Papa

I was hunting colored treasure
Buried in the Southern, springtime grass,
Delighted to run among the giant oaks and pines,
To race the hundred other children
Celebrating Easter time.
It was warm, a light breeze blew,
The dogwoods scattered white
Below the overarching oaks.
The pink azaleas stood in fluttering banks
Around the trees.
Through rustling leaves,I heard two children whisper,
"Don't tell him, but Mr. Kramer's dead."
I felt the sobbing start,
And then I fled the park
Across the asphalt street
To where my parents
And my old beloved grandpa lived.
Mother met me at the stoop.
In tears, I asked her was it true,
And she said, "Yes, it is. Your Papa's dead."
I'd known two days that
Death was near.
My Dad, a rawboned, giant man,
Had carried Papa from his bed.
I met them in the hall
My Papa said to Dad, "I'm scared."
My Dad beheld the cancer-bloated body
He had every day to drain
Of fluids with a large syringe,
Else Papa would explode,
And said. "I know."

Sometimes a person's death is beautiful
Following after suffering,
Like some exhaling of the pain
Out to earthen air.
Papa fled this earth into the light,
Leaving only memories of his love.

They called him Mr. Kramer
Where he worked.
Everybody knew the man,
From mayor to hardened criminal.
He was the City Jailor
Over fifty years.
"Mr. Kramer's Hotel", they called the jail.
He was a harsh, but fair, proprietor of it.
He served his time without vacation,
Without a day of leave from work
To hunt the white-tailed deer
Or lie about the fish he caught.
He didn't lie at all.
His life was bare-boned truth,
Like raw, unvarnished pinewood board.
(This was before psychology
When a man was what he did,)

This man did many things:
He kept a small menagerie
Behind the jail.
There was big brown bear,
Child of his heart,
And scores of poisonous snakes
He kept in a pit.
One day he put a King snake in
And, over a year or two,
The poisonous ones declined in numbers
Until there was only one fat King.
Papa's baboon liked my uncle Reggie,
Didn't like my mother Dot.
Dot and Reggie fought
The sibling fight a lot,
So, one day by the cage,
The baboon took my uncle's side,
Grabbed my mom
And pulled out half her hair.
Later, when she dated Dad,
They'd sit out on the porch to neck.
One of the gaudy parrots
From the little zoo
Screeched, "Papa, Papa,"
Every time they kissed.
Papa didn't have to come
To spoil the lover's play.
The parrot was enough.
To ruin their day.

Papa did lots of ruining.
His job was retribution
For the state.
He did it well.
Murderers and thieves
Were his unwelcome guests,
And blacks who didn't "know their place"
Found one in his.
"Hard but fair" was what
They said of him,
Both black and white,
But he could ruin a life
With fists and billy club.
Justice was a rigid thing—
You did a crime, and you got caught,
You went to jail and suffered.
That was it!
No one thought it harsh,
No one in jail felt victimized.
No one cared why
The crime was done—
The doing said it all.
This was a man's world still.
The Man was known as Papa
To his children,
And Mr. Kramer to all the rest.
He was American Justice in the flesh.

Papa carried habit to extreme.
Routine was his religion.
He served this god both day and night.
He had little table,
Halfway in the kitchen,
Halfway in the dining room
Where all his family sat.
Mama always made his food
Before the rest and let it sit
Until it was stone cold—
He wouldn't eat it hot.
His knife and fork
Had carved bone grips,
His plate was metal,
Divided like a child's
In sections for the different
Kinds of food.
Like a child,
He didn't like his flavors mixed.

At work he walked his rounds each day—
Same time, same route,
Always the same way home.
One day a Negro inmate
In a cell feigned sick
While Papa made his rounds.
Papa checked the man,
Who swung at my grandpa
With razor blade.
I think he meant to cut his neck,
But hit his badge instead.
This was his big mistake.
Papa was the Law,
And Mighty Law reigned fist
And billy club on him
'Til he lay bleeding, near to death.
Papa left his cell
And started down the way
His routine ran—
Same time, same route,
As always, the same way home—
Forgot about the bleeding man
Until his nightly coffee, always black,
Steamed on the little table at his home
And called the memory back.
In rising steam he saw the man,
Then summoned him an ambulance.

I still have the badge.
It has a vicious scratch
Across its face.
The man had tried to kill
The man I loved,
And elemental justice paid him back—
A man was what he did.

