Space...What a Wonder!

Space has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Looking up into the sky and imagining what worlds are spinning around each of those stars sometimes literally makes me dizzy. For me, watching the earth ease its shadow across the moon during a lunar eclipse seems to be a moment of intimacy with the cosmos. Several years ago I got my first chance to see Jupiter and three of its largest moons through a telescope, and I literally had tears in my eyes. One scene indelibly burned into my memory is the brilliant full moon on Christmas Eve 1968 as, for the first time, human beings -- Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders -- orbited the moon in Apollo 8. It staggered my imagination to stare up from my backyard and realize that men were actually up there. I had heard them a few moments before on the TV as one of the crew read the opening words of Genesis, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth..."

In recent years, the celestial event that most touched my emotions and imagination was seeing Comet Halle-Bopp as it made its way through our neighborhood in the late 90s. I found an undated account of this in a copy of a letter I wrote (it would have to be from 1997, but exactly when, I don't know), and I'd like to share it with you:

__________________________

I have been easing deeper and deeper into a serious love affair with the night sky. The other morning Cris, my wife, got in from work about 5:00 a.m. I had just dozed off (I can never sleep when she's closing the store and has late nights) when she came in and told me I had to come see something outside. I got up, groggy and cold, because I dozed without any cover, stumbled out the door with my feet shod only with socks, and they quickly began absorbing cold water from the ground, adding to my chill. She said, "Is that the comet?" There it was! There it was, a fuzzy star looking thing with a clearly visible tail. It was eerie standing there half-asleep, shivering with cold, looking out across millions of miles of space at a ghostly visitor I had never seen before. It was an awesome experience. The next night I began watching for it to see exactly when it would show up over the horizon. During the evening I watched the Big Dipper travel across the sky. I finally dropped off to sleep, but Cris woke me up when she came in. I went out and just stared -- and wondered. We got the older two children up to come see it. After everyone else had gone inside, I just stood there watching my new friend sailing across the cosmos when all of a sudden a spectacular meteor, sparks flying, streaked its way across the sky just above me. What can I say? Wow! What a night!

[Image Credits: (1) Earthrise from Apollo 8 by NASA, (2) Halle-Bopp Comet by Ian Griffin Astronaut Memorial Planetarium & Observatory, Cocoa, Florida, October 5, 1997 http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/comet/images9710.html]

Wayback Machine...A Sleep Interrupted on a Cold Winter Night

An interrupted sleep in the wee hours of a cold winter evening left me awake with my thoughts. One of the wonderful gifts of journaling is finding refuge at any moment to reflect on life - to analyze and record life in general, and my life in particular. The crisp early morning hours in an insomniac daze seem to nourish serious reflection unlike any other time of the day. Let's take The Wayback Machine to December 2004:

Thursday, December 2, 2004 (4:39 a.m.)

I woke up over an hour ago to the sound of a dog barking repeatedly. I wrestled myself through layers of sleep until I was aware of it. It sounded as if it were off in the distance, but not to far. At first I figured it was Carol’s black Lab, but then it sounded like Toby. I realized he must have gotten loose and was trapped somewhere.

I stumbled around and got blue jeans and a sweat shirt on, slipped on my tennis shoes without socks, and finally found two flashlights in the den where Patrick had them (it’s generally impossible to find one in an emergency). I headed out the door, but Toby had stopped barking by the time I got outside. I whistled and called, and he finally yipped a little. I traced where the sound had come from, and after a few false starts into the woods made my way into the thicket until I found him.

He had pulled the chain and post out of the ground, and it was wrapped around a sapling and undergrowth. It is miserably cold out – at least for stumbling through the night after being startled out of sleep – and my hands were stinging as I fumbled to unwrap the chain and retrieve the post. Toby and I made it out of the woods, and I got him established by his doghouse.

I came inside to look for something to put in his house to help him stay a little warmer. Cris roused long enough to go through the stack on the cedar chest and pulled out an old threadbare pink and white sheet with a hole ripped into it – I believe we’ve had that sheet since we got married. I took it to the doghouse and got Toby to go in. He’ll probably have it pulled out and ripped up by morning. Why is it that animals and children seem to rebel against anything you do to try and take care of them?

After I came back inside and got my hands washed in lots of hot water, I climbed into bed, but I couldn’t relax to go back to sleep. I lay there a while in the dark with Cris snuggled near – which is the only reason I didn’t go ahead and get back up. It’s hard for me just to lay in bed when I’m awake in the wee hours...my mind gets troubled with all sorts of thoughts.

