Looking Bleak, wot?

Bleak House is not merely the perfect title for a commodiously baggy 19th-century novel, but it can be seen as a dazzlingly claxon-clear metaphor to portray a failing society. A society shrouded in its foggy notions and bogged down in a seemingly endless search for any purpose for which it stands. Certainly, its potential remains not merely unrealized, but more than that, has become, it seems, unrealizable.

Now, whether this collapsing is due to the afflictions inherent in the residents of a house without a landlord, that is, in the acceptance by the majority of its tenants that they reside in a godless universe; or whether it has come to a head because of the negative accumulation of godly aspirations among the multitudes has become rather moot, don't you think? Bulldozers are unrequired to demolish that which is sinking under the weight of its own waste.

Looking about, no matter how piercing, or how casual one's gaze, one can see less and less reason not to welcome a rapid implosion of the whole godforsaken structure and a fervent desire to have it rebuilt upon a much sturdier foundation than mere "common living" quarters.

Conservatives are, surprisingly, because, counter-intuitively, it seems, those members of society who feel it  most that we are in the throes of the utter destruction of our distempered temple to civilization, the "shining beacon on a hill", so to speak. Progressives, for their part agree with them, for when does "the Other" not recognize a part of himself in his opposite number? Only when not looking in the mirror, I would chance to guess.

Ironic, is it not, that the things we make believe are true and the things we refuse to believe are true haven't come crashing down upon us much sooner. It is only optimism and its counterpoint that has put off the Apocalypse this long. Optimism, however unjustified, is immanently more sustaining, must be the answer.

Final Words for my BFF

Cory, just so you know, to honor your parents, I am wearing the same suit today that I wore to their wedding. I guess that was about half a century ago. Your father and I were both children of parents who had just lived through the Great Depression of the 1930's, and we learned a thing or two about being frugal, and making things last long--like our friendship. Did he ever tell you about the time we walked the 10 miles to Times Square from the Bronx to save the 5-cent subway fare to share a bag of popcorn? Well, I will never forget that day. We shared many adventures like that throughout the years.

Most of you already know me as Butch's oldest BFF, or Best Friend Forever. I am honored by his wife, Maxine, to have been asked to say a few words--something celebratory about the living person, Irwin Alexander Harris, my friend, Butch, who all of us have known, and loved, and now have lost, and will sorely miss.

To put our long and meaningful friendship in context, both his wife, Maxine, and my sister, Linda, were not even born yet when Butch and I became fast friends. As Butch and I, Maxine and my sister, Linda were born less than one week apart.

Butch and I began our journey through life together on our first day of school in September of 1948, at P.S. 67, in the Bronx. I was assigned a desk directly behind him by Mrs. Galuskin, our first teacher, because we were, all of us little boys and girls seated alphabetically. After Harris, Irwin sat Keeperman, Ronald. We kept those seating arrangements for the next 6 years. I sat directly behind him, appropriately, I suppose, because I would remain behind him forevermore.

Seated there in front of me, Butch was an easy target for the mischievous rascal that I was. I was forever armed with a carefully aimed spitball, or paper airplane, and as we grew older, and I more brazen--a pea-shooter. Butch was a good sport and took my incessant horseplay and hounding stoically. Of course, it made me love him all the more to see how he would do nothing, no matter how much I tested him, to abort our friendship. He forgave me everything. He always had a secret, quick smile and a light in his eyes that seemed to say, "I know that you're an incorrigible little putz, but I forgive you, pal."

He was unique in that regard. I can truthfully say that in all the years, throughout all the decades, since we had first met, he never argued with me, he never fought with me, he never spoke so much as a harsh word to me. Never. Our relationship, you might say, was more than unique--it was uncanny.

I swear to you, that as different as our nature's were, or at least, appeared to be, he never took me to task, he never felt compelled to criticize me. Perhaps, there is much we can learn from his example. He certainly knew how to keep an enduring friendship.

I have an hypothesis, and explanation, of his behavior. As crazy as it may sound, I think of Butch Harris as a kind of rabbi, a teacher that I was destined to meet. You see, I believe that the deep bond that Butch and I developed over the years was one rooted not just in our lives, but in the everlasting, as well.

I knew Butch, it seems like forever. I knew his mother, Helen, his father, Herbert, his older sister, Sandy, and when he was born, his brother, Alan. Butch like me, was a middle child. One by one, over the years, I remember each of them passing away, and yet, with each passing, Butch never changed his demeanor, at least not so you could notice.

He kept up his friendly, outgoing, caring, non-aggressive, jovial self. He appeared unchanged, despite the tragedies of the loss of his loved ones. He married Marsha, Cory's mom. She too, was taken. Heroically, Butch still kept his composure. Throughout all this time I stood by, observing him, empathizing with him, as a close friend must, in complete puzzlement and amazement.

Up to that point in my life I had lost nobody. I couldn't imagine how he was getting through all of this grief, managing all of this pain without ever showing it to the world, or at least, to me. How was he doing it? Why was he doing it? I knew him to be a compassionate guy, I certainly felt his pain. I had been feeling his pain for years and years.

And then, when I reached middle-age, I began to lose my family members to death. My wife, of 28 years, at 50 passed first, followed by my father, then my brother, my mother, and my middle son, Ben, who was just 49. And now, Butch himself has departed.

