List / Lust

The verbs, to Lust and to List, have common roots. An intense desire morphed into an inclination to one side as in a boat listing and finally to a shopping list or as one might have said in the 19^th century, a Chopin Liszt. 

All of which leads to one’s preferences as in a year-end summation of the most notable. Count me out. This will be a list of why I don’t make lists.

Since my memory is both too short and too long, I stay away from such conventions. Too short to remember what happened 2-3 weeks ago and too long so that 70 years ago seems like yesterday.

I could list my favorite vegetables: asparagus, eggplant and beets but then again, I might also say artichoke, squash and yams. And what about spinach, corn and cauliflower, but really who cares? Not me.

Lists change because we are alive, and the world doesn’t hold still for a minute. If I made a list of my favorite books or movies today, I could be sure to have left out a few for tomorrow’s list.

The worst thing about lists is the verticality, the hierarchy which relegates one work of art above or below another. It speaks to our competitive nature which demands winners and losers. I'm thinking about all those acceptance speeches we'll never hear, of deathless prose, crumpled up in the purses and tuxedos of also-rans. 

Peggy and I went to Europe eleven times. When someone asks what my favorite trip was, I say they were all tied for first place. Nor do I rank my friends. Everyone has something different to make them outstanding and perhaps each taps into a slightly different version of myself.

Must we really choose between Ella and Billie? Mozart and Beethoven? Kieslowski and Bergman? Streep and ? Make room for all of them.  

Lastly on my list of no-lists is that it is an indulgence to fix our gaze backward. If we are to live in the now, it calls for lusting after the bliss of unknowing, that life still to be lived.

 

Homecoming

119 million people are traveling this holiday season. Since my family never celebrated either Chanukah or Christmas, my recollections are few except for all those vivid memories that never quite happened.

What did happen was the dread I felt in 5th grade when we were assigned to draw a holiday scene. A one-horse open sleigh was not in my skill set. Even a picture of hanging stockings was beyond me. If I'd known about abstract expressionism I might have gotten a gold star. As it was, with a nickel and quarter I traced a thirty-cent snowman and called it a day. (It's O.K. not to be good at everything).

Another almost true experience happened at around age twelve. For one day I worked in a Christmas tree lot in Forest Hills, which had neither forest nor hills. I didn’t return when my nose fell off into a cup of hot cider. 

Then there was the time when I sped down an incline in my flexible flyer. The bottom of the slope was the Grand Central Parkway. Even with my three sweaters to protect me I was never heard from again. It was a quick demise as I recall. For the next eighty-one years I've been enjoying my afterlife.

One year, out of pity, I was given a Monopoly set, the board game which rewarded winners with hotels on Boardwalk. I never got past Marvin Gardens. It was my fate to remain mostly on Baltic and Mediterranean. Life follows art.

Homecoming has always been a popular theme of holiday movies. Prodigal grown-up children return home to siblings or old flames or to reconcile with their crypto-fascist father who beat them for sport...or worse. But it's Ho, Ho, Ho time and all is forgiven over toasted marshmallows, gift-wrapped scarves and a Rockwellian dinner. 

The home, the haunt. That word, haunt, originally meant to visit or appear frequently or as the noun... an old haunt. Nothing haunts us like memory. So, in another version, we return hoping to recover shards of ourselves, which is to say, to recover our youth as it might have been.

In Greek mythology Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War and got a well-deserved short, sharp shock in his kishkes by his wife, Clytemnestra. Ulysses took his time slaying dragons within and the fury of the Gods. When he finally showed up after ten years, he embodied modern man, conniving, pragmatic and ferocious, while Penelope raveled and unraveled the woven tale. 

My brother was never at home in this world. He returned after three years in the army and remembered why he had left. Within a month he was gone again in the grip of his haunts. He died in his thirty-third year, driving in an alcoholic haze. Maybe he heard the mermaids singing.

My life is visited by returning haunts, not spooks but good spirits hovering. Janice is here tending to me lovingly. Lauren and Shari are many miles away, yet I feel them close to me in this room. We are singing off-key in our separate versions of what was, exchanging the gift of ourselves and our amazing journeys.

