Dr. John’s Dr. Johnston, Mad Props for the Malaprops

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Polonius:  What do you read, my lord?

 Hamlet: Words, words, words.

 

Samuel Johnston in 1755-ish published the first ever dictionary in English.  He accomplished this Herculean feat single-handedly.

Imagine, idle reader, the enormity of the project.  How would you go about collecting words and defining them with no dictionary to consult? Would you start with aardvark and work your way alphabetically to zygote or start with verbs, assembling the gamut, so to speak, from states of being to acts of doing, and once you’d worked your way from is to zapped, would you then turn to the vast realm of nouns?

I ain’t know cause my mind be blown.

In 1994 with the help of a writer named Jack Rummel, Dr. John (nee Mac Rebennack) published an autobiography entitled Under a Hoodoo Moon.

Like Samuel Johnson, Dr. John, who just now died June 6, was a lover of locutions.  Like James Joyce, Mac, the Dr. (also known as the Nite Tripper) found the English language inadequate for his needs.

“So weenybeenyveenyteeny.”   James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

“Posilutely honorifficatedly medicatedly doctoratedly yours thank you.  Dr. John, from the liner notes of Desitively Bonneroo.

Sam Johnson was an eccentric. Obsessive, compulsive.   Before crossing the threshold of door, he’d go through a series of ritualistic gesticulations and when walking down the street feel compelled to touch every single post he passed.

Mac Rebennack was also an eccentric and was no stranger to wild gyratin-i-ficatin’,  as he might put it.

I’m now reading Under a Hoodoo Moon, and it occurs to me that I could honor these two doctor heroes of mine by doing a little lexicography myself, i.e., by compiling a Dr. John dictionary, a handy go-to reference when you run across a term like junk-a-dope-a-nals  or marygeranium.

The project is underway, and of course, I’ll publish it here, free of charge, despite Dr. Johnson’s oft-quoted observation: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”

But, as Dr. John says, “You can’t shut the fonk up.  No, the fonk got a mind of its own.

Caricature of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. — Image by © Lebrecht Authors/Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis

The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse

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Crumbling civilizations and apocalyptic doom are all the rage.  I should know. They’ve been my shtick for the 8 years I’ve been publishing blogs.  As I decline into the vale of years, what could be more natural than to project my own serotonin-starved vision of bleakness onto the world at large, to float like a dark cloud above the carnival, to cast a shadow on the festivities?

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees –
Those dying generations – at their song . . .

I suspect that this tendency of the aged to proclaim hell-n-handbaskets is a biological imperative as old as agriculture.  Remember the Greek myth of the Golden Age? Grandmama’s tales of the good ol’ days back on the farm?  How the Coca-Colas of your youth tasted so much better hissing from the fountain with a dollop of cheery juice?  [I suspect that Great Grandmama’s was even more pleasurable packing that eponymous ( i.e., not-so-secret) ingredient].

[cue Abner Jay]

As my aging body slouches towards dissolution, the world fast forwards beyond my capabilities and understanding.  As I carefully negotiate the crowds, pedestrians rush past staring into boxes the size of cigarette packs, manipulating buttons with their thumbs.

Honk honk!

Pouring pollution from their tail pipes, vehicles the size of city states shimmer like mirages in the gridlock.  Tinted windows obscure whoever inside has jacked up Jay-Z so loud that the bass lines sound like King Kong pounding on war drums.

Back home, my television offers more channels that I have the strength and/or attention span to cycle through: kung fu movies, costume jewelry emporiums, forty-year-old quiz shows, twenty-year-old football games, infomercials on ab-crushers, propagandists posing as news anchors.

Not to mention the kids these days, tattooed and pierced, playing the exotic dancer on Instagram, fantasizing about vampires, ending every statement with an interrogative lilt, sounding all alike whether they hail from Harlan, Kentucky or Exeter, New Hampshire.

An electorate with the attention span of a muscle spasm.

Well, if biologically I’m in decline, then the world must be in decline.  Some corporate evil force is somehow manipulating us!

***

Back in my g-g-generation’s swaggering youth, we shrugged off atomic annihilation the way we did parking tickets.  Wisely, we didn’t fret over scenarios of nuclear winters and genetic mutations because it was more fun (and made more sense} to devote our springtimes engaging in the lovedance beneath batik bedspreads in hippie vans, dormitories, and/or seedy apartments.  The future existed as merely an abstraction.

