Monday, March 24, 2014
The Ides of March, 2014
Wouldn’t it take a certain arrogance or pride to hold a party on the Ides of March?
Or, for that matter, to attend one?
Are we too busy to heed the signs? Too unaware of portentous omens? Too lacking in simple humility?
If this were a Greek tragedy, the gods would certainly punish such hubris:
-there’d be salmonella in the artichoke dip
-the keg would run flat…or worse yet, dry
-Jerry’s falsetto during “O, Danny Boy” would shatter our windshields
-the stage, at the end of Act V, would be littered with corpses
But, then again, it is the feast of St. Patrick,
And the Irish have been beating the odds for centuries.
They majored in tragedy, minored in hard knocks.
And as a wiser poet than I once said, “I’d walk a longish road, through drear, hard rain, and fog for a well-pulled pint.”
Who am I, a New England Jew, to argue?
Was it Yates? Or maybe Brendan Behan?
Either way, it was another scribe – a Brit – who coined for us “the Ides of March.”
I first read it in the tenth-grade English class of Mr. Wills,
Who, if the bathroom stall near the library was correct, “eats pills.”
In Act I, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, a Soothsayer – Yes, a Soothsayer; Rome was lousy with them in those days – cries, “Beware the Ides of March!”
He says it three times before exiting stage right, and we all know that bud luck runs in threes, like the number of leaves found on the much more common yet luck-less clover.
Caesar, stubborn as an Irish mule, pays no heed to the Soothsayer’s warnings.
But, this is high drama, and there are, to be sure, other signs.
Looking out on a tumultuous storm, here is Casca, a conspirator, talking to Cicero, a Senator, in Act I, Scene 3:
“Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds:
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.”
And, as if that’s not enough, here’s Calpurnia (Wife of Caesar) recounting her dream in Act II, Scene 2:
“Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn'd, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
O Caesar! these things are beyond all use,
And I do fear them.”
So, let’s recount:
The heavens are raining fire and blood; ghosts and the undead are strolling about; Lions are whelping in the town square,
And what does Caesar do?
Ignores it all. He might just as well have gone to a St. Patrick’s Day party for all he cared for such superstitions.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once,” he smugly answers his spouse.
“Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
You can say that again. Sir Julius gets it in the back nine times at the start of Act III.
The moral, as my own Calpurnia would say: Always listen to the woman.
But here I stand, despite the Soothsayer’s prophesy, on the Ides of March.
What’s a Roman with an omen to do?
I could cite my Old Man, a voluntary poet in his own right, when he heard me practicing Marc Anthony’s soliloquy for Mr. Wills’ English class;
Quoth me Da: “He who drinks beer, Shakespeare.”
--Steve Hodin
Or, for that matter, to attend one?
Are we too busy to heed the signs? Too unaware of portentous omens? Too lacking in simple humility?
If this were a Greek tragedy, the gods would certainly punish such hubris:
-there’d be salmonella in the artichoke dip
-the keg would run flat…or worse yet, dry
-Jerry’s falsetto during “O, Danny Boy” would shatter our windshields
-the stage, at the end of Act V, would be littered with corpses
But, then again, it is the feast of St. Patrick,
And the Irish have been beating the odds for centuries.
They majored in tragedy, minored in hard knocks.
And as a wiser poet than I once said, “I’d walk a longish road, through drear, hard rain, and fog for a well-pulled pint.”
Who am I, a New England Jew, to argue?
Was it Yates? Or maybe Brendan Behan?
Either way, it was another scribe – a Brit – who coined for us “the Ides of March.”
I first read it in the tenth-grade English class of Mr. Wills,
Who, if the bathroom stall near the library was correct, “eats pills.”
In Act I, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, a Soothsayer – Yes, a Soothsayer; Rome was lousy with them in those days – cries, “Beware the Ides of March!”
He says it three times before exiting stage right, and we all know that bud luck runs in threes, like the number of leaves found on the much more common yet luck-less clover.
Caesar, stubborn as an Irish mule, pays no heed to the Soothsayer’s warnings.
But, this is high drama, and there are, to be sure, other signs.
Looking out on a tumultuous storm, here is Casca, a conspirator, talking to Cicero, a Senator, in Act I, Scene 3:
“Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds:
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.”
