My Commonplace Book

Genesis 28:10-19 And Jacob went out from Beersheba, and went toward Haran. And he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it. And, behold, the LORD stood above it, and said, I am the LORD God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: And, behold, I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for I will not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of. And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel

This happened during a difficult time in Jacob’s life. He had stolen his brother’s birthright, tricked his father into giving him his blessing, and, in consequence, had to leave his family and travel to a place he had never been to be with people he had never met. On his way, in the middle of a rocky place with no shelter, but with night falling, he made a crude bed on the hard ground with only a stone for his pillow.

In that place of barrenness and emptiness, cold and alone, Jacob had a vision of the promises of God. His dream of the ladder reminds us that although Heaven is invisible to us, the way is open even when God seems farthest from us. Awakening the next morning, awestruck, he blessed that place and named it Bethel, House of God. The New Testament tells us that we are the Temple of the Holy Spirit. As a choir we have sung, “Send it on down, Lord, send it on down,” and like the angels on Jacob’s Ladder, God sends his blessings down to us.

In her poem, “The Jacob’s Ladder,” Denise Levertov imagines the ladder as a stone ladder—one where “angels must spring \ down from one step to the next, giving a little lift of the wings” which is how it seems at times waiting for the blessings to fall from heaven, as if we are far removed and blessings like her vision of the angels, struggle to reach us.

Levertov also suggests “a man climbing \ must scrape his knees, and bring \ the grip of his hands into play” revealing the image of a man kneeling in prayer, asking blessings from the father. But, she tells us, “The cut stone \ consoles his groping feet.” Coming to God in prayer and humility comforts us. And it is then Levertov says, he feels “Wings brush past him,” and his prayer, like the poem “ascends” because it is only in humility and prayer that we can come before God and have the comfort of knowing his blessings and promises are ours, despite what our circumstances might look like.

“The Jacob’s Ladder” by Denise Levertov

Students need more practice in research, in the application of knowledge to real life problems. In our current world, more than ever, students need to be able to create logical arguments rooted in evidence. We teach them that in our ENGL1010 Composition 1 classes, and I am not opposed to that as part of our ENGL1020 Composition 2 classes. They will also receive that experience in their sociology classes, their psychology classes, even their history classes. What they will not receive in those other classes is an understanding of and appreciation for the artistry, the beauty, the significance of language as an expression of the human heart.

So many of my students do not read, read superficially, have never read a book all the way through, do not like to read, see no value in literature. ENGL1020 is not just a composition class—although it is that. It is also a literature appreciation class. My students hated to have to read The Tilted World by Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly. But they read it, and more importantly, they liked it. The novel and the stories that they read for class, the poems that we explored, spoke to them, reached them on a level that goes beyond the academic to the very heart and soul of what the humanities mean and what our mission states.

We hear so much about the irrelevance of the humanities, the pragmatism that suggests that education has no purpose other than to prepare people for the practicality of the workforce, that every effort should be made to create students shaped to the needs of their employment.  Many of the classes that students take do just that.  But there is more to an education than the pragmatic.  Education opens people to the possibilities of life.  Education awakens the mind and the heart.  There is more to life than the drone of the worker bee gathering honey for the honey pot that someone else will eat and enjoy.

If someone needs a pragmatic reason for the study of literary analysis, let it be this.  The core of the scientific method is the systematic observation of data, the search for patterns of meaning, and the application of those patterns to the data for the purpose of directing human efforts toward understanding and control.  Rarely do students engage in unfettered application of the scientific method at the freshman/sophomore level.  Instead, they are taught the basic formulations, language, and discoveries of science with some practice in applying those methods in limited, experimental settings.

In ENGL1020, focused on literature, students are taught to engage in close reading of a text, to tease out of the text the relevant details, to search for the patterns that stitch those details into meaning, and to weave those details into a pattern of explanation that reveals the significance and meaning of the work.  Every assignment immerses them in this methodology that is analogous to the scientific method.  The data that students explore is different, but the methodology is the same.  More than any science class, they are immersed in the practical application of the scientific method.

