From A to Z

Trying to avoid the contamination by the new regime, I’m on my stationary bike pedaling to elsewhere. Here I am in Africa admiring the four legged-creatures from antelope to zebra, all herbivorous quadrupeds.

The only thing I know about antelopes is that they rhyme with cantaloupes.  And here’s another thing. The word is an umbrella term for a group which include gazelle, impala, and even wildebeest, also known as gnu. They are all undocumented and live happily munching grass in the savannas except when they are running like hell from cheetahs.  

Detroit looks toward four-legged creatures to sell their cars. Neither the Ford Bronco, Chevy Impala nor Dodge Ram could ever compete with the Ford Mustang. The less said about the Pinto the better….and then there’s the Jaguar. But horsepower is still the unit of measure which is an endearing way of honoring the past.

Creationists may argue that zebras got their stripes from the American flag or that God was watching the refs at a Laker game but everyone knows God is really a baseball fan and was fixated on the Yankee pinstripe uniform.

It has long been noted that zebras are social animals. When they congregate, their stripes form what looks to lions as a huge blob and too much to take on. Another more compelling reason for the stripes is that they evolved over millennia as a protection from the tsetse and horseflies.

(You have to admit this is far more interesting than wringing our hands over what went wrong on election night.)

Horses, which lack horse sense didn’t think of stripes and rely on their tail to shoo the flies.  Zebras, with their striped skin, are deemed less inviting to blood-sucking insects. The flies are attracted to solid surfaces because the light waves emitted resemble the light reflected from pools of water where they breed. From the POV of those insects one might say the system is rigged.

Yet zebras, stripes and all, don’t have what it takes for domestication. Horses were feral once also but opted for a barn and steady meal instead. In exchange they had to pull loads of men with whips.

Zebras should be credited as the first to come up with bar codes. They may all look the same to us but each carries a signature on its hide which singles them out to other zebras. In case you are asked what color zebras are, the answer is black with white stripes.      

Whether antelopes eat cantaloupe has yet to be studied.

All life forms evolve to give them the best chance of survival. Mankind seems to be the exception. Our most fearsome predator is ourselves. Four-legged creatures know better than to make such a mess of their habitat.

 

Mourning After

The page is funereal white. I feel the need to fill it up with squiggles that could be buds or birdies, but first some bile.

Did something just die in America or was it a chronic illness only now revealed? I believe Tuesday’s election was a full-body scan showing a long-festering malignancy exacerbated by a megaphone of nostrums causing massive disorientation.

What seemed like a sudden demise is really a pre-existing condition. Perhaps, even a congenital disorder as a consequence of familial misdeeds never addressed. We have yet to wash the blood off our hands from a rapacious past blighted with human bondage.

The underlying cause is systemic with severe maldistribution of needed nutrients. The body politic had grown increasingly sclerotic with an irregular pulse. Organic deficiencies in the bloodstream have long been ignored. Tendencies toward misplaced loathing are not unexpected.

Our free enterprise system yields winners and losers. It has always been thus. Every benefit won by the working class or middle class has been hard fought and earned. Even with new prosperity for many, a large body of aggrieved workers have been left behind.

The usual inequities have been compounded by a bipartisan push to seek cheap labor overseas which has always been the goal of corporations. Jobs vanished with shuttered factories as manufacturing moved offshore. Trump did nothing to confront the problem during his four years in office. Biden has, at least, brought computer chips back to the U.S. 

What we have witnessed, tragically, is a population overthrowing the very forces which offer their best hope. Rage has left them deaf to the menace of his words and blind to his misdirection.  

A new social contract is desperately needed which ensures the health, education and welfare of everyone. Instead, the MAGA program would scrap or weaken the very institutions providing access to the wealth of this affluent nation.

While on life support, we can still live our lives of compassion, creativity and love with even a deeper appreciation for the fragility of those values just rejected. We shall write the psalm needed to see us through this wasteland. Or better yet, live it, forged out of a new dawn with an incandescence to see us through this dark passage within sight of beginning sprouts and the feel of wings.

 

Harp in the Carnage

For every bomb dropped, particle of noxious air belched,

for every last syllable of loathing overheard,

moral violence spewed, every barbed lie,

choke hold, groping, ignorant oath, every

truth denied, every shrug in the midst of indecency,

 

Is there an answer in the stanza,

a poem that can override the filibuster?”

Will the bell in the fuchsia

toll for the mesmerized?

Is there enough nectar in the hibiscus,

enough dew to quench parched minds?

Is that a camellia blooming on the

blood-stained bandage,

a harp in the carnage of a smashed piano?

Can the trumpet in the foxglove be heard?

 

In the pharmacy poison foxglove

becomes digitalis. What can kill also heals.

The leaf that stops the heart

contains the alkaloid that slows

and strengthens it.

Counting My Chickens

John Maynard Keynes put it this way: Capitalism is the astounding belief that the wickedest men will do the wickedest things for the greatest good of everyone. But enough about Trump.

When greed and arrogance are valorized and smarts are vilified, I need a remedy. So, I stroll in the garden I don’t have and pick up the cello I don’t play. Yet the coleus leaves are bent as if toward music and leaves are falling into goldfish.

Having taken refuge inside Keats’ odes and urn I emerge rhyming with every word and empowered like a heroic couplet.    

I am insinuated with sky. Today’s dome was particularly vast, saturated with a blue not-seen-before. It was furrowed with cloud formations like rows in a vineyard or a wrinkled brow having just discovered a cure for loathing.    

Breath held becomes breath released sufficient to refresh the foul air. Gusty winds enter windows to vent the miasma. Spring bulbs stir in anticipation.

Thanks, will be given. No food-fights over white and dark meat. Our Founding Fathers are my fantasy guests seeking forgiveness for the sin of an Electoral College.

This page was written as I watched my Dodgers come from behind to win the World Series. The losers did not call for a recount of the score nor did they threaten the umpires or overthrow the stadium. May life follow baseball. 

In the Fall of ‘41

Often, I am eight. returning to that time of two awakenings. Franklin Roosevelt’s intonation came from the radio speaker. His voice was God’s voice and spoke of infamy at Pearl Harbor. The war rearranged faces. Emotions were suddenly made public. I felt the barrier dissolve between adults and myself. It was my portal into a world beyond my small one.

Two months before December 7^th I had another initiation which sounds frivolous. The World Series was the World Serious to me. The Dodgers were playing the Yankees as they are today. A Yankee player struck out to end the game, but the game did not end. Without going into details, what seemed like victory turned into defeat. Baseball is a lesson in failure but failing gracefully. There would disappointment but tomorrow's a new ballgame. I learned it that day and never forgot.

