Tonic of Wldness

“We need the tonic of wildness,” Thoreau says, and I received a double dose not too long ago.

I was coming home from work and turning onto my street, where I live on a small square of property located in the small square of a neighborhood touched on all sides by the small squares of other neighborhoods which are themselves contiguous with the small squares of other neighborhoods—all of which are encompassed by the square of a small city.  In my small square of a neighborhood, we all groom and landscape our yards.  We all put out seasonal decorations.  We all keep our houses in good repair and make them attractive—bowerbirds not just feathering our nests but adorning them, too.  We all are friendly.  We are good neighbors in a tidy, tucked, fob pocket of a neighborhood.

As I approached my driveway, a deer, a six point-antlered stag, dashed across my neighbor’s front yard, stopped on my driveway, and stared at my house.  He stuttered his feet slightly, looked at me as I sat in my idling pickup at the foot of the driveway, then looked back at the house, disquieted, it seemed to me, at being half enclosed in the semi-square L formed by the house and garage, as if my house were an unanticipated obstacle in his intended route, as if it stood between him and the where he desired to be, an unhurdlable here hindering his arrival at there. 

He stared.  I watched, absorbed, taken from myself, made a secret sharer.  And in the tight knot of my gazing, in the compressed energy of my attention, I felt myself receding, a mere armature of my looking, all but undone, precariously present, little more than a sound check, a bit of static, an trace, a dwindled witness of something—I don’t know what exactly, or even approximately, but I knew there was something to know—something crucially beautiful and essentially true.  I wanted the house and garage to evaporate, to crumble to the ground, to go up in smoke, to be spun away in a tornado, to be out of his way.

But he was wiser.  Glimpsing the path around the garage, he trotted over, stopped, then bolted away, a sculptural presence suddenly released into a kinesthetic burst, a conjuration of muscled grace, an uncoiled spondee of strength, a strength that moved the prophet Habkkuk to implore God for “deer’s feet” to traverse and surmount the “high hills” of his life.  I imagined the stag crossing my backyard, out of my neighborhood and into the next, and the next’s next, then through the deserted fairgrounds, then beyond the limits of the city, through the corn fields, until entering, ungridded finally, unexposed at last, the forest depths.

His neighborhood.  To watch us as we sometime or other pass through, and struggle to get our bearings, and, maybe, right ourselves.

 

 

 

 

Storm and Stress

It arrived, just as the meteorologist predicted, like a meteorological marauder, like an atmospheric Visigoth, the storm, a screaming knot of near-hurricane energy, pushing before it the alluvium of destruction and grief it had caused in its getting here, depositing it in my town, in my neighborhood, at my house, that splotch of angry red on the dual polarization radar now transfigured from image to clamor and blast, from pixel to furying rain, to howling straight-line winds, to hail, like a fusillade of miniballs, battering roof and window.    

The town’s warning siren sounded, and Kathy and I scurried to the basement.  We listened to the storm’s roaring monologue.  There is nothing baroque about the language of such a storm: it speaks the tongue of sheer and indifferent power.  Pulling a chair under a north-facing window, I stood and watched the wind thresh the trees.  This was no west wind like the poet Shelley described, one to quicken dead thoughts.  At 85 miles per hour, with peak gusts reaching near 100, the wind quickened only dread thoughts.

In his “Personal Narrative,” Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards confesses that he “used to be uncommonly terrified” of storms.  After his conversion to a “divine sense” of things, however, such storms “rejoiced” him, he “felt God” when they appeared, heard in them God’s  “majestic and awful voice.  I can muster no such faith; the voice I hear hammers in the mouth of the sky like a mad bell clapper.  The storm does not rejoice me; it stresses me—“sturm and drang,” literally.

Why my heart-plunging apprehension, my stomach-pit-churning alarm?  I’ve been through this before.    I own a heavily treed double lot.  The trees are very old, very large, and very tall; they have very large branches; they surround my house and line the backyard and back lot. Any storm categorized as severe can, and has, caused damage to those trees, sometimes minor, sometimes extensive, and almost always requiring the use of a chainsaw to clear—a tool that I’ve never been entirely comfortable using, not from fear so much as wariness, the tense awareness of the potential jeopardy involved in wading chainsaw-laden into a mass of entangled limbs.

