Oppenheim Arts & Letters

My Own Private Diaspora

I am an American citizen, an agnostic Jew, a registered Democrat in the United States.

My girlfriend is Christian, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, a graduate also of the English Master's program at Georgetown University, as kind and sweet a woman as any I've met. 

Note also: the Hebrew scholars are on her side of the family.

I have read that if we have children, they will not be Jewish as discerned by Jewish officialdom.

I wonder if they would become unchosen people or, perhaps, other than the children of Abraham. 

Would they be barred willy nilly from placing their faith in one God?

Would they be Christian by birth if not baptized or indoctrinated?

What is this competition, I wonder, for God and Godliness and God's favor if nothing other than vanity?

Is there a check box: [ ] Us . . . [ ] Them . . . [ ] Other?

My father spent every Sabbath morning religiously out on the golf course.

Around here on Saturday: books, brunch, gardening, a little photography, a drive in the Mustang.

And on Sunday: as much the same as Saturday as we can make it but with 60 Minutes or a movie in the evening.

It's a good life, ethical, just, virtuous, and pious along lines fit to the land, ourselves, and God: would it be any less so for our own?

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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Life in the Garden

Cool evenings spell the beginning of the end of a long and lovely season for the garden on the balcony.

One often wants the most pleasant interludes to go on forever, and this barefoot season has been especially so with the woman reading her magazines in the corner chair, the cat sleeping at her feet, the herbs growing strong in the best light, the Dusty Miller reaching for the moon, and numerous spiders' webs woven in silk circles beneath the eaves.

Two traps await all who enter the arts: living may well be an art, but making the lifestyle the point of the manufacture leaves little for the audience, but there are exceptions, and I may get to those in a moment; for talented others, there is also a day to day challenge as regards where to place one's bets and focus.

Among photographers, Araki Nobuyoshi lived possibly more than any other through not only his own lens but his own theater as well [1].  His mighty tome for the library, Self - Life - Death, details most the bohemian and hedonistic invention he made of living, especially so as a widower cum bachelor: how one should like, so one may wonder, to enjoy supper before a supine woman with her legs spread (or take one's tea while another bound and gagged hangs suspended from a ceiling beam).

One step removed from one's domestic arrangements and yet still documenting one's own theater: Saudek [2].

Saudek made of one old wreck of a room the stage of a lifetime, throwing children and models, nude bodies and clothed into it for the delectation of his camera.  The one room became the circus in which he and his subjects grew up and even grew old.

I have long differentiated between "constructed" and "response" photographer, the former representing work imported and placed before one's camera, the latter representing the world as the photographer may find it.  In fact, most photographers most of the time--from dads with kids to tourists to combat photographers--find in the environments through which they travel objects of interest, and then standing in one place point their cameras toward another, and that's the recording.

In production circles, from creative directors in advertising to filmmakers, theater is all, and there the artifice may divide, or not, over whether the lives depicted represent authentic personalities or authored inventions.

Why not both?

With that thought, there comes in the contemporary garden, one's own stage and style and populated both by real enough people but also by the characters possessing and the roles reflecting their aspirations.

There's the set--bistro for two, cantilevered with corner posts on the outside of fewer than 900 square feet of crib: ain't it grand?

It took a while this summer to figure out what would work by way of design and material. 

The most pleasant surprise: late spring through summer shade has made life especially hospitable to the New Guinea Impatiens.

Less right: we had the whole trailer park string of wind chimes crowded between hanging baskets.  How we solved that problem without having to go to the extraordinary bother of actually retiring and getting rid of one element or another:

I'm not sure what we're going to have in the way of pansies survived from the spring, either.

More troublesome: the little black dots, probably eggs of some sort, or poop, I suppose, getting into the Petunias.  I've been running short on garden sprays (and don't like them for spotting petals).  Pests, all gardeners know, come with the territory, however small.

Most humorous moment out there not involving another person: stripping off the bottle-cap sized bait of a beetle trap--men and women should have such perfumes and know such swarms. 

Please, if you use one of these yellow bags with the sweet smelling stuff, keep it many yards from the garden you would wish to protect.

:D

Then come those moments eternal and lovely, conventionally beautiful, a certain privilege to behold.

