A Triggered Resonance

A welcome addition to our household this year has been my gift to my wife of the algorithmic source of just about everything—Alexa via Echo.  Headlines, local weather, shopping, and, of course, music, almost anything you can think of is literally at your beck and call. We use it mostly for background music to accompany our household chores.

This morning my wife ordered a shuffle of Paul Simon songs.  After some obscure (to us) songs from the Graceland list, we heard the familiar introductory notes of “My Little Town,” the hit from 1975.  I always enjoyed the song for what back then I regarded (I suppose) as its piquancy, a kind of double-edged lamentation of misguided beliefs.  But then suddenly I heard familiar references to imagery and social contexts that resonate with our current deeply troubling social dissociations and displacements, generally surrounding the hapless clamor for that “America” distilled into #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

The song begins with a soft sentimentality:

"In my little town, I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all.
And he used to lean upon me as I pledged allegiance"

But closes that third line with “to the wall.”  The softness begins to meld to something perhaps defiant.

"Lord, I recall, in my little town,
Comin' home after school, flyin' my bike past the gates of the factories,
My mom doin' the laundry, hangin' out shirts in the dirty breeze."

The song becomes then a seeming incantation, a realization of disillusionment.  Mom is stay-at-home, but the dirty air fouls the clean laundry.  And then things get more dismal.

"And after it rains there's a rainbow and all of the colors are black.
It's not that the colors aren't there, it's just imagination they lack."

The narrator collapses the Oz-like landscape into shadowy, dull enervation.  And then, as though the narrator fears we might miss the hard experience of his thought, he tumbles onto the brink of his nihilism.

"Everything's the same back in my little town,
My little town, my little town.

Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town."

He moves on to personalize the experience, bringing it into the dread of his daily existence and the heritage of violence.

"In my little town, I never meant nothin',
I was just my father's son. mmm.
Savin' my money, dreamin' of glory,
Twitchin' like a finger on the trigger of a gun."

This then prefaces the angry wailing of the chorus, which traditionally should resolve his internal conflict…but not in this denial of the American idyll.

"Leavin' nothin' but the dead and dying back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town.
Nothin' but the dead and dyin' back in my little town."

And so, why bother with this parsing of what for some is an ancient, if jangly, lyric of small town/suburban American angst ca. the 60s and 70s?  I reacted by associating it with the contemporary taunting imagery of the nagging rally chant that urges a return to something that truly never was, to make America great again.  (By the way, “great” comes from Old German, almost whole cloth, meaning "big, tall, thick, stout, massive; coarse."  It has no meaning associated with “excellent”, as in its American English vernacular usage, associated with the marginally literate.)  Paul Simon was unconsciously prescient.  Back then, I will guess, he could not imagine that the cynicism and nihilism of his narrator’s wounded voice could ever become the rallying cry of the fearful descendants of his Little Town, those hurt-filled millions, the forgotten minions, those voices of the Trumpian lemmings gleefully and haplessly marching to their destiny.

I can see now through Simon’s eyes that it must have been a torturous festering indeed, the wound that hasn’t healed.

* By the way, “great” comes from Old German, almost whole cloth, meaning "big, tall, thick, stout, massive; coarse."  It has no meaning associated with “excellent”, as in its American English vernacular usage, associated with the marginally literate.

 

Blood Moon

What must they have felt?

The bright harvest ball, beaming

Their hope for plenty,

Dimming so slowly, such

Agonizing slowness, taking hope

To scarlet smear and a worse than

Darkness doubting their eyes,

Silencing their night sounds,

Did they feel crazy, did they

See crazy anyway, anywhere?

We conjure demons without

Sighting some actual something,

For

We have demons enough within

Us

To know their natures, their

Familiar.

Blood moon,

HA! simple

Science,

You see.

But they who cowered,

They are in us, yes,

Even though we shove them

down they rise still in

Our fears, yes, they believed

Then, because sometimes

They were right enough

Sometimes.

De-sorting

Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort excellently explains and delineates how the cultural explosions of the 60s fragmented and factionalized the US into satellites of “like-minded” communities.  Thus, we Americans sorted ourselves into comforting mutual admiration mini-cultures, which, for the most part, disdained but did not confront the other mini-cultures.  It would seem that such a life would be the happiness that we were ordained to pursue. 

