Janice Greenwood

The Pearl Poem is one of the most beautiful of all the medieval poems, and quite possibly one of the most beautiful elegies ever written.

The second of the Buddha’s four noble truths is that attachment leads to suffering. Lion’s Roar, a Buddhist magazine explains: “We suffer, and make others suffer, when we try to hold onto things after their time, whether it’s relationships, experiences, or just the previous moment… Nonattachment is neither indifference nor self-denial. Ironically, letting go of attachment is the secret to really enjoying life and loving others. It is freedom.”

While Buddhist thought offers wisdom for those striving for nonattachment, medieval thinkers also offer some fascinating insights into nonattachment. The medieval Pearl poem, for example, is an intricate meditation on loss, death, nonattachment, release, and purification. This stunning allegory on loss and redemption is considered by many scholars to be one of the most intricate poems in middle English and possibly one of the most intricate poems ever written. 101 stanzas each have their own rhyme scheme and are linked together by a single word that echoes in the stanza that follows. The poem is tied together to form a ring because the last linking word connects the reader back to the first stanza. The poem is an allegory, a dream vision, and a meditative journey with no beginning and no end. Like a jewel, its internal reflections and refractions are manifold. For the purposes of this essay, I’m relying on William Vantuono’s Pearl translation.

The poem opens with the speaker having lost his “special pearl without a spot.” The first movement of the poem ends with the speaker mourning over the grave of the dead girl, clinging to the earth and stench of decay. In fact, the stench is the thing that renders the speaker unconscious. The poem begins in the fundament, on solid earth. One imagines a man digging up a grave hoping to unearth the past, but finding only decay and “odor to my head then shot” that begins the dream vision to follow.

The speaker then ascends into space, into a world so beautiful “Tapestries never were found in a heap/ of half so dear an adornment.” The landscape the speaker encounters is a place of pure adornment. The repetition of the word “adornment” is critical. The vision is a spiritual one. The beauty presented to the speaker is merely décor to guide the spirit towards the lessons it needs to learn. The poet takes pains to de-emphasize the importance of the décor, while simultaneously drawing the reader into a realm so beautiful. Ultimately, the reader is admonished, with each repetition of “adornment” to let go of clinging, to appreciate the vision, but to let it pass through, like a stream. The visual feast presented to the speaker is illusory, an act of accommodation to human senses, because the spirit world is not physical.

After wandering through the vision world, describing its more splendid wonders, the speaker finally encounters a maiden bedecked in pearls. He asks the maiden: “Are you my pearl whose loss I lamented?” The maiden explains to the speaker that he is mistaken to think his pearl is lost. She is not lost, but safely treasured away in the realm of the spirit. Furthermore, the maiden admonishes the speaker for his attachment. She explains:

“Now, gentle jeweler, if you shall lose

Your joy for a gem that from you veered,

You apply your mind to maddening views,

And trouble yourself with transience bleared.”

The maiden reminds the speaker that it is madness to cling to things of a transient nature. Instead, he is urged to place his heart and hope on things that are eternal and unchanging.

“You have called fate thief, and feared,

When it has shown you something surer.”

And to the speaker, “each gentle word a jewel without flaws.” Language is the pearl. The poem is the pearl. The dream vision is the pearl. The maiden is the pearl. Nothing is not the pearl. Everything is the pearl. And the poem is connected, and so all things are connected, if you follow them to their source, which is love, spirit, heart, the breath that moves the sun and other stars.

But the speaker remains mistaken because he decides he will stay in the vision with his pearl. “I shall dwell with it in sheer woodshaws.”

And yet, the speaker is mistaken. The maiden explains:

“You say you believe I exist in this scene

Because your eyes have lit on me.

Second, you say in this country

You from me shall never sever.

The third, to cross this stream you see

Cannot now be, joyful jeweler.”

And so, the speaker is reminded that it is only with the heart that one sees rightly and that the scene he thinks he sees does not exist. Furthermore, he cannot cross the stream, because he is yet alive. In order to cross the stream “Your corpse to clot must coldly cleave.” The maiden reminds the jeweler that calling God cruel for this would not make him “stay… one step from his plan.”

Ultimately, we are each constrained by fate, but the realm of the spirit is not constrained by temporal things.

And so, we are subject to our fate, but have a choice in how we submit to it. We can choose to submit to our fate with joy and bliss or in despair and grief. Yes, the poem continues with all its Christian imagery and hope for eternal salvation. But for me, the core of the poem is in the lesson it offers earlier, the lesson of choice, of illusion, of nonattachment. We will lose things in this long and difficult life. We will not get them back. Or they will come back in another form, but never the same. Ultimately, our job is to not attach ourselves to each blessing, but to take it in for the adornment it is, and to accept the lessons love passes our way. The choice in life is the choice to live in illusion, or to see the connected invisible soul beneath.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I was the first person in my immediate family to graduate from a four-year university. My father dropped out of community college after attending a single semester, and I often remember him telling me how hard classes were. My mother attended no college and no university. I received no private tutoring, and the most my parents could do with regards to helping me apply for university was to help me fill out the FAFSA application by providing their tax information. My high school of over 2,000 students had one college counselor to serve the hundreds of juniors and seniors applying to college and university. She was wonderful, but overwhelmed. I took the SAT without having opened a single SAT preparation book or having taken a single SAT class.

As an undergraduate, I applied to the University of Florida, the University of Virginia, and New York University. I gained admission to New York University and the University of Florida. The dean at New York University called me to let me know that I made it into the university by the strength of my college admissions essay alone. I gained admission to the University of Florida, but I was required to attend the summer session.

I wanted to be a writer. It was my passion. I took AP classes in high school; the teachers were sometimes excellent and sometimes terrible. One AP English teacher in high school allowed us to spend the entire period playing the board game Cranium, while my AP Psychology teacher drilled us on concepts so extensively that she was known throughout the state of Florida for having the students with the highest AP Psychology scores. When it came to my high school education, it was hit and miss.

