El Castillo
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Year-end Letter December 2021
Simply to live does not justify existence, for life is a mere gesture on the surface of the earth, and death a return to that from which we had never been wholly separated; but oh to leave a trace, no matter how faint, of that brief gesture! For someone, some day, may find it beautiful!
Frank O’Hara, Journal, 1948-1949
SPIRIT
Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea
Gregory Corso
The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is;…
Marcel Proust, The Captive (In Search of Lost Time, volume 5)
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the source of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in this most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
Albert Einstein
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho!
Once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme
Séamus Heaney, from The Cure of Troy
A NOTE ON THE QUOTATIONS ABOVE
For a number of years now I have begun my Year-end letter with several quotes I read during the past year that particularly struck me. Since David’s death they have usually been about the nature of love and the impact of losing it. Why, this year, am I including so many quotations? It has to do with the fact that the older I get, the more the wisdom of others reverberates with me and it becomes so special that I want to make it available to my friends. The sense of shared experience amongst all of us intensifies with the passage of time and my life is so enriched by the reflections of others.
One quotation that I am repeating each year since I first used it in my 2019 letter is the excerpt from a Séamus Heaney poem, The Cure of Troy. Why? Because with each passing year I am struck with what a rare thing it is to achieve any true justice in this world, so that in those infrequent instances when it occurs, we must savor it, as a most precious treasure. This has become such a fixture in my mind that I think it bears constant repeating. The comforting statement that in the end justice always triumphs is simply a fantasy, in my opinion.
THE YEAR 2021 AND BOB
I Could Write a Book
Pal Joey, Lorenz Hart
If they ask me, I could write a book
About the way you walk and whisper and look
I could write a preface on how we met
So the world would never forget
And the simple secret of the plot
Is just to tell them that I love you, a lot
Then the world discovers as my book ends
How to make two lovers of friends
While 2021 brought with it many of the same problems and concerns of 2020 – the pandemic, national politics, effects of climate change, I can say that on a personal level it was, miraculously, a wonderful year for me. Knock on wood, despite the reality of some health issues, there was nothing major to worry about.
Most importantly, after 4 years of being on my own, I met a wonderful man, Bob Zimmerman, and in the course of the year, we have become a serious couple. He is as close to perfect as a companion, friend, and lover as I could have ever dreamed of – in fact, I could not have dreamt up someone quite this perfect. Early in the year, we transitioned from regular hiking buddies to lovers – we both had lost husbands to cancer, we both had children, we were both in traditional and same sex marriages previously. In short, we brought a lot of combined life experiences into the relationship.
Bob’s life story has a number of similarities to my own. He was married for 20 years and had two sons, now in their 40’s who themselves have spouses and children. He then came out and eventually entered into a long-term relationship that led to marriage when it became legal. His husband died of cancer in 2020. Like me, he is fascinated by the natural world and other cultures. He was in the Peace Corps for 3 years (Malaysia) and worked for several years in Japan and several years more in Germany (after traveling overland and by sea from Japan to Europe). Returning to the U.S. he was a public high school biology teacher, first in Oxford, Ohio (home of Miami University) and then in Cincinnati. I have every reason to believe he was one of those dedicated, outstanding, inspiring teachers we all hope to have but all too rarely do.
As different as we are in some ways, we share many interests and approaches to how we want to conduct our lives. Both of us love hiking, camping and the outdoors, spontaneous experiences, plants and gardening, cultural activities, and much more. We both have lots of love to give each other and little did I imagine that at this point in my life (my next birthday being 80!) that there was still a grand passion awaiting me. This has been such a remarkable development I remain somewhat breathless and in a state of partial disbelief that anything this wonderful could have happened.
Bob has a large comfortable house, and I have my small, downtown apartment at El Castillo. For the foreseeable future we will continue maintaining our separate residences though we are together, at a minimum, every evening and enjoy the options of a big house and garden and a centrally located pied-a-terre. So we feel no rush to figure out how and when we will eventually combine residences into a single place.
Interestingly, since we both had – and lost – long-term partners, we are able to be open in sharing our past experiences, our deep and abiding feelings, without in any way feeling threatened or undercut in the current relationship we have formed. It is a real blessing that we are free to indulge in the memory of past, deep relationships without holding back and without negatively impacting what we have between us.
I have a person in my life with whom I can share so much that is truly important to me. I feel both loved and lovable, desired and desirable. These sensations are more intense than I have known in my life. I could not ask for more. As a measure of how serious this relationship is, Bob and I plan to be married on his birthday this year, December 24!
