Cereal

Consider the snowflake, it’s one-of-a-kindness. Given all the possibilities for crystalline formations, I’ll take their word for it. Better yet, let’s talk about cornflakes, equally unique. If a cornflake were an island, as it is in a bowl of milk, it would show one deep harbor after another. No perpendiculars. You have to admire it for that. It’s as jagged as the right-hand margin of a contemporary poem, asserting its sui generis voice.

I am gazing into my bowl looking for the meaning of life. It’s as likely here as in the cottage cheese ceiling or the book I just found on my shelf, scrupulously unread. Some flakes resist sogginess almost successfully, others succumb to the frothy saccharine lacteal secretion of a graminivorous quadruped.

Where are you going with all this? I don’t know but I’ll think of something.

Truth be told I left cornflakes behind along with Wheaties many bananas ago.  Now, I’m a granola and blueberry sort of guy. But those old orange, rectangular boxes deserve a special place in my thrill-a-minute-life. Wheaties were quite possibly my first newspaper as I spooned and read about the designated champions. For a street urchin as I was, the heroes on the box became my brief idols. There was a certain magic in those words. I was becoming knowledgeable about something my parents knew not. These days the only thing I read is the carbohydrate and fiber content. 

To stretch a point, American history took an unfortunate turn when, in 1937, Ronald Reagan became a celebrity at least in Iowa when he won the Breakfast of Champions award for best broadcaster of baseball games sponsored by…you guessed it, Wheaties. From there it was a short step into the Oval Office. Presumably, he was gobbling Wheaties in Hollywood, as Governor of California and then, and then. Of such stuff B-movies are made. Is this a great country or what?

Enough of such trivial matters. It’s time to talk about how cereal boxes are stored in the pantry. My stepdaughter used to alternate her three cereals, flakes, rounds and squares on consecutive days of the week. If it’s Wednesday it must be Cheerios. This became Christie’s way of ordering through the small anarchies of life.

Friend Fred arranges all his cans alphabetically. As he tells it this is done in case he wakes up suddenly blind, he could grab the tuna fish and know it isn’t salmon. I call it the Artie Shaw Syndrome. The band leader and leader also of obsessive compulsives, insisted all pillowcases face the same direction. Eight marriages later he wrote about it. Fred can’t play Begin the Beguine but has other endearing qualities. He was miffed when his daughter and son scrambled his pantry as a prank. They even switched the Hi-Lo Flakes with Bran Buds. He was confronted with the chaos of life. But he recovered in time to email them that he was sitting at his desk with his will and an eraser. Humor is the best revenge.

As for the turmoil of existence I have no urgent need to tidy it up. Every day snaps, crackles and pops, in no particular order.

Mikhail Gorbachev died yesterday. The photo shows him with Reagan in front of the Statue of Liberty: Our iconic welcoming mother inscribed with our mission, the Man of the Century whose vision and courage liberated millions and the actor in his greatest role impersonating a head of state, all because he ate his Wheaties.

 

Wealth

The great poet makes us feel our own wealth.

                                                     Harold Bloom

 

When I used to do poetry readings I remember, more than once, glancing up and noting someone nodding off. A bit disconcerting but I decided those who attended to catch up on their sleep were, perhaps, my best audience. I consoled myself to imagine my words set into motion their own poem. I have also been on the other end. I wasn’t really sleeping, only being transported to another realm.

To tap into one’s own poem is a gift beyond words. We were all poets at one time. We saw with wonder. We were in the act of making sense of it. Our voice was singular. Our imagination was let loose until the crush of parents, teachers and society muzzled us. After all, creativity can be subversive.

When I say we were all poets, I want to add that many of us still are even if there are no poems to show for it. More important than product is what I would call a poetic sensibility, seeing the world metaphorically so this becomes that; connectivity without end.

By the same humanistic view, I also presume a certain goodness in others. As Wallace Stevens wrote, There is a substance within us that prevails. We are the fruit that comes and goes. Prepare a table for reception while we ripe and ripe even as we also rot and rot. The all of it is the commonwealth.

No, no, I haven’t forgotten that MAGA tribe who traded their autonomy for a pocketful of loathing. The Congregation of the Lost who, conversely to Bloom, met their fears and impotence with impoverished souls.

The wealth Harold Bloom refers to is that inner dimension that enriches us in measureless ways. It is nothing less than the soul being fed. That word wealth is well-traveled. It comes from weal as in commonweal, our well-being; nothing to be monetized. It is also associated with wholeness. What greater good than being touched by a work of art to strike up the music of one’s own composition.

