Civility

…and my life is still, trying to get up that great big hill, of hope, for a destination. I realized quickly when I knew I should, that the world was made up of this brotherhood, of man…And so I wake in the morning and I step outside, and I take a deep breath and I get real high, and I scream at the top of my lungs, “What’s going on?” –Linda Perry, 4 Non Blondes, song “What’s Up?”, 1993

Recently, I made an overnight trip to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to visit my “artist buddy” Jane Filer. Several years ago, I wrote a biographical story about her life and her paintings after we met in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Read: Being Jane Filer Two of her pieces are in our living room, “Eclipse” and “Elephant Journey”, both of them highlighted in the article.

jane in the garden with headless hat woman

The premise of traveling to her home was a painting I noticed and kept returning to on her website janefiler.com under “Available Work”. It was entitled “Above the Bridge”. I finally called Jane and said I was really drawn to this one but needed to see the painting in person to know how it made me feel. She agreed, and we set a date.

It was two years since we had last seen each other, but we fell into conversation easily, as friends generally do. I noticed the changes in her home and property since the last time I was there. A large shed had been renovated and turned into a gallery for on-site weekend art shows, there were now two cats in residence, and she started an outdoor project of reconfiguring stone pavers by outlining them with colorful pottery and pieces of glass. I picked up an alabaster egg on a windowsill to admire its smooth shape and beautiful translucency in my hand. She insisted that I take it home.

When we went into the studio to view the painting, Jane showed me a recently finished piece entitled “Congregation”. It was colorful and typical of her “primal modern” style which emanates from her dreaming-while-awake imagination. Then she moved “Above the Bridge” to the easel for my viewing. And I just knew. This was going to be my painting.

The question is why? What resonated? Like so much of Jane’s art, there are layers upon layers to see and feel and think about. Then you bring your own meaning to it. The details I first noticed were two small black figures “under the bridge”. One is swimming strongly onward; the other is rising to the surface with one arm extended straight upward.

Musing about these small figures under the bridge with the larger world painted above the bridge struck me as symbolic and meaningful. Right now. These are actions to aim for; onward and upward. For anyone, for everyone.

the rest of the world above and below the bridge

In the current American climate, where everything is moving in the direction of political dismantling and destruction, many people want, and need, to find what can be done now, while also moving toward the future. Then I thought; these are the same movements–the actions we take in the present are what we will continue to do in the future.

Poets, artists, and writers are often sources of inspiration about what is needed in trying times. Art cuts deep to the marrow of reminding us how to refocus and get moving in stressful times, whether personal, cultural, political, or global.

Almost every generation of Americans for the past 250 years has encountered and eventually survived some kind of catastrophic period; revolution followed by war, destructive civil war, two world wars, years of severe economic depression, McCarthyism, a decade of political assassinations and riots, the unpopular 10-year Vietnamese war, murderous terrorist attacks, devastating viral pandemics. Just as it seems that so much changes within generations; history teaches that great things can, and do, persist after turmoil.

We all have a part in shifting the story. –Joy Harjo, 23^rd U.S. Poet Laureate

Inside the head spinning turn of extreme change our democracy is currently undergoing, what part, as Harjo suggests, can we play in shifting the story?

It’s really the same part we play throughout life. First, we learn, we adapt, and we move forward with what we can control. Adaptive change often means taking on complex challenges that seem impossible in the beginning. Staying immobilized doesn’t help the situation. You have to try. Like the feeling a piece of art instills, we bring the meaning and sense to what can change and what we can change.

I read a story about a woman, Maureen Morris, who opened a coffee shop called Back Street Brews in a small, politically polarized Virginia town several years ago. During a time of stridently vocal opposing sides, she pushed the notion of a gentler America inside her café. Everyone was welcome to openly discuss their views, but there would be no attacking or judging. “If it comes up, as long as it’s respectful, you can talk about whatever your beliefs are…If you are a staunch this or staunch that, I always say, keep that out of here.”

Customers began asking about each other’s family or simply shooting the breeze over coffee. Discussion groups of varying topics began showing up. Maureen’s café became known as a quiet force of civility while crossing the political divide inside a public space. Neighborly ways, respect, and social ties persist.

