Riding the Dryers

My memories do not rush at me as a flood., and I do not drown in them. A particular memory may be inspired by an event— a stimulation to one of my senses—and they may be somehow, even distantly connected to it. My memories start in the body and then the narrative appears constructed as a film on a cinema screen. I’m trying to understand whence this one derived. Maybe I was folding laundry.

        At college I had a room on the second floor of the fraternity house. I belonged to that brethren whose odd assortment of members consisted of Jews, social misfits, physics majors and other eccentrics. I uften spent a great deal of time studying at my desk or on the bed in my room: I was an English major and often had a great deal to read and prepare each week: novels, plays and poems. And for every class a paper was assigned. I was learning to write scholarly papers and my waste basket was filled with yellow legal pad paper. And I was very happy, in fact.

            Downstairs, before the television in the common room there were always fraternity members lounging on the couch and chairs drinking coca-colas and Dr. Peppers and not being overly concerned with the academic aspects of college. But we were all somehow “fraternal brothers” and I enjoyed their company and their repartee. They were fun and I took breaks down there if not in front of the television then in the adjoining dining area in a chair at the table drinking coffee or tea with anyone else enjoying the time and space. 

            There I could be found one late evening—maybe I was writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter or perhaps on Crime and Punishment or Lord Jim.  Or I might have been enrolled in Dr. Wise’s Shakespeare class and was therefore finishing one of the sixteen assigned plays and various sonnets. T took me about four hours to read each play and was up late (I usually went to bed earlier than the couch crowd) preparing for class. The doorbell rang and we were not a little perplexed, though unconcerned—who might be troubled to request entrance. Usually, regular residents just walked in undisturbed: physics and chemistry majors returning from the laboratories and humanities majors having left the shuttering library. Some were returning from walking their women friends back to the dorm rooms: there was on campus a curfew for both men and women but, of course, a stricter hour for the women and of course, if you wanted a kiss (I would have loved one!) then walking your date home was de rigeur. Women were not permitted beyond the social area on the first floor. and there was to be no cohabitation in the dorm section of the residence! This was, after all, a Lutheran affiliated college with a somewhat strict moral code—and the House Mother would not refrain from reporting infractions of the rules.

            Anyway, answering the knock on the door, a few but not all of us moved toward the door and opened it to whoever sought entrance. Standing outside were two young men dressed in dungarees, t-shirts and cloth winter coats—this in the era prior to the arrivals of North Face, Columbia, and Patagonia, etc. outerwear. I think that at the time I didn’t even know L.L.Bean existed. When I refer to them as young men I mean college-aged individuals such as we were. And they sheepishly smiled and said they were in search of the perfect dryer and might they attempt a spin in ours. “What?” Well, they would like to take a ride in our clothes dryer: they had the requisite quarters for the machine. Could they try a tumble in our clothes dryer. Well, why not? We showed them down to the laundry room where three washers and two dryers sat waiting. There might even have been someone down there actually doing their laundry, but at the moment the dryers were available. 

            The two males took off their winter coats and their shoes and opened the doors to the dryer. Maybe they looked about inside though I could not understand for what they might be looking. They each handed to someone near a quarter and requested that after they had climbed inside the machine would he be so kind as to deposit the quarter and shut the door to the dryer. There must have been communicated some means to stop the ride when they’d had enough, and then when safety had been arranged (?) they eagerly (!) climbed in and kneeling on the floor of the tumbler and looking out through the glass pane on the dryer’s door, they nodded their readiness to begin the test. The quarters were deposited and the dryer began to spin. They withstood the heated tumble for about thirty seconds or so, maybe they endured for even forty-five seconds, and then they voiced their safe word or motioned the signal and the door of the dryer was opened and dryer spun to a halt and the fellows climbed out. I don’t remember their evaluation of our dryers, but they thanked us for the ride, accepted our offer of Cokes or Dr. Peppers and headed out the door and down the block to the next set of dryers.

            The memory makes me smile. There was a freedom in their request and a pleasure in accepting and accommodating it. The world and my life has changed and now my dryer accepts no quarters and is too small to fit a grown body even if someone were to request a ride.

