Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Leunig

"Once upon a time I was a political cartoonist...but had trouble making witty, incisive jokes; as a small rebellion against deadlines, punchlines and politics...I drew what I thought was an absurd, irresponsible triviality. It showed a man riding towards the sunset on a large duck. On his head was a teapot...not a 'proper' cartoon by conventional standards...the editor laughed, shook his head and published it. Many years later I was able to interpret the meaning of the drawing with certitude...the man was most definitely me and the teapot, worn like a fool's cap, symbolised warmth, nourishment and domestic familiarity...the duck represented feelings of primal freedom and playfulness..innocently I had drawn my impending departure from political cartooning, my flight to freedom."

 

I can't find the original drawing of which Leunig writes. Let's say the one I found (above) is a successor self-portrait. The duck grew tired of being ridden by a man. They continue their journey together. Some time later the duck turns and looks at the man, who responds.

 

 

With a little bit of luck
A duck
Will come into your life.

 

 

Or if you're inclined to go it alone....

 

 

Leunig — no one I know uses his first name — is a national treasure in Australia (literally: in 1999 he was declared a national living treasure by the National Trust and awarded honorary degrees from La Trobe and Griffith universities and the Australian Catholic University for his unique contribution to Australian culture.) 

For those intrigued by my short introduction above, I recommend the website maintained on his behalf. From that source, here is a brief biographical excerpt:

Michael Leunig is an Australian cartoonist, writer, painter, philosopher and poet. His commentary on political, cultural and emotional life spans more than forty years and has often explored the idea of an innocent and sacred personal world. The fragile ecosystem of human nature and its relationship to the wider natural world is a related and recurrent theme.

His newspaper work appears regularly in the Melbourne Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. He describes his approach as regressive, humorous, messy, mystical, primal and vaudevillian - producing work which is open to many interpretations and has been widely adapted in education, music, theatre, psychotherapy and spiritual life.

"In the artist of all kinds one can detect an inherent dilema which belongs to the co-existence of two trends; the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found." 

                                    - D.W. Winnicott

Serendipity, and a poem, "Only Once," by Denise Levertov

The poetry of Denise Levertov has long been a valued companion. Six years ago I wrote why that has been so. Interested readers may find that post here, with three more Levertov poems.

The question "Why?" has it's origins in the very beginnings of our learning language. Children are fascinated and delighted by their growing capacities to speak their mother tongue, their mother's tongue, their parents' tongue — in fortunate families, such as that of my great-grandaughter, their parents tongues (plural).

My great-grandaughter lives with her parents in a small house on the outskirts of Quito, Ecuador. From infancy she has learned both Spanish and English. In her still small world, her still small voice, the voice we used to attribute to God, she pimarily speaks Spanish. Her father, my grandson, was born in Edinburgh, but now speaks Spanish better than he speaks English (or Scottish). We tend to forget languages we don't often use, just as we may forget — at least until we are next stirred by the mystery of memory — much about people we no longer see.

For example, I have forgotten my mother's voice. She did not leave me a recording or poems, but she left me a great deal for which I am grateful.

The reader by now will be accustomed to my habit of periphrasis and my incurable attachment to serendipity, the aptitude for making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident. The word was used by Horace Walpole in the mid-1700s. Walpole said he took it from a Persian fairy tale, "The princes of Serendip," whose heroes, he said, "were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." For those determined to find origins (like Eric Partridge), Serendip was the Arab name for Sri Lanka, from the Arabic word serendib, roughly speaking, golden island.

I wish accident and sagacity would always go together. They often don't.

C.G Jung probably adapted serendipity (serendipitously, as it were) in coming upon his concept of synchronicity, which has found its way into English usage. Something is not sought, but it's found, and we then come to feel it was meant to come, or may have been there all along without our recognition, thus causing a shiver of pleasure or wonder. Denise Levertov knew such experiences.

 

Denise Levertov, 1923-1997

 With that introduction, here is a poem of Denise Levertov.

 

Only Once 

 
All which, because it was 
flame and song and granted us 
joy, we thought we'd do, be, revisit, 
turns out to have been what it was 
that once, only; every invitation 
did not begin 
a series, a build-up: the marvelous 
did happen in our lives, our stories 
are not drab with its absence: but don't 
expect to return for more. Whatever more 
there will be will be 
unique as those were unique. Try 
to acknowledge the next 
song in its body -- halo of flames as utterly 
present, as now or never.

 

Yes, the next song to appear will not — not clearly, not at once — maybe, as Levertov suggests, not at all, come from the last song you knew, or heard, or sang.

At least, your next song will be more likely to grace you with its presence, its joy, if you are prepared to imagine it 'in its own body" — and in yours, not in some other body, nor in your closet of ready-to-wear songs.

 

 

The soul, by Wislawa Symborska

I continue to marvel.

 

NOTHING'S A GIFT

 

Nothing's a gift, it's all on loan.

I'm drowning in debts up to my ears.

I'll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

 

Here's how it's arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

 

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I'll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

 

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors.

some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

 

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

 

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we'll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless too.

 

I can't remember

where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

 

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it's the only item

not included on the list.

 

(Poems New and Collected 1957-1997, trans. S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

Stockholm: Wislawa Szymborska and the 1996 Nobel Prize for Poetry

I've been immersed of late in the writings of Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet who won the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1996. Mostly I've been reading and re-reading her poems, but then I found myself wanting to know if she traveled from her home in Kraków to Stockholm to receive the Prize in person, because if she did, she would probably have given a speech when she accepted the Prize. I wanted to read that speech.

I'm very glad I followed my nose, because I've been richly rewarded. By two gems. First, by her reflections on the importance of the sentence, "I don't know." It seems like an ordinary, unexceptional sentence, only three words, and expressive of our ignorance at that. Or maybe not only that. Roll it around in your mind. Imagine different ways of saying it, different ways you have said it to yourself or others. Was it the end of a story or the beginning, or — taking a little inspiration from quantum physics — perhaps both at once?

That is just what Wislawa Szymborska was thinking about, and finding a way to say, in her speech on that gray day in Stockholm, the 7th of December 1996. Perhaps she was thinking, dreaming and jotting notes on the train from Kraków to Stockholm. (I imagine her on a train.) Anyway, she said something important about that maligned phrase, "I don't know."  And her reflections took her wonderously from inspiration, to "I don't know," to astonishment. 

"[I]nspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners - and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous "I don't know."

"That little phrase 'I don't know' is small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself "I don't know," the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself "I don't know", she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families, and would have ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying "I don't know," and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize.

"Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.

"I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself.

"The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing.

"But 'astonishing' is an epithet concealing a logical trap. We're astonished, after all, by things that deviate from some well-known and universally acknowledged norm, from an obviousness we've grown accustomed to. Now the point is, there is no such obvious world. Our astonishment exists per se and isn't based on comparison with something else.

"Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like 'the ordinary world,' 'ordinary life,' 'the ordinary course of events' ... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.

"It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them."

