PLEASE

A year ago, Hajnalka and I were trekking through Golden Gate Park, eyeing the yachts off in the distance, as they raced mightily for "The Cup". We gave them barely a side-long glance; we were there for the hills to climb, to revisit the Haights, so to speak. We are packing now to spend some downtime with them crawfish and po'boys "'way down yonder in N'Orleans". We don't expect to see many hills there, save those of steamin' hot rice and red beans that We Shall Overcome.

While completing a writing assignment for Penn U.'s ModPo (a Coursera program), distant voices came back to me, spanning across years, carrying their precious cargo. One of those voices was from the "Minstrel of the Dawn", Gordon Lightfoot. The year was 1968...On the back of his album, "Back Here on Earth", were the capped-words below, words to all, or any, of us who have never heard what it is exactly, that is "Blowing in the Wind".

Bob Dylan, like myself, a Lightfoot fan, called him one of his favorite songwriters, and observed that "when he heard a Gordon Lightfoot song he wished it would last forever."

Here's why:

PLEASE

I SEE MYSELF AS A CHILD
STILL EAGER TO LEARN BUT LOATHE TO ACCEPT
WHAT PASSES FOR REASON
I SEE MY FELLOW MAN
AS A CREATURE OF INFINITE GRACE
BOUND BY NATURAL LAW TO CREATE
YET CONTROLLED BY HIS OWN CREATIONS
I SEE THE WILD BEAST OF THE FOREST
AS NATURE'S OFFSPRING
SURROUNDED BY MYSTERIOUS BEAUTY
SEEKING COMFORT AT THE BREAST
OF MOTHER EARTH
VIOLENT YET INNOCENT
LIVING UPON THE REMAINS OF THE WEAKER ANIMALS
WHICH HE HAS STALKED AND KILLED
I SEE THE POET AS A WORD PROPHET
A DEALER IN SONGS AND PHRASES
OF WISTFUL MELODIES AND SUBTLE WARNINGS
PASSING HIS NIGHTS IN LONELINESS
TORMENTED BY BLANK PAGES
WHICH CRY OUT WITH DYING BREATH
TO BE FILLED WITH THE
SECRETS OF HIS HEART
I SEE HIM STANDING THIN AND RAGGED
IN THE DOORWAY OF HIS EMPORIUM
FACING EAST ACROSS THE BUSY MARKETPLACE
PAST THE TEEMING CROWDS
ACROSS THE BLAZING CONTINENT
TO THE MOUNTAINS BEYOND
TO WHERE THE MORNING SUN
SHOOTS ARROWS OF ENERGY
AT THE HOLLOWS OF HIS SLEEPLESS EYES
I SEE HIM WALKING
QUIETLY UNNOTICED
THROUGH THE GHETTOS OF OUR CITIES
ACROSS THE ROLLING COUNTRYSIDE
BESIDE THE SWOLLEN RIVERS OF SPRINGTIME
ALONG TRAIN TRACKS AND HIGHWAYS
I SEE HIM TAKING HIS REST
AT TRUCKSTOPS AND SLEAZY HOTELS
IN WORKSHEDS AND WAREHOUSES
LOADING DOCKS AND SHIPYARDS
AND CABINS UPON MOUNTAINSIDES
I WATCH HIM PLUNGE HEADLONG
INTO A RIVER TURNED RED
WITH THE BLOOD OF SLAIN ARMIES
BESIDE BATTLEFIELDS WHERE
PRIDE OUTWEIGHED THE VALUE OF LIFE ITSELF
I SEE HIM WALKING NAKED
THROUGH BUSY UPTOWN STREETS
FILLED WITH PEOPLE AT CHRISTMAS TIME
A SIGN ABOUT HIS NECK
UPON WHICH HE HAS PASTED
IN BOLD TYPE FOR ALL TO SEE
HIS LIFE'S WORK AND EPIC POEM
CONCEIVED BY HIS LONGING AND
FILLED WITH THE PERCEPTION OF HUMANITY
WHICH THE BUSY CROWDS IGNORE
AS THE WIND IGNORES THE TREES
THE ONE WORD                                  PLEASE

(c) 1968 Callee Music Corp
    

Windows on the World

ModPo friends and—


To all those who dwell in Possibility—
To all those who Sing Themselves—This—

 ____________________________________________________

1.

As strikes Thirteen—This Eleventh of September—Morn—

As Dreaded midnight hour flees—This—Our Dreaded Dawn—

I awoke just past midnight restless of mind. Thoughts meandering. Thinking a lot about Dickinson’s and Whitman’s poetry. The place of it in my life. Why should I invest of myself digging for their meaning, I wondered, when I’ve been spending a lifetime—happily—creating large and small meaning for Myself.

