IN MEMORIAM: PRIVATE SERVICE & PUBLIC MOURNING

Meaningful, one life will be remembered today and another has departed from this earth. One man had the gift of love: for his family, friends, community, country. The other had the gift of love: for his family, friends, and the world.

My dear older friend, Goodwin Graham, viewed humanity as a member of “The Greatest Generation,” whereas Muhammad Ali viewed our global community with his lens as “The Greatest.” To some veterans, Ali attacking his country’s policies was considered unpatriotic, but I believe Mr. Graham admired Mr. Ali, the athlete, dispensing with the politics. And that will be Muhammad Ali’s legacy, providing the glue that has helped ameliorate the sports world so that everyone, no matter their race, creed or country of origin would have the right to participate in athletics.

 Is the sports system perfect, today? No, and neither were these men. However, Mr. Graham heralded the future by learning from the past. When I met him, his wife had been admitted to a nursing home due to dementia, yet “Gee,” as family and friends called him, rose above his sadness to welcome a new friend with warmth and graciousness. He treated me like family and we’d often share a drink, a laugh and a friendly rivalry (He, New England Patriots; I, New York Giants—don’t despair Cape Cod readers, I’ve shed my New York favoritism).  He may have seen me as an anomaly regarding my life choices but he never judged or patronized me because I saw the world through a different lens. Gee’s smile overcame any barrier because his heart was filled with love.

Once an athlete himself, Gee admired self-discipline, perseverance and inner strength. He shared his opinions without reservation, but preferred anonymity, a modest life beneath the radar. In contrast, Muhammad Ali shared similar attributes via a public platform.  His choice to use his voice before, during, and after his legendary career, came from necessity, not just a desire for the limelight. Having been surrounded by bigotry, marginalized, dismissed, unjustly disgraced for declaring himself as a consciousness objector during the Vietnam war, Mr. Ali fought his way to the top and kept on scrapping.

A veteran of the Pacific theater during World War II, gunners mate, Goodwin Graham also had a fighting spirit until his death at the age of 91 on April 6^th this year. Despite serious medical setbacks and conditions, he worked his garden, went fishing, enjoyed the company of his fellow vets and other peers, and never stopped keeping busy, until forced to during the last few years.

Mohammad Ali had been compelled to stop boxing due to, then undisclosed, Parkinson’s Disease. And yet the renowned advocate for racial equality, social justice; world peace, no matter the odds, never backpedaled his opinions. His rapid-fire oratory may have slowed, but he didn’t curtail his verbal punches.

Both men will be remembered today. Goodwin Graham by a small circle of friends, family with reverence for his past, joy for how he lived, and love for the man who touched those who knew him. Mohammad Ali’s life will be revered, celebrated, and admired as it had when he lived and will be after he died. For me, neither man will be forgotten.

"THE CAPE COD WAY"

During an unexpected trip in an ambulance to the hospital, an EMT asked if I'd had any stressors in my life: I acknowledged "man trouble" and he responded: "That's the Cape Cod way!" In the midst of gasping for air, I couldn't help but chuckle. Later, when coherent and after time to ponder the EMT's comment, I felt figuratively betrayed, as if the single, male population had conspired to avoid commitment, compromise and most importantly companionship. What is love without these components?

I must preface the following comments with: a) I admire many men and am not bitter, just seasoned; b) I'm NOT a technophobe, and c) I have a life.

Back to basics: increasingly adult men of all ages, creeds, races, shapes and sizes who remain single after divorce, or by choice, for examples, do so for a reason. I tried to find excuses for these confirmed bachelors but then I recalled modern women often choose autonomy. Why should empowered women who fight for equality and independence deny single men that choice?

Because these same men want it all; hence, the now cliched label, "friends with benefits, or avoiding responsibility for another human being while getting sex and meeting once a week to do an activity together. Sans the conjugal aspect, in this rapid-fire world we live in--Type As abound here, too--who has time for human contact? Many, friends for pleasure and necessity, work or volunteer more hours in the day than not.

More so, some single men call sharing one's feelings "drama," but they don't hesitate to complain about their day, lives, stress, troubles on a regular basis, saying they have a right to be angry. Many women have learned, at least I have, that today's companionship means to share experiences, leaving "feelings" on the back burner, to our detriment. In contrast, albeit reluctantly, the male community has begun to accept women whipping out our fishing rods or becoming involved in activism and politics with the proviso that we "behave," i.e. remain quiet as they ramble. Then, men attempt to stifle us when we want the floor.

