I periodically have a dream that, generically, is not uncommon, though I suspect its content might be. It is the dream in which one discovers a previously unknown room in one’s house. In my version, I am in the basement, walking past the furnace, when I suddenly notice a door in the space behind it. I am astounded. The space behind the furnace is not especially dark or obscured from sight. How, in the twenty years I have lived in this house, did I not notice a door in the wall behind the furnace? This defies reason, I dream myself thinking. I walk to the door, open it, and peer in. I see a cavern that has been hewn into the earth with obvious care and is illuminated with a yellowish-white light, the source of which is hidden from view. Intrigued, I enter, walk about 20 yards, follow the bend to the right, and come upon a pile of neatly stacked lumber and several professional-grade woodworking tools: a table saw, a radial arm saw, a planer, a band saw, a router table, and a drill press. I am delighted, for woodworking is my hobby. It never occurs to me that someone else might own these tools. No, those tools, more numerous than, and vastly superior to, the ones I own are obviously there for my use. And on that note of delight, the dream ends.
Theories about why we dream abound. Some consider them clairvoyant, even precognitive. Freud considered dreams the place where the riotous id came out to play. Jung believed dreams featured archetypal symbols that connected us to the collective unconscious of the human race. Some cognitive scientists claim dreams are the means by which we process the events of our days and ways; others, that they are a kind of sanitation crew sweeping away the debris of our conscious lives; others still, that they are nothing more than the random detonation of neuronal bottle rockets and roman candles. My sense is that dreams are not forewarnings, not symbols for something other than what they feature, not a quality-control processing station, not a janitorial service, and not haphazardly firing neurons. Rather, I see dreams as transparent metaphors for embodied experience, for that which in our ordinary lives we invest considerable mental energy and strong feeling.
I took up woodworking some eighteen years ago because it required a set of skills and offered an end result that my professional work as a teacher did not. In a sense, I have never been delivered from the womb of education. After being graduated from college, I taught high school, which I left to attend graduate school, from which I entered university teaching. I came to worry that such an immersive experience would cause an inbent, progressively narrowing spiral of subjectivity. I did not want my thinking and feeling to gutter like a candle flame in its own wax. I wanted my horizons expanded, not my views reinforced. In woodworking I found the motor skills required to handle tool precisely and efficiently, the judgment necessary to gauge the best way to cut wood to minimize waste and chipping and splintering, the consideration demanded by the thickness and grain and type of wood I worked with, the mathematics involved in cutting arcs and stair stringers and roof runs and dovetail joints, the reading skills entailed in making sense of cutting diagrams and blueprints and tool manuals, the language of kerfs and dadoes and rabbets and mortises and tenons I was compelled to learn, the sensual delight of wood itself—its look and feel and smell, the shaping of it, its receptive materiality.
And in woodworking I found that a well-planned sequence of tasks led to a material result—so unlike teaching, where the most scrupulously crafted lesson can produce no observable result; where whether or how well students have learned is often not immediately apparent, if it ever is. I liked the teleology of wordworking—a conception calling forth and sequencing my action, an end explaining the means. Woodworking produced a visible testament to my competence, or incompetence; something I could point to in pride, or humiliation; a practical purpose rendered wel,l or imperfectly; an aesthetic intention made into an object to be seen; a realization of my ability, my craftsmanship, that does not rely on words, that is not subject to interpretation, but is plainly, or maybe painfully, apparent. I was sometimes successful, and I felt pride. I sometimes made mistakes, and I learned from them. I sometimes failed, and I learned to start again, to be more attentive, more mindful, better.
Everything we make, it seems to me, is purposeful striving embodied, will made visible. It is ourselves inside out, constituting what appears. We are transitive. We pass into what we make. We leave traces, revelations of mind and heart and hand. A piece of us takes its place in the world of intentional things. Our makings are a sign of our reach and our limitations, our triumphs and our flaws, our status as self-governing subjects and as material objects governed by laws beyond our choice or influence. Our makings are, finally, our selves, a humble offering to the often generous but always critical gaze of a judging world.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
The Joyous Season
Lately, I have been thinking about joy. An effect of the season, no doubt. We are warmly greeted and best wished. We are told, exhorted, to be merry and let nothing us dismay, to be of good cheer, to be happy. And we are told this is a joyous season, a season of joy. Somehow, to me, joy seems qualitatively different than merriness, cheeriness, happiness; of a different order than being wished and greeted—somehow weightier, more consequential, more momentous, more meaningful. A season of joy. What might joy consist of, be like, feel like, to account for that intuitive sense of difference, I wonder. What is astir in that word, what hovers within it, gives it its talismanic charge?
In his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie provides an intriguing conception of joy. Junior, the novel’s 14-year-old Spokane Indian protagonist, seeking to realize his dream of a more fulfilling life, has left the reservation to attend high school in the all-white town of Reardan, some twenty miles away. He befriends the smartest boy at Reardan High School, Gordy, who mentors him on the proper way to read a book. Gordy tells Junior “you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.” Junior is stunned. “What the heck is a metaphorical boner?” Gordy replies, “When I say boner, I really mean joy.” “Then why didn’t you say joy,” Junior asks. “Boner is funnier,” Gordy answers. “And more joyful.” Under Gordy’s subsequent tutelage, Junior comes to “realize that hard work—that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing, a task—is joyous.”
A metaphorical boner. In this image, seemingly silly yet perfectly drawn from the erotic clamor of adolescence, Alexie is telling us something important here about the psychology of joy, its texture and contour, its creation and reception. It’s significant, I think, that joy here is described not just as openness to the potential for being excited by, aroused by, stimulated by, uncovering the mystery, the richness, that lies enfolded in books, but also, like books themselves, as an ordered arrangement and sequential process for carrying a task through, from starting point to finishing point. Joy is not some unbidden rapture that breaks in upon us and carries us away; rather, joy is in some sense summoned, a subjective state intertwined with an objective act, the embodied experience of an effort, being finding cadence and diction in doing.
Alexie reiterates this point later in the novel when, in the space of two months, Junior experiences a torrential assault of tragedy: the senseless deaths of his grandmother, his friend Eugene, and his sister Mary. Why, he wonders, has he been singled out for so much grief? Why has he been snared in the sorrow’s too-muchness? Utterly distraught, wanting “to kill God,” feeling absolutely “joyless,” he embarks on a campaign “to find the little pieces of joy in my life,” the only way he knows “to make it through all that death and change.” He begins making lists of the people and things that “had given me the most joy in my life,” and continues making list after list, rewriting, revising, reediting, and rethinking. “It became my grieving ceremony,” Junior says. And in the crucibled intensity of this listing, this finding and sequential assembling of words, this ritual act of imposing structure, of making order amid the prattle of senselessness and the babble of contingency, Junior transcends it and, finally, reclaims joy.
Joy is, I think, ultimately about the richness of being we feel when we bestow sense on the senseless. We are blessed creatures, graced with life and the capacities to make that life expansive, expectant, fulfilling. Yet, at the same time, we are also finite creatures, limited, squeezed into a narrow timewidth, subject to the random and the unpredictable, to chance and tragedy, to the undeserved and unmerited. We are continually wounded, it seems, and the wounds often appear stubbornly impervious to suturing. In the face of our finitude, in our being beset by the arbitrary, the accidental, the sheer thrownness of things, it is all too easy to grow fatalistic, joyless, unless we make use of the fundamental rituals, the elemental ordering acts, that can give us “little pieces of joy”: nurture, friendship, inquisitiveness, compassion, craft for the hands, work that sharpens the mind. These small structuring ceremonies, these purposeful bestowals of sense and meaning, these are the way to joy, for they can be heralding signs, emblems that what we do, what we partake of, is the partial realization of a larger, more comprehensive order. And joy itself? It can take us outside ourselves, beyond the littleness that snares our spirit, can gesture beyond our finitude, can arrest the realities of here-and-now, can carve out a cranny in time, a time within time, a vestibule where we floresce, flourish.
Joy, as activity imbued with purpose and the delight we take from it for its own sake, can provide a privileged glimpse of transcendence, of the more so that we are. We take a step, take several steps, turn a corner, and there we are. We meet the meant of ourselves, the deep of us that points beyond us. We are not marooned in the mere, the only. Is this not the message embedded in the steeples and spires and vast vaulted ceilings of the great cathedrals? Is this not the message encoded in the incarnate deity whose birth is celebrated in this season? Is it not a message that speaks to us in any season?
In his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie provides an intriguing conception of joy. Junior, the novel’s 14-year-old Spokane Indian protagonist, seeking to realize his dream of a more fulfilling life, has left the reservation to attend high school in the all-white town of Reardan, some twenty miles away. He befriends the smartest boy at Reardan High School, Gordy, who mentors him on the proper way to read a book. Gordy tells Junior “you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.” Junior is stunned. “What the heck is a metaphorical boner?” Gordy replies, “When I say boner, I really mean joy.” “Then why didn’t you say joy,” Junior asks. “Boner is funnier,” Gordy answers. “And more joyful.” Under Gordy’s subsequent tutelage, Junior comes to “realize that hard work—that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing, a task—is joyous.”
A metaphorical boner. In this image, seemingly silly yet perfectly drawn from the erotic clamor of adolescence, Alexie is telling us something important here about the psychology of joy, its texture and contour, its creation and reception. It’s significant, I think, that joy here is described not just as openness to the potential for being excited by, aroused by, stimulated by, uncovering the mystery, the richness, that lies enfolded in books, but also, like books themselves, as an ordered arrangement and sequential process for carrying a task through, from starting point to finishing point. Joy is not some unbidden rapture that breaks in upon us and carries us away; rather, joy is in some sense summoned, a subjective state intertwined with an objective act, the embodied experience of an effort, being finding cadence and diction in doing.
Alexie reiterates this point later in the novel when, in the space of two months, Junior experiences a torrential assault of tragedy: the senseless deaths of his grandmother, his friend Eugene, and his sister Mary. Why, he wonders, has he been singled out for so much grief? Why has he been snared in the sorrow’s too-muchness? Utterly distraught, wanting “to kill God,” feeling absolutely “joyless,” he embarks on a campaign “to find the little pieces of joy in my life,” the only way he knows “to make it through all that death and change.” He begins making lists of the people and things that “had given me the most joy in my life,” and continues making list after list, rewriting, revising, reediting, and rethinking. “It became my grieving ceremony,” Junior says. And in the crucibled intensity of this listing, this finding and sequential assembling of words, this ritual act of imposing structure, of making order amid the prattle of senselessness and the babble of contingency, Junior transcends it and, finally, reclaims joy.
Joy is, I think, ultimately about the richness of being we feel when we bestow sense on the senseless. We are blessed creatures, graced with life and the capacities to make that life expansive, expectant, fulfilling. Yet, at the same time, we are also finite creatures, limited, squeezed into a narrow timewidth, subject to the random and the unpredictable, to chance and tragedy, to the undeserved and unmerited. We are continually wounded, it seems, and the wounds often appear stubbornly impervious to suturing. In the face of our finitude, in our being beset by the arbitrary, the accidental, the sheer thrownness of things, it is all too easy to grow fatalistic, joyless, unless we make use of the fundamental rituals, the elemental ordering acts, that can give us “little pieces of joy”: nurture, friendship, inquisitiveness, compassion, craft for the hands, work that sharpens the mind. These small structuring ceremonies, these purposeful bestowals of sense and meaning, these are the way to joy, for they can be heralding signs, emblems that what we do, what we partake of, is the partial realization of a larger, more comprehensive order. And joy itself? It can take us outside ourselves, beyond the littleness that snares our spirit, can gesture beyond our finitude, can arrest the realities of here-and-now, can carve out a cranny in time, a time within time, a vestibule where we floresce, flourish.
Joy, as activity imbued with purpose and the delight we take from it for its own sake, can provide a privileged glimpse of transcendence, of the more so that we are. We take a step, take several steps, turn a corner, and there we are. We meet the meant of ourselves, the deep of us that points beyond us. We are not marooned in the mere, the only. Is this not the message embedded in the steeples and spires and vast vaulted ceilings of the great cathedrals? Is this not the message encoded in the incarnate deity whose birth is celebrated in this season? Is it not a message that speaks to us in any season?
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Rebelling Against Aging
The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By altering the genes of the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans, one can slow their aging. The result is that the worms live much longer and they remain youthful and healthy longer. The current record for enhancing C. elegans longevity is an astonishing tenfold increase in lifespan.
Dr. David Gems
I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.
I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”
The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.
So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.
Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”
No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about
Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.
Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.
SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.
Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.
Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.
And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.
One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.
Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?
So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.
Dr. David Gems
I am at that age where age ceases to remain graffitied in the fine print of consciousness and assumes the graphic clamor of 24 point boldfaced Verdana. Any articles I happen upon that treat the topic of biogerontology—the science of aging—exert an irresistible allure, even ones that deal with lowly nematodes like C. elegans. It’s not that I fear aging, or suffer debilitating anxiety about it; rather, it angers me. I don’t like it. I consider senescence a corporeal insult and betrayal. I remain as I always have been: enchanted by the abracadabra of life, of living in the kinesthetic world of unending experiences, of sights and sounds, of savors and tangs that touch us into being. And while those experiences can abrade, they can more often rub us the right way. The Hayflick limit, that built-in restriction on the number of times a normal cell divides before it stops, strikes me as abjectly cruel. Quite simply, I resent that my body, the body that embodies experience, gradually and inexorably dysfunctions and deteriorates all the way down to the cellular and molecular levels. I take umbrage at the body’s truculence, its maddening disregard for what I want, its crassly insistent bullying to keep me trussed up within it. I take offense at its methodical unkiltering, its havocing declension.
I am not alone in this. Most of us, I suspect, are Ponce de Leoned. Myths from every culture have featured anti-aging stories of immortality, and most every religion has offered, and continues to offer, a vision of and a process for achieving it. One of the oldest written literary works, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written more than 4,500 years ago, narrates on twelve cuneiform tablets a search for immortality. Poetic treatments of the afflictions of aging abound: William Butler Yeats does not fancy being “old and gray and full of sleep,/ And nodding by the fire,” nor does Mathew Arnold “It is to spend long days / And not once feel that we were ever young,” or Billy Collins “No wonder the moon in the window seems to have/ drifted/ out of a love poem that you used to know by/ heart.” William Wordsworth notes that nature “takes away/ Our playthings one by one.” Dylan Thomas counsels his father that “Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Donald Hall, with bitter irony, affirms “that it is fitting/and delicious to lose everything.” A lamenting Robert Frost observes that he “craved strong sweets, . . ./ when I was young;/ . . .Now no joy but lacks salt,/ That is not dashed with pain /And weariness and fault.”
