Bearing bile and oft disease
On cloudy days or in the trees
To garner as the human’s bane
The unhallowed harvest of our veins;
Come not hitherward nor nigh
Mosquito fell, thou prince of air
And of darkness come not by,
Or else of thy own doom beware.
Equipped to sip from man and beast
Without respect of persons any;
Like those Christ met amid the deceased,
Thy name is Legion, for ye are many!
‘Tis fell, the wind that bringest thee hither
And fie on the leaf that givest thee shelter.
Get thee hence, ere I thee compact,
And mete ten-fold thy tortures back!
O die the death and grant reprieve
From stabbings of thy needles aught,
For none would sigh & none would grieve
Wert thou in cobweb’s torture caught.
Hark how they swarm
In corporate endeavor,
Our skins to pierce,
Our capillaries sever:
Begone evil surgeons;
we want not thy blood-letting,
And may we never meet with thee,
or those of thy begetting!
Here I am pictured at the helm of the green metal fishing boat, on Lake Inguadona, Minnesota. I enjoy fishing. I am on the lake perhaps five days out of the year, and rarely catch anything worth keeping. For me, fishing is like playing bingo: the stakes are low, strategy seems pointless, and success is as welcome as it is unexpected. Not to mention it’s an indispensable part of the culture. This is Minnesota: we fish. Me, I fish like Bob Wily sails.
“A little nonsense, now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.”
— Roald Dahl (1916–1990), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
I am in the interesting position of having a highly successful website that is never read by anyone I know. With the notable exception of one of my cousins, no one in my family has ever cared to look at it, and no one out here in Michigan even knows it exists.
This raises the possibility of writing candidly about people I know with relatively little fear of reprisal. Like a noble who goes about disguised as a mendicant, I can move freely in my circles of society without anyone being aware that my observations of their activities and personalities might one day be read by hundreds of attentive readers.
After a year and a half of living in West Michigan, I still feel like an anthropologist. It came back again last night; some of the folks at church invited me to a hymn-sing event at a friend’s house. Not a normal way to spend a Friday night, I suppose, but I enjoy unfamiliar & interesting situations. I walked in to the house and felt I had stepped back a hundred years. The women all wore old-style dresses and head coverings, and most of the men had beards and suspenders. The singing was good and loud, unrefined and unpretentious.
My friends informed me that while these were a rather conservative group of people, they were not Amish. I had some good long discussions with some of them afterwards, and left at about ten o’clock. I am enough like these people to be quite comfortable in their company, but I still felt like an outsider. I am told that the majority of Americans live in the cities, as do I when I’m at home in Minnesota. But here I am seeing a side of America that not many people are aware of, even those from the country: the side where people with beards and head coverings, and whose children know to sit still when they are told, gather in someone’s house to play piano and sing hymns until late in the evening. You’ll never meet people with clearer faces and firmer handshakes. “Behold, an American in whom there is no guile!”
With my tongue in my proverbial cheek, I ask: Weren’t we told that Utopia was only to be found by casting off the shakles of religion?
A lot of people style themselves writers, and rent apartments in the inner city and wear black turtlenecks in order to work themselves up into a creative mood. But take away their coffee shops and bookstores and then where is the writer in them? Take away their internet access, their satellite television and most cell phone coverage. Put them in a barely furnished house in the middle of miles and miles of farmland with no one to talk to at night. Now get them to produce something in the way of writing. It’s blasted hard, I tell you. But anyway, here it is, as always, and I hope you like it, as the wife said to her husband on serving him his 366th dinner since they’d been married.
The year I was born, an award-winning story was told of a couple of men across the pond. Here’s an ordinary Scottish fellow whose plan in life is do what his dad did, in the land where he was born. He does a lot of things and is quite good at a few of them. He’s got a real knack for running. He’s a modest fellow. All who ever knew him looked back on his friendship and counted it a privilege. The last we hear of him, we find that he is dead, having died in the land where he was born, and having lived his life much as he expected to.
