Spinning Yarns

“Daylight again, following me to bed
I think about a hundred years ago,
how our fathers bled

I think I saw a valley, covered in bones in blue
All the brave soldiers, who cannot get older
been asking after you

Feel the past calling, from Armageddon’s side
When everyone’s talking and no one is listening,
how can we decide?

Do we find the cost of freedom buried in the ground?
Mother Earth will swallow you,
lay your body down.”

— Crosby, Stills & Nash

A few weeks ago, as I was driving in to work, I was listening to a call-in discussion program on New Hampshire Public Radio. With the presidential elections coming up in less than a year, it’s not surprising that the show — which is a regular feature of this particular radio station — has been giving a lot of air time lately to political debates, social issues, taxation, and other such hot buttons of the campaign agenda. On this particular day, however, the topic of discussion had turned toward voter apathy, which I am forced to agree is a serious issue in this country. According to a thumbnail I read in Newsweek a few years back, only around 34-35% of Americans who have been eligible to vote in the last several presidential elections, have actually gone out and voted. In practical terms, this means that our past few Presidents have been chosen by about a third of the electorate … or, to put it another way, each person voting is effectively casting three votes instead of one.

While I’m quite happy to have the power to vote for my government, rather than simply having it imposed upon me by military force, I find this a somewhat disconcerting statistic. Can it truly be that, in the most democratic nation in the world, two thirds of the people can’t even be bothered to get up and exercise their right to vote? It seems practically inconceivable to me that this should happen … and so the fact that it does, has led me to wonder what it is that causes this fundamental disconnect between the way I think the world should be, and the way it actually is.

I grew up in a little town in rural Vermont, where, even unto this day, the town is governed by a body of Selectmen, responsible directly to their constituency for the decisions they make in administering the affairs of the town. And when I say “directly,” I am not exaggerating — the Selectmen and other town officials are elected each March at the annual Town Meeting, in which the vast majority of the town’s approximately 400 permanent residents crowd themselves into the aptly-named Town Hall, in order to discuss and vote on the business of their town. This was not a “town meeting” of the tacky and mediapathic sort which has came into vogue under the Clinton administration, but a good old-fashioned assembly, wherein the laborer stands on equal footing with the lord.

Even when I was very small, I always admired the severity and elegance of Town Meeting. Business was conducted strictly in accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order; outbursts were dealt with quickly, efficiently, and without malice or quarter. To attend a rural Town Meeting is to truly see and hear democracy in action. Everyone is given a fair opportunity to speak their mind — each man and woman, no matter how rich or poor, no matter how educated or ignorant, no matter how popular or infamous, could stand up before that assembly, and, having obtained the floor, speak their piece into a respectful silence worthy of the reverence of an Episcopalean sermon. The Moderator was smooth of speech, even-handed and capable, and so the meeting flowed through the agenda as smoothly as sap running through the switchbacks of a sugar-house trough. To this day, I love to hear the meeting words, with their reassuring antique phrasing … “All those in favour, please indicate by saying ‘Aye’. All those opposed, say ‘Nay’.” To see and hear the people working together in this way, carefully, methodically — exercising their freedom of choice — is a warm and enduring comfort to my soul.

Too often, in life, it is not so simple or so elegant as it was at Town Meeting. I have sat in meetings where a few clear voices strained to be heard above a disrespectful and tumultuous rabble, the clarity of their thoughts scattered and lost amid unstructured and unmoderated chaos. Indeed, I’ve been one of those voices, and I have also (to my lasting shame) contributed to the hubbub beneath. I’ve heard unpopular opinions drowned out in a sea of braying dismissal before they could even be fully articulated, and I’ve heard clear, rational discussions overrun by a torrent of emotional outburst. I’ve read accounts of how the bold and the powerful run roughshod over the timid and the weak in the name of “due process.”

Possibly the most important thing all of this has taught me, is that it’s not easy to get democracy right. It is not enough that all the players be present — the moderator, the officers, a quorum of the membership, an agenda, a dark smooth gavel judiciously rapped against the rosewood pallet. Nor is it sufficient for the forms to be followed, the parliamentary rules and the order of business. To be sure, these components are necessary; however, in order for democracy to truly work, all the players must also consciously understand and actively participate in the democratic system they belong to. We must stand up for our rights, show diligence toward our duties, respect the rights of other participants, and bear the full expectation that others should do the same. To put it another way, democracy cannot co-exist with ignorance — to be free, we must apprehend the mechanisms of freedom.

