goodnight and/or a wake

September 7, 2018 / Anne Focke / 9 Comments

What becomes history is to some degree determined by what is archived.

These words by artist, curator, and editor Julie Ault are quoted in a description of Field Histories, a series of essays highlighting the value of archives that begins publication this fall. Common Field, a national network of artist-centered spaces and organizers, is commissioning Field Histories to encourage its members to become aware of the value of their archives and to think creatively about the preservation of the materials.

The series has been championed by Martha Wilson – Common Field board member, artist, and founder of Franklin Furnace, a 42-year-old example of an artist-centered space…and a sterling example at that. In her description of Field Histories, Martha observes that, especially when arts spaces blur the lines between disciplines – as in performance art, video, and installation art – the preservation of archival materials can be especially challenging, and when the spaces themselves represent a rebellion against institutionalization, preservation of archives is often a low priority. While acknowledging that “the critical value of archives to historians’ original research is well established,” in the end she says, “We fear that the archives of some art spaces have wound up in dumpsters and are lost forever to art history.” She and Common Field hope these essays can help prevent filling more dumpsters this way in the future.

I’m pleased to be commissioned to write a piece about the archives of and/or, an artist space that operated in Seattle from 1974-1984. Because and/or lived and died in a far off corner of the country before the internet came of age and few Common Field members are likely to know of it, I feel obliged to share a bit of and/or‘s history along with stories of its archives. The resulting essay follows here and is being published simultaneously on Common Field’s website as the inaugural essay in the Field Histories series.

– Anne Focke

goodnight and/or a wake

An incomplete story of one organization’s archives

Once upon a time we thought we’d put it safely to bed and that we’d freed it to fly into legend. But, then, 30 years later it started stirring . . . awake.

On Halloween 1984, and/or, a ten-year-old artist space, hosted a costume party in the historic Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle – “GOODNIGHT and/or A WAKE.” With this party, the organization whose name begged to be completed with another word (some tried and/or “gallery,” others added “studio” or “workshop”), completed its run and closed down. The time had come to make space for other things and to let and/or move into memory.

As part of closing, plans were made to allow and/or’s major programs to spin off as separate entities. Its central spaces were cleaned and vacated, and its files were all boxed up. An artist friend of and/or, Buster Simpson, agreed to let us store all those boxes – about 50 of them – in his studio at the Pike Place Market. In a matter of months, however, he had to relocate and had no room in his new studio for our boxes. Norie Sato, an artist and and/or staff member, and I managed to find space in an empty ballroom a few blocks away, though it, too, was a temporary solution, as the building was destined for demolition.

Norie and I couldn’t imagine continuing to drag 50 boxes of mostly paper from one location to another, but we also couldn’t face the idea of just throwing them away (and in 1985 recycling wasn’t an option). I can’t remember how we got the idea of donating them to a library or how we made the connection with Special Collections at the University of Washington Libraries. But we offered the boxes to them, and they took them all, as is. All, that is, except a few that I held back, thinking they might be handy to have easily available. I could manage to store about ten.

From what I know now, I suspect a transaction like this would be handled very differently today. Special Collections would probably be much fussier about what they accept, and I would certainly be a more knowledgeable donor.

But . . . what the heck was and/or? And why worry about finding a home for its many boxes of files? Rather than write a new summary of its history, I defer to a report written by a 34-year-younger me a few months before and/or closed. It is presented here in a font rather like the one on my typewriter back then, and I underlined the name because my typewriter didn’t come with an italic font.

This history doesn’t give a picture of the actual art that swirled around and through the place – of what it looked or sounded like. One way to fill out the story is to glance through an accompanying list of the individuals and groups whose work was presented by and/or – visual artists, composers, videomakers, performers, writers, sculptors, filmmakers, photographers, curators, musicians, playwrights, performance artists, poets, among others. Even with 807 names, the list is incomplete. After it was distributed, we heard from people we’d missed.

Here are just the “A’s” – Keith Abbott, Vito Acconci, Kathy Acker, Acme Composer Performers, Paul Ackerman, Ibby Acosta, John Luther Adams, Cathy Aldworth, Jody Aliesan, Jo Harvey Allen, Penny Allen, Terry Allen, Jerri Allyn, Jim Allyn, Max Almy, Renate Altenrath, Beth Anderson, Denise Anderson, Eric Anderson, John Anderson, Mark Anderson, Laurie Anderson, Rob Angus, Ant Farm, Sharon Anthony, David Antin, Eleanor Antin, Jacki Apple, Evan Aresvir, Trisha Arlin, Ed Armstrong, Christoper Arpin, Mary Ashley, Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Asian Exclusion Act, Dana Atchley, Daina Augaitis, Natalie Auger, Diana Aurigemma, John Aylward, Alice Aycock, Mary Avery, and A2Z.

from the opening announcement, 1974

It’s not trash . . . yet

So what about all those boxes in the UW Libraries Special Collections and my storage unit?

In recent years, interest has been growing in and/or and in the history of the art, artist spaces, and political/social dynamics of its times, perhaps partly because of parallels that can be drawn with our times today. Interested curators, artists, historians, and others looking for photographs and other material from and/or have come up short. Although the materials at the UW are technically accessible, they’re hard to find and time-consuming to use. In addition, access to information about and/or is hampered by the fact that the organization came and went before the internet came of age, so there’s not much about it online. (A few news stories and other history websites are included in the “References” below.)

University of Washington. In fact, I’m grateful that the UW Libraries accepted and have protected and/or’s boxes all these years, but Norie and I were a little naive when we donated the material. The boxes included multiple copies of documents that we’d love to have now, and, most heartbreakingly, we gave not only prints but the negatives of Norie’s installation photographs. Copies, even of duplicates, come prominently rubber-stamped with University of Washington ownership terms, and prints from the negatives are expensive. (See references below for links to an inventory and Finding Aid for the and/or material at the UW Libraries.)

At the same time, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the materials have sometimes felt locked up and out of reach. After all, it’s the job of archivists to be concerned about preservation, not use. I’ve been advised that if I plan to actively keep using the files I still hold, I should hang on to them.

My storage unit. Until very recently, the and/or boxes I have in storage had been just as difficult to use, though for different reasons. While the boxes were labeled, they hadn’t been inventoried beyond simple box lists I’d created when I first put them in storage. Even with those lists, I couldn’t remember what was actually in them. and/or’s boxes were piled up with other boxes and ephemera from other years and other projects, in no particular order. My pack rat tendencies, perhaps exacerbated by an undergrad art history degree, compelled me to save much more paper than a reasonable person might. Besides stashing it away (and paying to store it), I haven’t paid much attention to it. In general, my focus has not been on my past. I’ve always been drawn to what’s in front of me and what might come next.

Maybe it was breaking through the 70-year-old age barrier that did it, but in the past several years I’ve begun trying to bring some order to the stored files. With help from a handful of UW art and library students, all of my approximately 150 stored boxes that may have historical relevance have been inventoried “to the folder level,” which means the inventory includes the headings on every folder in each box.

I’ve added a page to my website titled, ”It’s not trash . . . yet,” that gives background on how the inventories were created and what they include. The collection is divided into series, and I’m in the process of briefly describing each series and providing a download link to its inventory. (See references below.) The page is public but incomplete, and I’m currently seeking interns for the coming school year to work with both the files I have in storage and also with the and/or material at the UW.

Records and archives of and/or offshoots

The state of the records of and/or’s several offshoots vary considerably, from unknown and “they probably got tossed” to an expertly-organized archive with a classy website. Here are some of the main ones.

CoCA, Center on Contemporary Art was founded in part to fill the gap left when and/or closed its exhibition program in 1981, and it operated with and/or’s fiscal sponsorship until it got on its feet. During its nearly 40 years, CoCA has operated galleries and produced exhibitions, events, artist residencies, publications, and discussions. The CoCA Archives Project is evidence of what can be done with archives, both physically and digitally. The archive was created and directed by arts organizer and planner Anna R Hurwitz. Launched in 2013, the CoCA Archives collection includes printed materials, slides, video, and other materials. Anna, aided by archivists, historians, volunteers, and the support of 4Culture grants, has assessed the collection, begun preserving the material, written a Finding Aid, and digitized posters, videos, and slides. The physical archive is housed and managed by CoCA itself. Anna stepped into my life last fall after she enrolled in the two-year UW Master of Library and Information Science degree program. She has brought an invaluable, archivist’s eye to organizing my collection and remains my go-to person for counsel on my archives project.

Artech, the for-profit company that and/or launched in 1978, was recently purchased by an Australian fine arts handling firm, though Artech’s name and personnel remain the same. The one founding member still on staff, artist Mike Hascall, was commissioned by the new owner to write a history of the company. Not a Straight Line: The first 40 years of Artech Fine Arts Services is scheduled for publication in December 2018 for “in house” use, but with luck it will also be available online. Over the years, Mike has also been “squirreling boxes away,” not letting the records be destroyed. Because he used and organized the records as he wrote the history, Artech’s archive will be in good order when he leaves. Annual reports, which were produced for most years, form the backbone of the history. The archive is still held by the company and hasn’t been donated to an institution.

