little perils of
routine living, no escape
in the unplanned tangent
Adapted from the final lines of the short story, A NOTE AT THE END, from the book, My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber.
Mr. Thurber writes in perhaps a presentiment of the COVID era:
In the pathways between office and home and home and the houses of settled people there are always,
ready to snap at you,
the little perils of routine living,
but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn.
there he came upon
an oyster lying in its
shell upon the sand
My brother Pete says that what is unsaid in a haiku is as important or more important that what IS said.
A digression but why unsaid but not issaid?
I adapted today’s haiku from James Thurber’s The Philosopher and the Oyster in his collection, Further Fables for Our Time.
This Further Fable reads thusly:
By the sea on a lovely morning strolled a philosopher—one who seeks a magnificent explanation for his insignificance—and there he came upon an oyster lying in its shell upon the sand.
“It has no mind to be burdened by doubt,” mused the philosopher, “no fingers to work to the bone. It can never say, ‘My feet are killing me.’ It hears no evil, sees no television, speaks no folly. It has no buttons to come off, no zipper to get caught, no hair or teeth to fall out.” The philosopher sighed a deep sigh of envy. “It produces a highly lustrous concretion, of great price or priceless,” he said, “when a morbid condition obtains in its anatomy, if you could call such an antic, anomalous amorphousness anatomy.” The philosopher sighed again and said, “Would that I could wake from delirium with a circlet of diamonds upon my fevered brow. Would, moreover, that my house were my sanctuary, as sound and secure as a safe-deposit vault.”
Just then a screaming sea gull swooped out of the sky, picked up the oyster in its claws, carried it high in the air, and let it drop upon a great wet rock, shattering the shell and splattering its occupant. There was no lustrous concretion, of any price whatever, among the debris, for the late oyster had been a very healthy oyster, and, anyway, no oyster ever profited from its pearl.
MORALS: Count your own blessings, and let your neighbor count his.
Where there is no television, the people also perish.
you are free to do,
free to say and free to choose
what I tell you to …
Adapted from James Thurber’s Further Fable, “The Bears and the Monkeys.”
Not sure why (oh sure) but it came to mind this morning.
Maybe it was 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.”
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.
what we learn next week
helps understand yesterday
look to the future
Carpe Diem so it says now on coffee mugs and T-shirts.
Seize the day.
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero!
Seize the day, and put very little trust in the future!
Or as Scarlett O’hara says, “Tomorrow is another day.”
My training is in the field of history.
My wife’s training is in market research.
My wife takes today and projects it 6 months into the future.
I cannot comment on today until tomorrow at the earliest and am more comfortable waiting six months.
We get along famously.
Lots of sparks along the road.
But it struck me today how much the past depends on the future.
The old debate on facts and truth.
I love this quote from today’s reading, “postmodernism was a response to Marxism, not an embrace of it, and in fact has been described as the “cultural logic of late capitalism”. In many ways, the defining condition of post-modernity is neoliberalism, so there is no reason for Conservatives not to embrace it. But for politicians, “postmodernism” has become one of those zombie ideas that cannot be killed by facts, no matter how many times academics explain that it does not in fact mean what they say it does.”
Yup.
For the me the keys phrase was “zombie ideas that cannot be killed by facts.”
I can easily apply that to today but what about any day.
And what are the facts?
What we know we don’t know that is to be known?
Where do we go for the facts?
All can agree that there is only one past and one present and one future.
But why did the one that happened happen.
What could have happened that may have made what did happen different.
Maybe this is all too early on a Saturday morning.
I remember an odd little story from the first atom bomb test in the desert in 1945.
There was much anxiety that after spending $2 Billion Dollars, it wouldn’t work.
According to records, physicist Enrico Fermi said maybe they had just spent $2 Billion dollars proving mankind could not make an atom bomb.
Fermi thought the money would have been well spent.
Each morning, each day, each incoming sweep of the tide (yep, live near the beach now) is a new start.
A new start to understanding what happened yesterday.
I spent the last 20 years of my life the TV news business.
Today I can barely watch it.
Much like the feller who worked in a sausage shop for 20 years and after moving on, refused to eat sausage.
The news lives on the blocks on WHO WHAT WHEN WHY and HOW.
But it runs on GET IT FIRST, GET IT FAST and BE ACCURATE (yes this comes last too often).
The first rough draft of history which is credited to The Washington Post’s owner. Phil Graham.
First into print those stories have a way of lingering around.
Look to tomorrow to understand yestarday.
How much will the narrative be changed?
I am reminded of a profile written by James Thurber of a man named Norman Kuehner, newspaper editor of the Columbus Dispatch and Thurber’s boss for several years.
It was Kuehner who taught Thurber to start his story with a wonderful, wordy introduction and a wonderful wordy conclusion.
Then take a pair of scissors and cut out the introduction and conclusion and you would have “A helluva good story.”
Thurber recounted how once he and Kuehner had an argument over a story.
Kuehner disputed the the story as Thurber wrote it and told to Thurber how he felt it happened and how the story should be written.
Thurber asked what if the competing paper, the Ohio State Journal and their version of the story proved to be true?
Thurber supported this version of the story.
“That,” said Mr. Kuehner, “would make it a Journal re-write.”
“I would give it a paragraph on page thirty.”
when coffee not work
thank goodness for back up plan
those smoothies at dawn
Some mornings I don’t drink coffee so much as I pour into my stomach and wait for the caffine to kick in.
No thought for the taste, aroma or the smooth liquid brown warmth that starts my day.
Its the kick.
The kick in the head.
The kick in the head that starts me up and off past all other complaints and concerns and gets me in a place to start my day.
Some days it isn’t there in the cup.
Then what?
The back up plan.
I get up and go to work on the kitchen counter.
I work there as the coffee usually goes to work.
And on the days that I go to work and the coffee doesn’t?
Well …
On those days,
I have Ellington.
Ellington is my son who is also stuck at home and working his way through his senior year in high school.
He is starting is day.
His day starts with a fruit smoothie.
A concoction that requires about about 10 kinds of fruit, fresh or frozen, that he puts into his smoothie maker.
A smoothie maker might have been called a blender but for one slight diffference.
I am not awake.
Not fully awake anyway.
And the mornings I need a real kick to get going are not my best mornings.
Sickly.
Headachy.
Thick headed.
Slow.
Then Ellington turns on the smoothie maker.
It doesn’t turn on as much as it goes off.
It goes off like a bomb.
Like a bomb three feet from my ears.
Like a shrieking siren.
Like a shrieking siren three feet from my ears.
I have never stood next to an F-16 fighter jet when it takes off.
But I would be surprised if its louder and produces a higher pitched squeal than that smoothie maker,
It wakes me up.
It wakes up the people in the next apartment I am sure.
Maybe the whole building.
It gets me going for a lot of reasons.
In the short story, Something to Say, James Thurber writes of Elliot Vereker, “Vereker always liked to have an electric fan going while he talked and he would stick a folded newspaper into the fan so that the revolving blades scuttered against it, making,a noise like the rattle of machine gun fire. This exhilarated him and exhilarated me, too, but I suppose that it exhilarated him more than it did me.”
I know just the point Thurber was after when Ellington hits the on switch on that smoothie maker.
Except that I am sure if the sound exhilarated Ellington and exhilarated me, too, I suppose that it exhilarated ME more than it did him.
My backup plan.
It’s good to have a plan.
It gets me back up.
