God In Movie Guise

In the 1936 film, Our Man Godfrey, William Powell sets the world right. Just as God would do if he/she answered prayers. Godfrey, as one of the Forgotten Men, is plucked from among the filthy homeless to become butler in a household of the filthy rich. Homeless filth washes off but the soiled lives of the mindless moneyed family takes God(frey) an amusing ninety minutes to wipe clean.

Carole Lombard is the perfect ditz; Powell, the no-sweat hand of providence. Both earned Academy Award nominations. In those hard times I suppose we needed gift-wrapped endings.

Fast-forward a dozen years. Lombard had died in a plane crash. Indeed the whole world had crashed in the carnage and abominations of the war. A new God appeared in Samuel Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot. He wrote the play in 1948 and it was first presented five years later. In fact God did not appear. He was a no-show as he was for millions in the camps. Estragon and Vladimir aren’t sure if they are standing at the right tree at the right time but it doesn’t matter. Beckett evokes the absurd as the two men echo Laurel and Hardy. In another play he spoke of a shrub as a hardy laurel.

In the mid-fifties God makes a comeback in the first Godzilla movie. Now God is a mutated monster from the effects of nuclear radiation. This became Japan’s cautionary comic-book tale of the dangers of continuing Hydrogen bomb tests. The creature is killed in the way Beowulf got his. At the bottom of the sea… which could be our unconscious. Since then almost thirty other Godzilla movies have roamed the big screen.

During these years we were rescued, abandoned and warned. By 1972 we are held up to a mirror with the ultimate sympathetic anti-hero, Brando / De Niro / Pacino, the Godfather. The business of America is business and Michael Corleone tells his brother after a round of blood-letting, It’s not personal, Sonny. It's strictly business. The Godfather is an extended version of what this country, in its grotesquerie, has become. Worshipful of power some of us have turned away from humanity. The almighty dollar replaced God almighty.

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Over time even the false idols have left. The Miracle Worker went over the cliff with Thelma and Louise. Godfrey could not be accepted in today’s American Hustle. There is no million dollar payoff from a magazine sweepstakes in Nebraska, no Silver Lining Playbook. Nor can we wait for Godot. We’re on our own. The Boyz ‘N the Hood want a piece of the rock and why the hell not? 

Back in the day we Praised the Lord and Passed the Ammunition and assumed we had God on our side. He may be at the Next Stop, Wonderland….but I doubt it. The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. As Tennessee Williams said, We all live in a house on fire, no fire department; no way out, just the upstairs window. 

Jack and More Jacks

Back in the day the name Jack stood for everyman and he was everywhere. There was the boy who went up the hill with Jill. And the kid who climbed the beanstalk, not to mention Jack Horner who sat in a corner and Jack Sprat who ate no fat. Indeed he was ubiquitous until he wasn't so hit the road, Jack. 

The other day I received a letter marked personal and confidential. Anything not offering a large pizza for $8.99 was enough to catch my attention. It came from a law office in Toronto representing the estate of Jack Lasky. The first sentence identified them as executors. Right away I flashed back on all the Jacks I hadn’t made friends with over the past 93 years. 

The letter went on to explain they were looking for the certain Norm Levine who was living in Southern California in 2002 and a friend of the dear-departed Jack. I checked my driver’s license and sure enough I was Norm Levine and I have no memory of being anywhere else that year. 

So far, so good. I then googled, Jack Lasky. The first six hits had to do with a Jack from Long Island who is a Trumper. I presume he is still alive and well, even if his politics locate him beyond my threshold of endurance.

The second Jack L. was my man. Born in Toronto, died in Honolulu with a plaque on a kibbutz in Israel. Sounds like Jack got around, especially posthumously. I wrote back as requested, regretting my lapse in never having made Jack’s acquaintance. Already I felt close enough to be on a first name basis. Had I been afforded the opportunity I'm sure I would have been a loyal friend. I can imagine us in animated conversation over Chinese chicken salad and iced tea or better yet a Guinness. No doubt he was a helluva guy. Almost knowing Jack Lasky has made me a better person. 

I told the law office that I did have a friend named Jack and I remember a Lasky in my college days. Does this count for nothing? I never met a Jack I didn’t like.  

I suggested to the lawyer that should they fail to contact the worthy Norm Levine I'd be happy to serve as a surrogate. I have a particularly warm feeling for Canada, now more than ever as they stand up to their bully neighbor to the south. 

Going back to the generic Jack, I see that his name in folklore was regarded as an average guy ranging from resourceful person to a clever trickster, from playing card to jackhammer to jackass.

Research reveals that there was a Horner who tried to bribe Henry VIII when he pulled out some plum deed to a manor house. Not such a good idea, Jack. Beware of nursery rhymes. One can lose one's head over the ditty.

The Jack and Jill who climbed the hill were codes words for a half pint (Jack) and a quarter pint (Gill) which King Charles I tried to reduce as part of his tax plan.

It now occurs to me that maybe the real Norm Levine owed the late Jack Lasky some money in which case I'm glad not to be him. Or as my friend Fred put it on his answering machine, If you owe us money please leave a message after the tone; if we owe you money leave a message before the tone.

Life Story

My daughter recently videotaped my life story. Everybody has their own biopic. Even if we are second bananas in someone else’s, we create a sort of movie about ourselves in which we are the star of the show.

I found myself relating a collection of moments rather than a flowing narrative. It is like the distillate of Great Lakes reduced to fit inside a thermos. 

When I think of my ninety-three years, it’s astonishing how much I have forgotten or misremembered.

After about four hours I declared myself done or, at least, spent. It didn't take long before my mind flooded with all the memories I had left out. Maybe we’ll have one more session as an appendix but I suspect, even then, there will be large chunks which deserve mention and have escaped me.

