Real Weather

Living here in Southern California we usually have no weather……..to speak of. Seventy-two and sunny, no relief in sight, ho-hum, isn’t much of a conversation piece. I’m not complaining but there is a price to be paid for our good fortune. We have lost contact with the elements, with the vicissitudes of nature, the tantrums, the cosmic forces and cycles. It is invigorating to move out of our bubble now and then.

In a perverse way I welcomed the recent deluge, called a plume of moisture and the atmospheric river before that. There is great imagery in their terminology. The meteorologists must be closet poets. I wonder if anyone felt they were engaged in a prose-poem when the temperature reached 108 below zero in New Hampshire, all due to a bomb cyclone with frosty madness?

Tornados can be nasty events and no less so to find out that the hot air met the cold air in a furious vortex which sounds like a dervish of a romance. A massive dust storm is not only a lot of sand in one’s mouth; it is a haboob, if that’s any consolation.

Even earthquakes, under five, get us to reprioritize our lives. Benign upheavals shake us from complacency. When Mother and Father Nature start throwing tectonic plates at each other it can be a cautionary tale. We’d better tend to each other’s garden. We don’t own anything. We are just custodians with a season’s lease.

Temblors can be seen as a metaphor for the fissures in our midst. We live with artificial fault lines, culturally, politically and generationally. The god of carnage is met by the god of grace and survival. The combat is within the human soul played large on a global stage.

We have seasons within ourselves corresponding to the calendar. To some extent we have a mind of summer and one for winter. While June is busting out all over, wildflowers burst in our inscape. Part of us may shrivel in our autumnal life in accord with a shortening of days calling for an in-dwelling. Compensations are made by holiday lights and ho, ho, ho. Even here, some internal force seeks an alignment and now new climate patterns remind us of our fragility as real weather has its due.

Sorting

The Brits love it. When the sleuth assures us all will be sorted  out, it is the pivot of the plot. The suspects are soon to be assembled in the library. Sorting seems to be a synonym for solving, for setting things right, don’t you know? Such a bother! The range of sorting runs from a souffle rising while the soup is bubbling, to a guy double-booking his mistresses, to an axe murderer on the loose. It loses some teeth as it crosses the Atlantic.

Back in the day, the Sunday paper had a classified section, real estate section, and separate sections for business, comics, sports, entertainment, book reviews and both local and international news along with ads for everything later gobbled up by Amazon. 

I took a secret pleasure in sorting; code for discarding most of it with the illusion that I had a grip on things. I also weighed six pounds less when I put it down.

Today, much of our life comes down to sorting. If we don’t, we soon find ourselves out of sorts. Raise your hand if you’re one of them. I’m aware of no HMO which covers out of sorts. Given the glut of options at our fingertips we are called upon to manage our way through the clamor of a cluttered field. Dare I say wasteland? 

Think of all the carefully unwatched channels: the horror movies, Marvel comic books, versions of dystopia,  cartoons, bowling for dollars, sitcom reruns, and mud wrestling (even without the mud) to name a few. I suppose for some this is an embarrassment of riches. For me it's a glut of muck.

Perhaps this is what democracy looks like, a niche marketplace. Something for everyone but why is it we often cannot find anything watchable. I hear you ask. Where is the poetry channel? Where is a channel of art films, of jazz, aesthetics, literature or even a round table of ­­great minds? 

I guess I just blew my cover as a certified half-snob but the other half is a Philistine watching ball games. The third half is writing this maze of a blog, my remedial course in sorting.

Inheritence

The other day I received a letter marked personal and confidential. Anything not offering a large pizza for $9.99 was enough to catch my attention. It came from a law office in Toronto representing the estate of Jack Lasky. The first sentence identified them as executors. Right away I flashed back on all the friends I hadn’t made over the past 80 years. 

The letter went on to explain they were looking for the certain Norm Levine who was a friend of the dear-departed, living in Southern California in 2002. I checked my driver’s license and sure enough I was Norm Levine and I have no memory of being anywhere else that year. 

So far, so good. I then Googled, Jack Lasky. The first six hits had to do with a Jack Lasky from Long Island who is a Tea Party leader. I presume he is still alive and well, even if his politics locate him beyond my threshold of endurance in a country I hope never to wake up in. 

