Reflections on Deviants and Virtues in Literature and Art

I was teaching a World Literature class one semester when a student raised his hand and asked why the stories we were reading were so depressing.  He seemed agitated by this, and I did my best to answer his question.  “Because there is a lot of stuff in sorrow and suffering.  Happiness is pretty straight forward.”  It was a stock, oversimplified answer and from the expression on his face, it seemed not to suffice, but we dropped the topic nonetheless.  Now some years later, I’m organizing the syllabus for my Intro to Lit class and I am having the same reaction.  This has me thinking of how art and literature are generated and the state of the ethos that receives them.

            It could be the snow, the cold, the winter doldrums, cabin fever, rendering me particularly impressionable.  Perhaps these benchmarks of literature (think: The Story of an Hour, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Lottery, Madame Savage) are all too potent to be read together when in the throes of a winter semester.  Most of these model stories were written during the late nineteenth, early twentieth century when there was a need for a good long wake up call from the facades of propriety.  But these days we’re constantly in the throes of human calamity and dysfunction; it’s lurking on every device we have access to.

            In an art magazine I bought for a friend, there was a painting of a woman carving out her own viscera a la grand guignol.  Cathartic?  Perhaps if one has dyspepsia.  One has to wonder how a piece like this would be received: whether it would be novel and useful to a society over-staturated with gore.  Would it promote contemplation or desensitization?  And then there’s that picture of a young Adam Lanza dressed in camouflage with rounds of ammunition draped across his toddler legs.  The image is just as revolting as the grand guignol painting, but it is also heartbreaking.  We reached a new low with the Newtown tragedy; it is an indicator of a particular rampant mental lethargy and level of dysfunction in our society.

            I understand that artists and writers create art for personal reasons and I don’t want to dictate what they should and should not create.  What I am saying is that we need to be mindful of what we are releasing to the public and how it might contribute to this already dire ethos.

            This brought my thinking to the Renaissance and how, perhaps, we could use one right about now.  Just as the artists and writers of the Renaissance chose to revive Western Europe from its mental lethargy with ancient Greek and Roman texts on humanism, so too can we emulate particular works and redress our seemingly dire culture with new thought.  I’ve been compiling a list of works with the theme of compassion  because I believe it to be one of the most crucial of virtues, one whose power has been sadly underestimated.

            Just how, exactly does the mechanism of compassion work in literature, for instance?  Stories can inspire us. The writer presents a round, dynamic character with whom the reader can sympathize and draws forth the virtue through her actions and thoughts.  For example, the character Kitty Fane in The Painted Veil by William Somerset Maugham.  When we are first introduced to Kitty she is having an affair with a local politician.  Upon discovering the affair, Kitty’s seemingly stoic, intellectual husband Walter blackmails her into accompanying him to a cholera-infested village in China for her penance.  Here Kitty is transformed by witnessing her husband’s tireless efforts to better the lives of others and experiences the emergence of her own compassionate tendencies when she volunteers at a convent school.  She transforms from a shallow, immature woman to a model human being; one a reader can aspire to be.  A few months ago I had watched the movie version of The Painted Veil and revisited Kitty’s transformation.  My reaction was none other than relief; it is always a gamble as to whether someone will be open and aware to the good in themselves and the world and when one chooses it, it’s someone to root for.  And that’s what Kitty had brought out in me, relief and rooting.

            A second way the mechanism of compassion can work in literature is more personal.  I was about seventeen when I read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in an AP English class and saw myself in the protagonist Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive boy vulnerable to the glorious and treacherous aspects of the Catholic Church.  I don’t recall any big sin prodding me toward the flames of Hell as Stephen had prodding him, but I knew I was similarly impressionable and imaginative and aware of the Church’s message: Be Good or Else.  I shared that yolk of guilt and shame when the conscientious Stephen bore the blows of the Fire and Brimstone Sermon given by the preacher:

The next day brought death and judgment, stirring his soul slowly from its listless despair.  The faint glimmer of fear became a terror of spirit as the hoarse voice of the preacher blew death into his soul.  He suffered its agony.  He felt the death-chill touch the extremities and creep onward towards the heart, the film of death veiling the eyes, the bright centres of the brain extinguished one by one like lamps, the last sweat oozing upon the skin, the powerlessness of the dying limbs…No help!  No help!