Artist Trust began as and/or’s program of small grants that spun-off when and/or closed. After much planning and development, it launched independently in 1986. Now, it is a robust state-wide nonprofit in Washington state that supports artists in all disciplines and in many ways. Like Artech, it still holds the organization’s records. Of its archives, Artist Trust’s current director, Shannon Halberstadt, says:

Artist Trust has a treasure of archives, including documents, contracts, publications, and marketing collateral from over thirty years of supporting artists. It’s amazing to dig in the archives and find articles from decades-old Artist Trust publications to share with artists, grant panelists, funders, and stakeholders, underscoring the impact of our work over time. There’s the newsletter with a photo of a young Kyle MacLachlan in his native town of Yakima, or the one with an announcement of Gary Hill receiving an Artist Trust Fellowship award. These archives not only give us a sense of organizational history, they also allow us to reflect and learn about different stages of our organizational growth – lessons we can use and share to further the field of artist support. Seriously good stuff in these archives.

911 Media Arts Center was created from the merger of Focal Point Media Center and the Nine One One resource center, two entities created at and/or’s dissolution. After about 25 years, 911 Media Arts Center closed quietly on August 8, 2014. Former board members, Carole Fuller and Kurt Kiefer, pulled together all the 911 files they could find, sorted through them, returned artists’ media when they could, and put the rest in the hands of a curator at UW Libraries Special Collections. They don’t know the current status of 911’s files within the UW’s collections.

Why go to all this trouble? What good are archives anyway?

The value of archives to art and cultural historians is undisputed. But the material also has great value as living history, as part of an active, contemporary culture. My recent experience with student interns demonstrates this.

In 2016 I helped create a year-long “Alum in Residence” position for myself at the UW School of Art + Art History + Design. While there I turned a handful of undergrad art and art history interns loose on the records of one of the bigger projects from my past, Arts Wire, an early national online network for the arts, started in 1989. The students began by working on an inventory of what was in the 16 Arts Wire boxes, but quickly began actually reading the documents. This unleashed an interest in a historical time (late ‘80s and ‘90s) that seemed to them relevant today and also raised questions such as, how does something like Arts Wire get started? how did your generation deal with the culture wars? what was the world like before the internet? is making something like this art? when does history begin? The questions came along with a realization that “This is history . . . and you’re still alive!”

Over the course of the year, not only did the students continue plugging away at the inventory, they created two exhibitions, one in the school’s coffee shop and one in its gallery, as well as a 14-episode podcast. For the podcast they interviewed people who’d been involved in Arts Wire from places such as New York, Ann Arbor (MI), San Francisco, St. Paul (MN), Seattle, and from as far away as Bali. It was clear to me that the students wanted to share the history and ideas they discovered, to take what they found in the boxes and move it out into a continuing dialog with their contemporaries and others in physical and digital spaces.

The history they encountered in the archives gave them a tangible point of departure for conversation and shared understanding. Each of the interns wrote a piece at the end of the year. Short excerpts from essays by two students provide insights into the value of the archive experience to them.

This internship turned out to be much more than simple archiving…I have gotten a look into a history where, luckily, my subjects are still around. I have been able to talk to them about the files I have been going through. Because of our podcasts, I learned about the problems that were occurring at the time and what they felt about it. – Jessica Capó

At the heart of the experience was building a connection across generations that allowed me to stretch academically and personally… Within the files we found many tantalizing concepts and issues which were (and are) relevant to the present moment. Rather than simply become aware of such continuities, we wanted to work with them and explore the possibilities they offered; the intent was to pull the files into the present and to use them as a starting point for contemporary engagement and understanding. – Karen Beech

This archive, like that of and/or, remains open-ended and incomplete. There’s still work to do to make the material useful and “discoverable,” to use a library term. The archive can still be refined and added to. And through the direct engagement of people like Jess and Karen, 30 or 40 years later, the history in the boxes is coming back to life… the bones are dancing again. It is as if they were awake.

References

My introduction’s epigraph comes from Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985, an anthology edited by Julie Ault and published in 2002 by the University of Minnesota Press.
The “goodnight” poster was designed by Wilkins & Peterson with illustration by Gary Jacobsen and copywriting by John Koval.
“Standing on slivers of history,” Amanda Manitach, City Arts, June 24, 2014.
“and/or, enough structure and enough openness,” Anne Focke, Temporary Art Review, November 5, 2015.
“and/or (Seattle arts organization),” Jen Graves, HistoryLink.org, June 26, 2013.
And/Or Gallery Records 1969-1985, Archives West (a Finding Aid).
And/Or Gallery Records, Inventory.
“It’s not trash . . . yet” Anne Focke, archive reference page on the website, Carrying On. All the boxes I hold in storage are organized into series. and/or files are found in the “073” series, in boxes numbered 031, 032, 033, 034, 035, 036, and 112. Related files are in these boxes: 103 (Artist Trust), 108 (culture wars, NCFE, etc), 109 (NAAO), and 114 (a few things from CoCA). This inventory can be downloaded by clicking on the 073 series link.
CoCA Archives Project.
CoCA Center on Contemporary Art.
Artist Trust.
Artech.
“It can and will change: Why 911 Media Arts Center is worth saving,” Jen Graves, The Stranger, August 13, 2009, about the last days of 911.

About the Arts Wire archive project

“Archaic Social Media – Arts Wire uncovered,” Anne Focke, Carrying On, February 11, 2017.
“This is history and you’re still alive!” Anne Focke, Carrying On, July 29, 2017.
AND_NOW? a podcast produced by Jessica Capó, Karen Beech, and Lizzie Trelawny-Vernon, February-June, 2017. Choose “Extras” on the menu for brief information about each podcast, including topic and interviewee. Choose “Podcast” on the menu for a simple list of links to each one. They’re each about an hour long.

This essay was possible because of a commission from Common Field and support from the Jini Dellaccio Project, a fiscally-sponsored project of Artist Trust.

Cartwheeling

August 8, 2018 / Anne Focke / Leave a comment

Now and then in upcoming months, you’ll see pieces I write tagged with the word “cartwheeling.” The series responds to a cluster of questions I’ve struggled with since the 2016 election. As I’ve puzzled over how I can best contribute in a changed and changing world, I’ve written essays with questions as titles: “What should a concerned citizen do?” “So many ideas, so much to do – what’s next?” and, “What’s my piece of the puzzle? Is resistance enough?” I’ve thought of these as my “puzzle pieces.” The Cartwheeling series is one way I’m answering these questions.

So why cartwheels?

As I’ve tried to figure out my role, I’ve had to accept as given my stubbornly positive disposition. This has been its own kind of stumbling block, which I explore in “Pollyanna?” As I wrote that piece, I realized that the sense of possibility I get from leaping into things feels akin to my 8-year-old granddaughter Livia’s cartwheeling spirit. I can learn from her. Livia can and does cartwheel anywhere, even on the way home from school in the winter while wearing her huge, flowered backpack.

“Cartwheeling” as a rubric works for me. I loved the feeling of doing cartwheels as a kid, though the idea of this 73-year-old trying it now is daunting, if not a little scary. Mentally though, I like the idea of cartwheeling as another way to carry on. After all, you have to turn upside down to do a cartwheel. And to find our way to a better future we need to turn many of our ideas and assumptions upside down, then right side up, and upside down again.

Cartwheeling isn’t just a solo act. It can be an exchange, a conversation. I ran across a news story from Washington DC about a “conversation” between a kid and a cop by cartwheel and backflip. The kid’s challenge came first. The cop followed in kind.

Cartwheeling can be done anywhere, in Westminster Abbey by a joyful clergyman after the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton and in Antarctica by a team of graduate students taking a break from McMurdo Station.

It can also be teamwork. We can learn to double cartwheel and everybody-all-at-once cartwheel.

Cartwheeling is moving by revolving. How many revolutions, or kinds of revolutions, will it take to get there, to get where we want to go? It’s not the fastest or the easiest way, but working together a Canadian team of ten doing cartwheels travelled 31 miles in a single 24-hour period to set a record.

The road can’t just be about efficiency and how fast we’re going. It also has to be about where we’re going and how we get there. The phrase “doing cartwheels,” after all, means to feel good about something. We might even get farther and accomplish more if we know where we’re heading and if we move with spirit and joy in the possibility of finding ways to get out of this mess.

I’ll use the Cartwheeling series to share stories about work done and action taken by friends and others who inspire me and give me hope. I have many examples already; more will come. Two follow here. “Honestly, you have been very patient with me” was originally posted as a comment on my “Pollyanna?” piece. Then, Boting Zhang writes, in “Beneath Partisan Politics,” of her shocked response to the 2016 election. Bo didn’t wait to take action. Born in China and raised with images of America as “Meiguo– the Beautiful Country,” she writes, “the America of my young imagination compelled me to facilitate a year-long conversation across the red-blue divide.” With Between Americans, a conversation that involved 12 people who voted for Clinton and 12 who voted for Trump, she wanted to understand and perhaps help bridge the polarization in this country. What she learned is not what she expected.

