“Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” Over the years, I’ve read those words of that styptic nineteenth-century scold, Henry David Thoreau, dozens of times, and each time I found myself nodding in assent, agreeing that the thingness of the world fissures our lives, my life, burgles its force, scatters it, shards it, makes it full of a littleness that we, I, should leave behind. And each time, of course, I have allowed myself the narcoticizing delusion that reading the words and acceding to their wisdom substitutes for actually acting upon them. But for some reason that I cannot name, on my most recent reading I decided to send delusion packing and honest-to-Godly simplify my life.
Now, I had no intention of heading off to the woods, building a ten-foot by fifteen-foot microhouse, and cultivating a beanfield. Thoreau declares himself “determined to know beans,” but I don’t know beans about beans, and what I know of forest skills would fill a demitasse cup and leave room for a bowling ball. For me, roughing it is staying in a motel room without WiFi. No, I had no intention of squatting by a pond, contemplating the heavens reflected on its surface, and meditating about closing the gap between the spiritual and the material. Instead, I decided to start small. I decided to stop combing my hair.
I have always worn my hair long, not, as I did in the 60s, “shining, gleaming, streaming, waxen, flaxen . . .shoulder length and longer,” but long enough to require spending time planted in front of a mirror each morning, engaging in various manipulations of brush and blow drier to achieve a certain “look,” a look that entailed several touch ups throughout the day. A waste of time, surely, but more than that, a self-absorbed, self-regarding, unseemly bit of narcissism that I came to see as a shameful vanity—a vanity so indurate that I forsook a warm stocking cap on even the most frigid Iowa winter mornings for fear of matting my work at the mirror. Who was I, after all? What was I? Who was I trying to impress, and why? All this hair combing seemed shallow, somehow, a rather venal fetish, an overreaching for sophistication when I knew perfectly well that, as Da Vinci said, “simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Me, a sophisticate? I’d have better luck trying to capture a neutrino in a mousetrap. You can draw cubes, but that doesn’t make you Picasso. We long to hear our echo in the world, but, it suddenly seemed to me, the self I would trumpet seemed more suited to a kazoo.
A haircut, then, and a drastic haircut at that, offered a way to simplify my life, to buy both time and a chewy morsel of moral satisfaction. I would be shorn and shriven. I called Joyce down at the Clip Joint and told her I wanted a haircut that would obviate my having to comb my hair. “That’s pretty radical for you, Jerry,” Joyce said. “Yeah, but, you know, I’m trying to make my life less complicated. But here’s the thing, though: I don’t want a buzz cut, but I don’t want to have to comb my hair. Can you do something along those lines?” “No problem,” Joyce said, and I scheduled an appointment.
Joyce cut my hair close on the sides and back, and left it just a bit longer on top. “Just towel it off after you shower, and you’re good to go,” she advised, and then added, “but you can also do something like this.” She squirted a bit of mousse on her fingers and applied it to the top of my head, creating spiky tufts. And here’s where I learned that the breeze created by shutting one door to vanity blows open another.
I liked the tousled look she created; I liked it a lot. My wife Kathy, whose taste I’ve always considered unrivalled—except, perhaps, in her choice of husband—declared her admiration for the look, too. And then some raspy-voiced gremlin in me urged me to go online to research men’s hair products. I succumbed and found myself, blinking and dazed, in a magical world filled with volumizing texture wheys and soothing serums and defining shine gels and frizzy polishing milks and bodifying cream mousses and styling pastes and clay matte texturizers and structure waxes, and mint shape-forming pastes—all guaranteed to defy gravity and sweat, to clump thick and thin, to shine and shimmer and glaze; all permitting me, urging me, to Walt Whitmanize, to “dote on myself” because “there is that lot of me and all so luscious.” So tempting, all so tempting, the things I could do, the looks I could create with those products, the twirls and swirls and curls—and, yet, I held back, refrained from the siren song, refused to genuflect before their offer of metrosexual self-tribute, shook off the intoxication of their heady, distilled spirit. A long career reading and teaching literature sensitized me to the irony of what I was contemplating. No SPF, I quickly realized, no matter how high the number, can prevent us from being sunburned by the glare of vanity. So quickly, so easily it slips the vigilant leash, hurdles the hedgerows of rationality, and streaks with steroidal speed to taser the feel-good limbic circuit. No, no tussling with tousling for me. I was out to quell my vanity and simplify my life. I clamped down my desire to clump.
And should the hot-house flower of vanity blossom from my sally against vanity, should my efforts at simplifying my life tempt me to star in a vanity production, I had the compliments of my colleagues to effectively mortify it. “Jerry, I love your hair,” one colleague told me; “it takes ten years off.” And here I had thought I looked far younger than my age. “I like what you’ve done with your hair,” another said; “It’s so contemporary.” And here I had thought I was contemporary, was “with it,” was trendy and cool. “Nice hair,” yet another exclaimed; “did Kathy suggest it?” And here I had thought I was decisive. Was my cluelessness in matters of fashion and grooming a fact universally acknowledged? Those compliments were a bruising encounter but, I think, a salutary one.
