2024

It is safe to say everyone will be a year older at this time next year. That may be the only thing we can all agree upon. 

The chasm between the congregation of the lost and those who agree with me is wider than my eleven and a half triple E shoe size, wider than a pastrami sandwich at Langer’s Deli and longer than Pinocchio’s lying nose on Donald's face, invisible to MAGA eyes.

January is well-named with its provenance being the Roman god, Janus, that two-face figure, looking both back and ahead. It symbolizes transition as our democracy teeters on the precipice.

Auld Lang Syne and bring it on. So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You and what else have you got? I Don’t Know Why You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello.

If you think 2023 was terrifying, wait till 2024 unfolds. It could be a banner year for the doomsayers. But we must not think like this. I look to the arts as a redress against the tide of unreason flooding the country.

Yes, I know you have paper cuts and an itch on your back in an unreachable place and your catalytic converter is missing but peonies are in bloom. The pears are finally ripe in the fruit bowl and Joan Baez is singing Finlandia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBXy6TIun9k

Having just watched Maestro and a far better documentary, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE5L6CcqMjs&list=PLd1DecRGWbdoePvp1QCzp9b7yvzT10nDy

I felt some moments of Bernstein’s ecstasy; his exit from stasis, his transport. In the movie Casablanca, the term Letters of Transit was invented to move Ingrid out of harm's way. Save me a seat on any bus to elsewhere.

Maybe the elephant in the room, mindless America turned into Guyana, will toss their mesmerizing drink and rise from the soporific fog of gullibility, like a murmuration of starlings.

I look for poems to lift me as in Major Jackson’s lXXXi

… Saplings stand nude as Spartans awaiting orders.
The entire forest is iced-up and glistening.
Sealed in its form, the austere world I've come
to love beckons, earth runnels soon resurrected
into a delirium of streams and wild fields. Till then,
branches like black lines crisscrossing the sub-Arctic.

 

 

 

 

Your Attention, Please

How did you know the name of my college friend, she asked. Because you mentioned her to me a few months ago, I replied.

Of all the things we are asked to do in life, paying attention is the easiest and possibly the most important. It’s just a matter of being present and honoring the other person by listening. It is a habit I got into about eighty-five years ago.

My father told the story of how, in kindergarten, his teacher announced to the class they must pay attention. My Dad was raised in poverty and thought he had heard the teacher say that they must pay a pencil. He went home crying until a friend assured him there was nothing to be paid. That word pay had distorted his hearing.

However, the message was etched in his bones. Attention is the price for learning and relating and it is free. That lesson also became my words-to-live-by. 

( I can also claim the legacy of that imaginary pencil. My image of him is with a short stub of a yellow number two resting on his ear. I inherited that pencil and discovered myself along the way).

The other lesson in listening entered my consciousness by the back door. It was clear, by the 7th grade, that I could not carry a tune from here to there. Even though I sang in the shower to my delight, I was tone deaf. As such, I was consigned to the last row and designated a Listener. I excelled in lip-synching and became a world-class listener.

Listening is not just hearing words, it entails what is unsaid and knowing the difference between what is important from what is more important. Add to this the full body gestures but that doesn't work too well over the phone. It means being fully present; not rehearsing what you want to say while half present. Sometimes it means knowing when to shut up. Other times it calls for reflecting back to the speaker or probing but always in a natural flow as when attention is being paid and not as a disingenuous formula.

There is a line in Arthur Miller’s brilliant play Death Of A Salesman when Willy Loman’s wife scolds her son for disrespecting his father. Attention must be paid, she shouts. I never forgot that moment in the tragedy of this beleaguered salesman. All of us are selling ourselves or better yet, just being and we deserve each other’s attention.

It needs to be said that our retentive memory wanes in our dotage. I can almost see yesterday's conversation fading into oblivion. My attention needs tending. Attention must be paid but allowances must also be made. 

J.C.

• Jesus, it’s the anniversary of you.
• Time to mark the day in our neo-pagan way.
• With our hemisphere un-leafed
• we drag in the remaining green
• and illuminate our shortest days
• with menorahs, candles and fallen stars.
• We look for you in other J.C.s…
• Joseph Campbell, Jimmy Carter,
• Judy Chicago and Joseph Cornell.

• Irving Berlin’s on Muzak again
• and Wenceslaus is in the elevator.
• The money-changers are loose.
• Cash registers toll while politicians
• blather about goodwill.
• The robed men who stole the narrative
• and made you into Julius Caesar
• gloat in their edifice.
• 
  
• Jesus, you look weary. Forgive us
• for the misdeeds done in your name
• and your early subversion we have bungled.
• Just tell me this….did we get the story right?
• Are you human, nothing less?
• A Jewish-Christian, Jiminy Cricket,
• Julie Christie, Johnny Carson,
• Jeepers-Creepers, Jellico Cat,
• juicy cantaloupe, jeweled constellation?
• 
  
• From your manger 
• to a cardboard box by the off-ramp
• come silence the night, halt our traffic,
• unmask the imposter
• so we might pause and wake
• with astonished eyes, re-seeded
• for another go round as if
• in a haloed world, as if
• with turned cheeks, as if...

