Sunny Day

The Boomer hears the Harleys and the punk cars on the road

in visible proximity through the windows of his front door.

He doesn't see them now because of the Navajo blanket

over the windows upon which the sun beats, bounding

from the white wall of his landlady's office

between the road and his front door.

It is early afternoon, and the bikers and punks are celebrating

perhaps their forced vacation from job or school, or they're

enjoying their youth or exercising their rage, or using

the roar of engines to mask their discomfort of

instinctive anticipation this viral scourge

will advance their own generation.

Or maybe, the Boomer accedes, it’s only the sunny day,

denying the gloom of abysmal news and its rules,

lifting all moods, including his own behind

the Navajo blanket blocking the sun and

muffling the boisterous sounds

of the exercised engines

through his front door.

The Boomer also wonders if his elation is not more attuned to

the fragility of his position on the spectrum of susceptibility,

the heightened clarity, appreciation, and the gratitude

for one more day--sunny, rainy, windy, or gray--as

the poets are wont to say of those condemned. 

 

                                                                                m.d. paust

Wee Beastie

I communed last night with one of the killer viruses

as I was about to open a bottle of Beaujolais.

The wine sat next to the apple cider vinegar bottle

with the clouded mother on the bottom,

the two of them behind the crockpot on my kitchen counter.

Limited to telepathy because of decibel incompatibility

I was unable to record the conversation, but I took notes.

After a perfunctory exchange of greetings, I asked if it was alone.

Wouldn’t you like to know, came the answer in my head in my voice,

and I said yes, and it said its answer had been rhetorical,

and, realizing now I was dealing with no simple germ, I asked if it could kill me all by itself, and it laughed, a slow, deliberate, condescending laugh, and, suddenly enraged, I lifted the spray bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol I carry everywhere and waved it across the counter, and my adversary revealed its name and rank as Major Tom and said how do you know my legion isn’t positioned in camps all over your apartment awaiting my signal to attack, and, knowing this was no rhetorical question, I said I’ve been taking 1200 milligrams of liposomal vitamin C twice a day, and Major Tom said oh, and ended the communication.

And I opened the Beaujolais and poured a ceremonial glass, and it was good.

                                                                                                                   m.d. paust

Cough

It's Benadryl season,

so there's no dearth of healthy phlegm,

ordinarily,

allowing a hold on panic--

advisable with others near enough

to hear the second.

I've not yet found the need

to try a third

for the reassurance

of a gurgle

and something to spit,

even alone and fairly certain

it will do the trick.

For I have others, tricks,

such as dialing down

to relax the sense of urgency in a

tickle,

itself more a product, we all know,

of habit, reflex, tic--

unneeded to alarm us any more

than the situation requires.

                                                                                                         m.d. paust

Danger Zone

My mood fluttered when I saw

the something impeding traffic

was someone with long grey hair

hunched over a cart,

oblivious

of everyone around.

I started to veer

but nearly crashed

with another

pressing behind us,

with another yet behind, and others

all in a hurrying column,

one shrieking its need for oil.

Breaking free at last

I stole a glance

as I pushed past the stalled cart

and saw the wrinkled hand

with the complimentary antiseptic wipe

scrubbing the cart handle

with meticulous care,

thinking he, then wondering, she?

                                                                                                      m.d. paust

Swordplay

A friend informed me this morning

he'd been found

positive

for presence of the virus

that could paralyze his lungs

and take his life.

We'd lunched together

only a week ago,

our spirits then

less airy

than customarily,

considering our similar positions

on the timeline of chance.

Yet, each healthy it seemed,

each fancying himself

a bon vivant

we'd braved

a quip or two

about our proximity,

even placing a little haha wager...

haha...haha...

                                                                             m.d. paust

[I should note that this poem is imaginary, altho we know similar scenarios are occurring worldwide every day now and are likely to become more frequent so long as people ignore the recommended precautions and consider themselves immune to something that happens only to "someone else."]

CORONA-19

One good thing about these damned killer microbes
has been their impact on my sensibility,
a seismic blessing I am humbled to see
as I'd been having trouble
subduing my irritation at the morning noise on the road
outside my apartment door.

The failure I recognized I was feeling
straining for sympathy for the “poor souls”
exercising their momentary autonomy with a vengeance
on the internal combustion engines carrying them to jobs
I gathered from the sound of raging acceleration
they powerfully resent, I know now
was the jealousy of a solitary retiree.