Memories are moments that cling, momentous or puny; it doesn’t matter. The declaration of war by Germany four days after that December Sunday prompted Churchill to dance the jig. He knew our entry into the European theater would save England. For me, it would set into motion a cluster of childhood tableaus.

There would be air raid drills and blackouts, rationing and war bonds. Refugees entered my class. The Four Freedom posters by Norman Rockwell appeared on our school room walls. I rejoiced with Allied victories and wept with Roosevelt’s death.

As for baseball, there were historic feats performed that summer of 1941 which will never be equaled. But I was too young to take note. It wasn’t until that day in October that I was ready to take on the world. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a tragic event but there would a reckoning.  

 

The Taste of the Lie

The taste of the lie was good and sweet on my tongue

                     Yehudi Amichai, Israeli poet

I’m sure Homer felt the same way. Of course, there probably was no Homer. He/she was likely a scribe or select group of scribes setting down on paper the agreed-upon lie (myths) which came from a chorus of troubadours or mad poets singing of tall tales and legends from a millennium back in time. These were the lies that spoke truths.

Those in ancient times who lent their ears knew they were receiving wisdom through metaphor, not to be taken literally. I expect that other gatherings also knew the stories were parables of a shared ethos. And so it was that the tribe called Hebrews cohered.

In an oral culture, my guess is that information was passed along in broad terms with an accepted disregard for precise detail. Each happening was embellished and gods were introduced to be the embodiment of events or behaviors otherwise unaccountable. Small truths became big truths at the end of the telephone tree.

Could it be that the liar in our midst is a man of prehistory? His private delusions, which are all self-serving fabrications, are received not literally but as some sort of ventriloquism of the aggrieved followers' complaints and vague aspirations.

Just as a pre-literate society had no concept of literal truth so too is today’s post-literate herd of sheep heedless of fact-based actuality. We are witness to a congregation of the lost. He grunts, they grunt. He mocks, they mock, and it is multiplied by the megaphone of social media. When they chant his curses of an imagined threat, they don’t realize they are vilifying projections from his own psyche. His words are swords, barbed on his tongue, bitter on our ears.         

The line from Amichai’s poem comes out of the mouth of a ten-year-old boy. I went to another synagogue, he says, enjoying the taste of his lie. It is the precursor of a budding imagination, with a fragrance of the faraway. When his father dies, in the poem, he return's the lie, I've gone to another life.

When the sociopath speaks, he is either incapable of perceiving reality or deliberately distorting it to aggrandize himself. If he had written the Greek tragedies, they would have all been about Zeus, not Achilles or Odysseus, and certainly not about Penelope.

Last Thoughts On the All Of It

If I were you, I wouldn’t bother reading this. Seriously, who wants to waste their precious time with another article about the election? Not me or rather, not I. In fact, I’m on a twelve-step program trying to withdraw, but I’m only up to step three or four. It’s so hard.

When I look at a piece of Kleenex, I not only see a pristine, fluffy white tissue, so perfect in dimension, so sublime in texture and virginal, instead I see rectilinear Pennsylvania. As I hold it in my two hands, I am gripping Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and blowing into the red, rural middle. This has to stop.

What would Wordsworth do in times like this? Wander lonely as a cloud? I’d much rather be a swinger of branches in Frost’s birches. In his poem, the boy climbs to the top knowing to descend to the ground. There is no place better. So it is, I am earthbound, wondering how we have come to the brink.

Here’s my theory: We suffer from electile dysfunction. We go limp in November. Maybe his red tie arouses. MAGA’s appeal is directed to the glands rather than our brains. Their mendacity is a perverse aphrodisiac. Their repeated lies are a siren-song. If this were Masterpiece Theater we’d be witnessing Downstairs voting for Upstairs. The underserved identify with the privileged.

Americans are world-class consumers. We acquire and we think like consumers which is to say we really don’t think much at all. We vote the same way we buy a car. Not for its carbon footprint, or safety or economy so much as the cluster of images attached to the commercial. When new pharmaceuticals are advertised on T.V., we are seduced by the accompanying montage of family picnics or robust bodies even as the adverse side effects are being recited. The substance gets lost.

Ironically, we grow cynical at the same time. We know, on some level, we are being conned, but we have grown to accept that as being the way things are. Decisions are made by skimming the surface. Woe is we.

 

 

What Daddies Do

Yes, it's true. I've made a mess of this jigsaw puzzle world. Pieces are missing and other frayed by neglect or broken by breaking news.

I was raised with cross ventilation and now the air is noxious. I am shouting on the rooftop into a miasma. The planet is febrile. Beyond the reach of alcohol rub. My father repaired my world and now I must do the same for my three daughters. This is what Daddies do.

I won’t let the orange tide be pulled by a lunatic moon. Your sandcastles will endure. Once erected they are untouchable.

I shall don my pharmacist smock and descend to a subterranean laboratory with its smoking cauldron. Add a feather of dove, eye of newt, pluck wild berries, some rough-hewn bark and the root of aromatic abracadabra.

I’m remembering how my father healed my universe. Tapping a crystalline power on one side of the torsion scale, adding a grain or scruple on the other. He achieved an equipoise yet he also allowed himself to grind fascists into dust in his mortar and pestle. Vehemence and gentility in equal measure. May I bequeath that to you.

If this was a torn page of history, I would use my glue stick. If a table fell apart, I’d get my toolkit, even read the damn manual since these are no ordinary times. If that doesn’t work, I’ll find a bridge to Portugal or Costa Rica and I will lay me down.

There is something you have beyond the reach of polls and poles. That space, that room of your own, your orchard or riverfront of your own composition. There you will meet yourself and form a circle of like minds and hearts.

 

Donald, Doyle and Penny Dreadfulls

It is a stretch, I know, to find the thread between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Donald J Trump but I’d like to give it a go. Arguably, Doyle’s invention of Sherlock Holmes and Donald’s invention of himself are both characters on the spectrum. One is a benign obsessive compulsive sleuth and the other a malignant sociopath.

 Sherlock Holmes was a fit for the late Victorian age. Trump is less of a man than a scourge who sensed a vacuum created by an age of dislocation and festering grievance. The sleuth with the deerstalker hat was a noble outlier; the Donald is a megalomaniac who offers a satchel full of fibs and empty promises. 

Penny Dreadfuls were read by an estimated one million Londoners each week. They were illustrated sensationalist rags with stories of cheap thrills, piracy, murders and science fiction, aimed at young men. They ripped off versions of Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Dickens and Doyle.