There are some stories I’ve repeated so many times I can’t be sure they really happened or whether I’m remembering an embellished version. Did I really sit on a stoop with grandpa, at four-years-old, eating a bagel with a mustache of cream cheese? When I opened up Norm’s Pharmacy did I really tell people my mother named me after the store? 

What excites my imagination is a tableau which has endured for decades in my head for no apparent reason and suddenly I find myself investing it with meaning unavailable to me seventy-five or eighty-five years ago. When I threw a ball against the outer wall of my father's drugstore I never thought I was beating a portal into that store becoming my father.

I didn't say enough how Peggy's life was a constant stream of enthusiasms. She found beauty in tree stumps and peeling bark; in ashtrays (though no one smoked) and old paper as in ticket stubs and business cards. Many of her passions became mine and extended into new friends and into her poems. What she exhaled, I inhaled.

Toward the end of our video sessions I spoke about the arc of my life. My early years were steeped in evidence-based science and reinforced by philosophy which stressed objective reality. It left me with little tolerance for junk science and the irrational. My life's journey has been to make room for my imagination, for the chaos out of which creativity and connectivity grows. 

I'd like to think some of my blogs have charged the air for others just as I've been sparked by words and images of other fine minds. We're all pilgrims and we're only passing through. If all this sounds like I'm on the verge of checking out, I am not. I would hope I am still becoming.

If I were to mention all the things I never did that would take far more than four hours. High on the list would be having an ear for classical music, playing the piano by ear, carrying a tune and dancing the tango – I’ll catch up with these in my next incarnation. 

Poetry In Trump Time

How to write poetry (or stay sane) in these dark days brings to mind Gabriel Garcia Marques' book, Love in the Time of Cholera. We are living in the contagion of a diseased state. In a sense, a poem is a get-well card to the world even if it screams with vehemence since barbed words are a plea for an idealized society. 

Yet such a poem falls on deaf ears. Inflated words or those limp from rhetorical flourishes may get applause from the brethren but persuade no one and have a very short life span. Be careful what you say; you don’t know whose mouth those sentences came out of.

Poets do not breathe rarefied oxygen. They inhale the common air and live in the commonweal. As citizens with heightened awareness they cannot stand by as silent witnesses. Particularly now when the menace of MAGA is about values, deceit, moral vacuity and deviant behavior. This testosterone-driven mentality leads to unwinnable wars and indifference to human suffering. 

Poets to the rescue. Truth is on life support. Get us to triage and then to the maternity ward. Not to give birth to new words but to offer existing ones a smack and breathe new life in the body politic.

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. Any act of normalcy seems like a countermeasure against tyranny.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet was regarded as a dangerous man. He died twelve days after the CIA coup overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. His poems on the power of love can be read as a political act in opposition to the cruelty and violence of the military regime. In the hands of a beloved poet words become swords. Indignation must be delivered obliquely, as objective correlative, to elicit either the palm or the fist. 

During the McCarthy days Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Carl Foreman expressed their opposing views through their art. All were allegories either in defense of an informant as in On the Waterfront or the condemnation of passivity in a conformist culture in The Crucible and High Noon.

The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen will endure far longer than the colossal stupidity of why WWI was fought.

Red lips are not so red / as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.        Wilfred Owen

If they should ask you why I died / tell them because our fathers lied.          Rudyard Kipling

If there is a husk, as Robert Bly suggested, which separates the external from internal concerns, it becomes the task of the poet to find an opening. Ironically the most powerful political poems issue from the depth of one’s psyche. This flow between the public and private is particularly striking right now as we endure the damage inflicted by a pathological miscreant with a 4^th grade vocabulary. His disfigured inner life is being projected onto the entire society.

We have come now to see just how fragile the web can be. Our national fabric trembles. The threads are frayed in our coat of many colors. Can words serve to reweave and restore the apparel that doth proclaim us?

…And turned sunken faces to the sky
Haggard and hopeless. They, who have beaten down
The stale despair of night, must now renew
Their desolation in the truce of dawn,
Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace.

Nothing blossoms but the sky
trench-lines volleying doom for doom.

The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
         

Sigfried Sassoon: Prelude: The Troops

 

That Dreaded Suffix

We love our Social Security. We are lost without social media. Socialites used to be envied. (Maybe they still are. I wouldn't know.) We enjoy socializing. I even remember Social Tea Biscuits.

Yet, add the dreaded ism or ist and the words cause most Americans to raise their hackles. Of course, nobody wants to be impaled on a raised hackle. It's risky enough to identify as a Socialist; to advocate Socialism is a venal sin. The leap from Social to Socialist might land us in the great God Forbid. We choke on the word.

Americans live by a lie; or should I say, myth. The great American mythos is rugged individualism. We swallowed the notion of the self-made man from stories of the wild west. The west was indeed wilderness if you discount the million indigenous people whose land was stolen.

However the model of John Wayne or Clint Eastwood single-handedly creating a civil society is the wet dream of Hollywood. The fact is that the western territories received massive government subsidies in terms of land grants, federal support for railroads, infrastructure, agriculture and schools. 

None of that makes for a blockbuster movie. Call it support, grants or subsidies. Just don't call it Socialism.

The Democratic Socialists are not going to overthrow our government. Trump has already done that. Nor are they going to nationalize our frozen yogurt stores. They are advocating an extension of Medicare so that everyone is assured of healthcare. Currently, fifty nations around the world provide universal healthcare for their citizens. 

A social safety net is their agenda. It is long overdue. As the richest country in recorded history it is a national disgrace that we cannot find money to provide affordable housing for everyone along with childcare and higher education. We do not regard the general welfare as an asset. If that is Socialism, so be it.

