Complex Sobon and the Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea

 

I've just begun reading about Menachem Kaiser's first "treasure hunt" in Riese, Silesia.  He has a team of guides and is entering entrance #2:  "The entrance was low enough and narrow enough that to enter you had to lie flat on your back, feet poking in, and drag yourself forward and downward -- immediately there's an incline -- until your feet touch flat ground.  Andrzej went first; he wormed his way in briskly and with dust-raising gusto.  Jason, not a small man rested his Leica on his chest and maneuvered his way in.  Then me, then Janek.

"And we were inside Complex Sobon.  How can I describe it?  In the most immediate, material sense it was as you might imagine.  What I mean to say is that it was extremely tunnel-like: dank, cold, dark, just wide enough to walk in pairs and low enough that I could reach up and touch the ceiling, which was, along with the walls, unsmooth rock; the tunnel was reinforced, unfinished.  A deep mountain cavity.  We walked up a small slope and then down a small slope and then through a puddle that went up to my navel.  Here I had my first shiver of experience of what Andrzej and Janek and Joanna and all the other explorers and treasure hunters were hooked on: there is no way not to feel a real ringing thrill as you're wading through naval-high water inside a hidden tunnel, the weight of the water hugging your waist inside your overalls, the hole of daylight behind you shrinking away."

Back in the days when my friends and I had our first access to a car, Probably when we were fifteen (which would have been about 1948), and it probably belonged to Clifford Pedersen.  His family had more money than did Clifford Duhn's or mine, we drove down to Point Fermin in Palos Verdes, took what little gear we had and went "skin diving."  We didn't do anything that qualified as "free-diving" because we didn't know how.  We made some spear guns but then never managed to spear a fish.  Nevertheless we had fun.  One day we notice what looked like a cave half way up Point Fermin.   We climbed up and crawled inside.  It was just as snug as the entrance Kaiser described.  Once inside we discovered evidence that it had once been a gun emplacement.  During the California "Japanese scare" shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, California readied itself for an invasion.  We had discovered one of California's gun emplacements.  All serious hardware had been removed, but we liked it and decided it would be our "secret fort."  Thus, every time we went skin-diving we visited our fort. 

In 1953 while I was in Korea I received a photo from the two Clifford's.  They had finally learned how to spear fish.  The photo had several fish on a beach towel which they were smilingly behind.  Each Clifford proudly held a spear-gun which was more expensive than any we could afford when I dived with them.   In the letter that accompanied the photo, they wrote that our old "fort" had been buried.  There had been a rock slide from above and the entrance was now completely covered.  We all three reflected on the many times we had been inside, and of course, because it was a "secret," we had never told anyone where it was or when we would be in it.

During my thirteen months in Korea I spent three of them on Jeju Island where there was a small Marine Corps early warning station.  Jeju Island is where the famous Korean women divers would dive for sea-weed delicacies abalone and small fish.  I had hoped to do some serious diving for fish while I was there.  I did do some modest diving, but inasmuch as I had no gear it was nothing like what those women did.

The women I saw when I was there free-dove in just swimming suits.  Being in a nostalgic mood, I just checked Youtube and see that there are still women diving off Jeju Island, but they now have proper swimming gear, just as the two Cliffords did in the photo they sent me.  There is a Jeju-island lady touting the book she published (in 2013):  The Youtube video is called The Women Divers of Jeju Island.  Brenda Paik Sunoo spends an hour talking about it.  Her book is entitled Moon Tides: Jeju Island Grannies of the Sea.  Some of these women are in their 80s. 

I have wondered how I would be doing if I stayed closer to the sea and hadn't been knocked down any stairs.  Would I still be diving?  My lungs are still good.  I think I might still be able to do it.  But much of the water I dived in had become a bit toxic.  Maybe if I'd continued to dive in that water I would have joined the two Clifford's both of whom died of cancer.

On the love of place

 Menachem Kaiser, “Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure” was recommended to me. 

I am currently on page 44 and ran across, "We stayed another couple of hours.  We talked about the city, its history, its architecture.  Hanna's love for Sosnowiec was abundant and heartwarming, in the way that a learned, earned love of a place always is."

I stopped and thought about this strange comment for a long while.  As far as I can recall I had never "learned, earned love of a place."  And knowing what little I do about my ancestors I have never heard that they did either.  But, I think to myself that it is no wonder.  We are so new here.  My ancestors arrived in the "new world" in the 17th and 18th centuries.  Many of them arrived early in the 17th.  Many settled in Rhode Island and New York.  I have a great-great (great??) grandfather who was a private from New York and captured by the British during the war of 1812.  His grandchildren had soon moved through Indiana to Illinois where my great-grandfather Robert Dale Owens Matthews bequeathed his farm to his eldest son.  My grandfather, Troy, not being the eldest son moved to California where he was a "very clever" handyman.   During the time I knew him, he earned a living developing photographs.