Holmes’ exploits were fodder just as Trump and the National Enquirer used each other to fabricate his exploits while vilifying his enemies. For eight years they had Barack and Michelle divorcing with as much credibility as a JFK citing or alien landing. The Dreadfuls were the social media, the Tic-Toks and Tweets of the day. Both were the creation of fevered minds. At least the 19^th century version presented itself as fiction while Donald seems unable to distinguish fact from fable.

The British Empire was at its peak. Think globalization. Big bucks were being made by a few people. The air was foul. Science seemed out of control with epochal technology. The bucolic countryside was fast disappearing with a growing divide between rural and urban consciousness. There were 200,000 prostitutes in London. Homelessness, filth and indenture coexisted alongside a genteel civility. People knew their place. Social mobility was virtually unknown. Rigidity and rectitude were giving way to randomness and relativity. Society was held together by a veneer of respectability, class fixity along with a sense of order and resolve. Every disruption had its resolution.

Enter Sherlock Holmes. He brought rationality and logic. He deduced. He rooted evil out and restored civility. He was their defense against a random universe. He never died because he never lived. Arthur Conan Doyle’s invention rested on the shoulders of Edgar Allen Poe’s inventions and upon Sherlock’s shoulder came Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Raymond Chandler’s Phillip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade…the genre is still digging.  Detectives detect. They mostly act on their own as benevolent vigilantes offering the illusion of justice.

The new sheriff with the technicolor hair who rode into America’s heartland, on the last train from Yuma, is Donald Trump, that old robber-baron, land-grabber, in disguise. He and he alone nails the most-wanted posters to the wall. He leads the posse, locates the hanging tree and prepares the noose. He is the faux-detective offering simplistic words with a ten-year old’s vocabulary to complex problems.

Yet both Doyle and Donald appear at pivotal moments, albeit 125 years apart. Brits also encountered immigrants from their jewel, India. Holmes pandered to Londoner’s xenophobia with a distrust of foreigners. Many Indians ended up in Newgate Prison on the barest suspicion. Gay behavior was criminalized just as many red states would have it today. It would be decades before women were fully enfranchised in England. Their first voting rights act in 1918 was restricted to propertied women over thirty. 1895 Britain and red-state U.S. bear some resemblance in their racism and misogyny.

The name Sherlock suggests razor sharp certainty. I suppose he would be repulsed by the fuzzy mind of Donald. The man from Baker Street could surmise a man’s entire profile by a glance at his hands and the smell of his tobacco. Our guy from the high tower smelled angst and fear and inflamed it into irrational rage. There is a toxicity afoot surrounding Trump, something like the yellow fog that fell on London Town back in the day. Moriarity is in our midst. 

 

 

My Deaf Daughter

Sixty years ago, my daughter Janice was almost two. This was about the time we got the diagnosis that she was profoundly deaf. There had been clues earlier but my wife and I dismissed them as if we were deaf to her needs, even when I dropped a bag full of coins on a wood floor and Janice didn’t stir.

We made a decision which was controversial then as it is today. Our choice was to follow the course of the John Tracy Clinic which was to go with oralism as her first language, rather than sign language.

The third option was called a total approach which sounds wiser, but we bought into the idea that, given the two modalities, deaf children would be more inclined to use their hands and less likely to speak intelligibly.

The program at the Tracy Clinic was a four-year commitment. Under the guidance of a tutor, Janice learned how to lipread and speak, one word at a time. Her first word was not denotative but an action verb which literally demonstrated the power of speech. The word was open and her world opened.  

Our task was to create situations which encouraged her to open doors, boxes, bottles, books, fists et al. We had her put her fingers to our mouths to feel the breath of that word.

I'm reminded of the kindness people show in a special needs setting. There is an inherent goodness in caregivers, and, to some extent, everyone shows their best self. Being a nonagenarian, I experience some of the same deferential treatment. Even if I don't need any help, I enjoy the human interchange.

By age six Janice had about a hundred-word vocabulary she could speak and read many more words on the lips. When she entered public school, she quickly learned sign language. Today she has a very large command of the language both receptively and expressively.

Did we do the right thing? I believe we did, however the argument for early signing also has merit. Some would argue that by forbidding her to use her hands in those formative years we denied her the expression of her feelings and other abstract ideas.

In the deaf community, oralism is frowned upon, yet Janice can function to a great extent in the hearing world because of her early skills. I marvel at her hard-won independence and how she navigates her life having never heard her own voice. I also love watching her orchestrating a manual ballet as she communicates with her deaf friends on her video phone. She has felt the walls of this world and learned how to climb them.

 

 

Straight, Square and Smooth

By the 6^th grade the person I would never become was made clear to me. I was in shop class with the assignment to create a breadboard from a slab of wood. If we lived in a true meritocracy I would still be there, that old man in the back row shaving a hunk of wood for the 80^th year.

Straight, square and smooth the teacher demanded. What’s wrong with a bump here and there, my inner voice yelled back. I discovered two things in that class. First, that I was basically inept and secondly that I have a thing for irregularity. Maybe being ept is overrated.

Think of the beauty of a deckled edge. Let the border rise and fall and damn the perpendicular. It’s life’s grooves and edges, the sputters and stumbles, the jagged right-hand margin of a poem that lends its character. I wouldn’t give them up any more than the moon could relinquish its craters. 

You can have your Wyoming and Colorado, ruler sharp, I’ll take loosey-goosey Michigan or Florida which looks as if it might break away at any moment. Do people still have breadboards? Most loaves are pre-sliced and for baguettes, I just rip and chew. My breadboard looked like it conformed to teeth-marks.

Nature has no straight lines. Antoni Gaudi said it first and his wavy architecture replicates an organic flow as if on the way to the next best thing.

There I was with my diminishing rectangle of wood that refused its next incarnation as something straight, square and smooth. I admired its grit, dips and uprisings. It was to be my road map, prefiguring a contrarian nature and a nose for connective threads, however coarse.

Of those three Ss, I must admit some allowance for smoothness as in skin (my favorite organ) or cobblestones and then there are smoothies but graveled with berries, of course. At this point of my life, it’s safe to say I will never accept that 6^th grade mandate. One man's failure is another man's ept.

Turning

Since the vernal equinox happens on my birthday in March, I have to give the fall equinox its due. It happens here like a rumor, as silently as that needless “n” in autumn. You’d never know summer is done with temperatures reaching into the nineties for the next week.