I worry about structural damage to the house and roof should one of those very old, very large trees fall on my house.  I cannot blot from my memory the many news stories I have seen of houses crushed by uprooted trees, of families suddenly homeless, their lives suddenly measured by droppers, by thimbles and teaspoons, robbed by chance, by freakish accident, by blind randomness, of the domestic rituals and familiar routines that tame time, allow us to dwell in it and, in a manner, control its always onward passing.  

And then there is the banditry of time and stamina in cleaning up.  The chainsaw hangs heavy in the hands, wearying arms and shoulders.  Backs ache with bending.  Legs grow leaden.  Branches are trimmed, sawed; often they must be leveraged into a safe position for cutting to prevent the saw chain from binding or the fall of other, intertwined branches.  The resulting debris must be hauled to the curb and stacked in manageable piles for a city crew to pick up.  Another near hurricane several years ago struck my property like a detonation, damaging at least a dozen trees and taking me three weeks of after-work and weekend labor to clear.  This most recent storm, the one that bivouacked Kathy and me in the basement, would be mild by comparison: it sundered a multitrunk maple in the back lot, casting half of one of the 100-foot trunks and a 20-foot branch to the ground, and costing me a day and a half of toil on sodden ground to clean up.  There is no grace in this work, no heralding mystery, nothing especially affirmative.  It is only strength-pillaging, time-vandalizing drudgery.  As the poet Rilke says, “Endurance is everything.”

Huddled in the basement, waiting for the storm’s tick to tock, I realize I have no capacity for anything but huddling; nothing to do but hoard my foreboding.  There is no negotiation with reality here: I am caught up in the dynamics of implacable and impersonal forces, at the mercy of temperature changes, of high and low pressure gradients, of warm and cold air convection.  I can do nothing but seek shelter, feel a hectoring apprehension, and ponder a basic arithmetic question: what, when it’s over and I step outside, will it all add up to?  To what will I be commandeered? 

And then I will begin, again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do Sunglasses and Masks Make Us Less Moral?

Wearing sunglasses makes a person less generous, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.  Wearing big sunglasses makes a person more less generous.   And masks?  Well, forget about it: moral behavior gets heart-staked, and the id comes stomping up the basement stairs and burst into the living room to the tune of Romp and Circumstance.

The researchers theorize that obscuring the face, even if only partially, loosens the inhibitions that tie us to social convention. 

Really? 

Evidently, the researchers  don’t remember  those sunglassed Watergate impresarios of conspiracy, perjury and obstruction of justice, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, on the cover on “Newsweek” magazine.   They must not have not seen Paul Newman’s film “Cool Hand Luke;” otherwise, they’d have known how  menacing, how appallingly sinister, sunglasses, especially mirrored ones, can be.  They somehow missed all the Westerns featuring villains with bandanas pulled up to their noses, all the bank-heist films and their variously masked desperados.  They obviously have not read Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” or they would know the Reverend Hooper, going all Puritan-symbolic about secret sin, covers his face in black crepe and freaks out his congregants; nor could they have read  Joyce Carol Oates’  “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” or they would know the ironically-named Arnold Friend conceals his homicidal sadism behind aviator sunglasses.  They seem not to have learned the lesson of Burger King’s unceremonious dumping of that sneaking creeping plastic-masked  King mascot.   Nor, it seems, have they deeply considered  masked youngsters’  extortionate Halloweenean demand of “Trick or Treat.” 

I mean, who, after all, didn’t already know what the Toronto researchers have spent years laboring to discover?   It seems to me self-evident that masks can disinhibit.  After all, their sole purpose is to conceal identity, and, human nature being what it is, people often will do or say things contrary to social custom when anonymity indemnifies them against the possibilities of shame and shunning.  The inward lurking Iago often emerges with the mask.   But sunglasses?  Perhaps within the parameters of the study’s design, the researchers got the result they hypothesized.  Such parameters, however, do not reproduce a real world context and, thus, do not adequately account for our experience and use of sunglasses as a culturally coded commodity.

