Nostalgic for Platitudes

I’m getting nostalgic for those well-worn phrases such as Liberty and justice for all or all men are created equal. Suddenly these phrases are absent from public discourse in our new regime. Even the oath of the Boy Scouts of America might be deemed radical when it lists helping others as character building.

Four score and seven years ago it was 1938 and we were on the eve of a great war to test whether the precepts of our founders would long endure. We might ask the same question today. And remind me, Mr. President, why did we fight WWII?    

I am feeling gratitude for our platitudes. Their omission resounds, loudly. Here is an excerpt from George Bush’s inaugural speech in 2001.

Every immigrant, by embracing our ideals, makes our country more, not less, American. Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

A civil society demands from each of us good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness.

How outdated these words now seem. We have lost our bearings along with our spine. 

Not only has our language been debased and defiled but the thrust toward male domination has now been extended to support domination as a geopolitical blueprint. 

We used to hold these truths to be self-evident. Now we have even discarded the notion of truth. Somebody in high places must have been inspired by these instructional words.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. So said Joseph Goebbels.

Is he to be our new Founding Father?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going To the Well

There’s an upheaval outside. A wolf at the door. The new regime feels like a terrible school play about some ancient regime. Ivan the Terrible meets Vlad the Impaler, or the day Sparta overtook Athens. The air is full of Zuck and Muck. 

I could rant or I could chant. I choose a silent chant, not to seethe but to drown the noise with memories and visions, a wordless montage of intimacies; that persistent light near midnight in Connemara or the chronicle embedded in driftwood off the Cambrian coast or that first exchange of gifts…roots of a ficus for the stump of a live oak with new life springing. Even a dirge contains notes to be moved around the mulberry bush. We all fell down and got up again.

My instinct is to go to the well, to fill up on those values which comprise our ethos, those simple acts rooted in any overlooked day that affirm our humanity.

I watched a movie from way back, available on Kanopy. In the Argentinian Brazilian film, Found Memories, seemingly little action takes place. Yet the sum of it could be an antidote to the breaking news that is breaking our hearts.

It is like a visual poem depicting a few people in a rural Brazilian town, with glacial pacing, transporting the viewer into the spatial and temporal life of the town folks. The indoor scenes, in particular, have the feel of stepping inside a painting by the Dutch masters. 

The setting is a town occupied by near-ghosts, elderly folks, who have forgotten how to die. The gate to the cemetery is locked. The village café owner says he is not unhappy enough to be dead. Their existence is simple, reverent and communal. Madalena, well on in years, is shown kneading the dough for bread each morning and carrying it in a basket along railroad tracks almost grown over from disuse. Part of the daily ritual is her insistence on arranging the loaves on the shelf of Antonio, the shop owner, followed by his immediate removal of the bread. The playful jockeying between the two closely resembles affection. He then makes coffee which they take outside with a roll. It has the feel of a secular communion, wine and wafer.

The town folk are clearly living in the past, holding fast to memories of their loves and regrets as if time has been halted. Madalena writes nightly letters saving her emotions for her dead husband. When a young photographer arrives, routines are hardly ruffled, so quietly is her presence registered. Almost imperceptibly she insinuates herself into Madalena’s household. At one point she remarks, I’ve never heard so much silence.

The aged Magdalena’s old photos seem to merge with the recent ones developed by the character of the young woman. Out of this linkage a conflation of the two worlds emerges as well as a bond between them. When the time comes, Rita, the young woman is asked to assume the baking of bread which has taken on a spiritual dimension. 

More impactful than the memories, are the rhythms of quotidian lives captured by the filmmaker. She reminds us of the small miracles beneath the surface of what first seems like withered lives. Let us not wither but revere our enduring verities and each other.

 

  

I Don't Know Why

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she'll die!

We are a nation that swallows a lot. We relish a promise no matter how foolish.

Eight years ago, we swallowed a fly and again today. I don’t know why we keep swallowing flies. For eight years he’s been buzzing around in our ears and our eyes and he’s in our brain besides.

Look how the Lord of the Flies frets and struts when he spouts, and he flaunts. A few others have swallowed this fly…  millions have swallowed his lies. We’ve never seen an Ego and Id of such abnormal size.

