Absent From the Present

I am spectacularly ungifted at gifting.  Virtually every present I have presented has staged my incompetence, my utter cluelessness, at gift-giving.  If my gift-giving had mass, it would have the density of a 98 cent furnace filter; if it had volume, it could be measured in picoliters; if it had depth, it would  rival, just barely, a cat’s water dish.  My ineptitude for giftitude is encyclopedic, epic; only a twenty-six volumed Brittanica could encompass its sweep; only a Homer or Virgil could convey its profundity.   I am surprised that I don’t appear in the DSM-V under the heading “Gifting Obtuseness Syndrome.  Gift-giving, for me, is high-wire acrobatics without a net.  I am not just singularly bad at gift-giving, I am plurally bad, thuddingly bad, require a Papal indulgence bad, Shakespearean-tragedy bad, could-uncurl-Elvis’s-lip bad. 

I once gave my best friend his own golf shoes as a birthday present, thinking myself unsurpassingly clever.  He was not amused.  Nor was the colleague to whom, on his 50^th birthday, I gave a bag of prunes and a book on the colon-cleansing virtues of enemas.  Nor was the vegetarian friend to whom I gave a gift card to Carlo’s Steak House.  I once gave my Dad a basket of Sacramento Valley-grown strawberries less than one week after he was diagnosed with diverticulosis.  I once gave my wife Kathy a charm bracelet she exclaimed over with almost-enthusiasm, then deposited lovingly in her jewelry box.  It has since not seen the light if day.  I once gave her a wicker basket she described as “interesting.”  She placed it in a dark corner in an untrafficked area of the living room.  Mysteriously, it has since migrated to the foyer closet. 

I have learned my lesson.  Now, as some gift-giving occasion approaches, I ask her, “What would you like me to surprise you with?”  She buys it, I repay her.  As for all the others in my gift-giving orbit, well, let’s just say that the introduction of gift cards has been, for me, proof-positive that a providential goodness is at work in the world.  It’s all very neat, very algorithmic, wholly pragmatic in an accounting sort of way; still, somehow, I cannot help but feel that something important, something deeper is unaccounted for, something other and more that eludes the self-comforting truthiness of “this way they can get exactly what they want” or “it’s the thought that counts.”  

Perhaps Emerson best expresses the cause of my ungifted giving: “the impediment lies in the choosing. If, at any time, it comes into my head, that a present is due from me to somebody, I am puzzled what to give, until the opportunity is gone.”  A matter of judgment, in other words.  My gift-giving has been an aftermath for which I found the before math inscrutably difficult to cipher.  And it is the before math that marks all really gifted gifters. 

They pay attention.  They notice when you make do with something not specifically designed for the task at hand.  They take in-hand the most offhanded revelations of desire; they listen to the  casual “wish-I-hads”, are alert to “I-wouldn’t-mind-one-of-thoses,” take note of “that’s cools.”  They archive those moments of expressed preference and interest, and then, when a gift-giving occasion arises, they activate and orchestrate memory, perception, and imagination.  They take the time.  They factor a dash of creativity with who you are, what you are like, what you like, what you need, what you don’t yet know you need—and from that polynomial they calculate the perfect gift.

My record for gift-giving has been unsullied by success—except for one instance, and the just-what-exactly of this instance is something I feel apprehend but do not comprehend.  In second grade, for the first time in my life, I bought someone a present: Mom, for Mother’s Day.  I thought as long and hard as my seven-year-old brain would allow about what to get her.  I mulled.  Then I remembered Mom commenting on a TV commercial for Ivory soap: “Soap that floats?  What’ll they think of next?”  That settled it.  With money I vandalized from my piggybank, I enlisted my grandmother to help me buy a bar of Ivory and, for good measure, scotchtaped a quarter to it.  When Mom opened it, she began to cry and wrapped me in her arms.  I could feel her hot tears rivulet down my cheeks and neck.  “Jerry,” she said, “this is the perfect gift.  I’m never going to use it.  I’ll always keep it.” 

And she did.  Going through her effects after she died, I found that bar of soap, quarter still attached.

Perhaps at that young age I knew something that Emerson knew, something I have since been unable to recover:  “The only gift is a portion of thyself.”  Perhaps, for one resplendent moment, fifty-seven years ago, I gave a gift that was complete because I was not missing from it. 

