Category Archives: Letters

The humanities

With all the heart I can muster.

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In 1987 I was working for the local hands-on science museum, Discovery World, and part of my job was to beg companies to donate material to our cause. This was not really a task for which I was a natural choice – I am not really a salesman, and not a fund-raiser. As a matter of fact, due to internal politics I was forbidden from fund raising; I could only ask for “stuff.”

 

We were working on the “Health Is Wealth” exhibit, a compendium of stations, 23 in all, covering many aspects of whole-body health. We were looking for a blockbuster addition to this exhibit, and as artificial heart research was very much in the zeitgeist I was tasked with trying to get one. Being a novice and an innocent, I called up Symbion, the firm formed by Robert Jarvik, the inventor of the first practical, implantable, total artificial heart (TAH); the Jarvik 7. “Hi, This is Nic Bernstein calling from Discovery World museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am calling because I see that you have just removed a heart from a local man, and we were wondering if we could get that unit to display in our new exhibit…”

 

Yes, I actually made that call, and the response I received was much more polite than you might expect. “Well, we have received that heart from the implanting hospital, Saint Luke’s, but under FDA guidelines we have to disassemble the heart, test the components and then return the whole works to their labs.”

“Oh, well I guess that makes sense… Have you got any suggestions for me as to how I may be able to get one? We would really like to exhibit one, and seeing as a local man just had one, and local interest is high, it just seems like the time is right.”

 

“I tell you what, we cannot give you one, all of our hearts must go to an FDA approved transplant site. But, I can tell you this: There are two sizes of hearts, small, for women, and large, for men. Turns out that the large is really too large to implant into anyone’s chest cavity, so we are only using the small ones. St. Luke’s has a large one that they ordered for training. It can never be used, since it is too big, and since it hasn’t been used, they don’t have to return it to us or the FDA, and they need to purchase a new, small unit to train with. You should ask them.”

 

The next call I placed was to the communications director at St. Luke’s. “Can you give us that training heart that you have? I understand that you cannot implant it, and it would just go to waste otherwise…” I asked. “Tell you what, Nic, I am going into a board meeting right now, let me see what I can do.”

It was all that she would say, and nothing was promised. I put down the phone and waited…

Two hours later the phone rang and it was the communications director form St. Luke’s. “If we were to give you the heart, just how would you exhibit it? How would people see it? I have ten minutes and then I have to get back into the meeting.” she said.

 

I was stuck cold. I hadn’t thought it through this far… “Well, what we would like to do is have a display where the visitor would place their finger into the plesthysmograph that you gave us, and they would see their pulse on the heart monitor you gave us, and then the artificial heart would start to beat in synchronization with their own.” I offered. I was really loading up the stables on this one…

 

“Okay, I think I can sell that,” she said, “I’ll call you back in half an hour.” I was both proud and scared out of my wits. I waited, and worried about what I would say to Eric, my engineer.

 

She called back in 40 minutes and said, “You have your heart! Make us proud.”

 

Shit! Now came the hard part.

 

I made the long trek down the hallway to the lab, and sidled up to Eric at his bench. “I have just had a very interesting conversation with St. Luke’s and I have to tell you about it,” I started. “They are going to give us a Jarvik 7 artificial heart.”

 

“Cool!” said Eric.

 

“But, I told them that we would make it do this…” I said, and went on to explain to Eric what I had told the PR woman that we would do.

 

Eric thought about what I said, and then he said something like “Well, I guess we need to find out about it’s control circuitry.”

 

The next day I called back to Symbion and asked my contact if he could put me in touch with someone in the engineering department. “I heard from Bridget that you got the practice heart!” he shared, “Good play. Talk to this guy…” and he gave me a name and number. A few minutes later I was speaking to the head engineer. I explained what we wanted to do, and asked if we could get plans for their drive systems. It wasn’t going to be that simple.

 

The original Jarvik 7 heart was a bulky, and balky, device which was pneumatically driven. The control cabinet was about 4 feet tall by 2 feet wide, and housed an air pump, and a pair of drive assemblies. The drive controls had a pair of dials on their face, one of which controlled pulse rate and one of which controlled the duty-cycle; the ratio between systoli and diastoli — the amount of time the heart pumped in versus out. These values were hard coded, so to say, and did not vary. In other words, if you had a Jarvik 7, you would get a dialed in pulse rate, say 72 beats per minute, and a dialed in duty cycle, and that was that. There was no variability, there didn’t need to be.

 

I was crestfallen. How were we going to synchronize a Jarvik 7 to the visitor’s heart if the control unit was fixed? Well, we soon discovered that was not going to be an issue as we were not getting the control unit, just the heart. I called the engineer again. “Well, I can tell you that you need this amount of pressure to cycle the heart, and that you need this amount of resistance, and back pressure, but beyond that, I don’t know what to say…” “We want it to track the visitor’s heartbeat” I said. “Well, if you get that to work, we would love to see what you’ve done, ’cause that’s way beyond anything we’ve done.” Oh goody.

