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June 6 Still Now

I see her like this still now

distantly fading into the storefront of a building long torn down.

She squints into the light, across a divide.

Hand to her brow, she searches for passage to a place unknown.

She was a big woman—an expulsive hormonal explosion of unbridled anger.

Not usually warm or kind, she was humorous and talented.

And lost.

She left me and my sisters and my brother here to find the way,

scaling a great chasm large as the surgery scars

that crisscrossed her massive middle.

Thirty-one years like little scabs surround the wound open

still now.

Shirley Knox Baker Colley

Born June 6, 1938

Buried June 6, 1981

#tuskegee

The Chair

I learned right away that a chair is an important part of an academic career. When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I had a desk right beside the elevator, and our department chair, Denny Regal, saw me sitting there reading first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

One evening he paused by my office door to say, “Barbara, you may go home now.”

He didn’t know I lived nearly an hour from campus and didn’t have a good car. I had to stay until my partner, Anne, was ready to leave. She had the good car, a Buick.

Anne was a few rungs above, two floors higher, in the next position up the ladder, an assistant professor. We both had lousy chairs in our offices, but I sat in mine much more than she sat in hers.

In those days budgets were tight in our unit, the humanities; so when a little money filtered down through the rafters from the upper administration to our lowly stations, Dr. Regal was gleeful. I’ll never forget the department meeting when he announced that everyone in our building, the Hades Center, would get a brand new chair. Being academe, he said, it was important that the new chairs be distributed on a merit-based schedule according to seniority. He spoke about a complicated formula that would be applied to each person’s productivity and worthiness of proper seating. Professors would receive chairs with two arms and five wheels; instructors would get one arm and four wheels, and graduate assistants, especially those sitting in their chairs all day, would get three wheels and no arms.

I was hopeful that I could keep my old chair because, although the cushion was duct taped and the metal arms were rusted, it had arms, and I had discovered that armchairs are most desirable when sitting for more than five hours.

As promised, the chairs were delivered, and since the death trap of a building needed to be made to appear more presentable, no one could keep an old chair. The new ones were rolled out together, so beautiful with dark upholstery, first the two-armed chairs, then one-armed chairs, and then the armless one they deposited at my desk beside the elevator when they took my beautiful rusty armchair away.

Lucky for me, above me, Anne got the good chair, the one with two arms and five wheels. She said I shouldn’t worry, since she didn’t sit in her chair anyway, I could have it. My heart was happy when we wheeled my armless chair into the elevator and took it up two floors, then loaded hers with two strong arms and delivered it to my desk in the main hallway by the elevator.

No one ever luxuriated in an office chair studying for comprehensive exams the way I did that glorious day I sat in Anne’s chair. But when Dr. Regal came around the corner by the elevator on his way home at 4:45 that night, he stopped abruptly at my door and confronted me squarely. With a mouth animated like a cartoon he said, “Where did you get that chair?” Perhaps I had committed a breach of university policy, or I had set off a torrent of anger against those who simply cannot follow the rules. Either way, Dr. Regal was outraged by the sight of me in my chair. He demanded to know by what trick of witchcraft I had acquired this symbol of a station so far above my own.

When I told him I had traded chairs with someone from the floors above, he calmed back down into the reasonable lovely man he usually was and asked me to return the chair to its proper place, effective immediately.

All these many years later, the same chairs lay in an unranked mass in the basement of the dirty old wreck of a building, and call out from their tangled arm to armless meaninglessness the hilarity of all that mattered then.

Saw grandma in the mirror this morning. She was about my age when she first saw me. She still drove and shopped. She bought freeze pops and circus peanuts and sometimes drove us to Newberry’s in Wellsville. She drove fast for conditions as Aunt Lou put it. She was a nervous driver even from the passenger’s seat. When she wasn’t driving, she would yell out grandpa’s name and stomp her braking foot into the floorboard at most intersections. That’s how grandma was when she was my age. And so am I.