To get into the mind of the season I need to imagine the cycle turning in a change of palette from greens to rust, burnt sienna and yellows. Where are those migrations overhead, flannel pajamas, itchy sweaters, russet pears, chestnuts of childhood?

Of course we do get oranged in advance of Halloween. Pumpkins show up in ice cream, soup, pasta, pudding, pie, even beer. I could die happily buried inside Trader Joe's.  

Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have harvests or swollen gourds except for those trucked in. However, there are seasons we carry within. We flower and we fold. Each of us has all the facets, a rhythm or impulse to bend toward the light and then retreat inward. 

Another falling is the tossing away of election junk mail into the wastepaper basket. Half the country has been falling for the ill-tempered lunacies of Donald Trump. May he slough off the body politic a month from now in some massive descent. 

The Roman poet Virgil wrote, See Naples and Die. If he had lived in New Hampshire he'd have said, see maples, and die.

I’ve been to New England to watch the spectacle of ruddy sycamores and maple leaves dying in all their glory. From a distance they looked like a wildfire. It was operatic. Golden groves of trees majestic in their last gasp death-bed scene. Divas, all of them. Fall is a season of life and death.

If I were a tree I too would be in my foliage or beyond. Some of my favorite hair has fallen. My limbs are getting brittle. Even names carved long ago into my brain are fast fading. I am weathered and wind-bent in my bough. Exaltations of larks no longer nest in my branches.

Autumn is portentous of winter’s finality; the last act, 4th quarter. But it also carries the hope and expectation of one more go round. The curtain comes down, the curtain goes up again. Why not? Another opening, another show.

With luck we’ll soon have an incontinent sky to wet us. Umbrellas will open like black narcissus. I want to be caught in a downpour. Drench me. Let me be pelted and puddled. Parched earth will be heard slurping. I can feel it already in my arthritic bones.

The planet’s lease shall be renewed.

 

Earliest Memory

I can still hear those sirens and smell the smoke. I was between three and four years old watching a car ablaze from my third story window. I saw the red truck with a big hose and the flames. I’ll never forget it. Too bad it never happened.

For about eight decades I regarded this scene as my earliest memory. Then it occurred to me that I had a picture book about fire engines. Those images flew off the page and torched the parked car three stories below.

Better yet, I can mark that moment as when I felt the power of books sufficient to spark my imagination. A year or two later I learned how those squiggles on the page called words could ignite my inscape and make the world luminous.

Returning to that window I do remember a new apartment building going up across the street. There was a derrick, mounds of earth and bricks were stacked up.

The entire block was to be a series of five story apartments except for one house with chickens in the front yard. Over time we played marbles in the dirt where the chickens were partitioned off. I was introduced, without ceremony, to this tribe called children. It was an aural culture with unwritten rules passed from the ten-year-old elders to us little tots.

There was a rhythm to street games from stoop ball to hopscotch to double Dutch jump rope. We had our own benevolent leaders who knew a small something that allowed the flock to cohere, until one day they outgrew us, and the hierarchy shifted without a peep.

Written words would overthrow the oral, but language of the street still has echoes for me long after it vanished into chalk dust or flew away in the smoke, higher than a pop fly.

Life On Hold

What again? Does your menu never hold still?

 I’m glad my call is important to you but apparently some things are more important.

Every time I call, he's away from his desk. Couldn't he take his desk with him?

No, I don’t know his extension.

I’m sure you’re experiencing a high call volume. Have you considered hiring more staff? 

Please don't tell me your menu has changed while I'm waiting. Should I hit 7 instead of 4 in order to get 1?

I’ll go with jazz for now. By the time you pick up the phone it will have become classical

No, I can’t call back between midnight and three.

I already went to your website. That’s why I’m calling.

I’ve given you the last four numbers of my Social Security and now you want to know my favorite movie? I can only say my least favorite is Texas Chainsaw Massacre...the musical comedy version.

Now, you’re telling me your mailbox is full.

Wait, don’t hang up.

I’ve been waiting so long I’ve read the entire newspaper, the weather report in Asia, the police blotter and the obits. For a minute I thought I spotted my name.

Perhaps I was abandoned as a child and you've opened up the old wound.

The grandchildren have grown up. I’ve got the Neptune Society on the other line.

If you’ve changed your menu again, I’ll have the chef’s salad.

Now I’ve forgotten why I called.

I think it had something to do about paramedics coming over. I couldn’t manage to perform a Heimlich maneuver on myself.

Yes, I know my call will be answered in the order it was received. I am trying to get on your queue in case something happens the day after tomorrow.

 

Time and Time Again

OMG, it's almost two o'clock and I haven't had lunch yet.

In more ways than one we are off the clock. We have been out of time long before Salvatore Dali melted that watch in his 1931 painting. Climatologists have been warning our deaf ears of impending doom for decades. Time and tide are tired of waiting. 

The notion of clocks came as an imposition on the natural rhythm of human existence. Eating, sleeping, and working all yielded to the tyranny of the clock as if to an alarm. Being punctual became a virtue. Pre-literate societies had no such need to punctuate their lives. As kids we were heedless of when movies started as if it was life itself, we were barging in on. Yet I remember that big clock on the wall of all my classes in elementary school, an early lesson in conformity. 

When Big Ben strikes on the hour, all fourteen tons of it, you’d better check your timepiece and hurry up or else. The great London clock came at the height of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. It could be regarded as the symbol of uniformity and authoritarian rule. Everyone knew their place and when tea was served, one lump or two.

Football, basketball and soccer are all played against the clock as well as their opponent. Managing the clock has become the hallmark of a successful team while a baseball game defies it as the great board game moves counterclockwise into eternity.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, measured her life by the gongs of Big Ben. Harold Lloyd hung for his life on the big hand in one of the most enduring images of the silent film era as if to mock time itself. Orson Welles had his licks in a moment of levity during the zither filled Third Man movie when he ridiculed the Swiss for their neutrality and cuckoo clock as their sole contribution to Western Civilization. In fact, everything in that memorable speech was about as accurate as a broken clock.

But Mrs. Dalloway’s noon was altogether different from the other character’s twelve o’clock. Woolf 's use of time was a way of giving voice to the inner lives of her characters. In her masterpiece, time is subjective; for some an occasion for buying flowers or accepting a lunch invitation; for another a time for dying.

The clock gives us the illusion of quantifying our lives just as commodification monetizes it. It provides us with the idea of our existence being a chronicle. World War I shattered this sequential narrative. The myth of progress was laid to rest along with millions of dead bodies to fertilize the fields of Europe. A generation was lost, and survivors were also lost in the stupidity of it all, a life left in fragments and the dread of a world without a godhead to write the fable.