It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized that many people — indeed, possibly most people — grew up in places where institutions like Town Meeting are a quaint archaeism, and so they have never really seen or felt the humbling power of democracy in action. For most of us, it seems, democracy has been reduced to a process whereby wealthy politicians engage rhetoric, psychological manipulation, and millions of dollars worth of questionably-obtained media attention, to convince us to mark a check beside their names on a ballot — in much the same way as the myriad tangle of eye-glazing little shops in a strip mall cleverly manipulate us into purchasing a slick, bright-logoed plastic bag full of hapless doo-dads we have no need or desire for, in our quieter moments. We’re taught that all the important problems in our lives can be solved by voting for the candidate whose sound-bites best match what our party voting guide tells us we should believe in — never mind that both the sound-bites and the voting guides are the result of up-to-the-minute polls, gathered so they could tell us exactly what we wanted to hear.

If only it were so easy to do right.

Life would be so much easier if we didn’t live in a democracy. Why, if we had a dictator, our lives would be so simple. All that would be required of us would be compliance, and perhaps now and again an oath of fealty. All of this messy decision-making we detest so much would be replaced by a simple, efficient government that … well, maybe it doesn’t always do what we like, but hey, at least we know what to expect, right? Why should we be bothered to take part in this whole democratic business?

Perhaps that’s a bit extreme, but we live in a country in which the language of politics has a frightening amount of overlap with the language of advertising. The people have spoken: “We don’t understand all this stuff, make it simpler!” And so it is made simpler — sound-bites and issue ads, compact little brochures telling you how wonderful life will be after you’ve voted Jon Jonsen for Senate; no messy meetings to attend, or voting records to peruse … just find the name you recognize, and make your little mark, and aren’t you just so proud to be an American? Not everyone in the world gets the opportunity to vote like this, you know. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Once in a while, you read in the paper about some country that is having democratic elections for the first time, after a long history of despotism or military rule. What stands out for me in these accounts is that, even when you read stories about people being beat up on their way to the polls, or threatened by the military government that stands to be overthrown if the election goes the wrong way, you see 90% or more voter turnout. The press loves this stuff — it’s great to see that other people are doing things so enthusiastically the way we do them here at home. And once upon a time, it was like that here, too. This country was founded by a bunch of people who were fed up with being told what to do by a government that was too far away to understand — or even care about — their needs and desires. When they got the chance to vote, they damned well used it.

It’s here I think that we find the solution to my dilemma: Why don’t we use the choice we have? Because nobody has tried to take it away from us. It has been generations since we had to fight and die to obtain or preserve our rights as a free society, and I think we’ve simply grown complacent about the whole thing. “Here,” we say to our government, “just take this power and do something useful with it. We’re not using it for anything.” Our founders were a pretty clever bunch of louts — they realized that they had to protect our rights from the depredations of a power-hungry government. But I don’t think they ever could have imagined that we would consciously give away our power. I can see it now. “Hey, guys, what if they just kinda give up and waive their rights because they can’t be bothered?” “What? Jefferson, you’ve been smoking that wacky Virginia weed again. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. And besides, it’d just be evolution at work. Don’t worry about it. Slap your John Hancock on that sucker and let’s blow this pop stand.”

Not that I blame them. When you look at it this way, it does seem kind of ridiculous. Why would a citizen of the Land of the Free ever walk away from her rights and freedoms, and just leave them for someone else to pick up and use? And yet, that’s just what two-thirds of the population of this country is doing, every time they decide it’s not worthwhile to get involved enough in the democratic process even to cast a vote. Part of it probably stems from the fact that this country has grown entirely too big to be administered by a single central government — and yet, instead of working to solidify and increase the power of our state governments, we seem to be pushing more and more responsibility upon the Federal government. When it’s so far away and impersonal, it’s very easy to see how the actions of the government seem beyond our grasp, living out here in the countryside while the politicos in Washington wheel and deal in language only a lawyer could love. Keeping track of all of it would be at least a full-time job, and who has time to do that, with all the other things we have to get done?

