J. D. Vance, like many–including me–see a culture in crisis. Towards the end of Hillbilly Elegy, he cites a study from The Pew Economic Mobility Project in which they examined how Americans evaluated their economic futures and prospects. He writes:

There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation. Even more surprising, 42 percent of working-class whites—by far the highest number in the survey—report that their lives are less economically successful than those of their parents’.

No group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites? Contrary to what most Americans undoubtedly believe, the pessimism, the malaise, and the sense of futility that pervades the working-class whites are even more significant than that of other groups. In the past decade of my teaching career, I have witnessed many Latino parents (mother and father) faithfully attend parent teacher conferences. Even when language barriers prevented us from communicating with more than a few words, their hope for their children’s future and their steadfast belief that this future would be better than theirs was palpably evident.

I wish I could say the same about most of the white working-class poor students and their parents. If a parent or guardian attended conferences, it was generally just one. A mother, usually–sometimes a father or grandparent. I recall a conference with a mother of one of my male students in which I had to tell her that her son was failing because he simply couldn’t stay awake in class. He slept daily, his hood pulled over his head, which rested squarely on the flat of his desk. He drooled and sometimes snored. His mother grinned and said, “You know, I can’t keep him awake at home either. He likes to play video games late into the night.” What was I to say to a woman who refused to parent her own son, to set reasonable limits on computer use, or–if all else failed–to literally pull the plug? When I asked what her son’s plans after high school graduation were, again she grinned, shrugged her shoulders, and said, “I don’t know.” I’m sure that she didn’t, and I’m sure that her son hadn’t thought much beyond purchasing his next video game or beating the next level on his current game.

As a second semester junior with a single parent on a limited income, my student had real opportunities for post-secondary education: scholarships for those with legitimate need, assistance securing and completing his financial aid forms, academic counseling and scheduling of classes, grants–not loans–and continued financial and academic support in the college he would attend. And yet, he would essentially thumb his nose at all of these, choosing instead to remain with his mother, sleep during the day, and play video games at night. Neither he nor his mother believed that he would live a life that was more economically successful than his parent’s. In truth, neither gave much thought to the future at all.

Vance laments the futility and instability present in many working-class poor homes. He describes the extent of this instability in his book:

By almost any measure, American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world. Consider, for instance, Mom’s revolving door of father figures. No other country experiences anything like this. In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent—about one in two hundred. The second highest share is 2.6 percent, in Sweden, or about one in forty. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent—about one in twelve—and the figure is even higher in the working class.

Ultimately, he claims that  “Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.” And, as a natural consequence, welcome to life in many communities, businesses, health and social service agencies, schools, etc.

This chaos, Vance explains, is often the cause of what psychologists currently call ACEs, “adverse childhood experiences.” These are traumatic childhood events, physical, psychological and/or emotional, whose effects last long into adulthood. Vance identifies some of the most common ACEs:

• Being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents
• Being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you
• Feeling that your family didn’t support each other
• Having parents who were separated or divorced
• Living with an alcoholic or a drug user
• Living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide
• Watching a loved one be physically abused

You don’t have to be a psychologist or expert to recognize the pervasive presence of ACEs in lives all around you. Nor do you have to be a pediatrician or medical specialist to see the consequences of such childhood trauma on cognitive and emotional development. Vance explains that he and his sister were casualties of many ACEs, which resulted in a “fight or flight” response to any type of conflict. When I think of the countless students I’ve had over the course of my career, there were far too many that, like Vance, either fought their way out of conflict or simply ran away. In either case, it goes without saying that it was difficult–if not impossible–to teach such students. And most days, I’m ashamed to say, it was difficult to like and care for them.

