2024

It is safe to say everyone will be a year older at this time next year. That may be the only thing we can all agree upon. 

The chasm between the congregation of the lost and those who agree with me is wider than my eleven and a half triple E shoe size, wider than a pastrami sandwich at Langer’s Deli and longer than Pinocchio’s lying nose on Donald's face, invisible to MAGA eyes.

January is well-named with its provenance being the Roman god, Janus, that two-face figure, looking both back and ahead. It symbolizes transition as our democracy teeters on the precipice.

Auld Lang Syne and bring it on. So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You and what else have you got? I Don’t Know Why You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello.

If you think 2023 was terrifying, wait till 2024 unfolds. It could be a banner year for the doomsayers. But we must not think like this. I look to the arts as a redress against the tide of unreason flooding the country.

Yes, I know you have paper cuts and an itch on your back in an unreachable place and your catalytic converter is missing but peonies are in bloom. The pears are finally ripe in the fruit bowl and Joan Baez is singing Finlandia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBXy6TIun9k

Having just watched Maestro and a far better documentary, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CE5L6CcqMjs&list=PLd1DecRGWbdoePvp1QCzp9b7yvzT10nDy

I felt some moments of Bernstein’s ecstasy; his exit from stasis, his transport. In the movie Casablanca, the term Letters of Transit was invented to move Ingrid out of harm's way. Save me a seat on any bus to elsewhere.

Maybe the elephant in the room, mindless America turned into Guyana, will toss their mesmerizing drink and rise from the soporific fog of gullibility, like a murmuration of starlings.

I look for poems to lift me as in Major Jackson’s lXXXi

… Saplings stand nude as Spartans awaiting orders.
The entire forest is iced-up and glistening.
Sealed in its form, the austere world I've come
to love beckons, earth runnels soon resurrected
into a delirium of streams and wild fields. Till then,
branches like black lines crisscrossing the sub-Arctic.

 

 

 

 

Your Attention, Please

How did you know the name of my college friend, she asked. Because you mentioned her to me a few months ago, I replied.

Of all the things we are asked to do in life, paying attention is the easiest and possibly the most important. It’s just a matter of being present and honoring the other person by listening. It is a habit I got into about eighty-five years ago.

My father told the story of how, in kindergarten, his teacher announced to the class they must pay attention. My Dad was raised in poverty and thought he had heard the teacher say that they must pay a pencil. He went home crying until a friend assured him there was nothing to be paid. That word pay had distorted his hearing.

However, the message was etched in his bones. Attention is the price for learning and relating and it is free. That lesson also became my words-to-live-by. 

( I can also claim the legacy of that imaginary pencil. My image of him is with a short stub of a yellow number two resting on his ear. I inherited that pencil and discovered myself along the way).

The other lesson in listening entered my consciousness by the back door. It was clear, by the 7th grade, that I could not carry a tune from here to there. Even though I sang in the shower to my delight, I was tone deaf. As such, I was consigned to the last row and designated a Listener. I excelled in lip-synching and became a world-class listener.

Listening is not just hearing words, it entails what is unsaid and knowing the difference between what is important from what is more important. Add to this the full body gestures but that doesn't work too well over the phone. It means being fully present; not rehearsing what you want to say while half present. Sometimes it means knowing when to shut up. Other times it calls for reflecting back to the speaker or probing but always in a natural flow as when attention is being paid and not as a disingenuous formula.

There is a line in Arthur Miller’s brilliant play Death Of A Salesman when Willy Loman’s wife scolds her son for disrespecting his father. Attention must be paid, she shouts. I never forgot that moment in the tragedy of this beleaguered salesman. All of us are selling ourselves or better yet, just being and we deserve each other’s attention.

It needs to be said that our retentive memory wanes in our dotage. I can almost see yesterday's conversation fading into oblivion. My attention needs tending. Attention must be paid but allowances must also be made. 

J.C.

• Jesus, it’s the anniversary of you.
• Time to mark the day in our neo-pagan way.
• With our hemisphere un-leafed
• we drag in the remaining green
• and illuminate our shortest days
• with menorahs, candles and fallen stars.
• We look for you in other J.C.s…
• Joseph Campbell, Jimmy Carter,
• Judy Chicago and Joseph Cornell.

