October, 2005

Time: Wednesday, November 2, 2005 7:00 PM
Location: Left Bank Books
Mark Chmiel—The Book of Mev
Mev Puleo traveled the world as a photojournalist, then brought back images of the poor and suffering. She bore witness to homelessness and to struggles for social change ever alert to how her work might bridge the gap between rich and poor, ignorance and advo-cacy. With the delicacy that befits his subject, Mark Chmiel, professor at both Saint Louis University and Webster University, has written a tribute to his wife’s life and premature death at 32 from a malignant brain tumor. A kaleidoscope of everything from their love letters, to her photographs and interviews with leaders of the Christian liberation theology movement, this remarkable book celebrates the life and work of a unique human being.

by Andrew Wimmer

This book contains multitudes.
Among other things,
some beautiful faces, a spear through the heart,
Chomsky transformed,
and a bunch of hearts and minds wrapped in a tumor.

This is a book about the untimely death
of Mev Puleo, a promising photojournalist,
theologian, and seeker of the truth.
“Blessed are those who mourn.”
And mourn they do.

If you want hagiography, the life of the smiling girl
with the camera who goes to Latin America and
saves everybody, forget it.
Mev calls home to Mark (so embarrassed),
“I’m worn out and can’t make this,
I’m coming back.”
She didn’t expect that. She could do everything.

As later Mark will call friends (worn out),
“Mev has a brain tumor.”
We didn’t expect this.
Our broken hearts.

The seeing eyes.
In the end they’re all we’ve got.
It seems we just don’t have the intellectual
or physical stamina
to pull this off!
We are not going to make it, and precisely
in that lies the resurrection.

If you want hagiography, forget it.
Read something else. A fairy tale, perhaps.
(“They drove a lance through his side, and out flowed
blood and water.”)

Here’s the real story.
Mark was on a high one sunny California day,
mentors were lauding him for his intellectual abilities.
A PhD, life in academia, full steam ahead.
But the morning of Chomsky’s visit to Berkeley
Mark’s brain (and Mev’s brain and Chomsky’s brain) get
all mixed up with a tumor.
The Mark brain, the brain that would love nothing more
than to sit down and read and think
and then read some more,
finds itself holding a tumor,
and is at a loss.

Mark’s earlier work on Elie Wiesel is here radically redone.
It’s tumorized.
And Mark’s life work is here radically redone.
The worthy and unworthy victims that he learned about
from Chomsky are all tossed into a cocked hat and
dragged through a (literally) shitty death.
“A young husband shouldn’t have to write
his wife’s obituary,” he says.
“Human beings shouldn’t have to endure
terrible poverty and live in misery,” she says.

The worthy and unworthy victims are one.
We are all in this together.

A notion first grasped by the intellect
and now felt by the heart.

And thanks to Mark’s beautiful Kaddish
we all emerge full of light and with clearer eyes.

“Blessed are those who mourn.”
(“Why does he dwell on his dead wife?”
“He needs to move on,” they say.)
But the Dangerous Memory has taken root.
It’s all about seeing clearly
and where it leads you.
Pet names, goo-goo eyes, passionate lovemaking, and
brain tumors.
Dead—and not so dead—bodies piled at the edge of a
feeding camp.
What does it mean to move on?

Well, of course Mev was extraordinary.
(OK, let’s indulge in just a little hagiography.)
She was beautiful and funny and smart and sexy and wild
and a whole bunch of other great things.

She was also relentless. She had the bone in her mouth
and wouldn’t let go.
Not everyone knows what to do with the bone.
Mev had more than a few ideas.
That’s what the boy from Louisville fell in love with,
the clear eyes and the bone.
His Hound of Heaven.
(There was hardly any time to sleep.)

And then his beloved rebbe Noam Chomsky
comes to town, and what a day it’s going to be.
How can life get any better?
Sex in the morning,
Chomsky in the evening.
All but for the strange alarm that day.
Rolling over in bed, Mev’s tumor speaks:
“I belong to Chomsky.”

It’s as if the cock has crowed.
(I’d like to wring that goddammed cock’s neck.)
A massive betrayal?
The heart yanked up into the head and back
into the guts.
And then the guts are on the floor.
The bodies pile up.
(We’re not going to make it.)

Mev’s passionate, tumored heart had uttered a truth
that Mark had long been struggling to understand.
“I belong to Chomsky.”
No longer a contest but a unity,
the intellect finds its true home and takes flight.

“Blessed are those who mourn.”
It comes first.
It’s that first baby step (ha!)
in a wickedly logical progression.
(There goes that zany Nazarene
with his Borscht Belt humor.)
“Blessed are those who mourn.”
It’s the first in an ordered series.
All those other blessed things can only follow.
Hunger and thirst for righteousness,
merciful, pure of heart, peacemaker, whatever.