To conclude his book, Vance writes:

People sometimes ask whether I think there’s anything we can do to “solve” the problems of my community. I know what they’re looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovation government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren’t like a Rubik’s Cube, and I don’t think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist. A good friend, who worked for a time in the White House and cares deeply about the plight of the working class, once told me, “The best way to look at this might be to recognize that you probably can’t fix these things. They’ll always be around. But maybe you can put your thumb on the scale a little for the people at the margins.”

In his own life, Vance admits that “there were many thumbs put on my scale”: his Mamaw and Papaw, his Aunt Wee and her family, his sister, Lindsay, his mother (in spite of her drug addiction, she instilled the value of education in him), the men in his mother’s lives (who came and went but were generally kind), and countless teachers, friends, and community members. Vance credits these individuals with helping him defy the hillbilly odds: graduation from Yale Law School, marriage, and meaningful, stable employment.

After talking with his former high school teachers, Vance writes: “So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home.”

And there it is: the proverbial elephant in the room. While many have turned to teachers, social workers, government agents and agencies as whipping boys for the crisis in our culture, there are far too few who have been willing to look to the dissolution of the family as the most significant cause of the chaos, instability, and futility that threatens the very culture in which many of us have flourished. The very culture that, for all its warts, is still the legacy that most of us hope to leave our children and their children.

Ultimately, Vance claims that “we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth.” And then he asks if hillbilllies are tough enough to care for their own, those who are often left without love or support, if they are tough enough to “build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it,”and if they are tough enough to “look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children.”

We all would do well to ask ourselves these same questions, for it will take tough individuals to save a culture in crisis. I admire and respect J. D. Vance more than I can say. In the fallen world in which we live, he recognizes the fallibility of human nature, the sin of learned helplessness, addictions, indulgences, and blame. He understands the power and necessity of human agency, for if individuals cannot see themselves as agents of change–in their own lives and their culture–we are essentially throwing in the towel and calling our culture dead. Time of death: imminent.

Vance argues that “public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us.” He proposes that hillbillies need to “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better.”  Finally, he asks that as hillbillies look inwardly to help themselves, others look outwardly, beyond themselves and their situations, to genuinely understand the real challenges that face hillbillies like him. And then to act with compassion and urgency.

Regardless of who becomes our next president, this cultural battle will ultimately be won or lost by individuals like me. Like you. Because we are in the trenches daily. And, like it or not, we have been called to fight. At the very least, we have been called to put our thumb[s] on the scale a little for the people at the margins.

Obviously, the idea that there aren’t structural barriers facing both the white and black poor is ridiculous.  Mamaw recognized that our lives were harder than rich white people, but she always tempered her recognition of the barriers with a hard-noses willfulness: “never be like those a–holes who think the deck is stacked against them.”  In hindsight, she was this incredibly perceptive woman.  She recognized the message my environment had for me, and she actively fought against it.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             J.D. Vance in an interview with Rod Dreher, The American Conservative, July 22, 2016

The dedication at the front of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis reads: For Mamaw and Papaw, my very own hillbilly terminators

Now a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate, Vance recognizes the need for hillbilly terminators like his Mamaw and Papaw in a culture that nutures, accepts, and–tragically–promotes victimhood. “Never be like those a-holes who think the deck is stacked against them,” his Mamaw admonished him. With the presidential election only days away, if it were possible–and Vance’s Mamaw were still living–I would run her campaign for President of the United States. Now she would be a remarkable first female president. Preach it, Mamaw, preach it.

Vance’s grandmother understood, all too well, the challenges facing her family. And yet, as matriach, she provided a faithful foundation for her family, grounding their love with fierce love and loyalty. She refused to see herself or her family as victims of a deck that was stacked against them. Through the years of what Vance called a “revolving door of father figures,” Mamaw was always there, opening her door and her heart to Vance, his sister, and others.

Still, in his memoir, Vance laments that he “hated the disruption,” “hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I’d begun to like them.” As a result, he reports that he and his sister never learned how men should treat women. He writes that his sister once confided “men will disappear at the drop of a hat. They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and its not that hard to make them go.”