One of the things that was going through my mind was what will it be like when I get too old to go stumbling through the woods for my animal in distress? Who will I turn to? Who will I depend on? Being old is a frightfully helpless state of existence, even worse, in my imagination, than the helplessness of an infant. At least the infant grows and matures and develops into a self-sufficient person. Aging leads into deeper stages of helplessness. Is that really all there is to look forward to, if you don’t die early enough? It’s a bleak thought, but one, I suppose, that I must keep studying. My hair is gray (albeit prematurely) and some wrinkles are already starting to settle here and there on my face. It will only get worse as time goes on. I’m on the other side. I’m in decline. How does one overcome the looming tragedy of that?

Memories – just how far back can they go?

Some people apparently don’t have many memories of their early childhood years. At least that’s what I gather whenever I reveal just how far back my memories go. For some reason, I have very clear memories of my earliest years. One memory that is particularly clear may be the earliest. When I shared the details with my mama several years before she died, I found out just how early. As I relayed to her details of that memory, her eyes grew wide and she said, “Jim…do you remember being born!” Believe it or not, I was only five months old. Here’s how I know.

When I was born in March of 1957, my brother was a senior in high school. He turned 18 that April, graduated that June, and went into the Air Force immediately after he graduated. That meant he completed boot camp in August 1957. The place I described to my mama’s astonishment belonged my brother’s girlfriend’s family. We had gone there during the week he was home from boot camp. March to August – five months.

We were at a cabin, and there were woods nearby. There was also a stream. The cabin was made of dark, flat wood interspersed with wide white lines. Inside was a golden wood floor. There was a squarish hallway, and someone was holding me around my waist and under my arms facing away from her (the person was female, most likely my brother’s girlfriend). There was a guitar hanging on the wall in the hallway, and whoever was holding me took my left hand and strummed my fingers lightly across the strings. Next I remember being held under my arms by someone who was letting my bare feet dangle in the cool running water of the stream. Images of the water on my feet and the pebbles in the streambed, even of the diaper I was wearing, are still as vivid as ever.

There are many other things I remember from before I was two years old. How do I know? Because many of the memories are from the year we spent in Savannah. I remember standing in our empty house in Hillsboro, all the familiar furnishings already packed and probably en route. I was very sad, even the emotions are still clear. I also remember how happy I was when we moved back into the same house. After that, I always had a fear of moving again.

I remember my second Christmas, being taken out of my baby bed in the corner of Mama’s and Daddy’s room, and carried to the room where the Christmas tree stood. There were presents and toys, but I can’t remember any in particular. It would be another three months before I’d be two years old. A couple of months before that, I remember Halloween night and being terrified of the trick-or-treaters. As I stood with Mama in the doorway, a group of kids in costumes terrified me, and one of them, a little girl (a few years older than me) that often came over to play with me, pulled up her mask and said, “It’s just me, Jim.” That didn’t help – I remember clearly thinking that whatever these monsters were, one of them must have eaten her.

As the years progressed and I grew from a toddler to a boy, a boy to a teenager, a teenager to a young man, and a young man to the present, thousands of images, crisp and vivid, have accumulated in my mind. Sometimes late at night, when the world around me is quiet and I am still, I can play these memories like old movies. I have often wished there was some way to project them on a screen so others could see. It’s awfully lonely sometimes, especially since most of the memories are of people no longer alive and places that have drastically changed. The quantum singularity of time and space seem to have been suspended somehow in my subconscious, and on some quiet evenings it seems I might be snatched back to some other time, and it’s frightening. As much as I cherish the memories, it’s the pleasure, or trial, of the present moment that suits me best. And on a still evening in the future, it’s likely that this moment too will play like a video in my mind.

[Note: The photograph is my mama and me on my first Christmas.]

