Dancing the Antick Hay

April 29, 2015
Dancing the antick hay 

In the beginning of “The Lady with the Little Dog,” Chekhov writes of Gurov, who has seen the lady and is thinking about pursuing her:

Repeated experience, and bitter experience indeed, had long since taught him that every intimacy, which in the beginning lends life such pleasant diversity and presents itself as a nice and light adventure, inevitably, with decent people . . . grows into a major task, extremely complicated, and the situation finally becomes burdensome. But at every new meeting with an interesting woman, this experience somehow slipped from his memory, and he wanted to live, and everything seemed quite simple and amusing.

The Hay, Baby!

Could it be that everything is quite simple and amusing; only decent people complicate it, make it a task, load it all manner of burden? If so, why don’t we say, “To hell with decency”? It brings no ease, only constraint. It makes us take everything too earnestly. Simple becomes extremely complicated, light becomes heavy; and out of heavy hearts comes only so much sad poetry and bad novels, dogmatic religion and unreadable philosophy - and unhappiness.

          “To hell with it, then – decency!” I say. Let us go instead and dance the antick hay.

In “Gooseberries” the veterinarian Ivan Ivanych tells of his brother Nikolai’s sober fall into nobility – the meek little clerk who has saved his money, even married a rich widow, to own land. Any land he could buy cannot match his dreams, but he can act as if it does and live contentedly in the illusion. His gooseberries may be tough and sour, he declares they are delicious.

          But: “They were tough and sour,” his brother insists, then remembers what Pushkin said, “Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.” So Ivan Ivanych comes to see in his brother “a happy man, whose cherished dream . . . had come true ... who had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself.” Yet, Ivan Ivanych is “overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair,” because won’t contentment lead to inaction? And it is more important, isn’t it, to act than to be content.

          I say, “To hell with action, which always has an end.” Let us instead dance the antick hay.

Imagine the dancers have all had a little too much to drink; they misstep, they bump into one another. One stumbles, but someone crying “Whoops!” catches him before he falls. Another does fall, and two of his fellows help him laughingly to his feet. The cries and the laughter join the instruments in the music.

          There is no illusion that this is a court ball or these indecent old men are a professional troupe. That there are no illusions does not mean, however, that the dancers know the truth. They know they do not; they are not professional dancers, and they are not educators.

          The world will not become a better place because what they assuredly know and have earnestly sworn to tell will be heard, earnestly discussed, and taken to heart.
         The dancers say, “To hell with earnestness. To hell with the truth.” If one wise man believed that knowing the truth would set you free, another could answer, “Yes. But what is that truth?” What there is of it is nothing decent or earnest, only simple and amusing, to tippling old men, like satyrs on the lawn, tripping the antick hay.

A Nilosophy of Suicide

April 23, 2015
Who dies there? 

Quietly they put poor Cleveland Sandy in the ground this morning, but then it was back to the Presbyterian Church for all the bells and the whistles, the pomp, the circumstance, and the general hoopla. I half-expected the angels to descend with their trumpets to join the organ postlude. It was fitting: Cleve was a pomp and a hoopla and a trumpets-blaring kind of guy, a local grand poohbah; and his friends and his neighbors, even his few enemies, wanted to see him out right.

   Nothing like that for me, I hope. A quiet death, somewhere in a corner. Lamented by a few, object of no one’s curiosity. Then, bury me in an empty field alongside a seldom traveled road. Let four or five gather, knowing for certain only that it’s the right thing to do to commit a body to the ground and commend a soul to the God of the road and the field and the sky.

          “He was a sinner,” someone can say, “but he did try.” Then, an “amen” or two; and the men put their hats back on, the three of them, and the two women whisper “amen,” too, as they turn away to walk to their cars, then back to town.

Philosophers : those that love knowledge – not clever solutions or bons mots or cant ; those that recognize that knowledge is messy, not only because there is too much of it to grasp, but because it hides still more.

          (Knowledge : fat and shapeless and slippery as the giant blanc-mange in the old Monty Python sketches.)

