In Solitary

As a metaphor for life, this piece of foliage isn't bad ...

My mind is engraved with an image from one of the low points in my life, one I will never forget. It comes from the midst of the kind of troubled adolescence that often breeds writers, and which we tend to write about with such gusto it almost seems like bragging.

My parents were divorced (a common situation now, less common back then) and I spent each Saturday with my father. Saturdays were like little vacations from the tedium and daily horror of life at home with my mother and sister. I won't go into why it was like that; perhaps another time. To get some idea, read The Glass Menagerie, or maybe The Sound and the Fury.

Suffice to say that the end of Saturday was always a time of emotional crash. I felt like a prisoner being returned to his cell after being allowed a day outdoors, back from the sunshine into solitary confinement. On one particular evening, sunk deep into this mood, I sat in the car during the homeward bound drive, my head leaning on the glass beside me, watching the empty fields and pine woods pass as the sun set behind them. It was that time of day when the afterglow is fading and the sky is deep purple flecked with only the brightest stars.

My gaze happened to fix on a single small tree as it drifted past, silhouetted against that cosmic backdrop. In an instant the tree and I bonded, becoming representations of one another -- the tree saddened to be heading back home, and me standing forlornly on my own at the foot of a vast and uncaring universe.

This image struck me so powerfully that I later made a painting of the tree (I thought of myself as a painter back then) to commemorate the moment, working only from memory and trying to capture the frail shape set against the color of that precise moment in the history of the sky. I know I succeeded to a degree, because everyone who ever saw the painting thought it "sad" or somehow more vaguely disturbing, though I now see it as almost comically maudlin.

So, time passed. I grew up and got a life. My father died. I bought a house and planted trees in the yard. I started a business and got married. My mother died. I sold the business, got divorced, got married again. Over the years many people came into my life, hundreds of friends and strangers, girlfriends, coworkers, clients, vendors, fellow travelers of all sorts, and now an extended family including even grandchildren.

I've raised a few cats, too, and each morning and evening I sit outside with them watching them eat as the sun rises, then sets, and the seasons change. This activity is called by the Japanese, "watching the bamboo grow."

One evening I looked up and was startled to see that one of the trees I planted almost 30 years ago, a Jamaican dogwood, has reared itself up against the evening sky in a shape that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one in my painting, the same one still emblazoned on my brain after all these years. But there is one difference. The tree is now part of my own home. And it is surrounded by others -- friends, if you will -- that keep it company and jostle with it for the attentions of the sun.

There is a "ponytail" cycad, the same one that used to live in a small pot when I had an apartment, and which I planted in the yard when I bought the house, and which now towers twelve feet in the air. There is a huge royal poinciana that I planted after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and which has already spread its canopy over most of the back yard. And there are all the other shrubs and palms I have tended, or that simply planted themselves, or were planted by the birds and squirrels that frequent the place.

My cats are not alone here. The place teems with life. Besides the squirrels there have been visits by possums and raccoons, giant toads, garden snakes, and swarms of small geckos and lizards. The common blue jays, cardinals, and mourning doves are joined by daily overflights of wild parrots, a large hawk, and others. Once a peacock even wandered in through the gate, temporarily lost from its home some blocks away.

In similar fashion my life has been peopled by all its friends and strangers, and has grown lush in habitat for thoughts and feelings, efforts and accomplishments, successes and failures. Like the tree, I now stand rooted in the garden of my own devising. I have born fruit, and when the time comes will wither and pass on. But one thing I am not, and will never be, is alone.

Just a comforting thought to send back in time to that distant teen I used to be.

Waiting for Time to Come

Why God is like an alien, and when we will arrive at the promised land ...

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All things, it used to be said, will come to those who wait. That may have been a common attitude in Biblical or medieval times, but it is rather rare in this present age of speed and continual change. Now we are much more likely to go out and get what we want when we want it -- or better yet, place an order online and expect next day delivery by FedEx. Yet even now there are times when we have no choice but to wait.

One example? How about contacting the nearest race of alien beings in our galactic neighborhood. As you may have noticed, we haven't heard from any of them yet, unless you believe in Roswell, and the most likely reason for that is the huge length of time it takes for any information to travel between the stars.

Instead of wondering why no one has called yet, we only have to turn the question around. Why haven't we called them? Our species has only become capable of sending interstellar signals within the past hundred years -- after spending ten millennia gradually acquiring the technology to do so. And even now we are only broadcasting by accident, because our radio and TV signals just happen to go out in all directions. We have yet to organize a methodical project to aim a transmission at specific nearby stars, something that might make it easier for someone to notice us.

Our assumption is that we are much more likely to pick up signals from civilizations far more advanced than ours, because it would be so unlikely that any other planets in the vicinity just happened to come of age at the exact same time as ours. And so we are spending our time listening, and so far in vain.

But what if our nearest neighbors are more than 50 light years away? By galactic standards that's just up the road, but it still takes light or radio or any other kind of electromagnetic waves 50 years to get there, and another 50 to come back. Our neighbors may be listening to us right now, but from their point of view Mr. Marconi is still assembling his wireless and we have not invented TV yet, much less radio telescopes.

