Book and the Godhead

The breaking news was that there was breaking news for the first time. Sometimes the news is so epochal it cannot be seen. So it was about 3,500 years ago when the alphabet first appeared and put to use writing a narrative we call the Bible.

In his 1998 book The Alphabet and the Goddess, Leonard Shlain argues that the onset of writing brought about a gender change of the godhead. Out with goddess, in with a male god; in fact, out with images all together.

There is ample archeological evidence of female figures suggesting matriarchal societies in pre-literate times. First was not the word but the image. Yet it is notable that prohibition of graven images comes up as the second commandment. Thou shall not kill  does not appear till number six.

Men controlled the Bible. It is attributed to scribes and to Yahweh, word by word. Whether from right to left or left to right one reads in a linear sequential order. As literacy grew with the advent of the printing press, in the mid-15^th century, the consequences of print technology became more profound and pervasive.

Marshall McLuhan made the case that by extending the visual sense in this way it led to individualism, the nation-state, capitalism and to a way of viewing the world in distorted ways including misogyny and domination.

Reliance on print and its corollaries started to decline with the electronic age. Books by Virginia Wolff and James Joyce chipped away at the straight-ahead narrative.

Arguably, we are now in the post-literate age. Iconography with the return of images and signifiers are more easily read by Gen Z, along with graphic novels, and a gestalt of surfaces, phrases and bytes. Simultaneity has replaced the linear sequential.

Perhaps the Trump-era of male domination is the last gasp of the warrior age. I’d like to believe we are on the verge of a new consciousness informed by feminine principles and communal values.  

                                                                                                                                                                                 

Wets and Dries

For my birthday last month, my friend Larry presented me with a stack of prescriptions scribbled by doctors one hundred years ago. All of them had a smattering of Latin phrases and were written for syrups, fluid extracts, crystalline powders, emulsions etc... all from natural sources.

When I entered pharmacy college in 1950 those same substances were still in use. By the time I graduated, they were gone. The garden of botanicals had vanished. Exotic vapors had escaped along with rhizomes, roots and excrescence on some trees. No leaves macerating, nor acacia rancid in the glue bottle. It was those arcane names that drew me in and their intoxicating breath.

They asked me, what’ll it be? You’re seventeen. Who are you? I only knew who I wasn’t. My brother, four years older, with a tool box, tinkering under the hood, never owned a library card. No. I would become my father.

I entered his world of pharmacy as it was withering but still with ancient aromas I had inhaled as a kid. Apothecary jars on the shelf labeled podophyllin, glycyrrhiza, aqua hamamelidis. The glossary became a second language.

When I got my license, the Edenic garden was nearly gone. It had become bottled alphabetically. The aromatic elixirs had disappeared or fallen into disrepute. Squibb, Parke-Davis, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Burrough-Wellcome claimed the space, now deodorized. But we still had the Wets and Dries.   

That’s what we called them. Compound tincture of benzoin and oil of eucalyptus were some of the wets. The stuff put into a vaporizer whose mingled odor in the steam certified a sickroom. Bicarbonate of soda was one of the dries. They were sold over-the-counter as part of a section dividing the prescription area from the front.

The front was where customers stood. Back in the day the Rx compounding area was raised so the pharmacist was looked up to as he presided between globes of colored water. My father was on that pedestal for me but now I was eye to eye with a man faking a cough to get his hands on a bottle of Terpin Hydrate with Codeine, aka G.I. Gin, which was among the wets. His signature in the registry book was required; today it was Joe Smith, tomorrow Bill Blotz. Poor guy. If the codeine didn’t get him, the alcohol did.

Wets and Dries are the last gasp of early pharmacy. Old preparations or chemicals so long in use they couldn’t be patented and sold as proprietaries still hang on. Iodine would be one; spirits of camphor another one. Epsom salts, in five pound boxes remain, usually filling the bottom shelf of the section. Flowers of sulfur (brimstone) used for acne, no longer. The wets included oil of clove for toothaches, gentian violet (anti-fungal), cascara sagrada (laxative), spirits of ammonia (smelling salt), peppermint water (mild carminative) and Stokes expectorant (demulcent and cough suppressant). Those names still get me.

I'm of two minds about these old world remedies. They are part of my early romance with pharmacy yet I also tend to discount their therapeutic value in modern medicine. When I hear of someone relying on these organic, alternative medications, I cringe. Otherwise enlightened people spend money for worthless products as if they are striking a blow against Big Pharma. The result is what I regard as a multi-billion dollar hoax industry.

In the 1970s, the FDA required proof of efficacy and safety for all items sold having a therapeutic effect. There was no pharmaceutical company to bear the expense of an approval process. Old standards such as Mercurochrome fell away along with dozens of others. 

I also fell away but that drugstore air remains in a corner of my lungs, pungent, floral and earthy in a special proportion which I can conjure with any number of old-world words…cimicifuga, asafetida, opodeldoc.