But, while the scientific method is a tool for understanding and appreciating the complexity of the world around us, the study of literature opens us to the realities and complexities of the human mind and heart.  When Oppenheimer declared at the successful testing of the first atomic bomb, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” he was not speaking from the domain of science but the wisdom of literature. Two years later, his explanation of that comment was not one rooted in science, but one rooted in the realization of the implications of science drawn from the revelations of literature. “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatements can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose” (Temperton). The humanities stand as the counterbalance, the reminder that our actions have consequences, that there is more to this world than just existing.

I told this story for the first time last year to our Chatt State visiting Writer@Work Tayari Jones. She suggested then that I should write it as I had thought of doing on various occasions. Today, a high school friend posted about being proud of being white, and I posted this as my reply to her post. I thought I would post it here as well.

Growing up, I never thought of myself as white. I thought of myself as Pennsylvania Dutch, as part Irish, as Pennsylvanian, as Christian, as American. Over the years, people have thought I was Jewish or Iranian or Greek, various shades of not-quite-white. Some years ago, a perfect stranger asked me if I was Jewish. When I told her no, she asked, “Well, what are you then?” I answered the first thing that came to mind, “Pennsylvanian.”

Nowadays, with everyone talking about “white,” I resist the label. I recognize most people see me as white. Over time, my internal self-image has adjusted to having a beard, to being old. I suppose I will one day become accustomed to being “white.” But I can’t think of anything about it that would make me feel pride, something I can point to with pride.

The first time I knew I was white was the summer of 1972. I was working at Teen Encounter in York, PA, a local ministry similar to Youth for Christ. Several local black churches had asked to use the Teen Encounter Tabernacle on Duke Street for a gospel music festival.  I was given the responsibility of locking up after the event.  I love music, but I had never attended a black church or music event. For the first hour or so, I sat with a young black couple from Baltimore who had been ministering at Teen Encounter that past week. After they left, I didn’t know anyone in the room. I was enjoying the music until the last two groups. The next to the last group performed music and were dressed in the style of the Supremes, a style at odds with country church music or any other music I associated with worship. It was nearing midnight when the last group took the stage.  I attended a church almost Amish in its stillness.  This last group, four black men in dark grey suits, hopped on stage, their bodies rigid and drawn tight, their eyes glazed as though inebriated, their faces glistening with sweat.  The music was loud, and the crowd joined in, screaming, hands waving in the air.  Never having attended a Pentecostal service, the people seemed demon possessed, and I was terrified.

Then a young woman shrieked and fell to the floor. What if she died?  What should I do? Should I call an ambulance?  I was responsible.  Several of the older men carried the young woman  into the darkened gym next to the auditorium, and I went back to see how she was.

I learned what it meant to be white and black in America.

I was barely 18, a kid, scared. These black men in their 30’s and 40’s and 50’s came to me, scared, scared that I would cause them trouble. Scared of me. Scared of me because I was white, and they were black.

The young woman was fine. She had just fainted. The concert ended a short time later, everyone left, I locked up and walked the seven or eight blocks back to where I was staying.

I knew I was not going to tell the director about what had happened. I knew how afraid those men were, I could see them still, standing in the darkened room, frightened of what I might say or do, and I knew I would never do anything to justify their fear.

That night I was white. It was nothing I felt pride in.

Sestina for My Father

The once green yard is littered with squirrels
whose only crime was a taste for bright green walnuts,
now littering the floor of the house behind locks
jammed with scraps of metal broken off by my father.
Every day he barricades himself inside the scraps of sanity
that still remain to him. Inside, the house

smells like the den of some animal, a house
where the attic would never tempt squirrels
to save walnuts or acorns against any insanity
winter might bring, although even now walnuts
litter the attic in small heaps my father
has left behind. This is the way he locks

the present in place against a past he locks
inside himself. Despite his best efforts, the house
plots against him, whispering secrets my father
chooses not to hear. But dead squirrels
litter the yard like fallen walnuts,
and my father tries to buttress his sanity

within a litany of remembered wrongs. His sanity
has always been a matter he locked
away from us, covering himself with a walnut
shell of confidence. But this time the house
is a shambles, the bodies of dead squirrels
a testimony to insanity that even my father

has trouble ignoring. He remembers his own father
marshaling fleets of Buicks and Caddies against insanity.
Outside the house the fleet of dead squirrels
arrayed around the yard become locks
holding my father against his will in this house
he has carefully provisioned with walnuts.