The second Jack L. was my man. Born in Toronto, died in Honolulu with a plaque on a kibbutz in Israel. Sounds like Jack got around, especially posthumously. I wrote back as requested, regretting my lapse in never having made Jack’s acquaintance. Already I felt close enough to be on a first name basis. Had I been afforded the opportunity I'm sure I would have been a loyal friend. I can imagine us in animated conversation over Chinese chicken salad and iced tea or better yet a Guinness. No doubt he was a helluva guy. 

I have a distinct memory of letting a gentleman with one item get in front of me on line at Costco. And another instance in which I apologized when someone bumped into me in a crowded elevator. Almost knowing Jack Lasky has made me a better person. 

I told the law office that I do have a friend named Jack and I remember a Lasky.......or was it Lipsky.... in my college days. Does this count for nothing? I never met a Jack I didn’t like. 

There was the boy who went up the hill with Jill. And the other kid who climbed the beanstalk…. I hope not to fetch a pail of water. And then there’s the Lasky of all trades. I count each one as a friend or near-friend. 

I suggested to the lawyer that should they fail to contact the worthy Norm Levine I'm happy to serve as a surrogate. I have a particularly warm feeling for Canada.......Lake Louise, Canada Dry, the Northwest Coast Indian art plus Carol Shields and Michael Ondaatje’s novels. I also admire Marshall McLuhan from McGill Univ. whose book on media wowed me 45 years ago. 

In fact we recently visited Nova Scotia. The main reason for our trip was to see Peggy's Cove, I explained, hoping to score a few points. If, by some massive imbecility, a Koch brother candidate should get elected I would hope Canadians hold their fire as millions of Americans cross the border. I may even plead for entrance by pulling my Jack Lasky card. 

It now occurs to me that maybe the real Norm Levine owed the late Jack Lasky some money......in which case I'm glad not to be him. Or as my friend Fred put it on his answering machine: If you owe us money please leave a message after the tone; if we owe you money leave a message before the tone.

******************************

On a serious note, as an addendum I should add that my dear friend Jack Jaye recently passed away. We regarded each other as doppelgangers, having shared life's path in so many ways. Not only were we both pharmacists but we also felt the same disdain for it. More important was our shared sensibility. When he itched, I scratched. His friendship was cherished. He was the greatest Jack of all.                                                      

Vision

He has me bound to a chair in a pitch black room. The walls are closing in and he’s in my face going over everything I say, every letter, backwards and forward, looking for inconsistencies. Come clean, Levine, first you said better now and then you better Now.

I can’t keep my story straight. With sweaty palms, I break down, admit my life of crime: road rage, tax returns, return trips to the salad bar, the time I reused an uncancelled stamp.

Suddenly the lights go on. The optometrist says, No prescription change, as if he hadn’t heard a thing I’d said.

If I ever had pretensions as a visionary, I am now only half of one. It seems that the lens in my right eye from cataract surgery has become dislodged which renders everything to my right murky and up to no good. Politically speaking that’s my default position anyway.

Oculus sinister is the Latin name for the left eye. Sinister would now describe my other one. It is Oculus dexter, the squeaky clean right one which has gone deviant, misbehaving. This may account for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire or, at least, the decline. 

The vision thing as George, the elder, Bush put it, was never my forte. I have always had better hindsight than foresight. In a previous incarnation as a soothsayer in ancient Rome I would have warned Caesar about the Ides of March the morning after.

My penchant is for antecedents rather than prophecy. Seeing around the corner is suspect particularly without any concern for how we got there. It seems to me science fiction simply extrapolates the known into a usually cataclysmic setting with props as characters to serve the author’s agenda, as if the human condition were not enough as it is. 

There is a long tradition in literature to assign extraordinary insight to the blind. When Tiresias spoke everyone listened. Metaphorically, loss of sight conferred a certain inner wisdom to those afflicted. I’ll settle for viewing the world astigmatically, with an Emily Dickinson slant. I’m not even sure I would recognize myself if I met me in a crowded elevator. When it comes to tea leaves or palmistry I have a blind eye though I think I once saw Mahatma Gandhi in my oatmeal.