My parents wouldn’t take out loans to send me to New York University. While they qualified for parental loans, they weren’t sure this was the best investment and they were scared. After all, my father had dropped out of community college, and my parents had no first-hand experience of university success within the family or a sense of what university success could mean for their child. Later, they’d take out loans to send my brother to a for-profit school in Florida, but they did so only because they saw that their firstborn child could succeed and even thrive in college.

First-generation college and university students face immense challenges. They often don’t have tutors. They don’t have the same community support of their wealthier peers and may not have the same network. Their parents might actively discourage them from taking out loans to go to college or university because of a fear of debt (I know my parents were frightened for me). My mother actively discouraged me from attending college, encouraging me instead to find a husband and make babies. First-generation college students often don’t have parents to help them navigate the application process. I know I didn’t.

I studied English and Art History at the University of Florida. Using study skills I developed myself and with the help of kind professor mentors, I graduated from the University of Florida with virtually straight As. My only B was in a math class. In college I was fortunate enough to spend a summer abroad (thanks to my boyfriend’s dad paying for our flights and my boyfriend’s mom paying for our train tickets), but I had very little money and my boyfriend and I mostly slept in train stations and parks, making scraps from the hostel breakfasts somehow last all day. (There was one night in England where we were so scared and tired, we literally chained ourselves to a tree.)

In university, I often didn’t understand that my peers had often been better supported, and so I internalized my failure when I didn’t know the vocabulary they knew, or hadn’t done the reading they’d done in high school. In time, I came to understand how privilege and money shapes educational achievement, but for years I blamed myself. When I served as a teacher at an East Harlem college preparatory program years later, I often told my students my stories to help them understand that their struggles were not due to inferior intelligence, but due to lack of preparation.

After Florida, I attended Columbia University to receive my MFA in poetry. Though I received a fellowship, the fellowship was nowhere near enough money to pay for school. I decided to invest in my education and took out loans, which I am still paying to this day. Being a first generation college student also had disadvantages at Columbia University. At Columbia, I never asked my professors for help, never once told them I was scared about my student loans, scared for my future. Perhaps this comes from growing up in a neighborhood where shows of weaknesses got you in trouble, but at Columbia, I put on a tough face, thinking it served me, when it didn’t. Now I tell my students that they need to ask for help; that it is required; that they need to use the resources their school offers them to the fullest. I graduated from Columbia feeling completely unmoored, with little sense of what I would do next, and no guidance on what my next steps should be.

Later, my ex-husband and I moved to Canada (he was attending a Ph.D. program there and I followed as a spouse), where I worked as a private tutor. Because of my background, I knew how to teach myself, how to motivate myself, and how to study independently, skills which are essential to success in college and life. As a tutor I found myself teaching many students who were dependent on others to motivate them; who relied on me academically in a way I never relied on anyone. Occasionally, I’d encounter a self-motivated student, but these were the exceptions, not the norm. It seemed like the more advantages a student had, the less likely he or she was to be self-motivated. First-generation college students often have the advantage of self-reliance.

Many of the students whose families paid for their education in full, or who were better supported, now have published books, have gone on to win awards, went on to pursue Ph.Ds, or have tenure track jobs. We all graduated during the 2008 financial crisis. I spent a good decade out of Columbia working to pay my bills, drowning in student loan debt, failing, and trying to gain the stability I would need to be able to write a book I could be proud of. There was a period of time, several years after the 2008 economic crash where I was homeless and living out of my car. Students with stronger safety nets didn’t have this experience.

And yet, my writing saved me then and it saves me now. I also know that my education was my safety net. When I was homeless and living in my car, I was able to apply for remote writing jobs, and these jobs sustained me and ultimately got me out of the financial hole. My writing has given me immense freedom, including the freedom to live anywhere in the world I want. These days I live as simple a life as possible in Hawai’i. Food is incredibly expensive so my boyfriend and I buy the “last day” vegetables at the farmer’s market. We shop at the thrift store for the things we need.

I know I have privileges few people have, and have been given opportunities in my life for which I am grateful. But none of it was given to me. I worked my ass off to be here. For first-generation college students thinking about the next step, I say the road is hard, but not impossible.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Maslow’s famous “Hierarchy of Needs” is often illustrated as a five-step pyramid. At the very base of the pyramid you’ll find basic needs like sleep, food, water, shelter, and reproduction. One step up you’ll find the need for safety and security, which can be defined as freedom from violence as well as financial stability and security. A step higher than that brings you to social needs for belonging and love; the need to be part of a family and part of a community. And one step higher than this brings you to the needs of the ego, the need for self-esteem, power, recognition, and prestige. At the pinnacle of the pyramid you’ll find self-actualization.

Maslow’s popular pyramid is based upon a classic paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation” in which Maslow attempts to explain where motivated behavior comes from. In Maslow’s formulation, when basic needs (such as the need for food) are not met, a person’s motivation will be solely directed toward these needs. As basic needs are met, a person is more able to achieve higher needs and goals. Abraham Maslow wrote: “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.” Maslow’s hierarchy explains why a person who has enough food, proper shelter, a stable family, love, a community, self-esteem, and even power will still have needs and motivations. For Maslow, self-actualization is the pinnacle of human achievement, and also a life-long process.

In Maslow’s formulation, when basic needs are satisfied, they become unimportant, but when they are not satisfied, they dominate the individual’s consciousness. When you are sick, all you can focus on is feeling healthy and pain-free. When you are hungry, all you can focus on is finding food.

A person who is hungry will have his or her “consciousness … almost completely preempted by hunger.”

One of the most important insights that Maslow offers is the fact that needs have the power to shape our stories and shape our view of the world. If basic needs aren’t met, the world can become quite dark indeed. Maslow writes about a child who has taken ill for whom the “appearance of the whole world suddenly changes from sunniness to darkness…and becomes a place…in which anything at all might happen.”

