Both Moliere and Shakespeare grew up watching morality plays, fables whose stock characters were invariably named God, Death, Everyman, Good-Deeds, Angel, Knowledge, Beauty, Discretion, and Strength. Because they lived during the first flowering of public literacy they understood the indispensable healthiness of word flipping. Talk about nature’s bounty! Words were no longer merely to be received and absorbed. Can you imagine the joy of a 17th century adolescent forced to watch Everyman or The Second Shepherd’s Play, as he substituted Satan, Life, Neighbor, Sin, Second Rate Demons, Ignorance, Ugliness, Gossip, and Basic Human Weakness for the stock characters of religious drama? Of course you can. Almost no one who’s lived through a high school production of The Man of La Mancha has not done this.
One can do this with lines of poetry. Hope may be the thing with feathers but its also nubby like a plucked chicken. I don’t know about you but this is a good game for me. Optimism doesn’t have to be perfect. It can be homely. There are many jokes about this. The classic goes like this:
Three guys are walking down the sidewalk when they spot something in their path. Bob crouches down for a closer look.
“Looks like shit,” he says.
His friend leans in and sniffs it.
“Yeah. Smells like shit too.”
The third guy isn’t convinced. He pokes it with a stick, then touches it.
“Feels like shit.”
Finally, just to be totally sure, one of them tastes it.
“Yep. Tastes like shit too. I think it must be shit.”
Bob nods. “Yeah. Good thing we didn’t step in it.”
A useful form of hope is encoded in this. Its a hard life. But look. We didn’t step on the turd. BTW I like to imagine Fred Astaire dancing on poop. Such things help me. Anyway the trouble for millions of us is that optimism has been taken over by the self help industry Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the war between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands was like watching two bald men fighting over a comb.
I like to think of the bald man who still buys a comb.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