Perhaps time is not of the essence, at least, according to the clock or watch. Both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf took their Leopold Bloom and Clarissa Dalloway through a single day which recapitulated their entire life. History, both personal and otherwise, cannot be dismissed nor the consequences of our behavior ignored as it determines our future on this orb.

Long out of the workplace and back into the unpartitioned flow, the clock now seems an irrelevant construct except for meeting friends for lunch. I marvel at how hours fly, and days are indistinguishable. My wish is for moments marked by exclamation points.

From Munich to Michigan

I was born March 21, 1933, the same day, in Munich, Hitler made dissent a crime and cemented his dictatorship. Even gossiping or making fun of the Nazi regime was deemed unlawful. That summer over a hundred thousand citizens were arrested and sent to newly constructed concentration camps.

How did this happen? It happened because the three opposition parties could not form a coalition to defeat the dictator.

Today I read that the Muslims of Michigan will not give their vote to Kamala Harris. It is infuriating enough that Cornel West and Jill Stein would put their ego ahead of the public good. But for the Muslims to withhold their support for the Democratic ticket is itself a crime against humanity. 

In Hitler’s Germany the Social Democrats, Communists and Catholic Center Party together had an equal number of votes in their parliament but the Nazis prevailed because of their squabbling.

To see this same splintering unfold here and now, raises my blood pressure and my ire.

I share some of the outrage of the Palestinians but nothing can absolve them of their complicity in abetting the dissolution of democracy and the rise of American Fascism. Do they not realize their protest vote does not register except as a gift to Donald Trump. Will somebody inform them we do not have a parliamentary system here with proportional representation?

As a reward for their misguided act, are they blind to the consequences of their wasted vote in this most pivotal state; that Trump is a bedfellow of Bibi Netanyahu who would be unconstrained to unleash further lethal force against Palestinians? In addition, they are most likely to be deported.

Young pro-Palestinian sympathizers tend to live in an idealistic bubble. They think in absolutes. At some point they will understand it is much harder to live within the system than to throw stones at imperfections. I ask you to throw some water in your face and wake up before November 5^th. We are stuck with a two-party system. None of the above, is not acceptable. 

  

Perchance To Dream

At my age it’s safe to say I have slept for about thirty years. And that doesn’t include nodding off trying to understand Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Imagine what I’ve missed. Yet sleep is not a waste of time. I could live without the philosophers but not without sleep, perchance to dream.  

There used to be a commercial for Preparation H telling us that while we slept our hemorrhoids shrank. I wouldn’t know about that but I’m sure my engine gets charged, my entrails realigned, and my all-night laundry recycled. I may wake with bafflements unbaffled as yesterday’s dangling threads find morning clarity. More often, dreams are unremembered or unopened gifts, a light too bright to see. Those rapid eye movements probe my shuttered chambers, yielding no more than a glimpse into the fertile turmoil.

Thirty years is more time than John Keats lived or possibly Mozart was awake. One wonders what operas and odes visited their nocturnal hours. It was their genius to reassemble the shards.

For many of us easeful sleep gets more elusive as we age. Dozing off on the recliner with a book on my lap seems to have no connection with my head on a pillow in bed. It’s my inalienable right, isn’t it? No, it’s more like a gift bestowed randomly.

Mantras have never helped. My most recent one was Beaujolais. The last syllable had the promise of transport, but I probably would have done better drinking it.

Most nights I drift off with wings sprouting from my shoulders but then there are those occasions when yawns are nowhere near, and my waking brain is firing off its synapses. When the river is churning, all I can do is trust the raft will eventually find an unimpeded stream.

Handful of Dust

In a recurrent nightmarish daydream, I’m the last one standing. Aliens have arrived and I’m there to greet the spaceship hoping, at least, for someone to have lunch with. After the usual small talk about our respective planets and what went wrong with mine, I ask what took them so long. The pilot apologizes because they’ve been monitoring our decline and fall for many moons, alarmed at our recent planetary suicide, but he says they just didn’t make the lights.

My new best friend speaks perfect English. Good thing because I only took Trash as a second language. It had been a while since I’d spoken at all and found myself fluent, at first, only in gibberish till I regained use of my tongue.

He then turns to a pile of what we used to call technology inquiring how all the gadgetry works. I dread this moment and plead total ignorance. Fearful of raising his hackles I try to explain that we earthlings used a lot of things but most of us had no idea how anything worked. His hackles did indeed rise. I worried that some form of inter-galactic enhanced interrogation was coming in which I might find myself impaled on one of his hackles.

He seemed to accept my ignorance since, after all, we had convincingly demonstrated our collective stupidity having elected an infantile despot to lead our nation. The visitors regretted their delayed arrival and having to deal with such a poor specimen as me to enlighten them on our human progress. 

I could only assure them that there used to live among us some who could explain how the loom with its punch cards led to player pianos and eventually to programming the computer. I told him there were a few of us undaunted by hot wires or hard drives who could fiddle with links and algorithms and blue teeth and black holes. If one of those had survived, they could build it all over again from a handful of dust. However, I was not the guy.

All I had to offer was the paperclip, coat hanger and orange juice squeezer none of which he had ever seen before. We agreed to call it a start and besides it would take a lot more than things to get it right next time around.   

Imagined Woods

Looking through the sliding glass doors

I find myself 

across the street in a forest 

of old-growth oak and pine thick with green sleeves

surrounding apartment buildings,

having dodged bulldozers and aphids, 

as I have been spared, yet also mirrored

in sloughing eucalyptus bark 

and elbows of boughs bent 

toward a solar charge. I celebrate this lucky life 

with candles from the coral tree

and a canopy of tall fig trees swaying cheek to cheek 

while wondering how it is I have been granted

this Eden, this longevity of random turns. 

A controversy of crows is calling but not for me.

 

While Most Drink Coffee

To rev their engine and open their lids,

I have my own way of waking.

A ritual below consciousness

that caffeinates me.

Frozen berries blue, black and rasp

of a measureless number,

known only to my quick eyes,

half awake, dropped into a bowl followed by

just the optimal sprinkle of Bran Buds

and Catalina Crunch

(This is no laughing matter)

wet by a precise, random splash of almond milk.

Then comes the casual exactitude

of the spoonful, with a nod of approval

from my congenitally wise tongue,

sufficient to open my taste buds,

my hemispheres, my voltage

to set an equipoise to meet the day.  

An un-berried portion would be an insult

to my entire palate, would tilt my planet,

crumble my architecture, already teetering

and I might never know why.

