The Class of 2011

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

THE CLASS OF 2011

Children insist on growing up and going away. Their teachers are not happy about that. Really. Every year the old…um…venerable faculty see their high school seniors off to the new world they will make for themselves. Oh, sure, there are always one or two of whom one can sing “Thank God and Greyhound you’re gone,” but the loss of most of the students is very real, very painful, and very forever. And while the teachers taught them not to ever split infinitives (cough), which they immediately forget, the block form for business letters, which they usually remember, and the possible symbolism of Grendel in Beowulf, there are always lots of other little things one hopes they have learned along the way.

Here then, Class of 2011 are some disconnected factoids your old English teacher meant to tell you earlier in the year, before the month of May very cleverly sneaked up on all of us:

1. In October you will return for homecoming. You will find pretty much the same teachers, school, and friends you left behind. It will all seem very familiar at first. But you won’t be on the team or in the band; it isn’t about you anymore, and that will be oddly disturbing. By October of 2012 most of the students in your old high school won’t know who you are -- or were. And they won't care. You'll just be old people.

2. Some day surprisingly soon you will hear shrieks of insolent laughter from your child’s room. You will find your child and her friends laughing at your yearbook pictures. You will feel very old.

3. Change the oil in your car more often than the manufacturer recommends.

4. Billy Graham attended a public school; Adolf Hitler attended a Christian school. Don’t obsess on labels.

5. You are not going to win the Texas lottery.

6. T-shirts are underwear.

7. MyFace, SpaceBook, Tweeter, and all the rest are surprisingly dangerous to your career and to your safety.

8. When posing for a photograph, never hold your hands folded in front of, um, a certain area of your anatomy. It makes you look as if you just discovered that your zipper is undone.

9. Have you ever noticed that you never see “Matthew 6:5-6” on a bumper sticker?

10. College is not high school.

11. Work is not high school. There is no such thing as an excused absence in adult life. The boss will not care about your special needs, sensitivities, artistic gifts, or traumatic childhood.

12. God made the world. We have the testimony of Genesis and of the Incarnation that all Creation is good. Never let anyone tell you that the world is evil.

13. Most people are good, and can be trusted. But the two-per-centers, like hemorrhoids, do tend to get your attention.

14. Listening to radio commentators with whom you already agree is not participating in our democracy. Until he was in his thirties, Rush Limbaugh never even registered to vote in any place he ever lived. You can do better than that.

15. Why should someone else have to raise your child?

16. Tattoos do have one useful purpose – they will help your relatives identify your body after you die of some weird disease that was on the needle. Oh, yeah, sure, the process is sterile – a tattoo parlor looks like a hospital, right?

17. Your class ranking is little more than a seating chart for graduation, reflecting your performance in a sometimes artificial and often passive situation for the last four years. Your future is up to you.

18. Knowing how to repair things gives you power and autonomy. You will amaze yourself with what you can do with duct-tape, a set of screwdrivers, a set of wrenches, a hammer, and a pair of Vise-grip pliers.

19. Movies are made by committees. Sometimes they get it right. Books are usually written by one person. Sometimes he or she gets it wrong. But there are lots more good books than there are good movies.

20. Put the 'phone down. Grasp the steering wheel firmly with both hands. Stay alive.

21. Save the planet? Reform the establishment? Stop meanies from beating harp seals to death? Get a job first.

22. Time to wear the big-boy pants.

23. Some people are Democrats because they believe the Democratic Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Democrats because they are part of the Socialist / Communist continuum and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Some people are Republicans because they believe the Republican Party is best at protecting the rights of the individual. Other people are Republicans because they have Fascist tendencies and believe that government is a weapon to bludgeon people into obedience. Hiding out in the woods and refusing to participate is not a logical option.

24. Everyone tells cheerleader jokes, but cheerleaders are among the most successful people in adult life. The discipline, the hard work, the physical demands, the aesthetics, the teamwork, and the refusal to die of embarrassment while one’s mother screams abuse at the cheerleader sponsor do pay off in life.

25. You are the “they.” You are the adult. You are the government. You are the Church. You are the public school system. You decide what will be on the television screen in your home. Your life is your own – don’t become one of the bleating, tweeting sheep.

26. Giving back to the community begins now. Do something as an act of service to humanity -- join the volunteer fire department, teach Sunday school, clean up the city park one hour a week, assist at the nursing home.

27. Don’t bore people with sad stories about your horrible childhood. No one ever lived a Leave It To Beaver or Cosby existence. Get over the narcissism.

28. The shouting, abusive, 1-900-Send-Money TV preacher with the bouffant hairdo strutting about on the low-prole stage set while beating on a Bible and yelling is not going to come to the house in the middle of the night when your child is dying, you don’t have a job, and you don’t know where to turn. Your pastor – Chaucer’s Parsoun -- may not be cool, may not be a clever speaker, may not sport a Rolex watch, and may not have a really bad wig, but he’s here for you.

