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. 

Baseball As Poetry

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. Of course I sympathize with their impoverishment and must also take up the challenge in remedial education.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

To turn away from baseball is to reject your ancestry. Rumors have it that early man broke off a branch and swatted away an approaching rock thus giving birth to the rudiments of the game. The wood became a natural extension of an arm and the incoming missile could be the moon or any spherical celestial object. It is the paradigm for our defense against drones. When running, throwing, and catching were no longer necessary for survival they died as essential tools and became an art form or sport.

I can see this was too much of a stretch. It didn’t even convince me. Let me try again.

As if ordained by the gods themselves and brought down from Mt. Olympus, baseball celebrates Euclidean geometry. It turns a square into a diamond punctuated with three pillows, as safe stations, and a metaphoric home. The navigation around the bases is a hero’s journey, Odysseus-like. When home plate is finally achieved it is often accompanied by a cloud of dust to signify the arduous circumstances, with a god-like umpire passing judgement. Perhaps Zeus took pleasure in watching men fail. Sisyphus was not alone in futility. Baseball is so designed to reward a seventy percent failure rate with millions of gold pieces. Add to this, the divine correspondence of nine innings to our allotted decades on earth, with an allowance for extra innings here and there.  

Still not persuaded? Let me put it this way.

Can you hear it? The crack of the bat. The thwack of ball into mitt. The smell of green grass and hot dogs.  Baseball is so pastoral, so American, so deliberate and so inconsequential. Games will be won and lost, setting fans in anguish or jubilation, yet nothing will be really changed. Trump is still with us, the polar ice continues to melt and atrocities continue.

But here’s what changes: From opening day tomorrow to sometime in late October, a human drama will unfold without script. It is neither rigged nor predictable. An alternative narrative is enacted in real time, which makes more sense than this one we gnash our teeth over listening to cable news. The game of baseball offers the illusion, at least, of order, strategy and control. Every stance and swing will be scrutinized and the mountain of verifiable stats may not amount to a hill of beans for the uninitiated but to us the fan(atics) it is its own universe, a ritualized life and death, only to live again the next day regardless.

The game allows men of all sizes and shapes, beer bellies, hulks and shrimps, cerebral and instinctual. It attracts physically endowed jocks and bespectacled nerds. Harvard graduates are now general managers of several teams, trying to outwit their counterparts with new data, yet the core of the sport is an unquantifiable human element. What is more mysterious than a sudden slump or streak, not unlike a poet's writer's block? Even the dimensions of the playing field are inscrutable, with the precision of an infield contrasted with haphazard measurements of the outfield.

Baseball is our answer to the impermanence of life. It defines our seasons. There is an intimacy between pitcher and catcher in a shared fluency of silent gestures. Players are widely positioned spatially with anticipation coiled in their legs to dart at the instant of contact between ball and bat. And all this time the poet watches in the stands with time to ponder how life, itself, is simulated on the field.

Finally I am left with the nagging realization that I am really trying to understand why it is that I still care. The Bible says to put away childish things so I put away the Bible. At my age there is no messianic urge to convert the heathens. Rationalization is as hopeless as hitting a 100 mph fastball.

The 93rd Anniversary of Myself

Don’t make a fuss. It’s only a number. Furthermore, if mindless men in red states prevail, we will suddenly become nine months older than we thought we were. Happy fetus.

I have no memory of my day of birth. (It was 2 days after Philip Roth's and 9 days after Ruth Bader Ginsberg). I expect I was very busy that day taking my first breath and missing my umbilical time as a fish-like substance. Reports had reached me that Hitler was on the rise and I was to fear nothing but fear itself. The thought of eating apple sauce out of a Dust Bowl was not appealing at all.

Birthdays are a floating number. I contain each of my ninety-three years, some a bit more than others. The chronology doesn’t always behave. At age nineteen I was thirty-two and at forty-eight I was finally nineteen. My preference now is to be of no age which is to say, every age.

Here's what I have come to know. The best times are those outside of time when hours fly by unrecorded. Creativity and loving defy all measures of the calendar or clock. 

Being born on the equinox has endowed me with an even temperament. I hear Jung shaking his head that I must be repressing my shadow side. If my animus against all Trump-like substances isn't enough, maybe I am harboring some deviltry myself. It is true that I hate feta cheese and I've been known not to squeeze the tube of toothpaste from the bottom. 

In astrological terms I'm told I was born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries to which I say gurgle and bah.

As for infirmities, I can't think of anything more boring to talk about. So, I won't. I never realized how many body parts I have. Such a mechanism.

Did I ever tell you about the time I… Yes, you did, now be quiet. When all my stories have been told and shamelessly embellished it may be time to look out the window and marvel at this bush I have scrupulously overlooked now bursting with clusters of rhododendrons or that stump on my favorite tree, the result of overzealous pruning. The coral tree will soon be lit by red candles which I shall not blow out.

If I am running out of breath, I'm not yet running out of breadth. The imaginary candles I am blowing out on my imaginary cake do not signify the snuffing out of enlightenment. 

