7.2.2022 – laughter, singing rang

laughter, singing rang
again, all the sounds of the
earth were like music

Adapted from James Thurber’s Further Fable, “The Bears and the Monkeys.”

I have used this fable of Mr. Thurber’s before.

I will most likely use again and if I don’t use it again, I will read it again and most likely often.

The fable is an analogy on the red scare of the McCarthy era when folks were afraid to think for themselves and wake up to find out they were accused of being a communist.

It was better to let someone else do the thinking for you than risk being labeled being part of the red threat or a pinko commie sympathiser.

So they thinking went according to the monkeys.

When I first read this probably 50 years ago when I was a kid, I think I was able to grasp the meaning that folks do not want anyone telling them what to.

Maybe I was thinking along the lines of Mr. Lincoln’s “as I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”

I thought the story noble in its’ irony.

I read it today not in with humor but with horror.

I read it today and feel that the irony now goes over most folks heads.

I read the line, “By sparing you the burden of electing your leaders, we save you from the dangers of choice. No more secret ballots, everything open and aboveboard.” and I hear folks yelling, “YESSIR, THAT’S IT!”.

As Mr. Twain wrote in Huckleberry Finn, “Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?”

BOY Howdy 😦

I still somehow have hope.

Maybe its more I want to refuse to be hope-less.

But I do hope that one day folks will break the chains of their new freedom and found their way back to the deep forest and begin playing leap-bear again and stealing honey and buns from the nearby cottages. And folk’s laughter and gaiety will ring through the forest, and birds that had ceased singing begin singing again, and all the sounds of the earth will be like music.

The Bears and the Monkeys.

In a deep forest there lived many bears. They spent the winter sleeping, and the summer playing leap-bear and stealing honey and buns from nearby cottages. One day a fast-talking monkey named Glib showed up and told them that their way of life was bad for bears. “You are prisoners of pastime,” he said, “addicted to leap-bear, and slaves of honey and buns.”

The bears were impressed and frightened as Glib went on talking. “Your forebears have done this to you,” he said. Glib was so glib, glibber than the glibbest monkey they had ever seen before, that the bears believed he must know more than they knew, or than anybody else. But when he left, to tell other species what was the matter with them, the bears reverted to their fun and games and their theft of buns and honey.

Their decadence made them bright of eye, light of heart, and quick of paw, and they had a wonderful time, living as bears had always lived, until one day two of Glib’s successors appeared, named Monkey Say and Monkey Do. They were even glibber than Glib, and they brought many presents and smiled all the time. “We have come to liberate you from freedom,” they said. “This is the New Liberation, twice as good as the old, since there are two of us.”

So each bear was made to wear a collar, and the collars were linked together with chains, and Monkey Do put a ring in the lead bear’s nose, and a chain on the lead bear’s ring. “Now you are free to do what I tell you to do,” said Monkey Do.

“Now you are free to say what I want you to say,” said Monkey Say. “By sparing you the burden of electing your leaders, we save you from the dangers of choice. No more secret ballots, everything open and aboveboard.” For a long time the bears submitted to the New Liberation, and chanted the slogan the monkeys had taught them: “Why stand on your own two feet when you can stand on ours?”

Then one day they broke the chains of their new freedom and found their way back to the deep forest and began playing leap-bear again and stealing honey and buns from the nearby cottages. And their laughter and gaiety rang through the forest, and birds that had ceased singing began singing again, and all the sounds of the earth were like music.

MORAL: It is better to have the ring of freedom in your ears than in your nose.

Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated by James Thurber, New York, Harpers, 1940.

6.7.2022 – Belle Riviere –

Belle Riviere –
the french named it – a woman
easy to look at

We crossed the Ohio River again recently.

I was reminded of the poem, Whiffs of the Ohio River at Cincinnati, by Carl Sandburg from the collection, Good Morning, America.

