Martina Reaves' Memoir: Her Edges of Change...

 

I'm Still Here by Martina Reaves
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wyndy Knox Carr, The Berkeley Times, Knox Book Beat, 19 November, 2020 

Martina Reaves’ I’m Still Here: A Memoir, chronicles a young woman who comes to the Bay Area in 1969 out of a peripatetic “military family” upbringing and goes through huge relationship, self-image, occupational, physical, social, spiritual and health changes over the next forty years.

I really felt like I had gone through a lifetime of Bay Area, Berkeley AND All-American transitions from the late ‘60s to 2015 when I read this, because both Reaves and her partners had very close family in Texas, conservative religions and communities; as well as Bay Area and “outstate” experiences, associates and employers on the far right of the “Berkeley Bubble” politico-social spectrum. 

Working women, open relationships, back-to-the-landers, child care, disrupted social norms, same-sex relationships, divorce and other marks of that period are the subject matter; handled in an unflinching, though sometimes admittedly exhausted, confused or overwhelmed central persona. (Weren't we all?) “Unconscious shadow material” erupts and moves mountains we thought would forever stand...

The courage and honesty Reaves shows throughout her various and vacillating explorations is remarkable. As a trusting newbie on a San Francisco streetcar; a doubting, contemplating, often doggedly determined elder undergoing cancer treatment at Stanford; as well as a happily partnered Mom admitting the shock of “I feel my heart torn out” when their only child leaves for college in the Middle West and "empty nest syndrome" sets in in spite of her busy, friendly, fruitful life.

You can tell that Reaves has taken advantage of the many brilliant and varied teachers, writing groups, advisors, bookstores, editors and literary options in the Bay Area to hone her craft. She chooses pertinent, brief vignettes with realistic dialogue that ring true and carry us forward in a fluid, believable way; even through shocks, wonders and surprises we perhaps haven’t seen, imagined or shared.

I’m surprised that as experienced a publisher as Brooke Warner of She Writes Press let Reaves keep her title in 2020, within a year of Ram Dass’ death, the renowned author of Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying, published in 2000; and the difficult “interweaving” (staggering) of chapters between 1969 and 1986, two alternating “time frames” that do not converge until the Epilogue almost 250 pages later. I'd gotten used to it by the seventh or eighth chapter, but uncomfortably so. The entire plot is also encapsulated on the back cover (SPOILER ALERT!), which I was glad I didn’t read until I was well into the book.

I held back when her cancer treatment descriptions went on a little too long for me, seeming like an “intentional fallacy” meant to bring about the very weariness she felt. Maybe it’s because I went through several years of pain and medical turmoil myself not too long ago and didn’t want to “go back there,” even through "someone else." 

Mostly, her storytelling was inspiring, brave and fascinating in its authenticity, however. The best thing I can say about a memoir, I will say about Reaves’: By the time I got to the end of the book I felt like family, too, loving and understanding “where they were coming from,” “like” them (us) or not. 

View all my reviews

Born to Be Good by Dacher Keltner

 

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dacher Keltner
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading Dacher Keltner’s Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life showed me a lot about what humans are missing out on while we’re sheltering-in-place, physically and socially distancing; why it feels so Gawdawful rotten, inhumane and boring. 

     AND why “face-to-face” on video platforms, six feet away and/or going for a stroll with someone masked are Way Better Than Nothing! “Touch…alters animals’ nervous systems,” (familially comforted/ “snuggled” mammals) in childhood “show reduced receptor levels of stress-related neurons in the brain” and a “more robust immune system” throughout adult life. Like certain smiles, laughing, gentle teasing, play, handshakes and compassionate nods and bows exhibited together with other humans; it triggers “the orbitofrontal cortex and the release of opioids and oxytocin.” IT FEELS GOOD!

Our more “civilized” methods of child care and social interaction, maybe dating back to Abraham and Isaac and before, may have increased our inter-tribal hostilities; but our “strong urge to share and to avoid hoarding,…” group grooming and play, systematically trading “calories for touch,” physico-emotional expression of generosity and sympathy “creates trust and long-term cooperative exchange” in spite of our “touch-deprived culture” and hostile media barrage, even before twitter accounts and COVID-19 restrictions.

