Tonic of Wldness

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Storm and Stress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I will begin, again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do Sunglasses and Masks Make Us Less Moral?

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

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

Really? 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Language Abuse: In Four Parts

Part 1

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

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

 

Part 2

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

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

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

 
 

Part 3

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

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

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

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

 

Part 4

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

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

 

Not Lovin' It

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

*     *     *

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Cold and Old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Van Winkled

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rip is resilient.

*     *     *

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

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

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

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

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

 

Replay It, Sam

Language geek that I am, I of course have a favorite word:  “syzygy,” which refers to the alignment of the sun, earth, and moon.  It is not, however, the astronomical phenomenon that makes the word interesting to me; rather, it the word’s sheer oddity.  It’s an outlaw, an outlier, a renegade in the clubby, stuffed-chair company of English words.  It’s a muscular word, ripped and vascular and six-packed, a word that could clean and jerk an Audi.  It’s a martial word, a word with a soldierly march and Spartanish austerity, three syllables of two letters only, each containing “y” clinched to a consonant, a word as stalwart as Leonides at Thermopylae, a word undaunted  by its union of consonant-vowel clusters that appears at the beginning of no English word.   And then there’s the sound-sense bonus, the no-nonsense, military procession of syllables suggesting the alignment the word denotes.  It almost seems a made-up word, though it in fact combines two Greek words, syn, meaning “together” and zagon, meaning “yoke.” 

But my language geekdom extends beyond having a favorite word.  I have a favorite prefix: “re,” from Latin meaning “again,” “back,” “anew.”  “Re” attaches itself to verbs to indicate that the action is redone, revised, revamped, reiterated.  “Re” is the Xerox of prefixes; “re” is a keen edged coulter that turns the encrusted up and back and over; “re” is a verbal do-over make-over.

*     *     *

Sometimes, to purposefully renounce our self-awareness is to restore it.  Sometimes, we are reprieved from memory, rekindled by a seizing impulse, released into the swelling urgency of a moment.  Sometimes, like old recordings, we are remastered, recapturing the rhythmed tune that sings us.  Sometimes, we are bitten by remorse.  Sometimes, we are maladied with no remedy but resilience, retrenchment, rebellion, or the recuperative strength of renewed resolve.  Sometimes, religion ligatures us to an expression of reverence or a renaissance of wonder; sometimes, it redeems, buying us back to ourselves; sometimes, it resurrects us with a resurgence of hope and gratitude; sometimes, it reveals what we already knew by heart but could not find the words to utter.  Sometimes, we reject regret, repress repression, reserve our reserve, reproach our reproach.

*     *     *

I witnessed a retreat that was a resolute act of courage.  In a meeting of academic division chairs and department heads, my Humanities Division colleague presented and defended a proposal that received a dour reception. The discussion quickly regressed into contentiousness. Objections were raised, dire implications prophesied, tangents expounded, tangents of tangents were recounted.  Voices grew loud, angry. My colleague responded, calmly answering objections, pointing out misreadings and clarifying misconceptions, but moment by moment the mood of the meeting was fast unfastening. 

Suddenly my colleague stood up and said, “I’m going to step out into the hallway for a few minutes.  I’m finding myself growing angry at your anger, and I don’t want to say something I’ll regret later.  I’ll return when I’ve cooled off, and maybe then we can reconsider this issue more deliberately.”  He left, we sat silent, he returned, we deliberated.

My colleague refused to react by re-enacting, refused to reflect a resentment he did not feel, refused to recoil into a motion not his own, refused to reciprocate that meeting’s heat, retaining, instead, a steady temperature of his own.  For me he redefined what I thought I knew of rectitude, resolution, and resilience.

*     *     *

At the age of 22, Benjamin Franklin resolved to reorient his life by pursuing “the bold and arduous Project of arriving at moral Perfection.”  After all, he reasoned, because he knew right from wrong, he “did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.”  But rescinding faults and reinforcing virtues entailed more than simple resolution.  To succeed, moral rehabilitation required a method. It must be actionable, not merely speculative.  So, he created an 18^th century version of an app: a spreadsheet designed to promote his behavior to incorruptibility.

First, he chose 13 virtues, sequenced such that success with one leveraged success with the next: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.  Then, for each virtue, he created a page with seven columns, one for each day of the week, and thirteen rows for each of the virtues.  Focusing on one virtue per week, he marked every relapse with “a little black Spot” in the appropriate cell.  He anticipated the pleasing visual evidence of his having repelled fault and reinforced virtue.