#Youtube

The Way of Water

As Barbara Kellerman argues in The End of Leadership, by the end of the 20th century, traditional ideas of hierarchy and power were upended, and in their stead stood technological advancements that held the promise of a more democratic and participatory leadership shaped by the formerly powerless masses through social media (2012, pp. 21-24). Technology offered a knowledge economy in which leadership could potentially be a collaborative endeavor to which anyone with access to the internet could contribute. This signaled the end of the singular heroic leader who was seen as the source of all change and good. The post-heroic leader would be a plurality of voices technologically contributing to a communal conversation through social media.

What was not anticipated is that post-heroic leadership would turn to post-truth, an era in which the masses are silenced by rampant distrust of the very forms of communication that had allowed them to find their voices and lend them to movements like “me too”and “Black Lives Matter.” Fake news and hackers led to a declining trust in knowledge that is distributed on Facebook and its social media relatives Twitter and Instagram. Potential leaders, especially those with no ties to corporate media, have been left with few viable platforms on which they can freely communicate broadly and effectively because in post-truth the intended audience of any given articulation does not trust that the statement is, in fact, true; news is rejected as soon as it is articulated. In the wake of this epistemological reshaping of the dissemination of information, some thought-leaders conversant in new media are transforming their messages, often invoking spiritual concepts like “taking the way of water,” an ancient leadership philosophy suggested by Lao Tzu in The Tao Te Ching.

In the post-truth era in which we find ourselves, the Tao, or the way, presents itself as an antidote to the worn out rhetoric of masculine heroism, and water is the central metaphor of leaderless leadership offered by the sage who follows the Tao. Like water, the Tao of which Lao Tzu wrote cannot be held; it cannot be spoken about concretely since its power dissipates into abstraction when one strives to articulate it. In Stan Rosenthal’s translation of The Tao Te Ching he says that the name “Tao” is only a convenience we use to represent the universal and ancient principle which “enables all things to be, and to flourish naturally” (1984). In part 1, “The Embodiment of Tao,” Lao Tzu writes, “Even the finest teaching is not the Tao itself. Even the finest name is insufficient to define it. Without words, the Tao can be experienced, it can be known” (Rosenthal, 1984). The Tao shares qualities with many tenets of post-truth knowledge that cannot be articulated since once an idea is espoused it is commodified, attacked, and the veracity of it is dissolved.

Lao Tzu himself is as slippery as water in that there is no agreement among scholars that he existed at all or that he wrote The Tao Te Ching. Legend has it that around 400 B.C., on his retirement from public office, Lao Tzu headed west until a guard at the gate of Ch’in stopped him and requested he write a treatise on the Tao before passing. Lao Tzu is said to have sat for two days writing the cryptic text known as The Tao Te Ching. Afterwards he was never heard from again, and some say he ascended to heaven in the form of a dragon (Rosenthal, 1984). Among the wisdom he may have imparted before disappearing is his advise on leadership. In verse 6, “Leading from Behind,” Lao Tzu says that “The sea is the ruler of river and stream, because it rules from well beneath” (Rosenthal, 1984). It is from this position far beneath contemporary currents that some post-truth thinkers attempt to direct knowledge, and in so doing, they by necessity subvert or relinquish the title of leader. As Rosenthal translates from The Tao Te Ching, “The sage is aware that he who seems to lead does not always lead, and that he who seems to follow does not always follow. Because of this, the sage frequently seems neither to lead nor follow” (1984).

A good example of such a sage is Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. According to Katrina Brooker, because Berners-Lee released the source code for the World Wide Web “for free” in order to make it a “democratic platform for all,” his creation was subjected to debasement by “everything from fake news to mass surveillance.” In his devastation over what he sees as a profound undoing of humanity caused by his invention of the Web, he is now working under the radar to re-decentralize the Web, but not as the movement’s leader, “since by definition, the decentralized Web shouldn’t have” a leader (Brooker, 2018). Leading from behind the scenes, he hopes to return the power of the Web to all humanity by directing the streams of information from well beneath them.