The possibility of treating aging is not just an idle fantasy. By identifying genes that control aging rates, we can also learn about the underlying biology of aging. We can explore the aging-related processes that the genes influence. Many aging genes are associated with a nutrient-sensitive signalling network. Dampening the signals that this network transmits slows growth, increases resistance to stress and increases lifespan.
So, when a biogerontologist like David Gems offers scientific support suggesting that senescence is a treatable disease, I pay attention. I want my golden years to be aurific, to carbon-copy the “Late Ripeness” that Czeslaw Milosz experiences as he approaches 90: "I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning." I want to stand on the prow of the ship, arms open wide, and, even if I cannot proclaim myself “king of the world,” embrace the horizon.
Of course, I know full well that the jagged jostle of an iceberg will, eventually, breech the hull. I want that “eventually” to be more eventually than the current term limit, which the Bible sets at three score plus seven and attributes to a bit of Divine jealousy tempered with irony. After noting that Adam and Eve have “become like one of us, knowing good and evil,” God shows them the Garden door, convinced that humans will poach “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!” Still, Adam lived to be 930; his son Seth, 912; Seth’s son Enos, 905; and the record-setting Mathusale, 969. I do not wish to live that long. Just longer, a good bit longer, than three score and seven, and in good health, for the story of the unfortunate Trojan royal, Tithonus, lover of Eos, goddess of the dawn, depicts a ghastly denouement. Unaccountably, especially for a goddess, Eos neglects to include eternal youth as part of a packaged deal when she asks Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life. The dark and chilling result of that bit of absentmindedness surpasses even H. P. Lovecraft’s most morbid nightmare: "but when loathsome old age pressed full upon him, and he could not move nor lift his limbs, he babbles endlessly, and no more has strength at all.”
No, I do not want arrested aging. I want decelerated aging. I want aging that exits the autobahn and hits a school zone. So it is that I read with avid interest about
Resveratrol: a substance found in the skin of red grapes, it has received much press for its anti-aging effects, which are controversial in animal studies and lack scientific validation in human studies. I’m inclined to think the high speed pursuit of resveratrol as an anti-aging elixir is being conducted in a clown car. Red wine sales, however, are booming.
Telomerase: an enzyme that reconstructs telomeres, a sheath at the end of DNA thought to be involved in cellular aging. Each time a cell divides, the telomere shortens, eventually disappears, and the cell, unable to divide, dies. If telomerase had a “like” button, it would be getting repeated clicks.
SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence): research into regenerative medical procedures to repair the damage caused by age-related diseases in the human body. Kind of like a periodic checking-under-the-hood body tune-up.
Cryonics: low-temperature preservation, irreversible at present but assumed to be possible in the future when medical advances will have discovered cures for currently incurable diseases. Ted Williams is cryonically preserved. In the movie “Forever Young” (1992), Mel Gibson was successfully revived. Perhaps, given his recent escapades, he needs a recooling.
Nanorobotics: the use of tiny medical robots injected into the bloodstream for search and destroy missions targeting life-threatening organisms. A health enforcement squad, discreetly undercover, rooting out the impediments to indefinite youthfulness.
And having broached the topic of medical machinery, special mention must be made of a version of transhumanism, which predicts that, due to exponential growth in computing power, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence around 2045, at which point it will be possible to transfer human consciousness into these HAL-ed up computers and live, forever and a day, in a virtual environment. Could there be a more viscerally appalling instance of Thoreau’s concern that we are becoming the tools of our tools? Beyond the moral and ethical issues such an upload would raise lies what looks to me to be a profound category mistake: transhumanists, in thrall to the quantitative, technical wonders of computer processing, do not appear to fully understand that the very thing we cherish in ourselves and others is the qualitative, the personal idiosyncracies and particularities, the singular and irreducibly unique individualizations that lattice our identities, the feelings and faults and needs and gratifications and graces and ingenuities and plunging sadnesses and seizing joys and exuberant ricochets of creative thinking that define us. The transhumanist idolatry of the machine is, for me anyway, haywired: it pulps, pauperizes, and degrades.
One aim of aging research is to develop drugs that can reproduce the effects of dietary restriction and also of genetic alterations that slow aging. One approach could be to use drug therapy to target the nutrient-sensitive pathways that regulate aging and that seem to mediate the effects of dietary restriction on aging. The ultimate goal would be a pill that one could take regularly from midlife onward.
Though scientific data has yet to confirm its ability to extend human life, calorie restriction (CR) has proven successful in rodent and nonhuman primate studies, in some instances extending life span by 40 %. Certainly, the 2000 members of the Calorie Restriction Society, who reduce their caloric intake anywhere from 25% to 40% of bodily requirements, believe in its promise. And because a CR diet consists mostly of fruits, nuts, and vegetables, it does have some healthful secondary benefits. CR does exact a price, however; its adherents lose their libido, are perpetually cold, and they look, well, cadaverous. It impresses me as an overly punitive way to live, exhausting in its continual self-policing vigilance and colossal denial of hunger, self-punishing in its implacable refusal of the unsayable but richly delightful yesness of anything sweet or buttery or rich, anything taste-bud dizzying, dazzling, dallying. If John Calvin, that steeping tea of admonishment, were a foodie, a CR diet would be the grim and gloomy result. Why, I wonder, purposefully, willfully, carry a dietary November in our hearts? How is it that a superimposed layer of calculability wholly displaces those moments of appetitive spontaneity and impulse that round out the fully-inhabited integrity of our selves, that give our lives a melody as well as a song, an accent as well as a language? How is it that we are willing to trade in our culinary party clothes for sackcloth and ashes?
So, yes, a pill to do the distasteful, untasteful, business of CR seems to me the best of all possible worlds. And in the meantime that stretches between now and that panglossian future, those beset by longevity concerns might do well to follow the common sense (CS) plan: eat genuine, and genuinely healthy food; get some regular exercise, no matter what as long as it gets and keeps you moving; set goals, ambitious ones, be conscientious in working toward them, and, when they are achieved, make them the means of further goals; love well, and immerse yourself in a variety of communities. The CS plan is not new, is decidedly unsexy, scientifically speaking, but it does declaw the galling scratch of age. It’s a sensible plan to adopt, until the nanobots are ready to roll.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Waiting In Line
We hate to wait, and we especially hate to wait in checkout lines, especially in grocery store checkout lines. We are all allotted one and a half billion heartbeats, and we are loathe to expend more than a couple of them in checkout lines. No matter how long we have shambled through aisles and departments; no matter how long we have lingered before shelves and displays; no matter that the average wait is under 5 minutes, according to a 2007 study, and that we overestimate the wait by as much as 50%; no matter whether or not we have anything better to do, or anything at all to do; if we do not move, with gazelle-like speed, through the checkout line, the thudding kick-drum of impatience thumps within us. And, can anything be more abysmal, more an affront to all that is holy and just, than to choose a line only to see the one we ignored move faster? One need not be an evolutionary biologist to know, with the certainty of an evangelical holding four aces, that the human genome, somewhere in its tangled grammar, contains a gene whose expression is waiting irritation.
Undoubtedly, I am missing that gene, for I don’t mind waiting in checkout lines; in fact, I actually enjoy it. Whitman declared, “I witness and wait.” I witness as I wait.
I find product placement—that cynical “Oh, yeah” in response to classical economics theory of utility-maximizing, rational-choice consumerism—quite educational, a multi-course feast for the enquiring mind. From the various magazines and tabloids I learn that Elvis was abducted by aliens, Clint Eastwood is being hassled by the FBI, Nostradamus has predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, the 100 prophecies that will come true before Christmas, and a potential epidemic from a new form of influenza—the snake flu. I learn the latest intelligence about Mel and Oksana or Brad and Angelina or Ashton and Demi or Jennifer and Justin or Kim and Kris or George Clooney and whoever. I learn the latest escapades, mostly tawdry, sometimes tragic, periodically inspiring, of celebrities, near-celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and wannabe celebrities—the infidelities, the spats, the boorish behavior, the unmake-upped moments. I learn how to make a perfect pie crust, hard-boil an egg in a microwave, and keep shoelaces from unraveling. I learn the 26 ways to use vinegar, the 7 best pick-up lines, the 10 things never to say on a first date, the 3 magic moves to flatten your belly, an amazingly easy way to remove counter stains, and the 5 secrets to reducing your spouse to drooling desire. I learn about fashion and technology and home décor and fine cuisine and budget dining and medical advances. The checkout line is encyclopedic, a Harvard for the unlegacied.
And there is moral improvement to be had while waiting to check out. I look right at, I mean really regard, and then, in a burst of smug self-satisfaction, resist the farrago of sugared seductions, the candied temptations, that surround me. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, get thee behind me; Hershey’s Kisses, I will not give thee a foothold; Tootsie Roll Pops, I spurn thy allurements and cast thee aside. Who can doubt that free will exists, that resolute singleness of purpose can restrain the churning force of desire. In the humble checkout line, I find proof positive.
Perhaps most puzzling, certainly to my wife Kathy, is that, while I tend to be socially reticent, in checkout lines I become suddenly and strangely chatty. Once, to a woman behind me with a large, shockingly pink purse resting in the child’s seat of her shopping cart, I said, “That’s certainly a striking purse.” “Oh, thanks,” she said; “I bought it when I was in Memphis.” “I hope you got a chance to visit Graceland while you were there,” I replied. She smiled, and tuned the purse around. Emblazoned in rhinestones on its front was “Elvis.” “I bought it there,” she said. For the next five minutes we parsed Elvis as if he were a compound-complex sentence: his best songs, his best movies, his shopping for a pink and black suit at Bernard Lansky’s Beale Street store, his fondness for peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches, his picture with Richard Nixon, the fake FBI badge Nixon gave him in response to his request to be made an FBI agent, his incorporation of martial arts moves in the Jailhouse Rock dance sequence. We agreed that his creativity was in adapting songs, and that, in bringing black music into the mainstream, he played a small part in racial integration.
On another occasion, seeing Pop Weaver microwave popcorn among the items of the customer in front of me, I began a conversation that escalated into a friendly debate on the relative merits of microwave popcorn in general. He preferred Pop Weaver because the company’s founder, the Reverend Ira Weaver, was dedicated to providing the healthiest and best-tasting popcorn at the cheapest price. “They don’t advertise,” he said, “and they use plain brown bags. That helps keep the cost down.” I allowed that Pop Weaver was good but held out for the superior taste of Orville Redenbacher; besides, as Orville claimed in his iconic TV ads, every kernel popped. “That’s where the value comes in,” I noted; “minimal waste.” The debate ended in a draw, but we did agree that in the archipelago of satisfyingly salty-crunchy munchables, popcorn was an island of sensible snacking.
From a young checkout cashier, I discovered that she had just learned she was pregnant, that her lineman husband was home for a several-week stay, that she had pork slow-cooking at home in a crock pot, and that dinner that night would consist of shredded pork sandwiches and her favorite food, tater tots. I wanted to say I was a vegetarian and that tater tots contained enough saturated fat to clog a water main. But I didn’t. She was happy. Instead, I told her what was also true: “You know, when I was a kid, I loved tater tots. My dad said I’d turn into a tater tot. I had a nightmare about that.” She laughed. I laughed. We shared a laugh.
Individually, or even taken together, these waiting line conversations did not amount to much, and yet, they amounted to a lot. They took us out beyond the trip-wired, self-defensive perimeters behind which we tend to hunker, took us, if only momentarily, into that often unrealized common life in which we all participate. Too often, we wait impatiently, waiting for the oven timer to chime, for a leaf to fall and a flower to appear, for a meteor to rift the heavens, for our name to be called, our number to come up; waiting for what’s lying in wait to make itself known; waiting for the rapture, the quickening, the gathering of the righteous, for kingdom come that never seems to come; waiting, fist to cheek, elbow on the window sill, for something to pass by worthy of our regard before darkness falls. We wait, feeling that time has stood still, feeling suspended in it, yet all the while it tick-tocks on, as do we, always in transit, always finalizing, heart beating, blood circulating, breath pulsing in and out, growing each moment just a little bit older, time passed time past, an entropic echo, as we wait to check out. In those waiting line conversations, maybe, just maybe, the dense gravity of our minute-and-secondhandedness momentarily lightens and, as the poet Amy Clampett says, we “fall upward.”
Undoubtedly, I am missing that gene, for I don’t mind waiting in checkout lines; in fact, I actually enjoy it. Whitman declared, “I witness and wait.” I witness as I wait.
I find product placement—that cynical “Oh, yeah” in response to classical economics theory of utility-maximizing, rational-choice consumerism—quite educational, a multi-course feast for the enquiring mind. From the various magazines and tabloids I learn that Elvis was abducted by aliens, Clint Eastwood is being hassled by the FBI, Nostradamus has predicted the outcome of the 2012 presidential election, the 100 prophecies that will come true before Christmas, and a potential epidemic from a new form of influenza—the snake flu. I learn the latest intelligence about Mel and Oksana or Brad and Angelina or Ashton and Demi or Jennifer and Justin or Kim and Kris or George Clooney and whoever. I learn the latest escapades, mostly tawdry, sometimes tragic, periodically inspiring, of celebrities, near-celebrities, pseudo-celebrities, and wannabe celebrities—the infidelities, the spats, the boorish behavior, the unmake-upped moments. I learn how to make a perfect pie crust, hard-boil an egg in a microwave, and keep shoelaces from unraveling. I learn the 26 ways to use vinegar, the 7 best pick-up lines, the 10 things never to say on a first date, the 3 magic moves to flatten your belly, an amazingly easy way to remove counter stains, and the 5 secrets to reducing your spouse to drooling desire. I learn about fashion and technology and home décor and fine cuisine and budget dining and medical advances. The checkout line is encyclopedic, a Harvard for the unlegacied.
And there is moral improvement to be had while waiting to check out. I look right at, I mean really regard, and then, in a burst of smug self-satisfaction, resist the farrago of sugared seductions, the candied temptations, that surround me. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, get thee behind me; Hershey’s Kisses, I will not give thee a foothold; Tootsie Roll Pops, I spurn thy allurements and cast thee aside. Who can doubt that free will exists, that resolute singleness of purpose can restrain the churning force of desire. In the humble checkout line, I find proof positive.