You can't go home again but we keep rowing toward Eden anyway.

Everyone Loves A Good Story

Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land / Hard Working man and brave / He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor" / So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.

Poor working people, they followed him around / Sung and shouted gay;/ Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air/ And they lay Jesus Christ in his grave.  Woody Guthrie

Take a tale of subversion with a universal chord and flip it to a hierarchical system in an edifice of opulence and awe and the next thing you know....

I’ve got an idea, said Pope Julius circa 350 A.D., let’s turn this pagan Saturnalia and solstice festival into Jesus’ birthday. I think it has legs. It will quell the unrest and absorb their old ways. The peasants want their holiday, and we’ll declare it a holy-day. It’s a win-win. We can keep the gift-giving, candles and merry-making and sanctify the whole thing. God knows.

Fifteen hundred years later Charles Dickens provided a more secular twist with merry and jolly and Ho, Ho, Ho. Most of all, he went back to the ancient roots of the dying of the light as in Scrooge and the notion of renewal and good will, which aligns the human experience with the winter solstice.

What’s lost in all this myth-making is that it only makes sense in the Northern Hemisphere. For the other half of our planet the days are longer and brighter. Hold those candles till June 21^st.

Along the way we have Handel’s Messiah, Hallmark cards, Hark the Herald Angels Sing and other hymns, harvested and hacked spruce and Douglas fir (about 35 million in this country, alone), Irving Berlin, funky ornaments, record sales and lots of hallelujahs.

Who’s complaining? Not I. It also comes with an occasional cease fire. Warriors turn into normal human beings for a day or two and then return to their bellicose state.

The darkening days and then a lengthening suggest a sort of backdoor monotheism as a shared human experience. Could it be that one god is in cahoots with the other gods?

Bottom line: We bring in the light to hasten the turning toward the sun and metaphorically toward human possibility. If Jesus is born new, so too, can we be. And you too, Tiny Tim.

I-Thou

 That word, Thou, traveled a long way in my head from another four-letter word with three of the same letters, namely Thug. But enough about his nothingness.

Martin Buber’s 1923 book, I and Thou, sums up what has vanished during these times that try men's souls. The I / Thou relationship elaborated by Buber describes a meeting of intimacy of subject with subject. That word, Thou, takes on a sacred meaning not necessarily in a theological sense, at least in my mind, but in reference to what is in the process of fully tending to the other, the soulfulness of human beings. The Other could be someone close or even a brief encounter with a stranger. It could even be a work of art, a tree or the still-life of a breakfast table … which we relate to in the full presence of our being.

When two people are met there is a third entity born, they have a thing. An alignment, a tacit knowing between them beyond words, a human bond however transient or enduring it may be. When it's there you know it and when it is violated you know that too as when a thug lives on flattery and fealty. When he distances, with insults and ridicule, any who do not bend to his will. 

Let it begin with me, as the song goes. This is what I see as a consciousness with which to go forward. To a certain extent we really are the world, not as it is but as we can repair and remake it. 

If we lived in Gaza or Kiev, daily life would insinuate itself as a matter of survival. By virtue of the cosmic crapshoot which landed us a continent away with an ocean between,

we have only to deal with this assault on decency and dissent. No small thing but not quite existential. 

Life gives us moments, as the poet says, and from these moments we make a life. Many such moments are lost to us in the shadow of perceived walls. More I-Thou ways of being can be perforations of light to get us through the next four years. 

 

1688

If I said to you, 1688, would you immediately think of:

1- The number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour by a new McDonald's in Beijing?
2- The number of lies a certain candidate has told in his political career.

3- The price of Smirnoff's Vodka at Costco marked down from $20?

Let's not always see the same hands. For all I know, they're all true but I'm thinking of the year when the Dutch invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.

One of the first defectors from James to Willliam was John Churchill, great grandfather of Winston. The Churchills have always had a nose for the next best thing.

