Edward Taylor: Poet-Preacher

Continuing on with my project to read the entire Norton Anthology of American Literature in one year (a project I have called The One Year Norton), I arrived today at the poetry of Edward Taylor (1642-1729).  Taylor was a Puritan, who fled England to escape persecution, attended Harvard, and ultimately became the minister/physician of Westfield, Massachusetts.  Very little was known about Taylor's life until the 1930s, when Thomas H. Johnson uncovered a huge body of his poetry in the Yale University library.

Taylor's poetry demonstrates an active and creative mind, steeped in literary tradition and religious faith.  Puritans were not, generally speaking, a creative lot.  But the discovery of Taylor's poetry revealed "work by a Puritan divine that was remarkable both in its quantity and quality."  The Norton Introduction explains, "Nothing previously discovered about Puritan literature had suggested that there was a writer in New England who had sustained such a life-long love affair with poetry."

Perhaps Taylor's best poems are the Preparatory Meditations, which were part of his preparations for sermons.  These are influenced by the "metaphysical" British poets John Donne and George Herbert, who used elaborate metaphors to explore abstract ideas like faith, love, the soul, grace, and God.  Each poem begins with a Bible text, and proceeds to use that text as inspiration for poetic meditation.  In "Meditation 8," Taylor's text is John 6:51, "I am the living bread."  Taylor envisions his soul as a bird caged in his body, unable to reach the bread of God's grace:

 "When that this Bird of Paradise put in
This Wicker Cage (my corpse) to tweedle praise
Had pecked the Fruit forbade: and so did fling
Away its food; and lost its golden days;
It fell into Celestial Famine sore:
And never could attain a morsel more."

The "Bird of Paradise" eating the forbidden fruit and thus encaging and starving itself recalls Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the garden of Eden, and being banished from paradise.  Humanity, in the Bible's narrative, will ultimately be redeemed by Christ, who calls himself "The bread of life."  Taylor concludes his poem on a hopeful note:

"This Bread of Life dropped in thy mouth, doth Cry;
Eat, Eat me, Soul, and thou shalt never die."

This particular poem was written on the occasion of communion, and so it is appropriate that Taylor meditates on eating the bread of Christ, as his congregation would during communion.  While Taylor's poems are often serious and deep on content, he sometimes displays a playfulness and self-effacing humor, as in Meditation 22:

"My quaintest metaphors are ragged stuff,
Making the Sun seem like a Mullipuff (fuzz ball)"

But the most moving of all poems included in the Norton, for me, is titled "Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children."  Taylor was married twice and had 14 children, many of whom died as infants.  In 17th century New England, the infant mortality rate was ridiculously high, and so Taylor experienced many times the bitter pain of losing a child, plus he lost his first wife.  This poem is a meditation on his pain, and contains a beautifully hopeful extended metaphor.  Taylor describes his marriage as a knot of two branches, and his children as flowers blooming off of them.  After the death of his first wife, he married again, and flowers bloomed again from this union:

"my branch again did knot,
Brought out another Flower, its sweet-breathed mate."

Some flowers grew to maturity, while others were pruned early, as infants, like his daughter Elizabeth.  Taylor writers:

"But Oh! a glorious hand from glory came
Guarded with Angels, soon did crop this flower
Which almost tore the root up of the same,
At that unlooked for, Dolesome darksome hour.
In prayer to Christ perfumed it did ascend,
And Angels bright did it to heaven 'tend."

As a Christian, Taylor believes his dead children go to heaven, and he envisions them as flowers ascending, even as they carry away pieces of his soul:

"I piecemeal pass to Glory
bright in them."

As 21st century readers, we may not share Taylor's religious beliefs, but we may appreciate how this faith afforded him a sense of meaning and comfort in the face of so much innocent and senseless death.  He acknowledges the pain and suffering:

"But Oh! the tortures, Vomit, screechings, groans,
and six week's Fever would pierce hearts like stones."

But the poet, Christ-like (or Buddha-like) lets go of his dead children, believing they will become part of something larger:

"I say, take, Lord, they're Thine…
Whether thou get'st them green, or lets them seed."

It's refreshing for me to discover a poet like Edward Taylor, because he defies the stereotype of the austere, stoic Puritan.  He was obviously a man of great sensitivity and clarity of vision, a brilliant poet, and therefore (probably) a brilliant preacher.  I grew up going to church and I've certainly heard my share of boring sermons.  Maybe if more preachers were also poets, interpreting and contemplating scripture with creativity and literary sensitivity, church could be a place of real inspiration.