Have women enabled these separate but equal men who attempt to dictate how relationships should or shouldn't be? With the influx of technology, most of which has been invented by men (women have been involved but we still see little coverage) such as e-mail, texting, streaming, smart phones which show picture perfect video, and so on, men have more incentive to retreat into their "man caves," and detach from daily intimacy. In fact, they must be inwardly celebrating that they no longer need to pick up a phone and call their girlfriends, partners or wives and can use multi-media as an excuse not to communicate.

If a man has an eclectic taste in humor and appreciates wit, I'm engaged. Surprisingly, I found "Deadpool"  hilarious, and yet, I appreciate sophisticated wit, like that of Jane Austen's stories or Oscar Wilde."Hangover" and "Neighbors" reinforce vulgar behavior; I admit humor has always been subjective, but compulsory? Do I have to laugh to impress when I'm disgusted?

And as women are expected to be strong, no matter the obstacle, does that signify that females with disabilities are, thus, weak? I've met scores of men who have little patience with women's health issues though they have their own challenges.

Per my experience, available men blame everyone, everything for their plights without taking any personal responsibility, without making any effort to improve their lives. Yes, there are women on Cape who also fall into this habit. Expressing discontent is human. Spreading discontent without possible solutions, destructive.

Without bringing in a political agenda this week (read last week's blog or earlier commentary if curious), Cape Cod, in fact, is a microcosm of mainstream America. More people would rather be entertained, than informed. That's their freedom, to choose, and to their detriment, to avoid.

Having lived in an island community more than once, Singapore in particular, I am not surprised by the EMT's remark. He'd be baffled if I told him running from personal commitments is NOT "The Cape Cod Way." It's the American way.

POLITICS AND LITERATURE: MILAN KUNDERA'S "IMMORTALITY"

A man longs to be immortal, and one day the camera will show us a mouth contorted in a pathetic grimace--the only thing we will remember about him, the only thing that will remain as a parabola of his entire life.

(Milan Kundera, Immortality,1990)*

Kundera wrote his philosophical manifesto almost thirty years ago but his observations about politics reverberate today (he had moved to Paris by the time he wrote Immortality). He recognizes the show-biz of politics. Kundera understands that politics and entertainment have been and would be forever linked. Moreover, those who follow our current American circus could link  the "man," referenced above, to today's politico, Donald Trump. 

Trump has shown his narcissistic ambition for immortality as far back as the 1980s. Mr. Trump built his tower on Fifth Avenue, New York City in 1983, and included an enormous stamp on the tower's facade with his last name: TRUMP TOWER. That act, began his never-ending search for everlasting fame, and he recognized how to do it. 

The politician is dependent on the journalist. But on whom are the journalists dependent? On those who pay them. And those who pay them are the advertising agencies that buy space from newspapers and time from radio and TV  stations.

Kundera goes on to argue that ideology has become "imagology": 

What matter is the word finally lets us put under one roof something that goes by many names: advertising agencies; political campaign managers; designers who devise the shape of everything...; fashion stylists; barbers; show-business stars dictating the norms of physical beauty that all branches of imagology obey.

Sound familiar? Donald Trump and his staff, children apparently understood/understand this neologism, "imagology" (Kundera's term) to the point of mastery. Trump grew up learning the business from his father, who left the son his empire, giving Donald Trump a platform for Donald to exercise his innate and learned media savvy. 

Tabloid newspapers feed off any crumbs thrown at them by wily publicists so that often the stories, embellished or not, are secondary to the persona. Trump recognized this from the beginning of his real estate career. And "the Donald" discovered every trick of the trade from New York dailies such as The New York Post and The New York Daily News.

What's more, Trump knows how to play to the public. For example, Internet providers, television producers and newspaper editors have ensured that public opinion polls are as pervasive as gobs of gum on city streets. No matter how hard we try to avoid them, these polls grab our attention. Kundera sensed this phenomena would explode:

Public opinion polls are the critical instrument of the imagology's power, because they enable the imagology to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards the people with questions...And since for contemporary man reality is a continent visited less and less often and besides, justifiably disliked, the findings of polls have become a higher power of reality, or to put it differently: they have become the truth.

Friends and like-wise thinking acquaintances shake their heads in disbelief: how could Donald Trump have progressed this far with his campaign to become the presumptive GOP candidate? He gets it. Trump has played to the opinion polls, to those who believe what they see instead of learning what isn't there. Many of Donald supporters watch reality shows, read tabloid newspapers, listen to bombastic, superficial talk shows and assimilate what they believe is "the truth" when in fact, they're being manipulated. In essence, they're being controlled by puppeteers with invisible strings.

