Great Thoughts

I can’t take your call right now; I’m busy thinking great thoughts. They’re so great they don’t fit inside my head. I got it; I got.; I don’t got it. Great thoughts are slippery, too slick to attach themselves. No Velcro. When they appear as a glimpse and vanish in a puff, I should know they were undeliverable, not for my eyes, not in this tide. There goes another one, something epochal, gone.

Great thoughts are to be discovered, not received. If you meet the Buddha, or a guru or your all-knowing father on the road, kill him. Not as a homicide, just ignore him to death.

Yet, I reach for the beyond. It's a bad habit. An impulse for threads. If I am fixed on a bowl, I admire its shape or shapelessness, the aperture, the walls, clay transformed, wood with burls, a vessel like hands make, flawed like humans. The tiny hole at the bottom not to offend the gods. The imperfection, the way every poem fails.  Words, merely.            

Sherlock reached. He knew the tobacco smoked in the Cappadocia region of Turkey matched the whiff of the suspect … given Basil Rathbone’s considerable nose to say nothing of the Orient Express which arrived at Hammersmith Station in time for Moriarity to take the stage to Baskerville releasing the hounds. The game was afoot, and he would set the world right. Elementary, he declared, deductively.

He took the big idea and wrestled it to the mat. Or you can start with the word scoop as in ice cream, or the investigative story that would move a cub reporter to the newsroom, to the editorial staff, to praline fudge ripple, to breaking news, a thirty-minute slot on as a pundit on Sunday morning cable and a three-book deal. It all makes sense as inductive logic. This, therefore, that.

Inductively, we can presume that the good guys should have won the Spanish Civil War against the four insurgent generals since we had the best songs.  Cherry-picking can turn a pie in the sky to a pie in the face.

Can it be that the down-trodden masses would cast their lot for the man most likely to throw them under the bus and grind them into his own off-ramp? Magnificent thoughts are born of small stuff but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a promise is made of hot air and the emperor’s clothes are at the all-night laundromat in the spin cycle.

Here's Looking At You

Backward and forward gazes the Janus Head. Looking at both sides now. Giving birth to the month, January.

Remembrance of Things Past. Through a Glass Darkly.  Goodbye / Hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye; I say hello. G’day, What’s up? Good morning sun. The start of something big.

It’s a Wonderful World when you take Ovid out of Covid, the pox out of MAGA's vox populi. Looking for the Yes in yesterday, easier than locating the fun in dysfunction or the word in sword but here’s my calendar with all those empty squares, life-to-be, filled with cups of kindness yet for Miracles on 34th Street and Auld Lang Syne:

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere / and gie’s a hand o’ thine!........ And we’ll take a right gude-willie waught / For auld lang syne.

It makes good sense when you bend an elbow and down a few pints with mates.

Have I arrived where I began, knowing the place for the first time? There’s no arrival, I am just on my way but noticing the overlooked and listening past rhetorical chatter. The magnificent canvas outside my window astonishes my senses. Loving friends seed creativity. It is all a gift and for that I am grateful and feel a rush of reverence, an intimacy with the unknown.

I’ll be a year older this year than I was yesterday, so says the calendar of my bones. Even in this digital age, as the big clock spins, there is a child alive in my marrow. While tempus may fugit, another measure of time can stop on command, responsive only to our exuberance for life and alignment with the pulse of music in the spheres.

As Robert Bly put it in bis poem, Wanting To Steal Time………….

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, / I want to tie the two arms together, / And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.

 

 

 

 

 

 

List / Lust

The verbs, to Lust and to List, have common roots. An intense desire morphed into an inclination to one side as in a boat listing and finally to a shopping list or as one might have said in the 19^th century, a Chopin Liszt. 

All of which leads to one’s preferences as in a year-end summation of the most notable. Count me out. This will be a list of why I don’t make lists.

Since my memory is both too short and too long, I stay away from such conventions. Too short to remember what happened 2-3 weeks ago and too long so that 70 years ago seems like yesterday.

I could list my favorite vegetables: asparagus, eggplant and beets but then again, I might also say artichoke, squash and yams. And what about spinach, corn and cauliflower, but really who cares? Not me.

