non-fiction

On Going Deaf

/ wlm3 / 5 Comments

ear-trumpet

In the early ’60’s, as preadolescents (alas there were no “tweens” back then), we’d play a game in which our 11-year-old-selves would pose questions that featured awful binary alternatives: “Which would you rather do: slide down a razor blade into a pool of carbolic acid or kiss [insert name][1]?

Sometimes someone might pose a less silly question like “Would you rather be blind or deaf?” We’d seriously contemplate the awful alternatives, argue back and forth, weigh the good cons versus the bad cons.

Now that I’m practically deaf, I can assure you blindness is preferable. The sounds “deaf” and “death” are indistinguishable to someone losing her hearing.  Once it is altogether gone, you’re trapped in a silent wilderness of mirrors.

Bedrich Smetana

Bedrich Smetana

In September of 1874, the Czech composer Bedrock Smetana’s ears started ringing.  It worsened, crescendoed, went from high-pitched shriek to ocean roar, which eventually led to total trapped-in-a-mirror deafness, a sort of horrible relief.

Here he describes the process in a letter.

That ringing in my head! That noise! … that is worst of all. Deafness would be a relatively decent condition, if only all was quiet in my head. But the greatest torture is caused me by the almost continuous internal noise which goes on in my head and sometimes rises to a thunderous crashing. This dark turmoil is pierced by the shrieking of voices, from strident whistles to ghastly shrieks as though furies and demons were bearing down on me in furious rage.

In his late autobiographical composition String Quartet NO. 1 (aka “From My Life”), Smetana dramatizes this phenomenon with a sudden intrusion of a high E into the melody late in the 4th movement a couple a minutes before the end.

Here is the musical notation in his own hand:

Smetana_Quartet_I259

Listen.  Can you hear it? :

* * *

Even though my paternal great aunts suffered hearing loss — Aunt Polly was known to blast drapery rippling farts that she seemed unaware of — I prefer to blame my disability on Bruce Springsteen.  On 1 August 1978 we saw the Boss from the first row at Gaillard Auditorium in Charleston, a terrific concert from the first chords of the Bobby Fuller Four cover of “I Fought the Law” to the encore cover of Gary US Bonds “Quarter to Three.”  However, after the show and for two days afterwards I suffered a milder case of Smetana-like ringing in my ears accompanied by ear-canal itching.

Eventually, however, the ringing and itching stopped, but alas, ever since then my hearing has been in a state of decline.

* * *

In the late summer 2004, when I was visiting for the last time my ALS-stricken bosom friend[2] Tom Evatt, I couldn’t make out some of his whispery rasp, so I nodded stupidly as if I could understand what he was saying.

As I leaned towards him, his face darkened into displeasure.

“What did I just say?”

“Um, I’m not quite sure.”

“GET A HEARING AID!”

That was the first time I was caught out, and I can’t tell you how bad I felt deceiving Tom, but now it’s been another dozen years, and I often find myself nodding stupidly as I attempt to become a lip reader.  The good news, I guess, is that for 6 grand I might be able to get some help via a hearing aid, and the time has come for me to check out that possibility. Otherwise, I fear that among this generation of my students, my legacy will be that of the old deaf coot you could insult right in front of his face, and he would smile and sagely nod his head.

So then I can retire and become the old man in Hemingway’s “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”:

It was very late and everyone had left the cafe Chico-Feo except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him.

11th January 1963: A man demonstrating a long distance ear trumpet, at an exhibition of custom-made 19th century hearing aids in London. It is one of the many 19th Century hearing aids owned by Amplivox-Ultratone, and was originally made by F.C. & C.V. Rein & Sons. (Photo by John Franklin/BIPs/Getty Images)

[1] E.g., Phyllis Diller’s daughter Loquacia Quasimodo

[2] Wait along enough and antiquated clichés can come again to life.

The Past’s Future

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

 

Fritz Lang's Metropolis

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis

In the early Sixties, my maternal grandparents stayed in a subdivided Victorian house, the upstairs having been split into two apartments, the bottom story uninhabited and warehousing a portion of some wealthy family’s estate: furniture, rugs, an extensive library. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of books. In the side yard there was a well.  You could remove the cinder block and then the plywood and look down at your reflection in water.

Although not an adventurous child, somehow I gained entrance into those off-limit rooms downstairs, the furniture sheeted, the air stale. I’d sneak down there and explore. After repeated visitations and investigating some of the books I could reach on the lower shelves, I started secretly “borrowing” individual volumes of the Complete Works of Edgar Alan Poe.

Each slender volume, bound in red, featured sheer paper sandwiching occasional engravings of ravens, subterranean crypts, rats gnawing on ropes of a prisoner contemplating a pendulum. I’d take one volume at a time, terrified I’d get caught. Into the forbidden first-story space I’d sneak, carefully replace last week’s purloined octavo, surreptitiously flip through other volumes, and choose another based solely on the luridness of the illustrations. I was only nine or so, so most of the prose lay beyond my reckoning, but I could manage lots of the poetry and some of the stories (“The Tell Tale Heart,” for example). Unable to distinguish bathos from profundity, I became completely enamored of the singsong silliness of “The Raven,” devoting several stanzas to memory. “Annabelle Lee” could bring tears to my eyes. Something sinister lay beneath those works, so the whole enterprise smacked of trafficking in pornography – though pornography would not have been in my early Sixties vocabulary.