As a blogger I babble along with the proverbial brook though now and then I feel more aligned with the hush of it all. I have already told the world what to do and did they listen? No, they did not. Celebration feels unseemly as long as new wastelands are being created every day by unconscionable acts.

I have now lived almost as long as Poe, Keats and Plath combined, proving there is no divine plan in the allotment of years. My footprint barely registers but perhaps it’s okay not to succeed as long as one does it with an open heart. Born as I was on the first day of spring, I'd like to think I sprouted with the wildflowers.

Peggy died about 4 1/2 years ago. During my widowhood I have been blessed with a circle of loving friends. In her 100th year Peggy told me to go for it; and so I have. One woman, Adele, has become my late in life love. To be fully met in a caring and sharing relationship has added a needed dimension and joy to my daily life. My feet are on the ground but always at the ready for buoyancy.

I'm taking comfort in the words of A.K. Ramanujan, You can count all the oranges on a tree but never all the trees in a single orange. Who knows what juice still remains under the rind?

Notes on Near-Spring

 March is said to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. For much of the world the lion hasn’t left. It is still a time of carnivores. Now, there is an urgency for spring to snuff out winter’s lease.

Spring is a season of commotion.  Are we on the brink or on the verge? A rapture of buds birthing not quite replacing the rupture and the rubble. To do honor to the fruit and flower we regard, with wonder, its full arc, including its spasm of farewell. The old rot and the new ripe.

Too bad our man at the helm has given the narcissus bulb such a bad name. (Amaryllis and daffodils are in that family.) He seems blinded by his own reflection in the mirror of the pond, covered as it is with slime.

For the rest of us, seasons signify becoming. When I write, my joy is in staying inside the poem or paragraph; not to finish but to luxuriate in the process before it becomes a mere product. Not even to stay but to meander, to hitch a ride on the bus to elsewhere. 

I'm an unmoored vessel sifting through my cargo for new seeds. The mystery is not in the still-life of succulents, but in the cycle of the speckled banana. 

I’m reminded of the way Peggy would write a poem. She could be struggling with some metaphysical concept and along might come a dog or a dog walker with an orange cap. That dog or that cap would enter into her poem, incongruently, which gave the poem an inclusiveness as if to say nothing is apart from anything else and that includes the outer with the inner, the head mingling with the heart. The poem, like all poems, is about the writing of the poem, the futile attempt to say the unsayable and the ecstasy of failing. Wisdom is in the unanswered questions punctuated by an exuberance of exclamation points.

We are creatures in motion even in our sleep. I have an idea and sleep on it. Something happens. I wake up imperceptibly changed, maybe a bit more luscious, like fruit.

Spring is a time to align ourselves with the rhythm of the peach and the melon. Because of bogus ripeness from sulfur dioxide the peach got bitten before its flesh was ready. With the melon I waited too long and had to hurry my devouring. A loving relationship has to do with discovering each other’s rhythms and disequilibrium, the struts and stumbles.

In the film, Woman In the Dunes, a man is seen collecting bugs which live in the shifting dunes. He is later trapped, like one of his specimens, in this habitat along with a woman who has made of it a home. The static world is always in motion like a movable sculpture, while the two of them find their own choreography living a shape-shifting life.  

Oscars Everywhere

These are the months when hyperbolic adjectives are dragged out to adorn movie titles. It seems as if every new film is the greatest, best, most compelling, not-to-be-missed, if-you-see-no-other of the year, the decade, of all-time. All are Oscar-worthy which got me thinking about that name, Oscar, and all the Oscars I have known. The name derives from classic Irish, "friend of deer."

Sixty years ago my first job as a pharmacist was with Thrifty Drugs in Beverly Hills. I was newly licensed and thrust suddenly into a galaxy of Hollywood stars. Cary Grant called up one day to make sure his wife, Betsy Drake’s uppers and downers, were put on a separate bill from his. Robert Cummings stayed young buying vitamins I couldn’t talk him out of. My favorite customer was Oscar Levant. In his lugubrious voice he would phone for early refills on his favorite sedative, Paraldehyde, which fell out of favor decades ago. I’d hate to think I contributed to his delinquency.

He really didn’t need my help plunging from wunderkind piano virtuoso, composer, radio star of Information Please, actor, author, and wit to mental patient stung by his own acerbic tongue as if he quipped himself to death. He was one of the most quotable entertainers in town, e.g. In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare occasions loathsome but at my best unapproachably great.

Oscar Levant never won an Oscar but Oscar Homolka, the Viennese-born character actor, got a nomination for his supporting role in I Remember Mama…a movie I’d sooner forget. Oscar Peterson was another Oscar I saw several times when he performed at Birdland back in the early 50s. His fingers moved on the keyboard effortlessly yet so dazzlingly I was carried away with the cigarette smoke.

Oscar Hammerstein II was possibly the most famous Oscar of them all in my lifetime. His grandfather, Oscar the first, born 1850, made a fortune in cigars but also built eleven theaters mostly in what came to be known as Times Square. Oscar, the younger, won two Oscars for best song. He wrote hundreds too numerous to mention collaborating first with Jerome Kern in Showboat and later with Richard Rodgers. Hammerstein also mentored Stephen Sondheim who has taken musical theater far beyond Oscar’s reach.

