About Dry Grasses

Six of us went to see the latest film by the preeminent Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The movie is called About Dry Grasses. The grass doesn’t show itself till about the three-hour mark in this three-hour seventeen-minute narrative. Until then snow covers the screen and also swallows some of the subtitles. But I am not complaining.

All six of us were enthralled by the stark landscape against which the main character was shown to be sweet, artistic, mean-spirited and duplicitous, by turns. Just when you might feel for him, he would betray your trust and then you might get a glimpse of another dimension in his character.

He is a modern-day Ulysses, pragmatic, amoral yet achieving a certain humanity as he struggles for transcendence. He perseveres like my orchid which has died three times and is now fighting for another rebirth.

Like Ulysses, he is a man of many turnings. I came away thinking he is a self-deprecating version of the director / writer himself. At several points we see the still photography of the protagonist which is clearly the artwork of Ceylan. He is telling us not to demand purity. The multitudes within are struggling to survive. As Tarzan said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there.

My orchid has a tongue. It speaks fluent orchid. I see it wagging, reminding me about her three weekly ice cubes to quench the parched roots. The dry grass speaks to us of Nature’s cycles. Petals drop or get buried under permafrost but thaw and regenerate like the human spirit. At one point we too might seem desiccated with despair, then buds appear.

Over enchiladas, guacamole and strip steak we six agreed with ourselves, far from the Anatolian winter. Conversation flowed from the spring we contain wetting our meadow of dry grass.

Norman Conquest

In the year 2066, a mere 42 years from now while most of us are enjoying our next incarnation as butterfly, butter lettuce or butter pecan ice cream, it will be the 1000^th anniversary of the Norman Conquest. I intend to celebrate the occasion regardless of what shape I’m in. As invasions go, this one was momentous and not altogether destructive. I’m particularly pleased about that since they did it in my name. 

150 years before that, the French were ruled by Charles the Simple, who evidently earned his title. He accepted a horde of Vikings to occupy and protect a section of northern France which came to be known as Normandy (Norse Men). Thus was Norman born. I just took a bow.

It was on an October Thursday. William, not yet the Conqueror set sail from northern France with a gaggle of wine-soaked men to defeat the more pixelated forces of Harold at the Battle of Hastings. This is where Michael Kitchen presides as Inspector Foyle. He might have sniffed out the plot and defended the sacred shores but, like most European wars, this was simply a family squabble, not to be denied.

Normandy Bill, with some familial ties, was promised the crown by Ed the Confessor of England, who inconveniently died and Harold, his brother-in-law would have nothing of it. His throne was also being challenged from the north by the ruler of Norway. These were the days when Europe’s monarchs were at each other’s throats, unlike today when everyone loves everyone else, except for you-know-who.    

It might also have been a food-fight in which French toast got the better of English muffins and the result was eggs Benedict. The Normans had made better dishes to set before the king and so they did. Thousands came over to occupy British soil. They not only brought their latest recipes for technology in the form of weaponry; they also brought new notions of society, government and their mellifluous tongues. Mingling took place with the romance language of the Normans marrying the more guttural Anglo-Saxon speech of the Brits. The result was a most profound effect in the evolution of language, with the eventual meshing of Latinate and Germanic we now call English and speak, for better or worse. 

At first only the court, administration and elite spoke French while peasants stayed with their old Saxon words. Over time the one trickled down and the other met it and merged. The word, government, itself, traveled the channel in the period known as Middle English.

After a three-hundred-year orgy the new vocabulary became the common tongue. The old Brit words tend to be truncated and hard-edged while the French were often polysyllabic and lyrical. Those four-legged creatures in the pasture, sheep and cow, became French on the plate, mouton and chateaubriand or filet mignon. It is estimated that 10,000 French words have been folded into the English language. In that sense we Anglo-Americans are multilingual and all because of some Normans who came and never left.

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Bequeathed

I never knew my grandfathers and I presume they didn’t know me. I didn’t know me either.  However, over time I’ve gotten to make my acquaintance. It may have helped if I had the benefit of spending some time with my father’s father.  

