Christian Asplund - Composer

December 22, 1955 (from Missionary Journal)

Missionary Journal
Of
Elder Charles Thomas Asplund
Address: Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
Mission: South African

Important Dates and Events

Interviewed August 1955 by Bishop R.D. Livingstone
Interviewed September 1955 by Stake President G.G. Woolley
Interviewed Sepetember 1955 by Gen. Auth. Hugh B. Brown
Farewell Testimonial at Lethbridge 2nd Ward
Mission Home: Nov. 15, 1955 to Nov. 28, 1955
Endowments: Oct. 1955, Cardston Temple
Patriarchal Blessing by C.F. Steele
Set Apart Nov. 28 by George Q. Morris
Left Salt Lake City Nov. 28 via Denver, Chicago, New York, London
Arrived Mission Headquarters Cape Town on Dec. 22, 1955

Assignments

District Date Companion
Durban Jan. 2 Elder L.P. Walker
March 20 Elder L.F. Stokes
March 28 Elder E.E. Wilford

West Rand May 13 Elder Grant Wood

East Rand August 12 Elder R.L. Nelson

MISSION OFFICE SEPT. 12 ELDER L.E. DAWL

Ordinances Performed

Date Place Name Ordinance
2/12/56 DURBAN THOMAS OWEN BAPTIZED
2/12/56 DURBAN THOMAS OWEN CONFIRMED
5/6/56 PINETOWN JOSEPH HENDRIK WILKENS BLESSED
8/26/56 BRAKPAN BROTHER SCOTT SET APART TO SUNDAY
SCHOOL SUPERINTEND.

DEC. 23, 1955 (from Missionary Journal)
Well, here I am. And here I’ve been for almost 48 hours. I don’t know why it’s so hard to find spare minutes for journalling but I feel I’d better. That way I’ll be moved to accomplish more when I realize that I must record it daily. Sometime, in the next few chapters of this volume I will have to pause an d record the events of interest since I left home. That was almost 5 weeks ago. I arrived in Cape Town yesterday morning, about 9 a.m. The night before, my companions and I had got to playing around. I guess it was nervous anticipation that kept us awake. We didn’t get to sleep until about 3 but somehow we dragged ourselves out before 7 to see Cape Town and Table Mountain from the ship. It was worth it. However, I spent most of my time standing with Potty (the 7 foot boxer) watching the pilot boat. We landed and the hassle began. fortunately as a 1st class passenger I had about half the lines to wait in, but that was enough. The dock stunk, the people were rude and the officials were penetrating. However, the customs didn’t open my bags (just Irv’s and Dale’s) and with the kind help of Elders Hubbard and Forbush we set out happily for the mission home. The Town is beautiful (descriptive, eh?) The houses are a faded yellow with red roofs and run up the slopes of the hills and mountains. The streets are modern in a narrow sort of a way, lined with flowers and shrubs. Negroes are everywhere, doing all the physical work. At the house we met Sister Newby and the fun began. Irv and Dale were very anxious about letters from their girls and expected a large pile. I was anxious, too. Were grudgingly presented with one Christmas card each. The elders were softhearted, however and it took little haggling to get the mail. I received a huge pile. We then met President Duncan and had the mission procedure explained to us. He impresses me as a spiritual and capable man, but seems to lake an impressive intellectual force which I expected. I am sure, though, that I will learn to love and respect him. In the afternoon, after lunch an d dishes, we drove Irv and Dale to their quarters with Elder Snow and Elder Milne in Goodwood. To get there we had to pass through Pinetown, the most impressive residential district I have ever see. It is rather like a park with comfortable-looking thatched and tiled roof houses. The trees and shrubbery were magnificent. A pleasant taste of South Africa. After dinner, Elder Hubbard and I ran for a bus and travelled to Pinetown to administer to a young girl. This was my first such experience. I did the annointing and felt very good about it. As we travelled to the house I noticed that Cape Town is built on sand—virginal white sand. It’s amazing the grennery they coax from it. On our return we joined in with a Sunday School Christmas party. No matter what I see or hear, it just isn’t like Christmas. After conversation and prayer, the elders (Hubbard, Jensen, Forbush, Jarman), and I settled to sleep.
At today’s dawning my cold was very uncomfortable, but I bravely arose and prepared for the day. After shave, shower and breakfast the group prepared for a visual aids conference. All of the Cape missionaries were there including Sister Paxman and Elder Hamilton. Irv and Dale arrived, sleepy and humbled, with tales of narrow beds, fleas, bi-weekly baths, 4:30 risings, candle-light study, and the like. Apparently Elder Snow is breaking them in well. The conference was wonderful. Flannel boards are used extensively in this mission and Elder Jensen gave a marvellous display of their use. The fact that I couldn’t stay awake didn’t dampen my interest. After lunch I talked with the visiting elders until I worked up the enthusiasm to write a letter home and buy a gift for the Xmas party—tomorrow, yet! And so I’m caught up. Older experiences will have to depend on memory for interpretation. They have been wonderful and I hope I can record them. Today there have been long talks with Sis. Newby and Sis. Paxman. Surely, there will be more. I received a card from Dad. It’s amazing how powerful his words are. Well here’s hoping tomorrow I can prove my consistency.

March 12/81

            This is a fresh page and a fresh resolution to write something each day.  There is a massive presumptiveness in drawing these tracks.  Actually the first bit of poetry I ever wrote was about that—cast in the metaphor of making tracks in fresh snow.  When I was so young, presumptiveness was untried and I guess I sensed that the “gods” or fates or whatever, might punish my hubris.  I’m not as worried now.

            Despite a heavy grey sky and a slip of snow, I know it’s spring.  My sap’s running.  Maybe that’s why I’ve chosen this day to embark.

            Pat expressed her concern this morning about what she would leave.  Are we so old?  Middle-aged they say—but I don’t know many 92-year-olds.  I used to think about what I might leave, but it doesn’t bear on my mind so much.  mostly it’s the kids.  And that’s another presumption I’ve surrendered too.  I used to be concerned about parents who presumed their children to be superior, gifted, special.  Now I know mine are and I’m going to enjoy the fact.  Those who don’t see it are just unfortunate.  Mark’s good humour will carry him over a lot of rough spats.  It’s exciting to see Christian’s genius spark.  Marni’s efficient goodness is like a gently massaging swirl of warm water.  Matthew tries so hard to be useful, I can take joy in the fact that he will ultimately succeed.  Emily is the total joy of an old man’s life—intelligent, generous, good humoured, affectionate.  Whatever I had to do with it—if I leave this much to the world who can complain.

            I’ve told many about my kids—friends, relatives, grandparents.  I don’t know who has listened or believed—so I’ll tell myself so I can remember and believe.

 

April [1981]

            Time rolls along, doesn’t it?  Pushing to the end of classes I push everything back.  I’m even afraid to date this entry because it marks such a negligent squandering of time.  I should write everyday.  The response on my constitutional thing has been remarkable and helps me to believe there is something I can do.  Most satisfying, I am surprised to discover, are reactions that echo back to my childhood.  An old neighbour from Lethbridge who is now living in Kingston to be near her daughter, phoned to congratulate me.  And through mother I learned that Mrs. Cleveland in Lethbridge had read the piece & phoned Aunt Fawn to see if it was me.  Now that’s a real echo.  Mrs. Cleveland lived half a block from Fawn & Clifford at the corner of 12 St. and 6^th Ave.  Her husband was a postman, but they lived in what seemed a grand style—at least in the English middle class sense.  Dinner at night.  Silver and crystal.  Napkin rings.  Oriental carpets.  I think Mrs. Cleveland and her sister must have inherited a bit.  The sister lived with them, married to a Mr. Dawson.  Now Mr. Dawson was the one.  He and his wife were childless.  He worked as a bookkeeper in St. Louis furniture store and rode the bus to work—the old #2 Route—which was the bus I rode to & from school.  I guess I was a bit like Matthew in those days—grade 3 or 4—cute, anxious to please, vulnerable.  I often got my ticket in the bottom of a crowded pocket & would plead with the bus driver to proceed until I found it—which he always let me do.  Mr. Dawson would watch my quiet search, triumphal find, and apparently took pleasure in it.  It was during the war and I also collected Player’s cigarette packages because they had pictures of warplanes on them.  It was tricky when your father didn’t smoke.  But Mr. Dawson did so he used to help me with cigarette packs and, sometimes, lost tickets.  Then he’d save a seat for me.  I would be suspicious, paranoid, if someone took after Matt like that.  But a warm friendship developed.

            What I wanted most in life at that time was a wrist watch.  One that glowed in the dark.  It was an unreasoning passion.  Mr. Dawson was amazingly patient.  Cigarette cards, birthday remembrances, candy when I was sick.  A saved seat on a crowded bus.  for two or three years—the odd dime to be put away against the price of a watch.  Everything I got was put in a jar and hidden under the grill o the cold air return under my bed.  What was needed was about $10.  I think he wanted to get it but couldn’t afford it and was wise enough to know the happiness I would have if it were my own watch.

            The latter sense may reflect human tendencies—but not mine.  I’ve always valued gifts more than things I have earned myself.  It seems a gift carries the value of the giver.  Something I have bought myself I can buy again, but the gifter may never again feel toward me the desire to gift.

            But there it ends.  One Christmas I got a watch from Santa Claus.  The crystal fell out shortly afterwards and wouldn’t stay in.  I never really got to wear the watch.  Boy, I wanted it with one of those superwide straps with plastic stitching around the edge & tooled design.  That isn’t what I got—but I loved it anyway.  It sat above the kitchen sink on the little shelf where Mom kept her rings while she washed dishes, waiting to have the crystal glued in.  And somehow it disappeared.  I think of it because it was not until my last birthday that I got my first real watch.  I bought it for myself—but I wish someone had given it to me.

            Anyway, Mr. Dawson fell ill of heart trouble.  I was entering pre-adolescence and attendant ego-absorption.  I stopped to visit Mr. Dawson a couple of times.  He was so sick and happy to see me that I thought it was embarrassing.  It was the Groucho Marx/Woody Allen syndrome.  Anyone who could like me that much must not be worth valuing.  I’ve always regretted my slight stinginess of self—there could have been such great rewards to both of us for a little natural affection.

            So Mr. Dawson died, and now these 30-plus years later, his sister-in-law phones my Aunt to tell her what a joy I was, what a loveable little boy, and what joy she takes in my success.  Maybe it doesn’t sound like it should—but it gives me the greatest satisfaction.  That funny little kid with the runny nose who could never find his bus ticket was worth something in the end.

March 16/81

            Seminar tonight with a fellow named MacCormick from Edinburgh talking about the natural law theory of a colleague named Finnis.

            Sketchily described, it was an interesting attempt to solve the natural law positivist debate by arguing the existence of a broad band of objectively observed “goods.”

            It harked me back to my days as a 20-year old newspaper reporter, wondering about the value of intellectual inquiry.  The subject was agricultural research.  In those days I felt strongly that research should be applied & valuable.  Pure research—the issue in those days was the property of soil particles—was a waste of time.  Looking back, I think I resented anything I could not understand.  Now I understand how little I am able to understand and I have a different view.

            Tomorrow is Pat’s birthday.  Now that’s something that needs little speculation.  How do you treat a woman ^correctly? right?  It would be nice to speculate about what is good and bad, and ignore the real issue of living with someone successfully.  I can spend a lot of time figuring out what’s good, I can even figure out why and how I should teach such goods—but raising children with some sense of true value—living with them successfully, is hard to work out in contemplation.

            There was a phone call the other night.  A typical phone call.  The tentative voice—describing some slender connection—aunt, years ago, Bishop so-and-so.  An attempt to make a connection with the Church that will validate or identify.  It is inevitably a strained & distant relationship.  Then a quick description of a temporary set back—circumstances beyond control.  Then the clincher, “Can you help?”  Money.  Repayment.

            I engage in an embarrassed evasion.  “I’ll have to check on things.  I don’t know.  Things are scarce.  I’ll let you know.”  A second call.  “Have you found out?”  Not yet, I say.  And a third call and a fourth.

            It would be so nice to contemplate, to categorize, fix a principle, find a concept.  But the problem is much simpler.  Am I going to help?  Can I judge the sincerity of the need?  Do I have the authority to use church funds?  What will Pat think?

            Finally, I drop Pat at choir practise and drive to Loblaw’s.  “She has only two diapers and no milk.  My husband won’t be paid till Thursday.  My aunt in Toronto is a member.  Bishop Wilmot—do you know him?  City welfare can’t help.”

            I buy diapers, milk bread, apple juice, fruit.  $13-14 worth and drive to the Welcome traveler Motel.  Knock on the door.  “Are you so-and-so?  I have some groceries for you.”  Drop and run.

            Why is it all so hard?  A little clarity.  An answer to a scream of need.  There’s no book or law review article in it.  There’s not even much satisfaction of heart in such stifled charity.

            Is there a natural law that says I should help someone who needs?  Should I make inquiry about need—be skeptical, or should I be kind and generous.  I mean, when you pose it as an issue it all seems so easy and obvious.  Why is it so hard to manage?

May 29/81

            First day of glorious summer after a hard rain that leaked through both basement and roof of the old house.  A little heat & a little humidity makes things yeasty.  The students are pounding the street with hard music.  The problem with amplification and broadcast, those two miracles of the age, is that they are so neutral.  Bad is broadcast & amplified as thoroughly and powerfully as good—as usually more often.

            With the settling warmth of summer the old smells of the house creep out.  I could smell the kerosene and coal stoves and damp waste of 70 years ago—just a hint, but it triggers the memory.  I’m too morbid these days.  The past is too much in my thoughts—and too important to the make-up of my joys and sorrows.  I want to hold onto the good things because I’m not sure how long they will last.  Of course the whole society is caught up with the past—stained glass and old furniture.  But mine is very personal.

            Maybe the present condition will change it.  A “minor” heart attack.  Instant male menopause.  The first sign of the body’s congenital mortality.  Every other illness has come from the outside, and the body fought it off.  This time the body is the enemy.  To be attacked by one’s own heart is a thing that must be reckoned with.

            The whole affair has brought a gratifying response from friends and acquaintances.  My family has pulled behind me with love and concern.  I have often, in the recent past, felt hugely unappreciated.  That has not been so in this crisis.  I see now how hypocondriasis might work.  It really does test your relationships to be ill—closer to death.  I hope I never use illness as a thing—a grabber.

July 1981

Picton Beach

            The best pages of this journal are those that I’ve written in my head while walking and waiting for sleep, and, hence, they aren’t here.  When it comes to the pen and a hard place the age old problem recurs.  That is, I really can’t convince myself that of the billions of people who have metered off their lives on this globe, mine, in day by day recitation, is that interesting and important.  I sense a massive pretension on the part of those who carry notebooks around to record random thoughts and ideas, as if the mere working of their brains is a treasure of humanity.

            But there is another side.  Sometimes I have ideas or forms of words, or remembrances that seem like pearls for a moment—at least as valuable as Picasso’s negligent jottings that are hoarded & saved, or the mundane letter of many a literary great that have been guarded and treasured.  And sometimes I’m impressed by how little of the working of my brain gets out.  My children have received from me a broad range of postures, habits, attitudes, tastes, that now constitute their lives and personalities.  That all comes by observation and innate physical processes.  But what I think, what I’ve figured out and worked through—observed, synthesized—gets through spottily and in small measure.  Not that it’s even wanted.  It’s a truth of human nature that we prefer to learn by experience even though it is a painful and inefficient teacher.

            The greatest activity in which man can be engaged is the recording, classifying of experience, then the effective communication of it to others.  That is what constitutes civilization—or the highest level of human existence.  When Lehi set off for his new world and was sent back to get the brass plates, it was because that would be the model, or the yeast, or whatever, to prepare them to see experience recorded, and thus to continue to record it.

            I have not been engaged enough—and I say, we have a human resistance to the value of others’ experience.  And I make the same mistakes—preaching, cajoling, waiting and praying for the time I can say “I told you” which validates my experience, but helps no one.

            Adolescence is the most important awakening to experience and I have adequate opportunity now for watching my children plough through it.  I try to tell them—then stand back and hope

            1. that it won’t hurt too much

            2. if they won’t learn from my experience, then maybe they can learn from their own

3. selfishly I hope they will confirm the generalization s I have made from my experience.  I like to be proven wise.

 

            So I won’t abandon this journal.  I’ll jot down a few things.  If I can’t communicate effectively now, maybe this record will help me share with my children the product of experience.  Maybe they’ll say, that was a good idea!  I can see that now!  So that’s what he was getting at!  I never knew the old man had it in him!

 

Jan. 1982

            I don’t often go into my son’s room.  We divide up space into our little compartments.  It’s almost a breach of faith, or a flaunting of decorum to enter someone else’s room.  Not so when they’re younger but the older kids get, the harder it gets.  Territory that is so familiar to them is so alien to me.  Jerry reacts more extremely than I ever would.  She doesn’t let her children enter her room—except the babies.  Maybe for something special & they enter worshipfully.  I’d never dare to enter when I’m visiting.  It may be that she was not set up to it having her own room all those years as a child.  I was well into my twenties before I had a room to myself.  And I soon gave that up.

