Life is not too much with me, the passions of people are: the mad velocity of man, the fury, the sound, the howling, hurtling seething frenzy. It's hardly a secret that the recent explosion surrounding madmen with guns has dropped me into the hopeless, boiling depths of misanthropy, like a stone tossed in a witch's kettle which none of my toil and trouble can cool, but really that's what human events are, have been, will be like: a ferment, a boiling fed by unexamined fire and stirred by secret spoons to some unknown purpose -- or worse, to no purpose at all. So will it always be and we either simmer in the pot or dip our ladles as our situations have determined. Man is not a rational animal and any urge to be a pair of giant claws is only a latent vision of our essential nature.
A January morning is gilding the
treetops near and far into the infinite distance and the dew still
glistens on the patio screens. I take my warm cup of hand picked, hand
roasted, hand ground coffee from some remote village in Papua New Guinea
outside into the creamy fragrant air to examine my bonsai. Lemons and
Oranges hang from the gravid trees like Christmas ornaments, the
Poinsettia bushes glare like retreating tail lights, a new day's worth
of yellow Hibiscus flowers beckons. The forever forest of white
mangrove, mahogany, Sabal palm and buttonwood stretches to the end of
the world. It's still too early for the sea breeze but the soft roar of
surf is always audible at this time of year when the scream of insects
and birds is at a minimum. Shall I lounge in the hammock reading?
Perhaps it will grow too warm.86 new e-mails after the spam filter disposes of the worst, a smallish crop. All kinds of breathless announcements of things Obama, the media, the NRA, the Tea Party or the Liberals don't want me to know. Protect the children, Protect your rights, Ban the Guns, Tax the Rich, buy some guns, weekend Ammo blowout! Lose 30 pounds by next week with the miracle berry. Contribute NOW! before it's too late! The fiscal apocalypse is coming. Pssssst -- want a date?
Headlines: 1800 burglaries in this mostly rural county in 2012. Eight in my neighborhood this week, one armed home invasion -- shots were fired. We need to buy guns. We need to ban guns. We need and need and need and it's their fault and we need it now.
10 miles away, where the country road crosses the Turnpike, the big pickups with the off-road suspension are pushing the Jags and leased Bentlys from their tasks of snobbing at the KIAs and Hyundaes and the Luxo-Utility egoboxes are trying to intimidate everyone, assaulting rear bumpers like Chrome plated rapists while they stumble over their own tires trying to keep any fast vehicles from passing them before they get to the entrance ramp where their entrance will be blocked by countless angry machines trying to get past each other at 95 on their mad diurnal migration down to Palm Beach or Boca or Lauderdale.
Worn out, sunburned, dented fender, busted window; peasant, poseur and ponce. Pasted with bumper stickers:
Change You Can Step in ,
Save the Turtles,
Jesus is Lord.
The End of an Era
Ron Jon Surf Shop - Coco Beach
Wage earners, payment makers, inflated egos intent on arriving at their appointed places of deflation and cringing conformity -- and before that other son of a bitch does -- screaming, screaming, screaming radios cursing the Right and cursing the Left, big rigs cursing the four-wheelers, country boys cursing the yuppies. Rush hour rodents, their tails on fire. Next performance at 4:00 PM.
Out at the St Lucie inlet, the tide is coming in.
Beat poetry dream of Kerouac
ReplyDeleteI too have left this world a while
To return by red sunset with mountains
Is that yours or Jacks?
DeleteBeautiful!
Your lyrical prose reminded me of something Kerouac might have thought or written in a modern time. Just a simple Haiku. My getaway was to the local manzanita chaparral dogs in tow to commune with the oaks, boulders and red granite sandstone. As I drove homeward just a half an hour after sunset, I could see more mountains to the west outlined in the distance.
DeleteCapt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteA fine piece of writing -- lyrical stuff and wise. One thing I've noticed is that most people tend to be so caught up in the middle of things that they can't gain any perspective. It is a rare gift to be outside the busy flow of life, to look at it to at least some extent "from the outside in." What else really accounts for the wild success of stupid-realist formulae about the absolutely utter utterness of all our schemes of perpetual survival, ironclad collective safety, ultra-consequential morality, etc.? Always so many voices urging severity and absoluteness in the name of necessity: we MUST be cruel to the poor, slash this or that benefit for the elderly, in order that "the rest of society" may thrive; we MUST spend all our money on the military, lest the boogeyman come to get us; we MUST bomb this or that country just in case it's thinking it might someday like to bomb us, etc. ad nauseam. Milton said it well in PL: necessity is always "the tyrant's plea," and most of us live our lives in the shadow of tyrannies of our own and others' making.
Right-wingers in particular seem to envision life as taking place in a tiny, cramped lifeboat, ruled by a captain whose every thought is who to cast overboard to the waiting sharks, that others may live. It's so stupid, really -- as Keynes supposedly said, "In the long run, we'll all be dead." The appropriate response to such a realization, I think, is not severity but compassion.
I agree with our bloggingdino, it is a fine piece of writing, lyrical and philosophical in content. I often think of life as a tempest and long for calm seas. I think that we have to remember to grab the moments of calm and savor them in the hope that they will sustain us through the storms.
ReplyDeleteI am also on the Capt Fogg admiration wagon - fine piece of writing; for a moment there I was transported...
ReplyDeleteYou're all far too kind. An editor might have made something of it - or a writer with an attention span, but yes, being out of the channel watching the boats go by -- a quasi-Buddhist detachment is the refuge I dream about in the midst of all this endless screaming.
ReplyDeleteYou all know Edvard Munch and The Scream but most aren't aware that it isn't the man pictured who is screaming. It's the world screaming and he's covering his ears in pain.
It's only a fair likeness of me though.
I join the others to congratulate you on a great lyrical piece of writing. I am still thinking of that Swash Zone anthology, an idea first floated over a year ago. I think this would make a fine lead piece.
ReplyDelete