I got out of bed and heated up a cup of coffee. I went downstairs to my study and glanced at the volcano, an eruption of books that I’m reading and referencing, piled like lava rocks alongside my easy chair. A biography of T.S. Eliot, and another of his Collected Poems and Plays, Pete Hamill’s Forever, (the one book that I never want to finish reading. It will take me, well, forever,) The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, a collection of Wallace Stevens, The Complete Works of William Blake, The Complete Works of Walt Whitman, The Great Modern Poets of England and America, The Making of a Poem, A Handbook to Literature, Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, An Anthology of French Poetry (from Nerval to Valery), Dictionaries of English, French, German, and Latin…and these are just the titles that I can make out without restarting the lava flow.Why should I bother? I am just restless and wondering, I think. The coffee is old and strong…it begins to settle me. I need to go back to the future to find the answer. Cup in hand I scan the seeming acres of my often thrice-filled shelves. There, behind J. Barzun and his Decadence and scolding N. Ferguson, almost hidden by good-hearted Lewis' Clash of Civilizations I find what I’ve been searching for. All is calm. All is bright. The coffee has done its job, now I must do mine.

I slide out the autographed copy that I got from him at Barnes & Noble two decades ago. The neat signature--Harold Bloom--under the title, The Western Canon. (Subtitled on the cover, The Books and School of the Ages)—From Dawn to Decadence tumbles to the floor and down again crashes Civilization: The West and The Rest, sorry Niall, but I think I can pick them both up afterwards. But, right now I've got work to do.

I tune to WQXR, adjusting down the volume (so as not to disturb my wife who’s asleep upstairs—I have to wake her at 5:00 a.m.—she'll be off to the Presbytery to prepare breakfast for the hungry mob)—I plop into my Lay-Z-Boy Recliner and turn to those two chapters that expound upon Whitman and Dickinson, and after the closest of close readings place them at the very core of the Western Canon. He’s undecided who’s the better. Not between these two poets, O no, not Professor Bloom. He’s weighing them against Dante and Shakespeare for bragging rights. He slants slightly toward Walt, but is convinced that there has never been, nor will there ever be, a smarter poet than Emily, even if he is never absolutely sure what she means. He complains that she is so difficult that she gave him headaches. So armed now, with that knowledge, I can lay me down to sleep, restfully. At peace with Myself and My Songs.

What Cannot Be Without the Other Is the Other

Many years ago. Many, many, years ago, in fact, I sat in a lecture hall and listened to a very bright young professor of Philosophy, whom I shall call John Smith, largely because, believe it or not, John Smith was his actual name, expound upon the various themes in the branch of Philosophy known as Ethics. It was an introductory course, and I found it very, very interesting and threw myself into the study of the subject with a dizzying passion. After a few weeks of this, I felt myself becoming, smarter somehow, perhaps even wiser, as the ever-growing wealth of information passed through my fingers and beyond my eyes and seeped into my mind like a rich, green tea. After a few more weeks of near total immersion, the tea began to feel more like a thick, grayish soup that was starting to congeal in my brain, rather than the healthy and easily disgestible tea that I had enjoyed earlier.

My mind began to wander in class. I was perhaps nearing exhaustion, since at the time I was carrying a full course load, which included Spanish, Cultural Anthropology, English Literature of the 18^th Century, American History, and Philosophy while working full-time at night as a Proofreader/Typesetter to support my wife, our child, Benjamin Franklin Keeperman, and myself. From out of nowhere, and for what purpose I do not recall, it came to my meandering mind that opposites do not occur in Reality, but rather they are illusions created by us to order “things” in a manner that gives us a sense of actually having the power to create such order out of what any reasonably sane person would believe was a chaotic existence.

I had been reading much at the time about right and wrong, good and evil, free will versus Determinism (although I think Determinism went by a different name in those old days. Was it Cause and Effect? I can’t recall). Anyway, I gave up a week or so of sleep, and in the very spare time I had after doing my required reading, studying, working, commuting, etc., I managed to put several hundreds of single-spaced lines with my old L.C. Smith typewriter on some cheap legal-size pulp paper and titled it: Hypothesis: What Cannot Be Without the Other is the Other. I handed the same to my friend, the Professor, (we really had become friends by that time, because I was the only one that partook of his Office Hours where he was generous enough to listen to me praise to the high heavens the philosophical genius of our Founding Fathers whom, next to Captain Marvel and Blackhawk, remained my childhood heroes.)

He returned the typed work to me after the following class meeting. I could see that he had read it carefully, because it was practically impossible to read what I had typed under the abundance of questions that he had raised and inscribed; sometimes adding a half-dozen or more comments for each sentence that I had written. Even a novice such as myself could see that all of these questions were legitimate, and I found that I couldn’t, given my state of apparent ignorance, answer even one of them coherently. At the bottom of the last page, however, he wrote the following: Well, to tell you the truth the paper is around here somewhere, but I’ll be damned if I can find it. Maybe it is with those other pulps, Captain Marvel and Blackhawk. If I find it I’ll add his exact remarks to this blogpost.

The gist of what Professor Smith wrote was this: “Sir, you would be doing I, yourself, and Philosophy an honor and a service if you would consider making Philosophy your major and consider me as a Mentor in the months and years to come.” Well, needless to say, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I realized quickly that all those questions that he had raised about my hypothesis, all those questions that matter, are what makes being a Philosopher tick. They thrive on asking questions. That is why I decided to stick with Literature. I just love answering the questions that matter. Even if I am dead wrong.

