President Koom-Posh

I have written several blog entries this year that I have held off posting for various reasons, good or otherwise. Yet now I have sent in a blog entry to Aqueduct (aqueductpress.blogspot.com) — another "Readings" installment that should appear sometime this season. That essay had room for a few but not all thoughts that were coming to mind.

So here I follow a few unvoiced strands.

Aqueduct's L. Timmel Duchamp has told me that she is "becoming an apostle of slow thinking." My sporadic blogging arises from a similar inclination, which has realized itself in my policy to post here only what I have drafted first in handwriting, usually in pencil. I still do some writing on typewriter and computer keyboard. Yet blog entries I want to redraft minimally, if possible.

My typing speed results, too often, in that which haste produces: words parading as Thought. While I acknowledge the demands of expediency, I believe a writer must nurture the writing process at every turn. That means nurturing thought, as opposed to hastening words. Writing as a process yields thought. Hastened words only reflect thoughts; and since they must reflect expedience, as well, they tend to reflect those thoughts incompletely or inaccurately.

This has become a pressing issue, to my mind, with the rise to power by Koom-Posh. Bulwer Lytton coined this term for "government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most ignorant or hollow."

Andrew Jackson I suspect could have been called President Koom-Posh, had the term then existed. However quick and canny a man he was, his making cronyism into a political institution points to hollowness. Expediency, prior to his becoming president, seems to have ruled him; and, afterwards, its demands, rather than those of the presidency, continued to rule.

The other day I came across comments stating that the presidency requires "exclusive fealty" to the constitution. "Fealty" as a word has links to fidelity; and this suggests that in thinking about a person who lacks such fealty, one might use "infidelity" as an attribute, or "infidel," as a label. The current president-elect Comb-Over, or Koom-Over, or Posh-Over, has indicated he wishes to continue his businesses while part-time president; and business cronies will dominate his administration. His fealty lies with another lord than the Constitution. Perhaps we might call him His Expediency.

Our eclectic, mannerist Age of the Masses has its deepest shallow roots in the Modern century, roughly the 1860s to 1950s. Van Wyck Brooks, in writing about the later 1800s, noted alterations to the American Fabric then being made — such as the conscious discarding of the traditional writings that had offered bedrock, on which her founders could build the United States.

I find what Brooks said about the Classics telling. They "kept alive great patterns of behavior ... The close association of intimate studies had made the patterns real, and the patterns had made great writers as they made great statesmen. They appealed to the instinct of emulation, an instinct that in later days followed the patterns set by industrial leaders, by bankers and by millionaires whose only idea was the will to power and who ruled by the blind force of money."

Feeding at Dandelions

Today for perhaps an hour I pushed around our reel mower, which, for those not in the know, is a non-motorized affair -- an equivalent in yard care (vs. the various noisy and noisome affairs that destroy suburban and village peace, while consuming deep-drilled fuel) to the pencil, pen, and typewriter in writing (vs. the electric word processor which so many writers take skittering across a million electronic landscapes).

At some point while mowing, my eye lit upon a lone dandelion bloom, which had upon it a feeding Sulfur. A butterfly. Both dandelion and Sulfur fall within the category of Vagrant Organism, since both happen to flourish readily under the conditions Caucasian rule has imposed on this continent -- conditions which include disrupted and damaged soils, and a narrowed range of dominant plant types.

So my eye was caught by this sight which should be utterly commonplace -- "vulgar," perhaps, in an older usage -- of a vagrant insect feeding upon a vagrant forb's sunny blossom ...

When this thought intruded: "How beautiful."

Butterfly flew away. Lawnmower, pushed along by force of my legs and bare feet, beheaded weed.

Alas, poor Beauty! I knew her ... well, momentarily.

Various thoughts filled me. We have seen few or no dandelion blooms in our yard for a month or more -- until now, when a handful are appearing again, here and there. We missed dandelion season completely, in terms of wine making, even though both Martha and I made noises about wanting to make some again this year.

