Let’s think of the present political season as opera, shall we? It makes some sense that way. The participants are given to warbling daily arias that mostly involve loud vocalizations with small content. Every word of one person’s utterances is attacked by the opposite side who respond with their own attacks on everything from grammar to logic to underlying sinister meanings.
While we don’t have the “fat lady”singing as in the old jest, we do have the overweight and orange-tinted man, who is never given anything to sing that has an extended set of lyrics, because of his short attention-span. His companion is a man of darkness and twisted sense of humor who thinks nothing of resurrecting an old video that once nearly cost a young woman her life, as a joke.
On the other side we have our heroine, who is saying just as little as she can, having found that a picture (or a video) is truly worth a thousand words. Her sidekick is a wise and amiable dispenser of homespun truths who has already coined two words or phrases that have resonated with the electorate – “weird,” and “mind your own damn business.” Not bad for a Minnesotan, but then, no one knows what to expect from these denizens of a land where winter lasts eleven months and residents wear peat moss.
We’re still in the first act of this musical drama, and who knows what is to come? One of the problems with finding music for the Dark Side is that no first-rate musician wants to lend their tunes to them, leaving only Kid Rock to help with the score.
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On a walk yesterday we saw two Cedar Waxwings high in a bare tree. Just the two. It’s a very pretty little bird, always looking very well groomed. They were chatting away up there, too far away for us to hear what they were saying.
(Admission: This pic is not mine, but was pilfered from the internet.)
Their natty appearance is striking in comparison with the crow, for instance, which often looks as if it just got out of bed and hasn’t checked out its look in a mirror yet.
Actually, the bird in the photo closely resembles me this morning, when I found my mirror image especially unkempt. My hair was so vaguely directed that the only way I could orient myself as to front vs back was to look for my eyes.
(This pic isn’t mine, either)
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When my kids were in their teens the original and only true version of MTV was on screen in our home as soon as the sun came up. I couldn’t avoid being somewhat up to date on pop musical trends because the station was always there playing in the background to educate me. Life was good, but then MTV lost its mind and never came back.
Music videos are still out there, of course, but you have to go looking for them instead of having them curated for you and served up with a golden spoon. (Sigh). Once in a while one comes along than is really moving, like this anti-war and reflective tune by the group Green Day, 21 Guns.
The title refers to the salute given by an honor guard, as at a funeral. When the group’s album American Idiot went to Broadway as a musical it didn’t do so well, and was shelved after a run of just about a year. This is that Broadway cast, doing the best song of the bunch. On a video where these beautiful people will always sound just as good and will never age.
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My ear worm this morning is not a song, but a poem. It is Invictus, written by William Ernest Henley. It was one of those short writings that I was encouraged (forced, cajoled, pressed, threatened) to learn by rote and later to regurgitate in front of the class. Which I did. Rote memory and regurgitation were specialties of mine back then.
At the time I thought the poem overblown. “Who talks like that, anyway?” But I have been tenderized by life and find that I am more susceptible to things of the spirit because I have had ample opportunity to observe their importance. Or, more to the point, what their absence can mean to the soul of a person or of a nation.
Rather than blow any further smoke, I present Invictus to you. There is no need for you to memorize it. No test looms next Friday. It’s just a handful of words that I have carried in my head for a very long time.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears.
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
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Today I think that it is a pretty awesome piece of overblown. If I am not the captain of my soul, I think that I am at least a deckhand. Let me add this song by Bruce Springsteen, who I think is basically echoing some of the sentiments of Mr. Henley. I could be wrong about that but I’ll let The Boss tell the story.
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Amy Tan has written a book which is a journal that she kept of the birds she saw in her backyard. At the time she was a novice birder, and she decided to learn the art of sketching those birds as she journaled.
Since I have the drawing skills of a moribund slug, I am envious. It all takes me back to second grade, where the best artist (far and a-way)among my classmates was Geraldine Hong. I never handed a paper in if it was going to immediately follow one of Geraldine’s. Dreadful were the comparisons back then, and my talents haven’t improved in 77 years. When I finish a drawing even I can’t tell what it is.
The book is a delightful read, the illustrations showing the improvement in her artistic skills over the several months that the journal covers.
Now, if you are Amy Tan, an accomplished writer and you travel in elevated creative circles, you do get help along the way from scientists, artists, and the author of the Sibley Field Guide to Birds, David Allan Sibley. Not too shabby.
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From The New Yorker. A subversive cartoon.
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Little Home In The Valley 