            During a depression in high school, I had felt similar pangs of existential worry: No help!  No help!  The above paragraph depicts an impressionable and creative mind turning on itself; during my depression, I experienced just that.  Here is an example of empathy at its best, when a reader and writer (through the persona of character) commune over an idea and/or emotion.  One reads and one is not alone; one recognizes the suffering in another.  The alleviation of that suffering is compassion due not only to this “intimacy”, but also through any answer that may be presented.  Fallibility, according to Joyce, was part of artistic maturation:

            A girl stood before him in midstream: alone and still, gazing out to sea.  She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird...Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy.  Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call.  To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!  A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory.  On and on and on and on!

            Stephen’s “epiphany” is the realization of his authentic self- the artist.  It was my realization as well, ultimately, and I had started to peel away at the skins of my suffering.  In this way Joyce’s masterpiece is an act of compassion.  Now, I can’t know if Joyce intended to be compassionate by writing A Portrait.  But he presented the empathetic arena in which I might find compassion for myself.

            The Renaissance had the printing press; today we have the Internet.  We have the ability to flash mob on cue, tweet on command, transmit a tome in the blink of an eye.  It comes down to this: do we assemble in the name of the good and think more critically of conflict, identifying more positive outcomes or do we grab that low-hanging fruit?  In this broken and deluded world, we need compassion.  We’ve always needed compassion.

Compassion Anthology Website

The Compassion Project: An Anthology now has a website on weebly.  Visit us at www.compassionanthology.weebly.com or on facebook at www.facebook.com/compassionanthology

Wonder Woman and the Novel, Useful Power of Creativity

When I was young I wanted special powers.  I watched shows like Wonder Woman and I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and The Bionic Woman.  Jaime Sommers was so down-to-earth, unpretentious, just a regular gal; she made special powers seem attainable.  Whenever I ran at recess, I would hear that t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t sound that implied my make-believe bionics at work.  I would smooth a strand of hair behind my ear to hear far away sounds.  Once an older girl caught me doing this.  "What, are you bionic or something?" she snapped.  Oh how I wished.  How I wished to hear what no one else could hear, or jump to the top of a building, or have remarkable strength in my right arm.  I watched the 1984 gymnastic team and Mary Lou Retton with bated breath; they were girls who could fly.  I watched Katherina Witt, the elegant figure skater known for her flawless routines.  These women were my aspirations; I wanted to transcend the banal, the normal and predictable.

I had watched my mother, a woman of tremendous potential, struggle with the vacuousness of suburbia and being a stay-at-home mom.  She instilled in my sister and me a strong sense of independence: find out what you want to do and do it, for yourself.  When I was twelve years old, a friend wrote me a poem and I was enchanted by it, this small thing of rhyme and imagery; I aspired to emulate, make up my own creations.

When I completed a first draft for a novel in my twenties, I felt the rise of my powers.  Creativity was a way to leave the surface of the earth.  The feeling I got after capturing a poetic image or complex emotion was extra-ordinary.  I learned how the minutia of life could dissolve in the presence of creativity; I discovered how a woman with a room of her own could alter her world.

The problem is we learn to believe that creativity is not enough.  You are not really wonder woman until other, qualified people tell you you are.  In dire times of rejection, you may replace your creativity with a pint of ice cream or perhaps reruns of Desperate Housewives, or both.  The mind, now corralled to the demands of domesticity, as well as the numbing passiveness of technology, is like a tethered stallion.  It snorts and kicks.  It stands on its hind legs.  It overheats.  That creative energy is channeled straight into anxiety or worse.  Alice Walker reflects upon this in her essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens," where she writes about her Black ancestors, female slaves who, due to their stifled creativity “were not Saints but Artists; driven to a numb and bleeding madness."

Why is the power of creativity so fulfilling?  The answer lies in purpose according to Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist, who studies intelligence and creativity with respect to the neuroscience of the brain.  His specialty is helping people with brain injuries find meaning in their lives again.  Many of these people have lost their intellectual capacity and yet their creativity remained intact.  This is because intelligence relies on brain mass and conductivity between the lobes; conductivity is efficient with respect to intelligence, that is, minimizing point A to point B, while creativity depends on the many different, novel pathways a bio-electrical signal can take.  It is a sort of meandering.  Jung talks about Alonzo Clemons, an exceptionally detailed artist who creates exquisite sculptures of animals, horses, cattle, elephants, sheep in wood and bronze.  Clemons suffered a traumatic brain injury early in his life that rendered him mentally and socially challenged.  It is his artistry, however, that gives him a strong sense of purpose, a niche in the world.

