Potato Thoughts

 The potato is a tragic vegetable. In 1992 Dan Quayle couldn’t spell it and lost the election. In today’s dumbed-down America his ignorance would have been enough to sweep him into office.

The church at first denounced the tuber since it was not mentioned in the Bible. Makes sense to me. I doubt if sweet potato fries or potato latkes were mentioned either and now I’m getting hungry. It’s too bad, news of their condemnation didn’t reach Ireland in time for the blight of 1845-1850 which wiped out a third of their population, half through death and the rest by emigration to supply the Boston and New York City police force.

At first potatoes were scorned in Europe because they looked misshapen like leprous limbs and therefore must be the source of leprosy. A brilliant piece of illogic which might also have concluded that eating carrots and celery would lead to a tall and lanky population.

More likely, too many potatoes could hasten the onset of diabetes. They are high in carbohydrates but otherwise quite nutritional. At least they sustained the down-trodden during a century of the Industrial Revolution, but barely. They grow in soil otherwise nonarable which describes the land tilled by the peasantry. 

The region around Chile and Peru bequeathed potatoes to the world. Remains have been found which date back twelve thousand years. Spanish Conquistadors, obsessed with gold, had to settle for sweet potatoes. China, of all places, produces more of them now than any country. French fries must be America’s revenge to the Chinese who are becoming a fast food nation thanks to McDonald's and KFC. Leon Trotsky, who seemed always to be on the wrong side of history, thought it could feed Mother Russia but Lenin decreed there be all that wheat and no potatoes so now they drink it as the Mother of all Vodka.

Mash it or hash it, bake it or pancake it. Soup it, stew it or scallop it. The Pomme de terre, being of the earth for earthlings, is well-named by the French. The English boiled theirs which may account for the fall of the British Empire.

Potatoes can change lives. When the actress, Doris Roberts, was in kindergarten she had one line in a play. She said, I am Patrick Potato and this my cousin, Mrs. Tomato. She heard laughter and decided to be on the stage from that moment on. Kids learn to count, one potato, two potato, three potato, four. When they grow up they will join a nation of couch potatoes munching on chips that we can’t eat one of.

My mother was famous in our family for her lumpy mashed potatoes; it was a perfect complement to burnt liver. As a result I had a fondness for potato salad. An early memory of potatoes occurred watching old war movies when a soldier was given K.P. as punishment. The next scene saw him peeling spuds.

One of my first poems depicted an imagined scene of my grandfather, as a boy, hiding from the Cossacks in a cellar and finding his way across the ocean on the rhizome of a potato. Indeed great migrations might be attributed to the wings of the tuber.

John Reader, in his book, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, argues that this ubiquitous vegetable played a major role in the rise of both Western civilization and the current Chinese ascendancy, mostly by keeping the multitude’s bellies full and their tolerance for poverty high; and that’s no small potatoes.

Perhaps life, as it is lived, is a series of small potatoes. As Alan Watts put it, Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Super Bowl Sunday

It happens every year at this time. Two teams in their colored underwear will pretend to clash, brutally, and we will pretend to care as we stuff our faces with planets of pizza, guacamole and beer. We gather together on Super Bowl Sunday in a debased form of Thanksgiving.

Think of the camaraderie of eleven men huddling in brotherhood on the field while 120 million Americans commune, both brainy and brainless, putting aside our IQs, such as they may be, and slip on our fangs for a few hours.

For one afternoon. fandom triumphs over factions. Unless Donald takes the occasion to annex Greenland, MAGA and un-MAGA will redirect their animus to the gladiators on the field. The antics of the regime will give way to the theater of two football teams.

What we witness is a human drama unfolding, unrehearsed and unrigged. No one will be moving the goalposts. It cannot be hacked by Putin or the Chinese, nor lied about on Truth Social. Nor can the outcome be overturned by some archaic electoral contrivance. Perhaps it is the rules of the game we yearn for.

It is hoped that the snarls will be left on the couch, and our aggression might be sublimated for a while. Dare I say, mercy might even be tapped into? 

An estimated 1.4 billion dollars will be wagered, enough to rebuild Gaza or send Elon into orbit. We will bet on the outcome, whether the total points scored are even or odd, on the coin toss and even the length of the national anthem.