A One-Legged Prisoner and Robert Frost

As a teacher of inmates at a state prison, I strive to create an environment in my work area that is different from the rest of the institution. I have a genuine concern for these men, and in my vocation I not only teach academics, but I try to be a positive role model, and I try to treat each inmate with dignity and respect. That, in my opinion, is part of their education as well. How can you learn how to treat others with dignity and respect if you rarely see it modeled in the way others treat you? I bring to the job compassion and a sense of humor, and I try to share that with everyone - staff and inmates. Sometimes, though, it's simply sad to work at a place where human beings are like cattle in cages. Here is an excerpt from my journal about a prison moment which I hope will give you a bit of illumination about the strange world called Prison:

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Oftentimes I watch from the glass door of my building at the prison as inmates walk by, and I am sad for them. Some look invalid or mentally challenged (we would have said retarded, when I was a boy). This afternoon I was in the library, and I noticed a paperback of Robert Frost’s poems and The Best American Poetry of 2003 stacked on a desk. An inmate had just checked them out and was waiting to take them. He was a young-looking guy with a sad looking face, made sadder by scars tracing here and there a story of some past trauma.

I pointed to the Frost book and said, “Good choice.” He told me he likes to write the poems out and send them to his girlfriend. His voice was a bit shaky and rang of mental slowness. He reached down, for some reason, and popped off a prosthesis that was most of his left leg, and he began unscrewing something on it -- some sort of adjustment, I suppose.

As he put his artificial leg back on, I asked, “You like poetry?” Again, he explained, like I should have understood the first time, "I like to write it out and send it to my girlfriend." I wondered about what kind of girl would wait for transcribed Robert Frost poems from a crippled prisoner with a badly scarred face. I wondered what he had done to be in prison. I felt deep sadness at the pain that this young man has obviously been through, and I wondered about the pain through which he had put others.

Wonder!

A number of years ago, some friends of mine (along with a few folks that I didn’t know) started up a small-circulation magazine called Wonder. I was hooked from the first copy I got, but as things in publishing usually go, the magazine was not a smashing success, and the labor of love proved too much labor for the available love, and Wonder went the way of most start-up periodicals. It was sad to me, because the premise of the magazine’s origin is one that should be spread far and wide – the sense of wonder that is all around us. That magazine focused on literature and movies, but I personally extend wonder to every field of inquiry – nature, science, mathematics, work, etc.

At one time or another in my life I’ve had formal training in psychology, theology, and electricity and electronics. But on my own, I’ve studied a far wider range of topics. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had an insatiable hunger for learning something new all the time, and an intense fascination with the magic that is constantly present in the world. In my years of junior high and high school, I was a mediocre student, just doing enough to get by, because the standard curriculum and the means of transferring it just did not appeal to me. It wasn’t that I was a lazy student – I was constantly studying. Dictionaries and encyclopedias formed a world that was a second home to me. There were new worlds to which I could always travel, and travel I did...oftentimes without even having to leave the living room couch.

But the wonder was not only to be found in books, I also wandered the woods near my house, taking in with my eyes and my soul every tree, every shadow, every breeze, like a starving man taking in food. Then when I was in the eighth grade, I chose for a 4-H project to grow tomato plants from seed, and this led to a deep love of growing things. For years afterward, I studied everything I could get my hands on about plants and flowers. I collected cuttings from several of my elderly aunts and great-aunts who has splendid begonias, sultanas, and a lovely red and purple variegated plant they called goose gizzard. I ordered seed of all sorts and got on the W. Altee Burpee and Parks mailing lists. I subscribed to Flower and Garden and Horticulture magazines. The whole world of living things seemed to call out to me.

I didn't take on hobbies; I took on passions. Through the years I've become fascinated by airplanes, paper maché sculpting, crocheting, old time radio shows, stamp collecting, the theater, classical music... and the list goes on. Some of the passions have fallen by the wayside, and others have remained to this day. But the sense of wonder has been continuous.

Being bored was rarely a problem for me when I was a child, and it still isn’t. Everything offers fascination of one sort or another, whether intellectual or spiritual – and after all, aren’t those two pillars of the same building. I have lain upon the ground and watched ants traveling along dragging bits of leaves or cookie crumbs, I’ve marveled over a couple of square feet of soil as tiny flower seeds germinated and began searching for sunlight, I’ve ravished the night sky with my eyes absorbing from a billion stars the light that began its journey billions of years ago.

Books, music, magazines, movies, the theater, the science lab, the inventor’s workshop, the artist’s studio… and on and on it goes, this marvelous path of wonder that waits at the tips of our toes for us to step onto it. Like the Yellow Brick Road led to the magical Emerald City of Oz, so lies the road of wonder before each of us. All we have to do is take a step, then another, then another, then…

Why Maché Artist?