The relationship between Government and the corporate world has always been largely hidden. Farm subsidies go to giant agribusiness which has driven out small farms. Fossil fuel companies also depend on federal handouts. Big Pharma benefits from government grants which go to universities for R & D. The consumer ends up paying twice. The one massive manufacturing industry that can never be brought off-shore is our arsenal.  Weaponry is a cash cow fed by the Pentagon. Corporate Socialism is in our bones but don't you dare utter that phrase.

 

Fault Lines

The recent PBS documentary on the life and poetry of Mary Oliver has brought her work to a wide audience and also laid bare the fault line in contemporary poetry and by extension, all the arts. Her admirers take some of her lines as words to live by. While her detractors sneer.

It is a conundrum that poets who gain a large public audience lose their standing in the poetry community as if accessibility is some sort of betrayal.

Some poetry is so opaque its readers turn away with a feeling of being confounded into condescension. No wonder Billy Collins and Mary Oliver have found a wide audience. 

There is a vast territory between the too easy and too obscure. My own preference is a poem that approaches its subject with obliquity; it makes some demands on the reader and yields more rewards. As Emily Dickinson wrote, Tell all the truth but tell it slant.

Mary Oliver’s weakest poems settle for exhausted words like mystery or spiritual. Sometimes she tells rather than evokes. While her strongest, stay within the observed life of the insect or small creature out of which a larger exclamation happens as our sensibility has been stretched.

This dichotomy seems to hold up in other arts as well. Norman Rockwell didn't get much respect from the mid-century art world in NYC. Was it art or illustration? In capturing Americana he lost the respect of the contemporary critics, or rather he never had it. However, Willem de Kooning, the abstract expressionist, thought otherwise. He declared Rockwell's The Connoisseur better than Jackson Pollack's and particularly admired his brushstrokes under magnification.

When Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was first performed in 1924, it was panned by the N.Y. Herald Tribune's art critic as being derivative, formless and disjointed. Sometimes, academia acts as sentinels at the gate with a nose for transgressions and worse.

Popular acceptance is not necessarily the final arbiter nor should it be the kiss of death. The mass audience is so vast and varied, we need to make room for the balm and cri de coeur, the lyric and the gasp.

In the arts as in our political sphere, the populist movement now finds advocates on both poles. What moves the masses is little understood. Perhaps the greatest mystery is the zeitgeist. Who owns it? How does it change? 

 

Pitching the Movie of Our Days...In A Time Warp

(For cinephiles and septuagenarians or beyond)

Louis B. Mayer: I'll give you ten minutes. What have you got?

Me: I have this script about a delusional megalomaniac who takes over the country.

Mayer: What is it, a horror movie? Bela Lugosi?
Me: Think of it as The Rotten Tomato That Ate Chicago.

Mayer: So tell me more.
Me: He is elected President...twice and puts a wrecking ball to half the White House.

Mayer: I haven’t got time for this. You say a crazy guy wins two elections?
Me: Right, it's sort of a comic book, apocalyptic, political thriller.

Me: I can see Citizen Kane dumbed down to a blabbering Rosebud.
Mayer: You mean Orson Welles in the Cuckoo's Nest?

Me: More like P.T. Barnum meets Al Capone. Or Huey Long

merged with Elmer Gantry.

Mayer: Capone? We can use George Raft.
Me: No, he’s more than a gangster, he barks like Edward G. Robinson.

Mayer: Sounds like a musical comedy. it’s over-budget already.
Me: Listen to me, L.B., you only need one actor and a mob.

Mayer: A mob? Get me Frank Capra on line one.
Me: You’ll never regret it. You can use a lot of out-of-work extras.

Mayer: Sounds like a cast of thousands. Bring in DeMille.

Me; More like a zany madcap romp with body bags.
Mayer: Get me Preston Sturgis and Stanley Kramer.

Mayer: It may play in the Brown Derby but we need the Heartland.
Me: It will be a blockbuster. Everyman gone berserk. Think of the foreign market; dictators will love it.

Me: You'll need lots of red ties and MAGA red caps.

Mayer: Hold on here. That's too close to MGM. Scrap that.

Mayer: What about females, that's a must. Stanwyck is under contract and we've got dozens of starlets.

Me: We can use them all. The guy is salacious. 

Mayer: How about the ending?  It's got to be happy.

Me: Trust me, L.B. we’ll see him in a long shot. A guy in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash from a homeless encampment.

Communal Air

Fog is suppressed. Hair frizzled. Air stopped from cooling down by El Nino. Monsoonal flow is thick and sticky.

But think of it this way: monsoonal is communal. Whatever happens, happens to all of us. And, to some extent, we contributed to this sweltering phenomenum through neglect and avarice. There is big money in fossil fuels. Energy is the cash cow we've been milking for the past 150 years with calloused indifference to the consequences. The damage may be halted but is irreversible. 

To this ten-year old the summer heat tapped into my vault of childhood; weather, war and whooping cough, We had our heroes and our shared menace; infantile paralysis, traitors and the dreaded third rail.

Weather, particularly in triple digits, brings us together, setting off memories as when we lived in NYC or Philly or Jersey City. The illegal moisture from Mexico finds asylum in my head and with it a remembrance of distant summers. 

Low pressure trough, they say. It comes up like overripe fruit, pregnant with its bag of water. Thunderous maybe, tripping the sky electric. It’s not enough to quench a thirsty plant with its tongue hanging out. But enough to monsoonal me back to those afternoons in "Air-Cooled" movies (who cares what's playing?) and August nights on the fire escape. When the livin' was easy, languid but energy enough to chase a Good Humor truck when we heard that bell toll.

Games were postponed when they rolled out the tarp. Could just be a sun-shower. Some were rained-out, with a double-header scheduled the next day. Heat and humidity tied in extra innings.

There I was, empty mayonnaise jar with perforated holes in the lid, chasing after fireflies, leaping higher than a pop fly, delerious in the heat of my years.

