Mom bought every Elvis 45 available at the local record shop. Dad rarely bought records, but, when he did, he purchased Perry Como exclusively. I think Mom liked the raucous energy of Elvis’s straight-up rock ‘n roll, and the sentimental sadness or the fervent affirmations of the ballads. I think she liked Elvis’s gyrating hips, those howitzer blasts against the fortress of 1950s conformity. I’m pretty sure she liked that Elvis bought a pink (mom’s favorite color) Cadillac for his mother, and that he wasn’t shy about his affection for her. I’d guess she liked that he was “nice boy,” born into poverty and obscurity and an ethos of Southern prejudice, and became wealthy, famous, and, by bringing black music into the mainstream, a force for racial integration. I’d conjecture she liked playing Elvis records while she went about her daily homemaking tasks.
I’m forced to qualify all these statements. Mom never explained her Elvis affinity. Dad was different. He liked Perry Como, and he gave reasons, and, later, when I quite loitering in the foyer of maturity and actually passed through its main room door, I saw reasons beneath the reasons.
Dad liked Perry Como because he projected an unruffled personality, and his music was soothing—“he’s smooooth,” Dad said. Dad liked smooth. Perry Como’s hips did not gyrate. Dad liked that Perry Como was Italian—“you know, his real first name is Pierno,” Dad informed me--; was born poor of immigrant parents from Italy—as Dad had been--;worked as a barber and later ran his own barbershop; gained local recognition performing at wedding receptions and the like—as Dad’s dad, a shoemaker by trade, had--; and went on to become the most popular and successful singer of his generation. Dad liked success stories, especially ones that in some way mirrored his own rise from scrawny Depression-era kid to secure middle class status. Dad knew that Perry Como’s imperturbable, cardigan-sweatered cool masked a competitive nature, and Dad liked competition. Dad also liked romantic ballads, though he would never admit it. He was a stealth romantic.
Dad did not like Elvis—too androgynous, too much grease in his hair, too unconventional—and could not understand why Mom did. “What’s the fascination with that Presley guy,” Dad once asked her. “I like him,” Mom said. Dad wanted a reason, though: “Well, yeah, but why?” “Because he’s Elvis,” Mom said, and that was that. Dad never asked again. Unlike Dad, a systems analyst, Mom felt no compulsion to provide reasons for something she considered blindingly obvious . She thought or believed or felt something, and accepted it as perfectly legitimate, an experience that did not require explanation but that was nonetheless adequate to any query.
I came home from school one day to find the living room furniture rearranged. “Why’d you change the furniture,” I asked. “Oh, I just thought it was time,” she said. “But why,” I persisted. “It needed to be rearranged,” she replied, in a how-can-you-be-so-dense tone. Once, after a particularly lengthy and intense session of pestering of my younger brother Dennis, Mom intervened and told me in no uncertain terms to stop. “Why should I,” I smartalecked. I expected she’d say “because I’ll give you a smack if you don’t,” or “because if you don’t stop you won’t be allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club,” or “because if you don’t I’ll tell your father.” Instead, she said, “Because he’s your brother.” And she emphasized that last word.
It was only later, much later, that I understood what she meant, understood the sheer power of that word, its complexities, understood that its meaning lay in its connotations and implications, that it contained within it a self-evident sovereignty of meaning, that it carried a blood-deep, biology-deep cargo of empathy, of sympathetic imagination, of simple kindness, of the best of all rules, the Golden Rule. For Mom such things needed no logical analysis, no dictionaried explanation. Mom liked Elvis because he was Elvis; she rearranged furniture because it needed it; my brother deserved attentive care and kindness because he was my brother. For her that was enough. Sometimes things, or the idea of things, capture us, and we need to accept being taken. That was her lesson for me. Mom’s replies demanded imagination, and I learned never to mistake a deficiency of imagination on my part with a lack of meaning in her way of knowing.
Dad’s lesson was the necessity of strong claims supported by reasons, a lesson forged over two millennia ago in the Greek agorae, those public assembly places where citizens debated issues of community significance, a lesson that today goes by the name of public discourse, of truth-seeking, reasoned disputation, a lesson that today we seem to have forgotten. “Always give reasons, Jerry,” Dad told me more than once; “people will respect you. They’ll consider you a person who can be trusted.” He was right, of course, and there have been many occasions when I have put his counsel to good use, though I often find myself given more to Mom’s lesson. There is an uncurtained honesty in a simple statement of this-is-what-it-is-to-me that carries its own credibility, as much, perhaps, as a statement of this-is why-it-is-to-me.
Once, I eavesdropped on a conversation between Dad and his brother Carmen about a mutual acquaintance. “He’s an asshole,” Dad declared. “How come,” Carmen asked. “He just is,” Dad said. I smiled. Dad, it would seem, was no more immune to Mom’s lesson than I was. Though, like his Perry Como-ed romanticism, he’d never admit it.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
The Call
The last time I was in a Catholic church was for my Dad’s funeral mass last October. The last time before that was for my Mom’s funeral mass the November prior to Dad’s. The last time before that was a friend’s wedding six months before Mom’s passing. The last time I attended Sunday mass was when I visited my folks. They did not insist, did not even ask. They had accepted that I was fallen away, had been since I was twenty-one, but I went because I knew it would please them. Lately, though, I have felt a call to reintroduce myself to a faith I left more than forty years ago.
“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.
Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.
It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.
Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.
“Call” is likely an inaccurate word. I heard no beckoning voice while I mowed the lawn, no summoning words as I crossed the WalMart parking lot. No, it’s more a vague feeling; a tonal tendency, minor-chorded; a slight turn and lean of consciousness; a faint first beginning of a disposition; a candle flame flickered by some barely palpable slipstream of inclination; an insinuation, a light pressure, an embryonic emergence. I don’t know precisely what it is, or if it will coalesce into a longing, but it is present, and I am hard-pressed to account for it.
Perhaps it is simply solace-seeking in response to advancing age and its trailing intimations of mortality, a bid for assurance in the Church’s deepest mystery is a cycle of life, death, and rebirth. Perhaps I want to draw a protective circle around my life and convince myself that it has been more than an obscure footnote, or a footnoted footnote. Perhaps it is fellowship for a social nature I have undernourished in my preference for study and solitude, membership in a body bound by belief and purpose and conscience, the mutually encumbered embrace of community, the sharing of traditions and rituals and observances whose trajectory arcs back over two millennia. Perhaps it is the pageantry, the reverencing wonder and awe and soul-satisfaction of incense-laden air, of cascading organ notes echoing from vaulted ceilings, of sunlight shafting through stained-glass windows, of the miraculous transformation of a thin wafer of bread into divine flesh. Perhaps it is the need to believe that justice will finally, ultimately, irrevocably prevail, that judgment will be passed upon crimes committed without punishment and virtue practiced without reward. Perhaps I want to know, in the herenow, that there is a hereafter.
