In 1964, Kitty Genovese was knifed to death in the alley beside her apartment in New York. Two weeks later, the New York Times published an article with the famous headline "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" -- an account so inaccurate that the paper retracted it in the killer's obituary 52 years later. Still, the original version of the story entered public consciousness to the point where the phrase "Kitty Genovese" became shorthand for the apathy of bystanders. Not long after the incident, singer-songwriter Phil Ochs opened a composition by ridiculing those involved: "Oh, look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed / They've dragged her to the bushes, and now she's being stabbed / Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain / But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game..."
The thing about inaccurate news stories is that they're often wrong only in a specific sense. Thirty-eight people may not have actually stood by while Genovese died, but similar things have happened to others. As a species, we tend to come up short in moments that call for intervention. I'm hardly one to cast stones; once, I took part in a CPR class in which we practiced giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to plastic babies. After a series of scripted drills, the instructor dropped one of the babies on the floor and ordered us to act as though it were a real emergency. We all stood blinking at each other, expecting someone else to pretend to call 911. We were mired in our own comfort zones, clinging to our even keel the way Ochs' characters clung to their game. Of course, that was a plastic baby. A real one would have fired up our endorphins and spurred us into action. It's nice to tell ourselves that. A college professor of mine once said that we're more likely to intervene -- particularly in a violent incident -- if we're in a bad mood. Then, we're more inclined to punch a mugger in the face or chase an assailant who towers over us. If we're feeling decent enough, our inhibitions take over. We worry too much about going off script. Think about the template that most of us wake to each morning: We will rise at the usual time in a comfortable bed, shower and have breakfast inside a sturdy roof and walls, and fire up the car that runs dependably. The clerks at stores will be polite and helpful. The people that we pass on the street will smile but stay out of our way. We will have a few chosen interactions with friends and family members who serve as confidants. At work, we will be productive, complete our regular tasks, and move in a general direction toward a future that is healthy and prosperous. We will fit in a favorite song or two, enjoy a drink or movie when responsibilities are done. Our phone and credit cards will await us in the morning. Yes, we know that chaos exists, but that's the principle of yin and yang -- we recognize things by their opposites. If misfortune strikes, it will strike someone else, and that will serve to illuminate how easy our own path is. We spend a fair amount of our day near windows. They're one of our more symbolic inventions: a clear view of the outside world that's separated from us by an invisible pane. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Woman Next Door," centers on action that takes place on both sides of a window. A couple lives on one side; they're bystanders, like the fewer-than-38 who ignored Genovese. On the other side is the title character, who appears in the midst of a blowup with her partner. We only see her; the man stays inside the house as she hurls his guitar onto the lawn, flips the middle finger, then ends up flustered at the street corner, radiating indecision about where to go. Does the couple intervene? Well, would you? Look out the nearest window right now and imagine that you witnessed a similar scene. Probably your mind would start ticking off a list of criteria. Has the woman actually been attacked? No -- there doesn't appear to be any physical abuse. Is she the victim, still? Maybe not -- she is obviously strong enough to fight back. Do you know her? Not well enough to offer her your guest room. Do you know him? No, and it's probably good that you don't. If the people outside were your sister and brother-in-law, you might be outside right now pleading for a ceasefire. We all have it in us to be heroes. Typically, we require the right preconditions to do it. The poem ends happily, at least in part. While the marriage next door melts down, the narrator surveys his room and notes all the positive signs: "the corners / without guitars or amps, the books we've checked out / for each other, the hour's small talk priming the air." The eruption outside reminds him of how well he's nurtured a happy home, how much he's profited from staying on script. That's one of the perks of being a bystander. Sometimes, we get to enjoy our own show.
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There is a phase during childhood when we start paying attention to the whispers in the house. Early on, we are oblivious to most adult matters, and our questions center on the world as it relates to us: Where does our milk come from? What makes the jack-in-the-box pop up? When we hear grownups talking, their conversations are often incomprehensible. They do not involve us, and so we take little interest in them. Then, as our consciousness expands, we realize that another side of the world is being hidden from us. We wonder what is actually in the songs marked “explicit” that our parents skip on Apple Music, what is written in the books on the high shelf. Sometimes, we gather perplexing bits of evidence, but we would need an older sleuth to piece them together for us.