 

Well, long story short, Eric did it. He built an analogue computer which performed quadrature upon the output of the plethysmograph and drove the parallel pneumatic drives to the heart. A week or two later our heart arrived, and we had to put it to the test. A heart pumps against a load; in the body that load is provided by the arteries and the miles of blood vessels and veins. In our test, as we had yet to construct our hydrostatic tanks, we simply immersed the heart into a bucket, “more than six inches deep,” we were told. I handed the heart to Jerry, a Bible thumping shop guy, after first connecting it to the pneumatic tubes. I placed the plethysmograph onto my finger and Jerry plunged the heart into the bucket, and we turned on Eric’s drive unit. The heart started to pulse, and Jerry yanked his hand out of the water and ran to the other side of the shop spewing oaths in his wake. I grabbed the heart to keep it from surfacing, and had the most bizarre experience of my life. I was holding my own heart under water, it seemed, as it beat in perfect synchronization with mine, and with a firm and resolute rhythm.

 

We had done it! We, a small and underfunded science museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, had designed and built the most advanced artificial heart drive system in the world! We made minor adjustments to the system after that, and ultimately we were unable to allow the visitor to experience that eerie, out-of-body, sensation that I had of holding my own heart in my hands, but we had to protect the heart.

 

We did send all of our design materials off to Symbion. We never heard if they used any of them, but in the ensuing years the dream of a totally-implantable artificial heart (TAH) gave way to the more pragmatic ventricular assist device, the intra-aortic balloon pump, and similar heart pumps, assists, etc. All of these new generation of heart savers share the quality of tracking the patient’s own heart rate, systoli and diastoli. Whether or not our work was used, we laid the path.

 

Tonight, as I write this, my friend Tom is having a pair of ventricular assist devices installed into his chest cavity. If all goes well they soon will help his heart, his scarred and stricken heart, and pulse and pump blood though his veins. I do not claim anything in this, but I would like to think that in our own way, due to our own imperatives, we showed a generation of heart surgeons and clinical engineers that it was important to consider the patient’s own heart, their own pulse, when designing the systems by which we would keep them alive.

Mostly, however, I have to write this because I really want Tom to live and I have to do something with my fingers while he lays on that operating table and has this generation’s best and brightest install a piece of machinery into his chest to keep him alive long enough for me to tell him to his face how important he is to me.

My American Story

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Ballot Box

28th. February 1953

Dear Professor Lederberg,

Dr. Clive Spicer, who recently spent some time under you, has informed me that there might be a vacancy in your department for a graduate English student.

Such a project interests me very much and I would, if it is still open, like to offer myself as a possible candidate. Would you be so ‘kind as to let me have some further details  about it?

A. Bernstein

—

Thus began my American Story.

In 1953 my father bridled under the strains of life in post-war England. He had trained for a career in medicine, but after years as a corpsman during the Battle of Britain he had seen too much death. He had administered last rights in muted voice too many times and for too many faiths to ever face a career of dealing with patients, so he settled for research and teaching.

The post-war years had already taken him around the formerly occupied countries of Europe to help rebuild the medical establishment and treat the distressingly high rates of fevers and infections. He was released from service in 1948 after service as Emergency Lieutenant, War Substantive Captain, Substantive Captain, and finally mustered out in 1959 as Captain, the rank he carried to his death. The rank he would much rather never had taken.

My father, to put it direct, was eager, no fast, to get out of Britain and her post-war shock of austerity and deprivation. He had suffered already too much of that. Many tales are told of the Brits steadfastness and stolidness, in the face of Hitler’s unending siege, and indeed my father had witnessed his own home being destroyed by a V2 “buzz-bomb” and the virtually complete destruction of his country’s financial system. He wanted out, and NOW. He was tired of the straight jacket that England had become for him. He wanted the dream, the dream that had motivated so many emigrants from so many countries who flocked to the United States in those years.

I am having a little difficulty at present with the Bank of England in trying to arrange for the transfer of some of my Sterling assets to the U.S. I think that they will agree but time is running rather short…

The British were loath to let their citizen’s hard assets leave their shores. Indeed my mother, in 1977, fully 14 years after his emigration, had to fight to get the last of his bank notes released.
But I digress. Dad did get out, and he came to America, and met my mother in that lab in Madison, and they wed in December of 1954 and moved back to England when my father’s visa expired in 1955. They started a family, bought a modest semi-detached home, and finally, in 1963, moved back to the United States when he got a position at Marquette University.

On June 20, 1968, one day after his 46th birthday (I have just turned 46, so this is significant to me), and just two weeks after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, my father received his naturalization papers from this United States, his United States – He was a Citizen of these United States! He celebrated the fourth of July that year with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm.

He voted that November 4th for Hubert Humphrey. A Labour Party regular all his life in England he could not have done otherwise.

My own political awakening, born in 1968 when my parents hosted Students for McCarthy, came into its fullness in 1972 with the campaign of George McGovern. I was young, only 10 years old on election night, but I was a dedicated foot-soldier for McGovern, having distributed thousands of pieces of literature for him in some of the toughest wards of the city.

I still remember that election night, sitting in the local McGovern headquarters on Oakland Ave. and watching the polls come in.

I must digress here for a moment. Many of my friends these days know that I always watch the polls come in. For many reasons this is a remnant of that first election night I witnessed. I implicitly trust the democratic system, but I equally implicitly distrust the physical manifestation of that system.

My father came to the McGovern office at 8:00 to collect me and take me home. The next day was a school day and I could not be allowed to stay up all night. I was reluctant to go, to say the least, but I did.

