family matters!

1) The first quote is for Ellen, who seems directly concerned by this comparison: “In their sympathies, children feel nearer animals than adults.  They frolic with animals, caress them, share with them feelings neither has words for.  Have they every stroked any adult with the love they bestow on a cat?  Hugged any grown-up with the ecstasy they feel when clasping a puppy?”

2) The second note is simply a reminder of her most famous, and endearing book, which came out in a movie starring Gary Cooper in 1956: The Friendly Persuasion.  It takes place in Indiana, although Jessamyn left there at the age of five.  Many people questioned the accuracy of this account of a Quaker family on such a “narrow” basis.  The things Jessamyn said in retort are joys forever.

3) Indianapolis is a town with a baseball team, and a place my family go to shop.  But it’s also a town that selected The Friendly Persuasion, in 2002, as the book closest to the spirit of Indiana.

4) A little politics.  This woman was a second cousin to Richard Nixon.  She was taught by Nixon’s father, Frank, who was, she wrote, “a fiery, persuasive teacher” who convinced her that the Gospels contained a social message of freedom and equality for all.  This is the Nixon that has been totally erased by the “Tricky Dick” stuff and by watergate.  People from the midwest are quick on the draw to condemn, categorize, castigate and cat-call.  Drunk!  Pervert!  Socialist!  As President, Nixon had an incredible plan to reform American health care. 

5) This one is for me, and for my research.  “FAITHFULNESS TO THE PAST CAN BE A KIND OF DEATH ABOVE GROUND.  WRITING OF THE PAST IS A RESURRECTION; THE PAST LIVES IN YOUR WORDS AND YOU ARE FREE.”

Where else would the past live than in your own words?  It’s such an incredible promise to hear someone say that the same propensity can put you to death and represent the premisses of your resurrection.  Once ressurected, you are free.  And we’re not talking about life after death, but life after progress.  When I reread the prose poem I copied out like the obediant grand-schooler I still am, yesterday, I capture how adequate those gulls are to this conception of freedom.  Flying over constraints, and in the end winning out over the forces of death and destruction.  Wow!  But we’ve always known, at least since “Witness” what a potent force for freedom and creation the Quakers have been for America.

Today is Bastille Day in France!  Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness gets translated back to Libery, Equality, Fraternity.  There will be no polemical conclusion to this.  Just a kiss thrown out over the ocean, destination, and ocean, unknown.

Gulls wheel through spokes of sunlight over gracious roofs and dowdy thatch, snatching entrails at the marketplace and escaping over cloistered gardens, spike-topped walls and treble-bolted doors.  Gulls alight on whitewashed gables, creaking pagadas and dung-ripe stables; circle over towers and cavernous bells and over hidden squares where urns of urine sit by covered wells, watched by mule-drivers, mules and wolf-snouted dogs, ignored by hunchbacked makers of clogs; gather speed up the stoned-in Nakashima River and fly beneath the arches of its bridges, glimpsed from kitchen doors, watched by farmers walking high, stony ridges.  Gullls fly through clouds of steam from laundries’ vats, over kites unthreading corpses of cats; over scholars glimpsing truth in fragile patterns; over bath-house adulterers; heartbroken slatterns; fishwives dismembering lobsters and crabs; their husbands gutting mackerl on slabs; woodcutters’ sons sharpening axes; candle-makers, rolling waxes; flint-eyed officials miling taxes; etioliated lacquerers; mottled-skinned dyers; imprecise soothsayers; unblinking liars; weavers of mats; cutters of rushes; ink-lipped calligraphers dipping brushes; booksellers ruined by unsold books; ladies-in-waiting; tasters; dressers; fliching page-boys; runny-nosed cooks; sunless attic nooks where seamstresses prick calloused fingers; limping malingerers; swineheards; swindlers, lip-chewed debtors rich in excuses; heart-it-all creditors titghtening nooses; prisoners haunted by happier lives and ageing rakes by other men’s wives; skeletal tutors goaded to fits; firemen-turned-looters when occasion permits; tongue-tied witnesses; purchased judges; mothers-in-law nurturing briars and grudges; apothecaries grinding powders with mortars; palanquins carrying not-yet-wedded daughters; silent nuns; nine-year-old whores; the once-were-beautful gnawed by sores; statues of Jizo anointed with posies; syphilitics sneezing through rotted-off noses; potters; barbers; hawkers of oil; tanners, cutlers; carters of night-soil, gate-keepers; bee-keepers; blacksmiths and drapers; torturers; wet-nurses, purjurers; cut-purses; the newborn; the growing; the strong-willed and pliant; the ailing; the dying; the weak and defiant; over the roof of a painter withdrawn first from the world, then his family, and down into a masterpiece that has, in the end, withdrawn from its creator, and around again, where their flight began, over the balcony of the Room of the Last Chrysanthemum, where a puddle of last night’s rain is evaporating; a puddle in which Magistrate Shiroyama observes the blurred reflections of gulls wheeling through spokes of sunlight.  This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

