The Experiment: Day Sixteen, the Lovely Wreckage

I am awake before dawn, 0545, the bells striking three times, far off and then a moment later very near. The most devout moments of my life have been spent in bed at night listening to those bells. They flood over me, drawing me out of myself. I know where I am suddenly: part of this town and happy.

                          – from Salter's A Sport and a Pastime.

Now another change. Gone is the ennui of the empty house, the clicking quiet of the wooden floors, the cool uncertain mornings, the faint despair that seeps in without having Anna and Ada with me. And while I miss them more than ever, I've gotten into a good dutiful rhythm of work and play: steady work at the house I'm remodeling, tending to the garden when I get home, a beer in the hammock with a book in my lap, or futball in the evenings with the immigrants at the park. All I seem to need – outside of my girls – is a simple life of sport and literature for work not to feel too pointless and for life to hold some beauty for me. My desires seems as reduced and refined as those of Salter's protagonist in A Sport and a Pastime; as simple and hearty as Turgenev's in Sketches from a Hunter's Album.

But of course that beauty is no more than a sugar high without the sustenance of my women folk. When I was single it wasn't that way. Beauty then was an ideal, an actual element on the chart, so real you could study it from every angle, pursue with your senses and know esthetically in your mind its existence from the materials and shapes of the world about you. I won't say that's changed. But somehow, with family, I have, or my pursuit of it has. I still value Beauty just as much, but have less time to approach it esthetically, yet more time, by demands of family life, to feel it in my heart. More time to know the beauty of my wife in the happiness and struggles of merely trying to make dinner or time to go for a walk; more time to know beauty through the dearness of my daughter growing and learning about the world. Perhaps it's a more grounded sense of beauty, a less theoretical one. Less prosody and more prose. Less prose and more pinch of Ada's plump cheeks, a cheeky question from her and a check on the old bachelor state of contemplative and sometimes self-indulgent interaction with life.

But interestingly, experimentally, it's been a state I've been able to slip back into these last weeks – which has been therapeutic for me, a good artistic relief. But now I'm ready for the lovely wreckage of family life again.

And knowing they're to return from Colorado in a couple days has had me kicking my heels in anticipation. For Ada's birthday I'm building her a playhouse in the side yard – five by five feet of salvaged lumber, two windows and a used door under a shed roof, clad horizontally in pine I'd salvaged from my job. I worked on it yesterday afternoon and into the evening, a blustery sky of chalk blue shaking the trees now and then and whirling sawdust up into my eyes. The little house came along, the framing slowly clad course by course like a sleepy girl pulling on her socks. I had meant, on my last big night solo, to ride off to a bicycle rally (the Hellodrome race put on Boise Bicycle Project), but the rhythm of work had me charging along, as did the suffusing excitement of knowing Ada and Anna were due home the next day. A beer and then a whiskey soda added to the suffusing, but not the saucing. Mixed drinks and miter saws go hand and blade. Yet I had that humming feeling, serene, that has you pausing to admire the windy light in the walnut leaves, the gliding shadows on the grass, the surging green of late spring over the valley and overhead like the whole world's a floating garden and you're just a chittering, nut-drunk squirrel tinkering away at your nest in the trees. Tinkering and sprucing and knowing your little fur family is soon to be with you, soon to be home.

While all that sounds a bit corny, it's true. And maybe that's what this three-week experiment has taught me: how much I've changed since my solo days – “grown” sounds self-congratulatory – to need my family close for any artistic effort to hold much meaning for me. Without Ada and Anna all the rest is a glorious sunset seen alone from a hilltop. That used to be alright, the being alone and the beauty just for me, perfectly alright. But it isn't anymore.

The Experiment: Day Eight

3 June 12

Who said, "History is what happened, but literature is what people thought about it"? Anyway, it's true. Reading Dos Passos' letters in the hammock under sifting leaves, a swollen blue spring sky; feeling connected not only to the world but to its history, through the time-capsule of Dos' missives.

At this point he's reporting for Life Magazine from Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and from his writing you get a real insider's feel for the subtleties and contradictions in the struggle between Socialism and Capitalism. Dos was perfectly on the side of the working man and Labor up through the Thirties. But what he and many, Orwell especially, saw in the Spanish Civil War was the divisive Communist Russian effort to put down any revolutionary elements in the fight against Franco. And later, when post-war Europe became a testing ground for “monolithic bureaucracy”, as Dos called it derisively, he grew wary of the Russian's designs on the rest of the continent. He was always for individual liberty and loathed any restriction put on it, whether by Capitalist monopolies or the one party systems claiming ground in eastern Europe.

Nowadays it's mostly conservatives on Fox News who do the clamoring for liberty. But the left has always been concerned about the matter, only from a different angle. The right's fear of Big Brother is so restricted to Big Government that it can't see how corporations have gotten a strangle-hold on our society. It won't even consider how government might be our only chance, through elections and civic participation, to have some say in the matter. (Other than doing all we can to buy local and avoid corporate production lines.) To the right, Government is just more oppressive bureaucracy, a hangover from twentieth-century Europe, while Business is the golden embodiment of Free Will trotting over the level playing field of the Free Market to deliver bounty to the masses.

But both gov and biz are just systems, intrinsically neutral until profit motives and human frailty are introduced. These days I'd sooner take my chances with a government of the people, one that must at least consider the results of the ballot box, than a massive corporate structure that feeds on profits and stock market value at all costs. What kind of “freedom” do we have when your choice in food stuff is a decision between CrackDonald's and Maulmart, when the radio plays an elevator music medley of classic rock and jingoistic country, when the only way out of your suburban coldesac is a drive and then an onramp and an offramp into another suburban culdusac, or when the only option politically is a right of center Republican and slightly less than right of center Democrat, both in the sway of industry interests. The few “freedoms” we see manifested these days are typically coming out of the left, alternatives to the “monolithic bureaucracy” of the corporate model in the form of non-profit and public radio, a return to small-scale organic farming, efforts to improve mass transit and healthy communities through bicycle facilities, etc. I point out the obvious only because I'm tired of the right's constant claim to protectorate of individual liberty when they're the ones in the driver's seats of the SUV caravan rolling over the little guys out front scouting for new paths out of this mess.

Now I'm beginning to rant, and make bad metaphors, and ruining a serene swing in the hammock. I don't know if the far right and far left can ever unite in their fight for “individual liberty.” But a mis-portrayal of the labor movement as merely the villain in the Cold War isn't helping. (See public sector scape-goating from Minnesota to Idahota.) Socialism was around long before the Cold War and what the Communist Party did under its banner, long before it became Reagan's whipping boy. A good read of the thinkers of the past century certainly does help one's view, though, and spirit. Twain said, History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes. But, may I add, only if we're listening for its verses. And those tunes surely aren't being played on the corporate air waves.