Lightning in Infinity

In this cold and empty void,
a shining star warms a rock
replete with humankind,
a momentary capsule of consciousness
in Heaven's violent tumult.
The spark of life rages
like lightning through infinity,
captured for a moment of eternity
in our brevity on the edge of a galaxy
before it fades to black.
We live to pass the spark through time.
We die without the flame.
Is this God?  This fleeting bolt?
Does God exist without us?

Shiloh

They walked this field
on a day like today.
Blue and Grey, too young
to comprehend the meaning
of their sacrifice.
Dawn's silence was shattered
by the screams of the fallen,
stung by angry leaden hornets.
Dreams unrealized, extinguished.
Deaf to the din of the cannon,
blind in the smoke of destruction,
they lay on blood hallowed ground,
buried in our national memory.

Shiloh,
I too walk these fields,
now silent, long overgrown
with wild flowers of change.

Shiloh,
I too touch the cannons still hot
in this mid-August sun,
but I cannot feel the fervor
that your biblical name recalls.

Shiloh,
The best I can do
is remember the men
who died in these fields
on a day much like today.

The Star-splitter

"You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me

Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something

I should have done by daylight, and indeed,

After the ground is frozen, I should have done

Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful

Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney

To make fun of my way of doing things,

Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.

Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights

These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"

So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk

Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,

Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

And spent the proceeds on a telescope

To satisfy a lifelong curiosity

About our place among the infinities.

"What do you want with one of those blame things?"

I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"

"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything

More blameless in the sense of being less

A weapon in our human fight," he said.

"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."

There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground

And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,

Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years

Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

And bought the telescope with what it came to.

He had been heard to say by several:

"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;

The strongest thing that's given us to see with's

A telescope. Someone in every town

Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.

In Littleton it may as well be me."

After such loose talk it was no surprise

When he did what he did and burned his house down.

Mean laughter went about the town that day

To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,

And he could wait—we'd see to him tomorrow.

But the first thing next morning we reflected

If one by one we counted people out

For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long

To get so we had no one left to live with.

For to be social is to be forgiving.

Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,

We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,

But what we miss we go to him and ask for.

He promptly gives it back, that is if still

Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.

It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad

About his telescope. Beyond the age

Of being given one for Christmas gift,

He had to take the best way he knew how

To find himself in one. Well, all we said was

He took a strange thing to be roguish over.

Some sympathy was wasted on the house,

A good old-timer dating back along;

But a house isn't sentient; the house

Didn't feel anything. And if it did,

Why not regard it as a sacrifice,

And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,

Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm

At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn

To earn a living on the Concord railroad,

As under-ticket-agent at a station

Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,

Was setting out up track and down, not plants

As on a farm, but planets, evening stars

That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.

His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.

Often he bid me come and have a look

Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,

At a star quaking in the other end.

I recollect a night of broken clouds

And underfoot snow melted down to ice,

And melting further in the wind to mud.

Bradford and I had out the telescope.

We spread our two legs as it spread its three,

Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,

And standing at our leisure till the day broke,

Said some of the best things we ever said.

That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,

Because it didn't do a thing but split

A star in two or three the way you split

A globule of quicksilver in your hand

With one stroke of your finger in the middle.

It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,

And ought to do some good if splitting stars

'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,

And how it stands between the night tonight

And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?

How different from the way it ever stood?

- Robert Frost

Man will not merely endure: he will prevail

Ladies and gentlemen,

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

- William Faulkner (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech)

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the place of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.

--Wendell Berry

A Sense of Place

Nashville is a place to which I feel deeply rooted.  It is the place where I was born and where I spent the majority of my formative years.  I have not lived in Middle Tennessee for more than thirty years, and I have lived in seven other places since then.  Yet to Nashville, I feel a sense of belonging, one that is fundamental to my identity as a person.   It is a place of known earth and known weather, but it is a kind of knowing that involves the senses, and memory and history.  It is a place where things that are important to me happened.  This rootedness in geography is a reference point that guides my inward exploration, a landmark at my core that defines me physically and spiritually.  I feel the same sense of belonging to Nashville that I imagine Robert Frost felt toward Vermont or William Faulkner felt toward Mississippi, or at least the sense of place that they expressed through their writings.  Wallace Stegner argued that “…a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it died in it – have both experienced it and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities…. Whatever their relation to is, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.”   

