Agonizing Reappraisal

When I was a teenager (a few years ago) I knew everything. I couldn’t be wrong. If I was wrong about the worst song or the best shortstop, Dodgers vs Yankees, I might be wrong about everything. It took another decade to question the absolutes.

It’s alright to be wrong; not altogether but somewhat. In fact, rightness and wrongness may be incremental. My dogma hasn’t entirely died; only mostly dead. It is a long deathbed scene.

By 1956 with the Hungarian uprising, it was clear that defense of the Soviet Union was wrongheaded. Suppression of dissent by a maniacal head of state was indefensible. The government gave socialism a bad name.

In no way did this shift justify our domestic right-wing anti-labor agenda or their racist, misogynist and hawkish platform. Contrary to my youthful paradigm it was possible for both sides to be misguided. Fortunately, there was a third force pushing for mutual disarmament and peaceful coexistence.

Today I am again interrogating myself. It is hard to fault the Democratic Party’s foreign policy with its lofty ideals in defense of a free sovereign state but I find myself wavering. Count me among those who cannot support the continuing military build-up in Ukraine.

Important to note we are not a model for liberal democracy; not since Trump has uncaged the beast which has long festered as a pernicious force in our blemished history. We have never come to terms with the genocide and slavery upon which we are founded. The beacon we once were has proven to be a flickering match.

More importantly, we are far too confrontational abroad. We seem to act out of a messianic zeal with little tolerance for differences. Without condoning illiberal regimes, we must figure out a way to coexist with them. They do not necessarily threaten us in their wanton ways. This is not the eve of WWII but it could be the eve of a nuclear war. Our ultimatum to China and even the unyielding demands regarding a ceasefire in Ukraine are not conducive to a negotiated settlement in this unwinnable war.

Furthermore, the global consequences are catastophic for developing countries with energy supplies disrupted causing hardship along with the threat of famine. What happens on the Black Sea has ripples in the sands of the Sahara. 

The question is not who is right. Of course, Putin is a deranged criminal with no regard for human life. I say that is irrelevant. With eight million refugees and mindless destruction, the toll is far too great and too dangerous moving ahead. Someday borders will be justly regarded as folly. But for now, our thrust must be for a cessation of this unconscionable war. 

As an aside, it should be noted that Lockheed, Raytheon and Boeing et al are salivating with the bonanza of Pentagon weaponry contracts and no end in sight. 

A reappraisal may be agonizing but the American empire is in decline. We cannot police the planet nand we must be more mindful of perceived provocations.

Authoritarian regimes, antithetical to our way of life, have sprung up on every continent. Our task is to resist proto-fascism at home and find détente with foreign states through diplomtic initiatives. Let the repressive states fall by their own weight. As for the best shortstop, forget about it.

Words, Those Vanishing Squiggles

The Gettysburg Address is notable as much for its brevity as for its substance and eloquence. And rightly so. It has the lyricism and concision of great poetry. The speaker before him couldn’t say in two hours what Lincoln said in two minutes. His few words foreshadowed the end of florid oratory and ushered in the notion that less is more.

After WW I we buried ornamentation along with twenty million soldiers. The lost generation of the twenties had no patience for long-winded sentences. Public discourse was aligned with the staccato of the Jazz Age and Gershwin’s Rhapsody.

Hemingway wrote the shortest short story ever in two sentences: Baby shoes for sale. Never used.  

And here we are speaking in clipped blurts. We’re making good time on our way to nowhere. Fast food, Quick Lube, In and Out Burger, pinched minimalism. We have commuted our sentences to a vocabulary of the patriarchy: Spit it out. Did you, or didn’t you? Shut up. What have we got? Bottom line, how much…. all stripped for transactions. Soon we will settle for shrugs and grunts, nods and frowns.

My impulse is to push back. Why, I ask? The well-turned sentence can be a thing of beauty. It got Henry James reinvited as a constant dinner guest back in the day.