Vanity is, I suspect, an unconquerable passion in human nature. Likely, Ishmael is right in saying “the truest of all books is Solomon’s, and Ecclesiastes is the fine hammered steel of woe. `All is vanity.’ ALL. This willful world hath not got hold of unchristian Solomon’s wisdom yet.” Perhaps an anointed vision of ourselves had value in the long evolutionary slog and we are incapable of singing ourselves in a minor key. Could be that we can never be shooed away from wistfully gazing in a self-reflecting pool. Maybe the silty seepage of vanity requires a dredging operation that will always be partial, incomplete, ongoing. Possibly we are destined to be Will Kanes, facing down the perpetual high noon of overweening pride. But with complimentary colleagues like mine, I’ll never have to step into that hot, dusty street alone.
Monday, February 28, 2011
Sunday, February 20, 2011
High School Hell
Hell is endlessly interpretable. The gospel of Luke records Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the Dives (rich man), in which the beggar Lazarus has the satisfaction of seeing from Heaven the rich man in the “place of torment” and pleading for a drop of water to “cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.” Melville’s Ishmael speculates that Lazarus, were he exposed to a frigid New Bedford night, would willingly “go down to the fiery pit itself, in order to keep out of this frost.’
Dante envisioned hell as nine concentric circles: the vestibular limbo, hell’s suburb, so to speak, which contained the non-Christian good and virtuous, followed by those whose perdition was caused by lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery—and at the frozen center of that last, the ultimate practitioner of treachery, Satan himself. Using Dante, medieval scholars proposed elaborate architectural models of hell, complete with the likely measurements of its pillars and vaulted ceilings, which a 24-year-old Galileo, in a lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy, showed to be mathematically unsound, thus setting in motion what would later emerge as the sciences of physics and structural engineering.
Puritan apologist Jonathan Edwards devoted a sermon titled “The Eternity of Hell Torments” to proving, with implacable logic, the pain-stained doctrine that “the misery of the wicked in hell will be absolutely eternal,” and in his flinch-inducing “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” presented, in tactile terms, just what those condemned to hell would, absolutely and eternally, experience: “The wrath of God burns against” the unredeemed, “the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow,” and the “old serpent is gaping for them; hell opens its mouth wide to receive them.” Possibly, though, hell can be escaped. A modification of Edwards’ traditional “for all eternity” doctrine, known as “the harrowing of hell,” holds that Jesus, between the time of His death and His resurrection, preached to the inhabitants of hell, with those particularly receptive to His message translated to Heaven.
More recent theologians, holding up a wet finger, perhaps, to the slipstream of a current, less doctrinaire religious sentiment, have, as an alternative to the soddenly medieval Punishment Model of hell, proposed the Choice Model, wherein hell is not torturously punitory so much as what a person chooses—hell, in effect, honors personal choice. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, hell is a non-experience: at death, one undergoes a “soul sleep” from which only the righteous will ultimately be awakened.
Mark Twain advised readers to “Go to heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” Robert Frost considered hell “a half-filled auditorium.” Shakespeare’s Ferdinand, in The Tempest, asserts “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” For General William Tecumseh Sherman, hell is “war;” for Emily Dickinson, “parting;” for Voltaire, “loveless hearts;” for Jean Paul Sartre, “other people;” for Dick Gregory, “a liberal scorned;” for Milton Friedman, “a bureaucrat scorned.” For me, hell was, and remains, the four years I spent at an all-boys Catholic High School, operated under the curatorial powers of the Christian Brothers.
I began high school struck out, unswingingly struck out, slump-shouldered-slouching-back-to-the-dugout struck out, struck out with three high, hard fast ones guaranteed to make each day’s passage through the school doors an entrance into Stygian darkness: I was overweight, “husky” my mom said, but, in reality, needle-inching-up-to-the-red-zone overweight; I was tracked into Academic Latin, the college prep sequence; and I liked to read, not young adult literature, mind you, but canonized literary works—John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings. Now, try as I might, I could do nothing about strike one, though much later, when I was ready for it, and over the course of several years, I did lose over a hundred pounds. As for the second strike, despite an impassioned appeal to the principal, Brother Cyril, to be allowed to take Woodshop, I was informed that no deviation from my prescribed Academic Latin track would be permitted—so, goodbye radial arm saw, hello Caesar’s Commentaries. The third strike, being a grievous offense against the law of adolescent masculinity, I held as a closely guarded secret, going so far as to take the non-Hardy boys books off the shelves and stuff them high up on a closet shelf when my best friend spent the night. I even swore my parents to secrecy, fearing they might, in their pride at my precocious reading habits, mention it to the parent of a classmate who would in turn mention it to their son. Still, I was WikiLeaked, and by none other than Brother Jerome, who caught me sneak-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls during a study hall and mentioned it to the other Brothers at dinner that night, one of whom subsequently let it slip to a student, who told another, and, before long, I was outed and outcast. In the thickly vertical and horizontal world of an all-boys Catholic high school, I was the decidedly oblique other.