On Growing Old

Crystal and I are talking in my office about her paper on rap music.  I tell her I listen to rap, that I like the embattled self-consciousness in Kayne West’s “All Falls Down,” the resolute hope in Common’s “I Have a Dream,” the history lesson in Rage Against the Machine’s “People of the Sun,” and the exquisite pathos of South Park Mexican’s promise to his mother “not to do no more shit no more” in “Drunk Man Talkin’.”  Crystal’s eyes round.  “I guess I thought you’d never listen to rap,” she says.  “Because I’m an English professor?” I ask.  “No,” she says; “I mean, you know, you’re old.”

*     *     *

The Roman poet Virgil says, “The best days are the first to flee.”  Tom Stoppard says, “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.”  Edgar, in King Lear, says, “A man must endure his going hence even as his coming hither.  Ripeness is all.”  Brigitte Bardot may have had Edgar in mind when she said, “It’s sad to grow old, but nice to ripen.”  Yeats described himself as “a tattered coat upon a stick.” Kerouac may have had Yeats in mind when he described “the forlorn rags of growing old.” William Faulkner defines time as “the mausoleum of all hope and desire.”  Martin Amis may have had Faulkner in mind when he describes time going “about its immemorial work of making everyone look and feel like shit.”  The Beatles, worried about sustenance, physical and emotional, wondered “will you still need me, will you still feed me” when they turned sixty-four. Emerson asserts, “The years teach much which the days never knew.”  Thoreau declares, “None are so old as those who have outlived enthusiasm.”  Longfellow believes that “Age is opportunity, no less/ Than youth, though in another dress.”  So does Oliver Wendell Holmes: “To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than being forty years old.”  But a party-pooping Philip Roth character maintains that “Old age isn’t a battle; it’s a massacre.”

*     *     *

Autumn of our years, evening of our lives, the remains of the day, the Geritol generation, the empty-nesters, senior citizens, the leisure years, the twilight years, the sunset years, the golden years—what metaphor for being old that isn’t words hollowed out, grinning gourds, encandled to dispel the rueful nearness of kingdom come they only imperfectly conceal?

*     *     *

My dad said, “It’s OK to be old; it’s not OK to be an anachronism.  You can’t stop getting old, but that doesn’t mean you should stop learning.”  Dad had little patience for metaphors. 

*     *     *

The life cycle of a rose begins with a compacted and sheathed green bud stage, followed by the partially-open bud phase, which tantalizingly reveals the petals’ color.  In the full-bud stage, the color is completely visible, though the petals are not yet fully exposed.  The petals fully unfurl in the open rose stage.  The rose has bloomed.  When the petals fall off, the rose enters the rose hip phase.  A nutrient-strong bud remains, which is harvested to cultivate other roses and to regenerate a new rose from the old. 

Which of the five phases is the essence of the rose?  Each, in its own moment; all, in their progressive unfolding.  A becoming and a consummation.  The life cycle of a rose, of any plant, of any being, is a plotted narrative, coherent and continuous, whose theme is the what it is.

*     *     *

 From the perspective of the long duration, we are all, no matter how many times we have witnessed this whirling planet’s yearly pilgrimage around the sun, incomparably old, stretching back though veiled eons to the point of our emergence.  We are time’s chronicler. It records itself in us, on us.  We are fossils. We are still emerging.

*     *     *

I sometimes wonder if going gentle into that good night is preferable to raging against the dying of the light.  Seems like it could be a waste of good rage. 

*     *     *

I did not attend my 45^th high school class reunion.  I haven’t attended a reunion since the twentieth in 1986, where I found, two decades out, that too many of my classmates had never really graduated from high school. 

*     *     *

Getting old is reaching the point where one’s sense of self, one’s interiority, one measure of worth, no longer seeks validation in others, is no longer performative, no longer ritualized and staged to solicit social recognition.  The who we are, the what we are, is objectively established through long experience.  We have learned what to pay attention to and what to winnow from attention; what needs to be chosen, rejected, overcome, changed.  We have witnessed connections, disconnections, transformations.  We do not need a self granted and affirmed by others.  We are selved, and still selving.

*     *     *

My Dad told me a story when I was a kid about a young boy, the son of a farmer, whose father gave him the present of a newly born calf to raise.  Every day the boy lifted the calf in his arms.  By the time he was a teenager, Dad said, he was lifting a full-grown cow.

 

When I turned forty-five, I decided that each year, on my birthday, I would add an eight of a mile to my daily runs.  At fifty-five, the dull throb of aching ankles, knees, and hips—a persistent and discomforting body language, a grammar of pain—forced me to cut back.  At sixty, I stopped running and bought a treadmill.  As they say in the technology business, the power scaling stopped.  Still, I walk, briskly.

