Reflections: More Ted and Red

With age, the pleasures of looking become more intense.
~ Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire

As did Theodore Roethke, I live and work on a college campus. Spring has sprung and the young women—those who in Roethke’s and in my day were known as “coeds”—are out and about in their warm weather threads. Many of them are more out than about. Décolleté, sunkist navels and well-tanned coin slots—once exhibited only by fat plumbers wearing tool belts—all bloomed with the forsythia, appearing now in contexts that might well have led to arrests back when I was an undergrad. First they were called “short-shorts”—Who wears short-shorts? Da-da-da-da, da-da-da-da—and then they were known as “hot pants.” I don’t know what they call them now, and I’m afraid to ask.

And there are many more strikingly beautiful young women now than there were in my day, too. Today’s girls have all had their bites corrected. They all have contact lenses. Their clothing is more flattering to the female form and their sense of style with regard to hair and make-up has evolved since the 1960s to breath-taking effect. Girls today run; they work-out; they play sports—their limbs are trim and shapely and fit to be exposed in their full length to the appreciative eye.

But, zut alors!, these paragons of female beauty—this parading gender-bait—these nonchalantly sexual bambini—are my daughters' peers. Had I started my family at a younger age, they’d be the peers of my frigging grand-daughters. My temples are white, my eyes are red; my drooling heart trembles with that of Han Shan, as translated with commentary by Red Pine:

65. A group of girls play in fading light
wind fills the road with perfume
their skirts are embroidered with butterflies of gold
their hair is adorned with ducks of jade
their maids are dressed in red chiffon
their eunuchs in purple brocade
watching is someone who has lost his way
white temples and a trembling heart

65. At the sight of the emperor’s harem my heart would tremble too. The use of red and purple was reserved for the imperial household, as was the use of castrated male servants in the women’s quarters.

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Quote du Jour: Having a Bad Day?

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Earthling, the dark is true; the sun’s an accident.
xxxxx~ Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Firex
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Readings: On Memorial Day

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In dreams begin responsibilities? The hell. In dreams the death-wish renews itself.
XX~ Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire

I am humbled before the prodigious realization that I know, without a footnote, that Roethke's words are a response to Delmore Schwartz. I am humbled that I know who Delmore Schwartz was; that I know Lou Reed to have cited the book here alluded to by Roethke as seminal to his own urge to create. Since VU days, Lou Reed’s music has humbled me. I am humbled by my own knowledge; humbled that I can drive a truck and earn my bread, never sending my knowledge out to whore in the marketplace, where a rose is not a rose, but a bar-coded commodity.

Today is Memorial Day. So, who’s dead? Show of hands, please.
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Quote du Jour: Ranking the Oligarchs

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The following observation was entered into the notebooks of poet and teacher, Theodore Roethke, sometime during the period, 1948-1953:

We have come to expect the public man, at best, to be third-rate; most of the time. A considerable section of influential American public men are simply hillbillies who have learned to count. ~ Straw for the Fire

Amen. Timeless...
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Reflections: Some Uncomfortable Truths

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I continue to pick up, from time to time, Straw for the Fire, editor David Wagoner’s reassembled gleanings from the notebooks of teacher and poet, Theodore Roethke. I have quoted from this neat little book twice before, here and here. Interested persons will find the relevant links in the first of these locations.

In sections titled by Wagoner, “The Proverbs of Purgatory” (1948-49) and “I Teach Out of Love” (1949-53), I have found several more pithy quotes that I wish to highlight here.

First are two related thoughts from “Purgatory”:

1) The weapons of the weak are too violent.

We don’t need to think too hard about the geopolitical acting-out which regularly tears painful wounds in the security-hungry world we inhabit to see the truth of that statement. But the following, which I feel to be prerequisite to many instances of the emotional violence that we experience in our personal relationships with others, may be less obviously true:

2) The passive are first bewildered, then malicious.

Think only of some of the compliant, non-analytical, hyper-receptive people whom you have known over long periods of time; of how they were routinely probed, mauled, manipulated, and taken advantage of by more aggressive persons; and think of the spiteful, passive-aggressive behaviors which now manifest as delayed reactions to such shoddy treatment, once they have curled up into the spiky defensive postures from which they cannot straighten out to display the true beauty of their rightful forms. The harm we do to others!

And then there is this one:

The Devil today takes the form of noise.

Along with excessively humid heat, one of the aspects of a Midwestern summer that I find most aggravating is the constant roar of mowers, blowers, trimmers, and saws. At any given time during daylight hours, at least one nearby neighbor is doing his yard work. Then there is the jarring noise of TV commercials; the constant, arrhythmic distraction of jangling telephones; the annoyance of seemingly endless, empty collegial talk about irrelevant topics; and worse, those noisy songbirds raucously bragging about their sexual prowess at the first light of an insomniac’s desperate dawn. Satan sent those fucking birds.

Finally, from the “I Teach…” section, there is this:

That’s the horrible thing about being a genius. Everything’s so obvious.

One can only imagine.
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Quote du Jour: Ouch!

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A philosopher is one who worries and worries about the obvious.

~ Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire
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Quote du Jour: To Be and Yet Not Quite to Be

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I am reading Straw for the Fire, a compilation of excerpts from the notebooks of poet and Michigander homeboy, Theodore Roethke. As is the case with all Quotes du Jour, I present below words which resonate with my own experience of existence:

The feeling that one is on the edge of many things: that there are many worlds from which we are separated by only a film; that a flick of the wrist, a turn of the body another way will bring us to a new world. It is more than a personal expectation: yet sometimes the sense of richness is haunting: it is richness and yet denial, this living a half step, as it were, from what should be...

Yes, isn't it so.
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