It could be that, having watched this planet spin round the sun for over 60 years now, I have come to interpret certain objects and experiences as innuendos of that hereafter, or, at least, some transcendent realm beyond that given to our eyes and minds. The infinitude of language, for example, its potential for endless utterance due to the recursive embedding of clause within clause, combined with the way it often fails to express the knotted syntax of our hearts, gestures beyond that cincture. The bite of satire, the laughing critique of the what is, of the finite and obdurately material, relativizes our finitude and hints that it can be redeemed. Redwood trees 3000 years old and Foxtail White Pines 5000 years old point to the possibility of eternity. The involuntary “Ah!” invoked by the marvelous and strange and magical and joyous suspends our mundane reality and invokes an order of meaning, a mode of understanding, a way of being that supercedes it. And we ourselves, limited agents using varied means to accomplish varied purposes, stand as emblematic gestures toward an agentive intentionality beyond our circumscribed range of motion.
Could it be that, because I was born, raised, and educated a Catholic, Catholicism tattooed its intitials on me when I was young, and its imprint has grown as I have grown? Could it be that Catholicism, any religion of one’s youth for that matter, is a werewolf faith, always latent, always blood-deep, waiting only for the right conditions to re-emerge? Could it be nothing more than nostalgia, or an imaginative conjuration, or a vestige, a residue, a fragile echo, a trace, a groping regret? So much about ourselves is unknown, or half-known, and rightly considered, that should be a provocation for our discovery and articulation of what is necessary for our lives, what we can take, what we can leave. It would seem that, for me, although I left Catholicism, it never quite left me.
Monday, September 5, 2011
One Looks At One
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” the poet Theodore Roethke says. For me, a moment of seeing occurred in the pale half light just before dawn one morning toward the end of July. Waiting for the carafe of the Mr. Coffee machine to fill with just enough coffee to banish the last vestiges of drowsiness, I happened to glance out the backyard windows into the garden and saw, as if conjured from that auroral seam between night and morning, a fully-mature, antlered buck nibbling on some sedum. I knew deer were paying calls to the garden. They had left their visiting cards: cropped day lilies, gnawed hostas, and cloven, heart-shaped hoofprints. Neighbors had spoken of seeing deer in their yards, but, until this particular morning, they had been only trace presences in mine. I came to think of the hoofprints as ungulate footnotes without an accompanying cervine text.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
The buck was a stunningly lovely creature, built for speed and agility and lithe strength, so smoothly muscled it seemed hewn from sinew. It seemed at once ethereal and material, an annunciation of grace and power and beauty. And I experienced a conflict, for my wife Kathy and my stepdaughter Alma and I had labored all through late May and most of June, sometimes in chilly rain, sometimes in dizzying heat, to prepare the garden for a friend’s wedding. A part of me wanted to bang on the window and shoo the creature away. So much work went into making the garden over, so much artistry, so much imagination made real and palpably alive, and I wanted it to stand, unblemished, as a testament to that investiture of purposeful effort. Should I continue to watch or frighten it off?
I thought of William Stafford’s poem “Traveling Through the Dark,” where the speaker, finding a pregnant doe, dead but bearing a living fawn “never to be born” on a twisting mountain road, must choose, for the safety of subsequent drivers, whether or not to push it off the road into a canyon river, for a “swerve might make others dead.” He “thought hard for us all,” he says, his “only swerving--,/ then pushed her over the edge.” My dilemma was surely not so fraught, but, still, I felt as if I were traveling through the dark. I thought, hard, for myself. I watched.
* * * * *
One day, when I was a high school senior, I was on the practice range of the local golf course. My across-the-street friend Ben was sitting in a lawn chair watching me. Ben was the most devoutly Catholic of those in my circle of friends—had even considered the priesthood at one point. Oddly, at least to my thinking, his faith seemed to stand in inverse proportion to his robustness: he was beset my allergies and migraines, cadaverously skinny, and wore a nylon warm-up jacket in even the hottest weather. But he was a good friend, a good golfer, and an astute swing analyst. I was working on a swing change that I wanted him to monitor. Suddenly, from the far end of the practice range, a small squad of three deer emerged from the jack pines and came running full tilt straight at us. We were transfixed. The deer loomed larger as they closed upon us. We could hear their hooves pounding on the hard clay soil under the grass. Straight for us, at us, closer and closer, thundering, until, one after another, they leapt over Ben, who, though never touched, uttered a distended vowel-laden sound, fell over backwards in his chair, rolled once, and wound up under the chair. His face was drained of color; his eyes, like two 16 point Verdana O’s. “Jerry,” he said, as I lifted the chair off him, “that was a sign. How about we call it quits for today.” I agreed. Golf seemed pretty petty just then; the course, not a true place.
* * * * *
As I watched the buck in my garden, it abruptly looked up from the sedum and stared straight at me. I raised my hand, palm outward, in greeting. It tipped an antler in what I like to think was a civil acknowledgement of my presence, and trotted off at a nonchalant gait, disappearing finally into the dark tree line along the west edge of the back lot. Had I looked at that moment at the title to my property, I’m sure I would have seen, in place of my name, a heart-shaped hoofprint.
* * * * *
During my summer visits to my mom and dad, I ritually rose just before dawn, biked to the Schmeekle Wildlife Reserve about a mile away, and took an hour-long walk on its miles of wilderness paths. It was a cathedraled place, holy in the way certain places can sometimes forge ligatures to something outside of and larger than oneself, and my walk was, I suppose, more spiritual than physical exercise. The rising sun, filtered through the heavily treed canopy, was cool and green, with here and there a shaft of pure morning light, in which I momentarily lingered, breaking through. The silence was noisy with trills and whirs and scurryings, with humming life.
As I rounded a corner and stepped up onto a wooden bridge, I saw a large buck staring at me from the other end, staring hard, aggressively. Behind him stood a doe and a fawn. His family. I suddenly recalled an article I had read about deer using their keen-edged hooves as slashing weapons of defense when threatened. Having no wish to invite such a lacerating response, I relied on my only weapon of defense: I talked to him. Slowly turning both palms outward, I said, “I mean you no harm. I was just out for a walk. I have no wish to hurt you. I’ll just stand here as still as I can until you move on.” The buck turned his head to the right and I heard a rustling in the reeds. Six more deer emerged and took up positions alongside and behind the buck. His clan. For a moment, a clock-frozen moment unpinned from time, ten looked at one looking at ten. A language of eyes meeting—unblinkered, unblinking, tensile sightlines. Then the buck moved off to the left, followed by the others, and I found myself back inside time, back inside me.