“Grandfather,” my poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is about that time of bewildered curiosity. It appeared in The First Thing Mastered, which came out ten years ago this month from Tebot Bach and was the first book that I wrote entirely as a piece. Its predecessors, Thief After Dark and College Town, are more or less hodgepodges of unrelated poems; The First Thing Mastered goes chronologically through the first three and a half decades of life, with motifs and developing themes along the way. “Grandfather” fits into the book’s first half. It’s about naivete, but so are all poems about childhood. I think the reason that time of life is such a rich vein for poets is that we survive it first and figure it out later. When we tap into our elementary-school selves again, we wield the perspective of age but also the memory of those omnivorous wide eyes. I think of the famous line from Sandra Cisneros: "What they don't understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you're eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one." I remember being all those ages. If Cisneros is to be trusted, then I still have each of them in me. "Grandfather" is not based on a true story, but I grew up around mysteries, as all of us do, and perhaps this poem came out of lingering curiosities. The title character is a patriarch who lives with two younger generations of his family. He fled unrest in some country, presumably in Asia, and now lives a quiet life full of strict routines: the same drink poured at the same time, the same music on the radio, the same ritual of waking up. The children in the house are fascinated by his past but know not to question the whispers. Those faded photographs and artifacts in the drawer must mean something, and the answer will remain unknown until someone says it out loud. This poem contain a double meaning that I didn’t realize when I wrote it. At the end, the grandfather walks into the room where the children are playing with action figures, taps the plastic Darth Vader, and intones, Real guys like this. Real guys. Over the years, I’ve had a few people express curiosity about the intent of those lines. Is the grandfather cautioning the children that villains aren’t simply a fictional concept -- i.e., “There are real guys like this in the world”? Or is he complimenting the boys for being manly by playing war games -- i.e., “Real guys like this sort of thing”? When I wrote those lines, I had one of the above meanings in mind and didn’t even think about the other one. Which one did I intend? I refuse to say. This is a poem about secrets, so I’m content to let it have a secret of its own. The other week, I quoted Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica,” which ends with the proclamation “A poem should not mean / but be.” If the final lines of this poem resonate on their own, then they’ve done their basic duty. I have a feeling that if we asked the grandfather to explain his comments, he would be elusive too. The oldest-known writer in human history is Kushim, a name that was etched on several clay tablets in ancient Sumer. As a writer, Kushim wasn't quite in a league with Shakespeare or Homer -- his work consisted of lists of transactions of barley -- but he started a glorious tradition of human beings writing things and putting their names on them. That practice has existed for more than 3,000 years, and now there's speculation about whether artificial intelligence is bringing it to an end. In recent months, platforms such as GPT-4 have proven capable of everything from passing the bar exam to perfectly emulating the style of a poet or novelist. There's an old joke that writers don't really like to write; they just like to have written. In that case, why not spare yourself the hours of tedious brainstorming and revision and just order up a masterpiece with a few keystrokes?