Football is a reenactment of WWI where trench warfare was measured in yards gained as the combatants were carried away in stretchers. To reduce the carnage of war to an entertainment of contained violence is both a way of exorcising hostility and legitimizing it. Yet, for aficionados, it is a game of strategy and finesse. The players are merely pawns in the coach’s chess game.

Clearly football games are not everyone's cuppa. For those non-observant of this national holiday, it may be the perfect time to caulk your bathtub or take advantage of empty freeways, parks and noiseless restaurants.

Yes, the hoopla around the pre-game is disproportionately self-important, faintly militaristic and super patriotic. The halftime show has my finger on the mute button. All of it is indefensible yet there are times when we, en masse, are encouraged to confront the mystery of life where rationality doesn't reach. Rituals, such as this, answer that call. 

 

 

Two Old Poems

Rectangles and Howls

 

The plan for a hike in Sycamore Canyon

became a picnic on a bench at La Brea Tar Pits

Urban bucolic, I’m thinking

as we share a submarine sandwich

while a crane lifts a mastodon

from a river of primordial ooze

running deep under Wilshire Blvd.

where saber-toothed felines

are caught in claw and snarl

under the subterranean parking lots

of insurance companies.

The black cauldron bubbles

of prehistory in our nostrils

and my old brain almost remembers

the happy accidents it took to survive.

How it has all come to this:

A paved swamp with rectangles gone wild

on a street of museums, hung dreams and howls.
__________________________________

Out of Suburbia

 

I have come from abandoned streets

and serious lawns, from rooms of deep pile

thinking perpendiculars.

In the mall, a collusion of displays,

among the well-fed hungry.

The palm tree brought to live under skylight

hasn’t enough arms for me.

The orange grove is paved over

by on-ramps and off-ramps.

 

I return to search the manicured wreckage

for the man who sleeps in my body.

Listen, a sound beats beneath cut roots.

Nests grow in the metal tree on each roof

and a controversy of birds stirs the air.

Counter Narrative

So much is being written about the reckless edicts issuing out of our newly crowned monarch I have nothing more to add. The usurpation of Congressional power by the executive, without regard for human toll is well underway. Shock and awe were the stated goals, and the reign of terror is proceeding as planned. The cycle of history has us reenacting Germany circa 1933.

High culture offered much to cocoon Bavarians and Berliners. I now know the feeling. Being more middlebrow, I look to movies as a source of transport along with the restorative power of poetry and literature. Choose your artform. Any enrichment and enlightenment become a counter narrative to the menace we have let loose. Against the requiem there is heard an ode.

An art experience is not passive. It must be met with a reception that recharges our inherent creativity. At the bottom of this interchange is love, in all its permutations; that which nourishes the human heart. Now more than ever before is the time to bond and support each other.

For me, love releases a certain energy, a permission to risk and to forgive. It is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Love is the juice against which the despot withers.

Embodying the potency of that otherwise unnamable goodness is the poetic prose of Niall Williams. In his recent book, Time of the Child, he creates and immerses us into a world both real and yet of another realm, which is to say, the extraordinary ordinary. He risks schmaltz but never crosses over. He dares to be enchanting.

To bear witness to the dissolution of our former democracy, today, I count on the written word. Tomorrow it may be a film or some other visual lift. Every day it is the joining of kindred souls.

 

 

Nostalgic for Platitudes

I’m getting nostalgic for those well-worn phrases such as Liberty and justice for all or all men are created equal. Suddenly these phrases are absent from public discourse in our new regime. Even the oath of the Boy Scouts of America might be deemed radical when it lists helping others as character building.

Four score and seven years ago it was 1938 and we were on the eve of a great war to test whether the precepts of our founders would long endure. We might ask the same question today. And remind me, Mr. President, why did we fight WWII?    

I am feeling gratitude for our platitudes. Their omission resounds, loudly. Here is an excerpt from George Bush’s inaugural speech in 2001.

Every immigrant, by embracing our ideals, makes our country more, not less, American. Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

A civil society demands from each of us good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness.

How outdated these words now seem. We have lost our bearings along with our spine. 

Not only has our language been debased and defiled but the thrust toward male domination has now been extended to support domination as a geopolitical blueprint. 