In the immortal words of the Tams: Be young, be foolish, but be happy.

All too imminent horrowshow scenarios (e.g., getting drafted and sent to Nam) relegated more speculative disasters to paranoia’s hinterlands.  Our elders – as I do now – articulated the Roman analogies, only targeted the bacchanalia of Woodstock rather than the Trimalchio’s Banquet of conspicuous excess that characterizes Late Empire capitalism (my favorite whipping child).

Despite their self-decorations, today’s youth strike me as more concerned about our planet and future generations than we proliferates.  They wisely love their planet and understand the delicate balances that sustain existence.  They fear not the sudden nuclear explosion (which may be naive given proliferation) but the gradual erosion of resources and climate change.

I say bravo! Live for today as you think ahead,  mindfully turning down the AC before you climb the stairs with your lover. Tune out the hyperbolic curmudgeons (like me) and cultivate your gardens.

Be young, be wise, but be happy.  And save the planet!  Vote!

Goodnight, Dr. John, May Flights of Brass Bands Blow Thee to Thy Rest

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dr john keeper

Okay, Mac Rebennack’s dead, which means so is Dr. John, which means no more gumbo music, no more funkificated word coinages, no more “mos’ scociouses,” no more “desitively bonnaroos.”

Unique is too weak a word.  Dig this from his Nite Tripper days:

Although Dr. John put on great shows right up until recently (I’ve seen him three times over the last twenty years), I think his best album is 1974’s Desitively Bonnaroo.  Music critic Nick Deriso: “Even today, there’s really no roadmap for the crazy-eyed co-mingling of R&B, jazz, island beats, blues, boogie funk and hoodoo whackadoo splashed across this LP, recorded alongside fellow New Orleans legends Allen Toussaint and the Meters more than 35 years ago.”

I still got the copy I copped from a sidewalk record sale in ’76.  Take a peek at the musicians, if you’re interested, while you listen to a snippet of the title song.

The first time I saw Dr. John live was at an outdoor street festival, again in Columbia, and I’ll never forget his entrance, sporting canary yellow socks, bopping his cane on the sidewalk, strut-dancing his way up the piano to play and croak and banter.

After Katrina, my friends Jake, Keith, and my late wife Judy Birdsong saw him at the Newberry Opera house.  You could see Katrina had taken a toll, and he kept saying throughout the show, “They put me on psych meds.”  That was back in his way-over-weight days, and he occasionally got up from the piano and do these gyrations that didn’t quite qualify as a dance.

In 2013, I saw him for the last time at the Leaf Festival where he played the guitar. He had started out as a guitarist until he got a finger shot in a scuffle and turned to the piano.

dr on guitar

photo by Wesley Moore

Given his hanging out in smokey bars and strip clubs since his teens, his three-decade heroin addiction, his doing some time in prison, I doubt that Mac would ever dream he’d make it to 77, a lucky number.  At any rate, he follows Professor Longhair, Earl King, and James Booker, whom Dr. John once described as “the best black, gay, one-eyed junkie piano genius New Orleans has ever produced.”

So long, old friend. Gonna miss your music, gonna miss your rap.

jb_tragedy

James Booker

 

“Call of the Wild” Meets “The Man with the Golden Arm”

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Okay, Lefty.  What about this one?  There’s this German shepherd named Rolf working at LAX sniffing out dope, but the thing is, he starts to like the smell of the herb, wonders what it tastes like, and finally, one day loses his Teutonic dog discipline and tears into a bag of Acapulco Gold, wolfs the whole bag, starts seeing shit like black light bunny rabbits melting.

He’s instantaneously hooked. There’s nothing anybody can do.  They try everything: behavior modification, treats, punishments, but after that first taste, he’s long gone, addicted, unemployable, eventually let go, gets adopted, but busts out his backyard, his nose huffing, guiding him outside the city limits south to Flores where he spends every waking moment trying to cop.

This cat – I mean dog – has a world-class nose.  Can sniff dope out extraordinaire.  Becomes a pot pickpocket, gets the shit beat out of him a couple of times, but it’s worth it – he’s got to have it.  Loses weight, hair, looks scabby, his will-to-live vacates.  He considers throwing himself in front of a bus but then [cue violins] runs across a wino puking in a back alley, and in puke Rolf sees the face of Jesus. He eats the vomit, and after licking his chops, his mouth opens, and the words “Oh my God” come out loud and clear.

