Voices Gallery

By David L Siress

VOICES Gallery: written human voices - formatted as papers/essays/stories/lyrics, by 22 people, ages 8 - 90, from twenty different (spatial/cultural/personal) PLACES on planet Earth, 4 countries, second grade student to PhD students/scholars, forever teachers to forever students - always forever human, stories from ancient Egypt to a current Chinese Rural Revitalization village ... cosmic philosophical themes to personal existential journey excursions, from fishing for catfish to prison for life to the rise of monotheism to recovering from addictions to creating new beginnings ... arrayed in a Gallery of corridors labeled FOREGROUNDING, BEGINNINGS, PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH, LYRICS ALCOVE, SCHOLARLY VECTORS, and HUANG ZHUANG. VOICES Gallery tour is curated to emphasize the beauty and power of shared human voices. Take the VOICES tour, share with us, if you WILL ... then write the author a note to participate in his next 'shared human voices' venture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David L Siress
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9781370510245

David L Siress

Briefly: born in Benton, KY 1941, honor graduate of Murray State University and University of Tennessee graduate School of Social Work; lived and/or worked in KY, TN, IN, NH, ME, NY, MA; traveled in 19 countries and all but 2 USA states; father of 4 children - (much published son, Prof Dr Cary Siress); continuing studies at Harvard and over 300 professional workshops/seminars/training over past 40 yrs.; worked/studied in many fields, with focus on Human Behavior and Human Services Program design/leadership - titles = high school teacher, Psychiatric Social Worker, Therapist, Program Administrator, Executive Director, CEO, Consultant, Vice President, Executive Administrator, plus various leadership positions on various Boards of various organizations/corporations. Currently retired in Asheville, NC; politically active; Co-organizer of Asheville Skeptics; Co-leader of Asheville Idea Salon. Previously published papers with Dr. Jeffrey Salloway, PhD, and at Yale Club, NYC; published two eBooks in past year.

Book preview

GALLERY INTRODUCTION

The Gallery is presented in sections or corridors:

PROLOGUE

Gallery DIRECTORY

FOREGROUNDING

BEGINNINGS

PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH

LYRICS ALCOVE

SCHOLARLY VECTORS

HUANG ZHUANG.

Human VOICES are usually expressed as stories, regardless of utilized format. Cognitive scientists often model self as a dynamic collection, or living neuronal library, of remembered stories we have experienced and/or tell ourselves about ourselves relating mostly to (a) how/what is reality, (b) how/what we feel about that reality, (c) how we relate to/with our daily realities/environments, and (d) how/what meaning we gain or create from our daily living. Using various styles or foci for writing, all VOICES stories herein generally fall within and across those categories. The corridors are used mostly for organizational facade, or curator stories, or to suggest entangled linkages across all the stories.

As curator, as editor, and as author, I attempt to suggest and call attention to the multilayered VOICES contained within each of the stories, as well as the cosmic evolutionary echoes resounding from within the multilayered design space/time of each VOICES story … emphasizing the power of VOICES SHARED.

Mentioning space/time, do not overlook the potential foregrounding for possible, or perhaps probable, future human developmental vectors, which each story may suggest, or perhaps potentiate.

Most of all, enjoy your reading tour, and hopefully leave with something meaningful, perhaps specifically for you.

PROLOGUE

Every Exit is an Entry somewhere else.

(Tom Stoppard)

Every LIVING entity - every human individual - IS a COSMIC STORY, or perhaps closer to truth, IS a living assemblage of billions of cosmic stories, in TIME. An estimated nearly 14 billion years of COSMIC evolution … here, alive, precisely now … the cosmic stories in my/your/our living cells … quote from THE ZOOMABLE UNIVERSE, Caleb Scharf, (article in Scientific American, November 2017, pg70) … DO YOU WANT TO HEAR THE MOST EPIC STORY EVER? A long time ago the atoms in your body were spread across trillions of kilometers of otherwise empty space. Billions of years in the past there was no hint that they would eventually come to be configured as your eyes, your skin, your hair, your bones or the 86 billion neurons of your brain. Many of these atoms came from deep inside a star - perhaps several stars … As these stars exploded, they hurled parts of themselves outward in a flood of scorching gas that filled a small part of one galaxy out of hundreds of billions of other galaxies … Some of these atoms have been in the shell of a trilobite … Since then, they’ve been in tentacles, roots, feet, wings, blood, and trillions, quadrillions of bacteria in between. Yet others have nested in the yokes of dinosaur eggs or hung in the exhaled breath of a panting creature in the depths of an ice age. For others, this is the first time settling into a living organism, having drifted through eons in oceans and clouds, part of a trillion raindrops or a billion snowflakes. Now, at this moment, they are all here, making YOU.

