Write Down Your Dream

By the wrong measures, my brother Paul was a spectacular failure. On the day he died, he was poor and prematurely losing his teeth. He had a hefty paunch, though he rode a bicycle for daily transportation. His personality was so raw at times that some people couldn’t stand to be around him. Despite this, Paul thought of himself as a motivational speaker, much like the Greg Kinnear character in Little Miss Sunshine only without the endearing wife and family.

Today, he would have a diagnosis on the autism spectrum. He spoke loudly, sometimes shouting for emphasis. He was opinionated and got angry if you didn’t agree. He imposed his will and strange pastimes on others. At our last Thanksgiving together, he backed our entire family into a corner for a strained serenade of a Miguel Bosé song in Spanish. We didn’t know the language or the music and participated for fear of the consequences. At times his discomfiture was epic.

To make money, he was a bellman during the days and worked sleepover jobs in home healthcare. He had a room in a friend’s house. It was small and he was rarely there. When we cleaned it out, the room was a jamble of memorabilia, volumes of paper, and sheets that hadn’t been washed since college. His bachelorhood had gone to seed. 

Paul rode his bike at least twenty miles a day. He made a loop between the hotel and a client’s home, changing from his uniform into sweats and back again. He carried a satchel everywhere and had a peculiar gait that caused his six-foot-four frame to bob up and down. 

You would have recognized him as a teenager. He was tall and lanky, an accomplished runner and cyclist who rarely managed to slow down or relax. He rode El Tour de Tucson, the competitive bike race, sixteen times. He attended every University of Arizona Duel in the Desert football game for twenty-six years. 

He struggled to mature as he grew older. Emotionally, he was a volatile mix of unrequited love and nervous tension.

Paul was college-educated, and when he wasn’t riding his bike or working day and night jobs, he was writing obsessively, organizing weekly time management workshops, and volunteering in his community. He was appreciated among his friends, co-workers, and the people he helped. A month before he died, he took a Thanksgiving basket to a family in need. When his bank account was reconciled, we discovered he had less than $600 and had just spent $150 on the gift.

Paul’s motivational message was divine in its simplicity. What if we all agreed to treat each other better, to keep promises, and to be generous? He spent all of his enormous mental and physical energy trying to convince people that his plan would work. Among his closest friends, he had believers whose lives he managed to touch and change. Paul was a Big Brother to a young man who turned out well. Most of his friendships were lifelong. He kept even modest acquaintances afloat with an impenetrable hope for humanity.

But as a communicator he was pretty awful and his lack of social grace kept him from being accepted among equally high-minded peers. He acquired a graduate degree in counseling through sheer perseverance. After ten years, I suspect the school awarded it just to get rid of him. If anything, Paul was determined.

The reams of paper in his room and the files stored on ancient floppy disks were an obsessive chronicle of Paul’s philosophy. He wrote manuals on time management, printed up postcards that described his principles, and devised sample contracts that were meant to help men and women negotiate their relationships better. None of them were very good writing, technically, and the schemes he created were too formal for most human relationships. To some, Paul’s work looked like an academic and social train wreck. And, it was a lifeline to others. 

Every year Paul made a card for Martin Luther King Day. It was a tradition he created and upheld since the holiday began tumultuously in Arizona in 1983. The card invited you to “Write Down Your Dream,” and Paul provided very simple instructions.

“Write down your dream,” he said. “Something for a primary purpose beyond yourself that you would like to do, contribute towards, or see happen in your lifetime or beyond.” Look for something that truly excites you. Commit to it daily, if possible, but at the very least once a year. Find some way to measure yourself and stick to it. Do it with unconditional love. It’s easy, he cajoled. The first step is just to write it down. Then, he made space on the card to fill it in and provided an address to mail it back.

In the late 80s, Paul went to MLK marches in Tucson and Phoenix. He handed the cards out and invited people to join in the tradition. Though I never accompanied him, I can see him in my mind’s eye. A tall, rambling, white guy circling among the crowd trying to look like he belonged.

Ideologically, he was among friends. Paul’s thinking was deeply influenced by the American civil rights movement. His favorite song was “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” He was infuriated when then-Governor Mecham rescinded the MLK holiday, and later angry with our father for defending him in court. 

