Everyone’s talking about death and
dying these days. Well maybe not everybody but there’s Frank, our Greek drama
teacher, in a discussion about Euripides’ revenge play, Hekabe. And
my friend, Fred, in our phone conversation about.. I forget what. And, of
course, when I think of Mitch Mc…and his lot it feels like a death of the soul.
And then there’s our book group reading Lincoln
in the Bardo set in a cemetery. At this age I suppose mortality is
never far from one’s mind. In the meantime the banana in the fruit bowl moves
toward a speckled blackness and rot.
Add to this the inexhaustible supply of
murder mysteries from Netflix. Every time I see a victim I think of the poor
soul who got his/her start in theater as a walk-on dead body. How do they
manage to stay still during those fake autopsies… with a tag on their big toe?
I’m imagining a lot of giggles after the final take.
In the introduction to her translation
of the Greek play Anne Carson references Beckett who regards the great human
tragedy as having been born in the first place, astride
the grave. As long as we’re all doomed we might as well make the best of it
so have a piece of fruit. Rousseau said something about the most miserable
people are not those who have endured the most pain but those who experience
the least pleasure.
The latest David Grossman novel, A
Horse Walks into a Bar, is nearly 200 pages of a stand-up comedian’s
monologue described by one reviewer as a meeting of Lenny Bruce and Franz
Kafka. On top of that the guy is emotionally naked. To identify with him is to
attend one’s funeral. Peggy and I are reading it aloud. Tough going. He has us
in his brilliant clutches and we're squirming.
Life is cyclic. Consider the vibrancy
of the new counter-culture if one is willing to allow that this
oligarchy/monarchy of Donald the First is a culture at all. The seeds of coming
attractions make their way into the moribund body politic.
Think of Arts, Science and geo-politics
as one organism, a single stretched membrane. Touch it at any point and the
whole web trembles. A medical breakthrough which enhances well-being is no less
important than some draconian measure in Trumpdom to destroy it. The charged
words of a poet can cause fingers on keyboards around the world to pause and
suddenly see the world from a new angle.
So let me end this litany of morbidity
with some words by Theodore Roethke whose greenhouse poetry traces his
childhood experience in the family nursery.
The urge,
wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks / Cut stems struggling to put down feet /
What saint strained so much / Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
Roethke’s potent lines could describe
our country today rising against the Republican miasma. In the poet’s language
it is a place of scum, dank with malevolent forces in a congress
of stinks. Yet also fecund as it lays down rhizomes and roots from out of
the mulch and slime.
If we look hard we can see a new
radicalism; not necessarily on the horizontal political spectrum but down in
the vertical, reclaiming the old meaning of radical as root, the way one acts
out of his core values rather than some old slogans and prescribed behavior. It may
find resonance with an unarticulated sound aligned with our bones. Or it may
involve wonderment as if seeing things for the first time.
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