Jung defines creativity as something that is "novel and useful".  Why was Picasso a great artist?  Because his style is novel- unique, interesting, enticing; his work is useful because it excites the senses and adds emotion and complexity to a viewing space. Why is Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse a work of art?  Its novel aspect is rooted in the stream of conscious writing that mirrors the internal workings of the human mind; we revel at the power of poetic rawness, at the spark and capture of insight before the ego and the editor overly refine it with propriety.  The useful aspect is showcasing these internal workings; we don't read To the Lighthouse for its plot twists; we don't read it to be entertained; we read it to experience empathy.

I spend most of my time taking care of my 17 month old twins and the days can be very long, especially during the winter months.  I am sure I am not alone when I say I am often pummeled by the gravity of drudgery, by the pile up at the kitchen sink after every meal, by the onslaught of diaper changing and laundry, by domesticity in general.  This past spring, holed up with the babes and waiting for the weather to change, I experienced the ennui that comes with disillusionment.  I have felt this ennui before; often times it has been a portal to depression, a place where I hold a continuous debate with myself on whether life is inherently meaningless.  Once, during one of these periods, I enrolled in a philosophy course to find out what the big wigs said about the issue, but I didn't find the answer there.  I found it in the short stories I was writing.  This is what I must remember: while writing and in the zone, time seems to stop; I enter the world of fluidity and purpose.  My mood changes from a worried, depressive state to one engaged and curious, even playful.  This is why I make time to write, because creativity can eradicate existential angst.

Now that's true power.

The Melancholic World of the Subconscious

There it was again, the white house on Horace Road, the house I used to visit nearly everyday as a girl.  The house in the dream was similar to the actual house with concrete steps leading to the front door, a mirror over the piano in the living room, but this house had a multitude of hidden doors.  I went inside with a heavy heart; I was looking for those lost to me, but once again, they weren't home. 
Aside from my visiting the white house in my dreams, I had gone back there a few years ago after my childhood friend, N, had contacted me through facebook.  We went to see N's parents; her father was alive back then.  My own father had been gone some eight years; this seemed ironic because my father was nearly 2 decades younger than hers.  I thought the visit would bring closure for me and I would no longer dream about the house, execute fruitless searches, because I had found my friend and her parents, the people who were a prominent part of my childhood.  But that wasn't the case.

I go about my business in my conscious life.  I take care of my twin babies, keep the house clean, take the dog for a walk, teach my classes.  I do one task then another then another.  Each task is a rung on the ladder that extends from morning to night.  But while I'm climbing the ladder during the day, I'm also living somewhere else- in the amorphous, melancholic world of my subconscious where I am still grieving.  The part of me that dwells there- perhaps it is the girl, or maybe the soul- is conveniently compartmentalized. My meager attempts at meditation and prayer do not satisfy her.  Perhaps this is why she is so prominent in my dreams.

In this last dream regarding the white house, a former student attempted to break in.  His name is Bobby D.  I had his sister as a senior back when I taught high school; she was respectful and diligent as Bobby was when I had him as a freshman.  By junior year, Bobby started having behavioral problems; it was this Bobby who was at the door trying to get in.

Just as Bobby D was sneaking in, I slammed the door on his knee and fingers.  I succeeded in bolting it, but there were others that needed locking.  At one point, the hidden doors multiplied infinitely in both directions, like an image does when you place it between two mirrors.  Bobby was out there, looming, readying himself to break in and take things.  On a shelf in the garage, there were remotes, about ten of them, each with ducktape over the buttons; I freaked when I saw all of the overhead doors needing to be locked.  Then my father appeared.  Together we worked at closing all of the overhead doors and locking them to keep Bobby D out.

Once, in meditation, and guided by a teacher, the presence of my father was potent; it was as if he was sitting in my lap.  Tears burst through the lashes of my closed eyes.  It had been awhile since I thought of him; I had been busy.  And yet, I could feel his eagerness to come through, as if he had been waiting for a while behind some locked door.

