I became a conscientious objector during the War in Vietnam

I don’t remember just when I became aware of the war in Vietnam, but 1964 seems like a good year. That’s when the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which, in effect, authorized the country to provide military aid to South Vietnam (in its war against North Vietnam) without Congress having to pass a formal declaration of war. The war in Vietnam had begun.

I have a vague memory of being in the basement recreation room, where the TV was. I forget just what I was watching, perhaps a news report on the war, perhaps something else. My father was there. I think he’d just come down the stairs and was looking into the rec room, but wasn’t actually in the room. As I said, things were vague. I recall saying, “Don’t worry, if I have to, I’ll go.” While there had been some anti-draft protest before passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, protest activity increased after the resolution and in a year or two became large-scale protest against the war.

I would certainly have been aware of that activity – perhaps that’s what prompted my remark to Father. But I would also have been skeptical. I’d been reading Bertrand Russell by that time. I’m pretty sure I’d read his 1963 Playboy interview, in which he discussed nuclear disarmament and civil disobedience. Thus, regardless of what I actually said, that remark was surely an expression of my skepticism and uncertainty. I entered Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1965. My skepticism would grow, but it wasn’t until 1969 that I was forced to choose.

Johns Hopkins and the antiwar movement

I don’t remember just how I came to join the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). There were a number of political clubs. I assume there was some organization based on the Democratic party and another on the Republican. I know there was a chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Wikipedia says it was founded in 1960 at a meeting in the home of William F. Buckley. I thought of it as the right-wing near-crazies. None of those appealed to me, but I liked the sound of “participatory democracy,” so SDS it was.

I don’t remember much about SDS. We had meetings. A guy named Pete Davidovich was a sort-of leader. He had some kind of relationship – friend, girlfriend, I don’t recall – with a cool fair-haired blue-eyed blonde who went to Goucher College, an elite women’s school in Towson that functioned as a “sister” school to Johns Hopkins. There was another guy, tall, sandy-haired, dark glasses, whose politics led him to drop out in his junior year and take a job in the steel mill at Sparrows Point. And I remember that I somehow was asked to lead a meeting. So, I sat on a table at the front of the room and led the meeting. Davidovich remarked that I was the first hippie to lead an SDS meeting. I guess I was something of a hippie. I certainly had the long hair.

We went on anti-war demonstrations in Baltimore. I don’t recall how many or how often. I do know that I didn’t go to the big demonstration in Washington, the October 1967 march on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer wrote about in The Armies of the Night. It’s during this anti-war activity that I hooked up with the people I mentioned in my post, Breaking Down Monogamy in Baltimore in the early 1970s.

I also hung out in the Chaplain’s Office. Well, it wasn’t the Chaplain’s Office at first. It was just the Johns Hopkins branch of the YMCA, directed by Dr. Chester Wickwire, one of the most remarkable men I’d ever met, and who had a tremendous influence on me. He was from Denver and had toured as the tenor with an evangelist early in his life. He’d had polio and walked with a pair of arm crutches, you know, the ones that had cuffs that went around forearms and handles you gripped in each hand.

During the 1950s he led student trips to the Soviet Union in the summers. One summer his group was arrested for subversive activity of some kind and put on trial. They were acquitted, of course. It was just a sham, for propaganda. It radicalized Dr. Wickwire, who we knew affectionately as Chet the Jet. He became determined to see that that never happened in the America.

When he returned to America, he threw himself heart and soul into the civil rights movement, which is another story. When the antiwar movement emerged on campus, he championed it. When SDS held meetings, we met in Levering Hall, which was owned by the YMCA. That’s probably how I fell into Chet’s orbit.

He also ran a coffee house on Friday and Saturday nights, The Room at the Top. It was open on Friday and Saturday evenings and featured mostly local musicians, many of whom were quite good. The walls were covered with graffiti and line art, including an elaborate five-foot caricature of a 17th century aristocrat with an elaborate coat and a wig two feet high. In 1968-69 a local artist, Robert Hironimus, covered the walls with an elaborate psychedelic mural:

 

But I digress.

The point is simple, Chet the Jet had his fingers in a lot of pies, including the anti-war movement. When the Selective Service system instituted a lottery in December of 1969. Since I had graduated in the spring, I no longer had my student deferment, a status granted to full-time college students making them exempt from conscription. As I had drawn the number 12 in the lottery, I was certain to be drafted. What could I do?

