Ketchum December 28 2009 7:30 AM

I woke up at 6:00 AM after a night of many trips to the bathroom and unquiet rest.  Before going to bed at 9:30 I sat for a while at the kitchen island looking at my hands in the beautiful overhead spotlight, feeling contentment.  Joe, Amy, and Jan and the two boys had watched the show I’d been thinking about since I cleaned and scanned the slides in the Art History lab: 150 or so images from 1978 to 1984 projected on the white wall behind the couch.  Most of the pictures were of the trip to England we took from Lund in June 1978.  Joe was Ethan’s present age and I was two years younger than he is now. It was a time of fulfillment and promise for our young family then, as this is a moment of fulfillment and promise for his young family now. Jan and I pieced together a story line about the trip, and Joe filled in details both of us had forgotten.  He marveled at the similarity between my past and his present appearance.  The kids watched patiently for more than an hour, even though exhausted, and Ethan asked many questions. We agreed that just as Joe now remembers those events of 31 years past, Ethan will remember this present when he is Joe’s and grandpa’s age.

As I copy these words written a week ago, they recall yet another déjà vu.

I’m left with only fragmentary memories of events.

–His playing guitar and accompanying Deb in those aching renditions of “Me and Bobbie McGee.”

–The days he worked in our new indoor kitchen in 1974, building the cabinets we were happy to finally afford. His ability to run a table saw so precisely he could rip oak boards into moldings. His pace of work, slow to observe, fast to complete.

–His frantic call at dinner time in California one night in 1988 reporting that the man to whom we sold the farm had started to clear-cut. My grief and shame.

But his presence remains with me whole, like the one-syllable chant of his name. The open face, the toss of his hair, the lift of his eyebrows, the lilt and occasional crack in his voice, his laugh, more melancholy than amused. His humility. His stillness.

This website is the beginning of my endgame.

My aim is to do this kind of sifting of grain from chaff with the motley collection of journals and letters that fill my file cabinet. I’m content with the belief that this life is all I get. Rather than a mess to clean up, I’d like to leave behind an ordered recollection of what I’ve learned and enjoyed.

I wrote that three years ago on the  “about” page  of this weblog.

I knew then I was starting a big project.  The more I work on it, the larger it gets. Not really then an endgame.

Next week mother-in-law Ruth will be 93. This morning I visited her in Sydney Creek, the Dementia Facility.  As usual when I arrive, she is asleep in her chair, but she perks up immediately, light streaming from her almost blind eyes, her voice clear and joyful.  She tells me her dreams and hallucinations and memories.  She picks up our last conversation where it left off.  I report on Claire and the two great-grandkids, she listens and laughs and says, “I remember those playground toys you built for her in your backyard in Claremont.”

That was 1983.  I tell her that just this summer the cable and hardware for that tree trolley, which I’d stowed  in an old carpenter’s chest salvaged from the farm, returned to Canada, where Joe rigged it up at Knoll House for the use of his kids, their friends, parents and grandparents.

Back home I dig old pictures out of a huge lateral file drawer  and scan a few to match with this summer’s.

The galvanized steel of the cables and eyebolts and the polyethelyne of the rope are more durable than other artifacts I’ve been excavating.  Week before last I spent many hours in the Cal Poly Art Resource Library using its expensive equipment to scan 250 35mm slides that had been boxed in cassette trays in my garage. They record moments from our wedding, from early days on the farm, from our family trips to Europe in 1978, to Hawaii in 1984, from our time in Claremont and Palo Alto. The slides were covered with dust and grease and their colors were faded and distorted. The scanner software and adjustments in Photoshop brought them back to life, some almost as good as new, many better.  I gasped as our images of thirty years ago revived on the monitor.

I  spent much of the previous week in the CLA computer lab converting old VHS videotapes of English 510 Players productions of Twelfth Night (1990) and The Winter’s Tale (1994) to binary files.  Like the slides, they needed to be restored to a more accessible and permanent medium.  I’d discovered that the dozens of short segments I’d digitized nine years ago and placed on the University Media Server to provide material for my Triangulating Shakespeare website had decomposed over time into a kind of pixel jelly. Now I could replace them in larger, clearer format and at full length.  But the new digital files will probably be no less fragile than the previous ones I’d assumed would last forever.  The problem is called “bit-rot.” See the entry called “Data decay: even computers forget” on the Australian blog,  Time, etc.; Humans in the big scheme of things.