            Anyway, Chris’ room has a sense of sanctuary, territorial imperative, about it and I don’t often go in.  But the other day I did.  And, worse still, I looked at his diary [which, I should point out, was a “journal” (not a “diary”) something Pres. Kimball was telling us to write in at the time].  Once I had violated his space I just kept going.  He hasn’t kept the diary with any regularity, and his handwriting is atrocious.  He has been in anguish recently, however, and a kid that age has so few valid outlets.  So he has written some of it.  He’s not even sure what the anguish is and even in that most intimate setting he has trouble revealing himself.  But I know about that.

            My flesh & blood, I thought.  How little I know about something so intimate.  And then I thought, but from what he reveals maybe I know him better than he knows himself.  A piece of me, and it’s orbiting now around other suns.  It’s as if I had never existed.  He depends on me, tries with agonizing effort to please me, is angered & frustrated and reliant on me—but in his diary I don’t exist.  It’s not disappointing or anything—just vastly puzzling how silent and unacknowledged our bond has become.  So hidden I’m not always sure it exists.  He writes bout the girl that will not respond to him.  He writes about the music he hears, the weather, all the incidentals.  The girl is his token of depth—but she’s an incidental.

            There, on one page he writes about running over the ice on the lake at dawn.  Running alone in the morning because everyone runs but his Dad [I haven’t been able to figure this sentence out].  Running because it gives him something that the world accepts as good.  I should run with him and share that.  But the running I don’t understand.  Then he says he stopped and watched the sunrise and marked the color of the sky and was overwhelmed.  At first, I may have suspected that it was posing—writing in a diary it sounds profound and sensitive.  So I read it again and I had to believe that it was a sincere event.  Not incidental.  Not the cute girl or the folk-rock music and the undefined teen-age frustration.  He was out of himself in the observation.  I could stand with him on that ice at dawn and marvel at the colour and the splendour.  We were one flesh.  If I can claim a pair of eyes, a spirit, a hand that can find such experience, then my life has found a reason.

 

A Remembrance                                                March 1982

            The first summer of my law school term I worked in a meat packing plant in East Boston.  I had applied hoping to get a job in the plant where it was cool and the pay was good.  But jobs were scarce that summer, and I was an “alien” with immigration problems.  So I was lucky that the office manager took a liking to me (or the idea of being boss to a Harvard man) and offered to let me look after accounts receivable for $1.50 per hour.

            The firm was called Old Colony Cha-Pac.  It specialized in provisioning summer camps and summer resorts through New England.  The firm was over 100 years old, but it was still of a size that Mrs. Cohen, who was the bookkeeper in charge of accounts payable, still had to agonize over who should be paid and who could wait, and Mr. Goldman still had to talk sweetly to the bank.

            The jaw-cracker name came because the firm was an amalgamation of two previous firms and still involved the uneven merger of two families—the Goldmans and the Levskys (time has dimmed exact memory but the names I’ve made up are close enough).  For me, a small boy from the prairies, it was a textbook and a movie, all in one.  Stereotypes that breathed & walked.  Mr. Goldman was the leader of one faction.  He was in charge of shipping and spent his days in or around the scale house, counting things as they went in and as they came out.  He combined an inexhaustible suspicion with an inexhaustible interest in detail.  At sight, large & phlegmatic with a round heavy face and thick, dark rimmed glasses, he, nevertheless, could pursue detail with a gritty tenacity that seemed boundless.  Not one wiener went through the plant that was not considered and accounted for.  He worked in a fedora and a long white coat, following each truck driver in and out; his job was an unhappy one.  It is difficult living a life based on suspicion.  When the trucks were gone he would come to the little wicket window that led from the plant to the office and, sticking his grey fedora through the window would talk about the problems of shipping in a quiet, diffident manner that was scholarly as much as anything.  He studied shipping and the means of understanding dishonesty.  The only time he seemed at all happy was when he was talking about his brother—the Doctor.  This he would do at least once a day.  We followed the life of his brother the Doctor in more detail than anyone in the establishment.  And we even saw him once when he came to get a special order of meat for a barbecue.  Mr. Goldman spent himself over three days making sure the meat was ready, wrapped and priced—the latter being a delicate matter.  He knew the doctor would not want to receive it as a gift.  He would want to pay enough—but not too much.  When the Doctor came Mr. Goldman, glowing, ushered him around the plant to show him off, exchanged earnest happy chatter about family, a few chiding, fraternal wise-cracks and then passed along the bundle of meat like an after thought.

            One day at closing time Mr. Goldman caught me in the parking lot with the same kind of assiduously prepared spontaneity.  He wanted to talk about his son who had been accepted into Dartmouth.  His opening was to ask my advice—but it was apparent that he just wanted me to know about his family, and he wanted to talk.  Of his brother the Doctor, he had to tell the classic story of the older brother (him) who had wanted to go to university but had been required to maintain the family business so the brighter, younger brother could carry the family banner.  The pride and bitterness that had certainly been ingredients of the transaction, were, in the retelling, put aside as one will put aside the obvious or unimportant from any well-told story.  Mr. Goldman told the story with the same quiet and earnest thoroughness that he applied to his loading dock.

            He was happy when he talked about the Doctor—but he was contented when he talked about his children.  The glumness of the loading dock, the frantic smiles and animated cheer of thought about his brother turned to a confident and stern contentment when he talked about his children.  One was married to a doctor, another was a university teacher and the youngest was off to Dartmouth.  He had attended to the coming and going of his kids and had been, by most measures, successful in seeing them safely on their way.  No one else in the whole place had kids like that.  It gave Mr. Goldman undisputed moral superiority.

            The Goldman’s side of the family was represented by Mr. Goldman (Morris), Izzy, his brother who was the plant manager and Nestor, their brother-in-law who was the head butcher.  Izzy was loud and profane.  He wouldn’t talk to anyone in the office except Mrs. Cohen, but always did so loud enough so that everyone could hear.  He would catch Mrs. Cohen and tell long and detailed stories of absolutely no point or distinction.  Typical was one involving his wife’s failure to thaw the steaks for supper after a long day at the plant.  She was, he repeated several times, entirely devoted to him and was abject, groveling, in her self-recrimination.  But he said, it’s all right.   Just open a can of Snow’s chowder.  It will be all right for tonight.  I can manage.  Don’t throw yourself into a panic.

            Izzy checked every decision with his brother Morris, but then carried it out with a loud decisiveness that shook the rafters.

            Nestor was like the fourth of the three stooges.  He was from the Bronx and had, in addition to the accent, a rough, whispered voice.  Everything was said in jest, but without humor.  Nestor’s pride and joy was his house.  He had recently settled in a “nice” suburb, and talked at length about cutting his grass and dealing with his “nice” neighbors.

            The Levsky side of the partnership was made up of Meyer and his son Arnold.  Meyer was the president of the company.  While Morris was always at the plant, but hardly “present”, Meyer was seldom around but his presence was an overwhelming reality.  Everything was done because Meyer was either coming or going.  He was a balding round man, of course given to cigars and shiny, expensive suits.  He drove a Cadillac and had a diamond pinky ring.  And he never wore a hat.  His office was paneled in phony dark plywood, with a blue carpet and a gold horse on the desk.  But he was seldom there.  Arnold used the office and his principal function was to relay instructions from his father.

            Arnold had red hair, freckles and a new MG.  He was married with two children, but was engaged in an affair with a telephone receptionist from a nearby packing plant.  His car was his first love and he spent a great deal of time taking it to the garage.   He would quietly point out that none of Morris’ children had such a car.

            Meyer was either in New York City talking to suppliers, in the Catskills selling or up in Maine visiting customers.

            He was the bane of Morris’ existence.  Meyer would give steaks away—an extra one or two in an order for the cook or maitre d’.  It offended Morris’ sense of order.  Once 24 NY strips were sent to the manager of a nightclub that Meyer wanted to supply.  Morris was furious.  For two days there were high-level conferences in Meyer’s office.  Morris stalked back to his scale house and Arnold rushed breathlessly between Meyer and Morris, his face drawn and pained.  It could have been the end of the firm.  But things cooled down.

            Though not outside!  It was Boston’s hottest summer in years.  We were two blocks from the firehouse.  Every two hours sirens would shout and the fire trucks would roar by with the firemen’s coats and hair streaming in the wind.  I conjectured that there were no fires—they just wanted to cool off.

            The office was not air-conditioned.  We fanned a little air in from the cool plant—but it didn’t help much.

            The office manager who hired me was Mr. Thorn.  He was thin and had a tanned leathery complexion and wore tinted aviator glasses.  The picture could go on.  He drove a 5-year-old Thunderbird with the tail pipe wired up and he talked a lot about where he was going to go for lunch.  But he was good to me and I appreciated his constant chatter.  It helped to speed the day along & kept me awake in the long, hot afternoons.  He and Mrs. Cohen would bitch away at each other in a manner that often astounded me.  He would say biting things about her Jewishness and the Jewishness of his employers.  She was small with tight curly grey hair and thick glasses.  She handled all the money, and treated every penny as if it were her own—until 5 o’clock.  Only the receptionist left the place faster.  But she did not hesitate to score Mr. Thorne with the tenuousness of his job and the flimsiness of his line.  By profession, Mr. Thorne was a hotel manager.  He must have lived a long life to have done everything he claimed.  But he was unfailingly cheerful and the stories and claims went for nothing except that cheerful ambience.  He wanted to be liked, so I liked him.

            Dolly was the receptionist.  She had a pleasantly piggy Irish face wreathed in tightly curled black hair and operated with a classic surly competence.  Like me she had taken the job for the summer to get ready for college.  But she had worked there for two years before.  College for her was a state teacher’s college, which she attended to be near her boyfriend.  Her real life was involved with fingernails, hair and clothes.  She spent more time and affection on her nails than I spend on my wife.  And the clothes came in endless variety, tended impeccably, so they all tended to look vaguely the same—pleasantly tight on her young potato body and pleasantly undistinguished.

March 16/82

            I felt unexpectedly old today—defensive and beside the point.  Actually that’s the way people feel when they are very young.  But I felt tired and unfit and it started to snow.  Anyway, the demands were there.  Not demands for me—which can be kind of flattering.  But the demands that I justify my existence.  Maybe that’s why I am writing.  To justify my existence.  It had better be good writing, eh?

 

            I was thinking about my life with animals.  A strange thing.  But certain animals were very important to my adolescence and it might be interesting to remember them.  In some respects I remember them more vividly than people.  It’s not that I was ever an “animal person.”  In fact they usually frightened me.  Maybe that’s why I appreciated the friendly ones.

            For example, there was Prince.  His full name was G.R. Bar Real Prince domino the 19^th. 

And he was a ton of ambling muscle.  In detail he wasn’t a pretty Hereford bull.  The white mark on his shoulder was a bare wisp and his hair was short and thin.  He didn’t have that curly white foreface that all the pretty bulls had.  But he was so big that when people strange to beef bulls first encountered him they were inevitably awe-struck and had an innate urge to head for shelter.  My gosh he was big.  His legs were like gothic arches that swept out of his superstructure & met the ground as if they had no knees or joints.  A grown man could scarcely reach around his neck to affix a rope or halter.  The horns that curved like brackets around his eyes were like polished furniture.  His nose was so broad & pink and moist that it seemed to be a separate being.

            And his size was matched by his appetites.  He would eat and drink prodigious amounts, unlike many bulls who would become finicky and careful, especially when surroundings or food were unfamiliar.  And he was lordly.  He dominated the trough.  No other animal ate or drank without his studied approval.  He would dismantle a bale of hay with lordly flicks and stand in the scatter to assure his claim.

            He also loved his work.  In the days before artificial insemination, a normal bull was thought to be able to service 20-25 cows a summer.  A really good bull could handle 30.  And an 80-85% success rate was expected.

            Prince kept up with 40 cows or more many summers, and almost never missed.  His feats were prodigious.  The registrar of pedigreed animals always seemed to doubt that Prince had done what was claimed for him.

            Perhaps I envied Prince that natural regality.  It was the massive strength, I’m sure, that allowed him to be the most docile, playful pet.  There was absolutely no meanness or defensiveness in his make-up.  When a human would enter his pasture, Prince would begin to amble—an easy roll sort of movement that was deceptively fast and playful—in their direction.  From natural herding instinct or bovine curiosity (the way to see cows in a field was not to chase them down, but to drive into the field, park, and wait for them to amble over for a look.  It would always work) the few calves or cows in his immediate entourage would follow.  A yearling bull might break into a trot and kick past Prince, but would peel back and take his subordinate position in due course.

            But the new generation came along.  When I was about  16, Dad bought a bull from a ranch in Arizona.  Owen was to get married in Utah.  The plan on that June was to head out in the Mercury ½ ton—Owen, Malcolm and me.  We’d drive the 20-24 hours straight through and the family remaining would follow in the next couple of days.  After the wedding, Malcolm and I would continue to Arizona, pick up the bull and return.

            Simcrest(?) Aggressor V he was.  Six months old, a real Minoan spectacle, with curly fore locks, clear eyes, square & powerful body, the glassy shoots of fresh satyr horns.  He was beautiful and he knew it and even at six months proceeded through the world with the cocky confidence of a successful street fighter.  It was a long hard drive.  We slept out in sleeping bags—first in the back of the truck but after we loaded the bull—on the ground.  Malcolm pushed hard.  I wanted to take a little time.  I was sixteen and the freedom was beguiling—1500 miles from home with a motor vehicle and a fair amount of pocket money.  There were things to see and things to do and places to eat, and no special time limit—except that once we picked up the bull we had to steam for home before he weaned himself.  A nurse cow would be waiting at home.

            I was edgy for freedom.  I could drive the truck as well as anyone.  I could exist—eat, bed down—function—without parental supervision.  My body had grown.  I was larger than Malcolm and probably as strong.  I could crack jokes that made my older brothers laugh.  And I could pick through some of the levels of their banter.  I was enjoying and wrestling with the rush of adulthood, so it was an interesting time.  There were long, silent periods as I considered the prospects and pressures and this was the first time—out of school, away from home or work—that I had the space to work in.

            Aggressor, like Prince, was most aptly named.  Not mean, but strong and prickly.  He had his own space and wanted it known.

            We didn’t waste an hour on frivolity.  Malcolm wasn’t much for that.  We went directly to the ranch and while Malcolm sorted out the paperwork, and Aggressor was brought into the pen for loading, I was left in the bunkhouse to cool my heels for a couple of hours.  It was a real let down.  Nothing to do but read some improper paperbacks that the ranch hands had assembled.  I felt useless, powerless, trapped.  And when we headed out for home I was in a pretty sulky mood.

            It was a dash.  The young bull would wean himself in 2 or 3 days and he would need the nourishment of a nurse cow to help him build his weight quickly & efficiently.  Across the Arizona & Utah desert we sped.  Stopping only to feed & water our cargo—we ate bread & cheese ourselves.  In the middle of the second night, and in the middle of the Idaho highlands we finally ran out of steam.  Pitch dark.  We pulled down a side road, rolled out our bags on what felt like a flat piece of grass and fell into a stupor.  It was broken only by the sound of a train.  It seemed to be approaching and we gradually were raised in consciousness with its gradual approach.  Louder & louder, our antenna perceived it was heading directly for us but we were frozen in our bags until it burst with a roar above our heads and thundered over us.  The morning revealed that we had camped within four feet of the rails.

            It was back to Canada and a fight at the border.  The customs officials would not admit Aggressor without a quarantine period.  He was packed in an isolation barn & we rambled the 60 miles to Lethbridge to pick up the cow.  She was a docile, friendly sort that had been milked for about 4 years.  But when she was penned with our new boy she wasn’t sure about taking on an adoptive son.  Aggressor looked after that—and nursed as he pleased.

            He was a great bull, grew well, produced fine offspring but always maintained that cockiness with just enough challenge to cause you to admit that he was the one.

            It’s pleasant to remember animals as having personality—especially one which is reactive to human presence and goes beyond fear-learned  [or herd?] instinctiveness.  But when I think about it—the personalities were simple, of shallow dimension.  Prince and Aggressor would not be interesting people.

            Tom was something else.  He was an appaloosa horse that worked on our ranch.  A gelding of dark brown with white spots.  He was no beauty—short-legged, thick body, stubby neck.  We had the beauties.  Lady was a big bay more of uncertain temperament.  Fast and strong and usually dependable, she was easily frightened and had a fear of snakes and wire that could lead to moments of grave concern.  I swear she could shy eight feet and did so often, sometimes without the rider following her.

            Honey was a dark palomino cross—as beautiful as a movie star but absolutely undependable.  She was Dad’s gift to Jaroldeen until one day, riding down the middle of Parkside Drive she put Jaroldeen on the road with a broken arm.  After that Honey was shipped to the Siberia of Lundbreck—and until she was sold to some poor soul dazzled by her beauty, was the bottom of the draw whenever a riding day came.  In this capacity I was required to ride her a couple of times because I, also, was at the bottom of the draw.  When they told me one day I would have to ride her bareback on a roundup and count day, I made it known that I’d rather walk the 6 miles to & from the Johnson quarter and chase the cows on foot.  It worked—except that I was left to clean up the barnyard.

            The Chrispie mare—left to us by our old Irish sheep man George Chrispie was also around.  She was stiff legged & mean spirited but not strong enough to resist a firm hand.

