Homage to Walter Wilczewski

1.

After many years, I was again in Paris, this time in the good company of my wife, Nirmala.  Our four day bike tour in Burgundy was cut short when Nirmala was hit by a car.  We had to stay an extra week in Beaune, a quaint little town south of Dijon, due to Nirmala’s injuries.  Three broken ribs, a mild concussion, a fractured scapula and a leg wound were bad enough; it was the pneumothorax, however, that kept us in France.  It is medically contraindicated to board a plane with a pneumothorax, since the negative pressure during the plane’s ascent could make the pocket of air in the thorax expand. 

The subsequent X-ray a week later indicated that the pneumothorax had resolved.  We lost no time; we traveled to Paris the next day.  Our new flight was to depart in three days, so, poor us, we were forced to spend three days in the City of Light.  Nirmala’s arm was in a sling; the leg wound was starting to respond to antibiotics; she had some mild to moderate pain, but other that that she was willing and able to walk around Paris with me for about six hours a day.

Nirmla and I stayed at the Best Western Kapital Opéra, in the eighth arrondissement, not too far from that famous building where I saw a performance of Carmen many, many years ago.  After arriving in Paris from Dijon on the TGV, the fast-speed train, and after having lunch at the Gare de Lyon, we checked into our hotel and were ready for a walk.  Oh, it was so good to be in Paris again!  After about an hour, I noticed the classical portico of La Madeleine in the distance. I told Nirmala we just had to go there.

It is an impressive structure.  The neoclassical building contains fifty-one Corinthian columns, each 20 meters high, which surround all four sides.  It was based on the Maison Carrée of Nîmes, one of the best preserved of all Roman temples; we had seen it during a bike trip to Southern France two decades earlier. Originally begun as a church, Napoleon had it reconstructed in the classical style as a temple to la gloire de l’armée.  Well, that glory was short-lived; the building was rededicated as a church after Napoleon’s fall; it has remained a parish church ever since.

Nirmala thought sure that the church was closed, since its west façade appeared to be deserted.  I persisted.  We found an entrance, walked up the Freitreppe, and came to the level of the church itself.  We passed a group of young men gambling; they appeared to have roots in the Maghreb  They were sitting on the ground around a sheet on which the card game was taking place. (I wonder what Napoleon would have thought of that.) One of the gamblers gave us a quick smile. I had the feeling he was pleased to see a mixed-race couple pass by.

We hesitated to walk along the perimeter wall in order to get to the main entrance. A group of Japanese photographers was taking pictures of a “bride”, who obviously was not a bride, but a model whose photo was most likely destined for a fashion magazine.We waited for the picture to be taken, then proceeded.  We eventually entered a church that doesn’t look like a church at all.

I suddenly realized why I had felt compelled to visit—I met Walter there, a childhood friend from Jersey City.  The year was 1968.

Walter wanted to visit me in Paris, where I had been staying for the preceding week.  He agreed to come straight from the airport and meet me at La Madeleine. (A ridiculous place to meet! Why didn’t we agree to meet at my hotel?  I don’t know).

I waited several hours before he came.  There were no cell phones or computers in those days.  Patient waiting was much more common then than it is now.

My patience had been fraying for some time before he arrived.  I remember commenting on the garish alter, on which Madeleine with outstretched arms is flanked by two angels that appear to be wrestling. The nineteenth century statue was sculpted by Charles Marochetti; it supposedly depicts an ecstatic vision of the saint during daily prayer.

As memories came back to me, I felt overwhelmed by the passage of time.  We were in our early twenties then; I am in my early seventies now, while Walter has been dead for the past forty years, considerably longer than the time allotted to him on earth.

While Nirmala and I sat before the altar, we noticed a man placing a drum to the right of us.  I asked him whether a concert was being planned.  Yes, he told me, there would be a performance of Mozart’s Requiem at 8 P.M., and tickets would go on sale in ten minutes.

Chopin’s funeral took place in this church on October 30, 1849.  One of Chopin’s last requests was that a performance of  Mozart’s Requiem be included in the ceremony.  Chopin hadn’t realized it, but this posed a problem, since at that time women were not allowed to sing in church. (Mulier taceat in ecclesia—Women should remain silent in church.)  There is no way to delete female voices from the Requiem—think of the haunting melody for altos as they sing “Ad te omnis caro veniet”, ("to You all flesh must come"). A special dispensation was granted for the funeral with the stipulation that the female singers remain hidden behind a curtain.  Times have changed, thank God!

I thought of unforgettable Chopin and my friend Walter, who is remembered today as much as a spectacular yellow leaf is, having fallen off a maple in October many years ago. I am glad Nirmala and I were very tired and decided not to attend the concert  I don’t think I could have got beyond the orchestral introduction without sobbing, perhaps uncontrollably. 

