I Remember Standing by the Wall

1981. A loop to East Berlin via Dresden with a college class. Some snippets from my journal at the time (I was twenty years old, and, after the Soviets occupied Afghanistan, had been required to register for Selective Service in 1980):

Expecting smart jackbooted submachine gun carrying helmeted border guards, I was underwhelmed by the bureaucratic border police who processed us. . . Driving through the night was a little eerie, behind “enemy” lines. But there was no sign of Soviet presence. There was very little sign of anything. It’s much less populated than West Germany, perhaps because so many fled before the Wall was built. . .

Paper and other goods are of ersatz quality, markedly inferior to similar Western materials. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see how well-dressed and fed everyone is, being led to believe something different by our own media and government propaganda. Their propaganda I expected, but to find out we've been badly distorting reality is rather surprising. Too naive.

Our East German guides, Gunther X and Anita Kretschmar, were quite an experience. At first they were stiffly cautious, probing for our reactions to what they said. Within an hour they opened up and spoke to us as friends. Gunther was a man harried by the state bureaucracy. Anita was a young artist who felt stifled by that same bureaucracy. It appears that the East German system thematically is more like Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s 1984. Materially the East Germans do well by global standards . . . In return for self-disciplined caution in actions and words, the people are rewarded with material goods. . .

It was raining when we toured the Checkpoint Charlie Museum this morning . . . Some of the inventions and means of escaping from the Iron Curtain were really ingenious. The resultant countermeasures just as ingeniously added new diabolical strength to the Wall.

The saddest thing about the Iron Curtain countries, and indeed all centrally governed countries, is the people’s lack of individual freedom of choice. Freedom of choice is not in my opinion an inherent “right” of anyone’s, as our constitution suggests, but it is a very nice luxury to have.

Today's Rune: The Self.

For the Caveman Won't Leave You Alone

Once upon a time, Roky Erickson of Austin, Texas, helped pioneer psychedelic rock via The Spades ("We Sell Soul") and The 13th Floor Eelvators. His impact was significant enough to inspire Where the Pyramid Meets the Eye: A Tribute to Roky Erickson (1990) and to renewed efforts by Erickson, plus more recent releases of his earlier work.

One of my favorite tracks on the tribute compilation is Welsh-born Julian Cope's variation on Erickson's "I Have Always Been Here Before." Cope's lyric set, except for repeating the song title in a chorus, is almost entirely different -- and cooler. Cope, besides being a musician, has written six books, including two on European Neolithic sites (those stone circles and all).

Haven't been able to find any transcriptions of Cope's version; so, here's my own quick and dirty take:

I Have Always Been Here Before (Julian Cope version)

From the Long Barrows of Wiltshire to the Pyramids

From the stone circles that challenge the scientists

And the Neolithics that tread the ancient avenues

The children that died forever more exist
For the Caveman won't leave you alone

For you and your gods alone

For leaving the centuries

For leaping the centuries

[Chorus:] I have always been here before

Belief in my mind's opened the door . . .

Look behind you, look behind you, you are always there

Twenty-one years old -- or maybe twenty more . . .

Obelisks will mark the place you fell

Where children play they will mark the place you fell

You are perfect, you are immeasurable

Comes death -- oh, no mortal remains

Like the grey weather stones you shelter behind

You are a monument of your very own

(Chorus)

We sell soul (repeat)

The childish man shrinks back from the unknown world

And the grown man is threatened by sacrifice

He so ever protects himself from what is new and strange

Just ask the man who's running from the Past

(Chorus -- fade out).

For more on the Wiltshire Barrows, here's a link: http://www.wiltshire-web.co.uk/history/barrows.htm ; Images are of petroglyphs in lands now known as Canada and Sweden.

Today's Rune: Defense.

War and the Soul

Just what we need, another homicidal maniac on a killing binge. I'm reminded of other deadly incidents at other military installations in the USA and overseas over the last several years (and one involving British soldiers in Afghanistan just days ago), of the Virginia Tech massacre (April 16, 2007) and the Amish West Nickel Mines school shootings (October 2, 2006). And let's not forget the grisly Anthony Sowell, demented Cleveland rapist-killer now under arrest, who killed his victims one by one and then hid their bodies around his crumbling house.

At Fort Hood today, not that far from the site of the 1991 Luby's Cafeteria massacre in Killeen, Texas, Major Nidal Hasan -- a psychiatrist specializing in post traumatic stress -- opened up with two sidearms and killed twelve people, wounding thirty-one. As with Seung-hui Cho at Virginia Tech, Sowell in Cleveland and others, it's already evident there were plenty of red flags in Hasan's case. Combine that he is a practicing Muslim with his being disgruntled about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and clearly did not want to be deployed to Iraq later this month, one has to wonder. On the other hand, why didn't he just shoot himself in the foot? This is the deep end part of the equation, unless he was in fact a deliberately scheming Benedict Arnold or self-styled martyr. Who knows? More will most definitely be revealed. As with all those other incidents and people, it's sad and also sickening.