As I read through Vance’s mother’s history of husbands and boyfriends who came and went, I could not help see the faces of countless students I have had over the course of my career. In one of the my senior high school classes, one of my students told me that he was dreading his graduation ceremony. When I asked why, he said, “If it rains, and we have to hold graduation in the gym, they will issue each student six tickets. Then, my mom and my dad–who are divorced–will fight over who gets the tickets. It will be an awful mess, and I just don’t want to deal with it.”

Like Vance, many of my students live in environments in which constant fighting, criticizing, screaming, and threatening are standard fare. Like Vance, these students split their time, their possessions, and their hearts between a mother and a father who may not even speak to each other. They leave their math book in their father’s car and report that they will not be able to get it for two weeks; they fail to finish their essay because they were left to cook, bathe, and watch over their siblings while their mother goes out with friends. This is their life, such that it is.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes, “We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed.” When he returned to his Ohio hometown, he talked with one of his high school teachers who admitted that “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

I can personally testify to teachers who have spent their careers trying to shepherd students who have been “raised by wolves.” There is no instructional strategy, no educational incentive, no amount of time or effort that can effectively erase the damage done by wolves. Don’t misunderstand me: I have endorsed and promoted strategies, incentives, and relationships in hopes of making a real difference in students’ lives. Undoubtedly, there is work to be done to improve our schools. What I truly appreciate about Vance’s memoir, however, is that he refuses to blame teachers and schools for the failure of many students to graduate, to pursue lives, educational opportunities, and careers beyond their communities and beyond the expectations of their working class poor families.

Honestly, I wish more politicians, educational “experts”, reporters, and citizens would take an honest look at the baggage that many kids bring with them to school. And then I wish they would spend a week, a month–better yet an entire semester–trying their hand at removing this baggage and turning these kids’ lives around. These individuals are those who have criticized teachers, have told them how to fix these students’ educational and personal problems, so I’d like to watch them at work. Walk a mile in teachers’ shoes. Walk a mile in social workers’ shoes. Even better, walk a mile in the shoes of the poor. Take up the mantle of their lives. Live within their barriers.

Vance writes:

If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

 A cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government? A movement that gains adherents by the day? Oh yeah. If the society, the government, the schools, the police, the employers are to blame, then how easy it becomes to claim victim status. How easy to turn outward when you might first turn inward. How convenient to quit because you are sick of waking up early, of being asked to put your cell phone away, of actually having to work.

Again, I am aware of the real limitations facing many of the working class poor, the hillbillies and rednecks. Over the years, however, I have questioned whether or not our entitlements are truly helping. Vance’s words ring true for me, for I have had countless students look me squarely in the face and refuse to work, refuse to even try. Even when they are physically in class, they are neither mentally nor emotionally there. And yet they expect to pass, to graduate with their peers, to essentially get something for nothing. Because, as they glibly remind us, we owe them. A lot.

Many of these students have never experienced the genuine joy and authentic sense of purpose found in meaningful work. My fear is that most never will. They are being entitled to depend on others, most of whom are middle class individuals who will work hard for their own children and for others’ children. They are learning and embracing helplessness. And they are becoming particularly good at this.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance elaborates on this helplessness:

Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life. From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness.

Learned willfulness. I like that. Imagine a society in which we committed our time and resources to promoting and teaching learned willfulness. I can imagine it, although I am painfully aware that many in our current culture would find such work discriminatory and altogether unfair. It is interesting that Vance identifies the mores of his grandparents, clearly members of the working poor, but members who held different values than other working class poor. He writes:

Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. My mother and, increasingly, the entire neighborhood embodied another: consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.

Depression era stories are peopled with individuals like Vance’s Mamaw and Papaw. My great grandparents, grandparents, and parents began their lives as working class poor. They were, as Vance writes, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking. Certainly, there are individuals like this today. We just don’t hear much about them, for the stories of the consumerist, isolated, angry, and distrustful abound. They dominate the news and drive political, social, and educational policy.

