For reasons known only to my unconscious mind the line from that patriotic hymn popped up in my head this morning as I sat in meditation: “My country ‘tis of thee.” And then the question followed naturally from my conscious mind: Where is my country? Where do I belong?
I have been living in America for nearly sixty of my eighty-five years and it still does not feel like “my country.” Indeed, in consequence of recent cultural and political events, it feels less than ever like “my country”. I am not patriotic. I have always been skeptical of the whole notion of patriotism. In my mind it is associated with war. Perhaps the first poem to inspire me to become a writer was that haunting evocation of the vile truth of war in Wilfred Owens’s “Dulce et Decorum” whose last line, after the ghastly spectacle of a fellow soldier choked into an agonizing death by gas, his body stacked unceremoniously onto a cart, evoked, bitterly, “that old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori.” It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. I have never since been able to worship at the altar of patriotism.
I understand that there are certain positive values associated with the love of one’s country, even though these are not values that my own heart connects with. I also wish to avoid being glib or naïve. National borders exist, along with the need to respect territorial rights and integrity. I would be outraged should France decide to send troops across the Channel to invade the country of my birth; or should Mexican tanks cross the border with the U.S. and cause death and destruction as they shatter American cities. I am as disgusted with the memory of Hitler’s call to arms in the name of Vaterland and his invasion of Poland—and later other countries—as I am by Mother Russia, the more recent pretext used by Putin to invade the country of Ukraine and wreak devastation there. But by the same token, the boastful call of America First sends shivers down my spine. There is an important distinction to be made between patriotism and nationalism—something different and infinitely more dangerous.
Still, all this conceded I’m left wondering: what is “my country”? I am an old exile. The geographical borders on world maps mean little to me personally. I left the country of my birth when I was twenty-three years old, living first in Germany, then in Canada before coming to America. For reasons having mostly to do with practicality—I felt an obligation to be able to cast a vote in elections that affected my life; I wanted to be able to apply for grants and fellowships available only to citizens—I became an American national in 1972. I should perhaps have read the tea leaves back then: faced with questions to be answered “under penalty of perjury”, I chose to lie in order to qualify as an American. Had I ever knowingly committed a crime? Yes, I had smoked marijuana, a crime in those days. I answered, No. What would have been the point in answering this question with the truth? Had I ever committed adultery—why were they asking this? Well, um, yes… But would I say so on my citizenship application? No, of course not. I wrote an op-ed piece about this irony, published for obvious reasons anonymously in the Los Angeles Times: “To Become an American, He Had to Lie”).
When I look about me today, I no longer see the America that welcomed me in 1964. I see a country where lies are accepted by vast numbers of Americans as the unquestioned truth; where rampant social injustice is met with a shrug and a refusal to contemplate reform; where political parties (well, one in particular) seeks to gain advantage by subterfuge and deceit rather than by an appeal to the popular votes; where a loud-mothed, willfully ignorant minority holds sway over the majority of their fellow citizens; where violence simmers constantly not far below the surface and too often breaks out in the form of personal animus in mass shootings or the public hysteria of an attack on the very seat of democracy, the US Capitol.
It pains me to say it, but I feel like a stranger in America today. It does not feel like home. It does not feel like “my country.”
There are times these days when I contemplate a return to the country of my origin. I think of it fondly, but perhaps only with nostalgia. I hold in my heart the memory of small villages, communities where, despite all the gossip and petty animosities, there is a certain cohesion, a feeling of belonging. I hold in my heart, too, the unmatched, verdant beauty of the English countryside, the elegance of ancient trees, the unceasing flow of streams and rivers… All this calls to me across the years and oceans. In many ways—in the words of that old Gilbert and Sullivan ditty from “HMS Pinafore”—“In spite of all temptations/To belong to other Nations/He remains an Englishman.” (Sing it! It’s fun!)
No, I have no geographical affiliations. Borders, to my mind, remain purely artificial, invented by human beings for their own political or tribal purposes. Animals do not respect them, after all, and they are possessed of an intelligence deeper, more rooted in nature, and more mysterious than our own. And yet some part of me still needs a country, a place to call home, so I am coming to define “my country” instead as a country of the heart.
What does this mean? I suppose it means the place where I feel at most home. Not just the physical home where Ellie and I live together, a lovely refuge from the noise and chaos of the world out-there. We are fortunate to have such a place where we are privileged, and comfortable. No, at home is those places where I feel connected, at ease, known, recognized and accepted with love for who I am; places defined by the people who inhabit them rather than by their physical location. I think first and foremost of family, to whom I feel connected even though we are widespread—in England, Iowa, California—and even though we are not connected in the traditional or conventional way, celebrating holidays and festivals together, for example, over family meals. We are disparate, connected by the kinship of shared blood and the love that comes with that. I regret that we do not live closer to each other, as “close-knit” families did in earlier human days. But regret is insufficient to compensate fully for the painful realities of space and time.
I think, too, of other refuges. Last Sunday, after sitting in meditation for an hour with a small group of friends as I have done on Sunday mornings for now a quarter century—though not as often as I would like in recent months—I realized: This is my home! And said as much out loud. And I have other, similar homes. I have the small sitting group I started several years ago at our Los Angeles home; because of the Covid epidemic, we have been meeting mostly for the past two years on Zoom, but I still feel that heart-connection that I’m talking about. In the same way, I have the small support group of artists that Ellie started; there have been many changes along the way, but the core group has been meeting monthly for more than twenty years. Another “home.”
Then, too, I have the group of about ten men of respectable age who meet monthly to share the various experiences of “Conscious Aging.” These are all men who share years of work as participants and leaders in rescuing, first themselves, then countless other men, from lives of toxic masculinity; men who have learned to know and trust their hearts; men who have found their strength in vulnerability and have discovered the source of their power in both fierce and tender manhood. Like my family, we are widely dispersed, but gather on our computer screens and even the short single hour we spend together feels like coming home. I know little, for the most part, about these men’s personal lives, and yet I know them well, and they know me. We sit as of old, as elders, in communion, as though in some digital kiva, where hearts and minds are open and where words are true.
There are wider circles, too, that define “my country.” Friends, spread far and wide and through decades of time. Other men friends, Michael, Scott and Corky, Bill the poet, Gary and Peter, artists, men I never or rarely see. My friend Ben comes to mind; we were friends at school when we were eight or ten years old, at a time when I had few other friends. I have seen him only once since, when we were both already in our 70s. I do not know how to explain the connection that I feel with him; only that is there. As with another friend from those days, another Michael, who lives in Barcelona. There is my friend, Susan, who lives in Sydney, Australia. I was in love with her—she has forgotten!—when I was twenty years old. We have reconnected in recent years; I spoke to her just the other day on a video call. There are other women I have loved, and who loved me; I think I never stop loving someone, even long after not seeing or hearing from her ever again. It’s that same place in the heart: my country. I think of Shel and Linda, 35 years our neighbors. Of men and women who were once my students, long ago, and who became my friends: Jim, Judy, Tom..; And of course there are more recent friends, Mary and Brian, Mary and Stuart, Sharon and Donald, a circle that I know exists, a circle I can feel existing all around me, like a country.
So this is what gives me a place to be in a world in which I feel otherwise so often dis-located, alienated, out of place. My country. A country of the heart. A heart-land. A good place to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment