In A Swirl

Thanks to you Donald we are in a swirl. Witnessing the shredding of what was. Hokusai painted his great wave in the mid 19th century. Japan was on the verge. America is now under the surge and the foam. What our Founders wrought you have put asunder. 

Thanks Donald, now please leave. Thanks for inadvertently reminding us of the fragile beauty we have lost. The blue and white woodcut is bleeding. That is our flag, Donald, you have bloodied. You have pried open our eyes even as you defaced the sacred parchment.

But Vincent took that swirl and made of it his starry night. He lifted the wave into a magnificent frenzy. He yellowed us with his sunflowers. Now I am sipping absinthe with Hokusai under Van Gogh's yellow awning in the night café. Donald is rendered as a gnarled tree; his portrait, a pair of encrusted shoes.

After I’m gone Van Gogh's iris will continue to vibrate. The wreckage of our ship in the churning sea will be repaired under an all-seeing eye in the cyclonic sky. 

All Hallows' Eve (Resurrected from my Blog Graveyard)

 I love these pagan rituals ...Christmas, Easter and Halloween. Christianity usurped the first two but couldn't quite get church doctrine around the latter. All Saints Day, as such, is pretty much ignored. But the holiday survives stronger than ever in this country and Ireland now that its roots, as the beginning of winter, have been commodified as an occasion for vampire films, costumes and candy.

The origin goes back to the Druids and Celts who noted November First as the start of the dark half of the year. It was regarded as a magical time when the dead walked among the living. The few days between the eve and day following Nov.1st were seen as no-time when the rules of society which allowed tribes to cohere, were temporarily suspended, a short period when chaos prevailed. Hence the mischief, dress-up and cross-dressing.

The veil between the living and the dead was also lifted so those spirits gone were celebrated for their wisdom, bravery or magic. Enter Christianity. Unable to rid the peasants of their tradition the Church built upon it, just as many European cathedrals were built on former pagan sites.

My memory of the holiday is associated with colored chalk. We would mark each other's clothing and engage in benign pranks. Through the years, this evolved or devolved to trick or treating, a mild form of extortion. You gimme this or I'll do that. Of course kids, with their parents behind them, aren't about to do anything except receive compliments on their get-ups and get their fill of candy which probably caused tooth decay, stomach aches and acne. The origin of it all comes from the old notion that evil spirits roamed about and were pacified by a treat left out which also ensured a plentiful crop for the year to come. 

A more positive interpretation of our practice is that it introduces children to strangers and reaffirms the social fabric of the neighborhood. Fear and mistrust are bridged and adults get to relive their own childhood.

One of my favorite Woody Allen lines is, My only regret in life is that I'm not someone else. Costume parties allow us, for one night, to shed our skin for another. If it takes Halloween to do it, I'm for it.

Up until recently people lived closer to death. The Mexican Day of the Dead is a healthy way to experience the natural inevitability. A small act to relieve our repression and meditate on our own mortality.

Halloween is rooted, literally, in the earth tied to seasonal planting, harvest and a recognition of the solstice. It is a time to recall our connection to the natural cycles of the seasons, a universal observance, one way or another. Pass the pumpkin pie and pumpkin ice cream.

On Halloween night in 1938 Orson Welles scared the hell out of thousands of people with his version of that other Wells’ classic, War Of The Worlds. In case there was any doubt, the power of radio and public gullibility were demonstrated. I was five at the time and have no first-hand stories to relate but folks hid in their cellars, jammed the highways and wrapped wet towels around their head to offset the poison gas. Today, social media has replaced radio and the level of gullibility has multiplied exponentially. 

Light In Dark Times

Some friends say this is no time for humor

so I send them cartoons.

Smiling widens the face

un-gnashes the teeth, un-furrows the frown.

When nostrils flare, they let in more air.

Laughing is jogging, inner aerobics.

My Buddha is giggling.

Let the banana go black; it is no metaphor.

Peel me a grape but hold the wrath.