Ordinary people created a community where they listen and speak to each other without shouting. All due to one woman’s insistence that, amid the divisiveness of an era, she would lead from the strength of her beliefs. “It’s affecting people. Not me. Not in my bubble. We’re going to be fine, everyone! We’re going to land on our feet in my coffee bubble.”

This is how an individual shifts the story. By accomplishing small things that perhaps no one notices in the big picture but has real impact on people’s lives. Everyday lives. We nurture and nourish everyone in our circle of family, acquaintances, friends. We take care of ourselves. We stay true to our values.

Because there is a remnant of change that begins with one act of kindness, one spoken truth, one considerate conversation, one shared laugh, one poem, painting, or story. These are ways to move the narrative.

A brief scene in the old Hollywood movie, Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman offers another example of one person’s action to restore balance.

During a busy evening in Rick’s American Café, a casino and piano bar in Casablanca, there is a scuffle when the thief Ugarte is discovered by authorities. After Rick refuses to hide him, Ugarte is hustled out in a loud commotion surrounded by police. The music stops and customers sit mutely, in stunned silence.

Afterward, Rick (Bogart) apologizes for the uproar, reassures everyone that the trouble is over, everything is all right, and they should continue having a good time. He speaks calmly to the crowd, tells Sam to resume playing, and without breaking stride re-rights an overturned wine glass on a table.

…the saloonkeeper’s cool response to Ugarte’s arrest and his instruction for the band to play on could suggest a certain indifference to the fates of men. But in setting upright that cocktail glass in the aftermath of the commotion, didn’t he also exhibit an essential faith that by the smallest of one’s actions, one can restore some sense of order to the world? –Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

As we find our part in “restoring some sense of order”, we also climb “that great big hill of hope”. And make it a destination.

Poems and songs are written to get our minds thinking…in an unexpected way.

TROUGH

There is a trough in waves,
a low spot
where horizon disappears
and only sky
and water are our company.

And there we lose our way
unless
we rest, knowing the wave will bring us
to its crest again.

There we may drown
if we let fear
hold us with in its grip and shake us
side to side,
and leave us flailing, torn, disoriented.

But if we rest there
in the trough,
in silence,
being with
the low part of the wave,
keeping our energy and 
noticing the shape of things,
the flow,
then time alone
will bring us to another
place
where we can see 
horizon, see the land again,
regain our sense
of where
we are,
and where we need to swim.  

–Judy Brown

...Come dance with the west wind and touch on the mountaintops
Sail o'er the canyons and up to the stars
And reach for the heavens and hope for the future
And all that we can be and not what we are...

–John Denver, song The Eagle and the Hawk, 1971

Fun Final Photo Shoot:

The essential moral skill is being considerate to others in the complexity of everyday life. Morality is about how we interact with each other minute by minute. The wise person’s essential gift is tender receptivity. –Iris Murdoch, British writer and philosopher

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. –James Madison, American stateman, Founding Father, fourth President of the United States

In the current state of incivility between nations, religions, politics, and sometimes within family lines, when the argument of “us vs. them” feels overwhelming, I think about Count Alexander Rostov, the protagonist in Amor Towles’ best-selling novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. The story begins during the years after the first Russian Revolution, the assassination of the last Czar and his family, and World War 1. The Bolsheviks are firmly in power.

Count Rostov, born an aristocrat, was tried in a Bolshevik tribunal court in 1922 when he was 32-years-old. He was found guilty of being a gentleman of leisure and privilege and of allegedly writing a poem nine years earlier now deemed anti-revolutionary. He was sentenced to turn over his wealth, his personal property, and the luxurious suite where he resided in the Metropol Hotel, near the Kremlin, in Moscow’s Theater Square. Forcibly relocated to one tiny room, a former servant’s quarters in the hotel attic, the final provision was that he would be shot on site if caught outside the hotel premises. House arrest for life.

Rostov settled into meager quarters with few of his inherited possessions. He found the space depressingly confining, hitting his head on the sloping eaves, squeezing his tall body between his father’s large Louis XVI desk and the bed on creaking springs. To ease the cramped conditions, he secretly knocked out the back wall of the built-in wardrobe which connected to another tiny room. He made this into a study, furnished with a bookcase, lamp, two chairs, and his grandmother’s coffee table retrieved from storage, thus doubling his livable space. He remained there for the next 32 years.