Perhaps most puzzling, certainly to my wife Kathy, is that, while I tend to be socially reticent, in checkout lines I become suddenly and strangely chatty. Once, to a woman behind me with a large, shockingly pink purse resting in the child’s seat of her shopping cart, I said, “That’s certainly a striking purse.” “Oh, thanks,” she said; “I bought it when I was in Memphis.” “I hope you got a chance to visit Graceland while you were there,” I replied. She smiled, and tuned the purse around. Emblazoned in rhinestones on its front was “Elvis.” “I bought it there,” she said. For the next five minutes we parsed Elvis as if he were a compound-complex sentence: his best songs, his best movies, his shopping for a pink and black suit at Bernard Lansky’s Beale Street store, his fondness for peanut butter and fried banana sandwiches, his picture with Richard Nixon, the fake FBI badge Nixon gave him in response to his request to be made an FBI agent, his incorporation of martial arts moves in the Jailhouse Rock dance sequence. We agreed that his creativity was in adapting songs, and that, in bringing black music into the mainstream, he played a small part in racial integration.
On another occasion, seeing Pop Weaver microwave popcorn among the items of the customer in front of me, I began a conversation that escalated into a friendly debate on the relative merits of microwave popcorn in general. He preferred Pop Weaver because the company’s founder, the Reverend Ira Weaver, was dedicated to providing the healthiest and best-tasting popcorn at the cheapest price. “They don’t advertise,” he said, “and they use plain brown bags. That helps keep the cost down.” I allowed that Pop Weaver was good but held out for the superior taste of Orville Redenbacher; besides, as Orville claimed in his iconic TV ads, every kernel popped. “That’s where the value comes in,” I noted; “minimal waste.” The debate ended in a draw, but we did agree that in the archipelago of satisfyingly salty-crunchy munchables, popcorn was an island of sensible snacking.
From a young checkout cashier, I discovered that she had just learned she was pregnant, that her lineman husband was home for a several-week stay, that she had pork slow-cooking at home in a crock pot, and that dinner that night would consist of shredded pork sandwiches and her favorite food, tater tots. I wanted to say I was a vegetarian and that tater tots contained enough saturated fat to clog a water main. But I didn’t. She was happy. Instead, I told her what was also true: “You know, when I was a kid, I loved tater tots. My dad said I’d turn into a tater tot. I had a nightmare about that.” She laughed. I laughed. We shared a laugh.
Individually, or even taken together, these waiting line conversations did not amount to much, and yet, they amounted to a lot. They took us out beyond the trip-wired, self-defensive perimeters behind which we tend to hunker, took us, if only momentarily, into that often unrealized common life in which we all participate. Too often, we wait impatiently, waiting for the oven timer to chime, for a leaf to fall and a flower to appear, for a meteor to rift the heavens, for our name to be called, our number to come up; waiting for what’s lying in wait to make itself known; waiting for the rapture, the quickening, the gathering of the righteous, for kingdom come that never seems to come; waiting, fist to cheek, elbow on the window sill, for something to pass by worthy of our regard before darkness falls. We wait, feeling that time has stood still, feeling suspended in it, yet all the while it tick-tocks on, as do we, always in transit, always finalizing, heart beating, blood circulating, breath pulsing in and out, growing each moment just a little bit older, time passed time past, an entropic echo, as we wait to check out. In those waiting line conversations, maybe, just maybe, the dense gravity of our minute-and-secondhandedness momentarily lightens and, as the poet Amy Clampett says, we “fall upward.”
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Quoting and Paraphrasing
We quote to reproduce a source exactly and to provide the tonal core of the source’s voice or the impact of its expressive power. We paraphrase to restate that voice, that expression, in our own words, avoiding thereby the distracting iteration of quotations or the charge that we have done little more than create a string of prose beaded by someone else’s words. Most composition textbooks emphasize paraphrase and advise writers to quote sparingly. The original, the direct, is erased, to be replaced by the writer’s restatement of the original.
There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.
I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.
My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.
I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.
If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.
There are two related problems with paraphrasing. First, it is a translation, and translations never capture the original in its full integrity. The second problem lies in what Walker Percy calls “the symbolic complex,” a preformulated perception whose value lies only in the degree to which what is perceived approximates the preformulation. The danger, in short, is that paraphrase can blunt or distort the original, can chamfer or curtain its difference, can even render it mute.
I’d like to think that when we look at the things around us, when we gaze at and regard the phenomena that environ us, we have the choice to quote them or paraphrase them, to open ourselves directly to them or cast them into our own language.
My neighbor has counted every tree on his property and catalogued them by species, as if their sole value lies in their number and diversity. He has inventoried his trees, itemized and columned them in a mental ledger. They do not stand individually before him, are not palpably real and living things, have no secrets. They testify, rather, to the accumulated extent of what he owns, and in that extent he finds self-satisfaction. He does not know and, judging by his reaction to my mentioning it, is incurious about the cultural history of his trees. He does not know that oaks have been immemorially associated with strength and courage, that Socrates called oaks oracle trees, that a poultice made of oak leaves can be used to heal wounds. He does not know that maples represent balance and practicality, that elms emblemize intuition and mental strength, that lindens betoken purity and truth. No, my neighbor has paraphrased his trees, made them images of what he holds within the bounded lines he occupies. He has, in effect, made them images of himself.
I believe trees have a capacity for expression. I’d even say trees can, after a fashion, talk. As cultural ecologist David Abram asserts, trees “can seem to speak to us when they are jostled by the wind,” the “different forms of foliage,” those leafy tongues, lending them “a distinctive voice,” a particular dialect. “To be sure,” Abram says, they “do not speak in words. But neither do humans speak only in words.” Beyond the verbal, we employ, to a much larger extent than we realize, the language of bodily gesture, of pitch and tone and cadence. Linguistically, we share an affinity with trees.
If trees can talk, they can be quoted, directly. Here is what my trees say to me: “Renew yourself each year without fail; be a shading comfort and a nesting home for others; send the branches of yourself outward and upward, and in the winter, let them arch like cursive strokes across the leaden sky; let your living days ring you around and make you wise, and if not wise, then stoic, imperturbable; feel that you are deep-rooted and can withstand the beleaguering bluster of the fiercest gale; refuse to be hijacked by pieces of time; know that, like me, you cannot be shawled by your physical qualities, that you are something more, something implicit, something ineffable and undistilled; and know that that something can be listened to.” And I quote.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
Two Visitors
Each year my home hosts two visitors. They arrive separately, each at the same time, year in and year out, without fail. They are anticipated, and, while not particularly welcome, for I issued no invitation, they are not unwelcome, either. I suppose you could say that they invade my home on an annual basis, but because, practically speaking, there is nothing I can do to stop their arrival, I have learned to accept their advent, even to anticipate it, and use it to do what I like to do best: observe and learn.
* * * * *
The beginning of August, usually within the first three or four days, marks the appearance of what I call the “storm window spider.” From some deep, sub-windowsilled lair, it emerges into the 1/8-inch space between the storm window and screen of the very window before which I sit to eat breakfast and lunch, and, often, to read. Obeying a biological directive not to be denied, my storm-window spider opens the spinnerets at the base of its abdomen and filaments the lower six inches of the screen, from one edge to the other, with an undulant, gauzy trap for miniature forms of life that learn, too late and much to their sorrow, what, exactly, they have gotten themselves into.
Most striking to me is the spider’s immobility. Like some Araneae Zen master, it sits, rinsed of second and minute-hand consciousness, occupying the same spot on the screen no matter when or how often I look. I have seen it move only once, when, jerking abruptly into motion, it traced a zig-zaggy square around its resting place before resuming it. Perhaps that motion was a bit of exercise, an arachnid constitutional to stretch its eight segmented legs and pump some fresh, pale blue blood through its single-chambered heart.
I could easily enough remove the web, and, in fact, did so the first time the spider appeared. By the next morning, however, it had once again “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” And so, I’ve come to view that persistently expressed gossamered tapestry as a form of art, the procreant urge of the spider self unreeled and externalized, its inside made outside and filigreed across the latticed canvas of the screen. Besides, it may be that the spider trains in eight eyes on me as intently as my two eyes monitor it. Perhaps it thinks me a diminished thing, six eyes and six legs short of normal development. Perhaps it watches me sit mostly immobile, in the same place, at the same time, every day, doing the same things, and wonders, bemused, about such a strangely routinized creature. It’s best, I’ve concluded, to let the web remain, removing it only when, toward mid-September, the spider abandons it and retreats deep below the sill to await the next beckoning call of August.
* * * * *
Not long after the storm-window spider has withdrawn, on or about October 7, the wasps arrive. Never in the summer. Only with the serious onset of Fall. Coming home for lunch, I’ll find anywhere from 6 to 10 elegantly slender, narrow-waisted, resonantly buzzing bodies congregated on the living room piano window. I surmise they construct a nest inside the house wall, tucked up near the front-porch soffit, and despite my past attempts to caulk possible ports of entry, I am, finally, unable to discover the crack or crevice by which they get there. I suspect that, roused from their night-chilled torpor by the warming day, they make their determined way down the wall and enter the house through the large double-hung front-room window. My efforts to seal it, though, have proven as unavailing as my outside efforts. They always find a way in. They will not be denied entrance.
I open the piano window to let them find their way back outside. The loiterers I scoop up in a glass or jar, cover it with a piece of paper, then release them outside. My wife Kathy watches, bemused at the futility of my gestures. “They’ll only wind up coming back inside,” she tells me, and I know she’s right. Still, I cannot find it in me to kill them. While I cannot, like Thoreau, feel “complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter,” I can agree with him that they have “never molested me seriously.” They have stung no one but me, and that was once, as I reached under a lampshade to turn on the light, only to dispossess a wasp at its ease on the switch.
No, I cannot kill them, even if they do raise and perplex Robert Frost’s question of what gets walled in, and what, out. They harbor no malevolence, feel no need to beleaguer, have no aforethoughted intent to inflict a stinging wound. They are catalyzed by a cell-deep imperative. They only want out, out to do their pollinating work, out to scavenge, driven by a need for sweets and carbohydrates—a final feast before the coming winter that will mark their end—out, and then back again to nest and colony, back home, a home my home provides.
* * * * *
We are doubly housed, it seems to me. One house, framed with studs, sheathed in a dermis of Tyvek and clapboard, sets a boundary between inside and outside and protects us from the outside by keeping the outside out. And yet, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, given that we are only partially removed from nature, we bring the inside partially out. While we are wonderfully endowed prefrontally cortexed creatures, we yet remain enfleshed biological beings as well. We stand above that in which we are also firmly emplaced. And so, we build decks and front porches and terraces and sun rooms and porticoes and verandas, furnish them with chairs and tables and hammocks and coolers and portable ovens, and use them to eat and snooze and sip iced tea or lemonade or a cold beer and read and write and people-watch and creature-watch and world-go-by watch and, sometimes, maybe often times, just sit and ruminate. Who knows; perhaps some ancestral tug, some savannahed impulse, compels us to return to that from which we originally emerged, but mediated by the indoor we bring outdoor—a hybrid space, a third home. Who knows; perhaps at some level, some profoundly deep level where blood memory lies ineradicably embedded, we feel orphaned, taken by evolution from our original ground of being, and therefore, seeking as much of a reintegration as our new condition allows, we let the wild things in.
* * * * *
But we inhabit another house, bone-studded and skin-sheathed, a SmartHouse, really, powered by the thrumming energy of heart and mind, the churn of consciousness, and to avoid the echo chambering din of our self-reflexive selves, we need to let ourselves out, others in. Nathaniel Hawthorne warns us that “the saddest of all prisons is a [person’s] own heart.” David Foster Wallace warned the 1995 graduates of Kenyon College of the seductive tendency to think themselves “alone at the center of all creation,” lords of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But the outreaching gesture of sympathy can be rebuffed, our words can be misconstrued, our intuition can be mistaken, our understanding can falter, the gaze of others, always judgmental, can be withering. Safer, we conclude, to hunker down, dig in, pile up sandbags to thwart threats to our private conceptions of ourselves. And, so, our house has windows to see out, but no door to let in. We monitor our thoughts, our feelings, but find ourselves reluctant to share them. We want to be secure; we want to bond and understand. We linger at the windows, wistful, waiting, yearning to send forth a sticky thread in hopes of making an anchoring contact, but somehow, someway, it falls short. We buzz at the windows, wanting out, wanting out, but never venturing forth beyond the defensive perimeter to engage the could be, the is-there-more, and maybe, just maybe, leave our shackling too-muchness behind.
* * * * *
The beginning of August, usually within the first three or four days, marks the appearance of what I call the “storm window spider.” From some deep, sub-windowsilled lair, it emerges into the 1/8-inch space between the storm window and screen of the very window before which I sit to eat breakfast and lunch, and, often, to read. Obeying a biological directive not to be denied, my storm-window spider opens the spinnerets at the base of its abdomen and filaments the lower six inches of the screen, from one edge to the other, with an undulant, gauzy trap for miniature forms of life that learn, too late and much to their sorrow, what, exactly, they have gotten themselves into.
Most striking to me is the spider’s immobility. Like some Araneae Zen master, it sits, rinsed of second and minute-hand consciousness, occupying the same spot on the screen no matter when or how often I look. I have seen it move only once, when, jerking abruptly into motion, it traced a zig-zaggy square around its resting place before resuming it. Perhaps that motion was a bit of exercise, an arachnid constitutional to stretch its eight segmented legs and pump some fresh, pale blue blood through its single-chambered heart.
I could easily enough remove the web, and, in fact, did so the first time the spider appeared. By the next morning, however, it had once again “launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” And so, I’ve come to view that persistently expressed gossamered tapestry as a form of art, the procreant urge of the spider self unreeled and externalized, its inside made outside and filigreed across the latticed canvas of the screen. Besides, it may be that the spider trains in eight eyes on me as intently as my two eyes monitor it. Perhaps it thinks me a diminished thing, six eyes and six legs short of normal development. Perhaps it watches me sit mostly immobile, in the same place, at the same time, every day, doing the same things, and wonders, bemused, about such a strangely routinized creature. It’s best, I’ve concluded, to let the web remain, removing it only when, toward mid-September, the spider abandons it and retreats deep below the sill to await the next beckoning call of August.