This echoes the title of the work that Shakespeare rewrote as The Winters Tale, Thomas Greene’s The Triumph of Time. As I played and rewound and spliced the recitation of the character named “TIME”  in Act 4, Scene 1 (performed fifteen years ago by the daughter of my wife’s best friend in elementary school) I slipped into the allegorical role myself:

I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient’st order was
Or what is now received: I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To the freshest things now reigning and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it.

When I watched the final scene, where a memorial statue comes to life after its subject was thought to have been dead for sixteen years scripted  as a theatrical resurrection in a chapel, I felt that moment  of performance on the altar of San Luis Obispo’s  1762 Mission Church quickening again, wrinkled now but still warm.

POSTSCRIPTS:

January 20 2010: Wow! Just watched the old Measure for Measure video. Really amazing that you managed to get such solid performance out of non-acting students. I found the play charming and — most importantly — the language really came alive. You should do some directing for community theater. — Elizabeth

November 30 2009: It was wonderful to hear from you. I just got started on Facebook. Wishing you happy holidays, Don

November 28 2009: How wonderful to hear from you! Unfortunately I can’t seem to open this link – which might be a good thing as I think I was a pretty shockingly bad actress–Ann

November 24 2009: Thanks Steven–it’s amazing!  Tom

November 24 2009: Hi Steven! Wow. Thanks for this treasure trove! I remember lending my VHS copy of”Twelfth Night” to a friend soon after I received it. Never got it back. Almost twenty years later, my kids are saying “Daddy, you look weird. And why are talking so funny?” Congrats on leaving lasting wonderful impressions on your old students!–Greg

November 23 2009: What fun! Good to hear from you. Patty

November 23 2009: Participating in the English 510 Players Production of “Measure for Measure” was one of the highlights from my Cal Poly years. I’m sure I’ll cringe as I watch my performance but what an awesome experience it was. Thank you, Dr. Marx! –Candice

November 21 2009: This is great! Thanks for doing this Steven.  We’ll give you a call for lunch next time we’re down–we had a really good time with you guys last time. Take care. –Craig

Hi Verandah

Thank you for the invitation to the fortieth anniversary celebration at Packers Corners and for your handwritten note. Jan and I would love to attend, but regrettably that date coincides with our yearly pilgrimage to Lund British Columbia where we established our own total loss farm thirty eight years ago.

Your invitation has spurred me to delve into the collection of relics of our days in Vermont I’ve stashed in a file cabinet, and has brought our stays there both in the period 1968-70 and our visit with you and Marty in 1993 vividly back to mind, accompanied by great gasps and sighs.

Forty years seems a particularly powerful interval. Perhaps the the rounder number of 50 will be as strong, but I suspect by that time many more of us will have dropped out of sight and those who remain will be pretty unsightly. We attended the 68-08 Columbia Strike Reunion in May, getting together for wonderful times with Peter Behr and Linda (Grace) Leclair.

I’ve scanned and uploaded a few pictures from 1968 and 1993 on my Flickr site.

I imagine you’re overwhelmed with archived documents, but let me know if you’re lacking The Occasional Drop of 4 October 1968, 19 December 1968 and 21 December 1969. They are here in good condition.

Love,

Sunday morning, Jan and I bade farewell to Middle Village and drove with Peter back to Morningside Heights. He found a parking space near our former apartment at 423 W. 120 St. in front of which sat two little girls selling some of their old books–a nice selection of Berenstain’s Bears to bring home for the grandchildren.

We passed huge construction cranes filling the airspace at the corner of Broadway and on to Earl Hall, the venue for the morning’s programs. Entering the upstairs rotunda we heard the last part of an extraordinary soprano saxophone rendition of “Amazing Grace” closing the memorial celebration for those of the strikers who had died in the last 40 years.