The Brits don't like to talk about it; in fact, they spin the whole takeover as The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by some but not all. Europe has always been noted for disgruntled monarchs eager to have the multitudes give their lives to settle family squabbles

William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain. No, he did not bring orange juice. He invigorated the parliamentary system, initiated new finances (stock market), made innovations in horticulture, science, the arts and philosophy. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy,

now hanging by a thread.

A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of corporate interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America. This was worse than the trade which brough Babe Ruth from Boston to the Yankees.

Among the club of West European imperialists (Spain, Portugal, France and England), Holland did the least nibbling at the Americas. Their time came and went yet it was not without a trace.

There are currently five million Americans at least partially descended from the Netherlands. They bequeathed to us some heavy hitters including five presidents, Van Buren, the two Roosevelts and the two Bushes. Also of Dutch descent were Walt Whitman, Thomas Edison, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Walter Cronkite, Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep. And let us not forget Old Dutch Cleanser.

We have also kept some of their place names like Brooklyn (Breukelen), Coney Island, Harlem, Staten Island, Schenectady and give my regards to Broadway (Breedeweg).

Look how much more you know now than you did five minutes ago. No need to thank me, just pass a slice of Dutch apple pie and a Heineken.

Words, Those Squishy Things

Yes, I do love words, and I couldn’t have said that without them. I love their sound, their layers of meaning and the long journey they’ve undertaken to get here. One has to admire their elasticity, how they can stretch, bend and bounce. There is nothing more organic, rising into usage from someone’s mouth into the common tongue if it has the legs for it.

I just read an article about a sports team described as exceedingly mediocre. That was worth a sudden smile. Give me an oxymoron and I’m happy. One of my favorites is Dark White. but the most famous is probably from the Bard whose Juliet parted with such sweet sorrow.

This got me thinking about possible names for an ice cream flavor, Transcendental Fudge or Existential Sludge or MAGA Mud. Get Ben and Jerry on line one.

Words of endearment have a life of their own, uttered from some undisclosed location. Peggy and I had so many I can't remember any time we called each other by our given names.

I had names for my three daughters when they were mere tater tots. They are my aviary having each taken flight. Shari, my first-born, was Peanut Annie. Now, the strokes in her paintings move with a kinetic grace, a quiet ferocity.

Janice, my tiny one, now sixty-two, was Chester Apple. As a deaf person she knows the walls of this world and how to climb them. She orchestrates her life through fathoms of silence with fingers like a Dudamel butterfly.

Lauren had to live with Brewster Gazelle. She, in turn, dubbed me Chief Big Toe or Fatheringham. Consigned as she is to the middle of the muddle, she has grown elongated wing spans reaching from porcupine meatballs to Venus in transit.

Those names of endearment were all scrupulously deliberated blurts that somehow stuck, at least in my memory vault.

I must have heard a sort of music or cadence in the syllables of Brewster Gazelle which later morphed to Brewster Gazelleshaft. Maybe I was influenced by the German term Gesellschaft but meaning has little to do with all this. Otherwise, I would have chosen Gemeinshaft. Look it up if you want to impress someone at a cocktail party.

Probably the best string of meaningless words is Fuckingbastardsonofabitch uttered by me only once in my life in a slapping, scratching, punching fight I had with Peter Dalebrook at age 12, I would guess. It was my first and last physical fight and those words flew out of my mouth as my entire repertoire of expletives. I still hear a mellifluous incantation in those sounds though I don’t suppose they would have much success as an ice cream flavor.

The Great Unsaid

There’s a lot of noise out there. My hearing aid makes it even louder. But even without amplification, I hear the noise of exhausted words (some of it, my own), which draws me to the great unsaid.  

I once participated in a Quaker meeting where nothing was said. We shared the silence and felt closer for it.

Theodore Roethke, the poet, wrote how he wanted to make his silences more accurate.

Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson he was an invaluable companion because of his gift for silence.

Henry Fonda portrayed men of few words. I can’t say enough about how I admired that.

Gary Cooper always played Gary Cooper but the way he gulped and said, Yup, spoke volumes to me.