     Keltner and his research associates posit that the vast majority of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and survival are built on interaction, collaboration and communication; gestures, facial expressions, negotiation and cooperation between us; and NOT primarily the “tool making,” resource hoarding or building permanent material structures ensconced in the historical record. “Tech” does not make us “human beings:” language, emotion and mammalian bonding and care-giving do.

     The universally primary social activity depicted on pottery worldwide is dancing together, not warfare or even the hunt. It may be ritual or celebrational, but HUMANS want to “play nice with each other” as the bottom line. (Or maybe women, dancers and elders unable to hunt made the first pots!) Being thrown out of “the pack” is the most dire of circumstances for human survival, since our collective brainpower replaces the fangs, size, reproductive proclivities and brute strength of the other animals. 

     And then there’s the vulnerable 6-month infancy our head size at birth requires. Our “rugged individualist,” isolated lifestyle is a social and biological aberration more than a triumph. It DOES “take a village” to raise a human child. LOVE LED US THROUGH THE FIRST 9/10 OF OUR EXISTENCE ON MOTHER EARTH. We can’t let fear, violence and hate screw us up. 

     I’d like to see Prof. Keltner start this book with the misadventure with his young family on the winter sands near Monterey, the elephant seals’ chapter 10, the one entitled “LOVE.” His story of the alpha males, where they lord over their females with bellows, grunts, clouts, rape and pure physical bulk. 

They not only attack any lesser males with the same and worse auditory abuse and physical violence; but accidentally-on-purpose expel and murder their rivals, alien progeny and their own neonatal young. 

     Eeewww. What? Too scary? Hey, in the “Survivor” “Mean World,” * that’s what SELLS, RIGHT? And that’s WHAT IT (a meaningful life) ’S ALL ABOUT, RIGHT? At least it would bring us up-close-and-personal into the contrast between his traumatized human family seeking knowledge / inspiration about mammalian “family relationships” and, elephant seals, lacking our human “orbitofrontal responsiveness,” exhibited a hostile biology (“science”) that played out before their wind,-sand-and-tear-swept eyes.     

We humans CHOOSE pro-social behaviors. We need “hanging out” together, hearing and telling each other emotionally moving multisensory experiences ("stories") to get and stay engaged. That’s what humans DO that has allowed us to survive and thrive. All of our technologies, tools and unique cultural mannerisms are secondary to neuro-emotional communication relationships.   

     Travel writers completely know that. Unfortunately, so do people like Steve Bannon and Joseph Goebbels, more interested in communicating images of power and force. The gripping image comes first. Biologically. We learn to cling, suck and climb. We need to latch on. Our bodies are wired not only for language, but our whole bodies are ancient sensory tools.

     Actually viewing the cold, dominant cruelty of a fellow human’s face, voice and body as he extinguished Mr. Floyd’s life, for example, MOVED us from distanced thought-talk about racism, power and police brutality to gut-knowledge (vagus nerve) and active physical and emotional RESPONSE.

Instead, Keltner starts with an abstract Confucian “complex mixture of kindness, humanity and respect that transpires between people,” data about greed and status-seeking in lab games, then 50 pages of “brief philosophical history” from Darwin to UCSF’s brilliant Paul Ekman charting facial gestures of bonobos and “Cro-Magnon CEOs.”
 

Meh… I liked the anthropology, but Keltner, the founding director of the Berkeley Greater Good Science Center, is short on tales in the first three chapters to draw us in to hear about “that deeply satisfying moment when you bring out the goodness of others.”

He has snapshots, snippets, like the part about his physico-emotional response to meeting and being in the presence of the Dalai Lama on a scholarly panel, but this was my third or fourth try at reading this truly wonderful book, and I only succeeded because I started at page 199 and then went back. 

True, I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician; but I have significant intelligence and a legendary attention span, especially for reading good books.
I feel for him. 

Guys have 7x less oxytocin, the “feelgood” neuropeptide than gals do. It's the "early attachment" regulator that stimulates interhuman relational behavior "evident in the merging of minds, heartbeats, and nervous systems of caretaker and young child" and the "pro-social nervous system" "felt in every moment of life, in the trust of a stranger, in the willingness to speak out and fail, in the devotion to a romantic partner in times of difficulty, in the sense of hope, and in the devotion one feels for one's own children..." "If it goes well, that early love is felt as the encouraging, not-so-invisible warm hand on your back as you move through life."