 

 

 

Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"

Richard Wilbur's poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," reflects upon the experience of waking from sleep, and in a larger sense the experience of awakening into a larger and clearer consciousness (or not). Outside the waking sleeper's window hangs a line of laundry. As Wilbur says, the scene is outside the upper-story window of an apartment building, in front of which, on a clothesline, "the first laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky." 

"The things of this world" is a phrase taken from St. Augustine's Confessions, as in these lines from Book X:   "I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have no being at all."

"Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree," says Wilbur, "have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us back." That is the poem's central theme, the variations and complexities, the imbalance and balance, of returning to the earth, the quotidian, the things of this world. Awakening.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;

Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance."

 — Richard Wilbur

Here is Richard Wilbur commenting upon and reading "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjeLdTk7lPU

And here is another short video portrait of Wilbur, reflecting upon his mother and father, their families and their impact upon his life and work as a poet:

http://www.webofstories.com/play/14719

 

Sockdolager

I occasionally come upon an unfamiliar word or phrase that particularly tickles my fancy. Today's example, courtesy of an old and well-read friend, is sockdolager.

A sockdolager is a hard hit, knockout or finishing blow or remark; something exceptional or outstanding.

As in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckelberry Finn: "The thunder would go rumbling and grumbling away,..and then rip comes another flash and another sockdolager."

J.R. Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms (1848) offers us another related usage, one hopes for the sake of the fish among us referring to an obsolete instrument: "Socdolager, a patent fish~hook, having two hooks which close upon each other by means of a spring as soon as the fish bites."

I discovered from the Online Etymology Dictionary that sockdologising "was nearly the last word President Abraham Lincoln heard. During the performance of Tom Taylor's 'Our American Cousin,' assassin John Wilkes Booth (who knew the play well) waited for the line 'Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, you sockdologising old man-trap,' and as the audience laughed, Booth fired the fatal shot."

Another use of the term is in a tale told by Davy Crockett during his years as a member of Congress. He characterized as sockdolagers two comments addressed to him by a learned farmer and constituent, one Horatio Bunce, who persuaded Crockett that he had inadvertently violated the Constitution by his support of a bill passed by the House of Representatives in the preceding year. It's a good story, and may be found here.

Davy Crockett

Google Tap and Google Fiber: revolutionary products

Google Tap! A terrific Google spoof for April Fool's Day. Just imagine, writing two letters at once to two entirely different people, with only two buttons, while you're seated on the pot taking care of yet a third piece of important business. And perhaps a fourth, chewing a piece of Google Fiber! Available at www.gmail/tap and www.gmail.com/fiber. Well, the G-Fiber may already be sold out, or run to your local Apple Store. Get them while (if) they last.

There's a serious side to this spoof. If Google Tap is still in the offing and most of us are not about to relearn Morse Code, there are existing applications for our computers, iPads and "smart" phones that point in that direction. Nuance Communications, a large corporation which a recent article in the New York Times called "the leading force in voice technology, and the speech-recognition engine behind Siri, the virtual personal assistant on the Apple iPhone 4S," has also created an app called Dragon Go, and is hard at work on Dragon TV. 

"Humans are wired for speech and tend to respond to talking devices as if they were kindred spirits, says Sherry Turkle, a professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology."

“I’m not saying voice recognition is bad,” Professor Turkle says. “I’m saying it’s part of a package of attachments to objects where we should tread carefully because we are pushing a lot of Darwinian buttons in our psychology.” A curious phrase to use in this context, but I suspect she means there is the possibility that if we spend more time talking with machines we'll spend less time talking with each other. And pushing those buttons could indeed be dangerous to human health and well-being, say to friendships, marriage, and parents and children, for starters.

Think of how many well-dressed men and women you've seen walking down the sidewalk talking into the air, more or less oblivious to their surroundings, or teenagers in a corner of a coffee shop huddled over their cell phones. I've been known to do it myself. Maybe more amusing than dangerous, but I think Professor Turkle is right: we should tread carefully and consciously. 

Sven Birkerts writes in the current (April) issue of Poetry Magazine, “We are glued to our screens of all sizes not for amusement or business, but because we think something is going to be announced. We can’t bear to miss it,. We are waiting for the oppression of  ’what’s next?’ to be lifted. We are, in a deeper sense, waiting for our poet.”

My kinship with fruit flies

I think, but am not 100% sure, that until this very moment I have never felt kinship with a fruit fly.

I'm happy to add that while in these years of growing old I continue to feel stress and my responses seem no less diverse and no more or less effective than earlier in life, I no longer feel rejected by attractive females and am no longer tempted to drown my sorrows. My most reliable balm for dysphoria includes the gift of companionship and good conversation, the pleasures of reading, writing and long rambles in field and forest. That, I suppose, may still be regarded by neuroscientists as benign self-medication.

 Lest you conclude that I am fruitcake and/or aspiring to publish in True Confessions (available only at supermarkets) the above reflection was prompted by reading a New York Times account of a study published in the leading American scientific journal, Science. 

 The study itself is entitled "Sexually Rejected Flies Turn to Booze." Well, perhaps that is the racier online version. I have not read the Science article. The illustration at right, however, is drawn from the version on the Science website. It's caption reads "Drinking away rejection. Male [fruit]flies whose attempts at mating have been rejected by females prefer drinking alcohol (right [he does appear comatose, but while on his back he's still guzzling]) over a nonalcoholic sugar drink."

The Times story, explicitly comparative and relatively sober on the subject of addiction and its dynamics, is nonetheless called "Learning from the Spurned and Tipsy Fruit Fly." 

It is perhaps apropos to add this intriguing tidbit: Some species of fruit fly, notably Drosophila melanogaster, are engaged in a fascinating and protracted  evolutionary battle with tiny, delicate and deadly wasps called parasitoids. In each generation, the wasp evolves to be better and better at finding flies, sinking its eggs in those flies and having the eggs mature into wasps, break out of the fruit fly body, destroying the fly in the process, perhaps feasting on it from the inside on the way. The process sounds a bit ghoulish, out of one of the "Alien" movies, but in fact it is evolutionary cohabitation. The wasp finds her fruitfly hosts, "flies expertly in order to lay her eggs inside the fruitflies as they flee and evade, have an egg-needle just the right length and width to put an egg deep enough but not too deep, and elude the host’s immune system with chemicals and other subterfuge so the hosts immune system does not kill her children. For these reasons, wasps often lay their eggs in just one or a few host species, those with which they have evolved, hosts for which their tools of motherhood are honed." 

So it's a kind of evolutionary drama, both death dealing and life giving. If the wasp is successful the host fruit fly dies; if the fruit fly is successful, the wasp larvae die. In successive generations, the wasp evolves to be better and better at finding flies, sinking its eggs in those flies and having the eggs mature into wasps. Each generation, the fruit flies, in turn, evolve counter responses. 

