Twelve of Them

                       

                             Some say that ever gainst that season comes

                                       Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,

                                       This bird of dawning singeth all night long.

                                       And then they say no spirit dare stir abroad,

                                       No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

                                       So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Photo Trial for Christmas post Grange

                    Discovering the Altona Grange

                   In the Nick of Time for Christmas

   All my life they were standing out there-- out in the country. I used to drive by one of them out pheasant hunting. Those Grange Halls. I had no idea of what they were beyond their probably having something to do with farming. But, sadly, I lacked the curiosity to find out more about them.

   Then, now, old as I am, the recent meeting of the Gold Hill Club was invited to meet in the Altona Grange, half a dozen miles or so due north of Boulder. And there it was, the ritual building, where I learned what I now cannot imagine having lived this long without. It was a revelation.

The New TV Season

         

                              

                                          

                                        By One with an Agenda

   The most extraordinary thing has happened on prime-time television. We had been watching for the start-up of the new series “Hell on Wheels” on AMC-- about the push West to build the transcontinental railroad. Surely an interesting subject, don’t you think.

11-1-11

  It’s All Hallows, the day to honor and supplicate all the saints at once. Maybe you would call it economical, but It feels good to me  anyway. You have to admit that the Church really knew how to use the calendar.

  Not to mention that it’s one of those Number One days this  year. 11.1.11 Think of that!  Why is it so impressive, Numbers  are  plumb mysterious….  even to mathematicians, I’m told.

    And tomorrow is All Souls, the day for me to remember and think of and appreciate all my dead. Good souls all. They were my  good luck.

   Thank heaven that Christ Mass is on its way. Though I don’t believe a word of it, I am nevertheless  profoundly affected by and drawn to it. I look forward to the Angels’ singing.

    And speaking of not believing in it, we spent early Halloween at the film Anonymous. All that Elizabethan stuff about the Queen, her lovers, and some jerk named Shakespeare.

   A guy leaving the movie ahead of he turned back to say, ”Bunk, right?” Yup that’s it; the film is sumptuous bunk. It’s a fantasy of Elizabethan politics and scandal with a sub-plot of Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays? Well, it’s the old story: third rate poet, Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford. He’s characterized in the film as the very model of the romantic, post-Goethean artist, too pure, too tormented, too special, too soulful and rare for this world. His life is a longing for release from his suffering in the act of writing poetry.

    A man like that in Shakespeare’s London would have been so  rare as to be freakish. Shakespeare and his fellows were, and thought of themselves as workmen, as makers of poems, and  plays, and paintings, and dances, and architecture, and statues, and music. We forget that our idea of the artist is largely an idol of the nineteenth century. But we enjoyed the movie, even if it did ask us to believe the blockbuster of historical fiction that the queen’s lover was her own son! The blockbuster continues to bust when we are told that their son was no other than the Earl of Southampton, who is now no longer possibly Shakespeare’s lover, but the “secret son” to whom DeVere  dedicates those sonnets of “his”. How’s that for movie making!

    I read that the movie makers are distributing a “study guide” to distribute in high schools, the better for our children to understand the Shakespeare phenomenon.

   Socrates was made to drink the hemlock for talking sense to the youth of Athens. Today big money is made talking pure bosh to students.

Fishing Our Flies on Henry's

                                                  or

                             Naval Discipline in the Rockies

   Back then, In a long lost season, when Bill Woods and I had but a single day to fish the famous Henry's Lake in Idaho, we put to sea in the early morning dark. Bill was captain in command. I was an able-bodied seaman and had been detailed to bring a gunny sack from home to tie alongside the boat for keeping alive three fat cutthroats each, for home and  oven.

A Good New Book

              AND THEY WENT OUT

        INTO THE WILDERNESS OF THEIR PROFESSION

 I have just read a really good book. Eric and Libby Ericson, of Boulder and Santa Fe, have joined hands to present the experience of their early lives together when they deployed their courage and devotion to go far abroad in the professional search for oil, but more deeply and truly into the fundamental strata of the human mystery of family. There were the rocks to probe, dangerous politics, strange diseases amid myriad languages-- and the children, “the boys”.

