Category: No Name for It

For those of you who may be new to this blog, "Vidal" is my guide dog who appears in the photo at the top of our site. He is a yellow labrador and he comes from Guiding Eyes for the Blind in Yorktown Heights, New York. He is ten years old and starting to think about his coming retirement. He’s thinking that as a retired guide dog in Iowa City that perhaps he might want to think about a literary life. The post below, "The Secrets of Nature" is his first ever effort at poetry. I think it looks a lot like the Finnish poet Arvo Turtianen: direct, elemental, but still philosophical…

SK

Went to the woods.

Met King of the Wild Turkeys.

He was having trouble with lice, but otherwise he was fit.

Said that the stump god told him of big festival upcoming:

"Jamboree of Decay"

Wild Turkeys not invited.

"Gotta be truly decayed for festival," Turkey King said.

"Whaddya gonna do?" I asked.

"First, we’re gonna boycott straw and hay," he said, wiggling his fancy red neck tie.

"When people think "Wild Turkey" they think "straw and hay"" he said.

"So we’re not going to do the wild dancing in decaying vegetative matter any more."

"Then what?" I asked.

"We will only dance on sand, which as you know is still friendly to turkeys and all other fowl."

"Will you spy on the Festival of Decaying Things?" I persisted.

"No," said Turkey King, "That’s how they trick you into being inanimate like them. You gotta keep your wits out here in nature."

Vidal

Alright. Mea Culpa. I have committed the age-old blunder of dull husbandry, namely I have asserted that I am privileged to be able to go alone to the woods for the purpose of writing. I knew (ever so dimly) that I was making a mistake when I typed that sticky little phrase.

I am now doomed. "Why don’t I just marry my dog?" writes one commentator. Yes, I appear to have been exulting about my Hemingway-esque "men without women" position here in the woods.

It does no good of course to try to extricate myself from this grievous blunder by means of mere rhetoric. There is no hope for me. If I told my readers that I fervently wish that my wife was able to be here with me, well, you know, as they like to say in Arkansas: "That dog won’t hunt."

So okay. We’re back to the dog thing. "The Queen" wants to know why I don’t just marry the dog.

The real answer of course is that if I married the dog then I would have to wear the dog’s harness. This should be fairly evident to any amateur student of marriage, no matter what kind of matrimonial view that student might hold. Everyone knows that "the one who is the husband" is "the one who wears the harness" and there’s a considerable amount of literature on this subject. I recommend Honore de Balzac’s famous "Manual of Marriage" but you could consult more contemporary sources if you like.

There’s only one harnessed creature in our nuclear family and it’s the dog. Things are going to stay that way.

As for protestations that I’d like to have Connie here with me, consider this: I bought the cottage and the wind surfer that’s sitting under the house solely for the mutual enjoyment of man and wife. Oh, but with teenagers at home it’s been ever so difficult for us to actually be here at the same time.

And as for the teenagers, who are lovely people, well they don’t really like to come here because "there’s nothing to do" which is of course the point of going to the woods in the first place.

And as for me: I know I’ll never get out from under the gravity of my flip and uncomprehending but mostly iddy biddy slip because as everyone knows, there are no iddy biddy slips in the game of matrimonial Scrabble.

I’m doomed alright.

"I will NOT wear that harness!"

SK

Some years ago I was privileged to meet a trans-gendered acrobat who made her living by performing in a side-show at Coney Island. She performed as "the bearded lady" and her act involved riding a unicycle and talking rather directly to her audience. "Whatsa matter? Never seen a bearded lady before? Well, it’s like Toyota: You asked for it, you got it!" And she would wheel back and forth astride her unicycle, skirts ballooning, her long black hair and full beard glinting because, after all, one uses a good conditioner for the sake of showbiz.

I have lost touch with her and I regret this fact. I am just old enough now to have entered that stage of life wherein one can say without affectation: Where are they now?" (I prefer the Latin "ubi sunt" because it’s easier to say under your breath while you’re trying to replace a washer on the well pump.)

Ubi sunt? Where, I wonder, will my Coney Island friend go, now that the amusement park is closing so that the entire area can be Disney-fied. "Ubi omnia sunt?" Where will all of the different people go?

My friend’s "act" was a parody of the old fashioned carnival sideshow and the shabby acreage of Coney Island was exactly the right area for putting on that kind of show.

I worry about the Disneyfication of our nation’s liminal spaces. One can easily forget that parody as an art form requires real ground to walk upon. The current slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts is "a great nation deserves great art" and this is true, but the deeper truth is that "a great nation deserves great irreverent art" and we should all remember that. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock, and Judy Chicago are all "not quite ready for Disney" and I fear the evident erosion of free public space where the free thinkers can think.

This has been on my mind lately because I’m in New Hampshire at my summer cabin on Lake Winnipesaukee. I am a lucky guy to have such a cabin. It’s on an island and I have the additional privilege of being able to come here with just my guide dog for company and I get to write and my dog gets to paint–the way dogs do when they have the time.

My cabin faces north and if I could see I could espy the vacation mansion of Mitt Romney who as you know is currently a candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

The old, blue collar shoreline of my beloved New Hampshire lake has been taken over in the past decade by big spending folk who rip down the trees and build pasteboard immensities where there used to be granite boulders and birch trees.

In turn, public space has changed hereabouts. The little town where you could talk to the locals about the virtues of dynamite vs. shoveling when building an outhouse has become a place where one overhears people saying things like: "Let’s fetch this charming little moose-lamp for Grand-mama ,"and the men stand around and talk about the torque of their respective cigarette boats.

And so I find myself thinking about my friend from Coney Island as I blindly replace a nut on my well pump.

I wish for more bearded ladies who ride unicycles and who call the quotidian fashions of her audience into supreme question.

I worry that we’re losing more and more public unicycle space all the time.

By God, America is stuffed with vainglorious and wholly artificial public squares. Even I can see it, and I don’t see so good.

Ubi sunt?"

SK