Each of the TWENTY TWO HUMANS, whose VOICES are written and publicly shared in this Gallery, IS a unique constellation, configuration, perhaps orchestration of cosmic stories … billions multiplied by billions of cosmic evolutionary stories culminating precisely NOW in the living creature writing each one of these VOICES … not to forget the many unique humans referred to or ‘storied about’ in these individual stories.

Equally critical to ‘making meaning’, or ‘understanding’, or sensing the AWE in the herein written voices, one must deeply appreciate that at the moment of writing, the moment in time/space when the writer experienced writing her/his story … IS always a NOW MOMENT. Jorge Luis Borges, in his elegant story, The Garden of Forking Paths, has the main character think to himself, Then I reflected that everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen … - to me … each individual person.

Although human awareness of the echoing cosmic stories noted above are likely not commonplace, most people today are much aware of the genetic stories passed on from generation to generation, the shuffling of parental genes - each a living collection of ancient unique stories of their own - to create each embryo that grows into adult HUMAN, as well as the socio/cultural/spatial LIVING STORIES family and friends pass on to enrich the ‘beginnings’ of living stories of the next generation.

Genes, genetic stories, are about ‘beginnings’ - always beginnings … all things genetic are about beginnings. Yes, humans often conceptualize pieces of their personal stories as endings. I posit that inside genetic stories, and frequently inside socio/cultural/spatial stories as well, even what humans often call endings ARE in fact ‘beginnings’, beginnings of … of the next few moments of living, of evolving, toward or into the unknown, even if that unknown is individual death. Far more often than we commonly think, we can and do adaptively move on toward some ‘new’ or ‘novel’ beginnings … after all the humanly defined endings ‘become’ new beginnings … creating a new story, not only for ourselves and families and friends … perhaps for the cosmos.

Thus, this VOICES Gallery … sharing individually unique cosmic voice stories, embodied in each individual writer, echoing across our cosmos for billions of years, via thousands of human generations, living and procreating and dying in unknown places on our planet … written here for whoever will read, listen, understand, and make personal meaning therein and/or therefrom … perhaps inspiring or stirring novel ‘beginnings’, individually, community, world, cosmos.

VOICES Gallery DIRECTORY

FOREGROUNDING

Alina-Sophie Isabella Heese

BEGINNINGS

Frances Vaccarella Sibbers Vanecek

Mimi Craynon Rainen & Scott

Steve Sibbers

Jeff Copeland

Eric Phillips

Lindsey Haeger

Amy Pitt

Carolyn Virtue

PHILOSOPHY IN THE FLESH

Christopher Edwards

LPH

Mary Louise McLean

Alisia Upchurch

Paul King

LYRICS ALCOVE

Christopher Edwards

Steve Sibbers

Andrew Whiteside

Cary Siress

David L Siress

Paul King

SCHOLARLY VECTORS

William Lindsey

M.S. Friedlander

Marc Angélil and Cary Siress

Cary Siress

Zhou Yuan

Marshal Lu

HUANG ZHUANG

David L Siress

FOREGROUNDING

To foreground our tour of this VOICES Gallery, I present a letter composed and hand printed by my son Cary’s oldest daughter, Alina-Sophie Isabella Hesse (Siress), my GRAND daughter. Alina was voted the ‘best in class’ for handwriting and thus commissioned by class 2e to VOICE a collective vision in written letter format, unsolicited, originally in German of course. Below is the English translation in print format - next page in her English translation handwriting.