Maslow’s paper was written in 1943. He writes that “the healthy, normal, fortunate adult in our culture is largely satisfied in his safety needs. The peaceful, smoothly running, ‘good’ society ordinarily makes its members feel safe enough from wild animals, extremes of temperature, criminals, assault and murder, tyranny, etc.” Maslow writes that in order to see how the lower needs affect a person, we must turn to the “economic and social underdogs.”

Oh and how far our society has come from Maslow, where there are now so many more of these “economic and social underdogs!” As income-inequality has grown, as more people live under crushing debt (Forbes notes that federal student loan debt is over 1.5 trillion dollars and growing), as more people feel less secure in their access to food, shelter, and safety (we think of the police killings of Black men and women, the fact that the U.S. government looks less and less like a representative democracy every day as more districts are gerrymandered to favor minority rule), in 2020 America we see more people suffering from precarity, stuck perpetually at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy. These “economic and social underdogs” are the vast majority of us, struggling paycheck to paycheck, not sure if we’ll be able to afford food, or shelter, or pay our next medical bill. Do we even live in the “good” society Maslow claims to exist in 1943?

According to Maslow, neurotic adults (those whose safety is uncertain), live in a world that appears to be “hostile, overwhelming, and threatening.” Maslow explains that such a person behaves as if a great catastrophe were always impending.” And how could he not when he is living in a world where the next pay check is increasingly not guaranteed, where the savings account can’t even cover one emergency? Maslow explains that such a man searches for a “protector…or perhaps, a Fuehrer.” And those who do not turn to tyrants and dictators live in a state of constant stress and anxiety. Is it any wonder why Americans are suffering from mental health crises?

There is a real danger in a society that fails to offer meaningful security to such large groups of its population. I believe we are already seeing the cracks.

How have we gotten here? Beyond the need for food, shelter, and security, there is a need for self-esteem and self-respect. Self-esteem is based on achievement, self-respect, independence, freedom, and it is also based on how one is viewed in the eyes of others (reputation and prestige).

Strength, esteem, respect. In a consumeristic culture, where does this derive? For too many in our social framework, material possessions and achievements mark a person’s strength, esteem, and respect. Those who can afford to regularly consume feed the very frameworks that lead to inequality and wealth disparity.

Self-actualization is higher than all these. For Maslow “a musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy.” To self-actualize is to achieve one’s greatest human potential. When one’s greatest human potential is tied inextricably to the capitalist project—as it often is in our culture, we may conflate self-actualization with self-esteem and the lower needs of security. But when the vast majority of us are spending the vast majority of our time trying to pay the bills, there’s less and less time for self-actualization.

About self-actualization Maslow explains: “The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. In one individual it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions. It is not necessarily a creative urge although in people who have any capacities for creation it will take this form.”

Fulfillment must be more than what we own. I think we all know this on a fundamental level, even Kim Kardashian. Maslow himself was perplexed because he noted that science did not know much about self-actualization and that “basically satisfied people are the exception.”

Why all this lack of satisfaction? Why is it that those in our culture whose basic needs are met still feel at a loss? Why is it that the seemingly self-actualized among us, the famous musicians or actors, for example, still express a wish for more?

Did Maslow miss a rung? Should there be a rung for spiritual actualization? Or maybe so many in our culture, in the pursuit of higher achievements, miss rungs along the way—love, belonging and connection go out the window in the pursuit of respect or self-actualization?

Perhaps it is humanity’s ability to put aside essential needs in pursuit of higher ones that leads to confusion. There are cases where the hierarchy of needs can be inverted, where a person with a strong creative drive can give up food and water for a time to meet his or her creative drive; there are people for whom power and respect are more important than love. When we omit important aspects of our human needs, something essential gets lost.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been critiqued as an oversimplification of human drives and motivation. And yet, the hierarchy so captures the popular imagination that we must look at it closely when discussing motivation. And it does describe some of the things that do seem to contribute to the richness of human life.

I also don’t think it can so easily be used to explain the behaviors of society as a whole. What motivates the culture is not necessary what motivates the individual, especially if self-actualization is not the goal of the culture. I wonder what would happen if self-actualization became a goal of the culture as a whole. If we, as a culture and society, started from the bottom of the pyramid, and made sure everyone was fed and sheltered first, and then worked on the rest of it, where would we be?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

We have no names for what we cannot see. The Sapir-Wharf hypothesis holds that language shapes the way we think about reality; thought is shaped by the language one speaks. There are some debates about how strict the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis should be interpreted, with some believing that language shapes thought in a strict sense, and others believing that language shapes thought in a looser sense. In the strict sense, a person who didn’t know any language well, would not be able to think well, while the looser sense holds that a person without a strong grasp of language can think but may not be able to express those thoughts in a complex or intelligible manner.

If this is true, the death of a language represents not only the death of a culture, but also the death of a way of seeing the world, a way of being in the world. One of the moments in Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World that stuck with me was the scene where Herzog interviews a linguist who studies dying languages. At the end of the interview, Herzog notes: “It is the sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable while no one embraces the last speakers of a language.”

National Geographic reports that every two weeks, a language dies. One third of all the languages in the world have fewer than one thousand remaining speakers.

When a language dies, culture dies. And when language is preserved, culture is likewise preserved. We don’t often talk about the collateral damage that follows from the death of a language. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her stunning collection of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom and the Teachings of Plants explores the various losses that accumulate when we lose touch with indigenous wisdom—the loss of language being among the most tragic.

“Learning the Grammar of Animacy” is one of the most beautiful and fascinating essays in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom and the Teachings of Plants. Kimmerer explains that her native language is Bodewadmimwin, or Potawatomi. Before contact, there were 350 indigenous languages in the Americas. But now, many of these languages are threatened.