Consider, for a moment, what this study tells us about ourselves:   that human nature is susceptible to a deeply internalized bias, an intuitive shortcut for thinking.   Evolution has ineradicably stamped in us a cautionary reserve when dealing with others.  We are shaped to trust only the fully-visible face.   It reduces us to helpless reaction, to the tug of biological strings.   While this may be, likely is, true, it misses much.

The study suggests we are incapable of reflection and judgment, that we lack the cultural awareness to recognize that, in terms of style and brand, sunglasses can simply be worn as a fashion statement—hardly compatible with loosening ties to social convention.   People also use sunglasses to denote cool, and while cool can indicate a detachment from or a mild disdain for the normative, the everyday, it functions more as an affectation, more an iconography of the wish to be perceived as defying conformity, as mysterious, as capable of breaking bad.  Sunglasses do not detach us from social convention; they symbolize a desire to be regarded as detached, as possessing enviable élan.  Sunglasses do not cause rebelliousness; they commodify it.  As cultural actors, we know this; we understand the use of sunglasses to complement or achieve a look or lifestyle as a purposeful, self-aware choice with the goal of being seen in a certain way.  We understand that sunglasses are associated with edginess, glamor, self-possession, unflusterability.  We understand they confer an aura of intrigue, mystery.  Could they, as the study asserts, induce wearers to be less generous?   Possibly, but such a result surely restricts the complex cultural reality in which we use and comprehend sunglasses.  It offers thin gruel in place the thick chowder of culture.

I cannot help but see this study as something like click bait research, designed not to dispel ignorance, not to expand the frontier of knowledge, but, rather, to be alluring enough, enticing enough, to garner the attention of a journal eager to attract readers, to attract the popular press and recirculate on the Internet, and to keep the research dollars flowing.   In what light should we apprehend this study? Samuel Beckett provides an answer: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on nothing new.”   

 

Language Abuse: In Four Parts

Part 1

Perhaps only in Iowa could a candidate for the Senate declare that her experience castrating pigs qualifies her for office.

Yes, OK, she means it as a wry, gateway metaphor for her promise to “cut pork.” But it’s precisely this promise, not the tasteless image of detesticled pigs, that I find most objectionable. The words have sound but signify nothing. And that’s the point, really. They are short on meaning, long on emotional resonance.  The promise to cut pork is comparable to promises to resuscitate the American Dream or restore the middle class, to bring change you can believe in or apply sane business practices, to transcend mere politics or be impregnable to the Washington Beltway ethos.  The words are lexical black holes into which all meaning disappears.  What’s left is an emotional residue, a purr or snarl substituting for substance.  That, and the cynicism that thinks that is enough.

 

Part 2

It’s always nice to know we can kill a sentient creature and feel righteously comfortable about it.

The Animal Welfare Institute and Farm Sanctuary, two animal welfare groups, have petitioned the Department of Agriculture to step up inspection efforts at poultry slaughterhouses, so that birds whose necks are not cut by an automatic knife are not dropped alive into scalding tanks.  A Deputy Administrator of the Food Safety Inspection Service says birds boiled to death in the scalding tanks violates the Poultry Products Inspection Act; therefore, the FSIS would “take action, because the animals would be dying other than by slaughter — they'd be drowning, and not slaughtered in a humane way."

I confess I struggle with the ethical distinction being made here.  Aren’t the birds being slaughtered in any event?  Does slaughtering a creature “in a humane way” even make sense?  Can the words “humane” and “slaughter” dwell in the same linguistic neighborhood?  Is dollying the adjective “humane” into place before the noun “slaughter” a kind of verbal juke to avoid ethical anxiety?  Emerson says, "You have just dined, and however scrupulously the slaughterhouse is concealed in the graceful distance of miles, there is complicity.”  Wouldn’t the really humane thing be not to slaughter the birds at all?