From these three strikes, other indignities flowed. Latin came naturally to me; I liked it and was good at it. However, Brother Cletus, the Latin teacher, had a less than assured command of the language, and, to double-check student responses in recitation sessions, would often look to me and ask, “What do you think, DeNuccio?” With a subtle nod or shake of my head, I held the power to determine a fellow classmate’s grade for the day. I confess that, for the sake of sheer survival, for the sake of the possibility of my growing into adulthood, but not, I fear, for heaven’s sake, I invariably nodded, even if the translation was a spaghettied mess. And Brother Jerome, the secret sharer of my reading, continually called on me in English class, for I did not have it in me to say, as most of my classmates did, “Sorry, Brother Jerome, but I don’t know. That’s a tough one.” I was the know-it-all sprout of crabgrass in the smoothly-raked Zen garden of studied male adolescent ignorance, and my reputation as an apple-polishing brown-noser was, it seemed to me, calligaphied on every cinder block of every wall in the school.
But the frozen center of my private high school hell occurred in a physical education class where my being overweight was but on display. Filing into the gym one morning we saw a trampoline, the gift of a generous alumnus. The instructor, a muscular fireplug of a man, an erstwhile record-setting fullback at the local college who had been drafted but subsequently cut by the Baltimore Colts, gathered us around the trampoline. “You guys should feel honored,” he said; “you’re the first class to get to use this thing.” And then, scanning the twenty-two of us, his eyes zeroed in on me, and a tight, almost imperceptible smile, creased his lips. “DeNuccio, get on up there and let’s see what this thing can do.” I’m sure my face shone with desperation. I’m sure my eyes pleaded. I know I wished the universe had a cliff that I could hurl myself over. “Go on, get on up there.” I clambered up.
At first he told me to bounce, which I did, nimbly and proficiently, despite my never before having been on a trampoline. “Higher,” he barked, and I bounced myself up, up toward iron-trussed ceiling, adroitly, in control, landing squarely, letting the recoil fling me straight up and down. “Butt drop,” he commanded, and I landed squarely on my butt, straightened back into upright form as I hurtled upward, and landed, in perfect balance, on my feet. “Gut drop,” and I landed on my stomach and, again, righted myself in midair. “Forward flip,” and I performed a perfect somersault, everything tight, curled, everything efficient, no flailing arms or splayed legs, landing back on my feet; “back flip,” and again I executed. “OK, get down,” he said, and then, to the class: “See, boys, you can be athletic, even if you are fat.”
It was a crushingly cruel remark. But what could I do? I was fifteen years old, taught to respect my elders, to obey those in authority. What could I do? He had promised himself, and the class, amusement at my expense, he had expected the overweight kid to embarrass himself in a flurry of spasmodic contortions, and when I had failed to deliver it, when I surprised him off-balance and teetered him toward his own embarrassment, he righted himself by jacketing a compliment in a cutting insult. I was just a boy. He was an adult. What could I do?
What could any of us do? We were all boys, all of us, and we were all, at breakneck speed, travelling desperation road, suffering the honed-edge anxiety of not knowing what to value, what to believe, when to open our hearts and when to shutter them; of not knowing how to look forward but not wanting to look back; of yearning for release, for title to ourselves, and feeling that prospect tug us off-center, feeling it fissure our confidence and make us bright with fear, and masking that fear with a smooth, hard, impassive veneer of “cool.” All of us filled with words yet finding what we wanted to say too ponderous for our tongues to articulate. All of us playing hide and seek with ourselves, and good, so very good, at hiding, but fitful and indifferent at seeking. All of us aware, vaguely and apprehensively, that we were headed for a larger world webbed with denser entanglements than those that governed our clearly coded high school world, a larger world that would demand that we be other than what we already were. All of us huddled warily into ourselves, all clenched jaws and pocketed hands and smiles that never quite made it to our eyes. What could we do? We were all boys, just boys, and each of us knew the truth of what Virgil had said over two millennia ago: “Each of us bears his own Hell.”
Dante envisioned hell as nine concentric circles: the vestibular limbo, hell’s suburb, so to speak, which contained the non-Christian good and virtuous, followed by those whose perdition was caused by lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud, and treachery—and at the frozen center of that last, the ultimate practitioner of treachery, Satan himself. Using Dante, medieval scholars proposed elaborate architectural models of hell, complete with the likely measurements of its pillars and vaulted ceilings, which a 24-year-old Galileo, in a lecture on Dante’s Divine Comedy, showed to be mathematically unsound, thus setting in motion what would later emerge as the sciences of physics and structural engineering.
Puritan apologist Jonathan Edwards devoted a sermon titled “The Eternity of Hell Torments” to proving, with implacable logic, the pain-stained doctrine that “the misery of the wicked in hell will be absolutely eternal,” and in his flinch-inducing “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” presented, in tactile terms, just what those condemned to hell would, absolutely and eternally, experience: “The wrath of God burns against” the unredeemed, “the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the flames do now rage and glow,” and the “old serpent is gaping for them; hell opens its mouth wide to receive them.” Possibly, though, hell can be escaped. A modification of Edwards’ traditional “for all eternity” doctrine, known as “the harrowing of hell,” holds that Jesus, between the time of His death and His resurrection, preached to the inhabitants of hell, with those particularly receptive to His message translated to Heaven.