The Bible itself is a brilliant literary text, full of poetry and adventure and tragedy and letters and parables.  As an English major (and now teacher) I can say I benefitted tremendously from my knowledge of the Bible.  Part of appreciating the Bible has to do with appreciating language and poetry, as Edward Taylor did.

Human Planet

Recently, my parents loaned me a DVD series called Human Planet, which was put out by the BBC.  It's a multi-part documentary series about different human communities that live  in various environments on planet Earth: deserts, jungles, oceans, rivers, arctic, etc.  So far, I've watched four of the episodes and each is completely mind-blowing.

Growing up and living in a modern, industrialized western society, we tend to forget that our particular way of living is only one of many, and it may actually not be the ideal way.  There are thousands of human communities around the world that live in ingenious and sustainable relationships with their natural environment.  Hunting, house-building, water-gathering, and family structures often have remained unchanged for centuries, sometimes millenia. 

There are the Bajau people, who live in the coral sea near Borneo.  They do not live on land, but in houses and boats on the ocean.

 

There are the Tubu women of Niger who travel 80 kilometers through the vast Saraha with no maps, to find a single water well, the same well that has sustained them for years.

 

 

There are the moisture farmers of the Atacama desert, who use large nets to collect water from the air.

 

 

 

There are the Inuit of northeastern Canada, who burrow under arctic ice to collect mussels.

 





There are the Korowai people of West Paupua, Indonesia, who build their houses in trees 35 meters above the ground.

Sadly, it is often the industrialized west that is encroaching on and sometimes causing harm to traditional, sustainable commmunities.  Often, quite arrogantly, we think that our industrialized, mechanized society is the "superior" or "first world" model.  But the Human Planet film series suggests quite the opposite.  As resources decline and pollution and climate change increase, we  in the "west" could learn a lot from these traditional communities.  The concept of "sustainable living" may be a new concept for us, but for millions of people in the world, sustainability is a very old concept, one woven into the very fabric of how they live in this world.

G. Ray Kerciu's "Radical Retrospective" and the Beauty of Local Engagement

I am fortunate to work on two local college campuses: Fullerton College and Cal State University, Fullerton.  One of the benefits of constantly being on these two campuses is that there are amazing cultural happenings all the time: art exhibits, plays, musical performances, poetry readings, lecture series, festivals, the occasional protest, etc.  I am surrounded by creativity, ideas, and free expression.

One problem I've noticed, however, is that these campuses are largely "commuter" campuses.  Thus, it is quite possible, and often the case, that many students and faculty alike will come to school, attend their classes, and go home, paying very little attention to all the cultural and social richness outside the narrow confines of their classes or department.  For a while, I was in this category.  For the first 3-4 years of my teaching career, I did not feel a part of a larger campus community, and I was hopelessly uninformed about all the amazing things surrounding me.

What changed things for me was getting involved in the Fullerton Art Walk and the Fullerton community.  Over the past 3-4 years, I've discovered a profound interest in paying attention to local things, to being a part of them, and this means paying attention to what's happening on the college campuses where I teach.  Now I like to pick up the Daily Titan, I check out campus bulletin boards, I make a point of visiting the Fullerton College Art Gallery and the Begovich Gallery at CSUF, and I get to regularly experience the beautiful community that a college campus can offer.

Recently, as a result of this newfound awareness, I attended the opening reception for an art exhibit at CSUF's Begovich Gallery entitled "G. Ray Kerciu: Radical Retrospective."  It was a career-spanning exhibit of Kerciu, a former CSUF professor.  There was a lovely book for sale about the exhibit, which I bought, and I got to meet the artist, and he signed my book.  This is another benefit of local community engagement--you get to meet some really awesome people.  At the opening, I also ran into four artists who call themselves The Bloody Marys, who had exhibited at my gallery downtown.

I took my parents and my grandma Sally to the exhibit because they also have an interest in local things.  My mom is actually taking an Intro to Art class at Fullerton College, so she's been attending a lot of local art openings lately.  I also wanted to bring my family because of what I'd read about the show.

In his early career, Kerciu had taught at the University of Mississippi when the first African American student, James Meredith, was being allowed to enroll, ending a long legacy of segregation.  As a young professor and artist, Kerciu created works which commented on the racism in his community at that time.  I wanted to get my parents' and grandma's perspective, because they were alive during the 1960s, and I was not.  I wanted to know what they remembered of the events and ideas represented in the art show.  The exhibit encompasses more than the civil rights work, but I was particularly interested in this art, because I'm very interested in how art can contribute to dialogue about civil rights issues.  That was the inspiration for the current exhibit , LOVE. SEX. UNITY. RESPECT. at the Magoski Arts Colony, of which my gallery is a part.  This exhibit is full of artwork celebrating marriage equality and the LGBT community.