I have two responses to that question: one from a writer's perspective, and one from a reader's. For the first, I'll offer a quote from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert that appears on a podium in my classroom: "The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." I have never written anything without learning something about myself, and I urge my students to adopt the same attitude. You will make mistakes in the course of writing: ideas that go nowhere, reasoning that doesn't hold up, even a misplaced modifier or two. All of those foibles will help you grow as a person, and they may lead you to create something truly profound that you didn't think you had in you. As for the reader's perspective, I can say that, at least in some circumstances, I can detect AI-produced content within a few seconds. There is a coldness and slickness to it, all the more obvious when coming from writers whose work is not usually cold or slick. It has a flat formality, an over-dependence on logic and rationality. It gets everything right -- obviously, it can pass a test for a letter grade -- but it's a clear case of the mind and body without the soul. One of my favorite games now is to identify pieces of writing that a machine couldn't possibly have created. The Poetry Foundation lobbed me an easy one this morning; its Poem of the Day is "[anyone lived in a pretty how town]" by E.E. Cummings, whose style would have confounded any AI device in the early 20th century. Yes, nowadays, you can order ChatGPT to "write a poem about two lovers in the style of E.E. Cummings." For that concept to exist, a mercurial human would have had to create it first. Artificial intelligence works efficiently by doing things the right way; human genius works by doing things gloriously the wrong way. That was Cummings, with his shifting parts of speech, self-consciously garbled punctuation, and outright mischievous approach to standard English. What algorithm in 1940 might have had the impulse to name two characters "anyone" and "noone" or twist a composite word into a syntactical beauty like "anyone's any was all to her"? No doubt a chatbot of that time also would have insisted on capitalizing all the words properly. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Segue," which came out a decade ago and is wedded in my memory to an event that AI never could have duplicated. In 2014, artist Deborah Paswaters invited me to a multimedia event in Laguna Beach that, half a century earlier, would have been dubbed a "be-in": Poets read their work aloud while a pianist improvised in response to the poetry, dancers danced in response to the music, and artists sketched the dancers. "Segue" was one of the poems that I read, and I think the one that inspired the most music, dancing, and art. The whole event was as messy and delightful as it sounds, and I still have a souvenir of it on the wall of my study; Paswaters signed and framed a sketch that she did of me and the dancers. Yes, AI can produce pictures too, and much faster than any artist. It can also produce music and poetry, maybe even choreography. But note that I'm using the verb "produce" rather than "write" or "compose." Humans do those things. I'm not sure if AI takes the same journey of discovery. I was thinking of ending this blog entry by asking ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of "Segue," then copying and pasting it here. I've decided against it. If you want to try, though, here are the guidelines: Ask for a 39-line, six-section poem about the feeling in the house after a family member dies. Specify that you want free verse and a reference to Frank Sinatra. Require a one-word title that appears nowhere in the poem itself. Perhaps the chatbot will give you something brilliant. Perhaps it will be even better than "Segue." I frankly don't care. I am proud of this poem and accept that immodesty is human. AI can give us a masterpiece, but it can't relish its own creation. Kushim probably could. When I was growing up in Fullerton, there was an abandoned building on the edge of downtown that always confounded me when I rode by. It was in an awkward location for drivers -- at the bottom of a brief dip in the road, which meant that you might accelerate right past unless you were looking for it in advance -- and it had the dusty, faded look of a place whose heyday resided in a few people's memories. Evidently, it had been a small grocery store, as evidenced by the barely visible Carnation Ice Cream sign painted in the bottom right corner. That Carnation sign was what mesmerized me. How many people had once gone through the front door, seeking a treat on a hot day? Did any children taste their first bite of vanilla in the shade outside? Looking at that parched logo, I reduced the building's history to two simple phases: Once, joy had taken place there, and now the joy was gone. The remnants of that corporate image on the wall served as an memorial.
I find buildings fascinating. They are all empty canvases, waiting for emotions to load them with color. Years ago, when I pushed my daughter around the neighborhood in a stroller, I kept a running commentary about the houses that we passed. Almost all of them were silent and closed from the outside; as I've noted in another blog entry, neighborhoods tend to be private places. Here, we approached a two-story house with a car in the driveway. How giddy did the owner of that car feel when he or she first saw the house for sale? Who lived in that upstairs bedroom, and what was the most exhilarating moment that had ever taken place in it? Perhaps its occupant had opened a college acceptance letter, kissed a loved one for the first time, recovered from a debilitating illness. Now, here was a one-story house with a gravel yard and an American flag draped over the porch. The owner who displayed it must have felt patriotic. On 9/11, did the bedroom inside the house reverberate with sobs? Someone else would move into the house one day, and that person have no idea what had been said or felt inside of it. The house would be a canvas again, ready to be filled. We spend our lives passing by the traces of lives. Every house, every business, every street has hosted the gamut of human feelings: jubilation, sorrow, fear, reassurance, beginnings and endings and everything in between. I am thinking now of the 2001 Mexican film Y Tu Mama Tambien, in which the soundtrack periodically goes silent while a voiceover narrator points out what happened in the same locations years ago. Is the narrator meant to be God's voice? Perhaps; we can imagine that if God looks at any location on Earth, He (or She) is mourning others' tragedies while acknowledging our wellness. There are no happy or sad spots on Earth, only spots where happiness and sadness have taken place. We may personally attach emotion to a particular location, but that emotion resides in us, not in the location. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Ghost Town Pantoum," and I was about to call it a happy poem in a sad location before I stopped myself. Yes, the characters in the poem are enjoying themselves; they walk hand in hand through a ghost town (maybe a tourist trap), kiss by the jail, and in general take in the sights. Is a ghost town a sad place? Like all places, it's hosted sadness. There is a jail, of course. Crimes were committed here. Saloons brought their share of trouble, at least in the pioneer days. Then again, the beds show ample evidence of use, and the medicine show posters once glowed fresh and bright -- a promise of a rollicking afternoon. Someone was lucky, many times before, to be in this prairie town. As for us, we get a kiss out of it, maybe even an ice cream at the gift shop. We're lucky to be here now. I sometimes have my students do an exercise in which they draw a picture of themselves in the center of a page and form a series of rings around it. In each ring, they draw other people who play various parts in their life. First is the inner circle: parents, siblings, close friends. Next is the second tier: teachers, extended family, neighbors. The outer ring contains the bit players, some of whom might only be known by a first name or depended on for a specific service. As I remind the class, each of those bit players is the central figure in his or her own life, plus a member of the inner circle in any number of others. Perhaps they were born into that inner circle as a child or sibling. Perhaps they entered it as a spouse. Or perhaps that connection began in the sandbox at nursery school, in the lunch line at summer camp, or in a pickup basketball game at the park. "I've been trying hard to find the people that I won't leave behind," Brian Wilson once sang mournfully. That is an acute state of loneliness. Most of us find at least a few such people without trying hard at all.
I could easily complete my own assignment and fill in those rings with the people closest to me. I have a clear enough mental image of where those stick figures would go. When I was younger, there was a feeling of inevitability about them, and not just with family; some part of me felt like every favorite teacher, every intimate friend, somehow had to be in that inner ring. When a bond between two people grows strong or deep enough, the circumstances of their meeting take on a sanctified quality, as if the cosmos were pushing them together in anticipation of the rewards to follow. I am old enough now to recognize that as romantic absurdity. People enter our lives by haphazard chance, and sometimes we make the most of those random encounters. That person whom we have confided in for decades might have been a bit player in our lives if the teacher had assigned her to a seat one row over in kindergarten. "Interview with the Songwriter," my poem featured this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is about that notion. It was inspired by my days as an entertainment reporter for the Los Angeles Times and its community papers -- a time when I had a great many superficial encounters with a great many interview subjects. These were my kind of people, for sure: artists, poets, entrepreneurs, dreamers, ones with whom I might fill hours dissecting literature or pushing the boundaries of formal conversation. Instead, I spoke to each of them on deadline, with an assignment to get the information I needed, craft a catchy lede, and slip the quotes into the right places. I wrote a lot of stories during those encounters, and made no close friends. Yes, some of those people belong to my email list or view my posts on Facebook, where to "friend" someone is a verb. Compared to the relationships that we truly treasure, which often host an entire private language of references and in-jokes, that monosyllable seems pale indeed. I think "Interview with the Songwriter" was based on a true story. Perhaps it's telling that I can't quite say. As I recall, one time, I spent an hour or so talking with a local songwriter who had a new album or upcoming show, and I realized that many of our tastes overlapped. For lack of a name, I'll call him Pete. He was warm and gregarious, as hungry artists often are when you give them publicity. As I scribbled notes, I wondered if Pete and I might have become close friends if we had met earlier in life. Could we have written songs together? Perhaps my words might have fit his melodies. By the time we met, we were too busy to think of that -- "both of us with rings and planners," as the poem puts it. We could have met again, but that would have required crossing something off the planners. That's what Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is about, as much as we misread it as an inspirational poem. We make myopic choices and hope that they pay off. We fantasize about going back in time and trying the other road, when really we know that we're stuck with our choice. As time goes on, we accumulate those "mights" more and more. We might have picked another college, pursued another career, sought another person as our collaborator. Would we have ended up happier? There is no way to know. At this moment, I am completing this blog entry, and Pete may be at work on another song. He may not need a cowriter to help with the lyrics. My 2013 book The First Thing Mastered contains two poems about infancy. One is "Newborn," which is the book's closing poem (about the moment of childbirth) and which I blogged about last week. The other is "Waking," which opens the book and captures the first days or weeks of life from an infant's point of view, or tries to.
