Donald, Doyle and Penny Dreadfulls

It is a stretch, I know, to find the thread between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Donald J Trump but I’d like to give it a go. Arguably, Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes and Donald’s invention of himself are both characters on the spectrum. One is a benign obsessive compulsive and the other a malignant sociopath.

 Sherlock Holmes was a fit for the late Victorian age. Trump is less of a man than a scourge who sensed a vacuum created by an age of dislocation and festering grievance. The sleuth with the deerstalker hat was a noble outlier; the Donald is a megalomaniac who offers a satchel full of fibs and empty promises. 

Penny Dreadfuls were read by an estimated one million Londoners each week. They were illustrated sensationalist rags with stories of cheap thrills, piracy, murders and science fiction, aimed at young men. They ripped off versions of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Dickens and Doyle.

Holmes’ exploits were fodder just as Trump and the National Enquirer used each other to fabricate his exploits while vilifying his enemies. For eight years they had Barack and Michelle divorcing with as much credibility as a JFK citing or alien landing. The Dreadfuls were the social media, the Tic-Toks and Tweets of the day. Both were the creation of fevered minds. At least the 19^th century version presented itself as fiction while Donald seems unable to distinguish fact from fable.

The British Empire was at its peak. Think globalization. Big bucks were being made by a few people. The air was foul. Science seemed out of control with epochal technology. The bucolic countryside was fast disappearing with a growing divide between rural and urban consciousness. There were 200,000 prostitutes in London. Homelessness, filth and indenture coexisted alongside a genteel civility. People knew their place. Social mobility was virtually unknown. Rigidity and rectitude were giving way to randomness and relativity. Society was held together by a veneer of respectability, class fixity along with a sense of order and resolve. Every disruption had its resolution.

Enter Sherlock Holmes. He brought rationality and logic. He deduced. He rooted evil out and restored civility. He was their defense against a random universe. He never died because he never lived. Arthur Conan Doyle’s invention rested on the shoulders of Edgar Allen Poe’s inventions and upon Sherlock’s shoulder came Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade…the genre is still digging.  Detectives detect. They mostly act on their own as benevolent vigilantes offering the illusion of justice.

The new sheriff with the technicolor hair who rode into America’s heartland, on the last train from Yuma, is Donald Trump, that old robber-baron, land-grabber, in disguise. He and he alone nails the most-wanted posters to the wall. He leads the posse, locates the hanging tree and prepares the noose. He is the faux-detective offering simplistic words with a ten-year old’s vocabulary to complex problems.

Yet both Doyle and Donald appear at pivotal moments, albeit 125 years apart. Brits also encountered immigrants from their jewel, India. Holmes pandered to Londoner’s xenophobia with a distrust of foreigners. Many Indians ended up in Newgate Prison on the barest suspicion. Gay behavior was criminalized just as many red states would have it today. It would be decades before women were fully enfranchised in England. Their first voting rights act in 1918 was restricted to propertied women over thirty. 1895 Britain and red-state U.S. bear some resemblance in their racism and misogyny.

The name Sherlock suggests razor sharp certainty. I suppose he would be repulsed by the fuzzy mind of Donald. The man from Baker Street could surmise a man’s entire profile by a glance at his hands and the smell of his tobacco. Our guy from the high tower smelled angst and fear and inflamed it into irrational rage. There is a toxicity afoot surrounding Trump, something like the yellow fog that fell on London Town back in the day. Moriarity is in our midst. 

 

 

My Deaf Daughter

Sixty years ago, my daughter Janice was almost two. This was about the time we got the diagnosis that she was profoundly deaf. There had been clues earlier but my wife and I dismissed them as if we were deaf to her needs, even when I dropped a bag full of coins on a wood floor and Janice didn’t stir.

We made a decision which was controversial then as it is today. Our choice was to follow the course of the John Tracy Clinic which was to go with oralism as her first language, rather than sign language.

The third option was called a total approach which sounds wiser, but we bought into the idea that, given the two modalities, deaf children would be more inclined to use their hands and less likely to speak intelligibly.

The program at the Tracy Clinic was a four-year commitment. Under the guidance of a tutor, Janice learned how to lipread and speak, one word at a time. Her first word was not denotative but an action verb which literally demonstrated the power of speech. The word was open and her world opened.  

Our task was to create situations which encouraged her to open doors, boxes, bottles, books, fists et al. We had her put her fingers to our mouths to feel the breath of that word.

I'm reminded of the kindness people show in a special needs setting. There is an inherent goodness in caregivers, and, to some extent, everyone shows their best self. Being a nonagenarian, I experience some of the same deferential treatment. Even if I don't need any help, I enjoy the human interchange.

By age six Janice had about a hundred-word vocabulary she could speak and read many more words on the lips. When she entered public school, she quickly learned sign language. Today she has a very large command of the language both receptively and expressively.