“I never arrived at the Perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining,” Franklin confesses.  Life intervened: business and public affairs intrude and divert his attention.  Habit resists reform; inclination repulses principle; conjured ideals exceed the time and attention we have to give—the littoral shelves against which most resolutions founder.  And yet, for me, the most important word Franklin utters is “arrived,” for that means he started.  We always, like Franklin, fall “far short” of perfection, and while that can occasion regret, it is no reason for resignation. Franklin says, “I was by the Endeavor a better and a happier Man than I otherwise would have been, if I had not attempted it.”  The launching forth, the enterprising itself, the heart-deep reluctance to settle for being only what we already are—these repurchase us from reproach and recrimination. 

*     *     *

Periodically, mom decided the furniture in the living room needed to be rearranged.  Dad and I, knowing this reorganization would require our physical labor, plaintively inquired, “But why?  It looks fine the way it is.”  Mom gave no reason beyond “it was time” but beyond that beyond she intuitively knew what Dad and I could not comprehend:  things need to be repositioned, regrouped, reshuffled, reconfigured, recombined, repositioned, rerelated, reinvigorated.  Space needs to be respaced, reshaped.  Things need to be jostled into fresh dialogues of color and form.  A room, like a life, needs to speak in a fresh dialect, a repatterned idiom, if it is to impart a renewed nuance.

*     *     *

“Re”—just a chip of language, really, but brimming with linguistic power.  “It is a mischievous notion,” Emerson says, “that the world was finished a long time ago.”  “Re” is “plastic and fluid;” it confutes fixity and baffles the encumbrance of the given.  It pitches woo to the remodel and recast.  It says the made can be remade, the done, redone, and that means the made and done can be made and done, differently, better.

 

 

 

 

 

A Halloween Tale

He could not sleep so he went for a walk.  The winter-crisp night was windless.  A full moon candled a sky pebbled with stars.  He remembered the Ibo proverb in Achebe: “When the moon is shining the cripple becomes hungry for a walk.”  And what was that story that described each pinpoint of starlight as the cold cry of an anguished purgatorial soul?  He walked.  He had no destination in mind, no place he particularly wanted to go.  He just walked.

Crossing a snowy field he came upon boot tracks.  The punctuation of another night walker.  He followed them until suddenly they stopped.  Just disappeared, as if the walker walked up into the night sky.  Ascended into the pale energy of the white moon.  The night massed.  Something, he felt, lay in wait, lay just out of sight, clamped and lidded, hidden perhaps beyond the tree line ahead or in the seam of shadow and light or behind the moon--some summons, some surging epiphany, some something that would send him spinning, out over the field, over the town, over the horizon.  The cold deepened, entered his flesh and rippled him with shivering. He felt he might be unraveling.  He turned and followed the two sets of tracks until they became only his set of tracks.  He followed his tracks back across the field and returned home.

He snugged himself under a comforter, sealed himself to keep from untangling.  He slept.  But he did not dream. 

Bead Counting

For almost six years, a rosary has hung from the brass shade bracket of my banker’s desk lamp.  It has been five decades since my fingers trundled along the beads of a rosary’s five decades;  five decades since, as one of the “poor banished children of Eve,” I sought the merciful intercession of the Mother of God by praying the five sets of ten Hail Marys, each punctuated by an Our Father;  five decades since Sister Mary Joseph told us the etymology of the word “rosary”—rosarius, a crown of roses—“Mary’s flower, you know,” Sister said, and told us a story of Mary appearing to a monk praying Hail Marys and transforming each prayer from his lips into a rose with which she wreathed her head; five decades since I contemplated, with each uttered decade of Hail Marys, one of Joyful or Luminous or Sorrowful or Glorious mysteries of the Catholic faith; five decades since I had used a rosary for the purpose for which it was designed.  Yet, I still use it.

The rosary, in a white velvet pouch, lay, with dozens of others, in a basket marked “Take one, please” located in the narthex of the church at which my mother’s funeral mass was said.  The priest misidentified my mother in the opening prayer, confusing her with a woman whose funeral mass was to be said in the afternoon.  An attending deacon whispered in the priest’s ear, he apologized, correctly identified my mother, and began the mass.  No doubt, he was a busy man.  But this was my mother he had misnamed.  I seethed.  I expected a priest who was present in the clarity of right now, a priest more mindful that he was saying a mass for my mother.