Similarly, media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington, having morphed parts of their empires into SuperSoul Sunday and Thrive Global, appear to follow “The Way of Water,” as prescribed in part 8 of The Tao Te Ching: “Like water, the sage abides in a humble place; in meditation . . . in thoughtfulness” (Rosenthal, 1984). Huffington’s Thrive Global purports to end stress and the burnout epidemic by enhancing well-being. Winfrey’s SuperSoul Sunday nourishes the mind, body, and spirit while offering insights into spirituality, the afterlife, and personal fulfillment through in-depth conversations with some of the most recognized spiritual thinkers of our time including Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, Esther Hicks, Gary Zukav, and Arianne Huffington, themselves sage-like masters reflecting the life-sustaining nourishment of water through meditative practices and thoughtful humility.

Winfrey is particularly adept at harnessing the power of her own humility by deflecting from her wealth and status and presenting herself as no one special, a humble servant to the masses. She sometimes appears on her OWN network ensconced on a sofa in comfy clothing holding her pets, for example. As Rosenthal translates in “Without Seeking Acclaim,” the Tao indicates that “the talented person who is also wise, retains humility, and so does not create rivalry” (1984). When urged by her throng of followers to pick up the mantle of her power and lead the nation by running for the United States presidency, Winfrey diminishes her prowess claiming she is not qualified to lead. In reality, she is a universally recognized thought-leader whose almost ubiquitous presence in new media formats is the undercurrent of widely held public opinion.

One of most interesting sages among those currently following the way of water is presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. In part 13 of The Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu says that “Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self,” and he advises that the sage “love the world as yourself; then you can care for all things” (Mitchell,1988). Like Winfrey and the other sage-like followers of the way discussed here, Williamson seems compelled to care for all things, perhaps all of humanity. In her treatise, A Politics of Love,Williamson lays out the spiritual essence of her presidential bid saying, “A world unaligned with the ways of our spiritual nature has begun to fall apart because anything unaligned with the ways of our higher nature inevitably falls apart. The mind unaligned with love becomes aligned with fear, and fear now threatens to overtake our planet. We are challenged to regain spiritual balance, both in ourselves and in our world” (2019, p. 93). The premise of her book like the pillars of her campaign presents a significant sea change in political thinking.

Williamson also exemplifies the main problem with bringing ancient spiritual principles into mainstream political conversations. While few would disagree with the truth underlying her argument in A Politics of Love, once she articulates the premise, like any other post-truth concept, her philosophy is attacked and dismissed even by those who hold the same beliefs. Still, it remains to be seen if her spiritual wisdom might not rule the day in the end. As Lao Tzu says in part 78, “Sincerity,” “There is nothing more yielding than water, yet when acting on the solid and strong, its gentleness and fluidity have no equal in any thing. The weak can overcome the strong, and the supple overcome the hard” (Rosenthal, 1984). Williamson’s candidacy helps us imagine the possibility that the spiritual sea of Taoism might ultimately wear away the cynicism of post-truth along with the long history of masculine, heroic leadership and humbly guide us to the way.

References

Brooker, K. (2018). “I Was Devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the Man Who Created the World

Wide Web, Has Some Regrets. Retrieved from

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/the-man-who-create-the-world-wide-web-has-some-regrets

Kellerman, B. (2012). The End of Leadership. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Mitchell. S. (1988). The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Retrieved from

http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/Tao.htm

Rosenthal. S. (1984). The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. Retrieved from

http://www.integralbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Tao-Te-Ching.pdf

Williamson, M. (2019). A Politics of Love: a handbook for a new American Revolution. New

York, NY: HarperOne.

When my mother lay on her death bed, she was frustrated that her life was left undone. We were alone in the hospital room at Olean General, and she was in pain and confused from the opiates delivered through a Brompton’s serum administered to terminal cancer patients in those days. She knew her life was over, and she was sad that she could not complete the things she had started. She said to me, “Oh Barbie, what am I going to do?”