Next week my doctor will recenter the floating lens. I hope he gets a good night’s sleep. I don’t expect I’ll ever umpire a major  league baseball game but I’d rather gain insight than oversight at this age.

A Diffrent Elsewhere

Like a double agent

I straddled the border

following the herd, rhyming

with the serious lawns of suburbia,

of matching throw-pillows,

lip-synching the anthem

while drifting to answer a call

away from the last row of homes.

to another country with no address,

a wooded place of my imagination

plucking fruit forbidden and bloody brambles,

reptilian roots slithering,

with stumps and sun and shadows,

sometimes grounded, sometimes

perched at mid-distance, there

but not altogether,

half in half out of my mind

following birdsong to where it becomes

tweets, chatter on the run,

of apps, bots and OMG,

a new conformity fluent in emojis,

a different elsewhere, inside out. 

My passport may have expired 

and soon my shelf llife, 

clinging to imperishable verities, 

subversive still, radical to the root.

 

 

Doom and Bloom

 Someday they’ll have a softball game or food fight between the Yea-sayer’s and Naysayers to settle the matter. The two strains run through our national character as the punitive voice comes up against the permissive. Our Enlightened Deist founders had to contend with those anal Puritans. But maybe the differences are more hard-wired than a function of theology or politics.

If language is any bellwether it’s no contest. Negative words far outnumber the positives. Google, which tallies our every utterance in some grand ledger, has it that un words swamp their counterpart by huge numbers. The bad to good ratio is 5 to 1, unhappy to happy 260 to 1. The Thesaurus lists twice as many synonyms for unpleasant as for pleasant.

Are we a species of sour pusses? Do we see out of jaundiced eyes? Why do we get such kicks from bad news, and ads from candidates which smear and scandalize their opponents? Make a vampire movie and they will come. The grizzled, womanizing, recovering alcoholic anti-hero trumps the Boy Scouts of America model every time. Flawed characters feel like us, that’s why.

Freud and Oprah have consorted to encourage us to spill our guts. Anyone without a deprived childhood has been deprived. We are all in recovery. When asked at random for the intersecting event in their lives most people single out a death or trauma that forced them to be the way there are. Victimization is our default position and a vocabulary has been amassed to describe it. Have we become as melancholic as the Russians?

Maybe our negativity is an antidote to those insufferable happy faces, good fellow-well-met, painted smiles and happy endings. Perhaps cynicism is a natural response in a consumerist society with a built-in sniffer for hype and the inauthentic. Pessimism might be well-aligned with the decline of the American empire.

On the other hand it could be just a lag in language. Words for community, for caring, and all the varieties of love seem to have been nearly taken out of public discourse. We speak of childhood scars more than the nourishment we received. We are more fluent in varieties of despondency, despair, dejection and depression than in permutations of love. Boys have trouble using the word, love. If everything is described as awesome or cool the language becomes impoverished. Unlike the Eskimos relation to snow we seem to lack the words to express empathy and compassion without risking ridicule.

In a broad sense every poem is born with affection. Even the ones of vehemence carry a note of what is absent. It is much harder to write a love poem because words of endearment are exhausted and limp. Hallmark cards have pillaged the warm and fuzzy words and sucked the life out of them. They have raided the common tongue and now we mistrust sentiment. Writers seem more inclined to prowl the darkness than shine a light and critics hone their barbs rather than their faculty for appreciation. In the end, of course, life is a tender and clumsy dance, violins and kazoos, petals and nettles.

Now I should follow these words and hold my vituperative tongue against the new Confederacy and their slate of mendacious fools. But it comes so easily and if I swallow my rage I may break out in a rash. Besides, there is so much malignant about them that has earned my scorn. Maybe it’s enough to know when to scowl and when to sing.

Super Bowl

Wait, don’t go away. This is the great Americana gala. I know, for you it’s the Stupor Bowl, time to catch up on your sleep but Sunday is our national holiday. There will be growls and jubilation. 120 million crazed Americans will grow fangs from their reptilian brain plus another 30 million overseas. 