* * * * *
In Robert Frost’s poem, “Two Looking at Two,” “love and forgetting” almost cause a couple to hike too far up a mountain trail to return in daylight. They stop by a tumbled stone wall “with barbed-wire binding,” and on the other side see first a doe, then a buck enter the field from the surrounding spruce. The two couples, deer and human, each “in their own field,” stare at each other across the wall until, with “a spell-breaking,” the deer “pass unscared along the wall” and out of sight into the spruce. “Two had seen two,” Frost says, and the couple felt “A great wave from it going over them,/ As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor/ Had made them certain earth returned their love.”
The human and natural realms are separate, different orders of created being, Frost seems to suggest with the barbed wire-woven wall, but the wall is “tumbled.” Though different, the two realms can reflect something of each other in each other at some deep level of homology, and in Frost’s poem that shared plane appears to be love, at least as the human couple experiences it, and, who knows, really, the deer couple as well, or at least some version of a feeling our language labels “love.”. Two looked at two; the looking connecting them, if only for a moment, through some shared essential; and the human couple finding that nature itself, embodied in the paired deer, honors their love by reinforcing its felt experience.
* * * * *
My neighbor tells me of some homemade concoctions he uses to repel deer: rotten eggs work well, he says, or a mixture of dishwashing liquid and cayenne pepper or garlic sprayed around the garden perimeter. But, having resolved my momentary conflict by choosing to watch, I have no wish to repel deer. Gardens are the seam where nature and the human are sutured, where the power of human design and purpose are entuned with the fecundating power of nature. Appropriate, then, a deer in my garden. And I did not ask where it came from or by what means, convoluted or simple, it got there or where it was returning to when in disappeared into the tree line. In that suspended, pre-dawn moment, I made no demands on the experience. I simply accepted it as it was, the rich sufficiency of the deer’s thereness and my thereness, and one looking at one.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Hanging Out, Then Hanging Back
During most of my freshman year at Pacelli High School, my best friends Jim and Mark and I gathered every morning before school at the DX gas station two blocks away. We smoked, swore, drank a Coke or an Orange Crush, gobbled down some Junior Mints or Milk Duds, and assured each other we had not done any homework or studied for any upcoming tests. After school, we again convened at the DX station to discuss the day’s events, repeating the morning’s activities, with the exception of gobbling down Eskimo Pies and Drumsticks instead of candy. Of course, our parents did not permit us to smoke or swear, and, with what we considered puritanical zeal, monitored our homework, studying, and consumption of junk food. It was those very strictures, of course, that made the DX station such a liberating place for us—a mosh pit of indulgence, transgression, and impetuosity. And presiding over that scene of prodigality, its chief practitioner and enabler, and, for us, its chief attraction, was the station manager, Barney Zandiski.
Physically, Barney was a short, powerfully built, floridly complected man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Popeye: same squinty eye, same large jutting chin, same muscled forearms. Philosophically, he subscribed to Popeye’s existential credo: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” And what Barney was was lavishly profane, blushlessly crude, flamboyantly insensitive, and incandescently outrageous. Barney conducted a blustery, non-stop discourse of complaint and criticism, where little was worthy of veneration or respect, where little beyond his own pronouncements held any claim to authority, where an I’m-nobody’s-fool irony heaped scorn on the scantest expression of sincerity or earnestness or sentiment, where all enshrined cultural pieties and conventional standards of social behavior were hammered wafer-thin on the anvil of a sneer and a jeer, where a proud ignorance robustly mocked the supposed dreamy impracticality of intellectual interest or pursuit, where impugning others was a practiced performance, formidable, forensic, frictionless—a running narrative in which the number of Anglo Saxon words referring to sex, genitalia, or excrement stood in equal measure to those that did not, robust profanity in a frenzy of replicability. Barney was a blue-streak poet and a mean-streak cynic, a peerless rhetorician of convulsive shock and voluptuous irreverence. And we were his disciples.
Oh, Barney could be charming with customers, contracting himself into a knot of courteous servility when pumping their gas, checking their oil, and squeegeeing their windshields. He was invariably hospitable and ingratiating with those who ventured inside to purchase a soda or cigarettes or new wiper blades or a quart or two of oil. But once they left, the mockery began: how they looked, what they wore, how they spoke or acted—laced with lewd misogyny and envenomed misandrogy. We listened and looked at each other, eyes and mouths rounded, and then we laughed, and that laughter carried out the door and over the shake-roofed optometrist’s office across the street and on south to the outlying villages of Plover and Whiting. Barney was mesmerizing, shamanic. We harvested his vitriol and parboiled it into ours. We were his disciples.
The reason is no mystery. Barney was a reprieve from the orderly, homogenized, carefully scripted, authority-dominated upbringing that characterized our home lives and our Catholic-school lives. In the DX station those cinctures loosened and fell away. We felt free, truant from resolutely middle-class expectations; felt resistant and contestatory and conspiratorial and subversive. We were unrepentant prodigal sons, fugitives, outliers, outlaws mustered safe in our Hole in the Wall hideout. Barney permitted us this experience, encouraged it, and we let him created us in his own image, let him make us silhouettes against the glare of his unabashed, ungarmented expression of himself.
One day, though, something in me changed. I suddenly saw Barney’s outrage merely as an undisciplined howl, centrifugal and irrational, all sound and fury against something, anything, everything, devoid of significance. His irreverence was simply irreverence; his crudity, grotesque; his rancor, indigent transgressivity—not emancipating, not in rebellion against restraints, but firmly encoiled within them, lashing out with the desperate knowledge of the futility of lashing out. I remembered the look on people’s faces, in their eyes, when they came into the station: ill-at-ease, awkward, discomfited, embarrassed under our unblinkingly judgmental gaze. I felt shame, felt ashamed, shameful, shameless.
It happens like that sometimes, maturity. An abrupt awakening. No Descartes spending six days disassembling and recreating his understanding of what is true and what illusion. Rather, a page turns, a shutter opens, a shaft of eclipsed sunlight flares, a melody unexpectedly changes its key from subtonic to tonic. The physical development of maturity is easily charted: the voice deepens, shirt sleeves and pant legs unaccountably shorten, shoes shrink, hair sprouts in all kinds of untoward places. But cognitively is comes with a rush and something clicks, a puzzle you did not know you were working on suddenly fits its own pieces into place.