Rolf gets straight, spends the rest of his life talking to users, who think they’re hallucinating when a dog starts telling them what they already know deep down inside, but he assures them they’re not hallucinating, and a few of them follow in his pawsteps, so to speak, accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior, slip out of the chains of their addiction.

Getting people off drugs translates into some pretty powerful enemies.  One day a pusher named Roberto offs him, but Rolf goes to heaven, is the very first dog allowed in because dogs are basically amoral, no matter how much they seem to love you.  I realize this idea is unpopular, but it’s true.

I thought so.  Not believable.  Religious people won’t understand eating the vomit is communion, holy. I get it.  No hard feelings.

Well, the only other thing I got is even more unbelievable.  This reality TV star and professional wrestling promoter, who has a vocabulary of about 10,000 words, decides to run for president to drum up business for his brand.  The vulgarian is ridiculous, sports a platinum-dyed comb-over Teddy Boy do and tips the scales at 320. He has no intention of actually winning; it’s merely a publicity stunt, like I said, to hype his brand.  But the thing is that he kills his Republican competitors in the debates, mocking them to their faces.  It’s like, well, like professional wrestling: over the top, crass, stupid, the Red State Special. Even after he brags about his history of grabbing pussies, Evangelicals claim that God has sent him to save the nation.  He ends up winning the nomination, the presidency. Like I say, the talking Jesus dog is more believable.

My Last Class

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I guess it’s apt that I taught Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest for my very last class.  It was Wilde, of course, who claimed “life imitates art,” and in my case it was true, in a way, as I chose Hemingway’s Jake Barnes and Humphrey Bogart as my public masks, assuming the persona of a hard-drinking cynic, eschewing public tears as a failure of, if not character, at least temperament.  I didn’t weep at my parents’ funerals or at Judy Birdsong’s memorial service.[1]

So I was somewhat surprised to find myself yesterday in that last class on the verge of tears.  My friend and colleague Bill Slayton, a hell of a teacher, who is also retiring, asked if he could sit in, and I was happy he was there. The class had just finished Heart of Darkness, which was serialized in 1899, four years after the debut of The Importance of Being Earnest. I postulated that Marlow could be sitting on the deck of the Nellie in the River Thames telling his dark tale of jungle boogie, starring Kurtz and featuring severed human heads, while at the same time across town Wilde’s Algernon might be “tickling the ivories” and ordering his manservant Laine to fetch some cucumber sandwiches.

I suggested they were in the same town at the same time but in different centuries.

Bill talked of Tennyson and Browning and their raging against the decline of culture.  He quoted the last lines of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Wilde, he said, instead of tilting against the windmills of civilization’s decline, went with the flow, enjoyed the farce, embraced the titillation of sense organs and the idea that art existed merely for its own sake. [2]

The kids politely listened as Bill and I more or less had an adult conversation about art and civilization as the classroom clock wound down to dismissal.  As I wrapped up, I told them how much I had enjoyed teaching them.  Bill rose from his chair and said he’d done some calculating and over my career at Porter-Gaud that I’d taught over 30,000 classes and didn’t they feel privileged to be sitting in on the last one.  The kids were standing and clapping, and I was about to lose it until I managed to growl Yeats’ epitaph, “Cast a cold eye/, On life, on death/Horseman, pass by.”

I shook hands with them as they left.  A couple of the girls were teary eyed, but by then, my Bogie mask was back securely in place.

[1]Though behind closed doors for Judy I’ve done more than my share of sobbing.

[2]Until, of course, he found himself on his hands and knees scrubbing the latrines of Reading Gaol.

Commiseration Via Poetry

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antidepressant-Mirjana-Veljovic

Antidepressant by Mirjana-Veljovic

In college, back in the fall of 1972, my sophomore poetry teacher assigned our class the task to compile an anthology of contemporary poems that revolved around a common theme.  I chose despair because I reckoned that depression might be a common theme for poets, a notoriously withdrawn and navel-gazing lot.  I figured poems of despair, unlike, say, political poems or poems dealing with domestic bliss, would make for easier harvesting because they would exist in greater abundance.

So, I checked out anthologies and skimmed poem titles and promising poems hoping to amass thirty or so specimens to satisfy the minimum requirement. In 1972, Auden and MacLeish were alive, Sylvia Plath less than a decade dead, Anne Sexton about to kill herself in a couple of years, so many of the poems I looked at had been written mid-century.

