Ithaca from a long ago and right now

Maceo Carrillo Martinet. A name I can’t forget simply because it belongs to the bluest human being I know. I wrote about Maceo a few weeks ago (‘To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows’). It’s been more than 16 years since the rivers down which our respective rafts made of poetry, love and revolution met in an ocean called Albuquerque and six since swam in a blueness of each other’s words.

So I wrote about him and he wrote back to me. It was a song made of cloud-formations and constellations. It took me back to Ithaca, a small town in Upstate New York and a time of community and solidarity.

Maceo remembered ‘the oceans of smoke-filled coffee we drank that kept buoyed the ancient salt of our skins.’ All that, for many reasons, owes to Ayça Çubukçu, now a professor at the London School of Economics and then an undergraduate at Cornell University.

Ayça was un-contained by choice and uncontainable too. One day she emailed a group of close friends, all of whom shared with her a discontent with the way things were in the world. She had been irked by some story published in the ‘Cornell Daily Sun’ and wanted to come out with an alternative publication, ‘Cornell Nightly Moon.’

So we met as suggested at 'Stella's,' a coffee shop on College Avenue. It could not be ‘Cornell,’ we agreed, for we were of the Ithaca community and citizens of a world without boundaries of any kind. We discussed content and who we would be writing for. Someone said ‘we have to accept that some people in this world will remain shoe-makers.’ Others disagreed. And so we celebrated the un-celebrated, recognized the importance of labor, noted the extraction of value as profit, the lack of resources to publish a newspaper on a daily basis, decided on a monthly publication and called it ‘The Cobbler,’ with Stella's as its virtual editorial office.   

For Maceo, as it was for me, what Ayça helped create ‘was a space and time that surrendered [him] to the thirst of people-power, its unquenchable songs of truth [he still hears] in the smallest and largest of shadows, like those of a hummingbirds heartbeat or the side of the moon that she never reveals to her daughter.’

And so he misses, as I do too,  the ways in which ‘our fingerprints smudged ink, how trees opened their chest, how words realized for the first time they can walk, how shoes realized they are pieces of art instead of the subservient limbs, how the lakes of Upstate New York became long, icy nails that made us protect the warmth within.’

‘The Cobbler’ was launched at the turn of the millennium. Cornell students wouldn’t know. Some of the older professors or rather the more radical of the older professors would. The activist community of Ithaca, especially those associated with the ‘Ithaca Catholic Worker’ would remember.

Paul Glover, who founded an alternative currency ‘Ithaca Hours’ that has since been replicated in dozens of communities all over the USA, once observed, ‘I’ve seen lots of student activists over several decades, but no one left anything behind in Ithaca — “The Cobbler” is an exception,’ or words to that effect. 

The Ithaca of ‘The Cobbler’ is not the home of Odysseus. The Ithaca described by Maceo is a separate state of being that can be found on any map. For example, open an atlas to a random page, close your eyes and let your fingertip pick a spot. That’s Ithaca, for wherever you may be or go there will be people who surrender space and time to the thirst of people-power, sing unquenchable songs of truth in the smallest and largest of shadows. And shoes, clothes, caps and flags recover agency, shed all illusions of being appendages, seek and find compatible hearts that will storm barricades or simply fly over them.

How do friends separated by continents, united by companionship of blueness begin to ‘catch up’ after six years or six centuries? Maceo had an answer:

‘I suspect the beginning is somewhere in the middle, next to water and dry land, where the  theories that seek to represent the world through or between one set of eyes, are not only discredited, but replaced with something better. The honeybee nor its honey, the water nor its clouds, the ant nor its colony, the coffee bean nor its leaves, see the world the same, let alone compared to human senses. Heck, even each of my eyes don’t see the world the same way, one is perpetually red in the corners, and the other has something going on with its cones and rods.’

Maceo sent me ‘the soft warm hugs of desert-dried wind, the sweet smell of brand new earth made from yesterday's wastes, and the wet-blue smile of the oceans.’ And in the release of words and the release obtained in the releasing of words we rediscover the magic of other places and times in the here and now. In that way we reconnect, renew and reimagine the world with the primordial strength of a hummingbird.
In the Ithacas we find ourselves in. 

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below] 

 

Other articles in this series:

Lessons written in invisible ink

The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'

A tea-maker story seldom told

On academic activism

The interchangeability of light and darkness

Back to TRADITIONAL rice

Sisterhood: moments, just moments

Chess is my life and perhaps your too

Reflections on ownership and belonging

The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha

Signatures in the seasons of love

To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows

Sirith, like pirith, persist

Fragrances that will not be bottled 

Colours and textures of living heritage

Countries of the past, present and future

A degree in creative excuses

Books launched and not-yet-launched

The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains

The ways of the lotus

Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace

The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville

Live and tell the tale as you will

Between struggle and cooperation

Of love and other intangibles

Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions

The universe of smallness

Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers

Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills

Serendipitous amber rules the world

Continents of the heart The allegory of the slow road

 

 

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Farewell, beautiful people!