I’d smuggle the forbidden text and read it surreptitiously in bed because I knew my parents/ grandparents wouldn’t approve of my trespassing and borrowing without asking. I liked the musty smell of the books, the way the pages whispered when I turned them, the way the illustrations lay perversely beneath diaphanous paper. Despite the buxom space sirens who cavorted on the covers of pulpy paperbacks, Sixties sci-fi couldn’t compete with the deep purple sublimations of diseased consciousness that I found in Poe.

As a child, the musty past interested me much more than the disinfected future.

pit-pendulum.bmp-2

 

* * *

In those days, at my grandparents’ apartment, in the afternoons, we’d watch The Micky Mouse Club and Flash Gordon reruns. Flash Gordon appealed to me, not because it was futuristic, but because it was old-fashioned, serials my mother had watched as a redheaded girl at matinees during the Great Depression, the stories more or less Medieval, Ming the Merciless versus Buster Crabbe of the hyacinthine locks, a hero who could probably trace his lineage back to Perseus.

Occasionally, on the Mouse Club, we’d visit Tommowland for a glimpse at the wonders that the future might hold – if there was going to be a future. With Kruschev banging his shoe on the table at the UN and third grade atomic detonation drills, you weren’t so sure. Nevertheless, we would sometimes wonder what it would be like to live in the year 2000, calculating our ages when that distant day would arrive with its flying automobiles and uniform-like clothing.

The Future circa 1955

The Future circa 1955

Accurately imagining the future is not an easy task. I’ve written elsewhere about Huxley and Orwell and their relative prowess at prognostication. On the cinematic side, Fritz Lang and Kubrick deserve a nod. However, in my limited exposure to old-fashioned sci-fi and its forays into the future, I can’t recall anyone predicting the vast availability of information we now enjoy, which strikes me as the most meaningful aspect of the difference between yesteryear and now.

For example, if I were a bit wealthier, for a mere $6500 I could purchase that edition of Poe’s Complete Works I described above. Here’s a description:

New York. George D. Sproul Company. 1902. Lavishly bound in Publisher’s Deluxe custom, 3/4 burgundy crushed morocco and marbled boards. Gilt-tooled spine compartments with fleural motifs.Gilt-tooled raised bands. Marbled endsheets. t.e.g. 8vo. 5.5″ x *.25″. The Monticello Edition. This Edition Limited to only 1000 numbered sets of which this is #330. Illustrated throughout with delightful, tissue-guarded monochrome plates Editied by renowned Poe scholar James A. Harrison, the Monticello Edition of Poe’s Works is one of the scarcest of early compilations, with no complete set appearing at auction in more than thirty years.The 17 Volumes are comprised of: (truncated).

The wonder of it all! My cobwebbed memories come to life, a few keystrokes away! Yes, the volumes were red (okay, burgundy crushed morocco) and, yes, illustrated with tissue-guarded monochrome plates. (Looking for suitable illustrations for this topic, I discovered these volumes in a Google search after I had begun this post – the very volumes that I had treasured as a boy). In a sense, the past is at my fingertips because I can conjure its images.

In 2016, if I have a hankering to view a complete set of Flash Gordon serials, I can have Dale Arden and Ming the Merciless streaming through my computer in virtually no time. World classics of the public domain await plundering – in Latin for the scholar, SparkNotes for the slacker.

O, my baby boomer brothers and sisters, the future is now! Water pours automatically as your hand nears the faucet head; toilets flush, somehow knowing you’ve finished. I can talk to my son in real time and watch him sip a beer in Nuremberg as I languish six hours behind in the States awaiting our own cocktail hour. Somehow, the triumph of capitalism has enabled us to get stuff for free – whether it be the Aeneid or Skype.

Yet, the past still strikes me as more seductive, more fecund, as the future both expands and shrinks us, offering us worlds of information and entertainment, but distracting us from the glories of the natural world, the sunlight illuminating in steps your bedroom wall as you lie there not wanting to get up.

15598853

A Wordly Wise Wedding Feast

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

 

Kashmir Malevich's "The Wedding"

Kashmir Malevich’s “The Wedding”

 

Appetizer

Not surprisingly, Wordly Wise, the vocabulary series we use at my school, tilts big time towards those words brought over to England from France by William the Conqueror and his various cousins, i.e., words of Latinate origin. This imbalance, of course, makes perfect sense given the College Board’s predilection for polysyllabic words and that our students will be spending not an inconsiderable amount of their adult lives chattering away at upper tier cocktail parties.

Obviously, softening “cowardly” to “pusillanimous” at a St. Cecilia Ball might be judicious, especially considering the status of the target of the aspersion, and it’s not as if all failures-of-nerve are created equal. Throwing down your weapon and turning tail at the command charge is not the same as wincing your way through a racist joke without protest.

P-EN10-1211407The problem with Latinate diction, though, is that it often comes off as stuffy, to use an Anglo Saxon word, or pretentious, to use a Latinate synonym. You might even say – I’m sure someone has – that Latin appeals to the cranium/head, Anglo-Saxon to the viscera/gut.

Anyway, if you’re a new English teacher at our school, one of your many chores is to do Wordly Wise exercises, and at the beginning of a school year, if you’re an enterprising new teacher and headed from Charleston, SC, to Rhode Island to attend a friend’s wedding, you might decide to bring Wordly Wise along in your carry-on to bang out some exercises while you wait for boarding, wait during your layover at Baltimore, fly over the Northeast corridor, etc.

