Walking With Ponder

Brisk this morning or so it seemed inside. Outside, less so. With Janice as my Sherpa guide I climbed the Himalayas which is a slight incline on the last leg of my eight blocks around the neighborhood. I have changed my itinerary from the shady side of the street to catch the eastern sun, dappled as it is from the eucalyptus trees whose bark strikes me as wise and weary.

I’m shuffling along, wearily, with my walker wondering when wisdom happens to my bark. I’m told by my favorite astrologer that I have moved past my third Saturn return into sage-dom. Sounds like the penultimate stop before senility. Of course, I may be the last to know.

Sagacity is a many-splendored thing. There was a time when it seemed like a simple matter of following the syllogisms. If this, then that. Proof has the allure of elegance. But a gate slams shut with the finality of some crusty absolute.

Questions are better answered by new questions marks. Sentences yearn for exclamation points.

At some point I discovered a dimension that knows of no logic. I would rather poke my lantern into the realm of the inexplicable, that bubbling cauldron of the imagination. The heart that won’t behave beats out of its head. Words and images appear with no return address. I take my cue from the wizened eucalyptus discarding old skin as it reaches for a new season of treeness.

Of all the trees along my path these are naked sculptures caught in the act of their birthing. Like us they are a work-in-progress.

I’m walking slower today shedding exhausted, limp ideas. Dialectics clash and slough away. The sidewalk is a lesson in upheavals. The flowering tree remains nameless to me and that is all right.

 

 

The Artist and the Thanksgiving Table

 Believe it.............................................or not.

His art gave us nothing less than idealized Americana. Yet his life was an American enigma.  

He was scorned by the art world, particularly critics, but praised by William de Kooning and collected by Andy Warhol. He studied at the Art Students League in New York City. For years he was a patient and close friend of the psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson. He joined the cause for nuclear disarmament and civil rights movement. His painting of a 6-year-old Black girl breaking the color line accompanied by U.S. Marshalls against a wall of KKK epithets became an iconic image of the school integration struggle. We share a first name and one other curious event.

In 1957 both Norman Rockwell and I attended a college extension course, albeit in far different parts of the country, called Discovering Modern Poetry. He married his teacher. My class was under the auspices of UCLA and held at Peggy’s house. I remembered her when we reconnected 23 years later and began my life part II. But I digress.

He was a frail man raised at a time when Teddy Roosevelt promoted the robust, athletic type as a male ideal. His work often showed older men and boys caught in embarrassing moments, projections of how he saw himself. He had three wives but was probably a closeted gay man. Few of his paintings depicted women at all.

At age 22, in 1916, Rockwell’s illustration made the cover of America’s most popular magazine. There were two weeklies with the word Saturday in their title. One was the Saturday Review of Literature. Readers of that literary magazine most probably looked down on the Saturday Evening Post which employed Rockwell until 1963. The Post was vigorously anti-New Deal and isolationist until it wasn’t supportable. 

During the war Norman Rockwell offered his Four Freedoms posters to the War Department and was turned down. After they appeared on the cover of the Post the government swallowed its pride and embraced the work reprinting them by the hundreds of thousands. Rockwell also created Rosie the Riveter in 1943, the iconography of the time.

Along with Edward Hopper, who captured urban desolation, and Grant Wood whose American Gothic spoke of rural life in facetious tones, Rockwell’s work largely depicts a vanishing Americana of small-town New England. He ranks as a first-class draftsman but was he an illustrator or an artist? Now that I’ve posed the question I want to discredit it.

Is it art, might also be asked about work hanging in many contemporary galleries. If art is defined as that which confounds, agitates and shifts perception then Rockwell could be consigned to the category of illustrator. He was not only dismissed by the Modernists but regarded as the bourgeois antithesis of what they were all about. While the New York School veered toward reduction and negative space Rockwell’s canvases were almost cluttered.

But I abhor categories. Blurring the lines between is more fun. I’m all for inclusion. It can be argued that much of minimalist art is elitist, soulless and opaque. At least Norman Rockwell knew how to connect. His genre work offered immediate recognition. The first half of the 20^th century was a time when immigrant America had to invent itself and he found the populist links and rituals. His genius was to create a human drama in the moment. Even if we never found our real selves in the scene, our idealized self would know the way around. And perhaps his homey representations were not as benign as at first glance.