At the cemetery he conducted the burial wearing a Green Bay Packers knit cap and gloves.  I got it.  He was a regular guy, a Packer Backer, and in Wisconsin, where Vince Lombardi has been canonized and various players from the legendary 1967 “Ice Bowl” NFL Championship win over Dallas have been beatified, not to display one’s Packer loyalty is an act of apostasy.  Perhaps, as it was a cold November morning, that hat and those gloves were the warmest he owned.   Perhaps, being busy, he simply grabbed on the run whatever was handy.   And yet, and yet . . .  I wanted a priest, not a Packer fan, not a regular guy.  I wanted a man “configured to Christ,” a man through whom Christ acts, a man whose ordination aligns him in an arc of religious history stretching back to the Apostles. 

It was ungenerous and selfish thinking, angry thinking, unfastened, unshelved, unanchored.  I took offense, and the impulse of my displeasure supplanted thinking, understanding.  I churned with an unpoulticed resentment wholly unfit for the occasion, a maladied spirit my mother would have found foreign, and certainly mortifying in her son.  I wanted to treasure the light of my mother’s life and the solemnity of its passing, not the darkness of my smoldering and bitter indignation. After the funeral, I drove back to the church and took one of the rosaries.  It hangs on my desk lamp as a memorial, and as a self-rebuke, perhaps, even, a spun thread of atonement.

All things invoke; all things conjure.  All things gesture beyond their thingness, point away from themselves, away from their function and use, to an elsewhere, to a something other, to another meaning, more tacit than the thing.  They are charged with social assumptions and perceptions; they say things about us, about others.  They are inlaid, infused, with a social significance, with impressions and interpretations and feelings beyond their application.

Some things, however, go beyond even this beyondness and become sacramental objects.  They address us, hail us, as we hail Mary, to tend, to attend, to not defraud ourselves and give part of ourselves away. They act as talismen, media for a transcendent “herenow,” not a vaguely somewhered “hereafter.” They make moral claims, take us beyond choice and will and calculation, confront us with the force of passionate love, sublime beauty, profound tragedy, shearing sadness; transfer us out of our hermetic monologue and its all-immersive self-regard.   The rosary that hangs on my desk lamp, for all its cheap translucent plastic beads and its tinny chain, makes me stand outside the inhospitable, uncharitable anger I felt at my mother’s funeral, unannexes me, takes me to a place beside myself, a place where my opacity surrenders to my own gaze, where I see myself, what I was, did, could and should have been and done.

Maybe, just maybe, I am, after all, using it for the purpose for which it was designed.

 

Baring Threads

 

Take no thought . . . for the body, what ye shall put on.                     

Luke 12:22

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.                              

Henry David Thoreau

Know first who you are; and then adorn yourself accordingly.         

Epictetus

 

I walked into the kitchen and said to my wife Kathy, “Look at this.”  I held up a sweater I had found in the bottom of the bottom drawer of my chest of drawers.  My mother had sent it to me some 15 years earlier.  “A perfectly good sweater; why haven’t I worn it?”

“That’s easy,” Kathy said.  “It was new.”

“Well, that’s ridicu—“ I began, until, with a kick-drum thud, I remembered I had yet to wear the T-shirt, fiery red with a stylized blue and white scene of sailboats on the bay, I’d bought in San Francisco in 1987.  Or the six years’ worth of T-shirts from the 10K Bellin Run in Wausau, Wisconsin, back in the 1980s.  Or the three Graceland University T-shirts I received for three Julys, 2002-2004, I’d spent manning the academic table during Iowa Private College week.  Or the Eddie Bauer slippers I’d received in 2009, or several pairs of slacks, at least three sweaters, probably half a dozen dress shirts, three neckties, one belt, one University of Iowa hooded sweatshirt, a Green Bay Packer windbreaker, a leather overcoat, one package of ankle socks, and a Titleist golf cap.  As usual, Kathy was right.

The fear of clothing is called “vestiphobia.”  The fear of the new is termed “neophobia.”  Could it be I suffer from “neovestiphobia?”  Is it possible I’ve been Cotton Mathered to the point of renouncing new clothes, fearing an apostate capitulation to “the creature,” the things of the world, not wanting to take my eye off the ball of more redemptive pursuits?  Am I simply indulging in a self-delusion, flattering myself on my frugality and wise clothes management?

