A Set of Sayings and Anecdotes for 2017

Many years ago I asked whether the weathers of the world were all wrong, and now we know.  Every extreme has become a norm.  Records fall and the impossible becomes probable. 

Home is where you keep your stuff.  Home is where your friends and family support you.  Where am I?  Nowhere?  Wait another hundred years and then we’ll really know.

Before there was the internet, research meant reading books, when yiou could find them, copying copious notes from journals, virtually reproducing entire works, just in case you would shift your interests over the course of many years.  Before there were word-processors, there were typewriters, the kind you banged across the page, and thus had to produce whole thoughts and sentences in your mind before you began to write them down.  Before there was email, you received a letter, mulled it over several days, then produced an answer and posted it off.  Perhaps in three or four weeks, there might be a reply, and so the dialogue went, slowly, with much time between to think things through.  You hesitated long and hard before you made a telephone call because it was expensive and every minute counted, so that when you moved from one side of the world to the other, it was not likely you would ever see your friends and family again.

When we were graduate students, we sat around and talked, read each other’s essays and made comments, and if in the course of our own research we found something useful for our friends, we copied it out for them.  Knowledge was cumulative and not competitive. 

When we burned potatoes in the vacant lot, we called them mickeys.  No one knew why. Today, what we knew as meat patties and then as hamburgers, have down to burgers, as though one needed an adjective to tell you something was a beef burger or a cheese burger: Baloney!  Generic names are one thing, misreading the names of places another.

In the days of animal testing, the ponds near the university would swarm with tadpoles, frogs, guppies, minnows, goldfish and other little creatures; then came the ducks, wild and domesticated, who died of slimy coloured liquids that appeared out of nowhere.  We would circumlaculate (or peripondulate) to count the dead ones on the shore or hidden among the reeds.  It made a change from the nonsense and insults to knowledge going on in the modern halls of learning.

Seven small spiders in a corner of the shower.  One large spider looms over them, pounces and devours the group. So it seems.  The next morning, seven small spiders gradually consume the giant.  It takes them several days.  Then they face off against each other.  One by one they disappear, leaving one bloated giant.  Time to flush him away with one spray of the nozzle.

We used to watch the guppies, neon tetras  and angel fish in their five gallon tank, and we wondered how long their trail of excrement could be before it broke.  What started off a mark of ugliness and immodesty became a sign of wonder.  Could the little creature swim around more than twice with this parade of self-expression, or did it even know that it was for a moment or two so much more than itself, if not for itself then for us?  Perhaps it was a premonition of how my own life would reach its final stage.

What a shame to speak to God in terms He or She (or They or It) never heard of, as though you could play the same game as when you name your child with no regard to ancestry or etymology, let alone orthography and multi-lingual puns.  Even to leave out the “o” seems an affectation because those three letters are already meant to represent the Tetragrammaton; better perhaps to avoid pronouncing the unpronounceable, with the penultimate letter of dieu or the second t in gott as a glottal stop. 

Intelligence and intellectual do not mean the same thing, often quite the reverse.  Scholarship and research similarly can repel one another.  Authority matched with authoritarianism reveals the problem.  As does proud and prideful, fearful and fearsome.  In other words, the mind triumphs  over matter, if we are careful in what we say.

In 1954, having been cajoled into attending the first rock ’n’ roll concert organized by Alan Freid at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre, I made a vow to have nothing to do with popular culture again.  I was a fourteen-year-old snob.  The raucous music offended me, the behaviour of the audience frightened me, and the whole situation made me uncomfortable.   With very rare exceptions, and those usually inadvertent, I have kept to this vow.  This makes it difficult to understand people who must draw analogies for history or politics or even science from popular music, professional sporting fixtures, films about vampires and zombies,  celebrity marriages and divorces, fashion-plate narcissists, stand-up comedians who trade on personal  insults and all the rest.

Every generation or two, or maybe century or so, there comes a moment when everything seems come unhinged, old certainties fall out of the tree of knowledge, and words that seemed as powerful as myths and gods grow hoarse.  The darkness shudders all around us.  Fools seems to dance along the highway in great processions of self-flagellation and self-righteous absurdity.  Great men bluster, splutter, croak and expectorate whenever they seek to gather us up in moral crusades against the enemy within.  Poets and musicians cower in the cellars.  Students claw over each other in search of authority and facts.  Time passes slowly and awkwardly.  Eventually, as predicted in some gallimaufry of  symbolic murmuring, long lost in the dreams and delusions of ignorant eons, the light begins to ooze out again.  The silence creeps out of its archaic cocoon.  As though awakening from a trance, tangled in the thorns of fairy tale magic, we peer into the unfamiliar landscape, and wonder if the creatures and sensations that lie across the horizon are really true.