Every white man was racist then.
This was the South
And people still remembered when
The cotton grew,
The white man was still king,
And slaves did all the work.
Of course the memory was a lie.
A guy like Papa or my old man
Were called "white trash"
By folks who owned plantations.
They watched magnolias bloom
And sipped mint juleps
While folks like mine
Brought mules up from the barn
And milked the cows,
Or made, with toughened hands, their shoes.

Folks like mine had no one to look down upon
Except the blacks. (We all look down!)
Black was the rage inside my folks,
Black rage, terror, darkened hopes.
They looked inside
And saw themselves enslaved
With blackened souls
And little hope,
And hated that,
And hated those who bore the blackened skin.

Papa was a member of the Southern, Celtic tribe,
He was its Law,
So crushed the hated, scapegoat black—
A man was what he did.

Religion was something
Papa never cared for in his youth.
He never went to church
With all the women folk.
He believed in God all right,
The thundering one
On Sinai's heights,
Who punished all the sins of men.
Papa was like the Old Book's pages written in the flesh,
The wrath of God
To any man who dared transgress,
And Papa executed every law.
The womenfolk
Might know the God
With healing in his wings,
But Papa made the wounds—
A man was what he did.

Somewhere inside the rock
That was his heart,
A tiny spot of fertile soil
Was hidden in a cleft,
And in that spot a tiny
Bit of green had grown
All of his life.
Its holy tendrils worked
Among the cracks
And slowly undermined
His hardened core.
Then Mama died
When I was three.
The rock that was his heart
Began to break,
The greening plant
Began to grow,
As if it found its native soil.
Unannounced, one day
He went to church
And saw the God with tender eyes.
And saw She is a gardener.
He noticed that a little flower had grown
Within his yard—He noticed me,
And took me on his knee.
This was a most almighty
Place for me.
Its power lasts today
When I am past the mid-day
Of my life.
God had put a tiny seed
Deep in my heart too,
And Papa was the first to water it,
The very first to love.

He had a rocking chair.
It had blue cushions.
Its arms were carved
To look like necks of geese.
He entertained me there.
On his knee I sat and felt
The rough wool texture
Of his uniform,
Fiddled with his badge,
And with the patch
That covered up a missing eye.
Papa's smile was what I sought,
Plus, stories he told
Of bears and ponies.
He was my truly gentle friend.
His little dog named Mitzi
Shared his lap—His love could hold us both.
We were both wigglers,
Only I could talk,
But Mitzi had a language of her own.
He took the dog for walks with him.
After they retired him from the force,
let him keep his uniform,
And he, unpaid, patrolled
The park by us
To keep the black folks out—
All white men were racist then.

Papa settled in a rhythm of days—
The rounds he made,
The dinners at his separate place,
His metal plate
With knife and fork of bone,
His Sunday walk to church,
His daily talks with me,
Until his time ran out,
And sickness broke
The routine of his days.

"Don't tell him, but Mr. Kramer's dead,"
The children said.
I still recall the sadness of that day.
A man was what he did,
And he loved me.
A man is who he loves,
I love him still.

The True Believer

Abused by M. David Orr, watercolor, 8"x10", 1996

Mutually intolerant groups—Liberal-Conservative, Communist-Capitalist, etc.— seem to thrive on rancor. The True Believer by Erik Hoeffer offers a keen insight into the source and meaning of the rancor.

Hoeffer was a self-educated Longshoresman who wrote his profound book by looking with his own eyes outside the boxes provided by each of the conflicting groups. He was able to pinpoint the dynamics of the personality of the true believer--no matter what the ideological, religious, or atheistic persuasion. He was careful to distinguish between people who have secure, sincere beliefs and those whom he calls true believers.

The latter are characterized by an unwanted, hated self that they wish to escape. Any mass movement can provide the outside belief that promises salvation from the unwanted self and meaning for the person's life. The characteristic sign of the true believer is not quiet conviction, but intensity and a passionate opposition and antagonism to the opposite movement. Interestingly, the persons vehemence in defending the movement’s message is in direct proportion to his/her doubt about themselves and the movement. It's like, "If I can convince someone else, then that's evidence that my cause must be right."

Hoeffer was careful to state that the True Believer appears in every sect, religion, ideology, and political movement. I don't remember if he said it or not, but I think the phenomenon is related to tribalism--in its scapegoating and vilification of the outsider. I think it is also related to psychological projection--projecting the unwanted parts of ourselves onto others and hating them there instead of seeing these parts inside and healing the damaged parts.