 

At the Movies

He asked what attracted me to the cinema. A beginning response:

    Since I had been in my 20s, now more than fifty years in my past, the movie theater was my happy place. Whatever was wrong with myself or the world, entering the darkened space of the cinema relieved my anxieties. There had been times when the only relief I could find was in wine and drugs, but I discovered that in the movie theaters I could find a peace all by myself. At the movies I enjoyed not a temporary escape but an experience with something in which my trained critical sense could be engaged. Unlike in the museums or libraries where I tended to grow quickly tired, in the movies I felt alert and absorbed. I remember once walking out of a theater with my father and as I talked about the film he turned to look at me and frustratingly said, “All I want from the movie is to have a good time.” And I answered him: “Me too, but thinking about and analyzing the film is part of my pleasure.” In New York City I lived within walking distance of twelve movie theaters that often played different films, and there was always the subway that could deliver me to the art-house venues in Greenwich Village. At times I would venture on the crosstown M96 or M86 bus to a theater that was situated on the Upper East Side. In the movie theaters my anxieties would for the length of the film fade, and I would find some peace and, even in a noisy film, ironically enjoy a variety of quiet I experienced nowhere else.  There were times when after a particularly stressful week I would come home, run my six-mile course around Central Park, shower, and prepare on some whole grain bread a cheese sandwich (or two!), fill a small plastic baggie with potato chips and include a chocolate cookie or two; and place them carefully in my backpack with a plastic bottle of water and head around the corner to the Thalia on 95^th Street right off Broadway where I could sit in the quiet dark and enjoy my dinner and a double feature of classic films. Ironically, the seats in the Thalia were placed in an irregular manner. Rather than the seats that rose behind those in front making undisturbed viewing possible, at the Thalia the seats in the row behind were placed in a reverse incline: the row in front of me was higher than the row in which I sat.  Sometimes this created some difficulty when a tall person occupied the seat in front of me, but the screenings I attended were rarely sold out and there was always another seat if I was constrained to move. The lights would dim and, the theater would darken, and as the screen filled, I opened my backpack, took out my dinner and spent a peaceful several hours in the theater.

The Thalia is the theater in front of which stood Woody Allen in Annie Hall waiting impatiently for Diane Keaton to arrive in a taxi. She was a few minutes late and so he wouldn’t purchase tickets for The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary about the collaboration between the French and the Nazis, because he would not enter a theater after the film had already begun. I suspect he was wary of entering the theater even during the pre-film minutes or even during the previews! I had at some point screened that documentary—not at the Thalia—and was not terribly anxious to see it again. I sympathized with Annie, but I also understood Alvy’s hesitancy to enter the movie theater even a bit late. 

There is a ritual attached to my attendance at the movies: I always arrive early and find my seat. Arriving mid-day for a show when the theater is sparsely attended, I would choose a center seat in the row in the center of the theater and settle in uncrowded and comfortably alone. At a later showing, usually post 4:00pm, I would opt for an aisle seat. I desired the availability of a quick exit at film’s end, and I might need a trip to the bathroom (my least favorite option) during the film. I would purchase no popcorn because the paper bags create too much disturbing noise and the clatter of chewing is so distracting. When I was much younger a bar of banana flavored Turkish taffy would satisfy, but I would smack it and crack it before anything occurred on the screen. But post-childhood and now, sitting peacefully alone (sometimes even when I was accompanied), I stare at the blank screen for a time. I relax and feel my anxieties melt away. These days before even the previews flash on the screen there happens a great amount of commerce up there: advertisements for goods and services, attended by overly loud voice-overs and music. Games, advertisements, more games, flash on the screen, anything to keep movie goers amused as if they had to be forever occupied! Quiet seems anathema and I miss the silence of the theater before the show begins. I am not interested in anything that goes on up there.  Usually I had carried reading materials, but today the constant and loud presentations on the screen disturbs and distracts my focus. I sit and try to shut out the noise. Ah, but then, at last, the previews begin to announce what is coming next to the big screen! I have always enjoyed the previews though of late very few of the previewed films seem to interest me. Previews are about anticipation that sometimes exceeds the actual film event. But like an aperitif before dinner, the previews whet my appetite for the film.

It was in those darkened rooms that I experienced peace. Even if the film, like The Sorrow and the Pity, was disturbing, (and I have seen many troubling films) my anxieties were for a time held at bay by the film, and I felt safe. The world remained out there but, ah, I remained untroubled in here. The movie theater was where I could sit alone in the dark and be not afraid. There were no demons in there, though sometimes a film portrayed them. But I knew that those demons were not in me and were contained by the nature of film. I remember once reading that the experience of the cinema was like the experience of the dream: viewed in the dark, while alone, with images appearing on the screen for my viewing and interpretation. Even sometimes for my delight. Like a dream the images appear without my effort or my control.