* * * * *
Not long after the storm-window spider has withdrawn, on or about October 7, the wasps arrive. Never in the summer. Only with the serious onset of Fall. Coming home for lunch, I’ll find anywhere from 6 to 10 elegantly slender, narrow-waisted, resonantly buzzing bodies congregated on the living room piano window. I surmise they construct a nest inside the house wall, tucked up near the front-porch soffit, and despite my past attempts to caulk possible ports of entry, I am, finally, unable to discover the crack or crevice by which they get there. I suspect that, roused from their night-chilled torpor by the warming day, they make their determined way down the wall and enter the house through the large double-hung front-room window. My efforts to seal it, though, have proven as unavailing as my outside efforts. They always find a way in. They will not be denied entrance.
I open the piano window to let them find their way back outside. The loiterers I scoop up in a glass or jar, cover it with a piece of paper, then release them outside. My wife Kathy watches, bemused at the futility of my gestures. “They’ll only wind up coming back inside,” she tells me, and I know she’s right. Still, I cannot find it in me to kill them. While I cannot, like Thoreau, feel “complimented by their regarding my house as a desirable shelter,” I can agree with him that they have “never molested me seriously.” They have stung no one but me, and that was once, as I reached under a lampshade to turn on the light, only to dispossess a wasp at its ease on the switch.
No, I cannot kill them, even if they do raise and perplex Robert Frost’s question of what gets walled in, and what, out. They harbor no malevolence, feel no need to beleaguer, have no aforethoughted intent to inflict a stinging wound. They are catalyzed by a cell-deep imperative. They only want out, out to do their pollinating work, out to scavenge, driven by a need for sweets and carbohydrates—a final feast before the coming winter that will mark their end—out, and then back again to nest and colony, back home, a home my home provides.
* * * * *
We are doubly housed, it seems to me. One house, framed with studs, sheathed in a dermis of Tyvek and clapboard, sets a boundary between inside and outside and protects us from the outside by keeping the outside out. And yet, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, given that we are only partially removed from nature, we bring the inside partially out. While we are wonderfully endowed prefrontally cortexed creatures, we yet remain enfleshed biological beings as well. We stand above that in which we are also firmly emplaced. And so, we build decks and front porches and terraces and sun rooms and porticoes and verandas, furnish them with chairs and tables and hammocks and coolers and portable ovens, and use them to eat and snooze and sip iced tea or lemonade or a cold beer and read and write and people-watch and creature-watch and world-go-by watch and, sometimes, maybe often times, just sit and ruminate. Who knows; perhaps some ancestral tug, some savannahed impulse, compels us to return to that from which we originally emerged, but mediated by the indoor we bring outdoor—a hybrid space, a third home. Who knows; perhaps at some level, some profoundly deep level where blood memory lies ineradicably embedded, we feel orphaned, taken by evolution from our original ground of being, and therefore, seeking as much of a reintegration as our new condition allows, we let the wild things in.
* * * * *
But we inhabit another house, bone-studded and skin-sheathed, a SmartHouse, really, powered by the thrumming energy of heart and mind, the churn of consciousness, and to avoid the echo chambering din of our self-reflexive selves, we need to let ourselves out, others in. Nathaniel Hawthorne warns us that “the saddest of all prisons is a [person’s] own heart.” David Foster Wallace warned the 1995 graduates of Kenyon College of the seductive tendency to think themselves “alone at the center of all creation,” lords of their “own tiny skull-sized kingdoms.” But the outreaching gesture of sympathy can be rebuffed, our words can be misconstrued, our intuition can be mistaken, our understanding can falter, the gaze of others, always judgmental, can be withering. Safer, we conclude, to hunker down, dig in, pile up sandbags to thwart threats to our private conceptions of ourselves. And, so, our house has windows to see out, but no door to let in. We monitor our thoughts, our feelings, but find ourselves reluctant to share them. We want to be secure; we want to bond and understand. We linger at the windows, wistful, waiting, yearning to send forth a sticky thread in hopes of making an anchoring contact, but somehow, someway, it falls short. We buzz at the windows, wanting out, wanting out, but never venturing forth beyond the defensive perimeter to engage the could be, the is-there-more, and maybe, just maybe, leave our shackling too-muchness behind.
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Leave-Takings
My backyard trees are autumn-adorned, brocaded in deep scarlet, reddish gold, honeyed amber, and sassy yellow—tongues speaking in hued accents a chromatic carnival of color, a retinal assault of beauty so rich, so dense, that, had it mass, its weight on my shoulders would bend my back. I wish it would last, but, of course, I know it won’t. I know it is conjured only to be eclipsed—a requiem, really. I know that its very transience gives it its allure, that we treasure that which is soon to be lost. And even as I gaze, leaves leap from branches, “leaf subsides to leaf,” and I know the rasp and pang of a difficult truth: the change of seasons has pulsed to life biological forces not to be denied, forces that transmit hormones that create abscission cells that cluster at the nexus of stem and branch, gradually unmooring each leaf until a breeze completes the separation. The trees are unleaving. The leaves are leaving, they are leaf-letting-go. The leaves are leave-taking. To gaze, directly and attentively, at something is to become entangled with it. So it is with me as I regard the leaving leaves, watch their fluttering, pinwheeling plummet. I think of leave-takings of my own.
I think of my graduation from college, English majored, degree and teaching license in hand, and my wondering, Have I chosen well? Is teaching meant for me? And I found that I had, that it was. I think of the morning of the day I was getting married, and Mom joining me in the kitchen for coffee and telling me she dreamed that she walked into the family room and saw that the goldfish had disappeared from its bowl. And I said, “Mom, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know you’re experiencing a version of empty-nest syndrome. I guess we’ll have to call it empty-bowl syndrome. And besides, be glad you didn’t find the fish belly-up. I am.” And she laughed that laugh she had. And I thought of how, many years later, she was carried away into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, where I was just a face without a name, before she finally, mercifully, got her wish and was carried away into a deeper darkness. And I think of Dad’s gradual decline after a punishing fall that left him lying on the hallway floor for more than a day before he was discovered, and the death certificate that gave as cause “Failure to thrive,” and my thinking that whoever wrote that stark sentence did not know my Dad. And I think of my looming retirement, of the colleagues from whom I will take my leave, colleagues who have cared for and inspired me and never, not once, hid their light under a bushel; and students who have gladdened and saddened and maddened me and always, always pushed me, as I pushed them, to know more, to be better.
We are always leave-taking, it seems, always, in ways large and small, saying farewell, goodbye. It’s the way of things, and it’s best not to deny the inevitable. We live through, but we cannot dwell in, or on, a moment, a day, a season. We cannot give ourselves over to pieces of time. We are in them, but not of them. Each moment arrives unfreighted and quickly departs, cargoed perhaps with yearning or joy or penance or rupture or hope. We need to be beside ourselves, to view those shards of time from the outside, to step aside and back and out from them if their relation is to appear. We are on the move, in motion, churning, always churning. We cast a backward look, for that anchors us, but we move onward, for that completes us. We unfold. We go on going on. We make ourselves cohere. We gather the events and experiences and contingencies and set them to a plot, make them into a narrative, continuous and durable, whose revelatory theme is the who that we are.
I think of my graduation from college, English majored, degree and teaching license in hand, and my wondering, Have I chosen well? Is teaching meant for me? And I found that I had, that it was. I think of the morning of the day I was getting married, and Mom joining me in the kitchen for coffee and telling me she dreamed that she walked into the family room and saw that the goldfish had disappeared from its bowl. And I said, “Mom, you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know you’re experiencing a version of empty-nest syndrome. I guess we’ll have to call it empty-bowl syndrome. And besides, be glad you didn’t find the fish belly-up. I am.” And she laughed that laugh she had. And I thought of how, many years later, she was carried away into the darkness of Alzheimer’s disease, where I was just a face without a name, before she finally, mercifully, got her wish and was carried away into a deeper darkness. And I think of Dad’s gradual decline after a punishing fall that left him lying on the hallway floor for more than a day before he was discovered, and the death certificate that gave as cause “Failure to thrive,” and my thinking that whoever wrote that stark sentence did not know my Dad. And I think of my looming retirement, of the colleagues from whom I will take my leave, colleagues who have cared for and inspired me and never, not once, hid their light under a bushel; and students who have gladdened and saddened and maddened me and always, always pushed me, as I pushed them, to know more, to be better.
We are always leave-taking, it seems, always, in ways large and small, saying farewell, goodbye. It’s the way of things, and it’s best not to deny the inevitable. We live through, but we cannot dwell in, or on, a moment, a day, a season. We cannot give ourselves over to pieces of time. We are in them, but not of them. Each moment arrives unfreighted and quickly departs, cargoed perhaps with yearning or joy or penance or rupture or hope. We need to be beside ourselves, to view those shards of time from the outside, to step aside and back and out from them if their relation is to appear. We are on the move, in motion, churning, always churning. We cast a backward look, for that anchors us, but we move onward, for that completes us. We unfold. We go on going on. We make ourselves cohere. We gather the events and experiences and contingencies and set them to a plot, make them into a narrative, continuous and durable, whose revelatory theme is the who that we are.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Mom Liked Elvis; Dad Liked Perry Como
Mom bought every Elvis 45 available at the local record shop. Dad rarely bought records, but, when he did, he purchased Perry Como exclusively. I think Mom liked the raucous energy of Elvis’s straight-up rock ‘n roll, and the sentimental sadness or the fervent affirmations of the ballads. I think she liked Elvis’s gyrating hips, those howitzer blasts against the fortress of 1950s conformity. I’m pretty sure she liked that Elvis bought a pink (mom’s favorite color) Cadillac for his mother, and that he wasn’t shy about his affection for her. I’d guess she liked that he was “nice boy,” born into poverty and obscurity and an ethos of Southern prejudice, and became wealthy, famous, and, by bringing black music into the mainstream, a force for racial integration. I’d conjecture she liked playing Elvis records while she went about her daily homemaking tasks.
I’m forced to qualify all these statements. Mom never explained her Elvis affinity. Dad was different. He liked Perry Como, and he gave reasons, and, later, when I quite loitering in the foyer of maturity and actually passed through its main room door, I saw reasons beneath the reasons.
Dad liked Perry Como because he projected an unruffled personality, and his music was soothing—“he’s smooooth,” Dad said. Dad liked smooth. Perry Como’s hips did not gyrate. Dad liked that Perry Como was Italian—“you know, his real first name is Pierno,” Dad informed me--; was born poor of immigrant parents from Italy—as Dad had been--;worked as a barber and later ran his own barbershop; gained local recognition performing at wedding receptions and the like—as Dad’s dad, a shoemaker by trade, had--; and went on to become the most popular and successful singer of his generation. Dad liked success stories, especially ones that in some way mirrored his own rise from scrawny Depression-era kid to secure middle class status. Dad knew that Perry Como’s imperturbable, cardigan-sweatered cool masked a competitive nature, and Dad liked competition. Dad also liked romantic ballads, though he would never admit it. He was a stealth romantic.
Dad did not like Elvis—too androgynous, too much grease in his hair, too unconventional—and could not understand why Mom did. “What’s the fascination with that Presley guy,” Dad once asked her. “I like him,” Mom said. Dad wanted a reason, though: “Well, yeah, but why?” “Because he’s Elvis,” Mom said, and that was that. Dad never asked again. Unlike Dad, a systems analyst, Mom felt no compulsion to provide reasons for something she considered blindingly obvious . She thought or believed or felt something, and accepted it as perfectly legitimate, an experience that did not require explanation but that was nonetheless adequate to any query.
I came home from school one day to find the living room furniture rearranged. “Why’d you change the furniture,” I asked. “Oh, I just thought it was time,” she said. “But why,” I persisted. “It needed to be rearranged,” she replied, in a how-can-you-be-so-dense tone. Once, after a particularly lengthy and intense session of pestering of my younger brother Dennis, Mom intervened and told me in no uncertain terms to stop. “Why should I,” I smartalecked. I expected she’d say “because I’ll give you a smack if you don’t,” or “because if you don’t stop you won’t be allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club,” or “because if you don’t I’ll tell your father.” Instead, she said, “Because he’s your brother.” And she emphasized that last word.
It was only later, much later, that I understood what she meant, understood the sheer power of that word, its complexities, understood that its meaning lay in its connotations and implications, that it contained within it a self-evident sovereignty of meaning, that it carried a blood-deep, biology-deep cargo of empathy, of sympathetic imagination, of simple kindness, of the best of all rules, the Golden Rule. For Mom such things needed no logical analysis, no dictionaried explanation. Mom liked Elvis because he was Elvis; she rearranged furniture because it needed it; my brother deserved attentive care and kindness because he was my brother. For her that was enough. Sometimes things, or the idea of things, capture us, and we need to accept being taken. That was her lesson for me. Mom’s replies demanded imagination, and I learned never to mistake a deficiency of imagination on my part with a lack of meaning in her way of knowing.
Dad’s lesson was the necessity of strong claims supported by reasons, a lesson forged over two millennia ago in the Greek agorae, those public assembly places where citizens debated issues of community significance, a lesson that today goes by the name of public discourse, of truth-seeking, reasoned disputation, a lesson that today we seem to have forgotten. “Always give reasons, Jerry,” Dad told me more than once; “people will respect you. They’ll consider you a person who can be trusted.” He was right, of course, and there have been many occasions when I have put his counsel to good use, though I often find myself given more to Mom’s lesson. There is an uncurtained honesty in a simple statement of this-is-what-it-is-to-me that carries its own credibility, as much, perhaps, as a statement of this-is why-it-is-to-me.
Once, I eavesdropped on a conversation between Dad and his brother Carmen about a mutual acquaintance. “He’s an asshole,” Dad declared. “How come,” Carmen asked. “He just is,” Dad said. I smiled. Dad, it would seem, was no more immune to Mom’s lesson than I was. Though, like his Perry Como-ed romanticism, he’d never admit it.
I’m forced to qualify all these statements. Mom never explained her Elvis affinity. Dad was different. He liked Perry Como, and he gave reasons, and, later, when I quite loitering in the foyer of maturity and actually passed through its main room door, I saw reasons beneath the reasons.
