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