In the car, on the way home, I looked at my dad and asked if he had voted. “Yes,” he said. ” Who for?” I demanded. He paused. “Nixon,” he said. “How could you do that, Dad?!? You know how hard we all worked on the McGovern campaign. How could you?”

“For once in my life,” he said, “I wanted to vote for a winner.”

We never spoke of this again.

—

In the summer of 1974 we were camping in Indiana when Richard M. Nixon resigned the presidency of the United States of America. The first ever to do so. My mother couldn’t wait to call her brother John who had been a big organizer for Nixon in his home state of Virginia. I just had to sidle on up to my dad and …

… and say nothing. I wanted to ask him how he thought about his winner now, but I knew how he felt, and he didn’t need his snot-nosed kid to rub it in.

—

I am listening to Bruce Springsteen sing “Born in the USA” on the Hi-Fi right now. I can always appreciate that song even if I cannot identify with it. I was not born here, but this is my country as surely as it was my father’s, or my maternal grandfather’s – a seventh generation American.

Much has been made this year of early voting, and I have endured innumerable entreaties to vote early myself. I have done this in previous elections, but I shall not, will not, this year. This Tuesday, November 4th, marks the 40th anniversary of my father’s first vote as a naturalized American citizen. On that day I will cast my own ballot, proudly, for another son of an immigrant. And I will smile at my father’s memory, for I know that he would have voted the same way – for a winner.

Memory Lane II

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My friend Cindy P just sent me a link to The Beatles “Let It Be” on YouTube (see above) and it really took me back. Cindy was in the UWM Union today, setting up for an event, and overheard a student playing this song on a piano, and it took her back. “it really made me stop. breathe, think… she wrote.

I know the feeling.  It took me back to the winter of 1970, Christmas time.  I’ll be dating myself here, but I must confess that Let It Be was my very first record album purchase; the original release.  The Beatles were already broken up by the time it came out, but an 8 year old hardly cared about such things.

My uncle Leon, my father’s older brother, had sent each of us some money, probably $10.  My older brother Steve had spent some of his on a record, I will spare him the embarrassment and not say which one.  I was so jealous!  Well, not to be outdone I got all fitted out in my snow gear (we used to have real winters back then) and made the trek around the corner to Green’s bookstore, where Panther Books is now, on Downer and Hampshire.  My $10 bill creased into the palm of my hand inside my mitten.

I marched right up to the New Releases rack and waited for my glasses (a childhood curse) to unfog, and then tried to decide what to buy.  There was Johnny Mathis and Bobby Gentry, but the only band that I recognized, other than the records my older siblings had already purchased or received as gifts, was the Beatles.  Abbey Road and Let It Be were both in the rack, but Let It Be had a nicer cover, I thought, and besides it was an album it opened up, that made it automatically better.

I bought it for $5.59 and took it right home, the spare change jingling in my mitten and the four $1 bills pressed into my palm.  I asked permission to use my mother’s Westinghouse portable record player and settled in to listen to the record and read, I mean really read the liner notes.  I can still remember the first strains of “Two Of Us” coming through the tinny speaker of that phonograph.  I loved it all, though I didn’t really understand some of it (I probably still don’t).

In a way, listening to it tonight, that thin YouTube sound quality playing on my tinny notebook speakers was very much like listening to that old vinyl on the paper coned speaker in my mother’s old portable Westinghouse record player (with a penny taped to the tonearm).  Paul McCartney’s piano playing on Let It Be still sends a shiver down my spine, and “Long and Winding Road” still makes me sad.  In many ways all of my music purchases since that first one have paled.

I still have that vinyl, and when my turntable works I will get it out and play it.  All except for “Maggie Mae,” which suffered just a little too much from my tin-can-and-sewing-needle days of homemade phonograph experimentation.  But that’s what makes it genuine; it is older and worn and a little the worse for wear, like I am.

Thanks for the memory, Cindy.  A long and winding road indeed!

New Book Titles

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Pawn had dinner tonight with sister HG and an unexpectedly large number of book titles were spontaneously birthed as a result.  Here are three of them (copyright © 2008, all rights reserved):

Luminary Misfits

A Nasty Tussle in June

Jesus Has Two Mommies

I won’t go into all of the back stories or plot lines of these titles.  But there you have it.

Meeting Nell

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It’s four o’clock in the morning and I have just woken up next to a strange woman. That is probably not the best way to start a story, so let’s back up a little bit and start over.

I first met Nell a few days ago. I have just moved house, to a large and rambling apartment building near the railroad tracks in that part of town, they call it the Fifth Ward, where the Bohemian artists and the down and out of society mix freely. It’s a part of town whose real pulse is best taken at night, late at night, but seemingly quiet at, say, 10:30 in the morning. I have just lost my job at the paper, and picked up a few classes to teach at university. The apartment is cheap, and I will be able to get by on that salary and this rent.

The building is a four story walk-up, my unit is one of four on the second floor. Most of the buildings in this neighborhood are industrial, but this one was actually built as apartments. “The Hawthorne” is the name over the main entrance, but I, as most of the tenants, use the side door, off the litter strewn parking lot.

David calls shortly before my move. He’ll be in town for Father’s Day and asks if he can stay with me. You can stay in my apartment, I tell him, my new apartment, but it will be empty – I’m in the process of moving right now. That works for him, and he even helps me move a few of my things over. There isn’t much, really. I’ve been shedding possessions of late, part of an abortive plan to move overseas. I still may move, but that was the impetus to get rid of much of the accumulated material cruft with which one surrounds oneself over time. I still kept many books, an old typewriter of my mother’s, and my laptop. An old leather easy chair, in which I like to write, and a wonky footstool are what we are moving the night I first meet Nell.

