Why I Don’t Trust the Republican Establishment: an exposé

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

Know from the get go, Republican establishment, I am cutting you no slack. I learned of your dark hearts when I was 27. You’ve had to work to gain trust from me ever since. You haven’t succeeded.

I am not speaking of rank-and-file Republicans, those Americans with hankerings for pure capitalism and fears of big government who hold a vision of our nation being settled by self-reliant individuals protecting home and property. For the most part, I respect these Republicans and I am related to some of them.

Nor am I speaking of lower income Republicans, though I don’t understand why they are Republicans since their party has not benefited them in decades.

I am speaking of Republican policy-makers, big donors, elected officials who set agendas, stir up fears, have no trouble propagating mass delusion, block programs to help people in need, and who know “trickle down” is a scam. I’m talking of people who connive.

Here’s how I first learned of them.

In 1965 I was 23 years old and hired for my first real job in DC, the city where I had arrived from Iowa two years earlier with no employment, no place to stay, one suitcase, and $500 of borrowed money. During the first year I was often unemployed and occasionally a receptionist or cocktail waitress. The second year I was an editorial assistant for a trade magazine. I was fired from that job one year to the day while typing my resignation letter. My boss was right, I never took corner pharmacists, our clients, to heart, but the real reason I wanted out was she was a tyrant who kept trying to give me shoulder massages.

Mid-January 1965 I became a writer-editor at the Office of Economic Opportunity established in 1964 under President Johnson. Led by Sargent Shriver, those of us at national headquarters and on staff throughout the U.S. were filled with fervor to help the poverty-stricken and the under-served gain what they needed to raise the quality of their lives – to give the poor a chance whether they lived in the inner-city, Appalachia, migrant camps, or on Indian reservations. Whether they were white, black, Latino, young, old, or in-between.

We started the Head Start Program, VISTA, Legal Services, the Community Action Program, and Upward Bound. We were the War on Poverty. Working directly with and organizing those in need, we worked for justice, equality, financial opportunity, and early education. We gave people a chance.

The man who hired me left a month later. He had been the in-house photographer. When a call came from Shriver’s office that they needed a photographer in two hours for photos with the civil rights leader Roy Wilkins, I unlocked the closet that held the Nikons, called our photo agency, and asked them how to use a camera. At 1:00 pm I appeared in “Sarge’s” office and introduced myself as our new photographer.

Here’s the crux of it. As the in-house photographer, in addition to being a writer, I hired free-lance photographers to document the many forms of poverty across the nation, and to document our programs that were helping people change the course of their lives.

Every day I studied incoming contact sheets (36 negative-size black-and-white photographs per sheet) of poverty and programs. I selected the photographs to be printed as 8″ x 10″ glossies for distribution and publication.

I was the person, more than anyone else in the world, who knew what our nation’s poverty looked like. The contact sheets came to me, I examined them, and chose the best. I looked at between 500 and 1000 images a week.

We had a photographic archive equal in quality and scope to that gathered during the New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. We had many hundreds of photographs the quality of those taken by Dorothea Lange. The photographs were tragic, inspiring, revealing. They did what the best photographs do – reveal and convey the unique humanity of every person within the circumstances of his or her life.

This was my job for two years before I stepped back to start a marriage and a family. The process of getting photos slowed down, but continued.

In early 1969 I was 27. Two months after President Nixon took office, I received a call from one of my top free-lance photographers who was visiting the offices: “Patricia, they’re taking the photographs. They have a huge bin on wheels. I saw it going down the hallway filled with photos dumped in it. I grabbed an armful, but they stopped me. They are throwing everything out. Everything. The filing cabinets are empty. There’s nothing left.”

I called the photo lab instantly. It had been two years, but they recognized my voice immediately. Before I could ask, my guy there said: “Patricia, they just left. They took every negative.”

“Every negative?”

“They walked in and demanded them. We had no way to stop them.”

An historical archive of the American people was obliterated. A national treasure was destroyed.

Not only did the Republican administration set out to destroy the evidence of poverty in the U.S., it set out to destroy the Office of Economic Opportunity. Some programs were dismantled entirely, others siphoned off in pieces to other government departments. The War on Poverty was over.

Has anything changed?

It seems systemic to the Republican hierarchy to disempower and disenfranchise minorities and low-income people by gerrymandering voting districts, setting up discriminatory voting restrictions, exporting Latinos, putting Afro-Americans in prisons, having unequal criteria for providing loans for homes and businesses, refusing to support affordable advanced education, endorsing a tax system where it is corporations and the wealthy that get breaks, promoting Islamophobia, and fighting a respectable minimum wage while protecting the right to accept unlimited donations from extremist right-wing billionaires who promote their personal agenda.

I do not understand how people come to hold perspectives that dehumanize and denigrate the needy and under-privileged. I do not understand how people are willing to denigrate their own humanity by shutting off their empathy, understanding, and compassion.

I do not understand people who do not experience other humans as real and valuable, and I pray I never learn what that is like. I cannot imagine what it would feel like to believe only people like you matter.

The loss of understanding and compassion for all members of the human family, each desiring opportunity, justice, fairness, and love, would be horrific. I think it would be even worse than the loss of irreplaceable photographs that revealed and celebrated all the members of our human family.

That is why I dislike the Republican establishment. I have been watching them closely for more than four decades. They haven’t gotten better.

