78 Whistles

There are downtimes in the resistance, at least for retired amateurs like myself. One can tolerate only so much virtue in a day, even virtue in defiance of the non-stop malevolence effluent out of Washington, D.C. these months now. As if the virtue itself were tainted, ever so slightly, by the malignancy that spawned it. Non-violence provoked by violence, alas, seems to carry a seed of violence within it, which can be checked behaviorally, but not imaginatively. (How many government officials have I terminated in my daydreams? With extreme prejudice.)

Last week’s downtime, though, produced this poem, in praise of de-escalation. Violence free. 

78 Whistles

A Gordian knot of whistle cords lies

on the table before the old man, the

nickel-plated whistles nesting therein.

He pulls on one whistle, the knot tightens.

He pulls on a cord end, the knot tightens.

“What the . . . How the fuck? . . Who the fuck?” he thinks.

It is what cord does if left to itself.

A retired Ph.D., he’ll figure it out.

It just takes time. Patience. To untangle.

In time, seventy-eight whistles are free.

 

Winter is here. The ICEmen cometh

in brown shirts—faceless, bulky, and armed.

They prowl the streets for our brown neighbors

in SUVs with out-of-state plates.

Pepper-spray ever at the ready.

Tear-gas, side-arms, and assault-rifles

                              vs.

 Whistles, cell-phones, yellow vests—us.

 With losses, yes, yet we hold our own.

68th Winter

 

The Furor’s brown shirts have descended in force upon our city. Last week an ICE trooper killed one of our citizens in a neighborhood not far away. Shot her in the face, point blank. I attended her vigil/protest. The administration’s Big Lies to follow.

While we are not Nazi Germany yet, the government’s aspirations seem to be clearly in that direction and credibly well on the way. For someone who has known sixty-seven years of relative freedom—i.e. white, male, middle-class freedom—I find the change to dangerously not-so-free and the new demands of civic resistance considerable. Even the relatively simple protest marches and the ICE watches require dressing for the frigid weather now and the treacherously icy footing. Much more to learn and do. It would appear to be a long haul in a dark winter.

Old and retired, I have the time, and if less energy than I once had, I’ve read my history and retain much memory. And if we aged late-Boomers needed a sense of purpose—I didn’t, but you know, shit happens and it’s sometimes big—the GOP’s embrace of fascism, racism, and Christian nationalism makes for a wide field of opportunity to discover it: that is, opposing, well, EVIL.

So, they say, freedom isn’t free. No, it isn’t. It requires time, energy, treasure, and, apparently, the blood of young moms trying to get out of the way.

67

“67” is a meme apparently, a digital fart of no fixed meaning, a trendy bit of forgettable social media nonsense awash in the general nonsense of social media. It is also, as of today, my age for the next year. One of those ages of no particular promise, not a 0-birthday, or a 5-birthday—decadal or semi-decadal—not a schnappszahl (divisible by 11), and not one of those more broadly culturally recognized birthdays, threshold birthdays: Sweet 16, 18, 21, 30, 50, 65, 70, 100. My second Henry—Adams—tallied his birthdays with some attention. “At sixty-seven,” he observed, “one knows one’s nervous system at least.” Perhaps not completely. We should always be a little open to surprise, I think, but I probably knew my nervous system much earlier, starting at 13. We’ll have to see if my 67 has any numerological significance to speak of.

Seven Old Men In Prague

Whenever we travel, as retirees are wont to do, we’ll often include a museum or two on the itinerary, an art museum. I find a visitation to past imagery of our civilization instructive on many levels, with particular attention paid to the depiction of old men, like myself. At the Sternberg Palace gallery in Prague, I happened upon these aged gents. 

                    Johan Michael Rottmayr, 1692

Seneca, at 68, is having his veins cut on order of the Emperor Nero for alleged participation in a conspiracy to assassinate him, Seneca’s former student and imperial advisee. While premature to consider seriously as a form of self-administered euthanasia, bleeding out represents an exit strategy of some appeal to me in certain dire circumstances—inoperable, painful cancers; dementia; boredom and disgust with this world—though Seneca’s execution required poison and a warm bath as well. I’ve given blood enough to know that my flow rate would probably do the trick.

   

St. Jerome is not looking long for this world as he handles a crucifix and a skull. (Both Jerome and the skull have my hairline.) He is thought to have lived into his mid- to late 70s and looks it, or worse here. 

Jusepe de Ribera, 1646

 

 

 

 

Actually, he appears more than once in the Sternberg, with the Ribera capturing “all the details of the old man’s body.” Some of which, I recognize all too well.

Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, ca.1755

 

 

 

On a lighter note we have Tiepolo’s “luminous” Bust of an Old Man. 

“Tiepolo’s character heads of old men—often depicted with Oriental stylisation—were originally created as study materials but soon became so popular with collectors that the painter even bought them back to meet demand.” Imagine that. A world in which bald and bearded old goats in exotic headwear were a thing.

 

Jan Miensze Molenaer, mid-1600s

 

Or there’s the tippling peasant senior modeling and encouraging all sorts of questionable behaviors in the dark of a bar. Under the title of an old Dutch proverb, As the Old Sing, So Pipe the Young, we corrupted elders entail our corruption unto the following generations.