The other fellow is also a young man making his way in life. He does a lot of things and is quite good at a few of them. In fact he’s pretty nearly the best in his field. Everything else is peripheral to him. He is determined to make it widely known, through his talents, that not only is he not less human because of his heredity, but he is a better man than any other in spite of it. All who knew him were struck by his obsession. The last we see of him, he has by his mastery achieved incredible fame and victory, and has gone home to marry a girl who is apparently quite beautiful by the standard of the time.
At some point, both attended a sort of party, and both, after some close calls and rough situations, won what you might call party favours. For the second fellow it was the climax and fulfilment of many years, a high-water mark in life that that he might never reach again; for the other, it was merely a fond memory.
That is all there is, essentially, to Chariots of Fire, which was released in 1981 and won the academy award for Best Motion Picture in that year. I doubt I will ever see a work of cinema that gives such a realistic picture of life. A lot of people like the story because it depicts a man standing by his principles and all that. There is a lot more to the story than that, though, and its larger meaning is lost on most people.
Both fellows have something like a happy ending. They have both given their best and achieved sweet victory. For one, however, it is a precipice from which you know he will soon come crashing down. He is in his late twenties and has just spent his whole life doing nothing more than validating his existence to the public. He is still stuck on himself; the only change is that he now has nothing more to aim for. Thankfully, we are spared the picture of his married life.
Who is this other fellow? He has goals, too. The opportunity presents itself to run in the Olympics, and he pursues it with determination, but is perfectly ready to toss it away when it presents a conflict with his greater goals. His speed in running is not a means of obsessing about himself; it was a means of uplifting the spirits of those around him, like most everything else in his life. He was able to be the best without sinking into a quagmire of foolish introspection.
Then the story ends, and we see all the old folks leaving the funeral service, walking out of the austere Anglican chapel and into the rain. At that point I feel that I am as encouraged by the one man’s humble death as I am depressed by the other man’s proud life. I wonder sometimes if my funeral will be the same way.
— JD
“Unseen in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing glove.”
— P.G. Wodehouse
Though our labour soon devours all that lies within our powers
Soon it’s late and all our hours into past’s abyss have tore;
See, the light of Heaven’s fire pales both fame and funeral pyre;
Earthly glory, gain & hire lose the glimmer that they wore
Light of heaven pales the shallow grace and glimmer that they wore;
Now they sway us — soon, no more.
For we find in all the ages, men whose passing life presages
Life beyond our dusty cages, light behind that darkest door;
May we, as we end this chapter, freed from earth, our sometime captor,
Hail the advent of an apter sphere for all our souls to soar;
Hail, in death, the ageless God whose sight will make our souls to soar,
Dying as we lived before.
In Holland, Michigan, Irish paraphernelia is not to be had for love or money. Meijer’s and Walmart each have a little stand of green muffins, napkins with clovers on them, that kind of thing. No green body paint, no Irish flags, and very little in the way of public events. Of course it’s no fault of theirs; it’s simply that everyone here is Dutch and no one is Irish. You can’t seriously expect a large population of last names beginning with “Vander” to celebrate the heritage of all the O’Neals and O’Shaughnessys who are locally nonexistent.
But some of the locals have gone out of their way to accomodate me. At work I found a small vase of green daisies on my desk, which was (gasp; dare I, a macho man of twenty-two years, say it?) touching. Then after coming home from dinner with the Furhmans, I find that my kitchen has been penetrated by would-be Irish celebrants. A shamrock-adorned cake in my freezer and all my dairy products mysteriously modified with a charming hue of green that could only have been accomplished by an amateur user of food coloring. The buggers did leave a little in the way of identification, however, in the form of a couple of carefully crafted St. Patrick’s day cards and a short note.
Aw, shucks…sniffle…what are you lookin’ at, anyway?
A good amount of mail is flowing into our inbox, ranging in character from enlightening to provocative to willfully ignorant. While most receive private responses, a couple have been posted and annotated here.
“The name’s Samoud. Al Samoud.”
Shelly K writes:
“I like your articles, but I’m curious why you havent said anything about Iraq. In fact you never say anything political. What is up with that! Either you don’t care which kind of makes me think you aren’t living in the real world, or you are afraid to say what you think. Whatever it is, it makes me think less of yuo [sic] so what is your reasoning here.”