This is the way it goes, unrehearsed, 

in the dailiness of a plan that is no plan,

a knowledge beyond knowing,

making my way in the juice and crunch

of existence with berries and grains 

in this enormous bowl.

Hills, Stairs and A Big Climb

My friend Judy R. is an ace photographer. What I merely glimpse she composes. Stairs at Disney Hall become an abstract of intersecting angles with increments of light and shade. What are stairs but a series of horizontals within a diagonal to reach the vertical? She is a poet without paper capturing creases in the landscape and on faces. Stairs are what humans do to hills and high rises.

Artists have to find their place, their perch. half in, half out of this world. As A.A. Milne put it…….Halfway up the stairs / Isn’t up / and Isn’t down / It isn’t in the nursery  / And it isn’t in town / All sorts of funny thoughts / Run round my head  / It isn’t really anywhere / It’s somewhere else instead.

We step, we climb like Jack and Jill or Bill and Hill to fetch our water. Sometimes we break our crowns but if the land is parched, there is a thirst for justice to be quenched.

Five hundred years ago Incas built a city on top of a hill in the Andes. This was far more than a hill of beans.  It takes 3,000 steps to reach the top. I’d hate to have made the descent and forgotten my car keys.  They might also have prevented invading pseudo-pious Conquistadors. However, by the time Spanish marauders arrived Machu Picchu was buried under dust and rubble. It wasn’t unearthed until 1911. 

High as it is, nothing compares to the figurative mountain we need to climb. Ever since Donald descended on his golden escalator into the netherworld, he has dragged the country through an abyss with the slime of his indecency and delusional apocalyptic fictions. 

The transcendence I look for in the arts has its corollary on the socio-political scene. There is a moral violence in the air and voters need to dispel that miasma with a gust of fresh air. Not to be above the fray but to elevate the fray to civil discourse. Whether we can lift ourselves from his degradation requires a buoyant spirit and new vision that taps into this country's highest potential, releasing the creative and innovative force of our diverse population. Out of the mud, a lotus.

A few years ago, the poet Ann Lauterbach wrote a book called On A Stair which she said could also be read as Honest Air. We need some of that honest air.

Mattering

I must have been no more than five years old because my legs didn’t reach the floor when I sat back in a large seat of the darkened Austin movie theater on a Saturday afternoon. Besides the double feature there was the March of Dimes collection box passed around, cartoons, a serial and RKO Pathe news. It was an immersive experience. In those days people entered at any time.

Now the place was pitch black. A large man groped his way along my aisle, his eyes still wide with the sun. He inched slowly, feeling for shoes anxious to find a seat with no legs in front of it. Stopping in front of mine he started to settle down on top of me.

What could I do to announce myself in this world, to avoid eradication? My defense to being crushed and erased was to make a joyful noise, to shake my Good & Plenty. A sound that I was good and there was plenty of me or at least enough to live another day.

It was like Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo yelling to the cars as he crossed a street in Manhattan, I’m walkin here, I’m walkin. It was my declaration of existence, I’m sitting here, I exist, I matter.

I've returned to this scene many times in my head but there is a missing person in the scenario I have never included before; my brother who, four years older, was my keeper. Many fleeting snapshots stay in the album of my memory in those early years, but I seem to have photo-shopped Arthur out of all of them.

In the solipsism of my childhood, he didn’t matter… but, of course, he did. Too late to make amends; he died 62 years ago yet that needs now to be at least stated. Arthur had a short and troubled life. I don’t think he ever knew he mattered. His death came on a mountain road with high alcohol content in his bloodstream.

One day as early teenagers we were left a couple of dollars to have dinner in a restaurant. Either my mother was in the hospital with a detached retina and my father was working or he was laid up with double pneumonia and she was working. I recall how uneasy my brother was as we sat at the local deli waiting to be served. He wasn’t sure anyone would see us and if they did would the waiter even take our order?

There were times along the way when mattering took the form of vanishing. One class in pharmacy college was taught by a Professor Aldstadt who tyrannized us with his Gestapo-like tactics. The subject was pharmaceutical chemistry. We had to memorize structural formulas of new products coming on the market. Typically, he would say, You, with the pimples on your face hiding behind Goldstein, get up to the blackboard and show us how stupid you are.  

My strategy was to disappear by wearing a beige shirt to class that I hoped would blend in with the seat. It worked but a far better way of mattering happened when a returning G.I. cornered the diminutive teacher, grabbed him by the collar and reminded him why we fought the war against fascism.

 

My friend likes to talk to people in restaurants....  waiters, busboys and parties at the next table. It's a way of breaking down barriers, of leveling. Here we are together in this absurdist tableau. Maybe the man clearing our table has a novel-in-progress under the seat of his car and the server is waiting for a call from a casting director. Everyone has a story to tell. We all matter.

Labor Day

While normal fifteen-year-old boys were discovering fifteen-year-old girls, I was on the frontline saving the world. It was 1948. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger albums played in my head and Paul Robeson’s bass baritone voice shivered me to the core. We had the best songs and I had Truth in my back pocket.

I was given a stack of leaflets promoting Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party. Among those papers was the argument for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act which was designed to break the unions. The bill had passed over Truman’s veto. It prohibited the closed shop, jurisdictional disputes and mass picketing which ultimately led to the severe decline in membership in the C.I.O. and A.F. L.      

I covered several five-story apartment buildings, slipping my election material under doors running from floor to floor, while eluding the superintendent. I was a foot soldier, and we lost the war.

At that time unions represented over one-third of American workers. Today, that figure is less than eleven percent. This, in spite of 10,000 Starbucks and 2,500 Amazon workers recently signed up which may signal a new awakening.

Like most holidays, Labor Day has lost much of its historical roots. It is celebrated as just another three-day weekend replete with mattress sales and backyard barbeques.

The struggle for a decent wage and healthy working conditions needs to be restored to the forefront of our national heritage. Both noble and ignoble acts ranging from Lincoln’s son who helped break the Pullman strike in 1894, to the sit-down strikes during the Depression, to the sanitation worker's strike in Memphis in 1968 in which M.L King gave his life. Those who labor give their lives for a certain dignity, for a recognition of their humanity.

On the other hand, the working class is not free of racism or misogyny. Sadly, there is a long history of denying Blacks membership in unions. Could it be while folksingers sang their praises during the Depression, some may have been Klansmen or part of lynch mobs? Today, right-wing populism consists largely of White workers, gullible and misdirected and incited by fear and loathing.

