Many Thanks-Day

What a concept, setting aside a day for gratitude, for goodness gracious. And we gather together and eat and drink and eat some more. Yet between the stuffing and cranberry sauce, I wonder how many of us think about the fact that we are all offspring of immigrants.

The origin of all this goes back to those 132 (102 passengers and 30 crew) people on the Mayflower whose descendants now number 35 million worldwide. Only 10 million live here. The rest are in Canada, the motherland or possibly in witness protection programs.   

Those were the folks who came to dinner on Native land 404 years ago, shared the feast, then killed their hosts and never left. From the point of view of the Wampanoag tribe, it was the beginning of the end. From the POV of turkeys, 45 million give up their white and dark meat every last Thursday of November. From our perspective it could be Immigrant Day, or at least. Pilgrim Day, since we are all on a pilgrimage. Instead we forget about all that and gather together to ask the Lord’s blessings.

He hastens and chastens His will to make known. There is much to chasten or rebuke these days and He’d better hasten. That hymn we used to sing in school was written about 500 years ago during a war between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland. It’s always a good idea to have God on your side, especially during one of his tantrums.

So strange how holidays evolve or devolve, depending on whether you are in the oven or in a chair in the Norman Rockwell tableau, showing eight eager faces around a table about to be served the perfect turkey by the perfect aproned mother with the approving patriarch at her side. Among those seated is a male, half-turned away in disdain. This, I believe, was Rockwell himself who had a hidden life.

Unlike one of the Americana depicted on those covers of the Saturday Evening Post, he was married three times, and was probably a closeted gay man who always vacationed with his male buddies. He was also a civil rights advocate. His Four Freedoms were championed by President Roosevelt and made into posters which hung everywhere during WWII. The Thanksgiving picture was his interpretation of FDR's speech about Freedom From Want. Even Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, admired his work. Who knew?

Not to end on a sour note, I need to say that Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. No Hallmark cards, no hoopla or parades, no religiosity. Only family and friends in a communal dinner, forgiving each other their trespasses, even the crazy uncle living in the attic.

I note this day with much gratitude for my lucky life, for my three very special daughters and extended family, my forty years of Yes with Peggy and my loving friends now enriching my life. I should also express a special thank you to my 5th grade teacher who cast me as Miles Standish, rather than the turkey, in the Thanksgiving play.

The Birth Of Our Nation

The twelve-hour Ken Burns history of the Revolutionary War on PBS is not only a documentary; it is a document. In his unique way using paintings, voiceover, commentary, letters, diaries, sound effects and music, the stills come alive. This series should be seen by every American as part of our heritage.

Viewers are shown how our war for independence fit in a global context. What started as a redress of grievances grew to a full revolution against the most powerful empire at that time. To a great extent ours was a proxy war between Great Britain and France. Without French finance and materiel we would have likely been known as lower Canada, a dominion of the Crown.

Our battles with the British were just a part of the conflict. At the same time there were a dozen skirmishes with Native Americans and between tribes, slave uprisings and ongoing bitter combat between the loyalists and patriots; that was basically a civil war between families and friends. There were also divisions between New Englanders and those in states with plantations, a preview of what was to follow 85 years later. Implicit in that division were the seeds of an anti-government sentiment, particularly in the Scots-Irish of the South.

Even George Washington is shown with several military blunders yet he emerges as the heroic figure who deserves credit for holding the rag-tag army together.

It calls into question the motives of some of our Founders. John Hancock was a smuggler whose ships brought in goods from Caribbean islands eluded the British navy. John Paul Jones was a pirate and Washington, himself, a land speculator on Indian territory.

Women were dispossessed and endured terrible hardships during the six years of fighting. The letters of Abigail Adams are heartfelt and beautifully crafted works of literature. The hand-to-hand battles were largely fought by unpropertied men who were denied the vote at the end of it.

My guess is that most Americans don’t know much more than a few images of the Boston Tea Party, Washington crossing the Delaware River and Valley Forge. After watching this series one gets the full canvas with an understanding of the complex forces intersecting at the birth of our nation.

It was Emerson who wrote the phrase, The shot heard 'round the world. He had the vision to recognize those first shots at Lexington as the opening salvos which would resound among subjugated people everywhere, leading eventually to overthrow their domination by imperial powers. 

The question today is whether that new experiment called Democracy from 250 years ago can endure against the monarchial forces in our midst. 

Thinking About How We Think

Getting through the day requires a mind-set unknown to past generations. Not only must we give ourselves over to our phones but considering all the deceit out there, we also need a certain suspension of disbelief. 

Americans of all persuasions are world-class consumers. Try finding a parking spot at Costco. We are saturated with commercials, even with the mute button on; fed fabrications, exaggerations and images leading us astray from reality. Nowhere more so than with ads for prescription meds. The voice over recites: Side effects include falling hair, memory loss, kidney damage and necrosis of the liver, while kids are blowing bubbles, kites are flying, a dog just caught a frisbee and an apple pie is coming out of the oven. 