Today is a day when I read about “touching” in “New” and about how the world looks from a being able to fly.  There is the problem of evil, and there is the problem of the self, but there is a weave that awaits us all, right here, right now … to be continued.

Depending on who you are, what you’re doing, and what you need, a mystical attitude to life would consist in concluding that you always get what you need, and that prayers are always answered, and that the objects and events that seem to arrive unexpectedly are in fact answers, responses, clues, and delicious mysteries to unravel.

Here is one such moment, one such tidbit, once such pain au chocolat at the beginning of the day, from “New”:

“In such moments you experience all that life has to offer.  The moment, each moment, is the beloved … is what we are running after … merely to touch.  Each moment is delicious beyond imagining.

The Universe has conspired for countlerss aeons — so that (as Michaelangelo represented it on the Sixtine Chapel) two fingers might touch.  Wherever you are, whatever you are doing — the divine is touching the world.  … The Toucher  … the Touchee … the Touchiness!  … Take this bread, he would say … waving a half-eaten baguette at us — as an example of how ‘people have ears, but do not hear, eyes, but do not see’ — as an example of how anything could fill up the moment.”

New does a world of good to his entourage.  Later in the book, he catches fire, and must die.  On the spot of the holocaust is …. a heron!  I haven’t had to pronounce that in English for 50 years now.  A heron!  I feel a universe opening up under that word, a universe and a state of mind.  There are herons flying over Dejima on the beautifully done cover of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.”  And something tells me herons are extraordinarily present in New England.  (My “I” tends to confuse the heron and the huron tribes).

This passage about the touch is just what the doctored ordered!  The heron is a supplementary surprise this morning, along with our baguette.  “The unimaginable touch of time.”     

I never write anything without saying in its course: what would Brian say to this?  I’m sure this is a hyperbolic, exaggerated thought to have, because he is more often than not simply not interested in the kind of late-life, memory challenged stuff that keeps me going.  But still …  one wonders …

Especially when reading a recent novel of his, called “New.”  This one will once again cause people to murmur in knowledgeable tones and with eyebrows moving at high speed: the poor guy is “out west,” if the company is French, or “off his rocker” if it’s Americans.  (I’m sure Americans have many more recent ways to express their sympathetic rejection nowadays.  We ought to make lists of things like this.)

But still … one wonders … What if the guy was heart and soul present to everyone in his circle?  What if he looked for all the world like a saint, albeit a non-conspicuous one?  That’s my hypothesis: my friend is present to all of us to an extent that shames us all.  I’ll have to get down to brass tacks to express this, and to substantiate it.  This will take time, but in the meantime here’s a snippet from “New” that set off the hypothesis.

But, despite his legendary verbal reticence, you would misunderstand me if you got the impression that New was in any way niggardly with his time or attention — or even assumed that he was especially taciturn.  For New was no reluctant guru.  No one ever did things more purposefully than New.  No word fell from his mouth without being counted.  No second found him guilty of inattention.  He was like a lit candle: all light, pure and intense.  Still, usually, he would just shine.  He would shine on us — and we would forget our questions.  We would forget how pressing,how urgent, they had seemed only moments before.  We would just stretch ourselves out in his radiance like beachgoers after the optimum tan.  No sunsreen required.

What if this was to be taken seriously?  Does anybody know any more what it might mean to take a piece of prose seriously?  Is this passage about the author, or about New?  Does anybody give a shit?  I’m an optimist: I think there are hundreds, thousands of people who no longer conjoin giving with shit.  And who lend an ear. 

