Devon Marsh

Two years ago I went on a memorable overnight hike in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area. I wrote an essay about my experience and submitted it to a few literary journals that focus on place, geography, history, and ecology. The journal I thought might provide the best home for my essay kept it for over a year. The editors offered no update, and the status of my submission never changed from “In Progress” in the submission portal.

I like my essay. I want to share it, even with a small audience. So today I withdrew it from the unresponsive editors and posted here on my own website. Please enjoy A River of Many Cliffs.

In January 2019, I posted a short essay on Facebook to share my thoughts on masculinity. This was in the months following the rancorous confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and near the height of the Me Too movement. The topic of masculinity came up in a number of public discussions around that time. I thought some people who spoke out made overly-broad statements, even though their criticism of particular men–and even categories of men–were rooted in truth and verifiable facts. In my essay, I spoke up for the good and wholesome form of masculinity demonstrated by men I admire, and the type I strive to demonstrate myself. A good many friends who are very different in their political and social views liked what I wrote.

Recently I read a book that reminded me of the admirable qualities of masculinity in romantic relationships. It prompted me to find my essay and share it again here. I’d be please if you take a few minutes to read it.

The weather on Tuesday provided a lovely spring night, mild and dry, with a crystal clear sky. Disappointed at having missed the lunar eclipse on Sunday night due to clouds, I set up my telescope to take a few photographs. The best picture I captured shows the Great Hercules Cluster, known formally as Messier Object 13, or M13. The Hercules Cluster lies 22,000 light years from earth. It spans 145 light-years, and its volume contains approximately 300,000 stars. If you’ve ever seen a photo of a globular star cluster, it was probably this one.

Imagine living on a planet orbiting a star near the center of M13. The closest stars to the planet’s own would be just over 2 light years away. There would be a half-dozen or so at that distance, and dozens more at 4 light years, the distance of our sun’s closest neighbor. The night sky would appear as a dense star field, perhaps even too crowded with lights for observers to define constellations. A few close, bright stars would be visible during the day. If we lived on that planet, under those stars, our entire view of the universe would have developed very differently from the view we hold here on Earth. Creation stories, legends, scientific theories, and our sense of divinity would all differ completely from what we believe. And we would believe those different things fervently.

With a prompt and a moderate amount of imagination, you just contemplated a radically unfamiliar view. Not the details of the view, rather the plausibility of its existence in light of an unfamiliar set of conditions. Ironically, the existence of a fantastically different perspective is easier to imagine than the existence of a subtly different view.

We can picture a star-filled sky as seen from a world thousands of light years away, and how that setting could engender a sense of existence different from our own. Why then, is it difficult to appreciate that people here on Earth, under the same sky as us, might hold different beliefs? Why do we default to assumptions that others should share a worldview with us? They obviously wouldn’t if they lived on a different world, under a different sky. They don’t under this sky, either, even when they stand right beside us, searching for our respective fates in the exact same stars.

I didn’t submit many poems to print or online journals in 2021. Fortunately, several of the poems I did submit were accepted, and in three instances the editors nominated my poems for a Pushcart Prize. Poems nominated in 2021 that are selected to receive the prize will appear in The Pushcart Prize XLVII: Best of the Small Presses 2023 Edition in December 2022. Keep your fingers crossed that one of mine makes it into the anthology.

While I wait to learn the results of the Pushcart selection process, I can share the poems here and spotlight the outstanding small presses who published my writing.

First, iamb ~ poetry seen and heard, a beautifully curated online journal that includes voice recordings of authors reading their work, published “Own Fault.” This contemplative piece considers the nature of relationships–between two people, between humans and the natural world, and between an individual and the task at hand. Alongside “Own Fault,” Mark Antony Own at iamb also published “Storm,” and republished “Driftwood — Olympic Peninsula,” which first appeared in River Mouth Review.

Next, Orange Blossom Review published “Like Ones We Took.” Editor John David Harding also recorded and posted a video of me reading the poem.

Finally, “This Room” appeared in the anthology Dark Confessions, by Black Bough Poetry. The wonderful publisher at Black Bough, Matthew M. C. Smith, also included “This Room” in an author spotlight, the Silver Branch series, in July 2021, along with several other of my poems.

I am grateful to these three editors for including my work in their publications, and for nominating three of my poems for a Pushcart Prize. Please check out their websites and the most recent editions of their publications for some of the best contemporary poetry available. I am flattered to be in the company of the fine poets whose work they publish.