My mind jumps from Henry James to a street like National Blvd., the way it meanders in its elongation. It digresses and vanishes as if it lost its thread and then reappears just in time for its eulogy. Both James’ sentences and National demand our attention. You cannot skim or take your eye off the street sign. They challenge our perceptual span. National, you are a sentence with a dozen commas, (really, very) dense with adverbs and dripping with adjectives till they die from polysyllabic exhaustion. I shall call you a trickster, appearing and disappearing, like a great idea that explains everything, breaking the linear sequential in your fits and starts.

And what’s wrong with that? Forget your vertical thumb. National, you are a horizontal thumb. We have words, don’t you know? Words for nuance, for precision and rhythm, for flavor and grace. National, you are a trail through the thick, dodging what once was the La Cienega swamp, an equestrian trail around those brambles and boulders …before they paved you, tributaries and all.

Bless you National Blvd, infuriating as you can be. One can take the offramp and leave the unrelenting rush of life, take a subversive turn, meet oneself coming and going and ponder how once he was a Euclidean line and is now a labyrinth in the wonderment of life.

There is life yet in the bathwater we threw out. The more we discard words from public discourse the greater their value when a full sentence shows up as an artifact from a distant time. There are some of us who crave the long-winded, winding many-splendored ways down the road and lush progression down the page.

Beauty and Truth

This is a banner year for wildflowers. They are frolicking in their banners. Drunk on rain, bulbs are bursting, dancing the hora, petals trumpeting. A thing of beauty.  One kind of beauty.

Then there is the beauty in truth and here’s where it gets murky. In some cases, beauty kills…

Claude Monet, you were dangerous once,

upsetting the order in plein air.

Now we’ve made you a cliché.

You rhyme with lily pond and footbridge.

We have taken your measure with coffee mugs,

Devoured you with magnets on the fridge.

You keep the gift shop going.

We have loved you to death.

I yearn for your fractured light.

 

In his Ode to a Grecian Urn, Keats ends the poem with the lines, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty / That is all you know and all you need to know. However those deathless lines were in quotes as if the urn itself were speaking, not necessarily the poet and that has sprouted over two centuries of head-scratching. Keats seems to be raising the ordinary to high art and the truth therein as he celebrates the urn. The beauty also lies in his inspired words the urn evoked.

For example, I find my urn in everyday Japanese ashtrays, saucers and bowls. The simple contours and minimal strokes rendered casually, so it seems, touch me as much as most museum pieces. They seem to say, look at the commonplace for beauty.   

Edward Weston found eroticism in the close-up of bell peppers with beads of perspiration and their shapes writhing. He dared us to see as he did, voluptuously. His camera made a mistress of shifting sand; the thigh of a dune and the shadow of a gull upon it.    

Truth itself got decapitated a couple of centuries back. Big TRUTH became dethroned to small truths, deconstructed into points of view, the way Picasso saw in his Cubist paintings.

Santa Monica is a thing of beauty. If I didn’t live here, it would be a destination with its palms as tall as lighthouses, the pier, palisades, promenade and the sweep of its coastline. And then there is the life on the streets and the funk.

There is even a certain beauty in the truth of the ugly. We are transfixed at the sight of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. At the same time prettified art is hard to look at.

Some things are so ugly they are beautiful in their deviation from the agreed-upon standards of beauty. There is the beauty embedded in the creases of an aged face, a sunset smeared with the day’s pollution, the patina of old masonry; the beauty of authenticity.

Lincoln Blvd is no Champs-Elysée’s. It is void of pedestrians or arresting sculpture, no striking architecture or greenery. It is a boulevard devoted to wheels starting with the homeless and their shopping carts filled with life’s leftovers. It is choked with traffic, fast-food joints, car washes, auto repair shops, gas stations, quick lubes, and used car lots, A mirror of Americana.

Beauty is one of those words under constant revision. My preference is for inclusion from the jacarandas on Eleventh St. to the all-night laundromats on Lincoln Blvd.

On the other hand so much of what passes for art is simply a matter of decontextualization. Put a band-aid on an orange and it becomes an exhibit. Perhaps beauty, in the art world, is no longer an operative word except as experiential. I would replace it with transformation. Art needs to alter our ways of perceiving, however imperceptible that may be. What happens in this act might be called beautiful. 