On the subway with the overhead fan circulating vapors from under arms hanging on to straps. Maybe I grabbed a straw seat and got stuck to it even as we all whoosed under the East River to the canyons of tall rectangles.

That word monsoonal makes me swoon with the sound of it. Imagine an alto sax in cahoots with a lunatic moon; a recording of Sleepy Lagoon. The air is syrup, in a soupy spoon, thick enough to climb that cratered balloon. Every year we get a dose of this undocumented air from Baja or maybe Khartoum. 

Overhead fans didn’t do much but scatter the flies so people came out to un-stifle themselves. So did the gnats. They swarmed by gazillions all over the front window of my father’s drug store. 

It must have been the flag colors of the Ex-Lax sign that attracted the gnats. They covered that part of the window and gradually the rest of it in sufficient numbers to excite the neighborhood. I don’t think the store ever had such traffic, at least at the outside entrance. My father possessed a natural calm which could break a fever. He needed every bit of it to persuade the crowd we were not being invaded by an alien species. 100 degrees does strange things to all creatures in a shared inferno.

The Long and Short Of It

Our illustrious president, at 6 ft. 3 in. is pushing 240 lbs. which is unaccountable since he is a hollow man, but I suppose those Big Macs can add up. His official height, at 6 ft. 3 in. might include the bumper crop on top of his crown and an ego to dwarf the Eiffel Tower which makes up for an an absence of conscience and cognitive function.

Ever since David met Goliath in the great mismatch of pre-history, we've been rooting for underdogs. Or so we say. But when it comes to voting we tend to go big. Lincoln, at six ft. 4 in. was a full foot taller than Stephen A. Douglas who got trampled. Of course Lincoln was also stronger having built the log cabin he was born in. Abe was a gentle Goliath whom the Bible claims was nine feet tall. Michelangelo compensated for the disadvantage by sculpting David to seventeen feet.

William Howard Taft is probably the last obese president we’ll ever see. A wide girth doesn't play well on social media. There is a chair built specially for him at the Riverside Mission Inn which looks more like a couch to accommodate his considerable tush. Taft is said to have gotten stuck once in the White House bathtub. All 354 pounds of himself was almost enough to sink the ship of state.

Height counts; more than weight. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson put aside their prospective careers as power forwards in the NBA to found our country. Both were 6 ft. 3 in. give or take an inch. Madison was also 6 ft. 3 in. when on his horse. He is reported to have had a great outside shot but was too busy writing our Constitution.

Beethoven also had a tiny strike zone at 5 ft. 3 in spite of which, thankfully, he did what he did instead of becoming a baseball player. The result is our ode to joy. You didn’t have to be tall to be great in those days. It is doubtful Napoleon had a Napoleonic complex. He was the average height at 5 ft. 6 in. Genghis Khan was more deserving of that term at a mere 5 ft. 1 in. when he finally got off his high horse.

Andrew Carnegie penny-pinched himself to an even 5 ft. while his labor force worked 7 days/week, 12 hours/day. At the same height, Danny DiVito seems to have ended up hawking submarine sandwiches which, somehow, seems apt.

I was surprised to learn that Stalin was a tiny 5 ft. 6 in. to FDR’s 6 ft. 3 in. I suppose they came in at equal numbers with Roosevelt in his wheelchair. Puny Putin twirls Trump around his finger while giving up 8 inches to our inspirational leader. The same sems to be true of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jun Un. Our potentate seems to be drawn to diminutive despots.

Mickey Rooney, at 5 ft. 2 in, was once asked how he managed to accumulate so many tall show girls. He said that he lied about his height. His first wife was Ava Gardner; between them there were 16 marriages. Judy Garland wasn’t one of them. At 4 ft. 11 in., she almost made Mickey look tall except that her booming voice seem to fill the room.

I pray that the Dems come up with a candidate about 6 ft. tall (no need to slam-dunk) trim, well-spoken but not too eloquent; we don't want to alienate six-grade dropouts, also fluent in Spanish, tech-speak and trash talk should the occasion arise. I want a Progressive with a closet free of skeletons, 2.5 children, who refuses money from AIPAC but welcomes contributions with no strings. Someone for whom no constituency will stay home; a tall order.

Zero

It’s all about zeros. Turn your back and millionaires become billionaires and don’t even talk about trillionaires. Life has increased exponentially and left me still worrying about overdue library books.

A million seconds ago was August 8^th. A billion seconds ago, Bill Clinton said he was feeling our pain. A trillion years back, Neanderthals passed the baton to us Homo sapiens….which eventually led to Elon Musk and Donald Trump thus disproving the progression of our species.

A thousand million gives me a brain ache. It makes my hair hurt. Back in the 1950s my union negotiated a contract which would pay pharmacists $4.00/hour at the end of five years. I thought I’d be rich. At that time, the average pay was $2.00/hour. Now, that’s what I tip the man at the car wash.

Yes, I know, looking back is what old folks famously do, while Gen X, Y and Z look ahead. Who’s got the rosy lens and who sees through a glass darkly? It is too easy to embellish the past; it wasn’t so rosy then but, at least, it offers the illusion of clarity.

I am blind to the future, and the present is nearly opaque. My astigmatism helps me see the world at a slant, which is to say, absurd and askew. Few things compute. Zero which used to signify nothing, now multiplies to the beyond.

I have long had the habit of finding refuge in sports. It seemed fixed in time, impervious to the turmoil of the real world. Aside from a few changes in rules to align with fan’s sensibility it carried the aura of permanence. The sports section was a universe apart from the world of finance and politics. Not so now and probably never was the case. Teams, once family-owned, are now corporate toys.

