Words, Those Squishy Things

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

Some years ago the poet and publisher of Sun-Moon Press, Doug Messerli, prefaced his poetry reading by saying how he was more interested in the relationship between river and rivet than he was between river and bridge. I never forgot that. Doug was a language poet. His focus was not on any narrative but on language itself. In fact, his idea of a poem was to call attention to itself so the reader would accept his terms. Don’t look for a story, particularly for a single point of view. In a visual sense this was analogous to moving from representational, even impressionistic painting, to abstract expressionism.

The river / rivet note came to mind recently when I discovered that the word rival also refers to river. It can be traced back to a time when opposing points of view were debated along the banks of a waterway. The provenance of words enriches their meaning.

In poetry one can assume each word has been weighed and carry with it a secondary reference. When Lewis Carroll mentioned qualities of sand in his Walrus and Carpenter poem he may have been thinking about the sand in an hourglass which is code for mortality and how he would miss Alice as she left childhood and innocence behind.

Words are for leaping in some poets’ hands. Rub them together and sparks fly. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax – of cabbages and kings. When Dodgson / Carroll brings in Tweedledee and Tweedledum as mirror images could he not be speaking of his two selves, Dodgson the math and logics professor and Carroll, the playful spinner of yarns? Add to this a third self, the social satirist taking a swipe at British Imperialism.

 Consider the Walrus and Carpenter landing on a beach where the sun is shining at night. Sounds a lot like another colony in a distant part of the Empire upon which the sun never sets. Not to belabor the point but those shoes and ships and sealing wax are all part of Victorian civility along with cabbages and kings. Gobbling oysters is what colonists do to native populations. It is all about domination and those cunning settlers.

Dodgson / Carroll sailed down the river, Isis, with Alice and her sisters telling riveting stories. The rivals were within the author and his disparate aspects. Can a conservative, devout, tradition-loving Oxford professor with a penchant for postulates and proofs write a so-called nonsense verse translated into seventy languages which hides within the lines a disparaging view of the establishment? Is that what poetry can do? Shine a light, unwittingly, upon a dark corner of society which would be deemed subversive in a more frontal attack? Let the artist roam. Allow the muse its full throat. Who knows where it may lead?     

On the other hand maybe I am all wrong. No need for cryptic messages. I don't want to analyze it to death. Dodgson's poem stands on its own walrus feet. Millions have read it since publication in 1871, finding delightful bafflement in its illogical logic.  

Ticket to Elsewhere

There is a vault of memories which is endlessly fascinating to myself  usually bringing a smile to my face. These are probably the same remembrances that others find insufferable and never fail to elicit a yawn. And then there is trivia from that time back when I was a wee slip of a lad. Names jump out of the trash bin accompanied by a constellation of images.

So it has come to this. Mention Tex Beneke, Harry Babbitt or Anita O’Day and Helen O’Connell. I’m transported back 75 years to my neighbor’s apartment where we listened to Martin Block on Saturday morning for the top ten recordings. Which would be up three notches to number one? We would take turns being the announcer speaking into a hair brush which served as a microphone.

Trivia can be a shorthand for the long forgotten, some sort of time machine depositing me in the 1940s when radio shows, ball games and movies engraved themselves on my bones. I expect the roster for the 1941 Dodgers will still be clinging to my entrails after I forget what I’m doing at this keyboard. As for that elusive meaning of life I had it a few seconds ago but it just slipped away. 

My buddies, Earl and Fred, have a warehouse full of names to throw at me. It is what happens to late octogenarians seeking a time when we had a grip on things, or so we thought. I remember everything from that period and they know everything but we all have different everythings.

Earl has total recall. He has appeared twice on Jeopardy. Fred also has a mind for celebrity ghosts. Names like Zasu Pitts to Fritzie Zivic send me in a spin. What we saw by staring into the radio is a universe of faces and places from Duffy’s Tavern to the crusading editor of The Illustrated Press with Edward G. Robinson’s timbered voice to the mowed grass of Ebbet’s Field or the Yankee Stadium. We could even smell the mustard on hot dogs.

The three of us meet on certain subjects such as history, sports, politics, movies and pop music. Then Earl leaves us behind with his encyclopedic knowledge and passion for classical music, especially opera. There is enough common ground to keep us unburying the notable deceased.

Why do I remember everyone in FDR's cabinet but hardly anyone in Obama's? What ever happened to Joel Kupperman and the other Quiz Kids? Was Mutt and Jeff the inspiration for pairing Sydney Greenstreet with Peter Lorre?