   It is a compelling look at the geology of oil and family life, all of it told in a most remarkable modesty. They never speak for their competence, but we as readers never for a moment doubt it. The book is a cultural marker showing us a model of what was once possible in America:

      An Oil Geologist Abroad: Exploration with Family:

       Bolivia, Spain and Nigeria  1956-1966   (Santa Fe, 2011)

   Built as the Ericsons have built it, their book is that rare thing, a necessary  book. Its subject has rights. It is to be written and published. It is what writing is for.

   Eric and Libby follow one another with short essay-like sketches, one after the other from field to home and back again, Eric looks for oil in structures of unexplored rocks of Bolivia, Spain, and Nigeria. Libby’s hugely devoted effort is to get that family going and make it prosper.

                       Searching and Breeding

   This book, a vivid portrait of an American family at an historically loaded moment in the nation’s life and a submission of evidence, documenting what now seems an almost magical time in our lives and our culture. It is memoir, history, sociology, science, even romance. I think it must be unique.

   The 1950’s --A time, often decried as a static culture of conformity and lack-luster pursuit of dreary middle class comforts, securities, and regularities, is something quite different in this book. There were those young people back then with a fine new, public education for the professions, who were suddenly presented with the challenge to Go Out, almost in a Biblical sense, to do good and to serve.

   And knowing what they wanted, they were ready to learn fully how to do it. They went out as young families to breed and to spread the good news of their liberal learning and vision in the wildest of unexplored places.

    I write this, of course, in the only way I can, as a man who, like Eric Ericson, was accompanied by a remarkable woman, who was at least as ready as he for anything.

   Libby Ericson, educated in fine arts, gets her say in this book of alternating essays. I think it might be read as a text in early feminism. What proves my point and is so astonishing about the book is the balance between the alternating essays. Male and female created He them.  There is not the slightest hint of male dominance or compromise anywhere in the book. The woman, at this early moment, appears as not just an equal power with her husband, but as one who has always been such. This balance between the essays is the balance between souls.

    Style? The writing is good, clear, economic, educated, and self-edited. I would call it, “American Plain”. Some sentences run urgently on under the buoyant pressure of the essential narrative, and verbs, in their hurry, can fall quickly into the passive. But, it is a style with a draw to it, meaning that it keeps pulling the reader eagerly forward with the narrative. It is rigorously anti-metaphoric, uncolored, forthright, and seemingly unconscious of itself as literature. It is just right for its task.

    But, as I write this, I cannot keep from musing on how this book clarifies and gives a local habitation to what many of us experienced and felt back then, at the center of that magnificent storm of education that was the G I Bill of Rights.

   I see a bit more clearly, from reading this book, where that education sent even me, I see that I too went out into a wilderness of exploration, in no way comparable to that wild, big, brave thing the Ericsons did, but still…. Still, I think that many of us back then (I am a couple years older than the Ericsons) went out, in the midst of what was The American Century and lived crazy, productive lives and sometimes left a mark.

   Ours was the culture of science. Even in the arts, science was a model. Bertolt Brecht, a voice for many of us, spoke of himself as “a child of the age of science”. That’s what I always wanted to be-- like Eric Ericson.

    But today it’s all gone to hell. We are threatened with the leadership of those who want only to live private lives of private wealth, oiling their hinges at the public supply-- all the while preening themselves with their religious suspicions of evolution, global warming, and science in general!

    Bad Luck! They, in their particular, are not the affirmation of humanity we thought they might become when, back then, we were teaching them. We had gone out into the wilderness of the future to do our work and look what we got!

    But, I must not loose sight of what we got in this book, a testimonial to what once was and might be again in the human family.

    Christmas, 1945: Betty and I talked of Upsula, but we didn’t go.

Gordon Wickstrom

September 12, 2011