            Prince the horse (not the bull) was also there.  He was a Tennessee Walker Stallion and a thing of beauty.  Chestnut with light white markings.  Thin legs with sculpted muscles, shiny hooves, a classic neck & nose.  But he was also lazy, awnrey, bad-tempered, sneaky and cruel.  You didn’t sit easily on him.  He could feel your buttocks relax and then he’d start planning how to get you.  On one long, long day I was put on his back & stayed alert until I knew I’d ridden him into submission.  He was too tired to act up or run.  So when I relaxed he did too.  He just lay down in the ditch while I was still atop.

            I was never a good or an easy rider.  But I could last a day in the saddle and I got so I could manage a horse and stay aboard in most eventualities.  I was bucked off twice, but each time it was by choice and my easy survival didn’t increase my courage—but it did allay my fears.

            Tom was easy, though.  He belonged to Dad’s sometimes partner, Sam Kline.  But we’d run him for so long that he was ours.  The ideal cow horse.  Tom could go all day and never lost his enthusiasm for chasing cows.  He never tired and never flagged and except for a fairly wide belly spread, he was smooth and comfortable.  He loved to go and would respond with enthusiastic good humour to the slightest rider signal.  He was a dream to handle, no sensitive spots, no kicking or biting.  (Prince the horse was a notorious biter.  He’d turn around and get your leg while you were in the saddle—if you let [hit?] him.  And when you were saddling or grooming you couldn’t turn your back.  One time our foreman bent over to grab the cinch and Prince got his whole buttock in on snap.  And you had to measure the range of his hoofs which could move like lightening.)  Anyway, there was none of that from Tom.  And smart!—he knew more about chasing cows than any of his riders.  At slack rein he would keep them bunched and move them along with the instinct of a sheep dog.  The only time he might bite was when a balky cow would not keep up.  Tom could crank his head around and give a sharp nip on the top of the tail.  One time we picked up a load of yearling heifers in Lundbreck.  It was 5-7 miles to the ranch along a main highway, over a bridge & through some tough country.  They had been in a train for several days and were “spooked.”  When we unpenned them they wouldn’t herd but headed for the four winds, and they were small enough & frantic enough to climb barbed wire fences.  Help was summoned—a neighbour with the most famous cow dog in the country.  For a day we chased them through every field around Lundbreck.   Late, late afternoon we had them but the hired drover didn’t want anyone else around.  We had two horses and one half ton that would carry one of them.  I was on Tom and it was decided to tie his reins to the horn and let him follow the herd home without a rider.  It was a thing of beauty to watch.  We loaded the other horse in the trailer and followed at a distance.  The drover rode along behind the herd and the dog and Tom were the sidemen.  Tom would use his chest to push the animals into a herd.  When there was a break in the fence or an open gate along the road allowance, Tom would see in ahead, and edge along the side of the herd to fill the opening and prevent them from escaping from the planned route.

            The bridge over the Castle River was a tough one.  It was an iron bridge with a timber floor.  Cattle were always afraid of it.  The heifers were no exception and they wouldn’t touch it.  The fence line on each side of the road allowance broke just before the bridge and it looked like another scattering.  But tom pressed the cattle along the edge of the bridge, down the bank & into the water.  We rushed forward.  Panic was in order.  But Tom swam them across the river & up the other bank without breaking the grouping.  The cow dog followed and the drover sat up on the road watching in amazement.

            You could really love him.  But he had another side—and that became apparent when you freed Tom in a pasture.  There is this cliché of the proud horseman whistling at the gate while his obedient steed gallops to his side.  I’ve spent too long trailing around a horse pasture, halter & oat bucket in hand, cajoling, cursing, sweet-talking, to ever believe it!  And Tom was the champ.  As smart as he was about chasing cows, he used everything he knew when he was being chased.  I’ve spent a full working day shaking a can of oats & trying to sneak up on him to bring him back to the barn.  Finally, with four men, a truck and exhaustion, he was cornered and haltered and transformed into old Tom, as sweet, and good humoured & smart as ever.

Aug. 1982

            When I was growing up, that is when I was still looking for myself, trying to decide how the world works and reviewing what it contains (a condition that I ended much too soon because I was never comfortable in it and it seemed, was not encouraged to be comfortable)—so when I was growing up culturally and intellectually, the common lore was—“There is no Mormon writing, music, visual arts, etc., some tradition, some accomplishment.  But no Mormon writers.”  “Why not?” we would say and have long earnest discussion periods, trotting out our analyses.  There involved some combination of factors which had a common theme—something about Mormons not being contemplative or reflective.  It was presumptuous stereotyping of a sort that we would certainly have condemned in others.  The view was modified as I grew up.  The standard wisdom became that an early tradition of “writing” had existed in journals and sermons and letters.

            Of course (that’s what anyone says who is about to be patronizing), we (more specifically I) while clucking our tongues about this deplorable state of affairs, were secretly overjoyed.  It meant, the field was white & ready to harvest.  The Mormon writer who could do it would have the stage.  The stage or field or whatever metaphor is best to continue, was littered with the bones of those who had tried to occupy it.  for sure, there were novels & plays, short stories and poems that Mormons had written about[;] Mormons hoping that they would qualify.  I followed the history of many of these creative creatures (except novels.  I am not a novel reader at best) and was impressed by the skill & vitality that had gone into their creations.  It was intimidating but for two things.  firstly, the hue & cry remained that Mormons had not produced a literature, and secondly, except for some excellent short stories by Eileen Kump, even I could tell that none of the stuff was really “Mormon.”  Because the artist is Mormon and the subject is Mormon, it does not follow that the work is Mormon.  That realization lead me to wonder about a few things.

            Why does there need to be a “Mormon” literature.  Is there a Catholic literature, a Baptist literature, a Sunni Moslem literature?  It’s a valid question.  A watched pot never boils.  A desired culture doesn’t materialize because people are looking for it.  Maybe we are a derivative culture and must derive our art from the same roots.

            And then—what could possibly be a “Mormon literature.”  If a Mormon chose to write an imagist poem about Joseph Smith—would it really be a Mormon poem, or an imagist poem.

            Do we need a Mormon literature?  If we are the receptacle of truth (out of the best books) there is more than enough to receive.  Time has proved [provided?] libraries full of man’s wisdom & art.  Besides, the speculation goes, scripture and authoritatively revealed truth are the apex of church writing.  Why do we need less?  And finally, isn’t a well-lived life the ultimate work of art?

            I can answer these questions to myself.  The answers might be better worked out (the questions, too) by others who are broader & more thorough in their understandings.  But I can satisfy myself enough to function.  The answers, I might add, involve as much a commitment to faith as they do a firm understanding.

            Yes we do need art and literature that manifest our culture.  It is a distinct culture—or should be –because we have a distinct cosmology.  That is, after all, what set up the Greeks and Dante and the guilt-ridden Europeans and so forth.  Like ancient Israel looking back to Baal when his vision was dazzling and agreeable and tempting—our culture can turn back if we have not an artistically convincing expression of that culture.  Our music & our visual art can fall into the mainstream culture and our poetry will go with them.  The fight for spiritual distinctions will be so much more difficult if we cannot absorb the spiritual distinctions from our cultural expressions.  Art defines mans relationship with the universe.  Our concept of that relationship is so different, so vital, that it might not survive without a distinctive vision.  It’s true that a well-lived life is the ultimate work of art.  But with death the art is gone—unless it is recorded in a manner which can define it and give it effective expression.  It was not enough for Lehi to be a great man & a great prophet.  He needed to take Isaiah with him and he needed Nephi to write his story.

            As for the content of a distinctive literature, form has to be the important thing.  The form can partake a language, style, mode of presentation, the metaphoric code.  Northrop Frye’s book about the Bible as the great code reinforces my conviction that form is the important thing.  The Greeks had the epic and the tragedy with a distinctive language and cosmology.  with all that going for them, they were bound to create a great literature.  Likewise the 18^th & 19^th century Irish.  And the American south had a shared guilt and torturing blight that found fantastic expression in the short story.

            My knowledge of world literature is not broad enough to complete my thesis of faith.  So I will not stumble through my half informed justifications.  My faith is that form—in the broadest sense—is the important thing and the problem with Mormon writers to this point is that they have been captured by Baal—the worldly forms.  They haven’t bent them to the shape of their world view.  Maybe it’s our driven search for success and justification in the real world.

            There are distinctive Mormon literary forms.  I name three, for starters—the Relief Society Magazine poems, the personal essay and the sermon.  All of these have, at times, been bent to the Mormon sensibility.  Not always very well artistically—but they have been used distinctively so that another Mormon can feel that the artistic expression is one that fits within his cosmology.

            The personal essay has now, through Dialogue, Sunstone, Exponent II, been accepted and is developing as an effective literature.

            The Relief Society Magazine Poem is an unfortunate child—now orphaned.  It’s beauty and brains have not been well regarded, except by the creators.  Now I might not find atonal music appealing.  I would be a presumptuous fool to deny its artistic validity.  And to note that there can be good and bad electronic music.  So, I believe, the R.S.M. poem is a valid art form.  And I have read some that were very good manifestations of that form.  By the severest critical standards some could be considered effective literature and should not be denied by the frauds that surround them.  Think of how the novel would fare if we judged it by a random sampling & not by its best manifestations.

So to the sermon.  The bad sermons we can forget.  But have you not had a great moment listening to a fine preacher?  Is it not possible to recognize his/her art?  And in the Mormon tradition a really distinctive art?  It derives from the classic sermons—but the tone, the metaphoric setting, the rhythm is distinct and unusual.  I would be hard pressed to describe it with great specificity—and its formless diversity is part of the form.  Like blank & free verse, its break from form defines it.  But techniques that work are continued, conventions form and the attitude of those who are reacting to older forms, begin to give shape to a new form.

            A familiar convention, for example, is the appeal to scientific process.  It’s the proof-test process.  Proving the Book of Mormon to be true without spiritual support.  The old chestnut about the law student who took upon himself to prove in a court (albeit a moot one) that the B of M is true, used to be a favourite.  In the familiar form of the story, a discrepancy of years argued by the adversary was answered by the change in Roman calendars.  Of course, the spiritual testimony follows the story.  But the convention is one which has a distinctive frame of reference to Mormons.

            The personal and confessional element of Mormon sermons is one of their peculiarities.  Because we are not professional preachers—meaning that we preach irregularly, with less structured preparation and with somewhat less professional confidence to listeners that are close contacts and friends—we are personally involved with our expressions.  Personal experiences can be detailed, family legends recalled and placed with a shared structure of reference.  tears are shed.  It would be melodrama if it were not reality.

            The use of scriptural diction and metaphor is a firm part of the traditional sermon.  It is made distinctive in Mormon sermons because we have distinctive scriptures and a distinctive view of the traditional scriptures.  “Goodly parents,” for example, is a piece that brings with it a distinctive Mormon shine.  so too with, “a marvellous work,” “a peculiar people,” “as God once was….”

            Well, this is prologue to my own experience.  I tried several times to write something particularly “Mormon” and found myself frustrated.  In fact, at that time of my life I wouldn’t have written anything very well.  I was bound up in forms.  T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, whatever else.  When I left practice to further my law studies I had the germ of an idea but had not found a form.  The year was a frustrating one—illness, icy indifference from the Law School, mid-life crisis, etc.  Writing took the madness out of it.  And I just wrote as it came to me—dib/dab, helter skelter.  It was a satisfying experience.  It came out as a sermon—anecdotal, purple, ecstatic, nostalgic, melodramatic.  And it was accepted by Dialogue—though they and everyone else since has had trouble dealing with the form—poetry or short story?  What voice?  Is the scientific thing out of context with the rest?

            My Problem has been follow up.  I guess I’ve been a little scared myself—and uncertain of a new form.

 

Dec. 1982

            It’s the first real day of winter.  There was a skiff of snow last night that has stayed.  And it was uncomfortable to walk to work today.  Classes are just out.  Exams are in progress.  The students are at their paranoid peak.  Here am I.  Time is frozen.  The sensation is that it flashes by like a cold wind but not too much changes.  There have been some interesting thoughts scrambling around in my brain that might never see the light of day.  I wrote a brilliant essay in my warm bed this morning and what I wondered is whether or not a writer who is not read is like a tree falling in the forest not making noise.  But that was my conclusion.  I started with that old game of trying to remember as far back as I could.  I’d heard a time regression under hypnosis reported on the radio the night before and I was thinking back.  The event I penned on was not necessarily my first memory—but it was the one that caught my attention & turned my train of thought.  When I was a three year old I was on a family outing on the banks of the Waterton River in Cardston.  I fell in.  Neither my father or mother could swim & I was fast bobbing down the white water when a man rode up on a horse, jumped into the foam and pulled me out.  The story is often recounted at family gatherings.  I’ve heard my mother & brothers & sisters describe it, and remark upon its miraculous aspects.  I’ve never talked about it much, but I do remember the episode quite vividly.  What I impart is my memory—probably shaped by what others have told me, but rooted in a certain memory that I think is made honest by details that don’t always agree with other versions.

            Malcolm, Jeroldeen & I were waiting for my father to conduct some business with a man whose land was on the river.  To fill the time we started a game, the object of which was to see who could go out furthest onto a stone that jutted into the mountain river.  With the narrow vision of youth I could not see that the challenge of the game was the deadly danger of the river.  I could see only the distance of the stone & the ease with which I could go far beyond the reach of my brother & sister who were limited by their sense of danger.  So I walked along the stone & into the water.  My reaction was surprise that I could not walk out again.  Sure I was that I could walk out if the water would just let me stand up.  I was in a loud green world trying to stand up and walk.  There was still no sense of danger.  But I became tired and rested from my efforts & yielded to the great green force.  As in a vision I saw the horseman ride up.  He seemed a great distance away.  I saw him wheel down from his saddle and suddenly big arms lifted me from my green world & back to the stony bank.  There was some fuss and, to my relief, no chastisement for doing such a stupid thing.

            I suspect that this experience went a long way in the process of giving reality to my concept of God.  I rush to explain that before it’s misunderstood.  Experience is the basis of our understanding.  We only know what green is because we have seen green things.  If we want to know about God as a loving person, we must give that reality by thinking of loving people.  We know or have known, and using that experience to give meaning to our concept.  In a small forming[?] mind, the thought of a saving force is described by an experience of salvation.  Those strong arms pulling me not from the terror, but from shame at having fallen to the great green force, is a perception that I could never reproduce intellectually or imaginatively.  And when I think of God[,] that experience is close at hand.  My view goes somewhat further.  I have always thought that our fathers go a long way towards defining our view of God.  Maybe that’s sexist and I’m sure parental care generally influences our perceptions.  But a strong father, in our society at least, can have a great impact.  It’s not that I equate God with my father—but I am able to conceive a being who is protective, caring, good humoured, engendering of a loving fear, because I could see those in my father.  It’s one of the things I am very grateful for.

            At family home evening last night, Matthew taught the lesson from 2 Nephi—Lehi’s instructions to Jacob on the atonement.  I was glad that Matthew identified it as being important.  It does deal with the pivotal thing about our existence.  I tried to explain from my experience—from the kind[?] of thoughts that I have used to contend with my problems over many years.  Pat and Marni were a little excited and disputative—and I wasn’t sure enough so I let it lapse.  I would like to convey my sense that revealed truth is so effective at responding to the troublesome issues of traditional philosophy and theology.  For me it begins with an understanding that there is either a force or tendency in the order of things (an ill-chosen phrase) towards disintegration—coming apart.  And there is a force—the will of God—which tends towards integration and creation.  (“That’s entropy,” says Matt.  They teach them these things in school.  In fact Emily had just been watching a TV show about it before I called her.)  It is my view that the creative force involves will (an acceptance of responsibility for the status of things), faith (a willingness to work towards a future, unseen result) and priesthood (a joined will & faith, self-organized so that the sum of the force is greater than its individual parts).  Creation/integration is a process rather than a result.  It is life and must be sustained or it will move towards disintegration or death.  The notion of progress/regress is how it is often explained in Mormon theology; but that is only one aspect of it and tends to stress the idea of result rather than process.

            At a point in time (again, perhaps an ill-chosen phrase)…at least at a point in the organization of our intelligences a critical point was reached where certain things were necessary to advance their effective life.  So God asked for someone to take the responsibility for directing the step.  Satan’s plan was not accepted because it was a lie and a delusion.  It would lead to a frozen world of outer darkness—not because of punishment but because it would fail to be integrative and creative.  It would fail because it would fail to join the subject of the process into responsibility, will, faith and priesthood.

            It seems to me that the critical point with Christ’s plan was to bring us into the process but by a system which would accept our will and faith and responsibility.  Beyond the war in heaven and our acceptance as individuals of Christ’s plan, it was necessary that the absolute initiation of the creative process had to be accepted and willed by humans.  So Adam, by partaking of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, released God from his responsibility alone, and joined in that responsibility.

            As the scriptures give us to understand, the acceptance of that responsibility was doomed to fail—to end in death and disintegration because of its founding inconsistencies, except that it could be saved by the application of the law of mercy.

            The story of Adam & Eve is so brilliant because it moves through so many levels—from simple childhood fable to profound actuality—carrying the listener to new insights at each level.  The payoff is an understanding of purpose and reality which has been so unavailable in so many cosmic explanations.  But men, in their dim understanding, reach towards its truth instinctively.  The duality of the universe is a constant notion in many religions—most notably Eastern faiths.  The idea of the family of man—one’s responsibility for all—is important in standard Christian doctrine but is manifest in numerous forms of ancestor worship.  Greek & Norse myths abound with ideas that strike from these ideas.