* * * * *

We have almost no control over what comes to mind; what just comes. I am thinking on my way home from the funeral about Dutourd, and his apparent fascination with Ovid. Or, I am thinking about Ovid and how in his world everything is changing, or liable to change, all the time. Young women become trees and rivers. Men turn to stags or clusters of stars. All in an instant!

You are walking between the church and work in small-town Virginia; you close your eyes against the sun bouncing off the sidewalk, and you wake up behind the wheel of a strange car, lost on a gravel road somewhere on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Maybe. You could be in Wisconsin, or Ontario, or driving down the wrong side of the road north of Glasgow.

Wherever you are, there she is – not just in glimpse like on the Plaza Mayor in Madrid – but as present as if she is sitting in the seat next to you, both young and warm, funny and free, delightfully, delightedly confused, and dead by her own hand, dangling from a rope, wrapped up in a sheet, chopped up by flames into dust and bits of bone and scattered along the beach.

   Now she’s dangling her hand out the open window. “Why?” you say to her again. You mean: “Didn’t we – didn’t I – love you enough? Didn’t you love us; love me, your brother, enough to stay alive, not to choke yourself to death?”

   She looks straight ahead, still dangling her hand in the air. You stop the car, but you can’t get away by doing that: by stopping, shutting off the engine, and getting out of the car. By walking away into the gray-brown field alongside the deserted road. There she is, ahead of you, running, awkwardly as she always did, one of Ovid’s sad nymphs, who ran from life and metamorphosed into a shaft of light bouncing from the sun to the sidewalk and into your eyes, and you close them against the glare. And,

Here is where philosophy and science and technology part company. For the scientist is thinking, “How?” And, the philosopher wonders – constantly – why?

  I wonder if Moira, having figured out the how – put together the technology and the equipment – knew why she tying the rope to the ceiling fan, putting the noose around her neck. She was no doubt in no mood for philosophy; but a little might have saved her. Only might have, though. For philosophers – I was going to write – “not only love knowledge, they love life.” But that’s not strictly, always true. They love knowledge enough that they won’t give up looking for it, but no one is ever sure where he or she will find it.

  

Merry 8s

From the mind that brought bikini wax, basketballs, shaving-cream pies, and chainsaws to The Masters : Eight propositions – in no particular order.

1)    We take ourselves too seriously. We are all narcissists to one degree or another. This is a difficult state of mind and feeling to escape.

2)    One way to escape is through farce. We recognize in farce that however ordered is the physical universe – in fact, farce depends on physical order (especially the law of gravity) – the social fabric is frayed and splitting; it is tattered, torn, darned, patched, etc. Note the terms: physical universe, social fabric.

3)    And re-consider farce. Tragedy assumes an order to society that does not exist.  Pride doesn’t always go before a fall. Tragic flaws need not yield tragic consequences. In short, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, on their crops and on their picnics.
     Comedy assumes an order to society that does not exist. In tragedy, misunderstanding leads to complication leads to further misunderstanding leads to bloodshed. In comedy, complication leads to confusion leads to misunderstanding which is unraveled; there is resolution. In farce, complication creates complication creates misunderstanding creates confusion creates chaos, and any resolution is obviously fake.

4)    Laughter is better than – and healthier than – tears, if only because it is less self-indulgent. (See (1).) Tears turn us toward desire for control: the world is not as it should be, and it has been particularly unfair to us. (How can it not recognize its own sun?) Laughter is social. Yes, the world is unfair, but it hasn’t singled us out: it’s just the fornifreculated freak show it is.

5)    Freak shows. Carnivals. Circuses, Gallows humor. Flatulence to body parts falling off.

6)    It is unlikely we can always be merry. (Certainly it is unlikely I can be.) But merriment can be nurtured. (As I write this, Roz swings the back-stair door too wide and knocks a Chinese plate of its hook in the kitchen; it shatters on the wood floor – it puts a gouge in the floor- and there is colored china everywhere. We pick up, and we sweep up, not grimly; but no one laughs until she says, “Well, that’s enough of that for today.” And that’s funny because we know something like that will happen tomorrow – just not today, please!
     If we can cultivate melancholy, we can cultivate merry.