There is nothing to say about Iraq or any other political issue that hasn’t been said before. Anyone interested in these issues usually knows where to find opinions and information on them. As a matter of fact, we do have well-grounded beliefs concerning just about any issue of which you can think, and the Editor can occasionally be found debating these in other forums, both on- and offline.
As far as this publication is concerned, however, we are not interested in saying things that have been said elsewhere. It is simply too easy to write forceful articles about political topics, which are usually charged with undeserved emotional fervour and make for cheap ways to provoke responses from readers. At times we have cleared our throats and coughed up an article that had political connotations, but these always concern points that few others are raising, such as the assimilation of Canada and the abolition of the metric system. We are not afraid of making enemies now and again, but not at the expense of originality.
Stricken Collegiates Strike Back
A few people took exception to our editorial on modern poetry. Randy Singer, himself an admitted academic, writes:
“…Who are you to say what is ‘real’ poetry and what is ‘fake’ poetry? Work’s like Merrill’s are every bit as valid as Fitzgerald’s, and I myself enjoy both with equanimity. The real difference is that one style is primarily emotional, while the other is primarily intellectual. Just because you prefer the latter doesn’t make the former ‘fake,’ except as a matter of opinion.”
Where should we start? Skipping the fact that Mr. Singer has misused the word ‘equanimity,’ we note that he seems to have a definition of ‘poetry’ that is too wide and too vague. Apparently anything claiming to be poetry should be taken as poetry; but our stance is simply this: if it has all the essential characteristics of prose, and none of poetry, then it is just prose claiming to be poetry. That is what we mean when we say Merril’s poems are fake.
Mr. Singer also fails in his distinction between the two ‘styles.’ It is true that the ‘first’ kind appeals mainly to our emotions. It also assumes we have no mind, or that the mind is not the proper place for appreciation of poetical thought. But real poetry combines the heart and mind; it does not expel the emotions. Obviously the second is superior to the first.
All this shows how firmly rooted is this false notion that it is impossible to be objective in evaluating writing.
Seeing The Forest In The Middle of All Those Trees
Finally, Stephen H. sent this to the editor:
“Glad to see you back. Hard to find sites like this. I only have one question: who is your intended audience? just nerds like me, or what? You seem to be all over the map, at least in tone if not in content. Maybe you should decide exactly what you’re trying to accomplish here and dig in. Crossover types always end up alienating people.”
THE EDITOR RESPONDS: My intended audience is anyone who can read English, has a brain and uses it. The brain, I mean. What I’m trying to accomplish is writing about anything that interests me. Look again at the third word in the site’s title graphic.1
—JD
For many years the site’s subtitle was “Joel’s Improved Personal Website” ↩
If you had told me a month ago that I would actually rather starve than cook a meal for myself, I would not have believed you. But having been plunged into a life of bachelorly self-sufficiency, I find that it is not that hard to get from not liking cooking to simply skipping the meal altogether.
It goes like this. I come home from work and go upstairs. Now, I might like a nice meal, I say to myself. (If I were normal I would merely think it to myself, but more often than not I end up saying it aloud.) But, what should I eat? I immediately consider the path of reasoning that leads to the most desirable end: a hot, tasty meal. However, a number of obstacles immediately leap out from behind my visionary steaming casseroles and boiled vegetables. It takes too long; I’d rather not do that many dishes afterwards; I have hardly anything in the cupboard because I’m too cheap to buy things I know I’ll never cook anyway; and most of all, I hate cooking.
So much for that idea. But now, I’ve got to have something else. The only alternatives to cooking are cereal and sandwiches. But I’ve just had a sandwich for lunch, and I’m starting to get sick of having cereal. From this point it is only a trifling logical hop to thinking that, of course, the simplest thing would be to just not eat. I’m not that hungry anyway (it’s always either that or I’m more tired than I am hungry), and it would probably make the next meal taste better, and I would be saving money anyway. So after a few links in a simple line of reasoning, I have arrived at such an aberration of thought, that the Darwinians might despair of my genus being around for many more generations.