• Irving Berlin’s on Muzak again
• and Wenceslaus is in the elevator.
• The money-changers are loose.
• Cash registers toll while politicians
• blather about goodwill.
• The robed men who stole the narrative
• and made you into Julius Caesar
• gloat in their edifice.
• 
  
• Jesus, you look weary. Forgive us
• for the misdeeds done in your name
• and your early subversion we have bungled.
• Just tell me this….did we get the story right?
• Are you human, nothing less?
• A Jewish-Christian, Jiminy Cricket,
• Julie Christie, Johnny Carson,
• Jeepers-Creepers, Jellico Cat,
• juicy cantaloupe, jeweled constellation?
• 
  
• From your manger 
• to a cardboard box by the off-ramp
• come silence the night, halt our traffic,
• unmask the imposter
• so we might pause and wake
• with astonished eyes, re-seeded
• for another go round as if
• in a haloed world, as if
• with turned cheeks, as if...

Blame The Greeks

They gave us Democracy (demos: people; kratia: rule) along with its perverse cousin Demagoguery (agosos: leader). It is a package deal. Add to that their word Xenos: strange and we have xenophobia, fear of otherness. The result is a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Early on, a demagogue was just a leader of the people, the common people that is. He was generally benign but quick to rouse the rabble unlike the learned who tended toward deliberation. Aristotle denounced their intemperance.

The word, gadfly, was used in Plato’s account of Socrates' defense. He cites the essential role it plays to challenge and reinvigorate a democracy by disrupting the status quo in the service of truth. However, in the hands of self-serving megalomaniac, a gadfly can also sting the animal that causes a stampede.

You can see where this is headed.

When I ran for milk monitor in kindergarten did I promise two cows in every garage? If I had only thought of it then I might have won. It didn’t work for Herbert Hoover either when he promised a chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage.

Politicians are always painting a future they cannot deliver. Hopefully the electorate tacitly understands and smells the baloney. We allow for a modicum of malarkey. 

The demotic has long been a concern in a democracy.  An ill-informed, fearful and armed mob can be whipped into a frenzy particularly in this world of instant connectivity. In the process they willingly abdicate their autonomy.  

The demagogue, with a good ear for collective complaints and a satchel full of charisma, doesn’t orate. He speaks conversationally, like it is, in the common tongue, audaciously, and with absolute certainty. He gives voice to the outrages his followers couldn’t quite articulate or wouldn’t dare. His word is unimpeachable. He is father. His followers are being re-parented. Children must behave. Daddy will tell you who to hate, who to mock, to beat up. Order and greatness must be restored. The trains must run on time, the train to yesterday, to nowhere.

Despotism presents itself as the repairer of all ills suffered ... and the defender of order, so said Alexis de Tocqueville. 

Athenian democracy fell into tyranny after a failed invasion of Sicily. The hubris of exceptionalism, led to the hegemony of expansionism and finally the humiliation of extinction. 

John Adams warned, There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide. The carton of milk ends up a glass of Kool-Aid laced with hemlock.

To Curse or to Kindle

To curse the darkness

is too easy.  A dart board

the size of a barn

with a quiver of barbed adjectives.

 

To light a candle,

is to sizzle the fuse of jasmine

blooming at night.

 

To curse the villainy

lullabyes the choir

even as it charges them.

 

To nurture that tendril,

with common threads, shared tears,

is to create a spark of connectivity

to brighten the solstice,

one flicker at a time, one song,

one instrument, one reed,

one note.................and then another. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Critics and Complainers

As world-class consumers we have become chronic complainers, spectators demanding our money’s worth. We think as consumers, travel as consumers, even vote like consumers.

(By we, I don’t mean you or you or even me………..but all those other people.)

We want what we want and if we don’t get it we become whiners and throw hissy fits. Yelp thrives on us.  Interactive technology has created a society of quasi-experts. We all have virtual bullhorns to tell the world what not to eat, where not to eat it and how best not to get there. How am I driving?  the back of the truck asks in our face, call 1-800…..  Teachers’ jobs depend on student evaluations. Stay on the line to answer this short survey. We grumble. We have road rage. Corporations look at test marketing groups to see which direction their thumbs are pointing. 

We’ve been trained to have high expectations and encouraged to tell all. Revenge of the demotic. As befits a nation that consumes 30% of the world’s products, with only 5% of its population, we have grown passive even as we deplete the planet of non-renewable resources and account for 30% of its waste.

Yet we are probably less discerning than we might think. The corporate world saturates our senses in ways beyond our consciousness. They are on to us. They not only know what we buy and what we drive, wear and eat, they even know what we think.  I wonder if Alexa and Siri are listening to our gripes.

And how we think is not very long, deep or well-considered. As an art form intellectual and literary criticism ain’t what it used to be. Where are the John Leonards, Susan Sontags, and Edmund Wilsons? Use too many poly-syllabics and you are branded, elite, which is code word on Fox news for progressive.