The part in particular that goes:

When I asked for fish in the restaurant facing the Ohio river, with fish signs and fish pictures all over the wooden, crooked frame of the fish shack, the young man said, ‘Come around next Friday — the fish is all gone today’

So, I took eggs, fried, straight up, one side, and he murmured, humming, looking out at the shining breast of the Ohio river, ‘And the next IS something else, and the next is something else’

The customer next was a hoarse roustabout, handling nail kegs on a steamboat all day, asking for three eggs, sunny side up, three, nothing less, shake us a mean pan of eggs

And while we sat eating eggs, looking at the shining breast of the Ohio river in the evening lights, he had his thoughts and I had mine thinking how the French who found the Ohio river named it La Belle Riviere meaning a woman easy to look at.

5.31.2022 – as mysterious

as mysterious
as great the perpetual
rhythm of the tides

In “Notes for a Preface“, an essay written by Carl Sandburg for the the book “Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg“, Mr. Sandburg wrote, “The Spanish poet Lorca saw one plain apple infinite as the sea. “The life of an apple when it is a delicate flower to the moment when, golden russet, it drops from the tree into the grass is as mysterious and as great as the perpetual rhythm of the tides . . .“

According to Wikipedia: Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (5 June 1898 – 19 August 1936), known as Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director.

García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of ’27, a group consisting of mostly poets who introduced the tenets of European movements (such as symbolism, futurism, and surrealism) into Spanish literature. He was murdered by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. His remains have never been found.

In the poem, Ballad of the Water of the Sea, Lorca writes:

The sea
smiles from far off.
Teeth of foam,
lips of sky.

Folly Field Beach at high tide – Hilton Head Island May 30, 2022

Murdered by the nationalistic or Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War, those types of fellers have always had it for the poets and artists and such.

The smart people I guess.

I am reminded of the story of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia.

When they took over Cambodia they knew they had to cut off opposition and the best way to do that was get rid of the smart people, the people who could think, the people who would ask questions and start other people asking questions.

And so they did.

They soldiers of Pol Pot went from town to town and executed all the smart people.

They knew who to get.

They started with anyone wearing glasses.

5.23.2022 – the sky and the sea

the sky and the sea
put on a show, every day
they put on a show

Adapted from Carl Sandburg’s, Thimble Islands, which was published in “Good morning, America” by New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928.

In searching for the full text of this poem to copy and paste into this essay, I came across a 269 page document from the Office of Education in Washington, DC that had been written by the University of Oregon, titled The Whole Poem Teacher.

The document was identified as a Poetry: Literature Curriculum – Teacher’s Guide.

Printed in 1971, the first two paragraphs of the introduction state:

In the lessons preceding this one, your class has concentrated on various poetic techniques, isolating them more or less from the total fabric of the poem for the purposes of examination and identification. Such a process is necessary, but it is a rather sterile exercise if it stops there. For the goal of all this investigation has been not the ability to identify poetic devices, but to enjoy more fully the experience of reading a poem. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to “put back” all the isolated elements into the whole poem.

To borrow a useful distinction made by the poet:-critic John Ciardi, we want our students to be able to answer not only the question, “What does this poem mean?” but also the question, “How does this poem mean?” Answering the first question only leads to bad paraphrase and moral- abstracting. Answering the first question in terms of the second, on the other hand, leads to close and intelligent reading, to appreciation of the internal dynamics of the poem, and consequently to a far more sensitive perception of the poem’s “meaning.” For in poetry the way something is said is part of what is being said.

Wanting to avoid the introduction tearing out scene of Dead Poets Society, I think this is rather good as it does not impose a scale but plays on the readers interpretation.

“How does this poem mean?” and “… in poetry the way something is said is part of what is being said.” is good even as it brackets that oh so ponderous statement, “leads to close and intelligent reading, to appreciation of the internal dynamics of the poem, and consequently to a far more sensitive perception of the poem’s ‘meaning.‘”

The document was part of the Oregon Elementary English Project and according to the first line of the abstract, This curriculum guide is intended to introduce fifth and sixth grade children to the study of poetry.

Fifth and sixth grade children?