More recent theologians, holding up a wet finger, perhaps, to the slipstream of a current, less doctrinaire religious sentiment, have, as an alternative to the soddenly medieval Punishment Model of hell, proposed the Choice Model, wherein hell is not torturously punitory so much as what a person chooses—hell, in effect, honors personal choice. For the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists, hell is a non-experience: at death, one undergoes a “soul sleep” from which only the righteous will ultimately be awakened.
Mark Twain advised readers to “Go to heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.” Robert Frost considered hell “a half-filled auditorium.” Shakespeare’s Ferdinand, in The Tempest, asserts “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” For General William Tecumseh Sherman, hell is “war;” for Emily Dickinson, “parting;” for Voltaire, “loveless hearts;” for Jean Paul Sartre, “other people;” for Dick Gregory, “a liberal scorned;” for Milton Friedman, “a bureaucrat scorned.” For me, hell was, and remains, the four years I spent at an all-boys Catholic High School, operated under the curatorial powers of the Christian Brothers.
I began high school struck out, unswingingly struck out, slump-shouldered-slouching-back-to-the-dugout struck out, struck out with three high, hard fast ones guaranteed to make each day’s passage through the school doors an entrance into Stygian darkness: I was overweight, “husky” my mom said, but, in reality, needle-inching-up-to-the-red-zone overweight; I was tracked into Academic Latin, the college prep sequence; and I liked to read, not young adult literature, mind you, but canonized literary works—John Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, Eugene O’Neil, Tennessee Williams, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings. Now, try as I might, I could do nothing about strike one, though much later, when I was ready for it, and over the course of several years, I did lose over a hundred pounds. As for the second strike, despite an impassioned appeal to the principal, Brother Cyril, to be allowed to take Woodshop, I was informed that no deviation from my prescribed Academic Latin track would be permitted—so, goodbye radial arm saw, hello Caesar’s Commentaries. The third strike, being a grievous offense against the law of adolescent masculinity, I held as a closely guarded secret, going so far as to take the non-Hardy boys books off the shelves and stuff them high up on a closet shelf when my best friend spent the night. I even swore my parents to secrecy, fearing they might, in their pride at my precocious reading habits, mention it to the parent of a classmate who would in turn mention it to their son. Still, I was WikiLeaked, and by none other than Brother Jerome, who caught me sneak-reading For Whom the Bell Tolls during a study hall and mentioned it to the other Brothers at dinner that night, one of whom subsequently let it slip to a student, who told another, and, before long, I was outed and outcast. In the thickly vertical and horizontal world of an all-boys Catholic high school, I was the decidedly oblique other.
From these three strikes, other indignities flowed. Latin came naturally to me; I liked it and was good at it. However, Brother Cletus, the Latin teacher, had a less than assured command of the language, and, to double-check student responses in recitation sessions, would often look to me and ask, “What do you think, DeNuccio?” With a subtle nod or shake of my head, I held the power to determine a fellow classmate’s grade for the day. I confess that, for the sake of sheer survival, for the sake of the possibility of my growing into adulthood, but not, I fear, for heaven’s sake, I invariably nodded, even if the translation was a spaghettied mess. And Brother Jerome, the secret sharer of my reading, continually called on me in English class, for I did not have it in me to say, as most of my classmates did, “Sorry, Brother Jerome, but I don’t know. That’s a tough one.” I was the know-it-all sprout of crabgrass in the smoothly-raked Zen garden of studied male adolescent ignorance, and my reputation as an apple-polishing brown-noser was, it seemed to me, calligaphied on every cinder block of every wall in the school.
But the frozen center of my private high school hell occurred in a physical education class where my being overweight was but on display. Filing into the gym one morning we saw a trampoline, the gift of a generous alumnus. The instructor, a muscular fireplug of a man, an erstwhile record-setting fullback at the local college who had been drafted but subsequently cut by the Baltimore Colts, gathered us around the trampoline. “You guys should feel honored,” he said; “you’re the first class to get to use this thing.” And then, scanning the twenty-two of us, his eyes zeroed in on me, and a tight, almost imperceptible smile, creased his lips. “DeNuccio, get on up there and let’s see what this thing can do.” I’m sure my face shone with desperation. I’m sure my eyes pleaded. I know I wished the universe had a cliff that I could hurl myself over. “Go on, get on up there.” I clambered up.
At first he told me to bounce, which I did, nimbly and proficiently, despite my never before having been on a trampoline. “Higher,” he barked, and I bounced myself up, up toward iron-trussed ceiling, adroitly, in control, landing squarely, letting the recoil fling me straight up and down. “Butt drop,” he commanded, and I landed squarely on my butt, straightened back into upright form as I hurtled upward, and landed, in perfect balance, on my feet. “Gut drop,” and I landed on my stomach and, again, righted myself in midair. “Forward flip,” and I performed a perfect somersault, everything tight, curled, everything efficient, no flailing arms or splayed legs, landing back on my feet; “back flip,” and again I executed. “OK, get down,” he said, and then, to the class: “See, boys, you can be athletic, even if you are fat.”
It was a crushingly cruel remark. But what could I do? I was fifteen years old, taught to respect my elders, to obey those in authority. What could I do? He had promised himself, and the class, amusement at my expense, he had expected the overweight kid to embarrass himself in a flurry of spasmodic contortions, and when I had failed to deliver it, when I surprised him off-balance and teetered him toward his own embarrassment, he righted himself by jacketing a compliment in a cutting insult. I was just a boy. He was an adult. What could I do?