Therefore, I have had to invent him and imagine how my dad carried himself with such an aura of equanimity, unruffled temperament and full presence after a childhood of near destitution. He earned money selling newspapers on street corners and was a runner, dashing from the single phone in the candy store to summon a tenant in a four-story walk-up. He made Oliver Twist seem real and never even asked for more.  

I don’t think he ever read a book. Dyslexic perhaps. I say this because we had no books in the house. Newspapers and magazines were stacked up, scrupulously unread by him. Yet he managed to get licensed after two years at Columbia College of Pharmacy, tutored all the way by my mother.

In the 1920s, drugstores thrived largely due to Prohibition. Four ounces of ethyl alcohol was dispensed for medical purposes, of course. I was born when breadlines were the headlines but there was no dust in my bowl of Wheaties.

My father emanated an equipoise. It was as if any piece of menacing news was balanced on his inner torsion scale with slivers of goodness. If I found myself overmatched by the mean streets, he pacified my world.

My grandfather, Louis, must have fled the pogrom singing folk songs or, at least, humming them as he hid under a pile of potatoes. As he made his way onto steerage, did he remember fiddling on the roof and imagining himself a rich man? When the ship pulled into New York harbor maybe he saw pages of Torah in the sky while others saw seagulls.  

Louis passed my father along to be raised by his sister-in-law after my grandmother died. My father was three years-old but he had the DNA to feel comfortable in his skin. He later played the mandolin in a small band, a resource of music and the sun brought from the shtetl.

My daughter Lauren just suggested to me that I may have this all wrong. It could have been my grandmother Annie whose extraordinary genes of centeredness and nurturing survived another day in my father. 

Routines

Ain't misbehaving this morning. I rubbed the anti-inflammatory Diclofenac gel into my bad knee, cycled for fifteen minutes on the stationary bike and then did floor exercises to build up the musculature below and above the arthritic knee. Yes, I’m advertising myself as a model nonagenarian.  But don’t get the wrong idea.

This is rare. I am usually loath to disturb my routine of creative lassitude. I think about going on the bike but I’m told that doesn’t count. And the thought of enduring exercise with short term pain and no immediate benefit never had much allure.

The key word is routine. I can’t think of any ritualized behavior I have adapted since I started brushing my teeth. The well-ordered life is a transient state. Bring me a modicum of disarray. Something unexpected is likely to emerge. I might even return to my bike.

Habit is the thief of meaning, so said some sage. The sameness of daily activities in the same sequence robs one of creative vitality. First this and then that feels prescribed to me. I want the next act to grow organically out of the small chaos called life.   

I gladly make room for digressions. On my way to the kitchen I spotted a pair of scissors which reminded me of cut flowers and how they sprung to life listening to the music of Dave Brubeck and his signature song, Take Five, written by Paul Desmond.

Constancy, it seems to me, is an illusion and tradition the illusion of permanence. To be alive is to be in the act of. And that includes ample time for in-dwelling. As Wendell Berry reminds us it is when the stream is impeded that the real work begins. It is in this debris of life we live and we make something of it.  

I am aware that some of my favorite people cherish their rituals. I respect their discipline and honor the meaning it has for them. I almost envy them. Yet at the same time I know it is not my path up the mountain. 

Am I going through life winging it? I like the idea of having wings but I don't think so. I sense an inner order with its own clock, values, resistance, creative bursts and baggage along with my heart's chamber music. And all of it, I would like to think, is ever evolving,

Let it be known I left this page after the fourth paragraph and pedaled from Patagonia to Prudhoe Bay on my stationary bike. It only took me 15 minutes.

How Tru, How Tru

 Too bad Harry isn’t around to speak to Donald. One was a …man, the other an…mp. A Tru-MAN, the other a Tru-(I)MP.

Yes, I do love words. To stretch, pulverize and then dissect them to see what may be hiding inside. So here is the Imp writ-large, a demon or goblin noted for wild and uncontrollable behavior. He doesn’t qualify to be an ump. That would entail fairness and mediation between factions but he is already a faction, the guy who has moved the goalposts.