We used to hold these truths to be self-evident. Now we have even discarded the notion of truth. Somebody in high places must have been inspired by these instructional words.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. So said Joseph Goebbels.

Is he to be our new Founding Father?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going To the Well

There’s an upheaval outside. A wolf at the door. The new regime feels like a terrible school play about some ancient regime. Ivan the Terrible meets Vlad the Impaler, or the day Sparta overtook Athens. The air is full of Zuck and Muck. 

I could rant or I could chant. I choose a silent chant, not to seethe but to drown the noise with memories and visions, a wordless montage of intimacies; that persistent light near midnight in Connemara or the chronicle embedded in driftwood off the Cambrian coast or that first exchange of gifts…roots of a ficus for the stump of a live oak with new life springing. Even a dirge contains notes to be moved around the mulberry bush. We all fell down and got up again.

My instinct is to go to the well, to fill up on those values which comprise our ethos, those simple acts rooted in any overlooked day that affirm our humanity.

I watched a movie from way back, available on Kanopy. In the Argentinian Brazilian film, Found Memories, seemingly little action takes place. Yet the sum of it could be an antidote to the breaking news that is breaking our hearts.

It is like a visual poem depicting a few people in a rural Brazilian town, with glacial pacing, transporting the viewer into the spatial and temporal life of the town folks. The indoor scenes, in particular, have the feel of stepping inside a painting by the Dutch masters. 

The setting is a town occupied by near-ghosts, elderly folks, who have forgotten how to die. The gate to the cemetery is locked. The village café owner says he is not unhappy enough to be dead. Their existence is simple, reverent and communal. Madalena, well on in years, is shown kneading the dough for bread each morning and carrying it in a basket along railroad tracks almost grown over from disuse. Part of the daily ritual is her insistence on arranging the loaves on the shelf of Antonio, the shop owner, followed by his immediate removal of the bread. The playful jockeying between the two closely resembles affection. He then makes coffee which they take outside with a roll. It has the feel of a secular communion, wine and wafer.

The town folk are clearly living in the past, holding fast to memories of their loves and regrets as if time has been halted. Madalena writes nightly letters saving her emotions for her dead husband. When a young photographer arrives, routines are hardly ruffled, so quietly is her presence registered. Almost imperceptibly she insinuates herself into Madalena’s household. At one point she remarks, I’ve never heard so much silence.

The aged Magdalena’s old photos seem to merge with the recent ones developed by the character of the young woman. Out of this linkage a conflation of the two worlds emerges as well as a bond between them. When the time comes, Rita, the young woman is asked to assume the baking of bread which has taken on a spiritual dimension. 

More impactful than the memories, are the rhythms of quotidian lives captured by the filmmaker. She reminds us of the small miracles beneath the surface of what first seems like withered lives. Let us not wither but revere our enduring verities and each other.

 

  

I Don't Know Why

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she'll die!

We are a nation that swallows a lot. We relish a promise no matter how foolish.

Eight years ago, we swallowed a fly and again today. I don’t know why we keep swallowing flies. For eight years he’s been buzzing around in our ears and our eyes and he’s in our brain besides.

Look how the Lord of the Flies frets and struts when he spouts, and he flaunts. A few others have swallowed this fly…  millions have swallowed his lies. We’ve never seen an Ego and Id of such abnormal size.

He takes to his Oval and bequeaths it to Elmer Gantry, Archie Bunker and Citizen Kane. This is the fly over the mango, the one that ate Chicago. The hocus-pocus that infests us like locusts.

I don’t know why this nation keeps swallowing flies. When the fly hasn’t reached its demise, we swallow a spider that wriggles and jiggles and tickles inside. Then we swallow a bird, how absurd, in order to swallow the spider. Maybe we will swallow a swallow. The purple Rust Belt swallowed a goat; they just opened their throat, then they swallowed a horse. They will die of course.

We have swallowed his slurs and rants, his boasts and blather. We don’t know if he is delusional, depraved or deranged. He was born in a rancid hive of superlative flies. He’s that fly in the soup, now on the wall. Where is the flypaper to catch him in freefall?

Don’t you think it is time to turn away? Yes, doctor, but this is the fly my swatter can’t reach. He hovers over the bowl poisoning the fruits of our labor, our amber waves of grain. Yet if we snuff him and rebuff him, perhaps we won’t die.