Still, when I hear discussions on the radio about voter apathy, it makes me wish there were some way to make people wake up from the glazed-over advertizing trance they’ve fallen into, and see what has become of their freedoms. And I’m just idealistic enough to think that, if everyone had the opportunity to go out, once a year, crowd into a little town hall with a few hundred other people from their neighborhood, and look the policies and decisions of their government right in the eye, the world could be an immeasurably better place. And yes, to answer your question, I’m rather Libertarian in my philosophy — it’s practically impossible to truly love democracy, and be anything else. You might call yourself something different, but in the long run, it’s not about what you call yourself at all, but what you believe.

Get involved. Learn the ropes. Make a choice.

Filed by Michael at 16:51 under Philosophical, Political
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“You consider me the young apprentice
caught between the Scylla and Charybdes
Hypnotized by you if I should linger
Staring at the ring around your finger.”
— Gordon M. Sumner

The ancients tell us that Prometheus, whose name means Foresight in the antique tongue of the long-vanished Hellenic Empire, was punished by the gods for bringing the gift of fire to the humble precursors of Mankind. Zeus, who is called Iupiter in the younger and more familiar tongue of the Romans, grew enraged, and had him bound in chains, like a criminal, to a high and barren peak of Olympus — where, as he lay there cold and starving, a mighty eagle would seize him each day, and eat his liver (without, I am sure, the customary modern garnish of fava beans, or even a nice Chianti). This went on for innumerable days: Prometheus, being made of hardier stuff than are we simple mortals, managed to grow his liver back each night, just in time for the eagle’s return with the sunrise at dawn.

At long last, or so the story goes, the much-tortured Prometheus repented of his deed, and Zeus, seized at last with a fit of uncharacteristic compassion, made the gnarled old blacksmith Hephaestus to go and strike open the chains that bound him to the icy stone, and thus at last was he freed. But it is said that, forever after, Prometheus was compelled to wear a ring of bronze about his finger, as a token to signify that he was forever bound in obligation for the gift of fire he had bestowed upon Mankind.

Mythologists — if those who study such legends and lore can be called by that name — are fond of the idea that the fire granted by Prometheus was not simply a manifestation of burning flame, but instead a metaphor for the forbidden fruit that is knowledge, the genesis of Mankind’s transition from an innocent being of pure instinct and survival, to a self-aware creature of moral conscience, and flaws. Some go on to propose that this story (and others like it) could be the founding reason why modern Western cultures use rings to signify the bonds of commitment and obligation, as, for example, a wedding-ring is intended to do. It certainly seems as plausible as any other explanation I’ve heard for the phenomenon. And indeed, it is the idea of wedding-rings, and what they signify to us today, that started me off on this particular train of thought — as a good friend of mine, not six hours ago, accepted a ring of commitment from the young gentleman she has been dating for the past year or so, and thus stepped across the barrier into a part of the world I myself have not yet seen first-hand. A ring of commitment, a ring of memory, a ring of knowledge, a ring of fire.

This business of rings and commitment has become an increasingly popular pastime, among my circle of friends. At first, it was a shock and a surprise to hear of my friends becoming engaged — of course, there were a few rather hasty weddings held at the business end of a shotgun, between over-zealous young people I knew when I was in high school — but it is somehow different when it happens, intentionally, between those you consider close friends. And yet, as the years go onward in their slow and methodical way, more and more of my friends are taking this step, until now it has become difficult for me to tell which side would have the majority, if a vote were to be taken. In some sense, it is as though we stand on one side of a thin but impervious veil, whose other side we cannot yet see. Those who have crossed over have accepted the gift, taken up the fire, plunged into the world. It is not always a happy meeting, and some try to return to our side, to escape what they have begun. But always for them, the veil is translucent, and the knowledge of what lies beyond forever stamped upon them, like the gentle impression of that golden ring, even when they no longer wear it.*

(It is worth noting that this metaphor can be carried too far. For example, I know some folks who liken their in-laws to the eagle, in that they periodically come and eat away at you for a seemingly endless succession of days, until at last you repent of ever having invited them. Even after they have, at long last, taken pity on you and departed, you spend the rest of your life carrying around the grotty little lawn figurines they saw fit to bestow upon you for your hospitality. Cynical bastards. Yes, both.)

