Tomorrow, I leave on a roadtrip to Richmond, Virginia. I'm tagging along with two of my favorite found-family members, my friends Cat and Jill. In acknowledgement of this All-American trip, and in response to the repeated and frightening rhetoric of the Republican National Convention, I share a poem by the writer Delmore Schwartz.
"The True-Blue American"
Jeremiah Dickson was a true-blue American,
For he was a little boy who understood America, for he felt that he must
Think about everything; because that’s all there is to think about,
Knowing immediately the intimacy of truth and comedy,
Knowing intuitively how a sense of humor was a necessity
For one and for all who live in America. Thus, natively, and
Naturally when on an April Sunday in an ice cream parlor Jeremiah
Was requested to choose between a chocolate sundae and a banana split
He answered unhesitatingly, having no need to think of it
Being a true-blue American, determined to continue as he began:
Rejecting the either-or of Kierkegaard, and many another European;
Refusing to accept alternatives, refusing to believe the choice of between;
Rejecting selection; denying dilemma; electing absolute affirmation: knowing
in his breast
The infinite and the gold
Of the endless frontier, the deathless West.
“Both: I will have them both!” declared this true-blue American
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, on an April Sunday, instructed
By the great department stores, by the Five-and-Ten,
Taught by Christmas, by the circus, by the vulgarity and grandeur of
Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon,
Tutored by the grandeur, vulgarity, and infinite appetite gratified and
Shining in the darkness, of the light
On Saturdays at the double bills of the moon pictures,
The consummation of the advertisements of the imagination of the light
Which is as it was—the infinite belief in infinite hope—of Columbus,
Barnum, Edison, and Jeremiah Dickson.
- by Delmore Schwartz, from Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems, 1938-1958 (1959)
"All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful."
This is a way more articulate sentiment than I could produce right now (or ever), but it speaks to a certain sense of ennui/dread/wonder/distraction which currently occupies my head. These are the final lines of "The Bight" by Elizabeth Bishop, and are also the epitaph on her headstone. I visited it once, but I can't seem to find the photo I took of her grave. All I have is an image of this tree across the road.
November 2015
Anyhow, when I was on my wild Greyhound trip back from visiting my friend Rose in Chicago (hi, Rose!), I listened to this Jeff Buckley album a lot. There was a bunch of night lightning in the western sky over Illinois, and I caught a calm twenty minutes of sleep to this music. Then a fight almost broke out at the bus station and our bus broke down in rural Missouri, but the adventure was worthwhile.
My sister and I were talking about this speech yesterday, and I thought it was worth sharing. You can watch the whole thing below, but I've copy-and-pasted a few highlights from the New York Times' transcript in case you're into skimming:
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.
Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.
It’s a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I’d say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.
...kindness, it turns out, is hard — it starts out all rainbows and puppy dogs, and expands to include . . . well, everything.
...The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.”
And so, a prediction, and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit.
...So, quick, end-of-speech advice: Since, according to me, your life is going to be a gradual process of becoming kinder and more loving: Hurry up. Speed it along. Start right now. There’s a confusion in each of us, a sickness, really: selfishness. But there’s also a cure. So be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf — seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life.
I got a phone call on Wednesday morning from a detective who told me I'd been sent a suspicious package. After I asked a few clarifying questions, he told me FedEx had reported it as leaking a "suspicious substance" and that he and two other detectives were driving to my house to deliver it.
Then he asked if he had my permission to open the box, specifying that "if it's anything illegal we have to take it." I consented, and he told me that the suspicious package was a box of rainbow sprinkle cookies sent to me by my thoughtful friends Broti and Katie:
Clearly drugs and explosives, right?
Then, that afternoon, I ended up in the hospital after a panicked nurse at the Minute Clinic told me that my airway was being obstructed by a tonsillar abscess. After a very cold trip to the E.R., the nurses and doctors told me that it was just a rough case of tonsillitis and that I'd probably contract it not infrequently from here on out. They gave me the good drugs for pains and fever and infections and sent me on my way.
That's all I've got for now. There's plenty more to write about—there always is—but to cop a phrase from T.S. Eliot (whose hometown I'm about to visit!), "there will be time, there will be time."