Now, looking at the scattered walnuts
littering each room of the house, my father
begins to realize that even this house,
his home, can no longer protect his sanity.
At night he dreams of complex deadlocks,
but too soon the dream dissolves as squirrels

slip in to grab walnuts, and the shreds of sanity
become a dream my father wants desperately to lock
outside the house, outside with all those squirrels.

– Bill Stifler

This poem was originally published in Vol. 11 (2011) of Compass Rose.

A sestina is a poem of 39 lines. The first six stanzas each contain six lines all ending with the same six words. The order of the words ending the lines changes in a set pattern with each stanza. The last three lines of the poem are a separate stanza where the six words are again repeated, three at the end of the lines and three in the middle. Some writers use variations on the six words (which I have done here). Others use six rhymes rather than six words as the pattern of repetition. Often, writers will include the six words elsewhere in the poem in addition to the patterned repetitions (which I also do in this poem). Because of the repetition of words, the sestina lends itself to poems addressing obssessions.

This poem is based on a situtation in my father’s life that actually happened (and which became the basis for my initial six words). After the first stanza, I let the pattern of repetitions suggest the evolution of meaning in the poem. In the end, the “father” in the poem becomes a composite of his personality and my own imagination so that the final result goes beyond his individual circumstances and feelings while, I hope, at the same time offers a sense of what mental illness can be like.

Appointment in Samarra

The Grim Reaper
is my guardian angel
saving me 1000 times
from certain death.

No doubt the times she
lifted me from danger
meant the saving of some
other neglected life.

Her soft touch
sends exquisite pain
radiating through my body
promising that final ecstasy
when the church bells will ring
and the veil will be lifted
and we embrace at last.

–Bill Stifler, 2017

The Revelation

Last time it came in waves
of screams slipping into depths
immeasurable, darkness smothering
hope and hate, love and larceny—no
matter—only slow rocking time
remaining beneath a darkened sky.

Then, a promise of fire, bright orange,
suns exploding, the moon bloody, always
more blood, the sacrifice of innocents,
foolish lambs led to slaughter by wolves
rising out of the northern winter,
all promises forgotten—or misremembered—
the abomination of desolation at last revealed.

Still, hope clings to flotsam carried on rivers
of fire, the rapture’s final embrace carrying
them to the promised land of gnashing teeth.

— Bill Stifler, 2016

Cento: Lines from Mandelstam

Where to start?
No one word’s better than another;
Here, taking form, is the first draft.

The air trembles with similes,
And sometimes the air is dark as water.
You can’t get out of it, and it’s hard to get in.

The breast of the sea breathes tranquilly,
And all the seas of the world lie open,
but it’s a hard sail, and the same stars everywhere.

Time gnaws at me like a coin,
Stirs itself from long sleep on the harsh avenues,
Hangs above the damned abyss.

Never mind if our candles go out.
Ahead of us we’ve only somebody’s word,
And there’s not even enough of me left for myself.

I have forgotten the word I wanted to say.
Everything’s happened before and will happen again.
What I’m saying now isn’t said by me.

I have studied the science of good-byes.
Who can tell from the sound of the word ‘parting’?
Memory, are those your voices?

– Bill Stifler

A cento is a patchwork collage of lines taken from other works. All of the lines from this poem are taken from translations of various poems by Osip Mandelstam from a 1987 world poetry text compiled by Richard Jackson for ENGL433 at UT Chattanooga. I wrote the poem while taking the class and recently edited it.

I wrote this September 21, 2001, the day after hearing Walter Cronkite on Letterman. 

Awakening to Our Responsibilities as Americans
21 September 2001

During this crisis following the attack on New York City and Washington, D. C., I have frequently heard people refer to that World War II quotation which says, in reference to the United States following the attack on Pearl Harbor, that a sleeping giant has awakened. Those who use it mean it as a warning to our enemies, as a reminder of our actions in WWII.