In Cartwheeling I’ll look for connecting threads, broad ideas or theories that tie the various stories together and add to their power. I’m finding books and other materials that may help. At the end of 2016, in “A bigger choir – a countervailing force,” I expressed my frustration with the, usually disapproving, expression, “You’re just speaking to the choir.” It’s one of the assumptions we need to turn upside down, a small one perhaps, but for me a beginning. At the time I suggested that instead of being critical of speaking to the choir, “We should work to expand the choir, build connections with other choirs, welcome different voices in our own, and allow for differences since dissonance is a powerful part of music.” I wondered whether we can create a force that incorporates the strengths of both our differences and what we share.

As we start to understand these connections and their potential power, we have to figure out how to move together with them. Cartwheels are all about movement, but backwards cartwheeling is nearly impossible. We can’t go back. We need new ways to understand where we are and, as importantly, we need to imagine how we want to move and where we want to go.

References
(a few links are videos, most are not)

“Pollyanna?”
“What should a concerned citizen do? November 15, 2016”
“So many ideas, so much to do – what’s next?”
“What’s my piece of the puzzle? Is resistance enough?”
“A cop shows off to a group of kids with an epic cartwheel and backflip,” ABC News, 7/1/18 (video)
“Cartwheeling ‘clergyman’ can’t contain wedding joy,” Channel 4 News (UK), 4/29/11 (video)
Greg’s Antarctica adventures, “Leading trips to Room with a View,” by Greg Zerban, February 19, 2014
“How to do a double cartwheel” by the Cheernastics2” (video)
“Olympian Gabby Douglas attempts cartwheel record,” in St. Paul, MN ABC News, 6/4/14
“A bigger wave – a countervailing force,” Anne Focke, December 31, 2016

“Honestly, you have been very patient with me.”

August 8, 2018 / Anne Focke / Leave a comment

I was thrilled to find this letter from a friend as a comment on my piece, “Pollyanna?” Because online comments can easily get lost on a site like this, I moved it here with an OK from its author. I’ve also tagged it as part of my “Cartwheeling” series. The series is meant to be a place to share stories of places where I and others find hope in the face of the current state of the world. Many entries will be stories of extraordinary things that are already happening. My friend’s letter tells of his own quiet but extraordinary act, here in my own community. I’m grateful for it.

Anne

June 19, 2018

Hi Anne!
Tomorrow is the last day of detention school and I thought I would write a letter to the students. After reading your essay I felt a connection between our themes.

To My Students,

Thank you for all that you have taught me these last four months. I have become a better listener, a more patient, forgiving and fearless person. I came into the detention center not knowing what to expect. I made a few mistakes along the way, but each time I tried to correct my missteps. Honestly, you have been very patient with me.

I have been a teacher, tutor, and youth advocate for many years. I enjoy working with young adults. The detention center seemed like a place where my skills might be of some use. Now, I know that is true, and I know many of you have appreciated me being here, because you have told me so.

As the regular school year ends I would like you to consider two things:

First, keep practicing hearing your own, true voice. Your true voice can keep you out of trouble. Your true voice can keep you on the path of becoming a wise and happy person. And, your true voice will inspire you to love and help others.

Second, use every opportunity you are given to strengthen your education. The detention center is a great place to do this! The teachers here are dedicated to your success. Let them in—they have many wonderful gifts to give you.

I believe each one of you has so much to offer your families, your community, and the world. Most of you don’t know this yet! I didn’t know it when I was your age either. I believe the very best about you, and I will continue to work with you to bring that ‘bestness’ out.

OK,
Mr. Carl

Beneath partisan politics – Boting Zhang, guest author

August 8, 2018 / Anne Focke / 1 Comment

As many of us did, after the 2016 election Boting Zhang asked herself, “What’s a plebian to do?” I’m inspired by how quickly she responded. Since her childhood in China, Bo had carried in mind a dream of America as meiguo, the Beautiful Country. In late 2016, this dream from her childhood compelled her to leap into the polarized space that divides much of this nation. To try to understand the divide and, if possible, help bridge it, she developed a year-long conversation – by phone and online – that engaged 12 people who voted for Clinton and 12 who voted for Trump. What she learned is not what she expected. Instead, as she says, “I learned a few things about our political climate today and a lot more about what it takes to live a fully connected life in our modern age.” In what follows, she tells this story and threads through it glimpses of her own and her family’s experience in China before coming to this country.

Anne Focke

Destined for the Beautiful Country

I was born destined for the opportunity of America. As the only kid in daycare lucky enough to have parents studying in Meiguo – the Beautiful Country – I heard about it constantly. Meiguo sounded like an amazing place. I imagined Americans to be grinning all the time, just proud to belong to the nation that’s best at everything.

Months before my fifth birthday, my grandparents and I took the two-day train journey to Beijing. There, I boarded a plane alone for JFK. My parents would be waiting when the plane landed. I’d never see my grandmother again.

The American Dream tells us that success lives just on the other side of individual hard work and self-sufficiency. Three decades in, my family has lived that dream. But the proud and happy Americans that I’d expected to find on this side of the fairy tale? Turns out that we’re more complicated than that.

This is also a time when, around the world, cities and their surrounding countrysides find themselves at heated political odds. Many people seem resigned to the conclusion that their political opposites must be selfish, myopic idiots. Researchers and others have analyzed the causes of our political polarization, and I will neither rehash nor dispute these analyses. Our polarization has a complex history.

Through my year-long conversation I learned a few things about our political climate today and a lot more about what it takes to live a fully connected life in our modern age of individual ambition. My question about modern America now is this: How can we find the sense of belonging together that encourages people to work through their differences?

Between Americans¹

Twenty-four voters from around the country participated in the year-long conversation online. Half had supported the woman I’d voted for; the other half had chosen the man I didn’t understand. Most participants were strangers to each other, but all were introduced to me by people I know.

At the start, the project was called “Into the Schism.” Then, in a fit of hope, I changed its name to “Between Americans.”

At this time in American history, it takes a lot of hope and trust for people to even come together. My hope was that the year-long conversation would encourage greater mutual understanding. For most participants, the experiment didn’t succeed in the way they, or I, had hoped. It succeeded in a totally different way.

Through mistakes that I made and through what participants shared with me at the end of the year, the project helped me see that political dialogue is hollow if it doesn’t address the creeping loneliness and floundering sense of purpose that lie under our nation’s polished surface.

America the lonely

Underneath a veneer of pearly-white smiles, modern Americans are lonely. Even a former Surgeon General, Vivek H. Murthy, has rung alarm bells about our epidemic of loneliness. He wrote, “The world is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. If we cannot rebuild strong, authentic social connections, we will continue to splinter apart.” Although “loneliness” implies being alone, my conversations with participants surprised me by making it clear that busy Americans with lively social networks can also be intimately familiar with the feeling.

What’s more, this loneliness, this underlying stress to our collective whole, may be driven in no small part by our own restless individual aspirations for success. We’re industrious, ingenious, and interconnected, but these traits also lead to conditions that keep us apart: an extreme busyness, no room for serendipity, a craving for certainty and simple answers, and a crowded Internet.

Extreme busyness

The Between Americans conversation began in January 2017. Here’s what a few people wrote early in the project.

Immediately after the election, I felt like I needed to get more involved in the political process…. I kept coming back to the idea that I wanted to have a dialogue with people who think differently from myself.” — Participant A

I’ve never seen our country as polarized as it is right now. I don’t think that supporters of either major candidate in the last election are as blinkered as social media memes would suggest. One way to bridge the divide is conversation. So, let the conversation begin!” — Participant B

The project planned to use a combination of online writing and phone calls among small groups of participants. Almost immediately, participants and facilitators found themselves swept back into the urgency of everyday life. We only managed to schedule one small-group call with just five participants before everyone became too busy.

Yet, many participants didn’t lose interest. They still believed in the idea and wanted to continue – they just hadn’t expected to be so busy. This led me to wonder about the phenomenon of American busyness itself.

Our nation is home to two kinds of busyness. The first is a busyness of scarcity; many people are still working hard for survival in a nation of abundance. But graduating from scarcity often only brings Americans into a different busyness of abundance. The busyness of each participant seemed essential: responding to family needs or unexpected events in the context of overwhelmingly busy jobs. But in the aggregate, it formed a striking pattern. Something is wrong with our collective capacity for a functioning togetherness. This is a catastrophe that warrants deeper exploration.

