Out Of Vilna (from 2019)

Thanks to my middle daughter, Lauren, we have discovered the soil of our family tree. Going back four generations our roots belong in Lithuania….at least on one side. Lauren is our chronicler and noticer. While others ask what, she with her wide eyes, asks when and where.

She is the one who spots the incongruous hat or shoe in the canvas be it a scene in a movie or a photo album. She has always been able to identify the year and location of an image by what the apparel doth oft proclaim.

A sense of antecedents drives her questioning. I share that curiosity but on a more macro plane. Lauren sniffs out details, the animating particulars in order to create a soulful presence. She reminds me of all the questions I never asked.

In her seventeenth year Lauren left regular high school to finish in an independent studies program on her own. After two months she took and passed an equivalency exam which gave her a diploma. That spirit of self-discovery has never left. She answers to her own interrogating voice searching for beginnings. That wondering and wandering began her Out of Vilna moment.

My grandfather, Morris, made his way out of Vilna in his seventeenth year also. His journey brought him to the lower east side of Manhattan in 1887. It was a difficult decision and it was also an easy decision. Tough to leave family and friends behind along with the teeming cultural and literary scene in Vilna which was the Paris of that region. The Jewish population of the city reached 40%. Yet it was also a city under siege by Poles, Belarussians and Prussians. Pogroms ate away at the outskirts. Conscription was the fate of young men. I imagine young Morris hiding in a cellar from a band of drunken, mustachioed Cossacks. Perhaps he was concealed under a large stack of potatoes and he found his transit on one of their shoots.

He was part of a mass migration from Eastern Europe to Hamburg to New York harbor. Was he by himself? We don’t know yet. But I’m sure he traveled in steerage coming up on deck to pass that newly installed Statue of Liberty, then on to Ellis Island and from there to a tenement on a street of pushcarts. In 1891 he met Yetta and the tree was watered.

In my seventeenth year I was lost. I might as well have been in Vilna on the wrong road out. I had no idea it was a family tradition. Girls were still a foreign subject. Politics and sports were my strong points. I thought I knew the good guys from the bad guys... in government and on the playing field. I wasn’t altogether wrong but not altogether right either. A year later I chose my profession and four years after that I was married. Not very prudent with either choice……….but then again I wouldn’t have Lauren to learn from if I had embarked on that road not taken.

Did my father have his Out of Vilna intersection? I’ll have to make this up because I forgot to ask. He either didn’t finish or never started high school. Too poor. He sold newspapers on Flatbush Ave. and played the mandolin in a pick-up band, a piece of DNA not passed along to me. He earned loose change cashing in deposit bottles or as a runner dashing from the telephone in the candy store to fetch a neighbor from the 4th floor of a walk-up. He left his Vilna behind when he met my mother who tutored him for the two-year pharmacy college straight through to his license.

Morris, can you hear me? We’re all in your debt. Had you stayed in Vilna none of us would be.

Melville and Imagined Whales

Ahab's pursuit of Moby Dick is the great American allegory. There is no hissing the villain or cheering the hero in the book. Melville (call him Ishmael, the outsider) presents the white whale as demonic and ferocious on one page and noble on the next. In one chapter on whiteness we are reminded that his absence of color sums up the ambiguity of both the pursuer and pursued. Ahab's ill-fated mission is to uncover the ultimate mystery, blinded as he is by the enormous whiteness.

Add to this our contemporary understanding of the oceanic ecosystem and we grow indignant as Melville maligns our cuddly behemoth. Of course, the journey of the Pequod is not to be read literally. The author is after far greater game.

Were the architects of our misadventure in Southeast Asia testosterone-driven men bent on domination? Yes, of course, many were though some were just simple, self-serving fools. Nor can Ahab be captioned only as a crazed monomaniac…though he was. He was a seeker of truth, as well.

Four presidents were complicit in the tragedy of our knuckle-headed misadventure in Vietnam. Their acts were committed in the Cold War context premised on the belief that this Leviathan called Communism would gobble up one country after another and darkness would descend upon civilized life. Instead, they created their own doom. They mistook a small country’s determination to shake off colonial rule, for the Communist dragon. Now, the Hanoi regime is one our favorite trading partners.

Ahab’s mission was revenge for the loss of a limb which Freud regarded as castration but more importantly to pierce the mask of Moby Dick, to destroy that which lies behind the face of so-called evil. His zeal was messianic but the imagined outcome was unattainable just as religious fanatics, with colossal wrongheadedness, obsess over an imagined godhead in whose name all manner of evil is enacted; crusades, inquisitions and virulent hatred of the other. 

Maybe it’s a stretch too far to grant a crazed Dulles, McNamara, Rusk and a bellicose Pentagon similar status as Ahab, of being knights-errant chasing an illusory dragon. In fact they were all part of an apparatus befitting an American empire.

Aside from the war crimes of napalm, defoliants, stacks of body bags and a nation torn asunder the tragedy of Vietnam was our excruciating refusal to come to terms with our role as replacement for European colonialism. When you think you are menaced by this whale called Communism you see whales everywhere and end up supporting every corrupt tyrant on the map who declares himself anti-whale.