Paul spoke Spanish fluently and was embraced by friends in Arizona and Mexico. He felt far more at home in border culture where his unusual behavior was strange for a different reason. I gather he came across as charming to some. He was forever singing in Spanish and trying to engage through Mexican popular culture. He was in love only once, I think, with a beautiful Latina who was delicate and gracious in her longtime friendship with him.

Paul wanted nothing more than to be the Tony Robbins of his dusty Tucson outpost with an aim to pass on his simple assertion that we should care for each other. He handed out the greeting cards with persistence. Over the years he did meet like-minded people who filled in their dreams and sent them back. In an era before Facebook, Paul was the keeper of those hopeful messages. He yearned for and would have prospered in the online environment we have today. 

Paul was killed by a drunk driver while riding his bike home late one night in December 2006. The driver was a young woman who let her fate go careening far beyond her own control, this time fatally into my brother. Her lack of remorse made headlines at the time. I remember thinking that Paul would have immediately begun the hard work of forgiving her. She was one of his flock, in a way, someone he would have wanted to reach. Since his death, I understand more about Paul’s motivations.

His failures have also been instructive. Paul had a great message but a painfully awkward delivery. His strong desire to help others would have been better turned inward at times. Paul was a fiercely protective older brother. Yet in my last email, I pleaded with him to consider why he treated our parents with such disrespect.

Until he died, my deepest fears were rooted in his failures. We are more alike than was comfortable to admit. It was difficult to live with the spectre that his life could be mine. His behavior was a boundary fence for my own sanity. I was ok as long as I wasn’t acting like him. 

When I take full account of his life, it is much easier to accept those characteristics we share. Personally, Paul’s most lasting impact on me has been his approach to sport. He chose to burn through his mental energy rather than be medicated. The bike race every year gave him a goal and made the necessity of his daily commute more meaningful. Now, I cultivate in myself the physical determination that was extra-strength in him. 

The year after his death, our older brother took Paul’s place in El Tour de Tucson. The event is an annual gathering for our family, a chance to remember Paul’s life and cheer on the team that has formed around him. At the roadside pit stops, we hold up signs that say KEEP GOING and end up rallying for everyone who passes. Turns out Paul invented two traditions in his lifetime. 

Working on my own writing, I’ve come to view his effort as a first draft. There was real accomplishment in his work. He was ritualistic in taking notes with a high word count just waiting for the right editor. He tried out his stories on people incessantly. He was also learning to cope with himself in times of pain, doubt, and worry. Paul may have been on his way to something good. At only 46, he needed his lifetime to finesse it.

Peering out the window from my New Zealand writing retreat, I imagined going on a walk together to afford the patience and attention he desired and deserved. The infinite calm of the rolling Wairarapa farmland might have inspired a tone and modulation in his voice. The two horses down the road might have revealed a different trail toward tenderness. Cautiously, I might have taught him how to engage without feeling threatened or needing to be right. I sometimes struggled to listen to him. Now I’m curious what he might have said.

His death prevents that future, except through his memory. I see him in people all over the world and now hold a brotherly love for the socially awkward. He often advises me on those treks through nature. He was right about making space for the differences among us and being clear about relationships. 

The distance between Paul and his own craft may have been more than just time. He had hurdles to overcome, as we all do. But his clearest advice still serves today. If you have a dream, that first tender step is to write it down. 

Johannesburg 3

I’ve been daydreaming about Janet Flanner again. She was an American journalist in Paris writing about art and cultural life in the 1920s, and later a correspondent for the New Yorker who deftly analyzed the European approach to war. Janet was a heady broad who spent her time with other artists and intellectuals like Gertrude Stein, Bryher, H.D., Romaine Brooks, and Colette. Her friends ran the cafes and bookstores on the left bank also frequented by Hemingway, Picasso, and the like.

One of my favorite quotes came from Gertrude Stein during that era. She was probably thinking about war and troubled times, but I suspect it applied just as well to love and the complicated relationships among her group.

“There ain’t no answer. There ain’t going to be any answer. There never has been an answer. That’s the answer.”

My trip to Johannesburg had a touch of that sensibility. Our topics at the conference — the arts in political foment, as a means to greater social cohesion, and as potentially transformative economic solutions — they took on a seriousness in the context of a South African democracy only 15 years old and among delegates for whom ethnic-cultural conflict and economic uncertainty are ongoing sources of violence. A veil of American indifference lifted from me and I found myself in conversations with personal meaning and professional urgency.