*     *     *

I sometimes miss my young body, its agility and strength, its loping looseness, its seemingly inexhaustible energy.  Decline is hard.  Our bodies betray us, or seem to.  They age chronologically but our minds do not.  In our minds, the carnival of youth still clamors.  Our minds loiter in the past, in the what-I-could-do, and, with resistless seduction, whisper the should-still-be-able-to. That whisper is a high-proof intoxicant and offers a spiky buzz, but its hangover is disappointment.  The body, however, knows this and will not be seduced.  It is one acquainted with the night.  It knows things and does not speak in a whisper.

In Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer,” we are told the fighter “carries the reminders/of ev’ry glove that laid him down/or cut him till he cried out/In his anger and his shame/”I am leaving, I am leaving”/but the fighter still remains.”  We carry the reminders of hurts and guilts and cruelties, the anger and the shame, but we also carry the joys and pleasures, the curiosities and achievements, the loves and the friendships.  Beautiful things are still beautiful.  We are limited beings, and that is humbling, but it is also ennobling because it dignifies our striving.  So we remain, the almost-turned page, until we leave.   I’d like to think I’ll be grateful.  I’d like to hope I was unpercentiled and did not give myself away, piece by piece, until I was a silhouette of the man I was.  I’d like to hope that I honored the past but was not eclipsed by a longing for it.  I’d like to hope that I’ll have the grace to let go of what I held so closely.  Then, I’d be gone.

 

 

Mom and Strange Faculty

Mom was convinced that college and university faculty were strange, a human species apart, divergent, branched off to a limb’s end of blossomed eccentricity.  When pressed for justification, she would allude vaguely to their center-staging theatricality, their against-the-grain idiosyncracy, or the unswayable righteousness  with which they voiced opinions on political or social issues that, according to Mom, “just don’t make sense.”  But mostly, when asked just why university faculty were strange, she would simply say, “They just are.”  That was that.  Case closed.  Thus was it demonstrated.

Actually, Mom had never gone to college, and her acquaintance with university faculty was limited to the few she saw or met on her and Dad’s social circuit or at PTA meetings or civic functions.  Undoubtedly, the logic-minded would accuse Mom of generalizing from too few samples.   Mom, however, placed more trust in her intuition than logic.  And in my experience, that intuition was eerily reliable.  Indeed, my freshman year at the local university confirmed it.

There was, for example, the chain-smoking Spanish professor who during class, doing his bit to conserve the world’s lighter fluid resources, continuously  lit one cigarette from the butt end of another, which he snubbed out in the room’s taupe-colored metal wastecan.   I suspect we learned more in his class about the addictive personality  than we did the Spanish language.

And the economics professor who never, not once, looked up from his yellowed index cards and who, when asked while chalking on the blackboard a rather abstruse economic process, how he got from step two to step three, replied, without turning, “It just happens.”  Seeing him one day climb into a 1950-ish pink and black Rambler confirmed for me his irremediable oddity.

And the English professor who habitually placed his lit pipe into his green tweed suit coat pocket where it smoldered and smoked while he held forth on the beauties of English Romantic poetry.   Perhaps what we really learned was at least one possible cause of human spontaneous combustion.   But, as students of literature are wont to do, we interpreted the smoke as a symbol, an objective correlative, of his fiery enthusiasm for the subject matter

And the Sociology professor who told us, several times, that he had divorced his wife because she had put on too much weight, and who changed his hair color at least half a dozen times during the semester.  He confided in us that he used Clairol.

And the Philosophy professor, “call me Ed,” who sent his wife on the many occasions he did not show up for class.  She would ask, “What did you think about the reading for today.”  We made it clear we hadn’t a clue, and she say, “Class dismissed.”  When Ed did make an appearance, he was compulsively digressive, turning  discussions of Kant and Hegel and Nietzsche into disquisitions on razored haircuts, growing heritage tomatoes, rodeo clowns, granola, and the closing minor third that made the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” so sad.  Unlike Eleanor, Ed, when he came to class, did not keep his face in a jar by the door.

And the English professor who wore academic regalia—gown, hood, and mortarboard cap—about campus and town, and effort, he said, to show that “scholarship was not dead.”   He was a published poet, which perhaps accounts for his pronouncement in virtually every class that “poetry is the higher truth, the revelatory rupture in the familiar through which the transcendent emerges.”   We just found it hard.