It was a dark time in American history lit by some bright songs and burning draft cards and the emergence of a counter-culture. Yet just as Ishmael survived the wreckage on a floating coffin we are carried away in our leaking ship of state, still wounded, still haunted. 

Presidents and potentates require whales to stay in power. All they need to do is convince the ill-informed that they are under siege. If there are perceived barbarians at the gate they are a projection of his own barbarism. We have kept the rapists and felons out so that the rapist and felon can rule. 

Reagan had his 8-day whale of a war with Grenada as if the tiny Caribbean island were a threat to invade our frozen yogurt stores. The Neo-Cons under Bush had their own apparition obsessed with weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. 

Donald has set half the country against itself with the illusion of a diabolical deep state, painting government welfare programs as a monstrous force. 

Imagined whales are essential for tyrants and autocrats. I would argue that Bibi, like Ahab, is a vengeful hunter and his whale is Hamas. With a harpooned mind he has created an invisible demonic force impervious to extinction because it is an ideology which has seethed and festered for decades of humiliation, occupation and subjugation. 

Melville described his book (to Hawthorne) facetiously, as wicked as if he was possessed by witchcraft. In fact, his trespass was to dare go face to face with an imagined supreme being.

Ahab, like many among us, abhors the enormous unseen forces in tumultuous times and seeks simplistic answers. He was driven by a passion to confront the unknown and unlock the mystery. His failure defines existential man. Of course, we cannot know what evil lurks nor achieve perfect enlightenment, only strive to embody the divine or glimpse it as in a brief candle. 

Living / Dying

The coral tree outside my window is thick with green sleeves. The red conical blossoms are gone. They had their six weeks of fame with throats open wide and nectar dripping. Sometime in June they vanished, replaced by poisonous pods. Fortunately, the hummingbirds know when to poke their elongated snouts in for a drink and when to abstain.

At the same time large green leaves have been roused from their slumber, waking into verdant wakefulness. As throughout all life, it’s a matter of, Hello, I must be going. The curtain goes down at the same time as the curtain goes up. I know the feeling.

Like Schrodinger’s cat, alive and dead at once, we are in both the maternity room and intensive care. On a societal level, the death of democracy is much more in evidence than anything nascent. Yet while they are killing us (not so) softly with their song, I’m listening hard for the start of something big.

Meanwhile our planet begs for remedial care. We are losing over one hundred species a day according to some computer models while over 200,000 people join the human race daily. Make room for an additional two billion by 2050.

Schrodinger’s cat was simply part of a thought experiment set out to challenge Einstein (of all people) and demonstrate a fallacy of quantum mechanics. If this or any creature were confined in a box bombarded by electrons or any other lethal substance there is a point where it might be said to be both alive and dead, yet on observation this cannot be true. Beyond this oversimplification I get a brain ache. But the concept fascinates me at least metaphorically.

In the course of an ordinary day, living/dying happens, unremarked upon. Each day we may die a little and the next day, revive a little. I was recently told how, in conversation between two women, one became radiant from within as if being seen for the first time. New life, emergent, is no small thing.

 I take my cue from that tree busy making chlorophyll for green leaves and their day in the sun while those operatic flowers are hitting their high notes of the season with all corpuscles bursting, divas that they are.

Trash Talk

Alerted by the beep of breaking news 

I see his name on a continuous loop

tossing out a litany of puff, 

thanking us for attention to this matter,

the likes of which.. blah, blah

which muddies the muddle

as the green garbage truck,

upon which so much depends,

embraces the blue trash can

with its yellow arms like an enormous hug,

then lifts and dumps the barbed rambles

 into its hydraulic gut,

without any deliberation,

crushing ninety gallons of malice and blather

into a fraction of its thirty-ton cargo

which is why poetry is best as concision,

shucked corn, tops off the carrots,

the distillate, barely adjectival,

as it grinds rancid words into

hard-earned mulch

from which orchards may sprout

or even a thorn of a rose pushing up 

through the floor of his ballroom.

Fools

There was a time when one wondered if he was a clown, a criminal or a psychopath. One such a man was Adolph Hitler. Now we have one among us. Any notion of his being a mere fool was slowly dispelled. For a while the idiocy obscured the menace. His inanities and profanities are now met with impunity. In fact, his simplistic utterances delivered with a ten-year-old vocabulary seem to endear himself all the more to his base. It gives a bad name to fools.

The archetype of the fool has traveled from Greek literature through Shakespeare into the 19th century and beyond. There are simpleton fools and wise fools. In literature they have often been characters who speak truth to power. Kings tolerate jesters, at least up to a point. They are amused by harmless antics. On the other hand, there have been periods when retardation was treated with scorn and worse.

The Bard gave life to fools with Falstaff in Henry IV, to King Lear as well as the motley fool in As You Like It. At times they act out the primitive instincts or the disowned self of their masters. Their wise words can be subversive but allowed in jest. Shakespeare gave them a voice to reveal an aspect otherwise denied the audience. Profundity disguised as comic relief.  