At the same time our bifurcated cleavage will cleave together. Kumbaya on the couch. MAGA nitwits will share pizza and beer with democratic socialists. MSNBC will give high fives to Fox News. 16 billion dollars will be bet. Many will lose their shirts in this reenactment of World War I with American exceptionalism on display.

Listen to me; you’re not listening. Football, with all its human tonnage, is the brainiest of all sports. If you don’t believe me we can meet in the back alley. Eleven oversized men on each side move with precise assignments to execute each play. There is agility and finesse. It is chess with stretchers. A concussion here and there. Encephalopathy down the line is indefensible. 

I never allowed my sons to play but then again I don't have any sons. Consider the comradery. Who knows what goes on in those huddles. Where else do men huddle? Maybe even commune. And when the game is over they embrace their adversaries. Inarguably an advance over the Roman gladiators who never embraced the lions.

Think of it this way, football is a way of sublimating male aggression. Without it we might be well into WWIII. The game is a version of trench warfare fighting over yards. Better this than the carnage in Ukraine. Let them vent with controlled but violent infantilism.

When I was 16, I followed college football well enough to pick the winners of 17 out of 20 games. I was the headline of the newspaper. The only problem was that the paper was the Daily Worker, a publication of the Communist Party. I couldn’t show off to my friends but I’m sure J. Edgar Hoover took note. I expect the FBI opened a file on me. My mother and father were Party members but the thought of my Dad violently overthrowing the government was laughable. He couldn’t overthrow my mother.  But I digress.

Will I be watching the game this year? Who’s playing? I’m for the team with the Black quarterback but both teams have Black quarterbacks. Then I’m for the team with the injured quarterback. They are both injured. This is the end of the season. Everyone is injured. It is a game between a hospital ward and a rehab. If I watch it I'll be entering the mindset of a fan, living vicariously, plunging ahead into the realm of the irrational.

There will be a winner and a loser. On Monday morning the world will go on, unchanged. It is merely theater after all.                      

 

 

Potato Thoughts

 The potato is a tragic vegetable. In 1992 Dan Quayle couldn’t spell it and lost the election. In today’s dumbed-down America his ignorance would have been enough to sweep him into office.

The church at first denounced the tuber since it was not mentioned in the Bible. Makes sense to me. I doubt if sweet potato fries or potato latkes were mentioned either and now I’m getting hungry. It’s too bad, news of their condemnation didn’t reach Ireland in time for the blight of 1845-1850 which wiped out a third of their population, half through death and the rest by emigration to supply the Boston and New York City police force.

At first potatoes were scorned in Europe because they looked misshapen like leprous limbs and therefore must be the source of leprosy. A brilliant piece of illogic which might also have concluded that eating carrots and celery would lead to a tall and lanky population.

More likely, too many potatoes could hasten the onset of diabetes. They are high in carbohydrates but otherwise quite nutritional. At least they sustained the down-trodden during a century of the Industrial Revolution, but barely. They grow in soil otherwise nonarable which describes the land tilled by the peasantry. 

The region around Chile and Peru bequeathed potatoes to the world. Remains have been found which date back twelve thousand years. Spanish Conquistadors, obsessed with gold, had to settle for sweet potatoes. China, of all places, produces more of them now than any country. French fries must be America’s revenge to the Chinese who are becoming a fast food nation thanks to McDonald's and KFC. Leon Trotsky, who seemed always to be on the wrong side of history, thought it could feed Mother Russia but Lenin decreed there be all that wheat and no potatoes so now they drink it as the Mother of all Vodka.

Mash it or hash it, bake it or pancake it. Soup it, stew it or scallop it. The Pomme de terre, being of the earth for earthlings, is well-named by the French. The English boiled theirs which may account for the fall of the British Empire.

Potatoes can change lives. When the actress, Doris Roberts, was in kindergarten she had one line in a play. She said, I am Patrick Potato and this my cousin, Mrs. Tomato. She heard laughter and decided to be on the stage from that moment on. Kids learn to count, one potato, two potato, three potato, four. When they grow up they will join a nation of couch potatoes munching on chips that we can’t eat one of.