Just a few generations ago, indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in missionary boarding schools where they were taught English and punished for speaking their native languages and practicing the old ways. Of the many crimes committed against indigenous societies by missionaries, I think this was probably the greatest. As if the removal of people from their land wasn’t enough, the missionaries wanted wholesale annihilation—they wanted to erase languages, culture, religion, art, and a way of being in the world.

How many fluent speakers of Potawatomi exist?

Nine.

What is lost when a language dies?

Wisdom. Jokes. Medicine. Stories. Art. An understanding of the world that can only be captured by fluency.

Kimmerer describes her experience of taking a language class with the last speakers of her family’s ancient language. During the class, a native speaker becomes animated as he tells a joke. Kimmerer explains that in Potawatomi, “a small slip of the tongue can convert ‘We need more firewood’ to ‘take off your clothes.’” The anecdote struck me, not just for its humor, but for how much it revealed about the life of the speakers. I found myself imagining the dying embers of a fire from a party that had maybe lingered well into the night. A man turns to a woman, and asks for more firewood…or did he?

In English, words are divided into verbs and nouns, with nouns making up the majority of English words. “Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi that proportion is 70 percent.” In English, something is either a person, place, or thing. In Potawatomi, verbs and nouns are either animate or inanimate. What is unique about Potawatomi is that things traditionally seen as inanimate in English are seen as having life or having being in Potawatomi.

What does it mean to imbue life into things? What does it mean to imbue life into the natural world in this way?

“A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word.” In English, natural things are represented as objects, while in Potawatomi, natural things are beings.

About English speakers, Kimmerer explains, “When we tell them that the tree is not a who, but an it, we make that maple an object we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation. Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’”

Moral responsibility can be built into the language and its speakers. If birds are whos and not its we may be more inclined to treat birds better. If water is perceived as a being, as having a life outside our sinks and toilet bowls, we might be more inclined to think about where our water has come from and where it goes once it passes over our skin or through our bodies.

The death of indigenous languages is the death of a way of thinking about the world, a way of thinking that is incredibly crucial given the global emergency of climate change. In order to survive, our society will need more than band-aids, more than technology. We will need to rethink our relationship to the world.

Are these languages doomed to die? There is one case study that offers hope—that helps us understand what can happen when people come together to save a language from extinction.

One year after I was born, in 1985, there were only 32 children in Hawai’i who spoke native Hawaiian. According to NPR, in the 1970s, there were only about 2000 people alive who had spoken Hawaiian since birth. In 1896, after the overthrow of the monarchy in Hawai’i, Hawaiian was no longer taught in schools and in fact, was banned, according to the University of Hawai’i Foundation. It only takes one generation to lose a language, but it takes three generations to recover a language.

During the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, there was a movement to reclaim the language. In the 1980s, Hawaiian immersion schools were created. Now 2000 students are served by these programs. The University of Hawai’i now offers a bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. programs in Hawaiian languages.

Do I hear people speaking Hawaiian in public places in Honolulu, where I now live? No. But I do hear Hawaiian words used in place of English. My boyfriend and I are trying to learn the Hawaiian names for common things. Duolingo includes Hawaiian as one of the languages you can learn in the app. Given that Hawaiian words are often used in everyday conversation in Hawai’i, I found myself pleased to take a few of the early lessons without having to look up unfamiliar words.

Kimmerer believes that to understand a place, you need to speak its language. Kimmerer talks of elders who tell her that the plants and animals love to hear the old languages spoken.

I can say that my life has indeed been enriched by understanding that nalu is the word for wave. That kai is the sea. And honu is sea turtle.

And yet, Hawaiian remains an endangered language.

Werner Herzog drew a distinction between tree huggers and those who embraced the speakers of a dying language. Perhaps we don’t need a distinction. What if by embracing the speakers of a dying language, and their way of being, we could rebuild our relationship to the world?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

I recently indulged on a Sunday afternoon and binge watched several hours of Master Classes. Master Class, for those who don’t know, is a Netflix-like streaming service, where, instead of movies and television series, you can binge watch lectures delivered by some of the world’s best and brightest. 

Somewhere in between learning how to do an ollie from Tony Hawk and learning about “tactical empathy” from Chris Voss, I found myself watching a video featuring Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning economist. The title of the video caught my attention, “Inequality: Our Divided Society.” In the video, Krugman attempts to explain the reasons for income inequality in our society and offers ways in which individuals can advocate for justice.

If I have to think about the greatest challenges facing humanity today, I think the greatest is climate change (which threatens everything from biodiversity to food availability), but a close second challenge is inequality. In fact, I’d argue that obscene disparities of wealth contribute to the slow-moving train wreck that has been our global response to climate change.

Inequality impacts society as a whole. If you cannot pay for food, you’ll be undernourished and also limited in your ability to excel in other areas of your life. Children who suffer from food insecurity face ongoing challenges in their future success later in life. Researchers have found that food insecurity is correlated with poor academic outcomes in children. If you cannot pay for health care, you’ll delay seeking care until your disease has progressed to a point that it is untreatable, or to a point where only palliative care is possible. If you cannot pay for shelter, you’ll be homeless, and suffer all the indignities, and health challenges that homelessness brings. If you cannot pay for education, you’ll either be undereducated and lose out on opportunities, or you’ll be a life-long indentured servant to your college student debt. Even those who don’t suffer the most extreme consequences of inequality in our society, suffer from ongoing stress of precarity. Many don’t have enough savings to make it through one major emergency, much less a 9-month long (and counting) pandemic. Many are uncertain about job stability. Many are not making enough money to make ends meet.

Paul Krugman, in his lesson on inequality, attempts to explain the growing disparity of wealth in America. Krugman opens his lecture by explaining that “economists don’t necessarily understand everything that’s going on,” when noting that economists don’t always have easy answers for why income inequality exists to the degree it does. Krugman cites technological advancements, globalization (the loss of blue-collar jobs due to imports from China), and changes to “institutions and social norms” as some of the reasons why inequality exists.