 

 

 

And as winter approaches, the last detail of Allegory of Four Seasons and Human Ages, a dapper old fellow shares a meal and a brazier with his beloved, probably an art history major.

Simon De Vos, 1635

All of which is to say that even amidst the the tyranny and the mortality or our own times, we can seek and find a little truth, a little beauty, the warmth of companionship, and good humor. We must.

 

 

 

Grown Children

My son turns 40 today. At one point in his pre-natal months, a rather complicated pregnancy, there was some doubt about his reaching any birthdays at all, even his ur-birthday, that is to say, his birth, but here he is, my first-born, a man in full. When your own birthdays have less and less significance as they multiply, the birthdays of others can mark the passage of time with greater salience. Give one pause. My father, at 93, couldn’t believe that he had sons in their 60s: An old, old man with old men for progeny. He was not long for this world.

For these 40 years, my son—and his sister a few years later—have been the unmitigated wonder and pleasure of my life, a buoyant tag-team of now early middle-agists composing an acerbic fam-dramedy forty years running. I cannot imagine more delightful long-term company. But as I watch them in their majority living the fullest of lives, I cannot remember having such energy and so little seeming time. How do they do it? How did I, if I did? Even as I trundle toward the great abyss, yet I do not wish to return to their heady days, that comparative youth.

Forty was not a good year for me. Things falling apart. And work. But for him, they continue to come together, which is as it should be. Thus, I will enjoy his 40^th with a special savor: the wisdom of an old man.

Last Respects

Photo credit: KSylvie

Two weeks ago, I attended the “No Kings” march at the capitol in St. Paul. Earlier that morning, and mostly unbeknownst to me, a Trump-voter with a gun had murdered the Minnesota State House Speaker emerita, Melissa Hortman, and her husband, killing her dog for good measure, among previous attempted murders. This Friday last, I attended, with my civic-minded spouse and ten thousand others, Rep. Hortman’s lying-in-state, filing by their photos, coffins and an urn to pay our last respects. When I contrast the cautious, sometimes raucous optimism of the march with the ensuing solemnity, and consider these past two weeks’ news from Washington—Iran bombing, deeper debt- and deficit-enabling legislation, and Supreme Court spinelessness—I must sadly conclude that the Republic is a republic in name only, made so largely by a Republican Party that is republican in name only and has been for a long time. We are at the bottom, the Constitution a dead original letter, our politics a tawdry and empty theater, a dumb-show.

Insofar as I have had an academic, an intellectual career, it has been in the study of republicanism in the United States. The concept of virtue—personal and individual, constitutional, and political institutional—the very soul of our political system over two hundred and fifty years strikes me now as quite antique and enfeebled. A few fragments and figments of classical virtue remain to disguise the almost perfectly complete corruption, but, and I’ve hesitated to say it for eight months or so at the risk of sounding like an old man, which I am, we have become not merely a long-standing if imperfect example, but now a complete and utter embarrassment of that ancient ideal.

I have never lived in a dead country before. Perhaps it is the living death of a zombie republic.

Going Home

When you’re retired, going on vacation, that is, taking time away from your normal routine of doing as little as possible, carries almost exponential possibilities for sloth, especially if you’re “going home,” that is, returning to your place of origin, where your family takes complete care of you, and doubly especially, if your “home” is Mercer, Pennsylvania, where, according to loved ones who still live there, “nothing ever happens.” If indolence is one’s objective, Mercer is the place to do it—or not do whatever it is that makes for it.

We watch the big screen TV, sports: NCAA women’s softball, NCAA men’s baseball, MLB baseball, the Buccos, an LPGA tournament, men’s professional golf, the NBA quarterfinals, a few minutes of the NHL, the French Open, and, yes, the American Cornhole League. And fishing, an actual broadcast of others’ impressive and yet imperfect attempt at inactivity. The chair into which I sink to spectate folds in around me, a throne of comfort, with an ottoman of ease at my feet, a nap-enabling matched set of cushions affording light dozes that restore my attention to mindless observational sufficiency but never, thankfully, to critical cognition. I’m not sure the world merits it anymore. We did get out to golf once, the most indolent, the least active of activities—the brothers carted. I walked the good walk spoiled. Then it rained. And we returned to the big screen.

When the weather allows—when it is warmer and less drizzly—I lounge in the sun, passively absorbing solar radiation, dissipating energy into the boundless universe, then golf again, a stressless bogey round, two pars, two double bogeys, and the rest bogey, not unlike the ideal even-par round of two birdies, two bogeys, and the rest pars—only bogey. Of a good morning I’ll sit on the front porch with a cup of tea and watch the traffic, truckers trucking, people going to work, poor devils.

Today, a visit to the cemetery: to the only population less active than myself. They’ve perfected repose. I commune with my dead. They don’t say much. We listen to the wind in the trees, the cooing of a mourning dove, a single fly buzzing. I leave a token of the visit for my father, a golf tee from St. Andrew’s, though I miss my mother more. They walk the earth no longer these five years. I see a stone for Frank D__, whom I had, coincidentally, just seen up at my brother’s, spry as ever, though recounting the recent implant of a pacemaker. His wife had died in 2019. Only Frank’s birthdate was recorded. I calculate he’s eighty-five.

I am agnostic about posthumous consciousness. Of many possibilities are these two, which come to mind:  Heaven is either an extension of retirement or retirement the only heaven many of us will know.