It was I believe in January 2000.  I received an email from a friend, copied to others including some close friends.  Ayça Çubukçu, then an undergraduate at Cornell University, addressed the recipients as ‘Beautiful People’.  She wrote in indignation and with hope.  The cause of her agitation was a mischievous news report in the campus newspaper, ‘Cornell Daily Sun’.  I can’t remember what it was about, but there was blatant and utterly unacceptable misrepresentation.  Ayça had a proposal.  She wanted us to help her start a newspaper. It was to be called, she suggested, ‘The Cornell Nightly Moon’. 

We met at a café in Collegetown, Ithaca, called ‘Stella’s’.   If it was to be in opposition then it should be ‘Ithaca Nightly Moon,’ someone pointed, referring to the political economy that frames town space and the university.  Someone observed that we just didn’t have the resources to produce a newspaper on a daily basis.  A monthly, then, someone suggested and all agreed.  We moved quickly to content, leaving name to be decided later. 

We talked of target audience.  Someone said ‘we have to accept the fact that some people in this world are destined to be shoe-makers’.   That led to a lively discussion on the worth of shoes and shoe-makers, and of course the relevant under-valuation and exploitation.  The entire political economy of global capitalism was laid out thick and in detail then and there.  The majority sided with the shoe-maker.  This gave a name for the paper.

‘The Cobbler’ was a popular monthly newspaper solely dependent on contributions and a few advertisements from friendly and politically conscious small businesses in the town.  I left Ithaca after the 4^th issue came out and the paper ran for several months longer.   There were arguments, disagreements, tantrums, walk-outs and embraces.  There was photography and poetry, serious pieces and things to laugh about.  ‘The Cobbler’ made the ‘left’ campus paper, ‘The Progressive’ more progressive.  It had space for everyone who gets left out or needed space to say things there was nowhere to articulate.  There was nothing ‘beautiful’ about ‘The Beautiful People’ except perhaps that they kept doors open, knew how to laugh and were not ashamed to cry.  We covered issues, local and global. 

I remember a day in early June 2000, just before I left Ithaca.   Ayça and I were attending the memorial service of Jean Finley, a long-time and indefatigable activist who produced hundreds of shows for the local cable station, even though chronic kidney disease had condemned her to a wheelchair.  She went about in this wheelchair, attending protests, distributing leaflets and keeping people cheerful.  Ayça and I had talked about dedicating the next issue of ‘The Cobbler’ to Jean.  I received a copy in the post.  It had Jean’s portrait as cover with a simple headline: ‘For Jean’.  That day, at the memorial service, a young man came on stage to speak a few words. He said he needed someone to hold his hand.  The young man was in a wheelchair.  I only remember one thing he said: ‘Jean made it ok for people like me’.  And he wept. 

‘The Cobbler’ was about people like that.  I remember the beautiful people.  Ayça, Maceo, Michael, Balam, Mutaamba, Carson and Molly.  Chad, Raj, Dia, Lehlohonolo, Andrea, Mecke, Gerard, Joaquin,  Andrew and Aaron came on board at different times and with varying intensities.  Katie and Neil Golder, Paul Glover, the extended Grady family and many other good people in that quaint and spirited township helped with word and in deed.     

I remember all these beautiful people today. They’ve all moved on to different planets where I am sure they make flowers bloom on barren ground simply because they choose to walk, even as their feet bleed.  I remember them today because that was my first close association with a newspaper.  Back then I was a doctoral student. I duly dropped out and came home. I wandered into newspapers courtesy an invitation from the Editor of the Sunday Island, Manik de Silva to whom I owe much. 

I remember all these people because they helped create in my mind a sense of what making a newspaper is all about.  It takes a lot of people, and a lot of heart.  It takes people, let me repeat, and not all of them are journalists.  I got to know more when I joined the Sunday Island.  The typesetters, proofreaders, subeditors, tea-boys, drivers and others also count. 

It’s different perhaps for a freelancer, for we are non-contact or less-contact contributors.   Today, writing these lines for what will be my last ‘Morning Inspection’, I remember the Chairman, the editors who gave me space, the subeditors who cleaned my copy, the illustrators and others who picked appropriate photographs to decorate the particular article, my dear friend Errol Alphonso, alas no more, who crafted my copy (which I seldom went over) and others whose names and designations I will never know.  I remember the beautiful people relevant to ‘The Morning Inspection’, the readers and those whose lives I wrote about.

And I remember the beautiful people my friend Ayça sent that email to, more than a decade ago.  It is all about heart, they taught me, especially Ayça, and heart is never imprisoned, not by newspaper, policy frame, word limit, tragedy or triumph.  That’s a thought that brought me to newspapers and it is with that thought that I leave, two years and over 500 articles later.  Farewell, all.

[Courtesy, Daily News, October 15, 2011] 

www.malindawords.blogspot.com (msenevira@gmail.com)

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