Jack and More Jacks

Back in the day the name Jack stood for everyman and he was everywhere. There was the boy who went up the hill with Jill. And the kid who climbed the beanstalk, not to mention Jack Horner who sat in a corner and Jack Sprat who ate no fat. Indeed he was ubiquitous until he wasn't so hit the road, Jack. 

The other day I received a letter marked personal and confidential. Anything not offering a large pizza for $8.99 was enough to catch my attention. It came from a law office in Toronto representing the estate of Jack Lasky. The first sentence identified them as executors. Right away I flashed back on all the Jacks I hadn’t made friends with over the past 93 years. 

The letter went on to explain they were looking for the certain Norm Levine who was living in Southern California in 2002 and a friend of the dear-departed Jack. I checked my driver’s license and sure enough I was Norm Levine and I have no memory of being anywhere else that year. 

So far, so good. I then googled, Jack Lasky. The first six hits had to do with a Jack from Long Island who is a Trumper. I presume he is still alive and well, even if his politics locate him beyond my threshold of endurance.

The second Jack L. was my man. Born in Toronto, died in Honolulu with a plaque on a kibbutz in Israel. Sounds like Jack got around, especially posthumously. I wrote back as requested, regretting my lapse in never having made Jack’s acquaintance. Already I felt close enough to be on a first name basis. Had I been afforded the opportunity I'm sure I would have been a loyal friend. I can imagine us in animated conversation over Chinese chicken salad and iced tea or better yet a Guinness. No doubt he was a helluva guy. Almost knowing Jack Lasky has made me a better person. 

I told the law office that I did have a friend named Jack and I remember a Lasky in my college days. Does this count for nothing? I never met a Jack I didn’t like.  

I suggested to the lawyer that should they fail to contact the worthy Norm Levine I'd be happy to serve as a surrogate. I have a particularly warm feeling for Canada, now more than ever as they stand up to their bully neighbor to the south. 

Going back to the generic Jack, I see that his name in folklore was regarded as an average guy ranging from resourceful person to a clever trickster, from playing card to jackhammer to jackass.

Research reveals that there was a Horner who tried to bribe Henry VIII when he pulled out some plum deed to a manor house. Not such a good idea, Jack. Beware of nursery rhymes. One can lose one's head over the ditty.

The Jack and Jill who climbed the hill were codes words for a half pint (Jack) and a quarter pint (Gill) which King Charles I tried to reduce as part of his tax plan.

It now occurs to me that maybe the real Norm Levine owed the late Jack Lasky some money in which case I'm glad not to be him. Or as my friend Fred put it on his answering machine, If you owe us money please leave a message after the tone; if we owe you money leave a message before the tone.

Life Story

My daughter recently videotaped my life story. Everybody has their own biopic. Even if we are second bananas in someone else’s, we create a sort of movie about ourselves in which we are the star of the show.

I found myself relating a collection of moments rather than a flowing narrative. It is like the distillate of Great Lakes reduced to fit inside a thermos. 

When I think of my ninety-three years, it’s astonishing how much I have forgotten or misremembered.

After about four hours I declared myself done or, at least, spent. It didn't take long before my mind flooded with all the memories I had left out. Maybe we’ll have one more session as an appendix but I suspect, even then, there will be large chunks which deserve mention and have escaped me.

There are some stories I’ve repeated so many times I can’t be sure they really happened or whether I’m remembering an embellished version. Did I really sit on a stoop with grandpa, at four-years-old, eating a bagel with a mustache of cream cheese? When I opened up Norm’s Pharmacy did I really tell people my mother named me after the store? 

What excites my imagination is a tableau which has endured for decades in my head for no apparent reason and suddenly I find myself investing it with meaning unavailable to me seventy-five or eighty-five years ago. When I threw a ball against the outer wall of my father's drugstore I never thought I was beating a portal into that store becoming my father.

I didn't say enough how Peggy's life was a constant stream of enthusiasms. She found beauty in tree stumps and peeling bark; in ashtrays (though no one smoked) and old paper as in ticket stubs and business cards. Many of her passions became mine and extended into new friends and into her poems. What she exhaled, I inhaled.

Toward the end of our video sessions I spoke about the arc of my life. My early years were steeped in evidence-based science and reinforced by philosophy which stressed objective reality. It left me with little tolerance for junk science and the irrational. My life's journey has been to make room for my imagination, for the chaos out of which creativity and connectivity grows. 

I'd like to think some of my blogs have charged the air for others just as I've been sparked by words and images of other fine minds. We're all pilgrims and we're only passing through. If all this sounds like I'm on the verge of checking out, I am not. I would hope I am still becoming.

If I were to mention all the things I never did that would take far more than four hours. High on the list would be having an ear for classical music, playing the piano by ear, carrying a tune and dancing the tango – I’ll catch up with these in my next incarnation. 

Poetry In Trump Time

How to write poetry (or stay sane) in these dark days brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marques' book, Love in the Time of Cholera. We are living in the contagion of a diseased state. In a sense, a poem is a get-well card to the world even if it screams with vehemence since barbed words are a plea for an idealized society. 

Yet such a poem falls on deaf ears. Inflated words or those limp from rhetorical flourishes may get applause from the brethren but persuade no one and have a very short life span. Be careful what you say; you don’t know whose mouth those sentences came out of.

Poets do not breathe rarefied oxygen. They inhale the common air and live in the commonweal. As citizens with heightened awareness they cannot stand by as silent witnesses. Particularly now when the menace of MAGA is about values, deceit, moral vacuity and deviant behavior. This testosterone-driven mentality leads to unwinnable wars and indifference to human suffering. 

