Grunts from the Wordgrump (9)

•It saddens me that we have a mandatory policy to castrate adopted male dogs.  I think it speaks to a lack of innovative thinking.  Why can’t we train them to use condoms?  Isn’t there an app for that yet? 

•Protect your time from being wasted by refusing to watch “news” that is not news, viz., reporters and commentators who speculate about what may, could, will or possibly might take place.  They’re paid to  blather.

•The voice that sings the notes placed on the page, that strikes the tone and holds it; the voice that trusts itself to the music, that eschews the showy vibrato, the splayed hands, the puckered grimace; the voice that would rather merge with the melody than flaunt and preen itself . . . is very hard to find. 

•A hardback academic tome distributed by an established publisher contains a major error that creates a grammatical train wreck.  No excuse suffices here.  Not a “misprint.”  Not a “typo.”  If your copy editing is so lax that you print a verb as a noun, you have failed in your fundamental responsibility to the author and the reader. You deserve to be vilified and flayed.

•In 2012, I long for an election as close and rancorous as 2000.   But this time the Democrats win.  I want the Republicans to take it in the teeth so that I can watch them go bat-shit crazy.  And then I want Obama to find his inner meanie and rub it in.   

•Arragh!  Pearls Before Swine.  You can think it of a small group, a class, or an audience but you can’t say it.  If you voice it you will sound like a supercilious, arrogant asshole.  Even if you’re right.

•We all have a constitutional right to free speech but there is no corresponding constitutional obligation to listen.  Thank God for that.

In Memoriam: My Sister Katie, Leaving the Boat

   My sister Katie died one year ago on Christmas day, (2010).  In the year since, I've discovered that those we lose are the ones we learn from the most.  In part because we keep remembering things we had forgotten, . . . She brought me disposable syringes from her nurse's training program, and showed me how to practice injections on the skin of an orange . . . She had a wonderful ability to laugh at herself  even in situations when others would be angry and embarrassed . . .  She left the dinner table early one evening and soon we heard from the living room a loud crash. We rushed in and there she was, sitting in the middle of a collapsed piano bench, laughing . . . and she sometimes thought her parents and siblings were silly. . . She brought home a black female friend, whose last name was "White." This was thought to be amusing by the rest of the family .

   In the early 90s Katie published an article in a book entitled Whatever Happened To The Good Sisters? (easily findable by title on Amazon). In a family that had assumed the highest IQ was owned by the eldest child, she, the second born, proved to be one with the superior number. . .  Her piece was called "A Good Sister Story."  In it she described her entrance into the religious order, the Daughters of Charity; she chose an order that did not allow novices to make home visits. Ever. She wanted to get away from the rule of home.  She recounted what it was like to be a nun for twenty-six years, and how and why she decided to leave the order and live on her own.  All of those activities demanded courage, and Katie had that quality in abundance. When I was a school boy I found myself in the middle of a circle of goading males. I squared off against a bigger stronger boy, but she broke through, stopped the fight before it began, and dispersed the instigators. 
   In developing her narrative, she quotes a metaphor that was part of the culture of the convent.  "The community is the boat that will lead you to heaven.  If you leave the boat you will be in the water and God knows if you will ever get to heaven; or what will happen to you."  That dictate was freighted with the threat of spiritual loss. It served as a yoke that kept the young nuns on the prescribed path.  But over time Katie took the metaphor and turned it on its head.  "In the last five years that I was in the community, we began to have a lot of meetings, talking about where we were going as a community.  I longed for someone to sit down and talk with me about where I was going as a person.  But it seemed as though no one cared.  I didn't feel they had their own answers, let alone mine.  Finally, staying in the boat wasn't enough.  I knew if I did that I would never walk on water."  Katie did not aspire to miraculous locomotion.  The statement she sets down is her way of both pointing to and deflating the overwrought prediction of disaster for those with the temerity to "leave the boat."  But her departure--while a surprise to many, including herself--was not an angry exit.  Indeed, she concluded:  "I am very grateful for what I was given in the community; my entering was not a mistake and my leaving was not a mistake." 

   A family death creates not only absence but also a sobering sense of mortality.  We were both young and in the whole of our health, visiting in Mobile, AL, taking a stroll on a bridge.  Our talk turned to the worth of our work.  How long would our lives be?  What do we need to accomplish in our three score and ten?  She put things in perspective.  "I don't think we should fret.  We're all just passing through anyway." 
   For me, my sister's death  has confirmed the reality of "the undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns."  That's an uncomfortable truth.  But much later in the play, the melancholy Dane articulates a more settled stance toward finitude, one that reminds me of that conversation on the bridge.  "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now,yet it will come.  The readiness is all." 
   So if it's time to leave your boat, do so.  Your next step may be to walk on water.

Natalie Wood and Wordsworth

   Last month Natalie Wood, dead for thirty years, was back in the news.  The investigation of her death--she was found in the California waters off Catalina Island--was re-opened, based on "new information."  Her last evening was spent in the company of actors Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken aboard a small yacht.  The accepted explanation of what happened to her was that she fell overboard and drowned.

   During Natalie Wood's lifetime I had the same interest in her as many of my male mates.  She was a good actress in movies that we liked (especially Rebel Without A Cause) and since she carried herself with an insouciant yet flirtatious bearing, we were careful to cloak our languorous lust.  When we watched her on the screen we welcomed the dark, a fitting setting for desire.  Then she made a movie, which turned on the agonized frustrations of young love.  It was titled "Splendor in the Grass."
   The scene in the film that incorporates the title takes place in a classrooom--a high school English classrooom.  Natalie's character, her emotions roiled by her doomed romance with the school's Adonis (Warren Beatty), is overcome as she responds to the teacher's request that she read a passage from Wordsworth: 

                         What though the radiance which was once so bright
                         Be now for ever taken from my sight,
                               Though nothing can bring back the hour
                         Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                                We will grieve not, rather find
                                Strength in what remains behind;

   She can barely get through it, and runs from the room.

   The passage is from the Intimations Ode, Wordsworth's great poem depicting apprehensions of immortality "from recollections of early childhood."  It is my favorite poem produced by the senior sage of the English Romantic Poets.

   Years after I had outgrown my youthful crush on Natalie Wood, I found myself teaching gifted high school students.  I had assigned the Ode and we were beginning our investigation of its memory and magic.  As a first step I was doing a reading of the whole work in a small auditorium.  In those years, early in the school's history, there had developed among the English team an informal custom of stopping to listen when a colleague was providing a formal reading or was "on fire with the word" in teaching a compelling text.  The custom developed because the classrooms were of the open design, i.e., as little use of doors and walls as possible.  It was easy to pause while walking by, lean on a low divider, and listen.  A colleague did so and positioned himself so that I could see him but the students could not.  That was fine.  But as I approached--in sonorous tones--the lines, "Though nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;" his face formed a grimace of fervid concupiscence, and he smiled a broad lascivious grin.  "I know where your mind goes when you speak the line "splendour in the grass" his countenance conveyed, intentionally corrupting the quotation.
  
   Now, the "Intimations Ode" is a serious poem and the passage profaned here is prelude to a profound conclusion about mortality and memory.  I was on a precipice.  Giggling and guffaws beckoned.  If I succumbed I would confuse the students and besmirch the poem I loved.  I prayed to Wordsworth.  He sustained my voice and my concentration.  The reading was consummated.  My colleague wended on his wayward way.  Vanquished by a nobler mien.  But he was right.  He did know who I thought of when I declaimed "splendour in the grass."  And still do.