As I stepped inside I remembered this space 38 years ago, filled with paintings, sculptures, photographs, a great inflatable transparent tepee and 180 or so students participating in the three day final-exam festival of performance and ritual that concluded my Pastoral and Utopia class and my University teaching career before we headed for the end of the road in Canada. The poster for that event had been framed by a large Omega, suggesting its apocalyptic overtones but also signifying Ohm, the logo of “The Resistance,” an organization for civil disobedience opposing the draft. In the open-mike session that followed the memorial, Peter spoke earnestly about that group, which preceded and outlasted the Columbia strike–of its assistance to those fleeing the country or going underground, of its sit-ins at draft boards, of its members who went to jail for long periods, of its commitment to non-violence, of the predicament of young males at the time personally oppressed not by sexism but by militarism. (more…)

Ten days after it ended, I’m still processing the conference and slowly going through my notes trying to sift out memories and lessons to keep. So much of significance was happening at every moment that weekend–the recreation of past occurrences forgotten or newly understood, the simultaneous evocation of forty years of experience in hundreds of exceptionally conscious minds, the unfolding of present day history in encounters with young people and emergent political disputes, plus the emotional impact of connecting with old friends–it could generate a different book by every one of the participants. I look forward to see what comes of the many films, sound recordings and pictures documenting the activities while they were happening.

This picture was taken on the front steps of Peter Behr’s family home in Middle Village Queens, where we stayed for four nights during the conference. I had spent the whole ten hours of our flight engrossed in the story of the strike narrated in the 300 page book, Up Against the Ivy Wall, written immediately after it concluded over the summer of 1968 by the student reporters of the Columbia Spectator. I hadn’t looked at the book since the year it was published, and clumps of its pages came apart as I read. I was astounded by the precision of its research, the astuteness of its political analysis—even with the distance of hindsight–and the liveliness of the narration. As I finished with each clump of pages I passed it to Jan who was equally enthralled. The book was edited by Robert Friedman, Spectator’s editor at the time and now one of the organizers of the conference and moderator at many of the sessions.

(more…)

Next Wednesday we leave for this event in New York. Participants are being asked to submit stories of their lives since the 1968 strike to a collection stored here (at “Stories 68-08.pdf”). This is what I sent.

In January, when we first received word of next week’s reunion, my wife Jan Howell Marx and I agreed to go. The topics and speakers promised a pooling of wisdom about how to relate to a world which had become worse than the one we confronted head on in 1968. It would also be a chance see old friends and enjoy April in New York.

A few weeks later I changed my mind. Lets look at our obligations and finances and see if this trip will really fit into our schedule of grandparenting, visits with far flung children, our niece’s wedding, a long planned bicycle tour, I argued. Having just declared her candidacy in an upcoming city council election, Jan conceded it might be too much. But what really had made me back out was reading the bios accumulating on the website. Among the participants in this conference, my credentials were severely lacking in moral clarity, consistent commitment and creative innovation. I didn’t want to have to apologize or to brag.

At a party celebrating the success of “Focus the Nation: Global Warming Solutions,” an all day teach-in drawing 4000 attendees at the traditionally conservative University where I teach, one of the student organizers said to me, “I hope some time in the future, this group will get together to celebrate what we did today, like you are doing at that Columbia reunion.” How to tell her I wasn’t going? When a friend wrote from Chicago of his plans to attend, even the disheartening sniping on the website couldn’t keep me from ordering tickets on Travelocity with Jan’s immediate approval.

This shilly-shally recalls foggy memories. In or out of the building? In, then out, then in again, until the bust.

In 1968, I was a first year Acting Assistant Professor of English, closer to students in age and outlook than to most faculty colleagues. I’d entered the Stanford PhD program in 1963 after graduating from Columbia as an undergraduate, joining the Peace Corps and getting kicked out after ten weeks of training for being “too intellectual” and having the “wrong attitude toward authority.” (more…)

My aunt Hannelore died on January 21, almost three months ago. I keep telling myself that I will write about her or to her, to reach some kind of closure. Doing this with my father and mother upon their deaths in 1995 and 2005 allowed me to say goodbye and close the door. But Hanu has been weighing on my mind, and so has Gabi, her surviving sister, to whose living presence I feel I owe it. The delay has been largely due to lack of time—the pressures of teaching, visit to the family in Idaho, etc.—but now there’s no more excuse.