            Even a modern philosopher like John Rawls who attempts to define Justice and elicit its essential qualities begins with a premise of a pre-existence wherein people agreed to certain premises and then agreed to the drawing of a veil over their minds.   The premise is a philosophical device which is used to thread through natural, pragmatic, liberal, positivist doctrine—but its conception is uncanny to anyone who has studied Mormon doctrine.

 

Feb. 1983
I miss the boys a lot and regret not hearing more from them.  Perhaps I’m too much tied up in my children–have pinned on them my hopes and justifications.  Marni & Matthew have been very good support in these times of lack of capacity.  Someone remarked about what a pleasant and helpful person Matthew is.  I said, “When you’re a fourth child you’ve got to be helpful, willing and funny to find a place in the world.”
I dote too much on Emily and I’m sure it will be devastating when they are gone.  But that’s a long way off and I shouldn’t dwell on it.
But I do.  At Christmas time I found myself, as usual, rushing around with a camera.  I felt kind of over-bearing and out of place.  It occurred to me that I should be enjoying the activity–enjoying the doing–enjoying the event instead of trying to set things up so I can enjoy it at leisure.  Susan Sontag has bad things to say about photographs.  Perhaps she is right.  now is more important than then.
These events–even these words about them–are maybe not important enough to be given a permanent place.  Where to all the memories go?  The words and images of the ages–when will we have time to replay them?  If I videotaped my life, who would have a lifetime to sit and watch it?
But the photographs are important.  I have the illusion of stealing from time–or at least commanding time to some small purpose.

 

 

Feb. 1983

            There were those hard summers when I, as a boy, worked on my father’s ranch.  My father, like the patriarchs of old loved his land and cattle and children, and was entranced by the notion of his place.  I understand much more clearly now what was in his mind and heart.  He wanted a loving patriarchy where he could provide and teach and govern the elements of the earth.  Only one week over the several years we owned the ranch were we together there as a family—and it was an idyll.  With mother nesting and father patriarching, it was secure and pleasurable.  But usually it was a hired foreman, a couple of hired hands, sometimes Malcolm, sometimes Bill, and me.  Mostly it was hard, dreary work.  Hot and dusty.  Isolated and demeaning.  There was no electricity.  An old kerosene fridge sometimes worked and provided minimal refrigeration.  There were flies and smells and mean animals and few diversions.  I suffered horrendously from hay fever.  The water was awful.  There was a cistern, but the water tasted of cement.  There was a dug well—but it was too close to the canals to suit me.

            But there was a spring in the buck pasture.  The buck pasture was a quarter section about ½ mile from the ranch buildings.  It had been expensively fenced with page wire to keep coyotes out and sheep in.  The wire didn’t work.  The coyotes would sometimes kill the young, purebred, black-faced bucks we raised there for a couple of years.  Bucks were supposed to be a match for coyotes, especially in a group.  But the coyotes were careful and effective hunters.  During one summer we lost almost one buck a week.  Instead of going for the throat, the coyotes would castrate the young bucks and then savage them.

            Anyway, near the center of the quarter was a small shed and a corral.  It was used to shelter and work whatever animals were being pastured there.  Nearby was an old, moss-covered trough of two by eights which was filled with clear, cold spring water from a pipe driven deep into a wet cleavage on the downside of a small hill.  The cleavage signaled the existence of the spring and the pipe had been driven in years before by someone looking, as I so often did, for something cool and clean after a miserable day with hay or animals or whatever.  At day’s end I would grab a truck or tractor (anything but a horse that would have to be fed and cared for on return) and jounce[?] over the track to the buck pasture.  The sun would be setting behind the foothills on the west and I could look down the slopes of the hills to the east.  The sky would be backlighted—the atmosphere catching the rays of the last sun and bending them across the mass of sky.  I could see the lights of Pincle[?] creek—about 25 miles away.  Cowley at 15 miles was clearly visible.  The auxiliary airport and the big radio towers that guided planes across the mountains, looked like a movie marquee.  I often fantasized of going there to catch a plane and fly away to Hollywood or Rio or some such sappy nonsense.

            Then I would turn to the trough.  The animals would be poking around with that blend of dependence/curiosity/timidity that domestic animals have.

            Stripped to the waist I bury my arms & face into the cool water.  Bits of moss would break off & wash away with the overspill.  My burning eyes would ease.  The burrs & seeds and dust would wash away.  And then I’d cup my hand & drink.

            There must have been some fortunate convergence of geology and time that brought us all together.  Layers of rock, strata of mud & sand settled by lakes, thrown up and broken down by nature’s forces, rains gathered and channeled, trees catching, someone finding that wet spot, drove the pipe, and now I found my respite and refreshment.

            Soon enough I would fill a gallon glass jug, wrapped in gunnysacks tied with binder twine that would be soaked to provide refrigeration by evaporation and provide us with our drinking water on the hay wagon next day.  Soon enough I would bounce back to my sleeping corner, raise the lantern glass and blow out the light.  Soon enough—but while I was there I said some of my best prayers.

April 12/83

 

            Rummaging through some old papers I’ve come across some writings I’d like to pen down in more lasting form (what fools we mortals be).

 

            This was written the Easter after Emily was born.  I guess that would be 1975.

 

[Here he hand copies the essay from “A Month of Sundays” about Matthew and the Easter flower Marni made out of kleenex.]

 

Written in Palo Alto – Spring 1976.

Playing with Emily in the backyard.  She was an early walker and talker and, it appeared, my last child and too good for the world.

 

[Here he puts the poem “Emily and Innocence” (without using the title).]

 

            They’ll get me for that one day.  Sentimental hogwash, Clinton Larsen once said—though he’s long since forgotten.  But I remember the moments and the thrill flickers.  What is it about your children?

 

            The whole thing is so scary:

            Wanting to know how it will end but

            But knowing that the only

            Only way to know for sure is to end it.

                        And some do.

            Falling into things or

            Or letting themselves be pushed.

 

Then I wrote a bit one spring night in 1980 or 1981 when we drove up to Ottawa for the kids to play in a church (stake) talent show.  It was a disaster.  The night was cold & dark early.  we had to rush to get there on time—we were late, the piano was badly tuned, the program was all else cowboy music and accordions.  Pat was angry.

 

[Here is another essay from “A Month of Sundays,” the one about barreling through the night to some church assignment, Minnie Ripperton, etc.]

 

            In the summer of 1981 we took the children to the Hill Cumorah Pageant.  mark was in Brazil, but the rest went with us.  A visit to the Sacred Grove was part of the itinerary.  Dark thoughts, but honest thoughts.  How honest should one be?  Is it proper to admit to doubts—to dark views?  I’m not a somber person or a cynic or even much of a doubter.  And my views don’t bring into concern substantial issues.  At Christmas we received a letter from Weston.  He quoted extensively from his journal to “share” with close ones the quality of his life over the year.  I was hugely touched.  first, that he shared with me.  Secondly, that he had been so honest in his record of his life and in his desire to share it.  If a straight-arrow like Weston can address his life so honestly, a pussy-footer like me should be able to follow along.

 

[Here follows another essay from “A Month Of Sundays.”]

 

April 13/83

 

            A letter came from mother today.  So touching.  I’ve never fully adjusted to the reality of her as a person and not an institution.  And she’s a very nice person, but even her faults (however gentle & benign) take a different character because of their relationship to the institution.  I sometimes sense a similar reaction from my children.  The see me as “father” and it’s sometimes hard to be me.  maybe I can learn & help to handle it better with this generation.

            But she’s a great lady.  Sometimes I’m blocked from seeing how great.  I’ve been thinking about this piece for sometime now.

 

My mother is so wise she can eat persimmons

            and still look like she has a secret.

 

Peace can be scrounged from her handbag

                        like pennies or a spare comb.

 

Nourishment spills from her hands.

 

Her face, like June, has no season.

 

Her ears hear only triumph

 

And her eyes reflect our fire

                        and shed our blocked tears.

April 21/83

            There has been a late snowfall and more flurries expected today but the number of birds flocking around indicates that spring is here.  The sky is that even, unmasked[?] gray, but thin so the yellow sun comes through.  It makes an even background that highlights colours & events.  I heard a terrible bird racket and looked up and saw five large black crows.  Often, in this climate they are passive and solitary.  These were almost kittenish, tumbling through trees, rolling through the air, vivid against that grey sky.

            I can’t tell the difference between the call of a crow and the call of a seagull.  It was easy to glance up—black or white—and determine what was making the noise.  If I couldn’t look, I’d probably learn to tell the difference by the sound.  I suspect the seagull’s call is thinner and moves down the scale on a broader range.  But looking makes it unnecessary to bother analyzing & remembering.  I even get confused by the noise of flying geese—which I’m sure is much more easily distinguished by someone who wants to be careful.

            So I looked at the crows scatter through the treetops against the grey & yellow.  Eye & ear, a happy blend, a lazy blend.

            Further down the block the trees were filled with twittering birds—waxwings or grosbeaks—I couldn’t get close enough to tell.  The starlings had cleared the neighborhood, and the pigeons had hidden themselves.

            The boys will be home on Sunday.  I’m anxious to see them.  We’ll have to rearrange.  Probably we should have saved their quarters so they return to a secure place, but it’s so easy to slop over into unoccupied space.  I’ve really enjoyed my study and will relinquish it with minor regret—overshadowed by the joy of reunion.

            Now back to setting exams.

April 25/83

 

            The boys returned from university yesterday.  It was a glorious day.  Though they were tired & dirty from the long bus trip; and I was tired and subdued from the early and long drive to Syracuse—it was a happy and glorious reunion.  They are remarkable people.  Often guilty of the sins of youth, and it tempts me to forget their true value.  I spend a great deal of time taking pictures, salting[?] away letters & diplomas, trying to freeze time & keep them.  The compulsion to sequester, nurture, control is very great and has to be overcome.

 

April 30/83

 

[Here he puts the poem “Christian”]

 

May 1/83

            It was one of those very nice weekends.  The kids were together and in an especially good mood.  We performed at a Church function on Friday night—singing & playing a variety of instruments.  There was a good rollicking feeling with Chris on piano and Mark on bass guitar.  Emily & Matthew (I think) felt a good part of it.  We packed in the car & drove home.  I bought three massive pizzas.  Suzy Elliott, Linda Addy & Andrew Russell joined us in what seemed a situation sitcom atmosphere.  pat was relaxed & thrilled.  Everyone laughed & enjoyed.  Then we play Trivial Pursuits until I faded & left the kids to it.

            Saturday we all went shopping.  There was a rare harmony.  Not that we are an unharmonious family—but that this was an intense feeling of common will.  It is going well.  mark has gotten his job at Fort Henry after a great deal of pain and uncertainty.  Christian has been in agony about going to Alberta.  But that is resolved.  It has focused his interest and given him something to work for.  He has talked about a mission.  I held out for them to go to Owen for patriarchal blessings—which they did.  It (the blessing) is serving as an important reference.

            Does anyone realize how hard it is to be a parent?  To care so much and to be so out of control.  I have not addressed the issue of a mission with Christian.  He is so jealous of his time.  I want it to be his decision totally.  At that age they’ll draw on you to excuse the inevitable, justify the unpleasant, to take the burden of decision.  I want him to go if he decides to go—so that it is his mission.  That’s easy.  But if you try to couple with that a pledge of support and an assurance of support—the message can become garbled.  How does one communicate the intent and meaning of a relationship?  If you try to be explicit, your explicitness is viewed as judgment or enthusiasm or vigour.  If you try to be subtle, there is a possibility of your communication flying away in the wind.

July 27/83

            It has been a long, hot summer and my energies have been dissipated & drawn off by a host of assorted things.  I have struck on some good ideas for articles but have not had the will or time or concentration to go at them.  It’s hard to explain to people that one needs a cushion of time.  I need 30 minutes of reflection for every 10 minutes of work.  Pat and others don’t always understand that ratio.  I don’t understand it myself and I don’t make allowance for it.  Life gallops by and I watch it—secure in a belief that I can catch it next time round.  I should have learned about the prospect of no next time.

            So I worry about the value of my time.  Am I like the bandits in the Treasure of the Sierra Madre, scattering my gold to look for the treasure it hides?  And what’s it worth?  What’s this page worth?  What’s it worth if I write an article about executor bonds or the doctrine of ultra vires(?) that no one reads?

            Well that kind of reductivism can go on indefinitely.  It has been a philosophical summer.  The week at Western Ontario with the Law & Philosophy seminar started a lot of rusty cogs turning.  I’ve always wanted to develop a radial, basic understanding of law and right, and I’ve always wanted an historical bearing.  I’m still floundering—but with a tiny sense of progress.

            It’s amazing how thoughts tie together.  A little encouraging, sometimes to encounter insights that one has captured in the wild—so to speak—in the developed analysis of others.  Sometimes discouraging to have one’s sense of uniqueness shattered.  Like climbing a rough mountain and finding a rusted coke can at the top.

            I had recently been thinking about the nature of faith.  The current meeting of the World Council of Churches, the turmoil over disarmament, any number of issues have given me nagging questions about the nature of religion.  My premise is that religion, moral philosophy, ethical analysis, whatever, requires a first step of faith.  And then, I wonder, what is the destination—direction of that first step.  Truth?  Beauty?  Insight?  Good?  In religion, surely the goal of faith is salvation.  The term is easy to use, but needs a sense and understanding beyond the blue beauty of heaven.  Our sense of heaven involves truth, beauty, insight and good—but the overpowering sense is that heaven is peace.  The question then is—what is the source of peace?  What permits a person to feel satisfyingly, righteously peaceful?  If I spoke from my own sense and feeling I would have to define peace by what destroys it—undermines it; and I would venture that the greatest contributor to a lack of peace is the need for justification.  I am a foreigner here.  What permits me to belong?  I am a consumer.  I breathe and eat and people do things that benefit me.  With what currency do I pay for my consumption?  I am fortunate.  From whence is my fortune?  And who can take this all from me?

            The greatest source of peace, for me, would be justification—not pleasure or inactivity or aesthetic satisfaction.

            So what does the leap of faith do to lead me towards justification?  And how does religion advance the process?

            The first observation is, I guess, that I will not feel justified fully without justice.  That is—some sense of fair or equal treatment.  I can never bring mankind to justice—but I can start.  I can bring justice to some situations.

            Secondly, I cannot be justified by purpose unless I have an understanding of purpose—a cosmic view however simple, to provide a map.

 

            Now I’ll leave this train of thought for a moment.  I’ll walk home and it will bloom in my mind—then wilt when finally I set pen to paper.  The point I am leading to is what a prospect [page turn here, but hard to understand the continuity of this sentence] as the function of faith.

            Philosophers are usually concerned with truth.  The constant test of their methods and systems is truth—often intuitive truth.  But ultimately truth is the test and faith is looked at askance because it does not have the sheen, the hard edge of truth.  But I have prospected that salvation is the purpose of faith.  Not that salvation isn’t concerned with truth—it may even be that it logically embraces truth.  And that might say something important about the nature of truth.  That something might relate to the truth of prospect or truth becoming.  For example, the debate over the issue of human nature and the question of whether man’s nature is determined or a being of will.  The issue may not be which is true—it may be that both are true and the issue is what is made of the prospect.  No doubt a creature can live by predetermined patterns—genetically dictated, externally conditioned.  A person might not only live as such a creature, he/she might thrive as one.

            But is there a potential to be a free moral agent.  We all sense such a truth.  The fact that Skinner can observe man’s conditionable state and moralize about it—and paint a world he would like to achieve—seems to establish the prospect in its own unspoken assumptions.

            Well, I’m still not getting to my point about faith.  What I think might be the essential nature of faith is that we must operate with the sense that we can be responsible—that we can guide, pilot, direct the course of our existence and of existence generally.  Now it may be that we don’t, or that we can’t in the ways we think we can, but ultimately we must if we are going to justify ourselves so we have to learn how.

            If we were to attempt the course of mortal existence tied to any faithless imperative—scientific truth, moral truth, God’s final word or sure vision—then our sense of responsibility/agency/will would be destroyed.  The imperative would be responsible.

            An answer to my surmise might be that I am talking about an illusion (of power or control) as opposed to a reality.  That is, my position might be like saying that a baby who is held to the ground is given an illusion of walking—but in truth is being held or compelled by one who has the real power.

            Now such an argument is based on a notion that illusion is contrasted with truth.  My thought is that illusion might react with truth but it is not a logical opposite.  It does not define truth nor is it defined by truth.  But it can lead to truth.  We can create truth by realizing an illusion.

Jan. 8, 1984

Long time, no entry!  Here I am in my study.  It’s an interesting feeling.  I’ve never had one & I’m not sure it’s a good idea—a room of one’s own.  It’s just to have a place to organize my stuff.  Something in the human condition dictates this preoccupation with stuff.  Neither good nor bad of itself—it’s what we make of it or it makes of us.  My photography stuff, my church stuff, my New Yorker Magazine.  Stuff like that.  Next summer the kids will return.  I’ll surrender my envelope of space and my stuff will disappear into boxes & closets & ruin.  Maybe it’s not a good idea to be rich.  Rich means more stuff and I don’t have time to organize and live with the stuff I have now.

