Dick, Hank and Donald

The reign of Donald the 1^st has me thinking how he will be regarded by future writers and even those in our midst, when normalcy is restored.

This led me back to Richard the 3^rd, and how he was maligned by Shakespeare, writing in the service of Elizabeth, the reigning Tudor of the day. Dick was deposed by Hank, the 7^th, father of the next Henry whose depravity we can’t seem to get enough of.

This is the way it goes with a monarch. Fawning sycophants blowing sweet nothings into his ear until they stumble and lose their heads. It then takes someone like the Bard to set in stone the deviltry of his patron’s predecessor.

While Hank-8 is buried at Windsor Castle, Dick-3 rotted in Potter’s Field for five centuries and then got paved over as a parking lot. His skeletal remains were exhumed a few years ago and revealed a counter narrative to the one Will Shakespeare spun.

No twisted, withered arm, his back less hunched or humped into a mountain as Shakespeare had it, and no unequal, limping legs. More importantly, Richard III allowed for petitions of the poor and set up legal aid for them in a Court of Requests, later abolished by his successor, Henry VII. He protected merchants by prohibiting the importation of goods from abroad, exempting books which he encouraged for the people. Laws, henceforth, would be written in the common tongue.

Conversely, one wonders how the mountain of retrogressive acts by Donald will be remembered. Will Trump, the man-child,  become a dynasty like the Tudors? Yahweh forbid. 

16th and 17th century media in the hands of great pens could move minds just as Fox News and social media does today. Even in the 19th century Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities became the accepted version of the French revolution. 

I probably won't be around to have my question answered. My guess is it will take a generation or more to repair the damage done to the fabric of this once great nation. Even worse, Donald's push for fossil fuels and callous indifference toward the degradation of our environment may doom the planet irreparably. 

I expect there will be dozens of poets, essayists, playwrights and novelists eager to unravel Donald's gibberish and translate his jejune vocabulary to adult language. The challenge is to grasp the full extent of his appeal, where it came from, what sustains it and how a country embraced spectacle over substance, nescience over research, and how indecency, malice and incoherence became a virtue.  

I seem to have written myself to a summer / winter of my discontent. I allow this to happen on Tuesdays and Thursday. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday I convince myself that sane voices will prevail and on weekends I let the miracle of life wash over me and plan my afterlife. As Jimmy Durante used to say, Let me hear dat trumpet. Dat's no trumpet. Dat's no trumpet. Dat's a trumpet. 

 

Friends

As our country grows more unrecognizable each day, friends are poring over maps considering spots to relocate, at least till we collectively come to our senses. I expect to stay put and ponder about leaving this world for the next one. Do you mean there is no next one? In that case I’ll check out Emily’s List for an ice floe and be done with it. 

This brought to mind phone calls from a couple of my dear-departed but wacko friends a while back. She left a message on my answering machine: Sorry I missed you but maybe you’re not back yet from Mexico. Hope you are having a good time in San Miguel Allende. I thought to myself: Did I forget to go to Mexico the way some folks forget to have children? Maybe I should hop a flight and look for the expat community. 

When she reached me, she apologized saying she was thinking of somebody else who went to Hawaii. This is the way it works with octo and nonagenarians. I told her I couldn’t make it to Mexico but I’d been drinking margaritas to make up for it. I was glad not to have gone to Hawaii since I have a profound dislike for all things coconut. 

She said she was sorry to hear about my allergy to peanuts. I was also sorry to hear about it since I’d just had some peanut sauce with Chinese food. Was my body beginning to itch all over or was that a reaction from the coconuts I didn’t eat by not going to Hawaii? At least I didn’t have jet lag. 

I thanked her for saving me a visit to the dermatologist as well as an intestinal disorder from suspicious lettuce where I might have perished from dehydration in an emergency room, an unclaimed body with a tag on my toe. 

We need friends like this in our twilight years to check up on us as our diminishing memory turns into galloping senility and other childhood diseases. The phone is ringing again. This time from a friend who started telling me about the time he set fire to the shower curtains while his mother was taking a bath. He was seven and apparently a very curious boy. I didn’t ask when he was weaned from the breast. It was 1934 and times were tough. I’m sure this is not why he called but I forgave him his trespasses. How we segued to this defining moment neither of us could recall. That’s how life works. The chronology turns to mush. 