Of course, I have lost my anthology, which was hand written and received a B (likely the lowest grade given), but I do remember two of the poems I included.  One was Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” whose rhymes and rhythms I liked and whose rather childish message was right up my cynical alley:

I walked out one evening,

Walking down Bristol Street,

The crowds upon the pavement

Were fields of harvest wheat.

 

And down by the brimming river

I heard a lover sing

Under an arch of the railway:

‘Love has no ending.

 

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you

Till China and Africa meet,

And the river jumps over the mountain

And the salmon sing in the street,

 

‘I’ll love you till the ocean

Is folded and hung up to dry

And the seven stars go squawking

Like geese about the sky.

 

‘The years shall run like rabbits,

For in my arms I hold

The Flower of the Ages,

And the first love of the world.’

 

But all the clocks in the city

Began to whirr and chime:

‘O let not Time deceive you,

You cannot conquer Time.

 

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where Justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

 

‘In headaches and in worry

Vaguely life leaks away,

And Time will have his fancy

To-morrow or to-day.

 

‘Into many a green valley

Drifts the appalling snow;

Time breaks the threaded dances

And the diver’s brilliant bow.

 

‘O plunge your hands in water,

Plunge them in up to the wrist;

Stare, stare in the basin

And wonder what you’ve missed.

 

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

 

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes

And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,

And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,

And Jill goes down on her back.

 

‘O look, look in the mirror,

O look in your distress:

Life remains a blessing

Although you cannot bless.

 

‘O stand, stand at the window

As the tears scald and start;

You shall love your crooked neighbour

With your crooked heart.’

 

It was late, late in the evening,

The lovers they were gone;

The clocks had ceased their chiming,

And the deep river ran on.

 

 

auden

WH Auden

The other poem I remember including, a much better poem, is Archibald McLeish’s, “You, Andrew Marvell.”  As it turned out, the very next year I would hear MacLeish read the poem in person, he who was born the year that Tennyson died.

You, Andrew Marvell

And here face down beneath the sun

And here upon earth’s noonward height

To feel the always coming on

The always rising of the night:

 

To feel creep up the curving east

The earthy chill of dusk and slow

Upon those under lands the vast

And ever climbing shadow grow

 

And strange at Ecbatan the trees

Take leaf by leaf the evening strange

The flooding dark about their knees

The mountains over Persia change

 

And now at Kermanshah the gate

Dark empty and the withered grass

And through the twilight now the late

Few travelers in the westward pass

 

And Baghdad darken and the bridge

Across the silent river gone

And through Arabia the edge

Of evening widen and steal on

 

And deepen on Palmyra’s street

The wheel rut in the ruined stone

And Lebanon fade out and Crete

High through the clouds and overblown

 

And over Sicily the air

Still flashing with the landward gulls

And loom and slowly disappear

The sails above the shadowy hulls

 

And Spain go under and the shore

Of Africa the gilded sand

And evening vanish and no more

The low pale light across that land

 

Nor now the long light on the sea:

And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift how secretly

The shadow of the night comes on …

 

Unknown

Archibald MacLeish

Sometimes, like this morning, when sleep has stood me up and I don’t feel so hot mentally, I seek a dark poem with which I’m not familiar as a way to commiserate with a stranger who might have it worse than I-and-I.

And lo and behold I discovered this poem by Jane Kenyon a couple of hours ago. Jane Kenyon, who died of leukemia, was the subject of the superb book-length elegy Without by her husband Donald Hall.  I read the poem in the New Yorker in the mid-Nineties right after I had recovered from a serious case of clinical depression. You can read one of the poems from the collection here, but I would love to share with you Jane’s poem, which I find profound and beautiful:

HAVING IT OUT WITH MELANCHOLY” BY JANE KENYON

  1. FROM THE NURSERY

When I was born, you waited
behind a pile of linen in the nursery,
and when we were alone, you lay down
on top of me, pressing
the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on
everything under the sun and moon
made me sad — even the yellow
wooden beads that slid and spun
along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude.
You ruined my manners toward God:
“We’re here simply to wait for death;
the pleasures of earth are overrated.”

I only appeared to belong to my mother,
to live among blocks and cotton undershirts
with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes
and report cards in ugly brown slipcases.
I was already yours — the anti-urge,
the mutilator of souls.

  1. BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin,
Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax,
Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft.
The coated ones smell sweet or have
no smell; the powdery ones smell
like the chemistry lab at school
that made me hold my breath.

  1. SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND

You wouldn’t be so depressed
if you really believed in God.