One of his most famous pictures is Thanksgiving dinner as the representation of Freedom from Want. (Another term for economic freedom) Those gathered around the table are not looking at either Grandma or the turkey. None are bowed in prayer giving thanks and one central figure has a look on his face as if he is only begrudgingly present. This could have been Rockwell himself. He was estranged from his own nuclear family as he took vacations with his male model and friends. Rockwell is less a realist than a fabulist.

Perhaps Rockwell can be compared to Robert Frost. In their separate art forms each took a path less traveled by avant-garde movements. Their words and images will endure as Yankee-bred art whose narratives welcome the reader and viewer and are deceptively familiar but demand repeated visits. Is it Art? I say, Yes, make room for him.

The Day Wales Tied the U.S.

Have a pear-apple. Apple and pear tied in the pulp of the matter.

My Covid test is indeterminate. Was that really a pink line?

Some of Trump's toadies are denouncing him.

Others roll up their sleeves and approach him on their knees.

Putin bombs Ukraine to Smithereens.

Forty million Smithereens answer back.

Microbes, guns, carbon dioxide. Have a nice day.

French toast at 4 A.M. with maple syrup. Covid is neutralized.

Mr. Smith comes to the Washington swamp of Foggy Bottom.

Broken-field runner fumbles in Georgia. Let us open our hymnals.

Gluttony and Sloth vs Avarice and Malice. No contest.

Men put balls in holes. Where there was nothing there is now something and then there is nothing again.

Wales gave us Dylan Thomas. We gave them Mark Zuckerberg.

Raise the damn goalposts or lower the field. 

Fans don't love zero-zero. But the rest of us like the equipoise.

Urban Speak

Reading Vivian Gornick’s, The Odd Woman and the City,  I am returned to my first twenty-one years riding the New York subways and wearing out soles and heels on those teeming sidewalks. The author becomes an incarnation of Walt Whitman as she also hears America singing and plays it back to us. At least the America of the city across the East River from Whitman’s Brooklyn, a century later.

She meanders the length of Manhattan, with ears at the ready, engaging strangers or sometimes just overhearing the yells and curses along with moments of soliloquies and soulful exchanges. Urbane voices mingled with urban, hard edge street yawp. Moxie was earned on the street with Trash often the second language.

Get out of my face, and, fuck off, one minute, Bless you, dearie, the next. There is a certain music in the asphalt jungle. A rhapsody in the choir of six million bodies surviving until tomorrow and a choreography in the public space.

I’m not sure which subway Gornick took down from the Bronx. Mine was the E or F train which went east to Queens, the borough roughly north of Brooklyn. Ours was a nearly suburban area in many parts leading to Long Island. We called Manhattan, the City. It was as if one borough was a crowded elevator and the other an escalator with each person assigned a separate square.

All the five boroughs could be broken down into neighborhoods marked by candy stores and ethnicity. Mine was a chunk of Forest Hills apart from the WASPY area of restrictive covenants. Two or three apartment buildings provided enough kids for a commune. We lived on the sidewalks and streets with chalk in one pocket and a skate key in the other. The common tongue was banter.

I had two jobs in the City, both of short duration. I was either twelve or thirteen delivering women’s hats, made by a neighbor, and picking up orders for fabric in midtown. I believed I was invisible but got an introduction to the rhythms of speech in the garment district workplaces. I came with a list to pick up: velvet , satin or felt. This was the no-nonsense world of commerce, fast, coarse and cutting. Welcome to the hurry-up where life is lived out loud and cuts to the chase.

The second job came seven years later. I worked in the pharmacy attached to a well-known hotel on Madison Ave. My innocence had no place in this setting. Lying, cheating and stealing were the acceptable terms of doing business. Without going into the method of fleecing, highway robbery was the order of the day. It was a crude initiation into my chosen profession as practiced in the chain of upscale hotel pharmacies. I’m afraid the language is lost to me. My sense is that the white-collar crime was conducted with a casual suavity. I returned to college that fall semester a made man as Tony Soprano would have said though I might have been a candidate for a witness protection program. What happened in Manhattan stayed in Manhattan; didn't make it to Queens.