There's a dulcimer in the spare ribs,

a harp in the bombed piano.

Eventually a sigh elongates into music

and opens the fist into tendrils.

Even with a fly in the still-life

and a skull on the table

there is light from our inner bulb.

And when grass is paved over

something we may call weed

pokes its head through a crack,

which can split the rock.

Watching Fox Noose,

how they sneer, how they smirk,

the manure they spew could someday be mulch.

Are those not buds surrounding the thorn?

Auden cannot un-say

we must love one another or die.

 

Micro and Macro

I wonder if it is natural to conflate our own life journey with the chronicle of history? When I came into consciousness, age eight, Pearl Harbor marked my entry into the world beyond bubblegum cards and double features. The war itself fixed my sense of good and evil. After WWII was won, I remember the returning G.Is and feeling of newness, my own life on the verge of something.

Maybe it is in our nature to look for corollaries, signs within that correspond to that external world whose light from yonder window breaks …with breaking news. It is as if we might align our private lives with the events of history on one long continuum. The macro has its way with our psyche whether we know it or not. Sometimes we mirror the news, other times we may act out its opposite.

In literary terms the correlative can sometimes be regarded as a cheap shot. The patient is dying while outside the bedroom window a leaf is in an advanced state of decay. The dark and stormy night references the weather inside the house as much as outside. Yet art of any kind conveys emotion best when evoked indirectly and not told.

When Rudyard Kipling visited Japan on his prolonged honeymoon, he wrote about walking under an azalea tree in Kyoto about to burst with fruit; considered to be a coded message for his wife’s pregnancy.

April 12, 1945, Thursday afternoon it was announced that FDR had died. His intonations had shivered me with a beneficent divinity. I realized he was my God. His death was, for me, a quake and the death of my religious belief.

Now in my tenth decade my body is in its Trumpian upheaval. A whistle has been blown. The crumbling of our democracy under his malicious imbecility is matched by the decline of my own anatomy. Arthritis is having its way with my ambulation. An arrested cancer is just a spot of bother. My joints are testifying loudly. Bones conspire to overthrow my constitution. 

As my architecture has lost its spring, so too has our current Congress become a body of invertebrates groveling under the tyrant’s thumb. They made a Faustian pact to throw a blind eye and deaf ear to his vanity and greed. However, what appeared to be a MAGA zeitgeist two years ago now show signs that they bet on the wrong horse. One by one they disavow his endorsement and distance themselves.

Having been suckled on movies, happy endings are in my bloodstream. Trump has no right to reverse the script. There will be a reckoning. 

Even as my bones and organs may conspire to overthrow my constitution I intend to stay in this political theater until the dangerous manchild is impeached and removed with justice restored. As in the old days, I might then say, this is where I came in.

 

Reading Aloud

Most nights Adele and I read short stories aloud over the phone. Often, the narratives offer portals to a dimly remembered moment in our own lives to be shared. Sometimes, we halt and re-read a passage beautifully rendered.

We have read dozens of Joyce Carol Oates short fiction and, as if a rejoinder, tackled several collections of John Updike’s priapic yarns. She treats men as a sub-species with uncontained menace and Updike’s males are happily predatory as if that defines normalcy. His women have no agency. Oates seems haunted by demons and Updike is stuck with male fantasies. Yet both are masters of language so we turn the page and read on.

When we moved on to anthologies we discovered authors we had never heard of. One such is E.K. Ota’s gem The Paper Artist, the story of Japanese tradition and the heavy toll paid for patriarchal pride. So beautifully written it elicited sadness and joy at the same time.

Another author previously unknown to us is Brad Felver. His work appears in two editions of O. Henry Prize collections, 2018 and 2025. He is not to be missed. While most entries are heavily plotted, Felver’s are masterpieces of nuanced love. They resound with truth and speak to our core.