Blame The Greeks

They gave us Democracy (demos: people; kratia: rule) along with its perverse cousin Demagoguery (agosos: leader). It is a package deal. Add to that their word Xenos: strange and we have xenophobia, fear of otherness. The result is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Early on, a demagogue was just a leader of the people, the common people that is. He was generally benign but quick to rouse the rabble unlike the learned who tended toward deliberation. Aristotle denounced their intemperance.

The word, gadfly, was used in Plato’s account of Socrates' defense. He cites the essential role it plays to challenge and reinvigorate a democracy by disrupting the status quo in the service of truth. However, in the hands of self-serving megalomaniac, a gadfly can also sting the animal that causes a stampede.

You can see where this is headed.

When I ran for milk monitor in kindergarten did I promise two cows in every garage? If I had only thought of it then I might have won. It didn’t work for Herbert Hoover either when he promised a chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage.

Politicians are always painting a future they cannot deliver. Hopefully the electorate tacitly understands and smells the baloney. We allow for a modicum of malarkey. 

The demotic has long been a concern in a democracy.  An ill-informed, fearful and armed mob can be whipped into a frenzy particularly in this world of instant connectivity. In the process they willingly abdicate their autonomy.  

The demagogue, with a good ear for collective complaints and a satchel full of charisma, doesn’t orate. He speaks conversationally, like it is, in the common tongue, audaciously, and with absolute certainty. He gives voice to the outrages his followers couldn’t quite articulate or wouldn’t dare. His word is unimpeachable. He is father. His followers are being re-parented. Children must behave. Daddy will tell you who to hate, who to mock, to beat up. Order and greatness must be restored. The trains must run on time, the train to yesterday, to nowhere.

Despotism presents itself as the repairer of all ills suffered ... and the defender of order, so said Alexis de Tocqueville. 

Athenian democracy fell into tyranny after a failed invasion of Sicily. The hubris of exceptionalism, led to the hegemony of expansionism and finally the humiliation of extinction. 

John Adams warned, There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide. The carton of milk ends up a glass of Kool-Aid laced with hemlock.

To Curse or to Kindle

To curse the darkness

is too easy.  A dart board

the size of a barn

with a quiver of barbed adjectives.

 

To light a candle,

is to sizzle the fuse of jasmine

blooming at night.

 

To curse the villainy

lullabyes the choir

even as it charges them.

 

To nurture that tendril,

with common threads, shared tears,

is to create a spark of connectivity

to brighten the solstice,

one flicker at a time, one song,

one instrument, one reed,

one note.................and then another. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Critics and Complainers

As world-class consumers we have become chronic complainers, spectators demanding our money’s worth. We think as consumers, travel as consumers, even vote like consumers.

(By we, I don’t mean you or you or even me………..but all those other people.)

We want what we want and if we don’t get it we become whiners and throw hissy fits. Yelp thrives on us.  Interactive technology has created a society of quasi-experts. We all have virtual bullhorns to tell the world what not to eat, where not to eat it and how best not to get there. How am I driving?  the back of the truck asks in our face, call 1-800…..  Teachers’ jobs depend on student evaluations. Stay on the line to answer this short survey. We grumble. We have road rage. Corporations look at test marketing groups to see which direction their thumbs are pointing. 

We’ve been trained to have high expectations and encouraged to tell all. Revenge of the demotic. As befits a nation that consumes 30% of the world’s products, with only 5% of its population, we have grown passive even as we deplete the planet of non-renewable resources and account for 30% of its waste.

Yet we are probably less discerning than we might think. The corporate world saturates our senses in ways beyond our consciousness. They are on to us. They not only know what we buy and what we drive, wear and eat, they even know what we think.  I wonder if Alexa and Siri are listening to our gripes.

And how we think is not very long, deep or well-considered. As an art form intellectual and literary criticism ain’t what it used to be. Where are the John Leonards, Susan Sontags, and Edmund Wilsons? Use too many poly-syllabics and you are branded, elite, which is code word on Fox news for progressive.

Of course writers aren’t very fond of critic’s acerbic tongues. Kurt Vonnegut once quipped, Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs, so said Christopher Hampton.

I must admit to sometimes enjoying an erudite review more than the work itself. Their use of language and keen analysis is particularly welcome in this age of mediocrity.

Being opinionated doesn’t necessarily develop one’s critical faculty. We now have a nation of highly opinionated folks who seem unable to spot a fraud in their midst. They have ceded their higher faculty for the voice of bluster and a litany of lies.  