I’m drafted

I weighed my options. The easiest thing to do was simply to enter the military. But I objected to that, not simply because it was convenient, but because I objected to this particular war and to war in general. I was a pacifist. As a practical matter, with my education, I would not have been drafted into a combat unit. But I didn’t want to enter the military at all.

I could pay a psychiatrist to write a letter that would likely exempt me from service. I knew people who knew people and I was attached to one of the greatest universities in the world. If I’d wanted to, I could have done this. But it was undignified and dishonest. I could also have gotten messed up on drugs the day before my pre-induction physical in hopes of failing the drug test. This was iffy at best, but rumor had it that it sometimes worked. This was too was dishonest and distasteful.

There was another possibility. I could become a conscientious objector. That was a status established by the Selective Service System for people who were pacifists through religious belief. However, I had no conventional religious belief. I was a member of no church and didn’t attend religious services.

The Hunt for Genius, Part 5: Three Elite Schools [RIP #RichardAMacksey]

Once more I'm bumping this to the top of the queue, this time in remembrance of Dick Macksey, who has just died, three days shy of his 88th birthday.  In 1999 he sat down with Mame Warren and talked about the history of Johns Hopkins. The material is online, voice recordings and a transcript.

* * * * *

[From Sept. 2018] 
Over the last two weeks or so I've read more than I can stand about the sad case of Avital Ronell, Nimrod Reitman, and NYU. It doesn't have to be like that, and at many places it isn't. I'm reposting this from five years ago. Note my account of graduate school at SUNY Buffalo. These accounts are of times past, over three decades ago. Adjunctification hadn't set in yet.

* * * * *

[From Oct. 2013]

The Three: The Johns Hopkins University, the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the 70s (hottest department in the country), and Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute.

I grew up in western Pennsylvania in a suburb of Johnstown, a small steel-making city. My father was from Baltimore and he worked with Bethlehem Mines, the mining subsidiary of the now-defunct Bethlehem Steel Corporation. My mother was a native of Johnstown, had been there for the 1937 flood, and was a full-time housewife and mother. That was typical for the time, the 1950s and into the 60s.

Mother loved gardening and she was an excellent cook and seamstress. Father was more intellectual than most engineers. In addition to playing golf, collecting stamps, and woodworking, he liked to read, both fiction and nonfiction. Both parents played the piano a bit and enjoyed playing contract bridge.

I spent many hours happily immersed in books from my father’s library (which contained many books from his father’s library): Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, Rider Haggard, Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain among them. I went to school in Richland Township. The schools were above average, but not special. They did not regularly send students to elite schools.

I’d applied to three Ivies, Harvard and Yale, which turned me down, and Princeton, which wait-listed me. I’d also applied to The Johns Hopkins University, my father’s alma mater. They accepted me. That my father had gone there no doubt weighed in the decision.

A classmate of mine, quarterback of the football team, was accepted to Princeton. I believe he was the first student from the school to go to an Ivy League school. I don’t think he was very happy there.

I can’t say that I was happy at Hopkins either. But then I didn’t go there for happiness. I went there to get an education, which I did.

The Johns Hopkins University

Hopkins is probably the most distinguished of the elite schools I’ve been associated with. I did my undergraduate work there between 1965 and ’69 and then completed a Master’s degree in Humanities between 1969 and ’72 while at the same time working in the Chaplain’s Office as an assistant. This was at the tail end of the Vietnam War era and I was a Conscientious Objector to military service. I thus had to perform civilian service instead of being drafted into the military. That’s why I worked in the Chaplain’s Office.

After a so-so high school outside a small city in western Pennsylvania the intellectual life at Hopkins came as a welcome revelation to me. Ideas seemed important. Well, sorta’.

At the same time it was clear that coursework had its limitations. If a course clicked, then I tended to lose interest in assigned coursework for the last half or third of the semester. Instead, I’d immerse myself in whatever had attracted my interest. If a course didn’t click, well, I managed to stick it out.

What made Hopkins work was finding Dr. Richard A. Macksey, a polymath who taught comparative literature (in English translation for those who couldn’t read French, German, Italian, or Russian) through the interdisciplinary Humanities Center. I took several courses with him, an independent study, and subsequently did my Master’s under him. Other individual faculty were important as well, particularly Mary Ainsworth, Arthur Stinchcombe, Neville Dyson-Hudson, and Earl Wasserman.

But Macksey was the guy. Without him I’d have had a more difficult time graduating from Hopkins. He provided relief from the “system” and he knew that. Other students were attracted to him and studied with him for the same reason. He was particularly important to students interested in film since he taught a film workshop thereby enabling them to get academic credit for their passion. At least two students slightly older than me went on to distinguished careers in Hollywood (Caleb Deschenel and Walter Murch) and there may well have been others as well.