But there is another sense in which the sleeping giant has awakened. September 11, 2001, was not the first terrorist attack in the world. For years, terrorists have slaughtered innocent men, women, and children around the world, spreading hate and suffering. Far too many of us have been happy to sit back in our complacency, happy in our wealth and privilege, secure in the safety of our freedoms and way of life. Those whispers of trouble in other worlds—slipping between the sports scores and weather, the local children’s pageant, Visa bills, tax hikes, fluctuations in the stock market—those whispers we so easily ignored. On September 11, 2001, those whispers became a scream that woke America from its complacency.

Thursday night, September 20^th, I heard Walter Cronkite on the David Letterman show remind Americans of our obligations in a free world. Many of us were sleeping across America. It was midnight, it had been a difficult week, hard days lay ahead. So, many of us didn’t hear what he had to say.

Among the many things Walter Cronkite said that night, one important message highlighted our responsibility in the events to come. He spoke of the Allied liberation of prisoners from Nazi WWII interment camps. He spoke of the many German citizens horrified by the atrocities committed by the Nazis and soldiers in those camps. He spoke of the great pain the citizens of Germany felt when exposed to that great evil. And despite their horror and their empathy, Walter Cronkite condemned the German people as guilty for those atrocities. He said they were guilty, not because they had done anything wrong, not because they had known. They were guilty because they had not known.

In the days ahead our military, our government, our President will make difficult decisions. The consequences of those decisions will affect people across the world. And it is our obligation, our duty, our American right and responsibility to make sure that we know what actions they take. We cannot go back to sleep, we cannot pass off the responsibility for the actions of our military, our government, our President. This is America, where each of us bears the responsibility for the choices our country makes. And it is our responsibility, the responsibility of we, the people to make sure that justice is done, to make sure that, in our anger and our pain and our deep distress, we do not become the enemy. We are Americans, and we have an obligation, a moral and spiritual duty, to do the right thing.

This means, as Walter Cronkite so eloquently argued, that American journalists must accompany our troops, our forces, our leaders as they take on the task before us. Those journalists must exercise the restraint necessary to patriotic citizens not to report the news in a way that would endanger the men and women who will risk their lives for all of us, Americans and citizens of the world. And those journalists must act as the eyes and ears of the American people to ensure that our troops, and our forces, and our leaders act according to the strictest guidelines of morality, conscience, and the American spirit, where justice cannot be a word, a rallying call to war, but must be a living reality because it is that reality that defines who we are, that epitomizes what makes the United States of America unique among the nations of the world, both now and throughout history.

This awakening to our American responsibility must remind us of the spirit of giving and sacrifice that in the 1960’s prompted our then American President John F. Kennedy to challenge young Americans to give themselves to the world. In our complacency, in the safety of our security and material comforts, we have too often ignored the poverty and misery rampant in many of the countries of the world. The citizens of those countries, seeing our complacency and comforts, become easy prey to these charismatic terrorists who blame us for that poverty and for that misery.

Worse, there have been times when we have contributed, when we have been responsible for others misery and misfortune.

Sometimes in America, some of us forget our responsibility to each other, and acting in our own self-interest or reacting out of our own fear or inadequacy, we, too, commit acts of terrorism, acts of destruction. We have only to look at the burning of churches, the murder of Civil Rights leaders, the assassination of an American President, the attacks on abortion clinics, the Oklahoma bombing to find in ourselves the evil we have now committed ourselves to excising from the world. And we should not forget that those Americans who committed these atrocities believed themselves patriots, idealists, the hand of God.

And we have not just been guilty as individuals. In America, we have had, at times, to correct the excesses of our leaders. We have created, in this country, a system of government predicated on the necessity for checks and balances on power. We have created this system, not because we believe our leaders are unjust, not because we do not trust their integrity, but because we know that all of us are human with all the limitations and glories that that entails. We have created this system because we know that even the best of us can make mistakes, can react in anger without justice, can convince ourselves that we act in the interests of all as a cloak for our own selfishness. And our system of government, the American system of government allows us the opportunity–-and the responsibility—to right those mistakes, those excesses, those acts of selfishness.