What I intuited but did not yet know how to express was this: Our tiny DX gang took a puerile satisfaction of shock for shock’s sake. We wanted sovereignty over ourselves, but, of course, we had ceded it to Barney, experienced it through him, by him, in him. And Barney was a man of unexamined opinion, a man who asserted confidently because he understood and imagined so little that was otherwise, a man for whom the boldness and volume of an opinion masked his largely unrecognized awareness that it lacked any claim of place in the cross-fertilizing conversation where ideas are critically examined, augmented, altered, and always judged. He was a man who scorned and yearned, scorned because he yearned to be other than what George Eliot called “a small hungry shivering self.” He was a man who needed a rapt audience, needed a validating group of listeners. We thought we needed Barney, but I suspect the truth is, he needed us more.
Physically, Barney was a short, powerfully built, floridly complected man who bore an uncanny resemblance to Popeye: same squinty eye, same large jutting chin, same muscled forearms. Philosophically, he subscribed to Popeye’s existential credo: “I am what I am and that’s all that I am.” And what Barney was was lavishly profane, blushlessly crude, flamboyantly insensitive, and incandescently outrageous. Barney conducted a blustery, non-stop discourse of complaint and criticism, where little was worthy of veneration or respect, where little beyond his own pronouncements held any claim to authority, where an I’m-nobody’s-fool irony heaped scorn on the scantest expression of sincerity or earnestness or sentiment, where all enshrined cultural pieties and conventional standards of social behavior were hammered wafer-thin on the anvil of a sneer and a jeer, where a proud ignorance robustly mocked the supposed dreamy impracticality of intellectual interest or pursuit, where impugning others was a practiced performance, formidable, forensic, frictionless—a running narrative in which the number of Anglo Saxon words referring to sex, genitalia, or excrement stood in equal measure to those that did not, robust profanity in a frenzy of replicability. Barney was a blue-streak poet and a mean-streak cynic, a peerless rhetorician of convulsive shock and voluptuous irreverence. And we were his disciples.
Oh, Barney could be charming with customers, contracting himself into a knot of courteous servility when pumping their gas, checking their oil, and squeegeeing their windshields. He was invariably hospitable and ingratiating with those who ventured inside to purchase a soda or cigarettes or new wiper blades or a quart or two of oil. But once they left, the mockery began: how they looked, what they wore, how they spoke or acted—laced with lewd misogyny and envenomed misandrogy. We listened and looked at each other, eyes and mouths rounded, and then we laughed, and that laughter carried out the door and over the shake-roofed optometrist’s office across the street and on south to the outlying villages of Plover and Whiting. Barney was mesmerizing, shamanic. We harvested his vitriol and parboiled it into ours. We were his disciples.
The reason is no mystery. Barney was a reprieve from the orderly, homogenized, carefully scripted, authority-dominated upbringing that characterized our home lives and our Catholic-school lives. In the DX station those cinctures loosened and fell away. We felt free, truant from resolutely middle-class expectations; felt resistant and contestatory and conspiratorial and subversive. We were unrepentant prodigal sons, fugitives, outliers, outlaws mustered safe in our Hole in the Wall hideout. Barney permitted us this experience, encouraged it, and we let him created us in his own image, let him make us silhouettes against the glare of his unabashed, ungarmented expression of himself.
One day, though, something in me changed. I suddenly saw Barney’s outrage merely as an undisciplined howl, centrifugal and irrational, all sound and fury against something, anything, everything, devoid of significance. His irreverence was simply irreverence; his crudity, grotesque; his rancor, indigent transgressivity—not emancipating, not in rebellion against restraints, but firmly encoiled within them, lashing out with the desperate knowledge of the futility of lashing out. I remembered the look on people’s faces, in their eyes, when they came into the station: ill-at-ease, awkward, discomfited, embarrassed under our unblinkingly judgmental gaze. I felt shame, felt ashamed, shameful, shameless.
It happens like that sometimes, maturity. An abrupt awakening. No Descartes spending six days disassembling and recreating his understanding of what is true and what illusion. Rather, a page turns, a shutter opens, a shaft of eclipsed sunlight flares, a melody unexpectedly changes its key from subtonic to tonic. The physical development of maturity is easily charted: the voice deepens, shirt sleeves and pant legs unaccountably shorten, shoes shrink, hair sprouts in all kinds of untoward places. But cognitively is comes with a rush and something clicks, a puzzle you did not know you were working on suddenly fits its own pieces into place.
What I intuited but did not yet know how to express was this: Our tiny DX gang took a puerile satisfaction of shock for shock’s sake. We wanted sovereignty over ourselves, but, of course, we had ceded it to Barney, experienced it through him, by him, in him. And Barney was a man of unexamined opinion, a man who asserted confidently because he understood and imagined so little that was otherwise, a man for whom the boldness and volume of an opinion masked his largely unrecognized awareness that it lacked any claim of place in the cross-fertilizing conversation where ideas are critically examined, augmented, altered, and always judged. He was a man who scorned and yearned, scorned because he yearned to be other than what George Eliot called “a small hungry shivering self.” He was a man who needed a rapt audience, needed a validating group of listeners. We thought we needed Barney, but I suspect the truth is, he needed us more.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Butterfly Bush
The backyard view from the kitchen’s breakfast area looks out on one of the garden’s accent pieces, the butterfly bush. The shrub is easily five and a half feet tall, and each shoot terminates in a panicle, a pyramid-shaped blossom consisting of tiny, densely-packed purple flowers. It is classified by botanists as buddleja davidii. Nurseries refer to it as the Harlequin variety. I prefer butterfly bush because the name so definitively bears witness to the reality my eyes see. It seems to me that for the past several weeks it has been flash-mobbed by butterflies. Perhaps they feel intimations of their month-and-a-half-long lifespan and are eager to sip as much nectar as possible before they shuffle off that mortal coil. Perhaps, like us, they feel the looming of fall in the late summer. Or, more likely, I simply have not been paying attention. Whatever the reason, the butterfly bush swarms with butterflies, mostly monarchs with their distinctive orange and black-veined wings, and swallowtails, their yellow wings edged and spiked with black. As their long tongues extract nectar, those wings pump lightly, like two chambers of a contented heart.
In art and literature, butterflies often symbolize the soul. This symbolic connection makes sense given the metamorphosis that delivers butterflies to the world. Emerson says that power is a becoming; power “resides in the transition from a past to a new state,” and “that the soul becomes.” And that soul-becoming is power, for in it is the availing force of life itself, “not the having lived.” We emerge into self-possession, ready to lay claim to our deepest humanity. The butterfly begins humbly as a caterpillar, but, in obedience to a biological urge, creates a chrysalis from its own sloughed skin, from which it emerges fully-transformed, ready, at last, to enjoy the golden summer of its winged adulthood. To use the words with which Darwin concludes Origin of Species, “from so simple a beginning,” a form “most beautiful and most wonderful” has “been . . . evolved.”