What could any of us do? We were all boys, all of us, and we were all, at breakneck speed, travelling desperation road, suffering the honed-edge anxiety of not knowing what to value, what to believe, when to open our hearts and when to shutter them; of not knowing how to look forward but not wanting to look back; of yearning for release, for title to ourselves, and feeling that prospect tug us off-center, feeling it fissure our confidence and make us bright with fear, and masking that fear with a smooth, hard, impassive veneer of “cool.” All of us filled with words yet finding what we wanted to say too ponderous for our tongues to articulate. All of us playing hide and seek with ourselves, and good, so very good, at hiding, but fitful and indifferent at seeking. All of us aware, vaguely and apprehensively, that we were headed for a larger world webbed with denser entanglements than those that governed our clearly coded high school world, a larger world that would demand that we be other than what we already were. All of us huddled warily into ourselves, all clenched jaws and pocketed hands and smiles that never quite made it to our eyes. What could we do? We were all boys, just boys, and each of us knew the truth of what Virgil had said over two millennia ago: “Each of us bears his own Hell.”
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
Snow Drifts and Mind Drifts
I have left my Christmas lights up, especially the ones strung through the bushes that line my 90-foot driveway. I say I am celebrating winter, but I am really resisting winter, for the streetlight’s beams do not illuminate the upper-part of the driveway, the part I see from the three dining room windows when, in the morning, I descend the stairs and turn toward the kitchen to make the first of several pots of coffee. The darkness of that view, the deep, implacable blackness of it, has always torpedoed my spirit. And so, this year, I have left up the Christmas lights, an aorta of multicolored luminescence entering and infusing the frozen-chambered heart of an Iowan midwinter night.
I headed into that night at 6:00 am this past Wednesday morning, bundled and layered, snow shovel in hand. Those celebratory-resistant lights revealed that the aerodynamics of blizzard winds constrained by the right-angled geometry of the house and garage had sculpted several drifted waves of snow that would need to be removed had I any hope of meeting my 8:00 am freshman composition class.
Now, I do own a snowblower, a hulking, gas-powered, eight-geared Craftsman 24-inch Snow Thrower, a gift from my wife Kathy--an act of mercy, really, prompted by her concern about the toll last winter’s frequent and punishingly abundant snowfalls were taking on my aging body. But fingers that fumble buttoning shirt cuffs should not be fiddling with complicated machinery at 6:00 am in the dim light cast by a garage’s overhead bulb, and, in any event, I would not risk waking up my neighbors, human and otherwise. Besides, there is that Puritan residue in me, that somber, sober, styptic voice that says exertion is good, is physically strengthening, bracing, edifying—a bit of saving grace to redeem the body from the sedentary drift of contemporary life. Still, the thigh-high size of those drifts would, perhaps, have caused even the most ardent Calvinist’s faith to falter. I remembered that the lowest circle of Dante’s hell did not burn. It was frozen. No fire. Ice. Well, nothing to do but settle into the labor and attack the drifts in layers, scoopful after patient scoopful, thankful, but only in a small way, for the shovel’s ergonomic handle.
Shoveling snow is a mindless task, and the mind minds being mindless; it craves stimulation, so, as I shoveled my mind wandered into wondering. I wondered about the impossibly perky young woman I had seen the previous week on a morning show showcasing the latest devices, manual and powered, for lightening the snow shoveling burden, her warning about heart attacks, and her claim that after just two minutes of shoveling heavy snow the heart hammers at such a petal-to-the-metal pace that it is liable, at any moment, to be pulled over and placed under cardiac arrest. I wondered if Emerson, who delighted in “the frolic architecture of snow,” had shoveled any.
I wondered about a Sherman Alexie story in which a group of boys, wanting to play midwinter outdoor basketball, soak the snow covering the court with kerosene and set it ablaze. I had no kerosene, but I did have a nearly full two-and-a-half-gallon gas can; however, I remember the house next door had burned down 4 years ago, and I remember the tear-streaked face of the owner, each tear lit by the light of the fire consuming his home, the first that he had purchased, and I decided that, while it may have a certain flair in a work of fiction, in the real world the inferno option was best put aside.
I wondered about the grunt, primal and somehow viscerally satisfying, that accompanied each lifted shovelful of snow and its being flung off to the side. And that caused me to wonder if the discredited “heave-ho” theory of language origin might, in fact, have merit, that language emerged from the sounds involuntarily emitted by the push and shoveness, the lift and toteness, of strenuous physical labor—a language of the body transposed to the brain, localized and made neural in the Broca and Wernicke areas.
And as I tackled the much more compacted drift thrown up on the driveway’s apron by a city snow plow passing during the night, I wondered why, with just two or three shovelsful left, the snow plow came by again, reconstituting what I had so arduously removed. The driver did slow his speed slightly, proving, I suppose, that he had a heart, a soul, but the upsprayed snow toppled the trash receptacle, spilling its contents, and I wondered how so often we seem to be holding a chance card unaware that we have rolled the dice. How often we are forced to improvise. I wondered if that was a good thing. I thought it was.
