Opposites Distract
Lavinia, dressed in leopard print,
And Leopold in stripes,
Were destined to collide and clash,
Descend to snips and snipes—
She drinks her coffee black; he sips
Sweet tea with heaps of cream,
And every conversation
Escalates to near a scream—
Yet every fray defuses and
Dissolves in hugs and tears,
For they’ve adored each other
Through four-dozen blissful years.
. . . after all, most of us are fools for love . . .
Being suave and well groomed isn’t enough. It still matters that a gentleman have depth of soul, a spirit of romance; panache, élan. All the same, the dapper devil will always have an advantage and may be able to get by on looks and charm alone, as long as he knows when to, metaphorically speaking, let his hair down and when to maintain the full facade of savoir-faire. Regardless of the situation, any man-about-town worth his salt will do best to impress with a show of his smoothest, wittiest and handsomest guise whenever he can. It’s the easiest way to not only attract the best in companions but also to have a hope of keeping in their good graces for the long run. That, at least, is the buzz I hear around here.
Beau Bretagne has a twelve-gauge shotgun on the porch and has a ladder-back chair with one short leg, a chair in which he leans against a big old sycamore tree; he has fourteen perfectly good teeth and a wonderful, spotless complete set of the Great Books, and he has read the complete bindings of them more than once. He has the gift of playing the squeezebox in the Gilded Crescent’s Big Dog Zydeco Band so beautifully that dancers have passed out as often from dancing all night as from the vast quantities of moonshine they are drinking at the same time. Beau gets a lot of pleasure out of all this wealth, but most impressively, he has the envy of the entire county ever since he had the brainstorm to name his baby boy Xerxes Junior Bretagne so that he truly has something that no one else in that whole county has. Unless you count Beau’s two cousins Billy-john and Bart, whose sons also share this magnificent combination of names (modified for the Bretagne family’s convenience as XJ2 and XJ3), but since Beau doesn’t count these, why should you?
My Preference, by a Hare
Next to a soft warm rabbit, I
Love naught so much as a broad bright sky
A picnic under a chestnut tree
A bunch of kids in a spelling bee
A crazy quilt on a big deep bed
Sweet summer breeze playing ‘round my head
Cashmere and silk, or a good night’s rest,
But in truth, I still love bunnies best.
Beauty is in the Mirror of the Beholder
Brenda, trendy modernist, zips through her ultra-racy home
Her super-powered vacuum on a wave of pearly foam;
Her sexy subatomic voice, her skirt of crisp chiffon,
Her to-the-minute kitchen wares, her wildly brilliant spawn,
Her microscopic facial pores, her savvy in her biz,
Convince nobody that she’s great, but make her think she is.
To capture the kind of innocence that little ones have would be a scientific coup beyond what even our best magicians could hope to conjure. How is it that such jaded minds and dedicated tragedians as adults can be made from the raw childhood materials of clear-eyed honesty and untouched truth and light? As an artist and writer, even simply as a grownup who believes that honesty and reality have far more forms than the dull quotidian ones in which we grownups generally clothe them to fit our fusty adult needs for blandness to feel safe, I search the boundaries between worlds endlessly in hope.
Sometimes I wonder if I have been cheating when I don’t follow precisely that stern old caveat that warns me to always Write about What You Know—that I should stay fixed in the firmament of my own particular universe, my peculiar range and realm of reality. Of course, I know that no beautiful fantasy and very little romance would ever get written by anyone if this rule were strictly adhered to in every way; what’s more, I remind myself as I write that every word I put down on the page is true, just not always for me and my own experience: perhaps it’s something I’ve known of believed or felt, translated into another person’s events, and sometimes it is perhaps best described as true of (or for) another person who herself or himself is not known on this modest three-dimensional earthly and human plane. Anyway, I am reassured that I bend the Rule a little but I never wholly break it; I tend to wander further from the truth only when I must–in order to make the truth of the matter most apparent.
What is it about commercial enterprise and marketing that says we need to change everything on a regular basis and that everything newer is better? Have we not looked in the mirror lately?!
Aside from the obvious danger in believing that every tweak a company makes to its products is an actual improvement of it in form or function rather than a logical step toward getting us to buy more from them, there’s the problem of how easily we are led astray by our own hubris. What we see as innovation and a natural extension of expertise that comes with our getting older, more advanced and practiced does not, in my experience guarantee that no further missteps and mistakes will occur. Why, a flood of examples comes instantly to mind. Every era, and every single object conceived and invented and designed in that era, has connections to spectacular failures and dismal disappointments in this regard.
