Micro and Macro

I wonder if it is natural to conflate our own life journey with the chronicle of history? When I came into consciousness, age eight, Pearl Harbor marked my entry into the world beyond bubblegum cards and double features. The war itself fixed my sense of good and evil. After WWII was won, I remember the returning G.Is and feeling of newness, my own life on the verge of something.

Maybe it is in our nature to look for corollaries, signs within that correspond to that external world whose light from yonder window breaks …with breaking news. It is as if we might align our private lives with the events of history on one long continuum. The macro has its way with our psyche whether we know it or not. Sometimes we mirror the news, other times we may act out its opposite.

In literary terms the correlative can sometimes be regarded as a cheap shot. The patient is dying while outside the bedroom window a leaf is in an advanced state of decay. The dark and stormy night references the weather inside the house as much as outside. Yet art of any kind conveys emotion best when evoked indirectly and not told.

When Rudyard Kipling visited Japan on his prolonged honeymoon, he wrote about walking under an azalea tree in Kyoto about to burst with fruit; considered to be a coded message for his wife’s pregnancy.

April 12, 1945, Thursday afternoon it was announced that FDR had died. His intonations had shivered me with a beneficent divinity. I realized he was my God. His death was, for me, a quake and the death of my religious belief.

Now in my tenth decade my body is in its Trumpian upheaval. A whistle has been blown. The crumbling of our democracy under his malicious imbecility is matched by the decline of my own anatomy. Arthritis is having its way with my ambulation. An arrested cancer is just a spot of bother. My joints are testifying loudly. Bones conspire to overthrow my constitution. 

As my architecture has lost its spring, so too has our current Congress become a body of invertebrates groveling under the tyrant’s thumb. They made a Faustian pact to throw a blind eye and deaf ear to his vanity and greed. However, what appeared to be a MAGA zeitgeist two years ago now show signs that they bet on the wrong horse. One by one they disavow his endorsement and distance themselves.

Having been suckled on movies, happy endings are in my bloodstream. Trump has no right to reverse the script. There will be a reckoning. 

Even as my bones and organs may conspire to overthrow my constitution I intend to stay in this political theater until the dangerous manchild is impeached and removed with justice restored. As in the old days, I might then say, this is where I came in.

 

Reading Aloud

Most nights Adele and I read short stories aloud over the phone. Often, the narratives offer portals to a dimly remembered moment in our own lives to be shared. Sometimes, we halt and re-read a passage beautifully rendered.

We have read dozens of Joyce Carol Oates short fiction and, as if a rejoinder, tackled several collections of John Updike’s priapic yarns. She treats men as a sub-species with uncontained menace and Updike’s males are happily predatory as if that defines normalcy. His women have no agency. Oates seems haunted by demons and Updike is stuck with male fantasies. Yet both are masters of language so we turn the page and read on.

When we moved on to anthologies we discovered authors we had never heard of. One such is E.K. Ota’s gem The Paper Artist, the story of Japanese tradition and the heavy toll paid for patriarchal pride. So beautifully written it elicited sadness and joy at the same time.

Another author previously unknown to us is Brad Felver. His work appears in two editions of O. Henry Prize collections, 2018 and 2025. He is not to be missed. While most entries are heavily plotted, Felver’s are masterpieces of nuanced love. They resound with truth and speak to our core.

He strummed a toy ukulele for her. It wasn't long before Annabelle learned how to smile. D minor and G were her favorite chords, and for hours he would play them, the D minor hovering like a Frisbee in flight, just out reach, until he would finally resolve it with the G, and little Annabelle would smile and kick.

Several times we pause, thinking we must have missed something. But the gaps are meant to make demands on us to fill in the narrative. Queen Elizabeth, the title story is meant to be a tree. It is our surmise; we are never told as much. And just when we figure it out the tree becomes a metaphor for their dead baby. 

His language is spare as if sculpted from a larger block of marble. We get the essentials. His genius is how effortlessly and quietly he draws us into the drama. Communication happens from what is unsaid. Somehow he articulates the silences.

After receiving the gift of those two stories Queen Elizabeth and Orphans, we have now moved on to his newly published collection, Dogs of Detroit. The stories have turned harsh and the environment unforgiving as he explores the extremities of relationships. We hope they take a turn back to soulfulness.

Reading aloud is a different experience than reading to ourselves. We are sharing the moment; the sounds and cadence of the phrases are like music and, in the hands of great writers, our hearts are stirred together.  

Life-Support

The patient is in the emergency room. Microbials never seen before threaten the beating heart. Pus everywhere. The wound is abscessed and weeping, monitors bleeping. A miasma of avarice metastasizing and resistant to judicious measures.

The patient is us. Our democracy is on life-support wth I.Vs dripping. 