How I ever got to my ninety-third year when just yesterday I was eleven can only be explained by missing a plane to Mexico because of the skin rash I didn’t get from not eating Chinese food in the bathtub with burned coconuts or was it caramelized walnuts?

Even as the specter of a dictatorship looms large, I plan on living out my shelf-life blabbering in blissful incoherence. Flights of imagination will be my letters of transit out of this world.

  

In Search For Beginnings

Nostalgia has a bad name; always has. Longing for the imagined past can be a delusional exercise or at least a sentimental journey. In the 17^th century it was regarded as a sickness, a form of melancholia suffered by seaman who couldn’t wait to return home. Try getting your HMO to cover that.

Yet, raise your hand if you replay those glory years. That home run I hit in the schoolyard is still orbiting a distant galaxy. The older I get, the better I used to be.   

I like a beer now and then but can’t tell the difference between Schlitz, Pabst, Miller or Modello. Yet, I also can’t forget one of their old commercials…which shows what sort of programs I watched. We only go around once in life and should therefore (spend our remaining days drinking Schlitz beer) or as he put it… live it with all the gusto you can.

What about harps and wings sprouting from my shoulders? Sounds like heresy to me and I’ll drink to that.

One man’s gusto is another’s big yawn. At the moment my attention is turned back to how I got from there to here; the breadcrumbs of my madeleine. I have always associated the recovery of time past as a personal detective story and a comedy. I think of Peter Falk as Colombo - Columbus in his crumpled overcoat discovering the new world called Truth or beginnings. There’s just one more thing…

Maybe this comes from seeing too many movies as a kid. The intrepid sleuth snooping, the black sedan trailing him, the goon holding up the lamppost across the street, getting bopped in the alley, everyone a suspect and all of them assembled in the last scene. The detective deduces and detects. He unravels the essential mystery at the core as if now I know why my brother died early, why my father could barely read, and my mother trusted no one or... how I was gifted with three loving daughters having stumbled and bumbled my way along and then got so lucky.

It's not fair that we’re allotted only one childhood, and we are too busy living it to have taken notes. Maybe that’s what old age is for. To rewrite everything I should have said and the dumb things I shouldn’t have, those years of zits and scars.

Julian Barnes wrote, A child wants to see. He was able to walk and could reach up to a door handle. He did this with nothing in mind that could be called a purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy. A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, and looked.

In my infantile tourism I am at a window about three flights up looking down. A car is on fire, and I hear sirens coming. Across the street there is a derrick moving dirt and bricks are being laid. Another apartment house is going up.

I’m not so sure anymore about the car fire because I may be confusing it with my Little Red Fire Engine book. The dirt-mover is certain. It is on Talbot Street. in Kew Gardens, and I am between 3 and 4. Why that image while thousands of other sights have been shredded? It was unusual enough to be retained and when I see bricks mortared today it comes back to me. How does this figure in the detective story?

Guilt. Something went wrong. I wonder what I did or didn’t. I was a poor eater. I violated the clean plate policy. Serious stuff. People were starving in China… because of me. I wasn’t listening. Didn’t wear galoshes. That third sweater. Went out unprotected. No wonder I got measles, mumps, whooping cough, even scarlet fever. What about polio? Don’t go swimming. And head lice? Don’t lean back on the movie chair. Don’t. Don’t. How will I ever remember all these don’ts?

The don’ts get embedded. I fight for every Do. The derrick moves the dirt. I climb the hill, gradually find my gusto. Case closed………but not so fast. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

Poetry and Populism

If Walt Whitman lived today, what song would he hear America singing? In his day he must have heard the agony of the lash and sound of sweet chariots coming. He had an ear for the suffering as he tended to war-wounded and he heard the rattle of gold amassed during the Gilded Age. 

He knew the commonweal. Untamed himself, he sounded his own barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Whitman contained multitudes. He gave voice to the working man, to each leaf of grass, to this cradle of democracy endlessly rocking.