  1. OFTEN

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner
as seems adult
(I mean I try to wait for dark)
in order to push away
from the massive pain in sleep’s
frail wicker coracle.

  1. ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT

Once, in my early thirties, I saw
that I was a speck of light in the great
river of light that undulates through time

I was floating with the whole
human family. We were all colors — those
who are living now, those who have died,
those who are not yet born. For a few
moments I floated, completely calm,
and I no longer hated having to exist

Like a crow who smells hot blood
you came flying to pull me out
of the glowing stream.
“I’ll hold you up. I never let my dear
ones drown!” After that, I wept for days.

  1. IN AND OUT

The dog searches until he finds me
upstairs, lies down with a clatter
of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing
saves my life — in and out, in
and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .

  1. PARDON

A piece of burned meat
wears my clothes, speaks
in my voice, dispatches obligations
haltingly, or not at all.
It is tired of trying
to be stouthearted, tired
beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine
oxidase inhibitors. Day and night
I feel as if I had drunk six cups
of coffee, but the pain stops
abruptly. With the wonder
and bitterness of someone pardoned
for a crime she did not commit
I come back to marriage and friends,
to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back
to my desk, books, and chair.

  1. CREDO

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work
but I believe only in this moment
of well-being. Unholy ghost,
you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you’ll put your feet
on the coffee table, lean back,
and turn me into someone who can’t
take the trouble to speak; someone
who can’t sleep, or who does nothing
but sleep; can’t read, or call
for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do
against your coming.
When I awake, I am still with thee.

  1. WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

Unknown-1

Jane Kenyon

Happy Hump Day!

 

 

 

A Mother Day’s Message

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Lisbon, Portugal

I’ve never been one to celebrate what I call Hallmark Card holidays, i.e., money producing scams concocted by our Capitalist non-tax-paying overlords to cash in on sentimentality.

“Shit, I forgot it was tomorrow’s First Ex-spouse Day!  I better overnight Brandi a comical tee shirt.”

Once my late wife Judy Birdsong became a mother and the boys were old enough, a mock tradition arose in which we designated Mother’s as a day when Judy would work extra hard to make us happy.

Mother’s Day would begin with undesired sex, followed by her producing a delectable brunch of eggs benedict, cheese grits, buttered toast.

Don’t get me wrong, it was tongue-in-cheek; I cleaned up the kitchen mess, washed, and put up dishes. However, at some point we quit exchanging gifts for Mother’s and Father’s Day.  Late in both my mother’s and Judy’s life, we took MeMaw to a jazz alfresco Mother’s Day brunch underneath majestic live oaks in a little place in Summerville.  So we did end up celebrating in a way.

On Mother Day’s Eve two years ago, Judy announced it’s time “to get this show [of dying] on the road,” and, sure enough, at four something o’clock the next day she was gone.

I am very grateful for a few things: she walked to her death bed was never incontinent and gave up the ghost peacefully with her eyes closed.  She was absolutely unafraid to die, which helped the boys and me enormously.

Judy was a stellar mother: loving, non-nagging, even-tempered, sanely un-overprotective, considerate.  Her dying on Mother’s Day has managed to make the day a hallmark in the lives of Harrison, Ned, and me.

Now Mother’s Day is our day to celebrate her life.  It’s real now.

Retirement

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“My Lonely Room” by Jerry Cordeiro

My mother’s family has produced an uncanny number of recluses.  For example, my Aunt Virginia spent three-quarters of her youth holed up in her room in a rocking chair listening to the same Barbara Streisand albums over and over and over again.  Eventually, she transitioned into a halfway house for mentally ill, which required her to coexist with others, but she later was liberated to a subsidized apartment where she resumed her Emily Dickinson like existence. Three people besides her immediate family attended her funeral. [1]

Virginia at a New Years Eve party in 1964

Her father, whom we called Kiki, also retreated almost full-time to his bedroom.  There he listened to the radio (Paul Harvey, baseball games) or played the ukulele while crooning Hawaiian songs and/or yodeling. In his later years, he took his meals in that room where he stacked dirty plates on the floor next to the door for my grandmother to retrieve and wash after he had consumed the country meals she prepared and delivered.

In his sixties, Kiki began acting oddly, putting his alarm clock upside down on his bedside table, mowing the lawn at five a.m.  Eventually he was placed in a home in Columbia called Crafts-Farrow.  I was in college in Columbia at the time, so I borrowed my girlfriend’s car to visit him.  I met him in a large room where other patients and family members milled around.