29. If you insist on taking your shirt off in public, shave your armpit hair. Or braid it. Or something.

30. Don’t wear a shirt that says “(bleep) Civilization” to a job interview.

31. When someone asks for a love offering, offer him your love and watch his reaction. He doesn’t want a love offering; he wants money. Sloppy language is used to manipulate people. Call things by their proper names, and hang on to your wallet.

32. Stop eating out of bags and boxes. Learn how to use a knife and fork.

33. Life is not a beer commercial.

34. On the Monday after graduation you’ll be just another unemployed American.

35. When you find yourself facing a dinner setting with more than two forks, don’t panic; no one else knows quite what to do with three forks either. No one’s watching anyway, so just enjoy the meal.

36. What is the truth? Is it something you want to believe? Something repeated over and over until you come to believe it in spite of your own experience?

37. Green ideology means that gasoline costs more than you make.

38. A great secret to success in a job or in life is simply to show up.

39. No one ever agrees on where commas go. If someone shows you a grammar book dictating the use of commas one way, you can find another grammar book to contradict it.

40. Most people do not look good in baseball caps.

41. There is no such thing as a non-denominational worship service.

42. You will always be your parents’ child. You may become a doctor, lawyer, banker, or, God help you, president, but your mother will still ask you if you’ve had enough to eat and remind you to take your jacket in case the night turns cold. And parents are a constant surprise -- they always have new knowledge you need to acquire.

43. Strunk & White’s Elements of Style is all the English grammar and usage book you’ll ever need. If more people understood that and had a library card, every English teacher in America would be an ex-English teacher standing in line at the Wal-Mart employment office. Keep it a secret, okay?

44. From now on the menus should be in words, not pictures.

45. According to some vaguely named family institute or some such, raising a child to the age of eighteen costs the family $153,000 and a few odd cents. The taxpayers of this state spend about $5,000 per year on each student. Thus, a great many people have pooled their resources and spent about $213,000 on you since you were born. They did not do this in order for you to sit around complaining about how unfair life is.

46. There was never a powerful secret society variously known as The Preps, The Rich Kids, or The Popular Kids, just as there are no unmarked U.N. helicopters. But if you ask me, those guys who play chess need watching; I hear that the pawns are reporting all your movements to The 666 Beast computer in Belgium via computer chips in your school i.d. card.

47. Thank you notes: write ’em. It shows class. You can write; you’re a high school graduate, remember?

48. Don’t reach for the pen in someone else’s pocket. Carry your own.

49. The school award you should have received: For Compassion. While I must confess that I was happy to see some of you on a daily basis because that way I was sure my tires would be safe, there was never one single instance of any of you taking any advantage or being unkind in any way to those who were emotionally or physically vulnerable. Indeed, most of you took the extra step in being very protective of the very special young people who are blended into the student population. There is no nicely-framed award for that compassion, not here, anyway, but even now there is one with your name on it on the walls of a mansion which, we are assured, awaits each of us, in a house with many mansions. God never asked you to be theologically correct; He asked you to be compassionate, and you were. Keep the kindness within you always.

50. Take a long, lingering look at your classmates during graduation. You’ll never see all of them ever again. In ten years many of you will be happy and honorable. Others will have failed life, and at only 28 will be sad, tired, bitter old men and women with no hope. Given that you all went to the same cinder-block school with the same blinky fluorescent lights, suffered the same old boring teachers, drove along the same dusty roads, and grew up in the same fading little town, what will have made the difference?

Well, Class of 2011, it’s time to let go. Thanks for everything: for the paper balls and pizza and pep rallies and recitals and concerts and games, for your thoughts and essays, for your laughter and jokes, for usually paying attention to roll call (“Focus, class... focus...focus...focus...”), for really thinking about Macbeth and Becket and Beowulf, and those wonderful pilgrims (who, of course, are us) forever journeying to Canterbury, for doing those business letters and resumes’ over and over until YOU were proud of them, for wrestling with iambic pentameter, for all the love you gave everyone around you every day. Take all those good things with you in your adventures through life.

And whether we shall meet again I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take:
For ever, and for ever, farewell...

--Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, IV.iii.115-117

-30-

Searching for Sight

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Searching for Sight

 No one assures you that lenses are green

That spectacles are recycled from waste
That the optometrist’s glow-in-the-dark
Boxes, little lights in white, green, and red,
Are cultivated by fair-trade farmers
Along the Neckar River in Hungary
Where no one needs glasses to speak Magyar.
Eyes, like cans of squash, have expiration dates
And must be renewed and refreshed each year
With little boxed lights in white, green, and red
And a thirty-something voice assuring you
That your eyes are good – for someone your age.
Words spilling out like a soft cataract
Of diffuse, bubbling comfort for a year
With eyes recycled once again the seer
Seeks for the book store and the coffee shop

New books, fresh cups, old dreams held at odd angles

On Your Mobile Device

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

On Your Mobile Device

Life now approaches not as a basket

Of new kittens, or an old dog asleep
In the summer sun, a letter, a clock,
A vase of flowers on the kitchen table,
A glass of beer with a friend, a soft wind,
Cold moonlight slanting through the autumn leaves,
Or a wild thunderstorm that makes one glad
To doze inside with a book and a pipe.
Oh, no.  Because life now is but an app
A-blinking on a little plastic box:
The weather, stocks, throats slit in Arkansas,
An actress drunk again in Hollywood,
All, all repose in one’s pants pocket with
Keys, coins, a bit of lint, a pocket knife,
Those relics of an irrelevant past;
We need them not: we have a plastic box.

20 September 1870

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

20 September 1870

Like vultures hovering over the faithful dead

The rank red rags of base repression hung
Upon the blast-breeched walls of captive Rome;
The smoke of conquest fouled the ancient streets
While mocking conquerors marched their betters
At the point of enlightened bayonets
To the scientific future, murdering those
Who bore themselves with quiet dignity.

False, sinister Savoy sneered in disdain

At ancient truths, this costumed reprobate
Who played at soldier once the firing ceased,
And claimed Saint Peter’s patrimony on
The corpses of the merely useful who
With this day’s slogans fresh upon their lips
At dawn advanced upon the remnant walls
So thinly held by so few Papal Zouaves
And thus befeathered fat Vittorio
Was given his victory by better men
On both sides there, their corpses looted by
The pallid inheritors of Progress.
The son of a Sardinian spurred his horse
Along the streets of now obedient Rome,
And to the Quirinal by a passage broad,¹
And finally to the Ardeatine Caves.

¹Paradise Lost X.404

Roadside Detractions

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Roadside Detractions

An empty cigarette packet smokeless
An empty chewing gum wrapper gumless
An empty soda bottle sodaless
An empty chicken basket chickenless
An empty shell casing, yes, bulletless
And this is the road America walks
To its vague YouTubeifest destiny

The Sky to Moc Hoa

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

                                                              The Sky to Moc Hoa

The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue,

Layered between heat and Heaven. The damp
Rots even the air with the menace of death.
The ground below, all green and holed, dies too;

It seems to gasp: You will not live, young lad,

You will not live to read your books or dream
About a little room, a fire, a pipe,
A chair, a pen, a dog, a truth-told poem
Flung courteously in manuscript pages
Upon a coffee-stained table, halo’d
In a 60-watt puddle of lamp-light.

You skinny, stupid kid. You will not live.

Then circling, and circling again, again,
Searching, perhaps, for festive rotting meals,
Down-spinning, fear-spinning onto Moc Hoa,
Palm trees, iron roofs, spinning in a dead sun,
Spinning up to a swing-ship spinning down.
A square of iron matting in a green marsh,
Hot, green, wet, fetid with old Samsara.

Gunboats diesel across the Van Co Tay,

Little green gunboats, red nylon mail sacks,
Engines, cheery yells, sloshing mud, heat, rot.
Mail sacks off, mail sacks on, men off, men on,
Dark blades beating against the heavy heat,
The door gunners, the pilot impatient.
All clear to lift, heads down, humans crouching
Ape-like against the grass, against the slime
In sweating, stinking, slinking, feral fear
As the dragon-blades roar and finally fly,
And the beaten grass and beaten men
Now stand again erect in gasping heat,
Some silent in a new and fearful world.

You will not live, young hero; you will die.
 

What then of Dostoyevsky and Chekhov?
What then of your Modern Library editions,
A dollar each at the Stars & Stripes store
Far away and long ago in DaNang,
All marked and underlined?
                                             What is the point?
What then of your notebook scribbled with words,
Your weak attempts at poetry? So sad,
So irrelevant in the nights of death.
The corpses on the gunboat decks won’t care,
Their flare-lit faces staring into smoke
At 0-Two-Damned Thirty in the morning –
Of what truth or beauty are your words to them?

You haven’t any words anyway;
They’re out of movies and books, all of them.
What truth can adventure-story words speak
To corpses with their eyes eaten away?
Write your used emotions onto a page;
You haven’t any emotions anyway;
They’re out of the past, all of them.
What truth can used emotions speak to death?
So sling your useless gear aboard the boat:
A seabag of utilities, clean socks,
Letters, a pocket knife, a Rosary,
Some underwear, some dreams, and lots of books.
And board yourself. Try not to fall, to drown,
To be a floating bloating, eyeless face.
Not yet. Think of your books, your words.
Look up:The sky to Moc Hoa is hazily blue.