In terms of sheer brilliance I’ve never worked with anyone superior to Macksey and very few his equal. For whatever reason, he chose to work with and develop others rather than develop a large body of his own research. He taught many courses, more than required of him, and always had a group of students whom he worked with independently.

It would be interesting to compare his record as a talent scout with the record of the MacArthur Fellows Program. There would, of course, be a calibration problem. Macksey went at it for six decades or so (he only retired a couple of years ago) whereas the MFP has only been around for just over three decades. On the other hand the MFP has had more resources at its disposal.

Macksey is most-widely known, however, as the long-term editor of the comparative literature issue of MLN (Modern Language Notes) and as one of the organizers of the in/famous structuralism symposium of 1966: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. While Jacques Derrida is perhaps the best-known figure that spoke at the symposium, he was a relative unknown at the time. In fact, he wasn’t even supposed to be there. He was invited as a last-minute replacement for Luc de Heusch. The paper Derrida delivered, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” undercut structuralism as a movement and made him a star.

Though I was on campus at the time I didn’t attend the symposium – it wouldn’t have done me any good as it was delivered in French. But Macksey distributed an English translation of Derrida’s paper in one of his classes and I devoured it. It became one of my central texts for a while, though it didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for Lévi-Strauss.

At the time, of course, no one foresaw the consequences of the intellectual currents that organized themselves through that conference. For one thing, the conference was organized as a new beginning, a beginning in the New World, for structuralism as an interdisciplinary mode of investigation. Instead, it functioned as the beginning of the end.

 

* * * * *

And then there is Chester Wickwire. When I entered Hopkins he was the Executive Secretary of the Levering Hall YMCA. The YMCA subsequently decided to withdraw from the campus, at which time the University took over the building and Wickwire became University Chaplain.

Wickwire was an activist. He was central to both the civil rights and anti-war movements in Baltimore. In the spring of 1966 he brought Bayard Rustin to campus, which inspired the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross next to Levering Hall. He also ran a tutorial program in which inner city (aka ghetto) kids were brought to campus on Saturday mornings where Hopkins undergraduates helped them with schoolwork. These activities made him suspect among the more conservative folks at Hopkins.

I volunteered at the coffee shop Wickwire ran in Levering Hall, The Room at the Top, and in two film series he ran, one for classic American films and the other for foreign films. Dick Macksey advised Wickwire on films for both series and often held late-night discussions of the films at his house after the evening showing.

One summer Wickwire decided to book some films into the main campus auditorium, Shriver Hall, to raise some money. Chet was forever raising money, because, well, his programs needed it. We picked films that we thought would fill a 1000+ seat auditorium for two shows.

One of those films was John Waters’ Pink Flamingos. This was in the early 1970s before Waters had developed much of a national reputation, but he was well-known in the Baltimore area. As Pink Flamingos had never before been shown in Maryland it had to go before the Maryland Board of Censors for approval – the only such state-level board in the nation. One scene in particular was in notorious bad taste, even by Waters’s standards: a small dog defecates in front of Divine, the film’s transvestite star, and she scoops the feces up so as to deliver a ****-eating grin.

In order to provide a bit of intellectual cover for this cheapest of cheap tricks, we – I forget just who – decided that Macksey should sign a brief but edifying essay about the film. Without ever having seen the film, I drafted the essay, Macksey OKed it, and we included it in the package that went before the censors. They approved the showing and the film played to a packed house. Chet made his money and we all had some fun.

* * * * *

Finally, I should mention Lincoln Gordon. A former United States Ambassador to Brazil, he succeeded Milton Eisenhower (Ike’s brother) as university president in 1967. He introduced coeducation to the undergraduate program in 1970 and was forced out of office by the faculty in 1971. The Wikipedia says that financial problems forced him to cut budgets and that displeased the faculty. No doubt. What I remember is that for some reason the faculty thought him arrogant. Whatever.

The point is simply that faculty displeasure did force him to resign. Universities are like that, at least some of them.

Faculties are by and large intellectually conservative. Academic research and scholarship are not “boldly go where no man has gone before” kinds of business. Library stacks are finite in length and someone has always been over every inch of them at one time or another. Thus I’m pretty sure that intellectual life at Johns Hopkins is still dominated by the walls between departments that Macksey found so troublesome.