I wondered what would happen if Jesus should suddenly appear. Would he tell me that if I had a muscular faith I could command the snow to rise and remove itself, much as he tells his disciples, “if you shall say to the mountain `Arise, and hurl thyself into the sea’ it shall be done?” Would he grab the spare shovel and help, serene and self-contained, whistling a show tune perhaps? Would he comment on the Vatican’s decision to provide the Discovery Channel access to its exorcism files, or the blessing the Pope conferred on Facebook? Would he watch for a while, smile, then walk off, atop the snow, into the early morning darkness? Would I, one of the fallen away, fall back?
And I wondered, seriously, sadly, if, as the years pass, our lives announce our increasing humiliation—the debilities of age and the subsequent cultural neglect, the mad rush of befuddling technological gadgetry, the condescension of youth. Do our lives wither down to the concentrated space of a shovel’s scoop? Do we measure them with droppers, with tumblers and teaballs? Do we write them in six-point agate typeface? Speak them in a grammar of diminishment?
But no, I would have none of that. I was out for doing and being, not having done and having been. I had a job to do, and I did it; despite hands and feet that throbbed with cold, despite arms and back that muttered an achy monologue, I did it. Some hot coffee and oatmeal, and I was off to my class, where the students, hoping for canceled classes, were less than exuberant at my arrival. I felt good, though, felt vital, felt, somehow, victorious.
I headed into that night at 6:00 am this past Wednesday morning, bundled and layered, snow shovel in hand. Those celebratory-resistant lights revealed that the aerodynamics of blizzard winds constrained by the right-angled geometry of the house and garage had sculpted several drifted waves of snow that would need to be removed had I any hope of meeting my 8:00 am freshman composition class.
Now, I do own a snowblower, a hulking, gas-powered, eight-geared Craftsman 24-inch Snow Thrower, a gift from my wife Kathy--an act of mercy, really, prompted by her concern about the toll last winter’s frequent and punishingly abundant snowfalls were taking on my aging body. But fingers that fumble buttoning shirt cuffs should not be fiddling with complicated machinery at 6:00 am in the dim light cast by a garage’s overhead bulb, and, in any event, I would not risk waking up my neighbors, human and otherwise. Besides, there is that Puritan residue in me, that somber, sober, styptic voice that says exertion is good, is physically strengthening, bracing, edifying—a bit of saving grace to redeem the body from the sedentary drift of contemporary life. Still, the thigh-high size of those drifts would, perhaps, have caused even the most ardent Calvinist’s faith to falter. I remembered that the lowest circle of Dante’s hell did not burn. It was frozen. No fire. Ice. Well, nothing to do but settle into the labor and attack the drifts in layers, scoopful after patient scoopful, thankful, but only in a small way, for the shovel’s ergonomic handle.
Shoveling snow is a mindless task, and the mind minds being mindless; it craves stimulation, so, as I shoveled my mind wandered into wondering. I wondered about the impossibly perky young woman I had seen the previous week on a morning show showcasing the latest devices, manual and powered, for lightening the snow shoveling burden, her warning about heart attacks, and her claim that after just two minutes of shoveling heavy snow the heart hammers at such a petal-to-the-metal pace that it is liable, at any moment, to be pulled over and placed under cardiac arrest. I wondered if Emerson, who delighted in “the frolic architecture of snow,” had shoveled any.
I wondered about a Sherman Alexie story in which a group of boys, wanting to play midwinter outdoor basketball, soak the snow covering the court with kerosene and set it ablaze. I had no kerosene, but I did have a nearly full two-and-a-half-gallon gas can; however, I remember the house next door had burned down 4 years ago, and I remember the tear-streaked face of the owner, each tear lit by the light of the fire consuming his home, the first that he had purchased, and I decided that, while it may have a certain flair in a work of fiction, in the real world the inferno option was best put aside.
I wondered about the grunt, primal and somehow viscerally satisfying, that accompanied each lifted shovelful of snow and its being flung off to the side. And that caused me to wonder if the discredited “heave-ho” theory of language origin might, in fact, have merit, that language emerged from the sounds involuntarily emitted by the push and shoveness, the lift and toteness, of strenuous physical labor—a language of the body transposed to the brain, localized and made neural in the Broca and Wernicke areas.
And as I tackled the much more compacted drift thrown up on the driveway’s apron by a city snow plow passing during the night, I wondered why, with just two or three shovelsful left, the snow plow came by again, reconstituting what I had so arduously removed. The driver did slow his speed slightly, proving, I suppose, that he had a heart, a soul, but the upsprayed snow toppled the trash receptacle, spilling its contents, and I wondered how so often we seem to be holding a chance card unaware that we have rolled the dice. How often we are forced to improvise. I wondered if that was a good thing. I thought it was.
I wondered what would happen if Jesus should suddenly appear. Would he tell me that if I had a muscular faith I could command the snow to rise and remove itself, much as he tells his disciples, “if you shall say to the mountain `Arise, and hurl thyself into the sea’ it shall be done?” Would he grab the spare shovel and help, serene and self-contained, whistling a show tune perhaps? Would he comment on the Vatican’s decision to provide the Discovery Channel access to its exorcism files, or the blessing the Pope conferred on Facebook? Would he watch for a while, smile, then walk off, atop the snow, into the early morning darkness? Would I, one of the fallen away, fall back?