Notes:

1. Moc Hoa, pronounced Mock Wah -- a town on the Vam Co Tay River near the border with Cambodia.

2. “Young lad” or “lad” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers.

3. “Young hero” – employed sarcastically of recruits by chief petty officers and of Navy Corpsman in Field Medical Service School by Marine sergeant-instructors.

4. Utilities – heavy, olive-drab, 1950s style Marine Corps battle-dress issued to Navy personnel on their way to Viet-Nam. Too darned hot. I had to scrounge lighter clothing.

5. Samsara – in some Eastern religions the ocean of birth and death.

English Ivy

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

English Ivy

Why do some call this vine an English ivy?

Does it wear tweeds, call for a cup of tea,
And tut-tut over a pipe and The Times?
But far away from England climbs this vine,
Far up the bark and branches of an oak
Wanting to see, perhaps, the spring-blue sky,
A squirrel’s nest, the perfect leaf, a bird
Spying on the curious cats below,
On pups in happy repose, tummies up
To the dog-friendly sun. 

                                      O peaceful vine!

Your contract is renewed each day without
An interview, evaluation, or
The filing of an annual report.
You play your days in leafy-green ascent,
Dependant on your sturdy tree, yourself
A pastoral road for ladybugs and ants,
The occasional ceremonial worm
Or caterpillar; an auditor of
The coos and whos and cawks and squawks and trills
There cooed and who’d and cawk’d and squawked and trilled
By merry jays and robins, mockingbirds,
And silly, so-sad-seeming whippoorwills.
Oh, ivy, glad indeed, to celebrate
Your liturgical seasons dutifully!

It's on the 'Net; It Must be True

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

It’s on the ‘Net; It Must be True

 

Alexander Graham Bell, a Canadian who was born in Scotland, invented the telephone so that young Americans could use the thing to talk, text, tweet, and twit to each other during high school graduation and thus ignore high school graduation.  Since Mr. Bell never finished school, we may appreciate the layers of irony.

In May of every year, like buzzards returning to wherever it is buzzards return to, tiresome screeds about the ignorance of graduates arrive to roost in one’s in-box. 

One of the most popular is wrongly attributed to Bill Gates, another successful fellow who did not finish school and who does not write silly stuff, and is usually titled “Rules They Didn’t Teach You in School” or some such, and is forwarded by the sort of people who never vote in their local school board elections because they’re too busy complaining.

The idea of hopeless naivete is not true of most high school students, and it’s certainly not true of college students.  Very few graduates ever finish a degree on the mummy-and-daddy nickel, and for those who do, well, good for their mums and dads.

The reality is that most college students work their way through school, usually in minimum-wage jobs and at odd hours.  A student who works the night shift flipping burgers can only wonder about why he is falsely stereotyped as someone who thinks he’s too good to flip burgers.

My daughter spent some college time shoveling (Newark, New Jersey) in a stable.  Hamburgers would have been better.

Any college classroom will feature, yes, a few princesses of both sexes, but they are far outnumbered by folks who know their way around the loading dock, Afghanistan, and hospital wards at 0-Dark-Thirty, and who can wield with great skill an M4, a broom, and a bedpan.

One of my fish English students was a former sergeant who left the Army after sixteen years.  When I asked him why he didn’t finish his twenty he said that after three combat tours in the desert he figured he had pushed his luck enough.

He and his mates studied English literature in a college hydraulics lab because of a shortage of classroom space.  No ivy grew on the equipment.

Two of my students were in their mid-thirties, had been pals from childhood, owned a roofing company, and were nursing students.  In their late thirties, they said they were getting a little old for climbing up on roofs all the year ‘round and were going to sell the company and work in the shade for a while.  I asked them why they didn’t keep the company and spend well-earned time out of the sun by delegating more authority to their employees.  They said that their names were on each roof (metaphorically), and that they would never sign off on a job if they didn’t have first-hand knowledge of each square inch of that roof.

Oh, yeah, some dumb college kids, huh?

Age and experience are good, but they are only predictors: there are adult students who become angry when they are required to show up on time (which, presumably, was required of them on the job) and actually do some work (ditto).  In the same class there can be 18-year-olds demonstrating a far better work ethic (not the one texting behind her Volkswagen-size purse, second seat, second table on the right) than their elders.

In the end, success is almost always the result of an individual’s choice to show up for work, whether on the factory floor or in the classroom, and hit a lick at it.

That is, after the individual takes the tin cricket out of his ear.  In school we were taught that in ye olden days of yore crazy people who stumbled around mumbling to themselves were kept safely away from others by being chained to a wall somewhere.  We thought that was a bad punishment.  Silly us.