"Tries" is the key word. This is one case where I am not sure if I did or did not, whatever Master Yoda may say. A more reasonable bit of wisdom may come from the poet Archibald MacLeish, who wrote in "Ars Poetica": "A poem should be equal to: Not true." I don't take that as a charge that all poets are fibbers, but rather an acceptance of the line between reality and art. The two exist on different sides of a divide: The first provides the second with material, and the second colors our perception of the first. We artists may be magicians on our best days (or tell ourselves that we are), but we operate in the field of illusions. At times, I think back on a conversation with a college classmate who insisted that Life Is Beautiful was a better film than Schindler's List, since no film could accurately capture the truth of the Holocaust, and Life Is Beautiful had the sense not to try. Why try, then? Maybe it's a form of power: our little desire to play God and create our own worlds (even if they often abide by the rules of His/Hers). We can't conjure up an actual horse, but we may create a painting of a horse that reaches more eyes than any real animal. Michelangelo's David is more beautiful than any flesh-and-blood man could be. No night sky has ever swirled like Van Gogh's "The Starry Night." Both artworks are equal to: Not true. We have held onto them as truths now for hundreds of years. I realize that I'm citing some lofty names here. I am not nominating myself to be in a league with Michelangelo, Van Gogh, or Roberto Benigni. But their examples let me off the hook a bit when I sat down to write "Waking." As noted in my previous blog, this poem displaced "Newborn" as the opener in The First Thing Mastered, since I felt that that poem provided too much adult perspective to begin the collection. I wanted to start by evoking naïveté and innocence -- obviously, not an easy task for a college-educated writer in his mid-30s. And there lies the limitations of the poet. We may use simple words to evoke a simple time of life, but they are words regardless, nothing that accompanied us out of the womb. The best that we can do is hint at a life where context is absent and everything is taken at face value. At some point, we must wonder about everything that we see and hear and touch, before we start to apply names and figure out cause and effect. I couldn't write a true poem about those moments of life, so I wrote the best not-true one that I could. We have all forgotten our first days in the bedroom, but this poem about a bedroom contains a crack that our eyes focus on every morning. This poem contains a milk bottle and a chandelier that catches the red sunlight. Is any of it accurate? You and I both could have answered that question once. By the time we could express it in words, it was too late. In the story of my life, I have a three-and-a-half-year memory gap. It is not the result of drugs or amnesia, but simple cognitive development; I cannot remember anything that happened until I was nearly four years old. The earliest specific memory that I have is of seeing Return of the Jedi at the Brea Mall theater in the summer of 1983, and before that, there are a few vague random images. I recall a spacious bedroom at my house in Fullerton (clearly, in this case, because I lived there after the age of 3). There was a plastic toy, I think, that I put up to my eyes and scrolled pictures inside. No doubt there were a few Star Wars items as well. Otherwise, I remember nothing: no diapers, no stroller rides, no first words or first steps. I do remember all of those things about my daughter's first three years, but she has forgotten them already.