To give you an idea of how hard modern Americans work, we forfeited 206 million vacation days in 2016. If an average worker works for 45 years, that’s over 12,500 lifetimes of paid leisure, thrown away in just one year.²

I certainly relate to busyness. Workaholism is in my DNA. My dad grew up in a farming community where poverty and hunger were well-known. Especially in the famine years of his childhood, the purpose and meaning of life was fairly straightforward: to survive, and to help others survive if you can.

My dad and his four siblings grew up in the underground dwelling.

Loneliness was impossible. It was an environment that could only be survived together. His community pooled resources to help my dad become their first college student, to leave poverty behind. After she and my dad moved to this country, my mom cleaned houses and packaged chicken eggs as the two of them worked their way through grad school in Connecticut. That is how, layer by layer, our family made its way into the American Dream.

The opportunities of reaching the Dream present an entirely different challenge: not to survive, but to remain fully connected in community. In the world of the American Dream, neighbors each have separate lawn mowers and kitchen stand mixers. Friends respect each other’s busyness and avoid asking for big favors. We buy insurance policies. We avoid surprises. The farther we move up in the social classes of the ever-less-burdened and more self-reliant, the harder it becomes to see our vital contributions to each other’s survival. But the less immediately necessary we feel, the more deeply we succumb to the stresses of uneasy belonging.

We humans go crazy in solitary confinement. We’re like single cells that shrivel up and wither away when separated from the larger organism of community. To the extent that humans have a baked-in desire beyond survival and sex, that desire is to belong together.

No room for serendipity

Shortly after college, I worked for two years in a guesthouse in a sparsely populated Japanese mountain village. My parents were bewildered at why I’d be so eager for the rural poverty that my elders had labored to leave behind. How to explain that I was enchanted by the serendipity of shared humanity that arises from moments of idleness and curiosity?

“Mornin’, Bo-chan!” I heard one early morning, faintly in the distance, as I picked my way downhill through the lingering darkness to our log-cabin office. My eyes searched the empty road and fields until I finally spotted our 76-year-old neighbor, cheerily hanging from the upper trunk of one of his Japanese cypresses, chainsaw in hand.

“Morning, Omo-san!” I yelled back.

“What are you up to today? More emails?” It seemed to always astonish him that there could be so many emails.

Later that day, he stopped by for a visit. Irritated by the interruption, I served tea anyway and paused for a long chat, having learned the hard way that busyness isn’t an acceptable excuse anywhere in this village, and certainly not for Omo. After all, he’s spent entire afternoons showing us how to better tend to our potatoes and eggplants.

Ten years later, these memories are bittersweet when I recognize that I don’t spare that kind of time or curiosity for strangers at home.

We’ve created this culture where there’s no spaciousness in people’s lives to energetically take time, reach out, connect, have community with people outside their immediate philosophical, political, socioeconomic groups.” — Participant E

In moments of spaciousness, people are almost reliably surprising. In busyness, people rarely are. Thread by thread, busyness tugs away at the serendipity of community until, collectively, we reach a threadbare state of diseased loneliness. Busyness crowds out surprise.

A craving for certainty and single answers

At the beginning of the Between Americans project, I’d imagined my facilitating role to be something like that of an engineer helping shape a river. I wanted to help the conversation land on the right balance of conflict and harmony—not so much conflict that the water becomes turbulent, not so much harmony that the water stagnates.

But it turns out that dialogue doesn’t need such careful physics. Dialogue simply requires the spaciousness of uncertainty and vulnerability.

One of the strongest personal characteristics that any person can have is the ability to be vulnerable. And it’s one of the things that I think as Americans we’re the worst at. We all put on this suit of armor that protects us. And when we talk about politics and community and growth and unity, those suits of armor actually protect us from solving the problems that we have. And I guess with my personal history of poverty as a child, and homelessness…that vulnerability and those experiences, those are strengths.” — Participant F

I once worked in an office where our leaders never agreed on anything. It was a running joke. But our team thrived on these disagreements. Unless something was on fire, we didn’t feel compelled to end every conversation with a resolution. Our disagreements forced us to reckon with the competing paradoxes of efficiency, quality, cost, creativity, relationships, and so forth. Difficult conversations challenged us to find a higher synthesis that could resolve competing needs.

But in the trap of political punditry, ideas are either right or wrong; there is no higher synthesis. When I buy into this trap, I fail to see the point of a conversation that won’t easily end in agreement or a meaningful insight. This also helps the schism grow.

I hate political discussions…. Even when someone sides on ‘your side’, it seems like they still argue with you on hair-splitting issues, just to be argumentative…. It almost makes me afraid to have an opinion on anything.” — Participant G

Communication lets us borrow each other’s brains so that we can think together. When politics becomes reduced to trading answers back and forth, we lose the full potential of dialogue. We each respond to conflict in our own ways, and each response can hold a piece of the truth. It’s in the very incompleteness of our individual truths that we can reach a wiser togetherness. Having all the answers would be terribly lonely.

By the end of the year, I was learning to be more comfortable with the honest unknowingness of true conversation. In that open space, the conversation made some progress. Along with uncomfortable moments, the river of dialogue began to find its natural flow. Participants shared some daring truths, displaying trust even if understanding was shaky. I was beginning to feel a larger kind of American belonging that I wasn’t finding anywhere else in the political landscape.

A crowded Internet

From the beginning, I knew that phone calls were different from online discussion, but I was surprised at how much more I connected with each Between Americans participant in hour-long telephone exit interviews than in the entire year-long online conversation.

A short excerpt from the online conversation earlier in the year was about environmental issues:

So I have posted some stuff that’s environmental. And there was actually a lot of thought that went behind that…. I would agonize over what I should post … like, what is something that I [can] talk about meaningfully, without getting too emotional to the point where I can’t talk about it anymore.” — Participant A

Referencing the same conversation in an exit interview, another woman reflected:

I remember there was one, that someone had written about the environment…. I saved part of the post in my notes and I got back to it later…. And I got a very thoughtful response back…. And then I dropped the ball – I think it was the Fourth of July – and I never wrote back. And I was like, ‘Damn … I lost an opportunity to really keep this conversation going and learn about something that I don’t know a lot about.’” — Participant I

Before these phone calls, I’d forgotten how much of our human complexity remains below the surface of the Internet. When we type, our backspaces and pauses – the vulnerable hesitations that connect us as humans – disappear as unwritten words. And what’s more, the Internet often acts like a crowd, and crowds carry their own distortion.

At the start of the Cultural Revolution, when my mom was 11 years old, she watched from a crowded plaza as student leaders on the stage kicked, hit, and bit her dad’s colleagues in order to force public confessions of academic privilege and oppression. The crowd chanted slogans in support of class struggle.

My grandpa went through several “struggle sessions” like this one, having achieved academic prominence at the wrong time in history.

When my grandfather took his own turn on stage, my mom slipped away from the square. She avoided future “struggle sessions.” Away from the crowd, she got used to feeling alone. Only decades later did she begin to hear how uncomfortable others had also been in these public meetings.

What my mom saw – the people, the emotions, the chants – had been real. As she witnessed, crowds readily amplify extremism. This is the landscape of mass communication. Not only can written conversations filter away our humanity, but the crowded Internet also suffers under the simplifying distortions of crowds. When we forget the limitations of the Internet terrain, when we allow it to draw our attention away from the real people right next to us, we filter out our true complexity, and our loneliness grows. When I forget that we are deeper than the Internet, I conclude, wrongly, that everyone has gone crazy.

Beneath partisan politics

Between Americans was started as a way to understand and perhaps help bridge the polarization that was so apparent in the 2016 election. What I found instead, beneath partisan politics, is a shared struggle to be fully seen through the haze of each other’s busyness, ready answers, and hyper-connected networks. In my exit interviews especially, I glimpsed a tender layer of our nation that wants to know itself better, but that feels stuck, stuck in our polarization. It’s lonely and frustrating to be in a conversation that’s stuck, and yet, we Americans have together created a polarized, disconnected outcome that few of us want..

In Tribe: On homecoming and belonging, Sebastian Junger writes, “Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.” Modern ideals of self-sufficiency have gone a little too far.

In this modern world of bewildered belonging, political warfare offers a rare gift – an experience of shared purpose with other people. As Junger also says, in addition to all its destruction, “war inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.”

But belonging is a heavy load for politics to carry. Political conversations often echo strains of an exasperated belonging that can’t be solved through politics.

I think we’re actually damaging the structure that allows people to be individuals, because now they have to associate with these labels. Are you a Republican or a Democrat? Are you a feminist or not a feminist? And they don’t even come close to touching on the complexity of the actual human…. I think this creates a sense of isolation and loneliness because here you can name all these containers, but you’re not really known. Nobody actually really knows you.” — Participant N

As our democracy matures, the very qualities that brought us this close to success – our busyness, our conviction, our production-line innovations – could be the very things that hinder us from moving forward.

Looking back from the future, I hope we’ll see this time in history not as a struggle between competing ideologies, but rather as an awakening to the complexity of our problems and a gradual rejection of ideological answers. Generative, inclusive disagreement isn’t something we need to remember how to do. It’s something we’re learning for the very first time.