At the same time faculty members tend to be prickly and independent minded. The faculty at Hopkins forced Lincoln Gordon out; years later the faculty at Harvard would force Lawrence Summers out.

There is a certain looseness about such institutions that allows interesting people to survive here and there in little nooks and crannies. Some of them may well be geniuses, but that’s not by institutional design. It’s merely accidental.

The English Department at SUNY Buffalo

Not so long before I’d arrived there in the fall of 1973 the State University of New York at Buffalo had been a private university, the University of Buffalo, and it was still known by those initials, “UB”. The State University of New York (SUNY) system had acquired it with the intention of transforming it into a Berkeley of the East. Student riots in the early 1970s, however, scared the local gentry and they put the breaks on any massive upgrading.

But not before the Department of English had been turned into the finest experimental program in the nation and not before David Hays was able to establish an eclectic Department of Linguistics. I did most of my coursework in English, as that was the department in which I was enrolled. However, as I’ve explained elsewhere (e.g. in this essay on computational linguistics and literary study), I got my real education with David Hays. The English Department was fully aware of that and had no problems with it.

It was an extraordinary intellectual environment, as Bruce Jackson has explained in this essay:

For at least a decade, the UB English department was the most interesting English department in the country. Other universities had the best English departments for history or criticism or philology or whatever. But UB was the only place where it all went on at once: hot-center and cutting-edge scholarship and creative writing, literary and film criticism, poem and play and novel writing, deep history and magazine journalism. There was a constant flow of fabulous visitors, some here for a day or week, some for a semester or year. The department was like a small college: 75 full-time faculty teaching literature and philosophy and film and art and folklore, writing about stuff and making stuff. Looking back on it from the end of the century, knowing what I now know about other English departments in other universities in those years, I can say there was not a better place to be.

I have no reason to contradict that judgment.

How I Freaked the Secret Service and Lived to Tell About It

This story, like many stories, is at the confluence of many streams. The story itself is a simple one, but to appreciate the simplicity you need to know something about the contributing streams. So that’s where I’ll start. Forgive me if it takes awhile for even the hint of drama to show up.

* * * * *

The story takes place in Baltimore, Maryland, during the Summer or Fall of 1972 during the run-up to the Presidential election that year. I was working as an assistant in the Chaplain’s Office at The Johns Hopkins University. One stream is about the chaplain, Chester Wickwire, and his role in the Civil Rights movement. This stream explains how the chaplain happened to be at the event in question.

The event in question was a stop on the campaign trail – another stream. That explains the existence of the freaked out Secret Servicemen: they were accompanying Sargent Shriver, Democratic candidate for Vice President, who had a reputation as fine speaker. He was speaking before Baltimore’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, an organization of black ministers who had been central to the Civil Rights movement in Baltimore. That made them central to getting out the black vote, which is why Shriver was speaking to them.

Wickwire had been deeply involved in the Civil Rights movement as well. In consequence, he was a member of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance. That gets him to the meeting.

* * * * *

Now we’ve got to get me hooked up with Wickwire and give me something that would freak out a handful of Secret Serviceman. That’ll take some ‘splainin’.

Oh, the freak-out is easy enough. I stood up and blew a fanfare on my trumpet. It was loud, they weren’t expecting it, and they jerked to full tactical alert. As they should. That’s what you do when you’re a Secret Serviceman on detail, you get ready for action when you hear an unexpected loud noise.

The fact that it was only a fanfare also explains why I’ve lived to tell the story despite the fact that those Secret Servicemen experienced a moment of, shall we say, heightened awareness. As soon as they saw what was going on, they relaxed. Things were cool. The ministers smiled, laughed. Shriver shook my hand, as did Parren Mitchell, one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Things were cool. We ate lunch. And then Shriver had his head handed to him by Homer Favor. Metaphorically speaking, of course. 

* * * * *

But, I forgot. I was going to tell you how I got hooked up with Wickwire and what the bleep I was doing with a trumpet at a luncheon where Baltimore’s Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance was being wooed by the man who would later become Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brother-in-law.

OK, me and Wickwire – another stream. He was chaplain at Johns Hopkins. I was a student there, first undergraduate, then graduate. When I drew number 12 in the Selective Service draft lottery it was obvious I was going to be drafted. So I became a conscientious objector. Wickwire helped me with that, first hooking me up with counseling, then calling in favors to get Congressman to write on my behalf (Parren Mitchell and Paul Sarbanes), and then offering a me a job I could perform as my alternative service.