One of life’s lessons – it needn’t come from the classroom – is that stereotyping is wrong.  Just because something’s on the ‘net doesn’t mean it’s true.  Those giddy folks waving their diplomae (“diplomae,” he wrote, for he had been to night school) around and yelling almost surely worked very hard for the moment, both in and out of the classrooms and laboratories.

How Many Dead Aggies Does it Take...?

Mack Hall

College Station, where there is a college but no station, is segregating a section of its new city cemetery for Aggies only.

There is no word yet on whether the Aggies-only section will rest adjacent to the exclusive Elvis impersonator section. The answer might be indexed in the official guide to funerals in America, Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One.
Ross Albrecht (’84), marketing manager for the new cemetery, told the Associated Press that the use of Texas A & M symbols will be “correct and respectful.” The entrance to the Aggie section will be a “Spirit Gate” between two concrete columns faked up to look like limestone, and for the discerning Aggie there’s nothing that says correct and respectful like chunks of concrete painted to look like something else.

Correct and respectful pallbearers could be rounded up from The Dixie Chicken.

Maybe the maroon Aggie hearse will be drawn to the cemetery by twelve little Reveilles wearing maroon mourning plumes.

Although Texas A & M has no direct connection with the city cemetery, the school will license the use of trademarked A & M logos and other symbols. This means that if you – for reasons best known to yourself – wish to have your mortal remains decorated with an image of Ol’ Sarge, you will have to pay Texas A & M for permission.

Licensing agreements guarantee the quality of Texas A & M’s acounts receivable. The difference between a cheap, unlicensed, made-in-China tee-shirt proclaiming “Fightin’ Texas Aggies” and another cheap, licensed, made-in-China tee shirt proclaiming “Fightin’ Texas Aggies” is, well, nothing except a tag.

Will we ever see a tee proclaiming “Studyin’ Texas Aggies?”

Made-in-China Texas A & M coffee cups, made-in-China Texas A & M neckties, made-in-China Texas A & M lunch buckets, Made-in-China Texas A & M portable toilets, and now, dug-in-College Station Texas A & M holes in the ground, license fees payable to the university.

And some people say America isn’t a religious country.

A sales brochure preaches "The concept is that the Spirit of Aggieland travels in a ceremonial way from the campus to the Aggie Field of Honor through this final gateway." If that isn’t straight out of the Gospels I don’t what is.

At this writing no one is clear whether or not having posed nude or semi-nude will be a bar to resting in peace in The Aggie Field of Honor.

If the University of San Francisco were to feature a cemetery, would the trustees establish an Eternal Joint exuding faux marijuana smoke in The Mahareshi Yoga Guru Garden of Like, You Know, Where It Is Forever 1968?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology would have to license Star Trek Action Figure grave markers from Paramount. Funeral services might be offered in Klingon.

A beauty school – the Dear Departed is buried with a 21-hair-dryer salute.

Good ol’ A & M, coming up with a brand-new century-old tradition every year or so.

But what if…just what if Aggies who Pass On To The Other Side make their last Whoop! at the pearly gates only to discover that Saint Peter wears burnt orange?

Hullabaloo, caneck, caneck!

A Makeshift Shrine

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

A Makeshift Shrine

Teddy bears ribboned to a chain-link fence,

Plastic-wrapped flowers stacked like compost,
Dime-store candles flickering in the exhaust
Of passing mini-vans.  The inanity
Of filler-language falls, descends upon
The shattered souls of the barely alive,
The dead cliches’ of well-planned camera-grief:
“Our hearts and thoughts go out you.”
What does that mean?  Nothing but conventional noise
For generations of lovers and mourners
Long-ago looted of reality,
Programmed with state-sanctioned hyperbole,
And mourners now are left with nothing but
An existential howl against the light,
Sodium-vapor upon broken glass,
While strident Men of Destiny
There rake for votes among the ashes of death.

Come Laughing Home at Twilight

Mack Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com

Come Laughing Home at Twilight

And, O!  Wasn’t he just the Jack the lad,

A’swellin’ down the Water Street as if –

As if he owned the very paving stones!

He was my beautiful boy, and, sure,

The girls they thought so too: his eyes, his walk;

A man of Newfoundland, my small big man,

Just seventeen, but strong and bold and sure.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

Don’t tell me he was England’s finest, no –

He was my finest, him and his Da,

His Da, who breathed in sorrow, and was lost,

They say, lost in the fog, among the ice.

But no, he too was killed on the first of July

Only it took him months to cast away,

And drift away, far away, in the mist.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

I need no kings nor no Kaisers, no,

Nor no statues with fine words writ on’em,

Nor no flags nor no Last Post today:

I only want to see my men come home,

Come laughing home at twilight, boots all mucky,

An’ me fussin’ at ‘em for being’ late,

Come laughing home at twilight...