America is a country in perpetual motion where opportunities for mobility abound.  Often, this rootlessness is motivated by a quest for ownership rather than belonging, and it undermines the process of long-term association with any given place.  Our sense of place involves a sense of responsibility.  Without a commitment to place, Americans are content to litter their own streets, ravage their own hillsides, foul their own rivers, and pollute their own air and then move on.  If we truly felt rooted to the land, would we not take better care of it?  We are a country of bandits, raiding and pillaging before riding on to the next town.

My own experience has been typically American.  My family moved from Tennessee, to Texas, to Ohio, to Louisiana, back to Tennessee, then Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New York in response to professional opportunities.  A map of my wanderings depicts a big “X” with the center lying over Nashville -- even my transiency leads back to my roots.  I am not sure why I feel such a kinship with Nashville, but my thoughts often wander back to memories of Middle Tennessee.  To know a place in a real and lasting way is to dream it.      

Hiawassee, Georgia, 1976

In an old general store
on a small country road
near a trail I was was hiking along,
an overalled man
shucking peas in a pan
mumbled "mornin'" as I tool off my pack.
I had come seeking water ... and Nehi and chips.
After days in the woods, I had earned them.
As he filled my canteen,
he asked where I's from,
where I'm goin', and when I 'ad left.
We talked of the land
we had both come to love;
he was born here - I was just passing through.
He warmed as we spoke
of where I had been,
and he told me fond places he'd seen.
He wished me the best
as I turned toward the door,
when a handbill caught my attention.
The more that I read
blood rushed from my head -
"Grand Dragon, Imperial Wizard," it said.
On the counter it lay
on that hot Georgia day -
"The Royal Order of the KKK"
His smile expressed
what of me he'd not guessed -
"White Christian public invited"
For as a Catholic I knew
that he hated me too,
a fact that I never indulged him.
How could a man shucking peas
have this awful disease,
hating people without any reason.
How the black man must feel
with his daily ordeal,
judged by his color not soul.
Cross-burnings and hoods,
men prowling the woods,
Was this 1976?
Now this vision remains
clearly stamped on my brain,
a black and white photo forever.

New Tappan Zee Bridge

Every morning, I cross the Tappan Zee Bridge on my way to work.  At certain times of year, my crossing coincides with a beautiful sunrise I see through the latticework of the bridge’s superstructure.  At other times, I witness the colorful sunset over the western Palisades as I return home.  Recently, a veritable flotilla of barges has assembled at positions both north and south of the bridge, each laden with steel pilings and support beams for a new TZB.  The current bridge opened to traffic in 1955, and a 2009 report states that it was not constructed with a plan “conducive to long-term durability.”  As a result, it has been under a constant state of repair for the last 20 years – thus, the justification for a new bridge.  The most remarkable aspect of the assembly of barges is the flock of at least a dozen towering cranes floating alongside the spine of the bridge.  Each day, they position foundational pilings and move rust stained steel from barge to emerging bridge.  From a distance, the cranes are a delicate anachronism of an earlier era, of what I imagine construction looking like when Robert Moses reshaped New York.  The lattice of each crane's armature gives it an almost origami likeness to its feathered namesake, each crosspiece a metaphorical crease in its paper counterpart.  The only modern facet of the archaic technology I can see is an orange-checkered flag and an anemometer that screams in the bitter wind that rages on blustery winter days.    Today, construction workers were bundled in insulation, and helmeted, and tethered to the edifice as wind swept waves slapped the sides of each barge and sent an icy spray across the deck.  On a day-to-day basis, progress is imperceptible.  The project worms its way across the river at a snail’s pace, closing the gap between Rockland and Westchester.   Yet, the developing project is truly a marvel, and by the end of the year, it will become even more so with the arrival of “The Left Coast Lifter,” one of the world’s largest cranes capable of lifting more than 12 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty.  I never tire viewing this evolving spectacle - my semi-diurnal crossing is the highlight of an otherwise tedious commute, something I can look forward to for the next three years.

