Wholly, Unholy Halloween

I love these pagan rituals ...Christmas, Easter and Halloween. Christianity usurped the first two but couldn't quite get church doctrine around the latter. All Saints Day, as such, is pretty much ignored. But the holiday survives stronger than ever in this country and Ireland now that its roots, as the beginning of winter, have been commodified as an occasion for vampire films, costumes and candy.

The origin goes back to the Druids and Celts who noted November First as the start of the dark half of the year. It was regarded as a magical time when the dead walked among the living. The few days between the eve and day following Nov.1st were seen as no-time when the rules of society which allowed tribes to cohere, were temporarily suspended, a short period when chaos prevailed. Hence the mischief, dress-up and cross-dressing.

The veil between the living and the dead was also lifted so those spirits gone were celebrated for their wisdom, bravery or magic. Enter Christianity. Unable to rid the peasants of their tradition the Church built upon it, just as many European cathedrals were built on former pagan sites.

My memory of the holiday is associated with colored chalk. We would mark each other's clothing and engage in benign pranks. Through the years, this evolved or devolved to trick or treating, a mild form of extortion. You gimme this or I'll do that. Of course kids, with their parents behind them, aren't about to do anything except receive compliments on their get-ups and get their fill of candy which probably caused tooth decay, stomach aches and acne. The origin of it all comes from the old notion that evil spirits roamed about and were pacified by a treat left out which also ensured a plentiful crop for the year to come. 

A more positive interpretation of our practice is that it introduces children to strangers and reaffirms the social fabric of the neighborhood. Fear and mistrust are bridged and adults get to relive their own childhood.

One of my favorite Woody Allen lines is, My only regret in life is that I'm not someone else. Costume parties allow us, for one night, to shed our skin for another. If it takes Halloween to do it, I'm for it.

Up until recently people lived closer to death. The Mexican Day of the Dead is a healthy way to experience the natural inevitability. A small act to relieve our repression and meditate on our own mortality.

Halloween is rooted, literally, in the earth tied to seasonal planting, harvest and a recognition of the solstice. It is a time to recall our connection to the natural cycles of the seasons, a universal observance, one way or another. Pass the pumpkin pie and pumpkin ice cream.

On Halloween night in 1938 Orson Welles scared the hell out of thousands of people with his version of that other Wells’ classic, War Of The Worlds. In case there was any doubt, the power of radio and public gullibility were demonstrated. I was five at the time and have no first-hand stories to relate but folks hid in their cellars, jammed the highways and wrapped wet towels around their head to offset the poison gas. Today, social media has replaced radio and the level of gullibility has multiplied exponentially. 

Scoops

There are two kinds of scoops. The first is a word in the dustbin of history having been replaced by breaking news. Here is what used to happen, at least in movies.

Under relentless cross-examination the witness breaks down and blows the case wide open. An ace reporter with his chewed cigar bolts from  the courtroom to the nearest phone to give his paper, the Trib, the biggest scoop since Lindbergh and the extra edition hits the streets before the Evening Star giving the chain-smoking editor a raise and making the publisher, with his pipe, a shoe-in for D.A. or better yet, a chair in the State House because the party needs a decent man to drive out the corruption downtown even though his wife has been institutionalized since he pushed her down the stairs when she caught him in a compromising way but a newspaperman with a nose for trouble smells something fishy and the wife to spill the beans even in her comatose state. But I can explain everything, the governor shouts as they take him away and the cub reporter from the Star calls in his first scoop. 

Back then, crime was something for the police blotter. We've come a long way down the primrose path. 

The other scoop brings me to ice cream. I knew early on I was either destined for greatness or there was something seriously wrong with me when I looked around and saw everyone else licking their ice cream in a cone, while I bit mine. Not big hunks, just nibbles. I deemed it a greater joy to my teeth than to my tongue. There could be a profound truth hidden in all this but it eludes me at the moment.

When the Good Humor truck sounded its bell we kids salivated like Pavlovian dogs. Toasted almond bars, Dixie cups and popsicles. I bit them all. I remember nibbling on an Eskimo Pie, which was neither Eskimo nor pie, when news came that World War II was won. I think I dropped it on the sidewalk, always a small tragedy when ice cream fell to the ground. It is one of life’s set-backs that ultimately prepares us for other existential crises.

Ice cream could be a chronicle of maturation over the years by noting how flavor choices evolved. I was a vanilla sort of kid until first grade when I discovered the inherent psychedelic alkaloids buried deep inside chocolate. I had a strawberry phase and possibly even forays into orange and raspberry sherbet. Butter pecan had never been short-listed. I’ve always resented the intrusion of nuts into the smoothness however I did go through a rum-raisin phase.