The first thing that strikes me about this diminutive figure is her large head. Not large in and of itself, but large for her small, slender body. She has close-cropped black hair, almost spiky, with little elfin locks curling down before her ears. Her close-set dark eyes often peer out from under her brow, her face tilted down towards her feet, as though heavy. That brow carries thin, but not plucked, eyebrows, with a few hairs on the bridge of her upturned nose, revealing the eastern European heritage which most surely lay in her past. She has a slight frame, and her shoulders hunch forward when she thinks no one is looking, but she has a proud carriage otherwise. About 50 years old, maybe a bit less, but I can’t really be sure. Her face has a way of lighting up when she thinks she has impressed you, but can turn dark and cloudy with her mood. A black sweatshirt, with arms so long that they shroud her hands like a monk’s cowl, overlap the waist of her maroon jeans, themselves belted with an old tie.

She shuffles towards us in her slippers, looking through some mail, and almost absentmindedly holds the door open for us. She looks up, though, as we carry the chair and footstool through the door. Her eyes have an almost mischievous cast to them as she introduces herself in a voice weighted with years of smoking but still lyrical, “I’m Nell – 4A. What a gloriously disheveled chair you have there. I’m sure he has an interesting story in him.” A few, I assure her. “I’d shake your hand and properly introduce myself, but this glorious chair would tumble. I’m Nic, just moving into 2C.” She smiles and I get the first whiff of her subtly beguiling nature as she tilts her head down in that way and peers up at me from under her brow. She holds the door, and we, David and I, finish getting the chair through. As the door closes behind me David says he thinks she is hitting on me. I don’t know if that’s so, but there is something, that’s for sure.

Moving boxes with David the next day we run into Nell again. She offers to serve us tea in her rooms. “I’ve got the fourth floor to myself, I do my work here as well,” she says, as we climb the creaky back stairs behind her. She has an odd way of climbing stairs: she takes a step with one foot then brings the other up to meet it, then takes the next step with that other foot. In this way, right foot up, left foot follows, then left foot up, right foot following. This makes for an odd rhythm as the three of us ascend those old stairs.

Unlike the other floors, the fourth floor has no hallway or lobby, the stairs just empty out at her back door. She fumbles with a key chain which has a large number of keys on it, a pink feather for a fob and one of those stretchy plastic bands which some women use to hang keys from their arm when they don’t have a purse with them. She could never hang this key chain from her arm though, it would take all of the stretch out of that band.

The door opens into an almost empty room. There is an old green love seat, almost looks as though from an airport with its strongly geometrical style. A matching side chair and a low coffee table complete the grouping. That’s it; three small pieces in a room which many would consider a large living room. It echoes it is so spare. I comment on the sparseness and the echoes. “An empty room inspires an active mind to rest, I find.” she replies. “Sometimes I need that, with what I do.”

“What do you do?” David asks.

“I’m an artist,” says Nell, and offers him a business card pulled from her pocket, that key chain rattling and jingling the whole time. He looks it over and slips it into his own pocket.

“How many units are on this floor?” I ask. “Just mine.” she replies. “I don’t know why, but the building was built this way, with one large apartment on the top. I love it though, for my studio space.” This last is said as we make our way through another room and into a long hallway. There are many doors along that hallway, some with several locks on them. We are approaching the front of the building and the hallway leads us to her studio space, a long room which must span the entire width of the building and has several tall windows along the western wall which look out over the tops of the mostly lower manufacturing concerns and parking lots around us. The sodium-vapor lights from the lots down below cast an eerie dull-orange glow which comes up through those tall windows and illuminates the ceiling more brightly than the rest of the room.

“Let me show you my latest work,” she says, and she must have flicked a switch somewhere, for the room suddenly has more lights on. It is still dark, but there are pools of light in the otherwise shadowy room. I can make out a couple of figures in the shadows. They are almost in silhouette when, with another switch, more lights. I can now clearly see a pair of statues, one of a man seated on a tall stool, another a man placing a box upon a tall shelf which isn’t there, almost like mime. They are wonderfully lifelike, as I view them from the distance. As I approach one, however, I sense some movement. Then it strikes me, these are living! Surely, they are men, they hold poses, and have been carefully dressed and made up, as for a photo shoot or to sit for an artist, but they are now living statues.

I cannot say for sure how it developed, I am a little foggy on the details, but Nell took on a different demeanor once we crossed the threshold into her apartment. She becomes stronger willed, almost imperious. She doesn’t ask, she tells. She veritably orders us around, and no longer peers out from under her brow, but rather holds her head up and looks down her nose. She is strong, and we comply. Shortly after we enter the studio a young woman enters the room. “Bring tea, Hilda. Three cups.” orders Nell. “Bring the pot, and some honey. That new Earl Grey, that’s what we’ll have, for Mr. Nic and Mr. David.” “Get a move on it, girl.” she snaps. Looking quite frightened, Hilda even curtsies as she leaves the room.