Every day sees change in the garden; on some afternoons, most certainly because of the border of mature trees that shade the balcony in addition to its overhang and dapple the sun, quarter hours, even minutes even alter the character of light wondrously.

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1. Araki, Nobuyoshi.  Self - Life - Death.  New York: Phaedon Press Limited, 2005.

2. Saudek, Jan.  Saudek.  Daniela Mrazkova--concept, composition, and introduction; Jan Heller, Editor; Zdenek Ziegler, graphic design; Adrian Dean, translator.  Hohenzollernring, Germany: Taschen, 2006.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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Gardens, Rituals

"My straw hat low on my brow, O go down the grassy,

  vine-covered

Slope, mount the beautiful sloping stone stairs, step after step.

Already the house has vanished; I see the clipped boxwood

Tower rigid in the glowing sky, and the garden takes me,

The steep vineyard slope receives me; at once my thoughts are

Far from the house, from breakfast, books, mail and the paper."

Herman Hesse's Hours in the Garden and Other Poems (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1979, p. 11) touches on the beauty inherent in nature and in ritual, for gardens, abundant with herbs and flowers, have about them the scent of the divine, an earthy undertone, a too brief sweetness, and time in them is time spent apart and with God.

From its description, Hesse's garden comprised a mountain space of varying cultivation, decay, and tangle.  He describes, for example, the life and ruin of a cactus, once healthy, later cut and rotting from the inside, around the tomb of which his poetic character plants columbine (". . . and I hope there won't be too much / Sun for it here, because its home is the forest floor").

My garden is a 6 x 12 foot deck adorned with wind chimes surrounding hanging baskets and railing planters laden this mid-summer with Dusty Miller and Petunias.  As small as it is, Anne and I have made it spacious; as common as it may be, I have found ways of inhabiting it and, I hope, picturing it that both enliven and sooth the spirit.

Every day brings change to the garden--more blooms, more leggy stems, even more bugs, for which I spray from time to time.  Nonetheless, it's timeless too: the morning's cup of coffee and pastry; the hours spent reading in an old canvas chair; the afternoon plate of olives and feta cheese; the dusk settling down with talk over Margaritas; even late at night beneath a lantern, the clay fired cup of cold white wine.

I have heard that "living is an art," but I have found many arts are what make living beautiful, and then too taking the full measure of time to enjoy each in its turn, which time spent becomes time eternal.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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Retreat

Posted: 070712-0800

I've been mean to my girlfriend, neglected my business, let my guitar strings rust, and have not even stepped away to take a few minutes in my small garden for a week, the weekend included, the issues and the news have been just that riveting.

Everyman with a computer on the Internet has now in addition to entertainment 24-7-365 a near real-time front row seat to world history in the making.

Even from the desk chair, it's a consuming position: what part would anyone dare miss?

So today I have my Fair Trade Organic Ethiopian Yirgacheffe for comfort and with that start am taking the day off from the War on Reason.

Worlds

Editor's Comment: Philosophy? Foreign policy? I chose "Lifestyle" as the category for this piece because just back of it Anne and I have been discussing marriage and how to raise children so they may understand and respect their parent's traditions--Lutheran and Jewish--without either parent erasing that part of the other's identity or removing the faith or solace enjoyed as part of religious affiliation.

My modest proposal: produce an unafilliated ecumenical household sustaining observance of key holidays associated with each tradition and educating the children through books and discussions about divinity, faith, family, and law.  It's either something like that, or we'll find ourselves sharing with much of the Middle East the same "my people" vs. "your people" mentality that has led to so much . . . nothing.

It's not my want to undermine Anne's faith, nor is it my wish to raise my children as Christians.

Couples overcome their differences or split on beliefs so deeply held they're inseparable from who they are and would wish to be.  Countries, I think, may settle for coexistance (everybody sing: "This land is my land"--"That land is your land").

Anne's note here may go us all on step farther by speaking to common cause.

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For this guest blog post, I think I'll refer to one of those embarrassing things that hangs around on the Internet for years and years (since 1994 it's consistently shown up when I selfishly Google myself---come on, some of you must have Googled yourselves at some point or another).