Uniforms

Watching ball games, as is my vice, I have come to accept men running around in their colored underwear, or rather their uniforms. It doth proclaim them.

Before Zuckerberg’s t-shirt or Steve Jobs’ turtleneck there were suits. Three-piece or gray flannel or those you could buy at Sears with two pairs of pants, all wool gabardine. Men wore them to see a play or fly from here to there. These days, even sports jackets are so yesterday they're ripe for a comeback. 

I wore a smock, on and off, for fifty years as a dispenser of assorted remedies and assuring words. I don’t miss mine at all.

Maybe they’ve been replaced by tattoos. We’re not our job anymore; we are individuals each making our own major statement. Egalitarianism allows us to dress down, to slum or choose a wardrobe out of thrift stores. Designers have lines of scrupulous sloppiness with ventilation at the knees. There are friends I have never seen in jeans and others who always wear them. To each his uniform.

All of which leads me to remember vanished uniforms along with the jobs themselves. Whatever happened to that young woman with her bright jacket and flashlight patrolling the aisles as she hushed us and ushered us kids into the dark movie house, darker still because it was Saturday afternoon and we always came in the middle of a film. Was she dreaming of being discovered, projecting herself on the big screen. Or did she fade to black?

Gone, too, is the doorman with his epaulets, our peacetime commander who lived on tips. He waved, whistled and launched a thousand taxis. Doormen disappeared or did they just live in movies set on Park Ave? I imagined these quasi-aristocrats fled Europe as professors or constables and had to settle for the ignominy of brass buttons.

And where are the elevator operators, in authority for the length of their shift, traveling vertical miles on one spot from Icarus to Orpheus as they alone contracted and expanded those wrought iron lungs?

The usher had no name but saw plenty of wandering arms in the balcony. Maybe the other two wrote novels in their heads from snatches overheard. They answered to first name only and remembered to speak politely to Mr. and Mrs…. on the 23^rd floor.

They slipped away unnoticed, loud uniforms, shiny buttons and all. Jackets and caps now in vintage shops, indignity and pride embedded in the fabric. In one pocket dried lipstick and a stick of gum. In another an empty flask and a check for two bucks, uncashed.

Misadventure

It’s only money. If the object of life is to die broke, I’m well on my way. For $545 I could have bought a magnificent dinner on some rooftop restaurant for a few close friends or better yet, donated to a fund for saving the lives of bombed out children with medical needs.

But none of the above happened. Instead, I paid that money to retrieve my car after it was towed away for parking in a spot designated (in small print) for valet service owned by an upscale eatery called Elephantine.

I had met my two friends at the Laemmle theater in Santa Monica for a three o’clock showing of the new Christian Petzhold film, Mirror-3. All his movies are highly recommended.

In the last two works by this director, cars play an important part. In this current one, an accident kills the driver but his passenger escapes unharmed and that sets in motion the entire narrative. His previous film entitled Afire involves two men dying as they try to tow their own car. For me, it was a bad omen foretold.

Does anyone really believe in omens? After all, the Ides of March passed unremarkably. Synchronicity is another thing. As I was reading the word moth, a moth flew out of nowhere. It happens all the time. Not only moths but friends or relatives die or win lotteries at the moment they might enter your mind even though you haven’t thought of Uncle Max for eleven years.

We enjoy these random happenings as if portals to a place beyond. We crave transcendence. Surely, there must be another dimension, why else would my car be towed?

So there I was staring at the empty space where I had parked my car. By this time, Adele was about 15 blocks away but stayed on the line with me. Tamara was walking and graciously came back to be with me even as her husband Basil was waiting for her return. I thought I spotted Petzhold filming the entire human drama unfolding.

I was given a number to call. The police were very understanding of my predictament particularly when I played my age card and reliance on my walker. They arranged for a police car to pick me up. The officer was a model of human kindness as he first drove me to the police station to pay the fine, then to the towing place (which was closed) and lastly took me home.

Janice drove me to pick up my car this morning. Now, I have almost filled a page distracting me from my carelessness, from that elephant in the room.

 

 

Taking Back The Moon

The silver apples of the moon / The golden apples of the sun.

                                                     W.B. Yeats

The moon has always been the province of poets and songwriters. And now it is a destination.  No, not for low-housing, but as a base for further space travel. One hopes not for colonizing other planets.

Of course, we knew early on it was our satellite but wolves howled at it and troubadours pined under it to the point of lunacy.

For Somerset Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence, it represented the sublime. For Shakespeare, inconstancy. Eugene O'Neill saw the moon as a symbol of redemption in his A Moon for the Misbegotten. 

In Peggy's poem, Under the Unwed Moon, she wrote, The moon in the force of its pull releases the buried bones.

It also hit your eye like a big pizza pie. The moon can’t help it if it rhymes with June, balloon and sleepy lagoon. For Robert Graves in his book, White Goddess, the moon was the supreme muse; the feminine aspect which represented birth and the life of the imagination.