Half the country is in a comatose state, can’t be bothered or wants to pull the plug. The other half calls for massive doses of truth, they gather, they shout down the assassins with an arsenal of adjectives.

The third half, Independants, overwhelmed by the moment, ponders as if two plus two just might be three or seven. As if the lord high executioner really isn't naked; maybe his clothes will soon come out of the spin cycle at the all-night laundromat.

Someday, the undecided will be studied as a group accomplice in aiding the criminal act which laid to rest our country's heritage.

No hospice, our former Democracy will go to rehab. Can our country be transfused with new blood? I say Yes. Yes to resuscitation. Yes to the healing power of decency, to intelligence and yes to compassion. Sadism, psychosis and junk science have a short half-life. Degeneracy will give way. 

When, you ask. There will be a tide. 

 

 

 

Root Canal

I felt a toothache coming on Tuesday. No you didn't. Yes I did. It was gone on Wednesday. By Thursday evening it was loudly squawking. Friday morning, it was gone again but I answered its call of yesterday's distress. My dentist squeezed me in with the dreaded announcement that I require a root canal. Off I went to an endodontist. Now the deed is done.

The old joke is Life sucks and then you die...but first you get a root canal.

Not so, say I. First of all, life is such a joy. I can think of nothing better. Secondly, I enjoyed every moment of my root canal. How did it get such a bad rap? I love canals. My first non-memory is doing  the backstroke as I made my way into this world. Then there were those canals in Amsterdam and Venice. But I digress. 

The procedure was painless. He didn't talk to me about his portfolio as other dentists have done. Nor did he ramble on extolling the virtues of  DJT when all I could do was grunt and spit. Rule number one which I must have learned swimming down that first canal was, Never dispute the man when he has a drill in your mouth. 

One grows emotionally attached to one's body parts. Molar #19 had behaved itself for lo these many years. True, I may have abused it, early on, with Necco Wafers and Milk Duds. It registers every scoop of pumpkin ice cream or key lime pie passing through its ivory gates. So this, I suppose,  is pay-back time. 

Strange how teeth have a limited shelf-life. Elbows and knuckles last in perpetuity but molars have not only bitten and chewed but have also put up with all my gush of barbed words and the occasional poem with its jagged right-hand margin.

I can't say enough about my endodontist. After looking at teeth all day he must dream of corn on the cob or boy scouts lined up in rows. Or maybe he would welcome someone with fangs. I wonder if there were animal orthodontists in prehistoric times treating saber-toothed tigers?

As I write this, my anaesthetic is wearing off. I am, after all, long of tooth. Time for 600mg of Ibuprofen.

Shadows Of Doubt

The split in the Democratic Party is sure to be exploited in the weeks ahead and even more so heading into the 2028 election. Electability will be the operative word. Let us wrestle with it all but the opposing factions need to show up for whomever emerges as the candidate. 

To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, The trouble with this country is that right-wing nitwits are cock-sure of themselves and Liberals are full of doubt. True a hundred years ago and even truer today. However along with doubt are nuances, mitigation, forgiveness, empathy etc…

Ten years ago Judge Amy Berman Jackson castigated Paul Manafort for fifty minutes in what seemed like a prelude to an additional ten years in prison. Yet the final sentence was a mere three years plus. Spoken like a true Talmudic scholar. There’s this yet there’s this also that. The Jewish tradition is disputative of text.

Search in and out and roundabout

And you’ll discover never

A tale so free of every doubt

All probable, possible shadow of doubt

All possible doubt whatever.

So sings a character in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Gondoliers. There comes a time when doubt begs for resolution.

Tyrants make no room for doubt. I have never heard of Trump cogitating. Nor did Jim Jones. If I may be permitted to plagiarize myself, Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. This comes from a poem I wrote a long time ago addressed to my friends at Jonestown before they lost their two teenage children. Doubt encourages the freedom they were denied.

The trouble with the world, as Russell saw it, is also our strength. Progress can be measured in the extent to which we move away from absolutes, and dogma. People of true faith wrestle with doubt in their dark moments of dread. Keats wrote of negative capability which asks for one to live in a place of uncertainty and mystery without reaching for resolution. Sounds like doubt to me. The pre-condition for allowing the imagination full sway.

In 1933 Germany the Nazi Party had about 37% of the vote yet Hitler became chancellor. The other three parties hated each other more than they feared the Nazis. Our Centrists must reconcile with Progressives and DSA for the greater good.

When objective facts are gathered and well-considered by scrupulous, deliberative minds, doubt can be overcome and conclusions drawn. In other words oust the man in the Oval who soils our national fabric. The alternative is to invite American style fascism

What Keats described applies to the creative, not the political, process. He, himself, was fiercely opposed to the conservative agenda of his day. There can be no equivocation in the search for truth.