;)

It's from a website copyrighted by someone named Henryk Gajewski, whom I never met nor spoke to---it was one of those moments of graduate school idealism that coincided with a mass e-mail I believe Mr. Gajewski must have sent out to students at Georgetown or universities at large.

As you read it, kindly remember that I was a 20-something at the time, and maybe a bit full of myself to say that a well-known psychologist had crystallized MY thoughts. Maybe what I more accurately meant was that I had thought something along these lines before. Bruner's work, which you'll see mentioned below, was a hingepoint for my thesis and remains one of my favorite "academic" books.

The words, though appearing on Mr. Gajewski's site, are mine, written, as I said, well over ten years ago, but still hanging around on the Internet. Mr. Gajewski asked us to respond to this prompt:

"No/Yes War, No/Yes ______."

My response:

No war, YES LOVE

Love isn't easy, but it's better than bloodshed.

Recently I've been reading a book entitled Actual Minds, Possible Worlds by Jerome Bruner, a psychologist at New York University. In this book he crystallizes what I have thought before: much of what we think is "the way things are" is only "the way things are" because of how we perceive it.

In other words, if I have an idea about what is right or civilized, it may be right for my world (or not). But is it really right, or do I just think it's right?

No one can deny that certain physical realities exist.

I think, for example, that even if no one hears a tree fall in the forest, it DOES still make a sound. But some of what we perceive as 'right', or 'good', or 'beautiful' or 'worthy' is that way to us because we are conditioned to value those things, not because they are intrinsically valuable.

I don't know so much about war, but I venture a guess that many battles are fought over conflicting world pictures. If we can learn the ways we are conditioned, perhaps we can step back and examine those ways, thinking about what we really think, and if it is necessarily in conflict with what others think. Perhaps we can agree to value similar things; perhaps we can agree NOT to do so.

An aside, but related: I think it is possible to be a Christian AND to be tolerant of others. I believe Jesus is the way to eternal life, and that He loves me and died and rose again for me. That should not hinder my love; but rather enhance it.

What does this have to do with different worlds?

That is a perplexing question; I leave it to God to work out. I think it is also possible to step back and examine my beliefs in the hope of understanding and loving others.

Source: http://cis.cnt.pl/C-I-S/cis-INTERNET/NOWAR/nwKATALOG/NW-01E.html.

Anne: 070531-1530: Changing Spaces

Jim has graciously asked me to write something for O&AL, and I'm honored to be the first guest writer. 

My chosen topic:  moving.

I've moved a lot more than most people who haven't recently robbed a convenience store or passed a bad check.

Maybe my family of origin is partly "to blame" for that.  I say "to blame" because I'm not sure if my experience of being at home easily in new places is a bad thing or not.  Some things are not good or bad---they just are.

Many people, unless they're military folk, I guess, grow up and maybe eventually live in or near a place where there is some kind of family tradition, some parent who was born or raised in the place, some kind of tie to place.   

My experience was different. 

I was a pastor's kid. 

Dad felt that his effectiveness waned after a certain number of years, that people might choose to start focusing too much on him and not enough on the message if we stayed anywhere too long.  Because of that, I grew up in a state neither of my parents were born or grew up in and lived in five different houses in four different towns (three of which I can remember) before I was 15.

For the past 18 years, I've lived thousands of miles away from where I grew up.  My parents have moved since I left, and they no longer live where I grew up, either. 

There was one "home place" in Portage, Wisconsin before my grandparents died in the late 90's, a place where they had family land, where my grandparents were both born and raised, a place with woods and an old barn and a chicken coop and a hammock and a house, but no one I know well lives there anymore, either. 

There is no official "home place" with traditions and stories and memories going back years and years and years.  Growing up, home for us was where the people we loved were. 

All of that might have something to do with this: along with my childhood moves and the usual dorm shuffles during college, I've moved 12 times since leaving my home state, Iowa, at just-turned-23. 

So, I guess you'd say I'm pretty used to it. 

Was I running when I left my original home in the Midwest? 

Probably. 

All of the other times? 

Usually not. 

I was single longer than most---started seriously dating for the first time at 28, married at 31, separated at 38, legally divorced at just-turned-40. 

I  almost always got along with roommates well, and lived most times with a roommate until circumstances directed otherwise---one roommate left for Korea, another move was a summer sublet, another move was an apartment renovation, still another was a roommate's planned departure for getting her PhD.