I was 19 and knew everything. I said, “If it were me, I would quit taking all the medications, and I would get up and walk out of here.” She struggled to get out of bed. Fumbling with her IV, she drew back the covers and grasped the chrome railings with her bruised hands. Her slim wrists cracked as she tried to lift herself. She could barely sit up let alone stand. She said, “I can’t do it.” And she lay back down and died a few days later.

I thought my mother could wish away her pain and her death sentence. I bought into the idea that our conscious thought can alter the physical evidence. At that time I had not yet read any new wave philosophy. Now I have read much of it and discovered it is easy to think pain away when the pain is insignificant but not so easy when it is life threatening. Fear is a much louder voice than hope. My own diagnosis has made me realize that the relationship between determination and hopelessness is much more a dance than a negotiation.

Fear is an aggressive dance partner leading you this way and that, and sometimes towards giving in. Ekhart Tolle has scared off many a reader by suggesting a means to relief is to die before you die. We can find comfort in the knowledge that life here in this version ends for everyone. We shut our eyes and step into another plane. It is a great gift that for most of our lives we ignore this truth. But in our ignorance, we embody only one side of the dance. I am coming to see fear as a means to awaken myself and come alive to the moment I am in now.

Facing fear is both acceptance of this life’s inevitable end and responsibility for desiring life now. About twenty years ago a regression therapist hypnotized me. In the hypnotic state I was directed through a tunnel to a cave where a fire should have been burning. Mary, the regressionist, asked me how brightly the flames burned, and I responded that the flame was low, a very small fire. She said, “oh dear, that is what I thought.” When I came out of the hypnotic state I asked her why she said that and what it meant. She said that the flame represents our desire for life. When the flame is low we do not have a strong desire to live this life. She did say, however, that some people see no flame at all, and that I saw one meant that I could fan this flame and learn to desire living.

My mother had little to no flame. She said many, many times that she would die and we would dance on her grave. She did die young. I have never danced on her grave, although one time shortly after she died I drove to the cemetery and briefly considered doing it. Death is always accompanied by anger. I was not only angry about her apparently self-willed death, I was angry about the way she lived and her enormous capacity for abusive meanness.

I died just a little for the first time in 1968 as a result of an eruption of said meanness. It was Christmas Eve day, and my sisters and I were huddled on the couch in our trailer watching Rocketship 7. I spied the chocolate milk balls wrapped in Christmas foil in the candy dish over the tv. I remembered that Mom had said we could eat them on Christmas, and so I began and convinced my sisters to join me. In short order we had emptied the dish. My mother had worked the third shift at Acme Electric and was asleep in the back of the trailer. When she got up and saw the red and green tinfoil strewn about the living area and the candy bowl empty, she flew into a rage. She screamed and yelled and swore, and she brutally heaved the entire Christmas tree, lights and ornaments and all, out the door into a snow bank. The shame of it punctured the center of my chest as if the tree had been a spear she drove right through me. I spent the rest of my childhood steeling myself against her rage, and never attended properly to the wounds.

To die before you die is to live. For me that means releasing the paralysis of shame I have embraced all these years. As devoid of content as so many people claim that social media is, I sometimes find morsels of wisdom there that allow entry into thoughts of relief. Recently two memes kept passing by, and each time I read them, they interrupted the ongoing noise of anger playing on repeat in the background of my conscious thought: when a parent is abusive to a child, the child does not stop loving the parent. She stops loving herself. And my mother’s failure was not so much in her inability to love me as it was in her inability to love herself. I have chosen to let these ideas speak to me and to forgive myself for all unkindnesses forged in a cycle of lovelessness.

I have come to see my own cancer diagnosis as a summons to appreciate my life. I am both dancers in this dance, acutely alive and not afraid to fly. I share this now in some small effort to say what I should say and finish what is left undone.

This track was recorded at the Wheel in Olean.

Recorded on a tiny portable tape player that someone was carrying on his shoulder during a jamboree.

words2be

This was recorded in Buffalo with the inimitable Fontilla Timmons.

words2be

Two weeks on Norderney, Germany, June-July, 2014

My view, January-February 2014.

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