The fool was always the outsider who reframed the situation, offering a new dimension acceptable to the power elite. Mark Twain got invited to sit at the dinner table with robber barons of his day. Morgan, Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller took his sarcasm, dealt in the haze of cigar smoke. The Gilded Age was added to our language by Samuel Clemens. Apparently, they welcomed his celebrity along with his wit.  

After WWI, fools found a home in periodicals, movies and then radio. Chaplin, the Little Tramp, poked his cane at millionaire tycoons on behalf of the working class, even though he, himself, was one of the richest men in Hollywood. The Marx Brothers also made their fortune playing audacious fools.

Audiences loved them and nobody more than the millionaire moguls of Hollywood. Never under-estimate the capacity of the power-elite to promote faintly subversive voices as long as they can monetize their presence.  

Dorothy Parker quipped, How could they tell, when President Coolidge died. Mort Saul, Tom Lehrer and George Carlin were far from fools as they jabbed convention along with words of Molly Ivins in print.

Political satire flourished on T.V. up until now. Our current monarch has very thin skin. The man has no decency, no empathy and no sense of humor. Wit directed at the man in the Oval is no longer permissible. It seems that the late night truth-tellers have a short lease from their corporate-owned networks. 

What the Tudor kings allowed has now been muzzled. The fool is dead; long live the fool.

Mystery of the Spheres

In the span of my decades, I’ve lived through the ripening of our sphere as if a round fruit which now, hour by hour, is rotting. Planet Earth reduced to a melon.

Cut open the orb at its peak and you release the sun and the moon, the music of the spheres. Can it be, what seemed like progression was, in fact, cyclic? The straight line, actually bent. The Allies and Axis of 1941, flipped five years later and now the enemy is ourselves. The crystal ball bounces and rolls.

Melons fiercely hold their mystery. I’ve seen buyers at the market knocking on their skin and listening as if they could overhear a conversation among the pits. I’ve grown accustomed to the unknowing. It reminds me of something close at hand.

I’ve been watching it for the past six days. I pick it up and feel for? For what, I don’t know. This morning, I spoke to it. Are you ripe and ready? I think I heard a high pitch beep but that may have been a garbage truck backing up. What the hell, I bought it last Thursday. If I wait another day I may have missed the propitious moment. Everything in its time.

There are no signifiers. No bag of waters breaking. No contractions at short intervals. Every birth is Cesarean. So now I am making my incision straight down the mid-sagittal line to eventually create perfect quadrants….as if the judge from Uzbekistan is scrutinizing my grip for Olympian gold.

One nation indivisible, we pledged and we were when I spoke those words during WW II. Today we are a divisible zig-zag, as is this fractious globe, subject to a thousand cuts.

I would grant this honeydew an 8.7. I think it was a day away from sublimity. I wonder if melons rate us on a scale ranging from feckless to reckless. He who hesitates gets mush. He who rushes gets a sort of potato.

With a little bit of luck, our lifespan peaks when the world is ripening. By that schedule I should have checked out ten years ago or maybe hang around for another ten.

In honeydew talk I would hope for the pulpy flesh, lunar-luscious, in its prime as it reaches its upward slope when it sings, no zings, as if summoning Orpheus with his lute in the lost language of melon.

 

Unforgetting

I promised myself I wouldn’t do this. But I cannot let the anniversary of the last days of Peggy’s life go unnoted. I celebrated her birthday on May 2^nd and now I find myself commemorating the way she lived her dying four years ago. She lived 100 years plus 100 days.

Over our forty years together, Peggy and I created a soil in which our love watered and sunned a garden. I find myself imbued with that love as I embrace my remaining years. When she died, grief felt to me like self-pity. Instead, I celebrate the gift she bequeathed. When I go, she said of my future, go for it. I have.

While under hospice care she continued to write poetry until a week before the end on August t5, 2021. She faced the east window and communed with a hummingbird while singing along with the Irish folk group, Celtic Thunder. Below are excerpts of poems she wrote leading up to her death. All are taken from her chap book, Two Is A Sacred Number.*

I’ve taken some liberties with the lines I chose. I have conflated the overwhelming love she radiated with her embrace of the ultimate unknown. Both love and dying, I believe, are aspects of letting go, a mysterious transport.

 

A love that springs from nothingness, with opulence expanding,

To welcome each day in the flourish of this enormity,

our constant wedding.

Love has its own arithmetic,

Knows only how to increase.

 

From this window, larger than these years

you bring me vessels for the insistence of green.

Through your eyes I see rivers to remind us

what keeps moving, fluid as bodies.

You have traveled me here, out of a thirsty night

through advancing dark, into a moist

and sudden incandescence.

Love flares from its invisible yes.

 

Flesh answers more than desire

I/you forget to be old.

A Mozart rondo filling me with now.

 

Through the crack in the bedroom wall,

Green mystery makes its way.

When you enter among monarch butterflies

what I see comes to this:

The tree-lit park, touch of silk

The taste of tangerines.

 

Where we have traveled has carried me home.

I find my way to the orange sunrise

Even at the ebb of my long life.

* Peggy wrote under her maiden name, Peggy Aylsworth. Her poetry books are available from Amazon.