Listing

It is here again, the twelfth month, a time to wrap up the year listing; the verb, not the noun. The only list I’m feeling right now is the disequilibrium, the tilt of this country going down in a ship wreck. But enough about Trump.

The other kind of list enumerating the ten best or ten worst is altogether out of my reach. The last list I made out was a shopping list (Chopin Liszt). I doubt I can remember ten movies, thumbs up, down or horizontal. What I do remember turns out to have happened three or four years ago; or never. Let me see how many adjectives I can name which describe my feelings about lists; grouchy, irascible, cantankerous and crotchety.

I am particularly opposed to ranking artists, actors or athletes. All arbitrary and absolute. It is too hierarchical. Give them all a hand. Come up here and take a bow. As for the worst politicians, they are all tied for first place.

I take my cue from Gilbert and Sullivan. I’ve got a little list, and they’d none of them be missed, they’d none of them be missed. The sycophants and bullies, the lackeys and the cronies and all those who turn a deaf ear to his malfeasance.

Award ceremonies are an exercise in hyperbole. After alI, I don’t rank my friends and I have no enemies I’m aware of (just a lot of folks who regard me with profound indifference). Did Beethoven and Mozart compete or was Wolfgang still dead at Ludwig’s peak? Did Picasso and Matisse have food fights? De Niro and Pacino? Billie and Ella? Hammacher and Schlemmer?

If it isn’t lists it is those year-end letters summarizing life’s slings & arrows along with new riches, travels or benedictions. Along these lines I can attest that the dog I don’t have didn’t die. Once again, I did not win the lottery. Next year I may even buy a ticket. I did visit my daughter in her new digs on Bainbridge Is. Otherwise, my notable trips delivered me from the bedroom to the kitchen and a happy return. My three daughters continue on their life journeys beset with my imperfect DNA. Sorry girls.

The travel I look forward to is a transport from this realm to a transcendent elsewhere accomplished through love of family and friends.                                                  

 

 

 

Questions and Answers

Here's the question: How did I become me, you become you and, by extension, this country become what it is today? I didn't see it coming; neither myself or the trajectory of our republic. 

I remember myself as a shy, athletic kid who secretly thought he knew everything. I have shed my shy, lost my leap and I know less and less as I move into whatever's next.

I had some of Spencer Tracy in me, a chunk of Gregory Peck and a bit of Woody Allen. No Gable or Wayne. Later I had aspirations to be Ken Burns, Basho and Barack. Who am I forgetting? Gene Kelly and Charlie Parker, why not? I used to worship FDR but now I think much more of Eleanor. 

So we pilgrim our way along battered and blessed by the unforeseen. Maybe we fall on our face. Maybe we gain some grace. Maybe we are met and from that new selves might emerge.

In the end I have no simple answer. Life itself has too many twists in the labyrinth. There is no GPS to retrace our footprints or tell us what's around the corner. Instead we mythologize our journey as if the map were the territory.

On a macro scale I am preparing myself for the sound and fury told by an idiot. Our decline as a nation is the tragedy inherent in power and an indifferent public. Yet even that is not a simplistic straight line. Awareness, compassion and justice accompanies ignorance and malice. In the same way medical science comes with nescience. 

Movies gave me the illusion that all questions have answers. Wrongs would be righted in the dream palace. In real life, at that point, as a certified know-it-all, I had all the answers. In fact, I was so weighed down with them I forgot the questions. It has taken me nine decades to learn that questions are more important than answers. I get curiouser and curiouser. Cats can die from that.       

My unsolicited advice to my granddaughter is: do not listen to gurus or assorted sages of indeterminate age and especially not to authoritarian voices with a pocketful of promises. The state of the world we elders have bequeathed to the young is reason enough to doubt our imagined wisdom. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt to catch up on history and civics books, particularly those that have been banned in proto-fascist states.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, metaphorically, of course, with your stiletto questions. Haul the poseur in for interrogation. Shine the big light on him and hook him with question marks.

 

Couch Questions

How long it takes me to get up from the couch is a measure of my aging.

Where is it written that socks must match or to couch it another way when did life stop rhyming?

Should that picture over the couch pick up the green in the throw pillows?

Or should it clash loud enough to jar us awake and perturb our eyes?

Sitting on the couch, I never get to see the construction on the wall above me even though it is my favorite art piece.

Did Matisse’s painting register on the Richter scale when the polka dot wallpaper collided with the striped couch?

How would the couch feel if pictures were hung upside down?

Does apparel still oft proclaim the man? Does the couch proclaim the room?

When does a couch become a sofa or a divan? 

Now that I have an orange couch can I spill Ragu sauce on it?

No, now behave yourself.

Is it true that overnight my father didn’t wear a hat? Just thinking about that from the couch.

Why do some people slouch on their couch (like me) and others don’t?