So, I was doing this and that in the Chaplain’s Office. What about that trumpet? Sure, I was a trumpet player, had been one for years, but what was I doing with a trumpet at a meeting where the black ministers were being serenaded along with the founder of the Peace Corps?

And it wasn’t even my trumpet. It belonged to the Chaplain’s Office. But Wickwire bought it on my suggestion. He liked stagecraft as much as the next fellow, and that’s what the trumpet was about.

* * * * *

You need to understand that, while he was Chaplain at Johns Hopkins, he was also somewhat at odds with Hopkins – yet another stream. Hopkins was a top-shelf University and for many on staff that meant that it was had to be above the political fray, and certainly above the Civil Rights movement, which had inspired the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross on the campus in the Spring of 1966. The KKK burned that cross because Wickwire had invited Bayard Rustin to speak on campus. He also ran a tutoring program that brought black students on campus where Hopkins students helped them with their studies.

This was not consistent with a certain vision of the University as a bastion of the search for truth. Mind you, though, at one time Milton Eisenhower, brother to Ike, had been President of the University. That’s hardly above it all.

One day the clock in the Gilman Hall tower went silent. Gilman Hall was the University’s oldest building and was symbolic of the university as a whole. The clock in the tower atop Gilman Hall rang the hours, and perhaps the quarter hours too. I don’t rightly remember. In particular it rang the noon hour.

When the Gilman Hall clock sounded noon, everyone on campus knew about it. When the clock went silent, well, how the bleep did you know where you were in the day when noon wasn’t being sounded?

I took that as an opportunity for a little fun and merriment, a little showmanship, and Wickwire agreed. I went down to Ted’s Music – a wonderful little hole in a basement off Calvert Street that sold use instruments – and purchased a post-horn for the Chaplain’s Office. Post-horns are those long slender trumpets used for trumpeting the start of a horse race.

The idea is that each noon I would go out on a small balcony on the second story of Levering Hall – where the Chaplain’s Office was located and next to Gilman Hall – and sound the noon hour. Thus the Chaplain’s Office was now picking up where the official university had failed. It got us story in the campus newspaper and was, of course, lots of fun.

 

Now that the Chaplain’s Office had this post-horn we used it on other occasions as well. One of my colleagues in the office made a nice felt banner which we hung from the horn. It was a red peace symbol on a white background with yellow tassels. When Wickwire gave a speech, I’d precede him with the post horn. I blew the post horn at the beginning of Sunday morning services.

And I decided that it would be fun to blow a fanfare to welcome Sargent Shriver to Baltimore. Wickwire loved the idea.

* * * * *

Now the streams are coming together – the one about Wickwire and the Civil Right movement, the one about the 1972 Presidential campaign, the one about me and Johns Hopkins and the chaplain, and I suppose we really ought to have a separate stream about me and trumpets, but we won’t, because this story is getting too damn long.

There we are sitting in the basement of the church – just which one I don’t recall – me in my hippie clothes and long electrostatic hair and with the post horn. Oh, those ministers loved that post horn. They knew what I was going to do.

We got the word that Shriver had entered the building. I stood up, put the post horn to my mouth, and blew a mighty Joshua blast on the trumpet as Shriver’s party entered the room. Those Secret Servicemen jumped a foot into the air and a good time was had by all.

We finished lunch and it was time for the speaking. Shriver, of course, was the headliner. But Homer Favor preceded him on the bill.

Favor taught political science at Morgan State (“Teacher’s College” it was back then, now it’s “University”), a Baltimore HBCU known for its ferocious gospel choir. No more than 10 seconds or a half-minute in and I knew I was in the presence of a master orator. Favor may not have been a preacher, but he spoke like one. His speech had the cadence, the rhythm, the music, and the fire of a speech by Martin Luther King. He was that good.

I forget just what phrase he used as a refrain, but the burden was simple: When you’re in office, what’re you going to do for black people? I haven’t got the foggiest idea what Shriver was thinking during that speech. But I wouldn’t be surprised if sweat was rolling down his legs and pooling in his shoes. He had a reputation as a fine speaker, but as he soon showed, he wasn’t in Favor’s class.

When Favor was done speaking the show was, for all practical purposes, over. I remember nothing of Shriver’s speech. And George McGovern, who headed the Democratic ticker, lost the election.

Tricky Dick won.

Those were the days.

Break! How I Busted Three Trumpeters Out of a Maryland Prison

Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

For one thing, they weren’t really trumpeters. They held the horns and blew through them, but not much came out. If those guys were trumpeters, then my name’s Joe Friday and I’m a homicide detective in the LAPD. It isn’t—my name—and I’m not.