Did we do the right thing? I believe we did, however the argument for early signing also has merit. Some would argue that by forbidding her to use her hands in those formative years we denied her the expression of her feelings and other abstract ideas.

In the deaf community, oralism is frowned upon, yet Janice can function to a great extent in the hearing world because of her early skills. I marvel at her hard-won independence and how she navigates her life having never heard her own voice. I also love watching her orchestrating a manual ballet as she communicates with her deaf friends on her video phone. She has felt the walls of this world and learned how to climb them.

 

 

Straight, Square and Smooth

By the 6^th grade the person I would never become was made clear to me. I was in shop class with the assignment to create a breadboard from a slab of wood. If we lived in a true meritocracy I would still be there, that old man in the back row shaving a hunk of wood for the 80^th year.

Straight, square and smooth the teacher demanded. What’s wrong with a bump here and there, my inner voice yelled back. I discovered two things in that class. First, that I was basically inept and secondly that I have a thing for irregularity. Maybe being ept is overrated.

Think of the beauty of a deckled edge. Let the border rise and fall and damn the perpendicular. It’s life’s grooves and edges, the sputters and stumbles, the jagged right-hand margin of a poem that lends its character. I wouldn’t give them up any more than the moon could relinquish its craters. 

You can have your Wyoming and Colorado, ruler sharp, I’ll take loosey-goosey Michigan or Florida which looks as if it might break away at any moment. Do people still have breadboards? Most loaves are pre-sliced and for baguettes, I just rip and chew. My breadboard looked like it conformed to teeth-marks.

Nature has no straight lines. Antoni Gaudi said it first and his wavy architecture replicates an organic flow as if on the way to the next best thing.

There I was with my diminishing rectangle of wood that refused its next incarnation as something straight, square and smooth. I admired its grit, dips and uprisings. It was to be my road map, prefiguring a contrarian nature and a nose for connective threads, however coarse.

Of those three Ss, I must admit some allowance for smoothness as in skin (my favorite organ) or cobblestones and then there are smoothies but graveled with berries, of course. At this point of my life, it’s safe to say I will never accept that 6^th grade mandate. One man's failure is another man's ept.

Turning

Since the vernal equinox happens on my birthday in March, I have to give the fall equinox its due. It happens here like a rumor, as silently as that needless “n” in autumn. You’d never know summer is done with temperatures reaching into the nineties for the next week.

To get into the mind of the season I need to imagine the cycle turning in a change of palette from greens to rust, burnt sienna and yellows. Where are those migrations overhead, flannel pajamas, itchy sweaters, russet pears, chestnuts of childhood?

Of course we do get oranged in advance of Halloween. Pumpkins show up in ice cream, soup, pasta, pudding, pie, even beer. I could die happily buried inside Trader Joe's.  

Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have harvests or swollen gourds except for those trucked in. However, there are seasons we carry within. We flower and we fold. Each of us has all the facets, a rhythm or impulse to bend toward the light and then retreat inward. 

Another falling is the tossing away of election junk mail into the wastepaper basket. Half the country has been falling for the ill-tempered lunacies of Donald Trump. May he slough off the body politic a month from now in some massive descent. 

The Roman poet Virgil wrote, See Naples and Die. If he had lived in New Hampshire he'd have said, see maples, and die.

I’ve been to New England to watch the spectacle of ruddy sycamores and maple leaves dying in all their glory. From a distance they looked like a wildfire. It was operatic. Golden groves of trees majestic in their last gasp death-bed scene. Divas, all of them. Fall is a season of life and death.

If I were a tree I too would be in my foliage or beyond. Some of my favorite hair has fallen. My limbs are getting brittle. Even names carved long ago into my brain are fast fading. I am weathered and wind-bent in my bough. Exaltations of larks no longer nest in my branches.

Autumn is portentous of winter’s finality; the last act, 4th quarter. But it also carries the hope and expectation of one more go round. The curtain comes down, the curtain goes up again. Why not? Another opening, another show.

With luck we’ll soon have an incontinent sky to wet us. Umbrellas will open like black narcissus. I want to be caught in a downpour. Drench me. Let me be pelted and puddled. Parched earth will be heard slurping. I can feel it already in my arthritic bones.

The planet’s lease shall be renewed.

 

Earliest Memory

I can still hear those sirens and smell the smoke. I was between three and four years old watching a car ablaze from my third story window. I saw the red truck with a big hose and the flames. I’ll never forget it. Too bad it never happened.

For about eight decades I regarded this scene as my earliest memory. Then it occurred to me that I had a picture book about fire engines. Those images flew off the page and torched the parked car three stories below.

Better yet, I can mark that moment as when I felt the power of books sufficient to spark my imagination. A year or two later I learned how those squiggles on the page called words could ignite my inscape and make the world luminous.