We sat for a few minutes longer, as I stared up into the dome, thinking about my friend Walter and all the relatives, friends, acquaintances and strangers who have passed away during the past fifty years. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.  I remember feeling intense sorrow.  As we were leaving the church, however, I experienced a sudden rush of joy and consolation—Why?

2.

Walter Wilczewski was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on January 6, 1946.  He was the fourth of five children of Polish immigrants, each of whom had a thick accent.  I watched his father many times returning from the local bar with a white pail full of beer.  I can still see the beer sloshing about as he walked.

Walter had it rough.  An example: we were sitting in the back of a car; his father was driving.  There were no seat belts in those days; we knelt on the back seat facing the rear window, watching the world whiz by.  I suppose we had been talking about where babies came from, I don't remember.  Walter turned to his father and asked, “Daddy, what makes a lady have a baby?”  Without a word, his father stopped the car, turned around and gave his son a powerful slap on the face.  Not a word from him as he started the car again, while his son wailed.  We were about eight years old.

I was astonished.  I had it rough as well, but not that rough.  (Well, maybe I did.  Several years later, my mother, having received a telephone call from a bartender, asked me to bring my intoxicated father home.  The bar was barely a block away.  As I guided my staggering parent home, I noticed that many neighbors were watching.  My father suddenly broke free, and, without a word, gave me a hard slap on the face.  The sting of humiliation was worse than the pain from the slap.)

I can still see the joyful expression on Walter’s face, when, years later, he informed me that his father had just died.

Walter had a very low opinion of himself, not uncommon among those raised in poor, dysfunctional families.  In 1963, just after graduating from high school, I  remember the delight in Walter’s voice when he called me on the phone and informed me that he had just been accepted to study at Jersey City State Teachers College.  Walter didn’t expect to be accepted anywhere.

He became a math teacher at Dickinson High School in Jersey City from which we both had graduated.  (It was integrated—sort-of—Every black student was in the vocational program.  We college-preppers had no contact with them).

Walter was a good teacher at first, but by the mid-seventies his teaching abilities as well as the quality of his life began to deteriorate.  By his late twenties, many of his students, with some justification, thought he had gone mad.  I remember him showing me a little figurine of a cartoon character with a cracked skull, which one of the students had given him.  Yes, kids can be cruel, but the gift didn’t appear to bother Walter; he seemed to like it.

At this stage of his life, Walter liked to wander around New York City on the weekends; he was a frequent patron of bars in Greenwich Village.  He began to drink and smoke heavily; he had developed a paunch and looked years older than he was.

I had given him a copy of  The Dekalb Literary Arts Journal, in which one of my first published poems appeared.  Walter was so proud of it!  He apparently showed it to everyone who would listen.  I was with him on one of those occasions.  The man on the bar stool beside him had obviously seen Walter before, and reacted to the praise of his author/friend the same way I imagine a brahmin responds to a beggar in Calcutta.

One evening in the fall of 1973, Walter and I attended a performance of a mass by Haydn, Missa in Angustiis, at a church in Greenwich Village.  As in La Madeleine in 1968, Walter met me there.  Before arriving at the church, he had been roaming around the village, and had had a few drinks.  He looked a bit disheveled. After the concert, Walter wandered off and I returned to my home on Congress Street in Jersey City.

Then Walter disappeared.

All efforts to locate him proved vain until a few weeks later, I discovered that he had been picked up by the police and delivered to the psych ward of St.Vincent's Hospital.  He had no identification on him; he had been beaten and robbed.  He was unable to identify himself.

Later on, he became coherent and revealed his name and address.  He was then transferred to the Jersey City Medical Center, a monstrous complex which the corrupt Mayor Hague built in the 1930s.  An angiogram revealed multiple brain aneurysms, some of which had already burst.  The neurosurgeon informed me that there was nothing they could do.  “I wouldn’t attempt anything on a brain with that many aneurysms,” he told me.  The source of his deterioration had at last been found.

I visited Walter many times in the hospital.  One afternoon I was sitting beside his bed while the TV, looking down on us from its shelf at a corner of the room just below the ceiling, blared the usual nonsense. Suddenly the nonsense was interrupted by a bulletin: Elvis Presley was dead.

During my visits, I watched Walter writhe in discomfort.  He must have had terrible headaches.  The care was inadequate, and I was too passive to do anything about it. The poor man’s head in the poor man’s hospital continued to toss and turn.  Less than a month after Elvis’s demise, Walter was no more.