We all carry those indelible moments. In these baffling times old names become momentous. There is nothing trivial about trivia. It conjures an essential elsewhere. Anywhere will do but we might as well be immersed in those Edenic years of innocence and excitation. As Saul Bellow put it, Everyone needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door. They also energize the synapses and we can travel, unmasked, without fear of the damn virus.

Now where was I? Oh yes, Walter Winchell to Whitlow Wyatt to Whirlaway. From Jughead and Archie to Archibald MacLeish to Archie Leach. These are my Letters of Transit. Find Bogart. He'll always have Paris. 

Ovid As In Covid

Hidden inside that word Covid is the Roman poet Ovid even though he pronounced it Ahvid. He was all about love and transformation. Two of my favorite subversions. Love is what we are here for and transformation offers a new dimension to our lives. For some indiscretion in the eyes of Emperor Augustus he was given a one-way ticket to Romania, a fate worse than an afternoon in the Coliseum with hungry lions.

It strikes me that Ovid got it right. We are in the middle of a societal convulsion. Transformation is the operative word. The virus from bats has brought with it a toll of over 400,000 lives, a wreckage of economies and some profound behavioral changes. The confluence of this with hundreds of thousands of protesters taking to the streets demanding cultural and structural reappraisal would have brought a smile to Ovid’s face.

In fact, the two storms have interfaced. Massive unemployment has allowed for more marchers, masked and unmasked, even at greater risk for the virus. Racial injustice and inequality are, themselves, health matters and centuries of systemic racism have turned White America, us, partially deaf, blind and soulless. Liberals may not be racist but our silence renders us accomplices.

In his long epic poem, Metamorphoses, Ovid has people turning into stone or animals. Indeed, slumbering America has ossified in plain sight. It has taken a tragic loss of life to stir the consciousness of  the dominant race (us) into outrage. To measure up to Ovid’s standards we need to see the placards and chants transformed into legislation which redefines the mission of policing and revisits the standards of uniformed men and women. Public safety must not be regarded as a menace particularly to communities of color.

Seismic shifts can refresh the tree of liberty. We must not let this moment go. The act of dismantling and defunding the Minneapolis police department is a way of confronting the stranglehold by the union which has provided cover for unfit officers to remain on the job. Caught on camera some police are revealed as criminals or at least ill-equipped to deal with incendiary situations. Lethal power should never be put in their hands.      

Ovid was born in B.C. (43) and died in A.D. (17). Those were also tumultuous times. Whatever he wrote was deemed a threat to the empire. We know now when in Rome to do as the Romans do. He didn’t and for that had to pack his toothbrush and get out of town. Western Civilization is significantly the poorer because of that.

Incarceration is our idea of an enlightened form of banishment only because there is no longer anywhere isolated, uninhabited or unconnected. The shouts against brutal authority have become global. Prisons could be largely emptied without any threat to society. In fact they already have with the Coronavirus looming over the inmates.

Can legislation change a culture of racism? I say, Yes, it can and it has to some extent. Progress has been made compared to the segregation before the sixties. Clearly it is not nearly enough to enjoy black athletes, actors and musicians. Even a black president didn’t significantly alter the daily indignities suffered by people of color. But legislation with the support of leadership can bring us closer to a just society. Transformation from this to that. Ovid, I think, would agree.

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Awakening for Change

Vandalism, screamed the newspapers, will not be tolerated. They will pay for this.

So said the London press in 1774 reporting about the Boston Tea Party. And we did pay for it through heavy taxation. Two years later it was Great Britain who paid even more beginning with the Revolutionary War.

Uprisings are not tidy. They are reckless, sometimes given to excess and, at times, self-defeating. The Sons of Liberty, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who organized the dumping of tea into Boston Harbor are now considered patriots. If you would like a cup of tea I wouldn’t advise dipping into those waters though one of the 342 cases is now in a museum commemorating that act of looting.

Torching buildings and stealing merchandise is indefensible. I do not condone it. It is the red meat over which Fox News salivates to make the lead story. Bad optics. It is even tragic for small businesses who have already been devastated by the virus shutdown. Even the L.A. Times made looting the headline after Sunday’s widespread, largely peaceful, gatherings around the country and even in European cities.

It is unclear to me whether the bad guys are gang members exploiting the situation or White Nationalists who have infiltrated into the protest movement in order to provoke ill will. Or is this an expression of rage from a lifetime of abuse and inequality. Whether calculated or not the wanton destruction strikes at the heart of White dominant society, property rights. It is a symbolic act, however doomed, of redressing income inequality.