But the most colorful flower in this trellised garden of eccentricity was Professor Radzick, who taught early United States history.  One Monday, three weeks into the semester, he strode into class wearing a royal blue T-shirt emblazoned on the chest with a yellow “P” stitched on a circular patch of red.  He set down his briefcase, climbed atop the table at the front of the room, and announced that he was the Prince of Light, come to illuminate us not about the what and where and when of the United States’ colonial history, but the why they occurred.  History was not about general laws playing themselves out across time; rather, history was made by the choices of individual men and women shaped by and carapaced within particular social and cultural structures of feeling and thought.  There may be patterns and causal connections, but no overarching abstract laws governed history, though the fact that it was delivered to us as narrative may make it seem so.  History, the Prince of Light declared, was about the values, beliefs, and attitudes of those involved.  It was shaped by chance, improvisation, contingency.  It was predicaments, contending goals and interests, and the efforts to find a shared response to resolve them.  Such a perspective, the Prince asserted, was the only way to “see” history, the only way to situate ourselves within it and the possibilities for action it provides.

Like clockwork, on the Monday of every third week in the semester, The Prince of Light appeared.  No one was absent from that class.  We burst into applause when he came through the classroom door.  He was the quintessence of what Mom had in mind when she insisted that university professors were strange.  Yet, he was the professor from whom I experienced what critical inquiry felt like, the professor whose lessons I applied to my study of literature and used in my subsequent teaching.  Suddenly, weird did not seem so strange.

*     *     *

 So, what was Mom’s reaction when I announced one evening after dinner that I intended to resign my job teaching high school English, enter the University of Minnesota’s graduate program, and become a university professor myself?  She said she understood my desire to know more, to grow intellectually, and supported my decision.  But still I wondered: Did she think I had become what I beheld in my undergraduate years?   Did her heart flutter, torque, keen  at my willingness to hurl myself into the current of weirditude, quirkitude, and outlandery?  Would she, as Jeremiah tells us Rachel was, be filled with “lamentation, and bitter weeping”?

While I was home for a weekend shortly after I had begun graduate studies, Mom and I returned from the grocery store to find a note taped to the garage door.  The note, unsigned, told Mom that her cat had been digging up plants in the writer’s garden.   I was angered by the note’s anonymity and declared it cowardly that the writer did not present the complaint forthrightly, face to face.  Mom smiled and said, “Jerry, the note’s anonymous because the person that wrote it doesn’t want to cause bad feeling in the neighborhood.  You know, you’re in graduate school and you’ll study very hard and get a Ph.D.    You’ll have a bunch of letters after your name.  People will call you Doctor. You’ll be a certified, if not a certifiable, smart person  You’ll likely become strange, but it’ll be a good strange because, you know, you’re my son and I love you.   But you’ll have to study even harder if you want to become a wise person.”

Modesty forbade what she could have easily added:  “like me.”  And I felt a sense of something being unveiled.  The Prince of Light; he had nothing on Mom. Hers was a lesson that made me understand that I was incomplete, unfinished, and that my education would be ongoing, arcing far beyond graduate school, far beyond studying literature and teaching.  Hers was a lesson in what being a human person should be like.  Hers was a lesson for a lifetime.

The Quicker Picker-Upper

Since its first television commercial in 1967, Procter & Gamble’s Bounty Paper Towels have claimed to be the “quicker picker upper.”  P&G is wrong. 

I am the quicker picker upper. 

Now, honesty compels me to point out that the most recent ads assert that Bounty Paper Towels are the “thicker, quilted, quicker picker upper,” and I can make no pretension to being either thicker or quilted.  Still, I am the quicker picker upper.  I ply my picker upperism relentlessly in my classrooms.  Not the smallest chad from the edge of a page torn from a student’s spiral binder flutters to the floor before I have tweezed it between thumb and forefinger and deposited in the waste can.  Not the most forlorn penny lying on a classroom floor escapes my apprehension (provided, of course, that it is heads up), not a wadded gum or candy bar wrapper, not a drained plastic bottle or can of some beverage or other (AMP, Red Bull and Five Hour Energy are popular), not a well-chewed pencil, not a tracked in leaf, no detritus or debris or rubbish of any kind eludes my seizure.  