1.   4 July 2012, Wednesday

The Staretz

In middle life the sunflower bends its head,

No longer to the sun as in its youth,

But to the earth in all humility,

Ripening for us all its dreams and works,

And aging happily to eternal dawn.

2.   15 July 2012.  Sunday.  St. Swithin’s Day

The Farmer to Saint Swithin

O good Saint Swithin, please, to you we pray,

On this your high summer rain-making day –

Of your blest kindness send us sweet, soft showers,

The kind that gently fall for hours and hours,

To heal the sunburnt land of thirst and drought

And nourish the corn that sees the winter out;

And if you grant the boon we humbly ask

We’ll work the harder on each rural task:

We’ll ditch and fence and plough, and milk the cow,

Share with the widder-folk, and feed the sow,

Count out some plantful seeds for poor folks’ needs,

And daily tell God’s Mysteries on our beads.

3.   16 July 2012. Monday. Carmel

Pinon

The incense of the mountains drifts along

The arroyos, and into the narrow streets

Of Taos at dawn, the breath, perhaps, of God.

4.   17 July 2012, Tuesday.

Song Dancer Wind Something Woman

(slowly, soothingly)

Like, you know, crystals are so last week’s feeds;

Magic rocks are the latest transcendence,

Drawing from the mountains the soul’s desire

To be one with the one-ness of all things,

Warmed by the desires of the seeking heart,

These rocks, blessed by the, like, ancient peoples

Bring peace and healing to the soul and spirit

(faster)

And, like, I don’t care what people say

About me and what I done in high school

‘cause that ain’t, like, none of their business

And these people that don’t know me judge me

But they’re in darkness I have found the truth

In Transcendental Earth One-Ness as taught

By the One and he likes me anyway.

(parking-lot cat-fight speed)

And I know what you said about my past

You ***** but I know the Oneness of all

And you’ll never get that, you *****, since you’re

All high and mighty and hoyty-toyty

In that fancy cowboy church you think’s

Gon’ bring you happiness but you’re nothing

But a ***** and I know the truth of One…

Brightly-Colored Brick Pits

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
April, 2013

Brightly-Colored Brick Pits

On Saturday night ABC, in a worthy annual tradition, once again broadcast Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments.  Loud, long, and somewhat bombastic (“So let it be written.  So let it be done.”), the film is dismissed by the more precious sort of cineaste but beloved by everyone else.

In 1956, filmmakers understood the difference between color and monotone – when they made a film in color, the COLOR was capitalized (metaphorically).  The red in Pharaoh’s crown was definitely RED, and the blue of the queen’s dress was most assuredly BLUE.

The tendency now is to make color films as if the world had never been blessed with rainbows.  Most contemporary movies and tellyvision depressants inflict on the viewer a sad little palette of colors redolent of charcoal on cheap paper in art class. Gloom and diminished lighting are art; colors are plebeian.

And let the people say “Existential.”

The reality is that the world is in color -- the flowers this spring, for instance, have been taking Technicolor™ classes.  Lovely!  Monotone is good for what was once known as socialist realism (industrial scenes), and Georgia O’Keefe employed black-and-white to study forms, but Creation really is in color.

As for the brick pits in Goshen, not so much color, but that’s not God’s fault.  Pharaoh was practicing his own form of socialism realism – the people laboring in the heat and filth while he and his family lounged under the awnings in their cute little outfits.  Thank goodness that sort of thing never happens in a republic.

Charlton Heston as Moses is a multi-generational favorite; most movies on religious themes enjoy a brief spasm of popularity and then disappear into some storage unit in West Hollywood.  Every three or so years a new film based on some point of Jewish or Christian heritage is promoted with all the clanging and crashing of Moses presenting Ethiopian loot to the Egyptian court, and the ‘net is asludge with reviews gushing “this is the way it must have been!”  Congregations hire the film for showing in the church hall and enthusiastic fans put up posters and hand out flyers after divine services.  The magic lantern show is a two weeks’ wonder and is then forgotten.

The brick pits of Egypt are now the multi-story factories of the far east in which acid-burned hands labor long hours in heat and dust and chemical fumes to make for us  shoes and garments and plastic boxes that light up and make noises.  

Where is their Moses?

And where is their filmmaker?

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That Island, That Book

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com
March, 2013

That Island, That Book

A favorite discussion topic used to be about what book someone would take with him (the “him” is gender-neutral) into exile on a deserted island.

There was always some princess of either sex (one supposes now that it would be a matter of any of the four or five genders now decreed by any given federal court who takes Psalm 82.6 to new places) who brought up the Bible, and some leveler who snarked “Yeah, well, it’s about time you read it.”

