invisible memory of where rings first appear. I’ve heard this called “the memory point,” and knew of this point when I was young. What I did not know, then, was that one’s best casts to it are not necessarily made with a fly rod. Leaning mine against an osier, using eyes alone, I cast to a memory point now: In the last hours of a September day you can’t see down into the Clark Fork. The sun is too low, the light too acutely angled. In the last hours of day the river’s surface grows reflective, shows you blue sky and red clouds, upside-down pines, orange water-birch, yellow cottonwoods. Deer hang as if shot, by their feet, yet keep browsing bright grasses. Ospreys fly beneath you. Everything is swirling. In a snag, way down deep, you might spot a flycatcher. It’s hard to believe these clouds and trees, deer and birds, are a door. It’s hard to believe fish live behind it. Yet it was the clouds at my feet the rainbow troubled by rising. It was into this false sky that I cast the mahogany mayfly. It was out of inverted pines and cottonwoods that the trout then flew, shattering all reflection, three times speaking its winged word.

Not every cast hits the memory point. But when one does, this word goes on silently speaking. It says that death is like the Clark Fork, very late in the day. It says winged words are eternal. It says eternity moves through doors and worlds as it pleases.

David James Duncan, who received an honorary doctorate from the University in 2004 for “the power and passion and prayer” of his work, is the author of the novels The River Why and The
Brothers K, and of several collections of essays, notably the superb My Story as Told by Water.