I know that I have insecure and sometimes unwanted parts of myself that sometimes get triggered and result in things for which I have to apologize and ask forgiveness. It feels good for me to bash the other person, particularly if I think I am hoisting them with their own petard; in the end, I have to come back to myself--what is it in me that responds so vehemently to the other person's comments, position, or even attack? The uncleanness is in me not in them; or, if in them, that is their concern and God's concern, not mine.

Painting: Fire

Fire by M. David Orr, watercolor, 5"x 7", 1996

Hell

William Buckley once said something like, "Hell is an address, like Main Street," meaning that it is real. I hope not, but it could be. I know it is also metaphorical because, like many people, at times in my life I have felt like hell, and had the sense that God delivered me from that hell.

Personally, I've always had trouble with reconciling the doctrine of hell with a God who is Love and with a God who is victorious over Satan.

God is Love

I've heard born again Christians say, "God loves us so much that he demands the absolute highest standards from us, and we all fall short of that; hence the need for the redemption of Jesus." This explanation has never been satisfactory to me:

No human father or mother (well some bad ones) would take the same tack with their children--i.e, create impossible standards and provide dire consequences for failure. Good human fathers and mothers expect imperfection from their children and allow them to learn from a combination of feedback from reality (natural consequences) and from punishments that fit the crime. It's hard for me to believe that God is less loving than an ordinary human father and mother.

Jesus sometimes chided the Pharisees when they brought up certain harsh elements of the Law to condemn either him or others by saying, "God only told people that because of the hardness of their hearts." In other words, they wouldn't have believed a gentler doctrine. I believe that the doctrine of hell is a situation like this. People in Biblical days led harsh lives in a harsh, desert, nomad culture that demanded things like stoning women (not men) for adultery. To have told them at that point in their history to change these things would not have flown because of the hardness of their hearts. Maybe it's time we soften our stony hearts!

God is Victorious Over Satan

How can we say that God is victorious over Satan if we believe that a relative handful ("true Christians") make it to heaven, but the tens of billions of other souls who have lived and died on Earth are all going to hell and burn (metaphorically or literally) for eternity. It seems like Satan pretty much ruined God's creation and got most of the souls. Also, this vision seems like a mass-murdering God to me (worse--a mass torturer.)

Many of the born again Christians I have known are troubled by this doctrine of hell--certainly as a barrier to their initial conversion that they manage to overcome, or afterward, when they reveal their true feelings by disclaiming personal responsibility for the doctrine and saying, "The Bible says it, not me." Few will say to a sinner, “I believe you deserve to go to hell and burn forever if you don't believe the Bible (believe me) and accept Jesus.”

Hell is also a Catholic doctrine, and I am a Catholic. One of my spiritual directors made a neat legalism with "Catholic doctrine demands that there be a hell, but it doesn't say that anyone is in it." (Maybe Jesus saves everybody.) I've never found this explanation satisfying either. I'm not a Catholic fundamentalist, and my conscience rejects this doctrine of hell; however, I recognize it may be true.

In any case, I believe that God loves me unconditionally and rely on that faith and his goodness in this life and later.

I realize this essay is very controversial and is written from an individual, not institutional, viewpoint, but I'm very interested in other people's thoughts on the doctrine of hell from their own religious or personal point of view.

Feeling Our Lives 1

I've always loved abstractions--the bigger the better--God, quantum mechanics, cosmology, whatever. I love pressing my mind up against these big abstractions. I once thought I had to understand and harmonize all these to be happy, free, and justified, and, more importantly, so life would have meaning. A psychologist I saw once said to me, "David, if you can feel your life, it will have meaning." Here's a poem that relates to feeling our lives:

Photo: Lake in Upper Peninsula of Michigan by M. David Orr 2004


Leaves

Throw off the shackles of night,
Breathe the free air clean.
Why do you make it all a fight
Instead of walking in the green
And down the paths of leaves?
Why not call on greater powers
Blowing in the breeze?
There is magic in the colors,
Browns and reds and oranges
That rot upon the ground.
They bring a sluggish poet to his knees,
Out of breath and waiting for a line or memory
To start the words within him
Swirling like these autumn leaves.

Copyright 2006 by M. David Orr

Digital Manipulation of Photos 1

Digitally manipulating art photos has added a fun dimension to art photography. For example, this photo I took of model Heather Bailey is a routine over-the-shoulder B&W shot, but using the computer to add a hot wax coating, then manipulating the contrast has the pleasing results shown on the left.

I've even taken photos, manipulated them, then used the results as a basis for a painting. Taking this approach amounts to leveraging what you've already done to produce more art.