In recent years new flavors have emerged which I would not mind being preserved in, cryogenically speaking. Among these are peach, pumpkin and chocolate malt crunch. I shall not bite the dust but the ice cream.

These days, ice cream-lovers have to call their psychiatrists to find out which flavor they want when faced with Cherry Garcia peanut-butter clusters or black-mountain praline caramel ripple. Make it one scoop of each.

To bite at life or to lick it? Something of each, I think, an arrangement between tooth and tongue. To seize and to savor. But why seize at all? Maybe because I might miss something in transit. My daughter tells me she is also a bit of a biter so it must be familial. 

All the above is my way of practicing for my next incarnation as an ostrich while the world implodes.

What's The Big Idea?

There seems to be an impulse to think big these days; to fit every bit of dreadful news as it breaks under the umbrella of some all-encompassing idea. We want to wrap it up and be done with it. The problem is there are always pieces that misbehave, refusing to conform to the tidy narrative. Where I might see evil alloyed with goodness and growing organically, others look for a conclave of conspiratorial villains or for a master puppeteer or to the configuration of planets.  

 The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves. So said the bard. I say yes but it may be a way in, to consider the vast constellation of the interior life.

Many of us resist accepting randomness. Like the ancients, we think surely, no question shall go unanswered. We seek causation when there is only correlation. If you were wearing unmatched socks the day your rash vanished, to what shall you attribute the healing? If you read the word pastrami just as that word was spoken on a news-cast does it mean that uncle Abner died from eating a Reuben sandwich 3,000 miles away? Synchronicity happens all the time but our antenae are usually not alert to notice. When we happen to catch a conjunction in the net of the bee-loud wild garden we see it as a portal to the extra-rational. No harm exploring that other dimension.

We need our moments of transcendence. It is the stuff of poetry. If a beam of light comes through the curtains, I say, stay with it, let it signify. It is your magic carpet, your rhapsody, your poem to make of it what you will. It is beyond the literal; it belongs to another realm and is to be cherished.

My default position is in the disarray, hanging by my thumbs on the web of connective tissue. I stretch to grab a metaphor when I sense one in the minutiae of the mundane. Show me a cough and I start to think of cough syrup and I then wonder whether coughs should be suppressed or expectorated. And furthermore, whether anything should be inhibited or let loose. What did Spinoza or Schopenhauer have to say about that? Does a football game desensitize us to violence or does it sublimate our aggression?

In the case of that cough, Socrates may have had a coughing fit when he chose the ultimate suppressant, a hemlock smoothie, demonstrating that sometimes the examined life isn't worth living either.

And speaking of coughs it’s a short leap to focus on Kleenex. I’m looking for a subject so ordinary it escapes observation and any sort of overarching significance.

It occurs to me that there may be something wrong with my nose. Where are you running, nose? And not only my east and west nostrils but also my bilateral eyes. A partial parotidectomy in 1981 seems to have tampered with my glands causing an over-secretion. In addition, ever since cataract surgery about ten years ago my eyes no longer reabsorb tears so they make their way out of their sockets and travel down my cheeks as if I’m weeping. Of course, our geopolitics offers much to weep about. 

North of the neck I count seven orifices. They all secrete in their way. As a result, I have Kleenex everywhere. I am crying for you, Argentina ... and everywhere up from there on the map. I am crying a river. My body humors are speaking in the only language they have. I grant them their fluency.

Call me lachrymose and bless the tissues, so perfect in dimension (form follows function), so sublime in texture, so rectilinear and virginal as the driven blizzard in North Dakota only to find its demise as crumpled as Ohio or, better yet, the shape of Frank Gehry's next building. 

What did folks do before Kleenex or any other tissue? Why, they used handkerchiefs, of course. I used to have one in my pocket during my time at P.S. 99. I think my mother even ironed them. Far better to employ one of those downy swan-white tissues. There is nothing whiter and softer.

Before handkerchiefs I suppose there were always long-sleeve shirts but that’s as far as I want to take this. I must stop myself before I start looking for the big idea. There is no big idea for a change. What a relief! Don't get me started.

 

Light In The Dark Ages

Imagine living between roughly 300-1500 AD. If it wasn’t Goths pounding at the gate, it was the Visigoths.  No sliced bread, Saran Wrap or Scotch Tape. They couldn’t even watch TV by candlelight. But nobody knew it was dark until the lights went back on.

God(ot) was a no-show, even then, as he was during plagues and famines. Yet in his name ploughshares were beaten into swords as crusaders marched off singing Onward Christian Soldiers to teach those infidels a lesson and while they were there they had their sport. After all, everybody needs a hobby. To pillage and plunder was quite acceptable and God threw a blind eye at rape as well.