Dad liked Perry Como because he projected an unruffled personality, and his music was soothing—“he’s smooooth,” Dad said. Dad liked smooth. Perry Como’s hips did not gyrate. Dad liked that Perry Como was Italian—“you know, his real first name is Pierno,” Dad informed me--; was born poor of immigrant parents from Italy—as Dad had been--;worked as a barber and later ran his own barbershop; gained local recognition performing at wedding receptions and the like—as Dad’s dad, a shoemaker by trade, had--; and went on to become the most popular and successful singer of his generation. Dad liked success stories, especially ones that in some way mirrored his own rise from scrawny Depression-era kid to secure middle class status. Dad knew that Perry Como’s imperturbable, cardigan-sweatered cool masked a competitive nature, and Dad liked competition. Dad also liked romantic ballads, though he would never admit it. He was a stealth romantic.
Dad did not like Elvis—too androgynous, too much grease in his hair, too unconventional—and could not understand why Mom did. “What’s the fascination with that Presley guy,” Dad once asked her. “I like him,” Mom said. Dad wanted a reason, though: “Well, yeah, but why?” “Because he’s Elvis,” Mom said, and that was that. Dad never asked again. Unlike Dad, a systems analyst, Mom felt no compulsion to provide reasons for something she considered blindingly obvious . She thought or believed or felt something, and accepted it as perfectly legitimate, an experience that did not require explanation but that was nonetheless adequate to any query.
I came home from school one day to find the living room furniture rearranged. “Why’d you change the furniture,” I asked. “Oh, I just thought it was time,” she said. “But why,” I persisted. “It needed to be rearranged,” she replied, in a how-can-you-be-so-dense tone. Once, after a particularly lengthy and intense session of pestering of my younger brother Dennis, Mom intervened and told me in no uncertain terms to stop. “Why should I,” I smartalecked. I expected she’d say “because I’ll give you a smack if you don’t,” or “because if you don’t stop you won’t be allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club,” or “because if you don’t I’ll tell your father.” Instead, she said, “Because he’s your brother.” And she emphasized that last word.
It was only later, much later, that I understood what she meant, understood the sheer power of that word, its complexities, understood that its meaning lay in its connotations and implications, that it contained within it a self-evident sovereignty of meaning, that it carried a blood-deep, biology-deep cargo of empathy, of sympathetic imagination, of simple kindness, of the best of all rules, the Golden Rule. For Mom such things needed no logical analysis, no dictionaried explanation. Mom liked Elvis because he was Elvis; she rearranged furniture because it needed it; my brother deserved attentive care and kindness because he was my brother. For her that was enough. Sometimes things, or the idea of things, capture us, and we need to accept being taken. That was her lesson for me. Mom’s replies demanded imagination, and I learned never to mistake a deficiency of imagination on my part with a lack of meaning in her way of knowing.
Dad’s lesson was the necessity of strong claims supported by reasons, a lesson forged over two millennia ago in the Greek agorae, those public assembly places where citizens debated issues of community significance, a lesson that today goes by the name of public discourse, of truth-seeking, reasoned disputation, a lesson that today we seem to have forgotten. “Always give reasons, Jerry,” Dad told me more than once; “people will respect you. They’ll consider you a person who can be trusted.” He was right, of course, and there have been many occasions when I have put his counsel to good use, though I often find myself given more to Mom’s lesson. There is an uncurtained honesty in a simple statement of this-is-what-it-is-to-me that carries its own credibility, as much, perhaps, as a statement of this-is why-it-is-to-me.
Once, I eavesdropped on a conversation between Dad and his brother Carmen about a mutual acquaintance. “He’s an asshole,” Dad declared. “How come,” Carmen asked. “He just is,” Dad said. I smiled. Dad, it would seem, was no more immune to Mom’s lesson than I was. Though, like his Perry Como-ed romanticism, he’d never admit it.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
The Call
The last time I was in a Catholic church was for my Dad’s funeral mass last October. The last time before that was for my Mom’s funeral mass the November prior to Dad’s. The last time before that was a friend’s wedding six months before Mom’s passing. The last time I attended Sunday mass was when I visited my folks. They did not insist, did not even ask. They had accepted that I was fallen away, had been since I was twenty-one, but I went because I knew it would please them. Lately, though, I have felt a call to reintroduce myself to a faith I left more than forty years ago.
“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.
Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.
It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.
Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.
“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.
Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.
It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.
Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.
Monday, September 5, 2011
One Looks At One
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” the poet Theodore Roethke says. For me, a moment of seeing occurred in the pale half light just before dawn one morning toward the end of July. Waiting for the carafe of the Mr. Coffee machine to fill with just enough coffee to banish the last vestiges of drowsiness, I happened to glance out the backyard windows into the garden and saw, as if conjured from that auroral seam between night and morning, a fully-mature, antlered buck nibbling on some sedum. I knew deer were paying calls to the garden. They had left their visiting cards: cropped day lilies, gnawed hostas, and cloven, heart-shaped hoofprints. Neighbors had spoken of seeing deer in their yards, but, until this particular morning, they had been only trace presences in mine. I came to think of the hoofprints as ungulate footnotes without an accompanying cervine text.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Hanging Out, Then Hanging Back
During most of my freshman year at Pacelli High School, my best friends Jim and Mark and I gathered every morning before school at the DX gas station two blocks away. We smoked, swore, drank a Coke or an Orange Crush, gobbled down some Junior Mints or Milk Duds, and assured each other we had not done any homework or studied for any upcoming tests. After school, we again convened at the DX station to discuss the day’s events, repeating the morning’s activities, with the exception of gobbling down Eskimo Pies and Drumsticks instead of candy. Of course, our parents did not permit us to smoke or swear, and, with what we considered puritanical zeal, monitored our homework, studying, and consumption of junk food. It was those very strictures, of course, that made the DX station such a liberating place for us—a mosh pit of indulgence, transgression, and impetuosity. And presiding over that scene of prodigality, its chief practitioner and enabler, and, for us, its chief attraction, was the station manager, Barney Zandiski.
Physically, Barney was a short, powerfully built, floridly complected man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Popeye: same squinty eye, same large jutting chin, same muscled forearms. Philosophically, he subscribed to Popeye’s existential credo: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” And what Barney was was lavishly profane, blushlessly crude, flamboyantly insensitive, and incandescently outrageous. Barney conducted a blustery, non-stop discourse of complaint and criticism, where little was worthy of veneration or respect, where little beyond his own pronouncements held any claim to authority, where an I’m-nobody’s-fool irony heaped scorn on the scantest expression of sincerity or earnestness or sentiment, where all enshrined cultural pieties and conventional standards of social behavior were hammered wafer-thin on the anvil of a sneer and a jeer, where a proud ignorance robustly mocked the supposed dreamy impracticality of intellectual interest or pursuit, where impugning others was a practiced performance, formidable, forensic, frictionless—a running narrative in which the number of Anglo Saxon words referring to sex, genitalia, or excrement stood in equal measure to those that did not, robust profanity in a frenzy of replicability. Barney was a blue-streak poet and a mean-streak cynic, a peerless rhetorician of convulsive shock and voluptuous irreverence. And we were his disciples.
Oh, Barney could be charming with customers, contracting himself into a knot of courteous servility when pumping their gas, checking their oil, and squeegeeing their windshields. He was invariably hospitable and ingratiating with those who ventured inside to purchase a soda or cigarettes or new wiper blades or a quart or two of oil. But once they left, the mockery began: how they looked, what they wore, how they spoke or acted—laced with lewd misogyny and envenomed misandrogy. We listened and looked at each other, eyes and mouths rounded, and then we laughed, and that laughter carried out the door and over the shake-roofed optometrist’s office across the street and on south to the outlying villages of Plover and Whiting. Barney was mesmerizing, shamanic. We harvested his vitriol and parboiled it into ours. We were his disciples.
The reason is no mystery. Barney was a reprieve from the orderly, homogenized, carefully scripted, authority-dominated upbringing that characterized our home lives and our Catholic-school lives. In the DX station those cinctures loosened and fell away. We felt free, truant from resolutely middle-class expectations; felt resistant and contestatory and conspiratorial and subversive. We were unrepentant prodigal sons, fugitives, outliers, outlaws mustered safe in our Hole in the Wall hideout. Barney permitted us this experience, encouraged it, and we let him created us in his own image, let him make us silhouettes against the glare of his unabashed, ungarmented expression of himself.
One day, though, something in me changed. I suddenly saw Barney’s outrage merely as an undisciplined howl, centrifugal and irrational, all sound and fury against something, anything, everything, devoid of significance. His irreverence was simply irreverence; his crudity, grotesque; his rancor, indigent transgressivity—not emancipating, not in rebellion against restraints, but firmly encoiled within them, lashing out with the desperate knowledge of the futility of lashing out. I remembered the look on people’s faces, in their eyes, when they came into the station: ill-at-ease, awkward, discomfited, embarrassed under our unblinkingly judgmental gaze. I felt shame, felt ashamed, shameful, shameless.
It happens like that sometimes, maturity. An abrupt awakening. No Descartes spending six days disassembling and recreating his understanding of what is true and what illusion. Rather, a page turns, a shutter opens, a shaft of eclipsed sunlight flares, a melody unexpectedly changes its key from subtonic to tonic. The physical development of maturity is easily charted: the voice deepens, shirt sleeves and pant legs unaccountably shorten, shoes shrink, hair sprouts in all kinds of untoward places. But cognitively is comes with a rush and something clicks, a puzzle you did not know you were working on suddenly fits its own pieces into place.
What I intuited but did not yet know how to express was this: Our tiny DX gang took a puerile satisfaction of shock for shock’s sake. We wanted sovereignty over ourselves, but, of course, we had ceded it to Barney, experienced it through him, by him, in him. And Barney was a man of unexamined opinion, a man who asserted confidently because he understood and imagined so little that was otherwise, a man for whom the boldness and volume of an opinion masked his largely unrecognized awareness that it lacked any claim of place in the cross-fertilizing conversation where ideas are critically examined, augmented, altered, and always judged. He was a man who scorned and yearned, scorned because he yearned to be other than what George Eliot called “a small hungry shivering self.” He was a man who needed a rapt audience, needed a validating group of listeners. We thought we needed Barney, but I suspect the truth is, he needed us more.
Physically, Barney was a short, powerfully built, floridly complected man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Popeye: same squinty eye, same large jutting chin, same muscled forearms. Philosophically, he subscribed to Popeye’s existential credo: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” And what Barney was was lavishly profane, blushlessly crude, flamboyantly insensitive, and incandescently outrageous. Barney conducted a blustery, non-stop discourse of complaint and criticism, where little was worthy of veneration or respect, where little beyond his own pronouncements held any claim to authority, where an I’m-nobody’s-fool irony heaped scorn on the scantest expression of sincerity or earnestness or sentiment, where all enshrined cultural pieties and conventional standards of social behavior were hammered wafer-thin on the anvil of a sneer and a jeer, where a proud ignorance robustly mocked the supposed dreamy impracticality of intellectual interest or pursuit, where impugning others was a practiced performance, formidable, forensic, frictionless—a running narrative in which the number of Anglo Saxon words referring to sex, genitalia, or excrement stood in equal measure to those that did not, robust profanity in a frenzy of replicability. Barney was a blue-streak poet and a mean-streak cynic, a peerless rhetorician of convulsive shock and voluptuous irreverence. And we were his disciples.
Oh, Barney could be charming with customers, contracting himself into a knot of courteous servility when pumping their gas, checking their oil, and squeegeeing their windshields. He was invariably hospitable and ingratiating with those who ventured inside to purchase a soda or cigarettes or new wiper blades or a quart or two of oil. But once they left, the mockery began: how they looked, what they wore, how they spoke or acted—laced with lewd misogyny and envenomed misandrogy. We listened and looked at each other, eyes and mouths rounded, and then we laughed, and that laughter carried out the door and over the shake-roofed optometrist’s office across the street and on south to the outlying villages of Plover and Whiting. Barney was mesmerizing, shamanic. We harvested his vitriol and parboiled it into ours. We were his disciples.
The reason is no mystery. Barney was a reprieve from the orderly, homogenized, carefully scripted, authority-dominated upbringing that characterized our home lives and our Catholic-school lives. In the DX station those cinctures loosened and fell away. We felt free, truant from resolutely middle-class expectations; felt resistant and contestatory and conspiratorial and subversive. We were unrepentant prodigal sons, fugitives, outliers, outlaws mustered safe in our Hole in the Wall hideout. Barney permitted us this experience, encouraged it, and we let him created us in his own image, let him make us silhouettes against the glare of his unabashed, ungarmented expression of himself.
One day, though, something in me changed. I suddenly saw Barney’s outrage merely as an undisciplined howl, centrifugal and irrational, all sound and fury against something, anything, everything, devoid of significance. His irreverence was simply irreverence; his crudity, grotesque; his rancor, indigent transgressivity—not emancipating, not in rebellion against restraints, but firmly encoiled within them, lashing out with the desperate knowledge of the futility of lashing out. I remembered the look on people’s faces, in their eyes, when they came into the station: ill-at-ease, awkward, discomfited, embarrassed under our unblinkingly judgmental gaze. I felt shame, felt ashamed, shameful, shameless.
It happens like that sometimes, maturity. An abrupt awakening. No Descartes spending six days disassembling and recreating his understanding of what is true and what illusion. Rather, a page turns, a shutter opens, a shaft of eclipsed sunlight flares, a melody unexpectedly changes its key from subtonic to tonic. The physical development of maturity is easily charted: the voice deepens, shirt sleeves and pant legs unaccountably shorten, shoes shrink, hair sprouts in all kinds of untoward places. But cognitively is comes with a rush and something clicks, a puzzle you did not know you were working on suddenly fits its own pieces into place.
What I intuited but did not yet know how to express was this: Our tiny DX gang took a puerile satisfaction of shock for shock’s sake. We wanted sovereignty over ourselves, but, of course, we had ceded it to Barney, experienced it through him, by him, in him. And Barney was a man of unexamined opinion, a man who asserted confidently because he understood and imagined so little that was otherwise, a man for whom the boldness and volume of an opinion masked his largely unrecognized awareness that it lacked any claim of place in the cross-fertilizing conversation where ideas are critically examined, augmented, altered, and always judged. He was a man who scorned and yearned, scorned because he yearned to be other than what George Eliot called “a small hungry shivering self.” He was a man who needed a rapt audience, needed a validating group of listeners. We thought we needed Barney, but I suspect the truth is, he needed us more.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Butterfly Bush
The backyard view from the kitchen’s breakfast area looks out on one of the garden’s accent pieces, the butterfly bush. The shrub is easily five and a half feet tall, and each shoot terminates in a panicle, a pyramid-shaped blossom consisting of tiny, densely-packed purple flowers. It is classified by botanists as buddleja davidii. Nurseries refer to it as the Harlequin variety. I prefer butterfly bush because the name so definitively bears witness to the reality my eyes see. It seems to me that for the past several weeks it has been flash-mobbed by butterflies. Perhaps they feel intimations of their month-and-a-half-long lifespan and are eager to sip as much nectar as possible before they shuffle off that mortal coil. Perhaps, like us, they feel the looming of fall in the late summer. Or, more likely, I simply have not been paying attention. Whatever the reason, the butterfly bush swarms with butterflies, mostly monarchs with their distinctive orange and black-veined wings, and swallowtails, their yellow wings edged and spiked with black. As their long tongues extract nectar, those wings pump lightly, like two chambers of a contented heart.