            Pat’s playing the piano.  Matt’s watching TV.  Emily’s supposed to be going to sleep next door—but she’s reading and laughing.  Three levels of sound.  A rich richness—ontological density.  And I have put the exams I am marking down to write a few lines.  I don’t know why.  No big events or thoughts have arisen today.  It is cold.  The church was cold.  There was a good moment in the foyer after.  Whiteheads & Steve & Win Elliott and Carma and some of the kids were there.  It was light and pleasant.  Familiar and good-hearted.  There was the feeling that we belonged together and enjoyed the association.  It’s a feeling I always thought necessary at its core before the Ward could really begin to accomplish things or be established.

            We went to Bill Kincaid’s grave to dedicate it after Church.  Just Matt and me and the Bishopric.  I had missed his funeral because I had to take Mark & Marni to the plane.  I missed his last couple of days because I was so busy.  Oh my.  Roy told me about it.  He was actually happy to have a heart attack because it was the hook he could use to get his wife into an institution.  He got rid of his job.  Then he thought he would be freed of his wife.  He’s much freer than he anticipated.  But he was a good man.  And so lonely.  As shrewish as his wife was, I think he would have missed her company had she gone to the hospital.

            My lesson was on the Book of Mormon.  I find it a difficult book to teach and hope that working through it helps me understand it better.  It’s a simple, straight-forward book.  The writing and the characters are not rich in complexity—which is what I respond to best.  I’m sure it reflects the taste and view of Mormon and Moroni.  There were in a hurry to make their point.

            What strikes me as noteworthy is the audacity of it.  To present a book of history—challengeable by objective fact, a spiritual book—challengeable by experience and man’s innate sense; and to present it miraculously so that the book must stand on its own—is all really audacious and courageous.

            Roy Prete dropped by tonight to pick up his girls who were visiting.  He’s such a good fellow that I’m disarmed.  I’m not always able to respond as thoroughly as I should.  He was off to deal with one of the difficult problems of a ward family.  He cares so much and is so willing that it breaks my heart.  Since my illness I just can’t muster that deep, tangible sense of urgency and involvement.  I feel the slightest twinge and know that a good dose would be fatal.  Pray that his heart is stronger.  Part of the problem is family disintegration.  Without parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, to crowd around, pick up pieces, push things together, we’re left in a lonely world.  There’s something about the naturalness of blood that makes it possible to press a faltering enterprise along.  Without it we’re too hard—too careful—too concerned with cost and fairness.  Roy’s not and thank heaven for his kind.

Jan. 11/84

It’s doleful and cold today.  Past midnight.  Pat’s asleep on the bed beside me.  I’ve just been preparing for class.  Reading dreadful stuff and wondering how to convince an army of striving post-adolescents on a dim January morning that it’s worth putting some thought to.  The chapter I’m teaching from is one I did initially for the Tax book.  I has been redone and butchered by someone with a dim January morning mind.  Teaching is such a total mystery.  I had an argument with Mark W. today about it.  he is totally exasperating.  He’s conservative and defensive and protects himself in those positions by attacking others for being conservative and defensive.  It was a dreary argument and I don’t wish to remember it.

            In some ways it has not been a happy season.  There have been a lot of deaths.  Things are tight financially.  The world is reeling—doing it’s best to make me feel guilty.  I have developed a certain comfort.  My life is regular sequestered pleasures—indulgences, maybe.  And I’m selfish about it.  I used to think it boring for a man to claim an easy chair for his particular, fatherly use.  But it’s come to that.  That’s why it’s hard to watch Matthew and Emily grow up.  The were both the “babies”—and such good ones.  Emily jumped from childhood today with a whispered confidence to Pat that—when guessed—revealed the loss of infancy.  Things are supposed to lie dormant in January, but not a little girl’s headlong rush toward the end.  Why do we rush to the grave?

Jan. 13/84

            Exam time always gets me into a funk.  Taking power over people is difficult for me.  And the endless, boring reading is so hard to keep up.  Today I was thrown into a deeper funk by a couple of chance remarks by faculty colleagues.  Neither was intended, and both revealed a point of view I know existed.  But there was a casual thoughtlessness about them that, added to an unpalatable attitude about me and my ability, made me feel immensely inadequate.  Both because I may be tempted to believe that the negative judgment about me is accurate, and because I don’t have enough cool and confidence to ignore.

            And I don’t speak out.  Confrontation is so distressing to me that I swallow hard—and the judgment about my ineffectual nature is confirmed—to me and possibly to the person who holds the view.

            Such experience turns one in so sharply.  Immediately, you see less, hear less, ears ring, people become shadows.  I wrote this line long ago:

 

                        Sometimes my soul is shriveled

                        To such a pitied size

                        That I must stand on tip toe

                        To see out through my eyes.

 

            I suppose I should begin to wonder how often I have in casual insensitivity, done wounding of this sort to another.  I don’t have the temperament (or the courage) to be a swashbuckling wounder or a conniving one.  But I‘m sure that I have betrayed an inner condemnation in an insensitive way.  And that’s the worst.  If you keep it secret, you can change it or adjust it.  If you are direct, you present the subject with a chance for challenge or rebuttal.  But letting it sneak out without control, without responsibility, hurts the subject twice.  First is the bad opinion.  Second is the fact that the subject is neither important enough to address nor protect.

            So we go into the weekend.  It’s very cold.  I like the winter less and less.

Feb. 1/84.

Genesis holds no mystery for me.

I am a creator.

Each moment I take chaos – the unformed –

And I form it.

I say, “Let there be light,”

And there is comprehension.

From the thin skin of the world

To the thin skin of time

I make all time

And the point on which the universe spins

I can transform from sacred to profane.

I can cleanse that which is vile.

I can create love;

I can create hate.

I can connect the tree and the song –

Make them a unity.

Or I can tear them apart.

A thousand careless sounds become my song;

My cries and hums become a story,

A prayer.

If the nihilist tells me that life is ridiculous

I can only ask, “Compare to what?”

If the nihilist says, “I will make a work of art

To celebrate my nihilism.”

I can only surmise that his act of creation

Denies his nihilism.

He makes sense.

He desires that someone share that sense.

Out of blackness

He has created light.

Out of the unformed

He has created a community.

Out of the uncaring

He has cared.

Entropy does not exist.

If it seems the universe is pulling apart-

Rattling to pieces,

Falling under its own dumb forces-

Know this, it will return.

If we pull it apart,

Cast away its pieces,

It will come together.

The very will by which I pull it apart

Is the force that brings it together.

From dust I can make a person.

From sensation I can make an idea.

From the flying forces of the universe

I can make a reason.

And though I return to dust

To sensation

To the flying forces of the universe,

I shall return.

And though I fall from despair to failure

Heaven shall be my home.

 

Unpolished—but I read a review of a Fassbinder movie today—Berlin Alexandroplatz I think it called—billed as a 15-hour cry of anguish.  A nihilist rejection.  In my experience there has always been an intimidation in that type of art.  Nihilist, cynical, unhappy.  At 18-20 years I thought it was great.  Art that hurt seemed to be so—genuine.  Ingmar Bergman, the French objectivists, the American pessimists—all seemed so close to life.

            Of late I find little attraction in art that hurts.  Movies about nuclear annihilation, child abuse, wife-beating, incest, missing children, no matter how well done just don’t do much for me.

            When I read about Fassbinder and the awe of intimidation laid on the reviewer, I reacted by wondering about the legitimacy of nihilist art.  If you want to organize a piece of art and present it to a community, does that not deny your premise.  Something like being president of the Anarchist league.

            Then, in reading a book called Law, Language and Ethics it occurred to me that in some measure we live in a chaos but it is possible to organize & to create something with it.  To the extent that we do we are really living—not just existing.  And there is something in our essential nature that leads us to desire to form our lives and to form the lives of others and to form communities wherein our vision and purpose is shared and respected.

            It’s interesting that Dostoevsky started out as a cynic and anarchist as a young man of privileged upbringing.  Only after years in Siberian prisons with life at the edge did he become a mystic and a man who saw purpose and meaning in being.

Feb 3/84

            Raw thaw today.  Rainy and icy.  I fell and wrenched a shoulder.  Pat still won’t wear winter boots so I had to steady her along as we went to spend the evening with the Bales.

            Emily was to go to a strange practice with some people from the Church.  Both Pant and I were reluctant.  I drove her around to find the place and expressed my reservation.  She’s smart and sees right through to the heart of things.  Like when I railed against another driver a couple of days ago and she observed—mostly to herself in the back seat—“isn’t it funny how all the other drivers are always wrong.”

            It’s a clear view of things that is very frightening.  Where can I hide?

            But it’s not a true view.  It’s (the clear view of a child) too limited in perspective.  To see a moment clearly is not to see the truth if you don’t see before and after and relationships.

            It’s like a curve ball, that so often fools young batters until they learn how to read and anticipate.

            But to me it’s frightening because it is so true in a limited way—and to a young mind so important in the gathering of data about the world.  I am going to become what my child has seen in those brief lightening glimpses.  In the memories that will carry me into the future I am a series of momentary insights from momentary perspectives.  My recollection of my father is of a man of huge stature.  As a child, in my eyes, I looked up to a huge imposing figure and my mind took pictures that have never been erased by my present understanding that he was smaller than my full adult size.

            What data am I filling into my children’s minds as they see those true, small, bent moments?

            And I remind myself that age’s vision of what’s before and after—the relationships and the echoes—is sometimes so busy that it misses the lightening flashes.

 

Spring  1984

            I have often found it difficult to work through some parts of the Book of Mormon.  The early portions of 1 Nephi being one of those parts.  Lehi’s dream and Nephi’s vision of the world history seemed a little obvious and direct.  The promise that they would unfold the mysteries of God (1 Nephi 10:19) didn’t excite me because the visions seemed uncomplicated and unmysterious.  The failing, I’ve conceded, has always been mine and not Nephi’s.  But I faced today’s Sunday School lesson with a certain coldness of spirit because it involved those visions.  The experiences of the week have formed an insight that has helped me considerably.

            At a symposium early in the week, an English scholar attempted to deal with the problem of great writing.  He read from Plato’s 7th epistle, wherein Plato noted that a wise man would not set his thoughts down in writing because it dehumanizes them–takes away their truth because they cannot respond to time and change.  The words were written ironically–this irony talked about the value of the written word in providing a map of where ideas had come from and what feelings and needs had given rise to them.  I thought about the intricated [sic] record preserving processes that are such a part of Book of Mormon history.  I have always been convinced of the central value to human growth of history and experienced [sic] saved.  Saying it seems trite–but understanding the nature & impact is a process that cannot be exhausted by an enlightened imagination, as the scholar demonstrated as he ranged over the history of world literature.

            In a Sunday talk, Steve Elliott read a silly piece by the child songwriter Raffi–something about “I don’t Know If I’m Growing.”  It was cute and touching, and reminded me of the youthful poverty of experience and how it closes the vision, makes one feel like life at the bottom of a hole where only one small hunk of the world can be seen through the top.

            So many things came together in my mind that it is, even now, hard to fit them adequately into a description of my realization.

            the idea is that a cosmology–a history first to last–is fundamental to any system of values.  The broader our cosmology, the more accurately can be the foundation of our values.  Since it is hard to peer into the future, we can at least establish half of that cosmology by looking at the part.  A record of history–a description of where man/men/people/the soul have been, what they have encountered, done, felt, thought, reacted to–expands the vision by letting us see a broader slice.  To the extent that experience lets us perceive what is to come, it takes the scope much further.  We recognize this truth in our rude human forms.  So we say to our children–”Just wait until you have kids of your own!” or “You’ll grow out of it!”  “Some day you’ll understand,” is recognition that truth must be digested in a broader vision, and experience is the sources of such a vision.

 

[12 June 1984]
June 12 was the day the maple seeds came down.  I walked out on the warm sunny street to a shower of them helicoptering down to the ground.  They fell down my neck, over the lawn, through the door cracks, into the workings of the car.  And just one day.  I’ve never noticed that before.  It was like someone had scheduled it: “Tuesday morning we drop the seeds.”  If I were smart and observant like Thoreau, you could drop me from the sky into the woods–without calendar or clock.  And when the maple seeds started to fall, I could say–”Gee, it’s June 12!”  Now that’s one of the things about age and memory.  If you are around and notice things and remember them, you can make connections that might be interesting or useful or something.  Maybe I could note that when the maple seeds are heavy, we have a dry summer.  Or when they fall on June 17 instead of June 10, our autumn comes earlier.  I’ve never been much for that kind of detailed involvement.  Often I regret that I have not noticed more, captured more in my consciousness.  In some ways it has been the cross I bear.  At some point I become impatient with detail.  It bogs one down.  I say this after I have spent my life as a lawyer–and, supposedly–a scholar.  Detail is our meat and drink.  It should not only be my living–but my joy:  Last night I picked up Marni at work.  1:30 a.m.  She had just finished the cash at the gas bar and was $14 short and very discouraged.  She confessed a previous loss that had been deducted from her paycheck.  It seems I’ve passed along my impatience with detail.  I wish not.  She is such a fantastic person.  I just hope the world doesn’t hold her ransom to detail.  Mark is sometimes the same way.  I’ve pushed him on this and that–maybe I should be more sympathetic–the details of living.  I’ve coddled the kids in that department.  But Mark is bubbling along in his present context.  maybe he’ll carry it along to the real world.

Aug. 1, 1984
Another scratch on the door post.  Donald Stuart and I drove out to Gananoque to look at a dining room where a faculty “retreat” can be held.  It seems a lot of trouble–but some members of faculty seem to think that a mediocre meal or an uncomfortable room are a personal affront.  As a strict believer in “process” I should probably agree with them.  But it still seems that a bad meal is a bad meal and makes the next good one so much the better.  That’s only the half of it.  Some of my colleagues seem chary [wary] of commitment of time or effort to the institution that does not seem likely to fit the agenda of their own advantage. The subject of the retreat will be first-year curriculum.  Most of the faculty seem interested mostly in changing what others do to protect their own positions.  I’m in charge, and I don’t hold much hope for a satisfactory result–if we can’t easily find a dinner that keeps them happy.
I have cause to reflect today on the strange nature of universities–at least this one.  The old Groucho Marx joke is–”I wouldn’t belong to a club that would have me as a member.”
Universities seem to say “I don’t want that person to thrive unless he scorns the institution and what it was set up to do.”
Promotions are denied unless adequate publishing is in evidence.  Token observance is given to the categories labeled “administration” and “teaching.”  But, in practice, these categories are ignored and attention is given only to publications list.  Moreover, quantity of publication is all that matters.  Two books to full professorship.  But 6 articles equal one book.  It is assumed that they are of quality as long as they are written.  Thank heavens!!  Don’t get it right, get it written.
Those very things that sustain and improve the institution and its effectiveness are the things which the institution belittles and ignores.  When the institution is self-indulgent and thoughtless to its purpose and constituency, those who further the process are valued by the institution–I must assume out of shame or lack of confidence.
It has been a hard summer.  50 years is close at hand.  Sometimes I seem to be nowhere for the long journey.  Maybe I should care more about the quality of my dinners.  Maybe I have not demanded enough from life and myself.

Sometimes the words are beyond my
control
Like antic cats
And I am dumb to tell them
That soon we both will be buried.
Unless they are caught and
groomed
I must leave my careless pets
To fend for themselves
And follow me to dust.

Aug. 30/84

I was reading a note today about Quasars.  The current theory being advanced by astronomers is that these bodies exist at the edge of the universe and are rushing outwards at almost the speed of light.  The concept is so far beyond me that I barely imagine it.  By the best accounts the Quasars are vast light years away.  They may well have ceased to exist before our world came into being.  And if they are traveling away from us at the speed of light we may never see them.  In fact, if they travel away from us faster than anything else can travel–do they have any meaning or reality or impact on us at all.
It’s more puzzling because we quantify these masses with an infinitesimally minute piece of light that is such a small fraction of the total light & energy produced by the vast quasar as to not be worth thinking about.  That micro-speck of light that has to be carefully gathered and magnified after it has traveled millions of years through crowded space, still carries with it a full code which reveals the size and shape and makeup of a limitless burst of light and power that has strewn itself in every direction.  And each speck of that light carries with it that same code.
When I think of myself–small, light sensor, living a second in the millennium of moments it seems I either matter not at all or I am the matter of everything.  My dust speck existence is either swept away by eternity’s feather duster–or the whole thing was made–contrived–to light my way.  To let me see eternity.  A million years.  A billion bright holocausts are brought within my humble gaze to instruct me.  To permit me to command the ages with an understanding.

Jan. 1985

            I dropped a manuscript at Mary Alice Downey’s today.  It really was just a set of added drawings for The Perfect Pair of Pants.  Fun to do but far from being my strong suit.  I sometimes muse that it would be nice to have a talent for the tangible.  But everyone sees himself as being under-appreciated.

            Anyway, the question of name came up.  Should it be “C.T.” or “Thomas” or “Tom.”  I’ve been the rounds.  Many years ago it was “Tommy.”  My first thing or two were dune under that name.  I think it was to sound familiar and personal.  Then for a long time it was “C. Thomas” or “C.T.”  Many’s the paper I filled with practice autographs and I carefully worked out a blending of the initials.  Why should it be important to integrate initials in an involved sort of monogram?  Monomania.  Maybe the double-barreled thing helped me feel that I was confident.  It is difficult and personal.  And “I don’t need anyone” and this just shows it.