Lastly, I have read Milan Kundera's words again and again, trying to grasp how he could so perspicaciously explain our present electoral chaos from his author's chair in 1980s Paris? Well, you will need to read Kundera's novel to answer that question. Suffice it to say that I wish Kundera would win the Nobel Prize for Literature next year; just on the basis of his uncanny awareness of the political machine, which like a master's template, could be applied to any country's ideology and propaganda (contemporary and historical) as well as its politicians. 

*Written in Czech and translated to English.

A WRITER'S DISCOVERY: WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?

Mother wrote, in English, a Greek play in perfect meter when she was twelve years old. The play, lost in storage during the Depression, disappeared into Prometheus' fire, but the spark remained. She couldn't continue school in New York City but never lost her pride in her accomplishment or her love of writing.

I'd forgotten that as a child I'd written plays about romance: melodrama coupled with a withdrawn girl's imaginings about what love could be, despite life's obstacles. Yet, years followed and I forgot my attempts, and with those years my confidence waned. By the time I reached high school, I had lots of imagination but little grammatical form to write a simple essay. Only with the dogged persistence of my beloved English teacher did I eventually regain some coherence, clarity and structure. The child playwright, however, had disappeared.

Life experience, as the pundits often pontificate, taught me how to see the world with depth and perception. Graduate school helped me find my inner voice. And the creative juices brimming over here, on the Cape, in the land, in the sea as well as past voices and surging artistic energy which any writer can't help but embrace, all have helped me rediscover my muse. What I didn't anticipate? That I'd find my mother's words from among her ashes, a play's burnt embers floating in the sky.

Like Mom, I have always loved mythology. Since arriving on the Cape, I've experimented with playwriting using universal themes steeped in classical canon, especially social justice and feminism. For anyone who has read the Greek classics: The Iliad, The Odyssey by Homer or more powerfully, many of Euripides' works, e.g. Hecuba or The Trojan Women can find modern-day issues that speak to us. I remembered, also, that I read plays from high school and beyond, for pure pleasure.

Then, a synthesis began. My years seeing theatre in New York and elsewhere; reading Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen, Hellman, O'Neill, Williams, Stoppard and so on; acting in high school; working at theaters behind-the-scenes, all led to what I've become, for the moment at least: a dramatist. I'm exploring territory my mother had delved into a generation before: that young girl who had such high hopes for a future as a playwright. I may not have my late mother's gift for meter. I do have her daring. So, when my, albeit ten minute, play is produced the first weekend in June, along with other dramatists' for the Provincetown Theater's Playwright Festival, I will hold stand proud if for no other reason than to salute my mother.

SHAKESPEARE, PRINCE & EARTH DAY: WHAT DO THEY HAVE IN COMMON?

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. 

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

--Hamlet, Act I, v

Oft quoted these last few days, "Goodnight, sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest." (Hamlet, Act Vi, ii) in reference to the sudden, tragic death of the multi-talented musician, Prince. I'd forgotten, after I heard the sad news, that today, April 23, 2016, marks the 400 year anniversary of Shakespeare's death. On top of these stories, we celebrated Earth Day yesterday. A lot to process, three significant events. Past, present and future tied to life, tied to death. 

Shakespeare's talent embodied the Renaissance persona: how he learned from the past, acknowledged the present and laid the ground-work for the future. He saw life in layers: "If you can mock a leek, you can eat a leek." (Fluellen, Henry V, Act V, i)  Shakespeare, the humanist, appealed to and was beloved by all strata during his day and to this day; the musician, albeit figuratively, and as a music enthusiast in many of his plays; the environmentalist, "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." (Troilus and Cressida, Act III, iii) whose work was grounded in capricious Mother Nature.

Purists may balk at putting Prince, the performer, in the same sentence as Shakespeare (or closet racists for that matter), but the self-taught, (a la Shakespeare), articulate (did you ever hear him interviewed?) Prince has been rightly heralded as a creative genius. He played at least twelve instruments, wrote songs that can't be easily categorized, blues, funk, gospel, pop, soul, rock, which went on to become anthems. He lived a life in the limelight but his personal journey remains mysterious. The sprawling recording studio/mansion he left behind resembles a warehouse; however, I'd bet he would've described it as modernist architecture with minimalist landscaping. Prince rattled the establishment with his music and his life. But where does Earth Day come into play? 

Imagine holding Planet Earth

In the palm of your hand

With no regard for your place of birth

Or claim to any land

The only thing between us now is the truth we understand

If Planet Earth was in the palm of your hand.