Lists change because we are alive, and the world doesn’t hold still for a minute. If I made a list of my favorite books or movies today, I could be sure to have left out a few for tomorrow’s list.

The worst thing about lists is the verticality, the hierarchy which relegates one work of art above or below another. It speaks to our competitive nature which demands winners and losers. I'm thinking about all those acceptance speeches we'll never hear, of deathless prose, crumpled up in the purses and tuxedos of also-rans. 

Peggy and I went to Europe eleven times. When someone asks what my favorite trip was, I say they were all tied for first place. Nor do I rank my friends. Everyone has something different to make them outstanding and perhaps each taps into a slightly different version of myself.

Must we really choose between Ella and Billie? Mozart and Beethoven? Kieslowski and Bergman? Streep and ? Make room for all of them.  

Lastly on my list of no-lists is that it is an indulgence to fix our gaze backward. If we are to live in the now, it calls for lusting after the bliss of unknowing, that life still to be lived.

 

Homecoming

119 million people are traveling this holiday season. Since my family never celebrated either Chanukah or Christmas, my recollections are few except for all those vivid memories that never quite happened.

What did happen was the dread I felt in 5th grade when we were assigned to draw a holiday scene. A one-horse open sleigh was not in my skill set. Even a picture of hanging stockings was beyond me. If I'd known about abstract expressionism I might have gotten a gold star. As it was, with a nickel and quarter I traced a thirty-cent snowman and called it a day. (It's O.K. not to be good at everything).

Another almost true experience happened at around age twelve. For one day I worked in a Christmas tree lot in Forest Hills, which had neither forest nor hills. I didn’t return when my nose fell off into a cup of hot cider. 

Then there was the time when I sped down an incline in my flexible flyer. The bottom of the slope was the Grand Central Parkway. Even with my three sweaters to protect me I was never heard from again. It was a quick demise as I recall. For the next eighty-one years I've been enjoying my afterlife.

One year, out of pity, I was given a Monopoly set, the board game which rewarded winners with hotels on Boardwalk. I never got past Marvin Gardens. It was my fate to remain mostly on Baltic and Mediterranean. Life follows art.

Homecoming has always been a popular theme of holiday movies. Prodigal grown-up children return home to siblings or old flames or to reconcile with their crypto-fascist father who beat them for sport...or worse. But it's Ho, Ho, Ho time and all is forgiven over toasted marshmallows, gift-wrapped scarves and a Rockwellian dinner. 

The home, the haunt. That word, haunt, originally meant to visit or appear frequently or as the noun... an old haunt. Nothing haunts us like memory. So, in another version, we return hoping to recover shards of ourselves, which is to say, to recover our youth as it might have been.

In Greek mythology Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War and got a well-deserved short, sharp shock in his kishkes by his wife, Clytemnestra. Ulysses took his time slaying dragons within and the fury of the Gods. When he finally showed up after ten years, he embodied modern man, conniving, pragmatic and ferocious, while Penelope raveled and unraveled the woven tale. 

My brother was never at home in this world. He returned after three years in the army and remembered why he had left. Within a month he was gone again in the grip of his haunts. He died in his thirty-third year, driving in an alcoholic haze. Maybe he heard the mermaids singing.

My life is visited by returning haunts, not spooks but good spirits hovering. Janice is here tending to me lovingly. Lauren and Shari are many miles away, yet I feel them close to me in this room. We are singing off-key in our separate versions of what was, exchanging the gift of ourselves and our amazing journeys.

You can't go home again but we keep rowing toward Eden anyway.

Everyone Loves A Good Story

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land / Hard Working man and brave / He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor" / So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

Poor working people, they followed him around / Sung and shouted gay;/ Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air/ And they lay Jesus Christ in his grave.  Woody Guthrie

Take a tale of subversion with a universal chord and flip it to a hierarchical system in an edifice of opulence and awe and the next thing you know....

I’ve got an idea, said Pope Julius circa 350 A.D., let’s turn this pagan Saturnalia and solstice festival into Jesus’ birthday. I think it has legs. It will quell the unrest and absorb their old ways. The peasants want their holiday, and we’ll declare it a holy-day. It’s a win-win. We can keep the gift-giving, candles and merry-making and sanctify the whole thing. God knows.