I know, of course, that butterflies have a mundane function: the pollinate flowers. But I like to think they serve the more powerful purpose of simply being beautiful, of being a fluttering, flitting calligraphy of beauty, inscribing the air and annotating the blossoms upon which they light—small joys, small wonders, small graces to nourish the soul they symbolize.
In art and literature, butterflies often symbolize the soul. This symbolic connection makes sense given the metamorphosis that delivers butterflies to the world. Emerson says that power is a becoming; power “resides in the transition from a past to a new state,” and “that the soul becomes.” And that soul-becoming is power, for in it is the availing force of life itself, “not the having lived.” We emerge into self-possession, ready to lay claim to our deepest humanity. The butterfly begins humbly as a caterpillar, but, in obedience to a biological urge, creates a chrysalis from its own sloughed skin, from which it emerges fully-transformed, ready, at last, to enjoy the golden summer of its winged adulthood. To use the words with which Darwin concludes Origin of Species, “from so simple a beginning,” a form “most beautiful and most wonderful” has “been . . . evolved.”
I know, of course, that butterflies have a mundane function: the pollinate flowers. But I like to think they serve the more powerful purpose of simply being beautiful, of being a fluttering, flitting calligraphy of beauty, inscribing the air and annotating the blossoms upon which they light—small joys, small wonders, small graces to nourish the soul they symbolize.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Scooter Dreams
I said to my wife Kathy, “I think I’m going to get a scooter.”
“Have you been watching The Wild One again,” she asked.
Oh, Kathy is a wise woman. She knows that The Wild One is my second-favorite movie of all time. The brooding Brando as Johnny Strabler, belligerently anarchic and self destructive, glowering like a gargoyle atop the structure of the film. The tang of vicarious pleasure I get when he’s asked what he’s rebelling against: “Whaddaya got?” Nietszche on a motorcycle, wearing dungarees and black leather, a profanation of complacent postwar conformism
My favorite movie of all time? Shane. Not because of Alan Ladd’s Shane. Because of Jack Palance’s Jack Wilson, a coiled knot of psychopathic evil, slowly, meticulously, pulling on those skin-tight black gloves, barely containing the glee at the prospect of another killing, slowly, oh so slowly, dismounting from his horse to signal his disdain upon first confronting Shane. The laconic challenge before the gunfight: “I’ve heard you’re a low-down Yankee liar,” Shane says. “Prove it,” Wilson hisses. What Shane proves is he’s a bit faster on the draw. Christ in buckskins dispatches the cattle-baron-loving gun-for-hire Mephistopheles, redeeming the land for the homesteading elect.
“No, not a motorcycle,” I told Kathy; “a scooter. I’m thinking a Piaggio Fly 150. Midnight blue.”
“Why?”
“Why midnight blue?”
She made an exasperated noise. “Noooo, why a scooter?”
“It gets 75 miles to a gallon of gas. Think of the money we’ll save. And, it’s sleek and elegant, like me, and with 1.9% financing it’s affordable.”
“Do you know you’ll have to get a special license? And that means you’ll have to study a manual and take a test and then have your riding evaluated. You might even be asked to take a safety course. And what about insurance? And a helmet? And accessories? And the fact that it’s not a year-round vehicle?”
“But,” I protested, “gas is almost four bucks a gallon, and, besides, it’s sleek and elegant, like me.”
“That last part’s debatable. But tell me, how exactly are you saving money?”
Though she’s never read Blaise Pascal, Kathy knows what he knew: “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” She certainly made me aware of what I knew not of. And recent research suggests why: reason is fragile because it is personal, but more resolute when it is social. We use reason to justify ourselves to ourselves and others. We reason, but it is motivated, bent toward confirming what we already believe or want to believe. But used in the presence of others, with others equally motivated, reason widens our range of perspectives, pulls us beyond ourselves to a kind of self-overcoming—like a bubble balancing inner and outer pressure to preserve its membranous integrity.
* * * * *
Another bubble, the one in a spirit level, when kept within the small boxed area of a small, liquid-filled glass tube, establishes a confirmatory horizontal plane by noting any unparallel direction. It maintains constancy, plumbness and evenness of position; in effect, it resists any destabilization. There are people whose internal spirit levels immunize them from the dialogic expansiveness of reason, who draw an impervious protective circle around themselves and their inbent beliefs, who will not venture from the hermetic mountain keep of their confirmatory bias.
Once, in my introductory mass media course, a class discussion on the visual grammar of camera angle, lighting, and music turned to the scene in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society where Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard, now Dr. James Wilson in House) descends the staircase, on his way to his father’s den and the gun he will use to commit suicide. And that discussion turned to the movie’s conclusion which, to a person, the students acclaimed as uplifting, satisfyingly inspiring. I intervened.
“Wait a minute. You’re forgetting a few things. First, Robin William’s character, John Keating, has been blackballed. He’ll never teach again. And remember, he says earlier in the movie that teaching is his life? So basically, his life is over. And what about his role in Neil Perry’s suicide? Doesn’t he encourage Neil to pursue acting, in defiance of Neil’s father saying he would be a doctor? Doesn’t the movie fudge his responsibility for Neil’s death? See, the ending is illusory, it’s Hollywoody. Boys standing on their desks, the “Captain, my Captain” thing. It’s manufactured to make you feel good, make you feel everything’s noble and affirmative, by making you forget that Keating has suffered an irreversible personal tragedy and may well be morally culpable for the death of one of his students.”
Murmurs churned among the students, murmurs that swelled into a chorus of animated protest. “Geez, Dr. DeNuccio, there you go doing that English teacher thing again,” said one student, and the others voiced their assent. “Why do you have to analyze everything and take the interest out of it,” said another; “you’re as bad as that teacher who has the boys diagramming poetry,” and the others, again, but more vociferously, voiced their assent. I’d swear, though surely my ears deceived me, I’d swear I heard someone whisper, “Get a rope.” Chatting with one of the students in that class at the end of the year, I was told that on his residence hall my effort to broaden their critical perspective was still a topic of discussion, and still dismissed. The movie had conjured in them what Wendell Barry calls “a feelable thought,” from which they would not be dislodged.
* * * * *
In a recent study entitled “`Macho Men’ and Preventative Health Care,” Kristen Springer and Dawne Mouzon of Rutgers University have found that men who cling to stereotypical notions of masculine behavior die earlier than men who observe a more moderate masculine role. Macho men, cabined by show-no-weakness thinking, do not seek out preventative health care, and they are overly susceptible to risky, guy-code behavior.
A man on a midnight blue Piaggio scooter can hardly qualify as macho. Think of Tom Hanks in Larry Crowne. Such a man is therefore likely to live longer. I could have used that argument with Kathy, but she would have said, “Jerry, you never have been and never will be a macho man.” She’d mean that as a compliment.