This scenario describes my new English colleague Emily Neilson’s weekend. Emily did bring her Wordly Wise along, she did do the exercises, but she also wrote a letter to her students describing the weekend’s adventures and in doing so used every word in Chapter 1 of the Book 8 Edition of Wordly Wise!

The piece is downright inspired, brilliant, a tour de force, yes!, so I pleaded with her to let me share it with you, which she graciously has.

(By the way, if any of my former students are reading this, I encourage you mentally to circle any Wordly Wise words you come across and see if you still remember them.)

Emily, take it away:

Emily Neilson

Emily Neilson

Entree

Musings, Off-and-Onhand: Worldy Wise Essay, Edition I

Good morning, my little English ensemble, vibrant with curiosity and intellect and Joie de vivre. As I sat at the gate of the Providence Airport yesterday watching the phalanxes of folks line up to board flight after flight, I worked on my Wordly Wise homework. Yes, people, don’t ring the tocsins and become rambunctious, refractory parolees all because you have learned that teachers must also endure the tribulations of homework. It is of tertiary importance in this moment, but it is true that the Sunday Scaries are known by all — old and young, men and boys, women and girls, large and small, short and tall — what a swamp of lyrical empathy, a paregoric that should assuage us somewhat from feeling totally disconsolate. And if you do indeed set out to break the trajectory of my story, I will corral you back with the figurative lariat I own as a teacher. I am the maestro – or is it maestra? – within this classroom, this cornucopia of learning. Anyways, there I sat at the gate, oscillating between my Wordly Wise and my phone, and I thought how you might enjoy a story from my weekend, and so I began to indite right there, at gate 19, in Providence, at 11:12 am, telling you about my weekend – a meteoric one – spent in the hinterlands of New England, witnessing the nuptials of my friend.

As you might know by now, one of my favorite maxims is to “throw kindness like it is confetti.” I am equable in that belief, steadfast in my semi-dogmatic notion that kindness is the thing that helps us mortals hold up the cosmos.

I, however, also believe that sometimes kindness is not the cure-all, and sometimes situations call for more acetic approaches and attitudes. So there I was on my flight starting the descent to Baltimore early Saturday morning when I felt a rogue hand creep onto my knee. The rogue hand was attached to the man seated beside me, and I wondered, what was he thinking? That I was an effete sort of gal? That my effeminate ensemble afforded him an itinerary for his hand to explore my knee? That when I asked him earlier, “Is that seat taken?” I had intimated some wish for his hand’s current oscillations or for some clandestine maneuvers later to come? That I, a woman, rode some kind of tame, precious, subdued palfrey? No, sir! I opt for the wild mustangs roving the Staked Plains, unbridled, beneath the biggest skies, because I am one of those wild mustangs! Desist your tactile infraction! What a stupid, insipid attempt to cultivate romance! Was I disconsolate, you wonder? Would I be his collateral in the enterprise? Some kind of feminine lien that he could use and abuse and lose? Would I devolve in my integrity and sense of self? What, no! Students, listen to me: I was vibrant in my fusillade, impeaching this scoundrel for his manual traipsing. I repelled his advance; I felt refractory to every ounce of this meretricious loser. I needed my mace, either to spray in his eyeballs, making them rheumy, or to club over his head and dash out his brains like the Roman Heroes do in scenes atop ancient, marble friezes. I refrained from asphyxiating him, but my counterattack had plenty of those motifs to do the figurative trick. I might not be a professor emeritus, but I am smart enough to believe that there’s a good kind of love out there to keep me from temporizing for such airborne garbage!

I wish to spend no more time on such filth, trenchant as I may sound now, and perhaps sometime down the road we will exhume the story and laugh about it together — I assure you we won’t have to exhume him. Or will we …

What I do wish to tell you is this: that in Little Compton, Rhode Island on Saturday afternoon, a svelte bride married a svelte groom, beneath ray upon ray of light that streamed through the big windows of a white church, sitting beneath a blue sky. But that’s not right because the sky wasn’t just made of blue that Saturday, but out of sapphire, topaz, turquoise, indigo. It was the firmament of heaven, overarching everyone who has ever lived and ever will. It was made out of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen. It was made from the Big Bang which blew all those bits at the very beginning into a trajectory which would eventually lead to him and her, and to you and me. It was a regular stone transformed into a small opulence and held, tiredly, in the hand of the lapidary who had stooped for hours at his wheel, chipping and chipping away to unleash a beauty he knew possible all along. Or maybe it was in another hand, in the quivering hand of a maestro as he holds on to the last notes in their last moments before cutting all that cornucopic, symphonic sound, creating a vast, sudden, and evanescent silence.

But in the late afternoon light on a Saturday in Little Compton, Rhode Island beneath one blue, blue, blue August sky, evanescent also means this: as the minister spoke to the couple and the congregation about love’s many forms, the man standing before the altar reached out through the air, almost imperceptibly, and without taking his eyes off the minister, and sought to find the hand of the woman beside him; and she, at the very same moment and without taking her eyes off the minister and also almost imperceptibly, let go a hand from her bouquet and reached out to hold onto his.

