The title here is from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem entitled “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes”–a poem that asserts (correctly) that in the Spanish painter’s greatest works we see people presented in the act of achieving their suffering. We see them on the ordinary roads, spines hunched, faces contorted, walking among the blasted trees and carnage of humanity. Ferlinghetti points out that Goya’s people are “so bloody real” –doubly so for they are arranged along the roads.
Me? I thought of the line tonight. I’d gone to the local shopping mall with my wife for the half innocent purpose known as buying some trousers. (I prefer “trousers” to “pants”. I prefer “illud tempus” to “how old are you?”–there’s no help for it.)
I was trying on chinos in J.C. Penney. Quickly I found myself hopping on one leg in a stuffy closet. There were common pins strewn about the floor. I could feel them through my socks. I thought of the quaint, Victorian idea that Beauty stands and waits for whatever passes for immanence. There is no possibility of beauty when one is trying on pantaloons.
We got out of there with trousers in a sack.
And because we are not shopping mall people we thought we’d walk through the inner arcades. This was a mistake. It is always a mistake.
Could you have seen our faces you might have remarked on our respective achievement of suffering. It is a mild suffering as compared to the gibbet and cement skies and bayonets of Goya’s paintings. It’s silly to dare the placement of mild suffering alongside tumbrils and I admit it.
But walking past the iridescent, outsized atomic colors of teenage clothing and the relentless store fronts hawking goo-gaws that promote imbecile illusions of commidified happiness I felt paranoid and hysterical. I kept it to myself. I’m a poet after all. I always imagine that I’ll pick my time and write a small magazine piece. I’ll do something.
And then my wife Connie said: “I feel old.”
And that was the thing. The mall with all its torturous outcryings of provincial teenage unhappiness and its anodyne trinkets and calculating fashions is enough to give one a case of rickets.
As we walked past the food court I remembered the poet Kenneth Rexroth’s hilarious observation about Scottish cuisine–faced with Scottish food he observed that it would be better to be fed intravenously.
Ah, sunflower. We shall grow old but not in the mall.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 