The decline of our country can be marked by the radical change of what we used to call the masses. In Depression days after the 1929 Crash, the rural poor seemed aligned with an urban working class. They may have been largely uneducated, racist and Bible-thumpers, but they understood exploitation and bank foreclosures. And they understood that their staunchest friend was the federal government.

In addition, they could smell a demagogue when Huey Long was renounced as he tried to establish a mobocracy in Louisiana.

Credit the Republican Party with dumbing down the underclass, keeping their collective minds off their own well-being and turning their animosity against the single institution which has always benefited them the most, the government in Washington, where any semblance of a safety net was given birth.

Informed populism scares corporate America; but an aggrieved, ill-informed and misled populace is a grave danger to the very welfare of the masses and to democracy itself.

Would Whitman be mourning that our fearful ship is done, as he grieved over the loss of, Oh captain, my captain, Abraham Lincoln? Would he further write that the lilac last in the courtyard bloomed? Or could he find the cadence that beats jubilant our feet. He wrote that the future is our masterpiece as yet unwritten.

As Eliot wrote: There will be time for you and me to drop a question on our plates / a time for a hundred visions and revisions. / There will be a time for us to wonder and to dare.

To answer the tragedy unfolding in the fields and the streets where we now shackle the huddled masses, I turn to Stevens' line, After the final No, there comes a Yes. 

The Rectangle and the Round

 A baseball is exactly like an orange except one gets crushed and the other squeezed and the one is filled with cork and the other with pulp but otherwise they are identical in size and shape and every other way except for the rind in the orange and the yarn in the other covered in cowhide and stitched and if you threw the orange to a batter you'd get juiced, pulped and pitted and I don't imagine the orange would curve or sink or flutter like a knuckleball but otherwise they are indistinguishable in the dusk with the light behind them.

If you stick a band-aid on the orange, it might fetch triple figures and become a museum piece as a decontextualized construction demonstrating the use of two disparate objects in juxtaposition causing a shift in our way of seeing and our conception of space.

The distinction between art and life has been closed. Pause is music. Sitting in a chair can be a dance and a clothesline is sculpture. Baseballs and oranges have a kind of beauty but beautiful is no longer the operative word in Art. We are suspicious of prettified images. Poetry is criticized for being too poetic. The pendulum has long since swung away from ornamental, classical forms. Museums might as well remove their walls... Chris Burden's installation of Urban Lights adorn the entrance to the L.A. County Museum of Art and in the rear is a 340-ton boulder, Levitated Mass.

It is enough to have our perceptions rattled. A bandaged orange forces us to see the imagined wound, the confluence of round and rectangle shapes and the natural and man-made incongruities. After being saturated with objects online, in magazines and on our tables every waking hour the effect is to grab us by the collar and LOOK but look with different eyes. The art is in the experience of looking. For a brief moment the orange and the viewer may be transformed.

Better yet consider a blue, orange and red Band-Aid. Or if the orange were a rectangle and the Band-Aid round it would alter our senses even further. If you showed a straw coming out of an orange-colored baseball as a source of Vitamin C it could also take its place on a gallery wall in exhibition and shift our perceptions and maybe that's the name of the game.

Now consider sharp rustbelt Pennsylvania poking into amorphous Ohio; the rectilinear against roly-poly Ohio, beginning and ending with O. Sparks fly or at least rust.

Hi diddle-diddle, see cow jump over moon or the long arm of ICE coming out of the Oval and stabbing its victims. Art and life,

both tumultuous. 

   

Fourth of July

Ironic to be celebrating the founding of our country when in reality we are bearing witness to an extended deathbed scene. Hour by hour the precepts which bound our nation are being overturned. Absent is the legislative branch. Usurped is the Justice department. Bought is the judiciary. Mocked is the Constitution and its amendments. In less than six months, we have descended into quasi-monarchy. Threatened is dissent and betrayed is the populist constituency which gave him their votes.