Returning to that window I do remember a new apartment building going up across the street. There was a derrick, mounds of earth and bricks were stacked up.

The entire block was to be a series of five story apartments except for one house with chickens in the front yard. Over time we played marbles in the dirt where the chickens were partitioned off. I was introduced, without ceremony, to this tribe called children. It was an aural culture with unwritten rules passed from the ten-year-old elders to us little tots.

There was a rhythm to street games from stoop ball to hopscotch to double Dutch jump rope. We had our own benevolent leaders who knew a small something that allowed the flock to cohere, until one day they outgrew us, and the hierarchy shifted without a peep.

Written words would overthrow the oral, but language of the street still has echoes for me long after it vanished into chalk dust or flew away in the smoke, higher than a pop fly.

Life On Hold

What again? Does your menu never hold still?

 I’m glad my call is important to you but apparently some things are more important.

Every time I call, he's away from his desk. Couldn't he take his desk with him?

No, I don’t know his extension.

I’m sure you’re experiencing a high call volume. Have you considered hiring more staff? 

Please don't tell me your menu has changed while I'm waiting. Should I hit 7 instead of 4 in order to get 1?

I’ll go with jazz for now. By the time you pick up the phone it will have become classical

No, I can’t call back between midnight and three.

I already went to your website. That’s why I’m calling.

I’ve given you the last four numbers of my Social Security and now you want to know my favorite movie? I can only say my least favorite is Texas Chainsaw Massacre...the musical comedy version.

Now, you’re telling me your mailbox is full.

Wait, don’t hang up.

I’ve been waiting so long I’ve read the entire newspaper, the weather report in Asia, the police blotter and the obits. For a minute I thought I spotted my name.

Perhaps I was abandoned as a child and you've opened up the old wound.

The grandchildren have grown up. I’ve got the Neptune Society on the other line.

If you’ve changed your menu again, I’ll have the chef’s salad.

Now I’ve forgotten why I called.

I think it had something to do about paramedics coming over. I couldn’t manage to perform a Heimlich maneuver on myself.

Yes, I know my call will be answered in the order it was received. I am trying to get on your queue in case something happens the day after tomorrow.

 

Time and Time Again

OMG, it's almost two o'clock and I haven't had lunch yet.

In more ways than one we are off the clock. We have been out of time long before Salvatore Dali melted that watch in his 1931 painting. Climatologists have been warning our deaf ears of impending doom for decades. Time and tide are tired of waiting. 

The notion of clocks came as an imposition on the natural rhythm of human existence. Eating, sleeping, and working all yielded to the tyranny of the clock as if to an alarm. Being punctual became a virtue. Pre-literate societies had no such need to punctuate their lives. As kids we were heedless of when movies started as if it was life itself, we were barging in on. Yet I remember that big clock on the wall of all my classes in elementary school, an early lesson in conformity. 

When Big Ben strikes on the hour, all fourteen tons of it, you’d better check your timepiece and hurry up or else. The great London clock came at the height of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. It could be regarded as the symbol of uniformity and authoritarian rule. Everyone knew their place and when tea was served, one lump or two.

Football, basketball and soccer are all played against the clock as well as their opponent. Managing the clock has become the hallmark of a successful team while a baseball game defies it as the great board game moves counterclockwise into eternity.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, measured her life by the gongs of Big Ben. Harold Lloyd hung for his life on the big hand in one of the most enduring images of the silent film era as if to mock time itself. Orson Welles had his licks in a moment of levity during the zither filled Third Man movie when he ridiculed the Swiss for their neutrality and cuckoo clock as their sole contribution to Western Civilization. In fact, everything in that memorable speech was about as accurate as a broken clock.

But Mrs. Dalloway’s noon was altogether different from the other character’s twelve o’clock. Woolf 's use of time was a way of giving voice to the inner lives of her characters. In her masterpiece, time is subjective; for some an occasion for buying flowers or accepting a lunch invitation; for another a time for dying.

The clock gives us the illusion of quantifying our lives just as commodification monetizes it. It provides us with the idea of our existence being a chronicle. World War I shattered this sequential narrative. The myth of progress was laid to rest along with millions of dead bodies to fertilize the fields of Europe. A generation was lost, and survivors were also lost in the stupidity of it all, a life left in fragments and the dread of a world without a godhead to write the fable.

Perhaps time is not of the essence, at least, according to the clock or watch. Both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took their Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway through a single day which recapitulated their entire life. History, both personal and otherwise, cannot be dismissed nor the consequences of our behavior ignored as it determines our future on this orb.

Long out of the workplace and back into the unpartitioned flow, the clock now seems an irrelevant construct except for meeting friends for lunch. I marvel at how hours fly, and days are indistinguishable. My wish is for moments marked by exclamation points.