The upheaval we are witnessing is meant to have Liberals squirm out of our comfort zone. It takes that sort of jarring disquiet to reexamine our values. If fear has been generated it is cousin to the fear Black and Brown people live with every day of their lives. If traffic is halted so be it. If the marchers disrupt our lives it is the same disruption Susan B Anthony and the other Suffragettes caused in their decades-long battle for the vote.   

This has got to be more than a teachable moment. It must be translated into legislation which changes the culture of policing and addresses the virus called Racism. We have been rendered ignorant of our own history. Our morality has been warped. We have accepted the privileges of domination and even elected a president who lives by that creed. Our belief in the primacy of property rights goes back to our nation’s inception when slaves were regarded as property.

As for income inequality systemic shifts are long overdue. The wealth of our nation must become the Commonweal to be shared more equitably. This includes access to guaranteed healthcare, housing and education. It may take an insurrection but it shall happen if this country is to survive.

In the meantime have a cup of tea. It may or may not have been looted; if not from our mother country then from the underclass in Indonesia or India. We are a mere 4% of the world’s population gobbling up 30% of its goods. There is reason to squirm. In another thirty years Asians and Africans will comprise 80% of the world population. It is time for us to wake up from a lengthy malaise.  

  

Remembering an Old Friend

I have never wished to kill anyone but I must admit it would give me great pleasure to read of certain person’s demise. But that’s not why I’ve gotten in the habit of reading the obituary pages. If I don’t spot my name I proceed to cut the morning melon and burn the toast.

Last week I did see a name of an old friend, Nick Seidita, which set in motion an album of memories. He was 98 years-old and it’s been over fifty years since I last saw him. Nor have I ever heard a voice like his. Either he was a vanishing breed or that is a measure of how far I have strayed from the path of the righteous.

Back in the late fifties and on into the sixties I was a very involved member of the Valley Unitarian-Universalist Fellowship. Most of us in the congregation were in flight from orthodoxy along with a need for some community of kindred souls. The new minister fresh out of Harvard Divinity School was Paul Sawyer. He devoutly believed in the transformational power of the Arts. It was said that the last time God was mentioned in the church was when the janitor fell off a ladder. No Bible, No Jesus. Hymns were replaced by the words of Whitman, Frost, Wallace Stevens, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olsen et al.  Poetry, literature and visual arts along with social action was our agenda and it was, for me, a perfect fit. Indeed, the Arts became central to my sense of a religious experience. It has never wavered.

Nick was all about social action. He possessed a high level of vehemence but I never heard him raise his voice in anger. He was a model of creativity in terms of moving from mere rhetoric to concrete steps for effecting real change. He moved me from bystander to player. It was Nick who started telephone trees for protests, composed and circulated petitions, organized sanctuaries for draft-resistors, led vigils in front of defense plants, arranged to supply food for the needy and he brought together diverse agencies and churches for a common purpose. 

I was part of the Fair Housing Initiative in the late 50s driven by Nick Seidita. And later I went on to bring in monthly speakers from Civil Rights advocates to black listed writers to Vietnam War resisters.

There was no issue too remote for Nick. He had a messianic urge to level hierarchies and redress grievances. He started the Nuclear Freeze movement. I understand he even pushed for the Pope to proclaim for a universal free-lunch program for children.  Nick and his wife Mary Jo were the conscience of our congregation. There must have been a way to say NO to him but I never found what that was. Every cause was more worthy than the last one.   

It never stopped. Nick was relentless. At times I secretly regarded him as a pain in the ass but I also had great affection for him. He had a certain sweetness in the midst of all this outrage. He must have been driven crazy by these dark days in which we now find ourselves. I guess he also knew when to drop the curtain down and leave this stage. For every Nick Seidita in this world there are thousands of guys like me. We talk a lot mostly to ears already persuaded. Nick never gave up. He told them what to do. And did they listen? Sorry Nick, I’m afraid they did not.

When I read his obituary I contacted his eldest son, Michael, who had a different take. He left me with the impression that his father’s words were received at a different pitch than those I heard. At least they generated a resistance within him and he turned away from politics. It must not have been easy living with a god.

I am left wondering what all of Nick’s exhortations amounted to. Perhaps a few minds were aroused. For him there was no alternative. Social action was the continuing mural which demanded his attention. He heard the anguish of the under-served and made of it a kind of music to be sounded at the barricades. It was his art form.