In a time when a lot of art is only seen digitally, I think exploiting the medium is a great idea. David Orr

Catalpa Worms

The most deadly bait for bluegills is the awesome catalpa worm. Down South, there are lots of catalpa trees. This broad-leafed tree grows to the size of an oak and attracts moths that lay their eggs under the leaves. When the eggs hatch, larvae emerge and begin to feed on the leaves. These larvae develop into beautiful black and chartreuse, longitudinally striped caterpillars that can get six inches long and a half inch in diameter.

Rare is the bait shop that sells catalpa (pronounced cat taw' ba) worms; most of them come from private stocks. Some lucky person owns a catalpa tree that the moths happen to lay eggs on, so this person is worm-wealthy and, perhaps, will give a few to his friends.

With catalpa worms it is feast or famine. Most trees aren't blessed with worms, especially in the city; but on those blessed trees that do get visited by the moths, there are thousands of worms. These larvae are hungry devils and completely strip a full-grown tree of all its leaves. A stripped catalpa tree is a sad sight with its shredded leaf stems; it's sad because, if you only find it after it’s already stripped, the worms are all gone. What you want to do is catch the worms half or three-quarters the way through their feeding cycle, when they are still there in numbers and are really big and fat.

Fishermen who are lucky enough to get some catalpas, hoard them and keep them fresh by putting them in the refrigerator, in boxes with holes in the top. A Southern woman isn't a Southern woman until she has some worms in her refrigerator.* The women don't like it, but they tolerate it because they know better than to set up a choice between spouse and catalpa worms.

A fisherman cuts the head off a match stick and carries that in his pocket. When time to bait hook, he cuts the catalpa worm in half and uses the match stick to poke one end or the other and turn the worm inside out, exposing the yellowish-green, juicy insides. The only thing that loves catalpa worms more than the fishermen are the fish. Bluegills, crappie, and even bass go crazy over them, hence the reverence for these "worms." Hail to the awesome catalpa worm! For pictures and info on catalpa worms, see http://www.catalpaworms.com/ David Orr

* A note on the apparent sexism in this article. I used “he”, “his,” and “fishermen” in this article, even though we all know that women are perfectly capable of fishing. I’ve just never seen a woman be affected by catalpa fever or turn a catalpa worm inside out, hence the male gender references. I expect to be corrected. Oh, and I don’t REALLY think a man would choose the worms over his wife (unless maybe the bluegills are bedding in the spring.)

Info on the Saluda River

The Saluda River runs from the cold bottom of Lake Murray dam to just west of Columbia, S.C., where it flows into the Congaree River. The rapids were enhanced by General Sherman, when his troops blew up the dam for a cotton mill used to make cloth for Confederate uniforms.

These days, they call this part of the Saluda Mill Race Rapids. Columbia built its small, but excellent, zoo on the banks of the rapids.

Painting of Saluda River Rapids by Erica Hoyt http://www.jubiar.com/ericahoyt/originals/eh-0120.phtml?row=5&here=originals&here_sub=#IMAGE

Poem: Saluda

I felt words in my mouth.
They tasted like grit,
Like the dust in the air
Of red-clay roads
I walked as a boy.
I tasted the breeze
Wetted with spray,
Fragrant with weeds
And wildflowers
Growing from cracksI
n the rocks of the dam
That Sherman blew up--
On the cold Saluda River
Outside the city
In the South
Where I was born.
I smelled the moon's white light
Bathing the rapids' rocks,
Silvering the spray and foam
Thrown by the swift night current
Racing below my feet.
This is the place where
Friends met-- to stay cool
During hot sun days.
This is the place
They brought their lovers
To lay them on soft rocks,
To let the Moon's scented light
Swoon them,
Shadow them,
Lull them asleep.
These were the old days and nights.

Now an older man sits on the rocks.
They are hard.
The water is swift and dangerous--
It always was.
The stories of people
Trapped and drowned
Were like fairy tales
To the younger man then.
It never happened to a friend--I
t was always someone in the papers.
They didn't hear the siren's song,
When power company people
Opened the locks upriver.
None of the dead were his friends.
This older man can speak,
Not feel, his words.
He feels, not tastes, the breeze.
He sees the Moon's bright light
And sadly knows it has no smell;
Yet the rapids' cold spray, its roar,
Its fierce current
,Flowing out of sight down river,
Seem to speak a language
He can hear--
He, sitting in the moonlight,
With thinning gray hair.