Being lazy and spoiled, I’ll happily replace perfectly repairable things with prettier, shinier ones some of the time, but even in my privileged state I am capable of looking at my briefcase, thinking that I wish it had a strap that made it hug the handle of my rolling travel bag, imagining what it would take in time, money and effort to shop for another and find one that I really liked as well as I like this simple briefcase but had such a strap and then pay what would likely be an exorbitant price for it and thinking instead, ‘what do I have on hand from which I could make a suitable strap that I could then attach to my favorite little briefcase?’ The answer to which real-life question was a length of wide grosgrain ribbon, lapped fourfold end to end and stitched into one heavy piece now the width of the case and hand-sewn onto it. It’s not fancy, but it’s unobtrusive and cost me only a little labor, and by golly, it works.
Not that I intend to make my own replacements for, say, outmoded electronics when they no longer work. Because my new versions would be guaranteed to be failures, given my complete lack of knowledge or skill or anything related to them in the world of electronics, and I would have lots of nonfunctional electronics, a lot of things not done that should have been done, and a bunch of annoyed people around me wishing I’d just suck it up and get the equipment that would put me back on track. I am an accomplished fantasist, but I don’t go so far as to delude myself that I can make everything better than it is in its current form.
Not all upgrades are legit. Some of them are full of bugs or their new formats are not nearly as appealing and user-friendly as their predecessors’. Not all growth is positive. Noxious weeds grow, after all, and so does the hair on my chinny-chin-chin, which as you can imagine is not nearly as cute as it might sound in the Little Pigs’ tale.
Yet ranting about it is pointless other than as a vent. And much more good than ill comes from change and growth, it’s true. As a tiny example, while today’s pictorial illustration may not be high art by any stretch, it was made by using a combination of tools that I’ve only recently begun to embrace, and it was fun to make. An end in itself? No, and far from ideal and flawless as a Thing; I have new methods and am beginning to work on a new set of skills to use them and improve them, but I’ve a long way to go. But I don’t have to be all better, i.e., perfect, for the process to be worthwhile and the me that’s also in progress is an improvement if only because I am working on making change. I am happy when I can get up the nerve at any point to learn, to try, or yes, to become anything that I am not already firmly entrenched in being, because it’s worth striving to improve even–maybe especially–when the odds are against it. My evolution will always be slow and full of sideways and backwards steps, but I’m pretty sure it beats stasis.
It Takes All Kinds
I am the back end of a pantomime horse,
and I say this without much embarrassed remorse,
because I could never have claimed too much class
to have let people see I’m a true horse’s ass.
No reason to laugh, though, or mock me in jest,
since I’m in such fine company with all the rest
of the others (this, straight from the true horse’s mouth),
for we know every north end requires its south.
No cause for weeping, dear friends of my heart,
for prancing behind is its own kind of art,
and no matter how foolish the fine equine farce,
better far than play dead to just play the arse.
Peace of mind and clarity can be mighty hard to come by these days. Half of the time I have a tendency to suspect they’re things I once had access to or even owned in small quantities but somehow misplaced. Don’t mind me, I’ll be crawling around here on hands and knees with my compatriots. If we look like we’re hunting for lost contact lenses while not actually awake, you might well be right.
Respite
Among the herds and hordes that clamor for attention undeserved,
Some few remain that will not yammer but sit back, demure, reserved—
Odd, in the cacophony of wild, attention-grabbing rush,
That what finally wins from me my focused notice is mere hush—
The effect of surfeit, excess, ultimately in the riot
Of the maelstrom, is what checks us in our racing: simple quiet—
So I seek the silent moment, empty spaces, basic form
Of absent noise and crush and foment, then go back to face the storm.
Those things that I can see even with my eyes quite tightly closed are objects of reverence and awe. No matter how much I admire the visible world for its quirks and art and prettiness, I cannot always navigate it with precision. I often can’t recognize faces out of their expected contexts. I miss obvious details that people around me have noted with nonchalance. I fail to see the marvel in many a beautiful everyday thing.
So when the attractions of anything are so intense that they live, beyond existing in the visible world, within the depths of my mind’s eye, I accord them special significance. They become icons of a sort, or waking dreams. I can carry with me those images that hold their places in my soul with something stronger than mere physical presence can ever begin to attain.
Art-Colored Glasses 