 

Photo Credit: Jessie Small


Photo Credit: Jessie Small

 

 

Schadenfreude: A Confession

/ wlm3 / 5 Comments

Carl_Spitzweg_-_Der_arme_Poet_Neue_Pinakothek copy

Yesterday, at the school where I work, I took a prognosticative multiple-choice test formulated to determine high school students’ strengths. I’m 63, familiar with the Delphic inscription Know Thyself, so I think I can accurately say that my strengths lie in dependability and my main weaknesses in impatience and impulsiveness – “the awful daring of a moment’s surrender” as tight-assed TS Eliot put it.[1]

However, as I clicked my way through the 70-odd questions, it slowly dawned on me that I’m not a particularly compassionate person when it comes to inconveniencing myself to actually help people. Oh, I don’t mind sending a check, but if I had the choice between writing ten thousand times in longhand I’m not a compassionate person of or spending a day with Habitat for Humanity helping to build a house for the poor, I’d opt for the writer’s cramp.

In the test I took, this question came up more than once: do you like helping people? I answered sometimes virtually every time. Of course, it’s certainly gratifying rescuing a toddler caught in a riptide (which I’ve done) but not so much joining an intervention for one of your junkie relatives. The bottom line is that, no, I don’t particularly enjoy helping people if it inconveniences me, so the test was effective in that it made me realize that in reality I’m  not all that compassionate, which I sort of considered myself to be.   Sure, I enjoyed helping the guidance department test the test, but I really had no choice. It was part of my job.

As coincidence would have it, to reinforce that self-assessment, four Team USA Olympian swimmers made a bad decision down there in Rio,. Of course, virtually every bad decision is the culmination of a series of bad decisions. E.g., lying about the robbery was a bad decision, necessitated in the mind of Lochte because someone had vandalized a restroom, which was a bad decision, precipitated by staying at a disco until 5 a.m., which was a bad decision, no doubt aided-and-abetted by the consumption of torrents of intoxicants, which was a bad decision, that over-indulgence a habit arrived at early on in their hotshot days as revered student athletes and not abandoned over the course of decades, bad decisions, ad nauseam.

A truly compassionate person, the Buddhist that I used to pretend to be, would feel compassion for the swimmers. He might recall some really stupid antics committed in the throes of drunkenness from his checkered past instead of schadenfreude.

Unfortunately, what one feels is what one feels. Let the great ax fall where it may.

[1] E.g., sending an angry email at 3 a.m., dropping down the cliff face of a wave you should know you can’t handle in a hurricane swell.

Bachelor Party at Chico Feo’s: An Anthropological Study

/ wlm3 / 3 Comments

chico bachelor party

 

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity as an anthropologist to observe a late afternoon bachelor’s party at Folly Beach’s little corner of the Caribbean, Chico Feo.

By the way, bachelor parties for centuries have been traditional components of mating and marriage rituals in the West. Whether you’re bidding “farewell to bachelorhood” in Munich at a Junggesellenabschied or in Arles marking the “burial of the life of a boy” at an enterrement de vie de jeune fill, you can be assured of one commonality: the Junges and garçons are gonna get shit-faced just like the lads in Liverpool and the dudes of Malibu.

 

Berlin Junggesellenabschied

Berlin Junggesellenabschied

Indeed, even though it was merely four in the afternoon at Chico Feo, a few of the entourage exhibited telltale signs of intoxication — sleepy, glazed eyes; mouths that hung open; wobbly legs. The first reveler in this condition I encountered kept bumping into the vacant bar stool adjacent to me.  Charlie, Chico’s world-class bartender, informed me with a scowl that these fellows were part of a bachelor’s party. It appeared that Charlie had already cut this fellow off.

I’d estimate these young men to be from the Northeastern United States, a section of the country in which good-natured mockery seems to be an ubiquitous social custom (see Tolerating Middle Class Northerners for Dummies). The bros bantered about slinging insults, ordering beer after beer, and slurping down in one swallow Chico’s delicious tacos as if they were oysters.

Most of these young men were large in stature, and even if they weren’t, they sported over-sized biceps and an array of body art ranging from rustic gunmetal blue barbed-wire wraparounds to high-end multicolored patterns that screamed Gauguin. It seemed, though, that some had acquired their muscular upper arms a while ago because now their abs resembled not so much washboards as loads of laundry.

It was interesting to try to determine who reigned as alphas of the cartload. One “dude” particularly seemed in charge, a vociferous twenty-something who looked as if his ancestors may have entered Ellis Island from Brindisi. He had an olive completion, aquiline beak, and jet-black short-shorn hair covered by a baseball cap worn backwards. He was conversing with some female patrons, boasting of the Adonis-like beauty of one of his friends, Paul, a ridiculously good-looking and fit fellow whose sandy hair fluttered in the on-shore breeze. Paul was sitting at the bar but looking in the opposite direction at the bacchanal taking place beneath the overarching trees that provide shade for Chico’s tables and chairs.

“These chicks want you to take off your shirt, Paul,” the alpha shouted in an accent that I’d place somewhere close to Newark.

Paul sat there passively grinning.

“C’mon Paul.   Show ‘em what you got.”

The females nodded their heads, and the ringmaster shouted, “C’mon, Paul, take off your shirt. Now! Show us your tits,” and a chant began “Show us your tits, show us your tits,” to which bartender Charlie, the real alpha, put an immediate stop. The ringleader opened his mouth and raised his arm as if he were going to continue, but Charlie’s stare short-circuited the bravado, and the erstwhile alpha dropped his hand and benignly smiled what I would call (removing my pith helmet of anthropological professionalism for a second) a stupid, shit-eating grin.

“Hey, which one’s getting married?” I asked Charlie.