I go to the movies to be away from the world. Sometimes from the movies I find I can return to the world again.

Justice, Justice

This is primary season and the newspapers are filled with advice on what and how I should watch as the results are tabulated. Sometimes they even have recommendations for whom to vote. But regardless of who wins I know that the November vote will change nothing. We live in a time of political criminality. Politicians lie and cheat. Representative Liz Cheney, not a terribly nice person at all (ask her gay sister), has said of Kevin McCarthy, “He is embracing those in our party who are antisemitic. He is embracing those in our party who are white nationalists. He is lying about what happened on Jan. 6. And he’s turned his back on the Constitution.” Yet McCarthy will be elected by his Republican conspirators to be Speaker of the House should the tragedy of their ascension in the Fall occur. He is not alone in his hate, his lies, his animus: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Louis Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Ted Cruz. And the rest of the horde who voted not to certify the election results even after the mob invaded the Capitol and threatened the lives of senators and representatives and who advocated hanging the Vice-President. All of this organized and directed by Donald Trump, the absolute worst and most dangerous President in United States history whose Big Lie that the election victory was stolen from him has continued to be broadcast and supported by the politicians. The pundits say that we live in a time organized by the cult of personality: that personality being that of Trump. Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times, “It’s mind-boggling that so many people still embrace Trump when it’s so plain that he cares only about himself.” But perhaps, I think, it is not so mind-boggling that he is still supported by his crude base: I think we do not live amongst good people, least of all politicians. It is mind-boggling that so many people—millions—still adhere to Trump’s deceitful narrative and to his evil character and heinous intentions. 

In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Nice and the Good, Octavian Gray comments to John Ducane, his friend and colleague, “Politicians aren’t concerned with justice being done, they’re concerned with justice seeming to be done as a result of their keen-eyed vigilance.” For politicians (of either party finally) governing is all about appearance, but, in fact, the politician’s motivations are self-serving. They claim to pursue justice, but it is only the appearance of that pursuit that motivates them: what they pursue is privilege and re-election. Ducane suggests that whatever justice might be it is not what results from the speeches or acts of politicians who advertise their concern with justice. What occurs in our Congress is the enactment of self-serving acts of men and women. Politicians purport to act in the cause of justice but what they really do when they legislate is to display their egocentrism. What they are concerned with is not the good but what best serves their image and themselves—well, which perhaps is a redundancy! Politicians are their image.  

I am inclined to accept Gray’s comments in The Nice and the Good: politicians aren’t good, some of them are not even nice. Politicians are the damned. Octavian Gray again: “To be damned is for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting, agonizing preoccupation with self.” Others do not really exist for politicians though they espouse sympathies for their constituents. But look at the responses to the more recent mass killings in Buffalo and Uvalde. Lauren Boebert rants that they (the Democrats) want to eliminate the rights of the second amendment (already an inaccurate remark about an already contentiously disputed meaning of the amendment). But it wasn’t her child who was murdered. 

But then what is “good?” Willy Kost, a character in The Nice and the Good and a survivor of a concentration camp who lives now on the Gray property on a pension from the German government suggests that the good might be simply “a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” The good is not selfless—I think that would be form of martyrdom—but perhaps the good might be thought of as a state of consciousness in which one could be open to hear others. Not to claim to understand them because that would be to essentialize, but to to listen with a concern for what is spoken. To forgo self-interest. To abjure lies and deception. To care not for party but for country. 

We live in a very dangerous time.

 

 

 

Some thoughts on the present war in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has appeared (perhaps rightly) on the front page of the New York Times for the past three months, well, at least since the Russian invasion on February 24^th. Before that date there were daily indications and warnings that the Russians had begun to assemble troops along the border in anticipation of invading Ukraine. They did so on February 24 and the two countries have been at war since. Much of the Western powers have joined the conflict by imposing sanctions on Russia and arming Ukraine. Today, 3 June, marks the 100^th day of the war and the paper reports that the Russian firepower has made gains in Ukraine’s east. There are explanations for Russia’s war aims, but few of them make much logical sense to me. Of course, power is one strong justification.         On the pages of the New York Times for these three months there has appeared photos from the war portraying the devastation inflicted on Kyiv, Kharkiv, Mariupol, and the Donbas region, displaying images of the bombed buildings; of murdered civilians lying on the streets and amid the rubble, of wounded and dying soldiers, of all the horrors we know surrounding war. War knows no boundaries and follows few rules. And it isn’t only the New York Times that reports on the war: newspapers across the United States and in the rest of the world carry news and horrific images detailing the battles in Ukraine. 