 

 

Enough Already

When is enough, enough? We may have lost our faculty for critical thinking, our sense of civility and capacity for empathy but as a nation we remain world class consumers. We buy goods and services sufficient to keep about 1.5 million workers on the Amazon payroll. I know the feeling. I’m one of those consumers. When we are not online buying, we are in line at Costco, that shrine of excess. How fast can I eat a dozen pears before they turn to mush?

Capitalism legitimizes greed without end unless it coexists with some ethical force as a corrective. And greed turns into shopping which brings out the scolding preacher in me, a voice I allow to vent now and then even if I may be talking to myself.

As a gross generalization it can be said that the  word enough is not in the vocabulary of the one percent. There’s a hole in their imagined bucket which can never be filled. As the Bard said, Apparel doth oft proclaim the man (and woman). I suppose accessories are also included. I submit that the person proclaimed is the persona, not the real self. No designer watch or electric car can fill that empty space within. Jeff Bezos owns cars worth eighty million dollars. (Everybody needs a hobby) Did John McCain really need seven residences? (It must be a burden to remember where he left his toothbrush.) Could it be that the yearning for more is misplaced? 

Now I must disclose that I am no ascetic. I am enriched by beauty and greatly admire women's adornments, style and fine fabrics. I regard it as wearable art. When is it enough? I have no idea.The object itself is not the problem. It is an acquisitive impulse that warrants a pause and self examination. 

However, apart from things, there is a far different sort of possession in which you never get enough of that wonderful stuff, according to Wlliam Blake. 

The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom, said he.                                                                                                           

Blake was a visionary whose philosophy was antithetical to the accumulation of material goods. He warned against the false god of money and how power corrupts. His notion of excess is an expression of passion, that inexplicable urge toward ecstasy. His poetic sensibility found him reaching for the divine. I suspect the wisdom he meant was an enlightened state which transcended all earthy goods. Only at that perch can we know what is enough.  

Can we love enough, forgive enough, evolve enough to retain our wonder? In that sense I don’t believe there is such a thing as enough. Keep on keeping on.

I must remember to take Blake-consciousness with me on my next visit to Costco. I would start eating my dozen pears at the checkstand if only they were ripe. Thirty percent of our nation’s food gets thrown out. We have yet to learn what’s enough. Shame on us. Our excess has yet to bring us to wisdom. A modicum of dispossession might lead us to Blake’s notion of excess.

 

 

Life Itself

We are living in a world gone mad. Alias in Wonderland.  Lewis Carroll has us speaking in Jabberwocky. The hush money is loud. Vaginas, says Trump, are landmines. What was sordid and illegal has become a virtue for evangelicals. Is a life of crime to be rewarded with Bozo in the Oval?

All of which explains why I take refuge in baseball. (Wait, don't go away... yet)

It's a small vice. The crack of the bat is better than breaking news. The human drama makes sense (even though it is meaningless). Players observe the rules. The scoreboard doesn’t lie. There are no goalposts to be moved. Yes, teams steal signs but that’s not even a misdemeanor.

Fans know implicitly that baseball is a lifespan with its decades of nine innings including a seventh inning stretch which must signify something. Then there are the metaphorical bases we must traverse depositing us back where we started at home.

Every game has a loser and no manager with arrested development demands a recount declaring the winner's runs are rigged.  Failures teach us to get over it. Fandom also crosses our current ideological divide, even as it sets up a generally harmless rivalry.

The ballpark is made of primordial elements: infield earth, outfield grass with agreed-upon boundaries. I have traced its origins to my ancestor Igor who swatted some flying insect with a tree branch or was it when he halted a rock aimed at his cave entrance? Rock to ball to planet. The experience of connecting: barrel of bat to ball, is beyond the reach of mere words. The one I hit seventy-five years ago is still in flight orbiting a distant sun. It gets better with every recall.

This season the teams have decided to speed up the game against my mild resistance. Nothing wrong with slow, say I. Where else can a poem be written in between pitches? It used to be a time for contemplation interrupted by an occasional hurrah. More than once the meaning of life was nearly within my grasp.