Why are those hummingbirds (seen from my couch) refusing my feeder?

Where do dead birds go? Do they have a burial place like elephants?

Whatever happened to Sabu, the elephant boy last seen on TCM as I turned into a couch-potato?

How do today's actors walk into dark rooms with no lights except on their face and never bump into the furniture?

When the judge asks the defendant to rise I spring up from the couch.

When Freud fled Austria did he really take his couch along with all those dreams in its upholstery?

If couches could talk, would they? And then there are those throw pillows to worry about,

Famous lines from old movies: What is the meaning of this? Won't you sit down?

Tall Timeless Tale

I’ll begin with Einstein who insisted that past, present and future are illusions, however persistent. Time does not flow. It bends, stalls, leaps and merges. It just is. Maybe I am writing this yesterday or tomorrow.

So Thoreau (he pronounced it Thorough) is very much alive. This is his 206th birth-year. Also alive is Emma Lazarus. She never died nor her poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. And yes, Donald Trump has always been with us. He wore the dunce-cap in the little red schoolhouse and beat up kids in the yard. He roused the rabble, bought slaves and led lynch mobs. The card sharp is Donald, the con-man selling phony cure-alls and breaking picket lines, the robber baron and slumlord. All of them are Trump.

Taking a break from his lucrative pencil business, Thoreau thoroughly visits Staten Island seven times. He lives with Emerson’s brother and tutors his children. Here he is roaming the streets of Manhattan dodging stray pigs and trying to sell his writings. No buyers.

I live in NYC for my first twenty-one years and go to Staten Island just once. I take the ferry one day with my brother just for the ride. It was a nickel back then, gradually inching to five bucks. Now it is free. An instance of creeping Socialism. But time doesn’t creep, I almost forgot, it just is. Now I am passing the Statue of Liberty. I can hear the huddled masses yearning.

Thoreau’s last visit to the Island was in 1843. At first he isn’t very charmed by the place though he notes the variety of flora and fauna, different from Massachusetts. While he’s heading back to Concord to start building his cabin at Walden Pond he is also considering another cabin in Staten for a spell of solitude? The man is a visionary. Does he envision the Statue of Liberty? Of course he does.

Staten Island now has half a million people. It is the wealthiest and greenest borough with 170 parks. By any measure it really should be part of New Jersey. It’s the only borough with wildlife not in a zoo. Snakes, fox, feral turkeys and coyotes have been spotted in the Fresh Kills Landfill. Thoreau is changing his mind about this place with its forests and estuaries, bird sanctuaries, salt marshes and tidal wetlands.

Let chronology collapse. Thoreau is jailed in protest of the Mexican-American War and all others to follow with the exception of those fought against slavery and Fascism.

On nearby Bedloe/Liberty Island the Statue of Liberty, with its torch held high, is an inadvertent lighthouse to woodcocks and phoebes in their migration. Trump would call them illegal birds who deserve to die anyway. Thousands fall disorientated at Mother of Liberty’s feet as they smash into the 25 glass windows at the crown of the Colossus. That is corrected as dotted glass replaces the original which birds alone recognize.  

Did Thoreau visit Emma Lazarus in his Manhattan treks? Why not? Here he is presenting a box of his world-class pencils having discovered the perfect mix of graphite and clay. And she writes….

Keep your storied pomp, says Emma to Donald. Yes, you high in your Tower. And get your hands off these tired and poor yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of these teaming shores are pleading. But Donald is deaf to the cries as he sends his wretched garbage golf balls and caviar leftovers off to the Fresh Kills Landfill where a ragged forest is being born. It is a gigantic garbage dump as mulch with 150 million tons of Big Apple trash.

Is that you, Henry David Thorough, writing with your super pencil in your notebook about restoration? Nature persists. It repairs our human folly. The message is hope. There is a lamp lifting beside this golden door.

Homage To Thursdays

I have a thing for Thursdays. There’s something about the sound of the word. It feels juicy to me, bursting with the nectar of possibilities. It is the answer to thirsty. Thursday is not arid like Wednesday with that silent D…such a waste of a letter, parched and withered. Thursday is Thor’s day; Jupiter, god of thunder foretelling wetness and the dawn of a new day…which proves my point.

What was my point? I’ll think of something by the time I reach the bottom of the page.

Thursday is an auspicious day. The one when the Declaration of Independence was signed back in 1776. It’s a day plump with vision. Fifteen years before that Benjamin Franklin flew his kite also on a Thursday. 

Thursday was a holy day for me early on because it had a way of always preceding Friday which meant weekly tests. Not being very bright I decided I might need a touch of providential intervention to get me through the ordeal. So every Thursday night I became devout only to correct the doubtful attribution by the next day.