All of the people I love are obsessed, cooly, intelligently, but insistently, with the necessity of transmission and teaching.  Brian’s case is one of a person who conceives of his writing as a teacher-student relationship, a Brownian movement between the two, without there being any outside landmarks to stop the switching from getting out of hand.  And when he started teaching at the Sorbonne, it was easy for him to extend his writing into the classroom, with no quotes or photocopies of his work: all he had to do was to bring comic strips to school and he turned the trick with success.  Statistical success, that is.  3 out of 10.  Or perhaps 3 out of 20.  But this is huge, already, from my point of view, which has to be the point of view of anyone concerned with the ends of teaching!

There is much more of Brian Wall in New than anyone can be confortable with.  But I believe that New is as fictional as anything else in his corpus, but this is not to breathe a sigh of relief.  Fiction is not a way of declaring modest intentions; it’s rather a way of raising the ante, and making us all feel uncomfortable. 

In fact, I’ve only just begun reading “New.”  It arrived this morning.  I do what I can, with my tight schedule!  But let it be known to the two or three people who read this blog: nothing can compare with the urgency one feels after opening the pages of this novel, and after marvelling at the beauty of the cover art.  (Announcement: Brian Wall is a dangerous adept of a terrorist sect: those who have read and contemplated the art work of “The Little Prince.”)  How far away we are from the new-age clichés of David Mack.

The Baird Farm seems to me to be excellent story-telling, and in perfect sync with what used to be called the historical novel.  This is a way of getting into the conclusion of Wood’s “The Floating Library” apropos The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. 

the historical novel, typically the province of genre gardeners and conservative populists, has become an unlikely laboratory for serious writers, some of them distinctly untraditional in emphasis and concern. …

The revival of storytelling, after the great revolution of Latin-American magical realism, is surely what binds together the eclectic range of this laboratory.  … In many ways, The Thousand Autumns is a realist novel … its very historical distance — its self-enclosed quality — represents an assertion of pure fictionality.  … Mitchell can be more mitchellian, because the reader wants a kind of moral or metaphysical pressure that is absent, and that has ceded all the ground to pure storytelling.

This is a bad review, and an ill-inspired riff on the travails of literature since Blanchot and Beckett.  The critic would seek to nail the author on the horns of a dilemma the author seemingly ignores.  If I hadn’t just reread Brian Wall’s evocation of weekends at the Baird Farm, I would not have seen how vain this critical take finally is.  We go back to Baudelaire, to the astounding thesis that the imagination is a realist function, that nothing is more imaginary that a scrupulous account of what is real.  I don’t see anyone out there still interested in “pure fictionality.”  I see a huge wave of people who now submit to the dictates of good storytelling, without having to choose between true and fictional storytelling.  The fictional element stems from the historical part of the storytelling, and highlights its past and present impact on us, while the historical aspect of story-telling begs at every turn to be transformed into fiction, which, must I recall, means “making” before it comes to mean “make believe.”

Her knitting needles make the sound of swords clashing on a distant hill.  … No, her knitting needles make the sound of a blind man’s stick.  ‘I shall be eighty-one on Thursday.  Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter.  Beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk amid the still-are.  You believe I am an old woman hoary with superstition, and possibly deranged to boot. … Of course I am deranged.  How else could I know what I know?’ 

 (Number9Dream)

I’ve been nagging people about the distinction between praying for and praying to people who are no longer around, but who still matter.  The Catholic Church is strict on the importance of praying only to God in three persons.  And that everyone who has passed ought to be prayed for, because you never know what went on in the moment of passing.  Mary and the saints are excellent for intercession.  As are gardien angels.  All of these beliefs are being re-inculcated now, in study-groups, charismatic get-togethers, and fire-talks all over Europe.  No one is saying that this is the realm of dreams, of the “what if?”  I’m saying it here.  I ignore the consequences of such a belief.  I’d like to hash it out. 

My main concern is that this morning, the Sunday of the World Cup Final, I dream of a scene where everything can be said, everything forgiven, and everything become the object of gentle and affectionate laughter.  I dream of my mother laughing and someone from another age saying: that reminds me of Mayme!  And I dream that at that moment, my mother winks at me.  And the chain of generations is suddenly no longer a curse, but a grace.  I think I owe my mother an apology.  I’ll say a prayer for Mayme this morning. 