The recent shenanigans with the ownership of the Dodgers are a case in point. Mark Walter, the team owner, has been cited by the Securities & Exchange Commission and the Federal District Court for infractions. His nefarious acts are under investigation. It calls to mind the close ties between corporate misdeeds and the government which has always been the untold story in sports franchises. The baseball term caught stealing takes on a broader meaning as billionaire malfeasance is uncovered. 

The hollow man on the throne has a nose for money. He smells those zeros. It has now become obligatory for the captains of industry to fork up a few hundred million bucks to gain his favor when his DOJ is probing one's corporate empire. The money flows at the speed of a click in this zero-sum game. The king is in the counting house counting all his money and the mogul may or may not get his honey.

All this is almost enough to shed my infantile obsession with sports, but not quite.

A few weeks ago, the story concerned Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA (world soccer organization), cozying up to Trump and nearly ousted by European members. At the heart of organized sports is money (I almost said crime).

Winning and losing on the field is just a micro version of the winners and losers in the scheme of billionaires. It’s all about buying and selling and adding zeros.

 

 

Remembrance

Five years ago today, Peggy died. I'd rather celebrate her on her birthday, not her death-day. Yet here it is and I cannot let this day go without a small remembrance. She said Yes to life in all its offerings. Even in her dying she made of a dirge, a rhapsody. 

 Andalusian Epistemology

Don’t go away. This is not about

anything Andalusian or epistemology.

It is just the punchline of a joke

Peggy and I used to share.

And now I can’t remember the joke.

We used to say those words for the sound of it,

for the polysyllabic stumbling of it all,

for the numbing pretentiousness.

It became a private expression which loses

everything in translation.

I want to ask her to remind me

where it came from

and where the choreography

of our dailiness has gone.

Two, she said, is a sacred number.

Her radiance still lights my way

through this long-night city.

 

Beckett and Brooks

Here I am, Beckett’s character saying, I can’t go on…………I’ll go on. That line from his novel, The Unnamable, was written soon after the end of WWII with all its inhumanity on display. Caught between despair and persistence, was the existential belief that we must make our life meaningful even in a world of the absurd.

Today, we bear witness to nothing less than the systematic overthrow of our founding precepts. Every day, another outrage aimed to subvert our Constitution. I would like to ask one question to the man in the Oval: Why did we enter the war against fascism?

I try to convince myself that writing itself strikes a note of affirmation for the choir of which I am a member. It is an act of resistance and a shout against my own impulse towards futility.

It also makes me think of the line, I got it. I got it. I don’t got it, from Mel Brooks' High Anxiety. I live in that space between what I can carry and what I can't, between what is actual and what I profess. 

I live a privileged life with a closet of clothes, eating when hungry and unafraid of being blown to smithereens. Survival is not an issue.

Yet I pontificate on my keyboard. I get it but I don’t get it. The accident of geography which has deposited me safely flanked by two oceans from a far different reality, has altered my consciousness. It has kept me well-fed and well-clothed but ill-prepared to meet the enormity of daily struggles endured by billions of others.

When I take on the very real perils of climate change and it becomes my weather, my next breath, I fall into inaction and despair... but I go on. 

Pass the Prosecco as the talk goes to the disfigurement of our country literally and ethically. Beckett, with all his melancholia, leaned toward going forward in spite of the pull otherwise. Mel Brooks' character declares he's got it, he's got it, then doesn't. It's too heavy and he lets go. 

As William Bendix proclaimed in Life of Riley, It's a revolting development. Of course, that wasn't a call for revolution, but an incipient revolt may be just what is now taking place. I call it a true populism as opposed to the pseudo populist movement of MAGA.

An aggrieved class is always present under capitalism. Trump told them they were heard and he herded them like sheep, with enough wool to pull over their eyes.

Democrats have a tent full of felines who cannot be herded. Some scratch and their curiosity can be a killer, while others purr. Some cats are hep; others are the donor class who have been declawed. They make good pets. Most people aren't allergic to them as they are to alley cats.

The shepherd tells his flock whom to hate and they say bah on cue. Dems. are a cacophony with an urgency to become a choir.

Going For Broke

By the dawn’s early light, breaking news can break your heart but the heart grows by breaking into chamber music to mend this fractured world.

Breakfast is buttered by a solar spread. Humpty-Dumpty broke into a yellow scramble, then reassembled as omelet, an amulet for the deviled eggs in the Oval.

Today has never happened before with this morning’s minion of ten blueberries multiplied in the bowl while half a toasted bagel breaks into an urgent song to bless the mourning dove on the patio nested in my shoe. A hummingbird flaps a psalm, unheard, sawing  the contaminated air with random grace as light through yonder shadows breaks.

Strange how bro and ken spell split, not as pea soup or bananas  but split as in fracked. Today we break anew going for broke, driven by sun and wind. 

If the bough breaks in the big tent of my party, the cradle of Democracy will fall; let it bend instead, brokered, hemispheres joined, brothers as kindred spirits in a peaceable kingdom against the agreed-upon foe.

 

 

 

 

Better Answer The Phone

It could be Publisher's Clearing House Sweepstakes with your retirement plan.

Or it might be the governor calling the warden to commute the sentence as Lefty is walking that last crooked mile to the chair. After all, he's clean as a choir boy. The reporters at the saloon won't see the lights dim since the switch in the big house will stay untouched this time around.

It might even be your doctor with the news that your scan showed your prostate cancer has not metastasized into your bones. What happened to the prostate, stayed in the prostate.  Though it revealed severe degeneracy. One cultivates their degeneracy over the years; I call it a life, lived.

That sort of cancer is famously slow growing. So slow I suppose one dies from it posthumously. In fact, over 50% of men in their nineties have prostate cancer. Some of us just don't want to be left out. 

We're told we will die of something else, but we're not given a multiple choice. For my part I'd like to get a phone call informing me that I'm already dead and this is my afterlife. Pass the key lime pie. 