Ms. Gornick’s memoir is far more than a register of how New Yorkers speak. She has great insights into friendship, feminism and the zigs and zags of relationship. The pulse of the city takes on a universal dimension in her writing. Over time her daily walking tour of the city left her with the wonder of being alive, an astonishment which lifts off the pages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Covid and I

Not one to be left out of the narrative (what narrative?) I have now joined the Covid crowd. So here I am in bed with the dreaded virus, making the best of it. I know when to resist and when to beat a hasty retreat. Last night I provided my throat to the Covid victory parade. With every swallow my soreness was their jubilation. I’m letting them have the best of my nose and throat while I cough and sneeze my way to oblivion.

However, I have no plans on going to oblivion. Word has it they have no pumpkin there. I am using this time to drift off into waking dreams and half-thoughts. Is there such a thing as half a thought? I’m going to look at this period as a reprieve from information glut. There is a season for everything under the sun.

I have three books within reach but I am not reaching for any. Reading seems to demand a certain psychic energy I don’t possess. Much can be said for staring into the cottage cheese ceiling with half-closed lids. At this rate I may stumble on the meaning of life.

I am taking Paxlovid because I am immunocompromised. I’ve always suspected I am my own worst enemy. When your own immune system can’t get along with itself you’re in trouble.  Haploids against haploids! Can’t we just get along?

Janice has me in isolation. She feeds me and tends to my needs in ways which I may have tended to her fifty to sixty years ago. I can still smell the eucalyptus and benzoin in the vaporizer. I suppose I am being reparented. Covid can take credit for that.

Myth-Making

Myth is the noble lie that binds society. So said Plato and I would never argue with him. Certainly, the Greeks made the most of it. It seems to me the same is true of us all. We make of our lives a myth. We might call it our memoir or our chronicle. We are victims, we are heroes. We slew dragons. We leaped over tall buildings in a single bound. Whatever it took to get us through till breakfast. Like the ancients we had our quakes and eclipsis along with unaccountable good fortune and moments of sublimity. Many of us seem to have a need to explain the unexplainable. It's all a matter of attribution. 

God loves a good story. That is why she made shamans, griots, troubadours and Fox News. Anything to propitiate those bewildering forces given to tantrums and fruit, floods and rainbows. Let us sacrifice a newborn…..better a goat. Anything for the greater good.

Get out of my Republic, said Plato again, you trouble-making subversive poet. But we are all poets. We compose our myth; subtract that, embellish this. It becomes our truth, our agreed upon fable. We find the lie that speaks the truth. We don't mean to lie but certain chapters don’t fit. Therein is the meat, the incongruities.

Wendell Berry called it the impeded stream and heard it singing. The mind that is not baffled, is not employed, he wrote. Early on when I was baffled, I settled for absolutes. Now I embrace the unknown as a friend. A recognition of chaos and mystery teeming with new life.

I write my memories even as I know they’re a composite. We cleave together even as we cleave apart. Grandpa couldn’t have walked to the schoolyard with me. But he does in my mind. Did I wet my pants in kindergarten or was I imagining myself in Harvey Benson’s shoes? Was I chased by a superintendent down the block for slipping political leaflets under doors in the 1948 campaign or was that my fantasy? I’ll claim it as a memory. True because I say so. The details are less important than the metaphorical meaning we invest in them.

Written or not we all live the myth of ourselves. At my age there is no one around to refute my narrative. I shall always cherish those glory days when my twisted, turn-around jump shot brought everyone in the sellout crowd to their feet. Then there was that fastball I hit, still in orbit. Or is that me orbiting my inner space, that vast and virgin territory?

 

 

 

 

Election Dessert

Come what may I expect the Republicans are eating humble pie. The red wave turned into a blood pudding. Democrats, with our big tent, must be feasting on everything from baklava to apple strudel to our very berry pie. Make it a la mode.

This being said, my thoughts have turned naturally from pies in the sky to berries.

It is possible I could go through a day without starting with a bowl of nearly frozen blueberries enhancing the bland granola. Possible but not probable. I may never know because my pallet would overthrow my gullet and cause my tongue to wag against my gums. Oral anarchy. Look how the skin of a berry clings to this tooth and that. The bigger the berry the better to roll around half bitten, silently squirting its cargo, juicing me to meet life’s daily misdemeanors.

Strawberries have their own distinctive place in the kingdom of berries. My problem with these sweet red seeded berries is they seldom live up to my expectations. In my nearly nine-decade search for the perfect strawberry I’ve only been blessed with a half-dozen. Just enough to ruin it for all the rest.    