Todd Schlenke is a fruit fly biologist at Emory University, and in his neighbor's compost pile. He witnesses this drama again and again, searching to understand and to learn patterns of behavior that might be useful to people as well as the creatures that grow inside us. Todd's curiosity was aroused to find out if alcohol was playing a part. Indeed it was. 

Here's the hypothesis: "The flies may be able to use alcohol as a kind of medicine, to kill the wasps once they were infected. This would require the flies to be able to know when they were infected and to respond by drinking more alcohol when they were, even though high levels of alcohol could make them sick too." A delicate business, and one obviously related to our subject above. The experiment is ongoing. 

My source for this additional tale is a Scientific American essay with the cute, overly dramatic, potentially misleading and downright silly title "Fruit Flies Use Alcohol to Self-Medicate but Feel Bad About It Afterwards." 

Stay tuned.

A letter to my rabbi son about poems and poetry, truth and fiction

Joshua, I thought of you when I read an Orion blog posting by an unlikely Miami denizen, Karen Russell, author of two books for children with intriguing titles: a book of short stories called St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, and the novel Swamplandia!

Ms. Russell quotes a great poet and an even greater novelist, both women, both memorably creative and of highly distinctive voice, whose words evoked my memory of your sermon about the number of poems we don't understand on the way to the one we do. First, the brilliant Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”  And then Marianne Moore calls poets "literalists of the imagination" and poems themselves "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." Marianne Moore in turn brings to mind a thought apropos of your sermon. Like William Carlos Williams, she had a second vocation, like being a rabbi, that served household economy, social justice and the nourishment of her art. After her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1909 she taught at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, until 1915, when she began to publish her poetry. Afterward she served as editor of the literary and cultural journal The Dial.

 Marianne Moore 

The Orion Blog

Bookshelf: Swamplandia (with thanks to Orion Magazine, a wonderful publication entirely without advertisement; see http://www.orionmagazine.org)

November 04, 2011, by Karen Russell

Karen Russell is the author of the book of short stories St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and the novel Swamplandia! , reviewed recently in the May/June 2011 issue of Orion. We asked Karen a few questions about the intersecting roles of place and fantasy in her writing.

Whenever I’m asked about the ratio of the real to the fantastic in my work, I will shamelessly plagiarize Flannery O’Connor, who said, “The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.” Another quote that comes to mind comes from the poet Marianne Moore, who calls poets “literalists of the imagination” and poems themselves “imaginary gardens / with real toads in them.”

When I first started writing stories, eons before I ever did any reflecting on “craft” or “process,” I would just sort of naturally begin with setting, usually an aqueous or a densely wooded one, a literal, concrete place that I could see in my mind’s eye. In St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, the story “The Stargazer’s Log” I imagined as being set on a sleepy beach like Marco Island, on Florida’s Gulf coast; “Ava Wrestles the Alligator” was set on a failing alligator park in a kind of haunted version of the Everglades; and “Z.Z.‘s Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers” was a camp on an island of pines where it seemed always to be twilight or midnight, aMidsummer’s Night Dream of a woods.

In Florida, fantasy is our big industry, so I think it’s natural that in my writing I keep returning to settings where the boundary between the real and the fantastic, the natural and the artificial, gets effaced. I was very influenced by the theme parks that surrounded me as a kid in South Florida, these artificial worlds like the Miami Seaquarium that fronted the real ocean, or the Gatorland park in Orlando where you walk through a gaping, cartoon-green archway built to look like an alligator’s jaws in order to see the real thing. Here’s a creature that hasn’t changed in millions of years, and who survived its ancestors, the dinosaurs. It’s like a splinter of time. And while this Mesozoic monster is swimming around an artificial lagoon, children are wandering around the park with balloons, and infants are sucking on rubber pacifiers in their strollers while their dads push them, talking on cell phones.

Flannery O'Connor at the age of 39, well before publication of her mature works of fiction in the 1950s and 1960s.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

I think the geography of my childhood conditioned me to be drawn to fiction that was elastic enough to contain multiple universes, to juggle many worlds at once. Because that was daily life in my homestate. That collision of different kinds of time and natures and realities. For example, it took us forty minutes to drive from the Dadeland Mall, with its frenzied music and Food Court and zillions of people from every country you can imagine, and the “Hurry! Hurry! Buy! Buy!” vertigo of all malls, down the Dixie to the Everglades National Park, which felt dizzying in a very different way. I was an anxious kid, and somehow going to the Everglades could cure me of that shallow-breathing feeling. There is so much sky. And green spots of color on the horizon, these hammocks, tree islands, that appear to be floating in a sea of dark yellow grass. Even as a nearsighted child with a short attention span, I think I realized the sublimity of a sky that huge, of birds and trees as comically strange as the pelican, the royal palm. The Everglades, compared to the high-speed, honkadelic retail at Dadeland Mall, felt like a timeless, mythic setting: palm trees and gumbo limbo, big flame-red poinciana, mangroves and sawgrass, white ibis and great blue heron, anhingas frozen on pylons, turtles, manatees, and the grinning alligators, of course.

As a reader, I’ve always been attracted to books with settings that feel both wholly real and wholly other. Siamese-twin universes, where the daylit world we know is connected to an underworld or alternative reality. When I was a kid, so many of my favorite books seemed to simultaneously occur in a world that I recognized and some alternate zone—a bunch of anemic, pink-eyed British kids walking through their closet door to become the heroes of Narnia, say. Or siblings tesseracted through space to a different dimension, explorers plummeted in a submarine to an alien, liquid realm. A Midsummer’s Night Dream is set in both a real woodland and an enchanted fairyland where all ordinary laws are suspended.

So long as you have a human character interacting with a landscape, all those dreams zipped up in a skinsuit, I think you’re going to end up with an amalgam of fantasy and reality. Every tree and rock is filtered through that particular human’s eye. Any physical setting, in whatever book you take down off the shelf, whether it’s Venice or a Martian bear cave, reveals these other dimensions: the fantastic, subjective, invisible dimensions of the material world.

In Swamplandia!, I often found the physical settings through which Ava and Kiwi and Ossie travel to be analogous to their emotional states—when Ava has to escape from the swamp, for example, I pictured her trip across the vast floodplain as the literalization of what it feels like to move through grief. Similarly, when Kiwi gets “swallowed” by the Leviathan slide at the mainland World of Darkness theme park, I thought of that as symbolic of what it feels like to be digested by an impersonal institution: to become anonymous. Setting for me almost always operates on both a literal and a figurative plane, but only over the course of drafting does it become sort of shockingly obvious to me. Grief in a swamp, you don’t say? I’m always the last to know!

I discovered a lot of the places that ended up seeping into my fiction between the ages of ten and fifteen, when I would go on these long bike rides. I was a little bit of a loner, and I’d ride my bike to Matheson Hammock almost every day after school—it’s one of the last remaining hammocks in Miami, and right in the heart of the city, a really quiet oasis where I liked to pedal fast through this truly eerie mangrove tunnel. Sometimes I’d be the only one there and I’d see this beautiful heron that I swear looked as tall as me, just standing stock-still in the water. James Merrill has that beautiful line: “the world beneath the world is brightening.” Whenever I saw that great blue heron, that’s exactly how I felt—like some mystery was drawing closer to the surface, where you could almost glimpse it. And I think that’s the power of the richest settings in fiction—they take you to where the world beneath the world begins to brighten.