Beyond the verbal dexterity of a great poet is their humanity. Bloom writes that the soul is superior to its knowledge and possesses its own intrinsic wisdom. Receiving the words of Shakespeare, for example, we learn to recognize that gleam of light which flashes across the mind from within. Raise your hand if you hear the mermaids singing; they are singing for you. Now pass it on.

Harold Bloom managed to fall out of favor among academicians for his Eurocentric ways, turning away from diversity. This is a subject for another day. His humanism and love of literature are enough to fill my plate. Could it be that Donald’s incipient reign of terror has unwittingly offered us a paradigm of anti-humanism which can be inverted to serve as a model of soulfulness?

The great poems shepherd us like psalms. Wherever we are standing is a green pasture. There are shadows to be sure; the waters may be turbulent, but we have prepared a way to be still and recognize our own wealth which restores the soul.

 

 

 

Nocturnal Thoughts

Here I am thinking great thoughts when I should be dreaming great dreams. If this continues, I might as well get a job at an all-night Arco station. You would think I’d have this concept of sleep down to perfection by now.  I’ve slept nearly thirty years of my allotted time yet I’m getting worse at it.

As a baby I don’t recall any difficulties in my crib.  I slept through the dust bowl, breadlines and Hitler. Even growing up stumbling and bumbling along I could always count on the mattress to carry me away. I used to conk out in dark theaters. If that was a melatonin rush, where have you gone, melatonin? What ever happened to my inner Chopin and his nocturnes?

I can carpe my diem but nights cannot be seized. Come to think of it, maybe I have been asleep. It is now 4:11 and two minutes ago it was 3:47. I can almost feel myself adrift but I have to pee. It sort of feels that way but maybe it’s just my enlarged prostate wanting attention. So get up and go, you fool. No, don’t go you’re final nodding off. Go. Stay. How can I sleep with this racket? Perhaps I’ve used up my sleep quotient and I’m doomed to stand as sentinel for this doomed planet.

I’m remembering a commercial for Preparation H which promised that our hemorrhoids would shrink as we slept. As far as I know I never had any but I suspect other great things happen such as the flow of creative juices and a clarity applied to daily predicaments. It remains for us to catch these butterflies with our own net.

Grant me some quality sleep. I don’t want to be up till the dawn’s early light. Now that has me dwelling on our national anthem and how much better we’d be with Woody Guthrie’s, This Land is Your Land rather than our bombastic drinking song about flag, and rocket’s red glare. The red, white and blue is our great signifier. After noting that it still waved the next morning it recorded our expansion by adding new stars for the next hundred years. The land of the free and home of the brave forgot to include the enslaved, unpropertied, indigenous people and women.

Signifiers are first cousins to metaphors. Too bad the anthem is bad poetry, I think to myself as I slip into REM sleep. I have essential dreams yet to be dreamt. Sleep, you genius of montage, take me. I’ll get my gossamer wings from the closet. Launch me weightless to nocturnal lunacy where all my unsolved shards can be reassembled, a mission too important to be left to waking hours. It should have been listed as one of those inalienable rights along with life and liberty. How can we pursue happiness without a good night’s sleep?

Cynicism and Sentimentality On the Bus

If cynicism has become a national contagion the flip side is sentimentality. One sees through jaundiced eyes and the other through rosy lenses. Through a glass darkly an omelet is just a broken egg. A happy face stays happy eating the shell. There must be a range of options between a hard-boiled warrior and soft-boiled wimp.

Ironically cynicism seems to be the current default position for both the ill-informed and the well-informed. Among the hopeless MAGA minions a systematic breakdown of institutions has become devoutly to be wished for. Five minutes of Fox news is meat for a cynic. Non-belief in the DOJ, in climatologists or public health officials and certainly in levers of government including free elections is all a precondition for American fascism.

Sadly, we are also witnessing blue state cynicism. I know, I am one of them but only on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. For the rest of the week I try to restore my faith in the good sense of the electorate and the tenents of our democracy. And yes, Virginia, there really is such a thing as Truth.

Cynicism is too easy. It’s an abdication of engagement. Skepticism is the appropriate alternative just as sentiment is the healthy version of sentimentality. We don’t have a nuanced vocabulary sufficient to describe gradations between a mawkish gush of emotions and a well-earned expression of sentiment.