I can safely say that my reticence to wearing new clothes is not the result of being deprived of them when I was a child.  I think I’m on firm ground affirming that my superego is not laying  siege to my ego, or that I haven’t erected a defense against repressed impulses—at least I think the ground is firm, though, really, when it comes to the uncontinented ocean of the Freudian unconscious, how would I know?  I will admit that I tend toward sameness and routine. I will concede that I do not like to draw attention to myself—I should probably add scopophobia, the fear of being stared at, to my list of fears—and would be basketed by anxiety that, in displaying myself in new clothes, I would appear a vain, exhibitionistic poser trying desperately to pull off some look.  I’ll cop to being unduly influenced by an article I read in AARP: The Magazine that advised always and everywhere to dress age appropriately, which, I take it, means staid, muted, and absolutely no skinny jeans.  And I’ll concede to being haunted by the 37-year-old memory of donning a brand-spanking new pair of burgundy double-knit trousers only to have the pet cat leap onto one leg, clinging by its claws and rendering the slacks unwearably pilled. 

For whatever reason, I have this idea that I should wear out the old, threadbare it, consume it until it fades, tatters, and becomes rag-bag ready, before putting on the new.  Giving myself over to the seduction of something new while the old retains its use value strikes me as being a moral kneecapping.  It’s imprudent, it’s impudent, it’s prodigal, it’s profligate.  I simply cannot bring myself to slip into those Bauer slippers, for instance, until the demise of my current slippers, which, calculating by age, condition, and use, should occur on or around mid-March, 2015.  Alternatively, I’ll tell myself that I’m reserving the new for a suitable occasion.  Strangely, however, that occasion never seems to arise.

Mostly, though, I suspect my reluctance to wear the new lies precisely in its newness.  The new is magical; it lies in a crucible of suspended time and pluralled possibility.  It is crisp, unwrinkled, frankincensed.  The new loiters in the bright morning of conceivability, of the unencumbered perhaps.  It is unfallen.  But newness doesn’t last.  Nothing new ever does.  Something can be new only once and only in one way; used, it tocks and ticks, frays and     tuckers, becomes way-worn and, finally, laid away.

How, you may wonder, did I manage to accumulate so many new clothes?  My life has been blessed with generous women who possess what I conspicuously lack: a keen eye for fashion.  They have taken it upon themselves to do what I cannot: dress me, and in a manner that at least shares the same zipcode with the stylish.  The process usually happens like this: on some present-giving occasion, when they ask what I’d like, I reply “I don’t know; there’s nothing I really need or want,” and by default they give me clothing. 

Obviously, I need to provide a more specific response to their query.  If I don’t, it’s likely that by this time next year I’ll be adding G. H. Bass loafers, a Ferragamo military-style jacket, and ck one jeans to the list of the unworn.

 

 

Knight of the Altar

Sister Mary Joseph beamed and spread her arms wide, as if to embrace us newly-fledged altar boys, as if to gather us within a zone of spiritual exclusivity.  “You are knights of the altar,” she declared.   We looked at each other and smiled.  We knew about knights, and they were cool: the stalwart rectitude, the round-table brotherhood, the sword-on-the-shoulders dubbing, the designation “Sir,” the armor, the colorfully draped horses, the lances, the beautiful and soulful-eyed maidens.  And though we knew our only armor would be ankle-length cassocks and crisply white surplices, our only lances the extending taper used to light the altar candles, we nonetheless anticipated cutting a valiant enough figure to wilt the reserve of even the most aloof maidens in our 6^th grade class.

“And you know, boys,” Sister continued, “that the origin of serving as altar boys lay in the Last Supper, when Jesus sent two of his apostles, Peter and John, into Jerusalem to prepare a room in which to hold the Passover feast?”  We were stunned.  Jesus and the apostles?  Us?  To be doing something the trajectory of which arced back over an unimaginable two thousand years of history?  Us?  Baseball-playing, American-Bandstand- watching, cigarette-sneaking, dirty-joke-telling, smelly-sweatsocks-wearing us?   And then Sister told us that as servers, we were acting as acolytes.  We did not know what that word meant, but it sounded important and holy and confirmed for us that, having completed our training, we were no longer ordinary boys.  We were special, marked, singled out.  We had crossed into sacred precincts.  We realized, dimly, that more would be expected of us. 

Certainly, our training had prepared us for those expectations.  We had each been issued a server’s card and had spent months memorizing the Latin responses, from the opening “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem mean” to the closing “Deo gratias.”  We enlisted parents and relatives to quiz us.  We asked the Sisters to quiz us on the playground during recess. We quizzed each other as we passed in the hallway: “Hey, Jerry, `Gratias agamus Domino Deo nostro.’”  “Dignum et justum est,” I’d reply.  We quizzed each other in the restroom and on the bus ride to and from school.  “Dominus vobiscum.”  “Et cum spiritu tuo.”  And the pronunciation had to be perfect.  “No, dummy, it’s `cone-fee-tay-or,” not “confetti-er.”

