It is Sunday the 29th of June, 2014 and Maine has been suffering through some of the best summer weather ever. Whenever someone mentions something nice, like the weather, around these parts the usual response it, “Yeah, but it won’t last”. Therefore I use the term “suffering”. (I am not a Mainer by the strictest definition. I am the first generation Goodwin born outside of Maine since 1728, or so. I am a Bostonian; Dorchester to be exact. That makes me a “Masshole” to Mainers. So be it. I consider it a badge of honor.)
During my morning routine of drinking enough coffee to jitter-bug I was researching information on structural violence for an upcoming talk. I had the Venice Classic Radio website on the laptop speakers. Playing was a violin concerto that was especially elegant so I glanced at the data on the split screen. The artist was Janine Jansen, a young woman whose name I was not familiar with. One thing led to another, as is usual for us dedicated web surfers. Wikipedia contained a lot of information about her and her career and I found she plays a Stradivarius violin, or “Strad”.
Antonio Stradivari made over a thousand stringed instruments of which four hundred and fifty were violins. He made them during the turn of the 18th century. The best ones were made during the period of 1700 – 1720, the ‘golden period’. In my zeal to self-educate I discovered that the best made violins had a purfling or band of contrasting wood glued to the edge of the instrument. More recent purfling is done with a router to make a groove along the edge of the instrument. It has the same appearance. In some purfling there is an inlay of contrasting material such as mother of pearl or ‘nacre’.
This information gets my mind racing in all directions. There are so many avenues to trace when something as beautiful and complex as this subject splits and divides. The musical skill and beauty of Janine, Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, Antonio Stradivari, and the construction of the “Strad”! These are the moments that make my life so rich and pleasant. This moment at this time consisted of contemplation of these aesthetics and sipping Alonzo’s Double Dark coffee from Coffee by Design as I gaze out my back door letting my eyes rest on the spray of Henry Kelsey roses tumbling over the old garden gate. I am a borderline aesthete; way borderline. It may be more accurate to state this in a temporary sense. We are all capable of assuming roles, no? At any rate what I need to do is procure a bunch of recordings of Janine Jansen playing her Strad, the sooner the better.
Before noon I rushed out the door to drive to Maine State Prison. The Maine chapter of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has been facilitating a monthly series of films relating to cultural and ethnic differences. The series has been a success with the inmates. Rachel Talbot Ross, an educator for NAACP in Portland, Maine came up with this simple and effective program designed to introduce exposure to and discussion of various ethnicities. A film is watched ahead of time by the inmates utilizing the film library available in the prison. Civilian volunteers watch the same film on their own schedule. This Sunday was the scheduled meeting of the inmates and volunteers to discuss issues raised in Nelson Mandela’s autobiography film “The Long Walk to Freedom”. Ten civilians and over thirty inmates took part in the discussion which was held in a multi-purpose class room at the recreation center of the prison. This was my second NAACP group event. The last meeting discussed Muhammad Ali’s refusal to participate in the Viet Nam conflict. Other meetings centered on Irish heritage, the Jewish State, Italian culture. I am pleased to see all the attendees arriving and greeting one another as well as we outside volunteers with such grace and respect. This scene confirms to me the insult that incarceration is to the general population of prisons. The length of sentences and the conditions within the facility are not justified in my book. I am reminded over and over at these events the horrible effects of structural violence in this country. (To learn more about ‘structural violence’ I invite you to search the internet for Johan Galtung.)
The salient feature of Mandela’s success encompassed ‘forgiveness’. His strength was the ability to move beyond the hurt he suffered for over 27 years as an inmate of Robben Island Prison. He was a political prisoner during white supremacy in South Africa. He did nothing wrong. He only worked to protect his race from brutality and, again, structural violence. The forty or so participants in the workshop at this event spent two and a half hours in discussion of forgiveness; both giving and receiving. There were terrific stories told and experiences shared for the afternoon we were there in the class room. I don’t believe I’ve been in the presence of such a group of men and women who could express themselves so succinctly and clearly and with such passion and trust. Another aspect I recognized was the presence of respect during the discussion. In a prison setting one always is keenly aware of respect during discussion, while presenting one’s views especially if one’s views contradict another’s views. The words used are very carefully chosen and presented to recognize the other’s view and to not disparage or disrespect. Respect is a major act in the prison setting. Nearly all of the violence in prisons is a result of an act of disrespect.