On some unconscious level we have swallowed the association. (Sorry, chum, the new car does not come with beautiful people.) We seem to have an enormous capacity for being led astray and furthermore, we are paying to be lied to in the price of the car, the mattress or the cheeseburger.

We also vote as consumers, buying into promises and half expecting to be cheated. In this scenario, truth is a non-operative word. At the far end of the spectrum we have a man in the bully pulpit who has mastered the art of faux-authenticity with inane blurts repeated to numb the brain.

But enough about Trump.

We are conditioned to straddle two worlds, the humdrum and the as if.  They overlap and become almost undifferentiated at times. The imagination insinuates itself into the mundane. Wallace Stevens called it the necessary angel; that force which lifts us above the fray while our feet are stuck in the muck.

All this is a preamble to consider authenticity and artifice. The French New Wave in the late 1950s set out to overthrow the artificiality of studio-made cinema which lacked an edge and spontaneity of real life. It was deemed too literary, insisting on a resolution of conflict.

After a while the rebellion itself had a whiff of pretension. Yesterday’s defiance becomes tomorrow’s convention. It seems to me we now have a healthy mix of artifice along with raw bursts of reality.

As consumers, my hunch is we all share a hunger for moments of transcendence whether classical forms, World Series, British mysteries, documentaries, theater pieces or live music…and all the rest I left out. The options have never ranged so far afield, even as tickets are obscenely overpriced.

Warhol made art out of kitsch or was it just more kitsch? In this era of commodification, everything is monetized and that, I suppose, becomes yet another art form. Have Gen Z consumers discovered a new way of perceiving which has enabled them to find meaning through random surface images or phrases? What we regarded as depth, may have been an illusion based on our backstory and how we came to be us.

The current generation which shows an indifference to history also rejects narrative, tracing a protagonist through time. Resolution has given way to open text. What we regard as psychological depth, the new sensibility sees as just another construct, no closer to truth than a montage of surfaces. 

Like it or not, technology alters consciousness, the ratio of our senses and how we take in information. In my dotage, I find myself clinging to what I once believed were the eternal verities.  

Soggy Words

We don’t get much wet in this rescued desert so days like today come with the hazard of flash floods, mudslides and tornados. All of which the MAGA minions will blame on our Gov. Gavin Newsom. So far, the deluge hasn't lived up to the rumor.

Ironic, that Texas is parched with many houses sinking because of the lowered water table. There might be a metaphor in all this but it eludes me. Gov. Abbott and his gerrymandered oilmen disallow any mention of climate change, even as they argue whether to build desalination plants. And if one or two know better, there is the silence of the spineless. 

When I was a kid, shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire, weather wasn’t a topic for discussion, except for cancelled picnics and rained-out ballgames. It was a minor bother, not a cause for evacuation. I wonder what in thunderation we did to foul the air we breathe and carbonize the firmament to the danger point. We now have hundred-year hurricanes, fires, droughts and storms every 2-3 years. Weather has become a hot potato.

I want to turn to kinder thoughts about rain since someday I may be a flower with my throat open eager to be quenched. Umbrellas are flowers sprouting as seen from above. Renoir's palette captures Parisians, like a garden unfurled. And then there is Hiroshige's people hurrying across a bridge under fine lines of a sudden shower. Are those umbrellas or parasols?

I'm looking outside at some droplets on a leaf. They look like the pearl earrings Vermeer lit. I'm remembering the wet cobblestones in Delft and how we sloshed our way to the closest bruin cafe. 

Come on sky, let it go! End the fire season emphatically. I want to see Gene Kelly splashing. I’m thinking puddles. Where are you Ethel Waters, Gale Storm and Claude Rains? Go ahead, rain on my parade. 

 

 

An Answering Voice

There are times when I find that I don’t fully agree with myself. An answering voice to my last blog quietly demands this page.

Silencing the commotion in my hive is also a noble state. There is a point where busyness is mere noise, bustle and blather. The agitated mind is not a good listener.

Alexa is playing Yo-Yo Ma. I can feel my brain drifting. Its motion is not darting but following a slow pulse, contoured like a wave. No lyrics accompany this cello.            

I am not to be interrupted while I’m unbusying myself, like a plane jettisoning fuel, emptying the weight of words, the cargo of exhausted ideas.

Portals and pores are opening for deeper breaths. If I think of Trump, he is summarily dismissed. My store of vituperative adjectives is also overthrown. There is an enormous shadowed place but a tropism bends toward the light.    

Can I reach stillness? Only a hush. An interval between fathoms of the bowed instrument.

In the silence it is as if going to the well, not to quench my parched throat but to water the soil wordlessly.