“I don’t care,” he said shaking his head.

Unlike Dian Fossey or Jane Goodall, I didn’t ingratiate myself my this cartload[1] of not-so-fun-folks to follow them to their next destination, the Tides Hotel where they were wisely staying, eliminating even the need of Uber for their locomotion. However, I suspect that before the evening came to its inevitable end, these celebrants would witness some form of burlesque for hire, i.e., a stripper performing that age-old ritual.

I’ll leave you with this from Wikipedia:

In Israel, the bachelor party is called מסיבת רווקים. Such parties often feature heavy drinking and sometimes the presence of strippers.

Israeli מסיבת רווקים

Israeli מסיבת רווקים

Seems like a pattern, huh.

 

[1] Did you know you call a group of chimps a “cartload?” It’s a troop of gorillas and baboons, a barrel of monkeys, but a cartload of chimps. Go figure.

Deserts of Vast Eternity

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

shapeimage_2

And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; . . .
Andrew Marvell

“Me, me, me me,” squeals the toddler, waving his arms.

“Watch me!” demands the nine-year-old wobbling off on his bike.

“Who me?” snarls the adolescent, feigning outrage.

“Will you marry me?” asks the suitor, dropping to one knee, reaching in his pocket for the diamond.

“I need some time and space for me,” says the wife frowning, her back turned, her arms folded across her chest.

‘Why me?” wonders the patient in the hospital gown as his oncologist points to the mass on the x-ray.

“I gotta be me,” croons fedora-sporting Sinatra, a fading memory, a voice very few living have heard live.

Frank-Sinatra-duets-ftr

Some argue rather narrowly that world only exists in perception, i.e., that if there were no you, there wouldn’t be a world. Well, yes and no. If I had been killed in that horrific wreck on Hilton Head in 1976, the Braves still would have lost the ’91 Series – though for my sons non-Harrison and non-Ned, there would be no world.

Nevertheless, given that wherever we are is the center of the circle of perception – despite the fact that we’re mere dots on a map of blurred dots – each dot forms the center of our universes, 7 billion centers of 7 billion universes projecting outward from Europe, Asia, the Pacific, South America, the circles intersecting, forming collectively what is, or, rather, what seems to be.

1292515425-nytimes-nashville-census-map-2010

As our world becomes more secular, the surety of eternal bliss dwindles among the populace. As in the pagan world of Beowulf, for many the only path to immortality is through fame, but which one of us would trade places with Frank Sinatra or Steve Jobs?

No, as one of Flannery O’Connor’s characters put it, “You can’t be any poorer than dead.”

Given that oblivion looms for so many of us, no wonder we seek attention, desire to be noticed. So we have our photograph taken next to the Mona Lisa. We publish blogs, post photographs of our evening meals on Facebook, purchase red Corvettes to counterbalance the drop in testosterone. We struggle to leave a mark, whether it be a novel of lasting value, a beautiful building, a cure, an estate.

All the while the invaluable moments dissipate unseen like heat waves from the floors of deserts.

Mike Theiss: Tumbleweed and Patterned, Cracked Desert Floor, and Nearby Mountains

Mike Theiss: Tumbleweed and Patterned, Cracked Desert Floor, and Nearby Mountains

The global village underscores our ultimate insignificance. Back in the mists of time, among the few of our tribal community, among the savannas or in the forests, we didn’t seek notoriety but subsumed ourselves in rituals. However, now, like the toddler, we seek attention to prove that we exist. Once we’ve been gone a hundred years most of us won’t leave a trace – except for whatever genetic tracings can be found in our descendants or any bones that might show up in an archeological dig or construction project.

The paradox is that despite endless silence that awaits us, what we really need here in time is silence. Time to think. Time to feel.

images-1

The Age Old Anvil of Sorrow

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

broken

When things get bad for me, I tend to turn to literature in the paradoxical quest to both temporarily forget my personal troubles and to delve deeply into someone else’s. Obviously, great literature universalizes the human condition and reminds us that violence, disease, and sorrow have always been with us and will always be with us.

“Blood will have blood,”[1] like Macbeth says, as if commenting on this morning’s headlines.

His Russian cousin, Ivan Ilyich comes to realize that disease preys on the undeserving just as often as on the righteous (even on the exerciser, the non-smoker).

Meanwhile, despairing Manley Hopkins’ anguished “cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief/Woe wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing.”

No, to cop out with a cliché – I am not sorrow’s first rodeo. Antigone, Isolde, Hamlet, Emma Bovary, and Alyosha Karamazov have all been there (in despair), done that (grieved) – as have their creators.

antigone4

* * *

The Brothers Karamazov, which I finished yesterday, was June’s project, and Joseph Franks’ 5-volume biography of Dostoyevsky is July’s. The Brothers K offers all the vicarious sorrow anyone could ever desire – childhood abandonment, sexual exploitation, sexual betrayal, filial betrayal, insanity, alcoholism, adolescent angst, dark nights of the soul, and, of course, buckets of blood.

Dostoyevsky

Dostoyevsky

So far, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky’s life hasn’t been much happier. I’m only on page 70 (of 932), and already Fyodor’s mother has died of a lingering mysterious illness, he’s been sent off to a military academy he detests, and now his father has died, most likely murdered by his serfs, and Fyodor has a number of younger siblings who are now orphaned.