He immediately recognized me and started relating hard-to-believe tales of the abuse he was suffering.  He said, “Rusty, help me escape. Ask them if we can go for a walk; then we can ride away.  Just let me out on the side of the road.  You’ll never have to see me again.”

I explained that he’d get better if he stayed there. As I was leaving, I asked a fat lady at a desk near the door to keep an eye on him, explained that he was planning to escape, and she let out a maniacal, unhinged laugh.  Ends up she was a patient herself.

The good news is that he did get better and returned to Summerville and the house and [mocking cough] enjoyed a much better attended memorial service.

His son, my Uncle Jerry, worked on a spy ship tracking Soviet missile launches and had purchased the house where they lived.  When he retired, he also spent the majority of his time alone in his room, which was more like a suite, on the opposite end of the house from his father.  My grandmother had her own room, so essentially, you had this nuclear family who had little to do with each another living together in their separate cells.

My grandmother was the exception.  She spent her days in the living area watching television from dawn until the Indian test pattern shut things down after The Tonight Show starring Jack Paar and later Johnny Carson. One spring when I was in grad school, I visited and was almost blown out of the door by the hotness blasting from a gas heater even though the temperature outside was in the seventies.  Obviously, though not ensconced in her room, she didn’t get outdoors very often.

My mother, on the other hand, was extroverted and vivacious. She was the only sibling to have children. In the summers, she took us to the Curve In Pool or the beach and loved yard work.

Although I’m not geared for extended periods of solitude, I can appreciate its appeal. In my case, I’d opt for a darkened room with no radio and no Streisand, just a grandfather clock and a never-ending supply of camphor-soaked handkerchiefs in honor of Faulkner’s Mrs. Caroline Compson. I’d lay the handkerchiefs upon my furrowed forehead as the clock audibly ticked away seconds and marked with chimes the quarter hours and knelled away the hours — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve — while the planet rotated and revolved its way into my oblivion.

“Hey, Wes, have any plans for retirement?”

“Yeah, I plan to take it easy.  Hey, know where I might be able to cop some camphor?”

[1]You can read about how he disposed of her ashes here.

 

A Mean Case of the Sunny Sunday Morning Blues

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Suffering from a bad case of the Sunny Sunday Morning Blues, I slouched across the hall from our boudoir to my drafty garret/book depository and composed a boring blog post that interpreted the Eden myth as a mythological explanation for the loss of leisure following the transition from food foraging to agriculture.

[Yawn]

I cited scripture:

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

And

“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

I argued hunting and gathering were fun, citing statistics (“36.82 million hunting licenses, tags, permits and stamps were issued in 2017”).

[Yawn]

I pointed out that in the 21stcentury North Americans actually pay their hard earned money to pick strawberries and referenced a study that found “[a]nthropometric comparison between !Kung foragers in transition with settled Kavango horticultural pastoralists in Namibia indicate that the move from nomadic foraging to settled village life had deleterious effects on nutrition status for the !Kung.”[1]

[Yawn]

I commented on life expectancy:

Foragers often have long lives compared to people in the industrial societies of the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Richard Lee discovered that 10% of the San were over 60 years of age and the elderly, blind, senile, and crippled were supported by their families.  In the United States today, 10-15% of the people are over 60 and life expectancy is in the low to mid 70’s.  However, living to an advanced age in the Western World is a very recent trend primarily resulting from modern medicine.  In 1900, the average life expectancy in the United States was only 50.  At the time of the American Revolution, it was 35.  By comparison, the San lived relatively long, healthy lives.[2]

[Yawn]

I marveled that, according to the Kuhn Academy website, “[Foragers] spent “a large portion of their time in ‘leisure’ activities — conversation, joking, singing, and dancing. Decisions were reached by consensus, with women having relative equality with men. Chiefs were designated, but they had little additional power.”  In other words, food foragers enjoy an egalitarian society.

Truly paradise lost, I was going to argue: time not diced into ever-disappearing units of 60 – no Sunday morning blues — but a life imbued with meaning and imbedded in nature where rituals reinforce and playfulness abounds.

However, before I finished the post, my son Ned called me from Nuremberg for our weekly chat.  In the course of catching me up, he mentioned that he had attended a lecture entitled “Boobalicious?!  Production of the feminine breast in the comic medium” where he learned that comic villainesses ten to have firmer, higher breasts than their softer, more supple nemeses, heroines.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that foragers don’t have comic books and that they don’t fetishize breasts.  In other words, that their lives aren’t that great after all.