Travelers

With all the attention the movie version of The Odyssey has been receiving my thoughts have turned to another intrepid traveler, Barry Lopez.

Homer’s Odysseus met with every possible temptation, threat and struggle to return home. On one level it is a triumph over what we now call PTSD. Ten years recovery, after ten years as a warrior.

It could also be read as a testosterone-driven adventure for young adults. But it is better understood as an allegory with his ordeals representing a series of psychological states of mind. Each challenge is met with ingenuity, courage, expediency and reason, asserting himself against the fury of the gods. Ultimately, there is a yearning, above all else, for the feminine principle in order to gain his full humanity. 

Barry Lopez died six years ago. His genius ranged from great writing to geology, anthropology and photography, with a fearless exploration of harsh ecosystems, from equatorial deserts to polar tundras. He lived with arctic wolves and survived forty feet waves around Antarctica, as well as witnessing the wonder of one hundred kangaroos leaping in the Australian Outback.

Unlike Odysseus he wasn't seduced by lotus or sirens. He didn't need Circe to lure him into the untamed and unknown. His quest was for the felt experience and the people who live on the margins of survival. He walked into an old-growth rainforest to feel the sense of being lost. At the same time he tested himself enduring spatial closeness. 

His brilliance as a writer cannot be overstated. He was able to transport readers to confront their elemental selves and discover their own inner wilderness. His body of work erases categories. He was an essayist, author of eight works of fiction and winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction. His final book, Horizons reads like a memoir as he recounts six of his previous excursions into nether regions.

Above all else he was a humanitarian with a voice both urgent and lyrical. He wrote of the perils facing our planet even as he delivered affirmations with a reverence for life. I heard echoes of Thoreau and Loren Eiseley, as he noted that undisturbed land not only heals but brings a state of transcendence, releasing us to appreciate the wonder of otherness. He warned that violence to the earth, as in mining or drilling, begets violence to ourselves.

Lopez showed us that constancy is an illusion. The Yupik and Inuit now live with an existential threat of an environment in transition. It has been widely written about but it can only be experienced by being there as Lopez was. His witness adds a new dimension. What is regarded as a dreaded phenomenon to scientists was a numinous moment in time to Lopez. How these people strategize their survival and the thousands of indigenous folks who fought extinction before them, warrant our first-hand attention. We have much to learn from them.

Through his contact with indigenous people from pole to pole, he was able to re-dream the world for us. Against our xenophobia, he pled for diversity, for hard listening to the aborigines and trampled people everywhere, the wisdom revealed in their storytelling. Their art aspires to converse, and such a conversation is imperative. 

It isn't my intention to conflate the lives of Odysseus and Lopez. One was, arguably, the prototype of modern man in an epic poem and the other a real life national treasure. The former made his way to his imagined home after vanquishing all manner of foe while our contemporary polymath found his home among inhospitable locations on the map.   

Barry Lopez's voice embodies the human predicament and a fierce defense of our planet along with a certain poetic cadence aligned with the pulse of the earth.

 

Monarchs

No, not him again. True, they both have a thing for Mexico and favor orange with darkness around their edges, but the ones I’m thinking of have wings and they flap across the border, undocumented. As far as I know none are rapists.

Our subspecies potentate just prances around his gold-gilt bathrooms eyeing spigots and hurls verbal spitballs or gets ridden around the greens putting balls into holes.

Aside from all the other ills of this fragile planet, monarch butterflies are facing eviction from their winter home. The next time your order avocado toast, think again. The fir trees where millions go to cuddle in the winter, are being systematically cut down. Farmers on that land are planting avocado trees in their place. There is no money in butterflies but Mexico produces 80% of the world’s guacamole which fed sports fans while watching the World Cup. There were more tree stumps left than goals scored.

Here I am, trying to catch the butterfly of the moment even though the best I can do is note all the flutterbys I failed to net. Why butter, I wonder? Flutter is better than butter, so say I and now I know the answer though I wish I could withdraw the question: Because their excrement looks like butter says Google, as if it were flying cows. From now on I’ll take my toast dry, thank you, and that could be my butterfly moment with patterns made by my toaster oven on the low-carb, high fiber Keto bread, but hold the excrement, and besides what other species is named after their poop, I ask you?

Monarchs migrate 3,000 miles from eastern Canada to the High Sierras in Mexico. However it takes 4-5 generations for a round trip. They feast on toxic milkweed. Apparently, one creature's poison is another's banquet. Predators find out that monarchs are devoutly to be avoided.

They are defenseless, however, against human predators with our nets and pins. We seem to have cultivated predation into an artform. I can’t imagine that butterflies enjoy being pinned. After all, life is short enough orchestrating their choreography among the wildflowers. Their lifespan is about 6-8 weeks. They must die of exhaustion, a week being a decade but who's counting?

I wonder if their brief days are a frenzy or are there patterns, as in toast, we can't see? Jesus, is that you, Jesus or is it Walt Whitman? To be permitted to hold my gaze into those leaves of grass if only for a split nanosecond, seems to me a better use of butter as they flutter by. Put me on the wings of the lepidoptera as it dreams of its past life as a caterpillar, then a chrysalis; always on the verge of its next incarnation.

The Lost Language Of Chirps

It's come to this. Most of my friends have hearing aids. The rest don't know what they're missing. We get to hear utensils drop in restaurants, highly amplified. We also are treated to closed captioning not only for what is being said by humans but for howls and snarls of lurking beasts as well bird's honks, hoots, twirps and chirps. Not that we hear them but we are told they're happening.

Birds chirping seem to be the obligatory opening lines for detective stories set in bucolic England. It translates to, You'll never guess what's about to happen in this quaint Cotswold village. If nameless birds aren't chirping then gulls must be screeching. I prefer the chirp where I can be lulled into somnambulance. 