Copyright 2006 by M. David Orr

Proserpine: Dante Gabriel Rosetti

I mentioned Dante Gabriel Rosetti in the essay below on ways to learn, so I thought I ought to include at least one of his paintings. This painting is called "Proserpine" Other names for this mythical figure are Proserpina, and Persephone. She was a daughter of Zeus and Demeter, abducted to Hades, but allowed to return to the surface of the earth for part of the year (she is also a personification of spring).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown. Rosetti, Holman Hunt and Millais played a leading role in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, was Rossetti's model. Her distinctive visage appeared frequently in his paintings.

I love the passionate sensuality in Rosetti's paintings.

A Different Way to Learn

Early in my senior year in college (1967), I looked myself in the mirror and realized that with all the grade-seeking and crash-memorizing I did, I didn’t really retain a whole lot of what I learned. This bothered me so much I decided to study more each day and to just follow my nose. If something got me curious in my studies, I would follow that thread, maybe read an extra book or article I didn’t have to, look something up--let my curiosity be my guide.

I found that when I got to test time, I didn’t have to study nearly as much as before; I pretty well retained most everything. I realized immediately that this was the way to do things, this was real love of learning, and it worked better than grade-getting.

Case Study: Dr. Mandel

I was partially inspired in this learning path by a class I had in European Intellectual History of the 19th Century. It was taught by a 36-year-old professor named Dr. Howard Mandel. He was a dark-haired man with rugged good looks. Early on he told us he had been in the Merchant Marines for years after he graduated from Columbia University. He had run away to sea, more or less. At around thirty, he had gotten in trouble fighting with some bad dudes who were looking to kill him. He jumped ship and decided to go to graduate school.

He went to the dean of the University of Colorado at Boulder and told him he was smarter than anyone in his school. I guess the dean liked his brashness, so he let him in, even without the Graduate Record Exam, which most schools require. He got a Masters in Library Science, then switched to history for his Ph.D. We were his first class on his first job.

Right away, he set himself apart from all the professors I had ever had. He picked up the big textbook we had all bought, called Europe Since Napoleon, and said,”Look, it’ll be boring if I just cover this thing in class. I want you guys to read this thing on your own, and we’ll have a mid-term exam on it. We’ll also have a paper that will count for a third of your grade. For my lectures, I’ll talk about things that interest me: it might be art; it might be literature; you come and join in the discussions. That’s the other third of your grade—class participation.”

I thought he was crazy. No one else had ever done anything like this in my experience. But I was curious. Sure enough, in the first lecture he started reading fin de siecle (end of century) French literature. He started with Baudelaire, the Symbolist poet, reading to us from Le Fleur du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). I loved this stuff! It was decadent and sensual and seemed to glory in sounds for their own sake, images for their own sake, art for its own sake. We read us Huysmanns, a prose Symbolist, and introduced us to Oscar Wilde, a homosexual writer, who carried on in England.

Dr. Mandel just read us a few poems and prose pieces, but I found myself checking out English translations of Baudelaire and Huysmanns and reading all of it, even though it wasn’t required. Later, Dr. Mandel gave lectures on Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, slideshows, and lectures on the Impressionists. His favorite subject was the Dreyfus Affair, in which a French-Jewish officer was accused of treason and tried, in the process politically dividing the country, much like the O.J. Simpson trial in this century divided blacks and whites in the USA.

I talked with some of my classmates, and found we were all surprised at how much we read that we weren’t required to. The class discussions were lively, informed by all the extra curiosity and reading going on. One day, Dr. Mandel showed us some slides of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings. In several of them, there would be lights, like one over a pool table. The lights seemed to radiate concentric rings, so that it reminded me of how light seems to swim or vibrate when one is under the influence of marijuana. I blurted out, “Dr. Mandel, was there any evidence that Van Gogh took drugs?” He shot back with a wicked grin, “What’s the matter, this look familiar?” Everybody laughed.

In the course of the semester, I did memorize the textbook; I wrote a paper on Dante Gabriel Rosetti, the English Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter; and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I didn’t know it, and perhaps he didn’t either, but he was anticipating the kind of whole-brain, learning by immersion popular in many schools now. In corporate training, a recent trend is toward “accelerated learning” that uses techniques like Dr. Mandel’s. Funny, how someone new to a pursuit can create new ways that the professionals cannot see.*

* Note: British college-level education is much more like this "curiosity" method than American education was in the 1960's and in many places in the USA today. In my second semester, senior year I took a course on the French Revolution and Napoleon from a visiting Oxford professor. He gave us a long reading list and just said, "Read a book or two from each section of the list, listen to my lectures, and integrate some of your learning from both places into your essay quizzes."