This is the day to be cherished, flawed as it is when Thomas Jefferson declared that all propertied white men are created equal. The rest of you guys, get over there. And you too, wives, sisters and daughters. You may be equal but we plantation owners are more equal. After all, there is cotton to be picked, stolen land to be tilled, bales to lift and barges to tote.

Falling as it does on a Friday, means we have an extra day to buy a mattress, set off senseless firecrackers frightening pets, igniting fires and causing Ukrainian refugees to deal with episodes of post-traumatic stress syndrome. 

Otherwise, happy 4^th of July. If backyard BBQs and picnics are the signifiers, count me in. Any excuse for eating and drinking with friends will do just fine. It’s the next best thing to Thanksgiving.

This is no year for fireworks. The country is already combusting. Let this 4th of July be a time to revisit and redress the omissions and injustices baked into our document's yeast. 

Three of our first five presidents died on this day. If they could be brought back, they would shudder to see how the birth of this nation has been subverted. How a home-grown despotism has replaced the monarchy they rebelled against.

The legacy of Independence Day is still aspirational. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson's 230 slaves have been emancipated on paper but not yet freed from economic suppression, disenfranchisement and daily indignities, Now, that festering worm of racism in the minds of the dominant class is directed against asylum-seekers of color whose ancestors once occupied this land.

The temptation is to buy that mattress and sleep for the next three years, but we may wake up in a state of shame, dependence and decay with our former document in tatters. Better yet, let that mattress spring us to action.

Walking the Walk

At age fifteen, I ran from one apartment house to another dodging superintendents while distributing leaflets against the Taft-Hartley Bill and campaigning for the Progressive Party in the 1948 election. A year later I stood tall at the Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, N.Y. 

In the 60's I was out there in front of defense plants in silent vigils or at demonstrations protesting the Vietnam war and the draft. Before that the issue was fair housing.

These days, I just talk the talk.

For over fifty years as a pharmacist, I was on my feet all day, sometimes eating lunch on the run. I rarely sat down, performing miracle healings eight hours a day. (Hold down the applause). 

The problem with being 92 is that my architecture and entrails are also 92, beyond their shelf-life and out of warranty. Back at my 88th birthday I felt like I was 60 years into my 20s, racing around as caregiver for Peggy. Then, halfway to 89, just after Peggy died my ambulation hit the wall. People don't stroll much in L.A. anyway. One might get arrested for vagrancy. 

Up until about a year ago, I walked about ten blocks every day. Janice, my daughter dear, saw to it. She didn’t take any of my guff. I didn’t know I had any guff. In fact, I don’t even know what guff is except that I had it now and then, in resistance.

When I say ten blocks, I mean five blocks and back and with my walker. In effect, I was rolling; I could barely keep up with myself when the incline was downhill. I might even have passed Sisyphus.

We took the same route every day, so I became acquainted with the sidewalk. It is a topographical adventure negotiating the reptilian roots and fissures. Levels change every few steps as if I was walking on the roof of an underground civilization bulging here and caving in there.  

My next move was to a park where the path was level. It is a passing parade with kids climbing trees, elbow by elbow. There goes a frisbee into the mouth of an Irish setter. I greet joggers and dog-walkers but pass unnoticed to most whose world is in their mobile phone. I'm also passed by women of color pushing strollers with white skin babies. Ball games and picnics are my distractions along with deep whiffs of pine needles and freshly mowed grass.  

That was then. Nowadays my arthritic ankle and knee along with some autoimmune disorder and balance issues makes walking more challenging.

At this point I pause, leave my keyboard and head for my favorite park to test myself. I walk the equivalent of about three blocks keeping pace with the snails. I can hear my several joints screaming as I put weight on them. It is bone on bone without any cushion from cartilage. I can still make some poetic leaps and jump to conclusions but, I suppose, that doesn't count.

Metaphorically, walking the walk stands in opposition to talking the talk. Action vs. lip-service. However, when I’m not grimacing, the two are complementary and each can be transformational. My imagination gets ignited as I mosey along. Poems get born. Walking can be an interrogation into shuttered regions. Any day now I may come up with the meaning of life. Until then I’ll keep meandering through the thickets and dunes of my inscape.