Krugman notes that changes in technology and trade are not sufficient to explain income inequality. He believes that social norms and politics drive inequality. Most notably, the decline of unions has contributed to vast disparities of wealth between worker pay and CEO pay.

Inequality is a problem and it is not just an economic problem. Krugman explains that income and wealth inequality drives government dysfunction. When it comes to wealth disparity and politics, “the center cannot hold” to quote the great poet, W.B. Yeats. Research reveals that periods of greatest income inequality in America correlated to periods of greatest partisanship and divided government in America.

What is the path to reducing wealth and income inequality? Krugman believes that policy change is key. He notes that “you can’t rely upon markets to deliver justice.”

So, given that change needs to occur on a political level, what are some things we can advocate for?

• Improve the social safety net. Make sure the food stamps program (WIC) actually covers real food costs (right now, it doesn’t), and make sure that every person who is facing food insecurity has access to the program. Make sure that people have access to affordable health care. A medical bill shouldn’t ruin you financially, and health insurance shouldn’t take up a significant portion of a family’s earnings. Every other wealthy country in the world guarantees people basic health care services. Finally, ensure that everyone has a right to shelter. We need affordable housing; that is, housing costs need to reflect the minimum wage. And if housing costs don’t reflect the minimum wage, either rent needs to be capped or the minimum wage needs to go up.
• Fight for higher minimum wage and advocate for unions and collective bargaining. Again, the minimum wage needs to reflect the cost of living. Krugman notes that if you care about equality, you should be advocating for workers’ rights to unionize.

How do these policy changes get implemented in a divided government? People need to demand a representative democracy.

Republicans hold the majority in the Senate, even though a majority of voters support Democrats. Democrats represent more voters in the Senate, but they are still outnumbered by Republicans who represent fewer voters. Five times in U.S. history, the U.S. president lost the popular vote, but still won the election due to the Electoral College. We deserve better. Putting an end to gerrymandering is one start, but the solution may involve a restructuring of the Senate to better reflect the population it represents.  

Perhaps the real solution to inequality would involve finding unity in our deeply divided country.

Unionization works because workers band together and strike. Essential workers keep this country running. Statistics indicate that about 52% of Americans cannot make ends meet. That’s a majority of the country. A country divided protects the oligarchy (power by the wealthy) because a divided country will never band together for collective justice. It is in the interests of the top 1% that people remain divided. I wonder what would happen if the majority struggling to make ends meet joined forces and went on strike (joined also by allies interested in a more equal and just society). What would happen if all us struggling with health care bills, food insecurity, crushing student loan debt, and those of us living paycheck to paycheck said enough was enough?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

If you spend enough time in the water in Hawai’i, you’ll eventually meet the green sea turtle. The turtle comes to those who are patient, to those who watch. And if you watch the sea closely enough, and long enough, you learn that the green sea turtle serves as a messenger, a signal. When you are surfing, the sea turtle always surfaces right before the bigger waves come through. In larger waves, I have even seen the sea turtle getting pulled up into the surf. When I am scared in the swell, and I see the turtle nearby, I know I am safe. I also know it is time to paddle out to sea, to be in position for the bigger waves, and to avoid getting a wave on the head.

If you spend enough time in the reef, learning the habits of fish, following them, you’ll eventually encounter the green sea turtle. When you see one for the first time, it is a truly otherworldly experience—they literally seem to materialize out of the blue.

In Hawaiian culture, the honu, or sea turtle, is a messenger, a navigator, and a protector of both the land and the sea. According to the National Park Service, in some Hawaiian legends, the islands are formed on the back of the honu. The sea turtle navigates two worlds: the world of the sea and the world of land. The turtle is a voyager through time. It is Jurassic in the truest sense, having survived the downfall of the dinosaurs. It is a wanderer, spending much of its life exploring the seas, returning to land to lay eggs. Young green sea turtles spend the first five to twenty years of their lives in the open ocean, vulnerable to predators, foraging for food. Little is known of their dangerous and perilous youth.

The sea turtle is born small and vulnerable, and lives many anonymous years in the big ocean, sometimes hiding under pieces of trash to survive, only to become sturdy, able to reside on both the land and sea. Its shell is hard, but it is still soft inside. It dives deep, but needs to surface to breathe. It knows its limitations and these limitations have taught it how to be a keen observer of the swells and tides. It feels the energy of a swell, and knows when to surface. It is naturally curious. I have known turtles to surface once, and then a second time, looking me directly in the eye for a long time.

In the Hawaiian creation story, the Kumulipo, humans come last in the great chain of being. Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her stunning collection of essays, Braiding Sweetgrass explains, “we must look to our teachers among the other species for guidance. Their wisdom is apparent in the way that they live….Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.”

The sea turtle is shaped like a compass for a reason. Like humans, it can reside in two worlds. Like humans, it can dive deep, but must come up for air. It must navigate the vast seas and find its way back to land. We can be guided by the sea turtle, if we pay attention closely. If we follow its lead.

I saw my first sea turtle not in Hawai’i, but in Puerto Rico.

My grandmother used to tell me about Puerto Rico when I was a little girl. At night, the song of the frogs would keep you awake, she explained. The name of the frog is the coqui and its song sounds just like its name.

My grandmother was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to New York when she was a child. She returned to Puerto Rico after my father had been born, but the family left again because my grandfather followed the jobs where they took him. When I was 31 years old, I visited Puerto Rico for the first time. I went there to surf, and also to see the island where my grandmother had been born, and to hear the song of the coqui.

The first night I spent in Rincon, on the west side of the island, I sat awake all night listening to the song of the coqui. The next day I went surfing. In that wild ocean that made me at once terrified and awe-struck, I saw my first green sea turtle. I can’t explain it, but I felt closer to my grandmother sitting with the turtles than I’d ever felt since she had passed away. And so, whenever I saw a sea turtle, it felt a little like my grandmother was visiting me. I have seen sea turtles surfing waves and I have seen them come up to inspect me more closely. On some truly beautiful days, I have surfed beside them. They surf. They do.