My roommates (or "apartment mates") after college have included an elementary school teacher/illustrator, a high school teacher, a Korean business major who wanted me to talk English to him, a former cable channel star and Arena Stage manager, an English graduate student, and a houseful of rotating 20 and 30-somethings, mostly guys.  Then, of course, I was married, and then I was not.

Now, I'm planning to move again.

Sometimes I get tired of moving; sometimes I feel like I've had enough of it.  I've had some wrenching moves and some not-so-wrenching moves.  The toughest as a child was moving during my freshman year of high school (it's a wonder I don't hate the church for that one).  I will never forget my first day at the new school, which was about five times larger than the school I started in and looked to me like a gigantic shopping mall filled with people who all seemed to be disconcertingly certain about where they were going.

The toughest move as an adult was moving into the closet/apartment in which I live now.  I know I can't stay there no matter what I do.  I like things to move forward in life, and I know enough to know that, for me, people are more important than what city I'm in.

My mother has called me "her gypsy," and maybe sometimes that's what I've been. 

When I got my current job and starting traveling (there were more funds when I started and the travel perqs here no longer exist), she said, "I knew they couldn't keep you in that office too long." 

For my job just before this one, I traveled to the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, the Fort Berthold and Standing Rock Sioux Reservations in North Dakota, the Yurok Tribe's home in northern California, the Flatheads' home in Montana, the Seminole Tribe's urban reservation in Florida, the Mashantucket Pequots' Foxwoods Resort in Connecticut, and the Oneida Tribe's land in New York. 

None of that would have been as much fun if I had been afraid to travel, so I'm glad I wasn't. 

I'm stable, despite my moving track record, and reliable, and almost too loyal.  I love to learn; I love to laugh; I love to entertain and enjoy words, acting, music, dance, and even cooking (sorry, my quasi-feminist friends, but I do, even if you think it's a sellout); I love people. 

I learned not too long ago about Aristotle's concept of entelechy, and I think a modern definition of it might be, "willing to work to fulfill one's potential." 

That's what I aim to do in life, though I know I don't always know how to go about that. 

I'm willing to take chances and, sometimes, that means moving.

And, yes, I'm the girl ( woman :) with the cat.

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Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim

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Where Do You Live?

Oh that mountain greenery!

I don't know who lives there, but it's local.

And it makes me happy just gazing on it.

You know where I live--the back corner of a very small garden apartment complex about a mile north of Hagerstown, Maryland. 

At least the Post Office says "Hagerstown" but a few of the maps hereabouts (on the web) would seem just as happy calling it "Longmeadow".

One could argue the point, but as there are many ways of thinking about where one lives, let's look at a few and get beyond them.

In perhaps the most technical approach to the matter, I am on the United States Geological Survey grid at latitude 39° 40' 51', longitude -77° 41' 09'' at a height of 568 feet above sea level (although I think the balcony's about 16 feet above the ground). 

If you attempt to bomb me and miss, sorry--I think the data's close enough, and I have told you too much already.

However, whether the survey's accurate or not, the location's not really where I live, or where anyone lives, because we don't live on grids.

We live in "built spaces"--containers with plumbing and stoves and heating systems.

Two of my favorite things here--old Hechinger hand tools, and a bit of the charm of the small place--truly, the balcony's not more than 6x12 feet.

Of course, we may not even live in those: whoever says they're going home to their box even if it is a box in the way an efficiency or motel room with a hot plate can be?

We may live in "homes", but I'd like to think that homes are places in the heart.

"Home" describes a relationship with a certain place.  It doesn't get to the physical attractions of the space that help make it that special place.

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Girlfriend Anne and I walked around the "North End" neighborhood as it's called in Hagerstown, a place described to me in terms of the Washington neighborhoods "Bethesda" and "Chevy Chase": old homes, individually architected and built, well loved and lovingly maintained. 

Potomac, Hamilton, Old Oak--the street names could not be more comfortable nor the homes on them made to "arrive" more than they have already.  We have seen the end of the American Dream, and it looks pretty good to us: so many sweet lawns, trimmed borders, private gardens, white wicker filled porches.