Chet the Jet

But I was part of a situation in which three erstwhile trumpet players did manage to escape from prison. Me and Chet the Jet—that’s what we sometimes called him, but only behind his back. Dr. Chester H. Wickwire was University Chaplain at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. I’d been an undergraduate there and then took a job in the Chaplain’s Office. This was during the Vietnam era and I’d been a conscientious objector to military service and so had to perform alternative service, as it was called.

We, Dr. Wickwire’s staff, sometimes referred to him as Chet the Jet. Just where and why that nickname, I don’t know. But it was oddly apt. Dr. Wickwire couldn’t jet about anywhere. He’d had polio in his youth and needed two canes for support when walking, though he made do with one for short distances.

Nonetheless Dr. Wickwire got around. He was a dynamo and a mainstay of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in Baltimore, which often created a bit of tension with the university administration. He ran a tutoring program, a free university, two film series, a coffee house, the Sunday Experience (in lieu of regular church services) and managed to teach a course or two while also counseling students.

One day Dr. Wickwire got a letter from a medium security institution in the Maryland State prison system—I forget which prison it was, but it wasn’t Jessup, which was a maximum security institution at the time (early 1970s). A group of prisoners had formed a musical group, a rhythm and blues and soul review called Sounds, Incorporated. They were looking for gigs.

Not paying gigs, of course, but free gigs, courtesy of the Maryland State prison system. Here’s the deal: If an outside organization would invite them to perform, the prison would let them out to perform. So naturally they wrote to the Chaplain at Johns Hopkins. If anyone would extend these men an invite, he would.

Sounds, Inc. had been practicing for a year and were about to give an in-house performance and dinner on their first anniversary. Wickwire was invited to attend and check them out. As I was a decent musician and he trusted my judgment, Chet handed that one off to me.

Prison

Using the public bus, it took a transfer and a bit over an hour to get out to the prison. I remember little about the prison or the event.

But I do remember the double gate. They’d open the outer gate—thick iron bars like a portcullis—and let, say, a dozen visitors in. They’d then lower that gate and, when it was shut and secured, open the inner gate, disgorging the visitors into the prison. I must have shown ID, signed something somewhere, and been subject to some kind of search, but I don’t really remember that. I just remember thinking: So this is prison. Grim.

We made our way, no doubt under escort, to the cafeteria and sat down at rectangular metal tables, with attached swing-out seats, three or four to a side. Somehow we got food; I believe, in fact, that we were served. I remember that the food wasn’t awful, just standard institutional food served on paper plates to be eaten with plastic utensils. Nothing that could be used as a weapon, though I imagine that, in a pinch, you could break a plastic knife and get a sharp point that could make a mess of someone’s eye.

I remember a striking woman walking down one of the aisles, tall, stately, modestly dressed in white from her head down to her ankles. I figured she must have been a wife of one of the prisoners and that she, and most likely he as well, was a Black Muslim. I don’t actually know that, I’m just guessing. Circumstances. The Vibe.

As for the music, it was good, very good. But only that. Truth be told, the romantic in me was expecting-hoping to be blown away by an undiscovered Marvin Gaye followed by an undiscovered James Brown. But it wasn’t that good. These were good musicians, talented and skilled, but not stars.

The Chaplain invited them to perform. Three times.

My First Muse, and My Second

There have been no others.

That’s not what I called her, my muse. That's not how I thought of her. And perhaps that’s not what she was, not quite. But, in retrospect, it’s a good approximation to how I needed/used her.

At the time, I thought I was in love. But, considered as a love relationship, it would’ve made a strange movie. For the love was mostly in my mind, not in the relationship.

It started in the Fall of my freshman year at Johns Hopkins University. She was a student in the Master’s program of the Writing Seminars and had a job in what was, at the time, the Hopkins chapter of the YMCA, run by Chester “Chet the Jet” Wickwire. Later on, through some arrangement or another, the University bought out the YMCA and Wickwire became Chaplain. But that was a couple of years later.

At the time the YMCA at JHU was, effectively, the student union. There was no student union as such, but the Y, and its building, Levering Hall, served that function. Chesley, that was her name, was one of a number of assistants who helped Wickwire run the joint. One of them helped with the film series, another with the tutoring program, and so on. Chesley helped with the coffee house.