These partial lyrics in Prince's song, "Planet Earth," come from the album of the same name. He won a Grammy (Best R&B vocal) for the song which clearly testifies to his concern for our environment.

Then, we have Earth Day, overshadowed by other more "headline-driven" events. Disheartening because we should be shouting to the world how our precious gift, our planet, has been squandered and needs to be mended: 

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!

To spend that shortness basely were too long,

If life did ride upon a dial's point,

Still ending at the arrival of an hour. 

(Henry IV, Part I,V, ii)

As noted by eminent scientists around the world, we are on the brink of "The Sixth Extinction," (read Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-fiction book which outlines the dire phenomenon of how the majority of species are dying off, rapidly, and what that means for future generations).  William Shakespeare understood the precariousness of all life: the optimistic cynic.

Indubitably, Prince, felt the world's love and pain; he bared his soul through his art, thus we feel his loss as he had become a messenger for humanism and environmentalism. A rebel with a cause who would, given the chance, most likely dine with the Bard and discuss the multiple talents and causes they have in common.

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Topics/themes (Environment, social justice, etc.) often alluded to in my books: Shadowwater and Dark Sea, Shadowwater II. www.shadowwater.net

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ENVIRONMENTAL AND SOCIETAL CHANGE: LOSS AND RECLAMATION

Too much news about dire omens for the future? I propose that we take a step back and see that we have an opportunity to reverse these ominous predictions. I refer to social change spurring a re-thinking of what's important.

For years scientists from NOAA and the Oceanographic Institution at Woods Hole, have described Cape Cod's shores as ever-changing due to natural erosion and that, like other seaside places on the East Coast. I think of the Cape as an ameba which changes form to suit its host environment. The problem is how do we define "environment." Humans and the land are intertwined. We are our environment.

Meanwhile, lawsuits, proposals, local, state and federal intervention have tried to reverse the sea's reclamation with only varying degrees of success. Yet human nature, firmly rooted in centuries of willfulness, moves forward without using the peripheral and long-term vision necessary to work with nature, not against it.

Most scientists, environmental experts, many politicians and a majority of Americans agree that we need to stem the use and exploration of fossil fuels to lessen climate change's impact. The extremism seen in American politics; the "push-me, pull you" tug-of-war going on between parties doesn't bode well for our country's future. These politicos and their supporters present few or no practical solutions to our most pressing problems, climate change being one of them.

Sadness has loomed large lately here on the Cape, in my community and among my friends. People re-locating inland, older friends passing, and health issues curtailing normal activities have affected us. As the older generation dies or leaves, who will be left to pick up the cause, the tattered remnants of social activism, here?

We grieve, e.g. a home being destroyed by fire and weather; drug-users senseless deaths; rising car accident statistics and cancer-stricken families, as we should. However, where is the grief for the next generation and what they may be dealing with sooner than later?

A recent opinion piece in The Cape Cod Times alluded to those who seek alternative energy sources as "neo-tribal" (an objectionable term which caught my eye meaning impractical people who want to return to the days before fossil fuels and to living off the land). This negative thinking inside their comfortable box which supports fossil fuel dependence, ignores the long-term consequences, and has brought about the threatened world we live in today. More so, such recalcitrant belief about the environment and our indigenous populations only closes the door on alternative clean energy solutions and dismisses much-needed respect for our natural world.

Evidence has emerged that a large U.S. based oil company knew of the impact on our world's climate of burning fossil fuels as early as the sixties. Is it too late to stop climate change? The pandemic of the Zika virus is already at our doorsteps and Congress is still fighting funding to prevent the virus from spreading here. I try to remain hopeful but when I read public opinions written by those who should be aware of the inevitable I begin, like so many here, to worry about the future of Cape Cod.

I don't have children. I do, however, care about children and want a better life for them as they grow older. I've become involved with activism via social media along with some direct participation because I know the innocent deserve better. And, in the midst of the grief, sometimes raw and unspeakable, some feel in the present, instead of turning inward and becoming insular, we must re-channel our anger, our sadness; our fear. That is by helping our planet and encouraging others to accept what we cannot change and change what we can.

Let this sink in: we must reclaim our country, our planet and think forward to ensure environmental change for the better. Recent reports have cited by 2100 our coastal areas here and around the world will be inundated by as much as six feet of flood waters (NYTimes NY Times March 30, 2016 ) due to melting ice caps and rising seas. Millions may lose their homes, families; their ways-of-life. A worldwide depression will be on the heads of those who refuse to accept this.

Step out of your comfort zone, deniers, and learn all you can before your most precious assets are washed away. I'll leave it to you to define your "assets."