And I wondered, seriously, sadly, if, as the years pass, our lives announce our increasing humiliation—the debilities of age and the subsequent cultural neglect, the mad rush of befuddling technological gadgetry, the condescension of youth. Do our lives wither down to the concentrated space of a shovel’s scoop? Do we measure them with droppers, with tumblers and teaballs? Do we write them in six-point agate typeface? Speak them in a grammar of diminishment?
But no, I would have none of that. I was out for doing and being, not having done and having been. I had a job to do, and I did it; despite hands and feet that throbbed with cold, despite arms and back that muttered an achy monologue, I did it. Some hot coffee and oatmeal, and I was off to my class, where the students, hoping for canceled classes, were less than exuberant at my arrival. I felt good, though, felt vital, felt, somehow, victorious.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Breakfast Bowls, Pillows, and My Dad's Golf Clubs
Near the beginning of Part 2 of his Autobiography, a work that studiously avoids intimate details, Benjamin Franklin relates an intimate detail about his marriage. For some time, he tells us, his breakfast consisted of “Bread and Milk” which he ate “out of a two penny earthen Porringer with a Pewter Spoon.” One morning, however, he finds those inexpensive and thoroughly practical implements replaced by “a China Bowl” and “a Spoon of Silver.” His wife Deborah had purchased them without his knowledge, for “the enormous Sum of three and twenty Shillings” for “no other Excuse or Apology to make, but that she thought her husband deserv’d a Silver Spoon and China Bowl as well as any of his neighbors.”
For Deborah, the bowl and spoon meant more than their intended purpose. They were a gesture of love, a means of marking the affection and esteem she felt for her husband. They had a secondary meaning, intimate and interpersonal. Franklin, however, interprets them differently, more in line with the overall, rags-to-riches theme of his life’s story: “This was the first Appearance of Plate and China in our House,” he notes, and then cannot help adding, “which afterwards in a Course of Years as our Wealth increas’d, augmented gradually to several Hundred Pounds in Value.” For Franklin, the bowl and spoon testify to his having risen from poverty and obscurity to wealth and distinction. Their meaning is external and public. Same bowl and spoon, two different valuations.
I was reminded of this Franklinian moment recently when my wife Kathy recently bought new pillows for the front room couch and chairs. I had thought the old pillows quite adequate: they showed no signs of undue wear and tear, and years of supporting my sprawl-lounge posture while watching TV or reading or daydreaming had impressed upon them a comfortable shape. So, naturally, I asked why she deemed new pillows necessary. “These pillows pull the colors across the room,” she explained. I couldn’t see it.
I tried. I really tried. In a kind of dopplerized, weather-patterns-in-motion way, I tried to see the colors streaming across the room, then meeting in a joyous, hail-fellow-and-well-met reunion. I couldn’t do it. A gap in my social learning, no doubt, which, at my age, no amount of remediation would likely bridge. The pillows, for me, were simply pillows, decorous but functional, meant to comfortably support my head or back. But for Kathy, those pillows had an additional meaning, a superordinate purpose, a signifying component beyond the functional purpose for which I saw them designed. Kathy understood those pillows as aesthetic objects, drawing the living room together, giving it a chromatic coherence, a unified hue, a nuanced all-of-a-piece complexion. Same pillows, two different valuations—though now, of course, I have the additional worry that by using the pillows as pillows I may obstruct the color transmission.
Upstairs, in my clothes closet, stands a golf bag containing my father’s golf clubs. He left them to me. They are expensive golf clubs, featuring what, in 2010, constituted the most advanced technology in material and design. During the last years of his life, Dad bought new clubs pretty much every year, joking that technology gave him what age was taking away. I never intend to use them for the purpose for which they were designed. I put them in the closet because that’s where I would see them every day. And I would remember. I would remember that he introduced me to golf when I was ten, that two years later I was beating him regularly, and that he accepted this supercession of father by son with a calm grace that I drew upon when I taught my son baseball. I remember him standing by when I was on the practice range, frustrated by my erratic play, close to despair, close to tears, and his telling me I was a keen student of the game and I’d soon discover whatever flaw had imperceptibly insinuated itself into my swing. I remember him driving me to tournaments, following me as I played—often my only gallery—and catching his eye, and smile, when I executed a particularly good shot. I remember waking up one Sunday morning with one eye swollen shut, at a tournament far from home, and Dad driving all over a strange town in search of an open drug store to buy an ointment to ease that eyelid open. I remember when, enraged and infuriated, I snapped a driver in half over my knee and he responded in the only appropriate way, with silence—and I remember how a new driver appeared in my bag two days later, a note pinned to the headcover: “delivered by elfin hands.” I remember the year when I won the club championship and he won the senior club championship and our picture together ran in the local newspaper. “The dynastic duo,” Dad said. And I remember the many, many rounds we played together, all the talk, often serious, sometimes angry, frequently good-natured needling, as I struggled toward manhood, and then adulthood and parenthood.