Harpo expressed what Groucho couldn’t. The world was a broken piano and he made a harp of it.

Blessed is the man, said George Eliot, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

I need sunshine and the paving stones of the street without companions or conversation, only the music of my heart for company, said Henry Miller (of all people).

How much better is silence, to sit by myself with this coffee cup, this knife and fork, things in themselves, myself being myself………something invisible to others having shed its attachments.   Virginia Woolf

As happens sometimes, a moment settles and hovers for much more than a moment. John Steinbeck

Lincoln’s ten sentences at Gettysburg followed a notably unremembered two-hour speech.

Silent films lost its wordlessness to talkies with vacuous dialog along with the language of cinema, the artful camera.

Nuts, was the American General’s reply to the German demand to surrender during the Battle of the Bulge in Dec.1944. Short and to the point. 

Vows

I’m getting a jump on my New Year’s resolutions. Interesting how most vows are wishes we want to happen magically. We begin each January with great resolve and generally meet with failure by mid-month. By February it is either consigned to the back burner or, more often, long forgotten. There is nothing heavier than turning over a new leaf.

I wish I smoked so I could stop but I never started, so that's out. Yes, I intend to drink enough water to launch a rubber duck. One doctor told me water is overrated but another says dehydration is the root of all evil. Well, maybe not all evil.

I’ve given much thought to embarking on an exercise program but even that was more exertion than I could handle. Such an idea goes against my staunch belief in creative lassitude. I’ll settle for another year running off at the mouth with occasional leaps of faith.

Unlike most hearty Americans swearing to cut back on carbs and calories and resist junk food, I have taken an oath to gain five or ten pounds. The doctor has me drinking two Ensure each day before I decompose into a clump of dust motes.

My most challenging vow for 2025 and beyond is to cease writing about Donald Trump. Let this be my last mention of his name. I’m not sure I am up to the task since he has colonized my brain and my psyche.  

I see him in my oatmeal, in my burned toast. When I look out the window at the coral tree, once thick with green leaves, I now gaze at skeletal branches over-pruned by a bunch of zealous guys with chainsaws, and there is Donald again. When I am scanned or spammed it’s him. Enough!

Ever-present as he may be, I am resolved not to write his name again, neither his first name or last or his initials or even an objective correlative signifying him.

I’m setting a high bar for myself, I know. If I had a psychiatrist, I’m sure he’d agree. Such a course will prevent my liver from being bilious. It will save my skin from eruptions. It might even extend my life expectancy by a day or two. 

On a positive note, I want to declare my belief in change. We are always in the act of  becoming, acknowledged or not. Let it be in wonderment if not betterment. 

Bring It On

Oh Mama, can this really be the end /

to be stuck down here in Mobile with Memphis blues again?   Bob Dylan

                                                            

I’m girding my loins, prepping for the new regime.

It’s alright Mama, bring it on. The kid who ran with scissors

is cutting out the fat from big government, the waste

like license plates, speed limits and stop signs.

Crime in the streets will be gone if we have fewer streets.

Bring it on, bring it on. Put the axe to silent letters

like the d in Wednesday. In fact, eliminate the whole day;

Six days a week is all we need. We promised

to help the working man and there it is. Drill, baby, drill

not only for oil but for you dentists filling cavities

without that devil, Commie fluoride plot.

And why is two plus two, always four, I ask you?

Depends on who wants to know, the IRS or the bank.

What’s a mandate for? Bring it on.

We’ve brought in the best and brightest to fill the posts:

Falderal, Balderdash, Poppycock, and Hogwash.

As promised, we’ll be getting rid of all side effects

by banishing prescription meds. And remind me,

what’s so bad about a little polio or measles? 

Shucks, worms need love too.

Those were the good old days. We got rid of some elites,

those brainy eggheads, show-offs, know-it-alls.

As Don Corleone never said, Father knows best. Bring me back

to the time when real men didn't flinch from bar room brawls,

no uppity voices and women knew their place.

Can't wait for America to grate again. Bring it on.