Reflecting on missing this window of opportunity made me think that the people who realize most clearly the fact that dandelion blooms are fleeting in their coming and going are the home winemakers -- the ones who prize them, and know how promptly they must seize their chance.

What an utter puzzle it is that our society prizes lawns and loathes flowers that might disturb that green expanse, when the flowers themselves last so short a time. What a puzzle it is, too, that our society lacks respect for something that attempts to disrupt our un-beauteous lives with beauty. The disrespect arises, perhaps, because the beauty being offered is so commonplace -- even if not so common as it should be ... at least along our village street, where deleterious and long-lived poisons have ruined matters for even our most commonplace butterflies: for on this July day one might walk past yard after yard before spotting any vegetative sustenance that a lowly Sulfur might need.

How strange it is, too, to feel a celebratory twinge at seeing a butterfly that commands little respect even from lepidopterists. Sulfurs survived in numbers through the post-WWII disaster of DDT application and have thus far survived the neonicotinoids and other synthetic world-wreckers that have been unleashed by our so-called "agricultural" industries; their larvae feed on common vagrant forbs, as well as on commercially planted ones; adults produce as many generations in a season as they can, with the thoughtless abandon so appropriate to the vagrant.

Yet I felt the celebratory twinge, because while I have been seeing a variety of "better" butterflies in our garden I have seen none of these unassuming creatures for quite some time.

The fact that the rich and powerful among North American humans want all aspects of life aligned with the interests of their infinitely expandable pocketbooks has made our continent an uncongenial place for the poor, the downtrodden, and a supposedly commonplace butterfly.

The rich and powerful, mind you, regard themselves as the Beautiful People.

This I might believe, did they feed at dandelions.

For some reason the further thought appeared in my mind on this July day that writers should be like weeds: tenacious; recurring despite discouragement and attack; blooming predictably yet also, if lucky, unpredictably at other times, in some years; and commonplace.

Commonplace? Naturally. And should not readers, too, be commonplace? And beautiful?

I dream of the years before DDT and Agent Orange and Roundup, before Monsanto and Dow Chemical and Scott, before chemical lawn services, before the monoculture farming of the entire inner North American craton, before the gas-powered grass-shearing abominations that await sunny afternoons in every garage ...

Of the years when one kind of winged beauty by countless millions filled the air by day, and another sort, by night -- all of them alert and attuned to their vast world, and all of them alighting to feed at the countless millions available to them, in every variety, of blooms.

Cheers ...

Experimenting

Not everything turns out, that is an experiment.

In my several decades of figuring out what a story is, I sometimes have taken the approach that almost everything is worth trying. As a writer you cannot know what will trigger the unconscious into action: and triggering the unconscious into action, it seems to me, is one task of the creative sort.

You are attempting to frame thoughts in terms of symbols; and the creation of symbols seems to be a task to which the conscious mind thinks itself equal at least as often it proves itself not so.

In the 1990s I went through periods of excessively fast writing in an attempt to prevent overmuch intervention of conscious thinking. The approach works, at times: it seems suited especially for the creation of imaginative miniatures which are irrational in nature but which seem to have some sort of elemental balance. You cannot expand such stories, or continue them fruitfully at much length: they are what they are. They are like doodles in ink. You can, however, rewrite them -- with difficulty. In the past, several times, I have sent such stories to gather their dozen rejection slips before being capable of noticing some basic errors, missteps or mistakes that might be corrected without doing violence to their symbolic coherence. Sometimes I think stories that contain a considerable number of unconscious elements become partly invisible to the conscious mind, which is the mind capable of doing good editing.

Most often, fast writing leads to meaningless writing. Yet the task I set myself, that of doing the writing and finishing the job at whatever speed necessary, is not meaningless. It expands the possibilities of writing, even if the result of any particular effort might be complete failure.

There comes a point, in any case, when it becomes hard to tell what "slow" or "fast" means, in relation to composition -- for what matters is the degree of engagement.

Cheers ...