Of course, I am not alone in pointing out this memory gap; it's a universal phenomenon that psychologists refer to as childhood amnesia. But it does provide a perplexing dilemma for writers when touching on the formative years. In 2013, I published my second full-length book, The First Thing Mastered, which consists of 44 poems that track life in chronological order from birth to early middle age. When Richard Linklater made the film Boyhood, which follows a similar progression, he chose to begin when his protagonist was 7, but I opted to start the story at the very beginning. Eventually, I came up with "Newborn," which appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder and depicts what I imagine are the first sensations in a baby's life: a bright room, unfamiliar colors, strangers gathered around, the cut of the umbilical cord. I earmarked it as the opening poem in the book, and there it sat for a while. Then, I started having second thoughts about that placement. "Newborn" may cover the first moments after birth, but it does it only partly from a baby's point of view; there's also a great deal of perspective that only an adult can apply. It starts with an illumination / the brightest there will ever be -- an infant doesn't know comparison yet. ...the first taste of effortless flight / and the first fleeting touch down -- parents, not infants, keep track of "firsts." Adults have a lot to say about the births of children; we've lived long enough to wax philosophical about them. Every year, my 8th-graders and I listen to Paul Simon's song "Born at the Right Time," in which he regards a new arrival on Earth and sings: Never been lonely Never been lied to Never had to scuffle in fear Nothing denied to We talk about what Simon is leaving out with all those negatives. If we regard a newborn child and note that he or she has never been lonely, lied to, afraid or bereft, we are implicitly stating that all those experiences will come in time. Elsewhere in the song, Simon describes walking through an airport and observing babies who "follow me with open eyes / their uninvited guest." Therein lies the difference. We philosophize about babies, and they stare back at us. I was immensely proud of "Newborn," but as the manuscript took shape, I realized that it couldn't work as the opening poem. So it became the final one -- the end of the cycle, so to speak, as we encounter early childhood again with the perspective that decades bring. To replace it in the opening slot, I wrote "Waking," which imagines (to the extent possible) what a baby sees through those staring eyes. I'll blog about that one next week. Last week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, I posted my poem "Our Money's Worth," based on the story of trading in my aging Honda Civic for $1,500 credit. On this blog, I wrote about how I felt mostly indifferent to letting the car go, and how I viewed that reserve as a sign of hard-won wisdom. And so it was, maybe. But then, as Walt Whitman wrote, "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" There is a part of me that still clings very fervently to possessions. And that was the part of me that, despite a skin hardened over decades, embarrassed itself by weeping openly in the theater at the end of Toy Story 3.
Oh, man, that scene. There may be no other five minutes in recent cinematic history more notorious for reducing grown men (and possibly a few women) to lachrymose puddles. Owen Gleiberman, a critic with tastes so rugged that he named Natural Born Killers the best film of the 1990s and criticized The Silence of the Lambs for not being dark enough, responded so emotionally to the Toy Story 3 finale that he wrote an editorial urging fellow alpha males not to be ashamed of their blubbering. If you've seen the movie (and you might as well skip to the next paragraph if you haven't), you know that I'm talking about the moment when Andy, the boy who has come of age over the first Toy Story trilogy, drives to the house of neighborhood preschooler Bonnie and leaves Buzz, Woody, Jessie, and their comrades in her care before heading off to college. It's easy enough to explain the audience's tears as Andy lovingly hands over each toy -- the end of childhood, neatly encapsulated in one gesture! -- but I wonder if that scene taps into a deeper longing for many adults. Perhaps we mourn not just the end of childhood (ours and Andy's), but also the end of the time when we viewed objects as able to exert a mystical pull? There was a time when I found at least some toys to be enchanting, and that time is long past. I abandoned my playthings at a much earlier age than Andy does, and with no sorrow that I can remember. There is very little in my house today that resided there thirty or forty years ago. But there are a few things: old books on the bookshelf, old school papers tucked into filing cabinets. This summer, when my family did an extensive housecleaning, I found myself weighing the CD collection that I began assembling at the age of 11: several impressive pounds of jewel cases and box sets, many of them arranged in chronological order by artist, packed with memories of elementary school through graduate school and beyond. This collection is technically useless at the moment -- I don't own a CD player -- but no matter; when faced with the choice of what to do with those old-school discs, I opted to preserve them in the attic rather