Baseball was once a pastoral sport played on fallow fields or parks with trees as foul poles. Now it has yielded to urbanity, aligned with our impatience. Enter: the clock. No more lingering. Buy a hot dog at your peril of missing an historic play while the mustard is dripping on your jersey.

There are no alternative truths in the stadium. No fact-checks needed except to see if some record has just been broken. Consider it as a clash of dialectical proportions. In recent years stats have been dominant. But it is still a game of hunches. The rational coexists with the intuitive. Out of these opposites something emerges that feels like life itself.

Known By His Legacy, Not By His Name

Pharaohs sought immortality through mummy-wrap, entombing themselves with a few of their favorite wives, servants and pets. For those of us without the shekels to build a pyramid we may be best remembered by the deeds we bequeath. At least the gift endures if not the name of the giver.

Consider the image we have of Santa Claus, the Republican elephant, Uncle Sam and the Democrat’s donkey. One man created the first two and popularized the others. He is credited with being instrumental in the elections of three presidents: Grant, Hayes and Cleveland. Lincoln called him, our best recruiting sergeant.  He was hailed as the father of the American cartoon. His fifteen minutes of fame lasted forty years. During the Gilded Age he was as famous as his friend, Mark Twain. A household name 150 years ago, now only history buffs know Thomas Nast.

He is said to have added the whiskers to Uncle Sam and depicted him often enough for it to become a national icon. Nast was an ardent abolitionist and supporter of Native Americans and Chinese-American rights. He was the main attraction at Harper’s Weekly for several decades. When he left in 1886 the magazine lost its political significance.  One of his passions was exposing the corruption of Tammany Hall -- Boss Tweed in particular. Nast was offered a bribe by Tweed of $500,000 to leave the country. He declined.  In fact it was Tweed who fled after his arrest and was identified in Spain by Nast’s caricature drawings.

Nast’s depiction of cherubic Santa came to him partly from the folk lore of his native Germany and partly from Clement Moore’s poem, The Night Before Christmas. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Nast is that he never learned to read or write. His wife is said to have read the poem to him as he made his engravings. It was also his inspiration to locate Santa in the North Pole along with elves and a workshop, making him a universal figure for all children.

Later in life he started his own publishing house and newspaper (he was not related to Conde Nast) and still relied on friends to read the sentences out of which came his drawings. He saw words as pictures. One of them is worth a thousand of these squiggly things. History and the passage of time do strange things, lifting some names up and devouring others. Even though Thomas Nast got misplaced in the national chronicle his contribution is beyond authorship.

For the rest of us who do not live out loud and may not even exist according to Google there are enough daily acts of kindness, beyond all measure, to assure our claim for remembrance among those we have touched.

WORDLIZING

I love words (as opposed to grunts)----I can’t say enough about them but I’ve never been drawn to word games until Wordle came along and suddenly all five-letter words leap off the page. Now it would take a twelve-step program to get me back to normalcy. In keeping with my pentagonal-pointed head I thought I’d try to write a paragraph of five letter words.

Every month, a pious rabbi has lunch with a crazy mayor over a white table cloth. One sits in a green chair with a black skull cap, where he is known to bless his bagel and broth. The other, a cynic, curses his bacon salad with gusto though he has a noble ethic. They argue then agree about a vigil and a rally by a kiosk, while across the space a woman wears a glove which does not quite fully cover her elbow to wrist to pinky and thumb with her alien aroma scent of vapor neither poppy, aster nor daisy: maybe a pearl petal of a night-bloom plant meant to evoke a smile to drain the frown, smirk and sneer on the mayor known for his pluck and spunk though his scalp was shiny, not to speak of Putin with his shirt off or Biden of three score and more or even brain-empty, lying and manic Trump but more like ruddy mango or peach not to imply that one was meant to drive a Lexus to Texas or, if a lemon blest by a psalm from a rabbi, to the fifth state in the lunar cloud of Venus or some other realm so have a piece of fruit and a slice of bread. Raise your right index digit if all this can yield anything more than a mummy in Egypt for what it’s worth. If any of this makes sense please check into a psych floor at Pismo Beach, or Yorba Linda or any other five-letter hospital.