Other reasons made me start and stop, go frantic or lethargic, change plans. I felt a special connection with Hannelore because she was such a prolific writer, such a perspicuous observer, such an elegant stylist. Her love for books, expressed in her devotion to the family bookstores, could well have issued in her becoming a novelist or non-fiction writer, vocations I’ve always admired but never felt confident enough to pursue. She focused those talents on eliciting information about me and my family and then formulating her own stories about what was going on, often with great insight, sometimes comically off the mark. This connection led to extensive correspondance going back twenty years. Unearthing the file folders of thick letters she wrote and the word-processor and email files of my answers is an imposing task that I started last week, disappointed at first by the many holes in the record and then thankful that not more has survived for me to process.

Our connection was also influenced by circumstances of kinship. I had no brothers or sisters. Neither did my father. Hannelore was one of my mother’s step-sisters. She along with Gabi and brother Hans-Peter were my only aunts and uncles. With my maternal grandparents they emigrated to Brazil to escape the Holocaust while my parents went to New York. I had heard about them and seen pictures since earliest childhood, but had met only Gabi in person, during her visits to the States. Their many offspring are my only cousins. After my father’s death Jan and I took a trip to Sao Paulo in 1998. We felt deeply welcomed and at home in family gatherings. But that trip also revealed oceans of distance: cultural, linguistic and experiential.

In-person contact magnified Hannelore’s admirable eccentricities. We stayed in her house, squeezed between highrises in downtown Sao Paulo, filled with relics of Germany in the 1930’s. We witnessed her midnight rambles with neighborhood derelicts and her relationships with her live-in maid and son. She guided us through the business enterprises of her children and around the city-center. But the proximity was difficult: her ceaseless conversation, her endless discussions of the selection, purchase and packaging of gifts, her solipsistic self-sacrificial gestures made me claustrophic. She insisted on our sleeping in her bedroom, tidying up and cooking for us, but not eating. And she never slept. After three days I was relieved to return to the more relaxed hospitality of my aunt Gabi. Similar relief followed Hannelore’s lengthy phone calls to California, which I usually had to force to conclusion.

Death at 86 is no cause for sorrow, and Hannelore had been in the hospital twice during the last few years. Recent business reverses may have been the coup de grace. Cousin Marcelo’s brief email described a good ending, at midnight, on the way upstairs:

Unfortunately, our dear and lovely ant Hannelore died yersterday, at 0:00. Renato called us and immediatly me and Rony runned to her house to give them a little confort cause de sadly situation.
Lastely, she was bad because her hart was weak.
Suddenly, in her home, when she was going to upstairs, her hart stooped and she died quietely. Dario and Renato were together. Hannelore died near her son’s

But I cried when Gabi told me the news on the phone in Jan’s office. And now I want her to keep talking.

5 April 2002

I am not at the office, stayed home for a fortnight because I fell and broke—once again—my even previously not too classical nose, … I also broke all my front teeth, but nowadays you can glue them, which I had done…Monday I will go back to the bookstore!

…we are having big trouble with the house. You remember it is a double-house, now my neighbor has Alzheimers and cant practice medicine any more, his wife has Alzheimers too, they share a nurse, and the son, a building engineer, has sold the half to be torn down and incorporated with two more lots for a big building. We share one roof and separation wall. They want us to sell too and are trying to force us because we are afraid for the structure of our house. As a matter of fact legally they cant do it, but nobody cares much about the laws here…that was the reason I fell, because I was so worried. They are already tearing down the other two houses they bought, with a crew of unqualifiedmen, with axes, without the necessary license.