Now I hear the rages
as of mortally wounded beasts,
mechanized extensions
of the puny, frightened, denying hominids within
defying social distancing
and flying into the invisible lethal storm
for another paycheck
to feed and clothe their frightened families.

                                                                                  m.d. paust

MOMENT

The intimation of horror came without a blink of warning. I can’t trace it back logically to a genesis in something I’d read or heard or seen. Or dreamed--I was segueing into consciousness from the usual whimsically random, indifferent choreography of faces, silent voices, ghosts, and vague stresses. The stab of horror came an instant after the question arrived banishing lingering remnants before I could mount one and ride it back to the subconsequential imbroglio that would have granted me another hour or two of care-mending sleep. It was a cruel question, coming on breath that stank of the grave. 

The grave. The closer we come the more reluctantly we adapt, perspectives evolving behind fantasy shields against the mysterious inevitable’s starkening face. Shadow wisdom—the knees go first, maybe it’s Alzheimer’s…--sheds its abstraction as we edge toward proximity. That last is what punched through to a sanctuary I’d never found truly comforting, sensing a fragile accord with chance and denial. Unable to deny the incremental physical deterioration advancing years are bringing me I’ve held onto hope my mind can resist until the very end, for I cannot abide the thought of losing my ego. And so, coinciding with the palpable diminishing of physical options my attention has migrated toward adventures of the frontal lobe, where I’ve acquired the conviction that mind can indeed prevail over matter. Two examples are irrefutable—Stephen Hawking’s brilliance reaching into the Cosmos from a paralyzed body, and Thich Quang Duc’s absolute mastery over every fiber of his being during self-immolation to awaken a world inured to persecution of his fellow Buddhists.

Aware the mind is ordinarily last to know it’s fooling itself, and fearful of blissful ignorance, I constantly peek behind curtains where wizards are apt to dwell. But this can get tedious and demoralizing, and at some point probably risks neurosis. Staying balanced with age, to paraphrase Bette Davis, is not for sissies. Nor is awakening from a troubled sleep to the horror of a possible mental catastrophe, in my case that I’d unwittingly recycled the identical beginning of my review of another book by the same author. Had I not already sent it to the editor I could sigh heavily and blame it on...oh, I don’t know, some external distraction? National politics! Anything but the sort of memory loss that could signal the beginning of a terrible end. As a younger man I’d have laughed off such a gaffe as a brain fart. This morning there’s no laughter.

EMILY – Beate Sigriddaughter

Emily helped heal me this morning. Emily and two more hours of sleep. I'm not saying this as irony, although I can see how it might seem so. But I'm remembering a Norman Mailer assertion in perhaps Advertisements for Myself that some works of art can cure terminal cancer. As an example, he quotes part of a scene in William Burroughs's Naked Lunch describing open heart surgery being done with a toilet plunger. A theme in all of Mailer’s work I recall was his shock-and-awe attack on the boundaries of propriety, I could see how a sophomoric plunger scene in a work of “serious literature” would have aroused his admiration, perhaps even provoking it enough to have assuaged a hangover if not obliterated something catastrophic, as with Norman Cousins’s claimed laughing away a crippling bout of ankylosing spondylitis.

I’m hoping my morning malaise was nothing more than a combination of allergies, tail end of the flu, and a sudden claustrophobic alienation from friends herding online to hide their growing political anxiety. Feeling the onset of a low-grade panic myself, with a dizziness I sensed might floor me, I crashed for a little more sleep. Awoke feeling a little stronger, yet still torpid, weak, dispirited…

...a desperately friendly gathering brought back my sense of balance. This from Emily, setting the scene for a heart-bridging exchange between two women who apparently have nothing in common.

A less robust audacity than the sort to roust a Mailerian hangover perhaps, but the more curative for its subtlety—an antidote for the toxic social-media-required swift, surface judgment. Yes, “desperately friendly” describes many comment threads as they beg instant harmony, and the odd subterranean note can intrude like a deliberate belch in choir practice. Emily’s audacity (switching from title to voice now) is that she reports her sightings with a poet’s sensibility, not the bluster of a Mailer rebel. Two women with nothing in common who accidentally meet on Facebook will soon become invisible to each other. In the flesh, at the desperately friendly gathering, Emily tries a little harder after the other woman looks at her with starving eyes. Driven to survive this moment, Emily tells her she’d heard it was she who brought the honey in front of them on the potluck table.

“Oh yes, the woman eagerly responds. Her eyes relax. It’s rosemary honey. We also brought cheeses from upstate New York. Try some. They go together well.”

