Life Story

My daughter recently videotaped my life story. Everybody has their own bio-pic. 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 had 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 enthusiams. 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? 

 

Pitching the Movie of Our Days...In A Time Warp

(For cinephiles and septuagenarians or beyond)

Louis B. Mayer: I'll give you ten minutes. What have you got?

Me: I have this script about a delusional megalomaniac who takes over the country.

Mayer: What is it, a horror movie? Bela Lugosi?
Me: Think of it as The Rotten Tomato That Ate Chicago.

Mayer: So tell me more.
Me: He is elected President...twice and puts a wrecking ball to half the White House.

Mayer: I haven’t got time for this. You say a crazy guy wins two elections?
Me: Right, it's sort of a comic book, apocalyptic, political thriller.

Me: I can see Citizen Kane dumbed down to a blabbering Rosebud.
Mayer: You mean Orson Welles in the Cuckoo's Nest?

Me: More like P.T. Barnum meets Al Capone. Or Huey Long

merged with Elmer Gantry.

Mayer: Capone? We can use George Raft.
Me: No, he’s more than a gangster, he barks like Edward G. Robinson.

Mayer: Sounds like a musical comedy. it’s over-budget already.
Me: Listen to me, L.B., you only need one actor and a mob.

Mayer: A mob? Get me Frank Capra on line one.
Me: You’ll never regret it. You can use a lot of out-of-work extras.

Mayer: Sounds like a cast of thousands. Bring in DeMille.

Me; More like a zany madcap romp with body bags.
Mayer: Get me Preston Sturgis and Stanley Kramer.

Mayer: It may play in the Brown Derby but we need the Heartland.
Me: It will be a blockbuster. Everyman gone berserk. Think of the foreign market; dictators will love it.

Me: You'll need lots of red ties and MAGA red caps.

Mayer: Hold on here. That's too close to MGM. Scrap that.

Mayer: What about females, that's a must. Stanwyck is under contract and we've got dozens of starlets.

Me: We can use them all. The guy is salacious. 

Mayer: How about the ending?  It's got to be happy.

Me: Trust me, L.B. we’ll see him in a long shot. A guy in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash from a homeless encampment.

Communal Air

Fog is suppressed. Hair frizzled. Air stopped from cooling down by El Nino. Monsoonal flow is thick and sticky.

But think of it this way: monsoonal is communal. Whatever happens, happens to all of us. And, to some extent, we contributed to this sweltering phenomenum through neglect and avarice. There is big money in fossil fuels. Energy is the cash cow we've been milking for the past 150 years with calloused indifference to the consequences. The damage may be halted but is irreversible. 

To this ten-year old the summer heat tapped into my vault of childhood; weather, war and whooping cough, We had our heroes and our shared menace; infantile paralysis, traitors and the dreaded third rail.

Weather, particularly in triple digits, brings us together, setting off memories as when we lived in NYC or Philly or Jersey City. The illegal moisture from Mexico finds asylum in my head and with it a remembrance of distant summers. 

Low pressure trough, they say. It comes up like overripe fruit, pregnant with its bag of water. Thunderous maybe, tripping the sky electric. It’s not enough to quench a thirsty plant with its tongue hanging out. But enough to monsoonal me back to those afternoons in "Air-Cooled" movies (who cares what's playing?) and August nights on the fire escape. When the livin' was easy, languid but energy enough to chase a Good Humor truck when we heard that bell toll.

Games were postponed when they rolled out the tarp. Could just be a sun-shower. Some were rained-out, with a double-header scheduled the next day. Heat and humidity tied in extra innings.

There I was, empty mayonnaise jar with perforated holes in the lid, chasing after fireflies, leaping higher than a pop fly, delerious in the heat of my years.

On the subway with the overhead fan circulating vapors from under arms hanging on to straps. Maybe I grabbed a straw seat and got stuck to it even as we all whoosed under the East River to the canyons of tall rectangles.