Of much greater interest to me, however, are the times when the ring of fire brings happiness and wisdom to the lives it conjoins. There is, it seems, a vast and powerful link that it forges, enduring and beautiful, that can make the trials of the world around us seem as scanty cobwebs, to be brushed aside or burned away with a firebrand. This is a marriage not merely of bodies, or of words and ideas, but also of spirits — moreover, not in a religious sense; rather, in the most essential and humanistic sense, of two flames that burn brighter and longer and better, by burning together. I am awestruck, dumbfounded, and deeply moved by this phenomenon, when I am privileged enough to see it happen. It is at once both quintessentially terrifying and ecstatically thrilling to contemplate the bare notion that one day I might take part in it myself — or that it might never be. Sometimes there is a perfection in it that seems unattainable, and at other times, it seems to be more ceaseless labour than two people could dream of defying; and yet still, at times, we fall together like this, so terrifyingly quickly and easily that the eye cannot follow our progress.

Maybe you’ve seen a Möbius strip — think of a long strip of metal bent around in a circle, as if to make a ring — but just before the ends are joined, you give one a half-twist, so that there is only one single flat surface, around the whole of the figure. In some ways, the Moebius strip seems a more clever sort of device than a ring, for it defies our sense of the natural order of things. Yet, no matter how I admire the simple, mathematical beauty of a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle (a three-dimensional cousin), I still think, as symbols go, that rings are unsurpassed in their elegance. A smooth metal loop, perfectly round, and singing with the endless non-repeating magic of circularity that is pi — something mathematicians call an irrational number. Simple to understand, and yet an eternity of figuring will not plumb its fullest depths. The inside face, smooth and simple, presses close and secretive against the skin, bearing only perhaps the faintest of inscriptions — the memory of the giver, and a date. The outside, perhaps reflecting the world in the shatterglass facets of a precious stone, peering out in testament to all who wish to see, that the wearer has made and been given a powerful promise. Size, colour, material, and arrangement all tell you something about both the giver, as does the look in the eye of the wearer, when it comes to rest upon the figure of that ring.

As powerful a symbol as rings can be, it’s no wonder that society has built up an elaborate set of rituals and conventions around them. Big-smiling, beady-eyed, conniving little jewellers stand at the ready in their cheap, blue-gray polyester blend suits and polished platinum cuff-links, their hair slicked back with enough hair gel to make an Elvis impersonator daydream of Vidal Sassoon, ready to ply us with bright metal and warm, soothing words, to take away the sharp edge that the experience might otherwise carry. Spend this much money, get this kind of soft metal, that kind of precious stone, such-and-such a setting, and all your problems are solved, with a neat little velveteen covered spring-hinged box to carry it home in and a lifetime guarantee. It’s made into a convention, a system — you are supposed to do it without thinking too deeply about what it signifies, lest you be caught in a deep reverie, like a flame-trance or a hypnotic chant. Perhaps the salesman is afraid you’ll think too much, and instead of buying your beloved an engagement ring, you’ll have second thoughts about the whole thing, and go become a philosopher instead.

On whatever side of the strange curtain we may individually stand, we are all touched in some way by the curious destiny of the burning Promethean ring. Whether you take it upon your own hand, or are hypnotized as you watch and linger, staring at the ring upon another’s finger, we all bear it as a reminder of the gift of fire. I hope that you and I will wear it well.

Filed by Michael at 16:37 under Personal, Philosophical, Social
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When I was a child, my parents and I would always get a Christmas tree. Like much of the Western world, we indulged ourselves in this seasonally appropriate Pagan tradition with the customary vigour — we drove to the tree farm, and trooped through the linear aisles of sweet-smelling pine, balsam, fir, and spruce, the wet heaviness of December snow clinging to our arches. When a suitable sacrificial victim had been located, and deemed meet by our supreme judge, my mother, my father would kneel down on his jacket in the snow, and apply the cold steel teeth of our old blue bow-saw to the base of the tree, a few dozen strokes, until it heeled over into the snow beside its neighbors. The blond inner rings, newly exposed, were bright and surprising in a world whose only bright colours had been snow and cloud.

We’d drag it, then, the lilt of fresh-sawn wood still sparkling in our noses, down out of the false grove, and strap it to the roof of our car with an intricacy of ropes and rubber cords, which my father always had the forethought to bring along. Our tracks were erased by the passage of its fallen branches, and I was always glad, that our guilty footprints had been scrubbed away. We drove it home, then, and mounted it in a bright red and green tree-stand, the same kind you’ll find in every household in North America, with a reservoir of cool water to preserve the needles from falling on the carpet, and the little hard metal bolts that bind into the wood like crucifixion nails into the foot of a thief, or of a saviour.