He strummed a toy ukulele for her. It wasn't long before Annabelle learned how to smile. D minor and G were her favorite chords, and for hours he would play them, the D minor hovering like a Frisbee in flight, just out reach, until he would finally resolve it with the G, and little Annabelle would smile and kick.

Several times we pause, thinking we must have missed something. But the gaps are meant to make demands on us to fill in the narrative. Queen Elizabeth, the title story is meant to be a tree. It is our surmise; we are never told as much. And just when we figure it out the tree becomes a metaphor for their dead baby. 

His language is spare as if sculpted from a larger block of marble. We get the essentials. His genius is how effortlessly and quietly he draws us into the drama. Communication happens from what is unsaid. Somehow he articulates the silences.

After receiving the gift of those two stories Queen Elizabeth and Orphans, we have now moved on to his newly published collection, Dogs of Detroit. The stories have turned harsh and the environment unforgiving as he explores the extremities of relationships. We hope they take a turn back to soulfulness.

Reading aloud is a different experience than reading to ourselves. We are sharing the moment; the sounds and cadence of the phrases are like music and, in the hands of great writers, our hearts are stirred together.  

Life-Support

The patient is in the emergency room. Microbials never seen before threaten the beating heart. Pus everywhere. The wound is abscessed and weeping, monitors bleeping. A miasma of avarice metastasizing and resistant to judicious measures.

The patient is us. Our democracy is on life-support wth I.Vs dripping. 

Half the country is in a comatose state, can’t be bothered or wants to pull the plug. The other half calls for massive doses of truth, they gather, they shout down the assassins with an arsenal of adjectives.

The third half, Independants, overwhelmed by the moment, ponders as if two plus two just might be three or seven. As if the lord high executioner really isn't naked; maybe his clothes will soon come out of the spin cycle at the all-night laundromat.

Someday, the undecided will be studied as a group accomplice in aiding the criminal act which laid to rest our country's heritage.

No hospice, our former Democracy will go to rehab. Can our country be transfused with new blood? I say Yes. Yes to resuscitation. Yes to the healing power of decency, to intelligence and yes to compassion. Sadism, psychosis and junk science have a short half-life. Degeneracy will give way. 

When, you ask. There will be a tide. 

 

 

 

Root Canal

I felt a toothache coming on Tuesday. No you didn't. Yes I did. It was gone on Wednesday. By Thursday evening it was loudly squawking. Friday morning, it was gone again but I answered its call of yesterday's distress. My dentist squeezed me in with the dreaded announcement that I require a root canal. Off I went to an endodontist. Now the deed is done.

The old joke is Life sucks and then you die...but first you get a root canal.

Not so, say I. First of all, life is such a joy. I can think of nothing better. Secondly, I enjoyed every moment of my root canal. How did it get such a bad rap? I love canals. My first non-memory is doing  the backstroke as I made my way into this world. Then there were those canals in Amsterdam and Venice. But I digress. 

The procedure was painless. He didn't talk to me about his portfolio as other dentists have done. Nor did he ramble on extolling the virtues of  DJT when all I could do was grunt and spit. Rule number one which I must have learned swimming down that first canal was, Never dispute the man when he has a drill in your mouth. 

One grows emotionally attached to one's body parts. Molar #19 had behaved itself for lo these many years. True, I may have abused it, early on, with Necco Wafers and Milk Duds. It registers every scoop of pumpkin ice cream or key lime pie passing through its ivory gates. So this, I suppose,  is pay-back time. 

Strange how teeth have a limited shelf-life. Elbows and knuckles last in perpetuity but molars have not only bitten and chewed but have also put up with all my gush of barbed words and the occasional poem with its jagged right-hand margin.

I can't say enough about my endodontist. After looking at teeth all day he must dream of corn on the cob or boy scouts lined up in rows. Or maybe he would welcome someone with fangs. I wonder if there were animal orthodontists in prehistoric times treating saber-toothed tigers?

As I write this, my anaesthetic is wearing off. I am, after all, long of tooth. Time for 600mg of Ibuprofen.