My penchant for picker uppery extends to my office as well, but it is at home that it unfolds its wings most (in)gloriously. Active grandchildren and their friends tornado through the house, pillaging pantry and cupboard, ransacking the refrigerator, and having descended like raiding Visigoths, leave in their wake juice cartons and Dorito chips and Gatorade bottles and half-eaten apples and stray shoes and strewn socks and discarded and abandoned-in-place items of clothing and bottle caps that missed their waste-basket mark and scattered magazines, books, plates, silverware, glasses, food particles of various sizes and states of freshness, and sundry other riff-raff and rejectamenta, the unstowed, the unstored, the unput-away.  I pluck and gather, pince and forcep. St. Peter was a fisher of men; I am a fisher of the spread and shed, the dropped and slopped, the cast off, cast down, cast away.  By vocation, I am a member of the literati; by avocation, it seems, I am a conscript in the brigade of litterati.

This picker uppish passion is undoubtedly connected to my propensity to neaten, order, and arrange.  My colleagues have commented more than once upon the trim organization of my desk.  My wife Kathy has commented more than once, in decidedly dubious terms, about my habit of stacking coins on my dresser: quarters, dimes, and nickles, each sprucely columned, pennies in a cleaned-out candle jar.  The American literature section on my bookshelf is aligned historically, from the Puritans to Alexie, Robinson, and Morrison.  I prepare lunch at the same time I make breakfast because I eat the same thing at both:  proteinized and fiberized oatmeal topped with the contents of three packets of Truvia and a dollop of blackberry jam.  For dinner I rotate through the same three meals. Every morning I treadmill for exactly 60 minutes at precisely 2.8 miles per hour, increasing the gradient every ten minutes. Every morning I make the bed, pestering the sheets and blanket into unwrinkled compliance.  I chronically straighten throw rugs, return chairs to their prim position under the table, and wash dishes.  Undoubtedly, to the casual onlooker, my symmetry would seem fearful, indeed.  Were cleanliness really next to godliness, I would be well on my way to canonization.

My disposition to fix, place, align, and configure is a lonely office, but, strange to say, Mr. Clean is not my hero (he’s always seemed distinctly piratical to me), I do not haunt the cleaning products aisles, nor am I some puritanical greenie who considers the use of more than five sheets of toilet paper an ethical violation of the highest order.  How, then, did I acquire this disposition to dispose so systematically?  I don’t believe it was my upbringing.  Mom was a dutiful housekeeper, but she did not aspire to pristine, Ladies Home Journaled dustlessness.  Dad had a fastidious side, but, typical of his generation, only about his tools, his lawn, and his vehicles.  I share his tool care and cleaning pickiness, but my lawn languishes and my mud-splashed, bug-splattered truck goes unwashed.

I present none of the symptoms or allied behaviors of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: I experience no panic attacks or stress, am not continually beset by thoughts of neatening, am able to function socially and occupationally, exhibit no hair pulling or Tourett’s disorder or anorexia or depression or, to the best of my knowledge, brain chemical imbalances.  Nor, I am certain, do I suffer from an anal retentive personality:  Mom told me I was a “breeze” to toilet train, and she and Dad heaped praise upon me when, as Dad put it, I “did my business.”  It is unlikely that one of the six innate, universal moral principles theorized by Jonathan Haidt—purity/degradation—is particularly pronounced in me, and that my picker upperosity is an effort to avoid contamination and elevate myself to a nobler, more exalted level.  In fact, I’ve always found the fussy rectitude of Thoreau’s assertion that our carnal lives are a “disgrace” and a “cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which [we] are allied” a pulpiteering exercise in Calvinistic self-renunciation, too much along the lines of the Puritan minister Edward Taylor calling himself a “varnished pot of putrid excrements.”  Charming!  So much for the tanginess of experience.

So, if my picker upperist and neatest predilections are instilled by neither external nor internal influences, if they are not compensatory gestures to overcome what Abraham Maslow calls “deficiency needs,”  how, then, were they kindled?  Why their impulsive blossom?  I am tempted to ascribe them to the poet Robert Southey’s description of order as “the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the state;” however, I think that lofty sentiment both overstates and understates my habits.  I pick up and neaten because they are convenient and self-satisfying activities.  They save time, they save effort, and they are pleasing.  Why do I stack coins?  So I can quickly grab the amount I want to take with me on that particular day.  Why do I eat oatmeal for breakfast and lunch?  Because it’s nutritious, filling, and, most importantly, I like it.  Why do I treadmill every morning?  Because it makes me feel good, and it affords me an opportunity to read.  Why do I prepare the lunch oatmeal at breakfast?  Because I come home for lunch and am pressed for time.  Why is my bookshelf’s American literature section arranged historically?  Because I consult it often and it makes finding the text I want easier.  Why do I pick up and neaten?  Because it feels right, feels good, that the spaces I move in most frequently balance comfort and safety and hygiene and presentability.  Do I care if it all seems abnormal?  Not at all, for as Laura Kipnis says, “the concept of normalcy . . .is one of the more powerful social management tools devised to date.”  Is it possible that my picker uppery and neatenry are forms of sidling up to the border of nonconformism, acts of stealth rebellion?