My conviction for bridging divides is not about finding peace and harmony, or even common ground. Rather, I believe in talking more so that we can begin to become, perhaps for the first time in American history since colonization, a whole that’s truly greater than the sum of our parts.

Boting Zhang works at The Bramble Project, “joyful and conscientious urban development.” Of her work she says, “I work to support collective wisdom and agency in the complex civic and social dynamics surrounding urban change and belonging. I offer ideas for how our polarized society can heal itself in a parallel essay, ‘Our Political Polarization: Heartbreak and healing,’ on the Bramble Project blog.”

References

Between Americans began as a commitment to remember how the 2016 election felt. Since art is the only way I could think of to record an emotional time capsule, I committed to an art piece about that election night. My commitment was a seed that grew into this year-long conversation. To see and hear the full art piece telling the story of the year’s project, please go to: Between Americans Timeline. I invented the format you’ll see as a way to display the conversation. Among other things, it includes about three hours of audio. Scroll to the bottom of the page for links if you’d rather listen to it as a podcast.
“Being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still.” The Economist, “Why is everyone so busy?”December 20, 2014.

The wise-ager is in

August 8, 2018 / Anne Focke / Leave a comment

THE WISE-AGER IS IN
(a.k.a. “office hours”)

You’re invited to make a date for a conversation with a wise-ager. That’s me. I’m one of them.

With partners Artist Trust and the Jini Dellaccio Project, I reserve two Wednesday afternoons a month for conversations with anyone who wants to sign up to talk about whatever’s on your mind. We usually meet in person, but I’ve also had great conversations with people in other parts of the country by phone.

All “wise-agers” (accent on the first syllable) stand on at least seven decades of experience. They exhibit traits of both teenager and wiseacre, with splashes of wisdom and wizardry. Wise-agers love to listen and talk about and puzzle over almost anything. You can check the “about me” page on this website to learn more about what I’ve done with my seven plus decades.

Signing up. I reserve two afternoons a month for these conversations. The times and dates are listed on the “Wise-ager is in” page on this site, here. Once you find a date and time, just send me an email with “wise-ager” in the subject line and note when you’d like to meet. If you’d like, add a phone number and quick note about what’s on your mind. I’d love to talk with you!

Connecting. We usually meet at Artist Trust, though sometimes we meet by phone. We often walk down the street to a nearby coffee shop, or we simply walk and talk. Occasionally, I’ve met at someone’s home on Capitol Hill, and I’ve had conversations with groups of two or more and, a couple of times, with groups of students. My phone conversations have been with people from elsewhere in Washington State (Spokane, Mineral, Issaquah) and across the country (New York City, Los Angeles, and Virgin, Utah).

A little background. The idea Is based on memorable conversations I’ve had in recent years with people who wanted advice or just wanted to talk. Artist Trust and I started this experiment three years ago without knowing exactly where it would go. Since then I’ve learned that it gives me the opportunity both to meet extraordinary people I hadn’t known before and also to spend time with old friends. The conversations seem to matter to each of us. It allows for the kind of focused time that feels luxurious but that we seldom give ourselves. Each one takes its own course, and the form remains as open-ended as it began.

So, come use me as a sounding board, pick my brain, catch up on our lives, or try out new ideas. These chats are open to anyone. Let’s talk!

These conversations were initiated through support from the Jini Dellaccio Project, a fiscally-sponsored project of Artist Trust.

Why walk? – Every time, it’s time away.

July 4, 2018 / Anne Focke / 2 Comments

What is walking good for?

Losing myself in thought and sometimes in space
Getting where I need to go
Carrying on good conversations with friends old and new
Doing errands and learning how many things I can carry at once
Taking a stand in marches with friends and strangers
Grieving the loss of a friend or family member
Letting my mind go into itself and into the walk, often with unexpected results
Exploring new places – in small towns, wild & wide open spaces, and tightly-packed cities
Enjoying the familiarity of the same path over and over again
Mulling over next steps, thinking ahead through tricky situations
Whatever the weather, feeling it through skin and bones and ears
Getting away from my desk and out of the house
Putting muscles, bones, and joints to use, temporarily getting rid of the occasional arthritic pain in my right hip

In May this year, I decided to keep track of a month of my walks, mapping them after the fact, describing them briefly, noting what took me outside, and seeing where and how far I went.

What more is walking good for?

Timing my arrival at doctors appointments and work dates with careful precision
Smelling the wind, the trees, and of course the blossoms
Chatting with friends and strangers I meet along the way
Talking with nearby birds and small critters – squirrels, cats, dogs, a rabbit, and a raccoon
Feeling the satisfaction of my feet solidly hitting the ground
Finding new ways to get to familiar places
Allowing time for aimlessness
Listening to all the sounds I walk through
Getting unstuck and centered
Discovering new staircases, vistas, and untraveled short cuts
Following alleyways, water edges, railroad tracks, and back roads
Trying to come to terms with civic crises and figure out what I can do
Letting off steam
Simply enjoying the parallel motion of mind and feet

To make up for the fact that I didn’t have a map for every day in May – some days I either forgot to make notes or didn’t get out much – I made a record of a few good walks in June. In fact, it was hard to stop the recordkeeping, though I’m glad I did. I didn’t use a “fitness tracker.” It’s been clear, after listening to friends who use them, how easy it is get hooked on those electronic devices. It’s an obsession I don’t want.

Looking back at these records, I notice that, in this particular month, many of the walks I think of as favorites are missing – in towns and landscapes outside Seattle, political marches and rallies, through industrial areas or along railroad tracks, around the arboretum, along the waterfront, through Interbay and over the locks, and anywhere with grandkids. It’s definitely time to get outdoors and walk, right now.

What took me outside? Where and how far did I go?

Pollyanna?

June 18, 2018 / Anne Focke / 3 Comments

On a chilly Sunday morning in March, my granddaughter Livia and I went on an adventure through a nearly-deserted downtown Kansas City. Judging from her response, there’s nothing quite like the joy of cartwheeling through an empty passageway between a mall and a hotel lobby. She showed me how to use the slow-motion video function on my phone and then continued wheeling back and forth in front of the fountain. She found it hard to stop.

For as long as I can remember my natural instinct has been to be hopeful and positive. I see possibilities and go for them. My parents encouraged me or, at least, stayed out of the way enough that the impulse stayed alive. I still carry the residue of a childhood belief in Annie Oakley’s, “I can do anything.” The sense of possibility I get from leaping into things to see what I can do feels akin to Livia’s cartwheeling spirit.

That spirit has certainly been tested over the years, seldom more than it is today by the state of our political and economic world. Can we really do anything? I’m convinced we can, and I’m egged on by a positive frame of mind that I just can’t shake.

Several decades ago a friend, Jennifer, sent me a postcard because it reminded her of me. Despite pack-rat tendencies to save documents and memories on paper, I can’t find the card now, but I remember it being a black and white photograph of a cobblestone street, in what I took to be early 20th century Paris. In the middle of the street, a man had popped his head out of a sewer, the round sewer cover on his head and a big smile on his face. My memory is that he looked happy, even a little giddy as though asking, what’ll we do next?

Jennifer wasn’t the only one who pegged me as cheerful. I remember being asked once, why I seemed so happy all the time. Since I couldn’t think of a good reason, I said something like, “It’s just easier this way.” More than once in the past, I’ve been called a “Pollyanna.” This may partly have been because nicknames tend to play off one’s own name, but I’m sure it also had something to do with my general disposition. At first being called Pollyanna seemed complimentary or just descriptive. More and more, though, I began to cringe when I heard it, feeling its pejorative undertones. I was embarrassed. Was my cheerfulness irrational or annoying? And who was Pollyanna anyway?

Bronze statue of Pollyanna in front of the public library in Littleton, New Hampshire

Pollyanna, a 1913 children’s novel by Eleanor H. Porter, told of a girl who got through a terrible childhood by playing what she called her “Glad Game,” in which she found something to be glad about in every situation, no matter how dreadful it was. Briefly summarized, this might not sound so bad, but colloquially, “Pollyanna” has come to mean being foolishly or blindly optimistic, sometimes responding insensitively to terrible things. The adjective Pollyannaish has a male parallel in “Panglossian.” Dr. Pangloss, in Voltaire’s Candide, was “an incurable, albeit misguided, optimist who claimed that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.’ So persistent was he in his optimism that he kept it even after witnessing and experiencing great cruelty and suffering.” (Merriam-Webster)

Even when I was younger, I knew this wasn’t the way my energy worked. I’ve never felt that taking a positive attitude into the world denies the conditions I find there. Being aware of suffering or unfairness can in fact move me to act, to see what I can do about it. I wouldn’t characterize my actions as playing a “glad game,” even though something like gladness can come from it. There’s a kind of joy in figuring out what can be done to right a wrong, find a solution, or discover a new way to see an old problem. My hopefulness lives, at least partly, in often small but ultimately positive acts.