 
 

Part 3

A battle rages, and were I one who prefers his breakfast delivered from a restaurant window through my car window, I’d be caught up in the hostilities. 

On one side, Taco Bell’s new offerings to the on-the-go breakfast crowd—the Waffle Taco and the AM Crunchwrap.  On the other, the breakfast-market-share-leading McDonald’s and its iconic Egg McMuffin.  Just about every article I’ve read has described the two fast-fooderies  as engaged in the “breakfast wars” as they “battle it out” for the $50 million breakfast market.  TB is “taking aim” at MickeyD’s.   “Shots have been fired,” a “salvo” has been launched, a “bomb” dropped, “heavy artillery” rolled out.  McDonald’s will not be “ceding ground” however; in offering free coffee for the next two weeks, it has “fired back” with “coffee cannons.”

Well, metaphors structure how we see and understand, so perhaps journalists describing the thrust and parry of two corporate giants as a battle for the hearts and minds and palates of breakfasters everywhere isn’t so unusual.  It’s a no-brainer, actually.  And that is the problem. 

What are we to make of the herd-mentality journalism; the lazy, cliché-mongering, carnival-barking journalism; and, ultimately, the cynical journalism that uses threadbare metaphor to attract and churn up our interest in skirmishes over the vehicles by which eggs, meat, and cheese are delivered?  Why is it that the important questions are never raised:  why do we break so fast to be breakfasted?   What drives us through the drive through?  And how did a simple ritual of daily home life get outsourced to corporate griddles, fryers, and microwaves?  

 

Part 4

Who asked if roses wanted to be smelled and would rather that passersby not stop to sniff?  Who questioned if they had any desire at all to symbolize someone’s love or if they wanted their buds to be gathered?   Who wondered if lilies in their fields wished to be considered untoiling or wanted to be gilded?  Who inquired whether or not apples aspired to keep doctors away, or be American pied, or compared to oranges, or be in anyone’s eye or cheek, or represent the means of humanity’s fall?  Did grapes consent to being known as wrathful?  Who had considered whether some potatoes preferred or be known as potahtoes, or even cared about how the vowel was pronounced?  Would pickles appreciate being considered as no-win situations?  Did anyone seek to know if daisies wanted to relinquish their freshness, or prunes their wrinkledness or peaches their fuzz?  Perhaps peas do not want to share a pod.  Were olives OK with their branches being held out as a token of peace, or cherries with being gathered in life’s bowl, or carrots with being associated with sticks?

Did they want to be clichéd?  Who consulted them?  Who asked permission for their otherness, or even thought to?

 

Not Lovin' It

An elderly couple, octogenarians, are sitting, as they for several years have sat, at their local McDonald’s, having a mid-afternoon snack, talking, planning, remembering, enjoying, he says, a “sweet time of fellowship,” a communion of husband and wife that has underwritten their more than six-decade-long marriage.  An employee begins cleaning in the area around their booth.  The restaurant is mostly vacant—a few customers occupying a couple of the tables, a few off to the side using the free WiFi.  Nonetheless, the employee begins sweeping under and around the elderly couple’s table. 

 

The couple undoubtedly find the bustle intrusive. Dust kicked up by the sweeping is settling on their food.  Other, customerless, areas could easily be cleaned first.  The wife complains, archly, perhaps, but not humorlessly.  The employee tells the manager.  The manager tells the couple that they have overstayed their welcome, that they have exceeded the half-hour eating-time limit and have to leave.  There is no sign on any wall that announces a 30 minute customer limit.  The WiFiers were in place and plying the Internet when the elderly couple entered the restaurant.  Yet, the elderly couple must leave.  The franchise has disenfranchised them.

 

They are determined, at first, to dismiss the incident, to laugh it off as one of those sometimes strange, sometimes embarrassing things that just happen, one of those many rasps of living one periodically encounters.  But the husband, concerned that future customers not be so belittled, writes a letter to the editor of the local newspaper.  The letter is not indignant, is not rancorous, does not chafe or accuse, expresses no outrage.  No, it simply explains what transpired, and articulates the intimate significance he and his wife attach to their mid-afternoon being together.