Which is where I met her. It was, I believe, simply called The Room at the Top. Folk music was big at the time, which was about the time Dylan went electric and when the anti-war movement was cranking up. The civil rights movement, of course, was in full cry. The Klan burnt a cross next to Levering Hall to protest a speaking engagement by Bayard Rustin.

Those, as they say, were the days.

I don’t know how or why I ended up volunteering to help out with The Room at the Top. I wasn’t particularly interested in folk music. But, as I said, folk music was happening at the time. I suppose I just wanted to do something and that was something to do.

I don’t remember just when I met Chesley or what I thought on first meeting. Lights and music and fairly dust and all? Probably not. But somehow it worked out that Friday or Saturday night would be the high point of my week. That was when I’d see Chesley at The Room at the Top. She did whatever she had to do to actually run the joint for an evening and I helped out, maybe waiting tables, or whatever.

Come Sunday my mood would take a nosedive and I’d return to my studies. My mood would rise during the week, not steadily of course, but up and down, up and down, more up than down. And then Friday, Saturday, one or the other, perhaps both, I don’t remember, I’d fly into at The Room at the Top. Volunteering. Seeing Chesley, chatting with her. Listening to the music, which was often quite good.

And that’s how it went for the school year. I don’t know whether or not Chesley realized that I had a crush on her. I suppose she must have gotten some vibe. I remember that one of the regular singers there, a bluesman, dated her a couple of times. Have no idea what happened, though I was probably intensely interested in it at the time.

I didn’t myself dare approach her. I could say that was because she was an Older Woman—though the idea that a 22 or 23 year old woman could be an Older Woman seems a little silly to me now—but I wouldn’t have asked her out if she’d been my age. I was way too shy to do such a thing. But such thoughts did I have!

* * * * *

Then came the summer. School let out and I returned home. During the day I worked a summer job. But, no Chesley. Well not quite.

During the evenings I would write letters to her. Type them on my electric portable. And keep a copy for the files. I suppose I wrote two, three, four letters a week. Long letters. Somewhere along the line I must have confessed my love. And said the sorts of things typical of love letters. But mostly I just wrote and wrote and wrote.

About what? you ask. That was a long time ago and I don’t really remember. But I’m pretty sure I wrote about anything and everything I felt like writing about, including Chesley, of course. I even played a game with language, which involved creating complicated sentences by embedding parenthetical remarks within parenthetical remarks. It’s easy to do with word processing software as you can write a sentence through to the end and then go back over it, inserting the parenthetical remarks wherever. But I didn’t have a word processor. So I sort of had to guess where I wanted the base sentence to go and then embed the digressions as I went along.

I have no idea what Chesley thought of that game. But I quite enjoyed it and did it a lot. Probably thought I was crazy. Which, I suppose, I was in a way.

The thing is, I knew that this was odd behavior. I wrote these letters and wrote and wrote, and she didn’t write back. I wanted her to, I hoped she would. But she didn’t. And that didn’t seem to make any difference in my determination to write. I just kept writing.

And then one day I got a letter from her. Handwritten, I believe, two pages long or so. She was kind. Confessing she didn’t quite know how to respond to all this stuff from “a junior Marcel Proust”, an obviously flattering phrase. She suggested I read Dante’s La Vita Nuova, which I did, eventually.

As you may know, La Vita Nuova, The New Life, is Dante’s first book. The new life is that into which he entered “when the now glorious lady of my mind first appeared to my eyes. She was called Beatrice by many people who did not know what her name was. . . . At that moment, I say truly that the vital spirit, the one that dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that even the least pulses of my body were strangely affected”, and so on and so forth. From that moment on, Dante’s life was changed. Beatrice became his muse; she led him to god. And god made him a great poet.

The peculiar thing is, Dante never had a real relationship with this woman, this Beatrice, this muse. As far as we know, he only ever saw her once or twice in his life. He married a different woman, Gemma Donati, and had children by this woman.

But what does this mean “real relationship”? If we take Dante’s words a face value, his relationship to Beatrice is, in some sense, as real as any relationship he had. It was Beatrice who guided Danto in the Paradiso, not his wife. With his wife he had children. With Beatrice, Paradise. Is the one more real than the other?

* * * * *

But this is not about Dante and Beatrice. It’s about me and Chesley. Sometime after mid-summer I went back to Hopkins for a weekend. And I saw Chesley. That is not why I went back for the weekend, but it happened. That was after she’d written that one letter to me. And after I’d sent her the enameled earrings I made for her.

