On the Theme of Oneness

The swell was light to moderate as we steamed from Boston to Ipswich late last summer.  A straight shot from the North Channel, President Roads, to Thatcher Island, then around Halibut Point and west to the big buoy a few miles off Crane Beach.

In retrospect, the rise and fall of the boat mimicked the rise and fall of the human chest in deep sleep, or indeed in deep meditation.  

As in the beginning there was the Word, the secret is said to lie in the confluence of three things -- sound, light and frequency.

 

Dreadful Dwelling

I was living on the 79th floor of one of the so-called "pencil" buildings in Manhattan.  In fact, I shared the entire floor with my two older siblings, Mary and Charles.

I hated it.  I hated everything about it.  What I hated most was opening one eye in the middle of the night and seeing the dimly lit roof of a building that I knew from the ground to be a formidable structure in its own right, an Art Deco knock-off from the late 1930s.  There was a rusty water tank on the roof, probably no longer in use.

I also hated the incessant swaying we experienced whenever the winds aloft exceeded 25 knots or so.  Likewise a faint, peculiar smell that came in the late fall and stayed for the winter, a telltale sign, I thought, of some fundamental glitch in the heating system that might turn towards catastrophe at a most inopportune time.

And the awkward elevator rides, filled either with silence or meaningless chit chat.  In the chit chat, the building itself substituted for the weather as the safe default topic of choice.

And the reaction I got from casual acquaintances, friends of friends and such, when they learned where I lived.  There was an assumption that I was filthy rich, but also a conviction that I must have had more money than taste.

In fact, my father bought the unit for us.  He paid for everything thereafter, including Christmas gratuities for the people at ground level.  He did it, of course, to exercise control; you won't be surprised to learn that he still exercises control from beyond the grave, via a complex series of trusts.

I thought of the arrangement at first as a kind of dystopian experiment that I could share with two of my very best friends, two people who understood me on a deep level and who were, and are, inherently interesting and companionable.  The artist and the bond trader (and no, you have them backwards as to which is which).

The COVID years were particularly difficult.  The common American isolation was made locally worse by a little handbook of rules that the building association must have copied from Xi Jinping.  I ignored it when I could get away with it.

I finally left in the late summer of 2023, for a teaching job in Missoula.  I live there now in a small house with a ground floor and only a ground floor.  From my back porch I can see the Clark Fork River, but just barely, wending its way through a waterfront park.  There is a very friendly tavern within walking distance of my house and, at the other end of the street, a modest church, of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, that I have seen only from the outside.

I sleep soundly for the most part, but from time to time a dream recurs in which I am floating motionless above the city, like the Goodyear Blimp hovering against a gentle breeze.  It's bad because it's vertiginous, but to make matters worse, in due course a peregrine falcon decides to practice his bombing runs against my head.  At that point I wake up in a sweat.

My daily driver is a vintage International Scout in British Racing Green with a transfer case and a heater that still is able to fend off the winter cold.  My students think that it's cool.

There, you asked me how it was, and I told you.  Straight up and God's honest to the extent that I am able.

 

"God Shed His Grace on Thee"

The famous phrase displays a grammatical ambiguity.  Is it simply telling us something that happened?  Or is it rather a subjunctive prayer, a wish directed at God with the "may" understood?

It's the latter.  How do we know this?  Because of what comes after, in the same sentence.  "And crown thy good," not "And crowned thy good."

 

The Great Mescaline/Baked Potato Convergence

It was the theme of my dream just now.  The setting was a fancy restaurant.  The meal was accompanied by a beautiful and original vibraphone solo, the notes of which now, of course, are permanently lost.

As if in desperation, the mind reaches in every direction for inspiration, but the meaning becomes more and more elusive.