If the scene is set in Brooklyn we might get boids choiping particularly on Turd Avenue and Turdy-Turd St. Then we’re in for 90 minutes of crooked cops, back alleys, a topless dancer going to night school for a law degree and a car chase destroying a dozen fruit stands and pushcarts. Is that a chirp or a garbage truck backing up?

However nothing compares to the sunny hamlets with thatched roofs, riddled with crime and no one does it as well as the Brits. Their supply of detective stories is inexhaustible. Tough-gentle, scruffy-clean cut, oversized-frail, alcoholic-teetotalers, clergymen, classicists, hard or soft-boiled.

People with fully functioning ears may not know that a chirping bird is often sufficient to set off a mild-mannered septuagenarian on a killer rampage. Who knew what evil lurked behind those bake sales and cricket matches? Maybe it was the white suits that drove Fitzroy Fitzmorris to plot the demise of the former Lieutenant of the 3rd Fusiliers and local headmaster.

For the first 40 minutes every one of the eleven suspects interviewed tells whooping lies. As the truth is grudgingly revealed it becomes clear, from the couch, who the murderer is…..only to be dashed as his body turns up bludgeoned with a fire iron. 

Suddenly each face changes, birds stop chirping and crows start cawing accompanied by organ music. The Detective Inspector overhears a conversation at the pub and has an epiphany. Everyone is to gather in the library. He methodically eliminates the culprits one by one until……..yes, we say, he didn’t fool me for a minute. It is, of course, the retired benign viscount whose cunning chess moves are played, in human scale, out on the village green. The inspector then returns to take tea with his perfect wife and birds can be heard chirping once more.

Of course, the chirping birds knew all along who did the dastardly deed. If we were fluent in the lost language of chirps we could have saved ourselves all this sleuthing.

The formula, set in Albion stone, is reaffirmed. Order has been restored. Truth will out. The gardens are untrammeled. Songs can be heard from the pub. On the lawn of the manor house a croquet ball has been hit squarely through a portal. We shall, for reasons unknown, sleep well tonight.

Deprived are those without captioning. They have to do their crime-solving without benefit of bird calls. Only we hearing impaired get to know that birds are chirping once again.

World Cup Fans In The Stands

I tried to care about the World Cup but suddenly nothing happened. Like Trump at Madison Square Garden during Knicks basketball playoff game, I nodded off. Yet every time I woke up, I had missed something; a penalty shot, a free kick, maybe even a goal. Perhaps if I took the time to learn what an off-side or an infraction is, it might help. But I'm too ossified to enthuse about men, once again, throwing, kicking or clubbing balls into holes. Yes, it is better than throwing each other into pits, but still.

Go ahead, call me an Ugly American. 3.5 to 5 billion soccer fans can't be wrong. On the other hand, McDonalds sells 76 burgers every second, world-wide. They go for up to $25 at a World Cup match. When they sold 300 hundred billion they stopped counting. At my age big numbers no longer impress.

I'm not one to sneer over sports events. We get to chose our alternative universe. Baseball is in my bloodstream. I can watch a game and write a blog at the same time. I don't scoff at slow. Runs are hard to come by; the average game has about 6-7. 

Basketball has become a too high-scoring game with each team averaging over 100 hundred points. I can handle the last 2 minutes. Football keeps my attention with 30-50 points scored between the 2 teams.  

Fandom makes no sense. I know, I'm one of them. It is an exercise in the irrational which taps into the reptilian brain. It strikes me that the phenomenology of being an avid fan is more pronounced today than ever before. Passions have been sublimated into identification with a particular jersey. Stadiums are bursting with cheers and jeers. The throng is living or dying vicariously with the fate of their team. And yet, nothing in real life changes.

Of course, the fan knows this. We will go home (or get up from the couch) and register the elation or dejection for an hour or two. For those who bet, it's different story. An estimated 50 billion dollars has been wagered on this World Cup. Go figure!

On some level, fans are players in this theater of the absurd. It is a meta world enacting grievances as if the outcome will redress those complaints.

I am taken in by the crowd screaming, praying, rising en masse with each turn, projecting their imagined selves onto the field. The image of 60,000 ardent souls wearing the colors of their team's uniforms, coiled in expectation, is an arresting sight. From a distance it is a Pointillist painting or a Pollock action drip, a splattering of red or smear of green on the canvas. The painter might discover an abstract splash from his palette to capture the vortex of shoe and ball headed for the open net. Or possibly the head of a leaping player altering the trajectory of the soccer ball. 

Half the fans will get drunk in revelry. The other half may also drown their sorrows in drink, cursing missed calls, the refs and their fallen idols who let them down, just like life itself.

Berra Not Serra

An astute friend pointed out that on my list of quotations, I failed to include any words of wisdom by our singular 20th century philosopher Yogi Berra.

Berra elevated common sense to an artform and he did it unwittingly. His blurts became immortal and raised illogic to new heights. When Plato heard Yogi speak, he rethought the shadows on his wall, even though he'd been dead for over 2,500 years. 

It's been said that much of what Yogi is said to have said, he never said. Spinoza would have scoffed and Schopenhauer would have shrugged.

Yogi's most profound statement came when he advised a slumping teammate to try swinging only at strikes. Pause and consider these words to live by. First, it means recognizing when a strike is right in front of you. Then it means not swinging when the ball is out of your zone.

Take it out of the ballpark. We are all standing at the plate with a bat in our hands; we’re all seekers looking for our pitch. Few of us are finders because we are not seeing what we've been waiting for. To be present is to see and listen, to pick up what others let go by. Berra knew when to swing. He was a seer.

As Popes go, the late Francis ranks high on my list. He seemed more catholic than Catholic, yet he chose to elevate Junipero Serra to sainthood in Sept 2015. His papal decree got it all wrong. 

