USING THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD: AN ODE
1. The Commons at Little Compton, Rhode Island.
Wanting to make a sentimental gesture with what there was at hand, I placed on a small ledge of the pebbly concrete monument one violet and the broken shell of a robin's egg. The slate gravestone (which is now set in concrete) was badly chiselled; the letter y was left off the last word, BODY, for want of space I guess; later the slate broke. Now only the front is still exposed, still weathering. The poorly chiselled inscription is overwhelmed by words, in concrete, completely spelled out. The grave the slate stone marked is lost, to me.
The monument commemorates
ELIZABETH
(BORN ALDEN, DAUGHTER OF JOHN;
DIED PABODY, ON THE 31ST OF MARCH, 1717,
IN THE 97TH YEAR OF HER AGE)
for what its makers needed of her, that she was "the first white woman born in New England". And was buried somewhere near here, if not under my feet.
So, I have to make something of her, too; my bias being towards extemporizing with what there is to hand, I find the flower and eggshell, lay them on the half-inch ledge. Mist rises off the Common after the rainy night; flattened by rain, violets are everywhere in the short grass. I'm not a tourist, I live nearby and happened to be here, but I still push myself to make my own meaning from ELIZABETH PABODY; I can't just let her be.
Sentimentality: the art, science, or technique of evoking emotion; more simply, tear-jerking.
2. A workshop, a library.
The day I got brass filings thrown into my eye by a grinding wheel (I was cutting a duplicate key), after I ran to the sink to flush them out, and flushed them out, and knew I had not flushed them all out, I went to the Book of Familiar Quotations and looked up -- from the one line I knew -- a paragraph that someone spoke once, at someone's tomb.
America has joined forces with the Allied Powers,
and what we have of blood and treasure are yours.
Therefore it is that with loving pride we drape
the colors in tribute of respect to this citizen
of your great republic, and here and now
in the presence of the illustrious dead
we pledge our hearts and our honor in carrying
this war to a successful issue. Lafayette, we are here.
My father used the last line as a catch phrase. Probably he thought that it was Black Jack Pershing who'd said it, though Bartlett says that it was Charles Stanton. When I found the paragraph, my father had been dead about ten years. I read it aloud, and the tears came, jerked out--real tears: they washed my eye clean of the last brass filing.
Sentimentality.
3. A living room in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.
I read the speech aloud, again, maybe five years after that, to a group I wanted to harangue (and didn't) on my subject, sentimentality. I found that I no longer cried, much. And most of them didn't feel like crying at all! This came as a great surprise to me. --Nor did they recognize it, except for one officer (ret'd, late of Her Majesty's infantry; a classmate of Wales at Sandhurst).
So I was reminded that some recognition, some sympathy, may be necessary for the trick to work. Still, the trick often works.
4. Technology.
Sentimentality, like pornography, is a technology. Jerking tears, jerking off, when you think you or somebody should: when somebody says you should: when it is found in somebody's interest (some body's interest?) that you should.
Like art museums, to evoke esthetic feelings.
5. The Empire City of the Senses.
Some of us like art museums. Some of us like pornography. I willingly shed tears at Spielberg's E.T. (but have refused ever since to attend any film of his direction). Great pleasures can be had by self-manipulation, especially (for some of us) when we disown the hands--they are Breughel's, or Shere Hite's, or Steven Spielberg's; "I just happen to be here".
6. Cathexis.
ca-thex-is (k.-th.k's.s) n. The concentration of emotional
energy upon some object or idea. (American Heritage Dictionary)
We use what we can, to do what we need to.
No one can identify all the objects,
persons, ideas, to which he or she
is cathected. Practicing non-attachment,
I imagine, only makes cathexis fluid:
libido strikes like the tongue of a frog,
like lightning; but the rests of us, attached,
are like the workings of old television sets,
full of charged capacitors, and nasty shocks
for the unwary though we are unplugged.
It is because both ends of the string are fixed
that the fiddle-bow can draw this music from it,
by sticking and slipping, sticking and slipping.
And if you want to have control yourself,
try to -- maybe you can -- eroticize
new areas of your experience, train
yourself: it may not be much different
from acquiring new tastes, for semi-sweet
chocolate instead of milk-, Matisse
as well as Renoir: a teen-aged girl
wrote to Ms. magazine how she'd undone
her bondage fantasies, not forcing them
away, but taming them to fantasized
caresses. I thought this was politically
correct, and very clever, too: I wished her well
and still distrust control, all control.
But once the violin is strung,
whoever plays the fiddler calls the tune.
7. For Paul Goodman.
When I made your acquaintance, you were already dead: nothing I could do for you. And I want / don't want to use you. Tony (just my age) met you where I could have, at the Moratorium Against the War, at M.I.T., of which (I think) you wrote your line
Let them put up with me as I with them.
Still big on food-awareness, you chewed on and on at the plastic toothpick in your club sandwich, he says. Now he has gone to EST, and I have read about your bad teeth.
Am I enlightened? How would I know?
--Still attached.
But, damn, I would have liked to meet you at an airport with a brass band, which no one did for you.
YOU ARE READING
Teaching the Rocks to Swim: 2012 Attys Entry by Lee Rudolph
PoetryTen formal poems, collected into an entry for the Attys contest.