than throw them out. Wait, the attic: that's exactly where Andy plans to stash his toy collection before a series of mishaps eventually leads him to Bonnie's house. Those geniuses at Pixar know how to tap into our weaknesses. Perhaps, one day, with the gift of an antique CD player that I bought on eBay, I will pass that collection on to a mesmerized younger person. ("This is Johnny Cash, the roughest, toughest cowboy in all of country music...") Perhaps my sentimentality will run out and I will simply dispose of the collection one day. Then again, perhaps it will reside in the attic until I pass on -- in which case its subsequent fate will be an intriguing mystery. My poem this week in the Journal, "Salvaged," is about a scenario of this kind. A great-aunt has died, her husband having gone before her, and her three grand-nieces peruse her old belongings in the house. The oldest sister tells the younger two not to touch anything (maybe out of respect for the dead, maybe just for tidiness' sake), but the other girls pick through the items to see what they might spirit away for use. As the question toward the end of the poem asks, are they committing theft by taking what isn't theirs? Or, since everything in the house needs to be taken away somehow, are they simply helping the movers? The sisters aren't movers, at least not professionally. They take only what looks appealing. By the end of the poem, the youngest has swiped a teacup -- maybe for play (we don't learn her age), or maybe for actual tea-drinking. The cup can hold liquid, in either case. The middle sister extracts the old Al Jolson records, partly for social media and partly because vinyl is popular among her friends. With a turntable, the records may still play. They will liven a new room, charm a new listener, implant words and music in a new memory. "All art is quite useless," Oscar Wilde once wrote. The human race has continually disagreed with that. My second car was a white 2001 Honda Civic, and I got it weeks before my senior year of college. My first car, a Mercury Sable that I inherited in high school, had gone to pieces before it reached 100,000 miles, and its replacement proved much more durable. I drove that Civic for more than a decade, took it cross-country once and another time to Santa Fe and back, learned how to fit it with snow tires in Connecticut. During those years, it endured a couple of minor accidents but never had a breakdown, and I used it during a number of milestones in life: college graduation, first full-time job, first condominium, marriage. It logged more than 200,000 miles before my wife and I reasoned that it might be approaching the end of its prime. One day, then, we drove it to the dealership, exchanged it for $1,500 in credit, and abandoned it in the parking lot.
I realize that the above paragraph may come off as unemotional. That's the point, really. My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder is "Our Money's Worth," which tells the story of trading in the Civic with only a few details changed. It's kind of an anti-poem, if your definition of a poem is one that infuses a moment with dramatic epiphanies. In truth, I felt very little when I brought the car into the dealership; as the opening stanza notes, it was one of multiple errands that day. I had memories of the car, but those memories resided in my mind, not the car itself. "Our Money's Worth" appeared in the book Angels in Seven, which came out in my mid-thirties, right before my daughter was born, and serves as a farewell to a great many things in the first three and a half decades of life. The title poem is about outgrowing baseball fandom. Others are about the deaths of older family members, the passing of high school and college, even the burning of unfinished poems. "Our Money's Worth" is about resisting the impulse to view life as an epic journey and accepting that a car is simply a car. When I wrote it, almost a decade ago now, I took that indifference as a sign of wisdom. Ask me how I feel again in ten years. So the poem is not about nostalgia. That doesn't make it cynical, at least to me. (I am acutely aware that my reading of my own poem may be very different than another person's.) Up above, I mentioned that I felt little when I brought the car in. But the little that I did feel was luck, and rightly so. I have come to understand that there are two levels of bliss in life. When things are normal, we want them to be sublime. When things go wrong, we want them to be normal. Think about your circumstances right now: Does your car have a leak under the hood? Is there a lightbulb out in your kitchen and an overdue bill to pay? If so, very likely the first three things on your mind are fixing the leak, replacing the lightbulb, and paying the bill. Once those things no longer occupy your mind, you may begin fantasizing about taking the car on an exciting road trip or hosting a party in your kitchen. Efficiency gives us room to dream, and the Civic gave me that opportunity. Throughout all those uneventful drives and routine oil checkups, I got to mull over manuscripts, plan vacations, and otherwise make room for thoughts that engine trouble and astronomical repair bills might have crowded out. I also got the gift of life itself, which a safe and dependable car helps to provide. So I was lucky, and I had the car to thank for that. But here's the other thing, and one that I didn't realize