Mother would pull the ornaments from their forgotten closet — smooth, delicate teardrops of coloured glass; improbable baubles of gold and green and red and blue, that depended from cleverly fashioned little springs of anodized steel wire, still faintly redolent of machine oil from the distant factory that had extruded and twisted them into that shape. First, the strings of electric lights, clad in stiff green rubber insulator, to camouflage everything but the coloured bulbs against the dense web of needles and narrow branches, were wound downward in a lazy, rambling helix from the sharp peak around to the broad, comfortable branches near the ground (and the electrical outlets). Then came the delicate glass spheres on their spring-metal hooks, carefully ordered and distributed under mother’s watchful eye, so as to provide the correct aesthetic balance, without apparent symmetry. There were strange, gilded egg-cup things, with silver styrofoam spheres on a thread, and half-forgotten salt-dough ornaments out of my strange Kindergarten world; crackly chestnut-coloured pine cones shimmering with a scatter of glitter, hanging from a bronze-coloured cord; little round photographs of children’s faces, glued into milk-jug caps, threaded with bright red cloth ribbons tied into shoelace bows. And then, at last, the handsful of long, silky-smooth tinsel strands, draped in carefully randomized showers over the whole.

At last, when the rest was complete, the tall, starry crown would be placed atop — a noble, pointed spire of rounded glass, to fit over the topmost skyward branch of the Tanenbaum king. Sometimes father would have to cut the top branch so it would fit under our eight-foot ceilings. But then, it was finished, and the bright bulbs shone through the veil of richness cast about the tree’s plain winter cloak; it was, to me then, the very essence of what Christmas meant.

I wonder, though, why it is that a tree must die so that the spirit of Christmas may live. Like a young Aztec boy, chosen for the sacrifice, it is taken from its home, and brought in to the warmest sanctum of the high temple, in a time of feasting and celebration. Robed and clad and crowned like a king among trees, it is cut and pierced and chained, made into the very image of a god, sustained for a little while on the lifeblood of the world, for the adulation of the faithful. By the end of January, even that will not be enough; the needles will fall, and mother will decree that it is time for the tree to be taken down. And so the ceremonial robes are reverentially taken from the dying body, packed away like antique treasures in a sacred reliquary; the lights put out, the crown taken from the head cut to fit it, the baubles and knick-knacks and gewgaws and tinsel and memories stripped away, until only the battered old winter coat remains, threadbare and fallen. Father takes it outside again, and it goes ignominiously, unshriven, to its final rest, behind the smooth mossy stones that separate our strange, human world from the forest. I wonder if perhaps the other trees, the sleepy maples, beeches, and ash, shake their hoary old heads when they wake up again in springtime, to see the bones of this fallen child cast aside so.

Now that I am grown, I don’t cut down a tree for my home at Christmas-time. I like to spend the waning days around the solstice-time by myself, quietly reflecting on the year just past, and enjoying the uncharacteristic calm that settles over the small college town, my home these past ten years. Somewhere along the way, I learned to love the tree’s simple beauty more with its feet in the ground, and its shoulders bare to the vault of heaven, than standing golden-clad, with iron bolts holding its trunk in a goblet of false ambrosia. The moon and stars are better lights, than the feeble lamps of electric friction we strange mortals wrought; the scattering crystalline matrix of snowfall, a better tinsel. And though I have seen a thousand somber Gothic windows, trained heavenward with their peaked tops, no more fitting crown exists, than the single sky-bound branch a noble fir sends aloft from its conic top.

Much better, for me, are leaves of ivy flourishing, alive and questing in the boughs of a venerable oak, and bright with living berries. It is simpler, to be sure, and neither so dramatic nor so convenient as the beauty we rend from the world by the devoted work of our hands; and yet I find I prefer it, unwrought, untouched, and uncomplicated.

Perhaps you will not agree with me, and that is alright by me. I have hope only for this — that however you choose to speak to the universe, as the long year draws toward its solstice close, you will do so with your eyes, your heart, and your mind all equally open, and so let not the passing of time be the only metric by which your years are measured.

Think a pleasant thought for me,
as down the winding road you wend and wander,
distant against the westering sun,
lost to the present—
where we are the bygone;
kicking the pebbles of lost ideas
and contemplating the sandy circles
where raindrops
fell.

Filed by Michael at 17:09 under Personal, Story
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