Oscar, he of Academy Award fame, owes its origins to the stuff legends are made of. There are at least four claims to the naming from Bette Davis to Walt Disney to Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky, to Margaret Herrick, librarian of the Motion Picture Arts and Science. She is said to have looked at it back in 1931 and thought it bore a resemblance to her uncle, Oscar.

With apologies to Oscar Wilde, Oscar de la Renta, Oskar Werner and  Oscar Robertson, I have almost depleted my store of Oscars. Not a bad gallery of dignitaries. The name has never ranked high among boy’s names; it is now 175^th in popularity with about 1500 new Oscars in maternity wards each year. One version of its genesis derives from the French word for Golden City which would be apt for the 8.5 lb. trophy.

Finally a nod to Oscar Mayer Weiners whose jingle was once suggested to replace the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem.  It works for me.

Dreadful Times

Bombs dropping. Carnage in the streets. People fleeing. Dictators violating international law. A country is divided. A sense of dread across the world. Then as now.

This could be the present or the future but I am describing the past. It is late summer, 1940. Hitler has unleashed the blitzkrieg over England. Poland has fallen in the east and Belgium and France are occupied by the Nazis.

The U.S. is receiving refugees and the first peacetime draft is underway. Roosevelt has started to aid England with the Lend Lease program but the tenor of our country is half isolationist.

In a three-story brownstone in Brooklyn Heights by the East River there lived W.C. Auden, Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee. This Bohemian-like enclave was the brain-child of George Davis, the flamboyant raconteur editor of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In a single issue of that magazine Davis published Collette, Elizabeth Bishop, Katharine Anne Porter and Stephen Spender.

Over the next 18 months this address was, arguably, the hub of American literati living a communal style fueled by the urgency of war. This moment in history is so well-captured by Sherill Tippins in her 2005 book The February House.

All-night parties included Aaron Copland, George Balanchine, William Saroyan, Kurt Weil and Lotte Lenya, the three children of Thomas Mann, Salvadore Dali and Richard Wright who later moved in.

Carson McCullers was the toast of the town having just published The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter at age 23. Britten was working on his operetta, Paul Bunyan and Gypsy Rose Lee started her first novel, G-String Murders. It was a hive of creative minds.

Rent was $75/month shared equally by the residents. The Depression was still being felt for some while Gypsy Rose Lee earned $4,000/week from Mike Todd’s extravaganza at the World’s Fair.

At the same time, the British emigres, Auden, Britten and Isherwood were being denounced as cowards by their homeland. Britten made his way back to England in 1942 but Auden remained and became an American citizen. He was struggling with his loss of faith, which I take to mean faith in the human race. The book includes conversations between Auden and the theologian Reinhold Neibuhr.

I was alive through all this but my experience as a child was the sense of a struggle between the forces of good and evil and we were the good guys. By age ten (1943) I never doubted our victory over fascism. After all, I was buying war bonds, collecting tin foil and even knitting squares for blankets. Two of my closest friends were German refugees. With those clandestine meetings on the other side of my bedroom wall, I went to sleep driving Nazis from Stalingrad.

Auden and others were also conflicted with the role of an artist / writer in dreaded times as is the case today. In his original poem “1939” the last line rings true for me. We must love one another or die. He later changed it to read, love one another and die. In the final version he omitted the line altogether. It still has resonance 87 years later. Without love we die inside. 

Two Moroccan Films

Casablanca. Say that word and the Bogart / Bergman movie comes to mind even though it was shot in the Warner Bros studio in Burbank.

My two favorite films seen recently were shot in Casablanca and directed by the Moroccan born Maryam Touzani. Adam (2019) and The Blue Caftan (2022) are everything American filmmakers seem unable to achieve. Without deafening noise, explosions or sci-fi confections, each touches the souls of their characters. Nor is there any psychological probing on display.

It is through unspoken gestures that the camera, alone, reveals moments of a life-changing dimension. In Adam we see a widow’s face carrying the weight of the world, slowly melt as she rediscovers joy in her eyes while her body moves to the rhythms of Moroccan music.

In another scene we witness her reawakening while kneading dough. Her hands take on a sensuality. In its sweep, the camera transports us as we align with Touzani’s close-ups and a spirited humanity emerges.

The power of these films is in its simplicity. In the Blue Caftan, the complex heroic character of the husband is revealed wordlessly, only through the language of cinema. 

At the same time, each of these films is quietly subversive as one challenges the conventions of the male domination which consign women into a circumscribed life. In the surprising final scene of the other, the potency of love overwhelms a societal taboo.

American story-telling is most-often accompanied with bombast appropriate for a pre-adolescent brain. The operative word is power. Violence is obligatory as befits a nation out to police the planet, accompanied by high decibels as if to wake our numbed senses whose attention must be wrested from their smartphones.  

I found the two Moroccan movies on Kanopy, a free streaming site offered by local libraries. Touzani's latest film, Calle Malaga, will soon be available on streaming.