In his interview with Rod Dreher, Vance said:

The refusal to talk about individual agency is in some ways a consequence of a very detached elite, one too afraid to judge and consequently too handicapped to really understand. At the same time, poor people don’t like to be judged, and a little bit of recognition that life has been unfair to them goes a long way. […] But there’s this weird refusal to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right.

Perhaps we would all do well to compassionately and conscientiously find ways to deal with the poor as moral agents in their own right rather than romanticizing and stereotyping them. It goes without saying that this would be much more difficult–emotionally, socially, educationally, and politically. It would be messier and more personal. And above all, it would require people of faith to seriously examine the “help” they provide and fail to provide.

In the Part 3 of The Sanctuary of Hillbilly, I will share J. D. Vance’s suggestions for “helping” the working class poor.

Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins.

I took the photo above about a half mile from my home near Ottumwa, Iowa. I’ll concede that I live in southern Iowa and that there are a few who fly Confederate flags (the vast minority, trust me). But this is Iowa–not the Appalachians, not the South. Still, we are no strangers to hillbillies.

Hillbilly: an unsophisticated country person, associated originally with the remote regions of the Appalachians

The official definition identifies the unsophisticated country person. Think Jed Clampett, Granny, Jethro, and Ellie Mae of the Beverly Hillbillies. Think squirrel stew, moonshine, and corn cob pipes. Backwards, backwoods folk who use words like vittles, reckon, fixin’ to, and hankerin’ for.

Truthfully, I’ve been taken for a hillbilly–of sorts. When I moved to Wisconsin, my high schools students were not sure how to take me. They marveled at the way I spoke, asking me to repeat words and phrases and barely containing their amusement when I did. After a few weeks, a sophomore student blurted out, “You’re kind of a hillbilly, aren’t you? You’re from the South, right?” I simply smiled and said, “A hillbilly? From the South? Um, not quite. I’m from Nebraska.” He persisted. “But you talk like one. You say ant instead of aunt (the more pretentious sounding awnt, characteristic of those who live the upper Midwest). You say water fountain instead of bubbler and pop instead of soda. That’s pretty hillbilly, if you ask me.”

When I eventually convinced my students that I was, indeed, a Midwesterner and neither a hillbilly nor a Southerner, they grudgingly replaced their Ellie Mae Clampett image of me with a Laura Ingalls Wilder one from Little House on the Prairie. Most certainly, I had lived in a sod house, taken the family vehicle, a Conestoga wagon, to the kinfolk’s place, and ridden my pony five miles to school. Certainly, I was the only authentic pioneer they would ever know. And certainly, I was now displaced and living among the truly cultured Northerners.

When I moved to southern Iowa, I foolishly thought my hillbilly days were behind me. Not so. Months into my Iowa life, I became painfully aware of the geographic and cultural boundary created by Interstate 80. North of I-80? The territory of the more cultured, the more educated, the more professional folk. South of I-80? The less cultured, the less educated, and the less professional folk. After all, living in southern Iowa is tantamount to living in Missouri, which–we all know–is tantamount to living in Arkansas. Move over Jed Clamplitt. The southern Iowans are fixin’ to take their place in the halls of hillbilly annals.

Each morning as I walk by this abandoned property, I find it difficult not to look, once again, at the tangible reminder of hillbilly angst: Down with the Union, with Yankee bankers, law enforcement, and government.  It is equally difficult to look away from the remnants of a life, of the people who once called this place their home.

The whole has lost its essential parts. A splintered jumble of foundation sits unmoored from its former life. An abandoned Crown Victoria, a couch that oozes its remaining stuffing, twisted metal frames of appliances, and trash that has survived the elements give testimony to loss. But to Yankee injustice?

