Incorporeal Works

…of mine, entered here in the interests of Full Disclosure and Contrition. I was twelve when I committed the following literary crime (from the archives of the Mountain Breeze, a PTA publication):

The Sea

by Felix Miller (sixth grade)

Ah! The sea! It mystifies me!
There are strange things in the sea.

The whale, the shark, make it their home,
The octupus, the squid, in it roam

Man is awed by it, scholar wondering.
Mystyfied the sailor wandering.

Sometimes, stormy, sometimes clear,
in it the eternal death fear.

Storm lashed, wind whipped,
Bows of great ships in it dipped.

Sometimes angry, sometimes calm,
Ever watched by the shore palm.

Powerful, full of might,
In it the eternal fight.

Now, a critique by my 64 year-old self:

Rather a wooden insistence on rhymed couplets, combined with erratic metric discipline make Master Miller’s youthful effort painful to read, especially by his 64 year-old self. The influence of Mr. John Masefield and Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson (Sea Fever and Requiem, respectively) is felt. Unfortunately, the workmanlike literary skills of those worthies are absent. The pairing of phrases in many lines, as in:

Man is awed by it, scholar wondering

…

Sometimes, stormy, sometimes clear

…

Storm lashed, wind whipped

tend to induce a mild sea-sickness from the rocking sensation imparted. Some consideration should be granted, one supposes, to the youthful ineptness of the author at age barely twelve. Not a great deal of consideration, however.

It is a mark of the amusement of the PTA editors that all such efforts by schoolchildren remain completely unedited, including such fey misspellings as “mystyfied” and “octupus.”

The distance of years and a decent regard for youthful mistakes must bring this commentary to a close. Mister Miller has matured somewhat in 52 years, in some ways. Thank the merciful Lord for that.

Another July has rolled around, with heat, humidity and memories of summers past. I have written here of the sounds of summer, especially nights on the sleeping porch of my grandfather’s farm house, when the crescendo of cicadas around the house walled in my sisters and me, as we fell into sweaty sleep.

I was today reading the opening description by James Agee of another summer, this one in Knoxville in 1915. The passage describes the neighborhood in which he grew up, and the summer evenings after supper when fathers watered their lawns with garden hoses, while their wives and children sat on the front porches, trying to stay cool. The passage is the prologue or introduction to Agee’s posthumous novel, A Death in the Family, an autobiographical account of the death of his father. Left in disorganized form, the novel was shaped into its present form by Agee’s editor. The description of summer 1915 in Knoxville was placed as a prologue because it seemed to fit nowhere else. Reading it, I realized that summer nights in the south were never more minutely or eloquently described before or since.

The sound of the cicadas (Agee calls them “locusts”) I will quote here:

The noise of the locust is dry, and it seems not to be rasped or vibrated but urged from him as if through a small orifice by a breath that can never give out. Also, there is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand. The noise of each locust is pitched in some classic locust range out of which none of them varies more than two full tones: and yet you seem to hear each locust discrete from all the rest, and there is a long, slow, pulse in their noise, like the scarcely defined arch of a long and high set bridge. They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.

Wonderful. That completely describes a summer concert of cicadas. James Agee could write.

The YouTube mania has largely passed me by. I only occasionally look at one of the legion of links cropping up in email messages, bulletin boards, blogs and so on. I ran across one mentioned in a blog that interested me today, a trailer for an independent and apparently unauthorized film version of Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. A young aspiring director filmed it in the mountains around Asheville, NC.

As it happens, Outer Dark was the first McCarthy book I ever read. There was a very long caesura in my reading, since the book initially struck me as too strange to finish. I probably have mentioned the strange tale of this delay here, or elsewhere.

At any rate, this video interested me for that reason, and for the pointless daring of the director in making a film he cannot show anywhere, I would think, since there is no mention I can find of McCarthy granting permission.

The link to the Outer Dark trailer is:

Dark Images

Driving back from walking Lucy, the Wonder Dog (you wonder if she thinks at all) I enjoyed a very large and yellow moon slightly above the horizon. I knew that the Full Moon was within the next day or so, and looked up the data when I got home. Full Moon is officially at 3:59 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on July 18. So the moon tonight is pretty much full.