            Not of my own dictation “Thomas” was used in a couple of settings by editors.  Fine.  As long as you don’t call me late to dinner.  But for a moment on the Perfect Pair of Pants—which will actually be published—I thought, why not just plain “Tom.”  That’s what I’m called.  Kids might relate.

            I’ve never felt very confident about “Tom.”  It’s a dull sounding thing, and the connection are not all happy ones—Tom, Tom the piper’s son & thief, peeping Tom, Doubting Tom.  Why did they pin it on me?  It means “a twin” and I’ve always been a one-dimensional loner.  As a kid I was sure that I would use “Charles” as soon as I grew up—outside the shadow of Charles the first.  When I fantasized about being famous, it was under the “Charles” banner.  But that name never belonged to me.  When my father abandoned it—and all this worldly nonsense—it really didn’t fit.  I wore his left-over shoes and a nice Irish tweed suit—but Pat never thought they fit properly, either.

            So there it is.  “Tom,” and it’s me and mine.

            Now, then, I watched Stephen Spender on the TV this week as well.  He was talking about W.H. Auden.  It’s as close as I’m ever likely to get to artistic elbow-rubbing.  Anyway, Spender talked about Auden’s discipline, away from self-indulgent themes, towards a literature of the world—of public themes.  He also talked about Auden’s ambition—fully realized—in becoming a “poet” in the tangible, real sense that a reading of that term might imply.

            “For shame,” I felt.  “For shame” to sit and write this self-indulgent drivel and to hide it in a drawer.

            It might be the tremendous fault of my poetry.  It might be what closes it in.  I do write a very personal sort of line, laze around too much with self-consciousness.  I find it difficult to write a good line about “Canada” or “Church” or “human greed” or “political purity” without reflecting personally.  I put myself down in words so I can look around the corners.  It’s the very density that intrigues me and that I try to re-create.  I’m frightened when I see someone like Dorothy Liversay, who is (for heaven’s sake) an “Auden” poet—published, read, reviewed—saying that “Poetry is like bread.  Poetry is communication / not a game / played with words / a poem is a message.

            Do I need to climb out of it?  Failure is comfortable.  It can always be blamed on others.  Non-exposure means non-rejection.  Maybe I’m hiding in density because I’m afraid to come out.

            You know the nightmare—you come through the door into the crowded light and everyone looks at you and then starts laughing—because your pants are on backwards.  That’s the nightmare when one is writing this kind of stuff.

            The reality is that when you come through the door, no one notices because they are all looking to see if their own pants are on backwards.

            I think this whole thing started for me with a peculiar generation.  It was Churchill and F.D.R. who did me in.  They were main forces as I grew up.  In far off Alberta wilderness, F.D.R. and Churchill moved things with the force of their words.  Just by saying something—fear, four freedoms, blood, sweat—a power rippled through the air and tangibly moved people and things.  To the most innocuous little, red-eyed boy, it was amazing, and worth a try.  Wow, “In Flanders Fields” could make grown, tough men cry and stand still.  It caught their attention.  It made them think about being better.

            There was nothing in my arsenal with which to bang on existence and gain its attention.  Except, maybe, some ability to organize words.  I can remember exactly when it first dawned on me.  I was at my Grandfather Asplund’s funeral.  It all sounds contrived and corny—but it’s too vivid a memory to be anything but true.  I was, perhaps, ten years old—not fully aware of all the implications of what was going on.  Death was a new experience.  My grandfather was a warm, easy-going person who passionately involved himself in wars and politics and religion as ideas.  But he was jovially detached and there were so many grandchildren that it was hard to contend with each as an individual.  Grandma was more passionate—knew each of us, felt strongly and concerned and protective.  And she had lost one of her people and was devastated by the loss, jealous as she was of each.  She was in a state of collapse.

            I was sitting next to my father through that long Mormon funeral.  Several speakers, quartets and prayers.  I knew it was an important and solemn occasion and I had an overwhelming desire to order some words that would tell forever what was beautiful and important about that day.  So I took my father’s fountain pen (he always carried one with a golden nib) and a scrap of paper and I started.  My poetic vocabulary was limited to nursery rhymes (not at all appropriate) scriptures (so many had been used without apparent impact on that day) and Winston Churchill.  Heaven’s sakes, how I tried.  Of course nothing came of it.  But I’ve been trying ever since.

Thinking about the foregoing I can imagine Christian’s motivation.  I think that since Elvis Presley and the Beatles his generation has seen music as an immense moving power.  The palpable power of music to influence and cause people to react is awesome.  Conversations with Christian now recollected seem to describe his unspoken sense of that power and his desire to harness it.

 

March 28/85

            Pat and I wandered off to a lecture the other night.  The fellow was an Oxford philosopher named P.M.S. Hacker and the lecture was entitled “Brain, Mind and Language.”  In recent weeks I have been interested in the idea that language has a substance that precedes its use.  The critical legal philosophers are pressing us all with the idea that language means just what we want it to mean.  It is invested with our political and social values but we try to give it a neutrality that is false.

            I would like to be able to maintain that while language might be used in the way they suggest, its ideal use is beyond the power of the user.  And if we create a true language, its very use by the power holders creates the most effective curb on their power.

            Hacker did not provide solace.  Mostly he was concerned with scientists who use the words “language” and “code” to describe how the brain functions.  He was critical of this use of language to describe the functions of the nervous system.  Interestingly enough, his system seems to suggest something beyond nerves & brain which sounds suspiciously like a soul.

            I stayed awake through most of it.  The computer scientists and doctors didn’t like the lecture.  Unless somebody is actively offensive, I tend to like it if they talk seriously about something.

            One aspect of language that was debated—on the notion that only humans have languages—was the dance of bees.  I scribbled the following:

 

[“The Bee’s Dance”]

 

June 12/85

 

Pat just phoned.  We all forgot Matthew’s birthday.  Oh—That fourth spot in the sible.  If anyone deserves not to be forgotten it’s Matthew, and for that very reason it’s the one we do forget.  How much of our willful life is just a response to intimidation?

May 5/87 (from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund)
Stayed up all night, ironing, packing, roaming, dithering, blubbering. 3:00 AM—leaving Em in her T-shirt at the front door, wait at 401 Inn for bus driver to allow his passengers in. Gibbering baby in front of us “all the way to Toronto.” Never use a bus batheroom, if you treasure your identity & humbanity.Winging to Cathay
On this bronze hammered horse
That flies in its fixed & frozen moment
Hanging over the world
I find my own new world.
Taking civilization to China!
I see my own new world for the first time.
Great Bear, Great Slave, Athabasca
Frozen miles from my flying horse
So new they are breathless
Skinny Trails of Caribou tracks
Plod far from my flying horse
This heavy land that hangs
Above us.
And I learn about it while going to China

May 6/87 (from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund)We have followed the sun, raced it and almost won. It’s a momentary sensation of beating time. The home we left is deep in the middle of night. My watch says 3:30 a.m. And here in Japan it is bustling afternoon. Kingston seems like Brigadoon—swallowed by the mists.
Connections are tight but airports seemed geared to grind things through. Just stay in step. Do not be afraid to lose control. The Japanese, it seems on such a short exposure, are not as given to control as North Americans. The take it easier.
And as we alit, we were right next to the towers and the red flags erected by farmers and young radicals to combat the spread of the airport. Maybe their willingness to suspend self-control finds other outlets.
The towers have been in the news. I see them with that surprise that always accompanies the discovery that takes heard(?) and told are sometimes true. Visits to London & New York (and even Niagara Falls) are always slightly annoying with the discovery that things and people and attitudes that one hears about through television and newspaper and stories are true—palpable.
In Detroit airport Pat noticed an excited knot of people milling around. There’s someone famous over there,” she said. I walked over to the back of the small assemblage and looked over the heads—but there were none that I recognized. Suddenly a young black man dressed in coveralls retrieved a piece of paper upon which a droopy eyed fellow in designer jeans and a leather jacket had scratched with a ball-point pen. My eyes met with the eyes of the autograph seeker. He understood my unspoken question. “Hey man,” he said. “They’re the guys who starred in that TVee show a couple of years ago. You know, Invaders for Outer Space of somethin’ like that.”
So things are real. The rice paddies that we singed over as we landed in Tokyo, complete with people in conical hats clearly knee-deep in their jobs and oblivious to our massive overhead presence, were there just like National Geographic said they would be.
But there is not the excitement I used to know at finding Madison Square Garden, or turning a corner in Toronto and standing in front of Massey Hall. Or seeing the Eiffel Tower. Aside from annoyance at close(?) schedules, and the demeaning status of air travel at less than first class, there’s not that cold chill of excitement. And here we are—on our way to China.

May 8/87
(from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund, this entry by Patricia Asplund)

First night in Beijing in our hotel. Hong was muggy but gorgeous. Kent met us and we careened in a taxi to their waterfront apartment. Views of Mount Victoria, docks, lovers in gardens below, skyscrapers, and the huge Marlboro cigarette sign. We walked thru Hong Kong—circus of neon signs overlacing the streets, clock-fountain, Tom bought film, I slept for the first time in many nights! Baby Sam cute, their maid Emily present. Breakfast, then airport to Beijing in a 747—I thought somehow we’d be in a little rusty prop-plane. The red-guard soldiers at Beijing Airport scary, and Tom lost grey suitcase—found where we’d left it. The customs people dubious re: the famous Yamaha Keyboard schlepped across 3 continents in 6 Biway bags. Met by Dean Fong, Hospitality Lady, Mr. Wong. Diner good, a walk and to bed.

May 8, 1987
(from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund)

Now our first day in Beijing. The ruts of time must be reshaped after we rush around the globe. So we awake quite early and get a good start on the day. Breakfast at 8 a.m. with a Taiwanese computer expert from Columbus, Ohio. He seemed more ill at ease than we are—touchy about the food and transportation. So we started out, well armed with greasy eggs and dense toast, to find a bus to the center of the city. It takes a lot of nodding, shouting and shrugging. With the help of an English-speaking chinese surgeon we made our way to Tian An Men Square. It is the Chinese equivalent of the Lincoln monument. That is , most of the tourists are Chinese—buying ice cream bars, glasses of orange pop, gawking, dragging kids. for all that is human & familiar, however, it is still another country an d a separate experience. Pat’s attempt to use the public toilet brought the awareness to us. So we tramped down to the Beijing Hotel—old, musty, stuffy—Patrician—but clean bathrooms, incense burning over the stoop holes.
A stop in the shops to look at jade and bracelets, a warm coke and then the long—4-5 km walk to the friendship stores. No bargains—unless exquisite jade, furs, furniture at prices beyond our dearest imaginings are bargains. But we saw and were seen. Pat’s red hair and open-toed sandals appear to fascinate many on the streets.
It will take a while to get used to things. It seems to me that Beijing is just Monarch, Alberta with 10 million people. Dusty, rural in a special way.
So we join the ugly tourists at the Friendship stores and take a taxi home, driven by a black smoothy who charges old men on loaded bicycles, school girls, buses, with a frenetic aggressiveness that is breathtaking.
Our exertions lead to a long, refreshing nap, supper and a walk through a summer night so fresh and beautiful that it redeems all life. Emperors must have felt slighted that such nights did not come to them exclusively—better than palaces, gold or silk—a night could be indulged in by the poorest beggar who merely chose to step into it.

May 9 [‘87]
(from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund, this entry by Patricia Asplund)

Saturday, and off at 8:30 AM with Mr. Wong and driver to the Forbidden City in the morning—unbelievable rich carvings, palaces, clocks, carved rock, courtyards, paintings, theatre costumes, jade, coral, thrones, & the drop-cloth behind the young emperor’s throne, so the Empress, his mother, could prompt (power behind the throne!) Lunch at Friendship Hotel, then to the Summer Palace—elegant architecture, the promenade with intricate paintings of Chinese history throughout, the climb up to the Buddhist Pagodas, a breathtaking view of the lake, the Island of Perceiving Spring & the fantastic Marble Boat of the Empress. All the Chinese outingers having a ball, young & old. Home tired but tired.

Sun., May 10 [‘87]
(from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund, this entry by Patricia Asplund)

Up for the 7:30 A.M. bus to the Qing Tombs, & off on the wildest oriental goose-chase on record! Bus lost way, finally stopped for box lunches above lovely reservoir, through endless villages out of the 18th C.—burning branches for cooking. One wrong road tapered off into a family; little dirt yard—but all eating popsicles. Finally, after worst washboard road, we arrived, saw, acme home same route. Tired & sore, but saw CHINA, met Suzanne Ma, John, Shirley & Charlie Hoffman, Janet from Guelph, Tom from Asplund.

Mon., May 11 [‘87]
(from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund, this entry by Patricia Asplund)

To the University bus at 7:30 AM. Tom taught, I met English dept. & Dean Fong, got my assignments. Home for lunch, out for 1:30 PM bus to Friendship Store, missed it, shopped at “K-Mart,” saw Chinese looking & having revels, etc. Supper, more window-shopping. Nice calm time.

[Monday 11 May 1987?]
(from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund)

After a while you begin to notice things about tourists. For example, only three nationalities are often seen in group tours—Americans, Japanese and Germans. The Australians and New Zealanders are assiduous loners. The British, it seems, like to be in a place with a reason, to acquire local standing of some sort. And the French blithely ignore everyone.
And after a while you see tourists as types—those who want to see the place, those who want to acquire the place through its artifacts, those who want to consume the place and those who want to be consumed by it. I often thought that the loud, picture-taking short timer must be the most obnoxious. They are the ones who want to see a place and leave it untouched or untouching. I now think if I were a local, I would most resent another kind of tourist that has become very common to the exotic places I have observed. Usually young, carrying a back pack, wearing rough, vaguely disreputable—but thoroughly fashionable clothing. I guess they are kind of guerrilla tourists. Like Mao they want to be fish swimming in the ocean, but like all other tourists they want recourse to the costliest comforts. That is, their touring is a style but they are still tourists. Were I a local I would resent the sense they import that they can be casual about entering any world, that they can presume to take comfort and ease in it without paying the costs of giving themselves to it. It’s as if they want to return to their friends to tell them that they have beaten and subdued a place.
Big now to this culture of tourists are Tibet and Turkey. Not long ago, China itself had a cachet. But when Princess Tours can command its exotica, new boundaries must be sought. The forbidden city is no longer forbidden. but Tibet and the Trans-Siberian Railway. Inner Mongolia.
Now Ed Peterson is the quintessential consumer. When Pat mentioned China to his wife, she was quick to note that Ed was too busy—he’s used China up—it’s on to a new frontier. Turkey is the place this year.
And that leaves us here in China! It’s good to tear oneself away, but not easy and not without pain. In the end, the culture of China is possibly not interesting enough to warrant the pain. Emperors are not always interesting people, and the worlds they create for their amusement are grand, but ultimately silly. Maybe we’ll learn more and go more deeply, but the arrangement does not encourage that. We live behind a wall, and that too often suits us well enough, just as it suits those who put us there.
But the pain is valuable—a tough stretch of the muscles. The first thing one gives up is control, and I’ve reached that age where I have wrestled too long for what little control I have. Finally in my life I have acquired a position where I have the illusion of control—I don’t seem to have to depend on anyone but myself for the fundamental things. I can go and come—make decisions within the broadest range I know. And I’ve left that behind. I have to trust others to speak for me. My food and shelter are acquired by the sufferances of unseen powers. I cannot come and go without substantial effort. Traditional sources of information are closed to me. There is a slight claustrophobia. Pat solves it by moving furniture—changing the place to suit herself. I am reluctant to change anything for fear it will anger the unseen powers. And I hate myself for this cowardice.

I met the quintessential [The entry ends here.]

May 14/87

[Letter to kids.  Not sure if it was sent]

 

Dear Kids

            This is our first day off so we’ll try to get a little information down to tell you about this place.  I’ll probably tell you more than you wish to know.  We can start with the first day.  That flight from Detroit to Tokyo was a shin-kicker.  It seemed like 2 days in the air.  The Detroit stewards were surly and slow.  The only fed us once and the food wasn’t very good.  The only advantage was that the plane was only half full so we had plenty of room to stretch out.  The view of the Canadian arctic and the Alaskan mountains was compensation for a dreary time.  And we’ve been to Japan.  The plane landed in Tokyo—almost scraping the towers and flags the student and farmer protesters have erected to prevent expansion of the air port.  We got off the plane on the runway—entered a bus—drove to a small building—get off the bus, through one door, out another into a second bus which drove back out to the same runway and we boarded the plane sitting next to the one we left.  It all took about 10-15 minutes.  And so we left for Hong Kong.  The new crew was compensation.  They were fast and friendly and the food was much better.  We landed 1 hour late in Hong Kong—but Kent was waiting for us.  After a gut-wrenching taxi ride we were at the Elliott’s apartment.  A very warm and generous welcome.  Tommy has a hero in Marni—worship  left over from piano lessons.  Kent and Chris live very well in a high-rise overlooking the ocean, beautifully furnished with a full-time live-in maid.  I think they will miss it.  We slept well—except that Mom got up to go to the bathroom and couldn’t find the bedroom.  At noon the next day we left for the big “C”.  It was a 3 hour, relatively comfortable flight.  But the plane was very old, and the schedule haphazard.  In China there are only three things to drink—beer, water that may or may not have been boiled and coke.  No “diet-Coke”.  I guess they recognize the oxymoronic element of calling something you consume “Diet”.  Tea is not as present as one is given to believe.  Chinese friends say that drinking green tea at every turn is what the Japanese do.  The favourite tea is jasmine tea—which is fragrant in a bathroom-spray sort of way.  But one gets used to it.

