sometimes don’t care for nothin’, sometimes search heads for meanings, stories, stars..
For Labor Day, 2024, a haiku based on the poem Work Gangs by Carl Sandburg as published in his book of poems, Smoke and steel, New York, Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
Box cars run by a mile long. And I wonder what they say to each other When they stop a mile long on a sidetrack. Maybe their chatter goes: I came from Fargo with a load of wheat up to the danger line. I came from Omaha with a load of shorthorns and they splintered my boards. I came from Detroit heavy with a load of flivvers. I carried apples from the Hood river last year and this year bunches of bananas from Florida; they look for me with watermelons from Mississippi next year.
Hammers and shovels of work gangs sleep in shop corners when the dark stars come on the sky and the night watchmen walk and look.
Then the hammer heads talk to the handles, then the scoops of the shovels talk, how the day’s work nicked and trimmed them, how they swung and lifted all day, how the hands of the work gangs smelled of hope. In the night of the dark stars when the curve of the sky is a work gang handle, in the night on the mile long sidetracks, in the night where the hammers and shovels sleep in corners, the night watchmen stuff their pipes with dreams— and sometimes they doze and don’t care for nothin’, and sometimes they search their heads for meanings, stories, stars. The stuff of it runs like this: A long way we come; a long way to go; long rests and long deep sniffs for our lungs on the way. Sleep is a belonging of all; even if all songs are old songs and the singing heart is snuffed out like a switchman’s lantern with the oil gone, even if we forget our names and houses in the finish, the secret of sleep is left us, sleep belongs to all, sleep is the first and last and best of all.
People singing; people with song mouths connecting with song hearts; people who must sing or die; people whose song hearts break if there is no song mouth; these are my people.
it’s like the dentist unpleasant sometimes, but lots have been there before
Adapted from a passage by Stephen Vincent Benét in the short story Everybody was Very Nice as published in the book Thirteen O’Clock by Farrar & Rinehart in 1937.
That last is the salient note here.
Published back in 1937.
Feeling this way, back in 1937.
“Oh, it was a lot simpler in the old days,” he said. “Everything was for marriage — church, laws, society. And when people got married, they expected to stay that way. And it made a lot of people as unhappy as hell. Now the expectation’s rather the other way, at least in this great and beautiful nation and among people like us. If you get a divorce, it’s rather like going to the dentist — unpleasant sometimes, but lots of people have been there before. Well, that’s a handsome system, too, but it’s got its own casualty list. So there you are. You takes your money and you makes your choice. And some of us like freedom better than the institution and some of us like the institution better, but what most of us would like is to be Don Juan on Thursdays and Benedick, the married man, on Fridays, Saturdays and the rest of the week. ” and he grinned.
For myself in this passage, divorce is incidental.
It’s that cry of Oh, it was a lot simpler in the old days.
Someone once said something along the lines that each generation has to discover the 10 commandments for themselves.
Maybe I always understood this to mean the original 10 commandments.
Maybe instead, it means, each generation has to discover the 10 commandments … for that generation.
Only that’s a bit hard to work out, somehow.
At least in this great and beautiful nation and among people like us.
It’s rather like going to the dentist — unpleasant sometimes, but lots of people have been there before.
sometimes dreadful sense lonely with his burden once buoyancy is gone
For rarely is a man so alone as on the trail, especially under a canoe. He is then shut off completely from his fellow. Tom and I have sat for hours by a camp-fire at night, without a word to each other, each of us thinking his own thoughts, but with a most acute sense of companionship. Meditation is not lonely, even when it is solitary. But on the trail, with a heavy load, and weary, a man is intensely alone. The exertion, the pounding activity, the noise of one’s own heavy breathing, of one’s own heart beating, the implacable insistence of sweat — all these give something of the loneliness of severe pain, and forbid the soothing attunement of the spirit to the universe, which makes communion out of contemplation. In a sometimes dreadful sense, a man is lonely with his burden on the trail, once it has become a burden, once the buoyancy is gone.
From the book, The Incomplete Anglers by John Daniel Robins, Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd,1943.
But on the trail, with a heavy load, and weary, a man is intensely alone.
The exertion, the pounding activity, the noise of one’s own heavy breathing, of one’s own heart beating, the implacable insistence of sweat — all these give something of the loneliness of severe pain, and forbid the soothing attunement of the spirit to the universe, which makes communion out of contemplation.
In a sometimes dreadful sense, a man is lonely with his burden on the trail, once it has become a burden, once the buoyancy is gone.
Once more, the loneliness of severe pain, forbids the soothing attunement of the spirit to the universe, which makes communion out of contemplation.