Both the 33rd and 45^th president assumed the office at momentous times. The former presided over the beginning of post-war America. By any measure it was a new epoch. Our 45^th POTUS seems to be ending that seventy-year period of America as a beacon, a defender of Europe through alliances and a promoter of free-trade agreements.

To the admiration of their constituencies, both men were elected because they said it as it is. Harry spoke in short, clipped phrases. He was a citizen of the heartland, a plain-spoken man without rhetorical flourishes. The buck stopped with him. When his time was up in the oval office he simply got on a train at Union Station and rode, by himself, back home to Missouri. What you saw was what you got. Unlike the Imp.

Donald ventriloquized disgruntled Americans, particularly from the Rust Belt, orated in conversational style with locker-room vulgarities, schoolyard slander and a vocabulary of a twelve-year old. He stoked fear and long-simmering hatreds while all the time gloating as a celebrity. Truman lived with his famously insufferable mother-in-law in a small town. Trump lived on top of his tower in Big Town.

HST was a quick learner. He had to be after being sent into the next room by FDR which rendered him out of the loop regarding the Manhattan A-bomb Project and all matters pertaining to meetings with heads-of-state at Yalta and other summits. His load was the heaviest of any president. Twenty-five days after taking office Germany surrendered ending the war in Europe. Two months after that he met at Potsdam with Atlee and Stalin and weeks later made the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Pacific.

I cannot imagine our Imp presiding over the carnage and restoration of order in the world, with millions of refugees and displaced persons seeking asylum, returning G.Is looking to the government for educational opportunities along with labor unrest, segregated armed forces and the transition to a peacetime economy.

When I was fifteen the 1948 election campaign was underway. I was a staunch supporter of Henry Wallace, the Progressive party candidate. Unlike other kids doing normal things like stealing candy from Woolworths or sniffing airplane glue I was scurrying from floor to floor in every apartment building for blocks at-a-time distributing political material attacking both Truman and Dewey. Forgive me, I was living in an idealized world built on peace and justice. We had Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger to sing ourselves to an imagined place. Truman, of course, prevailed beating Dewey and also trouncing all that truth I had slipped under doors which went unheeded.

Looking back I have a greater admiration for Truman. He had to emerge from Roosevelt’s long shadow and he did, steering the nation through a troubling period. There are several areas where he fell short but compared to our new president he shines with a bright and true light.

One TRU stood for truth and trust and the other for trumpery and truancy, truculent...and the waste of a trumpet.

Joy in the Shadows

How to walk the valley of shadows,

air thick with maladies

and still feel the joy.

I’m far too old to die young

but too young at heart

to ignore the getting up morning,

sunrise on schedule, marmalade sky.

sun in the cantaloupe, a slurp of juice,

the miracle of unburnt toast.

Music of the sphere drowns the dirge.

Glenn Gould on Alexa, hands flying.

Blooms are actual, doom merely an attitude.

Petals over nettles in the bowl.

Seeds triumph over weeds.

What falls feeds the soil. Seeds will sprout.

The weeds of words

limp from the lies they carried,

limp from Valentine's Day verses.

Yet we need to shout our love for this life,

for this breath, this irrational exuberance

particularly now against the miasma

as if our furniture were not just furniture

but the bent wood of artisans

and fabric, woven with devotion.

The random scatter of papers,

remotes and books on the coffee table

is a still-life of exotic flowers to Dutch masters.

The messiness of a lived life, the art of it all.

 

 

 

 

Blank

Peggy had a thing for small notebooks. She always had one or two in her purse; tiny pages for big thoughts. When she died about 2 ½ years ago I found over a dozen of them in drawers and pockets. Most had phrases she had read, observations or fragments of overheard conversations but they filled only a few pages. The rest of the pads were empty.

I wonder about those blanks. They too were a presence; a white space for contemplation. The interval that made the music. The 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence John Cage dared to present to make the audience create its own music.

A writer writes as a way of not speaking. (Marguerite Duras). There is a pregnant hush out of which an inner voice is sometimes made audible and shared. The extroversion of the spoken word is born and borne from a well of introversion. Peggy’s poems were the small exudate or nectar which the vast silence within her flower yielded.