Rachmaninoff and Me

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

I haven’t written because I have too much to say, but question the validity of saying any of it. Recently on Facebook I have been adding “friends” who are poets and authors, and I don’t know who they are – well, some names are slightly familiar – and they all have books, and write beautifully, which adds to my writer’s block; but I just came from seeing the play “Preludes” at Lincoln Center about the composer’s block of Sergei Rachmaninoff after a disastrous – and I do mean disastrous – debut of a new symphony. The conductor was drunk and the orchestra not prepared, and Sergei got skewered by the critics. If seeing that play doesn’t unblock my backlog, I think nothing could except drunkenness, which isn’t my style. It didn’t work for the conductor, it wouldn’t work for me.

Afterwards I sat under the trees in front of the theater in this blessed balmy air that is the same temperature as your skin surface, which is, of course, heaven, and the guy who played Rachmaninoff walked by. He was talking to an obvious friend who left and then as he walked back, I said “Thank you,” and he came over and I told him about the Rachmaninoff wars between my 7-year-old grandson who adores Rachmaninoff, though at first he thought it was Mozart he adores but it is Rachmaninoff, and my 5-year-old granddaughter who thinks music isn’t music unless it has words and a singable melody, while Ben doesn’t like music with words. He is gifted in math so it makes sense. Rachmaninoff was mathematical also.

So the writer’s block has been both about that I cannot keep up with the magnificent writers who are suddenly all over my FB thread even though they don’t know me, but probably did a quick check, saw I looked harmless, and were willing to accept me as a “friend.” And it is also because I have lost my sense of having a profile, any i.d. Nothing makes sense anymore regarding who I am. And if you don’t know who you are, your literary impulses, which depends on what you think and feel, can get pretty confused.

Wendell Berry – one of my new literati friends posted this magnificent poem by him – described this well. Well, my dislocation takes it a bit further than he does, but he really described not knowing. See?

It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.”

Now, it seems the impeded stream may not be singing – more like gurgling eddies – but he sums up the bafflement and makes it all good somehow, as having the purpose of no purpose might actually get you somewhere.

I haven’t been fighting losing my identify. I invited it and have yielded to it even as I now question it. Several years ago I decided to strip myself of definition and it has been working. I mean, people think I am serenity, except for my closest friends who still think I am serenity and rely upon my being serenity for their own serenity even when some get occasional glimpses of churning waters underneath.

Joan Didion wrote that as she got older she couldn’t write as she once did, words eager to rush onto the page, internal rhythms known even before the words arrived. Now she just tries to use the right words, the accurate ones, the authentic ones. Each word done with such care. I tell myself to do the same but I am not Joan Didion, and to include a reference to myself in a paragraph about her is narcissistic blasphemy, but . . . yikes.

Plus, there is a residue inside me that is rococo. I would love to be able to use words like verisimilitude, laconic, obfuscation, lexicography, and lassitude as nimbly as I use words like harvest, fever, raspy, and earth.

It is imperative to use the right words, but it is work. It is a meditation, it is knowing what is. And knowing what is is, generally, beyond words. See the problem?

Other problems include that I’m just plain lonely in this transition to non-description. This is, by the way, an essential struggle of most elderly. Have you any idea how many people who were my friends or acquaintances a couple months ago are no longer here?

My second ex-husband sent the word out, through a convoluted route that found me across the U.S. and after 35 years, that he has dementia and Parkinson’s Disease. It wasn’t his lungs, after all, that got him. It was Lewy’s body disease, the second most common form of dementia, the top of the list of all those kinds of dementia that are not Alzheimer’s. Do you think I’m losing use of my vocabulary not because of seeking rockbottom truth but because words are disappearing? I am afraid of that. In any case, no-frill words tend to be truer. Something may be “transcending” but it is more accurately “rising, delicate and vaporous.”

Rachmaninoff really suffered. Brilliance hiding is not a pleasant thing, especially when you need to bring in rent money. Brilliance molding? What is a sorry state for others is a horror for a genius. I am not a genius. My suffering has been real but it is not a case of having a gift that could blow the minds of others into the stratosphere and that the world will forever ache over from its loss. Mine is more closely aligned to the loneliness felt in the gap of not hearing one’s self express one’s own understandings, of not taking something to the next level, of stupefied energy.

This is not outwardly visible. I look pretty good, and my health is good. I had it checked out of fear that the gloom eyeing me along the edges of my campfire was partially physical. My health is fine, my loneliness isn’t really.

Did I tell you my past is littered with bad husbands? Men who failed me on the simplest of terms. Fidelity, safety, things like that. It is a cluttered landscape behind me. Debris beside the road, but it is okay. I am blessed, and I saw this play today “Preludes” on the composer’s block of Rachmaninoff. He was 28, I’m 72. He got over it. I will too . . . or not.

It is not important to be able to use words such as pulchritude, dipsomaniac, vermiculite, or phrases such as “it hit him the way formaldehyde hits a lizard, “ or “she circumambulated the offering, an oracle tied to the thread of a vision” No, it is enough to be able to say, “She loves with her entire body. She loves so much she does not know her body from her mind. She loves more than fits conventional wisdom. She loves beyond calling. She loves with the clarity of a baby’s drool. She loves. She loves mindlessly. She loves so much she trusts losing herself even though she has no choice in the matter.”

Rachmaninoff went on to write his “Prelude in C# Minor.” I wrote this.

Art! Slam us to the ground!

Posted on February 13, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

Having lunch with a friend who has been targeted for assassination is one way to up your appreciation of art. De Kooning after an omelet tapa with tomatoes and olives. Diebenkorn after grilled cauliflower. Matisse after a cappuccino.

When the furniture glue coated on the wires under his car didn’t explode because it was the coldest week in the Middle East in years, the assassins settled for Molotov cocktails and exploded his car after he returned home.