Or someone may be replying to us right now, but it will take another 50 years before we receive the answer. In Carl Sagan's novel, Contact, he imagined that the aliens' reply contained a copy of our first TV broadcast -- Adolf Hitler declaring the 1936 Olympic Games open. How's that for a greeting? Maybe if we get to try it again we could be a bit more selective in our choice of material. (There was another old cartoon gag where the aliens threatened to destroy us if we did not stop broadcasting reruns of horrible situation comedies.)

The point is that the universe, if seen as a huge calculating machine, is griding its gears as fast as it can. We don't know what the answer will be, or if the "answer" is simply the state of everything at any given moment. But some things just take a certain amount of time, and there is nothing we can do about it.

All this was going through my head recently when I turned to consider social and political change in the same perspective. I may have also been influenced by contemplating the 10,000 year clock proposed by the Long Now Foundation, and what it would mean to take a long view of our future.

Suppose we could go back 150 years and speak to two Americans in the year 1859 as national conflict was building toward the Civil War. One of them is a slave yearning for freedom, another an abolitionist working toward that cause. Suppose we told them, with the benefit of our hindsight, that their wishes would come true -- that, in fact, a century and a half later, an African-American would preside over the White House.

But then, as they jump for joy at the good news, we hasten to add, "But wait, first you will have to go through the bloodiest war yet fought, with hundreds of thousands of casualties ... You will have to endure the sorrow of losing your President to an assassin... The slaves will be freed and granted the vote, but a backlash will take it from them again and subject them to many decades of cruel oppression as second-class citizens ... A century later you will lose yet another President to an assassin, as well as the most eloquent spokesman for the cause of civil liberties, and even then more decades will pass before the true promise of freedom and equality even begins to be fulfilled."

Sobered by this, our imaginary ancestors might be expected to become philosophical about it. No doubt they would be glad to know that success would come, regardless of price, no matter the effort required and the suffering to be endured. "As God wills it," says the abolitionist. "He moves in mysterious ways," agrees the slave. And they both go back to their work.

And what of us? It often seems that no matter how hard we try we are unable to find solutions to our problems, or to find a way to settle our disputes without war. But what if we are already doing as much as we can, and it will just take time for the collective effort to bear fruit? Could it be that our prayers for peace and all of our hopes and dreams of a more perfect world are being answered right now? Can we imagine that a personal God has heard us and is sending a solution right now at the speed of light, but it will just take awhile to get here?

Suppose we knew that the perfect peaceable kingdom was only as far from us in the future as the Middle Ages are in the past? What if we knew we would get there eventually, regardless of what global catastrophes we might have to endure along the way? What if what we are asking is just so huge and complex, with so many changes to make and conflicts to play out, that the fastest it can possibly happen is a thousand years?

What if these things, like the signals from the stars, just take time?

Revelations, and More

The Alvin Ailey Company kicks up some spirit ...

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Let me say first that I don't dance myself, personally. I have in fact a long history of not-dancing, stretching all the way back to elementary school when they tried to teach us a wooden fox-trot in Phys Ed class. Not even the advent of rock and roll got me moving, despite some abortive practice sessions in a sort of alley between portable school buildings. Perhaps the closest I have come was participating in some "creative movement" classes with local dance diva and gestalt therapist Poldi Orlando.

However, my own ineptitude only increases my appreciation of those to whom bodily movement is an expressive language that surpasses words and music. For example, when is the last time you can remember the audience giving a standing ovation at the intermission in a performance of anything? That's one measure of how much we were pleased by last weekend's performance of the Alvin Ailey Company at the Ziff Opera House in Miami.

The work that produced this enthusiasm was not even one of Ailey's own pieces but rather Festa Barocca (2008), choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti. There was plenty of meat for the whole cast to get its teeth into, as the various movements, all set to the music of Handel, progressed from ensemble to solos and duets and mixed pairs.

It was a visual feast as well, with gem-like colors and dramatic but understated lighting. Everyone was in skirts, and let me just add that it takes a real man to wear one with the panache exhibited by these guys. On the men the style evoked the sarongs favored in the South Seas, and allowed them to experiment with costume manipulations normally reserved for prima donnas.

After the aforementioned standing "O" and a pause to stretch, the program resumed with Solo (1997) by Hans Van Manen. Interestingly, this piece was danced in turn by three of the men despite the name. It also provided some light, almost comedic, relief as the dancers experimented with a variety of ways of entering and leaving the stage.

The finale was reserved for Ailey's landmark work, Revelations (1960). This piece, which has received the honor of a permanent endowment for its continued performance, manages to encapsulate the entire history of the African diaspora. From the opening tableaux, in which the wing-like arm motions of the dancers manage to evoke both ocean waves and the flight of the spirit, it evolves through suffering and sin to joy and redemption.

I also noted how the dancers were using even their fingers to communicate with us -- a dozen dancers, two dozen hands, one hundred and twenty fingers all splayed and individually visible.

At the end, after another ovation got us to our feet again, the cast went into a reprise of the final number, "Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham," this time with our clapping added to keep the time. I feel sure the opera house has never rocked like this to Puccini. Somebody say Amen!