The Sanctuary of Hillbilly, no longer contained in the hills and hollers of Appalacia, provides its residents with a certain mantle of protection against self-reflection and against ownership of consequences which too often are the result of personal choices but which may be written off, self-righteously, as the doings of damn Yankees.

Today, the Sanctuary of Hillbilly has less to do with geography and much more to do with other, equally influential factors: culture, economy, and heritage. I do not use the word sanctuary lightly or facetiously here, for hillbillies–self-proclaimed or otherwise–may take real solace in their hillbilly status, in living among their kind. High school boys who flaunt rebel bumper stickers revel in the camaraderie they find with others who flaunt such rebel signs. Boys who have never ventured farther south than the Iowa-Missouri line boast as if Confederate and/or hill blood runs deep in their veins. Undoubtedly, these are boys who have dabbled in making their own home brews, the evidence of their parties hidden in the hollows of rural southern Iowa.

A visit to one of my favorite flea markets in Rutledge, Missouri is a visit to hillbilly heaven. Shirtless men wearing bib overalls ride four-wheelers, Red Man dribbling down their chins, and chickens tucked under their arms. Their women sit beside them, holding barefoot children or scruffy dogs. For the genuine flea market picker, Rutledge is the real deal: dirt roads, vendors selling exotic fowl next to vendors selling Depression glass, tenderloins the size of dinner plates, and rows upon rows of rusted metal. Oh, there are “nicer”, more civilized flea markets for city folk, but Rutledge is an initiation into the Sanctuary of Hillbilly.

At Rutledge, you can make a good deal on almost anything. Its vendors are there to sell, and their wares offer a virtual cornucopia of stuff. At Rutledge, you can make a friend–or two. You can strike up a conversation with someone you have never seen before and, within minutes, settle into the easy conversation of friends. In truth, Rutledge is less a place than an experience. Seasoned vendors and buyers understand that this experience cannot be duplicated by other upscale flea markets. And they understand that most who visit once will come again, season after season. This is the draw of such hillbilly hospitality: a repeat visit makes you family.

Recently, I read J. D. Vance’s New York Times best selling book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. Actually, I listened to it first and bought the book later. Vance’s voice–his real and writer’s voice–drew me in quickly. This is a book I wholeheartedly recommend, a book I find myself thinking about daily. Vance’s boyhood hillbilly roots begin in southeastern Kentucky but settle in a poor Rust Belt town in Ohio. In post WWII America, many Kentucky hillbillies migrated north in search of better work and better lives. Vance’s grandparents were no exception.

In the introduction to Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes:

In our race-conscious society, our vocabulary often extends no further than the color of someone’s skin–“black people,” “Asians,” “white privilege.” Sometimes these broad categories are useful, but to understand my story, you have to delve into the details. I may be white, but I do not identify with the WASPs of the Northeast. Instead, I identify with the millions of working-class white Americans of Scots-Irish descent who have no college degree. To these folks, poverty is the family tradition–their ancestors were day laborers in the southern slave economy, share-croppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times. Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family. 

Hillbillies, rednecks or white trash, neighbors, friends, and family. Vance’s memoir examines all that it means to be hillbilly and the painful, but inevitable, consequences of working-class white culture in America today. In Part 2 of the Sanctuary of Hillbilly, I will share some of Vance’s most profound insights.

Vance, J. D. (2016). Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. HarperCollins.

Illustration by Patterson Clark. The New York Times

The Milkweed Pod
for Don Welch

The milkweed pod,
having spent itself through summer months,
explodes.
Its summer soul has burst.
The cocoon of its husk
looses fine, white floss into the air,
autumn’s lace,
its sheerest veil.

The bridegroom awaits.
He mourns not the passing colors:
the green and goldenrod,
the fields of burnished bronze.
He will not mistake his bride
in the brittle brown of this earthy shell,
will not kneel in the presence
of this absence.

For the filaments of love are whiter,
stronger cords of life than stem or stalk.
They dance where others sleep,
they sing such songs of wind and light
the world has never known.