Swords into Plowshares

And he will judge between the nations, and will decide concerning many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.  (Isiah 2:4)

On my way to work this morning, I listened to a remarkable story on the radio.  In the early 1990's, soon after the former Soviet Union had disintegrated, the United States was looking for ways to collaborate with its former adversary.  The US Department of Energy assigned a man named Philip Sewell to understand what was happening to the Russian nuclear industry.  He traveled throughout the Russian countryside and discovered that the uranium from thousands of decommissioned nuclear weapons was being stored in decaying buildings with little security.  Fearful that the nuclear material would get into the wrong hands, Sewell got the DoE to persuade the Russians to sell their surplus material to the United States.  Desparate for money, the Russians agreed.  The deal specified that the Russia would convert 500 tons of bomb-grade material to nuclear fuel, and the US would buy it and resell it to commercial power plants back home.  It was a win-win scenario.  The Russians made $17 billion, and today, roughly 10% of the electricity produced in the United States has come from Russian nuclear warheads.

Think about it, 20,000 bombs' worth of nuclear material has been utilized for peaceful purposes.  The nuclear sword has been beaten into a plowshare.  A monumental, but little recognized diplomatic achievement.

The last shipment of nuclear material arrived at a US storage facility today.  It will be sold to utilities in the coming years.  The program is over.  Now what?

The Road I Travel

The road that I'm on I have not traveled in years,
but the memories it brings back fill my eyes with tears.
I pass by the green, with its parade every year,
and the church with the bell made by Paul Revere,
the graveyard with heroes of the Revolutionary War,
and houses where neighbors do not live any more.
I pull onto the street that I know like my hand
and up to the place where that great old house stands.
A child who now lives there is playing outside
so I duck 'round the corner in order to hide.
I remember the birdbath out in the back,
and the birch tree with bark of white and black.
I attended reunions and funerals here;
this house, in my heart, is ever so dear.
Though the people are gone and the faces have changed,
the memories I have I will never exchange.
I stand here recalling events from the past
and wonder how it all happened so fast.
For time is a river, ever flowing, no rest,
and change is occuring, I hope, for the best.

My Hand

Five digits stand
separate but united.
Tough as nails,
but soft as the pad
on every finger.
Open in acceptance and love,
but closed in anger and scorn.
Each scar and callous, a tale of where I've been.
The lifeline, a map
of where I'm going.
My left hand like my right
but opposite.
My fist I open,
and the story
of my life unfolds. 

The color of your socks matters

I started my education at the public elementary school on the Fort Sam Houston Army base in San Antonio, TX.  There is a photo of me at the age of six headed off to school in jeans, a t-shirt, and white socks, a typical outfit for Army brats in the 1960’s.  Several years later, my family moved to Columbus, OH, where I attended St. Catherine’s Catholic school.  This school required that every student wear a uniform consisting of a white shirt and blue pants.  I continued to wear white socks as I had in Texas, but after several weeks, one of the nuns who taught at the school informed me that the uniform requirement also specified dark socks.  So that night I asked my mother to buy me a supply of blue socks lest I stand out from everyone else in the school.  After several years, we moved again, this time to New Orleans, LA.  Here I attended Holy Name of Jesus Catholic school which also had a uniform requirement – white shirt and khaki pants as it was too hot to wear dark pants in this climate.  I continued to wear blue socks as I had in Columbus, but soon after I arrived, one of my new classmates announced, “You know, only n******s wear colored socks.  If you want to fit in with white folks, you need to wear white socks.”   Hmmm, I had discarded all the white socks I wore in Texas because they were not useful in Ohio.  Now I couldn’t wear any of the colored socks I bought in Ohio.  Mortified that I would be mistaken for a person of color, I hurried home after school and convinced my mother to resupply my sock drawer with white stockings.  Then, in the early 1970’s I moved again, this time to Nashville, TN, where I attended a private school for boys. There was no uniform requirement, so I wore casual slacks, a collared shirt and the white socks I had acquired in New Orleans.  It didn’t take long, however, before the boy who sat behind me in homeroom announced that only rednecks wore white socks.  “We wear colored socks,” he explained.  "Here we go again," I thought.  This secret societal sock stipulation was clearly ridiculous.  I had changed my socks more often than anyone else in the school, perhaps the entire city, and it hadn't changed my personality or my outlook on life, at least as far as I could tell.  I had hoped that people would judge me by the content of my character rather than the color of my socks.  But I was wrong.  Perhaps it was a conspiracy instigated by sock manufacturers to increase the demand for hosiery.  Maybe I should just wear flip-flops.  