During the conference, panelist Iman Auon made a profoundly challenging argument about the role of the arts in the Israeli-Palestinian cultural negotiation. She noticed how an emphasis on cross-cultural partnerships (conciliatory in nature) failed to recognize the great harm experienced by Palestinians, and that other inequities revealed subtle political alignments in how cultural programs were designed and funded. The result, she says, is that Palestinian artists are encouraged to support popular political solutions and perhaps also quietly discouraged from sourcing their work from the most intractable places of the Palestinian experience.

This discussion made for stark contrast with a current debate in the U.S. where a relatively meaningless volley from the overly-righteous Fox News commentator Glen Beck recently cost a green NEA communications director his job. Beck rightfully complained about an ill-conceived conference call in which artists were invited to make work in support of the President’s agenda. Fair criticism, but in doing so Beck ascribed an unreasonable priority to the issue by calling up references to Nazi propagandists. The young buck who made the mistake bears no resemblance to a Nazi (nor does the agency have that kind of power) and the issue has no business on the front page of anything. It was a stupid mistake that is being used as political fodder. Having spent this week around people who served in guerilla armies as teenagers and lost limbs in assassination attempts, the sheer lameness of this exchange is embarrassing in an acutely American way.

It’s an uncomfortable space to occupy. I’m not looking for conflict in my own life, and I’ll take idiotic punditry over actual violence any day. But I did find a little Janet Flanner in myself in Joburg. The world becomes immediately human (that is to say beautiful) when something is at stake. Part of my problem in DC (and with the domestic cultural policy in the U.S.) is that not much rises to the occasion.

It’s not for lack of opportunity, though. I spent the summer touring ten American cities looking for places where the arts are working to great effect — where things seem to resonate with their communities and have both tangible and ineffable outcomes. I now have a desk full of evidence to add to the proof my colleagues have been collecting for decades. The social, educational, and environmental benefits of a vibrant cultural life are unassailable. Further, an attentive focus on diversity is the hallmark of the cultural professions as well as our special contribution to contemporary democracy.

Now that’s a mouthful and it helps to see an example. I’ve never found a better one than the Constitutional Court of South Africa. It’s the brainchild of Albie Sachs, who is both a hero and a friend. See my photo tour to get a sense.

Johannesburg 2

Today is the second day of the World Summit on Arts & Culture in Johannesburg. So far, I’ve heard speakers from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, Spain, Nigeria, Palestine, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Slovenia, Kenya, Singapore, and Germany. It’s been such a delight — not a single American has had the floor.

This is fun for me. I gravitate toward perspectives that are different from my own. I’m voraciously curious and a decent listener. I feel at home among a wide variety of people and a calm center inside diversity. I often feel more like myself there.

Comfort with the other has become the theme of the conference. It was first introduced by Njabulo Ndebele and has been echoed since. The work of cultural understanding, he says, is really about what human beings do when they encounter a person or an experience that they find strange. Do they shy away or ask a question? Do they engage or judge… or both? How do they deal with the feelings of disorientation — the sense that things are suddenly not what they expect or know?

The professor made the distinction that the idea of “strange” may be more helpful than “difference.” The latter tends to become a static category that masks a greater truth. Black people are different from white, for example. True in one way but also deeply false in another. It also tends to give a special pass to the one who is different, as though he or she must be accepted without question. Those moments when bad behavior is awkwardly accepted as culturally different, but ought to be challenged on its integrity.

Ndebele argued that approaching something as “strange” brings both people back into the moment. It returns us to the creative possibility of the encounter and reinforces the basic truth that all of us are strange to those we have not yet come to know. “When you arrive at the place that you don’t know,” said another speaker, “make theatre.”

As I said, it is the role of culture to give the cues. It’s our job to make the other visible, to give priority to the unknown, and to prepare in such a way that there is room to explore whatever one finds — including fear, doubt, and judgement as well as satisfaction and enchantment. Cultural spaces are designed to make this kind of interaction a norm.

It is never ours to control, but the hope is that this exposure strengthens our capacities when the strange appears in truly unexpected ways — on the street, as a loved one evolves, and in our own souls. The invitation, Ndebele says, is to ponder something at the very moment it unsettles us.