You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
More than zoology prompts these poems. The human imagination runs wild across the range. Up the mountain. Into the sky. Down in the sea. Under the earth.
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It’s all in our nature, too.
~*~
In college, I went through a soul-searching crisis that questioned whether we could justify subsidizing symphony orchestras or opera companies or art museums and the like in light of the economic inequities in our nation and world. And then I noticed how much of an entertainment industry flowed through the ghetto and Third World, too. That is, everybody has art (even those old Quakers, in a few restricted forms) — it’s not necessarily about money but a need for expression. And all of the emotions and aspirations that go with it. As well as the big bucks, for the big jobs.
In my trials after college, I eventually found myself moving among Friends and then, in time, a few who had grown up under the old restrictions that banned fiction, theater, and even music. Harsh as the old discipline was (and I could have never lived under it), there was also a valid criticism – especially of the superfluous nature of so much of the artistic effort and the egotism so rampant in its ranks.
Maybe the early Friends saw, too, how much the arts were a function of the royal court and its fashions. Or a gilded church. Even the way arts were used to veil the upper crust from the populace and its labors. It turns outs the original Quakers were also picking up on a dialectic from the earliest days of the Christian church, one that contended acting arose in counterfeiting thoughts and actions, many of them of an evil nature.
Within the memory of Quakers, at least, the fine arts have come a long way from the 1650s, pro and con.
Still, proscribing many of the arts did focus Friends on other matters, including abolition and nonviolence. It channeled creative energy into mathematics and science, architecture and industry, poetry and journalism (“We Friends only read true things,” as one Quaker purportedly said, regarding a neighbor’s stack of novels). Go ahead, tally the other fields.
On the other hand, how much of our own focus is deflected by our apparent indulgence? Or how much of it is enriched and deepened?
So how do we make peace with that seemingly artless side of our legacy? Let me suggest we begin with a consideration of “only true things” in our practice. Back to the deeper expression, the part that reflects Truth that goes beyond quantifiable facts. We might even begin with questions of quality or justice or compassion. And then, as they say, the plot thickens.
Think of these poems as an almanac for the year, a monthly calendar of not just rows of days and weeks but also the centuries of New England.
Where the past peers into the present and future.
And you peer back.
~*~
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Think of passenger rails and unless you’re a rare daily commuter, you’re likely to envision earlier eras. Steam powered locomotives, for starters.
And then great journeys across the landscape.
Now keep going. Deeper into history. Trips onto the frontiers of knowledge. The edge of the known world.
You might run into genius in the most unanticipated haven.
Like this.
~*~
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From the rails, the landscape threads together quite differently than it does from a highway or water passage.
The tracks pass sidings, graffiti-tagged warehouses and low factories, storage yards of all varieties, rundown housing, apartment clusters – and once out into the farmlands, grain elevators as well.
Clicking along, you can’t help but wonder how many of the enterprises are legit or how many, in their decrepitude, cover questionable activities.
For a maverick intellectual gone incognito, they might even be an ideal location to go underground for a while – a place to work uninterrupted.
In my novella With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses, English Bible translator John Wycliffe shows up in a railroad crossing on the American Great Plains, where he’s soon joined by Hieronymus Bosch.
As they discover, once you’re lost in time and space, anything just might happen.
~*~
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Looking at a volume and realizing it’s one of my “keepers,” meaning the ones I keep close at hand, had me wondering if I could name a Top Ten list of books.
Nope, definitely not.
How about Top Hundred?
I turned to my mostly Quaker bookshelf and realized it has more than that alone.
So nope, definitely not.
Five hundred? Maybe, but it would be tough.
We know someone who ordered a book online but was confused when a much different volume was delivered. Not the right title or shape at all, much less the anticipated title. The seller was quite perplexed, too.
So the order was placed again, with another supplier, only to produce the same mistake in delivery. The very same wrong title, in fact.
Only after checking the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) did anyone notice the two titles – the one ordered and the one delivered – had identical numbers. I thought this was supposed to be a fool-proof system. How often does this happen?
As for the warehouse, I’m left wondering: Doesn’t anybody read the title anymore? A double-check for accuracy. And that was well before the Christmas rush. For the sellers, this was a costly error.
Seeing radical religion continued through an elder-and-student succession over the generations also sets it apart from the wider society. In practice, it also invokes a circle of learning, all working together.
Sometimes, as in monasteries, the circle receives support from the wider society. At other times, it is based in circles of families whose identity somehow stands apart from the wider society. Upholding those values requires passing the teachings and practices down through the families.