Of course writers aren’t very fond of critic’s acerbic tongues. Kurt Vonnegut once quipped, Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs, so said Christopher Hampton.

I must admit to sometimes enjoying an erudite review more than the work itself. Their use of language and keen analysis is particularly welcome in this age of mediocrity.

Being opinionated doesn’t necessarily develop one’s critical faculty. We now have a nation of highly opinionated folks who seem unable to spot a fraud in their midst. They have ceded their higher faculty for the voice of bluster and a litany of lies.  

Listing

It is here again, the twelfth month, a time to wrap up the year listing; the verb, not the noun. The only list I’m feeling right now is the disequilibrium, the tilt of this country going down in a ship wreck. But enough about Trump.

The other kind of list enumerating the ten best or ten worst is altogether out of my reach. The last list I made out was a shopping list (Chopin Liszt). I doubt I can remember ten movies, thumbs up, down or horizontal. What I do remember turns out to have happened three or four years ago; or never. Let me see how many adjectives I can name which describe my feelings about lists; grouchy, irascible, cantankerous and crotchety.

I am particularly opposed to ranking artists, actors or athletes. All arbitrary and absolute. It is too hierarchical. Give them all a hand. Come up here and take a bow. As for the worst politicians, they are all tied for first place.

I take my cue from Gilbert and Sullivan. I’ve got a little list, and they’d none of them be missed, they’d none of them be missed. The sycophants and bullies, the lackeys and the cronies and all those who turn a deaf ear to his malfeasance.

Award ceremonies are an exercise in hyperbole. After alI, I don’t rank my friends and I have no enemies I’m aware of (just a lot of folks who regard me with profound indifference). Did Beethoven and Mozart compete or was Wolfgang still dead at Ludwig’s peak? Did Picasso and Matisse have food fights? De Niro and Pacino? Billie and Ella? Hammacher and Schlemmer?

If it isn’t lists it is those year-end letters summarizing life’s slings & arrows along with new riches, travels or benedictions. Along these lines I can attest that the dog I don’t have didn’t die. Once again, I did not win the lottery. Next year I may even buy a ticket. I did visit my daughter in her new digs on Bainbridge Is. Otherwise, my notable trips delivered me from the bedroom to the kitchen and a happy return. My three daughters continue on their life journeys beset with my imperfect DNA. Sorry girls.

The travel I look forward to is a transport from this realm to a transcendent elsewhere accomplished through love of family and friends.                                                  

 

 

 

Questions and Answers

Here's the question: How did I become me, you become you and, by extension, this country become what it is today? I didn't see it coming; neither myself or the trajectory of our republic. 

I remember myself as a shy, athletic kid who secretly thought he knew everything. I have shed my shy, lost my leap and I know less and less as I move into whatever's next.

I had some of Spencer Tracy in me, a chunk of Gregory Peck and a bit of Woody Allen. No Gable or Wayne. Later I had aspirations to be Ken Burns, Basho and Barack. Who am I forgetting? Gene Kelly and Charlie Parker, why not? I used to worship FDR but now I think much more of Eleanor. 

So we pilgrim our way along battered and blessed by the unforeseen. Maybe we fall on our face. Maybe we gain some grace. Maybe we are met and from that new selves might emerge.

In the end I have no simple answer. Life itself has too many twists in the labyrinth. There is no GPS to retrace our footprints or tell us what's around the corner. Instead we mythologize our journey as if the map were the territory.

On a macro scale I am preparing myself for the sound and fury told by an idiot. Our decline as a nation is the tragedy inherent in power and an indifferent public. Yet even that is not a simplistic straight line. Awareness, compassion and justice accompanies ignorance and malice. In the same way medical science comes with nescience. 

Movies gave me the illusion that all questions have answers. Wrongs would be righted in the dream palace. In real life, at that point, as a certified know-it-all, I had all the answers. In fact, I was so weighed down with them I forgot the questions. It has taken me nine decades to learn that questions are more important than answers. I get curiouser and curiouser. Cats can die from that.       

My unsolicited advice to my granddaughter is: do not listen to gurus or assorted sages of indeterminate age and especially not to authoritarian voices with a pocketful of promises. The state of the world we elders have bequeathed to the young is reason enough to doubt our imagined wisdom. On the other hand it wouldn’t hurt to catch up on history and civics books, particularly those that have been banned in proto-fascist states.

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, metaphorically, of course, with your stiletto questions. Haul the poseur in for interrogation. Shine the big light on him and hook him with question marks.

 

Couch Questions

How long it takes me to get up from the couch is a measure of my aging.