July 5 2002

Yesterday the Bookfair ended. I am getting a bit too old for these events, but love them. Ruy got an honorable mention for a book on Physics he publishes at an Oscarlike ceremony. We had a beautiful stand, a monument to Ernesto. I am very grateful that the children continue his life’s work…

Ruy managed to get a court order to postpone the demolition of our town house. Mario is a friend of the owner of the foremost civil engineering firm, who declared it unsafe for our house if the other half is torn down. A nice young lady judge had the demolition stopped by a summons served…eventually they are going to succeed…Of course, his is a crook and of course he waited for Ruy to leave for a US Bookfair on Tuesday to try on Friday to tear down the house court order and all, and of course Ruy had foreseen that intention and sent his bodyguards to stand in the path.

March 16 2005 (Upon the death of her older stepsister—my mother)

She was so happy and so proud of her family and I wish I could visualize her when she was her own self because her last years were very sad, since she was present only physically and not with her admirable mind. Very often that is the tribute people have to pay for still being around. I hope this wont happen to me, even more so because I would be financially a heavy burden on the family…She had a very special marriage, a lasting love-affair with adorable Henry. I don’t know whether you ever knew how the marriage happened: Henry was a promising executive in her best friend’s father’s department store, Tiefenthal and Halle. Lotte Tiefenthal set out on a trip to visit family and entrusted her so-to-say fiancée Henry to Lise’s care and guard so no no one would conquer him for herself. Of course he succumbed to Lise’s charm and beauty and…she kept him for herself. Lotte Tiefenthal would have liked to murder her when she returned, but emigrated also to the States, got married…and stayed friends. As opposed to Gaby and me, Lise had a new boyfriend and marriage candidate every month and kept our father busy chasing them away, but he was very happy with her final choice, Henry. Even during that restricted and morally hypocritical period , he helped her in finding a job there so they could be together. They did have an exceptionally happy marriage, though she was moody and he quite a tyrant in his charming way. I am really happy you followed their example, even though in the beginning, in those troubled years, you partially had a hard time. Janet went with you through thick and thin until you finally were “allowed” to resume your disrupted career. And like they did, you enjoy each other’s company.

August 8 2006 (accompanying a newspaper clipping)

Yes that’s poor old little me at the meeting in one more attempt to get the “camelos” (Peddlers) out of the once beautiful new town center. Nobody goes to town any more. One of our past mayors, Erundine, brought thousands of them downtown, where they destroyed the asphalt, ruined shops, including ours, bankrupted all our department stores, cook and sell Yakisoba, produce in plain view, thousands of pirate CDs and DVDs, use the streets as public toilets, steal, assault. Cheating at cards, now and then one kills another, generally by knife. They are dirty, illiterate, uncultured and nobody manages to get them out because they are really a front. Everybody at the meeting had one minute to speak. I told them that I had observed them for years. They never sold anything, had no wrapping paper, no small change. I never saw anybody choose, buy, pay, and most of all, they are not worried about it. That means what? I made my point, the are there to peddle DRUGS! Of course I didn’t say that or I would be dead.

August 15 2006

Here is something to amuse you, photos of the celebration of 70 years of Ernesto’s beloved bookstore. Considering the situation we were not going to do anything. But at the last minute Ruy changed his mind, improvising. We decided to have a very modest celebration at one of Ernesto’s favorite Italian restaurants. Knowing Ruy, you wont believe it: due to the “special circumstances, everybody paid for himself, we all shared a few dishes, nobody even mentioned desert, except of course for Yago. And would you believe it, we had a wonderful time. I had taken Ernestos picture along. In front of it I placed an orchid all the employees together had given to me…It was really a mark in my life and I want to share it with you. On August 1 I completed 66 years in the firm. Sylvia is eligible for pension next year. If I live until then, I will have a sixty year old daughter.

When to stop? Hanu, Hannelore, Hannylorie. These are short excerpts of but a few of the letters I saved, and the dozens that disappeared. These are paltry samples of pictures you sent, I and Jan took, and my parents preserved in boxes of albums sitting in the garage. And I met you only once. How much of you is left to the sister, children, grandchildren, extended family, co-workers and neighbors with whom you spent your days? How much less than we long for, how much more than we can relinquish?