It wasn’t until I moved to Hawai’i that I learned about the concept of the aumakua, an ancestor who has passed away and returned in animal form as a guide and protector. I think this is why I always feel safe when I see the green sea turtle in the water. Hawai’i is very different from Puerto Rico and also, in some ways, very similar.

On the big Island of Hawai’i, at night, I hear a familiar song.

Puerto Ricans were brought to Hawai’i to work on the sugarcane plantations. Along with the Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, Portuguese, and Chinese, they were brought to the island for their cheap labor. They also brought along with them the coqui. At night on the Big Island of Hawai’i, I hear them.

I am like the green sea turtle. I have spent the years of my youth, wandering the world, drifting, surviving. After many lost years, I have seen the shores where I’ll make my nest.

I come to Hawai’i not as the child of those Puerto Rican plantation workers, but feel somehow destined to be here, drawn here; I feel almost as if my ancestors may somehow be here, even if only in the form of the familiar animals of my grandmother’s birthplace.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

The influence of Rupi Kaur can be seen all over Amanda Lovelace’s debut poetry book the princess saves herself in this one. The use of epigrammatic form devolves often into cliché and the terrible use of enjambment are just the beginning of the similarities. Lovelace and Kaur also walk similar poetic trails: writing on the themes of sexual assault, menstruation, trauma, self-harm, and more.

Trigger Warning: the book contains a “trigger warning.”

Yet, Lovelace does something that Kaur does not do, which is to take a single theme and trope and push it to its limits. Lovelace explores and explodes the trope of the fairy tale. If you were a little girl raised on Disney fairy tale princesses, this book of poetry is for you.

Lovelace is still young enough to believe in the fairy tale ending. As a creator of legal content writing for law firms, I know all too well where that fairy tale ending often ends. Someday someone brilliant will write the next chapter of all our fairy tales: the Cinderella who wants a separation because she wants more for her life than to be a princess stuck in a castle, the Beauty who finally gets the restraining order against the abusive beast, the Ariel who wants a divorce so she can return to the sea because she realizes no man is worth losing your voice or identity over.

Facetiousness aside, Lovelace’s poetry book asks an essential question. How much has the fairy tale princess and the fairy tale itself shaped the female psyche? Lovelace’s speaker is obsessed with books and has transformed her life into a story. Anyone with even a mildly literary imagination can fall victim to this.

But there’s a danger in trying to transform life into a story. Lovelace explores this in one of the early poems in the book: “life—/the thing/ that happens to us/ while we’re off / somewhere else… wishing / ourselves into / the pages of / our favorite / fairy tales.”

Unlike Kaur’s poetry, which I think could use an editor, some of Lovelace’s poems read as more mature, complete, and well-rounded. (This doesn’t mean that Lovelace couldn’t also benefit from a stronger editorial eye.) The simple fairy tale trope is doing the majority of the heavy lifting. When Lovelace pulls it off, the poems work because the fairy tale theme and subject matter create multiple levels of meaning. The poems are at their best when the literal theme subverts the fairy tale theme.

The fairy tale theme is a unifying force that adds additional layers to poems that would otherwise be one-note. Yet, this is still the work of an immature poet. The poems that subvert and interrogate the fairy tale princess theme are few and far between, and too many of the poems simply fall into cliché.

Let’s start with the good news. Lovelace’s poem about parental abuse is brilliant. “The queen,” the speaker’s mother, offers the “princess” sugar, but instead, the sugar is salt. This clever conceit sounds very “Princess and the Pea,” but it carries the weight of allegory. The poem lands well (I can maybe forgive the terrible enjambment): “this is what abuse is: / knowing you are / going to get salt / but hoping for sugar / for nineteen years.”

The monsters hiding under the princess’s bed become the boys waiting to tell lies. The ghosts in the room are not ghosts but the haunting memories of sexual assault.

There are moments where better editorial insight might have made the book stronger. There are poems that shouldn’t be in the book at all (some poems work best on Instagram, where many of these pieces first saw the light of day). For example, Lovelace’s poems about social media are sometimes adequate, but work best in the more disposable form of social media. Better yet, they could have been saved for another poetry book written about the perils of social media.

The poems about weight and weight loss could have been better integrated into the fairy tale theme. Lovelace misses an opportunity with these that I believe a stronger, or more experienced poet may not have missed.

Lovelace’s parody of Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” is almost good—I took the time to distill it down to its essence. The poem could be reduced to three stanzas, pack more punch, and still convey the same general idea. If Lovelace had been a fellow student in one of my Columbia University M.F.A. workshops, this is what I would have suggested for her poem:

And yet, within the haystack of this too-long book, there are beautiful needles looped with the finest of threads. The poem where the speaker finds the dead body of a loved one is stunning. The speaker finds the body with a “mouth opened/wide enough/to suck all the oxygen/from the room,/wide enough/to plant lilies in.” I wouldn’t change a word here.

If fairy tale is the use of melodrama to narrative effect, too many of the poems become merely melodramatic because they fail to transform or harness the thematic. The fairy tale is rife with clichés, and using this to structure your entire poetry book is a risky move. If it is not handled in a manner that transforms the material, it comes across as a crutch. You can’t use the fairy tale as a way to disguise cliché, it just comes across as cliché.

I think the most disappointing thing about the book is that it fails to live up to its promise and its title. Maybe the princess saves herself in her own rationalization, but this isn’t a fairy tale without its prince charming.

And so the book ends with the cliché. The prince is real. He comes and saves the princess, despite the title of the book. The latter half of the book reads like a bunch of really bad pop songs. The boy replaces everything. “my boy/he is even/better than/books.” If the princess turned her life into a book and books saved her in the opening sequence, by the latter part of this poetry book, the prince has arrived and resolved the need for books and stories altogether.