All I can say about that is to paraphrase the Book of Psalms, Lord Byron and Stephen Vincent Benét (all at the same time!), By the rivers of Babylon, There I sat down and wept, When I remembered Zion.

Here is the Sandburg poem:

THIMBLE ISLANDS

The sky and the sea put on a show
Every day they put on a show
There are dawn dress rehearsals
There are sweet monotonous evening monologues
The acrobatic lights of sunsets dwindle and darken
The stars step out one by one with a bimbo, bimbo.

The red ball of the sun hung a balloon in the west.
And there was half a balloon, then no balloon at all,
And ten stars marched out and ten thousand more,
And the fathoms of the sky far over met the fathoms of the sea far
under, among the thimble islands

In the clear green water of dawn came a float of silver filaments, feelers
circling a pink polyp’s mouth.
The feelers ran out, opened and closed, opened and closed, hungry and
searching, soft and incessant, floating the salt sea inlets sucking the
green sea water as land roses suck the land air

Frozen rock humps, smooth fire-rock humps –
Thimbles on the thumbs of the wives of prostrate sunken
giants –
God only knows how many sleep in the slack of the
seven seas

There in those places
under the sun balloons,
and fathoms, filaments, feelers –

The wind and the rain
sew the years
stitching one year into another

5.21.2022 – appreciative

appreciative
of the good things in life, kind,
has intelligence

If it’s Saturday (and for me it is) and if someone is reading this (and they must be to read this) and they have read these posts in the past (which they might have) it will not come as a surprise that today’s haiku is based on the weekly feature in the Guardian titled, “Blind Date.”

Two people agree to meet in a London Restaurant and answer questions about the evening.

Often it is just the restaurant and its menu that brings out the comments in my fingers as they type on the keyboard and the restaurant today, Ottolenghi Spitalfield, could be a part of a Saturday morning creative process and but another day.

That being said, I find it hard to accept that I could call my wife and say, “Made reservations at Ottolenghi Spitalfield’s” and she would not have reservations of her own.

(UPDATE – further research shows that the place was Ottolengi’s IN Spitalfield but I am not sure that helps)

Also, I have to mention that a menu that list’s a Butter bean mash, burnt lemon and coriander salsa, pine nuts, Aleppo chilli for £11 or Lamb kebab, tzatziki and ladopita for £17 deserves some further attention, but I digress.

In the Blind Date today, the participants where asked the question, Best thing about …?

One of today’s blind dater’s responded: He seems kind, appreciative of the good things in life and has emotional as well as practical intelligence.

Which, I would think, anyone would be happy to have as someone’s first impression of themselves.

But it got me to thinking.

What are the good things in life?

I got to making a list of things.

I was smart enough in making my list that these ‘good things in life’ are of course those things that are free or cheap.

Right?

I mean I started my list with sunshine.

Maybe you have had to grow up in West Michigan, notably the 2nd most overcast piece of real estate in the Western Hemisphere, after the Pacific Northwest and Seattle, to understand how good a sunny day can make you feel.

Then I went the other way and made a list of the good things that aren’t free.

Not wanting to brag, by my wife and I can pick out the best bottle of wine available at the nearby gas station with our eyes closed.

Well, maybe not closed, as we do have to make sure that it is the cheapest.

This has got a little more complicated since the local gas station started keeping the Cabernet and the Merlot in the cooler for our conveince.

As a tip, the $6 gas station bottle is far superior to the $4 Kroger bottle.

(BTW, my latest book, “After the Third Sip, It All Tastes the Same” is number 3 in Germany this week)

But then I kicked myself and said, gee whiz stupid, get with the program and come up with the good things of life.

Then I looked at the phrase again, appreciative of the good things in life.

It came to me that there is no definitive list of ‘the good things.’

Everyone’s list is different.

It is the appreciative part that is the key.

Much like how Alice Walker wrote in the Color Purple, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

I am reminded of Carl Sandburg’s poem, Happiness:

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

There are a lot of people in this world.

God put a lot of good things in this world.

I hope I can appreciate it.

Or as the wonderful Nora York sang, Thank you for my breath, my breathing.