Where is it written that socks must match or to couch it another way when did life stop rhyming?

Should that picture over the couch pick up the green in the throw pillows?

Or should it clash loud enough to jar us awake and perturb our eyes?

Sitting on the couch, I never get to see the construction on the wall above me even though it is my favorite art piece.

Did Matisse’s painting register on the Richter scale when the polka dot wallpaper collided with the striped couch?

How would the couch feel if pictures were hung upside down?

Does apparel still oft proclaim the man? Does the couch proclaim the room?

When does a couch become a sofa or a divan? 

Now that I have an orange couch can I spill Ragu sauce on it?

No, now behave yourself.

Is it true that overnight my father didn’t wear a hat? Just thinking about that from the couch.

Why do some people slouch on their couch (like me) and others don’t?

Why are those hummingbirds (seen from my couch) refusing my feeder?

Where do dead birds go? Do they have a burial place like elephants?

Whatever happened to Sabu, the elephant boy last seen on TCM as I turned into a couch-potato?

How do today's actors walk into dark rooms with no lights except on their face and never bump into the furniture?

When the judge asks the defendant to rise I spring up from the couch.

When Freud fled Austria did he really take his couch along with all those dreams in its upholstery?

If couches could talk, would they? And then there are those throw pillows to worry about,

Famous lines from old movies: What is the meaning of this? Won't you sit down?

Tall Timeless Tale

I’ll begin with Einstein who insisted that past, present and future are illusions, however persistent. Time does not flow. It bends, stalls, leaps and merges. It just is. Maybe I am writing this yesterday or tomorrow.

So Thoreau (he pronounced it Thorough) is very much alive. This is his 206th birth-year. Also alive is Emma Lazarus. She never died nor her poem inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. And yes, Donald Trump has always been with us. He wore the dunce-cap in the little red schoolhouse and beat up kids in the yard. He roused the rabble, bought slaves and led lynch mobs. The card sharp is Donald, the con-man selling phony cure-alls and breaking picket lines, the robber baron and slumlord. All of them are Trump.

Taking a break from his lucrative pencil business, Thoreau thoroughly visits Staten Island seven times. He lives with Emerson’s brother and tutors his children. Here he is roaming the streets of Manhattan dodging stray pigs and trying to sell his writings. No buyers.

I live in NYC for my first twenty-one years and go to Staten Island just once. I take the ferry one day with my brother just for the ride. It was a nickel back then, gradually inching to five bucks. Now it is free. An instance of creeping Socialism. But time doesn’t creep, I almost forgot, it just is. Now I am passing the Statue of Liberty. I can hear the huddled masses yearning.

Thoreau’s last visit to the Island was in 1843. At first he isn’t very charmed by the place though he notes the variety of flora and fauna, different from Massachusetts. While he’s heading back to Concord to start building his cabin at Walden Pond he is also considering another cabin in Staten for a spell of solitude? The man is a visionary. Does he envision the Statue of Liberty? Of course he does.

Staten Island now has half a million people. It is the wealthiest and greenest borough with 170 parks. By any measure it really should be part of New Jersey. It’s the only borough with wildlife not in a zoo. Snakes, fox, feral turkeys and coyotes have been spotted in the Fresh Kills Landfill. Thoreau is changing his mind about this place with its forests and estuaries, bird sanctuaries, salt marshes and tidal wetlands.

Let chronology collapse. Thoreau is jailed in protest of the Mexican-American War and all others to follow with the exception of those fought against slavery and Fascism.

On nearby Bedloe/Liberty Island the Statue of Liberty, with its torch held high, is an inadvertent lighthouse to woodcocks and phoebes in their migration. Trump would call them illegal birds who deserve to die anyway. Thousands fall disorientated at Mother of Liberty’s feet as they smash into the 25 glass windows at the crown of the Colossus. That is corrected as dotted glass replaces the original which birds alone recognize.  

Did Thoreau visit Emma Lazarus in his Manhattan treks? Why not? Here he is presenting a box of his world-class pencils having discovered the perfect mix of graphite and clay. And she writes….

Keep your storied pomp, says Emma to Donald. Yes, you high in your Tower. And get your hands off these tired and poor yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of these teaming shores are pleading. But Donald is deaf to the cries as he sends his wretched garbage golf balls and caviar leftovers off to the Fresh Kills Landfill where a ragged forest is being born. It is a gigantic garbage dump as mulch with 150 million tons of Big Apple trash.

Is that you, Henry David Thorough, writing with your super pencil in your notebook about restoration? Nature persists. It repairs our human folly. The message is hope. There is a lamp lifting beside this golden door.