On my paternal side my great-grandfather, Schuyler Helm, was living in Illinois, at least that is where he enlisted.  He had been a blacksmith and his Military specialty was therefore listed as “Engineer.”  He was a Sergeant by the time the war concluded in 1865.  He was approved for an increase in rank to lieutenant, but he instead took his mustering out pay and bought a piece of land in "Indian Territory."  Schuyler didn’t make it out of his 40s before he died, and so I have wondered if he mustered out with some injuries as well as money.  He was with Sherman before the latter's march to the sea.  Sherman divided his force and Schuyler was with the northern segment (under General Thomas) that kept Confederate forces from chasing after Sherman.  I don't have any details about what Sgt Helm did as an engineer, but I sort of relate to him having been a Sergeant in the Marine Corps and later an engineer mostly with McDonnell Douglas.  Also, Schuyler was born in 1834 and I was born in 1934.  But no relatives I'm familiar with stayed in "Indian Territory."  Schuyler's son, my grandfather (Harry Homer Helm) was born in 1865 and died in 1925; so I never met him.  He worked for the railroad and retired with a gold watch which I left with my first wife to give to my son (she being afraid I would lose it if I took it with me) which was subsequently lost.

Harry Homer Helm left his first family and married my grandmother, Bertha Freeman, who was born in 1885, making her 20 years younger than Harry Homer.  My father, Harrison Schuyler Helm, was born in 1915, and was ten years old when Harry Homer died.  My father knew nothing about his ancestry.  He once told me that he read a novel which mentioned someone named Helm who has hanged as a cattle rustler.  He told the kids in his class that this rustler was his grand-father -- as a joke.  I only learned about Sgt Schuyler Helm after my father died.  I sent for Sgt Schuyler's military record.  I still have it.  It's in a box in the garage.  There isn't anything very exciting in it.

Bill Helm, from Harry Homer's first marriage worked on the docks in the Los Angeles harbor.  He got his younger half-brother Harrison a job there as well.  Harrison married Ferne Matthews (my mother) and rented a small house at 524 West Denni in Wilmington which was part of the Los Angeles Harbor.  Harrison worked as a lumber carrier driver which was considered an important activity as the U.S. began building up its war effort and so never was in the military. 

My mother was getting ready to take us to church.  My sister, brother and I were standing down below on the sidewalk.  My father with a stunned expression on his face, came out onto the porch and said, "the Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor."  My mother took us to church anyway.  My father stayed home.

My mother and father were divorced when I was ten.  We were still living in Wilmington when I enlisted in the Marine Corps.  Two years after I graduated from Long Beach State College with a degree in English I bought a home in Torrance; which was an easy drive to the engineering department in Santa Monica.  I worked on the Skybolt program which was moved to Culver City.  After it was cancelled by Robert McNamara I transferred to the Commercial Aircraft division which was located in Long Beach (near where I was born).  I was still working in Long Beach (on the C17 program) when I retired and moved to San Jacinto in 1999.

Upon retirement I wanted to move to Northern Arizona, but Susan didn't want to move too far from her ailing parents; so she made a bargain with me.  If we moved out of the Los Angeles congestion which I detested, but close to her father, Robert McWherter, who lived in Indio; after he died she would move wherever I wished.  After her father died, Susan said she was ready to fulfill her part of our bargain, but by then she had several nearby doctors looking after her.  She never said she wasn't willing to fulfill her part of our bargain, but I was never willing to put her through a move.

Susan used to tell me that I only managed to get in touch with my feelings when I wrote poetry.  Not having written much poetry since the Covid Pandemic, I will however guess that if I were in touch with my feelings and asked them if there was any "place" that I loved, they might guess that if there were such a place, it was the most-often-dry bed of the San Jacinto River.  The River was part of my compromise with Susan.  If I couldn't retire to Northern California, I would at least need two things, I told her: 1) a large, fairly quiet, study area and 2) a nearby place where I could let our dogs run off leash.  Susan got her sister to help and they began showing me places they thought suitable.   One of the selections was this one in San Jacinto.  It was up to me to drive about and find that the San Jacinto River was a wonderful place to let the dogs run; and so it has been for all the years since we moved here.   The circumstances of it have changed considerably in that there are now clusters of homeless people living down there.  Various family members and friends have warned me about the river over the years.  At first it was about the coyotes; so I carried a S&W 357, but none of our encounters with coyotes required me to use it.  Later on I opted for a Walther 22 caliber semi-automatic, but after the homeless people arrived I don't usually carry even that.  The homeless are mostly a pacific people who spend their time sleeping.    If they look out from underneath their tents it is because we have disturbed their sleep.

