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.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
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.
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