And if it DOESN'T go well...The conservative pundit on PBS News Hour’s coverage of the 2020 Democratic Convention couldn’t quite grasp the emphasis on empathy, all those odd (normal) (diverse) (non-cosmeticized) people casting ballots from every state. He kept asking what the “policies” and “issues” behind all this openness, diversity and inclusion were. He was truly puzzled. I felt for him, too.

Our evolutionary adaptational environment was “defined by 

an acute tendency to care, by 

highly coordinated face-to-face social exchanges, by 

the need to reconcile (differences with others) and 

the flattening of social hierarchies, by 

perpetually negotiated conflicts of interests, and by 

the emergence of the tendency toward sexual monogamy.” 

That's not what we hear about from the Western Expansionist "survival of the fittest" scientists, theologians and politicians who often misinterpreted Darwin's Origin of Species for their own reasons. Nor from "cave man" cartoon images. Nor from "me first" "alone against the world" bullies. Nor from conspicuous consumption, materialist marketers, corporations and "free marketeers" of all kinds.

Humans survived "evolution" by Sharing, Caring and Taking Turns. We really did...

Other chapters in Born to Be Good? 

SURVIVAL OF THE KINDEST, 

EMBARRASSMENT, 

SMILE, 

LAUGHTER, 

TEASE, 

TOUCH, 

COMPASSION and 

AWE. 

For example:
“Embarrassment converts events (like)…social gaffes, offensive remarks, violations of privacy…into opportunities for reconciliation and forgiveness…It is in these in-the-moment acts of deference that we honor others, and in so doing, become strong.”

AAaaaaahhhhh….. I’m smiling. Relaxing. Letting down some defenses.
I feel better already…

*(see David Brooks’ NYT 27 August 2020 “Trump and the Politics of ‘Mean World’: A Four-day Showing of Apocalypse Now.”) (https://archive.vn/NJMyT   https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/opinion/trump-republicans-2020.html )

View all my reviews

Human Natures, Lava Falls

 

Knox Book Beat, The Berkeley Times,                27 August, 2020, Wyndy Knox Carr.

It’s not only ironic, but actually painful to me, and I’m sure, to Lucy Jane Bledsoe and others; that the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and all its rights are, as of August 18^th, opened up, like the last apple on Earth, for mostly foreign corporations to suck dry, pollute and then spit out.

Lava Falls, “at the intersection of wilderness, family, and survival,” speaks a voice of inscrutable Wilderness Herself, a living,  animated deity to we who find Her/Him/Them/It placed in green things, blossoms, food, bodies, compost, rocks, soil; as well as the very “unpredictable” wind and waters of our communities and life directions.

Even, maybe especially, in common things like “eucalyptus,…with an underbrush of blackberry.” Maybe even in our terrifyingly gorgeous but "unnatural" ruby-orange, smoke-filled wildfire-sunset skies.

Bledsoe lives in Berkeley, “loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside, and telling stories;” and, almost as an aside, has “traveled to Antarctica three times.” 

A keen, detached but not overly scientific observer of the world around her, Bledsoe spans publications from Arts & Letters: The Chronicle of Higher Education to ZYZZYVA, “defined by its risk-taking and egalitarianism;” as well as doing readings at our own Mrs. Dalloway’s and Books Inc. bookstores.

Her characters are so deftly created, I thought they were all her at one time or another in her life (they are mostly women) until I checked out her bio and read the fine print: “based on experience and research, (but) names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of …imagination or are used fictitiously.” An imagination deeply informed by wisdom about human nature.

Good, bad and mostly, naturally and unnaturally, in motion in-between. Kind of like rocks thrown about in “that blissful intersection between safety and danger…attaining the skills needed to occupy that slim territory of ecstasy.” Or NOT, tumbling down “a wide dry gully, littered with red gravel and black cinders.”

And relationships. Even in the novella, Lava Falls, Bledsoe weaves in and out of her characters’ bodies, thoughts, sensations, perceptions and feelings like an astral projection; making them bump, hug, gesture, pierce and bluster against and with each other with unnerving verisimilitude.

Throughout the book, I watched her slipping from first person to omniscient narrator like a sylph, thinking “how does she know all that?” and the wonder of them, and the stories, is I never really knew what they were going to do, what river of “human desperation for resources,” “Grief Tree” or “beautiful. And maddening” actions, feelings or fantasies they were going to sluice down or chop into next.