Last week the London Daily Mail published a piece about a life prisoner who is into his twentieth year of talking to six walls and who feels very sorry for himself but not for the several folks he shot for not understanding his special needs and his sensitive, artistic spirit. 

The article mentioned that the prisoner has read about the little plastic boxes that people carry around and talk to (rather like the prisoner conversing with walls) but has never seen one.  He has no computer, no telly, no movies, and no radio.  The prisoner can read about such things because he is permitted to have at one time any twenty books, newspapers, or magazines from the prison library.

This is somewhat more than the one book on that hypothetical island, and certainly more entertainment than fictional Hilts’ baseball in The Great Escape.

If you were locked into a it’s-just-you-and-the-walls cell with a tiny concrete table, concrete stool, concrete bed (with a thin, fireproof mattress), and a steel potty for 23 hours of each day, what would you read?

Maybe the real book: Paul Brickhill’s The Great Escape.

When P. G. Wodehouse was imprisoned by the Nazis, he managed to take with him the complete works of Shakespeare.  He probably didn’t have to worry about his fellow prisoners borrowing the volume all the time.

Under the category “Books for Prisoners,” Amazon.com lists 21,847 results – not only is a significant percentage of this nation in prison, they seem to be more literate than the free population.

When 18-year-old Joseph Ratzinger was marched into a prisoner-of-war camp by Americans he carried a pencil and paper, and wrote poetry.

Giovanni Guareschi, an Italian officer, managed to write his thoughts on scraps of paper while in a series of German prison camps for two years, and used them as the basis of My Secret Diary, dedicated “To My Comrades Who Never Returned.”

Fr. Jean Bernard of Luxembourg was sent to Dachau with nothing, but lived to write about it in Priestblock 25487.

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, survived four different death camps and after the war wrote Man’s Search for Meaning.

Ho Chi Minh wrote poetry while in French and Chinese prisons.  Those who know both Chinese and Vietnamese tell us that his poems blend both traditions and are cultured, traditional, ironic, and precisely styled.  Thus, one of the few formalist poets after World War II was a Communist mass-murderer.

Many of St. Paul’s letters were written in a number of Roman prisons.  John Bunyan, St. Thomas More, Sir Thomas Wyatte, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Malory, Boethius, Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, Charles DeGaulle, James Clavell, Cervantes, Thoreau, Dostoyevsky, O. Henry, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Solzhenitsyn, Vonnegut, Ronald Searle – many of the world’s most famous writers were inside the wire fence, starving but thinking, thinking all the time.

If you wonder what books our sometimes shadowy government provides for prisoners at Guantanamo Naval Base at the southern tip of Cuba, America thus completing Castro’s theme of that unhappy island as one big prison camp, the Guardian (U.K.) has the answer: Harry Potter stories, Agatha Christie, the Twilight series, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Dan Brown, travel books, and Islamic books. The library hopes to expand to 20,000 volumes, which would be the envy of most grade schools in this country.

We do know that despite seques-can’t-spell-it, the remaining few workers in this nation will be required to fund $195 million (New York Times) for improvements to the prisoner compound at Guantanamo, including $750 thousand (Fox News) for a soccer field.  The approximately 166 prisoners must be mad about footer, eh?

The prison also offers cable tv (perhaps Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner is popular), which is a good idea for any entity who wants to keep people from thinking.  Television is anaesthesia.  Books and paper, though, those are dangerous.  Some of those prisoners are scribbling, and maybe one will write another The Consolation of Philosophy, but possibly one will scrawl another Mein Kampf.

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Oberlin College Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts

Mack Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Oberlin College Sounds a Clarion Call for its Smelling Salts

Oberlin College in Ohio dates to the early 19^th century.  Oberlin claims to be the first college to admit women and black men, though Middlebury College in Vermont says that honor belongs to them.  Certainly men and women from Oberlin helped save people from bondage during the slavery time, and some 1,000 Oberlin men, black and white, served during the Civil War, enabling their classmate Mary Jane Patterson to become the first African-American woman to earn a BA, in 1862.  At the turn of the 20^th century missionaries from Oberlin, then a Presbyterian school, felt a call to witness in China, and many died there from persecution.

Oberlin has truly been a light unto the nations.

Sadly, Oberlin has recently suffered a series of racist graffiti incidents, vandalism, and physical assaults.  Apparently no one did anything about the enormities except feel bad. 

More recently, someone said that someone said that he or she had seen a Ku Klux Klansman, bedsheet in full sail, walking across campus around two in the morning.  However, there is no source or me-phone footage.  Local police report that other witnesses report that saw a pedestrian wearing a blanket, so someone needs to verify the whereabouts of Charlie Brown’s friend Linus.

Oberlin’s president, Marvin Krislov, stood to his tackle like a true Oberlin man – he canceled classes, saying "…let us be very clear, we stand united. We will not give into hate."