But despite all the memorization and persnickety attention to pronunciation, we liked Latin and we yielded ourselves to it.  It was foreign and mysterious—our own secret language of sorts.  It had a poetic rhythm that unfurled like a bolt of silk off the tongue: “ET cum SPIRitu TUo;” “Qui TOLlis PeCAtta MUNdi, MIseREre NObis.”  We especially liked the repetitive  troche of “mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa” of the Confiteor.  The obligatory breast beating accompanying those clustered words made their cadence palpable.

After memorizing the responses, and after having recited them flawlessly to both the principal and the pastor, we rehearsed the basic moves we would be required to make: how to hold the hands (palms together, fingers pointed), when and how to bow (not too fast, too slow, or too deeply), when and how to genuflect (knee must contact the floor), when and how to ring the bells (twice, with a quick twist of the wrist), when and how to move the priest’s missal from the Epistle side of the altar to the Gospel side.  We practiced how to receive the priest’s biretta at the beginning of mass and how to return it to him at the end, how to turn (never face completely away from the altar), how to present the cruets of water and wine (handles toward the priest), how to pour water over the priest’s fingers (towel over the right wrist, dish in the left, water cruet in the right), how to prepare and hold the censer.  Finally, as the culmination to our training, we spent a week sitting in a small nave to the side of the altar observing experienced altar boys working a morning mass.  We were assigned our first mass the following week

Many of my fellow altar boys stopped serving at the end of eighth grade.  I continued well into high school.  I liked serving mass, liked the spectacle and theatricality of it,  the ritualistic discipline of it, the processional pace of it, the weighty sanctity and solemnity of it, the symbolic resonance of each gesture and movement, small acts that contributed to the larger act of praise and celebration.  I felt that somehow, in some small way, I was a co-priest; that the vital energy of the mass, its reverence and beauty, its very syntax, depended on me, if only slightly.  I was wholly held in the experience of it, the visceral sensibility of it.  I was determined to be perfect.

And, indeed, I did draw attention.  The sisters requested me for the 5 a.m. mass in their convent during Lent, an undertaking made more complicated because I worked without a partner.  The priest often called me to do funerals, for each of which he gave me a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and weddings, for which I received from the groom five or ten dollars.  I was asked to help train new altar boys.  I could do low masses and high masses and requiem masses, Christmas and Easter and Holy Week masses.  I never missed an assignment or obligation, never made a mistake.  My folks were proud.  I was proud of myself.  I was doing something important, something meaning-saturated, and I did it well.

And then, for reasons I still cannot satisfactorily explain, sometime into my junior year in high school my faith wavered, dimmed.  I declined invitations to serve, then removed myself from the active list.  After I graduated, I stopped attending church altogether.  I had fallen away, and have remained so some forty-five years later.  I suspect I began to find, and still find, other means to meet what seems to me the primary purpose of religion: to exceed our nearliness, our almostness, our in-partness.  When I served mass, I felt, intimately, what British writer Jeanette Winterson describes as “a doubtfulness of the solid-seeming world.”   I believed I witnessed, close up, a miracle.  When the priest uttered “Hoc est corpus meum,” that thin wafer of unleavened wheat became the body of Christ.  A transubstantiation had occurred before my eyes, and I was, at that moment, in the presence of something beyond my understanding, something otherwise and beyond that released me from the commonplace weight of my being in the world, something that gestured to an openness transcendent and never sealed.  So I believed.

I have since found, however, that if we look, really look, seemingly ordinary things, things taken for granted, unsecondthoughted, can be, are, quite extraordinary things, things, as Mary Oliver says, that “are something else . . . from what they were,” things that “my body whispers to me” are miraculous.  Small things can become large things, sacramental things, transfiguring things.  Epiphanies can occur daily.  Everything points away from itself ultimately; everything arcs beyond the horizon of available meaning, beyond the tongue of language to articulate: the human brain’s 100 billion tendrilled neurons; knowledgeable hands and tools of any kind; oatmeal bowls, a well-worn chair, and pencil marks on a pantry-door jamb; a student who says, “Oh, now I see;” the deep-blue stillness of a late summer day within which the spirit of autumn hovers; Grandma Jay bowing all day over a kitchen counter making ravioli from-scratch; my mother’s fingers playfully squeezing my upper arm, her right eyebrow arching just before she laughs; my father whistling Perry Como songs while he makes the kitchen table at which, forty-five years later, every day, I eat breakfast.