Our Capitalist system rewards greed which translates to cheap labor. To this end sowing bigotry and discord among the workers serves the bottom line. The great achievement of corporate America has been getting the exploited to vote for their exploiters.

Unionism is still largely a progressive force. But I have come to realize the trap of extolling the rank and file and painting them with such a broad brush. Absolutes belong to fifteen-year-olds.

 

 

 

An Eloquent Hush

Yes, it's true, I am a news junkie. In case of a nuclear attack or tsunami, I don't want to be among the last to know. I doubt if information overload is life-threatening, but it isn't covered by my HMO. From now until election night, I'm afraid my ears will have to endure a verbal assault from politicians, pundits, panels and pollsters ... all of which makes me yearn for poetry, its promised transport.

After the sound and fury dies, there is the eloquence of a hush, a signifying gesture, visual arts that speak volumes, the sign language my daughter orchestrates with her fingers in flight and the simple discourse between lover's eyes.

How many restaurants will I never return to because every menu item comes with noise? If the decibel level is too subdued, they insist upon playing music loud enough so we must lipread across the table. Candlelight dinners with conversation are no more.

When we watched a Marx Brothers movie, we saw Groucho overthrow a government with a raised eyebrow and flick of his cigar. After all the fast talk from Chico there was always a segment with Harpo breaking our hearts as if he was communing with the firmament.

One of the hidden aspects of a baseball game is the wordless communication going on between pitcher and catcher. If the camera zoomed in on the manager, we might catch him hitching up his trousers or pulling on his ear sending signals to his players with strategies. 

Antonio Gaudi's vision sings to us through his daring design and architecture. His aesthetic is a choir of mosaics, an astonishing vision that stills our tongues but stirs our wings.

In past centuries among women of a certain class, messages were conveyed in the way they positioned their fans. Carrying the fan in her right hand meant, follow me; in the left hand, we're being watched. Or I love you, her eyes behind the open fan. Of course, with air conditioning and texting, yet another mysterious enchantment is lost.

Van Gogh regarded himself as a musician of paint. We hear the anguish in his painted shoes and the ecstasy of his night sky. His iris still vibrates for me from the Amsterdam museum, thirty-five years ago.

In 1919 Nijinsky danced for the last time. He spun and twirled and fell crashing through a window into the snow. Deemed to be mad, he said he had danced the revolution and his own exile. 

On November 6th we will either be dancing in the streets along with most of Europe or gathering at the border in a massive emigration. No words necessary.

Two Vice Presidents

The office of Vice President has often been a place in which to disappear or become the answer to a trivia question. Who remembers Alvin Barkley (Truman's), Dan Quayle (George HW Bush's) or John Nance Garner (FDR's)?  

And then there is Kamala Harris who has emerged as a charismatic presence after three years in relative obscurity. Rising to such prominence to lead the Democratic Party in a matter of a few weeks is an American phenomenon. It is a testimony to both the power of social media along with her robust grasp of the moment, met with a fierce intelligence, buoyant and compassionate nature, grace and authenticity, rarely seen on the political spectrum.

Enter, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson's much-maligned V.P. He was not treated fairly during his term (1964-1968) nor is he enjoying a notable afterlife. I feel for the guy and want to apologize for not giving him my vote 56 years ago.

He was a pharmacist (of all things) who completed the two-year course in six months. Like many druggists of his day, he wanted more. I know the feeling. Our sameness ends there.

Humphrey was unknown nationally when he addressed the 1948 Democratic convention and stirred the conscience of the delegates plus 60 million radio listeners. His words caused Mississippi and Alabama to storm out of the hall. 

To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years too late! To those who say, this civil rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!

The pro-civil-rights plank was narrowly adopted and as a result the South splintered off from the party and formed the Dixiecrats which projected Truman’s defeat except that good sense and an aroused Black vote prevailed, returning him to office.

This champion for civil rights also spoke out for disarmament and was the first to propose Medicare in 1949 and the Peace Corps. He was elected senator three times before and twice after his term as vice-president.

As vice president, Humphrey played a key role in securing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He persuaded and cajoled the moderate Republicans, under Everett Dirksen, to gain their vote. In those days the Democrats needed 67 votes, not 60, to break a filibuster and they got it. The final bill received more Republican votes than Democratic. It is a matter of dispute how much credit goes to LBJ or his V.P.

In 1964 Humphrey spoke out at a cabinet meeting against the Vietnam War. His opposition to the bombing put him in LBJ’s doghouse for the next four years. He was shut out of cabinet meetings, never asked to Camp David and never flew on Air Force One… until invited, years later, by Jimmy Carter. Every public statement had to be cleared by Johnson.

By 1968 he became closely (and wrongly) identified with the president’s war policy which led to the protests in Chicago. The anti-war movement disowned him, and the election went to Nixon by less than half a percent in popular vote. It was said that Johnson actually wanted Humphrey defeated.

After a year in academia, he was returned to the Senate by a twenty-point margin. However, he is largely remembered as a muffled (perhaps muzzled) voice of Liberalism; a fiery Liberal who flamed out, another tragic political figure of the 20th century whose principles got crushed in the machinery of the system.

America has a chance now to atone for its sin.  

May Kamala Harris' fate be otherwise. She has been embraced by the sitting President, the high command of the Democratic Party and indeed the swell of public opinion. She has exceeded all expectations, and her ascendance may even change the way we look at the office of Vice President forevermore.

Like Humphrey before her, Harris' candidacy comes at an inflection point in American history. Thousands of lives could have been saved had Nixon been defeated in 1968.  Another disgraced ex-president must be denied a far worse imperial presidency in 2025. 

Convention Takeaways

To cleave or not to cleave, that is the question. Answer yes and you can’t go wrong.

The MAGAnites preach cleaving as in dividing, with their threats and insults. Their rhetoric is punitive regarding dissent, heedless to the water we drink and air we breathe, restrictive to what we read, and reckless by inciting acts of violence.  

The Democrats have emerged from their convention with a message that has the feel of a movement. The forward vision is of a nation cleaving as in bonding. Their tent, already inclusive, is now even broader as they are reaching out to centrist independents and former Republicans repulsed by Donald Trump.

Trump’s bluster smells stale. His complaints are being heard as whining. His indecency is contrasted with Walz’s reference to neighborliness and the lessons of a winning football team. Where Trump has delusions of a country in the throes of an apocalypse, Democrats hear America singing.

As former Republican speechwriter David Frum put it, this election pits an arsonist who sees America burning against the firefighters.