He canonized the colonizer, Junipero Serra. At the time of the American Revolution Serra was busy in California jamming catechisms down the throat of indigenous people whether they liked it or not. (As if they didn't already have a spirituality we could have learned from). There is evidence that he enslaved the Indians and forced them to build nine missions. Beware of anyone with a messianic urge.

The Church was part of the Spanish rapacious power structure; a shameful chapter in European history still with its aftershocks. 

No doubt by some act of providential intervention Yogi Berra chose that September week in 2015 to die.

Yogi was born in St. Louis, played in New York and spent his retirement years in New Jersey. When his wife asked him where he'd like to be buried, he said, Surprise me.

Now here was a man who not only performed miracles, he was one. He took the fork in the road less travelled to get to the restaurant nobody went to anymore because it was too crowded. 

It is also a fact he was among the first to land on Omaha Beach in the liberation of Western Europe. He was wounded but fought on and received the Purple Heart among other citations. This is enough to be sanctified.

His feats on the field also left the crowd scratching their heads. His strike zone seemed to extend from one dugout to the other. He swung at pitches from his shoelaces to his helmet. Yet he never struck out more than 38 times in a season. Compare this with today’s sluggers sometimes whiffing over 200 times. As Yogi said, 90% of the game is 50% mental.

I can think of no other person whose legacy is to encourage aphorisms from others and, by public acclaim, have it attributed to himself, though he denied it. He has become a repository of twisted common sense, even posthumously with no end in sight. As Yogi said, the future ain't what it used to be.

At the mention of Yogi Berra’s name, a certain bemusement crosses our face. While Father Serra stole the native language, Father Berra's casual erudition is well on its way to immortality. Yogi not Junipero, Berra not Serra should have been sainted.

Choice Words

Here are a few quotes I've picked up along the way:

Rumi said, If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light. __________________________________________

The only aristocracy is that of consciousness. 

D.H. Lawrence

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The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. -Vincent van Gogh

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The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. -John Steinbeck, 

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Fascism can no longer be seen as an evil force visited upon the public from above but a sickness that lives within each individual and could easily be tapped given the appropriate circumstances and timing. Sherill Tippins

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Voltaire wrote, God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

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Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. -Arundhati Roy

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“I begin to think, that a calm is not desirable in any situation in life. Every object is beautiful in motion; a ship under sail, trees gently agitated with the wind, and a fine woman dancing, are three instances in point. Man was made for action and for bustle.” Abigail Adams

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All children are poets

until they stop reaching for

butterflies that are not there. Dunya Mikhail

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The only way human beings can win a war is to prevent it. -George Marshall

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. -Federico Fellini

So we buy handbags and hats and other overpriced appurtenances of successful people because we have to nurture our confusing identities. Wan A. Hulaimi

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Colum McCann said: "I think a good novel can be a doorstop to despair. I also think the real bravery comes with those who prepared to go through that door and look at the world in all its grime and torment, and still find something of value, no matter how small."

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Scratch a pessimist and you find often a defender of privilege. -William Beveridge 

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The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives." Albert Einstein

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You’ve got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body’s sermon on how to behave. -Billie Holiday

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In the end, the poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see--and what we see is life. -Robert Penn Warren, novelist and poet (24 Apr 1905-1989) 
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The world-wide food shortage that threatens up to five hundred million children could be alleviated at the cost of only one day of modern warfare.  Peter Ustinov

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Charles Simic said:  Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

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It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves. -Edmund Hillary

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Adrienne Rich said, Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone."

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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?" Vita Sackville-West

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 "There is the view that poetry should improve your life. I think people confuse it with the Salvation Army." John Ashbury

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A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment, / to laugh and cry with the same eyes, / with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them, / to make love in war and war in love.  Yehuda Amichai

Independence Day

The irony is inescapable; celebrating the birth of our nation as it was in the maternity ward, even as it is now in the emergency room. Our job is to keep it from the morgue.

In fact, the signing in 1776 did not declare the establishment of a new nation. It declared the severing of ties with our mother country. At the time we were a loose confederation of colonies. The word nation first appeared in 1783.

250 years ago was not all that different from today. The division between blue and red states is deep. Our country is almost as fissured as in the antebellum period. 

The legislative branch is dormant. The judiciary contorts itself to find justification for the dissolution of our democracy as it grants the president authoritarian powers with impunity. We are witnessing an imperial presidency which our Founders would have disavowed.

Surely, we did not break with one monarchy to embrace another.

Back in those good ole days of 1776 the colonies were split into three camps. The four New England States, (NH, MA, RI and CT were founded largely by those seeking religious freedom. They became more literate by reading the Bible. Too cold for growing crops in inarable soil year-round, they lived on logging, fishing and shipbuilding.

The middle ones, PA, NJ, NY and DE furnished wheat and grain. Their population was more diverse with settlers from Scandinavia, Germany and Holland and were known for greater religious tolerance. The upper Midwest might be regarded as our purple states in today's electoral map.

The five Southern States were home to four of our first five presidents, aka Founding Fathers. They relied on slave labor for their wealth and were later ardent supporters of state's rights.

The racism of the 18th century in all its virulence, poisons the air again today, with discriminatory hirings and firings as well as denial of voting rights. Until we confront our sins of human bondage, racist behavior will continue.

At the same time, we are also a country born out of the Enlightenment. Our founders were deists who relied on reason, rejected dogma and the divine right of kings. This new experiment called Democracy was a beacon for those seeking new opportunity and in flight from oppression.

We have always been a fractious country. As we celebrate our document of aspirations, we must also acknowledge the stains in our heritage. The tree of Democracy demands watering and custodial care as well as action against the blight which threatens our beautiful country at its roots.