 

The letter goes viral.  The manager apologizes, the franchise owner reinstitutes an employee training program, and McDonald’s corporate, by way of apologizing to the beleaguered couple, sends them two coupons for a free small coffee.  The couple sends the coupons back.  They continue to enjoy their mid-afternoon snack, but at another McDonald’s.

 

*     *     *

 

So, beyond the heart-leap and hurrah of an elderly pair of Davids overcoming a fast-food Goliath, what does their story point to?  For what deeper issues does it stand as an emblem?  For one, this: the McDonald’s manager is a bully.  Perhaps he was having a bad day.  Perhaps he was simply following his training, cleaving to a cleaning schedule that, like the food preparation process itself, like the flow and placement of bun and burger and sauce and condiment, is thoroughly rationalized, certain areas spic-and spanned at certain times, no exception, the whole thing regimented, all graphed and charted, all factor-scored and tabulated.  Perhaps he was struggling to find in what he does some intrinsic value, something true.  Perhaps he was feeling a sting of bitterness, remembering that, at one time, his aspirations soared higher than managing a fast-food restaurant, farther than being a small man in a small job doing small things by rote and rule, none of which catalyze his intellect, none of which quicken his imagination, all of which palsy his self-respect.

 

And to poultice that self-respect, to leave his littleness behind, he turns to cruelty.  He intimidates.  He becomes a bully.  He devises an ad hoc rule, perhaps the only creative act the rule-governed can conjure, to move the couple out, get them out of the way to ease his day and keep the cleaning on schedule. The couple is old, after all, and he is young and can use his youth and whatever managerial authority he has to impose his rule and coerce their departure.   Cruelty, as George Eliot says, requires only opportunity, and he seizes it.

 

And then there is the stupefyingly flat-souled and diligently dismissive gesture of apology by McDonald’s corporate.  We’re sorry, and, to show our distaste for the indignity you suffered, to show how sincerely we value every one of our patrons, here are coupons for two small coffees.  How is this anything more than a glancing drive-by of a mea culpa?  How is this not just a departure from concern, but a severing of all ties with it?  What novocained sensibility could possibly think that coupons for two small coffees would be within five time zones of appropriate?  How is this anything more than an apology erased by its staggering triviality?    How does this indifference do anything more than invalidate the elderly couple, humiliate them, discard and disregard them, treat them as unsecond-thoughted?

 

Perhaps nothing more can be expected from a corporate culture.  Its perspective is narrow despite the massiveness of the enterprises it directs.  Perhaps a failure of imagination is built in when the primary value is market-share expansion and its connection to customers is remote and sluiced through datafying analytics. There is no way, no need, really, to lift the lid on customers’ lives; no way to understand the world they experience, its felt texture, its palpability, its heart-stings and heart-joys.  No way to be human, despite being a person.  No way to recognize the couple and, thus, no way to feel sympathy, gratitude, indebtedness.  No way, no way at all, to know what it was like to be that elderly couple, hoping only to savor another afternoon together. 

 

No way at all to understand how the cynicism of a thoughtlessly reflexive “give them coupons and they’ll be happy” protocol repudiates the couple.  And probably no way to understand, in sending the coupons back, the couple refused to be released from memory and, thereby, repudiated their repudiation.

Cold and Old

Each year, when the earth tilts 23.4 degrees away from the sun, a battle begins.  It features no frontal assaults, no marching fire and charges, no close quarter skirmishes, no blitzkriegs—no bold and brazen tactics of any kind.  It is, rather, guerrilla warfare, a furtive combination of shoot-and-scoot and sabotaging raids, covert insurgency, and just as covert counterinsurgency.  The battle field is my house.  The particular site of combat is the thermostat.  My wife Kathy likes the temperature cool.  I like it warm.  Under cover of darkness, or when she is occupied in another room, I slink to the thermostat and execute a clandestine upping of the temperature.  Under the same conditions, Kathy executes a stealth lowering.  When my fingertips begin lose all sensation, I know I have been Yukoned.  Kathy has maneuvered her way to the thermostat.