I have learned this: the friend I thought was lost to me, still exists.  She lives her life much as I do, taking care of children, maintaining a house, keeping a job.  I have also learned that my father still exists, albeit subtly.  It is uncanny sometimes, the way he flashes across a face, be it my sister's or my son's or my brother's.  There he is, I say to myself, as I observe my son and the way he watches cartoons with his lips in a semi-smile, his eyes alighted and depicting casual amusement, or as I observe my sister and the crinkle in her brow that shows up when she is perplexed, or the way my brother regards his car, meticulously, as my father did his.  And then, of course, there are the dreams where he shows up, suddenly and I am once again, whole.

At the end of this particular dream, after the doors were locked and my father had gone, I waited inside to tell my friend that her father had died.  In truth, I was eager to tell her, not to make her sad, but to have a confidant.  Because in that amorphous, melancholic world of the subconscious where the girl resides and grief resides, it's best to not be alone.

The Compassion Project: An Anthology, Call for Submissions

The Compassion Project: An Anthology

The Compassion Project’s main goal is to bring awareness to the simple, yet often marginalized concept of compassion. As it is now, antidepressant use by Americans ages 18-44 has increased nearly 400 percent in the last twenty years.  Almost weekly we hear about mass shootings, gang murders, and cyber space bullying.  It’s the diatribe of negativity in our minds, compelled by a success-obsessed society that enforces our sufferings, our singularity.  True compassion eradicates singularity.

To cultivate compassion, we must first define it for ourselves.  We must start with what the mind clings to- images.  We are bombarded with hundreds of useless or disturbing images everyday through media and advertising.  They reel in our minds, even when we turn off the screen.  What if we can replace these images?  What if we can focus on this thing compassion through positive images, images that unify us instead of alienate us, images of the spirit and not the ego; would this be a starting point in cultivating the light that lies within all of us? Will we then begin to know compassion?  Will we then recognize the seeds of the dark before they sprout and take root?

The Compassion Project: An Anthology is a call for images of original artworks depicting compassion, be they photographs, or photos of paintings, collages, mixed media, drawings, or sculptures.  Poetry, short personal essays and short stories are also welcome.  Selections from this collection of work will be published and used in presentations on compassion.

The Compassion Project: An Anthology

Guidelines for Submissions

All entries should include:

• a word document containing an imbedded image (jpg with maximum size of 2000 x 2000 pixels and minimum of 500 x 500 pixels) of the artwork along with a statement (one to three paragraphs) on why the image included represents compassion or a poem, short essay, or short story on compassion
• name, address and email included in the heading.
• Poetry must be 30 lines or less, single-spaced in 12 point Times New Roman font.
• Prose must be 1500 words or less, double-spaced in 12 point Times New Roman font.
• If an image is accepted for the anthology, the artist must be able to send it with high resolution.
• Images, essays and stories should be sent between December 1, 2013 and September 1, 2014 to Laurette Folk at lfolk@northshore.edu; all poetry should be sent to Jennifer Jean at thisruach@gmail.com.

Artists and writers of all ages and abilities are welcome. Please visit us on facebook: www.facebook.com/compassionanthology .

What the World Needs Now: Compassion

Pain is physical, suffering is mental.  Suffering is due entirely to clinging or resisting.  It is a sign of our unwillingness to move, to flow with life.  Although all life has pain, a wise life is free of suffering.  A wise person is friendly with the inevitable and does not suffer.  Pain they know but it does not break them.  If they can, they do what is possible to restore balance.  If not, they let things take their course.

                                                                                                            -Nisargadatta

I don't know anything about Nisargadatta save what Google tells me, that he is an Indian guru, a spiritual teacher, and a wise man who has sold many books.  But when I came upon this quote, in my bones I knew it to be true.  My father, another wise man, used to say of certain things- illnesses, injuries, emotional phases- "let it run its course".  The saying comforted me because it implied a secret working to life, but I tend to lose faith in this secret working.  This lack of faith has been the portal to dark places, and yet I know I am not alone in going there.  I hear about the insidious effects of depression and its cohort anxiety in the news, in phone calls with family; I read about them in my students' essays, in texts I receive from friends.  One article from Salon online magazine went so far as to call the prevalence of depression/anxiety an epidemic.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antidepressant use by Americans ages 18-44 has increased nearly 400 percent in the last twenty years.  We can debate all we want if the dehumanizing aspects of technological advances, the troubled economy, and daily stress are the culprits, but the truth is these things are an inherent part of our lives and are not going to go away.  One formidable adversary to this type of mental suffering is often overlooked and discounted; I am speaking here of compassion.  I have been doing research on compassion, listening to TED talks, reading articles, cutting out quotes because I think it is one of the antidotes to this epidemic that afflicts us.