I long to talk more about why or how I can be positive or hopeful now, but it’s not easy. I stumble when I try to write about it. I struggle with the words when I try to talk about it out loud. Hope and possibility can feel sort of wimpy and irrelevant. There always seems to be something more important and urgently serious. How does one take a hopeful stance in the midst of the fight for immigrants’ humanity or for protection of children and all of us from a lethal gun culture? What positive frame can one possibly create when democratic systems are failing and under attack and when we so urgently need to fight against more environmental destruction and against racism, the abuse of privilege, and increasing economic inequality?

If it’s not Pollyannaism or blind optimism that drives my hopefulness, what is it? And how in the world do I put that into words?

Whenever I get stuck and can’t seem to move ahead, I read, I listen, I learn and borrow from others to put the pieces together for myself. I can’t do it alone. Though I sit here now, by myself – trying to learn a little more and be clearer about my words – I’m not really alone. I’m surrounded by what I’ve pulled together from reading, from my own immediate experience, and from what I hear in other people’s stories.

As part of an early 2017 episode of WNYC’s On the Media, Robert Garfield interviewed writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit.*He began by mentioning that her 2004 book, Hope in the Dark: Untold histories, wild possibilities,was again “flying off the shelves.” The interview began with her reading a passage from the book outlining recent historical instances of unexpected, often nonlinear ways positive change has happened. Despite these lessons from history, Garfield was troubled. “In the foreseeable future, he said, “we are likely as a society to go abruptly and maybe irretrievably backwards on civil rights, human rights, climate, sanity. Isn’t a man permitted to be morose and desperate without surrendering? Isn’t that a reasonable reaction to horrible events?”

Solnit replied:

You’re talking about two different things: How do we feel, and what do we do? I’m not telling people how to feel. I’m telling people that there is scope for action. One of the great conundrums is that unless we believe there are possibilities we don’t act, but the possibilities only exist if we seize them.

I’m not an optimist. Optimism believes everything will be fine no matter what we do, and therefore we don’t have to do a damn thing. Pessimism is the mirror image of that that believes everything is going to hell in a hand basket, and it gets us off the hook. We don’t have to do anything. Hope for me is deeply tied to the fact that we don’t know what will happen. This gives us grounds to act while being clear that terrible things are happening.… There’s wiggle room in there. A lot of extraordinary stuff is happening and it’s happening in complex ways… We’re not talking about a future that’s already written.

Solnit inspires my determination to hang on to a positive orientation while not losing track of the conditions that keep me moving. One definition of positive is “concentrating on what is constructive and good.” That feels right to me.

My hope is not abstract. Hope can be an opening that gives us grounds to act, but it can also be triggered by stories of real people finding new, or sometimes bringing back old, ways of living and working together. It grows not just from the possibilities of an unknown future, but also from the actions, work, and ideas of real people who loudly, or often quietly, make a difference and show us new ways to live. Solnit reinforces my own observation that “a lot of extraordinary stuff is happening.”

Over the past year or so I’ve struggled to figure out the best ways I can respond to the current state of the world – to find my piece of the puzzle. One thing I’ve come to is that I want to contribute to imagining how we get out of this mess. Another way to put it is that I want to help answer questions like, Where is it we want to go? What do we want to be creating as we go forward, and how do we get there? For me, real-life stories along with leaps of imagination that tie them together are like fuel for my hopefulness.

Now and then in coming months, I plan to share stories I’ve collected and new ones I will discover, the kind of extraordinary stories that Solnit refers to. I also plan to write about some of the connecting threads, broad ideas or theories that draw on the various stories and that may tie them together and add to their potential and their power. As I write, I’ll try to avoid being blindly Pollyannaish without losing my own stubbornly positive voice.

Photo credit

The original photo of Littleton’s Pollyanna statue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. The photo is by David Fulmer, Daveynin, shown here with my modifications.

Note

* “Rebecca Solnit on hope, lies, and making change,” interview by Bob Garfield for WNYC’s On the Media, first broadcast on January 12, 2017, rebroadcast on December 28, 2017.

Where in hell are we?

May 16, 2018 / Anne Focke / 4 Comments

Where in hell are we? Judging from our national politics, international tensions, and the suffering described in news reports and visible on sidewalks in my own neighborhood, we’re in pretty deep. Like many people, I struggle to shape and reshape the way I take action in this post-2016 era without completely losing my balance in the maelstrom.

My vision of hell probably looks a lot like Dante’s Inferno (1320), an image I encountered in college when Dante’s long poem of his journey through the nine circles of hell was assigned as an essay topic in a philosophy class. I remember liking the premise I’d come up with, and it has stayed with me since then. It pops up especially when I get to wondering just how bad a particular incident or situation is – could it be worse? what could I do to help make it better? Given the current political, economic, and social climate, I’m not surprised that the premise of that 54-year-old essay is on my mind again.

A few weeks ago, a folder of college papers surfaced in one of the many boxes I’ve stashed away over the years. This essay was among them and I was eager to see it again. As I started reading, I remembered the panic I felt when I turned the essay in. Not only had I, a generally rule-abiding student, not read the whole book, but my essay was only about a page and a half, double-spaced. The suggested length was ten pages. With no prefatory comment and no helpful title, my 19-year-old self just leaped straight into my basic contention:

The severity of punishment in Dante’s Hell does not vary from one circle to the next. There only seems to be a difference to an observer, like Dante, passing through. But all souls in Hell are suffering and all are in agony no matter which circle they are in. Each soul has no other punishment with which to compare its own agony, and with this lack of comparison, that soul’s punishment would feel just as severe as any other. Each soul receives the worst and most appropriate punishment for the sin that soul committed. The soul of a thief is punished by having nothing, not even a form, that is not stolen from it. A glutton’s soul is punished by having to wallow in mud, an appropriate punishment for one who wallowed in material things on earth.

Dante says, “The more perfect, the more keen, whether for pleasure’s or for pain’s discerning.” A person evil on earth will not be as affected by a punishment in hell as will a person less evil on earth. The souls in the Circles of Incontinence, because their sins were not thought to be as bad, would be “more perfect” so the suffering they felt would be “more keen.” The souls in deeper circles do not suffer any more than the ones in higher circles. It just takes a stiffer punishment to make a sinful soul suffer the same agony.

After all my trepidation, the professor gave the paper an A with a hand-written comment, “In three brief, brilliant paragraphs you have touched the soul of the Inferno.” Only now do I appreciate her use of the word “soul” in the comment, which seems apt given that I used the word 13 times in the three brief paragraphs. I have no doubt, though, that her note played a part in how firmly the idea that my 19-year-old self took from a medieval text got planted in my mind.

The power of comparison burrowed into my thinking. If souls in the upper circles of hell had been able to compare their punishment with the punishments received in the lower circles as Dante had, might they have felt a little better about their plight, might they have suffered a little less? I suppose, though, that this wasn’t the point. In fact the upper levels only seemed better if, like Dante, you were able to walk from one circle to the next and observe the comparison, but not if you imagined being caught in one of hell’s circles suffering its specific punishment.

About 15 years ago, an editor I admired used a quote that felt true to me. Purported to be from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, though I can’t find proof, it said, “The root of all unhappiness is comparison.” Memory of the idea planted by Dante may have helped this quote feel right to me. I pinned it on the wall over my desk and it stayed there for years. I tried applying it to my life.

If I could let comparison go, I reasoned, my sense of worthiness or even happiness would not depend on comparing myself to others. It wouldn’t matter how I or anyone else judged my life against the lives of others. The amount of stuff or money or fame I had, whether or not I had a partner or children, how I expressed my activism, or any other of the many measures I’ve used, consciously or unconsciously, to judge myself – wouldn’t have so much influence over me. I’d use the quote over my desk to remind me that I’d be happier, more at peace with myself, and more able to be active and useful, if I could quiet those comparisons.

This expands Dante’s lesson to include pleasure along with pain. In hell, the pain experienced is appropriate partly because the souls in each circle aren’t aware of the pain felt in other circles. In my lived experience, I’m fuller, happier, more ready to be and act in the world, when I can stay in my own circle of pleasure and pain, keeping comparison away.

The impact of comparison takes a different but at least as powerful a turn when I step into the turmoil of the world around me. Much as Dante considered the circles of hell when he moved through them, I’m acutely aware of the widely differing conditions of people’s lives as I move through and act in the world today.

More than two decades ago, I discovered an exchange between Hannah Arendt, a German-born American political thinker, and Mary McCarthy, an American author and political activist, in a book of their letters from 1949 to 1975.¹The ideas they discussed have stayed with me over the years, but only now am I making a connection with the Inferno.

On June 9, 1964, McCarthy wrote to Arendt about an idea she longed to write about.

The present idea has to do with equality. I’ve long thought that this is the spectre that has been haunting the world since the eighteenth century. Or at least it has been haunting me all my life. Once this notion was introduced into the human mind, existence became unbearable, and yet once there it can never be banished.

