A BIT of FOOLERY
(perhaps not quite so foolish)

PRIL IS THE CRUELEST month, wrote T. S. Elliot, but the public-school system has not been kind to him for the next generations of readers, and he begins to seem as dated as he actually is. Name like a stockbrokerage or accounting firm, soundbiteable verses rare and all overused, choice of month, despite a semi-soundbited poetic “explanation,” as arbitrary as a random number or IRS ruling. For clearly the cruelest month is February, and especially this year: the sky whispering Spring but the ground smothered in snow and all White-Christmas Gemütlichkeit long ago packed away with great-grandmother’s Old Country centerpiece or thrown out with the tree. A recipient of pc honoraria unloved and disrespected by all not within the charmed circle and even some who are, birthmonth of Presidents smart enough to get conceived in the more congenial climes of May and June, and finally repository of St. Valentine’s Day, put forth as a celebration of love but gaining its commercial traction from such things as cards and chocolates instead of more theme-appropriate offerings like condoms and sexy lingerie and rental of hotel suites with monstrous beds and ornate Jacuzzis and mirrored ceilings.

But at least the language of Love, like Spring, is in the air, and it warms the poet’s heart. Our lovers and sweethearts stand with Earth’s innumerable such names, on common ground yet with their own peculiarities: more respectable, for one thing, than a French amant or maitresse, although just the sound of those words is almost enough to turn one on, like a little kiss in the ear by an ingénue; and definitely gentler than a no-nonsense matter-of-fact German Liebhaber. But if the nuance is lacking how readily we borrow from each others’ languages, like Rossinian thieving magpies, from the French girl with un boyfriend to the American and his inamorata to the German couple in Partnerschaft. And to this agelong and international festival the modern age has added...Friends with Benefits?

The phrase displeases, at once too analytically neutered and literarily coy. But it points to the problem: we are as interested in sex as ever (perhaps more so) but strangely lacking in passion. Let me be clear. If I desire Woman, that is libido. My desire for a particular woman, that is passion. But perhaps you do not desire women. If you are a woman reading this, especially a woman whom I might myself desire were I to meet you, I hope you do not. But it holds even with inanimate objects. If you are attracted to fast cars, that is libido. If you love your Mazda Miata, it is a cozy little affair that may last years. If your heart goes to a Corvette, your spouse and children will suffer. If your spirit has been captured by the Prancing Horse, you had best be very rich. And if you obsess on a Bugatti Veyron or Duesenberg SJ may God have mercy on your soul.

It is long ago and I am sitting with my son and some of his friends. The talk somehow turns to Green Day, a new band at the time. A friend is dismissive: “All their songs are about masturbation!” I do not know the group’s work and cannot judge this opinion, and am already far too old to care in any case. It does however invite a reply: “So why didn’t they call their first album Beat the Meatles?” But my son is in some respects too like his father and he chimes in, without missing a beat, “Probably because they didn’t want to be sued by Yoko Ono.”

The kid may have spoken truer than any of us knew. But it raises larger issues: how much of popular culture is shaped by fear of lawsuits? Similarly, how much of courtship is shaped by fear of disease and social ridicule? And returning to the original question: blame it on Sigmund Freud or the education of women or variations of “What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly,” but perhaps the lack of passion can be traced to a material culture in which people are increasingly raised and treated like interchangeable parts.

I want this job: before I even get to the interview I must meet a set of somewhat arbitrarily defined criteria, and if I succeed I must then fill out a sheaf of forms giving governmental taxing authorities and their whores in the banking system more information about me than many nineteenth century husbands saw fit to give their wives. I arise from my bought-in-a-bigbox mattress, to the sound of a Clearchannel station on an absolutely disposable clock radio, to go to this job in a worldbrand car over highways indistinguishable from those in any other part of the planet, and if that job contains even one function not involving manipulation of digital data or data-manipulators I am perhaps luckier than I know. I come home to a supermarket dinner, or perhaps go to a chain restaurant, and then watch this night’s must-see from the offerings of the cable provider in my tract neighborhood. Afterwards I either veg out before the Tube or read a bought-in-a-bigbox branded-with-the-ISBN-tattoo book. And after all this, preceeded by 12 or 16 or more years of bigbox education, is it possible – is it even conceivable – that I can then sit down at my worldbrand standardized one-of-only-two-operating-systems Intelchipped computer and type a heartfelt email to my one and only? Saying what?

And not even considering why I should be writing – writing, what a pathetic nineteenth-century atavism! – instead of texting to arrange a meeting, or calling on the telephone, where verbal soundwaves can travel back and forth for hours with scarcely any more exchange of literarily expressible content than the skypointing of albatrosses – though with far less of the passion.

But it’s all rhetorical – an academic Establishment demanding social security numbers from incoming students will never even see it as a problem to be investigated. So you’re stuck with us poets, buckaroo. And I’ll warn you, we lie as much as anybody else, especially when the attitudes and worldviews that permit us to do our job are involved. Maybe even more, because there’s far more journalists than poets and the truth of poetry is usually the lie of journalism.

 

--posted 19 March 2010