We chatted just like we had back at The Room at the Top. We may have mentioned my correspondence once or twice, but we certainly didn’t discuss it or anything in it. That, whatever it was, that was one world. This was another world. The two were connected, obviously, but the relationship between them was obscure.

When I returned to Hopkins in the Fall Chesley wasn’t there. She’d finished the MA program and had gone off somewhere in the Midwest to teach writing. We corresponded a bit. But my attachment to her was over.

I then found another woman, Christel, on which to hang my need. She had been my German instructor. The longing in this relationship—can we call it that? I think not, but I don’t know a better word—was perhaps not so intense. The letters I wrote during the next summer were not so long, nor quite so intellectual, and they were wittier and more playful. But the one-sidedness was still there.

It was as though I had this need and I had to hang it on someone, like one hangs a coat on a hanger. Any hanger will do as long as it can support the coat. While it is not the case that any woman could have served as a muse—Chesley and Christel were quite remarkable, and not only in their generosity toward me—it is the service I want to emphasize. Hence the crude metaphor, hanging a coat on a hook. The hook has little choice in the matter; it can but serve.

* * * * *

I have never again written with such ease and fluency as I had in my correspondence to Chesley and Christel. I didn’t have to work at writing those letters. I just sat at the typewriter, and the words flowed though my fingers onto the page.

Where did those words come from? And the fluency too? They came from me, obviously.

But I could only produce the words by directing them to Chesley, to my muse. Whatever I wrote about—literature, philosophy, politics, movies, the world, life, you name it—whatever i wrote about, I had to direct my thoughts to her. Without that direction the words wouldn’t come. I had to go through her, through my muse, to get to those words.

Those muse-born words were not, of course, the only words I wrote. I was a college student; I took many courses where I had to write term papers. Those term papers did not come out of my muses. They came out of me. The writing was hard work. On occasion it was even good work.

I sometimes think that in the decades since I was blessed by those muses I have been, among other things, attempting to actively and deliberately write my way into to the space they afforded me through an odd grace. Doing so requires that I develop my craft, in ideas and in prose, to the point where it can sustain that ease and fluency.

That new space, I can almost see it there ahead of me. But it probably doesn’t much matter whether I ever get there.

Living with Living Creatures: Will We Become the Apocalypse?

O! the one Life within us and abroad,
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul.


S. T. Coleridge, “The Eolian Harp”

Chet Wickwire was one of the most remarkable men I’ve known. He was Chaplain of The Johns Hopkins University in the third quarter of the last century. It’s in that capacity that I came to know him. He was central to both the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements of the 1960s and 1970s; he established a tutorial program that worked with inner city children, and he organized a wide variety of programs that benefited Johns Hopkins students and the local community. I worked for him as a program assistant for two or three years in the early 1970s.

One day during a meeting in his office – it may have been the weekly staff meeting – someone pointed out a possibly injured bee on the floor. My impulse – this is what I thought – was simply to kill it and throw the body into the trash. Chet’s was different. He gently picked the bee up and set it on the window sill. It then flew away.

That simple act of kindness, to a mere insect, impressed me deeply. Every time I think to kill an insect, I think of Chet and the bee. Sometimes I refrain and do what little I can to help the insect along, though often enough I kill the insect. But not without a twinge of guilt and angst, which is distinct from any disgust over contact with squishy insect guts.

But why was Chet unwilling to kill the bee? It is, after all, only an animal, and a rather lowly one at that? The only reasonable answer to that question is that he respected the bee as a living being. And if you ask: Why that? Well, is that not a reasonable why for an adult human being to act?

Just how are we to conduct our relations with other living beings? What degree of respect do we accord to their life? The answers to those questions, of course, vary from one culture to another. One concern here – it’s lurking in the background – is that the answer of the industrialized West, the agribusiness factory farming West is: None. None at all. No respect for other life forms. Is that answer anything less than a suicide pact?

Let me retell a story about my cousin Sue. She was born in the city and raised in the suburbs. But in her mid-30s or so she moved to the country and married a veterinarian. She began to raise sheep, not as pets, but as a source of wool to be spun into thread which she would then weave into cloth. When the sheep reached a certain age, she would take them to the butcher and, a day later, she and her husband would stock their freezer with mutton.

Despite the fact that these sheep are not pets, taking them to be butchered was not easy. Nor was their first meal comprised of mutton from sheep they'd raised. I'm told that when Sue and her husband sat down to that meal they were rather glum and sat there in silence, eating nothing. Then Sue said “baaa” in imitation of a sheep, they laughed, and began eating.