So farewell, food foragers, hail conical Mammalia! [3]

[1]Kirchengast, S. (1998). Weight status of adult !Kung San and Kavango people from northern Namibia. Annals of Human Biology, 25, 541–551.

[2]https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/subsistence/sub_2.htm

[3]Now that’s a subject I could sink my teeth imagination into.

Curiosity

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

The experts – those focused folk whose curiosity has prodded them to explore and conquer narrow realms – inform us that curiosity is not an instinct but a drive, whether primary (innate) or secondary (learned) they can’t agree.  Curiosity’s strange doubleness – it can be good or bad, can lead to cures or kill the cat – is imbedded in its etymology, from L. curiosus “careful, diligent; inquiring eagerly, meddlesome,” akin to cura “care” coming to English via the Normans from O.Fr. curios “solicitous, anxious, inquisitive; odd, strange.”

On the other hand, we have to grant that instincts are good, given that they’ve been selected for survival.  Unlike a drive, an instinct is a fixed behavior, inflexible, the compulsion that impels your dog to wallow in rotting carcasses whenever the chance occurs.  He’s not curious, not wondering what it feels like to immerse himself in that putrefied puddle of dead pelican. No, instinct compels him to mask his smell to stalk his prey more effectively (even though he’s on a supervised walk and has never even successfully killed a cockroach).

Furthermore, this instinct to swaddle himself in stench will never succumb to your vain attempts at behavioral modification; e.g.,  no matter how many times you blast him with the garden hose.  No matter how many times you batter him with Anglo-Saxon epithets worthy of Jerry Lee Lewis with his hands smashed in the door of a Cadillac, you’ll not be able to dissuade your dog from rolling around in rot.

Behavior born of curiosity, however, can be deprogrammed; e.g.,  sticking his nose in a corner and having it snapped by a rattrap might dissuade Mr. Dog from poking his snout there again.

No, if curiosity were an instinct, we’d have no choice whether or not to enter that peep show on Heart Attack and Vine that promises nude contortionist siamese twins who can twist themselves into chinese characters that foretell the future.

No, we walk on by furtively glancing, placing our hands over our pocketed wallets or clutching tighter our purses.   We may wonder what it’s like in there, but most of us don’t wander in, even if we’d somehow tailed Tom Waits down the dark end of the boulevard.

Therefore, because of its double nature, we don’t really classify curiosity as a virtue, although without it, life is arid, impoverished. Alastair Reid’s poem nails the paradox:

 

Curiosity

may have killed the cat; more likely

the cat was just unlucky, or else curious

to see what death was like, having no cause

to go on licking paws, or fathering

litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

 

Nevertheless, to be curious

is dangerous enough. To distrust

what is always said, what seems

to ask odd questions, interfere in dreams,

leave home, smell rats, have hunches

do not endear cats to those doggy circles

where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches

are the order of things, and where prevails

much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity

will not cause us to die–[*]

only lack of it will.

Never to want to see

the other side of the hill

or that improbable country

where living is an idyll

(although a probable hell)

would kill us all.

Only the curious

have, if they live, a tale

worth telling at all [. . .]

How sad to take someone’s word for it without doing a little digging, to believe an inherited, unexamined ideology.  To sit in front of Fox News slurping Kool-Aid or believing that the cosmo adheres to Marxist economic principles.

*Well, unless we’re really stupid. Google “Darwin Awards.”

In my experience, the most curious students have been the happiest.  I’m thinking especially now of Willy Schwenzfeier, who seemed equally fascinated by the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the denizens of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.  Sitting up front, he was insatiably curious, asking questions, smiling constantly.  I dare say that Willy is probably one of the least bored individuals on the planet.  Whether this wonder of the world was inherent or fostered by his parents, I cannot say, but I do know that it served Willy well in high school.  To be curious is to be entertained, and, let’s face it, despite John Berryman’s great “Dream Song 14″  boredom amounts to an inability to ignite curiosity.

We should, however, like Odysseus, exercise caution in our curiosity, to make sure we’re securely lashed to the mast and all the shipmates’ ears are plugged with wax, and that if we decide to slip into that peep show to keep an eye on the exits and a hand on that wallet or purse.

“Odysseus and the Sirens”, 1902, by Otto Greiner