And so my family and I entered the exhibit and looked at the art together.  Kerciu's "Mississippi Series" deals with all the racism and violence he witnessed during the integration of Ole Miss.  At the time, white racist segregationists were protesting the integration, and Kerciu was revolted by what he was witnessing.  He recalls, "I had to make some kind of statement.  I had to stand up and do something.  It was a gut reaction, an intuitive reaction to hatred and misery."  In his art, Kerciu used imagery and slogans of segregationists to ironically comment on what he was witnessing.  By putting racist slogans like "Ignore the Nigger With Vigor" and "White Only" and "The Only Good Nigger is a Dead Nigger" on large canvases for public display, he offered people an opportunity to reflect on the ugly racist attitudes of the time.

While Kerciu's work received national critical praise, it was less well-received locally.  He was actually arrested and jailed for "desecrating the Confederate flag," which he used ironically in his artwork.  Eventually, due to all the public and media attention, the charges were dropped.  Kerciu's pieces are powerful even today, like "Never," which included a swastika over the confederate flag, and "America the Beautiful," an ironically-titled piece which mirrors back the racist slogans he was hearing and seeing during the integration struggle at Ole Miss.

The value of art is the dialogue it opens up.  Art can allow us to transcend a lot of barriers, and see things from a new perspective.  At a time and place of great racism and conflict, Kerciu's art sought to expose the hate for what it was, and to promote serious reflection and dialogue, both in his own community and nationally.

As I had hoped, the show opened up some dialogue with my parents, who were kids growing up during the civil rights movement.  I asked my parents what they remembered, and my mom recalled a family car trip to Florida in the early 60s, traveling through the American south, and seeing signs like "White only" and "Colored" above stores and public places.  She recalled feeling, even as a child, that this was wrong.  Because my parents grew up in relatively small towns in Wisconsin, they were somewhat insulated from the major civil rights marches, protests, and struggles that were happening elsewhere.  Both recall friends and elders using racist slurs, and both recall feeling disgusted by racism. My grandma remembered her mother-in-law using bitter racist slurs her whole life.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and the discrimination I've seen has had less to do with race and more to do with sexual orientation.  I remember hearing and using the words "fag" and "faggot" in school, and I remember the laughter and ridicule our high school ASB president experienced when he "came out" in his graduation speech.  That was 1998.

After his "Mississippi Series," Kerciu began his "USA Series," which pondered larger social, civil, and political issues that defined America of the mid-1960s.  Overall, the exhibit inspired me to be continually engaged with my community, and to use my art and writing to comment on and contribute to the ongoing dialogue.

The show continues through May 25. Gallery hours are noon to 4 p.m. Monday-Thursday and noon to 2 p.m. Saturday. For more information, call 657-278-2434.

Edward Curtis: The Artist-as-Hero

Everyone has their own definition of a hero, and history is full of heroes: war heroes, civil rights heroes, outlaw heroes.  But rarely do I hear artists described as heroes.  As an artist and a writer, I have to say that many of my heroes are artists and writers.  Many of the great artists' lives are stories of struggle and sacrifice and ultimately profound contributions to humanity: Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel, VanGogh painting flowers in a mental hospital, Woody Guthrie riding boxcars through dustbowl America writing songs of struggle and hope.  Even among my friends, there are artist-heroes.  Steve Elkins comes to mind.  Steve spent ten years of his life traveling around the world filming experimental musicians, often at great personal expense, to make his award-winning documentary, The Reach of Resonance.

I've lately been reading a book about an American photographer named Edward Curtis, whom I consider a great American hero.  Curtis is not a household name, as is all to often the case with artist heroes, who often toil in obscurity.  I only recently learned about Curtis when I stumbled upon a documentary about his life.  He, almost single-handedly, produced the most comprehensive photographic and literary documentation of North American Indians of the twentieth century.  His monumental 20-volume work, The North American Indian, took him over 20 years to complete and cost him almost everything.  But his work stands as a timeless testament to what an artist can do when he follows his dream and never gives up.

The book I'm reading came out only last year.  It's called Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, by Timothy Egan, a writer who I'm beginning to really appreciate.  Egan's previous book, The Worst Hard Time, about the American dustbowl during the Great Depression, won the National Book Award.

