On Faith
by Cecilia Woloch

How do people stay true to each other?
When I think of my parents all those years
in the unmade bed of their marriage, not ever
longing for anything else—or: no, they must
have longed; there must have been flickerings,
stray desires, nights she turned from him,
sleepless, and wept, nights he rose silently,
smoked in the dark, nights that nest of breath
and tangled limbs must have seemed
not enough. But it was. Or they just
held on. A gift, perhaps, I've tossed out,
having been always too willing to fly
to the next love, the next and the next, certain
nothing was really mine, certain nothing
would ever last. So faith hits me late, if at all;
faith that this latest love won't end, or ends
in the shapeless sleep of death. But faith is hard.
When he turns his back to me now, I think:
disappear. I think: not what I want. I think
of my mother lying awake in those arms
that could crush her. That could have. Did not.


"On Faith" by Cecilia Woloch, from Late. © BOA Editions, 2003. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

Today is Earth Day. It was first observed in 1970 but its roots go back to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's (books by this author) landmark book exposing the effects of pesticides and other chemical pollution on the environment. Troubled by the lack of attention pollution was receiving on the national stage, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson began going on speaking tours trying to educate people and politicians about environmental issues, and while the public was concerned, the politicians didn't pay much attention.

During the late 1960s Senator Nelson had the idea to harness the energy and methods of the student protests against the Vietnam War to organize a grassroots conservation movement. At a press conference in 1969 he announced plans for a nationwide demonstration to take place the following spring. It was a gamble that paid off, and the public's response was enthusiastic. Gladwin Hill wrote in The New York Times: "Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation's campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam." Twenty million people nationwide participated in the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, and the government finally took notice, forming the Environmental Protection Agency and passing the Clean Air, the Clean Water, and the Endangered Species Acts.

It's the birthday of Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (books by this author), born in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1724. His father was a saddle maker. He studied theology, physics, mathematics, and philosophy at university, and worked for a time as a private tutor; he made very little money but it gave him plenty of time for his own work. He lectured at the University of Königsberg for 15 years, until he was eventually given a tenured position as professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. Though he enjoyed hearing travel stories, he never ventured more than 50 miles from his hometown, believing that travel was not necessary to solve the problems of philosophy.

In his most influential work, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), he argued against Empiricism, which held that the mind was a blank slate to be filled with observations of the physical world, and Rationalism, which held that it was possible to experience the world objectively without the interference of the mind; instead, he synthesized the two schools of thought, added that the conscious mind must process and organize our perceptions, and made a distinction between the natural world as we observe it, and the natural world as it really is. He viewed morality as something that arises from human reason, and maintained that an action's morality is determined not by the outcome of the action, but by the motive behind it. He is also famous for his single moral obligation, the "Categorical Imperative": namely, that we should judge our actions by whether or not we would want everyone else to act the same way.

He wrote, "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe ... the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

It's the birthday of legendary jazz bassist, bandleader, and composer Charles Mingus, sometimes known as "The Angry Man of Jazz," born in Nogales, Arizona, in 1922. Raised in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, his earliest musical influences were the gospel choirs he heard in church, and Duke Ellington on the radio. He was classically trained on the double bass, but found his home in jazz, and in the 1940s toured with Louis Armstrong and Lionel Hampton.

He wrote, "Let my children have music! Let them hear live music. Not noise. My children! You do what you want with your own!"

It's the birthday of poet Louise Glück (books by this author), born in New York City in 1943. She grew up on Long Island, and her father, a Hungarian immigrant, helped invent the X-Acto knife. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and her first book of poems, called Firstborn, was published in 1968. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Triumph of Achilles (1985), the Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Wild Iris (1992), and was named U.S. poet laureate in 2003.

She tends to write poems that operate, as she puts it, "on a vertical axis of transcendence and grief." She has a word of wisdom for young poets: It never gets easier to write. In the Yale Daily News, she said, "The fantasy exists that once certain hurdles have been gotten through, this art turns much simpler, that inspiration never falters, and public opinion is always affirmative, and there's no struggle, there's no torment, there's no sense that the thing you've embarked on is a catastrophe."

The first Oklahoma Land Rush began on this date in 1889.

In the early 1800s white settlers began eyeing the lands of the Cherokee and other tribes for farming and mining. The U.S. government had a dusty tract of land to the west that was uninhabited and not much good for farming so it began relocating the Native Americans to these western lands starting in 1817. The government promised the tribes that the new territory would be theirs "for as long as the stars shall shine and the rivers may flow." But over the next 60 years farming techniques improved and by the 1880s people began pressuring Congress to open up this chunk of land — now known as Indian Territory — to white settlement as well. The government begain exerting pressure on trives to conform to head of household style property ownership of plots of land for farming. Following the Civil War tribes that allied with the confederacy were forced to give up their land, while the Seminole and Creek were perswaded to sell much of their holdings.

On March 3, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison announced the government would make nearly 2 million acres of land available to settlers. Each person could claim 160 acres free of charge, provided he or she was a United States citizen at least 21 years old, and paid the a $14 fee to file the claim. Congress didn't bother to make any provisions for civil governance, figuring the settlers would work that out among themselves.

There was a seven-week gap between the announcement and the actual opening of the territory. Hopeful settlers, called "boomers," scrambled to prepare, and began pitching their tents around the edges of Indian Territory. On April 22 they assembled at dawn, getting ready for the starting cannon which sounded from nearby Fort Reno at noon. The stampede began: fifty to sixty thousand boomers, including several hundred women, sped onto the land. They came in wagons, on horseback, and even on foot. Trains carried some settlers into the territory, but the trains were required to travel at only 15 miles per hour — the speed of the average horse — to keep things fair.

As the would-be settlers streamed onto the land, they discovered that some people had gotten there first, staking claims and in some cases even laying out rough towns. One old man was discovered farming his plot with a team of oxen and the crop of onions he'd planted was already four inches tall. Many of the men were on the land as "legal sooners," authorized to arrive before the opening due to their work as federal marshals or railroad workers. Even though they were forbidden from filing land claims, almost all of them disregarded the prohibition. Lawsuits filed against these "sooners" dragged on for years.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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