“I was wondering if you would be so kind,” she starts, addressing me. “I’ve needed to rearrange this furniture a bit for the longest time.” We are standing near one end of the long narrow studio space with our tea. David is perusing the bookshelf and trying not to look at the stoic, seated figure near him – that statue on the stool. Hilda hovers, nervously, near the periphery. There is a long, low couch with a gray woven throw over it, and many neutral colored pillows. Next to it are a couple of tables and a large white upholstered ottoman. The corner and fully one third of the ottoman are under one of these tables. “I’d like that ottoman over in front of the couch here,” said Nell. “We moved it when I was working on a piece recently and I just can’t seem to move it back myself.”

I feel something, as she says those words, which tells me that she would never have even tried to move it herself. She isn’t given to acts of toil, there are other people to do work. She just directs. I take that direction, however, without even a thought of will. I put down my tea cup and move towards the ottoman. It is one of those large square pieces, about four feet across. It’s not too large for me to heft it alone, but it is awkward. As I pick it up I have to slide it out from under one of the tables. I hear a mew, and notice a kitten, as white as the ottoman itself, sitting on the corner which had been under the table. Where a cat would have jumped off of the now moving ottoman, the kitten just hunches down and cries in fear. Hilda sweeps in and grabs it. As she just as swiftly moves away I see that she has dropped a note before my eyes.

“Help, we’re prisoners.” is all it says.

I’m not thinking as I read it, aloud, but once I realize the meaning of those words I look up and see a hard look in Nell’s face. “What is the meaning of this?” exclaims David. I, still with that ottoman in my hands move towards Nell. The hard look in her eyes changes to fear, that fear of a cornered criminal, and she drops her tea upon the sofa and darts out of the room. “You foolish girl,” she hisses as she runs.

I hear a door slam as I drop the ottoman and head after her, David and Hilda hot on my heels. “You won’t catch her,” cries Hilda behind me, “they never do.” Nell is nowhere to be found. Most of the doors are locked, and quite sound. “Well, I don’t know that we care about her,” I say to David. “You’re welcome to come with us if you’re scared,” I tell Hilda. “I’m sure she can’t hurt you.” I confidently stroll towards the door to the back stairs. I hadn’t noticed, as we came in, just how sturdy it was, nor how many locks were on it.

“Nell, unlock this door!” I must have hollered that a hundred times that night as David and I tried to bust our way out of apartment 4A. Hilda didn’t even struggle, she just watched us, a mix of pity and fear, and defeat, upon her face.

As I said, it is four in the morning and I have just woken up next to a strange woman. I do not know when it was that I gave up. I don’t remember laying down with Hilda, but I awoke with her alongside me, her head firmly pressed into my left shoulder. “Where’s Nell?” I ask as I wipe the sleep from my eye with my right hand. I then look down at Hilda but she isn’t there. It was a nightmare, I realize, just a nightmare.

I push back the covers and swung my legs over the side of the bed, both hands reaching back to rub my sore lower back.

You’d be surprised just how stiff you can get from holding a pose all day long.

En Passant

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Pawn has moved this past weekend, and just wants to share a few words about that.

Here they are:

Comet

That night. That cold crisp night that he watched the comet streak overhead. That night was the last that he could be said to have been responsible for his own actions. Not that he had exercised any great care in living his life up until this point. It’s just that in that strange and generous calculus which we apply to the decision making powers of the artistic class, he had been cut a lot of slack. Up until the night that comet cut a gash in the night sky and everything changed.

She wasn’t with him then, not sharing his appreciation for late night walks in the less than safe neighborhood in which they dwelt. She was back in the flat starting another novel and finishing another bottle of merlot. That is how it was, in those days; she, his erstwhile muse, had no muse of her own save bottle and book, while he, numb and tired of losing her every night to those twins, he strode away each night to find some peace within.

There was no peace without, it was all traffic noise and loud conversation in the immigrant heavy district. It was a symphony in rare parts – the low hum of the sodium-vapor lights, the rich indecipherable patois emanating from the myriad open windows, the staccato rhythm of the tram wheels as they teased and taunted the edges of the cobblestone that still poked up in several sections of the aging pavement. On top of all of that was the static crackle of the power arcing from the overhead lines to the commutators of the trams themselves. A festival of sounds spanning a century converged in his little part of creation and drew him out of himself and away from the tempestuous storm which was brewing in the synapses of his drunken muse back home, back at the flat, steeping herself in cheap reds and that special sense of betrayal which age visits upon those whose ambition has been left behind.

The comet, he did not know, was early. He was no student of these things, of astronomy, nor did he have any special interest in the facts behind it. He knew only that as he walked east there was a smudgy line arcing across the sky which he could not recall having seen before. Comets are known for their punctuality, they are the timekeepers of the heavens, in the sense of the apito; that whistle blown to keep the Amazonian rivers of musicians in Carnivalé parade on tempo. Much as the leader toots the apito as he runs up and down the length of the bataria to keep all those drummers in sync, the comets race around the firmament keeping all of the celestial watches synchronized. Until that night.

All of the best minds in science agreed that comet Shinberg-Takie was not due until 21:13 Zulu Time on 3 February. Shinberg-Takie had other plans it seemed. He did not understand this, nor would he come to appreciate the peculiar effects it was to have on his life as he entered into the gravitational tug of the comet that night. It was 10:45 on the 2nd of February when he left for his stroll, and Shinberg-Takie was already making a show in the eastern sky.