            But . . . I read in a recent article by Magda Teter in the New York Review of Books entitled, “Rehearsal for Genocide,” a review of three new books concerning events in the immediate years following the end of World War I. Specifically the books explore activities in Ukraine and Poland during those years. Connections to the present, though not the focus, is too painfully clear. Teter’s article begins, “The war in Ukraine has simultaneously forced to the surface and upended the memory of a history that had fallen into oblivion. The past, we see once more, can be reinvented and reinterpreted.” Teter argues that the reporting on the current war has reinvented and reinterpreted history, but I do not think she speaks precisely enough: in fact ,as the books under review show, events in Ukraine and Poland following World War I served as a precursor to and foundation of the Nazi murder of most of the Jews in Europe. The history the books narrate recount the massacre of Jews in Ukraine by Ukrainians!. “In Ovruch, where Jews were attacked by troops affiliated with the Ukrainian People’s Republic, one of the officers declared that he wanted to “exterminate all the Jews in the city.” Actions attempted to carry out his threat. Troops tortured hapless Jews in the streets and murdered them in their homes and business places. In Cherkasy a pogrom in May 1919 left over six hundred Jews dead even as a group of Jews, “aged nineteen to sixty,” were beaten, stripped and made to sing songs for the amusement of pedestrians. Pogroms in Dubovo and Fastiv led to the deaths of two thousand Jews who were killed outright or burned alive trapped in their homes or synagogues. In Proskuriv whole communities of Jews were wiped out in a matter of hours. In a footnote Teter writes that Proskuriv is now Khmelnytskyi “named after a Cossack hero who in 1648-1649 led an uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” during which conflict enormous numbers of Jewish citizens were massacred. I find on Wikipedia: “Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.” Indeed! In Dubovo “only twenty-six of the approximately 1,200 Jews” who had lived there in 1918 were still in town by September 1919, the rest having been murdered or cast out as refugees.

            The books reviewed by Teter argue that events in Ukraine in the years immediately following  the end of World War I prepared the way for the genocidal holocaust that occurred in Europe not 20 years subsequent. I am not saying that the tragedies that are now take place in Ukraine aren’t horrific—they are, indeed. Nor do I mean to imply that what Ukraine is now experiencing is just retribution for its complicity in the policies that finally murdered six million Jews. What I suggest is that it is criminal to falsify history by suppressing events that actually did occur; to not acknowledge that the Ukrainian slaughter of the Jews in the years 1918-21—deaths that are not even included in the death count of the Nazi attempt at a final solution had occurred; that the present-day reports of the war paint Ukraine as wholly innocent of crimes of which they are now victim. I am demanding that the participation by the Ukrainians in the murders of the Jews during the years 1918-21 must not be forgotten, concealed, and suppressed. I demand that such facts be a part of the reports now emanating from that country whose citizenry once enacted atrocities of which they now are subject. We must not forget must be part of every contemporary report of the present activities now occurring in Ukraine. Citing the texts she has reviewed, Teter writes, “In the end . . . the Nazis did most of the killing, but it was in Ukraine and Poland that they first grasped . . . ‘that the physical extermination of the Jewish population need not remain a utopian fantasy but could actually be realized.’” The media has the obligation not to erase history.

            In this country today we are pressured to not only reinvent and reinterpret history, but to bury it as well. The arguments from mostly Republican demagogues and conspiracy theorists decry the teaching of Critical Race Theory that explores the presence and effects of racism in the United States that stems from our original sin of slavery; they reject the evidence of the 1619 project that situates America’s founding not in the Revolution (1776-1783) but in the importation of enslaved Africans to this country to be bought and sold.  Historians have offered critique of these movements, but none has denied the lasting effects of slavery in the United States since 1619. This history cannot be (literally) whitewashed, buried, forgotten. The story of Ukraine and Poland in the years 1918-21 might serve as dire warning for the future of the United States.