Still, I am no stalwart Leonides defending the Thermopylaen pass of inflexible routine.  As it happens, I agree wholeheartedly, wholesouledly, with novelist Tom Robbins: “True stability results when presumed order and presumed disorder are balanced. A truly stable system expects the unexpected, is prepared to be disrupted, waits to be transformed.”   I know that only as things are unsettled, only as commotion convulses and welter whirls, only as answers play hide and seek with questions, does creativity stir.  I seek balance.  I make room for novelties, try the untried, experiment, sometime vary simply for the purpose of varying—though I worry that this, too, has become part of my routine.

The Quiet Man

 

I am a fan of the CBS crime drama Person of Interest.  

While the two lead characters, Michael Emerson (formerly of Lost) as Harold Finch and Jim Caviezel (who has played two divinities, Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Bobby Jones in Stroke of Genius)as John Reese, are superb actors, the show does not break new ground with their pairing.  Finch, a wealthy and reclusive computer genius—stiff, formal, and hobbled by a limp—and John Reese, an  improvisational former Green Beret and ex-CIA field officer, are polar opposites, the kind of characters that populate any number of TV series.   

I do find the premise of the show an interesting ethical tangle.  Post 9-11, at the government’s behest, Finch created a machine that keeps everyone, everywhere and at all times, under surveillance.  The machine has a unique feature: it can predict with statistical certainty “persons of interest,” persons, that is, who will either commit a crime or be the victim of one.  Though Finch considers this feature of prime importance, the government does not; so, he strikes out on his own, hiring Reese to intervene when the machine discloses the Social Security Number of a likely criminal or victim.  At the show’s heart, then, lies an ethical dilemma: the specter of omnipresent scrutiny by a machine, counterpoised by two individuals’ secret efforts to insure that justice is served.

 I can easily suppose that from a certain political perspective, the show can be seen as a wet-kiss sealed mash note to  neoliberal ideology, tarted up for acceptability with compassionate concern.  “You are being watched,” Finch intones ominously in the show’s opening voice-opener, and concludes with “We work in secret.  You’ll never find us, but . . .we’ll find you.”  If this is the case, the show would seem locked in a full-nelsoned contradiction:  the means—invading citizens’ privacy rights—are justified by the end—protecting those very citizens whose rights have been violated.  From another perspective, the show could suggest the monitoring authority of an omnipresent, omniscient and benevolent Creator.  Yet another perspective might take the show’s message as the possibility of interdicting the curved talon of fate.  I prefer to see the show as a parable for our technological age, exploring a means whereby machines remain our tools rather than we theirs.

But what I find most compelling about the show is the character of John Reese.  It is marked by quietness.  He speaks quietly, moves quietly, and when an intervention requires his martial arts skills, he deploys them with a quiet efficiency.   He is imperturbable, cool, a James Dean cool but without the disdain.  He moves about with stealthy silence, a ninja noiselessness,  entering and exiting buildings, rooms, scenes, people’s lives,  unnoticed, unradared, unsonared, quiet as a church-mouse’s shadow, as a whisper’s whisper.  John Reese is a man of action.  He is a man of quiet.

I find this all so compelling because the adjective “quiet” has often been applied to me.  The times I’ve entered the kitchen and thoroughly startled my wife Kathy are beyond counting—so beyond, it has become a private joke between us.  The first time it happened, her body spasmed, she  dropped the knife she was jellying  her toast with, and said, “God, Jerry!  I didn’t hear you coming.  You’re so quiet! Make a little noise, will you?  Clear your throat or something.  I’m going to make you wear a bell.  You almost scared me to death.”  “That was my intention,” I joked.  “Just call me Tony Perkins, and be especially wary when you’re taking a shower.”  “Very funny, Tony,” she replied, and to this very day, when I startle her, she puts a hand to her heart, laughs, and says, “you about Tonied me to death there, Mr. Perkins.”