            We arrived in Beijing on a very crowded flight, and debarked into an airport that looks a bit like every airport in the world—except that it looks like people have been using it without paint or repairs for 50-60 years.  I swear, the Beijing baggage carousel is the oldest in the world.  From its condition and kemptness, it must have been the first one ever.  And of course there is that stomach turning moment when you wait to see if yours is the baggage that has not made it.  Ours did.  We waited for it with an Australian who talked through his teeth—sort of an inarticulate Crocodile Dundee—who had been in Beijing 6 months, had another 6 to go which he seemed to view as time at hard labour from which he would gladly accept parole.

            What we’ve learned is that, officially, there are two classes of foreigners in China—tourists and foreign experts.  The tourists come in 3 varieties.  The richest and most aloof are the Japanese.  The loudest and the dumbest looking are the Americans.  The most numerous and the strangest (strongest?) dressers(?) are the overseas Chinese.

            Foreign experts come in two classifications—the long-timers and the short-timers.  You can tell the long-timers—they don’t carry cameras but they carry shoulder bags with the necessities—toilet paper, something to drink, passport, etc.  They also direct their conversations towards the techniques of survival in Beijing—where cheap things can be acquired, where cheap transport can be secured; how to get kids to school.  They talk very little about “home.”  They almost seem afraid to.

            The short timers are all scientists—Americans, British, West Germans—they all carry cameras, they still talk about the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and how good the food is.

            We have met a very diverse group.  At table we have had German physicists, Scottish botanists, an American wind quintet, a German engineer, a Canadian astronomer, and so on.  On our first day outing our bus group included a Peruvian novelist, an Australian mining engineer, the wife of a Canadian economist, an American economist from Long Island and his wife, Shirley.  They were all long-timers.  I’ll tell you about the trip in a minute.

            Back to the story.  We were met in the Beijing airport by a delegation from the University.  But suddenly my grey suitcase was missing.  I accused a tour bus driver who was loading cases for his tour group with callous abandon.  Mother [nerded] forward to [resist] the airport.  Our efforts proved fruitless—because we’d left the bag back by the carousel.  Not a good start.  A loss of face I’m sure.  The ride from Airport to Hotel took about 1 hour and was our introduction to Beijing traffic.  It’s total chaos.  Like New York or London, only with twice as many people.  The relationship of bikes and motor vehicles is one of rapid negotiation in which the rider of the bicycle does not seem to realize the weakness of his or her position.

            In the meantime, we made conversation.  When you get to the point of asking what kind of trees are on the boulevard you know you are in trouble.  We asked a lot about trees.

            But the hotel came—and, it being dinner time, a substantial Chinese meal which was very good.  The hotel was built in the 1950s by and for Russian foreign experts.  Part of the cold war plan, I’m sure, is that they would get it new and turn it over to Westerners.  Unfair comment really.  It is like something out of a Tennessee Williams play, but it’s comfortable and happy.  The staff work hard to be good and we have a clean bathroom which is the greatest of heavens in China.  It even has a shower of sorts.  Actually, it’s a tub with one of those hand held devices.  The tub is about 10 inches wide (a slight exaggeration) so that when you sit in it you never quite reach the bottom.  So Mom has taken to the hand-held shower.  But there is no shower curtain.  I’ve learned to stay away from the sink or the open door while she is showering.  Her arm is far-reaching and unerring.  For the first 2 mornings Mom was up and in the shower first and came back grumbling about cold showers.  I [rove] and drew a piping-hot bath.  We eventually learned that the hot water is not turned on until 6:30 a.m.

            The room is very small—but compared to Chinese housing we are luxuriously fixed.  We’ve pushed the twin beds together.  Mr. Soberman’s mini-stereo is a godsend and we are very happy.

            On our first morning we arose and fixed upon a plan to catch a bus to the downtown.  We memorized some bus numbers and set off on what is a 20-25 km journey.  We picked rush hour.  The buses were packed and we had a most interesting ride.  Mom secured the cooperation of an English-speaking Chinese doctor on his way to work who helped us at the transfer point.  We were to transfer from #320 to #1 bus.  What we didn’t realize is that there are special bus stops for each bus number.  In the end we found our way to Tien An Men square which is the physical and emotional heart of the city.  Grand and exciting—but we had to begin the search for a bathroom.  That is the great adventure in China.  By the time 10 million people have used a facility, it attains a certain character.  In the end we walked a couple of blocks to the large old Beijing Hotel where the facilities are pleasant—burning incense even.  We sat down, had a coke, shopped and enjoyed a little bourgeois comfort.  We then decided to walk to the Friendship Store—the center of expatriate activity—which appeared to be six blocks from the Beijing Hotel on our map.  What we didn’t account for was that each block is 1 mile long.  But it was a lovely day.  We say interesting and beguiling glimpses of Chinese street life.  We visited a food market—I guess the Chinese equivalent of A&P.  The sounds and smells are—well I guess unforgettable is what one could say.  Eventually we found the Friendship Store.  It is limited to foreigners spending foreign money.  But this is not to imply that it is inauthentic.  The Chinese have been around long enough and are numerous enough that they put their stamp on everything.  Even the specialty places in the fancy Western-built hotels do not escape the cultural stamp.

            At the end of the day, we were so tired that we returned to our hotel by taxi—expensive, but necessary.  (Taxi-drivers, by the way, are almost twice as well paid as law professors, we are told).

            On Saturday, the University provided a bus and a guide.  The guide is my assigned student assistant.  His name is Wong.  He’s a graduate law student, 23-years old.  His English is very good and he’s a nice fellow with a good sense of humour.  His mother runs a small movie theatre in Beijing, so he was raised here, and he was a very good guide.

            In the morning we visited the Forbidden City.  It is an area of 3-4 square miles in the middle of Beijing which contained the palaces, dwellings, formal buildings and offices of Chinese emperors over a period of several centuries.  It’s grandness and exoticness are not diminished by the fact that it has been looted by invaders, revolutionaries and the departing Nationalist Chinese when they went to Taiwan.  The form of building has set the stage for Chinese building.  They seem to love walled enclosures and houses, hotels, public buildings, built in a familiar form with familiar forms of decoration.  Even the poorest farmers’ cottages are small imitations of the imperial style.

            In the afternoon we visited the summer palace.  It is on a lake in the northern part of the city, and is now a park and recreation site that is extensively used by the Chinese of the city, as well as by tourists.  The buildings are imitative of the Forbidden City palaces.  The most distinctive feature is a covered promenade which skirts the lake and runs for several kilometers.  It is adorned with many thousands of paintings and really is aesthetically pleasing and lovely.

            The weather was lovely.  It was a perfect tourists’ day.  We have both been feeling well and energetic.  Sleeping has been easy.  And the 6 a.m. risings have not been at all difficult.

            Sunday is the Chinese holiday of the week.  The University uses its mini-buses to take foreign visitors on tours.  The one planned this Sunday was to the tombs of the Qing Dynasty—the last dynasty which ended in 1909 after a 400-500 year tenure.  They are sometimes called the Eastern tombs because they are to the NE of the city about 100 km (the distance turned out to be a subject of concern and conjecture during the course of the day).  They are to be contrasted with the Ming tombs which are to the west of the city and are somewhat older.

            The tomb site was chosen to be where mountains would rise to the west at the back and a plain would flow easterly from the front.  Well, we set out at 7 a.m.  The company included the NY economist and his wife, the Australians, the Peruvians, Wong and another student assistant and guide, the driver and the driver’s son.  All was happy as we traversed Piying, tooting the bicycles out of our path.  Now the thing about China is that there is no countryside.  Every spare area is planted or built up or both.  And the roads aren’t separate thoroughfares.  They’re just a part of everything.  People live on them, sit on them, work on them, play on them, gamble on them.  And the roads go through the middle of houses, farms, whatever.  The sewers—open—run along one side of the road.  Opening your window when you stop can be an invigorating experience.  Well we bombed along very nicely.  Past stores and towns.  Billiard tables are very big.  They are home-made with any sort of cotton cloth to upholster them.  And they set them up by the road where 10-15 men gather to play or watch the game.  There were literally hundreds of them.

            We cleared Beijing at some indeterminate point and headed for the country.  The road was, I think it could be said, of uneven quality.  Sometimes four lane paved, sometimes two lane unpaved, for several miles gut-wrenching washboard which appeared to be certain destruction for the van and the case of pop in the back which would be our only source of moisture for the day.  But we survived.  At one point we had to dismount and push the bus over a mound of sand used in construction.  Several times we stopped to ask directions.  Noon passed, and 1 o’clock.  People were getting a little less than cheerful.  The road became narrower, the village more basic.  The TV antennas disappeared and suddenly the road ended in the back of a farmer’s pig sty next to his walled front yard where his wife and family stood watching us inscrutably.  We had missed the turn.  An hour to retrace our steps—we stopped next to a reservoir for lunch—warm pop, hard-boiled eggs, moldy bread, sausages and a duck thigh (fried).  Then on to the buses and the tombs.  Even when we saw them it was not clear how to get there.  Life has worked its way around the tombs.  They are in the middle of rice fields.  They have been looted often.  The last one to be used was closed up in 1909 when the Dowager Empress died.  It was looted in the 1920s by a nationalist war-lord who found the monk who had presided at the closure of the tomb, and tortured him in to revealing its secrets.  I tried to take a picture of mother in the bottom of the tomb and met my first official censure—a hand across my view-finder.  No pictures.  The flash will cause the artifacts to deteriorate.

            We only had an hour to sift around the on or two structures to which access was available.  But we were the only Western tourists there.  And there were precious few Chinese tourists—most of them arriving in army and police limousines.  There were a few local young people, out for a Sunday outing and a secluded spot to hold hands and spoon.

            And then the trip back.  Not a happy one.  We all knew that whatever we had gone through on the way out had to be repeated, and people were not happy.  The gut-wrenching washboard for 1 hour destroyed every semblance of good will, several empty beer bottles in the back and kidneys of everyone aboard who had emptied the beer bottles.

            At ten-o’clock we returned to the hotel.  Charity from the dining room and a clean bathroom saved our lives.

            Monday was our first day of work.  Our bus leaves at 7:30 a.m.  The hot water comes on at 6:30 a.m.  Breakfast is at 7 a.m. and takes 29 minutes.  It is not an easy schedule.  But we made it.

            We share an office with each other.  It is commodious and pleasant.  The University was built as a film studies B.R. (Before the revolution).  It has lovely gardens, but the housing is old and basic.

            I was introduced to my class of 18 graduate students that I will teach 4 hours each week.  I also teach 38 undergraduate law students 2 hours each week.  A bus picks us up at 7:30 a.m. and returns us to the hotel at 11:30 a.m.  Our afternoons are generally free.  But the hotel is far from the central locations and transportation is difficult for neophytes.

            Mother will teach 6 hours of English each week.  It is a proposed(?) curriculum of some rigidity and has caused her some anxiety—though I think it is an interesting challenge.

            Our only other major event has been the welcoming banquet.  It took place on Tuesday evening at a large hotel—but a Chinese hotel (ton contrast it with the foreign tourist hotels).  Everything is very formal—careful introductions and words of praise and encouragement.

            The food is more exotic and exotically-prepared (though I think not as tasty as our daily fare) and included quail’s eggs, lotus bulbs, sea-cucumber, an astounding variety of fungus.  It is served on your plate by your host.  We drank coke in preference to their mai tai firewater.

            So we are well, feeling healthy, enjoying experiences.  We miss you all very much.  And we miss not being able to pick up a phone to find out what you are doing.

            We love each of you very much, and realize just how much when we are deprived of your close company.  Look after yourselves.  How are music exams, Emily?  Boy, the TV is something here.  Not much of a temptation.

            Don’t forget to write to Matthew.

            Are you eating well?  Keeping the place clean?

            How’s the car running?  Don’t forget to pay the bills.

            Save this letter and let Mark read it.  We can’t write many letters this long.  Don’t have the stamina.  We’ll see you in July.

                        Dad and Mom

May 20/87
[from China Journal, by C. Thomas Asplund]

[This appears to be entry that gave rise to the unfinished poem “South along Baishiqiao Lu…”]

Out the guarded gate and to the right along the wall which separates the Friendship Hotel from the chaos outside, is a small park where the old men bring their birds every day. It’s a small park with stamped dusty clay and cement slabs between the trees. The birds are hung in the trees—each cage in its own tree a proper distance from the others. And the quilted covers are pulled away, but by bit, within a careful plan that is part of the mystery. Each bird has its own song, the old men say, and if they [see?] another singing they will mock the song and lose their own magic gift.
The old men arrive on bikes, three cages each, strapped to the rear of the bike. And as they wheel into the park they call to one another smiling, old greeting that one does not have to know to understand. And the birds sing. They are, I calculate, some kind of thrush or wren, fat, thick, with throats like an Italian tenor that open like a canon to blast out the song.
Sometimes the old men take the cages, humps of bamboo, fashioned with an art whose blending of form & function would make Bauhaus weep—and swing them around. The birds flap and grab. It is to give the birds exercise the old men say. They become fat and lazy. And the old men pinch their eyes and smile and show their old men teeth. My first instinct is to wonder what the birds cost. So much time is spent selling things. Good fortune more than good sense keeps me from revealing that I might even think with half a mind that there could be items of commerce. Sometimes the quilted cover of language saves us.
Then I return to the Friendship Hotel Garden, behind the wall. The [amahis?] bounce balls to children in the twilight. I dream of home and watch a crow, big and black, fly across the sky and land in the imperial orb that tops the turret of the Friendship Hotel. The crow becomes a silhouette with the birds of eternal life that are baked into oriental roof that sweeps from the orb.

May 25/87

One is tempted to capsulize it all. You know—China is…. There it was. The main concert hall it Beijing; ergo the main concert hall—China. Massive space, plush spacious seats, vast balconies, the China Broadcasting Orchestra, full symphonic treatment of Mendelsohn and Sibelius, cantillevered wood handsomely worked—and right out in the beautifully worked wood, full treatment on the vast panel at stage right, sticking out of the polished wood behind the last chair violin, a 3-inch iron pipe and a big red tap on the shut off valve. The whole city is either being put up, or falling down. New office buildings have carpet kicked into corners and running ragged along the walls. [Fuiring] is falling out. Buildings have nets in place to catch falling debris before it gets to pedestrians. And it is so easy to be smug.

June 6/87

A day of great dislocation. Pat was in the spell of extasy. I felt lousy. That alone was enough. The project of the day was an overnight visit to [Beidaihe?], a beach resort about 150 miles from Beijing. The plan was to leave in buses with other foreign experts to catch an early morning train. We could not agree whether the bus was to leave at 7:05 am or 7:15 am and that should have been the overture of foreboding. As it turned out we split the difference at 7:10 and we were both wrong—the bus was ready at 7 and we straggled up, late and in disgrace with Madame Dragon Lady, the trip organizer. Our first visit to the Beijing train station followed . No matter how you try to describe it, or the fact that it is a truism about China, one is never quite prepared for the crowds. Aggressive and bustling only out of necessity. The size dictates it. And the preferential treatment can be embarassin. At one point several soldiers were held back from a gate so the “foreign experts”could go through. I had versions of another Boxer Revellion from the fire in their eyes.
As it turned out we received our due when we boarded the train—hard seats instead of soft sleepers. But even there we received the preferred treatement of a reserved section—while Chinese sat in aisles or stood and watched us. “H

[Undated entry]

Well I didn’t get to finish that Beidaihe trip and Pat has aced me on it. Mind you, it was really two separate trips—Pat’s and mine. It reached it’s apogee when we stepped on the boat to cruise around a mountain reservoir. Pat was at the prow like carved sea maiden—in a transport of joy. I huddled under the canopy, hiding from a hot sun, caught up in my head-ache and swollen synuses. Those had taken on the aspect of rock baseballs after and during a night that was the most uncomfortable of my breathing life. Pat was ecstatic for a room that I found small, damp and dirty.
Toilet things are very important in China, you know. This toilet was in kind of a cave at the end of the room. It flushed and the taps sort of worked, though I was amazed that they were made out of metal and not out of stone. the are toilets everywhere in China. Clearly marked and convenient. Most homes don’t have private ones. The public one on the corner is good enough. One day as were were waiting for a bus, a little nine-year-old girl with the face of a madonna came from the door of the neighbourhood privy. She was singing and ambled down the alley towards home with the soft look of relief on her face. As she passed I noticed that her dress was caught in her panties. The street seemed as intimate as the bedroom hallway of a Causcasion bungalow. And sometimes you pass the long wagons that have come to pick up the product for the farms—three wheeled bicycles with oil drums fixed to the back, laying end to end with a hole cut in the top and a smell that announces their function. It’s the reason bathrooms are so plentiful and pretty. But as in all things in China, the façade does not always reveal the reality. Let’s face it, North Americans with 2 or 3 spotless, sanitized bathrooms apiece are revealing a certain amount of kinkiness about eliminatory processes. The Chinese are much more natural. That’s what it’s for. Even the Beijing Hotel—stuffy dowager empress of the hosteliers, with insense burning, burnished ceramic tile, space age hand driers—has stoop holes for the men in their public washrooms.
Anyway, the one in Beirdaihe was a new experience. Now it’s the first big revelation on the [paper?]. In Life and Death in Shanghai, a story told by a survivor of the cultural revolution, a couple of mentions were made of toilet paper—And I’ve noticed such mentions in other Chinese reportage or stories. Generally speaking, except when those people introduced colours, scent and [multi-thickness?], toilet paper is just toilet paper. In China it varies almost from roll to roll—as if they pressed out whatever came in to the paper mill that day.