Dostoyevsky was a man of his convictions and held to them even when they were unpopular. Throughout his life, from coming to the aid of bullied cadets at the military academy, to reaching out and aiding the peasantry, he practiced what he preached. Or as David Foster Wallace puts it in his essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky”:

For me, the really striking, inspiring thing about Dostoyevsky isn’t just he was a genius; he was also brave. He never stopped worrying about his literary reputation, but he also never stopped promulgating unfashionable stuff in which he believed. And he did this not by ignoring (now, a.k.a.” transcending” or “subverting”) the unfriendly cultural circumstances in which he was writing, but by confronting them, engaging them, specifically and by name.

This, DFW maintains, certainly isn’t the case nowadays:

But Frank’s Dostoyevsky would point out (or more like hop up and down and shake his fist and fly at us and shout) that if this is so [i.e., our intelligentsia abjures ideological passion], it’s at least partly because we have abandoned the field. That we’ve abandoned it to fundamentalists whose pitiless rigidity and eagerness to judge show that they’re clueless about the “Christian values” they would impose on others. To rightist militias and conspiracy theorists whose paranoia about the government supposes the government to be just way more organized and efficient than it really is. And, in academia and the arts, to the increasingly absurd and dogmatic Political Correctness movement, whose obsession with the mere forms of utterance and discourse show too well how effete and aestheticized our best liberal instincts have become, how removed from what’s really important – motive, feeling, belief.

In other words, our current condition is one of fragmentation. Both major national political parties are splintering, and the gulf between them ideologically is like light years. Congressional districts twist and turn across maps like wakes from drunken boats. Although you might think that our digital interconnectivity might bring us closer together, it seems to me it isolates us, as we sit at the bar ignoring our friend as we stare down at the screen cultivating some personal obsession. In other words, we suffer from what Dostoyevsky might call radical individuality: I perceive the universe from my perspective; therefore, I must be the center of the universe. Other lives don’t matter as much – white, black, Muslim, Christian, Jew, infidel.

nc12

This attitude of isolation, of course, is a recipe for unhappiness; just ask the diva who demands eleven red roses in a blue vase every time she books a suite facing east in a luxury hotel where some tiny little infraction is going to throw her into a tizzy.

She suffers from disconnection, different but in some ways not unlike the radicalized homegrown terrorist or the arsenal-amassing militiaman or the divorced, underemployed middle-ager attaching the hose to his exhaust pipe.

[cue Barbra Streisand’s “People”]

Here is Alyosha Karamazov after the funeral of little Ilusha addressing Ilyusha’s friends at the end of the novel:

And whatever happens to us later in life, if we don’t meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones, do you remember, by the bridge? and afterwards we all grew so fond of him. He was a fine boy, a kindhearted, brave boy, he felt for his father’s honour and resented the cruel insult to him and stood up for him. And so in the first place, we will remember him, boys, all our lives. And even if we are occupied with most important things, if we attain to honour or fall into great misfortune — still let us remember how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are. My little doves let me call you so, for you are very like them, those pretty blue birds, at this minute as I look at your good dear faces.

[. . .]

I say this in case we become bad,” Alyosha went on, “but there’s no reason why we should become bad, is there, boys? Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I say that again. I give you my word for my part that I’ll never forget one of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes. Boys, my dear boys, let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha, clever, brave and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two? You are all dear to me, boys; from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember all our lives? Who, if not Ilusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!”

Love.

Unknown

 

[1] Especially when purchasing an assault rifle is easier than buying a tube of cortisone cream.

On Our Nation’s 240th Birthday

/ wlm3 / 4 Comments
Robert Fowler

Robert Fowler

In the 1980’s, my pal Robert Fowler had a radio comedy show on SC Public Radio that aired on Saturday mornings called The Hog Breeders’ Gazette . I remember fondly one 4th of July program that featured a parody of a school assembly celebrating the founding of our great nation.

One of the contributions to the mock school assembly was a brilliant piece of doggerel that portrayed western expansion as nothing more than undesirables, miscreants, getting booted out of a series of towns forever westward until they reached the Pacific Ocean. I wish I could replicate it for you, but the cassette upon which I recorded it has been lost, and even if it hadn’t been lost, I have no machine upon which to play it, from which to transcribe those rollicking rhythms and clever rhymes.

Alas!

Anyway, the piece eloquently poked fun at the concept of American Exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is the New Jerusalem ordained by the Creator of the Universe as a shining city on a hill to provide the planet with a safe haven for individuals to live their lives in the open spaces that freedom provides. Fowler’s poem portrayed the early populace of these United States, not as idealists seeking religious sanctuary, but as the dregs of Europe, losers, crooks, neer-do-wells so out of synch with their original cultures that they’d risk the wild, treacherous stormy ride across the Atlantic in a desperate attempt to escape. These were the scalawags that inhabit The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, candidates for tarring and feathering, ungovernable, uneducated white people willing to do about anything to line their own pockets.

dawe-taxman-1774-adjustment

Obviously, the truth lies somewhere in between. I suspect for every desperado there have been ten Irish or Vietnamese mothers sincerely seeking the honest opportunity of hard work and upward mobility, but the truth of the matter is that we are a difficult bunch to govern as the recent occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge suggests.

Of course, we Americans have been indoctrinated to believe that our government’s fortunate birth in the Age of Enlightenment with its skeptical and rational check-and-balances insures stability, but now, given arcane and undemocratic rules of the Senate, it seems as if these checks-and-balances might result in paralysis, stagnation. In the current climate, we can’t even get that body to convene to fill a Supreme Court vacancy.