April/May of this year, local writer/editor and filmmakers Jessica Abbe and Toby McLeod screened Bullfrog Communities’ Standing on Sacred Ground online; and August 14^th, UUCB Personal Theology series hosted Dr. Paloma Pavel and Carl Anthony, co founders of Breakthrough Communities, as well as Marylia Kelley TriValley CAREs August 9th speaking on nuclear safety in our communities, nation and world for the 75th anniversary of the Atomic Bomb drop on Nagasaki, Japan.

These were all POWERFUL, poignant, determined and respectful examples of locals working deeply, intelligently, realistically and empathetically at the crossroads of political, cultural, land and environmental issues for peace, health and safety, like Lucy Jane Bledsoe does with her fiction in Lava Falls.

They make us contemplate “There is No Planet B,” how our daily practices relate to “The We of Me,” and, as Mary Oliver does, ask us,

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?”

Wasted - The Berkeley Times 25 June, 2020 - W. J. Knox Carr

Wasted: Murder in the Recycle Berkeley Yard by John Byrne Barry
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Recycle Berkeley, a “scrappy and idealistic recycling collective,” came out of Barry’s experiences at the Ecology Center. VERY Berkeley, Brian Hunter moves, sussing out a takeover attempt of both a City Council election and “Re-Be”s unbusinesslike, argumentative mix of GenXYZs and aging hippies by the evil corporate Consolidated Scavenger, its conflicted, needy hench-yuppies, “opportunistic” workers and outright thugs.

This “green noir” grew on me as I went along, all the “locals” here he so accurately portrays. Gino: “I was always fixing things, making things. There were ecology types running around then too, the old dumps were getting full, the new ones had all these complicated rules for leachate collection and I went to San José State to study landfill engineering. Got a job out at Solano Sanitary in Benicia, owned by another Italian family….In the valley, it was the Irish. It was an honest living. Before the suits showed up.”

He gives away several major plot twists on the cover for some reason, which makes empathizing and suspense hard at first, with hard-boiled first-person narration and heartless analysis to boot. The rather large cortège of characters popping up in the first 50 pages is confusing; but it gives Wasted a fast-paced, metro feeling with people appearing and disappearing like the snippets of the Chronicle and East Bay Beat used as chapter lead-ins. Here today, gone tomorrow. Delete, delete, delete. Move on…

Barry’s collective workers guilt themselves and others that “everybody has to contribute to every decision,” making efficiency and “expertise” “bourgeois.” We’re at once “ahead of the curve,” but “hoodlums are throwing rocks” at a peaceful “protest” the media calls “a riot” and radical protestors call “the revolution.” Wasted, ©2015. “You try and reach consensus with a bunch of purer-than-thou-radicals.”

Sound familiar? Like a shouting match I heard during a Food Cooperative meeting in Minneapolis in 1979 or so. Or UW-Madison at The Daily Cardinal in early spring 1969-70, after Kent State. The more things change, the more they stay the same?

Murder or other crime, economic pressure, clash of values, beliefs or sexual struggles can split a family, a business; it can make a community, nation or even the world seem like either/or, too divided, unable to be healed.

I heard a “Zen proverb” the other day that helped me believe in bilateralism and unity, however: “The

left foot may be on a different leg than the right foot, but only by using both the left and the right can we move forward and make progress in the world.”

View all my reviews

Dreams As Our Deepest Resources?

Rev. Jeremy Taylor was a teacher at Starr King School for the Ministry on Holy Hill in Berkeley for many years, particularly in the realm of trauma-taming Group Dream Work. His The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Your Dreams to Tap Into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life, is one of the guidebooks I’ve fallen back on when the walls seem to be creeping in and memories and monologues begin to go bump in the night during our Shelter-In-Place.

What a world view! “Every dream comes in the service of health and wholeness,” BONK “…The oppressions that are delivered with love are far more difficult to throw off than the oppressions that are delivered with malice,” OH NO! and

“This individual …process of fully becoming the unique, whole, fully alive human being my genetic heritage and personal experience call me to make manifest in the world also reflects and stimulates collective developments in human awareness.” 

And evolution. Evolution of the human species? Did he really say that? Did Carl Jung really say that, too?