Kenneth Noland after talk about moderation in actions and politics. Robert Motherwell after consideration of Aristotle and the Golden Mean. Helen Frankenthaler after talk of “psychos” – his word – from France, Belgium, and Germany joining ISIS because it gives them license to kill.

The Phillips Collection, an exquisite private gallery, was halfway along my walk from the restaurant to my home. If not now, when?

Mondrian after sorrow for the distortion of Islam. Sam Francis after re-commitment to hope because the other options would be fatal. Adolph Gottlieb following recognition of how fear strips most people of courage.

I stood in front of the paintings with the most aggressive colors – not a day for meditative studies – and challenged them to “Hit me with your best shot. Fill me.”

Many years ago I meant a young man at the Phillips. He was set to have an exhibit there before everything went topsy-turvy when the director was found to be selling paintings from the museum to fund his personal life. The young man and I became lovers. I took LSD with him once. We became bear cubs and romped and rolled. I didn’t realize he considered LSD a basic food group. It fueled his amazing mind and art. He painted white on white and it got whiter and whiter over the years, though he and I were together only a few months. He invented a written language for me. The pieces he wrote were exhibited – an iconography of love on yellow paper.

He said, “If art doesn’t come off the wall, hit you behind the knees, and knock you to the ground, it’s not good enough.” I believed him then and I believe him now, though I believed then and believe now that there are subtle ways to be knocked over. Sometimes a feather will do. Maybe he believed that to. His paintings got very white.

But today was not a day for gentleness. I asked the strongest, most colorful, most daring art to hit me. Come off the wall. Slam me to the ground. Fill me. Show me – prove it! – that humans are greater, are larger, are better animals than we seem. We are not just people who kill, people who try to kill my friend because he educates people in the truth so they will stop killing each other, people who kill innocent Muslim students, people who bomb Syrians, extremists who capture and rape young women. That there needn’t be more bombs, more killing, more blood, more freezing cold, more lack of shelter in the freezing cold, more stupidity, more justification, more ignorant savagery. That it need not be! We are better than this. We have artists, we have voices, we have kindness in us.

Slam us, art! Save us from ourselves! Keep red on the canvas and off our clothing and bodies. Give us meaning and perspective and hope that, despite the horrors we commit, we can find our way to compassion and care for each other. Knock us to the floor so we can rise in hope.

Helen Frankenthaler

Sam Francis

Adolph Gottlieb

Wassily Kandinsky

Richard Diebenkorn

Willem de Kooning

Henri Matisse

On Beauty: Chihuly in the Garden

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

ALERT: Be prepared to slow down. Glass, greenery, and mind-alteration ahead.

Last week I was at the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden in Miami where the 83 acres of barely tamed palms, cycads, and flowering trees were embedded with the blown glass art of Dale Chihuly. It was glorious, and forced me to rethink my beliefs about beauty.

Beauty is not absolute. We may cluster around Monet’s waterlilies, Venus de Milo, and Vermeer’s woman with a pearl earring and gasp in awe, but beauty is not absolute.

My heart may skip a beat over any painting by Odilon Redon or Wassily Kandinsky. Yet, beauty is not absolute.

We may feel a visceral snap, zap, ping that seems to have come across 40,000 years to reach us when we look at cave wall drawings of bison, horses, and deer. Still, beauty is not absolute.

To keep it simple let’s focus only on the visual arts even though the principle that beauty is relative applies to our perception of beauty in music, poetry, dance, film, and humans.

The functioning principle is: Beauty is relative because humans decide individually what they believe is beautiful and what they believe is not. The work of art is not saying to itself “I am beautiful.” We do that, and we have different opinions.

Humans assign beauty and other values to art based on filters inside ourselves that we do not even realize exist. Everything we see passes through these filters and is judged – tainted or enhanced – by them. We feel that we are discovering beauty or ugliness when, in fact, we are assigning beauty, ugliness, and all sorts of other qualities to art – and so much more.

The filters are determined by where we live, when we live, our experience, our education, and our wildly-varied personal quirks. It is all personal. There is no other explanation for Elvis on black velvet.

This is not to say visual arts are inert, flat, dead. They have internal resonance determined by their color combinations and spacial relationships. Paintings and sculpture have “chords” just like music. Their colors, scale, and depth can be analyzed and charted. They may be “harmonic” or discordant.

The majority of people prefer “harmonic” – that is, mathematically balanced – resonance where the light spectrum of different colors feel “connected” with each other and the spacial relationships feel cohesiveness, i.e. most people don’t like things to “clash.” Most of us like art we perceive to resonate harmonically inside itself that, by extension, then resonates inside us.

Until last week I never resonated with the blown glass works of Dale Chihuly. I found them stunning but soulless. Analytical, intellectual, a little too like a painting by Salvador Dali. Slick. Lacking the mess of human emotions.

But the idea of walking through the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden to see Chihuly’s glass works in sito was intriguing. Besides, my host was charming, and it was a sunny day with blue skies over Miami.

My friend and I were enchanted, and I saw Chihuly’s art as for the first time.

Suddenly the works were not shallow, but sensuous, brilliant, outrageous, and organic. Yes, organic. They created an Alice in Wonderland world where everything was alive, and slightly dangerous. They rose from the earth among vines and flowers. They “bloomed” and thrived on the sun like the carbon-based life around them.

The works resonated with the plants. Newts crawled on them, dragonflies rested on them, and birds walked among them. The plants, animals, insects, and glass were at home with each other.

This 180 degree turn in perception reminded me of a book I read years ago. The author explored our ability to change instantly what we think is ugly to what we think is beautiful, our ability to re-perceive.