And so, at least for now, both major political parties seem to be fracturing, heroin overdoses are all the rage among the middle class, victims of middle school bullying with shoulder-chips the size of Sisyphus’s boulder have easy access to automatic weaponry — but — and this is a very big but – there’s no more vibrant, alive, musically diverse, more interesting place on the planet, and I submit, we have immigration to thank for that and are very fortunate overall to call the United States home.

So happy 4th of July, dear readers.

 

Ants and the Karamazovs

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment
the author fleeing from an ant attack

the author fleeing from an ant attack

I’ve spent June with the Karamazovs.   In the literary category of most-fucked-up families, the Karamazovs rank right up there with Faulkner’s Compson clan and the mother-and-son team of Mr. and Mrs. Oedipus Rex.[1]   With the Karamazovs, we’re talking a toxic Freudian stew of father/son rivalry; religious/existential angst; vigils over putrid, decaying corpses; parricide – you name it.

paperbackFlipping through the yellowed pages of my 1957 paperback, I’ve been hanging out in monasteries, crumbling estates, filthy hovels, roadhouses, and prisons. Dostoyevsky’s celebration of suffering dwarfs whatever current troubles the reader tends to be enduring – in my case defending our household from an invasion of sugar ants (Monomorium pharaonis).

That’s right sugar ants, or, if you prefer, pharaoh ants, hordes of them, hundreds, if not thousands, marching dutifully in single file until they make the vertical descent from windowsill to counter top where they break up and swarm into earthbound clouds of tiny six-legged locusts.

If Dostoyevsky’s world is God-haunted, our bathroom is Darwin-haunted, man-versus-beast, and am I ever outnumbered, pitted against a very insidious, well-adapted enemy equipped with three types of pheromones, remarkable navigation skills, nesting strategies that subdivide colonies into non-competitive satellite campuses. To make matters worse, the colonies of these ants contain many queens, making it more difficult to eradicate a colony.

Monomorium pharonis with sugar crystal

Monomorium pharonis with sugar crystal

Sugar ants are tiny, a mere 2mm, about the size of a gnat. I first noticed them in the sink, feasting on a careless dropped dollop of toothpaste, so I guess you could say my carelessness caused the invasion.[2] Anyway, dispatching this first wave was as easy as retrieving tissue and wiping the intruders away. “Ha! Let that be a lesson,” I thought.

What I didn’t realize is that these fallen scouts had left a well-marked trail of pheromones pointing out to kinsmen the path to my sink. My next strategy was to spray the counters with peroxide, which instantaneously dispatched the unwanted immigrants, and I thought the puddles might act as a moat to dissuade others from visiting, but then again, I was mistaken.

The third strategy was successful. I mixed some Borax powder with fig preserves, placed the concoction on a piece of cardboard, and laid it on the counter. Man, what a cluster feast. It looked as if they were drunk, hundreds of them, inert, seemingly stuck, but still others were marching in single file, going and coming beneath the windowsill and through the screen.

That night I was shocked to discover that except for a few dead non-souls stuck in the preserves, that they were all gone, and the morning after no one returned, and now it’s been two days, so I am on the verge of declaring victory. Praise be for that slow acting poison borax, which the workers took home to their queens, who ingested it and with those royal deaths, the colony ended.

So now I can return in triumph to the Brothers Karamazovs — Dmitri, Ivan, Alyosha — and to the illegitimate Smerdyakov, whose stunted, dim-witted mother Lizaveta Papa Fyodor had his way with, impregnating her with the offspring that one day would put an end to him. In other words, return to a world far less organized, wholesome, and, dare I say, moral than the ant colony I destroyed.

[1] AKA the House of Cadmus.

[2] Or as Dmitri Karamazov might say, “”We’re all cruel, we’re all monsters, we all make men weep, and mothers, and babes at the breast, but of all, let it be settled here, now, of all I’m the lowest reptile.”
Karamazov-Banner

Mind-Forged Manacles

/ wlm3 / Leave a comment

shapeimage_2

C’est l’Ennui!—l’oeil chargé d’un pleur involontaire,
Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!*

Baudelaire “Au Lecteur”

In our culture of hyper-stimulation, silence has become the rarest of commodities. In the evening of an overcast, humid, post-solstice sabbath, a siren swirls off in the distance while some unseen high-pitched mechanical blower/sandblaster/particle-collider keens like an instrument of torture.

To me, a native of the Lowcountry, summer’s official beginning is a sad occasion. The best weather is already behind us. The drip drip drip of days will winnow with less and less daylight as the ambitious resolutions of early June melt in the heat like wax sculptures – the hot tub not repaired, the school work delayed, the evenings, mornings, afternoons dissipating inevitability into oblivion.

*It’s the soul-stunting boredom – an involuntary tear in the eye.
Smoking the houka, he dreams
of gallows. Reader, you know this exquisite malady.
You, hypocrite reader – my soulmate – my brother!

very loosely translated by I-and-I (who assures you it sounds great in French)

Ennui, by Askerov

Ennui, by Askerov

O, woe is me!

Even though I have access to an array of Robert Altman films I can stream instantly via Netflix, Nashville is not available; the beach that is exactly .32 miles away is teeming with vulgarians, the gorgeous vista behind our house muted by the cloud cover.