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Sesame Street at Forty

Sesame Street turned forty today, and my younger brother Jamie will turn the same age at the end of this year. These two things are connected in memory because anytime I watched Sesame Street, it was usually while babysitting Jamie, or watching him briefly while the adults did other things. I approved of Sesame Street, and The Electric Company, though I (at the time) mocked poor harmless Fred Rogers and Mister Rodgers' Neighborhood, which seemed infantile by comparison. (When I'd been Jamie's age, I sometimes watched Batman, The Twilight Zone, Captain Kangaroo, Dark Shadows, Milton Berle, Star Trek -- a real eclectic grab bag).

Anyway, Big Bird always freaked me out, his gangly size and weird voice. The Count, Cookie Monster and Oscar were the ones I liked best. The people seemed cool, the great urban mix that even now seems ahead of its time. A big hit for PBS and a legacy of good things put in motion by The Great Society, even during the Vietnam War.

The Electric Company (1971+) was stranger than Sesame Street, a little more on the surreal side; among its early regulars were Bill Cosby (who earlier had done I Spy; afterwards, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids) and Morgan Freeman.

In the tradition of older sibling taking younger to see scary movies, where Vickie, my oldest sister, took me to see The Omega Man and Deliverance, I later took Jamie to see Apocalypse Now! and Wise Blood. By that time, we'd run far far away from Big Bird.

Today's Rune: Defense.

Cracking the Codes of Culture

I. A salute to Claude Lévi-Strauss (11/28/1908-10/31/2009), the 100-year old hepcat anthropologist.

Along with my sister Linda, who is a practicing anthropologist/archaeologist, and our mother, who is a very engaged reader and thinker, I've practically always enjoyed anthropological ways of seeing the world. Anything that gets at what underlies cultural codes is cool by me.

II. Together with related fields, Anthropology makes its way into writing classes. Here are a three typical writing prompts (the resultant writing is usually really interesting, and entertaining):

A. Write about a personal belief, superstition or supernatural event (based on your own life or that of someone you know).

B. Write abut a personal ritual or routine and its meaning. (Includes religion, sports, holidays, etc.).

C. Write about a time when you found yourself somewhere you shouldn't have been.

III. An anthropological way of looking at things informs comedy and satire. Take any, say Monty Python or Larry David's humor (Curb Your Enthusiasm, etc.), and what you get is close and sometimes absurd scrutiny of human behavior, spotlighting manners, beliefs, customs and taboos, making them the butt of jokes, as it were. Oh, you betcha.

Today's Rune: Joy. Also, A salute to the Obama-Biden victory one year ago!

El Día de los Muertos II

"The Grown-Ups," the latest episode of AMC's Mad Men, hits the mark dead on. Not only do we see responses to the developments in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and in the days afterward; we also see it as a threshold moment for television, and for television news, and for the people watching.

This is the first episode of Mad Men that intersects with my own memories. Because even though I was not even three years old, everyone around me must have emanated such high emotion that I couldn't fail to remember it. Two fragments have stuck with me in particular ever since. In the first, I'm praying with my Mom for the President's life. Everything else comes to a halt. Clearly, my mother's responses say to me, THIS IS A VERY SERIOUS MATTER. And I vaguely do understand the idea of President as Leader. In the second memory fragment, I'm watching the funeral procession (days later) on TV. I feel a connection with John-John because he is only a little bit older than I am, that is obvious; and it is very sad. Horses, carriage, coffin, people walking. Vaguely remember other people being around me, also rapt in the moment.

Either before during or after this time, I believed in ghosts, goblins and witches -- actually saw them, presumably in dreams. I remember feeling strongly that I must pray for everyone I knew before I went to sleep, worried about their safety and well-being. I remember stories read to me before or after from a series of books including fables, legends and myths. But where those stories fit in actual chronology, I have no idea other than it was all before we moved to the Chicago area, when I was five.

For those old enough at the time, what do you remember about the JFK assassination?

Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).

All Hallows: First Day of the Dead

To the departed and the fallen: Gone but not forgotten.

Also got to see Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others / Das Leben der Anderen (2006), about life in the DDR (East Germany) in the mid-80s, and ending in the 90s, after reunification. I liked it. Got to venture behind the Iron Curtain around the time the movie begins, see East Berlin and Dresden. Strange to think how fast everything has changed since then: Gorbachev, Chernobyl, Glasnost, Perestroika, Soviet pullout of Afghanistan, fall of the Wall, Der Deutsche Einheit, and now German units participating in Afghanistan, fighting some of the same people the Soviets did. Who would've dreamed how things have turned out? Sometimes we forget that. We mustn't.

Today's Rune: Strength.