7)    re (5) While resolution in farce is obviously fake – Wile E. Coyote can’t return whole from every misadventure any more than he can walk on air until he realizes the earth is no longer under him – nevertheless the way the heroes (and goats) of farce bounce back from accident bordering on mayhem makes us merry. We’re not precious flowers either, china plates on a wall, Humpty Dumpties: we knit – and the looser-limbed we are when we slip on the banana peel or step off a cliff, the wider we swing our tongues to lick the pie off our faces, the merrier we are, the sooner we knit and can begin again. Or if we don’t knit? So we die. In tragedy, that is that. In comedy, the heavenly bridegroom will come for his bride. In farce, from our graves we sing “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout.”

8)    Sexual humor? Bathroom humor? Both, maybe the last more than the first, explode any illusions we have that we are in control. Some, granted, refuse to give up: “Here’s what I can do next time to prevent that’s happening again.” But watching a political candidate’s team huddling over their tablets, parsing their calendars, and charting pee breaks is as funny as watching the candidate wet his or her pants.

a tradition for your grandmother

April 18, 2015
Glof 

iii. “A tradition like no other” (continued from here)

                                                                      Picking up where I left off:

     It would be an overstatement to say I hate The Masters golf tournament; but I watch it with the sound off. Several reasons, all of which have to do with insurance, in this case insuring I don’t hear eight times per hour that this is “a tradition like no other” though a tradition that began just over 80 years ago (1934). The PGA began in 1916; the U.S. Open began in 1895; the British Open began in 1860. Hell, the Australian Open, which by all rights should be the fourth major, began in 1904.

      Still, it is The Masters that is “a tradition like no other.” And that is true, in at least this sense: it is the smuggest, stuffed-shirtiest, least spontaneous, and most anal-retentive sporting event on the planet.

Not Augusta National*

     Even as the play swirls this way and that way around them – because this is golf; there’s nothing wrong with the golf in this tournament: while it is true that the field is the shallowest of all the majors, good players play the course, Augusta National, which is interesting enough, good players are playing because they want to win – but even as the play moves about them, the announcers read a script. There are words they can say – and they must say “tradition” or “historic” at least once every thirteen minutes of air time. And, there are words they cannot say.

     Not just the usual rascals: damn, shit, holy maloly, or the eff-word. Words like: bottle, beer; choke and poke; whirligig and woman. Jack Whitaker, CBS lead announcer for the event was bounced from the broadcast team for referring to the august gallery as “a mob scene.” Gary McCord was booted in 1993 for referring to the tournament’s slick greens as “bikini waxed.”

This isn’t Notre Dame de Paris (1345); it’s a sporting event – it’s an entertainment event – even if it’s held in some rich guys’ backyard in a gated community. The Masters needs to take itself far less seriously than it does.

     I said in my previous post that I watched it with the sound off; if I could speed up the action and view it under a black light, I would. Liven it up all those dead colors.

     Add a few zanies, painted torsos, pratfalls, pies in faces, lit farts, hoochie-coochie girls (bikini-waxed), guys juggling basketballs and chain saws. Then it would be a tradition like no other.

 

____________________

     * Goofy Golf in Fort Walton Beach, FL

Camouflage

April 16, 2015 
next to of course god america i

               In arguments about what should be done – or should have been done – 
               the Puritans always win, even when they lose – because what they have 
               lost (they wag their heads sadly), so we have all.   – Uncle Albert

This was not an argument, not even a disagreement; it was a divergence of opinion, one bearing right and the other left. It circulated through one of those around-the-office emails, and everyone will decide sooner or later to put his or her oar in. 

i. American Sniper 
 It began with one bewailing that the University of Michigan, with which none of us has any link nearer than a sister’s husband’s brother’s son's girlfriend – bewailing that the University had canceled the screening on campus of American Sniper, the Clint Eastwood movie about SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. Students had mounted a petition suggesting that the film “sympathized with a mass killer” and promoted “anti-Muslim propaganda”; and the university had caved. Not “one” – let’s give our emailers names, like out of a Sheridan comedy. The emailer, Tickler, had no particular opinion (as if “caved” expressed none); what did any of us think? (For my friend and fellow blogger Tom Nashe’s take on the University’s decisions and the movie, see here.)