Nirmala and I had received a gift from Walter on our first anniversary in 1975, a glass bouquet of frangipani.  He died on our anniversary, September 12, two years later. The glass bouquet is the only concrete thing I have left to remind me that I once had a friend named Walter.  The few photos I had of him were destroyed when our basement was flooded by a burst pipe in 2015.

Ad te omnis caro veniet.  Some, unfortunately, a lot sooner than later. I still miss him.

3.

A few years later I composed the following poem, “Homage to Walter Wilczewski”, with which I conclude this tribute:

Your arteries shone like distant stars

in a doomed galaxy.  Remote and

detached as a Hindu god, the doctor

pointed out several bulges of light

against a dark cortical sky.  “Each of

those spots is an aneurysm.  A brain

that has that many lesions puts

surgery out of the question.” Very soon

the suns would burst and become dwarf stars.

The first time I met you, you were

sitting on your little sister,

beating her head on the porch.

After she went wailing in to Mother,

I introduced myself; we became friends.

Two poor working-class outsiders

who despised their alcoholic fathers;

we had much in common.  (Except that

you had more to hate: your mother, often

drunk, was cold as your father was cruel.)

Twenty years later, when another blew,

cops fished you from a New York alley

and dumped you at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Another kid on drugs, they thought;

yet when the tests proved negative

while you stayed wild and combative,

the diagnosis changed from "drugs” to “crazy”.

They sent you to recover on the psych ward;

to my shame, I accepted their verdict

Until an arteriogram was done, weeks later.

The boy who shot clips at his dog

in a sack hung on a clothesline

from the fourth floor; the boy

who told me with a puzzling smile,

“Guess what?  My father died!”

The man who left his mother’s funeral

to wander about in New York was

no misfit, mugger, or murderer;

despite expert predictions,

he had become an excellent teacher,

generous, sober and kind: a star,

till many starbursts later, he died

incoherent on a dirty ward

in the building where he had been born.

Who knows how much hard work it took

for him to become average?

Though forgotten by almost everyone,

in my sky your remain a first-magnitude star,

like Schubert, dead at thirty-one,

Walter Wilczewski, my friend.

How To Remove Ad Hominem Fury from Politics

In October, 1973 my wife and I were in Venice for a few days.  (We had met in New York during our first year of pediatric residency, 1972, and would be married in 1974).  Arriving at the hotel with a sense of awe after marveling at Titian's Assumption of Mary at the Basilica di Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, our mood soon changed from delight to disgust.  The world of thorns and stingers had returned.  We had turned on the TV and learned from the BBC that Nixon had just fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor in the Watergate investigations.  It felt as if the train of everyday politics, which is noisy enough, had derailed with a deafening screech before my mind's eye.

The mood of the country, however, was one darkened by shock and disappointment, rather than by implacable fury.  Yes, many of us were still angry at the wanton destruction of the war in Vietnam, but in this instance the bloodied hands belonged to Democrats as well as to Republicans.  Very few thought that Nixon and his entourage as persons were filthy and feculent, like fleas on rats that had to go lest we all come down with the plague. That was a long time ago.

Let us fast forward forty-two years.  It is the summer of 2015; Nirmala and I were again on vacation, this time on a river cruise on the Rhine and Danube rivers. At the information desk onboard, a sweet, young German girl was ready to answer any questions we might have.  I don’t remember the question I never asked; I do recall being on line behind a burly fellow with white hair.  He informed the young lady that he was an engineer from Tennessee.  He then begin to excoriate President Obama.  To him, the President was nothing more than a piece of black trash which needed to be picked up with gloves, crumpled up and tossed into the garbage.  Those were not his words, but they accurately describe his fury; he was seething with hate for a man, whether you agreed with him or not, was--and is--a decent human being. No sense arguing with him, I thought, as I left the line in disgust.

Things have gotten even worse since then.  The highest percentage in six decades, over 60%, view the policies of the other party to be “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being”. More families than ever, especially among Republicans, would be upset if their child marries a member of the opposite party.  81% of Democrats viewed President Obama favorably, compared to 14% of Republicans—the widest gap in presidential approval in six decades.  What makes matters worse is the genuinely fake news found on social media.  The internet, in addition, is replete with truly vicious comments about anyone one disagrees with. Cyberbullying is, unfortunately, a widespread phenomenon.

It seems to me that voters can be divided into two categories. The first use their frontal lobes to analyze data and come to a decision; the others use their brain stems to snap at the members of the opposition like crocodiles.  The latter are interested only in news that reinforce their prejudices.  Social media provide such news in abundance.

Take the example of Edgar Maddison Welch.  During the 2016 presidential campaign, a conspiracy theory that had gone viral asserted that e-mail leaks from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager at the time, contained code words that revealed that Democrats were involved in sex slavery. 