And so, when American leaders, when American businesses and corporations, when American institutions and individuals of every stripe and affiliation act unjustly, we can call them to account. And we have.

But in our sleepy complacency, we have too often closed our eyes when those same mistakes, those same excesses, those same acts of selfishness–-committed by Americans–-have taken place outside the borders of these United States.

And so the nations of the world have sometimes focused on our inconsistencies and our failures instead of our strengths. They have seen our complacency as acquiescence, and as, Walter Cronkite reminds us, they have been right. And those inconsistencies, those failures have helped fuel the hatred that has now come home to our shores.

We should not be surprised at our failures. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who penned the words that “all men are created equal” while simultaneously maintaining the institution of slavery. After all, we are human. And our strength does not lie in our perfect way of life–-our strength lies in the incontrovertible fact that more than any nation in the world, we hold ourselves accountable.

Many changes lie before us. We the people of these United States of America will have to take action against an elusive enemy, an enemy who justifies its evils by the argued rightness of its cause. As Americans, we must do better. As Americans, we must remain awake. As Americans, we must hold each other accountable so that if one of us goes astray, the others can call him or her back.

We must avoid excess. We must, as much as is humanly possible, protect the innocent, whether those innocents are Americans, Palestinians, Iraqi, Afghani, or members of any nation, community, or religious or political belief. We must do this because as Americans we are committed to people’s rights to freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom to choose their own governance, freedom to make the best of their lives.

We must protect the innocent. We cannot generalize about those who are not in complete agreement with us. We cannot vilify those leaders who, living in a world that does not understand the freedoms that we hold dear, are just beginning to see the light—men like Yasser Arafat, who has, if slowly and hesitatingly, begun to change.

We must act. We must act with resolution, with courage, and we must act responsibly, we must act like Americans, we must act like people who truly believe in liberty and justice for all.

© 2001, 2014 Bill Stifler

I was cleaning files on my computer and found a copy of the one and only letter I have written to a public official.  I wrote this on March 19, 2002, when my opinion was clearly in the minority.  This was my letter to President G. W. Bush.

I have never before written a personal letter to any public official, and certainly never considered writing on a topic about which I am less knowledgeable. But recent events have frightened me, and in the hopes that even one person’s opinion might carry weight, I have chosen to write. It may well be that you will never see this letter. I’m not so foolish as to believe that the President of the United States has time to read every letter sent to him.  But I hope that this will find its way to someone who will pass on my concerns to the policy makers in our government.

I know that these have been difficult times and that even more difficult times lie ahead.  I also know that there are many details about the happenings of recent times that are not available to the general public. And this is as it should be in the interests of both public safety and military policy.

Recently there has been talk in Congress and elsewhere of attacking Iraq.  I know that Saddam Hussein has committed a number of atrocities.  It may well be that our intelligence community has evidence of his complicity in recent events which has not yet been made public. However, it frightens me that our nation might overstep the bounds of decency and justice and become ourselves the aggressors,  taking action which is unjustified.

I am, at best, a novice student of history and even less of modern affairs. I have no idea what our best course of action should be. But I am afraid of the passion of desperate men. I am afraid of those who find it easy to suggest military action. I am afraid of how easy it is to justify the wrong thing in the effort to do the right thing.

I firmly believe in the freedoms and concerns on which our country was based.  I believe our country was founded on a willingness to sometimes allow a potential wrong in order to avoid a greater wrong. It is this principle that sometimes, regrettably, allows the guilty to go free from our justice system.  But the alternative, to act where there is reasonable doubt, was abhorrent to our Founding Fathers and the principles upon which they founded our nation.

In closing, I have never been prouder of an American president than I was while listening to your State of the Union address following the attack on September 11^th. I thought you spoke reasonably, compassionately, yet firmly.  As our leader, you can restrain those who, in their anger and pain at what has happened, might be tempted to excessive action.  If we act without due cause, Osama Bin Laden and those like him have defeated American freedom and American justice more surely than any act of terrorism they could ever commit, and we will have shamed before the world the principles we hold most dear.

© 2002, 2014 Bill Stifler