The Holy Land was the least holy place as dead bodies fertilized the ground. In my mind it is human life which is sacred, not a designated patch of land. Blood was squandered over competing fables and still is.

In Africa it was the same story. As Desmond Tutu put it, When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, let us pray. We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land, which, more or less, brings us up to date. 

Today in the MAGA universe when the potentate blurts and blusters, folks listen, having parked their brains outside the tent. As a miasma of ignorance spreads over our landscape, we watch comic books on big screens. We have become a nation conditioned to violence, vigilante justice and infatuated with power, muscular or by connivance. As in Monday night football, winning is everything.  

And yet occasionally a lotus can be seen pushing up out of the mud. My landlord hired a team of men to prune the trees outside my window. My garden is now a collection of stumps. I have to believe spring will bring a renewal. My faith is in the cycle and, by extension, in the ultimate goodness of our species. We are all upright apes. Have a banana.

As I was driving to a non-power lunch yesterday the thought of road courtesy occurred to me. How we obey stop-signs (more or less), traffic lights, automatic signals and lane changes. How our very driving grants us the opportunity to practice civility. Without it we’d be bumping into each other. For better or for worse we created our own psychic space and have learned to observe and honor our fellow strangers. And no highwaymen as in the Dark Ages.

Before electricity there was and still is a certain light emanating from within. A radiance sparked by the many permutations of love and a luminous shine of charged air as we commune with the firmament and release the stars.

Forgiveness

There are times when I allow my pulpit voice to bellow out. Or maybe I am one of those figures in a Chagall art piece in flight above the fray. I forgive you if you don't forgive me.

In ancient times and still, we traded eyes and teeth, walking around blind and toothless.... and bilious. Call it revenge. Some call it justice or closure. Is it Human Nature that summons that endless chain of retribution? Yes, but so is forgiveness.

Mark Twain said that, Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.

Hatred is a poison. We may think it is all directed outward but it also spreads within. It can metastasize and attach itself to other people or issues. The act of forgiveness need not be thought of as altruistic. Think of it as a self-serving gesture, an antidote to rid the psyche of toxins. 

Seething doesn't come from nowhere. Generations of loathing are an ember which can break into a wildfire when fanned by a demagogue or a terrorist organization. The seeds of that hate must be addressed. We must walk in each other's shoes.

It’s not a single, simple act. It’s a kind of journey into a higher consciousness. Forgiveness is first the recognition that the perpetrator is not all that different from yourself. We all possess the same human capacities. It doesn’t help to demonize the other. That’s too easy and too lazy. 

Rather than dwell on the punishment it’s more important to consider how to cleanse the wound of the victim or survivors. When we are wronged I believe it is important to call the bad guy to accountability. He must admit to his wrongdoing with an open heart. That admission calls for an equally open heart by his accusers.

The two are bonded, like it or not. Only by finding one’s own humanity can a healing take place. Otherwise the injury festers. It takes its secondary protracted toll. Vengeance, however measured, does not satiate it only incites an opposing response.

In Nazi Germany there were men who read Goethe, listened to Beethoven then went to work as concentration camp guards. Similarly slave owners might have been church-going men and loving fathers who walked into the fields becoming bestial. The task is to help those compartmentalized men to see how they have strayed from the better version of themselves.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa held the torturers and oppressors during Apartheid to come forward and face their victims. In some cases reparations were assessed. Amnesty was granted with full disclosure.

The series of trials did not satisfy all the victims of abuse but the process, I believe, represents a giant leap in human civilization over the punitive model.

After 27 years of incarceration Nelson Mandela embraced his jailer, guards and prosecutor. The day he walked away from prison he let go of his hatred because he knew he would have otherwise remained their prisoner. It took an enormous strength to reach this point, an evolved heart.

Healing

Grocers and intellectuals weigh everything,

said Zorba, dancing on the table.

My father was none of these;

he was a healer bent over

the torsion scale, the way he tapped

a crystalline powder on the weighing paper

adding a smidge with his spatula, 

taking back a half-smidge, on one side, 

then reaching for grains and scruples

on the other, achieving a magnificent balance,

an equipoise I can only aspire to.

Yet I also witnessed the way he triturated

fascists into dust with his mortar and pestle.

Vehemence and grace in a shamanistic tango. 

Remind me, father, how you tamed the germs,

conferred with microorganisms for a new homeland,

how fevers broke as you read the mercury

and you pacified the febrile world.

Was it those vapors you released from apothecary jars

presiding between globes of colored water?

What dervish danced in your eyes?

 

Now I have been knocked off center.

The world is burning up.

Was it an alcohol rub you used

or the ancient knowledge in your hands,

the silent incantation you didn’t need to sing?

How you overthrew fetid rhizomes and rancid roots

with aromatic buds and intoxicating herbs. 