Egan writes in an accessible style, with a profound sympathy for the underdog, which makes Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher a moving and exciting journey.  Edward Curtis began his career as a "society photographer" in Seattle in the late 1800s, taking fancy portraits of wealthy Seattlites, and making a good deal of money doing it.  He had a family, a nice house, and a studio downtown.  But his life took a profound turn when he first encountered Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Seattle, living among discarded junk in a shantytown on Puget Sound.  Egan begins his book like this:

"The last Indian of Seattle lived in a shack down among the greased piers and coal bunkers of the new city, on what was then called West Street, her hovel in the grip of Puget Sound, off plumb in a rise above the tidal flats.  The cabin was two rooms, cloaked in a chipped jacket of clapboards, damp inside.  Shantytown was the unofficial name for this part of the city, and if you wanted to dump a bucket of cooking oil or a rusted stove or a body, this was the place to do it.  It smelled of vicera, sewage and raw industry, and only when a strong breeze huffed in from the Pacific did people onshore get a brief, briny reprieve from the residual odors of their labor.

The city was named for the old woman's father, though the founders had trouble pronouncing See-ahlsh, a kind of guttural grunt to the ears of midwesterners freshly settled at the far edge of the continent.  Nor could they fathom how to properly say Kick-is-om-lo, his daughter.  So the sea-port became Seattle, much more melodic, and the eccentric Indian woman was renamed Princess Angeline, the oldest and last surviving child of the chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish.  Seattle died in 1866; had the residents of the village on Elliott Bay followed the custom of his people, they would have been forbidden to speak his name for at least a year after his death.  As it was, his spirit was insulted hourly, at the least, on every day of that first year.  "Princess" was used in condescension, mostly.  How could this dirty, toothless wretch living amid the garbage be royalty?  How could this tiny beggar in calico, bent by time, this clam digger who sold bivalves door to door, this laundress who scrubbed clothes on the rocks, be a princess?

...

And that is where twenty-eight-year-old Edward Sheriff Curtis found princess Angeline."

Curtis took a photograph of Princess Angeline, and this became the first of his Indian pictures, a passion that would shape and inform the rest of his life.  He began traveling among various tribes, learning of the degradation and injustice that had befallen the natives peoples of America.  He saw this injustice and sought to use his talent as a photographer to tell another side of the American story.  He sought to show the American public, through art, the humanity of the Native Americans, their customs and traditions, their religion, family life, and deep relationship with the land that was being taken from them.  Popular American sentiment toward Native Americans in the 19th century was not positive.  They were seen and portrayed as savages, heathens, uncivilized, inhuman.  Curtis sought, though photography and writing, to shatter these myths.

And so, for the next twenty years, Curtis traveled among the tribes of North America, photographing them, making recordings of songs and dances, interviewing thousands of people, and writing about what he found.  Prominent members of The Smithsonian thought him too ambitions, that he was attempting the work of 50 men.  But Curtis remained undeterred, through financial hardship, and illness, he never gave up and finally completed his magnum opus, The North American Indian.

Agora: The Destruction of a Library

I watched a movie tonight that was so packed with ideas, I had to take a walk afterwards.  I knew I wanted to write about it, but when I finished the movie, the ideas were jumbling around in my head.  So I took a walk, got a coffee, and now I'm writing about it.

The movie is called Agora and it's about the ancient city of Alexandria, which once housed the greatest library in the world, a repository for all the knowledge, ideas, and literature of the ancient world.  The city was commissioned by Alexander the Great, who was  student of Aristotle.  Alexander was a great military leader, but he was also a lover of learning, and he built Alexandria to be a shining example of knowledge.  For centuries, it was a home to philosophers, writers, and artists who taught and shared their ideas.  But such a thing of beauty was not to last.

The movie is set in the fourth century A.D. in the twilight years of the Roman Empire.  At the beginning of the film, Alexandria is still a city of learning, but profound religious divisions have begun to tear at its fabric of tolerance and wisdom.  The three main groups in the city are pagans, who worship the Greco-Roman gods; Jews, who follow Yahweh; and Christians, who are finally enjoying a period of peace after many years of persecution under Roman rule.

And then there is Hypatia, a female philosopher, a real historical figure, an agnostic who believes in science and philosophy.  Hypatia represents the spirit of inquiry and wisdom that characterized Alexandria of old.

After an ill-advised attack on the Christians by the pagans, the Christians gather in large numbers and storm the great library, burning countless scrolls and destroying works of ancient art, which they ridicule as "pagan trash."  This really happened.  Followers of Christ destroyed the greatest library of the ancient world.

I'll pause a moment to let that sink in.

