Living a Documentary

The theater of absurd which passed as a presidential speech Tuesday evening was a political rally; a spectacle that disgraced the halls of Congress. It was a rhetorical equivalent of the January 6^th attempted overthrow of our democracy. A litany of lies, insults and arrogance that created a moral violence in the air. 

There was no legislative agenda put forth because he has virtually dismissed the legislature, already, in favor of a despot’s decree. In the maelstrom of his edicts, not a single act addressed the grievances of his constituency. 

Ninety-two years ago, Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control of their parliament and three weeks after that he was granted full dictatorial power. In the interim I was born. From my embryonic sea, I sensed unrest.

The residue of those early years, of swastikas, dust bowl, breadlines and President Roosevelt’s patrician voice were the givens for me the rest of that decade. I was suckled on movies, and this is where I came in. We are now living in the historical moment of a documentary.

Ten years ago, I believed that progress, however slow, was inherent as humankind evolved. Now, I need to be persuaded it isn’t cyclic. We seem to have landed back in time. Can it be that humans are eager to abdicate their autonomy and look for an authority figure to mindlessly follow? Is this a blip in the chronicle or a flaw in the genome?

Indeed, bullies have always been roaming the schoolyards and maybe even embezzled milk money, but I don’t recall a movement to elect them as class president. Or for the class liar insisting that he won after being defeated. What we all knew in 2^nd grade, half of us have forgotten as so-called grownups.

Will the story of the next few years pick up in Bavaria or Brooklyn? Shall we make the world grate again? Or can we remember not to run with scissors but learn to play well with others?

 

 

The Day Zelensky Got Sold Down The River

The hands on the clock ran counter-clockwise

We asserted our right to pillage and loot

For pieces of silver under their soil

Vito Corleone made an offer that got refused

The hungry bear gobbled the salmon

A kindergarten bully knocked over a kid's blocks

Churchill choked on his cigar

Attila the Hun got pardoned

A man at the beach kicked sand in someone's face

A slumlord evicted a family

Stalin, from his mausoleum, applauded

Ivan the Terrible seemed less terrible

A passenger abused the flight attendant because he can.

The U.S. invaded Grenada again.

A murder of crows executed a hummingbird

Walmart closed down Main St.

The oval office grew spikes

A piranha swallowed the goldfish

 

 

 

 

Pistachio Ice Cream Revisited

Imagine placing a jar on a hill in Tennessee as in the Wallace Stevens poem Anecdote of the Jar. The jar took dominion. It tamed the wilderness. The scene was decontextualized as the hill became a table.

A hill of pistachio ice cream changed the table in my eyes and transported me. Enter Proust. I love ice cream, all flavors except those with nuts in them such as butter pecan or pistachio. Or so I had thought. I must have decided that over eighty-five years ago. My seven-year-old self was not to be trusted with such a momentous decision.

Why do we dislike certain foods, I ask you? I suspect my head did not consult my palate. Associative thinking, perhaps. Maybe my shoelace broke at that moment, or I was upset over the war in the Pacific. More likely my older brother hid my tennis ball.

I still have an aversion to butter pecan. But a pecan is not a pistachio. Up to now I have lived my life pistachio deprived. It may explain all my fiscal blunders. Now that I’ve discovered the pinch of pistachio in the creamy green almond pasture, anything can happen.

Forget everything I said about pistachio.

Researching all this, I discovered that it may be the almond flavor that gets to me more than the pistachios. Almonds contain amygdalin which yields traces of cyanide when they are metabolized. I’d better watch out; I could be slowly committing suicide. I’ve always suspected a self-destructive streak. If the carbs don't get me, the amygdalin will.

Am I allowed to like pistachios in a bowl but not in ice cream? Conversely, I don't particularly like raisins but they're OK in rum-raisin ice cream. As Emerson said, Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

The thing about pistachio is that it’s the only flavor that rhymes with mustachio. That’s a fact even though life doesn’t seem to rhyme anymore except with strife.

There is enough strife in nature, as my friend Roger once told me, with most animals dying by tooth or claw. It’s not for us to tame it. If I should go to that hill in Tennessee with a jar of pistachio ice cream, it would be to create a transient collage of disparate objects and then I can go home and lick it. 

  

 

Glut and Sort

Every morning I'm greeted by a couple dozen emails from five news sources, four Substack voices, three poetry sites, puzzles, ads, arts, articles, opinions, assorted miscellany, pleas for money, and several hellos from friends.

As the day goes on, they stack up. The puppeteer in the sky knows us and saturates us reinforcing material.  

At least half of them go unopened but a glut is a glut as a gluttony in the gut. I just spoke to Jung, and he said there is no archetype for this condition. It’s a maelstrom for the psyche. So, what do we do? We sort.  

Back in the day, the Sunday paper had a classified section, real estate section, and separate sections for business, comics, sports, entertainment, book reviews and both local and international news along with ads for everything later gobbled up by Amazon. 

I took a secret pleasure in sorting; code for discarding most of it with the illusion that I had a grip on things. I also weighed six pounds less when I put it down.

Life has come down to sorting. If we don’t, we soon find ourselves out of sorts. I’m aware of no HMO which covers out of sorts. Given the glut of options at our fingertips we are called upon to manage our way through the clamor of a cluttered field. A glut of muck.

The Brits love the word sort. When the sleuth assures us all will be sorted out, it is the pivot of the plot. The suspects are soon to be assembled in the library. Sorting seems to be a synonym for solving, for setting things right, don’t you know? Such a bother! The range of sorting runs from a souffle rising while the soup is bubbling, to a guy double-booking his mistresses, to an axe murderer on the loose. It loses some teeth as it crosses the Atlantic.