It is a short, outwardly simple poem—as are all twenty-nine in Emily—but like a perfect note played by a master violinist its overtones reach far beyond the moment and resonate long afterward in sublime memory. In an instant this morning Rosemary Honey reached all of the way inside me, touching and reassuring my starving heart. I felt something heal.

Ah yes, Emily of Emily is a child of Beate Sigriddaughter. No doubt of this. There’s her dance with joy and innocence. Her dance with disillusionment, disappointment, remembered horrors. Her hope for meaning, for the whisper of Divine. Her gratitude.

She’s a morning child, loving the excitements she knows await her for the day, remembering her breathless elfin adoration, and feeling she was still good enough for life.

Even Sunday mornings at church with her indifferent husband and the preacher insulting women from the pulpit as is so often the case, she enjoys the freedom to wear her hat and to bask in the choir’s voices, her time to sit and soar in private beauty.

She’s ambivalent, a bit of a pushover, as a child giving up her allowance to a fellow camper soliciting for a worthy cause, but disliking the girl from then on. As an adult, avoiding the sidewalk in front of a church where a beggar hangs out, her soul feels dusty and defensive.

Oh, Emily has a sense of humor, she does. To celebrate this, I’ll give you the entire poem, called 16^th Street Mall Shuttle:

On the way home from riding the roller coaster

twice, once in the front car, still fizzy with thrill,

Emily sits down on the mall shuttle, then notices

a small black man, even older than she is,

standing, leaning on a cane. All other seats

are taken. She jumps up and offers him her seat.

“No thanks, he says with a wrinkled smile,

“but you could give me a blow job.

Do something that’s really useful.” She turns

her head. Above them a sign reads

“Cancer cures smoking.”

Give Emily a look. She’ll see you, hear you, feel you. Heal you.

Get your copy here: Emily

Play it, Sam

Would the divine were meek,
a power sublime disinclined to meddle
to quell our crises,
preferring supplication, to be needed so completely one offers up self
for the touch of grace?


Would reason be in play,
a mutuality of sorts,
open invitation: you seek us out, we take you in,
succor's yours, your soul joins ours,
all in kind?


Would this be culling,
recruiting kindred spirits from the random multitude
with still the same old signs that point the way from primal
to live with love
or die?

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE – Stephen Crane

The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, ambertinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.

One of the better openings of a novel I have ever read. It beckons you straight-up, easing you into its dark milieu with an indelible foreshadowing scene using plain yet startling words that tickle portentous corners of the imagination.

Marvelous writing, that opening scene. My jaw hung open as I copied it from Kindle page to Word document to use in this review. Surprised I hadn’t remembered it from my first reading of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, as a boy, and it didn’t dawn on me until just now that it’s the finest writing in the entire novel.

All I did remember from back then was a vision of the protagonist--a boy a few years older than I—running terrified from the battlefield through a woods amid a stampede of retreating soldiers. I remembered the shame he felt, that he hadn’t lived up to his fantasies of heroism, and that he eventually was able to justify fleeing the fight when one of the others shuffling to the rear—they weren’t running, all were wounded—clubbed him on the head with his rifle. The injury drew blood, thus he obtained his “red badge of courage.”

Ominous talk lately about “civil war” in our current political word skirmishes prompted me to take another look at Red Badge. Surprised to see it’s only eighty pages, I was worn out from the flu and decided it would be a quick, non-taxing read. Mistake. Slogging along as if it were War and Peace, I was surprised again when I finished it and checked again for the page count: Eighty. Seemed more like three-hundred and eighty. 

Crane

And the problem was the writing. It seems once Crane put the finishing touches on that glorious first paragraph, he pulled out all the stops. Arching over the entire narrative is the strained, convoluted 19^th century literary style. I’ve navigated it in other works, but found it strangely out of place in a novel that takes place solely on battlefields and their environs. On top of that is the barely literate vernacular of the characters—all soldiers, and mostly uneducated enlisted men. I’ve always found extended phonetic representations of dialect tedious. A little bit, for flavor, and then, please...no more. Here’s a sample of the kind of dialogue strewn across the story as so many stumbling blocks I started feeling like one of Crane’s infantrymen trudging along wondering where in hell we were going.

“Oh, there may be a few of ’em run, but there’s them kind in every regiment, ’specially when they first goes under fire,” said the other in a tolerant way. “Of course it might happen that the hull kit-and-boodle might start and run, if some big fighting came first-off, and then again they might stay and fight like fun. But you can’t bet on nothing. Of course they ain’t never been under fire yet, and it ain’t likely they’ll lick the hull rebel army all-to-oncet the first time; but I think they’ll fight better than some, if worse than others. That’s the way I figger.

Okay, I move my lips when I read to myself. Sometimes. Found them, my lips, jabbering silently trying to pronounce whatever the hell was being said up there and in all of the rest of the dialogue. Bit my lower lip accidentally more than oncet. And here’s Crane’s narration, self-consciously literary, out of context for an uneducated youth: “Swift pictures of himself, apart, yet in himself, came to him—a blue desperate figure leading lurid charges with one knee forward and a broken blade high—a blue, determined figure standing before a crimson and steel assault, getting calmly killed on a high place before the eyes of all. He thought of the magnificent pathos of his dead body. These thoughts uplifted him. He felt the quiver of war desire.”

Most of the narrative takes place in the protagonist’s head. He’s referred to only as “the youth,” although his name is mentioned casually here and there in conversations with other soldiers. His two closest acquaintances are likewise named similarly, but we know them as “the tall soldier” and “the loud soldier.” Not having the names foremost in my mind irritated me at first, but eventually I came to find it helpful. More than a few named characters in novels often confuse me as to who is who. So that’s one for Crane.

What got on my nerves more than anything else was the confusion in The Youth’s head, and as I got back into the book I remembered this is precisely what bothered me when I read it as youth myself. Though premise is valid, there is only so much agonizing over oneself a reader needs to catch the drift that here’s a young recruit, wet behind the ears, fearing he won’t live up to his fantasies of heroism and the expectations of his comrades. Too much repetition, as if Hamlet simply could not stop repeating “to be or not to be” come hell or the Confederate Army.

Historians credit Crane for his “naturalism” and detail in describing battle conditions and psychologies, especially as he’d had no experience himself on a battlefield when he wrote Red Badge. He was a journalist, eventually covering the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars.

Still, his literary imagination and writing prowess at times converge to create scenes of near visceral realism, especially in the wider view. “...upon this stillness,” he tells us, “there suddenly broke a tremendous clangor of sounds. A crimson roar came from the distance. The youth stopped. He was transfixed by this terrific medley of all noises. It was as if worlds were being rended. There was the ripping sound of musketry and the breaking crash of the artillery...the battle was like the grinding of an immense and terrible machine to him. Its complexities and powers, its grim processes, fascinated him. He must go close and see it produce corpses.”

Ernest Hemingway said of Crane’s novel in the 1942 collection Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time, which he edited, Red Badge "is one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is."

A 1951 movie of Red Badge starred genuine war hero Audie Murphy as “Henry Fleming,” aka The Youth, and famed war cartoonist Bill Mauldin. It was directed by John Huston. The book was adapted for TV in 1974. 

Audie Murphy and Bill Mauldin

 

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]

WASHINGTON'S SPIES – Alexander Rose

One of my childhood heroes was Nathan Hale, the Connecticut schoolteacher/spy who gave us those thrilling last words before British troops hung him from a tree, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” Whenever I’d think of that moment I’d feel a frisson of wonderment. Could I, at such a dire time, the premature ending of my life, exhibit the patriotic courage and poise and presence of mind to bring forth such ringing eloquence instead of begging, weeping, and pooping my pants? I’m still wondering, and I dearly hope the opportunity to learn the answer never arises. But Washington’s Spies, based on letters, diaries, and official records, did clear up one thing about Hale’s final spoken words.

They weren’t what my gradeschool teachers taught me he said.

Hale likely had uttered the words, but earlier, at Yale, where he and classmates read them in Joseph Addison’s play, Cato. Years later, author Alexander Rose tells us, the memorable words were given as Hale’s last by former classmate William Hull, and others. “Hull could not have known what Hale said in his final moments, though he did remember that Hale had been struck by Cato when at Yale, and that he and Hull and [Benjamin] Tallmadge had talked excitedly of its brilliance. Perhaps he had specifically cited the ‘I regret’ line as representative of his patriotic views, and Hull, loyal as ever, allowed his friend the posthumous privilege of uttering it.”

British Capt. Frederick MacKenzie, who attended the hanging, wrote this in his diary: “He behaved with great composure and resolution, saying he thought it the duty of every good officer, to obey any orders given him by his commander in chief; and desired the spectators to be at all times prepared to meet death in whatever shape it might appear.”