My mother was famous in our family for her lumpy mashed potatoes; it was a perfect complement to burnt liver. As a result I had a fondness for potato salad. An early memory of potatoes occurred watching old war movies when a soldier was given K.P. as punishment. The next scene saw him peeling spuds.

One of my first poems depicted an imagined scene of my grandfather, as a boy, hiding from the Cossacks in a cellar and finding his way across the ocean on the rhizome of a potato. Indeed great migrations might be attributed to the wings of the tuber.

John Reader, in his book, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, argues that this ubiquitous vegetable played a major role in the rise of both Western civilization and the current Chinese ascendancy, mostly by keeping the multitude’s bellies full and their tolerance for poverty high; and that’s no small potatoes.

Perhaps life, as it is lived, is a series of small potatoes. As Alan Watts put it, Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Thoughts On War

They leave their trenches, going over the top,

While time ticks bland and busy on their wrists,

And hope. with furtive eyes and grappling fists,

Flounders in mud. O Jesus, make it stop.

                    Siegfried Sassoon                     

 

Horace overhears Doris say something to Morris. He gets the message wrong when he tells it to Boris. This could either be the beginning of a B movie or the origin of World War III. 

Leaders see with jaundiced eyes and hear with muffled ears. Call it self-interest. To retain power, they can always  rattle a saber to divert the citizenry from their real needs. Rally around the flag, boys! The enemy is at the gates. They are going to take away our Bibles, our right to be wrong or our mother tongue. It must be time to roll up our sleeves and get our guns. 

War is the abject failure of diplomacy. It took our President-General Eisenhower to warn against the military-industrial complex.The only way to win a war is to prevent it from ever happening. It is the ultimate abomination, a crime against humanity. 

Let us start with NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The name alone makes no sense. Kiev is 1,300 miles away from the north Atlantic. NATO started seventy-fours years ago with a dozen signatories; it now has thirty members, ever moving east with Finland and Sweden on the verge of inclusion.

And then there is Ukraine.

Every effort should have been made to avert the carnage. The combatants showed more muscle than brains or vision. From our perspective, the issue was sovereignty and self-determination. From their POV it was the provocation of a military alliance at their border. Two ways of seeing. Neither showed much regard for the death and destruction sure to ensue. 

I submit that both parties bear responsibility for the displacement of millions, limbs lost, rapes, torture, and a mounting death toll. High-flown rhetoric and bravado belong to B-movies. Lofty words pale compared to lives lost with dried blood and mud in the mouth of a human being.

Forgotten in the calculus is the bonanza reaped by munition-makers. How many voices are we hearing who are in the pocket of defense contractors? Loudly absent is an insistence that negotiations start at once. Great minds have developed ultimate weaponry. Now greater minds need to demand a cessation of hostilities in this unconscionable and unwinnable war.  

As constituted, the world is a fragile network. Russia is, by some measures, a failed state with a lethal arsenal. Touch this membrane at any point and the whole web trembles. Any war becomes global with famine and upheaval of energy sources a consequence.

Whether this war is a version of Hitler and Churchill or the quagmire of Afghanistan remains to be seen. Regardless of which analogy holds true it should be noted that all these conflicts are a function of the sickness staining Western Civilization, namely Nationalism. No border is worth a human life.   

From Their Perch

Skeletal trees in the Costco parking lot.

Look at those buds, will you, turning

into blackbirds, four and twenty of them,

singing their song with the only 

voice they've been given,

wondering what all those shoppers below

are doing with carts seriously filled

trying to remember where they parked

while drivers search for an empty space

and not one of them singing.

One woman looks up and listens

drawing a small crowd of sudden bird-watchers,

interupting the consuming ritual

as the choir of birds scatters from their perch

reminding those on the ground 

whose woods these were

and not for sale. 

THis is the picture and text taken by Adele Scheele which inspired the poem 

As I was leaving Costco today, just before rain fell, I heard noises that I couldn’t place and then saw buds on the bare branches of trees that separated the aisles of cars. I looked again and saw movement and swarming of little black birds. So unexpected. Life alive in the lot.
Several men saw me looking and they too looked at the birds. We stood faces up to the rain, the wind, and the blackbirds. We smiled at each other before we buckled ourselves in our cars.