He takes to his Oval and bequeaths it to Elmer Gantry, Archie Bunker and Citizen Kane. This is the fly over the mango, the one that ate Chicago. The hocus-pocus that infests us like locusts.

I don’t know why this nation keeps swallowing flies. When the fly hasn’t reached its demise, we swallow a spider that wriggles and jiggles and tickles inside. Then we swallow a bird, how absurd, in order to swallow the spider. Maybe we will swallow a swallow. The purple Rust Belt swallowed a goat; they just opened their throat, then they swallowed a horse. They will die of course.

We have swallowed his slurs and rants, his boasts and blather. We don’t know if he is delusional, depraved or deranged. He was born in a rancid hive of superlative flies. He’s that fly in the soup, now on the wall. Where is the flypaper to catch him in freefall?

Don’t you think it is time to turn away? Yes, doctor, but this is the fly my swatter can’t reach. He hovers over the bowl poisoning the fruits of our labor, our amber waves of grain. Yet if we snuff him and rebuff him, perhaps we won’t die.

 

Well-Remembered Rain

I’m thinking rain. A gentle wetness much needed here, like fine lines in a Hiroshige woodcut, umbrellas opening like wildflowers. A drizzle, not a deluge like that afternoon in Delft with the ghost of Vermeer, catching the glisten on a rooftop. There is a drop congealed on a tulip; the same one he captured as a pearl earring.

Rain sufficient to extinguish embers, to quench a parched brushland. Let the topsoil slurp, not drench, nothing torrential to create mud rivers. Save the heavy downpour for the Sierras, turned to flakes. Turned to drifts. Let snow fall on cedar like petals shook loose from cherry trees. Bring on the northern blizzards and give it four months to melt filling our spigots and hydrants, to irrigate the almonds and grapes.

I’m remembering the rain in Albany, relentless in sheets, how Peggy and I sloshed our way into a restaurant, sat by the fire celebrating our willingness to be lucky and how we ended each other’s drought.

How it rained in that seaside town in France we’ll never forget whose name we could never remember. We watched from our window the Atlantic churning against rocks going to pebbles. In the aftermath we walked under a wheel of gulls and a carbonated night sky. Waves found their own insistent music. We took that rhythm inside, going from Beethoven’s 5th to a Chopin adagio.

Precipitation in movies ranges from dark and stormy nights to that other cliché of funereal showers, black suits, black sky. Steady rain with a jazzy sax sets the mood in shadowy noir films. The goon is across the street holding up the lamp post. Everything is going against the guy in the trench coat including the elements. Then there is the rain of renewal, a secular baptismal washing away that old, crusted version and a new self, emerges. My wish is for the joy of rain as if drinking it; Gene Kelly prancing in puddles with his partner, that umbrella, iconically singing his heart out.

 

Poem From the Ashes

Gaza in the Palisades

Leveled to sameness

Millions as kindling

Firestorms as if…

No shield for embers

Acres vacant, evacuated

What money can’t buy

Hydrants drip by the sea

Walls between gone

Gone to gusts uncontained

No home, no homeland

From desert to the sea

Cease fire cease

An occasion to gather

To share worldly goods

To wake to what is.

 

 

 

 

By Heart

Such a soulful phrase. Too bad we used it up only for memorization. Not to say that poems or Shakespearean passages aren’t worth reciting. Oral renditions are increasingly rare these days, except in theatrical performance. We have ceded memory to the click of a link if we want to listen to words of wisdom or the music of poetry.  

By heart. It should be more than a habitat for deathless prose. It confirms the heart's status as a lonely hunter. So many acts of kindness and caring are done with and by our hearts. What we give with our full heart is returned to fill our heart. Reaching out to our fellow fire victims opens our own hearts.

My college experience was largely a matter of memorizing structural formulas and botanical origins. I would have much preferred the Canterbury Tales in Middle English or a passage from the Bard. All that rote education was a colossal waste except, perhaps, to exercise my head, not my heart.

My dear friend, Frank Dwyer, is a compendium of Shakespearean soliloquies and lyrical poetry. The lines flow like an inexhaustible underground spring, a muscle most of us have allowed to atrophy.