But what exactly is compassion?

What are its attributes?  Do we recognize it when we see it?  Is it a part of our everyday lives?  The first step to knowing compassion is to define it.  According to Dictionary.com, compassion is "a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering."  Often compassion is associated with tenderness: a mother soothing a crying baby (notably, the word for womb in the Hebrew Bible is rehem and this same word is often translated to mean compassion, in general).  Mother Teresa is a prominent figure of compassion for many people; the images of her with the sick and destitute are iconic.  We interpret such behavior as saintly, impossible for the regular person.  Compassion here, seems out of reach; we get a sense that it requires a certain strength and it does.  Mark Meusse, Professor of Religious Studes at Rhodes College, says compassion is "more than just a sentiment" and that it is "born of a brave consciousness and a strong will".  Compassion is often mistaken for pity, but pity keeps its distance from suffering; there is an element of disdain, aversion in it.  Joan Halifax, a Buddhist teacher and Zen priest, says having compassion is "to see clearly into the nature of suffering and stand firm and say, 'I am not separate'".

It's that separateness that causes us to suffer.  It's the diatribe of negativity in our minds, compelled by our success-obsessed society, that enforces our singularity.  True compassion eradicates singularity.

The problem with our culture is that we are selectively compassionate.  We show it when it is convenient for us to do so.  Around the holidays, we give because it is fashionable, because it makes us feel good.  Also, our selective compassion may be a mask for fear.  Barbara Lazear Ascher contemplates this in her essay "On Compassion" when she describes the anecdote of a homeless man being fed by a bakery owner in New York City.  The offering is a backdoor deal; the man accepts the hot coffee and the brown bag and "as silently as he came, is gone".  Ascher speculates why the woman would feed the homeless man: is it an act of compassion?  Pity?  Or is it a preemptive act to remove the man from her shop?  She unearths an ugly truth:

Raw humanity offends our sensibilities.  We want to protect ourselves from an awareness of rags with voices that make no sense and scream forth in inarticulate rage.  We do not wish to be reminded of the tentative state of our own well-being and sanity.  And so the troublesome presence is removed from the awareness of the electorate.

It could be us at the door of the bakery.  It could be us with the gun in our hands shooting at bystanders.  It could be us poking at our veins with a heroine needle.  Even reading these sentences makes us uncomfortable, but as the peace activist and Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn preaches, we are all vulnerable to the dark and the light within each of us and it's up to us which to cultivate. 

In the past, compassion has fallen under the umbrella of religion, but today this is not exclusively true.  I have listened to several interviews with doctors citing particular studies on how compassion strengthens the immune system.  Medical practitioners are becoming attuned in Reiki and other hands-on healing arts because touch in the name of compassion helps to heal.  I've been attuned as well and can vouch for the power of human touch.  I was on a skiing trip with the Appalachian Mountain Club and a woman in our group was having stomach pains; she had had surgery and the pain kept recurring.  She asked me if I could use Reiki on her.  It was a snowy night in Vermont and it was dark and cold; a trip to the hospital had to be a last resort.  Although I was somewhat nervous, I wanted to help her.  Also, I was curious to see if this Reiki thing would actually work.  Ultimately the space we cultivated that night- the space of compassion- brought peace.  I laid my hands on her belly as it rose and fell and the pain had ultimately subsided.

But compassion and science is not a novel idea; Einstein, knew full well, that in the hands of the technologically advanced, compassion would be imperative:  

A human being is a part of the whole universe, a part limited in time and space.  He experiences himself and his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness- that separation.  This delusion is a kind of prison for us.  Our task is to free ourselves from this prison by exercising compassion and embracing all of nature and her creatures.