Back here in the so-called real world, and just in the last week, three little tidbits, from disparate sources, that seem to point towards an equally elusive and variegated Elsewhere.  The intrepid USAF ICBM guardian Mario Woods.  ("He said that the propulsion systems of the craft are not built but grown.")  The SUNY Albany astrophysicist Kevin Knuth, reminding a podcaster that in the early 1950s an entire Italian soccer crowd experienced a rain from UFOs of fine filaments that came to be called "angel hair."  On physical analysis it was revealed that they had the same composition as caterpillar silk of all things.  And the groundbreaking professor of bioinformatics Michael Levin, publishing a new paper that seems to say that what we call "life" and "consciousness" and "intelligence" comes at us from a non-physical, non-local source, one that he calls "the Platonic Space."  And if you offer the criticism that "Platonic Space" is just a metaphor, he will insist that "all science is metaphor!"

I have not seen the Elsewhere, but I can feel it rumbling beneath my feet.  I will not live to see its eruption into the larger zeitgeist, but I believe that my grandchildren will.

 

May Perpetual Light Shine Upon Them

Upon all of the victims of the September 11 terror attacks.  Never to be forgotten.

 

Joe's Jetsam

You rarely hear the word anymore, and when you do, it is almost invariably paired with "flotsam," as in "flotsam and jetsam."

The two have independent meanings.  Flotsam is something that has fallen into the sea.  It could be salvageable.  A shipping container may have escaped the deck of a big cargo ship in a storm, broken up and left the surface littered with Nike shoes, basketballs and toilet items.

Jetsam is something that has been pushed or tossed overboard to lighten the ship, usually in extremis.  A 19th century American frigate might be in danger of capture or destruction because smaller enemy vessels are in hot pursuit.  "Everything overboard!"  Even the cannons might go, though they be neither flotsam nor jetsam but something that goes straight to the bottom.

What is on my list now for dispatch?  Practically everything save family and a few friends.  Books, kitchen gadgets, drums and drumsticks, reading glasses, socks and underwear.  A CD on which Mstislav Rostropovich conducts a rousing "Stars and Stripes Forever;" another of Irish folk tunes including "Tir na Nog," the ancient story of a man who makes a bad bargain with the leprechauns and loses everything as a consequence.  And all of the memories of my awkward youth, especially its squandered romantic opportunities.

Finally, my body itself.  You may object -- "Your body is the vessel!  How can the vessel be tossed overboard?!"  But I trust that it is one vessel among many, and the least of them.  I have abused it, and now it is abusing me.  To abandon the controlling metaphor for another, better it be left an empty shell, a translucent snakeskin wedged between this rock and this hard place.

 

A Thinly-Confected Memory

When my mind is idle, as it often is now, rather than count sheep I recapitulate memories, most but not all of which are authentic.  (If the memories don't come from my "lived experience," they certainly come from my unlived experience, which surely is entitled to a voice as well?)

This is an old man's game.  When my father was a child, circa 1926, he might have listened raptly while old men of his day reminisced about their child labors in the Merrimack Valley, working not in textile mills but rather in factories that made shoes for the Army of the Potomac, some of which no doubt still lie buried in the fields outside Petersburg, Virginia and in the accursed Wilderness.

One hundred years later, my memory paints two identical pictures.  They show mounds, small mountains really, of raw sugar.  The mounds sit inside the walls of two manufactories that I would often pass on excursions to see my mother's family in Woburn, Massachusetts.  One, owned and operated by the New England Confectionery Company in East Cambridge, was at the time the largest candy factory in the world.  It spat out millions of multi-colored, multiflavored Necco Wafers per year.  The other, in Everett, bore the proud logo of the Charlston Chew, a popular confection of chocolate-covered vanilla nougat.  These products had national reach; you were as likely to be sucking on Necco Wafers as a child in Des Moines or Bakersfield, California as in Eastern Massachusetts.

But where did all of that sugar come from?  Almost certainly, I surmise, from Cuba, at least in the days before Fidel's revolution.  And how much of the journey from there to here was taken by ship, and how much by railroad car from a place like New Orleans or Miami?

And so we can draw a thin, fading historical line that passes directly through the environs of Boston.  It starts with a bent-low campesino in the interior of Cuba, whacking away at cane with a machete under a broad-brimmed hat.  It ends with a dentist in suburban Des Moines, empowered financially to buy a bass boat because the teeth of his little patients have been corrupted, over and over, by New England-made confections.  In those days we were all, it seems, in this together, even though we hadn't the slightest clue what this was.