No wonder sometimes I feel so tired, once that buoyancy is gone.
And once that buoyancy is gone, how do you get it back?
Sometimes no price would be too high for just a solid night of sleep.
happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun
“I have often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
Dr. Franklin is supposed to have said this or wrote this to James Madison or Mr. Madison remembered Dr. Franklin saying this when the United States Constitutional Convention finished their work.
Maybe it was one of those things that was too good for someone not to have said so history decided Dr. Franklin said it.
He was famous for saying things he never said and his autobiography might not have been the way it happened but surely, was the way it should have happened.
BUT I DIGRESS!
Dr. Franklin is supposed to have been looking at the designed carved into the back of the chair of the President of the Constitutional Convention, a feller named George Washington.
Driving to work this morning I new that as I looked east I was seeing the sun rise out of the Atlantic Ocean.
It matched my spirits.
Hopefully, if Dr. Franklin was around today and watching CNN he might once again say, “I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.“
never known woman who could weep about her age way men I know can
Well, the characteristic fear of the American writer is not so much that as it is the process of aging.
The writer looks in the mirror and examines his hair and teeth to see if they’re still with him.
“Oh my God,” he says, “I wonder how my writing is. I bet I can’t write today.”’
The only time I met Faulkner he told me he wanted to live long enough to do three more novels.
He was 53 then, and I think he has done them.
Then Hemingway says, you know, that he doesn’t expect to be alive after sixty.
But he doesn’t look forward not to being.
When I met Hemingway with John O’Hara in Costello’s Bar 5 or 6 years ago we sat around and talked about how old we were getting.
You see it’s constantly on the minds of American writers.
I’ve never known a woman who could weep about her age the way the men I know can.
From Interview: THE ART OF FICTION: JAMES THURBER. Paris Review, 3 (Fall, 1955), 34-49. Illustrated
This snippet made laugh.
I could picture Thurber in his mid 50’s, sitting in a bar with Mr. Hemingway and Mr. O’Hara and that alone is a picture to make me smile.
And that they were worrying about how old they were getting and that Mr. Thurber thought it was funny to the point of saying “I’ve never known a woman who could weep about her age the way the men I know can,” is but itself funny enough to make me laugh out loud.
For sure Mr. Thurber, who was being interviewed for this interview by George Plimpton, was having a great time tossing off the names of Faulkner, Hemingway and O’Hara with the confidence that he COULD toss off these names.
(I am reminded of the a story of Hollywood Movie Director John Ford going on a duck hunt with Clark Gable and William Faulkner and the conversation got around to writing and Gable says to Faulkner, ‘Who are the best writers right now?” Faulkner replies, “Oh Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck … and myself.” Gable says “Oh, Mr. Faulkner, do you write?” “Yes,” says Faulkner, “Mr. Gable … what do you do?” … The kicker is John Ford swore both were on the level.)
BUT I DIGRESS …
As a kind of post script to the James Thurber story, The Paris Review included this photo.
Notice the caption.
Notice it says CONSIDERABLY REDUCED.
By 1961, James Thurber was pretty much blind in both eyes.
One eye was damaged playing William Tell when he was a kid and the other eye went due to sympathetic eye syndrome.
When he died, EB White wrote in his New Yorker Magazine Obituary:
I am one of the lucky ones; I knew him before blindness hit him, before fame hit him, and I tend always to think of him as a young artist in a small office in a big city, with all the world still ahead. It was a fine thing to be young and at work in New York for a new magazine when Thurber was young and at work, and I will always be glad that this happened to me.
His mind was never at rest, and his pencil was connected to his mind by the best conductive tissue I have ever seen in action. The whole world knows what a funny man he was, but you had to sit next to him day after day to understand the extravagance of his clowning, the wildness and subtlety of his thinking, and the intensity of his interest in others and his sympathy for their dilemmas — dilemmas that he instantly enlarged, put in focus, and made immortal, just as he enlarged and made immortal the strange goings on in the Ohio home of his boyhood.
He was both a practitioner of humor and a defender of it. The day he died, I came on a letter from him, dictated to a secretary and signed in pencil with his sightless and enormous “Jim.” “Every time is a time for humor,” he wrote. “I write humor the way a surgeon operates, because it is a livelihood, because I have a great urge to do it, because many interesting challenges are set up, and because I have the hope it may do some good.” Once, I remember, he heard someone say that humor is a shield, not a sword, and it made him mad. He wasn’t going to have anyone beating his sword into a shield. That “surgeon,” incidentally, is pure Mitty. During his happiest years, Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes.
Thurber looked in the mirror and asked I bet I can’t write today and then spit in the mirror and said I am going to write anyway.