Karen Russell, a native of Miami, received the 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation in 2009. Her novel Swamplandia! was published in February 2011 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Love,

Dad

 

Miss Thistlebottom’s hobgoblins

Miss Thistlebottom teaches English. She tells her students how to write. Miss Thistlebottom knows there are rules and rules must not be broken. Sticks may be broken, preferably upon a recalcitrant child's rump or hand, but rules are sacrosanct. 

Miss Thistlebottom's hobgoblins are the children of hairy little men and women. They break rules, often just to be rude. They are disruptive and should never have been allowed in school. If they cannot be sent home they must be ignored or punished.

Exemplary children, of whom there appear to be fewer and fewer, are those who are attentive, malleable, and follow the rules without question. Miss Thistlebottom occasionally praises them, and was convinced they would inherit the earth. She is no longer sure of that —  especially since her encounters and exchange of letters with one Theodore M. Bernstein, who had the termerity to include her letters in a book he called, without her permission, Miss Thistlebottom's Hobgoblins (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971).

Theodore Bernstein was the editorial director of the New York Times Book Division, taught journalism at Columbia’s School of Journalism for 25 years and served as a consultant on usage for the Random House and American Heritage dictionaries. He invented the archytypal Miss Bertha Thistlebottom not to debunk the rules of English grammar and usage, but to relieve of fear and frustration those who choose now and then to make exception to the rules. 

That was in 1971, when the rules and 8th grade teachers like Miss Thistlebottom were more likely to be found and therefore in need of remedy. Forty years later the reverse is more likely.

Writers familiar with rules of style and usage are less common. Fewer people have a well thumbed Chicago or New York Times manual or even a good dictionary. Smart phones go hand in hand with dull people. Letter writing is outmoded, historians pull their hair, email is brief or it is unread. Humbug and publicity are rife, masquerading as communication. We've even forgotten to shut up and listen. We talk to each other more frequently than with each other. 

I know, I'm beginning to sound like Miss Thistlebottom. Maybe her day has come round again.

For those who seek a middle way, try the lively New York Times blog called "After Deadline": "The latest subjective sampling of sparkling prose from recent pages. Read ’em and weep, or laugh, or cheer." Or read Harper's Magazine's Weekly Review. That's where I plucked the image of a humbug.

 

 

Frederico Fellini's "La Strada"

Frederico Fellini's magnificent "La Strada" (The Road, 1954) was the first ever to receive the Academy Award for best foreign language film, in 1956. Its impact upon American audiences persuaded members of the Academy of Motion Pictures, normally focused on the produce of Hollywood, to recognize that fine films had long been made elsewhere in the world.

"La Strada" deeply moved me. Filmed in stark black and white, its rural Italian landscapes are spare and hard, suggesting poverty, age, ravage of war. The story and characters are simple and manifold, comedic and tragic, like those of a fairy tale.

Indeed, the word "fey" has been used to describe the brilliance of "La Strada's" central presence, Gelsomina. She is played by the Italian actress Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife and muse. "Fey" means magical, fairy-like, strange, more literally and deeply, "fated to die." Gelsomina, a truly magical woman, does die, as do the film's two other principal characters, Zampanò (Anthony Quinn) and The Fool, touchingly portrayed by Richard Besehart. 

The story is simple and profound. A girl is sold by her impoverished mother to a crude traveling "strong man," entertainer and illusionist Zampanò. Gelsomina becomes Zampanò's assistant and companion, and as they travel by wonderful contraption — half wagon, half ancient motorcycle — from town to town, fair to fair, season to season, Gelsomina offers Zampanò a gift of true magic and love. She is a mythic presence of eros, a gift he is incapable of recognizing or reciprocating. 

The Fool, in this instance an aerialist, classical embodiment of humor, cleverness, tenderness and wisdom, recognizes Gelsomina as Zampanò cannot. But The Fool can only show the way. He himself, unlike those he serves, is powerless to effect transformation. He knows that gifts die if not recognized and passed on.

An Italian film critic wrote of this film, "how much meaning, how much ferment enrich this apparent simplicity. It is all there although not always evident." 

"La Strada" is a beautiful embodiment of human frailty, longing, resilience and aching loss. Like the enduring stories of old, it may be viewed and understood on many levels, at once manifest and elusive.

 

RECKONINGS: A brief introduction

Blueberries and granite, photo by John R. Boettiger (2001)

Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, political, economic, environmental, poetic.

Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.

The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over nearly 14 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still possessed of integrity. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page, and the search box in the same location.

Now, in the spring of 2013 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old or young as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when my wife and I were living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending trails. That remains my calling. My vehicles are still words and images, poetry, fiction, memoir, biography and photography, in addition to shovel and hoe. My formal training is that of a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice that discipline simply. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, my sister and brother, grandparents, parents, children (four) and grandchildren (eight!), now even a great granddaughter. The longer the years, the more I feel blessed.

Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of

• meaning and value,
• good and evil,
• sacred and profane,
• body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
• the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
• the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
• our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.

The word reckoning is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.

The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")

The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time). Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time, when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others -- ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.

Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription: I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly,

john@reckonings.net

Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)

Related articles

Declaration of the Rights Held by Future Generations and Bill of Responsibilities for Present Generations

Whatever Happened to the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County?

For Mother's Day: Poet Seamus Heaney Remembers His Mother With Love

Of Hope and Poetry

Interbeing: the beautiful, faltering dance of the honeybee

Seamus Heaney

Stump, a champ at age 10 (human equivalent, 70)

As I anticipate in a few weeks time joining the ranks of septuagenarians, I'm encouraged by the performance of 10-year-old Stump, a Sussex spaniel who took his victory in stride - best of show at the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club. Stump is the oldest dog to win that title in the competition's 133-year history. 

Gail Collins confirms that he is a natural:

"Stump, whose hobbies are sleeping and sleeping, is actually Champion Clussexx Three D Grinchy Glee, but nobody his age can remember all that. After a refreshing workout that involved a short walk around the driveway, he trotted onto the stage and wiped the floor with his younger competition." 

Elizabeth Gilbert on the nature of genius

Michael Leunig

This note comes by way of my refrigerator, where I just posted this admonitory observation of the incomparable Australian cartoonist and social critic Michael Leunig.