I enjoyed the look I had at this Thunder Moon, as the web site Earth and Sky calls it, after the Native American name for the July Full Moon.

I have developed an interest late in life for the great wheel of heaven and its perambulation about the universe. It is salutary to keep in mind that we are all part of a complex web of life and planets and the illimitable spaces of the universe. We are all very small beer, after all.

A friend of mine had two beloved dogs a week ago. This morning early, she had none. The first dog, 14 years old and increasingly suffering from multiple infirmities was given a merciful release on Friday. Saturday night Cat rushed the much younger dog to the emergency vet, to find that the unease and inability of the surviving dog to sleep was due not to grief over his lost partner, but to a critical digestive condition which was likely to prove fatal. Heroic efforts by the vet and a strong will to live on the part of the dog finally ended in cardiac arrest early this morning. How do you comfort a friend who has suffered so cruelly in such a short span of time? As best you can. Words are weak comforters, but they are all I have.

Dogs, for those of us who have loved at least one, carry with their love, companionship and devotion our knowledge that we will survive them, all but the last one. For awhile, they run or walk beside us, happy to be there, eager to share with us our lives, our joys, and our pains and sorrows. If you don’t believe a dog knows when you are in pain or need other comfort, you have not known a dog, not really. In return, they ask very little. Food, shelter, attention. They can subsist on very little of the last, ridiculously grateful for any time we give them. But they are on call all day every day, and at the last, when suffering themselves from whatever injury or illness is taking them away, will still summon up a tail wag or look at you with those devoted dog eyes.

Their broken bodies Howler and Romeo have left behind them; their spirits have returned to the air, running free and wild and beyond pain. They will not die in the hearts and minds of those who knew them, especially Cat, who followed them to the last release. Love never dies.

Now that the fireworks are mostly over, it is time to remember the occasion for all the hoopla. On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved the draft Declaration of Independence, and formal copies were authorized for signature. These copies bore the date of July 4, 1776, even though all the signatures were not completed until later in the month.  There was a long, hard road ahead to make the Declaration effective in actions as well as in words. I believe the Revolutionary War was the longest the United States has ever fought. Perhaps Viet Nam lasted longer, depending on when you designate the beginning and end of both conflicts.

At any rate, today lives both in history and national mythology to help us remember how we began, and what mighty truths were promulgated in the Declaration.

Thank those who pledge their lives and sacred honor to sign the revolutionary document. They were 18th century Barons to match those English Barons at Runnymede in 1215. The struggle for government of laws derived from the people is long and continuing.

I have loved fireworks since I was a child and my father and my grandparents conspired to buy loads and loads of sparklers, strings of small firecrackers and a few roman candles each July 4th. I have been in awe of professional fireworks since I was old enough to be taken to late-night demonstrations of pyrotechnics.

Tonight, though, like each July 4th Eve and the day itself, I have avoided and will avoid any of the many public exhibitions for Independence Day. I have grown old since first lighting a sparkler in my grandparents’ back yard. I am much less tolerant of crowds, noise and bumper-to-bumper traffic than in my youth.

A short while ago, I heard at five miles’ distance the concussion of big-time fireworks on the Tennessee River at Chattanooga. A Pops in the Park celebration, involving the Chattanooga Symphony and thousands of spectators. I expect the symphony concluded with the 1812 Overture, complete with simulated cannon fire. One year a firm that actually fired cannons was part of the show. I don’t know about this year, since I wasn’t there.

My Beloved and I attended one of these shows some years ago, part of a group that planned carefully for the event, with an advance party to stake out a place with good line of sight to the band shell, and assignments of necessary items for each of us to bring. We brought potato salad, green salad, chips and Sweet Tea. And wine in discreet containers. Lots of happy adults, a goodly group of happier children. It made the interminable time for exiting the area worthwhile. But not now. The children are grown (although we have grandchildren now, who were to be at Coolidge Park with their parents tonight.)

Between the traffic, and the crowds, age has dimmed the charm of this celebration. So the Dog and I listened to the distant fireworks, paused in our walk, then Lucy the Wonderdog went about her business and we returned home.

Happy Fourth of July!