However, in canceling classes, Dr. Krislov, hereinafter referred to as Aunt Pittypat, did indeed give in to hate.  A few bipedal pimples with spray paint bullied him and an entire college into abandoning their vocations as scholars.  Instead of standing up for the freedom to learn, to live, to work, Oberlin spent a day feeling sorry for its collective self.

That’s not exactly the spirit of the Oberlin men who helped hold the union line in the cause of freedom.

With classes canceled out of fear last week, the men and women of Oberlin finally did something – they made signs, they staged a sit-in, and they organized tolerance sessions.

Oh, yeah, a sit-in – that’ll stop evil in its clawed tracks.  Hey, and signs.  Wow.

One student told a rally that “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.”  The content and the use of the passive voice says everything we need to know about a young adult who, given the rare opportunity to study civilization, explore ideas, develop concepts, write, dance, paint, compose music, and perhaps, like her Obie predecessors, help free oppressed peoples, could only bleat out in weakness: “I’m feeling comfortable and supported.”

Reports of reports report (finding anything solidly sourced about the problems at Oberlin is at present impossible) that two Oberlin students were allegedly / maybe / sort of arrested / detained as persons of interest / expelled from school, but if so, no one is saying why.

When Aunt Pittypat addressed the newsies at a press conference, his students reportedly yelled vulgarities at him, so maybe a culture of spoken obscenity already obtains at Oberlin, and only written obscenity is offensive to the young scholars.

In addition to sponsoring teach-ins, Oberlin has called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation to, well, investigate crudities scrawled on walls.  And if that’s not a worthy use of the FBI, then what is, eh?

The reader can follow the Oberlin community as they twitter and tweet at

https://twitter.com/oberlin.  Somehow one gets the idea that Oberlin College at present is the sort of place where people seriously read Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Oberlin was once a moral and cultural light, a college of heroic young people who not only called for injustices to be righted, but hazarded their lives in doing so themselves.  Just now about all they seem to be capable of calling for is their smelling salts.

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Goodbye, Miz Burres

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Goodbye, Miz Burres

Music teachers are even more essentially American than red brick schools, soda fountains on Main Street, Studebakers, baseball, and sidewalk cracks that must be carefully stepped over.  Without a Miss (or the East Texas variant, Miz) Burris or Bernice or Emma to play the piano for school assemblies, weddings, funerals, Sunday liturgies, and visits to the nursing home, America would lose some of her soul and much of her Soul.

After all, some adult once showed young Beverly Sills how to grace a high note and young Ivory Joe Hunter how to echo life on the keys of an old piano.

Our Miz Burres died last week at the age of 102.  At 100 she was still giving private lessons at home.  In her 80s she was infinitely pleased to have her own childhood piano teacher, Miz Lexie / Aunt Lexie, sit in on her young students’ recitals.  And for decades before that she demonstrated infinite patience with schoolchildren, including a few inattentive oafs.

Like the wonderful old three-story school that reposed in pontifical majesty between First Methodist and First Baptist, perhaps in order to keep the peace between them, Miz Burres had always been there and would always be there.  A photograph of her with second-graders in 1955 and a photograph of her at a celebration of her happy century taken last year show exactly the same woman: elegant, white-haired, smiling, surrounded by adoring fans, including her last student. 

And that last student, still a schoolgirl, will in years to come teach other children how to play the piano, and will show them ways of patterning notes, saying, “This is how Miz Burres taught me…”  And so, yes, Miz Burres will always be there when little hearts and hands learn the keys and then grow up to celebrate civilization through music.

A young person of my acquaintance once visited Westminster Abbey, and in a cloister ambulatory now stepped out by sneakers rather than by monastic sandals, noted that she was looking down at the grave of her friend Muzio Clementi, who lived to the age of eighty despite having been married four times.  “Miz Burres taught me his sonatinas,” the young person said, “They’re fun to play.”

While driving to Miz Burres’ funeral, the same person, now a young woman, switched on the CD player and heard the prologue to Mozart’s Die Zauberflote, something else she learned to play from Miz Burres.

Much of what is good in life we all owe to each Miz Burres who blessed us in our youth.

Parade magazine is offering its first ever Music Educator Award of $10,000 to a music teacher working in an American school, kindergarten through university.  At Parade.com/music you can nominate that special music teacher who so much influenced you.  There is surely in your life a Miz Burres who could use that money to buy some better instruments or some new sheet music for her children’s lessons.

Miz Burres never had children at home, but like James Hilton’s fictional Mr. Chips, and in very truth, she can say, and surely does from a happy, happy place in Heaven, “I thought I heard you saying it was a pity... pity I never had any children. But you're wrong. I have. Thousands of them. Thousands of them...”

Goodbye, Miz Burres.

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