FAREWELLS

-

THE RIDE HOME 

-         

We would all crawl back into the car (which had been either freezing or baking all day long), shoveling bags of corn, trays of eggs and dishes of leftovers in ahead of us.  Gary, Jim and I would all slug one another a couple of times.  As a formality.  We knew we we would be asleep by the time we hit the cow gate, so we wanted to get in a few licks while we still could.  The dogs tossed off the obligatory bark or two, but you could tell they didn’t have their hearts in it.  Everyone was bone-tired and stuffed and had only a portion of one eardrum in working order.         

-

“You cum’on back and see us, hear?!”         

-

(Even my uncle had dropped to lower-case bellowing.)         

-

“We sure will…thanks for everything.”         

-

Our headlights cut through the dark, casting giant shadows of the Bairds against the farmhouse.  The engine shook itself awake in the brittle country air with a rattle…and we were on our way home.  The best thing about the ride home was the quiet.  Not just the sweet corn-fed silence of the fields.  But the silence in which we chose to luxuriate.  And then the silence of impossibly deep, dreamless sleep.         

-

I can recall only two times in my life when the Bairds came to visit us.  We always went to their place.  There was nothing for them to learn at our house.  Or, at least, nothing they could learn.  We knew there was more going on at our kitchen table than they could ever imagine.  But that was our secret.  Visiting Aunt Ginny’s was like crawling back down into Plato’s Cave to enjoy the shadows dancing on the wall.   

-

CURSES 

-        

Uncle Bob died of a heart attack when he was forty-nine.  Aunt Ginny turned into a vegetable as a result.  She “let herself go” worse than was her norm.  A giant axe had been laid to her world…and to her mind.  Her only pleasure in life came from relating the story of Uncle Bob’s death.  All of the cold-corpse details.         

-

“He just laid there…I said, ‘Bob…?  Bob…’”         

-

(For the first time anyone could remember, Uncle Bob didn’t have much to say.) 

-        

Aunt Ginny had to move into a trailer.

*         

My cousin, Janet, went nuts one day between her first and second divorce.  All the beauty, intelligence and sweetness festering away like a cow shingle in the woodshed.

*         

Two out of three are better now. 

-

(This concludes The BAIRD FARM series.)

So happy birthday to the senior (citizen) of Schlarman high school, just before it becomes an academy of (higher?) learning!

I’d invite you to contemplate the fact the being a senior at Schlarman means slightly more than the final stretch to being valedictorian.  I’m all for that, and will be tickled pink if it happens, but you know by now that I’m troubled that you have no other motivation than to be number one. 

Being a senior means being able to look back on all the freshmen, sophomores and juniors coming up.  You probably feel that being a senior means looking forward to college, which is of course absolutely true.  But if you are to honor the historical tradition of the valedictorian, you really ought to consider the option of turning back, not only on younger kids in high school, but on all the people who are now “seniors” having spent their lives, and now looking to cash in on what’s spent, or discreetly desperate to have so little to exchange for a life.  Of course, the chances that you may one day be a senior in this sense of the term are good, and that would make you into the kind of person I could at long last relate to.  But for this, a basic requirement is either reincarnation, or the everlasting life of the soul, for, before that, we shall all have to endure your painful, resolute, gifted advance into the ranks of the meritorious elite. 

I pray you not forget how many seniors there are out there who have never even dreamt of such a destiny, or such a goal.   It’s vitally important that (your) life not be reduced to the narrow confines of a career, a goal, or an ambition.  For the moment, this is my gripe with what you have achieved hitherto.  It’s also my hope to be pleasantly surprised to see, or feel, a change of heart.  That would be, truly, a divine surprise. 

Unbelievable!  That is a section of my response to the Japanese orator who sets up the next 200 years in his country as a contest between “what ifs?”, that is, a stuggle of beliefs.  Perhaps training for this world cup would involve striking out the word unbelievable.  What if there were fewer and fewer unbelievable things occuring?  And what if that were absolutely dreadful to have to contemplate?