There will be such songs in late October
when the milkweed pod opens,
giving its last breath to love,
wedding its soul to sky.

Shannon Vesely

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/urban-jungle/pages/120925.html

Juxtaposition: an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, especially for comparison  or contrast

Photography by Brian Schrack

Gerald Gentleman Station, Nebraska’s largest coal-fired generating plant near Sutherland [background]; iron hoops signifying wagon wheels, O’Fallon’s Bluff near Sutherland, National Register of Historic Places [foreground]

Mormon and Oregon Trail wagon ruts marked by iron hoops near Sutherland, Nebraska

Gerald Gentleman Station, recognized by Platts Power magazine as the lowest cost coal-fired producer in America [near Sutherland, Nebraska]

Of sorts, that is. For the thousands of would-be-photographers out there, there are but a few of the real deal. These are the men and women who use instinctive and learned eyes to see the photograph before they ever pick up their camera. Whereas amateurs glibly proclaim This will be a cute shot, a beautiful shot, a funny shot, the pros are asking What is the message, the memory, the feeling here? And how will I best capture this for others? They approach the view finder with a hushed reverence for light and shadow, shape and form. They kneel at the altars of perspective and balance.

Brian Schrack is the real deal, and his photography testifies to the craft he has honed for decades. This series of photographs he shot near Sutherland, Nebraska is a sublime study in juxtaposition. In the foreground, iron hoops that represent wagon wheels that left lasting ruts along the Oregon and Mormon Trails, a reminder of pioneer perseverance and vision. In the background, a coal-fired energy plant, its stacks rising formidably from the plains, a symbol of all that fuels our modern conveniences. Our eyes fix on the iron hoops and are eventually drawn to the smoke stacks behind. The juxtaposition of old to new is profoundly moving here. The power of the westward vision largely gone, the power of coal takes its place.  And the prairie survives, a persistent and holy ground, housing the remnants of the past and the structures of today.

In the Sanctuary of Juxtaposition, we are disturbed and delighted by unlikely pairings, by unusual side-by-sides. And we must thank the artist for such juxtapositions, for our eyes do not often see them. We pass by but fail to deliberately frame the world before us. We look but fail to see.

Minnesota essayist, Philip Connors writes:

I’ve always liked edges, places where one thing becomes another. . . transition zones, boundaries, and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. I like the way they help me see the world from a fresh angle.

Amen to that. We all need a little help from our friends, and those who can photograph, paint, and write the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections are, indeed, those who help us see the world from a fresh angle.  Those who live in The Sanctuary of Juxtaposition are fresh angles’ biggest fans.

 In  Les Misérables, Victor Hugo understands the power of fresh angles when he writes:

There were corpses here and there and pools of blood. I remember seeing a butterfly flutter up and down that street. Summer does not abdicate.

Summer does not abdicate its fluttering beauty even to death. The prairie does not abdicate its essence even to coal-fired power plants. Victor Hugo and Brian Schrack bring these messages, these fresh angles to those who have eyes to see.

Haiku writers, in particular, are masters of juxtaposition.  Traditional Japanese haiku juxtapose dissimilar images and use a kireji, or cutting word, to separate them.  English haiku writers may forgo a cutting word for a line break or pause. The effect, however, is the same, as the haiku writer brings two disparate images together, asking readers to take notice. Consider this haiku by poet John Wisdom:

harvest moon –
migrant kids eat the bread
tossed to the crows

In the foreground, the magnificent harvest moon; in the background, hungry migrant children feeding on bread crusts thrown thoughtlessly to the birds. The poet moves us to ask the universal question: How can such want exist amidst such beauty? This is the power in the Sanctuary of Juxtaposition, and haiku is but one evidential, albeit exceptional, form.