The participants struggled for a while in the definition and use of forgiveness. There was a bit of difficulty stating meaning and need of this behavior. I myself was thinking of my own experiences of needing to forgive. The case of my mother’s murder in a triple homicide in 1985 caused so much turmoil and change in the lives of many people. My personal recovery from that event was slow and took many years. The perpetrator was apprehended and incarcerated for 27 years in Massachusetts. The word ‘forgive’ was a tough one to think of and even harder to contemplate acting on. I listened to this group of men in this setting in the class room and my thoughts and feelings filled me with dreadful memories but also feelings and thoughts of empathy for the men.
Over the years, since 1985, I have reflected on and examined behaviors that were violent or beyond the law. My anger and fears surrounding that experience, cleaning up the gore from three murders in my mother’s house (no cleaning service for this situation existed then) and the post traumatic syndrome that resulted focused my life. I spent quite a bit of my life contemplating violence and the causes of violence. I have concluded from seeing acts of revenge, shame, guilt, and other stimuli as well as being both a perpetrator and victim of such acts that we are all capable of performing these acts. My desire for revenge after my mother’s death at the hands of this man now imprisoned in Walpole, Massachusetts lingered for a long, long time. I plotted revenge; method and place. I was determined to do the very same thing in return. My mental state was not good for many years. I sought counseling and I was able to put all of it in perspective with the help of professionals and people with similar experience.
I need to tell a story here. It is a light hearted story so it will accomplish two things. This story will explain and change the mood.
My old friend Paul Rousseau who now lives in Sandbridge, Virginia told me this story while we were on watch together on one of those long underwater patrols in the Mediterranean Sea back in the 60s. Two months underwater with a group of men is a rich experience that I have had multiple times. Paul told me his French Canadian father was such a good trapper he could catch a moose by the left back foot without fail. Of course I needed to know more of what he was talking about. With such a declaration I was certain there was much to learn; little did I know how much that story would change my life in the future.
Paul’s father knew animal behavior so well that he could arrange little cues, branches, stones, sticks and the like along a trail in the woods so that when the moose arrived at a log across the trail he would have to step over it with his hooves in a certain pattern and order. Paul’s father set the moose up with stimuli along the trail ahead of the foot trap in such a way there was no way for the moose to avoid being caught with his left back foot going right down on the springs of the trap. I believed Paul out of respect for his father’s French Canadian heritage. My own grandfather Alphonse Joseph Louis Boivin was from Coaticook, Province of Quebec therefore there was instant respect for any story Paul would tell me about his trapper dad. You’ll notice the repeat of the ‘respect’ theme in this story.
Throughout my life as I lived in male societies; Navy, schools, recovery homes I worked at counseling alkies and druggies I noticed the traps that caught us and how we were set up to step right into them. No one purposefully goes out to become apprehended and incarcerated or restrained somehow as punishment. This is all part of ‘structural violence’ again. I concluded that many of the individuals who were incarcerated were members of that caste who were without income or wealth and who had no access to legal help or people of influence to assist them in avoiding incarceration. Thanks to that moose who couldn’t avoid the foot trap on the far side of the log put in his path I understood the process of unjust laws and other traps.
On Sunday these thoughts swirled around in my head as discussions advanced along the lines of forgiveness and relief of guilt and shame in the class room at Maine State Prison. Ronald Guest, the perpetrator of the triple homicide involving my mother was a small man who suffered intense shame during his life. He was shamed and ridiculed mercilessly. I knew him from my days going to AA meetings in Boston. He was a pitiful little guy. He arrived at my mother’s house at the request of one of the people living there. I can well imagine that he perceived an insult or period of disrespect during those moments. His shame responded as all shame does. Ronald Guest lashed out with no control. He stepped into a huge trap.
The term ‘understood’ stayed with me. As I mulled the use of the word ‘forgive’ it occurred to me that I could understand behavior more easily than I could forgive behavior. Over the years and during the times I spent facilitating men’s groups in prisons and other places I learned that generally speaking, behavior is fairly common and available to all of us. Regardless of consequences there is a common thread; we are human and we are all eligible to behave ‘badly’ regardless of intent. I concluded that I was able to understand behavior and therefore forgiveness was the natural conclusion. To understand is empathetic. Once there is empathy there is acceptance of the behavior. I hasten to state there is no agreement with the behavior, just understanding of how it could happen. That is the conclusion I came up with and when I could I took a turn during the discussion to share those thoughts. The response was positive from the participants and it helped to further the discussion toward some conclusions.
As I am writing this I listen to another violinist and check out who it is. Anne-Sophie Mutter is her name.
This was a good Sunday.
Playing Fair and Being Kind 