And thus we can, and do, move on.
So, if you want hagiography,
read something else.
If you want clear eyes
and want to struggle to know the one thing that matters,
read The Book of Mev.
It’s got a blue cover and a lot of nifty photographs.

I think you’ll like it.

–Andrew Wimmer is the founder of Stop Torture Now, a project of the Center for Theology and Social Analysis.

by John Kavanaugh, S.J.

I have often wondered about the long-range value of writing, whether books or articles. It is certainly true that some novels and non-fiction works have shaped my own life, as I was recently reminded when a community of graduate students and professors traded the titles of books that were “transformative” in their lives. But the deepest impact on a person’s life, it still seems to me, is made by encounters with other persons. A new twist on this little mystery happened for me last summer. It took the form of this question: What happens when you read something written by or about people who also strongly influenced you long before the book was written? For me, it made my summer, and it reconnected me to friends who have graced my past.

When I went to Houston to give some talks on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, there was only one place I really wanted to visit. It was the Houston Catholic Worker, Casa Juan Diego. I had heard of ! Mark and Louise Zwick’s uncommon service to the poor—finding jobs, enlisting generous physicians and dentists to help those without insurance, providing food and housing—and I was also inspired by their philosophically nuanced, radically Christian, radically Catholic newspaper. I thought that meeting them might be like meeting Dorothy Day again, a return to those days when she set so many hearts on fire while visiting Jesuit scholastics in Saint Louis. It was. And I regretted the fact that I could be with Mark and Louise for only an hour.

The regret is over. I now have their book, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins, to remember fondly not only my brief time with them and a one-day encounter with Dorothy Day, but also the great “cloud of witnesses” from St. Francis of Assisi and Teresa of ávila to Dostoevsky, Emmanuel Mounier and Peter Maurin. The book reminds us that we have not lost them all. They inhabit our hearts and live! s. And we can only hope that their spirits are cherished in every Cath olic Worker community in the country.

I took The Catholic Worker Movement for spiritual reading during my yearly retreat. The book I used for my guide, however, was The Call to Discernment in Troubled Times, written by Dean Brackley, S.J. Dean could have had an easy life like mine, but the moment he heard of the martyrdom of Jesuits and their associates in El Salvador, he volunteered to teach at the University of Central America. He took the place of an assassinated Jesuit friend I had known from Rome, Ignacio Ellacuría, to work alongside another brother from my seminary days, Jon Sobrino. The memories came flooding to me as I followed Dean’s instructions for the retreat; but they did not diminish the power of his integration of faith and justice, his fidelity to the Spiritual Exercises, his wisdom in discernment. The stirring foreword, written by the copy editor who had been brought from unbelief to faith by her work on the book, is a wonderful tes! timony to the power of the written word.

One Jesuit with whom Dean Brackley teaches is Jon Sobrino. Jon was the pre-eminent “scholastic” when I was in training. He had mastered Aquinas, just as he would later master the many theologians of the modern world. His writings have inspired and consoled countless people, I am sure, but his most recent work, Where Is God: Earthquakes, Terrorism, Barbarity, and Hope, helped me face the demons of the world, just as Dean helped me face my interior demons. Sobrino’s is a pure heart and a laser mind. He consoles, but he troubles. He leads us into the mystery of redemption, but he exacts a painful honesty. For North Americans, the invitation he makes is welcome but troubling. We should read this work not only for our edification, but also for our reform.

People like Dorothy Day and Jon Sobrino enkindled the zeal of a luminous student with whom I once worked, Mev Puleo. When she died of brain cancer in her early 3! 0’s, I was the celebrant at her funeral Mass. As is the case with those who are so close to me, I remember almost nothing of the time of her diminishment and the commemoration of her life. I grasp for threads of memory, scrounge for occasions that I can see her face or hear the tone of her voice. I search for sounds and sights, of her voice before she lost it, of her bountiful hair before it fell away, of her bright eyes before they grew dim.

Then her husband and widower, God bless him, decided to write of her, to share their life, to unveil her years. Mark Chmiel brought it all back to me in The Book of Mev. Mev Puleo was stunning, uncommon in speech, rare in imagination and singular in her love of life and commitment to justice. Her husband’s book helped me remember. Dismembered, I was put back together by him, re-membered in my memory. And she lives, now not only for me, but also for others who were not graced by her presence.

It may be that the greatest books are in some way the deepest revelations of persona! l life. Now, when I think back on those earlier writings that were “transformative” for me, whether gifts from Dante, Dostoevsky or Anne Frank, it seems I actually came to know those people. I may never have met them, but by their word, even in lowly print, they live with me as a holy presence.

John F. Kavanaugh, S.J., is a professor of philosophy at St. Louis University in St. Louis, Mo. This review-article was published in America magazine, October 14, 2005.