Fifteen hundred years later Charles Dickens provided a more secular twist with merry and jolly and Ho, Ho, Ho. Most of all, he went back to the ancient roots of the dying of the light as in Scrooge and the notion of renewal and good will, which aligns the human experience with the winter solstice.

What’s lost in all this myth-making is that it only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. For the other half of our planet the days are longer and brighter. Hold those candles till June 21^st.

Along the way we have Handel’s Messiah, Hallmark cards, Hark the Herald Angels Sing and other hymns, harvested and hacked spruce and Douglas fir (about 35 million in this country, alone), Irving Berlin, funky ornaments, record sales and lots of hallelujahs.

Who’s complaining? Not I. It also comes with an occasional cease fire. Warriors turn into normal human beings for a day or two and then return to their bellicose state.

The darkening days and then a lengthening suggest a sort of backdoor monotheism as a shared human experience. Could it be that one god is in cahoots with the other gods?

Bottom line: We bring in the light to hasten the turning toward the sun and metaphorically toward human possibility. If Jesus is born new, so too, can we be. And you too, Tiny Tim.

I-Thou

 That word, Thou, traveled a long way in my head from another four-letter word with three of the same letters, namely Thug. But enough about his nothingness.

Martin Buber’s 1923 book, I and Thou, sums up what has vanished during these times that try men's souls. The I / Thou relationship elaborated by Buber describes a meeting of intimacy of subject with subject. That word, Thou, takes on a sacred meaning not necessarily in a theological sense, at least in my mind, but in reference to what is in the process of fully tending to the other, the soulfulness of human beings. The Other could be someone close or even a brief encounter with a stranger. It could even be a work of art, a tree or the still-life of a breakfast table … which we relate to in the full presence of our being.

When two people are met there is a third entity born, they have a thing. An alignment, a tacit knowing between them beyond words, a human bond however transient or enduring it may be. When it's there you know it and when it is violated you know that too as when a thug lives on flattery and fealty. When he distances, with insults and ridicule, any who do not bend to his will. 

Let it begin with me, as the song goes. This is what I see as a consciousness with which to go forward. To a certain extent we really are the world, not as it is but as we can repair and remake it. 

If we lived in Gaza or Kiev, daily life would insinuate itself as a matter of survival. By virtue of the cosmic crapshoot which landed us a continent away with an ocean between,

we have only to deal with this assault on decency and dissent. No small thing but not quite existential. 

Life gives us moments, as the poet says, and from these moments we make a life. Many such moments are lost to us in the shadow of perceived walls. More I-Thou ways of being can be perforations of light to get us through the next four years. 

 

1688

If I said to you, 1688, would you immediately think of:

1- The number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour by a new McDonald's in Beijing?
2- The number of lies a certain candidate has told in his political career.

3- The price of Smirnoff's Vodka at Costco marked down from $20?

Let's not always see the same hands. For all I know, they're all true but I'm thinking of the year when the Dutch invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.

One of the first defectors from James to Willliam was John Churchill, great grandfather of Winston. The Churchills have always had a nose for the next best thing.

The Brits don't like to talk about it; in fact, they spin the whole takeover as The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by some but not all. Europe has always been noted for disgruntled monarchs eager to have the multitudes give their lives to settle family squabbles

William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain. No, he did not bring orange juice. He invigorated the parliamentary system, initiated new finances (stock market), made innovations in horticulture, science, the arts and philosophy. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy,

now hanging by a thread.

A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of corporate interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America. This was worse than the trade which brough Babe Ruth from Boston to the Yankees.

Among the club of West European imperialists (Spain, Portugal, France and England), Holland did the least nibbling at the Americas. Their time came and went yet it was not without a trace.

There are currently five million Americans at least partially descended from the Netherlands. They bequeathed to us some heavy hitters including five presidents, Van Buren, the two Roosevelts and the two Bushes. Also of Dutch descent were Walt Whitman, Thomas Edison, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Walter Cronkite, Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep. And let us not forget Old Dutch Cleanser.

We have also kept some of their place names like Brooklyn (Breukelen), Coney Island, Harlem, Staten Island, Schenectady and give my regards to Broadway (Breedeweg).

Look how much more you know now than you did five minutes ago. No need to thank me, just pass a slice of Dutch apple pie and a Heineken.