Early adjustments were difficult. Rostov’s daily routines were confined to the hotel lobby, barber shop, tailor shop, two restaurants–the formal Boyarsky on the second floor and the less formal Piazza on the ground floor, a bar, and his own 6^th floor digs. In the fourth year of confinement, he contemplated suicide by climbing to the hotel roof at midnight one night in order to throw himself off, but was stopped by an unexpected conversation with a hotel caretaker he had previously befriended.

the ground floor restaurant which the Count referred to as the Piazza

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. –Viktor Frankl, Auschwitz survivor

But freedom of will has been a well-established tenet of moral philosophy since the time of the Greeks. –Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Rostov made a decisive shift in order to survive the next three decades of house exile. Instead of succumbing to bitterness with the loss of money, social position and possessions, he chose free will, his own intelligence, and the resilience of the human spirit to move forward, and live.

He took a job as the head waiter in the formal Boyarsky restaurant because, as a gentleman, he knew good food and wine and how to serve both properly. He forged deep, sustainable relationships with the hotel staff–first as a live-in guest, then as a colleague, confidante, and finally as a friend. He conversed at length with international guests, had a longterm romantic relationship with a Russian actress in frequent residence, befriended a child who lived in the Metropol and showed him hidden spaces with her master key. Later, she returned as a young woman and abandoned her five-year-old daughter, Sophia, to Rostov’s care. He shared his limited space, raised the girl to young adulthood, and learned paternal love. He tutored a Party Member, formerly an officer of the Red Army, who was partially responsible for his fate. For many years they met monthly for dinner and conversation about being a gentleman, learning to speak French and English, understanding the ways of western culture by watching American movies.

Rostov accomplished all of this by treating everyone with equal parts civility, respect, and kindness. He observed human nature by foregoing judgement. Interacting with individuals from every station and age in life with the same courteous manner, the Count matured in self-awareness, humility, and understanding.

Alexander Rostov’s story, before and after exile, is rich in complexity and detail during a turbulent political time in Russian history. A well-crafted, but nail-biting escape awaits in the end. Yet the heart of Rostov’s life under house arrest is that civility, or courtesy, has nothing to do with one’s social class, clothing, or bank balance. Rather, civility is a moral choice, and along with graciousness is the kind of practice that never goes out of style. Count Rostov is one of the most endearing literary examples.

The Count took pride in wearing a well-tailored jacket, but he took greater pride in knowing that a gentleman’s presence was best announced by his bearing, his remarks and his manner. Not by the cut of his coat. –Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow

Rostov’s gentlemanly qualities, the humanity, love, and respect he gained in return, illustrates that there are high rewards when civility prevails. As individuals, we can’t fix the world’s overwhelming problems of wars between nations, historic hatred between factions, partisan divides. Still, bridging the gap from Rostov’s choices to the philosophy of Joseph Campbell which says there is something we can control.

When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. –Joseph Campbell, mythologist, writer, lecturer [1904-1987]

In 1595, French Jesuits composed 110 Rules of Civility. George Washington is known to have copied them into his school notebook by the time he was 16 years old, more than two centuries later. He titled them, “The Young George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation”, and they were formative in the development of his character. A system of courtesy and respectful behavior appropriate in the company of individuals was later expanded to a nation when he became President. A man of that time wrote this about Washington, “…no wonder every body honored him who honored everybody.”

The first and last of 110 Rules of Civility:

Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present.

110. Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.

One final story. When our son, Adam, was four-years-old, we were at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri with 16 extended family members together in a big house for a reunion weekend. Two of his cousins, brothers, then four and six years old, were rolling around on the floor aggressively punching, kicking, and yelling as young boys or puppy dogs are apt to do. Adam, after watching the ruckus on the sidelines, finally approached, and standing directly over them asked, “Can’t we all try to get along now?”

To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order. To put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order. To put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right.

–Confucius [551-479 BC]

Paul to the Corinthians:

For our boast is this; the testimony of our conscience, that we have behaved in the world to be decent.

Books by Amor Towles:

Rules of Civility 2011

A Gentleman in Moscow 2016

The Lincoln Highway 2021

A Taste of Mind

window to a life overseas

Hope as a Destination

Can’t We All Just Get Along

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