Blackberries grow on prickly stalks. I remember vaguely picking some but I can’t recall where that would have been. They feel good on the tongue, dwarfing the blueberry in size with a promise of the elixir of life sloshing within. Yet when my molar pierces the epithelium of this oversized berry, I can hear the buds in my oral cavity sigh and shrug with indifference. The blackberry claims no place in the olfactory vault.

Huckleberries seem to grow in Montana in the area around Glacier National Park. They impersonate blueberries but taste as unspectacular as blackberries. I suppose tart is the adjective I am looking for. Who wants a sour squinch when visions of tangy bliss await? Yet I do have a memory of huckleberry ice cream. Of course, sugared in the syrupy compote of a pie any berry sings arias on the tongue.

Cambria, south of Big Sur is the habitat of olallieberry. It found its way onto menus on the pie page. This is another offspring of father blackberry, less sour than the huckle and once again redeemed within a flaky crust of a sugared pie, certain to raise blood glucose, cause cavities and possible zits at a certain age. But we only go around once and there are worse ways to die.

I know I’ve ignored gooseberries, marionberries and elderberries only because I have nothing to say about either one. However high on my bucket list is the experience of having a pie thrown in my face. In that case any berry will do though I expect a lemon meringue might cause less damage in the rearrangement of my nose. 

Returning to the pi r squared Republicans, we must not gloat. Even as they are eating crow for their wet dreams which went  down the drain, the fact remains that half this pie of a country seems to regard being vacuous as a virtue. The prospect of a Repugnant takeover of both Houses still looms as a possibility while the monarch has an appetite to reign. One can almost hear him saying, Let them eat cake (or pie).

 

 

Soggy Words

There is a thirst here in this rescued desert, a water table wanting. Folks are doing rain-dances. Whatever happened to seeding clouds? I suppose we've already messed too much with Mother Nature. 

Now a downpour has come. The sky let it go yesterday in torrents. Our sliding glass door leaked. We collected drips in a bucket and spread towels on the carpet. All this for fifteen minutes and then the sun returned.

The red wave became a ripple but let's not go there. 

When I become mayor of the planet I shall decree rain nightly between midnight and five. All right, go ahead on designated days. Rain on picnics. Call off the ball game. Wake-up windshield wipers. I want to see kids floating popsicle-sticks down the gutter-rivers, umbrellas blooming like peonies, Gene Kelly splashing in puddles. I'm remembering you Ethel Waters, Gale Storm and Claude Rains?  Rain on my parade. 

I recall, fondly, the trips Peggy and I took when it rained. There was a deluge that day in Delft and roofs had a glisten to them seen from across the water where Vermeer stands in our memory on the cobbles of the town square. He had a palette of tulips covered with drops congealed like pearl earrings. In the field cows chewed wet grass, their cud going to milk and back to that pitcher he caught the maid pouring as if from her breast.

Because of rain we stole a kiss or two.

The cloudy day gave way to skies of blue.

We must thank that moisty, misty window pane.

We found our love because of rain.           

          (Composer, Ruth Poll, lyricist Les Baxter)

It also rained in that seaside town we’ll never forget whose name we can never remember. We watched from our window the Atlantic churning against rocks going to pebbles going to sand. In the aftermath we walked under a wheel of gulls and a carbonated night sky spreading an enormous calm on the beach. Waves found their own insistent music.  We took that rhythm inside, our own turbulence going from Beethoven’s Ode to a Chopin adagio.

Albany rain torrential and relentless in its spillage turned streets to gullies and dips in the road to tubs as we sloshed our way into the restaurant, sat by the fire celebrating our willingness to be lucky and how we ended each other’s drought, lives like plants parched then quenched.

Now I am thinking Hiroshige wood-block prints of fine rain, a canvas of verticals and bodies under parasols running for shelter. I’m imagining snow falling on cedar and a blizzard of petals from cherry trees. Landscapes of white rolling hills. Let it cover the Sierras with drifts as wide as a blank page and now let it slip-slide away.

I started writing this two days ago under a partial sun and when I finished the streets were wet. I’m prepared to take credit for a fraction of an inch.

The Ears of Our Ears

I am sitting at the keyboard of my laptop as if it were a piano.  I improvise a few bars but they sound like yesterday's notes and the day before that. I want to say what I want to hear. Some mellifluous sound with a lift to induce flight. At least one foot, one wing. Let the other stay grounded.  Is that asking too much?