In the midst of all the senseless violence are beautiful scenes of Hypatia using science and logic to try to understand the cosmos.  As a character, she is more than a scientist, she is a good teacher, an advocate for curiosity and the free exchange of ideas.  Eventually, Hypatia herself is stoned to death by the Christians for refusing to declare allegiance to their particular beliefs.  When she dies, one gets the sense that the Dark Ages are about to begin.

The film is, of course, a tragedy.  But like all good tragedies, it offers insight and lessons.  And the lessons are these: 1.) Be tolerant of people with different beliefs and 2.) For Christ's sake, don't destroy libraries!

Ramona: a Book Report

I just finished reading the novel Ramona, by Helen Hunt Jackson.  I hadn't heard of this novel until quite recently, when I began studying local history.  The novel is set in Southern California in the mid-1800s, shortly after the Mexican-American War, and it dramatizes many of the social/political problems the region was facing at the time: forced re-location of Native Amerians, the shift in power from Mexico to the United States, the decline of the Missions, and the beginning of American settlement and development.

Ramona is a novel that reminds us of California's history.  For thousands of years, it was Native American land, then Spain colonized it, then it became Mexico (after the Mexican War for Independence), then it became the United States (after the Mexican-American War).

The main protagonists of the novel are Alessandro (a Native American from Temecula) and Ramona (who is half Scottish, half Native American, but was raised by a Mexican woman).  These two fall in love and must live like refugees in their own country, as American settlers and Agents force them off their land.  The tender love between Alessandro and Ramona contrasts with the cruel and inhumane way in which they are repeatedly treated.  Alessandro's village is taken over by white settlers who have the "law" on their side.  The United States government's policies toward the Native peoples of California have, historically, been outrageously unjust.

Before writing Ramona, the author (Helen Hunt Jackson) wrote a non-fiction book called A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes, which was a bitter condemnation of the greed, racism, and violence which defined Amerian Indian policy during the 19th century.  Before writing Ramona, Jackson actually visited, studied, and wrote about the conditions of the Southern California Indians.  On the heels of all this research and writing, she was outraged.  She'd learned things that were too important not to share.  Her goal with writing Ramona was very similar to Harriet Beecher Stowe's goal in writing Uncle Tom's Cabin--to help the American public understand a great injustice of their time, and maybe change things.

Ramona is a heartbreaking novel. The character Alessandro, a noble-hearted and generous young man, ends up going mad in response to all the calamities he suffers: the loss of his tribal land, the death of his father and infant daughter, the rootless and anxious life that comes from not having a home.  Alessandro and Ramona wander the southern California landscape of the mid-1800s, suffering loss after bitter loss, until it is more than they can bear.

The value of a novel, as opposed to a history, is that it allows us to connect with the characters, to understand their thoughts and feel their pain and love.  Ramona may be read as a dramatized argument for Indian policy reform.  It takes abstract ideas and humanizes them, allows us as distant readers to enter into the suffering and despair of a people robbed of their land, homes, and even their lives.

Reading is an exercise in empathy and a reminder of things past.  Reading Ramona allows us to meditate on the injustices of the past, reflect on their causes, and then transform how we think and behave in our present time.  Ramona is an indichtment of greed and arrogance, and a plea for compassion, understanding, and social justice.  In this way, it is a tremendously relevant and important work of literary art.

Every Town Has a History

For their last essays, my students are writing essays about the history of the town they live in.  One problem I have noticed with this prompt is a widespread sense that "nothing important happened in my town."  This is always, of course, a lie.  In order to show my students the rich history that happened in the most ordinary-seeming of towns, I share my own local history project, which is a work-in-progress.

Yesterday in class, I did a fast skim through my history, which I have called The Town I Live In.  I listed off major topics and themes, while a student wrote them on the board.  My purpose was to show students that LOTS of interesting and important things happened here, in Fullerton.  If they're thinking, "Nothing important happened in my town," I come back with, "Here are 27 important things!"  Here are the topics we came up with.  Click on the topic for further reading:

-The Founders
-The political system
-Native Americans
-Pioneers/early settlers
-Early business/industry
-The Missions
-California's Emancipation Proclamation
-Railroad monopolies/tycoons
-Early politicians/businessmen
-Newspapers
-The Labor Force
-Oil!
-Pollution
-War
-Disease/epidemics
-Discrimination/racism
-Gangs
-The Environment
-Hate groups (like the KKK)
-Local colleges/schools
-Richard Nixon
-Immigration/deportation
-The Great Depression
-Music
-Water Issues
-Labor movements/strikes
-Japanese Internment
-Major protest movements
-Civil Rights Heroes
-LGBT history
-Public art
-and on and on...

Towns are like people.  Every one has a history worth sharing.