Poets to the rescue. Truth is on life support. Get us to triage and then to the maternity ward. Not to give birth to new words but to offer existing ones a smack and breathe new life in the body politic.

What would Wordsworth do in times like this? Wander lonely as a cloud? I’d much rather be a swinger of branches in Frost’s birches. In his poem, the boy climbs to the top knowing to descend to the ground. There is no place better. Any act of normalcy seems like a countermeasure against tyranny.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet was regarded as a dangerous man. He died twelve days after the CIA coup overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. His poems on the power of love can be read as a political act in opposition to the cruelty and violence of the military regime. In the hands of a beloved poet words become swords. Indignation must be delivered obliquely, as objective correlative, to elicit either the palm or the fist. 

During the McCarthy days Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Carl Foreman expressed their opposing views through their art. All were allegories either in defense of an informant as in On the Waterfront or the condemnation of passivity in a conformist culture in The Crucible and High Noon.

The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen will endure far longer than the colossal stupidity of why WWI was fought.

Red lips are not so red / as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.        Wilfred Owen

If they should ask you why I died / tell them because our fathers lied.          Rudyard Kipling

If there is a husk, as Robert Bly suggested, which separates the external from internal concerns, it becomes the task of the poet to find an opening. Ironically the most powerful political poems issue from the depth of one’s psyche. This flow between the public and private is particularly striking right now as we endure the damage inflicted by a pathological miscreant with a 4^th grade vocabulary. His disfigured inner life is being projected onto the entire society.

We have come now to see just how fragile the web can be. Our national fabric trembles. The threads are frayed in our coat of many colors. Can words serve to reweave and restore the apparel that doth proclaim us?

…And turned sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Nothing blossoms but the sky
trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
         

Sigfried Sassoon: Prelude: The Troops

 

That Dreaded Suffix

We love our Social Security. We are lost without social media. Socialites used to be envied. (Maybe they still are. I wouldn't know.) We enjoy socializing. I even remember Social Tea Biscuits.

Yet, add the dreaded ism or ist and the words cause most Americans to raise their hackles. Of course, nobody wants to be impaled on a raised hackle. It's risky enough to identify as a Socialist; to advocate Socialism is a venal sin. The leap from Social to Socialist might land us in the great God Forbid. We choke on the word.

Americans live by a lie; or should I say, myth. The great American mythos is rugged individualism. We swallowed the notion of the self-made man from stories of the wild west. The west was indeed wilderness if you discount the million indigenous people whose land was stolen.

However the model of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood single-handedly creating a civil society is the wet dream of Hollywood. The fact is that the western territories received massive government subsidies in terms of land grants, federal support for railroads, infrastructure, agriculture and schools. 

None of that makes for a blockbuster movie. Call it support, grants or subsidies. Just don't call it Socialism.

The Democratic Socialists are not going to overthrow our government. Trump has already done that. Nor are they going to nationalize our frozen yogurt stores. They are advocating an extension of Medicare so that everyone is assured of healthcare. Currently, fifty nations around the world provide universal healthcare for their citizens. 

A social safety net is their agenda. It is long overdue. As the richest country in recorded history it is a national disgrace that we cannot find money to provide affordable housing for everyone along with childcare and higher education. We do not regard the general welfare as an asset. If that is Socialism, so be it.

The relationship between Government and the corporate world has always been largely hidden. Farm subsidies go to giant agribusiness which has driven out small farms. Fossil fuel companies also depend on federal handouts. Big Pharma benefits from government grants which go to universities for R & D. The consumer ends up paying twice. The one massive manufacturing industry that can never be brought off-shore is our arsenal.  Weaponry is a cash cow fed by the Pentagon. Corporate Socialism is in our bones but don't you dare utter that phrase.

 

Fault Lines

The recent PBS documentary on the life and poetry of Mary Oliver has brought her work to a wide audience and also laid bare the fault line in contemporary poetry and by extension, all the arts. Her admirers take some of her lines as words to live by. While her detractors sneer.

It is a conundrum that poets who gain a large public audience lose their standing in the poetry community as if accessibility is some sort of betrayal.

Some poetry is so opaque its readers turn away with a feeling of being confounded into condescension. No wonder Billy Collins and Mary Oliver have found a wide audience. 

There is a vast territory between the too easy and too obscure. My own preference is a poem that approaches its subject with obliquity; it makes some demands on the reader and yields more rewards. As Emily Dickinson wrote, Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Mary Oliver’s weakest poems settle for exhausted words like mystery or spiritual. Sometimes she tells rather than evokes. While her strongest, stay within the observed life of the insect or small creature out of which a larger exclamation happens as our sensibility has been stretched.

This dichotomy seems to hold up in other arts as well. Norman Rockwell didn't get much respect from the mid-century art world in NYC. Was it art or illustration? In capturing Americana he lost the respect of the contemporary critics, or rather he never had it. However, Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, thought otherwise. He declared Rockwell's The Connoisseur better than Jackson Pollack's and particularly admired his brushstrokes under magnification.

When Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was first performed in 1924, it was panned by the N.Y. Herald Tribune's art critic as being derivative, formless and disjointed. Sometimes, academia acts as sentinels at the gate with a nose for transgressions and worse.

Popular acceptance is not necessarily the final arbiter nor should it be the kiss of death. The mass audience is so vast and varied, we need to make room for the balm and cri de coeur, the lyric and the gasp.

In the arts as in our political sphere, the populist movement now finds advocates on both poles. What moves the masses is little understood. Perhaps the greatest mystery is the zeitgeist. Who owns it? How does it change?