“Have you been watching The Wild One again,” she asked.
Oh, Kathy is a wise woman. She knows that The Wild One is my second-favorite movie of all time. The brooding Brando as Johnny Strabler, belligerently anarchic and self destructive, glowering like a gargoyle atop the structure of the film. The tang of vicarious pleasure I get when he’s asked what he’s rebelling against: “Whaddaya got?” Nietszche on a motorcycle, wearing dungarees and black leather, a profanation of complacent postwar conformism
My favorite movie of all time? Shane. Not because of Alan Ladd’s Shane. Because of Jack Palance’s Jack Wilson, a coiled knot of psychopathic evil, slowly, meticulously, pulling on those skin-tight black gloves, barely containing the glee at the prospect of another killing, slowly, oh so slowly, dismounting from his horse to signal his disdain upon first confronting Shane. The laconic challenge before the gunfight: “I’ve heard you’re a low-down Yankee liar,” Shane says. “Prove it,” Wilson hisses. What Shane proves is he’s a bit faster on the draw. Christ in buckskins dispatches the cattle-baron-loving gun-for-hire Mephistopheles, redeeming the land for the homesteading elect.
“No, not a motorcycle,” I told Kathy; “a scooter. I’m thinking a Piaggio Fly 150. Midnight blue.”
“Why?”
“Why midnight blue?”
She made an exasperated noise. “Noooo, why a scooter?”
“It gets 75 miles to a gallon of gas. Think of the money we’ll save. And, it’s sleek and elegant, like me, and with 1.9% financing it’s affordable.”
“Do you know you’ll have to get a special license? And that means you’ll have to study a manual and take a test and then have your riding evaluated. You might even be asked to take a safety course. And what about insurance? And a helmet? And accessories? And the fact that it’s not a year-round vehicle?”
“But,” I protested, “gas is almost four bucks a gallon, and, besides, it’s sleek and elegant, like me.”
“That last part’s debatable. But tell me, how exactly are you saving money?”
Though she’s never read Blaise Pascal, Kathy knows what he knew: “The heart has reasons that reason knows not of.” She certainly made me aware of what I knew not of. And recent research suggests why: reason is fragile because it is personal, but more resolute when it is social. We use reason to justify ourselves to ourselves and others. We reason, but it is motivated, bent toward confirming what we already believe or want to believe. But used in the presence of others, with others equally motivated, reason widens our range of perspectives, pulls us beyond ourselves to a kind of self-overcoming—like a bubble balancing inner and outer pressure to preserve its membranous integrity.
* * * * *
Another bubble, the one in a spirit level, when kept within the small boxed area of a small, liquid-filled glass tube, establishes a confirmatory horizontal plane by noting any unparallel direction. It maintains constancy, plumbness and evenness of position; in effect, it resists any destabilization. There are people whose internal spirit levels immunize them from the dialogic expansiveness of reason, who draw an impervious protective circle around themselves and their inbent beliefs, who will not venture from the hermetic mountain keep of their confirmatory bias.
Once, in my introductory mass media course, a class discussion on the visual grammar of camera angle, lighting, and music turned to the scene in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society where Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard, now Dr. James Wilson in House) descends the staircase, on his way to his father’s den and the gun he will use to commit suicide. And that discussion turned to the movie’s conclusion which, to a person, the students acclaimed as uplifting, satisfyingly inspiring. I intervened.
“Wait a minute. You’re forgetting a few things. First, Robin William’s character, John Keating, has been blackballed. He’ll never teach again. And remember, he says earlier in the movie that teaching is his life? So basically, his life is over. And what about his role in Neil Perry’s suicide? Doesn’t he encourage Neil to pursue acting, in defiance of Neil’s father saying he would be a doctor? Doesn’t the movie fudge his responsibility for Neil’s death? See, the ending is illusory, it’s Hollywoody. Boys standing on their desks, the “Captain, my Captain” thing. It’s manufactured to make you feel good, make you feel everything’s noble and affirmative, by making you forget that Keating has suffered an irreversible personal tragedy and may well be morally culpable for the death of one of his students.”
Murmurs churned among the students, murmurs that swelled into a chorus of animated protest. “Geez, Dr. DeNuccio, there you go doing that English teacher thing again,” said one student, and the others voiced their assent. “Why do you have to analyze everything and take the interest out of it,” said another; “you’re as bad as that teacher who has the boys diagramming poetry,” and the others, again, but more vociferously, voiced their assent. I’d swear, though surely my ears deceived me, I’d swear I heard someone whisper, “Get a rope.” Chatting with one of the students in that class at the end of the year, I was told that on his residence hall my effort to broaden their critical perspective was still a topic of discussion, and still dismissed. The movie had conjured in them what Wendell Barry calls “a feelable thought,” from which they would not be dislodged.
* * * * *
In a recent study entitled “`Macho Men’ and Preventative Health Care,” Kristen Springer and Dawne Mouzon of Rutgers University have found that men who cling to stereotypical notions of masculine behavior die earlier than men who observe a more moderate masculine role. Macho men, cabined by show-no-weakness thinking, do not seek out preventative health care, and they are overly susceptible to risky, guy-code behavior.
A man on a midnight blue Piaggio scooter can hardly qualify as macho. Think of Tom Hanks in Larry Crowne. Such a man is therefore likely to live longer. I could have used that argument with Kathy, but she would have said, “Jerry, you never have been and never will be a macho man.” She’d mean that as a compliment.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Robert Frost: The Golf Poems
It is not generally known that the poet Robert Frost was an avid golfer. Unfortunately, his avidity for the game was not in the least matched by any skill at playing it. On the golf course, Frost exhibited ineptitude’s ineptitude; it was artlessness syncopated by lavish bungling, incompetence sung in the key of clamoring ungainliness, an anvil upon which his equanimity was hammered molecule-thin. Angels wept at the sight. But, as poets are sometimes wont to do, Frost turned his frustration into poetry. It offered catharsis.
Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away. No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes stored in the basement of the Lamoni Public Library in southern Iowa discovered them. What follows is one of the poems. Your IR promises that more will, for the first time, see the light of day.
Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*
Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,
On a golf course I played this weekend past.
My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.
My game’s a bag of botches first and last.
The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.
My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.
And just when I think my game’s come around,
A double bogey takes me unawares.
And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.
How many would be impossible to guess.
My stock and store of curse words are expended;
I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.
I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,
As if it were a promised-land oasis.
No Canaan looms to redeem my doffing game.
I wander lost in its desert places.
*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.