My older son received a jury summons today. He can’t serve because he’s in college out of state. That’s too bad: he would be a terrific juror. But so would a lot of people. It won’t be hard for the county to find someone equally qualified to determine the legal fate of another person. For all of our human flaws, we do a decent job of serving as jurors.

I wish the U.S. had representative government that was more like the jury system, in which ordinary citizens were chosen to serve, did their conscientious best, voted based on common sense without blind partisanship, and went home when the job was done.

A representative government modeled after our system for selecting jurors wouldn’t be perfect. But I feel sure it would be more perfect than the cronied, corrupt, mistrusted system of legislative representation we have now. And isn’t “more perfect” the kind of Union we adopted the Constitution to ensure anyway?

If I received a summons to serve in Congress, I would serve. And I would do my best, guided by my conscience on each issue that came up for consideration. And I would trust you to do the same. And when you came home, I would thank you for your service.

One of our favorite national stories tells us we come together in times of crisis. It’s a good story, and often true even if not always true. It rings most consistently true when the crisis comes from outside. From attacks like we suffered at Pearl Harbor and on 9-11. But what about when the attack is nearly invisible, and it brings about division itself as the crisis? That’s what we face now, a national division manufactured by—and certainly amplified by—the efforts of Russia. Other countries fan the flames, but Russia bears most of the blame.

In his recent book, Battlegrounds, retired Lieutenant General and former National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster explains how the Russians under Putin have fomented division in the United States (and other countries, also). He explains it at length, without political bias, and better than I can. I encourage anyone who wants a better understanding of our current national crisis of division to read General McMaster’s book. Whether people read it or not, I encourage everyone to consider how we can overcome the divisiveness that pervades American society right now.

My strongest recommendation for achieving reconciliation is for everyone to swear off broad, blanket statements about groups of people. I’m not asking for people to like everyone, or even to like anyone. I’m simply encouraging people to exert the effort required to understand individual points of view; consider that to the person expressing the view, it has some validity; and seek an understanding of the common ground you might share with that person, regardless of their viewpoint.

I read a comment on Facebook today in which an acquaintance said, “My problem now is that I truly have no respect for people who vote for the #$%@% party (name withheld, because it could be either one) and all that they stand for. Never thought I would feel this strongly but I do.”

Well, that is a problem, and not just for that person. It’s a problem for all of us. It’s exactly the attitude the Russians delight in reading. We will never achieve this country’s potential for strength, social health, and individual wellbeing if attitudes like that persist. The Russians will see to it. If that statement represents your current attitude toward Americans with political views that differ from your own, then you are supporting the Russians and the weak America they are working to ensure, not the strong America you think you’re supporting.

As this year winds down, encourage people to treat each other as individuals, worthy of respect, and discourage the practice of painting entire groups of Americans with a broad brush.

Thank you for reading this far. And Merry Christmas.

I have completed a long-overdue update to my list of published poems. Click on the ‘Poetry’ tab in the menu bar to see the list, with updated links to the poems that appear online. Thanks to everyone who has encouraged these poems and read drafts along the way to publication. All readers and all comments are greatly appreciated. Thank you for spending some time with my poems.

I was born on a Thursday. Thursday’s child has far to go, according to the nursery rhyme. Originally, that meant the child would go far in life. In modern times, the phrase has caused people to think the child has suffered a setback right from the start. I have felt evidence to support both interpretations, yet I remain optimistic. I have been fortunate and privileged for reasons beyond my control.

The hospital in Atlanta where I was born lies four blocks from a small brick building known as Ebenezer Baptist Church. Its minister was not at the church on the day I was born. He was in Alabama, leading the third—and ultimately successful—attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery. The minister led a group of marchers to protest the abuse of civil rights of African Americans. When he and his followers reached the steps of the capitol building in Montgomery, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a speech that has taken on the title, How Long, Not Long. It’s the speech in which King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I have seen that arc curving through my life, searching for the point at which it will intersect the ground where we walk.

We walk on ancient ground. Roads near my birthplace bore Cherokee names because they followed the routes of Native American trails. The house I lived in as a child sat on a battlefield where we found Civil War projectiles in our garden. Our predecessors left marks on the land. We incorporate those marks into the world we build, or they fade altogether and are forgotten. What will become of the marks we make?