Listening to politicians is generally hard on my ears. Where others get aroused, my ears go numb. Their words feel limp from exhaustion after a few minutes. Oratory reaches for poetry but settles for heightened rhetoric. However, Pete Buttigieg stood out for me. Without slogans or whipping the delegates into a frenzy he seemed to transcend the moment.

Tim Walz had a similar grasp with his language attuned to the heartland. It wasn’t the Gettysburg Address, but his message and delivery had the feel of alignment with the entire hall and beyond. Rather than political bloviating he spoke plain talk and common sense. 

Who knows why people vote as they do? As an aggregate they seem more persuaded by subliminal factors than by issues. A herd instinct stampedes logic. May it be that the vitality of the newly constituted Democrats be a gentle wave riding us to prevail in November. 

 

Evolving

All those As and B+'s did me in.

Rules like bricks upon rules. 

Six plus eight would always be fourteen,
Elegant in its way and rigid as the square of the hypotenuse,  
or the rote of presidents in order.
Knowing them all was plenty of nothing.

I mouthed the words by the dawn's early light, 

white with foam, my eyes saw the glory of the coming.

Like Vasco da Gama I explored 

and inched free by subtraction.

but the geography in my head 

was missing a hemisphere 

for which there is no syllogism or structural formula.

Slowly I heard sentences sprout, 

listened to orchid's tongues,  

the cello in a phrase, clash of cymbals in the oil slick.

I set sail inside the watermelon 

and parted the red sea.

Rafting down the river of tears, 

the smile of a gibbous moon,   

I own my blurts, first words, best words. 

I am bridging the hemispheres merging and emerging 

fluent in the lost language of reverence, 

of love aligned sufficient to surpass myself.

How sonnets have overthrown the eight + six 

yet every word from the heart is lyric 

and rhymes with itself. 

Through increments of teal this verdant life evolving,

the leaf, when fully evolved, is withered and gone.

Roots

Today is the third anniversary of my late wife Peggy's death. It must not go unnoted. However, I'll reserve my celebration of her life for her birthday. With the help of a genealogy book written by her great uncle in the 1880s she was able to trace her ancestry to the mid 1600's when her many times great grandfather landed in Narraganset County in what is now Rhode Island. 

I have no such records which only inflames my imagination as to my progenitors. 

45,000 years ago, give or take a week, Omar Levine left Africa walking upright, shed some fur, and made his way to the Eastern Mediterranean. He knew good real estate when he came to the Fertile Crescent. 10,000 years later Olof Levine was still looking for a good night’s sleep free of growls and snarls. Contrary to family lore his first words were likely, Your cave or mine? or maybe, How’d you light that fire, again? We’ve always been slow learners.

All this comes from the scrapings inside my cheek which my daughters arranged to be sent to Family Tree DNA. They traced my double-helix back from whence we came. The footprint of our beginnings is mapped by my haplogroup. It doesn’t reveal much of anything I didn’t know before but after staring at the genome for a while it begins to speak.

Given my propensity for staying out of fights I overheard my forefathers saying how they survived skirmishes as the ones hiding under rocks or high up in trees. They knew enough not to hang a left to Spain 20,000 years later though if they’d been there during the Inquisition I’d have been raised as a Roman Catholic altar boy. Faced with the multiple choice: conversion or expulsion or…boiling oil, I expect my forefathers would have said, What else have you got? I’ll be anything you want… except chopped liver.

As it is, they headed north by northeast. The Levites were the scribes and they scribbled like scriveners, writing blogs in Yiddish whether in Lithuania or Ukraine. One day during a particularly nasty pogrom, my father’s father huddled in the root cellar while the Cossacks were busy doing the only thing they were good at, pillaging and looting. He escaped on the shoots of potato wings and their ferment.

Without enough points for an upgrade, he took the passage in steerage. Grandfather Lior slept in the hold with potatoes; they became his skin and his misshapen dreams. Did he scramble above deck to wave at the famous torch lifting its lamp, seeing himself as the wretched refuse…, tempest-tost? It’s a good bet he did. By a twist of fate, he also ended up in Rhode Island; Providence yet. A taste for drink combined with gout had its way with him. He named his first two sons Shmuel; Sammy meet Sammy.

Had we arrived in Los Angeles earlier we would have been the ones racing down Wilshire Blvd toward the ocean hoping the mastodon got caught at La Brea in the tar pits. We knew enough not to do combat with saber-tooth tigers or any other creatures in need of orthodontic work. The DNA inside my cheek has gotten me and my daughters this far. Embedded in there is a winning combination of cowardice and luck and a fair share of Peggy's irrepressible pluck and spunk. 

A Samuel Beckett Docudrama

Four of us went to see Dance First, the unlikely name for a biopic of melancholic Samuel Beckett. I recommend it with some reservations.

One has to know a bit about Beckett’s body of work to be inquisitive about how he came to be one of the pre-eminent writers of the 20^th century. His plays are immediately recognizable and unforgettable, like them or not. Waiting for Godot speaks to the predicament of existence without any intervention by a supreme being. Somehow, he managed to evoke both futility and hope. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

The task of a filmmaker is to capture a writer’s genius; an aspiration with only a slim chance of success. Yet we can be generous with the honorable failure.  One’s inner life doesn’t yield easily to a visual medium. And this movie shows just how unattainable that can be.

The first scene is so inventive and surreal as to have delighted Beckett himself. Gabriel Byrne embodies his disdain for the Nobel Prize by climbing the wall of the Stockholm auditorium into another dimension where he meets his alter ego.

Unfortunately, this level of artistry is not sustained for many of the scenes to follow. But the narrative did have enough Beckett-like vignettes to keep my attention on alert.

One such was the domestic scenes with James Joyce in which the wisdom from the master was always undercut but his wife Nora and her announcement of dumplings.                                                     

Upon reflection, the first three women we are introduced to are unloving, dominating (his mother), a house frau with no appreciation of her genius husband (Joyce) and his unconvincingly bipolar daughter; all women with no agency.

One takeaway I have come to accept is how my immediate response may not be in accord with my more severe assessment the day after. This is where the title Dance First applies. Beckett’s advice to a student was his way of asserting the primacy of sensation over the filters of the intellect. While it may seem as if his theater pieces are cerebral, he might see them as issuing from a more visceral place and the dialogue, conversational.

I note how my critical faculty shouts down the immediacy of my enjoyment. As a prescription to myself I would suggest staying with the dance of his eccentricities, iconoclasm, his dark humor and vision of life’s absurdities.  Go see the damn movie and pay no attention to the flaws inherent in such a doomed enterprise.