That Fearful Symmetry

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake wrestled that metaphorical Tiger with his bright menacing eyes and the beauty and terror it signified. Call it Evil as opposed to the Lamb in his Song of Innocence. Call it Coronavirus. Or call it mankind in the garden of good and peril. Welcome to the forest of the night and the Song of Experience. We’ve got to take the good with the bad.

The Lamb and the Tiger are the fearful symmetry in whose midst we have come to live or die. Lamb chops and fleece or a carnivorous meal? From the point of view of the virus this is The Golden Age. They are just doing what we do; as their tribes increase so they survive.

Why would God do such a thing? A temper tantrum?  Punishing us for our transgressions? Just showing off? Reminding us we share this orb with other tenants invisible even in this year of 20-20 vision?  I wouldn’t know; I’ve been truant from houses of worship since I was thirteen though I have vivid memories of stale wine and sponge cake.

Maybe this is the reckoning. We are at the tollbooth paying the price for shrinking geography and hyper connectivity via the information highway. Add to this the search for cheap labor to supply an insatiable appetite for consumer goods. Erase China from your map and gone is Costco, Amazon and life as we know it.

It took the First World War to bring us the previous pandemic as if the colossal stupidity of European monarchs wasn’t enough to fertilize Flanders Fields. God is reputed to act in mysterious ways. Does he/she really ask us to congregate? Does the great puppeteer require the hymn on page 37 and the top of page 38? To get through the night?  I doubt it. Faith is an inward many splendored thing. No edifice complex. No checks in the collection box. No Hail Marys or Baruch’as.

William Blake was an early Romantic. He lived with angels and Satanic figures in his head which he etched and engraved. I’m not so sure I’d have wanted my sister to marry a man like him. But, then again, I never had a sister. He regarded the imagination as the greatest gift of human existence which would have endeared him to me and made him a good lunch partner as long as he doesn’t order roast tiger, medium rare.

I take him to mean that our lives are precarious, a fragile marriage of heaven and hell, beauty and terror, innocence of the sheep and ferocity of the feral cat even when it is no longer visibly reduced to droplets. In our mindless rapacity we must make room. Call it symmetry. I call it the human predicament.

Out of this World

What better transit out of this world of pathogen-Trump and virus–Corona than to crawl down the rabbit hole or into the looking glass provided by Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll?  His pen name derived from the Latinized scrambled letters of his first and middle names (Lutwidge). The man was a polymath of the first order.

His right and left brain spoke to each other They stammered and pondered and jostled and romped. He contained Euclid and Dionysus, axioms and word-play, in equal measure. There existed within Dodgson his mirror image, Lewis Carroll. The one, a man as exacting as solid geometry alongside the other, unfettered in flights of fancy. 

Dodgson illustrated his first book and was a well-regarded photographer exhibiting at the Royal Academy as well as author of eleven books on math, an ordained deacon and a prodigious inventor. Most of all he delighted the world evermore with his several children’s books which are all the more remarkable in their layers of meaning for adults.

While professor in mathematics and logic at Christ Church College at Oxford in mid-Victorian England he gave full voice to his imaginary life with stories told to the Liddell girls, especially, Alice, age 7-11. It was an oral gift he had, creating his own universe. Only later did he put the tales to paper.

His found the elasticity of words along with the absurdity of convention, through language. I can use a massive dose of that right now. Of course Trump butchers the English language daily but he doesn’t know it. Dodgson’s tongue is in his cheek, Donald’s foot is in his mouth. And my mouth is masked when here comes the Jabberwocky, burbling as he ambles, slain by the vorpol vaccine blade going snicker-snack and off he goes galumphing.

There is a menagerie out there in the garden. Of tiger-lilies, snapdragons and dandelions. I can hear them growl as they prowl. But it’s a peaceable kingdom in pre-Raphaelite England. And there is Gertrude Rose(n)Stein thrice declaring the flower as a three dimensional thing to be gathered now in May, tomorrow we may be …….no, not dying.

(I notice from the obits nobody dies anymore. They pass away. They go to the other shore. They are taken by the Lord. They cross over or go to a better place. Yes, there are days of despair when one (not I) is ready for that proverbial better place.)

It could be worse. We could be in some pestilential prison in a deep dark dock awaiting the sensation of a short sharp shock.

Tis brillig, says the White Knight, tea time, before o’clock. A ceremony ripe to be mocked. And we're in fine fettle so put on the kettle. Where is my hat, gone mad? Can this be the millinery-industrial complex? We shall under go to overcome.
Humpty's been dumped and I'm here with my runcible spoon. So we steep in this cup of madness yet for old land’s sake. The dormouse is stirring. Beware.