At 6:35 that evening, the large dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was trained towards the eastern heavens. It operated in concert with much smaller optical telescopes from Yerkes to Griffith Park and points all over the globe as astronomers and astrophysicists struggled to understand how their eagerly awaited guest could possibly have arrived a full day early. One young graduate student in Berkeley’s sleepy astronomy department was watching the screens that night and before anyone else had noticed, he was already aware of the odd pull of ST-2008. He could no longer be held accountable either. He was already looking eastward, and waiting.

It was 8:35 in Rio and the stout yet fearsome bataria leader could not find his apito. How, he worried, would his beloved bataria sound without the steadying rhythmic guidance of his apito? The light in the eastern sky barely even registered as he, too, entered into its metaphysical orbit.

Shinberg-Takie had captured three souls by 21:45 Zulu. They all looked to the east and waited.

A Letter To The Reader

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The following is a piece I originally wrote on September 11, 1990. I was sitting on the foredeck of a houseboat, going upstream on the Mississippi River with my friend X, and about 15 other close friends. That was a very important weekend to me, as I learned a lot on that trip. I have a wonderful photo that either X or F took of me that trip.

In any event, the reason I am posting such an old piece of prose is that while I was away in London and Prague recently, I kept thinking about the sentiment, contained herein, of documentary living. Everything recounted in this story happened to me during that very long Labor Day weekend in 1990.

Here it is, make of it what you may…

Whenever I see you, you’re reading. How many stories have you lived? How many words are in your soul? Do you digest all of these expressions and prose, make them part of you, or are they like bath water, washing over you and then rinsed away. These words, these souls, these lives which you consume like so many hors-devours at a nickel buffet, do they satiate you in some way? Some way that your own life does not?

A character in a book I once read escaped, ran for miles to be free. Does this happen to you? Escape? Or is it a grounding experience? When I was a child, my mother would read to me. I escaped, I left my own life and entered that of the character in the story of the moment. It was freeing – listening to the sound of my mother’s voice, closing my eyes and realizing another life. As I grow older, I sometimes find escape again in the pages of a book, imagine her voice, but it lacks – I cannot close my eyes or the story ends.

Does your story end? Is that why you read so much, like a chain smoker who won’t allow for a moment without a lit cigarette in their hand, you put down one story and take up another. Are you afraid of your own, or are you so comfortable with it – having crafted it from all that you have read from others?

As life races past me at freeway speeds, I try to capture some of my reflections in the written word. Like the mirror I face in the morning, they remind me of how much I’ve already died. Every day they have made me a prisoner, held me for a handsome reward. Since the first time I recounted my experiences on a piece of paper, I find myself writing those words in my mind as I experience – Documentary Living.

Mist in the Kickapoo Valley

A light fog lies in the valleys at night. The full moon paints it an eerie blue. I’ve traveled these roads sometime before. I know the curves, the signs, the lines which twist beside me as I drive. The road rises and falls before my eyes, like your chest as you sleep beside me.

The night sky closes around me like the coat clutched tight on a winter day. The only sound I hear is my own scream lost in the wind blown past my window, the road passed under my wheels, the tree lines lost from view, the cigarette which now is ash. A voice on the radio tells me the time, announces a song, reads the news.

I’ve put eight hundred miles of rattles on these bones in the last two days. Eight hundred miles of driving through other people’s realities, other people’s homes and villages, other people’s pathos. The midnight sky outside hides the cold of fall under a veil of summer stars. I cannot close the window although I keep the heater on. The radio plays loud.

A verse turns over, again and again in my mind, as I drive. The steady rhythm of the road provides a frame for me to fill, the night – a canvas to place there. The words seem to flow in and out of my thoughts as if from nowhere – I know not the inspiration for their presence, nor the excuse for their leave.

I once read that dreaming is just what part of our brain does to occupy time as the rest of it carefully files our day’s experience into the deeper cubby holes of our minds. People can die from lack of sleep. Is it sleep they lack, or dreams? Is it that our brains get snowed under from all of these experiences, and forget how to make us breath?

nightcountryroad.jpg

As I drive, I feel as though that part of my brain which handles these menial filing chores has decided that this is as good a time as any to get the job done, and does so. I am not dreaming though, I am wide awake and driving a car, as the odd snippets of the past several days’ experiences drift across my consciousness on their way to permanent storage.

One of them goes like this:

I saw the astronauts sleeping, tucked tight in their little sacks and Velcro-ed to the wall, their hands floating before them in space like unnecessary appendages. I felt like an interloper, a peeping Tom, invading their space-bound womb, to see them all drift as fetuses in the amniotic fluid of a deep sleep. Over their heads, through the windows, I saw the earth. A patchwork quilt of cloud and clear. I felt very very small, and floated, like their hands, like an unnecessary appendage.

And another, like this:

I am sitting in a fiberglass car, an old fashioned Hupmobile, being dragged along a track, serenaded by the rantings and ravings of a maniacal horse on a tinny loudspeaker. The buggy turns, first one way and then the other, revealing to me a view of the world I would never have expected existed. Pathetic statuettes, animated and gesticulating wildly, enact various moving tableau, recreating a sickening history of mankind’s foibles with his cars.

Children cry and their mothers sob with frustration as the derelict plants and factories, long since abandoned for some capitalist cause, stand as testament to their hardships and suffering. But me, I’m trapped in this buggy, with this ranting horse, watching as a plaster of Paris American eagle fans its wings at me, declaring the importance of the car in creating a united country, its tattered wingtips threatening to fall off at any moment.

As I ride, I ponder whose nightmare is this? What mind conceived of this, and are they getting therapy? Later, having a drink by the ferris wheel, it leaves me numb.

I did not intend to drive this far, this long. I took a wrong turn right out of the parking lot. I don’t know if it was pride or a sense of adventure which led me to continue and not turn back earlier. I crossed the state line about ten miles out, and that was over half an hour ago. As I drive now I try to convince myself that I am just skirting the border. I have no way of knowing if that is true – I have no map, there is no sun to guide me, I cannot even see the Northern star through my windshield. As the signs proclaim “Chicago – 58 miles,” I just trust.

At first I screamed at every intersection with a road I did not know. Now, however, I enjoy it. It is a lovely night for a drive: the road is new, the weather brisk, the radio adequate. The sky is pitch dark, except for a crisp, full moon. My heart is full with possibility and my head is soft with the smooth flow of a dreamy consciousness. I know I will be home in time for work tomorrow, that is not even a question, and beyond that I do not care. For now, I am drunk with the drive and the night and the memory of your smile.

That is enough.

These are all words which have been written across the blackboard of my mind, waiting patiently in a queue, ’til now, to be moved to paper.

I guess the day will come when I will write my life before it happens. Will you read it then? Will you tell me what my experiences will be like, warning me of those which lack literary merit? Or is my destiny more like that of the bath water.

Ther you have it. X, what do you think?

Never come between a man and his rum

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trench.jpg
These are some diary entries written in 1916 by Captain Alexander Stewart while serving with the 3rd Scottish Rifles on the Somme, during WWI.  I read some excerpts in the March 2008 issue of Harpers.  A book is available for download, online, at http://www.grandfathersgreatwar.com/index.html

June 30
The finest thing that ever happened in the tranches was the rum ration, and never was it more needed than on the Somme.  Yet some blasted, ignorant fool of a general — damned in this world and the next — wanted to stop it and, for a time, did.  The man must be worse than the lowest type of criminal, have no knowledge of the conditions in which the troops exist, and be entirely out of touch with the men who are unfortunate enough to have him as their commander.  He should have been taken up to the line and frozen in the mud.  I would have then very willingly sat on his head, as he was a danger to the whole army.  Curse him.  Those who have not spent a night standing or sitting or lying in mud with an east wind blowing and the temperature below freezing may think that I am extravagant in my abuse of the man who denied the soldiers their rum rations.  Those who have will know that I am too temperate.

August 26
Leave High Wood for trenches north of Bazentinle-Grand.  The flies in this part of the line are a perfect plague.  They cover everything.  They make it very difficult for a man to eat, as they cover the food he is about to put in his mouth.

September 1
While on a march, I was unable to get on my horse and had to be pushed up by my men.  When up, I could not get down.  An awkward predicament when suffering from dysentery.

Just goes to show you the similarities between trench  warfare and sailing.  I have left out the most graphic entries.

Remembrance Of Two Pioneers

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Two people, each a giant in his field, and true pioneers, both passed away recently. Pawn was deeply influenced by both. Joseph Weizenbaum, pioneer in artificial intelligence and skeptic of technology’s role in human affairs passed away on March 5th, and Gus Giordano, pioneer in jazz dance and an extraordinarily gifted correographer passed away on March 9th.

Here is an excerpt from the New York Times obituary of Weizenbaum:

Eliza, written while Mr. Weizenbaum was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964 and 1965 and named after Eliza Doolittle, who learned proper English in “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady,” was a groundbreaking experiment in the study of human interaction with machines.

The program made it possible for a person typing in plain English at a computer terminal to interact with a machine in a semblance of a normal conversation. To dispense with the need for a large real-world database of information, the software parodied the part of a Rogerian therapist, frequently reframing a client’s statements as questions.

In fact, the responsiveness of the conversation was an illusion, because Eliza was programmed simply to respond to certain key words and phrases. That would lead to wild non sequiturs and bizarre detours, but Mr. Weizenbaum later said that he was stunned to discover that his students and others became deeply engrossed in conversations with the program, occasionally revealing intimate personal details.
Joseph Weizenbaum, Famed Programmer, Is Dead at 85 – New York Times

A friend and mentor introduced me to Eliza in 1976, about a decade after its conception, and it opened my eyes to what could be done with what are now called human machine interface facilities (commonly referred to as UI). Much of my professional work with technology, whether in computer fields or in exhibit development have been influenced by those early lessons.

In 1980 I had the honor to work on several dance performances with Gus Giordano Dance Chicago, when they came to the humble Metropole Theater in Milwaukee where I did lighting and tech work at the time. Here is an excerpt from the Times’ obituary of Giordano:

Mr. Giordano was best known through the performing of his company, Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, founded in 1962 and based in Evanston, and through his teaching at dance conventions throughout the United States.

The company, now directed by Nan Giordano, his daughter, is said to have been the first dance troupe to dedicate itself solely to jazz dance. The company’s programs featured pieces by Mr. Giordano and later, as he grew older, included dances by guest choreographers including Mia Michaels and Davis Robertson. The performers became known for their strong training, energy and hard-driving, precise way of moving.