No argument from me though I was brought up thinking it was made of green cheese with cows jumping over to the fiddle of hi diddle-diddle.

Gilbert and Sullivan borrowed the moon in Trial By Jury.

     The moon in her phases is found the time, winds and the weather / You cannot eat breakfast all day nor put two Mondays together.  

Here G&S remind us that Monday is a contraction of Moon-day.

Again, in the Yeoman of the Guard, the moon belongs to lovers.

   It is sung to the moon / by a love-lorn loon ….. He sipped no sup, and he craved no cup /As he sighed for the love of a ladye.

In my day, which is close to prehistory, there was Les Paul and Mary Ford's rendition of How High the Moon and Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River. How many times did Frank Sinatra fly to the moon on gossamer wings? Cat Stevens walked to fame in Moon Shadow.

It's once in a blue moon that we get such as Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 14, thirty years later renamed Moonlight Sonata. And then there was Claude Debussy's Clair De Lune.

That word lunacy has a troubled history. In the ancient world a full moon became the culprit for an unsound mind. It also got tied in with female menstruation which was a mystery to unsound males. Lunatic asylums were so named for millennia. It was Barack Obama, in 2012, who signed a bill striking the word from all legislation forever more. It wouldn't surprise if Trump restores it. 

Go ahead, let NASA circle the moon. From where I stand it still casts a spell, bitten, gibbous or full.

Emergency of Spring

Millions marching costumed as wildflowers emerge on city streets in exodus from the king’s bondage, his masked storm troopers, Middle East / Wing in rubble, he's desecrated the oval, eggs of Easter- yeast rising as an insurrection against depravity in an upheaval against the edicts of war as buildings fall with children huddled, like petal-closed buds, their unlived lives, a procession merging hands across America, of chariots swung low, tendrils, rhizomes, old and new testaments derived from testicles held in oath, phallic spires, erection-resurrection toward a promised place, pass the bitters, bless the wine, good eggs hard boiled go up the hill with Jesus, Moses and Jack and Jill to fetch and pitch nine commands and one for extra innings, take two for C.B. De Mille with his cast of thousands, no time for leavened bread, for corn rye sliced thin with seeds, but seeds, yes seeds for hope and homelands, for miracles, for turning cheek to cheek, think Fred & Ginger, think love against which hate has no answer cause Jesus don't like killing no matter what the reason for, the equinox is vernal, something to shout about, a havoc of poppies wearing April dresses, odes of them in terraced stanzas strutting their stuff from plots to flower pots to bombed and empty lots; let me hear that trumpet in the daffodil, the sax in the foxglove, what was dormant is now emergent...

 

Ladybug and Distant Carnage

 I'm walking in the park and now I reward myself with a gulp of cold water from a thermos. I have covered the equivalent of about 4 blocks with the help of my walker. This is my half-way point today. I find a bench with a back. No small thing. It's only  springtime but the living is easy.

My trusted walker does more than keep me vertically balanced. It has a pouch. How else could I have lugged this nearly 800-page book by Rebecca West?

I settle into a shady spot on this sunny afternoon half a world away from the atrocities of overhead missiles and drones. No sirens, no blasts. I have been sheltered my entire life from the daily struggle to survive. I can dial my reality. Now images of destruction, now commentary, but all at a distance. The remote in my hand is well-named. I can even mute toxic voices.

The story I’m reading is The Return Of The Soldier; a tale set in the English countryside between the two world wars. The soldier suffers from what was then called shellshock. Lives were squandered in that so-called Great War which was a crime against humanity. Deliberate slaughter is unknown in other species.

It is as if I am reading about myself sequestered in bucolic civility while across the water limbs are lost, children orphaned and telegrams are making widows out of wives. My life is spared, even charmed, by the cosmic crapshoot of geography.

After a few minutes, a ladybug lands on my page. She is a model insect to behold with six black spots enclosing a larger one almost heart-shaped in the middle on a reddish dome. I am transfixed as she struts across the margin. I understand this is a sign of good luck, as if I needed that affirmation. In mid-sentence she opens her wingspan and flies away. My version of shock and awe.

The beauty of this beetle has distracted me. Ladybugs are revered in gardens as a natural predator against aphids and mites. One can eat 5,000 in a lifetime. However, they, in turn, are the prey of birds and some larger insects.

Just when life seems pacified, I’m reminded of these conflicts unseen being played out in the grass, even underground. Should I take back what I said about wars among other species? No. Their cycle of predation is their ecosystem. We have no excuse. We have been gifted with ponder and the capacity to love while at the same time, cursed with anxiety and fear leading to domination.

The father of a 3-year-old alongside my bench, remarked on Rebecca West, which gave me hope yet for civilization. I thought of a book by the poet Ann Lauterbach called On A Stair which she said could also be pronounced Honest Air. I felt reinvigorated walking back.