DAVID
Finally, this year a major project in my effort to remember David saw completion. A large semi-circular bench dedicated to David’s memory in the new Piñon-Juniper Woodland section of the Santa Fe Botanical Garden was set in the spot I chose for it and the plaques affixed to the bench are in place. The Woodland opened in summer 2021 and I was able to choose la location for the bench that is isolated, quiet, and has a wonderful view of the nearby mountains. It’s a perfect place to commune with David’s spirit and serves, given the lack of an actual one, as a virtual gravesite.
OTHER PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
Each year I continue to work on certain undertakings – this letter, which is a significant investment in time, the wall calendar I create each year based on my photographs (with some travel destination as the theme - for 2022 it being Rapa Nui or Easter Island), maintaining on my Web site what is probably the most comprehensive listing of museums and non-commercial galleries in New York City. I continue giving the occasional travel program at El Castillo.
The Crested Butte Wildflower Festival resumed this year and I was asked back as a wildflower hiking guide – in fact, with one of the guides dropping out, I was asked to come for several additional days to cover some of her events. Both because there were fewer scheduled events this Festival, and attendees were anxious to get out and “do something” every one of my hikes was filled to capacity and it was a very rewarding experience. Sadly, because of climate change Crested Butte, a high elevation destination that usually is cool all summer and has crystal clear air enjoyed neither. Temperatures broke all records and much of the time I was there, the air was terribly hazy due to the wildfires in Oregon and California – just another sign of how quickly our world is deteriorating.
Cultural life has resumed in Santa Fe and as a result I am active again as a volunteer with a number of performing organizations, handling ushering, will call, ticket taking, and even checking patrons’ vaccination status. Everyone rejoices in the return of civic life and for me it is a wonderful way to both contribute my time and get the benefit of some stimulating music and dramatic events.
My small garden in the back of my apartment takes more effort than one might think from late winter until I plant the spring blooming bulbs in the fall and “put it to bed.” But it continues to give me much pleasure and is an indescribably wonderful addition to my quality of life at El Castillo. Many of the perennials and shrubs are settling in and so it is taking on a well-established, comfortable look. A great source of new plants is Bob’s garden where a number of perennials need dividing and in dividing them, I have a free source of new transplants.
I continue to be in training for the Friends of the New Mexico History Museum’s walking tour program, although the actual walking tours, while they have resumed, are intermittent rather than daily, and I have not had enough practice or mentoring to be an independent docent yet.
I am still on the Board of the Friends of Folk Art, the main volunteer organization supporting the Museum of International Folk Art. I am now in my second year as Treasurer, a role I never would have picked for myself, given the opacity which most financial accounting presents to me, but somehow I wound up in this role, which does have its occasional challenges.
Along with the podcasts I previously discovered and still listen to – The NY Times Book Review Podcast, In Our Time, The Daily – I’ve found one more that is totally engaging, The Fall of Civilization. Each lengthy episode is a well told, thoroughly researched story of the rise and decline of some great past civilization, for example, the Assyrians, Byzantium, the Aztecs, the Incas, Easter Island, and so forth. Utterly captivating!
GOOD READS
As public life has opened up and as my relationship with Bob becomes a significant part of my day to day life, the time spent reading has, inevitably gone down. Nevertheless, I continue reading and there were a number of noteworthy books this year.
One to mention was Ninth Street Women Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. This big book not only provided detailed biographies of these five important abstract expressionist painters but re-created the whole heady milieu of the New York art world from the late 40’s to the mid-60’s. It reminds one that despite what he consider the self-satisfied bourgeois complacency of that period, there were a lot of exciting things going on, especially in a place like New York.
A book I had wanted to read for years, but only got around to this year (by buying it in the Library of America series) was Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Though written in the 1960’s it remains every bit as relevant today, particularly as it puts the strain of anti-intellectualism in our contemporary life into a historical perspective, reminding us that what we are experiencing now is nothing new.
I continued with my project to read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one novel in this magnum opus per year – this being my 5th year, I read The Captive (also known as The Prisoner), 500 pages of extended musings on only a few ostensible “events.” What this entire undertaking is about comes down to a few main ideas, in my view. Perhaps most importantly is memory in the human experience. Here is a beautiful quote from the book which I think gets at the idea quite beautifully. The narrator has been at a party and pieces of furniture in the Paris mansion of the hosts bring back a remembrance of another place the hosts lived in 25 years ago:
“… that part which has detached itself from the outer world, to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives a surplus value, in which it is assimilated to its normal substance, transforming itself - houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at the suppers which we recall - into that translucent alabaster of our memories, the colour of which we are incapable of displaying, since we alone see it, which enables us to say truthfully to other people, speaking of things past, that they cannot form any idea of them, that they do not resemble anything that they have seen, while we are unable to think of them ourself without a certain emotion, remembering that it is upon the existence of our thoughts that there depends, for a little time still, their survival, the brilliance of the lamps that have been extinguished and the fragrance of the arbours that will never bloom again.