“Their sleek lines and high, silent jumps had the feel of a well-oiled 1958 Chevrolet Impala, a pure expression of another era and something we remember as historically sexy,” Erika Kinetz wrote in 2005 in The New York Times, reviewing “Giordano Moves,” a tribute presented at the 14th annual Jazz Dance World Congress in Chicago.
Gus Giordano, 84, Innovator of Modern Jazz Dance, Is Dead – New York Times

Pawn remembers Gus as friendly and open, and very respectful. He had already won his Emmy award by the time I met him, but was gracious and down to earth. His company loved him, and it showed in the enthusiasm of their performances. I always looked forward to their arrival at the theater, and learned a lot about lighting design working on those shows.

London Journal – Epilogue – Echos From Dreamland

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I imagine myself to be a simple enough man. I am not given to epiphany with great regularity, nor am I given to cypher. I am probably plain to a fault, and tend to expose too much of my inner world. I do not often have dreams which move me. I had one last night, and it is still resting heavy in my chest.

I will, no I must, try to record what I dreamed in order to lighten this weight. I am on an airplane right now, flying somewhere over Canada on my way home from a month in London. I went to try to find myself, and in some ways I have. I have a better sense of who I am right now than I long have. I once again feel a level of confidence which I once carried like a shield but which has been missing for too long now. But this dream.

Before I left on my trip I wrote my ex-wife a letter about an essay I had read. No, not really about the essay, but about how my own experiences have left me in a different place than that author. That essay was by a woman who had lost her father when she herself was already an adult. In her map of the universe there were places which she associated with her father, places from which she had stayed away, as though they were off limits to her. There was his Brooklyn, and there was hers. Only after he passed had she allowed herself to venture too far into his Brooklyn.

I wrote that I had a very different map than she. In my map of the universe my father occupies times and not places. I do not think of a place and say “That’s my fathers” (fill in the blank). I think of times, “When my father was alive we…” I can no more venture into those times than could H. G. Wells without his time machine. I could not understand, I couldn’t relate to what this woman wrote, but she wrote it beautifully and it did make me think to recount in writing an event of which I had never written before – my father’s death in my 13th year. This I did in painful detail, and I cried while I wrote it. I suspect she cried when she read it. Later, when I cleaned up the letter and put it on my website, I suspect that other people cried when they read it. I did not intend to make people cry, I just had to get that account out of my system, and I had.

This was all in prelude to my month-long trip to London, and it served as a sort of cathartic warm up. In London I took a day to go and try to find my father’s London, and ended up finding how much the world changes in 60 years. Instead I found myself, or part of myself, and had a new catharsis. That prelude piece had ended in my admission that in a way I had always blamed my mother and her pack-rat tendencies for his death. I don’t know how aware I have ever been of this, but it must have been there and it came out full force as I wrote that memoir. I shudder to think of my siblings reading that and what they may now think of me.

But my dream really startled me, for in my dream I found myself confronting those demons directly in way I have never imagined one could in a dream. Here then is that dream, make of it what you will.

I am 45 years old now, middle aged. My marriage of 12 years failed, though there were many good years and much happiness, there was an unhappy period which came over me and by annex my marriage, commencing a few years ago, roughly coinciding with my mother’s final illness and ultimate death. After her illness, death and the administering of her estate I never really get back to enjoying my life as it was. Too much has changed. I cannot even see what is different or what is wrong, I am just sublimely unhappy.

But now I am a teenager again, I am in my mother’s living room and the room is clean, something it had not been since my father passed away. This in part is how I place my own age, as I cannot see myself. I am in a clean living room so I must be a teenager. The doorbell rings and someone answers. My father is at the door. He has been dead for five years now, and has come to talk about that. My mother comes out from the kitchen and they have the same little kiss on the lips with which they would greet each other every time he came home. My mother wore an apron and tea was soon served. We sat and chatted; my father, a neighbor, some other people. I was there, but I cannot recall any of my four siblings being in the room.

Dad in a clean living room, circa 1975

Dad asks for a glass of water. Oh my god, I cannot explain, but his voice is just the same, that thin reedy voice with the palest of English accents, the almost singsong lilt. My heart jumps as I offer to go get him one.

The kitchen is a mess, it is not clean like when dad was alive, it is a horrid, unlivable mess as I remember it from visits to mom 10 or so years after dads death. I am caught in a Sisyphean struggle to find a clean cup, or a cup I can clean, or something to clean a cup with, or …

My mother comes into the kitchen. She is still wearing her apron but is now as she was in the era of the kitchen looking like this, she is as she was at 60, not the 47 she was when dad died. I look at her with contempt and frustration. Dad is out there, in the other room, and if only she could keep house I would be there with him instead of trapped in this kitchen trying in vein to get him a cup of water. How long have I got, will he still be there when I get back? She is old now, will he be gone? Is the dream over? The dream, the dream

Yes, the dream. It slips away as I realize that I have been dreaming. I try to fetch it back, but I will never go back into the living room with a glass of water. I have failed. All I have done is find contempt for my mother, who certainly didn’t deserve it.

That is how I awoke at 4:00 this morning. I never really did get back to sleep properly, and a couple hours later was getting up to go to the airport and fly home. We will land shortly, so I must power down and stow my computer. Much to think about I guess.

Maybe I’ll sleep on it.