In the midst of sirens and screams

I yearn for your macerating elixir

containing everything you believed in,

which taught us to heal ourselves.

 

Transit

The bestial events in that holy, unholy land,

laden with sins,

have shrunk my map,

folded me across oceans to this ancient divide.

I am haunted by the butchery,

images of the fallen and those taken to tunnels.

What was a chess game for me of conversational

hair-splitting over Chinese chicken salad

in the safety of a back booth

is now a place where exhausted words 

have gone to die.

 

I am left grasping for a language to trace

the tears of my transit

from head to heart,

from my distant perch to the door

of my slowly un-shuttered chambers.

Have we not advanced since the ancients,

since the days of sacrificial lives

and slaughter of innocents?

By uncaging the beast

such vengeance discredits the cause,

assuring its own defeat.

Psalming

In ancient times a psalm was any song sung to the strings of a harp. If we listen, a certain music can be heard, a rhythm, a pulse to defeat the noise out of which we can create a psalm of our own.

The keyboard is my harp. Lyrics are what I write describing my engagement with life as I take it in; the injustice, carnage and mindlessness alongside love, mercy and creative bursts. I straddle two worlds… above the fray, distant and cocooned in green pastures, while preparing a table at the barricades in the presence of my enemies.

What if God, the Lord, is not a noun but a verb as in lording over one’s garden, one’s self. We are our own shepherds. Do we seek still waters? No, we seek the path beside the water, on the shore. To behold this water, this dry land, this strip, this Black Sea, this West Bank. The water is still and the air without wind to move invading sailing ships. We are wanting, left with rod and staff, at the great divide.

Let me presume that everything happening in our midst is happening inside the poet. Shall poets answer the bell heard tolling? Do they write out of their rage and despair?  Or do they breathe a more rarefied air above the valley of shadows? Is the poet the one who poles us across the water and puts music in our ears (Charles Wright.)?

The psalm I am hearing is the song of cessation from Kiev to Tel Aviv. Guns silenced. Pens to paper. Water shared. Cups running over. Grain as cargo. An adagio of diplomacy.

 

Sooner or Later

We must enter our dark and dank forest;

that dominion of wild-ness,

of stumps and excrescence,

where unseen forces commune

among the calligraphy of contorted branches

beyond my fluency. Screech and caw,

murmur and buzz outside my voice range.

Where I can be lost in the chaos

that has been shadowing me.

What seemed familiar is suddenly unknown.

I am prepared to meet my unlived (disowned?) self,

old bark shedding, maple gone skeletal.

These woods of brambles juiced,

nettles seeded and shedding trees

tapped for syrup. A lantern seen

from a golden grove unleafing. 

 

 

 

 

Sticks

I’m reminded of that old saw about the carrot and the stick. Maybe it works getting a mule to move the cart but I’m not fond of sticks or even twigs as a way of behavior modification. As applied to us humans it is even more abhorrent. I recall an English movie seen as a child, Tom Brown’s School Days, in which he was subjected to corporal punishment by a switch or whip or some other demented form of malice; knuckle-wrapping being the most benign in the sadist’s handbook. Whether this was a hand-me-down from those days of papal fervor or part of Brit imperialism or just garden-variety proto-Fascism, I winced then and I wince now. 

I’m realizing how that word, stick, is not one I use very much or have ever used except when attached to another word like stick-shift, chopstick or drumstick. As a kid a stick was that piece that held a popsicle or toasted almond bar together. It was your lucky day if your stick gifted you with a free Good Humor next time around. After rain we would float them down the gutter in a race toward the sewer. On a sunny day I might have snapped a stick of wood from a tree and gone fishing for a nickel through a grate. Sticks were also a weapon along with stones which could break my bones but names could never…. My favorite stick was the broom which, when sawed off against the curb, became a stickball bat. Many a tennis ball got whacked with those vandalized sticks. I never once thought of the superintendent of the apartment building left with a disembodied collection of bundled straw. 

Once upon a time this country was a coast-to-coast forest with branches sufficient to convey a squirrel three thousand miles (if he could hitch a raft across the Mississippi). Non-stop trees were a super highway. Then settlers and our motherland put the axe to the woodland to create more pastureland and to get them through the winters. I doubt if stickball was on their mind or even cricket. In order for Britannia to rule the waves they deforested North America for their ships and steel mills. The big sticks also allowed Lincoln to build the log cabin he was born in ( that's a joke). As a boy scout I never figured out how to rub two sticks together to start a campfire. Maybe rubbing two boy scouts would have worked better. Raised as a street urchin I wouldn’t know about such things but why not just put a match to a candlestick? Before I sail down the River Styx this is my story and I'm sticking to it.