Leunig is a treasure not to be missed. He is 5th generation Australian, in his early 60s now, something of a national treasure among Australian progressives. He has a very interesting website of his own, with writing about his work and his politics. A well-informed admirer, who maintains a Leunig appreciation website called Curly Flat, has described Leunig as follows:

Though his profession may be listed as "cartoonist" on his tax return, Michael Leunig is much more. Although his work is at times incredibly mirth provoking he is not so much a humorist as an observer, philosopher, commentator, historian of the absurd and catalyst for free thinking. Born in East Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) in 1945, Leunig subsequently evolved in Footscray, an eclectic inner industrial suburb, until his success as a satirical political cartoonist afforded him the means to escape the city in favour of the gentler ambience of nearby country environs. From his early work in the 60's when he was published in such diverse journals as Newsday, Woman's Day and the controversial London Oz magazine, Leunig developed his distinctive pen style and eye for the ridiculous which led to publication in 1974 of his first book The Penguin Leunig (see elsewhere on the site for a complete anthology). These days he lives somewhere near Melbourne where he is a regular contributor to the local daily broadsheet The Age and fridge doors all over the country. While most Australians are familiar with his work, few could tell you anything about the man and yet through his cartoons, know everything about him. By all accounts he is indeed shy, gentle and pensive, and his work reveals him to be cynical, witty, sensitive, deeply spiritual, emotionally precarious, at times depressed and always insightful. A dysfunctional genius perhaps.  Michael Leunig simultaneously defines and defies most Australian stereotypes, and I, for one, am thankful.

On a similar and complementary theme:


And a final moment of contemplative wisdom:

The Holy Fool

The holy fool, or the fool as wise soul, is a figure in many wisdom traditions, including notably those of the Sufis of Islam, Zen Buddhism, Christianity and the inheritors of the Hasidic movement of Judaism, as well as folklore that is not specifically religious, like some of the tales collected by the brothers Grimm. Fools in the courts of kings in the plays of Shakespeare are typically wise men who cloak their wisdom in a mask of foolishness, thereby reaching their master as straight men cannot.

Such fools amuse, confuse, sometimes speak in simile or circuitous riddles, are often ridiculed--they are, after all, intentionally ridiculous, sometimes insulting or scatological--but can succeed by that very character in breaking through a crust of resistance or disbelief. There is an enigmatic quality to the fool's cloak of madness or nonsense that provokes attention, response, reflection, as well as laughter. The fool's inherent humility, too, may loosen the defensive, ego-inflated character of those who make too much of themselves and thus lose touch with a deeper reality.

Finally, there is another sense of the holy fool, less a matter of conscious and intentional disguise, more a matter of guilelessness, transparency, embrace of wonder and mystery. "The path of soul, writes Thomas Moore, "is also the path of the fool, the one without pretense of self-knowledge or individuation or certainly perfection. If on this path we have achieved anything, it is the absolute unknowing Cusanus and other mystics write about, or it is the 'negative capability' of John Keats--'being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.'" (Care of the Soul, p. 261-262)

Here are a few illustrative stories:

Saint Symeon

Saint Symeon, for those who know of his existence at all, probably would be viewed as a curious candidate for canonization by the Catholic Church. He came to the Syrian city of Emesa in the sixth century. On his arrival, he tied a dead dog he found on a dunghill to his belt and entered the city gate, dragging the dog behind him. Schoolchildren saw him and called out, “Hey, a crazy abba [father].” For he was dressed in the habit of the ascetic Desert Fathers (indeed, that is the community from which he came), but behaved in Emesa quite otherwise. The next morning, a Sunday, he entered the church, put out the lights, and threw nuts at the women. On the way out of the church, he overturned the tables of the pastry chefs.

In Emesa, Symeon quickly consolidated his reputation as "a crazy abba." He walked about naked, ate enormous quantities of beans, farted prolifically, defecated in the streets, gorged himself on raw meat, pastries, virtually anything at hand, kept company with dancing girls and prostitutes, all without the slightest shame. On one occasion, having been invited to join the men in the public bath, he stripped off his clothing and wrapped it around his head like a turban. With his sexuality starkly apparent, he walked past the men’s bath and rushed into the women’s. When there was a new moon, “he looked at the sky and fell down and thrashed about.” In short, he violated virtually every norm of civilized urban behavior, and the citizens of Emesa responded with righteous indignation and not uncommonly with beatings. They were outraged: the most common word used to describe their reaction is "scandalized." That is our first hint of secret sainthood, for the same word was commonly used in the Bible to describe people's response to the behavior of Jesus.

Symeon left the desert for the city, having mastered the practice of the ascetic life of the Desert Fathers, with the purpose of saving souls and "mocking the world." He drew attention to the spiritual pollution of urban life in Emesa by exaggerating its expression. He maintained his spiritual practices in private, and his intimacy with the untouchables, the outcasts of Emesa, like that of Jesus, is full of loving kindness and the spirit of conversion, turning, metanoia.

In playing the fool, Symeon demonstrated that spiritual truth is obstructed, lost by the more dangerous pretenders: those upright, worldly and proper souls whose reputable lives hide an inner emptiness of spirit. In the phrase of St. Paul from First Corinthians, Symeon is "a fool for Christ's sake."

(I am indebted in this brief portrait of Symeon to Derek Krueger's scholarly study, Symeon the Holy Fool: Leontius' Life and the Late Antique City, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Krueger demonstrates that the later Church, although recognizing a tradition of the holy fool, had difficulty with some of the more colorful of Symeon's antics.)

Sufi Stories: Mulla Nasrudin

Probably the best known of the holy fools is Mulla Nasrudin, at once a central figure of the esoteric tradition of Sufism within Islam, and a popular folkloric figure from the Middle East to East Asia. The person who, above all, made Nasrudin accessible to readers of the Western world was the Afghan writer and Sufi scholar, Idries Shah (1924-1996), who wrote or compiled over thirty books on the Sufi way of life and Sufi stories. The way of the Sufis, in fact, antedates Islam, and has thrived in many cultures and wisdom traditions. That may be why so many people, in such diverse parts of the world, grew up hearing stories of the marvelous Mulla. Evidence of the interpenetration of stories in diverse traditions includes their reappearance in different cultural guises. That is true of several of several Sufi stories, including those of Mulla Nasrudin, as I shall illustrate and you may recognize below.

Unsentimental teaching stories are a staple of Sufi practice. They are intended lightly to provoke--laughter, mostly--then contemplation and insight. Some are longer, and some are very short. There are examples of both below.

A tortoise carries a stranded scorpion across a river. The scorpion stings the tortoise, who demands indignantly: "My nature is to be helpful. I have helped you and now you sting me." "My friend," says the scorpion, "your nature is to be helpful. Mine is to sting. Why do you seek to transform your nature into a virtue and mine into villainy?"

An elephant and a mouse fell in love. On the wedding night the elephant keeled over and died. The mouse said, "Oh Fate! I have unknowingly bartered one moment of pleasure and tons of imagination for a lifetime of digging a grave."