Thank you Alina-Sophie for gracing this VOICES Gallery with your youthful, thoughtful, unsolicited VOICES - clearly and powerfully spoken. How many uncountable eight year olds throughout our world have felt similar playful voices regarding their school playground experiencing … and how few ventured to put those voices in written format! Cosmically expressive, indeed … enriching, beginnings, and foregrounding the power of shared voices in this VOICES Gallery. Who would not be motivated, young or old, to think positively by reading, and feeling, your joyful, sharing VOICES!

Dear Mrs. Lorbeer,

We wanted to write you to say how much fun we have on our school playground. We enjoy most the hanging rings and the large slide. We also really like the fireman’s pole as well as the bridge. We often play on the car, taking turns turning the steering wheel and shifting the gears. Unfortunately, the playground has been quite wet lately, but the many roofs shelter us all from the rain. We really appreciate the jungle gym being big enough to allow younger and older children to climb on it at the same time. Now, we look forward more and more every day to the class recess so that we can play on our great playground!

Sincerely yours,

Alina-Sophie Isabella Heese

& Second Grade Class 2e

Gebele Primary School

Munich, Germany

April 10, 2019

*(Cary Siress note to editor): Mrs. Lorbeer is the Director of the Gebele Primary School in Munich, ranked as the best in Bavaria. Alina-Sophie Heese, on behalf of her second-grade classmates in class 2E, wrote this unsolicited letter to the Director in praise of the school playground. Perhaps nothing more than an innocent salutation, this could just as well be a savvy maneuver by a group of 8-year-olds to sway school policy in favor of more time to play and to enjoy being a child as long as possible.

*****

Curator: At 78 years old, I have personally seen and heard, and cognitively experienced some of the cosmic genetic stories, which flow through Alina’s cells today, personally linked back to their beginnings in the early 1860s, on her SIRESS genetic side. As a child 8-10 years old (about 1950), I remember visiting my father’s mother’s mother, my paternal great grandmother, a few weeks before she died, in Hardin, KY (USA). I remember her laying in the bed, mostly covered up to her neck, and saying a few words to me about growing up to be a good boy and something about minding your Mama and Daddy - stories of beginnings for me. She was about 90 years old, meaning that she was born in the early 1860s. This is my most ancient personal link with the beginnings of SIRESS genetic stories that now are passed on to Alina, and her younger sister, via her father, my son. She may have even more ancient personal genetic links on her Hesse genetic side. I suggest many of those genetic stories LIVE, again, here in VOICES Gallery via Alina’s letter … foregrounding the VOICES stories to follow in this VOICES Gallery.

…BEGINNINGS…

The following SHARED VOICES writings echo

or speak directly to

BEGINNINGS

often referred to as

growing up

becoming a person

gaining insights

maturing

perhaps beginnings of wisdom

multilayered in space/time

human beginnings

Previously Unpublished Selections From

FOOTSTEPS IN THE SAND

Poems and Stories

Frances Vaccarella Sibbers Vanecek

Venice, Florida

Mother Life

Enter me oh seed and grow, make me swollen, full and ripe,

torment me, make me unaware of all but you

bursting from my womb,

tearing me apart,

loosening me from space and time.

I, unknowing, scream and groan

until I lie exhausted

in a pool of blood

exposed to those who gather round you in a knot

forgetting me who like a useless skin

lie with legs in stirrups unaware.

Enter me oh seed and leave me

using me to feed you, warm you

without thanks,

a parasite, a fetus, selfish child.

Come into my arms

and let me look upon your wrinkled face

your grasping hands,

your frowning, knowing helplessness

and fill me with a joy I’ve never known.

I put you to my breast and feel my uterus contract.

I put my finger in your hand and feel my heart contract.

You put your life in mine, I feel my world contract

around you to make sure that you have safety

love, protection, joy.

And who am I to give you all these things?

Where do I go to pick your happiness from trees?

How do I make you grow in all the ways

I have failed to grow?

I want to give you freedom.

I want to hear you sing.

I want to walk with you through the meadows of your life

and name the flowers growing there.

I love you as I love myself.

No, even more

because you are his as well as mine,

you are uniquely you.

I’ll make your world as wonderful as my imagination

will allow and yet I know there will be times that I will

disappoint you and myself:

I’ll yell at you in fury,

make you cry

and you will do the same.