WOH! That is one big jump. You mean, ME all alone in my room or with my Zoom dreamers are CHANGING THE WORLD? Just by CHANGING OURSELVES and HOW WE TREAT EACH OTHER in this inside-outside, super-vulnerable super-crazy-outlandish-yes-no-maybe-boundaries time? This time that is sort of Not Time/Eternal Existential Waiting For Godot-sort-of time?

Just saying. Or am I intuitively prophesying by way of the Collective Unconscious?

View all my reviews

James Baldwin told her, "You must continue to write. It is imperative." And She Did.

In the Country of Women by Susan Straight
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Susan Straight’s daughter Delphine projected photographs for her Mother’s reading and talk at BAMPFA for A Country of Women, describing multi-generational and multi-racial family journeys to the Southern California community Straight has lived in for more than 40 years. They are real people written in real language, so blunt her 1980’s (bimbo) classmate from Smith College asks her “Why do you keep writing about all these working class people?”

Straight says, “…I thought: What the hell is working class? Work or welfare—those two were the only conditions of life back home …a paycheck job… or ‘You under the table, man?”…cash-only economy.” Her grim, wordless, hard-scrabble Colorado mountain father; the mother who wanted “a brick house… (but) Even more…to make enough money to escape poverty.”

Straight says flat-out, “It took constant vigilance not to be raped,” and she and her girlfriends “went to Planned Parenthood the week I was sixteen…afraid of the same thing…We didn’t want to have to marry our rapists.” She was lucky. “I ran so many times,” and she had her writing and her books.
The mostly African-American Carter-Sims family she marries into is a marvel and cornerstone of struggle, work, dignity and love. The neighborhood is classic multi-cultural California WAY East of Malibu, Monterey or Marin. She resurrects a feeling of “kin” and connection built of memory, effort, sharing and survival by the end of the book any i-pad toting yuppie-techie-millennial or wastrel hippie should envy. I certainly do. It sounds like the stories my grandparents told and hid from me.

The lives and photos are epic as well as bruising. Tulsa, Tennessee, Ontario, Mississippi, all to Riverside, CA; the Cherokee, Nigerian, Swiss and Haitian – the house, the driveway, the hair-braiding, the boom-box belting Al Green; the Granada, Country Squire, El Camino, the Bronco. Three of “Daisy’s girls” sitting at a club table circa early 1960 smiling gently into the camera, but with wise eyes; miniskirts, eyebrow pencil, lipstick, bouffant hair.

We are really, really DIVERSE, people; already, NOW. AND “It is the companionable line of our knees in the folding chairs that comforts us. We have one another.”

And for the young men – “what you have to know. Two of you can ride in the car. Three is a gang. One of y’all has to get in another car. Don’t fool around. No standing out in the yard at a party. Don’t be getting gas late at night. Don’t be speeding drinking laughing singing rapping walking. Don’t.” The funerals of fourteen-year-olds.

“Friends of Adeline” statement in the February 20 edition of BTx requests readers to “Support the Adeline community” in the Berkeley sweep of both homelessness and gentrification. Reunifying the nation and advocating for disadvantaged residents screams injustice both here and globally, but their local message is clear: “Development of the Adeline neighborhood must reverse the displacement of African Americans and the severe housing crisis facing low-income, working-class, and unhoused people.”

Let’s just get REALLY “real” and tell each other stories of our lives so we UNDERSTAND why we think and act and live the way we do, OK?
 
There is no question in my mind about STOP RAPE NOW nor is there about BLACK LIVES MATTER. Or about RICH WHITE OLD FOUL-TEMPERED MISOGYNIST DICKHEADS blaming Asians for the pandemic, either, even though they sound a whole lot like my Grampa sometimes, and look like the pictures of his grandfathers.

Joyce Carol Oates says about Country, “an ancestral chronicle, a personal odyssey, and a love letter to the author’s three adult daughters,” and so much more. Joyous love and survival, bathed in bitter truths. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. If this sounds like a Nurse Rant or a Mom Rant, it’s because IT IS. “We are true California. True America,” Straight says. THIS IS TRUE!

Quit fighting, people. Quit denying ourselves and who we really are. In way too many ways, the 99% are all one. And they are us, grown rich and fat and scared and old. If we don’t help each other now, we all go down. When Harriet Tubman has her vision, she hears, “Fear is your enemy. Trust in God.” She led hundreds to freedom.

Let’s just get REALLY “real” and tell each other stories of our lives so we UNDERSTAND why we think and act and live the way we do, OK?

View all my reviews