For instance, Podesta referred in one of his hacked e-mails to “cheese pizza,” which was taken to be a code word for “child pornography”. Several restaurants in Washington D.C. began to be harassed. On 12/14/2016, a young man from North Carolina traveled to Washington D.C. and fired shots into one of the restaurants imagined to be the center of the sex-slavery ring.  He later repented when he discovered that the rumors were false, which indicates that he wasn’t crazy, or perhaps only slightly crazy, to begin with, but had been driven to commit a mad deed by poisonous disinformation on social media.

If you think that hate-speech and political violence—recall the difference between Trump’s and Clinton’s rallies, for instance--are more prevalent on the Republican side, you are basically right.  But not absolutely.  On June 14, 2017, sixty-six year old James T. Hodgkinson, a Republican-hating Bernie Sanders supporter with a history of domestic violence and who had been living in a van, shot and seriously wounded a Republican member of congress and three others, who were at a baseball practice for an upcoming bipartisan game.

What is wrong with us?  Why are we unable to separate the deeds, however nefarious and murky, from the pristine, albeit hidden, images of God that perform them?  Why are we at each other’s throats while, even in matters of passionate disagreement, we should almost never refuse to shake hands?  How do we contain the fire that threatens to consume us?

2.

I have a solution, a solution of sorts.  It’s not that it won’t work—it would; the problem is that few people will follow my advice, especially those who need it most.

It is an adaption of a Buddhist meditation.  Buddhism has a very dim view of anger.  A legend relates that once a misguided person hurled insults at the Buddha.  He remained unfazed.  'How can you listen to that and remain calm?' a disciple asked.  Buddha replied that insults are like garbage in a pail; one can set it down before you, but you don’t have to pick it up.

Research shows that meditation is an effective way to rewire the brain for the better.  If what I propose is followed and practiced with sincerity, animosity will be significantly reduced. 

There is  traditional loving kindness or metta meditation in the southern branch of Buddhism called Theravada.  This practice enjoins thinking kindly of oneself; of one’s teacher; of one’s relatives; of one’s friends; of those to whom one is indifferent, and finally, thinking kindly of one’s enemies.  One sits quietly in the half-lotus position on the floor—sitting on a straight-back chair will work as well; one subsequently recites the mantra slowly to oneself, (it takes about four minutes), then repeats it.  This should be done for about twenty minutes.

I am a Democrat, I admit it.  Rush Limbaugh, as one might expect, makes me angry.  An example of what I consider to be hate speech: after Hodgkinson shot the Republican congressman, Limbaugh stated that the would-be assassin was a “mainstream Democrat,” implying that we are all pathological murderers at heart.

The meditation is a way to continue to oppose harmful things a person says or does while maintaining respect for the person as a person. To the former one says, regarding deeds or statements deemed to be harmful, 'No way!'; to the person saying and doing them, one replies with an inner namaste, as it were, thus honoring the godhead in that person. 

What follows is the mantra, adapted from a Buddhist meditation, using Rush Limbaugh as the person to which one directs loving kindness:

May Rush Limbaugh be happy, healthy and peaceful.

May no harm come to him, may no difficulty come to him, may no trouble come to him.

May he always follow his conscience.

May he meet and overcome the inevitable problems, sorrows and failures in life.

That’s it.  Feel free to keep on repeating this, or substitute the name with that of a scurrilous politician or that of an Trump-supporting Obama-hater of your choice.  (Yes, if you’re so inclined, God help you, use the name of a liberal of your choice. I practice the mantra by using the names, in turn, of every cabinet member President Trump has chosen. Yes, I'm reluctant to do it, but I do it. It has significantly increased my serenity, while not diminishing my opposition to issues I consider to be deleterious to the nation and/or to the world).

I advise you to conduct an experiment.  Perform this meditation with sincerity for five to twenty minutes twice daily for a month.  You will be surprised at the results. If this meditation works for you—and it will—pass it on.  Its practice is sorely needed!

Let me know your progress; let me know if you have influenced others to practice this meditation of loving-kindness.  I would be pleased if you would comment on this article; I would be delighted to answer any questions you might have.  Start practicing! Reducing political hostility and incivility begins with you.

Note: you might want to read the following articles on my blog.  Simply google the titles along with my name, Thomas Dorsett:

Ramana Maharshi and the Five Skhandas

Buddhism through Pictures: The Four Noble Truths

Why Meditate?
Ramana Maharshi and the Rabbi
Ramana Marharshi's Near-Death Experiences
Help Self, Help Others: A Reinterpretation of Leviticus 19:18

May they help you help others as well as yourself.