A few years ago when I first got on the Internet, I noticed all these fascinating noms de guerre people had created for themselves… names like “Lips2Sweet4U” and “2L8_4myLuv” for the girls, which, once I thought about it, really made me feel pre-rejected by people I didn’t even know and whose lips I had no interest in anyway; or names like “superSTUD4babes” and “Guy2Hot2Handle” for guys with some serious superiority complexes, which, for some neurotic reason, made me feel surprisingly inferior. For a long time I humbly went by… well, Jim Bohannon. Nothing like using your real name to throw people off! There came a time, however – a fateful time – when I decided I should set up yet a second Yahoo! account, and since my real name was already taken and I was already having to use it with the number “1” attached to it, instead of going for Jim_Bohannon2 (and since “studmuffin879” was also already taken and I had little interest in trying to remember “studmuffin880”) I decided I’d call myself something that represented me to the core. So Maché_Artist it was (Maché is pronounced “mah-shay…some people have trouble figuring it out).

Why would any self-respecting, net-surfing e-mail hopper name himself after a French adjective that literally means “chewed up”? Simple. I love paper maché. When I was boy I discovered a recipe in The Family Book of Games, which I had gotten in an introductory package from Doubleday Book Club (which I had inadvertently forgotten to tell my mama I’d sent off for…but that’s another story). Well, I didn’t care much about soaking strips of paper in a galvanized washtub, boiling them down, and beating them to a pulp. I decided what I would do is tear newspaper (and we always had a stack) into tiny pieces and stick them together with glue made from flour and water. I used this method to make toys for myself. The first thing I made was a very detailed Lunar Excursion Model (LEM) which stood about 5 inches tall and actually came apart so I could both land on the moon and take off from it. The poor LEM – after dozens of landings on the dining room table (aka “the moon” – the white tablecloth was perfect), I hopped off the couch one afternoon forgetting about the lander, and it met with a cataclysmic force from my foot, rendering all future moon explorations unfeasible.

In later years I began to wonder if I could make art with this method, so I began gluing these pieces of paper together to make more detailed works, including an elephant complete with tusks and a long-neck, cartoonish turtle. As the years went by, I made various starts and stops with this art form until I decided to pulverize paper in a blender and mix it with flour and water to make a moldable mash. This worked very well, and my skill increased, until I had a bout with clinical depression and gave up art for a while. Recently I have returned to my passion for sculpting in paper mâché with the enthusiasm of a teenager who’s just discovered girls (maybe that’s a bad analogy, but you get the picture). I made a half-hearted attempt to do some things with clay, but it left me uninspired – and it also cracks very easily.

The problem with working in paper mâché, at least the method of building from scratch that I use, is it takes lots of time. Each meager stage of production has to dry completely before I go on, so keeping the motivation for major projects such as I have in progress now requires lots of patience – and it’s perfect for somebody with a short attention span, because I can work on a piece, then set it aside for days and work on something else. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, so it takes endurance, coupled with downright mule-headedness, to keep going. I've also had to change the recipe – I no longer use flour, because those same beetles that love breakfast cereal also love flour...even when it's mixed with pulverized paper. Now I use Elmer's glue, which makes an incredibly strong product when dry, and an incredibly sticky mess while in progress, but one must suffer for one's art.

Something that I really like about my art medium of preference is that I take trash (literally) and turn it into a work of art. There is something profound in that for me – it’s a metaphor, much like what I try to do in my other job as a teacher of inmates at a state prison. Where you see trash to be dropped off at the dump, I see dragons lifting their wings to fly, Civil War soldiers haggard from war, frogs playing musical instruments on lily pads, a country baseball pitcher in mid-windup, and…well, lots of possibilities.

So…I figured that would be the perfect “other name” for myself. How appropriate, because life has a way of leaving us mâché-ed (chewed up) and spit out, and I’m no exception. It’s just that I want to take the chewed-up experience and turn it into something beautiful – and if not exactly beautiful, at least a whole lot of fun!

[I've included a couple of pictures here – an older work (a dragon perched on a rock) and a piece in progress, Dragonlock Holmes, who will sport, when completed, a trenchcoat and the typical Sherlockian cap, and will hold a magnifying glass in one hand and a Calabash pipe in the other.]