But (I argue with my imagined feelings) how can I say that I love the river when I had to take up photography in order to keep going down there?  I do, it is true, feel it a duty to take my dogs down there, but after a while I found it boring; so I took up photography and photograph the dogs and scenery.  I even photographed many of the homeless and their surroundings.

Lest it seem that I have been an unhappy person wandering from one unpleasant place to the next, if I could reword the comment of Menachem Kaiser’s that provoked all this, I should begin by asking how unhappy can I be living in one of the most desirable places in the world, Southern California?  That generality has its flaws, I know, but those who don’t like it here and move usually do so because of the congestion (both people and cars) and the high-cost of living.  But people come here and drive long distances to work because living here is otherwise very pleasant.

More specifically I have been immensely happy in the sea free-diving.  I did truly love to be in the sea. I took my kids with me and they played in tide pools while I swam out to free-dive.
 
Later I bought a West-Wight Potter as a dive platform and learned to love sailing as well. 

Also, even before joining the Marine Corps I loved to hike.  And so during the hot months I would free dive and then during the cold months I would hike.  In regard to hiking, it wasn’t a particular place I could stand in and say I loved to be there, it was the process of hiking, as it was with the process of free-diving. 

Beyond these I love to be in states of mind where I am writing poetry.  I also love states of mind where I am reading an entertaining or captivating novel or work of history or some other subjects. It was because I hadn’t been in the latter state of mind for a while that I hastened to buy Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure by Menachem Kaiser.  I do not love it yet, but I am still in hope.

Civilization as something artificial

 

On page 29-30 of Civilization, Clive Bell writes,

"I think we must take it as settled that neither a sense of the rights of property, nor candour, nor cleanliness, nor belief in God, the future life and eternal justice, nor chivalry, nor chastity, nor patriotism even are among the distinguishing characteristics of civilization, which is nevertheless a means to good and a potent one.  Obviously the essence of civilization is something to which savages have not attained; wherefore it can not consist in primitive virtues.  The antithesis between the noble savage and the civilized man which has been current these two hundred years implies a general recognition of the fact that civilization is not a natural product.  We should expect it rather to have to do with those last acquisitions of humanity -- self-consciousness and the critical spirit.  We should expect it to be the result of education.  Civilization is something artificial."

After this Bell opposes the "survival of the fittest" view:  "'Leave it to Nature' is their motto: the brute and the vegetable kingdoms are the exemplars of civility.  Men have made a mess of it, they say, by not allowing the fittest to survive: we shall not be truly civilized till we leave the weak to die and recognize formally that might is right.  The fit shall inherit the earth. . . . [however] "Cunning quite as much as guts, if we may trust the text-books, has done the work of evolution. . . If, as seems not improbable, war is to become the normal condition of humanity, the future will be with those crafty weaklings who adapt themselves to their circumstances by devising means of evading military service, just as in the glacial period those species survived which learnt to protect themselves from the sharpness of the climate.  'You have tampered with Nature's Law,' say the science students; 'It is our nature to,' we reply."

Another biography was published the same month as Philip Roth by James Bailey: Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism: a Biography by Mark Hussey, published April 1, 2021 by Bloomsbury Publishing, 693 pages.

Clive Bell and Philip Roth

 

Clive Bell in chapter two of Civilization chose to look at clearly uncivilized societies.  If he found there a characteristic some assert is or ought to be a characteristic of a civilized society, he will rule it out because if it is in uncivilized societies, it can't be peculiar to a civilized society.  The first such characteristic he looks at is cleanliness.  He finds several primitive societies that wash themselves more frequently than Europeans do and so rules that out.

The next characteristic is "sexual morality." He finds that in this regard the practice of many "backward peoples may well provoke our envy.  Like Boswell they 'look with horror on adultery.'  The forest tribes of Brazil, for instance, are inflexibly monogamous, and so are several of the tribes of California."

He goes on for quite a bit in this vein and then sums up: "Socrates and Shakespeare, Raphael and Titian, Caesar and Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington and George Eliot herself appear to have led lives that would have rendered them unfit for the best Igorrote society in Luzon.  In the great periods of Chinese history things, I fear, were no better.  So, as the natives of Kar Nicobar look upon unchastity as a very deadly sin, we are forced to conclude that chastity is not one of the distinguishing characteristics of civilization."