In art and literature, butterflies often symbolize the soul. This symbolic connection makes sense given the metamorphosis that delivers butterflies to the world. Emerson says that power is a becoming; power “resides in the transition from a past to a new state,” and “that the soul becomes.” And that soul-becoming is power, for in it is the availing force of life itself, “not the having lived.” We emerge into self-possession, ready to lay claim to our deepest humanity. The butterfly begins humbly as a caterpillar, but, in obedience to a biological urge, creates a chrysalis from its own sloughed skin, from which it emerges fully-transformed, ready, at last, to enjoy the golden summer of its winged adulthood. To use the words with which Darwin concludes Origin of Species, “from so simple a beginning,” a form “most beautiful and most wonderful” has “been . . . evolved.”
I know, of course, that butterflies have a mundane function: the pollinate flowers. But I like to think they serve the more powerful purpose of simply being beautiful, of being a fluttering, flitting calligraphy of beauty, inscribing the air and annotating the blossoms upon which they light—small joys, small wonders, small graces to nourish the soul they symbolize.
In art and literature, butterflies often symbolize the soul. This symbolic connection makes sense given the metamorphosis that delivers butterflies to the world. Emerson says that power is a becoming; power “resides in the transition from a past to a new state,” and “that the soul becomes.” And that soul-becoming is power, for in it is the availing force of life itself, “not the having lived.” We emerge into self-possession, ready to lay claim to our deepest humanity. The butterfly begins humbly as a caterpillar, but, in obedience to a biological urge, creates a chrysalis from its own sloughed skin, from which it emerges fully-transformed, ready, at last, to enjoy the golden summer of its winged adulthood. To use the words with which Darwin concludes Origin of Species, “from so simple a beginning,” a form “most beautiful and most wonderful” has “been . . . evolved.”
I know, of course, that butterflies have a mundane function: the pollinate flowers. But I like to think they serve the more powerful purpose of simply being beautiful, of being a fluttering, flitting calligraphy of beauty, inscribing the air and annotating the blossoms upon which they light—small joys, small wonders, small graces to nourish the soul they symbolize.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Scooter Dreams
I said to my wife Kathy, “I think I’m going to get a scooter.”
“Have you been watching The Wild One again,” she asked.
Oh, Kathy is a wise woman. She knows that The Wild One is my second-favorite movie of all time. The brooding Brando as Johnny Strabler, belligerently anarchic and self destructive, glowering like a gargoyle atop the structure of the film. The tang of vicarious pleasure I get when he’s asked what he’s rebelling against: “Whaddaya got?” Nietszche on a motorcycle, wearing dungarees and black leather, a profanation of complacent postwar conformism
My favorite movie of all time? Shane. Not because of Alan Ladd’s Shane. Because of Jack Palance’s Jack Wilson, a coiled knot of psychopathic evil, slowly, meticulously, pulling on those skin-tight black gloves, barely containing the glee at the prospect of another killing, slowly, oh so slowly, dismounting from his horse to signal his disdain upon first confronting Shane. The laconic challenge before the gunfight: “I’ve heard you’re a low-down Yankee liar,” Shane says. “Prove it,” Wilson hisses. What Shane proves is he’s a bit faster on the draw. Christ in buckskins dispatches the cattle-baron-loving gun-for-hire Mephistopheles, redeeming the land for the homesteading elect.
“No, not a motorcycle,” I told Kathy; “a scooter. I’m thinking a Piaggio Fly 150. Midnight blue.”
“Why?”
“Why midnight blue?”
She made an exasperated noise. “Noooo, why a scooter?”
“It gets 75 miles to a gallon of gas. Think of the money we’ll save. And, it’s sleek and elegant, like me, and with 1.9% financing it’s affordable.”
“Do you know you’ll have to get a special license? And that means you’ll have to study a manual and take a test and then have your riding evaluated. You might even be asked to take a safety course. And what about insurance? And a helmet? And accessories? And the fact that it’s not a year-round vehicle?”
“But,” I protested, “gas is almost four bucks a gallon, and, besides, it’s sleek and elegant, like me.”
“That last part’s debatable. But tell me, how exactly are you saving money?”
Though she’s never read Blaise Pascal, Kathy knows what he knew: “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” She certainly made me aware of what I knew not of. And recent research suggests why: reason is fragile because it is personal, but more resolute when it is social. We use reason to justify ourselves to ourselves and others. We reason, but it is motivated, bent toward confirming what we already believe or want to believe. But used in the presence of others, with others equally motivated, reason widens our range of perspectives, pulls us beyond ourselves to a kind of self-overcoming—like a bubble balancing inner and outer pressure to preserve its membranous integrity.
* * * * *
Another bubble, the one in a spirit level, when kept within the small boxed area of a small, liquid-filled glass tube, establishes a confirmatory horizontal plane by noting any unparallel direction. It maintains constancy, plumbness and evenness of position; in effect, it resists any destabilization. There are people whose internal spirit levels immunize them from the dialogic expansiveness of reason, who draw an impervious protective circle around themselves and their inbent beliefs, who will not venture from the hermetic mountain keep of their confirmatory bias.
Once, in my introductory mass media course, a class discussion on the visual grammar of camera angle, lighting, and music turned to the scene in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society where Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard, now Dr. James Wilson in House) descends the staircase, on his way to his father’s den and the gun he will use to commit suicide. And that discussion turned to the movie’s conclusion which, to a person, the students acclaimed as uplifting, satisfyingly inspiring. I intervened.
“Wait a minute. You’re forgetting a few things. First, Robin William’s character, John Keating, has been blackballed. He’ll never teach again. And remember, he says earlier in the movie that teaching is his life? So basically, his life is over. And what about his role in Neil Perry’s suicide? Doesn’t he encourage Neil to pursue acting, in defiance of Neil’s father saying he would be a doctor? Doesn’t the movie fudge his responsibility for Neil’s death? See, the ending is illusory, it’s Hollywoody. Boys standing on their desks, the “Captain, my Captain” thing. It’s manufactured to make you feel good, make you feel everything’s noble and affirmative, by making you forget that Keating has suffered an irreversible personal tragedy and may well be morally culpable for the death of one of his students.”
Murmurs churned among the students, murmurs that swelled into a chorus of animated protest. “Geez, Dr. DeNuccio, there you go doing that English teacher thing again,” said one student, and the others voiced their assent. “Why do you have to analyze everything and take the interest out of it,” said another; “you’re as bad as that teacher who has the boys diagramming poetry,” and the others, again, but more vociferously, voiced their assent. I’d swear, though surely my ears deceived me, I’d swear I heard someone whisper, “Get a rope.” Chatting with one of the students in that class at the end of the year, I was told that on his residence hall my effort to broaden their critical perspective was still a topic of discussion, and still dismissed. The movie had conjured in them what Wendell Barry calls “a feelable thought,” from which they would not be dislodged.
* * * * *
In a recent study entitled “`Macho Men’ and Preventative Health Care,” Kristen Springer and Dawne Mouzon of Rutgers University have found that men who cling to stereotypical notions of masculine behavior die earlier than men who observe a more moderate masculine role. Macho men, cabined by show-no-weakness thinking, do not seek out preventative health care, and they are overly susceptible to risky, guy-code behavior.
A man on a midnight blue Piaggio scooter can hardly qualify as macho. Think of Tom Hanks in Larry Crowne. Such a man is therefore likely to live longer. I could have used that argument with Kathy, but she would have said, “Jerry, you never have been and never will be a macho man.” She’d mean that as a compliment.
“Have you been watching The Wild One again,” she asked.
Oh, Kathy is a wise woman. She knows that The Wild One is my second-favorite movie of all time. The brooding Brando as Johnny Strabler, belligerently anarchic and self destructive, glowering like a gargoyle atop the structure of the film. The tang of vicarious pleasure I get when he’s asked what he’s rebelling against: “Whaddaya got?” Nietszche on a motorcycle, wearing dungarees and black leather, a profanation of complacent postwar conformism
My favorite movie of all time? Shane. Not because of Alan Ladd’s Shane. Because of Jack Palance’s Jack Wilson, a coiled knot of psychopathic evil, slowly, meticulously, pulling on those skin-tight black gloves, barely containing the glee at the prospect of another killing, slowly, oh so slowly, dismounting from his horse to signal his disdain upon first confronting Shane. The laconic challenge before the gunfight: “I’ve heard you’re a low-down Yankee liar,” Shane says. “Prove it,” Wilson hisses. What Shane proves is he’s a bit faster on the draw. Christ in buckskins dispatches the cattle-baron-loving gun-for-hire Mephistopheles, redeeming the land for the homesteading elect.
“No, not a motorcycle,” I told Kathy; “a scooter. I’m thinking a Piaggio Fly 150. Midnight blue.”
“Why?”
“Why midnight blue?”
She made an exasperated noise. “Noooo, why a scooter?”
“It gets 75 miles to a gallon of gas. Think of the money we’ll save. And, it’s sleek and elegant, like me, and with 1.9% financing it’s affordable.”
“Do you know you’ll have to get a special license? And that means you’ll have to study a manual and take a test and then have your riding evaluated. You might even be asked to take a safety course. And what about insurance? And a helmet? And accessories? And the fact that it’s not a year-round vehicle?”
“But,” I protested, “gas is almost four bucks a gallon, and, besides, it’s sleek and elegant, like me.”
“That last part’s debatable. But tell me, how exactly are you saving money?”
Though she’s never read Blaise Pascal, Kathy knows what he knew: “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” She certainly made me aware of what I knew not of. And recent research suggests why: reason is fragile because it is personal, but more resolute when it is social. We use reason to justify ourselves to ourselves and others. We reason, but it is motivated, bent toward confirming what we already believe or want to believe. But used in the presence of others, with others equally motivated, reason widens our range of perspectives, pulls us beyond ourselves to a kind of self-overcoming—like a bubble balancing inner and outer pressure to preserve its membranous integrity.
* * * * *
Another bubble, the one in a spirit level, when kept within the small boxed area of a small, liquid-filled glass tube, establishes a confirmatory horizontal plane by noting any unparallel direction. It maintains constancy, plumbness and evenness of position; in effect, it resists any destabilization. There are people whose internal spirit levels immunize them from the dialogic expansiveness of reason, who draw an impervious protective circle around themselves and their inbent beliefs, who will not venture from the hermetic mountain keep of their confirmatory bias.
Once, in my introductory mass media course, a class discussion on the visual grammar of camera angle, lighting, and music turned to the scene in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society where Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard, now Dr. James Wilson in House) descends the staircase, on his way to his father’s den and the gun he will use to commit suicide. And that discussion turned to the movie’s conclusion which, to a person, the students acclaimed as uplifting, satisfyingly inspiring. I intervened.
“Wait a minute. You’re forgetting a few things. First, Robin William’s character, John Keating, has been blackballed. He’ll never teach again. And remember, he says earlier in the movie that teaching is his life? So basically, his life is over. And what about his role in Neil Perry’s suicide? Doesn’t he encourage Neil to pursue acting, in defiance of Neil’s father saying he would be a doctor? Doesn’t the movie fudge his responsibility for Neil’s death? See, the ending is illusory, it’s Hollywoody. Boys standing on their desks, the “Captain, my Captain” thing. It’s manufactured to make you feel good, make you feel everything’s noble and affirmative, by making you forget that Keating has suffered an irreversible personal tragedy and may well be morally culpable for the death of one of his students.”
Murmurs churned among the students, murmurs that swelled into a chorus of animated protest. “Geez, Dr. DeNuccio, there you go doing that English teacher thing again,” said one student, and the others voiced their assent. “Why do you have to analyze everything and take the interest out of it,” said another; “you’re as bad as that teacher who has the boys diagramming poetry,” and the others, again, but more vociferously, voiced their assent. I’d swear, though surely my ears deceived me, I’d swear I heard someone whisper, “Get a rope.” Chatting with one of the students in that class at the end of the year, I was told that on his residence hall my effort to broaden their critical perspective was still a topic of discussion, and still dismissed. The movie had conjured in them what Wendell Barry calls “a feelable thought,” from which they would not be dislodged.
* * * * *
In a recent study entitled “`Macho Men’ and Preventative Health Care,” Kristen Springer and Dawne Mouzon of Rutgers University have found that men who cling to stereotypical notions of masculine behavior die earlier than men who observe a more moderate masculine role. Macho men, cabined by show-no-weakness thinking, do not seek out preventative health care, and they are overly susceptible to risky, guy-code behavior.
A man on a midnight blue Piaggio scooter can hardly qualify as macho. Think of Tom Hanks in Larry Crowne. Such a man is therefore likely to live longer. I could have used that argument with Kathy, but she would have said, “Jerry, you never have been and never will be a macho man.” She’d mean that as a compliment.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Robert Frost: The Golf Poems
It is not generally known that the poet Robert Frost was an avid golfer. Unfortunately, his avidity for the game was not in the least matched by any skill at playing it. On the golf course, Frost exhibited ineptitude’s ineptitude; it was artlessness syncopated by lavish bungling, incompetence sung in the key of clamoring ungainliness, an anvil upon which his equanimity was hammered molecule-thin. Angels wept at the sight. But, as poets are sometimes wont to do, Frost turned his frustration into poetry. It offered catharsis.
Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away. No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes stored in the basement of the Lamoni Public Library in southern Iowa discovered them. What follows is one of the poems. Your IR promises that more will, for the first time, see the light of day.
Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*
Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,
On a golf course I played this weekend past.
My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.
My game’s a bag of botches first and last.
The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.
My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.
And just when I think my game’s come around,
A double bogey takes me unawares.
And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.
How many would be impossible to guess.
My stock and store of curse words are expended;
I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.
I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,
As if it were a promised-land oasis.