Franklin Roosevelt died on a Thursday. In a strange way I count that as my day of entry into the adult world. He was literally a god to me. PresidentRoosevelt was one word. I knew no other. Sad and shaken as I was that April afternoon in 1945 I felt no longer a child at age twelve. Everyone was crying openly. just like me. A poor Black man was asked if he knew the president and he replied, no, but he knew me. FDR intoned the way you’d expect a deity to speak…from on high. When he died, God died and I was existentially on my own.

Thursday is the well-chosen day for our most secular quasi-religious holiday when we gather together to thank the cosmic crapshoot which brought us to this table as guests rather than as the sacrificial turkey stuffed with assorted breadcrumbs and berries.

Thursday was also the day when Peggy let fly her weekly poems to articulate the ineffable and her exuberance for life which sang off the pages, even if they may have confounded us.

I think my point has something to do with belief…which is necessarily elusive. One might even say, mysterious. Interesting to note that the word mysterious has its origin in the Greek word myein which meant closed…as in a mouth. So mystery is akin to mute. I’ll say nothing more about the subject till next Thursday.

Say What?

Getting old is a great adventure. Our immune system has to adjust faster than mutating viruses just to stay alive. Aside from these new assaults, our senses are in need of remedial help.  They are all withering and past warranty. Taste and smell have been compromised by Covid. My vision is beyond correction and my ears are becoming a vestigial organ whose acuity has been chipped away by too much exposure to Big Bands, Tijuana Brass and oratorical blather.

I’ll have the chef’s salad but hold the feta.

Did you just say to fold your letter?

Lip-reading had me laughing before the punchline or agreeing to something I just disagreed with. I’m always afraid I will smile when a friend tells me their cat died. A century ago I'd be carrying an ear trumpet. Now, hearing aids could be lost in a chopped salad.

Choosing a restaurant has become a weighty decision. We have to arrive either before or after the crowd. Maybe one day I’ll find that place that no one goes to anymore because it’s too crowded. (Thank you, Yogi Berra). 11:30 assures us easy parking and a booth in the corner but half an hour later the decibels arrive. 2:15 guarantees a near empty room but the place closes at 2:00.

Everything on the menu tastes like noise. My hearing aids seem to amplify the ambient chatter but still muffle the voices at my table. And why, I ask you, is the next table always so boisterous?Maybe they are thinking the same of us.

A few months ago I met a friend for lunch. We found a quiet table outside the eatery only to have a family with three kids sit alongside. When we moved to the far end, a jackhammer started up at a construction site next door.

Restaurants are afraid of silence as if someone might mistake it for a Christian Science Reading Room or library. They like the buzz, the illusion of being busy. They want the place to rock even when it is empty. The music is so loud I can barely hear the waiter reciting the specials as if auditioning for a part in some B movie.

Don’t they know there are more and more of us who only want peace and quiet but are not quite ready for assisted living? It isn’t only the clamor that agitates our innards but some of us still remember conversation. How else can we hear about each other’s latest infirmity? 

We may be the last generation to listen to each other rather than text across the table and take a photo of our plate. We are, after all, the elders, the living sages who actually have a distant memory of civil discourse.

Spoiler Alert: We're All Going To Die

Not now, not even soon, but some day. Right now I am too busy living. Dying is such a waste of time. However, dwelling on mortality now and then is, for me, a way of squeezing the most out of this wondrous state of being alive even when it comes to licking honey off a thorn.

I hate to give away the ending but Shakespeare did in the first ten lines of Romeo and Juliette.

     From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

     A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life.

Again in two of my favorite novels (The Transit of Venus and The Hand That First Held Mine) around page 37 we learn that the protagonist will die young and one in a plane crash yet. Now I know what she doesn’t know. For the next 200 pages I find myself anxious for her. What seems like a spoiler actually creates more tension. It may be counter-intuitive but it is a clever device.

By telling us, maybe the author is also declaring that she subordinates plot to either the larger issues raised or her language itself. Plot may be nothing more than the piece of red meat the burglar tosses to the watchdog while he raids the house.

In the real world, of course, we also know the last page but spend our lives convinced it doesn’t apply to us. We start dying the day we’re born and start living. Fortunately I’m now too old to die young. If it said so on page 37 it must have slipped my mind. There are always enough momento mori around to remind me.

The Greeks struggled with the notion of mortality. They invented the gods to account for fate, happenstance and bad hair days. Any behavior bordering on hubris or otherwise deemed offensive to the imagined gods received a ruler to the back of the hand… or much worse.

Oedipus ended up a husband and son to the same woman, committed patricide and then got a poke in the eyes, self-inflicted. It was enough to give him a complex.

The audience knew well the story of the myth but ate up the telling of it. No spoiler alerts necessary. Humankind is admonished to know its place and not stray into the precincts of the gods. Unanswered questions were to be addressed to Zeus and his accomplices. Messages are answered in the order received…even if Mt. Olympus is experiencing a high-call volume.