But we had forgotten and forsaken the better wisdom of the founders.  The states and the mini-cultures in them were not to be singular; they were to be united.  The problem with our post-industrial, post-modern world is that it has sparse memory.  What little memory we have involves only the chaos and fear of the 60s.  We sought the solace and serenity of our like-mindedness as a bulwark against what we could not bother to contemplate and understand.   It got in the way of our rampant consumerism.

A few years ago I did some research into the origins and manifestations of rap and hip hop.  One manifestation that warrants a great deal more research and analysis is the graffiti, or, as the “writers” preferred to call it, “taggin’.”  Taggin’ is the more appropriate term.  When it began (partially as a reaction to the chaos and terror surrounding the representative neighborhoods, the likeminded communities), it functioned as shout outs to the home community and competitive call outs to the other satellite communities in the region.  A debate remains whether it started in the Bronx, Brooklyn or Philadelphia.  The debate notwithstanding, the fact remains that its bedrock was social and psychological communication.

For all that Bill Bishop tells us about the religious, tribal and economic causes of “the big sort,” he neglects to discuss this phenomenon within the marginalized communities. And what distinguishes them from the comfort-seekers among the dominant communities is that they were reaching out to each other.

I won’t go into the historical sources of this re-socializing phenomenon in the history of the American and South American slave trade.  My point is that it sustained a survival mechanism based on shared cultural identifications, grounded in competitive art forms.  That is, as the turmoil around these marginalized groups imminently threatened to sort them into increasingly impotent satellites, they promoted a traditional de-sorting procedure that promised to re-group their energies and their identities.

I have a feeling that this is precisely what Barack Obama had in mind when he talked about change.  He wanted to de-sort our nation.  He wanted to dislocate the 40 year emphasis on difference and divisiveness.  He wanted to shout out the identity that we all once shared, a United States of America, to reject our fear and acrimony.  Re-charge our energies to do the right things.  Ignore calls for dishonor.  Make US a good people again.

Ironic end note:  Near the end of his book, in a footnote, Bishop cites Obama, saying “Illinois senator Barack Obama presented himself early in the 2008 campaign as the man of the earth candidate [a class of arbitrators in the Nuer tribe of the upper Nile…had no formal powers, but they had cultural authority to settle disputes], the politician able and eager to speak to­—and listen to—all sides.”

This sad and edgy irony is what currently impels us Americans into a murky and foul unknown.

A Poem To Chew On

On Having Read Ishion Hutchinson’s “The Old Professor’s Book”

                 [The New Yorker, September 17, 2018, p. 37]

I suppose I come to this as

Another winnowed out professor, well aware

Of his abuses but never quite ready to

Accept those aspired truths, which remain stilled

In those scarred minds incised by his espousals.

For no matter how we strugglers at

The wheel of the art may boast of “how

To align poetry with truth” we know, from

The certainty of our travail, the inevitable

Chagrin awaiting our efforts, the reader’s frown.

The struggle, honestly, is whether to be, rather

Than only to know—the dynamo creating “the

Voltage of self-alienating poetry,” in fact, the discovery

Behind the voice of the self-alienating mea culpa in Browning’s

Narrator’s tale of the grammarian, the funeral, not the burial.

And so, this challenging poem, worthy as well, brings

Us back to that grammarian’s funeral—that is ours,

Imminent and effectual—for our death matters only

So far as we are certain that our life had significance, had

The truth of living, not only knowing, but also weeping, perhaps, for all.

What have we become?

...from a letter to the editor at The New York Times, Sept. 3, 2018

"To the Editor:

Roger Cohen asks, Who are we? What have we become? Look at the corruption on Wall Street. Look at the weaponizing of the Supreme Court. Look at supposed Christian leaders falling into lock step with this sociopathic president. Look at the lies behind our endless wars. Look at the Kardashians. Look at a century of American interference in other nations’ elections.

That’s who we’ve become, and it did not all start with Donald Trump. We are merely entering harvest time for all those evil seeds planted decades ago. And the fruit is exceedingly bitter.

Daniel Lake, Mirror Lake, N.H."

"Self Comes to Mind"

(after Antonio Damasio's marvelous book)

I, finally,
am I, alone,
not other, not it,
not they or them.

To be, actually, as 
author, builder,
telling and trying
all and none, but
now, finally, knowing,
the difference and the
indifference, but still
knowing and feeling as I.

And, actually, all now
being, so, as I, then, all
forgettable change, I,
now, glittering nova.