as much when I was younger: You can't thank a car, only a person. Someone -- some people, I should say -- did a good job of putting my Civic together. Others did a good job of repairing and servicing it over the years. I'll never know who those people were (as the poem says, "no Jim or Luke or Pedro / here in factory clothes to thank in person"), but they had a positive impact on my life. I appreciate them doing their job well. The backside, of course, is that if the car had given me years of misery, it might have been equally hard to pick someone to blame. Every year in class, I share with my students the Grateful Dead song "Ripple." The verse that always haunts me is the one that the song's lyricist, Robert Hunter, said he was most proud of: "Reach out your hand if your cup be empty. / If your cup is full, may it be again. / Let it be known there is a fountain / that was not made by the hands of men." Perfection is usually out of our hands, which is why we reach out our cup hopefully. If we're lucky, we get it filled. In my case, I got more than a decade of luck with the Civic that I got at age 21, and then the car and I parted ways. I have no idea who got it after I did. By now, I am sure that it's been retired or scrapped. If the next owner had an easy time driving it and left it with minimal pain, then I hope that he or she felt blessed, not to mention thankful. Cars, unlike fountains, are very much made by the hands of men. In 2020, during the onslaught of COVID-19, Time magazine published an op-ed by Rutger Bregman titled "The Moment to Change the World Is Right Now." The logic of that headline may seem suspect -- when is it ever not time to change the world? -- but the writer made a compelling case that the circumstances were ready for a tectonic shift in human priorities. "The age of excessive individualism and competition could come to an end," he proposed, "and we could inaugurate a new age of solidarity and connection."
Three years later, I'm not sure what the status of that new age is. For sure, the world changes all the time, and many of those changes bring hope, but they take on a patchwork quality -- individual victories rather than a full-scale annihilation of aggression and greed. A social movement garners more prominence for Black actors in Hollywood; Native Americans remain mostly invisible. A regime change topples the dictatorship of Iraq; North Korea continues business as usual. More than 10 million people buy electric cars to curb air pollution; relatively few of them also give up beef. There are any number of advocates for Native American representation, North Korean freedom, and veganism, but their causes have not reached the tipping point in society. Not yet, at least. We often celebrate our heroes in hindsight. My poem "The Activists," which appears today in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is about two people who belong to that frustrated group. I have known the type. Around the time I wrote this poem in 2010, I was acquainted with a pair of animal-rights crusaders. Both belonged to tight circles of fellow believers. One struggled to reconcile her own vegan diet with the fish she had to buy for her pet cat. The other said she often felt nervous among other animal advocates, since they often attacked her beliefs as not progressive enough. Both of them had difficulty agreeing on restaurants with friends. Supporting a cause is often bleak and unglamorous, not to mention unapplauded. Every so often, a Rosa Parks or Malala Yousafzai provides a galvanizing face for a cause, one that can be mass-produced on T-shirts and marketed as a story. Those faces are exceptions. The unheralded crusader, who boycotts selected companies, signs petitions, and declines invitations on principle, is the more common profile of those who sacrifice comfort to make the world a fairer place. The poet Robert Hayden wrote about "love's austere and lonely offices." Activism must be one of those offices, at least sometimes. The man at the center of "The Activists" is lonely. He may be an activist by marriage; his wife seems more dedicated to their numerous causes than he is. His mind fixates on her body as much as on social justice, to the point where he keeps count of the blemishes that protesting has left on her. When she leaves for work, he smells the clothes that she dropped in the hamper. He shares a bed with her, but it can be a cold bed, even as he steels his resolve by remembering that their love centers on what they stand for. Most of us are not activists. At UCI, I had a classmate -- a devout Christian -- who told me that he dreaded walking through a section of campus where student groups habitually set up booths to petition for those in need. He only had so much money and time, and every booth that he passed reminded him of what he wasn't doing. Even the most socially minded of us tend to pick our battles; not every feminist is a vegan, just as not every antiracist drives a Tesla or avoids Walmart. We can bond easily over shared comforts. But if you know someone who checks the country of origin on shirt labels or bypasses Amazon to shop at the neighborhood co-op, ask that person what he or she has learned. You may get a lesson in how to be less "nice." You may also get a lesson in how to be a better person. |
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
July 2023
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