The Giving Of Thanks

A montage of Thanksgiving memories from early school days…….orange construction paper with drawings of turkeys gobbling or on the table, Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock. My turkeys looked more like Pilgrims and my Pilgrims could have been mistaken for Plymouth Rock. Then there were happy Indians and a hymn hummed…….

We gather together ….. Nothing wrong with that.

To ask the Lord’s blessing …. This is suspect, maybe we don’t deserve it.

He hastens and chastens … Nice rhyme and catchy tune but what’s with the rush? And who is he scolding with his chastens?

His will to make known … OK, get on with it.

The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing …. More rhymes but what are we singing about? Who’s doing the oppressing and who is being distressed?

Sing praises to his name … It can’t hurt. If we said thanks loads, Lord, for the good life,she would reply, You Betcha, No Worries.

He forgets not his own. … Is it only his own he remembers? Are the others chopped liver? This sets up the all too familiar Us and Them.

So we have the Native American hosts and first European settlers, those uninvited guests who stole their land and never left. Something went wrong with this arrangement from the Indian point of view.... to say nothing of the turkey's.

From out of our rapacity and manifestly ungodly destiny it has evolved that by an accident of geography, we sit down for a sumptuous feast, unless we happened to be indigenous people or needy people or those living in the rubble of bombed or bulldozed homes.

It turns out this hymn was written during the Eighty Years War between Holland and Spain in the 16^th and early 17^th century. The Dutch were Protestants looking to break away from Catholic Spain. So gathering together was itself a subversive act. The oppression was from the Papacy who saw their grip on Europe unraveling. We revived it in the twentieth century beseeching God to lift the distress caused by the Axis powers’ oppression. …and he’d better hasten and chasten.

In its travels the hymn has gone from the front lines of war, where it is always a good idea to have God on your side, to the dining room table where, in his name we hasten without chastening the chardonnay and stuff ourselves with stuffing just short of exploding. No hint of distressing from oppressing unless you count some insufferable neighbor who wrangled an invitation and arrived an hour late causing everyone to fill up on nibbles. 

But it is the season to forgive such transgressions even as our gluttony is followed by sloth. God pardons such sins once a year on Thanksgiving. Aren’t we all pilgrims stumbling and bumbling our way, trying to make sense of our brief allotment of time?

And isn't Thanksgiving really a celebration of immigrants being welcomed?

The Said and the Unsaid

Take cover, we're in for election noise during the next twelve months. That quadrennial American carnival, as in carnivorous, is upon us. The hollow man will start to deliver his hokum and hogwash smack in the middle of holiday season.

Rage against the dying of the light said Dylan Thomas but he intoned those words so mellifluously it felt more like a hallelujah. We compensate for the dark days of solstice with festivals of light and high decibels of ho, ho, ho. Silent night lives with jingle bells and the sound of the cash register….no longer the case, of course, but I can still hear it.

I once read that we actually speak for about fifteen minutes a day on average. It is hard to imagine someone going around with a stopwatch to come up with this. That makes about 1,425 minutes in silence; a long stretch to think great thoughts or allow our imagination to sprout wings. How we spend our silence is who we are and perhaps we are vessels more than we know.

The flow of conversation is a wondrous thing but it reaches another dimension when silences are also admitted into the discourse. The vacuum created by the pause is much like the visual space of this white page I’m smudging with words.

We don’t always see the negative space in paintings but we are missing something if we fix only on the paint. And what is music but the marriage of instrument and interval? The subtext may not be written or depicted but lie in between the strokes and sounds.

How many times have I thought of the perfect retort to someone at the party except now I’m in my car on the way home? Timing is all, as Jack Benny famously reminded us when confronted with the ultimate question: Your money or your life, to which he replied after an elongated silence, I’m thinking, I’m thinking.

Consider this Thursday's gathering around the table. An unspoken conversation may be directed toward the chair of the friend or family member whose absence is a major presence.

The 19th century was a time when working-people became literate. Novels were the rage and many authors got paid by the word. It was also an age of pretension and ornamentation. A well-shaped sentence on the page with a preamble and digressions of a dozen commas and semicolons, was considered a thing of beauty. The elegantly crafted phrase at the dinner table got you re-invited. Henry James could separate the subject from the predicate with as many words as it took a Minimalist to write a short story. Lincoln’s four minute Gettysburg Address was preceded by Edward Everett’s two hour oration. 

Now we must brace ourselves against the bluster and bloviations of the humbug candidate. I have vowed to turn a deaf ear to his moral violence. Doctor’s orders.

Three Point Seven

Men seem to like putting balls in holes. Stop right there, women do too, from golf balls to basketballs. Whatever bounces and rolls. We slam it, spike it and smash it as if we are beating on the planet itself. According to an eminent historian (that would be me) basketball was invented when an exasperated writer ripped his manuscript from the typewriter, crumpled it up and threw it across the room into a wastepaper basket.