I am continually indebted to those who bring the power of juxtaposition to me through image and word. Truthfully, I am better for their fresh angles. The Sanctuary of Juxtaposition is often a challenging one, to be sure, but one we would all do well to enter–willingly and often.

With sincere thanks to Brian Schrack, who graciously granted me permission to use his photographs. 

“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.”
L. M. Montgomery, Ann of Green Gables

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”
Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding [Act II]

“Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”                                F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I  would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”                George Eliot, Life of George Eliot: As Related in Her Letters and Journals

“Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.”  Robert Browning, Paracelsus

“Autumn…the year’s last, loveliest smile.”
William Cullen Bryant, “Indian Summer”

In mid-October, rural Iowa is awash in gold and green, russet and red, the white gauze of frost that skims the surface of grass and the white steam that rises from the pond in brief translucence at dawn. These are the glory days of autumn. And like Ann of Green Gables, I, too, am so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. 

Today, as the temperature rises to the mid seventies, there is no hint of winter-to-come. The noon sun–almost hot enough to warrant sun screen–convinces us of a second spring when every leaf is a flower.  And even when the dusk brings a crisp chill, you feel as though you might start all over again, you might take on a new name, all burnished with golden possibilities. In the Sanctuary of Autumn, it is like this on most October days. If you were a bird, you would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns, for your heart would swell with October song.

And yet. Something in you feels the tug of time passing much too quickly, of the bittersweet reality that October flashes the year’s last, loveliest smile. The paradox of autumn is just this: glorious life with imminent decay. Robert Browning claims that Autumn wins you best by this its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay. Perhaps. In truth, I find myself increasingly sympathetic for its decay. For my decay.

If, as some claim, our lives are like seasons, clearly, at age 61, I am well into the autumn of my life. Spring and summer spent, I walk the leaf strewn paths of autumn, keenly aware of how quickly gold turns brown, crumbling all too soon into dust. After the rain, I smell the dank transformation of leaves into earth. In the Sanctuary of Autumn, sixty-somethings praise and fear all that is October.

For us, golden does have advantages over green. It permits us to speak more freely, act more boldly, and love more deeply than we were able to in our greener years. With the patina of experience and wisdom,  it rubs out the kinks and softens the scars. We settle into it gratefully, prostrating ourselves on its kind hearth.

But just as we marvel in the well-earned autumn of our souls, we lament the autumnal decay of our bodies. When it comes to bodies, green has the clear advantage. Golden is mottled with degeneration of joints and muscles and bones; golden signals the last course, the final curtain call, the end. Golden wisely warns: Don’t jump with abandon into that pile of leaves. Remember that you don’t want to have orthopedic surgery. Again. 

Shakespeare understood this impending twilight. In his Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”, he writes:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

In their spring and summer seasons, others can see in me the twilight of such day, the glowing of such fire, the deathbed whereon their youth must inevitably expire. But as inglorious as the impending deathbed may be, the sonneteer breaks from the first three quatrains into glorious couplet. Here, Shakespeare gives me words to live by: when we perceive the reality of our autumnal selves, we can love that well which thou must leave ere long. 

In the Sanctuary of Autumn, there is much to be said about loving well before leaving. Live like you’re dying. Live like there’s no tomorrow. It’s not how long you live but how well you live, etc. Trite and overused as they may be, we may find truth in the cliches of country western songs and greeting card verses, expressions we previously pocketed for “later”. And when “later” arrives on boughs where yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang, we are mostly surprised. When did green turn gold? When did auburn turn grey? When did the sweet songs of summer birds turn into bare ruined choirs?   When did I turn old?

Still, autumn is surprising me daily with golden gifts I could have never imagined in my youth. Gifts of time–for reflection, for play, for reading, for talking and cat-petting, for creating and re-creating. Gifts of love–of family and friends. Gifts of faith–deepened and seasoned now through age and experience. In the Sanctuary of Autumn, these are gifts for unwrapping. I plan to love them all well before they’re gone.