No Canaan looms to redeem my doffing game.
I wander lost in its desert places.
*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.
Golf was Frost’s Gethsemane. He suffered. The game played havoc with his equipoise: it dekiltered, agoged, and thoroughly millstoned him. Frost believed poetry should be like ice sliding across the surface of a hot stove. Golf, for Frost, proved to be poetry’s dark other. Below, your IR provides another poem from the collection he has named Robert Frost: The Golf Poems.
Robert Frost’s Golf Game Acquaints Him with Darkness
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
I have walked out on golf courses—and walked back in pain,
I have outwalked ineptitude’s furthest baneful light.
I have searched for my incorrigible shots in vain.
I have been hailed and passed by golfers behind
And dropped my eyes, unable to explain.
I have swung and looked and thought myself blind
Till from another fairway comes a cry
To tell me where my ball is consigned,
And in that telling lies my golf game’s fall,
Its lack of grace and vertiginous fright.
Yet a Coors clock on the backbar wall
Proclaims the time for quitting neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library. As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incompetence at the sport, but your IR notices here a new wrinkle in the floundering and foozled poet’s psychic economy: a dire warning that his plunge into golf’s dark waters may cannonball-splash into apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, beneath the poem lies an almost Ahabian howl of fury at a seemingly malign and universal spiritus mundi that seeks, actively, to stupefy and degrade all human striving. Overheated verse by and underperforming golfer? Your IR will let you be the judge.
Robert Frost Goes Apocalyptic
My curse words rose with a dinning shout.
One chasing another going out.
I thought of doing something to the course
That sickles do to thickest gorse.
Clouds hung dark and low in the skies,
And echoed my profanities in stark reprise.
You could not tell, it seemed as if
My purpose here was to stage each whiff,
Whiff followed by whiff, and more besides.
It looked as if my inept bona fides
Were on display, not only for the day, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There will be more than my driver broken,
Before my I’m calling it quits was spoken.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued. Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. But these woods, while “dark and deep,” are not “lovely.” He decides to avoid the pain of entering the darkness that would confirm his frightening lack of golfing ability.
Your IR speculates that, introspectively speaking, golf, for Frost, was a contact sport where wrath and woe encountered each other and established ongoing, contentious relations. Your IR further speculates (your IR is a voluptuous speculator) that Frost yearned for the blessing of being Ben Hoganed, but that yearning was perpetually mocked until Frost saw himself as a symbol of thwarted effort, a mere effect of what he was unable to master, a being hackysacked by the jeer of fate and frustrated desire. Such a psychic economy creates a mental debt obligation that cannot be collateralized, and, rather than suffer an unswappable credit default, he chooses discretion and withdraws.
Robert Frost Refuses to Stray from the Fairway
As I came to the edge of the woods,
I heard an ominous mumble—hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark to pilgrimage or forage
For my errant drive.
Yet it was my last golf ball,
Entombed in that tree-trunked hive.
The woods seemed to gather its breath
As if to muster a voice
Of challenge: I am dark, I am dark.
And it awaited my choice.
Deep in the pillared dark
My golf ball went.
I could, like it,
Go into the dark, and lament.
But no: I was not out for pain.
The fairway is dark enough.
I would not go in for the ball,
And reconfirm my duff.
In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupÒ«on of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom. Perhaps, though, your IR suffers from the pathetic fallacy or intentional fallacy or some other grievous offense against the law of New Criticism which, despite numerous attempts by moderns “to stab it with their steely knives,” it seems “they just can’t kill the beast.” Your IR himself once played golf; he himself fell victim to the immaculate deception that, with enough expended effort, the game could be mastered; he himself experienced the lamentation wrung from a sorrow-drenched heart. But, unlike your IR, who renounced the game, Frost, in his last stanza, suggests he will persist, that, despite being continually Sahara-ed by bunkers, he has found the inner strength to endure even the repetitive slings of golf’s most outrageous arrows.
Because your IR has attention-diverting matters he must deal with, this poem will be the penultimate in the series. However, he assures you that the final poem will offer a trippy surprise.
Robert Frost Bunkered But Not Bunkered
I have been treading in sand all day until I am bunker-tired.
Millions of grains I have trodden on, and I have felt mired.
Perhaps I have been too fierce with fear of out of bounds.
I have trod upon sand I trod in previous rounds.
All summer long traps have invited me in,
And urged me to mistake and flaw, and sin.
All summer long I heard them threaten under their breath,
And when I entered them it seemed with a will to death.
They spoke to my granulated heart as if it were grain to grain.
They filled my shoes and eyes and touched me with the mark of Cain.
But it was no reason for exile to the land of Nod, east of Eden.
I would be up to my ankles in sand the following season.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find in the uncatalogued box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game. Your IR speculates that Frost and Stevens played together, and that Stevens’ taken abackness at Frost’s unlovely swing--a sight that might, just might, launch a single tattered and leaky dinghy, a motion so spasmodically crooked as to defy even the most sedulous of orthopedic straightening efforts, a spectacle so frightening it would most probably have kept Humpty Dumpty firmly seated on the wall, an action so abjectly frenzied as to be incapable of streamlining or safety-checking—moved him to poetic empathy.
But, unlike, say, the rhetorical bluster of politicians or the number of films in which Samuel L. Jackson appears, Stevens’ empathy is not inexhaustible. He proposes interventions, and, if they fail to have the desired effect, well, he is prepared to abandon Frost to the “ambiguous undulations” of his artless golfing efforts. “Pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” Stevens noted. Golf swings either.
The Emperor of the Golf Swing
Call the corrector of golf swings,
The famous one, and bid him whip
Bob’s s crooked stroke into concupiscent flow.
Let the foursomes dawdle and palaver
As they are used to do, and let young men
Boast their rounds in the clubhouse bar.
Let Bob’s summer be more than a finale of spring.
The only emperor is the emperor of the golf swing.
Take from the pages of Golf Digest
All the instructional articles, those sheets
On which slices and shanks find their cure,
And spread them in front of Bob’s face.
If his elbow still protrudes and he yet reverse pivots
It shows how incorrigible he is, and dumb.
Let inept then affix its venomous sting
And frustrate all help from the emperor of the golf swing.
Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away. No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes stored in the basement of the Lamoni Public Library in southern Iowa discovered them. What follows is one of the poems. Your IR promises that more will, for the first time, see the light of day.
Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*
Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,
On a golf course I played this weekend past.
My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.
My game’s a bag of botches first and last.
The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.
My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.
And just when I think my game’s come around,
A double bogey takes me unawares.
And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.
How many would be impossible to guess.
My stock and store of curse words are expended;
I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.
I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,
As if it were a promised-land oasis.
No Canaan looms to redeem my doffing game.
I wander lost in its desert places.
*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.
Golf was Frost’s Gethsemane. He suffered. The game played havoc with his equipoise: it dekiltered, agoged, and thoroughly millstoned him. Frost believed poetry should be like ice sliding across the surface of a hot stove. Golf, for Frost, proved to be poetry’s dark other. Below, your IR provides another poem from the collection he has named Robert Frost: The Golf Poems.
Robert Frost’s Golf Game Acquaints Him with Darkness
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
I have walked out on golf courses—and walked back in pain,
I have outwalked ineptitude’s furthest baneful light.
I have searched for my incorrigible shots in vain.
I have been hailed and passed by golfers behind
And dropped my eyes, unable to explain.
I have swung and looked and thought myself blind
Till from another fairway comes a cry
To tell me where my ball is consigned,
And in that telling lies my golf game’s fall,
Its lack of grace and vertiginous fright.
Yet a Coors clock on the backbar wall
Proclaims the time for quitting neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library. As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incompetence at the sport, but your IR notices here a new wrinkle in the floundering and foozled poet’s psychic economy: a dire warning that his plunge into golf’s dark waters may cannonball-splash into apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, beneath the poem lies an almost Ahabian howl of fury at a seemingly malign and universal spiritus mundi that seeks, actively, to stupefy and degrade all human striving. Overheated verse by and underperforming golfer? Your IR will let you be the judge.
Robert Frost Goes Apocalyptic
My curse words rose with a dinning shout.
One chasing another going out.
I thought of doing something to the course
That sickles do to thickest gorse.
Clouds hung dark and low in the skies,
And echoed my profanities in stark reprise.
You could not tell, it seemed as if
My purpose here was to stage each whiff,
Whiff followed by whiff, and more besides.
It looked as if my inept bona fides
Were on display, not only for the day, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There will be more than my driver broken,
Before my I’m calling it quits was spoken.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued. Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. But these woods, while “dark and deep,” are not “lovely.” He decides to avoid the pain of entering the darkness that would confirm his frightening lack of golfing ability.
Your IR speculates that, introspectively speaking, golf, for Frost, was a contact sport where wrath and woe encountered each other and established ongoing, contentious relations. Your IR further speculates (your IR is a voluptuous speculator) that Frost yearned for the blessing of being Ben Hoganed, but that yearning was perpetually mocked until Frost saw himself as a symbol of thwarted effort, a mere effect of what he was unable to master, a being hackysacked by the jeer of fate and frustrated desire. Such a psychic economy creates a mental debt obligation that cannot be collateralized, and, rather than suffer an unswappable credit default, he chooses discretion and withdraws.
Robert Frost Refuses to Stray from the Fairway
As I came to the edge of the woods,
I heard an ominous mumble—hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark to pilgrimage or forage
For my errant drive.
Yet it was my last golf ball,
Entombed in that tree-trunked hive.
The woods seemed to gather its breath
As if to muster a voice
Of challenge: I am dark, I am dark.
And it awaited my choice.
Deep in the pillared dark
My golf ball went.
I could, like it,
Go into the dark, and lament.
But no: I was not out for pain.
The fairway is dark enough.
I would not go in for the ball,
And reconfirm my duff.
In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupÒ«on of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom. Perhaps, though, your IR suffers from the pathetic fallacy or intentional fallacy or some other grievous offense against the law of New Criticism which, despite numerous attempts by moderns “to stab it with their steely knives,” it seems “they just can’t kill the beast.” Your IR himself once played golf; he himself fell victim to the immaculate deception that, with enough expended effort, the game could be mastered; he himself experienced the lamentation wrung from a sorrow-drenched heart. But, unlike your IR, who renounced the game, Frost, in his last stanza, suggests he will persist, that, despite being continually Sahara-ed by bunkers, he has found the inner strength to endure even the repetitive slings of golf’s most outrageous arrows.
Because your IR has attention-diverting matters he must deal with, this poem will be the penultimate in the series. However, he assures you that the final poem will offer a trippy surprise.
Robert Frost Bunkered But Not Bunkered
I have been treading in sand all day until I am bunker-tired.
Millions of grains I have trodden on, and I have felt mired.
Perhaps I have been too fierce with fear of out of bounds.
I have trod upon sand I trod in previous rounds.
All summer long traps have invited me in,
And urged me to mistake and flaw, and sin.
All summer long I heard them threaten under their breath,
And when I entered them it seemed with a will to death.
They spoke to my granulated heart as if it were grain to grain.
They filled my shoes and eyes and touched me with the mark of Cain.
But it was no reason for exile to the land of Nod, east of Eden.
I would be up to my ankles in sand the following season.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find in the uncatalogued box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game. Your IR speculates that Frost and Stevens played together, and that Stevens’ taken abackness at Frost’s unlovely swing--a sight that might, just might, launch a single tattered and leaky dinghy, a motion so spasmodically crooked as to defy even the most sedulous of orthopedic straightening efforts, a spectacle so frightening it would most probably have kept Humpty Dumpty firmly seated on the wall, an action so abjectly frenzied as to be incapable of streamlining or safety-checking—moved him to poetic empathy.
But, unlike, say, the rhetorical bluster of politicians or the number of films in which Samuel L. Jackson appears, Stevens’ empathy is not inexhaustible. He proposes interventions, and, if they fail to have the desired effect, well, he is prepared to abandon Frost to the “ambiguous undulations” of his artless golfing efforts. “Pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” Stevens noted. Golf swings either.
The Emperor of the Golf Swing
Call the corrector of golf swings,
The famous one, and bid him whip
Bob’s s crooked stroke into concupiscent flow.
Let the foursomes dawdle and palaver
As they are used to do, and let young men
Boast their rounds in the clubhouse bar.
Let Bob’s summer be more than a finale of spring.
The only emperor is the emperor of the golf swing.
Take from the pages of Golf Digest
All the instructional articles, those sheets
On which slices and shanks find their cure,
And spread them in front of Bob’s face.
If his elbow still protrudes and he yet reverse pivots
It shows how incorrigible he is, and dumb.
Let inept then affix its venomous sting
And frustrate all help from the emperor of the golf swing.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Prayer
In yet another scientific study that tells us something we already knew, research to be published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that prayer calms anger. In the study, participants who received demeaning comments on an essay they wrote displayed less anger and aggression when they were asked to pray for, rather than simply think about, the person who made the insulting comments. This anger management effect held despite religious affiliation or frequency of church attendance. According to study co-author Brad Bushman, “prayer really can help people cope with their anger, probably by helping them change how they view the events that angered them and helping them take it less personally.”
How, I wonder, can this study constitute what the article describing it calls “emerging research”? In Matthew 5:44, we are told Jesus counsels us to “pray for those who persecute you”? I was not aware that Jesus’s injunction to adopt the benevolent perspective of disapproving the action but not the person required scientific validation. Who knew an empirical basis was necessary? I always thought the truth of it was self-evident. And how, I wonder, do the results of this study differ from the advice many of us received when young to count to 10 when angered, precisely to avoid responding in kind? As a newly-fledged teen, I had, as they say, anger issues, which, of course, I blamed on the temperament I had inherited from the Italian side of my family. My mother, much too wise to countenance a my-ethnicity-made-me-do-it excuse for a personal failing, finally took me to task for my volatile and incendiary temper, offering this advice, her version of the count-to-10 rule:
“Jerry, what’s the most pleasant thing you can think of”?
“Well, I guess that Little League game where I struck out the side with nine pitches. Seven fastballs, two curves.”
“OK; the next time you feel yourself getting angry, think of that, think of those nine pitches, and if you’re really angry, like you might lose control, think of the person you’re angry at as one of the three you’ve struck out and sent back to the dugout.”
Fifty years later, I still use that strategy. It works. It works as well as prayer did for the study participants. In fact, I would argue that the technique my mom advised is a form of prayer.
* * * * * * *
I’m sure I scandalized a rather religious-minded colleague recently when, during a conversation we were having about prayer, he asked me if I prayed.