Golf was Frost’s Gethsemane. He suffered. The game played havoc with his equipoise: it dekiltered, agoged, and thoroughly millstoned him. Frost believed poetry should be like ice sliding across the surface of a hot stove. Golf, for Frost, proved to be poetry’s dark other. Below, your IR provides another poem from the collection he has named Robert Frost: The Golf Poems.
Robert Frost’s Golf Game Acquaints Him with Darkness
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
I have walked out on golf courses—and walked back in pain,
I have outwalked ineptitude’s furthest baneful light.
I have searched for my incorrigible shots in vain.
I have been hailed and passed by golfers behind
And dropped my eyes, unable to explain.
I have swung and looked and thought myself blind
Till from another fairway comes a cry
To tell me where my ball is consigned,
And in that telling lies my golf game’s fall,
Its lack of grace and vertiginous fright.
Yet a Coors clock on the backbar wall
Proclaims the time for quitting neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library. As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incompetence at the sport, but your IR notices here a new wrinkle in the floundering and foozled poet’s psychic economy: a dire warning that his plunge into golf’s dark waters may cannonball-splash into apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, beneath the poem lies an almost Ahabian howl of fury at a seemingly malign and universal spiritus mundi that seeks, actively, to stupefy and degrade all human striving. Overheated verse by and underperforming golfer? Your IR will let you be the judge.
Robert Frost Goes Apocalyptic
My curse words rose with a dinning shout.
One chasing another going out.
I thought of doing something to the course
That sickles do to thickest gorse.
Clouds hung dark and low in the skies,
And echoed my profanities in stark reprise.
You could not tell, it seemed as if
My purpose here was to stage each whiff,
Whiff followed by whiff, and more besides.
It looked as if my inept bona fides
Were on display, not only for the day, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There will be more than my driver broken,
Before my I’m calling it quits was spoken.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued. Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. But these woods, while “dark and deep,” are not “lovely.” He decides to avoid the pain of entering the darkness that would confirm his frightening lack of golfing ability.
Your IR speculates that, introspectively speaking, golf, for Frost, was a contact sport where wrath and woe encountered each other and established ongoing, contentious relations. Your IR further speculates (your IR is a voluptuous speculator) that Frost yearned for the blessing of being Ben Hoganed, but that yearning was perpetually mocked until Frost saw himself as a symbol of thwarted effort, a mere effect of what he was unable to master, a being hackysacked by the jeer of fate and frustrated desire. Such a psychic economy creates a mental debt obligation that cannot be collateralized, and, rather than suffer an unswappable credit default, he chooses discretion and withdraws.
Robert Frost Refuses to Stray from the Fairway
As I came to the edge of the woods,
I heard an ominous mumble—hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark to pilgrimage or forage
For my errant drive.
Yet it was my last golf ball,
Entombed in that tree-trunked hive.
The woods seemed to gather its breath
As if to muster a voice
Of challenge: I am dark, I am dark.
And it awaited my choice.
Deep in the pillared dark
My golf ball went.
I could, like it,
Go into the dark, and lament.
But no: I was not out for pain.
The fairway is dark enough.
I would not go in for the ball,
And reconfirm my duff.
In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupÒ«on of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom. Perhaps, though, your IR suffers from the pathetic fallacy or intentional fallacy or some other grievous offense against the law of New Criticism which, despite numerous attempts by moderns “to stab it with their steely knives,” it seems “they just can’t kill the beast.” Your IR himself once played golf; he himself fell victim to the immaculate deception that, with enough expended effort, the game could be mastered; he himself experienced the lamentation wrung from a sorrow-drenched heart. But, unlike your IR, who renounced the game, Frost, in his last stanza, suggests he will persist, that, despite being continually Sahara-ed by bunkers, he has found the inner strength to endure even the repetitive slings of golf’s most outrageous arrows.
Because your IR has attention-diverting matters he must deal with, this poem will be the penultimate in the series. However, he assures you that the final poem will offer a trippy surprise.
Robert Frost Bunkered But Not Bunkered
I have been treading in sand all day until I am bunker-tired.
Millions of grains I have trodden on, and I have felt mired.
Perhaps I have been too fierce with fear of out of bounds.
I have trod upon sand I trod in previous rounds.
All summer long traps have invited me in,
And urged me to mistake and flaw, and sin.
All summer long I heard them threaten under their breath,
And when I entered them it seemed with a will to death.
They spoke to my granulated heart as if it were grain to grain.
They filled my shoes and eyes and touched me with the mark of Cain.
But it was no reason for exile to the land of Nod, east of Eden.
I would be up to my ankles in sand the following season.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find in the uncatalogued box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game. Your IR speculates that Frost and Stevens played together, and that Stevens’ taken abackness at Frost’s unlovely swing--a sight that might, just might, launch a single tattered and leaky dinghy, a motion so spasmodically crooked as to defy even the most sedulous of orthopedic straightening efforts, a spectacle so frightening it would most probably have kept Humpty Dumpty firmly seated on the wall, an action so abjectly frenzied as to be incapable of streamlining or safety-checking—moved him to poetic empathy.
But, unlike, say, the rhetorical bluster of politicians or the number of films in which Samuel L. Jackson appears, Stevens’ empathy is not inexhaustible. He proposes interventions, and, if they fail to have the desired effect, well, he is prepared to abandon Frost to the “ambiguous undulations” of his artless golfing efforts. “Pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” Stevens noted. Golf swings either.
The Emperor of the Golf Swing
Call the corrector of golf swings,
The famous one, and bid him whip
Bob’s s crooked stroke into concupiscent flow.
Let the foursomes dawdle and palaver
As they are used to do, and let young men
Boast their rounds in the clubhouse bar.
Let Bob’s summer be more than a finale of spring.
The only emperor is the emperor of the golf swing.
Take from the pages of Golf Digest
All the instructional articles, those sheets
On which slices and shanks find their cure,
And spread them in front of Bob’s face.
If his elbow still protrudes and he yet reverse pivots
It shows how incorrigible he is, and dumb.
Let inept then affix its venomous sting
And frustrate all help from the emperor of the golf swing.
Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away. No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes stored in the basement of the Lamoni Public Library in southern Iowa discovered them. What follows is one of the poems. Your IR promises that more will, for the first time, see the light of day.
Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*
Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,
On a golf course I played this weekend past.
My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.
My game’s a bag of botches first and last.
The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.
My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.
And just when I think my game’s come around,
A double bogey takes me unawares.
And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.
How many would be impossible to guess.
My stock and store of curse words are expended;
I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.
I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,
As if it were a promised-land oasis.
No Canaan looms to redeem my doffing game.
I wander lost in its desert places.
*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.
Golf was Frost’s Gethsemane. He suffered. The game played havoc with his equipoise: it dekiltered, agoged, and thoroughly millstoned him. Frost believed poetry should be like ice sliding across the surface of a hot stove. Golf, for Frost, proved to be poetry’s dark other. Below, your IR provides another poem from the collection he has named Robert Frost: The Golf Poems.