She used the example of palm trees, how she considered them ugly until one day she saw them as beautiful. Reading that, I suddenly no longer saw palms as ugly but as beautiful.

Hold on. We’re going to take this to its extreme.

Years ago, within seconds of starting to meditate on a beach in California, I watched the setting sun become the center of a universe of love that held – in fact, was – a beating heart. Lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub, through the sky, the ocean, the sands.

My mouth was slightly open. A fly came to hover in front of it like a hummingbird. I saw my mouth through the fly’s perspective – a damp reddish cave. How inviting!

The fly came closer, but did not enter. As the fly, I reconsidered. As a person, I felt no abhorrence.

In the suspension of a world divided into beautiful and ugly, what would normally be felt as grotesque was felt as exquisite. I understand this is shocking when viewed from the constraints of normal perception and judgement, but it was a lesson I have never forgotten. It was a world alive in beauty without filters. It touched me so deeply that I could not speak of it for months and then only in tears of wonder.

As humans we assign not only designations of what is beautiful and what is ugly but of what is alive and what is not. We say a tree is alive, but glass is not.

FullSizeRender 10 We are as wrong in assigning life as we are in assigning beauty and ugliness. Everything is alive, everything is made of energy.

Sometimes we know this – an hour on the beach looking at the sun over the ocean. Sometimes we don’t know this.

Glass, to me, is now organic, both as the substance of glass and as the expression of an artist.

Most days the filters have less and less power. Most days, there is more and more beauty.

Thank you, my friend, for taking me to the garden. Thank you, Chihuly, for creating new forms of life.

The show continues through May 31. More on Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden and its programs at www.fairchildgarden.org.

One Movie Star at a Time

Posted on January 12, 2015 by Patricia Z Smith

My list of male actors just passed 370 with Sir John Gielgud, Gordon MacRae, Patrick Swayze, George Takei, and Harpo Marx. My list of female actors passed 260 with Claudine Longet, Olivia Newton-John, Olivia de Havilland, and Farrah Fawcett.

Their names rise like tendrils, sprouting from the silent dark loam of my mind to the light.

Ali MacGraw, Billy Bob Thornton, Ann Bancroft, Lillian Gish, Maximilian Schell.

Each morning I wake with a handful more names to add.

Eve Arden, Ray Milland, Jayne Meadows, Ossie Davis, Ann Southern, Joel Gray, Lotte Lenya.

The rule is that I cannot just add names I search on Google. I have to remember who they are, or were, and at least recognize their face before their name is added. I can, for example, remember the face of the woman in “Oklahoma” and then google her name. Shirley Jones.

My obsession, so far, is not about learning, but about remembering. It’s about stimulating my brain and having available the file of “who’s who” that other people have.

Peter Lorre, Angela Bassett, Loretta Young, Cheryl Ladd, Melina Mercouri, Celeste Holm, Billy Dee Williams.

This obsession, and fascination with how memories rise out of darkness, started – are you ready? – with a pressing need a few months ago to learn the nations of Africa. Then all the nations of the world. Then all the provinces and their capitals of Canada. Then all the capitals of all the nations in the world. The island nations of far Southeast Asia still resist cognitive patterns but I’m 90% of the way there on the rest.

After decades of geographical nonchalance, I need to know the pattern of the planet I stand on. What is underneath my feet? What nations touch up against other nations? Who are the people who live in that specific place? When they run from their home to another country, who are their neighbors?

But my need to know doesn’t stop with nations on the earth and stars of stage and screen. My brain lusts across a wide scope of nameable knowledge – the seven dwarves, the Supreme Court justices, Santa’s reindeer, the seas and mountain ranges. It wants to bring tangible nameable reality into place before I return to the intangible unknowns of peace work.

Jon Voigt, Peter Fonda, Werner Herzog, Anna Magnani, Jean Seberg, Chita Rivera, Omar Sharif, Julie Christie, Pia Madori, Mia Farrow, Ingrid Bergman.

What if someone asks me the Departments of the U.S. government and the Secretaries? Or the chronology of the Presidents? Or when Prussia was Russia or Germany or Poland, or Germany was Prussia?

Then there are all the film directors! This list will start when either the actor or actress list reaches 400.

Vivien Leigh, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple, Tammy Grimes, Peter O’Toole, Nick Nolte, Bruce Lee, Raquel Welch.

I’m not inherently inept with names. I voluntarily stopped registering names some time ago. I was more interested in the movie, or work of art, or book than in who made the movie, created the art, or wrote the book.

I can say I did this, though it now feels like an excuse, because other things were more important to me, like learning the principles of cultures of peace and forming global networks of women. I can say that I learned what I needed to know to do the work I needed to do in order to help make a better world, and that I didn’t have the capacity left to remember names. But now, it is I – not world peace – with the need to know who is who and what is where.

Kim Novak, Ruby Dee, Jeanne Moreau, Alan Delon, Margaret Cho, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Patti LaBelle, Viola Davis, Dorothy Dandridge.

I delight in the recall.

Daryl Hannah, Jack Webb, Lena Horne, Larry Hagman, Alec Guinness, Yvonne de Carlo, Jeff Chandler, Jackie Chan, James Dean, Lauren Bacall.

I feel my brain. Zip zap zip zap. Neurons popping. Synapses dusting themselves off.

Carrie Fisher, Kirk Douglas, Helen Hayes, James Earl Jones, Jane Alexander, Annette Bening, Audie Murphy, Sidney Poitier, Clara Bow, Charlie Chaplin, Uma Thurman, Oona Chaplin, Liv Ullman, Stacy Keach, Rod Serling, Jeremy Irons, Helen Mirren, Candice Bergen, Rosalind Russell, Eddie Murphy.

Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt, Tony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Mary Martin, Robert Culp, Jane Russell, River Phoenix, Betty Grable, Peter Lawford, Meg Ryan, John Wayne, John Travolta, Rita Moreno, Walter Matthau, Hedy Lamar, Leslie Nielsen, Gilda Radner, Robin Williams, Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Perhaps this obsession is about not forgetting people. Not letting them slip away.

Mogadishu, Somalia; Kigali, Rwanda; Antananarivo, Madagascar; Kampala, Uganda; Juba, South Sudan; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Ouagadougou, Burkina Kaso; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Accra, Ghana; Dakar, Senegal.

And not forgetting whole nations,

Sandra Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, John Robert, Anthony Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

. . . or those who judge our laws,

Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, and Rudolph.

. . . or who fly through the night with gifts for us all,

Sneezy, Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Doc, and Bashful.

. . . or whistle when they work, even when it is for minimal wage.

There are a lot of people to remember.

Making God in our (racist) Image

Posted on December 15, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

My initial understanding of racism arrived deus ex machina when I was 14 standing in the back of a empty country church in Iowa. Years were still to pass before I met anyone whose ancestors weren’t northern European.

While I didn’t know any blacks, Latinos, or Asians, I knew “my people” well – good people, farming people. I was a keen observer from an early age. I knew “my people” were insecure about how people outside of the Midwest saw them. Farmers, bumpkins, clodhoppers, country folk.

The tenet that we were “made in God’s image” was spoken often from the pulpit and it was reassuring. Yes, humility might be praised and promoted – we could take pride in how humble we were – but knowing we were made in God’s image was a private pass in our back pocket if life went from humbling to humiliating. It was an assurance of value. We had affinity with the Almighty.

Alongside the push-pull between humility and God-heritage was the question of the nature of God. Our black earth, hogs, corn, and cows inclined us to believe in God as embodied, as a being with our senses but over-sized, while the vast formless sky revealed infinity. The trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit tried to meld these concepts, but anyone looking at the symbol can see it is too complex – this is part of this which is not part of that. It is contrived. Truth has to be more elegant. But that’s looking at it from now.

Looking at it from then, my people assumed Michelangelo got it right regarding God the Father. White, male, mighty. And we knew the Holy Spirit from the miracles of nature around us and by the feeling inside when we were being saved. Salvation was pure spirit, a visitation of light.

And Jesus, well, . . . Jesus made the whole thing human. We could relate to Jesus. He was a shepherd, which is a kind of farmer. And a carpenter, and a fisherman. Jesus was an all-around capable amazing guy. He would have made a great neighbor.

But we weren’t told we were created in Jesus’ image. We were told we were created in God’s image, and God, we understood, was the Father – a Father who played favorites, kept score, and wanted allegiance; and He watched us. “His eye is on the sparrow” was not entirely reassuring. He held all the power, as in “. . the Power, and the Glory forever and ever. Amen.” Good thing we were in the same family – white and Christian.

He had to be white. We were made in His image and we were white. This special standing elevated us from backbreaking labor. If other races were equally loved by God, then we were no longer special – and we needed special.

At age 14 I melded the psychological premise of “I feel better about myself if I think less of you” to the priority of believing you are created in the image of a God that favors you, and that it did not allow for people who did not look like you to be equally favored by God. Standing alone in the back of that church, I understood that prejudice attached itself to the belief that you were in a special relationship to God.

While I could not have said it at that time, what this means is that instead of being made in God’s image, we made God in our image and we made Him racist.

Christians don’t have a monopoly on claiming special status as God’s chosen people. It is a self-serving fault line of extremists of the three Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Extremists use it now and have used it historically in the name of (so-called holy and definitely unholy) wars, forced conversions, justification of violence, the Inquisition, genocide, prejudice, ghettoes, the Crusades, pogroms, expulsions, and occupation of other people’s land and property.

Terrorists of these three religions believe they are God’s, Allah’s, Yahweh’s favored children. They believe they are superior, privileged, and – having kinship with their racist and vengeful God – can act with impunity. They are on a mission of the highest calling.

It is, of course, only a small minority of people of any religion who become fanatics, and what I am saying is, we all know, only a sliver of the multiply causes of evil enacted in the world. But among those causes, we must examine the ideological seeds that are planted in people.

Speaking only for Christians: If we had been taught that we were created in the image of Jesus who loved and forgave and didn’t suffer pomposity perhaps life on our communal planet might have turned out differently.

Or if we had been taught that we were created out of the Holy Spirit, perhaps more of us would have felt and found the light inside us. That flame has no ethnicity, no favored people, it burns from love.

But many of us, instead of finding our light, judged ourselves as inferior, sought – and created – an all-power father, and gave ourselves permission to harm and kill “lesser people” in his name.

It is a cyclical internal process that becomes institutionalized and fills our world with horrors. Syria, Gaza, Ferguson, torture, drones, Guantanamo, rape, injustice, police brutality, destruction of the planet, child abuse, slavery, prejudice. This list goes on, and it breaks our hearts.

It is revealing, isn’t it, that human hearts break from the harm we do to each other? Is this how the Holy Spirit makes itself known to us? Is this how we wash away false gods?

Diamond Out of the Rough

Posted on December 12, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

When the certified gemologist behind the counter asked for my husband’s name regarding all and complete contact information on me, I said “The diamond is the last of the husband.” People turned around.

He continued: “Well, I always have to ask.”

Me: “Really?”

But it was all done humorously. I was, after all, turning a ring that I hadn’t worn in more than six years because of the slightly malevolent vibration it emitted into a stunning necklace – an emerald cut diamond on a delicate 19″ gold chain. I handed over the gold part of the ring for credit.