June 11/87
Now the ride to the airport today revealed sights I had missed on first arrival when I was still uncomfortable and dazzled. The airport road is lined either side for about 50 yards with fine gardens and trees. It’s a façade, carefully, but not surprisingly, ordered to provide the impression for arrivals. Behind the fields, over-farmed and sucked for everything, and the perpetual building. But they never seem to finish. The new hotels

[Undated fragment on small (BEIJING FRIENDSHIP HOTEL notepad]

The cages are bamboo or black iron

Fat birds that pull their heads into
their throats like an Italian tenor
Open their throats like a cannon

Undated Entry after 1987-06-19

It was kind of a Ship of Fools thing. We were foreign experts and the bus was modern Japanese. But before the day was out the extremes of China would take our measure. We were to visit the Qing tombs or East tombs “near” Beijing. A 3 to 4 hour drive, we were told. The day was hot & dusty. We had enough cameras to record a world war, and plenty of beer and soft drinks at the back.
Janet is from Canada. Her husband was teaching economics for one year and had long given up such trips, preferring to hang around the Friendship Hotel looking for someone to talk baseball or unwieldy politics with. Janet was the kind who told you her whole life story in the first 5 minutes. This says something about her complexity. she was teaching English and trying to deal with twin 1-year olds. The latter task involved the acquisition of a car and immensely complicated provision for education at an Embassy school, daily lunches at Western Hotels and considerably more. Charles and Shirley were from Northern California (Marin County) by way of Long Island and the Bronx. Shirley had a twinkle, but Charles, an economist and “China expert” held center stage. He knew everything and nothing. but he was affable with us, a constant commentator and the passing scene, and, thus, a mild antidote to Janet.
Suzanne was a doe-eyed Eurasian with a soft Australian accent. She smiled a kind and giving smile and didn’t betray it. Her boyfriend “John” was an Australian mining engineer who was quiet in an angry sort of way. But he was not surly. He just had limited interests and was jovial and good-humoured when engaged.
Wong was our guide and translator—an unbelievably “pretty” Chinese boy of 22 or 23 who smiled easily and spoke with radio-announcer formality.
Then there was the Peruvian poet who sat next to the driver and kept alert to everything, except what was happening in the bus, like a chicken looking for grain.
The driver was portly and Chinese and we had his son who was even portlier, jolly and enthusiastic. Charles student assistant, another young Chinese college student rounded out our company.
The trip started in a good-natured flurry. Clearing the Beijing suburbs takes time. Everyone had to be introduced, exchanges of the Chinese experience as we made our way past the endless factories and restaurants, bicycles and buses. Things began to thin out—conversation and traffic—as we moved from suburbs to country. The division is not an exact one. Prairie cities are always carefully drawn, so I’ve never fully adjusted to these thinning out processes. Chinese grow grain and vegetables on every spare piece of ground and build their houses in clusters close to their growing plots. A substantial portion of Beijing is taken over for productive growing. The university is surrounded by rice paddies. Boulevards and the spaces between apartment complexes are seeded to crops. Balconies bear pots of beans and garlic. The complex rock garden at the Friendship hotel, with fountains and roses and lily ponds with fold fish, has a decorative border of beets and onions. In the spots between the walkways where we would sow grass and “ground cover,” someone has planted and will ultimately harvest, corn and beans. The concept of “ground cover” must be as totally alien to the Chinese as is the concept of “diet food.” I once expressed a desire for a “diet soda” and then realized how foolish it must seem in a place like China to have food which is eaten for the express purpose of not getting nourishment.
And the houses, one observes are huddled—near to each other and near to roads—it seems axiomatic, almost superficial to observe their contrast with the North American idea of space and solitude in housing—wide yards, long driveways. But trite observations, when they are made immediate by the tangibleness of experience, have a way of becoming lucid and exciting.
Where we use space, the Chinese use walls. We had just come from a tour of the Forbidden City with its grand halls, massive bare courtyards and embracing walls. The observation of the Chinese country home is that it is of the same species as the palaces of the Forbidden City. It is in miniature, the same structure, the same open house, enclosed walled courtyard, sweeping tile roof, proud lintel and barrier door, as the residence of emperors. The question is, did the Emperors build a large Chinese house, or did the peasants build small, Imperial palaces.
The next thing one observes is that the road is the public meeting ground. It is where people walk, talk, gamble, entertain, feed themselves, hold public meetings, the lot. Every intersection had at least one drink vendor, a pool table, and probably a book seller, a food stall and a public official taking weight, blood pressure or issuing government public service material. The road is used to dry laundry, walk hand in hand oblivious of honking traffic. At harvest time the grain is spread on the road and the traffic is used to separate grain and chaff. Old women and old men stand close with brooms to keep the strong pieces in line and to throw the harvest into the air so the wind can complete the work the traffic started. At one point we swerved to miss a dye-lot spread on the road to dry from and enterprise making water boutique. The pool tables were legion, most of them home made and upholstered with figured denim fabric, each was surrounded by 10-14 men, all with the ubiquitous cigarette dangling Bogart style. The players used the blunt end of the cues and barely flinch and the wind at the wind and dust thrown by passing cars and trucks.
The road beyond the suburbs was not good. The Chinese, perhaps from their imperial tradition, have a tendency to tear things down completely before they start to rebuild. So the whole road is destroyed before construction starts on the new one. Road signs, when they exist, have a certain Romantic notion of direction and distance, and no one much gives a darn about there the East tombs are.
The other distinctive Chinese communal resource is water. Like land, it’s use is efficient and frequent. If it is standing then someone is either fishing in it or doing laundry—often both. The most squalid ponds, the deadliest sloughs have a community. And then the water is taken to the land, fields leveled and diked to assure that every droplet is marshaled and applied. Furrows are tamped and formed to direct the water to its next use lest it flow away without full value being taken.
There is nothing more basic to the Chinese sense of total use of resources than this [use?] of toilets. There is an impressive abundance of public toilets. And they are not hidden in the backs of restaurants and service stations. They often hold prime position on the corner of a business block and have inviting tiled doors shaped like vases or fans. And sex is designated by art deco silhouettes of pompadored men and [marcilled] ladies of distinctly western features—big noses. Again they are a genuine community resource because most of the houses don’t have their own bathrooms. The one at the end of the block does it for everyone. One day while waiting for a bus at a stop beside one of the these odiferous facilities, I turned to the voice of a young girl singing. She was just leaving the “rest room” with that languid sense of relief that comes after a good visit and was slapping her shoes down the street and humming a little song. It was a sunny day and perhaps I was the only one that noticed the back of her dress caught in the elastic band of her panties. Public intimacy on the grandest scale.
So they run their restrooms for the product. It is hauled away in oil drums welded to the back of 3-wheel bicycles (not a contradiction in terms!) The smell is deeply human and almost unbearable. But it refreshed the depleted soil and fills the markets with green vegetables.
There are other signs of this efficient inefficiency throughout the countryside. In some places the soil erosion has been extreme. Large washes are visible—deep scars across the farmland marked by large clay palisades. To provide storage space and quarters for the animals, the farmers tunnel into these clay cliffs. The cavers are deep and secure, and they do not waste good farmland. The crops still grow above them. But often there are signs that the caves collapse and the process of erosion is pressed along.
But the Chinese press on with this imperial tradition. It is now established that the loss of forests has aided soil loss and erosion. The solution is to provide that by imperial decree each Chinese family must plant 5 trees per year. Bear in mind what a massive forest that is. But it means that each family must hunt for space. The city dwellers attack the country with their trees. And peasants are loathe to give them valuable land for trees that take land and water but do not produce food or money at harvest time.
By now, in our trip, I have seen all this, trying to be polite to Janet as she describes a Halloween Party at the embassy, and watch Wong nod off and bang his head against the window as we jostle over the road that has been torn up. After many stops, and frantic consultations with passing truck drivers and wise men, who do not help our confidence when they point successively in wildly different directions, we take a stretch of road that is almost eerily smooth, quiet and traffic free, but ends abruptly in the back yard of a Chinese farm house. It is the end. It’s not often that you come to the “end” of a road. City cul-de-sac’s don’t count. They are planned creations that turn around and take you back. This was just a plain end. The road went no further. And there was no road that led away from it or made its ending a temporary diversion. We backed around, watched solemnly by a Chinese farm wife, her two children and seven pigs.

Sept. 24/87

            It has been many years since I have offered a vocal prayer.  today I did with tears and earnestness that an old Stoic like me finds embarrassing.  It was triggered by a letter from Matthew—the letter was old, resigned and bitter.  If I am myself, that’s one thing.  But darling Matthew?  Old, resigned and bitter?  That one part of me that I felt would be forever soft and happy.  I know this mission thing has been a long strand of disappointment and frustration—not helped by the summer of work that preceded it.  But he was so undaunted, and he tries so hard.

            The frustration is not a new one.  Mark & Chris both went through it.  Somewhere in our heads we know the blessings of sacrifice and silent service.  Cast our bread upon the waters, we do.  Avoiding the loss of blessing by collecting prematurely the devalued currency of man’s approval.  But in our community, as it asserts its best values through that which it values and prizes as honourable, through its most honoured and authoritative speakers of truth, things are underlined—examples are singled out as expressers of value—often by giving the exemplars praise and position.  The implication is that if you don’t secure some measure of notice or position in your community—in the community of the Church—you can easily conclude that you are not worthy, not righteous.  Depending on your own self-consciousness to secure worthiness is a test of dark deepness.

            One thinks of Moroni, lonely, in black forests, trying to find within himself the strength to believe in his righteous mission.  The task is rendered more difficult because the exercise of finding justification within oneself borders so closely on self-righteousness and pride which we understand is the pit—the morass where on is forever lost.

            As difficult as lonely Moroni’s task was, so much the blacker is the task where one is surrounded, not by evil Lamanites, but by righteous saints, who have been taught to discern righteousness and don’t seem to do so.

            So we don’t seek power—but recognition that we can contribute to righteousness, in ways that match the things we do well and contribute.  I never minded the catalogues, the movings, sitting through meetings as meeting fodder, if I felt sometime I could do the things I think I’m good at—talk, teach, understand.  But forever have I felt slighted and ignored.  Mark, too.  Chris not realizing it.  Now Matthew.

            And so I pray.  Uncertain what I am praying for.  Is it because I think I can change by force of faith or concern, what is away from me and not part of me?  Or is it so I can tip into sources of understanding that are beyond me, so I can accept and find peace in a universe that unfolds beyond me?

            I know that the pain I feel for my children is greater than the pain I feel for myself in these things.

            My own pain is tempered by guilt.  It may be that I am not deserving or good enough.  I don’t feel the guilt on the part of my kids.  Some objectivity, I suggest to myself.  I can see what they are compared to others.  I know the view is shadowed and blinkered, but it’s partly true, isn’t it?

 

–Charles Thomas Asplund

 

Sept. 20, 1989

 

Dearest Mother:

 

            Don’t drop your jaw too far when you get this.  Yes, it is a letter.  It’s a beautiful sunny day – first day of autumn or last day of summer depending on how you look at it – and I’m thinking about you and wishing that you could come and visit us.  You made several autumn visits so it’s a time I particularly miss you.  In fact, we miss everyone.  We begin to know just a little of what you go through when our own kids are scattered so far afield.  What happened to the world that we started running our lives this way – tripping through the country instead of staying with those we love?  But that can’t be worried about right now.

            We are all well, and busy and happy and hope you are the same.  We’ve heard from most of the kids this week – one even by letter.

            Mark’s life has settled into that workaday routine.  He is up early, works hard, comes home and attends to church duties and goes to bed –often too late.  But he doesn’t have too much to tell us.  We’re glad that he keeps up his cello – he plays with a string group in his ward – and he has a weekly discussion group that deals with arcane things but attempts to keep a spirit

 

[I’m missing some lines here.]

 

Dickinson a few weeks ago.  He’ll be home for Christmas.  He was home three weeks ago for his high school reunion –but only for a very fast weekend and he spent a lot of time with his friends.  We did get one game of golf in – and he was very chagrined that his Dad beat him.  But he and his friend Bobby were competing and they didn’t notice me slip up between them as they were ranking each other.

            Chris and Lara have an interesting life.  they have a new “apartment” which they rent for about $600 per month.  It is one room about the size of your front room, over a delicatessen in Spanish Harlem [sic].  There is a stove (of sorts) a 40 year old fridge and a pipe to hang clothes on.  They share a bathroom with two other similar apartments.  But they’re such good kids.  They rented a floor sander and sanded the floor.  They’ll build what they call a loft bed to save floor space.  They’ve scrounged furniture (including an old piano) and have provided themselves with bed and desks and drawers without spending any money.  And it is satisfying to watch them work so hard at making a place in the world.  Chris wrote us a letter this week.  He has decided to suspend his schooling for one year and work.  He is looking for a job with Weston’s old firm – Merrill Lynch.  At a somewhat different level, however.  He is looking to be a clerk and not chairman of the board. It has meant ironed shirts and ties and dark suits – all of which Chris has not been into over the past several years.  Even as a missionary he managed to preserve his own distinctive style.  Lara will be finishing her degree and then they will move on to something.  Chris’ decision to drop out for a year is one we greet with mixed feelings.  We always have this bull ahead mentality – move most directly to the to end result.  But Chris has been a little frustrated with school.  It’s not exactly what makes him feel his best.  I’m proud of him for taking the responsibility to make a hard choice in favor of his family responsibility.  And I feel the year will help him to be more focused when he returns to school.

            Marni and Greg are expecting a baby in May!!!!!  We’re just a little excited.  Marni phoned at lunch hour last week because she was having problems with her Visa card.  We talked about it and were about to hang up when she said “oh, yes.  You know that I’m going to have a baby?”  I said “You mean you talked all this time about a silly charge card and then incidentally – I’m having a baby.  Is that your priority?”  Well she said that it seemed like such a little thing at this point.  And I said that 23 years ago she might have seemed like a little thing – but look at you now!!!!  So they are busy and happy.  Marni teaches two philosophy classes and Greg continues to work at the Orem library and play his drums on the weekend.  They both were playing horn in the Philharmonic which will tour Europe next spring.  But they suggested that Marni move down to the Symphony as first horn and the baby’s arrival would scotch the trip anyway.  Greg will probably be going to Russia next summer with the BYU Jazz band.  I suspect that she might like to go and leave us with a little grandchild babysitting.  Something I think we could manage.

            Matthew seems to be well and busy.  His working in a chemistry laboratory and just loves it.  He had a busy and profitable summer at a chemistry lab at Royal Military College here – so he continues to enjoy himself.  I hope not too much so that it afflicts his school work.  He was such a joy to have around this summer.  He is always so cheerful and helpful and it’s so nice to have someone pitching in for the big jobs.

            Emily is humming, too.  I think she was glad to get back to school and she is really responding to the challenges.  She gets up early – a thing she has always avoided in the past –does her exercises and gets to school on time.  She is good-natured and positive about everything that it keeps us happy.  She is back at music lessons, and I think enjoying them in a mature way she has not done before.  She got her ears pierced for her birthday.  I’m not always certain why things bring happiness – but she thinks that’s the greatest thing ever.  We had to hunt all over town for a piercer – they all seemed to be out on the birthday afternoon.  I suggested that we make an appointment for the next day, but she would have none of it.  It was her birthday, I had promised and she had waited for a year and she wasn’t going to wait a minute longer.

            Pat has taken on a real load of piano students this year.  I think she’s worrying about paying off the summer bills – and she shouldn’t.  But I think she is getting a reputation as a good teacher and lots of people are coming for her help.  It was such a busy summer for her that it’s also hard to change gears.  And she misses the children very much.  Mothers make the kids the center for so long that it makes a difficult transition when the kids leave – particularly when they go so far away.

            I’m just back at it.  There is always a lot of that stuff to do and I never get enough done – reading and writing and doing things for students.  We have a Chinese program, and it means a lot of time to help people who are in a strange country with little language.  But it’s very interesting.  The genealogical library is also a big drain.  It just gets busier and busier.  And Roy Prete and others keep pushing it – they keep trying me to do things to attract more patrons.  I think we have enough.  But there it is.  I’m also doing another play at the Domino theatre.  This one is a murder mystery and I play a very strange fellow – lots of memory work and I’m not very good at that.

            So that’s what’s going on here.

            We understand from Kate that Jerry will be in Connecticut early in November.  I don’t think we’ll get to see her.  We understand that Peter has broken off with his girlfriend –but Marni says she still sees them together so who knows.  Kirsti says she is a teaching assistant and ahs been going on lots of dates.  What else do you hear?  We all love you and hope life is treating you as it should.  Love.