That word monsoonal makes me swoon with the sound of it. Imagine an alto sax in cahoots with a lunatic moon; a recording of Sleepy Lagoon. The air is syrup, in a soupy spoon, thick enough to climb that cratered balloon. Every year we get a dose of this undocumented air from Baja or maybe Khartoum. 

Overhead fans didn’t do much but scatter the flies so people came out to un-stifle themselves. So did the gnats. They swarmed by gazillions all over the front window of my father’s drug store. 

It must have been the flag colors of the Ex-Lax sign that attracted the gnats. They covered that part of the window and gradually the rest of it in sufficient numbers to excite the neighborhood. I don’t think the store ever had such traffic, at least at the outside entrance. My father possessed a natural calm which could break a fever. He needed every bit of it to persuade the crowd we were not being invaded by an alien species. 100 degrees does strange things to all creatures in a shared inferno.

The Long and Short Of It

Our illustrious president, at 6 ft. 3 in. is pushing 240 lbs. which is unaccountable since he is a hollow man, but I suppose those Big Macs can add up. His official height, at 6 ft. 3 in. might include the bumper crop on top of his crown and an ego to dwarf the Eiffel Tower which makes up for an an absence of conscience and cognitive function.

Ever since David met Goliath in the great mismatch of pre-history, we've been rooting for underdogs. Or so we say. But when it comes to voting we tend to go big. Lincoln, at six ft. 4 in. was a full foot taller than Stephen A. Douglas who got trampled. Of course Lincoln was also stronger having built the log cabin he was born in. Abe was a gentle Goliath whom the Bible claims was nine feet tall. Michelangelo compensated for the disadvantage by sculpting David to seventeen feet.

William Howard Taft is probably the last obese president we’ll ever see. A wide girth doesn't play well on social media. There is a chair built specially for him at the Riverside Mission Inn which looks more like a couch to accommodate his considerable tush. Taft is said to have gotten stuck once in the White House bathtub. All 354 pounds of himself was almost enough to sink the ship of state.

Height counts; more than weight. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson put aside their prospective careers as power forwards in the NBA to found our country. Both were 6 ft. 3 in. give or take an inch. Madison was also 6 ft. 3 in. when on his horse. He is reported to have had a great outside shot but was too busy writing our Constitution.

Beethoven also had a tiny strike zone at 5 ft. 3 in spite of which, thankfully, he did what he did instead of becoming a baseball player. The result is our ode to joy. You didn’t have to be tall to be great in those days. It is doubtful Napoleon had a Napoleonic complex. He was the average height at 5 ft. 6 in. Genghis Khan was more deserving of that term at a mere 5 ft. 1 in. when he finally got off his high horse.

Andrew Carnegie penny-pinched himself to an even 5 ft. while his labor force worked 7 days/week, 12 hours/day. At the same height, Danny DiVito seems to have ended up hawking submarine sandwiches which, somehow, seems apt.

I was surprised to learn that Stalin was a tiny 5 ft. 6 in. to FDR’s 6 ft. 3 in. I suppose they came in at equal numbers with Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Puny Putin twirls Trump around his finger while giving up 8 inches to our inspirational leader. The same sems to be true of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jun Un. Our potentate seems to be drawn to diminutive despots.

Mickey Rooney, at 5 ft. 2 in, was once asked how he managed to accumulate so many tall show girls. He said that he lied about his height. His first wife was Ava Gardner; between them there were 16 marriages. Judy Garland wasn’t one of them. At 4 ft. 11 in., she almost made Mickey look tall except that her booming voice seem to fill the room.

I pray that the Dems come up with a candidate about 6 ft. tall (no need to slam-dunk) trim, well-spoken but not too eloquent; we don't want to alienate six-grade dropouts, also fluent in Spanish, tech-speak and trash talk should the occasion arise. I want a Progressive with a closet free of skeletons, 2.5 children, who refuses money from AIPAC but welcomes contributions with no strings. Someone for whom no constituency will stay home; a tall order.