Incidentally, you will also notice two other characteristics of reading Proust – unimaginably complex word structures fitted into sentences that can go on for half a page or more (within paragraphs that sometimes go for many pages at a stretch!).
THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
This was definitely the year, if it was not crystal clear before, that the climate crisis and its effects burst fully upon us. The events taking place this year, from massive wildfires creating their own inferno weather patterns, unprecedented flooding, record-breaking temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Siberia, Arctic ice melt, rainfall in amounts not seen before, are, I fear, merely a foreshadowing of what is in store for the world. We have not even reached a net global temperature rise of 1.5o C and are on track to reach a 3o C rise by century’s end. I cannot even begin to imagine what the impact will be on humanity and all living creatures, plant and animal.
Even at a directly personal level, I can see significant environmental degradation. One example, already mentioned, was conditions in Crested Butte, Colorado, this summer. On my camping trip this fall to Great Basin National Park, as isolated a location as one can seek, the signs of stress were everywhere. Temperatures were considerably warmer than “normal” for the time of year; the air was hazy from the West Coast wildfires; at least 10% of the trees on the mountain slopes were dead. It’s such a beautiful miraculous, complex world, and we are destroying it! In Santa Fe, the changes in the 30 years I have lived here are very obvious –much warmer winters and increasing, extreme drought.
While it is true that world consciousness of the crisis has grown enormously, the reality is that for all the progress being made to move towards renewable energy, it is not enough. The macro-picture is still dire with emissions continuing to grow, with deforestation accelerating, pollution of the oceans widespread. The Glasgow Conference was a colossal disappointment – for all the proverbial renting and tearing of hair, the human race is still unwilling and unprepared to make the gargantuan changes it will take to avoid the worst. And so it appears we will march into the jaws of disaster, with eyes wide open, and face the inevitable consequences.
It is a sad thing to say but like many of my generation, I feel fortunate that I will not be around when the worst is unleashed upon us. Meanwhile, I find that with every beautiful day, every tree turning brilliant color in the fall, every shoot emerging from the soil in the spring, there is cause for thanks and appreciation such as I have never known it before, uncertain how much longer even these small wonders will remain for us to enjoy.
THE POLITICAL SCENE
This has been, overall, a dispiriting year as I witness our country sinking deeper and deeper into paranoia, anger, and hopelessness. I had some hope that with a new Administration and a Senate and House of the same party, miracles would happen – of course, they have not. Even as I am aware that we have a sane government once again and that corruption and greed do not infect every corner of our official life, nevertheless I see what we have as hanging on by a bare thread and for an all too short time.
I am now convinced that in 2022 the House and Senate will both change hands – I think the probability of this happening a solid 100% - I don’t see the remotest chance of any other outcome. In fact, I predict a Republican sweep greater than that of 1994. And so from that time to end of the Presidential term the Administration will be, at best, a two-year lame duck interregnum, nothing of any consequence will get done and we will sink ever lower into dysfunctionality in basic areas that other advanced countries solved decades ago. I don’t have much hope that in 2024 we won’t have Trump or a Trump lookalike again and if so, I believe that is essentially the end of the American experiment as we have known or thought of it.
Culture wars over manufactured issues like critical race theory, transgender use of bathrooms, attacks on Christianity, parental control, are the red meat that an uninformed population jumps after, and the big issues – inequality, racism, a broken health care system, mass incarceration, child welfare, worker mistreatment, college debt, environmental degradation, climate change, and much more go unaddressed.
I admit to a lack of understanding about my fellow Americans. The Republicans no longer represent a political “party” in the customary sense of the word and they certainly do not represent “conservatism” in any traditional understanding. It is a far right, reactionary cult movement. It has no political program to address long-standing problems in this country – economic, social, political, environmental – unless one wishes to point to cutting taxes on the wealthiest and eliminating virtually all regulations that protect society. They trade in outright lies, far-fetched conspiracy theories, intemperate and violent language, require inflexible adherence to the most insane ravings. They say things about others that cross all boundaries of what was formerly acceptable and they behave in ways most of us would never tolerate in two-year old children. And yet, they are not held accountable, they thrive and win elections and much of the voting population does not penalize them.
The founders warned us of threats to our form of government. If the American citizenry chooses to ignore all the warnings, then the result is the destruction of our system of government. Having grown up during the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, I am struck at the close resemblance of Communist ideologues and the mutterings of those who call themselves Republicans. At times the Communists, at their most extreme, adhered more closely to reality than our right wing Jacobins, aka Republicans.
