Saturday

I did not sleep in this morning

as I had told myself I would

before turning in last night.

For one thing I am too old

to sleep in anymore, anyway, and

I roll out early no matter what,

and, no matter what, I take a nap about midday

everyday ordinarily for about half an hour

enjoying the cheap luxury of not giving a hoot.

At night, you might ask, are you in bed ordinarily by around

nine and I would answer yes. pretty much, as I have no TV

and you might wish to ask if my days are always this dull.

Oh, they've been this way pretty much for several years now...

before the politicians cramped our daily styles, trying their best

to keep a crashing economy from crushing their benefactors--

--and to save lives, of course! Oh my, nearly forgot...oh,

I did not. Trying to be cute here, as I have no TV to

confuse and accuse and amuse and enthuse and infuse

me with sponsored consensus, which I would accept only

if it agreed with my circumstances of comfort or aspirations, and

avoided agitating my irritations, or a particular one of my friends

by NOT CONSTANTLY SAYING EXISTENTIALISM!!

which wouldn’t bother me particularly unless I heard it

more than once an hour, or, upon reflection, every few days.

Where were we...oh, yeah, I was thinking to explain why

I’d decided to sleep in this morning, and why, upon reflection,

I am feeling somewhat remiss for not walking as usual

with my walking buddy, who’s stuck in her home teaching

university classes via the World Wide Web while

I’m stuck in my apartment trying to write what looks like poems.

Weather experts last night forecast a 14% chance of rain for

this morning, and although I knew the chance of this was

as good as my recollection now of the 14%, the odds were close

enough to affirm my body’s desire to start the day out a little

differently than the usual up, Facebook, out, walk walk walk

Facebook, breakfast, vitamins, legal pharmaceuticals, shower

Facebook, curse Zuckerberg, thank Zuckerberg, etc. etc.--

why does it seem necessary always to do two etceteras

when, as per the outhouse sign, my mother told me, one will do?

Rolling out this morning an hour earlier than the usual five, and

shuffling into what the British call the water closet to pee

I noticed it was so dark out I could not see if the promised

raindrops were pockety pocketying on the usual puddle outside

the northwest window which, if they were, I could sleep in

without remorse, and start my day without the walk walk walk.

At this point I became annoyed, with the weather experts

and with the rain god or gods for forcing me to step outside

to see for myself there were no raindrops or even puddles.

Really pissed now that I had based my anticipated sleep-in

on unreliable scientific prognostication, albeit knowing

the inherent unpredictability of atmospheric gamboling

I hissed to myself, to hell with it, and climbed back under

the covers for that extra hour of what should have been

blissful sleep, except my irritation interfered, and here I am.

                                                                                                                                   m.d. paust

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]