The diamond has been with me for 24 years, the blink of an eye in its lifetime. I am just a passing mirage to it – and my story not particularly interesting I suspect.

Point is, things under immense pressure, including people, sometimes turn into diamonds – brilliant, clear, and radiant that stand the test of time. Other things, including people, go soft, rot, and crumble. Whether it is a matter of decisions made while under duress or only an organic process having to do with the initial carbon of the person is not a question I can answer.

I’ve nothing more to say on this subject.

Ode to Thrust Bearings: getting unstuck

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Humans progressed from sticking twigs into holes in the earth and then licking off the ants to inventing thrust bearings, glorified wheels that opened the way for the industrial revolution, advanced agriculture, and travel in outer space. Can we not find the equivalent to change our human interactions and bring harmony to the world?

. . . . .

The world needs more thrust bearings. Thrust bearings allow things to be mobile and flexible while remaining stable. They allow large heavy things to turn, move, and realign. They allow juxtaposed things to stay in connection with each other while one – or both – is turning, moving, and realigning.

We need more thrust bearings in world politics, we need them for social mobility, we need them to manage the relationship between finances and education, we need them to unstick prejudices, we need them to navigate clashing attitudes on abortion, same-sex marriage, minimum wages, health care, gun control, immigrants, and housing for everyone. We need them in the U.S. Congress. We need them between religions and cultures. We need them wherever there is war, poverty, destruction, or hate.

What is a thrust bearing? It is a human invention, a thingamajig with only one purpose – to allow objects to turn in relationship to each other on a axis. It is, in effect, a flattened ring of multiple ball bearings that fits between a same-size washer on the top and a same-size washer on the bottom.

Yes, there are tools for almost everything – give me a large enough lever and a place to stand and I can make the earth move – but my heart belongs to thrust bearings.

The thrust bearing that thrills me most is 15/16” in diameter with a center hole 5/8^”in diameter. It is a 304 stainless steel alloy mix of iron, chromium, nickel, and small amounts of other things. (See photo of my actual thrust bearing.)

Thrust bearings are put to use by slathering them in grease between their two washers. Think lox slathered with cream cheese on both sides between two toasted bagel chips.

After this photo was taken my heartthrob was slathered, layered, and placed on a small rod – an axis – atop a stainless steel pole 2” wide by 3’ high. A matching stainless steel “top piece” of pole 3” high was placed on top of the thrust bearing.

This 3″ top piece is attached to a “cradle” with finger-like prongs that hold a 120 lb. angel’s wing of Carrera marble. The wing is 39″ long. The concept, construction, and installation for the support pole and cradle were all done by museum installer par excellence David Graham alongside Patrick Burke.

The thrust bearing allows the wing to turn on a horizontal axial plane 4′ high in my garden. Not like a windmill, it is too heavy for that. But I can turn the wing easily to view it from different angles.

Very few things look the same from difference angles. Very few things are not metaphors for something else.

My thrust bearing has the capability to allow an object of up to 3000 lbs. to rotate on an axial plane at 10,000 revolutions per second. Try that, junior cadets.

A nearly life-size terra cotta woman titled “Waiting for an Angel” sits nearby. She is serene, sure that angels exist and, if she waits long enough, one will walk in to reclaim the wing that fell to the ground and turned to marble. (The wing’s sculptor is Elizabeth Turk. The name of the creator of “Waiting for an Angel” has vanished from my records. There is more about both on my blog Returned: One Angel’s Wing.)

Her dream is ethereal but the thrust bearing that allows the wing to move is concrete. It is not a wish, a notion, or a longing. It is real. We humans need both the dream and the tool.

We need interior and exterior tools to bring us into equilibrium with each other so we can be flexible, creative, and work together to overcome inequalities such as food for some and not for others, medicine for some and not for others, education for some and not for others, safety and equal rights for some and not for others.

We are stuck. We confuse our selected morality with absolute truth. We trumpet the mythology of our own religion while mocking that of others. We justify killing as though we have no other option. We give precedence to one sex over the others. We favor some races and cultures over others. We imprison people unequally and label it protection of the rest of us. We think guns make us strong.

We entrench. We find it difficult to change our positions and beliefs. We close our doors and our borders and our minds and our hearts. We build walls against each other and then we bomb our way through them to kill each other. We feed our hate and fear and memory of harm done to us until it turns into harm and horrors we do to others.

We lack the courage and vision – or perhaps only the will? – to reconsider our stuck positions. We like thinking we are right, we like not questioning ourselves. But if we are to live in peace then we need to find and use our inner thrust bearings. We need to change our perspectives on what exists, what is possible, and how to get there. We need to do it individually and collectively.

So what does a thrust bearing look like? They are nouns, verbs, people, states of being, qualities.

For starters: Pope Francis, Jane Goodall, Desmond Tutu, neighborhood soup kitchens, dedicated teachers, fair trade agreements, cat videos, chocolate, inner-city gardens, deep listening to each other, forgiveness, reunions, interfaith outreach, art in our schools, nonviolent protests against injustice and inequality, paid maternity leave, respect for the homeless and poor, neighborhood libraries, smiles, increased minimum wage, diversity.

Love, education, and medicine are thrust bearings. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is the Golden Rule thrust bearing.

Many NGO’s are thrust bearings. Top of my list are Search for Common Ground, Doctors Without Borders, Bereaved Parents – Family Forum, Women for Women International, Chime for Change, and World Pulse.