Stories of Nasrudin:

My beloveds, I remember a time long ago when I was still a Mulla. I lived in a small town, just big enough for a real mosque, with a beautiful mosaic wall. I remember one evening, we had finished our prayers. The stars were clear and bright, and seemed to fill the sky solidly with lights. I stood at the window, gazing at the lights so far away, each one bigger than our world, and so distant from us across vast reaches of space. I thought of how we walk this earth, filled with our own importance, when we are just specks of dust. If you walk out to the cliffs outside the town, a walk of half an hour at most, you look back and you can see the town, but the people are too small to see, even at that meager distance. When I think of the immensity of the universe, I am filled with awe and reverence for power so great.

I was thinking such thoughts, looking out the window of the mosque, and I realized I had fallen to my knees. "I am nothing, nothing!" I cried, amazed and awestruck.

There was a certain well-to-do man of the town, a kind man who wished to be thought very devout. He cared more for what people thought of him than for what he actually was. He happened to walk in and he saw and heard what passed. My beloveds, I was a little shy at being caught in such a moment, but he rushed down, looking around in the obvious hope someone was there to see him. He knelt beside me, and with a final hopeful glance at the door through which he had just come, he cried,

"I am nothing! I am nothing!"

It appears that the man who sweeps, a poor man from the edge of the village, had entered the side door with his broom to begin his night's work. He had seen us, and being a man of true faith and honest simplicity, his face showed that he entertained some of the same thoughts that had been laid on me by the hand of Allah (wonderful is He). He dropped his broom and fell to his knees up there in a shadowed corner, and said softly,

"I am nothing...I am nothing!"

The well-to-do man next to me nudged me with his elbow and said out of the side of his mouth,

"Look who thinks he's nothing!"

_______________________

Late one moonlit night a friend came upon Nasrudin stooped, walking back and forth in the street in front of his house. "What are you doing, Mulla?" said the friend. "I have lost my keys and am looking for them," replied Nasrudin. The friend agreed to help, and they both continued to comb the ground. Finally the friend asked, "Where did you lose them?" "I lost them in the house," said Nasrudin, "but there's more light out here."

_______________________

My beloveds, I travelled again to the village of my friend Tekka, after years away. He had become very devout in his ways, sometimes a little pompous, but still the kind soul I had loved for years.

I visited him, and we picked up our friendship as if we had never been apart.

"Nasrudin, you are a light to the eyes," said Tekka, "Please stay with me. I insist."

I accepted his kind invitation. He showed me my sleeping room, with a window to the east, and the bed made up. "I have arranged it so your head faces toward Mecca," he said proudly. "You must always sleep with your head toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet, on whom be peace."

My first night, I tossed and turned, and finally fell asleep. I am apparently an active sleeper, for when Tekka shook me awake the next morning, he was very agitated.

"Nasrudin, I am disappointed in you!" I looked at myself, and said, "I am often disappointed in myself, Tekka, what seems to be today's problem?"

"You have slept with your feet toward Mecca! This is most disrespectful!"

"My apologies, Tekka, it was unintentional. I am a very active sleeper."

Tekka was mollified, but insisted that the next night I must do better. I promised I would.

The next night resembled the first. I slept well, after some tossing and turning, but awoke to find my feet on my pillow and my head resting on the floor at the end of the sleeping mat. Just as I realized my predicament, Tekka stood in the door and clucked in concern.

"This will never do, Nasrudin. I am a good citizen and a good Muslim. You must sleep with your feet pointing the opposite way from Mecca, and your head pointing toward Mecca, out of respect for the Prophet and devotion to Allah."

"What is your reason for insisting on this, my friend?" I asked.

"You must point your head toward God!" he said, and repeated it, "You must point your head toward God and your feet away from Him."

I thought about this. We spent the day together, and that night Tekka was most emphatic. "Nasrudin," he said, "If you cannot sleep with your head toward God, I regret to say I cannot have you in my house. It pains me to say this to an old friend, but my devotion is to Allah."

The third night was much like the other two, except that this time I awoke with my nose pressed against the floor at the foot of the sleeping mat. It was pushed out of shape, and I was rubbing it when Tekka appeared. His face was clouded with anger and sadness.

"Before you speak, Tekka, answer me this," I said, springing up. "Does Allah rule over everything, even the fate of men?"

"You know he does," replied Tekka, puzzled.

"Is Allah there in every part of His creation?"

"Of course he does."

I pointed out the window at the birds rising from the edge of the well. "Does he live in the birds of the air?"

"Yes," said Tekka. "Why are you asking these questions?"

"Please have patience with an old friend," I replied. "Is Allah everywhere, even across the desert and the mountains?"

"Allah is the creation. Allah is in the creation, and is the lord over the creation!" exclaimed Tekka.

"So, Tekka," I said, holding out my feet. "Point my feet where God is not!"

_________________________

Nasrudin was invited to give a sermon.
When the people had assembled, Nasrudin asked:
"Do you know what I'm going to tell you?"
"No", they answered.
"In that case", said Nasrudin, "there's no point in telling you anything. You're too ignorant to start with. I'd be wasting my time."
The people were disappointed. They asked Nasrudin to come back the following week.
When he did, he started his sermon by asking the same question.
"Yes!", they shouted.
"Very well", said Nasrudin, "then I see no reason to speak."
And he left.
But Nasrudin was persuaded to come back a third time.
"Do you know, or don't you?", he asked the people.
"Some of us do, and some of us don't."
"Great!", said Nasrudin. "Those who know can share their knowledge with those who don't."
Having said that, he went home.

______________________

Nasrudin used to stand in the street on market-days, to be pointed out as an idiot. No matter how often people offered him a large and a small coin, he always chose the smaller piece.

One day a kindly man said to him, "Mulla, you should take the bigger coin. Then you will have more money and people will no longer be able to make a laughingstock of you."

"That might be true," said Nasrudin. "but if I always take the larger, people will stop offering me money to prove that I am more idiotic than they are. Then I would have no money at all."

_________________________

Consider this one in relation to the meaning of Sabbath time:

Mulla Nasrudin was eating a poor man's diet of chickpeas and bread. His neighbor, who also claimed to be a wise man, was living in a grand house and dining upon sumptuous meals provided by the emperor himself.

His neighbor told Nasrudin, "If only you would learn to flatter the emperor and be subservient as I do, you would not have to live on chickpeas and bread."

Nasrudin replied, "And if only you would learn to live on chickpeas and bread, as I do, you would not have to flatter and live subservient to the emperor."

_______________________

Nasrudin sat on a river bank when someone shouted to him from the opposite side:
    - "Hey! how do I get across?"
    - "You are across!" Nasrudin shouted back.

_______________________

Since we began this venture with one saint, Symeon, let's end it with another, this one an imaginative creation of the translator and poet Stephen Mitchell, leaving us with the valuable conclusion that one need not be wise to be a holy fool.

Saint Ineptus

Born in third-century Illyria, he soon established a reputation for spilling his food, bruising himself, and tripping over non-existent objects in the street. His parents wanted him to become a doctor, in the hope that the rigorous training would make him more attentive. But he refused. Instead, he spent his time looking for angels in the dark alleyways of his native town, and feeding the stray cats. Even his martyrdom was botched. He felt so terrified, as the wild beasts approached him in the amphitheater, that he forgot the words of the Lord's Prayer.