This has been the history of the Jewish people, for starters, the preservation of a unique vision of justice and philanthropy, a critical stance from the mainstream, the independent role of prophecy in which political and social rulers are placed under a more absolute authority, monotheism rather than polytheism.
We see it, too, to some extent in minority and ethnic communities as they attempt to maintain their unique identities and cultures.
The Amish, of course, stand out in America as they pursue this.
One of the complications is that it can lead to a relatively small gene pool when it comes to finding a spouse.
In the Church of the Brethren, the annual sessions, which alternated between the East Coast and the Midwest, were often followed by marriage announcements. In other words, it was the place to go if you were looking. The shared values heightened the chances for a successful union, we can suppose.
For Quakers, the boarding schools allowed for some wider mixing than one would find in the home village. Still, the lines could tangle in time, even with a strict ban on first-cousin marriages. I remember a conversation with one young couple who told me they were also third cousins or some such. Don’t think it was aunt and uncle, but it seemed that complicated at the time.
Maybe that’s why I wasn’t shocked by the complex, tangled family lines presented in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex or even the incest. (As others have noted, the reason the incest taboo is so universal is simply that the practice has likewise been so universal.)
In the novel, persecution leads to brutal oppression and massacre. The generations are torn apart. And then, somehow, they continue. What shocks most is the violence and hatred and related moral failures of the more “civilized” ships that fail to come to the rescue of innocent victims. But that returns us to thoughts of the wider society, doesn’t it.
The tradition of art inspiring art is a long one. Perhaps we might even see a redundancy there and shorten the sentence to “Tradition inspiring art is a long one.” Or more accurately, “Traditions inspiring art are long.”
At the moment I’m reflecting on my poetry collection, 50 Preludes & Fugues, which springs in part from Dmitri Shostakovich’s 20th century homage to Bach. There are, we should note, two sets each with 24 preludes with fugues. I became acquainted with some of these piano pieces in college, via a budget LP recording apparently with the composer at the keyboard. (Memory had a young American pianist, as it is, but now I think it was the composer himself at the keyboard.)
And then these engaging, sometimes haunting, works disappeared from general public awareness.
Decades later, a Naxos CD set of the complete cycles by Konstantin Schebakov allowed me to rediscover their range – the discs were often playing as I drafted and revised the new poems. Still later, through a Christmas gift from my younger stepdaughter, I gained the opportunity to closely examine Keith Jarrett’s exploration on the ECM label, after hearing selections of his performances on public radio broadcasts.
What continues to amaze me is how different the two interpretations are. The Russian Schebakov is crystalline, restrained, centered on each chord and its ringing. The American Jarrett, in contrast, develops the phrasing – these pieces sing. Which version do I prefer? Or which is, in some way, “better”?
I can’t say. Instead, I’d argue that each is a counterpoint for the other, both springing from the same root. And that as a consequence, we’re all richer for their advances.
In the arts and if faith, we all build on deep roots that have come before us.
Some of us of a certain age remember a weird black-and-white Saturday morning children’s show starring Andy Devine, a rotund, raspy-voiced former cowboy movie sidekick. I never knew quite what to make of the show back then, but each week essentially had three individual adventures bridged by the host and an audience of screaming kids. The same ones, in the close-ups, each week.
When the topic of Andy’s Gang comes up – along with a singing of its theme song, “I’ve got a gang, you’ve got a gang, everybody’s got a gang – ANDY’S GANG!” – what I’ve noticed is the utterly perplexed look on the faces of those who’ve never seen it. In short, nobody can describe it in a way that comes across. The cartoons came on afterward and ran till noon or so.
Thus, when a recent Google search turned up some Andy’s Gang videos from the ’50s, we started watching. Let’s just say the show hasn’t aged well. After a few shots of the host, the mother in the room said she’d never allow her kids around that character. Ahem. And that was before his classic “Pluck your magic twang-er, Froggie,” which she declared had obviously Freudian meaning. (She was, in fact, more graphic.) And then we got a mini-episode with two bare-chested boys in India, who were rescuing monkeys. Another friend points out the blatantly racist undertone of the stories in Africa. Do your own analysis there, if you want.
I think the third regular adventure had a goat-cart in Ireland.
And then there’s an ad where Andy’s telling a friend he has a big date lined up. He gets all spiffed up for the event. Let’s just say, when she shows up (to eat cereal with him), she’s not age-appropriate.
It’s supposed to be cute, I know, but these days it’s just creepy. The word, in fact, just kept returning.
At least each week’s show ended with a reminder to be good boys and girls and go to Sunday school the next morning.
Jnana's Red Barn 