The art of committing passages to memory began to decline with Gutenberg’s printing press. Safe to say nobody knew their phone number in the 15^th century.

In preliterate times oral storage and transmission were our social media and about as reliable as Fox News. Hard to imagine Sean Hannity as a troubadour. No wonder the library at Alexandria was burned.

There is a ratio to our sensorium. Literacy has taken its toll on acoustic space. When the visual is extended we diminish the auditory. Thankfully there are folks like Frank to recite the best words in the best order; and they also make great dinner guests with seventeen syllables of haiku between courses and a sonnet sorbet for dessert.

When words come from the heart their provenance is unimpeachable. They not only play chamber music but are a repository of all we have let in, by heart.  

 

Great Thoughts

I can’t take your call right now; I’m busy thinking great thoughts. They’re so great they don’t fit inside my head. I got it; I got.; I don’t got it. Great thoughts are slippery, too slick to attach themselves. No Velcro. When they appear as a glimpse and vanish in a puff, I should know they were undeliverable, not for my eyes, not in this tide. There goes another one, something epochal, gone.

Great thoughts are to be discovered, not received. If you meet the Buddha, or a guru or your all-knowing father on the road, kill him. Not as a homicide, just ignore him to death.

Yet, I reach for the beyond. It's a bad habit. An impulse for threads. If I am fixed on a bowl, I admire its shape or shapelessness, the aperture, the walls, clay transformed, wood with burls, a vessel like hands make, flawed like humans. The tiny hole at the bottom not to offend the gods. The imperfection, the way every poem fails.  Words, merely.            

Sherlock reached. He knew the tobacco smoked in the Cappadocia region of Turkey matched the whiff of the suspect … given Basil Rathbone’s considerable nose to say nothing of the Orient Express which arrived at Hammersmith Station in time for Moriarity to take the stage to Baskerville releasing the hounds. The game was afoot, and he would set the world right. Elementary, he declared, deductively.

He took the big idea and wrestled it to the mat. Or you can start with the word scoop as in ice cream, or the investigative story that would move a cub reporter to the newsroom, to the editorial staff, to praline fudge ripple, to breaking news, a thirty-minute slot on as a pundit on Sunday morning cable and a three-book deal. It all makes sense as inductive logic. This, therefore, that.

Inductively, we can presume that the good guys should have won the Spanish Civil War against the four insurgent generals since we had the best songs.  Cherry-picking can turn a pie in the sky to a pie in the face.

Can it be that the down-trodden masses would cast their lot for the man most likely to throw them under the bus and grind them into his own off-ramp? Magnificent thoughts are born of small stuff but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a promise is made of hot air and the emperor’s clothes are at the all-night laundromat in the spin cycle.

Here's Looking At You

Backward and forward gazes the Janus Head. Looking at both sides now. Giving birth to the month, January.

Remembrance of Things Past. Through a Glass Darkly.  Goodbye / Hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye; I say hello. G’day, What’s up? Good morning sun. The start of something big.

It’s a Wonderful World when you take Ovid out of Covid, the pox out of MAGA's vox populi. Looking for the Yes in yesterday, easier than locating the fun in dysfunction or the word in sword but here’s my calendar with all those empty squares, life-to-be, filled with cups of kindness yet for Miracles on 34th Street and Auld Lang Syne:

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere / and gie’s a hand o’ thine!........ And we’ll take a right gude-willie waught / For auld lang syne.

It makes good sense when you bend an elbow and down a few pints with mates.

Have I arrived where I began, knowing the place for the first time? There’s no arrival, I am just on my way but noticing the overlooked and listening past rhetorical chatter. The magnificent canvas outside my window astonishes my senses. Loving friends seed creativity. It is all a gift and for that I am grateful and feel a rush of reverence, an intimacy with the unknown.

I’ll be a year older this year than I was yesterday, so says the calendar of my bones. Even in this digital age, as the big clock spins, there is a child alive in my marrow. While tempus may fugit, another measure of time can stop on command, responsive only to our exuberance for life and alignment with the pulse of music in the spheres.

As Robert Bly put it in bis poem, Wanting To Steal Time………….

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, / I want to tie the two arms together, / And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.