Countless thousands of women in Africa are thrust bearings. UN resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace, and Security” to get women at negotiation tables and in the enactment of peace accords is a thrust bearing. Any book by Jean Shinoda Bolen is a thrust bearing, including the just-released “Artemis: The Indomitable Spirit in Everywoman.”

We need countless more. But to have more thrust bearings in our individual and collective lives we must first believe in goodness and possibility. We must hold tenaciously to the vision of living together in generous harmony.

We must accept we can be kind and still be safe, we can reach out and not be harmed, we can give and not be destitute, and we can listen to those we think are our enemies until they become our friends. If we do not, we will continue to grind against each other. There will only be friction between us. We will continue to be afraid in a fracturing world.

The woman in my garden has waited for an angel for nearly two decades. She is patient, loving, and kind. When we humans become more adept at using the thrust bearings inside us – love, patience, and kindness – heaven has a chance.

If a thingamajig 15/16″ across can hold something 3000 lbs while it rotates 10,000 revolutions per second, shouldn’t we as flesh and blood and passion and visionaries be able to find our way out of this stuck place?

I think we can. I believe it is possible.

Fighting with Perfection in Paris

Posted on September 27, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

(Hang in there, this blog all comes together eventually. Plus there are photos of lovers, redheads, and dogs at the end. See example to left.)

Fighting with Perfection in Paris

Perfection does a hatchet job on Good. She’s a diva that tolerates no supporting cast, and She has been riding roughshod over my ability to write a blog since I arrived in Paris 12 days ago.

In addition to not writing blogs, I have not been to two of my neighborhood restaurants, Laduree and Mariage Freres. They are my usual haunts and I believed they were essential to my settling into the City of Lights.

I have been taking long walks and hundreds of photographs with a focus on lovers, redheads, dogs, children, art, and the homeless that I post on Facebook every day, but no writing.

What is going on?

Let me tell you as best I understand.

For one thing the Israeli killing of 2100 Gazans and then claiming more land in the West Bank ad nauseum not only depressed me but has shown me definitively that there are people who are not only far more expert on the subject than I am but who write much better. (Un-huh, I know Israelis were targeted by Gazans firing missiles and that 50 some Israelis were killed – all except six in the military – but this blog is not about politics and I’m not in the mood to equate 50 some Israelis to 2100 Gazans and call it a draw.)

For another, I have been taken over by an internal son et lumiere show in which a cacophony of characters bide with each other for the spotlight. Inside me is a mélange of languid sexy women wearing silk lavender, clowns in cone hats with red pom-poms on top, the child I was on the farm in Iowa, an overly-sensitive female who is subject to Stendhal Syndrome, and a hawk-eyed hunter-photographer who preys on and captures the innards of innocent people.

Over it all sits the Perfectionist Judge (she’s a female, dammit!) who says that if I write something it has to have a deep and meaningful impact in addition to good grammar. Otherwise, it isn’t worth bothering with and clutters the landscape.

Also, I’m in an apartment I once co-owned with a husband we don’t need to mention except that I don’t want you to think I could ever have bought an apartment in Paris on my own. The apartment is exactly as I left it except the floor-to-ceiling silk curtains are shredding on the window side and there is a humidor on the desk and new sheets on the bed – oh, and an updated master bathroom. This is a special kind of déjà vu made possible by the new owner.

Thus, a sonne et lumiere and cast of characters goes with me through the streets, into the cafes, across Luxembourg Gardens, and into the Louvre to view 17^th and 18^th century French paintings. It is a pleasant but timeless experience that is not very solid, wobbly even. Writing a blog requires concrete sentences in real time.

However a deep and impactful truth (at least for me) has finally taken form. I believe that having our moorings loosened and our time sense scrambled – and losing people, gaining people, and experiencing our self as multiple people is imperative to becoming more aware of the miracle that we are here at all. We cannot know more until we give up old beliefs that we know what is what. We need to be tumbled.

Often this happens by trauma. Breakage and loss undo our world, and in undoing our world they make us look again, experience again, change. We are forced to be flexible.

We are forced to be flexible in what we thought was existence – large and small – and who we are in it. It is easiest to do this if we accept the unmooring and the cast of interior personalities and float.

The Perfection Judge says, “This is not adequate. It’s too airy-fairy. You need to say something helpful when our world is in such crisis.”

You see, the Perfection Judge tolerates that I post photographs of redheads and lovers on Facebook, but she wants my blogs to have more depth, which means the only way I can write is to stand up to Her and say, “Half-ass and mediocre are just fine, thank you, anyway.”

Even so, I will now make an attempt at depth, or perhaps just at loosening your moorings: There are as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on planet earth. Odds are beyond all reckoning that we are not the only thinking creatures in infinity.

We don’t know much of anything but we experience that we exist. That is a place to start.

Two days ago I bought a work of art titled “Paradise Lost.” (See photo. Xavier Somers, Flemish, is the artist.)

In the beginning were Adam and Eve and they discovered the pleasurable things that men and women can do together. Behold, Eve laid an egg in the nest of temporal life and free will. Alongside it in the nest is the devoured apple of self-knowledge. The beginning was the awareness that we existed. It might not be much, but it is a start.

Everything my knowledge and experience tell me is that bliss is the natural state and it is humans who f**k it up. We all know the second part of that sentence. I believe the first part is true also. We “fell” out of grace into self-knowledge. It was the only way to know we are here. Now the task is to climb back up and join self-awareness with bliss. (. . . which raises all sort of questions such as which came first the bird or the egg.)

In “Paradise Lost” the golden male has a large key that inserts in the keyhole of the golden female. It joins them into one creature, a larger egg with legs. I’m just letting you know that without further comment.

And this Adam and Eve devoured the apple. Of course! If we’re going for self-awareness, we need to get as much as possible.