And what does a modern princess do once she’s escaped the tower and found her prince charming? Why, she moves to New York, of course. The last section of the book is a weird medley. A person jumps in front of the speaker’s subway train and the speaker memorializes her in a poem (no mention of Anna Karenina, sadly). A man on the street asks the speaker to help him find lost photos. Caught in the millennial rat race, the speaker writes about “working minimum wage jobs/ with college degrees.” But the poems don’t go deeper than this and fail to comment on the conditions of injustice, or social and racial inequity that got us here to begin with.

The conceit of the fairy tale gets lost in the real world, and Lovelace’s strengths are in the conceit.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

With a healthy skepticism I began watching “Inside Bill’s Brain,” a recent Netflix documentary by Davis Guggenheim that promises to delve into the inner workings of Bill Gates’s brain. Wealthy white men have more often than not been the architects of the world’s problems and not their solution, and any story that presents another wealthy white man as the solution to the world’s problems is bound to bring with it a little nausea and healthy concern. So much time has been spent worrying about the minds and thoughts of wealthy white men, and I wondered why we needed another three-part documentary to this end.

Variety has published a deftly written article about the dangers of “celebrity hagiography,” a new genre of documentary biopic that celebrates our cultural heroes by presenting uncomplicated puff pieces about these figures. “Inside Bill’s Brain” is part puff piece. But it is also a documentary about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and both Bill and Melinda Gates’s collective attempt to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

This is less a documentary about Bill Gates than it is a documentary about the work of the foundation, which is run in equal measure by both Bill and Melinda. And while the documentary is adamant in making the point that Melinda is just as much responsible for the foundation as Bill is, Melinda’s voice gets lost in the mix. When she’s interviewed, she’s asked about Bill, not really about her role in the foundation. Once again, the wife is relegated to the role of helpmate, while Bill is left to explain the intricacies of saving the world. I wanted to see Melinda at work. Instead, she’s sitting in a room laughing about the title of the documentary.

This should have been a documentary about Bill and Melinda, but the documentary’s title is “Inside Bill’s Brain” and Guggenheim didn’t have the vision to push the documentary further than that.  

The value proposition underlying the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the concept that “all lives have equal value.” To this end, Bill and Melinda Gates strategically invest their money to solve what they believe to be the greatest challenges facing humanity. In the first episodes of “Inside Bill’s Brain” we learn that a great deal of Bill’s time and money has gone into focusing on poop. More specifically, on finding a way to create an affordable toilet that can be used in the developing world. The CDC notes that diarrhea kills more than 2000 children every day.

Interestingly, the documentary doesn’t go into too much detail about wastewater treatment in America, but thankfully, there’s an Atlantic article for that. 20% of Americans use septic tanks and 80% send their waste to municipal water treatment plants. Septic tanks separate waste into liquid and sludge portions. The liquid portion is dispersed into the soil, where natural microbes take care of it. If the tank is working well, the liquid part should never pose a risk to groundwater, but eventually the sludge builds up and needs to be cleaned—pumped out. Wastewater treatment plants work similarly, but on a larger scale.

The problem with wastewater treatment in America is that periodically wastewater is released directly into the ocean, or environment, especially when the plant gets overwhelmed. As the population grows, and as wastewater treatment plants become overwhelmed by storms or power outages, we may find more cases where waste is released directly into the environment. Many wastewater treatment plants have to handle both toilet waste and stormwater drainage. The consequences when storms hit are catastrophic if you’re thinking about water treatment catastrophe. The Atlantic reports that the consequences of these dumps can be catastrophic for people and the environment: fish died off after a dump in Long Island, and Toledo, Ohio’s drinking water was rendered undrinkable. Because, yes, just like in the developing world, we source our drinking water from the same places we dump our sewage, and if it isn’t clean, we’re screwed. I recall surfing in Rockaway Beach after a storm, suddenly finding myself surrounded by what I will disgustingly call “shit buoys.”

The Gates documentary seemed to present the idea that gastrointestinal distress due to mixing of clean water and sewage water was a third-world or developing world problem. The reality is that this is also increasingly becoming an America problem—especially as infrastructure continues to be neglected in favor of tax cuts for the rich. Sending money abroad to solve a problem we’d like to believe has been solved at home, but—surprise—hasn’t really been solved at home, maybe doesn’t solve the problem at all.

I won’t spend too long commenting on how there was something cathartic in watching one of the world’s wealthiest men spend his days thinking about shit. It made me feel like I should probably spend more of my time thinking about shit and where my shit goes.

One of the most memorable (for me) moments of the documentary involved a conversation Gates has with security backstage before he gives a lecture about toilets. The security guard tells him two things. One, that he has purposefully cracked all the waters in the podium, so that all Gates needs to do is drink up, and that Gates’s poop specimen (a cup of shit he’ll use as a prop during his talk) is also in the podium. Gates is quick to ask whether security has taken the time to keep the water properly separated from the poop sample. And perhaps this sequence alone could serve as an adequate allegory for the film as a whole.  

Gates succeeds in bringing affordable toilets to the developing world, but his other mission, to shift the world’s reliance on coal to nuclear, won’t be so easy. The documentary makes a strong case for why the world should give a nuclear energy a second chance, and introduces us to a group of scientists trying to make nuclear safer with less byproduct than nuclear of the past. I’m not sure whether Gates’s solution is the right one or only one available, but I wish more wealthy people spent their money and time trying to make the world genuinely better (like Gates genuinely seems to be trying to do) rather than just thinking about ways they can send rockets into space to leave said world.

The narrative of the wealthy philanthropist doesn’t excuse inequality, no matter how humane it paints Gates and his good buddy, Warren Buffet. Sure, Buffet it no Koch brother, but rather than questioning the structures of a society that permits such wealth to exist in the hands of so few, the docuseries celebrates these men for choosing to use their wealth to make the world a better place. Yes, I’m glad Gates and Buffet are trying to make the world a better place, and I do indeed wish that more wealthy people followed their example, but the documentary could certainly have looked at the darker side of Gates’s company and wealth.