Einstein said that science for his generation, the generation that created the atomic bomb, was like a razor blade in the hand of a three year old.  What might be the one thing that prevents a war?  Seeing the "enemy" as human, non-separate, as people like Greg Mortenson do.  By building schools for the region where the Taliban has sunk its claws, Mortenson is choosing compassion over fear.  David Oliver Relin who co-wrote the book Three Cups of Tea with Mortenson says it best: "Mortenson goes to war with the root causes of terror every time he offers a student a chance to receive a balanced education, rather than attend an extremist madrassa."

And yet we must not leave compassion to the Mother Teresas and Greg Mortensons of the world.  Compassion begins on the individual level, with the self.  It begins with the worry we have for ourselves and our lives; it begins with our personal sufferings and darknesses.  To cultivate compassion, we must first define it for ourselves.  We must start with what the mind clings to- images.  We are bombarded with hundreds of useless or disturbing images everyday through media and advertising.  They reel in our minds, even when we turn off the screen.  What if we can replace these images?  What if we can focus on this thing compassion through positive images, images that unify us instead of alienate us, images of the spirit and not the ego; would this be a starting point in cultivating the light that lies within all of us? Will we then begin to know compassion?  And once we know compassion and act on it, thereby deepening our knowledge, will we then recognize an individual like Adam Lanza before the seeds of the dark sprout and take root and tragedies like Newtown take place?

I found this image in a book on meditation.  I used pastels to regenerate it on a larger paper, framed it, and put it in the living room.  This is my image of compassion for several reasons: one, it is white, a color depicting purity and nobility; compassion stems from the purist and noblest parts of ourselves.  Also, it is a magnolia flower, a flower that grows on a tree that blooms only once a year in the spring.  Spring is nature’s compassion for the earth after a hard, bitter winter.  It is a balm, a celebration, a departure from suffering and a leap toward life.  Also, the magnolia tree has been around for about 95 million years.  On the evolutionary timeline, it appeared before bees and is believed that the flowers evolved to encourage pollination by beetles; this is why the carpels (seed producing center) are extremely tough, to sustain the beetles walking all over them.  Compassion involves resiliency as well; a compassionate person must move into the nature of suffering but hold firm.

Unbeknownst to many, there is a compassion movement happening now (I hope to jump on the bandwagon myself, stay tuned for The Compassion Project Call for Submissions post).  I have found curriculums devoted to compassion, A Charter for Compassion, even the Compassion Games.  There is a Huffington Post interview with Jon Ramer, founder of the Compassion Action Network that documents all of these things.  This is all incredibly good news to me, someone who knows full well the power of compassion from seemingly small acts - a stranger opening the door for my oversized stroller - to greater acts - a wise teacher inspiring a long-awaited shift in my belief system.  But I wonder if such a movement will be a prominent and profound one like the Peace Movement of the 1960's or a short-lived, ambiguous one like Occupy Wall Street.  One can only hope we have evolved enough for the former to be true and our children reap the benefits.

Remembering My Father: His Half of Me

It would take a book or a lifetime to write about how a father can influence a daughter.  I've started that writing awhile ago, beginning with a poem I wrote when my father was alive.   The last few lines I find especially pertinent now and probably will always:

he, protector made me a safety circle
wrapped it tightly around me
me, a young girl, lived, played, hid inside it
as time passed, life dissolved it,
but i now woman, competent and like him
have realized his half of me,
his strength within me.

Without him here, I am left with the him that is part of me and part of my brother and sister, and now my son and daughter.  It is uncanny sometimes, the way he flashes across a face, be it my sister's or my son's or my brother's.  There he is, I say to myself, as I regard my son and the way he watches cartoons with his lips in a semi-smile, his eyes alighted and depicting casual amusement, or as I regard my sister and the crinkle in her brow that shows up when she is perplexed, or the way my brother regards his car, meticulously, as my father did his.  There is the Viteritti part, I say, the part that is my father.

There have been many journal entries, essays, poems, novel excerpts, already; these are my attempts at understanding his influence, like this one from the novel A Portal to Vibrancy :

I am not just like my father when I study Engineering, I am him.  He slips into my body and moves it around, mumbles to himself over the equations, moves my arms so my hands clasp behind my head.  I stare into the wall, thinking with his brain.  When I am him, I feel certain about my life; I move from one equation to the next, like stepping on rocks to cross a river.