And the nest is made of barbed wire. And so it is. Look around.

And because our self-awareness is still so miniscule, such a grain of sand in infinity, we harm each other and call it justified and self-protection and rational.

And I look around this apartment where loss has occurred and where beauty and blessing pour in the windows, and I cart my mélange of characters around with me and tell the Perfection Judge, “Bugger off.”

I say, “Bugger off. You, Perfection, are the scourge, thinking you know what is right or good. You, who wants life in perfect grammar and manners and brilliance. Look around, Perfection, next to the lovers are the homeless. Look, Perfection, look well, and tell me that you have a right to judge. We rejected you when we began to become aware and to care for all that fails your false standards. Bugger off.”

Photos of Parisians below, being their essential selves, even when dogs:

Slaughter, beauty, art, and obligation

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

In the fall of 1950 I arrived to school upset and angry. My parents had not told me we were at war and had been for months. They had treated me like a child, not bothering to tell me the horrendous news of people killing each other. What could possibly be larger or worse than war? How dare they.

I went immediately to the cloakroom where I asked Rosie, Jerry, David, and Tony if they knew we were at war. They did not. I told them it was with Korea, around the world.

Jerry said, “I’m going to be a soldier and I’ll fight and I’ll kill all the bad men.” He was punching his fists in the air. At that moment I realized he was a little boy with no understanding of what war was, that he didn’t even understand what death was. Existential isolation first hit me in the cloakroom of the second grade.

This memory has returned as people kill each other and allow others to kill. We in the U.S. blithely supply weapons for the killing. Death tolls are rounded to the nearest hundred or thousand and the accounting cannot keep up with reality.

But I am not feeling existential isolation. I, like most of us, feel the suffering that permeates our existential commonality. We live together in a world of blood, screams, decimation, death by weapons, hubris, callousness, arrogant self-justification, death close up, death by remote control, convenient self-delusion, and men who fight wars as though they were video games.*

We look for ways to cope, to put slaughter into a context that gives a modicum of relief. We protest, we give money, we write legislators, and we bombard Facebook. We use activism as an antidote to despair.* (I receive more or less 30 posts, videos, photos from Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel each day.)

This onslaught has brought me to a rare place – writer’s block – something I have seldom if ever experienced. This is my sixth attempt to write in over a week. The block does not come from nothing to say, but from too much to say, and that many brilliant writers and analysts are saying it far better than I could.

So what is my part? I cannot bear not helping, but what have I uniquely to give? And if I have nothing uniquely to add, should I simply wait, breath, cry, and pray in the quiet breathing sort of way that I do? It seems impossible to write blogs that are simply amusing.

An answer of sorts has come – a work in progress certainly – that I have only the personal to give. This feels, in one way, like a travesty, an indulgence, an eating of a fruit tart on the edge of a room with body parts in the middle. Do we eat it looking to the floor, to the corner, or to the middle?

Do I exaggerate? No, it feels that strange.

Am I too in-your-face? Perhaps, but at least I am writing again.

And what grants this writing is that I know I am not alone in the agitated distress of those of us who are witnesses. Because we care, we, too, are injured. We hurt.

I have come to that among the things we can do – in addition to protesting, giving money, writing, and other forms of activism – is to remember, even latch onto, beauty and to fiercely participate in creations that transcend devastation.

To state: This is not a time to shop – an obscenity coming out of materialistic responses to slaughter – but a time to embrace, rediscover, and express our creative “better angels” in order to heal and strengthen ourselves and to hold possibility for those who suffer. This is not a time to whimper.

If humans are both savage and divine, we must “activate” our impulses to create harmony and embrace light. We must not be afraid of the startling and cleansing power of light (ours from inside and that that feels as though it comes from outside of ourselves), and we must not feel it is shallow of us to create art or go to a concert when our friends are being killed. Our job is remain conscious of the suffering of others as we tether that suffering to creations offered to us by others or from us to others.

This is a time to write poetry, to create songs, and to paint. This is a time to listen to poetry, to listen to music, to go to galleries. It is a time to make delicate meals, create labyrinths for your children, carry and distribute chocolates, look deeply into flowers, and to dance. These actions may lift us into tears or laughter, but they will help us heal and they will spread. This, in the hands of a master, produces Guernica. This, in the hands of the rest of us, is a power that can change the world.

My grandson told me that humans are the weirdest animals because we talk and we create things. He turned seven two days ago, he is the age Jerry was when he going to kill the bad men. He is smarter than Jerry was, but I do not want him to know people are killing other people. I, like my parents, like all parents, want to protect the children.

Ah, the children. Ah, the children.

We are savages and we allow savagery, but we are also the vessels that divinity has to work with to bring joy and peace.

An Israeli on my Facebook, one of numerous new “friends,” occasionally posts a photo of an Israeli being arrested for protesting against the destruction of Gaza, but more often he posts incongruent beauty – a curve of a violin, a song, the inlaid decoration of a harpsichord. I have come to understand why. Each posting is a candle of beauty that has been, beauty that is, and beauty that will be.

To “never forget” horror is one thing, but to “always remember” our divinity – our better angels – is imperative. It is the stuff of personal and global salvation. We must take it out of the realm of possibility and into the world of reality. We must create beauty, harmony, acknowledgment, love, and forgiveness that can be touched, felt, heard, and seen. We must remind ourselves and others that transcending is something people do. It came in our package. We weirdest of animals can re-create the world for the better.

________

* “men playing video games” and “activism as antidote” are credited to Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, author, and Jungian analyst, who called during the writing of this post.

Traveling Light

my fierce freedom

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