As I recall from previous readings, Bell isn't going to end up finding that we here in the U.S. or anywhere in modern Europe are civilized at the time he wrote his essay.  But if he were alive today and just now writing, I wonder if he would draw quite the same conclusions he does about sexual morality.  This is because I have been reading the after-death saga of Philip Roth.  I don't know what California tribes Bell is referring to, but I suspect the majority here would disapprove of Roth's behavior and might even choose not to read his novels. While I have not yet read one, I have a couple of them in the Franklin edition and am working my way up (or perhaps I should say "down") to them. 

Roth chose in his own biographer, a man after his own heart, Blake Bailey.  Bailey's biography was published this year in the midst of a hue and cry over Bailey's own sexual immorality.  "In a statement provided to the Associated Press on April 21 by W. W. Norton & Company, the publisher announced it had "decided to pause the shipping and promotion of Philip Roth: The Biography pending any further information that may emerge." On April 28, W. W. Norton announced that it is taking the book out of print. Three weeks later, in May 2021, Skyhorse Publishing announced that it would release a paperback, ebook, and audiobook versions of the biography."

So not only do I have copies of Roth's novels that I am putting off reading, but prior to W. W. Norton's "pause" and removal from print, I acquired a copy Bailey's biography from them and have decided to put off reading that as well.

I've reconsidered what Bell said about the "tribes of California," (and apply it to others living in California).  He doesn't specifically say that we are uncivilized (although he would say that for other reasons), merely that our prudish views on sexual morality are not necessary characteristics of a civilization.

The Midlife Mind

 

In the May 7, 2021 issue of The Times Literary Supplement is a review by Hal Jensen of The Midlife Mind, Literature and the art of Ageing by Ben Hutchinson.  Hutchinson recommends the reading of literature as an aid to help one endure ageing.  The specifics of what he recommends seem to be the reading (with the help of Hutchinson's advice) some of the authors included in any "Great Books" program. 

Jensen writes ". . . Hutchinson settles into his main workout routines.  These consist of chapters on Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Goethe, the Victorians (George Eliot and Henry James), T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir.  For each, Hutchinson begins with a biographical-critical-historical survey of the author, with a close look at how they wrote about -- or out of -- those nebulous and crisis-ridden middle years."

Further down Hutchinson writes, "Each chapter ends with a look at a literary legacy and asks what lessons these writers can provide for our journey through the middle, Dante teaches us how to start again while still in transit, Goethe shows the value of restless curiosity, Eliot demonstrates the potency -- and necessary difficulty -- of late changes in belief, and Beauvoir the benefits of gender awareness when ageing. . . Still, I can't help wishing he had left out the 'Lessons' altogether.  They sound glib and patronizing . . ."

Hutchinson's audience would seem to be those in his age group, i.e., people in their 40s, who have not encountered the classics, and are worried about growing older.  Jensen makes short work of Hutchinson and concludes, "I respect Hutchinson's desire to help, but I have probably learned more about time and mortality from working on my allotment than from any amount of reading.  When it comes to dealing with middle age -- and I say this well aware of my audience -- books are not enough."

I had a long career in engineering but along the way anticipated that when those with degrees in Engineering retired with no clearly-thought-out plans, I would be able to retire to the pleasures of reading. 

One might object that formal engineers might have adequate plans for retirement as well.  My own observation has been that many, maybe even most, don't, or at least didn't (I retired in 1998).  I recall an engineer, Jim C., who was pointed out to us as having the perfect engineering work-ethic.  He had no outside interests.  Engineering was his whole life.  About a week after his retirement, he unexpectedly died.

An engineer I knew much better, Ray L., spent weekends and vacations building his retirement home in Northern California.  I was shocked when he died unexpectedly before he had a chance to enjoy his new home. 

These, and others, were cautionary examples, but perhaps anyone who is educated in what was in the past considered to be a "trade," is at risk, mentally and perhaps physically, when attempting to prepare for retirement -- at least more so than in a Liberal Arts major.*

I did take to heart the examples of people I worked with.  Among other things, I had a list of authors I didn't get a chance to read while I was in school, and worked my way through that  during lunch periods, weekends, etc. for several years.  To respond to Jensen (although I don't know what his "allotment" is), I did have a lot of physical interests.  I was a free-diver (managing to keep my freezer full of fish during many years) and a hiker (even to the guiding of small groups up into the San Gabriel and San Bernardino mountains).  But I anticipated that in my old age I would do less diving and hiking and more reading and so congratulated myself that unlike Jim C. and Ray L. I was educated well enough to (in retirement) engage in elaborate, self-devised reading programs with relative competence (joining Jensen in feeling no need of Hutchinson's "lessons.") 