Here is a good Newsweek articile on care-givers.  Of course most of them are women, and each and every woman should feel anger at this.  The most terrible part of the article (”The Caregiving Boomerang” by Gail Sheehy, July 12th edition) begins thus:

We’d like to think that siblings would be natural allies when parents falter.  In countless of my interviews with family caregivers, I hear the same stories. Brothers bury their heads in the sand. The farther away a sister lives, the more certain it is she will call the primary caregiver and tell her she doesn’t know what she’s doing.  A major 1996 study by Cornell and Louisiana State concluded that siblings are not just inherent rivals, but the GREATEST SOURCE OF STRESS BETWEEN HUMAN BEINGS.  (my emphasis)

Isn’t that unbelievable?  But what if it were the case?  What if the faltering twilight of parents sparked the splintering of bonds between siblings?  Wouldn’t that be as close to the ultimate hell-hole as anyting else you could imagine, next to all the other stuff taking place, inexorably, it would seem?  (mappô, but perhaps without a Mayumi to make it all right again) 

My fascination with that part of our extended family that is located in the Atlanta area is the contrast between what they seem to be pulling off and what we in our family have so miserably failed to do.  I.E., to stay together in the face of adversity, and in the face of the opportunities that adversity affords us all.

This makes me into some kind of turncoat I know.  I have no reason to doubt that the frequent family reunions down there around Atlanta are joyous events.  This drives me crazy, first of all because we have nothing to put up in comparison.  It’s like a pine-car derby.  Their cars are sleek and balsam-fast, and ours are like stones hardened in generations of wrath and frustration.  Secondly, and more importantly, I for one would not trade my family disfunction for anything in the world, because it has made me who I am, and has afforded me the exact shape of a gate under which my eternal salvation is decided each time I find myself between its pillars.  I would never say the grass is greener on the other side.  As my son John knows so well, if I had it all to do over again, I would say, with Nina the piano player, da capo.  Play it again Sam.  Nothing like: maybe this time we can get it right.  But rather: maybe this time we can make it worse, but funnier, more intense, and more likely to be of interest to those that put these cards in our hands, and no others.  Am I making sense?  I would love in a parallel world to be Tony Chiaffredo.  Big, and strong, and lucky as hell.  That’s probably the source of the ineradicable enmity between us.  He sees through this sentence.  He knows it’s a half-truth.  A jailbird can never become a scion of virtue, and if he does, it smells weird.  You can’t teach a dog new tricks. 

On the other hand, it has been liberating for me to admit how strong the longing is, now, for rich and fulfilling family experience.  This must drive my boys crazy.  On the opposite shore of Tony’s final judgment that I’m not very interesting.  They must be saying: after all this time, and all the subversive talk, the unbelievable systematic disruption of family bliss, how can he possibly still be writing a blog in praise of family reunions?  The guy’s a joke.

I wasn’t expecting to go any further than the excerpt from Gail Sheehy’s great article on the scorched earth advance of death in our lives.  And once again, I must avow that this blog format allows for quite a few moments of truth-telling, and soul-building.  Signed, Robinson Crusoe.  

Late at night, or early in the morning, one thing you can do when sleep just won’t happen is to turn on the TV.  This just happened to me, and I was taken up, once again, into the universe of Philip Roth, recycled and rewound and reduxed by a woman named Isabel Coixet.  Ben Kingsley plays Kepesh, and Consuella Castillo is accomplished by Penelope Cruz.  Kepesh’s best friend is camped by Denis Hopper, in what must have been his last role.

There is a discreet movement afoot right now to take the wind out of the sails of Roth’s reputation as one of the two or three greatest living American writers.  It’s being doing in order to sweep his vision of humans as dying animals under the carpet.  I suppose this smear campaign will succeed.  They will have to take care of “Elegy” too. 

I don’t know where to begin.  Ben Kingsley spends most of his time in the film speechless.  Staring out from what already looks like a skull.  A walking dead man.  The shock that someone as preternaturally beautiful as Consuella Castillo could possibly love this old coot, amoral, refined, and libidinous, is total.  We understand that this near absolute beauty is nearly absolutely narcissistic, and that the secret of their tie is her judgment that no one has loved her body better than Kepesh!  This is something that ought to remain secret.  This “fact” deserves its own hibutsu statue.  I’m not sure it might function as a bullwark staving off the tides of destruction and decadence, but it would bring solace to all readers in all countries who know that this is absolutely true, if seldom experienced.  Sometimes glimpsed, and that is enough to install it in the pantheon of values for a lived life.

I didn’t know such a film had been made.  For me Ben Kingsley was Gandhi.  And Penelope Cruz had committed the unpardonable sin of hitching up for way too long with the pervert Tom, who managed, apparently, to prefer scientology to Penelope Cruz.  He no doubt offered up in explanation of flattering comparison to Siddhartha on the morning of his enlightenment. 

Glory to God, and shards of that glory to Penelope and Ben.