Imagine yourself suiting up in colored underwear and running up and down the court 2 ½ miles every game, before twenty thousand screaming fans plus another three million watching on T.V. This is professional basketball. And you do this three times a week from October to June for as many years as your agent was able to negotiate a long-term contract.

Your career is behind you now. At thirty-seven you are an old man. You are sitting at the end of the bench watching with 3.7 seconds left in the game.

This is high drama. The game clock is winding down. The Lakers are up by one point. A foul is called, two shots. But wait, time out is called to freeze the shooter. Cut to commercials. Chevy trucks, lite beer, plugs for other shows. Back to analysis of the options. Announcers set the scene. LeBron is cool; he doesn’t freeze and sinks both free throws.

The clock doesn’t move. Now the Lakers call time out; still 3.7 seconds on the game clock. More commercials: Korean car, e-trading, car insurance. I’m thinking about how we are paying these salaries. The median annual paycheck for an NBA player is over 3.7 million. The sponsors see it as money well-spent. Go figure.

Ten minutes have passed in the 3.7 seconds. Now the  buzzer sounds, it is all over. Your teammates are aching, swollen and sweaty. You had no playing time. You are there in case two or three men were injured or the team is up or down by 37 points. Not tonight. Not ever again. You are spent. Finished.

Is everything in your dreams a roly-poly? Marbles, ice cream scoops, bagels, balloons, apples? Do you slam dunk in your sleep and dribble the moon? Does your competitive drive ever clot or your blood keep flowing, by the pint, in every vein? Is there a hoop hanging over your garage?

3.7 seconds, minutes, years. It seemed like such a short time between the all-star game and the old-timers gathering. You have lost a few inches. Now you are 73 and living like the rest of us, without adoration. Nobody notices you anymore. You didn’t like it before, so you said, but you actually did. No interviews now. Who cares what you think? The ovation in your head is distant and dim. 

Teammates have moved to the obit page. You are back on the bench, feeding pigeons. Times hang heavy. These past three point seven decades have taken forever waiting for that last flagrant foul when the clock stops.

Long Of Tooth

George Washington could never tell a lie. However, before chopping down that tree he may have eaten all the cherries and forgotten to mention it. Teeth don’t lie either; they register every Snickers and Key Lime pie that ever passed through their ivory gates. Every childhood has its cavities of truth.

Proof that we weren’t meant to live this long is the state of our molars by the ninth decade. Friends of ours have opted for implants, spending enough money to buy a new Lexus …which their dentists probably did instead. My old buddy from New York traveled to Florida where the cost is about half. If he’d kept going south to Brazil he could have saved another few thousand. In fact, rumor has it there’s a dentist in the Amazon rainforest who will do it for the price of a bicycle. And he might even use a jaguar’s choppers.

I lost a molar a few weeks ago. I didn’t really lose it. It just wanted out having grown tired of my mouth after all these years. My dentist offered it back to me for an under-pillow visitation but I declined. I’m enjoying the negative space. My tongue, which is the most curious of organs, keeps exploring the cavern. The alternative is to crown the adjacent teeth and get a bridge but I don’t want to die with my daughters’ inheritance in my mouth so I shall learn to love my new line-up.

I imagine dentists must dream of Boy Scouts or chorus girls perfectly lined up like corn on the cob. There’s something faintly fascistic about that much order. On the other hand fangs, have little to recommend themselves either. Saber-toothed tigers went through life without benefit of a veterinary orthodontist. No wonder they ended up in the La BreaTar Pits on Wilshire Blvd.   

Legend has it that Cadmus, the dragon-slayer, not only dealt the fatal blow but also removed the fire-breathers teeth which he sowed in the earth and up came the city of Thebes. One wonders how many teeth were needed for Los Angeles to bloom. Considering our sprawl they must have been gapped.

To set the record straight it is not true that termites got to Washington’s wooden dentures. Or even that he had teeth of wood. They were probably made from cows, horses, metal alloys or even humans. Possibly soldiers who didn’t make it through Valley Forge.

In the interest of historical truth (now out of fashion) it should be noted that Washington may have won the war because of his teeth. The British intercepted a message indicating that George would not be able to get to Philadelphia to see his dentist. The British Gen. Clinton (no relation to Bill & Hill) interpreted it to mean that Washington would remain in the New York area and not move his army south to Virginia and therefore the Brits needn’t bother to reinforce their troops. Washington, of course, did march his men to defeat Cornwallis at Yorktown, with much help from the French fleet.

One might say he cut the Redcoats into bite-size pieces. We need our teeth with all that history gives us to chew on.

Looking Backward

How will historians handle Donald Trump? Not the man. I’ll leave his legacy (autopsy?) to the psychopathologists and tragedians.