Finally, however, I realize the gift that Butch had given to me. The biggest gift that a friend can give, the gift of eternal, unconditional, unselfish love. For I know now, as I am speaking to you, that Butch did indeed suffer grievously from the loss of his family, but he suffered in silence, so that upon his passing we too, shall have learned not to suffer our loss grievously, but rather, to go on living, to continue caring for one another, appreciating what we have, and what he has given to us: the strength we'll need to face the shadow of death squarely and fearlessly, as he always had.

I have been lucky to know him and to have him in my heart longer than anyone.

Such mazel! What did I do to deserve him?

I have no idea, but I can't wait until I take a seat behind him again, to have him school me once more.

To Whit:

 "Our fundamental want today in the United States is of a class of native authors, literateurs . . . far higher in grade than any known, sacerdotal, modern, fit to cope with our occasions, lands, permeating the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new breath of life, giving it decision, affecting politics far more than popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the selection of Presidents or Congresses -- radiating, begetting appropriate teachers, schools, manners, and, as its grandest result, accomplishing (what neither the schools nor the churches and their clergy have hitherto accomplished, and without which this nation will no more stand, permanently, soundly, than a house will stand without a substratum) a religious and moral character beneath the political and productive and intellectual bases of the States. . . . The problem of humanity all over the civilized world is social and religious, and is to be finally met and treated by literature. The priest departs, the divine literatus comes.

Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, 1871.

Fall and all

There was a not quite chill in the air,

a damp that skin wouldn't absorb.

Something not here, but on final approach.

Summer's door now slammed quite shut,

a last dog day rolled over to Fall and all.

My Congressional Invocation

So, we heard about the separation of Church and State here in the U.S.of A., particularly from Jefferson, you know, that guy from the Commonwealth of Virginia, who wrote about it when he was merely Governor Jefferson. He also wrote and spoke about equality, liberty, happiness, and independence; things we can aspire to.

But was all of it just an illusion?

The doctrines of The Church and the doctrines of The State work, and have always worked, have they not, in lock-step with one another, and by design have produced, each in its own way, an aroma that can incense the body politic, and drive them, sheepishly, to conform to the powers that be---whether almighty gods, or flawed faux-mighty men?

Alongside every Chief has there not always been a Shaman eager to share the spoils?

Unentitled Opinion

In this post I am going to make a half-hearted attempt to give a fair assessment, as far as that is possible considering my ponderous lack of objectivity, of our current state of discombobulation. I won't go so far as to assert that my conclusions are based on anything deeper than my experience as an observer of my fellow humans for nearly 8 decades. When it comes to matters concerning our very survival, it won't do to become overly tangled up in such issues as scientific analyses, moral obligations, legal issues, and other things that one would ordinarily examine in times of less existential threats than those that now confront us.

We face a number of serious hazards as we go about our daily business, while basically ignoring all of them. You already know what the more commonly agreed upon dangers are: the decline of the West, if not civilization itself, the realization that democracy doesn't have the staying power that we had previously supposed, starvation, thirst, and global resource depletion, global warming and its resulting environmental disasters, enculturated racism, a universal lack of purpose, and not last, the psychological problems wrought by alienation and man's inhumanity to man.

Floating above and overriding this flotsam of detritus is an ineluctable realization that if our lives mean so little to our erstwhile and present fellow beings and our leaders, what hope is there for the human race, let alone for the individual?

Well, not that much, I would proffer. There is one tiny glimmer of sunshine, though, relatively speaking: as heretofore mentioned, I've been an observer of my specious species for nearly 8 decades.

The Crossing

Standing guards shivering in the shimmering shadows--

weighing the fear of the crossing--

the long blue line now waits for their purging--

On Becoming Dismade

It would be easy, as if being easy wasn't the problem.

To say, "well nothing . . . nobody's perfect."

We'll remain awhile, grow, fester, worsen.

What remains to bury will be forgotten.

Easier than we thought.

Had we.

The Agony of Antigone

An ancient cast this unburied corpse

like a leaf blown apart by a storm.

The Fallen cannot be seen by day.

One could drag the bloodied sea, the devil's den,

And seize no scrap of his blackened soul.

Soulless, his face shall sully forever.

His just reward his mirror reflecting

Naught but his eternally open grave.

Seen And Heard and Noted On The Fly

The hawk swooped and scattered

congregated birds at their feeder.

A lone squirrel screamed.

It was lifted, clawed and bloodied.

A silent cardinal watched from his treetop perch.

Sparrows fled. Defiant jays did not. Doves took cover.

Waves of crows dived and circled above.

Caw caw caw.  Caw caw caw.

The hawk flung its prey on the shingled

roof, shreiked, tore, and shredded

The lone squirrel was not yet dead, but silent,

and the vultures spread their frightful wings.

Sparrows, doves, a hungry squirrel returned.

The cardinal chirped his happy song.

Malarkey

The ancients had to deal with it.

There's still no getting away from it.

Some say it was started by a fractious God.

Some say He didn't cotton to diversity.

Some say He set out to prove a point--

No Goddamn Tower could game Him.

He started them babbling.

Some call this a lot of malarkey.

Some don't.

Why George (Eliot) Matters

"It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power, but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms into skills and makes life various with a new six days' work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy 'Let there not be' -- and the many coloured creation is shrivelled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon. And looking at life parcel-wise, in the growth of a single lot, who having a practised vision may not see that ignorance of the true bond between events, and false conceit of means whereby sequences may be compelled -- like that falsity of eyesight which overlooks the gradations of distance, seeing that which is afar off as if it were within a step or a grasp -- precipitates the mistaken soul on destruction?

--Mary Ann Evans, epigraph lifted from Daniel Deronda, Vol. II, Ch. XXI.