On the plaque commemorating my winning the 2005 Alumni Award for Excellence in Teaching,  I am described, in a paragraph written by my English Department colleagues, as a “quiet man who keeps a low social profile.”  Low, I hasten to add, but not disengaged.  I am not a social introvert.  I prefer to conserve my words.  I am not infatuated with the resounding peal of my own voice.  Members of committees on which I serve regularly tell me they appreciate my reluctance to engage in trifling, beside-the-point “jibber-jabber” and my speaking only to the point and only if I have something to advance the discussion.  In my literature classes I never lecture, never assume the role of “sage on the stage;” rather, I pose questions and wait, as uncomfortable as that can often be, for students to respond and weave a conversational thread.   At social gatherings I tend to listen, not just to what is said, but how it is said, its nuance and understatement, its texture and tone and grammatical shape, the felt experience it embodies or lacks, the meaning the words are given or that lies laired in the spaces between words. People tell me I’m a good listener.  In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character of Polonius may be kind or sinister, jocular or Machiavellian, but he gives his son Laertes a bit of advice I’ve taken to heart: “Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.”

In this, I am my father’s son.  He confessed to me once his frustration in talking with people who were not listening but, rather, formulating a response as you spoke.  “You can see it in their eyes,” he said; “they’re inattentive because they think talk is some kind of competition.   It’s hard, but try to listen fully, right to their last word.  It’s basic respect.  Never interrupt.  Try to listen between the lines, too.”  But I think, too, my quietness has evolved from my lifelong study of literature, my pursuit of the quiet company of books and my thoughts about them—a form of conversation with their writers.  Perhaps my vocation accounts for my two favorite times of the day: the hush of predawn and the deep stillness of a midsummer midafternoon, times when I become a  chorus of one, when my restless thought syndrome settles into a pulsing hum, the yammering day takes five, and there is an “absence of insistence.”

I like to think that quiet is outgoing and social because it is receptive, mindful, hospitable, tolerant—not an outstretched arm palm up, but a hand waving in.  It fosters connections.  It draws energy from the substance of what others say.  But I also like to think that quiet is inbending and individual, drawing energy from its own resources, from the uncrowdsourced cartography of its own interior landscape, a place where the mind deliberates, the heart feels, and the soul, well, not for nothing are sacred places quiet.  As John Reese demonstrates, that quiet is kinetic, purposeful and active intervention, in the world outside ourselves, and the world within.

 

 

Mashed Potatoes

I read recently that 7-Eleven Stores in Europe and Asia, and a few in the United States, are featuring machines that dispense mashed potatoes.  The machine mixes instant mashed potato powder with water and oozes it out steaming hot, complete with gravy.  Now, this is a market-based theology before whose god I cannot genuflect.  It is a concept of mashed potatoes wholly different from mine—an order of magnitude and tastitude different.  To me, machine-spurted mashed potatoes are not just a departure from the aesthetics of food consumption, it is an excommunication of it, a refusal even to grant it recognition.  After all, how can mechanically squirted mashed potatoes make any demand for one’s gustatory attention?  Simply calling them mashed potatoes constitutes a linguistic felony.  I like mashed potatoes, made-from-scratch mashed potatoes, mashed potatoes with textured particularity, mashed potatoes freighted with flavor and savor—mashed potatoes, in other words, made the way my father-in-law Tom made them.

At all family gatherings involving a main meal, Tom was called upon to perform what we called “the ceremony,” that ritualistic, almost shamanic process by which he turned a bowl of boiled and skinned potatoes into a side-dish so unsurpassingly delectable that only waving pennants and the blare of silver trumpets would have been fit to announce their arrival on the table.  Eating them was to enter and stroll the midway of an endorphin carnival.

Tom was a talkative, good-natured man, but when he performed the ceremony, he entered a cocoon of silence, his smile vanished, and seriousness settled in his eyes. His every action was resolute, practiced, distilled to its most precise and efficient motion.  Through his hands flowed an accumulated knowledge, the past and present intersecting, colluding.  He never said a word, but he communicated, each gesture a testimony to the significance of concentrated and patient effort, each action a small poem about the human capacity for craft and being wholly held in its experience.   And the result was mashed potatoes, but something more, something additional and beyond potatoes, something no machine, no matter how sophisticated, could possibly deliver.

Where, I wonder, did time go that instant mashed potatoes were no longer fast or convenient enough?  What looking-glass world did I step into where what happens hastens with barely a hiss of resistant air parting, then closing behind?  When did a-fishing in the stream of time become living in it?  I am sometimes accused of being anti-modern, but the truth is I am ambivalently modern.  I have read that the University of Southern California has received a $40,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Arts to develop a video game based on Thoreau’s Walden—a massive irony considering that Thoreau essentially flipped off the two technological marvels of his time, the train and the telegraph.