Robert Frost’s Golf Game Acquaints Him with Darkness
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
I have walked out on golf courses—and walked back in pain,
I have outwalked ineptitude’s furthest baneful light.
I have searched for my incorrigible shots in vain.
I have been hailed and passed by golfers behind
And dropped my eyes, unable to explain.
I have swung and looked and thought myself blind
Till from another fairway comes a cry
To tell me where my ball is consigned,
And in that telling lies my golf game’s fall,
Its lack of grace and vertiginous fright.
Yet a Coors clock on the backbar wall
Proclaims the time for quitting neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with golf’s night.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) here offers a third poem from the manuscript, Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, that he found mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library. As do so many of the poems in the manuscript, this one depicts Frost’s fraught fetishization of his incompetence at the sport, but your IR notices here a new wrinkle in the floundering and foozled poet’s psychic economy: a dire warning that his plunge into golf’s dark waters may cannonball-splash into apocalyptic consequences. Indeed, beneath the poem lies an almost Ahabian howl of fury at a seemingly malign and universal spiritus mundi that seeks, actively, to stupefy and degrade all human striving. Overheated verse by and underperforming golfer? Your IR will let you be the judge.
Robert Frost Goes Apocalyptic
My curse words rose with a dinning shout.
One chasing another going out.
I thought of doing something to the course
That sickles do to thickest gorse.
Clouds hung dark and low in the skies,
And echoed my profanities in stark reprise.
You could not tell, it seemed as if
My purpose here was to stage each whiff,
Whiff followed by whiff, and more besides.
It looked as if my inept bona fides
Were on display, not only for the day, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There will be more than my driver broken,
Before my I’m calling it quits was spoken.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a “change of mood” in this fourth selection from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, a change that, in a small way, saves some part of a day he’d rued. Frost faces a small crisis: his only golf ball has right-angle sliced into the woods. But these woods, while “dark and deep,” are not “lovely.” He decides to avoid the pain of entering the darkness that would confirm his frightening lack of golfing ability.
Your IR speculates that, introspectively speaking, golf, for Frost, was a contact sport where wrath and woe encountered each other and established ongoing, contentious relations. Your IR further speculates (your IR is a voluptuous speculator) that Frost yearned for the blessing of being Ben Hoganed, but that yearning was perpetually mocked until Frost saw himself as a symbol of thwarted effort, a mere effect of what he was unable to master, a being hackysacked by the jeer of fate and frustrated desire. Such a psychic economy creates a mental debt obligation that cannot be collateralized, and, rather than suffer an unswappable credit default, he chooses discretion and withdraws.
Robert Frost Refuses to Stray from the Fairway
As I came to the edge of the woods,
I heard an ominous mumble—hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark to pilgrimage or forage
For my errant drive.
Yet it was my last golf ball,
Entombed in that tree-trunked hive.
The woods seemed to gather its breath
As if to muster a voice
Of challenge: I am dark, I am dark.
And it awaited my choice.
Deep in the pillared dark
My golf ball went.
I could, like it,
Go into the dark, and lament.
But no: I was not out for pain.
The fairway is dark enough.
I would not go in for the ball,
And reconfirm my duff.
In this fifth poem from Robert Frost: The Golf Poems, your Intrepid Researcher (IR) discerns a pygmied scintilla of self-acceptance, maybe, even, a peeweed soupÒ«on of the beginning of the start of the birth of the onset of the inception of wisdom. Perhaps, though, your IR suffers from the pathetic fallacy or intentional fallacy or some other grievous offense against the law of New Criticism which, despite numerous attempts by moderns “to stab it with their steely knives,” it seems “they just can’t kill the beast.” Your IR himself once played golf; he himself fell victim to the immaculate deception that, with enough expended effort, the game could be mastered; he himself experienced the lamentation wrung from a sorrow-drenched heart. But, unlike your IR, who renounced the game, Frost, in his last stanza, suggests he will persist, that, despite being continually Sahara-ed by bunkers, he has found the inner strength to endure even the repetitive slings of golf’s most outrageous arrows.
Because your IR has attention-diverting matters he must deal with, this poem will be the penultimate in the series. However, he assures you that the final poem will offer a trippy surprise.
Robert Frost Bunkered But Not Bunkered
I have been treading in sand all day until I am bunker-tired.
Millions of grains I have trodden on, and I have felt mired.
Perhaps I have been too fierce with fear of out of bounds.
I have trod upon sand I trod in previous rounds.
All summer long traps have invited me in,
And urged me to mistake and flaw, and sin.
All summer long I heard them threaten under their breath,
And when I entered them it seemed with a will to death.
They spoke to my granulated heart as if it were grain to grain.
They filled my shoes and eyes and touched me with the mark of Cain.
But it was no reason for exile to the land of Nod, east of Eden.
I would be up to my ankles in sand the following season.
Your Intrepid Researcher (IR) was stunned, simply and stupefyingly stunned, to find in the uncatalogued box of Robert Frost’s heretofore unknown golf poems a poem written by Wallace Stevens about the pitiable state of Frost’s golf game. Your IR speculates that Frost and Stevens played together, and that Stevens’ taken abackness at Frost’s unlovely swing--a sight that might, just might, launch a single tattered and leaky dinghy, a motion so spasmodically crooked as to defy even the most sedulous of orthopedic straightening efforts, a spectacle so frightening it would most probably have kept Humpty Dumpty firmly seated on the wall, an action so abjectly frenzied as to be incapable of streamlining or safety-checking—moved him to poetic empathy.
But, unlike, say, the rhetorical bluster of politicians or the number of films in which Samuel L. Jackson appears, Stevens’ empathy is not inexhaustible. He proposes interventions, and, if they fail to have the desired effect, well, he is prepared to abandon Frost to the “ambiguous undulations” of his artless golfing efforts. “Pears are not seen/As the observer wills,” Stevens noted. Golf swings either.
The Emperor of the Golf Swing
Call the corrector of golf swings,
The famous one, and bid him whip
Bob’s s crooked stroke into concupiscent flow.
Let the foursomes dawdle and palaver
As they are used to do, and let young men
Boast their rounds in the clubhouse bar.
Let Bob’s summer be more than a finale of spring.
The only emperor is the emperor of the golf swing.
Take from the pages of Golf Digest
All the instructional articles, those sheets
On which slices and shanks find their cure,
And spread them in front of Bob’s face.
If his elbow still protrudes and he yet reverse pivots
It shows how incorrigible he is, and dumb.
Let inept then affix its venomous sting
And frustrate all help from the emperor of the golf swing.
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