At the halfway point of my daily walk there is a garden of about two dozen birds of paradise plants. Half flower, half feathered. Blue beak, orange wing. It straddles two worlds; alien to both. I am seeking such a perch.

In my search for the transport that love offers I am carried away by my daughter Janice who has returned after decades away. She now lives with me in a reversal of parenting. I am both her father and in her charge. A little help here and there is welcomed. We care for each other though I know now when to back off. Janice is fiercely independent. The loves flows, back and forth, a music of our own making which she hears through her deaf ears. I have learned from her how to receive. I had almost forgotten. Her fingers fly on her video phone. Perhaps they are the bird-plant fluttering in the shadows. Though I am not fluent in her language I take joy in her joy. 

In fact, I never learned an instrument nor how to carry a tune. Perhaps in compensation, I’m told I have a listening heart. I don't hear America singing. I hear it goose-stepping.

Sometimes my words reach the level of lyric or lantern. Through the slang and slur of the day, the moral violence of deceit, it is hard to make words sing but it’s all I have. The page is funereally white. I write to leave my print. It’s me, Oh Lord. Where have you gone? This is no time to be taking a sabbatical.  

The psalm we need to see us through this dark passage hasn’t been written yet. It will be forged out of a tragically slow awakening. First the refiner’s fire. There will be a stirring in the ashes. What can we do to make music out of the dread?  Neither a hymn nor a dirge or a marching song. Music of a new morning. A lyric of dawn. Distant but approaching. Maybe with koto and flute or oboe and piano. Faintly familiar riffs with the ring of truth resonant to our bones. The ears of our ears will hear it.

You Like A Mystery?

Here’s a mystery.

It’s a dark and stormy afternoon. Assailants are loose. They have fractured their victims. They go for the skull. Bodies are strewn across the land. Get me Morse on line one, Barnaby on two. Columbo, Spade, Sherlock, Marple, Poirot, Bosch, Vera and Inspector Foyle.

Americans don’t like each other anymore but we love our mysteries. Why? Because they get solved and we walk away with the illusion of resolution. In real life we have many cold cases to account for.

All the suspects are summoned to the library of the manor house. Everyone has been lying to keep the drama alive. Pages have been turned. Just when you have the solution from the couch the guy is wiped out, yet another victim. As the chief inspector unriddles the puzzle a hand reaches out from behind the drapery. A knife is plunged and the lights go out. A body lies on the floor. Who did it Mac, who did it? Whiskey, he says, then, L.B. he gasps with his last breath. So now we know it was Lionel Barrymore or Lucretia Borgia or Lauren Bacall or Laura Bush, Les Brown or Larry Bird or Lucille Ball or Leonard Bernstein or Elbee the butler or maybe he was saying, I’ll be damned.

On T.V. dramas the obligatory phrase first spoken by the investigator is, What have we got? What we’ve got is a crime scene in America. Get out the yellow tape and wrap it around the heartland. Democracy is the victim. That’s us. We are witness to an absence. What was, ain’t no more. Fairness and decency, gone. Diversity and justice, no longer. Our curriculum lies. Our legislators are invertebrates. Half of us are deniers. Half don’t vote. I hope it’s the same half.

Here we are living inside the greatest mystery in my lifetime. One out of three are suspects. Make that two out of five. Accomplices. Everyone knows but none of them tells. Crime, evidently, pays. The body politic is on life support. We need to be transfused. Quick, is there a doctor in the house who transplants hearts?

What were you thinking, our grandchildren’s grandchildren will ask. Did WWII mean nothing? The next skirmish might be at the Canadian border with millions seeking asylum from proto-Fascism.

First came genocide followed by fratricide and now we are witnessing assisted suicide. The autopsy report describes a self-inflicted wound. The murder weapon is a convergence of Fox news, social media, a miscreant sociopath and the latent malice in our sin-sick souls. An enormous noose and a hanging tree await.

We know whodunit. The motive is avarice and power for some, for others it’s a settling for simplistic answers, an incoherent vilification.  Somnambulance has metastasized. It’s an open and shut case. Historians are writing Democracy’s obit. The Shadow warned us what lurks. 

Can those who have lost their way be rehabilitated? Can a compass be installed to point north towards fellowship, the best version of ourselves? That is the mystery, perhaps beyond the reach of our former sleuths. It remains for us to find our ethical center.