On a Clear Night

“I inquired of that ‘Learn’d Astronomer,’”

You know the one I mean,

“Now see here, bud--if I may be so bold--

That what with the universe expanding,

So rapidly and all, oughtn’t you get a bigger telescope,

To stand a decent chance in Hell of gettin’ a glimpse of God before He’s up and gone?"

Revelations

Now that universal anti-Semitism has again reared its inevitable head, and the bloodsport of scapegoating has clogged both the Cyberswamp and the genuine Ether with instantaneous reports--like Scoreboards--Palestinians 1153/Israelis 67--with everyone but [some?] Jews rooting for more Jewish casualties to justify the carnage, perhaps one should take a short time-out to recall that in his novel, The Haj, Leon Uris is as prophetic, at least, as William Blake, if not Elijah himself, and thoroughly puts Nostradamus to shame when in Part Two, Chapter Eleven, one of his Israeli characters, Gideon Asch, speaking in April, 1948 makes a couple of startling observations which follow. Amazingly, Uris penned these dialogues 30 years ago, in 1984.

"When you see Ben-Gurion, you'd better impress upon him that he has to dissolve and absorb the Irgun. If you continue to allow a private little army in your midst, [ISIS, Hamas, Al Qaeda, ad inf] you'll end up with the same anarchy that pervades the Arab world. Allow it to continue, as the Irish have with the IRA, and you'll condemn yourself to everlasting chaos."

And this, later on the same page...

"Strange, isn't it, that we Jews are once again stuck with a dirty job no one else wants? You and all your snide friends in all the foreign offices know in your hearts the cruelty, the evil that emanates from the Moslem world. But you are afraid to hold Islam up to the light and tell your people, 'Look, this is what we have to live with.' No, let the Jews do it. We once again man the barricades alone, berated by our smug, so-called allies of the Western democracies. Islam is going to turn this world upside-down before this century is out [9-11-2001) and you'd better have enough guts to deal with it. It's lonely, here, Brompton. It's lonely."

Despite the bald-faced truths that Uris told, critics at the time dismissed him as biased in his writing--Pro-Semitic, you might say, as opposed to Israel's critics today.

As long as Islamists believe that the only peaceful solution is "the final solution," there will be no respite from the forces of reaction. That is not a prediction; it's merely a plain fact.

Moses and his followers wandered in the wilderness for forty years, Israel has been mired there for more than sixty. Who knew?

Sunnyside Gardens: A Bright Side of Life

A Slice of Life from Jonathan Lethem's
Dissident Gardens:

That's how you know you're still alive, Miriam wanted to tell her. Dying inside was for Rose a way of life. Within her mother was a volcano of death. Rose had spent her whole life stoking it, trying to keep the mess inside contained but fuming. In Rose's lava of disappointment the ideals of American Communism had gone to die their slow death eternally; Rose would never die precisely because she needed to live forever, a flesh monument, commemorating Socialism's failure as an intimate wound. Rose's sisters' unwillingness to defy, by their marriages, by their life stories, the obedient Judaic domestic-life scripts Miriam's grandparents had salvaged from that shtetl that was neither Poland nor Russia but some unholy no-Jew's land between; this rage too had to smolder eternally inside the radioactive container, the unexploded bomb that was Rose Zimmer. God himself had gone inside her to die: Rose's disbelief, her secularism, wasn't a freedom from superstition but the tragic burden of her intelligence. God existed just to the puny extent he could disappoint her by his nonexistence, and while he was puny, her anger at him was immense, almost Godlike. Finally, if you dared argue, if you needed proof of Godlessness in this vale of outrage, the Holocaust. Each of the six million was a personal injury nursed within the volcano, too.

Forever

From Forever, by Pete Hamill:

He had given Cormac the address on Stone Street of a place called Hughson's, where he might rent a room while Mr. Partridge looked for a place for his print shop. He himself would be staying at the Black Horse Tavern. Run by friends. Booked long ago. Cormac should call on him once a day, that was the plan, and Mr. Partridge would tell him of his progress. He had given Cormac a crudely printed map of the town, along with a litany of dire warnings. Don't let anyone carry your bag, or you'll never see it again. (The fastest thieves in the world live here.) Don't get drunk and lose control, or you'll lose even your shoes. (Lock your door, button your coat, strap your hat, tie your laces.) Don't sleep with any woman who offers her services (It's a city of whores), or you'll end up with a pox that will swell your tongue to the width of a plank. New York was a dangerous place, Mr. Partridge said. Full of thieves from many nations. (They speak seventeen different tongues, not counting the African languages.) The English were the worst. Lazy buggers. Rather steal than work. (As an Englishman, they fill me with shame.) There were hundreds of Englishmen transported to America for crimes committed in English cities. (They start by cutting their mothers' throats and then go downhill.) And they weren't even the worst.

"The most dangerous of the lot are the ones who now think they're respectable," he said when they were a week away from America. "They go to church. They wear fine clothes. They use snuff. And they'd steal the eyeballs out of your head."

He paused, staring at his journeyman's hands.

"Still and all, they'll give us much to print."