Life has come down to sorting the glut. I squirm to think of it, but my blogs may be part of it. One man’s essay is another’s man’s glut.

 

Speak Tables, Speak

I think my earliest kitchen table was blue and it had a drawer holding utensils to slurp, stab and slice. The tools one needed to grow up. That table was the place for high-level policy decisions. My parents would settle world affairs as if on some summit. Of course, they pretty much agreed with themselves. When it came down to less lofty matters, like cursing Uncle Irving for God knows what or how to get Mr. Dalebrook to settle his outstanding bill after the drugstore went belly-up, what better place to plot strategies or reconcile differences.  

Oh yes, I suppose we ate there too.  I have fond memories of burnt liver and boiled chicken which I tried, in vain, to hide under the mashed potatoes. But then there was also my mother’s world class pot roast, and I shall leave with that whiff in my memory vault.

The Algonquin Round Table, or Vicious Circle, was comprised of NYC literati including Dorothy Parker who had a habit of committing suicide unsuccessfully, Robert Benchley, Jascha Heifetz (to my surprise), a loquacious Harpo Marx, the NY Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman to name-drop a few. It all started when a few members decided to surprise Woollcott by roasting him. It turned into a ten-year lunch. They were said to have viper-tongues and concealed stilettoes as they jabbed each other with taunts, barbs and gleefully mean wit. It was the post WWI roaring 20s, with a dozen speakeasies on every block in midtown Manhattan.  Gradually they drifted off to Hollywood or sobered up with the crash of 1929. The table outlasted them all. 

Speak tables, speak.

Going back in time to mid-18^th century England, Samuel Johnson sat with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and assorted luminaries around a table every week at Turk’s Head Tavern. James Boswell was there to record the pearls of wisdom dropping onto their plates and into their ale. The group was called The Club. One had to have a silver tongue to gain a seat at this table. I wonder if their waiters wondered if they’d put their money where their mouth was. In later years, Tennyson, Kipling, and Eliot made the cut but not Dickens, Trollope or Hardy.  Some tables don’t have a leg to stand on.

Johnson’s words were precise and mellifluous yet not ornamental. One could be happily reprimanded and save the insult under glass as Lord Chesterfield did. Perhaps the greatest export of imperialist England was language itself. It flowed around six continents leaving its mark of empire upon which the sun never set.

Then there would be the solitary figure sitting and ruminating on such petty matters as the meaning of life. That would be myself at a corner table in the Automat where I could introvert into my coffee and take communion with a Kaiser roll.

Now I sit with dear friends at a table commiserating over the thousand cuts into the entrails of our dear-departed country. A fly has found low-cost housing in my salad. The lettuce is undocumented. The music is a dirge, but we move the conversation from lamentation to exclamations of charged air and green remembered hills.

 

 

About Face

Is our face a map of where we’ve been? Does it register our journey from dread to radiance in the country of our eyes? My guess is that our wrinkles signify a continent of sorrow alongside a firmament of wonder. My creases are on-ramps and off-ramps where I've dared and where I haven't, like a hung jury carrying both innocence and guilt.

Mouths can sneer, foreheads can frown and eyes can laugh, even noses; I’m told mine flare when I’m telling a joke. I wouldn’t know. I seldom look at myself. I’m not even sure I’d recognize me if I ran into myself in a crowded elevator.           

The full spectrum is there but not always decipherable. Yet some people, apparently, can probe our past and intuit our future as they decipher the nuances of our facial terrain.

It got me thinking how my face at age five has grown over decades to this one I’m wearing now. Was the guy in the mirror always there in waiting or has my thrill-a-minute chronicle shaped it? If I had been born in squalor and fallen in with a band of mercenaries, would I have the same look? I would hope that my lucky life of passion and compassion has found a home in this landscape of a face.

Some of us like Redford or Newman keep the same face for a lifetime. Others like Pacino or Brando morph as if there was always another Al and Marlon waiting to emerge. A friend once remarked that she had married Roddy McDowell and ended up with James Gandolfini.

Our nose always lands in the middle of our face to make for magnificent symmetry, yet the possibilities seem infinite. Siblings and cousins come close but are not indistinguishable. Maybe there’s a guy in Bulgaria who is my double and we're each other's generic equivalent. That’s the sort of stuff of which trashy novels are written and even trashier blogs. 

Valentine's Day

February 14^th is a holy day. There’s nothing more sacred than love, being met, where we can discover our full selves. Who is to be more revered than the person who can received us and be received.

Love is the opposite of death. The way compassion is the antithesis of dispassion, callous indifference. Now more than ever, love is our stay against hatred and oppression. Even when we rage against the dying of the light we do so in the name of love. Love is what is missing in a room of nefarious schemers.

I can imagine that someone, early on, profoundly unloved Donald and his wound is now ours. Against all the avarice and loathing let loose in the scramble for power and domination let this Valentine’s Day be our filibuster against the madness of our country, our stay halting the moral violence in the common air. 

Love expressed is risky. The designated day has to overcome the ridicule of cynics along with the usual monetizing by merchants of roses and chocolates. Then there are the recycled verses of Hallmark cards all of which tend to degrade true affection.

But I say, let it be, all of it. The flowers and the candy, even the bad poetry. We live with a paucity of language for love. It is far easier to write a poem of vehemence and dread than one from the loving heart. Love eludes what is sayable.

Life is an astonishment and warrants an astonishing embrace and exclamation. Love is, of course, more about being than saying yet we get revitalized in trying to find the words. I can't carry a tune, but I sing anyway. Let it be celebrated today and renewed every day thereafter.