In a comedy routine, when confronted in a hold-up with the demand, Your money or your life, Jack Benny famously answered, I’m thinking, I’m thinking, after 17 seconds of silence. That silence got one of the longest laughs ever noted in radio history. Humor aside, he was confronting an existential moment.

Nature abhors a vacuum and noise abhors silence. Noise is on the menu at every restaurant. If it's not chatter, it's loud music to show it is a happening place. 

Our heads are filled with the cacophony of our times and at high decibels as if to disallow conversation or, God forbid, introspection. Nobody can listen in to the imagination, the quiet night of the soul from where subversive ideas might spring.

War is failed diplomacy. The sentences that filled the sheet of paper were insufficient so barbed words became shrapnel and bodies blown to smithereens. War is hard noise until it raises a white flag surrendering to kinship.                                                                                              

The blank slate is how we come into this world. We scribble our improvised lives and gradually learn the margins, then risk overthrowing them. The white space gets ignored yet it is always there, like sky, a white canvas, an inscape where we meet ourselves.                                                                                                                                                    

Weather and Climate

The difference between weather and climate is that nobody is a weather-denier. Weather has become poetic. Who can resist the plume of moisture stretching from Hawaii as a pineapple express becomes an atmospheric river? Suddenly I am sailing downstream with Huck Finn and Jim or on the high seas with Ishmael and Queegueg and no Ahab in sight.

Weather is in our face. Flood and mud. Water table rising. Power lines down. The havoc among trees. Cars half under. Weather is a grounded poem.

Weather is what we almost never have here in this collection of outskirts called Los Angeles. It is so ho-hum. 72 and sunny, no relief in sight………until now, all of a sudden we have returned to the elements. What next, seasons? A time to sow, a time to reap. Could be an alignment with the grand cycle.

L.A. County is so vast parts get pummeled while other areas remain parched. We are 800 sq. miles larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Is that possible? So says Google. Flowers with their throats open for a drizzle on one end while cascading debris causes evacuations on the other.  

Weather is the offspring of climate. Abuse the air and the forecast gets super-charged. It used to be, It's raining, it's pouring / the old man is snoring. If he slept for centuries, he is now awake. We have messed with Father Time and Mother Nature and we’ve gotten hundred-year storms and droughts every few years.

Glaciers calving, sea-levels rising, islands sinking, crops failing, millions migrating. Have a nice day. We now know why there ain’t no sun up in that sky / Stormy Weather.

There was a time when plant-life overran the planet. They inhaled all that carbon dioxide, stored it and exhaled oxygen. As flora decayed it became coal and oil. Temperatures sank in what is now known as the Ice Age. 

We are now reversing Earth’s respiration and choking on CO2. Bring back the forest, the greenery and halt the mining and drilling. For a favorable weather report scrub the sky and let sun and wind power us to ever after.

 

   

Finding My Balance

I’m tilting this way and that. It happens. Life has narrowed so I get to feel the walls allowing my fingers to touch the margins. What margins? I swing from silly to serious, still evolving in soft clay. The mudpuddle of words. The blurt of my heart. From the contrarian No and Nor in my name to the OM. The long stare, the blank ahead and faded album I clutch. What if I fall? Let it be like petals of the orchid which regenerate. What if I lift? Carried away by a poem in my folder marked Poem by Others. Extend my reach? The whole ball of wax. It’s a new ball game. I don’t care if I never come back. Only for an hour or two like one of those paddles with a red ball attached. Now there is Donald, the enormous dartboard in my head I cannot stop targeting. Yes, you can. No, I can’t. He has helped me define whom I hope I have never been. Thank you for that Donald, now please leave. I need a deep draft of good air. There is wind in the word window visible now in the sway of trees. In my next incarnation I want to know the names of trees. Not for mastery; only as a salutation. Early on they were called 2^nd base or the goal line. Now I can commune with the folds of eucalyptus bark or the reptilian roots of old-growth ficus slithering. In summer months friend Dean and I get carried away in conversation under the umbrella of an ash tree with its winged yellow leaves. The hardwood is used to make baseball bats and guitars. I find a balance between these two.