That Credo Thingy

March 4, 2015

Marcello, Martinis, and Madness

This afternoon I got this [See box.] from Tom Nashe.  He wanted to know if he could post it as a credo on “Go Around Back.”  I told him he could – the site was his now, as far as I was concerned; but if I were he, I’d wait to see if he felt the same way after Happy Hour – Tuesdays he meets a bunch of old hippie friends and 

they drink martinis, because “They’re as far from what we were imbibing in 1969 as any of us can imagine. A drink our fathers – no, our mothers – would have drunk, one just before we came home from school and one after they’d gotten us into bed. I feel like a girl in my thirties just ordering, ‘Martini – not too dry.’ Mar-tee-nee. Listen to the sound of it, and you can see your mother’s eyes as she turns away from tucking you in: she’s day . . . evening-dreaming: she’s Sophia Loren on the back of Marcello Mastroianni’s Vespa.” Pauses: “I’ve probably got the chronology wrong, but what the hell!”

 

I was talking on the phone to Gaspar Stephens a couple of days ago. He was remembering something he’d heard somewhere about something.  The something was – vaguely – this: he wasn’t entirely crisp with details, and I’ve forgotten half of what he said.  So, this may be ten/fifteen percent right.

          A neurologist or psychologist is explaining: We tend to think of other people, even ourselves, as all one thing – medievally: they’re sanguine or choleric or phlegmatic or full of melancholy. But we’re less like the humors, he was saying, than like a modern city; that was his metaphor. We’re streets and sidewalks – cars and people pushing and pulling at each other; but we’re also parks: there’s an old man in brown that comes to that particular bench everyday but Saturday to feed the pigeons.  There’s theater – sometimes we feel theatrical; and there’s music, even on the subway – sometimes we feel musical.  And there’s hockey . . .

          Also, it’s not so much that we feel now this way and now that; we are this way and that, all at the same time; dawn or dusk or midnight in the city, we're all the streets, sidewalks park benches, music halls, basement bars.  We’re “mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore” and we’re hesitant to move from where we are.  We’re anxious to finish a task and we’re turning away from it, because we don’t want to be done.  You can multiply the examples at least as well as I can.  Here’s one of Gaspar’s (I’ll play like I really remember what he said and put quotes around it): “We might say, rightly, that New York City is politically Democratic, but we know that there is a substantial portion of the city that is Republican, and libertarian and progressive and . . .   It's not all one thing.  This guy says our brains are the same way. And we know this - most of the time: we have predominant opinions but we hold at the same time minority thoughts and sentiments.”

I called Tom after supper.  “How many martinis?”

          “The perfect number, one too many.”

          “And your credo thingy?”

          “I’m going to put it up, purposely misspell one word – at least – and drink to its health and short life.”

          “Amen.”

          “But tomorrow.”