I have no tolerance for cold.  During that time of year when the trees are “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang,” the boughs aren’t the only thing to “shake against the cold.”  Every winter is my winter of discontent.  I find no delight in the frolic geometry of frost pasted on my windows, no joy in the keening cantos of a furying north wind.  The cold is neither bracing nor invigorating, and the only thing it stimulates is the galloping retreat of blood from my extremities.  I dress not in layers, but in strata.  When it’s cold, I wear a T-shirt, covered by a long-sleeve thermal T-shirt covered by a hoodie, covered by a winter jacket rated for 20 below zero.  When it’s very cold,  I add a full-length black leather coat given to me years ago by a rock-and-roller friend.  When it’s cold, I wear two pairs of thinsulate-stuffed gloves, thermal socks, 40-below-zero-rated winter boots, and a wool knit cap under the hoodie’s hood.  When it’s very cold, I add down mittens, another pair of thermal socks, and a fleece ear band.  

And to that bundling, that upholstering in cold-repelling materials, I add, for its warming somatic echo, thoughts of the dog-dayed summer, hot and humid, toilet-tank condensation hot, arm-sweat-on-the-table humid, the white-sunned swelter of July, the sultry embrace of August, the very basin of summer when simply forming a thought sprouts beads of  forehead perspiration.  Hamlet may have implored the heat to dry up his brains, but mine scamper lively enough.  John Ruskin asserted that “there is no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather,” but I beg to differ.   I do not fear “the heat o’ the sun,” but I do dread the “furious winter’s rages.”  Then my brains freeze dry, and even the prophetic Shelley’s “if Winter comes, can Spring be far behind” holds cold comfort, the deluded hope of a herald-seeking romantic.

Of course, the cold war quietly rages on during the summer.  Kathy likes the air conditioning at levels that slow molecular motion.  I dislike wearing sweat pants and a sweater in the house when it’s flirting with equatorial temperatures outside.  So slyly, oh so slyly, with ninja-like silence, I ratchet the temperature down, just a notch, then another notch, just a tad, just a smidge, thinking my ambient alterations so subtle she will never notice the difference.  Of course, she does, and is less than sly, or subtle, at reversing my reversal.  Really, the crevices of time before spring and fall gather the full strength of summer and winter are the only cease-fires in our relentless conflict.

No doubt age plays a major part in all this.  Cold and old are longstanding fellow travelers.  They never bicker.  They maintain a shivery relation of goosebumpery—always have, always will.  Mr. Old sets the stage: he slows my circulation and basic metabolic rate, thins my fat layer, toggles my hormones, haywires my chemistry and then, like some arrogant and audacious graffitist, attaches those pesky methyl tags to my DNA to mark his tissue-aging work.  All the while, Mr. Cold has been circling, his orbit drawing ever closer, setting up bivouacs along the way, observing with relish the shocks that flesh is heir to, until, finally, the ground is ceded and he swaggers in with an icy sneer, gives Mr. Old a high five, and together they establish a permanent camp.

It can’t be helped.  Biology writes a hack-proof script that we are compelled to follow.  We are, as novelist William T. Vollman says, “shadowed by finitude’s despotism.”  And it’s so despotic that it’s become a stereotype: old men grow colder; old women grow warmer.  So Kathy and I wage surreptitious war at the thermostat.  But here’s the thing:  I hate following scripts.  I hate conforming to a stereotype.  I hate being average.  I’d rather be special.

So, here’s my story, and I’m sticking to it:  my unspecialness is special.  I may be average, but I’m pretty darn good at being it.