Holding both stillness and busyness in tandem feels like home. Each is fed by the other. The contradiction is life itself.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Full Of Busy

True magic inheres in the ordinary, the commonplace. Everything around them is pure miracle. Only petty minds yearn for the supernatural.     Edward Abbey      

I concur. I can’t imagine anything more surreal than witnessing the deconstruction of America. Duchamp’s urinal might be the fitting iconography.  

These days, I spend quality time gazing out the window in the amaze of its miracle. There are enough high trees spared by bulldozers to imagine whose woods these were a hundred years ago when I swung from branches in my loincloth. Imagination is the renewable sanctuary; my unlived or disowned life.

It’s all here, the still-life on the table. I welcome the haphazard. The word itself makes me happy. I have an affinity for a modicum of disarray as if everything is unfinished, caught for a moment in flight on its way to elsewhere.

William Carlos Williams said, No ideas but in things. I would amend that to things in motion, upon which so much depends. The red wheelbarrow is only glazed with rainwater for a few minutes.

Last night I lost my mouse. How could I lose a mouse? It was just in front of me but now gone. Maybe I had dropped and kicked it; I got a flashlight to look under the couch. Nada.

A wise man once said that everything is somewhere. This morning, I tried putting on my shoe but there was no room for my foot. The mouse had found a homeland. I admire its vision and kinetic energy.

In those gangster movies of the 40’s, Bogie or Cagney were sent up the river, taking the rap for another hood who is laying low till the heat’s off. In the next scene they’re planning a prison break and if that fails we see one of them or George Raft walking down that last crooked mile, getting an earful of Jesus on his way to the chair.

I would hope that the notion of flux also applies to myself. I expect to be dead for a long time. Until then I want to evolve. My memoir is a run-on sentence, unpunctuated, a vessel unmoored. Even in my contemplative, sedentary life I would like to be full of busy as Abigail Adams put it.

               

Two Guys And History

History has a way of rewriting itself. November 5th was Guy Fawkes Day, going back to merry old England in 1605 when he conspired to blow up the House of Lords. The thwarted plot was in protest against the persecution of Catholics by King James. Apparently it wasn’t so merry for everyone.

Now, five centuries later, kids create straw-filled effigies and go around asking, "A penny for the old guy?" It morphed into a frolic around bonfires whooping it up at the end of harvest time; a sort of British version of what we call Halloween.

That was once a pagan ritual, usurped by Christians to honor all saints but not over my dead body said the peasants (that’s us) who spooked the church to concede the 31^st of October to a bit of mischief and costuming.

In my misspent youth that night was marked by chalking buildings and each other. For those bent upon small anarchies, an overturned garbage can or toilet papering a tree was tolerated.

One wonders how history will treat the reign of the guy who has shredded our Constitution, defaced the White House and subverted our Justice Department and the Courts. Will kids orange their faces, on his birthday, wear red ties and compete for braggadocio prizes and the most outrageous lies or wear masks and beat each other up, celebrating it as Bully’s Day? Will he be pitied or scorned? Or will it be a day of national shame? How to mourn the dilapidation of language and restore it?

Whatever happened to chalk? And where is the Boy Scout Oath of helping each other, of telling the truth and keeping promises, of being a friend to people very different from you, being respectful for the rights of others?

Seemingly, all is forgotten in these uncaring times. In the sausage factory of history there's no telling what we are given to swallow. Maybe Peter the Great was terrible and Ivan the Terrible was great. 

Guy Fawkes set out to explode the British government and our Guy is imploding the cherished democracy we loved. If their Guy is celebrated as a day of revelry and fireworks maybe ours will also be remembered with festivities noisy enough to silence his villainy. Ridicule may be the best answer, or better yet, note our Guy's Day with kindness and love, for everything he wasn't.

Humpty-Dumped

The conversation went around like the two pizzas on the table, from strategies for survival under a monarchy to the day of the dead, pass the prosecco, while in my head I drifted to the image of a golem, made from debris and clay to the 1955 song, People say a man is made out of mud / A poor man’s made out of muscle and blood and from there I went to the new Frankenstein movie…was he not a golem, first a protector then turned monstrous like some countries, pass the pepperoni, roaming the heartland written by eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley, fearing machines gone wild, made by us yet no longer of us, like AI, fed by humans to rock and roll like the pizza that ate Chicago or was it a tomato escaped from a BLT when this Frank/Golem/ Grokenstein rolls over the ballroom where the wing once stood adding to the carnage of our times mixed with the mushrooms of mother earth and the dead mingled with the undead hallowed to trick us to treat the stuffed hollow man, on the night of golden golem toilet seats (not on the menu), to Tuesday’s gathering in the piazzas where we owe our souls to the company store while billions turn to trills, bubbles famously burst and all the king’s horses couldn’t put Humpty’s heritage together again.