The benefit of a documentary that creates “celebrity hagiography” to quote Variety, is that it offers models of goodness that others might follow. I do indeed hope that more intelligent men make it a goal to read as voraciously at Gates, and that they aim to use their wealth, power, and privilege for good.

But I still wonder what gets lost when we, as a society, rely on the philanthropy of a few wealthy men rather than demand a more transparent government to ensure equality for all? The world suffers from immense disparities of access to healthcare and food, but children in America similarly suffer. When men like Gates are not asked to pay higher taxes, children at home suffer. Buffet, to be fair, has commented on this. It should not be the role of private citizens to play the role of government nor should a single individual be responsible for the social safety net.

But Gates (and the documentary, for all its social consciousness) doesn’t talk about these issues.

And while I found myself endeared to see Gates’s menagerie of fascinating friends (my favorite was the guy who wrote a paper on the physics of dinosaur tails and a five-volume meditation on bread), I also couldn’t help but feel like I was watching the product of a culture bloated beyond its own good, so enamored and engorged by its own excesses, that it couldn’t see the shit on which it was standing.

Bill Gates grew up in a comfortable wealthy family where he was given every opportunity and then some to success. Yes, it is clear that he had natural talent, but that talent was nurtured and coddled and celebrated every step of the way. Not all children are so lucky.

If every life has equal value as his foundation notes, what world would we live in if every child had the opportunities Gates had from the start? The myth of genius is that he is singular, alone, and self-made. The biggest good that comes from the docuseries, Inside Bill’s Brain is that Gates was anything but self-made, but as much a product of his time, culture, and background.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

One of the best songs on Taylor Swift’s album, evermore, is “Champagne Problems,” which she co-wrote with Joe Alwyn. While fans have mined Swift’s songs in an attempt to peer into her personal life, I’m more interested in Swift’s ability to use her songs to comment on aspects of the female experience seldom explored in music, or explored, but only haphazardly so. Swift claims that her songs are based upon fictional characters and scenarios, but much like a poet writing a persona poem, the characters offer a channel through which the artist can explore difficult themes common to all of us. The songs resonate not because they are confessional or not-confessional, but because, in their ability to fictionalize raw experience, they capture something true about the human experience.

Elle reports that Swift herself has said that “Champage Problems” is based upon the premise of two college sweethearts meeting for a night, one with a plan to propose, and one with the plan to break up.

Google “rejected engagement proposal” and you’ll find cringeworthy stories of women saying no to marriage proposals in front of basketball stadiums, women saying no in front of the guy’s family, women running away. In many of the stories, a woman is put on the spot and is forced to answer an intimate question that involves her entire life in front of friends and family, or worse, strangers.

Engagement proposals are incredibly romantic, and they can be wonderful.

But.

If a romantic engagement proposal happens after a couple has sat down together, discussed their future, and mutually agreed that they want to spend their lives together, (and both understand what that means), a marriage proposal can be a beautiful celebration of that decision. But when a marriage proposal comes without such a discussion, and especially when it occurs in a public setting or among family and friends, it can become coercive. A woman put on the spot might feel forced to say yes. And if she says no, she becomes that woman. The fictional character in “Champagne Problems” is that woman.

The woman wants to break up and the guy, either clueless, or so thrilled and wrapped up in his own feelings that he doesn’t consider the girl’s feelings, proposes. The core of the song is the theme of miscommunication in relationships, and the heartbreak that follows when two people are in different places. 

The song is excellent because not only does it capture the woman’s pain in such a scenario. (We are always so quick to see how painful it would be to be the guy, but Swift puts the focus on how it also hurts to be the girl; I sure wouldn’t want to be the girl in that scenario.)

Swift is also deftly able to show how the culture perceives such a woman. Swift sings about the town talking afterward: “She would have made a lovely bride/ What a shame she’s fucked in the head.”

When a man isn’t ready to commit, he’s commitment phobic, or just young. When a woman is not ready to commit, she must be fucked in the head.

In its ideal form, the marriage proposal is a public performance that enacts an authentic sentiment. I think of how so many of Shakespeare’s plays concern themselves with the blurred lined between the authentic and the performative. The audience doesn’t forgive the actor who reveals the performance as such. In a marriage proposal the guy is the active agent, and all the girl has to do is provide a passive yes.

The public ceremony of the marriage proposal reinforces the idea that women are to be passive, even when making important life-altering decisions. I think a marriage proposal can be an incredibly romantic celebration (and therefore a performance), but if it is not a performance for the woman, but rather an authentic question posed in the moment, then I think the public marriage proposal is problematic. Is Swift seeing this when she sings “One for the money, two for the show?”

Swift manages to deftly capture the way the culture responds to a woman who doesn’t “play her role” in such a scene. The people talk about the girl and console the guy telling him he’ll “find the real thing instead.” But what is the woman’s “real thing”? Does the culture even care?

And this comes back to Swift herself. Seventeen magazine writes about the “gossip often spread about Taylor, specifically those who talk about why she isn’t married yet.”

In many ways, we still live with the Victorian mentality that if a woman reaches a certain age and isn’t married, there must be “something wrong with her.” Swift, who is 30, is at an age when many women in her peer group are decidedly settling down (or have settled down already).

Why isn’t Swift married? “I couldn’t give a reason,” she sings. In response to the societal pressure to get married and reproduce, more women are choosing to do neither and aren’t offering excuses.

“Champagne Problems” is interesting in another way. There are enough songs about women leaving cheating men, leaving men who emotionally abused them, leaving men who were no good, but what about the song about a woman leaving a good man, whom she still loves? What about the song about a woman leaving a man who loves her enough to commit?

Swift imagines a world where a woman can say no, without just cause–and sing about it.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.