I have read that the BBC has partnered with Legacy Games to create a Facebook game based on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the purpose being to reunite the separated Darcy and Elizabeth while immersing players in scenes from Austen’s novels.  Indeed, Austen has been thoroughly repurposed and mashed up: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, a YouTube video “Jane Austen’s Fight Club,” even an action figure.  Tolstoy, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, Defoe, Kafka, Kerouac, and Charlotte Bronte have also gotten the mashup treatment.

Should I jeer or cheer?  Feel saddened that, as the French poet Paul Valery says, we no longer work “at what cannot be abbreviated,” or gladdened that it in some sense these minor imaginations validate major ones?  Well, it is the way of things.  Best to muster oneself, I suppose, to be like Walt Whitman, large enough to be at least on civil terms with the antonymed rhythm, the dialectic energies, of how the world goes.

But even in this hither-and-thither world, this coiled and convulsed rush of a world, among its glens and coves and hollows, small, soft-cymballed revelations occur if we are attentive enough to recognize them.  Tom rendered one at every family gathering.  Working with potatoes, milk, butter, salt, a few herbs and spices—elemental and unreverenced materials—Tom performed a sleight of hand in plain sight, affirming the ordinary, conjuring a small epiphany of the mundane. Tom transfigured lumps of tubers, humble members of the nightshade family, into mashed potatoes that lingered in the mouth and blessed the taste buds, mashed potatoes so good, so genuinely good, it approached impiety to even consider topping them with gravy.

Manifesto

I have a wish for New Year 2013.  It is a wish, which means it is a hope, which means it has the substance of things rarely seen.  It could be nothing more than a wish upon a star.  Perhaps it is a prayer without a prayer.  It is surely an ideal, but, then, why are we given to imagining ideals if we cannot at least begin to or at least partially fulfill them?  I believe it is in our nature not to hand-wring, but, rather, to make claims upon the world about how things ought to be.

My Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives six definitions of “new.”  Here is the definition I do not wish for 2013: “beginning as the resumption or repetition of a previous act or thing (a “new” day).”  Such a definition leaves the before, the as-it-has-been, the yesterdayed, untroubled.  It denotes merely a new number, the tic of the annual odometer, while we continue to settle for too little, to yield ourselves to the embrace of the way-it-was, which, by habit, becomes the ever-shall-be.  Such a definition mocks the winged promise of newness; it contravenes the wished-for, the expectation-imbued.  Such a definition means we occupy time without being much occupied about it.

Here are the definitions I wish for the new year: “having existed or having been made but a short time: recent;” “recently manifested, recognized, or experienced: novel or unfamiliar;” “unaccustomed;” “refreshed, regenerated;” “different from one of the same that has existed previously.”  These definitions disturb the what-has-been, the erstwhile, with the otherwise, the fresh, the different.  They suggest that the prior can be made prismatic, the previous a preface, the antecedent an alchemy of moments.  Nothing is permanent, says Emerson, but life in transition, powered by “the energizing spirit.”

I wish for a new year of moments in which we are seized by such a spirit and taken beyond the profanation of languid and dreamless drift, beyond ossified discourse and strategic calculation and ironic detachment, taken beyond our sidewise indifference and default disdain, beyond our shadowed nooks and crannies, beyond the defensive perimeter we deploy to garrison enshrined ideas and manicured pieties and soothing ideologies. I wish for us to be taken by awe, by love, by compassion, by moral imagination, by anything real and adrenalizing and outward-reaching—and I wish for us to make our lives a narrative of that captivity.  I wish for a new year in which we engage the could-be, the there-is-more, the this-is-not-the-way-it-has-to-be.

I hope our new year deepens the familiar and pushes it to the verge of enchantment.  I hope our new year galvanizes our imagination, turbocharges it into spacious regard and makes each of us, as Henry James said, “one of those people on whom nothing is lost.”  Let’s practice, until it becomes second nature, wondering and marveling that this improbable planet, just now beginning its improbable tilt toward spring, still whirls its improbable pilgrimage around the sun.  And what a planet it is!  Madly impenetrable?  Gladly inadvertent?  It demands, even if it does not always reward, our full-gazed regard. 

Best wishes for 2013: I hope it gives us nothing we think you want, and everything we know we need.