I prefer that scenario. It may not resound through the ages, but it rings far truer than the theatrical Cato quote while yet reflecting Hale’s brave comportment at the end. A stoicism remarkable in itself for an amateur spy barely seasoned as an infantry officer standing on the ladder against the rope-slung tree limb by the freshly dug grave he knew was for him. It was almost as if he sensed the irony of his death becoming a martyrdom that would spark his country’s first military intelligence network.

Code-named it the “Culper Ring,” for no known reason other than that it played on Culpeper County, Virginia, where Washington had worked as a land surveyor during his teens. He chose “Samuel Culper” as the cover name for one of the ring’s first members, Abraham Woodhull, a Long Island farmer whose vegetables and livestock gave him easy access to produce-starved New York, selling to British troops and Loyalists. He and several other friends who’d grown up in the tiny Suffolk County, Long Island, community of Setauket formed the nucleus of the embryo spy ring.

Washington was breaking new ground using civilians to work undercover gathering intelligence. Previously armies relied on soldiers to scout out military tactical positions. Hale, an Army captain had volunteered for a plainclothes mission to reconnoiter the enemy. He was cautioned against it by a friend who told him he was too good-looking, and that this and his military bearing would give him away should anyone become suspicious. This proved prophetic, as the blackguard Robert Rogers, working for the British, easily spotted Hale, watched him taking notes at military sites, and finally befriended him as a “fellow rebel.” Rogers won the inexperienced Hale’s unwitting confession over beers in a local tavern.

The problem back then with using civilians was stigma. Only military scouting was acceptable, as civilians, working for money, were not deemed trustworthy. But Washington wanted information from civilians embedded in enemy territory. To help him set up such a system he hired Nathaniel Sackett, a middle-aged member of New York’s Committee for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies—the enforcement arm of the political revolutionaries. “If Sackett succeeded in recruiting agents,” author Rose tells us, “he would certainly require a deputy empowered to detail army riders to run their messages to headquarters, as well as able to soothe the snippier colonels annoyed that a civilian was interfering in matters they regarded as their own prerogative. To that end, Washington quietly appointed a freshly made captain, Benjamin Tallmadge of the Second Continental Light Dragoons, as Sackett’s military contact.”

Familiar name? One of Nathan Hale’s best friends at Yale. Rose includes some affectionate letters between the two during and after their college days, and concludes “If anything malign ever happened to one, the other would be merciless toward his assailants.” In addition, Tallmadge was a native son of Setauket, where the fledgling spies would be recruited. One code name leaped out at me as if deliberately bringing irony into our present day Washington imbroglio: Tallmadge was known in the Culper Ring as “John Bolton.”

Benjamin "John Bolton" Tallmadge

Rose’s exhaustive study of previously unexamined documents from this period won praise from colleagues for his scholarship.

“After working on Washington,” writes —Joseph J. Ellis, author of His Excellency: George Washington, “I knew there was a story to tell about his reliance on spies during the Revolutionary War. But I believed the story could never be told because the evidence did not exist. Well, I was wrong, and Alexander Rose tells this important story with style and wit.”

Richard Brookhiser, author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, writes that Rose, “making brilliant use of documentary sources...gives us intrigue, crossed signals, derring-do, and a priceless slice of eighteenth-century life.

As an enthusiast of the period, albeit with none of their scholarly dedication, who am I to disagree. I enjoyed this history unveiling immensely, with only one complaint. For the sake of my twenty-first century ear Rose might have gone easier on the direct quotes from correspondence and documents in that era. They spoke, or at least wrote, in what seems now a convoluted style that’s almost another language. Here, for example is part of a letter from Tallmadge to Hale in their college days: “Friendly Sir, In my delightsome retirement from the fruitless bustle of the noisy, with my usual delight, &, perhaps, with more than common attention, I perused your epistle—replete as it was with sentiments worthy to be contemplated...” I’ve read it several times now, and yet am not certain I have the drift.

I came to the book by way of a four-season TV series, Turn: Washington’s Spies, which I borrowed on dvd from the public library. Checking just now I see it is available online from several sources, including Netflix. The dramatization strays a bit from historical accuracy, but at least the dialogue is current. I’d happily watch it again. In fact I recommend watching it first, as I did, and then reading the book. Remembering scenes from the series helped me visualize their counterparts when reading the historical version.

[Find more Friday's Forgotten Books links at Todd Mason's amazingly eclectic blog]