Recently I've taken up tennis.  I am impressed by how much I think of the sport, how it is becoming an obsession.  And there it is again, the Viteritti part, the Dad part, the part that wants to excel, to make the body move with finesse to master a swing and hit a ball; there it is the competitive part that wants to win and impress.  I imagine my forehand, the position of the racket when it contacts the ball, how to follow through and I remember how my father did his wrist exercises during a long car ride, readying himself for a base hit.  "Think wrists" he once wrote on the concrete wall in the basement where he practiced his swings.


My father was a model provider for his three kids.  He not only put a roof over our heads and food in our mouths, he supported us in our studies, spending hours tutoring us in math and science.  Being a teacher now, I realize he was actually a pretty good one himself, exercising patience and diligence and orderliness.  He went to our games, taught us to love the woods and the outdoors, to respect and honor our elders (did you kiss your grandmother?  That "she" is your mother, don't forget that, he would say).  My father was not only meticulous with his car, he was that way with pretty much everything, especially his tools.  Every tool had a specific function, had a place to be hung on the peg board by the work bench, next to his collection of weights and the bullworker he bought back in the seventies to shape his muscles.  My father knew just the right cereal to milk ratio to not leave residual milk in his bowl. 

Most importantly, my father had a playful sense of humor and was a formidable tease, as my mother, who took the brunt of his teasing, could attest.  She spent years being pinched, splashed and caught off guard by his antics.  Once he went so far as to lay a ladder across the back lawn and himself beside it so my mother would think he had just fallen off the roof.  Just when he heard real concern in my mother's voice, he started cackling.  His laugh was infectious. 

He called people by silly nicknames, Butter Mella for my mother, Dud for his mother-in-law, Ditizy for his own mother.  This was his way of being cute and loveable.  Confident.  Close.  I wrote about this in an essay titled "Balanced Rock":

Butter Mella was a name my mother's family called her because she looked like a butterball when she was a baby, cute and fat.  My father did not start calling my mother Butter Mella until after they were married and he was fully integrated into her family, enough so to learn all the childhood stories.  He called her "Hon," sometimes, a full "Honey" when they were having a disagreement and he wanted to persuade her to come around to his side of seeing things.  Rarely did he call her by her real name.  When they first started dating he asked her if could call her "Kitten" and she sneered at him for being so oblivious.  Before her he dated girls, little women with mousy faces and voices.  My mother, he soon realized, was no kitten; she was a lioness who liked to lounge, sleep late, and go for the jugular when she believed someone was taking advantage of her.  My father knew full well the meaning of "once bitten twice shy" and he respected her.  He learned to voice his appreciation, to communicate, because this is what it took.

I can speak for the three of us, my sister, brother, and myself, when I say we are grateful to have my parents' marriage as a model marriage to follow.  I am not saying it was perfect, but it had longevity; they knew how to consider one another.  In fact, I can honestly say, it was a marriage based on consideration.  Here's another excerpt from "Balanced Rock"":

My mother had to put up with my father's family's eccentricities.  My grandmother and grandfather used to fight and grumble at each other overtly like bulldogs and this created numerous uncomfortable situations.  Having learned to respect family no matter who they are, she called my grandparents "Mom" and "Dad" and reminded my father of his duties as a son, to call them on their birthdays.  They had been known to call him on their birthdays and my mother knew this made him feel bad, so she saved him the guilt by reminding him.  These are the sorts of things you do in a marriage.


At times, I have a bad attitude about my father's death and I take on an almost existentialist perspective: he's dead, I'm alive and I feel nothing.  Time has buried him.  What I have realized is it's up to me to keep him alive by recognizing him in myself and others, by writing, by reminiscing, by meditating.

Once, while guided by a teacher through a meditation, the presence of my father was so strong, it was as if he was inside me orbiting my heart.  Tears streamed through the lashes of my closed eyes.  It had been awhile since I acknowledged him; I had been busy, but more so, self-involved, dejected.  What amazed me about that meditation was that I could feel his eagerness to come through, as if he had been waiting awhile for me to get with it and pay attention.  And this is what a daughter must do: pay attention, no matter how old she is.