And, as if that’s not enough, here’s Calpurnia (Wife of Caesar) recounting her dream in Act II, Scene 2:
“Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn'd, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
O Caesar! these things are beyond all use,
And I do fear them.”
So, let’s recount:
The heavens are raining fire and blood; ghosts and the undead are strolling about; Lions are whelping in the town square,
And what does Caesar do?
Ignores it all. He might just as well have gone to a St. Patrick’s Day party for all he cared for such superstitions.
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once,” he smugly answers his spouse.
“Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
You can say that again. Sir Julius gets it in the back nine times at the start of Act III.
The moral, as my own Calpurnia would say: Always listen to the woman.
But here I stand, despite the Soothsayer’s prophesy, on the Ides of March.
What’s a Roman with an omen to do?
I could cite my Old Man, a voluntary poet in his own right, when he heard me practicing Marc Anthony’s soliloquy for Mr. Wills’ English class;
Quoth me Da: “He who drinks beer, Shakespeare.”
--Steve Hodin
Field of Vision
I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking staight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.
Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated howthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and
rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.
She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.
Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate --
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whiewashed pillars, where you could see
Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distincly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawwn in by what barred the way.
-- Seamus Heaney
In a wheelchair, looking staight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.
Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated howthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and
rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.
She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.
Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate --
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whiewashed pillars, where you could see
Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distincly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawwn in by what barred the way.
-- Seamus Heaney
The Season of Too-Many-Pockets
I frisk myself, like a beat cop on a punk thief.
"Where's that wallet, you bugger? That phone, those keys?"
I maintain my innocence but I still can't find my stuff.
I'm tellin' you
It's not me that's the felon, it's this damned winter-
It's stolen my breath
It's robbed me of my now-meager dignity,
As the nose runs and the eyes stream.
It mugs me as I struggle uphill among the office towers
Assaulting me with gales thrown in my face.
It trips me up on black ice and brittle bricks of last week's slush.
It's frigid, it's snizzling, it's offering up that "wintry mix" that sounds
so much like a trendy new cocktail
But that's really only a misery-to-go.
Damn it...
I've filed a complaint you know
But I expect it won't be heard for a few more weeks.
-- Louise Outler
"Where's that wallet, you bugger? That phone, those keys?"
I maintain my innocence but I still can't find my stuff.
I'm tellin' you
It's not me that's the felon, it's this damned winter-
It's stolen my breath
It's robbed me of my now-meager dignity,
As the nose runs and the eyes stream.
It mugs me as I struggle uphill among the office towers
Assaulting me with gales thrown in my face.
It trips me up on black ice and brittle bricks of last week's slush.
It's frigid, it's snizzling, it's offering up that "wintry mix" that sounds
so much like a trendy new cocktail
But that's really only a misery-to-go.
Damn it...
I've filed a complaint you know
But I expect it won't be heard for a few more weeks.
-- Louise Outler
Get Up, Please
The two musicians pour forth their souls abroad
in such an ecstasy as to charm the audience
like none I’ve ever seen before, and when
they finish, they rise and hug each other,
and then the tabla player bends down
and touches the feet of the santoor player in an obvious gesture
of respect, but what does it mean? I don’t find out
until the next day at the Econolodge in Tifton, GA,
where I stop on my way home after the concert
and ask Mrs. Patel, the owner, if she has ever heard
of these two musicians or knows
anything about the tabla and the santoor and especially the latter,
which looks like the love child of a typewriter
and a hammered dulcimer only with a lot of extra wires
and tuning posts, and she doesn’t seem to understand
my questions, though when I ask her about one person touching
the other’s feet and then bend down
to show her, she lights up and says, "It means he thinks the other
is a god. My children do this before they go off
to school in the morning, as though to say, 'Mummy,
you are a god to us,’" and I look at her
for a second and then surprise us both when I say, "Oh, Mrs. Patel!"