“Kind of,” I replied.
“How do you `kind of’ pray? What do you ask God for?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really pray to God, and I don’t really ask for things. Emerson says that kind of prayer `is meanness and theft.’”
“Jesus specifically says in John that `You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it.’”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to resist a bit of Scripture-quote jousting, “but in Mark He says `whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ See, that ‘believe that you have received it’ is a kind of qualification. It’s more about the psychological stance than a divine gift. If your prayers are answered, it’s more you than God.”
“Well, but how can you pray even ‘kind of’ if you don’t pray to God? Isn’t prayer by definition addressed to God? I mean, if not to God, who do you pray to? And if not for things, what do you pray for?”
“Myself, for myself.”
He made a noise in his throat, as if a particularly spiny piece of mesquite was lodged there, and, despite my not having denied the existence of God or the value of prayer or even the imprecatory nature of it, he walked off, convinced, I fear, that my heretical assertions made me a fit subject for police surveillance.
* * * * * * *
The best prayer I know was written by one of the most spiritual persons I am acquainted with: Henry David Thoreau. Here is Thoreau’s prayer:
Prayer
Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
Thoreau’s “Prayer” may seem irreverently self-regarding, but it really asks for nothing more than the courage of his “firm faith,”—the courage to avoid hypocrisy, the courage to persist in it despite his friends’ disappointment that he hasn’t adopted a career and made a life for himself, the courage to neither underrate nor exaggerate the end for which he believes the created order was intended. Thoreau’s “Prayer” is really about seeing himself clearly and being himself clearly, not as others “think or hope” him to be. He purposely uses the word “discern,” which, etymologically, means “to sift apart,” and the sifting he has in mind is a rigorous, truth- telling kind of self-analysis that reveals how well his life accords with the gifts by which he has been “distinguished.” In short, I take the prayer’s theme to be contained in the second line: “that I may not disappoint myself.” It was this appeal I had in mind when I told my colleague that I prayed to myself for myself.
* * * * * * *
Henry Ward Beecher is surely right when he says “It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.” Herman Melville may be right when he says that prayer “draws us near to our own souls.” It depends, as so much does, on how one defines “soul,” and whether that definition occupies the space of a leaflet or the wide-ranged expanse of a novel. But I particularly admire Frederick Douglass’s resolutely unmetaphysical perspective: he prayed, he tells us, for twenty years for freedom, and his prayer went unanswered “until I prayed with my legs.” Prayer as doing, not seeking to receive; prayer as remastering a higher fidelity version of the scratchy vinyl we tend to become; prayer as mustering the energy to better ourselves, to strain, like a dandelion pushing itself up through the tarred gravel of a macadam road, toward the summer florescence of our full potential.
We are limited beings, physically and cognitively, but that it hardly a flaw. It simply means we can create the best self it is in us to be, and not some other self. Lucifer fell from heaven; our fall was garden-level. We can, as poet Amy Clampett says, “fall upward.” We are not neurochemicaled; we are not DNAified. “Human limits structure human virtue,” Martha Nussbaum points out, “and give excellent action its significance.” I pray that I don’t disappoint myself. I pray to articulate and reflect on what I am, what I can be, and how to bridge the difference.
How, I wonder, can this study constitute what the article describing it calls “emerging research”? In Matthew 5:44, we are told Jesus counsels us to “pray for those who persecute you”? I was not aware that Jesus’s injunction to adopt the benevolent perspective of disapproving the action but not the person required scientific validation. Who knew an empirical basis was necessary? I always thought the truth of it was self-evident. And how, I wonder, do the results of this study differ from the advice many of us received when young to count to 10 when angered, precisely to avoid responding in kind? As a newly-fledged teen, I had, as they say, anger issues, which, of course, I blamed on the temperament I had inherited from the Italian side of my family. My mother, much too wise to countenance a my-ethnicity-made-me-do-it excuse for a personal failing, finally took me to task for my volatile and incendiary temper, offering this advice, her version of the count-to-10 rule:
“Jerry, what’s the most pleasant thing you can think of”?
“Well, I guess that Little League game where I struck out the side with nine pitches. Seven fastballs, two curves.”
“OK; the next time you feel yourself getting angry, think of that, think of those nine pitches, and if you’re really angry, like you might lose control, think of the person you’re angry at as one of the three you’ve struck out and sent back to the dugout.”
Fifty years later, I still use that strategy. It works. It works as well as prayer did for the study participants. In fact, I would argue that the technique my mom advised is a form of prayer.
* * * * * * *
I’m sure I scandalized a rather religious-minded colleague recently when, during a conversation we were having about prayer, he asked me if I prayed.
“Kind of,” I replied.
“How do you `kind of’ pray? What do you ask God for?”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t really pray to God, and I don’t really ask for things. Emerson says that kind of prayer `is meanness and theft.’”
“Jesus specifically says in John that `You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it.’”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to resist a bit of Scripture-quote jousting, “but in Mark He says `whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.’ See, that ‘believe that you have received it’ is a kind of qualification. It’s more about the psychological stance than a divine gift. If your prayers are answered, it’s more you than God.”
“Well, but how can you pray even ‘kind of’ if you don’t pray to God? Isn’t prayer by definition addressed to God? I mean, if not to God, who do you pray to? And if not for things, what do you pray for?”
“Myself, for myself.”
He made a noise in his throat, as if a particularly spiny piece of mesquite was lodged there, and, despite my not having denied the existence of God or the value of prayer or even the imprecatory nature of it, he walked off, convinced, I fear, that my heretical assertions made me a fit subject for police surveillance.
* * * * * * *
The best prayer I know was written by one of the most spiritual persons I am acquainted with: Henry David Thoreau. Here is Thoreau’s prayer:
Prayer
Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.
And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.
That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.
Thoreau’s “Prayer” may seem irreverently self-regarding, but it really asks for nothing more than the courage of his “firm faith,”—the courage to avoid hypocrisy, the courage to persist in it despite his friends’ disappointment that he hasn’t adopted a career and made a life for himself, the courage to neither underrate nor exaggerate the end for which he believes the created order was intended. Thoreau’s “Prayer” is really about seeing himself clearly and being himself clearly, not as others “think or hope” him to be. He purposely uses the word “discern,” which, etymologically, means “to sift apart,” and the sifting he has in mind is a rigorous, truth- telling kind of self-analysis that reveals how well his life accords with the gifts by which he has been “distinguished.” In short, I take the prayer’s theme to be contained in the second line: “that I may not disappoint myself.” It was this appeal I had in mind when I told my colleague that I prayed to myself for myself.
* * * * * * *
Henry Ward Beecher is surely right when he says “It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.” Herman Melville may be right when he says that prayer “draws us near to our own souls.” It depends, as so much does, on how one defines “soul,” and whether that definition occupies the space of a leaflet or the wide-ranged expanse of a novel. But I particularly admire Frederick Douglass’s resolutely unmetaphysical perspective: he prayed, he tells us, for twenty years for freedom, and his prayer went unanswered “until I prayed with my legs.” Prayer as doing, not seeking to receive; prayer as remastering a higher fidelity version of the scratchy vinyl we tend to become; prayer as mustering the energy to better ourselves, to strain, like a dandelion pushing itself up through the tarred gravel of a macadam road, toward the summer florescence of our full potential.
We are limited beings, physically and cognitively, but that it hardly a flaw. It simply means we can create the best self it is in us to be, and not some other self. Lucifer fell from heaven; our fall was garden-level. We can, as poet Amy Clampett says, “fall upward.” We are not neurochemicaled; we are not DNAified. “Human limits structure human virtue,” Martha Nussbaum points out, “and give excellent action its significance.” I pray that I don’t disappoint myself. I pray to articulate and reflect on what I am, what I can be, and how to bridge the difference.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Being Average
For Thoreau, social conformity creates a dull and deadening averaging tendency. He ends Walden with a parable about a “beautiful bug” that, having been deposited as an egg some sixty years previous in an apple tree, gnaws its way out of the kitchen table built from the wood of that tree. “Who knows,” Thoreau asks, “what beautiful and winged life . . . may unexpectedly come forth . . . to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!” For Thoreau, we capitulate to being average; it is not our destiny.
* * * * *
As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.
* * * * *
In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.
* * * * *
The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded
* * * * *
Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.
* * * * *
Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.
* * * * *
Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.
* * * * *
The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.
* * * * *
The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?
* * * * *
No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.
* * * * *
In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.
* * * * *
The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
* * * * *
At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.
* * * * *
To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?
* * * * *
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.
* * * * *
A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.
* * * * *
As a young man, I wanted to zig-zag, to tack, to feint and juke, rather than straighten to the average tendency. I wanted to be one of those fireworks that spins wildly, shooting off sparks and bursting into a mad profusion of clamor and color. I was determined to be one of the chosen, one of the elect, polymathic, an outlier, off the chart, gauge-breaking, one of a kind.
* * * * *
In my last year of Little League baseball, I lost only one game as a pitcher and led the league in home runs. In my first year of American Legion baseball, I won only one game and hit no home runs. Fifteen years ago, in a slow-pitch softball league, I had no hits. I never hit the ball out of the infield. My career in slow-pitch softball was unsullied by success.
* * * * *
The word “average” is taken to mean normal, ordinary, in the middle, what most things are. As an arithmetic mean, it denotes the sum of items divided by the number of items. It is not to be confused with “median,” the middle number in an ordered sequence, nor with “mode,” the most frequently occurring number. In its common usage, “average” means all three; it means being meaned, medianed, and moded
* * * * *
Moby Dick is now considered an extraordinary novel, above average’s above average, a masterpiece, perhaps the greatest ever written. Pure lyricism spills from Melville’s pen. The novel tells a dark truth about human nature and the universe, a universe Ahab defies. It explores Miltonic themes of fate and free will. It is celebrated for its democratic spirit. Most book reviewers at the time praised it for its imaginative sweep. Readers, however, were unimpressed; the novel did not sell. “Dollars damn me,” he told his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne. He couldn’t write what he wanted to write and make a living. He turned to poetry and lived out his years, forgotten except as a less than average American writer, as a tax collector in New York. His reputation underwent a revival beginning with his centennial in 1919, and by the mid-1930s he had been catapulted from the rank of a lesser writer to the pantheon of literary immortals, a tax-collecting Matthew who finally received his beatific summons.
* * * * *
Rory Mcllroy, a 22 year-old Irishman, won the 2011 U.S. Open with a record-setting score of 16 under par, surpassing the previous record of 12 under par set by Tiger Woods in 2000. Mcllroy’s score will be bettered and he will become a footnoted second. That bettered score will be bettered yet again, and again, and Mcllroy’s score will come to seem customary, middling, average.
* * * * *
Some interesting averages: The average weight for U.S. males is 191 pounds; for women, 140 pounds. Both men and women use 16,000 words per day; their vocabulary averages 5 to 6 thousand words. They repeat themselves a lot. On average Americans laugh 13 times per day, eat 35,000 cookies in a lifetime, have 1,460 dreams per year, eat 18 acres of pizza per day, and consumes 3.1 cups of coffee per day. On average, a full moon occurs every 29.5 days; a blue moon, two full moons in one month, occurs once every 2.5 years. Once in a blue moon I dream of laughingly eating a cookie-topped pizza and washing it down with Starbuck’s Venetian Robusto. With a Hersheys Milk Chocolate Bar with Almonds on the side. It averages 6 whole almonds per 52 gram (1.8 ounce) bar.
* * * * *
The average age for getting bifocals is 40. I got bifocals at 40.
* * * * *
The average measures a tendency toward centralization, but not everything has a central tendency. What is the central tendency of dogs? Of a dewed, sun-dappled meadow? Of ice cream? Of home and poetry and courage and mirth and dignity and the little shard of mystery we are?
* * * * *
No one wants to be average. No one wants to appear ordinary to themselves, or to others. We almost always overestimate our knowledge, our common sense, our practicality. We almost always consider ourselves more original, more distinctive than we are. We set our lives to the meter of I-am-ic. We like to think of our lives as a bit of guerilla theater. What we fear is invisibility, a life unacknowledged, unheralded, ciphered, a cursive stroke written in disappearing ink. We fear cloaking conformity. To be average is a shackling littleness we desperately seek to leave behind. Average is tyrannous. The mean is mean.
* * * * *
In 2010, the Scream Awards, given to movies in the horror, sci-fi, and fantasy genres, had 32 categories, including one for the best mutilation scene. In his book Everyone’s a Winner: Life in Our Congratulatory Culture, University of Delaware sociologist Joel Best introduces the term “status affluence,” a recent phenomenon exemplified by the proliferation of awards and the emergence of subcultures and lifestyle clusters where group identity is often consolidated by handing out or receiving awards. We are rapidly becoming average at being above average.
* * * * *
The last line of Middlemarch, referring to the idealistic Dorothea: “But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
* * * * *
At my last wellness screening, everything—blood pressure, BMI, HDL and LDLcholesterol, triglycerides—checked out average, within the normal range. Here, average is good. My weight is below, well below, the 190 pound average for males. Below average is considered bad, but in this case it is probably good. I drink more, much more, coffee than the 3.1 cups per day average. Above average is good, but in this case it is probably bad. “Average” is a slippery word, never definitive, always contingent on circumstance. There is always a slippage between public and private meaning, what the world knows and what we know. Too often we take the world’s word for it.
* * * * *
To be average means to have been measured against something else. Average is a relational concept. It has the seductive, come-hither appeal of metrics. I’d like to think individual subjectivities are unaverageable, but even personally chosen measures of self-assessments are based on criteria we have internalized from the cultural milieu. Who is the “I” that measures? That is being measured? Are we available to ourselves as ourselves?
* * * * *
Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture Atlas Slave depicts a half completed human figure that seemingly strains to break free and emerge from, to transcend, the block of marble that contains it. Thoreau’s apple-tree bug has a precedent. It is an old idea.
* * * * *
A new genetic paradigm, called epigenetics, is currently taking shape in biology. It revises the idea that DNA is deterministic, that it acts as a foreordained blueprint, that our genome shapes who we will be. DNA is itself shaped by the cells that contain it. Our cells, it turns out, are affected by a variety of environmental factors, even by our social networks, and these factors cause chemicals to attach to the gene which control its expression. Life is creative, not foreordained; ongoing, not given; a sculpture in process, in transit, mustering itself. We are, beyond measure, beyond average. We are our own average.
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