All of which brings me to a bittersweet movie called The Last Bus. Most critics dismissed it as soppy sentimentality. I gladly suspended my disbelief, muzzled my critical yawp and got on the bus as it left the station. Perhaps if it weren’t for the great Timothy Spall in a tour de force performance I may not have remained in my seat. But, with a face only a mother could love, he conveys the full spectrum from child-like wonderment to hard-edge vehemence and earns the emotions in spite of a needlessly manipulative script. Sir Timothy’s face seems to have registered all of life’s insults yet manages a radiance in spite of that.

Let cinephiles scoff. I saw the film as a desperately needed antidote for the malice in our midst. It was an act of restoration in humanity. Hearts melt, blue and red. See it and park your censorious arsenal in storage. A little schmaltz can’t hurt; get over it. Without any words preached, Spall’s character models a way of being to reawaken a slumbering society. He reminds us how some of us may have taken the wrong bus.

The Last Bus can be seen on streaming sites,  Kanopy or Amazon. There are other films with the same name. Look for Timothy Spall’s name.

 

The Anniversary Of...

Today is the first anniversary of Peggy leaving us. She preferred me to say she died. I cannot. Not yet.

She is both gone and still present in the drawers, on the shelves and most of all as a resident of my inner life.  I hear her laughter and her words singing off the page.

I have just completed a manuscript about Peggy comprising eight-six poems and prose pieces which I wrote about her over the past forty years. In the process of digging, I came across many references to special moments out of which our private language was born; tears and laughter in a slow dance.

What we created together was a living artform sprung organically from the center of our beings. I see that more clearly now with the distance of these months. What seemed like normal oxygen then, was a more rarefied air of our own exhalations.  

I don’t grieve in the conventional way. I extend her being by trying to live as we did with spirit and soul. I’ll have what she’s having. What she had was not only an irrepressible appetite for life but a deep harbor as a place of reception. A white horse in the library of a manor house is an image which embodied two of her essential passions, Beauty and Art.   

David Brooks wrote about two value systems of a different order. There is what the poet G. M. Hopkins called, the achieve of, or the résumé of one’s life and then there are qualities for a eulogy. For Peggy there was a merging, no separation. Her poems were the nectar of her fruition as a person. Same exuberance. Same reaching out from the conjunction of head and heart. She saw life as a pulsing metaphor which gave each experience another dimension. Her consciousness, creativity and enthusiasms flowed as a single stream.

The above-mentioned book soon to become available will be titled, Forty Years of Yes. Peggy met each day with affirmations, even a reverence. She said yes to stumps and pods, yes to wherever she was standing and yes to the overwhelm of our love.  Yes, even to that word, Death, so I’ll yield to her wishes but this is not to say she is unalive.

Janice and Me

I have sprung my daughter Janice from Texas to live with me. Tonto was our guide just ahead of the posse. It was high noon when we hopped on the last train to Yuma. Janice will be sixty in four months. We had to persuade the border guards neither one of us were seeking an abortion.

Of course, none of her getaway happened this way except in my fevered mind. Janice and her dear friend Paula drove out of the regressive state with no hail of bullets. Texas is where everyone carries a gun to protect themselves from everyone else who carries a gun. Texas is ruled by boys in the back room, card sharps and cattle rustlers, by puerile men who didn’t listen to their school marms yet who think they know what’s best for women, their possessions.

Janice is looking after me with all her pluck and spunk. I lost my zest and zeal somewhere along the way except for an occasional shout on the page. She is here to steady me when I jump to conclusions. It happens that way at a certain age.

She has much to teach me.  My impulse to rescue her from life’s labyrinth no longer holds since I’m as lost as she is. Seldom is heard a discouraging word. My daughter hears with her eyes reading my lips and speaks with her hands to her friends. When she makes her calls it is to a screen with her orchestrating fingers flying like butterflies. Over the years Janice has become familiar with the walls of this world and how to climb them. She has reminded me that she is not hearing impaired. She is simply Deaf.  The skies are not cloudy all day.

After nearly forty years on her own journey, she returns carrying a strange mix of elemental wonder and wounds from indifference of the marketplace. Isn’t that the same marriage of irreconcilable forces we all grapple with? How to keep our humanity alive in the midst of an uncaring society?

We are here for each other with our respective lanterns in the shadows. To see the deer and the antelope play. There are, to be sure, moments of exasperation. Never having learned how to sign, I live with that shame. There are now apps available which print my voice. We manage. I think of all the voices in my years I have been deaf to. I bear witness with amazement to Janice's dance through life.