Bill Clinton, you can’t even begin to feel my pain!

clintonfrown460

Perhaps, the decadent, entitled, whining dissatisfaction sampled above stems from my disinclination to seek out silence. The East has provided us with techniques to subdue what zen masters call “the monkey mind,” i.e., the brain’s tendency to flash from idea to longing to memory the way a spider monkey slashes from tree to tree to tree.

spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi)

spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi)

One of the many beauties of Buddhism is that it provides its practitioners a regimen of exercises that transforms the mind – to switch metaphors – from murky strom-tossed waters into a glassy pool that reflects things as they are. Buddhism relies on self (not supernatural) reliance in the paradoxical quest to annihilate ego.

“If you understand real practice, then archery or other activities can be zen. If you don’t understand how to practice archery in its true sense, then even though you practice very hard, what you acquire is just technique. It won’t help you through and through. Perhaps you can hit the mark without trying, but without a bow and arrow you cannot do anything. If you understand the point of practice, then even without a bow and arrow the archery will help you. How you get that kind of power or ability is only through right practice.”
― Shunryu Suzuki, Not Always So: Practicing the True Spirit of Zen

Jeff League: Bonsai Tree with Blossoms

Jeff League: Bonsai Tree with Blossoms

Oh, but if right practice were only that easy! The changes are oh so slow. After all, according to Buddhist teachings, it’s a regimen that may take lifetimes rather than weeks to perfect.

Plus, the Faustian temptations – the webs (worldwide/ otherwise) that stretch out to snare us. Why assume the half lotus when I can watch reruns of What’s My Line? on YouTube or channel surf with a television monitor that provides images that seem more wonderful than the flora and fauna outside my window?

Not to mention the restive hardwired desires for sustenance and sex.

Nevertheless, as the adage goes, charity begins at home, and right practice is ultimately a matter of self will. In fact, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus offers a superb example of the dangers expressed at the beginning of this post – the tendency to shrug off the profound for the superficial, to squander precious moments in fruitless distractions. Remember, Faustus sold his soul to achieve greater knowledge, to understand how the cosmos functioned, yet soon enough started wasting his powers in trivialities, e.g., playing magical tricks on his adversaries and conjuring illusions like Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships/And toppled the topless towers of Ilium.
The 16th century equivalent of computer porn.

5 D. Fausti Buhlschaft mit Helena aus Graecia

Of course, the mind itself consists of the most delicate of chemical balances. What we so naively consider our substantial selves is an illusion conjured by a delicate mixture of amino acids, monoamines, acetylchlorine, nitric acids, etc.

A hit of illicit acid or a doctor prescribed dose of Prednisone can transform the seemingly substantial you from Jekyll to Hyde, begging the metaphysical/existential question who or what am I?*

Certainly, successful meditation must alter our brain chemistry in some mysterious way that leads to serenity. Here’s an anecdote from Ram Dass (aka Richard Albert) on the subject:

*Note to former students: Cf. Raskolnikov, Harry Haller, Stephen Dedalus, Oedipus, Hamlet, Othello, Emma Bovary, Milkman, Willy Logan, Merseault, Elizabeth Bennet, Raskolinkov, Mr. Kurtz, Dorothea Brooke . . .

In 1967 when I first came to India, I brought with me a supply of LSD, hoping to find someone who might understand more about these substances than we did in the West.

When I had met Maharajji (Neem Karoli Baba), after some days the thought had crossed my mind that he would be a perfect person to ask. The next day after having that thought, I was called to him and he asked me immediately, “Do you have a question?”

Of course, being before him was such a powerful experience that I had completely forgotten the question I had had in my mind the night before. So I looked stupid and said, “No, Maharajji, I have no question.”He appeared irritated and said, “Where is the medicine?”

I was confused but Bhagavan Dass suggested, ” Maybe he means the LSD.” I asked and Maharajji nodded. The bottle of LSD was in the car and I was sent to fetch it. When I returned I emptied the vial of pills into my hand. In addition to the LSD there were a number of other pills for this and that–diarrhea, fever, a sleeping pill, and so forth. He asked about each of these.

He asked if they gave powers. I didn’t understand at the time and thought that by “powers” perhaps he meant physical strength. I said, “No.” Later, of course, I came to understand that the word he had used, “siddhis,” means psychic powers. Then he held out his hand for the LSD. I put one pill on his palm. Each of these pills was about three hundred micrograms of very pure LSD–a solid dose for an adult. He beckoned for more, so I put a second pill in his hand–six hundred micrograms. Again he beckoned and I added yet another, making the total dosage nine hundred micrograms–certainly not a dose for beginners. Then he threw all the pills into his mouth. My reaction was one of shock mixed with fascination of a social scientist eager to see what would happen.

He allowed me to stay for an hour– and nothing happened. Nothing whatsoever.

Although we must cast a skeptical eye on anecdotal evidence, logic itself suggests that we at least give meditation a try, even if it yields something less than guru-dom. If it can help us shed delusions and rediscover wonder in the everyday, why not take the plunge? Meditation is religion neutral – the Southern Baptist and Shite Muslim (they have more in common than you might imagine) can practice meditation in honor of their respective deities.

It has in my negligible experience helped me to focus outside of myself to discover a certain interrelatedness, and the twenty minutes it costs can be scheduled between texting and checking emails – sometime during the evanescent day’s decline into darkness.
Just try to make sure you’re somewhere quiet.

photograph by Judy Birdsong

photograph by Judy Birdsong