It is the phenomena which should command our attention; the shame and the stain. How was it possible for so many Americans to abandon our foundational precepts and willingly inhale his noxious air?

Ever since he appeared with his fake hair, faux promises and bogus rants his followers seem to have multiplied like a supporating infestation on the body politic. Providing we survive the festering wound inflicted on democracy, he may have served a useful purpose.

He has laid bare the latent racism, toxic nationalism and pseudo religiosity of a significant chunk of the electorate by tapping into a well of fear and discontent. He only had to proclaim; I hear you. And now, I will tell you whom to hate. Furthermore, I am a brilliant billionaire, follow me.

Of course, the would-be potentate had no clothes, no ideas, no program and a 4^th grade vocabulary. But he was so brazen, so void of decency and self-examination he became a model for millions to project their own primal instincts as if there were no age of enlightenment, no science, no feminist awareness or civil rights movement. A mirror has been held up to our vapid faces, a selfie of disgrace. 

Trump drew the map and brought us to the crossroad of compassion and humanity or loathing and degradation. He erased from the collective consciousness the reason we fought WW II. Hitler made a comeback in his incarnation. Any study of Germany in the 1930s would serve as a guide to our descent.

These years might also serve as a rebuke to Marx’s valorization of the downtrodden masses. We now know that the working class can easily be flipped into a lynch mob which only serves the interest of those who would keep them downtrodden. Grievances of the underserved are real though the aggrieved in his tent are misaligned. 

At the same time we are threatened by global extinction through avarice and denial. Historians will answer how we survived this juncture of urgently needed action at the moment of rampant mindlessness. 

The mass movement to the far right will go into reverse on cat's feet. It will happen unreported as light bulbs, by the thousands, go on overhead. Nostrils will sniff the stench of betrayal. In the movie, Twelve Angry Men, the rush to judgement falls away shedding racism and dismissal of the foreign born, recalling perhaps, that this is a country of immigrants. How one man ignited the embers of our perverse nature will be the subject for the centuries to come.     

How do I know all this, I hear you ask. I have an advanced copy of a mid-century news-feed.                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Order, Chaos and the Whole Damn Thing

A fine mess you’ve got us into said Oliver Hardy to Stan Laurel. Even then, messes were what we secretly wanted, as long as order would be restored by the time we left the theater.

What is a whodunit other than the illusion that wrong-doing will be righted and mystery resolved? We pay money to be transported into the unknown with the expectation of a return ticket.

Order is a tenuous state. Disturb one part and the whole network trembles. Disorder, over time, is perceived as a new order after our resistance dissolves. Life doesn’t hold still for a minute.

The itch gets scratched, then disappears. A broken narrative, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Picasso’s prismatic POV were all deemed subversive until our sensorium rearranged itself. Now, we might regard Monet as a cliché though the blur of early impressionism met with outrage in the salons of Paris.

The poet, Stanley Kunitz put it this way: Order is greatest which holds in suspension the most disorder, holds it in such precarious balance that each instant threatens its overthrow.

If the sort of order created in words or paint is not easily decipherable that’s because we are not yet fluent in their terms. Our senses are slow to move; too comfortable in rhyme and reason. Poetry gave it up long ago. The world of unreason is a Wonderland full of delights as Alice discovered.  

I’m talking to myself trying to find some measure of alignment with the chaos. I am adrift in the irrationality of geopolitics and our embrace of a quasi-deranged flim-flam man. Of course, the news as it breaks is no artform; more like the sea we fish are swimming in.

There are periods when conformity begs for a dose of upheaval to quake us alive. I don’t think this is one of those times. Now I am longing for those good old days of civility, constraint, compassion and common sense. As for art, I am waiting for the bus to elsewhere. 

Hear O Abraham

 

Like a Rothko painting, an undifferentiated mass of blood-soaked land. Gaza / Israel, borderless. Both of biblical wrath gone to sacrilege. Hear, O Abraham. Blue gone to red combusted to vapor, seething with indifference to human life. God doesn't live here anymore.  ReplyForward

Los Muertos of A Desecrated Land

This day of all days reserved for dead ancestors,

for gravestones overturned by the power

of love and memory,

for old souls to walk among us

but there is no room for los muertos to roam

in Gaza or Israel, that desecrated land

where newly dead go unburied.

 

The rocket's red glare is no cause

for a star-spangled anthem. Rockets yes,

by the thousands, forth and back, in lethal formation,

rockets of senseless rage against rage

sowing wrath for generations to come.  

Los muertos cannot walk 

with the stench of limbs in the rubble.

 

Outside my window in the gathering dark

a ferocity of wind shifts directions,

made visible in the dervish of leaves

like a murmuration of starlings bringing

bulletins from this dance of death.

Let rockets cease for human's sake.