and burst into tears, because I think,
first, of my own dead parents and then of little Lakshmi and Padma
Patel going off to their classes in Tift County schools,
the one a second-grader who is studying homophones
(“I see the sea”) and the other of whom is in the fourth
grade, where she must master long division with
its cruel insistence on numbers lined
up under one another with exacting precision and then crawling
toward the page’s bottom as you, the divider, subtract
and divide again and again, all the while recording
on the top line an answer that grows increasingly
lengthy as you fret and chew the tip of your pencil
and persevere, though before they grab
their books and lunch boxes and pile onto the bus, they take time
to touch Mrs. Patel’s feet and Mr. Patel’s as well,
assuming there is such a person. Later my friend
Avni tells me you touch the feet of your elders
to respect the distance they have traveled
and the earth they have touched, and you
say “namaste”not because you take yoga at that little place
on the truck route between the t-shirt store
and the strip club but because it means “I bow
to the light within you,” and often the people being
bowed to will stoop down and collect you as if to say
"You too are made of the same light!"
Reader, if your parents are alive, think of them now, of all the gods
whose feet you never touched or touched enough.
And if not your parents, then someone else.
You know someone like this, right? Someone who belongs
to the "mighty dead," as Keats called them.
Don’t you wish that person were here now
so you could touch their feet and whisper, "You are my god"?
I can’t imagine Keats saying, “You too are made
of the same light,” though I can see him saying,
as he did to Fanny Brawne, “I have been astonished
that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have
shudder'd at it—I shudder no more—I could
be martyr'd for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that—
I could die for you.” My own feet have touched
the earth nearly three times as long as Keats’s did,
and I’m hardly the oldest person
I know. So let this poem brush across the feet of anyone
who reads it. Poetry is
my religion—well, I wouldn’t die for it. I’d live for it, though.
-- David Kirby
in such an ecstasy as to charm the audience
like none I’ve ever seen before, and when
they finish, they rise and hug each other,
and then the tabla player bends down
and touches the feet of the santoor player in an obvious gesture
of respect, but what does it mean? I don’t find out
until the next day at the Econolodge in Tifton, GA,
where I stop on my way home after the concert
and ask Mrs. Patel, the owner, if she has ever heard
of these two musicians or knows
anything about the tabla and the santoor and especially the latter,
which looks like the love child of a typewriter
and a hammered dulcimer only with a lot of extra wires
and tuning posts, and she doesn’t seem to understand
my questions, though when I ask her about one person touching
the other’s feet and then bend down
to show her, she lights up and says, "It means he thinks the other
is a god. My children do this before they go off
to school in the morning, as though to say, 'Mummy,
you are a god to us,’" and I look at her
for a second and then surprise us both when I say, "Oh, Mrs. Patel!"
and burst into tears, because I think,
first, of my own dead parents and then of little Lakshmi and Padma
Patel going off to their classes in Tift County schools,
the one a second-grader who is studying homophones
(“I see the sea”) and the other of whom is in the fourth
grade, where she must master long division with
its cruel insistence on numbers lined
up under one another with exacting precision and then crawling
toward the page’s bottom as you, the divider, subtract
and divide again and again, all the while recording
on the top line an answer that grows increasingly
lengthy as you fret and chew the tip of your pencil
and persevere, though before they grab
their books and lunch boxes and pile onto the bus, they take time
to touch Mrs. Patel’s feet and Mr. Patel’s as well,
assuming there is such a person. Later my friend
Avni tells me you touch the feet of your elders
to respect the distance they have traveled
and the earth they have touched, and you
say “namaste”not because you take yoga at that little place
on the truck route between the t-shirt store
and the strip club but because it means “I bow
to the light within you,” and often the people being
bowed to will stoop down and collect you as if to say
"You too are made of the same light!"
Reader, if your parents are alive, think of them now, of all the gods
whose feet you never touched or touched enough.
And if not your parents, then someone else.
You know someone like this, right? Someone who belongs
to the "mighty dead," as Keats called them.
Don’t you wish that person were here now
so you could touch their feet and whisper, "You are my god"?
I can’t imagine Keats saying, “You too are made
of the same light,” though I can see him saying,
as he did to Fanny Brawne, “I have been astonished
that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have
shudder'd at it—I shudder no more—I could
be martyr'd for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that—
I could die for you.” My own feet have touched
the earth nearly three times as long as Keats’s did,
and I’m hardly the oldest person
I know. So let this poem brush across the feet of anyone
who reads it. Poetry is
my religion—well, I wouldn’t die for it. I’d live for it, though.
-- David Kirby
Thursday, March 06, 2014
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