He has become the patron saint of the clumsy, the tactless and the unqualified. They are instructed to leave a candle burning for him once a month (making sure there is nothing flammable in the vicinity). His intercession is said to do more good than harm.
___________________________

 

Whatever Happened to the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County?

Reprinting an entire newspaper article is hardly the ordinary style of Reckonings, much less one two-and-a-half years old. My excuse in this event is that the article is drawn from the archives of The Daily Reprobate, the sister publication of Reckonings for several years but with much more distinguished pedigree, having been (allegedly) founded in 1866 by Mark Twain when he was working as a journalist in San Francisco.

If there was a single piece of short fiction which launched Mark Twain's career as a writer, it was surely "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." In the spring of 2003 the chief (and only) roving correspondent of The Reprobate proposed to its editor that an investigative article was in order to reveal the fate of jumping frogs in Calaveras County. Despite his reporter's incurable habit of profligacy with his expense account, the editor responded with enthusiasm, hoping I imagine for a small boost in circulation. His judgment was not off the mark; the boost, in fact, was not small. Readers of The Reprobate have asked that I reprint the article here, partially to draw a little more attention to Mr. Twain and the journal to which those readers remain so loyal, but mostly because they found the story such a representative piece of Americana. So here it is in its entirety.

 

Pogo Possum

Pogo and the other inhabitants of the Okefenokee Swamp* disappeared from the newspapers' comic strip pages shortly after their maker, Walt Kelly, died in 1973. I grew up with his world in the 50s and 60s.

I still tune in to Doonesbury now and then. I have been devoted to Calvin and Hobbes, Opus, and Gary Larson's wonderful upside down and sideways view of the world. For a time, as a child, the thoroughgoing loving kindness of Al Capp's shmoos captivated me. But Kelly's way with character, setting and especially language  were satisfying as no other comic strip. As Brad Leithauser writes, "Pogo was different. It had depth, a madcap unpredictability, and a restive verbal playfulness; it was, in short, the only comic strip spun through the mind of a poet."

The denizens of the Swamp--Pogo, Albert the alligator, Beauregard the hound, Owl, Porky Pine, the ominous wildcat Simple J. Malarkey (modeled on Senator Joseph McCarthy), the blowhard bear P.T. Bridgeport, Miz Beaver and the fetching French skunk, Ma'm'selle Hepzibah, with whom Pogo is shyly enchanted--lent the strip a wonderful range of linguistic warp and woof, lyricism, affection and (mostly) friendly dissension the likes of which we have not seen since.

The pace of life in the Swamp is... well, like a swamp should be: comfortable, slow, yet with unpredictable depth and color.

There are some genuine bad guys among the residents of the swamp--Mole with his omnipresent shades, and his sidekick The Deacon, for example--but they are more like literate rednecks than real evil. The only source of threatened (never realized) violence is the manifestly malignant Malarkey.

Some of Kelly's lines remain with me well over a quarter century after they were uttered. "We have met the enemy and he is us." Whenever I hear "Deck the Halls" at Christmas time, I find myself quietly singing, "Deck us all with Boston Charlie..." And when I tend to go on longer than I should--a common professorial malady--I recall one of Pogo's rhymes:

Riddle you the little dew
And little do you do?
Little did is little done,
Tho' little did'll do.

I hope to weave into these pages at least a little did'll of Pogo's gentleness, kindness, exuberance and nonsense.

For those interested in a contemporary tribute to Kelly and his creation, and a sample of some of his characters' antics, I recommend Brad Leithauser's essay, "Lyrics in the Swamp," in the April 25, 2002 issue of The New York Review of Books. There are several collections of Pogo still available in paperback.

* The real Okefenokee Swamp, thankfully, is still with us, and is a heartening story of environmental intelligence at work.  Covering approximately 700 square miles of South Georgia and North Florida, it is a primitive wetland which harbors thousands of birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, many of which are endangered or threatened. The north end of the swamp is bordered by pine forests and thick tangles of vegetation. Small water trails lead south to the open prairies and west to the Suwannee River. Nearly 400,000 acres of the Okefenokee were designated as the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge in 1937, protecting the headwaters of the Suwannee and St. Marys Rivers from further human development. For that, Pogo would be proud.

Reprobates and Curmudgeons

I had the great privilege, for several years around the recent turn of the century, of editing an online journal, The Daily Reprobate, that in its original print version was founded by Mark Twain in 1866. (There is some scholarly controversy about the details, even the veracity, of that founding legend, but such controversy in general can be safely ignored.) Some articles and snippits from The Reprobate will inevitably find their way into Reckonings, if only to lend it a much-needed antidote to its insufferable seriousness. Most of those posts will be lodged in the category I've called "Words and Whimsey," whose character will be described shortly in another post. In the meantime, here is a brief description of The Daily Reprobate, a reasonable definition of its operative word, and a similarly felicitous description of its close sibling, "curmudgeon."

The Reprobate's founder, Mark Twain, once remarked aptly, "Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense." Edward Abbey, a modern inheritor of Twain's spirit, added the companion truth, "The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny." The Daily Reprobate has honored that wisdom since its founding 140 years ago as "a congenial companion for the intelligent and irascible reader gifted with a sense of humor and a love of language." The origins of The Reprobate will be further discussed later. Here I'll just draw from its archives a concise description of two words that suggest the enduring importance of its mission.

Reprobate

For the linguistically challenged,  we provide a short definition of our operative word, reprobate. It has a distinguished pedigree, having risen over the last 3000 years or so from its wretched beginnings when reprobates were lost souls rejected by God, wicked Sabbath-breaking sons of Belial, fallen angels, Israelites in the desert when Moses wasn't around. A small residue of that early meaning is preserved in the forbidding language of Calvinism, and in that of evangelical Christians intent upon their own virtue and others' salvation even if it kills them.

More currently, and for our own guidance over our many years of publication, reprobates are shameless rascals. Often reproved as unrepentant scalawags by the Authorities (the bearers of cultural, moral and political orthodoxy) they in fact stand as bastions, fonts of discriminating disapproval. Sometimes they are wily and subtle, coyote shape-shifters resorting to irony and satire, at others straightforward firebrands. In whatever guise, they are pungent critics of deceit and abuse in the established order.

Curmudgeon

We take a moment's opportunity to enjoy a word lover's delight (and no doubt someone else's sheer boredom): contemplation of the relationship between reprobates and curmudgeons. We are, by blood, title and persuasion, the former. But we offer a congenial home to curmudgeons, who are, in a roundabout way, the closest of kin. On a good day, we can find the two spirits commingling in our hearts. Repromudgeon.

Purely as a pedigreed word, curmudgeon is a poor relative. No one appears to know where it came from. There's been speculation about its connection to Middle English and Old French words relating to stealing and hoarding; and it is said that a correspondent of Dr. Johnson attempted to assign an etymology to it based on the fusion of coeur (heart) and méchant (malicious, spiteful). Mischievous souls, these amateur etymologists.