Ironic twist of fate

I recall my first year in the graduate chemistry program at Columbia University as a very trying experience.  I was unprepared to handle the advanced coursework required of all entering students.  I performed very poorly on my initial qualifying examinations.  At the end of my first semester, I received a letter from the head of the department stating that my performance was unacceptable, and I would not be allowed to continue in the Ph.D. program unless my progress improved markedly.  I also recall a classmate from Taiwan by who I'll call Qingyun.  He completed his undergraduate work at MIT and was one of most brilliant students I had ever met.  While I was slow to grasp the concepts of Statistical Thermodynamics, and I struggled with the advanced mathematics required to solve the weekly assignments, Qingyun sailed through the course and demonstrated great talent and creativity in the way he approached challenging problems.  I developed a great respect for his scientific insight and admired his technical abilities.

This was the first time I had encountered an academic situation that I could not handle, and I was terrified that I might actually fail out of the graduate program.  I was in over my head, and I was embarrassed to reach out for help.  Nevertheless, Qingyun recognized that I was in trouble, and he showed great kindness and patience in spending time to explain the key concepts and to guide me in solving the most difficult problems on my own.  While I did not do well in Statistical Thermodynamics, it was because of his efforts that I did not fail the course.  By the end of the spring semester, my performance had improved, and I was allowed to pursue a Ph.D. degree.  Qingyun did not have to help me as he did, but I was profoundly grateful for his assistance. 

Years later, I worked at IBM in semiconductor research and development.  I led a team of two hundred scientists, engineers and technicians and was responsible for the engineering activities in a microelectronics development fab.  Soon after I assumed the role, I learned that Qingyun was working as an etch engineer in the organization.  I recalled the help he had provided me as a first year graduate student, and I felt awkward in the role as his superior.  Without his help, I may never have had the opportunity to pursue a doctorate degree.  Without a degree, IBM would never have hired me into the semiconductor development organization, and I would never have enjoyed a fulfilling twenty-three year career with the company.  Privately, I told Qingyun to reach out to me if he needed help, yet the gesture seemed insufficient.  The irony of this situation - it’s funny how things turn out sometimes.

Pickup Truck Memorials

On my way to work today, I passed a pickup truck with a memorial inscribed on its rear window.   It was a Ford, and while I did not notice the model, it was the type of truck you would see at a construction site with a big steel tool box mounted in the back.   The decal was white and written in elegant script that read,

In Loving Memory

Joseph P. Meena

1954 – 2012

Perhaps Joseph was the driver’s father, or maybe his brother.  Whoever he was, it was important for the driver to announce to the world that Joseph is no longer with us.  I first noticed memorial decals like this after 9/11 that remembered officers from the NYPD or PAPD or firefighters from the FDNY who perished in the twin towers.  I have seen memorial decals in Spanish, usually with the wording surrounding a prominent white cross.  I have never seen them on the same window as a college decal. 

Such memorials are an odd mix of the elegant and the mundane, of the eternal and the impermanent.  When I think of a memorial, I picture a permanent fixture located in a peaceful park or quiet glen - a place conducive to reflection.   On the other hand, these memorial decals are literally stuck in traffic in the middle of the road amid the noise and bustle of everyday commuting - not exactly the dignified place I would set aside to remember those dear to me.  But these memorial decals do make an argument in the same way that an advertisement informs us of of an event.  In some sense, they also have an element of graffiti.  They make a statement that Kilgore was here, where Kilgore is really a brother or a father whose existence the driver wants us to acknowledge.  For whatever reason the driver chose to place a memorial on his pickup truck, his action did get me to think.  I still have no idea who Joseph P. Meena was, but I now understand that he was important to someone.  And maybe that is the point.