Many cities in the southeastern U.S. have a road named for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cities honor the man so we don’t forget his name. Yet other things we do dishonor what Dr. King taught. The privileges that one race enjoys over another, based on implicit bias and written into laws, municipal zoning ordinances, school funding decisions, and corporate policies have been slowly undone, but they are not gone. Their effects persist, as does the bias that produced them. It’s as if we’ve decided in the past half century that some of Dr. King’s teachings were wrong and we’ve politely ignored them. His metaphor about morality bending toward justice, for example. Our failure to incorporate morality into justice in matters of race suggests that we’ve discovered a different natural law: the arc of the moral universe only bends toward justice like an asymptote, approaching but never touching it. Dominant culture has driven the meaning out of Dr. King’s words even though we still pay lip service to them. This is what we do with Native American names for roads and rivers, honoring a people who were driven from their own lands so our predecessors could secure the privilege of land ownership for themselves. And us. We honor to make ourselves feel better about dishonoring.

Roads today bear new names, new markings. A road in Washington, DC now bears bold yellow letters, taking up all of the lanes and stretching blocks. The letters spell out BLACK LIVES MATTER. That’s easy to write or say; our challenge is to honor the statement. Our challenge is to honor Dr. King by doing more than naming roads for him or erecting a monument. Our challenge is to recognize the ground on which we stand, and the present moment of our individual and collective standing, as the moment when we finally bend the moral universe sufficiently to intersect justice. Dr. King asked how long it would take to realize the moment. He concluded, “Not long.” It has probably taken longer than he expected, and certainly longer than he hoped.

I share a date in history with the March from Selma to Montgomery. The speech after the march was a watershed moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement, and the birth of the idea that morality was still only approaching justice. Thursday, March 25, 1965. Thursday’s child has far to go. Now would be a good time for the moment Dr. King envisioned to arrive. Let’s make sure it does.

Risk is the chance that something can go wrong, that something bad can happen. The term “risk management” is a misnomer. No one can manage risk, only do things to reduce its likelihood or severity. We can’t manage risk, therefore the field of risk management focuses on managing controls designed to reduce risk. Effective controls can help prevent bad things from happening.

When we think about the possibility that something bad will happen, our thinking can skew our judgment about controls. In his excellent book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman describes errors in judgment such as the “possibility effect,” which causes highly unlikely outcomes to be weighted disproportionately more than they deserve. Conversely, the “certainty effect” causes outcomes that are almost certain to occur to receive less weight than their probability justifies. Kahneman writes, “When you take the long view of many similar decisions, you can see that paying a premium to avoid a small risk of a large loss is costly… Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.”

As the world confronts the corona virus and COVID-19, scientists and medical professionals appear to be the only ones equipped to make a rational prediction about probable outcomes in various scenarios. They have determined rather conclusively that the corona virus presents a large risk of large loss. The rest of us should heed their guidance instead of speculating about improbable outcomes.

Laypeople posting on social media have questioned the economic impact of the response to COVID-19. They cite the number of deaths from causes such as heart disease and obesity that are often preventable but that people, through conscious choices, fail to prevent. They suggest that our society accepts a certain amount of death even when death could be avoided. This line of thinking has two critical flaws. First, leading a lifestyle at increased risk for heart disease or obesity is largely a personal choice that cannot directly cause the death of another person. Second, weighing loss of life is appropriate in a very few situations, and unethical in most others. A military leader planning an invasion might rightly make a calculation in terms of acceptable loss of life. A leader protecting citizens from attack by an invader—human or viral—should not. For a leader to accept loss of innocent life when defending people from attack is unethical.

Well-written op-ed pieces suggest that the economic toll of measures put in place to flatten the curve of corona virus infection may be too steep a price to pay to prevent COVID-19. In fact, we will never know. In risk management, it is never possible to compare the actual cost of mitigation to the actual cost of unmitigated loss. Successful risk management and loss are mutually exclusive. When risk management is completely effective, its cost will seem excessive. If risk management fails, the losses it allows may be unbearable.

I worry about not having sufficient information to make informed decisions regarding the threat posed by the corona virus. I worry about my family, extended family, and friends. We face the risk that something bad will happen. Bad things are happening; the risk has become not just possible but real. And in this environment, people no better informed than me are second-guessing experts. The actions of a few people may undo effective controls and increase the risk we all face. That should worry everyone.

The brilliant journalist Rebecca West wrote, “After any disturbance … we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.” Let’s rely on experts for their clear thinking during this extreme social, medical, and economic disturbance. Let’s follow their advice. When we come out on the other side of the crisis, we can get together—in person—to develop new ideas about how to do better next time. There will be a next time.