Oh child of mine be all those things

I’ve wanted for myself, and more.

Learn what I can teach

but be yourself.

Grow and go

and leave behind the residue of my mistakes.

Be free, dear precious child, be free

and look upon your mother as she is:

imperfect,

loving you.

Unique and wonderful relationship

child/mother/child.

Of me, not mine.

THE ROOM

A study. Pine paneled, bay windowed, carpeted, lined with book shelves, a view out to an aged, elegant apple tree. A room in which to write, to contemplate, to balance check books, to read. A room of my own in the full sense of Virginia Woolf! A room with no other purpose but to contain my books, my papers, my ideas, my work.

I have it. It exists. Right now in 1981 it is compete. I have just moved my desk, my papers, my chair, myself into it.

The pens are in the ceramic mug, the erasers are in the plastic box next to the typewriter. The typewriter table faces the apple tree and the garden. The books are settled into categories - there my favorite poems, novels, plays, texts, and here, in these two folders are my writings: my own short stories and poems.

These two folders are very precious to me. They are my inner self, my creations. They are complete. These two folders lying neatly together behind the leather bindings fill me with a sense of accomplishment and pride. I smile content with the name I have selected for them: Patterns of My Presence.

I have more ideas, seeds of unborn stories. These are stored on bits and pieces of paper. These incomplete descriptions of people, places, happenings are waiting to be incorporated into form and meaning. They are waiting for me and now the time has come, for now I have my room, my study, my office, my studio, my space.

*****

Like late summer flowers subjected to the first winter frost, the room, the folders of work, the lists of ideas, the incomplete descriptions, the sense of satisfaction have all lost their bloom. It is as if a cloud has obliterated the sun streaming through the windows onto the plants, the carpet, the chair. I feel a chill, a sense of foreboding. Guilt. I feel like a child caught in the act of pretense, the child momentarily convinced that she is a knight, a queen, a pirate rudely brought back to the reality of childhood. Only this time it is worse than childhood fantasy because I am a full grown ordinary woman pretending to be a writer.

I put the folders on the shelf. I stand up, look around the room, confirm that it is indeed a beautiful room and wonder how I could be so pretentious, so selfish, so foolish to believe that I had the right to set aside such a lovely space as this for me, for me alone, not to be shared. All this space just to write.

To write? Who could possibly care about what I had to say. Those little poems, those silly stories, would anyone really care to read them? Sure, my friends say that they’re good, that I have talent, but they are FRIENDS - they wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings.

Wait a minute. What has happened? Why did my thoughts suddenly change directions? Where are these accusations coming from? Who is standing inside my head negating my enjoyment and my ability? Who is deriding my desire to capture scenes and people, moods and mountains with words? To whom do I have to justify the existence of this space or the way I spend my time? Who has stolen the joy, the pride, the bloom from my room, my dream my purpose?

There’s no one with me to answer. I am alone here. Even the cats are sleeping in other rooms. This is my house and I live alone. I am not taking this space away from anyone else.

These intrusive thoughts, these negations of creativity rise up suddenly without warning and dissipate my spirit. They rush into happy moments and destroy enjoyment. They are the thieves of reverie, the despoilers of happiness, the jealous mistresses of my freedom. They drain my energy, they cause me to hesitate - and then to STOP. Their disapproval is aroused whenever I make even the slightest deviation from the well-worn path of duty, definition and deference. It is as if there is a built in cancellation button activated by any conscious self-expression.

I sink back into the chair. I am looking out at the lawn, which shows slight hints of spring green in the unusually warm February sun. (Yes, the sun is still there, still shining, still warm). I stroke the keys of the typewriter, adjust the box of erasers, pat the ream of blank paper waiting … the room is beautiful again because I have discovered the roots of these negative thoughts.

There is deep seated suspicion within me that I am fooling myself and pretending to be a writer even though my work has been published and has received approbation of critics not known for their kindness.

This is not a new conflict for me. It began many years ago, when I, the child, dreamt, attempted, hoped to do or be or have something, anything beyond my mother’s ability to dream or attempt or hope. If she were here now with me in this room, if her heart had not suddenly stopped beating while she slept one August night ten years ago, I know how she would look, what she would say, what she would do …

*****

She would arrive, via someone else’s efforts because she never drove and refused to use public transportation claiming that it was too fatiguing, too frightening. She would arrive like a princess or a queen and would be expecting deference and are because she had just taken a long journey.