The only people who remain happy or content are those who haven’t yet heard of it, for one reason or another – at either end of the social scale. The beknighted squires (and there still are a few) who don’t have a guilty conscience, and the beknighted peasants (and there still are a few) who don’t suffer from envy. Both these groups, as it were, don’t question God’s disposition of His favors, whether He smiles on them or frowns on them. But everyone else is only pretending if they claim to take inequality for granted. On both sides. “Why should I have this and not he?” or “Why should he have this and not I?”

…I have the sense, maybe subjective, that the worm of equality is not only eating away at the old social and economic foundations but at the very structure of consciousness, demolishing the “class distinctions” between the sane and the insane, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad.

Arendt replied on June 23, 1964.

Let us talk about the equality business; most interesting. The chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy – the great vice of free Greek society. And the great virtue of all aristocracies seems to me to be that people always know who they are and hence do not compare themselves with others. This constant comparing is really the quintessence of vulgarity. If you are not in this hideous habit you are immediately accused of arrogance – as though by not-comparing you have decided to be on top.

McCarthy’s words, like ideas sparked by Dante, are firmly planted in my mind. McCarthy’s “worm of equality” digs through layers of class, health, beauty, and morality, just as Dante’s downward path draws him through the circles of hell.

But what of Kierkegard’s root of unhappiness or Arendt’s vice of envy? What if we long for the satisfaction and joy that might come from living in a world that allows us to know who we are without the envy and arrogance that can come from the habit of comparison? Can we imagine such a world without assuming that it requires returning to a medieval realm inhabited by beknighted squires and peasants?

If we’ve found such a place, why would we venture out to see and feel the inequalities in both suffering and joy in the world around us? Why venture into a world that demolishes the distinctions between classes and between “the sane and the insane, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad”… the truth and the lies?

Why? Because the suffering is just as unbearable today as it was in the past. The violence now may be less but the pain remains as keen. Perhaps our hell, the circle of suffering being experienced right now, is exactly matched to the conditions we’ve created, just as the punishment in Dante’s hell was perfectly matched to the sin. And if, in absolute terms, today’s conditions are better – “more perfect” – and the suffering less than in the past, as some research shows², the reason the world has improved must be because many people have ventured out, seen the differences, and insisted that things get better. Digging through the layers of class, health, beauty, and morality and comparing what we find, one layer with another, can be a source of energy to act. Things would not be better now if so many people in the past had not been restless, dissatisfied with what they saw, and determined to be part of making things better.

Choosing to work to reduce suffering or strive for more equality doesn’t have to mean living without joy or pleasure. We just have to engage in two apparently opposite ways of living a life, one that digs down through layers of inequality, taking action as we can, and one that allows for the pleasures that come from being ourselves, avoiding envy and comparison with others. In The Crack-Up (1936), F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”

I see it as a matter of continually weaving back and forth between stepping outside the dynamic spiral of action and into a more constant awareness of our own groundedness, then getting up and leaping back into the fray…then stepping out, then back in, and out, and in.

Notes

Excerpts from two longer letters in Between Friends: The correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975, edited and with an introduction by Carol Brightman. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995, p163-167.
For example, The Angels of our Better Nature: Why violence has declined, by Steven Pinker, Viking, 2011.

Alice, Alzheimer’s, and special powers

March 31, 2018 / Anne Focke / 2 Comments

“Alice Anne”

I was named after my two grandmothers, Alice Ross Crawford and Anne Bosworth Focke. My parents liked the sound of Alice Anne much better than Anne Alice, but Alice lived with us for most of my life through high school and having two Alices in the house would be confusing. Whenever my parents felt I needed a strong talking-to, they called out both names. And these were almost the only times I heard them together. So, except as warning or reprimand, I was Anne.

I developed strong attachments to literary and historical figures with each of these names, girls who led colorful, exciting lives. I was called Annie as a kid, and two Annies especially fascinated and influenced me. One was Annie Oakley, a famous sharpshooter in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and featured in Irving Berlin’s musical Annie Get Your Gun, which I heard as a girl at San Diego’s Starlight Opera. (Recalling this, Annie’s song, “Anything you can do, I can do better,” is now stuck in my head.) A second seminal Annie was Little Orphan Annie of the long-standing comic strip, who in the background had a protector, Daddy Warbucks, and who foiled evildoers by herself with her dog Sandy.

The most influential of my heroines, though, was probably Alice from Alice in Wonderland. She never seemed afraid and instead was simply curious. She followed the White Rabbit in a hurry and fell down a rabbit hole. She landed in a strange and magical place where she got larger and smaller, swam in a pool of tears, shook hands with a dodo bird, watched Father William balance an eel on his nose, conversed with a hookah-smoking caterpillar on a large mushroom, watched the smiling Cheshire Cat in a tree disappear, had tea with the Mad Hatter and Hare, tried to play croquet with a flamingo and a hedgehog, and had to testify before the court of the fearsome Queen of Hearts.

I went on those adventures with her while my dad read the stories aloud. Her story and Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations provided beginning points for imaginations of my own Although Tenniel’s drawings are the source for my strongest visual memories of the story, I’m sure the characters in Walt Disney’s movie have a role in my memories as well.

Alice, Annie, and Annie taught me the special powers of imagination, believing in myself, and the thrill and adventure of catching evildoers.

My grandmother Alice died after I left for college. From my youngest brother Ross’s brief descriptions of her last years, I now assume she died with dementia or Alzheimer’s. Years later, my mother did also. Looking back on it all now, I’m saddened by how distant I was from Gran’s death and in many respects from Mom’s death as well. She died in 1997. My brothers Frank and Ross – especially Ross – were the true caretakers of my mom in her last years. They’ve become bright stars for me as I remember their caregiving role.

The few times I was with Mom by myself toward the end of her life, I remember wondering how to enter her world of dementia. I felt I had to be carefully present-tense, consider things that were right in front of us, that we could see and touch, not things that happened yesterday or that might happen tomorrow. Being unable to remember yesterday or think about tomorrow made her feel bad or angry and just increased her confusion. I didn’t understand the disease well enough to know that if we’d jumped much further back in time, we might have opened up older, more enjoyable memories for her and for us both.

Perhaps influenced by my Alice-in-Wonderland past, I’ve always found it easy to jump beyond present circumstances, imagining ways of being that might be but aren’t yet. I wondered how I could see my mom’s and her mom’s dementia – perhaps my own in the future – as interesting or useful, or simply as another acceptable way of being. I thought about historical tales of the wise fool, the wisdom of the village idiot, the ancient oracles, or the mystic seer.

Today dementia is an evildoer. At a 2010 symposium of designers and developers of senior housing, a speaker referred to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease as the biggest fear of aging boomers, a fear he urged his colleagues to acknowledge.¹

What are we losing by not including in our lives – personally and societally – relationships with and insights from people who seem to exist in other realities? Are we losing their special powers in our super-rational world? How do we understand the edges dividing dementia and wisdom?

A year or two ago, I discovered a book by Dana Walrath, Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass.²

In Aliceheimer’s, Walrath, a medical anthropologist, graphic artist, and writer, tells the story of her mother Alice’s journey with Alzheimer’s, especially during the two years when Alice lived with Dana and her husband in their Vermont home. In the introduction, Walrath says that the biomedical story of dementia “is in desperate need of revision.”

The dominant narrative is a horror story. People with Alzheimer’s are perceived as zombies, bodies without minds, waiting for valiant researchers to find a cure. For Alice and me, the story was different. Alzheimer’s was a time of healing and magic. Of course, there is loss with dementia, but what matters is how we approach our losses and our gains. Reframing dementia as a different way of being, as a window into another reality, lets people living in that state be our teachers – useful, true humans who contribute to our collective good, instead of scary zombies.

Wow, I thought. I’ve been waiting for this. Perhaps this begins to show how to slay the evildoer.

Alice in Wonderland seems to be as important to Walrath as it was to me. She uses Lewis Carroll’s book as an emotional frame for her book. “I found the story’s voice the day I cut up a cheap paperback copy of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, using the page fragments to make her bathrobe, Alice’s favorite garment.” Alice falls slowly down the rabbit hole of her memory loss and disappears gradually like the Cheshire Cat.

Walrath’s book is part of the Graphic Medicine series.³ She chose the graphic narrative form in the belief that it could reach someone with dementia. She writes, “Graphic storytelling captures the complexity of life and death, of sickness and health. Going back and forth between the subconscious and conscious, between the visual and the verbal, lets us tap into our collective memory, an essential element of storytelling.” It allows us to “better understand those who are hurting, to feel their stories, and redraw and renegotiate social boundaries.” She made her Alice drawings in part “to process my own grief after placing my mother in an Alzheimer’s residence…. But I was also drawing to remember the magic and laughter of that time.”