Van Winkled

When he awakens from his gin-induced slumber high up in New York’s Catskill Mountains, Rip Van Winkle does not realize that he has slept for twenty years, nor does he realize that while he slept the American Revolutionary War has been fought and won.  He drifted into sleep a British citizen; he awoke an American.  He drowsed off a colonial subject; he arose and made his way back down the mountain the sovereign subject of a democracy.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Rip is bewildered when he returns to his village home.  The place has undergone a singularly disorienting transformation.  Time seems out of joint.  The village’s accustomed demeanor of phlegmatic snugness and timeless tranquility has been transformed, into the clangorous babble of disputatious voices using baffling words like citizens’ rights and Congressional elections and liberty.  The male bastion of Nicholas Vedder’s inn has disappeared and, in its place, stands the Yankee Jonathan Doolittle’s ramshackle Union Hotel.  The inn’s sheltering tree has given way to a liberty pole from which waves a flag bestrewn with stars and stripes.  The inn’s sign, too, has changed, revised to portray General Washington rather than King George.  Rip himself, formerly a village favorite, goes unrecognized, is mistaken for his son, and suspected of being a Tory spy, is threatened with violence.

Confronted with such confounding change, driven to his wits’ end end, Rip comes undone, his sense of identity upended: “I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, . . . and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”  Eventually, however, Rip’s identity is affirmed by the village’s historian, and displacement replaced by replacement, he settles into a new role, a storyteller, a chronicler of the pre-war past, and comes to be revered by “the rising generation” as one of the village patriarchs.

It’s likely that Washington Irving intends Rip to represent the socially ameliorative role the artist can play by suturing the historical past to the cultural present.  But rereading “Rip Van Winkle” as autumn enters the not-to-be-denied bear-hugging embrace of winter, has got me thinking instead about change.

E. B. White says that “The only sense that is common in the long run, is the sense of change – and we all instinctively avoid it.”  I have been such an avoider, I would rather listen to 18 straight hours of 120-decibeled Norwegian Black Metal music than make peace with change.   And gazing at the mounting evidence outside my windows of winter implacably choking autumn’s song in its throat, I find myself resonating to Robert Frost’s claim that such a change of season is, somehow, nothing “less than a treason.”

But then there is Irving’s ending to the story, that accommodation Rip makes, his détente with change, his capacity to roll with it, submit to the rhythm of it, use it, finally, to sculpt out a space in which he can attune it to his specifications rather than become its relic.

Rip is resilient.

*     *     *

Stability is undeniably comfortable; predictability, convenient; the settled, dependable.  Change can seem a snap-jawed disruption that cannot be halted.  Its signature is scrawled across the world in indelible ink.  Change happens, has happened, will continue to happen.  It time-warps our conception of the world and our function and fit into it. Change never stops, and to think it does, or to want it to, is a fantasy romanced by illusion.

Muttering to ourselves at the dusty rear of the caravan is no place to be.

The very fact that disruption erupts, however, means that it can be accounted for.  We cannot control the events and circumstances of the world, but we can control how we think about them, how we react to their turbulence.  There is the fact of change, but there is also the fact of my purposeful response to it, the fact of my pro quo for its quid, my imposition on its imposition. A world sunk in stability is a determined world, a world suspended between tock and tick.  In such a world, we never really reach childhood’s end.

The question is, which Rip will we be: the Rip garrisoned by sleep, impervious to the goings on going on, or the Rip who improvises and adapts, the Rip who intuits that roles change, but the need for one never does.  Do we settle with change or settle for it?  Do we work it, integrate it, or do we avert our eyes and practice careful unnoticing? Can we, even in small, quiet ways, shake the burrs of habit off our clothes; Houdini ourselves from rigidity of thinking and acting; learn what’s necessary, what to engage, what to let pass by?  I think the better part of wisdom says we should, must.  “Prudence keeps life safe.” Samuel Johnson says, “but does not often make it happy.”

Oh, and that relentless change from autumn to winter?  Seasonal change never changes, but I can winterize both house and wardrobe.  And, perhaps, myself:  I find myself itching for a snowball fight, and I’ve retrieved, from its long exile atop a dusty basement shelf, the box that contains my ice skates.