It is always easier to tear up and attack than to do the hard work of finding intelligent solutions based on solid data. The Republicans have nothing positive to offer, but they are exceptionally adept at manufacturing divisive cultural issues that in our poorly informed society win votes Republicans are masters at rousing the general public and getting it to vote against its interests. Everything is stacked against the liberals and progressives: messaging, voter suppression, gerrymandering, partisan interference with elections, the judicial system.
Exacerbating the extreme breakdown we are witnessing is the role of social media. I can recall at the dawn of the Internet we all had such hopes for how it would be a force for good, that it would knit humanity together. And of course, the Web and its children – Apps – have enabled enormous benefits, but at the same time, it has been a powerful engine for disseminating hatred and disinformation. We all look back with disbelief at what the average person of the Middle Ages accepted as gospel truth and yet, in our time of scientific progress and understanding, huge swaths of the populace are mired in quackery. Ignorance appears all across the spectrum but is particularly destructive when it comes to political discourse and addressing serious national and global problems that recede further and further from resolution.
Because Democrats are still wedded, by and large, to working in the established system, they do not even have the mindset to destroy governance or forego legislative compromise. It is simply not in their DNA to come up with the kind of behavior exemplified by a Mitch McConnell to not even hold hearings on a Supreme Court Obama nominee and then foist one on us weeks before an election “his guy” lost. Of course Democrats try various political maneuvers but within the boundaries of well-established political game playing. Republicans are willing to wreck everything to triumph. And when two opposing groups operate so differently, one with metal clubs and swords and the other with one bare hand and one tied behind its back, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
I have mostly lost hope that our system is functioning as intended by the founders. Were I a lot younger I would likely look around for another country to settle in. I just do not see that the U.S. will ever deal with its real and fundamental problems but instead keeps going down dead-end rabbit holes. Even more troubling than the problems we cannot and will not solve is our deep-seated legacy of injustice, inequality and racism. I want to live in a country where the right to health care is understood, where there is no death penalty and imprisonment is not an extreme form of cruel punishment, where support of families and children is universal and where there are basic worker protections. That country is not, I am afraid, the United States of America.
TRAVEL
Limited travel resumed in 2021, but it was entirely domestic.
I continued my major spring and fall camping trips with my good friend Jerry and these trips were a wonderful liberation from being homebound virtually all of 2020. In April we went to the southwestern corner of New Mexico (the “Boot Heel”) and on into southeastern Arizona, a highlight being Chiricahua National Monument, where we had been before. Our fall camping trip was to the long-deferred destination of Great Basin National Park in far eastern Nevada, often called the most isolated national park in the Lower 48. As part of this trip we also camped and hiked at Cathedral Gorge State Park in eastern Nevada and on the high plateau of southwestern Utah. During this pandemic / post-pandemic period the demand on campgrounds was clearly much higher than pre-pandemic and it is becoming much more difficult to get campsites without prior reservations. Getting reservations is antithetical to my entire concept of camping as I have known it. It considerably reduces one’s flexibility and an important part of camping for me is examining sites and carefully selecting one on the spot.
Bob and I did several short camping trips (3-4 days) within New Mexico – first to the northeast corner of the state (Clayton Lake State Park, the Kiowa Grasslands and Capulin Volcano National Monument) and then to the very beautiful El Morro National Monument in the central western part of the state.
But the biggest adventure by far was an almost 6-week road trip that Bob and I made to visit friends and family of both his and mine – a kind of mutual introduction of each to our respective worlds, as well as a general catch-up after several years of not seeing people we missed.
Given the problems with flying and the lack of rental cars, we hit on the road trip idea with Bob’s SUV as a cost effective way to make many stops. All our personal visits were in the Midwest and the East, so until we got there – and after we left – we camped along the way and explored some interesting places (e.g., Caprock Canyons in Texas, the Tallgrass Prairie in Oklahoma, Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas, the Blue Ridge Parkway and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, to name some of the highlights). We had a fabulous time – both when doing things just together and when spending time with friends and family. In a sense the trip felt like a kind of pre-marital honeymoon, a magical time released from the worries and cares of the world.
AND SO, IN SUM
My apologies that this year-end letter is not an overwhelming example of optimism and cheerfulness, But at the personal level I am deeply grateful that Bob is in my life and offers love, companionship and a considerably more positive outlook than I tend to. It is so good to have his bright optimism to contrast against my tendency to darkness and gloom. Though perhaps hard to believe, day to day, I enjoy my life and take pleasure in the little delights – sunshine, warmth, a good cup of coffee and freshly baked bread! And with that, I close. Yours in the New Year,
Ken