Good Friday

Dear Reader,

I am a Christian, and today is one of the most significant days of the Church calendar – it’s Good Friday, a confusing name for the day when Christ was crucified. Who was this Jesus? Did he really make claims of divinity? Did he even really exist? People have chosen a variety of answers to those questions, but one thing is certain – Jesus was, for whatever reason, the most significant person in history. So significant, in fact, that recorded time is divided into two distinct parts by his birth. Christianity and Jesus get a lot of bad rap, and to be honest, some church folks don’t help his case any. But I’d like to invite you, just for a moment, to put aside all your negative stereotypes and consider a few possibilities.

The first thing that I find wondrous about the Judeo-Christian heritage is the book that, for the most part, we share – the Bible. Unlike the claims made about the holy books of some faiths of a specifically divine origin, the Bible is a book of the people. The language of the original scriptures was not some idealized “holy” language – it was pure, everyday language. The Bible was born out of the struggles and experiences of people trying to find their place in history as it related to God’s presence with them. The Bible is not a sanitized account of a people, rather it paints them with all their failures and blemishes. Failures and blemishes – now that’s something I can relate to!

Another attractive point of Christianity to me is the intimate involvement of God in the lives of ordinary people. There is a doctrine in Christianity that many folks find odd (therefore they often dismiss it as superstition, a myth, a fairy tale) and that is the doctrine of the incarnation – carne being from the Greek word meaning flesh. In other words, in Jesus, God became flesh. I can see why people have trouble with this, and why they would scoff and laugh at it, but hear me out. What better thing could happen if there is a God than for God to become intimately involved in the lives of human beings by becoming one? Have you ever heard the wise old saying, never judge a person till you’ve walked a mile in that person’s shoes? Well God decided to go even further – to become one of us. Not just to walk a mile in our shoes, but to spend a life from infancy to adulthood experiencing pain and rejection, joy and delight, hunger and fullness, all the things we experience. This is what incarnation is about.

Another doctrine of Christianity is the dual nature of Christ. An early church debate that raged for a while was about this issue. Some pointed out the human nature of Christ (Jesus had to be human, or he could not have been tempted or have suffered); others pointed out the divine nature (only God could forgive sins and work miracles). How can he be both? The question can be posed like this – “How could somebody be human and God at the same time?” Is he half man, half god? No, the church finally concluded – he is 100 % God and 100 % human. That just doesn't make sense, at least not to our natural sense of logic. How can we understand it?

Well now, have you studied quantum physics, or the nature of light? Here, I believe, we have a kind of analogy in the natural world. Quantum physics is the branch of science that focuses on the sub-atomic world, and we’ve found that to be a very strange world indeed. For instance, did you know that subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time? They can also travel in two directions at the same time. Odd? You better believe it’s odd. It contradicts every shred of evidence available to our sensory experience. But there it is. Scientists know it’s true, but it simply doesn't make sense, and nobody can understand how or why it can be true.

Scientists had a long battle with the concept of light. Is light a wave, or is it a particle? It had characteristics of both. This isn’t a far-fetched hypothesis – it’s an experimentally verified fact. Light is a wave, and it’s also a particle. It has characteristics of two different natural phenomena.

Does this prove that Jesus could have two natures? No, it doesn’t. But it does prove that there are things in this world that contradict our natural experiences, even if we can’t explain them. That should give pause to an outright dismissal.

This isn’t a polemic to try and get you to believe a certain thing. It’s just an explanation, and hopefully a characterization of what some people have believed for centuries, and some of us still believe today. We don’t understand it, but we embrace the notion that God loves us so much that God came and dwelt in our midst, experiencing life from our perspective. If you read about the life of Jesus, you can’t help but notice that he was not an ordinary person, and he never tried to please the powers that be – in the political or the religious world. He pointed out that our notions of power and success are off the mark, that what really matters is selfless love expressed through compassion.

Good Friday is good because it reminds me that no matter what I go through, no matter how bad and hopeless I feel, that God walks with me. What is the worst thing that could possibly happen to me – and I mean to me, not around me. My first two children died, my first born son in my arms, and my daughter just over a year later as I listened from the emergency room door as the heart monitor went silent. I’ve been through a divorce. My family and I have gone from a fairly prosperous life several years ago to one of constant struggle and trying desparately to hold poverty at bay. But one day something with ultimate finality will happen to me. I will die. Good Friday reminds me that death even happened to God. I am not alone, and I will never be alone, and even the worst thing that could ever happen to me is only a stepping-stone to something far greater.

I wish you a blessed Good Friday and a joyous Easter, whatever your faith – or even if you don’t have one. You can still rejoice, and I hope you will.

Peace, blessings, and love,
~ Jim