Saturday, October 31, 2015

#304




I had an instructive little exchange with a colleague this week. The setup: A buck whitetail deer crashed through a window on our campus, probably because it’s the mid-fall rutting season and bucks become crazy, testosterone-maddened brutes, and he saw his own reflection in the window and tried to fight with it. Once the poor animal found himself inside the building, he panicked and started running around the halls looking for a way out, terrorizing students and staff people at every turn. He ran across the lobby into the dining hall, tried to jump out of a window there, then scrambled back into the lobby, hooves clattering and flailing along the slick terrazzo floors, bashing into more windows, down a flight of stairs, bursting into the game room, then the snack bar, breaking more windows, leaving blood stains and broken glass everywhere, people yelling and shrieking all the while, finally down a basement hall heading for the loading dock. Some poor guy walking down the hall minding his own business heard the commotion behind him, turned around to see a huge charging whitetail bearing down on him full bore, and he took off running for his life down the hall with the deer gaining on him. They reached the loading dock at the same moment and fell off of it together in a tangled heap. A chunk of the buck’s antler broke off and stuck in the student’s back, and he suffered a concussion. The deer bounded off for the woods, with some cuts from the broken glass and a disfigured antler, but otherwise okay. The student was taken to the hospital, had the wounds in his back treated (they weren’t serious), and was released. He’s fine. When the student got back from the hospital, he was of course an instant campus celebrity. Because the damage was limited to three broken windows, some scuff marks and blood stains, and because the student wasn’t badly hurt, that opened the door for a salvo of jokes. One of them: You were trying to steal that buck’s doe, weren’t you? That’s asking for trouble!

Not thinking too deeply about the political ramifications, I repeated the joke somewhere and got politely called on it. Bucks don’t “own” does and fight for possession. They fight to attract the females’ attention. Who is really in control of this situation? Uh-oh…. That’s debatable in the case of deer, but discretion is the better part of valor, they say, and rather than engage in a gendered argument about cervine sexual politics, I instantly dropped it. I can forget to think at particular moments, sure, but I’m not stupid. Not an argument I was going to win in the environment of a college campus with a feminist history professor. I didn’t want to win that argument anyway, which is more to the point.

There are all sorts of human behaviors where males use dominance and violence to control groups of women: harems, slavery, pimps and hookers. This is generally considered immoral and criminal. They’re underground behaviors these days for the most part, generally condemned and criminalized. Depends on what corner of the world you’re in, though. But this is still an undeniable aspect of violent human behavior. It’s possible to see some male human behavior as determined by a perpetual rut. Deer, not being affected by a moral code, just do what they do. They don’t have to ask why. This behavior in humans is condemned and underground now because it is enforced by violence, and because the women involved have their agency and humanity stripped from them. They’re reduced to commodities, and maybe we’re progressing to the point, society wide, even in all its backwaters and darkest corners, where this is not an acceptable condition. And yes, it’s narrow and boneheaded anyway to think that women are ever helpless, but it’s also true that violence makes victims and robs them of their agency. The point of this, though, is to acknowledge that in the fully and realistically regarded worlds of both deer and people, the females have every bit as much control as the males do. So, males need to attract attention, and in order to attract attention, males brag, pose, flatter, and preen. They sharpen their antlers to gleaming ivory points, but it’s more about show than actual fighting. Deer rattling their antlers in the woods, linebackers in their strange brightly colored and patterned uniforms—like birds of paradise—the show and pantomime are what it’s really all about. The women are watching.

And sometimes you write a poem to the women you want to love and admire you. You flatter them. You note that Ellen is on a hill-top, and Maris is the vividest writer yet, and Valerie “has only & always her own / in her daring & placid beauty.” And if you really want to up the ante, you mention—just as a sort of casual aside, you know—that you wrote a letter to the White House apologizing for missing out on the invitation to dinner with the President of the United States, one of the greatest conferrals of stature extended to an American. And why do you do this?

            I should have consulted him on my splendid getting
            four ladies to write to Henry: who is most fair,
            ingenious & adept?

I guess it’s so ridiculous that we’re supposed to laugh at it, and yes, I can laugh at it. Oh, yeah, well, I got an invitation to the White House, and damn, that’s quite an amazing accolade, but even better is the accolade I just got from letters written by you four fair & adept ladies! Let's talk about that, Mr. President! Oh good lord, but doesn’t it also strike me as maybe just a touch fawning, fatuous, and perhaps even just a little bit creepy? Nah! It’s for the ladies! Watch him strut his stuff!

And so it goes. Toujours l’amour

Friday, October 30, 2015

#303 Three in Heaven I Hope



[No online link available.]

Henry in a noisy bar, talking with an Irish lady about her six children, three dead (in heaven she hopes), one in a mental hospital, three of them married. This gets Henry thinking about his child: “I do love that baby.” All about children, having children, parenting. No Faustian “Thou shalt not love” today. “Working & children & pals are the point of the thing.”

Really? Okay. The sight of a four-year-old daughter on the floor “doing her coloring & her scissoring” will do that to a fella, I suspect. No grand ambition, no fatuous fawning for fame, no decrepit body, no river of ethanol. Nothing of damnation, ambition, decline. “Of babies I have loved I declare I rejoice / chiefly in Paul & Martha, called Twissy-Pits.”

Kate got cross, pal Jimmy came over, rocking of pretty little Martha, old Jane tells her story. Life, for a change.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

#302



[No online link available.]

The poem begins with a familiar line: “Cold & golden lay the high heroine / in a wilderness of bears.” Who the bears are gets pinned down in lines 7-8: After looking around (back in the States) and realizing “This place is theirs,” Henry had decided “I will not live here / among my thugs.” The bears are thugs, but they’re his thugs, i.e., I think, his fellow countrymen. So, “Lo, and he went away / to Dublin’s fair city.” Yes he did. “There he met at once two ladies dear / with problems, problems. Henry could not say / like their parish priest ‘Pray’.” Well, no, he can’t tell them that, can he? He’s not a true believer, not from what gets established in the work. Orders to pray from a priest would still have currency and influence in Ireland, but Henry is candid enough to realize that could never be his mode, at least not yet. “He immersed himself in their disabled fates / the catafalque above all for instance T—’s / and others bound to come.” Hard to say who the two ladies are, but it does seem likely they’re real people. A “catafalque” is the support for the coffin in an elaborate funeral, so the ladies seem rich or influential, and probably elderly. You often meet people like that at literary gatherings.

So, we know he had run from the bears in a dream, and the dream significance of the bears seems restated here: They’re thuggish American Philistines, well worth running from. The poem ends with a kind of ironic joke: “The White House invitation came today, / three weeks after the reception, hey, / Henry not being at home.” A White House invitation marks the very pinnacle of American recognition, our answer to tea with the Queen. But he doesn’t even hear about it until three weeks after the fact, having run from the high heroine’s cohort of slavering bears.

The poem is meant to elicit an ironic chuckle, I think. Figures. Having run from home, he misses out on a high-honored accolade from home. The bears he so fears wanted to put a crown on him! Figures.

Even though he missed out due to the slow, ship-bound mail service, the invitation is still worth mentioning as testament to the recognition he is so invested in attracting.