"I want one of those," I told Anne, pointing to no home in particular, "but I seem to have trouble wiping the bird shit off the roof of my car."

I exaggerate: I keep so much carnauba on the pony, it's amazing poop sticks to it at all.

On one street, a green divider of a strip of about 100 yards of church property split the neighborhood, so walking north, the catalog homes were on the right and the duplexes with the old chain link fencing were off a ways on the left.  "If you write as well as Daniel Steele," I told my lady, "you live on this side with the curved driveways, but if you must teach English somewhere, well, then . . . ."  You live in the place where the detritus of home projects five years back have found their permanent homes on the porch and around the side of the house.

For writers in middle age (and old age coming on faster than we care to know), that sort of thinking amounts to incentive.  It's our last chance to "get it together" and make like Sidney Sheldon or Nicholas Sparks or Anita Shreve--and write at least as well if not better, so may we have children and pass on the royalties to them.

On the other hand . . . .

I said to Anne--and this while passing garages I mistook for cottages--where does anyone really live?

The devils are always in the details:

• the porch with the flowering plants newly minted from the garden center and still--and always to be--in their plastic pots;
• the parking pad with dueling Beamers taking in the lawn and not a human in sight: do you suppose there's a movie playing in the home theater?
• even the middle of the wide street where I stood taking pictures up one side and down the other: Anne kept a lookout, but, really, somebody should have run me over.

Oh, we're just a little envious, aren't we.

And yet, where do we live?

I think we live, pretty much, in the Mustang (just kidding, but the spirit's there), then at the computer (everyone lives at the computer these days) followed closely by the kitchen, the garden on the balcony, the dining room table, and on the leather sofa with the old JVC television now pumping through an Onkyo-driven 5.1 surround sound theater system (I'd put money into soundproofing the room, but, you know, I'm just renting).

"Mustang", "JVC", "Onkyo" ("Potomac", "Hamilton", "Old Oak")--when I'm not even trying, I'm trying.

We all are.

I know it's a neighbor's dream house--I hope it is that--and just looking breaks my heart (in a very good way).  God bless the owner.  (Breaking caption rules and going right on here): there's a little about money going on in this blogsay, but in overlooking the litter that's not in the picture, also the forgotten bicycle (that's not there either), and the tools scattered around the yard (missing also), one may note that money has nothing to do with straightening things and making a place pleasant.

Be that as it may, and to stay on topic (and away from brands, which it turns out are not far off at all), we do wonder how much "skin"--how much surface armor--we need to wrap around a comfortable office, kitchen, garden, dining room, and home theater (we're not ready, I'm afraid, to live in the bath on top of everything else although some do, we suppose, not that there's anything wrong with that).

Some things we're missing in apartment living and really do need even though they're not spaces in which anyone lives (except the kids).

For example, we could do with a basement for so many boxes of papers too important to throw away and never important enough to winnow.

We'd like also to have an outdoor space off the kitchen for dining and surrounding it an an herb garden.  Is asking for an awning, porch, or gazebo too much?  (By God a man should be able to pour a Bloody Mary for breakfast and take his eggs outside in the fresh air.  We are, after all, not animals).

Then there's the mother of all reconstructed, reinforced, second-story rooms: the 19th Century library stocked with thousands of volumes (we have got those now) and furnished for all the solitary hours that readers prize.  Not that a bed  in a back room or a sofa in front of the television won't do.  It's just that here in 850-square-feet of apartment living, display space is at a premium: after practically a year in this space, I'm still stumbling over boxes weighed down with paperbacks. 

I want all the books out on the walls, organized, accessible--and then we'll start weeding through them and giving away a few here and there, an earnest gesture having to do with something like scaled back or more simple living.

Did I mention the dire need for a marble-topped, leather-padded bar and a room devoted to its devotions alone?

It seems I have.

I'm not so sure we need that, or are even missing it, but if we did have it--and in middle age, drinking so much less, appreciating a tot so much more, and preparing to entertain guests--I'd count such a thing part of the civilized nature of the place.

As befits my name: come in, have a seat, let me pour you a drink, and together we'll studiously ignore how the other half--and the half beyond it, and the half beyond that one--lives, and may that discipline apply whichever half happens to find us in it at so congenial an hour.