My Dad’s golf clubs: there’s the fact of them and the truth of them; the denotation of them and the connotation of them, the thingness of them and the visceral significance of them, a significance, a connotation, a truth recognizably for me, from me, my own. They are not just golf clubs, not just things with a designed purpose, just as each of us is not only, or even primarily, “a thing that thinks,” as Descartes says, a thing unshackled by time, disembodied from our history. We evoke that past, remember it, feel it, interpret it. It is a procreant urge. We do not experience the world as a factored polynomial floating abstractly in undefined space, possessing a logically determinate answer. We do not find meaning in the world; we beckon it, summon it, create it. It is not “out there” in some X-marks-the-spot location. We place it there. We make it, and we make it from feeling and memory, and then we leave its traces, its imprints, on everything that we in some way touch or that touches us, pertains to us. No, I can never use those golf clubs to play golf. They are much too valuable for that. Best to use mine and live in the hope that they, and I, will become a memory.
For Deborah, the bowl and spoon meant more than their intended purpose. They were a gesture of love, a means of marking the affection and esteem she felt for her husband. They had a secondary meaning, intimate and interpersonal. Franklin, however, interprets them differently, more in line with the overall, rags-to-riches theme of his life’s story: “This was the first Appearance of Plate and China in our House,” he notes, and then cannot help adding, “which afterwards in a Course of Years as our Wealth increas’d, augmented gradually to several Hundred Pounds in Value.” For Franklin, the bowl and spoon testify to his having risen from poverty and obscurity to wealth and distinction. Their meaning is external and public. Same bowl and spoon, two different valuations.
I was reminded of this Franklinian moment recently when my wife Kathy recently bought new pillows for the front room couch and chairs. I had thought the old pillows quite adequate: they showed no signs of undue wear and tear, and years of supporting my sprawl-lounge posture while watching TV or reading or daydreaming had impressed upon them a comfortable shape. So, naturally, I asked why she deemed new pillows necessary. “These pillows pull the colors across the room,” she explained. I couldn’t see it.
I tried. I really tried. In a kind of dopplerized, weather-patterns-in-motion way, I tried to see the colors streaming across the room, then meeting in a joyous, hail-fellow-and-well-met reunion. I couldn’t do it. A gap in my social learning, no doubt, which, at my age, no amount of remediation would likely bridge. The pillows, for me, were simply pillows, decorous but functional, meant to comfortably support my head or back. But for Kathy, those pillows had an additional meaning, a superordinate purpose, a signifying component beyond the functional purpose for which I saw them designed. Kathy understood those pillows as aesthetic objects, drawing the living room together, giving it a chromatic coherence, a unified hue, a nuanced all-of-a-piece complexion. Same pillows, two different valuations—though now, of course, I have the additional worry that by using the pillows as pillows I may obstruct the color transmission.
Upstairs, in my clothes closet, stands a golf bag containing my father’s golf clubs. He left them to me. They are expensive golf clubs, featuring what, in 2010, constituted the most advanced technology in material and design. During the last years of his life, Dad bought new clubs pretty much every year, joking that technology gave him what age was taking away. I never intend to use them for the purpose for which they were designed. I put them in the closet because that’s where I would see them every day. And I would remember. I would remember that he introduced me to golf when I was ten, that two years later I was beating him regularly, and that he accepted this supercession of father by son with a calm grace that I drew upon when I taught my son baseball. I remember him standing by when I was on the practice range, frustrated by my erratic play, close to despair, close to tears, and his telling me I was a keen student of the game and I’d soon discover whatever flaw had imperceptibly insinuated itself into my swing. I remember him driving me to tournaments, following me as I played—often my only gallery—and catching his eye, and smile, when I executed a particularly good shot. I remember waking up one Sunday morning with one eye swollen shut, at a tournament far from home, and Dad driving all over a strange town in search of an open drug store to buy an ointment to ease that eyelid open. I remember when, enraged and infuriated, I snapped a driver in half over my knee and he responded in the only appropriate way, with silence—and I remember how a new driver appeared in my bag two days later, a note pinned to the headcover: “delivered by elfin hands.” I remember the year when I won the club championship and he won the senior club championship and our picture together ran in the local newspaper. “The dynastic duo,” Dad said. And I remember the many, many rounds we played together, all the talk, often serious, sometimes angry, frequently good-natured needling, as I struggled toward manhood, and then adulthood and parenthood.
My Dad’s golf clubs: there’s the fact of them and the truth of them; the denotation of them and the connotation of them, the thingness of them and the visceral significance of them, a significance, a connotation, a truth recognizably for me, from me, my own. They are not just golf clubs, not just things with a designed purpose, just as each of us is not only, or even primarily, “a thing that thinks,” as Descartes says, a thing unshackled by time, disembodied from our history. We evoke that past, remember it, feel it, interpret it. It is a procreant urge. We do not experience the world as a factored polynomial floating abstractly in undefined space, possessing a logically determinate answer. We do not find meaning in the world; we beckon it, summon it, create it. It is not “out there” in some X-marks-the-spot location. We place it there. We make it, and we make it from feeling and memory, and then we leave its traces, its imprints, on everything that we in some way touch or that touches us, pertains to us. No, I can never use those golf clubs to play golf. They are much too valuable for that. Best to use mine and live in the hope that they, and I, will become a memory.
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