     Patronizia thought, in effect, that “caved” was a good word. Who was to be running the place, responsible administrators, of no political bent but only concerned that students should grow up, or the students that hadn’t?

     Because, “You’re right, Pat,” Miles added, the students hadn’t grown up, and they wouldn’t; they didn’t know what true adults, who had seen it, knew about war.  That might not be their fault, but it had made them what they were. They thought “in the aery leaps of soft sophistry that balletic graduate assistants in philosophy had taught them, no sense of the harsh, cruel, physical reality of battle." (I love the way Miles writes when he gets wound up.) But what will they do – on whom will they rely – when the shooting begins - no prelude for a seminar to wrestle with moral considerations and politically correct alternatives?

     “Yes, just what we need always: shoot now, ask questions later.” There I was butting in. You should never enter an email conversation with a smart remark you can’t resist, I know that; but, I added in an email that followed immediately that in any case, the University of Michigan had reconsidered and was showing American Sniper anyway.

There followed two or three quite favorable impressions of the movie. Fairbrother said his son had liked it but didn't think he would; so he hadn't seen it. Tickler, who had, concluded that it wasn’t anti-Muslim really; it wasn’t propaganda of any sort at all; it wasn’t political; it was a personal story, about a man that genuinely believed in what he was doing, his part in war.

     “Killing 160 people,” I wrote, “one-by-one.” I couldn't, can't fathom it.

     Tickler’s response, “How about all at once?” Which I characterized as” a different kind of insanity.”

Miles asked what I thought about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Granted it took 80,000 lives instantly and thousands more over time, but military historians generally agree that it shortened the war. (Do they? I don't know. But Miles probably does.) Had we invaded Japan, up to ten times as many lives might have been lost. The point of war, however terrible it is – so, it is never to be entered lightly: the point of war is to end it with as few casualties to your side as possible. What did I think of that?

     What I thought - and I think - is that the kind of history that says we had to do that thing instead of some other, because then the consequences would have been these, is bunk.  We can’t know what would have happened if we had done the other, because we can’t go back and do it. We can’t let the chicken cross the road today, see what’s going to happen tomorrow, then take her back to where she started and not let her go across yesterday.

     Miles: But “we can’t say we have no idea what would have happened if we hadn’t bombed but invaded; in fact, we have a pretty good one.” 
     “Perhaps,” I said, bowing out, partly because I like Miles; he’s a genuinely thoughtful guy, and there aren’t many of them where I work. “Perhaps. I’m not so sure.” 

     What I didn’t add is that when we ask what would have happened had we done this instead of that, our answer is always based on what we think should have happened in the first place. If we believe the bombing of Hiroshima was necessary to shorten the war and save lives, then we won’t build a case for any alternative, we'll dismantle it. If we believe the bombing of Hiroshima was a ghastly mistake, then we tear down the arguments advanced for it; and we argue that there were better alternatives because . . . , pretending we know those alternatives would have led to a better result. In neither case, however, do we have any real idea what would have happened had the bombs not been dropped. The chicken was already across the road, yesterday.

  
ii. Oslo, Norway - New York City, U.S.A.

I am not one of those that worries about his patriotism when he disagrees with the right wing, but my poor friend Rick is. He was telling me, not too long ago, about the time he’d spent in Norway as a child; it’s a story he comes back to, so I had heard it before.

     He was wondering (again) if the year and two summers his family spent there didn’t somehow ruin him as a “patriotic American.”

Puritan ski-jumper

     “Meaning,” I asked, “a jingoist?”

     “Maybe. What I learned those years in the late fifties and earliest sixties: there were people elsewhere, living differently from the way I'd ever lived, who were at least as happy as any I knew at home, and – I couldn’t have put it that way then - they were at least as happy and a damn sight less pretentious or, especially, defensive about it.”