With a community of help that included pirates, good neighbors, a cast of characters from space-time travel, and my dead father hovering in the branches of the maple trees that surround our Vermont farmhouse, Aliceheimer’s let us write our own story daily – a story that, in turn, helps rewrite the dominant narrative of aging.

Most of the book alternates between graphic and written pages, each two-page spread telling of a day in Alice and Dana’s world.

“Dana, am I going crazy? You would tell me if I had lost my marbles, wouldn’t you?”

I’ve heard these questions many times. Repetition. Anyone who lives with Alzheimer’s knows from repetition. As her rudder, I always supplied Alice with the same steady answers. “No, you’re not crazy. You have Alzheimer’s disease so you can’t remember what just happened.”

“Oh. I forgot. What a lousy thing to have.”

One story, early in the book, tells of Alice losing her home. The accompanying drawings count Dana’s days with Alice. “Alice is disappearing. Soon there will be none.”

Often the “internal governor” of people with Alzheimer’s also disappears; they say exactly what’s on their mind. This disappearance lets new things appear. Alice found parts of herself that she had kept hidden, from her children anyway. She wished out loud that she had gone to medical school instead of becoming a biology teacher. Her years of pushing me in this direction and away from creative work made sense at last.”

One of the reasons Walrath moved Alice into her home was “our unfinished business of finding a good close.” They had never been close. In gentle, surprisingly direct ways, they found resolution, “at last.” After one quiet but deeply felt exchange of apology and forgiveness, Walrath writes, “I knew that if I wanted it, Alzheimer’s would let us have this conversation every single day.”

Alice remembers all the songs from The Music Man and countless others from her youth. The present is more elusive. These days she doesn’t remember that she has Alzheimer’s. But she used to. And she always sings.

One May morning, she stood by my dining room windows, looking out over the rolling field, and she sang this bit from Babes in Arms:

It seems we stood and talked like this before
We looked at each other in the same way then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.

She stopped and she smiled and said, “That should be the Alzheimer’s theme song.”

Aliceheimer’s.

As a medical anthropologist, Walrath’s broad, cultural and historical understanding of sickness and health reaches beyond the medical system that so dominates the understanding of health in the U.S. today. She writes in her introduction:

Biomedicine locates sickness in a specific place in an individual body: a headache, a stomachache, a torn knee, lung cancer. Medical anthropologists instead locate sickness and health in three interconnected bodies: the political, the social, and the physical.⁴ The prevailing political economy impacts the distribution of sickness and health in a society and the means available to heal those who are sick. …The social body constructs the meanings and experiences surrounding certain physical states.

Some cultures locate sickness not in individuals but instead in families or communities. As any caregiver knows, we live the sickness too. And while biomedicine can cure diseases, it flounders with permanent hurts, troubles of the mind, states present from birth or that are incurable or progressive. In biomedicine, these states are stigmatized and feared. We medical anthropologists have a term for this: social death.

The role of “social bodies” – that is, communities – in the health of individuals is being discovered and described more and more often. Alzheimer’s is one kind of “social death,” and British writer George Monbiot identifies another. Loneliness and isolation constitute a “disease of epidemic scale today,” he writes in Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis.⁵ “Of all the fantasies human beings entertain, the idea that we can go it alone is the most absurd and perhaps the most dangerous.” Monbiot is constantly on the lookout for ways to combat this disease. He begins a recent column for The Guardian, “The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community,” this way: “It could, if the results stand up, be one of the most dramatic medical breakthroughs of recent decades. It could transform treatment regimes, save lives, and save health services a fortune. Is it a drug? A device? A surgical procedure? No, it’s a new-fangled intervention called community, as results from a trial in the Somerset town of Frome [England] show.⁶

Although Monbiot warned that the findings are based on what he termed “provisional data” – that is, not yet published by the academic press – he also wrote that “this shouldn’t stop us feeling a shiver of excitement about the implications.” Results of the Compassionate Frome project, begun five years ago, appears to show that when isolated people who have health problems are supported by community groups and volunteers, the number of emergency admissions to hospital falls dramatically. Sometimes the help took the form of handling debt or housing problems, sometimes joining choirs, lunch clubs, exercise groups, or writing workshops. The point was, he said, “to break a familiar cycle of misery: illness reduces people’s ability to socialize, which leads in turn to isolation and loneliness, which then exacerbates illness.”

When [Alice] was certain that her own mother, who died in 1954, had just been sitting on the sofa in the living room and talking with her, she would say, “You see her, don’t you?” I’d say, “I can’t see her, but I’m sure you can. You have special powers. You can see things that we can’t.” For her that was enough.

What Walrath offered her mother was a way to break the familiar cycle of Alzheimer’s misery. And it’s telling, I think, that Dana and Alice’s “wonderland” – the community they made together – offered gifts to them both.

Notes

¹ Robert Kramer, founder and president, National Investment Center for the Senior Housing and Care Industry, speaking at the Senior Housing Design and Development Symposium at the University of Maryland, 2010.

²Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s through the Looking Glass, Dana Walrath, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.

³Graphic Medicine book series, from the Pennsylvania State University Press. “Books in the series are curated by an editorial collective with scholarly, creative, and clinical expertise, and attest to a growing awareness of the value of comics as an important resource for communicating about a range of issues broadly termed ‘medical’.”

⁴From Walrath’s introduction: For more on this see Nancy Scheper-Hughes and M. Margaret Lock, “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 1, no. 1 (March 1987): 6-41.

⁵ George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis, Verso Books, 2017.

⁶George Monbiot, “The town that’s found a potent cure for illness – community,” The Guardian, February 21, 2018.

Get up, get up! Like a busy lady bug

February 11, 2018 / Anne Focke / 2 Comments

Commissioned for an exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2013, “Get up!” was the first artwork of mine to hang on the wall of an arts institution since the 1970s – the Moore College of Art in 1975 and the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in 1978. Without it being a conscious plan, “Get up!” gave me or identified for me a theme that runs as a kind of refrain through my life, at least since then and probably for years before that. Get up, get up!

Each of the 36 commissioned artists worked with one of 36 poems in a 1907 collection of poems, Chamber Music, by James Joyce . . . or more correctly, we were asked to make a work on paper (10.5 x 14.5 inches) inspired by a piece of music based on the poem. In the flurry of having to get my piece done in a short time, I ignored or forgot the musical aspect of the assignment and went straight to the poem. There were other layers to the exhibition and to my contribution, but the poem and producing something for the wall had to be my first focus.

Scott Lawrimore, deputy director of the museum at the time and curator of the exhibition, suggested “Chamber Music XIV” for me. The final line in the four stanza poem is, “Arise, arise!” As I read it, a young lover (with Joyce as author, I assume a male narrator), is trying to get his love, his “beautiful one,” to get up. And he’s having a hard time of it. I can almost hear a little irritation as he repeats his request – “arise, arise” – three times in the sixteen short lines. Here’s a stanza from the original:

The odorous winds are weaving
A music of sighs:
Arise, arise,
My dove, my beautiful one!

Scott’s surprise invitation to participate was a gift, even as it rattled my world for a few days while I tried to decide whether or not to take the project on and if I did how I would. It began a shift in my understanding of who I am and how I want to get things done, an understanding that’s always changing and continues today as I stubbornly keep asking myself what’s my place in the troubled but hopeful world we live in today. As I say in my own Chamber Music text, I regularly make that demand of myself, “Get up, get up!”

•

Seasonally, I share my apartment with lady bugs. The 1908 building I live in “breathes,” according to a contractor who did some work for us a few years ago. For one thing, he said, this has kept structural elements inside the walls dry and free of rot. For another, I’m sure the “breathing” has provided easy access for my small red visitors. There aren’t many tiny critters I enjoy living with, but having fallen in love with lady bugs as a child, they are welcome in my home now. And occasionally they teach me something, like this busy lady bug who, even in silhouette, reminds me to keep getting up. See her demonstrate here.

The odorous winds are blowing.

Get up, get up!

Production notes

From the printer, Miss Cline Press (Ana Karina Luna): “Get up!” text was “letterpressed by hand using linseed oil ink from photo polymer plates onto Arches River BFK 100 lb. paper using a 1870 iron manual platen press. Paper torn by hand. Printed in an edition of nine, plus newsprint proofs.”

Karina also printed my calling card, designed by Warren Wilkins, the upper half of which appears below and in the banner of my website, Carrying On. My characteristic “a:” is also imprinted in the lower right-hand corner of “Get Up!” As I’ve told Warren, he gave me the best “a” logo on the internet. Just try to find a better one!

What becomes history is to some degree determined by what is archived.

goodnight and/or a wake

It’s not trash . . . yet

Records and archives of and/or offshoots

Why go to all this trouble? What good are archives anyway?

References

Destined for the Beautiful Country

Between Americans1

America the lonely

Extreme busyness

No room for serendipity

A craving for certainty and single answers

A crowded Internet

Beneath partisan politics

References

What is walking good for?

What more is walking good for?

What took me outside? Where and how far did I go?

Notes

Notes

Between Americans¹