"Curmudgeon seems, vexedly, just to appear sometime in the latter half of the 16th century, a nonce-word, made up. There is little doubt that a curmudgeon is a churlish fellow of independent mind, and tolerates neither fools nor those who provoke others' suffering for their own advantage. His critics call him greedy, a muckworm and pinchgut, a lickpenny. In truth he is none of those. Like Robin of the Hood, he steals and hoards only in the interest of equity, and knows more than most that gifts remain gifts only by passing them on. The reprobate is marginally more consistent; his reprobacy is likely to be characterological. The curmudgeon's totem animals are the chameleon and the lion. He commonly pads among soberly collected wisdom, fulmination, frothing outrage, depression, and sleepy abandonment to the muse.

Both are formidable critics, both shape-shifters.

It is intriguing that reprobates and curmudgeons are typically identified as men rather than women. Current explanations are unsatisfactory, and the truth belies the myth. A plausible but untested hypothesis rests upon a curious transposition of subject and object. It is not that there are fewer female than male reprobates and curmudgeons. The people whose lives and works they deflate and disarm, however, are far more often men than women, for a simple reason: men have thus far been the world's destroyers.

Edward Abbey's reflections in A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989) are fitting here: "I have been called a curmudgeon, which my obsolescent dictionary defines as 'a surly, ill-mannered, bad-tempered fellow.' ...But through frequent recent usage, the term is acquiring a broader meaning, which our dictionaries have not yet caught up to. Nowadays, curmudgeon is likely to refer to anyone who hates hypocrisy, cant, sham, dogmatic ideologies, the pretenses and evasions of euphemism, and has the nerve to point out unpleasant facts and takes the trouble to impale these sins on the skewer of humor and roast them over the fires of empiric fact, common sense, and native intelligence. In this nation of bleating sheep and braying jackasses, it then becomes an honor to be labeled curmudgeon."

The last word should be given, in justice, to an inspired taxonomist. John Winokur, in his introduction to The Portable Curmudgeon Redux (a successor to The Portable Curmudgeon, and predecessor of A Curmudgeon's Garden of Love and Return of the Portable Curmudgeon), writes:

I remain convinced that there is no hope for the human race and that we are in the terminal stages of Life As We Know It. This book is an attempt to amuse myself and others while we're waiting for the last lug nut to fly off the last wheel of civilization.

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Reflections on Soul: Loss and Redemption

More than a decade ago, Thomas Moore suggested that the greatest malady of our time was neither heart disease nor cancer, but loss of soul: loss of wisdom about it, loss of interest in it. "When soul is neglected," he wrote, "it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning."

While Moore (in Care of the Soul) warns against efforts at precise definition, he associates the word soul with recognition of depth and genuineness or authenticity in our lives. As such it is no less present or absent in our ordinary daily rounds--work and love, play, active and contemplative times--than it is in rare moments of dramatic crisis, insight or vision. He argues, I think persuasively but less capaciously than is justified, that the instrument of soul is imagination. That is so if we understand imagination to include experience of all of our sensory, emotional and intuitive faculties, including the enormous range of bodily sensations in movement and at rest.

But, with that caveat, imagination is a useful word, because it conveys the important sense that soul is not merely more or less present or absent in our lives, but that there are crafts available for its cultivation, renewal and redemption. One further limitation of the term, however, is that it encourages us to conceive of soul as an exclusively human phenomenon. More classical notions of soul acknowledge that it is present in all animate creatures; indeed, it may be most usefully understood as the very principle of animation or vitality, and care of the soul as the craft of reanimation. Anima mundi, Moore reminds us, refers not to some abstract concept of  world soul or organizing divinity, but to "the soul in each thing," and our capacity truly to tend with lingering and loving attention.

Paradoxically, as spiritual traditions have commonly recognized, soul is more accessible, more nourished, when we are simply attentive and mindful, rather than when we deliberately seek. One of the most beautiful expressions is found in the Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching (here in my own adaptation from several versions; I don't speak or read or write Chinese, but this book has been a treasured companion.)

Of old, he who was well versed in the way
was subtle, mysteriously comprehending,
and too profound to be known.
Just because he is unknowable,
The best one can do is describe him.

His alertness was as that of one crossing
        a river in winter.
His caution was as that of one who must meet danger on every side.
His gravity was as that of a guest.
He was fluid as melting ice,
simple as uncarved wood,
open as a valley.
inscrutable as murky water.

Who can be muddy and yet, settling,
        slowly  become limpid?
Who can be at rest
till the right action arises by itself?

He who preserves this way
does not seek fulfillment.
Not seeking, not expecting,
he is present, and can welcome all things.

When we think of ways of caring for soul, tradition often suggests, rightly, that we think of the liturgies,  the music and other practices of our religious traditions, including prayer and meditation. For all of us, though--and especially for those who have lost effective connection with those traditions, it is worth recalling that soul makes no hard and fast division between sacred and secular. Reckonings time and again recognizes poetry as a deep well of imagining, reimagining, evoking soul.

One of the oldest and most treasured ways of gaining access to soul is through the ancient craft of storytelling. Many traditional tales, if written--or preferably spoken, sung or enacted--by a genuine artist, bring soul to life in ways that are both moving and profound. A contemporary example is the work of an old friend, Gioia Timpanelli, who, in her writing and (best) in the full presence of her telling before an evening fire, breathes new life into old tales in ways that reveal both the depth of their familiarity and their ineluctable mystery.

In her novella, Rusina, Not Quite in Love, a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast fable in Sicilian guise, she weaves a tapestry of mutual awakening, that of the young woman Rusina and that of the reclusive Master Gardener, Sebastian, whom Rusina initially knows as both gentle and "the ugliest man I had ever seen." The story, of course, is that of their coming to know each other more deeply, and particularly that of Rusina's awakening, through kindness, care and love, to Sebastian's true nature. At story's end, when they are talking, Sebastian says, "My favorite part of the story, Rusina, is when you take my hand and look into my eyes and see me." Rusina replies, "As always, mine, Sebastian, is now when you will say for the first time and again, 'This has happened not because we have loved beauty but because it has loved us.'" (Gioia Timpanelli, Sometimes the Soul, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998)

Care of the soul, writes Moore, "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel."

I spent my professional life (as well as much of my childhood and adolescence) in schools, colleges and universities, which--particularly as one moves from high school to college and on to graduate study--pay too little attention to recognizing and developing the crafts of soul. The very pace and fragmentation of the school day, as well as preoccupation with information, cognition and skill, have more to do with socialization and functionality in the marketplace than with human development. Intellect and soul are not antithetical; at best, they complement and nourish each other. When they are out of balance, when intellectual accomplishment and physical prowess are rewarded in service to a narrow or superficial sense of vocation, soulfulness--a more capacious identity--withers.

Nature and God—I neither knew
Yet Both so well knew me
They startled, like Executors
of My identity.

        - Emily Dickinson

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