She would be dressed carefully. This being winter, she would be wearing a hat (probably crocheted, but not by her) which covered her ears against the cold, a coat of moderate length and moderate price, shoes with moderate heel, stockings, a silk scarf at her neck, a leather handbag over her arm, boxes from the bakery carefully placed into a shopping bag which would be held in her gloved hand. She would be carefully made up, wearing earrings and a broach or necklace - nail polish. None of her accessories would be intrusive by virtue of color or design or value.

Her corseted figure, giving a false impression of firmness, would be covered by a woolen jumper and a blouse of a coordinated color.

She would be smiling as she entered, the smile exposing the even row of plastic teeth which replaced the crocked ones of which she had be ashamed throughout her childhood. Her eyes would quickly gather in the details of the room, the furnishings, the plants, the carpet and she would immediately notice anything that was new or different from before. Her eyes, a mixture of brown and green, sometimes more green, other times more brown, depending on her mood or her health, would be showing their green tint because of fatigue from the trip.

She would hand me the bakery boxes, remove her gloves and scarf and coat, glance into the mirror to tidy her hair after removing her hat, suggest that I put the water on for tea and go into the bathroom to wash her hands and freshen her make up.

Her skin, fair and easily freckled, would still be unwrinkled. Age approached her timidly, not daring to change the auburn tinted brown hair or the smoothness of her features - even into her seventies.

I think she would be satisfied with this house. I think she would approve because it is small, neat, in a quiet neighborhood, less ostentatious than the last house I lived in. She never like that house, never felt comfortable in it. She said it was a nice house, impressive but I knew she thought it was too large and too isolated on its two acres of suburban woodland. That was a house far too removed from the small city apartments of her lifetime; too indicative of my departure from the old neighborhood and the old ways. This, more moderate house, would ‘fit’ her better.

She would love the washer and dryer placed near the kitchen behind folding louvered doors. Status to my mother was always measured by whether or not one owned their own washer and dryer. She never did. Cadillacs, acreage, or college degrees did not impress my mother but having one’s own laundry did.

Of course the cats would have to be removed. She didn’t trust cats, said they looked suspicious, evil. She would never pick them up because she said they felt as if their insides would fall out when she did. Poor cats, they would have to stay outside for the entire visit.

I don’t know what her reaction would be to my owning my own home. While I was married, she approved, but it was always HIS house anyway. She knew that I could not have afforded one on my own. But now that I’m divorced and working … oh, what would she have to say to that? Divorced? Her daughter? After 27 years of marriage? Her lips would tighten up on that one. In fact, I believe that the impact would be so great that we wouldn’t discuss it at all. Well, actually it would be present in all discussions. It would be there - permeating everything but not overtly discussed. (She might inquire though if I took the washer and dryer, or if they were new. Maybe she’d be a little bit pleased if she knew that I bought and paid for them myself).

We would go from room to room, and I’m sure she’d nod and admire the way the rooms were decorated until we came to this room, my study. I’d probably try to convey my delight, my expectations of creativity that this room symbolizes. I’d probably say something like, Look at this room, Mom, isn’t it great! I’ve just bought this typewriter and I picked up this beautiful desk at a second hand store so it isn’t quite an antique but lovely anyway. I am going to set aside time each morning, before I go to work and come in here and write. Look, these are the poems and stories I have finished so far. I would hand her the magazine opened to the page on which my poem appeared and await her reaction to seeing her daughter’s name in print.

She would step down from the den into the study, probably remark about the rug, Wasn’t this in the dining room of the other house?, ask who owned all the books and wonder if the diplomas hanging on the wall were really mine or if I had purchased them for effect. I know I would have difficulty convincing her that they were real, earned during the ten years since she died. If I did convince her that I had gone back to school and worked that hard, she would wonder why I had bothered or assumed that I had been included in the WHO’S WHO OF STUDENTS because I was so much older than the usual student.

She would look at the room, the books and the writings and say, "Very