*How does one with an English major become a competent enough engineer to have a modestly successful career and a better than average retirement benefit?  I can take no credit for that.  I feared I would never graduate from college if I majored in a subject I wasn't interested in.   And so I refused to worry about getting a job until after I graduated.  Then I went through an employment agency who reviewed my qualifications and sent me to Douglas Aircraft which at the time was being criticized by the Air Force for sending them poorly written engineering documentation.  The chief engineer ordered Douglas administrators to find recent college graduates capable of understanding engineering who could also write. 

Joan Didion's conclusions

 I love Joan Didion's conclusions.  She isn't forceful or brash, as much of her as I've read, but her conclusions hit one powerfully, like a surprise ending, or a powerful poem.  Here is the ending paragraph of her Haight-Ashbery "Love in" reportage of 1967:  

"Sue Ann's three-year-old Michael started a fire this morning before anyone was up, but Don got it out before much damage was done.  Michael burned his arm though, which is probably why Sue Ann was so jumpy when she happened to see him chewing on an electric cord.  'You'll fry like rice,' she screamed.  The only people around were Don and one of Sue Ann's macrobiotic friends and somebody who was on his way to a commune in the Santa Lucias, and they didn't notice Sue Ann Screaming at Michael because they were in the kitchen trying to retrieve some very good Moroccan hash which had dropped down through a floorboard damaged in the fire."

Earlier in this section (from her "Slouching Towards Bethlehem") she voices concerns as when she writes, "We are seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum. . . At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game . . . maybe we had stopped believing in the rules ourselves, maybe we were having a failure of nerve . . ."  

This is good, touching, and we might imagine her looking about while wringing her hands.  But she gets back to seemingly straight reporting until she reaches the last paragraph with it, and the mere reporting becomes a conclusion, a powerful one, in its own right.

On Stephen Fry and Free Will

 

In regard to the Fry interview (Stephen Fry would like to remind you that you have no free will") by David Marchese, I have in the past read, or been in, a great number of debates about the issue of free will.  Here in this country, our English forefathers if we have ancestors settling in New England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, were probably for the most part Calvinists who would have put Fry's arguments in those terms.  We didn't have free will because God chose those whom he would save.  Calvinist preachers, however were in short supply and were later on replaced by Baptists and Methodists who were Arminian, that is, they believed we had in all things Free Will.  We could thereafter choose to accept God, rather than the reverse.

Yes, Scientific knowledge has advanced to a point where we can declare without qualification that we are not created equal, and Fry mentions some of the reasons that is so.  But I did a double take when I got to the part where in past arguments God would be mentioned, and here find him presenting the "collective unconsciousness of the people" in God's stead.  I at one time read a lot of Jung and liked his idea of the group mind which I take to be equivalent to Fry's "collective unconsciousness."  But I was surprised that Fry would simply assume this as accepted fact. 

I did wonder to what extent Fry believes that his genes determined his homosexuality.  I have in the past read interesting arguments advancing the idea that "circumstances" influence some to become homosexual.  There was a study years ago with rats allowed to increase in a confined area.  As the rats became overcrowded they engaged in all sorts of deviant rat-behavior including homosexuality. 

It would be unacceptable today to describe homosexuality as deviant human behavior, but it would in the absence of a given gene, seem equally plausible (and hopefully, politically acceptable) to conjecture that societal circumstances might be the cause of homosexuality.  Thus, someone caused to be homosexual by circumstances in early childhood would have this matter decided for him (or her) as much (perhaps) as if the cause was genes.

Fry's actual words were "But we can't choose our brains, we can't choose our genes, we can't choose our parents.  There's so much."   So Fry is probably including the force of societal circumstances.  I came around to giving Fry the benefit of doubt on everything here except for the "collective unconsciousness".  Not that I disagree with the idea exactly; although I wouldn't claim it to be an accepted fact.  I still like Jung.  But I wouldn't have thought the idea widely accepted. 

David Marchese doesn't comment on Fry's words directly, but Fry commented on a great number of things in this interview and Marchese selected just one:  "Stephen Fry would like to remind you that you have no free will."   I'm reminded of Joan Didion's saying that a reporter always betrays the person she is interviewing.

Fry's interest, if one reads the whole article, seemed something else entirely.  He wanted to know if we like Prometheus could give fire (enlightenment) to creatures with artificial intelligence, and how that might work out.  Perhaps though, Marchese is right, and we like he will ignore Fry's interest in artificial intelligence and concentrate on the degree to which we have free will -- and by inference, the degree to which Fry's homosexuality was determined by agencies beyond his control.