     “These were people that loved their land, which – again, I think now – belonged to them, and maybe was in them, in a way our country didn’t, doesn’t belong to or live in us. They didn’t necessarily think theirs was the greatest place on earth; it was only the best place for them – it was theirs.”

     “They didn’t have to sell it like an insurance policy, stuffed with both guarantees and fine print. They could just show it to you, like a house.”

     “Yes.  Good.  Something very like that.” 
     “I try.”

     “I’ve told you, I know, about how I wept when we left the Oslo harbor, looking back at the Rådhus. Also, how I wept when we saw the Statue of Liberty, entering New York City. And I usually leave the story there, but it’s clearer and clearer that I wept for different reasons.

     “In the first instance, I was leaving something precious behind; in the second, I was enormously proud. And, there’s always something snaky in pride, you realize, when the tears dry.”

My sense is that Rick thinks he may be screwed – patriotism-wise. He might aspire to a Norwegian-style patriotism in the U.S. of A., but it can’t be.  First, even if he could achieve that delight that comes from showing people around a house you love as much for its flaws as its wonders, who (around here) wants that kind of tour? Such a tour isn’t patriotism in an office where the goal is to be salesman of the month. Second, he doesn’t own his house in the same way the Norwegians own theirs anyway; nor will he ever: history, the way we tell it now, won’t let him.

iii. “A tradition like no other”

Speaking of patriotism, or the lack thereof, it would be an overstatement to say I hate The Masters golf tournament; but I watch it with the sound off.  Why, and what that has to do with either American Sniper or the Norwegians’ love of their land – or with Puritans and insurance salesmen: my next post.

April Fooled

March 32, 2015
Sweet bird of  

We’re in New York City, Roz and I – though why we’re here instead of home (where we belong) is for another time. Looking on her son’s shelves for a book to read on the subway, something that would fit in my back pocket, I found this, a 60¢ Signet paperback of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth. In the middle photographs from “the MGM motion picture release, starring Paul Newman and Geraldine Page” and before the play, a foreword by the author, “written prior to the Broadway opening . . . and published in the New York Times on Sunday, March 8, 1959.” Williams begins as follows:

When I came to my writing desk on a recent morning I found lying on my desk top an unmailed letter that I had written. I began reading it and found this sentence: "We are all civilized people, which means that we are all savages at heart but observing a few amenities of civilized behavior." Then I went on to say: "I am afraid that I observe fewer of these amenities than you do. Reason? My back is to the wall and has been to the wall for so long that the pressure of my back on the wall has started to crumble the plaster that covers the brick and mortar."
     Isn't it odd that I said the wall was giving way, not my back? I think so.

I don’t. Nothing seems to me as porous, as filled with nicks, cuts, holes, and cracks as the walls on every side of us. And I am not referring to the psychological walls but the walls of clothing, air, wood, steel, bricks-and-mortar.

          I think we will learn, and before too long, not just how to see – we can do that already – but also how to pass through walls, however rough or thick. It will be a marvelous experience, I think, and an uncomfortable one.

Consider Star Trek’s transporter.

          It is a symbol of lives that are not only desperate – we wouldn’t be hurtling around the universe if we were comfortable at home – but disparate. We enter the transporter; it is energized, and we are scrambled like eggs, cracked into a metal bowl and stirred with a fork until translucence and yellow begin to run together. Then, then we are reassembled, the white and the yolk divided, decanted into the shell, and the shell glued back together. The reassembly may be clever and as fine as if by Fabergé; but we are different. The difference is slight – it may be negligible, even invisible - but we feel it, and we feel off. We know who we are, all our right things seem to be in all the right places, but we think we may be getting the flu. Or, we’re aware that we are about to realize we are lost.

          This happens, this feeling of being lost, a recent study has shown, every time we go through a doorway. It’s why when we leave one room to get something, we forget in the next room the something we have come for. This repeats itself several times a day. We walk through doorway after doorway until we’ve lost count, and account: we can no longer describe the process that brought us from the beds we woke in to the place we are standing.

With the walls all around.